In the comments thread of a post over at BXBlackrazor (where JB has been on a tear of great posts lately), we got into a brief exchange about my past as a Dungeon Master, and how I'm planning to run Dungeons & Dragons going forward. During that exchange, JB said that it sounds like I'm trying to "re-learn the approach to the game", or "reformulate a new philosophy of D&D". Which got me thinking... what is that philosophy, and what do I want out of my next campaign? Why am I delving so far back, and stripping D&D back to its most basic form?
I'll start by writing about my history with the game. As I've mentioned before, I got the D&D Basic Set (the one written by Frank Mentzer) for my 10th birthday, somewhere during the last week of 1988. I was already obsessed with the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks (and possibly Lone Wolf, though I'm not sure of the timeline there), so the type of fantasy found in D&D was familiar to me, and the "choose-your-own-adventure" intro in that set made for a perfect segue into role-playing games.
My friends and I played D&D (first Basic, then AD&D 2nd edition) a lot during my last two years of primary school, just about every lunch break, and outside of school as well. This continued through high school, although as I remember it the lunch break session tapered off once we got into years 10 through 12. We never had a proper campaign as such, or a regular Dungeon Master. Our games were mostly set in the Forgotten Realms, as filtered through our collective knowledge of the novels (actual game products being relatively scarce in the country town of Ararat where I grew up). Whoever had an adventure they wanted to run would be DM, and there was rarely any continuity between adventures. We had a lot of fun at the time, but looking back on it I don't feel like I learned much about how to be a good DM during those years. My times running the game were too few, and too sporadic, to really build any skills beyond familiarity with the rules.
After graduating high school in 1996, I went to university in Ballarat to study IT, and it didn't take long for me to put together a new group of friends to game with. Most of these guys had never played D&D before, so I was the permanent DM. This time, I had my own campaign setting, "The Twin Worlds", inspired in some ways by Warcraft and in others by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I also had a story I wanted my friends to play through. I was fully on board with the story-path, Dragonlance style of D&D. It wasn't a total railroad. I let the players act as they wished, and based subsequent adventures on what had gone before. But I still had a destination in mind, and story beats I wanted to hit, and I made sure that nothing happened that could derail that train.
These were the years where I felt like I actually learned the rudimentary skills of putting together and running a campaign. Not just designing my own setting and adventures, but organising sessions and managing the personalities of my players. This campaign lasted until 2001, when it faded out with a whimper in the form of a Total Party Kill (the first time they got fireballed). It was a bad end to a game that everyone was invested in, and I'm still torn about how I handled it. Should I have found a way to save the game, or did I do the right thing by following the rules and letting the TPK stand? Let's park that question for later, because I think it's relevant to my new way of thinking about the game.
I started a new campaign about a year later, set in the same world a few centuries down the line, and updated for the new and shiny 3rd edition of D&D. I won't lie, part of me was excited to get the old campaign out of the way so I could start playing 3e. I was still in story-path mode for my 3rd edition game, but with a lighter touch. The players had more agency, and I was more willing to roll with the consequences of their actions. This campaign lasted until 2011, not coincidentally a few years after I got married and had a son. Despite the frequency of play really slowing down from 2008 to 2011, this one went out with a bang rather than a whimper, a huge blowout against an invading army of orcs. It was a very satisfying conclusion that wrapped up most of the campaign's loose threads, and to date it's the only successful campaign that I've ever run.
I feel like I learned a lot during that decade running 3e. Certainly the adventures I was designing were stronger than the ones I wrote earlier for 2e, and I feel like the setting and story I'd come up with were more robust, better able to withstand the vagaries of character deaths and player dropouts. A lot of what I'd learned was how to adapt my style of D&D to real life, and the ways that real life could interfere with it. That said, what I'd learned was how to adapt to the lives of a bunch of unmarried guys in their 20s. I never did figure out how to keep playing and DMing once I was a husband and father.
I had a long gap after 2011 where I barely did any gaming at all. I tried to continue the 3e campaign circa 2018, following up on a major outstanding plot thread, but I only had two players and it sputtered out after a half-dozen games over the course of several years. Some of those games were really good, but in retrospect my heart wasn't in it. Since 2011, I'd delved deeply into the online D&D community, particularly the OSR. I wasn't all that interested in running story-path D&D anymore. I was weary of 3e, and had been for a long time. My D&D muse had moved on to other styles and other editions.
Which brings me to where I am now, planning a campaign using original D&D, with a minimal sandbox setting and not a story-path to be seen. Going back to basics. Treating the game as a game. I return to the question that's been nagging at me since 2001: was I right to let my story-driven 2e campaign end in a disappointing TPK? Now that my philosophy on the game has changed, I think I have an answer: no, I shouldn't have allowed it.
This might come as a surprise, given that I've come around to treating the game as a game first. But back then, I wasn't doing that. I'd set that campaign up as a highly story-driven game, with the promise of a pay-off to the elements I'd introduced. Prophecies, chosen ones, the end of the world... name a cliche and I'd thrown it in there. But having set that up, I should have followed through. I'd built a game where the story and the characters came first, the world second, and the rules third. But when I allowed that TPK, suddenly I had flipped the paradigm, and the rules were made paramount over the story and the setting. The promise of the game, albeit one made unknowingly, had been broken.
The thing is, I want to play and run D&D where TPKs are possible, and where they don't run counter to the way the campaign is set up. I have to flip the paradigm on how I've run D&D in the past, but do so knowingly and deliberately, and before the first game session. Rather than the importance of game elements being story and character, then setting, then rules, it must be the opposite: rules, then setting, then story and character. The game must be a game, first and foremost, because I don't ever want a campaign to end in a whimper again.
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