View source for Session One, Sprites and All

'''Following [[The Baron]]'''

==[https://tao-dnd.blogspot.com/2026/02/session-one-sprites-and-all.html Original Page]==

The Discord D&D game took place on Friday and it's now Sunday evening as I write this. I agreed that it would be a good idea to discuss the game after, but of course that's easier said than done. Usually, during a game, I'm in a state of flow; I easily lose track of time, I don't remember the order of decisions made by myself and the party, I don't remember a lot of what I said. I know I tripped over a lot of words, speaking fast and struggling to describe the image in my head in words vocally, when I've gotten used to be able to write half a sentence, pause, then finish. I suppose, in some degree, I embarrassed myself. Not because I made any mistakes as a DM, or failed to drive attention, or get the players invested... though a first running with a group of players who are also DMs is a climb in that regard. No, "embarrassed" in the sense of maybe getting a little too excited about playing again.

I can report pleasantly that after the event I did not experience a "drop," but rather a continuation of being "wired." This continued uncomfortably for a couple of hours, despite my having a shower and trying to escape into other things. I could have really used a glass of wine, but there wasn't a drop in the house; I haven't bought any liquor since last September, because it's viciously expensive. I might buy a bottle for this Friday, when we've agreed to run again. Two Fridays put us in the territory of birthday parties and I think a wedding, so to be flexible it was either run again in a week or in three weeks. The party voted and it's this Friday.

I'd say the players struggled with investing; they didn't get the rolls they wanted, putting them firmly into the four basic classes of cleric, fighter, mage and thief; no one wanted to be a mage or a thief, so the party sorted itself out as three straight fighters and one cleric. The cleric elected Buddhism as a religion, a good one if the character wants to remain isolationist and self-directed. Personally, I'd prefer to be inside a strong, ordered structure that I can contribute to or feast from, but that takes a specific sort of headspace, which I know most don't have. I've had buddhist clerics in former parties; I don't mind in the least.

The rule-comprehension came very easily. As they're all DMs, no one disputed any rule in any manner whatsoever. The clarifications were certainly in line with the issues presented. I made only a couple of notes for things to be added to the malady table, as players pointed them out, and once I had to go to the original Players Handbook to estimate the weight of a godentag. That's the only reference I made to the Players. I made one reference also to the Monster Manual; I've never actually used sprites in a campaign before, and had to actually look up the original for them. Everything else was managed through my wiki and Discord. It's phenomenal that I can just drag and drop a file into discord, so that if I do have something in a file on my desktop, I don't need to take a screen shot, I can just give a copy. Great way for these fellows to get inside copies of the Streetvendor's Guide, as it happens.

Tried to get through the character background generator as fast as I could; there were a lot of bad rolls and I do wish I'd taken some time to upgrade that before playing with it again. A note for the future: that damn page needs work. If ever I have the time. I could, I suppose, just stop blogging.

We were hung up on buying equipment for time. I expected to be. It's a huge table, deliberately made confusing. Still, it's an excel file and saved to text, so people can just sort it. The players gamely tried to manage it by vendor, which makes a cruel headspace check. You don't find an axehead at the blacksmith's but at the "hacker's," that kind of thing. The players called out answers to each other and I feel the best approach is that if you're looking for anything for more than thirty seconds, call it out and someone else will answer. The issue conflates only when players try to stubbornly solve it themselves. The idea, and I wish I'd thought of this in-game, I only have now, is that you're on a street talking to your friend and saying, "I was just at the blacksmith's and I didn't see any axes."  Whereupon the friend answers, "Oh, I've just come from the hacker's; it's up two streets on your left." Only, of course, without the directions rendered in geography.

The starting game was pulling teeth, though it probably didn't seem like that from the players' perspective. In retrospect, I'm sure they were turning over a few dozen things in their minds, making the choosing of a character name seem superfluous and not at all necessary. It is always hard to progressively describe a party moving up through a forest, in this case along a stream, because the DM says, "You reach the point that represents the furthest you've ever been along this stream from town," and the player quite correctly has no answer for this. In painting the picture of where the players are, how they got here from there, it's often a series of descriptions that land flat in this manner, and it's easy for the DM to think, "Gawd, how boring must this be for them." But it's not really that, I don't believe. It's only that the player can't decide the actual terrain themselves; they can't react to trees or hills or streams except to move around or up them... and there is a feeling that the only reason I am mentioning the stream here, or that hill in the distance, is in some literary Chekhovian fashion: I would not point out this hill unless it mattered somehow. The problem, however, is that it "matters" because you're passing it now, and that actually passing the hill in reality would take time, and would be a little dull, and you would feel a little nonplussed to be marching on. So, though it feels uncomfortable, the actual trek would also be so. Subconsciously, the players need to be made aware of how far they are from civilisation, even as they march away from it.

A similar issue occurred when the lone sprite was encountered. If the party had been properly surprised by it, they'd have seen it run off and been left to wonder if they should follow. Instead, the sprite goofed, made it's presence known, lost initiative and the nearest fighter to the sprite missed. The sprite's fired arrow did all of 2 damage (details that really don't matter), whereupon the party agreed to parley. The sprite gave some salve to the hurt fighter, who got some x.p., and then I did a very obvious thing as a DM: I outlined a simple, straightforward, 2D adventure hook.

These guys needed it. I'd given them some teasing with some 8 ft. creature ripping into trees for honey, only to get back a sort of uncertainty about getting involved. Parties differ. One party will think, "Well, owlbears haven't much treasure, its just a fight, so is it worth it?"  Another party will think, "An owlbear, three or four hours from town? It's our duty to make the land safe for hunters." That kind of thing. In any case, the owlbear went over like a fart in church, so Asiff the sprite took the party to his treehouse settlement, where the party talked to the acting head of the lofty "hamlet," Hara, who explained that their princess had been kidnapped by a mage of some kind, aided by kobalds, and was likely being siphoned for blood for the purpose of potion-making. The party flinched at the idea that this is a sort of "few drops a day thing," and were willing to invest. The sprites explained that a "ward" had been created somehow that disabled sprites from moving past a certain part of the forest, which they suspected hid the princess. The players, not sprites, volunteered without being told (and I wouldn't have) and bravely marched off (hesitating every couple of steps like parties do) to rescue the princess.

It's almost embarrassing that I'm writing those words. But, heck, it's a story that's worked for a thousand years, who am I to argue?

Predictably they found the kobalds, not on guard but busy making charcoal in a valley; they descended, puzzled out the unfamiliar [https://wiki.alexissmolensk.com/index.php/Stealth_(sage_ability) stealth rules] from the wiki, made their approach on one kobald, got within 9 hexes, won initiative and killed the kobald. And that is as far as we got. But the party's blood was certainly up by then, so yeah, good all around. We'll pick it up from there on Friday.

Discord, I think, allows for a faster loosening up than text. The Juvenis Campaign and those on blogs were always hard to get off the ground; I expect every game everywhere is. Which is why we should be paying a little closer attention to a first game being like getting a crew together to say cook in a restaurant or work a job site. It doesn't go that great initially. It never does. The first practice of a baseball team is always a disaster, if the players don't already know each other. It's not until they lose that first game by 9 points that the second practice matters. We, and by this I mean every player and every DM in this pasttime, put too much emphasis on the first session. It's not that we need a "session zero," its that we need players who will guarantee three sessions before quitting.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could give each player $25 dollars for their first three sessions, with the understanding that they'd have to pay it back over five sessions if they wanted to keep going? Probably wouldn't work — D&D players are such nasty, ruthless people that a mere $75 would go such a long way toward changing their lives — but it would be nice if some measure of encouragement could be invented that would encourage players to believe that with real investment, it's certain to get better. Perspective, let's call it.

Trust me... anyone who quits after your first game? You don't want to even know that person.

'''Continued on [[Session 2: Kobalds and Rats]]'''