My Turn

At the risk of being pretentious, I feel like putting up my DMing backstory, too. Whatever, pretend is fun.

So, first year of college I was rather taken aback that some of my friends played D&D. You know, I'd had the warnings that D&D was a popular game in college that led to the demonic.

The summer between freshman and sophomore years, Andrew e-mailed the Pro Tempore crowd asking if anyone wanted to play. After securing a "you don't have to do anything you don't want to do" from him, and the blessing of my parents for a "trial run," I agreed to play.

We spent two weeks making characters, since we had such a large group of people, most of whom were new to any kind of roleplaying game. I started to really get into the concept of "Paladin."

The first session we played was, well, probably the most fun I'd ever had in my life. Combat, storytelling, fantasy, puzzle-solving, improvisation, mystery, miniature dungeon models...I thought I was on the Celestial Planes. And not in high school or in a basement. I was in college and in a conference room in the Student Union.

Needless to say, I soon realized that D&D was not the occult. I also proceded to become so interested (obssessed?) in it that I think I quite wore out the subject with my roommates.

Andrew's game is very politics heavy, and he favors just talking over rolling Diplomacy checks. This has been slightly detrimental to my high-Charisma PC, such as when I couldn't think of anything persuasive to say to the guards who were knocking me out...

But overall I like the high storytelling component of the game; I'd always wanted to actually get into the worlds and stories of fantasy books I'd read, and this gave me the opportunity to do so. I also enjoyed the really detailed backstories and histories. Random encounters are not really my thing, and Andrew certainly doesn't provide many of them.

So, my games: I love world-building. I made up my whole universe from the point of its creation by its primary deity. I've been filling in the current politics as I need them, and I don't think mine are quite as complicated (or realistic).

As far as storytelling goes, the campaign I DMed this summer was pretty linear and railroaded. My PCs could have gone anywhere they wanted, but the only interesting stuff they heard about was in one direction. But, that was good for a 4 episode game and my first attempt. In the one-shot I hope to run soon, I want to provide more options which will all lead to fulfilling but slightly different conclusions.

Encounters: I love terrain. I still need to work on the specific terrain stats. What I meant is that I love making cool buildings and cliffs and movable places to stand for fights. I don't know how creative I am with monsters. I guess I'll find out as I continue.

Diplomatic encounters - I'll throw in some of them but I think the course of the game will be determined more by decisions of the PCs than their abilities to influence the right people. I really like making up and playing the NPCs, and my players seem to like interacting with them too. I do the voices for them somewhat, and give them distinct speech patterns.

Random encounters - I don't like 'em.

I'll probably throw in medium to high treasure, just because I love magic swords. I would like to make magic a rarer, more special thing in the game, but that would be hard to do without penalizing the Arcane classes. I'd also like to rework the distinctions between Arcane and Divine magic (and maybe Psionics if I get ambitious).

So, I think both because of my personality and because of Andrew's influence, I am a worldbuilding and storytelling DM. I've never played anyone else's game (for some reason I never get invited to the guys' parties...sniff). I'd be really happy to try, though; if nothing else, I've thought of half a dozen PCs I'd really like to play. I'm sure I could learn a lot too, about combat and plot threads and the best ways to sprinkle clues.