Back in the saddle

I of course mean "back in the saddle" for both DMing and blogging.

Running D&D games has been a long and involved process for me. I never had a Great DM, just DMs in the range of Pretty Good to Simply Terrible, so I've had to make due on my own. For the most part I just use published adventures to take advantage of others' experience and ability, and then try to patch the gaps by using my background in writing and my love of video games.

I have about as many successes as failures.

The important thing is, I'm learning. I take risks and try new techniques, and though it doesn't always pay off (and may, indeed, blow up spectacularly) I feel like I find new tricks for myself and new confidence.

So I've returned to DMing because... well, because I love it. It's fun to make silly voices for captured Kobolds. It's fun to design some horrible problem for the NPCs and then be surprised by my boyfriend's plan to solve it. It's a hobby that isn't very cost intensive but also constantly replenishes. I like the commmunity. (Sometimes I like complaining about the community.)

Anyway.

I've already run a few sessions of my Unnamed Eberron game for my boyfriend. We went through The Forgotten Forge and now we're finishing up Shadows of the Last War. My boyfriend's PC is Lord Jasek Kelswa d'Cannith, a warrior-wizard sort.

I've become very adept at running the beginnings of games. I usually pick a published module to serve as my framework and then spend my energies customizing the game to the PC: hooks tailor-made to get the PC involved, tweaking the antagonists so they are a hindrance/threat to something the PC values, changing around dungeons so they focus on what my boyfriend enjoys and minimize what he finds frustrating/uninteresting. I feel techniques like that are probably the bread and butter of any good DM, so while it's not brag-worthy I'm still pleased to have gotten to this point.

My issues come once I need to move beyond the introduction, and that's my major focus for this game: designing adventures to build off of what has come previously. There should be consequences for the PC's actions or else why bother doing anything at all?

I've resolved to run a game that gets the PC up to level 10. I'm almost halfway there already and now it's time to really push myself. Lord Jasek is getting the attention of some powerful people with his antics and I want to run a game where the PC actually starts affecting the world in meaningful ways. Which factions will he side with--or will he be a unifier? Can he stand against those who mean his family harm--or will he discover there's more to it than simple good versus evil?

I've also resolved to update this blog more often. (So long as one goes about resolving things, one might as well go all the way.) Since I use frameworks for my games as a jumping off point, I'll do the same here. Starting Monday the 18th I'm going to update every other day. The theme of each post will revolve around a letter of the alphabet--A for Monday, B for Wednesday, C for Friday, etc. Hopefully that will inspire me to write more frequently.

Yeah! Resolutions!