Starting a new Game With More Weird, Whimsy and Wonder
There is a hunger in me. It calls to me and makes me crave for more. If you have known me personally for more than 45 seconds or have read even a single article on this sight, you will know that I am obsessive. Like, should probably be diagnosed properly by a professional, but, I am sad enough as it is. Anyway, I digress.
That hunger has recently transitioned from uncontrollably buying Warhammer miniatures and dumping hours upon hours into building and painting for almost no reason other than feeding that viscous need and found it’s way back to Dungeons and Dragons. The wife and I have been packing up, driving to our hometown for a homebrew game with someone I have been playing Warhammer with since the late 90s but only played D&D with a few times. Recently I wrote about starting a Season Two of Game Night, a new game with pretty much the same players group, and I could not be more excited for that. But, there in lies the problem.
The Season Two game, set in the Forgotten Realms and starting outside of Waterdeep, was originally intended to continue a one-off game over a weekend that I had off, set in my homebrew world of Raidethe. Having planned for that game and not liking what I had devised, I suggested instead we use those same characters to start a game in the realms, and we all enjoyed it, and want to continue. But, we are playing a game run by another member of that gaming group, and he is running us through his version of the OG 90s Baldur’s Gate game. We are having a blast, but, its the same group, so, my game has to wait until that story concludes. That’s fine.
It’s fine. I’m fine. No really, but, um, maybe not. I could feel that pressure, the obsessiveness building up. A fiery need was threatening to turn into an outright conflagration through my psyche. So, I decided it was time to find myself a side piece, a sort of tabletop game mistress. But my wife was playing so, that makes it sound akward.
Anyway…
Session Zero
Before this game even started forming in my head, I had tried to start a new game on alternating weeks with the same group, but on the night of the week I wanted to play, two players could not make it or couldn’t commit to consistency. A few feelers were sent out but didn’t quite build a full game. Eventually I sorta just abandoned that game, which was going to also be set in my homebrew world. I had a serious hard-on for Raidethe for a few months. Lucky for me, that went away before I needed to consult a physician. While I loved every aspect of creating Raidethe, it was also a lot of work. And World Building is not game planning, so I was building things to then plan things around. Rewarding, but time consuming.
And that was the problem. I had been spending a lot of time reading lately and had no intention of slowing down. I had finally begun playing video games again since I had shed that need to build and paint miniatures to stash away immediately and move onto the next unit. While discussing with Robert just how deep I had already returned to, or more like descended face first into, he mentioned that I needed to make sure I didn’t burn myself out. Fuck. He got me. When I stopped to think about it, I could already see the signs beginning to build up. I wasn’t there, but I was already working on it. Like I said, I am obsessive, but, also emotionally intelligent enough to avoid the problem. I began to downshift my plans.
It wasn’t long before I wanted more again. As I said in the first episode of Season Two, I had enjoyed the fuck out of taking an idea out of a book and making it my own. The way I figured it, I could do something similar with another setting, and still get a lot of what I was hoping to make out of the extended Raidethe setting. I settled on Planescape, with plans on working our way towards Spelljammer.
On a whim, I sent a message to a buddy we hadn’t seen in years, a friend my wife made in college that happened to get a house with his significant other not so far away from our apartment some years back. Kera was on new meds and feeling better. We were trying to figure out how to have lives again instead of ever lurking alone together in our apartment and the two of them came to mind. The message was sent and my hopes were running high, yet at the same time I was unsure of the response I would get.
Turns out I had no need to worry, we were chatting again like it hadn’t been years since we had last spoken and both Bob and Lynn were interested. The trap was set, I had found another couple to join the wife and I. Knowing our friends, this was going to be a more whimsical game: Bob goes by the moniker Wizard of Weird in real life, I could only imagine the fun he was going to be in D&D. We would take the game seriously enough, but we would not take ourselves too seriously. I mean, the number one rule of the game is to have fun.
Next thing I knew we had a session zero set up in a week. Aside from needing to spend some time catching up, we needed to figure out what kind of game we all wanted to play. Remember above when I said I sent out feelers but not much came of it . Funny how life just sorta works out sometimes. As the day rapidly approached, I ran into an acquaintance, someone that I knew played D&D and had even tried to recruit him before, but he had something going on the planned night. Well, it had fallen through and he asked if I still had a spot available at a game. How serendipitous, the cosmos had aligned at just the right time and now I had a full table.
The actual session zero was fun. I ordered pizza. Quickly we discovered that everyone preferred a well balanced game with equal parts role playing, exploring and combat. Variety was goal. I talked about how player agency is important to me but how we are also entering into a bit of a social contract to make sure everyone was having fun. No one cared if I used premade adventure modules, made the whole thing up or landed somewhere in between. Chad fit right in with the two couples and we had a good time making characters, and even advanced them to level 3, so that if I went with the campaign in the 5th ed Planescape box, we would be ready to go.
The stage was set. The actors were developing their characters from all across the dungeons and dragons multiverse. Thank Fuck, no one was playing a Kender…
Before we ended the evening, I announced that everyone should figure out what they were doing the last day of their normal lives. Next time, we’ll see how I bring them all together.
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Tyson
Obsessive and neurotic collector of little plastic men, novels about the same little plastic men and paints to make the little plastic men pretty. Married to Kera, who puts up with him and pretends that she doesn’t hear him speaking to the little plastic men in between making pew pew noises in the hobby room. Requires adult supervision. A menace to himself but rarely to others. More beard than man
