Getting into TTRPGs and Becoming a DM

While setting up camp for the night on the side of the road, a heavy fog starts to roll in. The surrounding forest has gone silent.
Roll a perception check

You hear the rustle of a bush a ways away but chalk it up to the wind. As you finish lighting the fire for the evenings meal, 3 dire wolves leap out of the bush, with one landing a bite attack on the druid, pinning them to the ground. Roll for initiative...

It's a small on-the-fly setup for an encounter, but you get the idea. But you kinda figured something like that was coming based on the title. Predictability in my blog posts is kinda expected at this point.

That's not the start of the story. For that we are going to have to take a trip back to April/May 2023. One of my friends mentioned they had friends moving back to the area and was looking to get a D&D game started and wanted to know if interested. Me, never having played and only some minor interest or exposure, said sure. A few weeks later I was creating my first D&D character. I created Shammagar, a Kobold barbarian whose way too strong and angry for his own good. We played most of the summer before schedules got to crazy, lending to protracted breaks between sessions.

I was enthralled. 80% of my TV time was bingeing Critical Role S3. Come fall, I found a campaign that was starting up at a local game store / bar.

That's it.

Pretty boring right? Expected something more?

That's just how I got into it. Becoming a DM is kind of a sillier story filled with dumb mistakes.

We find ourselves in the middle of Oct, I'm just thinking about what I want to do for my annual Charity stream with Extra Life. I had a couple friends participating that were D&D-curious and decided I wanted to try and run a one-shot for them. So I did the sane thing, helped them create a couple of characters, picked a pre-written adventure and ran it during the event. What a sane thing to do right?

WRONG!

I may or may not have drunk the Kool-Aid a bit too strongly. I decided I was going to try and write a one-shot for them completely out of the blue, with custom maps and everything.

The maps honestly turned out fantastic, I spent dozens of hours decorating them. The story was simple, had a clear villain and a clear resolution with a few paths of variety to make things either easier or harder. From there, that's when things started falling apart. In my head, the whole thing should have taken 3–4 hours. By hour 5 they were just getting to the last encounter.

I wrote too much, bit off more than I could chew. Honestly I kinda felt defeated for a long while. I didn't try to pick up a virtual DM screen again for a long time.

Fast-forward to March 2024. Spring break is coming up, our tables' DMs are going to be gone for about 2 weekends. I offer to run so that anyone at the table who wants to still play while they're gone can.
I had been paying more attention to how much would get done in the 2-ish hour window we'd been playing in, and had gotten my hands on One-Shot Wonders from Roll & Play Press. I had them pick an adventure based on a d100 roll, and started translating the prep into my laptop to make life easier. I erred more on easier for the encounter design, and they finished the whole thing in about 90 minutes. The next session I picked at random based on their level and left it on the defaults, finished in a little over 2 hours. Everything went back to normal for a bit until finals, and they ended the campaign in a glorious battle.

Meanwhile ... on a Discord server I'm a part of, a bunch of people had interest in starting up a game, and I was sort of volunteered to run the campaign. I didn't mind really, busy lives meant it would be a once-a-month type thing. I decided I was going to run Keys from the Golden Vault as a base for them. That campaign has been going good, but slow.

I was starting to feel a little more comfortable telling a story and fitting it into a certain timeframe. I didn't want to run one-shots all summer and I had splurged a few months back on something ... daunting.

It's a fantastic, modified system put together by Free League Publishing, based on The One Ring 2e. Key word being modified. A lot of the base is the same, probably 80% of it. Changes to certain checks, different rules for travel, palaver, and Shadow Points make enough tweaks that it's not as simple as "create some new characters, and we'll drop them into the world and everything will run smoothly".

Except with it being a low magic setting, eldritch blasts and spells in general would really just make most encounters go too smoothly. So I made a few adjustments to bridge the rules to basic 5e rules.

• Limit the class options to Bard, Rogue, Ranger, with the options of Paladin and Cleric coming from the Callings in the book.
• Limited the subclasses and the spells available, re-flavoring them to be more skills than conjuring healing out of thin air, for example.
• Kept some of the traveling rules, but cut the Fellowship and Council phases, treating them more like average downtime and NPC encounters
  • For keeping the difficulty of getting stuff out of Council type meetings, I decided to keep the intentions and still have them make basic persuasion or intimidation rolls based on expected DC's for what kind of support they could expect.
• Kept most of the checks the same as regular 5e, re-merging the 3 skills split from Nature, but keeping Medicine as Intelligence (one of the LotR changes).
• Cut out the idea of Shadow Points

Honestly it was hard and stressful. but SO rewarding. About a month or so into it, I started seeing a shift in my storytelling abilities, I started loosening up a bit more about the rules and going with the flow. I eventually ended up including the Shadow Points back into the story after one of the players decided to go full chaotic. Dropping a ceiling on your party members and refusing to pull them out of the rubble deserves some consequences.

Which brings me to the present and the last few months. I'm back to running one-shots for them in person. The Fall/Spring campaign has been on hold, and I've been too busy with life stuff to focus on the conversions again. Did create a murder mystery event that's run all of October for them, but that's the closest to a campaign they've gotten to do in the last couple of months.

I did start another campaign though. Two of my friends who did the stream one-shot wanted to play again, then an old coworker expressed interest. 2 of my friend's friends wanted to play. And then one of their relatives. Quickly, within 6 weeks (3 sessions), I had a table of 6 playing virtually. That campaign is a whirlwind, with the understanding from them that I'm using them to tweak and adjust more of my storytelling skills. I decided I wanted to do more work to tie in backstories into the campaign and make actual plot points around it. So I find myself every other week building a narrative that's going to spawn months.

I'm starting to feel outside my depths, and probably biting off way too much, but I'm realizing so far the only pressure to perform is on myself. As things happen in the campaign I might write about them, I don't want to spoil much, but I will say that in 25 days in-game the campaign will no longer be really following Candlekeep Mysteries.