The Campaign Gets Started

Well, this isn't "new" content, exactly ... but if it's warstories, at least I don't have to invent things.

Around 2004, my partner Tamara, who'd never heard of D&D before we'd met in 2001, showed signs of wanting to know how to play.  I hadn't pressed her to do so, which is why three years passed of her watching me work on D&D before stepping up herself.  I must point out that during those years, I didn't have a campaign going, nor did I have any sort of online presence.  To her at the time, my "game" was nothing more than my accumulating details about the world in general and working on my trade system.

When we met, even the trade system did not exist.  I'd been mucking about with the idea since 1986, but I hadn't solved the math and couldn't actually make it work.  The solution was a sort of flexible mathematical device that could stretch like an elastic, but like an elastic, it would stretch only so far.  This keeps the numbers from exaggerating, so that even if something is very expensive in a place where it isn't made, it isn't impossibly expensive.  This was always the problem from the beginning.

Anyway, I'd tell Tamara every once in a while that I was going to have a bath and "think" about the trade system.  This involved me going to the bathroom, turning off the lights, running a hot bath and thinking for 30 or 40 minutes before getting out.  Forcing myself to problem solve, so to speak.  I'd run possible calculations in my head based on the parameters I had: number of references, base totals for products, distances, supply vs. demand, food vs. manufactures and so on.  Then I'd get out, fool around with a few tests and fail, shrug, and let my head rest on the subject for a couple of weeks.  I did this for years.

This sort of behaviour was completely alien to Tamara.  She'd never known anyone with that kind of nature, had never had an artist as a friend, or known a mathematician, or had a problem she had to solve with skull-sweat.  To her, what I was doing made no sense at all ... but since I'm very passionate and I get excited when I hit upon some new thought, like Archimedes running naked down the street screaming "EUREKA!", when I actually did figure out the trade system in 2002, and then tried to explain it to her, Tamara's interest in this thing D&D began to grow.

She asked if I could teach her how to play and I agreed.  This started with both of us rolling up characters, as I wasn't going to put her on the spot without my helping.  She rolled a human fighter named Allyson, and I added a dwarven thief named Frith.  We played twice, with me setting up very simple scenarios (I don't remember what those were), while I'd suggest that we could (a) do this or (b) do that.  It was basically just make your pick.  Tamara found it a bit intriguing, but couldn't get the hang of it without my instigation.

One afternoon she was explaining this to my teenage daughter, who has a thing about being named online.  I'll call her "Celeste."  Celeste lived with her mother Michelle and her grandparents, not me, and this is a very long and sad tale that I'll tackle eventually on the Shifting Sands blog.  At the time, Celeste was just 16.  She suggested playing with Tamara, whereupon I retired Frith and ran them for a little bit.  I'd never actually run my daughter, though she'd seen me run others many times when she was much younger.  She knew my idiosyncracies and she'd played with kids her own age off and on since she was nine, so the combination of her and Tamara worked out for, I think three runnings.   At which point, Celeste suggested that her boyfriend Kevin should join us.  This would have been late 2004, when I had just figured out how to build the sort of 20-mile-hex map that has become iconic since, which I started for no particular reason in the oblast of Voronezh, southeast of Moskva.

I suggested that we use the new map, and that if Tamara and Celeste wanted to roll up new characters, they could, along with Kevin of course.  They both decided to do so.  Tamara rolled up a mage which she named Garalzapan, Celeste rolled up a ranger that she named Fayln, and Kevin rolled up a druid he named Pikel.

I put them in the little village of Kolyeno, on the vast rolling steppe between the Don river and the Kopyor, a place with 156 people.  This was their home town.  And wanting to give the three of them a feel of "traditional" D&D, I didn't mind running them in the "Caves of Chaos," though I made changes to the number of creatures to suit just three 1st level characters.

Fayln still is an 80 lb. female elf who hit like a hammer even then, especially as I was still using the silly rule of rangers causing an extra point of damage per level against some creatures.  Garalzapan is also still alive in my game, though Tamara has retired; he has an 18 intelligence and she was very lucky with her spellbook rolls.  Pikel is also still alive, but the rule about his being limited to leather armour, and only a druid's hit points, were a hazard.  Because the mage needed a screen, Fayln and Pikel were it; and while Fayln could hold her own, Pikel always needed saving.  Fighting the ogre in the Ogre Cave, area E. in KOTB, Pikel very, very nearly bought it ... and for many, many years afterwards, as Pikel grew to be a very powerful druid, the party would remind him of when he was "soft and spongy."

As a player, Celeste is hyper-prepared, patient and resistant to unnecessary problem-solving.  She'd rather just get into a set of events where the goals are clear so she can swing.  She hates "solving the problem that gets the party to the next problem," which defines a vast quantity of game modules.  When I had the party run in Death Frost Doom, she was so infuriated by the bullshit puzzles that at inevitably she refused to go on playing.  Eventually, the whole party at that time agreed that we'd just skip any puzzles that remained.

Kevin is a brilliant tactician, a very clever spellcaster, incredibly lucky with dice (watching him makes no difference) and absolutely a disaster at role-playing.  Any situation that calls for asking an NPC anything is just dead air to him.  Once Pikel reached 5th level, with a sufficient number of spells under his belt, he became the lynchpin of the party's combat offensive.  Fayln hits and causes all the damage, but Pikel's always at the right place at the right time.

Tamara hasn't the game-playing experience to really master the game, though she saved the party's bacon time after time.  When she was playing, and that was for 11 years, she gave it her all, she took advice, she proved an excellent problem solver and she had a knack for rolling a natural 20 at the verge of things going into a TPK.  However, one thing she didn't like was my way of setting up lose-lose scenarios.  Oh, I don't mean the party would lose, but rather that the consequences of winning always has some bitter pill that ended up leaving a bad taste in the party's mouth.

To give a sense of this, you can go on a quest for the father to rescue his daughter, and you can rescue the daughter ... but when you get her back home, you discover the father has been stabbed in the back and murdered by the girl's uncle; and now that is the next adventure.  You can find the uncle, corner him, waste his minions and finally push him into the sea, where he drowns, but when you go through his things, there's an arcane, powerful book written in a language that you need the dead uncle to interpret.   And now it's too late.  So you have to adventure to learn the language of the book, which you succeed in doing ... only now you wish you didn't know it, because it's raised this horrible monster that's now laying waste to the countryside.  Oh, you can ignore the monster and go on your way, but you know that you're responsible for that monster existing, so ...

Tamara used to say, "GREAT!  It's DM shitland all over again."  For most players, this sort of twist is intriguing, like wondering where I'm going to go with this thing ... because heck, who wants to end the campaign, right?  I like the campaign drifting forward logically from adventure to adventure, rather than there being any definite end to things.  Tamara, on the other hand, began to feel, "What was the point?  We just end up creating new problems."  Eventually, at a time when circumstances suspended my campaign for quite a long time, she decided just to bow out.  And so she has; but thank heaven, because when I run today, there's a 3-year old boy running around, who loves his Grandmother, who is there to look after him.

I'll pick this up with the next post.