Finding D&D - 10

With the party and the children, their parents and the drivers loaded up on the wagons, there's an opportunity here to casually invest the players in the game. It's not needed... but small bits of "stage business" in telling what goes on in a campaign helps ground the players in the place and time, so that the world is a little more "tangible." It's a practice that needs to be inserted in bits, when an opportunity arises.

The idea is to convey the physicality of a setting that can't actually be seen by the players, and therefore can be easily dropped from their memory... which flattens the players' experience, such that each part of the game world becomes like any other part. In addition, we want to give moments emotional "weight." It doesn't have to be a lot, just enough to make these people in the wagons, whomever they are, feel like people and not stick figures. And finally, we want to convey a sense of connection between the players and both of these things... giving the overall experience of the game "atmosphere."

At the same time, we don't want to stifle the campaign or invest a lot of time. The momentum of events has to be maintained, so anything more than four or five minutes of atmosphere would potentially bore the players. So there, right off, we've got a series of goals and constraints we want to observe, and no apparent easy way to do it.

Continued on The Higher Path

Finding D&D - 9

 Olivia heads to the bathroom and, predictably, Susan reaches for her coat. October now and the weather's getting cold. Rick stands and asks if she'd mind his coming along and she says, "No, of course." He follows her outside.

John has sat down again and appears to be copying some part of his character onto another sheet; he's been fairly quiet all night and I want to ask, but I won't as long as Jason's here. None of us know the fellow yet and I know it's not the time to ask John what's wrong — though I know something is.

There's nothing odd about Jason's presence creating a shadow over the usual rhythms of a group. Someone like Jason was going to be friendly because I trusted Susan's judgment. She wouldn't have asked me to let just anyone play; I've long known that her instincts about people are good.

Susan's husband had been named Daniel too, like his son. He was a professor specialising in urban planning; when Susan discovered she was pregnant, Daniel had been in Boston, overseeing a reconstruction project as a consultant, with a nice stipend in the bargain. When Susan told him over the phone that she was four months pregnant — they hadn't seen each other in a few months — Daniel had been wildly happy about it, half raving on the phone as Susan told us. The next day, he was home. He'd caught the first flight out of Boston he could get and after 17 hours of hopping planes, he was back in Calgary. He told Boston they'd have to do without him; he wasn't leaving his wife and child for any reason. That was the sort of man that Susan married.

Continued on The Higher Path