Reflection & Resolution of Capstone Project

I’ve belatedly realized that, over the course of this blog, I have collected 20+ hours of experience as a Dungeon Master! Each in-person session (10 by my count) lasted on average 2-3 hours each, collecting more than the 20 hours required of my high school Capstone project, the original purpose of this blog. That is not even counting the hours of preparation for the maps, encounters, and enemy stat-blocks.

Preparation for each session taught me the importance of having a detailed plan, because without details the players will encounter confusion or their own shenanigans. Reacting to these instances have given me more experience in improvising, and more confident in my decisions as a DM. Collecting the Dungeon Master Handbook and Monster Manual by Wizards of the Coast, as well as reading articles from D&D Beyond, enhanced my content knowledge and allowed me to add elements to the game that I previously lacked the knowledge to inact. The amount of patience involved in waiting for an opportune time to play D&D is immense, particularly with two high school extra-curricular-packed schedules and one working college student schedule, but the experience of moving to the Discord app is a testament to the virtues of alternate modes of cummunication.

Since I have accumulated the needed hours (and my group agreed that we wanted to change campaigns) I will let my campaign rest while Ashley picks up DM’ing with the Wizards of the Coast ‘Into The Abyss’ campaign. I doubt I will stop recording my experience in D&D as a DM or a character-player, though, and our first meeting will be this coming Sunday evening, March 24th. I look forward to presenting my bard, Kallax the Tiefling, and finally playing D&D again for the first time in months!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Location: The Shrines of Papazotl, Wongo, and I'jin

After a long period of settling into new school and life schedules, I held a session with Meagan and Ashley on Saturday the 24th at Orc's Forge in Tuttle Mall, from 1pm to about 3:45. Using the power of Dungeon Master Executive Decision, I quickly summarized Agile's entry to the city of Omu and directed him toward the battle that had yet to be completed between Casamir and the crocodiles in front of the shrine of Papazotl. With Agile arriving as back-up (and the crocodiles making extremely pitiful attack rolls) the party defeated the four enemies without taking very much damage, and entered into the shrine itself. The floor was a mosaic depicting Papazotl, an elbis , fighting its rival Kubazan the froghemoth , and a set of stone doors (that required a combined Strength check of 20 to push) separated the antechamber from the main room, in which six statues sat. A riddle etched into the wall provided their next course of action. "Comes with sunshine, leaves with night. Hid...
Read more

Location: Camp Righteous

A lesson I learned in Dungeon Master-ing in this session goes as follows: buy your own re-usable battle maps, because drawing a grid of one inch squares using a ruler and a Sharpie hurts after an hour. If buying the maps are impossible, then at least don't start drawing the map only three hours before your players arrive, because that is bad time management. I finished the map an hour before anyone arrived, so the session did not start completely in disaster. Makenna, however, had lost her character sheet, which ended up being an omen for what came to pass in the session. To avoid the settlement of violent and overpowered goblins, the guides Flask and River suggested crossing the River Soshenstar at the abandoned camp of the Order of the Gauntlet, Camp Righteous. After a brief disagreement (because my players are contrarians to the bones) Casamir used his wings to fly Agile and Nugget the Velociraptor over the river, while the guides crossed in a canoe and Princess Quiana tried t...
Read more

Location: Character Creation and Refuge Bay

I met with Ashely on Friday after school and together we helped Norah, a friend of ours, to completely build a level 7 Battle-Master Fighter in order to join Casamir. The session lasted from about 3 pm to 4:45 pm when Norah was picked up from Ashley’s house. Norah’s character Suga is a gold Dragonborn with a Charlatan background. Such a combination had never occurred to me before, but due to Norah’s creativity and the Fighter class’s versatility, Suga became a very believable character. The Bond that Norah chose for Suga also tied in well with the story: searching for the murderer of a loved one is a classic, and could definitely push a scam artist to become a dedicated Fighter. I described a way to integrate Suga into the story that Norah agreed to: Suga had followed rumors of the murderer to the mountainous southeastern coast of Chult and was lead through the wilderness by a small party of two Emerald Enclave Scouts and their priest, named Sullesh. Norah also described Suga as ve...
Read more