Back to the regularly scheduled programming

After a two-week hiatus, I once again spent Saturday playing D&D. I'm a geek, what can I say? It was nice to be hanging out again, and I even managed to convince two friends to join in - one had played once before, and the other was a D&D virgin (although he admitted to playing Magic in high school). Unfortunately, the first had to leave early, and I couldn't tell if the second one actually enjoyed himself or not... and since he doesn't leave comments on my blog, I won't ever know (BIG OLD NOT SUBTLE HINT RIGHT HERE!).

I have spent the majority of my [short] D&D career as a player. I've been gaming for less than a year, so it makes sense. Tonight, I was the Dungeon Master (or DM, for those of you in the know) for the first time. Well, technically it was my second time, but the first time was on a weeknight with only two players, so it doesn't really count, especially since we abandoned it after one night. This time, I had five different players, and we played for about 10 hours (including character creation and a dinner break). It was a pre-fab adventure, which does put some limits on the DM, but it went pretty well. I recorded the first hour or so of it, and I'm planning to go back and listen to it later. Why? To see how much I suck as a DM... to see where I lose control of the game, to see where I give more information than I should, to see where I take too much time to set up things... just to see where, as a player, I would get bored and lose interest. And then I'll delete it.

All in all, it was a pretty good session, although I'm not sure if I like being the DM... There's definitely less waiting for someone else to be ready, but I don't really like that other people are waiting for me to get ready. The pre-fab adventure is fairly restrictive, and I think that's bothering me a bit. I definitely didn't get to be very creative with this one. I think it might be better if I was writing my own adventure - I love how Shane's campaigns just flow with the players. I guess everyone has to start somewhere, though, and most of the DM's I know (but I only know 4) started by running pre-fab adventures, or at least running in pre-fab worlds. It's not a bad way to get a feeling for how to run, I suppose, and it's keeping my players in line a bit more... kind of... although it's driving me nuts that Artemis keeps controlling every undead creature they come across! The party had a zombie and two skeletons following them around for a while, and almost had an ogre zombie (I'm soooo glad that check failed!).

Hope you enjoyed reading all this geekiness... I'll bet it's as foreign to some of you as football stats are to me!