It's zero hour before this weeks D&D game and wouldn't you know it; I'm pacing back and forth again.
I can't help but be excited. This is the fourth run I've taken at playing through this campaign I'm running this evening. And this time the players are half way through and seem as though they're going to work their way through the whole of it.
The first time I ran this adventure the players decided to go a completely different rout and gave up on it half way through to explore character hooks. At the time this didn't really bother me all that much since I used to abhor canned adventures. Preferring the fluid nature of character driven story lines and random encounters to rule the day. And now, since I no longer spend nearly twenty hours of prep time on my adventures the way that I did when I was a little younger, having a steady through line of adventure and pre-made dungeons to explore along with my players has become a little more my speed.
The second time I ran this adventure path was for a Library group that I was DMing as part of a summer reading program. This is rewarding in a way that other games are not, but also somewhat frustrating. When doing the whole "paid GM" thing you only have a small window of opportunity to get adventuring done. Since most of the time these players have either never played outside of that instance or have little motivation to explore the books and game info on their own game sessions can be slowed down considerably with rules explanations and getting the idea across that; No this is not quite like an MMO and that the actions that their characters can take are much more robust than most digital offerings have. Mostly because they're not limited by digital storage space and pre-planned responses. The other reason that this adventure was never completed during a library run is because the goal of the Library games is more an educational one. To teach the players how to play and run their own games while teaching the basic research skills necessary to play the game. This is doubly important since these games are meant to be geared towards middle to highschoolers in an effort to help them apply these same skills to non game projects. Which, so far, has worked. For the adventure it means barely scratching the surface in the handful of weeks the program takes place and constantly reintroducing a rotating crop of players.
The third time...well...technically this is a continuation of the third time.
I started it with a group of new players, taught them the basics of the game and then dove in head first into the adventure. They were making great headway and really enjoying the game. But as often happens with role playing groups; life happened. People moved, changed availability and the like.
So, now here I am with the remnants of two groups come together to pick up where the third group left off.
Last week we started by giving a brief introduction of "Last time on Dungeons and Dragons..." that detailed each of the characters journeys that led them to this point coupled with expositioning in the parts of the first half of the adventure some of them weren't there for. And after taking a small detour to chase down a monster bounty that almost killed some of their number, they jumped onto the investigation train "In Character" to set themselves on the path of adventure.
So here I am, waiting for the players to show up, going over my notes from the previous sessions, the notes for the coming session, and generally being a Nervous Nelly about and doing the "Did I do enough prep work" dance that always has me teed up before a game starts.
Which I think I did..hopefully. But, as always with these table top games. The pace is dictated a lot by where the players want to go and what they want to do and I'm simply here to provide the backdrop and the adventure paths for them to follow.
