Drink, Talk, Roll Extended #1: A Star Is Borne

The first session of the new campaign of Drink, Talk, Roll has started and your friendly neighborhood Dungeon Master is back to talk about it.

On Beginnings

The first session is a tough but rewarding session for any campaign. While Session Zero, which I covered in the last column, sets the tone and basic guidelines for the campaign, Session One delivers on that and sets the stakes for the campaign. On that front, I think I delivered.

I talked last time about my inspiration for the campaign mentioning both the Wheel of Time series of books and the Golden Sun series of video games. The opening narration was directly inspired by the opening narration of each Wheel of Time book. The opening scenario of people coming into town and seeing someone without a face approaching was also taken from the first book in the series The Eye of the World. The opening festival also gives time for each of the player characters to introduce themselves and show of their personalities.

The first combat of the campaign was inspired by a whole slew of JRPGs including Golden Sun that have a fight early in the game that you can’t win. Being down one player that night certainly didn’t make things any easier on the party, but I had already made plans for both possible outcomes of the fight with the goblins. If they had managed to defeat all of the goblins, the Masked Man would have walked out of the Star Chamber and the combat would have begun to look more like the ending of Rogue One.

What I didn’t expect was for Amra (Manuel) to play dead but I ran with it. He rolled low of his Deception check but the goblin next to him rolled a Nat 1. I did that in a private roll just to determine the outcome without them knowing so I know some will say I fudged it. Here’s a screenshot of the rolls as proof:

I was going to give the chance to grab the bag with the Stars to one or all of the players but since he decided to take that course of action, it ended up falling solely on him. With his roll of 12, he only managed to get his hands on one.

Once again, this was a spot where I had to make only general plans based on the number of stars they had, and whether or not they decided to follow the masked man. I do like leaving the general direction of the plot up to the players which is why I tend to end sessions with the players deciding their next course of action so I can plan it out. If they had wanted to just go and find the tower for the Air Emerald that they had retrieved ignoring the threat of the masked man, I would currently be planning for how they would track down that information. It might be very difficult and they might change their mind halfway through but I like giving them the option.

System D(eez Nuts)

I remember reading Anthony Bourdain’s book The Nasty Bits and learned the term “System D”. (Get your jokes out now) As I remember it, it’s essentially just how a group adapts and improvises in the face of adversity to make everything go smoothly. In a way, it’s a lot like how a D&D group behaves in and out of every session.

Coming into the session, I felt woefully underprepared as I almost always do. That’s something most DMs will feel at least during their first session. I’ve DM’ed campaigns before, but never for this group and only played with them for a few sessions so I was unsure how much I’d need to prep. This gets better with experience. My other group has basically taught me that the outline should be something like:
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1. Set up situation
2. Player Shenanigans
3. DM reaction

And by “shenanigans” I don’t just mean the players acting in an expected way like fighting the obvious enemy or talking to the NPC, I mean “spend time destroying the AI train controller they were supposed to have a riddle competition with” or “walk straight into the villain lair that will most likely get them killed in direct engagement”. Luckily, my expectation in the former was that they’d do something to take out the AI and derail the train so however they did that, I could move on to the next bit.  All I had to do was make sure that I allowed them to move from steps 1 to 3 as they wanted mostly by roleplaying a dying AI. Good thing I’ve watched 2001: A Space Odyssey.

This also comes up on the players’ end as well. It’s basically what being a player is all about. The game master gives you a situation and you adapt and improvise around that. Sometimes there are limitations because of the system or your character’s abilities and items. Sometimes, the problem is because you forgot to enter your character information like a few characters in this week’s session.

So, a message to all the players reading this: Please be prepared. Your DM has done a lot of prep work on their end. The least you can do is have your character sheet ready. (Especially if you have a month to prepare) Obviously, life can be terrible so talk to them if something has made it difficult for you to prepare or play. Most problems in TTRPGs can be solved by talking to each other like adults.

Next Time on DTR

As for where the campaign, the players’ made the decision to head towards Ikana where both Amra (Manuel) and Jedah (Warren) have a history and a bounty to go with it. I’m really looking forward to seeing how that goes.

​-J.D.