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As I was moving some boxes, I came across the external hard drives I had in college which contain my notes from the RPGs I played in college with my first gaming group. Which got me started thinking about all the DM lessons I learned and especially those that took me longer to learn, or which I still struggle with compared to other examples I see out there.
I first played a tabletop RPG in my Freshman year of college, back in early 2008. A group of people from my floor were playing D&D 3.5 and I asked if I could join in. I made my first character, a glass cannon wizard, from which the joke that became my online username (SquishyMage) started. That campaign petered out like so many do with time conflicts and people getting busy and players just having minor table drama.
The second campaign started the next fall. I rolled up my second character. I decided to go different that time. I rolled a sorcerer, and solidified the joke at the table that Alex always plays the squishy mage. And again, the game kinda just petered out right about the time one player managed to strand my character and the rogue in a completely different city from the rest of the party.
The DM from those games got busy with being a grad student, and I’d been reading all sorts of stuff online about the game. This being 2008-2009, 4e was starting to fizzle a bit, and the OSR movement was starting to take off and people were talking about the “way things used to be done.” And I was new to the game and a lot of those things sounded interesting to me. So I grabbed a retroclone, an early free edition of Swords and Wizardry, and I made my own campaign. I built my own world and had ideas for what I thought was a great and epic plot that would make for the best campaign ever.
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I built my own world, or rather stole it wholecloth from so many sources like most new DMs. It was a fantasy World War II set up like Hetalia: Tolkien Powers. My elves were French, the Dwarves were German, Italians were Halflings. And because there’s been fantasy since Tolkien, there was even special death-fueled magic for my dwarves inspired by Harry Turtledove’s Darkness Series.
I had a blast in that first game. The players escaped from a Fantasy Russian dungeon that had been overtaken by dwarves and they reported to the King who gave them the mission to find an end to the war by tracking down the source of the death magic the dwarves were using. So, yes, from session one, I handed a first-level party the epic continent spanning quest that really should have been handled by trusted and experienced professionals. But don’t worry, the actual quest was swiftly forgotten as I ran them through scripted scenes that whisked them from place to place in what I called the “Warp Nine Cart”. So there wasn’t much story to worry about the terrible mismatch between what the party could do and what they were tasked with.
That party had the rune mage I ported from a 3rd party 3.5 supplement, a basic magic-user, a cleric, and a fighter. And then there was the DMPC Magic User who was so many levels higher than the party, and was consistently used as the “whoops, guess who hasn’t mastered encounter balance yet” button. Which led to a lot of cheap victories for the party.
When I opened the word document I used as an ongoing prep file after about 12 years, I cringed reading through the level to which I tried to script out every single word of NPC dialogue and which places the party would go in which order. I was the railroadiest of DMs in that first game. No one seemed to care too much though. They came back, even after that first game ended after the summer.
We returned to the world a second time. The group was a tiny bit different, and following one player’s insistence I’d picked up some AD&D 2e books second-hand and got just as excited to run that system as I’d been to run a retroclone.
Of course, I’d managed to learn exactly zero lessons about the scope of a D&D campaign and began right away with a slightly different “Save the entire world from session one” plot which played parallel to the first campaign, with little easter eggs built in so that players who’d played in that one could see the effects their characters had had.
I worked with the players to try and build a custom quest for each PC, with custom chosen and in some cases custom-built and entirely unbalanced magic items tied to those quests. In hindsight, the plot is like the most ridiculous of RPG video games. World’s in danger, but hey let’s stop in the Paladin of the Goddess of Love’s home temple for an obligatory onsen scene, since the Paladin was a walking anime nosebleed trope.
The Elven Bladesinger ended up creating a whole organization of elves that stood in for Vichy France in the setting, working with the dwarves to further their own goals. I also had Fantasy Mandate Palastine feature a conflict between druids and clerics because that wasn’t a college student’s oversimplified view at all.
We continued the story structure of warping from one place to the next, getting into scripted set piece fights through another campaign. Our rogue from the clan of the druids eventually murdered the cleric after their campaign-long rivalry, and the campaign ended shortly thereafter. And thus was born a rule I use to this day, hostile actions against fellow PCs automatically miss unless there is active consent from the targeted PC.
I took a short break from being the DM while a would-be game of Shadowrun failed to make it past session one. And yet, reading through the Fourth Edition Anniversary Book got me hooked on the lore of that system.
I took the GM’s seat again, or rather the Storyteller’s seat, when I found a copy of Mage: the Awakening (Affiliate Link) in the local game shop. I liked the freeform nature of the World of Darkness sytem’s spellcasting. And being the squishy mage, an entire campaign around mages sounded awesome. The one downside of World of Darkness (including Mage) is how tied to the system the plot is. Everyone in the group went with different factions and that led to people working against each other. It was a fun one, but not executed well. Some players moved away which brought that campaign to an early end.
As I retell this, it occurs to me that I’ve had so many chances to learn that I should get better at pacing the RPG plots I run. But, to be sure, I still struggle with getting excited about the big homebrew world-spanning adventure and forget the fun that can be had solving the small mystery in the village and clearing out the kobold lair on the outskirts of town just to keep things safe.
And after a few sessions, the Mage campaign gave way to a coworker wanting to run an Unknown Armies game.
The Mage Campaign was the last one I DMed before I moved from Seattle to Lansing, Michigan after college. Three prematurely ended campaigns filled a ton of fun evenings with friends. When I arrived in Michigan, I found myself in a new group and it took a few months playing at a D&D Encounters table before I worked my way back behind the screen.
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