The Rewards of Dungeons & Dragons

So I've taken up the mantle of Dungeon Master once again at my shops Dungeons & Dragons Encounters every Wednesday night. Of all the table top games that exist role-playing has to be my favorite. It's a shame that it's also seems to be one of the most complicated endeavors to plan and execute.

Along with D&D I'm hosting a Thursday night Shadowrun game that manages to fill every seat I have available to me. It's nice to run two games like this back to back. If the themes were similar that fact might be different. Shadowrun and D&D have very few meaningful similarities and that makes it easy to engage in each of them week after week.

There was a long time where I was 'done' with Dungeons and Dragons. It had been a rough run in 4th edition where the 'edition wars' here on the internet were the loudest. Every customer who wasn't part of a table on Wednesday nights had nothing but criticism. I'll say that in my heart Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition will always be my favorite; that doesn't make it a good game.

Now that I've come back around I can see the game (in it's current form) as it is. We're just having fun running into ancient dwarven keeps and bashing in monster domes. Granted, there's a greater story being told by Wizards of the Coast and the design team but the best parts of this game are the moment to moment scenarios. Dungeons and Dragons thrives on immediate threat and immediate reward.

The set pieces and their devious trappings are just as important -if not more so- than the over-arching plots scrawled within the campaign books. This is where the stories come from. The Barbarian who spends his bonus action and rolls a critical hit twice in a row? He saved the party from a powerful wraith! The mysterious slime oozing forth from an old tattered door? Only the druid knows what horrors might lurk beyond, and only he knows the stories of the ancient insects that might be borrowing beneath their very feet!

It's nice to take a break from high brow gaming, complex NPC's and interconnected plots. It feels good to present a group of players a straight forward challenge or a logic puzzle that can grant them immediate satisfaction. Even more satisfying for me that I can sit back and wing it every now and then and everyone still has the opportunity to have fun.