I've started running a D&D game on the weekends I'm not playing Champions with my regular group. This new group started when my wife read an awesome book called Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress. It's a sort of biography of a woman who plays D&D on a regular basis. My wife was interested in D&D before she read the book, but it helped to get her more motivated to play the game.
More than a year later and we've finally gotten enough people together that we can have a regular game. We've had one session so far, and luckily for me, the players seem interested in the campaign I've worked up. I hadn't expected my first game as DM to be going so smoothly, but I really didn't expect to have so much fun writing everything up.
I expected there to be some fun points, certainly. Writing up the story and campaign outline would be fun for sure, but setting up encounters, establishing characters, mapping locations etc had to be tedious and annoying, right? Turns out, these things are the most fun I've had so far.
Crafting encounters and puzzles for my players to solve has become one of the most entertaining parts of this experience for me. I love sitting down to my graph paper and mapping out dungeons, writing out the rewards or encounters, carefully placing clues to the greater story.
Watching my players go through this world I've created and seeing them react to the still speaking severed head of an undead beast they dug up behind the Inn or puzzling out the meaning of a strange journal or smiling during an encounter I set up warms a part of my heart I didn't know I had.
I know it seems weird, but to have three people (growing to six this coming session) get so into the world I've created for them is incredibly rewarding. A few of you reading this will understand what I'm talking about. For those that have no experience with this, imagine working on something tirelessly for weeks on end, filling in every detail of the project, making sure nothing is left out. Then imagine the project accomplishes everything you hoped it would and more. That's about as close an approximation I can give.
I think I'll be running a lot more games after this one. It's great to see the players getting into their characters and exploring their personalities. I'm lucky to have players that are dedicated to the game and their characters in it. I look forward to making this a regular thing.
If you're interested, I'll be posting updates on Twitter as the game progresses. Follow the site here.
