D & D at MEPACon

Allow me to preface this by explaining something. I started my roleplaying with D&D in the late 70's, as a lot of people did. It remained my game of choice through most of the 80's, at which time I switched over to GURPS (more on that another time). And relatively recently, I was pulled back to D&D (in its 3rd edition by now) by the fact that my stepnephew became interested in roleplaying, and that was the game he wanted to learn, so that's what I taught him (along with some others). My point here is that it's not as though I'm simply unfamiliar with D&D.

As I'd said in the MEPACon post, I chose to run D&D more to help the con than because I enjoy it. The scenario was purposely written with the idea that it would involve the sort of intercharacter conflicts I enjoy (which are considered unconventional in typical D&D play) while including the combat relished by most D&D players (and usually bores me silly now).

I had six players altogether, including two of my con regulars and four D&D players. Of the D&D players, I recognized one of them, though I'm not sure whether he'd played in something else I'd run before or if I'd just seen him around or talked to him before. The scenario involved three low born adventurers and three high born courtiers who have to team up to deal with a threat to the kingdom in which they all live. There are separate scenes for the two groups at the beginning, and as the situation progresses, they're brought together and have to learn to co-exist. Since split groups are uncommon in D&D, I'd expected the two groups to come together fairly quickly. I was pleasantly surprised to find that everybody got so involved in playing in character that it took some time to actually bring the two groups together in one place. There had been a minimum of combat up to that point, but it was obvious that nobody was bored (though I suspect one of them would've preferred more combat than we ultimately had).

We reached the climactic final scene, which did involve combat, and things went from lively to a screeching halt as the reference books came out. My usual approach is to keep things moving as quickly as possible, since you don't have time to carefully consider your actions when you're in the middle of a fight. The D&D players wouldn't tolerate that, and forced a slower pace so they could figure out what they were doing, and occasionally asked me to more specifically define the effects of their opponents' spells so they could try to figure out what level the bad guys were by what they could do. In the end, we had a satisfactory win for the good guys, one of the bad guys escaped (setting up the possibility of a sequel), and everybody seemed to be happy. I took it as a good sign that two of the D&D players asked me when I'd be running games at another convention, as they wanted to play in one of them again in the future.

On the positive side, everyone did a wonderful job of getting into character and playing off of one another, and everyone seemed to genuinely enjoy themselves.

On the negative side, I didn't enjoy the scenario design process as much as usual because it's just too damn complicated to quantify your own monsters and NPCs in D&D. There's always the option of using monsters straight from the book, but then the odds are that the players have read the books or seen them before, and will quickly figure out how to beat them. Then there's the way combat runs in D&D. My usual players were just rolling with the situation, doing the best they could on the fly, while the D&D players wanted to stop to look up the specific effects of each of their options in game terms before choosing an action so they could find not just any workable useful action in the fight, but the optimum action. They were also puzzling out the spells the bad guys were using so they could figure out what else they might have up their sleeves. In fact, I didn't have a preselected spell list for the bad guys; I'd just decided in advance what the biggest thing was that the bad guys could do and how many hit points they had, and any spells below that level that struck my fancy at the moment was available to them.

I'd considered it possible that I could enjoy writing basic fantasy scenarios, putting a little of my own stamp on them, and do the convention some good by offering a popular system without the players having to join the RPGA just to play some D&D. At the end of the day, there's just a fundamental style clash between the things I enjoy about RPGs and the things most D&D players enjoy about them. I want to see interesting character interaction, and while combat is an option to resolve your story, it's not necessarily the preferred option. Most D&D players play that system because they enjoy the details of combat in that setting. They consider knowledge of the rules to be a priority and a sign of a good player, while roleplaying ability is secondary. I consider an ability to play in character to be primary, and knowledge of the rules is secondary. There's nothing wrong with either preference, and while this session showed that the two camps are not entirely incompatible, they aren't entirely compatible, either. If I'd found a way to include a little more combat in the early part of the game and had been as interested in the nuances of combat as most of the players were in the last scene, this could've been a great session instead of a good one.

I don't plan to run D&D at a convention again because I don't enjoy the same things that most of those players do, and that's fine. I won't say I'll never run it again, because I'd thought I was done with D&D in the late '80s and ended up running it again over 15 years later. I run games for fun, and I can have more fun running something that fits my preferences better and still draw players (if not as many). I learned that perhaps our preferences are not as far apart as I'd thought, but they're far enough apart that it reminded me why I moved on to other games in the first place.