So, I’m not happy with my last D&D session, for a lot of reasons. WIDWAD, What I Did Wrong At D&D, is all about me being really harsh on myself about my performance, so that I can improve. I find it very helpful.

Last session, I rebuilt the dungeon around my players, introduced a puzzle door system, and had 2 unsatisfying combats. A lot to unpack.

1. I rebuilt the dungeon around my players. 

We’re not going to talk about having dungeons done before players go into them. I probably ought to internalize that a bit more, but I know it’s a thing and I have a lot of work to bring the rest of the campaign in line with that thought. If I can get out of balancing on the edge of being unprepared, then having dungeons ready to go may be a possibility. But I’m not there yet. 

The important thing here was that I had rebuilt the dungeon, then tried to get my players up to speed. There are a lot of things I’d do differently, but the big key one for this session specifically: I should have started my players at the entrance again, and not kept them in the same spot. I think it added to the confusion of the session, not really providing any benefits, other than having kept some promises I probably should have not made about keeping players informed.

2. I still hate the puzzle design. And the doors.

I built a puzzle that would be great in a video game. One room that the puzzle is in has a good-ish reason for the puzzle design. The players did not see that this session. Instead, the puzzle is just kinda there, and then I tied it into the boss fight as well as the doors, and it is just all not doing what I want. I’ve tied a bunch of constraints into the puzzle, and the triangle of suck has activated.

So, what I need to do- I still need to do something better with the puzzle. Don’t know what that is. But a big part of the problem with them is that they unlock the doors, when I sort of want them to be optional in the dungeon. So, I need to make the doors openable without them.

I mean, the doors are, but while the players know intellectually that they can use the spellcrystals to bypass the doors, they aren’t going to. Monkey trap. The players see the crystals as treasure to hoard, not a key that they can then take out of the dungeon if not needed. Which is fair. I gave them out as treasure long before they were keys.

So I have a fix for the doors. I’ll need to probably just tell my players the change to the doors, because it’s something they would have known by this venturing point, so that sucks, but it will make the dungeon better.

I still don’t have a fix for the puzzles. I’ll take a walk in a bit and see if that helps.

3. I’m showing too much of how the sausage is made.

I’m a huge fan of experimenting in D&D, but there’s a fuzzy line that I think I’ve crossed. Players need to know what the rules are, how things work, so they can build off of it. I’ve done too much iteration in the game recently. The changes have been big and sweeping and basically non-stop. It’s okay to put untested things in front of players- It’s not okay for them to feel like they’re playtesting. Not unless that’s what your players *know* your table is for. 

So I’ve made a new channel on the Magpie Arcanum Discord where I’ll be posting things like this and my WIP comments. This way people can opt out of seeing it. Maybe they’re interested, but probably not. I think players just want to play, and I’m interrupting that a bit. 

4. I’m failing at my core job as a DM. 

DMs wear a lot of hats. But one of the ones that I am particularly failing right now is that it’s my job to take whatever is in my notes and make it real for the players. 

They should be able to feel it. They should be able to see it. Everything together should accumulate in making real memories for them of this experience. And I’ve not been doing that. I’ve been really bad at that. Part of it of course is my aphantasia. I don’t innately have those details on hand. This isn’t a world I see in my head, so the mechanics are what matter to me. It’s easy to forget about this hat, and slip into other aspects. So I need to brush this off, straighten the brim, and make my session something REAL. 

Petrifying Rocko was along those lines. It just sort of happened. It didn’t feel like it should have happened, it just… did. And adding on to that anticlimax was me not describing it. And adding on to that anticlimax was me handwaving getting his statue out. And adding on to that anticlimax was me handwaving a new character without any hassle. I’m not happy about ANY of that. But the last two parts are sort of “eh, what can you do?” They’re campaign level choices I’ve made about the idea of the backup party/base camp and they make sense in terms of gameplay, but eh.. So the ONE THING I can control is the description. So I need to make that more and better.

5. Loot and such

This is connected to a lot of other issues, but I tried videogame style loot drops and they didn’t work for anyone. 

So there’s a few interesting constraints concerning loot. First, my campaign is No Experience, so gold should function as something like experience. So when you kill something, you should get something for it. 

The spell gems sort of makes sense. Gold doesn’t. How much gold should drop when you kill a basilisk? Sam was disappointed that he died and they got 12 gold out of it. Which is telling, because there is also a spell crystal that didn’t enter into the math at all. And the treasure in the room may have happened after the quip. So I can’t blame him for that. 

I think all of these foes need to have static loot. Maybe there’s a table that can roll on that will give something with a bit of variety, but for the most part, it should be pretty predictable. 

I don’t feel bad for the basilisk being low gold. It’s an encounter that I feel is designed to be avoided. And sure, the players haven’t seen the pattern yet, they’ve only interacted with it twice. That’s something I have to keep in mind. I have an understanding of this dungeon based on what it is after the players have obtained mastery. And so when the players are floundering, wondering why there doesn’t seem to be a path where the doors are all unlocked, I know that it’s because they don’t have the perspective that I do. But I also know that players are only going to interface from their perspective. Will that change next expedition? Maybe. Next expedition is wild. 

I’m having a lot of ideas on what I should do for loot, but they are things that are going to work better in future dungeons. Really the big takeaway that I’m getting here is that I don’t know if players are concerned with having alternate methods of dealing with encounters. Which is strange to me and I don’t know how to rectify it with what I know about players and wilderness survival situations. I’m used to thinking that players are going to avoid combat. Are dungeons different because there’s not an infinite number of tabs and the monsters are in the way? Am I misremembering from last session? 

6. What we have here is a failure to communicate

One of my encounters last session was supposed to give details that will be helpful in a future encounter. Instead, it didn’t work like that at all. And I think that I might have to just live with that. And when the next time this dungeon comes around, I’ll have to make some tweaks to the story and the sequence of events. Which is good to know. Wandering monsters isn’t a horrible idea, it’s just a thing I’m really bad at. 

Okay, sausage time. The knights that were in the chapel probably should have been wandering around a little bit. Like, when the puzzle of a particular sigil get solved, an alarm sort of sounds, increasing the tension, and that knight is dispatched to that region to investigate. The knights are also supposed to have some sort of extra ability based on the boss and based on their sigils, but I haven’t telegraphed that at all. 

What this means is that the puzzles don’t necessarily have to be puzzles. They could just sort of be switches. And if they take a little bit to activate, that hits one of the constraints that I haven’t explained because that one is still very secret although my players might start having details about it really soon. 

7. I am soooo bad at bringing complications into play. 

Currently, the party has two of a complication, which means that the monster’s damage should increase by four. I have yet to remember this during combat. It doesn’t enter my radar at all. And that’s a problem. If my complications aren’t making complications, then they aren’t complications. I think that sentence works. I need that extra pressure to be applied, however I pull punches. I’m notorious for pulling punches.

So here’s what I’m going to do. Initiative zero, I’m going to randomly pick an adventurer to take two damage. Since there’s two instances of scent of blood, I’ll do it twice. Easy to remember, because it’s end of round, it’s less damage because it’s not every single attack, and it’s still going to be giving damage, and possibly triggering concentration checks. 

Is it a thing where I will make little number cards and let players potentially tank a lot more damage than the others? It’s possible. But not at the outset. I’ll try it with this and we’ll see what happens. 

Conclusion 

I’m sure there were more things that I did wrong, and I’m sure there were a lot of things that I did really well. I have a much better feel for this dungeon, for the play experience that I want to engender from it and some good action items for me to do. Which means I’m ready for my next session.

(Well, it means I’m ready to start preparing for my next session. Which is basically the same thing, right?)