• he/him

Precision-seeking, but often ridiculous.


For a little over a year now I've been co-running a discord D&D game with my friend @masamage. If you asked me any time in the ten years before that, I'd have told you I couldn't DM, because I've slowly learned that I have a lot of trouble with the particular central improv skill of adapting on my feet when a player makes a choice I didn't anticipate or plan for. Now we're doing this game where @masamage handles most of the NPC dialogue and world exploration stuff and I handle most of the combat; we hang around making supportive sidekick interjections while the other one is in charge of something and we worldbuild and plan the adventures collaboratively.

I've never heard of anyone running a game like this before (which is one reason it took so long for it to occur to me to try it even though I've been reading D&D sourcebooks for about three decades and best friends with @masamage for only slightly less time); I've looked for it specifically since we started, but even stuff about shared campaign settings seems to assume you'll be running your own discrete sessions in a setting that other DMs also run sessions in. The language of dungeon (or game) mastery seems to presuppose that the role is unitary and autocratic. But it works really well for us; we've taken the PCs from level one to level five and we still seem to have momentum. This isn't the longest campaign I've ever been involved in, but it's one of the three or four longest, and I didn't think I would ever get to have that in a game where I was in this kind of role.


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