Its D&D!

Session Notes (08/17/22)

Game: D&D 5e

Module: n/a

Players: 4

I sponsor the D&D club at school and the kids play 5e.  We just started and we’ve got about 8 players and only one kid that can DM, so I take four  of them and try to keep the premise simple: it’s D&D!

I built up a small sandbox / open table concept using the city guidelines from the alexandrian’s blog.

Characters:

Vi, plasmoid druid

Valcrius, tiefling sorcerer

Theodore, harongon sorcerer

Astor, goliath barbarian

Session:

The characters arrived in Ottgar, and after briefly describing themselves, ended up at the Smoked Salmon, a waterlogged house for wayward adventurers.  They picked up a job from the notice board, and took a gondola up river to a neighborhood of wealthy citizens known as “The Whaleback”.  Here they found the house of the Wizard Geld, who hadn’t been heard from in quite some time.  Their job was to find out what happened to him.

I’m going to just briefly gloss over the session:

• Some animated coat hooks stole some of their things

• They gingerly avoided expensive looking porcelain dinnerware that had signs saying “do not steal” written on them

• They inspected, but left alone, all the fire elementals that powered the kitchen’s many stoves

• In the animated weaving room, where looms run themselves, the plasmoid went inside a suit of armor that suddenly animated.  The party had to fight it without damaging their comrade inside

• In my favorite room, they discovered 5 small jars, and a sixth broken jar with progressively larger footprints leading to a hole in the wall.  Each jar had: a small t-rex, a small giant, a small roc, a small star, and a small city in them.  The players discussed what would happen if they broke any, and agreed it would be a very funny way to TPK, and then they very carefully left the room.

• They met a medium sized bat, who spoke druidic, who liked to read.

• In the wizard’s observatory, they found that he had looked at a beautiful star and then collapsed on the ground, and died from it.

Having discovered what happened to Geld, they returned and were paid.

Dungeonmaster Notes:

It’s 5e!  It is what it says it is.  Do you want a game where there is a rabbit person sorcerer and then a half devil, but also a sorcerer?  What about sentient ooze?  Well, you can be anything in this game, haha.  It is a kitchen sink style that takes getting used to, but if you lean into it, it can be very fun.

And depending on the DM (which is me in this case) you can season the game to taste.  When the only fight of the session broke out, I didn’t roll initiative.  I just treated it like an environmental puzzle and asked for player input.  If they attacked, then they did.  If not, then they did something else.  It was much more fun and freeing.  I suppose if a lot of people sat down with me as DM they might be a little miffed, but it seems to me that most kids want to play D&D so that they can create their weird character, draw some art of them, and then interact with the other weird characters.  And that is pretty fun.