Our D&D session tonight was all an all-out two-hour brawl in a town council building. D&D is a mix of puzzles, social interaction, and fighting but tonight was mainly fighting. Which is kind of fun. After all, players stock all these hit points, weapons, and spells as they get more powerful . . . let’s put them to the test.
The test tonight had me take down three of my four players at one point, but they made it through and ended the session victorious. I’m learning about balance in battles (how strong of monsters do you throw at people) and it’s tough to get right. Partially because a lot of it comes down to the roll of the dice. But I wanted a tough battle in this situation, I wanted them to get a win that felt hard fought for, and hopefully that was the result.
It was also fun for me since the main bad guy was a spellcaster and I don’t play them very often. I got to bring furniture to life and send a cloud of daggers after folks. As a player, I like being able to brawl and hit with my fists or sword, but it’s good for me to learn more about the spellcasting side of D&D (maybe it’ll mean my spellcasting players surprise me less often!).
I’ve also been using D&D Beyond’s Maps feature which has made combat a lot easier. I made a simple town council building map for tonight’s battle, but there are a lot of fantastic maps that people create either for free or for reasonable tiers on Patreon. That allows us to see where players and monsters are on the map and better visualize the terrain and how to use it to our advantage.
I learn more every time we play. And I feel like I’ve gotten more relaxed since I started DM-ing over a year ago. I used to worry about whether I knew all the rules but now I have more confidence in looking things up as they’re relevant. Or just confidence in my knowledge from consuming a lot of D&D content.
I have a lot of room to grow too — improving dialogue or adding dialogue into a fight is not something that comes naturally to me, but I love it when DM’s add that into combat so the story keeps going throughout the mechanics of the fight.
Keep growing. Keep playing D&D.
With Love,
Natalie