Continuing from last week into the penultimate session of the season, I reminded the participants in my local library’s Dungeons & Dragons program of the coming end of the season and of expectations for moving forward in the hoped-for next season. The idea is that we will begin with participants running one-shot games of their own design, using the characters currently in play; I will swap in for the participant running the games with a character of my own, one who will conform to the character-building and level restrictions in place for the participants and who will have additional, personal inhibitions that will help me not to get in the way of the younger participants.
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On the topic of getting in the way: as might be expected, I have a lot more experience building and playing characters than do the participants in the library’s program. It would be easy for me to make a character that would dominate the narrative, not least because I do have some advance knowledge of the stories my aspiring game-runners want to tell. So much would be an unacceptable level of metagaming, however, and as I would decry any player doing such a thing,1 I can hardly avail myself of such a thing. To get around that, then, I am imposing additional restrictions on the character I intend to play2; not only will he3 adhere to the source-material restrictions in place for the group,4 he will be a dedicated pacifist. Although combat figures are inherent to D&D, owing in large part to its origins in tabletop wargaming,5 I mean that my character will carry no weapon, learn no directly offensive prayer,6 and make no attack roll. I will be in a supporting role, both in-game and in-group, making sure others have the opportunity for narrative prominence; I don’t need to have it, myself.
No, while I do look forward to playing as a player, I intend to be a resource in what I hope will be another season of Hanlon, not only helping the party succeed at the challenges presented to them, but also for the new game-runners as they deal with rules-sets, player tensions, and narrative concerns. I take seriously the idea that I should be helping others to get more fully into the game and preparing a new generation of gamers for play. After all, I won’t be able to run games forever, but the hobby has been good to me for a number of years, and I think it ought to go on for a while longer; I need to do my part to make that happen.
1. See “Continuing the Return to Hanlon,” here.
2. A goliath life domain cleric: the party lacks a cleric and the associated support abilities, and the goliath will both contrast with other player-characters and make for some interesting tension, as discussed below.
3. I mean him to be a he at this point, although that might change as the character develops in my head and on the page
4. For reasons of accessibility, the Hanlon campaign is restricted to materials in the core D&D 2024 rules, expressed in the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and the Monster Manual. If and when house rules come up, they will be promulgated to the group at no cost. It’s a public library program and presumes no effective access to outside rules–and I know that one or more of the participants are substantially economically disadvantaged. They deserve to get to play too, and at no disadvantage I can mitigate.
5. For some discussion of this, see Lawrence Schick’s Heroic Worlds.
6. Players across decades have worked out how to make even the most innocuous things deadly in game. There’s an art to it, and it’s fun, but I’m not looking to do that when I play alongside the participants while testing out others’ game-running.
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