Nightmares

Picture this: You spend 6 hours coming up with a story. You make up characters, good and evil. You give them stories, back grounds, motivations and goals. You weave this tale and try to come up with "loose" connections for your players so they can feel like they are a big part of the story. So they can feel like THEY are directing the story, and the story isn't direction them. You create dialog between characters in an attempt to "hint" them in the right direction. Sure, I delivered the dialog horribly but I tried. And after all this work to try and make the players feel "involved", I still get a "Well that's not my characters problem, lets keep going."

I probably shouldn't post right now, seeing as I'm in a very cranky mood and tired as hell having only got around 4 hours of sleep last night. We were up playing Dungeons and Dragons until 4am this morning. I don't even know if my brain was actually functioning for the last 2 hours, but that's half the fun isn't it?

I'd love to say the session was a smashing success and everyone had an awesome time, but as always that wasn't the case. I really thought I had prepared well this time. I had cool little mysterious things for each player to be worried about, I had a main plot thread that started with a cool cinematic large scale battle. I had important NPCs (non-player characters) with vague but important quests. Even an unknown bad guy! All these elements I tried to throw in and it still didn't work. The dialog was choppy, the plot was too straight forward, and my attempts to give the characters motivation was lacking. There was bickering, slow progress, and once again arguments about the definition of good and evil. Oh the joys of Dungeons and Dragons.

Perhaps like a lot of things in life, my dreams of the perfect Dungeons and Dragons session is just a pipe dream and actually a nightmare. But I can't give up yet... for where there is a will, there is a way! Somehow the princess must be rescued, the forces of evil brought to justice, and the heroes will reap the rewards!