Tag Archives: Dungeons and Dragons

Game of the Week Blog Reflection Week 9: D&D Week 1

In this week’s class, we started playing Dungeons and Dragons. I have a bit of background in this game, but not nearly as much as some of my other friends. Dungeon and Dragons is a storytelling game. In this game, the players and the Dungeon Master tell a story together. Players roll dice to determine whether their attacks hit or miss and if they succeed or fail in what they wish to do.  I had never used the software Roll player before. Usually, when I am playing Dungeon and Dragons with my friends, we tend to not use a map. 

During our session, I played as a pink tiefling druid. Now don’t tell me tieflings have to be the same colors as humans. If I want to be a bright pink tiefling, I am going to be a bright pink tiefling. We were ambushed by goblins, but were able to capture one of them. My character fed the goblin berries while another player wanted to kill him. My character, Iniki, wouldn’t let our barbarian kill her new friend, and the party ended up putting the goblin on a baby leash. The session ended with us having our goblin ‘friend’ start leading us to a cave. 

I really had a blast trying to bounce ideas off of my classmates. I ended up making my character slowly seem more and more crazy as the session progressed. For example, when a horse was killed, my character would pet the horse to make it have “nice dreams.” Another time I made it so that the goblin we kidnapped knew it was my “friend” and that “friends never leave one another.”  I think the most difficult part of this game was setting up the Roll Player software. At times it was slightly confusing to use, but after a while we finally got it working for everyone.

Dungeons and Dragons relate to leadership in how we work together in a group. One person may try and control the narrative at times, but when the timing is right you can completely change where the story is going. You need to be able to listen to what others are talking about and then make a decision based on it. Sometimes it’s better to be the quiet character who then springs up a crazy idea. Other times you want to make sure that the story leads to a specific area and have to make a way for the session to run in that direction.

I am not sure who I would recommend to play Dungeon and Dragons, at least from the people that I know of. I would say my friends, but all of my close friends already play Dungeons and Dragons. After a year of not seeing each other in person, we are planning to start a new campaign once the school semester is over. Honestly, I would recommend this game to anyone who wants to tell and be part of a fun story.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection Week 9: D&D Week 1

Today in Tabletop Leadership, we played Dungeons & Dragons. I have never played this before but I enjoyed our first session. It is a roll playing game that requires a game master and a lot of creative players. The hardest part about the game is managing all of the character stats and being a good roll player. I don’t consider myself that creative so it is difficult to carry on the story.

This game has ties to leadership because it is a group working together. There are many different perspectives by each of the players and you have to make decisions as a group. Leadership requires making decisions and managing different perspectives within a group. The game master also acts as a leader because they have to initiate the story.

I think my friend Taylor would enjoy this game because she likes to roll play. I think her creative mind would make this game more enjoyable. She is very good at following along with a story which would let her get into it easily. I started to get into our play session after our first combat. I like how we won our first combat and then made decisions as a group on what to do next. I look forward to next week in order to see what interesting things develop in our game.

Game of the Week: Dungeons and Dragons

I play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. Over the 4 years I’ve been playing (a fifth of my life, if you want to feel old), I’ve played with many different groups and been Dungeon Master more often than not. Getting to play it for college credit? A dream come true. For my character I decided to try something new to me, playing a human barbarian (who was also a little old lady who worked in an archive). Our DM, Nick, did a fantastic job of introducing the game to the new players in our group. The world he created was both immersive and interactive, allowing our characters to have agency as well as lots to discover. Over three weeks our rag-tag party of heroes killed goblins, befriended goblins, unionized goblins, mourned exactly one goblin (RIP Rushwater you will be missed), and killed a bugbear (basically a large hairy goblin).  There was a healthy mix of cave exploration, social negotiation, and good old-fashioned fighting. 

The hardest part of this game is basic math. I’m not joking. I’m so bad at adding a number to another number. I keep a calculator on hand just to make sure everything goes smoothly. Aside from that, the other major difficulty in this (and other social games) is finding the balance between leading by example and knowing when to step back and let other people have the spotlight. This is especially relevant when the other members of the group have less experience with role-playing games and may be more shy about jumping in. 

Dungeons and Dragons is not a game for everyone. It has many moving parts and numbers to keep track of, and it’s designed to tell a very specific type of story. However, it is undoubtedly the most ubiquitous of the tabletop role playing games. Everyone and their grandma has heard of it. This combination doesn’t always work out; many times people will try to hack D&D to make it do what they want, when better alternatives exist. The same thing applies to leadership! There are nearly infinite styles of leadership, and not every one will work for any given group. It’s important to fit the leadership tactic to the situation and the people who are involved. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, you have to know when to take charge of a situation and when to sit back and let other people take initiative.

Dungeons and Dragons

Once again, a key part of my experience is how it was impacted by being virtual. It made it hard to work together and see how the others felt about each group decision. It was extremely amusing to see my fragile warlock get down to 2 and 0 hp in the first two sessions, with a long rest in between. I knew my warlock would be soft when I made him, but since it was my first time playing a character that is primarily a magic user I wasn’t expecting that level of squishiness.

We spent time enjoying my near state of death and trying to get closer to the solution to solving the issue of where all these goblins came from. No one was quite willing to be the one to speak out and offer a course of action. Likely due to not being able to see the reactions of the other players and their reactions to different options. At least, that was why I kept fairly quiet. It wasn’t fair to our DM and definitely increased the uncomfortableness, but it was hard to get over it when trying to not speak over anyone. 

Overcoming these obstacles happened more easily and more often towards the end of the three sessions. While we still struggled to communicate, the plot motivated us to work better together and get involved and invested. Leadership was shown when everyone trusted our DM and each other and put in the effort to try and work with each other to have fun and follow the goblins.

Week 3 – D&D

This weeks game play went well. We were missing one of our players, but things ran smoothly still. It was interesting because we have the chance to explore a town, which we hadn’t gotten to do the last 2 times. It made me realize the amount of freedom one has in the game and how they can really choose to explore anything they desire. Griff did a great job of helping guide us in decision making when we were stuck or confused.

The hardest part about this week’s game was the amount of decisions we had to make. While I enjoyed the freedom of exploring the town, I also felt it was challenging to decide what to actually do once there because I have never played this game before. I thought this hard decision making tied to leadership because leaders are often forced to make decisions for the group and they aren’t always easy. A leader may be making a decision in which they do not know all the effects or consequences of this decision, but consider all their options and choose which they believe will lead to the best choice.

If I were to play this game again I think it would be interesting to play with my brother and his best friends. They are a great group of guys who enjoy making jokes constantly. Because of this I think they would make the game enjoyable and constantly have me laughing. They have never played before and I think it would be nice to play with other inexperienced players as it is less intimidating. Overall, I had a positive experience playing D&D for the first time.

D&D Week 2

This week we played D&D again, continuing our game from last week. I thought this weeks game play went even smoother than last week. We defeated Cleric together as a team, which made us all work together. I had a better time this week as I began to understand a lot more of the rules and had a chance to start using spells. I liked using different spells as it kept me engaged in the game. The only thing I really don’t like about the game is that there are so many different rules it seems like it would be hard to really know all of them without looking different things up constantly.

The hardest part about the game is deciding what route to take. Being an indecisive person, having to make all these different choices is difficult for me. The open endedness of this game really allows for one to create their own story. I think this ties to leadership because a leader must make choices for a group. They are depended on to make a correct choice and lead the group to success.

I would enjoy playing this game with my sister. While she isn’t very into role playing games, she is very good at making choices. She has never been an indecisive person, so seeing her play this game would be interesting for me. I think she would enjoy being able to control the story line.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection: Roll Player and D&D Character Creation

For my D&D character, I had absolutely nowhere to start as I had never played the game before and therefore knew nothing at all about races, skills, weapons, proficiencies, etc. Upon watching a few videos and reading a few forums and other blogs about the game and the best ways to set up your character for the best gameplay, I started to build my character.

My character was a double race/class, a tiefling monk, and a rogue. https://www.dndbeyond.com/profile/veethedestroyer/characters/34636310

The hardest part about the game was adjusting to natural gameplay as the game is both roleplay and tabletop related, so finding a balance between referring to the handbook and die rollers while trying to keep track of the storyline and all the moves other people made was quite difficult. I struggled most with keeping up because everyone in my group save for one person who had little knowledge of the game and had played once before, I knew nothing about the game and had never played and felt as though I was slowing down the game and frustrating my teammates in the process.

This game is excellent at propagating opportunities for leadership as each scene or moment of gameplay is unique to what moves, skills, and weapons each player has, and therefore is customizable, like Fiasco, to allow characters to take on bigger, more leader-like roles in different rounds, depending on their comfort level.

I know this game is incredibly popular and has been for decades and I can definitely say that this game would be most enjoyed by groups of friends or individuals who are really into improv, developing storylines, and creating characters and situations that are totally made up but detail specific and require background knowledge to play. DnD is an amazing game for individuals who love to lead and create and control situational factors as well as the role of dungeon master is just that, they record and playout each scene from their handbook utilizing a set of rules and tools specific to each character, dependent upon their race, class, skillset, etc. This game is also perfect for people who are detail-oriented and enjoy making very detailed storylines, i.e. character backgrounds.

The sessions overall went well, the most frustrating part was that I struggled to keep up and often made moves that were the same or weren’t considered to be creative as I wasn’t completely confident in my character’s abilities, including what I could and couldn’t do at that moment in the game, i.e. being out of range or not having enough strength or the right weaponry to attack