Autumn, Agency & An Unreasonable Need for More Dice

It is officially autumn.

AUTUMN.

Not fall. I don’t particularly like the word fall. It is autumn, and I am so fucking happy it is finally here.

This morning was cool and cloudy and misty and basically perfect. Now I just need the leaves to slowly start changing and for the universe to kindly give me two solid months of this. Honestly, I’d take September, October, and November as autumn if anybody in charge of these things is listening. Winter can show up sometime after that.

I want cool mornings. Changing leaves. Camping. Halloween. Anniversary things. Spooky shit. All of it.

October is probably my most coveted month of the entire year, and I tend to take a lot of me time during October and a little bit of November, too. Which unfortunately means it doesn’t look like I’ll have availability to run D&D in October… or play Call of Cthulhu.

That part is kind of a bummer.

Especially Cthulhu, because Travis and I are both in that game, so when both of us are out it either means no game or the other four players have to figure something out. I would be totally fine with them continuing without me and letting my character hang around as support, but Cthulhu is also a little harder to do that with. There’s a lot more investigation and thinking involved than just “my character hits the thing.”

But we’ll figure it out.

And maybe November.

Because right now?

My D&D brain is fucking BACK.

I feel like I’ve been slacking a little for the last three or four games. To be fair, I’ve had some shit going on that I haven’t exactly disclosed to my players. Maybe I will someday. Maybe I won’t. Who knows.

Anyway, moving right along.

I am getting back into the swing of running, planning, and prepping games, and I am ridiculously excited about where everything is going.

There are threads and hooks out the wazoo right now.

The players can grab onto them. Investigate them. Ask questions. Deep dive into something that looks suspicious.

Or they can say, “Fuck all of this,” and wander off in another direction.

And honestly?

Cool. Go.

That’s one of my favorite things about running an open-world, sandboxy game.

There is a main goal. There is an overarching theme and story arc. There are smaller arcs tucked inside of it, and eventually pieces of those things will be discovered.

But I don’t want the players to feel like they’re walking through a story I’ve already decided for them.

I have a story happening in the world.

That’s different.

There are things moving in the background. There are events, people, mysteries, consequences, secrets, and all kinds of shit waiting to be uncovered. But there are multiple ways into those stories and multiple ways they can play out.

The players decide which doors they open.

If everybody wants to ignore every hook I’ve dropped in one place and wander across the world instead?

Fine.

There will be another hook somewhere out there.

My job as the DM, at least the way I see it, is to help the players navigate themselves into the story. Drop some breadcrumbs here. Add a little flavor there. Put something weird in front of them and make somebody at the table go:

“Wait…what the fuck was THAT?”

And then they decide whether they want to know more.

Maybe they investigate the mystery.

Maybe they go looking for the MacGuffin.

Maybe they accidentally piss off someone extremely important.

Maybe they spend forty-five minutes making dick jokes and drinking beverages instead.

All equally possible.

Sometimes a little guidance is necessary, but that's less “railroading” and more herding cats in the vague direction of plot progression.

We only get so many hours together at the table. Occasionally the cats need herded.

But character agency has always been incredibly important to me.

I don't have some prewritten decision buried in my notes saying, “And then this character becomes X,” or “This person must choose Y.”

That sounds like a fucking bummer.

Their characters are theirs.

They get to decide who those characters become, what matters to them, what they pursue, what they ignore, and ultimately what their destiny looks like.

I just build the world around them and make sure it has plenty of interesting shit to stumble into.

And right now, I am so fucking stoked about D&D again.

I've also started reorganizing my DM notebook.

I still have my super badass dragon-skin-looking binders that I made, but these days my actual working binder is much smaller. It's just a regular-sized binder where I scribble notes during games and keep printed copies of the world information I need to reference quickly.

I'm trying to keep most things digital now, but I don't think I'll ever completely give up having paper at the table.

There's something about flipping open a binder, scribbling something down, sticking random pieces of paper into it, and slowly turning it into an increasingly deranged archive of campaign information that just feels right.

I was actually working on reorganizing it when I got distracted by a little Scully Bones who apparently required my immediate attention in the cutest possible way.

So.

Obviously that took priority.

Hopefully I'll finish the binder in the next day or two.

Outside of D&D, I'm still trying to get myself completely back into the routine I had going since March. Some personal things shook that up, and I'm not quite there yet, but I'm getting closer.

This year has been…a fucking year.

Ups. Downs. Learning. Growth. Changes. Figuring shit out.

And somehow it still feels like I'm only getting started.

I'm hoping over the next couple weeks I can settle back into my routines, keep working toward the personal goals I've set for myself, and carry some of this momentum into next year.

Because I'm closer to some of those goals than I've ever been.

And I would really, really like next year to just be a good year.

I don't need some spectacular movie-montage year where everything magically becomes perfect.

I would just really appreciate a year without tragic events.

A year where I get to build things instead of recover from things.

That sounds fucking wonderful.

For now, though, I have plenty to look forward to.

Autumn.

Camping.

Halloween.

Our anniversary.

My parents' 50th anniversary.

Cool weather.

Changing leaves.

More D&D.

More ridiculous adventures around a table with people I love.

And apparently more dice.

Because I want more dice.

I absolutely, unequivocally, do not need more dice.

But that's completely unrelated to whether or not I'm going to buy more dice.