Bullshit Campaign Tales from a 7th Grade Table — #1

The summer between 6th and 7th grade I played a game of Dungeons and Dragons with my Uncle. He had a long-running 3.5 campaign that I was able to be a guest in for one session. I remember my 11 year old self thinking “this is some nerd shit. But why not?”

It was in fact some nerd shit. But that nerd shit seeped into me. It started to occupy half of my brain and almost all of my creative efforts became in relation to it.

I was very lucky to have that be my first experience with D&D. It was a session that was lengthy and exciting enough to be cemented in my brain as an epic. We fought an Aboleth and I landed the killing blow, we talked to a dragon and an Elvish King before we descended into the Underdark.

My time in that game would stop there. It was 3 A.M or so and I do not blame my uncle for not wanting to run the horrors of the Underdark with his nephew present.

But I couldn’t end my D&D adventures there. I picked up a copy of the 5th Edition Players Handbook and harassed my friends into playing once the school year started.

I didn’t read the handbook. Not until a year later I have to think. Why would I need to? I mean that one session of 3.5 would certainly transfer all the knowledge I needed to DM a 5e session.

My 11 year old genius could also not be contained. I elected to construct a grand world with a narrative worthy of an epic. In actuality, that narrative was a formulaic, awkward, unbalanced, and dragon-heavy mess. But the world I’m actually quite fond of for what it was. It was simple, but had some good ideas and core tenets.

But that campaign was embarrassing. Especially once I looked back on it as an 8th and 9th grader. It was the type of embarrassing that made me shut down whenever mentioned. I regretted it.

Now, honestly, I love it. It was atrocious. And It did not inspire any confidence. But the nice thing about being a 7th grader is that you lack some self awareness. And that your friends are also 7th graders who lack general awareness. The amount of mistakes and bullshit I got away with was outstanding.

I did not know the word balance. The fact that highlights this most is that I had people roll 6d4 drop lowest for stats instead of 4d6 drop lowest. I also gave out a hideous amount of custom magic items.

So many that I decided to take some away. But I didn’t elect to talk with my players about this. I simply took.

The party was summoned by Moradin and Bahamut to prove their worth. The party was level 6 or so. They had to fight a Kraken in order to keep their items. Why? Cause fuck my players.

One of them rolled a 1 on an attack roll and dropped their daggers into the water. Gone. They decided to swim down to find them. It didn’t work and we all clowned on them for my bad call. Good times.

I didn’t even realize I did something wrong. Not until a few years later when I really thought about it. Natural 1s always meant something terrible. They had to. A 5% chance of something terrible just happening is always fun!

But that’s just more of a symptom of bad DMing. Not really a symptom of the table.

A symptom of the table would be the dwarf paladin having a hammer that would crit on a 18–20, do 3x crit damage, and have the capability to one shot almost anything. Think of the dwarven thrower — which I didn’t even know about — but more powerful, and for a 6th level character.

But if that wasn’t enough, the paladin’s player would cheat to get the crits. We all contributed to that trainwreck. And I would later return the favor in a campaign he ran by cheating myself. Apparently neither of appreciated failing.

These are the stories that tell the most about the table, or at least the memory that my former players and I share about it. But there were many moments that were more extreme. There were minor, weirder moments that arose unfortunately in a cast of preteen boys. There were confusing villains and odd deaths. But I still like some of my ideas, or at least the general intent behind them, and it started me down 6 more years of DMing and branching into other Tabletop RPGs.