My first D&D experience was confusing at times, but solid.  While the openness and free-form play can be daunting at times, it’s clearly a unique experience that I feel everyone should at least try.  There really is nothing else like it.

I was DM again, which I’m OK with for the moment, though I desperately want to play a character soon.  This time it was with Pathfinder rules (available at a gigantic discount from the Humble Bundle people for another three days…jump on it, it’s a huge value!), which weren’t terribly different from 5th edition, at least in the very small frame of reference I have.  However, it was with a different group of people, with a different level of experience and dedication.  Two of the other players had actually created back stories, and all three players had known each other very well, which boosted interaction greatly and made things much looser overall.

(Note: this isn’t slighting the first group, but really, the four of us that played last night have been friends for a very, very long time.  Hard to stack up to that level of familiarity.)

We rolled new characters instead of using pre-generated ones, but did use the beginner dungeon to get our feet wet. Luckily the documentation made my job as DM pretty simple, which allowed me to be creative and relaxed while corralling the adventure as best I could.  Everything was pretty great, and here it truly showed how awesome D&D could be.

I kind of resent myself for taking this long to try and experience it.

Anyways, we surely messed up some of the rules (I think combat math is still going to take some time to remember every time), and we didn’t quite finish the entire adventure as we had to call it around 2AM.  However, it’s an experience we will surely continue, and I hope to write more about it when we do.

I just realized this sounds like a love letter to not just D&D, but the friends I played it with last night.  I suppose it is.