Christ Centered Gamer

Anyone currently playing D&D games? Are you playing or DMing? What's your story like? What are your favorite things about D&D?

I'm gearing up to DM a game for our church starting this Fall. First time I'm running a sandbox so that should be interesting! (any tips wouldn't be rejected )

I've recently started running a campaign in the Pathfinder setting for my family. I'm hoping that we'll eventually get to the point where we can play on a regular basis, but life has been hectic so far!

What campaign setting are you using - an existing one, or one that you're making yourself? From my experience, there is an abundance of adventures on-line that you can find (some better than others), so if you're making your own campaign, it can be easy to shoehorn ones you like into the ongoing narrative.

One of the biggest pieces of advice I can give is this - let the players shape the world around them. In one of the longest campaigns I ran, I allowed the players to determine the outcome of the adventures, rather than stick rigidly with the script. It ended up changing things that I had planned, but it worked out for the better. Since the players became emotionally involved in the world they helped to create, it allowed them to become more immersed in what was happening, and filled them with an eagerness to come back every time we played.

There have to be limits, of course. You shouldn't allow your players to roll up a half-dragon lawful good paladin with a +5 holy avenger at level 1, for example. But listen to your players, shape the adventure(s) to what they would like to see, and go with the flow.

Yeah player input is super important.

I always tell players that as a party we are writing The Lord of the Rings together. As the DM, I'm playing the part of Tolkien. However, I have given individual control of each member of the fellowship to a player. So I set up the world, control all the good guys and enemies, and determine if you succeed at what you attempt, but you get complete autonomous control over Gimli for example. You decide what he would do and how he acts. You don't HAVE to split off and follow Aragorn and Legolas after Merry and Pippin, but that's an option. What do you do?

I've created my own region/area. My church actually has enough D&D players that we've got 2 campaigns running during the school year (college church) and we created a world map that all games take place on. So every campaign takes place on the same world, just maybe at different times or on different continents. My current game will take place 100 years after the events of my LAST game, so players will get to see the impacts of their decisions 100 years later. Pretty hyped for that.

As far as systems, we use 4e because we have the offline Character Builder and it makes everything easier. But I've heavily modified it to be much more palpable