On my last day of work at Sure, the insurance tech company I’ve worked at for the last year and change, I ran a very impromptu game of Dungeons & Dragons for some people on my team. And by “impromptu,” I mean I had literally nothing prepared save for an idea of how to design a set of rules simple enough to be explained in under ten minutes and some character builds based on those rules. I got that together in roughly thirty minutes before we were scheduled to play.

The main idea was to keep the core mechanic of D&D: the Dungeon Master describes the situation; the players describe their actions, possibly rolling to see how well they do; the Dungeon Master describes the outcome. The “rolling to see how well they do” contains pretty much the entirety of the rest of the rules to D&D. I decided to boil it down to a simple idea:

Roll a d20. If you’re good at what you’re doing, you add 5 to the result. If you’re bad at what you’re doing, you add nothing. Otherwise, you add 2 to the result.

I designed four characters—fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue—each with short lists of broad categories of things they were good and bad at. And I gave each one or two class features that are fairly iconic for their class, such as: the fighter had Extra Attack; the cleric had combat buffing magic; the wizard had damage dealing magic; and the rogue had sneak attack. I figured too there might be some situations come up where it would be appropriate to grant ad hoc abilities after the fact, depending what felt appropriate for the character and the story.

I let the five players each choose their class, with two players picking wizard, and then asked each of them three questions:

1. What is your character’s name?
2. What do they seek?
3. What’s something they’re afraid of?

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the answers to these questions. I hadn’t even thought of these questions until we were sitting in Zoom and the players had already chosen their classes.

Beside the five players, we had several spectators who each watched for different lengths of time. (After all, it may have been my last day, but others still had work to do.) I had the spectators and other players provide the answers to the third question for each character. One of the wizards sought respect and feared snails. I also asked each player one question tailored to their character, such as the rogue’s criminal history and the tenets of the cleric’s faith.

The goal was to give them some entry into the idea of their characters as more than numbers in a document. I didn’t expect we’d have any heavy roleplaying interaction going on, but I wanted them thinking at least a little bit outside that which might be strategically valuable. It also, I figured, could be used to build some story elements for the adventure.

This last point is important, because right up until when we finished picking and roughly defining the characters, I still had no idea what the adventure would look like.

The introduction, explanation of the rules, and building of the party took about twenty or thirty minutes, and the adventure unfolded over the next two and a half hours. I gave them a goal of exploring a mysterious clearing in the forest with a large rock in the middle of it, around which wild animals gather every full moon for unknown reasons. On their way there, I decided that there was some spirit of the forest harboring vengeful anger toward the people of the nearby town (which the spectators dubbed South Park), and it was corrupting and strengthening animals in the forest to do its bidding.

I trust you don’t mind me spoiling the ending, because the players managed to find a secret chamber beneath the rock where a large crab-like creature and four dog-sized snails resided, all holding a large amount of this vengeful force. The party fought and killed the monsters, thus quelling the spirit and its vengeful bloodlust for the time being.

I have to say, running D&D with spectators always has me a little nervous, because I don’t know whether what we’re doing as DM and players could possibly be entertaining enough to hold anyone’s attention. I’ve done it before a few times for Drinking & Dragons with Nerd Nite LA, and even though it’s always great fun, I am all nerves leading up to it that it will bomb and everyone will largely be bored.

These nerves were heightened when my audience was a handful of muted Zoom attendees. So I tried to keep an eye on the Zoom chat to see how things were going. Fortunately, my coworkers are habitually prolific sidebar conversationalists when it comes to Zoom calls, so there was plenty going on, which became as much a part of the entertainment as the game centered in the call.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have put the audience out of my mind entirely after getting the setup questions answered by them. It’s not as if I was able to sufficiently digest their engagement to make meaningful changes to the game. And having that little bit of my attention split off from the game may have hampered my DMing in some or many ways. But it’s hard not to care and to want to perform for them as much as for the players. I wanted everyone who had never played before, especially those spectating because they were reticent to jump in and play, walking away feeling like D&D is a game they could possibly see themselves playing and enjoying. If I am to take everyone at their words, I would say I was reasonably successful.

I don’t get to play D&D often myself these days. Getting to spend some time in the workday to share this hobby of mine with some of my coworkers—my friends—was a real treat and a great way to say goodbye.

Two quick side notes.

Only one of the players had a set of physical dice, so I offered up the dice roller I built years ago as a project to teach myself Angular. That felt weird to trot out.

The dice photo set as the image for this post is what I’ve used as my virtual background in Zoom for about a year now. It seemed fitting to use it here, especially since I have no pictures from today’s game.