There's more to Oz than the Yellow Brick Road

 I went to the gaming Meetup that I was planning to and ran the same adventure I ran last month, though with new players this time. Very new players, in fact. Not only new to the Meetup group, but 2 of my players were completely new to RPGs as a whole.

Which makes me glad that they came to my table. Not that the other games that were being offered weren't good games run by good people. They absolutely were. But when players are coming from a history of board games, as these two were, a nice Old School dungeon crawl is perhaps the perfect introduction.

Old School D&D was an evolution of tabletop wargaming, so comparison to a board game is not far off. But it is also a step beyond. Especially in a basic dungeon crawl like the adventure that I was running, the idea of "This is the map/board and this is my character/playing piece" is pretty easy to get across.

One of my older pieces of gaming advice, before I started pitching a lot of big ideas and even designing my own stuff, is "dungeons are fine." Especially when you're starting out, don't sweat the big stuff. It's not about the 10 page character backstories or 10,000 years of history that you have to make up for your fantasy world. It's about playing. And simple dungeon crawl adventures let you get into the play experience quickly. Everything else can come later as it emerges organically from that play experience.

So I hope I gave them the baby step that will prepare them for the quantum leap into other roleplaying games.

It's also getting me more motivated to turn the whole thing into a proper campaign. Now that I've decided to stop overthinking and underthinking, I just need to figure out what the right level of thinking is. Right now, that feels like running modules from my collection and creating a loose continuity and geography around it.

Another issue is figuring out the location. I'm sure I've brought this up my issues with the lack of late night coffee shops in easy reach. Because cost is one of my concerns and my ability to hang out in a space for not much more than the cost of a cup of coffee is very important to me. There's also the local game store, which I am fond of.

It's largely a matter of getting my rear in gear at this point.