The Fearless DM

I emailed off an offer to volunteer to help in future organized play efforts for 5e, but just as soon, the doubts started to pile up, and I had this conversation with a friend via email:

> > I bet you five bucks there will be no living campaign this time around.
> > All Encounters, all the time.

For about a microsecond I was taken aback and then I suddenly realized he was right. He was dead right. And I told him so.

On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 12:52:50PM -0500, Peter Seckler wrote:
> 
>    The more I think about this, the more I think you are right, and that living
>    campaigns may have actually contributed to the end of the edition.
>    Hmmmmmmm
>    ============================================
>    Peter Seckler

And he elucidated further:

» I am totally right about that. LFR (and more so LG) was a contributor
» to the idea that every GM had to interpret the rules exactly the same
» way all the time. There should be no single D&D; each table should have
» a different one. But living campaigns push towards monolithic rules.
»This is also Gygax’s most pernicious legacy, even if a lot of the OSR
»would like to pretend he didn’t think it was the way things should be.

A pause… and then this brilliant thing:

»Oh, and WotC should not have a charop board for 5e.

Yes, absolutely true!

For a long time I have been struggling with this, the huge potential of organized play- it’s a social potential- and it is ruined (my opinion I guess) in servitude to my least favored audience- the ones who see the entire game as primarily a matter of builds and carefully considered strategy.

But what we get wrapped around the axle is on procedure and conformity and standards, and it’s impossible to fight “the powers that be” (of which there are no shortage) on a big campaign level. And yet, by contrast, Encounters is local. There’s no expectation of maintaining a single experience- it’s an acknowledgement of the DM as an individual arbiter. I Dm’d two entire seasons of Encounters- unlike my usual gleeful subversion of Living Realms as a Faerun that actually engaged players on a personal level, I didn’t even think about what anyone else thought of what I was doing. It was just D&D. Thats all it should have been.

As a side note: The reason this blog is called the Fearless DM is because i wanted to promote that exact subversive take to others- in a sense i was saying the only “powers that be” are the ones you have in attendance at your table on game night.

I still do find the Encounters format a bit short-form, though. Hm.