AL S7 DMing

Adventurer's League Season 7 DMing

I enjoy DMing (most of the time) and the Adventurer’s League DM Rewards were so good, I was able to justify lots of DMing during Season 7. I logged:

*4 runs of the module DDAL05-12 Bad Business in Parnast;
*1 play of Storm King’s Thunder Chapter 3;
*An entire campaign of Tomb of Annihilation, with the Tortle Package;
*An entire campaign of Rise of Tiamat;
*An impromptu session of the module DDAL04-2 The Beast;
*2 runs of the campaign for Lost Mine of Phandelver;
*1 run of Princes of the Apocalypse Ch 6;
*1 run of Hoard of the Dragon Queen Ch 7;
*An extra play of Rise of Tiamat Ch 9;
and I had more planned to run, but I ran out of time.

The first time I ran an online session with Discord for voice chat and Roll20.net for the mechanics, the players were all talking over each other – and me, for some silly reason – and I had to figure out how to wrestle control of the group; it was the online mechanics that threw me off. After that session, I established expectations before the start of the game and firmly held everyone accountable for letting one person at a time talk. It meant calling people out for interrupting, but I got used to that. I told people that if they wanted to communicate during another player’s turn to try to just use text chat in the game instead of saying it out loud. That really helped cut down a lot of the meta-game talk and kept players from telling each other what to do.

Figuring out the DMing aspects of Roll20.net were more complicated than simply being a player, but I improvised with what I didn’t know and made it work for the sessions. It’s a really good gaming interface, but there were times that – to speed up the process and let the game happen quickly – I would roll my actual dice instead of using the Roll20 interface. As a DM, that was fine since DM etiquette allowed for “hidden rolls” anyway. Once I had better mastered the use of NPCs and monsters, I ended up using the Roll20 options and allowing players to see all of the DM rolls. That’s just my preference anyway, since in my home games I DM without a screen.

With maps and monsters imported, it was mostly easy to run a session. Once something was setup, it was easy to run it again for different characters. And the more I DM’d, the more rewards I got for my own characters; this allowed me to level up my characters and gift them extra magic items. Looking back, DMing online for Adventurer’s League really was a heavenly experience. It’s unfortunate that the Season 8 rule changes no longer encourage people to DM as much.