Daern
Explorer
My friends and I stumbled upon a pretty cool thing while playing some casual DnD last night. We three got together sort of last minute and the idea was have round table gladiator fights where in we took turns running an encounter against the other two PCs. We each made up a character and thought up encounter ideas (which we kept to ourselves) and then rolled to see who went first.
At first we were thinking of this as a series of unconnected fights, but as soon as the first DM started setting up his encounter we started doing a bit of roleplay and the encounter ended up having a story as we battled Yuan-ti and Hook Horrors. Then we switched DMs and it seemed natural to continue the story, so the next DM re-imagined his encounter on the fly to make it build upon the previous one... It all went too late, but as my character was dying I was busy thinking how the encounter I had ready would be made to narratively follow what had come before. Would I even be able to use the same battlemap? Maybe...
I realized that what were doing was a version of the classic Creative Writing Class party game Exquisite Corpse where people pass around a sheet of paper and each person gets to write a sentence until a story has been collectively written.
This was a ton of fun. It completely collaborative story telling with all the crunchy battles too, the challenge was to make it all fight together and no one could know how it would end up. We'll definitely do it again. It was neat for my buddies too because I am usually the DM so this was a really low impact intro to switching chairs at the table.
Has anyone else done this? Anyone interested in trying it out? This seems like it could be a fun twist on the Dungeon Delve: Bring a 4th level character AND a 5th level encounter!
At first we were thinking of this as a series of unconnected fights, but as soon as the first DM started setting up his encounter we started doing a bit of roleplay and the encounter ended up having a story as we battled Yuan-ti and Hook Horrors. Then we switched DMs and it seemed natural to continue the story, so the next DM re-imagined his encounter on the fly to make it build upon the previous one... It all went too late, but as my character was dying I was busy thinking how the encounter I had ready would be made to narratively follow what had come before. Would I even be able to use the same battlemap? Maybe...
I realized that what were doing was a version of the classic Creative Writing Class party game Exquisite Corpse where people pass around a sheet of paper and each person gets to write a sentence until a story has been collectively written.
This was a ton of fun. It completely collaborative story telling with all the crunchy battles too, the challenge was to make it all fight together and no one could know how it would end up. We'll definitely do it again. It was neat for my buddies too because I am usually the DM so this was a really low impact intro to switching chairs at the table.
Has anyone else done this? Anyone interested in trying it out? This seems like it could be a fun twist on the Dungeon Delve: Bring a 4th level character AND a 5th level encounter!
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