The Second-coming of Snow: A Blog Resurrection, Part 1 (The Story of a Deeply Complex Departure)

Last year, I launched my first campaign and became self-inaugrated into the amalgam of amateur dungeon masters. "Hi, my name is Snow. I am a Dungeon Master. I do dungeon mastering.” I could go into what that all meant, with anyone who cared to ask; and my-my, what an earful they might get about what I think I do -- creation, manage, co-exist, structure; oh, and have fun with friends around collections of food/ leftovers. Yet, I decided to do something I’ve longed to do for some years: start a blog. I transferred the energy I had with running a campaign into a complimentary project. So, with that said, would anyone like to guess where my blog went once the campaign started to fizzle? 


The correlation, whether I realized it during the writing freeze or afterward, is a stark one. I didn’t, by the game’s end, feel like an accomplished DM. My flow of topics for the blog, my willingness to write, vanished. Recently, I’ve been granted True Seeing, and I’ve noticed some hidden pathways in my adventure as a blogger. I start this two-part resurrection with an epiphany. If no one else reads, if no one else plays, you’re still a blogger, and you’re still a dungeon master.


Now, I know what some of your are thinking: Umm, without a group, no, you’re actually not a dungeon master. At to that argument, I offer this refutation and a modification to an old movie saying. "If you build it", you are an architect; regardless if "they will come". Towards the end of my final campaign days, I solicited feedback from my players about what they thought about me as a DM, what they thought about the game, and asked them to share some advice for me going forward. Some replied. Some flat-out ignored it. While I would be lying if I said this didn’t shut me down, I would also be remised if I didn’t acknowledge that the silence left room for some much needed introspection. To get my act together as a DM, I needed to have one night of simply doing what I felt was natural. Rather than end the campaign I had been running for 5 months, I created a one shot for the group; but set it up as if the game could continue. In just that game, I validated for myself two points which I knew were true all along: failure with a group happens, and trying too hard as a DM is a fallacy. 


I’ll relate this to my profession. In a teachers’ meeting, a faculty member talks about how students just aren’t engaged with learning, how they have an unhealthy relationship with the education. Straight up, they’re lazy. We’ve been saying this for decades, and we find news ways to say it, new scapegoats to point fingers at; and yet, we never own up to the reality that we may just not be effective at what we do. In the future, I hope I am not a DM who claims to know what I’m doing based on the fact that I’ve been doing it for years. I’ve read so many posts online from DM’s who refuse to shake up their system or cater to their audience. To each their own. May I never abide by the rules of ritual. 


To end this rant, I leave this advice for DM’s, especially new DM’s out there: Try less, Fail to allow failure to continue, and Shake it up. Yay, now I have officially completed my prestige class as Motivational Hippie.