Instructional Gaming

So some guys at work asked me to teach them DnD. My partner asked me questions while working and one guy also made plans to go LARPing. He is the one I think is really interested. Normally I am leery of new players, took me a while to get the courage to invite Fred to our group, but I figured if they were into it, I should go with it.

A while ago I bought the Pathfinder Beginner Box, which is a product full of good content and is well designed for new players, so I figured I'd use that. I researched the included module, which wasn't exactly complex, and kind of got in the mindset of teaching newbs how to play Pathfinder.

We set up a time to roll characters while watching The Two Towers on Bluray and possibly play a few rooms in the module. Long story short, they bailed on me. I was strangely unsurprised though. For some reason I kind of felt it coming, despite my partner constantly asking me questions about the game. I'm not that irritated by it either, which is also rather surprising. But, it wasn't like I spent a bunch of time building a scenario for them, just read a ten page adventure a few times to make sure I had a good handle on the content and the flow of the module. Not really a big investment of time.

I dunno, I'm just kind of like meh about the situation. I don't care. If they want to try DnD, they'll make it happen, I'm just going to concentrate on my main game. I am really enjoying the current campaign. I like the group dynamic and the focus on planning things out for the future. It feels like we could do a lot of cool stuff with this campaign and it has me so excited I am putting them on the fast track with the fast experience progression, at least for now.

I feel this sense of excitement about this campaign. I feel like the group has chemistry. I feel like the setting has potential. I feel a lot of things, and most of them are good. All of them really. I guess the core reasoning for this is because the players are planning for the future. Not in the sense that they have a feat they want to take at 3rd level, or a magic item they'd really like to have that they wrote down on a list of magic items they'd really like to have and handed off to me. More in the sense that, we have this tower, we'll need to defend it to keep it from being snatched out from under us, lets hire a bunch of dudes with spears to protect it. We need food, so lets buy food in bulk to cut costs for these soldiers of ours. 

In the previous campaign, they just wandered into whatever mess they felt like or that I put in front of them, and wandered back out just as nonchalantly. They did whatever anyone told them to and didn't really question why or what the consequences of their actions might be. I dunno, my next post will be about the actual scenario itself, so I guess I can pause here for now and continue on Friday.