r/denofthedrakeofficial

So I’ve been watching Den of the Drake and other DND story Youtubers for a while now (sidenote, Drake is my absolute favorite! He’s made me learn how I want to GM my own games and how to better myself as a player. Plus the voices he puts on are iNCREDIBLE and really help bring the stories to life! Dude should seriously consider doing audiobooks!) and decided to finally post the story of my first experiences with TTRPG‘s. DND 5e and the Cypher system by Monty Cook Games. (The Cypher system is an underrated TRPG. Would honestly recommend it if you want to do more story and role-play centered games. it’s genre neutral with a lot of expansions. Anyway, no more shilling.)

There are two important characters to this story, each one being a DM, their fake names will be Pinky and Brain. (Yes after the show) All of this happened a long time ago, BTW. A little over a decade.

After years and years of me pitching the idea of a DND club to my school, even almost getting involved with the student government to bring it to life, Pinky started to host one. When I heard this news, I was ecstatic! The only DND I’ve ever been able to play couldn’t even be cLASSIFIED as an actual game. Basically just role-playing with the occasional “guess what number I’m thinking of” sort of stuff. Most people had no experience with DND, so having a session zero just to figure out what we would even be doing would’ve been nice. There were about 16 players in this game with only one GM. Not a great start.

If you were lucky to catch Pinky after school, he’d help you fill out your character sheet. Only about half got to meet with him. Meaning the first session was mostly just people sitting around bored while people made characters. I COULD’VE BEEN AT MCDONALD’S FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! I have no problems with setting up characters during the first session,, but with so many people it starts to really burn people out just sitting there doing nothing. It’s also important to know, we had NO IDEA what ANY of the stuff we were we selecting even did! Pinky would just give us vague answers if we asked any questions. I was so new at the time I didn’t even know how the basic stats worked! Now I won’t be too harsh on Pinky, I learned later that he was new to DMing. For this club he even spent his own money to get the books. So I’ll let him off the hook a little bit.

For the sake of transparency, this lack of knowledge I feel led me to becoming a problem player. We had no discussion on etiquette and I had been coming off of games like Skyrim. So I would often interject in role-plays I didn’t belong. I was used to being the main character and not having a session zero didn’t tell me what the expectations of the game were for stuff like this. My second character even almost killed a PC the first day they joined the club and had spent two and a half hours making a character! I mean, that guy was discovered to be a huge racist piece of shit at one point calling one of the black players at the table his slave, this was out of game not even in the club room, so maybe it was cosmic justice. But still! I literally used the phrase “it’s what my character would do“. luckily I was able to have the self-awareness to knock that shit off. (If I could realize that in about 12.08 seconds, there’s no excuse for the people that can’t!)

I wish I could say I enjoyed the game. I did end up meeting some friends there who I still play with to this day, and considered to be my closest friends, but the size of the group, along with the other stuff I will mention, just made me not enjoy playing. We would spend so long just sitting there waiting for our chance to do anything. It was terrible. But this is where I stop, giving Pinky the benefit of the doubt. He promised us that our back stories would be relevant to the game. Me, and a few other people in the group, spent literal weeks writing and rewriting our back stories. We weren’t making them super long or anything. I think the longest one was about five pages? But nothing… I repeat, NOTHING, was EVER used from ANY of the players! All of that time wasted, and it never became relevant. That’s, in my opinion, one of the worst things you can do to a player. If you can’t guarantee their backstory will show up you should tell them that. Not act like it’ll be some huge important thing that will help shape the world and story then just never do anything with it! Still pisses me off to this day.

For the first six months of the campaign, we just never got to use our character sheets. Pinky would have them, but whenever our turns came up we always had to ask what options we had at our disposal instead of us keeping track. Really didn’t solve the problems of us not knowing the system. Probably made it worse honestly. He did eventually make a custom hyperlinked Google doc character sheet layout so it would be easier for us to use our sheets, which I respect, but you still gotta give your players’s access so that they can, you know, play the fucking game! We had some spell casters in our party as well! Imagine that, trying to remember your spell slots and cantrips off the top of your head. Genuinely insane.

Lastly, the thing that relates to me the most is how we just didn’t get to know the lore of the setting. I’m not sure if we were using a module, but it was all base game stuff. But again, none of us knew the base game stuff! One of my characters was going to be a multi class paladin cleric. I wanted him to be a holy knight type character. But instead of going over the pantheon he just had me worshiped Leviathan. If I remember, that’s a god of war, but is also lawful good. that’s at least what he told me. My character did become slightly lawful stupid, but I was new to the game so can’t really beat myself up that bad. But it genuinely pisses me off that I was just given this god. Now that I know actual basics about DND, I can tell you I would’ve wanted to be a pallet of Helm and a cleric of Illmatter. A knight who defends the innocent and tries to take on the suffering of others so that they don’t have to suffer themselves sounds AWESOME! But instead, I became generic paladin number 557.

Now it’s time for you to meet Brain! He was a second GM that came in a year or so after the club started. Apparently, he had more experience! Great right? Ha ha WRONG! He hosted the Cypher system. Let’s get one thing straight, i’m planning to run a Cypher system game, and I can tell you Brain did NOT run this game correctly. Maybe it was slightly different before the revised version came out, but I can’t find anything online about the major differences. He neglected to use damage track, a very important thing to the game that essentially acts as crippling/debilitating wounds the closer you get to death, and he gave us a printout of the names of descriptors (things that affect your stats), types (classes) and foci (essentially secondary classes) with no descriptions of what they even did or which was which. He set up the characters correctly, but trying to build them ourselves was impossible! Literally throwing darts blindfolded! If I had to hesitate a guess, I would say he was only using the free rules primer to run the game and found a vague list of the character options on the Internet.

He also promised that our back stories would come into play, but I didn’t stick around long enough to find out if that was true or not.
I mention this because, again, I put in a lot of work into my character. We were doing a sci-fi campaign, so I made a knock off Jedi. I even set up some hints to their culture, how they got wiped out and were being hunted as plot hooks. Again, never used, but at this point I was used to that. Still pisses me off though.

So he kidnapped that character. I was being a bit stupid and trying to run after what was clearly, in hindsight, meant to be the BBEG. But my character just got kidnapped. You see, I made it to her and started to fight her. I got my ass kicked, but I fought her. In this situation you could just have her throw my character out of the ship, but nope. My guy got kidnapped. Brain never even asked the classic DM question “are you sure?”, so I had no idea that there would be these major of consequences. Criticize me all you want for being stupid, but at least warn your players in someway that there could be drastic repercussions to their actions if it will affect their characters this much! just have her kick me down the ramp back onto the station. We weren’t even in space! She just turned on the engines!

Now here’s the thing you might be here for, one of the players decided to leave the game to go back to the 5e session, which was running at the same time. This player had a grenade on him and said he wanted to go out with style. Well, we started fighting some giant spiders that had taken up nest in the ventilation of a space station. We were able to beat them with every character surviving. I guess Brain was expecting the former PC to die because, as we were walking back, the character just started choking and fucking died! Naturally, we thought the air vents were maybe doing some cleaning cycle releasing chemicals into the air or maybe he had been bitten and was poisoned. But Brain wouldn’t even let us roll to figure this out. He gave us meta game knowledge that the character just choked to death on the air and died. It sounds objectively hilarious out of context, but the player specifically wanted that grenade to be used as a way to send off his character. If you can’t think of a way to make that happen with these enemies, just say the vent breaks and there’s a giant spider queen or something. The Cypher system literally gives GMs the tools to be able to do stuff like this on the fly with the way its monsters work! Have us fight it, get our asses handed to us, and the former player sacrifice himself in a blaze of glory to kill the thing!

One last bitch fest about Brain. He decided to host a short campaign using standard DND 5e. We weren’t going to finish anything because he was using the water deep module and we never even started it. We only had a month to play this. We just kind of existed in the city doing random jobs. But yet again, just like Pinky he expected us to know the lore of the setting without telling us. Apparently drow live underground and worship a spider god. Guess who didn’t know that when they were making their character? That’s right! ME! So anytime I did something that was out of character for a drow, he hit us with the classic ”um actually”. And corrected my characters behavior. A few times he would even change full actions I would do in investigation or force me to say something different in dialogue. Icing on the cake, when the month was over every other player, except me of course, got to describe how their character retired. Even though I was there, I just didn’t get to explain my characters retirement. Small thing, but it’s still irritating. There were some funny moments in that game though.

All of this together made me question if I even enjoyed TTRPG’s. And I think I’ve learned that I want to be a forever GM. Maybe they were just shit, but I find myself enjoying telling the story more than being a part of it. Over the past few years I’ve been in games as both a player and a GM. Granted, my friend group was too poor to afford any actual books so our system was held together on notes, bubblegum, duct tape, and hope! But even that was MUCH better compared to this. Now that we finally have our hands on a system I’m excited to play again! I will be the GM, and I’m trying to do the exact opposite of what these guys did. I want to give players info, I want to hold a session zero, I want to make sure everybody’s on the same page before we even play. Some of the stories I’ve told have brought my players to tears from the emotions. (that was a huge ego boost since I love to write lol) the group I will be hosting for now that I have an actual system will be a little bit big, normally it’s only the friends I made in the club and I who play, but I think it will work. One of my friends even mentioned he was thinking of using the system. I think I might bring back my paladin and do him right this time! Assuming he will fit in the setting, of course.

I’m sorry for how long this was, but it’s been building in me for a long long time. I have some other horror stories as well, damn gooner furrys,. I might post those at some point, but that’s a different story. Thanks for reading. End of story.

Okay, so in my last post I talked about my ex blowing up Nevada in a Savage Worlds game run by an amazing GM mentor of mine. After that campaign, I had a World of Warcraft high-school AU a la Dimension 20 Fantasy High I really wanted to run and of course as my at the time husband, my ex would be a player. My friend who GMed Battle Mountain had been hankering to play for once since he's a forever GM and joined up as did a few other players, two of which are also important to the story. I will be dividing this into a couple anecdotes because it is long and there is a lot of cringe (some of which is on my part because hey, let he who is without cringe cast the first fireball).

Cast is as follows:

Conquest- my ex, Tauren Sunwalker(Minotaur Oath of Conquest Paladin), problem player 1

Fiend- a chaser, human warlock(pact of the fiend) pacted to a heavy metal demon called Mecha Jeraxxus

Gloom- mentor friend, Night Elf Sentinel (moon elf gloomstalker ranger)

Harvest- my best friend(also a trans man, our genders are unfortunately relevant), a human priest(harvest domain cleric)

Me- GM for the story, a trans man, which is unfortunately relevant.

There were also two others and two that weren't there long, but they aren't really relevant except that the first two got talked over and dismissed a lot by Fiend because both are fairly quiet and polite.

The story involved the characters going to Anduin Lothar High-school, a newly integrated Horde and Alliance education program following a big political incident at Mount Hyjal by some current seniors last year that made Principle Aegwynne ready to implement her plan to bring​ Azeroth together.

The characters met up on the first day of school and ended up grouping up during party selection because most of their prior friends were already in groups and most had chosen big name WoW characters to be connected to and I wasn't having the players quest with faction leaders who were all either grades above them or adults in the setting.

Fiend immediately feels the need to infodump. Constantly. And he cannot explain a single thing about his character without a League of Legends, Critical Role, or Stranger Things reference. Sir, I love Laura Bailey as much as the next nerd, she voices my favorite character in this exact setting, but Ukatoa is not a WoW monster. Please, just ask me and I will literally create a named Kraken or something for you to reference that fits the story.

On that note, his back story flip flops to fit all these references. Needs to reference Mighty Nein? He's secretly Kul Tiran now on his dad's side and Ukatoa is totally a real thing that's connected to Kul Tiras now because they're pirate themed. Just binged Stranger Things? Did he mention how his character dresses just like Eddie Munson? Isn't his character such a warm, excellent mentor just like Eddie?(he was not, as will become apparent). And so on.

Meanwhile, Conquest decides that only he is allowed to have main character syndrome, so Fiend is his arch enemy. IRL vow of enmity straight out the gate. To his credit, he DID play the thing he was referencing a bit better than Fiend did, in that his paladin DID have the accent and over all outward personality of Wayne from Letterkenny without him having to mention it every five seconds. Not that what he did instead was any better.

The students were supposed to go on quests to gain experience in their classes outside of school, which was most of the game proper because the in school classes would have been too divided. The first quests they went on went fine and aren't really of note, but they would butt heads at least subtly every single one and then both be in my DMs, my ex to complain about Fiend, and Fiend to tell me another plot point he wanted for his character, mind you he already HAD an arc we had discussed together, which he was getting and was being explored, he was just bored because other characters were being allowed to explore their arcs too. Also he wanted a love interest.

That's part one, the initial overview, because this is already getting long in the explaining, I will add the further parts in the comments because there are many. This is just the lead in, getting my thoughts out, explaining the overarching issues.

Alright, let me tell you about what happened at D&D a few weeks ago. Our usual DM cancelled due to coursework commitments (the real BBEG, scheduling) leaving us without a DM.

So I volunteered to run a oneshot.

The players arrived expecting a regular game of D&D when instead I gave them statblocks for Commoners with the following requests: Give them a name, give them a job.

What followed was rather chaotic and possibly one of my best nights as a DM to date. I'll introduce the starter crew and then new commoners as necessary (read: as the starter crew die off).

• Humperdink - Loveable closeted Himbo

• Opal - The Jeweler

• Hazel - The old lady

• Luz - The Baker

• Jerry - A regular tax guy

• Delia - The gardener

The quest premise was simple enough, the residents of Bonington (pronounced Bone-in-tonne) built their village next to an old crypt, as villagers are wanton to do. Well, it being a crypt in a non descript medieval fantasy setting, many a skelliton had made their way out of the crypt and the villagers were fed up of waiting around for adventurers to help and took it upon themselves to deal with the Emperor of bones.

Their first challenge, was the locked door to the crypt. The door had a higher AC and hp than the individual commoners, but unlike the commoners, could not fight back. Humperdink started initiative off, by kicking the door, hurting his foot... as old Hazel attempted to reason with the door, checking to see if it was locked... it was... Luz the baker hammered away at the door with his rolling pin. This was all in vein as Jerry apparently carped a bit too much diem and got a nat 20 breaking the door open as he effortlessly slid down the newly revealed staircase.

So, encounter 1 down, no casualties.

In the first proper room of the dungeon, an owlbear emerged from the gloom of the tomb, angry at being disturbed, it attacked the commoners (A/N : Don't ask how the owlbear got there, I don't know it was a prewritten module).

Delia, who was suspiciously absent having initiative below Jerry went first, failing to hit the owlbear... before immediately getting mauled to death. She literally turned up did nothing and died for it, I'm sure there's a metaphor there... Anyway, in that same turn Hazel, mistook the Owlbear for her cat and was similarly chewed upon as the rest of the party began to fight the owlbear, other than Humperdink who shat himself and ran off screaming further into the dungeon.

Delia and Hazel were replaced by Hilda (the LumberJack) and Susan (The medicine woman). They entered the dungeon, Susan who the players decided was in an on and off again relationship with Hazel saw the owlbear, proceeded to do a Humperdink and run off screaming into the dungeon... tripping a trap Humperdink had somehow managed to avoid and immediately getting turned into slurry by a series of magic missles (A/N : There was no-one else near her at the time, they all had to hit her).

Meanwhile, Hilda attempted to get the party to follow her into the dungeons after Humperdink, but was ignored as the townsfolk continued to beat on the owlbear. (Mob mentality?)

Said Owlbear proceeded to try and attack Jerry, and rolled a nat 1, his follow-up bite attack however did not, killing Luz the baker. Hilda and Luz the Baker were in turn replaced by Derek (the town drunk) and Ash (the animal tamer) why the village needed an animal tamer, I don't know. (A/N : It was at this point that the players started getting invested in their commoners, Derek and Ash were decided to be Opal's Brothers).

Derek approached the Owlbear, wanting to pet the dog... and was then immediately mauled to death. The Owlbear tried to swipe at Jerry but new guy Ash stepped in and between the player being incredibly lucky when rolling for his health and the Owlbear being incredibly unlucky with damage, somehow Ash survived. Derek was replaced by Amelia the village beauty, who upon seeing the owlbear, decided "nah, I'm good" chasing after Hilda deeper into the dungeon. Amelia and Hilda will here after be referred to as the LumberJanes (I didn't come up with this, the players decided they were secret lovers), eitherway we'll pick back up with the Adventure of the LumberJanes later on. Now, aside from the numerous dead, the commoners had actually been doing relatively well against the Owlbear, the following turn Jerry, once again demonstrating he was the main character killed the Owlbear bringing his kill count to 2/2. Following the Owlbear, the Party stood:

• Humperdink the himbo

• Opal the jeweller

• Jerry the tax collector (totally not the main character)

• Ash the animal tamer (Opal's brother)

And...

• Hilda (LumberJane)

• Amelia (Village beauty).

The party met up, sans Hilda and Amelia. It was at this point things started changing for Jerry, with his new found confidence, both Humperdink and Opal began to fawn over his heroism. They kickdown an unlocked door, revealing a room covered in cobwebs Jerry leads the way in, with more weirdly high rolls he avoided getting caught in the cobwebs, Opal was less lucky, as she got caught in the webs. The spiders who made said webs were less than happy about this, swarming from under them and attacking the village idiots... They swarmed the party, biting at them, unfortunately, the previously wounded ash, did not stand a chance and died whilst Opal cried for her dead brother. In all though, the spiders didn't stand a chance and it wasn't long before they were dispatched.

(A/N : it feels important to note, that once again, Jerry dealt the finishing blow).

With Ash now dead, Eddie, Opal's father and the village librarian who was apparently 2 days away from retirement joined the team... given what's happened to the rest of her family so far, I'm sure he will make it to retirement.

After bravely vanquishing the spiders they found themselves in a locked room, with a portcullis on the far side. This room was meant to be a puzzle room... and whilst the players are independently very smart, collectively they had the intelligence stats of the commoners. So what was supposed to be an easy puzzle ended up with them brute forcing their way through... Now finally, there they stood, the villagers of Bonington opposite the great and powerful Emperor of Bones and his hoard of skellitons (3 Skellitons). A combination of the emperor winning initiative and hearing the villagers approach, allowed the Emperor to cast Mirror image on himself, before secluding both himself and his skellitons in a fog cloud.

Meanwhile... I mentioned before that we would return to the LumberJanes, they carried on down the tunnel past the slurry that was once Susan. There they found the long dead remains of an adventurer wielding two swords, so of course now, each of them wielded a sword... Turning the corner on their passageway, they find themselves in a Treasure Room.

Despite not getting involved in any of the actual combat in this dungeon, the Janes had found their way into the Emperor's Vault, acquiring a spellbook, a wand of secrets and 10gp - more money than either of them had seen in their entire life. With the gold now making them the richest commoners in the village, the Janes admitted their feelings to one another, before carrying on further into the dungeon through a fissure in the dungeon wall.

Through this fissure, the Janes now enter the Emperor's chamber, seeing the other villagers lead by Humperdink and Eddie charging into the fog cloud. Humperdink charged into the fog, eager to prove himself for Jerry, swinging at a figure in the fog missing As Eddie followed him in, also attacking a figure in the fog, hitting... Humperdink. (A/N : This one, I do feel a bit bad about the himbo did nothing wrong, but dice fell how dice fell and unfortunately for H'dink that resulted in his death).

Jerry and Opal skirted around the fog killing two of the skellitons they both rolled rather well, with Jerry somehow securing his third Nat 20 of the session and well, bludgeoning weapon + Enemy vulnerable to bludgeoning = dead skellitons.

As the fog cleared Eddie was cut down by the remaining skelliton, before being avenged by Hilda and Amelia, leaving only the Emperor of Bones... With both Eddie and Humperdink now dead, the Gravedigger and his wife entered the dungeon, mostly to collect the dead... Reginald and Clarissa.

They arrive at the chamber, just in time to see the four remaining commoners all curbstomping the emperor of bones into the floor. With the emperor dead, the party leaves the dungeon, the three happy couples...

Authors note: It feels important for me to say, this was possibly one of the funniest and most bizarre sessions of D&D I have ever ran. The wooden door they broke open to get into the dungeon, had a higher AC than any of the enemies within, Throughout whenever I had enemies target Jerry, they missed. The initial Owlbear took out more of the commoners than the BBEG of the dungeon, and whilst that was mostly down to poor rolls on my part, it was also due to the BBEG's vulnerability to being bludgeoned. I don't think I've explained in enough detail how many lucky rolls Jerry got throughout the session, he was more often than not on the frontline and somehow in most cases dealt the finishing blow.

Thank-you for reading, I hope you enjoy the rest of your day

So, very recently, I had a game completely fall apart in a matter of seconds. I'm honestly a bit impressed that it only took the DM saying one thing for everyone in the group to say, "fuck this shit, I'm out." But I'm getting ahead of myself. This was a Pathfinder 2e group I found on Roll20 that was running official Pathfinder adventure paths set in the official Golarion setting. Now I love Golarion as a setting. I did a PF lore binge around the time of the OGL incident, and it quickly became one of my favorite fantasy worlds. I really wanted to RP in that world, so I jumped at the chance to play an official adventure. And that's when the problems began.

So the first campaign I tried playing was Blood Lords, which takes place in a nation ruled by the undead. And when I first logged into the game on Roll20, I was actually impressed. The guy put a lot of effort into the maps he made. They had all the fancy stuff like animated effects, background music, and fog of war. To someone who's used to theater of the mind and basic grids, this was fancy. I was less impressed by his frequent complaints about not having enough official maps to work with. And when I say constant, I mean it happened like every 30 minutes. Every time we'd enter a new area of the city, we'd get a complaint about how he didn't have a map for it. This overreliance on the fancy maps would cause another problem when all the fancy effects started glitching out. This didn't happen too often, but when it did, the session would grind to a screeching halt while he tried to fix it. He was also not very good at RPing the NPCs and had a tendency to rush us to certain plot points. Dude was also not good at improvising NPCs. If there wasn't a description or statbock in the book, he'd complain that Paizo (the company that makes Pathfinder) wouldn't give him enough information. Still, I could ignore all these small annoyances and try to have fun. Whether or not that was because I'm a tolerant person or because I was desperate to play is up to you. What I couldn't ignore were half of the players dropped out of the game entirely. They said that it was because of work stuff, but looking back, I'm not so sure.

So the first campaign was a bust. That's fine, DM had a plan B. We'd start a new campaign. The new plan was to start with Wardens of Wildwood (an adventure where we had to deal with the change in leadership of a druid lodge) and move on to Spore War (where we'd assist an elven nation in fighting some demons). Now I was really excited for this one. Both of these adventures take place near my favorite nation in Golarion, The Republic of Andoran (a.k.a. fantasy colonial America that spec'd hard into abolitionism instead of capitalism), giving me the perfect excuse to make my character one of Andoran's elite Eagle Knights. DM got a brand new group of players together, and we were ready to start playing. And every session had someone drop out. Sure, they all said that they were too busy (and one guy legit said that he had more fun smoking week than playing Pathfinder), but I could tell that the DM was becoming a bit too much for some of them. When the group got down to just me and another guy, we decided to move on to plan C, grab some new dudes, and start Spore War. We did just that and got two sessions in before we ran into a different problem. Spore War starts you at level 11, and half of this new group had never played PF2e before. They were a bit overwhelmed by all the stuff you get at higher levels. So we all decided it would be best if we just started over with an adventure path that started you at level 1. And just our luck, Paizo released one around that time.

Plan D, Hellbreakers. It's time for our ragtag group of adventurers to free a nation from its devil-worshiping oppressors. We all got our character sheets ready, backstories written, and dice ready to roll. I even decided to make my new character an Eagle Knight, too. And the first session went great. Sure, the technical issues cropped up again, but that was overshadowed by the group really finding our footing with our characters. Our first mission was to evacuate civilians from an active warzone, and we took to it like fish to water. The party RP was really fun, especially when one player found a friend of his executed by the aforementioned devil-worshipers who invaded the city. The session ended with us in an alleyway, and one of the party members sent his weasel familiar to scout ahead. The weasel said something to his owner, but the session ended before he could report back to the rest of the party. I feel like it's important to mention at this point that this game was played every two weeks late at night. I'm talking 9 pm to midnight late. So by the end of the session, we were a bit tired and many of us wanted to go to bed. Two weeks later, we get ready for session two. We were pumped, we were excited, we hopped into the Discord VC ready to kick some hellish ass. Then the player with the weasel said, "Hey, I don't remember what my familiar said last time. Could you give me a recap?"

The DM replied with, "No. You should've written it down. I don't like repeating myself."

Fucking... what?

DM: "Yeah, you guys need to write stuff down. I can't be expected to do everything while you do nothing."

This was the last straw. Three out of the five of us dipped immediately. The last guy and I spent like half an hour trying to tell DM that he needed to cut us some slack. This wasn't a test that we needed to study for; we were all here to have fun and play a game. But it was like talking to a brick wall. He eventually decided to leave the VC and then deleted the entire server in the middle of me talking to the last remaining player. I think it's safe to say that this was a bust.

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it's that as a DM, you have to remember that we're all here to have fun and play a game. I know you want your players to pay attention and actively engage with your plot, but you can't treat TTRPGs like a classroom. People are busy. They've got jobs and responsibilities that can be very distracting. They might forget something, even something important. That's normal, that's human. It's not your job to punish your players for forgetting something like this. It is your job to make sure that everybody is on the same page, though. I'm still pretty new to DMing, but even I give a "previously on Dragon Ball Z" style recap at the beginning of every session. And these recaps are especially important if there are long gaps in between sessions.

It is a shame that this game fell as flat as it did. I still love Golarion and really want to play in it. I'm sure my time to be an Eagle Knight will come one day. And when that time comes, I'm gonna make sure that I won't get rejected when I ask for a recap.