On Shadowdark and Embracing Losing
Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, © 2020 Eric Lofgren. How does one quantify the length of time they’ve been a Dungeon Master? Generally, the time you spend between jobs doesn’t count towards your experience in a given field. But being a DM is different. Do you count the weeks where the game was cancelled, but the aspects of the game continued to plague my mind? Do I count the times I was vividly daydreaming about running my game from when I’m eating my usual breakfast gruel to when I’m trying to fall asleep? Surely the times I’ve been kept up trying to think about how an encounter would go has to count as DM overtime. Let’s call it one and a half years in traditional terms, but when it comes to how long I’ve “worked” on running my games, a good two years. Two years. That’s how long it took to encounter my first TPK. And it wasn’t my usual campaign, or my usual system. In my main game, a post-apocalyptic city survival game ran in Pathfinder Second Edition, we’ve had a couple of c...