Matt was the first to mention it. Bill was the second. Dan said he was game, and a D&D group was formed.
After cross-checking all of our family schedules, we settled on Sunday night. We meet up on Discord around 9 PM when all the kids are in bed, goof around, and roll electronic dice on Roll20. We could only meet up for an hour and a half or two before Matt had to head to bed, but it was better than nothing!
We started off with a small, homegrown adventure for a couple weeks(more on that below), but Bill really wanted to try a module from Wizards of the Coast. I already had the physical copy of one from a starter set I used with Gen, Chris, and Carrie, so I bought the electronic version on Roll20. Briggs showed up on Discord and heard us playing, so we recruited him and the party grew larger!
Bill made a Paladin (of course), Dan made a Druid (also, typical for him!), Matt made a Rogue, and Briggs made a Warlock. I DM'd.
We've been meeting up once a week since! There were a few times someone couldn't make it, but everyone is up to level 3 and working their way through a bunch of sidequests in Phandelver. Bill's luck swings from so much from critical hit to critical fail that it's become a running joke. Matt was unavailable one night and forbade Bill from rolling for him!
The d20 system has some of those big swings built into it. I rolled "shenanigans" while the group was fighting a bugbear early on. He was frantically climbing down a cliff that required an athletics check. He passed, but the goblin running after him failed, crit'd a "shenanigans" check, and fell right onto his boss. They fell to their doom amongst wild laughter.
I had been resistant to doing an out of the box campaign at first, but it's been convenient not having to do much in the way of prep each week. As always, it would be more fun in person, but with Matt in SC, Dan in Vegas, Bill in NJ, Briggs in NoVA, and me on a farm that's unlikely to ever happen.
This particular Sunday night (10/16), we started the game sharing stories to remember Travis. I was the only one who'd been able to go to the funeral, so I gave a report on what happened. Then everyone told a story and raised a toast.
Bill talked about one time he and Ed has a disagreement over something and Travis showed came to his support. Dan and Matt talked expounded about that first night we'd visited Travis' house and he'd blown us away with music and acting in a game! I brought up the "naked animals" tale, and the "cute parking space" came up, too! I don't remember everything we said, but Travis was remembered and missed. He was such a gamer, I think he would have approved of us starting off the night with him on our minds.
BONUS:
The first couple nights I ran a homebrew adventure to refamiliarize/teach the rules for D&D 5e. Since we were online, I had the idea that I could email everyone their own exposition. That way I'd talk less, we'd game more, and maybe I could sneak in some competing individual motives. In my head, the players could text me any actions that wanted to do in secret to add a fun layer of subterfuge.
In the end, that didn't really happen. It was fun to come up with the expositions, but each of those could've been a blog post in hindsight! I'd love to run my own story again at some point, but I don't have the spare time and mental energy to do so. Running a pre-made was the right choice for now.
That all sounds like so much fun. Did you ask Patrick if he wanted to play with you guys?
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