I’m a Bad DM: A persistent Forgotten Realms
Hello, I’m David Foxfire, and I’m a bad DM. I’ll pause while the rest of you say “Hi, David.” I guess I need to introduce myself for starters. I got into D&D several years back in the later parts of 4th Edition, but I really dived into the game full-time would be when they started playtesting 5th Edition. While I’m not one who’d do into any Edition Wars (I’d play any Edition) 5th Edition is the version for me. When the Encounters table I used to go to split into a separate table for playtesting, I went to the 5th Edition table with relish. However, after a couple previous campaigns, the DM had to leave the Encounters table during Murder in Baldur’s Gate and since I had the seniority, asked me to take his place. I tried my hand at DMing with the gone-but-not-forgotten Virtual Table from DDI once, and the other players really liked the way I did it. So I was honored to pick up the slack, and took to the my new role, screwing around with the players and doing very bad things to the poor unsuspecting city. Just for the record: I had two Chosen of Bhaal at the end of Murder in Baldur’s Gate; Silvershield and Ravenguard. They ended up killing each other off and destroying most of the Upper City in the process. Bhaal hasn’t spoken to me since. This will be important later in this article. So now 5th Edition is all in everyone’s business, with all three of the main books published and its current Encoutners Season, “Tyranny of Dragons,” out in the stores by now. I wanted to take my table through both Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat if I could breeze through the books. I was so focused on developing my own style of DMing; some parts I’ll share in future articles here if the admins here would be so kind and tolerant of me and my crazy ways. But I knew that I was in a bit of a pickle when the party breezed through the Encounters-themed content—up to the Dragon Hatchery chapter—in the course of a month and a half. At first I thought, hey, we might be able to get to the official end of the big story here, but then I...
Read more