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Manage conflicting social demands during a DnD game in a fantasy world, April 6, 2024This game consumed a lot of my attention and thought process.
You are a dungeon master/game master having a night with a classicallly-sized 4 person party, complete with fighter, rogue, cleric and mage.
All of the participants, though, are magical (well, mostly), including a fox spirit and a golem. Also, many of them are neurodivergent in different ways (including you).
The gameplay loop is that you advance the campaign a bit (which seems like its own fun story), and then an issue arises either in-game between characters or in-person. You have options to resolve it, which vary but often include taking gentle action, taking firm action, or doing nothing.
There are three ‘negative’ things that can pile up (or, occasionally, go down) that I found: you can get more and more distracted; the individual people can feel hurt or disconnected from the game; and time can progress.
I wasn’t sure what each of my actions would do or what the consequences, if any, of the above would be, but I had some idea and formed a strategy. It was very similar to a real-life stressful situation; it reminds me of my day-job as a high school math teacher (do I continue the lecture when everyone’s bored and the only topic left is really obscure but has a 5% chance of appearing on the end of year exam and ruining their life? Do I focus on the engaged students and let people talking in the back keep going? etc.)
I ended with time running out in the climactic fight, and that seemed just fine to me. I didn’t feel a need to replay, as there aren’t any perfect TTRPG sessions in real life, and ending without any major meltdowns seemed a big plus.
The characters were very distinct and their individual personalities mattered, making this work well as a character piece.