Hello, D&D players!  We need to have a talk.

If you were in the previous D&D session with me, you would know that it did not go so well.  It’s not all bad news however, since it certainly opened my eyes on what I need to work harder on to allow for a better session.  But, the resulting session was more of a mashup of everything that could go wrong, both on the side of the DM and the players.  I’d like to address these issues, and hopefully we can both take that as a learning experience.

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I’d like to start on my side of the coin, pointing out the problems I made during both creation and playing of the session so that I may better myself, and my players may enjoy the session much more.
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**1) Session Goals.**  Now, along with my previous session, I more or less dropped the players haphazardly through a series of openers, trying to bring them into the setting.  This seemed to have worked decently at the very beginning, but this session, more or less a lot of nothing happened.  This was due to me saying “the players must prove their worth to the faction, then they get their freedom.”  This is a bad philosophy in terms of enjoyment, one that I should have known before but I definitely know now.  I’ve already made plans on the next session allowing for a much more open-ended story, one that the players may shape, but still allowing for an antagonizing force to rise up against the players.  Hopefully, you’ll find this to be much more enjoyable than before.

**2) Encounters.**  This is a much simpler thing to do than setting goals for a session.  The biggest problem was, last session, there was an encounter with a high amount of low-level dwarves, whose biggest threat was in their numbers.  Now that type of encounter is not a bad idea, per se, but there are times when that does and does not work.  Obviously, within a small laboratory focused on the creation and enhancement of weaponry, a fuckton of dwarves to throw at the party was not my best of ideas.  If it were, say, a swarm of kobolds defending their nest against invaders, it would make much more sense to overflow the poor party members with tens upon tens of those little lizards.  The “boss” encounter, I found, was also very lacking.  I had a clear idea, however, I played it poorly.  That all was on my part, however, more on that in a moment.

**3) Player Size:**  Three players is the minimum amount of players you need for a session to be the best it can be.  I’ve certainly found this out last night, as I’m sure the others have as well.  Sure, I expected the third player to be there, and the fourth I already knew was not going to make it, yet I continued anyway.  From now on, sessions will ***not*** be starting unless there are three players present.
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More or less, there were some minor issues along with the flow of the session, but every minor gripe tied into any of the problems above somehow.
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On the other side of the coin are the players to a D&D session.  These are beyond my control, but they directly impact the success of a game.  D&D is a party game, after all.  So let’s talk about the things that were brought up during last session:
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**1) Player Presence.** I know I just said that starting with a certain player size was a problem on my end, but players showing up or not isn’t under my control.  I have no problems as to any number of you coming up to me and saying you can’t make next session.  That’s fine, an I’m absolutely okay with postponing sessions as long as I know at least a few days beforehand.  And I know, sometimes, things happen, and you just suddenly can’t join a session, or something happens mid-session and you miss out on gameplay.  We’ve all been there, even me.  It’s totally fine.  However, when sometimes turns into relatively often, there’s a problem, and I urge you to strongly consider continuing to be a part of the campaign if you don’t know if you’ll be present or not.

**2) Player Respect.** I understand there are some things players enjoy, or would love to do, and want to get to do that thing as soon as possible.  However, as stated before, D&D is a party game, and as far as what the party’s doing, it’s best to follow along.  Also, the party extends to the DM.  While it shouldn’t be my job to pull you through what you’re doing (and, again, apologies, I’m working on that), it is part your job as a player of D&D to accept what is happening, and deal with it.  Particularly, I’m thinking of the encounter with a bunch of oozes flowing out of the grates.  Now, one of you really wanted to get to that goblin at the end of the dungeon over there, and have said so.  Multiple times.  To the point of outright stating that you want the encounter to end already so you can get to the one you want to do.  You wanted a much more fulfilling encounter than dwarfspam, and it was right there.  Please consider the time and thought put into making an encounter, and why it’s there in the first place.

And respect does go a long way.  I want you to have fun, or at the very least, care.  If you don’t care, I’m not gonna care, and if I don’t care, *nobody’s* going to have fun.  I’m not trying to be vindictive, but I can’t continue putting my effort into something where I don’t get the satisfaction of knowing my players had fun.  The result of this kind of thing is something like the goblin encounter; instead of a neat encounter involving a potion-bomb-lobbing spellcaster with his pet oozes keeping you from getting at him, it turned into a “he fought you but you killed him, hooray” encounter. I just didn’t care. The same thing happened with the second encounter, because nobody cared about it.

**3) Roleplay and Character Permanence:** I’m not gonna go too far into this one, I’m really not.  For the most part, roleplay is done enough to have an enjoyable part in our sessions.  But your characters really do matter.  Death is a part of the game, and as a part of the game, it should be roleplayed well.  There should never be a circumstance in which the most interaction you can get out of your character death is, “Oh no.”
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I know this seems like a lot to write up for what’s just a game, but the ultimate point of playing a game is to have fun.  That didn’t really happen though, and these things are things on both our ends that we need to work on.  Y’know, unless a not fun session happens again.