Yet, Another Rekindling...

 As you can see from the previous posts, my D&D gaming experience has been quite.... sparse.

During the pandemic, I ran a Swords & Wizardry sandbox campaign on Roll20 for my wife and friends, most of whom never really played D&D. It was an actually pretty fun campaign and I had every intention of recording their exploits here as I had done with my previous S&W campaign. These adventures existed in the same campaign world that I've been running in my previous years long sandbox setting.

This "COVID Campaign" was also my longest Roll20 campaign as well. Roll20 served nicely for all of us to get together and play for a few hours each week during the world's apocalyptic pandemic.

Swords & Wizardry was a great ruleset for getting noobs into a fantasy RPG. Simple rules and mechanics got everyone up and running pretty quick. Everyone enjoyed the game, we all had lots of laughs and it was a great way to kill long hours at home. With characters like Karona Viress the cleric, George Michael the wizard and BuFoo the assassin, you can imagine the good times that we had as I ran them through everything from the Keep on the Borderland's Caves of Chaos to Rahasia and the Endless Tunnels of Enladin to all manner of one-shots and home made dungeon crawl adventures. 

Running the sessions on Roll20 evolved into me having to prepare a lot more assets for game play. We ended up relying quite a bit on the maps, tokens and interfaces to 'enhance' gameplay. This meant I spent more and more time preparing maps and tokens. This took a bit of a toll on me especially when my job was becoming more and more demanding.

We wrapped up the campaign with everyone's characters hitting about 5th level or so. I really do wish I recored the campaign because it was quite wild and fun.

So, let us flash forward to 2022.

Friends from my old group were looking to get together for at least a one-shot and maybe more if things went well.  Well, we're all a bit older and have more responsibilities and, after weeks of scheduling conflicts, we finally go together to play some D&D. This time it would be D&D 5e.

Yes, the cool-aid has been sipped.

I stepped back as a DM and slipped in as a player.  

Brian (Teabag and Arg form our old S&W campaign), our 5e DM ran the classic Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh.  It was a fun romp through the infamous 'haunted house' scenario and beyond. And 5e wasn't so bad either.  Brian played very loose with it so it pretty much ran like a classic D&D game.  

Annnd, of course, this piqued my interest in running a 5e game myself.  There are some mechanics I really liked, and, I will soon fine, some I will need to tweak.

So, yes, here we are again. I'm diving into 5e and seeing where that takes me....