You’re playing Dungeons & Dragons the right way. Unless you aren’t.

What’s the right way? Well, the best indication is that you’re enjoying it, and your friends are coming back each session, eager to play more with you.

That’s really the only metric we have.

Every bit of advice we have on the game comes from someone’s own experiences, and what makes it so hard sometimes is that that advice may be for such a different style of campaign, that it’s just bad advice for you.

For instance, “YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”
Gary Gygax thought this was so important that he put it all in capitals, as I have here, in the original Dungeon Master’s Guide.

I guess none of my campaigns have been meaningful. In fact, over all the years I’ve played D&D, I don’t think we’ve ever kept strict time records. Abstractly? Sure. Time passes in my campaigns, and the years add up. The old king dies, the new king ascends, and upon being given his uncle’s sword, starts a foolish war against the evil demigod, Iuz. But strict time records? Nah. It’s not part of my game style.

I came across this quote again in a recent book I was reading on how to run D&D, along with statements that you absolutely want to give XP for treasure and very little XP for monsters. I could tell that this player really wanted the D&D that Gygax presented in the AD&D rulebooks, and not any competing style. The trouble is that those competing styles have been around for a very long time. As soon as the original Dungeons & Dragons game got out into the wild, people started using it for their own purposes.

And XP for treasure gained? That was one of the first things to go amongst one strand of players.

This will be the 24^th year I’ve been playing with some of my players. I started a campaign in Ballarat back in 2000, shortly before the D&D 3E books were released, and I have players who have been with me since then. Or they joined shortly thereafter. We’ve played through several editions (with one player I’ve run D&D 3E, 3.5E, Pathfinder 1E, 4E, and 5E). My individual campaigns typically last two to six years, and all fit into the greater picture of my version of Greyhawk.

And I don’t keep strict time records. I’m a failure as a DM.

Is keeping strict time records useful advice? It certainly is – for a certain type of campaign. The more you use time as a resource, the more meaningful time records become. You can see aspects of this style of play in the early editions of RuneQuest, where training time between adventures was as important for your character’s advancement as the experience you gained on adventures. For all Gygax emphasised the training rules in AD&D, they’re not even mentioned in many other editions of the game. And when I asked him about them on EN World a couple of decades ago, he indicated that he only used them when the players had gained a lot of XP very quickly.

Consider that training takes one to four weeks under the AD&D rules. Do the characters have any time to train in the GDQ series? Not really – it’s one adventure after another as they pursue the drow deeper and deeper. And that has always been the problem with training rules: they work well when you’ve got a campaign where the party goes on a short expedition, has a break, then goes on another short expedition, but much less well if you’re trying to tell any sort of story.

And D&D is explicitly inspired by a whole lot of stories. You don’t think that D&D players wanted to emulate the action in those stories?

It’s been fascinating watching how old things have become new again. People have found new ways of doing old concepts. I run very story-based campaigns. Some of my friends run hexcrawls, or megadungeons, or lots of other styles of campaign. Are the players following a path the DM laid down, or is the DM designing adventures in response to player goals? Things are only wrong when the players and DM aren’t having fun.

It’s okay to realise that your way of playing the game doesn’t fit into a group. It’s tricky when you don’t have another group to go to.

The Friday Night campaign I’m currently playing is doing the Deadlands RPG. Our GM has learnt – through long, painful experience – that this group doesn’t do investigations well. (Personally, I think it’s also got something to do with how those investigations are presented). So, we go for more combat-heavy experiences. I suggested that perhaps the Forbidden Lands RPG might be an interesting fit – lots of exploration and dungeon delving, most likely. With another group, he’s running another game from Free League Publishing – Bladerunner. He knew better than to get us to play it, because it’s got a lot of investigations. But as his other group includes people who write Call of Cthulhu scenarios, they’re a LOT better with investigations than we are.

Our group? Give us action!

As you may have seen, from my memories of an old AD&D Greyhawk campaign, I’ve always been involved heavily in published adventures. They were what I really enjoyed reading in those early days, especially when I didn’t always have people to play with. And the ones that had strong stories appealed to me more than those that didn’t. Although I am extremely fond of Keep on the Borderlands. I guess it’s got a really strong story around it, and then allows the players to find their own place within it.

I do design my own material as well, but I rely heavily on published material to provide insights and approaches that I wouldn’t design myself.

But then you have people who 100% design everything they run. Wizards and TSR have published official adventures, are they then doing it wrong by ignoring them?

Play the style that engages you and your players. But I will say that it’s very interesting to investigate other ways of playing D&D or other RPGs – you never know what you might find useful! Some day, I may run a campaign with strict time-keeping. It’s a entirely valid way of playing D&D. It’s just not the only way!