Saturday Night’s first session in Balazar felt very positive. We played our first adventure with just two players in-role as Balazaring late-paleolithic hunters within a Bronze Age world, but they rose to the challenge admirably. All-in-all, it was perhaps the most confident experience of GMing I’ve had in ages.

Saturday’s session was powered by the versatile “5 Room Dungeon” (5RD) methodology originally conceived by Johnn Four of roleplayingtips.com. Well, to be more precise, I applied the 5RD approach to create a “5 Room Adventure” in the manner suggested the last time Johnn was on RPR.

The session was an application of what Johnn calls the, “minimum viable adventure” in terms of notes. In other words, I had a skeleton of potential encounters / scenes that the player characters might engage with and then I improvised around them. Allowing space for creativity in terms of description was liberating.

But the best part was the emergence of the play and the narrative generated. While the skeleton gave a framework for the player characters to act within, I found myself frequently surprised by events and enjoying the improvisations I had to make.

There was a palpable sense of challenge on both sides of the screen and I was never sure what might happen next. My chief concern was always about the linearity of the 5RD approach – it’s a structure originally designed for simple dungeon adventures and it implies a sequence of encounters. But the linear structure was no less fun.

More than that, after the adventure I noticed the players deciding what the next goals in their game are going to be. In other words, the players grabbed hold of their agency and said, “We want to go here, find this person, and do this thing.” It’s been a long time since an adventure has inspired players at my table to such desires.

In conclusion, I found the 5RD skeleton gave me the confidence I need to run an adventure. It seems my players have been inspired to move on some new goals that arose from the play experience – which is awesome – and that I felt energised and joyful about having run the game.

Perhaps doing things differently really can make a difference. You can get Johnn’s guide to “5 Room Dungeons” free on roleplayingtips.com.

Game on!