So to start I’d like to go over who I’m running this for and how I’m running it.

I’ve got a larger party of 6, and of them 3 – Luther, Tallet, and Fang – have played quite a bit of D&D over the years. The first two are real-life husband and wife, and Luther has not only played in a number of campaigns for various DMs but DMed himself. Fang similarly has been on both sides of the table, and was not only the first DM I played with for any amount of time, but one of the players in my LMoP campaign.

The other three have much less D&D or TTRPG experience in general. Hickory and Nomuri were the other two players from my LMoP, and for both that was their first real hands-on D&D experience. Hoid has played a bit of older D&D systems, and a bit more of other systems entirely.

The last thing to mention is that these players come from two different social circles of mine. Fang, Nomuri, and Hickory I’ve known for a while through a Discord we’ve been part of for years, but while Fang actually lives only a few minutes away from me in western Canada, Nomuri and Hickory are one and two timezones away respectively in the southeastern USA. Hoid I’ve known in real life for even longer, and Luther and Tallet I had met online through him – all three are within driving distance of me. This meant the game was going to be run online with some attention paid to flexibility in scheduling.

Our gaming setup is Discord for voice and video, D&D Beyond for character sheets, and Foundry for a VTT, and largely it’s been Theater of the Mind. From a technical perspective there’s only been a few hiccups but overall it’s worked quite well – I can’t say enough good things about Foundry, certainly.

On the DMing side I’m making extensive use of Notion as a planning tool. Sly Flourish’s Lazy DM Technique has come in handy, and his Notion template for session prep really resonated with me. I’ve completely bastardized it to make it work for me, but it’s a great tool for keeping myself organized.

Overall we had settled on a biweekly schedule – alternate Friday evenings, starting at 8MST, as Luther and Tallet’s kiddos have a 7:30PM bedtime. While weekly sessions was great for LMoP the general consensus was that my players didn’t want a standing commitment every Friday. Plus, with the amount of prep I tend to do, two weeks works best for me. Our sessions are generally shorter, around 2-3 hours more often than not. So far so good!