#ars pair-of-dice-ica?

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I’m sorry I don’t even have that much experience playing D&D but now I’m thinking about this and I’ve gotta expand on it (partially pulling from my tags on the original post).

Nikhil and Sally both played it a lot in college back in their original timelines

at some point back in 19XX ODAR’s doing something sketchy and one of them makes some snide remark along the lines of “roll to destroy the space-time continuum” and they have the Moment of Realization

cue Campaign the First

they somehow con Anthony, Esther, Mateo, and Carmen into agreeing to play

they both want to DM but they also both wanna be a player character so they have an unnecessarily convoluted co-DMing system set up, something along the lines of a plot that jumps back and forth between two alternate realities/planes of existence, and every time the character move between the two the DMs switch (Sally and Nikhil’s respective characters both only exist in one version of reality, so they’re just conveniently Not There while DMing is happening)

since the assorted handbooks and materials don’t exist yet, they make their own

(almost all of the spells are bizarre and extremely specific)

they also create character sheets and help the players fill them out

Anthony starts out as a dwarf wizard, gets VERY into the games, and ends up multiclassing as a cleric or something Just ‘Cause; he’s probably big on homebrewing things later on when he realizes how little material Sally and Nikhil actually have down in their version of the manual

Mateo is a bard (he has like a -2 wisdom modifier but a +4 on charisma starting out and he spends 60% of the game starting brawls and then talking his way out of them) and rolls nat 20s with a wildly improbable frequency

I’m legitimately not sure what Esther’s character would be like but I can tell you that she makes Nikhil and Sally’s lives 500% more difficult by derailing the main quest so that her character can go off and save villages, flirt with NPCs, take up farming, etc. 

Carmen plays either a dragonborn druid or a gnome barbarian, those are the only two options for her, sorry

Eventually Anthony starts DMing another campaign (with Sally, Jack, Carmen, Chet, and Penny as players) and Carmen does a series of one-shots (usually with Petra, Bridget, Maggie, and Lou, although sometimes other people will join)

Chet is just...so terrible at this game. He’s constantly rolling 1s. He’s awful at improv. Every character he’s made has died and he’s running out of names to give them, but hey, he’s trying.

Petra, on the other hand, rolls suspiciously high and may or may not be playing with loaded dice. Her character has killed Chet’s at least twice.

Lou isn’t sure how he got roped into this but the NPCs have named his character as their ruler and now he’s turning the game into an academic study on societal structures.

Bridget is the master of remembering people’s throw-away jokes about their characters and bringing them up in relevant combat situations. She would make a wonderful DM if she had, you know, the free time in which to do that. 

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on this later but for now I’ll stop here. 

At least one iteration of the timeline has gotten screwed up because Nikhil & Sally introduced d&d a couple decades too early.