Dungeons With Dragons

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Hello! My Name is Ryan Grimes!

Who am I? What am I? … Who are you?!?

My name is Ryan. I am 30-years-old and I currently live in Spokane, WA. Before all this, I worked at a local news station in Fairbanks, Alaska from 2012-2016. When I quit that job and moved to Washington, and eventually Texas with my high school friends, I was relatively ignorant of TTRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D, D&D 5e).

That all changed after my friends, Cody and Alex, convinced me to play the game with the help of a mutual friend that would facilitate the game for us. When we started D&D, I quickly fell in love with the format of the game, and heavily leaned into my reporting background to play the game. Surprisingly, the first character I ended up creating was an amnesiac half-orc barbarian by the name of Muk Yearn, and he had some amazing stories!

However, those first games were bitter-sweet and left my friends and I wanting more. While they were very fun and a great social experience, the games were almost always delayed due to the dungeon master at the time being fashionably late. It was still amazing, but I quickly knew that I had to start something of my own, especially when the lease to the house expired and my friends and I went separate ways.

So! After I collected myself in Spokane, Washington, I sought to continue the D&D experience. But this time, I would be the Dungeon Master. Starting in the Summer of 2022, just after the COVID pandemic, I was finally ready to play. I bought a copy of Lost Mines of Phandelver (LMOP), a pre-made DND 5e Module for beginners, and purchased a virtual tabletop program called Fantasy Grounds to start playing digitally. All I would need is my coputer, Discord, a great social media app for gamers and TTRPG enthusiasts, and some friends to play my game with.

What happened afterward is nothing short of an adventure! Many of my friends from the first game were already interested in playing. This, despite my personal ignorance of the rules at the time. They joined me in my games alongside some players that I found on the D&D Beyond forums, and we have since expanded from LMOP into other modules, such as Curse of Strahd (COS). We’ve also been playing custom stories that I’m proud to call my own. My new and old friends still play online today, with two 3-hour sessions per week at a consistent schedule.

Why Start This Blog?

It’s been a whole year of LMOP, COS, and homebrewed one-shots. I even had the pleasure of enjoying a custom one-shot that my own friend and player, Dan, made due to our adventures together. These experiences, along with some failed wisdom saves, made me want to roll initiative and start sharing my D&D experience with other people too. I want to use this blog to talk about my personal D&D games (and potentially other TTRPG games I may start playing), and use this blog to improve my own play style. I also want to start an invested community of like-minded players and share with them some of the knowledge that I’ve gained after just a year of playing dedicated D&D.

I don’t expect much out of this blog. I just want people to enjoy the content I create involving all things dungeons with dragons while we all stumble around figuring out what to do next. Cheers!

-Ryan Grimes, Creator – Dungeons With Dragons Blog

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