Debrief: We Played Dungeons and Dragons!

The road was quiet, the horses were not, and our dice had other plans. We jumped into Dungeons & Dragons 5e with a veteran DM guiding us through a one-shot that quickly became a masterclass in what makes tabletop role-playing so compelling: real choices, shared imagination, and the wild variance of a d20. From a dwarf fighter built to tank to a half-orc monk chasing precision, our party learned how character ideas collide with probability—and why that tension is half the fun.

We break down how a simple prompt—a pair of dead horses blocking the path—opened the door to true player agency. Instead of chasing quest markers, we learned to ask better questions, read the scene, and work as a team. Combat felt brutal and swingy at level one, but a clear initiative order and tight action economy gave the chaos shape. A few critical misses later, we had a deeper respect for positioning, cover, and the value of a well-timed assist. Leveling up teased new tools like Second Wind and ki features, turning frustration into momentum for the next chapter.

Foundry Virtual Tabletop deserves its own spotlight. Dynamic lighting, per-player vision, measured movement, ambient audio, and click-to-roll mechanics transformed the session from a rules tangle into a living map. The forest rustled, the cave echoed, and our different darkvision profiles changed how we explored. That sensory design didn’t just look cool—it nudged smarter teamwork and made consequences feel earned. Along the way we also talk about the D&D multiverse, the Neverwinter and Phandelver beats, and why a patient DM can compress months of learning into a single night.

If you’re curious about starting D&D, this is a ground-level tour with honest wins and losses, plus tips on easing the barrier to entry with a good guide and the right tools. Subscribe for more tabletop adventures, share this with your party chat, and drop a comment with your first-session triumphs and disasters. And if you’ve got solo RPG recs or VTT favorites, we want to hear them.

Chapters

• 0:15 Welcome And Guest Introductions
• 0:44 Why D&D And Our Past RPGs
• 4:40 The Setting, Editions, And Party Lineup
• 6:41 Building Characters And Roles
• 9:31 First Combat Reality Check
• 12:16 Story Beats And Player Decision-Making
• 17:35 Foundry VTT And Immersion
• 21:00 Cave Encounter, Darkness, And Team Synergy
• 24:10 Leveling Up And What’s Next
• 24:59 Wrap-Up And Community Invite

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:15

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast. Back in Better Than Ever. I have dogs walking around my room. We got the big dog himself of Board Games Media. It's Clayton Gable.

SPEAKER_00: 0:27

Oh, you some call me Clayton Gable. Others call me by my my real name, which is Pogo Vondo.

SPEAKER_01: 0:35

Pogo Vondo.

SPEAKER_00: 0:37

The Hill Dwarf.

SPEAKER_01: 0:40

Oh man. So uh this is gonna be less of a debrief today. We are gonna talk a little bit about Dungeons and Dragons because Clay and I had the opportunity to sit in on a one-shot kind of the first chapter of a campaign for Dungeons and Dragons. And for me, it was my first taste of DD for Clay. He's done a couple of smaller campaigns, a couple of one-shots before.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04

Yeah, I've I've done I have done one DD one-shot before many years ago. And I recently did a different RPG that's more geared towards like intro family that my brother-in-law, who actually was our DM for this game, he did for me and my boys. So that was called Quest. But yes, this is like officially my second time playing Dungeons and Dragons. My first time playing with other people. The other time I did it, it was just my brother-in-law as the DM and me, and he was just running me through um a one-shot story. So sort of my first time as well.

SPEAKER_01: 1:45

Okay, yeah, so first time like in the official DD five fifth edition rule set.

SPEAKER_00: 1:51

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:52

So I had never done DD, I've never done like any sort of facilitated dungeon master, game master type uh RPG, play lots RPGs. Um, you know, one of the first questions he asked, uh, you know, your brother-in-law, Jason, yeah. Jason, yeah. So uh Klay's b brother-in-law was happy, uh, was willing enough to DM for us, GM for us. Is is DM an outdated term?

SPEAKER_00: 2:20

Uh we'll have to check with him on that. But GM now. I mean, Game Master is a more wider RPG type. Yeah, that's true. But I think maybe it's still Dungeon Master for Dungeons and Dragons. We'll roll with that.

SPEAKER_01: 2:35

That's fair. We'll just call him the Master. So the Master, uh, you know, he sent us the information. Uh, this is my first time diving into any of this, but the one of the first questions he asked us when we did our little like pre-limb meetup, answering questions about how Dungeons and Dragons work was like, Do you have any experience playing RPGs? And he mentioned specifically Baldur's Gate. And Baldur's Gate is a uh video game, came out last year for the third edition, Baldur's Gate 3, and it won all sorts of awards and got high up praise, uh high praise. I have played that one, and that is literally Dungeons and Dragons, the video game, and it's pretty awesome. All the classes are there, all the races, all the jobs, like everything that you could want in Dungeons and Dragons, including the super fancy digital dice rolls. That is all there in Baldur's Gate 3, and it it, you know, you roll your checks and stuff. So I have some experience with it, but I've never done it like facilitated by an individual. It's always been like algorithmic, so it's kind of cool to like see this interpersonal interaction with the DM, GM, and like how they play off of your decisions because I imagine like some of those campaigns can go off the wall with when players get wild, and it seems like he's got some lots of experience doing this in the past.

SPEAKER_00: 3:50

Yeah, he's been doing it for a long time. He's been, I I'll put words in his mouth, but it's probably been the better part of 15 years that he's been playing, and a lot of that time he's been DMing as well. So he loves it. I know he to me, I don't know how he could love it, let love be DMing because it seems like so much work, but I think he actually does like it, and I think he was especially keen to help our little troop out because he is a big DD guy, he bought all the stuff for DD, but apparently his game group likes to dabble in other RPGs, and so he's been feeling a little left out of the DD universe, and so yeah, he was he was happy to jump in and give us our first taste of uh DD.

SPEAKER_01: 4:40

Yeah, so I I without jumping too far ahead, I was surprised when we first jumped in and he showed us our first map. He was kind of doing some stage setting, and I did not understand like Dungeons and Dragons is a multi-veral universal world, a multiversal world with all sorts of realms and all sorts of lands and planets and all sorts of stuff. Like, I kind of figured Dungeons and Dragons is like just ethereal, like you are in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, and I know that they have like specific continents and countries and factions and stuff like that, but I didn't understand that it was like kind of a multiversal type thing. Yeah, that's still lost on me.

SPEAKER_00: 5:20

I he was he was describing it. I we're somewhere in Neverwinter, there's things happening, you know. I you might have caught more of that than I did. I was just getting excited about rolling some die and getting into some combat.

SPEAKER_01: 5:36

Yeah, well, we'll get into this this scene setting a little bit later, but we decided that we were gonna do this. Uh, we kind of put it out there to some of our friends on the Discord and Megan, emptiness board board mama.

SPEAKER_00: 5:50

Uh, that's Amanda.

SPEAKER_01: 5:51

Um Amanda, aka emptiness board mama, and her friend, Meg, Meg Guinea Big Mom, uh, decided to join us on this quest, and we were super appreciative because you know, as much as I love hearing Clay talk, like just sitting there, the two of us going through the quest would not have been as fun. So it was cool to like have two different people in there that kind of mix things up. Uh, Amanda, it was her first time running a campaign or a one-shot, no experience with Dungeons and Dragons. Meg is experienced though, she's done it for a little while. Um, I it sounds like it's not like a recurring thing, but she's done it in the past. Yeah, she knew it was up. She knew what she was up. She like her character creation was done before we even sat down to do it. Um, so yeah, she brought she brought some heat, and that was that was good to help us out. Yeah. Um, so Jason tasks us like we're gonna sit down and make a character. What were your considerations uh when you're reading through the rule book? Like, how did you go about your character creation? How did you decide on Pongo? Pogo. Pogo. I always want to add the N in there.

SPEAKER_00: 6:59

I mean it can be Pongo to you. That can be our cutesy nickname between. Callsign Pongo. Callsign Pongo. Yeah, I think at least for me, in my novice role-playing experience, I want to be the character that I want to be. And I've always liked dwarves, they seem cool, they are tough, they're stout, drink a lot of beer, and they fight hard. And so I wanted to be a dwarf. And then obviously, you know, I have a history in combative, so a dwarf fighter was as far as I could really think through the logic of what I wanted my character to be. I just imagined myself I wanted to be the tank, I wanted people to trust me to go in with a war hammer and you know, deal some big hits. And that's what sounded like a fun character to play to me. Uh, you, Travis, you went you went a little deeper cut with it. I went a little bit deeper. Tell us about it.

SPEAKER_01: 8:04

Uh, and I was familiar with at least like the races and the classes and stuff like that, and I had played lots of lots of magic casters in the past, um, lots of wizards and things like that. Uh, done the barbarian thing, done the the warrior thing. I wanted to do something a little different, and so I was kind of flipping through the races, and I was like, half orc, that seems kind of interesting. Maybe I'll go more combat role. And then I thought, like, as I'm flipping through the actual sub the classes, I thought to myself, like, maybe I don't want to go brawler, maybe I want to do something a little different. So I was a half-orc monk, yeah. And so monks are good at acrobatics and athletics and use a lot of like empty-handed attacks, um, or at least they excel at empty-handed attacks. So it was a little bit of a different take from what I would normally go with. And um, yeah, so I I I went a little bit different. And I I was also an acolyte, that was like my subclass. Um, that really did not come into play. I think if you played a full campaign, that would come more into play because you are like a religious zealot and you go out and you can you know interact with people of the similar faith and and stuff like that. Um, but yeah, that I wanted to do something a little bit different. So um how do you feel like your character played out? Like, did you get the result that you wanted out of your tanky dwarf?

SPEAKER_00: 9:31

Uh so I don't know how deep we want to get into like the actual gameplay right now, but I felt like the first combat we got into, the first swing I took on a goblin, I you know, KO'd him one shot, boom, I dealt wicked damage. And then the rest of the combats did not go as smoothly for my dwarf. Uh the die were not rolling in my favor, so uh pogo did not contribute as much as I had hoped to the well-being of our party. But I think I think that the it's still there. And as we just leveled up, I think I got a new ability uh from my dwarf that's gonna allow me to maybe attack more often than I did before. I think it was called second wind or something. Yeah, so you know, as I I assume just as you go through this, again, I've never played past a one-shot. So as we go through, we're gonna level up, and I think there's gonna be ways to mitigate and lean into uh these different strengths that we have, and I'm excited to see how that goes.

SPEAKER_01: 10:41

Yeah, well, if the dice rolls were not going your way, uh they were even worse for me. Yes, I thought this half work was gonna come and just like thrash these goblins. And um man, I missed everything. Like I I got like one hit out of the many, many attacks that I did in uh in our first encounter. I went down, old pogo had to save me. I did I was the equivalent of like Mac from Always Sunday in Philadelphia, like doing air karate. Like I was just doing air karate by myself, and these goblins were dodged duck diving on me. So uh yeah, that was that was a little frustrating. I I wish I would have like it's not satisfying when you like are rolling all these die dice trying to like chain attacks together, and like you think that you come up with something great and then you whiff, and then you think that you come up with another great solution, and then you whiff again. So yeah, it was a lot of that for me, and that was a little frustrating. It pulled me out of it a little bit.

SPEAKER_00: 11:41

I'm not gonna lie, yeah, yeah. I can see how that would happen. I that I guess comes with the territory and dungeons and dragons. The die rolling is a big piece of it, and like I said, I I think the mitigations come with levels and you know different abilities and thoughts and experience. I I just don't think we're there yet as level one dwarves and half orcs.

SPEAKER_01: 12:07

We have to submit yourself, submit yourself to the eye.

SPEAKER_00: 12:10

We are at the mercy of. Should we like kind of talk about the story? I don't know if that's a spoiler, but I mean I kind of got into it. The minds of hey, if you're listening and you don't want a spoiler on the first, did he say it's the first it's the first chapter in this campaign.

SPEAKER_01: 12:30

Um, but I could not tell you what campaign that is.

SPEAKER_00: 12:32

Um the minds of Fandelver or something.

SPEAKER_01: 12:35

Yeah, there you go.

SPEAKER_00: 12:36

Candilever.

SPEAKER_01: 12:37

Yep, yeah. The Candilever mines are out there, and we start at Neverwinter, and we're on the Sword Coast, and we're right up the road from Baldur's Gate, and we get invited by our dwarf friends to go into this mine. They found something really cool that they want to show us. They have a way to get to this mine that has this special thing, convinces us to go, and we have a night buddy that is like, Hey, you should really get into this. You got to go help your dwarf friends. I'm botching this story already, but we are inspired to go on this trip. We all load up in our cart and our wagon with our horses, we head south on the main road.

SPEAKER_00: 13:14

Yeah, the main road.

SPEAKER_01: 13:16

The main road. I think it's called the main road, isn't it? I don't remember. I don't know, it doesn't matter. Uh, head south on the main road, and then we turn off. Um, you know, kind of we're headed towards Boulders Gate. We turn off towards the mine where we were told to meet our friends, and we encounter some dead horses in the road. And it that was like our first thing was like, yeah, encounter some dead horses in the road, and that was it. Like, what do we do?

SPEAKER_00: 13:42

What do we do? Yeah, and that's the kind of open-endedness that you're just not used to in board games, right? Like, yeah, the DM just says there's horses in the road, and he and I'm I'm kind of at a loss. I'm like, well, do we move them? What's going on here? Uh fortunately, Meg the pro kind of took the reins a little bit, and she's like, How about we search the area? And you know, obviously that's a thing that you do. Now I know this. We searching is a thing, and apparently you roll for perception, and then based on that role, the DM determines what you uncover in your search of the area. Yeah, what do you think about that first that first encounter of the dead horses?

SPEAKER_01: 14:30

Well, it kind of made me feel really dumb because he's like, There's dead horses in the road, and I'm like, Can we go around them? Like, you know, how do we keep progressing instead of like let's slow things down a little bit? I think I just need to get used to the pace, right? Like, yeah, you come up on something that is not as it seems, and you gotta take a beat, you gotta take a beat to figure out what's going on and what you want to do. And so, like, kind of getting my mind right for that type of scenario um took a little bit of time, especially because we're doing this virtually, we're not looking at each other, we don't see anything on a table. We're what doing this in Foundry, we'll talk about that in a little bit, but yeah, we're just gonna like sitting there in silence, like waiting for somebody to make a decision, and then and then Meg came up with like, hey, let's something's not right, let's let's look around. So, yeah, we get into some combat with some goblins, and um, you know, things did not go well. We're not rolling well, we're not working together as well as we should.

SPEAKER_00: 15:25

Yeah, we what'd you think of what do you think of the combat system as a whole? Because that's that's a whole thing, right? You know, yes, rolling for initiative, you get your turn order for all the enemies yourself. Like, how did you feel about how that all played out?

SPEAKER_01: 15:40

Yeah, so uh you all roll for initiative, you roll your 25 die, and then you are ranking from highest number that you rolled down to the lowest number, and that's like your turn order, and you just go right down the right down the list and then you recycle. And some types of characters have like two attacks, one attack, depending on what level you are, different abilities, all this stuff. Um these dogs are making so much noise, it's driving me nuts. Uh, and so yeah, you have like your kind of order of operations that you go through, but everybody's order of operations looks a little differently. So you can move up to a certain distance, you can attack midway, you can do items, you can do all sorts of different stuff, and so it's a it's a bit to manage, and luckily Jason's a pro and like helped us through it. If we were like keeping track of every little thing that we could do and had to do, I we would have been lost. It would have been dead on arrival. So thankfully Jason is a pro and and helped us through that stuff. Um, but yeah, it it takes some getting used to for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 16:44

Yeah, yeah. And I mean that that first combat took a while. I mean, I think we were fighting those five goblins for maybe an hour.

SPEAKER_01: 16:57

Yeah, it was it took a while, and one because we were rolling poor, I was rolling poorly.

SPEAKER_00: 17:02

Yeah, I mean, none of us were doing great.

SPEAKER_01: 17:05

Yeah, it was it was a little tough. Um, but we got our feet underneath us, we beat the goblins, we went off uh to follow a trail that was drug in the mud because we were looking for our night friend who might have been captured by goblins, and we'll kind of leave it at that. But anyways, yeah, second scenario got a little more complex. We're going through caves, we're finding creatures that might be able to help us in the in the encounters. Um, it was our first time encountering darkness, and our different characters could see differently in the dark. Yeah, and that kind of brings me to the next point that I want to make, which is Foundry. Foundry is an online tool that Jason used to help facilitate this uh DD. It's got preloaded assets in it, it's got all the different maps and everything already done. We're not drawn on grid paper. That stuff was cool. Yeah, the cool thing about Foundry is it can help automate a lot of the stuff that builds out like the immersion. So like in you know exactly how far your character can run. Uh you know all their stats and everything at a click of a button. Um, it's got like we we're in the forest, like you have leaves that are falling to the ground, and you can hear the birds, like it's got atmospheric music and stuff. Yeah, um, all that was so cool and like really sucks you into the game.

SPEAKER_00: 18:22

Any thoughts? Oh no, I I was just I honestly was just picturing that little like cave area, the entrance to that cave, and remembering you know how much it really does feel like you're there, yeah, and how quickly during some of these like storytelling beats you can kind of lose yourself in absolutely in the moment and feel like it's more than just a computer screen and a couple clip art pictures of a of a dwarf and a half work on on the screen and our uh little half. What was Meg?

SPEAKER_01: 18:58

She was a Meg was a rock rock gnome, yeah. Rock gnome wizard wizard rock gnome.

SPEAKER_00: 19:04

Um Amanda was a dragonborn, she was a druid, yeah. Druid dragonborn, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 19:09

Uh and that, yeah. So the entrance to the cave, we come up, there's trees kind of in this little like outcropping, and it's kind of cool because you can't see around the trees, so like wherever your character is, you can only see like line of sight. So if something's hiding behind the tree, you wouldn't know it. And then as we get closer to the entrance to the cave, Jason says, like, you know, there's a stream that's trickling out of the cave, and you can kind of faintly hear water trickling, and you can still hear the birds chirping and the leaves rustling and stuff. Then you go into the cave, and then it's like just stream. It's it's so cool how it switches like that. Your character could not see colors, yeah. Like you could only see black and white in the dark. So the second you crack cross that threshold, everything was black and white for you. But I could see colors because I was a half orc.

SPEAKER_00: 19:54

Like, oh, you could see colors? Yeah, I didn't realize that. I mean, I'm in there in black and white. I thought I was doing good.

SPEAKER_01: 20:02

But then we had uh Amanda, who's a dragonborn, who could not see in the dark, and so she entered and she's like, I can't see anything, and she's just bumping around, like following us. She can see our little hexes, but not can't see anything around it. So man, it was so immersive and cool, and like I love how it can change according to what your abilities are. Foundry is a cool system, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 20:23

I I'm glad Jason was running it. I don't know what it's like to actually you know make it work like that, but it's it it's cool as a player when you're just moving your little token around and getting to experience all the benefits of it.

SPEAKER_01: 20:39

Yeah. So uh then we you know finished the second encounter in the cave. We all you know slapped hands, everybody escaped unscathed from the cave, and then we rallied back at was it Neverwinter, or did we go? We went somewhere else.

SPEAKER_00: 20:55

I think we went to the Fandelver.

SPEAKER_01: 20:57

Yeah, there we go. Yeah, we went to Philadelphia. Went to Philadelphia, and um, yeah, we kind of rallied there. Our chapter ended, we all leveled up. Uh I am excited to play again because the level up actually means that like my character gets a little bit different. I think the monk doesn't really pay off until like levels three, four, five. Like you get a little better and you get new abilities and stuff, as you do with most RPGs. But um, at least for the monk, you get like um what is it called? Like it's I just had it. It's like something blows, but like you can just walk up and like barehand somebody and punch them in the face. So yeah, super excited about that. Super excited to try out my new abilities in the next chapter.

SPEAKER_00: 21:45

Yeah, and uh yeah, I'm just excited. I feel like we got the the hard stuff out of the way, you know. We got the character creation out of the way, we got which is fun in its own right, but it is kind of a uh, you know, it's like a tedium thing you have to do to get started. And then, you know, the first adventure, obviously we were newer to it, so there was some learning happening and uh exploring what's in the realm of possible, sure, and now you know, heading into the next one, hopefully, here in the next month, we're gonna I think it's gonna really be a lot of fun getting to rally back up and you know continue the story.

SPEAKER_01: 22:24

Yeah, so uh yeah, I'm excited to get back into it. But if you we probably have not done Dungeons and Dragons any sort of justice with those episodes. This is just our kind of first impression. So yeah, you've played Dungeons and Dragons before. If you have lots of experience, like let us know things that we should check out, uh things that we should watch, things that we should research, um, any sort of systems that you really like. Uh, we've been doing some solo RPGs. If you have any solo RPGs that you want to recommend, go ahead and hit us up on Instagram at Operation Game Night Podcast. Uh, you can comment in the link below uh in for YouTube. And uh if you like this podcast, if you like this show, if you like Clayton Gable, then you can um you know subscribe to our YouTube channel, you can like the video and uh just tell more people about Operation Game Night.

SPEAKER_00: 23:13

I know you're wrapping it up here. Uh you were going through your wrap-up spiel, but I had one more thing I wanted to say. Please. Sorry, for those of you that didn't tune out when Travis started his wrap-up spiel. Um I just don't know how people do this, honest to God. Like if if just three people that never played Dungeons and Dragons before wanted to sit down and do it, the the barrier to entry just seems uh incredible to me. Like, I honestly, I the the player's handbook, yeah, like we complain about rule books that are like 10 pages long. This player's handbook is like an encyclopedia. Oh yeah. And it behooves you to have a pretty good grasp on it, especially if you're not at the you know, the nurturing hands of somebody who's been playing it before and can answer all your stupid questions. So I mean, I I have in my Amazon cart, um, they came out with like a beginner set.

SPEAKER_01: 24:13

Oh yeah, the starter set.

SPEAKER_00: 24:14

Yeah, that I've heard good things about. So I might give that a whirl, you know, maybe just with a couple people and see if I can work my way through it. But yeah, I find yourself somebody that knows how to play. Oh, yeah, for sure. I would I would say because it is intimidating. And Travis, you may continue signing off.

SPEAKER_01: 24:36

Well, uh, whenever you're ready to run the root RPG, I have all those books and I'm I'm ready. You're ready to go. I'm ready. I can DM that one. I know that, I know that one for sure. Okay, much more simple, much more simple system.

SPEAKER_00: 24:49

Okay, all right. I can get on board with simple.

SPEAKER_01: 24:52

All right. Uh, from two simpletons, this has been Operation Game Night Podcast. I have been Travis, he has been Clay. This has been our first impressions of them Dungeons and Dragons, and we're out.