You Made a How-Many-Slide PowerPoint About D&D?

So this afternoon was the great orientation and kickoff meeting, which, I gotta say, went better than expected.

Nobody backed slowly out of the room, feigning a suddenly sick aunt in Idaho. Nobody was called into an emergency meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

By the end, everybody seemed engaged in the idea of sitting around a table, making shit up.

A lot of this outcome was probably due to the fact that, even though the PowerPoint was 46 pages long, the DM and I left a LOT OF STUFF OUT.

Like, a whole lot.

Put it this way: The Player's Handbook is 312 pages long for a reason.

But today was just about getting everybody excited about adopting a character (in teams), and understanding their character's race and class, selecting an alignment, and figuring out the art of roleplaying.

And when it was all said and done, the best question of the day, by far: "Why roleplaying? Why not just be yourself?"

Dude. That's, like...that's so deep it's practically...philosophy.

And I am not even joking.

Back to the orientation. We rolled through the slide deck, identified somebody who'd never seen any of the shows or movies we used to illustrate alignment, and ended the meeting with a D100 roll for trinkets that would belong to the player, not the PC.

I got a silver bell missing its clapper. Hmm.

Finally, we determined to up the Geek Factor by another 10 percent by Skyping in one team member who works from home on Fridays...

And we're off!