Day in the Life of an Idiot

Several weeks ago, naomikritzer tagged me on Bluesky so that I would be sure to see that someone was promoting their new Dungeons & Dragons 5e module: Solidarity: Drunk Girls* in the Bathroom. The concept: the adventure starts because your characters stumble across a drunk girl sobbing in the bathroom. Your quest? To undo the wrong what was done to her!

The whole thing is very…


Image: The "You have my sword" meme.

The concept sounded AMAZING.

I bought it immediately.

Perhaps my first clue that what I was getting wasn’t “all that,” was the price. DriveThru RPG had it listed for $3.00. I didn’t immediately think this was a red flag as I’ve bought things for less that were worth way more than that. Hell, I’ve picked up free stuff on some of these sites where I feel a bit guilty for getting so much for nothing. Plus a lot of these places like itch.io have a “name your own price” button that always starts insanely low. I nearly always tip.

It turns out the price broke down to a dollar a page of gaming material (technically, the whole thing is 7 pages, but that includes a title page, the copyright page, dedication, and an introduction.)

Somehow I thought those remaining three pages would be… denser, maybe? Also, when I was a young gamer the word “module” conjured up something complete--something that a novice GM, like myself, could use to run an entire mini-campaign or a one-shot from start to finish.

Yeah, so, you heard the pitch?

That’s the whole module.

The first real page that could be counted as content is the introduction. I loved the introduction. I’m not sure it was worth $5 (I tipped! I always tip!), but the author talks about how what she wanted to do with Drunk Girls* -- and that was to make something accessible and fun. She talked about an experience that is far too common among women gamers in which she was belittled at a D&D table full of men who just seemed to want to prove how many of the rules she had not memorized and generally bully her out of RPGs for years. This is, unfortunately, very relatable. A lot of women I know have had similar experiences. In fact, one of the women I ended up gathering to play this game, had something almost EXACTLY like the one the author described happen to her.

The author then explained the asterisk in the title and how this is meant to include not only all women, but also any cis or queer boys that wanted to play. Truly, an excellent intro! I was all in! Gimme me a stripped down, rules-light, role-play heavy game! Yes, please!

The next page is largely occupied by 1d20 options for WHY the drunk girl* is crying in the bathroom, none of which is more than a sentence long, followed by a suggestion that the basic structure of a good D&D game goes like this:

• Introduction & wrap-up - 15 mins
• Interaction - 15 mins
• Puzzle or obstacle - 30 mins
• Combat - 1 hour

Interaction 15 minutes? I was a little thrown by this, given that the whole intro was all “All the Role-Play! None of the hassle!” I was like, I have gathered 5 players, that’s--let me do the math--3 minutes of character time a piece??? Including the introduction of the drunk girl????

Ideas for how to do a quick build D&D character appear on the last two pages and an empty (but not form-fillable) stripped down character sheet. By searching around I discovered that there were pre-generated characters for this game which were being sold for an additional $5.00 (so I bought them. If you are keeping track, so far I have now paid $10.00 for this, in part because I tipped the author $2.00 on the initial $3.00.)

There is no help beyond the above bullet points for a GM. To be fair, some of the scenarios seem set up to be GM-less. A group could just come up with some characters, roll from the list, and just spend an hour or two just playing out the pretend problem without ever rolling dice. AND, to be fair, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. I, myself, personally love role-playing games that go like this. I’ve been really intrigued by GM-less games lately and, had my party been interested in playing like this, we absolutely could have.

But this module was not billed as a GMless scenario.

In fact, given the above outline, there seems to be an expectation of a LOT that is not not discussed in this module at all!! Plus, when you gather a group of people and tell them that you’re going to GM a fun D&D scenario… it turns out that a lot of them are actually expecting to play D&D the traditional way! As noted, even the listicle in the module itself includes the words “puzzle or obstacle” and “combat.” But, there are literally no suggestions for good puzzles or obstacles--particularly for any that might slot nicely with “She fell for her biggest rival but they want nothing to do with her,” (which is what you get if you roll a 5 on the scenario chart) or “She broke up with her first love due to family pressure but now they’re back, hot, and rich” (17).

So, I paid $10 to basically build something from scratch.

Luckily, I’d gathered good players. Among them lcohen  and naomikritzer , but also my friend Nick from college and a couple (as in a literal couple, a husband and wife team) who are friends of my friend haddayr . I’d also read and absorbed a lot of the materials for GMs in Thirsty Sword Lesbians when I was prepping to run a one-shot of that for ConFABulous last year, and so I spent several weeks ahead of this game asking players what they thought this scenario would be like, what they wanted from the game (do you want combat? Are you expecting monsters? How much role-play do you typically like? Etc.?) And, of course, going over lines and veils, because drunk girls* could lend itself to subjects people do NOT want as part of an RPG.

We decided--because the module suggested this idea if you had enough players--to have someone play the actual Drunk Girl*. lcohen  stepped into that role as a human bard named Thalia. Rather than roll a scenario, I let her pick her favorite. Together, we had a number of back-and-forths via email to decide details. She went with “She’s engaged but she’s fallen for someone else,” so we figured out what was up with the groom and who she’d fallen for instead and how close to the wedding this all happened, etc., etc. I let lcohen  decide everything around this whole scenario, outside of the surprise I wanted everyone to experience.

Because my players were expecting some combat (I mean…do I blame them? No! After all, there are spells and cool-sounding weapons listed on the character sheets!), I decided that at some point the drunk girl’s love interest would get kidnapped by the groom’s extended family who, as it happened, belonged to a secret cult of Snake God worshippers.

I designed a whole (albeit short and not terribly dangerous) dungeon crawl for them to go through, including a f*cking puzzle for them to solve!

It was fun and fine. I think, if I were to add advice to this module, I would encourage players to spend time thinking about who they were (and their various relationships with each other and the gods) so that a GM could work in whatever bits of backstory they wanted to play out--which is what I did. For my own game, I think I had the most success with the halfling paladin, as her backstory slotted in best with the adventure--but some other folks got spotlights here and there. At least two of the players basically played out some of how they met, etc., via an email thread before the game, which I think added to a sense of depth. We ended up with a decently well-developed set of characters before we even started, which I hope made the game feel “as advertised on the tin.”

My one shot, naturally, took two sessions (it was a six hour game, broken in half).

But, I write this review to let any prospective buyers know that, yeah, please support this concept and its author because it’s awesome and more like this is not only good for the author it’s a good thing for our community… just don’t go overboard on the tip… unless you really want to. Honestly, if it were mine to do over with the foreknowledge I have, I’d have tipped decently on the pre-generated character sheets and not bothered to buy the module. There is almost nothing in the module that a person needs in order to create this game. If you read the title, you know what to do. Better to have your official GM Guide, Monster Manual, and Player’s Handbook at your side. Or hell, download a free D&D module and rearrange it to suit your needs. Especially if you, like me, are brand new to GMing.

I don't know that people are interested, but I may write up a little campaign description of all the things I ended up doing, if nothing for my own memory aid/enjoyment. Don't worry, sabotabby if you read this, I will be creating a whole new scenario when we finally run our version of this. Plus! You will benefit from all I have learned here!