I had forgotten that it was D&D today so they had to call me! They are in an area where they know the encounter table, encounter frequency, and the stats of all the enemies on the table, and they were doing engineering shenanigans using Reduce Size spell to move massive amounts of rice around.
They spend a full day (diegetically, a three hour session) doing so, fighting the enemies etc. My contributions mostly included being in bed shouting cheerful insults from the NPCs. Fun fun fun.♥︎
If all sessions were like this I could DM seven days a week♥︎♥︎♥︎
My dorks are extremely autonomous. I mean, to the point that I think other people wouldn’t believe it was real. That’s what happens after six years of blorb. The temple is such as real place to them now so they know how to move around in it and rarely need to ask me anything. Things like “We close our eyes and feel at the spot where we left the Medusa head, is it still there?”—they don’t make things up that they don’t know, they do ask—and if something unusual happens, I’ll interrupt—but mostly it’s just them roleplaying and I just listen to them.
The drawback is when we have spotlight imbalance since they’re not used to me running the show, I have a hard time stepping in and saying “OK, while they do that, what do you do, Tarala?” etc. That’s why when we have larger groups I like taking turns being caller a la Hillfolk. For B-team it’s fine, they know each other well so I can just relax.
Also they pretty much never talk about off-topic things either. No phones, just dice rolls & describing the fights & moving crates of rice.
Like, here is my tense & moody narration:
“OK, you’re, uh, there. Whaddayado?”
(Not pointing to anything, just, it was stated that they were headed back to the elemental temple beach on abd-Yson, a place they’ve visited many times and that has become vividly real inside my own head. Wordlessly.♥︎)