I am a professional Dungeon Master, and I have to admit, I didn't think this one through.

I’ve been a professional DM for about five years now. Nothing big time, just enough to pay the bills, but it is by far the best job I’ve ever had. I’ve had a lot of different groups over the years, but nothing could have prepared me for Martin.<br><br>At first, Martin was just a weird request. I got a call from a woman saying that both her and her boyfriend had played D&D when they were kids, but hadn’t played in years. She said she wanted to get him a session as a birthday present, and she asked if I knew a DM who had experience running games for people who hadn’t played in a while.<br><br>I told her I was pretty experienced, and that I would be happy to run a game for him. She said that would be great, and asked if I was high. I was taken aback by the question at first, but I remember a similar conversation I had with a potential client before, and assumed she meant drugs. <br><br>I told her I wasn’t high, but I was a little confused as to why that mattered. She explained her boyfriend was on a number of medications for physical and mental handicaps, and a lot of the DMs she had talked to didn’t want to deal with power wheelchairs in their houses, or with players who needed to stop occasionally to take their medication.<br><br>This was the first I had heard of the wheelchair, or the special needs, but I reassured her I could handle it. She was delighted, and we set up a time to meet.<br><br>When the day of the session arrived, I was excited. I had spent extra time getting everything set up, making sure the path to the dining room table, where we would most likely be playing, was navigable. I had also spent some extra time double-checking all of my rules, making sure I would be able to handle anything that might come up.<br><br>When Martin and his girlfriend showed up, I was shocked. I’m not great at reading people’s disabilities sometimes, but this was clear. Martin was severely handicapped, and needed almost everything done for him. He had no verbal responses, and communicated using a complex system of blips and beeps from a device on his chair that he controlled with his head.<br><br>It took almost half an hour for his girlfriend to get him and all of his stuff into my living room, and she broke down crying as soon as she was done. “I can't believe I got someone who would do this,” She said. “I was starting to think I would never find anyone.”<br><br>With that, she gave me the world's heaviest book, told me she had to go, and left tears of joy in her eyes.<br><br>---<br><br>I sat down, and flipped through the book. The world was already fleshed out, and the characters were already made. The adventure was already written out, and all of the NPCs had backstories.<br><br>I was floored by the amount of work that must have gone into the book. I was starting to feel a little inadequate about my "A nice little cave to clear, with a dragon at the end" that I usually use for beginner players. Either Martin or his girlfriend had put a lot of work into this, and I was going to have to step up my game if I was going to do it justice.<br><br>That was my first mistake.<br><br>I started to read through the book, and I realized just how ambitious the campaign it outlined was. I was a pretty experienced DM, but the type of things they were asking for were things I had only recently started to be able to do well. I had never had such a handicapped player before, and I was starting to realize that I had bitten off more than I could chew.<br><br>This was my second mistake.<br><br>The session started with Martin's character, a powerful wizard, being hired for a job by a local merchant. I was hoping at first that I might be able to use some of my pre-made stuff for the first few encounters, but when the first thing Martin did was try to have a conversation with the merchant, I knew that wasn't going to be the case.<br><br>It took almost two hours just to get through the conversation, and at least a quarter of that was me making excuses for why the merchant wasn't responding. It didn't help that Martin was having trouble with his communication device, and kept accidentally making it sound like he was trying to intimidate the merchant when he really wanted to make a reasonable request.<br><br>Once they had finished talking, Martin's character was on a forest path, headed to the merchant's logger encampment to figure out why production had slowed down so much. He wandered the forest for almost an hour, asking periodic questions about the setting and then moving a mile or two in one direction or another.<br><br>I was getting worried because, according to the book, there were a number of things that should have happened by now. The players were supposed to be ambushed by some goblins, have a chance encounter with a traveling bard, and pass by a small village. It was clear that none of that was going to happen, and I wasn't sure what to do.<br><br>This is where my third, and biggest, mistake came in. Instead of going back and trying to make any of those things happen, I decided to push forward with the adventure as outlined in the book and see if we couldn't get to the part where Martin was actually going to be.<br><br>I tried to make that decision very secretly, but anyone who has been a DM knows there is no such thing as a secret. As I was making my decision, Martin asked me another question about the forest, and instead of my usual, "not really sure", answer, I gave a very confident "no". He looked me straight in the face, and I knew he had caught me.<br><br>He started pushing harder on the questions, quickly pointing out every inconsistency and plot hole as I tried to push further down the campaign. The game went from me being the storyteller to me being on the defensive, and it was going very badly.<br><br>The three hour session I had been hired for ended after about an hour, with Martin asking me why I had wasted his time, and leaving.<br><br>I was incredibly embarrassed, and I ended up walking home early, with my head down in shame. When I got home, my wife asked me how the session went. I told her it did not go well at all, and showed her the book.<br><br>She flipped through it, and told me that she used to have a boyfriend with MS who loved D&D. She recognized the writing in the book as his, and told me that he had spent all summer one year working it out when he was younger. <br><br>She told me the only thing she remembered from the campaign was that it was way too complicated for any DM they had ever had, so they gave up on it almost right away.<br><br>I asked her why she didn't tell me that was her old boyfriend who had hired me. She said she felt bad giving me a client who had so many special needs, and didn't want me to feel like she was guilt-tripping me into taking the job. <br><br>I told her it was fine, but Martin had not seemed to like the session very much. <br><br>She laughed, and said “Well, I guess you learned why I broke up with him.”<br><br>---<br><br>I have since called Martin and offered to do the campaign justice, and he has agreed. In the month since our first session, I have done nothing but study the campaign and the world, and I am excited to try again. Wish me luck.<br><br>EDIT: Holy crap, this blew up! I see that a lot of people are confused as to how Martin communicated. When his girlfriend referred to his system of blips and beeps that he controlled with his head, she meant a system that looked something like this;<br><br> Each of the buttons corresponds to a word or phrase, and Martin would put his head on the button he wanted, and the device would say it out loud. As such, while he couldn't talk, I could always hear what he was saying, and I should not have referred to it as a blip or a beep.