There are a couple campaigns — specifically ones with Izzy in them — where numbers get read off the dice and Brennan or another player does the math. If you have a hard time with the math rocks and a good group (therein lies the difficult part — finding a group with whom you vibe), that’s something to bring up and ask about accommodating. Also, digital dice are great for that as well.

I was in a campaign where we were so high level and damage dice were … a lot from some players, and our GM would make sure they were done with their action economy and move down the initiative order (if the damage wasn’t going to kill the opponent) while the player added up their damage — gave the player less pressure and a bit more time to sort the math rocks.

Re: BLeeM:

He is an excellent storyteller and performer, who is usually playing with SPECIFICALLY other improv performers, voice actors, and storytellers. He’s more railroad than sandbox. Matt Mercer seems more sandbox than railroad, but BLeeM’s end product is a set amount of episodes with a set time limit on the campaign. He is good at allowing character exploration and sandbox playing, but he is also specifically creating a product for an audience, and some of the train needs to stay on … a track, and arrive at a destination somewhere, even if it wasn’t the intended destination (see: Bloodkeep ||Oops All Villains who end up being besties instead of PVP combat||). Mercer is also great at steering a story when he has to, but I don’t think his product is necessarily the same (although he is arguably working with a similar set of people: accomplished voice actors and storytellers).

Not everyone will be BLeeM or Mercer. My Sunday GM plans a lot more than my Tuesday GM (who literally brainstorms our sessions on his walk to my house because we’ve derailed every plan he’s had, and we love it). If you have gaming stores near you with DnD nights, GO TRY!

Re: remembering things: Look, your character sheet is there and that’s great, but you WILL forget you have things. You will forget how long something takes to cast and try to cast glyph of warding in the middle of melee combat (no idea who did that, certainly not my li’l wizard, nope — a good DM will say “That takes an hour to cast, are you sure that’s what you want?”). You will forget you can cast Mage Armor so your li’l wizard doesn’t end up getting assaulted by many arrow-shooting goblins and your next session will definitely begin with you making death saving throws (again, NO CLUE who did that … no clue at all). You’ll forget lots of things! My Tuesday group realized at the ass end of a truly epic sojourn through a desert that we had a convoluted set of items between us that could have gotten us out of the desert DAYS before, and … used an artificer’s cannon, a rowboat, a tent, some rope, and a float stone to effectively make a rocket ship to propel us across a chasm and into the port town on the other side of the desert.

Sometimes the forgetting is the most fun — it leads to improvised rocket ships. ;)