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Chill, Till The Next Episode – 3WD Answers The Question Of How Long An Adventure Should Be And How To Build Episodic Adventures For Your D&D Game.

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Our current zeitgeist in storytelling are epic, longform adventures that span entire book, television, and film series… think Avatar: The Last Airbender, Lord of the Rings, ACOTAR, and the MCU. And while these epic stories are incredibly engrossing, are they the best default for our gaming tables?

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave answer a listener question asking for our advice on running episodic adventures, which serves as our jumping off point to an excellent question by TTRPG influencer and Running the Game Dungeon MASTER, Matt Colville, of “How long should an adventure be?”

What I Like (And Hate) About You – 3 Wise DMs Reflect On A Decade of 5e and Share Tips That Will Make You Have Your Best D&D Game Ever

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On July 3rd of 2024, D&D 5e will turn 10! While it has taken some hits in those ten years, no one can deny the positive effect it has had on our TTRPG hobby, bringing in an entire generation of new players. With this anniversary, we started to reflect on what we have loved, what … Read more

Go Go Godzilla! 3WD Brainstorms The Best Ways To Bring Unbeatable Monsters Like Godzilla Into Your D&D Campaign

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As we learned from the AD&D release, Deities & Demigods, “If you stat it, players will kill it.” So, what do you do if you want to place an unbeatable Kaiju-type monster, like Godzilla, into your game world? Something way more fearsome than a Tarrasque. A complete force of nature that shapes the entire world and every adventure in it. Something that you can’t just “punch really hard.”

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave respond to a listener’s question, “have you ever put a monster in your campaign that cannot be defeated?” and enter into a real time brainstorming session as we discuss how we’ve used it as DMs as well as played with it as players in our own games.

Back in the Saddle Again: Our Best Tips and Tricks for Coming Out of DM Retirement and Running Your First D&D Game in Decades

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We’ve done several episodes and articles about how to best onboard new DMs and GMs to the hobby, including episode 113: Just Do It, with DM Lenny, about running his first game ever. But what about all the Grognards and OG DMs that were playing it out of the White Boxes assembled by Gary Gygax in his own home?

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave sit down with our good friend, Scott Washburn of Paper Terrain, to discuss his recent return to the DM chair with his homebrewed campaign “World of the Five Gods.” True to form, Scott kitbashed together the original White Box D&D with some flair from 5e.
For all the DMs who have thought that “Retirement Sucks,” whether its been 40 days or 40 years, this is the episode for you.

The Old Man: The Easiest Trick To Placing Fizban the Fabulous In Your Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen Campaign

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While Fizban looks like a traditional Gandalf-type wizard, he is anything but. A confused, doddering and incredibly powerful Wizard, he seems to forget what he’s doing, who he’s talking to, and most of his incantations in every scene – casting Fireball at the most opportune, or inopportune times, depending on where you’re standing.

Godspell: Two Simple Changes To Make Clerics In Your Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen Dungeons & Dragons Game Feel Special

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There has been much discussion about how some of the major features that separate the Dragonlance setting from other settings were left out of the adventure. While this allows DMs and players unfamiliar with the setting to not feel completely lost, it does leave a good deal of work to a DM (like myself) who loves the Krynn setting and wants to have it feel different and special.

With this in mind, here is the way that our friend of the show, and resident Terrain Wrangler, Scott “The Wizard” Washburn, cobbled together a small and simple change to make the return of True Clerics to the world after three centuries feel special – without rewriting all the mechanics of 5e!

Changes – 3 Wise DMs Absolutely Best Tips For The Player That Wants To Change Their D&D Character Class

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What do you do when your player is unhappy with the direction of their class and wants to change over into a new class mid-campaign, but with the same character?

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave answer a listener question about their player that wants to change their character’s class from Paladin to Sorcerer at 5th level. We delve into not just the narrative components of a change like this, but also the mechanical effects that such a change would inevitably bring. Along the way, we offer tips, tricks, and questions you should ask yourself if you’re planning on something like this in your own games.

RPG Mythbusters: The Tavern is the Best Place to Start Your D&D Adventure

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The tavern. It’s the start of 23 different campaigns that DM Tony has been in over the last three decades. It’s a fantasy adventure trope and gets a lot of hate out there for being basic and unimaginative, but is that necessarily a bad thing?

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave return to our RPG Mythbusters series and test the myth, “Is a tavern the best place to start an adventure?” Will it be confirmed, plausible, or busted?

I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In: 3 Wise DMs Discuss How Using Conditions Will Enhance Your D&D Game

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With our recent Forged in Fire article series, DM Chris realized how many Conditions that monsters have resistance and immunity to, especially in 5e. With that, we began to discuss how much (or little) we play with Conditions in our home games, and how that might be limiting what we can do to craft engaging, thrilling, and challenging encounters.

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave delve into the Conditions mechanic (both in and out of 5e), the issues we have with some of them, what ones we find to be somewhat limp, and the ones we would love to use more. We also delve into what we have found is a Condition we often times inflict on ourselves as DMs: Expectations.

Forged in Fire Part Deux: Our Top 3 Homebrews For 5e: Narya, The Ring of Fire, Excalibur, and the Nazgul!

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In a recent episode, we discussed a listener question about homebrewing magic items that are based off our favorite books, movies, myths, and television series. This is something that every DM and GM is going to do… heck, it might even be the reason you got behind the screen in the first place!