Dave 
One of the players is planning on playing an evil wizard wearing the Black Robes. Is this doable in the campaign seeing that the group is going to face off against some Black Robes, or is this really hard to uphold in a further good aligned party? Our Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign … Read more
Bad sessions. We’ve all dealt with them and we’ll continue to have them periodically. It’s all part of running TTRPGs. But how to you deal with them when they happen? What do you do to salvage the game at the next session? DM Dave offers a question to his fellow Wise DMs regarding a recent … Read more
Running the adventure outside of the game session? Yes, that’s right. Starting back in DM Dave’s Curse of Strahd campaign, we began to develop characters and backstories with narrative side quests via text, email, and online documents (like Google Docs). In our Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign, we have utilized them from the … Read more
One of the hardest things for me about higher-level play in D&D is that, inevitably, we’re going to war. It just makes sense that at some point above level 10, we’re going to get into wars between nations, factions, religions, devils and demons, etc. At that point, either I need to present the war as … Read more
Pirates. It doesn’t take long for a D&D group to want to play as pirates, swashbucklers, privateers, and sailors. In our modern day, we can blame Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. But how do you approach running a seafaring adventure? Is it just a fancy travel mechanic? Is it … Read more
Movies like The Godfather, The Lord of the Rings, Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Gladiator, Goodfellas… the list is inexhaustible. Movies that are “must-see” movies, classics that are nearly required viewing. Many published adventures, like Curse of Strahd, Storm King’s Thunder, Dragonlance, The Keep on the Borderlands, Against the Cult of the Reptile God, … Read more
The 3 Wise DMs are all approaching campaign finales: DM Tony’s Journey to Ragnarok, DM Chris’ “Wednesday-Nighters” campaign in our homebrewed world of The Further, and DM Dave’s Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign. Just like the start of a campaign, the end only comes along once. So what should you focus on when … Read more
Immersion in your D&D game. It’s one of the most sought after and asked about topics in the whole DMing Multiverse. The real trick always lies in how well you can tie together all the seemingly disparate pieces of your group – characters, backstories, motivations, and adventures – into one cohesive, epic story. In this … Read more
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?”
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
