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The Prestige: 3 Steps to Make Your Character’s Backstory Shine in your D&D Game

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Characters are the most important thing we deal with as DMs. How many campaigns suffer because the DM is tied to their story, instead of the party’s? I don’t have a number — it was meant as a rhetorical question — but it’s probably a lot. How do we get the best of both worlds, with a rich experience for both player and DM? The backstory, that’s how.

Any character worth his mettle has some sort of backstory — former soldier, disillusioned priest, etc. — but a history ignorant of the world they’re playing in leaves us with the same problem. So the task isn’t just creating a backstory, but rather creating a backstory in the world you’re given. Something to tether the character to the lore, history, and developing plot lines of the campaign world. Sounds daunting, but it’s no harder than your traditional backstory. It’s hitting the right story beats, as our friend DM Tony might say, that makes it all come together.

How Low Can You Go? The Things Every DM Needs To Know When Creating Low Magic Settings in Their D&D And TTRPG Campaigns

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Magic. It’s the thing that separates Fantasy RPGs from all others. Every other TTRPG can have combat, exploration, social situations… but magic is the secret sauce that makes fantasy special. Many DMs and GMs toss around the idea of “low magic” worlds, but what does that mean exactly?

3 Wise DMs 6 Easy Steps To Crafting And Playing The Best Character In Your D&D or TTRPG Game 

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What really makes a character in any given RPG awesome? Sure, high stats help but they guarantee neither success nor that they will be interesting in any way. Maybe six years from now, you and your friends will be sitting around the table talking about how a character was incredibly strong. But that’s only if they did something with it in the game which really was worth remembering. 

After running decades of games, the characters who stand out were run by players who ran them extraordinarily well. But what makes a character an “A-lister” who will be weaved into the lore of both the stories of both you and your friends in years to come? To answer this we have created a list of the seven things which will make your characters the most memorable

D&D Accounting: 11 Tips and Pitfalls to Tracking Treasure in your TTRPG

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Gold. It’s the perfect representation of the reward mechanic from the earliest days of the White Box. Hell, it even used to represent experience! As a companion piece to our 19th episode on RPG Economics, Tony, Chris, and Dave delve into not just how to make things worth using the gold for, but also the idea of how do you, or DO you, account for the treasure that the party finds?

Journey & Council: Making Travel and NPC Interactions in Your D&D game Epic Like J.R.R. Tolkien With 2 Simple Mechanics From The Lord of the Rings RPG

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The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Sourcebook by Free League contains new races, classes, rules and generators for D&D 5e to help you bring the world of Middle-Earth to life at your table. It’s available in both hardback and digital copies, but be forewarned that you’ll need access to the rules of 5e as well. The sourcebook only contains the new information and lore, so the basic rules and combat are still handled in the traditional fashion

Come Together: 3 Wise DMs and Tabletop Journeys Come Together to Discuss the Best Tips to Running a Shared TTRPG Campaign World

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At some point, most DMs pursue the idea of a world and/or a campaign where multiple DMs are running the game. This is an audacious and exciting project, so in this week’s episode, 3 Wise DMs teamed up with our friends, Lewanika, Josh, and Glen at Tabletop Journeys, to discuss shared worlds, shared campaigns, and shared universes… as well as all the other discussions that happen when you try to corral six DMs into a conversation.

Ballad For The Bartender – 3 Quick Tips to Make NPCs More Interactive and Meaningful in Your D&D Game

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If there is one truly archetypal NPC, the bartender is it. Friend, confidant, drink deliverer, quest giver. They might be the first NPCs we create when fleshing out a new city, in addition to often being our player’s first roleplay interaction. 

Now, everyone in your world doesn’t need to revolve around beer and crossbows (although if you feel it does I’m always looking for a new campaign), but there are fundamental pieces there that we can use to make our other NPCs more interactive and meaningful. I’d like to share three simple tips to help make all your NPCs shine like our beloved bartenders.

Behind the Screens: 3 Wise DMs Reveal What They Want and Need Behind Their DM Screens and Offer Tips to Improve Your DM Set-Up

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The DM Screen. It’s one of the quintessential D&D visuals. But what goes behind it? What lurks behind that foot-high barrier between the characters and the gods? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave delve into how they use the DM screen, what they want to have behind it, and what they need to have behind it.

The Old School Renaissance: 3WD’s Top 4 Pros and Cons to Returning to Basic Dungeons & Dragons With the Basic Fantasy RPG

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A change of pace can be nice, and when it comes to gaming it’s no exception. Case in point, we recently played two basic style D&D games using the Basic Fantasy RPG, and they were interesting to say the least. The rules are based on the Moldvay system from the 1980s which is about as old school as you can get without playing the White Box.  

If you haven’t tried this system, you might have heard things like: it can be a lot of fun, but you better bring several character sheets to the game. Because if you make it to the end of the adventure it probably won’t be with the same character you started the session with. 

So does this classic stand the test of time and is it worth playing today?  To answer this question we put together a list of reasons both for and against so you can be the judge.

Glory Days: 3 Wise DMs Shares the Pros and Cons With Their Return to Basic D&D Through the Old School Renaissance

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We’ve talked about it many times on the podcast. We’ve been waiting for a chance to run it. We finally did! DM Dave ran us through an old-school dungeon crawl for our friend Scott’s birthday with the Basic Fantasy Roleplaying RPG. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave review the pros and cons of returning to Basic Moldvay-era D&D with the OSR. Final verdict: More pros than cons… try it out!