Books, movies, and television shows benefit from one major advantage: the entire story is planned before the audience experiences it. D&D campaigns don’t have that luxury.
Players miss clues, chase unexpected leads, ignore carefully crafted plot hooks, and sometimes decide that the villain’s plan sounds surprisingly reasonable. As a result, even the most carefully prepared campaign can become a tangled web of stories, side quests, and unanswered questions.
In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave tackle a question that arose during Chris’s ongoing Lord of the Rings campaign: How important is it for every plot thread, mystery, and adventure to fit together into a perfectly coherent story?
Along the way, the Wise DMs explore the balance between narrative consistency and table enjoyment, discuss when loose ends are worth tying up, and ask a fundamental question: Is it more important for your campaign to make sense—or for everyone at the table to have fun?
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1:37 Our congratulations to The New York Knicks and New York city!
3:22 DM Chris’ question regarding his Middle-Earth campaign.
4:48 Continuity is important.
5:58 DM with a Day Job’s YouTube video: Stop Connecting Everything!
7:30 This question can change when you’re playing in worlds like Middle-Earth.
9:05 “Sometimes a tomb is just a tomb.” Not everything is a reveal.
11:05 Some campaigns are one long, epic adventure: LOTR and Dragonlance.
12:30 Our discussion of the factions and innerworkings of Moria.
15:30 You don’t have to explain anything until you have to explain it.
20:15 Frequency of Play.
22:58 Your players are focused more on explaining their characters rather than explaining the adventure.
25:00 Lore heavy campaigns.
26:54 The evolution of storytelling in TTRPGs.
29:48 Paying homage to well-loved properties.
32:23 The longer you have between sessions, the more your mind will find all the “plot holes.”
36:35 Final Thoughts.
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