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?”
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.
Greetings, 3WD-verse! DM Chris here. As you’ve no doubt picked up from some of our #MinisMonday posts on social media, me and the boys have recently picked up a mean Warhammer 40K habit. Credit to the Wizard Washburn, as Scott has assisted in our introduction to the wonderfully addictive wargame. Although it can get pricey (I think of it a lot like golf for geeks), the combination of modeling, painting and battling with your army is a rush that tugs at the heart-strings of gamers like us who love minis and combat.
But what does that have to do with D&D, and more specifically how does that help us as Dungeon Masters, Chris? That is a legitimate question. I’ve been wrestling with it myself. As with any of my hobbies, I love to talk about it. But that’s not enough. We pride ourselves on providing advice to DMs with problems. There wasn’t an article there, or at least there wasn’t until Me, Tony, Dave and Scott had fought several battles. Then the article idea appeared to me in a Warhammer-influenced daydream.
I think of it a lot like plyometrics. If you want to jump higher, then exercise by jumping. That is a gross oversimplification, but the essential idea remains. Every game session, D&D or not, is exercise for your gaming, and by proxy DMing, skills. We’re always learning and evolving. The beauty of our game is how easily it lends itself to the little tweaks and homebrews we imagine as we play other games. So herein lies the little nuggets that I’ve pulled from my recent Warhammer experiences and added to my bag.
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.
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.
Greetings gamers from all systems, places and timelines!
During a campaign, there are dozens of ways the game flow can begin feeling disjointed or muddled. Like if your particular game has a great deal of lore or subplots that have put the players on different pages. This isn’t always a problem, but when a good chunk of the party can’t remember key details of the plot then it definitely has become one.
If you find yourself in this spot at least you will be in good company, as this has happened to the best of DMs. Especially if you’re running a significant number of campaigns and you’re constantly trying to outdo yourself. Or perhaps you just rolled too many plot drops that your group just isn’t retaining them. This is why we put together a list of five ways that you can help your party reconnect with both your game and story without starting over at square one.
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!
