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Campaign Design

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.

Baiting the Hook: How to Create Immersive Adventure Hooks When Running the Game and in Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen

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All kidding aside, putting the time into creating a believable, character-centric hook to the upcoming adventure does a lot of the heavy lifting for you by increasing player buy-in to the story and giving them a seriously good reason to risk life and limb to go adventuring.

My Name’s the Teacher: Making Leveling with Character Abilities, Oaths, and Patrons Matter in your Dungeons & Dragons Campaign

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We can all understand that Fighters and Rogues just get better at doing the things they do, but what about Paladins, Warlocks, Clerics, etc… characters that gain incredibly powerful class abilities that are not of this world? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss how they make character choices in leveling matter more when it comes to BIG class changes.

D&D Calisthenics: The Benefits of Solo Gaming And How It Can Help You Improve Your DM Skills When Running Your Own TTRPG Sessions

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I can understand why it seems odd to many, but the real secret is that it isn’t really DM-less. In fact, it can be quite the opposite. DM-less and solo gaming help us to learn to use our imagination at run-time. So much preparation is geared towards anticipating scenes and encounters ahead of time that we often feel afraid to let the story run its own course. Using a DM-less system like Mythic Role Playing or a solo system like 5e Solo Gamebooks can help develop your imagination in ways to help improvise while the story is evolving. 

When Good Gaming Groups Go Bad: 3 Wise DMs Tips On How To Continue Your TTRPG Campaign With Only One Player

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Game groups fall apart. It’s as inevitable as the rain. What do you do when your current group goes south, but you still have a player who wants to continue? Do you continue with the current campaign? Do you now run the entire rest of the party, the monsters, and all the NPCs? The 3 Wise DMs answer long-time listener Jared’s question about his Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign and delve deeper into utilizing Sidekicks, DMPCs, and other tips with one-on-one gaming. And, as an added surprise, we introduce our newest co-host…

Rewrites: 3 Wise DMs 7 Tips to Craft Your Homebrew Ideas Into a Published D&D Adventure

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Greetings gamers from all systems, places, and timelines! When preparing to run a new campaign, one of the questions you should be asking is how this game will be different from the last? A shift of scenery is nice but it should mean more than just the places and names changing, where instead of being … Read more

Terrain, Maps & Minis, Oh My! The Long Tradition of Using Terrain and Minis in D&D to Enhance Your Game

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In this episode, Tony and Dave sit down with our good friend and fellow gamer, Scott Washburn of Paper Terrain to discuss the tradition of using terrain, maps, and minis from the earliest days of the game up to our current times. Along the way, we discuss how we have used and continue to use physical props to enhance our games as well as the tips and tricks to ease the burden on the DM.

Strahd’s Maker: How 3 Wise DMs Kitbashed an Epic Finale to Their Curse of Strahd D&D Campaign

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It’s easily one of the most iconic settings in all of D&D history and we’ve gone into detail about how we homebrewed sections of Curse of Strahd for our table. But, what do you do when the long-running adventure you’ve been running ends at around 10th level? How do you handle it when your players want to continue with this set of characters and take it all the way to epic tiers?

Not Just For Beginnings: How Session Zero Can Serve As An Ongoing Tool In Your D&D Games (And Other RPGs)

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Does what you’re currently running still feel fresh and fun? Are your players as invested in it as they were in the beginning? Does something feel missing? Are you burning out?
Beginning to look at what Session Zero does for us at the start of a campaign can assist us in gauging what is happening in an ongoing campaign.

Finish Your Homebrew D&D Campaign With a Bang: DMs’ Breakdown of the Epic Ending of the Woodstock Wanderers

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Like Thanos said, in a homebrew campaign, reality can be whatever you want it to be.

We realize that reviewing a homebrew campaign is different from Curse of Strahd or Storm King’s Thunder – after all, you can’t go pick up the contents of Thorin’s head at the bookstore. But everyone should try their hand at homebrew at one point or another, and this episode is choc full of tips and feedback for creative DMs everywhere. That includes frank discussion of what worked, what didn’t, our biggest challenges (looking at you, Roll20), where the world seemed too shallow, and what was most interesting in this long-running homebrew D&D campaign. We hope it helps you craft even better games for your table.