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RPG Mythbusters: The Tavern is the Best Place to Start Your D&D Adventure

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The tavern. It’s the start of 23 different campaigns that DM Tony has been in over the last three decades. It’s a fantasy adventure trope and gets a lot of hate out there for being basic and unimaginative, but is that necessarily a bad thing?

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave return to our RPG Mythbusters series and test the myth, “Is a tavern the best place to start an adventure?” Will it be confirmed, plausible, or busted?

I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In: 3 Wise DMs Discuss How Using Conditions Will Enhance Your D&D Game

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With our recent Forged in Fire article series, DM Chris realized how many Conditions that monsters have resistance and immunity to, especially in 5e. With that, we began to discuss how much (or little) we play with Conditions in our home games, and how that might be limiting what we can do to craft engaging, thrilling, and challenging encounters.

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave delve into the Conditions mechanic (both in and out of 5e), the issues we have with some of them, what ones we find to be somewhat limp, and the ones we would love to use more. We also delve into what we have found is a Condition we often times inflict on ourselves as DMs: Expectations.

Forged in Fire Part Deux: Our Top 3 Homebrews For 5e: Narya, The Ring of Fire, Excalibur, and the Nazgul!

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In a recent episode, we discussed a listener question about homebrewing magic items that are based off our favorite books, movies, myths, and television series. This is something that every DM and GM is going to do… heck, it might even be the reason you got behind the screen in the first place!

Invasion! 3 Wise DMs Dungeons & Dragons And Dungeon Master Advice Podcast Invades YouTube To Offer All Our Tips And Tricks!

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That’s right, 3WD listeners… we’ve packed our Explorer’s Packs, donned our Breastplates and Shields (so as not to gain Disadvantage on Stealth checks!), sharpened our weapons and entered the “Dungeon of YouTube!”

In an effort to increase our ever-growing community here and invite new listeners (and viewers!) to experience our unique, conversational brand of DM advice, we have begun uploading our episodes from our return this past March with Back in Black: The Players Wrap-Up to the Absolutely Epic Curse of Strahd Finale with Vampyr, the Star of Blood

So, all we ask of the 3WD-verse is to shoot on over to our YouTube channel, Subscribe and, if the mood strikes you, or someone you know is in need of some friendly advice, or you just want to scream your love of us from a mountaintop (hey, guys can dream, right?) SHARE, SHARE, SHARE… help us defeat the dragon that is the YouTube algorithm.

She’s A Mystery To Me: How Long To Keep Secrets And Clues From Your Players In Your D&D Game

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One of the beauties of TTRPGs is the ability to not just watch or read an amazing story, but to experience it… to create it. The mystery, the action, the climactic battle between good and evil; D&D gives us the ability to create our favorite stories.

One of the most important aspects of that, as the DM, is creating a level of mystery to the story that the players get the chance to uncover as they delve deeper into the adventure. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss a listener question about their mystery that they’re planning on having last for 10 levels and ask, “am I being cruel by leaving them in mystery so long?”

Forged in Fire: 3WDs Top 3 Homebrews For 5e: The Sword of Power, Zeus’ Thunderbolt and Demonic Bob Ross

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In our recent episode, we discussed a listener question about homebrewing magic items that are based off our favorite books, movies, myths, and television series. Specifically, they were hoping to translate the legendary Shardblades from Brandon Sanderson’s epic series, The Stormlight Archives. We discussed several of our own homebrew items that we’ve instituted in our … Read more

To Be Or Not To Be: 3WD Reveal The Top 2 Pros And Cons To Consider When Its Time To Kill A D&D Character

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Now I get that not every story has a happy ending and some of the greatest of all time don’t. But when this happens to your character in a table top game it usually plays out and feels significantly different.  So as a DM, if you have a chance to kill a player, should you? And, as a player, is this what you expect at the table? To help sort this debate out we are offering our top two pros and cons to consider if this makes sense for you and your gaming group.

Damage, Inc. – 3WD Discuss What Hit Points Represent And How To Improve Your D&D Game By Changing Your Perspective

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What do Hit Points represent? Who knew that this was a controversial question on par with asking about Alignment? Following our episode reviewing the Avatar Legends RPG and their use of Fatigue and Conditions, we posed the question regarding what hit points represent on our socials and the response was impressive.

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave take a deeper dive into what Hit Points represent in their games, how they describe the loss of them, and how other systems approach one of the oldest traditions of D&D.

Time Is On My Side: 7 Tips To Run Quick Yet Satisfying D&D Games

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According to the almighty Google, the average D&D game lasts somewhere between four and six hours. This may explain why scheduling is so difficult, because it’s like trying to get your friends together to watch not one but two full games of football back to back. 

So what if carving six hours out of everyone’s weekend just isn’t going to happen? We’ve put together a list of tips which can help you run shorter, but still enjoyable, games. A game that still hits all the beats of a full session (but won’t require everyone blocking off a time slot four weeks in advance that someone will inevitably double book and tell you about the morning before the game). Instead, everyone will just hop on Roll20 or other VTT whenever they are available, for about an hour or two, so the adventure can continue.