Do you actually give your player characters downtime? Or do you keep them slaloming down the plot with barely a weekend to get their equipment sharpened?
In any game, just like in life, no one enjoys constantly losing. Most people would quickly get discouraged and want to move on to another game or stop playing such games at all. If the players always won, wouldn’t the reverse also be true? Instead of being frustrated with consistently losing, the players would start phoning in every scene and battle because the chance of defeat is less than zero. That’s why the risk of failure is just as important as the risk of death to a good TTRPG game.
The DM is a player, too. If you’re not having fun, there’s no game. Here’s how to figure out what’s wrong and get back to a game you enjoy running.
Understandably, many DMs and players feel strongly against adding a DMPC to the table. However, I am here to tell you that, if done correctly, this NPC could not only be valuable to the party dynamic but also provide the DM with unique perspective that you’d never get from the other side of the DM screen.
It may be the DM’s world, but the players know the game too. They have access to all the books, all the lore, even all the monster stats! What do you do when they can’t keep personal TTRPG knowledge separate from PC knowledge?
Is the key encounter/NPC/Lost Tower of Super Badness this way or that way? Maybe it’s both and neither? Everything in your world can be simultaneously alive and dead until the players open that box and find out what’s inside. Here’s how to use that to your advantage and save time on DM prep.
The best NPCs become legends, the rest won’t even be memories. How do you bring NPCs to life so players will engage with, trust and remember them?
To help you to have a successful villainous campaign, I will provide four guidelines that have worked for me in the past. And trust me when I say they can make the difference between a party wiping each other out or creating their own evil pantheon. (And who wouldn’t want to do that?)
At some point, every DM sees their campaign get lost in the weeds. How do you get the PCs back on track and involved with the big, bad plotline?
While it’s great you have this epic story about a dark lord and his all-powerful ring, maybe your players want a break from that weeks-long march to Mount Doom? This gives you, the DM, an opportunity to introduce something known as an “All-Star Game”!
