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
Greetings gamers from all systems, places and timelines!
How challenging your campaign should be is one of those questions, like alignment, where if you asked ten seasoned DMs, you can expect to get ten entirely different answers. Odds are the players at your table will have vastly different gaming backgrounds and expectations. This can be tricky to balance between the player who really doesn’t understand the rules fully but wants to hang out and have a good time with their friends and the player who’s been gaming for twenty years and thinks Elden Ring isn’t difficult enough.
The obvious solution is just to make sure everyone has fun. But this is easier said than done when your players are looking for different levels of challenges to enjoy themselves. This is why we put together a list of four methods that will help you keep your game challenging without leaving anyone behind
Greetings, 3WD-verse! DM Chris here. In the long hours, weeks, months, and even years of your campaign, there will be portions of your carefully crafted story that will get lost in the flood of plotlines and twists. It’s inevitable. Don’t fret – it happens to writer’s as well. Remember, you spend a lot more time with the details than your players do. Top that off with the power that ideas can have. Once your players have had a “wrong” idea about the story, it can plant itself deep in their understanding and cause issues for you down the road.
We recently experienced this in our current Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign. DM Dave does a fabulous job delivering lore and secrets, but over the multitude of sessions a “wrong” idea began to grow amongst the party members. I don’t want to spoil the fun for anyone looking to play that adventure, so I’ll be talking about it generally, rather than in specifics. Our party is nearing the epic finale of the story, and one of the key portions had become slightly twisted. We became so focused on this altered version of what we were there to do that finally Dave had to break immersion and course correct us in order for the story to continue. But then that got us talking – is there a better way to get your players back on point?
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!
What do you do when your player is unhappy with the direction of their class and wants to change over into a new class mid-campaign, but with the same character?
In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave answer a listener question about their player that wants to change their character’s class from Paladin to Sorcerer at 5th level. We delve into not just the narrative components of a change like this, but also the mechanical effects that such a change would inevitably bring. Along the way, we offer tips, tricks, and questions you should ask yourself if you’re planning on something like this in your own games.
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?”
Greetings gamers from all systems, places, and timelines.
Recently, we released a podcast from a listener’s question on how to handle a player that wants to be in every scene as if they were the star of the show. But, just as many times, we have encountered a wide range of equally reserved players, who can be anywhere from being somewhat uncomfortable with taking the lead in a scene to doing a five hour impersonation of Silent Bob. This could be for a number of reasons, such as that they are newer to the system or haven’t found their groove at the table.
Likewise, this can happen with experienced players who are on their seventh character and this particular one just isn’t clicking. Because how you conceptualize someone in your head is almost never how they end up once the game starts. Like Gerald who was intended to be a fearless knight, but during the actual game ended up more like John Ritter from Three’s Company. If any of this sounds familiar then you are in luck. As we have composed a list of seven tips to help you bring out your character’s potential without turning you into an obnoxious power gamer, like myself, in the process.
Sharing. It’s one of the first skills that we have to learn as kids and, as anyone who has gamed for long enough, some kids never quite learned how to do it. Our longtime listener, Jim Laubacker, posed a question regarding how to best deal with players that won’t share the spotlight. As a bonus, Jim is also trying to balance a group that is a hybrid of in-person and virtual players!
In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss the ways in which they’ve adjusted to turn the dominant and passive players weaknesses at the table into strengths. Additionally, they delve more into the difficulties they’ve experienced in running hybrid games and some tips and tricks with dealing with a very new issue in TTRPGs.
We recently shared a post about our Halloween one-shot adventure that we started referring to as the “Kurt Russell Campaign.” Four players, all playing one of the legendary roles made famous by your favorite, and ours, Mr. Kurt Russell. The response was fantastic, so we thought we’d do a deeper dive.
In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave are joined by return guests Bonnie and the Monster Wrangler himself, and now official DM, Matt, who decided that for his first official session behind the screen, he was going to do something that might even challenge even seasoned DMs.
