Greetings gamers from all systems, places and timelines. One of the few things that can be guaranteed about running games is no matter the system, both the expectations of the players, as well as your own, will steadily rise over time. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but could also leave you forever under the … 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
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
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?”
Greetings, 3WD-verse! DM Chris here. Over the past several months, the folks over at WOTC have been releasing some of the changes being made to our beloved D&D 5th edition, culminating in the release of the 2024 Core Rulebooks. And as one would expect there have been a bunch of reviews published about the updates, both good and bad. People are resistant to change, and anytime you’re going to alter something that has evolved and grown into such a wide-ranging community, you’re going to ruffle some feathers. But for those of us who have seen years and fads pass by, change can be what you make it.
On July 3rd of 2024, D&D 5e will turn 10! While it has taken some hits in those ten years, no one can deny the positive effect it has had on our TTRPG hobby, bringing in an entire generation of new players. With this anniversary, we started to reflect on what we have loved, what … Read more
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?
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.
