While Fizban looks like a traditional Gandalf-type wizard, he is anything but. A confused, doddering and incredibly powerful Wizard, he seems to forget what he’s doing, who he’s talking to, and most of his incantations in every scene – casting Fireball at the most opportune, or inopportune times, depending on where you’re standing.
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.
Greetings, 3WD-verse. DM Chris here! The Bard class in D&D is a fickle thing. Much like being an actual musician, teasing the right notes out of your wandering minstrel can be challenging. As a guitarist myself, I’d often admired the cool eccentricities of the Bard from a distance, but when DM Dave first mentioned the Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign, I knew it was finally time to pull the trigger. Enter, Rasgueado Vilhuela. Herein lies the top 5 tips and tricks I used (and learned through experience) as we traveled through Krynn to make my Bard truly sing.
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?
Either in realistic settings, or fantastic ones like Middle Earth or Star Wars, there is nothing quite as visually awesome as an epic battle between grand armies, as these are often the main events within stories which can include a cast of hundreds or even thousands. Soldiers will cross swords, exchange gunfire, or dog fight in space fighters in a spectacularly cinematic fashion as the fate of the universe or world hangs in the balance. So, it makes perfect sense that you would want to bring this to your tabletop RPG, but this can be easier said than done.
Regardless of the system you have been running your players through, there are plenty of rules you can find to handle a mass combat scenario.
However, this style of event is significantly different from what your group is used to and, likewise, may not be something which you want to attempt a cold open for in a pivotal moment of your game. This is why we have drawn up a list of different ways this can be approached so that, when the Gates of Mordor need to be stormed, you will use the way which works best for both you and your players.
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.
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!
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.
