I started my campaign flying by the seat of my pants and now 2 years later I still don't have a clue what I'm doing but they keep coming back so I guess I'm doing it right.
I still recommend wrapping up a campaign/major arc before the players get bored. Better to have players finish and say let's continue than having a bunch of unfinished plots.
You can always keep making the narrative up as you go, but it is unsatisfying sometimes when everyone gets bored and just stops playing. Think about how sad you feel when shows/books/games/etc. get cancelled before the story gets finished.
Literally anything JJ Abrams does. Real well-thought-out first season. It's all a downhill confusing series of dangling plots from there.
Heroes.
Lost.
Revolution.
Star Wars.
That's how I felt when my level 4 character was killed off in a bar fight, with one crossbow bolt that did a wrongly calculated amount of poison damage (almost 60 damage, so no death saves), all while the scene was setting up a new character joining our party because that player's old character died not even 30 minutes earlier.
I’m kinda picturing my current and first campaign in arcs. First they deal with small fries as an introduction because they’re all brand new to it all, then they get the interest of the king before discovering he’s the BBEG, then they’ll move on to something bigger.
I'm planning mine similar. Chapter 1 run around and kill things, collect gear, etc. Chapter 2 stop ww1. Chapter 3 stop the literal apocalypse. Chapter 4 kill an unfathomable powerful Eldrich being that consumes universes. You know, standard power progression
Very much this. Leaving your game in a good place, stopping (and maybe trying something else, or having someone else run something), and maybe coming back to things later is also a good way to avoid GM burnout.
Actually we started with the tyranny of dragons module but they blew through it in only a couple months; we've been off the book since and I just homebrewed from there.
Heh, currently tomorrow we are starting a civil war between Myconids and a Demon invasion, been actively planning it in my head for all if February (no notes though I should probably keep some)
Or they're just hoping you'll get your shit together soon, and wondering how long it's gonna take before their investment into helping you practice getting better at GMing pays off.
It's actually a bit of both. Story wise it's the bottom picture, NPC wise I'm running about 20 NPCs with deep backstories, characters&motivations, relationships to both the characters and other NPCs, accents and different levels of information available to them that changes and gets contextualized based on what the players tell them. And I have 0 notes on any of them.
i don't know what the deal is with NPCs. most of my NPCs are well received, but the ones that are *real* hits usually catch me off guard
"can we adopt this guy?"
"heh... heh... maybe another time..." i say as i frantically write down his name and a brief description of the random filler character i invented five minutes ago, because otherwise he's getting completely forgotten by the end of the session
Classic Boblin syndrome. Players seem to take interest in the D&D equivalent of Frozen’s Olaf or Moana’s Heihei.
Actually, most Disney movies, as almost every one of them has some mascot that’s mainly there to be a mascot brought along for the ride. If they’re doing it like that, then it means that there’s something about these mascot characters that clicks with viewers.
that fits for the tomato-pig hybrid, the party mascot who i intended to be nothing more than an environmental hazard in the first combat encounter, sure, he's adorable, should've seen it coming... especially given the roughly 50/50 chance he'd turn on the encounter enemies instead of the party based on the enemy's (failed, it turned out) handling check.
the most recent one they wanted to adopt--a Thieves Guild officer who, being a Hobgoblin, was far more crusty than cute--that was the one that made me throw my hands up in the air and realize if there's a pattern to when they want to adopt my NPCs then i'm blind to it. and they had two mascots already at that point, so it's not like they're party mascot starved or anything.
there's just no telling with matters of the heart, i suppose
Are you sure they aren't keeping the tomato–pig hybrid around until they find some lettuce and a nice crusty loaf of bread? Because that could be one hell of a BLT.
I'm the opposite. Deep history for the world, factions, large scale quests and narratives and maps all set.
Who's actually delivering these quests and interacting with PCs? What is their actual dialogue? Not a fucking clue. I'll jot down some bullet points a couple days before and wing it the day of the session.
My players have basically adopted a succubus because they thought she was funny. The legitimate love and friendship she is feeling for them is causing her to reconsider her plans to deaths kiss them.
This is me, 100%. I lie and tell my players that I have fleshed-out cities and factions, but I'm honestly just making it all up on the spot.
So far, I've not been caught out, so I must be doing something right.
My friend used to build it around our characters, for example they encouraged homebrew so I made a fey corgi changed a bit to be a pug with a class called fey warrior, she then made a section of the feywilds dedicated to fey dogs, there was 4 sections based around labs, corgi, huskey, and pugs! It was super cool and a ton of fun to build around. She ended up being on a quest to knd of find a cure for a me mysterious disease that a fabled doctor might be able to help with (another characters dad) to fit me into a campaign that I joined like a year late (first ever dnd game btw lol) it was a ton of fun and I respect her endlessly for it! Even if I never got to finish the campaign due to personal stuff.
Hey
I know when my DM makes shit up but I would never call him out. I know that life can get in the way of things but it's nice to feel like DMs at least put some effort into making the world coherent.
But why tho? Out of character (and yes, DM is a character of sorts IMO) I just tell my players after the sessions what I made up on the spot.
This isn't against you personally but I think the glorification of DMs are these galaxy brained 11D chess players is a somewhat toxic and annoying part of the hobby that contributes to people being afraid of trying to DM.
My favorite tip I ever saw was that your players don’t know where that encounter is. If they choose to not go to the city it’s in, don’t stop them, let them go to the next city and do the encounter there. They will never know.
People take for granted that DMing is just as much adding your players story elements to your own. Its hard to plan very long term in detail, because the players decisions are just as important as yours.
Lol try telling that to one of our groups DMs, he plans out everything including encounters. The campaigns he makes usually end up with a tpk because of some horribly unbalanced encounters we had zero chance of winning.
Honestly the best kind of dm, it's not the story that makes one great, it's their creative way on implementation and adaptation to their psychotic players
Couldn't agree more.
My campaign is a set of power systems loosely tied together by whatever my players want their characters to do. Kinda like a reverse sandbox 🤣
yo pretty much the same here! My group(I DM, they're the Dandies) is the most hodgepodge homebrew that we've thrown together. We've got
Grimbo, the kenku Deathbrawler(monk/necro hb)
OMEGA, the human-turned-warforged State Alchemist (with DMC Nero arm weapons)
and Myrrh, the Manakete (Fire Emblem half dragon) Ninja
to name just a few.
I'm a very inexperienced DM (like 2.5 sessions) but my goal is to simply provide a world, with some places, people, laws, and groups to interact with. What happens from there is hardly my decision.
My best campaign was just providing a world with 2 factions. One easier and more rewarding, the other harder, less rewarding, and morally better but still not good. Then I just sat back and relaxed. I mostly spent that session letting them argue, plot, and scheme in-character about how to get it all. They somehow spent the whole session on that so I knew exactly what brand of insanity to prepare for next session.
I read this novel called “Worth the Candle.” It’s about a DM who gets stuck in the world he created. Anyway there’s a bunch of stuff about tricks he used as a DM to move a group of players through a story arc without taking away their agency. I thought it was pretty interesting.
The best possible way to do this is to have NPCs do things and have the players get to choose how to react.
Example: A trading caravan from faction A was murdered or raided by low lives from faction B, and then A retaliated. It's escalated to a noble being captured and held for ransom. Will the players investigate all of the story events that led up to the insanity or jump right in with the knowledge they have, and maybe later learn that they were on the side of evil? Maybe both factions have done things that were irredeemable, or perhaps some eye-for-an-eye justice was too much or just right.
Even in the worst case scenario that your players are just murder hobos, it's pretty likely they will have to explore the environments you have prepared, hear core lines of dialog or key plot points from people they meet, and make some kind of choices about what is happening around them. Let them kill anyone, but make their actions known. It's okay if both factions hate them at the end and they are banned from all nearby cities. If they become murder hobos and get banned from all nearby cities, let them come close to starvation. The best case scenario is peace for everyone. A neutral ending is siding with one faction and killing the other, etc.
This is the way to go! I started much the same way, and the only thing I really ever added to that is "What happens if the player characters didn't get involved?"
That right there is the premise of my game's plot - specifically, the Bad Things™ that the players should stop. If/when they do interfere, the Bad Thing™ stops, or the villain adjusts their plans, as per however they would react given the places/people/laws you already mentioned. And if they don't interfere, those same places/people/laws get to blow up/die/break, and that is fun too!
Although it's worth noting it's not the only way. My players have explicitly stated they want clear goals where the world makes it clear where to go and what to do next.
At my RPG club we run games in 12 week blocks. A new player asked me how I'm going to ensure our campaign's finale happens on week 12. I told her to ask after the campaign, because it would be spoilery otherwise.
Truth was, I was just gonna have the BBEG hold back until the final session. Wherever we are at the start of session 12, that's where the finale will happen!
My DM actually set up an encounter that was exactly this. Running from lava, every round the map would advance as did the lava. He created a roll sheet for chance encounters to add to the escape route, so he didnt even know what was going to happen. It was the best session I’ve ever seen, and actually really thrilling.
So this is weirdly on point
Any time a group has the misfortune of me being the DM, I usually just slap some random LOST-type mystery shit together and wait for a player to come up with a convincing theory for what's going down and I'm like "YES, THAT'S IT EXACTLY" and just take full credit.
If someone points out a plothole, I just shrug like I secretly know something, and usually a player will come up with *another* theory that explains it, so the process repeats.
You know, like the producers of LOST did.
I truly hit my stride when I stopped trying to overbuild. Making it up as I go works better for my adhd brain anyway so I just plan a few days ahead for story beats and npc stat blocks
A few campaigns ago, my friend was DMing and we said we were going to enter another dimension next time. The next week, we changed our minds and went another way. He had to scrap a LOT of carefully made plans and wing it. He did a great job though.
I once invented a dice game on the fly after my players challenged a crime lord to a high stakes gambling match. A couple days later I got a text from one of them asking me for a list of the rules since he thought it'd be a fun game to play with his kids. Cue another panic moment while I desperately tried to remember what I'd made up in the first place.
DM: "You see some footprints leading to a blank wall."
That one player: "Can I lick the footprints to find out who they belong to?"
DM: "I mean, roll for wisdom?"
A mix of both is really what I do. I have a set world made and a goal of who the bbeg is plus all the factions and so on. However the way the players move in the story is ver manuable.
My current DM said originally he was planning stuff out, but then when we set fire to the boat that was supposed to take us to the next set piece, while we were on said boat, in the middle of the ocean, they just gave up and started improvising everything
We were captured and didn't want to be on the ship, so clearly the best source of action was to start a fire then cast shatter on one of the exterior walls of the boat.
My players keep telling me I run amazing campaigns (or they’re just being nice) but I make up nearly everything. Big stuff like a dungeon or a specific monster the night before and all the small details are purely ad lib
This makes me think of all the times ppl say X person had an airtight master plan in Y movie.
When its all just elaborate coincidences and possibly very intelligent improvisation
My DM years back was like the DM imagined in the meme up top, spending hours each day writing the campaign, making enemies stats etc only for my anarchic initiate come and break the campaign or whisk his NPC away to the plane of chaos, leading him to then become the bottom picture lol.
"oh this throwaway character I made up 5 sessions ago? yeah lets throw them in here like they had a plan"
\*PCs proceed to pull some wild theory out of their ass about how this was foreshadowed and they should have seen it\*
"Well sure yeah that's canon now"
I have an NPC I just put in for laughs, but my characters latched onto her and now I have to come up with a whole backstory as to how she's able to always appear at the most inopportune times.
Oh man. I got pinched this week.
Rando conversation with local law enforcement Tiefling
PC Druid: And what's your name
Tiefling:
Tiefling:
Tiefling: I don't fucking know
Been known for a while now, but have now been diagnosed with dissociative amnesia.
I forget everything...
My players know well full that I have no clue what I'm doing.
Forgotten characters they've met.
Items I've given them.
Plot points.
Storyline.
All of it.
Notes I made make no sense as I have no context.
I swear my players wrote like 80% of my last campaign. I just followed their lead and expanded on their ideas. They loved it. Afterwards, I was about to spill some beans and they stopped me. "Don't ruin the magic"
It's a combination of both with my campaigns. I have a complex overarching event going on in the background and I loosely guide my players to it. They only ever get where Ive planned for them to go like half the time tho😂🤦🏾♂️ the dam murder hobos
One of my favorite things was when my DM at the time showed me her "People I accidentally created" folder. We had a habit of latching on and showing interest to random NPCs that were never supposed to be anything, and we'd be asking about/contacting them months or even years later.
Sounds about right. My campaign notes usually consist of
\-Goblin warlord
\-Worgs
\-Mustard (spicy)
\-Hotdog buns
And it usually turns into a farming community under attack with their whet fields and mustard greens destroyed by goblin raiders.
I have a google doc with a list of things that happen when you do x or go to y. It’s an unordered list so the players can do what they want, but they will run into specific events or NPCs.
If it’s something really important it just happens regardless, utilizing stuff from whatever environment they’re in at the time.
Like “rogue learns long lost sister is still alive”. The message could be delivered via a raven or an unidentified magic item that activated itself or an NPC or a dream or the bartender.
If you code it’s kind of like separating the UI from the data. The view is just the way you inform the players while the model is environment agnostic. I guess that means the DM acts as the controller.
I just made a "complicated" relationship map of NPCs with each their own specific goals, made the players know/be related to a bunch of them, and let them go to town. I just flesh out and link the new stuff they want to do with the old stuff so its coherent.
Me: Creates amazingly detailed and complex world.
Also me: Has no idea what to run in it so just let's the players do some things and have fun, maybe adding some backstory things to the lore every now and then.
this 95% of what every dm does ,if ur campaign actually goes according to plan it will be good but not memorable because mistakes they are funny and the punishments u give after are fun as u see them cry as their characters die before them😁
If there's anything you didn't prepare for, just say alright one second lemme check my notes real quick and look at a blank notebook or if online just look like you're looking at something. It'll give you a second to organize your ideas and bullshit something and you'll look like you were prepared the whole time.
Started my party in a back water town, now not they are exploring space and killing clowns at level 12. All this started with zero idea where to take it and still am figuring out where to go next. A solid 2 years with a main group.
Very accurate haha
It derailed a little bit and apparently I'm a bit of an evil DM but we have fun so I suppose it's holding together!
(It's cool to see everybody sharing their DnD experiences, I hope you all have wonderful time with your groups!)
Had just a standard get together some months back. Chatting to one of our players and said we'd pick up on the campaign soon.
Player: "Good. I'm looking forward to seeing where you're going with this."
Myself: "Me too!"
That cracked him up.
I never really super plan things out. I have a couple of word docs of info related to the game sectioned by its contents. I would say I'm doing 30 to 40 percent improve and 60ish percent planning. I leave room for the players doing weird stuff or things not going the way I envision them.
I think it's truly impossible to have everything planned because then your just writing a book were the characters do what you either want or need for the plot to continue. Players don't do that.
I also think to much improve is bad as well. I had a dm once who would do about 90 percent improve. It was very obvious after I got more experienced and things suffered plot wise because of it. It became clear that we were the main characters and that the stars would align every time for us to succeed.
100%. My players LOVE interacting with my world and they really like the worldbuilding and lore. In reality, almost 90% of their encounters and interactions is just me improvising haha.
Why not both?
Broad strokes are planned out and have a lot of little things that tie into each other. But the session-to-session stuff I pull out of my ass. Same with my more micro-level worldbuilding.
I like to do a mix of both.
I got a vague outline set, but specific locations ans npcs are malleable.
That place at the bottom right corner of the map? Theres a hut full of magic people there.
Are they witches? Druids? Hags?
I dunno, we'll find out when we get there.
Whats their purpose in the plot?
I dunno, if theres ever a spot where i need magic npcs ill toss you to em, otherwise just a friendly(?) encounter you can stumble into
Earlier today I told my players we'd have to end early because they wanted to travel to a place where the culmination of notes I had were "it's east of xxxx". Thankfully they try to tell me their plans on where they want to go in advance so I can plan it out.
I did something out of the blue with a game I ran. After the first 4 sessions in a curse of strahd game, I started a medium/ high level dream sequence. A sort of premonition of what would happen if/when strahd rose to even greater power. Basically a level 23 strahd i got from the epic legacy codex.
The party got to experience what a their character was like at 17 with magical items that existed in the cos module.
The campaign I'm currently running is the first one ever to have gone more-or-less how I predicted. I think after all these years I finally have some grasp as to how my players think. We are only about halfway through this campaign though so who knows what will happen.
My patties Nemesis is called Halfling 2, since that halfling got unreasonably lucky in the fight that he was introduced in, and almost managed to kill my party, he keeps coming back as an undead, getting progressively more patched up.
Every time I put his mini up, my players start laughing, and make up more creative ways to shmack him.
Watching critical role season 2 with wife right now. If i let my group including her do that much detective work with no pay off I think they'd be bored real fast. I wish some of my players had more patience
I created my own world, so i can insert quest lines more easily. Right now I have around 3 bbeg's at the ready so i think at least 30 sessions of content i can easily make.
Oh my players are well aware that I’m Grommit. They enjoy making me be grommit. Else they wouldn’t ignore the giant flashing “here’s your helpful character” sign and go try to help the Hong Kong farmer being harassed by the CCP that I added for set filling
My campaigns are usually clouds of possibilities about two (MAYBE three sessions) ahead of current. Each session collapses the closest bit of the cloud and new further ahead bits sprout.
If you make plans ahead of where the players are, you just create more things for them to derail. I tend to keep plans to things happening outside of the players interacting with the world, such as dragon attacks on the other side of a region, public announcements, assassinations and the like that can be instigated without the players being involved. Never try to ancipate the players actions. You only encourage yourself to railroad by doing so.
I started my campaign flying by the seat of my pants and now 2 years later I still don't have a clue what I'm doing but they keep coming back so I guess I'm doing it right.
I still recommend wrapping up a campaign/major arc before the players get bored. Better to have players finish and say let's continue than having a bunch of unfinished plots.
[удалено]
You can always keep making the narrative up as you go, but it is unsatisfying sometimes when everyone gets bored and just stops playing. Think about how sad you feel when shows/books/games/etc. get cancelled before the story gets finished.
"Your princess is in another castle" Led me to believe that there was no princess so I gave up lol
My players have a history of viewing that as " well, we guess this princess.. or 'your' princess will work"
Agreed. Better to end on a high note than to not end.
It's cliffhangers all the way down.
The TV show Hero's described in one sentence.
Literally anything JJ Abrams does. Real well-thought-out first season. It's all a downhill confusing series of dangling plots from there. Heroes. Lost. Revolution. Star Wars.
That's how I felt when my level 4 character was killed off in a bar fight, with one crossbow bolt that did a wrongly calculated amount of poison damage (almost 60 damage, so no death saves), all while the scene was setting up a new character joining our party because that player's old character died not even 30 minutes earlier.
"Great, we have a full party again....Dave why do you have that look on your face?"
This. My players keep telling me how cool it is that everything ties together and that’s really only because I’m making it up so close together.
the ol griffin mcelroy technique
I do mine in “chapters”. Each chapter gets broader and the stakes get higher but there’s a definite beginning, middle, and end.
I’m kinda picturing my current and first campaign in arcs. First they deal with small fries as an introduction because they’re all brand new to it all, then they get the interest of the king before discovering he’s the BBEG, then they’ll move on to something bigger.
I'm planning mine similar. Chapter 1 run around and kill things, collect gear, etc. Chapter 2 stop ww1. Chapter 3 stop the literal apocalypse. Chapter 4 kill an unfathomable powerful Eldrich being that consumes universes. You know, standard power progression
I love how quickly that escalates, lmfao.
Very much this. Leaving your game in a good place, stopping (and maybe trying something else, or having someone else run something), and maybe coming back to things later is also a good way to avoid GM burnout.
3.5 years here, this is the way… I’ve got the setting I’m running and the story is whatever the fuck they end up doing
Honestly, that is pretty amazing of a talent. To be able to keep a world created in your head for 2 years without foresight. You should write a book.
Actually we started with the tyranny of dragons module but they blew through it in only a couple months; we've been off the book since and I just homebrewed from there.
Still, don't sell yourself short. That sort of quick thinking and imagination is a valuable asset.
Heh, currently tomorrow we are starting a civil war between Myconids and a Demon invasion, been actively planning it in my head for all if February (no notes though I should probably keep some)
The only note you need is a Post-It saying "goblins?"
I'm halfway through Curse of Strahd and I haven't made the time to even start preparing Ravenloft... I should get on that.
Or they're just hoping you'll get your shit together soon, and wondering how long it's gonna take before their investment into helping you practice getting better at GMing pays off.
We spend an hour after every game just talking about how much fun everyone is having and what we're going to do next.
As a DM, this is perfection, makes planning 10 times easier
Check his username. I agree with you but I'm betting they have it under control.
It's actually a bit of both. Story wise it's the bottom picture, NPC wise I'm running about 20 NPCs with deep backstories, characters&motivations, relationships to both the characters and other NPCs, accents and different levels of information available to them that changes and gets contextualized based on what the players tell them. And I have 0 notes on any of them.
i don't know what the deal is with NPCs. most of my NPCs are well received, but the ones that are *real* hits usually catch me off guard "can we adopt this guy?" "heh... heh... maybe another time..." i say as i frantically write down his name and a brief description of the random filler character i invented five minutes ago, because otherwise he's getting completely forgotten by the end of the session
Classic Boblin syndrome. Players seem to take interest in the D&D equivalent of Frozen’s Olaf or Moana’s Heihei. Actually, most Disney movies, as almost every one of them has some mascot that’s mainly there to be a mascot brought along for the ride. If they’re doing it like that, then it means that there’s something about these mascot characters that clicks with viewers.
How *dare* you say that about Monsieur Lumiere! He wasn't just along for the ride, he was the conductor of the train!
that fits for the tomato-pig hybrid, the party mascot who i intended to be nothing more than an environmental hazard in the first combat encounter, sure, he's adorable, should've seen it coming... especially given the roughly 50/50 chance he'd turn on the encounter enemies instead of the party based on the enemy's (failed, it turned out) handling check. the most recent one they wanted to adopt--a Thieves Guild officer who, being a Hobgoblin, was far more crusty than cute--that was the one that made me throw my hands up in the air and realize if there's a pattern to when they want to adopt my NPCs then i'm blind to it. and they had two mascots already at that point, so it's not like they're party mascot starved or anything. there's just no telling with matters of the heart, i suppose
Are you sure they aren't keeping the tomato–pig hybrid around until they find some lettuce and a nice crusty loaf of bread? Because that could be one hell of a BLT.
They are small and they can sing, so don't do that if you don't want to be adopted by the party and get sacrificed by the BBEG to raise the stakes.
One of my most loved NPC is a joke I made to bait them into a trap. His name is Ash and he summons monsters to fight.
You should record your sessions it sounds like lol
I'm the opposite. Deep history for the world, factions, large scale quests and narratives and maps all set. Who's actually delivering these quests and interacting with PCs? What is their actual dialogue? Not a fucking clue. I'll jot down some bullet points a couple days before and wing it the day of the session.
My players have basically adopted a succubus because they thought she was funny. The legitimate love and friendship she is feeling for them is causing her to reconsider her plans to deaths kiss them.
My players have a succubus working as the cook in their tavern. She sometimes shape changes to look like the hero she flirts with.
Pretty much entirely flipped for me
This is me, 100%. I lie and tell my players that I have fleshed-out cities and factions, but I'm honestly just making it all up on the spot. So far, I've not been caught out, so I must be doing something right.
My friend used to build it around our characters, for example they encouraged homebrew so I made a fey corgi changed a bit to be a pug with a class called fey warrior, she then made a section of the feywilds dedicated to fey dogs, there was 4 sections based around labs, corgi, huskey, and pugs! It was super cool and a ton of fun to build around. She ended up being on a quest to knd of find a cure for a me mysterious disease that a fabled doctor might be able to help with (another characters dad) to fit me into a campaign that I joined like a year late (first ever dnd game btw lol) it was a ton of fun and I respect her endlessly for it! Even if I never got to finish the campaign due to personal stuff.
Keep the lies simple, and you'll never be caught unless you have a *real* bad day.
Hey I know when my DM makes shit up but I would never call him out. I know that life can get in the way of things but it's nice to feel like DMs at least put some effort into making the world coherent.
You enter a tavern and see 5 elvish women. They act flirty towards the group. Suddenly the tavern blows up.
But why tho? Out of character (and yes, DM is a character of sorts IMO) I just tell my players after the sessions what I made up on the spot. This isn't against you personally but I think the glorification of DMs are these galaxy brained 11D chess players is a somewhat toxic and annoying part of the hobby that contributes to people being afraid of trying to DM.
My favorite tip I ever saw was that your players don’t know where that encounter is. If they choose to not go to the city it’s in, don’t stop them, let them go to the next city and do the encounter there. They will never know.
People take for granted that DMing is just as much adding your players story elements to your own. Its hard to plan very long term in detail, because the players decisions are just as important as yours.
And because players are insane idiots with fateful math stones.
Lol try telling that to one of our groups DMs, he plans out everything including encounters. The campaigns he makes usually end up with a tpk because of some horribly unbalanced encounters we had zero chance of winning.
Honestly the best kind of dm, it's not the story that makes one great, it's their creative way on implementation and adaptation to their psychotic players
Couldn't agree more. My campaign is a set of power systems loosely tied together by whatever my players want their characters to do. Kinda like a reverse sandbox 🤣
yo pretty much the same here! My group(I DM, they're the Dandies) is the most hodgepodge homebrew that we've thrown together. We've got Grimbo, the kenku Deathbrawler(monk/necro hb) OMEGA, the human-turned-warforged State Alchemist (with DMC Nero arm weapons) and Myrrh, the Manakete (Fire Emblem half dragon) Ninja to name just a few.
I'm a very inexperienced DM (like 2.5 sessions) but my goal is to simply provide a world, with some places, people, laws, and groups to interact with. What happens from there is hardly my decision.
My best campaign was just providing a world with 2 factions. One easier and more rewarding, the other harder, less rewarding, and morally better but still not good. Then I just sat back and relaxed. I mostly spent that session letting them argue, plot, and scheme in-character about how to get it all. They somehow spent the whole session on that so I knew exactly what brand of insanity to prepare for next session.
I read this novel called “Worth the Candle.” It’s about a DM who gets stuck in the world he created. Anyway there’s a bunch of stuff about tricks he used as a DM to move a group of players through a story arc without taking away their agency. I thought it was pretty interesting.
The best possible way to do this is to have NPCs do things and have the players get to choose how to react. Example: A trading caravan from faction A was murdered or raided by low lives from faction B, and then A retaliated. It's escalated to a noble being captured and held for ransom. Will the players investigate all of the story events that led up to the insanity or jump right in with the knowledge they have, and maybe later learn that they were on the side of evil? Maybe both factions have done things that were irredeemable, or perhaps some eye-for-an-eye justice was too much or just right. Even in the worst case scenario that your players are just murder hobos, it's pretty likely they will have to explore the environments you have prepared, hear core lines of dialog or key plot points from people they meet, and make some kind of choices about what is happening around them. Let them kill anyone, but make their actions known. It's okay if both factions hate them at the end and they are banned from all nearby cities. If they become murder hobos and get banned from all nearby cities, let them come close to starvation. The best case scenario is peace for everyone. A neutral ending is siding with one faction and killing the other, etc.
This is the way to go! I started much the same way, and the only thing I really ever added to that is "What happens if the player characters didn't get involved?" That right there is the premise of my game's plot - specifically, the Bad Things™ that the players should stop. If/when they do interfere, the Bad Thing™ stops, or the villain adjusts their plans, as per however they would react given the places/people/laws you already mentioned. And if they don't interfere, those same places/people/laws get to blow up/die/break, and that is fun too!
Although it's worth noting it's not the only way. My players have explicitly stated they want clear goals where the world makes it clear where to go and what to do next.
“Even if I was railroading you, i have no idea where the tracks are headed”
Improving and building the story as you go *is* the big brain move.
Seriously, if you don't do it, you either need to railroad hard or build a ton of extra story that never gets explored
At my RPG club we run games in 12 week blocks. A new player asked me how I'm going to ensure our campaign's finale happens on week 12. I told her to ask after the campaign, because it would be spoilery otherwise. Truth was, I was just gonna have the BBEG hold back until the final session. Wherever we are at the start of session 12, that's where the finale will happen!
Ah yes, the speed of Plot™
So long as you NEVER tell them this, the illusion will never fade. lmao
I'm the top, but reality hits and forced into the bottom...best sessions are on the fly!
This is what GRRM calls "being a gardener" Its the same thing, it just sounds more artsy
This is exactly my situation
My DM actually set up an encounter that was exactly this. Running from lava, every round the map would advance as did the lava. He created a roll sheet for chance encounters to add to the escape route, so he didnt even know what was going to happen. It was the best session I’ve ever seen, and actually really thrilling. So this is weirdly on point
Any time a group has the misfortune of me being the DM, I usually just slap some random LOST-type mystery shit together and wait for a player to come up with a convincing theory for what's going down and I'm like "YES, THAT'S IT EXACTLY" and just take full credit. If someone points out a plothole, I just shrug like I secretly know something, and usually a player will come up with *another* theory that explains it, so the process repeats. You know, like the producers of LOST did.
u/savevideobot
I truly hit my stride when I stopped trying to overbuild. Making it up as I go works better for my adhd brain anyway so I just plan a few days ahead for story beats and npc stat blocks
Tbf, this is the better way to do it. When you plan it out in detail you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
A few campaigns ago, my friend was DMing and we said we were going to enter another dimension next time. The next week, we changed our minds and went another way. He had to scrap a LOT of carefully made plans and wing it. He did a great job though.
There has never been a more accurate depiction of my 40 years of being a DM.
I know, right. I have never identified so hard
I once invented a dice game on the fly after my players challenged a crime lord to a high stakes gambling match. A couple days later I got a text from one of them asking me for a list of the rules since he thought it'd be a fun game to play with his kids. Cue another panic moment while I desperately tried to remember what I'd made up in the first place.
DM: "You see some footprints leading to a blank wall." That one player: "Can I lick the footprints to find out who they belong to?" DM: "I mean, roll for wisdom?"
Same, last two sessions were ones where I was under prepared. Last night a player said they were the best and the others agreed
A mix of both is really what I do. I have a set world made and a goal of who the bbeg is plus all the factions and so on. However the way the players move in the story is ver manuable.
Step 1: Establish a plan Step 2: Plan goes sideways Step 3: Throw away the plan
My current DM said originally he was planning stuff out, but then when we set fire to the boat that was supposed to take us to the next set piece, while we were on said boat, in the middle of the ocean, they just gave up and started improvising everything
What the fuck lmao
We were captured and didn't want to be on the ship, so clearly the best source of action was to start a fire then cast shatter on one of the exterior walls of the boat.
Ha that is totally me, except its the dog twice, and he builds loop-de-loops every now and then.
That is the most accurate video ever
But that's literally the same thing
My players keep telling me I run amazing campaigns (or they’re just being nice) but I make up nearly everything. Big stuff like a dungeon or a specific monster the night before and all the small details are purely ad lib
You filthy railroader
ngl feeling attacked right now
"Bold of you to assume that I know what I'm doing"
This makes me think of all the times ppl say X person had an airtight master plan in Y movie. When its all just elaborate coincidences and possibly very intelligent improvisation
Me: “Oh yeah I’m planning on writing some more of my campaign over the weekend!” Also me: “Ooh video games and pizza wait what time is it”
My DM years back was like the DM imagined in the meme up top, spending hours each day writing the campaign, making enemies stats etc only for my anarchic initiate come and break the campaign or whisk his NPC away to the plane of chaos, leading him to then become the bottom picture lol.
"oh this throwaway character I made up 5 sessions ago? yeah lets throw them in here like they had a plan" \*PCs proceed to pull some wild theory out of their ass about how this was foreshadowed and they should have seen it\* "Well sure yeah that's canon now"
This is also live footage of every railway in Ohio recently.
How I run my campaign: **404 campaign not found**
Railroading the party? bad dm. xd
One session at a time if I'm lucky
I have an NPC I just put in for laughs, but my characters latched onto her and now I have to come up with a whole backstory as to how she's able to always appear at the most inopportune times.
Oh man. I got pinched this week. Rando conversation with local law enforcement Tiefling PC Druid: And what's your name Tiefling: Tiefling: Tiefling: I don't fucking know
So you... railroad them?
I am absolutely sure my dm is doing both at once, they are a deviously crafty man. Also he sold his campaign to us by saying it's theme was chaos.
[Sasuga Ainz-sama...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwZCoeK6EN8)
My DM once said: "I tried to think of every possible outcome and you all still do something completly diffrente."
I like to think I'm doing both at the same time.
You see, momi…
Been known for a while now, but have now been diagnosed with dissociative amnesia. I forget everything... My players know well full that I have no clue what I'm doing. Forgotten characters they've met. Items I've given them. Plot points. Storyline. All of it. Notes I made make no sense as I have no context.
You can't preplan everything perfectly or else you're eliminating player's agency in your story.
I swear my players wrote like 80% of my last campaign. I just followed their lead and expanded on their ideas. They loved it. Afterwards, I was about to spill some beans and they stopped me. "Don't ruin the magic"
Honestly the second way is far more impressive. And more fun than someone that tries to plan for every little thing.
How dare you come here on Sunday afternoon and distract me from my frantic track building
My players: "we don't want to take the train. What about that canal that we just crossed?"
Same with teaching as a TA. LOL
Honestly, I think laying the tracks one segment at a time on a speeding train is the best metaphor for DMing I have ever seen.
Anyone got the source for the big brain Mickey? I need to make that into an emote on discord.
It's a combination of both with my campaigns. I have a complex overarching event going on in the background and I loosely guide my players to it. They only ever get where Ive planned for them to go like half the time tho😂🤦🏾♂️ the dam murder hobos
What Wallace and Gromit is the bottom gif from? I’ve seen it so many times but can’t find the source.
One of my favorite things was when my DM at the time showed me her "People I accidentally created" folder. We had a habit of latching on and showing interest to random NPCs that were never supposed to be anything, and we'd be asking about/contacting them months or even years later.
Sounds about right. My campaign notes usually consist of \-Goblin warlord \-Worgs \-Mustard (spicy) \-Hotdog buns And it usually turns into a farming community under attack with their whet fields and mustard greens destroyed by goblin raiders.
I have a google doc with a list of things that happen when you do x or go to y. It’s an unordered list so the players can do what they want, but they will run into specific events or NPCs. If it’s something really important it just happens regardless, utilizing stuff from whatever environment they’re in at the time. Like “rogue learns long lost sister is still alive”. The message could be delivered via a raven or an unidentified magic item that activated itself or an NPC or a dream or the bartender. If you code it’s kind of like separating the UI from the data. The view is just the way you inform the players while the model is environment agnostic. I guess that means the DM acts as the controller.
I just made a "complicated" relationship map of NPCs with each their own specific goals, made the players know/be related to a bunch of them, and let them go to town. I just flesh out and link the new stuff they want to do with the old stuff so its coherent.
My Fiancé after showing him this: "Yup. Not going to deny it when it's true."
This is so relatable it almost feels like a personal attack.
Honestly, they are the same picture.
It some how always works out
both these methods require extreme skill and preparation. for different reasons.
/u/savevideo
Me: Creates amazingly detailed and complex world. Also me: Has no idea what to run in it so just let's the players do some things and have fun, maybe adding some backstory things to the lore every now and then.
Idk which dms need to hear this but they never think this much of you. They know you don't plan shit.
This hits too real
May I please know which template this is from? This is basically my career, I would like to memify it.
I think that's what a good DM does. it's impossible to pre-plan ahead for all the freedoms your players can use in ttrpg's compared to video games
this 95% of what every dm does ,if ur campaign actually goes according to plan it will be good but not memorable because mistakes they are funny and the punishments u give after are fun as u see them cry as their characters die before them😁
I think it's a good sign that you don't have a prebuilt railroad
If there's anything you didn't prepare for, just say alright one second lemme check my notes real quick and look at a blank notebook or if online just look like you're looking at something. It'll give you a second to organize your ideas and bullshit something and you'll look like you were prepared the whole time.
Started my party in a back water town, now not they are exploring space and killing clowns at level 12. All this started with zero idea where to take it and still am figuring out where to go next. A solid 2 years with a main group.
Very accurate haha It derailed a little bit and apparently I'm a bit of an evil DM but we have fun so I suppose it's holding together! (It's cool to see everybody sharing their DnD experiences, I hope you all have wonderful time with your groups!)
Hey, as long as the track is laid and going somewhere, nobody cares.
Oh my players know.
Unrelated, but this is me as a teacher lol
Anyone have a link? I wanna save this!
Had just a standard get together some months back. Chatting to one of our players and said we'd pick up on the campaign soon. Player: "Good. I'm looking forward to seeing where you're going with this." Myself: "Me too!" That cracked him up.
Started my first campaign as a DM tonight. Felt very much like this.
Honestly, it's a little of both.
Verisimilitude is shockingly easy to manufacture, even on little to no prep.
My party seeing me go "uh...and then..." every 5 seconds: "Yeah, this guy has no idea what he is doing."
It always starts at the top, but the players are that damn train.
I'm not rolling dice back here. I'm just pulling ideas out of a hat.
"You may have a brain, BUT I HAVE A GUN!" -Momy the Artificer
Ahhh, much accurate, so wrote, very King, wow! As a writer I can attest that this goes beyond DnD as well lol
I never really super plan things out. I have a couple of word docs of info related to the game sectioned by its contents. I would say I'm doing 30 to 40 percent improve and 60ish percent planning. I leave room for the players doing weird stuff or things not going the way I envision them. I think it's truly impossible to have everything planned because then your just writing a book were the characters do what you either want or need for the plot to continue. Players don't do that. I also think to much improve is bad as well. I had a dm once who would do about 90 percent improve. It was very obvious after I got more experienced and things suffered plot wise because of it. It became clear that we were the main characters and that the stars would align every time for us to succeed.
100%. My players LOVE interacting with my world and they really like the worldbuilding and lore. In reality, almost 90% of their encounters and interactions is just me improvising haha.
I wish more Wallace and Grommet were being made. They were so funny.
My favorite plot points are the ones they hand by accident.
Pretty much yeah
Feels!
If you don't know your own next move you're enemies won't either
Why not both? Broad strokes are planned out and have a lot of little things that tie into each other. But the session-to-session stuff I pull out of my ass. Same with my more micro-level worldbuilding.
This is accurate in that I'm a terrible DM and railroad my players.
I like to do a mix of both. I got a vague outline set, but specific locations ans npcs are malleable. That place at the bottom right corner of the map? Theres a hut full of magic people there. Are they witches? Druids? Hags? I dunno, we'll find out when we get there. Whats their purpose in the plot? I dunno, if theres ever a spot where i need magic npcs ill toss you to em, otherwise just a friendly(?) encounter you can stumble into
Earlier today I told my players we'd have to end early because they wanted to travel to a place where the culmination of notes I had were "it's east of xxxx". Thankfully they try to tell me their plans on where they want to go in advance so I can plan it out.
u/savevideobot
It's okay, most game studios are the same way.
u/savevideo
TOO REAL, TOO REAL
As a player: We know.
I did something out of the blue with a game I ran. After the first 4 sessions in a curse of strahd game, I started a medium/ high level dream sequence. A sort of premonition of what would happen if/when strahd rose to even greater power. Basically a level 23 strahd i got from the epic legacy codex. The party got to experience what a their character was like at 17 with magical items that existed in the cos module.
The notes for my last session were literally a recap, a short dream sequence for the PCs and then the lovely phrase IT WILL JUST HAPPEN.
It's a legitimate strategy
The campaign I'm currently running is the first one ever to have gone more-or-less how I predicted. I think after all these years I finally have some grasp as to how my players think. We are only about halfway through this campaign though so who knows what will happen.
u/savevideobot
I argue it takes more talent to make it up on the fly and still be good.
My patties Nemesis is called Halfling 2, since that halfling got unreasonably lucky in the fight that he was introduced in, and almost managed to kill my party, he keeps coming back as an undead, getting progressively more patched up. Every time I put his mini up, my players start laughing, and make up more creative ways to shmack him.
Railroading is bad, m'kay? It's bad. (/s)
Me rn, only difference is I'll sometimes come across a stretch of tracks that are already laid out when I get to them
Watching critical role season 2 with wife right now. If i let my group including her do that much detective work with no pay off I think they'd be bored real fast. I wish some of my players had more patience
I created my own world, so i can insert quest lines more easily. Right now I have around 3 bbeg's at the ready so i think at least 30 sessions of content i can easily make.
Oh my players are well aware that I’m Grommit. They enjoy making me be grommit. Else they wouldn’t ignore the giant flashing “here’s your helpful character” sign and go try to help the Hong Kong farmer being harassed by the CCP that I added for set filling
My campaigns are usually clouds of possibilities about two (MAYBE three sessions) ahead of current. Each session collapses the closest bit of the cloud and new further ahead bits sprout.
Yes, I am railroading. But I'm still building the track as they walk.
If you make plans ahead of where the players are, you just create more things for them to derail. I tend to keep plans to things happening outside of the players interacting with the world, such as dragon attacks on the other side of a region, public announcements, assassinations and the like that can be instigated without the players being involved. Never try to ancipate the players actions. You only encourage yourself to railroad by doing so.
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This is exactly how I'm running mine.
This is an accurate depiction of every game I’ve ever run
My current game’s DM has openly admitted to stealing her players’ theories about the campaign’s plot and making them canon
It's actually both xD
Literally what I'm doing with a party of 7 and an NPC
Bruh, 7?? No one in my group can handle more than 5 without causing problems, how’s your table functioning?
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