5 Worldbuilding Mistakes DMs Make // D&D Advice 

Me: "I'm an experienced DM with almost 10 years' experience who's built multiple homebrew worlds from scratch. I'm usually pretty confident, but there's definitely room for improvement so maybe this video will be useful to get some more advanced tips..." Ginny Di: "Tip 1: Read the DM Guide." Me: "...Oh yeah fuck I should probably do that at some point."

I've always loved the idea of having an entire campaign in a single city. Puts a fantasy world under a microscope, and to me that can be even more immersive and magical :)

To go off of the planning thing, someone took a Churchill quote and rephased it to this: "DMs that don't plan before a session have no brain. DMs that don't improvise during the game have no hearts."

There's a quote that I think gets at the heart of tip 5: "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." In other words, you can't make a plan that will successfully address every actual complication; what you can do is develop, through careful thought and exploration, a list of things that likely could happen and the ways and means you have at hand to address something unexpected happening, as it surely will.

I'm just blown away that you just dropped "Dragons eat magic" as an off-the-cuff idea that more or less instantly unfolded into an entire multi-book/film/campaign world.. :O .. Just awesome! :)

One of the funnest most memorable moments in our d&d campaign in the 90's was when the party tried to teleport somewhere and the teleport failed. Instead of putting us in a generic swamp or standard dark forest (as usual) we ended up in the 1300's China helping the ancient Asians rescue a dragon of luck. The wizards there used magical paints and wands, blew our minds. Yes. World building can be magical!

omg, a world where dragons are attracted to the scent of magic, that sounds so cool. Also would create interesting dynamics if someone on your party decides to play a Dragonborn wizard. Or a dragonborn in general.

As a long time DM a common mistake I have seen and made is making the world too functional. I have seen so many new DMs make a world where conflicts are solved too easily by NPCs or by big organisations. For newer DMs, I would recommend placing the adventure in a remote place or in a country where organised help is rare. It is OK to make the world good at dealing with problems the players aren't going to fix, but if the story would logically solve itself without the players the adventure is going to feel hollow. Give the big pieces of your world a compelling reason not to help the party directly.

A good resource that I enjoy is Sly Flourish's Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. Really places an emphasis on start small. Especially the concept of a spiral campaign. Don't go planning out your entire world when you won't leave the first town for 5 sessions. Overthinking can drive even the most skilled DM mad.

The players may skip some stuff, toss it in the recycling bin! No not in the trash, the bin where you grab it later when it would make sense and make a few adjustments to update it.

Everytime i would create a world it would be a literal world and i'd always get overwhelmed and quit. Great advives

Wonderful, smart, funny video as always, and side note--who else is OBSESSED with her shirt in this??

Thanks for the advice, Ginni! As a 40+ year gamer (and having spent 20+ years building my world), here's my two silver- handle the big themes- religion, climate, topography, major history- first. Then choose the area in which the campaign will start- flesh that area out with local topography and history, but get your players involved. Give them the overall themes, and let them build out their backstories in advance of the game- use those backstories to create a richer local history and culture. If you stick with a single world long enough, you and your players will help create a deep, rich, gaming environment.

I feel like this is the one that makes me actually join WorldAnvil, tbh.

I agree, start big. Fill in just as much as you need to actually easily 'run' the world and have better easy ideas. Find the way that works as well for the feel and theme of the campaign you are about to run in that world. Make sure the theme of the world suits the style of game/campaign the players actually want to play. Communicate with the players. You can also make many worlds. Give yourself at the very LEAST a month to worldbuild before the campaign starts. Prepare what happens to help you AND that you enjoy as well as what will actually help the players. I agree. Continue to build as you play as well!

Me, "OK I have a rough sketch of what's happening I should start world-building." Me next session,

My world building system is: 1. Make some important characters. 2. Think up some historical events. 3. Plan out magic or the lack thereof 4. Important locations. 5. Some plot threads 6. Done!

"I would marry Google drive if it were legal" MOOD

Is it me or does "world anvil" sound like the coolest macguffin ever?

I've been a DM for a long time (27 years) but I believe you can always improve. I am guilty of #1 for sure. And.... #2.

What I find with players skipping stuff I carefully planned is, I can generally rework those plans into the next segment of the campaign somehow. It's never wasted! Like, the map for the dungeon they bypassed is now the interior of the manor house they'll be visiting at the start of next adventure (with a few more tapestries and four-poster beds, and fewer rusty chains and skeletons).

For Number 5, I've learned that sometimes learning how to motivate your characters to go the way you want (and therefore, the way you have planned) is a huge help. But the information here definitely checks out: There are no substitutes for planning ahead and being prepared to improvise.

Great video. One thing to help with the overplanning/underplanning thing: ask your players what their immediate goals and desires are. If they tell you they want to travel upriver to visit the court of the vampire queen, you can plan that and put planning on hold for the island ruled by dragons

Great ideas as usual! I love the spitballing off the dragons smelling magic idea. I'm a firm believer in having a few very strong key concepts to define a setting, rather than trying to include every fantasy concept you can think of and seeing what sticks.

The other great benefit of planning is that even if your players skip one of your ideas, you still have it prepared and waiting. With a little bit of tweaking, you can circle back around to it later or even use it in a different campaign. Ideas never go in the trash, just back in the box.

"Starting Small": my advice is the "T" structure. You should have a "starting area" with as much notes and prep as your world at large. Whether you start with the small area before filling in the surrounding world or build the frame of the world before developing a detailed area should depend on your personal strengths. I do better at foundation -> details, but some people do better at small scale -> large scale. As long as your amount of details is the similar and have all been "fitted together" at the end of worldbuilding, your world is sufficiently developed for playing. Good job.

I'm about to start my third campaign as a DM and my first using a homebrew system and this helped SO MUCH THANKYOU

When you said resources I thought you were going to cover in world resources like which regions have ores or export wheat ect

Going through the effort of preparing your world also gives you a better understanding of its inner logic and vibe, making you better at improvising while staying consistent.

Oh dang it's been a while since I've watched a video on this channel. Glad I made the decision to watch this one, because it was a pretty good watch!

Ive been designing a world for over 3 years now and reciently ive decided to take an area ive been neglecting and giving little attention to and make it (or at least part of it) into a playable map. To do this ive concluded that making a campaign using dnd with some modifications as a base for interactions with this world is the best option. And your channel has really helped me to design this world. Regarding the world, it can be divided in 3 areas (not actual names used by people of the story). The exterior: the vast majority of the planet. There are currently 8 known nations here (Mercante, Veluca, Tercenia, Marroquia, Júnaro, Sateal, Uralices and Népiro) each one as well as the exterior as a whole have their own history and culture. In the exterior, theres a fair amount of magic that can be manipulated by not many but it isnt rare enough for commoners to ignore their existance. We have Pluval, the 9th currently known nation. It is completely isolated from the exterior by a ring of mountains, a ring of land and another ring of mountains. Pluval has no natural magic whatsoever and before the reign of Carolus, the first monarch of the reciently discovered Pluval (which ran by a different name), Pluval was over 3 centuries more primitive in terms of technology in comparisson to the exterior. Now the area where the campaign takes part, the circle of land between the mountain rings. This land has yet to be explored and the players have the duty to do so (the reason behind it is their choice). The ring has an incomprehensible ammount of magic, it even "sucked up" the arcane energy from Pluval. There is so much that laws of physics and time arent fully respected. For example, in reality, the area is miniscule, taking all the surface itd be a few thousand km but bc of the distortion, the terrain seems endless. This area has some things that make it easier and harder to make than a normal campaign. It relies a lot more on creativity, but laws, authority, power and influence dont reach far, making history of most locations individual and without connection. All areas have some degree of surrealism, from The Cathedral of the Bestowed Cries to the Reverie Castle-City, including The Great Grave Garden with its gardeners and the grave digger "infant" and many more. I want the campaign to be fun, weird, surreal and different to the fantasy one is used to. It is meant to not only include plenty of combat with interesting enemies and horrific bosses, but also puzzles for which youll have to look closely at your environment to gather clues (maybe the little man engraved into the tympanum of that entrance pointing to the right and the 4 dots carved below him mean something...), many non combat related sidequests, lots of exploration and visual design of locations and of course, optional areas like The Suspicious Traveling Circus and some others. It is clear, that with different cultures there are many different religions, which, are all wrong, this is partially revealed in the main part of the campaign, but it is fully explained in a "dimension" tightly related to the true structure of this reality. Here, there are many other areas and locations which some are even crazier than the main ones. The one players will stay the most time in as it is the second safest place here and the first to get access to, the City of Flesh. A general problem i have with the designing of the world is the specifics of each area. It has to be a bit of a maze, as if its too linear itd be boring. If its just room after room after room itd also be boring and having access to places youd normally be unable to reach like roofs and buttresses is really fun and immersive so i analyze the world design of games i love to get ideas, but its still really difficult. Id love to keep hearing your tips and advice on worldbuilding. Thank you

Thank you! I've been floundering a bit with certain aspects of world building, and this was both informative and reassuring. Granted I'm only writing for my two best friends, so in a way no pressure...but also PRESSURE BECAUSE I LOVE THEM AND NEED THEM TO LOVE MY WORLD 😂 So thanks.

For the last year ish I've slowly started building a toroid (donut shaped) world, occasionally getting too stuck into minutia of trying to figure out psychics and how it would impact everything, but I think my main issue beyond going too small is having too many fun big ideas that don't necessarily work together.

Very useful tips as always, thank you Ginny! PS. loving the colour co-ordinated look of this whole video 💚💗

Absolutely loved these tips, they make the whole worldbuilding process far less daunting.

Absolutely thrilled to have another fabulous Ginny Di advice session! Excited to learn why my own favorite world is in need of repairs :)

This is great stuff. Thank you for reminding me I don’t have to do what so-and-so does! Surprise surprise, I’m no Mercer.

FINALLY! An ORIGINAL video about worldbuilding tips! Worldbuilding advice is always just the same thing over and over: "start with a town first", "don't overprep", "don't write the campaign until you know the characters" ... These tips may be helpful for people really short on time. But for people who actually want to get started, I hate that all the advice for people wanting to start working is just tips for working as little as possible. Cheers Ginny!

Ginny, you are absolutely speaking my language here. Fae courts, magic academies and adaptation of folklore and other stories into my world is almost exclusively what I do. Gads, I would love to play in your world or even have you in mine.

Having been crafting a homebrew setting for the last few years, this gave me some fresh perspective to revaluate some bigger parts of my setting. Thanks!

I love how Ginny comes up with this awesome worldbuilding concept as "just spitballing". It's those big overarching ideas I have trouble coming up with. Characters, places, local histories/events are easy, but the "big idea" I struggle with.

Love those tips, they add nuance onto knowledge we already acquired and it really makes them stand out

Thx for these building my first world rn and stuck need to go back and fix if any of these apply :)

Cool! I like hearing you run over the dos and donts of DMing. Very informative!

I highly recommend obsidian vaults for world building, you can link different notes together in a super easy to follow way that allows you to follow a previous thread of consciousness to what you're looking for. I love it so much

About the under/over planning issue, I recall my big anime setting. I did a lot of planning, built several important NPCs to populate the school so players would have people to interact with. Naturally, not a single one got used. In fact, the biggest NPC ended up being a character who started as a foot note on a separate npc's sheet. When you plan stuff and develop people and places, even if the PCs don't interact with them, it still helps by fleshing out the background and makes it easier to populate where they DO go.

My players once quizzed me on where a village got their plates. They never questioned me again after I took a whole 5 minutes to explain how wood was harvested, processed and carved into plates locally and then exported to other local villages.

My approach is to go very deep on world building, but very light on actual campaign prepping. Since player agency can affect where the campaign is going, but not how the world that campaign inhabits fundamentally works. That way I can freely redirect the direction of the campaign based on the players, but the fact that wherever they go, chances are there's something there already I can weave into the story.

One of my favorite world building systems is the one from Stars Without Number. It provides a fantastic rubric for top-down world building, everything from environment to tech level to population to basic plot hooks. I've taken to using it as a way to organize my D&D worlds, and it provides a great way to let players explore your world in a more sandbox fashion. You have a particular adventure in mind but the players want to go to some random village on the map? No sweat, you already have some good basic info on that place, a couple plot hooks, and one or two key NPC's

Nice one Ginny. World building is what I do. For games and for stories and your advice is very solid. Looking forward to part 2.

This is amazing advice! And that campaign you just came up with off the top of your head sounds really good.

Agree on the planning point. The problem isn’t planning too much, it’s planning THE PLOT too much. Planning to improvise with lists of possible scenes, possible npcs, and secretes and clues (thanks slyfourish!) and then dropping them in where needed is one way to plan, that doesn’t require guessing at the PC’s actions or choices. Another is more sandboxy- build out a populated hex map with stuff for them to encounter, it’s a lot of rock up front but then you are good to go each week cuz the world is ready for them.

In my experience, planning is the foundation to good improvisation. It's like preparing a toolkit. You will not always have exactly what you need in the kit, but having some tools are more helpful than having none.

This is solid advice, I think about the game in a very similar way! Especially with the under planning issue, I find more commonly that the old guard, supposed “overplanners” are actually the ones struggling with improv. Why allow your players to overlook something you intricately planned? Either move it to a different location, have an NPC switch with another or change their dialogue. It may be difficult, but it’s not impossible to rearrange the pieces of the story around where the players are going, instead of being angry that they left the linear path you gave them

My RPG isn't D&D, but everyone who plays it inevitably mentions D&D, which brings me here. I made my own worldbuilding tool, specifically for just "making things up as I go". With the push of a button I can roll up new worlds, maps, characters and plotlines. They take a few minutes to parse though, so as always, DM discretion is important. The cool thing is that I can drop my players into a world with no planning at all and just hit the ground running. Or alternatively, we can get together on session zero and build the world together as they build characters to fit into it, and I can have the world built right alongside with their characters. I live in a place where almost no one plays RPGs, so I'm definitely looking for people who want to try online games through Zoom, Discord, or other voice-chat servers.

This is by far my favourite World Anvil ad, I knew it was coming, but it still kept me waiting if it actually was going to be.

With the whole "start with the big picture and narrow it down", that's something I've been doing for my own campaign setting and writings in general for a *long* while now; I have a vibe and I know certain key points, but it makes it much easy to break it down and get increasingly more specific than to build upwards, since I can see the point of everything right off the bat. TL; DR - Number 3 is a *good* tip.

5:45 Couldn't agree more. Most folks, (myself included), want to start off with something like an ancient magical kingdom or enormous city-state full of unique races and cultures, but then it's hard to scale it back to something smaller. Take the Pufferfish Approach, as I like to call it; start small and expand. Maybe begin with a tiny farming village on the borders of a forbidden forest and grow your surroundings from there. This way, you're always building up to something bigger and better.

Been binging your videos all day. Thank you so much, you're awesome!

Glad to see a video on this. I use to want to be a writer but found myself better at the world building than writing a full out book. After discovering D&D I've been slowly converting the world I created for that book into one I can use for D&D and expanding on it in the process. It is great to gain some tips and better ideas on how to go about it from this and now I'm excited for the second video for this as well. Also I absolutely loved the sponsored skit. You always have the best sponsor parts in your videos of anyone I have ever watched.

For me the best way is creating the frame of the world first. I write about important stuff about the world, its regions, culture etc. I don't go too deep, but this way I can remember the idea of the world I want to build. THEN I focus on the areas around the first few sessions, going deep about whatever I can think. This helps me think in a large scale AND helps me give more characteristics to the specific area. When I write about its culture, politics and stuff, I can think of its relation to the rest of the world.

I am in 100% agreement with the tip of starting with big ideas and then narrowing your focus. Big ideas are super important to making a setting more interesting because they can change fundamental aspects of your world, and by starting with those ideas in mind, you can more easily create interesting places for your players to explore and interesting problems for them to solve.

You are phenomenal resource of knowledge, and a champion of imagination. Thank you for endless inspiration to so many, and have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

World building is the part of running the game I'm best at, my process is this: 1: General tone and concept of the setting. 2: Reference any setting history I've already shown to the players. 3: Begin npc design, make fleshed out characters in a vacuum, then think about that characters personality 4: Finish npc design by thinking about what a person who has the personality I've fleshed out would want in the setting I've created and how they go about working towards that goal. 5: Well thought out characters with defined goals working with or against each other in a setting I understand the basics of should naturally give rise to local plot hooks. 6: Add major plot extensions based on player interest and larger scale story events.

Your content never fails to impress and this one is no different!!

As a DM who is often heavily utilizing improv, the biggest thing i would say for other DMs who struggle with spoons around that stuff sometimes is, the setting and location is important, if you know a city then you can create a fleshed out character on the spot easily, but if you dont know what the city is at its core then you will have a lot more that is needing to be developed at the same time.

You’re my favourite person thank you for all this joy xx bless your heart

This video hits home. I've got a world in my head that's been slowly growing over the course of years of daydreaming. Plenty of details, history, qualities of the people and nations that inhabit it, and so on. I'd love to one day put it to paper and try my hand at DMing a game involving this "World of Astra" but I lack the confidence to do it. I know I'm gonna mess up in some capacity and I don't want to go down in history as a "bad DM" that reddit and other forums so constantly rage about. This video helps a tiny bit in that regard. Looking forward to the second part. :)

Ginny, for far too long I’ve been improvising not only worldbuilding techniques, but also character development. I hit the lowest of lows with my current WIP, but your video helped me get back on my feet again. Thank you for being a beacon of hope for all creative writers and Dungeon Masters out there. We appreciate it!

I been DMing my own Homebrew world for the better part of 22 years and Ginny Di is right 100% here. The guy i learn to play D&D from been DMing sense the 70's the best advice he gave me was start small make note as the player progress from that starting point and build as you need to. And when feel the need to "produce" your own world info do the lay out in such a way that you are only swapping out the game mechanics part and updates from what the players have done from the last campaigns.

Ginny: "If you rely too heavily on improvising your world building..." Me: "...you end up with the Wizarding World." 🤔

Quite the timely video for me. Was just hashing out a possible star system for a Myriad Song game I was contemplating running. Thanks!

Thank you for making such great content. I’m working on my own world right now and it’s been so long since I read the DMG that I didn’t think about it as a resource. I suddenly went from being lost with what to do next and now I have a plan of attack. Again, thank you so much 🙏🏻

Hi! Plug for World Anvil...I've used it for a couple of years. Very versatile and thorough. Love the map feature (I often load my own maps and visuals, and able to use it to communicate and record info more clearly in and out of sessions). Also, great video! I'm planning another campaign for next year, and any tips to get the brain cells going are gold. Oh, and not to detract from any of the great advice you provided, nor your amazing overall talent, but I genuinely love the shirt Ginny.

Love the video! Great job as always❤

Ive done a few small sessions that I need to tie together. This is giving me a good idea of doing a small island/country and having all my events within in. Thank you for your help!

If World Anvil doesn't turn out to be the right fit for someone, I've been using Campfire as a world building tool for about a year now. I started by handwriting everything, and exactly as Ginny has said, i've lost journals and notes more times than I care to admit. Word and google docs just left me with blank pages not knowing where to start, so writing tools like World Anvil and Campfire are lifesavers. World building is incredibly daunting because it's so difficult to know where to start or even what it means to make a city or village. I never would have thought to consider major imports and exports but knowing those things has made shaping large cities more comprehensible.

I love your channel. Your presentation is awesome and you hit the topics that are really helpful.

I especially agree with the point about starting with big themes then that helps you come up with small local ideas more easily... This also helps the world stay consistent early on as opposed to just a random Hodge podge of towns and locations that seem to have no rhyme or reason to them. This also helps prevent issues where you have to redo your early towns because they contradicted something you come up with later.

This couldn't have come in a better time. I am planning a series of one shots we play when one of our players /dm can't join the session. I'm DMing those and this really helped me

About No. 5: I ALMOST got caught out in my first ever DM oneshot by this, thankfully the info I had taken EXTREMELY basic notes on saved my arse in two scenarios. I didn't need a whole world built, I focused on a basic outline of one faction, the grography of the lands, the culture, religion etc, and those basic notes allowed me to flavour some NPC dialogs and made a useful cheeky element to investigating a bookshelf, which let me talk about the topography and climate owing to a "geography book" being one found on the shelf. You may be a god of improv, but I couldn't help but notice the amount of DEPTH given by those small tidbits that I thought were nonessential. My players (as it was part of my uni course to design a driven narrative) certainly reflected on this in their feedback! It matters people! Some notes on everything are better than no notes!

As an aspiring DM slowly building his world, I've noticed one crucial thing about all worldbuilding styles, and that's building "out" vs building "in", and where that boundary may lay. In simple terms, it's your starting point when approaching a worldbuilding scenario. For example, when building your pantheon, do you have a few or even one key God in mind and build out from there, or do you start with a scaffolding of the major domains of your pantheon and build inwards, fleshing each God out as you go? Or for physical map making, do you start in a town and build outwards to form a continent, or start with your landmasses and build inwards to form your towns? Identifying where you intend to start can help ground your building and make it so you're not lost in a sea of floating facts, features, and fun locations on a word document.

The Halfling cosplay is great. You really sell the difference in scale between the sneaky little con-merchant and the Variant Human Nerd.

As a world builder do not be afraid to say that your world mimics a standard fantasy world. The current world I am building copies a lot from Pathfinder's world. I am copying wholesale their new starter city (Otari). I am dropping that city into my world. I am keeping the Pathfinder deities. Just different countries and geography and history. But, there is enough similar to Pathfinder that the players feel more comfortable with my setting. When you mentioned you live in Colorado it made me reminisce about our vacation we took to Colorado earlier this year. We stayed in a small town in the mountains (Dillon) and it was magnificent. We loved every minute and cannot wait to take another trip there. :-)

Worldbuilding was more difficult for me when I started Dming, but now it comes completely naturally, like its insane how much easier it is for me now that I have some practice and experience.

One thing I do to avoid having specifically prepped items being skipped is to have multiple instances of the same npc around, but when the party engages with them have the others never exist. Such as: a military captain in the palace and a blacksmith/ex-captain could provide the same quest connection but it is a lot more likely that a party would go to one than the other. Another way is to have the story move with the characters. I've often given my players 3-4 different locations to go, but a similar plot point would be at each location.

I WISH I knew to start small when I first began worldbuilding. I had a whole grand plan of an entire world for my D&D game, and glorious indeed it would be! Fell apart in a month or so. Taught me some lessons, so I scraped the whole thing and took what few points I liked from it and transferred them all into a small country, and slowly went on from there. Only had very minor footnotes on the surrounding continent, and it took me a few months before I eventually came up with the barest idea for the other continents of the world. It's been a year and a half now, I'm only just starting with the in-between details like islands and oceans. Great video!

great tips in this vid!. I have been doing a different approach as of late and its been really alot of fun and especially because i dont have alot of time to plan and build worlds anymore in my life. I kinda of just start with one scene, spend all the time i have available on the one scene or little area. I then just let the players build the world as it happens, by what they do and how the improv plays out they sort of build the world for me really. I just take little notes of key things as it moves along, and its almost like my world started in one area and the fog of war dissapears as they walk to a new spot and it gets procedurally generated in real time from our minds as a group!

I really love these DM advice videos. They get me really excited about what a wide array of possibilities there are. But once I actually try to sit down and prep for a session, I often get stumped. I.e. that video where you described how the same Character Background can play out differently for different characters. I seem to only be able to come up with one thing that I'm then stuck with, and the character feels very predictable, and less like a real person.. like all of their characteristics are somewhat connected to each other..? I feel like there is so much to learn when it comes to DMing, but the tidbits are spread so far and wide.. and I'm not used to just jumping in and trying things out. I like to know what I'm doing or at least have some idea what to look out for and jow to get better. I really want to be able to make it a fun experience for the people I play with, but I struggle with not knowing what to do. Like when asking for advice on how to learn writing: Just write (and read!), advice for GMing is often: Just set up a game and do it! And I feel like I'm not getting it. How does one learn by just doing it?

...Ginny being a good DM again ... You can tell she's made all the mistakes we've all made and learnt from them - Brilliant advice as always Design the overarching concepts of the world - prep the basics of everywhere the players can reasonably go Plan in detail only where they are likely to go.... fully in the knowledge they might not go there after all...but it's not wasted as they will eventually ..and that's less prep to do now ... I've done this, and on occasion had to improvise .... but with a base to work from as I have a named town with a few important named NPC's with one line descriptions, and a deep foundation of the area, the local politics, and the world, it's so much easier to be consistent

I started getting into D&D in 2017, and as I watch the Unexpectables, the TFS streams, Matthew Colville's Running the Game, and Critical Role, I got the drive to build my own world, I didn't really know if I would ever DM, but I still began building, I started with a section of my world, with like 8 Continents (technically one of them isn't the full size, as I expanded on it with a different map) but I came up with rough ideas of each area I had, and some key places not on the current map at that time, and after starting to DM a year ago, using my world, I plan a lot, for where I expect my players to go, and only once did I have to fully improv, when they were offered a chance to teleport to a different place than they had been, and they spent one session in that other City, before asking to be teleported back.. but I loved the surprise, but in a normal session I do a healthy amount of improv (mostly do to forgetting my notes and not wanting to scan them over) I am still coming up with ideas for the main mapped out areas, plotting out creek locations, or names for villages, or menu items, etc. Anyway, incredible video!

I discovered my love for world building is actually more than my love for playing when it comes to d&d, this addiction has however given me the ability to tell you any given npc's favourite dish at the drop of a hat

I had Lisa Frank folders in my Trapper Keeper in high school in the 1980's. Way to nostalgia me, D&D lady!

This was really helpful for me trying to develop my own world as a newcomer to D&D, so thank you! P.S. I love your shirt

In relation to the prep and improv, I am a fan of the advice that unused material can be used later in that or a different campaign!

The way I have never skipped an ad of yours is a credit on your end

@5:32 Ginny that short spitball of an idea has set my brain on fire! 🤯🔥🔥🔥 I want to DM that world!

"Just be a god, what's the problem?" is such a powerful line

I'm 50... Started playing in 1985... Just got back into it and your videos are great.

I build mine off of a simple starting line. This year I did “The party meets a rabbit who steals their names in the Fae” and basically answered every question I could ask myself about that setting from that point forward