A better way to run D&D 

I can’t agree with this video more than I already do. Not only is it less work for the DM to give the players more control over the game, but it is way more enjoyable too. Great video.

It's something of a clumsy analogy, but I think for me, the fun of being a DM is somewhat like that of an author reading a genuinely good fanfiction/sequel written by another writer. I feel the recognition and pride of this being the world I created with love, but also the thrill of seeing new characters and new twists and turns that I can only guess at.

I resonate with this. I've found a lot of fun setting up the lore and backstory of my game and seeing how my players subvert my expectations. I've taken a few times to take an interim while I plan the unexpected turn the party took. Heck, last session the party went to the underdark for mushrooms to keep a cursed player sedated while they look for a cure. I had no idea they were even going to get cursed in the first place, so all the stuff I had thought they would do is up in the air or pointless to work out. To add on to this, a grand puzzle or mystery to unfold and challenges along the way are the narrative structure I think about when planning the game, because it keeps me from solving the problems for the party while forcing me to think about the why which can be used to roleplay a what, or how in the moment. Well-designed combat encountets are still something I have trouble with and I also still add in things in the moment I wasn't planning on which has caused some issues, but that'll get better with experience.

I'm a storyteller DM, I write the outline from start to finish then let my players navigate that outline to fill in the gaps however they want. I feel like it's better to say that the DM and the players are the storytellers, we write and it and change it as we go. If you are not creating an overall story for your players to follow, they can become lost or bored or chaotic, which may not be bad. I guess I just want to say that being a storyteller is fine, forcing your players into an act or result can be bad.

Exactly how I run my games. I create problems, half the time I don't even have a possible solution in mind, and see what the players come up with. If it makes sense to me it will work

The first 30 seconds you described me

Amazing!

Great video and a lot of good points! Just like Drudenfusz I'm mostly wih you. What you describe is my preffered style of play. I would like to point out that promises and payoffs are a central element of the telling and enjoying of stories though. I've startet Lost Mine of Phandelver recently and I told my players about the lost mine in the prologue, the implicit promise being them dicovering said mine. My Curse of Strahd group got to know about that vampirelord early on, the implicit promise being them fighting him in the end. This doesn't determine neither the outcome nor the way to get there, but it gives the players some sort of goal or direction from the get go. Of course I'm just as exited as them to see if they will get to do that and to experience whatever happens along the way. Especially new players usualy need to have an impression of what they should strive to accomplish, otherwise they might feel a little lost. Many campaigns (just like LMoP and CoS) are a bit more on the railroady side of things in the beginning and after a while lead the players to certain points from where they can choose their own path more and more. The players get more and more agency along the way and learn to make use of it. Also I've had players at my table who didn't enjoy too much player agency, at least not for them personally. They gladly would support other player's choices, but they feared moments when they stood in the spotlight and had to make a choice that would heavily influence the rest of the campaign. Those were new players and at first I expected their approach to change over time, but even after several years of one ongoing campaign some players didn't want to decide to much. At my table those players have always been a minority (if present at all), but with a table full of such players a DM would need to give more direction for the whole group to enjoy the game. For a new DM without a lot of experience as a player your approach might be hard to grasp. In almost every other medium stories come without the potential of different outcomes. What you suggest is not exactly hard to do, but it is somewhat hard to imagine without rpg experience. Most new DMs will feel they have to provide a clear way and structure to the story. Those DMs really should relax a bit, watch this video and then buckle themselves for the joyride their about to participate in. I'm happy I've found your channel!

I am with you, that I also do not plan plots, but I think you are wrong in regards that people do not like to know the outcome of a story. You even mention a film you watched multiple times, and many people are like that, that they consume a piece of media over and over again while already knowing how it will end. And I think that there are also plenty o players in the RPG hobby who also want to be sure their character has an arc or that their character will at least prevail and maybe even triumph at the end. And I think that is why people buy and run modules, since those come with the implicit promise to deliver a narrative that will satisfy player needs.

I agree with the first part. You can't write a game the way you write a movie or a book. However, I disagree with the notion that you shouldn't plan your game. It's fine if you want to do that, but not everyone can think that fast on their feet. If you are writing your own adventures, you have to write them more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Tere's the plot. There's a choice. If they do X, this happens. If they do Y, that happens. The one big difference is what do you do if they choose Z and Z wasn't something you anticipated when you were writing. Then you improv. However, it's a lot easier to improv when you have something written down.

I mean the only reason I enjoy dming is because I get to tell a story now of course my campaign is very freedom focused they can do whatever they want in the world I've created (my campaign is framed like an open world video game)

I'm 4 min in and you still have not fully made your point. Up to 3:12 you just repeated the same point over and over. The advice is okay, though I wish it could have been presented a bit better. I HUGELY disagree with one comment (albeit a small part of the video) where you imply that not being a player first means you can't be a good DM. *That* particular line I would consider poor advice and I've seen other creators say the same so I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. Either way, still good job on the video. =) I can only judge so much as I'm not a content creator.

With respect, you seem to be making some pretty inaccurate assumptions about things like Critical Role, while appearing to navigate away from critically important nuance. To approach this subject, it would be useful to introduce the concept of "play styles": dodging around this and presenting the game as if there is "one true way" to play it (which this video does, whether it meant to or not) is problematic, click-baity, and wholly inaccurate to the realities of table-top gaming. Every group, every table, has its own "style of play", and its own unique set of things ("experiences") it hopes to get out of the game, together, and hopefully in accordance with agreed upon dynamics with their group. Content creators pushing "a better way to [x]" without establishing the impossibly high degrees of variance and nuance found at each table GROSSLY and irresponsibly misrepresents the reality of gaming, which is an especially egregious offense given the influx of (as the video itself says) *new players*. There's no "better" or "right" way to play: there are ways that work for a given group, and ways that don't. A highly skilled and competent DM will be able to adapt and move between several playstyles with several groups, games, genres, or settings; but there's nothing wrong with being good enough at one thing, if that one thing is what your specific table is looking for. In terms of the misconceptions about Critical Role: there's VERY little railroading going on at that table. Mercer, for as over-acted and performance-oriented his style is, 100% allows the player choices to direct the course of a story's progression. The "big bad" of Campaign 2 didn't even exist, couldn't even have existed, outside of the choices of a player and a guest: it was something which had not been written or conceived beforehand, and couldn't have been, for reasons that become VERY evident to anyone actually familiar with that story. Railroading in games IS something that can be problematic for some players, for some tables, for some groups: but this video doesn't properly define what railroading is, or provide a single accurate example of it. Railroading (as seen in early Dragonlance modules from the mid-1980s, which redefined what roleplaying game modules and campaigns "could be" by introducing concepts of narrative cohesion, plot, and continuity beyond "the endless dungeon crawl" of "murder hobo" adventurers) is a narrative approach to story structure which sidelines player autonomy/agency, reducing the stakes and value of player choices, in favor of rigid conformation to a pre-existing plot or storyline. (There are virtually no examples of this from any of the Critical Role campaigns-- not even the guest-DM'd "Calamity" mini-series, which for very obvious reasons DID have some fairly important (because prequel) "known storyline outcomes", but still managed to avoid ANY railroading pitfalls and maximized player agency like a masterclass in doing so.) Railroading, for the average player and table who isn't operating at a professional level, is simply when a DM favors pre-determined plot paths MORE than the choices (and freedoms) of the players engaging with that story, such that those player's actions and decisions have less impact on the story (and its world) than would otherwise be ideal. Examples from the early Dragonlance modules include times where players could kill certain antagonists, only to have those antagonists revive (unexplainably) later, simply because they were "still needed for the story": the consequences of player actions had VERY little impact on the world, and thus, the stakes and investment were narratively railroaded. At the time, this was still groundbreaking (because it introduced the concept of stories and plotting narratives to TTRPGs, just 10 years into the game's history, when most products otherwise were one-off "weekend dungeon crawls" operated with an assumption of 1:1 real-time dynamic in-universe, meaning that they were basically proto-MMORPGS with respawning dungeons as the expected norm, rather than static worlds in which characters intimately affected their surroundings, and were affected by them.) Railroading is fine for casual gamers, though. Some folks just really want escapist play, decent die rolling, fun spell effects, whiskey shots and junk food with their friends, and a story they get to tune into and out of once or twice a month. That's a playstyle. It is only a problem when people at the table DO NOT WANT THAT, and the DM can't adapt (or understand how to hear what they're after). Critical Role, both the main campaigns and the side-quests/mini-series are the OPPOSITE of railroading--- so this video using those as examples of railroading is going to be VERY confusing to people who aren't familiar with the term, or the concept. Mercer doesn't have heavy-handed story plots that the players are all expected (demanded, forced) to comply with: their choices are intimately connected to the consequence and causality not only of the story (and the whole world those stories are set in), but on the next chapters of storytelling-- complete with encounters which were planned and painstakingly statted and built as battle-maps being abandoned, because the players made different choices. This is literally *the absolute opposite* of railroading. The opposite railroading is "sandbox storytelling" in which the players get to explore, make choices with high levels of freedom from plot-constraints, and respond/react to story elements only if/when they feel like it: at any point they could say "forget this, peace out, let's go steal a boat and become pirates" even if that has NOTHING to do with present story direction. If giving cautionary advice to newer DMs (and their players) about Critical Role and expectations therein, a reliable approach would be simple: communicate with your gaming group to determine what everyone's playstyles and expectations are, and do so in a way (unlike this video) which doesn't seek to shame/disparage approaches or desires at the table which aren't in alignment. Not every playstyle works at every table, and there IS such a thing as "the right player at the wrong table", or "the right DM in the wrong genre", and so on: selecting the right game (and group) for one's gaming desires and needs is the same as joining the right group for ANY activity. Whether playing a sportsball game in the park with friends, or assembling wild full-contact amorous dalliances with stolen trampolines and too much hard liquor, or putting together a group to take road-trip with, it is important to make sure everyone involved is aware of (and given the chance to voice) the shared and collective aims, goals, directives. The worst sportsball games in the world are the ones where half the group wants to be hardcore competitive and aggressively seek points, while the other half is looking to dick around, laugh, and get wasted at the beach. Playstyles exist in sportsball, and they exist in group amorous trampoline acrobatics, as in roadtrip groups, and TTRPGS: *communicate* with your group. Critical Role works so well not because they're all professional actors (that doesn't hurt) or because they have a production budget (that doesn't hurt either) or millions of fans (that actually might hurt things), but rather, it works so well because the group of friends playing the game together have communicated with one another about their expectations, their desires, what they each want to get out of a given campaign or character, and they hold consummate trust with one another that those things will be attended to honorably (between the players, and with the DM), that their agreements and boundaries will be heard and respected. That's it. Respect and communication. That's the advice. Railroading? Oh, honey, no. They're a sandbox game that just happens to have really mature and respectful players involved, who've been gaming together long enough to know what works and what doesn't for their group game cohesion. This is the opposite of railroading---- but, so are most of the examples given in this video.