You've always been pretty natural in front of the camera, but it seems like you've really figured out a formula that makes you really comfortable and confident. I love seeing the growth both of you and your channel.
I really appreciate that, mate! I'm still developing and finding my feet as a creator, but I'm really glad progress is being made. It helps that I just really love doing these long-form videos!
This is really, reaaaally good advice. I love thr part where you're like "yeah, put their goals, all of them, near each other, get them headed in the same direction." It's so freakin obvious in hindsight.
Thank you, mate! It's neat, right? And because the goals all came from the players, it still feels to them like a natural occurrence, even if they know on some level that the DM had a hand in it.
The social contract would make it the responsibility of the players to ensure their character has an initial reason to stick with the party. However, the GM can definitely help with the brain storming here and make it all come together.
"For the first ten sessions or so, give them a monster of the week type of adventure" I somehow accidentally did this in my campaign with this group here and they loved it a lot, helped them learn about each other and what not. We've now gotten into longer story arcs with them defeating some evil druids and now they're trying to return one PC's mother back home (which has taken months to do).
This is really good advice, it’s so appreciated. I just started a campaign with some of my friends, and before we started i had this whole plan for the campaigns place in the timeline of the world and other things that i began to feel were restricting me as i began to run the session. Also my pacing was horrible, even tho all the players said it was good, we all kinda agreed it was a but rushed, it was my first campaign and i really wanted them to reach a certain spot, but we started late so I couldn’t flesh it out as well. After watching this and some more of your videos, i have a great plan on how I can fix my world building issue and my campaign, thank you so much :)
I should have actually specified in the video that some of the advice (Tip 3, especially) really applies more to longer campaigns, but hopefully some of the tips are still useful 😄
I just start with each PC having a bond with at least on other PC. I have had too many times where PC’s don’t gel, so unless I know and trust my players to make that bond building process work, I start with them already connected.
awesome advice and I will definitely apply most of it to the campaign i'm starting in a few days!! sidenote: i started getting seasick around 10 minutes into the video and couldnt figure out why until i looked away and the whole room was slidding slowly to the side xD. staring at the video with the scrolling background image (altough very pretty art I might add) made me VERY dissy.
I'm quite the world-builder. I like having time to develop a map with some plot hooks embedded in it. Generally if I come up with a location I always think of something cool for the players to discover in that location, being that some knowledge, monster, magic items or other things but this has been useful in order to give my first sessions a structure of some kind. Thank you!
I LOVE urban campaigns! My biggest Patreon project last year was actually a single-city campaign, and it was probably one of the coolest things I've worked on so far. By the way, you may have already seen it, but I did a video on prepping and running cities (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-e0dwKvdfPiE.html), which might spark some fun ideas!
I always get something from your video. Plush Heres a idea for your next video How do you handle long break between sesions or game that you play 1 a month
Excellent video, preparing to start a new campaign in the next month or so! I definitely agree with having reasons to bring the party together. I'm asking all my players to come up with a reason as to why they have set out to the wider world, and i'm going to use that as a way to justify them all having been at a common rest stop between major cities, which will, in the dead of night, be ransacked by orcs, who will take everyone, them and dozens of other travelers, to their camp, and to the depths of a cave system, where they will have to work together to get out, and escape that area, which has fallen out of the eyes of the local guards, and become riddled with orcs. It gives them more of a reason to have decided to work together rather than the "You all sat at the same table in a tavern" start. I also have my players thinking heavily as to where they came from. In my world, the nations that exist are always in some state of war, mostly with the 4 smaller nations fighting against a larger empire. However, I have refused to make the Empire a clear big evil power that must be taken down, because despite the constant desire for the empire to expand, those who are conglomerated into the empire do see a huge raise in their standards of living. Efforts are made to bring sanitation to sizable towns and cities, and medicine and healing is provided generously by mages who are part of the army, who regularly patrol and heal as part of their duties. This constant war also means that players have to think deeply about allegiances they might have. Is one of them ex-military? If so, who did they pledge allegiance to? do they still? does this create conflict between the players that they might need to overcome to bring themselves closer? It makes the world more than just a map for them to explore, but a fragmented land where allegiances are formed and shattered, and political power reigns supreme.
About your opening ideas I MUCH preffer the the tavern action scene than the cult abduction. I'm so sick of evil cults who abduct people for no reason just because they're evil.
Solid videos! First time DM (never played more than a single session) Just found your channel yesterday, and I have made it through maybe half of your videos already. I’m actually taking notes, and it’s very easy to do since you use steps or pillars. Easily earned a subscriber. I hope your channel keeps growing!
Nice. I just gathered four people for my first IRL game in literally years! This will help me get back into it. The level 3 start just really isn’t for me. Especially DnD sucks at higher levels in my opinion PCs are technically super heroes in 5e anyway and the power creep really gets ridiculous fast. Being lvl 1, or even lvl 0 gives players the option to experiment a bit more and maybe swap chars easily, if they don’t like the one they started with
Players often hate the characters they make because: Class combinations are rubbish, they want the coolest looking race but different abilities, their 15 pages of backstory don't fit the lore, their character does not have enough impact on the world as they want, their character isn't "optimized", the list goes on.
That map is beautiful! I'm working on my own setting at the moment, would you be open to sharing yours so I could use it as inspiration (And yoink a few place names)?
For "monster of the week", what are some example themes to try out in each session? You mentioned heist, classic dungeon, monster in the woods, horror, mystery...any others? Thanks :)
Depends on your game, but don't prep more than 8ish hours of content. Then again, prep twice as long under the assumption they'll skip half of what you prepared. And it absolutely depends on your game. Are you running on rails, sandbox, prewritten adventures? Sandbox will take the most work because you probably have to prep about 8ish places. But, realistically, only maybe 3 encounters for each place? And they could be as simple as "you find a golden bell in the middle of the road, what do you do" or they could he combat encounters. Or puzzles. I'll say this for certain: do not plan a campaign. Plan forces in the world and things those forces will do in the absence of any players. Seed these things throughout the world on a hex grid of arbitrary size, 24 miles a grid is usual which is the groundspeed of a typical person walking. If you need more time, throw a couple combat encounters their way, don't let em rest between because resting in wilderness might cause another random encounter. But yeah, create things that will act upon the world in the absence of players, and the story will unfold that way, and more organically, because you control those forces and if you don't want the goblin to raid the village today cuz your PCs are across the river and through the woods visiting grandma for a social encounter day, those goblins might invade and steal the blacksmith's daughter another day. Or it could be that day because the clock is always ticking and there be forces at work, and the monsters want to win. I dunno, my two cents. Plan forces, give them a leader, a goal, and some ways they'll attain that goal, a flowchart for how things will go uninterrupted. Oh, ok, the goblins attack the village. They steal the blacksmith's daughter away to a local crypt. They start a ritual to sacrifice the child and summon their god. The ritual is complete. The child sacrificed, they summon a lesser demon because a single child is not going to summon a big bad. Otherwise, look up Dungeon World's adventure fronts. If you don't understand them, ask ChatGPT, they know.
Interesting points for sure! One question; how long do you run sessions? If you say try to do the first 10 sessions as one-shots, how much playtime do you have for that?
Hello in trying to get into DMing but we will have to do it online since one of the members live at the other side of the country and I would love to know what map tool you used to make that smaller area of your world. Edit: Sorry I’ve just realised you tell us in the description
I've heard a lot of people say to plan 1 session at a time but do you have any advice on how to time stuff? Say a session is 3 hours long. Would 3 encounters be good? Too many? Too few?
I have a question on writing a campaign as a first time DM: What software(s) would be good in writing and keeping track of your campaign? I currently use Google Docs and an app called RPG Notebook. Any other suggestions?
All I need are the core books for GURPS 4e, some cool modules, and I'm starting my first campaign. Four of my players are total virgins as far as tabletop roleplaying games, and the fifth has only had about 18 months of experience, when he was a kid- I have a sneaking suspicion that I'll be saying the phrase "I meant to do that" a lot.
My players have been excited for their proposition that the campaign should be about fighting against communist takeover of the land. Imagine having to come up with scenes for that.
Oh I dunno. Lots of real world inspiration to pull from. Just pick a country that has slud into communism and use that as your main story progression, then add monsters and magic as the tools and some of the players.
Starting game: Lock players into 1 of 12 to 14 character classes. Basically forget their starting equipment, and racial features, but hey they look cool right? Have them realize they have 10 Gold and don't have to take any quest for about a month. Cry when the player that gave you a 15 page backstory doesn't show up. Finish the game by making a better game than D&D!
