The ONE Book That Fixed My DMing 

5 days left to back THE WANDERING TAVERN: www.kickstarter.com/projects/homieandthedude/the-wandering-tavern?ref=cswbid I'm excited to run it, I'm adapting it to Blades in the Dark!

Matt Colville said players remember their stories, not the plot. I think this theming is relevant, it sets up the players telling their stories!

This is a great articulation of what I've intuited. I feel like building a campaign world is like setting up a playground. When the kids get there, you're not telling them how to play--your job is to give them varied, interesting, and cool things to choose to play on and explore each in their own unique ways.

This was fantastic! Really good work, Skylar. I particularly loved the machine you built. It gave me "high-tech Calvin and Hobbes" vibes.

I've taken two different approaches to the basic "don't pre-write your plot!" premise recently. Didn't realize I had done it until you put it into words. In a teen superheroes campaign, all my NPCs were foils who existed to show up and force my players to make decisions. One of my players wanted to play an alien, so I gave them two to play off of - one a bumbling school teacher with a mild interest in city planning and no concept for how dangerous their technology was to humans, and another a grim gruff bounty hunter who sees every encounter (even social...) as a fight to the death and isn't ever seen without at least 3 weapons. These two characters tugged on the alien's player to choose between the integration and subjugation of earth by the aliens. In a low-magic fantasy campaign, I made factions to ask my players how their characters viewed the world. Orlain saw the peoples of my world as begging for order, and empowered agents to control the flow of information. Their armies would march in, lauded by the townsfolk as heroes, banners changed overnight without a single drop of blood shed. Rogatta saw the peoples of my world as needing empowerment, and educated every denizen, including non-citizens, to give them the perspective required to think critically about their place and what is needed most. The Reach saw the peoples of my world as needing freedom, throwing off the shackles of all civilization, even going so far as to include things like architecture. They were sandwiched between my other two nations, spread too thin to defend themselves fully. What are they willing to pay for knowledge? Freedom? Safety? This campaign is still on-going so I don't know exactly how my PCs are going to answer ultimately, but so far it is "Not Orlain's price."

I speak of this often about campaign construction. It's important to establish opportunities for player agency to assert itself, and for players to react to options in a characterful way that can encourage role-playing between them and NPCs.

Thanks for the video Skyler Edit: I agree. Theme is one of the core pieces of my games and, when I'm DMing, the theme is the core driving piece of almost everything happening in the game

yeah, anytime a game creator, GM or player, tries to TELL A STORY instead of letting a story happen through the game, the RPG engine stalls. it took me so long to learn this lesson.

0:49 "falls flat" is an incredible visual effect there, it actually made me gasp

Brian is one of my good friends and a mentor of mine. I cannot think about stories, character, worlds without structuring it around armature. It makes so much sense that I can’t go back to my old ways of thinking and fumbling through stories and in this case, rpg campaign building. So glad to see other people *applying his work into this hobby.

Watching this made me realize that the "Armature" of my games is "is the devil you know better than the devil you don't" One faction has been very upfront on what their goals are. They want to take control of the 3 inner planes for themselves (with intentions to protect it from the outer planes, but still committing planar domination). The other faction has been very secretive, wanting the parties help but never giving them the full picture as to what they want. It's also important to know that these guys are from the Shadowfell. My party are now stuck between just working with the people they know are evil, or working with the other group, hoping their intentions aren't as bad as the other. It also helps that most monsters they've fought up are either shape changers or appear to be one thing but are actually something else. It's really made the fact that there are people willing to just be honest with them a more tempting offer.

I think proposing the dramatic question (similar to the armature, but from Save the Cat) is very helpful in play separate from traditional story telling as it guides behavior without feeling like what is often dubbed railroading. I think this is the case because GMs see media, want to tell a similar story, but then can’t figure out how to do so with 2-5 other people involved. This is mainly the case as we don’t often distinguish between plot choices (what happens to allow the story) and character choices (what the characters due in response the plot choices). In a movie or novel, we can control both aspects, but as a gm we can only control plot choices. Superman chooses to save Metropolis because of the supervillains endangering it. With the dramatic question/armature, the GM can set the plot choice (villains endangering the city) and the players can choose to save the city (character choice) while the armature consensually guides their actions (what is the responsibility of power?)

Years ago I stumbled upon the same conclusion, after I actually started to learn story seriously.

Commenting for engagement because these videos are phenomenal and need to blow up already like goddamn

this video has such a cool aesthetic. keep it up bro

Cannolo for one, cannoli for box, Skylar 😂 Thanks for the awesome resources! I was super anxious the first time I ran a campaign, especially because it was for 7 mostly-brand-new players. I didn't know nearly as much about how to DM well as I do now, and this video is another file for the ever-growing cabinet

More people need to find your channel. I love your view on ttrpgs and you do it all through such a creative aesthetic and presentation ❤

The quality is insane! Great job love the video asthetic

I guess I accidentally stumbled upon this answer. I've written a booklet that Idon't have the confidence to publish which helps Game Masters create factions. There are tables that help create those factions with focus, fallacies, their starting power, key NPCs within those factions, among other things that happen with each faction. The idea was to create a line of these booklets, 12 total, covering different themes (generic, lycan, vampire, wizard, military...) to allow Game Masters to create living, breathing factions that can be plugged in to any campaign to create life. I only ever finished the first (generic) and the vampiric. Maybe I will revisit the idea and flesh the booklets out more and complete the series.

Love this video. Your production quality is insane!

You did an INCREDIBLE job with this video. I appreciate all of the time and effects you put into it, really brought your story telling style out. But I hope you don't push yourself too hard to keep making leaps and bounds in your content that you burnout. I can relate to the desire to keep one-upping the previous video.

The Tavern looks fun! For my own “armature”, I’m a big fan of “Albyon Absey’s Geographical Almanac” - it’s an a-z of variously themed locations with loads of different possibilities for different stories. I can’t imagine two different gaming tables having the same experience using it. Plus, it’s free, which is always a bonus! 🎉

My game has been mostly “Hags are taking over the land and now you gotta take care of them” and will eventually transition something like “Kingdom opened up a portal to Fey World and caused ‘X’ and that’s why Hags are doing this” though now that I write this I’m still thinking this through. Hahaha

Okay, this is genuinely worthy content.

for our game, we blend the sandbox with the campaign setting. I have a "story line" set up and drop hints through out travels and the party of players develop the story based on what they choose to do and where to go. At that point i insert aspects of my game that will have hooks and more options like encounters with aspects of the outlined story that i created to hopefully let them choose direction and develop the story.

I keep saying, TTRPG's are not for telling stories, they're for making them.

I hope that crazy contraption will appear in more of your videos

"Story" is just the collective results of the choices of the PCs. As a GM, I just like to give my players a starting set up, populate the setting with various opportunities and challenges and turn them loose to see what they do. I like being just as surprised by the sequence of events as my players, never really knowing how any given situation is going to unfold.

I dont normally put on the notify me, but i really enjoyed the last video

Thank you Skylar.

This is a good insight! Thank you! My friends and I worked out some time ago that if your game world only had two factions, they basically came down to the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, with the players usually siding with the Good Guys. But if you created *three* factions, suddenly the players had choices they could make. This video builds on that by describing a way to design those factions to create interesting thematic choices. It's good, practical advice. I've copied sections of the transcript and saved them to my writing craft folder. ;)

Bloody hell this is a good video! The quality is insane 😱

Solid advice!

This is the first video of yours I've seen, and I found it super interesting. Sub'd!

I sort of want to work with a frame of Permanence vs the Impermanent in a campaign I was writing for a little while, Where the worlds primary factions focus on either siding with immortal powers or newer mortal ones (along with some economic and spiritual boundaries attached to those). Whether or not it turns out well or if I should change it because it is too constricting I will probably figure out when the character sheets are written, better to have the framework there and keep what you need as long as you are willing to scrape and repaint the players ideas in just in case the campaign become a cross-country journey to steal secrets and blackmail some 2000 year old skeleton who is a mathematics nerd.

Why does this small 10k sub channel have such high quality videography lmao

My group has just put one of our campaigns on hiatus in favor of another interlude-like adventure with characters from a previously abandoned campaign set in the same world. The question of my game world's theme has been floating around my head for a long time now, so the book seems like a good resource for this. I'll have to take a read during the downtime between our adventures 👍

My 2 year long still running campaign I guess its "armature" is how do you proceed when hope is gone.

The Wandering Tavern sounds so cool. I hope we can get a game going with that sometime soon! Also need to check out Invisible Ink

YEEEEESSSSS! Another Armature evangelist!

Why was this so short? Is it an advertisement? This is the first video I saw from your channel

I love the machine you made!

I was talking about this with my group last week and making the 'story-is-a-byproduct' argument. I probably won't be picking up The Wandering Tavern; it's too close to many of the ideas I've been working with already, but divergent enough that I prefer mine. Ghibli's been one of my touchstones for years. I've always had a bent towards ecological themes, and integrating spiritualism for a spiritual ecology. It's pretty consistently one of the Six Truths(Sly Flourish's framework for communicating 'armature' to players) about most of the campaign settings I come up with. But I think I will read _Invisible Ink_ soon. S'like ten bucks on kindle.

Well, I never tought about it like that but makes a lot of sense. Maybe I'm already doing it. My armature is about the domain of gods. It started as a typical dnd adventure where they got a divine call to save the world, but my players further discovered some dirties on the gods and met some people who are not so happy about them and are starting to wonder if there is another way. Maybe they even get violent, I don't know. That's the cool part.

Gotta love your story machine lil dude 😂😂😂 Hey, talking about factions, have you ever played Magic the Gathering? Their narrative design often revolve around competing factions, and their (arguably) most beloved world is all about them. A city-covered plane called Ravnica, ruled by the ten guilds. It's really good stuff! I also know D&D made a supplement that's all about playing in Ravnica, just wondering if you knew about this.

Another wonderful video. I like this brief and to the point format as well, it feels more conversational and informative than a list. That said onto the comments question. My game's armature is an industrial dirty Victorian fantasy London along the lines of Robert Downy Jr.'s Sherlock Holms or Carnival Row. It's mostly a Dungeon of the week format where the party picks up adventures from their local pub's adventure board (AKA me slapping things together from the large collections of books I'll never run the full adventures out of). The recent reason for this is so the pub owner can win a bet with the other pub owners to see who's adventure board is the most successful, while the winning party gets an unnamed rare magic item and a spot of coin (their pub has also thrown in a forgiven tab and free food and and drink for a month to anyone who completes an adventure on the board since no one was biting before that).

I wish I didn't need to be reminded of this as often as I evidently do 😅So true - RPGs are not stories. RPGs are questions. Thanks!

Oh good, your games are held together by cardboard, some hoses, & duct tape too. Thought I was the only one.

Interesting, I used to call theme my engine for the sandbox. That was a decade ago, these days I refer to it more as framework. The funny things is that armature can mean both. In that regard, I think have to look into that book. I work on my own system, and maybe I find more thought there to better express what I want the experience to be, since the interactive and spontaneous approach to narrativ is also what I want from my roleplay pastime. I also moved away from calling it a sandbox, since character arcs are still something I want t have even in this flexible environment of creating the story during play.

I see you are very engaged with your audience and that's great, so sorry if this comes off as mean. My intention is constructive criticism, not negativity. I don't think making half of your video an ad (whether or not it applies to the video's subject) is a good idea. I've never seen your videos before, but this first impression is not great to me. I see a lot of comments saying they don't understand why you don't get more recognition, but if this is the norm for your videos, I could imagine people watching up to the midway point then clicking away. No smashing the like button, no subscribing, and certainly no ringing the bell icon. Just from my experience I can tell you that I got to the point where you started to do an ad that I've already seen from about a dozen other D&D adjacent channels. So I started skipping ahead, only to realize the rest of the 5 minute video was all advertisement. I was really looking forward to hearing about what the author's ideas about the "armature" were, how you interpreted it, and maybe a few ways it applies to RPGs compared to prewritten narratives. Anywho, that's my two cents. Again I'm hoping this is taken as a genuine critique, and not bullying. I wish you the best! Perhaps I will stumble upon a video of yours in the future and be pleasantly surprised.

For the algorithm (crazy intro)

Interesting. Armature reminds me of how Beliefs work in Burning Wheel. I'm not sure what the themes are in the Ioun City game...or what questions I'm asking. Maybe asking if it is possible to be successful and moral in the midst of a corrupt mercantile system with terrible imbalances built into the foundation. Maybe? Interesting question! Thanks.

Cool shirt

DnD is a choose your own adventure book where choices follow a rule-set. If you follow the book, and play by the rules it is a very fun and easy experience.

Does the little robot in this video have a name?

realizing the back half of the video was just supporting an affiliate link felt pretty bad :(

Ah! So you're saying I should rip off Fallout New Vegas! Got it got it! But in all seriousness, great video!

Written without AI? Is that even possible? 🤔

Cool video. DMing from scratch is like writing a story, but you don't know who the main characters are or what they do. Most writing aids out there don't take that into account. Also the smiths suck. Byt we can still be pals.

Slap “capitalism bad” on that bad boy And she’ll run beautifully! Also try to scrub the racism out of RAW wherever you can.

I thought this would be the end of the same feeling I had as you, but then all you tell me was factions. The word I've heard over and over and yet still I couldn't get it. Multiple factions turns the game into a complicated mess of politics. I play TTRPGs to ESCAPE from them. Plus, I can't wrap my head around it because there will be way too many moving parts to track with. Is multi-faction campaign like Dungeons of Drakkenheim the only way we can truly have enough questions and answers? I don't want to think so. There has to be more than that. We can distill it better.

Well this just completely changed the way I think about running campaigns in the absolute best way. I'll be marinating on this for days. You got yourself a new subscriber! 🩷