#dm advice

It's not really that much work and it will save you a lot of work in the future. You will forget story details, character names and backstories, places, and dates. It's just gonna happen. Help your future self. Create a lore bible.

Without a lore bible you're gonna have a much more difficult search for the info you want. With a lore bible, it's so much easier. You'll see Brennan Lee Mulligan searching on his laptop for a name, place or date on D20 and Critical Role. And you can hear Murph doing the same on Naddpod when someone (usually Emily) asks for someone's name.

I enjoyed a video on being a player at the table recently and wanted to share it with you all. It goes a bit long, I feel, but at the heart of it, for me, is that a D&D character shouldn’t just be a backstory stapled to a stat block. They should be an engine for play.

A person with needs, contradictions, blind spots, fears, assumptions, wants, and opinions that will actually form attachment to the world, story, NPCs, Players (and their characetrs) and, of course, sometimes collide with the world and with the party.

The best character choices are the ones that give the table something to work with.

Know what role you’re playing in the story in the dramatic sense. Are you the skeptic? The heart? The moral compass? The chaos goblin? The truth seeker? The person who says the ugly thing out loud? The one who makes bad decisions for interesting reasons? Your task is to bring something alive to the table that can be challenged, tempted, wounded, proven wrong, and transformed.

It touches on a misstep I see a lot of players make: arriving with every answer pre-written, or an end-game expectation. I believe you'll see better results if you leave blank spaces. Let the campaign teach you who your character is.

Track what your character believes. Track who they trust. Track who they resent. Track what scares them, what they’re avoiding, what they keep pretending not to want. Hell, do yourself a favor and jot some notes you observe in what the other players do here for their characters and they'll LOVE that too.

Because that’s where the actual characters in your campaign live. Not in the backstory or the expectations you set away from the table, but in the moments of pressure, development, change and its impact, and how it all feels during play.

How to Play Dungeons & Dragons: SlyFlourish.com

No idea the source, but here have this.

A magic or mundane artifact generates an effect harmful to the PCs, but it is guarded by the monster's minions.

The encounter's setting starts to collapse during the battle, and all the combatants will need to escape.

A boss monster has a 'second form' that activates mid-way through the battle.

Traps are placed throughout the battlefield, and characters must be wary of them.

The PCs must complete a ritual while fending off attacks from the enemy.

The encounter area is a series of cliffs or platforms, forcing characters to jump around and risk falling, possibly into a pit, water, or lava.

There is a monster that uses the blink spell or tunneling to avoid attacks between its turns.

A minor enemy has the ability to summon or call for reinforcements every round.

There are three sides, not two, battling in this encounter.

A disastrous environmental effect, such as an avalanche, wildfire, or earthquake, occurs in the area, dealing damage and forcing the combatants apart.

An anti-magic pulse affects some areas of the battlefield periodically, suppressing spells and magical items when it is active.

hi! i exclusively use google drive to plot my campaigns. i have sort of two main documents: my overall planning document, and my session planning document.

master doc.

so, for example, in a campaign i ran which was one hundred 3-4 hour sessions over .... nearly two years (one of my 3 players who are on here may correct me), i had one master doc for the whole campaign in which was all of the major lore and information i needed to build a story. here's what the subsections looked like:

now those sections could be massive or could be tiny, depending on how relevant they were to the plot, but they were a place for me to dump any and all thoughts i had relating to certain threads of the campaign. some even linked to other small documents when i felt they were getting to unwieldy for my master doc:

"the players" tab was a fairly important one where i kept track of npcs. sometimes, i would colour code the npcs based on faction as a quick reference, which was especially useful in the linked 'empire of masks' doc because that was for a part of the storyline where the players got involved in a civil war and i needed an easy way to keep track of who was on what side:

session planning doc.

so moving on from the master planning doc (and switching to a different campaign) i then had my session planning doc, which was a single google doc for each act, with sub-docs for each individual session beneath them + lore docs for relevant areas:

that first doc, "act ii" would be my overall act planning doc, and was purposefully fairly messy and included thoughts and important lore bits that didn't really fit anywhere else:

the session documents, however, were my bread and butter. this was where i had all my information for the upcoming session, my summary of the session beforehand, the date, etc.

that's just a section, the whole document is longer and covers all the areas the group could be likely to interact with. at this stage the campaign was fairly established, and i am lucky enough to DM for 8 players, so things are always moving, and i have a lot of trust in my players to explore what i've set out. i've found over the years playing with this particular group, i don't need so many obvious plot devices once the campaign is up and running, because the players are fairly proactive and will hunt things down.

other organising.

(In no particular order)

Players only follow bread crumbs if the floor is made of bread

Just because the party doesn't follow a plot point doesn't mean it's dead. You're developing it for later.

Consequences maketh man (or rather: character)

Don't be afraid to make your players cry, but do cry with them and hold their hand after

Presentation is 75% of DMing. If that's your costume or makeup or your body language and tone, put your best face forward. Your players will follow suit.

Build the world with your players. They'll love the world more for it.