#dm starterpack

To me, one of the best marks of good DM advice (or for any creator) is not just sharing tips about what you COULD do, but WHY you should do it in the way the person is recommending; helping you build a methodology of better play.

Recently stumbled across this channel in some of my youtube deep dives and I have been solidly impressed since.

DM Tip: Coloring outside the lines. 

A piece of advice that’s vitally important for DMs, especially newer DMs to recognize is that presenting our party with a fleshed out, vibrant world is a magic trick mostly reliant on us having enough easily adaptable world-pieces laying around. It’s a matter of building the track as they go, and though modules provide a box full of pre-selected track pieces that can be useful building that backlog, the process is still reliant on YOU to fill in the blank space and account for the odd directions your party might end up in. 

As such, it’s important for us to look at modules not as a recipe that must be followed to have a good time, but as a concentrated dollop of inspiration/jumping off point upon which we can create our own adventures. There’s a similar philosophy behind my own adventure prompts, as I seldom expect people to be able to use them 1:1. Even I have to adjust things and change details when turning a series of individual prompts into the material of a campaign. 

The first step when you’re thinking of adapting an existing work  (whether it be a module or a narrative you want to turn into an adventure)  is to ask yourself and your players if this is the right fit for what they want to play.  There’s no point in adapting an adventure focused around a heist if your party wants to be out exploring the wilderness, and there’s no point in adapting a wilderness exploration adventure if your party wants to do a political thriller/urban mystery.  Just like with creating a homebrew campaign, you want to match the story to the expectations of your players. Trying to build a machine without knowing what it’s for is an exercise in frustration, as is trying to build a story without knowing the general direction you want it to be going.  

Next is to read the work back to front, making notes as you go, specifically looking for: 

Interesting ways the narrative could spin off from this, and what adventures might occur if your party make different decisions than what the story allows. 

What emotional work you need to build into the party’s backstory/previous adventures/to have them make the decisions you NEED them to. 

What happens if the party fail at each major step of the journey. 

Ways you think you could do X thing better. 

After you’re done with that, read another work with similar themes/subject matter with an eye of salvaging it for ideas to improve the first. Most modules have a direct path in mind with a few major branching points. What you want is raw material for when your party zigs when the original writers expected them to zag, as well as extraneous details that can make otherwise thin plot beats into sturdy pillars of your story. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve averted disaster or disinterest in my games by importing an npc or worldbuilding detail from something I’d recently read/watched into a narrative I’d thought was fully planned out but was just failing to fire

Finally, sit down with a notebook and try writing out the adventure step by step. Any time you get fuzzy on the details, it means you haven’t internalized the story you want to tell, and would end up running things by the book. This isn’t bad necessarily, but it’s the difference between a musician who has to go slow and follow along with the sheet music vs one who’s practiced enough to be confident in their performance. Recreating it like this might also let you see narrative potential that wasn’t necessarily evident in your first attempts.

DM Advice: More Than You Can Chew

Time and again I’ll have folks write in with a really solid idea for a big picture campaign concept or third act twist with a request to help bridge the gap between the low levels/start of the campaign and the thing they’re excited for. I love helping these folks, but as someone who looks for structural answers to problems it’s made me think there might be something lacking in how we’re teaching DMs to tell stories.

If I had to break it down into pure fundamentals: The constant guiding theme in any and all adventure or campaign writing is that whatever the party happen to be doing, whether it be hunting monsters, protecting an ally, exploring a ruin, or planning a heist, It’s only a piece of a far larger story. This larger story operates at a greater scale than the party currently has a means of dealing with, initially making them feel like small fish in a big pond and providing a great sense of achievement when they finally do manage to take on the larger threats.

 On a Campaign Basis:

When plotting a story arc you should start with a goal, something difficult but conceptually achievable that the party can throw themselves at with cleverness or daredevil bravery. Rescue the Heir, Save the Village, Avert the Disaster, Steal the Jewel. The task is not impossible, but the solution is not obvious requiring them to explore, be crafty, and get inventive. It’s best if they’re invested in accomplishing this goal in some way, so make the stakes personal and resonant with the characters and their desires.

In the background however you’ve got something else cooking, a larger story that the party are only pieces in, a conflict between individuals and forces far larger than they’ve previously dealt with that’s been going on unseen. Start with how the party achieving their initial goal will affect the world: who’s it going to piss off? what tenuous balance does it disrupt? What had to be done to keep that balance in place? Do any of the power players in this arrangement see the party as their opportunity to make a move and so throw their support behind this seemingly innocuous goal? What prices do they extract?

Villains are generally going to be your primary link between the small and large scale stories, but it’s important to set them up correctly; the villains are acting/reacting in relation to the larger story and their actions trod on the lives of the party/the people the party care about. In trying to correct this injustice (if only for selfish reasons) the party gain the villain’s attention/the attention of that villain’s enemies ( though whether they be allies or villains themselves depends on the story) and suddenly find themselves caught up in the events of the larger narrative.

While it’s a good idea to plan the goal based adventure as something the party can objectively “win”, I prefer setting up the background scenario as a delicate sort of jenga tower: things were inevitably going to fall apart but there’s no way to predict how. That’s because your players a) are chaos agents b) have agency, and it’s all about seeing how they choose to act/react in the face of an overwhelming scenario. 

The small scale story is about the lives of the heroes/people, where as the larger scale story is about the outcome of ideas/the world.  You do the small story first because getting your audience to care about themes and lore is best done through getting them to care about characters first, and then using their plights and passions as a lens to see the bigger picture.

Advice on using this technique on specific adventures under the cut:

Tableskills: The Proactive DM Voice

One of the most fundamental lesions I learned over the course of becoming a great DM was that it was my job to push the story forward, not my players.  When I was younger I was terrified of taking any agency upon myself for fear of railroading my group, thinking that my job was merely to read out prepared text and design a playground for my players to explore as they saw fit. Needless to say, no matter how much planning i did or how big I made my campaign world it never made my party any more energized, instead bleeding out their attention until they became listless and the group/campaign dissolved. 

Once I made the change to DM driven play, things changed almost instantly. My once distracted players became excited collaborators, looking to steer the runaway engine that was my narrative. Where as before they were directionless, having infinite shallow options, they were now focused on the road ahead of them, trying to dodge upcoming hurdles while reacting to the unexpected ones.  

This change took some getting used to, but became most evident in how I narrated my games, cutting down on extraneous calls for rolls,  chaining together scenes until a big finale at the end of the session, using my infinite power as narrator to push receptive players into interesting situations that progressed both the story and their character arc. Over time I began to think of these changes and a bunch of others as “proactive DM voice”, a skill that I think players and dungeonmaters alike could benefit from learning. 

Lets look at an example, lifted from one of the very first modules I ever ran: The party stands at the edge of a tremendously large fissure, and has to lower themselves a hundred or more feet down to a ledge where they’ll be ambushed by direrats.  You could run this in a rules literal sense: reading out the prepared text then waiting for the party to come up with a solution, likely dallying as they ask questions. Have them make athletics checks to descend the ropes, risk the possibility of one of them dying before the adventure ever begins. Then you do it two or three more times as they leapfrog down the side of the canyon, wasting what was perhaps half an hour of session time before you even got to any of the fun stuff. 

Or you could get proactive about it: 

Securing your ropes as best you can, you belay over the side of the fissure, descending down in a measured, careful pace aiming for the most stable looking outcrop of rock, still a hundred or so feet above the canyon’s base. A few minutes and about two thirds of the way through your decent [least athletic PC] looks like they’re struggling, their hands are coated in sweat and they can feel unfamiliar muscles burning in complaint.  I need [PC] to make me an athletics check

Rather than waiting for the players and the dice to make a story for me, I took the extra step in my prep time to think of something interesting that might happen while they’re venturing through this section of the map. I specifically designed things so that happenstance wouldn’t kill off one of my heroes, but they might end up damaged and in a perilous situation should the fates not favour them that particular moment. 

Likewise, this planning has let me prepare a number of different angles that I could use to prepare the next scene: with an injured player ambushed by multiple rats while their allies dangle a few rounds away or with the party saving their friend and descending together, too much of a threat for the rats to tackle all at once, leading them to stalk the party through future encounters.

This is already getting a bit long, but for those interested in more ways you can adopt a proactive DM voice, I’ll give more examples under the cut

Fantastic advice from a fantastic DM, especially when combined with all those amazing community produced maps

DM Tip: Being a better Storyteller

I talk a lot on this blog about constructing better stories, but I frequently forget to talk about what I call “Tableskills”, those parts of the DM’s craft that are less about formulating plots and laying out narratives than they are relating those narratives to the people around the table.  The thing is, teaching tableskills is a lot harder than just suggesting ideas about stories that could be told, as every DM or prospective DM has their own particular type of storytelling that they’ll grow into as they master the art. As such, there’s no hard and fast rubric I can pass down, only the things that have improved my own performances over time.

The basics: The DM Narrator Loop

I’ve been playing d&d for well over two decades now, and I’ve never heard the DM’s art summed up any better than this video by VOX: Describe, Decide, Roll.

You as the DM Describe what situation the party is in and ask them what do they do next ( in a very leading tone, pulling them forward or offering them direct choices)

The players Decide among themselves what they’re going to do, with clarifying input as needed.  

If anything needs to be decided by dice, you Roll and figure out the outcome, then you snap right back to the descritption phase. 

Keep doing this and your party will be guided along your storiy at a steady clip while having a lot of fun. Keep rolling to when it’s really important, and you’ll be doing just fine.

All Killer No Filler

The most basic trick I’ve learned for tabletop storytelling is asking yourself “ what’s the most interesting thing that could happen this session “ and then telling a story abouthow the party gets from where they are to where that interesting thing happens.  Sometimes that interesting thing kicks down their door and forces them to react, other times it doesn’t quite happen on time, and you need to elude to the fact that it’s about to happen next time they play. Sometimes your players will take the initiative upon themselves to make interesting things happen, ranging from deep roleplay moments to taking an unexpected narrative turn and throwing all your plotting out the window. Learn to love when this happens, but don’t rely on it. Players should be given the spotlight when they stand up and take it, but that doesn’t mean you should shove them on stage before they’re ready. 

Because you’re running a live session and thus have limited “screen time” in which your interesting thing might happen, you should focus on scenes that push the party forward, building narrative momentum while offering the party a chance to break off and do their own thing. “Does anyone want to do anything before we X” and variations of it is your best ally here, as including a pending time limit spurs the party to act before circumstances change while also giving them a direction to fall back on when they don’t want to make a decision. This is where radically open world/hands off DMs fail, because the players showed up expecting to be part if a story rather than entirety making their own fun while a friend if theirs silently chides them for not pretending to be an elf good enough. TLDR: Always be moving towards something interesting happening inside the session, but never be afraid to detour when it looks like your party is going to do your job for you.