#dungeonmastering

Last session, the party finally got partway through the final puzzle encounter; it was a long walkway filled with magic walls if varying kinds, each meant to be overcome by a different character and their strengths, with three characters meant to fight against a horse of enemies trying to smash down the door they came through.

The only hints I gave to them was a vague and cryptic prophetic dream.

Not only did they quickly work out their roles, but did so WITHOUT THE PROPHECY BEING TOLD TO THEM, because the person who received it was paranoid about self fulfilling prophecies.

The big bruiser, the Laughing Mask, had the hardest time of it, he was having just awful, terrible rolls.

OOC I asked him "To your character, what is a sword? (Hint, be philosophical here)"

His response was "A sword is a life, given in it's service and taken by it's edge, to live by the sword is to exalt it and to die by it is inevitable."

And I'm like "WELL SHIT SON THATS A GOOD ANSWER."

So, his sword isn't quite cutting the mustard, his sword, the Anvil Cutter, just can't get through the force wall and do enough damage. He makes a few crit fails which damage his weapon pretty heavily. He keeps trying, though, even after he is told that if he critfails one more time it'll shatter.

He finally rolls a few really high rolls (crits) and I tell him to make one more roll.

He crits. And then confirms crit.

And I say to him, "Your adamantine sword shatters. Violently. Shrapnel embeds itself into the ceiling and walls."

The party goes nuts, angry, wtfs all around.

"And yet, the cut continues, as if it was there."

Party is in the "wait what" stage, I let them be confused for a second.

"A sword is a life, given and taken. You have become the sword, and it is become you."

Laughing Mask starts quietly but obviously losing his shit.

"I don't have a name for this enchantment yet, but consider it similar to brilliant energy. A sword of imperceptible life force, infinitely keen, rests on your hands, forged by your discipline and pursuit. The Anvil Cutter has shed it's soft tempering clay to reveal it's true and stunning form."

@dungeons-and-danis was asking about how to plan out a campaign. I write out my advice here, but several of the steps in writing an excellent campaign revolved around putting all your DM creativity into the player’s current adventure, so I feel it’d be a disservice to not do a followup on how to write bomb-ass adventures that will captivate your players. 

Step one: inspiration

inspiration for an adventure can come from anywhere, (including my sideblog @dailyadventureprompts) and I highly advise keeping a journal to write down stray thoughts and an associated google doc where you can keep ideas in hard copy. That said, you can generally get the necessary “seed” for an adventure by finding something that excites you, whether it be a monster, a dramatic scenario, a particular character... and building out from there. The fact that it EXCITES you is important, as your enthusiasm for your own ideas is what’ll drive your creative process forward. 

Step two: brainstorming

Once you’ve got your seed, you’re going to want to give it rich soil in which to grow. Get some scrap paper or a journal ( not your campaign journal) and start asking the six basic questions ( who, what, when, where, why, how). Note that answering these are going to be a LITTLE different than normal: 

Who: Npcs are important for providing an emotional anchor to the ongoing events of your adventure. Whether it be potential allies in upcoming conflicts, antagonists to push the world towards chaos, or normal people caught in between. Work to build a cast of likeable characters your players can form bonds with, even if that bond is with a scenery chewing villain your players love to hate. 

What: Generally any adventure has two or three crowning moments of awesome. Events that the story hinges on but must build up to in order to EARN that payoff. If an adventure involves fighting a dragon in a disused mine complex, you could just point the players at the nearest tunnel entrance and let them blunder their way along, but to properly ground that setpiece you need do some groundwork to earn it. What gets the palyers into the mine? What threat does this dragon pose? what effect has this event had on the wider world? What sort of history is at play here? what’s the average person’s opinion on this, and who disagrees with them and how? 

When: To keep your players focused and interested and “on mission” I can recommend this tip: when the players neglect a section of the plot or subplot that you want them to draw their attention to, “upgrade” the threat posed by that plot element. Say you have one subplot involving bandits and another involving a haunted inn. No matter which element your players investigate, you can draw their attention back to an overlooked element by making it intrude upon the player’s lives. Maybe the bandits mount an attack while the player’s are playing ghostbusters, or maybe the spirits haunting the inn possess an ally of the party while they were out battling the brigands.  This technique can be very useful for drawing your player’s attention back to the game, but be sure to reward them with a little downtime for their efforts. 

Where: The location of an adventure isn’t just a backdrop, it provides a useful toolbox of stock characters, potential gameplay mechanics, and inbuilt player assumptions. If an adventure takes place in a port frequented by pirates, one could easily extrapolate adventures involving treasure hunts, dealing with untrustworthy sea-dogs, and dramatic sea battles. A high-fantasy trade town likely has local festivals, a wilderness full of foul beasts to track, and scheming merchants/nobles looking to turn a profit. 

Why: While writing out a full history of your world is likely a useless timesink, its important to know the causal chain of why things are happening the way they are, and what will happen after the players interact with them. Start with vaugeries, then sketch in details as needed. Have a few different endings in mind for each plot element, and maybe include some that your players are likely to fail.   

How: The bridging factor between the adventure as you’ve planned it and the players are the HOOKS. Reasons for your players to care about your adventure, things that tie them to this particular settlement/setting, and temptations to dangle before them so they’ll get embroiled in the goings on of your world. 

If a stray idea comes across in your brainstorming, WRITE IT DOWN. Nothing is off the table at this stage. Ideas are always useful, even if they’re not useful in your current adventure. 

 Step three: putting it in order

if an element isn’t working, throw it out,  try including another one. Do this till you’ve got a handful of stable setting elements, then get to work arranging them. You’ll want to focus in on the player’s experience, how you’re going to introduce them to each element without being too heavy handed, the early forshadowing or lore you NEED to get out of the way. After they know the very basics of what they need to know, let them discover the rest on their own terms, create a few low-stakes scenarios for them to get tangled up in which slowly reveal to them the forces at work in your world.

There will be “morphs” of “servant;” a generic name for these beings made from biomass that are often semi-amorphous and similar in role to cells int he human body, because why not.

The Basic Servants are humanoid in shape, attack with weapons or claws and are very weak; they will run/scatter if confronted and seek to set off traps or gather en masse or find other morphs to protect them. they do daily work, moving objects, repairing walls, etc. 

The Defender Servants appear to be like a hulking body hidden behind a black cloak, but in reality they are essentially an amorphous, animate cloak. They specialize in grabbing, engulfing, and capturing or crushing intruders, as well as going out to gather more biomass. They are aggressive and mindless, feel no pain, and can work together very well. 

The Manager Servants are the first servants to show any kind of above animal intellect. they can command other servants directly, and they provide an AoE buff to servants, based on their better control and tactics. They have no compassion and mercilessly seek to kill anything that violates their goals, whatever those are. They do not negotiate, and if captured, will either kill themselves or seek to draw everything they can towards their captor. 

The Hunter Servants are assassins who use stealth and pack tactics to overwhelm and assault enemies at their most vulnerable, using every unherhanded trick in the book to whittle their opponents down and end them. 

The Reviver Servants, which are like skittering health potions to the rest of the servants, they sacrifice their own health to heal others, until they wither and die. 

Originally I was gonna have a character relevant tot he story as the main boss, but now I’m gonna have it so the character in question had an experiment go wrong and he, along with everyone else in his castle, were killed, and the remains of his servants became a sort of malicious hive mind. An allegory that one always takes risks when they tread on untrod ground. 

I have a rough map of how rooms are connected; the Castle, I’ve decided, will be actively trying to work AGAINST the hivemind, as a small fragment of the master lies within it, trying to fight back in the sake of revenge. That said the Castle is mad/insane, so it will likely use it’s horrible tricks on anyone who enters. 

Some tricks;

321 room;

This room leads to a great variety of other rooms; but is smaller than a usual hallway, and more confusing. Each room is 15′x15′, and has four archways. The left way  is number 1 , the front way is number 2, the right way is number 3, and the way one just entered is number 0. The order in which you walk through each archway determines the end location like a combination lock. Space stacks on top of itself in this regard. 

The Flat Slope;

Visually, the hallway is a flat, straight, level hall. As one walks down the hall, on gets the sensation that they are walking downhill, more and moreso until the end of the hall, where the far wall is now more like the floor. (But what would this be useful for?)

Incubation Chain;

A set of incubators for Servants, which hang off a chain suspended on the wall. The chain passes along into a noneuclidan space longer than t’s external length and severely reticulated; allowing much more extensive storage in a relatively smaller external area. 

Dumbwaiter halls;

(Because tumblr’s mobile messaging system eats any post you’ve not fully typed out, I lost an ask from someone who was stressing out over running their first game for their friends. Sorry anxious stranger! I hope this post finds its way to you somehow.)

I think it is a universal DM experience that we worry about making the game “fun” for our party. Personally I suffered through years of writersblock with regards to my prep, paralyzed by the idea that my players would hate what I’d prepared but not having the tools, knowledge, or tradecraft necessary to act otherwise. 

There’s no chapter in the rulebooks on game design and fun, just like there’s no chapter on roleplay. These are things that the original designers considered incidental. That you and the other players would make your own fun as you butted up against the inscrutable wall of whatever module you happened to be playing. This is where you get archetypes of “killer dungeonmasters” or “The thief that steals from the party just to bully another player” come from. Tradtionally our hobby has had no way of quantifying “fun” and so you had bored players scraping the bottom of the barrel for stimulation. 

Fortunately for us, we have the internet, and friends (like myself) who can spend years studying game design and cultivating all that knowledge into an easy to use checklist:  

Match your player’s expectations:  I can’t stress how important it is to take the pressure off yourself as a DM. If your players are new, they don’t have Critical Role level expectations. Just like you’re going to need to run lot of games to build up enough skills to be good as Matt Mercer, your players are going to need to PLAY IN a lot of games to build up the skills/standards/desires of veteran players. You’re actually in a convenient spot where your players haven’t yet experienced any of the traditional cliches, so you’ve now got an arsenal of material to throw at them. Likely they won’t have any standards beyond “ Play Dungeons and Dragons” so don’t get yourself bent out of shape by trying to create a whole world and plotting out the adventure to level 20. 

Keep it simple: When prepping, focus on creating small-scale adventures. Don’t threatan to blow up the world, unleash an evil god, or start the zombie apocalypse because in all likelihood you’re not good enough to pull that off. ( NO one’s good enough to pull that off, especially in the first adventure). A kid falls down a well and when your players are fishing them out, they see a mysterious and ancient door in the stonework.   There’s been raids by the gnolls out in the hills, where is their lair? An ogre drunkenly wandered into town last night and is still a bit sloshed, see if you can negotiate? If you’re really stuck,look up “adventure hooks” online and write down any that seem fun to you. 

Don’t be afraid to be a cartoon:  I was going to call this “characterization” but really “be a cartoon” is a much easier way to summarize my point.  The Grim-Serous tone of most modern fantasy is not something you can expect to maintain in a hijinx laden tabletop game, and most of the rules  meant to simulate the tone are distinctly anti-fun. Instead picture your campaign in your head like a disney movie. The characters and monsters are given over the top character traits to get their point across to the audience, which gives YOU more to work with as you’re roleplaying them.  Make jokes, have a bit of slapstick, sure your players are going to have some serious moments later on but for the most part they’re playing to have an escapist fantasy and there’s no easier way to do that than tapping into their childhood. 

Moving parts: This is the most “game design-y” topic i’m going to have on the list, but I’ve found its given me an amazing guideline whenever I’m stuck in my prep.  D&D is made for the players to win it, and you as the DM facilitate that winning. You are creating the challenges and narrative that’s going to make your friends into heroes.  The game is meant to be beaten, but at the same there needs to be SOMETHING that can be lost to keep the narrative tension going.  This is where the idea of a “moving part” comes in, something that can go very wrong for our heroes, while they still overcome the greater challenge and save the day.  Moving parts can be as broud as a subplot in an adventure “ Yes they stopped the bandits, but did they realize that the duke was the one masterminding it through the coded letters they found?”, or as specific as a gimmic in one encounter “ While we were fighting these goblins, a bear wandered out of the woods and is attacking people on both sides”.   

Mix it up: There are many different kinds of players, and the surest way to alienate some of your group is to throw only one kind of encounter at them over and over and over again. Even in the wilderness or the hostile environment of a dungeon, you need to vary what type of scenes your running for your players to keep them engaged and on their toes. The four broadest archetypes of encounter are Story/socializing, Problem solving, Exploration, and Conflict/combat.  I use the acronym “SPEC” to remember to do this, so while I’m planning I ask myself “ Is this up to spec?” 

I hope all that helps some of you out there. It took me years to work out. Please feel free to contact me if you’d like me to elaborate on any particular points. 

Being a Dm is different than being a novelist in one major way, in that a novelist can plan, write, and edit a work as much as they want until they reach a workable state.  Both love their creations, but the writer is far more like a gardener, who can coax things into place or retry with the next draft. The DM is like a sculptor: The future of our campaign exists in a cloud of possibility and once a choice has been made, we just have to shape the rest of the work around it. 

A friend who’s about to try being a Gamemaster for the very first time just asked me for some advice. I thought it might be nice to share my reply,  re-written slightly for a general audience, here for others.

If everybody is having fun then you're doing it right. Any rules mistakes can be addressed in the next session, maybe in the moment if you catch it quick enough for a one turn re-wind & retcon. Even after doing it for 20+ years my players are easy-going when I fiddle something, so your friends should certainly be kind to you on your first attempt! Everybody is there to enjoy themselves, not judge you.

Try to keep things moving. If players get bogged down in conversation, have an NPC nudge them,  maybe mention the weather is becoming ominous, or even have a wandering monster(s) show up. Think about how tv shows and movies are generally better if the characters don't sit down and talk for thirty minutes about who'll check the door for traps!

Don't let players ask you if you think their plan will work. Dunno why, but even veterans will do that sometimes. I tend to go with "I dunno, what do you think?", then they remember I'm "God" and not a fellow player.

Cycle your attention around the table... ...so you don't get a solo show with the loudest player doing everything and the others sitting back staring at the ceiling. I tend to go left to right around the table, allowing roughly one action per "turn", then back across from right to left again. In combat you follow initiative order, of course.

I’m pretty sure that is a word. I love RPG games and have been playing D&D 5E for a while now, so wanted to start my own campaign. 

I was telling them for weeks that I was not going to make it easy for them in the first session, they should know how to play by now and should be able to handle any situation. 

So I unleashed nearly 5,000 goblins at once. 

Instead of rolling for normal combat, a group of NPC’s appeared to save the group.

I then started to run a “cinematic combat mode”.

This was a simple case of rolling for initiative and allowing the player to keep using as many actions as they like to perform some more impressive fighting results. 

I still held a couple of regular structured combats, but in cinematic mode the few thousand goblins that were charging for them stood no chance. 

I am not a stickler for the rules if I am honest. I use them as a guideline to how a mechanic works, then get distracted by writing a story, a cutscene, a single line of dialogue from an NPC has kept me away from getting to know the REAL mechanics of the game.

In short; I had a theory that my group would be able to defeat the army of the goblin city.