#personal campaigns

6) What do you do when your players are stuck or aren’t picking up your plot threads?

Well, to be honest, I haven’t actually had much of a problem with that: I'm inexperienced enough to be like “THIS IS THE PLOT IN YOUR FACE.” If they somehow still don’t pick it up, I usually have a trusted NPC of theirs point out the thread, if they are truly stuck. But sometimes, I let them go in the direction they are heading, as that can lead to... interesting happenings.

14) Do you enjoy when a PC contributes something original to your narrative or lore? What’s been your favorite player addition big and small?

Oh of course I enjoy it when a PC contributes something! DND, to me, is a collaborative story. I can set up some things, but if a PC decides to go a different direction, or add some bit of lore I can use, it makes my job that much easier. We collaborate, and we tell the story together. I could have some sort of Beginning, Middle, End shenanigans, but everything in between is malleable and changed for the good, most of the time. Sometimes endings change due to the decisions the players make, and it just makes me, as the DM, so enthralled by their decisions, their actions, their characters, and how they interact with my world, it brings me joy.  That is why I am here, DMing for amazing people. Most of the time I really only have a Beginning, in that I set them up with my setting and a possible thing to do, but after that, it’s essentially sandbox mode. What that also means is that I Improv the hell out of things, however.

As for my Favorite player addition, I'm going to choose the one in one of my current campaigns, which I call Auriga. The player who added this nice tidbit was a person who joined in later in the campaign but only after a few sessions in so, it was good. He decided to play a Warforged: now, in my world, Machines of his like and other technological advances were broken due to a loss of power, namely Magic. Magic essentially had all but disappeared from the world. Until recently, and that's when this Warforged awoke. Now, because of that, that already adds a lot I can do for side quests, possible enemies, NPC interactions, all that. But this player also added in a big “home base” of sorts that the machine was supposed to protect: being that it was drafted into fighting an Enemy (who one of the important NPC’s is actually the same race of) at his time, he was not with this Garden of Shade, as he has called this place he was supposed to defend. So having that connection I can toy around with, given that is has been millennia since he was last awake, is also nice. What this guy also did was add a background affinity for a possible future multiclass: I love that to bits too, as having an actual, personal, feasible reason to multiclass as something either that happens in-game or through background is amazing.