#worldbuildingrpgideas

TLDR: My DM style has been influenced a lot by my experiences playing in TTRPGs, and I think there is a lot DMs can learn from being a player

Prior to even thinking about being a DM I had been a player for a number of years. I’d played in games from 3e, 3.5, Pathfinder, and even a weird space Homebrew 5e system. I didn’t really even consider the idea of being a DM until 2017, even though I had helped out other DMs and writers with a variety of things

So when I picked up the mantle as a DM, I already had a huge well of experience on what I liked as a player. So here are just a couple things I do as a DM that I learned from being a player:

I Avoid Prophecy Plots

Or more accurate if I plan to use a prophecy, I make the prophecy about what the villains are doing (rather than the PCs) The problem I found with prophecies is that it can make it feel like the PCs HAVE to do certain things in a certain way and they can’t fail if they do those things. This can end up taking away player agency and/or taking out a feeling of risk because the players know the DM can’t kill them off because that would ruin the entire prophecy

I Don’t Know the Answer

There is a lot of thinking power between 3 or 4 players, and a lot of times if I have a puzzle or encounter the players will come to very different solution than what I expect. For this reason I design a lot of things with the mindset that I am giving the player a problem and reason out a solution to it that they come up with, rather than trying to design something with a set solution and then guiding players towards that. 

Rule of Cool

There are a LOT of things I have let my players do simply because they lead to interesting or fun outcomes. As an example, a Wizard player in my home game usually carries the spell Grease because I ruled that the grease it creates is flammable and works like Alchemist Fire or a flask of oil. When players realize they can do things in an unorthodox way, a lot of times that makes for really cool moments for them, and so whenever I can bend the rules in favor of allowing a player to do something cool, I do. 

A Tarrasque is Always an Option

This is pretty much my motto as a DM. What I mean by this is that the DM has all the power in the multiverse, and so virtually nothing the players do or are capable of doing is OP relative to the DM. I have 0 problem giving players a shiny new toy or magic item on occasion and letting them feel like their character is becoming super powerful even if that means a little extra work for me in making challenging encounters. Players LOVE getting new items to use, so the logic behind this is pretty similar to the Rule of Cool. 

more dnd nonsense, love it

It has, but that’s all right. I don’t mind repeating now and again :P Though I don’t tell stories in a short manner, so forgive me for the text wall you’re about to have to read.

When is relatively simple. My awakening took something like three months, give or take here and there, from July 2017 to October 2017. July was when I first found the otherkin community and a lot of things started falling into place; October was when I started using the words dragonkin and draconic for myself and I consider that my awakening “anniversary,” if you will. (I use the day I started this blog as the specific date, since the two line up very closely and I can find that date very easily by plugging in “/tagged/otherkin/chrono” into the URL and looking at the date on the first post.)

As for how - I stumbled across an Otherkin FAQ website, though I honest-to-Goddess don’t remember how I got there or what I was actually looking for when I found it. Upon reading it and several of the links within, I was instantly interested. I spent the next few weeks obsessively researching and reading through the entire Tomorrowlands website, a site run by an older dragon named Baxil. As I was reading I realized that a lot of Baxil’s (and other dragons’) experiences lined up unnervingly closely to my own, and started questioning whether I might actually be one of them. I did more reading, and more research, and my lovely now-girlfriend was, as always, wonderful to me and let me talk to her about it even though she really had no more experience with it than I did. (As a result, you could say she was the first human I came out as otherkin to, though really it was less “coming out” and more “she was there for literally the whole awakening process.”)

Anyway, suddenly a lot of things were falling into place for me - the feeling of having wings and a tail that had followed me for as long as I could remember with no apparent reason why, which I’d always brushed off as imagination? These people had an explanation that fit. The weirdly nonhuman behavioral quirks I’d never dropped, and which often came to me more naturally than “human” responses? These people understood and related. The feeling of longing for the sky, that ache in my chest of missing something I’d never had? These people knew that ache as well as I did, and had a name for it: homesickness, or hiraeth.

Of course, there was a lot of doubt too. That kind of comes with the territory of something as weird and fringe as otherkinity. “This is crazy.” “This can’t possibly be real.” “But what if you’re faking it? Making this up?” And, perhaps most paralyzing for me, “What if you’re wrong?”

See, I loathe change. It’s not even necessarily that I fear it, though sometimes I do (and with something as integral as my identity, I definitely do), it’s that I have the ability and tendency to Settle. I get into a rhythm, and even if it’s not an ideal situation, as long as it’s the same not-ideal situation every week and I don’t have to change my responses much, I can be okay with that. The benefit of that: I can stay content in a less-than-ideal situation for a very long time compared to most people I know, which enables me to stick out hardships pretty well as long as they don’t come and go real fast. The downside: it’s super hard for me to get out of my comfortable rut and change, even if that change is probably for the better. So identity changes… really come hard to me. It’s why it took me so bloody long to figure out I was asexual (and why I had to have a literal mental breakdown over it to finally smack myself out of the “I’m straight” loop). It’s why it took me a lot of agonizing to decide to start calling myself dragonkin (though a lot less agonizing than it would have had a certain otherkin help blog not given me some very good advice). It’s almost definitely why I’m having problems coming to terms with the fact that I’m maybe, probably some form of nonbinary (but that’s another story for another day).

Anyway, that doubt is still around. Usually it kicks up on the days when I feel distinctly more human than dragon, since it’s remarkably easy to forget how much more dragon than human I can feel some days when it’s not one of those days. “This just proves you’re faking it,” that nasty little gremlin in the back of my head likes to say. “You’re wrong, and also you have a remarkable ability to cherry-pick your evidence,” I like to say back, imagining kicking said gremlin out the window of my thoughts.

But as aforementioned, a certain otherkin help blog did give me some advice that finally pushed me over that last edge of label-changing. They told me that there’s no harm in trying a label on just to see if it fits. That even if you find out you were wrong later, that’s okay, and you can always drop the label again. That it’s okay to try something new and see if it works for you, and to later decide that no, it doesn’t work, something else works better. That advice gave me the courage to start this blog to start recording my experiences and to start calling myself dragonkin. And now we’re here a little over a year later, and I’m more comfortable with and open about it every day.

I like how you assume a 3 year olds intent in saying that, then someone else assumes responding with detail would do anything for a 3 year old, and then you assume the reason for the person responding being hating women LMAO

There are two main styles people use when building worlds: Ground up, and Top Down.

Ground up is where you start with a small location- Typically a dungeon or town. Then you flesh that location out with possible NPCs, things of interest, history, etc. Then you figure out how things within that area relate to the nearby surrounding area, and then continue doing this process with ever-larger details until you have created the kingdom, continent, or whatever you think the largest relevant area would be.

Top down is the exact opposite. You start with the entire world (or even Realm) and figure out what the big details are- major kingdoms, continents, gods, etc. and then figure out how those relate to smaller things.

In short- Ground Up is creating small details and figuring out how those relate to a broader scale while Top Down is having a broad idea and working down to the finder details

While both of these require the same amount of work to complete a world, there are still advantages to both on a micro scale, and you may find that you prefer using one or the other overall. 

Ground Up is very good for oneshots and small campaigns. Unless your games are sandbox or high in improv, you may not need larger details at all- just a small contained area for your players to explore for a few sessions and some defined conflict in that area. If you stay focused on a small scope, it is much easier to determine what you might need to know about that area ahead of time. 

On the other hand, I have found Top Down to be a very good method for longer campaigns with overarching story lines. While the story line itself should change based on what your players do, mentally putting your focus on the big picture as a DM can make it easier to realize what could be happening in the world outside of your players.