Spelade
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Some players come into any RPG they play with a 4-page character origin and personal history that drives them to adventure — others can barely pick a name. What do you do with player character backgrounds like these? Would you rather have the deep story, and the story baggage that comes with it, or the blank campaign canvas? Do PC backstories ever lead to unfair play, special treatment or other problems in the TTRPGs you play?
In this week’s episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave dig into what they want and don’t want from character backstories, and how they use them in their games. Along the way, the guys talk about where their backstory boundaries are and a few times when background plans went way wrong.
3:00 Who writes the PC backstory: DM or Player?
8:00 The risks of embracing backstories
15:00 Background bias: Do you find PCs with more better backstories overshadow other players?
19:00 Using backstories to keep players invested
24:00 What do you want out of a PC backstory for your game?
29:00 How we make sure background details don’t become a problem
34:00 Some good ways to handle background contacts in the game
39:00 What’s off-limits in character backgrounds?
41:00 Do you give mechanical, in-game benefits based on backstories?
48:00 Secret history: Is it a good idea for the DM to “reveal” secret details the player doesn’t know about their character?
57:00 How secret do you keep player backgrounds and side-play?
60:00 What we want from a boss fight, and breaking down a good one: COS Baba Lysaga
66:00 Group backstories: What about having the whole party come in with a combined history?
72:00 When not using a PC’s backstory goes wrong
75:00 Final thoughts
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Players know speed kills, but DMs know lack of pace can wipe out whole games. How many encounters should you get through in a session? How long should combat take? What do you do when the players are board? How can you adjust pace if things are going to fast or too slow?
In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave reveal the details of their three wildly different pacing strategies and how they play out at the table, along with how they spot trouble and the adjustments they make when things aren’t going to plan.
1:00 Three DMs, three markedly different pacing strategies
2:00 Dave adjusts to Barovian time5:00 Is one combat per session enough for Thorin’s Wanderers?8:00 How Tony turns seven maps per session in Storm King’s Thunder11:00 Advancement speed: How does the XP chart influence game pace? (And, is WotC skewing XP to favor published modules with milestone leveling?)
19:00 Skyrim vs. Devil May Cry: Should your games ramble across multiple sessions or play out like self-contained episodes?
22:00 How session frequency (monthly/weekly/daily) and platform (Roll20) impact pace
26:00 Balancing roleplay and combat
30:00 Rewards and pacing: What makes it feel worthwhile for the players to be there?
39:00 How the party’s playstyle impacts game pace — and what DMs do that trains them
46:00 Whose responsibility is player engagement? (i.e. Am I getting paid to drag your lazy butt on an adventure?)
51:00 Finding character motivations when the players don’t have them
64:00 Ways to optimize the pace of your game
72:00 Optimizing initiative order
74:00 Final thoughts: What do you plan to get done in a night and how do you adjust if it’s not getting done
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The encounter is the heartbeat of most D&D games, especially in 5E. A lot of the system is built around them, and that’s where you get to play with the toys: Characters get to use their neat powers and DMs get to bring out cool new monsters, traps and challenges. Get your encounters right, and the players have a great time. Get them wrong, and your session may not be very fun.
In this episode, we talk about how we lay our own dastardly plans for encounters. We get into our philosophies for what we want to accomplish with encounters, as well as the tactics and tips we use to build the challenges. We’ll also talk about what hasn’t worked for us and times our encounters have gone totally wrong.
2:00 What’s the role of encounters in our games? What are we trying to accomplish with them?
8:00 Encounter balance … and how it’s not always what you think it is
12:00 What encounters teach players about the game world and where they are
17:00 Encounter balance, CR and party size
22:00 Building tension and intellectual engagement
28:00 Fast vs. slow encounters
29:00 How allowing players to occasionally do the impossible builds your group’s gaming mythology
35:00 What makes a bad encounter and how do you get the party to fix it?
41:00 When the party doesn’t listen, take the bait, or otherwise trigger your cool stuff
48:00 Using monster lore and backgrounds to shape encounters
51:00 Encounters without tactical thinking are boring — ways we keep them interesting
53:00 Motivations make the monster — and great encounters
56:00 Crunchy tips for building interesting encounters
65:00 Common encounter mistakes and how to tell when you’ve made one
75:00 TPK, TPC (capture) or TPR (retreat): How we handle encounter deaths and defeats
85:00 Unapologetic DMing
87:00 Final thoughts and how many rounds should an encounter go?
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Whether you have an epic story to tell or just hope your new RPG campaign survives week-to-week, mastering long-form storytelling is an essential part of being a Dungeon Master or game master in any game system. And it’s not easy.
As the person running the show, you experience the story in a way that’s completely different than the players. It may be a big picture in your head with tendrils in everything the party does, but for them it’s a series of immersive, detailed episodes that may or may not feel like they’re building a story. If you want your players to remember why they did it as much as what they did, you need to learn how to plant those story hooks deep and keep the party on them.
In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about how they try (and sometimes fail) to tell stories that players remember in their different styles of games. While they’re at it, you’ll get deep dives into how they’re running Curse of Strahd and Storm King’s Thunder; hear how players come to each game as different people; understand that PCs are unreliable narrators of their own stories; and see why, as the DM, you need to be telling intricate, sensitive, emotional stories … narrated in Knife Hand.
1:00 Where we get our campaign ideas
7:00 How much time we spend getting the ideas together
12:00 How we structure our games and how do the players experience them
13:00 Thorin: Thinking in worlds and themes
15:00 Players don’t experience your story the same way you do
16:00 Dave: Kit-bashing modules and going location-by-location at the players’ pace
19:00 Tony: Making the story your own
23:00 How to make the players (and their characters) care about your story
27:00 How the DM experience is different than the player experience, and what that means for your story and campaign
31:00 What do you do when the players aren’t getting your plot? (Storm King’s Thunder spoilers)
43:00 How to make plot points stick in your players’ memories
49:00 How do you handle PC death, especially when they’re essential to your story?
58:00 Making resurrection and divine intervention feel worthy
63:00 What do you do when players say your campaign ideas are dumb?
70:00 Session 0 and getting players on board with your campaign ideas (hat tip to Matt Colville)
76:00 Long story pacing, mini-climaxes and story beats
84:00 Planting plot points in an open-world, player-driven game
88:00 What role does treasure play? How does giving out more magic items affect your game?
91:00 The joy of Hunger of Hadar in a 20x20 room
97:00 Tony’s manual of off-prime skill and stat boosting
100:00 Final thoughts: Advice for new and veteran storytellers
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Older players who look at the D&D 5E rogue would be forgiven for thinking traps aren’t in the game anymore. In fact, throughout the 5E Players Handbook, traps are given less attention than in previous editions. But that doesn’t make them any less important to the game, or any less tricky for the DM to get right.
D&D Traps require the DM to walk a fine line. Balance them right, and your PCs will find themselves in a world of trouble that’s entirely their fault. But overdo it, or make traps too randomly deadly, and the party can slow to a crawl as they check for traps every 5 feet — cursing the DM the whole time.
Deathtraps are a dungeon classic, but the best traps cause chaos more than straight kills. Before you line the entryway of your fort with lightning runes, are you sure the people living there can get in and out themselves? Do these traps even make sense in the dungeon you’re running?
You want a trap to engage your players in some kind of problem-solving. In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about how they build hazards that up the mayhem and force layers to solve problems, without reducing traps to two rolls to avoid random death … at least not too often.
2:00 Do traps still fit into modern, encounter-heavy, exploration-light D&D with its murder rogues?
7:00 Your traps should make sense in the world and the environment, and also at your table
11:00 What do good and bad traps look like? Would you want to live next to it?
14:00 Do you want the party checking for traps every 5 feet? How careful do you want them to be?
19:00 What’s the goal of your trap makers?
27:00 Tony’s favorite traps: The Mirror of Opposition, Glyphs of Warding
29:00 Dave’s favorite Traps: The no-trap trap, the stone wall that splits the party
34:00 Aside: Handling magic weapons with unarmed PCs or PCs with specific weapon needs
40:00 Cursed treasure and the Lich that faked his death to let the party TPK themselves
44:00 “That was on us!” What good traps teach the party
45:00 Bad Traps: Revisiting the Murder House debate and the salt it left on the table
51:00 Bad Traps, Marvel Edition: The “Big Bomb” with multiple fail states and what it taught the PCs
58:00 Traps that create chaos and disadvantages for monsters to exploit are better than instant death
64:00 Trap specialist classes vs. D&D 5E’s approach where anyone can find/disarm traps
72:00 Final thoughts
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There’s a myth that “old-school” Dungeons & Dragons was mostly a minis game. That may have been the case in the very earliest days, but throughout 1st and 2nd Edition, we played without minis and maps. Our game happened entirely in “The Theater of the Mind.” And, in many ways, it was a different experience from the maps-and-minis style of game most DMs run today.
Some DMs still prefer theater of the mind. Thorin, for one! Dave’s not as hot on the idea, and Tony kind of likes it both ways. Would you? Even if it’s not your preferred style, you might run a theater of the mind game whenever you don’t have all the accessories for maps-and-minis play
In this episode, we answer Marshall, a DM from Brazil who asked to explain how to play D&D in Theater of the Mind. We talk about what we like about this style of play, what we don’t, and our best tips for making theater of the mind games flow and resonate with your PCs.
1:00 What is theater of the mind? How we use it and when we use it
5:00 Thinking beyond the battle map
9:00 Which style has faster combat: Mas-and-minis or theater of the mind?
13:00 What are the players paying attention to: You or the map?
15:00 How do you keep ruling consistency in combat without a map?
17:00 Tips for tracking turns, distances and combat details behind the DM screen in theater of the mind
21:00 Is D&D traditionally a minis game? Busting the myth that 1st, 2nd and other early editions were “mostly" minis games
23:00 When should you break theater of the mind and show the party a map?
27:00 Problems that can arise with theater of the mind
30:00 Pressure on the DM to provide engaging descriptions that focus on the right things
37:00 How much longer does it take to prep maps and minis compared theater of the mind?
41:00 How Tony’s game survived the Frost Giant Jarl in Storm King’s Thunder (on a map!)
43:00 Combat descriptions with minis vs. theater of the mind
46:00 All Eyes on Me! The biggest advantage of theater of the mind
53:00 Tips for doing theater of the mind well
·Simplify movement into 1-move units equal to the party’s most common speedTailor the length and detail of your descriptions to the roomLet players do things beyond what you had planned – they’re adding to the storyGet cool with your combat descriptions! Adjudicating area effect spells64:00 Final thoughts
