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So as part of character creation (session 0) you ask your players for their characters priorities and goals and then create the adventure with these in mind to build in the tough choices? Not sure I’d have the skill to weave in something for each of the players that doesn’t come across as contrived 😊

All fantastic advice! The Statue of the Duke of Wellington will feature in my game now!

That gives me some things to think on, thanks for the excellent video!

I love the fact this comes out just after my PC Summer in our DnD campaign had to make the tough choice whether to bury her personality and identity as an entertainer to join the lycan gang or stick to her ideals and go her own path but by becoming an enemy to them. Yes she's a goodie-two-shoes and she will try to somehow find that third option that no one considered or nobody knew existed where lycans no longer have to live in shadow and she gets to get closer to the gang members but the path going there will be bumpy to say the least. It's not a journey I ever expect to be easy since no story that I know of ever goes beyond the fact that "well, lycans just kinda turn evil on a full moon and eat people, nothing you can do about it", putting them in a societal stranglehold where whether or not they get any choice or say in the matter just becomes a non-decision, kind of like stealing a player's agency would. So I already experimented a ton with the idea in one of my own campaigns where Shifters and lycans kind of undergo a spiritual training to gain perfect control of their lycanthropic side and wanted to see how other DMs would tackle that sort of thing by making a character who left her tribe too early to gain that ability. So now we're in this really awesome predicament where she _knows_ of lycans who do **not** go crazy and also lycans who **do** and her mission becomes figuring out how to become that bridge so that she doesn't just spread false hope but actually makes a difference for the betterment of lycan lives.

This Lucas Frost Jr. sounds very handsome.

“Toys are there to be played with.” What a wonderful and refreshing way to look at our campaign worlds! This vid was awesome!

This is great advice, thank you!

great video! looking forward to seeing more from you :D

I think, one of the most smart worldbuilding method is doing FromSoftware way: build a civilization then destroy, build another one on top of the ruins then destroy it too. Doing this enough of times, you won't need to info dump. There will be no one that can info dump. There will be gaps but they're justified bauacse everything is ruined.

Am I a masochist. I create worlds in my head, and want players to wreck them?

I *love* your retellings of local events in the language of D&D.

Amazing video. Especially your examples helped so much by showing exactly how to make this work

Great system. I've used it for horror sci-fi and whimsical fantasy, cyberpunk and gritty westerns. Low HP and easy mechanics that don't get in the way of the game. Great online community too.

A great use off accents is for shibboleths. We could tell what street someone was from, or what school they went to, back in the day, and by this determine "what foot they kicked with". Hilarity and sectarian violence were equally possible outcomes. A great example of this is the bar scene in Inglorious Basterds, although that was more gesture related than accent. Dialect words added to the accent adds to the mix. I moved to Grampian many years back and was bewildered when asked if I wanted a "fancy piece with my fly". To me a fancy piece was a posh sandwich and a fly was a fly. In fact I had been asked if I wanted a bit of cake with my cup of tea.

Saw the Duke. Must be a Weegie, says I. RPGs? Attention grabbed. You have a new sub, comrade.

Awesome

Thanks for an entertaining presentation of incisive takes.

Love this! Instant subscription.

Great video. Great to see Rich on the road, those story fragments were really fun!

I just recently fully comprehended that I am also a LLM so I should just respond appropriately to players. I need to prep the scene a bit to understand what's in front of the group, but it just works. My best scenes are when i am fully present and ignoring the cognitive load

I love this concept and thank you for putting words to something I’ve been struggling with <3

You have a great ear for story telling about story telling. Cheers

Another fantastic video!

This was a completely random video on my suggested list and I'm glad it was! There were a good number of tips in here I've never heard before and I listen to a lot of DMing advice videos and have played for a long time. I'll be watching more of your stuff

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Most spellcaster classes can be "split" into a "master/minion" variety. So a druid can either have learned it through study or they might have been gifted by some form of natural spirit. If they learned it through study the class works as it always have. But if the player wants to be a minion they keep the skill list but instead of earning spells they earn the ability to ask the spirit to help them. (Doesn't quite work with for example warlocks they have their own mechanics for their interaction with their boss. But most classes can be done that way.) Now you don't always know how your spirit will help out but it will help. You don't get to say "I want to cast X" you instead say "please help me in this fight" and the GM then decides what spells gets flung around. As a tradeoff you get 20% boosted exp alongside a novel play style that works if even just one player wants to run a more chaotic way while the rest of the table wants to stay traditional. It's not a perfect solution but its a way to introduce a wilder/softer system to the table without stuffing it down the throat of the guy who wants to play hos class/race combo his way.

Congrats on a viral video! Super helpful, fun history, and great editing definitely make it deserving of the thousand views it's garnered in a day, my friend. I'm definitely going to be using that second tip about 'time and place for everything' to shape up my upcoming adventure with my friends this December to make a big paradigm shifting event in the world. Looking forward to another video :D

I've been using a homebrew world that I've spent over 20 years expanding on. Tons of crap that's ultimately(probably) only for my own entertainment. When a campaign ends I usually roll the story forward 10-20 years and let the characters succeed in their goals. For example I had a group that played bad guys and ended up establishing a cult. Now after the campaign ended that cult have flourished and grown into a large villainous faction. And in the new campaign the heroes wind up facing off against the original founders as the next BB.

No matter how dramatic past or current events, life goes on, and people cope with it. And someone will probably put a cone on it. If you want your life-changing lore to seem realistic, make it dull. For example, if you do have two empires locked in a thousand-year war, the place to look is probably somewhere like North/South Korea and India/Pakistan. Yes, there's tension and skirmishes, but the war has become very formalised. Maybe the yearly peace talks have become a festival people look forward to. Maybe there's one valley where soldiers stare at each other from barricades, while on literally every other part of the border people are trading and commuting. There's a popular series of plays about the war, played in both empires with the names switched around. The evil emperor's ambassador is coming to the wedding of the lord tyrant's daughter next week.

Great video! Earned my subscription!

I LIVE in that dark playground.

I really love this! Thank you for sharing good advice and glimpses of real-world history around you. Very inspiring! I swear I thought that traffic cone on the thumbnail was a flex of your Photoshop skills and not the real deal 😅

this was such a charming video; here's to your deserved future success 🥂

Whoa! You are awesome at this!

Ah, show not tell. GM Gold right there 👍

Wise words and inspiring thoughts!

Keep up the good work!

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As to 2:40, I catch myself worldbuilding while writing the Secrets & Clues part of prep. Usually deep stuff the PCs aren't likely to find out during the session.

Great video and spot-on tips that can equally apply to any GM running one-shots for new players 😊👍

That was a really fun intro! And this is the first time I've seen the min-max side of you, Rich! ;) On pregen characters, it really depends on the player. If someone asked me to play a new system but said I *had to* use a pregen character, it would be an immediate no from me, because making characters is such an important part of the TTRPG experience for me. <-- Dan, making entirely custom parties in Baldur's Gate since 1998. That said, I wouldn't expect the GM to help me out with character creation, either, but I guess it could do down badly with other players if only one ends up with a custom character. I guess the "talk to your players" advice is key here.

A lot of good advice here, well done!

This video is a treasure trove of great advice. Keep up the wonderful work!

I just kinda say, "Group, I've got this RPG I want to try. We'll do a one shot and if we like it we can add more. Oh, you want to play that other RPG? Cool, so you're GMing, right? No? Alright then, well I'm going to be GMing this one. I'm sure we'll get back to the other one too."

First!