Davvy's Guide to Writing a Campaign
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- Writing is hard, but it doesn't have to be.
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Song: Kingdom of Bards - Adrian Von Ziegler
my setting started as a single idea: what if we had a city that was built entirely on a bridge?
I am in love with the idea of a bridge connecting to mountain peaks. If you watch neebs gaming check out their recent conan exiles videos they make a dope castle like that
Now I have multi-tier 8 Bridge City about the size of NYC that's sitting over a huge hellpit that was created by a demon lord a few hundred years ago. Before the demon lord screwed over everyone, an epic wizard came from another continent and sealed him away by destroying a priceless god artifact and using his own lifeforce, transmuting large bridges of earth to cover up the hellpit in the process.
@@DurdleDers I dig that. Is there any adventuring going on in the pit? Is it a mine for crazy metals or jewels? Is it just a death pit of demons and fire?
@@timstiteler4817 it's definitely a decent chunk of the map in that it stretches down into a huge underdark that was chopped in half, also tons of latent planar instability leads to bleed through and tons of weird stuff coming up thru the cracks
That sounds like a lot of fun. I also like the idea of a giant dam city. Maybe even with some sort of bever humanoid that has incredible engineering skills. Super complex city construction all out of wood making a giant dam.
Thank you I am picking up the rains soon and needed this 😘
I really needed to hear the "don't worry as long as your players are having a good time" near the end, I'm currently writing a campaign and I'm super stressed. I've got all these ideas and plots I want to incorporate and I just feel like I'm way over my head. I appreciate this video, thanks
I’ve had one campaign err I tried to get players into somewhere and they thought it was for later so I had three sessions trying to get them where I needed then to be
Yes
It's like a chinese finger trap, you have to push to pull
“Spread the cheeks of your wallet” is possibly the best phrase for throwing money around I’ve ever heard
Prison wallet
you prolly dont give a damn but does someone know of a way to get back into an instagram account?
I was dumb lost the password. I would love any help you can offer me
@@aryanalijah3502 I'm sorry, I can't help you
I heard "that plotline you wrote on the back of a napkin" and felt that call out in my soul
*Dat Game of Thrones Shade*
Players throwing my very easy solution out the window and arguing for 15 minutes on a “better” one is legitimately the best part of dnd
🤣
If ads help you stay afloat, then who am I to complain.
Yup, so spread the cheeks of your wallet and pitch in!
I'd rather they have their own ads then RUclips trying to get me to buy a Truck or some purfume!
Honestly as long as he does something comical, I'm fine with it too.
Just skip it.
Reeeeeeeeeeee!!!!
6:30 "...or *seduce* the amulet."
D&D is a weird game sometimes.
EDIT: Is the villain trying to seduce you to the dark side? Put all your points in Charisma and seduce the dark side to you!
It's time to counter charm and I m not talking about the spell ;)
New DMs also need to be prepared for their players to spend 3 hours interrogating the first 2 NPCs they come across.
Also chairs. You never know when your players will demand to spend a hour rolling investigation checks on a randomly placed chair.
"You got an 18 on your investigation and a 15 on perception? Okay. With that, you can tell that it's a chair. Probably locally made. It's no less a chair than it was when the rogue rolled a 15 and the barbarian rolled a 12."
Ffs not everything is a mimic! You use a mimic one time and now they cry mimic all the time.
Hmmm. What if its a mimic rogue?! It could have rolled a 28 on stealth. Let's stab all the chairs to be safe
You really helped my first campaign out. Thanks Davvy, you're the best DnD youtuber!
Indeed
"I am your farther at some point"
Out of context quotes are the best. Great video by the way!
I think it's overkill to write every possible scenario you can think of. Because 9 times of out 10 the players choose the path you never even considered. Improv is a good tool to have when DMing and it limits the need to write it out.
"all campaigns are railroaded"
Bard and wild mage: *are you sure about that?*
Litterally just started a new campaign
Have session 1 starting in 12ish hours
So good to have this video here in time
Edit:
Ahhhhh this explained nothing
Really? I found this really helpful actually
Literally, you are probably too new to understand the tips being shared.
this video is more about prep *before* the game starts, but for a 1st session try to have a rough set of bullet points, and adlib your way between them. Cue cards and basic notes that say 'adlib, he's a butt face' are your friend
Dont worry dude. you can do it!!
@@feurgott9332 its been more than 12 hours lol
Overall the session went surprisingly well, definetly need to improve my improve and voice acting abilities though
As a person who got dragged into being a DM for the first time with 20 min for preparation I can say yeah you right.
Same. At least we were running a module that I owned because I had bought the essentials kit. (still hadn't looked through it in depth or had even played the actual game before, but y'know)
As a DM I have literally no plan for my campaigns, I just come up with a world, and whatever makes the most interesting story in the moment
And that's a great way to do it.
I'll take a DM that makes stuff up at the very last microsecond over one that gives me the "Telltale game" experience.
True player agency is one of the few things that gives tabletop rpgs an edge over video-games. Taking that away seems to me like a disservice to the genre.
Same
Yeah. Like this video is for a specific kind of campaign like a not sandbox
Welcome to the sandbox campaign. Where we make a little world and send the party through it, letting them do as they please. Y'know. The opposite of railroads. Cause those are bullshit.
My campaign was started out as a module then became loosely based on the plot of the module and now it's a open sandbox where I improvise everything because my players will destroy my plans within the first 20 minutes of play.
I'll take a DM that makes stuff up at the very last microsecond over one that gives me the "Telltale game" experience.
True player agency is one of the few things that gives tabletop rpgs an edge over video-games. Taking that away seems to me like a disservice to the genre.
Agency in anything is arguable.
The feeling of agency is more important
The first idea that started the campaign I'm going to run, started with "what if the world worshipped a single door?"
Did you just make Kingdom Hearts in D&D?
The door to every place in earth, understandable.
A random door though?
Wha
I think your DMing method is a bit exhausting, you're putting in tons of effort before the game starts which will inevitably go to waste.
buuuuuuuuuuut then again you run several campaigns at once so the method I use of going session by session probably wouldn't work there
I'm running my first campaign but my players are moving through it much faster than I anticipated. This was a well timed video
Add random encounters during travel to allow you to have more time to prep and think about what the players are doing and remember to have down time sessions where they're just shopping talking to NPCs or following side goals for their characters.
I love the digs at the Star Wars and Game of Thrones bad writing, lol.
The slow zoom on Mercer was the equivalent of inspiring church gospel
I improv every session I've ever done. And I don't think it always comes across this way. I made a fleshed out world, and I know how the world would run without the players there. The players being in the world is what I react to and I let them do anything they want. I have three campaigns right now happening on the same continent at the same time. Everything they do destroys the balance of the world and I love it. Good and evil are constantly struggling to get a step up on eachother because my players are chaos incarnate.
When your villain is a slave owner
"Where's there a whip, THERES A WAY!"
To be honest, I genuinely believe the worst thing to happen to DnD was in the early 2000s when forums and RUclips vlogs like Counter Monkey fetishized the idea of the charming rogue who defeated the evil GM and their railroading, which to this day plagues the game with its stink that TTRPGs are about player vs DM instead of the two cooperating.
Jeez, the Nerdarchy guys really bought out every DnD RUclipsr out there.
Man, davvy, what lvl of bard are you? This video just gave me 1d100 of inspiration to write my campaign!
Still rolls a 1...
“Spread the cheeks of your wallet”
Thank you sir, I will now use that expression.
i had to rewright my campaign two times. tow complete times.
1:52 Or maybe you wanted to fight time travelling communists.
True story.
Thanks for This vídeo, man. You are really helping New DM's to Bloom!
One thing i do for my personal campaign is write up the next session for my group; hidden objects, possible detours ect. and then let their decissions dictate the next thing i write.
Like my group harrassed a "Shady man in bar" who was a random NPC, and by pissing him off they gave me a whole new plot to write up which will set up the next 3-4 story lines.
I put all my players back story in my campaign this is how. I have a fighter who’s village got raided while he was away and his sister died because of the raid. I have a rouge who’s master was a samurai . And a alchemist who’s parents were also alchemist. My alchemist got a letter from her parents soon after they died. Something really cool that my alchemist let me do is put what ever I wanted in to the letter. So I made the letter say that a man was raiding villages trying to get ingredients for a potion of immortality. Then it was going to be revealed one of the villages that was raided was the fighter’s village. Once they finally tracked down this man it would be revealed that the man was the rouges master. The master was trying to make the immortality potion because he was promised by a necromancer that he would bring the samurai masters wife back from the dead, if he got the materials for a immortality potion. A emotional battle was supposed to ensue between the rouge and his master.
Sadly this never happened one of players had internet issues and could not play after the third session. So rip.
To sum it up... Railroad but don't Railroad too hard and the players are just as good at writing your campaign
Or just introduce railroads that they will want to do, ie. Just use their backstory plot hooks.
I just have a basic idea and don't really have an end goal, I feel like that takes a bit of pressure off. There's a war about to break out, and the PCs choose who to help and how the dominoes fall.
I think its good to do arcs for each character (keep in mind this is probably better for waaaaay longer campagins), start off with a unrelated plot that ties into everyone's arc eventually, then work on what you think their arcs should be, then begin to weave them all together, that way it makes the stakes of the final push more hard hitting as they feel they are part of it from the beginning
I dm my first time with the lost mine of phindelver, and they killed next to none of the villains so I had to put those reformed villains in the story wish made for some fun moments. My second older brother taught his goblinoids how to properly fight, and in turn they protected the town they originally stole from; from their own tribesmen.
My campaign notes are just a summary of DOOM and a bunch of monsters
WAIT! IS THAT DAVVY IN OLD AGE MAKEUP??? DID HE DO THAT HIMSELF? Honestly, if so, that’s amazing.
It's a digital filter not make up
"Try to include something from each player character's backstory."
But what if most of my players don't even have a backstory at all. Their backstory is "I'm a wizard" or "I'm a paladin".
Then you work with your players to come up with one. Ask them if there is anything that they think should have happened to their character to give them their motivations. IFF they're really struggling, I might even go so far as to suggest some ideas for them.
You're the best Davvy, thank you!!!🙃
Fucking love this guy. That ad was even great
@@timstiteler4817 I know right
Ha, I actually live in PA
I'm dming my first campaign, a continuation to LMoP, and so far I have the endgame, but have been running one or two session chapters to keep the game going.
Yeh okay but how do I plan for each sessions in a large scale story. I plan each session and the points I want to see, but I don't know where they will get to by the end. There is no crafting a larger story with my group. I've taken a 3 week break and am trying to crafts story this time.
And ideas, I need the help.
Thank you very much for this video I am new to d&d and I have been trying to learn it everything has been so confusing but this video helps a lot. Thank you so much for making this.
I'm having a session tomorrow of our freshly started campaign, one I was already having serious doubts about. Thank you for this Davy, it actually helped me a lot.
Absolutely staggeringly good video. This is the BEST DM advice I have ever heard and explained clearly and humorously. After several campaigns, dozens of sessions, and countless hours of you tube advice this is EXACTLY how I have come to DM (I wish). This is the only way to do it without loosing your mind!
Bravo!
Howdy!
how in the bloody hell are you this fast!
PJ VC I rang the bell icon? It’s 2am here and I have nothing better to do. Bardic inspiration from Best Bard?
Hello!!!
I don't think you should have told us how much they paid you. I'd change that and re-upload if I were you.
I thought the same thing, but most advertisers have to give the vid an ok before it's released, so maybe they thought it was fine?
Literally writing for my campaign as this is posted, thanks dav
Wow Davvy, too soon.
RIP TellTale
Random NPC saying "Hey I knew your father at some point." to a Bhaalspawn PC.
Bhaalspawn PC: "???????????????????????????!?!?!?!?!?!?!?"
I messed upped making a campaign so much I was kicked out of the group. Lol
I'm more in the habit of making a framework, as opposed to planning everything or planning nothing, I go to the half-way point. Better than flying by the seat of my pants, or having to throw away plans.
I've just sat down to begin writing a new campaign when i got the notification. Lol
before video reaction: i'm thinking if i made a campaign i would add just enough information and then let the players decide what to do
so you don't have to delete 3 hours of work whenever they roll a nat 20 or derail
I love your analogies particularly about the dumpster fire behind the DM screen so relatable at times. Hope your still doing stuff, for this was good to watch.
hi davy! agree with everything except the including of backstory in a campaign. there is one exception to that rule that should be noted. meatgrinders. if you're running a deadly adventure like barrowmaze or rappan athuk and you have party members frequently or semi-frequently dying like you would irl in those types of dangerous situations then you can hardly work backstory in for a charachter that might be dead before the end of the next session.
One thing I do every once in a while is I'll talk to a single player in private and offer them to be an assistant of mine, if they accept only the two of us will know. Their job is to keep the group in the right general direction. They still wont know the overall plot but they will know ahead of time, hey this town will be important or it would be nice to visit the bar. That way in game and at the table it feels organic but it helps the story progress
my first time DM-ing is a one shot since i always dread the day they want a real campaign and this helps, quite a bit. also take a nice little happiness when players somehow make shit up of an excuse to do things in paranoia when in reality i was like "huh...... great idea"
Top ten anime crossovers!:
Nerdarchy and Davvy Chappy
Thanks to conflicts with last minute cancellation and party comps because of that I had THREE, THREE CHARACTERS MADE WHEN WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE PLAYING.
I’ve only played one dnd campaign and my friends want me dming for them because I got fire stories like I’m sure I got the story part down but WTF DO THE NUMBERS MEAN
So, I’m one of two people on a server who have any D&D experience. I’m not at all experienced though, I’m currently a player in my first campaign for the past 6 or so months. We both offered to DM so we said hey, we’ll do a pair of oneshots and be players for one another. Yesterday I did the first oneshot, we played for 9 hours, party went a totally different route and honestly made it cooler and then befriended the dragon and I ended up rapidly expanding the map with new places, new NPCs, and a totally new plot and Big Bad. Cool, we’ll wrap it up today right?
NO BECAUSE THEY JUST ELECTED ME DM AND THIS IS NOW THE INTRO TO THE CAMPAIGN.
**I AM NOT PREPARED**.
*Dungeon Master: **_Spends hours creating a clever, challenging and unique campaign_*
*The fucking Horny Bard and OP Cleric: **_"Ima bout to ruin this whole mans campaign"_*
Sorry for compliaining under your video, but as newbie that would like to attempt to DM it's infuriatingly frustrating how ALL the YT videos about this topic are just hpyotetical examples over hypotetical examples and general advices. WHY there is at least ONE video that goes "this is how STEP BY STEP i made this SPECIFIC idea into a campaign"? ahahah
I don't look for general advices. Those are mostly common sense i already find reasonable. I wanna undesrtand what could be an intelligent way to write down stuff and when i should consider myself ready for the session
I put multiple potential main antagonists, just in case my players decide that the suspiciously well meaning emperor or the archwizard whose family they murderhoboed is definitely more of an evil threat than the leader of the terrorist shadow organization or the conquest hungry hobgoblin warlord .
For me I'm trying to write a town with people going missing,screaming in the night and the towns people try and act as if nothings happening
(Go down to see what's really happening.)
A cult is doing rituals in the nearby woods stealing people from the town sacrificing then eating them if the players find them in the middle of the night then they get in a huge fight and in the end if the last cult follower or the leader is still alive they'll run and once the players kill the last cult person, it turns into a wendigo
I've DM'ed once and my brother was all of the characters and I was the narrative....we coDMed and wrote a story about an artsy fartsy town full of every form of entertainment possible, the problem was that such a place relies on tourism and recently there have been entire theater troupes just vanishing, only to reappear sometime later completely changed. Ruining the towns reputation and thus it's tourist draw
The problem with running this sort of game was that our players, much like myself as a player honestly, liked to stretch literal definitions and add as much improv as possible...which wasn't too hard for me to BS my way through some stories because a town of story tellers will all try to add their own spin on information.....where this became an actual issue was when one of the players decided that in a town full of all art forms....BDSM must be an option....this led to a long and very weird section of the story that was not my forte ...but that player and a couple other players loved having their ideas be identified and not told that they are wrong for adding to the story.....I did not add a BDSM part of town before the session started......but due to popular demand I made one up on the fly and the players loved it....I did not but hey they had fun....the town never did uncover the twist Eldritch host devouring their performers....but oh well
One good rule of thumb for a DM is the rule of fuck it. And wing the story with the help of your notes. Like " Hey is their a barber shop in this town" or " hey as a curupt cop in 1920s I won't to see if the Chinese one armed drug smuggler that I know as a random not written contact is near the docs." ... 1st question " Shore and it's more of a salon though" 2nd question "role luck (passes) Eh what do you won't officer J..... Fine I'll tell you." See the rule of fuck it can push a story along without railroading and makes that player feel bad ass..... Or just clean shaven but the point still stands.
I don't write too much. The most writing i do, is world building, taking notes and writing out temporary stat blocks. Mostly because, you can cast plot hook after plot hook, and often the PC's don't bite. Or worse, they later let go, after they have bitten. I have honestly found great success, in slowly building the PC's up as they world explore, and then i introduce villains or rivals who are threatened by them in some way shape or form. That way, they can plot hook and railroad themselves all day.
I make up the encounters, Stat Blocks, NPC's, Voices, and Loot, as i go along. That way, I'm not flipping through some book all day, for one lousy block of text.
Yeah my players will never show me where they want to go.
Backgrounds include: Outlander, Hermit, Outlander again, and Urchin.
They're not chatting it up in the slightest
I literally was thinking of how I was gonna start my first ever campaign you are awesome Davvy!
I know this is an old vid but I want to say this: choose your players well.
Choose people you know play as a team and not lone wolf, choose players who want to engage with your world and ask questions rather than ones who start shit for the evulz just to get a rise out of you, avoid inviting players with whom your relationship with them irl is tenuous at best, and especially avoid people that cut your confidence down and don't give well constructed and valid criticism when they can't take what they dish out. This isn't train ticket to railroading 101 but I'm trying to say that you should play with people who aren't toxic influences or whose goal it is to tear down your campaign in a "misguided" attempt to "challenge" your skills. The most egregious offenders being experienced players who do this knowingly.
You deserve kid gloves for your first time, buds. And anyone that doesn't afford you that courtesy is the equivalent of a grown adult playing in little league football and thinking they're so smart for bullying inexperienced players/dms.
I have 224MB of world and story building. Its roughly 200,000 words
I'm sorry, but writing out the whole thing had litterally never done the trick for me. The best results sp far came from overstocking on puzzle pieces of encounters, little plots, tactical maps, places and versatile NPCs, and having a loose goal in mind. Right now I'm running an intrigue-heavy game where the plot consists of over 10 factions with stated goals and resources. I find this approach more adaptable to player actions.
My opinion: Don't do this. Do not plan every session. Know your main villain and what they want. Know your starter town. Plan your first session and make it very fun and intrigueing. Have vague and flexible ideas for the future of the campaign. Focus on planning your next session, because that's the one that actually matters, the players will guide and change the story you've created for the better.
Our current campaign is a disaster, the DM is just bad at explaining things but keeps jamming the story with weird puzzles and obviously railroads us and gets upset when we derail the campaign. On the other hand most of our other players don't have any backstory or have some bare minimum which isn't really fleshed out enough to start a rp conversation. Today's our final session and as much as I want to play as a player, I've said that I'll be the new DM for the new campaign because I usually DM for them before we started this short campaign. I will not leave the group because we're all long time friends and most of them only recently got into dnd thus the no backstory and weak role-playing. We've decided to try out waterdeep dragon heist, we'll see what happens because I've never run a pre made campaign, I've always home-brewed mine.
I think I will use a lot of this so thank you. But I am planning on a humor improve thing and it's my first time dming, but not my first time playing.
I’ve never dm’ed in my life and soon I’m going to be DMing a group of 6 people, not including myself.
The campaign im building off will start with the “son of the Ruby dragon”
Aiding us in adventure, as my characters backstory shows that wren, my character, found his abandoned egg, so they raised, hatched, and grew them through the wyrmling stage, before they took of to they Ruby palace, and returned after finishing “training fit for their age”
This probobaly sounds very stupid thinking about it. I need help idk what to do.
We have
-failed saving the feywild from a demon general
-dealing with undead coming after the butler of the lord of the area, secretly their litch wife in disguise.
Any ideas
Edit: I GOT MY IDEA. Ghost forest, urgent need for investigation. No more needed to be said, I must write this down.
I find this to be really bad advice, because it leads to burnout (and because I just don't have the time to write what would amount to, what, several novels worth of story just to throw them all away). Writing out like 5 different stories because the player's MIGHT do something, and then maybe throwing all of them away anyway because they decide to do something you didn't foresee it a huge waste of energy and time. Same goes for "this scene X MUST happen because it's so awesome in my head!", instead of letting the players create their own awesome scenes.
A much better alternative to planning contingencies is writing up situations and tools. The villain has a specific goal and a plan to achieve that goal. If the players interfere, what resources does the villain have to adapt? Instead of planning out all of the scenes and rewriting the story every time the players do something, tools help with actually adapting to the player actions. And you should really already think about situations and tools already, even when writing out plots, which would be the last step, so it's not actually additional work.
Also remember, you’re dnd universe is a sea of chaos and nothing is set in stone until the players hear you say it. And even then you can change things up
All very good advice. I will say it's not necessary to write out exactly what every session will be like. Typically i have an Idea for an event, or just a place i want to have the PCs see. then like you, i work outwards. In a recent gamei had this idea for Va little villiage that had made a pact with they fey to mutual benefit. the town was built up around a powerful Dryad's tree, and the Dryad protected the town. So i worked outwards. Why would a dryad allow a town to be built around it? what would she ask in return, what are the consequences.. would all the fey agree? (hell no) etc. For each question i wrote up an answer in the form of a plot hook.
wait...so it's not normal for players to intentionally insert their characters as deeply as humanly possible into the world's lore? heh.
Granted that's mostly because I am physically unable to make a normal character. Offbeat but viable builds are the way I do things, but that always means I have to look into the lore for a reason my character would be different. And when I see a rabbit hole, well, I tend to jump in.
I've noticed if I try to railroad the game even subtly it goes to shit. I personally do better when I have a few generic encounters ready, let them go how they wish(with a few hooks ready) and letting my brain come up with weird/entertaining characters typically allows for a more ridiculous time which I've found works better for me.
I seem to just be able to wing it, I can't seem to find confidence in what I write. My players don't know and don't seem to cotton on but I am always terrified it will just fall through.
Thank god my friends and I are on the same page (we have a massive world that we’re all developing campaigns for similar to the MCU)
my players never make backstories.... then they complained about the first campaign i ever made saying they didnt have enough backstory based plots... at character creation, after session 1, after the first major dungeon, and so many more times i begged them to and they never did.
did they think i knew them when they never made one?
One key skill of a DM: Being willing to rework/rewrite anything that has not been established at the table. I cannot count the ways my game has been improved because I didn’t fall into the trap of considering something “canon” just because I wrote it down.
One good (and bullshit) way to make sure ur macguffin doesnt get pre destroyed ect is to make the magic evil item immune to all attacks except one concluded way to destroy it. Think Diablo's soul stone only being able to be destroyed in the hell-forge in Diablo 2.
i am starting a thing that will be 11 sessions long with an hour playtime for each session, and there will be absolutely no flexibility to that, how do i make that work and what are some sneaky railroad tactics and re-railing tactics?
I feel really bad cause one time i was playing an 11 year old knee biting warlock searching for my cleric mother , but i forgot to tel my dm about the search for my mother, my main character motivation .
There are a lot of non backstory items that write themselves to. Warlock in the party? Give them a story arc where their Patron wants them to prove their worth! Got a Drow? Lolth gives them mission that they have to figure out how to not betray their team but also not get turned into a Drider. Someone took the soldier background? Have them meet a former commander or subordinate who accuses them of desertion or praises them for a "glorious deed" your player is secretly ashamed of.
The problem I have is the control over my story, I like my game needs go the way I expected it to go. including everyone's backstory in the story is the easiest for me
Start writing a book! You've got your setting, your characters, and your villain. It sounds like it could be a problem with the players, because a lot of people want their player agency. However if the players are still having fun, then there should be no problem.
I wish I could like this video 1k times cuz this was the best advice I've gotten as a new dm. And trust me I've watched a lot of videos
Yo what are you gonna do when you run out of guides? More in-depth advice? These are great because of how general they are, but I can't help but feel like this can't last forever.