This was the most fun I've had making a video in awhile so let me know if you want to see more like this. Also, obviously, if you don't write lore or prep your D&D campaigns, this disregard this video.
I treat my Pantheon as NPCs, probably most akin to very powerful rulers. The whole impetus of my homebrew world was my dissatisfaction with religion in most fantasy worlds. Usually it seems like the gods are demonstrably real, insanely powerful, and not infallible, but they just... don't do much? Unless someone is playing a cleric/paladin? In that sort of world, sure, ignore your gods. But I think the reality of living in a world of real and imperfect deities could be very very interesting. I explained to my players that the gods would be a big part of this campaign, even if they don't personally worship them, and so far everyone's been really on board and interested, even those not playing divine classes. I don't think everyone needs to take it as far as I have and make the themes of their campaign free will, organized religion, and personal responsibility, but I strongly encourage people to try thinking about their gods as people. The conflicts they have can easily spill into the rest of your world and make for great stories.
HP loss isn't direct hit massive damage. HP loss are near misses, flesh wounds, pain and exhaustion. A fighter with 100 HP isn't 25 times tougher than a common man, he's just a lot better at avoiding deadly blows and taking HP loss is how that's represented. When you run out of HP that just represents you being at the end of your rope and having lost the ability to defend against that next killing blow, it overwhelms your ability to avoid being taken out and then you begin the survival rolls. So people, get over this idea that a character with high HP is this super tough meat shield, it's not. HP is is just the games mechanism for allowing heroic fantasy combats. That's why Fighters and Barbarians tend to have more HP, they aren't tougher than a wizard with the same scores, they're just a lot better at avoiding being killed because they have a lot more experience in doing so than any of the other classes.
How do you square that with Incidental damage, like stepping on caltrops in the dark. There is no effort and struggle, you either had a metal spike dig into your foot or you didn't.
@@Alorand It's simple, I covered it in the first few lines of the original post with " HP loss are near misses, flesh wounds, pain and exhaustion. " So in the case of caltrops the HP loss would be a combination of pain and a flesh wound as caltrops only do like 1 HP, the big thing they do is reduce your move by 10ft. I didn't cover it above but secondary effects such as poison on a blade also limit your narrative choices about how you can describe the HP loss. Like in the case of a regular blade the HP loss can be described as a last minute dodge that causes the attack to completely miss or a flesh wound etc but if it's got a secondary effect like poison then the narrative of a complete miss is off the table since the rules demand certain side effects of failure. But if someone has an ability that lets them say take half dmg on a failed save and no dmg on a successful save then a complete dodge is back on the table and any damage inflicted from the originating attack can be said to be you spending an equal amount of energy/HP to avoid that attack causing you to become a little more exhausted. Pain and exhaustion coupled with minor wounds help explain why you get all your HP back after a long rest instead of spending weeks laid up healing. But to be fair caltrops is a weird one anyway, as someone who has stepped on a nail that went nearly two inches into my foot I can attest that the rules for HP don't cover what it does, no 8 hour rest makes that pain go away and the -10ft to Movement lasts about a week. If you need any further explanation let me know.
As for the god question, I think people should use more "local deities" cultures from the East. Like, a deity's shrine is just your neighbor. Every neighborhood got their own minor gods, as arbiters/directors of minor powers. They take minor offerings like hunted prey animals or veggies. And if you anger or ignore them, they wouldn't kill you, but they will make your life miserable through other believers/followers or some minor mischief. And of course, you can have ambitious gods and century old animosities to spice up your stories.
When I started my setting, I told my players if they had a god in mind, use it. Most gods in my setting are product of worship rather than the worship a product of theirs. I had 3 elder gods, with only one holding any importance in any one campaign if at all. I later developed a pantheon for NPCs, but never required players to adhere to it.
I used a mishmash of deities for my first campaign world, which was set in one Egypt/middle-east-themed megalopolis in an undefined world, but for my second, on-going campaign I wanted a more focused pantheon so I created my own. What I did to "lure" my players into choosing my created deities was I tied them intrinsically to game mechanics - backgrounds, domains and magic schools. Some players still created their own gods to follow, or announced they were atheistic, which was totally fine by me. One of them even ended up choosing Nilbog, the goblin god of mischief who had appeared as a curious NPC, as their back-uo character. Their whole character arc is about gaining enough followers to restore their godly powers. 😁
On players not caring about your lore - think about it. Why do YOU care about your lore? It's because you can do whatever you want with it, you can change it, you can make it affect your game, the characters and events in it are directly affecting other parts of what you're making or are going to make. It's an enjoyable thing to do on its own, and you have all the control to play with it to your heart's content. To players it's just words that they can't interact with. They're not selfish if it doesn't interest them. Making lore that affects players directly is such good advice.
The reason that I have lore in my world is so that all the actions, living, non-living, and magical, make coherent sense. This is not to say that there is no free will in my world but it is to say that all actions take place within the framework of the world and its context. Thus there are consequences and reactions to all the PCs decisions and actions. In order for me (and them) to understand exactly what those consequences and reactions might be, and for them to ring true and therefore be believable, I have to know the history of the world.
Wow fantastic Video really valuable information and great actually practicle help and the vox machina free music at tge end....nice The only thing I could say is that picture changes in the beginning are bit erraten but otherwise great video
I think lore without context/stakes is pretty boring. Like I said in the video, I don't believe my lore is exceptional at all. If I thought people would get any interest from it, maybe I'd do something with it. But honestly, the best lore to read, imo, is the stuff you're invested in
I can't really lay this at the doorstep of one video creator; but, this idea is a big part of why I'm not very likely to ever get back into the TTRPG hobby. There are so many videos that reiterate how players cannot be bothered to read and become familiar with the background story of my world, and yet expect me to familiarize myself with their backstory and incorporate it into one of my worlds. I definitely appreciate that I cannot info dump four plus decades worth of world-building on players, prior to starting one campaign; and I wouldn't want to do that anyway. My worlds are my characters; I never did have much interest in playing one being at a time, with one backstory, and one job to be performed over one lifetime. It isn't like those player backstories are something new and refreshingly different; they're largely the same tropes used over and over again, too.
This comment got a "like" recently, which prompted me to update it. I've learned a lot more about the state of NuTTRPG'ing in the last month. I had been out of the hobby for a very long time, and didn't realize how endemic the tyranny of the individual character had become. In my day, the setting was what the players, including both the DM and the PCs, built together, collaboratively. Now, I see that the individual character even rules over its own player. I can definitely understand why today's DMs are charging for their services...they only exist to service the characters individually. So, good on this content creator for still being willing to deeply develop a world; one thing that hasn't changed is that the players will only ever see ten percent of that world (they're like icebergs). The way I see it, today's play amounts to: "OK, I rolled a natural 20, now tell me what I did to be the hero, so I can write it in my character journal." I don't see how that's fun; but, I can just keep to OSR-style games.
@@superhunksickle That is some consolation. I suppose the answer, then, is to keep playing, whether online or in-person, and you'll inevitably meet up with people with similar interests in play. Thanks for the positive comment, and cheers!
Obviously the most important part of World building is the question of Old School World Building or New school world building. Are we having 5 nations that are all ethnostates that want to genocide each other Balkan style or is there multiculturalist nations of multiple races that completely ignores the fact that different looking, thinking and existing races (as in species), would 100% fight against each other big time, so you´d NEED a history set up where those aforementioned ethnostates existed but fell apart.
Appreciate the video, but i can't wrap my heads around a couple of your affirmations "Someone has already thought of your cool ideas somewhere in the internet, so just find something that separates your world from generic fantasy n° 3, don't stress about originality" So this means that to find something unique and distinctive about my world I have to not stress about originality? I maybe understood what you meant, but put like this, it seems a bit like an unsolvable conundrum
You can have aspects of your world that are not generic but are not original. Your world might exist on a flat disk. Not original but it is certainly not generic.
@@enterthedungeon Awesome, thanks for the clarification. I suppose this also includes taking things and ideas from existing settings, and twist them into something new?
it's really amazing how many bad takes are crammed into one short video. -you, the DM, are not also playing a game. abandon your own fun! absolutely everything you do Must be in service to the players. -make a starting town. but make sure it has no culture! -gods are for suckers! they don't have any effect on the game! it's not like anybody plays divine classes. or like non-divine classes can interact with gods. or like religious beliefs affect cultures. also, your world's origin has no plot relevance. -don't waste your time writing background information. set dressing is for nerds. "things to do, not things to read." sacks of hitpoints in a void is the way to go. -start by writing characters. (not gods though. gods aren't characters.) they don't live in places, or worship anything, but they're motivated to do things by the power of Providing Plot Hooks. -create nations. create factions. don't worry about things like imports and exports, factions wouldn't care about those. they need strong, gameable motivations like being the Being Evil And Kicking Puppies faction, the Taking Over The World Just Because faction, and the Being Helpful To PCs faction. when building your nation, focus on things like demographics. just make sure you plop them down wherever, because origin myths are stupid. focus on culture, but again, make sure mythology is not involved. -in real life, nations are deeply affected by their geography. for some reason though, elves are not. just make your nations texas sharpshooter style. you definitely won't end up with a boring single blob of a continent. honestly it sounds like your players suck. refusing to engage with anything that's not the bare metal of a plot hook is boring. making you contrive an alternate lore reason for a game mechanic that takes 30 seconds to explain because they can't listen is worse. pretty much everything about this video seems like a reaction to having terrible players rather than actual actionable advice. my advice: putting your attention on an aspect of worldbuilding makes it playable because your attention is what makes it exist. a town's winemaking industry is playable, if you put your energy into writing it, because a town's winemaking industry is also made up of characters and motivations and factions and treasure. put your energy into writing things you enjoy. your friends should respect that.
This was the most fun I've had making a video in awhile so let me know if you want to see more like this. Also, obviously, if you don't write lore or prep your D&D campaigns, this disregard this video.
"if your lore doesn't facilitate that, then your not writing a DND game, you are writing a book" oh perfect, because that's why I'm here
"... you read the terms and conditions."
I literally have the terms & conditions open for a purchase I'm making. I feel so called out.
I treat my Pantheon as NPCs, probably most akin to very powerful rulers. The whole impetus of my homebrew world was my dissatisfaction with religion in most fantasy worlds. Usually it seems like the gods are demonstrably real, insanely powerful, and not infallible, but they just... don't do much? Unless someone is playing a cleric/paladin? In that sort of world, sure, ignore your gods. But I think the reality of living in a world of real and imperfect deities could be very very interesting. I explained to my players that the gods would be a big part of this campaign, even if they don't personally worship them, and so far everyone's been really on board and interested, even those not playing divine classes. I don't think everyone needs to take it as far as I have and make the themes of their campaign free will, organized religion, and personal responsibility, but I strongly encourage people to try thinking about their gods as people. The conflicts they have can easily spill into the rest of your world and make for great stories.
HP loss isn't direct hit massive damage. HP loss are near misses, flesh wounds, pain and exhaustion. A fighter with 100 HP isn't 25 times tougher than a common man, he's just a lot better at avoiding deadly blows and taking HP loss is how that's represented. When you run out of HP that just represents you being at the end of your rope and having lost the ability to defend against that next killing blow, it overwhelms your ability to avoid being taken out and then you begin the survival rolls. So people, get over this idea that a character with high HP is this super tough meat shield, it's not. HP is is just the games mechanism for allowing heroic fantasy combats. That's why Fighters and Barbarians tend to have more HP, they aren't tougher than a wizard with the same scores, they're just a lot better at avoiding being killed because they have a lot more experience in doing so than any of the other classes.
Yeah instead explaining this to players and them still not getting it I just changed the lore
How do you square that with Incidental damage, like stepping on caltrops in the dark. There is no effort and struggle, you either had a metal spike dig into your foot or you didn't.
@@Alorand It's simple, I covered it in the first few lines of the original post with " HP loss are near misses, flesh wounds, pain and exhaustion. " So in the case of caltrops the HP loss would be a combination of pain and a flesh wound as caltrops only do like 1 HP, the big thing they do is reduce your move by 10ft. I didn't cover it above but secondary effects such as poison on a blade also limit your narrative choices about how you can describe the HP loss. Like in the case of a regular blade the HP loss can be described as a last minute dodge that causes the attack to completely miss or a flesh wound etc but if it's got a secondary effect like poison then the narrative of a complete miss is off the table since the rules demand certain side effects of failure. But if someone has an ability that lets them say take half dmg on a failed save and no dmg on a successful save then a complete dodge is back on the table and any damage inflicted from the originating attack can be said to be you spending an equal amount of energy/HP to avoid that attack causing you to become a little more exhausted. Pain and exhaustion coupled with minor wounds help explain why you get all your HP back after a long rest instead of spending weeks laid up healing. But to be fair caltrops is a weird one anyway, as someone who has stepped on a nail that went nearly two inches into my foot I can attest that the rules for HP don't cover what it does, no 8 hour rest makes that pain go away and the -10ft to Movement lasts about a week. If you need any further explanation let me know.
For me, it depends. Roll a 2 on a d10? Almost a miss. Roll a 9? Direct hit!
@@sharktos3218 That's the great part about Hp, you can narrate it however you like depending on the special effects involved in the attack.
Great video! Exactly what I needed today! My campaign is starting earlier than expected and we have our 55th session on Saturday!
Wait ! I just realise that you only make 1k - 2k per videos and have only 10k followers ? What the heck. Keep it up man, you're awesome.
As for the god question, I think people should use more "local deities" cultures from the East.
Like, a deity's shrine is just your neighbor. Every neighborhood got their own minor gods, as arbiters/directors of minor powers. They take minor offerings like hunted prey animals or veggies. And if you anger or ignore them, they wouldn't kill you, but they will make your life miserable through other believers/followers or some minor mischief.
And of course, you can have ambitious gods and century old animosities to spice up your stories.
If you said "world war II history for an hour"... you MIGHT be a dungeon master
Right?! War history is cool as shit
You must’ve never done military history with the Fat Electrician before. Easy hour and very interesting.
When I started my setting, I told my players if they had a god in mind, use it. Most gods in my setting are product of worship rather than the worship a product of theirs. I had 3 elder gods, with only one holding any importance in any one campaign if at all. I later developed a pantheon for NPCs, but never required players to adhere to it.
I used a mishmash of deities for my first campaign world, which was set in one Egypt/middle-east-themed megalopolis in an undefined world, but for my second, on-going campaign I wanted a more focused pantheon so I created my own.
What I did to "lure" my players into choosing my created deities was I tied them intrinsically to game mechanics - backgrounds, domains and magic schools. Some players still created their own gods to follow, or announced they were atheistic, which was totally fine by me.
One of them even ended up choosing Nilbog, the goblin god of mischief who had appeared as a curious NPC, as their back-uo character. Their whole character arc is about gaining enough followers to restore their godly powers. 😁
Absolute gold mine of information! Thank you for uploading this :D
On players not caring about your lore - think about it. Why do YOU care about your lore? It's because you can do whatever you want with it, you can change it, you can make it affect your game, the characters and events in it are directly affecting other parts of what you're making or are going to make. It's an enjoyable thing to do on its own, and you have all the control to play with it to your heart's content.
To players it's just words that they can't interact with. They're not selfish if it doesn't interest them.
Making lore that affects players directly is such good advice.
7 campaigns a week? Holy shit. How do you even have time for that?
Careful planning and keeping my Sundays wide open
The reason that I have lore in my world is so that all the actions, living, non-living, and magical, make coherent sense. This is not to say that there is no free will in my world but it is to say that all actions take place within the framework of the world and its context. Thus there are consequences and reactions to all the PCs decisions and actions. In order for me (and them) to understand exactly what those consequences and reactions might be, and for them to ring true and therefore be believable, I have to know the history of the world.
And this is exactly why you worldbuild. So that the fine details always point in the right direction and make sense. Good job!
Wait wut ! You run seven games a week !? Damn ! 🍺
you would love pathfinder !!!
Wow fantastic Video really valuable information and great actually practicle help and the vox machina free music at tge end....nice
The only thing I could say is that picture changes in the beginning are bit erraten but otherwise great video
Love ya videos very helpful for new dms thanks. 😘
I guess I have the personality of wonder bread
I just want to read YOUR lore. Does your lore bible come in your patreon?? @enterthedungeon
I think lore without context/stakes is pretty boring. Like I said in the video, I don't believe my lore is exceptional at all. If I thought people would get any interest from it, maybe I'd do something with it. But honestly, the best lore to read, imo, is the stuff you're invested in
I can't really lay this at the doorstep of one video creator; but, this idea is a big part of why I'm not very likely to ever get back into the TTRPG hobby. There are so many videos that reiterate how players cannot be bothered to read and become familiar with the background story of my world, and yet expect me to familiarize myself with their backstory and incorporate it into one of my worlds. I definitely appreciate that I cannot info dump four plus decades worth of world-building on players, prior to starting one campaign; and I wouldn't want to do that anyway. My worlds are my characters; I never did have much interest in playing one being at a time, with one backstory, and one job to be performed over one lifetime. It isn't like those player backstories are something new and refreshingly different; they're largely the same tropes used over and over again, too.
This comment got a "like" recently, which prompted me to update it. I've learned a lot more about the state of NuTTRPG'ing in the last month. I had been out of the hobby for a very long time, and didn't realize how endemic the tyranny of the individual character had become. In my day, the setting was what the players, including both the DM and the PCs, built together, collaboratively. Now, I see that the individual character even rules over its own player.
I can definitely understand why today's DMs are charging for their services...they only exist to service the characters individually. So, good on this content creator for still being willing to deeply develop a world; one thing that hasn't changed is that the players will only ever see ten percent of that world (they're like icebergs). The way I see it, today's play amounts to: "OK, I rolled a natural 20, now tell me what I did to be the hero, so I can write it in my character journal." I don't see how that's fun; but, I can just keep to OSR-style games.
@Archaeo_Matt if it's any consolation, what you are describing hasn't been the case for me (as a young, relatively new dm)
@@superhunksickle That is some consolation. I suppose the answer, then, is to keep playing, whether online or in-person, and you'll inevitably meet up with people with similar interests in play. Thanks for the positive comment, and cheers!
So i made my first DISCORD server . This may not mean anything towards it but im trying to create the backstory lore for the world...
ok but where can we read the lore 👀
Obviously the most important part of World building is the question of Old School World Building or New school world building.
Are we having 5 nations that are all ethnostates that want to genocide each other Balkan style or is there multiculturalist nations of multiple races that completely ignores the fact that different looking, thinking and existing races (as in species), would 100% fight against each other big time, so you´d NEED a history set up where those aforementioned ethnostates existed but fell apart.
There is a reason it is called the Lore-d of the Rings.
Appreciate the video, but i can't wrap my heads around a couple of your affirmations
"Someone has already thought of your cool ideas somewhere in the internet, so just find something that separates your world from generic fantasy n° 3, don't stress about originality"
So this means that to find something unique and distinctive about my world I have to not stress about originality? I maybe understood what you meant, but put like this, it seems a bit like an unsolvable conundrum
You can have aspects of your world that are not generic but are not original. Your world might exist on a flat disk. Not original but it is certainly not generic.
@@enterthedungeon Awesome, thanks for the clarification. I suppose this also includes taking things and ideas from existing settings, and twist them into something new?
IM WONDER BREAD 😢😢😢😢😢😢
How in hell do you run 7 capaign AND still have time to do a RUclips Video
it's really amazing how many bad takes are crammed into one short video.
-you, the DM, are not also playing a game. abandon your own fun! absolutely everything you do Must be in service to the players.
-make a starting town. but make sure it has no culture!
-gods are for suckers! they don't have any effect on the game! it's not like anybody plays divine classes. or like non-divine classes can interact with gods. or like religious beliefs affect cultures. also, your world's origin has no plot relevance.
-don't waste your time writing background information. set dressing is for nerds. "things to do, not things to read." sacks of hitpoints in a void is the way to go.
-start by writing characters. (not gods though. gods aren't characters.) they don't live in places, or worship anything, but they're motivated to do things by the power of Providing Plot Hooks.
-create nations. create factions. don't worry about things like imports and exports, factions wouldn't care about those. they need strong, gameable motivations like being the Being Evil And Kicking Puppies faction, the Taking Over The World Just Because faction, and the Being Helpful To PCs faction. when building your nation, focus on things like demographics. just make sure you plop them down wherever, because origin myths are stupid. focus on culture, but again, make sure mythology is not involved.
-in real life, nations are deeply affected by their geography. for some reason though, elves are not. just make your nations texas sharpshooter style. you definitely won't end up with a boring single blob of a continent.
honestly it sounds like your players suck. refusing to engage with anything that's not the bare metal of a plot hook is boring. making you contrive an alternate lore reason for a game mechanic that takes 30 seconds to explain because they can't listen is worse. pretty much everything about this video seems like a reaction to having terrible players rather than actual actionable advice.
my advice: putting your attention on an aspect of worldbuilding makes it playable because your attention is what makes it exist. a town's winemaking industry is playable, if you put your energy into writing it, because a town's winemaking industry is also made up of characters and motivations and factions and treasure. put your energy into writing things you enjoy. your friends should respect that.