Turn Clichés into Adventuring Gold in 5e Dungeons & Dragons - Web DM
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- Опубликовано: 19 дек 2017
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You awaken in the highest chamber of a mystical tower. As you take in your surroundings you notice between 2 and 6 other adventurers of similar skill level to your own, all dressed in ways that denote different specializations and professions from yours. Before you can ask your new companions their names, a door opens. Through the doorway walks a princess, dressed in a glimmering pink dress that illuminates the tower chamber.
"Oh good, you're up." She says as you and your party watch her move around the room, checking various arcane and obscure alchemical artifacts lining the shelves. "I need your help. My dragon has been abducted and is being held captive in a tavern on the far side of "Zombie Horde Ravine." Bring me my dragon and be sure to look out for the royal wizard. He should be the one doing this, but every time I have need of him I find out he's run off to recruit small bands of halflings to run his errands and fetch his groceries."
Lol XD
So many d&d games get so batshit insane that sometimes I don't mind just saving a princess.
Saaame
Honestly it would be a pretty cool thing to do
In all the d&d adventures i have played in or written i have never saved a princess from a tower....
*After 5 campaigns involving ending the Blood War, some extremist trying to unite Evil or Good or Chaos of Law against everyone else in a war that would destroy all the Planes, a Thanos wannabe trying to snap away all the Gods... Suddenly, we got a Princess in a Tower with a dragon*
THANK THE GODS! Something normal! Hopefully the Princess actually gives out this time...
Also the dragon. The Bard has a thing for dragons.
throw a few teleportation tubes, and we're cool
My ''mentor'' DM once told me that a cliché adventure is an old puppet. The DM job is to find new and interesting ways to pull on its strings.
Wow. That is a fantastic way to think about that. Thank you.
Reminds me of when my quest started in the middle of a siege a few years back
Not enough new DMs take the the time to find a mentor...ive got 3 guys on discord i keep in touch with all have been playing since the 80s or 90s all of them are super approachable, all of them have the right attitude, but they are not the guys to go to if you want your ego stroked, they have seen it all or most of it anyway...they tell me what i need to heat not what i want to hear.
@@Satchmojones I wish I had more people to talk about dnd with. The friends that are into it are my players and I don't want to spoil encounters with asking something like "what would you do with this monster?"
What the party knows: The princess is locked in a tower on the edge of the kingdom.
What the party is not told: the princess locked herself in the tower because she wants to study magic instead of being married off in one of her father's political deals.
What the party will find out pretty quickly: the princess is actually a pretty damn quick learner - not malicious, but very prepared to defend herself.
Currently doing some world-building for an upcoming campaign. Consider that little tidbit stolen. ;^)
Isn’t that a cliche as well?
@@jm329 yeah was about to ask the same thing.
I am straight up stealing this.
PLOT TWIST!
the princess has locked herself in the tower because she's a werewolf
Now what does your Good aligned party do?
Sling up the princess to bring her back to the king and allowed to reap havock once night falls?
Leave her there to earn the scorn of the king?
Slay her to stop the victim princess to save her from her self imprisonment and be hated by the entire kingdom?
Go upon some long quest to find a way to cure her of the lycanthropy?
If you give your PCs something that requires them to talk about and discuss with eachother, give them a true dilemma they must solve not just a monster to slay, then it's no longer a cliche.
You are in a tavern. It is on fire. My favorite opening I've ever done.
Love it
"... bathing in the blood of milkmaids" got a genuine guffaw out-loud from me. I hope that doesn't make me a bad person.
I love to do the tavern start with a party of brooding loners.
I refer to it as the "Middle-school dance" tavern
What if you give Zombie Horde a collective intelligence? The more zombies there are then the more intelligent the zombie horde becomes. Starts out with shambling zombies then suddenly start using the weapons they died with after is enough of them. It just keeps progressing and eventually the zombies are a organized professional army with zombie wizards and groups of zombies raiding villages to rob graves for more corpses.
That's a kickass idea, it'd be cool to have an organised undead army with intelligent tactics, maybe the horde eventually starts sending diplomats to recruit cultists or neighboring nations to join them.
I similar idea is to give them super low Int or Wil in small groups, but ramp it up as the quantity increases, all of a sudden a lot of the spells that target them become a lot less effective, or to give them spell resistance based on quantity.
Jay Sheddan XD zombie diplomats are always well recieved.
Might as well off ourselves now.
domehammer zombie with a hive mind?
... so, I've yet to actually play any 'Cliche' in a DnD game... and I want to. I want to meet in a tavern, go slay the dragon and rescue the princess and be the shiny knight in armor.
Raganui hang in there. It’s only an adventure away...
Just gotta find a DM.
Maybe the princess and the dragon are having an affair?
Ala the 12 dancing princesses.
Which one is the bard?
They're both bards. Especially the dragon.
Well....if she's a dragonborn....
DabIMON Cough, cough, crossbreed Priscilla.
I personally think the best way to handle the "Powerful Wizard McQuestGiver" is to not make them a Wizard, but a Scholar. Everyone assumes that only a Wizards can be extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, so of course this guy would be a great wielder of arcane forces, but maybe he just never could quite grasp the ways of magical practices. So yeah, he knows about the great threat or some artifact from the dawn of time, but only because he has been doing research and tracking events beyond the local area for many years now.
Also, great video as always, my friends! Keep up the good work! :D
"You have been offered a quest by the great mage Archimedes! Oh... wait. Did I say "mage"? I meant "sage". My bad."
Ah. This is similar to my thought, but instead I'd have all mid-high LVL spell casters lose that ability. Weaker casters can still lvl up and become strong, but are also being hunted.
I did this last night, all plot knowledge came from the Harbour Master, not a wizard just a badass with logistics.
Not even sage is needed. Started one campaign in a tavern, bandits come in looking for trouble. Leads to a bar fight, party wins. Paladin decides to stock the wagon for the travels... walks outside to discover a second group of bandits stole from their wagon.
Just because a "quest-giver" is an "invested NPC" doesn't make it a rule to make that quest-giver powerful or venerable or even particularly useful. These NPC's are resources for information, so a wise GM uses them carefully and employs just enough to set the hook, not so much that the Players can claim agency to defile the "surprise"...
Honestly, since the earliest days, I've NEVER used a spellcaster of any kind as a quest-giver. It's generally someone just obvious enough to be a dubious mark in the otherwise situation. In a tavern, bar, or saloon setting, it's great to stick an unusually youthful NPC in there. Usually I go for some kind of apprentice or student (in the guild of choice)... That way he or she can know or could have figured out enough to explain there needs to be a mission, but not much more than "I can tell you, something damn well must be wrong with this."...
Sometimes, if you want the venerable elder, a gypsy caravan is perfectly good. In case you have someone overtly sensitive about it, you can employ "Romani" of course... BUT There's a resource for a fair amount of explanation and exposition without necessarily being so invested in the town or region as to want to go off "conquering dragons and ruining fair maidens and stuff"... lolz.
The point is, just any kind of character that "should" know something about the quest to be given can be explained right into the story... The trick is making the quest-giver just dubious enough to garner attention. The better you work this technique, the better you also teach your players "the game of subtlety"... :o)
If you have a Princess in a tower, she might be a political prisoner. She was captured by or given over to one nation or one ruler, and is being held so her father - the ruler of another nation or land - is required to acquiesce to the former's demands. Maybe her father's army was bested in battle, and she was given over as part of the terms of surrender. So now her dad acts as a vassal ruler to her captor, not daring to act against his superior lest she be killed.
This gives a very solid reason why the party of adventurers are going to free her. The princess's father can't send his own people - he can't be seen conspiring against this greater lord - so he contracts a group of warriors to sneak in. Even if they fail, the lord contracting their services can maintain plausible deniability. But if the party succeeds, suddenly the political landscape could change, because the vassal lord is free to act against his superior. That might lead to war, or it might lead to betrayal while the greater lord is busy in some conflict, and was counting on the vassal's loyalty.
To make the "plausible deniability" more convincing, the party might not know who hired them. Maybe the vassal lord sent a wizard - or someone who is magically (or mundanely) disguised as a wizard - to act as the hiring party. He charges the party to go save this princess held captive, while keeping the lord's hands clean in case the whole matter goes south.
Bluecho4 Thanks for the great tip, dude. Merry Christmas to you.
sutket sokun but the king was the bad guy the whole time
Bluecho4 I really like this idea. It is extremely well thought out and explained.
I had a quest one time where the princess was a demoness who was annoying her daddy by shaking up with an angel or something. So we had to go get her back because of a deal one of our wizards made back in the day.
Maybe she was just insufferable and the last party to be sent decided she was better off locked up and is now helping keep her prisoner! "You want me to WALK back? In these shoes? Unhand me, barbarian! How dare you touch me! My dress cost more gold than you will ever see in your pitiful little lives! Put me down or I'll have my father toss you into the dungeons!"
i started a game in a tavern in a remote hamlet it turned into dog soldiers with crossbows instead of mp5s very quick
Darth Vader’s weakness is sand.
It's rough coarse and it gets everywhere
Giancarlo Peñalba I mean if too much sand gets into that mouthpiece he's gonna suffocate!
@@ninjabluefyre3815 Sounds like it already has.
I started writing a campaign a few years ago in hopes of playing D&D after a 25 year break. Not knowing any better it started in a tavern when the blacksmith pops in with the quest. The evil mage's symbol was a dark tower. And yes, there was a zombie horde. I hit all the crappy cliches.
Well... some would say "cliches are cliches for a reason..."
Others would just recoil with, "eeew".
I'd shrug and suggest, the tavern is easily fixed with a fair, circus, gypsy-caravan, or festival (take your pick)... Blacksmith is okay, but he could already be fairly drunk when he starts blathering on about the "problem"...
Zombies... huh... Well, dial them back to a "nuisance" portion of something else for your centerpiece. Don't forget to add a few other nuisances, some real issues, and at least a situation or two that might be fun to mention... confusion/semantics and all that.
You still probably have a pretty good thing building there. I wouldn't give up on it just because of one video I saw in YT. :o)
When you find your work has cliches in it just tweak the story and subvert them
Paint more D&D player characters!! Love your channel
When I started I was 26. No idea how I missed D&D in high school or earlier being a pretty big nerd. That being said new players may love cliches or the expected tropes. I know I did. I had to DM because I got some army buddies to play with and I fell into some of the same tropes we all still loved it lol.
Considering D&D is predicated on using clichés for the sake of familiarity for everyone at the table, it's kind of hard to draw the line.
Just wanted to say, I love the way you guys do things on this channel. You approach each topic with a pretty objective and unbiased mindset. You put in a lot of effort to help others get the most out of this game that you clearly love at least as much as we do, and you really give your viewers some refreshing viewpoints and ideas.
You do all of this while keeping such a chill and casual vibe, and also while not being afraid to be honest about some of this game's shortcomings- and most of all, you manage all of this while still making it very entertaining to watch. Naturally entertaining, at that; it never once feels forced. It's very rare to find channels on RUclips of any sort that can pull off the overall vibe and functionality that you guys do so well, and I love it.
+xOldSkoolHollywooDx Thank You!!!!!
xOldSkoolHollywooDx right on
This man is correct.
This is truly the superior d&d channel.
You nailed everything that they are. This is what I’ve always wanted to say to them. Thank you for this comment.
Kingdomonia is God Damn inspired.
Will Mills it’s Grade A Cheese! Nah..Brie plus.
Whoever photoshopped the wizard image in the thumbnail did a great job! I didn't even realize it wasn't the original picture!
I was roaming the universe, lost, until I discovered the calendar. I saw the date, December 20, 2017, and rejoiced, for it was a Wednesday, and I’d get another wonderful video of a pair of eloquent two-bit hacks with a really cool dm screen that I can’t help but admire. The beards are nice too.
Ash vs the Evil Dead (and the Evil Dead series in general) is a great place to draw inspiration for zombies from. I suppose they're more like ghouls or wights, but tomato tuhmahto.
Never had the issue of starting at taverns, but always ALWAYS it has been "you all joined the same adventurer's guild"
Famine and Cyanide
That’s the one we left out! Damn. There’s always something.
Famine and Cyanide the term "company" refers to a group of mercenaries. Theoretically, you and your buddies would/could form a group or simply see the same "help wanted" ads a lot.
I changed this cliche up by having my group create their adventurer's guild from the ground up. They start with a shack and 4 beds (with 5 characters) and they can use funds to upgrade it sims/animal crossing style. Made different customization options as well as a random npc generator for hirelings to make the guild better and increase revenue/guild fame. Theyre taxed every season and bankruptcy = game over.
The tavern owners and staff, having picked up a few tidbits from the local adventurers, decide to take up arms themselves during their off-hours and go a-questing.
Took improv acting classes. Now all my friends want me to DM every session.
I haven't watched the video fully yet, so there's a good chance you guys brought up this quote, but here it is from the great author Terry Pratchett: "The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are hammers and screwdrivers in the tools of communication."
Or something like that. The point is that cliches are there because they're extremely convenient, and they're convenient for a reason. Sometimes there are far better ways to do things, even if they are harder to create, but there is a time and place for cliches, they're popular for good reason (most of the time).
I have a big bad in one of my stories, a necromancer. She is a powerful magic wielder, with a deep seated hatred for one of the largest ruling kingdoms in the land, and commands a massive army of undead. She's also a pink furred wolfkin, bubbly, and thinks zombies are cute. She's charismatic, fun natured, and somewhat comes across as an airhead. I like to turn the cliche of the 'dark brooding necromancer' onto its head. She later becomes a lich, but keeps her personality traits. However, she doesn't gain a hatred for the living, but instead comes to pity the living. They feel pain, sorrow, and fear death. Unlife can cure that, and she's more than willing to help solve that. It's how you make a willing death cult... almost plausible.
Perfect proof for the validity of re-examining cliches to find what makes them work in fresh ways is the Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss. Nearly every character trait, story element, and plot beat can be found in another story - but the way they are connected, and treated with an air of "no, really, what would this mean for a character to live through" makes it all feel really revelatory and surprisingly unexpected.
He made fun of himself for this when I saw him do a reading on his tour. He said something like:
"I wrote a flashback story about an orphan that goes to a school of magic and kills a dragon."
Best part was that it was true, but he wrote it so well that i didn't even realize that it was a layercake of cliche until he pointed it out. Brilliant.
My favourite subversion is the "princess imprisoned in the tower by a wicked witch", when the princess is really the witch's boss, and is a grand masterind in a spellcasting cult
New DM here. I've been scouring the web for guidance and this is the best channel I've come across. Great work guys!
I like how in Goblin Slayer the super powerful Sword Priestess hires adventurers to kill the goblins because she has a phobia of goblinoids. Like logically she could just wipe any goblin she sees off the face of the earth but if you have a traumatic experience centered around goblins you're obviously just going to avoid them in general. Get someone else to do it.
An excellent topic. Apologies for the long response....
I hate the cliches that have been adopted and unchanged, because changing or twisting expectations is the best way (IMO) to challenge both new and experienced players. For instance:
Hags. The perpetually ugly and foul creature, always female and always obvious, has been the source of more Disney villains than any other. However, I love using Hags. Why? I read the fine print. I looked at their abilities. Many either shape-shift or can cover their appearance with illusions. They can be almost anyone...anywhere...and the players will never know. They're intelligent, manipulative, and should be involved in schemes that bewilder the players. They could even appear as victims or even as "the quest giver" if you like, which I have done, and this always throws the players for a loop.
They can even act...sort of...on the players' behalf, offering "aid" because they may be involved in complex politics with rival sisters in their own coven. Like the DM's gude states (and I use this as a suggestion only), they can only be in covens with odd numbers, and "always three" (bullpucky. 5 or even 7 would be fine)
I have my players dealing with a Coven now, and they've dealt with one Sister, and have been completely fooled by another. THAT reveal at the last game was priceless.
Naga can fill this same roll, albeit with less shape shifting and more minions.
Dragons. Dragons for me a major sticking point. They are always portrayed as big stupid claw/claw/bite/breathe machines. They share this "bag of hit points" cliche with Giants. I'm sick to death of these ancient races being portrayed in such a manner that would indicate that they would never survive to adulthood. Dragons are intelligent (yes, even the White ones. If they were as dumb as the MM indicates, they would never survive the Giants, Rhemorhaz, Yeti, Winter Wolves and other frosty badasses that patrol the frozen wastelands) and should be treated as such. They should always attack from above, dropping boulders (or ice chunks) upon their prey, or picking them up and dropping them (like ravens do with walnuts, or seagulls do with snails and other shelled prey) upon rocks or off cliffs. They should be rare and fantastical in the extreme. To add to this, try my suggestion and make ALL Dragons shape shifters. They would walk among the peoples of the world and determine who the real threats and allies are, and deal with it appropriately.
Likewise, Giants should understand (like spiders with ant hills) to avoid large masses of tiny peoples, and then use their bulk to create environments that hamper or endanger these others. Swinging a giant axe and only hitting one player? Have you not seen what happens when a race car goes off the track and into the crowd? Does it stop with one? What effect would a Fire Giant have on a community when it sets the surrounding woods ablaze and then captures or kills the escaping populace? Would it act alone?
Give these ancient creatures credit for being ancient in the first place.
Wizards. Ugh. Always with "a wizard did it.". I love replacing mad wizards with Aberrations. Mind Flayers could have such advanced science as to be perceived as magic. Agents infected with Intellect Devourers need not be the assumed human, but any species that it could reasonably infect. The same goes for the Illithid's "tadpoles". Imagine such a tiny threat placed in one of the ancient species above (Dragon or Giant). Would that species then reduce several sizes and look like a Mind Flayer? I doubt it.
Consider Fey or Fiends as well. Ancient and powerful, their machinations would span centuries. Their goals might be beyond mortal ken.
Celestials like Coatl make excellent "quest givers", because their benevolence can be disguised (again) through shape shifting, and has the luxury of a long life filled with wisdom. They, too, can provide assistance but need to stand off to oversee other plots.
"Rescue the Princess" might be assumed as "Save this figure or concept". What if Spring never comes to a long winter unless the "First Dryad of Spring" isn't released from a frozen seed pod at the top of a mountain? That mountain itself might be a series of adventures, and the need for that pod is desperate there as well.
Lastly, any and all villains. You were spot on. Tom Hiddleston said quite correctly that "all villains see themselves as the hero of their own tale." It's something that I latched onto a while back, and apply it to my Orc Hordes (The Iron League of Tholl), Hobgoblin Legions (Three Handed Khanate of Shenkhah) or other areas. It might be my "Order of the Face of Helm", who see themselves less as inquisitors and witch hunters and more of "protectors of the sanctity of the realm." After all "Do you not remember the Second Pherexian Invasion?! Do you not remember the loss, pain and blood of the innocent whom thought their foe ended? Have you not read your Rememberences, 9:21?! 'And the People rejoiced in their ignorance, eating upon the baited hook of their dark masters. And lo, the Goblins rose and fed upon the innocent like dark fishermen.'......"
When the villains see themselves as acting out of necessity, or can rationalize or justify their actions, they become more dangerous. They become seductive. And the players now have not only a villain to defeat, but their philosophy as well, or another may well rise to take this villain's place.
Mike Gould yeah I agree. I'll be dming a game fairly soon and my general idea is to have the pcs be monster hunters-ish. It'll be a setting where decent amounts of people are dying, not tons but enough to keep gravediggers a little behind schedule most of the time. At a later point in the campaign there will be some sort of large scale war with aberrations. Once the head of the army has been dealt with by the players I'll have a lich come via project image and say that this was all his plan. Along the way I'll have multiple mind flayer giants. In fact one of the cities in my world is built on a 1000 foot tall spire that is secretly an ancient giant frozen by the gods. The goal of the mind flayers is to lure a neothelid to hijack this giant, and create a super-weapon that even the gith won't be able to stop.
Pretty valid (though I'm way past agreement with Reague of Regends on the polymorphing matter), but I have to speak against the 'make \every/ villain deep and meaningful' sentiment that has been going around:
It can be really refreshing to fight a Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik. If you psychoanalyze him, you don't get "He has been pushed to extreme measures and he picked bad extremes," "He's a victim of circumstance," or "He thinks that what he's doing is for the greater good." No, you get "This dude's a friggin' psycho. It's hard to say at what point he snapped, but we know that he's pretty much a textbook sociopath. He has concepts of empathy, honor, appreciation of life, and so on, but he doesn't really feel them like we do, he works beyond them, and his only concern is what he wants in his twisted, egotistical, unreasonable mind." Does that make him lack depth? No. You can still analyze his character. I, uh, just did . . . Does that make him difficult to take seriously as a believable char concept? It shouldn't. If you're at all honest about humanity, you have to admit that there are freaks like him out there. Does that make him difficult to take seriously as a challenging antagonist? Geez, no. Even Sonic, known broadly for his cocky, aloof front, periodically takes a moment to seriously warn people away from the lunatic, take \some/ precautions and planning, constantly watch his back during forced team-ups, et cetera. What does it take away? For most, relatability.
We've become addicted to relatability. In literary circles, we've told each other that we have to cater to everyone's ego issues by making absolutely everything into mirror houses. That's why so many stories nowadays are so bland and uninspired. If everything is focused too much on relatability, we forget to cut our binds and let loose with the full power of fiction.
Go ahead and make a lot of villains "heroes of their own tales." I'd even say that it's perfectly fine to make \most/ villains like that. Just don't totally lose appreciation for the classic baddies. After all (I didn't want to make this my main example because it's so overused, but to drive the point home . . .), "Some men just want to watch the world burn."
Another A+ intro gentlemen
My next campaign shall take place in Kingdomonia.
My God! The thumbnail game is strong with this one!
Reid Taylor it’s a great shop! Trav went into BEASTMODE on this one.
JPruInc I have loved watching the thumbnails of this channel get better and better over time. Scrolling through all the uploads is an adventure unto itself. Keep up the great work Trav!
I've always liked the idea of having the mysterious wizard show up and turn out to be a con artist who's just trying to rob the party or something along those lines.
A chained up silver dragon? I'd want to free the poor dragon! Silvers are Good-aligned dragons! Save the dragon, kill the princess for torturing the poor girl? Guy? Whatever the dragon is!
Also, I don't know if it still applies, but I recall Silvers are also fond of shapeshifting and living with Elves and Humans. Maybe the Silver could be persuaded to join your party now that it's free. Give it some time to see the world again, especially if it's a young dragon.
Also on LotR and Dark Lords - Mordor only had one quarter or third that was the ashy volcanic landscape. The other two thirds/three quarters down around the Nurn Lake is crop lands that is a big support of Mordor's war effort - Tolkien actually considered how Mordor fed themselves.
On the mysterious wizard quest giver - it makes me think of Elminster in Baldur's Gate (the computer game). He didn't give the quest, and he only appears a few times to offer advice. Charname (the player character) got the quest because of their parentage (Bhaalspawn) - so destiny - and I always thought why does Elminster only appear to give advice? Because he's a busy wizard! Elminster does a pile of stuff around Faerun!
And I am thinking about BG again because I started a new game. It's currently paused in the Nashkel mines.
Mimi Sardinia XD have fun dying over and over to kobold commandos and later skeletons after Maluhay is dead. They always and only kill you after 5 of your six dudes are paralyzed and Xzar is the only conscious one.
We'll all die anyway...
9:35 well so much for that plotline
I like how they suggest that complex villains make a good dark lord, but honestly I feel like the unabashadly evil Skelator or Jafar style character works good too as a dark lord.
One thing I've always loved The Witcher for is it does this stuff all the time: it takes classic fantasy dross and gives it a new lease of life. The sorceresses are all uniformly vain and beautiful but that is because many of them started out as commoners and cripples so it's a point of pride, the prince of the elves is a hardened guerrilla fighter, the vengeful wraith can be freed by the kiss of her old lover (who is now just a fisherman), and most of all, monsters are often antagonistic but not always evil.
I like the idea of the "mysterious wizard" that has lost most if not all of his powers. He's still knowledgeable, still knows how to cast spells, but for whatever reason he can't actually cast them. At that point, restoring his powers is a major side quest, if not the main quest
Reminds me of a character called Oromis from The Inheritance Cycle(*Note, Read the books for context*),
When he and his dragon got captured by evil dragon riders, they basically broke his connection to magic, and now he can only cast spells on a level far below that which he should, currently average human level and a bit(normally he could do things that would kill most humans from lack of power), but retains his magical knowledge and can still cast relatively small spells
I ran a game in high school where one of the introductory quests was a "save the princess" scenario. For the most part, the crawl was exactly what you would expect, but towards the end, everything went pear-shaped -- for the BBG. Guards were running for their lives, monsters were running amok, and the evil sorcerer was begging the player party to save him. It turned out the Princess was an adept Swordmage, and she didn't do the whole "Damsel in Distress" thing.
I think it important to remember many of the things experienced players see as "played out" are still fresh to new players
I'm a simple gamer: I love clichés.
I want aloof elven spellcasters, gruff dwarven fighters, tavern brawls, wizard towers, and yes, give me a dragon in a dungeon.
I'll play that game a hundred times.
My favorite alternate take. The Princess and the Dragon, decide they like each other. The Princess refuses to be rescued and joins the dragon as they travel the world.
They travel the world as a famous vaudeville singing and dance act.
Let's raise a flagon
For Damsel and Dragon
The best song and dance team in the whole, wide world
Our audience is clapping
And their toes are tapping
For a handsome reptile and a pretty girl
Ugh, haven't been able to get this out of my head for way too many years. Darn you Craig Shaw Gardner. Don't even get me started on grakels
Loved this video and I got 2 ideas for clichés.
1 princess guarded by a dragon: the princes isn't captured it's a rumor the dragon spread in polymorphed formed in order to attract would be suitors. The dragon defends her and tests adventurers to see if they would make a good suitor.
2. Dark overlord: the neighboring country is full of oppressed people and strict laws and ruled by a tyrant. So adventurer's would go and save these people. What they find out is that the country our hereos came from is the true menace, making the king of the neighboring country have to take drastic measures in order to kept his subjects safe
I did the whole "The Princess Has Been Kidnapped By An Evil Necromancer and The King Will Reward Whomsoever Rescues Her Handsomely" story hook once where by the mid-point of the campaign the players realized that she was the necromancer's lover, had betrayed him, and was on a quest to construct her phylactery in preparation for becoming a lich -- which the players inadvertently helped her achieve, so that the climax of the campaign was them destroying the lich she had become.
I have an adventure idea where as the intro "time for everyone to meet each other" quest is a job given by a wizard from the Big Magic School of Magic to figure out why a spell component she ordered hasn't shown up yet, she's entirely capable level wise of dealing with it herself but she has to teach classes here, like, every day and she's already used up all her days off so she needs some help
Seriously though, if you've never had the save Kingdomonia experience, then it will be awesome the first time around.
I love this channel so much, you guys make some serious content without it being boring at all.
This was very useful and thought provoking quality even for this channel
One of the best episodes yet. Really gave me a lot to think about in how I am running my game. Thanks!
Guys I think this was your best video in months. Watching it I had a couple ideas I wanted to integrate into my current campaign and even a couple ideas for whole new ones. You stayed on topic, but spoke in such a way that was able to weave many different subjects together and really got creative juices flowing. Great stuff. It's these kinds of videos that i Subbed for.
Web DM video along with hot tea makes for a beautiful cold night.
Thanks for the warm camaraderie! Merry Christmas
I always loved the "Save the Princess from her imprisonment" only for them to save the villain of the campaign as the first quest so it gives her reason to toy with the party and take them seriously once they acquire more power. Also just because saving the person who wants to take over the Kingdom always makes them question and fact check EVERYTHING so I can add even more lore and myth with the facts for extra fun.
Ya thats always a fun one but always made better when the person that sent you on the quest was actually a faithful lackey of said princess.
I love the "start in a Tavern" cliche
Another great one guys! Very entertaining how you two share your ideas and keep up the great work!
thanks for your channel i have been dming for years since fourth came out, and i use your videos alot fpr reference when im burnt out. Keep it up guys!
No save or dice today but web dm are the guys I wanted to see so glad you did things to keep me interested in d&d
Just started my players out in a tavern waiting for the quest giver. When he never shows up they go looking...and Kraken attacks the city now they have to escape the burning city and cultist.
This is my favorite channel! You guys are awesome!
I've seen all your videos and this might be y'alls best yet. Great ideas in here.
15:13
"The best villains don't see themselves as villains and see what they do as a type of good."
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
I can't express enough how much I love how you treat cliches.
I have my mysterious wizard be the magic shop merchant. I play him up to be kind of senile and goofy so that no one takes him seriously at early levels but as the party continues adventuring, they realize that there might be a reason his shop just so happens to be in every other town they go to or that there might be a reason he has access to a myriad of rare magic items. After the PCs get more experienced, he begins to take an interest in them and he becomes a sort of gate keeper to mid to end game content.
The cover art just keeps improving,. Love it
Thanks for the videos, guys!
Ahhhhhh hearing him talking about “drumming to control” zombies was super inspired by the Dresden Files, ahhh glad people actually know about this series it’s GOOD
They've referenced Dresden Files quite a lot in these videos, with the big one that comes to mind being the video where they talked about the Fey.
DRESDEN FTW!
Nothing better than Web DM Wednesday!
keiferj0415 Thanks! And I agree!
I am Dming since a pretty long time and I have to admit this video is one of the most usefull I've seen in a long time.
Great show guys! I once telled a story to a very-very jaded brunch, and i've started it like: "the far away kingdom ruler summons you to do a task: Rescue the dragon from the princess. It turned out the dragon was a gold dragon, and the local patron, and the princess was an evil necromancer.
I'm planning my first campaign, and I think it has a good mix of clichés and fresh ideas:
-Starts in a tavern, but it's a gnome tavern.
-Town was recently attacked by a purple worm, powerful mage mayor needs help with his to-do list.
-Goblins are camping in the tunnel left by the purple worm
-His Robe of Eyes lets him see that there are Phase Spider eggs in his tower, but his arachnophobia prevents him from getting rid of them. They'll hatch when the players get near them, but the hatchlings have Poisonous Snake stats because Lvl 1.
-Collecting various ingredients, each leading to 1 or 2 encounters.
This will serve as the tutorial section for my new players, and they'll come out of the other side at Level 3 and ready to actually start adventuring.
-The players will find out much later that the reason the worm left the underdark was to escape a greater danger caused by BBEG's scheme to summon Demon McEvilBad or whatever.
-The twist with the wizard questgiver is that some of the tasks he needs help with are for a ceremony to become a lich. When the party is the right level, he'll ask them to keep an eye on him while he does the lich transformation to make sure he doesn't turn evil. He's just old and wants to keep helping people.
-Depending on the dice, he'll either become the first good lich I've seen in a DnD game, or the players will be forced to kill this sweet little old gnome even though he only wanted to help people.
Your opening bits are what I live for
That was a really good video. You guys are awesome.
I love what you guys do. Keep it up!!
Exciting hook at the beginning of the video. Really grabs you by the attention!!!
The way that I did zombie horde was for a higher level group to have accidentally helped Vecna in his plan to raise every single dead creature that has ever lived across every plane. It wasn't a problem they could deal with by just fighting them or fighting Vecna, and required using the same massive power to reverse the ritual (after dealing with some of the consequences, of course).
GoldDaniel that was a great way to amplify the threat beyond normal expectation. Well done.
GoldDaniel You can't say, "it wasnt a problem they just had to fight them or fight Vecna"
No. No! GOD NO!
Vecna is a god. Some of those dead guys were gods; a lot of them dragons, and a huge number monsters more terrible than most people will ever hear of.
You can't undermine Vecna's authority like that. It should be able to wave a hand and kill things; this is actually one of the things I most dislike about DnD, the idea that the PCs eventually can fight gods with a reasonable chance at success. It doesn't work with the notion that dieties are the things granting divine magic and miracles, it doesn't work with the idea that they created the world or its races, and it doesn't work that a god could be killed by humans.
But I guess thats just my opinion.
He said they *couldn't* just fight them or Vecna, though?
This was back in 4th edition, so the prospect of them getting to level 30 was a very real one. But D&D is also a flexible game. In that particular setting I was going for a mythic fantasy feel, so they were dealing with the affairs of gods at higher levels. In other games, I've had gods as untouchable, silent entities. The core conceits of the game can be changed to suit your preferences.
But besides all of that, Vecna is also a lich. So even if they did 'kill' him in any meaningful way, he'd reform at his phylactery.
casey hudson Read it again
To the OP, I know that the system has oft been designed to do that. My grip is with the system and its creators for seeming so blind to their own narrative. I don't care how you build your world, just that the official one seems to be, "lol humans can go kill a bunch of kobalds and eventually defeat Vecna and Baphamot and the whole host of heaven."
My Dm always starts quests in a tavern, but it's because it has become a joke within the group. He also finds ways to mix it up. Once, we ended up locked onto the tavern because it was the nearest abandoned building and we were trying to survive an attack from a zombie horde.
Your vision fades in as you wake up on a wooden cart, in the woods. A blonde man turns to you and says "Oh, you're finally awake."
You too are great. However, I think a big part of why I love your channel so much is the editing. It isn’t frenetic like a typical youtube vlog, but it isn’t a totally off-the-cuff one-camera-angle production like most of the awesome rpg channels
Too is wrong, should have used two.
On the topic of thus Video go and watch the "trope Talk" series by the overly sarcastic productions. These are very well done and discuss this topic in general storytelling.
Daniel Jensch I LOVE TROPE TALK
I second this recommendation! "Overly Sarcastic Productions" is an amazing tool for any aspiring storyteller, DM, or author. Seriously can't recommend them enough.
a healthy diet of "trope talk" and "terrible writing advice" can really enhance a video like this or matt mercer's or matt colvile's. gives some interesting perspectives and ideas.
Suggested variation on 'princess in a tower': several townsfolk have gone missing, turns out a roc harpy or group of harpies has lured them away and now those people are trapped on a tall cliffside in the harpy's/harpies' lair.
That was such a good and well shot and well edited and fun intro that I've SMASHED that subscribe button :3
omggggggggg the undead hoarde ideas! I'm so totally using that - I've just realised that the world I'm building would have fields full of unburied corpses and I can use that to create a huge fighting space :D
I was watching your rogue vid and making a new character when you posted this lol
Thanks for the idea of 'Bongos of Undeath' as a magic item.
I agree so much with the point of reading the old Conan stories. I listened to all of the on audiobook and really started to love Conan as a character.
I now have a continent in my world that is named Kingdomonia. Just because of the intros.
I think the bigger issues with the "starts in a tavern" is hybridizing the tavern and the inn. This has also been done before but making the tavern also an inn gives the characters more reason to be there more places to be in the sorta "start zone" and more ways to encounter each other and the hook. If given the chance I almost always have a character stumble in to the inn with disheveled clothes smelling of smoke because they need a room to sleep off -reason they're in the city in the first place probably-
My favorite "Undead Horde" was an entire town that was spontaneously changed by a magic item. We had some information and knew the people weren't actually undead but just possessed townsfolk. My Paladin realized he couldn't just slay these "zombies" so he had to subdue every opponent... That is until the brothel broke open and overwhelmed us and we had to start using lethal force.
Myu Half-Orc Paladin of Pelor wading through a horde of zombie hookers with reckless abandon and righteous zeal was something to be remembered for the ages. :)
Hearing you guys talk about this makes me very proud of my first campaign. I managed to subvert a lot of cliches and really immersed my players. I'm only sad we never got to conclude it: it had a conspiratorial lich working behind the scenes and an incredibly powerful sorcerer who recruited the players early on to help him out. He was off handling huge crises that I was building up to the players eventually being able to help, while at the moment they were following other leads and handling lesser threats that the big guy couldn't spare time to investigate. In the end, at least as far as we got, the players were the ones to uncover the big conspiracy and they were the guys now giving missions to the big sorcerer.
I had this idea of my players walking into a dungion and finding a man in a massive stone room with heavy chains connected to the walls and the mans arms. After they interact with the man he erupts into flames and becomes a red dragon, turns out the man is an abnormaly powerful dragon sorcerer who can change shape at will. Interesting setup for a cliche fight
Absolutely agree with the major points of this, the advice I give a lot of my friends when they start DMing is 'cliches are only a bad thing if you don't know what you're doing with them.' Once you get past putting it in because there's a cliche and start considering the hows and whys, you start really telling your own stories.
That’s the heart of it. Making it your own.
Another thing though is that sometimes, playing the cliche straight is exactly the way to turn the tables on your players- PCs are simultaneously the smartest and dumbest animals in existence.
Sometimes you have to help a dragon save a knight from a princess.
Magic Knight Rayearth is one of the best subversions of the princess in the tower I have ever seen.
Are you guys gonna do a special on Xanathar's Guide to Everything?
DM judo, that term is now part of my D&D vocabulary.
The princess in a tower, classic cliche, BUT ... star wars episode 4 - princess in a tower, there are ways of telling the same old story that keep it fresh
There is often a job posting board in the taverns my characters have frequented. There are also wanted posters as well since that is a place frequented by many people increasing the chances of the wanted to get caught.
I've been working on a cliche but taking real world examples and making it feel fresh. An elven knight (who's actually just a low-level bard) hires the party to aid him in a quest to save a damsel from the highest tower of a castle. He describes her as beautiful and forlorn at the absence of her hero. You arrive to find the castle has been rigged with several puzzles and traps. You finally find her, only to learn that the elf who hired you owns the castle, and the damsel is his middle-aged human wife who is angry with him because he went drinking with his pals and forgot their anniversary.
A campaign I was in put an interesting twist on the whole "zombie hoard controlled by evil necromancer that wants to purge the land of human life." He had these zombie cannons that were able to launch payloads of zombies all over the place, however they were too spread out to truly create an "apocalyptic" scenario without a central control mechanism, which our unwitting adventurers, myself included, accidentally delivered directly to the necromancer.
Love these videos, super helpful! Can you guys comment-or maybe a video-on doing a Monster Campaign?
In one of our DnD campaigns we were servants of "Dark Lord" on his rise to power. It was awesome.