It's funny how I thought that the more modern styles of play were making the old rules obsolete because it made for a better game to remove them. But, the older I get, I realize how much we lost along the way that truly made the hobby the masterpiece that it was. Also, I realize that the old way of playing is truly what I enjoy.
Amen. Playing the latest version feels like a clunky 1990s FPS fantasy dungeon crawl computer game. Characters & NPCs are sterile 2d cutouts. Everything is cookie-cutter predictable & sterile of anything outside the rulebook.
Modern D&D is like the Beatles, a band with 4 guys who travel and perform together. Old D&D was meant to be an orchestra where different musicians would be at different performances, or even with different ensembles.
I always think the 1gp=1xp concept really explains the generic campaign setting history with its ancient empires and forgotten magics, thus: In the beginning all the loot is held by monsters in the wilderness. Humans and allies go and fight the monsters. They gain the loot and level up. The Age of Heroes is initiated by these powerful characters. They found kingdoms, forge artifacts and claim the wilderness for civilisation. But then the supply of loot runs low. There is no more XP to gain. There are no more heroes. The kingdoms fall into decadence and disrepair. The wilderness strikes back, reclaiming its lost territories and looting the treasure, and the magic items back to itself. Civilisation retreats, leaving ruins of lost glories behind. The campaign begins as civilisation is starting its upswing again. New heroes are set on exploring the lost glories of ages past, fighting the monsters that infest the old ruins and guard the treasures…. And the cycle turns again.
Plot hook, PC are capture while fighting through a paladin's keep manor house, and the paladin asked the PC while pin down by his house guards why they attack his house and not killed any of his guards ? PC, " Cause you Charmed innocent men to defend you and you force marriage the baron's daughter to yourself ! We are here to free them ! " Paladin, " Uh huh, .. and where did you hear this ? " After a few minutes, .. the players realize I dup them with a Chaotic neutral/ good rogue/bard lying to them with tavern room sob story for sport, and the players' PC paladin couldn't detect evil on the guy and they failed their sense motive roll on the story, and the whole tavern was on in the joke. Since no one was serious injure the house guard called it a good training exercise and good sport. With a few good charisma/ etiquette rolls the PCs gain their first patron in the campaign.
My original campaign has been going on for over 20+years now its such an amazing experience through the years to build the stories and be a part of them. My friends make characters that are descendants of the original group and a whole shared world. This is nothing new to anyone who is commenting or watching this video I guess I just wanted to share my love of a long campaign. Anyway, love your content always Professor Dungeonmaster.
Yeah. I am with the progeny on this one. I design the starting place (town, village, etc.) in great detail and then all of the nearest possible destinations. This has always worked for me. The main reason is I have had players decide on session 1 to ignore the rich town around them, with all its plot hooks and starting experience opportunities and head directly into the wilderness. Those session are able to continue because I have the details about where they were going. I do this like a spiderweb. I have a full area map with named locations and as they discover one area I detail all the areas around it. This allows them to go where they want immediately. If they finish an area at the end of that session I do ask them if they have plans for where they are going to go the next session and that lets me review and maybe second draft where they are headed adding detail as needed. It also allows me to grow the spider web out from the next destination. This way I am always 1-2 sessions ahead of the players. After 40 years of GM-ing this way seems best, at least for me. If there is a down side, it is sometimes it is too much detail for casual players. I will have one player that wants to know everything about the place they are in and others who just want a map and bullet point list of what is where and nothing more. This tends to give advantage to the players who want and can absorb details. I try to tailor the handouts to match the player's style of taking in information. I may give a map and bullet list for one player who prefers that and the next gets 1-2 sentences per numbered area and an overall summary of the area. To my in depth players they get a map (or more than one), and each area has a short paragraph of what and who is there and how it ties into what they know, with appendixes about details and things they know overall about the area, light history, contacts, a legend or two, etc. Behind me I have a wall full of three ring binders. Each one started from a campaign I have had. At the end of the campaign I reorganize the binder to be less about the campaign and more about the area. If anyone goes there again I can pluck it down from the shelf and pick right up. Of course this is my life's hobby. It isn't for everyone and I totally understand that. When I am running a group, I spend 4-16 hours of prep and design before each session. I find that the early and ending prep sessions take the longest and the middle session prep are shorter because much of the work is done and I am just tying threads together or adding details where the players decided to do something novel. The late ones take more prep because I enhance it to tie in what they have done as characters to have an appropriate chance to end it in the ways they have shown me they prefer. So maybe that annoying innkeeper that they kept arguing with and who always charged them too much for everything turned out to be the brother of the one of the villains and at the end to get to the villain they have to deal with the innkeeper in a fashion that is fulfilling for them. That's just how I role....
Maybe you simply like the act of designing locations? Even if you know you won't run everything at the table, it can be fun in itself to design and flesh out the world. Other people view it as a chore ("prep work") or don't have the time for it though - those folks should definitely not design ahead of time.
@@wasteoftime41 possibly. Before I was doing this, if they went off the detailed areas I had to use random tables or just make it up with mixed-results.
I appreciate the spiderweb post, I was trying to figure out a way to anticipate players. It’s hard to predict if they will travel a road or crash through the woods. Love the spider web, I am stealing this.
I wound up running a west marches game on accident. I was a first time DM and texted everyone in my phone and said "hey im running Dungeons and Dragons, do you want to play". So I started with 1 game of 6 people, then world spread and i got a second group of 5, word spread again and I got a 3rd party of 4. I was running them in the same homebrew world, using a mix of my own stuff, Saltmarsh, Yawning Portal and a bunch of 3rd party modules because I just couldn't keep up the content generation. It was so much work that I became completely overwhelmed trying to keep a coherent world together and then I saw Matt Coleville's "Orc's Attack" video and decided that destroying the main town of my city and hitting a reset button on the campaign was a good idea. I would up getting all three parties to a ship. Which sort of turned my campaign in to a sort of "West Sails" campaign that resembled Star Trek on the High Seas. They elected a captain and used the ship as their main conveyance and their home base. It really simplified a lot of of my problems as a first time DM running the game week to week. It solved the scheduling issues by being more drop in-drop out, as all of the sessions started and ended on the ship, it gave them a clear narrative that they were in control of because they had an in universe excuse to record and discuss all of the events of the campaign with people who weren't there. I still wound up getting them a patron-ish NPC to help point them at things as they weren't really in for the "pick a direction and sail" type of gaming. I kinda have tried to force a more "modern" campaign in our current one, but I see myself going back to this open-table, west marches type of structure in the future. When you have a huge pool of players, it really just makes things easier and makes those events when "all hands are on deck" much more epic.
This is a very good explanation of the way I grew up playing (and continue to play). I have experienced player dissatisfaction with this style of play, especially over the last 10-15 years, because it's not really what modern players are expecting. But once they get a feel for it, many of them find it very enjoyable.
In the Early 80s I ran a Top Secret 'Open World' game With players being part of British,American or Russian intelligence services operating in cold war Europe Some players operated on their own,some as pairs total of 12 players Being the old days I also had not only face to face games but Telephone calls and mail drops with future briefing packets It lasted three years!
No I wouldn't have the time now,but with the technology we have now it would probably be easier because you could run games over a 'gaming patform' as well as face2face and with emails etc getting info to various PC Intel officers would be easier So in conclusion it would be easier to run but unfortunately it's 'Time'
As a big fan of your work, I must congratulate you on raising such an articulate young DM. My kid thinks DnD is lame and for old folks...You really got a lucky roll there with your boy following your footsteps to continue the craft. I applaud you both. o7
I love that you had someone on with a different style and let them explain the strengths of their system without trying to make an argument. It went from a explanatory video to an interview and never became a debate. Wonderful! I land somewhere in between. I LOVE to plan things out and design dungeons, and I don't really care if no one ever explores the isolated temple of orc monks. But I prioritize the 'next session' and always plan that out as it comes up, only ever dropping clues about other things I've made.
I loved that episode on Questing Beast. This is how I played in college 1991-1993 with a fantasy campaign that was the setting and 40+ players with multiple characters (if wanted) and 3-5 GMs and a coodinator. The campaign progresses, characters/players came and went but the world continued. The campaign lasted over 40 years. The nostalgia for this style was the catalyst for a "course correction" in my current game (even though it's just 6 players) and something I was partially doing for decades without realizing it (multiple groups in the same world). The players are all excited to have a stable of characters and the chance to affect the world even if a character death occurs. very happy to see your take on this concept. Edit: back then 3-5 GMs would pitch their adventure. 10-15 people would go along on that GM's adventure and return at the end of the session. The next week (Saturday was game night) time progresses and we'd swap stories.
Michael sounds like an awesome DM! Also, I really envy him for having so much free time to prepare his campaign as much as he wants to. His players are really lucky to have him! 😃👍
Prof DM forgets "Never work with children and animals" 😂😂😂 Michael's campaign sounds like a lot of fun. Can we get Michael back for some more details of how he runs the game/
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 A good teacher gets their pupils to remember the lesson. A great teacher helps their pupils to think for themselves... and to up stage their Dad on youtube 😂
It could also be so heavily pre set that players don't feel they have much agency. A balance between scripted and improvisation is what makes a campaign great.
I grew up not having any of the D&D books, but it’s funny how many of the things that Gygax used ended up naturally manifesting in our game play process. The Westmarch style of game really took a lot of pressure of me as a DM, it made the players think creatively as they competed with each other over the “resources”, and it was the only time I’ve successfully been able to maintain the bones of various modules I would later pull from, because inevitably my players would throw too big a wrench in my plans if I relied on a module too heavily.
I really like the advice you are giving. This will make it much easier for new DMs to set up campaigns/worlds for their gamers. One of the biggest barriers that D&D had to overcome was that OD&D needed to find really talented storytellers to be DMs - most customers would be overwhelmed by the work that Dave and Gary and other pioneers had to do to keep Braunstein, Blackmoor and Greyhawk running week after week, and most beginning DMs would fail to create the excitement of a good story line or narrate the events in an imaginative way: "You hit his right leg and he goes down on one knee, so his sword thrust misses you!" not "Your roll beats his roll by six points so he takes six hit points of damage and misses you." OD&D did not provide enough examples of play so the players could learn by example without one of us being there to run them through a lot of games. We started providing Dungeon Modules to provide detailed settings for the beginner DMs who lacked imagination and experience to create their own (and also to make more sales, I'll admit it). It was like a company that had created a very popular cookbook then bringing out a line of frozen meals using the recipes in the cookbook, for all the customers who liked the dishes, but found cooking too hard. We still hoped that the beginner DMs would learn how to do it right by running the canned modules, but we saw that the players who would never manage to grow into good DMs would still provide us with a much bigger market. That worked very well, until other things destroyed TSR. So I'm glad to see you keeping the flame alive. Keep rolling those polyhedra! -David Wesely
Darkest Dungeon is a good modern analogue: you have a roster of adventurers you can send into the bowels of your ancestral manor, but you can only send 4 at a time and some might be recovering from their last delve and not in an ideal position to venture forth again. Instead each player has a mini-stable of PCs so they can use the one best suited for the situation or the one who isn't currently healing. (You could also have a stable of PCs shared among all players if everyone's on board for that. That level of detachment from your PC starts to feel closer to one of those dungeon-delving boardgames instead of an RPG proper for my tastes, but lots of other people have fun playing that way.)
@@digitaljanus It also is more thematic for a more "deadly" system, and yeah, Darkest Dungeon is a great inspiration. It also allows to make the world "grittier" making stuff like healing slower without slowing the actual game.
Michael's perspective is great. I love that you kept the design disagreement in the video instead of scripting out some compromise. It makes for a much more nuanced and interesting video.
That boy has his head on right. He has been taught well. I kind of like how he’s taking modern sources of inspiration such as Elden Ring or the Mandelorian, and applying those to an old-school framework.
The bonus content at the end is awesome. Those random encounters and roll of the percentage dice on the lore & knowledge chart is always good for a curve ball.
Dude, you're ringing all my bells. I started playing D&D and Traveler, Top Secret and Boot Hill in 1977. Lots of great memories. I changed my game styles with the times, playing all the way into the early 2000s. But the old, early style of D&D was always the most fun for me. Thanks for reminding me of those days!
If you want to see an actual example of this kind of campaign in action I highly recommend checking out the Trollopulous campaign. It's a really interesting living campaign that evolved over several years of real time. With no house rules. Just the rules as written in the AD&D 1E player guide and DMG.
I like that you included Michael's thoughts even though it was the opposite of what you were trying to say. I liked the idea of two parties in the same world interacting with each other indirectly.. and at least once very directly.
This video has lived in my head rent free for a year. I used a lot of the princples dicussed here to run a Table Top Wargame campaign. The gem here was using a map and a home base. Only once did we have all the players at the table at the same time. But we were able to get campaign done using these priciples. Great video. Thanks.
Really, the great thing about this hobby being 50 years old is that hardly anything is new. Over the past month I got hooked on the idea of making a sandbox TTRPG experience for my friends. We had a couple story and exploration focused TTRPG sessions but recently we played a board game called Descent. It's essentially a series of short battle encounters with a simple progression system and an alibi story to frame it all. And it was quick and easy and fun. I thought, that had to be possible as a DnD campaign, just going out, having adventures, people can join or not, none of it is a huge commitment. And yeah, I found out about Hexcrawls and OSR and rules light systems and West Marches and so much that had been done in that style. Great to find all this in an era when it's coming back :D
I've never come across such a refreshing take on how to run this game - and to think this is how it was originally done! I am 100% going to try this once I get my current campaign wrapped up!
I must say, this seems to be the most fundamental aspect of old D&D and it's amazing how no one talks about it. Suddenly every design choice makes sense. I feel like I can finally create something with older editions and get players excited to try. Thanks a lot, professor!
Michael sounds like he runs a mean game! I appreciate you and QB bringing this style of play more exposure. West Marches definitely favors the GM who has more time, but one beautiful thing that happened in my open game was that we opened it up to multiple referees running several weekly time slots. It was a blast.
I participated in a Westmarches campaign in the pandemic. My newly minted Artificer rose to become a founder of a university town, craftsmages guild and eventually a general in an epic end-of-campaign war. Finishing sessions in one night could be a problem if the party got too big, so restricting the number turning out in a session is a good idea, especially online, when it's difficult not to talk over each other. One thing we really got into was writing downtime stories, storifying our character progression. My character's marriage proposal was one, and the funeral of his wife's brother, killed as an NPC in a session, was another. He brought the Warforged to our world, so there was lots of Asimov style 'what is it to be alive' stuff to mine. Another player raised a red dragon, so wrote about whether evil was innate or learned. There were even solo player text adventures when a DM was free. My artificer crafted and sold magic items to other players for a profit. We didn't really get to use that as a quest generator for exotic ingredients, but it could have been.
My first exposure to d&d was through ad&d 2nd edition in the early and mid 90's and I had no idea it was such a departure in play style from the gygax style. Glad my OSR RUclips binge has surfaced your channel to me, really great stuff
I wasn't going to watch this from the title, it seemed like something I wouldn't be interested in. But this is by far your best video. I learned a lot. Thank you.
My first foray into playing D&D was West Marches on discord. We had 50 players, 10 or so Player-DMs and a whole lot of camaraderie! Houses,Factions all trying to defend A place in Tal'dorei (we were all Critters). Ended up playing a Lorebard for three years. Best D&D times! Also This video inspires me to run a West Marches for others. Thanks!
Seeing the Professor and his son sharing their passion for TTRPG warms my heart. I truly wish and hope for this same shared passion with my own kids someday. It's going to take a while though: they're 6 and 3.
I've been running/ buying campaign modules for the small group I DM for, but I love this concept, so I think I'm going to slowly transition my players into it, building from our current map and utilizing the base my players already set up. Thanks!
As a burned-out veteran DM of the "sprawling epic narrative" school, this was a breath of fresh air and exactly the creative kick in the butt I needed. Finally. FINALLY. All the pieces for my 5th edition campaign (divided factions, an uncharted world, gray morality, more personal and less world ending stakes) come together and make sense. And best of all... it works perfectly for remote play with shifting characters. I'm inspired!
I like the way you think. I really think a good game comes from the players and the GM finding common ground and building on the world one evening at a time. As an artist I like the visual aspects of the game while someone who loves to write can add narrative to the game. Thanks Professor for keeping gaming alive.
I'm 61 and have been playing since 1981 and agree with the young sir on this. MILES of UnderDark fully mapped out and such in my Homebrew campaigns and such.
Yeaaahhh!!! I can never get enough of these "roots" of D&D vids that show original concepts of gaming coming back around today. Very cool! I loved your spin on Questing Beast's topic -- the visuals helped me really understand this West Marches/Open Tables approach. Great to hear Michael's perspective, too. Amazing how different, but how cool his style of play is.
I’ve been playing in and running this type of campaign since first edition in the late 70s. Each DM has his own world (some set in Greyhawk or Athas, others custom-designed), in which each player has his/her own stable of characters (always starting at 1st level). We never had competing groups; the adventuring party just consisted of whichever characters the players who showed up that session wanted to play (from their stable in that DM’s world - if they didn’t have one, they rolled one). Occasionally alignment would preclude some party combinations and we’d have to work that out (usually this involved paladins). We didn’t have just one home base; rather there were cities spread across each world that functioned as safe havens at the end of each session. There were banking networks between most major cities, and in some campaign worlds there were teleportation circles that could be used (for a 100-gold-piece fee) to go wherever you desired that you had seen before. Rarely would we be accompanied by a henchman or NPC; usually it was just one PC per player at the table. The DM tracked hp in fights, just giving you a general idea of how your PC was faring. He also kept a master sheet for each PC, where he tracked xp and magic items owned, as well as the ability scores originally rolled and how they changed due to the passage of time (and magical aging). Mundane items and wealth were tracked by the player in the honor system. At the end of a fight, the DM would tally xp and tell us if any PC had met the threshold to train for the next level. Mostly we just sought out monsters and treasure, but occasionally we got involved in NPC intrigues. Once in a blue moon there was conflict between PCs, which the DM would adjudicate on a case by case basis. It’s a very fun, workable system - I’m glad to see it regaining popularity!
I also designed the entirety of most of my "Locations" in advance. But I also had a map, with edges, and only designed certain areas when the campaign indicated we'd go there. And as DM, I often would enable the campaign to go to newly developed areas. And occasionally, the campaign came back to a previous location, with a better Knock spell, or an artifact that made all secret doors discoverable :) ... It was a really great five years.
I like that they both have very different approaches to their structure and campaign styles and they both work incredibly well. It just goes to show, for me at least, just how versatile D&D really is. Thank you for taking the time to create and share this.
When playing with most friends, I end up in stories/adventures meant to play out like a novel and bringing characters from a start to an end. But when I run games for me wife (or play a Tiny Dungeon thing with some other friends), it goes back to this kind of play style. I know part of what I love about it is the familiarity, but...also everything you mention in this video. With busy lives, it just works!
You might have planned it, or it may have been a happy accident, but you showed how this format is very tweakable around the style, preferences, and time/energy of the GM/DM. Great video!
Kudos to you leaving in the kid to give a completely different view. A lot of people would cut that out, but I really like the idea of combining both of your styles, have the lore and everything fleshed out and not worry about a story, but actual layouts I need to wait til it's needed otherwise I will feel like I can't "reuse" an idea even if it goes unused
Ah, you youngsters. I met Gary Gygax at Gen Con in Lake Geneva, Wi in 1972. The original, original rules were in a set Medieval combat rules called Chain Mail 1st ed 1971. In 1972 the 2nd edition had a Fantasy Supplement written by Gary. It took off the next year. There were 3 boxed sets of rules. How the build the castle and fill it with wandering monsters, tricks and traps etc, how to assign abilities/develop characters, and finally an exterior campaign. It diverted us from historical miniatures for a couple of years.😁😁
Very interesting! I've been running a shared world, multi-DM and player "west marches" style group for about 2 years. Every player has multiple PCs they have built and leveled up in individual games. Every DM adds in elements and locations to the world and map. It's been super fun.
This makes so much sense. Thanks for explaining it. I was introduced to D&D as part of an AD&D Geeyhawk campaign, but then most of the other players I met were Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms fans, and they were all trying to be Raistlin or Drizzt, whereas I was expecting a less narrative-heavy game. To this day, I see RPGs as more a rules-based simulation than a story-telling tool, and that's what I look for in RPG content (it was a dark couple of decades for a while).
They just have more free time than we do. I appreciate your time saving techniques. What I thought was really interesting was Michael's use of the villain as someone's friend concept. It reminded me of how you talk about having the denizens of the Caves of Carnage be degenerate humans and demi-humans, so that it's not so easy to go in there and butcher them indiscriminately.
Really great explanation of the kind of games I used to see a lot. I would run screaming into the night to avoid running or playing in a game like this, but that’s why we have so much variety in our games. There’s something out there for everyone. This just isn’t for me, or most of my players. Some of them run games like this, but it is worth noting that I’m the GM about 95% of the time.
This is very cool. My first DM decades ago didn’t start us as a group but rather had an “adventuring guild” in the city. We were newbies in the guild looking to build reputation and of course get loot. We’d come back to the guild HQ/tavern and see what jobs could be picked up, who was hiring, learn the latest gossip (and maybe follow up on it… Old One-Eye went out looking for the lost Thingy of Power but no one’s seen him since. Folks though he headed off towards the “caverns of yaGonnaDie”, things like that. Sometimes those became parts of stories but often were go out, do something, come back to base events.
I am glad you made this video. Many younger or newer players have never experienced this style before and there is little awareness of it these days. Campaign events and time moving forward in between sessions has always been an old-school style and it is cool when it can be managed well. This style typically requires a lot of commitment and regular sessions. A lot of times, the campaign may have to be "paused" because real life and game time do not always cooperate with each other. So, I'd say don't sweat it if you can't meticulously keep the 1:1 pattern.
I love how you bring Michael in - and he completely go against your thesis - but at the same time, it's great seeing the perspective of two different DM's. The more I think about it, the more I think running my next campaign in this style is the way to go. Thanks again for another fantastic video
Love the contrasting styles discussing a topic. I have been toying with the idea of running a West Marches, now I'm feeling like I can actually do it. I want to prepare contained amounts like the Professor recommends, but I know I'll just end up doing it like Michael.
A couple of things generally seem to get missed in these discussions about old school (not necessarily by you prof): 1. Humanoid monsters carry gold in their pockets so killing a goblin is actually worth double xp, xp for the kill plus xp for the gold 2. OD&D was about building heroes for a fantasy army, arming them with magic weapons looted from a dungeon and getting gold to recruit troops. It all makes sense when looking at a war hammer fantasy battle. Here is my hero (level 4 fighter) leading his knights and battling the minotaur and his skeletons from the Caves of Chaos. Here is my cleric and his acolytes battling the goblin regiment and here is the dragon we subdued attacking the necromancer and his zombies Allegedly, Dave Arneson had a good party and an evil party each building up their forces and having battles.
The apple did not fall too far from the tree. Give the boy more chores! He has too much free time! :) Fantastic video. Huge Kudos for showing how different your son's approach is.
Loved the GM camaraderie! I'm excited to take these rules and apply them to my next campaign. I'm somewhere comfortably between Professor DM and Michael. I'm not flushing out every location but I've written short descriptions for most of the locations.
Fleshing out the locations in advance makes winging it easier. If you have a dozen maps plotted out, you can populate them on the fly and put them where you need them for the session. I have an orc mine that I reuse rather regularly. I’ve actually used it two sessions in a row before, with the players being none the wiser. Taking a cue from Mark Hart’s article on evil from Dragon Magazine and a handful of of maps, you can make a west marches game that feels like an epic adventure to save the world, simply because the PCs assume that all of of the evil plots they uncover are connected. Evil doesn’t play well together, so sometimes a loose random thread will keep the players guessing how it’s connected for weeks.
I started running this style of campaign using Dungeon Crawl Classics. So far one group did a level 0 funnel where the peasants home village was raided. Another group of level 0 peasants have since been exploring the wilderness trying to find where those raiders came from. The best part of about this style of game is that it's player driven. I get to sit back and let them drive the story.
lol I love that your Son had his way and it went against the advice in the video. Shows to each their own and reminds me of the days when I had the free time to do the same
I think this video is awesome! More importantly, I feel PDM and Michael represent how this style of game is prepped by most GMs. Some prefer broad strokes and fill details in as needed; others prepare everything ahead of time.
My first gaming shop 25 years ago had a dozen player groups competing against each other, my last one had about six. To flip in on its head, the monster camp locations were index card drawn to be ran by the players. PCs used as NPC can not be killed unless they were ran by their players, and activity used PC/NPC gain 1/2xp, and un active NPCs gain 1/8th to 1/4thxp. Whitewolf/ World of Darkness gaming system stated PC learn despite themselves and just because the player/PC is not doing anything doesn't mean the world around them will stop growing and evolving without them. How else will PC find those high level evil priests/wizards to fight for treasure xp gain.
This was a great video! The Knights of Last Call are doing this on their Patreon/Discord. A giant MMO/West Marches type game but for PF2. Many GMs and many players. They explore and create new hooks in an ever growing world.
Excellent video. I watched Ben's when it came out and the idea blew my mind. A lot of the concepts would even work well with a single regular group of players as well. I hope to run Ultra Violet Grasslands as my next campaign and I will be digging up lots of advice from this video for it, the big difference being that the home base will be a mobile caravan. Thanks for the fantastic explanations!
Against the Cult of the Reptile God was the first "module" I played way back in the mid-1980s. Great fun! I got hooked and am still playing various versions of D&D as often as I and my DM husband can get our group together.
Like I posted on Ben's video: Finally someone who gets it! You both have done a much better job than I ever have in explaining the we rolled back in the 70s. Thats for the great video, Herr Professor! And it looks like said progeny is standing on the shoulders of a giant in The Arts of DMing!
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 I know, right? The biggest challenge i have with this channel and Ben's (and others) is wanting to implement so many different ideas. Its a wonderful problem to have so many excellent options though! And having a table that's open to experimenting is a blessing too. I bet the open table might allow for a bit of A/B style testing of variations...thank you very much for such consistently excellent content!
I love the way Michael describes his style of DMing, and I've never been cool enough for two separate groups to attack one another hahahaha AMAZING! Please, more content like this, you two are great together. Also, I LOVE your Deathbringer rules. Cheers friend!
I tried out using the system from Dungeon World's Perilous Wilds to throw together a last minute DnD session for two players. It worked really well, and the Perilous Wilds system fits really well into the style of gaming Professor talked about in this video. I literally spent only a half hour in prep, most of which was spent calibrating the two major combat encounters to make sure they fell somewhere between moderate and hard on the scale in the DMG. The PW system allows you to be as pre-planned or slapdash as you want; I really enjoy allowing the player's imaginations shape what they find (e.g., the first room they explored turned out to be a giant geode like cavern, the image for which only popped into my head after one character cast dancing lights at the ceiling as a way to see if there was anything lurking up there). Anyway, the PW book has highly influenced my style of DMing, and is a lot less stressful approach as compared to the old way in which I planned out every last detail. I'm going to try to apply the ideas from this video to a rolling game at my local game shop, picking up whatever strays happen to be hanging around when I am there :-).
Love this - something I've done for years now is create a list of possibilities for the party - then I share these with the party - similar to naming cool locations - but the list is more specific, this allows me to have a 6-12 potential directions the party can go, and I only have to have an outline (the list with some basic notes) and when the party chooses one, that's the direction I plan for and prep out. It's worked great, and still allows me to have a BBEG or main overarching theme, that the players eventually get to as the choices are whittled down.
So here is a tip for doing a Hex Crawl using Western Marches-- where you don't actually have a "home base". This works especially well if the PCs are part of an expedition or larger adventuring company, etc. I split the group into two parts. The Vanguard and the Rearguard. The Vanguard is the characters who are in the current session of play. They are the ones doing the dangerous adventuring stuff. The Rearguard is all the characters who are not in the current session and most of the NPCs that are for some reason traveling with the party. They are at a basecamp in an adjacent hex to were the Vanguard is. They cannot attack or be attacked. What the Rearguard *can* do is downtime activities (crafting, training, healing, etc.). For this reason, most players have 2 characters so they can have one in the Vanguard while the other is in the Rearguard. If absolutely necessary, a player can switch characters mid-session if the Vanguard stops for a couple hours. The Vanguard and Rearguard can converge, but only when the entire group is in a safe place like a town.
Pro tip to Michael- never say to your dad that you “have a lot of free time” because that’s how you end up painting his house for the summer.
True story.
You just gave me a splendid idea...
Your quest is…clean out the garage.
Haha I was thinking the same thing! What and honest and trustworthy young man though, well done👍
-Dan
Yep!
Michael already sounds like a master GM. You should feel very proud Professor!
A chip off the old block!
He's okay.
Great hair too!
I would like to see more of master Michael on Dungen Craft. This was fun.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 hahahaha
Michael is a very powerful addition to this video. Good thing PDM had his vest on, or he might not have survived this PvP encounter.
Thanks. I'll let him know he got good reviews.
It's funny how I thought that the more modern styles of play were making the old rules obsolete because it made for a better game to remove them. But, the older I get, I realize how much we lost along the way that truly made the hobby the masterpiece that it was. Also, I realize that the old way of playing is truly what I enjoy.
I got the same experience, I started with 3.5 and really ended hating DnD and mostly played BRP based games, but once I found OSR style...
Amen. Playing the latest version feels like a clunky 1990s FPS fantasy dungeon crawl computer game. Characters & NPCs are sterile 2d cutouts. Everything is cookie-cutter predictable & sterile of anything outside the rulebook.
Thanks for sharing!
@@vapormissile Sounds like your DM isn't particularly good with roleplaying NPCs, which can happen with older rulesets too lol
@@vapormissile That's literally what OSR games are trying to reproduce: a board game with little to no story.
Modern D&D is like the Beatles, a band with 4 guys who travel and perform together. Old D&D was meant to be an orchestra where different musicians would be at different performances, or even with different ensembles.
I like that analogy.
Including the cutthroat competition to be first chair!
I always think the 1gp=1xp concept really explains the generic campaign setting history with its ancient empires and forgotten magics, thus:
In the beginning all the loot is held by monsters in the wilderness. Humans and allies go and fight the monsters. They gain the loot and level up.
The Age of Heroes is initiated by these powerful characters. They found kingdoms, forge artifacts and claim the wilderness for civilisation.
But then the supply of loot runs low. There is no more XP to gain. There are no more heroes. The kingdoms fall into decadence and disrepair. The wilderness strikes back, reclaiming its lost territories and looting the treasure, and the magic items back to itself.
Civilisation retreats, leaving ruins of lost glories behind.
The campaign begins as civilisation is starting its upswing again. New heroes are set on exploring the lost glories of ages past, fighting the monsters that infest the old ruins and guard the treasures….
And the cycle turns again.
also you equip the best magic items from the loot, because you didnt have the complex skill trees that you have now.
I had not considered Spenglerian D&D.
having one group's best friend NPC be the villain of another group is genius.
And it sounds like it happened by accident.
Very George RR Martin.
Plot hook, PC are capture while fighting through a paladin's keep manor house, and the paladin asked the PC while pin down by his house guards why they attack his house and not killed any of his guards ?
PC, " Cause you Charmed innocent men to defend you and you force marriage the baron's daughter to yourself ! We are here to free them ! "
Paladin, " Uh huh, .. and where did you hear this ? "
After a few minutes, .. the players realize I dup them with a Chaotic neutral/ good rogue/bard lying to them with tavern room sob story for sport, and the players' PC paladin couldn't detect evil on the guy and they failed their sense motive roll on the story, and the whole tavern was on in the joke.
Since no one was serious injure the house guard called it a good training exercise and good sport.
With a few good charisma/ etiquette rolls the PCs gain their first patron in the campaign.
I enjoyed Ben’s video and this was a great expansion!
Thanks!
You can see Professor Dungeon Master doing his best to contain his joy when Michael starts talking about his campaign.
My original campaign has been going on for over 20+years now its such an amazing experience through the years to build the stories and be a part of them. My friends make characters that are descendants of the original group and a whole shared world. This is nothing new to anyone who is commenting or watching this video I guess I just wanted to share my love of a long campaign. Anyway, love your content always Professor Dungeonmaster.
Yeah. I am with the progeny on this one. I design the starting place (town, village, etc.) in great detail and then all of the nearest possible destinations. This has always worked for me. The main reason is I have had players decide on session 1 to ignore the rich town around them, with all its plot hooks and starting experience opportunities and head directly into the wilderness. Those session are able to continue because I have the details about where they were going. I do this like a spiderweb. I have a full area map with named locations and as they discover one area I detail all the areas around it. This allows them to go where they want immediately. If they finish an area at the end of that session I do ask them if they have plans for where they are going to go the next session and that lets me review and maybe second draft where they are headed adding detail as needed. It also allows me to grow the spider web out from the next destination. This way I am always 1-2 sessions ahead of the players. After 40 years of GM-ing this way seems best, at least for me.
If there is a down side, it is sometimes it is too much detail for casual players. I will have one player that wants to know everything about the place they are in and others who just want a map and bullet point list of what is where and nothing more. This tends to give advantage to the players who want and can absorb details. I try to tailor the handouts to match the player's style of taking in information. I may give a map and bullet list for one player who prefers that and the next gets 1-2 sentences per numbered area and an overall summary of the area. To my in depth players they get a map (or more than one), and each area has a short paragraph of what and who is there and how it ties into what they know, with appendixes about details and things they know overall about the area, light history, contacts, a legend or two, etc.
Behind me I have a wall full of three ring binders. Each one started from a campaign I have had. At the end of the campaign I reorganize the binder to be less about the campaign and more about the area. If anyone goes there again I can pluck it down from the shelf and pick right up. Of course this is my life's hobby. It isn't for everyone and I totally understand that. When I am running a group, I spend 4-16 hours of prep and design before each session. I find that the early and ending prep sessions take the longest and the middle session prep are shorter because much of the work is done and I am just tying threads together or adding details where the players decided to do something novel. The late ones take more prep because I enhance it to tie in what they have done as characters to have an appropriate chance to end it in the ways they have shown me they prefer. So maybe that annoying innkeeper that they kept arguing with and who always charged them too much for everything turned out to be the brother of the one of the villains and at the end to get to the villain they have to deal with the innkeeper in a fashion that is fulfilling for them.
That's just how I role....
Thank you for taking the time to share your ideas!
Maybe you simply like the act of designing locations? Even if you know you won't run everything at the table, it can be fun in itself to design and flesh out the world.
Other people view it as a chore ("prep work") or don't have the time for it though - those folks should definitely not design ahead of time.
@@wasteoftime41 possibly. Before I was doing this, if they went off the detailed areas I had to use random tables or just make it up with mixed-results.
This is awesome. As someone who is still trying to figure out how to even approach/organize GM-ing I appreciate the exposition of your process!
I appreciate the spiderweb post, I was trying to figure out a way to anticipate players. It’s hard to predict if they will travel a road or crash through the woods. Love the spider web, I am stealing this.
I wound up running a west marches game on accident. I was a first time DM and texted everyone in my phone and said "hey im running Dungeons and Dragons, do you want to play". So I started with 1 game of 6 people, then world spread and i got a second group of 5, word spread again and I got a 3rd party of 4. I was running them in the same homebrew world, using a mix of my own stuff, Saltmarsh, Yawning Portal and a bunch of 3rd party modules because I just couldn't keep up the content generation. It was so much work that I became completely overwhelmed trying to keep a coherent world together and then I saw Matt Coleville's "Orc's Attack" video and decided that destroying the main town of my city and hitting a reset button on the campaign was a good idea.
I would up getting all three parties to a ship. Which sort of turned my campaign in to a sort of "West Sails" campaign that resembled Star Trek on the High Seas. They elected a captain and used the ship as their main conveyance and their home base.
It really simplified a lot of of my problems as a first time DM running the game week to week. It solved the scheduling issues by being more drop in-drop out, as all of the sessions started and ended on the ship, it gave them a clear narrative that they were in control of because they had an in universe excuse to record and discuss all of the events of the campaign with people who weren't there.
I still wound up getting them a patron-ish NPC to help point them at things as they weren't really in for the "pick a direction and sail" type of gaming.
I kinda have tried to force a more "modern" campaign in our current one, but I see myself going back to this open-table, west marches type of structure in the future. When you have a huge pool of players, it really just makes things easier and makes those events when "all hands are on deck" much more epic.
This is exactly what I was trying to create without even knowing it. A player driven narrative. Hunt and gather. Love this style.
Thanks!
This is a very good explanation of the way I grew up playing (and continue to play). I have experienced player dissatisfaction with this style of play, especially over the last 10-15 years, because it's not really what modern players are expecting. But once they get a feel for it, many of them find it very enjoyable.
My sons' friends seem to love it.
In the Early 80s I ran a Top Secret 'Open World' game
With players being part of British,American or Russian intelligence services operating in cold war Europe
Some players operated on their own,some as pairs total of 12 players
Being the old days I also had not only face to face games but Telephone calls and mail drops with future briefing packets
It lasted three years!
I really like this idea, I’m gonna be sure to steal it later on. Have you ever tried to run it again?
No I wouldn't have the time now,but with the technology we have now it would probably be easier because you could run games over a 'gaming patform' as well as face2face and with emails etc getting info to various PC Intel officers would be easier
So in conclusion it would be easier to run but unfortunately it's 'Time'
This episode always cracks me up. What a duo! Love it.
Thanks for watching multiple times!
As a big fan of your work, I must congratulate you on raising such an articulate young DM. My kid thinks DnD is lame and for old folks...You really got a lucky roll there with your boy following your footsteps to continue the craft. I applaud you both. o7
I love that you had someone on with a different style and let them explain the strengths of their system without trying to make an argument. It went from a explanatory video to an interview and never became a debate. Wonderful!
I land somewhere in between. I LOVE to plan things out and design dungeons, and I don't really care if no one ever explores the isolated temple of orc monks. But I prioritize the 'next session' and always plan that out as it comes up, only ever dropping clues about other things I've made.
I loved that episode on Questing Beast. This is how I played in college 1991-1993 with a fantasy campaign that was the setting and 40+ players with multiple characters (if wanted) and 3-5 GMs and a coodinator. The campaign progresses, characters/players came and went but the world continued. The campaign lasted over 40 years. The nostalgia for this style was the catalyst for a "course correction" in my current game (even though it's just 6 players) and something I was partially doing for decades without realizing it (multiple groups in the same world). The players are all excited to have a stable of characters and the chance to affect the world even if a character death occurs. very happy to see your take on this concept. Edit: back then 3-5 GMs would pitch their adventure. 10-15 people would go along on that GM's adventure and return at the end of the session. The next week (Saturday was game night) time progresses and we'd swap stories.
QB is always awesome.
Michael sounds like an awesome DM! Also, I really envy him for having so much free time to prepare his campaign as much as he wants to. His players are really lucky to have him! 😃👍
Prof DM forgets "Never work with children and animals" 😂😂😂 Michael's campaign sounds like a lot of fun. Can we get Michael back for some more details of how he runs the game/
Seconded. PDM has great advice, let's hear from some people who take the advice directly from the source and how they have run with it!
Live and unscripted. My patrons told me to leave that part in.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 A good teacher gets their pupils to remember the lesson. A great teacher helps their pupils to think for themselves... and to up stage their Dad on youtube 😂
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 No it was perfect. Not everyone runs the game the same.
It could also be so heavily pre set that players don't feel they have much agency. A balance between scripted and improvisation is what makes a campaign great.
I grew up not having any of the D&D books, but it’s funny how many of the things that Gygax used ended up naturally manifesting in our game play process. The Westmarch style of game really took a lot of pressure of me as a DM, it made the players think creatively as they competed with each other over the “resources”, and it was the only time I’ve successfully been able to maintain the bones of various modules I would later pull from, because inevitably my players would throw too big a wrench in my plans if I relied on a module too heavily.
I really like the advice you are giving. This will make it much easier for new DMs to set up campaigns/worlds for their gamers. One of the biggest barriers that D&D had to overcome was that OD&D needed to find really talented storytellers to be DMs - most customers would be overwhelmed by the work that Dave and Gary and other pioneers had to do to keep Braunstein, Blackmoor and Greyhawk running week after week, and most beginning DMs would fail to create the excitement of a good story line or narrate the events in an imaginative way: "You hit his right leg and he goes down on one knee, so his sword thrust misses you!" not "Your roll beats his roll by six points so he takes six hit points of damage and misses you."
OD&D did not provide enough examples of play so the players could learn by example without one of us being there to run them through a lot of games. We started providing Dungeon Modules to provide detailed settings for the beginner DMs who lacked imagination and experience to create their own (and also to make more sales, I'll admit it). It was like a company that had created a very popular cookbook then bringing out a line of frozen meals using the recipes in the cookbook, for all the customers who liked the dishes, but found cooking too hard. We still hoped that the beginner DMs would learn how to do it right by running the canned modules, but we saw that the players who would never manage to grow into good DMs would still provide us with a much bigger market. That worked very well, until other things destroyed TSR.
So I'm glad to see you keeping the flame alive. Keep rolling those polyhedra!
-David Wesely
The Idea of a STABLE of diferent characters to rotate is brilliant, I was spitballing with a family/clan thing, but this would be useful too.
I guess that, for maximum flexibility, the players' characters could come from an Adventurer's Guild.
Darkest Dungeon is a good modern analogue: you have a roster of adventurers you can send into the bowels of your ancestral manor, but you can only send 4 at a time and some might be recovering from their last delve and not in an ideal position to venture forth again. Instead each player has a mini-stable of PCs so they can use the one best suited for the situation or the one who isn't currently healing.
(You could also have a stable of PCs shared among all players if everyone's on board for that. That level of detachment from your PC starts to feel closer to one of those dungeon-delving boardgames instead of an RPG proper for my tastes, but lots of other people have fun playing that way.)
@@digitaljanus It also is more thematic for a more "deadly" system, and yeah, Darkest Dungeon is a great inspiration. It also allows to make the world "grittier" making stuff like healing slower without slowing the actual game.
@@digitaljanus A tabletop version of Darkest Dungeon could be good fun; with simple, but characterful character classes.
Good idea. I'll speak with Michael about it.
Michael's perspective is great. I love that you kept the design disagreement in the video instead of scripting out some compromise. It makes for a much more nuanced and interesting video.
That boy has his head on right. He has been taught well.
I kind of like how he’s taking modern sources of inspiration such as Elden Ring or the Mandelorian, and applying those to an old-school framework.
One of my favorite videos, I've come back to it more than once for inspiration
Cool! Thank you!
Love the relationship you have with your son. I wish my dad had been an RPG guru when I grew up. He was a guru of other things.
If only I could convince him to work for me...
The bonus content at the end is awesome. Those random encounters and roll of the percentage dice on the lore & knowledge chart is always good for a curve ball.
Thanks for watching!
This contrast between professor and junior professor was great! 👏🎲
He’s a contrast alright. My nickname for him is “Conan the Contrarian.”
Dude, you're ringing all my bells. I started playing D&D and Traveler, Top Secret and Boot Hill in 1977. Lots of great memories. I changed my game styles with the times, playing all the way into the early 2000s. But the old, early style of D&D was always the most fun for me.
Thanks for reminding me of those days!
If you want to see an actual example of this kind of campaign in action I highly recommend checking out the Trollopulous campaign. It's a really interesting living campaign that evolved over several years of real time. With no house rules. Just the rules as written in the AD&D 1E player guide and DMG.
Cool!
Great video. Also great input from Michael. He should come on more often 👍🏽
He may. We'll see.
I like that you included Michael's thoughts even though it was the opposite of what you were trying to say. I liked the idea of two parties in the same world interacting with each other indirectly.. and at least once very directly.
Sensational as always. Highlight of my day. Just sitting here painting a yeti and along comes a new PDM to make it even better.
Triva: my friend Kerry, who convinced me to start a RUclips channel, collects yetis. True.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 Clearly an individual of impeccable tastes.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 I hope that Kerry treats the yetis humanely.
This video has lived in my head rent free for a year. I used a lot of the princples dicussed here to run a Table Top Wargame campaign. The gem here was using a map and a home base. Only once did we have all the players at the table at the same time. But we were able to get campaign done using these priciples. Great video. Thanks.
Really, the great thing about this hobby being 50 years old is that hardly anything is new. Over the past month I got hooked on the idea of making a sandbox TTRPG experience for my friends. We had a couple story and exploration focused TTRPG sessions but recently we played a board game called Descent. It's essentially a series of short battle encounters with a simple progression system and an alibi story to frame it all. And it was quick and easy and fun.
I thought, that had to be possible as a DnD campaign, just going out, having adventures, people can join or not, none of it is a huge commitment. And yeah, I found out about Hexcrawls and OSR and rules light systems and West Marches and so much that had been done in that style. Great to find all this in an era when it's coming back :D
I've never come across such a refreshing take on how to run this game - and to think this is how it was originally done! I am 100% going to try this once I get my current campaign wrapped up!
Thank you! That’s kind of you to say. Pass this video along!
I must say, this seems to be the most fundamental aspect of old D&D and it's amazing how no one talks about it. Suddenly every design choice makes sense. I feel like I can finally create something with older editions and get players excited to try. Thanks a lot, professor!
Love the guest appearance! His style of prep reflects his age... Don't we all wish we could still run things that way?
Michael sounds like he runs a mean game!
I appreciate you and QB bringing this style of play more exposure. West Marches definitely favors the GM who has more time, but one beautiful thing that happened in my open game was that we opened it up to multiple referees running several weekly time slots. It was a blast.
I participated in a Westmarches campaign in the pandemic. My newly minted Artificer rose to become a founder of a university town, craftsmages guild and eventually a general in an epic end-of-campaign war.
Finishing sessions in one night could be a problem if the party got too big, so restricting the number turning out in a session is a good idea, especially online, when it's difficult not to talk over each other.
One thing we really got into was writing downtime stories, storifying our character progression. My character's marriage proposal was one, and the funeral of his wife's brother, killed as an NPC in a session, was another. He brought the Warforged to our world, so there was lots of Asimov style 'what is it to be alive' stuff to mine. Another player raised a red dragon, so wrote about whether evil was innate or learned. There were even solo player text adventures when a DM was free.
My artificer crafted and sold magic items to other players for a profit. We didn't really get to use that as a quest generator for exotic ingredients, but it could have been.
My first exposure to d&d was through ad&d 2nd edition in the early and mid 90's and I had no idea it was such a departure in play style from the gygax style. Glad my OSR RUclips binge has surfaced your channel to me, really great stuff
I wasn't going to watch this from the title, it seemed like something I wouldn't be interested in. But this is by far your best video. I learned a lot. Thank you.
My first foray into playing D&D was West Marches on discord. We had 50 players, 10 or so Player-DMs and a whole lot of camaraderie! Houses,Factions all trying to defend A place in Tal'dorei (we were all Critters). Ended up playing a Lorebard for three years. Best D&D times! Also This video inspires me to run a West Marches for others. Thanks!
You're welcome!
Seeing the Professor and his son sharing their passion for TTRPG warms my heart. I truly wish and hope for this same shared passion with my own kids someday. It's going to take a while though: they're 6 and 3.
I've been running/ buying campaign modules for the small group I DM for, but I love this concept, so I think I'm going to slowly transition my players into it, building from our current map and utilizing the base my players already set up. Thanks!
As a burned-out veteran DM of the "sprawling epic narrative" school, this was a breath of fresh air and exactly the creative kick in the butt I needed. Finally. FINALLY. All the pieces for my 5th edition campaign (divided factions, an uncharted world, gray morality, more personal and less world ending stakes) come together and make sense. And best of all... it works perfectly for remote play with shifting characters. I'm inspired!
You made my day.
I like the way you think. I really think a good game comes from the players and the GM finding common ground and building on the world one evening at a time. As an artist I like the visual aspects of the game while someone who loves to write can add narrative to the game.
Thanks Professor for keeping gaming alive.
I'm 61 and have been playing since 1981 and agree with the young sir on this. MILES of UnderDark fully mapped out and such in my Homebrew campaigns and such.
The Elden Ring theme is really on-point in this style of game design. Was chuffed to hear it mentioned!
Yeaaahhh!!! I can never get enough of these "roots" of D&D vids that show original concepts of gaming coming back around today. Very cool! I loved your spin on Questing Beast's topic -- the visuals helped me really understand this West Marches/Open Tables approach. Great to hear Michael's perspective, too. Amazing how different, but how cool his style of play is.
I’ve been playing in and running this type of campaign since first edition in the late 70s. Each DM has his own world (some set in Greyhawk or Athas, others custom-designed), in which each player has his/her own stable of characters (always starting at 1st level). We never had competing groups; the adventuring party just consisted of whichever characters the players who showed up that session wanted to play (from their stable in that DM’s world - if they didn’t have one, they rolled one). Occasionally alignment would preclude some party combinations and we’d have to work that out (usually this involved paladins). We didn’t have just one home base; rather there were cities spread across each world that functioned as safe havens at the end of each session. There were banking networks between most major cities, and in some campaign worlds there were teleportation circles that could be used (for a 100-gold-piece fee) to go wherever you desired that you had seen before. Rarely would we be accompanied by a henchman or NPC; usually it was just one PC per player at the table. The DM tracked hp in fights, just giving you a general idea of how your PC was faring. He also kept a master sheet for each PC, where he tracked xp and magic items owned, as well as the ability scores originally rolled and how they changed due to the passage of time (and magical aging). Mundane items and wealth were tracked by the player in the honor system. At the end of a fight, the DM would tally xp and tell us if any PC had met the threshold to train for the next level. Mostly we just sought out monsters and treasure, but occasionally we got involved in NPC intrigues. Once in a blue moon there was conflict between PCs, which the DM would adjudicate on a case by case basis. It’s a very fun, workable system - I’m glad to see it regaining popularity!
I also designed the entirety of most of my "Locations" in advance. But I also had a map, with edges, and only designed certain areas when the campaign indicated we'd go there. And as DM, I often would enable the campaign to go to newly developed areas. And occasionally, the campaign came back to a previous location, with a better Knock spell, or an artifact that made all secret doors discoverable :) ...
It was a really great five years.
I like that they both have very different approaches to their structure and campaign styles and they both work incredibly well. It just goes to show, for me at least, just how versatile D&D really is. Thank you for taking the time to create and share this.
When playing with most friends, I end up in stories/adventures meant to play out like a novel and bringing characters from a start to an end. But when I run games for me wife (or play a Tiny Dungeon thing with some other friends), it goes back to this kind of play style. I know part of what I love about it is the familiarity, but...also everything you mention in this video. With busy lives, it just works!
Thanks for sharing, Christopher!
You might have planned it, or it may have been a happy accident, but you showed how this format is very tweakable around the style, preferences, and time/energy of the GM/DM. Great video!
That's why playing RPGs in your teenage years is fantastic. You have the time and imagination to really create your playing world.
Lovely to see you and your son and interesting to see how different takes on the style can work.
Does anyone else think it's really wholesome to see this father and son disagree without invalidating the other's position?
Yes! That's right! You tell him, Michael! Bring DeathBringer into the 21st century!
I love that you kept that derailment in. Great contrast.
kudos to Prof. Dungeon Master for giving more perspectives than only his. That carries a lot of credibility.
Kudos to you leaving in the kid to give a completely different view. A lot of people would cut that out, but I really like the idea of combining both of your styles, have the lore and everything fleshed out and not worry about a story, but actual layouts I need to wait til it's needed otherwise I will feel like I can't "reuse" an idea even if it goes unused
Ah, you youngsters. I met Gary Gygax at Gen Con in Lake Geneva, Wi in 1972. The original, original rules were in a set Medieval combat rules called Chain Mail 1st ed 1971. In 1972 the 2nd edition had a Fantasy Supplement written by Gary. It took off the next year. There were 3 boxed sets of rules. How the build the castle and fill it with wandering monsters, tricks and traps etc, how to assign abilities/develop characters, and finally an exterior campaign. It diverted us from historical miniatures for a couple of years.😁😁
Very interesting! I've been running a shared world, multi-DM and player "west marches" style group for about 2 years. Every player has multiple PCs they have built and leveled up in individual games. Every DM adds in elements and locations to the world and map. It's been super fun.
Cool!
Thank you for a comparison of campaign styles. Also DM styles. It was very entertaining and showed different perspectives.
This makes so much sense. Thanks for explaining it.
I was introduced to D&D as part of an AD&D Geeyhawk campaign, but then most of the other players I met were Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms fans, and they were all trying to be Raistlin or Drizzt, whereas I was expecting a less narrative-heavy game.
To this day, I see RPGs as more a rules-based simulation than a story-telling tool, and that's what I look for in RPG content (it was a dark couple of decades for a while).
They just have more free time than we do. I appreciate your time saving techniques. What I thought was really interesting was Michael's use of the villain as someone's friend concept. It reminded me of how you talk about having the denizens of the Caves of Carnage be degenerate humans and demi-humans, so that it's not so easy to go in there and butcher them indiscriminately.
Really great explanation of the kind of games I used to see a lot. I would run screaming into the night to avoid running or playing in a game like this, but that’s why we have so much variety in our games. There’s something out there for everyone. This just isn’t for me, or most of my players. Some of them run games like this, but it is worth noting that I’m the GM about 95% of the time.
This is very cool. My first DM decades ago didn’t start us as a group but rather had an “adventuring guild” in the city. We were newbies in the guild looking to build reputation and of course get loot. We’d come back to the guild HQ/tavern and see what jobs could be picked up, who was hiring, learn the latest gossip (and maybe follow up on it… Old One-Eye went out looking for the lost Thingy of Power but no one’s seen him since. Folks though he headed off towards the “caverns of yaGonnaDie”, things like that. Sometimes those became parts of stories but often were go out, do something, come back to base events.
I am glad you made this video. Many younger or newer players have never experienced this style before and there is little awareness of it these days. Campaign events and time moving forward in between sessions has always been an old-school style and it is cool when it can be managed well. This style typically requires a lot of commitment and regular sessions. A lot of times, the campaign may have to be "paused" because real life and game time do not always cooperate with each other. So, I'd say don't sweat it if you can't meticulously keep the 1:1 pattern.
I love how you bring Michael in - and he completely go against your thesis - but at the same time, it's great seeing the perspective of two different DM's. The more I think about it, the more I think running my next campaign in this style is the way to go. Thanks again for another fantastic video
Its cool to hear opposing style from Michael. Just shows that its really up to everyone to find their own groove and their own style. Great video !
Love the contrasting styles discussing a topic.
I have been toying with the idea of running a West Marches, now I'm feeling like I can actually do it. I want to prepare contained amounts like the Professor recommends, but I know I'll just end up doing it like Michael.
A couple of things generally seem to get missed in these discussions about old school (not necessarily by you prof):
1. Humanoid monsters carry gold in their pockets so killing a goblin is actually worth double xp, xp for the kill plus xp for the gold
2. OD&D was about building heroes for a fantasy army, arming them with magic weapons looted from a dungeon and getting gold to recruit troops. It all makes sense when looking at a war hammer fantasy battle. Here is my hero (level 4 fighter) leading his knights and battling the minotaur and his skeletons from the Caves of Chaos. Here is my cleric and his acolytes battling the goblin regiment and here is the dragon we subdued attacking the necromancer and his zombies
Allegedly, Dave Arneson had a good party and an evil party each building up their forces and having battles.
I saw this at Ben's feed. Implemented it and its changed my game! Do it good folks!
I love that you kept his version in your video even though it clashed with yours. I think it made the video so much stronger!
The apple did not fall too far from the tree. Give the boy more chores! He has too much free time! :)
Fantastic video. Huge Kudos for showing how different your son's approach is.
Loved the GM camaraderie! I'm excited to take these rules and apply them to my next campaign. I'm somewhere comfortably between Professor DM and Michael. I'm not flushing out every location but I've written short descriptions for most of the locations.
Fleshing out the locations in advance makes winging it easier. If you have a dozen maps plotted out, you can populate them on the fly and put them where you need them for the session.
I have an orc mine that I reuse rather regularly. I’ve actually used it two sessions in a row before, with the players being none the wiser.
Taking a cue from Mark Hart’s article on evil from Dragon Magazine and a handful of of maps, you can make a west marches game that feels like an epic adventure to save the world, simply because the PCs assume that all of of the evil plots they uncover are connected. Evil doesn’t play well together, so sometimes a loose random thread will keep the players guessing how it’s connected for weeks.
I like Michael, I enjoy the building and fleshing out and want the players to create the narratives at the table
I started running this style of campaign using Dungeon Crawl Classics. So far one group did a level 0 funnel where the peasants home village was raided. Another group of level 0 peasants have since been exploring the wilderness trying to find where those raiders came from.
The best part of about this style of game is that it's player driven. I get to sit back and let them drive the story.
I agree!
lol I love that your Son had his way and it went against the advice in the video. Shows to each their own and reminds me of the days when I had the free time to do the same
Particularly loved this one! Loved Michael's take!
I think this video is awesome! More importantly, I feel PDM and Michael represent how this style of game is prepped by most GMs. Some prefer broad strokes and fill details in as needed; others prepare everything ahead of time.
That concept of a living world, with 2 different DnD parties sharing the same ecosystem is fascinating. I never thought of that before!
Glad this video was useful!
My first gaming shop 25 years ago had a dozen player groups competing against each other, my last one had about six.
To flip in on its head, the monster camp locations were index card drawn to be ran by the players.
PCs used as NPC can not be killed unless they were ran by their players, and activity used PC/NPC gain 1/2xp, and un active NPCs gain 1/8th to 1/4thxp. Whitewolf/ World of Darkness gaming system stated PC learn despite themselves and just because the player/PC is not doing anything doesn't mean the world around them will stop growing and evolving without them. How else will PC find those high level evil priests/wizards to fight for treasure xp gain.
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 I can't wait to try it out! Your channel has inspired me and is what really got me into the hobby. Thanks Professor!
@@krispalermo8133 That sounds awesome!
This was a great video! The Knights of Last Call are doing this on their Patreon/Discord. A giant MMO/West Marches type game but for PF2. Many GMs and many players. They explore and create new hooks in an ever growing world.
Excellent video. I watched Ben's when it came out and the idea blew my mind. A lot of the concepts would even work well with a single regular group of players as well.
I hope to run Ultra Violet Grasslands as my next campaign and I will be digging up lots of advice from this video for it, the big difference being that the home base will be a mobile caravan.
Thanks for the fantastic explanations!
best cast from Prof DM to date.
Against the Cult of the Reptile God was the first "module" I played way back in the mid-1980s. Great fun! I got hooked and am still playing various versions of D&D as often as I and my DM husband can get our group together.
Like I posted on Ben's video: Finally someone who gets it! You both have done a much better job than I ever have in explaining the we rolled back in the 70s.
Thats for the great video, Herr Professor!
And it looks like said progeny is standing on the shoulders of a giant in The Arts of DMing!
Ben is a genius. He knows more about the games I played in the 80s than I did--and I lived through it!
@@DUNGEONCRAFT1 I know, right? The biggest challenge i have with this channel and Ben's (and others) is wanting to implement so many different ideas. Its a wonderful problem to have so many excellent options though! And having a table that's open to experimenting is a blessing too. I bet the open table might allow for a bit of A/B style testing of variations...thank you very much for such consistently excellent content!
I love the way Michael describes his style of DMing, and I've never been cool enough for two separate groups to attack one another hahahaha AMAZING! Please, more content like this, you two are great together. Also, I LOVE your Deathbringer rules. Cheers friend!
Loved how it was "so, you don't need to do this thing ...", "actually I do do that thing .."
I tried out using the system from Dungeon World's Perilous Wilds to throw together a last minute DnD session for two players. It worked really well, and the Perilous Wilds system fits really well into the style of gaming Professor talked about in this video. I literally spent only a half hour in prep, most of which was spent calibrating the two major combat encounters to make sure they fell somewhere between moderate and hard on the scale in the DMG. The PW system allows you to be as pre-planned or slapdash as you want; I really enjoy allowing the player's imaginations shape what they find (e.g., the first room they explored turned out to be a giant geode like cavern, the image for which only popped into my head after one character cast dancing lights at the ceiling as a way to see if there was anything lurking up there). Anyway, the PW book has highly influenced my style of DMing, and is a lot less stressful approach as compared to the old way in which I planned out every last detail. I'm going to try to apply the ideas from this video to a rolling game at my local game shop, picking up whatever strays happen to be hanging around when I am there :-).
“You don’t plan everything out in advance, do you?”
“Actually, I do.”
Hilarious.
Love this - something I've done for years now is create a list of possibilities for the party - then I share these with the party - similar to naming cool locations - but the list is more specific, this allows me to have a 6-12 potential directions the party can go, and I only have to have an outline (the list with some basic notes) and when the party chooses one, that's the direction I plan for and prep out. It's worked great, and still allows me to have a BBEG or main overarching theme, that the players eventually get to as the choices are whittled down.
So here is a tip for doing a Hex Crawl using Western Marches-- where you don't actually have a "home base". This works especially well if the PCs are part of an expedition or larger adventuring company, etc. I split the group into two parts. The Vanguard and the Rearguard. The Vanguard is the characters who are in the current session of play. They are the ones doing the dangerous adventuring stuff. The Rearguard is all the characters who are not in the current session and most of the NPCs that are for some reason traveling with the party. They are at a basecamp in an adjacent hex to were the Vanguard is. They cannot attack or be attacked. What the Rearguard *can* do is downtime activities (crafting, training, healing, etc.). For this reason, most players have 2 characters so they can have one in the Vanguard while the other is in the Rearguard. If absolutely necessary, a player can switch characters mid-session if the Vanguard stops for a couple hours.
The Vanguard and Rearguard can converge, but only when the entire group is in a safe place like a town.
I loved Ben's video he did recently and this video did not disappoint. Absolutely loved this professor.
so great , thank you ! lots of great ideas , and the relationship with your son made my day !