Tag: DM Resources

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DM Resources

Breaking Away From Procedural Story-Telling

When you watch an episode of CSI, Law & Order, or NCIS you know that by the end of the show all the loose ends will be tied up. The villain will be captured, the conflict resolved and the story wrapped up nicely. This formula for procedural story-telling is gratifying because you know that it’s going to be self-contained. There’s rarely an expectation that you’ll need any more than a rudimentary knowledge of the story coming in and that when it’s done you can walk away satisfied that no questions were left unanswered.

D&D adventures usually follow a similar procedural approach. The DM sets the stage, introduces the conflict and the villains, and after a few encounters everything is resolved. The exception is a long-term home campaign where the DM creates a much larger story arc, but even when this is the case the stops along the way are almost always resolved as quickly as they happen.

This is not to say that procedural story-telling is a bad thing. If it’s what everyone expects and it makes all the participants happy then by all means keep doing it. But if this is the way your game has run for as long as you can remember then perhaps it’s time to leave some details unresolved. After all, real life isn’t usually anything like the procedural shows we see on TV. There are always loose ends and things left unresolved.

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DM Resources

Curse Your Sudden, Yet Inevitable Betrayal

There is a spoken contract at my gaming table which dates all the way back to when I first started Dungeon Mastering. Characters brought to my table are a part of a story that we, being the players and I, are telling. Characters do not cease to exist while their player is absent. If you cannot make the session, arrangements can be made to either have your character elsewhere for the adventure or played by another PC for combat and the like. While playing another player’s character has been addressed already in this blog, there is another aspect to this contract which I make clear to my players.

If you are not enjoying your character, feel free to bring in a new character. If you are not having fun at my game, feel free to leave it. I will not think less of you. Your old character, though, they now belong to the story. And they will invariably die or turn evil.

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DM Resources

Design Encounters That Reward Cooperative Play

D&D has always been a game where players work together to accomplish a common goal rather than compete against each other for a prize. It is a game where the DM provides a backdrop for character conflict. Players are likewise not competing against the DM. Instead everyone should collaborate to create a great story and a fun experience.

In order to provide a backdrop where players can develop their characters, we need to let go of the tendency to design encounters to challenge the party’s damage output. The story should advance by developing such themes as characters actively helping others, conquering foes, and overcoming afflictions or wounds. If we use valid rewards for contributing to a team effort this will inspire others to reciprocate.

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DM Resources

7 Tips For Running an All-Zombie Campaign

With the season two premier of AMC’s Walking Dead airing yesterday, zombies are again the flavour of the month, especially with fantasy gamers. If you’re like me then every time you watch Walking Dead, or any other zombie move, you start thinking about running a zombie apocalypse campaign in D&D.

I’ve given considerable thought over the years on the best way to run a game where all the monsters were zombies. It’s tough if you’re as deeply engrained in D&D as I am. After all, one of the great things about D&D is that there are a wide variety of monsters. One week you might fight trolls, the next week a beholder, and the week after that zombies and the next week a dragon. Between the wide variety of creatures available in the Monster Manuals and the relative easy of creating your own creatures with Monster Builder, it seems kind of ridiculous to even want to create a camping where you battle the same creatures again and again.

But if there’s one thing the zombie genre has taught me it’s that a campaign with only one monster type can be very exciting if you play your cards right. Today I’m going to share 7 tips for how to pull off a successful zombie campaign in the world of 4e D&D.

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DM Resources Player Resources

Let the Players Roll More Dice

Players love to roll dice. This is one of the reasons that strikers are so popular in 4e D&D. Strikers attack more often and always seem to roll more damage dice than classes in the other roles. I must admit that I fall squarely in the “love to roll dice” camp. It’s part of what I find appealing about D&D or any board game for that matter. Quite simply, it’s fun. But for some players rolling dice is where their interest stops.

I’ve had a lot of issues lately with players who don’t pay attention to what’s going on when it’s not their turn. I’ve tried a lot of different things to keep them engaged from rewards to punishment but many simply zone out. I see this a lot during public play like D&D Encounters and LFR. I’d pretty much given up and come to accept that some players are simply there to roll dice and don’t care about what else is going on if it doesn’t directly affect their character. And then I finally came up with a way to solve this problem and the solution involved rolling more dice.

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

7 Adventure Hooks for Making the Loot Part of the Plot: RPG Blog Carnival

This month’s RPG Blog Carnival hosted by Campaign Mastery is “Making the Loot Part of the Plot.” As they describe in their overview article, this topic can be applied broadly to a lot of games in a lot of ways.

It’s been my experience that most D&D games revolve around items and loot. They may not always be at the heart of the adventure, but they are usually a significant part of the plot. If you’re looking for a way to kick-start your next campaign may we suggest you use one of the adventure hooks provided below. All of them involve making the loot part of the plot in one way or anther.

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Month in Review

Month in Review: September 2011

September was a great months at Dungeon’s Master. We started the month by hitting the very significant milestone of 1,000,000 Page Views. During September we welcomed two new contributors, we brought you weekly write-ups of D&D Encounters and shared our first attempt at Lair Assault: Forge of the Dawn Titan, and we also shared 100 Beta codes to the new Facebook game Heroes of Neverwinter. The month in review is your chance to get caught up if you missed any of the articles we ran in September.

We want to thank all the readers who visit Dungeon’s Master day after day and month after month. It’s because of your continued support and your comments that our website continues to flourish. As always, we welcome your feedback and comments so keep them coming. You can always email Wimwick or me if you have one-off questions or ideas for articles.

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DM Resources Editorial

Traps: Challenge the Players and the Characters

Sometimes it’s difficult to separate what the player knows from what the character knows. The reverse can also be true, in a manner of speaking. There are going to be times when the character would have certain knowledge or information that the player would never ever know themselves. This is just part of how the game works. You have to accept it if you’re going to play RPGs.

When it comes to combat there’s rarely any concern between the separation of player and character knowledge. Combat has clearly defined mechanics that involve a lot of dice. It doesn’t matter that I’m not proficient with a great sword, if my PC has the appropriate proficiency then the mechanics account for that and I keep on rolling my dice.

Where this becomes more troublesome is outside of combat. During the non-combat parts of role-playing games players have to be more mindful of separating what they can do from what their character can do. This situation can be troublesome when playing characters with exceptionally high ability scores or playing characters with exceptionally low ability scores.

During the past couple of weeks I’ve come face to face with this conundrum. I’ve been working on some articles about traps and puzzles for Dungeon’s Master with Dungeonmaster Johnny, one of our new contributors. He’s come up with some fantastic ideas. However many of his puzzles challenge the players and not the characters. I personally enjoy a good brain teaser, but I don’t want to spend an hour of real-time while the real-life me tries to figure out how to escape from a trapped room. I’d prefer to have a way to solve a puzzle that involves at least some mechanics that relate to my PC’s numbers.

This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with challenging the players. It all depends on what kind of game you enjoy. Both approaches have merit and both have drawbacks, as we’ll discus below.

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DM Resources

Improve Your Game By Removing Save Ends

In the years since 4e D&D was first released Wizards of the Coast has tweaked and adjusted some of the rules in an effort to improve the game. Several vaguely worded powers were cleared up. The action economy of Solo and Elite monsters has taken steps towards becoming a challenge again. Different methods of power advancement, outside the AEDU (At-will, Encounter, Daily, Utility) model were attempted with mostly successful results. Despite these many improvements to the game, there is one aspect of 4e D&D that continues to hold it back – allowing PC to wield powers with save ends effects. I believe 4e would be a better game if we took save ends effects of out the hands of PCs and made it exclusive to monsters.

While this suggestion may seem a little extreme, there are good reasons for at least considering this change. In the hands of the DM, effects with a duration of save ends heighten the drama of the game for the players. It is another dice roll on the table and rewards players who are either favoured by luck or by proper planning. There are several powers which interact with saving throws, either by granting them or by granting a bonus to them, as well as several key class features and feats. As such, any character can effectively plan around suffering and shaking off effects with a duration of save ends. It is an empowering mechanic for PCs, because it places the power to save themselves firmly in their hands.

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D&D Encounters DM Resources

8 Things I Learned at D&D Encounters

D&D Encounters began in March 2010. Since then, I’ve ventured down to my FLGS every Wednesday night after work to play D&D. I started in season 1 as just a player. Through seasons 2-3 I still played but I was ready to jump in and DM if needed. When season 4 began I decided to become the primary DM. Now, five weeks into season 6, I’m still the DM and still have a blast every week at D&D Encounters.

Before D&D Encounter started up I had experience with public play D&D but it was limited to LFR and D&D Game Days. Both presented excellent opportunities to play D&D but these were very different experiences than what I see weekly at D&D Encounters. D&D Encounters is designed as a gateway for new players to try out D&D for the first time. However, it also serves as a pick-up game that many experienced players can fall back on if they don’t have a regular game of their own. This leads to a variety of players with ranging levels of D&D and even gaming experience.

Over the past year and a half I’ve seen a lot of stuff while participating in D&D Encounters – some of it good, some of it bad. I’d like to think that in the end everything I’ve absorbed has made me a more savvy DM and that I’ve developed a pretty good idea of exactly what needs to be done to keep the adventure great every single week.

Today I’m going to share a few of the things I’ve learned during my run at D&D Encounters. Many of the points in my list are common sense things that most DMs are likely already doing. However, for the newer DMs out there a list like this can be a good reminder of the kind of things to keep in mind when running your weekly game.

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