A good D&D campaign can run the gamut from epic combat to labyrinthian dungeon delves to gut-punching, emotional moments. D&D Beyond tools such as Encounters and Maps help you with those first two, but today let’s talk about that third one.

For many players, the high-stakes drama of a D&D game is the appeal. Here are some ways you can make big emotional moments memorable.

1. Tie Moments to the Party
2. Make NPCs Loveable or Just Plain Tragic
3. Properly Set Up the Moment
4. Wait for the Perfect Moment to Strike
5. Don’t Feel Like You Need to Have Everything Planned Out
6. Let the Moment Sit With the Room

1. Tie Moments to the Party

Artist: CLAUDIO POZAS

D&D is a game of legendary, heroic storytelling. It says it on the tin, or in this case on the covers of the 2014 Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. The players are not just playing folks who show up while stuff is happening, they’re playing the core cast in unfolding events.

That doesn’t mean that events can’t be happening before their involvement. It does mean, though, that their presence should undeniably impact what happens. It’s a running joke that Raiders of the Lost Ark would play out the same way if Indiana Jones never showed up, but the truth is it’s Indy and Sallah who unlock the secret to the Well of Souls’ location. Without them, the entire story comes to a dead end. It’s not just that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is trying to prevent the end of the world, it’s that the antagonist is her boyfriend, and she has to destroy him to stop it. Thanos obtains all of the Infinity Stones not just despite the Avengers’ efforts to stop him, but in many cases because of them.

One of my favorite examples of this in D&D is from the Critical Role miniseries Exandria Unlimited: Calamity. As DM, Brennan Lee Mulligan knew the titular apocalyptic event would occur during the series, as did his players. Mulligan then led the players down a series of bread crumbs playing off the strengths and weaknesses of their characters. After three episodes of build-up, a spell cast by Aabria Iyengar’s character, Laerryn, is what finally ignited the fuse that kicked off the end of the world as she knew it.

Use the gifts your players give you through their roleplay and backstories and look for things that can connect them to your plans for the overall campaign. Tying major story events to the party invites the players to figuratively reach out and place a hand on the story themselves. It’s these kinds of moments that ensure a story will occupy lasting real estate within your players’ brains.

2. Make NPCs Loveable or Just Plain Tragic

It’s a sad truth, I’m afraid, that your players probably aren’t going to be too invested in the big story moments involving your NPCs if they don’t care about those NPCs to begin with. This is true in every direction. A party won’t feel the sting of an NPC’s betrayal if they never bothered to trust them. A party won’t mourn the loss of an NPC if they never connected with them.

Loveable in this context doesn’t mean they’ve got to be super sweet or easy to get along with. The players might love an NPC that the characters despise. A go-to example for this is Gollum, a character that Samwise Gamgee deeply distrusts. But we still care about Gollum and understand the tragedy of how obsessively drawn to the ring he is. We feel the impact when that obsession leads him to one last attempt to steal it, causing the destruction of the ring as well as his death in the process.

If you’ve got an NPC you plan to use in a big story moment, make sure they have mattered to the story up to that point. If your party makes a purchase once from a merchant on their journey, they might not care much if that merchant is revealed to be the big bad. But if they’ve been shopping from them this entire time? If they realize that the reason the merchant has always been there in their times of need is because they’ve been trailing them and keeping tabs on their every move? It might concern them.

3. Properly Set Up the Moment

Truly great emotional moments don’t come out of nowhere. Tension has to build, it has to simmer. Drop clues along the way. Give your players hints of what is to come without completely laying your cards on the table.

You can lay out the tension overtly, such as sending the players on a series of fetch quests that build toward a known goal. Or you can do it more subtly, like peppering in a few random encounters with a subtle but common theme, like evidence of a supernatural blight or some corrupting force. The players might not realize the connection at first, and only over time will the threads start to weave together in their minds.

It’s a fine line to walk though, and this is where knowing your table will matter a lot. You don’t want to sprinkle in too many clues until the table gets impatient, but you also don’t want to assume they’ve picked up on threads you’ve laid out only to find out most of the clues went over their heads.

A move that I’m fond of for taking the temperature of the table is to take your own hands off the wheel for a bit. In between major story beats, give your players a little time in camp or in a tavern, and let them roleplay amongst themselves. Similarly, give them some downtime in between adventures and the freedom to explore things they want to follow up on. Pay attention to the choices that your players make, and you should get a pretty good idea of what story threads are sticking out to them as important.

This also can reveal something else: If you give your players space to explore the story and they’re not engaging with any of these dramatic or emotional stakes, that is a good indication that perhaps this simply isn’t a group that is looking for those kinds of things, or that they haven’t been excited about them so far. This is also an excellent tool for knowing if or when you need to course correct.

4. Wait for the Perfect Moment to Strike

Artist: AARON MILLER

The thing about big emotional story beats is that they’re exactly that. Big. When they happen they should feel like a big deal. If you drop them too early or too often, they will quickly wear out their welcome. If you start dropping what you think are amazing jaw-dropping moments in every session, you risk having the feelings they invoke become diluted or frustrating. You don’t want your players to feel like their roleplaying is in the way of the story you want to tell.

The two best scenarios for dropping a big emotional moment into your game are either when the players least expect it, or when the tension has been built so fiercely that they cannot wait a second longer for it. There’s a reason mentioning the death of Aerith in Final Fantasy 7 will still cause gamers' eyes to twitch decades after its release. It comes during a quiet moment when the players have let their guard down and it was a shock. Calling back to an earlier example, the reason it’s so satisfying when Tony Stark snaps his fingers in Avengers: Endgame is because of just how grueling the journey to get there has been.

5. Don’t Feel Like You Need to Have Everything Planned Out

D&D campaigns can be daunting, and as a DM we often feel like we have a lot of plates spinning in the air. Because you’re already juggling so much, you can quickly overwhelm yourself if you get a sense of also needing to have a fully fleshed-out narrative ready before your session zero even begins. Here’s the secret about that: you don’t.

Think of the things you need for your adventure to function, like an idea of who or what the villain is, what their goal is, or even just an inciting incident that sets the plot into motion. Don’t worry if your story brain isn’t the type that plans much more than that. For now, just focus on making those early adventures into something interesting and fun for the players to engage in, and keep an eye out for details that excite them, things they interact with, and make notes to yourself about them so that maybe you can find ways to tie them into where you eventually see the story going.

One of the most well-known actual play shows, The Adventure Zone, did exactly this with their most popular campaign, Balance. The genesis of the show began as a one-shot using the Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure, and it was only after playing with his brothers and father for a bit that DM Griffin McElroy started to piece together what he wanted his overall campaign to be and diverted the story away from the published campaign.

It’s OK to not fully know where you’re going when the adventure begins. It’s OK to start a game without even thinking about stuff like this, and only going down that path once you’ve been inspired. Sometimes you simply won’t find those building blocks for emotional impact until you’ve had time at the table with the characters and players.

Big emotional moments do not need to be campaign-defining. They do not need to be the climax or crux of your story. Sometimes they’re just the end result of some good roleplay, and that’s not only OK, it’s great!

6. Let the Moment Sit With the Room

Everyone processes emotions differently. Whether a big emotional moment is the culmination of multiple sessions of planning or something big that came out of improv, it is important to let your players deal with it and react to it in the healthiest and best way for them.

You can allow your players to approach these moments in several ways:

• Give them time in character to work through it through roleplay.
• Foster an open table environment that lets players feel comfortable standing up from the table or taking a step away if needed.
• Check in with your players both in and out of character.
• Make sure your players feel comfortable utilizing an X card or other “rip cord”-style setup if they get overwhelmed and need to pause the scene or pump the breaks.
• Let an earned silence fall over the room and linger without immediately moving on.

People can and often do get invested in the characters and stories crafted at the D&D table, and part of creating truly unforgettable and well-remembered emotional stories is to honor that investment and respect your players' reactions to them.

A Parting Toast

Emotional moments aren’t everyone’s cup of tea in D&D, and that’s okay. But for those players for whom it’s a big part of the game, a good story beat can feel as satisfying as rolling a natural 20 when facing off against an ancient red dragon. So as a DM, when you feel like you’ve managed to pull off a moment and feel appreciation for it from the table, take a second to mentally pat yourself on the back for it because you’ve earned it.

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.