I am new ( half a year of being a gm ) my players cant all be at the game at the same time, how should I deal with this without kicking them out or not playing with them?
I am new ( half a year of being a gm ) my players cant all be at the game at the same time, how should I deal with this without kicking them out or not playing with them?
Is it a meet in person thing or meet online thing? Just take what you can. If only two people can make it, run with two. For the people that don't or can't show, ask the if they are still interested in playing. If they do, run solo games that run parallel with the group. You can have events from one group intertwine or affect events in the other group.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
I just started with LMoP and then warped the story into whatever the players characters were about after we exhausted the content. You can reskin encounters and adventures from modules pretty easily, the actual story depth and perspective I drew from my own interests and lots of fantasy novels.
It went fairly well, even at a break neck pace, but that's just one newbies perspective.
Think about what you players would like storywise, lorewise and setting and then start writing a movie like story. I use my phone and a storywriting app for it, make it BIG and make sure to put a big and bad evil in it. Look at it, sometimes things will pop in to your mind, add it, rewrite a bit until you are getting really excited about it. If you don't, toss it and start over.
Once you fleshed out something big with some interesting characters and a big bad evil you're ready to make it really really small, let the players create their characters or look their existing ones and see what non-related next small adventure they can go on that would directly interest the characters. See how it plays out but drop a hint to your story arc somewhere. You can then start writing the next chapter of their adventure, where you'll drop more hints, or maybe a related encounter or an NPC who knows one of the characters in your story.
Start small and build is the best advise I ever read, however some foreshadowing is what keeps it interesting in the long-run.
I agree with what is said. Everyone’s tendency is to write a story. No. That’s not writing for a game. That’s writing for a book. You have a one sentence premise. Then you design encounters that support that premise. And rip those encounters right off from other places. Replace enemies and settings as you see fit. You can populate the town with whatever NPCs you like. Then the PCs interactions with all these encounters is what creates the story. So I recommend keeping a stockpile of encounters on hand. You should be able to “see” a session or two out to see which encounters make the most sense to put in front of them.
Another bit of advice: It feels dramatic and awesome to plan encounters where they meet a high level enemy, but don’t fight him, or he escapes them to fight them another day. Don’t. Players will WRECK your clever plan. They will doggedly pursue this enemy until either they die or he does in that session. RPGs are just different than movies.
This is great advice. Overplotting can eat up days of a DMs life for nothing. You're not an author, you're the master of ceremonies at an improv fantasy club. Everyone makes the story.
I start my campaigns with atmosphere and geography. That might sound silly but I find the setting is absolutely integral to what mood you want to express, so they go together like ham and cheese. Just like LOTR used the Shire to express a quasi-English comfort zone before venturing into the unknown (please don't hate me Tolkien, I know you despised allegory) or Dracula transitioned from a remote Eastern European castle to London in order to express the opposite - the unknown intruding on the familiar.
Once I know what kind of adventures I want and where they take place, I make a few notes detailing what sort of races and monsters live where, and why. How they survive, who they obey, what problems they're facing, what resources are abundant or lacking and what they make from them. You don't need to be 100% scientific because your world can be generated arbitrarily by a god or whatever, but having a few consistencies (like mountain ranges being drier on one side and forested on the other, where moisture concentrates) helps players roleplay with a kind of natural logic, and helps you as a DM extrapolate from your initial conditions. The same applies to political and supernatural geography.
With tone and location in place, NPCs come more easily. An important stronghold in a warzone without someone competent guarding it wouldn't last long. Major port cities will have influential traders and a more diverse mix of visitors than further inland, unless it's part of a xenophobic or isolationist country. A royal that ascends to the throne after his particularly charismatic father might have trouble keeping up the same act, lowering his popularity and making him bitter. And so on.
This is a very top-down approach. You can also start with one basic town + wilderness + dungeon and go from there, which often leads to a very erratic and gamey feeling world - but that approach can have charm in itself. A small-scale setting simply might not need the sprawling kingdoms you see in high fantasy.
What's been written above is good advice, but to go against the grain here slightly, there's nothing wrong with writing an outline of the major plot points you expect for your campaign ahead of time. It's not useful for sandbox or episodic campaigns, but for any campaign that will have a one or more long-term plot arcs, it's a must. Ignoring the need for this outline, and stringing together a series of adventures post-facto, won't do you any favors as far as continuity and cohesion are concerned.
A sandbox can totally use a few preplanned events. The players might not be present when they occur, but something like an assassination might have rippling effects that branch through the entire land. Having a few offscreen things like this makes it feel like a more organic world and can shake up a stagnating setting a bit. Certain events like a meteor strike or new technology can emerge rapidly and affect virtually everyone.
I am new ( half a year of being a gm ) my players cant all be at the game at the same time, how should I deal with this without kicking them out or not playing with them?
You might want to try a West Marches style game. If I had enough players to run, and I had known what one is before I started my current game, that's probably what I would do. In a West Marches game, you usually have a pool of many players, and their PCs all start out at level 1... As a DM you put the world and some adventure locations in front of them and then you let them decide, as players, what they want to do and who is going to do it. Then when they decide what they want to do you prep that scenario and run it, and those who said they wanted to be there, are the ones who play in it. Next time, it may be some of the same people and some different people, etc. You let them decide what they want to do and you just run the adventure.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Since I skimmed through and didn't see anyone else mention it: rpgwriterworkshop.com is having their next class starting on November 1st, and there's a free option. I took it this summer, and I'm taking it again in November. It covers a LOT of material in daily/weekly chunks, and if you are able to fit it into your schedule, you can write an entire adventure/campaign in a month.
I too am new here and I require assistance. I'm trying to fit my little town's military into the campaign so one of my NPC's makes more sense, but there's not enough room on this land that I have made for two kingdoms to be at war. It's supposed to be pretty peaceful. Should I make a legion of beast hunters?
Or reduce the size of the military. Melanie Rawn's Sunrunner setting is a single continent, and it doesn't seem very big, so her "armies" are forces numbering only in the low hundreds. I distinctly remember one force being numbered around 80 soldiers, and that was an Important Battle.
First, writing a campaign like the ones you've run so far is hard. You're talking hundreds of pages with a strong, overarching narrative that takes players from 1st to somewhere around 15th level. I have been playing the game for 25 years and I've done it successfully once. (Available now on the DMs Guild. 😜)
My recommendation is that you start where other people have suggested, with an episodic campaign. Your players are playing adventures for hire who go about plundering tombs and taking out evil creatures who threaten a particular region. That gives you a chance to learn how to write adventures without running the risk of developing a long story arc that doesn't work and then trying to salvage it somehow as you're going.
Speaking of writing adventures, it's a very different method of writing than other forms of entertainment. In the case of a script or a novel, you as the author have full control over what the characters say and do. In the case of a video game, you might have more options, but you still have full control over the dialogue and how the main character responds. A campaign is more like a Choose Your Own Adventure story combined with collaborative theater improv. It takes a while before you can accurately predict how players are likely to respond.
Once you've mastered the episodic campaign, then you can move onto developing a campaign like the ones you've run. In such a campaign, I would recommend you divide it into five parts. For example, if the players must assemble the Four Holy Relics of St. MacGuffin to defeat the demon Beelzebubble, each relic is one part and the battle with Beelzebubble is the fifth and final part. You can generally divide each part of a campaign into four acts. Act 1 is the adventure hook and preparation. Act 2 is the journey there. Act 3 is the dungeon or its equivalent. Act 4 is the conclusion.
Thank you for the advice, this is a great forum. :)
That being said, I would like one more little piece of advice. My players also don't listen to me and I need to grab their attention in some way so they stay focused. I've heard of the classic "roll random dice/ have players roll a random d20, note it down. and then don't explain, therefore making them paranoid", but I need something else. This is a party of 6 teenagers and they are loud, so I'm always having to shout above their clamour.
Dungeons (Alderac Entertainment Group, 2001). I remember when I first picked up this book, it felt like getting handed down secret knowledge from on high. It gives great advice about how to design dungeons that have character and challenge your players.
Dungeon Masters Guide 4th Edition (Wizards of the Coast, 2008). Like many people, I did not like 4th Edition. However, the DMG for that edition has some superb advice on how to run games and design adventures for your players. Honestly, I think it's probably the best DMG out of any edition for new DMs.
The Standing Stone (Wizards of the Coast, 2001). This is a nicely contained adventure that gives great ideas for how to design a non-linear adventure.
Curse of Strahd (Wizards of the Coast, 2016). It sounds like you've already read this adventure. I would encourage you to look at the non-linear dungeon design of the castle. Players can go to any room, encounter Strahd anywhere, find allies, and even skip rooms entirely. I would even recommend going back and looking at the previous incarnations of this adventure, because the authors have introduced some wonderfully creative ideas for how to run it.
You might want to take advice from teachers on this issue, but I say that only because I've seen their tactics work on adults in professional conferences and on middle school students on Tiktok. I've personally used a cowbell to call adults to attend a keynote and other large group events at a busy conference. I've seen teachers use countdowns or clap-ins. I've heard of DMs using visual aids, like a sand timer.
All of this comes with the caveat that you should discuss adding this stuff in with your players. A) it's respectful to include them in the decision process, since it's their game, too. B) when they contribute to the process, they're more likely to respect it. C) you don't necessarily want to make D&D night feel like an extension of school. Explain your position thoughtfully and clearly, though, because DMs deserve to have fun at game night, too.
My campaign idea was technically stolen from a brother of mine, but he's chill with it so I just call it mine. Besides, I made it my own- adding characters, towns, lore- so that it's almost unrecognizable. Anyways, I would suggest you find/ make up a good concept for it, then tailor it to your players. Make different "arcs" so that you can focus on each characters backstory for a certain amount of time. It makes the players feel like they are an important part of the lore to this world (making their backstory plot relevant is also recommended). If you have no players/ friends who might be interested, then I'd be happy to share with you/ the forum the concept that I made. Using premade campaigns like baldurs gate or stormwreck isle is recommended as well because they don't require as much brainpower :'D (I'm struggling lol)
Why can’t they be there, and how many players?
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
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Content Troubleshooting
Is it a meet in person thing or meet online thing? Just take what you can. If only two people can make it, run with two. For the people that don't or can't show, ask the if they are still interested in playing. If they do, run solo games that run parallel with the group. You can have events from one group intertwine or affect events in the other group.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
I just started with LMoP and then warped the story into whatever the players characters were about after we exhausted the content. You can reskin encounters and adventures from modules pretty easily, the actual story depth and perspective I drew from my own interests and lots of fantasy novels.
It went fairly well, even at a break neck pace, but that's just one newbies perspective.
Think about what you players would like storywise, lorewise and setting and then start writing a movie like story. I use my phone and a storywriting app for it, make it BIG and make sure to put a big and bad evil in it. Look at it, sometimes things will pop in to your mind, add it, rewrite a bit until you are getting really excited about it. If you don't, toss it and start over.
Once you fleshed out something big with some interesting characters and a big bad evil you're ready to make it really really small, let the players create their characters or look their existing ones and see what non-related next small adventure they can go on that would directly interest the characters. See how it plays out but drop a hint to your story arc somewhere. You can then start writing the next chapter of their adventure, where you'll drop more hints, or maybe a related encounter or an NPC who knows one of the characters in your story.
Start small and build is the best advise I ever read, however some foreshadowing is what keeps it interesting in the long-run.
This is great advice. Overplotting can eat up days of a DMs life for nothing. You're not an author, you're the master of ceremonies at an improv fantasy club. Everyone makes the story.
I start my campaigns with atmosphere and geography. That might sound silly but I find the setting is absolutely integral to what mood you want to express, so they go together like ham and cheese. Just like LOTR used the Shire to express a quasi-English comfort zone before venturing into the unknown (please don't hate me Tolkien, I know you despised allegory) or Dracula transitioned from a remote Eastern European castle to London in order to express the opposite - the unknown intruding on the familiar.
Once I know what kind of adventures I want and where they take place, I make a few notes detailing what sort of races and monsters live where, and why. How they survive, who they obey, what problems they're facing, what resources are abundant or lacking and what they make from them. You don't need to be 100% scientific because your world can be generated arbitrarily by a god or whatever, but having a few consistencies (like mountain ranges being drier on one side and forested on the other, where moisture concentrates) helps players roleplay with a kind of natural logic, and helps you as a DM extrapolate from your initial conditions. The same applies to political and supernatural geography.
With tone and location in place, NPCs come more easily. An important stronghold in a warzone without someone competent guarding it wouldn't last long. Major port cities will have influential traders and a more diverse mix of visitors than further inland, unless it's part of a xenophobic or isolationist country. A royal that ascends to the throne after his particularly charismatic father might have trouble keeping up the same act, lowering his popularity and making him bitter. And so on.
This is a very top-down approach. You can also start with one basic town + wilderness + dungeon and go from there, which often leads to a very erratic and gamey feeling world - but that approach can have charm in itself. A small-scale setting simply might not need the sprawling kingdoms you see in high fantasy.
A sandbox can totally use a few preplanned events. The players might not be present when they occur, but something like an assassination might have rippling effects that branch through the entire land. Having a few offscreen things like this makes it feel like a more organic world and can shake up a stagnating setting a bit. Certain events like a meteor strike or new technology can emerge rapidly and affect virtually everyone.
You might want to try a West Marches style game. If I had enough players to run, and I had known what one is before I started my current game, that's probably what I would do. In a West Marches game, you usually have a pool of many players, and their PCs all start out at level 1... As a DM you put the world and some adventure locations in front of them and then you let them decide, as players, what they want to do and who is going to do it. Then when they decide what they want to do you prep that scenario and run it, and those who said they wanted to be there, are the ones who play in it. Next time, it may be some of the same people and some different people, etc. You let them decide what they want to do and you just run the adventure.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Hi. I have created two campaigns / questbooks. These may help you with general structure. Links in my signature.
thank you!
Since I skimmed through and didn't see anyone else mention it: rpgwriterworkshop.com is having their next class starting on November 1st, and there's a free option. I took it this summer, and I'm taking it again in November. It covers a LOT of material in daily/weekly chunks, and if you are able to fit it into your schedule, you can write an entire adventure/campaign in a month.
I too am new here and I require assistance. I'm trying to fit my little town's military into the campaign so one of my NPC's makes more sense, but there's not enough room on this land that I have made for two kingdoms to be at war. It's supposed to be pretty peaceful. Should I make a legion of beast hunters?
-Baby DM
Or reduce the size of the military. Melanie Rawn's Sunrunner setting is a single continent, and it doesn't seem very big, so her "armies" are forces numbering only in the low hundreds. I distinctly remember one force being numbered around 80 soldiers, and that was an Important Battle.
-Carrion
First, writing a campaign like the ones you've run so far is hard. You're talking hundreds of pages with a strong, overarching narrative that takes players from 1st to somewhere around 15th level. I have been playing the game for 25 years and I've done it successfully once. (Available now on the DMs Guild. 😜)
My recommendation is that you start where other people have suggested, with an episodic campaign. Your players are playing adventures for hire who go about plundering tombs and taking out evil creatures who threaten a particular region. That gives you a chance to learn how to write adventures without running the risk of developing a long story arc that doesn't work and then trying to salvage it somehow as you're going.
Speaking of writing adventures, it's a very different method of writing than other forms of entertainment. In the case of a script or a novel, you as the author have full control over what the characters say and do. In the case of a video game, you might have more options, but you still have full control over the dialogue and how the main character responds. A campaign is more like a Choose Your Own Adventure story combined with collaborative theater improv. It takes a while before you can accurately predict how players are likely to respond.
Once you've mastered the episodic campaign, then you can move onto developing a campaign like the ones you've run. In such a campaign, I would recommend you divide it into five parts. For example, if the players must assemble the Four Holy Relics of St. MacGuffin to defeat the demon Beelzebubble, each relic is one part and the battle with Beelzebubble is the fifth and final part. You can generally divide each part of a campaign into four acts. Act 1 is the adventure hook and preparation. Act 2 is the journey there. Act 3 is the dungeon or its equivalent. Act 4 is the conclusion.
I hope that helps. Good luck!
Thank you for the advice, this is a great forum. :)
That being said, I would like one more little piece of advice. My players also don't listen to me and I need to grab their attention in some way so they stay focused. I've heard of the classic "roll random dice/ have players roll a random d20, note it down. and then don't explain, therefore making them paranoid", but I need something else. This is a party of 6 teenagers and they are loud, so I'm always having to shout above their clamour.
Oh! I should recommend some books that can help.
You might want to take advice from teachers on this issue, but I say that only because I've seen their tactics work on adults in professional conferences and on middle school students on Tiktok. I've personally used a cowbell to call adults to attend a keynote and other large group events at a busy conference. I've seen teachers use countdowns or clap-ins. I've heard of DMs using visual aids, like a sand timer.
All of this comes with the caveat that you should discuss adding this stuff in with your players. A) it's respectful to include them in the decision process, since it's their game, too. B) when they contribute to the process, they're more likely to respect it. C) you don't necessarily want to make D&D night feel like an extension of school. Explain your position thoughtfully and clearly, though, because DMs deserve to have fun at game night, too.
Thank you so much, I will try some of those. I have simply resorted to trying to shout above them. :')
I think that the cowbell might not work, but I could try a little desk bell? Also, elaborate on the visual aids. Those might work.
Hand signals, small colorful signs... that sort of thing. Flashing lights, even, if no one has a problem with flashing lights.
All of this information is very helpful, but any ideas on what to write? Or has anyone made a homemade DnD campaign they could share with me?
My campaign idea was technically stolen from a brother of mine, but he's chill with it so I just call it mine. Besides, I made it my own- adding characters, towns, lore- so that it's almost unrecognizable. Anyways, I would suggest you find/ make up a good concept for it, then tailor it to your players. Make different "arcs" so that you can focus on each characters backstory for a certain amount of time. It makes the players feel like they are an important part of the lore to this world (making their backstory plot relevant is also recommended). If you have no players/ friends who might be interested, then I'd be happy to share with you/ the forum the concept that I made. Using premade campaigns like baldurs gate or stormwreck isle is recommended as well because they don't require as much brainpower :'D (I'm struggling lol)