I've spent most of this year putting together the basic ideas I've been having for a D&D world, and have recently started properly fleshing out the ideas. The problem is, I've got 37 pages of bullet-pointed notes (on excel, copied it all to word for the page count) and am halfway through my first bit, which is a one-shot style encounter in the mountains. I've turned 360 words from my notes into 10 pages of details.
At this point, I made the colossal mistake of working out how big the document will be if it all translates at the same rate - it'll end up being a nearly 700,000 word, 1085 page book!!!
I'm going to keep chipping away at it but it suddenly seems a lot less like a winter project and more of a several year one!
how do you kepe yourself from getting bogged down by how much there is to do?
I am in no means an experienced DM, but if you just want some basic advice here you go.
If you have the “skeleton” of your campaign and all of the big ideas written down and thought out then ,that’s great! Make sure the all of those big ideas are fully fleshed out and done. You don’t want a book, you want bullet points. But not to many, I’ve made that mistake one to many times. Even if you want to prepare for everything or even if your just trying to go with the flow you do have to stop and step back. You can’t prepare for everything, you don’t know what your characters are going to do, you going to have to improvise a lot. If you want to write lore or ideas about, let’s say a mountain, then do that but keep it to a minimum. Write a few sentences or ideas and then that’s it, unless you know that your players are going to 100% go there. If it is a main part of your adventure then flesh it out a bit more, let’s say the mountain was a mine for dwarves. But it was abandoned many years ago for unknown reasons, maybe they unearthed something, there’s an adventure right there! (Yes, I know that’s just lord of the rings) DMing is about improv and making things up on the fly, that’s what makes it fun!
tl;dr: don’t flesh something out unless it’s absolutely necessary, make bullet points, but not to many! Improv is your best friend and please, just have fun
also here’s a like to a video that basically says this but better
I've spent most of this year putting together the basic ideas I've been having for a D&D world, and have recently started properly fleshing out the ideas. The problem is, I've got 37 pages of bullet-pointed notes (on excel, copied it all to word for the page count) and am halfway through my first bit, which is a one-shot style encounter in the mountains. I've turned 360 words from my notes into 10 pages of details.
At this point, I made the colossal mistake of working out how big the document will be if it all translates at the same rate - it'll end up being a nearly 700,000 word, 1085 page book!!!
I'm going to keep chipping away at it but it suddenly seems a lot less like a winter project and more of a several year one!
how do you kepe yourself from getting bogged down by how much there is to do?
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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I am in no means an experienced DM, but if you just want some basic advice here you go.
If you have the “skeleton” of your campaign and all of the big ideas written down and thought out then ,that’s great! Make sure the all of those big ideas are fully fleshed out and done. You don’t want a book, you want bullet points. But not to many, I’ve made that mistake one to many times. Even if you want to prepare for everything or even if your just trying to go with the flow you do have to stop and step back. You can’t prepare for everything, you don’t know what your characters are going to do, you going to have to improvise a lot. If you want to write lore or ideas about, let’s say a mountain, then do that but keep it to a minimum. Write a few sentences or ideas and then that’s it, unless you know that your players are going to 100% go there. If it is a main part of your adventure then flesh it out a bit more, let’s say the mountain was a mine for dwarves. But it was abandoned many years ago for unknown reasons, maybe they unearthed something, there’s an adventure right there! (Yes, I know that’s just lord of the rings) DMing is about improv and making things up on the fly, that’s what makes it fun!
tl;dr: don’t flesh something out unless it’s absolutely necessary, make bullet points, but not to many! Improv is your best friend and please, just have fun
also here’s a like to a video that basically says this but better
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgHI5f7hbIw&list=PLFqx3C51bAluHTJqt8JPOenjDjijwMdhu&index=7