This is genuinely excellent content, and should be included verbatim in the next DMG. I applaud the idea of providing a framework connecting the many individual pieces the current DMG provides into a coherent strategy of designing and running a session and then connecting sessions into a campaign. It sounds simple when I write it out like that, but when you're a new DM it can definitely seem daunting, and difficult to maintain perspective.

I'd love to see this idea expanded upon, perhaps an exploration of different types of challenges you can run. Mystery, horror, history, man v nature, and then how to incorporate them in to a dynamic play map to give the players a living environment. There's also the dreaded social interactions! Even the professional modules will rarely have you speak to an NPC twice and practically never more than that.  I'd consider myself no longer a rookie DM, but even I struggle with that balance of unique and fun vs mundane and tedious when I attempt a stylistic genre or gaming mechanic I haven't tried before.

TL:DR this is good, please make more of this.

One of the best tip articles I've seen in a while and a real novel way of simplifying the description of a city.

This has a very Interactive Fiction feel to it (ie. old-school text adventures). Love it!

Quote from KaiRyssdal >>

That island chain city map looks awesome. Are those available anywhere in DnDB?

Looks like a Mike Schley map. He has a website: https://mikeschley.com/portfolio

Thank you, this was an excellent article!

I mapped out my city and a lot of lines crossed. I put key locations at these points. It helped me figure our where a few placed are at on the map. Very cool.

This is truly great advice. I had never considered it from this point and I have literally been struggling with a better way to look at exploration as my current party of players hate having too many options. I will find a way to blend this with my current method to make it simple! Thank you!

With a city, or similar area where travel isn't normally restricted, one idea I would suggest would be to have places be linked not based on location but based on accessibility, and on knowledge of.

For example, in order to cross the city (in this article's plot idea) you could need permission from one of three city officials. (perhaps the lands beyond aren't civilized, so it's not like most people want to travel there, or perhaps they closed their gates because of the war.) Obviously, top city officials don't make time to meet with any random person who asks. Perhaps one of them is the head of some temple, and the temple has a holiday coming up where people who have demonstrated loyalty to the faith are welcome (and provide a service that they can render to the temple.) A second official is known to be fond of gladiator games, and will sometimes invite particularly good gladiators to meet him. The third is sequestered in his home, hasn't been seen for months, and there are all types of rumors flying. To reach him, the players will have to sneak in, whereupon they'll discover that he's a prisoner in his home, or afflicted by a curse, or some such. 

The first step of meeting with the religious official is deciding which religious quest to take. The second is the party, perhaps culminating with an attack. Then they meet the offical, and get tasked to track down the preparators of the attack, in exchange for a favor (being allowed to leave the city on the far side.) They're given a few names that might help them track down the preparators, each in different locations and with different problems to reach. 

I'm sorry this became so wordy. The idea was that they're "Exploring" the city's different areas, (and different politics) but they're choices aren't based on location, but on what's going on. It isn't normally hard to travel around in a city, and there's no reason that the temple's initial quest should be closer to the entrance than the party is. The reason that I feel this is exploration is that each step open up new areas for them to access/explore.

By knowledge of (in the first paragraph) I mean that there can be special gardens, and/or other places, in various locations in the city. They won't know about them until they've befriended city residents (likely via quest) and/or they won't have access until they've done the same. Again, these areas aren't out of reach due to distance, they're out of reach until they're told of them, and/or until they obtain accessibility.

What a great article. I will use this more often. Keep it up.

Thanks, Davyd!

This is a great article that really helps with the meat and potatoes DMs need to make the magic soup! Thanks Davyd

Excellent advice. Thank you for writing this!

Intriguing

Really sounds advice all around! I had already started taking exploration like a dungeon with some time to travel between the nodes, but hadn't considered yet taking the same approach to cities and World Maps – mostly because there is usually not enough time pressure to limit players into exploring a city sequentially, but this might work for specific adventures or even chase sequences!

One particular advice given that I really like and have already implemented in my games is trying to make challenges that players can step away from, particularly puzzles

There's nothing as frustrating for players as getting stuck on a puzzle that is the only way forward. So I usually put puzzles as optional paths to extra treasures or objectives, or maybe as a shortcut to certain paths of a dungeon. Occasionally, I've even thrown in one as part of a combat encounter, where solving the riddle correctly would activate magic that would create a safe area for players or enchant a weapon to be magical in a particularly difficult combat versus monsters immune to non-magical damage

Another thing to consider when thinking about the three pillars of play is how they map to the three 'classic' types of conflict in traditional literary analysis. Like the simple machines, this list has expanded and changed over time, but the general notion is this:

• Individual vs. Individual (Combat). Once called "Man vs. Man" or "Man vs. Other", this type of conflict is about individuals with diametrically opposed goals and possibly views or philosophies. These differences can't be resolved without conflict, and the most common kind of conflict for this sort of thing is Combat. There's no conversation that the Fellowship can have with the minions of Mordor about the ring; the Fellowship wants to destroy it, the orcs want to return it to their master. Both things can't exist, and that brings our players, who are individuals even if they exist within a group, into contact with other individuals, even if they exist in a group. 
• Individual vs. Self (Social). I love what David said here about Social Interactions, but I always take that a step further; Social Interactions make up Social Encounters. Roleplay is a part of all of it, but the reason you do a Social Encounter that requires Social Interactions is fundamentally because your players have encountered an obstacle that is not external to the world, but rather internal toward themselves. The uppity guard in the Manor Heights district is a pretty good example; they could just kill this mook and move on, but their internal moral compass might compel them not to. This is also a great moment to highlight the difference between character wants/needs and player wants and needs. There's a unique aspect, because the "Self" of a player character is truly separate from the "Individual" of the player. I always think of this as culminating in obstacles that come down to "I'm going to get what I want either way, but I have to figure out how much I have to live with myself to get there." 
• Individual vs. Fate (Exploration). This used to be called "Man vs. Nature," and I don't know what its modern literary term is, because I think lit folks have broken this down into subsections pretty aggressively - individual vs. technology, individual vs. society, individual vs. nature, there's a lot of different elements in this. I use the term "Individual vs. Fate" because I think this is best handled when the obstacle they're trying to overcome is really an Ineffable Force of existence. The obstacle doesn't oppose them specifically; it's just there, and it's a problem, and they have to overcome it. It lacks malice or intention, it just is. I like to go to the 2012 movie The Martian as a great example of how you can make an entire story where almost every conflict is man vs. nature. Mars doesn't want to kill our hero, Astronaut Mark Watney. Mars simply will kill him, because its environment is inhospitable to life. Mark has to continuously overcome that obstacle, which is challenging simply because the obstacle never really stops. Mars can't be beaten; it can be survived or circumvented or escaped, but never defeated. Certain dungeons and traps have this effect as well, but forces in the universe might conspire to create obstacles for our heroes - a horrific arcane storm brought about by the clash of two gods eons ago that has never stopped churning. Fate can also be a foe - if the heroes kill a Rakshasa in combat, the looming threat of the Rakshasa's vengeful return will hang over their adventures, possibly forever, maybe it was even one of their ancestors that did so and the Rakshasa is still hunting their family line. Where environmental obstacles don't suffice, backstory elements can create great opportunities for the Individual vs. Fate. 

The time scale thing discussed here is also so, so important, and a thing I think about almost constantly. When you're taking this approach to design, consider some of these ideas as well: 

• Combat (Individual vs. Individual) Objectives. Most fights in DnD, especially a lot of published adventures, come down to "the heroes need to reduce the villains to 0 hit points or vice versa." This isn't inherently bad, and sometimes it's even outright necessary, but that's not the reason for many conflicts of hostility or violence in most stories. Most of the time, each side has an Objective, a more ephemeral or non-definitive task which they mean to accomplish and to which their opponents' goals are diametrically opposed (foes). When you're designing Combat nodes, consider the Objectives of the villains and the heroes, and make sure they really are mutually exclusive; if they're not, keep intelligent enemies open to negotiation and non-intelligent enemies concerned with self-preservation. If the Giant Crocodiles wants to eat the cadaver of the murdered noble and the adventurers need to recover the ring on his finger, the Giant Crocodiles will defend their meal, but they're not gonna die for each other, or even for the meal. Equally, the adventurer just need to cut the ring off the finger, so if they can do that without killing every Crocodile, then make sure they know that. In this way, you can actually create very threatening, very challenging encounters that are near impossible to actually "Defeat" in the sense of killing every bad guy. However, in such circumstances, the objective of the combat might be doable without exposing the whole party to 3 rounds of 4-8 bite attacks with grapples. When you have intelligent foes, make sure they're focusing on what they're there to do. If they were hired to Assassinate a party member, don't waste turns attacking anyone else unless you have to do so. If they were hired to steal an artifact from a museum, they're only going to fight the heroes for as long as they need to in order to get away from them. Similarly, if they need to take the One Ring, they'll shoot Boromir in the chest three times, but they don't stick around for every death saving throw - they grab the Hobbits and Run. 
• Social (Individual vs. Self) Currency Or "How to Win Enemies and Lose Friends." The DnD books don't actually spend a whole lot of time on Social Interactions or how to turn them into encounters, but I think it's important to consider the fact that all of your players have, to some extent, some form of social currency, and it's that currency that they're spending on these encounters. How valuable that currency is to them is one of the reasons I think this maps so well onto man vs. self, because of the inherent complexity of separating Character and Player. A player understands (or we hope they do, anyway) that they are not the character they are playing. The character they are playing wants things, has goals, hopes, dreams, and ambitions - Ideals, you might say. They also have promises, obligations, duties, and attachments - or Bonds, you might say. And they have fears, worries, shortcomings, and flaws - or, well, Flaws you might say.
  
  A Social Encounter is a fundamentally different beast than a Combat Encounter in D&D,  but be prepared for them to sort of emerge dynamically. As with all things in the TTRPG space, the freedom created by the medium allows for quite a lot of Autonomy - you may have wanted the heroes to parley with the smarmy noble, they may decide to simply kill him. That decision exists beyond you; you might say that he had his archmage cast "Invulnerability" on him, which is a valid choice, but there's not a whole lot you can or even should do to prevent a given course of action. Bonds, Flaws, and Ideals exist here as leverage you can use (and currency the players spend) to encourage them to follow the social conventions of your game world. It doesn't necessarily have to make sense against a real-world comparison - heroic adventurers are here to accomplish a job, heroically, not necessarily tidy up all the loose ends of actual social interplay. In order to best use the Bonds, Flaws, and Ideals of your characters in Social Encounters, try to make it clear that you're not interested in resolving the problem through fighting (or at least, not purely through fighting). Have their opponents make it clear that they need not be enemies even if they don't agree on everything; flat-out saying so is a good way of doing that. Some players don't have any interest in a Social Encounter, the same as some players don't really have interest in Combat Encounters; that's ok. Don't compel their participation. If a player has disengaged from an encounter, don't attempt to compel their character to participate. Assume that they are generally supportive of the resolution and move on. Secondly, make sure your players understand that table talk is "ok" during a Social Encounter to the same degree you allow it in a Combat Encounter. If you don't allow players to strategize out-of-character during Combat, I might even encourage you to allow them to do so in Social Encounters, simply because Bonds, Flaws, and Ideals may not have been outright discussed in character but might have been inferred or even discussed during downtime; players may not know about these bonds their characters share or they may, or they may prefer to hide them. Whatever their preference is, make sure they are able to engage with it. Thirdly, remember that a Social Encounter, most often includes the assumption of victory: The players will get some version of what they want out of the Encounter. The degree of success is essentially a measure of what it costs them. Spell Slots and limited use Class Features are great resources to consume in this instance, same as they are in combat. The "fail state" of a Social Encounter isn't a TPK; it's corrupting Ideals into Flaws, breaking Bonds, or promising additional complications in the future for the characters with new Bonds. Remember, a good default assumption of the outcome of a Social Encounter should be that the players get over the goal; it's setting the stakes, incurring costs, and rewarding them with future currency that determines the how they get there.
  
  
• Degrees of (Individual vs. Fate) Success. Regarding Fate, you don't tend to simply avoid it or embrace it, and Exploration Encounters are pretty similar. Ultimately, you generally want your players to get where they're trying to go; keeping them from doing so keeps you from being able to use all that other content you have prepared. Instead, an Exploration Encounter, like a Social Encounter, really has degrees of success, and that's where you can really think about the resources Davyd describes - particularly time. If you blow it on your way through an Exploration Encounter, it's likely going to cost you time, time you probably don't have to spend. That time could have effects all over the story, but it's short-term effect often means the next encounter on the list is more difficult. If you're late to a Social Encounter, you lose some Social currency. If you're late to a Heist, your enemies might already taken the MacGuffin and now they're fighting from a position of defensive power. Sometimes, the best way to handle an Exploration Encounter isn't to consume time, but rather esoterically consume resources. 
  
  Except in rare circumstance, the rules for DnD don't really account for varying degrees of success. A check has a DC, which must be met or exceeded, or it fails. In some situations, they add a little extra flavor with a "Fail by 5 or more" condition and sometimes a "Succeed by 5 or more," but that can be tiresome to map out for every possible instance. Plus, while I describe this as Individual vs. Fate, it's rare that the players' characters are going to attempt something or suffer something as Individuals, which means that their degree of success should probably be measured as a group. In that way, we can take a "Best out of x" approach, which lets us keep the traditional binary DC of a DnD (pass or fail) and add degree to it by counting number of passes or failure. I like the 4e concept of "Skill Challenges" for this, though not necessarily in the way 4e modelled it (you can look it up or check out MCDM's ideas behind it). Basically, the gang is trying to do something and they make Ability Checks to score successes. Depending on the difficulty of the challenge, they're trying to score a certain number of successes before garnering three failures - three strikes you're out. Strike 3 should almost never mean they just fail - it just means that they have a bad consequence they have to navigate. If they're trying to get out of the collapsing tomb underneath the Necropalace of the Prime Lich or whatever, they might be making Athletics, Acrobatics, Survival, Perception, or even Religion, HIstory, or Nature checks. They're probably not making a lot of Persuasion or Performance checks, but, who knows, maybe. The idea is that you go turn by turn, checking with what they want to do, then you have them roll a check based on their action choice on their turn. If the pass the DC of the encounter (which you can set), then they score a success, and they're one step closer to escaping without issue. If they fail, they mark a strike, and they're still one step closer to escaping, but the "without issue" part is gone. If any characters score 3 failures (in any combinat) before succeeding a sufficient number of times (I always treat it as 5 / 7 / 9 for challenging / hard / good gods how they gonna do this), they still get to the exit, but it collapses as they get there, dumping them into a subterranean cavern under a tide of bone and necrotic earth. They make one final saving throw (or use whatever spells) and take a bunch of damage on a success or a truly nutzo amount of damage on a failure - but either way they're out. It could be that this is how the Encounter always ends, but the number of Failures they score determines the number of dice you roll for damage or even the DC of the final check. For example, if the base DC is 13 vs 4d6 Bludgeoning and 4d6 Necrotic (half on a success) and they score two failures before succeeding, you could either increase the DC to 15 or bump each of the damage dice by 2 increments, for example, to 4d10 instead of 4d6. When you do the latter, remember to take into account that damage math can be very wonky. Keeping the DC low and increasing the damage is a great way to reward your beefier characters (for whom the higher damage numbers mean less) while a higher DC with less damage punishes everyone a little more equally. 
   

Agreed. I'm currently reading So You Want To Be a Game Master by Justin Alexander, and many of the topics from here are reminiscent of some of the information that's covered in the book.

Great article.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up, Davyd. I think you are focusing on one of the pillars of storytelling that is often overlooked. It is always interesting to me to see how other DMs approach the less structured elements of running the game.

This is one of the most usefull pieces i've read in Beyond. Thank you very much. I hope I'll be reading more in the future.

Quote from Elia_Senn >>

This is genuinely excellent content, and should be included verbatim in the next DMG. I applaud the idea of providing a framework connecting the many individual pieces the current DMG provides into a coherent strategy of designing and running a session and then connecting sessions into a campaign. It sounds simple when I write it out like that, but when you're a new DM it can definitely seem daunting, and difficult to maintain perspective.

I'd love to see this idea expanded upon, perhaps an exploration of different types of challenges you can run. Mystery, horror, history, man v nature, and then how to incorporate them in to a dynamic play map to give the players a living environment. There's also the dreaded social interactions! Even the professional modules will rarely have you speak to an NPC twice and practically never more than that.  I'd consider myself no longer a rookie DM, but even I struggle with that balance of unique and fun vs mundane and tedious when I attempt a stylistic genre or gaming mechanic I haven't tried before.

TL:DR this is good, please make more of this.

 Make more of this *AND give us some Campaign tools on Beyond!

Bravo.  This is absolutely going to help newer and seasoned DM's.