Alright guys, I'm the next DM for my group after our current campaign and I've decided to make a homebrew campaign. Can any expericenced DMs give me some pointers on what I should/shouldn't do, helpful tips, etc? I've been worldbuilding like crazy so far, and my current plan is to make a definitive beginning-middle-end that would play out WITHOUT any player interaction, then modify those plot points as the players go through and frick with the world in our sessions. In general though, what sort of guidelines should I follow when writing up a campaign?
Step one "Don't do that."
Prepping a bunch of shit you don't need and know you're going to throw out is a waste of time.
But I guess 5e players are a different breed, and I get the impression they enjoy just going for the ride, so maybe you're on the right track.
Noted--and I didn't mean to make it sound like railroading, I meant more of "alright, you just got a bunch of leads, you can either slay the dragon, fight the undead, or frick the princess, what'll it be?" Then if they, say, frick the princess, then they may now be friends with the royal family, but also the dragon and the undead will destroy the villages they would've saved, or whatever. Is even planning out a handful of quests like that considered railroading?
I think maybe we're at a misunderstanding based on your wording.
To elaborate; if you're going to have an open situation like that, don't prep quests at all. Just prep factions, actors, and situations.
Ultimately the point is don't plan too far ahead or too rigidly. If you plan anything rigidly, it should just be npcs and what they want, what goals they're pursuing, etc.
And combat encounters I guess. 5e is shit and it likes to break if you don't overprepare combat encounters. Doubly so because they're not fun unless they're all prop-laden gimmick-objective set pieces.
Ahhhh yes, okay this makes sense. And I can definitely get on board with devoting most of my prep time to combat stuff (rather than quest stuff that may not even get used)
>my current plan is to make a definitive beginning-middle-end that would play out WITHOUT any player interaction, then modify those plot points
That's not a terrible way to go about things, but you need to make sure you're dropping information in whatever way is appropriate (lost clues, hidden journals, NPCs just telling them) so they don't just end up missing what is effectively a ticking clock. This guy is right, listen to him.
Make sure to work with the players so they have a personal stake in that line or else they might just say "frick that. That sounds dangerous. Let's go be pirates or something and leave this country to die."
Have a good idea of how the world works, but don't fill in actual details until it matters to the players. For example, in the past, Dwarves were attacked by a terrible fae creature, which is why they now all have a tradition of wearing a little cold iron among their israeliteelry just in case. It doesn't matter what it was that attacked or why a dwarf would be so fearful to leave his israeliteelry behind until that creature is coming back or something to that affect.
Important note: CR in 5e is almost totally meaningless. Things at the high end are very powerful and things at the bottom are less powerful but some of them have random special abilities that will one-shot players or don't have the attack rolls to back up their HP. Multiattack can be particularly lethal if numerous monsters have it.
Prep NPCs in a few places who want things or have problems
The players can interact with these people or not, you can note how this effects things - don't depend on them interacting with anybody who you're not dropping right on top of them
Same thing with factions
Preparing encounters is a good idea but also note down what creatures are likely to be encountered in what places so if they frick off into a place you haven't sorted out any encounters for you know that it's going to be some form of X and you can pull some of those out of your ass real quick - of course, if it's not important at all where creatures are found you can disregard this line. Since you've been worldbuilding I thought it might be helpful.
Since you seem to have a core plot, you should probably have a reason they care beyond "it's the plot"
If there's someone eating villages you can require them to be from/know someone from a particular place and have their village get eaten or otherwise make a character who would care about this
This is a VERY crude example I wouldn't actually use but you get the point. If you intend them to do the main plot, it should actually matter to them. It can be far more subtle than the above and for many players "you'll get paid" will more than suffice.
these guys get it
forgot to add
some people are talking about railroading but they seem to be missing that you've got events that play out without the players and change because of them
you do need to make sure your players can influence things but you seem to have the right idea, just be prepared to either make it obvious when something can have a major effect or have far too many less obvious clues for so that they can't help but find one
you may have to nail it to someone's head
obvious to you is not obvious to everyone because you think like you, not like someone else
>they're not fun unless they're all prop-laden gimmick-objective set pieces.
I challenge you to name three systems where this isn't the case.
GURPs, Car Wars, Kamigakari, Double Cross, Nechronica for what little I experienced of it, Exalted wasn't too bad, and FFG Star Wars was fun but may or may not be discounted as you're sort of setting up the 'gimmicky bits,' on the run based on the dice rolls.
Obviously any game requires the GM to run combat well, but very few I've ever played require such extensive lengths to avoid engaging with the actual mechanics to stay fun as D&D
The trick, usually, is to have more going on than
>My Turn: "I roll to attack."
>Enemy Turn: "I sit here doing nothing until the GM tells me I lost HP."
A pretty wide variety of games can manage that.
If you think D&D 5e's combat is just "I roll to attack" and that terrain and movement are "gimmicks" then you deserve to have a bad time in it.
>GURPs, FFG Star Wars
No.
>Exalted
I'll give you that one.
>Car Wars, Kamigakari, Double Cross, Nechronica
Haven't played, what makes these different?
Car wars has the best, well, car rules I've ever played. Lots of careful maneuvering and nudging collisions to spin people out kind of shit. If you hate GURPs you'll hate it too.
Kamigakari has a dice-retention mechanic where you're using the rolls for attacks/abilities and substituting stored dice in to try and build combos.
Double Cross isn't great in comparison, but "Your superpowers are paid for literally with your ability to remain human," and deciding how to ride that line and what can be risked at least something.
Nechronica I haven't played a lot of, but the major thing is that all of your abilities are parts of your body, and the health system is just losing them/replacing them. "Your most action point efficient way to move is the move action granted by your legs, but you can crawl slower," kinda thing.
Still settling on GURPS as the best combat I've played though. Which, I do realize, automatically makes lal of my opinions about anything invalid.
Terrain and movement aren't gimmicks in 5e, they're borderline irrelevant. Oooh, I can control line of site and AoE exposure, just like every other game. Who fricking cares. Positioning barely matters otherwise. You can't flank people, or if you use the optional rule that you can, half the abilities in the game because pointless because all they do is grant you advantage anyway. Shit has no redeeming features. I've asked. I've genuinely tried to understand why people like 5e and all they've ever told me is "I already know how to play it," or something to the effect of "I like this car especially because it has wheels."
>Car wars has the best, well, car rules I've ever played. Lots of careful maneuvering and nudging collisions to spin people out kind of shit. If you hate GURPs you'll hate it too.
And if you like both, you'll really like GURPS Autoduel, aka Yo Dawg I Heard You Like GURPS So We Put GURPS In Your Car Wars So You Can Play GURPS While You Play Car Wars.
If you aren't at least using Xs and Os like a football diagram, and doing theater of the mind bullshit, combat is going to suck in most systems.
This. Don't prep too hard. I've done this for my first game. Worst mistake ever. Have the final boss and general world in mind and present that to your players. Then fill in the blanks with their backstories and connect the dots between them and the final boss. Let them do what they want, but present your plans within that. Say you give them a crossroads to three cities you vaguely mentioned. Your next plan is for some miniboss to attack them in a city. It doesn't matter which city they go to, have them be attacked there. Same for everything else really. It will happen no matter what, just where and when depends on your player choices.
That's the secret really. Give players enough room to go and do more or less what they want, but always lay tracks to their next goal where they are going.
Why do you think that is?
Tailor things so the characters would get involved. Make sure everyone knows where and how your world differs from normal D&D
I would add to this by recommending you wait until both you and your players have a better idea how the characters work. If you start catering too early you could be forcing your players to play a certain way. Wait until characters develop gradually and naturally.
>hey guys i'm gonna run 5e and also I am going to railroad and storyshit so hard it will make my player's heads spin
You are playing the right system.
Are you new? It's more of an art than a science. The best experience you can have is the ability to tell stories well, or the ability to improv (as in improv activing) as both skills key into the energy and motivations of the audience. It is more about understanding the audience than being "funny" or "entertaining", and being able to intuitively key into naturally occurring emotional peaks and resolutions. If you "think" about it, you'll get too overwhelmed
Almost all extreme advice is wrong. "Never" railroad players into plot points is wrong. "always" give your players absolute freedom is wrong. "never" change the plot or "whodunnit"in response to what the players like is wrong. "Never" use quantum ogres is wrong. "Always" fail forward is wrong. "Never" kill your players for things they don't understand (maybe they refuse to engage with the actual mechanics) is wrong. "Always" have the world or plot pounts move on regardless of the players is wrong.
Realistically a good campaign uses both and there's no rules for when or how. If rules could be written we'd have an ai that could generate a meaningful story.
Also. Have you considered not using 5e? The only thing it's good at us being slow.
Start with a town and a dungeon. You need to crawl before you can walk.
The confines of the dungeon crawl structure narrow options to a handful of well-defined ones so you can get practice running the game and giving players concrete options for "what do we do next". It also helps, that in spite of the the deviantart tumblrcore reputation 5e has, that a lot of people *want* the classic experience of a human, elf, dwarf, and halfing going into a subterranean maze, fighting orcs, evading traps, and grabbing the loot.
Nice, that sounds like a good jumping off point. And yeah my group is more on the side of dungeon crawling (but don't completely neglect plot)
This guy has the right idea. I personally don't like running maze-like dungeons, but I do put my players in a position where they can't exactly argue with the events, thus creating a more linear experience (which is far easier to DM!)
I like starting my players en media res: they've already accepted the bounty on the bandit king, and the adventure begins as they stand before the camp they've tracked him to. One scuffle later with some malnourished miscreants, and they'll find a note, saying the Bandit King has gone to plunder some "tombs of power." With no idea where these might be, the PCs will head back to town and talk to the quest-giver, so we can meet them, and maybe some other NPCs who can point the players in the right direction. From there, they might find that the Bandit King has stolen a mcguffin better left sealed away, thus creating rising tension until a final confrontation with the Bandit King, the fate of the land (or maybe just this province) hanging in the balance!
Its a simple story, one that probably can be concluded in 3 sessions, but it also introduces them to your style of DMing. It allows you to begin fleshing out the world slowly, and nothing says that you can't use the events as a jumping-off point for future adventures. Maybe the Mcguffin vanishes without a trace, creating a hook for a future conflict. Maybe the banditry was a consequence of an ongoing war, one that will rear its ugly head in new ways, creating new adventures. Start simple, and build complexity to match your comfort and experience!
And one last unrelated piece of advice: remember that this is a ROLE-playing game, not player-wish-fulfillment simulator: the role of the PCs within your story, is to be the central characters of the story. You should be on their side, and look out for the PCs, but so too should the players be willing to role the kind of characters your story requires.
>D&D 5E
Anything you have planned is going to get derailed with magic.
Honestly, as much as my player believe I put ridiculous amounts of time and effort in my campaigns, I just wing it the majority of the time. All my worldbuilding effort is spent on fleshing out the, well, world. This includes factions, regions, cultures, politics, etc., and then after I share a brief synopsis and everyone makes their characters, I decide where to go from there. I always have a set-in-stone first session, and then come up with a plot befitting of their backstories and choices.
90% of my GMing is just improv, and somehow I've always been everyone's favorite.
I guess the best advice I can give is to come up with a loose plot and let your players choose how to reach it's end. Best to have multiple possible outcomes, and ESPECIALLY be ready for curveballs you never expected. I keep a collection of battlemaps handy for just such occasions.
However, my most well recieved campaign was a lot more railroaded than I'm used to. The key to railroading it to never say "no" if you can help it, but rather say "yes, and/but". Basic improv rule.
I've gotten by for about a decade doing this.
Amazing, thanks, this is good stuff
As for 5e vs. another system, I'm definitely interested in learning more systems (I've played a 3.5e campaign), but for now 5e seems good enough. But at the same time, I don't know what other rules systems have to offer since I've only ever played 5e or 3.5
My last group was heavy into 5e, but I managed to get them to appreciate Savage Worlds too. If I could describe it in a word, it'd go with modular or adaptive. You can run any genre with it, and it's not only really easy to homebrew traits, skills, items, spells, etc., but the book even encourages it.
I should also mention Savage Worlds is just as simple and easy to learn as 5e, but is faaaar more open with what you can do with it.
Consider going with 3.5 or Pathfinder in that case. 5e is easy as shit to run but it has a bunch of problems and abuses.
You should give Call of Cthulhu, especially if you try to diagram the investigation flowcharts of their adventures and how to deal with gating information behind rolls without stonewalling the adventure.
To me, the dungeoncrawl and the investigation are the most fundamental TTRPG adventures that any GM should be able to run.
>I've been worldbuilding like crazy so far, and my current plan is to make a definitive beginning-middle-end that would play out WITHOUT any player interaction, then modify those plot points as the players go through and frick with the world in our sessions.
Don't do that.
Being your first time, it'll probably be underwhelming, and if there's a over-arching story your players will feel bad about wanting to end the game
Don't expect players to care, players only care about their character and doing cool shit, world building is entirely for your own pleasure.
The best way of players not fricking up everything is just saying "guys, this I'm planing a long campaign that follows a storyline" and then give them pointers on what the campaign is about, and what is the tone you are looking for, then help players integrate their characters to your campaign even before it begins, adding them to plot lines you thought and adding plot lines they thought to your game
Also, the next session should be exciting, don't waste a session "building up" to something, you may have something building up in the background, but there should be always action and something to solve right now in the foreground
>my current plan is to make a definitive beginning-middle-end
Your players are incredibly unlikely to appreciate the amount of work this requires. It is also ultimately completely useless to if your players do decide to interact with that hook in any meaningful way.
I would recommend just doing the beginning and developing whichever one they pick. Otherwise you're very quickly going to experience burnout.
the DM in the pic should clip his nails.
Your heart is clearly in the right place, the best single piece of advice I could give you based on your current plan is FRONTLOAD - something like 80% of your work should be on what might possibly happen on your very next session and 18% on what might happen in the few sessions after that.
Dropping your group and never picking up D&D 5e ever again would vastly improve your life
I'm a DM who only runs homebrewed games.
>my current plan is to make a definitive beginning-middle-end that would play out WITHOUT any player interaction, then modify those plot points as the players go through and frick with the world in our sessions
Don't do this, it's a waste of time and it'll demoralize you. Here is what you need more than anything:
>maps (overworld map, important towns, etc)
>an overarching tone/genre (you can do multiple tones like I do, but you have to separate it by arc/region)
>important npcs/bbeg
>central conflict
Then try to make up concepts as much as possible between sessions. The reason for this is simple-- there will be a gap between the way your game will actually play out vs how you think it will play out. A simple encounter might become a struggle for life and death and a big climax might end up being trivial and forgettable for the party. You have to be able to shift your focus based on what happened in previous sessions in order to get things going.
To that end, it's far more important to have a tone you're aiming for rather than a set of lore. Approach the game's lore the same way an artist does, by focusing on how it is supposed to feel and look aesthetically. The details ultimately don't matter as much as you think it does. What matters is having those details enhance this overall atmosphere you're creating.
In general, it's better to constantly create in-between sessions rather than blow your creative load all at the beginning. This is a common mistake. You are also front-loading your enthusiasm for the game world and then running it all will seem like a drag. Come up with the minimum amount of stuff needed to run, let's say, three session and just dive right in. If you get a good rhythm down, you will find you will come up with your best ideas in-between sessions based on stuff you would have never considered at the start of the game.
Put your players on a timer.
Not an hard one, but like dangle dangers in front of them, if they don't deal with the Google or whatever then towns start getting eaten up, shit like that.
You need pressure to make a good quest, otherwise it's just murderhobos fighting fantasy gang wars.
>dont
Run a game in 5e
Plan more than one session in advance.
Let players initiate pvp
Give them ACTUAL freeworld exploration
>Do
Have 2 or 3 small encounters prepped to drop anywhere you need it.
One thing DMs stopped doing at some point that I hate: LOOT
Put a few odds and ends on your henchmen and monsters that players can use creatively and add to the depth of the world with little effort.
>I search the goblin's body
>you find a scrap of dried meat in his pocket, a curved dagger of fine make in his belt, and a couple of smooth river rocks in a pouch.
It takes nothing and its shit like this that players end up clinging to the most ironically.
Read a fantasy/scifi/historical book or watch a film. Change names of people and locations and run it as your own.
My main fear in DMing anything for the first time is that somehow my players will just arrive at their goal within 30 minutes because I can't come up with anything decent to keep them from it.
Especially when running something that's not exactly combat focussed like pic related.
I know players tend to pace themselves a bit as well, but I imagine some player gunning for it would either just reach the goal in 20 minutes or I'd have to throw something their way that completely derails the adventure and makes me have to improvise every turn from then on
thats when a group of mercenaries come in behind them
" nice work, losers. we will be tak8ng the macguffin from here..."
You need to visualize the setting more and incorporate elements from the environment. For example, the players need to get the macguffin which is in the town square. What else might be there? Oh, there's actually a parade for the autumn harvest festival going on RIGHT NOW. Oh, that explains why they wanted the dropoff to be there-- it's easier to hand something off like that in the middle of the crowd.
Now your players won't have a direct line to the macguffin, they have to deal with this complicating factor which completely warps their initial plans. Basically, you gotta think bigger and remember the world is a living breathing thing which will unintentionally interfere with the players' goals.
It doesnt really work for 5e players but if you dare you should look up Tucker's Kobolds.
A fun game shouldn't be you throwing mindless, but "fair" statblocks at overpowered players and hoping it's "enough" to keep everything on pace. Do they really expect to be the sole intelligent life on the face of the Earth? Why shouldn't a dungeon full of 1/4 HD monsters team up and swarm an invading party? Why the frick wouldnt they wait just behind that spike trap with poisoned bows and alchemist's fire? Did they lay the trap just to frick around or did they actually plan on defending their home?
If your players arent attempting to scout ahead or use stealth within 100 yards of a dungeon's entrance, why the frick should they get to waltz in and take an entire community by surprise as if they didnt have enough sense to post a single lookout? We give creatures and traps a "Challenge Rating" to determine the CHALLENGE they pose, not a doormat rating for how easily they are bamboozled by a group of egotistical swaggering morons.
>5e session being 30 minutes long
Not likely