3 Wise DMs – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Following the footsteps of our Storm King’s Thunder and Curse of Strahd campaigns, we gather all five players from our Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen players wrap-up!

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave welcome The Wizard Washburn, Monster Wrangler Matt, and our own Chaos Engine, Bonnie, to sit down and discuss the epic entirety of our Dragonlance campaign: what we enjoyed and what we didn’t in this campaign that clocked in at just under 2 years! For anyone wanting to run or play in Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen, this episode is for you.

1:50 Player Introductions:

Sir William de Grey – the Knight of Solamnia who makes a devil’s bargain with Sargonnas to gain power to defeat the Dragon Army, only to be redeemed by Chislev and fulfill his Anakin arc.

Rasgueado Vilhuela de Latigo – A whip-wielding Bard who was in search of The Great Song, as well as his Father – only to find that his Father was Lohezet of the Black Robes, High Wizard of the Dragon Army!

Adran Oakenheel – An orphaned Kagonesti Elf who was left with the Sanctuary of the First World; a monastic order dedicated to the Prophecy of the Ascendant Dragon.

Mikros – A Kender Rogue who was searching for her missing past but who was chosen by Lunitari to wield magic.

Dame Eeva Pyrope – An orphaned girl who squired for the Knights of Solamnia, wishing to one day become a full-fledged Knight… only to realize that she has been chosen to herald the return of the Gods!

7:45 Crafting backstories and character concepts that fit within the deep lore of Krynn and Dragonlance.

31:50 We discuss the implementation of the Warriors of Krynn strategy board game developed for the SotDQ adventure: what we liked, what we didn’t, and some changes we would make.

47:40 We discuss the extensive narrative stories that developed the character’s arcs well beyond what we could have achieved at the table.

52:40 The #1 Rule for DMs: Meet Your Players Where They Are.

57:10 Final Thoughts.

Happy New Year! As promised, we’re kicking off our 5th Season with one of our favorite episode varieties: the 3 Wise DMs Campaign Reviews! Following the footsteps of our Storm King’s Thunder, Curse of Strahd, and Woodstock Wanderers campaigns, we delve deep into the High Tale of the Dragonlance with our DM Review of Shadow of the Dragon Queen.

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave review how we experienced running and playing it; what we enjoyed and what we didn’t in this campaign that clocked in at just under 2 years! For anyone wanting to run Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen, this episode is for you.

Stay tuned for Part 2 when we bring ALL the players on for our Player Wrap-Up episode!

1:50 How close to the book did the DM run the campaign?

3:30 The momentum that is created with the overall theme of impending war in a campaign.

4:30 Why DM Dave chose Dragonlance as his next campaign to run.

7:00 This is the Way: How Dragonlance did NPC death right.

9:30 The Kingfisher Festival: How mini games help get players invested, like fishing for Old Benebog.

12:30 The first stumbling block in the adventure – the translation of the adventure into the Northern Wastes.

17:50 The second stumbling block – Lord Soth is introduced only as a plot device.

22:20 The majority of the adventure is found in The Northern Wastes.

23:50 The Third Stumbling Block - the strange design decision to provide the players with the ability to fly over all the travel mechanics of The Northern Wastes.

27:10 The homebrewed Journey Game that we debuted in SotDQ.

32:00 Classic “Fetch Quests” to get the ball rolling for the players in a new territory.

35:55 The #1 Reason why this was DM Dave’s favorite game to ever run…

41:20 The 2 great things WotC learned leading up to SotDQ: the Adventure Hook and Encounter Difficulty.

44:05 Final Thoughts.

Movies like The Godfather, The Lord of the Rings, Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Gladiator, Goodfellas… the list is inexhaustible. Movies that are “must-see” movies, classics that are nearly required viewing. Many published adventures, like Curse of Strahd, Storm King’s Thunder, Dragonlance, The Keep on the Borderlands, Against the Cult of the Reptile God, Tomb of Annihilation… they’re classic adventures that you want to experience, just like a classic movie.

So what do you do if your players want to experience one of these “classic movies” and you’ve been running all homebrewed worlds? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave sit down to answer a listener question about what their top tips are for approaching running a published adventure for the first time.

3:45 Tip #1: Know the general plot of the adventure – the “elevator pitch.”

4:50 Tip #2: Think of the adventure more like a sourcebook, rather than the gospel.

8:10 Tip #3: How to manage a giant adventure? One session at a time.

10:40 Tip #4: Focus on the plots in the adventure that will be fun for your players.

13:00 Tip #5: Lean on your fellow internet DMs… every published adventure has tons of hacks.

15:00 Tip #6: Approach these longform adventures as multiple adventures in your overarching campaign.

22:30 Tip #7: Make sure your initial hook is solid. Often, the published adventure hooks are “ehhh.”

26:06 PSA: Stop listening to “Tough Guy” DMs who use Railroad as an insult. Do what makes you and your table have fun.

36:40 Final Thoughts.

Sometimes the best stories play out after defeat, but to get to them, bad guys need to occasionally survive the fight. It’s not always so easy to recognize when it’s time to pull back and have the monsters or villains run away or surrender to the PCs, and it can be even harder to get the party to accept the surrender after it’s offered.

When should a DM surrender and how do you make sure it doesn’t turn into a slaughter? It all comes down to how you teach players to play your game. After all, if every bad guy they don’t kill comes back worse, what are you teaching them but to be murder hobos?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave roll out their best tricks for using surrender as a storytelling tool, combat hack, and reminder that actions in their RPG worlds have consequences. Listen to learn why the greatest DM victories often come from battles your villains lost.

2:00 “Make intelligence matter again”: How and when we have NPCs surrender in our games

5:00 Curse of Strahd: How the Hags escaped Old Bone Grinder to mess with the party for months

7:00 A solution to slow combat: Why DM Thorin has more 5E NPCs run away than previous editions

9:00 Scripted retreats: Steal a trick from Hollywood and give the party a taste of the BBEG to come

12:00 When bad guys running away gets frustrating to the party

15:00 If the villain surrenders and doesn’t deserve death, can they be redeemed?

19:00 The checkmate: Really good villains already have a reason the party can’t kill them

21:00 Should you “punish” PC parties that don’t accept surrender?

25:00 When surrenders lead to conflict in the party or the story

28:00 What do you do with a party that never accepts surrender?

31:00 What happens after the villain surrenders? It can be a more interesting story than killing them off

42:00 DM Dave’s 3-legged stool of villainy!

46:00 If your villain surrenders just to come back worse, you teach the party to never accept surrender

50:00 Is the modern trope that superheroes just beget supervillains a plot-hole-ridden cliché?

58:00 How to make players understand their actions will have consequences (And how DM Tony feels when his PCs can’t kill the bad guys)

64:00 Final thoughts

Combat is such a central part of D&D 5E, but it’s also a part of the game that can take forever! And not all players are down for a 4-hour fight every game session. What can the DM do to keep the fights fun for everyone, even if some players in the party want fast combat and others want to take their time and enjoy the tactics? How do you make sure you’re not the one slowing combat down and killing the vibe?

It’s not just a D&D question, either. DM’s who stumble running combat encounters can make even the fastest combat systems seem like a slog. In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about how they run combat, from what makes a good or boring fight to how they manage their monsters, how they decide who gets attacked next, and how hard they try to kill the party. It’s everything you need to know to make your RPG combats, especially in D&D 5E, as fun as they can be.

2:00 Is D&D combat unique? In any system, you need to keep it moving and know your NPC/monster abilities, so you don’t bog the fight down.

6:00 What makes a combat encounter good or boring? It’s about the time invested and the context.

12:00 Encounter building: How we prep our combats, whether they’re planned or improvised.

16:00 An aside about our Curse of Strahd party making deals in the Amber Temple.

18:00 How you manage your monsters says a lot about how you DM.

24:00 Nothing kills combat faster than a DM trying to cast spells they’ve never read: Know your NPC abilities.

29:00 Treasure: Random rewards or planned gifts for every party member?

35:00 Too many easy fights are boring, but so is the party getting beat down every combat.

38:00 What do you do after initiative is rolled?

39:00 Why Call of Cthulhu combat runs much faster than D&D 5E.

45:00 Balancing what different players want from combat: Some want fights to go faster, others want to take their time and enjoy tactical combat, and new players are still figuring it out.

48:00 Players need to feel like they’ve accomplished something with the game, not wasted all night on one meaningless combat

50:00 Understanding players’ mental ability to grasp D&D combat, their options and theater of the mind

53:00 Is theater of the mind (combat without maps) a good way to make combat run faster?

55:00 How aggressively should you try to kill the party?

61:00 Fight about 1 in 3 encounters on the NPCs’ terms, not the party’s

65:00 The monsters should know what they’re doing (h/t Keith Ammann) and fight that way

70:00 DM Dave breaks Tony’s heart by saying Strahd won’t deign to wrestle Hawk Morgan

72:00 How DM Thorin decides monster tactics on the fly

74:00 Sometimes the party crates opportunities for the monsters … seize them!

76:00 When is it OK to run large, all-night combats, and how do you keep them from bogging down? (There may be no right decision.)

92:00 Final Thoughts

Whether you’re playing a book Dungeons & Dragons campaign or just have big plans for a couple uglies in the Monster Manual, there’s a level window where your PCs will have a good, balanced encounter with those threats. But what do you do when the party isn’t in that window?

Maybe through the course of their adventures, the PCs have explored everything and leveled up too fast, so now Strahd or Auril or whatever big bad is looking a little wimpy? Or maybe your players have characters they’ve been playing for a while and love, but the campaign they want to play is lower level, so it’ll need some adjustment? Either way, you may find yourself looking for ways to scale up the danger so that climactic battle still has some bite.

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about how they approach these problems. Listen on to hear 3 good ways to bring underpowered villains’ power up to par, Dave’s dilemma with Strahd and the jacked level-10 party of 6, and whether or not level-adjusting modules is worth the effort in the first place.

1:00 A Listener Question: How can you scale up Rime of the Frostmaiden’s Auril for higher-level play?

2:00 Leveling out of the window: How do you keep your BBEG challenging for a party that’s powering up faster than expected?

7:00 The 1st Way to Boost Your Villain: Leveling up their monster type

10:00 “I want to play it the way it’s Done”: Why DM Dave is Reluctant to modify Strahd in Curse of Strahd or Auril in Rime of the Frostmaiden, even though the players may be higher level

13:00 Be careful just increasing Villain hit points and making the fight longer, and what to do instead

17:00 BBEGs like Strahd and Auril should not just get smoked — they have more stuff going on

20:00 The 2nd Way to Boost Your Villain: Giving Strahd additional forces or power-ups to make sure the fight is interesting

23:00 The 3rd Way to Boost Your Villain: Upgrade its raw stats and powers, but try to keep the length of the fight the same — and what’s wrong with the DMG on this?

26:00 A few Final Fantasy 7 spoilers and how to use them with your villain

29:00 Monster Benchmarking: Go look at things that are the kind of threat you want your villain to be

35:00 Your BBEG should know the party and plan to beat them specifically. But how well should the party know them?

45:00 Is it worth scaling up a pre-made adventure to fit a higher-level party, or is that wasted effort?

53:00 How the unexpected makes for some of the most memorable D&D moments

58:00 It depends on the room: Giving your players what they want

60:00 Initial impressions of Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft: Did we just buy homework?

63:00 Final thoughts

Dungeons & Dragons gives most DMs a good idea of how to start running high fantasy games, but where do you go from there? Or if you started with another genre of role-playing game, like horror, how do you make a high fantasy game feel alive? What mechanics, details and dungeon master tricks (or GM tricks) can you use to make your players feel what’s unique about your setting?

One of the cool things about 3 Wise DMs is that we do get to play a lot of games and try a lot of genres and settings. With active campaigns that run from high fantasy to gothic horror (Curse of Strahd) to eldritch horror (Call of Cthulhu) to superhero gaming (Marvel SHRPG) — and past campaigns that covered intrigue, sci-fi and more — Thorin, Tony and Dave are always looking for ways to make their settings stand out to the players in them. Here are 13 tips we use to bring different RPG campaign worlds to life with players who’ve seen them all (and could easily start forgetting which game is which if we’re not on top of our genrebending).

Note: Episode contains paid promotion.

1:00 Paid Promo! Our first sponsor is Crit Academy’s Capes & Crooks: A 5E Superhero RPG. Visit the Crit Academy’s Capes & Crooks Kickstarter for more information.

2:00 A listener question: How do we DM different genres and different levels of technology so they feel different from D&D.compaignworld?

4:00 Respect your players’ lore tolerance and don’t over-work your details —you may be wasting your time

7:00 If you spend a lot of time describing a detail, make sure it has a point, or the players might give it one (like Dave’s overly personal Curse of Strahd Tarokka Deck Reading)

12:00 How DM Dave sets the tone for Curse of Strahd, or as he calls it, “D&D’s Universal Monsters”

14:00 How over-the-top characters and events brought out the high fantasy in DM Tony’s Storm King’s Thunder D&D campaign

17:00 What makes high fantasy feel like high fantasy? Magic item shops? Lost civilizations? The fall of Rome and Irish mythology?

26:00 How do people in this setting get things done? Can the party kill every problem, or do they need to solve the mystery or save the day?

28:00 Superheroes don’t kill people — how we define superhero settings

33:00 Investigators can’t kill eldritch horrors — how DM Thorin brings historical reality to 1920s Call of Cthulhu and then cracks it with Mythos abominations

38:00 Changing genres in response to player agency — or how we made Storm King’s Thunder a game of court intrigue

40:00 Make friends and influence people: What sets intrigue games apart from classic fantasy hackfests?

43:00 Not all of these games can be done with improv, you might actually have to prep

46:00 Building steampunk and magicpunk worlds — science vs. magic or science via magic?

58:00 Fantasy and guns: If you’re in a fantasy setting and a player wants to do some technology stuff, like be a gunslinger, should you let them?

61:00 Final thoughts

From The Avengers to The Snyder Cut and Arrow to Wanda Vision, superheroes have conquered entertainment. Are you ready for them to clean up the streets of your game group, too? That’s exactly what’s been happening at the 3 Wise DMs’ game table, as our little experimentation with TSR’s Marvel Superhero RPG (MSH RPG) from 1984 has ballooned into a 3-DM shared universe. Instead of the MCU, we now have a 3WDMSHRPGU! (We really need to work on that acronym).

Ever since DMs Dave and Tony were 0-level Dungeon Students, they’ve both been dying to get a superhero game up and running, and now it’s finally off the ground. But bringing a superhero world to life, managing 60 years of great backstories, and managing player characters who don’t really progress and get more powerful the way we’re used to from D&D, presents a whole new set of challenges. Not to mention, TSR’s system is not at all easy to learn by modern standards.

In this episode, we’ll break down how superhero games play different from D&D and other traditional RPGs, what we do to bring them to life, and how we’ve handled the steep learning curve.

Note: Episode contains paid promotion.

1:00 Paid Promo! Our first sponsor is Crit Academy’s Capes & Crooks: A 5E Superhero RPG. Visit https://www.critacademy.com/capesandcrooks for more information.

3:00 The Marvel Superhero RPG: Digging up TSR’s 30-year undead superhero roleplaying system

5:00 Why superhero gaming? 60 years of great background material to mold into our own shared Marvel Universe (the #3WDMSHRPGU?)

8:00 What sets superhero campaigns apart from D&D or other more typical RPG settings?

12:00 How do you present true “superpowers” in an RPG, like throwing cars to the moon?

29:00 Capturing the fantasy of superhero roleplaying: Why lack of progress is a feature, not a bug

37:00 Superheroes vs. murder hobos: A no-kill comic book power fantasy

42:00 5 elements of a superhero campaign:

1. Heroes are defined by their villains
2. Machinations playing out from the street to the villain’s secret lair
3. Know the level of the team you’re playing with and the villains they’ll be fighting
4. Let the threat escalate around them
5. Public opinion matters for the heroes

51:00 How session prep for superhero games compares to D&D

56:00 Cameos, cameos, cameos! Galactus, The Elders of the Universe, The Avengers, Ego the Living Planet … our superhero team has met them all and more!

61:00 Can you pull DC into your Marvel? Sure! If you can manage the power gap

67:00 Final thoughts

How much time should you spend prepping for individual game sessions? When should you improv and when should you plan more ahead of time? How can you keep rules lawyers and house rules under control?

This episode marks one year of recording 3 Wise DMs and some of the most intensive gaming of our lives. We’ve had as many as 5 campaigns running across 3 different systems, and every week we got together to talk about them on this podcast. It’s been an intensive RPG workshop for all three of us, and we learned a ton during it.

This week, we look back on the very first episode, how our DMing ideas have changed since then, and 11 things we think make us better dungeon masters than we were at the start of this podcast.

1:00 Traumatized DMs: Cringing back at our first episode

7:00 Lesson 1: Stun still sucks — nothing wrecks combat like making someone skip a turn

10:00 Lesson 2: Dealing with the unexpected — or how we learned to loosen up as DMs

15:00 Lesson 3: Can you improv a historical mystery RPG? Why Thorin is running Call of Cthulhu by the book (and the history books)

25:00 Lesson 4: What we’ve learned about session prep, dialogue and running organic worlds

32:00 Lesson 5: Talking it out — how the podcast helped give us better perspective and empathy when handling DM-player conflict

36:00 Lesson 6: How we cut down on rules lawyers and broken house rules

47:00 Lesson 7: Homebrew magic items — creating the Vampiric Wand of Cthulhu

52:00 Lesson 8: How playing different games with different people and talking about it every week helped us handle our games better

55:00 Lesson 9: Improving DM-player communication, expectations and engagement

58:00 Lesson 10: We’re not there to entertain the players! … Except maybe we are

65:00 Lesson 11: The formulas we use to set our games up for success

69:00 Final thoughts and how our DMing changed over the first year of recording 3 Wise DMs

The 3 Wise DMs have only just started to get back together for some in-person gaming, but none of the online RPGs we’ve talked about has yet made it back to the dinner table. Can they be saved? Do the Wise DMs even want to bring them back in-person? Are the players on board? Even if everyone wants to go back to playing live, what challenges do they face?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about the surprising difficulty of bringing their games back to live, in-person play. From commuting convenience to hosting fatigue and player pushback, there are objections to overcome. But there’s a lot we all miss from in-person gaming, too. And when/if they do come back, what will they be mindful of after a year DMing from the Lab?

2:00 Do we want to bring in-person gaming back? And if so, how much?

5:00 The benefits of no-commute gaming vs. the roleplaying rapport of knowing each other in-person

9:00 Relieve the tension: Why players should laugh, a lot, during your horror-themed game … and then scream

15:00 Will our digital tools make the transition back to in-person gaming? (Google Notes = Tony’s MVP)

19:00 Is losing online battle maps a problem? Depends on the game you’re playing, your group and the size of your minis collection

29:00 The many in-person minis and mapping solutions we’ve tried

35:00 The Chain Golem Gang: Cool figs we never get to use

39:00 Why were excited to play with minis and terrain again (in part thanks to our minis master, Scott, who also runs Paper Terrain: paperterrain.com)

48:00: Can we DM historical games (like Call of Cthulhu) without quick access to Wikipedia?

50:00 PC pushback: Do our players want to get back together to playing in person, ordering/cooking food, someone hosting, driving to the game around work commutes, etc.?

57:00 The overlooked burden of hosting D&D

62:00 The elevated expectation of DMing in person: If everyone’s going through all this trouble to come together, you better give them more than just fights and some XP

70:00 Final thoughts: Do we want to bring our games back together in person? If we do, how do we do it?