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?

It takes more than just a Wise DM to make a great roleplaying game campaign. No matter how thoroughly you plan or brilliantly you improv, the DM (or GM, judge, storyteller, or whatever the system you’re playing calls it) is only one person in a group of 2 to 10 or more people making this thing happen. When push comes to shove, the players are the ones who really make the game what it becomes — whether that’s an epic cooperative tale imaginative high adventure or a series of glorified minis skirmishes.

What can players do to make a better game? It comes down to investment in the game, engagement with the world, attitude, helping bring out the best in the other players, and learning to play the game beyond your character sheet — all while not hogging the spotlight! On our website, DM Tony posted a great article on The 6 Habits of Highly Successful RPG Players, and that’s a great place to start.

In this episode, The 3 Wise DMs discuss those tips and much more as Thorin, Tony and Dave delve into what makes a great RPG player (regardless of system), we want they see from the players at their tables, and what they try to do when playing for other DMs (wise or otherwise).

1:00 How “The 6 Habits of Highly Successful Players” blew up

2:00 What makes a good character from the DM’s point of view?

• “They can take the football and run with it.” I.e., they can devise a plan and make it happen
• They can get involved with their fellow players and “really make some magic work”
• You can be a very powerful character and still basically suck to play with
• A great character helps the whole party feel like they’ve accomplished something after the session

5:00 Player investment in the game, not just their character

9:00 Good players look for ways for their characters and the party to impact the game world — they don’t wait for (or beg) the DM to solve their problems

13:00 The 3rd level of freedom: Taking the game to that place only tabletop RPGs can go

16:00 How do you kill a vampire? A test for the degrees of freedom in your game

20:00 Good play goes beyond your character sheet and mechanics

26:00 The way the player characters talk and have fun with each other makes the game

28:00 Trust you DM: Have a good attitude and know how to “Yes, and …” with everyone at the table

35:00 Engage with the story as it happens and accept how the other players engage (even if your character hates it)

40:00 Metagaming ruins everything we’re talking about

47:00 Describe what your character is trying to do, not the roll they’re trying to make

49:00 How to be an inspiring player

52:00 How we build characters and what we try to do when we’re players in someone else’s game (plus: Tony’s research into Hulk Hogan)

59:00 Build the coolest character that you can still stand to see change or die during the game

69:00 How to build power-gaming characters that are still interesting and character-driven

72:00 Final Thoughts

Dungeons & Dragons used to have cursed treasure that would suddenly cause big changes in player characters — like the Helm of Opposite Alignment and the Girdle of Opposite Gender. These were transformations that could ruin a character for some players, so we see less of that in most RPGs today, but they can still be powerful tools for the DM and players to make a narrative twist have a lasting impact on the game.

Sometimes big character changes like these — changing alignment, class, subclass, race, or even gaining weird tentacle powers from an eldritch horror trying to destroy the world — can add mechanical oomph to important narrative moments. Other times, players may want their characters to change in some fundamental way to reflect what’s happening in their personal narratives. Frankly, most great campaigns see some form of big event that alters some characters forever, and that’s something you want to capture in your campaign as well. The Lord of the Rings wouldn’t be the story it is if Gandalf The Grey didn’t die and return as Gandalf The White.

DMing these moments can be delicate, to say the least. If you’re driving them, you have to make sure it doesn’t ruin the character or the game for your player. If the player is pushing for them, you have to make sure it doesn’t ruin the continuity of your world or the experience for the other players.

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave break down how they handle big, character-altering changes in the game, including how to get the players on board with them, what buttons not to push, and how to make it all balance mechanically with the rest of the game.

2:00 Different ways to handle changing characters

5:00 Why it’s cool to make rule-breaking changes a part of important story beats

9:00 Breaking their build: When players don’t want their character to change

14:00 Are you “ruining” the character for that player?

18:00 DMing the alignment price of accepting a dark gift from the Amber Temple in Curse of Strahd

23:00 Back in the Day with DM Tony: Demogorgon’s Wishes in Throne of Bloodstone

27:00 How big character changes that break the rules have a different impact than regular multiclassing

31:00 If you’re going to push a narrative change on a PC, sweeten the pot with boons and abilities that make it worth their while to come with you

35:00 When players push for big changes, should they have to give a narrative reason?

45:00 How can you be sure these changes will work and not kill your game?

51:00 Balancing the mechanics of big character changes

57:00 Will the Curse of Strahd characters kill each other off now that some of them are turning evil?

58:00 Final thoughts

Of all the roles the DM takes on, none is more important than bringing new players into the hobby. DM a game, and your player has fun for a night. Teach someone to play, and they may have fun for the rest of their lives (or think you’re a gigantic weirdo — it’s a win either way).

DMing new players has its own rewards and challenges. On the one hand, they haven’t played anything before, so every goblin, dragon and rogue demigod is new and awesome! On the other hand, you have to help them learn the game mechanics, their character mechanics, and how to engage with a wide-open RPG world. It’s a lot of fun but requires some extra thought to onboard the new player and make sure they have as much fun as possible.

In this episode, on the eve of DM Dave launching a mostly rookie campaign, the 3 Wise DMs talk about how they handle new players, what they do to try to teach them the game, and how they make it fun without overwhelming the poor newbs.

1:00 Dave’s new game for Bonnie’s girlfriends, all newbs, running Rime of the Frost Maiden …

4:00 Remembering 0-level antics and Necros: The Dragon Magazine school of evil wizardry

8:00 Tip 1: Where do you start? Do you teach the rules first or let them build a character they’ll love?

14:00 Tip 2: Why we hate teaching the game with pre-gen characters (well … mostly)

19:00 Tip 3: The joy of DMing players who haven’t seen any RPG tropes before

21:00 Tip 4: Guiding new players into the right characters for them

23:00 Tip 5: Letting the player create characters together instead of a bunch of secret randos

26:00 Tip 6: How we try to get new players out of their shells and into the roleplaying

29:00 Tip 7: Should you start your new players in a big town to explore or lead them right into a dungeon?

34:00 Tip 8: How self-directed are your players? Getting a feel for how they’re going to react to the world

39:00 Tip 9: What do you do beyond session 0 to session 1, 2 and onward? When do you put the real long-haul campaign together?

44:00 Tip 10: “The protagonist is directly messing with you!” What to do when the party doesn’t know what it wants to do

47:00 Tip 11: Make sure the new players have good characters who want to be adventurers (ideally heroes)

52:00 Tip 12: Teaching the game mechanics: Should you start with combat?

57:00 Tip 13: Teaching new players their place in the world

60:00 Tip 14: How do you help new players learn their characters better?

66:00 Final thoughts

The 3 Wise DMs are all approaching campaign finales: DM Tony’s Journey to Ragnarok, DM Chris’ “Wednesday-Nighters” campaign in our homebrewed world of The Further, and DM Dave’s Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen campaign.

Just like the start of a campaign, the end only comes along once. So what should you focus on when your campaign is coming to a climax? What questions should you ask yourself? What do you have to make sure you do? How do you create something that will be talked about for years to come?

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave sit down to continue our discussions from the last two episodes about tying elements of the game together to share their pro tips about designing and executing a great finale that will be the capstone for the game that has gone on for weeks, months, or years!

1:10 3WD is Big in Algeria!

3:40 What do you mean by the end of a “campaign”?

6:40 What has been the Theme of the campaign?

8:05 Lessons learned for your games, good and bad, from the ending of Loki.

12:00 Does a campaign or campaign ending need to be “epic”?

13:45 How our Curse of Strahd campaign really had 2 separate finales.

16:40 Does every character’s story need to be tied up by the end? Does the campaign actually end?

28:25 The story ends when the story ends, whether it’s 10 sessions or 100.

33:10 The pros and cons of running a “Resolutions” session after the finale.

43:00 Final Thoughts.

It’s the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG)! The font from which all the pain in your campaign should spring. … So, how do you make sure that NPC is epic and inspires your PCs to true desperation like Darth Vader and not a sniveling mama’s boy like Joss Whedon’s Steppenwolf?

It can be a fine line to walk. You need to make the villain powerful, intimidating, and willing to do things that the players will hate. But you can’t make them so bad that the players will come to hate your game. There are levels to this, and finding just the right level for your players is part of the magic hidden in every great RPG campaign.

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave dig into how they create villains, from concept to motivation to final confrontation. Along the way, they talk about what makes a good evil and how to trigger their players and characters just enough to motivate them to put a stop to it.

2:00 What are you trying to achieve with your villains?

5:00 5 reasons your big bad doesn’t just kill the party (or why Strahd didn’t wipe us out at lvl 3)

13:00 Hiding in the shadows: When should you reveal your BBEG?

18:00 DMG tools for changing up your campaign style

22:00 What kind of villain do you want to run? Power broker? Archmage? Giant immortal dragon? Unspeakable tentacle monster? Kaiju-sized flying bear? Motivated tax collector?

26:00 DM Dave’s Triangle of Evil: Monster – Villain – Amorphous Organized Enemies

34:00 Anticlimaxes: What do you not want to have happen to your villain?

38:00 Making Strahd Scry: Ways to give your villain an advantage over the party

42:00 A boss battle needs mortal tension, but how much tension is right for your players?

47:00 How long should your boss fight last?

49:00 Preparing your villain for the final showdown: What special measures (cheats?) are OK?

56:00 Adding levels and minions to keep the villain powered up with the party

59:00 The players need to know they beat something worth defeating

67:00 Character motivations: Creating an enemy that pushes the buttons these characters care about

72:00 What the BBEG can’t do: No sexual assault, no “women in refrigerators,” no acts so dastardly they ruin the game for the players.

76:00 Final thoughts and a 5-step plan for creating great RPG villains

“Alignment doesn’t matter!” We’ve heard it all over the place, but alignment has been a part of D&D — and most RPGs in some form — for decades. And it’s been played differently through every edition. Is it worth your time? Does it make things worse instead of better? Does it have any benefits players today are overlooking?

Once upon a time, violating alignment could cost a character a level, which meant acting against alignment lead to fighters forgetting how to swing a sword as well. It got kind of weird, and many modern RPGs, including D&D 5E, have de-emphasized alignment since then in the name of player fun.

But in other ways, the 9-box D&D alignment grid can be a very useful roleplaying tool. And doesn’t it make sense for Paladins and Clerics to lose some kind of power when not acting within the tenets of their deities?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about what they really think about alignment in TTRPGs, including how they use it in their games to define characters but not controlling them.

2:00 A brief history of D&D alignment and what we think about the iconic 9-box, law/chaos X good/evil system

7:00 Who decides what these alignments even mean DM, player, other players?

9:00 Should alignments be relative to the world or the character’s internal POV?

12:00 Would the 3 Wise DMs (and most modern people) be Lawful Good?

13:00 Alignment is more useful for defining how a character feels about the world or culture than defining the world or culture

15:00 How lawful, neutral and chaotic characters feel about the rules and society

18:00 The DM Trap: Don’t get caught up in “enforcing” PC alignment

21:00 How mechanics interact with good and evil in D&D 5E

24:00 How do you define “good” and “evil” in a D&D campaign?

27:00 Captain America and making decisions by prioritizing one side of alignment over the other

30:00 “How is this OK from your character’s POV?” An approach to DMing player character alignments (and the Deck of Many Things Debacle)

38:00 D&D’s 5E power balancing and how it impacts play

41:00 Cons and pros (but mostly cons) of Paladins needing to be Lawful Good in old school D&D

47:00 Don’t be a line judge, but do get player buy-in on how alignment, gods and patrons work

50:00 Why alignment should matter

53:00 9 stories about burning a village down: The alignments in action

58:00 Alignment subjectivity vs. character decisions and problem-solving

63:00 Beyond alignment: Things more important to characters than their alignment

68:00 Alignment and god-like tentacle monsters

73:00 Use alignment as a hook, just don’t force it

76:00 Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what alignment the DM thinks an action is because the PC’s point of view should define it

82:00 Final thoughts

90:00 “Alignment isn’t important” — Myth busted, plausible or true?

For the first time ever, we brought the whole team together to recap DM Tony’s very highly customized version of Storm King’s Thunder. Hear what all 5 players and Tony thought of the game and what they have to say about the CRAZY MAGIC ITEMS in it, his changes to the campaign, fitting in their backstories, and more! Along the way, we talk about fighting the Kraken, befriending (most) of the giants, and how we all became The Avengers in a Halloween game.

If you’re wondering just how far a DM can push a book module beyond what’s written before your players balk, this is the episode for you. You’ll hear how Tony pulled off his tricks, how the players reacted to them, and the secret backstories and DM canon we never got to see.

1:00 Introducing the players

3:00 A high-magic party for a high-magic campaign

4:00 Jacob: The middle-aged police detective turned dad-rage barbarian with his dead wife playing ancestral spirit.

7:00 RO4M: The “repurposed” Warforged warlock with a random personality track

9:00 Wilhelmina Draughall: The Sorcerer-Warlock dedicated to convincing the Raven Queen to save her brother’s life. And her pet alcoholic imp, Morningstar

10:00 Roderick R.R. Draughall: The dying nobleman based on Vincent Price from The Fall of the House of Usher

14:00 The Draughall’s secret backstory and how the big campaign plots battled with personal storylines for airtime

21:00 Playing Zhang Fei: A lawful neutral samurai bugbear raised up from a slaughtered goblin warren by his cruel Daimyo

25:00 Enter Erasmus the half-giant DMPC replacement wizard

34:00 How Tony worked PC backstories into the wider SKT plot, one plot twist a player vetoed, and one we never got to

37:00 The 3 Guardians of DM Tony’s SKT: Zephyros, Elios and Traxton the Troll King (Hint: two of those aren’t in the book)

41:00 DMing a party that talks its way out of half the encounters

45:00 What you gain and lose when the players don’t share their backstories with the party – and the stolen Wish!

49:00 Jacob’s secret backstory (and Erasmus’s)

53:00 How much of Tony’s story and headcanon did the players actually catch?

58:00 Bryn Shandar: Where the party started making friends and influencing giants

64:00 Our favorite moments from the campaign

• Going ham on the Hill Giants
• Racing the Frost Giant demigod Tagrim’s dragon-drawn Spelljammer longship for The Ring of Eternal Winters
• Recovering Jacob’s memories (which included the murder of the Queen)
• Wielding the fulling empowered Hammer of Thunderbolts

71:00 The Weapons of Legend!

81:00 Other items, boons and buffs DM Tony showered upon the party

86:00 Why DM Tony doesn’t think jacked attribute numbers matter

87:00 Running the Kraken fight against 11th level characters

90:00 Final thoughts and the Avenger we each became in the Halloween game

When is a book module not a book module? When the DM throws in birthday games, a modifiable Spelljammer airship, legendary weapons tied to every character’s backstory, and more deviations from the standard campaign than we could count.

That’s how DM Tony made Storm King’s Thunder his own. We just wrapped this epic campaign at level 11 after 16 sessions. Now the 3 Wise DMs are comparing notes on the episodic, exploration-lite, story-focused approach Tony took with it, how that felt to play in, and what you can learn about making Wizards of the Coast published campaigns fit your table and DMing style.

Click the episode to hear all this and more, as we break down the 9 main deviations Tony brought to Storm King’s Thunder and the DM’s perspective on running it. Then come back for our next episode, when we bring in Tony’s players and hear what they thought of his approach to DMing the game and their characters.

2:00 Wrapping up our first 3 Wise DMs campaign: DM Tony’s Storm King’s Thunder

4:00 How we did it: 11 levels in 16 game sessions, and how that compares to our other campaigns

7:00 The two Erasmuses

10:00 From book to tabletop: Getting Storm King’s Thunder ready to play

12:00 The 1st Deviation: Why the party meet-up matters, and how Tony got the party working together

17:00 High magic and The 2nd Deviation: Zephyros’s Guide to Turning Your Party Into Tactical Brilliance

20:00 The 3rd Deviation: Putting in boons and items that boost PC’s lower stats is “harmless”

22:00 Dealing with intraparty jealously and making sure the PCs are on par with each other

28:00 What did Tony keep from the original campaign? 70%! Really! Only about 30% Changed!

30:00 Get on the Highwind! Why we did SKT as a whirlwind tour instead of meandering exploration

33:00 The 4th Deviation: Zeus’s Lightning Bolt and Mjolnir? Every character gets a legendary artifact weapon! … You just have to take it off a giant chief

35:00 An EPCOT World Showcase Forgotten Realms experience

41:00 The 5th Deviation: Opting out of the build-it-yourself side quests to off-book places like Waterdeep (and getting up to 35%, 40% changed! Honest! Only 40%!)

45:00 Worthy side quest motivations? “Go save the world! But first, go to that city 500 miles away to tell this courier’s widow that he’s dead.”

49:00 Tony’s formula for creating legendary, character-specific magic items.

56:00 The Curse of the Draughalls

58:00 A chapter-by-chapter rundown of our run through Storm King’s Thunder

59:00 The 6th Deviation: Nightstone and the early quests we skipped to do Dave’s birthday right

67:00 The 7th Deviation: King Traxton’s Mountain and DM Tony’s take on the airship (which was promoted from blimp to a Spelljammer ship that let the party race a Storm Giant Demigod for the Ring of Winters)

69:00 The 8th Deviation: Skipping the exploration and jetting off on DM Tony’s Celebration of Gaming

73:00 The All-Father’s Path, fighting every kind of giant in one encounter, and The 9th Deviation: visiting Elios’s Sky Mall (50% It was only 50% different! Honest!)

78:00 Prep for DMing like you’re giving a presentation

82:00 Final thoughts

Do your players feel into the campaign setting you’re running, or is it just generic D&D world #124 to them? What can you do to bring that world more to life and make it feel unique to you and your players? What makes a D&D session feel like more than just a glorified board game?

With about a half dozen campaigns running between the 3 of us, making each of those worlds and settings feel unique is important (especially with Strahd running around in two of them). Over the years, we’ve built up a bunch of description techniques, mechanics and tricks to try to give our settings just the right amount of detail to feel alive without overwhelming the players with architectural dissertations.

Here are 37 of the tricks the 3 Wise DMs use to try to make the players feel immersed in our worlds and give the settings some soul. If you can think of any to add, leave a comment or write us at 3wisedms@gmail.com.

2:00 Do the Drow have clown schools? — Setting ideas that … appeal to us

5:00 Why it’s important to make players feel the tone of a setting

6:00 Trick 1: Keep your descriptions brief but memorable — pick one detail you want to make sure the players remember

9:00 Trick 2: What does this look like in the game? Think about how players will interact and the why behind what things look and act like

12:00 Trick 3: What am I playing? High fantasy needs different descriptions and details than horror or other types of games

14:00 Trick 4: Deep logic: Why pull historical details into a high-fantasy game where you could do “whatever you want” (and why what you make up may feel less fantastical than the historical detail)

16:00 Trick 5: Using “generic” fantasy tropes to set up unique twists and subversions

18:00 Trick 6: Don’t introduce things you won’t be able to give the attention they need (i.e., why Beta Ray Bill didn’t make it into The Avengers movies)

20:00 Trick 7: Start your description small and let the players ask for the details they care about

22:00 Trick 8: Curse of Strahd’s Baby Walter Returns! Don’t be afraid to steal plot ideas the players throw out that you didn’t think of — use them to hook that player

26:00 Trick 9: From Spartacus to Plato’s Utopia: Steal smart and without shame

29:00 Trick 10: Be careful not to design so much you can’t run it effectively

30:00 Trick 11: Do spend time building the unique, cool things that players will interact with often

32:00 Trick 12: Why highly magical campaigns where you fly/teleport/space travel often leave players feeling disconnected from the day-to-day worlds their characters are in

35:00 Trick 13: The timing of your sessions should impact your level of detail — monthly games don’t have room or attention for details like a weekly game

39:00 Trick 14: You can’t horny bard your way through Barovia — showing the players what works and what doesn’t in your campaign setting

42:00 Trick 15: How to teach D&D players to be afraid in a Call of Cthulhu game

49:00 Trick 16: If your setting is in our world or historic, search online for real photos and records to show it

50:00 Trick 17: How and when to use an unkillable monster to teach the players to run away

53:00 Trick 18: Like they noted in the original Ravenloft module, horror is tough to convey when everyone is sitting around eating chips

55:00 Trick 19: Skill check difficulty is its own kind of horror

56:00 Trick 20: Know when a too-easy fight could ruin the adventure

58:00 Trick 21: Limiting technology (or turning it to evil) can enhance horror

60:00 Trick 22: How secrets and PC insignificance make Call of Cthulhu feel different

63:00 Trick 23: Modern settings require the highest suspension of disbelief — unless you take them off-world

64:00 Trick 24: Why most Marvel RPGs are set in the ‘80s, even when they’re in the “present-day”

65:00 Trick 25: Establish your difficulty level at the start of the campaign. What level qualifies as “high level” in this world?

66:00 Trick 26: How to pace and benchmark level in your world

68:00 Trick 27: Slave collars: The new player railroad! (Make sure you discuss the situation beforehand and everyone wants to play in it)

70:00 Trick 28: Reskin spells to look different in places like Barovia

72:00 Trick 29: Understand that the dice can roll for the players or against the players at any time

74:00 Trick 30: How available is magic in the world and what does it look like? If a player wants to get a magic item, do they need to go home and buy it, or go out in the wilderness and find it?

77:00 Trick 31: You decide what’s going to be important to the players: Are you making them count rations? Ammunition? Does money even matter to PCs in your world?

78:00 Trick 32: Counting sanity and honor dramatically change the tone of a setting

80:00 Trick 33: What kind of benchmarks are you showing the players so they can see where they stand?

81:00 Trick 34: Involved item lists make players love shopping

82:00 Trick 35: Use skill challenges to reinforce the environment and break up the action

83:00 Trick 36: Death Curse

85:00 Trick 37: If players have an easy-solution spell (like Goodberry to overcome starvation) let it work, but make them do it and describe it so the challenge of the setting isn’t overlooked

90:00 Final thoughts

Party balance: It’s the most important thing every new campaign needs, right? Maybe not. Is there anything a party really NEEDS to have? Can your players survive without a healer? Or a thief? Or a meat shield warrior? Will they still have a good time?

In general, we’re big fans of letting each player play whatever they want to play and working out party balance as we go. But what do you do when that leads to overlap and obvious weak spots? Is party balance as important as some players make it out to be?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave take a deep dive into what party balance and imbalance do to the game, what it means to the DM, and what it means to the players — some of whom might not be entirely copacetic about playing in a game where the party isn’t balanced the way they want it to be.

2:00 Do we, as DMs, care whether the party is balanced or not?

5:00 Cool things DMs can do with unbalanced parties

10:00 Ways an unbalanced party limits what the DMs can do

13:00 Even if you don’t care about party balance, the players might

15:00 Hired Goons! Wizards are executives, so the all-wizard party should hire meat shields

17:00 How to use subclasses in D&D 5E to make sure PCs of the same class still feel different. IE: The 4 Wizards are an Evoker, a Conjurer, a Diviner, and a Blade Singer

23:00 What you gain when the PCs do have a balanced party

29:00 Players tend to care that the party is balanced and handle that themselves

35:00 What to do when a player is worried about party balance and won’t just go with the PCs everyone has brought

39:00 Exploiting weaknesses against high-stat PCs

43:00 Does the importance of party balance change with different systems? (and why it never really matters to the DM)

51:00 The real problem with an unbalanced party? Players don’t like other PCs stepping on their toes? (and why whatever the PCs can or cannot do, at the end of the day, it’s the DM’s problem)

58:00 How do you help the players accept the party’s overlap and deficiencies?

63:00 Final thoughts: Myth confirmed, busted or inconclusive?

The biggest variable in any TTRPG campaign isn’t the dice, the monsters, or even the unbalanced psyche of an exasperated DM. It’s the players themselves and the party dynamic they create both in the game with their characters and around the table as the people they are.

How do you want the party in your campaign to work? Are you OK with a little role/skill overlap? Are the players? How well do the players themselves need to get along? Are you approaching the game as a bunch of friends hanging out, or as people with a shared hobby just coming together to do the thing and may not have to get along great to make a great campaign?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about what they want in the parties they’re playing with, what they care about, and what they let slide. Along the way, they discuss some of their trickier party dynamics challenges, and how they try to keep the games fun for everyone playing.

2:00 What we want to see in our PC parties

7:00 Character class/role/skill overlap and a listener who’s feeling squeezed out

14:00 Some tricks we use to deal with skill overlap

22:00 How the numbers work themselves out at higher levels

26:00 Should you intervene to prevent overlapping characters as the DM or let the players work it out?

32:00 How mechanics have been spread around D&D 5E classes to help with unbalanced parties

37:00 Party roles we enjoy and hate playing

44:00 Can’t we all just get along? Handling player personality dynamics

48:00 Intra-party conflict: When the party fights each other (and a digression into the D&D fiction we have and haven’t read)

52:00 What we want players to do to help bring the party together

59:00 How do you reign in a player who’s hogging the spotlight without squashing their enthusiasm?

66:00 Should you push wallflower players into the spotlight?

73:00 Final Thoughts: Is the way we think we’re playing the way the other players experience us?

The ultimate BBEG for any tabletop RPG is the calendar. And judging by the vast gallery of memes about this topic, that villain is nigh unbeatable. Whether our schedules are hard to align or players have important things that come up or someone in your group is just flakey, every DM has to deal with some level of absenteeism. It’s always a little bit disruptive, and sometimes it can outright kill your campaign … How do you handle it?

We all deal with this. Every game Thorin, Tony and Dave run sees players occasionally have to miss a session. We deal with it in a variety of ways, from rescheduling to running without them (there’s a ranger in The Woodstock Wanderers who hasn’t been seen since she ran off to “study dinosaurs”).

Although no one likes having players miss a game, we have ways we approach the issue and keep things moving along. In this episode, we reveal all our best advice for overcoming attendance and scheduling conflicts, including our one killer tip for getting players to commit to the next session.

2:00 A gaming club with a problem: How do players missing games impact your campaign?

10:00 Should there be a penalty for missing games? Do they still get XP? Treasure? Magic items?

17:00 The politics of players missing games – are the other players OK with it?

19:00 Information management: How do you keep a player engaged in the story and lore if they’re missing half the content?

26:00 Flexibility and FOMO: Different ways to approach players missing games

32:00 The Cannon Ball Run Gambit

35:00 Adjusting your game for lower session frequency

39:00 And now for something completely different: Try a new campaign or game with the players you have

43:00 Are you playing too often? Adjusting frequency and session length for the players you have

48:00 Why you should keep the tone lighter if players are missing or you’re playing less frequently

52:00 TTRPG scheduling tips: Our one big tip for getting the group to commit to the next session

57:00 Final thoughts

One of the old, unwritten rules of most TTRPGs is “Never Split the Party!” We tease our players with the risks and watch things go haywire when they don’t listen. But is splitting the party actually so bad? Can you play “Character Karaoke” and make sure everyone still has fun?

In truth, though, we usually try not to split the party up as DMs. After all, that just means you’re now trying to juggle 2 or more stories instead of the one you came to tell. But we’ve had a few split-party incidents lately that turned out to be a lot of fun! Is this old saw just a myth?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave play MythBusters: They dig into their experiences with splitting the party and break down what you gain and lose by introducing this trick to your game.

2:00 Why splitting the party in an RPG doesn’t work the same as a book or movie

7:00 When scouting gets out of hand: The druid works alone

10:00 A few ways to handle solo scouting and fly-away familiars without eating up too much game time and spotlight

20:00 The usual suspects: Breaking PCs out into individual dialogue with NPCs (like the Arkham police)

28:00 Is everyone at the table having fun when they split up?

31:00 Shopping during game-time: Better in some systems than others

34:00 How to balance individual character spotlights and the rest of the party waiting

43:00 How far should you let the player’s interpretation of NPCs and events influence what you planned?

47:00 What makes the party split themselves?

56:00 Character impulsiveness: Good role play or impatient players?

59:00 Tips for DMing split-up parties

63:00 When do you bring the party back together?

66:00 How do you handle table-talk and party knowledge when the characters split up?

69:00 Secrets and lies: How do you handle intraparty secrets and hidden backstories?

74:00 Who is Finneas, anyway?

79:00 Partial-party side quests: Do you do them? How do you handle treasure, XP and … Death?

87:00 Final thoughts: Myth busted, confirmed of inconclusive?

Every campaign gets to level 1, but how many make it to level 20? How do you challenge players who wield actual cosmic power? Is it fun to be kings, queens, warlords and arch-mages — and take on the responsibilities that may come with those titles? How does the DM/GM make epic-level enemies feel challenging and satisfying to defeat? How do you bring it all to a satisfying end?

There’s a time for fighting rats, goblins and thugs … And that time is long gone. High-level play, in any TTRPG, should feel different. It’s not just about bumping up stats — you have to make the game FEEL epic. It’s time to pay-off on the plot threads the PCs have been pulling since level 1 and let the players see the impact their characters have had on the world.

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave reveal their best tips for high-level campaigns, including what they do with “Hall of Fame” characters and how to bring it all to the kind of climax your players and friends will talk about for years.

2:00 Our experiences with long campaigns

6:00 When is a campaign “High Level”?

11:00 High-level play should pay off on the relationships and events built throughout lower-level play

18:00 The PC’s story arcs should still be alive heading into the epic tier

23:00 Who really wants to be king? What does REAL POWER look like in a TTRPG setting?

32:00 How do you bring a high-level campaign to a satisfying conclusion? Pay off on the character’s goals

40:00 What do high-level campaigns look like? How are they different?

46:00 What we want in epic-level villains and monsters

52:00 How we handle thugs, bandits and run-of-the-mill/random encounters for high-level PCs

60:00 “Welcome to the Hall of Fame”: How to bring an epic campaign to a satisfying conclusion

64:00 Do the things video games can’t: Reshape the world in the characters’ (and players’) image

65:00 Going out with a bang: How to nail that last session

·        Bring out that BIG monster you’ve been saving all campaign

·        Try not to TPK them (heroic death can be good, failure is usually bad)

·        Pay off on expectations – don’t subvert them

·        Give them a BIG fight

·        Don’t wait until the final fight to give them the legendary gear

·        Finish it in one session— you don’t want to cut in the middle of the final battle

68:00 Final thoughts

Immersion in your D&D game. It’s one of the most sought after and asked about topics in the whole DMing Multiverse. The real trick always lies in how well you can tie together all the seemingly disparate pieces of your group – characters, backstories, motivations, and adventures – into one cohesive, epic story.

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave answer a listener question about how to best tie their characters into their newest campaign, Tomb of Annihilation, following the finale of their Curse of Strahd campaign. Along the way, we brainstorm how to tie these two adventures together into one large epic story.

4:02 We delve into what we thought the question really was… how do you tie Curse of Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation together?

7:15 What to do with Curse of Strahd’s Megaliths?

8:00 Published material, like Curse of Strahd, is great fodder for ideas of how and where to tie characters into the story.

9:10 The heavy lift of some published material, like Tomb of Annihilation, in hooking the characters into the story.

11:05 Detailed backstories vs the blank slate as well as DM Tony’s idea of “Reactive” backstories.

15:20 Tying in the characters, backstories, motivations, and adventures in the same way as you plan your sessions… one session at a time.

24:40 Providing the characters with stakes that really matter.

26:15 Weak hooks with adventures that were meant to be from tournament modules and how we’ve tied characters in.

29:25 Remembering the perspective of the characters, not the audience.

32:00 Creating a one-sheet Campaign Guide (like Mike Shea’s) to help players tie the characters in at creation.

38:35 Final Thoughts.

Downtime: It’s when we play, when we sleep and when we record podcasts. Everyone needs some downtime, right? … Maybe. Do you actually give your player characters downtime? Or do you keep them slaloming down the plot with barely a weekend to get their equipment sharpened?

What do you let the PCs attempt when they do get a weekend off? Is it taverns and tax collectors, or can they create new spells, magic items and heists?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about different ways to handle downtime and keep the game moving and fun. They also talk about what’s not fun in downtime, and things they’ve tried that the players didn’t like.

But first, we have an ogre to bury … A quantum ogre! A recent article on our site kicked a hornets’ nest of a broader discussion about encounters that DMs op in no matter which way the PCs go. Here’s what we think of the debate and how it fits into reasonable game prep.

It’s all in this week’s episode of 3 Wise DMs.

1:00 Schrodinger’s Encounter gets ambushed by the Quantum Ogre

8:00 Revisiting traumatized players and how it influences online discussions

13:00 The lies DMs tell … and should keep telling

20:00 A frank discussion of how we build and change things on the fly

27:00 Downtime activities: How they fit into 5E vs. prior editions of D&D

32:00 Libraries?! How Quaint! Ways to portray downtime research

39:00 Pros and cons of letting players find incorrect “facts” and false research

47:00 Do you want to let players design new items and spells with downtime?

50:00 Does your adventure even have room for downtime activities?

53:00 Giving PCs a cool base of operations

55:00 Do you open up the world and give players a chance to take on other big downtime projects like building armies, magic items, spells, kingdoms, etc.?

63:00 Training, titles and taxes: Are your downtime activities actually fun?

68:00 How do you bring a long-running, high-level, epic campaign to a satisfying end?

79:00 Final thoughts

You studied the RPG books. You recruited the players. You started a New Game. Every week (or weeks or month) you get everyone together and run them through a world you control! … What if you don’t like it? What do you do when you find yourself running a TTRPG game you don’t enjoy?

The DM is a player, too. If you’re not having fun, there’s no game. We’d never recommend trudging through a campaign you hate just for the players or your pride. Your time’s too valuable. For the game to go on, you must get it back to a point where you enjoy running it. How do you that?

In this episode, hear how Thorin, Tony and Dave make sure their games stay fun — for their players and themselves. Along the way, we’ll talk about how we lean into the things we enjoy and cut the things we don’t, even when those things may seem essential to the game. Plus, we’ll go deeper into DMPCs and how they can be one way for unhappy DMs to reconnect with the fun of the game (and how to keep them from overshadowing your players).

1:00 A new DM who isn’t having fun in Icewind Dale

3:00 DMPCs: Do they make the game more fun for the DM or are they just one more thing to manage?

6:00 What do you do when you start a new game as the DM and it’s not fun for you?

8:00 DM know thyself: What specific parts of DMing do you actually enjoy?

11:00 Don’t be afraid to pull a “Princess Bride” and run your own “good parts” version of the module

16:00 Never listen to what anyone online says you’re doing wrong

19:00 “Your DMPC should be like Gandalf”

22:00 How to make DM prep work more reasonable and more fun

27:00 Run the kind of campaign you’d enjoy reading/watching/playing in

31:00 RPG environment and the limits of survival-focused settings for super-heroic D&D characters

34:00 Encounter difficulty and how the feel of fights should change as you go up in level

40:00 How do you fix a game you don’t like DMing?

43:00 Stop doing the things that make you miserable and find your own DMing style

47:00 Are you playing any NPCs you enjoy being?

50:00 Are you playing with players you enjoy DMing?

55:00 Final thoughts

No matter how much we say it’s the DM’s world, the players know the game too. They have access to all the books, all the lore, even all the monster stats! Sometimes that’s a big help. Other times, it can be a problem for the campaign you want to run.

Have you ever had players who actively spoil what all the monsters do? Or players who think they know what your NPCs are all about? Or a fellow DM who’s DMed every Ravenloft module D&D has produced and is trying not to spoil your run through Curse of Strahd? How do you handle players who don’t separate their personal knowledge from what their characters would know?

Thorin, Tony and Dave go off-book a lot, homebrewing, up-scaling, and repurposing all the time. In this episode they talk about what is OK and not OK metagaming, problems metagaming has created in their games, and how they deal with the players and situations it spawns.

1:00 Dueling Strahds: Metagaming rears its blood-sucking head

3:00 What out-of-character knowledge is or isn’t a problem?

6:00 How metagame expectations can undermine attempts to create original adventures

10:00 How we sometimes struggle with meta-knowledge as PCs

15:00 Reimagining Strahd

18:00 Really, how should PCs react when literally The Devil invites them to dinner or to do a job?

23:00 The Strahd dinners that might’ve been…

29:00 What to do when players think they know what the monsters do?

36:00 “You just don’t want us to win!” When the world doesn’t work the way the players assumed, and they blame the DM

38:00 The Deck of Many Editions: What worked then doesn’t work now, and some players hate that!

45:00 In-depth on vampire challenge levels and the problem with nonmagical damage immunities and

53:00 Changing monsters to create interesting thematic, cinematic, moments

58:00 Metagaming: How do you get players to cut it out and respect your “authority”?

68:00 Monk Owl Bears are too far … Or are they?

72:00 Final thoughts

Characters bring a story to life, and that goes double for your TTRPG campaign. The best of your NPCs will become legends, most of the rest won’t be any more memorable than the thousands of monsters your players slay along the way.

But how do you bring those NPCs to life in a way your players will engage with, trust and remember? Does the DM make an NPC memorable, or is that something the players decide? Does it all come down to who lives, who dies and who tells their story?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about their biggest successes and failures creating memorable NPCs, their favorite characters in gaming and beyond, and all the tricks they use to bring their favorite characters to life.

1:00 Metagaming against the NPCs: Fighting snap judgments about the Zhentarim in Storm King’s Thunder

5:00 I KILL IT! When the PCs instantly hate an NPC and kill someone you had bigger plans for

13:00 What makes an NPC memorable?

·        What is the NPC doing for the party?

·        Do the players make them memorable?

·        The NPC that knows things the party doesn’t

·        The comic relief who supports the environment

26:00 How do we bring these NPCs to life?

·        Communicate that they have something to offer

·        Get the party to trust them, but not fully

·        Don’t spill the beans, NPC secrets should tease the party over time

·        Good NPCs have an internal compass, motives and secrets that drive how they act

·        They need a distinct description and personality

·        They need a backstory, but the players don’t need to hear it

33:00 Building NPC personalities

41:00 Our picks for the most memorable NPCs (in RPGs and pop culture)

53:00 What to avoid when creating and playing memorable NPCs (and WTF is a “non-descript” man?!)

58:00 Tips for creating NPCs with depth and character development

62:00 What makes an NPC not work?

72:00 Great NPCs don’t need to stay in their campaign: Tony’s Ra’s Al Ghul

75:00 Final thoughts

At some point, every DM sees their party get lost in the woods … or the weeds … or the brothels … Whatever the specific distraction, it’s easy to get caught up in the session-to-session filler content and see the game grind to a slog of travel encounters or petty larcenies or extended haggling sessions that bore everyone at the table.

How do you get the party back on track and involved with the big, bad plotline? How do you make it epic again if the game’s gotten a bit mundane? How do you link the little adventures into the big adventures, so you have a campaign that’s truly worthy of legend?

How do you get the party out of the weeds and back on the path to adventure?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about how they link elements together to let the PCs explore the town or woods, but still keep them engaging with the big epic content heroes are made of. They’ll also talk about some of their favorite things to do in a campaign and their DMing trademarks.

For more basics about how to build an adventure, check out: Adventure Time: 15 Tips to Build and DM Great Adventures

3:00 A new DM gets lost in Wildemount, and how we’d try to find our way out

9:00 How do you progress the party from low-level missions to epic adventures?

14:00 How the player characters and party dynamic can shift where the campaign is heading

17:00 “You’re meddling in affairs you do not understand!” Using lower-level enemies to yank the party into the BBEG’s plans

23:00 “You need other things in there.” The value of one-shots, side quests and “palate cleansers”

26:00 Protagonist-driven (party) vs. antagonist-driven (BBEG) plotlines

30:00 Our favorite ways to hook the party on an adventure plot

32:00 Is Strahd’s schtick too stuck in the 80s?

35:00 When PCs don’t reveal their key backstories, secrets and potentially important plot points

38:00 Creating adventures that lead into more adventures

43:00 Completing PC quests and backstories encourages protagonist-driven plot development

49:00 Our trademark DM moves

55:00 Things that annoy us as players that we’re trying to learn from as DMs

65:00 Final thoughts

RPG tables tend to grow. Once you get the game going and people are having fun, they start talking about that fun, and new players come in quickly. The only problem is, most TTRPGs are optimized to run with 3 to 5 players (plus the DM), and DM gets tougher are you expand to 6, 8 even 10 players.

Throughout our DMing careers, we’ve run a lot of large tables. Most of our current games have 6 or more players, and we routinely have 7 or 8 at the table. We’ve all had some experience running even more than that, too.

In this episode, we’ll dive into the many issues that make large tables challenging and what Thorin, Tony and Dave do to overcome those obstacles.

1:00 The biggest games we’ve ever DMed

3:00 What happens when you start getting a lot of players?

• Players’ backstories start to slip through the cracks
• Encounter balance: The party starts blasting through encounters super easily
• Slow play and “the interminable slog of 2-hour combats”
• Table talk and trying to keep the game moving without losing player attention

10:00 How virtual tabletops like Roll20 influence table talk, combat and player attention

12:00 Monster lineup, CR and the sweet spot that challenges a large party without making it a slog

17:00 How we use CR (and before that, HD and monster category) to plan encounters and adjust for large parties

24:00 Running Curse of Strahd with 6 players and the encounters that still took the party to the edge

27:00 Building encounters to challenge the front and back of the party

30:00 Scene control: How to handle 8 players fighting for airtime, and the ones who don’t

36:00 Encouraging everyone to step up and have a voice

39:00 Overlapping character roles/backgrounds/personalities

45:00 Choosing and distributing treasure for large parties — and dealing with the exponential escalation of magic in and out of combat

47:00 Club band vs. stadium show: Dealing with compounded player expectations

50:00 Can you trust large parties to make consensus decisions quickly, or should you railroad them to keep things moving?

56:00 Should you bring new D&D players into large games?

62:00 How to keep from bogging down, running slow and getting boring

71:00 Technology issues using Roll20 using 6+ players and how we solved them

76:00 Final thoughts

What drew you into role-playing games? Was it the movies, TV, myths and legends you experienced as a kid? Was it video games? Was it the first time you picked up a gaming book and fell into the world?

Once you got into the games, what shaped the stories you tell and worlds you build? Where do your characters come from? Where do your mechanical parts come from?

We all stand on the shoulders of giants in games, whether those are metaphorical giants, literary giants or literal giants. In this episode, the 3 Wise DMs talk about the things that shape their games and how they directly impact what they do. Whether you’re looking for inspiration of ways to make the inspirations you already have a bigger part of your game, this episode will give you the big picture of how all these crazy parts come together to make our DMing whole.

2:00 Movies, myths, the ancient Celts … Things that laid the foundations of our DM styles

6:00 Magenta-colored glasses: The first TTRPG products we were exposed to

10:00 What drives people’s interest in D&D

13:00 Excitement and mystery: That feeling of getting sucked into an RPG book before the Internet ... even before computer games

18:00 Art and awesomeness

20:00 Crunchy influences: The things that influenced us mechanically and thematically, good and bad

27:00 D&D 2E Memories: Why did DRUIDs have to kill each other to level up? Why could a Celtic warrior throw a spear with its FOOT for evisceration-level damage?

32:00 The problem with very simulationist games: Are they fun?

33:00 Adventuring in the “real” history: Reactions to our first 3WD Call of Cthulhu campaign

39:00 When D&D got Medieval: The 2E Arms & Equipment Guide

43:00 Stream of influence: The impact of online campaigns like Critical Role on us and TTRPGs as a whole

46:00 Music in our games: Influences and game soundtracks (DM Dave, say it ain’t so!)

51:00 Video games that influenced our DMing

57:00 How 5E D&D is still influencing us

60:00 The D&D 2E Monstrous Compendium and Expanding Universe: A Creatively Encouraging Vision for TTRPGs

69:00 Making D&D combat look and sound more like real or theatrical combat

72:00 Can you do it simpler? How can we fit interesting details into our games without spiraling complexity?

80:00 Aur’k Ka’ang, the Fire Giants’ Iron Golem (SKT) and making solo NPCs the party-crushing bastards they were born to be

86:00 Unearthed Arcana: The excitement of spells that used to do really weird stuff

93:00 Final thoughts: “Feed your creative soul”

There comes a time when the dice cease to sparkle, when the monster loses its luster, when the DM screen becomes a prison, and all that is left is a DMs love for their players … Those little campaign-ruining jerks! Or not — maybe your players are victims of your burnout just as much as you are.

Every TTRPG campaign is different, but one thing never changes: Without the DM, there is no game. And a burned-out DM is one of the biggest game-killers in any table-top RPG you’ll play.

What does burnout look like? What does it feel like? Can you play your way through it? If not, how do you handle it? Thorin, Tony and Dave have all had their own brushes, and sometimes head-on collisions, with burnout. Here’s what they’ve learned and tips to start healing.

2:00 What does DM burnout feel like?

9:00 Can you play your way through it?

15:00 Things that burn us out #1: The setting gets old

22:00 Things that burn us out #2: Spending too much time on maps

26:00 Things that burn us out #3: When we’re not playing the kind of game we want to play

37:00 Things that burn us out #4: High expectations – both from the players and ourselves

40:00 Balancing DM and player expectations with running the kind of game you want to play

50:00 Things that burn us out #5: Players who think they can kill everything

52:00 The one biggest sign that you’re burning out

58:00 Things our players do that protect us from burnout

65:00 Things that burn us out #6: Players set in character roles they can’t/won’t/don’t play well

68:00 What we do to heal from burnout

76:00 Final thoughts

Every DM needs to run their first game, and you don’t need a Ph.D. to do it! If you’re new to the system, and especially if everyone is new to the system, how much do you really need to know to start a game?

Do you need to read all the rulebooks cover to cover? No. Do you need to design a minimum of 6 dungeon levels and populate it with monsters like Gary Gygax first intended? Absolutely not.

So, what do you actually need to know to bring some friends together, throw your first game, and help everyone learn how to play along the way? Here’s how Thorin, Tony and Dave learned to DM themselves, and their advice for mastering the game while you run it.

3:00 Start with character creation

9:00 Just get to “minimum viable build” system understanding

14:00 It’s fine to launch with the system’s starter adventure and pre-gen characters

19:00 The core rules you need to know to start a game in any system: Dice, core rule, what kinds of encounters and conflicts is it built around?

27:00 Why you shouldn’t try to read the whole handbook and DM/GM guide before playing

32:00 How to prep your first starter adventure

35:00 Don’t be afraid to stop to look things up — set an expectation with your players that you’re all learning and supporting each other

39:00 Don’t be afraid to adlib and make a judgment call – and to revisit rules after the game

44:00 Monster wrangling for beginners – no one has fun in a first-game TPK

52:00 Some thoughts on introductory adventures, difficulty and leveling

58:00 What you want out of the player group for your first game

61:00 Final thoughts

In March of 2020, we were getting ready to record our first episode of this podcast. We all got together in our planned recording space and cut the trailer. … Then COVID happened, and that entire plan went into the garbage along with concerts, vacations and sending kids to school. But as the year went on and we figured out online gaming and recording, the podcast and our games took off.

2020 was an “interesting” year for everyone. But if you had access to a computer and some friends, it was a pretty great time to be gaming online. For a lot of us, it was our first time playing on virtual tabletops, and that blossomed into more gaming than we’ve ever done before.

For some people, 2020 was a quarantine lockdown. For us, it was a year in the lab doing intensive DMing and podcasting. Here’s how it went, what we learned and our resolutions for gaming in 2021.

2:00 How COVID almost derailed 3 Wise DMS but wound up letting us do more gaming than ever

8:00 2020 as Dave’s intensive DM workshop

12:00 Holiday one-shot games became our personal TV holiday specials

·        Dressing up as the Avengers for Halloween

·        Rescuing Kidnapped elves from Evil Frosty and his Krampus minions

·        A Very Marvel Christmas Carol

·        Spending a Barovian Yule in Charlie Manx’s Christmasland from NOS4A2

·        Tips to come up with good magic items gifts on the fly

·        Curse of Strahd tip: An off-brand vampire encounter lets you scout how the party might fight Strahd

34:00 Lessons of 2021: Mix theater-of-the-mind combat with battle maps to speed up the game

38:00 Resolving to use more splash images and fewer maps (and tips for finding them)

44:00 Getting players to ask the right questions and look for clues (and how Call of Cthulhu can help)

51:00 Our 7 most memorable gaming moments of 2020

58:00 The 8 most important lessons we learned in 2020

·        Get more player buy-in with a session 0

·        Have players make their characters together so they already know each other

·        Better table communication

·        Drop more clues and don’t be afraid to point out options the party isn’t seeing

·        Sometimes your story-heavy campaign needs a one-shot palette cleanser

·        One of us LOVES running published WotC adventures

·        We’re not afraid to go beyond module level-limits

·        Play in more games to be a better DM (and maybe watch some live play streams)

67:00 Honorable mentions and superlatives: Who does what best in our games

70:00 Why we want to play more games and more game systems in 2021

74:00 Curse of Strahd vs. Castle Ravenloft and older versions

80:00 Tony’s version of Storm King’s Thunder, with a Gummi ship

84:00 Lesson: How does a Vampire’s charm work, anyway?

90:00 Final thoughts and 2021 gaming resolutions

2:05 A listener question regarding how to run episodic adventures that serves as a jumping off point for Matt Colville’s recent video asking the question, “How long should an adventure be?”

3:40 DM Tony’s lead-off question… what is your table hungry for?

5:25 The classic Monster of the Week theme and DM Chris’ love of The X-Files.

7:25 Episodic Adventures can easily become a railroad.

8:25 How epic, longform stories are the current zeitgeist and how that affects the adventures we create.

10:15 Whether a longform campaign or a one-shot, every adventure needs to be self-contained with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

 20:05 The issue of players remembering ALL the lore and information gleaned over longform adventures.

22:45 The adventure should be as long as it needs to be to feel complete.

27:40 The level of prep needed between short and longform adventures.

30:50 Creating episodic adventures even in longform adventures, like DM Tony’s Storm Kings Thunder and Journey to Ragnarok campaigns.

40:30 Final Thoughts.

Older players who look at the D&D 5E rogue would be forgiven for thinking traps aren’t in the game anymore. In fact, throughout the 5E Players Handbook, traps are given less attention than in previous editions. But that doesn’t make them any less important to the game, or any less tricky for the DM to get right.

D&D Traps require the DM to walk a fine line. Balance them right, and your PCs will find themselves in a world of trouble that’s entirely their fault. But overdo it, or make traps too randomly deadly, and the party can slow to a crawl as they check for traps every 5 feet — cursing the DM the whole time.

Deathtraps are a dungeon classic, but the best traps cause chaos more than straight kills. Before you line the entryway of your fort with lightning runes, are you sure the people living there can get in and out themselves? Do these traps even make sense in the dungeon you’re running?

You want a trap to engage your players in some kind of problem-solving. In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about how they build hazards that up the mayhem and force layers to solve problems, without reducing traps to two rolls to avoid random death … at least not too often.

2:00 Do traps still fit into modern, encounter-heavy, exploration-light D&D with its murder rogues?

7:00 Your traps should make sense in the world and the environment, and also at your table

11:00 What do good and bad traps look like? Would you want to live next to it?

14:00 Do you want the party checking for traps every 5 feet? How careful do you want them to be?

19:00 What’s the goal of your trap makers?

27:00 Tony’s favorite traps: The Mirror of Opposition, Glyphs of Warding

29:00 Dave’s favorite Traps: The no-trap trap, the stone wall that splits the party

34:00 Aside: Handling magic weapons with unarmed PCs or PCs with specific weapon needs

40:00 Cursed treasure and the Lich that faked his death to let the party TPK themselves

44:00 “That was on us!” What good traps teach the party

45:00 Bad Traps: Revisiting the Murder House debate and the salt it left on the table

51:00 Bad Traps, Marvel Edition: The “Big Bomb” with multiple fail states and what it taught the PCs

58:00 Traps that create chaos and disadvantages for monsters to exploit are better than instant death

64:00 Trap specialist classes vs. D&D 5E’s approach where anyone can find/disarm traps

72:00 Final thoughts

A few weeks ago, a listener reached out and asked how we manage players with special circumstances. She was DMing for her brother, who’s on the autism spectrum, and hit a trigger that made him feel like his character was ruined. And even though she’s a therapist, that reaction surprised her.

None of the 3 Wise DMs have DMed a player diagnosed with autism before, but we have had many players with special circumstances. We’ve learned a lot from playing with them — sometimes from our mistakes. In this episode, we talk about those experiences, D&D’s impact on players with all types of personal issues, and how we try to handle communication challenges at our tables.

And, for the first time on 3 Wise DMs, we have a special guest! Bonnie is in our game groups and she’s a therapist who uses D&D to reach teens going through special circumstances. She joins us to talk about her experiences there and how her charges react to the game.

2:00 Reader Question: DMing players with special circumstances that impact how they view the game and unexpected challenges

7:00 Revisiting miscommunication with cognitive challenges: Everyone brings something to the table

11:00 Using D&D to connect with teens in a therapy setting

16:00 Unexpected player reactions may be more about personal issues than the game

19:00 D&D helps explore issues that aren’t easy to express and gets players excited to discuss them

27:00 How therapists can use scenarios that gently push triggers to create room to talk

34:00 Don’t take mental health issues lightly or use triggers to terrorize your friends! (And an aside on giant spiders)

38:00 Mental flexibility and feeling like something “ruined” the game

42:00 Characters as the players’ ideal selves and its impact on their perception of the game

47:00 Communicating when something isn’t fun for the players or the DM

49:00 How hard table communication can be for people who struggle with social queues

52:00 Empowering, and not overpowering, your players’ voices

59:00 Is murder hoboing a risk in using D&D for therapy, and how does a therapist handle that?

63:00 We all want to be the hero in our own story … don’t we?

70:00 The soft skills at the heart of D&D — and the extra weight they can put on DMs

77:00 Final thoughts

Related Links:

“How Dungeons & Dragons Saved My Autistic Son” — Salon

“Tips for Managing an Autistic Player” — Reddit

“Dungeons, Dragons and Autism” — Altogether Autism

It’s one of the hardest things for any DM to handle: What do you do when the way you see the game and the way the players see the game is no longer in sync?

You describe something as super dangerous, and a PC runs up to give it a hug — then the players get angry when it attacks them. Or the players come up with a plan, but when they try to execute it, the actions they take work out more like the Keystone Cops than Seal Team 6. Or the tough, henchmen-level bad guys seem too hard, and players start accusing the DM of cheating for the outcome they wanted.

This is no academic discussion. One of our own games is suffering from miscommunication, and it’s not fun. Can it be saved? Can yours if it’s starting to see some of these same issues?

Listen in as Thorin, Tony and Dave dig into the miscommunications issues their games have had (and are having) and talk about why it happens, where it leads, and what can be done to try to save it.

2:00 “The world is this way.” “No, it’s not, it’s this way.” What is a DM-player communication breakdown?

4:00 When the “super-rare” power you were warned about shows up in the first adventure

8:00 The psychology of D&D: How the game reads behind the screen and to each individual player is vastly different

12:00 Reader question: How to handle recklessly naïve PCs who keep trying to make friends with things they should run from

·        16:00 Demanding very-low DC insight checks to give players a final warning

·        18:00 Embracing multiple fail states to allow a negative outcome that doesn’t destroy the party

·        20:00 The smackdown encounter the party can easily escape from

·        22:00 Give the rest of the party an opportunity to intervene

·        24:00 You COULD decide the outreach works in a way that fits your game world

25:00 Do you want to adjust the world to fit your player’s understanding/assumptions/mistakes?

29:00 “You didn’t have to do that!” When the NPCs do something the players really dislike — and they reject it

35:00 What do you do when an NPC ruins the players’ fun? What if it ruins the DM’s fun?

38:00 Is the DM getting blamed for the PCs having different goals?

41:00 The interrogation that went very, very wrong (And how much power should a tied-up NPC have?)

49:00 When players start to feel like they don’t have agency and you’re just pushing them around

53:00 How do you try to fix communication issues that are becoming toxic?

55:00 Did you step on a player character’s big moment?

57:00 The Power of Ghatanothoa: What do you do when you reveal the power of the big bad, and players don’t (or refuse to) recognize it?

66:00 How often do you ask the players what they’re enjoying or not enjoying about the game? Or if they understand what’s going on?

73:00 It’s just a game: We bring ourselves to our characters and our tables, and in 2020, that can mean extra strain on the group

80:00 Reader question: How do you deal with players who don’t provide character backstories?

86:00 Final thoughts

WotC as a company has long used errata as a way to keep its competitive games, like Magic: The Gathering, working as intended. But just several years into D&D 5E, they’re still releasing new errata that impact books printed years ago that have been used at tables for years since. Some of it just clarifies rules interactions in a helpful way, but other errata literally make books we bought obsolete.

The most recent changes significantly change Booming Blade and Green Flame Blade, which no longer work with Shadow Blade. Taken in a vacuum that sounds fine, but what does a DM do if they have a player who uses that combo or built a character around the interaction. There are also changes to how Changelings allocate their attribute boosts that may impact characters you’ve been playing with for years. Do you go back and “fix” them to match the new rules?

These can be thorny questions for any DM. In this episode, we dig into what Thorin, Tony and Dave think about errata and how they DM it their games.

2:00 How do we feel about WotC changing rules years after they were released

5:00 Sage Advice is great! It has answered a lot of non-errata questions for us as DMs and PCs

8:00 What the recent errata has changed and how WotC tries to empower Dungeon Masters

11:00 WotC vs. TSR: How Magic: The Gathering influences today’s D&D errata

15:00 Changing print editions, outdated Players Handbooks and the old days of checking magazines for rules clarifications

18:00 If I play $60 or $70 for a book, shouldn’t that book should be finished?

21:00 How WotC takes a lighter hand with D&D to give DM’s creative control

25:00 How strong is errata in your game? What do you do if you or a player wants to ignore it? Do you walk back character creation that violates new attribute rules?

32:00 The downsides of ignoring errata (and of making errata in the first place)

38:00 Are you strict about material components?

43:00 How the game has changed: From exploring magical worlds to fun tactical combat, and what it means for errata

50:00 Continuity concerns: Clarification errata > patchwork changes to books we already own

56:00 Is it a better game experience to play by your physical books or up-to-date online text?

59:00 Make rulings that leave room to change your mind in the future

63:00 Taking down the Frost Giant Jarl in Storm King’s Thunder and other campaign updates

68:00 Getting sick of Hunger of Hadar

71:00 Where we establish that the 3 Wise DMs love D&D 5E exactly as it is and there is nothing we’d like WotC to change/errata/muck with in the published material (not even the Coffeelock!)

79:00 Players love playing with the toys they think are overpowered

81:00 Sickening Radiance tricks

83:00 The fight where everyone got a personal Pixie

86:00 Final thoughts

There’s a myth that “old-school” Dungeons & Dragons was mostly a minis game. That may have been the case in the very earliest days, but throughout 1st and 2nd Edition, we played without minis and maps. Our game happened entirely in “The Theater of the Mind.” And, in many ways, it was a different experience from the maps-and-minis style of game most DMs run today.

Some DMs still prefer theater of the mind. Thorin, for one! Dave’s not as hot on the idea, and Tony kind of likes it both ways. Would you? Even if it’s not your preferred style, you might run a theater of the mind game whenever you don’t have all the accessories for maps-and-minis play

In this episode, we answer Marshall, a DM from Brazil who asked to explain how to play D&D in Theater of the Mind. We talk about what we like about this style of play, what we don’t, and our best tips for making theater of the mind games flow and resonate with your PCs.

1:00 What is theater of the mind? How we use it and when we use it

5:00 Thinking beyond the battle map

9:00 Which style has faster combat: Mas-and-minis or theater of the mind?

13:00 What are the players paying attention to: You or the map?

15:00 How do you keep ruling consistency in combat without a map?

17:00 Tips for tracking turns, distances and combat details behind the DM screen in theater of the mind

21:00 Is D&D traditionally a minis game? Busting the myth that 1st, 2nd and other early editions were “mostly" minis games

23:00 When should you break theater of the mind and show the party a map?

27:00 Problems that can arise with theater of the mind

30:00 Pressure on the DM to provide engaging descriptions that focus on the right things

37:00 How much longer does it take to prep maps and minis compared theater of the mind?

41:00 How Tony’s game survived the Frost Giant Jarl in Storm King’s Thunder (on a map!)

43:00 Combat descriptions with minis vs. theater of the mind

46:00 All Eyes on Me! The biggest advantage of theater of the mind

53:00 Tips for doing theater of the mind well

• ·Simplify movement into 1-move units equal to the party’s most common speed
• Tailor the length and detail of your descriptions to the room
• Let players do things beyond what you had planned – they’re adding to the story
• Get cool with your combat descriptions!
• Adjudicating area effect spells

64:00 Final thoughts

The dice never lie, but they don’t tell great stories, either. (We mean, they’re dice, they don’t even talk!) So how much of your game do you want to leave up to the dice? When should you roll them and why? What kind of game are you teaching your players to play? Can rolling the dice even discourage role-playing?

In this episode of 3 Wise DMs, Thorin, Tony and Dave dig into everything you always wanted to know about rolling polyhedral dice but were afraid to ask. From random encounters to fudging rolls, they talk about what’s going on behind the screen when their players are trying to interact with the world.

1:00 When and why do we roll the dice?

6:00 Using random tables (encounters, terrain, weather) to represent the world

10:00 Balancing random encounters vs. planned encounters vs. “plandom encounters”

12:00 Is random treasure a recipe for disappointed players?

14:00 Dice psychosis: Logical cause-and-effect vs. “We love rolling dice!”

17:00 Can dice discourage roleplay?

26:00 Do skill-ability substitutions (i.e. allowing intimidate with strength) encourage roleplaying?

30:00 Don’t let the “need” to roll stop you from rewarding play you want to encourage

35:00 When is it OK to fudge your dice as a DM?

43:00 Hedging your bets: Techniques for creating the tension of rolls without the risk

48:00 When rolls go wrong!

53:00 The Rules of Rolling: How we each decide when and what should get a roll in our games

60:00 Why Tony hates in-game haggling and Dave doesn’t

66:00 How the DM and players accidentally negotiate how the game is going to be played

69:00 When do we not allow a roll?

72:00 Do you want to have truly game-changing dice rolls in your campaign?

74:00 Different kinds of rolls (beyond a simple d20) that can make challenges feel unique

79:00 Final thoughts

How do you feel about a player who wants to play a famous fictional character in your game, like Drizzt, Riddick or Gandalf? Do you let them or ask them to come up with something more original? How much do you adjust the game world or homebrew mechanics to support it?

That’s a question one of our listeners recently asked on the website, and Thorin, Tony and Dave have come across it before. As DMs who’ve played PC knockoffs of Hulk Hogan, King Arthur and the Buddha (two of them currently), they’re certainly not against the idea, but there’s a lot of ways it can get complicated. What if a player wants The Power Cosmic at first level? How do you make that fit into your medieval world?

Hear what the 3 Wise DMs think is OK and not OK in running pop-culture clone characters, and how they make them work in their campaigns.

4:00 An we’ll played clone character is better than no character

7:00 Recreating pop culture is the root of all role-playing games

11:00 What if that kind of character doesn’t fit the world you’re building, or you’re not familiar with the property it comes from?

15:00 How “Not Iron Man,” “Not All Might” and “Not Ang” played out in Dave’s games

17:00 How to make bad-ass character concepts fit first-level power scaling … and how it can go wrong

20:00 What do you do if the other players aren’t on board with having that character in the game?

25:00 How we try to handle players who have issues with other people’s characters

35:00 What do you do if the player decides to change the character concept later in the game?

43:00 What if someone wants to be a seemingly impossible PC, like The Silver Surfer? (And then we figure out how to do it)

46:00 Do you push the player to change the character to tell their own, unique story

50:00 How character development makes every PC unique over the course of the campaign

55:00 How much homebrew should you do to make a character concept work?

63:00 If your player has a character that inspires them and will keep them engaged, let them play it

66:00 Character we’ve always wanted to play but haven’t … yet

75:00 How character stories are developing in our games

83:00 Final thoughts

How do you create your own RPG campaign from scratch? Do you build a railroad straight through the story, or an open world for the players to explore in their own way at their own pace? Or do you do what DM Dave does, and try to split the difference between a tight story and an open world without getting lost along the way?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about how they build their campaigns, from what they want to accomplish to how they prepare week to week. Along they’ll way, we’ll look at how the different styles affect the players and their game experience. And we’ll discuss whether or not, in the end, they’re really all that different?

2:00 3 Different styles of campaign building

3:00 Building Dave’s Halloween railroad to Weird New Jersey

5:00 Adjusting BBEGs for player level

10:00 Building Woodstock: A border town on the edge of MADNESS

12:00 Is there really that much difference between paying in an open world and tight story-focused adventure?

17:00 How players must find their way in an open world (and some freeze up)

24:00 Can player characters REALLY have agency in a pre-built adventure?

33:00 The “No” reflex: How DMs react when players try to do big, cool (campaign ruining?) things

41:00 The limits of memory: One advantage straightforward, story-focused games have over open worlds

44:00 How even open-world games see their paths narrow to a railroad as the game goes on

48:00 Gaming outside the box: What does a truly player-driven campaign look like?

52:00 Pacing, technology and the great fear of coming up short

59:00 Who defines a PC’s role in the story, the DM or player? (i.e. Who wants to be a sidekick?)

63:00 Player agency on the large scale: How the campaign unfolds, not just encounters

68:00 1st level to 20th in 3 months: RPG timelines are weird

76:00 How we build our campaigns and prep for sessions week by week

85:00 Final thoughts

Gold and jewels are all over the treasure tables in the Dungeon Master Guide. Player characters can get filthy rich from adventuring! But then … What can they do with it? After a 1,500 GP suit of plate mail, the only expensive things left for players to buy in the D&D PHB are boats. How many boats is a level-15 wizard supposed to own? Does high-level play morph into some weird naval combat sim we haven’t seen yet?

The DMG has a few more options, but the entire D&D economy is underwhelming, and many other modern TTRPGs have that same issue. These are design decisions: The game is supposed to be about character powers and adventures, not shopping. Yet, gold is still a huge part of the RPG reward system.

This leaves a ton of interesting depth you can add to your game by creating an economy that lets players make choices and build out their characters. After all, is Batman any less interesting because he has all those wonderful toys?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about how they handle the RPG economy and the crazy things players can and can’t do with gold in their games.

2:00 Why does the economy matter in a roleplaying game?

7:00 The problem with D&D 4E’s residuum and 1-to-1 magic item swapping

10:00 What role should money play in your game world? Can players buy magic items? Spells? Property? Adventure access?

17:00 The argument for a magic item shop and how to run them

22:00 How closely do you track the party’s gold?

25:00 Different systems for tracking PC money and resources and how they change the game

30:00 Does a magic item economy break continuity in your game?

33:00 Managing the power curve of games with more magic items

39:00: Power money can’t buy: High-level magic items, false honor and money-related party dynamics

45:00 Economic mechanics: Making money part of story goals and side quests

50:00 Do your players even want a castle?

54:00 The amount of money PCs find is preposterous compared to the rest of the village. What could they do with that?

58:00 What we’d like to see out of crafting and professions

63:00 Should players be able to buy training in skills, abilities, combat, etc. beyond normal leveling? How do you balance that?

75:00 Is high-level play boring for some classes? Can you use the economy to shake it up?

80:00 Other crazy stuff you might let players might do with their gold: Paying the thieves guild to do their adventure, upgrading a pet imp like a Pokémon, have the king assassinated?

87:00 Final Thoughts

Some players come into any RPG they play with a 4-page character origin and personal history that drives them to adventure — others can barely pick a name. What do you do with player character backgrounds like these? Would you rather have the deep story, and the story baggage that comes with it, or the blank campaign canvas? Do PC backstories ever lead to unfair play, special treatment or other problems in the TTRPGs you play?

In this week’s episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave dig into what they want and don’t want from character backstories, and how they use them in their games. Along the way, the guys talk about where their backstory boundaries are and a few times when background plans went way wrong.

3:00 Who writes the PC backstory: DM or Player?

8:00 The risks of embracing backstories

15:00 Background bias: Do you find PCs with more better backstories overshadow other players?

19:00 Using backstories to keep players invested

24:00 What do you want out of a PC backstory for your game?

29:00 How we make sure background details don’t become a problem

34:00 Some good ways to handle background contacts in the game

39:00 What’s off-limits in character backgrounds?

41:00 Do you give mechanical, in-game benefits based on backstories?

48:00 Secret history: Is it a good idea for the DM to “reveal” secret details the player doesn’t know about their character?

57:00 How secret do you keep player backgrounds and side-play?

60:00 What we want from a boss fight, and breaking down a good one: COS Baba Lysaga

66:00 Group backstories: What about having the whole party come in with a combined history?

72:00 When not using a PC’s backstory goes wrong

75:00 Final thoughts

On July 3rd of 2024, D&D 5e will turn 10! While it has taken some hits in those ten years, no one can deny the positive effect it has had on our TTRPG hobby, bringing in an entire generation of new players.

With this anniversary, we started to reflect on what we have loved, what we’ve hated, what we would change, and what we look to for the future. And, as opposed to most of the posts we see on social media (like the DM who stated that a 1st level character could kill a Tarrasque?!?), this is coming from players and DMs who have been playing weekly, not just pontificating from their armchair.

In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave see where the rubber hit the road in 5e as they discuss how it has affected some of their campaigns over the last 10 years: Storm King’s Thunder, Curse of Strahd, Tomb of Annihilation, Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen, and their homebrewed world of The Further!

2:55 Bardic Inspiration as a Reaction from the One D&D Playtest.

9:00 Counterspell… a DMs Bane!

14:00 The UA Tunnel Fighter build… one man holding off the armies of Mordor!

18:40 Leomund’s Tiny Hut… 5e’s “Save” Function.

23:45 Looking to the future: Making Rests Better.

29:50 We need to have some real talk about Find Familiar…

36:45 Looking to the Past for the Future: 3rd Editions Change to Magic Items.

40:55 3WD Homebrew: Stacking Inspiration.

43:45 Looking to the Future: Feats!

45:00 Final Thoughts.

It’s the heart of every D&D story: The player characters did something crazy and their whacky adventures in getting themselves out. That’s what tabletop RPGs are all about, no video game will ever let players embrace free will and agency like a pen-and-paper role-playing game, and we’d never want it any other way.

But it’s also where playing by the book stops and the real art of being a dungeon master (or any game master) begins. Can you think on your feet to keep the game running as the players carry out their crazy plans? Or will you panic and squash the fun?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about 19 of the craziest stunts players have pulled in their games and how they bent the systems to make it happen — or sometimes didn’t. Along the way, hear our best secrets for adlibbing and adjudicating some of the hardest situations DMs face.

2:00 That’s Just D&D

4:00 Stunt 1: Oblivious in Bloodstone 2

6:00 Stunt 2: The Sphere of Annihilation is not an illusion

11:00 Stunt 3: Down the Blue Hole in Weird New Jersey

14:00 Stunt 4: Vorpal sword tricks, and just how sharp is a magic sword?

16:00 Stunt 5: The Deck of Many Things and a 2nd Edition Wild Mage with BIIIG plans … that only kinda worked.

20:00 DMing difficult wishes

33:00 Stunt 6: Wishing a Storm Giant into an itty-bitty wizard body, and how we made it balanced (more or less) with level-appropriate benchmarks

40:00 Stunt 7: Hawk Hogan! Supporting a real Barovian hero’s wrestling obsession

43:00 Appreciating D&D 5E’s Wish limits and bounded accuracy

47:00 Stunt 8: Balancing cool: Could the players hotwire Baba Lysaga’s hut? Should they?

50:00 Stunt 9: High-level play and PC’s wielding god-like powers

53:00 Stunt 10: PCs inventing spells, powers and magic items

58:00 Stunt 11: Crazy at low-level: The Paladin that talked down a raging Brontosaurus and Oathbreaker Anti-Paladin with the power of faith

61:00 Stunt 12: Species tension with the old Human Wizard and the trouble it got him into

64:00 Stunt 13: Mad Wizard X 13: Abusing the 2E Clone spell

66:00 Stunt 14: The wizard who seduced the Bronze Lich

69:00 Stunt 15: Rifts mutant shenanigans: Robbing Fort Knox with Super Strength and taking the money to another dimension

73:00 Tips for adjudicating crazy player stunts

76:00 Why DM-player trust is not optional

80:00 Stunt 16: The players that stormed directly into Strahd’s castle … and won

82:00 Stunt 17: Player enterprise: Trying to start an orphan-run newspaper to spread the party’s legend

88:00 Stunt 18: The PC who tried to create a Venom suit … failed and became a Venom suit … then wound up being worn by another PC who had no clue.

93:00 Stunt 19: The Wizard that blew himself to molecules with a 1st Edition bouncing chain lightning

95:00 Final thoughts

Dungeons & Dragons is the biggest role-playing game in the world, and frankly, it’s our game of choice. But that doesn’t mean it does everything great. There are design choices, and in some cases design shortcomings, that shape how a game of D&D plays and separates the experience from other systems. From D&D’s own basic roots (and the old-school renaissance — OSR — games recreating it) to the 3.5 spin-off Pathfinder to investigative games like Call of Cthulhu to completely different systems like FATE, Cypher, Marvel, Warhammer, Kids on Bikes and a hundred more, every RPG system creates a different feel of game. The better you understand what D&D does well and doesn’t, the better you’ll be able to DM it.

In this podcast, we dig into what makes D&D 5E different: The experiences that define the system, what it does well and what it doesn’t do well. Along the way, we’ll talk about how we lean in to the best of 5E while adjusting and homebrewing the aspects we wish worked differently for the styles of games we want to run.

1:00 What does D&D 5E do well?

• 2:00 Plus #1: 5E stopped letting players hose the boss monsters!
• 3:00 Plus #2: Accessible ruleset has built the widest player base yet
• 6:00 Plus #3: D&D 5E is a very good encounter-oriented game
• 7:00 Plus #4: Gives players and the DMs cool “toys” to play with (PC powers, DM monsters, etc.)
• 9:00 Plus #5: Entire system supports encounter-focused style (at the expense of exploration)
• 10:00 Plus #6: Simpler to learn and DM
• 15:00 Plus #7: D&D is now optimized to teach to generations who understand video games
• 17:00 Plus #8: How 5E got rid of all that spell-stacking bullshit
• 19:00 Plus #9: The most balanced system D&D has produced yet
• 21:00 What about Lucky?

22:00 What doesn’t D&D 5E do as well?

• 22:00 Minus #1: Make travel and exploration exciting. “You can do it, but the system doesn’t embrace it.”
• 25:00 Minus #2: Investigations can drag
• 26:00 Minus #3: It’s too hard for characters to die for real
• 30:00 Minus #4: Grappling and unarmed combat are shallow
• 33:00 Minus #5: The skills system is mushy and limited compared to other systems (complexity vs. playability is always a compromise)
• 37:00 Minus #6: Weapons, armor and equipment are too simplified and limited
• 41:00 Minus #7: Lack of mass combat mechanics
• 42:00 Minus #8: Not enough to do with your time and money (including Tony’s instant long-rest tent, training and other things he lets players buy in his campaigns)
• 51:00 Why add this stuff into 5E when you could just play another game that’s made for them?
• 59:00 Minus #9: The limits of D&D strength and the hard boundaries on D&D’s so-called high fantasy setting
• 67:00 How DMs teach players how to play in their games (and why you can’t help it)
• 79:00 Would Strahd care if the PCs stole Baba Lysaga’s Hut and partied through Ravenloft? (an aside)
• 80:00 Minus #10: Encounter balance is delicate, and the CR system doesn’t work well at higher levels
• 82:00 How to keep encounters challenging

86:00 How we’re building the stuff 5E is missing into our games

90:00 Final Thoughts

We mentioned that we talked about these across some of our favorite Facebook Groups. We really appreciate that they let us have the conversation! Check these out:

The discussion on our page

Dungeon Craft

5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons

MyDND Group

Chaotic Good DnD Memes

D&D 5E Group Finding

Tenkar's Tavern

Old School RPGers

Fans of Roll20

DnD Bedtime Stories

Role-playing games, at their heart, are all about adventure! But are the stories you’re telling and sessions you’re building really creating “an adventure” your players will enjoy? How do you build focused, engaging, self-contained quests that span 3-6 sessions (roughly) with a tight theme, clear goals, fun ways to achieve them, and satisfying rewards at the end?

In this episode of 3 Wise DMs, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about how they build adventures — and sometimes fail to — to keep players happy and the DMs in business.

1:00 What makes an adventure? Thinking in terms of movies, series and books.

10:00 Working adventures into your world and long-arc story

13:00 What makes a great adventure?

18:00 Are we focused so much on campaigns that we’re forgetting to run adventures?

22:00 Theme and plots: How do you put an adventure together?

27:00 Getting players to take the hook … and to see it clearly

32:00 Tricks and ideas to make sure the players know what they need to do

38:00 Does your treasure suck? How we give it out.

45:00 How do you make sure the adventure is engaging and fun?

48:00 Organic dungeon building: Motives maketh the monsters

54:00 Manipulating the story so the PCs stay motivated and can’t just walk away

63:00 What makes a good goal/villain to drive your adventure?

69:00 Do we put enough thought into what makes a good adventure vs. the session or the long-arc story?

73:00 Final Thoughts: Hook the party, clarify what they need to do, and focus them on doing it.