Ask The Dungeon Master! Tips and tricks from Dungeons&Dragons designers

welcome to the ask the DM seminar panel oh how many of you are in a D&D game ooh look at that awesome oh yeah I didn’t raise my yeah a good part of this seminar will be dedicated to Q&A but we want to kick off things by introducing ourselves and starting a few questions to get the ball rolling and each of us dreamt of a question before we came here that we could ask one another my name is Chris Perkins I am the senior producer for Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the coast thank you my DM cred comes from years of campaigning the two campaigns I’m running right now our fourth edition campaign set in my own campaign world I talk about it a lot on the D&D website in a column called the dungeon master experience you may also know me as the dungeon master for acquisitions incorporated and he’s my DM yes and mine is and we’ll be doing our annual live game tomorrow at 3:30 in the paramount it’d be awesome the gentleman next to me is I’m Mike Murrells I’m the senior manager for D&D how many players have you killed over the years oh I mean sorry not there’s actually there’s I have a few aliases I’ve gone that’s why Mike’s not in the game right now right exactly all these players are bad yeah they’re all in his basement it’s actually cuz I know I have to be on it it’s because I I DM at homes for the elderly people the end state survives yeah Mike Mike I love that you’re such a dyed-in-the-wool DM that you are drawing a dungeon right now on that piece of paper I think it’s to kill yeah just kind of did some graph paper just going to hack them together on either side is I’m Jeremy Crawford I oversee development and editing for Dungeons & Dragons and thank you I have a fourth edition campaign I’m DMing right now set in my home setting of Oberon that I have been using since first edition I’m Rodney Thompson I am an advanced designer on Dungeons & Dragons I I’m also a co-designer of the Lords of Waterdeep board game co-designer dungeon command and my DM cred is similar I have a fourth edition Forgotten Realms campaign that I have run on Monday night’s load these many years so we hope that this seminar will be informative if not entertaining and if it is neither feel free to walk out at any time but to get things under way I’d like to ask the first question of my panelists which is what in your mind is one thing that makes a great DM so the ability to improvise we got these questions before so I’m not answering just super fast cuz I’m clever I’ve thought about this I think it’s the ability improvised like you know because play D&D is all about chaos and who knows what the players are going to try to do so if you’re going to do one thing as a DM f is one school you can try to have it’s the ability to improvise under pressure and really I mean a lot of cases it’s not always easy to do so having the ability to just sort of stall for time would be the second thing I can’t improvise and at least keep them waiting usually that’s a good time like maybe get dinner lots of P let’s of P breaks yeah yeah I get a piece of me gotta do so that’s probably my two best things at the end all right uh the the one I’ll say is an add-on to that and that’s actually being a good listener which might seem like a strange thing to say because DM spends so much time talking at the DM I mean at the game table but so often to improvise well the DM needs to listen well to in and I don’t mean just listen with your ears but also pay attention with their eyes to see what’s making their players smile what’s making them laugh what maybe occasionally makes them cry and then improvise Jeremy knows a lot about this yes I I do actually at least once a year have a session where I make my players cry because they’re moved not because I’m hurting them mace eye sprays them with mace but yeah a big a big part of being able to improvise well is just having a lot of awareness at the table I would say one of the biggest things that a good DM can have is patience both with their players because we all know that patience players can sometimes be trying and difficult but also with themselves just as we talked about improvising being a really big part of Dungeon Master Aang when you do run into something you can’t handle remember to take a step back to keep calm and keep DMing if I were to answer my own question I’d say one of the qualities of a great DM is really good players in the group if you’ve got players in your group who are acting like a bunch of ass clowns it doesn’t make one what a difference how good of a DM you are the story is not going to be very satisfying for anybody so Jeremy you had a question well my question is related to the answer you just gave and so so my question to three of you is when you’re the DM what makes a great player I like players that get engaged for the game world and get they’d like to be active in the design of the world and the design of the campaign I like it when my players say hey I want to be a part of a secret society or hey I want to lead an army or you know give me at some idea what creative things they’re interested in doing and then take that next step and be creative right don’t just tell me you’re in a secret society tell me that you’re in the order of the crimson Raven and they do X Y & Z and I imagine one way that a DM can encourage that kind of great player is making it clear to them that they too can improvise and helped create the world absolutely I would say one thing that makes a great player is the ability to pay attention you know like you know when you read box text from an adventurer or you’re describing your room you say you walk into a ten foot high chamber full of bones and the first question somebody around the table asks so how high is the chamber yeah wait what was give Ethan I’m Rodney is a worst offender I hate him but also I like players who can remember the thousands upon thousands of NPC names that I throw on there oh my god he is not kidding yeah so even if they just could remember the NPC that they’re actually talking to that would be great welke and and I lied in that Chris creates so many NPCs in our campaign that you know most of us will try our best to remember the sort of the big-ticket NPCs but there’s a look there are lower tiers of NPCs where my running joke in his current campaign is if and if an NPC has dropped to one of those lower tiers that none of us can remember the the NPC’s named my character always refers to the person as Expo no no it’s it’s oh you’re the cook yes so so all we have so many cooks we have Magnus so I’d say for me as a DM it’s probably I really like players who have a kind of a sense of lateral thinking like instead of just here’s the door let’s just go through it is there another path we can take being a little inventive and how players attack problems and taking a bigger picture of you like if is a haunted house you don’t just go into the front door maybe you climbed the roof in Toronto or get into the second floor or just burn the haunted house down right I actually like the visit because me that’s more interesting it’s more fun as a DM to deal with that and roll those weird punches after flaming ghosts running around oh alright well Mike you had a question oh yeah so my question was uh what is your the biggest challenge you face as a DM I don’t know I’m gonna pass the buck to Jeremy because you have no chal challenge hmm it’s dumped Ronnie do you have a quick answer deep time you can’t bounce it right mine is Mike no I think the biggest challenge I always face personally is remembering what I’ve said in a previous session I know that sounds ridiculous but man I love to run with things off-the-cuff one of our players if I see them reacting really well to something I’ll be like oh yeah and then the guy says here meet my brother Joe right and then two sessions later I’ll be like hey what was that guy’s name I’ll be like pee break so yeah the biggest challenge for me is remembering to actually write things down during the session when I get super engaged in dealing with my players yeah now that that is one of my challenges I will not cop out though and just say that’s my answer to oh I might ya know one of my challenges is because I insist at least in my home game on making everything up myself I never run any published adventures anymore it means I am constantly having to like come up with the maps for everything the names for everybody and so one of the things I go to for the most help is ready-made Maps like that’s sort of like the one cheat I give myself is it’ll please any where is there a map I can lift either from an adventure or you know that the plan of a real world building that I’ll use for some location in my campaign my biggest challenge is coming up with story ways to kind of make the characters grow during their campaign so when I nice once once I know who all the players are and who all their characters are I spend a great deal of time thinking about what’s each of the characters arcs what do the players want their characters to evolve into over the course of the session and finding ways to pay that off I sort of think of my campaign a lot like a an ensemble television series like I’m the writer of a series and trying to find episodes or adventures that are going to key off of different characters so that Jeremy’s character for instance gets a moment in the spotlight Rodney’s character gets a moment in the spotlight finding those moments and finding interesting things for their characters to face a tie-in to the greater stories is an ongoing challenge I think my character is a little bit of a spotlight hog yeah I love how matter-of-fact were you agree ah Ronny so my question for the panel is what’s the one piece of advice do you always want to give to a new DM a new DM that’s so for me I would just say just do it like it’s so easy to worry about the rule I’ll say noticing and keeping everything Jami I was going to say it’s fine if I want an issue you run it jump in there I saw you last 8 yeah that’s I really just it’s not it’s it’s it’s easy to get really bogged down to worry about all the details and getting everything absolutely mapped out but most the time the player is going to do something unexpected anyway so you can all the prep you do like maybe 10% of it will actually come into play so if you’ve thought about DMing and you think it seems into it’s just the best way to do is just is just start just run that first session and get it out of the way so yes I DM I remember making the mistake of like fully detailing out of town and talk you know detailing out the blacksmith and the mine near town and the innkeeper who had this cool story about you know being this ancient war hero who had basically settled down and all that it was completely meaningless the characters were gone from that town and never looked back five minutes after the campaign started if they could have burned it to the ground they would I was gonna ask if all that was left with a smaller ruin right yeah and you know the dead end keeper his fist rising up out of the records saying but I had a story my my piece of advice would be trust what you love and what I mean by that is it’s really easy as a DM to second-guess yourself and think oh I need to come up with this story in advance that’s going to be totally creative and nobody’s ever seen it before and tailored exactly to what my players want your best starting point is just what’s what excites you what do you love what’s the kind of fantasy story you want to tell be inspired by other fantasy stories or science fiction stories or any kind of story that you love and and carry that passion into your DNA and again just trust your gut well I’ll say my answer to my own question is don’t hold anything back if you have a good idea or obviou I think is good if you have an idea for something exciting or fun that could happen in the next session use it because you’ll always have more ideas right I used to do this all the time where I’d say I’m gonna have this awesome fight with a treant and he’s gonna have a laser gun or whatever and it sounded better in my head and I would say but that will be a great thing for two sessions from now and then of course the next session the game explodes and my players leave and we never get to that right you will always have more good ideas so when you come up with something don’t save it don’t hold it back always put your best ideas out there because that’s what’s going to keep the momentum going in your campaign that’s a really good idea whenever I do the PAX games with the guys from Penny Arcade I just generally assume that it’s always going to be the last one right and so I try to throw everything I can into that session knowing we might never do it again because I might get hit by a bus yeah when I when I was a much younger DM I would constantly dream up these amazing banner encounters and you know these these set pieces that will blow people’s minds and as Rodney says you know often the campaign would never even get there and so the whole thing was about getting to destination that we never arrived at and so now I follow the advice that that Rodney just gave in every session I treat it as if we might never have another session so you know the thing that’s exciting me now is the thing I’m putting into this session ooh well we’ve all had a chance to ask our own questions this is an hour-long seminar and we’d like to offer you the chance some of you to come up and ask some questions of us related to DMing in particular if you have other questions try to grab us after the seminar is over and and we also have other panels we’re doing at the convention mm-hmm check your on in situations where a conflict between player characters is boiling over what’s the best tips you had for keeping story continuity now you’ll resolve it they’ll kill each other or whatever but I’d like to get the story going I like characters we are talking about player characters as opposed to players right absolutely that’d be a different panel all right but I mean that’s actually something it comes up in in Chris’s game in I play on Wednesday nights and at various points I’m not sure Chris has pushed me into conflict over the player game yes yeah yes he has right I probably pushed Rodney’s character harder than anybody else I set up huge conflicts with him and other party members right but I think the thing that makes it work is a make sure the players know that at the end of the day this conflict needs to be resolved in a way that keeps the campaign going right one of the things we often talk about when we talk about DMing is that there are players who will say things like well this is what my character would do it’s okay to have that conversation with your players and say do what your character would do in such a way that the campaign can actually keep going after that because there’s there’s real playing your character and then there’s being disruptive right so I think just first of all making sure that you’ve set up that that relationship between your players between your players and yourself is really really important and also I think just sort of set foreshadowing it helps because then the players kind of feel like they’re building toward it to take the case of Rodney he’s playing a character who is a devotee of the Raven Queen the queen of death and in my campaign war forged are actually fueled by necrotic energy not life energy and so she has charged him her eternal champion with basically wiping the war forged out the problem is another of the player characters is a war forged and what does that actually mean that’s been sort of building up or brewing up to the point when she actually came forward and said hey Vargas get off your ass and kill the war fort yeah and now he’s got to wrestle that issue that’s unresolved at this point but I think the players understand that this is all part of the story and regardless of how it ends up it’s not player versus players whatever by the same token in the same group Kurt Gould another player of mine who plays played until recently xantham the gnome bard he got thrown for a loop out of nowhere and got thrown into hell spent a lot of time there came back realized very little time had passed in the world at large but the party didn’t want him around anymore and they threw him off their ship and so you think it’s all so harsh you threw him off the ship he was a known Bard I mean he couldn’t hey be nice to the gnome nice to know he could Norris I’m kidding so that one sort of came out of the blue that was one that wasn’t very well foreshadowed and consequently it actually caused a sort of a minor disruption in the campaign because at that point Kurt decided that he was going to go back and play one of his older retired characters rather than bring xantham back but obviously Kurt wanted to stay in the game so that was the solution that worked for him and as far as I know they have no intention of throwing his current character no I would like his other character yeah because he’s not a known bard thank you and when the conflict is generated by the players rather than something you know rather than a seed that the DM has planted because Chris definitely does plant these seeds this is where improvisation becomes so important yeah for the for the DM to be able to roll with it and with any bit of adversity at the game table whether it’s inter inter party conflict or some unexpected course of action that the party takes what I always try to do is see it as a new storytelling opportunity rather than oh my god what my plans are being thwarted instead it’s like no is this awesome crazy thing I can now do because they’re being idiots you know or you know whatever it is thank you like celebrities um I actually don’t have a question I just want to give you guys a quick thank you I think I’ve watched online or attended every ask the dungeon master panel has been I read you guys blogs I’m a big fan of stealing stuff from your world Chris my party’s in heal gala Roth right now Wow oh sweet um but I wanted to just share a quick text message that one of my players sent me not knowing that how much of all of you guys stuff I read and how much I steal from you so really I think you guys deserve this credit what he said is I know you’re going to a place where everyone cares about the the things that we care about so you can feel free to share this my DM is the best DM hands down and I will murder anyone who tries to re Wow so so thank you very much for all for all the ideas you guys give me and all the tips over the years and everything and all the panels it’s been great great thank you so when when I played D&D now I look around the table and I see a lot of iPads cell phones laptops are there are there any software tools that you guys use yourselves or would recommend are definitely worth a look at things like that for helping the DM a you know sort of keep track of notes for instance or keep track of maybe the 10000 status effects that happens sometimes uh anything that you guys would recommend in that area I I now do all of my DMing with an iPad and I have my campaign notes in it I create all my encounters in advance using Apple’s spreadsheet program numbers that’s also how I track initiative because I can quickly reorder things so yeah by iPad has become my little DMing companion I also use my iPad I haven’t there’s an initiative tracker out there called I think it’s called initiative right that I use is really simple to use I have a database program that I use to track world war sometimes I will set up slideshows in advance with images if I know the players are going to encounter NPCs just load the images on to on my iPad and say and you know see this guy right and and that’s a good way to do the sort of pseudo handout I guess most what I use I’m the opposite I’m very old-school I don’t have a Facebook account I don’t have a Twitter account I don’t use my iPad I don’t bring a computer to the table I just keep everything trapped in my robot like brain yeah I don’t have a radical brain I have Dropbox so I just use Dropbox and everything and so uniform at work I just see an image I like I just put it my Dropbox have a folder that just gets filled with stuff and so either it’s campaign notes so after a session I can just if I have a few free minutes at work I just you know can go through them but even just keeping things on air for import that for just ideas like maps I see online to someone on a blog posts a map or anything or just a photo about you know cool-looking vistas like that I just drop it all my Dropbox when it’s time to plan at least echo levels random collected thoughts or in one spot I can just go through so thanks um I actually run a game that has seven players um so there’s no obviously with fourth edition combat can take a long time and there’s also a lot of time in between each person’s turns so a lot of what I see is twittering facebooking using their cell phones and stuff which I’m fine with they usually also get up and like sit on the couch but it’s gotten to the point where a couple of my players last session started playing magic in between turns so my question to you is um what we hardly endorse their magic playing behavior my my question is how can you engage the players when it’s not their turn and you’re also trying to adjudicate other people’s turns what one thing I do I mean on one hand I just accept that a certain amount of that is going to happen I mean that’s been true you know ever since I’ve been D I mean going all the way back to first addition people get up they’ll go get you know a drink from the fridge they’ll you know play you know more recently play a game on their phone or something but one of the things I do is I try to keep the story going throughout a battle so almost all wait and this is yeah this is something Chris definitely does as well in his DMing is I just keep the description coming the whole time you know the NPC’s always have things to say there’s always some cool thing to describe in the environment so some some shift that’s occurring I don’t assume that once I’ve set an encounter up that it’s basically sort of a clock I wound up and it’s just going to play itself out I just I keep performing the whole time and and that usually succeeds in keeping people engaged yeah I was gonna say too one thing after I’ve heard other people do this with with 4e and it’s something I think is pretty useful if you give if people have their action chosen before their turn like as soon as their turn comes up they know exactly what they’re going to do you should give like a pasta bonus or something like that so the least your it might not solve for everything but it encourages people to be at least be ready and that kind of maybe helps things move along and it does reward you for paying attention because you know what’s happening you’re not just going to fireball those kobolds oh no they just died on Bob’s turn or something bad so does reward you for at least keeping tabs on what’s going on if it’s a case of a player being indecisive like they’re just taking a long time to figure out what they want to do I’ll skip them and go to the next person and just once they figure out what they’re going to do they can jump back into the initiative order I don’t wait for them basically got to keep it moving no no yeah all right thanks hey guys hello um actually little tip on since you use your iPads and games I’ve got a note-taking app that to help me remember I actually record all my games and I take notes afterwards I thought about doing that but I’m afraid than my iPad will burst into flames sometimes you have to employers yeah sometimes we have to go back and censor but I actually she kind of touched on one of my questions most of my players we work by ton so we very rarely get together so two of the things that I struggle with are for one prepping with short amount of time whenever we find a weekend that we can actually gain you know I’ve got story out to forever but actually getting right for the game so any tips that you have there and then also when we get together it’s like we haven’t seen each other for a while so how do you guys manage keeping on track on task and moving the game forward even though everybody is you know having fun talking to each other because you don’t want to stop that but you also want to make sure you get somewhere meaningful in the game at the start of a game session as soon as I feel I’m ready to begin all just force all the conversations come to a stop by saying previously in i”m Andhra and then recapping previous sessions work everybody just sort of goes oh they’re in the game now and it all just sort of stops dead it has a nice ritualized feel to it especially because yeah this is another second campaign of Chris as I’ve played in I know when he says previously in the block campaign that’s time to stop talking yeah and it’s it’s a technique I use in my home game as well and because I mean with Chris’s game we play at the office so we we don’t have audio equipment where we play but at home I not only do the the sudden you know the the visual and the the verbal cue that it’s time to start but I also have a piece of music I always play when it’s now the game is starting it was sort of the theme song and yeah if you go while between games it also and one thing I try to do is have it the first scene of that adventure you’re going to play is like really important you’ve you’re it’s a cliffhanger that’s being resolved or there’s a really important like just Troy Sadowski made because I found a players start talking socially but they start talking with a game then it’s easier segue because people know you know what do we do about this X or Y or is you know some I’m going to live or die or something I mean so if you can kind of plan it ahead you can sort of tell the players like here’s almost like get that preamble done or on email or something like that so they know coming in you’re going straight into something really important as far as prep time stuff I find cover your ears that I don’t have to do much prep at all I just know knowing it but they think I spend hours and hours and hours actually planning all this out no III actually wing it a ton too I mean I it I find the most valuable prep is getting getting your elements ready like a list of names some locations a few useful maps you make make sure you actually have your own plot straight in your head and as long as you have those key pieces ready you you can pretty much do anything what I typically do to prepare and this is exactly what Jeremy’s describing is I’ll make a one sheet for myself that’s basically here’s the name of the adventure at the top here’s a list of NPCs organized in some sort of priority order from most important to least important or however I want to do that very much like a you know cast scroll at the start of a television series or something like that with like a one-line description of who they are just as a reminder to me so that when I put this sheet in my log later on it doesn’t get I can remember all the details and then underneath that list of the cast list basically is a bullet point list of events what I assume is going to happen in the session now often that’s about 50% inaccurate as the session plays out it goes off in weird directions but at least in my head I’ve thought about one possible way in which this is actually going to play out thank you very much your uncle hey guys hello I uh periodically run one shot game nights for both to introduce new people to the game and to kind of interview people from my ongoing sessions so I was wondering if you have any advice on both how to make the game as exciting as possible for those brand new people and – and for my benefit to see you know which players are going to be the best for my ongoing campaigns well I think for brand new people it’s easy to overcomplicate it like if they haven’t played uni before even just the simple things just the idea of hey you can try anything I think I’d be an important thing to bring up is give them really open up it’s easy to think for beginners you want to give them something very linear but I think the opposites actually true like in my experience new players the ones are the most open to just trying anything that new kind of testing the bounds of the game and in some ways kind of giving them something that is a has a really I mean the one thing they probably need is clicks clear direction because you have them one one hand you can do anything beyond the other well why are you doing what you want to do so I usually like to run for new players sessions or adventures that have a clear goal like here’s something that’s going on that you need to resolve in some way but give them a lot of options for how to do it rather than a very like say linear dungeon or something that’s very ambling like hey you’re under dungeon what he want to do right so the players kind of know hey we have a goal here’s what we chose to do and I think it’s also important in the setup is to give them a reason to care about that goal you know whether it’s just you know you’re going to visit your mentor and hey he’s been kidnapped or we’ve been killed and here’s the guy who did it you know or something like that so so the players are they’re not trying to like figure out what they’re supposed to do they’re more focused on how are we going to do what we’re supposed to do because I think players if they’re new to deity are you steady of games having goals right if you play Mass Effect you know where you’re supposed to do or any other RPGs so I think kind of trading on those two things is key and kind of challenge them to be creative and have a good time rather than kind of feel yet the really blow up lead them by the hand from point A to point B there are two things that I do very quickly one is I don’t start off by describing the rules in any way shape or form I just throw them right into the story and the rules will come up as the story progresses and I can deal with them on a case-by-case basis then the other thing I do is I spend a lot more time articulating some of the more visual elements of a battle say like how this guy is swinging his sword around and what he’s saying and doing as the sword is hitting and what what the effect of the sword hitting the shield actually does the shield splinters all these little fine details that aren’t represented in the rules at all but just that color to the combat in the situation and as far as sort of spotting potential players in in a situation like that this goes back to something I was saying earlier about just listen well a watch yo see see who’s engaged see who is funny without being disruptive see who is who’s being a mini storyteller with you as the DM because I I know as Adam I love it when players sort of join me in telling the story you know they take a detail in there characters background or and then the environment and they just run with it they start describing things so I just again just listen carefully watch their behavior person’s a rules lawyer who there’s no chance they’re going to make it to my table that’s why you kick me out the one thing I will say is remember that you are the window through which the players look into your world so all of your descriptions are extremely important but it’s also good to communicate to them Mike said make sure they have lots of options to communicate very clearly that they are options right if you if you think that they can solve a problem by going and talking to the blacksmith or the butcher or the carpenter make sure that when you communicate to the players that there are those three professions that there’s something about them that draws the players towards them as a means of getting them through that plot it’s just it it can’t be you know I can’t reinforce enough that with your descriptions you’re painting a picture of your world so it’s really important to pay attention to what you’re telling them alright thank you guys welcome hi hello Lee my evil campaign needs your help my party is awesome they have formed a nice cohesive unit they are well on their way down the story to world domination they’re not having enough evil fun um they’re being incredibly smart we’re having some great interactions with all these NPC’s they’ve managed to talk enemies into joining their cause which is kind of evil but I have a few more bloodthirsty members of my group who would love to do things like slaughter the puppy that I put out for them but they then managed to convince the guy to join them and the puppy doesn’t get slaughtered so I feel like maybe I’m just not coming up with smart enough ways for them to be evil if I and it’s all you’ve got like this is like some sort of bizarre oh yeah all the people that they thought have been well armored militia people who can defend themselves and when I give them opportunities to slaughter the innocent they want to do smarter things so how do I come up with a more subtle way of being evil when they won’t even slaughter a puppy well I mean in in some ways the most evil thing that they could do would be to subjugate the people around them and convince the people to follow them I mean you basically become very clever tyrants so if if the road of slaughter is not the road they want to go down then encourage that that pursuit of domination yeah are the players having fun are they enjoying the campaign they are I just have a couple of the fighters want to fight things and and they’re having fun with the negotiations and it certainly is all as I said on the way to world domination but when they’re itching to slaughter the town people around them and everybody else is going to know because then we can’t buy the things that we need and we can’t get the information we need and I want to reward them for being smart and intelligent and crafty but I’d like that guys to be able to slaughter things every once in a while be overtly evil well there are there are good monsters they could be fighting they could be fighting you know gold dragon or a silver dragon have them fight some treants you know so you know an easy way actually like so if you want to have it they talk some of these towns folk into being their friends have them revolt because it’s like hey we just killed these guys this would have been a problem so something like that where it’s just I mean it’s an it’s like it sounds like maybe it also if the players really convinced this is always going to work but you can kind of go back and visit some of their older decisions as cover I like to mess with players like they think something’s solved but it’s actually a glaring problem that’s growing it kind of gives them a chance to go back and revisit you know a choice they made or something that happened right so go you spared these guys well these guys are actually forming the freedom fighter alliance behind your backs it’s going to come back and try to in try to take you guys down or something like that you can also introduce the idea of an adventurers guild in your world that sees your adventurers as a problem both in terms of PR and in terms of adventurous can’t go into a town anymore because they’re thinking about this party who’s just ransacked everything in sight having this adventurers guild be the sort of the party’s nemesis and occasionally when thing when the fighters getting bored a group of these adventurers suddenly become visible in a room because they’re probably invisible to begin with and start attacking them out of the blue that could be an interesting ongoing and odd campaign villain and I think that especially with villains right what’s the one of the most common ways you see villains engage and sort of wholesale slaughter is when they need to make an example out of somebody right I think the idea of the rebellion or what-have-you is a great example of you know well actually killing these guys is the right solution right in Star Wars they blow up all around to make a point basically thank you yeah that was a great that was a great question and very hard to top sir yeah and I want her water problem good look no comment I thought I’ve always in line in reference to the thread earlier about electronics I use a wiki to track all of my stuff which works really well because then you can kind of have links deep information about things right but anyway so my question was I tend to focus really heavily on the RP side of things and less on the mechanics and I have this tendency to sort of bend the rules I have some house rules that good-for-you expand oh you’re doing it right yeah but yeah so I’m trying my question is if you guys do that – like if that’s encouraged how do you balance bending the rules to tell a good story versus having the players have a stable system that they can rely on so that they they know what they can do and like that things will work when they expect them to work yeah for me it comes down to like within what kind of rules are changing and I try not to house real things that show up in a character sheet like if I’m going to like change things it’s more likely be they can access space like in this campaign there aren’t any sorcerers or in this campaign paladins Earl hunted by this bad guy or something like that so players know when they make their characters if there’s any restrictions or just things like you know whatever certain powers that don’t want people using the campaign whatever the the trick is this in my experience is if if you’re going to bend the rules you can either be very obvious about it the players know this rule has been changed it’s a house rule and then the other way to do it I mean in some ways it’s the old diem trick of you know you roll the die behind the screen and then you have the other die that’s like cocked right to the result that you want to show the players and so they kind of don’t know you’re bending the rules because it is tempting sometimes like you know it also depends on the kind of players you have right like some players especially the rules lawyers they want the rules to work the way they are and I suspect you have rules lawyers in your group I have a mix I have some newer players that I’m trying to get to you know do things and like think about all the possibilities but then I do have older players who you know have been playing for a really long time they’ve been playing since a second I think some of them men so they they’re expecting the rules to work the way the rules work in the in the book yeah I also just also make sure that you when you bend you’ve been both ways remember that your players are engaged in that story just as much as you are and so if you’re bending the rules to their detriment all the time of course they’re going to react negatively that if you bend the rules in their favor occasionally that sort of softens a little bit so you you it makes it very clear to your players that you’re getting the rules to tell a story but it’s their story that you’re telling because I mean that’s really what would what you do when you DM is you help them tell their story right and so bending in their favor lets them know that you’re doing this all in good faith yeah yeah and if as long as they know you’re not their adversary right now my guideline is I never mess with something that could invalidate a player’s choice and that includes not messing with things on the character sheet but I will mess with things at will if it’s going to make a better story but that means I’m usually messing with things the players don’t have access to like the abilities that a monster might have you know right I frequently will have my players meet some hag who is doing some stuff that is in no stat block you know she’s summoning up strange fake creatures and turning the entire area into a swamp you know this is not written anywhere just I decided oh this is going to make this encounter even more awesome and and yeah that’s part of my problem is that some of the people I play with they’re actually or DNS and so they know that that’s sort of stuff like there’s no that’s not an ability you know that that’s that that’s what previews DM so that’s that’s completely different right you’re having the monster do something I mean if you’re having to do it with players like I cast fireball in like well this ice elemental is immune to fire right that’s one thing right because we’re just trying to counter what the players are doing but it’s examples like Jeremy just gave that’s that’s part of being a DM is going up with those things possibly just tell the players deal with it well yeah just say in my world is how it works and thing cuz it’s not I mean that’s especially that’s kind of how you planned it out I mean that that’s you’re right as the DM it’s not it’s subtle I kind of argue with a novelist like you can’t leave this can’t this guy can’t do this because of that like well you can I mean if there’s obviously the case the players can just leave but I mean if they don’t they’re really that offended by it but it’s players shouldn’t be trying to DM for you I mean that’s all its kind of attitude toward it you’re they’re creating like the setting in the world fun to enjoy if they kind of want us to start poking the the stuff of the firmament behind it and it’s kind of to me that’s kind of crossing a line is Collier should be going if I’m changing rules I always think well at some point the player should be able to turn this against me yep and I and if I’m cool with that then it’s good yeah one one trick real quick that you can use if you have people who are very familiar with say monster stat blocks and this is a trick I use all the time because a number of my players work with us on the game so they like you know like us they know the game inside and out I make sure that when I’m DMing say with a monster I will only use the montt monsters printed name if I’m going to run the monster by the book if I if anytime I am customizing the monster in any way I never refer to it by its printed name so nobody sort of goes down this path of thinking oh I know what this type of star spawn does like no I will give it a unique name you know nobody not knows what auntie Rock tooth does only I do because I’m making it up right now and and if I never you know say this is a night hag a lot of those problems vanish yeah I think that news comes down to ply players our expectations if you say hey you’re fighting control and the players think we should use fire oh this is actually I know it’s a orange skin flame troll it gets stronger with fire right and then then you’re not really playing fair it’s so right I think it’s it’s having that balance between those two well thanks awesome yeah hey what’s up uh I run a fourth edition dark Sun campaign I know Ronnie liked you a lot of material on that night oh I totally used as much as I can whoo so and one of my favorite things to do like as IDM is to split the party and get them to go on their different ways except most recently uh the party split uh it’s kind of hard to put them both back together so basically just to run down the plot I’m running like a giant arena tournament a Coliseum and tear and half the people are now like in the final matches and the great you know ziggurat and all that and half the party didn’t make it and they’re doing off their own thing but the problem is how what’s the best way you would go about handling both of these two subplots together so that everyone remains engaged I don’t have to like oh I have a separate section for one top plot in a separate section for the other I I would one thing I would say is try and work him back together that mean I mean it’s a I’ve it’s I mean it’s I realized that it was a little harder than usual to do its time but okay it’s okay to be contrived occasionally to hate I mean the lady’s like oh and suddenly because you’re following this plot thread over here you find the thing that allows you to go fight in the arena again right I mean that’s okay actually well that was the thing because the party members I did make it didn’t want to keep fighting they didn’t want to go back to urea it’s like they wanted to go down this other path I have nothing for you I expected via what I like to do is just define some way for the other group to like have an obvious reason to go handle the other like dude like some monkey wrench comes up that so if you have party a and party B yeah party a is somehow being recruited or somehow C being exposed to something that’s going to monkey wrench party B so in your example maybe some mysterious stranger approaches these characters who aren’t in the tournament says hey we know you guys are gladiators we want to hire you to infiltrate the the tournament and sabotage party B with maybe the guy not knowing that they’re aligned or they over here so I’m making these plans so you kind of give the play organic input maybe interesting reason for that eyes get together right there’s there’s some plot there that’s going to have them cross the group that’s not fighting maybe you’re gonna give them their own story to resolve like something interesting from them to do it’s not just hey you’re gonna go watch the arena fight and that might be kind of I found that happen sometimes when you just split the party one group’s having a more interesting story another group just kind of is drifting they kind of give them a real clear goal that’s also going to happen I think they both have something like really Oh very high stakes for both of them the problem is trying to keep the story moving so I have try to give as much attention as I can to both sides I think that’s more or less the issue one of the things I will often do in my games is actually run both scenes simultaneously that is basically put everybody into an initiative order and when it comes up to the turn of somebody who’s in Group A we’re in the Coliseum when it’s somebody’s turn and they’re in Group B we’re out in the streets you know killing somebody and I will jump back and forth with a little bit of narrative every time we skip to a new place I think it’s totally okay to do that even if both groups aren’t in combat yes yeah and we have five minutes um I’ve been teaming for a few years now but I also work so I’m fairly busy but I still you know want to learn to be a better TEM but at the same time I don’t have a whole lot of time to spend on actually working it how to do that but I do you know maybe have a couple hours on a weekend to read stuff or you know while I’m waiting for code to compile or something like that so are there any resources you could recommend that I you know what one or two things would you recommend I have a look at in the time I’ve got read Chris’s column yeah his his column has a lot of great advice in it also the fourth edition Dungeon Master’s guide is filled with great advice that is actually edition neutral no matter what edition of D&D you’re DMing or really in a lot of the advice is applicable to any role-playing game and there is a lot of great advice there for running the game at the table preparing for your game analyzing what you players like and so on and so on and assuming that you have internet access when you’re when you have this downtime I mean you said you’re profiling code so I assume so occasionally I’ll go and find like YouTube videos that are about improv acting and watch those just basically you know improv tips from professional actors yeah there’s also a lot of blogs out there on DMing if your to RPG bloggers comm it’s just aggregates a bunch of feeds and I found like not all those blogs nest about gaming but you may find a couple and then it starts to network off from their blog their lists you know whatever feeds and then start finding more more blogs gnome stood coms oh the good place to start they have a lot of DMA advice articles there I collect adventures so I spend a lot of my off time just reading old adventures not necessarily always D&D either because sometimes I can get as much inspiration from a Call of Cthulhu adventure as I do from a dungeon magazine actually I’d say that’s even better sometimes the before gets you to think in different ways you know instead of having a very D&D mindset you might be thinking about the dungeon or the encounters reading adventures for other systems can maybe help you think more like a Pendragon you know adventure which is you know sort of art theory and fantasy might really inspire a different way to approach the adventure and there’s a slightly less chance my players will have ever seen or heard of it yeah but only slightly okay thank you very much that’s so cool hi I was wondering how you as a panel come down on the idea of player death versus a story like if you Warren’s character dad we just put him in the basement and Mike’s basement like if um maybe the role just go there right about to me maybe the mastermind that they’ve been working towards and a bunch of like the henchmen really just sock it to them and they’re all wiped out do you let the dice roll and sort of show a humanizing lesson or do you maybe make a story spin off so they all survive or just sort of fudge the numbers what are you like I typically let the dice fall where they may and if it’s a if it’s like a TPK which has happened on occasion yep often I’ll sort of or even if it’s not even if it’s just a single character I always put the ball back in the players court and ask them what do they want to do they want to keep do they like playing the character they have known do they want that story to continue or they is this an opportunity for them to try something new maybe they’re actually chomping at the bit and they’re secretly relieved that their half-elf barter pallidum is dead because now they can play a character who’s actually liked by the party yeah you having if they’re out there too is if it’s near the end of the campaign and you can always just fast forward like a 10 20 years like evils one what’s going to happen next because that also means like some of those NPCs the characters may have like the players have been exposed to become really great villains through next campaign yeah it’s personal this time you know it’s not just because because often your biggest blessings as a DM are going to be the things you didn’t foresee because if rather than fighting it against them if you embrace them you’ll have all sorts of great twists thank you very much so I loved playing I love damming but ever since I started making games my free time has just kind of been vaporized and I find these days whenever I’ve tried to actually DM I just burn out very quickly and I’m wondering if you have any tips for DMing on a very tight time budget and like avoiding burnout in that situation so one of things I used to do before I came to work at Wizards I was a freelance game designer and I wouldn’t have much time I had a campaign I ran and then it kind of ended and I had I was kind of in the same situation I made just a bunch of like fourth level characters and I’d run these very specific very weird adventure just as one-offs you know things like you know you are the year old like the catechol minions of some super powerful people guide who sent you to kill this kitten kind of like the other theatre DM the so can be something really distinct but I also found having a very focused meant we play for two or three hours and then be done and it kind of get that let me either a focus on something it’s fun and completes it’s not like okay we were middle finish or and it kind of let me really test out lots of different stuff you know and kind of track get back to where I wanted to be as far as gaming or you know the players new showing up that we just we’re gonna have something very focused and quick so and just having I just I still have it a folder bunch of three five characters of just so no character generation just grow the character sheets on the table people pick them up and we just are playing oh we’re at time we’re at time I’m sorry yeah just like yeah don’t much time to prep uh we have to call this here but thank you everyone for coming thank you thank you for playing thank you for Dungeon Master ring there are never enough Dungeon Master’s in the world so thank you thank you have Dungeon Master babies yes thank you not now okay out in the Holyman yeah okay

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