Pretty early on in the campaign I decided I wanted to add an auditory element to everything we were doing, without resorting to generic dungeon crawling ambient noises that you can find on YouTube.  How would one go about this then?  Maybe they would search for music that set the appropriate mood, cause that would actually be a smart idea.  But what if we added hours to my session prep and included unique music tracks for encounters and story beats?  That’s the position I’ve put myself in.

There were specific tones and moods I was trying to cultivate throughout our campaign in an effort to add some drama and weight to everything.  It started out with me making little stingers of violins swelling or big drums strikes that would act as the period on the important sentence I was relaying to the party.  It largely went unnoticed and didn’t really add much to the experience.

But instead of bowing out there, I decided to go further.  What if I made these long, loop-able songs that would properly portray the current encounter or location?  I should note, this was all inspired by listening to certain RPG podcasts, where the element of audio can add a lot for both the players and listeners.  On one of the podcasts, The Adventure Zone, they did an episode where they answered a lot of lingering questions by the listeners, where it was revealed that most of the music was made with Apple Loops that were built into Garage Band.

I didn’t have a Mac, but I did have an iPhone with Garage Band installed.  Using the phone version of Garage Band wasn’t the optimal experience, but it got the job done.  I mainly stuck to relying on the included loops and various midi instruments as well as occasionally actually recording a guitar track.  Luckily the loops all worked well with each other for the most part, which made the whole affair a lot more manageable and less laborious.  Once I had managed to make a handful of tracks, it was time to use them in the campaign.

It actually went really well and was received positively by my players.  It made things feel a little weightier and put them in the mental place they needed to be.  Would it have been easier to find a good facsimile of the music I was making on the internet?  Of course it would have been, but I like making things myself.  So not only did I get to make sure the mood was just right, but I got to stretch my creative muscles.

I suppose I never really appreciated how important music could be to a D&D campaign before, but I doubt I could ever go back to not having it.  Aside from making the campaign better, it’s just fun to create things in general.

Honestly, being a DM has been some of the most rewarding creative work I’ve ever had the pleasure of doing.  From writing, to map making, character creation, acting and of course, making music, it’s truly a creatively fulfilling experience.  And considering we’re about to start an entirely new campaign with new themes, you know I’m excited to get in there and make several albums worth of tracks for it.

Like the countless memes on the internet would lead you to believe, scheduling our Dungeons & Dragons sessions can be unnecessarily difficult sometimes.  People have their obligations and responsibilities, and it’s important to recognize and respect that, because at the end of the day these are still your friends.  I recently found myself getting very down due to the scheduling nightmare that is our D&D campaign, and it took some time for me to get over it.

For months now, my group had been on the verge of some pretty big revelations in our campaign that I’ve been eager to drop on them.  The problem was, with the holidays and various personal obligations, we hadn’t been able to meet for a full session in weeks.  Totally understandable stuff.

The problem is that at some point during this period, whenever I would send a text message to the group on game day, it always felt like a roll of the dice as to who would cancel this time and considering we’re a small group of 4, when one person bows out, we all bow out.  It wasn’t their fault that something came up and I understood that.  But after a while of this, it started to feel like I was bothering them and hounding them to play D&D.

I hated this feeling.  I hated it so much that it somehow warped into resenting myself and to a lesser extent, them.  I was angry at my friends and they had no idea.  While I completely had no right to be angry, there I was, dejected and frustrated with the current state of things.

The problem for me was that even though the sessions had stopped for a bit, my brain didn’t.  In my mind I’d been thinking about all the things I want to throw at them from combat encounters to story threads.  Whenever I’d go to write these outlines out or make a map, I’d just get upset because I started getting overly defeatist about the situation.

It was stupid and immature of me to be so upset and filled with resentment, and eventually I realized that.  The reasonable part of me finally chimed in, cooled me down, and made me realize how childish I was being.  Even though we still haven’t played a session yet, I’m okay with it.  I’ve started funneling my creative energy into other projects, and that’s been incredibly helpful.

Even though I know it was immature and shitty to harbor these feelings, it was just so deflating to have sessions get cancelled, the day of.  So one decision I did make was that I wasn’t going to hound them about playing anymore, and instead wanted to let them come to me when they wanted to start up again.  What I’m really trying to avoid with this strategy is having them feel like D&D is work.  It’s a game that we play together, and just like other games, sometimes you can’t sync up.

While I always feel immensely satisfied with the work I put into crafting and delivering our various DnD sessions, when I look back on where we started versus where we are now I can’t help but feel like I missed endless opportunities along the way.  My Dungeon Mastering started by following the Waterdeep: Dragon Heist book in an attempt to get my sea legs under me.  I had always intended to stray from the book and its story, but never did I expect it to be such a dramatic departure.

I’ve gone over that transition once or twice already, so I won’t retread that yet another time.  No, the crux of this The Master of Disaster is about adapting on the fly and how important being able to do it effectively is.

One of my players is currently in the midst of crafting a one-shot game for us as a way to get comfortable with being a Dungeon Master for a future campaign they’ll run.  He recently came to me and let me know that he was a little behind and needed more time to hone it.  That’s completely understandable, considering that putting together even a one-shot is a tremendous amount of work.  But I wanted to impart my limited knowledge upon him and maybe help him prepare for the stuff that you can’t script out.

I don’t know if I was effective in portraying that message, but hopefully this can help him along with other first time Dungeon Masters.

The first thing to understand is that you need to give your players a reason to do something.  I’ve struggled with it in the past and it led to a couple of moments with me breaking the fourth wall and just saying, “you’re going there cause that’s where the rest of the game is.”  There was more context to that statement, but it doesn’t matter because that’s just a bad way to handle the situation.  I either needed a better motivator or a better way to express that this was the direction the party should head in.

The second thing is to know your NPCs.  You don’t have to make bespoke character sheets for every NPC you craft, nor do you need to name every citizen in a town or village.  That path leads to nothing but insanity.  What I settled on was making sure I had an understanding of what the named NPCs knew and what that information meant to them.  Maybe the party would have to earn that information, maybe the NPC was easily intimidated, maybe they were a good Samaritan, or maybe they just don’t know something.  You can’t plan for every question or line of dialogue cause you never know what your players are thinking.

Along those lines is the third and arguably the most important thing a Dungeon Master can do, and that’s being able to adapt on the fly.  Improvisation is a required ability when leading a session or campaign, that’s why it’s important to have the previous two skills down because it makes this third one that much easier.

For example, you might have a quest line involving a corrupt king that’s been enjoying the benefits of their royalty while their people live in squalor.  Why should the party care?  Well, the easiest reward is money or treasure, but if you have players who actively role play, you can tap into their characters minds and appeal to their nature.  The lawful good guy isn’t going to be too keen on an neglectful and abusive king.  You can reinforce this by having citizens who voice their disdain and dissatisfaction to the party, or an event that shows the kings brutality.  These can help propel the party in the direction you want them to go.

But you never know if they’ll take the bait or be as invested as you want them to be, and that’s why you need to be able to improvise and think on the fly.  Maybe the party is looking for a diplomatic approach even though you planned for a big battle.  Don’t squash that effort, embrace their decisions.  Even if you had this elaborate fight planned, you need to know when to let it go and let the party succeed.  There will be plenty of opportunities for other fights.

You can apparently buy this screen here

But let’s say you really want them to fight anyway.  Okay, I guess if that’s how you want to play it, you have to justify it.  The king might be okay with the negotiation, but maybe a group of his personal guards aren’t to keen on giving up their power.  Things like that can allow the players to feel like they’ve accomplished something without making it too obvious that you just wanted to fight.

Although one thing I’ve learned is that it’s usually better to just let your players take their victory in circumventing a battle because it makes them happy.  But maybe now you’re in a position where suddenly a battle that could take up half of your session is just gone and you’ve got nothing planned.  Using the previous example of the king, you can have the guards jail the king for betraying them or the throne or something and have it end up as a big brawl between the citizens and the guards that remain.

That actually accomplishes a lot because your players feel like their plan worked, but there were unforeseen consequences of their actions that rippled throughout the town.  Now they’ve got to clean up their own mess, and now they’re invested.

Like I said, I’m not perfect at this Dungeon Mastering thing, but I have figured out a decent way to keep my players engaged and excited most of the time.  Sometimes it’s fun to make a quest that plays their alignments against each other, or that one players character would be really invested in and see how they convince the rest of their group to follow along.

I guess to sum up everything here into one tight sentence, it would be this; Don’t say no to your players, instead offer up alternatives, goals and challenges to their requests and attempts, even if it goes against what you’ve planned for.

I don’t have a great deal of experience with Dungeons & Dragons outside of playing a few one-shots, playing in a short campaign in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and of course DM-ing the campaign my friends and I are currently going through.  But I’d like to focus in on that short campaign in The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and talk about the time one of our players decided to take up the mantle of expert accountant at the cost of his literacy.

We had a particularly greedy dwarf barbarian in our party who was always quick to gather as much loot as he could possibly carry on his mostly naked body.  It was a funny bit that worked well with the rest of us because our goals were a bit more altruistic and personal in nature.  But not for our enterprising dwarf.  No, he was motivated purely by shiny things.

I imagine this is what our dwarf looked like

It’s when we came across a chest of gold pieces that Gravy-Train (his name was a play on the Pokemon, Graveler, but I refused to call him that) found and decided that here in this enemy infested cave was the best place to count it all.  Worried that we would all be caught off guard while Gravy was counting his pennies, he flippantly posited that his character was a money-whiz, and could count a vast amount of coins in mere seconds.  I think our DM was willing to concede that point, but Gravy followed it up by saying that he didn’t know how to read, but could count really well.

Me being the scamp I was demanded that this was canon and he had to commit to it.  I experienced no push back from anyone, and from there on, Gravy was illiterate but could count really well.

We ended up in a library packed with books that our now illiterate dwarf could not read.  While I had hoped for some sort of Twilight Zone styled Sisyphean curse where he’d lament at the vast amounts of knowledge he could no longer consume, but Gravy-Train was unphased and went ahead and told us how many books were on the shelves as if that was some great piece of intelligence he had just dumped on us.

That run down mound of garbage on the far right?  That’s Gravy-Train’s Bar

Later in the campaign, Gravy-Train began to split from the party in an effort to make some deals with the town banker or something.  He wanted to buy the entirety of the town if memory serves, and started by buying out the old and run down tavern on the hill.  The guy couldn’t read, but had already set his plan of owning an entire city into motion.  It was an amazing moment when he finally revealed that to us.

It’s the little bits of character building that I’ve come to appreciate in my time with D&D.  This story may seem fairly benign in the grand scheme of things, but it made his character more tangible and real, despite being hilarious.  It’s because of this that I think I’ve been so taken with D&D.  I want to have more of those moments in the game, both the funny and serious alike.  After destroying their world, I was presented with the unique opportunity of putting my players into a setting where they can re-contextualize everything about themselves, and maybe put them in more situations that can bring out these character moments.  That’s my hope at least.

But I do wonder if we would’ve ever taught him to read again though.  I’m guessing we wouldn’t.  It’s funnier if he never could read again.

Every month I step in here to tell you a little anecdote about my D&D adventures and the various mishaps that inevitably took place.  Last time I told you all about a fairly simple puzzle the absolutely flummoxed my players.  This time I’d like to tell you about when I destroyed the world.  But before I can tell you that, I need to tell you about the circumstances that led up to the eventual destruction of everything they came to know and love.

I’ve been running a campaign for a few months now with my players, and since I embarked on this journey, I’ve kind of found a groove in how I like to run a game.  I’m very fast and loose with the rules, I actively try to encourage my players to think outside the box, and above all, I want them to feel like they have full agency over the world they’re in.  Simple enough, right?

When I started, I bought a module through Roll20, the app in which we use to play our wonderful fantasy adventure.  I purchased, Waterdeep: The Dragon Heist, a module which looks like it could be a lot of fun in the hands of an experienced DM who has an understanding about the lore of the world.  I am not that person.  So when this module didn’t have answers to the questions my players were asking that were lore based, I decided instead of do research, I’d just write my own campaign.

What followed was a continued effort to carve out my own narrative and characters in the map of Waterdeep that was included with my purchase.  This map ultimately came to represent the thing keeping my players from feeling agency.  Most of my players never felt any attachment to the city itself, because there really weren’t many opportunities to explore it or uncover cool stuff in it.  This undoubtedly falls on my shoulders for not properly getting them hooked on the city, but I had already mentally moved past Waterdeep, leading all of us to treat the map more like a screensaver until I moved them somewhere actually interesting.

So after months of planning and writing, I pulled the trigger.  They were sucked through a portal and transported to a land of my own creation.  A place that they thought was just a pocket dimension, but turned out to be their first stop on the upcoming grand journey they’d have.

I built the simple island with three goals in mind.  First, I wanted them to be in an unfamiliar place, with its own lore and history.  Second, I wanted to craft a place with its own politics, factions and problems.  And lastly, I wanted them to feel invested in this world and approach it as an opportunity for a fresh start.  The first two I think I managed pretty well.  That third one though, didn’t play out how I had hoped.

See, the entire time they were there, I was juggling two story lines I wanted to pursue.  Either this would be a pocket dimension they’d return from, or they were trapped here.  I played coy and didn’t give them much insight into what the truth was, but since they were convinced this was just a vacation till they eventually returned home, they weren’t as invested as I would’ve liked.

Finally I made a decision on their fate after receiving a few compliments along with grievances from a few of my players.  They liked the concept of this new world, but felt that there was nothing to do in it aside from leave.  A fair point, I did kind of only write this section as a single path with three branching paths that eventually led to the same place.  But it was one particular comment that pushed me over the edge.  I was told that Waterdeep, the actual map of it, was imposing and kept them at a distance.  They never felt compelled to pursue their own character motivated quests because they had no idea where to start.

That’s when I decided.  Fuck Waterdeep, you’re done.  I tantalized them with an orb that would surely bring them home, only for it to be just a crystal ball that shows you stuff.  Guess what I showed them?  I blew up that map in front of them, killed off every person they knew, and hurdled them 1000 years into the future.  I basically wrote a short story that equates to, “And everything exploded.”

The reaction I got was kind of… not what I expected.  In game, nobody said anything.  It was just silence.  After sitting there for what was the longest minute ever, I just kind of pressed forward with the session, not giving them much time to comprehend what just happened.  That was my bad.

I gave them a boat, and sent them to the northeast to this massive new world I made for them.  I’d put that picture in here, but as I’m writing this, I don’t know if we’ve made it there yet.

Which leads me to where we stand now.  What awaits my players is a massive open world that has several settlements of varying sizes, with creature politics and behaviors that differ from what D&D lore might normally decree.  These places have their individual quests ranging in severity and importance.  Quests will take them from city to city.  They’ll have tough choices to make, and they’ll have city faction reputations to deal with.  They have bespoke story lines and quests I’ve generated for their specific characters, along with a main quest that might shed some light on why Waterdeep went kaput (aside from what I’ve just told you), and what happens now.

Outside of all of this, what I’ve actually done is give myself a massive amount of anxiety and intense deadlines to write quests that have longevity and are interesting along with make maps.  Also I run this website, work, and have other hobbies.  So what I’m saying is, don’t do what I’ve done and make your first time being a DM something worthy of an intervention.

Puzzles are hard.  Or at least they can be.  This is story of one particular puzzle that I made for my players that absolutely flummoxed them for way longer than it should have.  It’s this experience that has led me to make sure that my puzzles going forward, are no harder than those children’s toys where you put the right shape in the right hole.

The party was on the trail of a werewolf that had been terrorizing the outskirts of the city, wreaking havoc on local farms as well as businesses in the city by destroying their shipments.

The party had some leads which led them to a local police force that was able to give them some information on a mostly uncharted area of the wilderness.  With this information, the party headed to a clearing that led to the entrance of a collapsed mine.  Above the mine was a large flat piece of land that they surmised might have an entrance to the cave below.

This is where things got tricky.  See, there was a small cottage up there, something they were very hesitant to investigate.  Inside of the cottage were a few things.  In front of them was a series of 5 large levers jutting out from the wall, all in the bottom position.  There was also, and I quote “a tall dresser, a bed, a coat rack, and a long coffee table in the room, but no sign of any life.”  The “puzzle” as it were, was that from left to right, the position of the levers corresponded to the height of items in the room.

It took these fools 30 minutes to figure this out.  One of my players basically checked out during it, admitting defeat to my very complex word games.  It was astounding to me.  Once they figured it out, the door locked and the floor opened up.  They were now in the mine and ready to continue their pursuit of the werewolf.

What I came away with, is that even the simplest puzzle, can flabbergast anyone.  So much for my next brilliant puzzle idea where one person tells the truth and the other always lies.