One of the most interesting, fun and tedious parts about being a Dungeon Master is preparing from session to session, but even more of a challenge is preparing a new campaign entirely. My group and I are currently wrapping up our “one-shot” of The Sunless Citadel, a pretty decent Dungeons & Dragons adventure, and are gearing up for our next big campaign. As luck would have it, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden released just as we were finishing up, so we decided that it would be our next adventure. Being that this is my first time prepping a full campaign, I figured I do it as meticulously as possible. Here’s what’s happened.
Considering I’ve always had some difficulty with absorbing the things I read, I had to approach preparing for Rime of the Frostmaiden from an overly redundant and thorough angle. I can’t just read something once or twice and commit it to memory. My brain just never worked like that so I had to bust out old my note-taking methods from my school days in order to properly tackle this behemoth of a book. What that meant was that I had to essentially read the book paragraph by paragraph, rewriting everything I was reading into a notebook.
The notes themselves, while useful, aren’t really why I’m doing all of this extra busy work. The problem I have is that I need to rewrite something to commit it to memory. I don’t think that’s too uncommon, but it definitely adds a lot more time and effort to whatever it is I’m trying to absorb. But I wanted to be as meticulous as possible, and luckily the book is actually really interesting which has fueled me to continue with this overly redundant way of learning.
Rime of the Frostmaiden – Wizards of the Coast
Both my notebook and the module itself have tiny little bookmark tabs everywhere that denote all of the important information I might need at a moments notice. I do it in a way that is more granular than the format of the book itself can account for allowing me to quickly access anything from notable characters, town lore, quests, items, hazards and more. On top of that, my notes also point me to whichever page in the book I need to get to, so I’m covering all of my bases to make sure I am never more than a few pages away from relevant information my players might need.
But I don’t want to paint all of this as an exercise in futility or anything, because I’m genuinely enjoying the book on its own. The story in Rime of the Frostmaiden is interesting and captivating as written, and all of my efforts in documenting it are just so I can provide my players with the best campaign I can muster. I get to enjoy the book as is, but my players are relying on me to deliver them an exciting and cohesive story to go along with the actual game itself. If I don’t nail this thing then they might have a pretty lackluster impression of the module, and that would be upsetting on a lot of levels.
Other things that I’ve done in preparation outside of just reading the book has involved making generic encounter maps for the frozen wasteland of Icewind Dale, along with listening to well over a hundred instrumental pieces of music and “soundscapes,” and categorizing them into several different playlists that I can quickly switch between. Is the place they arrived in a happy town? Well I’ll play the happy town songs for them. Is this battle an intense and dramatic one? Got it covered.
Page 2 of my Character Creation Syllabus
I even went as far as to make a 4-page syllabus of just about everything they need to know in order to create characters for this campaign. When I say that out loud it sounds truly insane, but they genuinely appreciated me doing that. When I’m head down on preparing for campaign, the thought that I might be more “into it” than my players always creeps into my mind, but their reaction to getting a literal syllabus was overwhelmingly encouraging.
All of the little seemingly superfluous things I’ve done in preparation I do because I know that it’s worth it. I can describe a battle in the middle of the frozen wasteland just fine, but having a generic snow-covered battle map I can toss up for them will help give them a sense of place and another opportunity to tangibly interact with their characters. Picking out hundreds of music tracks and categorizing them by their “emotional weight” seems ridiculous, but music is so damn important to setting the tone and atmosphere that I find it’s necessary to a successful campaign.
Maybe this article is just going to be met with other Dungeon Masters feeling like I’ve just described what they all do all the time, but to me I feel like I’m really putting in the extra effort to make this campaign a success. Like I said, this is my first time truly preparing for something this large and intricate, and I don’t want to mess it up. Luckily my players seem just as excited for this new campaign as I am, so I don’t think my efforts will go unnoticed.
People often talk about the three pillars of Dungeons & Dragons and how crucial they are when making a well rounded campaign. Of the three pillars, exploration, role-playing and combat, I usually tend to focus on the role-playing pillar the most while paying less attention to the others. I’ve always felt that exploration was the toughest one for me, but as I run more Dungeons & Dragons games with different groups, I find that combat ends up feeling the weakest and least interesting.
Combat always seemed like a layup to me, wherein I could just launch enough monsters at the players and call it a day. It wasn’t until I had to deal with a real slog of a combat encounter where everyone was rolling terribly, that I realized just how bad at these encounters I actually was. Simply pitting stronger enemies against a party doesn’t make for an inherently fun encounter, so I wanted to outline some things that I’ve started to fold into my combat scenarios to make them more interesting.
LOCATION
One of my biggest issues with a lot of Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules, particularly the lower level ones, is that they don’t provide much in the way of variety for the players. Take the 5e book of one-shots, Tales from the Yawning Portal (TYP) for example. In TYP there’s a level 1-3 scenario called The Sunless Citadel, in which a group of adventurers has to go to this mysterious citadel that exists at the bottom of a ravine. While I’ve enjoyed running my players through this scenario, I’ve found that the majority of the fights they’ve gotten into basically turn into slug-fests where it’s just about standing your ground and hoping you hit more than your enemy does.
Most of the battles in The Sunless Citadel go this way, where there isn’t enough space or location variety to do any of the crazy stuff that makes Dungeons & Dragons so special. No one is going to swing from a chandelier or knock a dude into a pit if that stuff just isn’t there, and that’s the problem. These locations tend to lack a lot of variety often just being some dusty old dungeon where something was worshiped in a time long forgotten.
Tales from the Yawning Portal – Wizards of the Coast
My solution to this is to invite people to flex their creative muscles by allowing them to basically manifest room features (within reason) if they succeed on a good enough investigation or other appropriate check. It can be something as simple as letting them scoop up dust to throw in an enemy’s eyes to blind them, or finding an empty bottle to hurl at a threat. I’m not gonna let them just find a rocket launcher or anything like that, but I think it’s important to allow players to get wacky and shake up the mundanity of just rolling dice to hit armor classes.
Most of the wildest stories you here when people describe their experiences with Dungeons & Dragons tend to come out of some wacky combat scenario, but planning for wackiness is an impossibility. Sure you can put some fun stuff in every room to entice the players, but they might not always take the bait. Instead, I tend to entertain just about every wild thing they want to search for in the midst of combat, and will make a decision then and there.
LEVEL DESIGN
Level design is incredibly important when making a combat scenario, and I often find that limiting the playing field both in width or height makes for a boring encounter. It’s easy to craft a battle in a single story room, but that doesn’t really afford the players or enemies any opportunities to do much besides just run at or away from each other. Things like pillars and furniture can help for sure, but I find that the best encounters are the ones where the enemies aren’t always in your line of sight.
I prefer battles that span larger areas as opposed to confined spaces, but that’s a broad sentiment that needs to be explained. You can make a combat encounter be on the first floor of a house and call it a day, but it would be far more engaging if the entire house and both front and backyard were in play as well. Sure a battle could just naturally spill out into those areas, but that might not happen which could lead to a bland encounter.
What really makes these encounters slow down to a crawl is when the party starts out all bunched together and there’s no incentive for any of them to move. That’s why you need a diverse location with plenty for the players to explore beforehand that could have them start the encounter off a little scattered. It isn’t a way for me as a DM to punish the party for splitting up, instead it’s a way to make combat encounters more than just a war of attrition. Are the wizard and rogue looking through an office on the second floor while the fighter and cleric explore the lower floors? Great, now the players have to really take into account their strengths and weaknesses and open their decisions up beyond just “what attack do I use?”
Descent into Avernus – Wizards of the Coast
If they’re determined to group up again, make that an exciting event that might involve them using a full dash or disengage action. The act of self-preservation shouldn’t feel laborious, it should feel like a triumph. As a DM, you have be able to paint these less flashy actions as a victory for whoever needs to utilize them. Players have so many non-combat oriented abilities they can utilize, but no one will ever do any of them if it’s just about making sure the tank can take all the hits while casters do their work from a distance. My method is to make sure that every player has the opportunity to shine in a given combat encounter, while also putting them in positions where their characters might not be primed to be in. Just don’t be malicious about it.
Make sure everyone has the chance to bail out and regroup if they need to, but give them a chance to be the focal point at all times in combat. Sure all the characters combined are a party that needs to work together, but being a party shouldn’t steal their individualism as characters. The line is quite thin, but making sure that a character both feels capable and under powered on their own is difficult, but I find that when it’s done right it makes for some very memorable moments.
LESS FREQUENT & MORE INTERESTING COMBAT SCENARIOS
This final point also builds on the previous one, but it’s important enough to be its own thing. There is nothing less interesting than opening a door to a small room, rolling initiative, beating the bad guys, then opening another door a few minutes later to do it all over again. It’s tedious and makes battle feel more like a chore than an opportunity for fun. I think combat scenarios should be bigger than just combat in general, which is confusing at first, but let me explain.
So you’ve got your big open mine where a bunch of goblins hang out. There are various natural ramps along the walls allowing for miners to reach new areas, there’s a mine cart track and a large molten lava pit in the center that’s used for smelting. We’ve got ourselves a big open combat scenario right there, but the party is bunched up together as they entered the room and don’t really have a reason to split up. That’s why you need to give them a reason.
Adding multiple objectives to combat scenarios beyond just killing everything is key. Have the players take a look around and find that there are half a dozen detonator plungers with wires leading off of them in various directions. If you visually track those wires, you can see a few of them are attached to explosive charges that are crammed into cracks in the walls. Also, this mine is right below a village of unsuspecting innocent people! Oh no! Now the party has to survive and accomplish a goal to truly be victorious.
Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide – Wizards of the Coast
But you need to have a contingency plan for when your players just try mage hand the wires off the explosives or something. Maybe some goblins with fire arrows will show up to detonate the charges themselves, or some fire elemental gets summoned to do it. Maybe the goblins are protected by a massive troll who is going to run interference for the party, thus emboldening the slinkier and more nimble characters to go and deal with the charges while the tankier classes try to push the troll into the lava.
That combat encounter alone is way more interesting than just a flat room with 7 goblins running up to you with swords. I firmly believe that adding in objectives, having waves of enemies show up at different times, and having a big space with a lot of different tiny stories going on in them is key. Some goblins are on planting charges duty, some are running defense, that troll is protecting both of those parties. Having all of that going on at once will make for a longer and more memorable combat scenario than the firing squad of goblin archers standing opposite the party.
I’m not the ultimate authority on this stuff, but I’ve had plenty of experience in making boring combat encounters. Adding in some of these elements alone made for a more engaged party in my experience. It’s a shame that Dungeons & Dragons often paints combat encounters into these random occurrences like something out of a Final Fantasy game where you open a door and enemies pop out.
The beauty of Dungeons & Dragons is that it empowers your players to use their imagination to conquer any challenge in their way. Too often I find that new players will use the rules and their abilities as static things, like it’s all they can do. The rules are there to guide you and give you a way to navigate the crazy shit you want to do and not the other way around. Regardless of if you take my advice in this article or not, make sure you’re emboldening your players to be creative whether they’re in combat or not.
I’ll never forget the first time I played Dungeons & Dragons. It was a few summers ago and one of our friends offered to run us through a single session campaign, otherwise known as a one-shot. It was a ton of fun and is the event I attribute to getting me hooked on the game. But there’s one thing that will always stand out to me most about that experience, and that was when we finished the game and our DM pulled me aside and said, “Ari, I play with a lot of people and I can tell when they’re hooked, and you’ve got it.”
That single phrase always stood out to me because of just how accurate it was. He saw something in myself that I never thought would be there, and even as he said it, I thought he was full of shit and just stroking my ego a bit. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Regardless of his intent, he was a thousand percent right.
In the past few weeks, I’ve heard his voice echo in my mind louder and more frequently than ever. That probably has a lot to do with the amount of Dungeons & Dragons related purchases I’ve made in that time, a trend that tragically shows no sign of slowing up.
I’ve bought so many fucking dice and I have no idea why. Even before the pandemic, all of the games I played were online, so why the hell did I buy a ton of plastic dice along with a fancy set of metallic ones? Why did I buy a dice rolling box? Why did I buy several digital rule books and modules, and then also buy their physical editions as well?
Because I need them.
Every time I hear my friend’s voice in my head, reminding me that “I’ve got it,” I can’t help but feel like he cursed me. Right there and then, in the middle of our mutual friend’s kitchen, my DM cursed me to an eternity of buying books filled with adventures I will never experience and dice that I’ll never roll.
One day in the future when we’re allowed to congregate once again, I’d like to believe I will actually make use of these physical items that now occupy my bookshelves. But the odds are these will just be items that I’ll be pissed about having to transport when I inevitably move away from here. I just hope that I don’t start buying miniatures next. Like, yeah they’re cool and you can paint them to look like your characters and stuff… Yeah, definitely don’t want to buy those little guys.
Have you ever seen a trailer for a game and immediately knew it wasn’t for you? This happens to me consistently, and all it usually takes is a trailer or screenshot for me to see the mechanics at play to know a game isn’t for me. While I try to keep an open mind about every game, it’s a challenge for me to look at certain mechanics or genres and still feel compelled to play it despite what the critical reception is.
There’s been a lot of great games that have already come out this year, but I honestly haven’t played most of them because of this inherent bias I have against certain mechanics. It isn’t a qualitative judgement about the game or the mechanic in question, it’s just something I know won’t jive with me.
I guess you could just chalk it up to personal taste and knowing that every game isn’t made with me in mind, but sometimes I feel like I’m doing myself a great disservice from not giving these games a fair shake. That’s why I wanted to do a deeper dive into the elements and genres that immediately rebuff me, and try to get to the bottom of why that might be the case.
Starcraft 2 – Blizzard Entertainment
STRATEGY & TACTICS
It’s weird to start this list off with something so broad and nebulous as “tactics,” but allow me to make my case. There are phenomenal tactics games out there that people have raved about for years that I’ll never play. Games like the X-Com series, Starcraft, and even the Divinity series all seem so interesting from a distance, but rebuff me the second I get a little too close. It’s hard to nail down exactly what it is about these games that’s kept me away, but honestly it’s less about an inner conflict with the mechanics themselves and more about me being incapable of properly strategizing a coherent plan of attack in these kinds of games.
Quite frankly, I’m miserable at these games to the point where they just feel overwhelming. Usually I end up walking away from these games feeling like an idiot because I’m just so bad at applying foresight to these combat encounters. There’s also the issue of learning the internal mechanics that make things work in these games. For instance, when I played Divinity: Original Sin II, not only was I having trouble figuring out a good plan of attack, but I was also trying to learn what spells and attacks were effective against the enemies and the environment. It felt like I was learning two games at the same time and failing at both.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 – Larian Studios
I’m not great at strategizing in general, which is why real-time strategy games like Starcraft and Warcraft never appealed to me. My only tactic is to build my army as fast as I can and click on enemy troops and buildings in the hopes something happens that I like. There’s also a lot of plate spinning in these games, where I’ll have to contend with a multi-pronged attack plan, while managing the defenses at my base, while making sure troop and supply production lines are working and so on and so forth. It’s a lot for me to focus on at once, and I inevitably fail miserably at each of them whenever I try to play one of these games.
There is one glaring potential exception to this however. At some point in the next few weeks, Baldur’s Gate III is supposed to enter early access. Now, I’m incredibly excited for the game for numerous reasons, but the main one at this point is because I know the inner working mechanics it’s going to be using. It’s running off of the Dungeons & Dragons 5e rule set, something I’ve become very familiar with over the years. It’s led to me looking at Baldur’s Gate III as less of a strategy or tactics game, and more of a way to play D&D by myself. There’s a lot of mental gymnastics going on in my head to make me feel at peace with Baldur’s Gate III, and I completely acknowledge that.
Magic: The Gathering Arena – Wizards of the Coast
DECK BUILDING
Like most kids in the 90’s, I was a big fan of Pokemon and would consume everything it touched, from the show, the games, the toys, and of course the cards. The thing is, despite owning a ton of the cards and organizing them into a nice binder, I never actually did anything with them. I’ve never once actually played Pokemon as a card game before. I just wanted cool little pictures of them to collect.
That mentality has shifted as I’ve gotten older, but not in the direction of actually playing card collecting games (CCG) whatsoever. I’ve moved in the other direction, away from collecting cards and even further away from playing CCGs. There is something incredibly boring to me about building a deck of cards filled with spells, monsters and other stuff, and playing against other people with it. I’ve had people try to get me into Hearthstone and other games before, but I just don’t have the patience for any of them.
Hearthstone – Blizzard Entertainment
The CCG genre is incredibly popular and beloved by so many people, and I’m not trying to take anyone’s enjoyment of these games away from them. Focusing on games like this are extremely difficult for me because of just how slow and methodical they inherently are. You’re supposed to take your time and strategize, but as we’ve discovered earlier, I’m bad at that.
You might ask, “why not learn to play them so you can get better?” A good question to be sure, but I’ve only got so much time on this planet, that I’d rather not try to force a square block in a round hole for more of it than I already have to. CCGs are great fun for the people who can focus and really wrap their minds around them. Hell, my Discord channel is currently filled with Magic: The Gathering Arena optimal deck links and people constantly playing it. While I’d love to be able to engage my friends on this topic, I know it just won’t happen and I’ll end up just grousing about how much I dislike everything about CCGs to them.
Outlast 2 – Red Barrels
HORROR
To be completely honest, I don’t know why people enjoy the horror genre in any aspect, whether it be games, movies, TV shows, or even going to haunted houses on Halloween. I don’t like any of it, and it’s because I don’t enjoy being scared. Nothing about the emotion of fear seems fun to me at all, and I don’t get how some people are so eager to get frightened.
I get that some people get a great adrenaline rush out of a scare, or can appreciate a nice haunted tone in a movie or game or whatever, but I’m not one of those people. To me, fear was something I wanted to avoid and steer clear of as best I could. I don’t enjoy feeling on edge, I don’t admire the artistic talent it took to evoke that spooky tone, I just don’t like any of it.
Resident Evil 3 Remake – Capcom
Call me a coward or whatever, but fear was just never something I actually wanted to experience. That’s why when people clamor about the latest Resident Evil game or talk about the masterpiece that P.T. was, I can’t even begin to have that conversation with them. They might be stellar games through and through, appealing to everything a horror fan wants, but to me they’re just an expensive way to feel uncomfortable and have nightmares.
Once again, you can enjoy and praise the horror genre all you want, but none of it is going to make me willingly pay money to be scared. We haven’t even talked about games that like to throw in a jump scare in it just to shake things up. Bioshock Infinite had one of those and I’m still angry at it for including it.
Final Fantasy VII Remake – Square Enix
JRPGs
If I’m being honest here, JRPGs combine two things I’m really not that crazy about into one package that I don’t have any reverence for. As far as anime goes, I think I’ve enjoyed maybe one or two of them in my life, and they’re pretty mainstream if I’m being honest. I know that people really enjoy anime, and I’m not here to take that away from you because I truly believe that certain anime media can be really cool, particularly in the badass fight scenes that I’ve seen posted online. Anime can be cool is what I’m saying.
But the other half of that equation, the turn-based RPG part of it? That’s the part that I can’t handle as much. In my life, I’ve played part of one Final Fantasy game, and watched a childhood friend blast through large sections of Final Fantasy VII when it came out. Both of those experiences were pretty agonizing for me. And I know it’s unfair to target the Final Fantasy series here, but they’re one of the few touchstones I have in this genre of games. I never had the urge to play anything in this genre, so I’m well aware that there might be something that I might find interesting somewhere out there.
Persona 5 – Atlus
Similar to my issues with tactics and strategy games, I’m just a poor planner when it comes to gaming… and probably everything else in my life. So making sure I’ve got the right party members, items and buffs never really appealed to me in video games. I used to point to the fact that taking turns in combat made no sense to me, but that’s a pretty juvenile argument that I no longer use especially considering my recent reverence for D&D.
The reasons I won’t play those games today has changed significantly since I was younger, but they basically boil down to the fact that a lot of JRPGs are way too long and dense for me. Those games usually have so much going on in them that I can’t keep up. It’s the same way I feel about intense classic RPGs like the old Fallout games or last year’s Disco Elysium. They’re highly regarded games that I just don’t have the patience for.
The Long Dark – Hinterland Studio
PLATE SPINNING
There’s the concept of “plate spinning,” or the idea that you need to manage and keep tabs on a lot of moving parts at once. I notice this mostly in survival games where you need to worry about your food, thirst, stamina, temperature and so on. Both this and time limits feel like two sides of the same coin that I want to just throw into a storm drain.
Sometimes these mechanics are intrusive and steal the focus away from anything else in the game. When that happens, a switch flips in my head that instructs me to stop any forward progression and just hoard everything I can find for the next few hours. Maybe that’s how you’re supposed to play the game, but it just feels like paranoia-fueled busy work to me.
Minecraft – Mojang
There are some exceptions to this rule however, and it only occurs when a game isn’t too intrusive about it. For instance, Minecraft has a hunger and stamina meter, but it’s such an afterthought that you really don’t need to do much aside from carry a few steaks on you at all times. The ‘survival’ portion of the survival mode in Minecraft mostly applies to you not dying in whatever monster-filled chasm you inevitably arrive at.
Even Red Dead Redemption II had some light survival mechanics that were easy to fulfill. If you find yourself in town, you might as well snag a hot meal and a bath and refill your dwindling meters. Both of those last for days as well, and you’re never really in danger of starving to death or passing out from exhaustion. It’s that kind of light touch approach that I can deal with when it comes to plate spinning, but games that are designed around your ability to multitask efficiently just stress me out.
PLAYERUNKNOWN’S Battlegrounds – PUBG Corporation
BATTLE ROYALES
Remember back in 2017 when we could go places and do stuff but ultimately decided to stay inside and play PLAYER UNKNOWN’S Battlegrounds instead? I do. In fact, I played a whole lot of PUBG, to the point where it started to get tiring which ultimately led to me falling off of it about a year later. It was a marginally better time.
But now if you asked me to play a battle royale game with you, I’d probably find any excuse I could to avoid doing so. I don’t necessarily have anything against the genre itself, but I have played enough of one of the most popular ones out there to have had my fill with the genre entirely.
Ring of Elysium – Aurora Studio
This feeling was cemented when I tried to play Fortnite a few times, and bounced off of it almost immediately. From PUBG, to Fortnite, to Apex Legends, Ring of Elysium, Radical Heights and The Culling, I’ve played a lot of these games, and I think I’ve had my fill of the entire concept itself.
These games can still offer up a lot of entertainment and satisfaction, but they can also be sources of immense anxiety and stress. I’ll never forget the tension that would fill the air when you’d hear a gunshot ring out in the distance during a round of PUBG. Hell, everything in PUBG was incredibly tense when I think about it. The sound of a car, the sight of already opened doors, the literal ring of death that’s slowly closing in on you, it was all designed to be stress inducing.
Stress inducing as it was though, it was a lot of fun. But I just don’t think I need that in my life at this point. I like having stakes in games, I like tense moments, but battle royales seem to luxuriate and bask in these moments to the point of sensory overload for me.
A lot of what I’ve talked about here are just some personal examples of things that turn me off when looking into new games. They’re not value judgements or statements about the product itself or the people who actually enjoy them, they’re just my personal proclivities and nothing more.
Something also interesting to note is that just about everything I’ve listed here plays into my personal issues with anxiety and attention span. It’s weird how you can know all these various facts about yourself, but not be able to see how they’re all intertwined until you actually write them out and try to find a connective thread.
Ultimately I’d like to impress upon you that liking these things is totally valid and I want you to keep enjoying whatever it is you’re playing. If everyone felt the same way as I did, then these games wouldn’t be made anymore because people would stop buying them. The world is filled with different people with different tastes, and while some of these mechanics and genres aren’t for me, I celebrate the people who garner enjoyment from them in my place.
Recently my friends and I shuffled our roles, affording me the opportunity to play in a campaign rather than run one. It’s been fantastic both from a gameplay standpoint along with freeing me up creatively to focus on other projects. Simultaneously another group of friends expressed interest in running a starter Dungeons & Dragons campaign, so being the masochist I am I obliged and started running them through The Lost Mines of Phandelver. And honestly, both games have been tremendous learning experiences that I desperately needed.
I don’t want to imply that I didn’t have fun running home-brew campaigns for my friends, but it did get pretty exhausting from a creative standpoint, which is ultimately why I needed to shift focus from running games to playing them. I agreed to run my other friends through The Lost Mines of Phandelver because I didn’t have to really prepare anything on a week to week basis. Everything is accounted for and fairly well explained, leaving little need for drastic improvisation.
Being a player again allowed me to experience how other people run their games, seeing what rules and mechanics they tend to enforce or cast aside. That’s given me a lot of perspective on just how much of my own campaigns I was glossing over in terms of rules and abilities, giving me more insight as to why they exist in the first place. Understanding the various resistances, spell components, move actions and so much more have made it really apparent as to how infuriating my DM style could be at times.
It was never something I did to intentionally upset or undermine my players, but I’m almost certain that my actions directly resulted in a lot of session to session disenfranchisement. Considering I’ve only been a player once or twice back in the very early stages of my relationship with Dungeons & Dragons, I didn’t really have any experience as a player and instead just became a DM when I had no business doing so. But everyone has to start somewhere right?
Being a player wasn’t the only thing that helped me gain some insight into proper Dungeons & Dragons gameplay, running the starter campaign has been infinitely more helpful than anything I was doing before on my own. Being able to see what a module accounts for and doesn’t has been instrumental in my better understanding of how to build worlds, maps and encounters. To see exactly what I should be accounting for when crafting my own adventures has been illuminating to say the least.
At this point I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for about 3 years or so and only now can I say that I’ve really made progress as both a player and a DM. When I first started running games, I was trying to emulate what I’d seen and heard from popular videos and actual-play podcasts, not really understanding that real games don’t work like that. As of now I can safely say that my style of running games has evolved to the point where I am taking the rules of Dungeons & Dragons more seriously, and I am more conscious and aware of so many more facets of the game itself. I believe that this will only lead to a more positive experience for whatever group I end up running games for in the future. And for the first time in a while, I feel really confident about my abilities as both a player and a dungeon master.
For anyone out there that’s aspiring to be a DM, I genuinely and sincerely recommend starting with a preexisting module and really understanding why certain things interact with others and why. Knowing and enforcing effects on moves and spells heightens the tension and importance of every combat encounter because everyone is aware of what can and cannot happen. I look back at my previous blunders and wince at how I behaved and ruled on things, but genuinely hope that one day I can give my friends the satisfying and fun campaign that they deserve.
During my time running various campaigns for my friends, I’ve experienced a bevy of highs and lows that have both energized and exhausted me to different extents. Today we’re going to be talking about the latter and how if left unchecked, can wear you out pretty easily.
A little under two years ago I took the plunge and started running a campaign for my friends in D&D that went off the rails a few times, which ultimately led to me rebooting the campaign and home-brewing a story of my own. It was exciting, terrifying, and a ton of work that would be piled atop the rest of my responsibilities and projects. It wasn’t a bad thing by any stretch though, because I was already working on other things like finishing out my degree and working on this website. I was firing on all cylinders from a motivation aspect.
But recently I handed in my final assignment of my last class which was a massive weight off of my shoulders. The unintended side-effect of that however, was that all the fatigue and exhaustion that I had managed during these busier times finally caught up with me. Almost the second after I hit the ‘submit’ button on my final, I felt like a truck hit me, and all I wanted to do was just relax.
Shortly after that, we convened online to play the latest session I had prepared for our Monster of the Week campaign, and once it ended I was thoroughly spent both physically and mentally. I wrestled with the idea of writing our next session and pushing this narrative forward for my players, something that had up until now, had been a labor of love. But I crumbled and ultimately had to pull the plug on the campaign and take a step back from that level of creative output that I was used to.
It wasn’t so much an issue of just running a game that had gotten to me, but the amount of extra work I had to do in order to make it all work that eventually got me. From creating the lore of this world, to fleshing out the characters, making a compelling plot, building on the players past decisions, making maps, making music and so on and so forth, the weight of all of that had just gotten to be too much to handle.
I explained the situation to my players who were all really supportive and understanding of my situation. After all, I had been doing this level of work for them for nearly two years, and they got that. I also made it clear to them that I still did want to play D&D with them, I just couldn’t be the one running the show for a while.
So there I was, with a clear head and a chance to finally unwind for the first time in a while. That’s when a different friend of mine reached out to me suddenly and expressed that his friends and him wanted to play D&D for the first time. Part of me instinctively rejected this idea outright, but then other, much stupider part of me chimed in and rationalized doing this whole song and dance again by suggesting just using the starter campaign on this group. I looked into it and discovered that the module on Roll20, like all of their D&D modules, was incredibly straightforward and easy to use, eliminating most, if not all extra work I’d have to do to make it work.
I still haven’t made a decision about it one way or another, because like I said earlier, I’m an idiot. But there’s something tempting about introducing these new players to D&D the way I was introduced to it, by using the campaign the creators themselves suggest using. I feel bad for even considering doing it at all because I had just told my group that running a campaign wasn’t something I could do for a while. I think the reality of the situation is that I needed to take a break from running these home-brewed games that required so much of me, at least for a while.
Ultimately, the treadmill of productivity that I was on up until now worked because I wasn’t thinking about how exhausting it all was, it was just part of my weekly routine. But once that routine got disrupted by the quarantine, and once more by finishing up school, I was unable to keep up that mental pace. A new DM has risen to take my place in our core group and I’m excited to just play D&D again for the first time in a while, but I’m also genuinely intrigued by the idea of introducing a new batch of people to role-playing games, as long as I don’t have to work too hard to do it.
If you’re looking for some sort of sage advice or piece of wisdom you can glean from all of this, I suppose I’d want to impart upon you the idea that it’s okay to step back and let those batteries recharge. If you aren’t excited about the game you’re running your players through, they’ll feel that too, and I’d rather not disenfranchise them to the idea of playing a campaign of mine again, and instead just end it graciously.
Welcome to another installment of The Master of Disaster, a feature where I outline some of my preferences, tactics and stories that have come out of both playing, but mostly from running various tabletop role-playing games. This time around I’d like to talk about something fairly obvious, but easily one of the more labor intensive parts of being a GM. Of course I’m talking about maps.
To preface, considering all of my GM/DM experiences revolve around playing a game online, this article is going to exclusively be about online resources and tools I use to make maps.
MAP PURPOSES
First thing I want to touch on before we get into any specific tools is the mentality I have when I decide it’s time to make a map. It’s an alluring prospect to have a map ready for every location your players might visit, but that’s a fool’s errand as well as the quickest way to lose your mind.
In my previous campaign where we ran a custom story in a custom world using the D&D rule-set, I wanted to create an entire continent with interesting topography, plenty of hidden areas with quests attached to them, and unique cities that all had a different feel. While that sounds like a lot (and it was), I went ahead and pushed on, creating roughly 30 different maps that my players might stumble upon, not including bespoke dungeons.
I essentially wanted them to approach my world like they would have if they were playing something like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I had random encounters ready to go, caves and dungeons they could stumble upon and of course, cities for them to explore. The problem was that I was approaching running a campaign along with map making, as if it were a video game. Some video game concepts might translate better than others, but the way I went about crafting a world didn’t 100% work out. Ultimately, I only ended up using a third of the maps I made before we ended the campaign.
Fast forward to the current campaign I run using the Monster of the Week rule-set, and instead of a massive world that’s been hand crafted, I went went with a city that had only a handful of notable landmarks. Some of these landmarks do have maps associated with them, but for the most part I now rely on my players to tell me where it is they want to go, and flesh it out on the fly by painting a “word picture.” This approach is easier on me, but far less visually appealing for the players. So it’s good to brush up on your improvisation and narration skills before attempting this.
The point I’m trying to make here is about over preparation. I went insane and made 30+ maps, most of which that were never seen before, because I had these grand ideas about where my players would go, and what they’d do. As we all know though, you can’t assume that your players will do anything you plan for. My strategy now is to build each session, maps and all, based off of what happened in the previous one. It lightens the workload a lot and let’s you get particularly detailed with descriptions if you know your players are going to be there for a while.
Being that all of my sessions are run through the Roll20 service, I rely exclusively on online tools and resources to aid me in my map making endeavors. These tools range in quality and scope, but all of them are good for different facets of running a game. So here are a few of my favorite tools and resources for you to use.
INKARNATE
Inkarnate is a really accessible “free” tool that you can use to make all manner of visually striking maps. It has a robust editing suite that has a lot of custom art for you to plop down and create with. Within minutes you can generate a world, regional, or city map with various terrains, buildings and landscapes. The tool is great whether you want to only spend 5 minutes in it, or an hour.
The only thing that could be a drawback is that the free version of Inkarnate, is severely limited in what you can actually use. In the paid version, I have access to hundreds of different objects from different kinds of trees, mountains, buildings, walls, gates and so on and so forth. The free version only had a fraction of that stuff to use, but still enough to pump out a couple of maps.
The free version also limits the export quality of your maps in some regards, although while I have the option to export my maps in 4K, I don’t know why I ever would. The silver lining here is that if you did want to shell out cash for the full suite, it’s only 5 dollars a month or 25 for a year upfront. I think it’s worth the price if you need good fantasy themed maps, but if you’re running anything other than fantasy, Inkarnate has basically nothing for you.
MEDIEVAL FANTASY CITY GENERATOR
This one is kind of self explanatory, but it’s worth talking about briefly. The Medieval Fantasy City Generator is super easy to use, but fairly limited as well. With only a few clicks, you can generate a top-down view of a city and determine if there are farms, roads, coastlines, and other things like that. It’s quick, it’s simple, and it’s free.
What this tool isn’t however, is super customizable. You can choose different color and object options to toggle on and off, but you can’t really get granular with it. You can edit the dimensions of certain objects in the city, but that’s about the extent of it. I actually used this tool to make my modern day, Monster of the Week city, and it’s worked out pretty well.
DUNGEN
Want to generate a dungeon really quickly? Well DunGen has got you covered, although not completely unless you back the maker’s Patreon, which you should consider if you like this tool.
With DunGen, you select a few options, size, theme and levels, and in seconds you’ll get a pretty awesome looking dungeon. As I’m writing this in early April of 2020, the creator has unlocked some Patreon exclusive features for everyone to use during the pandemic, such as higher resolution downloads, and automatic dynamic lighting integration for Roll20 users.
Since the tool is using pre-generated assets which it stitches together, the maps can feel a little “samey” in spots. But despite that, it’s one hell of a tool that I’ve used several times in conjunction with the art assets I have on Roll20. Just drag a couple of boxes and torches or whatever on to one of these dungeons, and you’ve got something people will think took you hours.
DONJON
Finally, I’d like to highlight something that isn’t just a map making tool, but something all GMs should explore. Donjon is a massive resource that includes, various map generators with annotations for doors, traps, and stairs, as well as a generator for just about anything you can think of.
In a matter of clicks, not only can you make dungeons, but you can just generate full quests and locations. For instance, the image below this paragraph was just the first thing that came up when I clicked on “inn generator.” I now have this one page that not only gives me a quest to give my players, but menu items, NPCs, rumors and a description of the place itself. In one click, I am able to describe a scene that might take me a while to write, and even longer to illustrate.
Donjon is an amazing set of tools that everyone should check out. If you just need a dungeon, click here, but I strongly suggest you check out the entire suite of tools they have available.
This feature has already run pretty long, but I just have one or two more things to touch on really quickly. Firstly, make sure your maps are clear and legible. What is just a stack of useless boxes you plopped in the corner for flavor, might turn into a 20 minute conversation about looting the boxes because your players don’t know any better. Not to say that those conversations aren’t useful or fun, but if you’re on a time crunch like we usually are, minimize the amount of confusing imagery on your maps.
Finally, and this one is pretty obvious, but make sure each room has a purpose. I know there’s only so many goblin sleeping quarters and dining halls you can stuff into one dungeon, but there is nothing more deflating to a player than the feeling that exploring is a futile effort. These aren’t just maps, they’re supposed to be visual representations of “real” places. Not many people just have an empty room in their homes that exists for no reason.
Anyway, thanks for sticking with this one for as long as you did. I could go on and on about making maps and easily double the word count on this feature, but my fingers are starting to cramp. So for all of you DMs out there who suddenly have to migrate to online sessions, I hope these tools helped a little.
For various reasons, a few weeks back I found myself putting some time into what might be one of the longest running live games, World of Warcraft. The quick and dirty is that I was looking for a way to engage with my friends who fell down a WoW hole, and I hoped I could brave those depths with them. It did not work out.
Just to get this out in the open, there is no love lost between us because of this whole situation, it was a long shot and we all knew it. World of Warcraft has always been the culmination of things I don’t enjoy that much, from its game mechanics down to its fantasy setting, it just was always something I looked at and sneered. In my eyes, World of Warcraft is just in insanely boring, tedious and cumbersome experience, but my feelings are my own and I realize that.
I’m sure in my youth I would have been phenomenally shittier about playing the game, thus thoroughly ripping it apart for not checking all of my boxes. But I’m not that idiot anymore, and I know that World of Warcraft brings people a lot of joy and satisfaction and that’s great.
For instance, the friend that I started playing World of Warcraft in a effort to reconnect with and I had a conversation about me bowing out of the game. I expressed that it just wasn’t my thing and I appreciated him extending the olive branch. We went on to talk about the guild he had built up and how proud of it he was. With somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 members that engaged in multiple raid nights per week, he was able to look at this organization he started with pride. He equated it to the satisfaction I felt from leading our Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
I understood exactly how he felt in that moment. It’s no surprise that people are proud of their creative endeavors especially if they’re successful, but when he equated it to what I do, it clicked in a way that it hadn’t before.
We will never see eye to eye on World of Warcraft or our gaming tastes in general, and that’s okay. The important part isn’t that we’ve found a game we can actively play, cause while that would be nice, it would probably require us just developing our own game from scratch. No, the important thing is that we keep trying to reach out to the other. We want to play games together and we’re going to keep trying to to find that thing that hooks us both, which I can definitively say is not and never will be World of Warcraft.
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.
For those of your who aren’t aware, for the past year or two, I’ve been running various Dungeons & Dragons campaigns for my friends. I’ve more or less chronicled this in our Master of Disaster feature on this site which for obvious reasons, I recommend you check out. Yet despite my love of playing Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve never been able to garner any modicum of enthusiasm for video games that try to capture the tabletop feeling.
This disconnect and lack of enthusiasm on my part has been perplexing to my friends to say the very least. How could someone who is literally the DM (Dungeon Master) of our campaigns not enjoy these mechanics in a video game? It’s been difficult for me to articulate over the years, but I think I finally understand it. But for me to explain it properly, you need a little context about me and how I absorb information.
At a young age, it became very evident, very quickly, that I wasn’t a traditional learner, often needing to read something several times over, or do some hands on learning if applicable. To this day I have a difficult time reading something and comprehending it on the first go, often needing to reread it 4 or 5 times before I can fully internalize the actual meaning of the text. As silly as it sounds, I’ve just never been great with reading comprehension making every online course I’ve ever taken in my life a tremendous chore.
I think it’s because of that mental hurdle that I tend to zone out in text-filled, management-heavy, and turn-based games. My experience with these kinds of games usually goes the same way every time, with me eager to hop into the action, only to be buried in menus and skill trees that I can’t comprehend on my first encounter with them. Even though I know that I’m only seeing a fraction of what’s to come, it still feels like I’m being thrown in the deep end.
What I like about playing D&D as opposed to something like Divinity: Original Sin II is the fact that someone is shepherding me through it. There’s a DM who isn’t only painting a word picture for me, but is there to answer any mechanical questions I might have. It’s that hands-on approach that works for me from an educational standpoint that’s also present here.
I’ve even run into this while running my own D&D campaign. When I started out, I bought a D&D module that I would run for my players. Yet after being asked enough lore questions that I had no answer to, I decided to blow up the world and start fresh with a campaign and lore of my own. It was a lot more work, but so much more personally engaging and rewarding.
There’s also the matter of my own level of patience and tolerance for a game, but I’ve covered that before.
All of these things are factors in why I bounce off of and usually avoid these types of games. But we haven’t even talked about the gameplay portion of them yet. Even if I manage to find a suitable on ramp for me to get somewhat into the game, I still have to contend with the game itself.
It usually isn’t the turn-based part that turns me off as much as it is the “tactics” portion that bounces me off of a game. I’m just terrible at setting up plans and executing on them, whether it’s positioning, item and spell management, or whatever, I suck at it. Usually I’ll formulate a plan I think is great, try to execute it, and watch it fail miserably. Instead of doing what normal people might do and say, “oh, I should try a different approach,” my stupid-ass jumps over any rational thought and straight into a pit of self-loathing and dejection. It’s the same way I feel about the Dark Souls games, where I don’t feel emboldened to do better, I just feel like I could be playing a game I have a better time with.
And if I really wanted to split hairs (which is about to happen), I’d say that I think the tutorial levels of these games are usually the most excruciating parts. Take Divinity: Original Sin II for example. You start on a boat that promptly gets attacked by bugs and a tentacle monster, which sounds way cooler than it actually is. Then you wash up on an island where you eventually find your first village where I assume more of the game takes place. Despite trying to power through it on three separate occasions, I have yet to be able to get through what I found to be an incredibly dull part of the game.
When asked why I don’t like these kinds of games, I usually answer with something dismissive like, “cause they’re boring” or something, but what that really means is everything I’ve written thus far. But I agree with my friends when they say that I should enjoy these kinds of games. I want to enjoy these games.
But I’m not ready to write off the genre just yet. A little game called Baldur’s Gate III was recently shown off, and after reading about it more, I think this one might be the last one of these I try. After everything I’ve written up until now, you might be wondering why I would attempt this, ostensibly throwing $60 dollars into a virtual garbage can, but there are a couple of factors that are intriguing me with Baldur’s Gate III already.
First and foremost, it a Dungeons & Dragons based games, meaning I know a lot of these mechanics and have varying degrees of familiarity with them. That alleviates a lot of the mechanical obtuseness that I might have trouble with in other games. Like, I know what plenty of D&D spells, items and attacks are, so that won’t be such a steep learning curve. Having to learn both the mechanics of a game as well as their made up lore makes me feel like I have to learn two games simultaneously, which usually goes about as well as you might imagine.
On top of that, I’m really digging the presentation when it comes to dialogue options, opting for more of a Dragon Age or Mass Effect styled approach instead of a text box that pops up on the screen. It’s a small thing, but it adds a slight cinematic flair that I think goes a long way.
Despite my better judgement and spotty history with these kinds of games, I’m cautiously optimistic and dare I say, excited for Baldur’s Gate III. At the very least, I’m going to keep my eye on it and certainly give it a shot when it enters early access later this year.
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The Bonus World 