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Best: Dabble in the dark arts, become a Lich, summon thralls to do your bidding. Worst: Pesky adventures coming to steal your hard won loot. Best make a dungeon full of traps to guard it. Curse the choice items for good measure.

One trope I like from Sword and Sorcery is "society is decadent and corrupting", and I would probably use this to influence the quests and quest givers when designing a campaign. For example, rather than have a starting town the party save from a looming threat. I would probably make the...

For me it’s improv. As soon as my players are veering off and doing unexpected things, I can feel the quality of my DMing dip. I do loads of prep work, trying to sketch out a few details about anything and everything I think they might do, but they still catch me off guard. If I feel it’s...

I’m in the same boat as you - my custom dungeons usually have around 3 encounters within them. I had actually considered making a thread about this, because I look at those massive dungeons in the official campaigns and have wondered how they could ever be found enjoyable and not a massive...

Either 1 or 2. I try to make each battle a set-piece with a unique terrain layout and fun mechanics (usually with bespoke abilities on the enemies). I am also conscious that my players don’t like overly drawn out combats or too many combats in a single session, so set the pace accordingly. To...

My experience is players love to come up with the towns, cities and even nations where their characters come from rather than having to ask the DM, so before the campaign begins I, as the DM, actually do very little world building. I usually just create the starting town and the starting quest...

I ask the player to make a cheesy action move line before they land the killing blow. In our last session the Rogue declared “Petrify This!” as he let loose an arrow into the eye of the Basilisk.

I just wish my players took the risk a little more often 🙂 Hopefully it will come up at some point and allow for something cool to happen. 20 sessions into my campaign so far and don’t think they’ve triggered one yet.

I find as a DM that the mechanics of Attacks of Opportunity result in my players always disengaging to leave an enemy’s threat range so that they never trigger them, I wonder if that’s just the nature of my group or if it is the same for others? It makes me wonder if there is something that...

Speaking for 5e, I always loved the idea of threatening someone could be an Intimidation (Strength) check. I think if you came up with a list of social skill checks that each keyed off a different ability score apart from Charisma, it could be a great way to make sure every class has a role in...

As one of the other games I play is Warhammer in all its guises, I have lots of d6 dice. Maybe 200+? When I play Warhammer I always take a single set of d6, (usually around 30). I am very particular and think having matching dice adds to the experience. For D&D I am actually a lot more...

Indeed! And there is probably a middle ground where there's a system that let's the players feel like they are making the same decisions as a real general would in war, but is streamlined enough to be quick to get to grips with for both the players and the DM.

So I am definitely in favour of my players contributing to world building, but definitely do not have them doing so impromptu in the session. The only time I allow such is when it's for very unimportant things and minor details. For example, in our last session, the party were making a forgery...

I'm sure you could! Personally those sorts of mechanics are not what I enjoy in RPGs though so I would rather go the whole hog and come up with systems based on realism for the players to explore. The end goal would be for my players to feel as smart as Ceasar or Napoleon when they outmaneuver...

To add onto my last post, I think there is a third approach which is to play Combat as War as Sport. What I mean by this, is to design encounters that have the verisimilitude of Combat as War, but with some of the underlying balancing mechanisms that feature in Combat as Sport. You can...

I imagine playing Combat as War for the monsters can be a lot of fun, but I think it needs quite a lot of prep by the DM as you need to create systems for the PCs to interact with to learn information about the enemy, so that they too can approach Combat as War. You also need to make sure they...

The idea of a heavily depleted population in an urban area is very interesting. The plague could even be recently cured, and you could have a city where several districts are now deserted, allowing gangs and bandits to rule these lawless areas. It would allow you to do a campaign where city...

On the other hand, for Goblins and things like that, I have pushed them all in the other direction and made them fiends/ akin to demons. Goblins are not biological creatures, but things spawned out of the darkest shadows in the deepest mountain caves as the waxing half-moon passes across the...

I changed Tieflings in my world as I found their existing background to be both unfun and problematic. Instead Tieflings were once part of the Egyptian-analogue civilisation. This civilisation was created and ruled by Tyrannical Devils who created the Tieflings to be in their servitude as a...

I think once you remove humans from the setting, you either want to delve deep into past and say your world is primordial or you want to venture far into the future and have it be the last days of a dying world. Making a world Primordial sounds fun to me. The central conflict could be the...