Rodney Thompson Looks Behind The Screen

WotC's Rodney Thompson is the author of the first in a new series of articles on the official D&D website, "a regular column by Dungeon Masters for Dungeon Masters that presents helpful tips for use in your D&D campaign." The first article looks at the creation of an adventure cheat/prep sheet, incuding the adventure, interludes, character arcs, encounters, and more.

You can read it here. Additionally, check out the DM Support Group video below!

[video=youtube;teHtEpCk64Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teHtEpCk64Y#t=123[/video]
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[Guyanthalas]

In addition, on the subject of the article: proper adventure support in bite size chunks, IME, is a better teaching tool than a web article. I would hate to be a new DM who used Phandelver and then had to step into the great void of 5e. The website is a major mess and hard to navigate, and the little adventure support there is, in the form of $30 hardcovers, needs a lot of massaging even for an experienced DM to make it work.

I agree with you on the adventure support being a better tool. I still consider myself pretty fledgling on the DM scene, and I've been around for a while. I like the article for what it was, but I felt it was like one of those free samples you get at the public market. A good taste, but lacking substance. In order to make use of the article, you already have to have some of those bags of tricks lying around. The NPC interaction table for example. Go grab a new DM and ask him/her to whip one of those up on the fly. I've been finding that the newer DM's get into analysis paralysis on some of those things.

It would be really cool to see a "brainstorming" article, to help people get pen to paper.
Picture a typical tavern in a small town in your campaign. Nothing dramatic happening, just the usual drinking, bar games, and music. Someone walks into the bar.
Write down 6 different things that could walk in. The mayor. Half-orc Ranger. An unseen servant... etc
Pick one of those people, or roll a dice if you want random. Write down 6 different reasons they came to the bar...

Related:
My girlfriend is going to DM for a group of her friends, and she designed an entire dungeon using the DMG. She's super happy with how easy it is, but some of the tools need a little jiggle to make work. She rolled up the weakness of the bad-guy but couldn't get it to fit. She was just going to reroll it (which is an option that should be presented), but I told her that outside the box thinking is often more interesting. I grabbed one of the traits (Soul is trapped in an object?) and started free-wheeling. What if the "Object" was actually a lost lover, and its a metaphor? Its a stretch, but its an example of how stretching can be good. New players/DMs have a hard time thinking outside the box. Especially if the box they started with was 4e.

That being said, I'll reserve my judgment until I see a few more articles. The sample size is a bit small for either a "glowing yes" or a "resounding no".

 

[Remathilis]

"And the bees have guns"

My Pathfinder group has a gunslinger (AC? LOL!) and a few games ago, they fought an awakened bee swarm (wasp swarm + advanced template + Int score) which nobody could harm thanks to the swarm rules. Said gunslinger (after firing a shot and then being covered in bees) declared "We fight dragons and don't break a sweat! How are we getting our asses kicked by BEES?!?"

Now he has to worry about swarms of bee's with ranged touch AC attacks...

 

[Boarstorm]

Was that Trin Miller in the video? Nice to see a Gamers alumni in other things.

 

[HobbitFan]

I think you're right Boarstorm. The lady from Gamers: Hands of Fate, right?

 

[Boarstorm]

Unless my memory deceives me. Ran into her every time I turned around at GenCon a couple years back. Began to fear she thought my girlfriend and I were stalking her!

 

[pemerton]

This caught my attention:

Character Story Arc
These scenes illustrate or develop some aspect of one of the player characters' personal stories. Usually, these grow out of the character's bond to the world, or out of previous events or interactions. They are personally relevant to an individual character (or maybe a couple of characters) but don't usually tie into the primary ongoing narrative of the campaign.​

The implication of this is that there is a "primary ongoing narrative of the campaign" that is separate from the arcs and personal stories of the PCs. I'm not sure that this is good advice. I tend to find that the players get more involved in the game when the "primary ongoing narrative" is built around the personal stories of their PCs.

The examples given are:

* A player character receives a letter from a dying relative.

* The party comes across refugees from a player character's home town.

* The player character overhears a rumour concerning the whereabouts of his or her archnemesis.​

In each case, it seems that the most natural response for the player of the PC in question is to follow the lead: visit, and perhaps try and save, the relative; find out what is happening in his/her home town and try to liberate it; track down his/her archnemesis.

If the PC ignores these things because the campaign is "about" something else, that seems counterproductive to me. How is it "developing some aspect of one of the player characters' personal stories"?

 

[BryonD]

I'm not sure that this is good advice.

I certainly won't say it is good advice for everyone. But ti works well in my game.
The world is organic and there are a lot of different things going on.

They don't all have to connect.

I tend to find that the players get more involved in the game when the "primary ongoing narrative" is built around the personal stories of their PCs.

I don't agree with the implication of this statement. You can have a party of 4 or 5 characters who have a personal stories which tie to the primary plot of the game AND also each have unrelated things going on as well. They are not incompatible.

 

[LostSoul]

I wonder if you could work up some procedures for new DMs to make it easier to include these "Interludes" in the game.

I'd use something like a random encounter roll after each rest*. There'd be a chance for each type of interlude, and a (probably greater) chance for nothing. Then I'd have a big list of one-line events, following the basic theme in the article. The ones Rodney put in the article are a good place to start. I'd also have some advice about how to make these events come alive: how to tie them to your PCs, NPCs, adventure, or world, as well as some advice for making up new ones (again, the article probably does that already).

I think that would be helpful for novice DMs. They don't need to come up with a lot of content, or worry about when the best time to put in one of these interlude scenes is; the system will take care of that for them. Once they get more experience, they can handle this sort of thing themselves.

* - I don't know if I'd put them after each short/long rest; I don't know enough about how the game system works. A flexible schedule would probably be best - tied to adventuring locale (wilderness, dungeon, urban), game style (fast paced, slow paced, moderate pace), or whatever else works in 5E.

 

[turkeygiant]

I actually found it useful and might give the template a whirl for my upcoming beginning session.

Some of you folks need to remember that not everyone is an experienced and/or recently practiced DM. There are new DMs out there, and DMs like me who have been playing for decades but not a lot lately and looking for ways to simplify and speed up prep.

The only thing lacking from the article is an example. I would have loved to see an actual cheat sheet from Rodney's campaign.

That would have been way more interesting to me (and helpful to new DMs), actually go through describing the creation of a real game's cheat sheet and why you added this note or that reminder.

 

[dd.stevenson]

In each case, it seems that the most natural response for the player of the PC in question is to follow the lead: visit, and perhaps try and save, the relative; find out what is happening in his/her home town and try to liberate it; track down his/her archnemesis.

If the PC ignores these things because the campaign is "about" something else, that seems counterproductive to me. How is it "developing some aspect of one of the player characters' personal stories"?

If I understand you correctly, I think that same critique could be leveled at all of his examples in every category: depending on the context, the risk exists that players will treat the interlude like an adventure hook and run with it, potentially moving the campaign away from what it's supposed to be "about." That's the inherent risk of an interesting situation that probably won't take more than ten or fifteen minutes to resolve before getting back to the main story.

Personally this is one of the things I really like about the traditional D&D story arc campaign: PCs must balance their personal goals and impulses against whatever Big Important Thing they're doing, with consequences either way.