And once you make all that. Don't be surprised when your party skips town for pretty much no reason.

@kaylaa2204

Ай бұрын

Sometimes the idea is to provide an environment that doesn’t expect anything of players and just provides an environment with many scripted events and lots of ways to interact Very old module, caves of chaos, filled with stuff all over the map, in and outside the town, despite also having a big dungeon that was the centerpiece and name of the module. No matter where you went you would have a very interactive world. One player group I ran through it didn’t do any of that at first and instead wandered the woods, found a bear, killed it, carried its body into town, disturbing the people in the process, and sold it gaining a good chunk of gold and exp

@Dracoswizard

Ай бұрын

@@kaylaa2204 my homebrew world is set up like skyrim, the party is adventuring at their own pace, they world progresses at a standard pace and if they are present then thats awesome. other wise they do their thing and i provide story threads for them to pull or ignore.

@kaylaa2204

Ай бұрын

@@Dracoswizard sandbox is the best way to run a tabletop in my opinion It capitalizes on the strengths of the medium. It’s ran by people so it doesn’t have to have predefined scripted events and should be largely player directed like an open world rpg video game, but better What you describe is amazingly the only way Gygax and Arneson could imagine people playing the type of game they were pioneering, because that’s how they played their game. Narrative games hadn’t even crossed their mind until people started doing that. There’s a whole section of 1e where Gygax goes off about time and keeping players in the same general time frame which only makes sense in a game where players could and were expected to separate and come back together which confuses a lot of people going back and reading it,

@Dracoswizard

Ай бұрын

@kaylaa2204 I made sure to let my players know that my world keeps moving and they were allowed to do their own thing. They loved that freedom and it's be fun as heck to see their characters experience things like, almost getting overrun by a horde of kobolds , encountering a near dead insane beholder, finding a broken teleportation circle that still worked more like a 1 way random wormhole, and a racetrack that utilized a wind tunnel system. Then a big bads henchman wiping the floor with a more powerful party as then ended up in a location that was not intended for them to be in at that time. Basically they warped from the level 5 area to the 10-15 area while level 4 and were shown the power of the enemy that lived around there. They could have stayed and power leveled if they wanted to risk it but instead fled for their lives lol.

@kaylaa2204

Ай бұрын

@@Dracoswizard love to see someone else realizing the great thing about allowing players full freedom. Though leveled zones are not something I’ve ever thought would translate well from video game to tabletop. But I suppose the game loosely already functions that way. I guess in a similar way, the way I do things, I enjoy occasionally dropping in a creature that is well beyond the capability of the party to fight, including some other way to overcome it often, or have the object simply be avoiding it. Encounters should have more variety than “this thing exists for you to end it”

I like to prep short scenes that PCs will encounter as they move through a town. I use these as a vehicle for background lore/tone. These don’t need to have quests attached to them - they can be as simple as a bunch of kids chasing a dog through the street. Maybe in a well-off town, they’re playing a game with the dog. Maybe in a town under siege, they’re chasing dinner. Little scenes of people doing stuff can flesh out the town very quick

This is honestly such helpful advice

NPCs are my bread and butter. Having a batch of names and personalities ready to pull out really makes a city feel alive to me.

I usually go with this question "What would the people of this town usually eat" and then work backwards using that information and develop the town/city.

Large or small I always put locations/cultures through an acronym to ensure I've developed enough of it -- PERMITS: Politics, Education, Religion, Military, Industry, Technology, Socialization. Figure out how the culture relates to/fulfills each of these social aspects, possibly create a cultural norm and/or NPC/group of NPCs that "represent" them. Works all the way from a country down to a village.

First, build your hub town, where the party can rest, buy equipment, sell drops and find quests. Second, build the questing locations, dungeons, swamps, deserts, caves and other hostile lands. Lastly, build multiple pathways for traveling, roads, rivers, tunnels, so that the party never feels railroaded. Have a few options to flowchart them into the plot.

To make that world-building come allive, be generous with telling players exposition because their character already knows things about it. They can then express your world-building through their own character.

The DM book contains tables to roll settlements at random and it game me some of the most compeling quest i've ever DM.

A good point to start is to ask: Why are there people? A town never is 'just' a town. It's a mining town, a port, a trade hub, derelict ruins inhabited by outcasts, an important holy site. If you go from there, it's easier to give your location the neccessary flavor. If you want to go deeper - many a place has been different things over the time. Starting out as a trade hub on a natural river crossing, later they've found gold, or marble, then it got destroyed and built over, now it's a bustling student town around the newly built mage college (and it's said there's haunted caverns and old mineshafts deep beneath connecting to all sorts of weird places...

This is actually insanely helpful

If I tried to do this the city would just get skipped 😭

@heylolp9

Ай бұрын

That's the Neat part, you just plonk all that stuff into the next town they'll stumble across

@Jayblaze1193

Ай бұрын

file off the numbers and put it somewhere else

How would you make a character who's able to create and command an army of constructs like robots?

The fishing pond!

AND the means to make it all happen. A source of food wood and stone are just the basics for making buildings but what about the unique stuff that makes this place interesting in the first place? Where are they getting it from? How are they sustaining that and themselves in the long term? What other hobbies and jobs are being filled to take up space in the meantime? This'll all help you naturally build out as 'cool new stuff' is a great interest to people in general, so anything you put there make people there interested in it.

I like to base towns off their main exports, lodging or mining or farming or fishing or more complex things like magic

I normally do this, post world map. I have a capital city and 6 major cities and if its one of these then it has all of the big city pros and cons... Maybe you meet travelers again here! If its a lesser city, town, or village then make it feel more personable and may even have a unique craftsman or priest

Great advice

If you need to make a city or town on the fly, there's a cool set of random tables on page 112 of the Dungeon Master's guide, and on page 113 there's tables for creating a random building.

I’m a newer GM building my first world setting and I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can from my experience in my first campaign, which was an absolute mess imo, and various resources online. I’m so relieved to say that a lot of these tips are things I’ve already included in my settlements. I do need to include “something dangerous” in a couple of them though. Any good suggestions on what they could be? What comes to mind is maybe a thief trying to pick pockets or a dog that attacks the party as they’re walking through town lol.

I'm running an underwater campaign, and setting up the final session. It's a Merrow castle, where the Merrow king is summoning a Leviathan to avenge humanity killing his Queen. Any ideas for challenging underwater obstacles/encounters that aren't necessarily combat based that could fit in?

Hey Cinder, how would you go about making tieflings of different races? The player’s manual says that they’re the defendants of humans who made deals with devils but I find it hard to believe that humans are the only ones who do this. I feel like from a mechanical standpoint it could be tricky to try and combining the different racial traits without just making it so that you get the best of both with no balance with other races. Love your videos btw

Personally I enjoy having a problem or two in every city/village ranging from small to big then one of the last cities to be visited in is just a perfecto everyone's happy it's clean nobody's poor, so much cheer that it's a point of suspicion for my players, drives them ludicrous trying to find what's wrong in the place

Paladin, "Where do we eat?" Cleric, Creates. No Druid, "Berry? NO! Wizard, NO!!! Barbarian, Maybe? Bard, Hell No! Rogue, "I'll ask a local." DM, Yea!😅

funny thing * statue of a wizard who founded the town who is completely fictional, as in, from a novella writte 2 centuries ago and got terrible reviews*

My problem is I'm running spelljammer and they planet hop. So I need multiple planets that don't feel empty?

Hey cinder block silly. I have a question. Planning on running a large scale war but unsure how to do it without making the players feel too small or having init be too clogged with groups of enamies

@dragonvlame2662

Ай бұрын

Would like advice on this. I have a plan to play a risc like or Warhammer like game but that doesn't feel like dnd

@dragonvlame2662

Ай бұрын

Mechanics based on that. Setting and world is already done

you look like hank greens cousin

19th

Hi

Do you think he intentionally poofs his hair for youtube shorts and then the rest of his life, he just looks like a normal dude?

@Cinderblocksally

Ай бұрын

Hard to tell

Please help I have a player who is min maxing at the beginning I said I want to have fun and I don't want min maxing but I'm fine with op stuf now no one else is having fun and he's claiming I said it was OK I don't want to kick him out but what do I do

@pensandshakers

Ай бұрын

You're the DM. Sit him down, talk to him, and make it clear that his character is affecting the game. If you need to nerf something you gave players, that's fine. If he doesn't take it in stride, you don't need him at your table. ...Either that or give everyone else OP items to go with his OP character.

@Cinderblocksally

Ай бұрын

There is nothing inherently wrong with optimizing a character. Can you be more specific about why no one else is having fun?

@nuke_bean

Ай бұрын

@@Cinderblocksally We planed on having a more combat heavy game than usual but our table is usually roleplay heavy and he is killing every enemy in one hit and making the enemy's stronger isn't fair to the other players

@Cinderblocksally

Ай бұрын

@@nuke_beanhow is he killing all the enemies in one hit? Dnd is kinda hard to make characters crazy op. You sure he using the rules properly for stats/damage/resources?

@nuke_bean

Ай бұрын

I fixed it we were reading rules wrong

Wah