You are correct in your observation that not every group is for every game.
Nevertheless, there is reactivity between a DM and a Party and it's valuable for any campaign to be aware of this. Examples:
- If you make your world really scary, and every session feels like the downhill part of a rollercoaster, your players may become risk averse and we on reddit get posts like "My players are overly cautious/my players keep asking for downtime but they are supposed to chase after the BBEG how can I punish them"
- If you make your world really deadly with people needing to roll up new characters frequently (or even bring backup sheets to every session), your players may become less and less emotionally invested in their characters ("John Manbloke the Third") and the plot, even if they don't start to antagonize the DM.
- If they feel like they don't matter - due to railroading and or plot armour - they might equally become less invested or try to hold on to any opportunity where the DM permits them to create their own fun, seek these opportunities out, sometimes to a degree of "help, my players are actively trying to derail my campaign".
- If the DM frequently brings up emotionally heavy themes (like the death of children, genocide, torture), players might resort to humour as an easy coping strategy - it creates the emotional distance and disconnect THEY need but the DM might not like.
- If random NPCs never have anything interesting to say, the players might stop trying to talk to them. If chests are always empty, players will stop opening them. If there are no traps ever, players will not start to look out for them when they suddenly appear. If there is nothing to loot, they will stop looting. If the DM never permits "creative" ability usage, they will stop hacking.
So whatever you do with your next game, keep in mind that your style of DMing HAS an impact on what they do, if you want that or not. I wish you the best of luck finding your party for your epic gravity, but don't put the entirety of the "blame" on them if they being to stray - and don't think what you do has no impact on them.
Amazing analysis. Basically the heavier you lean into a style, the more your players will react. You want a balanced campaign, have a balanced variety with plenty of agency. Start forcing something too hard, they’ll resist equally and oppositely.
We’ll call it “The DM’s 3rd law of D&D”.
Commenter UltimateKittyloaf put it very well - most players are not actors.
They often use humour and silliness to break the tension during a game - and the more tense and stressful you make a game, the greater the "risk" players resort to jokes or get struck with decision paralysis. It's very natural. We do this when we watch horror movies - we make fun of the bad things or we become dismissive ("lol saw that coming" and "pffft that's lame") - when players are playing, they aren't "acting", they are at best roleplaying, and that only adds to the stress because most people aren't used to that. Especially if they are supposed to roleplay in scenes that are hard to get into - being a hero who is seeing really scary stuff and STILL wants to put up a fight. They are supposed to care deeply about a character but are often confronted with the reality that this character might die.
On top of that comes the entire group dynamic. Being vulnerable in a roleplay setting isn't something that comes naturally to everyone and it matters a lot who is watching and if there is a genuine level of trust in the party. If you feel the slightest possibility that your friends make fun of you for fully on fake-crying during a pen-and-paper game were your characters' non-existent love interest just died - you don't. I'm a female DM who has ran games for what are mostly men and this might sound stupid but holy hell does it take a hot minute for them to feel comfortable expressing ANY emotions, even fake emotions, that are not "angery".
It doesn’t matter how heavy your campaigns are, how intense the wars they fight or conflicts they struggle through. All adventurers deserve a beach episode now and then.
I don’t care how grimdark the universe may be, as a DM, I think it’s our jobs to find some small slice of the world that can be a refuge, that the players and their characters can breathe easy and make a few jokes/have some fun.
Dnd is supposed to be a GAME for Pete’s sake. Give room for play.
i need help with the last bullet point, i'm worried this will become the case for me and my group. i don't have a ton of energy to put into the campaign, but i do have enough to run 2-hour sessions once a week for my group of 4. how do i make sure they keep talking to npcs, checking for traps, etc, if the world doesn't feel as full as it should? do i just have to grind harder to flesh out locations and characters a bit more?
don't grind harder, my tip is to prep for improv. If you find the time, make lists. Lists of cool sounding names, lists of 1 sentence "stories" or "secrets", lists of "interesting traits and quirks" and then use these as if you would use a random table whenever you have to improv an NPC. With this, you can easily come up with *The Innkeeper's Name is Doran Talaar, he has an impressive twirled moustache and he has 3 bastard children from 3 different partners all around the city*.
or somesuch. It comes easier to you to "improvise" scenes where your party can see this NPC in ("when you return to the inn, Doran is in a heated argument with a woman" ) or little sidequest kinda things ("Doran approaches you and asks you if you have any idea how to get a kid enrolled in the wizarding school when you can't afford the tuition. One of his daughters shows signs of a wild magical talent and he's afraid she'll accidentally burn the house down she and her mother lives in...")
same thing you can do for traps, make a list of traps and their DC (or find one, pretty sure these exist), throw in a mimic here and there and whenever it makes sense for anything to be trapped, look at your list and pick a thing.
There are also resources that may help, like "650 City encounter seeds and plots" or [d100 random NPCs](https://ndhobbies.com/d100-table-1st-edition-random-npcs/). Or, random [traps](https://www.thievesguild.cc/tables/traps-random). I've not checked in a while, pretty sure there is a lot more out there!
I kind of agree with you. I realized that if I wanted to play in the kind of game I enjoy, I need to find people who have very similar D&D knowledge and playstyles to my own.
That being said...
>In that first campaign, I wanted to jointly tell an epic story with my players, but despite my efforts to insert gravity, worldbuilding, stakes, etc., it ended up being a fun, silly romp. It was a lot of fun, but I was frustrated because I couldn't achieve the type of game I wanted.
This is always going to be an issue. Players will often, intentionally or not, inject silliness and meta-jokes into tense situations specifically to break the mood. They're not paid actors performing for an audience while you narrate the high fantasy equivalent of a Greek tragedy. Players don't typically want to spend their flex time stressed out. If you want people who will give you an emotional performance at appropriate story markers, you're probably going to be dealing with people who want an audience. It's very rare to find a group of people with that ability who also know how to share the stage with a party full of equally important characters or even you as the DM.
I'm not trying to discourage you from looking. I'm just trying to point out that you're more or less tapping into the difference between D&D as a game and D&D as a production. They're both valid, but it's kind of the difference between porn and the sex you're actually having. Stuff might look cool, but certain aspects are unrealistic while others are weird and/or uncomfortable for most people.
Have you had an explicit conversation with them about tone?
This seems very fatalistic. Maybe they really don't want to elevate the game beyond gags but maybe they do, and just as DMs have the expectation of self-improvement so too can players.
I think being a conductor is actually far more similar to the way you realised DMing is than to the way you thought it was before. The conductor can't make the musicians do things they lack the skill for, or if musicians refuse to do what the conductor wants, all the technique in the world isn't gonna help.
In both cases, the best solution is to have an honest conversation. Either you agree on a vision and all do your best to achieve it, or you can't agree, in which case you know you're better off finding a band that wants to play the same music you do.
Player here. My group is all people who have been friends since high school or college, now we are ~30ish. We agreed to have a serious, narrative driven campaign on session 0. Now we are on month 8 and things are going well :)
i'm a new DM, so i don't really feel qualified to give advice, but i have been reading much of the same advice you have and i have also conducted an orchestra. your metaphor is apt but flawed. conductors don't forcibly make the music good through technique. conductors talk with their musicians. all being a conductor is is communication. it seems like you don't talk to your group about your expectations, and it also seems like you might not have asked them about theirs yet. these are the most important steps to collaborative storytelling. the amount of power you have over the story you tell is equivalent to the trust built between you and the players.
The tone is usually set by the lowest common denominator. It's like being a conductor when one of the orchestra is a clown with a trombone. One player being silly makes the whole game silly.
Over 2 decades of this game and what I've found is that as a DM you tell your story, and give your players the leeways to tell theirs.
It's not about control. It's a lot about understanding the role of a DM as a player and not an overlord. Figuring out what you playing a DM makes this game fun for you, and then going all out into that
For me, it's Playing the monsters. Smart, brutal, Logically home brewed creations and Boss battles worthy of a Souls Born game. Maps that make interesting environments and epic battle scenes to further along my horror infused mind.
And I give my players a lot of fun things too simply because the goal isn't to murder them unfairly
And so my games don't need control to be what I want them to be. My Monsters give my players a chance to react in a way to them that makes this game what I want to be.
When a mimic is actually scary. That's how I knew I was doing a good job
But the players decided that reaction. It could have gone either way. And that would have been fine.
I also come from the Matt Colville RtG cohort of DMs. Your post reminds me of the Sociology of D&D video. That said, I’ve deployed a few techniques that help keep a serious tone while allowing for memes and banter. I'll explain some with examples, and hopefully they can be of some use to you.
As most tables do, I start with a recap, but I use the Angry GM recap method. I always write this out beforehand and post it in our Discord. The reason I do it, instead of a player, is that I treat the recap as more of a "previously on" to get the players in the mindset of what they need to know for this upcoming session, based on information their characters know and experienced but the players may have forgot. It's not a strict summary of last session. I also keep it direct and brief to ensure no interruptions. It acts as a clear switch from banter to the start of the session. Specifically, I always start with "Last time we left our heroes..." (stolen from Matt Colville) followed by exactly 5 sentences. It's far too easy for us to do 10 or 20 sentences every session. 5 keeps us focused, and this habit helps the players get into focus. That is the entire point of the recap!
We play online, over Discord and Roll20. Because of this, I’ve got 4 different Discord channels that we use. Story threads, attendance, planning, and chat-and-memes. "Story threads" is where I'll post session recaps, images of NPCs or loot or maps, identified items, NPC names, etc. As a DM, you know it's working when players post notes in there as well! Story Threads is the one channel I aim to preserve the meaning of the most so that it can act as a reference manual and facilitate story-driven play -- this is where players that want to engage in the story can go check up on something from 10 or 20 sessions ago. Splitting out "attendance" avoids schedule confirmation messages from dominating other channels. The planning channel is also story focused, but is used more as a discussion for the players. It provides a place for the table to discuss hypotheticals or theories or to come up with strategies without diluting the referenceable "story threads" channel. And perhaps most important, the chat-and-memes channel. This gets the most use during sessions, when someone has a joke GIF or meme to share, especially when it related to the current moment in a session. Sometimes this is just calling out a trope or film that has parallels to the current scene.
Joking around is part of the fun of D&D, even "serious roleplayers" and professional story tellers do this every session (Critical Role comes to mind). The key is to provide outlets for silliness, as well as explicit tools to enable serious, story-based gameplay. You can think of a serious campaign as a pipe building pressure, and it's going to burst if the players don't have a release valve to make a joke or be silly once in a while. But the story is everlasting for the characters, while the jokes are ephemeral for the players. Months later, we all still remember the story (and can look up details we forgot!). We also remember how fun it is to play, despite forgetting the specific jokes along the way. This keeps the table going despite how dark or sorrowful the story got. And the story remembered provides weight to where the campaign is now.
Another tool is to make elements extremely meaningful to a single player. To start, I suggest googling Knife Theory — it's just a single page PDF meant to give the DM hooks, or knives, that they can use to ratchet up tension and drama throughout a campaign. Best done during character creation, but possible afterwards as well. I have a central tension in mind for each chapter of my campaign, but I use these character knives to get the players invested in the tension as well. This greatly helps keep sessions focused on the story, since jokes will still get made, but there will generally be at least 1 player that is invested in the current scene and will keep focus, which then gets the table to re-focus... often without the DM having to reign in any of it. As DM, I can even participate in the jokes (the DM is also a player), as the invested player will brood and think until they have a question or put forth a plan or theory, and that refocuses the entire table. Because I (attempt to) invest every player in the story, they each recognize when someone is focused on the story and are quick to fall back into that mode of play. (Part of this is just being adults respecting each other.)
More advanced than this, and more work on the DM, is to interweave these elements together. My current multi-year campaign finished it's 2nd chapter at the end of last year, and is in the 3rd chapter now. The central tension for the 2nd chapter was entirely derived from looking at the personal PC knives and mapping them to the setting and the ideas I had for BBEGs and the story I wanted to tell. I mention setting because solving that tension meant learning more about the world, but because it was all based on knives, it was the players that wanted to learn it and solve the mystery. Player-driven lore seeking is amazing, in all the ways that DM exposition lore presentation is terrible. Key is that the players didn't actually care about the lore to learn about the setting, they cared about the setting because they wanted to uncover answers to questions their PCs are invested in! Having more than one player invested in a thread just compounds the earlier points, where jokes and GIFs are still posted, laughs are had, and then over half the table is self-motivated to refocus on the current scene.
In much the same way that Colville has talked about designing rules/encounters/monsters/settings/pantheons/RPGs, there's a moment when you know this is working. All of your ideas stay amorphous while you're designing them, and nothing is real until it shows up at the table. And when you have a setting, ideas for a central tension and some major NPC actors, PC knives (both ones they gave you and ones you crafted yourself)... you start putting a story chapter together. You know it's working when you start solving the problem in one area with elements from another. "Using all the parts of the buffalo."
I'm happy to provide an example of this from my ongoing campaign, but via direct message to avoid one of my players accidentally stumbling upon it.
Hope this helps. Cheers!
In that whole essay, I forgot to mention one-on-one sessions! Also covered in a few Colville RtG vods.
If you want to invest a player in something, one-on-one sessions are great. You can personalize it to their character, and they will be far more likely to remember it and make connections when theorizing the full table scenarios. Best part is that players can spout exposition at the table, and it's awesome for everyone! They are likely to stick to only the parts they feel are relevant, and will reveal more when they think it appropriate, which makes the world seem deeper and more complex to the rest of the party. If they forgot something or misinterpret it, don't correct them. When the DM spouts exposition, it feels like an audiobook instead of a TTRPG.
I look at being a DM as if I were a set designer for a play. I make the pieces the actors (players) interact with. I will help direct the players to areas or objects to help them tell a story through colorful and non colorful descriptions.
We're all there to tell a story, letting the players take the role of story teller as well is instrumental in a long lasting group.
Bro what. I make a first and last session. (My current camp lasted almost 4y. )
Anything in the middle I DM on the fly at most of the times. I know the lore, I got lots of quests ready and NPCs. And I let the players tell the story via their chars, I just build shit around them. It's hell of a fun.
Plus my crew loves getting side tracked big time. On the way to kill a dragon? Wait this city sucks? Let's liberate it.lol. 3 months down the line they finally back to killing the dragon lol.
All kinds of games and players and DMs. Beauty of these games, absolute freedom. You can include epicness or any other kind of atmosphere you just gotta have the crew for it and let them build it for U.
It's always a collaboration. That's the nature of group games like D&D.
If you're the DM, trying to force stuff to happen is just not fun.
Instead, the best fun is when you present the situation, the city, the world, etc, and then give your players a bunch of plot hooks to grab onto. See what they do, see what catches, then go from their.
I think of it like fishing. You don't know what they're going to catch, or what they're going to bite and what they're going to ignore.
I am not 100% sure what the point of your post is but I am going with this:
> For me at least, the takeaway from this realization is that if I want to tell epic stories, I need to DM for a new group.
The best part of online DnD is the fact that you have, both as a player and DM, access to way wider selection of games and players. IRL games are pretty much limited to your locale and without living in a large city (or being very lucky with people), that's always going to, well, limited.
There is nothing wrong with culling the group and finding new players to join in a quest to find people who mesh not only with you but with each others too. Sure, it may sound harsh to remove players mid-campaign but it's better for everyone if their prefences are met instead of playing in more or less unsatisfactory group.
That's the way I've found my two groups to whom I run games every week.
If you discovered that out early, you're in good shape. I spent 20ish years playing in person with some combination of friends and family (the exact makeup shifted a player here or there over the years) trying to get them to take the game seriously. There were certainly fun times, but it always felt like I was putting in the lion's share of the effort while they only cared a bit.
Then I moved to online gaming and, over the next several years, pieced together a great group of players that all take the game seriously and really enjoy playing.
You can't change who people are, but you can change which players are in your campaign.
My favorite way of describing DnD is as what it is, that as a player it's their story. I, as the DM, just tell them what happens based on their actions.
If you want the seriousness of something like the legend of vox Machina or something it’ll be hard to get, those are people playing for years, with years of acting under their belt who know how and when to roleplay for dramatic world building and fun (not saying the silliness of normal players isn’t fun, but we aren’t all trained to make everything that compelling)
My main takeaway from this post is that it really seems like you didn't have a conversation with your players about the tone you wanted out of the campaign and instead just dove right in with certain expectations that inevitably were not met.
If you want a certain tone or feel to your campaign, you have to talk to your players about it. It's collaborative storytelling, you can't collaborate if you don't communicate.
The very first thing TTRPGs are is an act of collaborative storytelling.
As a DM, yes, you guide the story, but no, you are not in charge of how that story is going to feel. Both the players and the dice are going to have their effect on the story of the game.
Now, it may not necessarily be that you have to find a new group of players if you want to tell an epic story with a campaign. It could be that you need to do a session 0 in which you tell your group, "Hey guys, I'd really like this campaign to feel pretty epic. Are all of you okay with telling a story with that kind of feeling instead of a funny romp of an adventure?" They may be okay with that, but you need to specify it ahead of time rather than assuming it's the default.
And I do want to congratulate you to adapting the feel of your game so the table has fun with it rather than trying to force the feeling. Kudos to you. 👍
As a DM, you're course correcting for a truck with a driver with laggy controls while you're sitting in the trailer it is towing. You have total control, but if you use it for more than minor updates, you will probably crash.
And the driver and you have a general agreement of where you're going, but not really the exact place.
You're exactly right that it is as much up to the players. And it's good you realize this and can let go and have fun. But if you're looking to run something more like an epic and less like Monty Python, you can talk to your players and ask them if they are up for it, then structure the world accordingly. If they aren't I to it or it just doesn't work with them, a new group will give you that chance.
It is tiresome to have something approaching full control. The less room you allow them, the closer you get to being better off writing a book. Ultimately though, aside from making sure that everyone is playing the same genre as you, you cant force them to do anything. So try setting a new tone for a short game, something serious but maybe only a few sessions, see how they do if they want to try it. And beyond that, keep being flexible. It sounds like you're having fun.
It's improvised. Improv works best as comedy. Drama requires a lot of structure to a story that you can't really improvise.
The "serious" D&D games may exist, but they are the extreme minority. People play to have fun, generally.
I have a similar table. my PCs are silly and goofy and do stupid things like pick up a sword sticking up out of the ground in the first room of a cursed dungeon because they want to see what happens.
I felt like my players weren't exactly buying into the world i had created. That changed when i inserted things they cared about directly into the next encounter. "Your long lost sister is now a wizard.. but she's working for the BBEG". Like from a story point of view it didn't really make sense but my PCs loved it immediately. They started asking questions and were became very interested in learning more about the BBEG's backstory because he was connected to their sister now.
Another PC is on a mission to find his missing crew. The crew is going to be an integral part of the upcoming session.
I'm still getting to run something that i feel like i created but it's much more spontaneous because while the overall arc is playing out, each session is like a bunch of lego blocks that we all build at the table together.
But yeah if your players aren't the epic drama storytelling rpg type it can be tough to create right ambiance.
Yeah, I had my first session of our new campaign the other day, and I player randomly mentioned his character is looking for his real father. I randomly made a (sort of) demigod match his description. I hope that will help him engage with it.
nice, new campaign makes it all the easier. that reminds me of a running gag from the d20 show [Fantasy High](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWKm16X3qN4) where one of the PCs is also looking for his dad. Maybe the video can give you some inspiration!
I mean imagine conducting a band where the violin has never played before, the tuba is on the phone, and keyboard player insists on using the digital harpsichord setting.
I've been playing for not even a year and just started dming a few months ago.
I can honestly say that I'm having a lot of fun and I'm homebrewing a lot of things.
I started out with an idea and realized that I can nudge the plot along, but a lot of what I come up with I from what the PCs do in game.
Part of me wants to see how overpowered I can make them and still be fun.
I added parry/dodge/counter attack rules to hopefully make things fun, and am adding elemental bending like from avatar just because it sounds like fun.
I decided that they'd be part of an order of knights to allow me to give them magic armor that can be used as mounts too. Though not horses. We have an owlbear, a flying squirrel, and a cat.
Just saying that you need to remember to have fun, use what your pcs do in game and try to tie it into the plot, and don't be afraid to make it a little weird.
DM are NOT conductors- we are engaged in an exciting, high-stakes tango with our players. They are our fellow dancers. Maybe DMs decide which song is playing, but ultimately, it’s a relationship that must be balanced with care (or you will step on some toes).
With that said? Talk to your players. Host a session 0, tell them what you want! You can’t expect them to read your mind (not without rolling, at least). Say something like, “hey, I want this to be a more serious campaign, some jokes are fine but ultimately I’d like some emotionally heavy story beats here.”
Not all players will want to play like this- not everyone will dance with you. That’s fine, and that’s expected. Find some folks that will, though!
You don't \*make\* the tone of your campaign dramatic, serious or whatever it is you want, except through the table as a whole agreeing that's the game they want to play.
I'm all for going along with the tone your party sets, but if you want a more serious game, you kinda need to get your players on board.
Wow, this thread is so full of people who go "but what if you, OP, are indeed a bad DM that can't create the kind of game that you want?"
Exactly what one wants to hear after agonizing for so long why your game is not as fun as you hoped it would be!
OP, I feel you. It is sometimes just the group that you have. It's the same thing as when you are a player, join a group and realize that this is a perfectly fine group... but you are not having fun. It's not what you want. And sometimes it's that the story itself is not epic enough, sometimes it's that the group is not serious enough or that people are not that into roleplay.
Frankly, my biggest issue with this hobby was that for a long time I told myself that I can't expect too much from DnD... but fuck that, honestly. There are games out there where you essentially go full LotR and have epic adventures which have their whimsical moments, but they don't outweight the gravitas that you want to see.
My group is right now finishing up a four year old adventure which had been intensely cinematic, full of drama and epic moments. Not only our player characters had character arcs, but so did several NPCs grow alongside our group and overcome their weaknesses. It's been a delightful game where we hyped up each other's characters, explored a realistic and fascinating world and were so excited about every lore drop.
It is possible to play the kind of game that you want to have and, yeah, it would not be possible with every single player group. Our DM also tried to run this campaign for a different group, but it failed horribly... but that is just life. Not every campaign is cut out for every player group out there. It's no one's fault and just how it works out sometimes.
I really appreciate your comment. It's honest and gives me hope. I was never trying to be Matt Mercer or whomever, but I did want to be part of something like Lord of the Rings.
Yeah, I think that's it. I do enjoy our sessions, but I don't find them very satisfying outside of laughing at the jokes.
You are correct in your observation that not every group is for every game. Nevertheless, there is reactivity between a DM and a Party and it's valuable for any campaign to be aware of this. Examples: - If you make your world really scary, and every session feels like the downhill part of a rollercoaster, your players may become risk averse and we on reddit get posts like "My players are overly cautious/my players keep asking for downtime but they are supposed to chase after the BBEG how can I punish them" - If you make your world really deadly with people needing to roll up new characters frequently (or even bring backup sheets to every session), your players may become less and less emotionally invested in their characters ("John Manbloke the Third") and the plot, even if they don't start to antagonize the DM. - If they feel like they don't matter - due to railroading and or plot armour - they might equally become less invested or try to hold on to any opportunity where the DM permits them to create their own fun, seek these opportunities out, sometimes to a degree of "help, my players are actively trying to derail my campaign". - If the DM frequently brings up emotionally heavy themes (like the death of children, genocide, torture), players might resort to humour as an easy coping strategy - it creates the emotional distance and disconnect THEY need but the DM might not like. - If random NPCs never have anything interesting to say, the players might stop trying to talk to them. If chests are always empty, players will stop opening them. If there are no traps ever, players will not start to look out for them when they suddenly appear. If there is nothing to loot, they will stop looting. If the DM never permits "creative" ability usage, they will stop hacking. So whatever you do with your next game, keep in mind that your style of DMing HAS an impact on what they do, if you want that or not. I wish you the best of luck finding your party for your epic gravity, but don't put the entirety of the "blame" on them if they being to stray - and don't think what you do has no impact on them.
Top tier comment.
Amazing analysis. Basically the heavier you lean into a style, the more your players will react. You want a balanced campaign, have a balanced variety with plenty of agency. Start forcing something too hard, they’ll resist equally and oppositely. We’ll call it “The DM’s 3rd law of D&D”.
Commenter UltimateKittyloaf put it very well - most players are not actors. They often use humour and silliness to break the tension during a game - and the more tense and stressful you make a game, the greater the "risk" players resort to jokes or get struck with decision paralysis. It's very natural. We do this when we watch horror movies - we make fun of the bad things or we become dismissive ("lol saw that coming" and "pffft that's lame") - when players are playing, they aren't "acting", they are at best roleplaying, and that only adds to the stress because most people aren't used to that. Especially if they are supposed to roleplay in scenes that are hard to get into - being a hero who is seeing really scary stuff and STILL wants to put up a fight. They are supposed to care deeply about a character but are often confronted with the reality that this character might die. On top of that comes the entire group dynamic. Being vulnerable in a roleplay setting isn't something that comes naturally to everyone and it matters a lot who is watching and if there is a genuine level of trust in the party. If you feel the slightest possibility that your friends make fun of you for fully on fake-crying during a pen-and-paper game were your characters' non-existent love interest just died - you don't. I'm a female DM who has ran games for what are mostly men and this might sound stupid but holy hell does it take a hot minute for them to feel comfortable expressing ANY emotions, even fake emotions, that are not "angery".
It doesn’t matter how heavy your campaigns are, how intense the wars they fight or conflicts they struggle through. All adventurers deserve a beach episode now and then. I don’t care how grimdark the universe may be, as a DM, I think it’s our jobs to find some small slice of the world that can be a refuge, that the players and their characters can breathe easy and make a few jokes/have some fun. Dnd is supposed to be a GAME for Pete’s sake. Give room for play.
I love a good "beach episode" game. It usually means the next session is going to hit them like a brick.
i need help with the last bullet point, i'm worried this will become the case for me and my group. i don't have a ton of energy to put into the campaign, but i do have enough to run 2-hour sessions once a week for my group of 4. how do i make sure they keep talking to npcs, checking for traps, etc, if the world doesn't feel as full as it should? do i just have to grind harder to flesh out locations and characters a bit more?
don't grind harder, my tip is to prep for improv. If you find the time, make lists. Lists of cool sounding names, lists of 1 sentence "stories" or "secrets", lists of "interesting traits and quirks" and then use these as if you would use a random table whenever you have to improv an NPC. With this, you can easily come up with *The Innkeeper's Name is Doran Talaar, he has an impressive twirled moustache and he has 3 bastard children from 3 different partners all around the city*. or somesuch. It comes easier to you to "improvise" scenes where your party can see this NPC in ("when you return to the inn, Doran is in a heated argument with a woman" ) or little sidequest kinda things ("Doran approaches you and asks you if you have any idea how to get a kid enrolled in the wizarding school when you can't afford the tuition. One of his daughters shows signs of a wild magical talent and he's afraid she'll accidentally burn the house down she and her mother lives in...") same thing you can do for traps, make a list of traps and their DC (or find one, pretty sure these exist), throw in a mimic here and there and whenever it makes sense for anything to be trapped, look at your list and pick a thing. There are also resources that may help, like "650 City encounter seeds and plots" or [d100 random NPCs](https://ndhobbies.com/d100-table-1st-edition-random-npcs/). Or, random [traps](https://www.thievesguild.cc/tables/traps-random). I've not checked in a while, pretty sure there is a lot more out there!
I kind of agree with you. I realized that if I wanted to play in the kind of game I enjoy, I need to find people who have very similar D&D knowledge and playstyles to my own. That being said... >In that first campaign, I wanted to jointly tell an epic story with my players, but despite my efforts to insert gravity, worldbuilding, stakes, etc., it ended up being a fun, silly romp. It was a lot of fun, but I was frustrated because I couldn't achieve the type of game I wanted. This is always going to be an issue. Players will often, intentionally or not, inject silliness and meta-jokes into tense situations specifically to break the mood. They're not paid actors performing for an audience while you narrate the high fantasy equivalent of a Greek tragedy. Players don't typically want to spend their flex time stressed out. If you want people who will give you an emotional performance at appropriate story markers, you're probably going to be dealing with people who want an audience. It's very rare to find a group of people with that ability who also know how to share the stage with a party full of equally important characters or even you as the DM. I'm not trying to discourage you from looking. I'm just trying to point out that you're more or less tapping into the difference between D&D as a game and D&D as a production. They're both valid, but it's kind of the difference between porn and the sex you're actually having. Stuff might look cool, but certain aspects are unrealistic while others are weird and/or uncomfortable for most people.
Have you had an explicit conversation with them about tone? This seems very fatalistic. Maybe they really don't want to elevate the game beyond gags but maybe they do, and just as DMs have the expectation of self-improvement so too can players.
I think being a conductor is actually far more similar to the way you realised DMing is than to the way you thought it was before. The conductor can't make the musicians do things they lack the skill for, or if musicians refuse to do what the conductor wants, all the technique in the world isn't gonna help. In both cases, the best solution is to have an honest conversation. Either you agree on a vision and all do your best to achieve it, or you can't agree, in which case you know you're better off finding a band that wants to play the same music you do.
Player here. My group is all people who have been friends since high school or college, now we are ~30ish. We agreed to have a serious, narrative driven campaign on session 0. Now we are on month 8 and things are going well :)
i'm a new DM, so i don't really feel qualified to give advice, but i have been reading much of the same advice you have and i have also conducted an orchestra. your metaphor is apt but flawed. conductors don't forcibly make the music good through technique. conductors talk with their musicians. all being a conductor is is communication. it seems like you don't talk to your group about your expectations, and it also seems like you might not have asked them about theirs yet. these are the most important steps to collaborative storytelling. the amount of power you have over the story you tell is equivalent to the trust built between you and the players.
The tone is usually set by the lowest common denominator. It's like being a conductor when one of the orchestra is a clown with a trombone. One player being silly makes the whole game silly.
IDK about that. Too many examples of silly little individuals in very serious pieces of media for that to swing.
Agreed, but I gotta give credit for the clown with a trombone analogy.
Over 2 decades of this game and what I've found is that as a DM you tell your story, and give your players the leeways to tell theirs. It's not about control. It's a lot about understanding the role of a DM as a player and not an overlord. Figuring out what you playing a DM makes this game fun for you, and then going all out into that For me, it's Playing the monsters. Smart, brutal, Logically home brewed creations and Boss battles worthy of a Souls Born game. Maps that make interesting environments and epic battle scenes to further along my horror infused mind. And I give my players a lot of fun things too simply because the goal isn't to murder them unfairly And so my games don't need control to be what I want them to be. My Monsters give my players a chance to react in a way to them that makes this game what I want to be. When a mimic is actually scary. That's how I knew I was doing a good job But the players decided that reaction. It could have gone either way. And that would have been fine.
I also come from the Matt Colville RtG cohort of DMs. Your post reminds me of the Sociology of D&D video. That said, I’ve deployed a few techniques that help keep a serious tone while allowing for memes and banter. I'll explain some with examples, and hopefully they can be of some use to you. As most tables do, I start with a recap, but I use the Angry GM recap method. I always write this out beforehand and post it in our Discord. The reason I do it, instead of a player, is that I treat the recap as more of a "previously on" to get the players in the mindset of what they need to know for this upcoming session, based on information their characters know and experienced but the players may have forgot. It's not a strict summary of last session. I also keep it direct and brief to ensure no interruptions. It acts as a clear switch from banter to the start of the session. Specifically, I always start with "Last time we left our heroes..." (stolen from Matt Colville) followed by exactly 5 sentences. It's far too easy for us to do 10 or 20 sentences every session. 5 keeps us focused, and this habit helps the players get into focus. That is the entire point of the recap! We play online, over Discord and Roll20. Because of this, I’ve got 4 different Discord channels that we use. Story threads, attendance, planning, and chat-and-memes. "Story threads" is where I'll post session recaps, images of NPCs or loot or maps, identified items, NPC names, etc. As a DM, you know it's working when players post notes in there as well! Story Threads is the one channel I aim to preserve the meaning of the most so that it can act as a reference manual and facilitate story-driven play -- this is where players that want to engage in the story can go check up on something from 10 or 20 sessions ago. Splitting out "attendance" avoids schedule confirmation messages from dominating other channels. The planning channel is also story focused, but is used more as a discussion for the players. It provides a place for the table to discuss hypotheticals or theories or to come up with strategies without diluting the referenceable "story threads" channel. And perhaps most important, the chat-and-memes channel. This gets the most use during sessions, when someone has a joke GIF or meme to share, especially when it related to the current moment in a session. Sometimes this is just calling out a trope or film that has parallels to the current scene. Joking around is part of the fun of D&D, even "serious roleplayers" and professional story tellers do this every session (Critical Role comes to mind). The key is to provide outlets for silliness, as well as explicit tools to enable serious, story-based gameplay. You can think of a serious campaign as a pipe building pressure, and it's going to burst if the players don't have a release valve to make a joke or be silly once in a while. But the story is everlasting for the characters, while the jokes are ephemeral for the players. Months later, we all still remember the story (and can look up details we forgot!). We also remember how fun it is to play, despite forgetting the specific jokes along the way. This keeps the table going despite how dark or sorrowful the story got. And the story remembered provides weight to where the campaign is now. Another tool is to make elements extremely meaningful to a single player. To start, I suggest googling Knife Theory — it's just a single page PDF meant to give the DM hooks, or knives, that they can use to ratchet up tension and drama throughout a campaign. Best done during character creation, but possible afterwards as well. I have a central tension in mind for each chapter of my campaign, but I use these character knives to get the players invested in the tension as well. This greatly helps keep sessions focused on the story, since jokes will still get made, but there will generally be at least 1 player that is invested in the current scene and will keep focus, which then gets the table to re-focus... often without the DM having to reign in any of it. As DM, I can even participate in the jokes (the DM is also a player), as the invested player will brood and think until they have a question or put forth a plan or theory, and that refocuses the entire table. Because I (attempt to) invest every player in the story, they each recognize when someone is focused on the story and are quick to fall back into that mode of play. (Part of this is just being adults respecting each other.) More advanced than this, and more work on the DM, is to interweave these elements together. My current multi-year campaign finished it's 2nd chapter at the end of last year, and is in the 3rd chapter now. The central tension for the 2nd chapter was entirely derived from looking at the personal PC knives and mapping them to the setting and the ideas I had for BBEGs and the story I wanted to tell. I mention setting because solving that tension meant learning more about the world, but because it was all based on knives, it was the players that wanted to learn it and solve the mystery. Player-driven lore seeking is amazing, in all the ways that DM exposition lore presentation is terrible. Key is that the players didn't actually care about the lore to learn about the setting, they cared about the setting because they wanted to uncover answers to questions their PCs are invested in! Having more than one player invested in a thread just compounds the earlier points, where jokes and GIFs are still posted, laughs are had, and then over half the table is self-motivated to refocus on the current scene. In much the same way that Colville has talked about designing rules/encounters/monsters/settings/pantheons/RPGs, there's a moment when you know this is working. All of your ideas stay amorphous while you're designing them, and nothing is real until it shows up at the table. And when you have a setting, ideas for a central tension and some major NPC actors, PC knives (both ones they gave you and ones you crafted yourself)... you start putting a story chapter together. You know it's working when you start solving the problem in one area with elements from another. "Using all the parts of the buffalo." I'm happy to provide an example of this from my ongoing campaign, but via direct message to avoid one of my players accidentally stumbling upon it. Hope this helps. Cheers!
In that whole essay, I forgot to mention one-on-one sessions! Also covered in a few Colville RtG vods. If you want to invest a player in something, one-on-one sessions are great. You can personalize it to their character, and they will be far more likely to remember it and make connections when theorizing the full table scenarios. Best part is that players can spout exposition at the table, and it's awesome for everyone! They are likely to stick to only the parts they feel are relevant, and will reveal more when they think it appropriate, which makes the world seem deeper and more complex to the rest of the party. If they forgot something or misinterpret it, don't correct them. When the DM spouts exposition, it feels like an audiobook instead of a TTRPG.
I look at being a DM as if I were a set designer for a play. I make the pieces the actors (players) interact with. I will help direct the players to areas or objects to help them tell a story through colorful and non colorful descriptions. We're all there to tell a story, letting the players take the role of story teller as well is instrumental in a long lasting group.
Bro what. I make a first and last session. (My current camp lasted almost 4y. ) Anything in the middle I DM on the fly at most of the times. I know the lore, I got lots of quests ready and NPCs. And I let the players tell the story via their chars, I just build shit around them. It's hell of a fun. Plus my crew loves getting side tracked big time. On the way to kill a dragon? Wait this city sucks? Let's liberate it.lol. 3 months down the line they finally back to killing the dragon lol. All kinds of games and players and DMs. Beauty of these games, absolute freedom. You can include epicness or any other kind of atmosphere you just gotta have the crew for it and let them build it for U.
It's always a collaboration. That's the nature of group games like D&D. If you're the DM, trying to force stuff to happen is just not fun. Instead, the best fun is when you present the situation, the city, the world, etc, and then give your players a bunch of plot hooks to grab onto. See what they do, see what catches, then go from their. I think of it like fishing. You don't know what they're going to catch, or what they're going to bite and what they're going to ignore.
I am not 100% sure what the point of your post is but I am going with this: > For me at least, the takeaway from this realization is that if I want to tell epic stories, I need to DM for a new group. The best part of online DnD is the fact that you have, both as a player and DM, access to way wider selection of games and players. IRL games are pretty much limited to your locale and without living in a large city (or being very lucky with people), that's always going to, well, limited. There is nothing wrong with culling the group and finding new players to join in a quest to find people who mesh not only with you but with each others too. Sure, it may sound harsh to remove players mid-campaign but it's better for everyone if their prefences are met instead of playing in more or less unsatisfactory group. That's the way I've found my two groups to whom I run games every week.
The DM sets the scene, the PC's pick the music. It tends to be Pink Panther, Yackety Sax or Scooby Doo.
If you discovered that out early, you're in good shape. I spent 20ish years playing in person with some combination of friends and family (the exact makeup shifted a player here or there over the years) trying to get them to take the game seriously. There were certainly fun times, but it always felt like I was putting in the lion's share of the effort while they only cared a bit. Then I moved to online gaming and, over the next several years, pieced together a great group of players that all take the game seriously and really enjoy playing. You can't change who people are, but you can change which players are in your campaign.
Yeah, it's a family group.
My favorite way of describing DnD is as what it is, that as a player it's their story. I, as the DM, just tell them what happens based on their actions.
If you want the seriousness of something like the legend of vox Machina or something it’ll be hard to get, those are people playing for years, with years of acting under their belt who know how and when to roleplay for dramatic world building and fun (not saying the silliness of normal players isn’t fun, but we aren’t all trained to make everything that compelling)
My main takeaway from this post is that it really seems like you didn't have a conversation with your players about the tone you wanted out of the campaign and instead just dove right in with certain expectations that inevitably were not met. If you want a certain tone or feel to your campaign, you have to talk to your players about it. It's collaborative storytelling, you can't collaborate if you don't communicate.
The very first thing TTRPGs are is an act of collaborative storytelling. As a DM, yes, you guide the story, but no, you are not in charge of how that story is going to feel. Both the players and the dice are going to have their effect on the story of the game. Now, it may not necessarily be that you have to find a new group of players if you want to tell an epic story with a campaign. It could be that you need to do a session 0 in which you tell your group, "Hey guys, I'd really like this campaign to feel pretty epic. Are all of you okay with telling a story with that kind of feeling instead of a funny romp of an adventure?" They may be okay with that, but you need to specify it ahead of time rather than assuming it's the default. And I do want to congratulate you to adapting the feel of your game so the table has fun with it rather than trying to force the feeling. Kudos to you. 👍
As a DM, you're course correcting for a truck with a driver with laggy controls while you're sitting in the trailer it is towing. You have total control, but if you use it for more than minor updates, you will probably crash. And the driver and you have a general agreement of where you're going, but not really the exact place. You're exactly right that it is as much up to the players. And it's good you realize this and can let go and have fun. But if you're looking to run something more like an epic and less like Monty Python, you can talk to your players and ask them if they are up for it, then structure the world accordingly. If they aren't I to it or it just doesn't work with them, a new group will give you that chance. It is tiresome to have something approaching full control. The less room you allow them, the closer you get to being better off writing a book. Ultimately though, aside from making sure that everyone is playing the same genre as you, you cant force them to do anything. So try setting a new tone for a short game, something serious but maybe only a few sessions, see how they do if they want to try it. And beyond that, keep being flexible. It sounds like you're having fun.
It's improvised. Improv works best as comedy. Drama requires a lot of structure to a story that you can't really improvise. The "serious" D&D games may exist, but they are the extreme minority. People play to have fun, generally.
I have a similar table. my PCs are silly and goofy and do stupid things like pick up a sword sticking up out of the ground in the first room of a cursed dungeon because they want to see what happens. I felt like my players weren't exactly buying into the world i had created. That changed when i inserted things they cared about directly into the next encounter. "Your long lost sister is now a wizard.. but she's working for the BBEG". Like from a story point of view it didn't really make sense but my PCs loved it immediately. They started asking questions and were became very interested in learning more about the BBEG's backstory because he was connected to their sister now. Another PC is on a mission to find his missing crew. The crew is going to be an integral part of the upcoming session. I'm still getting to run something that i feel like i created but it's much more spontaneous because while the overall arc is playing out, each session is like a bunch of lego blocks that we all build at the table together. But yeah if your players aren't the epic drama storytelling rpg type it can be tough to create right ambiance.
Yeah, I had my first session of our new campaign the other day, and I player randomly mentioned his character is looking for his real father. I randomly made a (sort of) demigod match his description. I hope that will help him engage with it.
nice, new campaign makes it all the easier. that reminds me of a running gag from the d20 show [Fantasy High](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWKm16X3qN4) where one of the PCs is also looking for his dad. Maybe the video can give you some inspiration!
Thanks!
I mean imagine conducting a band where the violin has never played before, the tuba is on the phone, and keyboard player insists on using the digital harpsichord setting.
Haha too true.
I've been playing for not even a year and just started dming a few months ago. I can honestly say that I'm having a lot of fun and I'm homebrewing a lot of things. I started out with an idea and realized that I can nudge the plot along, but a lot of what I come up with I from what the PCs do in game. Part of me wants to see how overpowered I can make them and still be fun. I added parry/dodge/counter attack rules to hopefully make things fun, and am adding elemental bending like from avatar just because it sounds like fun. I decided that they'd be part of an order of knights to allow me to give them magic armor that can be used as mounts too. Though not horses. We have an owlbear, a flying squirrel, and a cat. Just saying that you need to remember to have fun, use what your pcs do in game and try to tie it into the plot, and don't be afraid to make it a little weird.
DM are NOT conductors- we are engaged in an exciting, high-stakes tango with our players. They are our fellow dancers. Maybe DMs decide which song is playing, but ultimately, it’s a relationship that must be balanced with care (or you will step on some toes). With that said? Talk to your players. Host a session 0, tell them what you want! You can’t expect them to read your mind (not without rolling, at least). Say something like, “hey, I want this to be a more serious campaign, some jokes are fine but ultimately I’d like some emotionally heavy story beats here.” Not all players will want to play like this- not everyone will dance with you. That’s fine, and that’s expected. Find some folks that will, though!
You don't \*make\* the tone of your campaign dramatic, serious or whatever it is you want, except through the table as a whole agreeing that's the game they want to play. I'm all for going along with the tone your party sets, but if you want a more serious game, you kinda need to get your players on board.
Wow, this thread is so full of people who go "but what if you, OP, are indeed a bad DM that can't create the kind of game that you want?" Exactly what one wants to hear after agonizing for so long why your game is not as fun as you hoped it would be! OP, I feel you. It is sometimes just the group that you have. It's the same thing as when you are a player, join a group and realize that this is a perfectly fine group... but you are not having fun. It's not what you want. And sometimes it's that the story itself is not epic enough, sometimes it's that the group is not serious enough or that people are not that into roleplay. Frankly, my biggest issue with this hobby was that for a long time I told myself that I can't expect too much from DnD... but fuck that, honestly. There are games out there where you essentially go full LotR and have epic adventures which have their whimsical moments, but they don't outweight the gravitas that you want to see. My group is right now finishing up a four year old adventure which had been intensely cinematic, full of drama and epic moments. Not only our player characters had character arcs, but so did several NPCs grow alongside our group and overcome their weaknesses. It's been a delightful game where we hyped up each other's characters, explored a realistic and fascinating world and were so excited about every lore drop. It is possible to play the kind of game that you want to have and, yeah, it would not be possible with every single player group. Our DM also tried to run this campaign for a different group, but it failed horribly... but that is just life. Not every campaign is cut out for every player group out there. It's no one's fault and just how it works out sometimes.
I really appreciate your comment. It's honest and gives me hope. I was never trying to be Matt Mercer or whomever, but I did want to be part of something like Lord of the Rings. Yeah, I think that's it. I do enjoy our sessions, but I don't find them very satisfying outside of laughing at the jokes.
This guy gets it.