Dungeons and Dragons – Project Work by Shane P.

Thoughts for low prep, impromtu games

January 25, 2025 ShaneLeave a comment

I read a blog post recently, which I’ll have to try and dig out from my NetNewsWire again. Though, it wasn’t entirely about what I was excited about.

The article was talking about how some modes of TTRPGs are underserved, compared to sword and sorcery. They listed a few other thoughts, but the part I cared most about was the self-directed nature of some adventures that the players could go on.

Returning ‘gold as experience’, adventurers would mostly go plundering without too much concern about impact on a story. It tightens the normal adventure loop up to just Find Job -> Complete Job -> Loot -> Spend Loot.

The article talked about this kind of gameplay having a high casualty rate for characters. That’s much less of an issue because their emotional ties to world aren’t that great: the intent of the game is to fight things and take their stuff. A number of people in my group like making new character concept, so they probably wouldn’t mind some fast-levelling-fast-dying. They’d enjoy the opportunity to go through character creation again.

An issue I keep having as a DM is that I pick up ‘one shot’ slots in my group rotation and when the game inevitably runs over a single session, everyone really wants to get back into the regular campaign (including me!), so my stories never really get finished.

This world wouldn’t worry to much about that though. Since it’s probably just one Long Rest in length, it will most likely only last one session. There’s no real story to round off nicely and no need to set up a cliffhanger or tension for the next time we play. The intent would be to stick to that tight loop, completing it one evening.

There would be very little need to remember what happened last session, which could have been days or months ago. All the history that needs to be kept is the party’s inventory and the state of the base. Stuff that’s already kept on the character sheet anyway.

On the other side of that coin, preparation will only take a few moments too. An available battle map makes up the environment and there are a few encounter builders around to make a fun battle.

Game play flow chart

January 3, 2025 ShaneLeave a comment

This comes from the OSR subreddit (via QuestingBeast’s newsletter) and I think it’s a great idea for adventure writing.

The original author was considering this for a table of contents, which I think would be a misstep. It is a really nice, evocative piece of work though.

Loadouts

November 3, 2023 ShaneLeave a comment

“Did anyone remember to buy a healers kit?”

There are some situations where characters would behave smarter than their players. That’s why we have passive checks and other checks to see if the character thinks (or even remembers) something the player doesn’t.

One of those situations is remember to leave the house with their winter coat when in the middle of the darkest months. It’d be cruel for a DM to suggest that since the player didn’t specifically say, “I’m going to dress up warm,” that the character would be wandering around in a t-shirt and shorts.

Similarly, when you are on floor four of a mine, where the job was to collect a few diamonds, only to realise that no one noted down a pickaxe, the group should be given the benefit of the doubt. Obviously the character would have considered this and picked one up.

Full disclosure: I’ve not actually read Blades in the Dark, and only know it from the Adventure Zone, but it has a nice system for this kind of thing. Before setting off on an adventure, the players decide what loadout they’d like to take. I believe these are along the lines of light and heavy.

The items in those loadouts aren’t decided immediately, but are decided in the adventure as they’re needed. If you’re going in light you can get away with a small handgun or an iron file or some such. Small things. Too many small things will eventually add up to a heavy load, so at some point you can no longer add more things.

A heavy load means you can start pulling out great axes and whatnot. The downside here is that (even before you’ve decided on what items there are) people around you will know you’re packing. Suspicions are going to be raised pretty quickly.

These loadouts might cost an upfront payment, but making the group pay for the items at the end might be more fun, adding a push-your-luck mechanic. Shall we splash out on a Scroll of Detect Lies now? What if it reveals nothing? What if the dungeon is a bust and the PCs end up going into debt? Drama! Tension! Oooh!

The DM can of course have final ruling on what a loadout contains. Maybe it doesn’t make sense for the PC to be carrying a glass making kit. It’s important to remember rule one of being a good DM though: at the end of the day, your job is to make the players feel like their characters are heroes. If that means they pull the perfect macguffin out their ass and it makes for a cool scene, then why on earth not.

What brings you here? Helping players buy in to your game.

June 14, 2023 ShaneLeave a comment

If you’re running a one shot, it’s more than okay to drop your PC’s at the entrance to a dungeon and forcibly push them in. On more long lived games though, you’ll want to make sure there’s a reason for the player characters to stick around (rather than returning to their family, their job, or just deciding to call the town guard to handle it). It’s important to the PC’s to know their motivation.

On the flip side, it’s important for players to remember that they’re there to play a game. In most RPGs, you should be building a Hero or at least an Adventurer At Heart who’s eager to throw themselves into a quest with very loose reasoning. “Of course I’ll help! I’m just that kind of half-elf.”

DM and player should meet in the middle here and come up with something fitting and fun. Often, “you were looking for a job – here’s one” is all it takes. But what if you want a little more ramp up to this?

Fortunately, there are some very easy ways for getting buy-in from even the most reluctant of characters and to find out something about them along the way.

Time to pay back that favour. This may be my favourite for a couple of reasons: a) the quest giver can be morally ambiguous, and yet still be owed a debt from the PCs, and b) it sets up a back story for the PC’s and helps them decide their flaw.

In my run of Maze of the Blue Medusa, the initial quest giver was Twisted Wrought Iron, a kenku and master forger. Session zero was a meeting where the party had been summoned and we went around the group with the question “what favour did Twisted do for you that means you own him one?” We kept going around the group and iterating on each others backstories until everyone had a good reason to need to do this job. And, many of the characters “realised” they knew each other too.

Duty calls. What ever the character’s backstory, they lived in a full world before. There’s certainly going to be some person in their lives which you as the DM can exploit. Nobles are often sent off on jobs by their higher ups, and there’s little they can do about it. Holy people are sent on missions.

Remember to ask them how that conversation went, and to describe the authority figure that sent them. That’s some meaty plot there!

Factions are a big deal across the Forgotten Realms, and outside of Faerun you’ll find plenty of allegiances and secret groups. Getting your PCs to join or align with one of these makes plot hooks very easy.

“You’re not the first party we’ve sent on this quest”. You can put this into any adventure with little modification. The buy in here is easy: your sister was in that first party! When the party eventually find the butchered remains of their loved ones, they have a sudden and equally powerful revenge or justice motive.

How did your last adventure go? This may be a brand new character, but this might not be there first adventure. This is a good way to have characters in the group already know each other too. Whatever they say, try to work in a hint towards this adventure. Maybe it was all leading to this, right now.

DMs, note: You don’t have to improvise everything. Get the players to help out.
Finding the character buy-in should be a process the entire group is taking part in. You don’t have to look like a master improvisor. Listen to what your players are hoping to play and lean into that. Let them create whole narratives that are happening outside of the story you’re hoping to tell. Feed off of that, and try to bring it into the adventure.
They’ll be surprised and excited when you ask them “can you tell me more about this god you worship? are they popular? are they the main god of the realm?”

Published adventure hooks. Most 5e adventures, certainly all the published ones, have an ‘adventure hooks’ and/or a ‘backgrounds’ section. These shouldn’t be shrugged at and there’s a lot to be learned in them. One in Elemental Evil picks a villain from the adventure and puts the PC specifically on a quest to hunt the villain down. (Since you’re here, you may as well finish what you started and carry on with the adventure!) Storm King’s Thunder describes how to get PC’s from their previous adventures to the story of the giants.

Give the gift of Taking Notes

May 3, 2023 Shane1 Comment

The Tuesday Group, where I’m a player, are on the cusp of finishing Horror on the Orient Express. A very good adventure, which has spanned much more than a year of sessions. 39 sessions and counting. In that time we’ve travelled through a lot of Europe, both west and east and done a lot of investigating.

The investigations often have a lot of exciting twists and turns as we realise that that person is actually the same person as that other person!. When those beats hit, they hit really good and the table gets very excited about it. However, after two years of playing we can’t possibly remember every character’s name, so we turn to our notes.

Playing Cthulhu more than any game has shown me the importance of taking good notes. The investigative mechanics mean you’re given a lot of information that you can’t possibly remember. Dates of when someone died, dates of when they were last seen (often many years after they’d died), and first mentions of cults, the kinds of injuries cult members are likely to have.

Not everyone’s notes are complete. Often it won’t be clear that the tidbit you’ve just heard is important, so it doesn’t get written down. But between you all, hopefully, someone has written it down. There’s excitement in that moment too. “Oh, I remember this. I have half a note about it from session six. Does anyone else have anything?” The flicking through pages is full of anticipation.

Hitting a wall in the investigation happens too. Fairly often actually. But if the DM steps in too quickly at that point, the game begins to be lead by the DM and not the players (an important principle in investigation games). The leads don’t actually have to match up with what’s in the DM’s adventure: the DM is looking for any excuse to give you more information, the players just have to lead the DM to those excuses. With that in mind, keeping a list of potential ideas noted down is crucial. Did you check the newspaper? Ask the hotel clerk for anything interesting going on? (Although, we probably went back to the cement factory more often than was useful.)

I’m certain I’m not the only one that struggles to pay attention the whole time whilst playing ttrpgs whilst at my computer. I’ve found that taking notes keeps me actively playing even when I’m not part of the scene playing out. There’s always something to be writing down which may help in the future – you never know what you’ll miss in a game like CoC.

All the above is fine the player, but it’s wonderful for the DM. It’s disheartening when a world has been finely crafted, only for your players to forget about it later on. The twists aren’t noticed and clues have to be crude. I think it’s really fun for the DM when the players can have a conversation amongst themselves about the world being weaved. It shows player buy-in which is all a DM is ever striving for.

It’s always endlessly useful when a player can answer a lore question before the DM has time to look back a hundred pages to find it. “Does anyone remember [the throw away] name of the train driver from six sessions ago?” “Yep – I wrote five full pages of notes about him.” What a delight for a DM that didn’t realise that Trevor the Train Conductor was going to be a major character.

Write notes – you’ll enjoy it!

There are two other ways you can be a good player over on slyflourish.