7 tips to help your D&D sessions soar.
Some basic and straightforward methods for Dungeon Masters to raise the intensity of any D&D adventure or campaign
You’ve had good, medium, and even a few poor games as a Dungeon Master. It might be difficult to know what to do when things don’t go as planned, or when a player or DM does something that knocks you off balance.
For the game masters and those taking part in their first sessions as players, Dungeons & Dragons may generate dread and trepidation, but also great excitement.
We enjoy the idea that D&D provides an ever-changing universe with shifting stories and that we have power over what occurs. But at the same time, your hunger might ruin a session by making you study regulations, resulting in you losing interest and attention.
After all that, here are some advice on how to avoid the pitfalls. These are modifications you may apply to your campaigns and sessions in order to make sure everything in your tale is as thrilling and breathtaking as this game is!
Tip 1: Use Advantage as a means to inspire your players to be more creative.
This solution answers a commonly asked question that Dungeon Masters, and among the most difficult ones to nail, will face. An example of this might be:
It’s a no-brainer. My players start out fighting with their swords, but eventually decide to jump from the building, swing across to the monster, and stab down with their swords.
Combat, or even social encounters, in D&D may get tedious due to repeated rolling of the dice. This complicates the DM’s story building process, and it makes the game less interesting and pleasant for the players.
I use the concept of advantage as a reward mechanism to begin setting expectations from the very beginning of the campaign.
In addition, I prefer to employ a friendly NPC to demonstrate the behavior I want my players to employ in combat.
The first part simply implies this:
Step 1: A player takes some kind of narrative action.
Here’s an example:
I leap off the boulder in front of me, and drive my blade into the kobold’s neck.
This is the type of narrative activities you want to promote from your players, therefore I’ve always done this:
The next step is to roll a check related to the activity.
Roll a basic athletics or acrobatics check to determine how well you jump off the rock in front of you. set the DC value Next, you may tell the story, and continue on to step 3:
“DC10 check” 18 rolled Leaping from the boulder in front of you, you charge straight for the jugular of the Kobold.
It’s easier to strike with your sword.
What did you see? A storyline-progressive choice was taken, with favorable results. They were also given a +1 to hit. This is the third step.
Step 3: Give the player the ability to hit, depending on whether they passed the check or not.
This reward system is flexible, so sometimes you may want to reward critical hit damage, and other times you may want to award something different. By taking advantage, it is possible to construct this risk/reward system.
As a result of anything they accomplished in the plot, this player would now receive advantage to hit the Kobold.
It should take only a few sessions for this to become a learnt behavior, where your players will actively seek for opportunities to exploit their advantages in various narratives.
Players:
If you’re a player in this case, speak to your DM to see if they would agree. Nary a DM would willingly choose monotonous and repetitive story styles.
There is no harm in leveraging the rules of the game to urge everyone to make decisions that will improve the excitement and fun of the session.
Tip 2: Set clear party and personal goals by using storytelling.
This advice has to be part of your campaign or story’s basis. The participants should have a “big quest” (the reason they came together) and a “personal quest” (the motivation for their character development).
These aims should be evident and well-defined. The goals do not have to be exact or spot-on from the player’s perspective, but they should at least be easy for the players to utilize to help them orient themselves in your universe.
Goals can be added to a campaign or story arc at any moment.
Personally, I prefer to have a clearly defined party aim as early as possible, make it clear and evident, and then dump in as much information as possible (memories, flashbacks, NPC encounters, weird events, objects, etc) on each character that advances them individually.
Here’s an excellent illustration of how a campaign’s initial aim may be stated clearly and rapidly. This one is a lot like Baldur’s Gate 2…
You awaken in an unfamiliar location. You ache all over. By standing in a hanging cage, you witness other humanoids confined in their own cages, suspended above walkways that run through damp, gloomy prison rooms. The shadows thrown by the flickering candlelight flutter over the stone walls. Your recollection is hazy. You observe a humanoid person in a crimson hooded robe approaching your cage, with a snake crest on the chest. Is everyone okay today?” “Good work.”
What are you known for?
Setting the atmosphere with the parties beforehand, but also giving them a clear and quick instruction, is how this works.
Why are you in captivity?
An evocative story point, or visual marker, was also established because of it. The snake-like crest: What organization is this and what are they doing?
Then you may include hints and discoveries about your objective in the dungeon the players are escaping from. Always have these 3 pearls of wisdom in mind:
Write these aims into your narrative?
Backwards. To put clear goals into the tale of your campaign, try starting at the end. Consider what your goals could be, and then imagine the kind of circumstance that might motivate you to achieve those goals.
So, the aim is to discover out why people in a town or hamlet are being possessed in their sleep.
When you have just started a campaign, one or two of your players may wake up from their rooms at the tavern and bump into each other as they leave, and then investigate, discovering the other party members, sleepwalking and possessed, all walking together out of the town’s gates into the forest.
Additional plot points and markers might be added later. Maybe everyone with the identical bite mark on their neck was being possessed. Perhaps the perpetrator of this murder is now being apprehended for the crime. Maybe the guards are inquiring about, and putting out ‘missing person’ signs, having been notified by a spouse, wife, or friend that someone was gone.
Tip #3: Create opportunities for taking an alternate approach
Encouraging participants to consider different approaches to scenarios is excellent.
Even for a basic interaction, there are lots of ways to inspire creativity.
Think about what it will take to implement the idea, and then go into depth about how they will solve the many difficulties that crop up.
Tip 4: Speeding up or narrating the scene changes
This technique might be hard to pace right, but once you can identify where a portion of the story would be tedious or may take longer to play through, you can start narrating over these parts rather than trudging through an uninteresting section of the story.
Your players won’t notice when you do it right, but it’s important to find a way to accomplish it without removing your players’ freedom of choice.
The village was invaded by elementals after a recently opened elemental rift resulted in the players’ abandonment of the area. The NPC accompanying them recommended somewhere that would be secure for them to relax and conceal.
I knew this path was over-trodden territory; they had previously traversed it in the past. The gamers and I both knew the path was clear, and the experience wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining to repeat.
Here’s an example of where this suggestion works well. I only recounted the group’s trip from start to finish. Instead of having a frustrating trip of little real benefit, we could cut to the chase and focus on the portions of the story arc that I knew the players were involved in, and that I knew I had spent more time describing.
Music should be varied to keep things interesting.
For me, music is essential to the whole D&D experience. There’s nothing like the proper music to get everyone into the session, and picking the right music may create more vivid mental imagery.
To keep things interesting, alter the music from one workout to the next.
Select various musical genres and then select music for fighting of various types, and select evocative and emotive music for scene/plot-advancing momentous tale developments.
If you are able to keep an open mind when it comes to selecting music for your session, you will have an abundance of choices to choose from. No lutes required.
Go beyond the generic soundtracks to discover tons of interesting ones like electronic, horror, or video game soundtracks.
instructing
Organize your music as you choose for your sessions. Playlists are great since you can customize them based on mood. Some people prefer playlists organized by area and theme/music type. A cold northern dwarf city could feature Celtic music, while a woodland in the underdark has a harsher, more gritty sound.
I prefer to group my sessions into ‘Chapters’. For each chapter, I set up a playlist for different circumstances and interactions, which I’ve planned ahead of time.
Also, in a session, we arrived in a little fishing village. In the nearby woods were a number of Kobolds that had just moved in, as well as an ancient tomb that linked to the broader campaign plot (that the Kobolds had overrun and were now using as their base of operations). Besides this, a neighboring, but extremely detested, bandit community had banded up with a few townspeople to assist them in locating their children, allowing them to sneak through mine tunnels into the hamlet to access it. The playlists’ content included this:
Chapter 5: Town
Chapter 5: The tavern.
Chapter 5: Fighting
Chapter 5: The tomb:
Chapter 5: The burial chamber of the King
Chapter 5: The jungle.
Chapter 5: Bandit camp
Chapter 5: Mines.
For all of the playlists, it will seem thematically coherent for the storyline and plot.
And I know what music will be playing and when to change it the entire time.
This feature also lets you to select different music for each session/chapter, so that your players are never listening to the same lute instrument for long periods of time.
Also, reminiscing about your favorite playlists from memorable sessions is always enjoyable. With Spotify streaming, you can make playlists that players may access after each play session.
Tip 6: Don’t let your adversaries’ motives or actions be hidden.
No one ever asks, “Why?” We all do it. Did something extraordinary happen? Why? What was unusual during your day? Why? There is some loud music next door at 2am? WHY!
In general, we’re empathic beings, and as humans we care about the well-being of others, even those we know and love. We also want to know why.
This holds true in the case of your opponents and campaigns’ ultimate bosses.
The rule of here is to ensure that players are curious as to WHY.
Demonstrate, describe, and provide specific information about what is occurring or what someone is doing.
For this, see here:
The bandits in the campsite give you one of their huts to sleep in for the night, offering to assist you discover the missing children in the morning. You spend the night in the hut.
Make a sleep Perception check
Waking up, you see that one of the bandits tied up your companions and another bandit group was exiting the hut with your possessions and weapons.
Failure: Your arms and legs are bound, and you are all chained together in the middle of the hut floor. Your weapons and equipment are missing. There are no bandits outside the cabin, because the door was open.
In this situation, you know that the bandits enticed the group in, offering drinks and information, and then used the mine tunnels to transfer their things to a merchant in town, who sells stolen goods for cash.
However, to the players, this looks unusual and immediately impacts them. What caused this? And what do we do now?
Controlling your narrative’s adversaries is the key to keeping your plot moving and achieving any results.
Write a brief recap, and read each session’s recap to the group.
This is my favorite tip and the one that receives the most evident positive feedback from the gamers I DM for.
A recap is a useful tool. The show spends the first few minutes going over the events from the previous episode.
Probably your players have forgotten much of what happened in the past session. They’re especially likely to have forgotten those small instances where someone rolled a perfect 20 or dealt a spectacular finishing blow.
Create a brief review of the session’s major story points and events, and read it to your group to get everyone started for the next session.
Eventually, your group will look forward to the next session, as well as the review as a means of reliving all that transpired in the prior session.
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And here’s what you wanted! Here are seven tips that will ensure your D&D games are epic. Take care, and have fun!
Originally posted by Chris Ashby at https://medium.com/creative-scatterbrain/7-tips-to-make-your-dungeons-dragons-sessions-incredible-69c9ab57a1a