This has also come up in a Discord server that I’m on lately. And I think it’s a good time to talk about how much or how little work you need to do. As a semi-seasoned Dungeon Master, I’m hoping that my experience can help get more people into running Dungeons and Dragons. But also save the effort that so many people put into it.

KISS

Keep it Simple Stupid. We’ve all seen this before, but doing something like creating a campaign can be tricky. And for a lot of gamers and people, there is an idea that you can get it “right”. This is not something that anyone can do. In fact, that is some of the charm of Dungeons and Dragons or an RPG, there isn’t a perfect way to do it. There isn’t a most ideal campaign to run that everyone is going to love. Dungeons and Dragons is a matter of taste.

With that said, don’t over prepare, don’t plan out everything. Your players will not do what you think they will. You want them to go right out of a town to a dungeon, they will go left. You want them to talk to a shop keeper for a clue, they will punch them. They shouldn’t attack an ancient black dragon at level 3, they will. In fact, you can be confident your players will do what they shouldn’t or what you least expect. So don’t over plan.

Three Things For Your First Campaign

While I could give you a lot of things to think about when it comes to a campaign. I want to make my advice follow the KISS methodology as well. So build your world small and out as you go. Know where you want to end the campaign. And only craft situations and scenarios that you need.

Start Small

This is really trap #1 when creating a campaign. I even fall into it at times. I create a whole world and think that I need to flesh out everything. But that is way more than is needed. Firstly, your players won’t go to the whole world. Secondly, you don’t need to know it all now.

In fact, let’s make it even simpler. If you want some rules for creating the world. Draw out a map, mark down 10 things on it, 5 cities, and 5 features. There is your world. Then pick one of those cities, that is where you are starting. Create 5 things of importance in it. One needs to be a tavern and one needs to be a shop. The other three are points of interest. Right down what makes those places interesting. And write down 3-4 NPC (non-player characters) the PC’s (player characters) can find there.

Then with four other points of interest on the map. Write down what makes them interesting and NPC’s who can be found there, again only 3-4. You won’t name shops, or anything like that at those other locations, you are just fleshing out a very little bit. And you have enough to start your campaign at that point.

Know The End

Well, enough world building it is. You do need one more thing. You need to know the end goal. In my Tower of the Gods campaign, that is to make it to the top of the tower. In another campaign I ran, it was to defeat a beholder. Know the end goal, it seems obvious, but a lot of campaigns don’t know the end. Or they come up with the idea of running 20 level campaign and don’t think about how to get there. But knowing the end is important so you have a goal.

Create Situations

Because that goal is what you then use to shape your campaign encounters, both social and combat. It is the lens that you filter the campaign through in such a way that everything, or most everything drives towards that end. But when creating these situations, don’t create them with a specific result in mind. Like I said, building out a dungeon that is to the left when you leave the city and the players head right, that’ll always happen. Attacking a monster they were supposed to talk to, they’ll do that, and then they’ll do the flip. Threating the King instead of making a deal with him, for sure that’ll happen.

In the end, you want the situations and scenarios you create to always move stuff forward. And you want them to feel varied and different. It might be killing the monster, but why are you killing the monster. And monsters will do different things. Social encounters you want some of them to be shaking down someone and some might be at a fancy dinner. But they should all move the story towards the end, or at least the majority should.

And you don’t plan these at the beginning. You shouldn’t need to know every session that far in advance. This is what you plan before each game. This means that you do work for a long time, but it also means that you don’t do so much work that you burn out at the start. It’s doing the work just when you need it.

What Else?

There is a whole lot more that you can do. But the point is that you don’t need to do it. I am trying to give you a simple way to getting your first campaign. Could you build out a world and create every important NPC that you players might run into. Sure, you could. But that isn’t going to be help for getting a game started. In fact, if you try and do that you will never get the game started. There will always be another NPC, another town, another scenario to think of. Instead, KISS and just do what you need, when you need it.

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.
Support us on Patreon here.

Thrain and Barrai spooked by the noise decided to book it towards the direction of the mess hall. There they run into a stone wall and Barrai thinks it’s a dead end but Thrain, with his dwarven eyes study it and see that there appears to be a single stone, large, that looks like it’s loose that he could push out of the way. It takes some effort and Barrai’s help but they push the door out of the way and they see that they are in the cellar where they were supposed to have gone for shelter during the dragon attack.

Bokken thinking that everything is good leaves Sanphire up in the tower after their dagger throwing competition and heads back into the mess hall through the kitchen. In the kitchen he is caught by Narius. But Narius, after having gotten beaten up by their group once decides not to fight him and just finishes drinking his water. Bokken settles down watching the door for the night.

Thrain and Barrai thinking that they are being smart decide to loop back around, sneaking outside to see whom they can see who was following them down the tunnel. They make it to a corner and they see Sanphire, out of the tower where he had been keeping watch, going to pick up the two daggers. One of the daggers is lying by the trapdoor which is propped ever so slightly open by a piton. Barrai, thinking quickly, decides to try and cast sleep on Sanphire. However, the spell doesn’t seem to have an affect on him, instead there is a thump from down inside the tunnel and Sanphire notices the trapdoor and the piton. He throws open the trapdoor and messages Tormin. Tormin sees the trapdoor and looks surprised by it. He wakes up the other teachers and they all come out. Barrai, watching the proceedings notices that neither the teachers Dadellous or Linken seem surprised or as surprised as they should be by the trapdoor. Or at least as surprised as Assendial and Tormin did. Barrai and Thrain sneak back inside.

Inside they go back to sleep and are awakened early in the morning by Assendial and Tormin who wake up all the students. Tormin tells them about the secret tunnel and that something was found underneath the barracks where the dragon had attacked and where Castillia had gotten her leg broken. They then tell the students that they are going to question them one by one and start on that process while Linken and Dadellous continue to study the tunnels.

Bokken is the first to go in to be questioned. He steps in and realizes that the room has had some spell cast on it, a zone of truth, and that he has to tell the truth, not Liar Liar style but he cannot right out lie. Assendial is sitting there and she asks him if he knew about the tunnel or any secret passage prior to Tormin telling them about it. He answers truthfully that he did. She asks him what entrance to it he knew of, he answers truthfully. She pulls out four items, a necklace, a scarab, an amulet, and rock with runes etched into it, she asks him if he knows which was found down in the tunnel underneath the barracks. He answers truthfully that he doesn’t.

Barrai is next, and he also fails his saving throw against the zone of truth. Realizing this he hems and haws a bit about it. Assendial asks him to clarify if he knew about it, and he hems and haws some more. She next asks him where an entrance is, he gives a vague answer but not a lie about how a place as old as this there are probably several entrances. Finally she asks him which of the items was under the barracks. He guesses that a dragon would probably want the items that have the most value and that the necklace, amulet and scarab are all golden. Or maybe it’s the rune covered rock because that’s different.

Parrag goes in next followed by Thrain. Thrain who has a very high charisma doesn’t fail the saving throw and he and Assendial know it. She asks him if he knows about the tunnel, he answers truthfully that he does. She asks him if he knows where they are or if he’s been down in there. He successfully deceives her that he knows less about the tunnels and where they go then he actually does. She pulls out the items and asks him about them, about their origins, which was found under ground, what he knows about their magical properties. Thrain is 100% truthful with her that he really doesn’t know much about them. She believes him.

Everyone else is sent back into a large group except for Narius, Addrus, Barrai and two second year students. They are all brought into one room together with all the teachers and are asked a couple of questions, the first that they had to write down was how many different directions the tunnel splits at it’s single junction point. Narius says outloud 4, but had written down 2. Addrus says 4 and has written down 4, Barrai says 4 and has written down 4, one second year has said 4 and written down 4, the last one has written down “?” and says 4. Next they are asked where the four directions of the tunnel go. The first 2nd year just writes down “I don’t know” and says “I don’t know”, the next one says “Moody’s Bar, the field, the cellar, and the tower” and has written that down. Barrai has written down “Not not the field, not not the cellar, not not somewhere fun, and not not somewhere awesome” and says that. Addrus gives the same answer the second year who knew all the directions. Narius, on the other hand, gives all the right answers but only had written down “the field, the food, and the drink”.

The two second years are let out of the room as is Barrai while Narius and Addrus are kept in the room to answer more questions.

The group decides to go to Moody’s bar, since they assume that the trapdoor and the hidden door into the cellar will be blocked off for good now, and they should try and find another way in. Moody’s Bar is the one where the fighting circle that Barrai and Thrain had made some money before, and they had seen Sanphire and Esmelda fight. Bokken decides to give them a good cover as they search around. Barrai and Thrain spot Zaphir, an older student from another school whom they’d swindled before in a fixed fight. They go up to him and see if he wants to bet with them on the Bokken fight. He recognizes them and knowing that they had taken his money before, he orders two beers, plus he has one in front of him. When the beers arrive, he takes one in each hand and smashes them into the faces of Barrai and Thrain. A bar fight ensues and Thrain unleashes an eldritch blast on him, plus hex damage and takes him down. The bartender kicks them out of the bar so that they don’t get in more trouble since technically Zaphir started it, and they head out just until Zaphir is gone. Then they sneak back in wearing fake moustaches (a Dwarf and a Tiefling) and join the crowds who are getting ready for the first fight. They get their program which has the betting odds and see they can get 5 for one on Bokken, slightly worse than normal first time fighters. So Thrain puts down two gold and Barrai puts down 10 gold, that he’d stolen off of Zaphir. And the announcer came out….

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the week night fights…. Let’s get ready to rumble………”

Behind the DM’s screen:

Most of this session was ad libbed. I had some plans for them down in the tunnels, but because of choices that were made, mainly Bokken heading back when he did and not picking up the daggers things changed. Had he picked up the daggers even, they could have gone through the cellar, come back around, and repeated the process. I’m assuming they would have been the ones to find the odd object in the tunnel under the barracks, instead of the teachers. And that was going to be my main plan, things clearly went differently.

One thing that was a lot of fun was the Zone of Truth just to see the different tacts and different successes for passing. I like how Zone of Truth works where you know as the person who is in it what is happening so you can talk around the truth, but the caster also knows if you pass or fail. It makes for some interesting moments in gaming.

And Zaphir being at the bar was totally something the players asked about. So the fact there was a bar fight is on them, Zaphir survived to fight another day.

We’ll have a few weeks off now from any more Tower of the Gods. I’m in the midst of moving and seeing as this is remote, I’m not sure when I’ll have my computer and full set-up ready to go again.

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.

Combat

Often this is the main pillar that a lot of D&D games rely on. If you are used to playing with a play grid and with minis, you’re going to have a lot of combat. Also, so much of the character sheet and skills you get from a class are built for combat as well. You’re casting fireball, that’s for combat. Critical hit on a 19 or 20, that’s for combat. Sneak Attack, that’s for a quick combat. But we have sections for hit points, armor class, weapons and spells, most of that is going to be used mainly in combat situations, now because we’re interacting with someone peacefully. And because of that, even if you aren’t trying to use minis on a grid, to fully use the character sheet, most sessions will have some combat in them.

Social Interaction

Probably the next most used pillar. This can just be talking with the “quest giver” in the tavern before you go out to fight someone or something to get the MacGuffin back for the that NPC. However, you can set-up situations where social interaction is just digging for information from a lot of people. An example of this was the last session of Tower of the Gods (you can read about it here). In there, I presented the problem to the players, two of their classmates are spies put in by the school itself as part of a test. It’s the job of everyone in the class to figure out who the spies are or the spies to not to be found. That lead to the players interacting with almost all of their classmates. There wasn’t anything in particular that the players were trying to get out of it, they were just trying to trip up any of the other classmates to see if they could figure out anything that would give them information. So that’s another way that you can end up with social encounters as well.

Exploration

The hardest pillar to implement, going and exploring the world. It seems like it should be pretty easy, but walking across miles of wilderness looking for a long lost cave system where there’s allegedly treasure, that isn’t that exciting. The common answer is to drop in combat, so you “explore” for five minutes with a couple of dice rolls and then a random encounter happens, they come across a pack of wolves or a boar charges them or a group of goblins shoots arrows at them. But that’s not really part of the exploration, it’s part of the combat pillar. And if you spend twenty or thirty minutes of real time going through everything and having them roll for survival to navigate and explore and not get turned around every half hour of in world time, it’ll end up being a fairly dull twenty to thirty minutes because not much will have happened. Or they’ll end up frustrated because rolls haven’t gone well and now they are lost. Now, exploration could be exploring a dungeon as well, which would still lend itself to being combat a lot, but gives you a different sort of setting rather than wandering through a land.

So, the upcoming articles, three of them, are going to be looking at the three pillars of Dungeons and Dragons. I’m going to tackle how you can make them work and what interesting twists you can put on them so that a combat doesn’t feel as static or so that your exploration has a sense of adventure to it more than just a random encounter waiting to pop up around the corner. With that, I’m going to try and create unique encounters that you’re able to use in your own game, or maybe I’ll drop into mine, that’ll give the players an interesting challenge.

But before we do that, I want to talk about how and if you should balance the pillars of Dungeons and Dragons so that they are even for your game. I think the idea that it’s three pillars that D&D is built upon would make you think they need to be even. They really don’t. The most important thing is to balance it to your group. If you think they are going to like to explore dungeons and solve the mysteries of them, lean on exploration, if they talk to everyone that they meet to see what information they might have, lean on social interaction. If they are built for fighting and everything is min-maxed, they probably want a lot of combat to show off their characters. You can easily have one be more important and take more of the weight than the others.

Now, with that said, don’t only rely on a single pillar. If all you’re really doing is marching from combat to combat and it isn’t a war based story where the players are part of the army so of course just going from battle, you’re going to want to change it up. Throw in a little bit of role playing and some social interactions so that there’s something between the combats. Or send them off on a mission that requires them to explore and figure out a cave system that might lead underneath the city that they are about to lay siege to. It pushes the players to fully engage with the game, even for the people who love an epic social interaction, if that’s all that any of the sessions are, it’s going to end up being monotonous, so don’t over use the party’s favorite thing.

Which of the pillars do you find easiest to use in your games? Is there one that you prefer or your players prefer, if you’re running the game?

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

Email us at nerdologists@gmail.com
Message me directly on Twitter at @TheScando
Visit us on Facebook here.