Common Worldbuilding Mistakes in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

as a DM designing your campaign world can be one of the most daunting and one of the most rewarding tasks to take on there's a lot to consider when you're getting started over the years we had designed many of our own homebrew Dungeons & Dragons settings and game worlds and we've made quite a few mistakes along the way suffered from our own pitfalls setbacks and roadblocks and even had a few complete and total disasters so we're gonna talk about ways you can avoid them yourself my name is Monte Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our show where we discuss everything Dungeons & Dragons including advice for Dungeon Master's and in-depth guides for players we air new episodes every Thursday so please subscribe so that you never miss an episode today we're gonna be focusing on the common world building mistakes the dungeon masters make when they set out to make their own home brew campaign world there's a lot to talk about so let's get rolling as I set out to talk about creating fantasy worlds one of the first things to remember is that it is always a labor of love and as such it's your own artistic creation which means that you're the final authority on it no matter what anyone says we're here to give you useful tips and tricks that have worked very well for us there might be different ways that you want to do things at your table we're here to look at some of the rules and guidelines that we've used to structure our game worlds one of my teachers once said that we teach you the rules so that you can break them properly and that's one thing that we're looking at when building our worlds is what rules do we use to structure them and if we want to break those rules how can we do it in a good way speaking of rules and guidelines many Dungeon Master's draw inspiration and even methodologies from world building techniques that are used in literature novels screenwriting and more but the important thing to bear in mind is that Dungeons & Dragons game worlds work a little bit differently than the world building that you might want to do for something like a novel because it is an interactive experience and you're creating a world that players are going to be inhabiting in a very direct and hands-on way which is different from creating a world that might be for a novel that you're writing when you're writing a novel you as the writer are in complete control of all of the characters and the directions that they go in a game of D&D the players are gonna make their own choices and they are going to change the world so you need to be a little more open-ended with your ideas and the way you construct your game world this is why one of the biggest pitfalls and mistakes the dungeon masters make when creating their worlds causes so many problems and that is over preparation over preparation is the number one reason why as a brand new DM I took on the task of creating my own game world before ever reading a module or other campaign book I over prepared by a long shot and that is what ended up destroying my campaign the fact that I wrote an 80 page novel on every possible thing to the point where my brain was just mush at the idea of what could happen in my campaign world and I couldn't keep track of everything anymore I had to give up on that campaign and move on and it was purely because of over preparation that I failed at my first attempt to design my own campaign world the thing is is that this is a really common experience for first time or brand-new Dungeon Master's and unfortunately it's something that often gets repeated several times over I am blown away by the number of potential Dungeon Master's that I've spoken to who said they can't start their campaign because they aren't finished designing their world and simply put this is not true the amount of detail and work that you need to put into your Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting will never match the amount of detail of a cinematic world that is exist in popular media because there's dozens and hundreds of people working on those worlds and you're just one person because your work is just for you and your players it doesn't need to live up to the same standards that we expect from published and broadcast media of course it's possible that you may have ambitions of one day publishing your campaign setting but you have to remember that even published campaign settings like The Forgotten Realms Dragonlance and Oberon are the products of dozens of writers working together for decades to create a detailed and colorful world not every person out there is going to be JR Tolkien who wrote and created his own universe that scales beyond measure in the ideas of even beyond Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit not everybody can do that and to expect that of yourself will just lead to disappointment the thing is is that even in the case of Tolkien Tolkien's world is incomplete your world will be incomplete and it's possible to tell stories and have amazing experiences even in a world that isn't finished yet and in fact one of the beautiful things about that is that the act of telling these stories and playing in your incomplete world will give it life that it could not have if it had just come from you alone your players will contribute to your world in a beautiful way and if you over prepare your campaign many things in your setting may become stuck in stone in your mind and you'll be unflexible and unwilling to change those things when your players respond to them by leaving gaps that your players can fill in you make less work for yourself and create the opportunity for your world to grow in an organic way also keep in mind that your players don't know what's happening outside of what you've presented to that if your campaign starts in a small town there's no need for you to have already designed the town that's 20 miles away you could design that later once the player characters are heading there all that they need to know about in that moment is the town that in and how the campaign is starting you can start to plan the path that they're gonna go on once the players push the plot in that direction so always keep in mind that you don't need to show more than what you're presenting to your players it's often very easy to want to start designing our worlds by designing a massive map of the entire world that spells out all the continents all the political borders where all the great cities are and all the adventure sites those kind of maps are so much fun to make but they are daunting because once you've drawn one you have to fill the whole thing which is why I myself now tend to avoid creating overarching world maps for my entire setting and I instead focus on creating maps of a city or a town or a small region about the size of a province and I present that to my players as a constraint and I say this campaign is about what happens in the owl surveil this campaign is about what happens in the city of Drakon hein and I keep the campaign focused on the areas that I know that I've created things in because the reality of it is is we can have a detailed and exciting campaign that lasts all the way from level 1 to level 20 and have that campaign set in a single overall location Waterdeep dragon heist and dungeon of the mad mage is an entire level 1 to 20 campaign that happens in one city curse of straw occurs in burrow via a rather small area of Peru via overall that you can walk across in about a week even some of the campaign's that do include a lot of Overland travel don't necessarily include traveling across the entire world I think of tyranny of dragons where you get to tour all around the sword coast visiting some key locations but you never leave that stretch of cities along the sword coast which really just means that you can dumb this all down to like you said a province sized area and that will work it's okay to make point form notes and potential ideas and even if you haven't finished all the details of your setting one of the magical things that you can do is hint at them and even hint of the details that you haven't completed the reason for this is simple in the real world before the advent of global communication and industry while there was a lot of Overland travel and communication between people for many folks what was happening on the other side of the world was a bit of a mystery they might have heard tales of different lands and fantastic cities but those were all rumors hearsay speculation and that once in a while experience when a far traveler would arrive that makes worlds feel larger than life a little bit more real and magical and mysterious and you can use that to your advantage when you're creating your world by hinting at the things that you haven't created yet and presenting them as those far-off distant lands that have yet to be explored now there is some information that you do want to have known to you before you start a campaign this is information that would be relevant to hand out to the players to have them have a better understanding of the world that you're presenting to them this might be some of the key locations they're gonna visit early in the campaign maybe what one or two of the major cities are if there's any NPCs that they might already know at the point that they're starting at that said keep these documents small I tend to restrict myself to maybe one or two pages my players have never read the 30 page lore documents that I've given them and you really want to watch out about exposition and information dumps on your players because a lot of time that information tends to go in one ear and completely out the other respond to the things your players tell you that they're interested in for their characters if one of their player your player says I want to be part of a mage guild that's when you can tell that player about the mage guild in your setting if one of the players say that they want to play a druid and want to be part of a circle that player can then be given the information that's going to be pertinent to creating their own character I've made this mistake many times I have a Facebook group for the the Indy table that I run and every time that they would reach a new location I would post a picture of that location as well as a two to three paragraph blurb about the history the important events what the players might know maybe even pictures of NPCs that they know about in this location and then when they would arrive at the next game I would ask so who saw those pictures and read the history nobody ever did and I realized that I was wasting a whole bunch of time coming up with lore and ideas for all of these things when really the players just wanted to know what they would find out at the table this is another problem with extensive world building and preparation is that you can waste time preparing locations that your players never visit in the first place so make sure that you really be careful to prepare only the things that you anticipate needing I find that many Dungeon Master's feel like they have to be prepared for absolutely anything that happens and that what happens if my players go off in this random direction if they do do that it's okay for you to stop in the moment and say hey you know what my friends I actually haven't prepared anything for that direction if you want to go there maybe we can do a few more things here and give me a week to come back and prepare something it's okay to be honest and your players aren't gonna give you a hard time for that they're gonna be much more understanding than you anticipate the other thing that you can do is one of the most handy tools in my DM tool belt and that is the idea that once again the players not knowing what's outside the invisible wall that you've set for them means that if your plan was to steer them towards the creepy castle to fight a prominent villain but they decide to go wandering into the woods nearby instead you could move that castle from its perch on a mountaintop into the woods if you haven't told them where the castle is yet using this technique you can actually steer your players in the proper direction to push the campaign forward and let them make their own choices on which direction they're going if there's something you haven't presented to the players yet that means that it's not set in stone where is you may have written it on a piece of paper castle in the mountains but your players aren't even going near those mountains there's nothing stopping you from saying okay that's not gonna work this castles now in the forest because that way they'll run into it and we can push the plot forward at the same time be very careful about doing this because it can make your players feel like if you're moving things behind the scenes that they are being forced to go to certain locations a little bit one of the things that you can always remember is that you'll be playing D&D for years to come and if it turns out your players don't want to go in the direction of something that you've prepared well leave that in your notes and maybe you can repurpose it and recycle it in some other way in the future as well part of being a good world builder and a good dungeon master at the same time is being willing to let go of the things that you've made and you find a way to use them later one of the big problems and pitfalls I've run into and that I've seen other Dungeon Master's run into is having this fixation on making sure that your work is completely original and an utterly new idea that will blow your players minds this is so hard to actually do and in my opinion there's nothing new Under the Sun rather I try to take advantage of the fact that the role-playing game will always change and morph whatever I present to my players and I steal as much as I can I love reading adventure modules novels stories watching movies and video games and finding things that I can steal to use as adventures locations sites worlds NPCs and more rather than making sure that everything I create is completely original my notes are filled with things like this character is basically Winston Churchill or this castle is exactly the same as Edinboro castle or these people act a lot like Klingons and I use those as a shorthand to fill in the gaps it's remarkable how much just changing the name and a few little details of the description on something will utterly and completely mutate it into something original don't be afraid to steal things as Dungeon Master and make them your own one of the beautiful things here is that just by taking two ideas that you love and mashing them together you actually end up with something moderately original I remember one time that the two of us were sitting down to come up with a campaign world together and I came to Monte with the idea what if we took Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask and Dark Souls and then mashed them together what me and Monty then did is we took concepts from both of those videogames put a fresh coat of our original ideas overtop of it and came up with a campaign world the remarkable thing about this is that we created a map for a city that ended up being really similar to the map for tallest monte cook city by the spire so I ended up using that book that had been published as a huge amount of the source material for the campaign and that gave me so much material that I could use and then make it my own so whether or not you're looking at books movies video games or published campaign settings be on the lookout for things that you can use to save yourself time this is particularly valuable for things like maps which I guarantee you that location that you're designing a map for someone like Mike Schley or Dyson logos has probably already made a beautiful map that is like 90% of what you want so check out the maps that already exist and see what you can use because ultimately what's happening between you and your players is not yet ready to be published into your own RPG book so if you do have ambitions of publishing your material or sharing it on the dungeon masters guild the things that you're gonna put into your real game don't need to hold up to those standards yet so don't be afraid to use them like that the amount of times that I've spent hours creating my own map of the temple that the players are gonna go into and then afterwards I say what if I google temple maps and I find one that I actually like better than the one I created that's happened to me so many times now that I've just stopped wasting my time and instead I have a folder on my computer of maps that I've grabbed off the internet to throw in at any time if the players go to an end or a castle or a tavern or a temple or a cave I can just open up the folder and say I really like this map this is where they're going now one of the related problems will that this can cause which has happened to me and I am still a long suffering patient of is that when I start getting on Google and doing searches for maps I inevitably start researching things because I'm like why does this map have this room here this sends me down a rabbit hole of researching history science technology architecture so that I can understand these maps but then use them in my game in a convincing and realistic way realism is a massive world building trap I have wasted an inordinately medial demographics making sure my maps are historically accurate my architecture is structurally sound and trying to come up with complex societies worlds locations that would make sense in a realistic scientific historical level and well I love doing this and I have so much fun researching these things in detail I've always been a little bit heartbroken about how little it actually resonates with my players the fact is I know that Monty loves to research all of these types of things and he loves to talk about them when he's DMing and although it does add a certain atmosphere at times he'll start throwing out architectural words about how castles were designed in the medieval era and I have to admit that I've never researched that I've never been a fan of how castles were designed I'm a fan of medieval fantasy but I don't care about how a castle was built structurally sound so when Monty starts describing it and starts using words that were used in the medieval era to describe certain elements he could just use words like murder holes and I go I know what that is or there's a gate in front of you and a drawbridge and a moat and I say neat I get it and that's enough for me yeah even though I've done research about my fantasy cities to make sure that I made a city that could actually be large enough to have a hundred thousand inhabitants I don't think that that's actually occurred to any of my players at any moment that that's a realistically sized City for its population or that the distances between towns are realistic or that the biomes of my weather patterns and the locations of my mountains properly adhere to plate tectonics it's a tremendous waste of time to do all this it's fun but you have to recognize it as a fun waste of your time it might not necessarily be something that truly makes an impact on your players experience I don't need any more than Monte telling me that it's raining to understand that it's raining I don't need to know why or how it's raining in correspondence to the rest of the world also we're dealing with a world that is inhabited with all sorts of bizarre and strange creatures so when we're talking about architecture maybe there's goliaths or half giants or Giants or ogres that exist within these cities why are the streets so wide that doesn't make any sense well maybe there was an ogre that had to push a cart down these roads and that was a common thing in this city I don't know there's so many reasons why things could be drastically different than real life architecture and real life weather and just there's magic and that is precisely our next point is that well realism and technology and historical truth can be a big time sink one of the things that you do need to think about properly in your game for your campaign world is the impact of magic on your society and in your setting and very specifically the specific brand of magic that the D&D rules imply exists in most campaign settings one thing to be very aware of is the power that spellcasters have if you have a very high magic setting where spell casters are commonplace there's a lot of impact that that has on the world in a world full of druids world hunger is going to be a very minor issue if city has a druid that can help the crops grow every season the reason why magic needs to be taken into account but things like population demographics and plate tectonics might not need to be is that magic is a tool that the players will use to solve problems in their game and magic is something that lies at the intersection of your world building and the actual mechanics of the D&D game this is why it's something that needs to be factored into your world building in order to create a world that isn't realistic but one that is internally consistent or has what we call verisimilitude it doesn't matter that your world is realistic but your world does need to make sense and your world needs to make sense within the context of the magical powers that may or may not be commonplace in your setting and having a very clear understanding of exactly how common and widespread magic is in your world is critical to good world building for Dungeons and Dragons another example of a mistake that's very commonly made would be sending the party on a quest where they need to deliver an important letter from one kingdom to the next only to find out that both kingdoms had court Wizards who very well should have known the sending spell these are things that can short-circuit your adventures unexpectedly especially if you present a campaign world that is populated by a large number of high-level non player characters it only takes a handful of wizards to transform the world if you were to take maybe a dozen 10th level wizards and drop them into 14th century Europe the world would become a very different place assuming the Wizards weren't executed for witchcraft but accounting for how only a handful of magic users can radically transform a setting is pretty important I do think it is worth doing a little bit of mental math to decide how magic users are seen in your setting how prevalent they are and how powerful they are for me magic the way it's presented in Dungeons and Dragons is so useful and so potent and so reliable that I really do think that societies need to be your societies need to account for that in some way magic in Dungeons and Dragons is something that is potent reliable and it's a skill that people can learn not necessarily one that there are born with deciding what that means for your campaign world is really going to shape the societies that emerge and how they perceive magic and magical creatures do mages create guilds are there entire nations ruled by cabal of warlocks do elves dwarves orcs and humans live together in harmony or is that a source of conflict our ogres used in large groups to build Titanic buildings which people could not construct otherwise these are all decisions that you can make and the lever that you can pull is really deciding how common or uncommon these creatures are in your world if magic is something that is only born to one and a thousand people then you've got a pretty good justification for why it's rare but if the typical city has at least twenty non-player characters that are the equivalent of 15th level characters it's a very different setting it actually makes a lot of sense for magical worlds to have things like like Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry because in a world where magic exists and you need to learn magic in order to use it properly and it's commonplace it would make sense that there would be several schools throughout the world specifically for spellcasters to go to to learn to harness their powers this might change the way you design your world where are these schools where do people study and learn magic what sort of things are the rules of these spellcasters lerche obviously there would be rules to try to not have any spell casters turn evil how do you steer the spell casters towards a path of good these are all things to consider when you're building your world magic can have a drastic effect and understanding how smell casters are handled and what role they play in your world is of the utmost importance if you're not interested in checking out JK rowling you might want to look at Ursula K Le Guin's a wizard of Earthsea or NK Jasmine's the fifth season for examples of fantasy worlds that integrate magic users with dangerous and unpredictable powers but in really interesting ways that support the setting another major mistake that a lot of people who are just getting into world-building might have is a lot of people like to start with who's my villain who's my big bad guy what is my monstrous event that's going to end the world and then they build out from that but sometimes it's better to look at it the other way many first time Dungeon Master's create a singular monolithic evil force that is the source for all of the problems in the setting their equivalent of Sauron the ultimate force of evil which ultimately must be defeated at the end of the campaign and this concept of creating singular monolithic evil often extends to all the other elements of your worlds which have monolithic and singular societies all the dwarves in your world are the same everybody in this nation believes and thinks and acts the same way this toad this totalitarian government is able to suppress magic unfailingly and they never mess it up there is a great divine emperor that rules the entire world with an iron fist and rebellion never works against them it's important to remember that not everyone will think and act the same way and particularly with the presence of evil in your campaign worlds one of the things to remember that that people that are selfish and evil don't necessarily work well with each other even established institutions don't exert perfect control not everyone in a society always believes and acts in the exact same way exceptions to things in your world are really really useful and I find that having a singular monolithic evil as being the ultimate problem of your entire campaign setting can be a little bit limiting and sometimes the pitfall that this creates is that Dungeon Master's generate a ton of awesome things to happen at the high level of the campaign because obviously you can only have that big bad ultimate force of evil that's the source of all the problems in your world they can only be fought and defeated at the end of your campaign and the result of doing this is that you as a Dungeon Master end up preparing a bunch of content that is going to be directed at your highest level characters things that your players won't get to for years and years and years and you neglect all of the things in between and this is what short-circuits the campaign because you end up with this really great beginning you've got all these really great ideas for the end and now you have no idea how to get in between and that's really what that's what's wrecked my campaigns there's there's a lot of ideas out there for how to implement smaller evils throughout your campaign there might be problems in various towns or cities that before that town or city is willing to help the adventurers move forward you need to do tasks actually I always think Zelda games do a great job of this you arrive in the town and you need to get up the mountain because there's something up there that is going to help feed into the major plot and the major evil but this town's having a different problem right now and they don't have time to help you suddenly you're solving a different plot that then will feed into the main plot also when I think of Lord of the Rings I think of that scene where they decide to go through the mines of Moria they find all the dwarves dead there's goblins everywhere and oh my god there's a Balrog that Gandalf now has to fight none of that had to do with Sauron that was all just its own little plot line its own little adventure and its own little evil that occurred that the players had to work their way through before continuing on their major quest these little moments actually make a better campaign having the players face little different arcs that might eventually feed back into your main plot but don't have to necessarily be directly involved now of course tokine did have a bunch of connections running behind the scenes that explained the context for the mines of moria and the presence of the Balrog but none of that mattered in the actual moment and that's a great example of how that over preparation of world-building your history can really get sidelined when an action-packed sequence is happening anyways I find instead of creating a monolithic evil I like to create a world that is filled with many problems problems that aren't necessarily easily solved in a black-and-white fashion I'm a big fan of the morally grey and the in-between and people that disagree about what the world should be like I find those things a little bit more human and relatable and I like to use that as a motif for my campaigns because I like fantasy that reflects the problems of the real world where in our real world there is no monolithic evil there's just a bunch of people that are just trying to make it and people have different feelings and different thoughts but that makes them more human by filling your world with problems lots of different villains lots of different evils and things that need to be solved this leaves room for your players to be the primary movers and shakers in your campaign the world doesn't revolve around your player characters but the campaign definitely does your campaign as distinct from your campaign world is about the player characters so the world might not care about them but you as a dungeon master in framing and creating your campaign do have to let your player characters be the stars and part of this is either letting them tell their own stories and seeing where they land or letting them be that mover and shaker and having an impact on your campaign world itself oftentimes all of the stems from over preparation and it really makes the world fixed and you decide through that over preparation exactly how your players are going to be able to change the world instead of leaving that something open-ended and something that you find out together one of the most important lessons that I've learned in designing not just a campaign world but in even designing every night that I sit down to DM a game of D&D is not to worry so much about what the players might do or what the solutions that they will come up with for the problem is but just what setting are they currently in who are the prominent NPCs or villains that are going to be presented and what are those NPCs villains or other trying to accomplish within this setting by sticking true to that knowing the characters knowing the setting and understanding what would happen if the players never showed up in the first place what is happening here and then let the players come in and do whatever the heck they think that they're gonna do and then you just need to roll with the punches and it actually I find is more fun as a DM to go oh man they're really messing up these bad guys plans and just let it fall apart and that to me has been the biggest lesson that I can take away is to just focus not on the players but focus on the world and let the players come in and be the decision-makers be the ones who are pushing their stories forward your players will run rampant over your world and they will shape it in ways that you could never predict embrace that and revel in your players ability to play with the sandbox that you've put in front of them one thing that you as a DM need to keep in mind when you're building your world is that if you need to at any point up the stakes don't be afraid to blow your own world up I slammed a meteor into my world and I'll do it again I think one of the most important lesson that I've learned over the years is that it's vitally important with Dungeons & Dragons to not fall so completely in love with your setting that you'll be upset if something bad happens to it your world will look better on fire it's okay for things to fall apart it's okay for the established order be broken and for things to change Dungeons & Dragons is a place that we get to play out those fantasies and that beautiful idea that we can change the world don't take that away from your players embrace it so this has been our look at common world building mistakes and Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition if you've made any mistakes or pitfalls designing your worlds let us know about those in the comments below if you're enjoying the show consider supporting us on patreon you can find out how by following the links below and if you want to check out our live play dungeons of dragon hime it airs Tuesday nights at 6 p.m. Eastern on Twitch you can check out prior episodes right up over here we've also got plenty more great advice for Dungeon Master's in our playlist please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thank you so much for watching and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 612,392

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book, worldbuilding, campaign, setting, adventure

Id: R_QoK-Yp4Lw

Length: 36min 31sec (2191 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019