Five Ways to Start a D&D Adventure - Dungeon Master Tips

it's dangerous business walking out your front door if you don't watch your feet there's no telling where you'll end up but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step so we're gonna talk about some awesome ways a Dungeon Master can start off their next Dungeons & Dragons adventure [Music] greetings Dungeon Master's my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelley McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes today we're taking a look at five ways that you can get inspired to start a brand new adventure or campaign in Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition we're going to be focusing on narrative structure by looking at some classic archetypes that are used in screenwriting and published adventures but also found in fantasy fiction and television shows yeah and one of the hardest things for DMS is getting your players excited and motivated to take part in the stories that are about to unfold you also want to put a couple new original twists on what you're creating but you don't want to make the players feel forced into the storyline that you're putting in front of them so we're gonna look at ways to give the players of good sense of freedom and choice at the outset of the campaign and you can use these to inspire a brand new campaign or even just a quest or adventure that the parties have had to go on with that let's get rolling so we're gonna call these different openings a term that we borrow from screenwriting which is called the inciting incident yeah we're gonna take a look at structure not so much story we're gonna use something we call the adventure hook to kind of lay the bait to lure the players into wanting to participate in the adventure regardless of how the story is gonna go adventure hooks have these structural elements that you can tailor to the characters motivations the circumstances of your campaign world and the specific story and adventure that you actually want to go on anything like a war a plague even a tavern can all play vital parts in the adventure a good opening presents characters with a conflict or a problem that demands the characters action they then need to find the motivation to participate in the event and the right stakes to make it all feel tense this is how our story sizzles all of these share the same idea a problem is presented that only the heroes can solve but what's unique about this is that the structure can be mapped onto almost any story or plot line that you want to tell an introduction to a campaign about a war is very different if the characters begin as soldiers fighting on the front lines versus a group of refugees fleeing a besieged city there are many different sides to the same story so we're going to explore how this actually works in play so one of the most classic ways to open a story is the trouble on the road scenario this is found in so many Dungeons & Dragons adventures including in the fifth edition starter set like lost - themed Alvar yeah it kind of begins when the players are travelling from point A to point B they might be on the way to the next city or town they might be travelling with a caravan this actually even works if they're on a ship or a boat for a more naval themed campaign yeah and as they're traveling as something occurs that causes a problem disrupts their travels they're attacked they're ambushed basically something causes them to need to jump to action and kind of takes them away from their initial path to start something new yeah it's most often that this is like a bandit attack that then has other mysterious circumstances or sometimes the players run into a mysterious ruin or a traveler on the road that needs help or some sort of strange magical phenomena sweeps them up in some other way the important thing about this is that it often can feel like an interruption to the characters previous goals they might be really excited to get to water deep and continue with what they wanted to do like buying magic items and meeting with the patron or consider continuing their own personal story so when you start a campaign or an adventure off by interrupting them on the way you need to think about how you might make it more relevant to the characters themselves one way to do that is if they're on their way let's say to water deep in order to meet a specific person you have that NPC meet them part of the way there or that's part of the interruption is the person they were going to meet now needs their help yeah this is actually exactly what happens in lost mine offend Oliver as well that one of the contacts that you're going to meet has actually been abducted on the road you find the traces of that crime scene and then you follow it up to figure out what exactly has happened that makes it feel less like an interruption and more like the the thing that you knew you were going to do is it's now even more important that you solve this immediate problem in order to continue on your quest yeah it introduces a complication or a permutation right another popular way of doing this is that the players have an encounter that seems like a random encounter on the road and then when they get to town it turns out that that encounter actually fits in with the bigger problem at play and that they need to now engage with those instigators that they encountered on the road to continue on with their main mission or quest um so you really want to find out ways to tie that in another great way to do this is to actually have characters that the players were not anticipating from their own backstories run into them on the road I think if we're if we're gonna use this to start off the campaign one thing that's really cool is to have that initial journey the road that they're travelling on to their destination be somewhat trivial in comparison to the story that's about to unfold so when something bigger and more important happens it suddenly takes precedence over their initial quest for example they're going to water deep because they need to deliver some goods to a store but then all of a sudden they get attacked and they find they uncover some secret truth about like something that's threatening water deep as a total that that kind of changes the the stakes and and takes it away from oh man I really wanted to get the water deep with these goods to oh my gosh we're now the only ones who know about this secret and we need to save the whole city another thing to ask yourself when you're creating adventure like this is is the journey more important or as the destination more important if the destination is where the players are really excited about getting to then maybe don't use this as your as your opening structure right sometimes the travel just isn't the exciting part right on the other hand you could have an entire great adventure that is about the adventures that people go on on the road going from town to town helping the local villages and all the misadventures that happen in between that and then maybe the players run into trouble on the road that doesn't necessarily create a new plotline but maybe on the road they make a new enemy who wasn't involved in the main story but now they are an antagonist like they piss off a thief or a crazy wizard or a gang of brigands who might not have been involved in the storyline at all but because the players interacted with the wrong person now they've got an extra problem on their hands Wow Monty I think I've played that campaign before yeah no that's that's an excellent way to put it at the beginning of the campaign that I'm playing in at your table yeah starting off very light-hearted with a cross-country journey where we made a few strange enemies along the way but part of our part of our quest was just getting from point A to point B and all of these kind of hiccups happen along the way but they didn't they didn't stop us from our quest they just became part of the journey yeah I think the biggest thing about starting your campaign as a journey is that you want to give the players a little bit of a tour of your campaign world as well you want to show them the magic majesty and wonder that exists out there and get them thinking and excited about all the things that are in front of them next up we have the all famous disaster strikes scenario this one is incredibly common in published modules we see it in hoard of the Dragon Queen but also in storm Kings Thunder yeah in this adventure opening the players are minding their own business they might be drinking in a tavern or in a castle or keep they might even be on a boat - it can kind of crossways with the but the biggest difference here is how the players respond to the inciting incident in this case the City Tavern comes under attack or there is some sort of natural disaster that occurs and now the players are faced with a choice are they gonna rise up and fight against the threat or are they gonna try to escape and maybe help others escape in the process yeah with the beginning of hoard of the Dragon Queen which is a campaign that I've ran it starts with the town being under attack and you do have to make those choices on like what what are we gonna do is this a situation that we can overcome or are we just gonna do our best to save as many people as possible from all of this crazy stuff that's happening to it to the town yeah one of the best way is to get your characters really invested in a scenario like this isn't campaign opening is have them make their backstories as local heroes from the town so they already have non player characters that are their family members and childhood friends that they grew up with and then spend a good part of the session actually just maybe having a local festival or interacting with the locals give your players a little bit of time to fall in love with this idyllic country village and then smash it to pieces it sounds it sounds like a mean way to go but honestly as a DM your goal is to get them hooked into the story and nothing gets you hooked like being like here's all these ten NPCs that you absolutely love and now some of them died some of them are captured and you're trying to rescue a few of them in the whole town that you fell in love with is under attack everything's on fire and you're sitting in the corner weeping because you just hope that you can make it out alive but that brings up a real pitfall is that with these kind of scenarios you don't want it to be so grim that the players lose absolutely everything you want them to be able to save something you want them to have a success they could go as far as fighting off the entire attack and then being lauded as the local heroes this is a great way to make your players feel amazing at the start of a campaign and especially if you set up a really open-ended scenario where ask yourself when you're designing the attack or the natural disaster what would happen if the players weren't there how would this whole thing go down and play it out like that because that will allow the players to take the initiative in the scenario and rise to the occasion rather than having a predetermined set of events that must be tackled in a specific order I I really like with this idea yeah rather than railroading the party through like here's the things that you do to solve this problem even with with the beginning of hoard of the Dragon Queen it presented here's the things that they're gonna do and instead I presented all of the options to the party and said they're all happening at the same time yeah which ones are you going to choose to take part in to try to rescue people and I think that was much more interesting for them to feel like the whole town is being bombarded at once what are they gonna choose to do when they're looking out from the keep being like the church is under attack the mills under attack there's a high profile target over there there's people stranded over there we only have a few hours to figure this out which way are we gonna go and then it puts it in their hands that the attacks happening with or without them the time pressure is such a cool thing to introduce in these type of types of scenarios as well right that ticking clock is a great way to use as an adventure structure because it means that with the disaster scenario the players don't have many opportunities to rest so they really have to use their resources carefully it's a fantastic challenge and it's why the disaster strikes is such a strong way to start a campaign the other big pitfall that you really really want to avoid with this one is deus ex machina that is having high-level NPCs that come along and save the day instead of the players this feels absolutely awful and it really undermines all of the tension of the event because the players felt well our actions didn't matter because the badass dragon came along and saved everybody or all the Knights of the Vale rode in and saved us this is something that works really well in movies and television thinking about all the times that the losing battle is by the cavalry coming in but I gotta say it sucks so much as a player unless that has been foreshadowed really clearly and the event is set up is that the players have to hold out until the cavalry arrives if they just show up unexpectedly and save the day it doesn't feel very good at all yeah there is that way to twist that into like you said the the time crunch yeah in like four rounds the cavalry will arrive then that adds this element of against insurmountable odds we need to survive for this long yes Hill until we get saved that works but yeah otherwise you're you're stealing a thunder from the heroes of the story and really if it's not about the players around the table then what are you doing what are you doing next up we have the literal call to adventure this is a very well understood storytelling trope it's best explained as the hero's journey with the moment of the call to adventure Joseph Campbell wrote a book called the hero with a thousand faces where he talked about this archetypal storytelling cycle this patterning of a story that has used time and time again and of course it's in so many stories that we love but it's a very difficult one to execute in Dungeons and Dragons if you're looking for classic examples how about a crazy wizard knocking on your door and saying hey you have a ring we need to go on an adventure yep the basic model behind this is that the player characters are living their lives normally but then some person prophecy or object drops into their life and whisks them away from the normal world that they once knew into a life of a grand adventure star wars would be another great example you betcha Yeah right and even Harry Potter as well the world that the characters once knew has completely changed by the new information that they've run into now you can make this a lot different they could be witnesses to a crime they could discover that the debtors have come calling and need to go running the biggest thing with this weather the players have found a MacGuffin need to save a princess or anything like that is that you can betcha that there is some evil force that wants to get up get their hands on the person object information or prophecy that the players have in their possession and they'll do anything to get it one of the problems with this with this arc though that you can run into is the whole railroading the the party into you need to take part in this adventure and I think one way to one way to kind of avoid that is that you can actually look at this at your players and try to tie it in to their backstories to the characters that they know you mentioned like rather than having the princess be captured it's like a family members yeah it's like your brother is the one that's in trouble yeah right or and the object could be a personal family heirloom that now has more power than you thought it did right or the person that needs help is your old mentor right um this is a great way to actually work with the party a lot more in preparation for this type of adventure and ask them to do a little bit more with their backstories so you've got some more NPCs characters and objects and places to work with there's a couple really big pitfalls to watch out with these kind of adventures especially when you're using them as the start of your campaign and the biggest one is setting your player characters up as the chosen ones this can lead to a lot of problems yeah having them be the chosen ones kind of makes it like not as urgent almost because they're just like okay well we're the ones who can solve this mission I guess it's up to us and here we go and now we're all powerful and we we need to be yeah it's almost like you're all-powerful now yeah the players want to feel like they're the only ones that can solve the problem but they want the stakes to be real and if they're the chosen ones that are the only ones decided by faith that can solve this problem it means that maybe the threat of death or failure is taken away from them because they kind of know that by the story that you're gonna tell you're gonna fudge the dice and change the circumstances to make sure it always works out in their favor and that really falls apart in a role-playing game where the players need a lot of joy and freedom to explore different things as an alternative to this you may want to try the mission briefing scenario instead the mission briefing is basically where the players are hired in a similar moment means to the call to adventure but in this circumstance they're given a specific task that they need to accomplish and the reward for completing that task is crystal clear to them so they know what they're gonna get for doing the job and they have a vague idea of how to go about doing it but it's really up to them this one really works if your party is like a group of mercenaries or soldiers or like hired goons of some sort that it's just like or rogues going on a heist yeah they might be bounty hunters they could be monster slayers this also would be the example that you'd use in an investigation style campaign where there's been like a murder mystery right and this means that the players kind of have a big puzzle to solve right yeah much like the disaster strikes one particularly if you're doing like a murder mystery or a scenario the best way to do this is to have maybe one of the players but bring the one that presents the objective right it's a personal objective of their own or that this is someone in their own backstory or it concerns somewhere that's important to them directly so it's session 1 you'd let one player know the plot and they have to relay it yeah maybe one of the player characters is actually the one that's hiring the rest of the party to do the job that's cool right and then that creates kind of this connection like that's what works in heist movies right yeah like you got the brains and the Brawn and then they have to go get the hacker and the other specialists that all work together and then they're gonna get a big payout at the end and they make their own plan they figure everything out and when you do it this open-ended like this the players really get to feel like they're in control of deciding how they're gonna tackle the mission and so all you need to do is a DN is make the details of all the obstacles in their way and bring those up as the players encounter them right it makes it much more open-ended and really the cool thing with the mission briefing is that you can kind of combine it with all the other ones and say you know in a master scenario the players have been given a mission where they have to fulfill that one thing to prevent the disaster or in the call to adventure this is when Gandalf knocks at your door right what are the other classics is the Great Escape scenario yes where the the characters start imprisoned or yeah in some sort of prison somewhere and they have to escape they have to find their way out this one has a few pitfalls to it but it's also one of the most classic ones that I've seen unfortunately the Elder Scrolls and a lot of video games have kind of ruined the idea of starting the campaign as a prisoner yeah and it's really hard to arrest your players partway through but there's some really cool ways to morph The Great Escape into not the players being stuck in a literal prison but they might be shipwrecked on an island maybe they're in an oppressive City where they have to break off the shackles of an evil regime right the idea here is that the players are in control applauding how they're gonna get out another great way of this is actually cursive straud which in some ways is about escaping another realm or an evil dimension right you have to fulfill all these objectives which makes it share a lot in common with the mission briefing and get out yeah and then out of the abyss does the classic you're in jail but I think one thing that out of the abyss does that's important is if the characters are in a prison you don't want to have them be like well we're gonna throw you up against the wall tomorrow and assassinate you or anything like that in terms of out of the abyss there they're being lettuce slaves yes so they have chances they have time they have all of these opportunities to plan their escape accordingly but just like in the mission briefing and the disaster scenario a time pressure makes a really good sense in this kind of scenario because if they're shipwrecked on an island they're gonna run out of good food after a couple days maybe they are in prison and they're going to be executed in two weeks and they have two weeks to get out of there maybe they are in a the oppressive city of an evil regime and they need to stage a revolution and overthrow the evil king before that king can start enacting some really awful policies in all of these situations again the players get the freedom and the choice to decide how they want to tackle the adventure and they're gonna feel really really awesome about it when it pulls off and they succeed like before you don't want to in the disaster scenario prison break the escape really works well if there is no one that's gonna come and save them yeah you don't want everything to just build up to somebody being like hey I was coming all along to rescue you guys let's go you want that prison escape to be up to them yeah makes it much more value another way to motivate the players including the time pressure is that maybe the players are going to be executed in two weeks but they're in prison and there's some other event or person that they need to get to external to where they're trapped like maybe you're in prison but you need to escape so that you can warn your family about the impending attack because you overheard the guards talking about it right so finding those ways to give the players a reason to want to escape and to want to do it now because otherwise players in a prison situation might just feel like okay well I'm just gonna wait for my sentence to to run out right or just keep slowly building up you want to create that pressure so the players feel that they have to act now why don't we open things up now with the wide world scenario so this is kind of our bonus on top of all this to say that you can actually combine all of these together in one adventure or campaign to yield a really really open-ended scenario where the players can find adventure almost anywhere yeah with this one it takes a little bit more preparation because you need to kind of know all of the possible places your characters might choose to go mm-hmm but it works really really well when you think about the impending disaster as this big event that's gonna happen campaign it's the big inciting incident but there's all sorts of different entry points the players might have to that and that's something that they can actually decide perhaps it begins with them traveling and they might get arrested and end up as prisoners maybe they're conscripted into the battle maybe they are going to be soldiers or they're going to escape from the besieged city thinking about it in this way and then talking to your players really about what their expectations are and what they want to out want to get out of the campaign will allow you to take that big plot idea that's rolling around in your head and give the players the entry point that they need to care about it what are on I I think a great example of the wide world is actually the campaign that you're running currently yeah because that uses several of the options that we've talked about so I say if you want to lightly just go through which ones were used in the beginning of your campaign well I used the idea of the players just traveling along the road visiting tavern to Tavern and they had an objective because they were part of a wedding party yeah and that was that was a very light-hearted opening and a lot of fun but it still kind of got us hooked got us to learn the towns got us to learn the places that we were passing through really get to know everything and that actually came from you guys as the players because you all decided that you wanted to be childhood friends that all were going to a wedding of a mutual friend I think that came out of us just riffing on Oh wouldn't it be cool if we were all going to a wedding to start a campaign and that became the time pressure because you had two weeks to get to there you had a few things you had to get on the way and what you didn't know though was that there was a real impending disaster that was going to happen yeah and that was hinted at several times but we didn't really see it come through and till after the wedding when it blew right open and suddenly there was this impending doom yeah and the whole time there was this little bit of a twist involved because the players needed to bring a wedding gift this was kind of a call to adventure because they have to find a mysterious object that a whole bunch of bandits and a crazy wizard wanted to steal from the party so they had to protect it while they were traveling and that ended up being the of this whole game yeah because it turned out that that music box that you found was actually the phylactery of a witch yeah which was given as a wedding present yeah yeah and yeah so here you have an open world we got to know the entire world before really things blew open and we had all of these kind of little little bits that we're adding up to this epic story and then it culminated in really the players feeling like we have a mission that matters to us yeah and we were in scripted Tooley and the army against the hobgoblins yeah this is a template of how we've expanded the Red Hand of doom which is a very classic module as well and a great example of a mission based campaign that opens up lots of ways for the players to have their own ideas and choices that really make a difference so this has been our top 5 scenarios to start your D&D adventure we hope that you feel inspired to start the most epic adventure you've had yet this is a huge topic and there are so many different ways that you can start your campaigns and adventures and we would love to hear your ideas and thoughts and we encourage you to check out the comments below for more ideas and inspiration beyond what we covered in this episode if you want to see our reviews on some of the campaign modules we mentioned you can check out our playlist over here and we've got a continued playlist of more great advice for Dungeon Master's that you can check out over here 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: 391,054

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, start, begin, adventure, inciting incidents, trouble on the road, disaster strikes, call to adventure, mission briefing, quest, great escape, wide world

Id: O0ygYIjyjHo

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 21 2018