Reading My Good(ish) DM Notes (AKA, How I write my games)

hello everybody and welcome back to how to be a terrible GM if you thought my video yesterday that is a pretty accurate representation of how I tend to prep for my games I always get in the mind of I'm gonna do all these really cool things and then I never actually do them since I didn't read my cringy notes video a lot of you are asking to read my good notes and I wasn't initially going to do this because I don't have any good notes however I kind of like the idea of the video so I thought eyes might as well just do it and show you guys what notes actually worked when I ran my games and what notes didn't let me just set a precedent for everybody I am an improv Diem meaning that I could sit down with nothing prepared and just go yeah let's play and that's kind of how I kind of run my games anyways I will know that we're playing D&D in a few days and I'll go in the shower all drive somewhere and I'll just come up with the game then in my head and go yeah I can run that and maybe write down a few things and so a lot of my good notes tend to just be a few sentences that I was like that's a good idea and that's about it I have a lot of documents that are just ideas that I came up with that aren't really anything super interesting or in-depth or all that I do however write down a lot of my world-building which really I don't consider preparing for running a D&D adventure you can write down as much lore as you want it's not necessarily going to matter when it comes to the actual fun of the game because the players are there to play a game not sit there and listen to your lore if you want players to care about your lore go write a book that's way way better than just running D&D in any case that's just kind of my style onna on on on dungeon mastering there but I do have a few documents where I did attempt to write out everything and prep for every possible thing that can happen which is a terrible idea don't do that there was something worked and there were something worked and we're go through some of them so they know why are these good notes whatsoever these are just what worked and what didn't and they're not necessarily cringy they're just lessons lessons from Jacob buds from XP to level 3 I should not be giving any advice or any wisdom I'm a young dumb youtuber you that that says enough so here's my D&D folder on Drive there's a lot of stuff on here these so my old game that I used to run was a cast some oral never workers and it was called a kiss because that was the name of the world so I guess we could jump into here everything is color-coded so why don't I go I ran a game for some people on discord about a year or so ago and I wrote a little adventure because I was D&D deprived and I wanted to play something so I actually did write this one out and if you want it it's over on my patreon if you you know you want it it's called tab arukou and it was supposed to be this really long overarching adventure about Japanese folklore and monsters and I was going to include night hags and oneis and all this kind of cool stuff but the game kind of fell off when you never really gonna continue playing it because I started streaming and all that stuff so but I did finish it sort of and I wrote it out a bit so if I were to say if I were to point out any of like my best writing in any game that actually worked this is probably it which is why I put it up on my patreon cuz I'm like hey I'm actually kind of proud of this so I made a few NPC's for the ship and here's another thing I do I like to write out what they look like so I can describe to the players and their their voices so right here I've got eccentric gandalf he or you know shirin's like tea I've got lots to sell that's just what he sounds like and then I I wrote up the city and the government and the defenses and the Commerce the organizations and the currency oh my god none of this matters I've learned that when I write up cities I don't need to write all of this though in the DMS guide it's nice to have in case the players want to know and if you want now for yourself then go ahead and write it out for me none of this ever matters the population never matters the defense if it's a city it's a city if it's a village to village if they go to the city there's a lot of people in it I'm not gonna be like well there are exactly six thousand people in this village like it never really matters and so yeah writing down how many elves are in the city is a little ridiculous you can't like let's say the players go into the city and they're like I want to find out that I'm gonna be like okay well there's 6,000 people and 280 are MLS that means they're kind of rare if the plate is gonna find it out then just make a roll investigation to find an elf-like it's not that hard you can it's like are there elves or are there not elves there doesn't need to be the exact number of things and I think I just got really caught up into writing all of this which just goes into the nother theory of world building is different than preparing an adventure for Dungeons and Dragons the exact specifics that go into the city don't really matter the players are not going to have more fun if you know how many elves there are in your population 6000 City 60 archers and a hundred veterans oh wow that's so nice to know you can just make it up is the thing unless you're one of these people that can not do improv whatsoever then you should be another necessary dungeon master is 50 60 70 80 almost 100% improv most of the time because the players can walk into this city and then they'll go we want to we want to steal from the potion shop near you be like on and write this down there's no defenses at the alchemy shop oh no no just make up what would happen okay make a sleight-of-hand check okay you grab a green bottle you don't know what the green bottle is but they don't either so if they're like in a roll kind of check and you're like okay and then you're like well it smells stinky like you're just making this up because you know what the game is supposed to be in fun and they'll take it seriously the players will take whatever you say as law just so long as you say it so there's no reason to write down something I actually really like to have is a list of NPC's this is super helpful because coming up with NPCs can be difficult especially for me I can't come up with NPCs on the fly very well some like I can but they're like two different people it's either old man who knows the city very well or random towns girl who's just standing there enjoying the street so having these different kind of people to have ready if they're like I'm not on a trip to this random person or I'm gonna go into this shop and see what the person is I can kind of role play it out be like okay you're gonna go to the shop alright the the guy at the front he's a male human entertainer copper hair like three little eyes fine clothing silk gloves and he wants to continue the noble legacy of his father okay so that guy owns the weapons shop and that can play into some interesting stuff that they could step in and he can just be like oh hello maybe he doesn't care about the shop too much and he only really cares about his family's nobleness and then he'll raise enough money to buy a castle and that's why he's doing everything so maybe he feels very disinterested and if the players actually care about that maybe they'll try to help him and he could be an NBC down the road like there's a lawyer that can lead into that so I think having these things written down as possible things the players will actually encounter will is is helpful chops are nice to have written down because sometimes the players really want to indulge in job so you get like two different types of players sometimes you have the players who just want to go buy the thing and they just spend their golden buy the thing where the players are like I want to step into the shop and I want to talk to the guy and I want to know what kind of race he is and then I'm gonna try to play that up to try to get a better deal from him and then I'm going to try to trade him this thing and you're just like okay a little persuasion buddy Jacob you're being kind of contradictory you're saying to write a lot of notes but also saying not to round a lot of notes what see there's a difference between writing down the population because the players aren't necessarily going to care about that or the shot that they're actually going to interact with and a have fun with so I think it's important to prepare your notes for things that the players will encounter or possibly encounter alright so if if you all know I run a game on arcade arcade which is kind of like my second channel where we play a live dungeons dragons games like cursive strata and Waterdeep dragon heist and my own homebrew campaign sunder and in sunder i've been doing a lot of world building and writing for it because I think it's super interesting I made a map for it and all that kind of stuff just just because it's fun and when you initially start at the campaign I had this overarching plot and theme and stuff that I wanted to go through which I still have now which can always be really fun you have world-shaking events and this thing that affects this thing that affects this thing I love long-running campaigns where consequences from like game 2 will show up in game 35 and that's always a lot of fun however there was one game that did not go very well at least from my perspective as a dungeon master on gauging a few things a did the players have fun be did they feel like they have the freedom to choose what they wanted to do in the game and see was there any sort of resolution or inch something interesting that happened under the game that they learned with their players and this game was this is when they went to the port city of a Vernis which was for the sake of the plot of my game my game is all about Devil's taking over the Material Plane and they had a more a long time ago and a lot of them popped out of this city and it kind of transformed and it's now got a large influx of tea flings and it's called a furnace because they named it after the first layer of hell and this is when I decided to go you don't want I'm going to sit down and I'm going to write something epic and awesome for my players and here's the problem you can do that if it's something like a dungeon that's kind of structured where they can go here here and here and here here and they can when at the end or not they could die see dungeons have this video game-like structure to them where it's like new to the next room then we can stealth and then we can fight the next thing and then we can work together to try to defeat the bad guy but I was doing city intrigue whoa and this is hardest [ __ ] to right because you have to make a mystery and mysteries are hard to right now I'm gonna give a little bit of wisdom insight advice from my experience of running this before I go over how awful I wrote this if you're ever going to write a mystery in D&D and you don't know what to do and you're having a hard time coming up with any ideas for it literally just make [ __ ] up and if the players put together a theory on a murder just make that the answer if they are like obviously a fireball was fired off here and the culprit ran away and went to the sewers you can just be like yeah that's what happened yay and you just make that like they figured it out and then they feel like wow we're so smart we figured it out and you're just the dungeon master just like yes yes you did that's like poor man's mr. D and D and D but if you want to try to be super Sherlock Holmes about it and make the players figure out a puzzle inside a city about a devil culprit rising from the ground to destroy a city in your region well here's how to not do it every day's large port city once it's built by once a ruled and built by your hland was brought out by the new ministry investing improved on the first stop wasn't coming to sunder it's a port city that takes in all the trade and they dispersed it everywhere so it's very popular and very large and I wrote a map for it everything and I'm super super flush this thing out and as I'm writing this money yes yes this is a great idea this is awesome and as I'm writing it I think it's cool and so I wanted to make factions because I wanted to create this faction war my idea was to make a city where there was this underground mafia cult of devil worshippers trying to bring to life Tiamat but there were another cult of devil mafia worshippers that were trying to stop them because they worshiped cereal and 0l doesn't want TM n to show up she wants to be able to be she want they want to be able to summon cereals they're kind of fighting each other while the law and the players kind of get mixed up and they have to figure out what happens that's the basic idea so I wrote up a bunch of factions I wrote up the children of the pen to flame the coastal ministry the seekers of justice and these were all the different people and they had different motivations on what they would do in the course of the game and I was literally just gonna throw the players in here and have them figure it out so the city's current problem the summoner's saved the city from destruction by allowing cereal to place a rune in her city her magical presence now affects the city as a whole and allows her to travel there when needed she has yet to travel the Aramis and mostly uses it as a threat so she wants to people keep the people there scared that she could always show up it's more or less turn into kind of like a myth and like a conspiracy because the government silences people who talk about it because they want their citizens to feel safe meanwhile as Ariel just kind of looms there knowing that she could show up whenever she wanted this in turn affects a city with teeth Ling's devout cult and gangs the coastal ministry keeps this under rope so many aren't scared from the city but also so they aren't found out by the new ministry and the new ministry is the big government from way down south that need to are like a double or evil they need to be eradicated but if they find out that the coast of ministry is kind of working with the Devils they would eliminate the government the people in power would lose all of their seats and they don't want that so instead of losing their seats to power they work with the Devils so that they can stay there and make sure they never show up and also Silas any citizens from saying anything so full-on governmental espionage if the Sundy circle were to be removed it would cause Ariel to send her troops back to the city so they allow the children and appeasers to worship in secret kill those who would bring out the truth and we run crime throughout the city to make money the city needs money to get troops so that they can end the demonic influence meanwhile the children are secretly using the money to fund the summoning of bull MINIX which in my world is TMF it was just TM n the Seekers want to put put it into all of this now this is kind of a morally grey circle of events here that I thought was kind of cool to run for this city so I wrote up a list of taverns churches points of interest blah blah blah some stores that I wrote up just in case the players wanted to go have some stores I wrote up this one of the total who creates candles from beeswax and a beekeeper and all this kind of stuff and she created all these little magical things that I thought would be kind of fun if they wanted to buy some things from the must or there's the misty step which was like a magic shop because I know my players like magic and then I decided to go with the quest and I'm gonna start them off on the quest to get ready to go so if I can kind of TLDR this for you guys basically they discover that a man was buried alive because he was he found out about the cult and he was buried alive because their evil sons of [ __ ] and they want to make sure that there's as much torment as possible to worship cereal he was a dummy I wanted to have the players discover this and then be concerned about this happening and try to find out what the devilish cults were doing in the city and if there were any and try to put a stop to them and so they would find this buried man they would try to they would try to save him and his wife and then they would try to go out and look for clues and I wrote up clues in ways that they could find this devilish cold it's really long and I'm not going to go through all of it but that's the basic idea of what's supposed to happen here's how it actually went the party shows up and they're all tired so they go to sleep in a tavern meanwhile two other characters go off exploring the city and I'm like you guys find the funeral these two characters are the only ones that go about the mission to uncover the ring and they're kind of the only ones who care meanwhile the rest of the party is like trying to buy magic items tried by shops I'm like oh cool that wrote up shops and all this kind of stuff and they're very split meanwhile I'm like trying to be like there's devil cults here the players are like oh yeah we should probably deal with that so I kind of forced them into finding the clues and they go about it but they split they the party didn't necessarily know where to go so a few of them go here and a few of them go here one of the characters had an idea to try to create a snake cookout to try to lure people from the cult in to try to find them and unfortunately none of this is working and they're going about it very poorly at least that's my perspective they end up never finding the cult they interrogate some they free somebody from prison and half the party gets wanted from the city guard they end up skipping town and leaving and I'm sitting there like oh well TM it's just gonna show up and I'm like well what was the flaw and what this happened why did they fail to understand my quest line why didn't they understand that they had to go about all this crap the problem was is that I expected too much of them and I expected them to care so much about the city of when it didn't really care about them I expected them to be good in a situation that didn't necessarily need them to be good they saved a man they didn't need to uncover an entire governmental plot the other gigantic problem with this is that I created a mystery with clues that led nowhere the entire mystery led up to them getting captured which I thought would be a cool moment and the problem with mysteries when you want to write them in Dungeons and Dragons is that you have to make them easy you have to make the players understand them figure them out and feel awesome for understanding them and you have to give them clues you can't create a mystery that doesn't bleed to anything the players followed all the clues only to go well now what where do we go and I'm like and I'm assuming there's a dungeon master like when they go to sleep the guards will find them and arrest them but that's there's no way for them to accomplish that so they did their own thing and just left and I was like what dang it guys so this is a good example of wow I wrote all this really cool stuff but it didn't matter because the game wasn't very fun because I wasn't focused on the players I was more focused on my city the mystery and the awesome conclusion that the players would have about this all this world building I did so after this experience I don't really write like this much anymore because I have discovered that it's not very fun for my players and if I go to my more recent notes the games that the players really enjoyed that we've been like oh this is so much fun I had a lot of fun I feel like I characters did a lot of things that there were a lot of choices that we got to have let me just pull up pull up this this would be more recent I think if I go to season 2 episode 6 let's see what this is ah there it is this for four small paragraphs about what loosely will happen this was about a game where they were in like this battle royale arena like fortnight pub G apex legend style there was a ring closing in they had to fight other adventurers and that's what I wrote for it the rest of it I just kind of made up and I and I put monsters in and and the players had a lot of fun and and I realized that this is where I strive as a dungeon master now here's the thing I'm not saying this is what you need to do is have dungeon master this is just how I work as a dungeon master if you really like a huge wall of text that you can use and read and and all that kind of stuff then go for it it's all about finding your stride and testing things that work and don't and if they do work then great you've you found what your players enjoy and if you they don't work then you realize what doesn't work and you should probably not do that anymore so don't get too caught up in preparation and writing for being a dungeon master or having an epic story because your epic story means nothing to the characters and what they do in the game and how they feel and what they accomplished and feeling like heroes or villains throughout the campaign and that's the most important thing you want a loose idea of how the game will go because you're the dungeon master your job is to make sure that they have fun you two but again like I'll say at the beginning if you want your players to experience lore and something super awesome just go read a book go write a book and have people re into awesome stories that you write because dungeons dragons is not about your stories it's about everybody's stories this has been Jacob sits here talks to you about D&D for a long time thanks for watching and you know what guys this video was sponsored by humble wood their Kickstarter is still going there is three days left to back the entire project it is super cool you guys really need to check it out there's really awesome art bird races there's maps there's cards there's lots of lots of cool stuff they have a bunch of different editions and packs that you can buy out of it so go check it out because they sponsored this video and the past like five videos on this channel which is really really great so go support their Kickstarter it's really great to support smaller D&E Kickstarter so that we can get more content in the future and they've worked really really really hard on it so go check it out and thanks guys for watching I will see you next video

Channel: XP to Level 3

Views: 229,078

Keywords: dnd, dungeons and dragons, 5e, 3.5, pathfinder, critical, role, roll, how to, tutorial, gm, dm, tips, tricks, writing, world, building, ideas, inspiration, d&d

Id: Ux0WVoXNqQs

Length: 21min 44sec (1304 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 08 2019