3 Wise DMs

2:05 A listener question regarding how to run episodic adventures that serves as a jumping off point for Matt Colville’s recent video asking the question, “How long should an adventure be?” 3:40 DM Tony’s lead-off question… what is your table hungry for? 5:25 The classic Monster of the Week theme and DM Chris’ love of The X- Files . 7:25 Episodic Adventures can easily become a railroad. 8:25 How e...

On July 3rd of 2024, D&D 5e will turn 10! While it has taken some hits in those ten years, no one can deny the positive effect it has had on our TTRPG hobby, bringing in an entire generation of new players. With this anniversary, we started to reflect on what we have loved, what we’ve hated, what we would change, and what we look to for the future. And, as opposed to most of the posts we see o...

As we learned from the AD&D release, Deities & Demigods , “If you stat it, players will kill it.” So, what do you do if you want to place an unbeatable Kaiju-type monster, like Godzilla, into your game world? Something way more fearsome than a Tarrasque. A complete force of nature that shapes the entire world and every adventure in it. Something that you can’t just “punch really hard.” In...

We’ve done several episodes and articles about how to best onboard new DMs and GMs to the hobby, including episode 113: Just Do It, with DM Lenny, about running his first game ever . But what about all the Grognards and OG DMs that were playing it out of the White Boxes assembled by Gary Gygax in his own home? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave sit down with our good friend, Scott Washburn of...

What do you do when your player is unhappy with the direction of their class and wants to change over into a new class mid-campaign, but with the same character? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave answer a listener question about their player that wants to change their character’s class from Paladin to Sorcerer at 5th level. We delve into not just the narrative components of a change like this...

The tavern. It’s the start of 23 different campaigns that DM Tony has been in over the last three decades. It’s a fantasy adventure trope and gets a lot of hate out there for being basic and unimaginative, but is that necessarily a bad thing? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave return to our RPG Mythbusters series and test the myth, “Is a tavern the best place to start an adventure?” Will it be...

With our recent Forged in Fire article series , DM Chris realized how many Conditions that monsters have resistance and immunity to, especially in 5e. With that, we began to discuss how much (or little) we play with Conditions in our home games, and how that might be limiting what we can do to craft engaging, thrilling, and challenging encounters. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave delve into...

One of the beauties of TTRPGs is the ability to not just watch or read an amazing story, but to experience it… to create it. The mystery, the action, the climactic battle between good and evil; D&D gives us the ability to create our favorite stories. One of the most important aspects of that, as the DM, is creating a level of mystery to the story that the players get the chance to uncover as t...

Homebrewing has been part of the game since its inception. Hell, the game itself is a homebrew of wargames! We’ve discussed homebrewing in previous episodes and articles , but a listener asks the question about how to homebrew magic items and monsters from well-known pop culture sources (like Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere Universe.) In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss their top nine tips...

Birthday games. Several of our recent articles and episodes discuss our passion for running birthday games for our game group, whether it be D&D, the OSR , Avatar Legends, or the classic Marvel Super Heroes system; it’s become our thing. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss the recent Birthday Game they ran where The Doctor teamed up with the Sensational She-Hulk and members of the A...

Inspiration. Along with Advantage and Disadvantage, its one of the most streamlined mechanics in 5e. However, we all love to try new or adjusted mechanics to continually improve our DMing. Fellow Wise DM Mike Shea over at Sly Flourish shared an article discussing the Luck System from Kobold Press’ Project Black Flag playtest. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss Inspiration; how we use i...

Sharing. It’s one of the first skills that we have to learn as kids and, as anyone who has gamed for long enough, some kids never quite learned how to do it. Our longtime listener, Jim Laubacker, posed a question regarding how to best deal with players that won’t share the spotlight. As a bonus, Jim is also trying to balance a group that is a hybrid of in-person and virtual players! In this episod...

Happy New Year! Just in time for our 2024 Season, Johnny at For Monster Kids has designed our newest logo, a beautiful homage to the legendary Dave Trampier … let us know what you think! And for our first episode of 2024, we delve into a listener question regarding the players constantly Splitting the Party in their Curse of Strahd campaign and how that’s leading to DM Burnout. But, Splitting the...

What do Hit Points represent? Who knew that this was a controversial question on par with asking about Alignment? Following our episode reviewing the Avatar Legends RPG and their use of Fatigue and Conditions, we posed the question regarding what hit points represent on our socials and the response was impressive. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave take a deeper dive into what Hit Points repre...

The 3 Wise DMs just played through the new Avatar Legends RPG Starter Set from Magpie Games. Based off the Powered by the Apocalypse system, Avatar Legends is about as different from D&D and Pathfinder as can be. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave review the Avatar Legends system, the one-shot that we played as well as discuss tips, tricks, and pitfalls to playing completely new systems –...

We recently shared a post about our Halloween one-shot adventure that we started referring to as the “Kurt Russell Campaign.” Four players, all playing one of the legendary roles made famous by your favorite, and ours, Mr. Kurt Russell. The response was fantastic, so we thought we’d do a deeper dive. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave are joined by return guests Bonnie and the Monster Wrangler...

Most of us who enjoy TTRPGs like D&D also love board games… classic board games, strategy games, resource management games, and the list goes on. It won’t take long until you as a DM start thinking of implementing some of your favorite board games or board game mechanics into your D&D sessions. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss the ways that they have utilized their favorite b...

Spell effects in Fantasy TTRPGs are easily the times when we as DMs and GMs have to respond on the fly to changing parameters. In systems like 5e, we’ve discussed how they’ve crafted a system that does some of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to rulings. But, no matter how many rules exist, you are going to have times that interesting uses of spells make you have to adjudicate in a complete...

Roleplay. It’s commonly understood to be one of the three pillars that make up the game of D&D. But, roleplaying between the DM and player is one thing… how do you get your players roleplaying amongst themselves? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss their best tips in getting players to roleplay amongst themselves, drawing from their games in Tomb of Annihilation, Shadow of the Drago...

12 players. 2 DMs. 6 dragons. Tiamat. 2 birthday cakes… and a whole hell of a lot of fun! As a companion piece to DM Tony’s recent article , the 3 Wise DMs are joined by some special guests to discuss and detail the lessons learned from running our largest endeavor yet – a massive, multiple-campaign ending game that required 2 DMs to pull off. If you’ve ever thought of running a massive Endgame-st...

In the immortal words of The Bard… “To roll or not to roll, that is the question…” Rolling dice is the cornerstone of TTRPGs, because without them, as DM Chris says, we’re just telling a story as we play with our GI Joe’s in the backyard. So, when you’re running a session, when do you decide to haventhe players, and yourself, pick up the dice? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave springboard off...

Cutscene. In a video game, it’s a scene shown to the player when they reach a particular point in the game, such as at the end of a level or when the player's character dies. The immense popularity of videogaming and the similarities between them and TTRPGs begs the question: Can you, or should you, utilize cutscenes in your game? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave respond to a listener’s ques...

Murderhobos. It’s one of the most discussed issues in any TTRPG discussion. Players who don’t feel like there’s no encounter that can’t be solved by casting “Sword.” But what happens when your party turns out to be what we refer to as “Anti-Murderhobos”? What if the party isn’t motivated to engage and/or end the evil machinations of the Bad Guys? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss a li...

Magic. It’s the thing that separates Fantasy RPGs from all others. Every other TTRPG can have combat, exploration, social situations… but magic is the secret sauce that makes fantasy special. Many DMs and GMs toss around the idea of “low magic” worlds, but what does that mean exactly? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss the definitions and parameters of low magic and how we’ve implement...

Gold. It’s the perfect representation of the reward mechanic from the earliest days of the White Box. Hell, it even used to represent experience! As a companion piece to our 19th episode on RPG Economics, Tony, Chris, and Dave delve into not just how to make things worth using the gold for, but also the idea of how you, or DO you, account for the treasure that the party finds? And please visit our...