3 Wise DMs

How do you bring your campaign world to life? It’s a question lots of DMs and GMs ask from a lot of different angles. We’re all looking for ways to make sure our players have fun, but also have new experiences in the game that make it feel more like characters living out a story and less like tabletop Diablo. Some of our best questions come from our listeners. That is once again the case this week...

No DM’s plan survives contact with the players. Between remembering the story you’re trying to tell, the details you had to improvise, and the players’ actions (which may or may not have made sense), it can be hard to keep the details straight in your RPG campaign. How can you plan out the important stuff, capture improv details before you forget them, and make sure you remember it the same way we...

When you take your RPG campaign to the high seas (or under the seas, outer space or anywhere else they need a ship to survive), all bets are off. Sure, you could run it like any land-based campaign using the ship for fast travel, but is that really what a ship-based campaign is all about? Or are they about ship-to-ship combat, unlimited freedom, and unimaginable treasure? The lure of the sea is ab...

Dragons are to D&D what Jerry West is to the NBA: The Logo. They’re the monsters so iconic that they’re literally part of the name. No other fantasy property has done as much or gained as much from its dragons. So, when you decide to put a dragon in your campaign, you know it has to be special. But how do you make sure it hits the right notes for your players? Fortunately, dragons are some of...

Sometimes you want to change the game up completely, even if it’s just for the night. Maybe you want to have a night of gambling games, a carnival with an archery contest, a little football, or, like DM Dave’s Barovia, a werewolf wrestling match to put the WWE to shame! When you have that urge, how do you make that happen? The 3 Wise DMs call them minigames, and in this episode, they’ll use Dave’s...

DMs have some crazy ideas. And deep down, there’s nothing most of us want to do more than unleash those ideas on our unsuspecting players. The party is rolling along a totally normal campaign in a non-descript fantasy world, and suddenly, you’ve dropped a giant, soul-eating, boon-granting, Lovecraftian spaghetti monster into the center of it with a cult that’s depopulating the world to wake it up....

Most DMs come to a point in their campaigns where they want to run The Big Battle. We’re not talking the players vs. a few Balors, but a real war: Storming the beaches of a fantasy Normandy, the Siege of Winterfell, the Battle of Pelennor Fields from Lord of the Rings. But when you go to set the battle up, you realize just how clunky mass combat is in D&D and most RPGs. The problem is, most RP...

Lots of DMs draw inspiration from their favorite movies. But adapting a movie to your game isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Can you really use D&D, where the PCs are super-powered, to create Jurassic Park, where most of the characters are lunch? How do you capture the magic of Lord of the Rings in a way your players can actually play through without following the book scene-for-scene? How do...

Sometimes the best stories play out after defeat, but to get to them, bad guys need to occasionally survive the fight. It’s not always so easy to recognize when it’s time to pull back and have the monsters or villains run away or surrender to the PCs, and it can be even harder to get the party to accept the surrender after it’s offered. When should a DM surrender and how do you make sure it doesn’...

Combat is such a central part of D&D 5E, but it’s also a part of the game that can take forever! And not all players are down for a 4-hour fight every game session. What can the DM do to keep the fights fun for everyone, even if some players in the party want fast combat and others want to take their time and enjoy the tactics? How do you make sure you’re not the one slowing combat down and ki...

Whether you’re playing a book Dungeons & Dragons campaign or just have big plans for a couple uglies in the Monster Manual, there’s a level window where your PCs will have a good, balanced encounter with those threats. But what do you do when the party isn’t in that window? Maybe through the course of their adventures, the PCs have explored everything and leveled up too fast, so now Strahd or...

Dungeons & Dragons gives most DMs a good idea of how to start running high fantasy games, but where do you go from there? Or if you started with another genre of role-playing game, like horror, how do you make a high fantasy game feel alive? What mechanics, details and dungeon master tricks (or GM tricks) can you use to make your players feel what’s unique about your setting? One of the cool t...

From The Avengers to The Snyder Cut and Arrow to Wanda Vision, superheroes have conquered entertainment. Are you ready for them to clean up the streets of your game group, too? That’s exactly what’s been happening at the 3 Wise DMs’ game table, as our little experimentation with TSR’s Marvel Superhero RPG (MSH RPG) from 1984 has ballooned into a 3-DM shared universe. Instead of the MCU, we now hav...

How much time should you spend prepping for individual game sessions? When should you improv and when should you plan more ahead of time? How can you keep rules lawyers and house rules under control? This episode marks one year of recording 3 Wise DMs and some of the most intensive gaming of our lives. We’ve had as many as 5 campaigns running across 3 different systems, and every week we got toget...

The 3 Wise DMs have only just started to get back together for some in-person gaming, but none of the online RPGs we’ve talked about has yet made it back to the dinner table. Can they be saved? Do the Wise DMs even want to bring them back in-person? Are the players on board? Even if everyone wants to go back to playing live, what challenges do they face? In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk...

It takes more than just a Wise DM to make a great roleplaying game campaign. No matter how thoroughly you plan or brilliantly you improv, the DM (or GM, judge, storyteller, or whatever the system you’re playing calls it) is only one person in a group of 2 to 10 or more people making this thing happen. When push comes to shove, the players are the ones who really make the game what it becomes — whe...

Dungeons & Dragons used to have cursed treasure that would suddenly cause big changes in player characters — like the Helm of Opposite Alignment and the Girdle of Opposite Gender. These were transformations that could ruin a character for some players, so we see less of that in most RPGs today, but they can still be powerful tools for the DM and players to make a narrative twist have a lasting...

Of all the roles the DM takes on, none is more important than bringing new players into the hobby. DM a game, and your player has fun for a night. Teach someone to play, and they may have fun for the rest of their lives (or think you’re a gigantic weirdo — it’s a win either way). DMing new players has its own rewards and challenges. On the one hand, they haven’t played anything before, so every go...

It’s the Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG)! The font from which all the pain in your campaign should spring. … So, how do you make sure that NPC is epic and inspires your PCs to true desperation like Darth Vader and not a sniveling mama’s boy like Joss Whedon’s Steppenwolf? It can be a fine line to walk. You need to make the villain powerful, intimidating, and willing to do things that the players will hate...

“Alignment doesn’t matter!” We’ve heard it all over the place, but alignment has been a part of D&D — and most RPGs in some form — for decades. And it’s been played differently through every edition. Is it worth your time? Does it make things worse instead of better? Does it have any benefits players today are overlooking? Once upon a time, violating alignment could cost a character a level, w...

For the first time ever, we brought the whole team together to recap DM Tony’s very highly customized version of Storm King’s Thunder. Hear what all 5 players and Tony thought of the game and what they have to say about the CRAZY MAGIC ITEMS in it, his changes to the campaign, fitting in their backstories, and more! Along the way, we talk about fighting the Kraken, befriending (most) of the giants...

When is a book module not a book module? When the DM throws in birthday games, a modifiable Spelljammer airship, legendary weapons tied to every character’s backstory, and more deviations from the standard campaign than we could count. That’s how DM Tony made Storm King’s Thunder his own. We just wrapped this epic campaign at level 11 after 16 sessions. Now the 3 Wise DMs are comparing notes on th...

Do your players feel into the campaign setting you’re running, or is it just generic D&D world #124 to them? What can you do to bring that world more to life and make it feel unique to you and your players? What makes a D&D session feel like more than just a glorified board game? With about a half dozen campaigns running between the 3 of us, making each of those worlds and settings feel un...

Party balance: It’s the most important thing every new campaign needs, right? Maybe not. Is there anything a party really NEEDS to have? Can your players survive without a healer? Or a thief? Or a meat shield warrior? Will they still have a good time? In general, we’re big fans of letting each player play whatever they want to play and working out party balance as we go. But what do you do when th...

The biggest variable in any TTRPG campaign isn’t the dice, the monsters, or even the unbalanced psyche of an exasperated DM. It’s the players themselves and the party dynamic they create both in the game with their characters and around the table as the people they are. How do you want the party in your campaign to work? Are you OK with a little role/skill overlap? Are the players? How well do the...