Hello friends first time DM here who foolhardily decided to jump into world building rather than running a cookie cutter adventure.
I’m hoping some battle tested dungeon masters could throw me a couple pointers on how you introduce players to your worlds to help flesh out my pages of notes 😅
With good intentions to immediatly get derailed.
First rule of DMing, your players will fuck up your carefully planned out story.
No plan survives contact with the
enemiesplayers.This actually touches on a really important point. Make sure you and your players are on the same page about the kind of game you’re looking you run. Are they buying into an epic, cohesive campaign over a year or more? Or are they looking for a monster of the week build a story purely on the fly? It’s way easier if you establish this early on… then it’s up to them to bite on the plot hooks you throw them which they almost certainly will. They might throw you a curve ball and send you down different roads than you were planning, but you’ll still get to your destination.
In my experience it’s just when there’s a disconnect there that it becomes a problem.
For my longest running campaign I told my players that the world will zoom in with details when you interact with it. So I started with a 5 or so big hooks and they looked at a few of them. Others they ignored. I did ask them what few ideas they were interested in doing and built it from that.
One of their ideas was to have one others players father to get arrested. That ended up being a huge plot point that I never considered until they mentioned it. Player driven campaigns are the way to go
They’re just different. Sometimes you want to play Lord of the Rings, with a reasonably clean beginning, middle, and end. There’ll be side quests and diversions, but a pretty clean narrative, as if running a published campaign. Other times you want something more open ended where they can chase down random rabbit holes and see where they go. I genuinely like both, or mixing the two, but everyone needs to be on the same page what the goal as players is or someone is gonna get upset.
I mean, even cohesive epics will usually have player driven deviation, and that’s cool, not implying it’s a pure one or the other… but there’s nothing wrong with a DM wanting to run a “tighter” campaign as long as players are buying into it and are still forging the path there (they’re going their own way to Mordor, but they’re still going there, in other words).
I really do like both. Sometimes I want Minecraft where I make my own story, other times I want to play out a choose your own adventure… we’re going to get to the same destination, but how we get there and what the ending will be is a big question mark.
I definitely agree that as a DM, whether epic or open ended, the paths you haven’t thought of that your players throw you is easily the most interesting part on that side of the screen.
For sure. There is fun in both open ended and tight story structure. Player driven is way to get player input to both and make sure player choices matter. I agree with being on the same page