"I think we talked about this in another video" - Matthew Colville, talking for the fourth time about the money thing that the Village of Hommlet does.
Has anyone ever put together a RtG Bingo card? Or we might even extend it to an MCDM Bingo card, bc I believe he also talks about it in one of the RPG Q&As _again!_
Have to put in my $.02 on ToEE. My wife ran it for our group. We had no idea how tf we were supposed to take on an entire temple. So instead we joined it--we became a merc group for hire and worked for the temple, worked our way up the ranks, eventually becoming the highest ranking group under main leadership. Then we burned that f*cker to the ground. Campaign took about 1.5 years IRL. One of the best campaigns I've ever played in.
Using a magic item in a novel way: One of the other players had to leave early and gave me his character to run. We got into a battle with a behir, and it swallowed his dwarf whole. I was studying his sheet and wracking my brain on how to get him out of the situation. Using his axe in a grapple situation wasn't going to work well. Did he have a dagger? Would that help? I really don't want his character to die! Wait... What's this? A Decanter of Endless Water? What does that do again? "Produces a 20-foot-long, 1-foot-wide stream at 30 gallons per round." Perfect. I gave the behir an emetic.
Also, if your players have created any level of backstory for their characters, using elements from them is the perfect bait to thread on to your plot hooks! -Nerdarchist Ryan
Too true! One of my players decided to go Snowflake and use the Haunted One background, and since I'm running Keep on the Borderlands converted for 5E, I decided that which haunts her is the evil entity the cultists in the caves are trying to bring forth. Another player, who quit on us without any notice, had a mention in his background of having been ambushed by bandits and being robbed of a parental memento... So that was going to be the raiders camped out south of the Keep.
I had a strange instance the reverse of that. My friend and I had tied our backstories together. He got bored with D&D and just up and quit. So as my DM is trying to write his character out, he's like "Come with me". And as it stood with the current party, we hadn't really had any bonding moment, we didn't know or trust each other. and I told the DM straight up. "My character would leave with him, without question". So he then had to change the way the character was leaving so that I could feasibly refuse. It was kind of strange.
In my current campaign, One of my players was a dwarf who was married to a dragonborn in the city where their fortress is and as a plot hook, i had an evil priest of the fallen god sarlac hold him hostage and once they started to revolt against him, he teleported in frount of them and stole his soul in frount of the party and teleported away, leaving the husk of the clerics husband
I think I may have watched this video like fourteen times. Recently I actually tried an open world sandbox, I found that when you tell your players that's what your doing they needed 0 motivation to go to the Moathouse. They straight up just went. Things are not always so different these days!
I wish I had this level of ease. I presented the main quest to my players via an NPC and they tried to kill her because she was “suspicious” 😂😂 I had plans to make the town absolutely hate them but we ended up resetting the campaign because it turns out I could have made her a little more friendly and explanatory as she was meant to come across. From now on it’s just happy little accidents!
@@TimTamSlam7 When I was a kid, I ran for a bunch of friends and they straight off killed the plothook before she could open her mouth. Their reason was she tried to pickpocket them. This was the umpteenth time I dealt with their murderous rampage and I just stood up to grab a snack, telling them the adventure is over, they get 25 xp each for killing the thief. It actually reigned their murderhoboing in for a while. Last game I had with them, I was actually a player and the story was literally: *knock-knock* "Who is it?" "We brought the wood." "What wood?" *murder, blood, killing innocents* *Next door. Don't even bother yourself with hiding the bodies.* I think... the best way to deal with murderous players is to not play with them. At all. I mean... your time is more valuable than that.
If anyone is looking for a 5e equivalent of Dungeon Delve (a collection of level-by-level mini-dungeons) the book "Prepared" from Kobold Press is exactly that, and it's great.
I love the design philosophy of saying: "I think up problems, not solutions" and I will start using this myself. I always felt I had to have some solutions prepaired but that will only make the players feel like they have to figure out my solution not their own.
My players are random enough to be guaranteed to go of script, so being able to sandbox an adventure is necessary. My advice for any who want to try this would be: Create a few encounters of a few different types. Make so they could reasonably occur where you are or in range of where you might end up. Write those encounters on cards or sheets of paper and keep them handy. Do the same with a few NPCs. Become familiar with what terrain type they'll be in, and what wildlife might be around. Become comfortable being uncomfortable. In other words, learn to improv. Don't worry if you're not that good at it. The more you do it, the better you'll get. Learn to develop a good pokerface and be willing to be vague on yes or no questions. If you make a mistake and it looks like you've dropped the ball on a description...and the players call you on it...raise an eyebrow and say something like "really? Hmmm. I wonder why it looks like that....". They'll immediately go into 'paranoid' mode and you have a whole new aspect to run with. Once you've done all that, develop the map as you go. Feel free to make stuff up and record it as they encounter it. When you need a terrain feature to be there to justify an encounter you've made, so long as it's reasonable, go for it. When the players come up with great ideas about "what may be going on", if you like it, steal it and insert it in the game. They'll pat themselves on the back for their genius and you'll have more hooks for them. As you go, repeat all of the above. Retain all the encounters you wrote that never got used so you can use them later. If a character dies, it's okay. They have hit points and an AC for a reason. Make the death dramatic and suitably heroic. Players will tend to want a good death over a bad story. My final piece of advice would be to run the game every second week. That will give you time to create new gems for them to encounter. You may even come up with a full dungeon or town in the meantime. This keeps the flow going and reduces DM burnout. EDIT: To address Matt's comment that there's not a lot of 5E modular content - I agree. I wanted some for myself that was easy to access and free of charge. Both are not that easy to come by. So I wrote my own. I write an online article for Nerdarchy.com called "Out of the Box Encounters". To date there are 32 (so far) ranging from level 1-10. Some are wilderness and some are dungeon. Some are puzzles, lots are monster-driven, and none are campaign-specific. They're also posted on this website free of charge.
It may not be free, but Out of the Abyss has a few encounters that could easily be ripped out and inserted elsewhere. The Lost Tomb of Khaem, The Oozing Temple, The Silken Paths and The Hook Horror Lair could all be easily inserted into various adventures. Maybe one of the party members hears a whisper pointing them towards the Lost Tomb, and if they choose to seek adventure elsewhere Khaem succeeds at freeing herself. Now you have a big bad wraith in the world with nebulous goals and served by those who accompanied her in life. Maybe the party's headed through a mountain pass and an earthquake opens up a cave through which lies the Oozing Temple. Again, not free, but there's plenty to rip out.
I like the idea of premade modular encounters that can be put into the game at will. I have a tendency to improv to the extreme when sandboxing, I often create encounters, or even monsters on the fly. However, having some cards like that to work with sound like it could really enhance my sandboxing.
Dallas, I posted my entire collection "Out of The Box, Series 1" on Nerdarchy.com in PDF format for download. That's 50 separate encounters. There's also a full length starting adventure there called "Parish of Lost Souls" for characters levels 1-2. Both are free for download. And good luck on your first campaign!
@@mikegould6590 DO you have a specific link ? I cannot find it on Nerdarchy and I am a BRANNNNDDDDNEEEWWWWWWW DM that haven,t have his first session yet and I am interested to see a most possible things before the first session :P
the players are just a few ants doing there thing in a huge world that barely notices they exist, no matter what the PCs do (or don't do), the world is going to do it's thing. My sandbox is huge, PCs can do whatever they like to try, and the world will keep on keeping on - seasons change, holidays come and go, politics occur, goblins raid, etc. Eventually, the PCs might become big enough for local politics to notice them, but for the most part, the world doesn't. Oh, and nothing is to scale. It's entirely possible to run across a baby dragon or a clan of stone giants in a novice quest. Sometimes all one can do is RUN! and hope to survive to see another day.
Years ago I had a main villan (necromancer) growing alongside players. Every time they got xp, he got the same amount. We never finished this campaign so they never knew, that a childhood fried of one of the players was this elusive necromancer they were trying to catch.
I recommend everyone read up on the Faction system in Blades in the Dark, specifically their clocks. It is a very easy and intuitive way to keep track of what a faction is doing, and whenever the players help or hinder them in something, you just tick the progress clock up or down accordingly. (It should be going up with time just on it's own)
You worked on Mercenaries?! Dude those games were so amazing, thanks for great times when I was like 10, then continuing it now I'm like 25. Papa bless.
My favorite way my players have used a magic item is the "Immovable Rod." My Dwarven Paladin decided to attach it to his shield and make any creature charging it make a DC 30 strength check to attempt to move it. It was his third ever game.
I always run sandbox. I make the skeleton of a story, of a challenge, and then i just react to the players, and let the story evolve depending on what they do and say.
duckforceone I find that the best way for me to run a game. You don't get bogged down with details and it allows you to bounce ideas off the players as you're playing.
I'm 6 sessions into my first campaign. Your videos have been such a HUGE help! I'm loving DMing! Thank you so much for your hard work on these awesome videos. You're making a difference for our hobby, if nowhere else you're improving the games at my table. Please keep it up. :)
I think it’s more fair to say Gugax assumed you had a campaign of your own and would work the module in to things in a way that made sense for your players. A lot of things were not spelled out because that is simply what a DM was expected to know and do.
I always really love re-watching a lot of these old videos when I'm getting ready to run a new campaign, just to refresh my memory. I really appreciate the content, Matt!
wow this reminds of this one time, we were all locked in a dungeon that was filling with sand and we had to figure out how to get out within a certain time framed. Like we were literally timed. Our DM had no solution intended and expected us to die lol but we blew his mind on how we managed to get out. Basically we panicked for a while trying to figured out what to do so we started striking at the door, which was metal, trying to get out. We managed to puncture a small hole in the door but by then the sand was about chest deep. I was small enough to fit through the hole but my two friends couldn't. The sand almost completely buried them but then one of them had and awesome idea and they basically did a super powerful fire spell that created a small explosion that created a bubble of glass around them. It also heated up the door which made it easier to tear open and they got out.
Haven't even finished watching the video yet, just commenting because I love the idea of "bad guy npc thinks a pc is also one of their bad guy buddies" as a plot hook. I'm currently populating my world with story threads and that one is most definitely getting dropped in there somewhere.
I've been DMing since 1st edition. I've found that no matter how you think your campaign is going to go; your players are going to turn it into a sandbox, and that's a good thing. My players have a strong hand in determining not just the fate, but the nature of the world. There are regions that exist because, back in second edition, a player came to me and said, "I have this character concept, where can I be from? what is there culture like?" Sandbox games can take several forms. One methodology is the character driven story. Instead of giving them adventure options, ask your players what they want to accomplish. If it was a book, the players write the outline, and possibly the chapter titles; while you decide what happens in each chapter. I always discuss what my players want to do at the start of a campaign and work from there. In my latest campaign, I told my characters I wanted them to be heroic (not just good); then I asked them how they wanted to do that. They came up with the idea of championing a town in distress and turning it into a great city. I had a cursed region that was perfect for that in my world. Thus was born the town of Hope Falls. My world is very developed. I mapped the part of it they are in at the beginning of 3rd edition. I think a well developed world is crucial for any kind of sandbox game. Still, you have to be ready for the players to ignore everything you have laid out and set off in a different direction. TLDR: You need a well developed world and be ready to improvise to run a sandbox game.
Instead of "well developed", I'd say "developed enough". My homebrew world had only VERY basic topography, a few major cities and country borders. I only had a couple of sentences about each country/region, because partially I wanted this to be a group project between my players and myself: if they wanted to create a city/town (and if it was thematically appropiate for the region) I let them. Once they picked their starting location, I slowly added more and more to the map as they 'discovered' those locations. All-in-all I'd say (and I'd recoomend it to any DM designing their own homebrew world) you don't need to have all the details planned out, just have a general idea about the regions of your world, as to give your players a basic understanding of them, then once they start somewhere, develop THAT region further.
@@MrEtamsorojam Have a few locations more developed than a few sentences. I have the Black Forest which is a forest so thick most of it has never seen sunlight. There's enough spots of light to explain the food supply of the kingdom of drow and orcs that live there. There's also an entrance to the Underdark there that likewise has a forest, but giant luminescent crystal mushrooms bright enough to not need a torch to see. These are things you need sorted out before the players get there.
Hi Matt! Thanks for making these videos. After watching a bunch of your Running the Game Series (Not in Order), I ran my first 5E group on the Lost Mine of Phandelver. Working with the concept of "The Clock is Always Ticking", I went way off script when the party pretty much sidestepped a big part of the main content and changed a huge section of the game related directly to the town of Phandelin. The players loved the game and I think all of the advice I took from your videos helped to make the game more enjoyable than my previous attempts at DMing which were all in 2E in the 90s.
This video has really helped me realise, that while I thought I was giving them a sandbox they were feeling "obligated" to do plothooks right in front them, like "In the night you hear screams for help, what do you do" not really a choice they are going to go help that person. It has shown me an area to work on
What I find really interesting is the fact is the similarities between the "Clock is Ticking" concept you use in your sandbox campaigns and the idea of fronts outlined in the game Dungeon World. It's always interesting seeing different sources creating similar approaches to game design and the way that ideas that work tend to float to the top. Also, for anyone who watched this video and wants another resource for sandbox campaigns I'd strongly recommend picking up a supplement for the game Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures called Further Afield that details a method of creating what it calls a "shared sandbox" campaign in which players seed the world you create with location and rumours about these locations the DM can use for adventure hooks.
Currently, I'm running a homebrew world. The characters are going through a world that is basically Europe with each country at the height of it's fantasy potential. So the Scandinavian countries are Norse. Greece and Italy have a Greco-Roman feel. Romania has gothic horror feel with a Vampire running it. France has a Marie Antoinette type of queen running things. That sort of thing. The characters have no idea that this is the case. They are from Britain. The country has been caught in a civil war for 200 yrs and has lost contact with the outside world. The new king is sending the characters out to make diplomatic contact with the outside world and to map it. They are basically Lewis and Clark. They can go wherever they want. I know the basic political situation in each country. I don't have any real major plot points. I do know that if nothing changes at some point, the continent with have open warfare between several countries. I'm spending a bunch of time reading their character sheets looking for hooks from their backgrounds. So far, so good :-)
I ran the Delian tomb last week (as my first DM experience) for my girlfriend, and then she instantly became hooked on D&D. So I spent a few hours doing up some maps and fitting the tomb into the world, and here I sit with a second player now in the campaign that all spawned out of a test run. :D
You have your own story? I'll be honest I'm jealous, I rarely have more than the next session or two planned. Which is a hard habit to break. I'm running the pre-written module chains of Asmodeus right now and at one point (in dis) the paladin of Lathander wanted to fight undead, meanwhile he, the sorcerer, and the fighter took an interest in the slaves that were mentioned in passing in that layer.... So we spent several sessions bringing down the slave trade in Dis which was run from the shadows by a vampire lord, none of that was in the module. And I've also run several similar side quests at the players initiative both in and out of the nine hells.... That's when I'm running a pre-written, my homebrew games are even more session to session. I legitimately don't know what I would do if my players weren't so proactive.
I had no idea you worked on Mercenaries 1. I just want to say back in the day I played that entire game for a very long time and loved it completely. It was my first "Sandbox" video game and I fell in love with it. I applaud you tremendously for the writing and style of that game and want to tell you your work was greatly appreciated. Keep on keeping on.
I love these videos, especially the help for new DMs. I've only just got into D&D like 3 months ago after gorging on the "Critical Role" show and while I wanted to DM I thought only experienced players could DM but your videos inspired and helped me start my own campaign. Thanks!
I remember when my brother and I played mercenaries 2... he got in a tank and I Had a large carrier helicopter and we did an aerial tank assault on most mid-late game missions. It was a blast
One of the standard signs of becoming experienced at a particular craft: you learn the shortcuts. Figuring out ways to throw together a fast adventure, or series of adventures, or even a whole campaign in a fairly short amount of time is something that comes with time and experience and lots and lots of practice. Incidentally, here's a rough draft of a form for quests, so you can build up a bunch of 'em on 3x5 cards for ease of use: Name of the quest (optional) Intended power level Quick summary Quest hook Challenges involved Rewards Seeds into other quests/plot archs
Thank you, this was exactly what i needed. I ran my first campaign (hoard of the dragon queen) and after the 3rd episode i truly hated the railroad style of play. I told my players when we finish the adventure this month i want to try and play a sand box or home brew. I didn't have any real idea on how to do that, but this video was a capstone to your other videos on running adventures. im off to find some ancient adventures to populate my new world.
I am getting ready to run my 1st 5E campaign and planning on a sandbox ish game. This could not have been posted at a better time. Thanks! I would love to see a video where you expand on hooks and inserting content along the way.
One of my players worked out how to use a portable hole as a way to transport rocks with Glyphs of Warding on them. It was in preparation for an encounter that they'd worked out needed a specific sequence of successful actions to succeed at. Her character walked into that fight with - effectively - three concentration spells up. Of course, the twist was - now of all times - they rolled the _perfect_ initiative order and another player got a success on a vital check _first time._ It was still a great plan and I was incredibly proud.
It is sooo funny that i am listening to this now. I just finished a "home brew" campaign for my players that began with the "Palace of the Silver Princess" and lead to some one shots jumbled together from the "Explorers guide to Wildemont" And when that is done i will be mashing together the "Tomb of Horrors" and "White Plume Mountain". I always thought this was how DM's created their worlds.
kobold press has something similar to 4E Dungeon Delve, called "Book of Lairs". They are just standalone dungeons which you can throw at your party or plug into your sandbox. Complete with adventure hooks, locations etc. Also, the "Prepared!" supplement for 5E might fall into this category. A compilation of quick, standalone adventures, ready to plug and play while you figure out what to do next with the campaign.
mercs was the BEST. loved how the game never seemed to say "no" to me. my favorite was dangling a tank from a helicopter while listening to flight of the valkyries.
One of the tricks to running sandbox campaigns is to create thematic worlds, and rely heavily on random tables to generate a lot of what the players run into. For anyone looking for something premade and easy to run at the table, any of the Old School Essentials Adventures fit the bill, as does Neverland RPG. The OSE adventures would need a bit of adapting to 5e, but Neverland is compatible out-of-the-box.
Holy shit! Mercenaries was reveletory for me in middle school. Instant sub. Working the Keep on the Borderlands into my own setting rn, super stoked to find your content!
I started DMing a few weeks ago after being a player for years and I have to say that your advice has been very helpful. From building encounters and making my world and campaign which spans 4 continents that I have built from scratch your advice has been very helpful, so thank you sir!
Hey Matt, I've been trolling your TH-cam page without much to say but wanted to chime in on this video with some of my own ideas. I've been playing/running D&D since 1981, and with my recent move to a rather rural area in Maine have been trying to build my gaming group back up again. I still skype in to my old group every other week, but the experience just isn't the same. I contacted my FLGS and have started running Adventure League and am at a point now where I'm starting to mentor a new DM or two and have been directing them to your page as I think that what you are doing (and how you explain it) is phenomenal. Thank you! You mentioned Dungeon Delve from 4e as a collection of short one-offs that you use and I couldn't help but think of some older 1e adventures that I have used many times to pull my bacon out of the fire when the party did something unexpected or just wandered so far off track that I had to start making a new track for them to follow. Four jump immediately to mind, The Book of Lairs I, The Book of Lairs II, The Forgotten Realms Book of Lairs and The DragonLance Book of Lairs. With only a minor amount of modification any and all of these encounters can be gussied up for use as an encounter (Skeletons 52 is a particular favorite) or as a plot hook for building a multi-encounter (Cave Bears 4, leading into an assault on a Stone Giant homestead) are from Book of Lairs I. Otyughs (3) and Flesh Golem (1) from Book of Lairs II are fun, and Beholder (1) can be downright nasty as the PC's hare off thinking they are after a Medusa (oops, spoilers!). Also, when it comes to low level starter dungeons there are a few (including some that have great starter towns) that you missed... maybe just because you haven't used them, or maybe just because you had to cut yourself off somewhere. U1, Sinister Secreat at Saltmarsh is an all time favorite of mine. Granted, it doesn't have a starter town all set up but it has a page of notes on how to make one and I've found a great one that I stole from online that I going to use as my "Saltmarsh (vishteercampaign.pbworks.com/w/page/10036309/Saltmarsh)." I also really Like L1 The Secret of Bone Hill and L2 The Assassin's Knot. The towns of Restenford (L1) and Garotten (L2) are phenomenally well laid out and explained. Great starter towns! And the murder mystery... it is a bit dated, maybe a touch formulaic but it is interesting and fun from a time when dungeon crawls were the big thing. For starter dungeons, especially for training new DM's (and I know you've talked about this elsewhere) Lost Mines of Phandelver is great, but I don't think we can overlook The Sunless Citadel from 3e. Now, I know that it was redone and included as a 5e version for Tales From the Yawning Portal, but even before that book came out I had re-written it to include vegepygmies (the theme of my current homebrew campaign is "nature gone wild" so there are LOTS of plant creatures and abberations that make up the primary bad guys). So far, you have focused on smaller towns, and especially for newer DM's this is important to keep the resources being tracked low. However, for people who want to have a city based campaign there are some great cities out there as well, but the five that I use on a regular basis. Two are from previous D&D editions and three are from WarHammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st edition). Now, three of these are fully laid out cities, and one is an adventure set in a city that gives enough blurb to be able to flesh out the city. The adventure first: B6 The Veiled Society set in Specularum. Going all the way back to D&D Basic For urban campaigns I like starting here becuse it introduces the seedy underworld, the devious dealings and the secret societies that exist. It is a little bit rail-roady, but fun. Second, Lankhmar: City of Adventure. A long book. A lot of locations. Fritz Leiber's Fafrd and Grey Mouser's stomping grounds brought to life. Wow. For the next three cities, we traipse over to the Old World of WarHammer Fantasy Roleplay. WarHammer City details Middenheim, the city of the White Wolf. Shadows Over Bogenhafen gives us a great river city and for a fantastic port city, we go to Marienburg: Sold Down the River. I won't go into a lot of detail on these, but they are great LARGE cities even if you don't use the adventures that they are based around. However, if you want to do a lot of converting and updating, The Enemy Within Campaign from WFRP is one of my all time favorites and has the party starting out traveling to Bogenhafen, then getting sandboxy with Death on the Reik, getting super-political in Middenheim with Power Behind the Throne before getting super sandboxy again with Something Rotten in Kislev and wrapping up with Empire in Flames. However, that could be a video series in and of itself. Thanks for doing what you do. It is appreciated by newbie DM's and oldbies who know that you can never not learn something new! (Oh, and while writing this I'm watching your "4e to make 5e combat" video and I had to laugh as you reference that far away land of Maine... which is where I am from, though at -20 degrees today it feels a bit more like Hoth).
I've been playing and running dungeons and dragons for four or five years now and, having been someone just dropped into the role of dungeon master soon after learning to play, I want you to know that this video (many others too, but definitely this one) helped me a ton! After putting into effect a few of your tips, I for the first time, was able to do two things. A)provide an experience that left my group of players wanting more from the same story, and subsequently returning to the same story for a second game night. And B) I had a BLAST running it. It was smooth, my players had fun. They didn't feel restricted by a linear plot, yet they were entangled by a plot that has grown very large over the course of only 2 game sessions! Dude, you're awesome and you helped me bring to the table a very very memorable experience for me, my gaming group, and TWO new players (one picked up each session). Thanks man! And please keep making these videos!
I just have to say thank you, your series has helped me refine my DM style and really expand my games to the joy of my players and myself. You are a gentlemen and a scholar, you are exactly the kind of person the table top community needs.
something Matt said in one of his live streams that I've found really useful when sandboxing is the rule of 3s. Try and set up 3 adventure hooks and let the players pick one. Don't show any favoritism towards the choice. 3 is normally the perfect number, enough that the players feel free and open, but not too many that they feel overwhelmed. it's been a really useful mind set. thanks matt
When I ran the delian tomb for my first level players they reacted to the riddle with violence. The tried to beat a riddle with brute force. They tore the bronze plaque the riddle was carved into off the wall. Then one player decided to tap the metal plate on the wall until he heard echoes, I thought that was clever so I gave it to them.
This series, but this episode in particular, has highlighted to me how non-optimally I have been preparing my games. Because of this we are able to play less, and it becomes less fun for me to DM. Thank you for all these insightful videos that are making me a better DM, and making the game even more fun than it was before!
Personal experience: When playing with an inexperienced party, put in one Railway Dungeon at the beginning to introduce them to the mechanics and basic lore, then throw in 1 or 2 plot hooks based on the characters' backstories and 1 more that has nothing to do with any of them. (The last one should at some point in the campaign come back as some kind of callback or a main quest line if possible.) When the players choose one of these (or decide to go completely off the rails) you can start going full open world.
@@oz_jones No, you shouldn't. If you want it to feel real or serious there are more effective techniques to create verisimilitude or atmosphere in the world that are less work and time intensive for everyone at the table. Arbitrarily sticking to all the plot lines from the very first sessions also runs the grave risk of alienating your players, because if they chose to not follow those plots then chances are they did so because either they weren't interested in it or you didn't do a very good job setting them up. A D&D campaign is very different from most other forms of storytelling that way, where everything should ideally have narrative consequence since they can rely on hindsight to alleviate any momentary disinterest retroactively, while the DM needs to consider their player's momentary session to session enjoyment first and foremost.
I loved 4e and all I hear about is people insulting it. They always bring up things like its bad because fighters are inessence casting fireball (yes I really have heard this) or that all it is is just one big combat simulation. The big one is that its just an MMO. Yet they get really angry or they plug their ears when you talk smack about 3.5. Like how it had a dozen of dysfunctional rules that if you used as is allowed thing like becomeing invisible by using a tower shield and hiding behind it which in tow hid you tower shield or that magic was so dominaring in 3.5 that a decently built wizard could easily remove the need for the party, along with the abuse that several spells caused like sleep, Simulacrum and wish.
***** He was sayig he was going to talk about 4e in a later video. I wanted to voice my opinion plus just mentioning 4e often times spawns edition wars.
KamiRecca My two biggest things I loved about 4e was that Martial characters had abilities they could activate so it was not just them swinging a sword. The second is that there was general balance. In 4e wizards, clerics and druids did not make the other characters pale in comparison. Other things I loved about it was the way leader / healing classes were built with various ways of healing while still doing something in battle. The multiclass system being a series of feats was cool as well enabling little splashes of interesting to characters. Power builds rewarded the player who built it without making others feel weak in comparison. I also loved the way things were worded in the simplicity of the rules. I rarely felt the need of asking the GM if my interpretation of the rule was right. The combat system was also very tactical. Allowing plans to function without the GM needing to interject to much.
Hey Matthew Colville! Love your videos so far, you've been such a great help so far! If you don't mind me suggesting, and if you haven't already got one you're making, do you think you could make a video on Towns and Cities? I'm really struggling with designing them! Likewise, a video going deeper into dungeon design (like larger scale dungeons) would also be great! Thanks again!
How detailed do you want? If you look at maps for European cities... some of them still have old town centers.. When I lived in Spain I bought street maps... I've used them for cities and such. Many Euro towns haven't changed the roads first laid in ye olden times.
Six years later... this is a great reassurance to me as I slowly build up a sandbox/hexcrawl/hexclearing type game in Chult by throwing in literally everything from a load of different sources as far back as the Jungles of Chult 2E module as well as a tonne of locations from Tomb of Annihilation, including entire dungeons and storylines (and ignoring the ToA storyline entirely). I'm glad to see that someone as well-respected literally does the same thing of homebrewing by cobbling together pre-written stuff!
Three things: 1. Night Below is already a pretty sandbox style game don't you think? 2. What do you think of the 5th Edition Adventure Temple of Elemental Evil? 3. It's not true that WotC isn't releasing modular content, it's just that they're releasing it in the context of larger adventures. For example, there's a great encounter in Out of the Abyss where the characters find a tomb, and it has no relationship to the rest of the adventure. You could easily use it in another adventure altogether, and even feels like it was intended to be used that way.
Actually, your idea of starting the adventure at, “Tor Keep, the seat of the local barony, and there are NO adventures there,” is pretty much how I used The Keep On The Borderlands. The Keep usually being the major part I kept. Lots of hooks to adventures in the surrounding lands, but, initially, not a whole lot going on there. Eventually, it becomes clear that the bandits are getting cover from a corrupt Castellan and the Caves of Chaos are being used as a staging area for an invasion by surrounding evil forces, but that’s all later in the game. The initial meat is mostly references to adventures at villages, towns and dungeons much farther afield. Even the invasion force is upgraded to the point that the 5th-6th level characters encountering it are mostly reduced to setting off internal conflicts and getting out.
I was a 1st Edition DM and ran a couple of campaigns that lasted 4 years. Until 2nd edition released, essentially. Now I'm back and loving this content. It's nice to know that the essentials of storytelling and building the setting are still important.
Sandboxing isn't being told what to do and not how to do it. Sandboxing is being put into a living world and the players doing whatever they want, however they want and accepting the consequences from any rules or laws or physics of the preexisting world. My Father was the best DM I have ever played with and this is the only way he played. Spent weeks creating a world that in theory functioned with or w/o the players there and then we created the story as of how we came together and that was it. It was amazing. In video game terms it would be something like Star Wars Galaxies. There were never "quests" or "adventures" with names, there were preexisting politics, cultures, religions, magics, prior catastrophes and he organically changed the world while we affected it or how things in the background politics or even weather changed at random. But he was a genius, most DM's have a boring cookie-cutter idea of "fantasy adventure" and dungeoneering...lame. Our ambitions as characters dictated the choices we made and we often ended up split partied and it actually worked amazingly, the stories it created were novel worthy. I remember my brother a human racist fighter went to enlist in the local kingdoms army to fight in the civil war in the first night of play and it ended up being hilarious and fun. The DM didn't force him into doing anything or not doing anything because he has some grand narative that he thought was best for us. That's sandboxing.
Amnesiac Angel did you miss the first 5 minutes of the video? Matt says sandboxing IS being told what to do and not how to do it, what you described is what he defined, in this same video, as an Open World game. Most of what he is saying in this video is the virtues of open world style play and how to pull it off, the bit about sandboxing is merely to clarify that most people use the word “sandboxing” wrongly.
I've been running campaigns and adventures in my world for so long and it's grown so much. I've had hundreds of developments, from the largest city in the world being built by a player to having a cursed item strategically placed by a player on an important npc, thus causing the collapse of an entire civilisation, who later rise up as ancient and angry beings released by another party over 200 years later (in game, like 8 years later by a completely different party) who have now taken over a section of a continent and built a tremendous tower. Its amazing, really. All I'd say is make sure its what your party wants to do, some prefer a more structured adventure.
Hey Matt, DM Veteran here (three decades). Just want you to know I've rewatched this particular video about a dozen times now. Thank you. This actually helps. A lot.
Dungeon World has a wonderful expansion book called Perilous Wilds where the first session is a "session zero" where you not only create the characters but then the world they inhabit and then you can incorporate what players want to do and appropriate things and places for those arcs. You can easily port that method to something like 5e which is what I'm doing next weekend.
YOU worked on Mercenaries?? I LOVED that game. C4 jeeps were my go-to way to deal with tanks, because it was so much fun, if not the most effective. 14 C4 charges+T72=Almost North Korean Space Program.
Matt, whats your thoughts on the Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh (and the Two following Adventures, Danger at Dunwater and The Final Enemy)? Between those three and Cult of the reptile god they are the 4 adventures i was introduced into dnd on when i was 13, You mentioned CotRG but not SSoSM.
my favorite sandbox segment was after defeating a black dragon in a mythril mine the owners of the mine said we could have the dragon's horde and what loose mythril was on the ground as payment, the DM forgot he gave me a scroll of earth to mud, so i thought after we loaded everything up was to hit a good sized vein of mythril and have the rock and earth around it just fall away so the metal would be "on the ground" for picking... needless to say he let me keep the good stuff but found a way for me to not make use of it for a good while later
Thanks! I just DMed for the first time last night and I realized how materialistic my PCs are! When you talked about it, I knew I needed to add it in. Going to use that and come up with some loot tables for them.
Thank you so much for taking the time to put out this series! My wife and I have been hooked on TAZ and CritRole, and we're about to jump into d&d for the time (her as the DM). She's taken notes from various Mercer videos, but your series has gotten her really excited to start. She would ask for tips, but you've likely already made a video for it! Thank you again.
In a video game the portable hole through the portcullis probably wouldn't work because you can't stick your arm through... unless there was some kinda glitch lol
I'm a guy with a demilich as his avatar I know what a portable hole is. I meant in a video game a portcullis would usually be a solid wall so you couldn't stick an arm through it.
lol thanks, I realize that. I was referring to coding of a portcullis usually being a solid wall in a video game... Meaning a character in the game could not pass an arm or weapon or gunshot through a hole in the grate of the portcullis.... I don't know how I could have better explained myself.
A book like Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is good for this because there are a bunch of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 towns and mini-adventures. Thats 20 quests total, some of which are more connected to the plot but most are great standalone within an icey environment or not.
Absolutely love the videos you make! Super helpful for new DMs!!! I've watch 2+ hours of your videos for the past few days and I feel like I'm taking Dungeon Master 101, I've been doing my homework (mapping out my campaign) and the first test is tomorrow nervous and excited to be running my first session. I feel like you've really prepped me for my first session with the group buy knowing my friends they're gonna come up with something I was not expecting... Anyway!! thank you so much for making these videos they are incredible!
One of the advantages of using Keep on the Borderlands is that its very easy to "Re-skin" to fit your setting. I named all the NPC's re-flavored the Minotaur maze as a skill challenge mine and other portions as associated facilities (still over-run with Demi-humans) made the hermit helpful and the players (some of whom had experience with the module) never recognized the adventure.
sand boxing really does result in some amazing moments. i was running an island adventure once and my players walked right out of the starting town away from the low level quests they had been informed of and wandered straight into an ancient city where they met some dudes at a bar and found out about a hydra in the mouth of a river a few miles away so being level 2 and it being two of my players first game they decide their going to kill this thing, my other player who had fought a hydra in another campaign decides to kick back and watch as the hydra nearly murders both players who barley escape with their lives
I ran the temple of the Delian Order as my first dungeon and my players loved it. making the dungeon dynamic caught them off guard lol. Thank you for your videos there are the reason I jumped into dming after years of hesitance. Keep it up with the awesome vids Matt
The rolling jeep was pretty much the first thing I thought of doing when I got the remote C4 in Mercenaries 1. I can't believe none of the designers thought of it :D This series is great. I've become hooked.
Personally, when it comes to sandbox play, I like to run a heavily improvised game and I often prefer to use systems that provide me with tools to that end. Pretty much all of Kevin Crawford's OSR stuff is designed with sandbox play in mind, and as such his games come with really good system agnostic tools for creating all sorts of interesting problems for the players to solve - not to mention systems for having different factions compete with each other in the background, which helps make the world feel more lived in. Dungeon World, meanwhile, has what it calls "Fronts"; these are basically where you note down what the general gist of the adventure is, and you write down how the front will progress if the players don't interfere, complete with whatever the final problem may end up being.
Matt, great presentation and information as always. The advice to give your players different information, motivation and/or leads is the absolute best way to get a sandbox campaign going. Make them feel like other things are occurring within your World outside of their influence, but be ready to prep a lot of material for those player curveballs.
One of my players used the immovable rod in a way i had never thought. Not to keep something shut, not to use it for a pully system. They used to get up a floor. They jump, activated it, then swung up, turned it off before turning it back on. Using their own momentum and turning the rod on and off to gain height to a level that wasn't accessable from their current postiton.
That's crazy! I had no idea you worked on the Mercenary games. I was an Infantry Scout stationed at the JSA inside the DMZ in Korea when the first Mercenaries came out and where the game starts out. It blew my mind playing a game that took place right outside my window. I was in Iraq as a Private Contractor when the second Mercenaries came out, and played the hell out of it with my brother when I'd come home on leave. Those games hold a special place with me.
I remember Mercenaries. I loved it and the sandbox ambitions, which were a breath of fresh air when it came out. Makes sense that a DM was involved in a project with that kind of scope and reach. :)
I had the Deck of Encounters (both of them) with 2E, and that was amazing for that sand box kind of style. Whatever terrain the players were exploring, you could grab a few encounters beforehand, or even as they were traveling (since they were pretty quick to go over) and put that in their path. Not only was it good to populate the world, but some of the ideas could really lead to bigger and better things, like finding an artifact in an encounter, that needs its own kind of scrying to determine what it is/does. And that sets the party off in an entirely new adventure.
I find myself here in 2021 getting ready to run my first major "homebrew" campaign, which is essentially a port of Ghost Recon Wildlands, a notably open world sandbox game, into fantasy DnD 5E. I have been listening to all your videos and knew I would owe you a huge thanks as a DM. Now I realize I owe you first for the hundreds if not thousands of hours of enjoyment for Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. I have no idea how many North Korean jeeps and helicopters I have blown up or how many game mechanics I probably broke by grossly OVERUSING helicopters, but I enjoyed every minute of it. Thank you.
This episode might be my favorite so far because of the use of all the low level adventures that I never thought of using and dropping them all over the place so coming up with a whole new story with new plots and characters is a little easier.
Dear Matthew. This is probably one of your best videos to date. Thank you for sharing your vast DM knowledge and experience. Currently I am running my old gaming group (20+ years ago, since we last played) through Curse of Strahd. This is kinda of a limited sandbox, as I really like the sandbox idea. I am already thinking about the future for characters when they return from Barovia to their own world. A lot of your ideas and knowledge is making its way into my world ;)
Fantastic video and very relevant to being a DM for yourself. In my videos on solo DMing I talk about using pieces of different modules in the same way. It’s another way of giving choices that seem external. Thanks for the great content.
"I think we talked about this in another video" - Matthew Colville, talking for the fourth time about the money thing that the Village of Hommlet does.
It would be an interesting experiment to figure out exactly how many times he talked about it over the past seven years
We need an unemployed new DM to scrub
@@experiment8230 4 times until this episode. I'm gonna keep watching more
We love our repetitive king
Has anyone ever put together a RtG Bingo card? Or we might even extend it to an MCDM Bingo card, bc I believe he also talks about it in one of the RPG Q&As _again!_
You should talk more about Casserole the Vile.
casserole of bile
I think my mom made that once...
@@bloodsword6577 xD
@@alexiagrind1860 *whooosh*
@@karmathevaporeon9039 You mean Cantaloupe of Smile?
I like that Matthew Colville's videos start out at 1.5X speed!
Until this moment, I thought he just talked at a convenient speed and feared anyone who would lose an argument or "get a talking to" by him.
i always listen at 2x speed
Dang I forgot about this setting....I am try to learn C++ and the teacher is talking 2x the speed. Thanks for reminding me.
... I always listen at 2.5x speed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(I use "video speed controller")
And when you set the video speed at 0.5x speed you get drunk Matthew Colville :)
Have to put in my $.02 on ToEE. My wife ran it for our group. We had no idea how tf we were supposed to take on an entire temple. So instead we joined it--we became a merc group for hire and worked for the temple, worked our way up the ranks, eventually becoming the highest ranking group under main leadership. Then we burned that f*cker to the ground. Campaign took about 1.5 years IRL. One of the best campaigns I've ever played in.
My god.
But seriously though this sounds godly
LOL that's awesome
J
@@finlayreeds6725 don't you mean ungodly?
Using a magic item in a novel way:
One of the other players had to leave early and gave me his character to run. We got into a battle with a behir, and it swallowed his dwarf whole. I was studying his sheet and wracking my brain on how to get him out of the situation. Using his axe in a grapple situation wasn't going to work well. Did he have a dagger? Would that help? I really don't want his character to die! Wait... What's this? A Decanter of Endless Water? What does that do again? "Produces a 20-foot-long, 1-foot-wide stream at 30 gallons per round." Perfect. I gave the behir an emetic.
lol nice!
That’s awesome!
Also, if your players have created any level of backstory for their characters, using elements from them is the perfect bait to thread on to your plot hooks! -Nerdarchist Ryan
Too true!
One of my players decided to go Snowflake and use the Haunted One background, and since I'm running Keep on the Borderlands converted for 5E, I decided that which haunts her is the evil entity the cultists in the caves are trying to bring forth.
Another player, who quit on us without any notice, had a mention in his background of having been ambushed by bandits and being robbed of a parental memento... So that was going to be the raiders camped out south of the Keep.
I had a strange instance the reverse of that. My friend and I had tied our backstories together. He got bored with D&D and just up and quit. So as my DM is trying to write his character out, he's like "Come with me". And as it stood with the current party, we hadn't really had any bonding moment, we didn't know or trust each other. and I told the DM straight up. "My character would leave with him, without question". So he then had to change the way the character was leaving so that I could feasibly refuse. It was kind of strange.
Love your channel
In my current campaign, One of my players was a dwarf who was married to a dragonborn in the city where their fortress is and as a plot hook, i had an evil priest of the fallen god sarlac hold him hostage and once they started to revolt against him, he teleported in frount of them and stole his soul in frount of the party and teleported away, leaving the husk of the clerics husband
This is the game I run.
I think I may have watched this video like fourteen times. Recently I actually tried an open world sandbox, I found that when you tell your players that's what your doing they needed 0 motivation to go to the Moathouse. They straight up just went. Things are not always so different these days!
I wish I had this level of ease. I presented the main quest to my players via an NPC and they tried to kill her because she was “suspicious” 😂😂 I had plans to make the town absolutely hate them but we ended up resetting the campaign because it turns out I could have made her a little more friendly and explanatory as she was meant to come across. From now on it’s just happy little accidents!
@@TimTamSlam7 dont take blame for MURDERHOBOS... the response to suspicion SHOULD NOT BE DEATH
@@TimTamSlam7 When I was a kid, I ran for a bunch of friends and they straight off killed the plothook before she could open her mouth. Their reason was she tried to pickpocket them. This was the umpteenth time I dealt with their murderous rampage and I just stood up to grab a snack, telling them the adventure is over, they get 25 xp each for killing the thief.
It actually reigned their murderhoboing in for a while. Last game I had with them, I was actually a player and the story was literally: *knock-knock* "Who is it?" "We brought the wood." "What wood?" *murder, blood, killing innocents* *Next door. Don't even bother yourself with hiding the bodies.*
I think... the best way to deal with murderous players is to not play with them. At all.
I mean... your time is more valuable than that.
That's funny. Whenever I run sandbox, my lazy players just stand around not doing anything.
If anyone is looking for a 5e equivalent of Dungeon Delve (a collection of level-by-level mini-dungeons) the book "Prepared" from Kobold Press is exactly that, and it's great.
Thanks
I love the design philosophy of saying: "I think up problems, not solutions" and I will start using this myself. I always felt I had to have some solutions prepaired but that will only make the players feel like they have to figure out my solution not their own.
My players are random enough to be guaranteed to go of script, so being able to sandbox an adventure is necessary. My advice for any who want to try this would be:
Create a few encounters of a few different types. Make so they could reasonably occur where you are or in range of where you might end up. Write those encounters on cards or sheets of paper and keep them handy.
Do the same with a few NPCs.
Become familiar with what terrain type they'll be in, and what wildlife might be around.
Become comfortable being uncomfortable. In other words, learn to improv. Don't worry if you're not that good at it. The more you do it, the better you'll get.
Learn to develop a good pokerface and be willing to be vague on yes or no questions. If you make a mistake and it looks like you've dropped the ball on a description...and the players call you on it...raise an eyebrow and say something like "really? Hmmm. I wonder why it looks like that....". They'll immediately go into 'paranoid' mode and you have a whole new aspect to run with.
Once you've done all that, develop the map as you go. Feel free to make stuff up and record it as they encounter it. When you need a terrain feature to be there to justify an encounter you've made, so long as it's reasonable, go for it.
When the players come up with great ideas about "what may be going on", if you like it, steal it and insert it in the game. They'll pat themselves on the back for their genius and you'll have more hooks for them.
As you go, repeat all of the above. Retain all the encounters you wrote that never got used so you can use them later.
If a character dies, it's okay. They have hit points and an AC for a reason. Make the death dramatic and suitably heroic. Players will tend to want a good death over a bad story.
My final piece of advice would be to run the game every second week. That will give you time to create new gems for them to encounter. You may even come up with a full dungeon or town in the meantime. This keeps the flow going and reduces DM burnout.
EDIT: To address Matt's comment that there's not a lot of 5E modular content - I agree. I wanted some for myself that was easy to access and free of charge. Both are not that easy to come by. So I wrote my own. I write an online article for Nerdarchy.com called "Out of the Box Encounters". To date there are 32 (so far) ranging from level 1-10. Some are wilderness and some are dungeon. Some are puzzles, lots are monster-driven, and none are campaign-specific. They're also posted on this website free of charge.
Share that on the subreddit :p
r/matthewcolville
It may not be free, but Out of the Abyss has a few encounters that could easily be ripped out and inserted elsewhere. The Lost Tomb of Khaem, The Oozing Temple, The Silken Paths and The Hook Horror Lair could all be easily inserted into various adventures. Maybe one of the party members hears a whisper pointing them towards the Lost Tomb, and if they choose to seek adventure elsewhere Khaem succeeds at freeing herself. Now you have a big bad wraith in the world with nebulous goals and served by those who accompanied her in life. Maybe the party's headed through a mountain pass and an earthquake opens up a cave through which lies the Oozing Temple. Again, not free, but there's plenty to rip out.
I like the idea of premade modular encounters that can be put into the game at will.
I have a tendency to improv to the extreme when sandboxing, I often create encounters, or even monsters on the fly.
However, having some cards like that to work with sound like it could really enhance my sandboxing.
Dallas, I posted my entire collection "Out of The Box, Series 1" on Nerdarchy.com in PDF format for download. That's 50 separate encounters. There's also a full length starting adventure there called "Parish of Lost Souls" for characters levels 1-2. Both are free for download.
And good luck on your first campaign!
@@mikegould6590 DO you have a specific link ?
I cannot find it on Nerdarchy and I am a BRANNNNDDDDNEEEWWWWWWW DM that haven,t have his first session yet and I am interested to see a most possible things before the first session :P
"The clock is always ticking" is a brilliant idea, oh god. have the world grow stronger alongside the players.
the players are just a few ants doing there thing in a huge world that barely notices they exist, no matter what the PCs do (or don't do), the world is going to do it's thing. My sandbox is huge, PCs can do whatever they like to try, and the world will keep on keeping on - seasons change, holidays come and go, politics occur, goblins raid, etc. Eventually, the PCs might become big enough for local politics to notice them, but for the most part, the world doesn't.
Oh, and nothing is to scale. It's entirely possible to run across a baby dragon or a clan of stone giants in a novice quest. Sometimes all one can do is RUN! and hope to survive to see another day.
Years ago I had a main villan (necromancer) growing alongside players. Every time they got xp, he got the same amount.
We never finished this campaign so they never knew, that a childhood fried of one of the players was this elusive necromancer they were trying to catch.
@@88Grabarz Oh damn. Shame you didn't get to do the reveal.
I recommend everyone read up on the Faction system in Blades in the Dark, specifically their clocks. It is a very easy and intuitive way to keep track of what a faction is doing, and whenever the players help or hinder them in something, you just tick the progress clock up or down accordingly. (It should be going up with time just on it's own)
You worked on Mercenaries?! Dude those games were so amazing, thanks for great times when I was like 10, then continuing it now I'm like 25. Papa bless.
My favorite way my players have used a magic item is the "Immovable Rod." My Dwarven Paladin decided to attach it to his shield and make any creature charging it make a DC 30 strength check to attempt to move it. It was his third ever game.
How did he move his shield?
@@katherinefortner9303 you can turn the immovable rod on and off.
@@ANIMEniacReviewbut doing that requires an action
I always run sandbox. I make the skeleton of a story, of a challenge, and then i just react to the players, and let the story evolve depending on what they do and say.
duckforceone I find that the best way for me to run a game. You don't get bogged down with details and it allows you to bounce ideas off the players as you're playing.
I'm 6 sessions into my first campaign. Your videos have been such a HUGE help! I'm loving DMing! Thank you so much for your hard work on these awesome videos. You're making a difference for our hobby, if nowhere else you're improving the games at my table. Please keep it up. :)
How is it now?
I think it’s more fair to say Gugax assumed you had a campaign of your own and would work the module in to things in a way that made sense for your players. A lot of things were not spelled out because that is simply what a DM was expected to know and do.
I always really love re-watching a lot of these old videos when I'm getting ready to run a new campaign, just to refresh my memory. I really appreciate the content, Matt!
wow this reminds of this one time, we were all locked in a dungeon that was filling with sand and we had to figure out how to get out within a certain time framed. Like we were literally timed. Our DM had no solution intended and expected us to die lol but we blew his mind on how we managed to get out. Basically we panicked for a while trying to figured out what to do so we started striking at the door, which was metal, trying to get out. We managed to puncture a small hole in the door but by then the sand was about chest deep. I was small enough to fit through the hole but my two friends couldn't. The sand almost completely buried them but then one of them had and awesome idea and they basically did a super powerful fire spell that created a small explosion that created a bubble of glass around them. It also heated up the door which made it easier to tear open and they got out.
Absolutely loved merchs 2. Had one of the funnest songs attached with it. Great game-play.
TheXPGamers I can’t believe that I found you guys here, hello captain shack.
I loved Mercs 2! Better than alot of the open world garbage coming out these days. Also, the "Devastator" joke was pretty funny.
Oh no you didn't!
Haven't even finished watching the video yet, just commenting because I love the idea of "bad guy npc thinks a pc is also one of their bad guy buddies" as a plot hook. I'm currently populating my world with story threads and that one is most definitely getting dropped in there somewhere.
Works super well! Not only is it a great hook, it gives one player some great roleplaying opportunities, and choices to make!
I thought the same thing!
I've been DMing since 1st edition. I've found that no matter how you think your campaign is going to go; your players are going to turn it into a sandbox, and that's a good thing. My players have a strong hand in determining not just the fate, but the nature of the world. There are regions that exist because, back in second edition, a player came to me and said, "I have this character concept, where can I be from? what is there culture like?"
Sandbox games can take several forms. One methodology is the character driven story. Instead of giving them adventure options, ask your players what they want to accomplish. If it was a book, the players write the outline, and possibly the chapter titles; while you decide what happens in each chapter.
I always discuss what my players want to do at the start of a campaign and work from there. In my latest campaign, I told my characters I wanted them to be heroic (not just good); then I asked them how they wanted to do that. They came up with the idea of championing a town in distress and turning it into a great city. I had a cursed region that was perfect for that in my world. Thus was born the town of Hope Falls.
My world is very developed. I mapped the part of it they are in at the beginning of 3rd edition. I think a well developed world is crucial for any kind of sandbox game. Still, you have to be ready for the players to ignore everything you have laid out and set off in a different direction.
TLDR: You need a well developed world and be ready to improvise to run a sandbox game.
Instead of "well developed", I'd say "developed enough". My homebrew world had only VERY basic topography, a few major cities and country borders. I only had a couple of sentences about each country/region, because partially I wanted this to be a group project between my players and myself: if they wanted to create a city/town (and if it was thematically appropiate for the region) I let them. Once they picked their starting location, I slowly added more and more to the map as they 'discovered' those locations.
All-in-all I'd say (and I'd recoomend it to any DM designing their own homebrew world) you don't need to have all the details planned out, just have a general idea about the regions of your world, as to give your players a basic understanding of them, then once they start somewhere, develop THAT region further.
@@MrEtamsorojam Have a few locations more developed than a few sentences. I have the Black Forest which is a forest so thick most of it has never seen sunlight. There's enough spots of light to explain the food supply of the kingdom of drow and orcs that live there. There's also an entrance to the Underdark there that likewise has a forest, but giant luminescent crystal mushrooms bright enough to not need a torch to see.
These are things you need sorted out before the players get there.
You sir are a river to the people. :)
he makes your people wet and they dump their poop into him?
Well you're not wrong about the first thing ^w^
RPGManoWar you could totaly Obi that Wan?
Oh no
@@tuhmater2985 agreed.
Wait, you did Mercenaries? I love you even more, good sir. So much fun.
Merc II is one of my favorite games of all time!
The first one was a masterpiece. Personally thought 2 was trash, but 1 was absolutely incredible
Exactly my sentiment! I was so astonished to find out Matt was involved with that :o
Hi Matt! Thanks for making these videos. After watching a bunch of your Running the Game Series (Not in Order), I ran my first 5E group on the Lost Mine of Phandelver. Working with the concept of "The Clock is Always Ticking", I went way off script when the party pretty much sidestepped a big part of the main content and changed a huge section of the game related directly to the town of Phandelin. The players loved the game and I think all of the advice I took from your videos helped to make the game more enjoyable than my previous attempts at DMing which were all in 2E in the 90s.
I'm very happy that you defined open world and sandbox styles of campaigns. I was misinformed and this helped a ton
This video has really helped me realise, that while I thought I was giving them a sandbox they were feeling "obligated" to do plothooks right in front them, like "In the night you hear screams for help, what do you do" not really a choice they are going to go help that person. It has shown me an area to work on
What I find really interesting is the fact is the similarities between the "Clock is Ticking" concept you use in your sandbox campaigns and the idea of fronts outlined in the game Dungeon World. It's always interesting seeing different sources creating similar approaches to game design and the way that ideas that work tend to float to the top.
Also, for anyone who watched this video and wants another resource for sandbox campaigns I'd strongly recommend picking up a supplement for the game Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures called Further Afield that details a method of creating what it calls a "shared sandbox" campaign in which players seed the world you create with location and rumours about these locations the DM can use for adventure hooks.
I have watched this episode a bunch of times, and I tell ya, it is just jam-packed with stuff. So much to remember!
Currently, I'm running a homebrew world. The characters are going through a world that is basically Europe with each country at the height of it's fantasy potential. So the Scandinavian countries are Norse. Greece and Italy have a Greco-Roman feel. Romania has gothic horror feel with a Vampire running it. France has a Marie Antoinette type of queen running things. That sort of thing. The characters have no idea that this is the case. They are from Britain. The country has been caught in a civil war for 200 yrs and has lost contact with the outside world. The new king is sending the characters out to make diplomatic contact with the outside world and to map it. They are basically Lewis and Clark. They can go wherever they want. I know the basic political situation in each country. I don't have any real major plot points. I do know that if nothing changes at some point, the continent with have open warfare between several countries. I'm spending a bunch of time reading their character sheets looking for hooks from their backgrounds. So far, so good :-)
Karl Meszaros i'm takin'this xp but for asia and africa
My question is how did it end?
This sounds really fun
I wonder what fantasy Brexit would look like?
I ran the Delian tomb last week (as my first DM experience) for my girlfriend, and then she instantly became hooked on D&D. So I spent a few hours doing up some maps and fitting the tomb into the world, and here I sit with a second player now in the campaign that all spawned out of a test run. :D
I think dming dnd is an art of letting the characters do what they want but “letting” them find your story and make it feel like a sandbox.
You have your own story? I'll be honest I'm jealous, I rarely have more than the next session or two planned. Which is a hard habit to break. I'm running the pre-written module chains of Asmodeus right now and at one point (in dis) the paladin of Lathander wanted to fight undead, meanwhile he, the sorcerer, and the fighter took an interest in the slaves that were mentioned in passing in that layer.... So we spent several sessions bringing down the slave trade in Dis which was run from the shadows by a vampire lord, none of that was in the module. And I've also run several similar side quests at the players initiative both in and out of the nine hells.... That's when I'm running a pre-written, my homebrew games are even more session to session. I legitimately don't know what I would do if my players weren't so proactive.
I had no idea you worked on Mercenaries 1. I just want to say back in the day I played that entire game for a very long time and loved it completely. It was my first "Sandbox" video game and I fell in love with it. I applaud you tremendously for the writing and style of that game and want to tell you your work was greatly appreciated. Keep on keeping on.
I love these videos, especially the help for new DMs. I've only just got into D&D like 3 months ago after gorging on the "Critical Role" show and while I wanted to DM I thought only experienced players could DM but your videos inspired and helped me start my own campaign. Thanks!
I remember when my brother and I played mercenaries 2... he got in a tank and I Had a large carrier helicopter and we did an aerial tank assault on most mid-late game missions. It was a blast
One of the standard signs of becoming experienced at a particular craft: you learn the shortcuts. Figuring out ways to throw together a fast adventure, or series of adventures, or even a whole campaign in a fairly short amount of time is something that comes with time and experience and lots and lots of practice.
Incidentally, here's a rough draft of a form for quests, so you can build up a bunch of 'em on 3x5 cards for ease of use:
Name of the quest (optional)
Intended power level
Quick summary
Quest hook
Challenges involved
Rewards
Seeds into other quests/plot archs
Thank you, this was exactly what i needed. I ran my first campaign (hoard of the dragon queen) and after the 3rd episode i truly hated the railroad style of play. I told my players when we finish the adventure this month i want to try and play a sand box or home brew. I didn't have any real idea on how to do that, but this video was a capstone to your other videos on running adventures. im off to find some ancient adventures to populate my new world.
I am getting ready to run my 1st 5E campaign and planning on a sandbox ish game. This could not have been posted at a better time. Thanks!
I would love to see a video where you expand on hooks and inserting content along the way.
One of my players worked out how to use a portable hole as a way to transport rocks with Glyphs of Warding on them. It was in preparation for an encounter that they'd worked out needed a specific sequence of successful actions to succeed at. Her character walked into that fight with - effectively - three concentration spells up.
Of course, the twist was - now of all times - they rolled the _perfect_ initiative order and another player got a success on a vital check _first time._
It was still a great plan and I was incredibly proud.
Sometimes you gotta watch his videos multiple times to understand the layers of knowledge his dropping.
It is sooo funny that i am listening to this now. I just finished a "home brew" campaign for my players that began with the "Palace of the Silver Princess" and lead to some one shots jumbled together from the "Explorers guide to Wildemont" And when that is done i will be mashing together the "Tomb of Horrors" and "White Plume Mountain". I always thought this was how DM's created their worlds.
kobold press has something similar to 4E Dungeon Delve, called "Book of Lairs". They are just standalone dungeons which you can throw at your party or plug into your sandbox. Complete with adventure hooks, locations etc. Also, the "Prepared!" supplement for 5E might fall into this category. A compilation of quick, standalone adventures, ready to plug and play while you figure out what to do next with the campaign.
Rolling Jeep with C4 happened before mercenaries. We would do that all the time in Battlefield 1942.
mercs was the BEST. loved how the game never seemed to say "no" to me. my favorite was dangling a tank from a helicopter while listening to flight of the valkyries.
If ever any one sentence ever convinced me I need to try a game.
One of the tricks to running sandbox campaigns is to create thematic worlds, and rely heavily on random tables to generate a lot of what the players run into. For anyone looking for something premade and easy to run at the table, any of the Old School Essentials Adventures fit the bill, as does Neverland RPG. The OSE adventures would need a bit of adapting to 5e, but Neverland is compatible out-of-the-box.
This man saved my campaign.
Holy shit! Mercenaries was reveletory for me in middle school. Instant sub. Working the Keep on the Borderlands into my own setting rn, super stoked to find your content!
I like how you can see Mathew's beholder in the background on the right
I started DMing a few weeks ago after being a player for years and I have to say that your advice has been very helpful. From building encounters and making my world and campaign which spans 4 continents that I have built from scratch your advice has been very helpful, so thank you sir!
Hey Matt,
I've been trolling your TH-cam page without much to say but wanted to chime in on this video with some of my own ideas.
I've been playing/running D&D since 1981, and with my recent move to a rather rural area in Maine have been trying to build my gaming group back up again. I still skype in to my old group every other week, but the experience just isn't the same.
I contacted my FLGS and have started running Adventure League and am at a point now where I'm starting to mentor a new DM or two and have been directing them to your page as I think that what you are doing (and how you explain it) is phenomenal. Thank you!
You mentioned Dungeon Delve from 4e as a collection of short one-offs that you use and I couldn't help but think of some older 1e adventures that I have used many times to pull my bacon out of the fire when the party did something unexpected or just wandered so far off track that I had to start making a new track for them to follow. Four jump immediately to mind, The Book of Lairs I, The Book of Lairs II, The Forgotten Realms Book of Lairs and The DragonLance Book of Lairs. With only a minor amount of modification any and all of these encounters can be gussied up for use as an encounter (Skeletons 52 is a particular favorite) or as a plot hook for building a multi-encounter (Cave Bears 4, leading into an assault on a Stone Giant homestead) are from Book of Lairs I. Otyughs (3) and Flesh Golem (1) from Book of Lairs II are fun, and Beholder (1) can be downright nasty as the PC's hare off thinking they are after a Medusa (oops, spoilers!).
Also, when it comes to low level starter dungeons there are a few (including some that have great starter towns) that you missed... maybe just because you haven't used them, or maybe just because you had to cut yourself off somewhere. U1, Sinister Secreat at Saltmarsh is an all time favorite of mine. Granted, it doesn't have a starter town all set up but it has a page of notes on how to make one and I've found a great one that I stole from online that I going to use as my "Saltmarsh (vishteercampaign.pbworks.com/w/page/10036309/Saltmarsh)."
I also really Like L1 The Secret of Bone Hill and L2 The Assassin's Knot. The towns of Restenford (L1) and Garotten (L2) are phenomenally well laid out and explained. Great starter towns! And the murder mystery... it is a bit dated, maybe a touch formulaic but it is interesting and fun from a time when dungeon crawls were the big thing.
For starter dungeons, especially for training new DM's (and I know you've talked about this elsewhere) Lost Mines of Phandelver is great, but I don't think we can overlook The Sunless Citadel from 3e. Now, I know that it was redone and included as a 5e version for Tales From the Yawning Portal, but even before that book came out I had re-written it to include vegepygmies (the theme of my current homebrew campaign is "nature gone wild" so there are LOTS of plant creatures and abberations that make up the primary bad guys).
So far, you have focused on smaller towns, and especially for newer DM's this is important to keep the resources being tracked low. However, for people who want to have a city based campaign there are some great cities out there as well, but the five that I use on a regular basis. Two are from previous D&D editions and three are from WarHammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st edition). Now, three of these are fully laid out cities, and one is an adventure set in a city that gives enough blurb to be able to flesh out the city.
The adventure first: B6 The Veiled Society set in Specularum. Going all the way back to D&D Basic For urban campaigns I like starting here becuse it introduces the seedy underworld, the devious dealings and the secret societies that exist. It is a little bit rail-roady, but fun.
Second, Lankhmar: City of Adventure. A long book. A lot of locations. Fritz Leiber's Fafrd and Grey Mouser's stomping grounds brought to life. Wow.
For the next three cities, we traipse over to the Old World of WarHammer Fantasy Roleplay. WarHammer City details Middenheim, the city of the White Wolf. Shadows Over Bogenhafen gives us a great river city and for a fantastic port city, we go to Marienburg: Sold Down the River. I won't go into a lot of detail on these, but they are great LARGE cities even if you don't use the adventures that they are based around. However, if you want to do a lot of converting and updating, The Enemy Within Campaign from WFRP is one of my all time favorites and has the party starting out traveling to Bogenhafen, then getting sandboxy with Death on the Reik, getting super-political in Middenheim with Power Behind the Throne before getting super sandboxy again with Something Rotten in Kislev and wrapping up with Empire in Flames. However, that could be a video series in and of itself.
Thanks for doing what you do. It is appreciated by newbie DM's and oldbies who know that you can never not learn something new!
(Oh, and while writing this I'm watching your "4e to make 5e combat" video and I had to laugh as you reference that far away land of Maine... which is where I am from, though at -20 degrees today it feels a bit more like Hoth).
Daniel Fields Thanks for the great advice, just what I was looking for.
I've been playing and running dungeons and dragons for four or five years now and, having been someone just dropped into the role of dungeon master soon after learning to play, I want you to know that this video (many others too, but definitely this one) helped me a ton! After putting into effect a few of your tips, I for the first time, was able to do two things. A)provide an experience that left my group of players wanting more from the same story, and subsequently returning to the same story for a second game night. And B) I had a BLAST running it. It was smooth, my players had fun. They didn't feel restricted by a linear plot, yet they were entangled by a plot that has grown very large over the course of only 2 game sessions! Dude, you're awesome and you helped me bring to the table a very very memorable experience for me, my gaming group, and TWO new players (one picked up each session). Thanks man! And please keep making these videos!
i loved the mercenaries 1 and 2.
I just have to say thank you, your series has helped me refine my DM style and really expand my games to the joy of my players and myself. You are a gentlemen and a scholar, you are exactly the kind of person the table top community needs.
Man I love these videos! Shame I binge watched them all and am now up to date. How often do you usually bring them out?
Since February, I've posted a video on average once every 3.8 days.
It always feels like about 6.7 times as long.
something Matt said in one of his live streams that I've found really useful when sandboxing is the rule of 3s. Try and set up 3 adventure hooks and let the players pick one. Don't show any favoritism towards the choice. 3 is normally the perfect number, enough that the players feel free and open, but not too many that they feel overwhelmed. it's been a really useful mind set. thanks matt
When I ran the delian tomb for my first level players they reacted to the riddle with violence. The tried to beat a riddle with brute force. They tore the bronze plaque the riddle was carved into off the wall. Then one player decided to tap the metal plate on the wall until he heard echoes, I thought that was clever so I gave it to them.
That wasn't clever it was having a fit
@@BrobinsProductions This.
This series, but this episode in particular, has highlighted to me how non-optimally I have been preparing my games. Because of this we are able to play less, and it becomes less fun for me to DM. Thank you for all these insightful videos that are making me a better DM, and making the game even more fun than it was before!
Personal experience:
When playing with an inexperienced party, put in one Railway Dungeon at the beginning to introduce them to the mechanics and basic lore, then throw in 1 or 2 plot hooks based on the characters' backstories and 1 more that has nothing to do with any of them. (The last one should at some point in the campaign come back as some kind of callback or a main quest line if possible.)
When the players choose one of these (or decide to go completely off the rails) you can start going full open world.
Also, develop the other two alongside the one chosen, so the world feels more real.
@@oz_jones No, you shouldn't. If you want it to feel real or serious there are more effective techniques to create verisimilitude or atmosphere in the world that are less work and time intensive for everyone at the table.
Arbitrarily sticking to all the plot lines from the very first sessions also runs the grave risk of alienating your players, because if they chose to not follow those plots then chances are they did so because either they weren't interested in it or you didn't do a very good job setting them up.
A D&D campaign is very different from most other forms of storytelling that way, where everything should ideally have narrative consequence since they can rely on hindsight to alleviate any momentary disinterest retroactively, while the DM needs to consider their player's momentary session to session enjoyment first and foremost.
I love the immovable rod as a magic item. It's my favorite item because it has virtually endless uses outside of combat and virtually none in combat.
I loved 4e and all I hear about is people insulting it. They always bring up things like its bad because fighters are inessence casting fireball (yes I really have heard this) or that all it is is just one big combat simulation. The big one is that its just an MMO.
Yet they get really angry or they plug their ears when you talk smack about 3.5. Like how it had a dozen of dysfunctional rules that if you used as is allowed thing like becomeing invisible by using a tower shield and hiding behind it which in tow hid you tower shield or that magic was so dominaring in 3.5 that a decently built wizard could easily remove the need for the party, along with the abuse that several spells caused like sleep, Simulacrum and wish.
***** He was sayig he was going to talk about 4e in a later video. I wanted to voice my opinion plus just mentioning 4e often times spawns edition wars.
he actually ended up talking about it
I did not like 4th ed, but i would love to hear about what you liked about it ^^
For me the new way of rules found themselves in DnD Essential.
KamiRecca My two biggest things I loved about 4e was that Martial characters had abilities they could activate so it was not just them swinging a sword. The second is that there was general balance. In 4e wizards, clerics and druids did not make the other characters pale in comparison.
Other things I loved about it was the way leader / healing classes were built with various ways of healing while still doing something in battle. The multiclass system being a series of feats was cool as well enabling little splashes of interesting to characters. Power builds rewarded the player who built it without making others feel weak in comparison.
I also loved the way things were worded in the simplicity of the rules. I rarely felt the need of asking the GM if my interpretation of the rule was right.
The combat system was also very tactical. Allowing plans to function without the GM needing to interject to much.
I see. Thank you ^^
Now, let me tell you why your wrong.
Naaah kidding. My taste is mine, and your taste is yours.
Got alot of respect for you as a person. You have great integrity in the things you do and the ways you go about them. Keep it up
Hey Matthew Colville! Love your videos so far, you've been such a great help so far! If you don't mind me suggesting, and if you haven't already got one you're making, do you think you could make a video on Towns and Cities? I'm really struggling with designing them! Likewise, a video going deeper into dungeon design (like larger scale dungeons) would also be great! Thanks again!
I just go buy a town or city, so someone else did all the work.
Matthew Colville Thanks for the advice!! Also thanks for responding!!
How detailed do you want? If you look at maps for European cities... some of them still have old town centers..
When I lived in Spain I bought street maps... I've used them for cities and such. Many Euro towns haven't changed the roads first laid in ye olden times.
Richard Ashley wow, I'm in one of England's oldest towns , so that's certainly an idea! Thanks
It might be fun to make a town Collabris-style on twitch one night.
Six years later... this is a great reassurance to me as I slowly build up a sandbox/hexcrawl/hexclearing type game in Chult by throwing in literally everything from a load of different sources as far back as the Jungles of Chult 2E module as well as a tonne of locations from Tomb of Annihilation, including entire dungeons and storylines (and ignoring the ToA storyline entirely). I'm glad to see that someone as well-respected literally does the same thing of homebrewing by cobbling together pre-written stuff!
Three things:
1. Night Below is already a pretty sandbox style game don't you think?
2. What do you think of the 5th Edition Adventure Temple of Elemental Evil?
3. It's not true that WotC isn't releasing modular content, it's just that they're releasing it in the context of larger adventures. For example, there's a great encounter in Out of the Abyss where the characters find a tomb, and it has no relationship to the rest of the adventure. You could easily use it in another adventure altogether, and even feels like it was intended to be used that way.
Actually, your idea of starting the adventure at, “Tor Keep, the seat of the local barony, and there are NO adventures there,” is pretty much how I used The Keep On The Borderlands. The Keep usually being the major part I kept. Lots of hooks to adventures in the surrounding lands, but, initially, not a whole lot going on there. Eventually, it becomes clear that the bandits are getting cover from a corrupt Castellan and the Caves of Chaos are being used as a staging area for an invasion by surrounding evil forces, but that’s all later in the game. The initial meat is mostly references to adventures at villages, towns and dungeons much farther afield. Even the invasion force is upgraded to the point that the 5th-6th level characters encountering it are mostly reduced to setting off internal conflicts and getting out.
Cue in Jester and the Dust of Deliciousness...
I was a 1st Edition DM and ran a couple of campaigns that lasted 4 years. Until 2nd edition released, essentially. Now I'm back and loving this content. It's nice to know that the essentials of storytelling and building the setting are still important.
Sandboxing isn't being told what to do and not how to do it. Sandboxing is being put into a living world and the players doing whatever they want, however they want and accepting the consequences from any rules or laws or physics of the preexisting world. My Father was the best DM I have ever played with and this is the only way he played. Spent weeks creating a world that in theory functioned with or w/o the players there and then we created the story as of how we came together and that was it. It was amazing. In video game terms it would be something like Star Wars Galaxies. There were never "quests" or "adventures" with names, there were preexisting politics, cultures, religions, magics, prior catastrophes and he organically changed the world while we affected it or how things in the background politics or even weather changed at random. But he was a genius, most DM's have a boring cookie-cutter idea of "fantasy adventure" and dungeoneering...lame. Our ambitions as characters dictated the choices we made and we often ended up split partied and it actually worked amazingly, the stories it created were novel worthy. I remember my brother a human racist fighter went to enlist in the local kingdoms army to fight in the civil war in the first night of play and it ended up being hilarious and fun. The DM didn't force him into doing anything or not doing anything because he has some grand narative that he thought was best for us. That's sandboxing.
Amnesiac Angel did you miss the first 5 minutes of the video? Matt says sandboxing IS being told what to do and not how to do it, what you described is what he defined, in this same video, as an Open World game. Most of what he is saying in this video is the virtues of open world style play and how to pull it off, the bit about sandboxing is merely to clarify that most people use the word “sandboxing” wrongly.
I've been running campaigns and adventures in my world for so long and it's grown so much.
I've had hundreds of developments, from the largest city in the world being built by a player to
having a cursed item strategically placed by a player on an important npc, thus causing the collapse of an entire civilisation, who later rise up as ancient and angry beings released by another party over 200 years later (in game, like 8 years later by a completely different party) who have now taken over a section of a continent and built a tremendous tower.
Its amazing, really.
All I'd say is make sure its what your party wants to do, some prefer a more structured adventure.
Village of Hommlet map....oh, how many towns you have served to typify. (gaming since '82;)
Im 23, and even i have a great appreciation for that map. I've used it with the keep (one the borderlands) to form a small countryside.
Hey Matt, DM Veteran here (three decades). Just want you to know I've rewatched this particular video about a dozen times now. Thank you. This actually helps. A lot.
I really love Anna. She's exactly the type of player you want at least one of in a game: Funny and creative.
"I don't take orders from dead men."
Dungeon World has a wonderful expansion book called Perilous Wilds where the first session is a "session zero" where you not only create the characters but then the world they inhabit and then you can incorporate what players want to do and appropriate things and places for those arcs.
You can easily port that method to something like 5e which is what I'm doing next weekend.
the caves of chaos are from keep on the borderland
YOU worked on Mercenaries?? I LOVED that game. C4 jeeps were my go-to way to deal with tanks, because it was so much fun, if not the most effective. 14 C4 charges+T72=Almost North Korean Space Program.
Matt, whats your thoughts on the Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh (and the Two following Adventures, Danger at Dunwater and The Final Enemy)?
Between those three and Cult of the reptile god they are the 4 adventures i was introduced into dnd on when i was 13, You mentioned CotRG but not SSoSM.
I'm running the SSoSM right now, and have found myself running all kinds of extra combat encounters since the haunted mansion is so empty...
my favorite sandbox segment was after defeating a black dragon in a mythril mine the owners of the mine said we could have the dragon's horde and what loose mythril was on the ground as payment, the DM forgot he gave me a scroll of earth to mud, so i thought after we loaded everything up was to hit a good sized vein of mythril and have the rock and earth around it just fall away so the metal would be "on the ground" for picking... needless to say he let me keep the good stuff but found a way for me to not make use of it for a good while later
Where do I find the Caves of Chaos?
Keep on the Borderlands! It's in the doobily-doo!
Thanks! I just DMed for the first time last night and I realized how materialistic my PCs are! When you talked about it, I knew I needed to add it in. Going to use that and come up with some loot tables for them.
Thank you so much for taking the time to put out this series! My wife and I have been hooked on TAZ and CritRole, and we're about to jump into d&d for the time (her as the DM). She's taken notes from various Mercer videos, but your series has gotten her really excited to start. She would ask for tips, but you've likely already made a video for it! Thank you again.
In a video game the portable hole through the portcullis probably wouldn't work because you can't stick your arm through... unless there was some kinda glitch lol
BonadanAlloy actuall the portable hole is just a cloth with a portal to a pocket dimension enchanted to one side
I'm a guy with a demilich as his avatar I know what a portable hole is. I meant in a video game a portcullis would usually be a solid wall so you couldn't stick an arm through it.
BonadanAlloy a portcullis is usually a lattice metal gate. not solid wood.
lol thanks, I realize that. I was referring to coding of a portcullis usually being a solid wall in a video game... Meaning a character in the game could not pass an arm or weapon or gunshot through a hole in the grate of the portcullis.... I don't know how I could have better explained myself.
BonadanAlloy they could just not code it as a solid wall...
A book like Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is good for this because there are a bunch of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 towns and mini-adventures. Thats 20 quests total, some of which are more connected to the plot but most are great standalone within an icey environment or not.
Absolutely love the videos you make! Super helpful for new DMs!!! I've watch 2+ hours of your videos for the past few days and I feel like I'm taking Dungeon Master 101, I've been doing my homework (mapping out my campaign) and the first test is tomorrow nervous and excited to be running my first session. I feel like you've really prepped me for my first session with the group buy knowing my friends they're gonna come up with something I was not expecting... Anyway!! thank you so much for making these videos they are incredible!
Mercs made sure I didn't look away from as ps2 for three years. Over and over and over and over.
Thank you.
One of the advantages of using Keep on the Borderlands is that its very easy to "Re-skin" to fit your setting. I named all the NPC's re-flavored the Minotaur maze as a skill challenge mine and other portions as associated facilities (still over-run with Demi-humans) made the hermit helpful and the players (some of whom had experience with the module) never recognized the adventure.
sand boxing really does result in some amazing moments. i was running an island adventure once and my players walked right out of the starting town away from the low level quests they had been informed of and wandered straight into an ancient city where they met some dudes at a bar and found out about a hydra in the mouth of a river a few miles away so being level 2 and it being two of my players first game they decide their going to kill this thing, my other player who had fought a hydra in another campaign decides to kick back and watch as the hydra nearly murders both players who barley escape with their lives
I ran the temple of the Delian Order as my first dungeon and my players loved it. making the dungeon dynamic caught them off guard lol. Thank you for your videos there are the reason I jumped into dming after years of hesitance. Keep it up with the awesome vids Matt
The rolling jeep was pretty much the first thing I thought of doing when I got the remote C4 in Mercenaries 1. I can't believe none of the designers thought of it :D
This series is great. I've become hooked.
Personally, when it comes to sandbox play, I like to run a heavily improvised game and I often prefer to use systems that provide me with tools to that end. Pretty much all of Kevin Crawford's OSR stuff is designed with sandbox play in mind, and as such his games come with really good system agnostic tools for creating all sorts of interesting problems for the players to solve - not to mention systems for having different factions compete with each other in the background, which helps make the world feel more lived in.
Dungeon World, meanwhile, has what it calls "Fronts"; these are basically where you note down what the general gist of the adventure is, and you write down how the front will progress if the players don't interfere, complete with whatever the final problem may end up being.
Mercenaries inspired much of my early tabletop writing and play. Thank you for your work on that, it was one of my favorites.
Dude! The mercenaries games were some of my favorite games growing up! That's awesome!
I absolutely loved the book of challenges for 3.5. Best book I've ever gotten
Matt, great presentation and information as always. The advice to give your players different information, motivation and/or leads is the absolute best way to get a sandbox campaign going. Make them feel like other things are occurring within your World outside of their influence, but be ready to prep a lot of material for those player curveballs.
One of my players used the immovable rod in a way i had never thought. Not to keep something shut, not to use it for a pully system. They used to get up a floor. They jump, activated it, then swung up, turned it off before turning it back on. Using their own momentum and turning the rod on and off to gain height to a level that wasn't accessable from their current postiton.
That's crazy! I had no idea you worked on the Mercenary games. I was an Infantry Scout stationed at the JSA inside the DMZ in Korea when the first Mercenaries came out and where the game starts out. It blew my mind playing a game that took place right outside my window. I was in Iraq as a Private Contractor when the second Mercenaries came out, and played the hell out of it with my brother when I'd come home on leave. Those games hold a special place with me.
I remember Mercenaries. I loved it and the sandbox ambitions, which were a breath of fresh air when it came out. Makes sense that a DM was involved in a project with that kind of scope and reach. :)
I had the Deck of Encounters (both of them) with 2E, and that was amazing for that sand box kind of style. Whatever terrain the players were exploring, you could grab a few encounters beforehand, or even as they were traveling (since they were pretty quick to go over) and put that in their path.
Not only was it good to populate the world, but some of the ideas could really lead to bigger and better things, like finding an artifact in an encounter, that needs its own kind of scrying to determine what it is/does. And that sets the party off in an entirely new adventure.
I find myself here in 2021 getting ready to run my first major "homebrew" campaign, which is essentially a port of Ghost Recon Wildlands, a notably open world sandbox game, into fantasy DnD 5E. I have been listening to all your videos and knew I would owe you a huge thanks as a DM. Now I realize I owe you first for the hundreds if not thousands of hours of enjoyment for Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. I have no idea how many North Korean jeeps and helicopters I have blown up or how many game mechanics I probably broke by grossly OVERUSING helicopters, but I enjoyed every minute of it. Thank you.
Good luck!
This episode might be my favorite so far because of the use of all the low level adventures that I never thought of using and dropping them all over the place so coming up with a whole new story with new plots and characters is a little easier.
Dear Matthew. This is probably one of your best videos to date. Thank you for sharing your vast DM knowledge and experience. Currently I am running my old gaming group (20+ years ago, since we last played) through Curse of Strahd. This is kinda of a limited sandbox, as I really like the sandbox idea. I am already thinking about the future for characters when they return from Barovia to their own world. A lot of your ideas and knowledge is making its way into my world ;)
Fantastic video and very relevant to being a DM for yourself. In my videos on solo DMing I talk about using pieces of different modules in the same way. It’s another way of giving choices that seem external. Thanks for the great content.
Ah good old B2. It came in the Borderlands. It was present at the birth of many a campaign. The Keep on the Borderlands is legendary.