Is there anything specific about structuring a D&D campaign that you want me to discuss in a future video in this series? Thanks so much to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video! Visit www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK to get 51% off any annual membership! www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike
Ah yes "structure", as I try to string together a coherent narrative through a collection of old Dungeon Magazine adventures and Dungeon Crawl Classic (3e) modules.
I am so freaking excited for all your plans in the new year! I've been thinking it would be really cool to see more of what you did with the Indiana Jones video and apply the D&D deconstruction to non-D&D media
The thing that's helped me plan longer campaigns is to start from the BBEG, that epic final confrontation, and work backwards to determine what monsters to use and how to use them. Most high tier monsters have archetypical cultists, minions, lieutenants, and thralls that can make encounter building easier to manage and can help players determine who said BBEG is.
A great perspective. As a DM, it took me years to realize most players really aren't inclined towards very long campaigns- even when they believe they are. Only after finding a perfect group did I end up being able to DM a 50 Session run of Curse of Strahd. It's unfortunate that hyping yourself up and expecting any given group to be willing to go the distance long-term rarely ends well. All the more reasons there should be more short prewritten campaigns to choose from, like Lost Mine of Phandelver or Stormwreck Isle
I've known Audwick for 5 minutes but if anything happens to him I will call the Pinkertons on myself and write a bad spelljammer book just to spite you
@@ellabartal4652 doing his best? *DOING HIS BEST?!‽* he is a manipulative, conniving, spawn of warmbo Satan! He is a threat to humanity and MUST be dealt with accordingly! lol
12:30 One of the biggest changes I have done to "Phandelver and Below" is adding a second enemy trying to fight for the territory. This all started because I changed out the Agatha the Banshee for a Green Hag pretending to be a Banshee (Banshee's aren't known for making deals, but hags are.) This led to me adding a Hag coven that was competing for the territory, and that made for a more interesting game, as suddenly, the problems the various groups were causing in the early game became those two groups trying to disrupt each other, and the players tipping over everyone's apple carts.
I'm prepping for my first campaign in paranormal order in a long time and this video is VERY useful, especially the part about having more than one sinister threat loving the content mike
Excited for this series. I am a history teacher and a sometime dm. Planning a history class is similar to campaign prep. Looking forward to implementing some of your advice into my classroom. Center the characters (I mean…students)!
I have dm'd a nearly weekly game for 5 years as of March, and I have a friend who's done the same for 2 or so years, and we both discussed that it feels like we're mangaka sometimes. Week to week, making it up, and always looking back to see what we can bring forward to make it look like this was all planned ahead and trying to constantly to give the players moments of surprise and wonder.
I'm running three campaigns. One is just for my kids and for my wife who dropped out. That started as a serialized adventures of two friends out to see the world. After my wife's character left the party, the kids went to go resolve some backstory stuff from the little one's first character, which she had created as a one player one shot. They stumbled right into a plot hook for storm King's Thunder, and they're currently playing through that. My second campaign in the same world started as a series of one shots with different characters. The mostly adult players decided they were having a lot of fun and didn't want to make new characters at a certain point. And their characters that were active at that time discovered a thread that they wanted to know more about. They pulled and pulled on that thread and the episodic series of avengers has turned into a serialized one. Got the timeline synced up with the kids adventure and a solo game. I'm running for someone else. So now I have three serialized adventures going on at the same time and occasionally have crossovers events. It's super fun
While there was a time that I loved over preparing and running a true sandbox style, where everywhere the PC's went, there were things happening and a lot of detailed NPC's, I have evolved with my thinking. Mostly for time constraints. I now love to have a large world affecting story that will be happening in the background, whether the characters interact with it or not, then creating the campaign one smaller story at a time, that is sometimes connected to the main plot or at least be designed to move the party towards the next part of the story. Each adventure will have clues or information that the party can find that will allow them to become aware of the main storyline, but they would still choose when and how they will act on that info. It allows for a lot of adjusting along the way when the players ultimately do the unexpected things that players do.
Oooh great question! I got lucky with a great group, we did a 4 Arc structure, each Arc was roughly 1 to 1.5 tears in real time playing twice a month. The campaign lasted 5 years and we still talk about it all the time
I joined a ttrpg group a few years ago and it was a pretty fun method in my opinion. My friend was/is in a group that had a campaign running where he was a player. During October, he thought it would be fun to run a Halloween themed one shot. 1st One - Halloween Themed One Shot. People sent in to a haunted mansion occupied by vampires trying to commune with the God of Entropy 2nd One - A White Hat Bank Heist One Shot 3rd One - A one shot about traveling through harsh terrain. A new player joined. Was an incredibly long one shot but stayed in one session. 4th One - Intended to be a one shot it became a 5-6 session mini-campaign. I joined during this one. It was a murder mystery. 5th One - A 3 session campaign dungeon crawler with a big horror angle. 6th One - A 3 session campaign that was originally going to be POLITIK with us trying to find the best candidate to take ruler ship but due to team configuration the GM pivoted and it became fascinating for being a group that broke up at the end. 7th, 8th, & 9th - All 3 sessions where about the same War and the idea is we hopped between our 3 different adventuring groups through different moments in the war (4 sessions each). First batch were a "Rallying" phase where it was telling the story of a city-state preparing to go to war whereas our characters were trying to stop sabotage and assassination attempts. Second one was the first major battle and skirmishes tied to that. Third one was breaching enemy territory proper. Fourth one was the final battle of the War. 10th - This became the first long running campaign and is still running with us just having finished are 62nd Session. It started as a caravan travel. The city-state that won the war from the previous story now was funding a caravan to travel the world to display their wealth, influence, and power as well as to set up trade and diplomatic relations with other places in the world. Originally a war was going to spark up about 15-20 sessions in but the GM ended up enjoying giving us time to build up our characters, relationships, and having mini arcs and episodic content as we traveled along before finally having the war kick in only in the last few sessions. The arc just before the current one was centered around a city called Proximity that was built next to The Bowl, a place very much drawing from a STALKER and the sorts. City that was obliterated by something and left magically irradiated. The wizard got a spell that gave us shields to protect us from radiation and it was very much a westmarches style map of the remnants of the city where we could travel tile by tile each one taking up X amount of time and each movement had a roll with a modifier that would build up until an Apex Predator came for you (but also using old routes let you travel 4 tiles without rolling on the encounter table). All of them were in the same setting so it helped build up a world in a really fun way. The GM has mentioned after this campaign he'd like to do shorter sessions and one shots in the world again. He's enjoying the long campaign but he'd love to swap it up again.
I spoiled myself by prepping an entire sandbox campaign combining the first two starter boxes during 2020. It started out as an excuse to teach myself Tabletop Simulator and then it turned into an entire thing. I've used it for two different groups and it give me a lot more time to improvise during the sessions, letting the different villains plots react to the player's actions because I know that every encounter on the map is ready to drop in and I have basic notes for all of them ready to go. I can adjust things about the story in real time because I know what the baseline is and what feels like a natural way to deviate from that baseline based on what the PCs have been doing. But the strength of that prep style is the sandbox nature of the region the players are locked into. I've started prepping a Strixhaven inspired campaign using the adventures from Candlekeep Mysteries and a few other sources, but the more open ended nature of a school filled with mysteries is making it more of a challenge to prep long term. I should just kick off the campaign and prep as I go, but running D&D without having to prep anything before a session is a liberating experience.
What I did was have a level 0 adventure that chronologically went into a year long game of Phandelver, but due to a player quitting after the level 0 adventure, I fashioned Wild Sheep Chase to be an adventure post phandelver while I rewrote some things.
Personally the method I use is from a video from Enter the Dungeon titled "How to Plan a D&D Campaign: The 3 Arc Structure - DM ACademy" that introduces the idea of Campaign Arcs, Narrative Arcs, and Immediate Arcs. The TL;DR on how each arc is categorized can be paralleled to the Infinity Saga portion of the MCU. Campaign Arcs is the entire story from Iron Man 1 all the way to Endgame. Narrative Arcs are each Phase, where you have a bunch of individual movies and then one big "crossover" movie that brings it all together and signals the transition into the next Phase. Immediate Arcs would be each individual movie. Personally how I'm using this in my current campaign is overall I have an idea of the overall BBEG / Vecna from CR level threat. So the Campaign Arc is, of course, them rising to power and (hopefully) eventually culminating in a big final boss fight. Then I have 3 Narrative Arcs of the stages of this BBEG's plan. Stage 1 is a setup and introducing the party to this threat where they take a more back seat role and the party interacts with their underlings more often than them. Stage 2 the heat will be cranked up a little bit with Stage 3 being sort of the "go forge these trammels in the undersea forge" section of CR campaign 1 pre Vecna. For the Intermediate arcs of my campaign I basically have each Narrative arc set up so that each character has an Intermediate arc where they progress their narratively character in some way and then there is one big final huzzah where they fight their "Avengers level threat" and grow as a party. I think it's a really nice way to organize it because each character gets the spotlight for an arc, rotating around. I will say one con though is from a prep standpoint I way over stress on making sure every single character is perfectly balanced but that might just be my own perfectionism, not a flaw of the system. It also might feel less organic. I know since I sort of have an open ended "hey here's these 5 dragon relics, each one relates to one of you, which one do you want to do next" sort of leads to an above table "ok we're going after this" that then influences a contrived "oh hey in game you're drawn to this area completely coincidentally how weeeirrd" but hey my group enjoys it and loves making the "wow what a coincidence" jokes so I can't beat myself up too much over it. As for the point of making sure the one singular BBEG doesn't make the world seem thin, I definitely have introduced a lot of smaller threats! Even though worldwide, Masquerade (a terrorist faction a la Talon from Overwatch) is like the singular #1 threat with their hands in everything, there are also other cults in the world that might be working with Masquerade. So it's really neat being able to introduce all these other evil groups and being able to link them back to Masquerade just to express how deep into the world's factions' pockets Masquerade truly is, even corrupting the good factions.
me trying to convince myself that it's okay that i just have the beginning and the end planned and i can let my party guide the rest of it. (My party is good. They'll follow the plot hook. And they know something's gonna happen, they just don't know what it is yet. They're on board with it.) (They'll make their plan with how to handle it, and I'll construct that) (it'd be really funny if they sided with the bbeg)
The definition of campaign changes with nearly every person. During 1E we had a saying “The campaign ends when the DM dies.” But I am glad you are giving a definition. So my shortest campaign was five minutes my fighter shown up from the Chaos fog, and got blasted 5 minutes later. And the body was looted at 5 minutes and 8 seconds. Due to PCS, ETS, Schedule conflicts, college courses, my campaigns have been very short. Heck, I don’t think the same pcs ran through G1-G-3 giants, D1-D3 drow and Q1 Lolth. I will say 2024 DMG is best for a new DM who needs some hand holding. One bonus with multiple plot lines is if Mike has been the mover and shaker of the pcs, you can advance other plot lines. AKA WTF I had planned on Mike getting his wand of magic missile machine gun this session, now I have nothing planned. 17:54 Tour of the campaign world. SNARK Like Spelljammer, Planescape and Vecna books. Walks away whistling. Never Ran. I have seen plenty people fall for the trap of over prep. I try not to roll my eyes at the current teenagers who are occasionally sitting in at my table. Storm King’s Thunder. I had two pcs died during the epilogue. All I was going to do was wrap up the loose threads, award the final magic items and rewards. Nope two pcs wanted to fight a certain someone. And then did not coordinate. I was able to bring Thunder in at 27 3 hour sessions. On this week Episode should be the default for most people. DUE to scheduling. I did love how in the 90s tv and cartoons did shift to a megaplot for the season. Now they did not always do it well.
i've been subscribed since your Tiberius video and i root for you to hit those mile stones... that being said, i gotta ask(jokingly).... Are you seriously trying to Warmbo threat your way to 100k? . . . . . . . . . . . . GENIUS! lol good luck on the climb and grind! i'll be chillin' here on the other side of the screen to watch, comment and like within the first 1hr(ish) for each to help boost
This is pretty well-timed for my first campaign that I'm still running. It's meant to be a 5th-15th level campaign, and I've been naturally trying to pace it by stringing together (somewhat) unrelated adventure "arcs". However, I've been trying to keep a few recurring antagonistic factions that show up every other arc. It felt more interesting that way
@@SupergeekMikeon one hand (speaking as a trans woman) that's probably a good call. You wouldn't want to have this association with your content.... But on the other hand....it would be kinda hilarious
I find it interesting how some of the suggestions about structuring campaigns (which seem sensible suggestions) are completely counter to the full length Pathfinder campaigns that Paizo publishes, and which are great. Personally, having already played through 2 and DM'd 1 level 1-20 campaign based on a published adventure path, I liked having the structure it provided. I'm not sure I'm good enough at foreshadowing and coming up with sensible connective tissue to make a set of unrelated adventures feel like one single cohesive story.
Found this video really interesting there’s a duet ttrpg called Partners but I’m hoping to use the charts and structure from that game to inspire a episodic campaign inspired by murder mysteries and procedurals
I have tried to run episodic style campaigns so often. Love the idea, and it has worked in some aspects very often... But we've always run into the time constraints, felt restrained and "up against the clock" to finish the adventure in one session... I'm so curious about how Jay does it? I love the idea, I just never quite got the execution right
I know it’s so unlikely but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the DA RPG. There’s no videos out there that really talk about it and me and my friends have been doing a bunch of one shots trying to figure out how we could make a campaign work in the game.
Planning out the entire campaign is an easy trap to fall into, but at the same time you don't want to miss the forest for the trees either. The trick, I feel, is to understand enough of the big picture of the campaign (assuming an overarching narrative that'd go on with or without player interference) to understand how it influences the current events the players and their characters are facing. If the big bad's end point is X, what stage of that plan is he at currently? It can be hard to foreshadow something that you can't see clearly yourself and run the risk of plot holes and contradictions if you're only focusing on the here and now, unless the game is being run so episodic that there isn't any sort of narrative through line, like if it's purely independent "monster of the week".
What I find funny is that none of the definitions you gave really fit what I think of as a campaign. When I started playing seriously at University back in 1982 we used the term campaign to refer to a given DM's world and its history. To use the comics analogy, one DM's campaign might be the Marvel Universe, while another's would be the DC Universe. It wasn't about the same characters, it was about the same setting and continuity. My Friday campaign has been running since May of 2023, and we've probably only missed at most three or four weeks in that time. It started with a couple of DCC modules, jumped into Storm King's Thunder, did a couple of homebrew adventures, followed by a heavily modified 1e Vault of the Drow, and is now going into a modified version of Tomb of Annihilation; all with the same characters who are now 14th level. I don't have a solid structure at all, but I do have close to a dozen players and it's been working well.
Serialized but I never run published adventures (that is lazy GM'ing). Generally my campaigns go for about a year. Sometimes there might be some more episodic stuff thrown in if, for example, a player is missing and I don't want to do a big moment like fighting a major boss or beginning a new arc without everyone there. I do agree with not prepping the whole campaign at once but sometimes it's helpful to have big story beats planned out. In my most epic campaign I knew in the first arc that I wanted to introduce a specific character as a patron later on and there was at least one NPC who was "fated" to turn evil unless the players really did something to change his course.
Oh hey, I also played Deathwatch in college! Maybe I should swing by the discord to see if there's anyone else who wants to play that and... be normal about it, yknow?
I don't think the boy in Stranger Things ever said their session took two weeks to plan. He said the campaign did, which might still be true if they're not playing a one-shot
So far so good! It’s been scary but so far we have not had to evacuate, and our friend who DID have to is already back in his home, thank goodness. But we’re still keeping an eye on things… 🤞🤞🤞
Mike employing The tried and true tactic of negative reinforcement. Don't want to hear the annoying beep in your car. Put on your seat belt dingus. Don't like the algorithm wizard. Just subscribe and he goes away eventually
"Eat healthy" isn't bad advice, but it's useless on its like. It's like "Do the right thing," when the right thing isn't immediately obvious. You're placing all responsibility on the receiver to know what to do in an established goal, even if they did know what to do, they probably would not have sought your advice in the first place.
Love the channel, but there's a thought I've had almost since I started watching, which is that I feel like you should space out the release of your videos a bit more. It seems like you often have a week or two when you can't release a video, then when you can release them you do multiple in a single week (last month you did four in four days). Wouldn't it be better to just hold off on those videos a little bit to have a more regular release? Just a thought and I might be missing something, best of luck to you either way!
8:33 Im sorry, you made this WAAAY more complicated then it needed to be... D&D Adventures and Adventuring can be broken down into 2 simple structures... 1. Which PC is which Golden Girl 2. Any adventure is always based on Scooby-doo There, done, you're good. ...and if you're too young to understand either of those references... firstly, educate yourself! Secondly, thats how true D&D (or most RPG's, actually) are played, have been played, should be played, and will be played! 1. Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Mage... everything comes down to a style that fits one of those archetypes in play (aka Are you a Blanche, Sophia, Dorothy, or Rose) 2. You come to a location, you find clues, you solve the mystery, you get the reward (Buffy, Supernatural, Star Trek, etc have all used this "Scooby-doo" method)
I'm going to have to dispute your definition of campaign - Some campaigns involve permanently retiring characters with games that have mechanics that incentivize that (particularly generational games where it's expected that you'll be retiring your character and playing others from the community or their offspring as your original character ages. Pendragon's the obvious game that incentivizes that, particularly if you're playing the 80 year (game time) prepublished Pendragon Campaign, but The Warren is a generational game about rabbits with mechanics for tracking the births and deaths within the warren outside of the players (and there are mechanics for both determining if your rabbit becomes pregnant while mating with another PC and giving birth as a rabbit if you're playing as a doe)) where there is zero expectations that anyone will be playing the same characters at the end of the campaign compared to the start, but also some campaigns have players playing a staple of characters, picking the right one for the current session (with expectation that characters will need the extra down time from not going on every mission), with games like Blades in the Dark built on the assumption that this is how you'll play it.
I’m already a subscriber. What do I have to do to make Oddwick go away? After the first appearance last time, I thought I’d give him a chance, but-no. I can’t think of a worthwhile payoff for that, and he Just Needs to Not Take Up Time at the end of the videos. Please, I beg you, keep him out of the Demystified episodes. I’m interested in this series, but Avoiding Oddwick may become a side quest.
Is there anything specific about structuring a D&D campaign that you want me to discuss in a future video in this series?
Thanks so much to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video! Visit www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK to get 51% off any annual membership!
www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike
I would love to see a video on how to effectively work in downtime between adventures, without it feeling dull or taking away from momentum.
Jesus, I almost spilled my drink when the lil wizard screamed "call to action" xD
I was hoovering my kitchen at the time and it genuinely made me jump!
Oddwick sure is... a character. One of the characters of all time, in fact.
People, please subscribe. This channel slaps.
Ah yes "structure", as I try to string together a coherent narrative through a collection of old Dungeon Magazine adventures and Dungeon Crawl Classic (3e) modules.
I am so freaking excited for all your plans in the new year! I've been thinking it would be really cool to see more of what you did with the Indiana Jones video and apply the D&D deconstruction to non-D&D media
This is a good channel. I like Mike
This video is exactly what I needed because I just thought how should structurize our next campaign
The thing that's helped me plan longer campaigns is to start from the BBEG, that epic final confrontation, and work backwards to determine what monsters to use and how to use them. Most high tier monsters have archetypical cultists, minions, lieutenants, and thralls that can make encounter building easier to manage and can help players determine who said BBEG is.
A great perspective. As a DM, it took me years to realize most players really aren't inclined towards very long campaigns- even when they believe they are. Only after finding a perfect group did I end up being able to DM a 50 Session run of Curse of Strahd. It's unfortunate that hyping yourself up and expecting any given group to be willing to go the distance long-term rarely ends well. All the more reasons there should be more short prewritten campaigns to choose from, like Lost Mine of Phandelver or Stormwreck Isle
I genuinely got a fright when oddwick shouted about "call to action"
oh god same
I've known Audwick for 5 minutes but if anything happens to him I will call the Pinkertons on myself and write a bad spelljammer book just to spite you
I, for one, welcome our new, purple wizard overlord.
All hail Oddwick!
until he takes over the set and starts leaving creamed corn everywhere.... IYKYK
@BlackOpMercyGaming This feels like felt puppet discrimination tbh. Warmbo's just doing his best.
@@ellabartal4652 doing his best? *DOING HIS BEST?!‽* he is a manipulative, conniving, spawn of warmbo Satan! He is a threat to humanity and MUST be dealt with accordingly!
lol
HAIL ODDWICK!!! ✊
Love that this is going to be a video series topic.
Looking forward to these videos. I've been gming since 1979 and still learning.
I’m getting ready to run my first campaign and I’m so excited about this series
12:30 One of the biggest changes I have done to "Phandelver and Below" is adding a second enemy trying to fight for the territory. This all started because I changed out the Agatha the Banshee for a Green Hag pretending to be a Banshee (Banshee's aren't known for making deals, but hags are.) This led to me adding a Hag coven that was competing for the territory, and that made for a more interesting game, as suddenly, the problems the various groups were causing in the early game became those two groups trying to disrupt each other, and the players tipping over everyone's apple carts.
I'm prepping for my first campaign in paranormal order in a long time and this video is VERY useful, especially the part about having more than one sinister threat
loving the content mike
Excited for this series. I am a history teacher and a sometime dm. Planning a history class is similar to campaign prep. Looking forward to implementing some of your advice into my classroom. Center the characters (I mean…students)!
Cant wait for these vids, this topic is something I would love to see explored
I have dm'd a nearly weekly game for 5 years as of March, and I have a friend who's done the same for 2 or so years, and we both discussed that it feels like we're mangaka sometimes. Week to week, making it up, and always looking back to see what we can bring forward to make it look like this was all planned ahead and trying to constantly to give the players moments of surprise and wonder.
I'm running three campaigns. One is just for my kids and for my wife who dropped out. That started as a serialized adventures of two friends out to see the world. After my wife's character left the party, the kids went to go resolve some backstory stuff from the little one's first character, which she had created as a one player one shot. They stumbled right into a plot hook for storm King's Thunder, and they're currently playing through that.
My second campaign in the same world started as a series of one shots with different characters. The mostly adult players decided they were having a lot of fun and didn't want to make new characters at a certain point. And their characters that were active at that time discovered a thread that they wanted to know more about. They pulled and pulled on that thread and the episodic series of avengers has turned into a serialized one. Got the timeline synced up with the kids adventure and a solo game. I'm running for someone else. So now I have three serialized adventures going on at the same time and occasionally have crossovers events. It's super fun
Crossover events? 👀 I'd love to hear more!
While there was a time that I loved over preparing and running a true sandbox style, where everywhere the PC's went, there were things happening and a lot of detailed NPC's, I have evolved with my thinking. Mostly for time constraints. I now love to have a large world affecting story that will be happening in the background, whether the characters interact with it or not, then creating the campaign one smaller story at a time, that is sometimes connected to the main plot or at least be designed to move the party towards the next part of the story. Each adventure will have clues or information that the party can find that will allow them to become aware of the main storyline, but they would still choose when and how they will act on that info. It allows for a lot of adjusting along the way when the players ultimately do the unexpected things that players do.
Oooh great question! I got lucky with a great group, we did a 4 Arc structure, each Arc was roughly 1 to 1.5 tears in real time playing twice a month. The campaign lasted 5 years and we still talk about it all the time
That’s awesome!
I joined a ttrpg group a few years ago and it was a pretty fun method in my opinion. My friend was/is in a group that had a campaign running where he was a player. During October, he thought it would be fun to run a Halloween themed one shot.
1st One - Halloween Themed One Shot. People sent in to a haunted mansion occupied by vampires trying to commune with the God of Entropy
2nd One - A White Hat Bank Heist One Shot
3rd One - A one shot about traveling through harsh terrain. A new player joined. Was an incredibly long one shot but stayed in one session.
4th One - Intended to be a one shot it became a 5-6 session mini-campaign. I joined during this one. It was a murder mystery.
5th One - A 3 session campaign dungeon crawler with a big horror angle.
6th One - A 3 session campaign that was originally going to be POLITIK with us trying to find the best candidate to take ruler ship but due to team configuration the GM pivoted and it became fascinating for being a group that broke up at the end.
7th, 8th, & 9th - All 3 sessions where about the same War and the idea is we hopped between our 3 different adventuring groups through different moments in the war (4 sessions each). First batch were a "Rallying" phase where it was telling the story of a city-state preparing to go to war whereas our characters were trying to stop sabotage and assassination attempts. Second one was the first major battle and skirmishes tied to that. Third one was breaching enemy territory proper. Fourth one was the final battle of the War.
10th - This became the first long running campaign and is still running with us just having finished are 62nd Session. It started as a caravan travel. The city-state that won the war from the previous story now was funding a caravan to travel the world to display their wealth, influence, and power as well as to set up trade and diplomatic relations with other places in the world. Originally a war was going to spark up about 15-20 sessions in but the GM ended up enjoying giving us time to build up our characters, relationships, and having mini arcs and episodic content as we traveled along before finally having the war kick in only in the last few sessions. The arc just before the current one was centered around a city called Proximity that was built next to The Bowl, a place very much drawing from a STALKER and the sorts. City that was obliterated by something and left magically irradiated. The wizard got a spell that gave us shields to protect us from radiation and it was very much a westmarches style map of the remnants of the city where we could travel tile by tile each one taking up X amount of time and each movement had a roll with a modifier that would build up until an Apex Predator came for you (but also using old routes let you travel 4 tiles without rolling on the encounter table).
All of them were in the same setting so it helped build up a world in a really fun way. The GM has mentioned after this campaign he'd like to do shorter sessions and one shots in the world again. He's enjoying the long campaign but he'd love to swap it up again.
I spoiled myself by prepping an entire sandbox campaign combining the first two starter boxes during 2020. It started out as an excuse to teach myself Tabletop Simulator and then it turned into an entire thing. I've used it for two different groups and it give me a lot more time to improvise during the sessions, letting the different villains plots react to the player's actions because I know that every encounter on the map is ready to drop in and I have basic notes for all of them ready to go. I can adjust things about the story in real time because I know what the baseline is and what feels like a natural way to deviate from that baseline based on what the PCs have been doing.
But the strength of that prep style is the sandbox nature of the region the players are locked into. I've started prepping a Strixhaven inspired campaign using the adventures from Candlekeep Mysteries and a few other sources, but the more open ended nature of a school filled with mysteries is making it more of a challenge to prep long term. I should just kick off the campaign and prep as I go, but running D&D without having to prep anything before a session is a liberating experience.
What I did was have a level 0 adventure that chronologically went into a year long game of Phandelver, but due to a player quitting after the level 0 adventure, I fashioned Wild Sheep Chase to be an adventure post phandelver while I rewrote some things.
Great video! Looking forward to others in this series.
Personally the method I use is from a video from Enter the Dungeon titled "How to Plan a D&D Campaign: The 3 Arc Structure - DM ACademy" that introduces the idea of Campaign Arcs, Narrative Arcs, and Immediate Arcs. The TL;DR on how each arc is categorized can be paralleled to the Infinity Saga portion of the MCU. Campaign Arcs is the entire story from Iron Man 1 all the way to Endgame. Narrative Arcs are each Phase, where you have a bunch of individual movies and then one big "crossover" movie that brings it all together and signals the transition into the next Phase. Immediate Arcs would be each individual movie.
Personally how I'm using this in my current campaign is overall I have an idea of the overall BBEG / Vecna from CR level threat. So the Campaign Arc is, of course, them rising to power and (hopefully) eventually culminating in a big final boss fight. Then I have 3 Narrative Arcs of the stages of this BBEG's plan. Stage 1 is a setup and introducing the party to this threat where they take a more back seat role and the party interacts with their underlings more often than them. Stage 2 the heat will be cranked up a little bit with Stage 3 being sort of the "go forge these trammels in the undersea forge" section of CR campaign 1 pre Vecna.
For the Intermediate arcs of my campaign I basically have each Narrative arc set up so that each character has an Intermediate arc where they progress their narratively character in some way and then there is one big final huzzah where they fight their "Avengers level threat" and grow as a party. I think it's a really nice way to organize it because each character gets the spotlight for an arc, rotating around. I will say one con though is from a prep standpoint I way over stress on making sure every single character is perfectly balanced but that might just be my own perfectionism, not a flaw of the system.
It also might feel less organic. I know since I sort of have an open ended "hey here's these 5 dragon relics, each one relates to one of you, which one do you want to do next" sort of leads to an above table "ok we're going after this" that then influences a contrived "oh hey in game you're drawn to this area completely coincidentally how weeeirrd" but hey my group enjoys it and loves making the "wow what a coincidence" jokes so I can't beat myself up too much over it.
As for the point of making sure the one singular BBEG doesn't make the world seem thin, I definitely have introduced a lot of smaller threats! Even though worldwide, Masquerade (a terrorist faction a la Talon from Overwatch) is like the singular #1 threat with their hands in everything, there are also other cults in the world that might be working with Masquerade. So it's really neat being able to introduce all these other evil groups and being able to link them back to Masquerade just to express how deep into the world's factions' pockets Masquerade truly is, even corrupting the good factions.
As someone who'd like to turn my one-shots into a plot that takes a few games to complete, this series is going to be SO USEFUL! Thank you, Mike! ❤
Man you play off the Algorithm Wizard so well that I forgot he's a doodle, massive props
Love Oddwick 😂 Love this content, excited for the next couple weeks!
me trying to convince myself that it's okay that i just have the beginning and the end planned and i can let my party guide the rest of it. (My party is good. They'll follow the plot hook. And they know something's gonna happen, they just don't know what it is yet. They're on board with it.) (They'll make their plan with how to handle it, and I'll construct that) (it'd be really funny if they sided with the bbeg)
woah that sounds like such a cool project! can't wait to see what you talk about!
Odwick is phénoménal. Gave me a great chuckle!
Keep up the great work Mike
Love your stuff 💖
Guy (How to be a great GM) did a great series on "how to plan an epic campaign". I also bought the book. It is fantastic.
The definition of campaign changes with nearly every person. During 1E we had a saying “The campaign ends when the DM dies.” But I am glad you are giving a definition. So my shortest campaign was five minutes my fighter shown up from the Chaos fog, and got blasted 5 minutes later. And the body was looted at 5 minutes and 8 seconds.
Due to PCS, ETS, Schedule conflicts, college courses, my campaigns have been very short. Heck, I don’t think the same pcs ran through G1-G-3 giants, D1-D3 drow and Q1 Lolth.
I will say 2024 DMG is best for a new DM who needs some hand holding.
One bonus with multiple plot lines is if Mike has been the mover and shaker of the pcs, you can advance other plot lines. AKA WTF I had planned on Mike getting his wand of magic missile machine gun this session, now I have nothing planned.
17:54 Tour of the campaign world. SNARK Like Spelljammer, Planescape and Vecna books. Walks away whistling.
Never Ran. I have seen plenty people fall for the trap of over prep. I try not to roll my eyes at the current teenagers who are occasionally sitting in at my table.
Storm King’s Thunder. I had two pcs died during the epilogue. All I was going to do was wrap up the loose threads, award the final magic items and rewards. Nope two pcs wanted to fight a certain someone. And then did not coordinate. I was able to bring Thunder in at 27 3 hour sessions.
On this week Episode should be the default for most people. DUE to scheduling. I did love how in the 90s tv and cartoons did shift to a megaplot for the season. Now they did not always do it well.
i've been subscribed since your Tiberius video and i root for you to hit those mile stones... that being said, i gotta ask(jokingly).... Are you seriously trying to Warmbo threat your way to 100k?
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GENIUS! lol good luck on the climb and grind! i'll be chillin' here on the other side of the screen to watch, comment and like within the first 1hr(ish) for each to help boost
The analogy that a roleplaying campaign is like a comic book series is my favorite. 🥰 That's exactly how I see it as a Dungeon Master.
This is pretty well-timed for my first campaign that I'm still running. It's meant to be a 5th-15th level campaign, and I've been naturally trying to pace it by stringing together (somewhat) unrelated adventure "arcs". However, I've been trying to keep a few recurring antagonistic factions that show up every other arc. It felt more interesting that way
That's a project 2025 I can get behind :D
Haha I almost referred to it as that in one of my scripts and quickly had to slam that backspace button 😂
@@SupergeekMikeon one hand (speaking as a trans woman) that's probably a good call. You wouldn't want to have this association with your content.... But on the other hand....it would be kinda hilarious
I like the carrot approach to getting more subscribers. Also this (video) campaign you’re starting seems interesting.
So helpful!
I find it interesting how some of the suggestions about structuring campaigns (which seem sensible suggestions) are completely counter to the full length Pathfinder campaigns that Paizo publishes, and which are great.
Personally, having already played through 2 and DM'd 1 level 1-20 campaign based on a published adventure path, I liked having the structure it provided. I'm not sure I'm good enough at foreshadowing and coming up with sensible connective tissue to make a set of unrelated adventures feel like one single cohesive story.
I love Oddwick. I will die for Oddwick.
Found this video really interesting there’s a duet ttrpg called Partners but I’m hoping to use the charts and structure from that game to inspire a episodic campaign inspired by murder mysteries and procedurals
I have tried to run episodic style campaigns so often. Love the idea, and it has worked in some aspects very often... But we've always run into the time constraints, felt restrained and "up against the clock" to finish the adventure in one session... I'm so curious about how Jay does it? I love the idea, I just never quite got the execution right
I know it’s so unlikely but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the DA RPG. There’s no videos out there that really talk about it and me and my friends have been doing a bunch of one shots trying to figure out how we could make a campaign work in the game.
It's Oddwick! Hooraaaaaaay!!! 🎉
"If you don't like Oddwick, Subscribe to the channel so Oddwick will go away!"
Genius.
But what if you like Oddwick?
@boroswalker7923 then subscribe anyway so you can see every time he appears?
It's funny because I've been listening to Rick Roderick videos and it rhymes.
Planning out the entire campaign is an easy trap to fall into, but at the same time you don't want to miss the forest for the trees either. The trick, I feel, is to understand enough of the big picture of the campaign (assuming an overarching narrative that'd go on with or without player interference) to understand how it influences the current events the players and their characters are facing. If the big bad's end point is X, what stage of that plan is he at currently? It can be hard to foreshadow something that you can't see clearly yourself and run the risk of plot holes and contradictions if you're only focusing on the here and now, unless the game is being run so episodic that there isn't any sort of narrative through line, like if it's purely independent "monster of the week".
What I find funny is that none of the definitions you gave really fit what I think of as a campaign. When I started playing seriously at University back in 1982 we used the term campaign to refer to a given DM's world and its history. To use the comics analogy, one DM's campaign might be the Marvel Universe, while another's would be the DC Universe. It wasn't about the same characters, it was about the same setting and continuity. My Friday campaign has been running since May of 2023, and we've probably only missed at most three or four weeks in that time. It started with a couple of DCC modules, jumped into Storm King's Thunder, did a couple of homebrew adventures, followed by a heavily modified 1e Vault of the Drow, and is now going into a modified version of Tomb of Annihilation; all with the same characters who are now 14th level. I don't have a solid structure at all, but I do have close to a dozen players and it's been working well.
Serialized but I never run published adventures (that is lazy GM'ing). Generally my campaigns go for about a year. Sometimes there might be some more episodic stuff thrown in if, for example, a player is missing and I don't want to do a big moment like fighting a major boss or beginning a new arc without everyone there.
I do agree with not prepping the whole campaign at once but sometimes it's helpful to have big story beats planned out. In my most epic campaign I knew in the first arc that I wanted to introduce a specific character as a patron later on and there was at least one NPC who was "fated" to turn evil unless the players really did something to change his course.
Mike why are you using the 2014 DMG? The 2024 handles literally this exact topic much better!
Confirmed Mike is now a Warlock lvl 1
No DM's plans survive contact with the players, so every DM should be ready to adapt, reference later then pretend that was the plan all along
Oh hey, I also played Deathwatch in college! Maybe I should swing by the discord to see if there's anyone else who wants to play that and... be normal about it, yknow?
Something nice about Oddwick? He's not Warmbo. (But, seriously, youtube clippy is a funny concept to me so I don't imagine I'll mind)
the wizard made me think of charles the coconout from patrick h willems videos
I subscribed because of Audwick hooraaaaay
Calling it now, the Algorithm wizard won't go away, he'll just change his hat and then stick around for 1M subs 😂
How tf did Oddwick get behind me when he said "call to action"?!
I don't think the boy in Stranger Things ever said their session took two weeks to plan. He said the campaign did, which might still be true if they're not playing a one-shot
I'm subscribed. Please make oddwick go away.
Xunderbrok?
I hope Oddwick doesn't become super annoying.
I hope you're safe from the wildfires :(
So far so good! It’s been scary but so far we have not had to evacuate, and our friend who DID have to is already back in his home, thank goodness. But we’re still keeping an eye on things… 🤞🤞🤞
Mike employing The tried and true tactic of negative reinforcement. Don't want to hear the annoying beep in your car. Put on your seat belt dingus. Don't like the algorithm wizard. Just subscribe and he goes away eventually
"Eat healthy" isn't bad advice, but it's useless on its like. It's like "Do the right thing," when the right thing isn't immediately obvious. You're placing all responsibility on the receiver to know what to do in an established goal, even if they did know what to do, they probably would not have sought your advice in the first place.
Love the channel, but there's a thought I've had almost since I started watching, which is that I feel like you should space out the release of your videos a bit more. It seems like you often have a week or two when you can't release a video, then when you can release them you do multiple in a single week (last month you did four in four days).
Wouldn't it be better to just hold off on those videos a little bit to have a more regular release? Just a thought and I might be missing something, best of luck to you either way!
8:33 Im sorry, you made this WAAAY more complicated then it needed to be...
D&D Adventures and Adventuring can be broken down into 2 simple structures...
1. Which PC is which Golden Girl
2. Any adventure is always based on Scooby-doo
There, done, you're good.
...and if you're too young to understand either of those references... firstly, educate yourself! Secondly, thats how true D&D (or most RPG's, actually) are played, have been played, should be played, and will be played!
1. Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Mage... everything comes down to a style that fits one of those archetypes in play (aka Are you a Blanche, Sophia, Dorothy, or Rose)
2. You come to a location, you find clues, you solve the mystery, you get the reward (Buffy, Supernatural, Star Trek, etc have all used this "Scooby-doo" method)
I'm going to have to dispute your definition of campaign - Some campaigns involve permanently retiring characters with games that have mechanics that incentivize that (particularly generational games where it's expected that you'll be retiring your character and playing others from the community or their offspring as your original character ages. Pendragon's the obvious game that incentivizes that, particularly if you're playing the 80 year (game time) prepublished Pendragon Campaign, but The Warren is a generational game about rabbits with mechanics for tracking the births and deaths within the warren outside of the players (and there are mechanics for both determining if your rabbit becomes pregnant while mating with another PC and giving birth as a rabbit if you're playing as a doe)) where there is zero expectations that anyone will be playing the same characters at the end of the campaign compared to the start, but also some campaigns have players playing a staple of characters, picking the right one for the current session (with expectation that characters will need the extra down time from not going on every mission), with games like Blades in the Dark built on the assumption that this is how you'll play it.
I’m already a subscriber. What do I have to do to make Oddwick go away? After the first appearance last time, I thought I’d give him a chance, but-no. I can’t think of a worthwhile payoff for that, and he Just Needs to Not Take Up Time at the end of the videos. Please, I beg you, keep him out of the Demystified episodes. I’m interested in this series, but Avoiding Oddwick may become a side quest.
Ah, Negative reinforcement. Make an annoying side kick who only goes away when you reach a goal. Classic classical conditioning at its finest.
oh no i love oddwick so much. i need to unsubscribe to make sure he sticks around for as long as possible
Really don’t like oddwick. I’ll continue to watch the videos until he shows then I’ll turn them off. Hope he helps you get to 100k though.
Tempted to unsub because I love Oddwick so much
i will unsubscribe if Oddwick is more videos. hes the spawn of Clippy and great gazoo. this is not as cute as you think it is.