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Showing and Telling are not, in and of themselves, good or bad. They're tools in the storyteller's toolbox. What matters is how you use them, and under what circumstances or for what purpose they can be put. Showing something makes it more visceral, and gives the players the chance to think through the implications of what they're experiencing themselves (which can have an emotional weight that merely being told the answer does not). But Telling is necessary, when the something being conveyed is abstract, convoluted, or otherwise outside the bounds of demonstration. (You generally wouldn't want to see the doomsday device in action to understand the threat, if your job is to make sure it never gets activated in the first place). Moreover, some things are so elementary to the setting that the players should know about it from the outset, without it needing to be shown. And then there's the matter of brevity; sometimes, you just don't have time to show the players something, and need to tell them. Also, Telling has the same capacity for giving the players a chance to come to conclusions, based on what you tell them and what you elect to remain unstated.
@@Bluecho4 Since my actual campaing is a new thing to me (full player driven open world), i am afraid to put to many info, or to many plot hooks on something and my players come to think "Oh, so that is the main quest lets do that.". For the most of the time i keep trowing some stuff into the story, and use a method of emulating foresights with improvisation, similar to the narrative created by Eiichiro Oda in One Piece. So its important to not expose to much.
I love the hags creating goblins thing. Reminded me of, in one of my settings, kobolds' must serve dragons. If there are kobolds there is a dragon neaby b/c they are compelled to find a dragon to serve. When their dragon dies they move to the next dragon. This often includes sprouting wings to fly to that dragon. Dragons on this world rule islands. And a kobold's scales slowly change (over months) to match the colour of the dragon they serve. :)
This gave me the idea of having the peacock style cockatrice that can also unfurl its feathers and cast hypnotic pattern! I’m sure I’m not the first but damn that’s a cool idea
This is awesome! I am thinking about incorporating it into my previous idea of birds having a crystalline beak, could turn its foes into crystal when petrified! ^_^
This is truly great advice, because it gives real, actionable advice on how to be evocative of your game world. Too many GM advice shows talk about what would be best but they dont' say HOW to do those things. Keep it up, guys.
My favorite lore dump ive done so far is a cirque du solei style performance using flight, minor illusion, thaumaturgy, pyrotechnics, and color spray spells in an opera the players decided to watch to describe the final battle between the draconic armies of tiamat and bahamut over the world tree yggdrasil 700 years ago and the immediate aftermath of the battle.
This is a big part of the exploration pillar that not only doesn't get talked about much, but that most dms (myself included) always wanted but never new how to do. Thank you so much! I'll be using this advice for my DMs guild adventure.
Another technique is to add non solicited lore information, when someone makes a history/nature/knowledge check. You find a way to tell them something new about the world, that is related to the piece of information they were trying to recall
I was able to use Decent to Avernus as a level 0 funnel adventure as a lore dump for 12 players. I did this using 36 group skill checks while using the wolfheartfps narrative. The total of all 36 group skill checks equated to the xp the players started the campaign at. Now all the characters have a united backstory.
[18:00] "Monster are an awesome way to reveal the lore." And so easy too. Just give your players some monsters to fight. It will fill most of the session and if the players ask for more information, you can deliver.
Can I just say I miss Pruitt for those awesome intros. But hope he is mentally better since taking the break. Still watch the videos regularly and rewatch them
All in all it's much more interesting when players have to piece together THE LORE. Naming is a huge trick to use for this! Place names, castle names, also royal titles, NPC family names, and names of items such as swords, and magic wands and the like can go a long way towards allowing your players to piece together your lore. Also whenever a PC asks like, "The Bridge of Conan's Folly, what's that?" You the DM don't tell them, their character has to go ask an NPC...and that NPC will give an answer based on their perspective, not based on the actual facts.
I try to keep meta knowledge to a minimum and only divulge lore from the npcs' perspectives. Primarily only having access to anecdotal information makes a more interesting and varied setting and gives extra information to the players about the characters and locations without having to explain it
I always tell players during session 0 that I'm not going to dump lore unprovoked but that there is lots of lore available the I'm happy to dump if they ask. Very easy way of avoiding lore dumps that the players don't care about
I've had a lot of success role playing my players through character creation. Start with race and stats, then play them through their cultural origin. Then they level into a background, exploring wh at the world they play in feels like to live in. Finally they get their class and get to feel how they have power and can influence the world. It was especially fun when I did this as a multi generational game, where they played their family through three generations, except for the player who made an elf. Then in let them pick their family character, so therewas an elf, two young bloods, a 2nd generation character, and a half elf 1st generation character. It was awesome, and everybody felt like they understood the world they were in and helped write thehistory of their characters.
18:30 Well i get rid of that, players are far to tempted to metagame of they know loads about the monsters. For an example the momster manual has only metallic dragons shape changing. Well screw that.
As far as equipment goes, you can call a longsword a katana, but it's still a longsword. "Just pretend it's something different" is one of the biggest problems 5e has.
I mean...that’s been a thing since AT LEAST 3rd edition. In 3.5 a Katana is just a bastard sword 🤷♂️ and 3.5 has an entire Oriental Adventure campaign setting book to draw from too lol
I will confess that I once started a campaign with a 10-minute out-of-character history lecture. In my defense, everything I said was common knowledge about the history, demographics and economy of the city that the entire campaign was about. So it went like "the city is a port in this climate, its region was like this until colonialism 300 years ago, the indigenous population is partially but not fully assimilated, the city's economy revolves around this export which also gives it international strategic importance, and 10 years ago the government was taken over by this charismatic indigenous strongman, leaving the city with a fragile balance of power between this couple of factions." It wasn't elegant, but I think it might have been the right thing to do. Yeah, all of that could theoretically have been revealed through NPC interactions, but I think it was worth it to just get it on the table without any wasted time. Especially because the players didn't need to memorize every detail of the lecture - as long as they got the basic broad strokes of the setting, they'd be fine. Infodumps aren't fun, but they are efficient (time-wise), and sometimes a little pain in the set-up will make the rest of the game more fun. (The campaign in question turned out great, by the way, so at a minimum the infodump didn't ruin it.)
Honestly sometimes you just have to do it like that and lore dumps get a bad rep. Bad lore dumps are when you just throw the Silmarillion are your party, lot of fancy stuff and worldbuilding that ultimately doesn't affect the party or their current situation in any real meaningful way. There's an anime called Log Horizon which actually does have flat out lore dumps at the start or even in the beginning of the episode but it never feels like a slog to go through it, partially because its interesting but also because there's usually a quick pay off or you're having a more knowledgeable character explain something to a more clueless one.
If it's presented well and engaging then I'm all for stuff like that. Too often I get confused or struggle to come up for reasons for why my character does this or that because I wasn't informed about how the world or local region actually worked.
My nephew saw you guys on the screen, pointed at you and said "They're superheroes, I can tell.". When I asked him how he could, he said "Because I'm one too.". I couldn't disagree with him. Keep it up guys, you're an inspiration.
Ascribing factions to classes? What? 5e gets nowhere near specific enough outside very very few archetypes for that to even really be an idea. The class and archetype is what you're good at doing. You can describe that as basically anything. Even in something more robust like pathfinder with actual faction specific things being much more common, the same build for a swashbuckler could be some badass pirate captain or a top of the line duelist. Like I'm not a big 5e fan, but even I realize everything has a generic flavor for that purpose. I guess if the player is completely new to writing backstory it could help maybe.
Every WebDM I watch I need to rewind 10 times because I start applying things to my campaign as they are mentioned. So much good advice! You guys have truly made me a much better DM. Thank you for your amazing work.
Pruitt, may I remind you of a suggestion made by Charles Bronson? "In the Afterlive, everyone who has worked in or on a film must watch all the works again in their entirety." But it's nice to see, that Jim actually helps him compile these puns.
I write a world where starting out, you aren't allowed to know what is going on. history is held back by the ruling class. this gives me time to render whatever is important to players. I have another campaign world where i write too much. the first one is way more fun for me and the players.
This is a fantastic subject. My players don't engage much with my world but still say they love the seamlessness and themes of my world, so thanks for the tips!
The thing is if I am limiting races I need to be able to tell the players which races are in my world. Same with classes and subclasses. So what I did is I created a document with a small blurb on each class subclass, race and subrace. Saying things like "high elves could represent an elven noble or an elf from one of the magocracies on the east coast of the continent." Or "Dwarves and elves in their own kingdoms in this setting tend more towards druidic and bardic magic and less towards clerics and wizard"
I learned a long time ago that you can relay most overview information in 3-5 paragraphs. In my current campaign, I started with thirty or forty PAGES of background lore, but for me. The players got 3 or 4 paragraphs with information about where they were starting, a war being fought in the region twenty years ago, some VIP's, and that's pretty much it. For the first few levels of play, they had a bard NPC in the party who was their information source on more information about the general area. After that, they had a feel for my world, and as they found information I started sharing more and more of my background info on OneNote. - A secret they didn't know for nearly a year and a half is that the domains of the gods were something they shaped from my general one sentence lore like "GodName is the god of Nature" and they filled in all the details that became the religions.
Here's your #1 Advice: Watch anything beside anime. Their storytelling is Tell don't Show. If you're a lonely weeb you're being taught the worst possible way to tell stories.
This is surprising good advice, anime fans need to remember for most anime there's a lot of exposition because in manga it can be hard to tell what is going so they explain everything as it happens. This doesn't happen quite as much in anime that weren't based on manga so they, for instance evangelion or cowboy bebop.
Basically, less is more. It's hard to distill a book of lore into a single sentence, but I have found players are infinitely more engaged with a rumor like "a black rainbow was seen over the horizon" versus "THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO THE GREAT DEMIDRACOLICH DID A THING, AND NOW THAT THING IS ANOTHER THING!"
3:25 Nope I created a lexicon of sorts where I did a little this is what this clas and subclass could represent in this setting thing. I am not going to limit them to it of course but it gives them an idea. To use my example from earlier of they want to play a wizard from the eleven courts I'm not going to say no but they will likely be seen as eccentric by their fellow elves. The point is they don't have to read through it all they just look up the race subrace class subclass and background they are intrested in and read the blurbs there.
Lol too late for me. Luckily my players really enjoyed it and I'm glad they have a good idea of things anyone in the setting would probably know off the top of their head. Session 3 is this Sunday and I couldn't be more pumped! Thanks always, Jim and Pruitt, for being helpful and inspirational
I looove trinkets! I always have characters detail where and how they acquired them (I took it from a fallen foe at the first battle of the regions current civil conflict. It was given to me by my mentor Liu Chao as a cryptic symbol of my graduation. It was bequeathed to me by my Great Uncle Festoon.) It always makes for a great plot hook, when the players hear something about the stuff they invented - and helps ensure the world's features are things they'll enjoy.
TL;DR: I'm an advocate of pregame lore dumps, and expect players to know the world, and how their character fits into it. For a longtime my role-play itch was satisfied by playing role-play enforced Ultima Online free "shards". In order to play, you had to submit a character application which required a background, description, motivations, etc. These shards operated on donations and had staff that fulfilled different roles, with some serving as mappers, coders, asset artists, lore writers, and those running quests by playing NPCs. The websites were huge lore dumps that you needed to read in order to submit an application for a new character. It was necessary to ensure the character you were making actually fit into the world. I loved it. I feel that having a character that is built into the world is better than simply having a character built for the system. It has always seemed like the ultimate laziness to oppose understanding the world you're character is living in. The world is far more important than the PCs, as it dictates everything about the PCs. I got around this by the default mode of character generation in my system being random rolls on tables. Starts out with continent, then geographic region, then province, then locale, then village/city. Each time you roll, you flip to another "page" (I have a website I host on my at home gaming server, which is mostly used for Ark: Survival Evolved) for the next table, which also has a summary of that area, with hyperlinks to the full lore page. Random char generation solves a lot of issues, as long as you have players that are capable and willing to assume any role.
18:00 Oh but monsters are easy if I want them in my world I put them in my world and if I don't thrn I dont put them in my world. The worst thing that can happen is that someone's backstop may have their family killed by orcs instead of goblins.
I have a strange recurring encounter in the campaign I run. Every night of a full moon, a white owl is spotted by at least one character as it swoops down and nabs a small prey animal then flies out of sight. They have no idea what is going on with the owl and it is never seen on any night without a full moon. The funny thing is I don't know what the significance of the owl is. I'm actually waiting for a character to make a guess that sounds good to me.
One trick I like to use when explaining lore to my group is to point to players whose PCs would have that knowledge and attribute the little bit of exposition I'm about to deliver as, "[their PC] would know that [bit of lore]." It's really easy, and it involves the players more than just delivering a lecture. Players whose eyes might glaze over if you just dumped info on them, will sit up and take notice if you explain that it's _their_ character who knows some nugget of lore.
I had a new player on my (virtual) table yesterday and I couldn't stop thinking about this. I didn't want her to feel overwhelmed, but it was also important to explain the important bits of my world.
Look for chances to show the important bits. One example is Matt Colville's take on Dragonborn. In his world they are the special guards of the recently dead king. The Big Bad has a bounty on them because they are a reminder of what "was". Instead of explaining this Colville has wanted posters in taverns show a reward for information on the Dragonborn and has NPCs in unfriendly towns confront any PC Dragonborn to try to collect the bounty. You could explain this before you play, but it comes more naturally if you show it as you play.
Lately I've been jotting down ideas for an Eberron adventure with players who aren't very familiar with the setting and I actually spent last night brainstorming how to get the lore across without going overboard. It's kind of a delicate process to find the right balance of giving enough to get people into the world, but not lecturing them on the pretend history of a fantasy world.
I have a question for y’all that I think Jim would really enjoy. What do armies look like when they aren’t human. Specifically I have a game where there aren’t any humans. 10 foot Dragonborn and huge centaurs dot the land. Do you have any suggestions regarding their tactics. Is this a topic you’d be willing to delve into?
This is something we kinda talked about on our own podcast (DM ShowerThoughts): inferential Worldbuilding, and letting your Players explore the world for you. It’s cool to see some of the same ideas from a channel like WebDM!
I just went with Go Big or Go Home. Every game in my homebrew setting comes across the remains of a multi-dimensional hyper society. Sometimes it was the Axe of Thunderbolts. One time players were sent to ask a unicorn to come home, and they witnessed the last death of Arvandor before it teleported them back home and was killed by Maglubiyet’s Atropic Zombie form. Moradin’s Bane and Shadows of the Wall were both mini-campaigns that ran quick and ended super climactically with the reveal of Moradin’s and Tharizdun’s imprisonments. Oh yeah, and nobody’s seen any dragons since the apocalypse that killed or imprisoned most of the gods, and severely weakened the survivors. Well, except that a few players helped save a city from a Bronze Colossus that came hunting its creator, the steel dragon Severong. Severong then killed one faction of allies and thanked the rest for saving him, and the players were left with a lore reminder: the dragonborn oppose the return of dragons and gods, and were recently at war with the human Potion King who just turned into a steel dragon. (other players later stole from the Potion King’s granddaughter’s “Looming Vault,” where attack rugs grappled to cast trap spells, and the party stole the Lace of the Eternal Redoubt, which holds inside it a heist oneshot) And more recently, the world conquering Telqan arrived to chase the players down. The Four Winds failed to escape. Now, Telqan, supposedly the last Baatazu, surrounds the Four Winds with its Bloodpact horde of worgs, hobgoblins, and wereforms and many ogres and trolls and weretrolls. And Telqan wants the Four Winds to work for it, the Biggest Baddest Wolf, and perhaps accept the veinplate “power armors” it’s made out of Post-Blood War demon flesh (gotta rival treants and dwarven stoneplate somehow).
19:20 great protips when worldbuilding. Trolls in D&D do not steal children and replace them with changelings (from Norwegian folklore) but in my campaign I changed trolls to do that! The changeling is incredibly beautiful but has a cow's tail which they have disguise self spell as an innate spell (once per day) to hide it.
Why does half of this video amount to doing your players work for them? I have no idea why I as the DM would be telling them what their background means, or how they learned the class they have, or what their "trinket" is. Nevermind that none of this really even touches on presenting a world without lore dumps as much as it's "generic advice on how to flavor a world". None of this gets you any closer to conveying information about organizations, pantheons, histories or any of the actual things that require "lore dumps". So that I'm not just criticizing, lore should be given in tidbits and players making checks. Oh, that castle? Here's a brief description and a single weird thing about it's design. Get to the town nearby? Maybe a piece of myth or a historical fact gets revealed. Inside the castle? Find a weapon or a monster that ties into and expands the thing you learned in the town. Lore should be a trail of M&Ms, not a buffet that closes in 5 minutes.
My trick is not once saying a single written word from the module I'm running (excluding NPCs & Items) I read the old whole thing myself, then prep three possible paths I think my players will most likely take over and over until the campaign is done.. my players usually go for something unprepared regardless lol.
Not gonna lie, feeling a lot of DM nihilism these days. I guess you had an episode on DM burnout, but I just feel like there's no point in putting in effort because it won't be appreciated. There's so much advice on how to improve your game, but I feel like 5e culture just wants the power fantasy of trouncing a lobotomized sack of hit points, while expecting the DM to run the player's setting over their own.
I've watched several of your videos and the the thing that I come away with is confusion over why you can't experess yourselves with normal polite language. I don't get all the profanity. Why do you need to make roleplaying advice into NSFW content?
I've been informing my players pre campaign as to knowledge of general history or how certain things would work to their knowledge. We have a lot of dudes from very different places and they have cool backgrounds they've come up with. I've tailored things to their PCs. I let my elf blood hunter pick the name of the tribe he was from. I let my cleric pick the name of his deity and made it the primary religion of the province he hails from.
My players literally went into a bookstore to buy a book about politics and history of the city they were in... and then just wanted me to keep going on about the lore and wrote it all down with enthusiasm. That was such a great moment. But then again, i center my canpaign around them as players and have interwoven their backstories and make npcs they care about. I never explicitly say no, i use the yes, and or the no, but rule. I guess this approach makes them really want to be invested in the lore if it's not too much
Anyone else not get a care-package from their university? I feel like I paid tends of thousands of dollars in tuition, but I guess my Starter Kit got lost in the mail when I graduated...
yes break the meta. they don't know your class in world and for rp with your table. is you new religion leader truely divinely blessed or did they make a deal with something or is their religion new and they are doing odd things because its the commandments of their religion maybe even the patron.
just a thought, in keeping with the illusion that you're both in the same room, it may be helpful to place a ball on a tripod so that you guys can have a seemingly natural eyeline to each other. my 2c
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That intro lmao.
First try a game like Crimson Cutlass
Script based games give you the lore in little pieces as they push the story forward.
The "Show dont Tell" is my motto, but sometimes my players get really confused, so i have to explain some things out of the game.
Yep! Happens at the best of tables
Showing and Telling are not, in and of themselves, good or bad. They're tools in the storyteller's toolbox. What matters is how you use them, and under what circumstances or for what purpose they can be put. Showing something makes it more visceral, and gives the players the chance to think through the implications of what they're experiencing themselves (which can have an emotional weight that merely being told the answer does not).
But Telling is necessary, when the something being conveyed is abstract, convoluted, or otherwise outside the bounds of demonstration. (You generally wouldn't want to see the doomsday device in action to understand the threat, if your job is to make sure it never gets activated in the first place). Moreover, some things are so elementary to the setting that the players should know about it from the outset, without it needing to be shown. And then there's the matter of brevity; sometimes, you just don't have time to show the players something, and need to tell them.
Also, Telling has the same capacity for giving the players a chance to come to conclusions, based on what you tell them and what you elect to remain unstated.
Do be afraid if the show and then tell. I ran into too many players that act if not told then it was not shown.
@@Bluecho4 Since my actual campaing is a new thing to me (full player driven open world), i am afraid to put to many info, or to many plot hooks on something and my players come to think "Oh, so that is the main quest lets do that.". For the most of the time i keep trowing some stuff into the story, and use a method of emulating foresights with improvisation, similar to the narrative created by Eiichiro Oda in One Piece. So its important to not expose to much.
@@JoaoVictor-nu7sz I tried that but I failed a bit since my players felt they had no Idea what to do. Will try again tho.
Pruitt's dump puns were an absolute joy.
Jim's face the entire opener was priceless
Are you kidding?! They stink! ;)
I love the hags creating goblins thing. Reminded me of, in one of my settings, kobolds' must serve dragons. If there are kobolds there is a dragon neaby b/c they are compelled to find a dragon to serve. When their dragon dies they move to the next dragon. This often includes sprouting wings to fly to that dragon. Dragons on this world rule islands. And a kobold's scales slowly change (over months) to match the colour of the dragon they serve. :)
This gave me the idea of having the peacock style cockatrice that can also unfurl its feathers and cast hypnotic pattern! I’m sure I’m not the first but damn that’s a cool idea
Awesome
@@willmendoza8498 Sounds cocky!
This is awesome! I am thinking about incorporating it into my previous idea of birds having a crystalline beak, could turn its foes into crystal when petrified! ^_^
I love how this looks like 2 guys sitting right next to each other who never actually look at each other.
The wonders of zoom :P
This is truly great advice, because it gives real, actionable advice on how to be evocative of your game world. Too many GM advice shows talk about what would be best but they dont' say HOW to do those things. Keep it up, guys.
Thank you!
My favorite lore dump ive done so far is a cirque du solei style performance using flight, minor illusion, thaumaturgy, pyrotechnics, and color spray spells in an opera the players decided to watch to describe the final battle between the draconic armies of tiamat and bahamut over the world tree yggdrasil 700 years ago and the immediate aftermath of the battle.
This is a big part of the exploration pillar that not only doesn't get talked about much, but that most dms (myself included) always wanted but never new how to do. Thank you so much! I'll be using this advice for my DMs guild adventure.
Awesome!! Let us know how it goes!
Started the last arc of my game with a pretty big exposition dump, so glad for this video!
This is so helpful because I recently got a , idk i think it’s a 461 page third party setting book ( Midgard from kobald press)
As someone with books filled with lore, this is going to be so helpful, thank you!
Thanks Tyler! Enjoy the video.
I need to take better notes so I can be more consistent with my world building when I have to make stuff up
Every bathroom break is a campaign, thanks for being my lore dump while I waited for gravity's turn in the initiative order.
Finally an old school pun filled intro! U guys were slacking on the intros but this is a strong one! I kid u guys are a major inspiration!
Not the puns i was expecting, but definitely the ones I needed
The one time I tried to lore dump on players one of them rolled to see if they fell asleep. It was fair, I don't do that anymore lol.
This is a great topic thanks for the discussion! Intro hilarious as always.
Another technique is to add non solicited lore information, when someone makes a history/nature/knowledge check. You find a way to tell them something new about the world, that is related to the piece of information they were trying to recall
I was able to use Decent to Avernus as a level 0 funnel adventure as a lore dump for 12 players. I did this using 36 group skill checks while using the wolfheartfps narrative. The total of all 36 group skill checks equated to the xp the players started the campaign at. Now all the characters have a united backstory.
[18:00] "Monster are an awesome way to reveal the lore." And so easy too. Just give your players some monsters to fight. It will fill most of the session and if the players ask for more information, you can deliver.
I need this advice in my life!
A play by play of the day, 😆 The story of my life, that's all I have to say about that. And then i took a bath
Can I just say I miss Pruitt for those awesome intros. But hope he is mentally better since taking the break. Still watch the videos regularly and rewatch them
Yall gotta do a new episode on fighters/warriors and talk about berserk. RIP Miura!
All in all it's much more interesting when players have to piece together THE LORE. Naming is a huge trick to use for this! Place names, castle names, also royal titles, NPC family names, and names of items such as swords, and magic wands and the like can go a long way towards allowing your players to piece together your lore. Also whenever a PC asks like, "The Bridge of Conan's Folly, what's that?" You the DM don't tell them, their character has to go ask an NPC...and that NPC will give an answer based on their perspective, not based on the actual facts.
I try to keep meta knowledge to a minimum and only divulge lore from the npcs' perspectives. Primarily only having access to anecdotal information makes a more interesting and varied setting and gives extra information to the players about the characters and locations without having to explain it
Howdy folks! I don't know why the algorithm has returned you to me, but I'm here for it.
I always tell players during session 0 that I'm not going to dump lore unprovoked but that there is lots of lore available the I'm happy to dump if they ask. Very easy way of avoiding lore dumps that the players don't care about
How to DM without lore dumps: Just start playing the game, and allow the characters to ask questions about the world when they're curious.
NO QUESTIONS
This one is interesting. Queuing up for ride home!
Drive safe!
Y'all are awesome! Thanks and keep that shit up!!!
I badly needed this video
Thank you for giving us the poop on your topic in the intro. Are you in the privy council?
So... is Pruitt playing Legend of the Five Rings? ‘Cause I would love to see some L5R content on the channel
He is playing in an L5R campaign yes, and I too would love to see some more L5R content in general.
@@AGrumpyPanda for sure
I've had a lot of success role playing my players through character creation. Start with race and stats, then play them through their cultural origin. Then they level into a background, exploring wh at the world they play in feels like to live in. Finally they get their class and get to feel how they have power and can influence the world. It was especially fun when I did this as a multi generational game, where they played their family through three generations, except for the player who made an elf. Then in let them pick their family character, so therewas an elf, two young bloods, a 2nd generation character, and a half elf 1st generation character. It was awesome, and everybody felt like they understood the world they were in and helped write thehistory of their characters.
I like lore dumps...
🌈👍
Keep the big lore to your self but just drop little nuggets of flavour at random.
18:30 Well i get rid of that, players are far to tempted to metagame of they know loads about the monsters.
For an example the momster manual has only metallic dragons shape changing. Well screw that.
Wait what; Polymorph self has always been a feature of ALL True Dragons in d&d; did 5e get rid of that?
@@skelitonking117 Yes in 5e chromatics can no longer polymorph.
First one!
As far as equipment goes, you can call a longsword a katana, but it's still a longsword. "Just pretend it's something different" is one of the biggest problems 5e has.
I mean...that’s been a thing since AT LEAST 3rd edition. In 3.5 a Katana is just a bastard sword 🤷♂️ and 3.5 has an entire Oriental Adventure campaign setting book to draw from too lol
@@skelitonking117 I would *love* a 5e Oriental Adventures book
I think it would be appropriate to say that that intro was a bit...crap....get it?
Got it
first lol
Number two...
Lol, poop.
I wanted the end of that opening skit be Jim shaking his head and saying "sh**".
I will confess that I once started a campaign with a 10-minute out-of-character history lecture. In my defense, everything I said was common knowledge about the history, demographics and economy of the city that the entire campaign was about. So it went like "the city is a port in this climate, its region was like this until colonialism 300 years ago, the indigenous population is partially but not fully assimilated, the city's economy revolves around this export which also gives it international strategic importance, and 10 years ago the government was taken over by this charismatic indigenous strongman, leaving the city with a fragile balance of power between this couple of factions."
It wasn't elegant, but I think it might have been the right thing to do. Yeah, all of that could theoretically have been revealed through NPC interactions, but I think it was worth it to just get it on the table without any wasted time. Especially because the players didn't need to memorize every detail of the lecture - as long as they got the basic broad strokes of the setting, they'd be fine. Infodumps aren't fun, but they are efficient (time-wise), and sometimes a little pain in the set-up will make the rest of the game more fun. (The campaign in question turned out great, by the way, so at a minimum the infodump didn't ruin it.)
Honestly sometimes you just have to do it like that and lore dumps get a bad rep. Bad lore dumps are when you just throw the Silmarillion are your party, lot of fancy stuff and worldbuilding that ultimately doesn't affect the party or their current situation in any real meaningful way. There's an anime called Log Horizon which actually does have flat out lore dumps at the start or even in the beginning of the episode but it never feels like a slog to go through it, partially because its interesting but also because there's usually a quick pay off or you're having a more knowledgeable character explain something to a more clueless one.
If it's presented well and engaging then I'm all for stuff like that. Too often I get confused or struggle to come up for reasons for why my character does this or that because I wasn't informed about how the world or local region actually worked.
My nephew saw you guys on the screen, pointed at you and said "They're superheroes, I can tell.". When I asked him how he could, he said "Because I'm one too.". I couldn't disagree with him. Keep it up guys, you're an inspiration.
Omg
That is freaking adorable, man.
I can't argue with that. Flawless logic.
Ascribing factions to classes? What? 5e gets nowhere near specific enough outside very very few archetypes for that to even really be an idea. The class and archetype is what you're good at doing. You can describe that as basically anything. Even in something more robust like pathfinder with actual faction specific things being much more common, the same build for a swashbuckler could be some badass pirate captain or a top of the line duelist. Like I'm not a big 5e fan, but even I realize everything has a generic flavor for that purpose. I guess if the player is completely new to writing backstory it could help maybe.
Invite your players to have backstories that let you cooperatively build parts of the world together.
I was literally just brainstorming exactly this in preparation for a new game in a few months! WebDM to the rescue again!
Every WebDM I watch I need to rewind 10 times because I start applying things to my campaign as they are mentioned. So much good advice! You guys have truly made me a much better DM.
Thank you for your amazing work.
Glad I'm not the only one. XD
Pretty much every video they release I've got to stop like halfway through just so I can write down ideas.
I was actully just about to sit down and work on the exact subject of this vid.
Pruitt, may I remind you of a suggestion made by Charles Bronson? "In the Afterlive, everyone who has worked in or on a film must watch all the works again in their entirety."
But it's nice to see, that Jim actually helps him compile these puns.
I write a world where starting out, you aren't allowed to know what is going on. history is held back by the ruling class. this gives me time to render whatever is important to players. I have another campaign world where i write too much. the first one is way more fun for me and the players.
This is a fantastic subject. My players don't engage much with my world but still say they love the seamlessness and themes of my world, so thanks for the tips!
We had a 100% improvised filler session, and I used a lot of these tips in my to impart facts about my world as they explored a library! Thanks!
The thing is if I am limiting races I need to be able to tell the players which races are in my world. Same with classes and subclasses.
So what I did is I created a document with a small blurb on each class subclass, race and subrace. Saying things like "high elves could represent an elven noble or an elf from one of the magocracies on the east coast of the continent."
Or
"Dwarves and elves in their own kingdoms in this setting tend more towards druidic and bardic magic and less towards clerics and wizard"
God damn it, you made me laugh at a poop joke because of Jim's reaction. >:v!
How dare
*On the next episode of Dungeball* "Flying rodent, I choose you!" *....oh Emma* XD
Really appreciate the timestamps in the video length actually, super helpful to remember the info from the course of the video
I learned a long time ago that you can relay most overview information in 3-5 paragraphs.
In my current campaign, I started with thirty or forty PAGES of background lore, but for me.
The players got 3 or 4 paragraphs with information about where they were starting, a war being fought in the region twenty years ago, some VIP's, and that's pretty much it.
For the first few levels of play, they had a bard NPC in the party who was their information source on more information about the general area.
After that, they had a feel for my world, and as they found information I started sharing more and more of my background info on OneNote.
-
A secret they didn't know for nearly a year and a half is that the domains of the gods were something they shaped from my general one sentence lore like "GodName is the god of Nature" and they filled in all the details that became the religions.
Here's your #1 Advice: Watch anything beside anime. Their storytelling is Tell don't Show. If you're a lonely weeb you're being taught the worst possible way to tell stories.
This is surprising good advice, anime fans need to remember for most anime there's a lot of exposition because in manga it can be hard to tell what is going so they explain everything as it happens. This doesn't happen quite as much in anime that weren't based on manga so they, for instance evangelion or cowboy bebop.
Basically, less is more. It's hard to distill a book of lore into a single sentence, but I have found players are infinitely more engaged with a rumor like "a black rainbow was seen over the horizon" versus "THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO THE GREAT DEMIDRACOLICH DID A THING, AND NOW THAT THING IS ANOTHER THING!"
actually have dieties stand for something... I hate when a palidan or cleric picks a domain and the DM changes their gods beliefs to fit the player
Jesus, Mr. Pruitt's pun game just keeps getting stronger. You might even say IT'S OVER 9,000!!!
3:25 Nope I created a lexicon of sorts where I did a little this is what this clas and subclass could represent in this setting thing. I am not going to limit them to it of course but it gives them an idea. To use my example from earlier of they want to play a wizard from the eleven courts I'm not going to say no but they will likely be seen as eccentric by their fellow elves.
The point is they don't have to read through it all they just look up the race subrace class subclass and background they are intrested in and read the blurbs there.
Lol too late for me. Luckily my players really enjoyed it and I'm glad they have a good idea of things anyone in the setting would probably know off the top of their head. Session 3 is this Sunday and I couldn't be more pumped! Thanks always, Jim and Pruitt, for being helpful and inspirational
I looove trinkets! I always have characters detail where and how they acquired them (I took it from a fallen foe at the first battle of the regions current civil conflict. It was given to me by my mentor Liu Chao as a cryptic symbol of my graduation. It was bequeathed to me by my Great Uncle Festoon.) It always makes for a great plot hook, when the players hear something about the stuff they invented - and helps ensure the world's features are things they'll enjoy.
This is one of the best dnd videos I've seen.
Thank you my dudes 🐸
Thanks guys! Excellent video.
TL;DR: I'm an advocate of pregame lore dumps, and expect players to know the world, and how their character fits into it.
For a longtime my role-play itch was satisfied by playing role-play enforced Ultima Online free "shards". In order to play, you had to submit a character application which required a background, description, motivations, etc.
These shards operated on donations and had staff that fulfilled different roles, with some serving as mappers, coders, asset artists, lore writers, and those running quests by playing NPCs.
The websites were huge lore dumps that you needed to read in order to submit an application for a new character. It was necessary to ensure the character you were making actually fit into the world.
I loved it. I feel that having a character that is built into the world is better than simply having a character built for the system. It has always seemed like the ultimate laziness to oppose understanding the world you're character is living in. The world is far more important than the PCs, as it dictates everything about the PCs.
I got around this by the default mode of character generation in my system being random rolls on tables. Starts out with continent, then geographic region, then province, then locale, then village/city. Each time you roll, you flip to another "page" (I have a website I host on my at home gaming server, which is mostly used for Ark: Survival Evolved) for the next table, which also has a summary of that area, with hyperlinks to the full lore page.
Random char generation solves a lot of issues, as long as you have players that are capable and willing to assume any role.
18:00 Oh but monsters are easy if I want them in my world I put them in my world and if I don't thrn I dont put them in my world. The worst thing that can happen is that someone's backstop may have their family killed by orcs instead of goblins.
I have a strange recurring encounter in the campaign I run. Every night of a full moon, a white owl is spotted by at least one character as it swoops down and nabs a small prey animal then flies out of sight.
They have no idea what is going on with the owl and it is never seen on any night without a full moon. The funny thing is I don't know what the significance of the owl is. I'm actually waiting for a character to make a guess that sounds good to me.
One trick I like to use when explaining lore to my group is to point to players whose PCs would have that knowledge and attribute the little bit of exposition I'm about to deliver as, "[their PC] would know that [bit of lore]." It's really easy, and it involves the players more than just delivering a lecture. Players whose eyes might glaze over if you just dumped info on them, will sit up and take notice if you explain that it's _their_ character who knows some nugget of lore.
Currently working on my first Eberron campaign, this episode is super useful, thank you !
I had a new player on my (virtual) table yesterday and I couldn't stop thinking about this. I didn't want her to feel overwhelmed, but it was also important to explain the important bits of my world.
Look for chances to show the important bits. One example is Matt Colville's take on Dragonborn. In his world they are the special guards of the recently dead king. The Big Bad has a bounty on them because they are a reminder of what "was". Instead of explaining this Colville has wanted posters in taverns show a reward for information on the Dragonborn and has NPCs in unfriendly towns confront any PC Dragonborn to try to collect the bounty.
You could explain this before you play, but it comes more naturally if you show it as you play.
it feels like you could have an entire episode on just the backgrounds of 5e.. OH WAIT
"We'll have to cut this transition out"
They did not in fact; cut the transition out
That trinket bit was great.
Lately I've been jotting down ideas for an Eberron adventure with players who aren't very familiar with the setting and I actually spent last night brainstorming how to get the lore across without going overboard. It's kind of a delicate process to find the right balance of giving enough to get people into the world, but not lecturing them on the pretend history of a fantasy world.
Absolutely is an art that takes time to master!
Required reading,
I have a question for y’all that I think Jim would really enjoy. What do armies look like when they aren’t human. Specifically I have a game where there aren’t any humans. 10 foot Dragonborn and huge centaurs dot the land. Do you have any suggestions regarding their tactics.
Is this a topic you’d be willing to delve into?
This is something we kinda talked about on our own podcast (DM ShowerThoughts): inferential Worldbuilding, and letting your Players explore the world for you. It’s cool to see some of the same ideas from a channel like WebDM!
this audio tuning on Jim ever since they switched to the green screen set is so grating
God this makes me want to work on my homebrew setting
I just went with Go Big or Go Home. Every game in my homebrew setting comes across the remains of a multi-dimensional hyper society. Sometimes it was the Axe of Thunderbolts. One time players were sent to ask a unicorn to come home, and they witnessed the last death of Arvandor before it teleported them back home and was killed by Maglubiyet’s Atropic Zombie form.
Moradin’s Bane and Shadows of the Wall were both mini-campaigns that ran quick and ended super climactically with the reveal of Moradin’s and Tharizdun’s imprisonments. Oh yeah, and nobody’s seen any dragons since the apocalypse that killed or imprisoned most of the gods, and severely weakened the survivors. Well, except that a few players helped save a city from a Bronze Colossus that came hunting its creator, the steel dragon Severong. Severong then killed one faction of allies and thanked the rest for saving him, and the players were left with a lore reminder: the dragonborn oppose the return of dragons and gods, and were recently at war with the human Potion King who just turned into a steel dragon.
(other players later stole from the Potion King’s granddaughter’s “Looming Vault,” where attack rugs grappled to cast trap spells, and the party stole the Lace of the Eternal Redoubt, which holds inside it a heist oneshot)
And more recently, the world conquering Telqan arrived to chase the players down. The Four Winds failed to escape. Now, Telqan, supposedly the last Baatazu, surrounds the Four Winds with its Bloodpact horde of worgs, hobgoblins, and wereforms and many ogres and trolls and weretrolls. And Telqan wants the Four Winds to work for it, the Biggest Baddest Wolf, and perhaps accept the veinplate “power armors” it’s made out of Post-Blood War demon flesh (gotta rival treants and dwarven stoneplate somehow).
26:00 Nice but make it prime number groups.
A cool idea for none lore dump is players wake from cryogenic sleep and have to see new world
That is a good one! Jim and Emma are currently playing a game that started with a similar premise and it's been great
19:20 great protips when worldbuilding. Trolls in D&D do not steal children and replace them with changelings (from Norwegian folklore) but in my campaign I changed trolls to do that! The changeling is incredibly beautiful but has a cow's tail which they have disguise self spell as an innate spell (once per day) to hide it.
Why does half of this video amount to doing your players work for them? I have no idea why I as the DM would be telling them what their background means, or how they learned the class they have, or what their "trinket" is. Nevermind that none of this really even touches on presenting a world without lore dumps as much as it's "generic advice on how to flavor a world". None of this gets you any closer to conveying information about organizations, pantheons, histories or any of the actual things that require "lore dumps".
So that I'm not just criticizing, lore should be given in tidbits and players making checks. Oh, that castle? Here's a brief description and a single weird thing about it's design. Get to the town nearby? Maybe a piece of myth or a historical fact gets revealed. Inside the castle? Find a weapon or a monster that ties into and expands the thing you learned in the town. Lore should be a trail of M&Ms, not a buffet that closes in 5 minutes.
My trick is not once saying a single written word from the module I'm running (excluding NPCs & Items) I read the old whole thing myself, then prep three possible paths I think my players will most likely take over and over until the campaign is done.. my players usually go for something unprepared regardless lol.
Not gonna lie, feeling a lot of DM nihilism these days. I guess you had an episode on DM burnout, but I just feel like there's no point in putting in effort because it won't be appreciated. There's so much advice on how to improve your game, but I feel like 5e culture just wants the power fantasy of trouncing a lobotomized sack of hit points, while expecting the DM to run the player's setting over their own.
I've watched several of your videos and the the thing that I come away with is confusion over why you can't experess yourselves with normal polite language. I don't get all the profanity. Why do you need to make roleplaying advice into NSFW content?
I've been informing my players pre campaign as to knowledge of general history or how certain things would work to their knowledge. We have a lot of dudes from very different places and they have cool backgrounds they've come up with. I've tailored things to their PCs. I let my elf blood hunter pick the name of the tribe he was from. I let my cleric pick the name of his deity and made it the primary religion of the province he hails from.
What a shitty intro.
My players literally went into a bookstore to buy a book about politics and history of the city they were in... and then just wanted me to keep going on about the lore and wrote it all down with enthusiasm. That was such a great moment. But then again, i center my canpaign around them as players and have interwoven their backstories and make npcs they care about. I never explicitly say no, i use the yes, and or the no, but rule. I guess this approach makes them really want to be invested in the lore if it's not too much
Anyone else not get a care-package from their university? I feel like I paid tends of thousands of dollars in tuition, but I guess my Starter Kit got lost in the mail when I graduated...
Players like factions and are interested in their lore. People will listen to an NPC's background of they are rewarding or aiding them.
In 1000 years Jim will start to make more videos and we'll learn he is actually an ancient dragon...legend goes.
yes break the meta. they don't know your class in world and for rp with your table. is you new religion leader truely divinely blessed or did they make a deal with something or is their religion new and they are doing odd things because its the commandments of their religion maybe even the patron.
just a thought, in keeping with the illusion that you're both in the same room, it may be helpful to place a ball on a tripod so that you guys can have a seemingly natural eyeline to each other. my 2c
Is Pruitt playing in a Hidden Fortress style campaign? That would be rad