Links to References in the Video: Don't Prep Plots (The Alexandrian): tinyurl.com/59byxvkm Mausritter PDF Itch.io (Pay What You Want): tinyurl.com/mr3becmh Mausritter PDF DriveThruRPG (Pay What You Want): tinyurl.com/cvx54xtx Mausritter Box Set Exalted Funeral: tinyurl.com/3u3a4u9v Worlds Without Number FREE PDF: tinyurl.com/43nxtwna Worlds Without Number Deluxe PDF/Print: tinyurl.com/4rye49jw Halls of the Blood King (Print): tinyurl.com/2pxvwamx Halls of the Blood King (PDF): tinyurl.com/5xhpjryr Dungeon World (PDF): tinyurl.com/2s45urur
Man, i'm about to start my own campaign in two weeks. And the premise of this video literally saved me from being burnt out before starting. I was planning a long story to fight invading goblings on the frontier with themes of corruption and war mongering behind the scenes and was already getting frustrated with shit that my players probably wouldn't ever find or interact with. On top of the fact that i have almost no experience as a DM and don't know how to run exploration, long travels, supplies gathering, time events, etc etc. It was doomed. So i'm literally ditching all that, and instead i'll approach it similar to FInal Fantasy Tactics Advance. I'll make my players the founders of an adventurer's guild, i'll give them some quests to choose from each time they're on downtime, and we'll run whatever they chose for some sessions. Rinse and repeat. Somewhat sandboxy, with videogame-esque features, for my pcs to get familiar with the system (they're all new), and for me to try out rules and different ways to do stuff. And when the time comes, i might send them into a small quest with an overarching plot. But not now. TL:DR: I wasn't up to the challenge i was about to put myself into and your video saved my campaign from being born dead, so thank you very much for your insight :)
The author of the article on the Alexandrian said his opening and title on 'no plot', was 'tongue in cheek', in his own essay. And openly states that the things DM's plan is "usually a lot more awesome than when PC's chart their own course". And in his own article, he describes railroading a plot. Then he describes uses exactly the same scenario, and just removes the railroading. There is definitely a NARRATIVE, it's just not a scripted narrative. You're misrepresenting this article. He says "A plot is the sequence of events in a story." What he's saying in this article is not to SCRIPT the outcomes, not to not prepare a story.
@@Zelrin04 bruh. What you were PLANNING sounds amazing. A pointless world of random quests sounds awful. D&D is narratively driven, not narratively documented. The story is what drives your players forward, motivates and inspires them. What's their motivation with a bunch of random adventure hunts? There is no purpose to their existence. Yeah, the giant world story sounds like a lot of work to plan, because it is! It's sad to me that this video caused people who were creating amazing campaigns to just give up, mid-struggle and claim that this terrible advice 'saved them'. What you were planning before sounds amazing. I hope you go back to it instead of bookending random adventures without purposes or cohesion.
@@neepers Yes, of course. Is not that this is terrible advice in itself. Is just that is like a starting point. Is not like i just won't ever run grand scale adventures. Is just that I'm still green. Thanks for the compliments, tho :)
I have been a GM for almost fifty years now and I've developed a system that works for me. Start off with a session zero. Let your players know what you expect to come out of the session zero beforehand. On the day of the session zero, find out what kind of adventures your players want. How did they meet/why do they want to adventure with each other? What are their individual motivations to adventure? What does everyone want to play and how well will that work (don't try and change their minds). What level does everyone want to start at? You now have the bare bones to prepare the initial rumors/problems that they can choose from. Provide them with 3-5 situations that need dealing with and let them decide what they want to do. There might be a job to escort a merchant to his next destination. A criminal has escaped and there is a reward for his capture. You overhear a drunken teamster talking about the heavy chests he just delivered. Rats have been attacking residents and there is a 1 GP per tail bounty. A caravan is forming up to go to the next kingdom and can use more guards. The beautiful thing with this is that some of the hooks will go away by the time that the party finishes the one they chose, another party could have done it. Some of them could have gotten worse, the rats are getting bolder and have snatched a baby from a crib. There will always be new ones and some old ones the seemed to have gone away may resurface later as an even bigger problem (the haunting of the cemetery calmed down, only to turn into a plague of ghouls three months later). Most adventures will follow standard tropes, so you can improvise them with ease. Don't forget to throw in a curveball or two so that there is some spice in the stew, something they didn't expect (the merchant's apprentice running off with some gold, a sick child in a village they are passing through, an unwilling bride that has been promised to a bad man, etc, etc). I have been able to keep my adventurers on their toes for adventure after adventure by doing this. If they want a more focused campaign, give it to them. The Lord's seneschal may need trouble shooters. The local Thieves guide (with a heart of gold) needs help fending off rivals. A merchant captain may need their help to explore a new land he has found.
I love emergent storytelling, is the perfect way to narrate a world in which the players and the GM contribute almost the same to the worldbuilding, and also a great way to promote player agency in a pretty much plot-forced landscape.
I have always preferred the emergent storytelling in a sandbox style game. I usually start with a detailed city, that has a lot of detailed NPCs and things happening that the players can interact with. Ultimately I want the party to feel like they have a "home base" to go back to once they start adventuring. I will have some possible storylines that may take them out of the city for short periods of time if they choose to follow and one or two major world affecting events that will begin to unfold even if the players do not make choices to go in that direction. The campaign I am currently running is the first time I used a list of rumors that the players have all heard before the game started, with a few of them being ones that will be revealed as true during the unfolding of a few events as the story unfolds. I have always been lucky and had a couple of very proactive players that are always looking for something for their characters to do, so it is easy for me to put those hooks in front of them. It may take a year for them to eventually interact with the main world affecting events, but I want the pace of the game to be determined by the actions of the players. I only use hard timelines in games that are meant to have a set ending and/or are only going to last a handful of sessions.
I appreciate that you're not saying don't prep. I mostly prep situations and moments I know are coming. Most of my prep is unknown backstory and paying off threads from the backstory and paying off threads the game set up.
Ran a campaign for decades with my kids and their friends. As the grew up, the game matured as well. Created a world with more than one storyline, and LOTS of random encounters. Using random encounters also keeps the players attention on the game.
Really great video. One of the rarer kind that, while echoing principles that exist in many other videos, offers a solid alternative angle from which to view and think about them. Emergent storytelling is a term I've heard used rarely, if ever, in other videos about sandbox games. They discuss it in various other forms, but you do a great job of really outlining how that comes together and what kind of storytelling that really is. And I can say that because you've helped me unlock the mental tangle I have over a couple areas of my approach. Thank you!
Yes! Yes! Yes! Thethan’s D&D manifesto Rule 2: Save your epic story for the book Rule 3: Your players are not an audience Rule 4: let the players take the reins, and their characters will write the story This needs to be spread more. Player agency is what’s really important at the D&D table. The “story” is what happens afterwards when the players talk about the D&D campaign later. They’re not really interested in whatever story the Dm has in mind, instead they want to be able to interact and affect the world. The game should be filled with actionable situations which the players can interact with and change.
Absolutely right! Give me a blank hex map, and any dungeon map that's large enough, and I'll give you a story that was based on nothing but the random encounters, the choices of the PCs, and the result of the dice, that you'd swear I had planned from the start because everything tied in together to tell a central plot, that also has sub-stories.
"Fronts" are essentially how I ran Dragon Heist. So many people recommend dropping Chapter 2 because it doesn't advance the plot, but that's exactly why I kept it. I expanded the faction quests and let the players decide which factions to ally with and which ones to investigate. Though I chose summer as the season, the players showed much greater interest in pursuing the Zhentarim and Xanathar's Guild. I ended up dropping Jaraxle entirely because keeping up with four enemy groups would become confusing. While they loved some of the cultist quests, they didn't follow up on them much, and I didn't want the cult to become a main villain that sprung up out of seemingly nowhere. I let the players choose their enemies, and their actions decided which ones gained and lost power. In the end, they took extra steps to sabatoge the activities of the Zhentarim "splinter faction" (as they believed it to be), and because they chose to keep one of Xanathar's gazers as a pet, Nihiloor ambushed them at the Vault of Dragons instead of the villain I had at one point imagined. I ended the entire adventure at the Trollskull Tavern's Grand Opening, with all of the most memorable NPC's they befriended showing up for a celebration at the end, and Laerel herself showed up to thank them for retrieving the gold for the city.
Its almost like writing a choose your own adventure that accounts for every choice is very hard. Only a few video games have done it successfully. I write the next session based on the choices within the last session and then try to also include as many decision paths as i can and try to predict the actions of the characters and account for those.
Great video. I've been DM'ing since I was 9 years old, with a long hiatus between 20 and 37, and I've only recently realized that this is the best way to DM. Now, at my 40s I've DMed the most memorable campaigns of my life because I've turned to giving the players an initial conflict or two that they will decide how to interact with. According to those interactions I prep session to session. I do a lot of work creating the NPCs, especially, because their interaction with NPCs is what will create the story. I usually DM real world historical settings with no monsters or (obvious) magic. Right now DMing the Great Pendragon Campaign, but starting much earlier, when Romans leave Britain. PCs ended up feuding each other, so the story is revolving around their rivalries. So much fun.
This is what I've been doing, I recently felt the need to lean more towards the adventure path style due to some tip videos I watched lately. This video was great for reminding me that I don't actually need to do that, and my way (incidentally similar to your way) works as well
This is pretty much how I’ve always run games (in a multitude of systems, for many decades), and it works great. Only the term is new for me, so it’s nice to have a definition to help explain what I’m doing to new players. Thanks! 🎉
Dude, can't agree more. I've been wanting to DM a sandbox campaing for quit a while, had the opportunity to pause the ongoing ToA campaign for some sessions and we played a sandbox game using Shadowdark. I had a blast from the start, the players got the spirit of it after the second session and it was awesome. Since then, once I wrap up the ongoing ToA campaign, I'll take a loooong break from 5e and those linear style long games. I'll run a sandbox campaing on Dolmenwood, which have me super hyped to start.
You basically described what I try to achieve. It originally started as something of a hybrid, I wanted the players to have a single storyline that was "the" storyline. But I realized that players go off the rails with impunity. So I wanted there to be other things going on that they could engage with, other things happening that would happen whether they engaged or not, and other plotlines for them to pursue. It helped the world feel alive when they noticed hints of some "side quest" and then saw later hints and realized that things had developed. I've never had as much fun as I have running these games where the world exists, the characters exist in it, and we write stories there together. It can be a LOT more work than a non-emergent setting, IMO. You have to know the world, the characters, the things that are happening, and you have to move them forward as the game progresses. However, the end result is that I spend an immense amount of time preparing my world, and less worrying about cultivating storylines specifically intended for players to engage with. After all, they end up engaging with them anyway, now don't they? And if they don't... well... That's one more kind of story too.
Well said! I find that I do a lot of front load prep for my sandboxes, but as the game sessions flow its way less prep work. They tell me what they want to do next session and I check my notes for that area and build anything out that's missing. They can also return to places they've already been, but you've restocked it and its something new this time.
Man you resqued me. I just started to adding some new factions (as my players entered the new dungeon) and I had some troubles to make them feel real. Thank you very much!😁
My advice for those unsure about running a game. 1. Nothing in your world is static. Everything can be moved to where it is needed. 2. Draw out the map as the players progress. This is typically how West March Campaigns are done. 3. Collaborate story telling. Get your players involved. 4. Be clear and communicate with one another. Boundaries should be discussed and if none come up, the game doesn't go forward. This is important so a session doesn't come to an abrupt halt do to some line being crossed that shouldn't have been. The third and fourth ones will be the more daunting because, and I'll catch flak, a lot of players are lazy and don't even bring a bare minimum of anything to the table. This is a game that requires communication, if you barely can have a conversation, how are you going to play?
Ive been constantly running games for the last 5-8 years like this. I dont have the brain cells to write consistent stories, I run Rule of Cool, and let the players place their print on the story.
This was always my approach when running a game or campaign. It's not my story, it's theirs. I'm just there to help them interact with the game world. The choices, consequences and directions are entirely up to them. Granted, this was mostly in the days of AD&D, which seems to be better suited to a more free-form approach to running a game, but I'm just old school...
I run a no plot dungeon delve based on OSE style with 5e rules. It was the best decision I have made to create a long term sustainable dnd group where I wasn’t overly burdened as the dm.
I use sandbox style. All of us at the table sit down and talk about what they want to play. I’m lucky enough to have a very well developed home brew world to play in with caravan routes, political intrigue that already exists, and things like that. I’ve had a few “plotted” campaigns go completely off the rails and turned into “look, we just want a damn job and we will do anything within reason” type of road adventure where the group started off as caravan guards and eventually became traders running their own caravan to different places. The adventures dealt with regional politics, random encounters that lead to cleaning up some hostile areas, and role playing transactions as they try to become rich. Fun times. The players are the story tellers, as the DM I’m the referee and do the injects to see what sticks and takes the table on the trip. Some things will be random, others planned out in advance.
I make a kingdom, with a not entirely evil royal family, natural corruption means it's worth being a bandit or a thieves guild, danger of the goblin overpopulation and attacking the kingdom. (Without making the goblin to be evil due to some "magic" nature) The players can fight the not entirely evil royal family to make the world a better place for everyone, but run into the problem of the goblins killing everyone. They can fight the city "mafia" and instead the vampire mob moves in to take over or they could just try to find ways to give the poor better work, by making some kind of trade empire. All that and you still have the option of the PC's starting a cult and use human/goblin sacrifices by taking over various groups. You do need to have a world ready where adventurers is designed into the world, kinda hard taking our real world and add adventurers on top of it, as there is no mechanics to support it and instead you get the silliness of all "heroes" being super rich, but if you instead making a world that is ALIVE without adventurers doing anything, the world will keep being alive when the adventurers exist and their choices become endless.
Love this video, I was planning on having a war actively going on with the concept of, the war is guaranteed to be a win but it’s going to take a very long time as the empire (main government body) is doing its best to lessen casualties on the orc’s side as they have had many wars and do not wish to be blamed for the countless deaths of a race once again. So obviously this is going to take time, however the players can step up and help if they so choose through any way they wish, assassinate orc tribe leaders, join the war front, or simply protect cities from orc raids. Raids on cities will happen naturally and more than likely when they are inside them, they could run away or stay and fight reducing the intended casualties that the orcs wanted, raising the resources and man power the cities have. I would probably have a sort of point system to keep track of their deeds, defending a city gives 1 tick or half a tick and 1 tick = 1 less year on the war. Killing an orc camp leader would probably be 15 ticks. I intend the war to last 350 years and this is a world in which, if the players get wiped, time skips ahead a little and they can either play their kids, or a random. Once the war ends a new continent will open up and they will get a choice between which continent I make next. To any readers I would love any ideas or feedback as I have yet to actually make this campaign (just started about 2-3 weeks ago) and am still in the works of making certain aspects of it. It is currently an open world campaign and will switch to a linear story once they traverse to another continent. 1) They visit the “continent of the enemies” in which they have to either 1) find a way to convince their leaders to open up boarders and make peace 2) find a way to make a weak spot within their naval defenses so another war can happen and 3) a mix of both (although idk how that would work yet) Another continent is the under dark which would probably have them dealing with the monstrously overpowered race I made for that area as well as underground monsters And finally the continent which they came from which is where the empire lies, this would take me the longest to make because I would need lore and history for the continent as well as this would take a more political focus with the world in which they uncover many secrets and shady dealings of the coalition of the races, their government body.
I played a game like this at GaryCon. The DM was late, but he showed up and we started playing. He had a basic plot based on a module and just made it all up the entire game, and it worked quite well. Clearly he had all the rules in his head and there was no set dungeon or anything. We all had fun and had a lot of laughs!
UA-cam recommended this video to me this morning and two people I trust both recommended it; all three within 20 minutes. I agree with all of your points, even if it has taken me 6 hours to get enough free time to finish this video...
You're totally right. Players are looking to tell the story. When they have ideas and change the world, they are creating plot. It will naturally grow in scale as the next logical step (idea) comes up. DMs only really need to be willing to ask them questions and pose situations. The players do the heavy lifting and feel rewarded for it the whole way. They often get the sense of "being smart" because thier ideas made impacts on the world.
I really liked this one. For the last few years I've rarely had anything planned beyond the next session or two. Often the players tell me what they want to do next through there characters. Now, that's not 100%. Sometimes I have to place some deep hooks to get them moving, but I enjoy running something THEY want more. Great video and you earned a sub.
There's a third option, which is to use both (loosely) scripted and emergent storytelling. I feel that that can give the most realistic world... I run a sandbox campaign and make heavy use of emergent storytelling. Towards the end of each arc, I prepare some ideas for quests, but that's all they are - ideas or prompts for the players. Take one, or choose something different. I still have an overarching plot in the campaign. That plot doesn't force the direction of the story, but it does inform it and I keep it in mind as the emergent story unfolds. I feel that having things occur within the world regardless of the adventiring party's involvement (e.g. things that happen on a timer) is key to making the world feel like it's living and breathing, and overarching plot(s) can help inform the kinds of things that may happen on a timer or otherwise that add flavor and life to the world. My overarching story point is that the settlement that is the focus of the campaign will eventually be attacked. Knowing this, I always jave it in mind to present quest and downtime options to my players that can help my party strengthen the settlement itself (it's very small, e.g. by training the guards), or gain potential allies for the settlement. Great video, keep it up!
Excellent video! I specially liked that you took examples out of an OSR game (OSE) and a PbtA game (DW). I have always felt that OSR/PbtA are two sides of the same coin when it comes to emergent gameplay.
I have such a better time when I plan locations, and let the story unfold. I generally plan loot, a few encounters and traps, and some scenic areas to set the mood.
I totally agree with you. I tend to use other peoples modules as main adventures in my D&D world and I like to have what happens there, in the module, determine what happens going forward. They rescue the merchant and his wife In the Hobgoblin lair at the Caves of Chaos and he rewards them but also gives them a chance for a new mission. Maybe caravans are getting raided and he wants someone to investigate. Or he's got a cargo to go to restenford that he needs guards for, and they need to catch a boat in Salt Marsh. Or in the caves they had a loyal retainer who goes home to Orleans after the caves and the group goes to Pick them up on the way to their next adventure and low and behold his mom says he's disappeared and there is something weird happening to the townspeople. Or we have the merchants daughter captured by bandits and the party is engaged as a known trusted quantity to retrieve her. I use surviving villains and found characters as the drivers for what happens next. I have an idea that there are Lizard Men or Elves that may be involved with an elder god and interested in breaking up my loosely affiliated ecumenical country that my PC's are from. But I'm trying to have what they do create the story line. I use a random tailored encounter table for travel which works the same way your random encounters seem to. There are marshall's offices and post offices which are the federal authorities in my loosely amalgamated Country. There is a ten most wanted poster in all of these offices that tends to morph a bit as they move from region to region. Yeah I'm not trying to write a novel. I'm trying to plan interesting encounters.
Funny how easily it all goes off the rails anyway. I’m doing Hoard of the Dragon Queen with my group. Introduced the Dragon Masks a little early and now they are trying to hunt down the remaining masks instead of following the plot line in the book. I am going to have to make it up as I go but it’s what they want to do. Which honestly seems more fun than what is in the book anyway.
I would... Probably say that on a campaign that I'm currently dm'ing, I've been experiencing a sort of sandbox campaign style, although I wouldn't say it's an entirely true emergent story campaign. Like, since the beginning, there was a very clearcut goal, that was literally the name of the campaign: Slay the Beast of Oaksfell. Now, all of the campaign has been surrounding the idea of the characters exploring the maps and picking up weapons, pieces of information and lore to puzzle out what the beast really was, and how to categorically slay it, since... Well, it's basically more then just a monster, but an intelligent creature protecting a region from something else. I never said them how they should conduct their investigations, though. Or where to find information. They just kept asking npc's, and I kept spilling information, and linking to places of interest in my map, that I had decided previously that I would use. So far, it has been pretty interesting the campaign, partially because while there is the clear conflict with the beast, there is also the conflict of the characters navigating through a world that both is very alien to them (in the sense that none of them is from that region, and many customs and stories are just odd to them and they have to figure out if they are suspicious behaviour or just general oddities), and also full of places of interest that they are really curious to explore. And I mean... They haven't even figured out that their benefactor is vampire in disguise, playing his cards and securing his own interests. Not that he's particularly evil, just not the most altruistic one in all the world.
I so far have used published modules/adventures, but I increasily try include elements of verisimilitude that the emergent style provokes. It feels more fulfilling for me, although I am not sure my players care or notice. Your premise about it reducing stress for the DM? Not so sure about that; maybe I just need to get better. You earned my subscription with this video. I hope you will follow up with more on this topic.
Subscribing and hoping to see more like this! This is how I've been wanting to run my games, but it feels like little "official" material is aimed in this direction.
Yeah its certainly the case with WoTC's products if your running 5e. A lot of great indie/OSR stuff presents open ended adventures/sandboxes for use. Cheers!
Your advice is spot on. It’s something I had to relearn myself because I couldn’t put my finger on why something that I used to be able to riff so well felt so awkward and stilted with 5e. It’s because of the shoehorning of the story path versus the situational encounters. Enemies need motivations and desires which can be expressed by what and how they do the things they do rather than following a “because the script say so” mentality of adventure design. It creates a cause and effect when it’s situational adventuring, which maintains the verisimilitude and immersion 1000% better than $50 lore dump books with A then B then C next D encounters sprinkled throughout. Kudos to you for the succinct advice. Speaking of: You should get a teleprompter. Help you connect your advice with the audience when you don’t have to break eye contact so much. It’s like when DMing from boxed text. It engages your players more when you can just tell them what their characters see via bullet points rather than read it to them.
I began this campaign March 2020. I had vague ideas but they have yet to materialize. We are still going at it and new ideas spawn new content following the paths the players choose. I did not imagine having reached what we have done.
my first gm experience literally Just dice rolls and random enemy stats in my head no rule book just drinking and coming up with stuff on the fly. I love writing however I feel you make a world up for a week or two or however long then just dive in and make things spring up in that stuff you wrote about its much more fun that way for me.
my game is a loose sandbox / story line. I love prepping and creating encounters and dungeons, but i dont force players to follow a specific path. I do inject a snippet of story as we go along by finding specific treasures or story related items that hint towards something of a story line. As well some NPCs will have some hints of the story line either by the way they interact or something they are wearing or an item or something like that. The game play flows based on where the players go. If they pick up on some of the story hints then i will increase those things or offer a story line hook to see if they are interested. If not we keep running based on their game play.
That's a nice way of doing it. You can definitely have deeper situations going on and if the players bite, then great. If not, you can either set it aside or keep it brewing in the background till they might see more of it down the line.
I like the situations model. I haven't played or DMed in years but I have thought about it. I do some fiction writing and and have been developing a fantasy world through short stories. I want to do old school, in person gaming. Good video, you've given me some ideas to work on.
I naturally came to this conclusion very early on when I first started playing when 3.5 was out. The players do all the work for you anyway and they always do what they want to do either way. Practice improv and you will be better than 99% of DMs.
i remember being 14 and 5e just came out, so me and my buddies would just run campaigns where you start in a tavern and the rest is improv. aaaaah, the good ol days 😭
I prep two things. Past events that shape the present. NPCs of any kind, person, monsters, town, organization, and I give them motivations, means, objectives and code of conduct. That and the PCs eventually create a story.
You mentioned Dungeon World. One of the key agenda items for a GM outlined in that game, and which has become a mantra for me as a GM is: "Play to find out what happens."
I started running AD&D 2e recently and have been running a campaign thats almost fully improv other than the design of the world. It's gone from the group getting kidnapped by hobgoblins and forced to be shock troops, barely surviving from day to day, to them buying a house of their own and starting to fight against a cannibalistic archdevil cult that I didn't even know would exist when I started the campaign
Fronts are an Apocalypse World thing. They are roughly threats like fractions, scarcity, disasters outside the PCs power base trying to knock their stuff down. A giant Mad Max dust and glass storm could be one.
As a professional BSer who despises structure, I have found that the best way for me to build a story is to have a one sentence descriptor for a beginning, middle, and end of an arc. Everything else is either pulled out of thin air or brought into play by the players
I have really been wanting to try out an anti-campaign. A multi-session game that does everything in its power to refuse having an overarching story. So no major villains, no grander factions, none of that. Just a random "pointless" adventure every week or two.
Love this. Have you ever tried "converting" a linear D&D campaign into an emergent one? I'd love to know if this is feasible, given that I love the worlds, characters, NPC motivations etc. of a lot of the WotC modules.
The algorithm brought me to this video and I just wanted to say that your advice and the structure of your video is of a really high quality. I hope your channel grows :)
The Art in the Blood King is possibly some of my favorite art from any ttrpg. Also, the way you describe your process is basically how I was forced to run something like Curse of Strahd - it required me to give up on having control in a story sense. Players can basically start anywhere, see Strahd as much or as little as you want, do most things in any order (except for one area which is TPK even at high levels). The guidance you give here is golden. Once you get off the ground and have some feedback in terms of player choices - it becomes natural thinking about how things are moving in the background, and how the story CAN unfold. Look at open threads, or fronts, and determine if anything has changed because of action or inaction. then think about possible future actions players may take. I created a lot of if/then's for the open threads/fronts - if they do this, then this can happen, which gives you a prompt for how to proceed if they go off the beaten path. If they don't go back to town to help, their NPC friend dies. If they go to this location, then they meet Bart and he knows 'x' information if they help him solve 'x' problem. By the middle of the campaign I understood the locations well enough, and had made connections in my head where my prep became very minimal, because you basically know the characters in the background, the triggers - and while you don't know the order of things, you do have ideas of what can happen given certain choices. But I deviated immensely from the source material, because I simply had to, creating new threads and changing character motivations as I went to adapt to what was needed. How you think greatly effects both the amount of work required and the amount of fun you have at the table. If you can understand plots through the lens of movement, motivation and reaction - in reference to the players - you can basically improvise the story as you move along. It takes practice, but this is a great video to demonstrate simple but elegant adventure philosophy. Very inspiring :)
I like both approaches. I'm not a fan of having a completely open sandbox because it's too freeform and barely feels like a cohesive story, but an adventure path can feel too "on rails". I do, however, feel that all campaigns should have a theme and scope so the players know what is expected of their characters and have some idea of what might be going on. I prefer a hybrid, what I call "Playground" (as opposed to sandbox) where you can and should give the player's whatever the adventure hook of the session is and let them go at it, but not all those adventures need to be linked together. Some might lead from one to another (e.g. the bronze disc the PCs recovered in the old catacombs is a relic for an evil cult, which prompts the cult to go after them) but most should be in the vein of "picaresque" novels or (my inspiration) the Conan stories/1970s comics where it's perfectly okay to tell the players that they've traveled to the west to a different land before presenting them with the hook. Too many players, i think, conflate "here's the adventure hook for tonight's session" with railroading, when that's not at all the same thing. But I also feel that you can have things organically develop via encounters. For example the PCs might just be traveling on the road and meet a merchant who, after a conversation, offers to pay them a few gold each to escort him to the next town over. From there, you could have some random encounters that seed plot hooks for later (perhaps some bandits attack the merchant because he's carrying a special item or owes the thieve's guild), or simply a minor combat with some wolves. that sort of thing
interesting idea. DM burnout is real. been their myself. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and BingChat Copilot has emerged as an invaluable resource for my DMing prep. The style of DMing/Emergent Storytelling is valid. Im an experienced DM and im always looking for ways to improve as a DM. You talking about maximum player agency which is probably different to the way we first started playing D&D. I like to use modular encounters and insert them into the session as they are needed. Save the ones they dont get to and use them in a later session. i use recurring NPC villains and homebrew my own sandbox game based in an off-the-shelf purchased setting that has maps, NPCs and a history. From this starting point I have homebrewed my own 'story'. The players drive the story and decide which story hooks to explore. Listen to your players and include encounters that link to their backgrounds. My NPCs have motivations and goals also, this gives the game continuity and improves immersion for your players.
I like to read the official adventures, then run them entirely from memory. So stuff like, "have them make a DC 17 save," pfft, skim over it, not gunna remember it. But the overall story high points are easy enough to remember, let the rest be emergent.
I'm an accidental genius. I'm currently running my first ever campaign as a DM, and I let the players know in their Session 0 that I planned to make it an episodic campaign, bunch of smaller narratives and stories, all eventually connected to a big bad. Thank you, Scooby-Doo campaign.
I guess it helps that i've built an enormous world with dozens of factions, planes of existence, and wild areas. This type of spontaneous story telling is perfect for me.
I'm not a DM (now I am) but I am a writer. I have an overarching narrative where major events happen regardless of what happens with the characters. I understand the sentiment of videos like this but executed right an overarching narrative can be very exciting.
Every good story requires a MacGuffin. It can be as simple as "Destroy this ring in the volcano or the world will end." DMs need to give players motivations.
Prep can vary a lot based on what the players want to do next and the style of your sandbox (say they want to do a dungeon crawl or hex exploration, would be totally different prep). But if I think of a compelling way to show it, I'll see if I can put something together.
really the issue is that people are trying to tell massive over arching stories but the answer isn't just show to up at the table without plans and neglect any big story stuff, the best games are both, bullet point based stories where complete player choice can still over write the bullet points when needed and fill in the blanks otherwise
I agree that table-top D&D is much better when the narrative is emergent rather than pre-scripted. In fact, pre-scripted narratives in D&D make me feel a bit depressed. Most old-school D&D modules are basically just little sandboxes where they players are free to explore and get involved with things that have been going on in the region described in the source material.
ngl i build a world once. Just some citys, shops and interresting NPC. Some quest ideas. Then i trew my players into the World. ngl, my players told me what they wanna do and i build something for them. I remeber they really like dungeon crawls, so i made some random generated dungeons and spiced them up wie neat little puzzles. they loved it more then enny elaborat quest i did in the past. i like to call it the Minecraft prinziple. just build a world with laws and give them free reign, the rest will happen as the story plays out. i dunno if tommorow they will go on a big pirate adventure or kill a lich and i cant wait to find out :=)
I’ve played a lot of “sandbox” games with an overarching story. But somehow (🤔) the bbeg always had something going on in the towns we were going to to get away from the bbeg. In my experience the sandbox only happens without a bbeg.
This has been my default style for 3 decades. Such great stories has happened because of it. Fair warning though, there are a LOT of players that loath this style. Some really need to know EXACTLY where it starts and what they need to do to end the "quest".
Yep, this is how it is done! As a Conflict Manager I watch the players choose with the situations before them how they resolve and that opens up what situations filled with conflicts might be next.
Great video, I actually developed a really similar way of running the game last year. It's so cool to hear from other GMs who run the game this way. This video has given me lots of cool things to think about and refine how I run my games.
Plot and story in the world is important. Writing is an exercise. Plot is not railroading. Your adventures and campaigns don't have to be like Tolkin or Martian, find your own voice. I have never been a part of a "good game" and it is a sandbox game. We have very different ways of running a game.
I'd be willing to bet most players are 5e first timers (like myself) and have been introduced to the game from critical role or more recently stranger things. I don't think a lot of people know dnd as a hack and slash looter at this point
Absolutely not how it was played. Emergent storytelling is the modern interpretation of dungeons and dragons. And it has quite a number of pitfalls to it. The primary one is not being prepared for anything when your characters go off in that direction. You better be very good at storytelling and very good at shooting from the hip and making things up on the spot which takes a lot, years, of practice to do well. Early done is a dragons was nothing but linear dungeons. That's what we expected, dungeons to go into.
@@WayneBraackYeah. The flip side of this is that, as a more improvisational DM, you’re not really distressed if the players go off script in the first place. Honestly, in my experience, it may involve a little more worldbuilding up front, but from there you have a startling amount of freedom. As do the players.
I ran a game of Dark Ages: Mage (though significantly homebrew modified to make it a modern day game) many years ago that did this. My players, all veteran TTRPG players, said it was the best game they'd ever played. Further, by making the various antagonistic forces not be compelled to have some in-depth exposition for the sake of plot, it made the intrigue and deception of their adversaries feel very real. They loved that the world felt "alive" and that they were a part of it rather than feeling like the world and story revolved around them.
Links to References in the Video:
Don't Prep Plots (The Alexandrian): tinyurl.com/59byxvkm
Mausritter PDF Itch.io (Pay What You Want): tinyurl.com/mr3becmh
Mausritter PDF DriveThruRPG (Pay What You Want): tinyurl.com/cvx54xtx
Mausritter Box Set Exalted Funeral: tinyurl.com/3u3a4u9v
Worlds Without Number FREE PDF: tinyurl.com/43nxtwna
Worlds Without Number Deluxe PDF/Print: tinyurl.com/4rye49jw
Halls of the Blood King (Print): tinyurl.com/2pxvwamx
Halls of the Blood King (PDF): tinyurl.com/5xhpjryr
Dungeon World (PDF): tinyurl.com/2s45urur
Thankya very much! ^^
Man, i'm about to start my own campaign in two weeks. And the premise of this video literally saved me from being burnt out before starting. I was planning a long story to fight invading goblings on the frontier with themes of corruption and war mongering behind the scenes and was already getting frustrated with shit that my players probably wouldn't ever find or interact with. On top of the fact that i have almost no experience as a DM and don't know how to run exploration, long travels, supplies gathering, time events, etc etc. It was doomed.
So i'm literally ditching all that, and instead i'll approach it similar to FInal Fantasy Tactics Advance. I'll make my players the founders of an adventurer's guild, i'll give them some quests to choose from each time they're on downtime, and we'll run whatever they chose for some sessions. Rinse and repeat. Somewhat sandboxy, with videogame-esque features, for my pcs to get familiar with the system (they're all new), and for me to try out rules and different ways to do stuff. And when the time comes, i might send them into a small quest with an overarching plot. But not now.
TL:DR: I wasn't up to the challenge i was about to put myself into and your video saved my campaign from being born dead, so thank you very much for your insight :)
The author of the article on the Alexandrian said his opening and title on 'no plot', was 'tongue in cheek', in his own essay. And openly states that the things DM's plan is "usually a lot more awesome than when PC's chart their own course".
And in his own article, he describes railroading a plot. Then he describes uses exactly the same scenario, and just removes the railroading. There is definitely a NARRATIVE, it's just not a scripted narrative. You're misrepresenting this article. He says "A plot is the sequence of events in a story." What he's saying in this article is not to SCRIPT the outcomes, not to not prepare a story.
@@Zelrin04 bruh. What you were PLANNING sounds amazing. A pointless world of random quests sounds awful. D&D is narratively driven, not narratively documented. The story is what drives your players forward, motivates and inspires them. What's their motivation with a bunch of random adventure hunts? There is no purpose to their existence.
Yeah, the giant world story sounds like a lot of work to plan, because it is! It's sad to me that this video caused people who were creating amazing campaigns to just give up, mid-struggle and claim that this terrible advice 'saved them'.
What you were planning before sounds amazing. I hope you go back to it instead of bookending random adventures without purposes or cohesion.
@@neepers Yes, of course. Is not that this is terrible advice in itself. Is just that is like a starting point. Is not like i just won't ever run grand scale adventures. Is just that I'm still green. Thanks for the compliments, tho :)
The best advice I’ve ever ready that sums up this video is this: “prep the world, not the session”
Frodo, Sam, and Gandalf were following an adventure path
Merry, Pippin, Gimli, and Legolas were in a sandbox game
Yet, there was a story, a plot, an anatagonist, things which needed done. Most creative writing is dog shit for this reason.
@@DeSalvoLaw sure jan
Matt colville sandbox game video lol I miss old matt's content
@DeSalvoLaw what even is this take
@@SunBane67 Matt's Sandbox vs Railroad video is absolutely a classic.
I have been a GM for almost fifty years now and I've developed a system that works for me.
Start off with a session zero. Let your players know what you expect to come out of the session zero beforehand.
On the day of the session zero, find out what kind of adventures your players want. How did they meet/why do they want to adventure with each other? What are their individual motivations to adventure? What does everyone want to play and how well will that work (don't try and change their minds). What level does everyone want to start at? You now have the bare bones to prepare the initial rumors/problems that they can choose from.
Provide them with 3-5 situations that need dealing with and let them decide what they want to do. There might be a job to escort a merchant to his next destination. A criminal has escaped and there is a reward for his capture. You overhear a drunken teamster talking about the heavy chests he just delivered. Rats have been attacking residents and there is a 1 GP per tail bounty. A caravan is forming up to go to the next kingdom and can use more guards.
The beautiful thing with this is that some of the hooks will go away by the time that the party finishes the one they chose, another party could have done it. Some of them could have gotten worse, the rats are getting bolder and have snatched a baby from a crib. There will always be new ones and some old ones the seemed to have gone away may resurface later as an even bigger problem (the haunting of the cemetery calmed down, only to turn into a plague of ghouls three months later).
Most adventures will follow standard tropes, so you can improvise them with ease. Don't forget to throw in a curveball or two so that there is some spice in the stew, something they didn't expect (the merchant's apprentice running off with some gold, a sick child in a village they are passing through, an unwilling bride that has been promised to a bad man, etc, etc).
I have been able to keep my adventurers on their toes for adventure after adventure by doing this. If they want a more focused campaign, give it to them. The Lord's seneschal may need trouble shooters. The local Thieves guide (with a heart of gold) needs help fending off rivals. A merchant captain may need their help to explore a new land he has found.
I do the same thing. I handle economy and ecology. The players build the story. I just watch to see what happens.
I love emergent storytelling, is the perfect way to narrate a world in which the players and the GM contribute almost the same to the worldbuilding, and also a great way to promote player agency in a pretty much plot-forced landscape.
I have always preferred the emergent storytelling in a sandbox style game. I usually start with a detailed city, that has a lot of detailed NPCs and things happening that the players can interact with. Ultimately I want the party to feel like they have a "home base" to go back to once they start adventuring. I will have some possible storylines that may take them out of the city for short periods of time if they choose to follow and one or two major world affecting events that will begin to unfold even if the players do not make choices to go in that direction. The campaign I am currently running is the first time I used a list of rumors that the players have all heard before the game started, with a few of them being ones that will be revealed as true during the unfolding of a few events as the story unfolds. I have always been lucky and had a couple of very proactive players that are always looking for something for their characters to do, so it is easy for me to put those hooks in front of them. It may take a year for them to eventually interact with the main world affecting events, but I want the pace of the game to be determined by the actions of the players. I only use hard timelines in games that are meant to have a set ending and/or are only going to last a handful of sessions.
Sounds like a good process, thanks for sharing!
As someone who craves agency as a player, I'm mystified that this isn't the default approach to TTRPGs. Thanks for expressing it so clearly!
I appreciate that you're not saying don't prep. I mostly prep situations and moments I know are coming. Most of my prep is unknown backstory and paying off threads from the backstory and paying off threads the game set up.
Ran a campaign for decades with my kids and their friends. As the grew up, the game matured as well. Created a world with more than one storyline, and LOTS of random encounters. Using random encounters also keeps the players attention on the game.
Really great video. One of the rarer kind that, while echoing principles that exist in many other videos, offers a solid alternative angle from which to view and think about them. Emergent storytelling is a term I've heard used rarely, if ever, in other videos about sandbox games. They discuss it in various other forms, but you do a great job of really outlining how that comes together and what kind of storytelling that really is. And I can say that because you've helped me unlock the mental tangle I have over a couple areas of my approach. Thank you!
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Thethan’s D&D manifesto
Rule 2: Save your epic story for the book
Rule 3: Your players are not an audience
Rule 4: let the players take the reins, and their characters will write the story
This needs to be spread more. Player agency is what’s really important at the D&D table. The “story” is what happens afterwards when the players talk about the D&D campaign later. They’re not really interested in whatever story the Dm has in mind, instead they want to be able to interact and affect the world.
The game should be filled with actionable situations which the players can interact with and change.
Absolutely right! Give me a blank hex map, and any dungeon map that's large enough, and I'll give you a story that was based on nothing but the random encounters, the choices of the PCs, and the result of the dice, that you'd swear I had planned from the start because everything tied in together to tell a central plot, that also has sub-stories.
"Fronts" are essentially how I ran Dragon Heist.
So many people recommend dropping Chapter 2 because it doesn't advance the plot, but that's exactly why I kept it. I expanded the faction quests and let the players decide which factions to ally with and which ones to investigate. Though I chose summer as the season, the players showed much greater interest in pursuing the Zhentarim and Xanathar's Guild. I ended up dropping Jaraxle entirely because keeping up with four enemy groups would become confusing. While they loved some of the cultist quests, they didn't follow up on them much, and I didn't want the cult to become a main villain that sprung up out of seemingly nowhere. I let the players choose their enemies, and their actions decided which ones gained and lost power. In the end, they took extra steps to sabatoge the activities of the Zhentarim "splinter faction" (as they believed it to be), and because they chose to keep one of Xanathar's gazers as a pet, Nihiloor ambushed them at the Vault of Dragons instead of the villain I had at one point imagined.
I ended the entire adventure at the Trollskull Tavern's Grand Opening, with all of the most memorable NPC's they befriended showing up for a celebration at the end, and Laerel herself showed up to thank them for retrieving the gold for the city.
Its almost like writing a choose your own adventure that accounts for every choice is very hard. Only a few video games have done it successfully.
I write the next session based on the choices within the last session and then try to also include as many decision paths as i can and try to predict the actions of the characters and account for those.
I'm loving your game collection as it's very similar to my D&D-esque games.
Great video. I've been DM'ing since I was 9 years old, with a long hiatus between 20 and 37, and I've only recently realized that this is the best way to DM. Now, at my 40s I've DMed the most memorable campaigns of my life because I've turned to giving the players an initial conflict or two that they will decide how to interact with. According to those interactions I prep session to session. I do a lot of work creating the NPCs, especially, because their interaction with NPCs is what will create the story.
I usually DM real world historical settings with no monsters or (obvious) magic. Right now DMing the Great Pendragon Campaign, but starting much earlier, when Romans leave Britain. PCs ended up feuding each other, so the story is revolving around their rivalries. So much fun.
This is what I've been doing, I recently felt the need to lean more towards the adventure path style due to some tip videos I watched lately. This video was great for reminding me that I don't actually need to do that, and my way (incidentally similar to your way) works as well
This is pretty much how I’ve always run games (in a multitude of systems, for many decades), and it works great. Only the term is new for me, so it’s nice to have a definition to help explain what I’m doing to new players. Thanks! 🎉
Cheers, happy gaming!
Dude, can't agree more. I've been wanting to DM a sandbox campaing for quit a while, had the opportunity to pause the ongoing ToA campaign for some sessions and we played a sandbox game using Shadowdark. I had a blast from the start, the players got the spirit of it after the second session and it was awesome. Since then, once I wrap up the ongoing ToA campaign, I'll take a loooong break from 5e and those linear style long games. I'll run a sandbox campaing on Dolmenwood, which have me super hyped to start.
Dolmenwood looks great, can't wait for the print stuff to come out.
You basically described what I try to achieve. It originally started as something of a hybrid, I wanted the players to have a single storyline that was "the" storyline. But I realized that players go off the rails with impunity. So I wanted there to be other things going on that they could engage with, other things happening that would happen whether they engaged or not, and other plotlines for them to pursue. It helped the world feel alive when they noticed hints of some "side quest" and then saw later hints and realized that things had developed. I've never had as much fun as I have running these games where the world exists, the characters exist in it, and we write stories there together.
It can be a LOT more work than a non-emergent setting, IMO. You have to know the world, the characters, the things that are happening, and you have to move them forward as the game progresses. However, the end result is that I spend an immense amount of time preparing my world, and less worrying about cultivating storylines specifically intended for players to engage with. After all, they end up engaging with them anyway, now don't they?
And if they don't... well... That's one more kind of story too.
Well said! I find that I do a lot of front load prep for my sandboxes, but as the game sessions flow its way less prep work. They tell me what they want to do next session and I check my notes for that area and build anything out that's missing. They can also return to places they've already been, but you've restocked it and its something new this time.
Man you resqued me. I just started to adding some new factions (as my players entered the new dungeon) and I had some troubles to make them feel real. Thank you very much!😁
Dope video bro, thanks
This is pretty much how I've been doing things without ever hearing of this method hahaha. Glad I can finally put a name on it
I love the color scheme for the blood King pictures.
The artwork in Blood King is really distinct and evocative
My advice for those unsure about running a game.
1. Nothing in your world is static. Everything can be moved to where it is needed.
2. Draw out the map as the players progress. This is typically how West March Campaigns are done.
3. Collaborate story telling. Get your players involved.
4. Be clear and communicate with one another. Boundaries should be discussed and if none come up, the game doesn't go forward. This is important so a session doesn't come to an abrupt halt do to some line being crossed that shouldn't have been.
The third and fourth ones will be the more daunting because, and I'll catch flak, a lot of players are lazy and don't even bring a bare minimum of anything to the table. This is a game that requires communication, if you barely can have a conversation, how are you going to play?
Ive been constantly running games for the last 5-8 years like this. I dont have the brain cells to write consistent stories, I run Rule of Cool, and let the players place their print on the story.
This was always my approach when running a game or campaign. It's not my story, it's theirs. I'm just there to help them interact with the game world. The choices, consequences and directions are entirely up to them. Granted, this was mostly in the days of AD&D, which seems to be better suited to a more free-form approach to running a game, but I'm just old school...
Nice overview of emergent storytelling. Looking forward to more from you!
My current open landscape campaign is in it's eight year! And it is fucking great. Good tips. I want to see more vidoes from Earthmote.
Love this perspective.
I run a no plot dungeon delve based on OSE style with 5e rules. It was the best decision I have made to create a long term sustainable dnd group where I wasn’t overly burdened as the dm.
If you guys want more info of how I do it just let me know and I’ll explain it in detail.
Sounds fun, happy gaming!
I use sandbox style. All of us at the table sit down and talk about what they want to play. I’m lucky enough to have a very well developed home brew world to play in with caravan routes, political intrigue that already exists, and things like that.
I’ve had a few “plotted” campaigns go completely off the rails and turned into “look, we just want a damn job and we will do anything within reason” type of road adventure where the group started off as caravan guards and eventually became traders running their own caravan to different places. The adventures dealt with regional politics, random encounters that lead to cleaning up some hostile areas, and role playing transactions as they try to become rich. Fun times.
The players are the story tellers, as the DM I’m the referee and do the injects to see what sticks and takes the table on the trip. Some things will be random, others planned out in advance.
Tbf, if you're putting out mediocre ideas every week, it's still more than GRRM is doing these days.
Preach! 🙏🏿
I make a kingdom, with a not entirely evil royal family, natural corruption means it's worth being a bandit or a thieves guild, danger of the goblin overpopulation and attacking the kingdom. (Without making the goblin to be evil due to some "magic" nature)
The players can fight the not entirely evil royal family to make the world a better place for everyone, but run into the problem of the goblins killing everyone. They can fight the city "mafia" and instead the vampire mob moves in to take over or they could just try to find ways to give the poor better work, by making some kind of trade empire. All that and you still have the option of the PC's starting a cult and use human/goblin sacrifices by taking over various groups.
You do need to have a world ready where adventurers is designed into the world, kinda hard taking our real world and add adventurers on top of it, as there is no mechanics to support it and instead you get the silliness of all "heroes" being super rich, but if you instead making a world that is ALIVE without adventurers doing anything, the world will keep being alive when the adventurers exist and their choices become endless.
Great video! I've been loving your videos and format!
Love this video, I was planning on having a war actively going on with the concept of, the war is guaranteed to be a win but it’s going to take a very long time as the empire (main government body) is doing its best to lessen casualties on the orc’s side as they have had many wars and do not wish to be blamed for the countless deaths of a race once again. So obviously this is going to take time, however the players can step up and help if they so choose through any way they wish, assassinate orc tribe leaders, join the war front, or simply protect cities from orc raids. Raids on cities will happen naturally and more than likely when they are inside them, they could run away or stay and fight reducing the intended casualties that the orcs wanted, raising the resources and man power the cities have. I would probably have a sort of point system to keep track of their deeds, defending a city gives 1 tick or half a tick and 1 tick = 1 less year on the war. Killing an orc camp leader would probably be 15 ticks. I intend the war to last 350 years and this is a world in which, if the players get wiped, time skips ahead a little and they can either play their kids, or a random. Once the war ends a new continent will open up and they will get a choice between which continent I make next.
To any readers I would love any ideas or feedback as I have yet to actually make this campaign (just started about 2-3 weeks ago) and am still in the works of making certain aspects of it. It is currently an open world campaign and will switch to a linear story once they traverse to another continent.
1) They visit the “continent of the enemies” in which they have to either 1) find a way to convince their leaders to open up boarders and make peace 2) find a way to make a weak spot within their naval defenses so another war can happen and 3) a mix of both (although idk how that would work yet)
Another continent is the under dark which would probably have them dealing with the monstrously overpowered race I made for that area as well as underground monsters
And finally the continent which they came from which is where the empire lies, this would take me the longest to make because I would need lore and history for the continent as well as this would take a more political focus with the world in which they uncover many secrets and shady dealings of the coalition of the races, their government body.
I played a game like this at GaryCon. The DM was late, but he showed up and we started playing. He had a basic plot based on a module and just made it all up the entire game, and it worked quite well. Clearly he had all the rules in his head and there was no set dungeon or anything. We all had fun and had a lot of laughs!
UA-cam recommended this video to me this morning and two people I trust both recommended it; all three within 20 minutes. I agree with all of your points, even if it has taken me 6 hours to get enough free time to finish this video...
Thanks for watching!
We have been playing sandbox or emerhent storytelling from day 1 it is nice to hear about more groups doing it.
You're totally right. Players are looking to tell the story. When they have ideas and change the world, they are creating plot. It will naturally grow in scale as the next logical step (idea) comes up. DMs only really need to be willing to ask them questions and pose situations. The players do the heavy lifting and feel rewarded for it the whole way. They often get the sense of "being smart" because thier ideas made impacts on the world.
I really liked this one. For the last few years I've rarely had anything planned beyond the next session or two. Often the players tell me what they want to do next through there characters. Now, that's not 100%. Sometimes I have to place some deep hooks to get them moving, but I enjoy running something THEY want more. Great video and you earned a sub.
Thank you!
There's a third option, which is to use both (loosely) scripted and emergent storytelling. I feel that that can give the most realistic world...
I run a sandbox campaign and make heavy use of emergent storytelling. Towards the end of each arc, I prepare some ideas for quests, but that's all they are - ideas or prompts for the players. Take one, or choose something different. I still have an overarching plot in the campaign. That plot doesn't force the direction of the story, but it does inform it and I keep it in mind as the emergent story unfolds. I feel that having things occur within the world regardless of the adventiring party's involvement (e.g. things that happen on a timer) is key to making the world feel like it's living and breathing, and overarching plot(s) can help inform the kinds of things that may happen on a timer or otherwise that add flavor and life to the world.
My overarching story point is that the settlement that is the focus of the campaign will eventually be attacked. Knowing this, I always jave it in mind to present quest and downtime options to my players that can help my party strengthen the settlement itself (it's very small, e.g. by training the guards), or gain potential allies for the settlement.
Great video, keep it up!
Thanks! I like having things moving in the background. Helps keep the world alive and as you say potential conflicts for the players down the line.
Excellent video! I specially liked that you took examples out of an OSR game (OSE) and a PbtA game (DW). I have always felt that OSR/PbtA are two sides of the same coin when it comes to emergent gameplay.
Thanks!
I have such a better time when I plan locations, and let the story unfold. I generally plan loot, a few encounters and traps, and some scenic areas to set the mood.
Yep, that's a great way of doing it!
I totally agree with you. I tend to use other peoples modules as main adventures in my D&D world and I like to have what happens there, in the module, determine what happens going forward. They rescue the merchant and his wife In the Hobgoblin lair at the Caves of Chaos and he rewards them but also gives them a chance for a new mission. Maybe caravans are getting raided and he wants someone to investigate. Or he's got a cargo to go to restenford that he needs guards for, and they need to catch a boat in Salt Marsh. Or in the caves they had a loyal retainer who goes home to Orleans after the caves and the group goes to Pick them up on the way to their next adventure and low and behold his mom says he's disappeared and there is something weird happening to the townspeople. Or we have the merchants daughter captured by bandits and the party is engaged as a known trusted quantity to retrieve her.
I use surviving villains and found characters as the drivers for what happens next.
I have an idea that there are Lizard Men or Elves that may be involved with an elder god and interested in breaking up my loosely affiliated ecumenical country that my PC's are from. But I'm trying to have what they do create the story line.
I use a random tailored encounter table for travel which works the same way your random encounters seem to. There are marshall's offices and post offices which are the federal authorities in my loosely amalgamated Country. There is a ten most wanted poster in all of these offices that tends to morph a bit as they move from region to region.
Yeah I'm not trying to write a novel. I'm trying to plan interesting encounters.
Sounds like a good way to run it!
Funny how easily it all goes off the rails anyway. I’m doing Hoard of the Dragon Queen with my group. Introduced the Dragon Masks a little early and now they are trying to hunt down the remaining masks instead of following the plot line in the book. I am going to have to make it up as I go but it’s what they want to do. Which honestly seems more fun than what is in the book anyway.
Nice work enabling the players to go after their own goals. Best of luck reworking the module!
Emergent storytelling for everybody, but mostly for me (the GM) 😊 insta sub, matey!
I would... Probably say that on a campaign that I'm currently dm'ing, I've been experiencing a sort of sandbox campaign style, although I wouldn't say it's an entirely true emergent story campaign.
Like, since the beginning, there was a very clearcut goal, that was literally the name of the campaign: Slay the Beast of Oaksfell.
Now, all of the campaign has been surrounding the idea of the characters exploring the maps and picking up weapons, pieces of information and lore to puzzle out what the beast really was, and how to categorically slay it, since...
Well, it's basically more then just a monster, but an intelligent creature protecting a region from something else.
I never said them how they should conduct their investigations, though. Or where to find information. They just kept asking npc's, and I kept spilling information, and linking to places of interest in my map, that I had decided previously that I would use.
So far, it has been pretty interesting the campaign, partially because while there is the clear conflict with the beast, there is also the conflict of the characters navigating through a world that both is very alien to them (in the sense that none of them is from that region, and many customs and stories are just odd to them and they have to figure out if they are suspicious behaviour or just general oddities), and also full of places of interest that they are really curious to explore.
And I mean... They haven't even figured out that their benefactor is vampire in disguise, playing his cards and securing his own interests. Not that he's particularly evil, just not the most altruistic one in all the world.
I so far have used published modules/adventures, but I increasily try include elements of verisimilitude that the emergent style provokes. It feels more fulfilling for me, although I am not sure my players care or notice. Your premise about it reducing stress for the DM? Not so sure about that; maybe I just need to get better. You earned my subscription with this video. I hope you will follow up with more on this topic.
The only way I like to play DND.
Subscribing and hoping to see more like this! This is how I've been wanting to run my games, but it feels like little "official" material is aimed in this direction.
Yeah its certainly the case with WoTC's products if your running 5e.
A lot of great indie/OSR stuff presents open ended adventures/sandboxes for use. Cheers!
Your advice is spot on. It’s something I had to relearn myself because I couldn’t put my finger on why something that I used to be able to riff so well felt so awkward and stilted with 5e. It’s because of the shoehorning of the story path versus the situational encounters. Enemies need motivations and desires which can be expressed by what and how they do the things they do rather than following a “because the script say so” mentality of adventure design. It creates a cause and effect when it’s situational adventuring, which maintains the verisimilitude and immersion 1000% better than $50 lore dump books with A then B then C next D encounters sprinkled throughout.
Kudos to you for the succinct advice.
Speaking of: You should get a teleprompter. Help you connect your advice with the audience when you don’t have to break eye contact so much.
It’s like when DMing from boxed text. It engages your players more when you can just tell them what their characters see via bullet points rather than read it to them.
I began this campaign March 2020. I had vague ideas but they have yet to materialize. We are still going at it and new ideas spawn new content following the paths the players choose. I did not imagine having reached what we have done.
You had me at Joe Abercrombie.
my first gm experience literally Just dice rolls and random enemy stats in my head no rule book just drinking and coming up with stuff on the fly.
I love writing however I feel you make a world up for a week or two or however long then just dive in and make things spring up in that stuff you wrote about its much more fun that way for me.
my game is a loose sandbox / story line. I love prepping and creating encounters and dungeons, but i dont force players to follow a specific path. I do inject a snippet of story as we go along by finding specific treasures or story related items that hint towards something of a story line. As well some NPCs will have some hints of the story line either by the way they interact or something they are wearing or an item or something like that. The game play flows based on where the players go. If they pick up on some of the story hints then i will increase those things or offer a story line hook to see if they are interested. If not we keep running based on their game play.
That's a nice way of doing it. You can definitely have deeper situations going on and if the players bite, then great. If not, you can either set it aside or keep it brewing in the background till they might see more of it down the line.
@@Earthmote Ty, cheers...
I like the situations model. I haven't played or DMed in years but I have thought about it. I do some fiction writing and and have been developing a fantasy world through short stories. I want to do old school, in person gaming. Good video, you've given me some ideas to work on.
Best of luck! I'm really enjoying old school DnD lately.
Nice video. Played this way and the grand story way. Both can work with the right players.
I naturally came to this conclusion very early on when I first started playing when 3.5 was out. The players do all the work for you anyway and they always do what they want to do either way. Practice improv and you will be better than 99% of DMs.
Next step is to put your friends in charge of the NPC Factions and ask them how they react to the players actions. #BrOSR
Yay. Another guy with a bookcase behind him.
i remember being 14 and 5e just came out, so me and my buddies would just run campaigns where you start in a tavern and the rest is improv.
aaaaah, the good ol days 😭
I prep two things.
Past events that shape the present.
NPCs of any kind, person, monsters, town, organization, and I give them motivations, means, objectives and code of conduct.
That and the PCs eventually create a story.
You mentioned Dungeon World. One of the key agenda items for a GM outlined in that game, and which has become a mantra for me as a GM is: "Play to find out what happens."
Good mantra!
I'm looking to implement this kind of stuff into my plans. Thanks for the ideas!
Glad it was helpful!
I started running AD&D 2e recently and have been running a campaign thats almost fully improv other than the design of the world. It's gone from the group getting kidnapped by hobgoblins and forced to be shock troops, barely surviving from day to day, to them buying a house of their own and starting to fight against a cannibalistic archdevil cult that I didn't even know would exist when I started the campaign
Fronts are an Apocalypse World thing. They are roughly threats like fractions, scarcity, disasters outside the PCs power base trying to knock their stuff down. A giant Mad Max dust and glass storm could be one.
As a professional BSer who despises structure, I have found that the best way for me to build a story is to have a one sentence descriptor for a beginning, middle, and end of an arc. Everything else is either pulled out of thin air or brought into play by the players
Nice. I feel like this is my game style already... Now I have a name for it. Cheers
I have really been wanting to try out an anti-campaign. A multi-session game that does everything in its power to refuse having an overarching story. So no major villains, no grander factions, none of that. Just a random "pointless" adventure every week or two.
Love this. Have you ever tried "converting" a linear D&D campaign into an emergent one? I'd love to know if this is feasible, given that I love the worlds, characters, NPC motivations etc. of a lot of the WotC modules.
The algorithm brought me to this video and I just wanted to say that your advice and the structure of your video is of a really high quality. I hope your channel grows :)
I appreciate that!
So basically the way AD&D 1e and 2e (until modules started to be story based like the Dragonlance modules) were run.
The Art in the Blood King is possibly some of my favorite art from any ttrpg.
Also, the way you describe your process is basically how I was forced to run something like Curse of Strahd - it required me to give up on having control in a story sense. Players can basically start anywhere, see Strahd as much or as little as you want, do most things in any order (except for one area which is TPK even at high levels).
The guidance you give here is golden. Once you get off the ground and have some feedback in terms of player choices - it becomes natural thinking about how things are moving in the background, and how the story CAN unfold. Look at open threads, or fronts, and determine if anything has changed because of action or inaction. then think about possible future actions players may take.
I created a lot of if/then's for the open threads/fronts - if they do this, then this can happen, which gives you a prompt for how to proceed if they go off the beaten path. If they don't go back to town to help, their NPC friend dies. If they go to this location, then they meet Bart and he knows 'x' information if they help him solve 'x' problem.
By the middle of the campaign I understood the locations well enough, and had made connections in my head where my prep became very minimal, because you basically know the characters in the background, the triggers - and while you don't know the order of things, you do have ideas of what can happen given certain choices.
But I deviated immensely from the source material, because I simply had to, creating new threads and changing character motivations as I went to adapt to what was needed.
How you think greatly effects both the amount of work required and the amount of fun you have at the table. If you can understand plots through the lens of movement, motivation and reaction - in reference to the players - you can basically improvise the story as you move along.
It takes practice, but this is a great video to demonstrate simple but elegant adventure philosophy. Very inspiring :)
Thank you! Sounds like you have a solid grasp on a lot of it. Happy gaming!
I like both approaches. I'm not a fan of having a completely open sandbox because it's too freeform and barely feels like a cohesive story, but an adventure path can feel too "on rails". I do, however, feel that all campaigns should have a theme and scope so the players know what is expected of their characters and have some idea of what might be going on.
I prefer a hybrid, what I call "Playground" (as opposed to sandbox) where you can and should give the player's whatever the adventure hook of the session is and let them go at it, but not all those adventures need to be linked together. Some might lead from one to another (e.g. the bronze disc the PCs recovered in the old catacombs is a relic for an evil cult, which prompts the cult to go after them) but most should be in the vein of "picaresque" novels or (my inspiration) the Conan stories/1970s comics where it's perfectly okay to tell the players that they've traveled to the west to a different land before presenting them with the hook.
Too many players, i think, conflate "here's the adventure hook for tonight's session" with railroading, when that's not at all the same thing. But I also feel that you can have things organically develop via encounters. For example the PCs might just be traveling on the road and meet a merchant who, after a conversation, offers to pay them a few gold each to escort him to the next town over. From there, you could have some random encounters that seed plot hooks for later (perhaps some bandits attack the merchant because he's carrying a special item or owes the thieve's guild), or simply a minor combat with some wolves. that sort of thing
Sounds like a good approach! Cheers
interesting idea. DM burnout is real. been their myself. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and BingChat Copilot has emerged as an invaluable resource for my DMing prep. The style of DMing/Emergent Storytelling is valid. Im an experienced DM and im always looking for ways to improve as a DM. You talking about maximum player agency which is probably different to the way we first started playing D&D. I like to use modular encounters and insert them into the session as they are needed. Save the ones they dont get to and use them in a later session. i use recurring NPC villains and homebrew my own sandbox game based in an off-the-shelf purchased setting that has maps, NPCs and a history. From this starting point I have homebrewed my own 'story'. The players drive the story and decide which story hooks to explore. Listen to your players and include encounters that link to their backgrounds. My NPCs have motivations and goals also, this gives the game continuity and improves immersion for your players.
Thanks for the tips.
I like to read the official adventures, then run them entirely from memory. So stuff like, "have them make a DC 17 save," pfft, skim over it, not gunna remember it. But the overall story high points are easy enough to remember, let the rest be emergent.
I'm an accidental genius. I'm currently running my first ever campaign as a DM, and I let the players know in their Session 0 that I planned to make it an episodic campaign, bunch of smaller narratives and stories, all eventually connected to a big bad. Thank you, Scooby-Doo campaign.
I guess it helps that i've built an enormous world with dozens of factions, planes of existence, and wild areas. This type of spontaneous story telling is perfect for me.
I'm not a DM (now I am) but I am a writer. I have an overarching narrative where major events happen regardless of what happens with the characters. I understand the sentiment of videos like this but executed right an overarching narrative can be very exciting.
RPGs are really a combination of improv theater, cops and robbers arbitrated by dice rolls
Been doing it since 1978.
Every good story requires a MacGuffin. It can be as simple as "Destroy this ring in the volcano or the world will end." DMs need to give players motivations.
Your pitch for sandbox play is convincing. Thanks for the brief. Would you demonstrate session prep for a single session, please 🙏
Prep can vary a lot based on what the players want to do next and the style of your sandbox (say they want to do a dungeon crawl or hex exploration, would be totally different prep). But if I think of a compelling way to show it, I'll see if I can put something together.
really the issue is that people are trying to tell massive over arching stories but the answer isn't just show to up at the table without plans and neglect any big story stuff, the best games are both, bullet point based stories where complete player choice can still over write the bullet points when needed and fill in the blanks otherwise
I agree that table-top D&D is much better when the narrative is emergent rather than pre-scripted. In fact, pre-scripted narratives in D&D make me feel a bit depressed. Most old-school D&D modules are basically just little sandboxes where they players are free to explore and get involved with things that have been going on in the region described in the source material.
Agreed! Its interesting how the game has evolved over the years and editions.
ngl i build a world once. Just some citys, shops and interresting NPC. Some quest ideas. Then i trew my players into the World. ngl, my players told me what they wanna do and i build something for them. I remeber they really like dungeon crawls, so i made some random generated dungeons and spiced them up wie neat little puzzles. they loved it more then enny elaborat quest i did in the past. i like to call it the Minecraft prinziple. just build a world with laws and give them free reign, the rest will happen as the story plays out. i dunno if tommorow they will go on a big pirate adventure or kill a lich and i cant wait to find out :=)
Thank you. This was extremely helpful.
I’ve played a lot of “sandbox” games with an overarching story. But somehow (🤔) the bbeg always had something going on in the towns we were going to to get away from the bbeg. In my experience the sandbox only happens without a bbeg.
This has been my default style for 3 decades. Such great stories has happened because of it. Fair warning though, there are a LOT of players that loath this style. Some really need to know EXACTLY where it starts and what they need to do to end the "quest".
Yep, this is how it is done! As a Conflict Manager I watch the players choose with the situations before them how they resolve and that opens up what situations filled with conflicts might be next.
Choices and consequences! Cheers
Great advice! Hail the Alexandrian!
Great approach!
Wait! On second 0:30 - DM thinking the sequence of events - Way does that seem wrong? It's perfectly fine to me!
Great video, I actually developed a really similar way of running the game last year. It's so cool to hear from other GMs who run the game this way. This video has given me lots of cool things to think about and refine how I run my games.
Glad it was helpful! Cheers
Plot and story in the world is important. Writing is an exercise. Plot is not railroading. Your adventures and campaigns don't have to be like Tolkin or Martian, find your own voice. I have never been a part of a "good game" and it is a sandbox game. We have very different ways of running a game.
Thank you
.....so how Dnd was originally played
I'd be willing to bet most players are 5e first timers (like myself) and have been introduced to the game from critical role or more recently stranger things. I don't think a lot of people know dnd as a hack and slash looter at this point
@@jacobbeaumont1529 I was introduced by a bunch of kids going to a theme park, taking a darkride, and suddenly passing through a portal
@@jacobbeaumont1529lmao you dont know old school dnd if thats what you think of it
Absolutely not how it was played. Emergent storytelling is the modern interpretation of dungeons and dragons. And it has quite a number of pitfalls to it. The primary one is not being prepared for anything when your characters go off in that direction. You better be very good at storytelling and very good at shooting from the hip and making things up on the spot which takes a lot, years, of practice to do well.
Early done is a dragons was nothing but linear dungeons. That's what we expected, dungeons to go into.
@@WayneBraackYeah. The flip side of this is that, as a more improvisational DM, you’re not really distressed if the players go off script in the first place. Honestly, in my experience, it may involve a little more worldbuilding up front, but from there you have a startling amount of freedom. As do the players.
I ran a game of Dark Ages: Mage (though significantly homebrew modified to make it a modern day game) many years ago that did this. My players, all veteran TTRPG players, said it was the best game they'd ever played. Further, by making the various antagonistic forces not be compelled to have some in-depth exposition for the sake of plot, it made the intrigue and deception of their adversaries feel very real. They loved that the world felt "alive" and that they were a part of it rather than feeling like the world and story revolved around them.
My problem is if i let my players do whatever instead of feeding them the plot they would just get day jobs.