 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie, and today it's time to look deep into the inner recesses of D&D into the clock-working brass that holds the whole thing together and go over the painstaking process of writing up a D&D campaign. I'm gonna talk about my own personal experiences that have helped me make games, and hopefully I'll be able to help you spin your own tales of might and magic. As always, keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you think that my story is weak and that my plots don't make sense, feel free to write your games however you want. What's this? A challenger approaches. It's... an ad! Now, I don't like to run ads on my channel unless they're about something that I can personally get behind, but I think that if I can get behind anyone's promotion, it's another D&D talk about her, so it is from within the goodness of my heart that I present Out of the Box, Encounters for 5th Edition, a labor of love crafted by the wonderful folks over at Nerdarchy, and currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. This big ol' book comes jam-packed with situations and story hooks designed to help all you fledgling dungeon masters get the ball rolling on your own epic adventures, or if you've already got the best story in the world all laid out but aghast! You're having a hard time coming up with encounters to pad out the fun, then BAM! This book has got you covered. You can just rip out a scenario from the pages of this tome and plug it right into your Saturday evening tabletop game. And if you pledge $40 or more to the Out of the Box Kickstarter, you can get your own physical copies so that you can rip the actual pages out of the book and plug them into your actual tabletop. Anything's possible with literature, so spread the cheeks of your wallet and slide into Nerdarchy's Kickstarter to help fund the best homebrew this side of the coast. Made for Nerds, by Nerds. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So, there's a certain level of preparation that takes place before you even start going to your friends with an idea, and while that varies from person to person, I think that everyone can agree that most campaigns stem from a small stray thought that was left to run and gather other stray thoughts until it turned into at least a basic framework from which a story can take place. You might want to do a mystery, and so you thought of one cool plot twist to turn the whole investigation on its head, or maybe you thought of one cool moment in an epic fight and now you're just working to get there. The point is that most of my own campaigns have a point that I'm trying to reach, and I'm just working outwards to get the players to that point and flesh out the things that came before and after it, sort of like starting the writing process by dropping an idea on the timeline and then working outward until I have the whole story. Now, to that end, it should be noted that a dirty little secret of DMing is that all campaigns are railroaded. Unless your campaign has no story and it's literally just the DM making shit up, your Dungeon Master undoubtedly has somewhere that they want you to be, and they're just trying to get you there so that the plot can continue without you murdering the innkeeper. The trick with DMing that separates the chimes from the chums is how obvious the railroading is and how much you're willing to adapt your plot based on players' choices. A good story is something that has an outer framework that follows your own story beats, but the closer you get to the details of a particular session or an arc of sessions, the less the story needs to happen in the way that you want it and the more that it becomes more of a guideline. Sure, the players need to talk to the Fairy Queen so that she can send them on the next step of the story, but the puzzle, getting to her, shouldn't be a problem that's solved by the DM and the DM only. You can leave an obvious, or not so obvious, way for the players to get to her by using the Fairy Boat or something, but if the players are coming up with their own fun, let them do it, unless it's completely so impractical that it's unreal. You should let their harebrained scheme work, along with any complications attached to it that you can think of because it's important that they feel like they're contributing to the story as much as you are. Even if they're not really, you need to make sure that they feel that way, or else the symbiotic relationship between the players and the DM isn't going to work. With your story, you'll find that the less control that you demand over the players and the more you let them run around with their own concepts, the more creative storytelling that'll come as they rush to fill in the gaps of your logic that you didn't even know you missed. And for God's sakes, whether you're running your own pre-reading campaign or you're just adapting from a module, please try your best to take something from each person's backstory and include it in the game. I understand that not everybody's backstory is going to be the most impressive thing in the world. I understand that a lot of people have a lot of trouble fitting in their own character concept, and sometimes character concepts just aren't that interesting. But if you don't make them feel like their contribution to the game as a player is being felt, then as fun as the game is, they're going to wonder, why am I necessary to be here? Especially if you are using the backstories of other players and one person is being left in the dust. If you've seen my character backstory advice video, shameless plug, that is a very good resource I think to helping figure out how to get a character into the game, both as a player and as a DM. Honestly, the easiest trick in the world is to have one of the NPCs say, hey, I knew your father at some point, or hey, I am your father at some point. And sure, that is the absolute bare minimum that you can do, but you would be surprised how well that works and how much the players light up just because they feel like they're being included. Now, that's not to say that the players need to do all of the legwork and you're just here to reap the rewards of players making the game better on their own time. You should still have a cohesive storyline that runs through the entire plot from start to finish. I actually never begin a campaign officially without having written what I expect literally every session to be like, because I believe that humans can be lazy and incompetent sometimes, and if I just come to a session and say to myself, I'll just wing it, then I'm setting myself and my players up for a failure of a session. Writing the whole game out beforehand isn't meant for railroading. It's there so that I can prove to myself that this is something that I'm willing to sink my time into. I have to show that hard work to me because otherwise I will just lie to myself all the time and say that I'm so smart and talented that I can just fly by the seat of my skinny jeans and everything will be fine. And once the campaign starts as I go along, I'll rewrite those individual scenes to adapt what has happened previously in the sessions that have already taken place. Keeping that upkeep is how you maintain control over your own game, both externally and internally in your own mind. I think everybody can remember that one DM that was so great when it first started, but as the campaign went along, it felt like they just cared less and less. And as the DM, as much as you don't want to show it, it shows, it happens, and people will pick up on subtle clues even if you're trying to hide it. And if you do need a break from the campaign because you're having trouble writing, talk about it with your players. More often than not, players are very understanding of your plights, and if it's a campaign that they've enjoyed, then the worst that they're going to say is, Well, I'm sad, but I can't wait for it to continue. Now, the big stink of all this campaign preparation is that in the end, you are planning for all of your hard work to go to waste. Players will do what they do, and while you should work to make sure that your game can loop back around into getting the story done, you should also prepare contingencies in case the players get crafty and try to break the whole game ahead of time. Your best laid plans mean nothing if you let everything hinge on the one mystical amulet falling into the hands of the villain, only for the heroes to either kill the villain, steal the amulet, or seduce the amulet. So a good thing to do is write up many alternative possibilities for the story to go in that'll all lead to the same place so that the players will have their feeling of impacting the plot and you can still have your storyline. Think of it like a telltale game, except they can't go on YouTube and watch all the alternate routes so they don't realize how cheap a telltale game really is. Or if you really want to go off of the deep end, if your players have gone haywire with your adventure that you don't even recognize the notes that you're taking anymore, you could potentially go through the maximum effort required to write up a new story based on all of the new events. The biggest, biggest benefit to being a DM is that the players have absolutely no idea what goes on behind the scenes and in that head of yours save for what you present to them. So no matter how much writing and rewriting you have to do to ensure that the campaign is going in a good direction, your players will never know that there is a dumpster fire going on behind that screen until the very moment that you run out of things to save. So to conclude this video, I really want to hit on this last point, and it's a point that I've made before in different videos, but it's just so important. If you're a new DM, just getting into the cockpit and you're still wondering what all of these fancy knobs and switches do, you really, really don't need to be worried. No matter who you're playing with, no matter what plot outline you write on the back of an Afghan with a Sharpie, as long as your players are having a good time, you're doing a good job. And your story, as patchworked and made up as it may be, if your players are smiling through it, then it's a good story. When in doubt, let your players decide what they want to do and listen closely when they take time to role play with each other's characters because oftentimes they're telling you what they'd like to see and what story lines they'd like you to pick up on when you're working out the story of your own campaign. So yeah, as normal, I hope that this rambling video manages to catch somebody's ear and hopefully inspire them to make a great campaign. That'll about do it. Remember to subscribe, like, comment, ring that bell icon. It's stupid. It's dumb. I hate it. It doesn't need to be there. But if you don't ring it, then you don't get my deep bassy voice. And hey, maybe support me on Patreon so that you can keep hearing my seductive bassy voice for years upon years to come. I hope this video helps you. But yeah, Davi out.