There's no question that encounters are one of the most important parts of Dungeons & Dragons.
At its most basic level, D&D is simply a series of connected challenges (encounters) the characters try to overcome.
Without encounters, there are no adventures. Without adventures, there are no campaigns. Encounters are the fundamental building blocks of everything else!
Because of this, we should make the best encounters we can for our players. If we design engaging encounters, those encounters will go on to fuel excellent adventures and campaigns over time.
Exciting D&D encounters have these four elements:
1. Enticement: a reason to engage with the encounter.
2. Pressure: a reason to maintain momentum and finish the encounter.
3. Interaction: interesting things to do during the encounter.
4. Consequences: meaningful results from the encounter.
This shortens into the word EPIC to help you remember.
So, read on as I break down each of the four elements and explain how to implement them in your own encounters!
You can also scope out the livestream video at the end of this article where I demonstrate how to do this method in an actual one-shot adventure.
Let's start with element number one: Enticement.
If the characters don't have a reason to engage with an encounter, they won't bother.
Imagine a situation you've set up where an invisible assassin is lying in wait for the characters inside an otherwise empty, uninteresting room. The assassin will launch a surprise attack as soon as the characters have crossed over the threshold and turned their backs to the door!
But what if the characters don't see any good reason to enter the room?
The assassin is invisible and totally silent, after all. The room itself is nondescript, empty and devoid of any signs of treasure or things to do. At best, one character might look inside for a secret door.
While the empty room might seem realistic (wouldn't an assassin want a totally innocuous place to hide?), the room's empty and boring nature is probably not going to convince anyone through the door.
Remember that characters are primarily motivated to seek out treasure, combat, and interaction with NPCs. Conversely, they try to avoid things that look like traps or wastes of precious time.
So if we want the characters to enter the room with the assassin and engage with the encounter, we must entice them inside!
There needs to be something interesting to look at or do. Perhaps some obvious treasure glints on a dusty altar. Maybe there are strange marks on the wall, or fresh tracks on the floor, or there's a faint outline of a secret door in the dimly lit corner. Maybe there's a bound and gagged NPC hanging over a pit of acid, or a gurgling fountain with oddly colored water, or a weird clicking sound!
Whatever the enticing element is, it should tempt the characters in. Don't over-explain it from the start; if the characters enter the room, they can learn more by investigating.
At that point, the assassin will be in a position to attack.
And so, we've enticed the characters in! Now, how do we make sure the encounter is exciting?
For this, we need our second element: Pressure!
Pressure is something that forces the characters to act and keep up the momentum so the encounter doesn't become boring.
Consider all the action movies that involve a ticking time bomb. Without that bomb, the heroes wouldn't have to rush around and take big risks! They could spend a week diffusing the bomb with a remote-controlled robot, yawning and sipping coffee in their perfectly safe bunkers.
Not much of a movie, eh?
What we want is action, which demands pressure! Time pressure works really well, but there are other forms of it, too — resource loss (like slowly draining HP), NPCs getting into more and more danger, an increasing risk of madness over time, or even the enemy becoming stronger the longer the characters wait.
The important thing about pressure is that the players need to be aware of it. Not necessarily the characters, mind you, but the audience of the game itself; the people sitting around the table.
This goes back to the action movie example. Although the hero may not know where the ticking time bomb is, or even that it's present, the audience does. We watch in growing horror from the front row seat as the bomb's timer counts down, or Jaws swims closer, or the murderer creeps up behind the babysitter!
If the audience didn't know about the pressure, it wouldn't have any impact at all. So make sure your players are aware of it, even if their characters aren't.
Finally, make sure you keep the pressure varied between encounters (don't always use the same type), and don't always have it be full-throttle. There needs to be some ebb and flow or else the constant, high-stakes squeeze gets exhausting. Save the big guns for the most important encounters.
Now, we've used enticement to get the characters into the encounter, and pressure to make sure it has momentum.
But that still leaves us with a question: How do we make the encounter fun for the characters to engage with?
For that, we'll go over the most critical part of the encounter: Interaction.
Interaction defines what the characters can actually do during an encounter.
Having a high amount of interactivity is better, because it means the characters can engage with more of the game world.
Having stuff to do seems like an obvious element to any encounter, but this is a nuance that often goes overlooked in encounter design.
A good encounter will have more than one or two things to do. Whether the encounter is exploring a dungeon room, talking to an NPC, or climbing a castle wall, our goal is to make sure the players aren't saying, "I do the exact same thing I did last round."
This means the dungeon room should have cool things to mess with. Water to jump into, buttons to push, loose flagstones to lift, chandeliers to swing on, vines growing with useful (or harmful) berries, magic runes swirling with latent power.
NPCs shouldn't be "one trick ponies." They should hint at things they want, change their minds, become impatient or curious, and transform over time based on what the characters say.
The castle wall shouldn't just be four climb attempts in a row. Snakes should hide in loose cracks, stone should slip away, guards should unexpectedly appear, a wind should kick up, a territorial crow should dive-bomb someone.
The possibilities are endless if you think in terms of variety. Give the characters more to do than just the surface, obvious things. Reward them for engaging with the environment or trying different strategies. Encourage different approaches in combat, such as ambushing, entrapping, intimidating, or tricking.
Stretch your mind to throw in a handful of options, and the encounter will come alive with a huge array of possibilities.
Once our enticing, pressurized, interactive encounter is nearing its end, the characters need a final element to cinch the deal: Consequences!
In short, what the characters decide to do during the encounter must matter.
It again seems obvious, but it's always important to self-check our encounter design to make sure we aren't forcing a specific outcome.
For example, if you have an NPC you don't want the characters to kill, what will you do if they attack that NPC?
Although it can be a hard pill for some Game Masters to swallow, the best thing to do is make the characters' decision to fight (and even kill) that NPC matter.
You may end up needing to alter the course of your adventure. But not doing so would be even worse. If the consequences of encounters don't matter, nothing matters. The characters would have no ability to shape the world. They wouldn't be doing encounters at all; they'd be passive participants in a script.
So don't use your Game Master powers to make that NPC into a retired 20th-level fighter. Unless there's a very logical in-game reason, the characters should not be surrounded by conveniently godlike NPCs, unscalable walls, or impervious monsters.
Remember what we said about encounters being the building blocks of everything. The fact is, if you do not have real encounters (conflicts with consequences), you are not playing D&D!
So approach your encounter design knowing that you need to allow consequences. Don't make an NPC too important to kill. Don't write a chase scene where the villain escapes no matter what. Don't hold back when a character makes a decision that leads to their death. Don't put giant eagles in your game world and then tell the characters they can't dedicate themselves to befriending one and riding it to Mount Doom.
Consequences are the gel that holds the rest of the EPIC system together. With these powers combined, you have a mighty tool at your disposal.
Don't forget to entice the characters into a situation and then create pressure to keep the excitement high.
Put some elbow grease into creating multiple things to interact with during the encounter, and make sure what the characters do matters in the end by embracing whatever consequences emerge.
If you leverage the four EPIC elements in your encounter design, you'll always have engaging challenges for your players. They'll be chomping at the bit to play in your games, and you'll be confident knowing you gave good thought and design to the material you're creating!
For a longer discussion and video walkthrough of this process, check out the recording below, which is Part 4 of Kelsey's livestream series, How To Write A D&D One Shot, Step By Step!
Header art by Tithi Luadthong / shutterstock.com
]]>My name is Kelsey Dionne, and I’m a full-time adventure writer and publisher who got started in all this by googling “how to write a DnD adventure” (the results I got in 2016 made me wish someone had written this article).
These days, I write D&D adventures for a living. I’ve faced the gauntlet of hundreds of public critiques here, here, and here (to name just a few), and even Wizards of the Coast recommended my material during their Stay At Home, Play At Home series. I've muddled my way through this process enough times to make it repeatable, and now I want to pass along some of my learning to you.
So if you’re still with me, read on for the method I've developed over the years for writing an action-packed D&D adventure with as little friction as possible.
(Just as an aside, I used this exact method to write The Secrets of Skyhorn Lighthouse. At the time of writing this blog post, it's the #1 highest rated adventure on the DMs Guild of all time with more than 350 five-star reviews and 100,000+ downloads.)
So how do you get started? You need to follow seven steps in order, which I’ll go over in detail.
First, let me square with you. Writing a D&D adventure does take a fair amount of work. But if you’ve ever written a term paper, finished a school project, or studied for and passed a test, you have the level of dedication and follow-through it takes to do this, too. So commit to seeing it through, and you’ll look back and wonder why you didn’t start sooner.
Now, about those seven steps! Here they are:
Sounds pretty direct, right? If you tackle each step at a time, it will be. So let's dive right in.
How do you come up with an idea worth writing?
All you need is an urgent problem that only the characters can solve with their special skills.
The key part here is urgent problem. In order for an adventure to be compelling, it needs to insist the characters act! For example, a compelling problem would be the characters sitting inside a tavern that suddenly ignites in roaring flames. This situation forces the characters to act and use their heroic skills to do things like 1. put out the blaze, 2. save bystanders, 3. track down and apprehend the culprit.
In other words, the characters are doing something exciting and dramatic that ordinary people can't or won't do.
Now, lots of adventures make the mistake of presenting a non-compelling problem as its core idea. The most classic example: guard a caravan on its journey to deliver a merchant's goods.
That doesn't demand decisive action. It poses no immediate threat. There is no real problem (except the goblins raiding the caravans... a common, boring occurrence). And it doesn't take a hero to solve that problem — hire some mercenaries!
No, your idea must be worthy of adventurers. Even at low levels, you can give your characters important things to do (see Ghostlight, where 1st-level characters enter the realm of death itself aboard an extra-dimensional ship).
Action Steps: Develop an adventure idea that demands action. If you need help, roll 5 results on the table below (this is a table from my forthcoming old-school D&D book, Shadowdark RPG). Some of the results might be a bit strange and spark unexpected creativity as you try to get things to make sense.
For each result you roll, ask yourself: How will the characters learn about this problem? Try to imagine at least three situations that involve the characters directly. For example, if you get the result "find the thief in the magic library," you could come up with three ways for the characters to learn about this challenge:
Of those three ideas, the one that demands the most action and most directly involves the characters is....
If you guessed number three, you're right! So that will be our adventure idea.
After you've found your adventure idea and have brought the urgent problem as close to the characters as possible, move on to step 2 where we come up with adventure hooks to pull the characters into the action.
When we're talking about an adventure, what we mean is something a Dungeon Master can run in 1-2 sessions. That pans out to about 4-5 hours of gameplay for most groups, or 6-8 encounters.
Of all those encounters, the most important one is the hook. The hook is what pulls your players into the adventure and kicks off the momentum.
Remember in step 1 when I said a good adventure idea needs to demand urgent action from the characters? This is where that comes into play.
Your hook should connect to the characters as closely as possible. It's always better to have something happen to the characters (or around them) rather than off-screen where they can neither see nor care about it.
So we want to pull in the characters, yes. But hold on. When you're writing the hook, it's very important for you to consider that the hook is actually for the players, not the characters.
That's right! You're trying to convince the people playing the game to take the hook, not the imaginary folks inside the game world! The players are the ones who must feel motivated to send their characters on the adventure.
Players are generally enticed by three things: reward (something to make their characters stronger), heroism (the ability to right wrongs and gain esteem for their characters), and discovery (the chance to learn secrets about a problem, location, person, object, etc.).
Finally, know that the hook is the one time where you're allowed to be a bit heavy-handed with making a big change to the game world's status quo (within reason).
For example, normally during an adventure, you wouldn't want to just announce that the characters' ship hit a bad storm and sank without giving them the chance to save the ship (likely in the form of an encounter). But with a hook, you do have that bit of leeway, as long as you aren't too crazy (don't murder someone's favorite NPC or make rocks fall and kill everyone).
Action Steps: Time to come up with your hook. Make sure it contains these two elements:
For example, using our "find the thief in the magic library" idea, our hook would be the thief appearing and snatching something of immeasurable value from the characters before darting off into the forbidden section of the library!
This appeals to the players' desire to get their item back (reward), right a wrong (theft), and discover why the thief stole the object and what's hidden inside the magic library (discovery).
After you have your hook, let's go to the bulk of the work: step 3.
Quick breather to mention that you can join The Arcane Library's newsletter for a free 1st-level 5E adventure, plus more in-depth articles like this one!
We're about to begin planning the rest of the adventure's encounters. But before we do that, we need to know the second most important part of the adventure besides the hook: the final encounter.
We have to understand what the "end game" is, and how we'll know whether the characters have succeeded or failed at our adventure. Note that we need to allow for both success or failure — no adventure should ever guarantee one or the other, or it's not an adventure, it's a narration!
So your task is to imagine what the world would look like if the characters solve the problem you came up with in step 1, and what the world would look like if they fail.
In our example of a thief and magical library, the solution would be the characters getting the item back and escaping the magical library.
Failure would be the characters never getting the item back, dying, or giving up.
So the encounter to determine that situation is going to be our last encounter. Usually this will be a big moment, like a combat or a tense negotiation. I love boss battles, so I'm going to make a big fight the last encounter for our example adventure!
To develop the rest of the encounters after the hook, you can use a trick I often employ called "hurdles-based design."
Imagine for a moment that you're playing in your own adventure. Your character accepts one of the hooks, and... what do they do next?
Think of the two or three most likely thing your character will do all the way until they hit a roadblock.
For example, let's say my character Thelonius (goblin wizard extraordinaire) just had his glorious, tricorn hat of disguise stolen by a thief who then escaped into a magical library.
Thelonius would do one of two things: run into the library in pursuit, or cast locate object and begin methodically trailing the thief with murderous intent.
And so those are Thelonius's next hurdles. Notice how both options hit a roadblock pertinent to the adventure's problem: He's is trying to find or catch the thief, and we don't know if he'll be successful.
An example of a next action that does not contain a roadblock is Thelonius wandering around looking at the books in the library. Yes, that is something he might do, but it's not relevant to solving the adventure's problem.
Sometimes, it's easy as new adventure writers to get overwhelmed with the idea that you need to account for everything that might happen. What if the characters look under that table? What if they decide to take a nap? What if they walk out of the library and talk to someone?
When deciding whether to include an encounter or explanation in your adventure, ask yourself: Does what I'm describing help move the characters closer to the adventure's solution?
If not, do not write it. Trust that most DMs will be able to improvise when their players go off-script, and know that it is not your task to design the whole world; you're writing about one problem and its solution (AKA, an adventure)!
Alright, back to outlining.
We now need to come up with our next hurdle and imagine how we would address it if we were playing the adventure. In fact, we'll need to come up with 8 hurdles in total for the 8 encounters we want to write (about 4-5 hours of gameplay)!
We already know the last encounter, so this is what our outline currently looks like:
Now, you must bridge the gaps between 1 and 8 with encounters that fit the theme of your adventure, give the characters variety, and move it toward the final confrontation.
By variety, I mean different types of encounters. In D&D, we have three broad encounter options: combat, NPC interaction, and exploration (traps, puzzles, navigation). The goal is to make sure you don't have too much of the same stuff back-to-back.
Now, I admit, we can't guess the exact order the characters will go through the adventure (especially with a well-designed map, which we'll discuss later on), but we can estimate a rough path.
So we might decide the rough order of encounters is something like this: navigation, trap, combat, NPC interaction, combat, puzzle, NPC interaction, combat.
Notice how there weren't two encounters of the same type back-to-back. Variety!
Now let's make this even better. We want to make sure there's a cool thing for each broad character type to do (cleric, fighter, rogue, wizard). So try to assign at least one of these encounters to each character type and think about how you can design it around that character's abilities. It won't be the only way to overcome the encounter, of course, but it'll be giving each character an opportunity to shine.
Here's my updated outline following those principles:
Action Steps: First, decide what your final encounter is that solves the problem you introduced. Consider what failure would look like, too.
In the case of our thief and magic library, the final encounter will be a battle against the thief and his magical friends.
Then, fill in the blanks! Mix-and-match encounter types and character types to help you create more hurdles for your characters to overcome. Fill out your encounter list, and then move on to step 4.
A great map has a few critical elements.
I've written a very detailed article about how to design a map from scratch, but the key takeaways are:
If you're looking to take this adventure to publication, you'll definitely want a professional-looking map that can be used in a virtual tabletop program like Roll20 or Owlbear Rodeo. There are three routes here:
Here's an example sketch of what I might do for the magical library. I added a few non-encounter rooms and secret areas to give the characters fun exploration options and places to regroup:
Action Steps: Follow your outline and create a connected series of rooms to match each encounter. Then move on to step 5!
This is the part people think is the hardest, but it's actually going to be a breeze because you've already done all your difficult thinking and planning!
Here, we take the outline and start crafting full sentences and descriptions to make each encounter come to life.
A few guiding principles:
As far as NPCs go, less information is more. You want to give a description of what that NPC looks like, a mannerism or two for the characters to latch onto, and something deeper that makes the NPC interesting, like a motivation or secret. I know I've been redirecting you to a lot of my other articles, but this is one of my best: How To Create Compelling NPCs in Seconds.
Action Steps: Take it one room at a time, and try to spend no more than one page explaining the entire room and the important things that happen in it. Start with what the characters notice when they enter, and then give the DM brief updates underneath that about hidden details and developments. Remember not to give away too much in each opening description so the players are enticed into asking questions and exploring the area.
Once you're through that, it's time for step 6!
Congratulations, you are ready to make your adventure look fancy!
When I first started publishing adventures, I did all my layouts in Apple Pages. Yes, you heard right. A word processor. And there's nothing wrong with that!
These days, word processors are really powerful and useful. You can put art into documents, move things around, format the text in all sorts of ways, and export your document into the all-encompassing PDF format.
There are lots of Microsoft Word and Apple Pages adventure templates out there, and I'd recommending starting with one. This one in particular is a Mithral bestseller on DMs Guild, which means it has a lot going for it.
When laying out your adventure, I'd strongly encourage you to keep each section or encounter to one page at most. That makes the Dungeon Master's life so much easier. Doing this takes refining and cutting and paring down of your writing, but it will make your adventure that much better.
As Bruce Lee said: "In building a statue, a sculptor doesn't keep adding clay to his subject. Actually, he keeps chiseling away at the nonessentials until the truth of his creation is revealed without obstruction."
Now, where to find art?
These days, excellent fantasy stock art is abundant on places like shutterstock.com (search terms "fantasy" or "magic") and drivethrurpg.com (include "stock art" in your search terms). Many writers, myself included, leverage stock art to allow us to publish material faster and give us more budget for things like custom cartography.
For your interior and cover art, the plain truth is that color art tends to look more polished and pull more eyes to your work. If possible, I'd try to avoid mixing-and-matching color and black-and-white art, and I'd try to keep the style of the art you use as internally consistent as possible.
And definitely use your coolest piece of art for your cover. A great cover is the best way to pique interest!
Just a quick note: It is not okay to grab art off of Google searches or from places where artists post their work, like Instagram, Imgur, or DeviantArt. When you publish an adventure, even for free, you must have to have the rights to share the art included in it.
Finally, wherever you get your art, make absolutely sure to follow the attribution rules. On that note, let's go to the final step about legal stuff!
Ah, legal stuff! This is the most exciting part of adventure writing because it means you're almost ready to publish.
First of all, you must include an attribution and link for every piece of art you use. Include the artist's name, even if you got the art from a stock website. Doing so will ensure you're being respectful and abiding by best practices.
As far as publishing outlets go, you have two broad options:
If all of that sounds like mystical babbling, you are not the first to think so. In fact, this was one of the most confusing parts of adventure publishing to the point that I wrote the most in-depth article I could possibly manage on how to use and understand all the D&D licensing.
Action Steps: Read that article I linked to know exactly what you need to do with all the licensing stuff. Implement the information in it step-by-step and you'll glide right through all the licensing shenanigans.
Wow, if you made it this far, congratulations are in order! You now have actionable steps and my best tips to take you from no adventure idea to a publishable work.
I hope this article sets you on the right path and saves you the years of flailing and making mistakes that I went through to get proficient with this process.
If you write an adventure with the help of this article, I'd love to hear about it! Shoot me an email or message on social media and let me know.
Thanks for reading. Now go forth and write! Happy adventuring!
Want to see me use this process myself to write a 5E adventure from scratch? Check out the first video below in my adventure writing series on YouTube (more videos coming soon)!
Header art by Warm_Tail / shutterstock.com
]]>"Imagine first, design second."
One of the web's most notorious adventure reviewers had agreed to talk to me about a project of mine that felt dead in the water. We were halfway through a video call when, out of nowhere, he looked up and told me with oracular clarity that that was the problem with the adventure I was writing.
It seemed like a revelation to both of us at the same time. I blinked in surprise.
"Imagine?" I said. "Like, imagine the space? The combats?"
"All of it," he said. "What you're doing here is designing. And it's not bad, it's just... boring. The adventure itself feels flat."
These were the words I needed to hear. I knew something was off with the writing, but I was struggling to put my finger on it.
The project had other things going for it, thankfully. Strong layout, punchy art, interesting monsters. But good cake ingredients don't always make a good cake.
It began to dawn on me where I had gone wrong. I'd been trying to juggle mechanics, pacing, monster design, space design. And throughout all of it, I had neglected to really imagine the space and sink my teeth into what was exciting about it!
I'd reduced the dungeon to a mechanical series of encounters, traps, fights, and treasure caches. And although it had technical merit for those elements, it didn't actually have thrill, vibe, or color.
"You're right," I groaned. I laughed at how easy the problem was to see in hindsight. "So... how do I fix that?"
This reviewer, who has been called incredibly cruel by people who do not like critique, went on to give me some of the kindest and most thoughtful advice I've ever received.
For the record, if you can't take feedback gracefully (even when it's harsh), you aren't ready to be a publisher. This is a fear we all face, and rather than shrink away from it, you can confront it yourself by seeking out the harshest feedback you can find and learning to separate the trolling from the truth.
After my talk with the reviewer, I had a sense of relief I wasn't expecting. During our conversation, I resolved to continue tinkering with the adventure as a way to hone my writing while also deciding not to publish it.
I thought I'd feel disappointed about putting this one in the "Don't Publish, Ever" drawer, but it was just the opposite; I was ready to jump into new things that sparked my interest and excitement, which this project lacked.
And what advice did the reviewer give me? I'll distill it below, along with my personal observations that line up with what he and I discussed.
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How can you detect when you're making the mistakes I did in writing a lifeless adventure? Here are some signs:
1. You can't name at least three things you're excited to write about in your adventure.
2. You sit down to write and can't clearly imagine the space in which the adventure is happening.
3. You feel like you could accomplish the exact same material you're writing by using random dungeon generation tables.
If you run into any of the above dreaded issues, take heart! You can take steps to remedy a lifeless adventure or extricate yourself from the pain. Here's what I ended up doing:
1. Accept that you're going to write some duds once in a while. This is my job, and I still wander down fruitless creative paths on a regular basis. Don't beat yourself up.
2. Consider setting this project aside and starting fresh, or at least rolling back what you have and coming at the adventure from an entirely new angle. Don't do this just because the writing is tough; do it only when your heart isn't in the work.
3. In either case, realize that you need to engage your imagination first, and come at your project brimming with enthusiasm and strong images in your mind. To find that enthusiasm, start a new research cycle:
4. Accept that even with excellent writing, you'll have to do hard work and difficult polishing to get it just right. Still, this should never feel like endlessly pulling teeth. If something is painful to work on, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, it might be time to move on.
5. Don't write to tropes, genres, or expectations of how something "should be." I went wrong on this with my above failed project. I was writing a more Old School-style adventure, and I thought that meant "simple and straightforward." Wrong! Three giant rats in a rubble-strewn room is not exciting anymore, even if it may have been novel 40+ years ago. We can do better and imagine bigger.
Finally, a few parting words.
Before you begin writing, you must see the titanic, black-glass mountain towering overhead like a rearing leviathan. You must smell the sultry jungle mist, redolent with flowers and the stench of nearby corpses. You must feel the rat bones pop beneath your boots as you stalk across the damp flagstone into the vine-draped halls of the monkey god.
Only then are you ready to add a Dex save to avoid falling into a 10-foot deep pit trap.
Imagine first, design second.
Header art by Tithi Luadthong / shutterstock.com
]]>Kelsey from The Arcane Library here to talk about a question in the gaming world that is heavily debated: Is milestone leveling or XP leveling better?
Now, I should preface this by saying that I almost never believe one thing is always better than the other (although Jif peanut butter is the best, and you can't persuade me otherwise).
You can expect a similar take here, but I won't just declare a tie. In this article, I'm going to present a (totally experimental) alternative to both milestone and XP leveling!
First, why is this even a debate? As is often the case, XP vs. milestone leveling comes down to what DMs think is easier/more fun vs. what players perceive that to be. And as we saw in the sandbox vs. railroad debate, looking at the pros and cons for both players and DMs helps. So let's do that!
XP Leveling Pros
So, each system has something going for it and something to knock. I've found that very narrative-driven groups tend to prefer milestone leveling managed by the DM, and more exploration-focused or sandbox groups tend prefer the XP system that leaves leveling more in the players' control.
Do you as a DM or player find you prefer one or the other?
Lately, I've been tinkering with a system that's more fun than XP and its fiddly number-crunching (not to mention its underwhelming support for exploration and social encounters), but not totally controlled by the DM so players can't hunt XP. Be warned that this is totally experimental and hasn't been playtested. We're just having fun imagining, here!
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This is the system, which I shall call Mithril XP (you'll see why):
Characters are broken down into four categories based on level. Copper is levels 1-5. Silver is levels 6-10. Gold is levels 11-15. Mithril is levels 16-20. These match D&D tiers, but I just like the cooler names, and I think players might get a kick out of using them, too.
Characters need to complete a certain number of encounters at or above their category to advance to the next level. An important note is that completing an encounter below a character's category isn't worth anything; it would be too trivial of a challenge. This also encourages players to seek level-appropriate challenges and prevents them from slaying countless giant rats in the swamp to rack up no-risk XP.
Here's how many encounters it takes at each tier to gain a level:
Copper: 2
Silver: 3
Gold: 4
Mithril: 5
You can certainly tinker with the above distribution, but in my case, I want to implement this in a West Marches game. So, I want low-level characters to gain fast, and I want higher level characters to have a longer tail to spend more time in the "sweet spot" between 6-15. Add more encounters to a tier to slow progression.
Next, encounters (combat, exploration, and social) are assigned a category, too. For example, a boss fight against a hobgoblin and his minions could be called a Copper encounter. A negotiation with an ancient red dragon in her lair would be a Mithril encounter.
Here is how much each encounter is worth:
Copper: 1 Copper
Silver: 2 Copper, 1 Silver
Gold: 3 Copper, 2 Silver, 1 Gold
Mithril: 4 Copper, 3 Silver, 2 Gold, 1 Mithril
Here's another important point: Similar to milestone leveling, not every encounter will have a category (and thus, a reward). Not every encounter is notable, and this will also discourage characters from seeking unnecessary combats or trying to get into an awkwardly deep conversation with the barkeep just for the XP gains. Instead, we'll be consistent and clear about exactly what encounters and achievements have an award attached.
Here are some examples you could share with the players:
Copper: Defeating a local threat, successfully exploring into nearby territory, negotiating out of a likely combat, convincing an important NPC to help, clearing a small dungeon, finding an uncommon treasure, completing a mission of local importance
Silver: Defeating a regional threat, successfully exploring into distant territory, persuading a powerful group of foes into something, changing the attitude of a dangerous foe from hostile to friendly, clearing a risky dungeon, finding a treasure that is highly sought, completing a mission of regional importance
Gold: Defeating a national threat, successfully exploring into far-away lands, negotiating successfully with a monarch, convincing a powerful warlord to turn back its army, clearing a deadly dungeon, finding a treasure of mystery and legend, completing a mission of continental importance
Mithril: Defeating a cosmic threat, successfully exploring into the multiverse, successfully negotiating with a god or supreme entity, clearing a dungeon where mighty beings fear to enter, finding an artifact that can destroy nations, completing a mission of planar importance
With the above list, we're still allowing the players to plan and choose how they want to go about gaining levels; level-up opportunities are not hidden behind the inscrutable DM screen. And the DM can still offer a reward in the moment if it's well-deserved (since we can never truly predict what the players will do).
The math about how this shakes out isn't perfect with 5E's normal progression — and it's not meant to be! The point is to give players some control and visibility while still allowing the DM to establish pacing from the outset and only give out rewards for completing valuable encounters.
For an example of the math, let's say a 1st-level character is part of a team of five that defeats a boss fight against an ancient white dragon (a Mithril encounter). That is worth 25,000 XP. So the 1st-level character will gain four Coppers from it, and thus two levels, taking the character to level 3! That's just slightly behind the level gains from a 5,000 XP share, instead, which would take the character to 4th level.
Super epic encounters could even be the fabled and secret Adamantine tier that exists above 20th level (just follow the progression pattern up).
Altogether, it would take a character 70 same-tier encounters worthy of a reward to go from first to 20th level. That's faster than D&D 5E's progression, but also remember that you're not giving XP for every encounter — just the notable ones. Now the players don't have to grind six combats a day to stay on track, and they can reach exciting high levels without three years of game time!
So, there's the Mithril System for leveling that takes a bit from both XP leveling and milestone leveling. I'm planning to test this out in my next D&D campaign, fiddle with it, and see how it lands. If you decide to try this out, or you have any cool ideas for it, let me know what you think!
Header art by Tithi Luadthong / shutterstock.com
]]>Why is making D&D maps so hard?
I might be in the minority here, but I find designing maps to be one of the trickiest parts of adventure writing. Still, after ungracefully stumbling my way through drafting a lot of maps over the years for publication, I've learned a few ways to ease the process.
If you've ever stared at a blank sheet of grid paper and been totally lost about what to do next, this article is for you! I'm going to show you how I got this:
Out of this:
A note before we proceed: Not all adventures need maps, but most adventures have some element of site-based exploration. Even if you write for purely theater-of-the-mind play, you can still benefit from a strong visualization of the locations in your adventure.
One of my hangups with maps is the chicken-before-the-egg problem. Do you try to write the adventure first and then draw the map to fit it? Or do you draw a map cold before knowing much about the adventure?
If you had to choose one or the other, I think it's easier to write an adventure to an already existing map.
But! This has its limitations:
For a control freak like me, that never goes well.
The fact is, maps and adventures designed in isolation from each other are often not harmonious. At some point you'll need to mesh the map and encounters together, and the longer into the process you wait, the harder it can become.
So I draw the maps and write the adventure together right from the start, building upon both in very small stages.
For the map at the top of this article, I started with a kernel of an adventure idea: The characters need to steal a black lotus flower growing inside a monastery guarded by demonic monk-sorcerers.
As excited as I was to start writing that very Conan-esque adventure, I first needed to make a list of what spaces might exist inside the monastery.
Room ideas: guard room, training hall, sorcery chambers, library, the black lotus room, central courtyard, meditation chambers, religious shrines.
Once I had a list of general locations, I made a second list of visual and thematic elements to really get my brain firing. If the rooms list is the bread, the thematic list is the delicious peanut butter plus Nutella.
Random roll tables (what up, Tome of Adventure Design!) and Google Images helped provide tons of inspiration.
Thematic ideas: shadows, red light, room of false doors, illusions, statues, blood moon, smoke, invisible paths, trials of worthiness, mirrors, hidden locations, poisoned water, beams of moonlight, fire, black-horned demons.
Note, it's always better to over-shoot on these lists and come up with as many ideas as you can. Then you can pare down and keep the very best ones.
Creating these lists and combining them helped me come up with encounter and pacing ideas:
Everything was starting to work together. I now had my overall adventure idea plus thematic rooms and encounters to bring it to life.
I was finally ready to start drawing that dungeon map!
...By doodling some circles and lines.
That's right! Drawing maps straight onto the graph paper has always eluded me. They never look quite right, and the spacing gets wacky. The squares of the graph paper also subconsciously move me toward blockier room designs.
So I always draw circles and lines in a notebook first to represent rooms and their connections to other rooms. That helps me visualize the flow of movement without over-committing to anything. I'm easily able to re-draw the lines and circles to make sure it all fits together.
You can see some of the circles and lines I made for the monastery map in the picture up above. You might notice how those circles and lines translated into the map, which was slightly different!
Once I was happy with the final version of circles and lines, I labeled each circle with its room contents. Guardians, library, training hall — all things that came from my original brainstorming lists.
With the circles and lines to guide me, I started sketching blobs and shapes in my notebook as a rough draft for each room. I refined each one until I was happy with the general shapes and features (water, pillars, stairs, statues, etc.), starting over quickly each time I wanted to get a full look at things.
No counting squares yet, no fussing with exact details. It was all very quick and loose, just building general size, spatial relationships, and the placement of key features.
Here's a second or third iteration of one of my blob drafts:
The final map came together as I wrote each section of the adventure with the blob map as my guide.
That was when I counted exact squares and drew them onto graph paper, committing to room size and the placement of all important features.
If you look closely at the below image, you'll still see plenty of eraser marks and scribbled notes. It all takes a bit of tinkering, right down to the final draft.
(I drew the courtyard stairs going in the wrong direction, oops!)
And so it was drawn! I traced over the lines in black ink and sent an image of the map (along with a list of notes) to a professional cartographer, who made it look ten times cooler than I could have imagined.
Let me leave you with a general list of useful things to keep in mind for making interesting maps:
Maps are always going to be a tricky and ever-improving art form for me, but believe me — if I can somehow do it, you can too.
Build piece-by-piece alongside your writing, make idea lists to pull from, and draft and trash plenty of simple sketches until you're ready to commit.
P.S. The monastery map from the beginning of this article appears in Monastery of the Shadow Sorcerers, an 8th-level adventure that's part of Legends of the Library, Vol. 1. You can scope it out here if you want to see more!
I had an epiphany during a gaming session when my character died in the vicious jaws of a manticore.
It hurt to lose a character I loved (our reactions were caught on live stream), but I also knew I wouldn't have traded that outcome for anything less.
I realized that without the serious danger that resulted in my character's death, her demise, and the campaign itself, would have been far less exciting and meaningful!
So in this article, I want to look at how Dungeon Masters can use the forces of danger and death (D&D... oh wait... that's already taken) to create exciting, memorable moments players will talk about for many sessions to come.
First of all, imagine your character dies unexpectedly on the end of a goblin's sword in an encounter that was just supposed to drain a few of the party's combined HP and spells. Would you feel a bit sold short in that case?
I would! I would have preferred to die in a heroic battle against a deadly monstrosity that was ravaging nearby villages, a beast we chose to face knowing death was a real risk.
Which is what happened to my character, by the way!
As Dungeon Masters, we often focus on making our encounters perfectly level-balanced, neither too risky nor too easy. We laser-in on "getting to six," a term meaning reaching enough encounters per adventuring day to keep the party busy-but-safe (which usually turns out to be six encounters).
But what we're really doing is figuring out how to avoid danger and make the world a low-risk place for our players.
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Now, is that a bad thing? No. We need to have some balance if we don't want our players rolling up new characters every other session. But can "getting to six" result in a lot of low-stakes, grindy encounters? Yes, without a doubt!
There's a reason "grinding for XP" is viewed as a chore. It's not exciting, memorable, or risky.
Danger, on the other hand, is electrifying. So we occasionally want to cut the grind and replace it with encounters that clock in as deadly. If we assume six normal encounters are the standard, perhaps we condense that down into 2 deadly encounters in a day.
We don't do this lightly, either. The key is making sure players know the risk they're about to take is deadly, important, and not-your-normal-kobolds. Don't hit them with one of these when their resources are super low, or when they're not sure of the stakes — that would make it feel unfair.
Now, if you try this out, you might notice something happening. Your players are on the edge of their seats during the fight. They're desperately clawing for victory. They're falling unconscious, saving each other, rallying, using every resource, and noticing every environmental advantage they can scrape out.
Suddenly, you have an excitement level you can't achieve when abiding by the normal safety recommendations.
After the fight, players will talk about it for weeks. And if their characters die in such an epic battle, they'll know they didn't die in a throwaway fight against some orcs who rolled lucky crits.
I've seen this dramatic transformation happen with my own players. This spring, they almost died in a tense battle where a character jumped on the back of a wyvern. The wyvern flew out over a 200-foot cliff to shake the character off, the group rallied with spells and abilities to help him, and he killed the wyvern just before it turned to make a devastating pass. Then he had to make a tough return jump to avoid tumbling to his death.
To our great relief and excitement, he made it! But what if he hadn't?
He would still have had an awesome death story. A hero's ending.
My players talked about that battle for many sessions thereafter, and they actually thanked me for such a fun fight (I kept thinking, "they're thanking me for nearly killing them...")
As Dungeon Masters, we're rooting for the characters just as much as the players. We feel personal responsibility when a character dies (in the above clip, our fantastic Index Card RPG Dungeon Master, Jason, couldn't help but apologize even though he was doing exactly what he should have)! Our love of the characters can make us subconsciously shy away from real danger.
But don't forget that it's also our DM responsibility to make sure the players are excited, engaged, and challenged. We have to give them opportunities to be memorable heroes. We have to show them we care by trying to kill them.
Sounds a bit crazy until you realize it's a key way to create tension, excitement, and interest!
Header art by Dom Critelli / shutterstock.com
]]>Tension! The driving force behind some of the best scenes in film, comics, novels — you name it. Tension is what keeps us on the edge of our seats waiting to find out what happens.
For example, a great source of tension in my life during the first season of The Mandalorian was wondering whether Baby Yoda would survive yet another kidnapping attempt.
If you're like me, you were glued to The Mandalorian each week making sure our precious, broth-sipping meme of the year wasn't coming to any harm.
And this is a powerful effect we can put to use in our D&D games. Tension comes from questions we ask ourselves about what will happen. In screenwriting and theater, these are referred to as dramatic questions. "Will baby Yoda survive? Will Wonder Woman put an end to WWI? Will I have any cavities this time around at the dentist?"
When you're designing an encounter, you can make sure there's tension by setting up a clear dramatic question.
Once you know it, you'll know what's exciting about the encounter. You'll also know when the encounter's tension is over so you don't get stuck in a dead scene!
So, how do you sort out the dramatic question of an encounter? First, determine what will cause the danger/risk of the encounter to end. Then, turn that into a question that can be answered with a "yes" or "no."
For example, let's say the Mandalorian needs to make it through curtains of enemy blaster fire to the safety of his ship. What will end the danger? If he escapes to his ship in one piece. So the dramatic question is, "Will the Mandalorian safely escape to his ship?"
Some dramatic questions are just that simple. But there are many cases where the dramatic question is much more than it seems, too.
Take a boss battle, for example. Amid the fighting and spell slinging, the villain is trying to place the Iron Crown of Nadian on the Apocalyptic Altar of Entropy to unleash madness upon the mortal world.
Even though this is a combat, the dramatic question isn't, "Can the characters kill the villain?" The thing that has everyone on the edge of their seats is actually this: "Can the characters stop the villain from placing the crown on the altar?"
If the characters stop the villain from placing the crown on the altar, whether by stealing it or tossing her inside a portable hole, then the tension is suddenly gone. The dramatic question is answered!
That means it's time to move toward the next scene rather than linger in an encounter that is no longer very dramatic (and wasn't even about fighting to the death, as it turns out).
If you can recognize tension and know when it's over, then you'll have great command over pacing and excitement.
Next time you scream in fear over Baby Yoda's safety (am I the only one who does that?), ask yourself: What's the dramatic question here?
When you do that, you'll see exactly what's behind all the thrilling tension.
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Header art © Dean Spencer, used with permission / drivethrurpg.com
]]>Has another Dungeon Master ever asked you if you're a "sandboxer" or a "railroader?"
Or maybe you've heard someone decry adventures that are railroads and then talk about chasing the illustrious, ever-elusive sandbox-style campaign.
You may even be wondering what I'm talking about with all these buzzwords.
First, a brief explanation. Railroads and sandboxes are both styles of D&D adventures that focus on limiting the players' choices (railroad) or offering a huge abundance of choices (sandbox).
A quick example of a railroad: a dungeon where the rooms are laid out in a linear fashion, from entrance to boss, with no flexibility to the order of exploration.
A sandbox example is a dungeon laid out in a hub, where each room branches off the center and the players can choose the order in which to explore.
"Aha!" most people say. "Limiting players' choices is bad, so railroad adventures must be bad." The fast conclusion is that sandboxes are superior because they offer so much choice.
But! I'm about to go against that philosophy. Hear me out. Railroads serve an important purpose, and so do sandboxes. Neither is good at the exclusion of the other, and I argue that the best kind of adventure is actually a blend of the two — let's call it a "sand road."
Now, why should you even care about the fiddly nature of a sandbox vs. a railroad? If your players are having fun, then all is well. That's an axiom of truth if I ever heard one. But maybe you're limiting yourself without realizing it by only employing one style. Or perhaps you want to write and publish a D&D adventure, and you want to make sure you're considering all the angles!
So I'm going to lay out the major benefits and dangers of each style, and then explain why I feel the sand road (the blend of the two) is an ideal outcome.
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Railroad Benefits
How to Achieve A Blend: The Sand Road
The major achilles heel of a railroad is lack of flexibility, while the same for a sandbox is lack of motivation and story. And there's a way to lessen the issues of both by combining both styles.
You can do this by alternating between a sandbox and a railroad at varying levels. By that I mean from the top down from the campaign level, to the arc level, and then the adventure level.
A fantastic example of this is the most recent Legend of Zelda title, Breath of the Wild. The main hero, Link, knows there's an overall story goal (defeat Ganon and save Princess Zelda), and to do so, he must visit different dungeons around the map to get sweet gear and correct the terrible wrongs inside each one that are contributing to Ganon's power.
At the campaign level, Breath of the Wild is a railroad. Link must conquer each dungeon to have a chance at beating Ganon (except for those crazy people on YouTube who run straight to Ganon armed only with a wooden stick and three hearts).
But on the arc level, the order in which Link explores the world is totally up to him. He must travel, battle, and talk his way around the map to hit the four main dungeons (arcs). There are sub-storylines with people and places he can accept, or not, to help him get around. This is a classic sandbox in all its glory.
Finally, each actual dungeon in Zelda is a railroad again. There's a fun beginning, middle, and end that must be followed in mostly the prescribed path in order to beat the dungeon.
So you can see that we variate between railroad - sandbox - railroad depending on what scope you're looking at with the overall campaign in Breath of the Wild. This is what made it one of the most exciting and satisfying Zelda games ever released — it balances between the freedom to explore while maintaining a driving storyline that prevents the hero from being a directionless wanderer.
Final reveal: You can even variate the sandbox vs. railroad element within the scope of a single adventure.
An example I can cite that I wrote it, Temple of the Basilisk Cult. It starts with a railroad when a pre-determined event happens to the players that creates a story goal. Then, it shifts into an exploration-driven sandbox within a temple dungeon that has many branching paths. At the end, there's a final railroad element to the adventure — in order to "beat" the dungeon, the players have to deal with a final boss in whichever way they choose, be it negotiation, combat, or something else.
Ultimately, it's a variation between a sandbox and railroad. It never leans too heavily toward one side or the other. It's a sand road!
Header art © Dean Spencer, used with permission / drivethrurpg.com
]]>I want to share an adventure-writing technique with you that has saved me in countless emergency situations.
My secret lies in the Five Room Dungeon! Hats off to expert game designer Johnn Four for originating the idea. If you’ve heard of these before, you know their power. And if not… welcome to the ancient order, my friend.
Full disclosure: I've also used the Five Room Dungeon technique to write full-out adventures, most notably Crypts of Azarumme. So they're not just for emergency situations. But you can rely on them in a pinch!
In this article, I'm going to write a complete Five Room Dungeon to illustrate how they work. You can put it in your back pocket if you need a quick dungeon to throw at your players.
First, imagine this not-uncommon scenario: The players said they were headed down to the sewers at the end of last game, so you spent your most recent prep time working up a map and planting all the devious crocodiles, falling portcullises, and stalking thieves needed to make for a great session.
Fast forward to game night when the players announce they’ve decided to kick in the teeth of the cult they know is lurking inside the abandoned Temple of Krull instead.
Now, you can either panic, or you can grit your teeth and say, "Cowabunga it is!"
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It's on! Let's write a Five Room Dungeon for the Temple of Krull! We'll call it a 4th-level adventure (feel free to use this mini-dungeon next time you need one).
A Five Room Dungeon has, as you might have guessed, five main parts. You can mix up the order of these parts (especially the middle sections), and they don't all have to be actual rooms — think of them as encounters.
So let's jump in!
1. Entrance with Guardian: Throw some gatekeepers at the players! This could be monster or barrier. The Temple of Krull is stocked with overconfident acolytes of the Plague Mother (I'm making this up as we go), so they rely on a secret entrance inside a shabby, abandoned church sept in a bad part of town. The sept is filled with disease-stricken beggars.
2. Puzzle/Roleplaying Challenge: The second encounter is a changeup from combat. Here, we test the players who love roleplaying and problem-solving. Past the door, in a shadowy foyer, an ill woman hides in the corner. She holds a sick infant and will trade information in exchange for aid for her child. Make the players' hearts hurt.
3. Trick or Setback: The trick or setback is a combat, barrier, or even puzzle that threatens the players' plans. One of the best ways to do this is by compromising their advantages; we'll make it so the players' stealthy entrance and their potential edge of surprise is challenged.
4. Big Climax: Time for the heroes to really flex in the final confrontation! Usually a big combat works well here, but it could also be an epic skill challenge, negotiation, or chase.
5. Reward/Revelation: Finally, the reward for hard work. Here we could have treasure, boons, information, or something that the players will appreciate. Make it into a shocking revelation as a bonus.
And that's it! A Five Room Dungeon with a set of encounters that match a specific goal, provide variety, and help you quick-step your way through adventure creation.
Now, is this adventure a bit of a proverbial railroad? Sure. But I expect this adventure would still be plenty entertaining for a night of gaming. Here's what I think about the ancient battle of railroaders vs. sandboxers and which is the "best" option.
I hope you'll give this adventure design hack a whirl if you get the chance. Let me know what you think!
If your D&D group is anything like mine, they're always talking to an NPC you had absolutely no plans for in your notes.
Sound familiar?
Maybe the players bailed on the plan to explore the Sunken Tomb of Yix-Nathir, or maybe they decided to get really, really interested in the halfling barkeep for no reason at all.
Either way, every DM will face the inevitable need to come up with a compelling NPC on the fly and make it look like it was the plan all along. So how do you go from nothing to a clever, sassy potion vendor in a matter of seconds?
First off, you need a formula. NPCs suffer from the problem of infinite options — with no real limit to what you can choose, it's easy to get stuck on the sheer abundance of possibilities. Suddenly, you don't know if you should pick an accent first, or portray the NPC as a shady person, or come up with some unique quirks. Or maybe you can't think of a single interesting thing at all except that the NPC has a red beard.
I've hit this problem so many times that I had to impose some rules for my brain to work within. I limited my NPC design to four crucial elements (I also have a process for helping me decide the toughest element out of the four). After a bit of practice, the whole thing now takes me just a few seconds. Kind of cool, right? Let me show you how I do this:
1. Name. I'm so bad at this that I made a mini GM screen with a huge list of names on the inside that I keep handy at all times. You can also make a list of your own!
2. Appearance. I think of one or two standout elements that will help the players remember what the NPC looks like. The key is to take a feature and make it unusual. Example features include: Hair, height, clothing, demeanor, posture, injuries, eyes, weight, jewelry, racial traits, lack of expected traits.
3. Does. A tic, behavior, or frequent action that shows a bit of character. Take a typical behavior this NPC would do. Then, once again, make it unusual. Examples include: Blinks very hard, wipes mugs repeatedly, clenches jaw, burps frequently, has a high-pitched laugh, constantly realigns his wig.
4. Secret. The most interesting part. Every NPC has a secret, and that informs how the NPC behaves. For example, is this NPC in support of the local cult? He might be a bit nervous around the players in that case.
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Now, choosing a secret can be tough — so I have a trick for doing this fast. I use a process called the FORD Method (originally developed to help people figure out what to ask each other in awkward small-talk situations) to pin down something the character has a secret about. FORD stands for Family, Occupation, Recreation, and Dreams.
I choose one FORD element (sometimes I roll a d4!), and then I give the NPC something to hide about that particular subject. For Family? Perhaps this NPC has a troublesome brother he's looking after. For Occupation, maybe the NPC is a good archer because she had to defend her family farm against invading goblins as a child.
I bet you could come up with some excellent examples for Recreation and Dreams!
Finally, when I'm making an NPC on the spot, I don't worry about alignment. That will show through in the NPC's behavior based on the choices you made above. In my published adventures, I include a flavorful quote and alignment for each NPC, but for on-the-fly play, you don't strictly need those.
What do you think? Will this help you pull an NPC out of the ethereal next time you need one? I'd love to hear if you've used this process, or if you have a personal favorite NPC of your own who will stand out in your players' minds!
Header art by breakermaximus / shutterstock.com
]]>Have you ever had a spell completely derail your entire D&D adventure?
I've heard a few horror stories, including one where a druid used speak with animals and a few pointed questions to uncover the adventure's surprise villain within the first ten minutes.
]]>Have you ever had a spell completely derail your entire D&D adventure?
I've heard a few horror stories, including one where a druid used speak with animals and a few pointed questions to uncover the adventure's surprise villain within the first ten minutes.
Or the time Taliesin Jaffe's character in Critical Role managed to sideline an entire naval battle with a good roll on a control water spell.
These moments of unexpected triumph can be incredibly fun for the players, but they can catch even the most experienced Dungeon Masters off guard. So what can DMs and adventure writers do about all these terrifying spells? There are a few things!
While you won't always be able to predict what spells the players will leverage (even Matt Mercer gets hit by this sometimes), you can minimize nasty surprises by digging into the spell lists and hunting for "problem spells."
A great place to start is the divination and enchantment spell lists. Those can have a big impact on mysteries and influencing NPCs. A few examples include zone of truth, speak with animals, and charm person.
You'll also want to watch out for spells that can trivialize the adventuring environment, such as dimension door or scrying + teleport.
Below is a list of spells, sorted by category, that you want to bear in mind while writing or running a D&D adventure.
Remember that you don’t want to outright foil or negate these spells — just consider how you’d respond to them if the players used them. Build your encounters around these spells rather than against them.
The purple spells are ones that have an outsized impact at their level bracket. Most of the spells here are “corner cases,” but you’ll want to keep the purple ones in mind at all times.
These spells that cover all sorts of circumstances. Use the list as a reference, but don't feel you have to memorize or live in fear of everything listed in it. The point is to avoid being caught by surprise or writing yourself into an easily defeated corner by something like dispel magic.
Now, with these spells, the idea isn't to figure out how to foil each and every one. You want the characters to be able to use the spells they've earned. But if you sit down to write and realize the fly spell might be an easy button for your adventure, you can design encounters that benefit from fly and others that don't.
Give the players opportunities use these spells; tempt them with expending all their 4th-level spell slots to dimension door through one room, only to find the boss battle could have benefitted from a 4th-level spell, too.
Finally, try not to hinge an entire adventure on a single spell or magic item. For example, if the main villain maintains her cover for most of the adventure with a hat of disguise, even low-level characters have multiple ways to neutralize that, possibly without even realizing (how many rogues can resist stealing a cool hat?).
This season's latest trend: hats stolen from NPCs.
And when the unexpected does happen — a player bombs an entire encounter or adventure with one well-placed spell — go with it and celebrate that player's creativity. You'll notice in the above video that even though Matt Mercer had invested a ton of energy into prepping his naval battle, he didn't pull the rug out from under the players when they derailed it. He embraced their brilliant move with a laugh and an "onward" attitude.
And next time, that same spell won't catch him off-guard.
Header art by Tithi Luadthong / shutterstock.com
]]>Publish D&D adventures legally with the Open Game License (OGL) and 5E Systems Reference Document (SRD)! A primer on how to publish D&D material as a third-party writer while remaining lawful good.
]]>Welcome to this primer on how to publish D&D material as a third-party writer while remaining lawful good. I hope I can help clarify some of this and make it much less painful, scary, and off-putting.
In this article, we'll talk about how to publish D&D adventures legally with the Open Game License (OGL) 1.0a and 5E Systems Reference Document (SRD).
I’m focusing on those who want to publish 100% independent, third-party stuff for this primer. Just be forewarned that these rules don't apply to publishing on DMs Guild.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer or anything official like that, so please know all of the following is not legal advice. You should absolutely consult with a lawyer if you have any questions, and you should not take this article as evergreen — laws can and do change, so make sure you do your due diligence if you have any doubts.
So! To start, all the third-party D&D material you publish must be OGL-compliant, meaning it only uses game material that's been released under the Open Game License (OGL). It also has to follow the rules set out in the OGL.
Already confused? Me too. I'm about to explain everything, so keep scrolling for the info drop.
A quick note, I made a glossary of key terms at the end of this article. Refer to it if you get acronymed out of your mind — happens to the best of us.
Now, let the explanations begin!
The Open Game License is a short contract Wizards of the Coast created. It contains 15 provisions that explain the rules surrounding what D&D material you can use in your published work.
When you publish third-party D&D material, you must include a copy of the OGL in it, plus a few other things you add to the “legal stuff” page of your document (more on that later). You have to do this and abide by the rules in the OGL even if you publish something entirely free of cost.
You should absolutely read the Open Game License — it’s short. You can find a copy of it as the first page of the 5E Systems Reference Document (I'll explain what that is in a moment).
Next, let’s go into what Open Game Content (OGC) is. OGC is a "body of work" that many creators have contributed to over time. It's the open-source world of D&D material. Anything in the OGC is free to use as long as you properly credit and cite the original publisher and abide by the OGL’s rules.
An example of Open Game Content you can use in your writing is the all-important 5E Systems Reference Document (5E SRD). The 5E SRD is a subset of D&D rules that Wizards of the Coast has given anyone permission to use for free under the OGL.
The 5E SRD is the most important Open Game Content, in fact, since it's the core rules of D&D that would otherwise be WotC's sole copyright to use. With the 5E SRD, WotC is letting us use the backbone of D&D totally for free under the Open Game License. It’s an awesome resource!
Note that while WotC has been very generous with what they included in the 5E SRD, they did NOT include permission to use their trademarks. That includes the words "Dungeons & Dragons," "D&D," or "Dungeon Master." In an update as of late 2022, WotC has now trademarked the phrase "The world's greatest roleplaying game." So that's why you often see people saying "Game Master," "5E," or "the world's most popular role-playing game" on third-party material instead.
If you look at the 5E SRD closely, you’ll find it’s missing some things from the core D&D books. Iconic monsters such as beholders aren’t in it. Spells with proper names like Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion aren’t in it. Even some character races, magic items, class options, and feats aren’t in it. The 5E SRD is not a carbon copy of all the material in the core D&D books.
Be careful to check what you want to use in your writing against the 5E SRD. All D&D stuff is important to look up, whether it's rules about magic item attunement, races, feats, or sub-classes of the barbarian.
The 5E SRD is awesome and expansive, but it’s not the only place you can pull material from in your writing. Some third-party D&D writers do a thing called submitting their material as Open Game Content.
To do this, they publish something original and then make a statement in the back of the publication saying they’re allowing X, Y, and Z to be used under the Open Game License. Later on, we’ll look for real-world examples of how to phrase this statement.
Just be aware that submitting material you created as Open Game Content isn't required when you publish something. It’s totally optional, but certainly appreciated.
So far so good? To recap, you have the legal contract called the Open Game License. That contract allows third-party creators to use material that is Open Game Content, meaning its creator has submitted it as open source material to the D&D universe. The 5E SRD is the biggest and most important body of Open Game Content, but there are other creators who have written D&D material and have submitted it to be used by others, too.
Now, be aware that any D&D material you use outside of OGC stuff has to be something you created that isn’t riffing on someone else’s copyright. So don't slap extra eyes on someone's bird beast and call it a "googly-eyed bird beast."
When I say “copyright," I mean material that is considered Product Identity — proper names, custom monsters, storylines, and more. The creator owns and has the sole right to use that material.
The creator owns that material because they wrote it; they don’t have to apply for any legal documentation, publish it, mail it to themself in a dated envelope, or pay anyone. Under copyright law, creators own their material the second they create it, and nobody else can use it without their permission.
So what falls under the umbrella of Product Identity? Well, a ton of stuff, actually. Everything in a product that isn’t Open Game Content is Product Identity. Because of that, declaring your Product Identity in the legal section of your publication is actually optional! It's considered to be "everything else" in your work that isn't Open Game Content. But many creators (including myself) still declare our Product Identity just to be clear.
Be aware that Product Identity isn't just original names, places, monsters, storylines, etc. — it's also trade dress (the "look and feel" of the published work), logos, and even special words and phrases.
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Now, technically, there are some ways to use copyrighted material without permission under a doctrine called fair use. But that's way outside our scope for now. You want to be at least a 12th-level publisher before you enter that dungeon.
Next, we’ll talk about the specifics of what you need to actually include in the legal section of OGL work you publish.
It’s important to know that just slapping the OGL in the back of a product isn’t enough. The OGL calls for you to do a few more things besides that. Here’s the additional stuff you need:
This is a good moment to look at some real-world examples of all of this! Doing this can help you find ways to word your own legal statements.
Grab a few reputable third-party D&D publications, flip to their legal sections (usually in the back), and do the following:
You’ll find that no two publishers are identical, but many of them cover the same ground in one way or another.
Last, we’re going to go over how you want to apply all this to your own work. This will be a mixture of a recap and a reminder.
1. You must include a copy of the Open Game License in anything you publish using D&D rules. Even if the product you’re publishing is free!
2. Within section 15 of the OGL, you must create a copyright statement for yourself. For example, “Product Name, © YEAR Your Name.” You must also include citations for any other publisher’s work you used in your material. Note that the 5E SRD is already included here as “boilerplate” in the generic version of the OGL.
3. Outside the body of the OGL (but often on the same page), you must include a statement called a Notice of Open Game Content that says you are using Open Game Content in your publication. This statement should contain some verbatim language copied from section 2 of the OGL.
4. Outside the body of the OGL, you must include a statement called a Designation of Open Game Content outlining what material you’re using that is Open Game Content. This must be reasonably specific.
5. Outside the body of the OGL, state what material you’re submitting as Open Game Content. Submitting material to the OGC is optional.
6. Optionally, include a statement specifying what your Product Identity is.
Now that we’ve covered the rules for using the OGL, it’s time for a quick quiz. Don’t cheat and look at the answers early!
Quiz Answers:
Hopefully you passed that quiz with flying colors. If not, you can retake it, and a hint is that the answer to every question is “no.” I have a terrible sense of humor, by the way!
All that aside, the OGL and its glorious gifts are much more about what you can do rather than what you can’t. It’s an amazing resource that allows you to write original D&D material that is completely your own to do with as you please.
This concludes our primer on how to use the OGL, OGC, and 5E SRD to publish third-party D&D material. Thanks for reading!
Glossary:
Open Game License (OGL): The legal contract Wizards of the Coast made that defines how you can use D&D material that has been submitted by its creators as Open Game Content (see below). You MUST include a copy of the OGL in any material you publish that uses D&D rules, and you must add a copyright statement for yourself in section 15.
You are only allowed to alter section 15 of the OGL to add citations for work. You can’t mess with any other parts of it.
Open Game Content (OGC): An open-source body of D&D material that anyone can use without having to pay a license fee, royalty, or otherwise. Any creator can state that they are submitting some or all of their published work as Open Game Content, which means any other creator can use it for free under the rules of the Open Game License (see above).
You are not required to make any of your original work Open Game Content; it’s optional.
Notice of Open Game Content: The required statement in the legal section of your product saying you are using Open Game Content in your work. You must quote the required statement from section 2 of the OGL, which is something along the lines of: “Open Game Content may only be Used under and in terms of the Open Game License version 1.0a.”
Designation of Open Game Content: The required statement in the legal section of your product describing what material you’re pulling from OGC sources. You have to be clear and specific about what OGC material you’re using.
5E Systems Reference Document (5E SRD): The most important piece of Open Game Content out there for D&D creators. It's all the core game rules for D&D that Wizards of the Coast has submitted as Open Game Content so you can use the rules of D&D to make third-party material.
Product Identity (PI): Original material that belongs to its creator. It identifies your brand and includes things such as proper names and places, original monsters, logos, trade dress, and other elements of a published work that are not drawn from Open Game Content. You do not have to state what material of yours is Product Identity (it’s assumed to be everything that isn’t OGC content), but some publishers do so just to be extra clear.