You step through the dank corridor, a slight breeze tickling your skin, bringing with it the certain smell of death. Only the light of your flickering torch guides you past coffins filled with piles of dusty bones. Your senses are on alert for any sign of movement or danger. You grip your battleaxe for comfort, drawing strength from the ancient runes that have guided your family for centuries. You descend a set of worn stairs and enter into a larger room with a single sarcophagus in the center, a chair on the far wall where a skeletal frame sits in a tired pose. You move forward and hear a grinding sound. The arm of seated skeleton reaches out to you, its index finger extended and dank robes hanging limply from its bony frame. Its eyes light up with a sickly green glow and sound emanates from its mouth, though the jaw doesn’t move. You hear an old voice whisper, “Rarely do I receive visitors to my chambers. I hope, for your sakes, you prove to be useful.” What do you do?
Hi, welcome to the first ever episode of How to Be a Better DM, your source for constant tips on how to create better and more engaging stories for you and your players while playing the famous Dungeons and Dragons. I’m your host, Justin Lewis and I’m excited to introduce you to this show.
As of right now, this show will come out on a weekly cadence and it won’t be more than 30 minutes long. We’ll be talking in terms of the RPG Dungeons and Dragons and we’ll be using the 5 Edition. Many of the tips I share will likely apply to other games, but we’ll stick to DnD.
I may have guests come on the show, but for now, you’ll just hear some tips from me on how to be a better DM. So let’s get to it.
For today I want to share a Quick 4 Step Guide for Building an Interesting One Shot.
Now, the reasoning behind this is that if you can build a one-shot, you’re most of the way there to creating an interesting adventure and then a great campaign. It’s all building blocks put on top of one another. So let’s begin.
In this step, get your group together. This means create characters or choose to use simple template characters. It also means figuring out the difficulty level of the encounters you mean to use. You can use the DnD Beyond Encounter builder which makes it really easy. Here you also plan the timing of the one-shot. Assume you’ll play anywhere from 3 to 4 hours (you can do more or less) but that’s a good base. In that time frame, you could do 2 maybe three encounters based on how many people are in your group.
In any video game or movie, there is always a big boss that is more interesting and more difficult than any other creatures they might face. In this example, let’s pick a lich.
The characters need to feel invested in the adventure and have to have a reason to pit themselves against the big boss. For this example, let’s say the lich has been using undead minions to steal things from a local town in order to help him create a bigger undead army.
Once you have the general idea of what’s gonna happen in the story, make a twist that no one expects and that will severely make things more difficult. In this example, let’s say the village makes a deal with the Lich to provide goods for him and companionship in exchange for saving the town from a terrible drought. The village reneged on the deal and now the Lich wants revenge. This twist allows the players to explore multiple ways of creating peace.
Obviously this was a quick example, and you can totally use it or change it to suit what you need. I’ll probably come out with better tips on organizing one-shots, but this should get you started.
If you liked today’s show, let me know on Instagram @geronimolevis. Otherwise, thanks for listening to today’s show. Go be a better DM. Now let’s roll initiative…
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