The GM's Guide

Trail of the Behemoth is an game about hunting giant monsters, a TTRPG you can bring to a boardgame night. I'm working on it with Seamus Allen, and we're going to talk about what we're doing and when it might be finished. I might even hand out some playtest files to listeners. If your interested, contact me on twitter @designerdanf. 

A listener sent me a question on how to deal with evil PCs, and how to deal with lawful-stupid paladins. I answer.

How do you identify an inherently fun mechanic anyway? What's this 'Decision Engine' thing Dan loves so much and how do you make one yourself? Listen and find out.

Want to run RPGs for new players? Want to get them hooked on this hobby we love? Here's how Dan does it.

The second part of Dan and Reuben's live world building session. This time we're digging into Adventure Hooks and Sample Locations in the Necropolis.

Dan and Reuben recorded a live session of their world building. They had fun recording it. Will you have fun listening to it? Let's find out.

We didn't finish everything about this topic in one podcast? Huh, who would've thought? Game Designer Dan Felder breaks down how he starts working on a game and the common pitfalls new designers get stuck in when starting a project. 

I get a lot of requests to talk about designing and hacking TTRPG systems, so here we go! I make my own systems for nearly every campaign I run. It's a huge topic, so today we're going to lay the foundation. 

First example of the Content Forge, where we talk about a setting, system, or adventure we've found inspiring and pulled pieces from to use in our own games. Sometimes it'll be the royal we, but this time we're joined by Reuben Covington to talk about the whimsical and creepy Gardens of Ynn. Check out The Gardens of Ynn And the Gardens of Ynn Generator

Designer Reuben Covington returns to chat about designing Boss Fights in TTRPGs. The two give some advice, and tell a LOT of stories about memorable boss battles they've made and played against. Feel free to steal them (like always). 

Dan and guest Reuben Covington break down how to design and run Dynamic Adventures, where the GM role is treated more like a player than a job. Link to the adventure notes: Cold-Blooded

Prepare a full adventure setting, a full region of your world, with just a single page of notes. This format, the one-page setting, is what I use to prepare vast open worlds with diverse and interesting regions with just a little bit of work.

A great sandbox campaign is incredibly fun to play in, and it's a great introduction for new players. I often start new groups in sandboxes rather than carefully constructed narrative games. It's a simple pitch: Here's a fantastical wilderness filled with monsters, treasures, dungeons, and dragons. Want to go explore it? However, while sandboxes can be a lot of fun to play in, they can be intimidating to think about building. Preparing one adventure is hard enough, how are you going to prepare dozens? In fact, I think a sandbox campaign is actually much easier to build than a linear campaign and takes me much less work to set up. There are a lot of tricks I use in my own sandbox campaigns and we're going to go through the big ones today.

I love making combat encounters. I have a lot of advice on how to make them, but there's one point that I come back to more than any other: Attack the players' STRENGTHS, not their weaknesses

Random Encounters are a classic element of TTRPGs, but most aren't fun in practice. Often the table just turns up entries like "2d4 wolves" or "two gnomes are arguing about which way the nearest town is".  Here's the secret: Random Encounters are Micro-Adventures.

Part 2 of our epic Disney World adventure.

Lore Dungeons are a concept that have worked out incredibly well for my circle of gaming friends. We're talking about them. It's fun. Gabe's here too.

The most common mistake GM's and adventure designer's make, and how to avoid it.

The GM's Guide is a podcast all about writing and game design through the lens of RPGs and how to run a great game. Today we're tackling Plot Twists, one of the most powerful and easy to misuse devices there is. We go through the five essential criteria of executing a good plot twist with examples from my own games and mass media. Sound fun? Then you're the strange type of person that I can get along with. Let's get started!

We apply the principles of how to create great characters and start building Ravenshadow's key NPCs.

Part 2 of the great conversation with the creator of Primordia about world-building.

The brilliant Mark Yohalem, brilliant writer and designer of the cult classic Primordia, drops by for a chat about world building.

We establish our final adventurer's character arc, then lay out the core process I use to destroy writer's block and build the materials for my campaigns. We even start putting together a soundtrack. 

Not all characters are easy to work with. Even the best players sometimes pitch spitballs at a GM. Chad's character was a nightmare for the campaign. While the character would be great for a novel, in an RPG it featured an unworkable inner conflict that would be a weak experience to roleplay. Worse, Chad's own joys as a roleplayer ran directly counter to my campaign's setting and theme. Here's how we made it work.

Premade Adventures train us to build a campaign first, then figure out how to 'hook' a group of players and drag them into it. Here's how you can build a campaign where your players are truly the main characters. They aren't the random action heroes sucked into the story, they belong here. It's their story. The results can be absolutely extraordinary.

We return to building a campaign step by step and create the core character and history of the setting's arch-villain, as well as many of the important locations we'll use throughout the campaign. In the process, we break down what makes great tragedies work and why so many inexperienced writers fail when they try to create unhappy endings.

How do you make something scary to your players, when they know they're the heroes? We develop the core concept of the camapign's key setpiece and build Ravenshadow's creative playlist.

We start creating the foundation of Ravenshadow's world and design a way to get the most out of our player's characters.

The beginning of my richest stories was within the ashes of transformers style action.

It's time to play god.

We all have worlds we love. Let's make them feel as real as possible.

"Why would anyone play a human fighter?" "Why would anyone ever play anything else?"

Dan designs an adventure from scratch live on the podcast.

Tips and tricks and example villains.

Three principles go into making a great villain for a heroic campaign.

Here's a bunch of traps I've made and run for my players. Feel free to introduce them to your own players.

Traps have a huge history in RPGs and they're a MOUNTAIN of missed opportunity.

Dan takes apart some of his adventures to show how they work. It's also an example for how Climactic Event Structure and Four Act Adventure Structure work in practice. Feel free to take any of these ideas for your home games.

When new GM's ask me for advice on how to build a great dungeon, this is the foundation of it all.

When new GM's ask me how to create great adventures, this is what I go through first. No, it's not the hero's journey.

We're back! Story Structure is one of my favorite topics and I've spent more time studying it than probably anything else. If there's anything I can give to new GM's to help them set up great adventures, it's this basic Story Event Structure.

It's The GM's Guide's Christmas gift: The third and final installment of the epic difficulty trilogy!  Today we dig into the secret of weaving in the benefits of high difficulty adventure design into any campaign, while sidestepping the problems that sometimes pop up. We also answer some listener questions. It's good stuff.

One podcast wasn't enough. Today we dig further into why High Difficulty is the sonic screwdriver of rpg adventure design and how to implement it successfully into a campaign.

High Difficulty is the sonic screwdriver of RPG design. While not technically necessary, it does SO many things, comes with SO many advantages to make your games extremely difficult that I can barely imagine a running a game without it.

Don't set your encounter in an empty box. 

Why does D&D's own Creative Manager include "Throw out what the rulebooks say about building encounters" in his advice to new DMs? Because the rulebooks have been leading us wrong for years. Tune in to find out how you can shake things up and make your players scream. Whether it's in delight or terror is up to you.

DMs have to create tons of characters to fill their world. Here's how to make them interesting and memorable.

Players want meaningful choices that determine what happens in their adventures. Here's how you can add them to your game without needing to create lots of extra content.

The Dungeon Master's Guide provides useful and practical advice on how to deal with a DM's greatest challenges. In the process, we learn about game design. It's as awesome as it sounds.Derailing is like any crime, it needs motive and opportunity. Here's how to solve it.