You know when you first started RPing and every character you made was an extension of your own desired self-image and their magical adventures might as well have been your own magical adventures?

No? yes?

I'm about to start a 4th ed D&D campaign where I'm DMing solo for my first whole game and I need every speck of advice you pros can give me. I'll be running a (hopefully) long-running campaign for a group of 4-5 guys that I've been playing with for 5 years now. They're great because they're always up for a game and they don't skeeve me out. They're problematic because we've all been playing together so long that every character is just a "build concept" and we've got a serious game ADD problem.

So is there a +10 band of instant DM talent I can buy? (etsy maybe?) or any actual tips, tricks, and fun homebrew rules that have been super successful for you guys?

I've been playing with the same group for a long time, and we also hit that rut where everything seemed to be all crunch and just rolling dice for its own sake a while back.

In order to buck that, I think there are two options. One is to embrace the predictability and play a game that is expressly designed to be as stereotypical as possible. The dumb fighter. The holier-than-thou paladin. The ranger who dumped the fuck out of charisma because he was raised by wolves or forsakes civilization or just smells really bad. They fight tons of obviously evil orcs en route to a dragon that will eat all the town's virgins or whatever. Make it stupid and predictable and just as over-the-top obvious as you can. And, for this part of it, make it short.

Then, once you've had a laugh at yourselves and gotten some of it out your systems by taking it to the nth degree, you can offer something as a counterpoint. A combat-minimal story of intrigue, maybe. Or turn every convention on its ear, with dwarven wizards, sinister halflings, and humans a dying breed. Create a world that contains none of the core races (or ones frequently used in your group), and leave it up to the players, in part, to decide how they interact with one another. Make a ground rule that characters must be built sub-optimally (with encounters tuned accordingly), or at least require that every feat selection be explained within the context of the character's thoughts and experiences.

These all may sound like lots of rules and work, but if any of them seems exciting to you, bring it up to your group. The best way to make sure something atypical happens is to put yourselves in circumstances that resemble your past games as little as possible.

Great post.

That's one option followed by the other option, now that I look at it. Take either suggestion on its own if that's what you're into!

A rule that my groups use is "Edible Minions". Instead of a spread of identical minis or tokens, use Hershey Kisses/Hugs, Caramels or Starbursts or whatever small candies you and your group prefer, and whoever kills the baddy(not necessarily a minion; different flavor Starbursts are great for distinguishing one baddy from another for the purpose of HP tracking) gets to eat their candy(or trade/gift it or whatever).

Another consideration that isn't as extreme as either of the others is to explore other genres. For instance, after a million fantasy epics, I thought it would be fun to run a police procedural set in one of my group's favorite Magic: The Gathering planes (Ravnica, natch). Because we had watched so many hours of Law & Order in our regular hangout time, I knew they'd be into it. Maybe your group has a similar shared interest that can be applied to your games to take away from the crunch-orientation and inconstant attention.

Luchadork said:
thought it would be fun to run a police procedural set in one of my group's favorite Magic: The Gathering planes (Ravnica, natch).

This just makes me sad that my Call of Cthulhu-rules Scooby Doo adventure never saw the light of day.

Johnny Landmine said:


This just makes me sad that my Call of Cthulhu-rules Scooby Doo adventure never saw the light of day. PS: (Not a joke or fakepost.)

I would play the hell out of that.

The Naniwa Tiger said:


I would play the hell out of that.

DITTO.

If you take nothing else away from this thread, let it be that a (sub)genre mashup can be your ticket to greatness.

Amanda said:
You know when you first started RPing and every character you made was an extension of your own desired self-image and their magical adventures might as well have been your own magical adventures?

No? yes?

I'm about to start a 4th ed D&am...

So my first character was an AD&D 2nd addition "Amazon" cleric. Yes, female.

Chosen solely because it offered the most useful sub-class benefits (no matter how absurd or unrealistic they seemed to me).

So... pretty sure the only part of that character that reflect me was the desire to have magical healing powers.

Sexual healing powers. Wait, no, just regular magical healing powers.

I was 13.

Anyways, I currently play games in two different non-D&D systems with four different GM's total. My only real advice is... communicate with your players. If possible, develop trust that you won't rape them and they won't undermine your efforts willfully.

Also, if you want everyone to enjoy the game, you really ought to know what your players are looking to get out of the game. I left a group a few years back who exclusively played D&D (first 3rd ed, then 4th) because they were mostly interested in statting up characters then killing monsters. I'm mostly interested in character development, plot, and interesting story, so I bailed in favor of more RP-intensive, emotional- and plot-driven games. There's just enough combat to make my characters seem like awesome badasses, but it doesn't dominate the game.

So, yeah... communication and player-GM trust are key.

I feel like a lot of DMs/GMs miss out on one simple thing that can spell doom or fortune for a new campaign: if you really want a LONG running campaign, it's imperative you talk to all the players before hand and make sure you are running the type of campaign the players (including yourself) want to play. Some people might want detailed tactical combats, some people might want minimal combat. Some people might want to be delving into court intrigue while other people just want to delve into ruins. Some of these preferences can be (or become) incompatible, so it's best to lay out before hand "this campaign has a focus on exploration, with difficult combats for which you should optimize mechanically," or "this campaign is all about city adventuring and many combats will be with minions you're meant to bulldoze through, so build the character you want to play" or "This campaign will be a challenge for the players, so don't worry about skill optimization, you'll have to solve these puzzles without dice rolling," etc. Letting them know whether you are going to fudge dice once in awhile or whether you are going to roll in the open, whether you will consider "plot immunity" for certain NPCs, etc. are all good ground-rules to establish before some character tries something that catches you off-guard (though they still will, of course). You should discuss exactly what kind of play-style you have in mind, and of course this all might lead to some negotiating out the campaign that works for everyone. (Of course, if you've been playing with these guys for years, you might already know what kind of game will get their socks hot- but it never hurts to confirm, who knows, maybe Jerry the Tactician really wants to dial it back for a few months and play a more social character.)

For instance, my 1e campaign is heavily exploration based and every combat has the very real potential to be DEADLY. The campaign is player-driven and they decide, each session, where they will be adventuring and how they will approach it. There is no over-arching plot-line to follow, just an environment to explore and interact with. The players are aware that most (nearly all) of our non-combat challenges are handled through verbal negotiation, not dice rolling, so they need to rely on their wits, not the numbers on their character sheet. I do almost all dice-rolling in the open and never fudge results for either side. Etc., etc., etc. I try to make all this very transparent for the players, so they know exactly what kind of game they're playing. I don't want to play "read the DM's mind," I want to play Dungeons & Dragons.

I don't feel this needs to go so far as a written document/charter, though I've heard some groups do go so far. What I've usually done is laid out what kind of campaign I want to play (often in a private Facebook group for ease of scheduling and between-session communication) and let players join it or not as they feel is right.

Amanda said:
So is there a +10 band of instant DM talent I can buy?

Actually, it's called the Dungeon Master's Guide by Gary Gygax, for the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Even if you'll never play AD&D, even if you'll never use a lick of mechanics from it, it is the single best gaming volume ever penned and contains indispensable advice on nearly every aspect of fantasy gaming. It is dense, baroque, and at times confusingly laid out, but it is THE tome on how to referee a fantasy campaign, and every GM (and ESPECIALLY every DM) should have at least two read-throughs of the original DMG under their belt.

Buddy Boy I've been playing D&D since I was 8

My dad DMed for my sister and I.

(Oh those halcyon days)

As I said, this will be my first continuing game that I'm DMing solo, though I have run modules or one-shots to pretty great effect in the past. To that effect, though, I'm not really sure what kind of game I'll end up running. Probably whatever blows my skirt up from week to week!