'What I wish I had known' as a starting DM

Some thoughts I pulled together on a private discord:

1. Recognise what elements of world-building actually give you bang for buck. My first game I have designs for the coins of the realm - relevant? Never came up. I detailed whole towns that the players blasted through, talking to 2 people before heading on. So, while it can be lots of fun to work up your world and that can be fun for you outside of the table, my single greatest learning was doing most work on the things players would likely interact with, have a few contingencies, and then a just a list of names to ad-lib anything else they decided to do

2. Mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal. All your favourite things, wherever they came from? You can use all of those for inspiration. Everything goes in the pot, there is no 'legitimate' source of inspiration. Just repaint it enough not to be immediately obvious and you will probably get away with it

3. Session Zero is your friend or Check what your players enjoy and make sure they get a chance to do that. Both a pre-campaign session and a brief post game 'where do you think you'll go after next session' gives you a heads up on where they are likely to go and what type of thing they want to do - tomb-diving, politics, exploring etc. - and makes sure you are preparing hooks they will probably go for.

Note - there is a lot of fun to be had world building things your players will never see - as long as you are clear that this is you noodling about in your world for your own entertainment and you will not feel too sore if it is never interacted with.

For further reading on the topic here are some blogs of wisdom:
Harbinger Games DM tips.
Sly Flourish DM tips.
Advice for OSR DMs from Goblinpunch.
The Ultimate D&D SESSION 0 Checklist has a lot of distilled wisdom in it.

Should you prefer videos then here is a selection of DMs - give them a watch to see who are your favourites to listen to. In my experience all these people speak the truth, the question is which do you find easiest on your ear.
Running the game with Matt Colville.
What Should You Have in a DM Binder? by Dael Kingsmill.
Building Your Own Campaign Setting with Matt Mercer & Brennan Lee Mulligan.

If what you want are podcasts; check out our friends at The Adventuring Party.

Updated class preferences, incl. Twitter, Facebook

Following up on class preferences in D&D 5e players with a few new data sources, it underlines that all online fora seem to respond in a similar manner - Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, down to smaller dedicated forums like Giant in the Playgrounds.

The numbers coming out of the latest poll in the Facebook D&D 5e group show the same pattern. This added to Elderbrain and ThinkDMs twitter polls broadens the catchment outside dedicated forums like Reddit channels or RPGnet.

There is a particularly strong response in favour of clerics and warlocks, a little more favour for fighters and rogues, but the pattern is the same.

The orange line, the numbers from D&D beyond, can be taken as the baseline population and while some forums - as seen here - show some preference for fighter and rogues that is not the strict 'we hate non-spellcaster' archetype, the break below the general population response for Barbarian and Rangers and heightened preference for Warlocks show that surveys are getting responses from a particular sub-group of players.

Noisy version below with all collected surveys - Fighter, Rogue, Wizard can get noisy but always for D&D Beyond or Apps (orange) Barbarians and Rangers have some fans and in every forum they are disfavoured.

City building: Reasons strangers come to Sholtipec

Strangers come to Sholtipec to seek many things. The abandoned parts of the city have been un-evenly gleaned and the active core still produces crafts and answers that can be found nowhere else. Still an administrative centre within the Scaledlands, the ways lead from the dragon cult-cities back to Threshold and the deep homelands.

I built this table to have a skew by using d6+d12 in place of 3d6. This makes the 6-12 block equally probable among themselves to allow equal weight to the main activities of the city. The tails on either side are then reflecting the stranger aspects of the city.

d6+d12	Things to seek in Sholtipec
2	Answers from the Great Library
3	Military assistance (official or mercenary)
4	Gemwork
5	Decisions and warrants from the Temples
6	New intoxicants from the Hives (dusts, honeys or bugs)
7	Eel delicacies from Crystal Ponds
8	Cult affirmation for deeds or sacrifices
9	Sage suppositions from Drumspires
10	Space for dwelling/activities
11	Fuel, heat
12	Fashion, garments
13	Exoteric equipment
14	Reagents & ingredients
15	Information or intelligence
16	Art, culture or performers
17	Vengeance, assassins
18	Magic crafts (made in Drumspires or dug from Rooftops)

The purpose of this table serves both as a motivator for anyone encountered on the street - either as a stranger, this is why they have come, or as a local this is the aspect of the city they are involved in. Similarly for buildings, it can give a tag to the activity within; though for an out-of-district result, this can be assumed to mean that some non-normal activites are dominant at this place just now.

Food in world building

Following up on this post on food in settings on Reddit I thought to go deeper on some of my thoughts.

Mealtimes plays a big part of the current campaign with quite a few memorable meals and the idea of having to stay away from base and miss the dinner hour as a tangible sacrifice. The beats through out day are more or less 'major meal' and 'time between after meal'.

I try to make meals a daily opportunity to gather info, so continually positively reinforce that. I also flag 'its cold, you are burning energy and getting hungry' as a soft timer to drive pace during activities. Lore to the setting is that spell slinging makes you hungry, so the sorcerer is always concious of when the next meal is.

The specific foods that have turned up are ways to showcase one of the fairy tale races of the setting. The atmosphere is Ankh-morpork crossed with the fairy-tale aspects of Arthur Rackhams work and food is a great way to drive that things are not quite the same.

Examples of food preferences becoming tags within the world have been:
Super large mushrooms served whole with baked topping being one for the mountain and cave folk with intact transport being tricky and a safe arrival being cause for a celebration.
Large juicy breadbugs for breakfast, lunch and dinner marked a winter festival being one for the animal-lings.
Pungent stews are a favourite for the weasel-lings and have become a marker for their presence.

When I working food into world-building, I usually derive it from other parts first; if the city generation indicates a couple of obvious food types and sources then those will feature prominently.
Thenya is a city in the interior, on a river but mostly fed by field and mountains nearby. The sea is too far away. So as a first pass, classic medieval fare is a good model.
Sholtipec is a city on a river but with extensive eel farming, large hives and a large part of the city being reclaimed by jungles. Much hotter and with lots of available food in the forest and a significantly higher proportion of insects in the diet as the population is largely reptilian.

Once the general ideas were in place, I pre-generated a couple of food carts using the Dungeonspoon tables from Famous Hippopotamus and also rolled up the stall holders using the appropriate city dweller tables (e.g. these for Sholtipec.)

For my games, lots of useful business has gotten done standing around food carts or sitting to high tables; why not let the food served also drive the atmosphere?

Edit to add: Box Full of Boxes has a great Local Cuisine Generator along the same general concept.

City building: aspects of Sholtipec

Building the centre-piece city of my last campaign, I tried to spend time prepping the toolkit instead of creating specific detail; for instance in the first post on the city we saw what the population make up was. Now we will look at building generation tools.

A lot of this was seeded by the Infinigrad suburb generation tools on Lizardman Diaries but I felt I needed to cook up a few more specific tables to help specific more closely what I wanted.

For background the city, Sholtipec, is old; first growing up around the Great Library, then becoming a bastion of the Lizards Empire after they crushed the Gray invasion force nearby. Buildings and populations reflect all those epochs through to the current long, slow depopulation and retrenchment. So while the generalised chaos and atmosphere of the city can use the Infinigrad generators, beneath that I wanted an original epoch of the building.

So a given building in the city would roll a d10:

d10	Epoch	Building Aspect
1	Ancient	Eldritch carvings, non-euclidian spaces, illithid-inspired
2	Elder	Stilted, tree-dwellings, organically grown, magically mutated
3-4	High Lizard	Fortifications, neuva-aztec; insulated buildings
5-7	Dragon Era	Multi-racial build-outs; different sizes; big dragon-sized
8-10	Late	Repurposed buildings

This would give me a start point for who built the building, replacing the 'raceoid' originators from Infinigrad and then allowing me to use the rest of those generators more or less as is.

The 3 pillars of gameplay beyond D&D

A new survey from D&D Research Wizards (NYU team) is ongoing and they have published some preliminary results. This one is open to all TTRPG players and it is interesting to see it plotted against D&D focused surveys.

The increased importance of role-playing makes some sense as broadening the apeture from D&D to include everything will bring in many games where the classic modes of finding abandoned ruins and searching them for treasure while fighting off beasties are not their primary operating modes. Taking Call of Cthulu as an example - for almost all the games of that I have played, combat was lethal and to be avoided by the squishy humans - the fun was in the investigations (exploration) and the roleplay.

Similarly for World of Darkness - games I have played of that were less exploration focused and more roleplay and combat (fistfuls of d10s!) focused. Investigations and problems solving were usually rapidly brushed over by the application of high level gifts.

The survey is still open, looking for information from all Tabletop RPG players. There is also a raffle with participation prizes which is nice.

Other sources are:
Sven Writes twitter poll (2020)
D&D reddit survey (2014)
Sly Flourish facebook poll (2018)

d20 tricks for a villainous escape, boosted by neural network tools

A few ideas thrown together to challenge high-level PCs. The core assumption being that once the villain is in the clutches of the party, they will be torn down pretty quickly so the theme here is how to prolong the fight.

This is generic as much as possible to allow tailoring to the specific terrains you want.
1. Traversible but difficult terrain between the PC and foe; presents the puzzle of just slogging across (a known factor) vs spending resources to rapidly come to grips.
2. Terrain the foe can trigger - e.g. hiding on the far side of a tarpit or oil slick that sucks up movement to cross, that the foe can then ignite while the players are traversing
3. Multi-level close quarters - allowing crossing of paths without opponents blocking; e.g. running around on top of shelves in a library or facing something that can swim under the ice of a shallow lake
4. Highly visible, obvious traps - snares, pitfalls, things that won't kill but will delay individuals either de-activating or extricating themselves from - all action soaks while allowing the foe freedom to attack or flee
5. Living terrain - the foes are in a howdah of a large beast or fleeing past a sleeping dragon - both cases where slips or wild attacks risk bringing a new foe into the fight
6. Collateral innocents - fight happens atop a creature or with the foes holding a hostage - PCs need to defeat them with precision
7. A time limit for action - the foes have escaped into a mine with an avalanche descending or into a passenger pod on a giant turtle about to dive - the PCs must address the environmental challenge before their access is cut off.
8. For truly advanced challenge, crack out the non-eucidean architecture (part 1, and part 2) starting with part 3; wierd gravity.
9. Avoiding multiple objects in one spot - e.g. having to worry about multiple objects being piled up against a wall to allow foe to climb and escape; or bones tumbling from opening tombs that will rise to fight once enough falls in to allow skeletons to form
10. Avoid being surrounded by obstacles - foe tries to keep you in a place because they know they will be able to escape but not you - e.g. water rising toward a drain chute or other exit path that they will be able to slip away down, spiders building webs that will trap the PCs but the foe can slip through
11. Random encounters - The enemy won't just randomly drop on the map when they die e.g. they need to be brought to a place where they can be pinned to finish them off or else will likely escape - e.g. a planar being or vampire will reform elsewhere if killed
12. Endless encounters - prolonged or loud clashes are likely to bring reinforcements or generally worsen the situation - e.g. both parties are thieves/assassins where an alert will rouse the guards
13. Unwanted enemies - crushing the known foes at current location will turn current friendlies against the party - mistakenly assuming you are attacking innocents or breaking hospitality rules or some such
14. Moving on to the next phase - roll twice on this table and combine; success in the first phase shifts the fight to the second so more tactics need to be employed e.g. front-running an avalanche then having to negotiate traps in the cavern everyone is sheltered in
15. Raining - a thunderstorm on icy or rocky surfaces, making them first slick, then flooding, bringing a risk of lightning strikes to those near tall things and making communications and sight difficult as flashes disrupt vision
16. Water - a large area may have pools, rivers, bogs, lakes, swamps, rivers, ponds, deep waters, rivers in tributaries or even entire lakes making pursuit difficult for heavily armoured adventurers
17. Fences - some fortifications with solid walls or fences or trenches that regularly block line of sight and provide lots of close cover
18. Ropes - an area is a maze of spikes that requires pursuit by swinging on ropes- e.g. a huge cave with a lot of spikes or large pits within tunnels
19. Crumbling - an ancient stone floor is crumbling and pursuit paths must be judged by the weight of the pursuer
20. Narrows - the path to the foe requires that players can engage only piecemeal - some must power a lift or hold a rope bridge while others cross - requiring careful choice on who gets to grips in what order

A mightier list of terrain features can be found here to flesh out and modify the high level concepts described above.

Items 1-8 above were standard off the cuff responses to a prompt but from 9 onwards are slightly cleaned up outputs from the GPT-2 network at Bellard.org. I found this through Eldritch Fields. I fed it sub-sets of the 8 prompts I had created, chopping and changing to get more responses. A neat tool for beefing up some content that may be a bit scant.

Note 11 was originally "the map is randomly generated each time you start a new playthrough"
12 was "enemies can be friendly (for instance you can see where they are coming from or they can"
20 was "Tidal wave - a time warp from earlier phases of the fight - either the foes are still trapped deep into the cavern or they are under attack or drowning and need to escape quickly" - too similar to 7