My first two full-length 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons adventures have mostly followed similar structures. I think of the main villain (known in D&D parlance as the Big Bad E🌱vil Guy, or BBEG), and give them an ambition and a way to meet the party in the first chapter. From there, I find ways to keep them connected to the main adventure while keeping them at arm’s length and giving the party other issues to contend with, before hopefully tying it all together satisfactorily by the final showdown. This approach, obviously, is nothing new. My latest attempt, thou🤪gh also not all that new, has at least refreshed my creativity around building a long-term adventure.

When 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:writing my second adventure, I took some lessons from the first - I already mentioned this when I revealed that Capcom 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:stole my idea and put it in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dragon's Dogma 2. I will have my day in court, and all the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ace Attorneys in the world won't save them! In any case, the things I took away from it were based solely on my experience. I had not run much of the first adventure when I started writing the second one, so I wasn't reacting to what my players liked or didn't like, just my overall feeling of where the storytelling or game design could be improved. Now that I have my players' thoughts in the mix, I'm ready to step it up.

BBEGs Can Focus Your Adventure, But Also Make The Story Too Narrow

For this third adventure, I've had a lot of images rattling around in my head for a long time. Characters or settings I couldn't squeeze into the first two, storylines I wanted to pursue, and new environmental hazards to introduce - the last being heavily motivated from playing the adventure rather than just writing it. But I haven't been able to fit them together. Rather than starting with a BBEG and forcing these elements into the adventure, I'm squinting at the random assortment of potential features like it's a magic eye picture that will reveal the perfect BBEG. And eventually, it worked. Kind of.

The structure for the adventure is still very fluid in the early stages, and I'm cognizant that one of the groups I play D&D with regularly read this site, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:and the other work here as editors, so I can't exactly reveal my grand plan. The fact it doesn't exist yet plays to my advantage in this sense. However, the basic idea is to avoid getting drawn into building an adventure around chasing one specific BBEG, which often means constructing roadblocks for why they can't just go kill the BBEG right away, and instead looking at ways to run multiple potential baddies that I lock in as the story progresses.

My desire to make a campaign without focusing on a specific BBEG comes from my current sessions. Although my party has clashed with the current BBEG and their role in the story is narratively clear, it seems like they've most enjoyed the discoveries away from the central goal. And I don't just mean in the 'doing goofy side quests' sense, but in that the downtime away from the BBEG, what you might even deem the filler of the story, has been the most rewarding for me to DM and has gotten the best comments from players.

Five BBEGs Are Better Than One

This time, I’m experimenting with ignoring my typical 'inciting incident', 'final battle', 'okay how do I spin this out for eleven chapters' pathway, and condensing it. Rather than being in pursuit of a BBEG across a whole campaign, I'm thinking of smaller boss-style enemies (SBBEGs?) whose motivation can be deeper, weirder, and less connected to a grand plan, and therefore are more freeing.

It still needs something to tie them together (just doing a boss rush D&D adventure isn't going to be fun), and it's the non-combat stuff that my party enjoys most, so a story still needs to be present. Weirder enemies could also lead to stranger, more unique combat encounters, though I do have 168澳洲幸运5开奖网🦹:my issues with people trying to ⭕overthink 5e too. Best of all t🌺h💮ough, this approach ignites a fuse for inspiration.

My ideas for D&D are mostly sparked by other peoples' art. I collect portraits from Pinterest, ArtStation, and Reddit to use in my adventures, and finding a great picture often sets neurons firing and the pen squiggling until suddenly I have an entire faction, city, or multi-arc side quest on the page. Other peoples’ writing? Not so much. I read D&D manuals and various homebrew stuff, but a lot of it is designed to be picked up and used wholesale. Not all DMs write, and it's a talent to seamlessly stitch together existing lore into one coherent story (or to roll with the punches when the group inevitably goes off script in a pre-written module), but it's a talent I lack.

Whenever I look into the lore of a creature, or backstory of specific characters or homebrewed BBEGs, I rarely find much to go on. They're too reliant on complete quests or locations, and you need to either use them in pretty much their entirety, or leave them alone. Wanting to write my own stuff, I opt for the latter. But now I'm reading up on creatures and realising I can have them in a world that belongs to me by having them and their quest running parallel to mine, or shrinking it so my party is only involved in one stage of the plan - possibly stopping them before they get too strong. Not everything I add has to tie in with a big villain encounter.

You don't always need to fight them to the death in an epic showdown, but they might provide ample chaos for my party to complete other plots, or cause a diversion into other business, or even be the reason a different SBBEG is overthrown.

Writing my own stuff helped me fall in love with Dungeons & Dragons, and I needed to start with a good old fashion 'get strong then fight this BBEG' campaign. But next time, it's all about those funny little SBBEGs, baby.

Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook – Fifth Edition

Title

🔯 Dungeons & Dragon's Player's Handbook

Genre

Games

Publication Date

𒅌 August 20, 2019

Age Range

ꩵ ♊ Recommended 22+

Number of Pages

320

Publisher

🧜 Wizards of the Coast 🧔

Begin your adventures in Dungeons & Dragons with the Fifth Edition Player's Handbook. This sourcebook has everything you'll need to create a character for the world's most popular tabletop roleplaying game. The Player's Handbook includes a step-by-step guide to building your character and basic rules for playing the game, advancing your character, skills, exploration, a character sheet, and so much more. 

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