This article was originally written for a column in a newsletter. I wanted to share it here, though 🙂
If you’ve played any tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) in the past decade, you’ll be familiar with the number one issue that kills campaigns – schedules. Let’s talk about how you get around them and how to run an immersive, atmospheric D&D session with very little setup needed.
This article is intended for dungeon/game masters and those with some experience playing TTRPGs already, but it should still be interesting if you haven’t played any. If there’s enough interest, I could write up an intro to D&D here for everyone.
A Quick Primer
Tabletop roleplaying games are a type of shared storytelling game where you and your friends gather together in person or virtually to experience a fantastical world. You tell the story and describe the scenarios verbally, using character sheets and dice to determine outcomes.
There are plenty of options out there, but you’ve probably heard of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a fantasy RPG where players can create anything from a fierce human fighter to clever halfling wizard or even.. You! Step into the shoes of the character you create and roleplay the world through their eyes alongside 2-5 friends.
Setting the Scene
So you make it a few weeks into the campaign and your paladin won’t be available for this week’s game; they need to take their son to a party. No big issue, you think, going on to run the session with just three players this time. You catch up with them before next week and find a way to slot them back into the story.
A few weeks later it happens again, but this time you’re two down. Do you carry on? Is it worth the hassle of figuring out reasons why those characters were absent? After all, you’ll need a way to drop them back into the story afterwards. And what if they miss out on a big event that you tailored just for them? Your group decides to postpone and suddenly all that anticipation and prep has gone out the window. You can wait another week.
This, as mentioned before, is the grand killer of campaigns. These interrupts happen more and more over time as that weekly time slot becomes too busy and eventually the campaign fizzles out. Let’s fix that.
Immersing Your Players
The first way to combat scheduling issues is to keep in contact and make sure your players are excited to attend. It might sound obvious, but running immersive and interesting sessions reduces the chance of someone getting bored with the storyline.
I could write for ages about how to handle this but we’ll keep it short for now. Here’s your recipe to running an effective session:
A Communication/Messaging Platform – Discord
Make sure you have a quick and effective method for keeping in touch with everyone. It’s good to encourage chatter and to talk about your game between sessions so that everyone stays in touch. This will also give you a convenient place to drop session summaries and useful pinned links.
A Great Virtual Tabletop – Foundry VTT
It’s simple to jump into using Roll20 for D&D games, but Foundry has made huge advances in recent years and is extensible with hundreds of plugins available to make character creation and management the easiest it can be. If you’re already a DM and you’ve not tried Foundry, take a look and consider switching over (there’s a Roll20 to Foundry import tool!), you won’t regret it and your players will love it.
Background Ambience – Kenku Bot
Many DM’s avoid adding background ambience as it becomes awkward to find and manage the MP3 files. Go grab a copy of Kenku bot and run it locally. You can use a web view of Spotify and Youtube to mix together incredible soundscapes just by searching for readily made playlists. Excite your players with music and it’ll do a lot of heavy lifting for you.
Quick References – 5e.Tools
Not having information can be a killer for motivation. Websites like 5e.Tools for D&D or the Archives of Nethys for Pathfinder 2e are fantastic. They provide reference materials in a simple format so you and your players can look something up and keep the flow of the game going. Be sure that you own the books when referencing such sites, of course.
Prep Your Maps – Anything!
There are lots of options for grabbing maps and images to use in your game. I personally like to just run a module so it’s all ready for me. The key point here is that the visual aspect of the game can do a lot to bring players into your world. Be sure to set up maps in advance to play on as well as having some quick handouts to show off what something really looks like.
Drop-In Drop-Out
The second way you’re going to keep the sessions flowing each week is to embrace the fact that sometimes people won’t make it. You should prep for this in advance by agreeing with everyone what to do (and the answer should usually be to run it anyway!).
It’s even better if you can build in the drop-in drop-out mechanic right into your story somehow. Perhaps your players are all agents working for some higher power who moves them around at will, allowing you to explain away why they were yanked out of the story temporarily. Make it an expectation in-world that there will be interruptions and you won’t have the awkward parts of each session where players need to make up a reason for having been absent.
If that’s a bit much you can also just handwave it! Remember that D&D is a shared storytelling game. If it’s not fun to try and piece together things in an awkward way then just agree with your players that you’ll handwave it and make something up if it’s important later.
Do this right, and you can even drop new players right into the game if someone else wants to take part, while gracefully retiring players who don’t have time any more. Focus on running the game first and make things up as you go.
Anthologies
Finally, a tip that might not be everyone’s cup of tea – run an anthology. We have to accept that as adults we don’t always have all the time in the world. It’s hard to commit every Saturday evening for the next year!
I’ve been running the D&D 5e module “Keys From The Golden Vault”, a series of heist adventures. I aim for my players to complete each heist in 3-4 sessions and it works out beautifully. By doing it this way, I can smoothly change up the list of players between heists and my players don’t need to commit to more than a few weeks at a time.
There are many options out there dungeon crawls to bite-sized stories. You can also adapt full adventure modules to work in an anthology format as long as you provide a bit of an introduction and background setting. If you haven’t tried this out yet, give it a go. Removing that barrier of long-term commitment is one of the best ways you can keep a session going!
Summary
To quickly summarise, there are three key factors to running a great game and keeping it from fizzling out.
- Keep it interesting, keep it immersive. Don’t let players burn out or lose interest.
- Expect the interruptions. Bring them in as part of your world so that the roleplaying and the games themselves aren’t interrupted.
- Use anthologies, reduce the commitment. By running shorter form games as part of a larger narrative, you can allow players breaks and reduce the pressure of being part of a long-running campaign.
Hopefully this helps you keep your games going, dungeon masters. Tabletop roleplaying is incredible and losing out on that fun thanks to schedules is all too banal. Reach out if you found this article interesting or if you just want to talk D&D at some point. 🙂
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