I’ve started running Curse of Strahd and have been having a ton of fun making wacky homebrew things for my party and tweaking the module. Unbeknownst to the players so far, I have made them all a secret Dark Power trying to use them to usurp Strahd and Vampyr, and they’re just waiting to offer their dark gift.

For example, I have a druid with some fire giant ancestry who loves Produce Flame and is their front line, so he’ll be offered a slightly weaker Rage with the Path of the Storm Herald desert feature to use once per long rest. The celestial warlock would get charges to boost his Eldritch Blast damage and some secondary healing in exchange for sapping his life.

Giving my players powerful upgrades alongside typical class advancement can make some encounters harder to balance around, but as long as we’re all having fun who cares about balance??

  • haltzief@lemm.ee
    1·
    1 year ago

    When I first started DMing, I focused a lot on maintaining a captivating pace at the table, and also had a few story beats that I wanted to hit, and kind of nudge the players towards. This meant I was able to pull off some gratifying one-shots, or short arcs, which I thoroughly enjoyed, but longer adventures started to become too stressful to properly maintain. Especially if there is a larger connecting world or lore in place beforehand, that felt more constricting as the campaign went on.
    Practically it felt like being a filmmaker and making every session sensational. And when it worked, it felt awesome. If a session did not land properly however, I felt quite discouraged afterwards.

    Then I discovered: hey, I want to be surprised as much myself by the events as the players at my table. I don’t want them to follow my pre-existing story beats. Rather, I want to be an impartial arbiter and just see how the players react, and especially interact.
    Want to kill a key NPC? Sure, you can try, and if you manage to do it, the world will react accordingly.

    Three things I employed to make every session much more enjoyable for myself:

    • Adventure Design. I build adventures and campaigns “bottom up” (instead of top-down, where you do a lot of worldbuilding before play starts). Basically it means I have smaller sandboxes, with a few hooks, that might not even be backed up by anything yet, and just see what the players engage with and what sticks. Check out this Matthew Colville on Youtube, that explains it way better than I could.
    • Powerful Tools. I like giving the players meaningful powers and abilities, that are powerful, but also have some drawbacks. Not talking about the default “+1" magical items, but more like “you are invisible while you play this flute loud enough” or “With this ring you can breath under water, but you dry up if you don’t submerse yourself in water once a day.” And as soon as they earn such abilities, I just let them use it. Bypass substantial parts of the adventure? Well OK, you earned it - even if it’s hard in the moment to accept as a DM, I err on the side of just allowing it, because it feels awesome as a player to just be allowed using ones tools successfully.
    • Random Tables. I was very reluctant to use it at the table, because I did not wanted to drag the pace down and maybe “misinterpret” or tank the pace of a session. Sometimes I even rolled on random tables before a session, to “prepare properly”. But as soon as I committed to trying using random tables during a session, I noticed, that these sometimes quite improvised elements, caused the most fun on the table overall. And I just like being surprised by these twists and turns they might offer, how I can interpret them, and especially how the players react. And more often than not, they cannot even tell afterwards, what sprung from a random table, and what was planned beforehand.

    tl;dr being surprised by the twists and turns in the narrative I did not expect myself