I am running a Domain of Dread campaign inspired by one of the ones provided, but expanded to make it a whole closed sandbox world to explore. My regular DM who never gets to play is excited they say to join, but there have been some issues.

(Thing to note, this is a world where the Darklord has removed history of the world and made it their own false version. There is no real mention of races/species being in the world. Most stuff I have had to do myself to get it to be a world players can learn about since the material provided doesn't do any of that. It just provides a settingwith no real substance on how to actually run it.)

First is they didn't vibe with any of the races I provided for the world, a list of over 12 races each with different Lore to build off of. They said they couldn't connect with any of them not because of the lore provided, but because it wasn't the DnD lore they knew. I explained that this is part of the Domain's appeal to players, that you as the player will be rediscovering this history of your race/species' true origins. I then reminded them they could make a character from outside the domain if it was an issue of lore not matching what they know, but they said they wanted to do a character from that world.

Second is they don't understand why certain races/species don't know of their true origins, such as those originating with the fey, demons/devils, celestials, and others of different planes. I pointed out that the history of this world was erased and that due to this each race has a new origin they believe to be true as ordained by the Darklord. This history I pointed out isn't real, and their real origins will be discovered throughout the campaign. There is no reason for the fey creatures to know they are originally from the feywild, because that history is gone to them due to the Darklord. It is to the point they read over the materials for that Domain from the source books and tried to argue that their is no information on races, and that the Darklord has simply removed known history, as if that would explain why a race would know their original history. A tiefling isn't going to know of their demonic ties as being demonic ties if there are no known demons in that world's lore, and it makes more sense for them to believe they are simply cursed in some way.

I don't know how to address this. I have offered to change lore while still having it fit the already established guidelines, said I am open to critiques, criticism, and open to suggestions, and tried to make it clear that their real origins have not actually changed, and that those origins will be discovered in the campaign. I've tried to be firm that this aspect of the campaign is not changing, but if they can make suggestions on lore that would explain why they know of their original racial ties then I am not against implementing it.

There is another player who also tends to be a DM, and they have not been having this issue. In fact they have told me they like the way I have handled the erased and changed history. They have been having a blast coming up with a character, fully embracing the world's context and creating a character they want to play. There is also two other players who have enjoyed the stuff provided, and are excited to get their characters in the setting to explore and go on epic adventures.

What can I do at this point to get the Forever DM to understand that this is not a world where races/species actively know their true origins, and that although I accept their thoughts on it I am not going to change a whole major draw to the campaign simply because it isn't what they know. Or am I actually in the wrong and they have a point?

Update: The Forever Dm has at least chosen a lineage, but not a race. I might try to work backwards to a degree on character creation for them, figuring out their class, alignment, background, motivations, personality, etc. I also plan to talk to them about making sure they know that if the lore at this point is still an issue that maybe this isn't the campaign for them unfortunately. I will still offer the explanation of the why for the lore being how it is by further explaining the lore of the Darklord's reasoning for erasing history and rewriting it.

Hi everyone!

In a few weeks I'll be running my very first D&D campaign as a DM. I've spent months building the world, writing the main story, and creating personal questlines for each of my players.

The part I'm struggling with is one particular character. I know his backstory and his motivation, but I'm having trouble figuring out where I want his personal story to go.

I'd like his quest to be divided into three acts, with each act revealing more of the truth and eventually leading to a meaningful moral dilemma.

Would anyone want to try and expand this story into 3 acts?

Here's the backstory (this is what player submitted):

Khal

Ever since I was a child, I was rebellious and could never stand injustice. Whenever the strong preyed upon the weak, I simply couldn't stand by and do nothing. More often than not, this led me into fights, much to my father's despair.

My father, Alder , was a high-ranking imperial official responsible for inspecting the safety of mines throughout the Empire. He believed that discipline and responsibility were the highest virtues. When my behavior became impossible to control, he made a decision that would change my life forever—he sent me to study at the Temple of Tyr.

At first, I hated him for it.

But over time, I realized that it was there I found my true calling. The priests of Tyr taught me what justice truly meant. I swore my oath to Tyr and became a paladin.

For the next several years, I carried out missions on behalf of the temple. Between my duties and relentless training, I visited my family less and less often.

Everything changed one day.

News reached the temple of a terrible disaster at the Branwick Mine. Flooded tunnels had claimed the lives of dozens of miners. The official reports stated that the mine had previously been declared safe by Alder —my father.

Shortly after the catastrophe, my father disappeared without a trace.

The Temple of Tyr declared him the prime suspect and assigned me, along with several other paladins, to track him down and bring him to trial. If found guilty of willful negligence resulting in the deaths of so many innocent people, he could face the death penalty.

I don't know whether my father is guilty.

I only know that I have to uncover the truth.

Why does he travel?

He seeks the truth behind the Branwick disaster, protects ordinary people from the abuse of power, and is determined never to become the kind of man who justifies evil for the sake of convenience.

Why did he accept the mining contract?

The events surrounding the mine strike directly at his own past. He cannot ignore another situation in which innocent workers may lose their lives.

He also hopes to uncover documents or other evidence that will reveal what truly happened at Branwick—and what role, if any, his father played in the tragedy.

Greatest Fear

That one day he will begin to justify terrible decisions with words like "procedure," "orders," or "the greater good."

Flaw

He is stubborn, impulsive, and deeply distrustful of authority—especially when he believes someone is lying or trying to bury the truth.

I was playing 3.5e as a kid in my parent's basement and it was with a couple of friends and we just loved building characters. We would rarely play more than a dungeon and it was a ton of fun. I took about a 10 year break then COVID lockdowns and Critical Role meshed into my life and brought the obsession with the game back. Since 2020, I've been running 5e games for my friends and introducing it to 10 newbies. Throughout this, I've been struggling and adapting to different scheduling styles. I went from just a dungeon to wanting a long spanning campaign with amazing backgrounds and narratives with fun mechanics, puzzles and encounters. I usually blend modules and homebrew.

The last 6 years have led me to trying a bunch of different scheduling styles. It has been a major frustration trying to get campaigns going. Only over the past probably 9 months, have I finally felt like I hit my stride in scheduling successfully and getting the narrative the players and me as a DM want.

The more people I've talked to about scheduling online and in person have been split. On one side, there's the Casual Drop-In Default: Same day, same time, and we march on with whoever is sitting in the chairs. On the other side, there's the High-Commitment Contract: We only play if the whole party (or a strict quorum) can make it, treating game night as a sacred, high-priority commitment.

There is some interesting behavior psychology around "weak-link" principle and FOMO and how it influences group cohesion and long term success of playing these type of games out. My feeling is we, game master and dungeon masters, are having to water down our sessions or default to barebones adventures without mixing in backgrounds or momentum because of these scheduling decisions.

Which camp does your current group fall into, and is it actually working for your campaign long term?

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My sister and I will start a campaign soon. We want to switch up dm-ing every few sessions. The one who isn't dm-ing has their own character. Our characters are multiple personalities from one body, so we don't have to find excuses as to why one of the two characters is missing every session.

My questions are:

what else can we do, so it will be fun for everyone involved? Feel free to share your own stories and rules.

Is there a way we both can communicate on the overall story without always knowing all plot twists and surprises one comes up with?

Hi everyone! I am having a hard time getting a “new” player in my group to engage in sessions, and I’m not sure what to do.

For context, I have been playing online with a group of four friends for about three years. Three of them are very experienced players/gms and we have rotated gms depending on who has the gming itch! The itch fell on me this time, and I have been gming the Cypher System for them. At the very start of the game, however, a friend had to drop out, and another friend of mine (we’ll call Sam) wanted to join – which everyone welcomed! At this point, we are 12+ sessions into the game, so Sam is no longer that new.

The problem is, Sam has been slow to integrate into how we roleplay (we were under the impression they are new TTRPGs but I’m not entirely sure), which is very conversational – speaking both in-character and narrating out-of-character how their character feels or what they are doing. I understand that it can be daunting to join a new group of people and be vulnerable and silly, but everyone immediately liked Sam and tried to get them to talk in character and engage in low-stakes character-driven scenes to ease them in (for example, in-character asking each other how they feel, what they think is going on, or just having fun moments, etc.).

During most of the session, Sam is quiet and just lets everyone else take the lead, even if it's not what their character would want. They are more engaged when the spotlight is solely on them, and I try to give everyone their moment in the spotlight where they are the only character or the leading character in a scene focused on their individual interests to balance the more group-driven scenes.

Obviously, group scenes make up most of the session and I try to encourage Sam in by asking things like, “Sam, what does your character think? Does your character want to say anything?”. 7 times out of 10, Sam will essentially say “I think my character would have said something sooner in reaction to that”, and they are referring to something that happened in the scene maybe 5 or 10 minutes ago after all the players have enthusiastically engaged. Oftentimes, Sam wants to do something a little different from the rest of the players (like negotiate or investigate rather than intimidate or threaten), which sometimes means we have to rewind parts of the scene so they can have their say – which I do not find fun, as I have to walk back whatever we have developed in a scene.

Sam is clearly not feeling comfortable enough to interject and talk with or over the other players in more high-stakes scenes. I have tried to encourage them outside of the sessions to speak up, to warm up to the other players and not to feel like they have to “wait their turn” to speak. I feel bad and am sure this is also partly my failure as a gm (this is only my second time running a table). I could probably be better at prompting them earlier, but we are 12 sessions in, and no amount of prompting or speaking to them out of the game has changed their in-game behaviour.

The final straw came from outside of the game yesterday, though, when I was hanging out with Sam and our other friends, and they made a joke about my friends in the game being “bad role-players”, which makes me think Sam is not as inexperienced as we thought, and this might be an issue of expectations or just not meshing well. Besides being upsetting and putting me in an uncomfortable spot between two friend groups, the joke also makes me think that Sam isn’t uncomfortable but just seems to think everyone else should also be “waiting their turn”, which I have less sympathy for as that is just not how I run my table.

I would really appreciate advice as I’m not sure what to do.

Thank you!

'How I learned not to Railroad'.

Way back when, in the very early 90s, as a university age DM.  Sick of D&D, murderhobo styles (I had been DMing for nearly all my highschool years).  Had seen Dragonlance.  I thought I could do a much better High fantasy and well plotted campaign with a system without a skyrocketing power level system.  Real plot, stakes, and Heroic struggle.  I decided on Fantasy Hero as a system.

I plotted an epic campaign.  It centered around a world plagued by demons, an absence of gods, a pile of philosophical paths, and a deep belief in luck, fate and prophecy.  There is a push by a demonlord to openly conquer the world, the PCs are trying to fill a prophecy in order to stop it.  They are powerful Heroes, and all strongly motivated to work together to do this, despite some considerable cultural and ethical differences.  6 Players, make detailed characters and backgrounds. 

I write the basis of the plot arcs, described in the prophecy, which they have, but is somewhat vague.  The significant twists come through other, lesser demon lords, who really don't want the world takeover to succeed, as then they become vassals of the one that does the conquering.  The demons have enough selfish, bickering politics that this can be used to let the Heroes succeed.  One demon prince in particular, weaker but very cunning, has the complete prophecy, including the bit the PCs don't have, but doesn't want the other demon lords to know this.

Session Zero went well.  Session 1 has the PCs perform a ritual in an old city in an ancient wasteland, and begin the quest.  Someone has ratted them out, and their location is known to the BBEG.  A column of wyvern mounted scout troops attacks them, wounds one badly, but the party kills several and the rest realise they are outclassed and fly off.  From a high bluff in the wastes, they see the scouts flying off towards a huge marching army.  20 wyvern troops, they win easily.  They know there is no way they can fight this army, and several have played with me before and know my style of 'stupidity tests' which start early (if you are dumb enough to think the 7 of you can smash that army single handed, we can just have you die now, establishing the genre and tone).

The Heroes try to hide and flee.  The aerial scouts make hiding not a great solution in the fairly open semi-desert wasteland.  They try to flee.  The problem is that there are demonic and undead troops, that need no sleep or rest.  Short term they are faster, long term they are run down.  It looks grim, then the sneaky Demon lords lieutenant rocks up with retineue (on wyverns) and signals to parley.  He offers them a free ride out of there, to wherever in wyern range they would like.  Questioned, he replies about his lords motives for this present.  Party lore guy confirms this does make sense.

Problem... In session 0, two characters had made 'no compromise with demons' fanatics.  Made sense in lore.  The RPed their characters well.  One refused to touch the deal.  The second killed the emissary...

Oh shit, my party is up a creek without a paddle in a barbed wire canoe, and my deus ex machina was just shot down by some good RPing.  My (fairly good) GM improvising brain had in mind letting the lore master in the group 'remember' some underground tunnels from the city they were in, that lead out a long way (great adventure, a 'forced double time' dungeon crawl, pursued by foes, and having to cover their tracks, sounded great fun).   Problem was, the whole freaking plot relied on 'deals' with demon lords that were not going to happen...  I fucked the whole grand campaign, on session 1.

I did the only thing I could do, apologised to the players, and ended the game.  It was my mistake.  But I learned, that day, why railroading is bad, even 'the party doesn't care if they are on a railroad as long as it goes to awesome' railroading.  

(reposted from an RPG forum).

Good morning Reddit people!

Well, there's one week left until the second session as DM of my first campaign. I'd like to know if what we did in the first session was correct:

I would compare it to an open-world video game like Elden Ring, with permadeath of course. The players point to the place on the map they want to go (if they have one) or head wherever the road takes them. I made printouts of items whose descriptions reveal parts of ancient lore and geeky stuff like that.

The story is as follows: Kill the 4 Ash Princesses; Cinderella, Rapunzel, Ariel and Snow White, who reign over the entire world. These four are — and the players don't know this — controlled by a god with a protagonist complex who was meant to be the "chosen one" to defeat them. The players have to defeat the god instead. Yes.

I'm torn between 3 games. I want to get into DMing to give it a go, for fun, be able to try out different games, and meet new people outside of my 5e friends.

D&D 5e:
Pros: This is the game I am by far the most familiar with. It's so popular that the hope would be that I'd be able to more easily be able to find players willing to try a game with a new DM.
Cons: One of the main reasons I want to try to DM is to play games other than 5e! 5e has a reputation (quite fairly maybe, from my experience) of having some players more likely to turn up never having read any of the rules. I don't mind this in general and think 5e is a super cool RPG to get started with, but I worry I'll have too much to juggle trying to learn to DM while also helping somebody learn to play 5e and TTRPGS in general.

Pathfinder 2e:
Pros: My current favourite system. Seems to have plenty of players in my region. I'm fairly confident with the rules and system in general, though nowhere near as confident as 5e.
Cons: The game is so rules dense that I worry I'll fluster on the night. Even though I'm fairly confident with the rules and style of play, a lot of that knowledge comes from a videogame of the system, and PFS (PF2es organised play) games.

Dolemwood/Shadowdark:
Pros: I am most excited to try some OSR-type games, and they don't seem very popular in my region so DMing them might be my best shot. Since they are rules-lite they will hopefully be a little easier to DM.
Cons: My experience playing either of these games is literally one single game of Dolmenwood that I will be playing on Saturday as part of free RPG day. My knowledge of the game comes exclusively from an actual play I love to watch.