You're a living proof that quality is better than quantity

We shall title this quest: "The Search for the Good Boy."

I used to be a werewolf like you, but then I took an arrow in the knee.

You should also expect your players to do something goofy that throws that narrative thread out the window and forces you to make something up on the spot. In one of my games, the running joke is that potatoes are the solution to everything. Because they often are. Want to grab the attention of a sleeping owlbear? Chuck potatoes at it. A puzzle involving a dragon fountain statue? Shove a potato into its mouth. A swarm of spiders are attacking through that hole you just made in a wall? Plug the hole with potatoes.

That Sans noise just confused the hell out of me and I ended up looking through my tabs to figure out where it came from.

I am a simple man,i see Kanekuo,i click

Hell yeah another D&D video! Love this series and monsters misguided because they both have helped me understand D&D better.

I don't trust that hunter. It sounds like if I listen to what he has to say someone's going to end up having a bad time.

I'm spending most of today prepping a "monstrous adventurers party" one shot for a convention I'm leaving for tomorrow. This video came at exactly the right time, and it's given me some amazing ideas for how to reveal some of the plot elements to the players! You've reminded me that "show, don't tell" is important when writing these narratives, so I think I'll do some tweaking and restructuring to get this one shot to fit the theme even better. Thanks a ton for making these videos! They're a big help, and I appreciate them every time! (Also, this is the first time in ages that I've wanted to throw money at a kickstarter because it advertised on a KZfaq video. That setting looks like a ton of fun, so I'll go look it up later today!)

Yaaaaassss! More mechanics! It really does help us neophyte DMs

Were is my dad

Really like your animations and i also like your term of "rolling a ball of yarn." As primarily a world build i have the better part of a planet done however i can't seem to bring it to "life." Looking forward to any other tips and epic animations you make. Keep up the good work. :)

This helps with my DMing immensely! Story building isn't my strongest attribute, Thanks!

Aw yes. Just want I needed to get through class.

This sounds a lot like the way I build backstories for my characters. I set up family and a reason for leaving. Then I delve into how they learned all they know.

This was truly very helpful. I'm at a point where I am struggling to bridge the gap between major plot beats and this helped immensly. Thanks you so much!

As a Lore type DM, I love this so much

Thank you so much, this is super helpful!! My current story building process was really messy do this will help make things faster and cleaner!!

This Video is the single reason I know how to brain storm, every other explanation and Definition never worked for me but the yarn metaphor just made it click just like that, Thank you for that! Also I've always loved your content, Hope your doin' well even if your not makin' videos anymore!

The idea of putting the adventure into a flow diagram-type is absolutely genius. I think I’ll try something like this and see how it goes in my next session.

More please!!!! We need more concise and practical D&D informational videos like these. 😁 Thank you so much for sharing your DMing knowledge.

I'm more than likely going to start using this for quests on major campaigns. Thanks!

I'm working on the start of my new campaign but I didn't really know how to solve it in the end. This really saved my bacon in that respect, thank you.

Solid video, everything was communicated effectively and concisely. You didn't even try to inflate the video length with rambling. Also narrating as a bird man just makes it more fun in general. Looking forward to new uploads✌️

Just watching his videos stir my creative juices and widen my D&D knowledge. Keep up the great work Kanekuo!

Always love your stuff, nice one on getting sponsored!

Yet another great video! I enjoyed the animation and the lesson!

Thank you sooooo much, I went into This video thinking it wouldn't help much but This is actually extremely helpful!

I’m a newer DM, and this video was supremely helpful!

This is so freaking cool! The story is intriguing and dynamic but the methodical way you describe writing it makes me feel like I could do the same, thanks!

This video is amazing! I don’t know why, but it just answers all the questions I had perfectly, the yarn analogy fit really well. This could even be applied to writing!

I love this series! These videos are really helpful for me!

This is actually really useful. Awesome, man

I've been world building a campaign for the past three months, and I want to say my process is kinda similar to this though I never tried to contextualize my process. This visual definitely helps me understand my own process a lot more. Thank you so much for this video!

Such a great and well done video, gives me a lot of help for creating quick little encounters/ quests. Thanks =) def gonna sub, love the art work

This actually really helps me, thanks for the uber useful video :3

This was so helpful! Thank you!

This will definitely help with future campaigns and writing in general!

Yeees! You got a Sponsor and a nice one as well.

This is basically what I'm trying to do in world of darkness. But, I don't thought about brainstorming or condition trees. Thanks for the video 😊

This is super interesting, as a non-DM.

Found you through your fananimation. Love your vids man! Subscribed!

This is hella helpful and not just for D&D.

Great stuff!

Thank you for this video! Big help to me!

Useful info for overall storytelling.

Very useful like always

Great process. Time to steal ruthlessly!

This is really cool.

Your DM advice is pretty good, I'll try to use it within how I run my Games, I pretty much make stuff on the spot, but with this, I'll be able to better organize it more than I already did on the spot.

The ball of yarn is a well thought out idea!!!

Watched a few of your Critical Role animations and ended up here. Love your videos; I'm a subscriber now! ^^

your videos are so dam helpful!! thank you so much!

That’s a good method! I’ll try it out to hopefully make my dm notes less chaotic

Thanks for this!

This was very insightful I'm not a DM, but I found this very interesting!

I NOW KNOW HOW TO DO A GOOD STORY, THANK YOU!

holy fuck,im so proud of ya for the sponsor,man! and such a great one too! also, I think I'm probably gonna use that structure of worldbuilding haha (starter dm here,lol,if aynone would have any tips,id be thankful)

I think this also shows how to structure stories in D&D; don't rely on your players to progress the thing. It can continue and develop without their influence. Then you don't have side stories just being awkwardly static and stilted, your world feels more alive

the set up for this quest gave me whiplash because of how similar it is to my first pc's backstory lol

Danm that was nice comrad

I love this method of quest-building, so organised! Unfortunately, I can't do anything but improv' my ideas to my players at the table before spending hours between sessions tying up the impromptu ideas.

I already started building the prologue of my current campaign in a different, less effective way, but I’ll likely use this method for the larger, main plot, so thanks for the advice! :)

I find your sona so cute for some reason, haha also nice advice

I just imagined an Aphmau-like world with this video... Thanks

Yes, thank you!!

It's cool you did a small story of a werewolf,I find it cool because I have a werewolf ranger character (never used yet).

I love ur content

I am so using this

In my home brew game (the shadows that fall) there is this ancient tablet where if you fail to read it you have to find an old elf that is inside the woods but if you can read it it says “I am watching you -rose”

Your really good at what u do

Bird man makes good video. Bird man should continue following his dreams. Bird man brings happiness to others.

I world builded via a character side quest, basically getting to know the "Gandalf the grey"/guide character without having the character really explain ANYTHING like a part of his side quest was getting a prosthetic arm because he was missing his! Along the way they learn of the history, religion, and other stuff about the world.

really good vid, kamek! maybe you can make a monster designing video next?

I love your avatar!

The one thing I think this method is missing is a link to the player characters. To continue with your yarn analogy, I prefer to have the yarn be tied to the PCs so that they can easily reach it. You could see this as a piece of yarn entangling them and forcing them to deal with it, this discovering how far it really goes.

Fo shizzle, I'm new to dming without another DM to ask this stuff, I haven't found anyone else getting down to the nitty gritty of prep, thanks!

This is good shit. More please! Maybe fleshing things out more/more detail in general in the form of a free-talk/podcast/drawing stream sort of style if that strikes your fancy.

... Did I miss the part with the world building? I was told at the start there would be world building. This is brainstorming for a plot.

Fun detail I've recently discovered: in older editions of D&D, they used to specify how frequently any given monster would be encountered: common, uncommon, rare, very rare, or unique. Werewolves? They're COMMON. Right along with Humans, Dwarves, Orcs and Ogres. Lycanthropy is an ISSUE.

Lovely Also bird people are great

Twist ending, the whole village was ALSO werewolves, and the sister's the only human (adopted) Good ending, she's offered lycanthropy as a way of saying "welcome to the family" quite literally Bad ending is much messier and will likely lead to TPK

Worldbuilding and yarn are a good metaphor, and to add: Players are like cats with yarn. No matter how carefully you weave, even the most cooperative player might just get tangled in it, unintentionally ignore it all, or bat it around and pull it apart. I am..... overwhelmingly guilty of 2/3 of those. Not even on purpose. Sometimes the players woven into the stray start changing the direction you would have taken it, i think. [pls note i can't DM to save my or a party's lives, haven't even learned how to do it properly]

Thaaaaaanks

I was expecting a more broad form of worldbuilding, but this is helpful too - more actually, since the wide-scale worldbuilding videos are a lot more common I'm brainstorming some ideas for a Slavic-inspired homebrew campaign, and I can think of a couple of 'balls of yarn' I can work with. Maybe the players find themselves in a tavern where a fight breaks out between a dwarf paladin of Perun and an elf cleric of Veles, who are both after the same goal that their gods requested of them. Or, how about a village on the outskirts of a forest that's home to Baba Yaga herself? Or maybe a group of rusalki come to a local town asking for aid fighting off a group of vodyanoi. Or what if the rusalki are attacking people instead, because their river has been polluted or dammed by the humans?

I’m getting distracted by how good your art is.

Yes

One of the PC's is alergic to dogs, and the alergies kick in while at the farm despite the farmer not owning a dog.

That bird man is your fursona. Fact.

I really like your world building technique, it's quick and effective. Too bad pcs will never allow plots to unfold that seamlessly.

I love you

Good stuph.

could you possibly do an episode covering curses or lycanthropy? trying to worm it out for pc's

plz do more playble races in monsters misguided

Any tips on how to decide between a few broad conditions and dozens of specific ones? Your thoughts on having both?

One of my friends failed at that.. He was DMing for me and other 2 friends, the scenario was a rebellion on the capital, the militia asked our help but later we were approached by the king's assassin to backstab them for riches, we were suppose to give our answer to him the next day, we were all neutral so, at first, we though of going with the assassin for the money but, in the end, since we were Lv3, we decided to just flee the capital, let them kill themselves and come back to scavenge since it would be chaos after the fight, my DM did NOT saw that coming, he was pretty damn sure we would aid one of the factions instead and he had to call out the session short to create the scenario for the next weekend.. He didn't liked to hinder player's choices so he didn't went with "Oh, you have to side with one or the other or [halfassedexcuse] will happen!" in order to force us to choose a side so, next week, we fought other scavengers, people from the remaining militia that were angered at us bailing on them and the king's guards because the king was upset because we not only denied his request, we also didn't even bother to show up and give an answer to his royal assassin, it was epic tho'..

When you come back do more vids like this.

That sounds like a lot of work for players to just go "Farm. Okay. Whatever. Are there goblins in the area?"

This would work great in my campaign except for the fact that lycanthropes in our world pulled the old City Goblin and have a wealthy and massive monarchy. Technically they're all royal family.

I've never played dnd but I'm gonna assume that it's like turn based choose your own adventure?