Thank you, mate! It's neat, right? And because the goals all came from the players, it still feels to them like a natural occurrence, even if they know on some level that the DM had a hand in it.

The social contract would make it the responsibility of the players to ensure their character has an initial reason to stick with the party. However, the GM can definitely help with the brain storming here and make it all come together.

I really appreciate that, mate! I'm still developing and finding my feet as a creator, but I'm really glad progress is being made. It helps that I just really love doing these long-form videos!

Ditto!

Good luck with all the games to come!

@@TalesArcane Any chance you could share the steps you take to create one of those self-contained one-shot adventures?

I should have actually specified in the video that some of the advice (Tip 3, especially) really applies more to longer campaigns, but hopefully some of the tips are still useful 😄

Prepping and worldbuilding CAN be a lot of fun! But for me, if I can start sooner, I will, because the magic happens once the players are involved.

I LOVE urban campaigns! My biggest Patreon project last year was actually a single-city campaign, and it was probably one of the coolest things I've worked on so far. By the way, you may have already seen it, but I did a video on prepping and running cities (kzfaq.info/get/bejne/m5aUqq6nycy0mXk.html), which might spark some fun ideas!

Perfect! I hope the new campaign goes well - happy adventuring!

Good luck, have fun!!

@@TalesArcane thank you!! I think tying all of their goals together will be the trickiest part, but i’m sure it will go well

@@vanillemor5009 thank you! I am nervous but beyond excited

Mate, thank you so much! Really glad you're enjoying the videos. Many more to come!

I'm always delighted to hear about someone taking up DMing for the first time, it's such a fun, rewarding experience. Good luck!

Glad you found the video useful, Ben!

Players often hate the characters they make because: Class combinations are rubbish, they want the coolest looking race but different abilities, their 15 pages of backstory don't fit the lore, their character does not have enough impact on the world as they want, their character isn't "optimized", the list goes on.

Depends on your game, but don't prep more than 8ish hours of content. Then again, prep twice as long under the assumption they'll skip half of what you prepared. And it absolutely depends on your game. Are you running on rails, sandbox, prewritten adventures? Sandbox will take the most work because you probably have to prep about 8ish places. But, realistically, only maybe 3 encounters for each place? And they could be as simple as "you find a golden bell in the middle of the road, what do you do" or they could he combat encounters. Or puzzles. I'll say this for certain: do not plan a campaign. Plan forces in the world and things those forces will do in the absence of any players. Seed these things throughout the world on a hex grid of arbitrary size, 24 miles a grid is usual which is the groundspeed of a typical person walking. If you need more time, throw a couple combat encounters their way, don't let em rest between because resting in wilderness might cause another random encounter. But yeah, create things that will act upon the world in the absence of players, and the story will unfold that way, and more organically, because you control those forces and if you don't want the goblin to raid the village today cuz your PCs are across the river and through the woods visiting grandma for a social encounter day, those goblins might invade and steal the blacksmith's daughter another day. Or it could be that day because the clock is always ticking and there be forces at work, and the monsters want to win. I dunno, my two cents. Plan forces, give them a leader, a goal, and some ways they'll attain that goal, a flowchart for how things will go uninterrupted. Oh, ok, the goblins attack the village. They steal the blacksmith's daughter away to a local crypt. They start a ritual to sacrifice the child and summon their god. The ritual is complete. The child sacrificed, they summon a lesser demon because a single child is not going to summon a big bad. Otherwise, look up Dungeon World's adventure fronts. If you don't understand them, ask ChatGPT, they know.

Oh I dunno. Lots of real world inspiration to pull from. Just pick a country that has slud into communism and use that as your main story progression, then add monsters and magic as the tools and some of the players.

@@nathanmorgan3647 To be honest, I completely forgot that I could use real-world inspiration from countries as a portion of the setting. Thank you!