100%! I've seen DMs present that kind of advice, and I always just wonder how sustainable that is. If you have a clear vision for a campaign, and you're excited about it, and then you take out all the defining features of that vision to make the campaign work for the maximum number of players, will you still enjoy running that game months down the line? I find it's better to get the right party for the right campaign, so everyone has a good time throughout.

Putting the ‘Master’ back into Dungeon Master… you will live and breathe this game for months, years… your investment and energy will far out way that of your players - even the super keen ones. If you don’t totally love your world and its story options, you won’t stay the course.

As a DM I whole-heartedly agree!! I think we should normalize DMs being a little more "selfish" (for lack of a better word) with our campaigns because we are the ones putting in countless hours of creative prep work into this project while the players just get to show up, have fun, and not think about it again until the next session. For some reason it's become culturally expected of us to do everything for the players' entertainment by providing them with personalized content at the expense of what we as DMs really want to do. Nah, I'm here to have fun too. I already have a full time job and being a DM isn't it. It's a hobby and it's a lot of work to sustain. Especially when nobody else wants to DM and they just wanna kick back and chill instead. Long story short: at my table I let them know what I wanna run, what I don't wanna include, and they need to decide for themselves if they wanna be a part of that or not .

I'm napping things out to dm my first campaign, I'm going to try to address this by running a quick scene where the party meets as children, I build game mechanics for them to play a sport, then there will be a city wide attack they have to escape from. Session one will time jump into the future to start the campaign where they already know each other

I've never run a post apocalypse game, but that sounds like so much fun! How long do you envision it running?

@@TalesArcane roughly to level 10-12, so maybe 1,5-2 years. it will take place only 20 years after the end of the war, so the land is still trying to stabilize, so the land will be in chaos, since the war tore open the veil between planes, so rifts appear every so often, letting strange forces and creatures through. they can be walking throught he forest when an ifrit appears. nowhere is safe xD

@@Teraclon very cool! I grew up on D&D, Gamma World and Thundar the Barbarian, so pretty much every game I've ever run has had "post apocalyptic" flavors. I tend to set mine FAR after the "apocalypse" (like 1000 years or so), so that the buildings and bunkers of the past are now dungeons, while the mutations and "genetic experiments" of the past are now the monsters / monstrous humanoids. My current party did battle with a Wight Monk with a cybernetic eye that fired scorching rays as a reaction. Good times >:-]

I get that! Give me "pre-formed party" over "strangers meet for the first time" any day of the week. I absolutely understand why some players prefer the latter approach, but as a DM I find the first few sessions are so much smoother and more natural if everyone is already acquainted.

How'd it go?

@@redd_Jack Good thanks for asking, didn’t have anytime for a combat encounter though

Glad you're finding the content useful!

The point is to remove barriers to long-term commitment. If players know that every second game won't involve a commute, for example, that can be pretty helpful for getting people locked in longterm. For example, on nights when I play, I have to spend just over two hours commuting to and from my DM's apartment. With work and other life commitments, doing that every week could be a bit draining. Doing it every second week? Much more manageable, for me and for the other players who have to cover distance to and from the game.