Didn't expect to see a pro-PvP video. Nice work, especially both RL examples. I've avoided PvP like this like the plague, but this seems doable (with practice). Can't wait what you'll cook up next!

Mechanically DnD was never designed with PvP in mind.PCs engaging in combay with each other is horribly inbalanced and easily explaitable.Just having 5ft more speed or flying can auto win fights.or controll spells.

I think PvP can be incredible, if you follow exactly what is mentioned here. It’s the characters conflict, not the players. This is really important and can give exciting moments and character depth. You are not just mindless adventurers who just want to tick off quests. And it is really important to clarify real life uncomfortableness if it arises. I am the player behind Cazi but due to some circumstances I also play another character in the campaign. Cazi just recently returned, so the two character thing is new to me. The question came up if this was a way for me to get one of my characters out, so I can be only one person again. The other players were worried that they are preventing a pre planned exit strategy. I assured them it is not, but if it came to that (Cazi leaving again) I would be fine with it. This way everybody knew that the outcome was not predetermined and nobody was ruining anything. I was just excited to see what would happen at the end. And let me tell you, counterspell sucks if it is used against you. But in the end, I think everybody had fun and thats what it’s all about.

Very good video! I like this idea for motivation a lot, and it will be put to good use, both for my new character and for my ongoing campaign as a dm.

am learning to play D&D for the first time currently, and picked tactician as it seemed cool. your videos is helping solidify that for me and teach me! thank you! im a fan (:

Wolverine as an image for Batman. Whoops.

Great vid, very practical.

Another beautiful addition to the series. Thanks! I'm going to apply this to my (N)PC's. Thusfar I've mainly focused on short-, medium-, and long-term goals for them (depending how deep I want to go for a character). This will be a nice change of pace. Obligatory but ackchyually *puts glasses on* moment: it's Appelo

Order and Freedom does kind of help explain the difference between Lawful vs Chaotic Alignments in a beautifully simple way. Not 100% fully since one could argue that a stable environment could better allow for freedom to flourish, but on a surface level, but on a surface level it can make sense. Lawful Evil = Order and Power as they want a stable environment to to exercise their influence in as well as maintain it. Chaotic Evil = Freedom and Power as they want to exercise their influence independent of others who could hold them back. Of course, not a perfect system for alignments since all alignments might want power to do different things, but Alignments and Motivations often do go hand in hand in informing the other.

ideas Artificer : Curiosity, Mastery , Goal Barbarian : Freedom , Power, Honor + relatedness , status Bard : Status, Relatedness, Acceptance Cleric : Order, relatedness, acceptance, Druid : Order, Acceptance, honor Fighter : Power, Mastery, Freedom Monk : Mastery, Order, honor Paladin : Status, Order, Power Ranger : Freedom ,goal, relatedness Rogue : Goal. curiosity, mastery Sorcerer : Status, freedom, honor Warlock : Mastery, curiosity, power Wizard : Curiosity , Mastery, status

Motivation is only a part of a deep character. Can't forget about flaws, worldview, attitude, needs, wants, fears and more. To delve deeper we can ask WHY those are the motivations of this character. Why is this goal important to them, why are they persuing mastery, why they conscious(or not) chose acceptance? In order to understand their core beliefs and backstory. Maybe you could make a series about creating the layers of 3 dimensional characters? The system you presented is both easy to grasp and varied.I like it, but personally I prefer working from the bottom --->up. I use MTG colour wheel theory starting with core philosophy and work my way outwards. Creating layers of the characters and shaping the backstory to explain them. also I don't like your new profile picture, I wish you'd change it. Also also, don't you dare listen to some randoms on the internet telling you what to do with YOUR yt channel.

Thanos did nothing wrong. Having said that, I think this is a good approach to guide a characters decisions. But I do quite like the suggestions from the backgrounds, at least as an inspiration. I would never really fully go by them, but use them as a source for more background for the character. So I don’t think they are completely useless, though some are more useful than others. And I agree, sticking 100% to them is not the thing to do. But especially for beginners or just some inspiration, they are a great thing.

I agree that having a good set of principles is preferable to skill. However, I disagree with your priorities. Before anything else, you must have good players who will try as much as the GM to engage with the world, their characters and pursue goals. It doesn't matter how good a GM is if the players are uninterested, lazy and passive, which in my opinion is most players. This is rule 0. Additionally the biggest problem most GM's and players have in this age of live plays and influencer culture is prioritizing story and narrative over player immersion, genuine roleplay (not just doing silly voices), and agency. The thing that separates rpg's from other mediums is the amount of immersion and verisimilitude one can experience while playing. Thus, a good gm's mindset and biggest priority should be to maximize immersion. If they can manage that then everything else will fall into place. If the GM is in the mindset of trying to tell or steer a narrative, then it becomes easier to fall into common pit traps like railroading. I also slightly disagree that player fun is a major priority. If the setting is reacting to players in a believable way then players will inevitably come into contact with conflict they can't handle and some of their characters may die. Having a character die isn't always fun but it is necessary to create a world with stakes.

Great video man. loved it

I agree 100%. Good values make good games. My main value is simple: I am a player in my own game. I do not have a player character, but i am a player. It helps shape my mindset over the game in a way that curbs my competitive nature. When i seperate myself from the players, it very quickly leaves me frustrated when my players short circuit my encounters. Now that im part of the group when *WE* short circuit my encounters it means *WE* won. I wanst defeated, i wasnt out manuvered, i helped the rest of my team have a good time. Second: my players characters are theirs. Anything i want to do to them outside the typical bounds of combat must be run past them. For example: i wanted to run a situation in which my players need to sacrifice one of themselves to obtain an ability they need to use against the big bad evil guy. As such i brought this up. It was vauge. I said "i was thinking of a situation in which one of you trade your lives for some spooky ghost powers as well as a mcguffin youll need for the end game. If anyone is interested i can elaborate, if not, im happy to move beyond this idea." Oje of my players is ready to sacrifice themselves to a giant hermit crab god of death to gain the power of True Death to wield against an ancient progenitor god sealed away in a volcano. All because i asked permission. Were getting a fantastic rp moment and i didnt have to force it or surprise anyone. Lastly: my ncps are mine, and any world details i have written down are immutable, but the gaps are there for my players to fill. One of them created a stone worshipping cult of miners, laborers, and warriors who give devotion to the god of masculine beauty and their temples are gyms and worship is lifting. Its a little sillier than the tone i ususllu go for but its so good and fun and my players loved it so i happily added it.

Yes i often get that my games are more immersive and allowing than most. just recently I even revealed how little perfect prep I do. I was the one surprised. They knew. Always prioritize the fun having of your groups, and ask what kind of fun they want to have. Mine has even allowed the unfolding of my story across their shenanigans and they know that I can adapt to anything they want to do. Its really refreshing.

Nice video, deserves more views

This video is gold

Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation. Listen to what your players are telling you they want and incorporate it, rather than push your own campaign agenda. Sure in session 0 all 5 players agreed to hunt down a cult worshiping mind flayers, but a few months of creepy squidlings, the thieves guild's activities are actually more interesting because the cultists all feel the same. I think this is a point for constant collaboration, and post game retrospectives. I like to ask my players, both about what they think about an encounter in character, but also as a player. Some of these notes can also be from idle discussions with each other, like "Oh I wonder if the big twist is...." or "I bet the BBEG is someone in this family, the clues line up!" even if they don't fit what you planned, make changes to keep the customer happy and make your prep useful. Frequent, purposeful collaboration reduces the amount of wasted work. Don't forget you're a customer and a developer! Awesome video as usual. I really enjoy this content and am excited to see what you develop next!

Another week, another video and this time a beautiful and agile manifesto! I'd love to see how deep you went with the twelve pages. I don't remember how much prep I did for my first time DMing, except for the fact that it was way too much. My players always get sidetracked, which makes it so much better than I could have 'scripted'. These days, instead of spending too much time on prep, I'm working on making failures better, i.e., failing forward, or dare I say it: do stuff for myself.

I think framing all of these as values to be contrasted with technique is the wrong way about thinking about these things. Number 1 is a value: the thing I care about most is that my players have fun playing D&D. All the other things are skills and techniques to accomplish that goal. Being able to run sessions without excessive preparation and knowing how to preserve player agency are skills you employ so that your players will get to play D&D and will have fun while doing so. These skills are part of your DM jutsu just as much as improving or knowing the rules or knowing when to break the rules or having great voice acting skills. There was nothing wrong with Matt Colville's values; he cares about his players having fun. He was just juggling competing concerns. If the jailer executes the character, they'll feel railroaded and won't have fun, but if he doesn't that'll break their suspension of disbelief and they also won't have fun, and in the moment, he didn't see the way to employ his skills in a way that preserved fun. Not because he didn't want to, not because he had the wrong values, but because he wasn't adequately skillful in that moment and it was only afterward that he realized he should've used the DM jutsu technique of "shifting the camera" to resolve the issue in the most fun way possible. I think it's good to encourage DMs to run something even if you can't prepare for every eventuality, and to work to avoid the unfun experience of railroading, but we should recognize that these are skills that we work on and improve. We should also recognize that having put some thought into the game before running it and having an idea of what might happen in a session are things that help make games fun. There are plenty of horror stories of the railroading DM, but there are also plenty where the DM shows up and just wings stuff with no plan and the game is lackluster as a result. As with all D&D skills, employing them is context dependent: overpreparing and never running is bad, but not preparing at all is also bad. Railroading your players is bad, but so is not giving your players any content or destroying their suspension of disbelief or sense of stakes is also bad. It's all a balancing act, except the value which is player fun. You can never have too much fun. The point is to balance everything else to maximize the fun, which is all a matter of skillful technique.

It's spiderman!!! Not batman who said that great power comes great responsibility :)

Cool stuff again! Nice 80/20 split. Never thought about it that way. Love the "milk it for drama" <3

I wish I’d seen this video years ago. I’ve been running my games out of a spiral notebook like a high schooler this entire time!

I hate to admit it but I was a major contributor in my last group falling apart. I had a complicated relationship with one on my players and didn’t feel like I could talk to them when conflicts arose. I ended up just letting them get away with things until resentment boiled over and I just stopped scheduling games. My word of advice, don’t ever play D&D with anyone you feel is beyond reproach.

Yo, my comment got featured! You made my day man, thanks!

hellow!!! thanks for.this!!! helps even in actual office teams and projects. ❤

everyone seems to hate railroads, i like them. we have talked out what we want and what will work with the DM and everyone else at the table. and as the DM is the person doing the work, i want to play what they have worked on.

Seems the algorithm picked it up for me. I got this in my recommended super quick! For my group, I think we mostly suffer from a Fear of Conflict, but there's elements of Absence of Trust and Avoidance of Accountability. Luckily, I'm already doing things to help address our issues by planning some meetings to talk things out in a specific structure to best help enable us in our specific group dynamics. I think the default assumption for who should tackle these things are the DM. After all, they're hosting and leading the game at most tables and thus the players are already more accustomed to listening to their rulings. However, I personally think it is a team effort to fix the dysfunctions at the table, and really anyone who is willing to take the initiative should be the one to help lead the process. It's usually easier to take the initiative with people you know and consider friends as you know how they work, and thus it's also easier to make a plan or at least a vision to present to the group for how to tackle the issues.

Very informative video and somewhat relavent to my current situation. I'm running a west marches campaign and have made many sacrifices for it to work and while their is some minor friction it's between party members it goes alright for the mostpart. I had an amazing first dozen sessions but from there it spiralled as 1 player (The problem) skipped out on 4 sessions without informing me even post session lied about what they were doing, and then when they did show up they cant even pretend to be interested because and I quote "guys, guys... DONT look at my twitter." It's frustrating so I spoke with their close friend who was also playing and asked them to talk to them because even if they're on the spectrum if I have to wake up for 4 different sessions a week two of wich are at 4am then and they can't even give me an apology or explanation? I think singlehandedly that they ruined my campaign. They made me miserable and then the party miserable, nevermind that the other group of 4 (west marches) is having a great time. I don't think I'll ever run a campaign for this group again honestly not because I don't want to but because my reputation as DM has been ruined. They actively talk about me behind my back too, so I'm just not sure what to do, that doesn't result in me exploding at them. I've planned to end the campaign a whole year and a half early by cutting it off at the second arc. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to reconcile with the remaining players?

Omg, I almost missed this gem. I was wondering how much longer I may need to wait for this video when I saw the first one reappear again. Loved this video! This will be really useful for my character concept for my upcoming campaign. I have the chance to play a Hexasorcadin who'll have the opportunity to lead our adventurer's guild in a setting based underground. I had already gotten them willing to try me out with playing a leaderlike-character in advance over the table, but this will help me really sell the concept once we start playing! Man, I'm excited!

As a software developer, I hate how I'm probably going to end up using this.

What a great video! I can’t wait to watch some more!

First day of Vacation. KZfaq pushes me a fricking D&D Kanban Video.

Pretty genius

As someone who has only ever studied Agile Scrum in theory, this looks well organized and seems efficatious.

I've found the most important part in being a tactician is to allow your other players to have agency. telling them how to play is always a bad idea. your time is better spent adjusting your own playstyle to them and doing your best to put them in positions where they can succeed best. it's why I love playing a wildfire druid. the free 15 ft of teleportation of up to 9 players is massive in helping people get out of tough situations and into more advantageous ones

I just ran my session 0 and used a whiteboard with stickies to cover all the topics we should discuss in a backlog, as well as had them write some to populate the type of game they wanted. I helped create goals in a user story format, after I can do a refinement with scoring, it helps my backlog to prep things to get in their way. For as much crap that people give us Scrum Masters, it can be useful. I even got them to agree to retrospectives after the sessions. They pretty much outlined the campaign with their notes, they just don't know it yet. It was fantastic.

Why do I also have to do sprint planning in my D&D now 😫

Can you make a more extensive kanbam guide? You seen to onow a lot about it, since you said it was near and dear to your heart or something like it, great video