6 MORE Worldbuilding Mistakes DMs Make // D&D Advice

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Ginny: Your world biomes don't have to hold to any ecologist. My Table: Druid played by ecologist, Bard played by a biologist, Fighter played by a water resource management technician.

A note on travel times: It is entirely realistic for players traveling between major cities to not ever have to camp outside. A major road that runs through arable land would realistically be dotted with small villages with inns no more than a day’s journey apart. Farmers and traveling merchants don’t want to spend a week sleeping in fields any more than the players do. If you use this justification, you can designate on the map highly settled areas where supplies and lodging are inconsequential, and sparsely settled areas where the PCs will need to stock up in advance to traverse. It’s convenient but doesn’t sacrifice realism.

For weather, one of the best things my DM ever told me was to look up a part of the real world that's similar geographically then choose a random year and use that area's weather history as the basis for what the weather is like in your in game city, all the homework is done for you at that point, it's realistic and you don't have to roll on any tables to find out what it's going to be like.

"This is a game we are playing for fun" One of the best pieces of advice. Always keep this one thing in mind

Whenever I worldbuild for anything—games, books, etc—I actually love making mistakes and finding ways to integrate them. Maybe a mistake can become a plot point, and the characters can be like "you know, I thought that seemed off, maybe there's something else afoot here!" Mistakes make the world more organic! After all, nothing in our own world has come about by perfect design.

One I'd like to add: Making everything in your world special, so that nothing is actually special. For example, I once played in a homebrew campaign where literally every city in the world was built atop the backs of titan animals. The concept was cool on paper, but this meant that every city we traveled to was like this, and ultimately it took away some of the magic of the concept because all cities were like this. Not to mention the difficulties it created in actually traveling between them because they were always moving. It's important to realise that coming across a magical waterfall that flows up is a very incredible and memorable experience. But if every waterfall is magical and flows up, it's no longer special, it just is.

When i world build, i have two forms of history. The short hand, which is the bare bones abridged information and key details everyone in the setting would know. The history book, which is the full detailed history as i imagine it. The history book is usually only for me as the dm.

I've found that when people complain about something being 'unrealistic' they most often mean 'inconsistent'. Versimilitude is important in any setting. This is what people often mean with phases such as "Oh so we have Dragons, talking swords, Vampires and magic, but me climbing a sheer wall of ice is 'unrealistic'." You can have Dragons, haunted swords etc and still have a feeling of realism as long as the fantastical is consistent.

"You're not Matt Mercer, dude." One of my friends told me that when I mentioned the detail I wanted to put into the world, and I needed to hear it. I'm a big story guy, and watching how incredibly smoothly Matt's world unfolded made me desperate to give my friends that kind of experience. I made the error of throwing my friends into a pretty major storyline way too quickly, and it sort of curbed the amount of fun I felt we were having. So, in lieu of missing about three players from last session, I decided to kick back and relax a little bit. I gently pushed my friends toward a bounty wall I'd written up, and within a few minutes we were in tears laughing about how difficult they'd found it to catch a single Gnome Rogue (my Dragon Knight player rolled an 11 to grapple, the Gnome rolled a 6... but had a +6 to Acrobatics). Next, they were able to expertly coordinate the capture of a rogue Aaracokra, only to find that she was a child stealing food in tandem with her teenage brother. I guess what I'm trying to say is this: you as the DM are the only one behind the screen, but you're still a player. So let the little things flow. If you're feeling overwhelmed or underprepared, delay the big story stuff! Maybe a storm rolls in that makes travel impossible. Maybe the guild in charge of securing passage to your destination is waiting on approval from the officials of your destination. We can't all be Matt Mercer. Let yourselves breathe, and remember that 99% of the time, your players are there to just have fun. Plus, while your players are RP-ing, it gives you more time to plot the gut-twisting moments that await down the road. >:)

3:39 - “Internal consistency is generally more important than realism.” Thank you. I 100% agree. For that matter, “internal consistency”, aka verisimilitude, is more important than many things, because it defines the laws of your world and maintains believability, even in a world filled with physics & nature-defying elements. Too many people confuse and conflate verisimilitude with hardcore realism. All it is, is as Ginny described it: “internal consistency”

My favorite method of destabilizing a world for players is to create a semi-stable alliance between 2 factions that the group accidentally puts in jeopardy. Then half the campaign have them work with one faction learning their culture, politics, and religion. Then have them sent out on a mission where they are captured by the opposing faction where they learn a lot of what they were told was propaganda or more complicated than previously told. The last half of the game is sending them on increasingly more dangerous missions with increased consequences until they have to decide how to resolve the main source of the conflict

Another advantage of letting your players do some of the world building, is it adds additional diversity. One of your players adding in details you wouldn't have thought to add makes the different locations feel more like distinct cultures

For long distance travel, I have a suggestion. Once my players started hitting lower middle ranged levels, they had an encounter the Pegasus Repose, which is an inn and tavern run by a djinn named Molgiri. The inn has a toucan mascot named Leslie that wears a sandwich board "advertising" for the inn. Oh, and the inn flies. You stay for a day or two, and Molgiri is able to have the inn take you where you want to go. But he only serves "interesting" clientele.

Something I have for my players to be involved with the world building is what I call the “I know a guy” rule. Basically, what it is, is if the party is really stumped/stuck, I will let them create an NPC that they know of that they can get help from. I have final say on whether or not they can come in based on the circumstances, but it gives them a chance to bring something to the world to help them out.

Once again, really good advice. One way to deal with inconsistencies is to run things forward in time or move to a different spot in the same world. If you've run multiple campaigns in the same world, I highly recommend it. That way many choices you regret can disappear into the past. One cool thing you can do if you're running with most of the same PCs is run history a long ways into the future, at least a few hundred years to allow substantial changes and NOT tell your players that it's the same world. Then they'll start noticing similarities as things feel familiar.

I've been playing in a homebrew campaign for a few weeks now, and one big mistake our DM made was thinking about the bigger picture almost exclusively. We had a talk with our DM at the end of the last session and let him know we have no real direction at this point, to which he replied he gave us the story beats about gods being missing in action. Bruh, we just hit level FOUR. Not only are we not nearly powerful enough to deal with that, we weren't given any real leads regarding that. Moreover, our backstories have yet to come into play, so there isn't much reason for us to care about the bigger picture. Fortunately, the DM is open to constructive criticism, so we do expect the story to get better going forward. DMs, take note: if you're not good at creating a smaller scale story to hook your players in, their backstories exist for that very reason. Use them to tell the smaller scale story, and tie them into the larger one. Think of it this way: Sam and Dean Winchester did NOT sign up to avert the apocalypse; they were out on a mission of revenge -- as well as "saving people, hunting things: the family business" -- and the apocalypse grew organically from that.

I struggled a lot with having my players hometowns being fleshed out in my mind- especially when they all decided to be on the outskirts of my setting that I've had to restrict them to for story reasons. When I asked my players if they'd help build their hometowns: with as much free reign as they wanted I got done amazing results. I got really lucky to have a party of DMs so they took my offer and ran with it. One of my players made 3 entire cities that their character has lived in(with input from me) because they truly wanted to. Another made 2 cities and a bunch of intricacies about the culture there. Based on input from another character I was able to create a more interesting digital environment in the nobles of the capital city of my game. It was so cool to have that input and collaboration in creating the setting my players were going to be in because it feels so much more like they are a part of the world rather than being dropped into it.

The Mint Cupcake cosplay is just as good in the sequel

I’ve just started playing and my DM does step 11 They have essentially allowed me to construct an entire plotline as my backstory (starting at 9th level) which didn’t exist at all before in what is ostensibly a very large world they’ve made It’s really nice and makes me feel super involved