I can’t remember which video was the first to appear in the YouTube recommendations on DM kits. But I suspect it was the Jim Murphy video.

In that video he went through his DM kit and folder. And that got me thinking and searching YouTube for other similar videos.

I suppose with the impending third session for my campaign I hit upon these at an opportune moment. There is a bit of me that leans towards taking everything including the kitchen sink for a session. Which is strange when I think back to my light weight journey when backpacking. So it looks like I may be starting a similar journey with being a DM.

Let’s face it taking the three core D&D books, plus say the Sword Coast book, all that 3D stuff, minis, etc etc gets pretty heavy and cumbersome. Could I cut back?

I also needed to sort out my session notes. I work with printed copies of stuff, despite between sessions storing everything digitally.

I liked the use of the 3 by 5 index cards, and the DM folder by Jim. I also took away from the video about having some mechanical pencils and notebooks to give to new players (or existing ones) plus making up dice sets incase they are needed.

Another two videos I liked are The Arcane Library video and the
Sly Flourish (of Lazy DM fame) video.

Both Sly and Arcane Library recommend these flat plastic minis by Arcknight. Which would be nice to cut down on weight and amount of stuff to lug around. But they are not readily available in the UK, and the international shipping/import isn’t something I want to even think about.

I also like the home made token idea from Sly a lot. I’ve seen that in another video or two as well. Something to look into doing.

It’s been an interesting exercise watching these videos and one or two others, and picking and choosing the bits I like the look of. And thinking just exactly what do I need to be taking with me.

One of the great finds in all of this were Dry Erase Index Cards. These will be a very flexible addition to my toolkit. They can be used for initiative order (although I do have the cards for this from the Essentials kit), they can have a condition written on them to remind a player, used for messages to players, and whatever else I can think up or need them for on the day. So some of them have gone in the index box.

The index box will also have a handful of official D&D monster cards in it. These will be the cards for monsters I need for encounters in that session, plus some to use in a random encounter if needed. By doing this I don’t need to carry the Monster Manual with me.

Over time I see the index box building up into an invaluable part of my DM’s kit. Hopefully it will be as useful as the one Jim Murphy has with characters, npc’s, maps etc inside it that can be used at the drop of a hat to create an entertaining, fun adventure. Although I am having a hard time finding 3 by 5 grid index cards in the UK. I got some A6 ok. Which I can cut down. But 3 by 5, easy to get in the US, nigh impossible in the UK.

In one video, can’t remember which they included a couple of timers to use during sessions. I got a set, and will just get it down to a couple of them to use.

I suppose I could cut out the books totally, and go digital. I have everything digital. But call me old fashioned but I prefer to have the physical copy. Hence why my notes are printed out. Devices fail, as do internet connections. I think dropping down to the Players Guide and the DM Guide will help a lot. Plus an organised DM folder, instead of having my notes just lose and unorganised will make a difference.

I now have the Wilderness tiles that WotC currently do. I’m able to make something from them that loosely resembles a coastal road for use in the session. Plus a road section will be ideal for organising the party walking order. But whether I’m carting along 3D tiles and minis, cardboard tiles, battle maps or combination of will be dependent on the session.

Naturally everyone’s DM kit is unique to them. But there will be some commonality between them. I’ll post a photo of what I ended up taking at the weekend as part of the session write up.

Ok it was extremely hard not to use a Tolkien quote from one of his books as the title of this post. So I took the easy route and went ahead and used one.

It introduces the subject of this post really nicely. Getting from A to B in D&D. You know that bit that takes our party of adventurers from that nice “safe” town or city to that extremely dangerous dungeon/liar full of who knows what monsters, traps and treasures.

As a disclaimer for the post, I’m not going to go into detail on each of the methods for handling travel (can you imagine the length of this post, or number of posts I’d have to bore you with?). I’m going to briefly describe them, hopefully enough to pique your interest, and where possible provide links to the source material. Also bare in mind this post is acting as my notes and thoughts on the subject, and is something for me to refer back to at a later date. But I also hope you dear reader find it interesting and of use.

In the Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG) we as DM’s are given two suggestions for how to handle this wilderness travel between locations, A) the travel montage, and B) hour by hour.

“Just as movies use travel montages to convey long and arduous journeys in a matter of seconds, you can use a few sentences of descriptive text to paint a picture of a wilderness trek in your players’ minds before moving on.”

We are advised to use the travel montage if the destination is more important than the journey.

The alternative given by the DMG is the hour by hour approach. Which it suggests should be used when “…wilderness travel feature prominently in your adventure and isn’t something you want to gloss over…”

The hour by hour approach uses a combination of planned and random encounters, and possibly a travel montage if there are long periods without anything happening.

You can find the specifics in chapter 5 of the DMG for these two suggestions.

I think in my short time as a DM now, I’ve used both methods. So take that into account for this next bit, and bare in mind my experience is extremely limited.

Personally as a DM I’m have not found the travel montage very satisfying. I feel I’m short changing the players. Maybe it’s due to me not feeling too confident in my descriptions of the journey. I certainly know descriptions are an area I need to work on.

The hour by hour approach I did was more a travel montage with a planned encounter. This I knew I wasn’t happy with. Both parts just didn’t work for me, or I wasn’t happy with. Obviously the travel montage bit for the reasons just given. The planned encounter was a skill challenge. Which I feel in hindsight could have gone better. And it was down to how I ran it. It was the first one I’d ever ran. I’m not giving up on skill challenges yet.

Naturally there are going to be more wilderness journeys in my campaign. We have one in our next session (it’s not a spoiler, they know they are doing it).

So I went looking for advice on how to improve things, make travel more exciting and immersive for the players, for those occasions that the journey does matter. Which technically I think is when the players first visit a new location. Once they have been to a place and got back safely, I think it’s ok to skip to the montage to speed things up. Otherwise you are kind of sign posting something is going to happen when you don’t use a montage.

“Short cuts make long delays.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Third Party Advice and Alternatives

This wouldn’t be a D&D post without me squeezing in a quote or talking about Matt Colville and what he has to say about this subject. And yes he has done a video on this very topic. It’s called Making Travel Interesting, Running the Game #58 funnily enough.

Matt argues for the montage, and only use another way when or if the travelling through the wilderness will advance the plot. But if you want to add tension to travel to think about using skill challenges. And then goes on to discuss how he would use skill challenges to get from point A to point B.

Which brings me nicely onto the D&D Beyond Encounter of the Week from the Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus series of encounters they ran. You can read the actual post here. The linked to encounter uses a skill challenge to navigate through a wilderness. And from my reading of it is being used to a similar way described by Matt Colville in his video.

I think I’ve already in a previous post said I like the looks of using a skill challenge for navigation, and have/had an adventure hook planned that would/will use it. The only draw back at the moment is that less than positive experience with my first attempt at a skill challenge.

In Tomb of Annihilation chapter 2, WotC present another way to get from A to B. If I’m summarising this correctly, is hex based using a map. In the book I think each hex is 10 miles on the map they are using. So each day of travel (basically a hex) if not lost get shown their position on the map. The party then chose a navigator that rolls to see if they get lost or not, after choosing a direction and travel speed. After the check, the DM rolls for encounters during the day, and finally at the end of the day checks for dehydration.

I kinda like the looks of this, and for me sounds a good fit for travelling over a large distance on a map.

Dael Kingsmill has a fantastic video entitled “Overland Travel in D&D || Dael Kingsmill” on the subject. Dael’s homebrew stuff is really cool. There is a really nice example of a variation of the montage that involves the players. I’d seen it elsewhere described. But this saves space and time just telling you to watch this if that interests you (here is the link to the article she mentions about it). Dael also makes a point her suggestion does involve a bit more prep work.

Dael’s system is a modified/extended version of the one we will look at next from The Angry GM. She has the party select three roles, navigator, provisioner and scout (watch the video for more on them, ok just watch the video). Dael uses a stack of cards for different events that can happen, and these are broken up into the six chucks of the day that the Angry DM uses. Plus some cards (to my knowledge the content of these cards has never been released) that are specific to the type of terrain being travelled on. One of these cards is selected at random and it describes what happens during the day, with various choices and encounters for the players.

Another system I like the sound of. But requires a lot more work up front. But once done.

The Angry GM. Apparently like marmite you either hate him or love him. But his post Getting There is Half the Fun is really good. Although if you are not interested in his look at the current state of travelling before getting onto his solution, it is a long read (much longer than this) before you hit the part you are interested in. So you can either skip a lot of the post or pop on over to another blog for a post titled “Travel Rules (from an Angry Man)“. Which is a really nice summary, and has the all important discovery table missing from the source.

The Angry DM method sounds complicated. And I’m not even going to try explaining it. It really is easier and quicker to read the posts above for the details. Instead I’ll point out bits I like. I like that at the start you have the players decide on a route from a couple or more options presented to them, based on danger level, number of days and whatever other information you give them about each route. The players set a marching order each day, and decide the pace they will travel that day. Plus the players can vary that pace through out the day. The difficulty level of the route is really how many encounters potentially can happen each day. There is the possibility for the party to make discoveries such as an abandoned shrine or derelict tower along the way. I like how it assumes every member of the party will be on watch, unless an individual expressly says they will not do it. So if an encounter happens at night a die is rolled to see which party members were on watch.

As I said when you read it, it sounds complicated. But I went through the process of planning a couple of routes and they take seconds. Very quick to plan.

Journeys are an important part of The One Ring. There is a lot of travelling in Middle Earth. And more than one commentator online suggested looking at how The One Ring handled things. Naturally The One Ring is a different system to that of D&D, so if it looked good would need converting somehow. Luckily for me and everyone else the publisher of The One Ring has done the hard work for us by publishing the Adventures in Middle Earth RPG (the d20 OGL version of The One Ring).

In away when you look at the actual details of journeys in this system, they have some things in common with The Angry GM and Dael’s suggestions, such as assigning roles. I like that events from one stage can have a knock on effect in the next. Naturally this too will involve some work before hand. But once set up…

The basic rules for Journeys are in the Players Guide Chapter 8, and the underlying mechanics are in Journeys Extended Chapter 4 of the Adventures in Middle Earth Lore Master book. Journeys in (and I keep wanting to call this MERP) Adventures in Middle Earth are split into three parts, with each part feeding into the next in some way. The three parts are embarkation, travel and arrival. Each part has it’s own table that you roll against. And for our needs the raw tables will enable us to create custom ones suitable for D&D and the campaign you are running. They may need a slight tweak here and there when they mention a class or skill into the D&D equivalent.

The thing is I think all the ones I briefly describe above (with links mostly) have their own merits and drawbacks. I don’t mind my players knowing this next bit, it’s not a spoiler really. But we will be experimenting with most, if not all of the above alternatives at some point. Then based on feedback we may just stick to one or two. Or I may just pick the one that fits the best with what I want that travel to achieve at the time.

Well I hope folks found this post useful and got you thinking.

For some reason my train of thought for the last few days has been about what to do if one of my players characters die during the campaign.

Naturally I turned to Saint Colville to see what sage advice he had on the subject. Here are some of the points I picked up from his Let’s Kill A PC! Running the Game #68 video.

“…the game is so complex, no one doing anything wrong, characters can die.”

Matt Colville does get you to ask the question “how lethal is your campaign?” in the video. Up until now it’s now something I’d really thought about.

So how lethal is my campaign? Is death a rare thing, or uncommon, common or this is a suicide mission/dark souls level of mortality?

I’m not sure. It’s something I think that needs to be discussed with the players. My leaning at this point in time is it’s common. It’s a medieval fantasy setting. The world, especially outside of civilisation is a dangerous place. If it wasn’t why would our adventurers be needed, or driven to go out into the world? And let’s not ignore the expected life span of a pheasant in medieval times, and the state of medicine (even taking into account magic and potions).

“…my bad guys want to win. They are going to act the same way you do, and for the same reasons. They may ignore an unconscious pc under the reasonable premise they are no longer a threat. Or they may kill that same pc to remove a potential threat.”

“If we set expectations. If we explain D&D is a game, and that even a mundane encounter could go south without anyone intending it too. If we explain the bad guys want to win…”

I think the best line of the whole video is the following:

“Death is always a possibility. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”

It’s a line that with his other bit of advice for players “Anytime you are out numbered the odds are stacked against you.” should be repeated on a regular basis to players. And something I need to start doing.

There is also advice how to reply to the dead player when they want to discuss what could have been done different. Like avoid saying “if only you had…” and instead replying “there’s always something different you could have done” and staying quiet on the matter.

However what is missing from the amazing video of Colville’s is then what? Is the player out of the game? Do you get the player to create a new character?

I think that was my biggest sticking point, the then what?

This is where The Dungeon Dudes came to the rescue with their Character Death in Dungeons and Dragons – DM Advice and Tips video.

It’s interesting to have this different perspective on a character death in D&D. I particularly like their advice on dealing with the in game moment of a characters death. Which I’ll discuss in a moment.

They do mention words of warning, and Colville has also discussed this in a video or two. It’s sign posting that the players are about to get into a dangerous situation. Giving them the information they need to make an informed decision with. I kind of did that in my previous session when the Northlanders told the party about the Red Rage of Mintarn and that no adventure going after it’s horde had survived. But these guys also talk about warning the party that a player is down and bleeding out, and they better do something to help them. If the players ignore the warnings then…

Back to dealing with the death of a character. The Dungeon Dudes like to invite the dying player to describe the how their character dies. Then they go round the table asking each player how they character reacts to it in the moment. I’m not sure about the raising a glass and round of applause part. But we’ll see how the moment takes me when/if a character dies.

Now we get to the bit I wanted to know about.

The Dungeon Dudes have the player grab their dice and a blank character sheet, and immediately create a new character. If this is mid game, giving the player about 15 minutes to do that. Then the moment the narrative allows for it, get the player back in the game. Not worrying about it making sense, or fitting in with their back story. Afterwards you worry about back story, and fitting it into the campaign and integrating the new character into the group. They also talk about the whole group getting involved with this.

This all seems so obvious. But it isn’t until you hear some-one more experienced say it that you feel empowered to do it. I’m assuming that when doing this the new character is being created at the same level as the rest of the party (assuming all the same level, if not then the same as the lowest level of the party).

But what about resurrection? At the moment the party has just levelled up to become level 2 characters. So it’s not something available to them yet, unless there is an npc nearby that is able to do this. I do like the approach that Dael Kingsmill takes to resurrection. It sounds a great idea, and I like the plot twists it can introduce. Her injury system also sounds interesting. But that’s something to delve into at a later date.

I’ll also look into resurrection in more depth at a later date. I think it’s an interesting subject to dive into.

I hope this has helped. As a new DM looking into this has been a big help. I have a clearer idea of how to handle it when it happens. I just need to remember, hopefully the shock of a character dying won’t throw me off my game!

I think by now it’s not much of a secret that I’m a big fan of Matt Colville and his D&D beginners YouTube series.

One of those videos is an interview with a friend and fellow DM of Matt’s Jim Murphy.

What I didn’t appreciate was that Jim has his own YouTube channel give DM advice.

It was something I kinda discovered thanks to the YouTube recommendation engine this morning. In the list of videos it thought I might be interested in was the one I’ve embedded below.

The title of the video piqued my interest. So I clicked on it and watched it.

I really enjoyed the video. Well I must have because I’m writing a post to tell you dear reader all about it and Jim.

It’s a talking head style video to a webcam of some sort. The video like the others he has done are relatively short, 10-15 minutes. Which is a really nice length. I like his style of presenting. It’s obvious he’s very knowledgable and has been playing for since the dawn of D&D time. So like Matt we are getting the benefit of all that experience being filtered down into great advice that we can use.

There is some great advice in the video above. And I think it is advice that even a noob DM like me can use. Plus it’s system neutral. So it equally applies to D&D, Genesys, Pathfinder, WOIN, or whatever your personal favourite RPG system is.

I think what I like about Jim and Matt is they not only encourage you to try being a DM, and help remove some of the mystery behind it. But that they encourage and give you the confidence to create your own stuff. Whether it is from scratch (even how to cut down that workload by using material from elsewhere), or taking an existing adventure and making it your own.

I know have a bit of catching up to do on Jim’s back catalog.

You can visit his channel HERE. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.