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PODCAST

3 Wise DMs

3 Wise DMs is a podcast for dungeon masters (for Dungeons & Dragons) and game masters (any other RPG) with problems. And when we say problems, we don’t mean the kind of things you find answers for in the gamebooks. Think of it as a gaming philosophy show with a strong emphasis on applied knowledge. We all want to be great DMs, so what do we do to try to get there?

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All Episodes

01:09:08

Getting the “Face” Player to Shut Up and Let Other...

3 Wise DMs ·

2022/02/20

Some players are more assertive than others, as every DM quickly learns. Some players sit quietly waiting for their turn to speak, while the “Face,” like his A-Team counterpart, never misses a chance to go to town. Before you know it, the party is down another rabbit hole or skipping through a conversation without anyone else getting a chance to participate.Or, as this week’s listener question asks: “How do you get the “Face” to STFU?To be fair, none of us actually recommends telling a player to

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01:17:36

9 Alternate D&D Rules to Try: Our Favorite Optional...

3 Wise DMs ·

2022/02/13

Vanilla Dungeons & Dragons 5E is a fine game, but depending on the atmosphere you want to set and the possibilities of your setting, there are a lot of alternate rules that can bring your game to the next level. The D&D 5E Dungeon Masters Guide has some great optional rules you can use to bring different genres of games to life by playing up things like honor and horror. Beyond D&D itself, a lot of other games use mechanics that are worth porting in to create certain effects in your

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01:14:47

How to Handle a Backseat DM: 11 Things to Know

3 Wise DMs ·

2022/02/06

Why won’t the experienced DM playing in your game back off and let you run it? A backseat DM can be a frustrating experience and force some difficult conversations — but having an experienced DM on the player side of the table to help lookup rulings and encourage the other players can also be a really beneficial asset in your game. How do you leverage that DM player as a good assistant and not let them become your worst critic?At 3 Wise DMS, we’ve played with backseat DMs, been backseat DMs, and

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01:25:04

Sharing RPG Worlds: Balancing PC Power Levels and NPC...

3 Wise DMs ·

2022/01/30

Across the games we’re running and playing, we have several campaign worlds, NPCs, and PCs that cross over between DMs. Usually, this is no big deal, but sometimes what one DM does can unbalance what another DM is trying to do. Often this revolves around PC power, with characters in both our Marvel and Woodstock Wanderers game sometimes breaking the curve for the other DMs/GMs. But conflict can also arise over how shared NPCs and campaign worlds are portrayed. If one DM’s giant unfeeling tentacle

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01:37:50

Does D&D 5E Need Character Levels? Radical...

3 Wise DMs ·

2022/01/23

Leveling up! It’s synonymous with D&D and one of the game’s biggest contributions to gaming culture. The very idea of gaining a level has become a staple of RPG video games, board games, and even most (but not all, as we’ll discuss) Tabletop Roleplaying Games. But is it the best way to handle character advancement in D&D 5th Edition?Dael Kingsmill of the MonarchsFactory YouTube channel has some different ideas. In a recent video, she even suggested that D&D shouldn’t use levels! Our

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01:16:58

How to DM PC Builds and Abilities That Piss You Off

3 Wise DMs ·

2022/01/16

In any TTRPG, but perhaps especially D&D 5E, the DM runs the world and the players run their characters, who are built within the rules of the game. You should let players build the characters they want to play, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it!It’s OK to have a TTRPG PC build that pisses you off. Whether it’s because they’re unkillable, unhittable, undetectable, unsurvivable, or, like our listener question this week, they passively perceive absolutely frickin’ everything! This may mean

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01:28:05

How Hard Is Too Hard for Your RPG Campaign and Players?

3 Wise DMs ·

2022/01/09

Balance can be the trickiest thing to strike in any RPG campaign. On the one hand, the DM is running monsters and villains who are literally plotting the PC’s destruction. If their plans aren’t good or their combat abilities aren’t challenging, like DM Tony says, it’s like playing the game on baby mode. A game that’s not challenging is unrewarding. On the other, a game that gets too hard can frustrate your players right out of wanting to play it. So where is the balance? How hard is too hard for

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01:18:22

Characters Over Combat: What We Learned From Gaming...

3 Wise DMs ·

2022/01/02

Happy New Year! It’s a new year for new games or just continuing the ones you already love. But before we look forward to 2022, it’s important to look back at what we learned from gaming in 2021. Between playing and running about 6 different campaigns throughout the year, not to mention talking about all of it here on 3 Wise DMs, we learned a lot. From speeding up combat to the importance of good characters, especially PCs, the way we play and DM keeps evolving. In this episode, Thorin, Tony and

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01:10:12

What to do With a Bored D&D Player? A DM’s Dilemma

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/12/19

What if you have your D&D campaign going, the players are having a good time … except one of them, who’s bored? Maybe they’re bored with their character or combat or the way things are going, and now figuring out a way to pick things up a notch for this player falls to you. Do you let them revamp or replace their character? Do you make combat more difficult? Making things more complicated, if the other players are having fun, is adjusting for the bored player going to ruin it for the rest of

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01:43:44

The Curse of Strahd Postmortem: Our Players Talk...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/12/12

You hear The 3 Wise DMs talk about our games all the time, but what do our players really think? In this episode, we have 6 of the 7 players from Curse of Strahd on to get honest with DM Dave about what they thought of his campaign! Along the way, we get into whether you should leave your Tarokka reading random, The Death House, what it was like playing in a low-magic setting, slow leveling, the Amber Temple and much more!If you want the real scoop on how our game of Curse of Strahd went, and how we

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01:11:26

Strahd, Dead and Loving It? The 3 Wise DM’s Review of...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/12/05

Ding dong, Strahd is dead! He was thrown down from a pillar and we smashed his head! And with that epic victory, the 3 Wise DMs are finally able to talk about their review of D&D 5E’s Curse of Strahd, including their thoughts on what worked, why and the adjustments DM Dave made.It was a big group with 6 players, and Dave managed to connect each of them to the events in Ravenloft in some way. He talks with Thorin and Tony about how that worked, how the players and DM interacted to make the game

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01:15:23

All Eyes on the Game: 12 Tips to Keep Your RPG...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/11/28

It’s a problem as old as roleplaying: You have a few players who are engaged, paying attention and driving the story, and other players who may be shy, or not interested in what’s going on today. The result is that half your table may not be involved in what’s going on. A few weeks ago, DM Tony posted his article with 6 Tips to Get Everyone at the Game Table More Involved. That’s the tip of the iceberg for this essential DMing topic. On the show today, Thorin, Tony and Dave will dig into what causes

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01:17:29

Motivating Your Players: How to Get Your TTRPG Player...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/11/21

We’re all at the gaming table for an adventure, right? But what about when your players don’t take the bait? Maybe they’re not interested in the mysterious disappearances in town? Or you’ve built a full dungeon in “The Mysterious Cave,” but they’re not going anywhere near it? What do you do when the player characters just aren’t vibing with the adventure hooks you’ve put in the water?In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about what they’ve seen undercut PC motivation, how they get it back, and

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51:31

It Takes a Village: 19 Tips for Building Towns and...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/11/14

What do you need to make a town or city for your RPG campaign? A place for your PCs to hang their hats and rest their weary feet? Stores and taverns for them to unload their loot and pick up new quests? How about an economy and some way the town makes money? Who runs it and how do they keep the peace? Who tries to intervene when the party gets up to PC shenanigans? What about surprises? Is that beggar actually a shapeshifted silver dragon? Is there a secret wizard school operating out of a simple

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01:11:16

D&D 5E for Old Fogeys: What Old-School DMs Like Us...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/11/07

We all started DMing RPGs a long time ago. In the case of Thorin and Tony, we held on to older editions long after new ones were released (stretching 1E material into 2E and flat refusing to move to 3E later on). But Dungeons & Dragon 5E has been around for 10 years now and is bigger than any edition has ever been in terms of sales, player base and media exposure. WotC recently announced that they’ll be releasing an update for 5E in 2024, not a replacement, and the edition itself shows no signs

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01:12:18

Horror Gaming for Halloween: How We Squeeze Scares...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/10/31

It’s the scary season around our gaming tables, and that brings up one of the age-old questions about DMing: Can you reasonably expect to scare adult roleplaying gamers? Maybe, maybe not. But what you can definitely do is remove the illusion that they’re in control. Undermine that false comfort that their characters will be OK. Whether you’re threatening their hit points, sanity or character attachments, if you can shake the players’ sense of security, then you can scare them — and that’s what

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01:07:56

Teaching Your Wife to Play RPGs: How to Bring a...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/10/24

Can you teach your wife, girlfriend, best friend, family member or anyone you love to play your favorite RPG? It’s a risky proposition, as listener Dave points out in this week’s listener question: He wants to teach his wife to play D&D, and she’s agreed to give it a try, but he’s afraid that “if she doesn’t enjoy that first session, she will never come back to the table.”The thing is, we’ve all been there. Whether it’s a girlfriend, wife, best friend, brother … at some point, you want to share

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01:14:04

WotC Changing D&D 5E Monsters and More – Are These...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/10/17

At D&D Celebration, Wizards of the Coast held a Future of D&D panel discussion with Ray Winninger, Liz Schuh, Jeremy Crawford, and Chris Perkins about new products and changes coming to D&D 5E over the next year and beyond. Among the topics discussed were changes to the way monsters will be presented, balanced, rebalanced around Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse as well as some hints about how settings will be presented in the future. One of the big points of emphasis is

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01:31:53

29 DM Ideas for Spicing Up D&D 5E: New Twists for...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/10/10

DMing is all about bringing your ideas to the table, but some ideas reach beyond the story and dialogue to change the way the game is played. Today, 3 Wise DMs open a Pandora’s Box of DMing ideas and inspiration for D&D 5E. From campaign setting ideas to new weapon rules, combat formations, vampire and dragon age categories, and more, in this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave pitch the craziest D&D house rules and setting features they’d love to play with in the future. 1:00 Campaign ideas1

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01:11:59

Patrons, Powers and Punishments in D&D 5E: So Many...

3 Wise DMs ·

2021/10/03

Patrons and punishments have been a part of D&D since 1st Edition’s paladins had to toe the line or get busted down to fighter status by an angry deity. But with so many classes drawing their powers from gods, devils and monsters in 5e — and not really getting any better deal than the wizard who studied, sorcerer who was born with it, barbarian who’s too angry to die, or the bard who just has to rock out with his glockenspiel out — how can the DM handle these patron relationships in a way that

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