January – March 2026 Patreon Q&A

I think it should work just fine. You might want to throw more cultists into the mix and be sure to let the players know that they don't have a chance to defeat Golgoron. 1st level characters would know this absolutely but at 4th level they might think they have a chance and attack him, which sort of ruins the moment. Give them other chewy things to fight – like cultists – but be sure to tell them that fighting a horned devil is beyond them. Thanks for considering City of Arches!

I definitely write them down as secrets and clues or in my notes for the characters. Here's an example from my game this past week: - Conrad Redbook (Michelle), Wolfkin Scholar – knows the history of Riddermound and the DE. - Jacksnapp Johnson (Jerry), Dwarf Hunter – particular flora grown on the cairns - Nadja Silverhowl (Mike), Wolfkin Bard – Knows the tragic love of **Gynan** and **Threx**. - Salin Leafcloak (Bryan), Elf Druid – The mushrooms on the cairns, when properly cooked, protect those from the cold chills of undeath. - Webster (Sean), Mallard Merchant – Treasures of the Riddermound are valuable and untouched. I don't put them on cards but I could. I usually just tell the player what their character knows or discovers as they explore an area. You can certainly try writing them down. One trick is that secrets change – both in what they say, how they're discovered, or who discovers them. So even though you might have tied a particular secret to a particular character, that might not be how it ends up at the table.

I don't really have a difference in mind when I refer to them. To me, they're both doing the same thing: Someone asks the characters to go somewhere and do something. Seeds have locations, motivations, and sometimes inhabitants. You can often fit them into a single sentence but certainly don't need more than three. They give players enough information to decide if they want to go on it but aren't so fleshed out that you've prepped a whole adventure you might not run. I have more than a hundred such seeds in City of Arches for examples.

There are some hard realities when trying to fit a 5e game in a shorter amount of time. The more players you have, the slower things are going to go. The higher their level, the slower things are going to go. If you can find opportunities to run for fewer players at a lower level, you'll manage to get more done. You can also focus your adventures to be more episodic – like a 30 minute action TV show. Think of the episodes of the Mandalorian. They were short and focused and got right into it. When prepping your sessions, think about how you can move the story forward with only one or two scenes (that's about as much as you can expect to get done in 90 minutes). Make dungeons small – maybe single encounters. Get the main plot motivators up front as much as you can. Open-world-wise, put several options in front of the players – maybe even outside of the game – have them choose one and then focus on that one. But the realities are hard. 90 minutes for 5e games isn't a lot of time.

For sesson zeros or the ends of campaigns, I might bring all the players to the table. Sometimes players still can't make it but I'm not likely to wait for everyone. Instead, I make sure players who are missing either have their own little session zero with me or we ensure they get their "one year later" montage even if we have to do it out of game.

Sorry to hear about your hard drive crash! I recommend some sort of continual online backup of your main data or documents drive. I use Apple iCloud but any of them are probably fine – even if they do have an added cost. That is just two of your 3-2-1 backup though. You still need some sort of offline backup you rotate through as well. I have a to-do to flip my Time Machine drives every three months. Anyway, enough about backups! The eight steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master were designed from the top as being usable with any system. For many years I wrote down my eight steps in a little Moleskine notebook and used those for my games. I still print my notes on paper from my Obsidian vault. If I had no paper, I'd do the same thing I used to do. I'd have a couple of pages in my notebook for my notes, maybe a bigger 5" by 8" notebook instead of the pocket notebook or maybe I'd live with four pages in a pocket notebook. I'd also keep an extra section up front in my notebook for the characters and for NPCs with a few extra blank pages to fill in those details as a campaign rolled on. So here's how I'd organize my physical notebook. I really like pocket-sized Moleskine notebooks for this. - One page up front per character, say eight pages total just to be safe. - Six pages for NPCs with names and short descriptions. - The rest of the notebook are four-page spreads for session notes based on the eight steps.

I don't regularly use a VTT and when I do it's Owlbear Rodeo which makes it very easy to improvise monsters. One thing to consider is having generic monster tokens in your VTT of choice without any monster stats assigned and then just use the monster book you want to use or improvise monster stats from the Forge of Foes stats. I haven't used DDB enough to know if you can do that in there. Another option is just using the default monsters but improvising encounters. There are lots of great D&D 2024 monsters to use – almost surely you can find a good replacement monster for the one you had in mind. I'd put in a generic blank battle map to show positioning so you don't have to make a custom map every time too. Just a gray stone map or a grass map can do the trick. As far as making it easier to custom build a monster, just focus on the stats and improvise one special ability if you need. If they're normal soliders or minion style monsters, you really don't need to add anything special. Damage is scary enough.

I do milestones or a sort of "time to level!" progression. I don't have a real solid system for it. We play weekly for 3 hours so it's about 60 to 80 sessions or so. It was about 70 for City of Arches. I don't think anyone felt like we rushed through it. Most of my campaigns run about that length of time for the longer campaigns. It's rare to get to 20 and for City of Arches, they leveled very quickly through the final four levels or so. We do lots of roleplaying and some side quests but the game is pretty free flowing so there isn't a list of main quests and side quests. There are just quests leading to the conclusion.

First, unsolicited advice from Uncle Mike: - Eat salads to stay regular. - Drink lots of water. Bring refillable bottles and fill them often. - Pick up takeout so you're not waiting to eat all the time. Try to grab food outside of popular times. Ok, with that out of the way, I'll answer your actual questions. Michelle and I love playing together and love playing smaller faster RPGs we don't often play at home. Consider Pirate Borg, Shadowdark, Dragonbane, and other lightweight games. Free League and Exhalted Funeral often have awesome convention appearances. Luke, the creator of Pirate Borg, puts on a hell of a convention experience. As you say, the epics and specials are great for D&D adventures. They're well timed and it's fun to watch tables working together on a goal. They can get formulaic but not if it's your first time. Some people focus exclusively on D&D adventures but I don't find them as fun or engaging as I do smaller lighter one-shot RPGs. If you can, try to get games together with your friends so you can enjoy them together. Hope that helps!

This doesn't sound like much of a corner to be painted into at all. You can pivot this to a more "points of light" style setting where small settlements hope to survive and thrive in a larger dangerous wilderness. Many campaign settings are built like this including Nentyr Vale and the main setting in Numenera. Greyhawk is a little like this too. Because it was once heavily populated, there are lots of old ruins to explore, old lore to find, ancient horrors unleashed, and so on. This sounds like the *default* setting for a lot of RPGs. You won't be running urban intrigue adventures there but it's a great setting for a pure fantasy environment. I'd just change "no populated settlements" into "few populated settlements". They could really just be small camps. And maybe they grow as the characters explore. If you're a video gamer, think about Skyrim and Elden Ring and how they handle the sorts of dangers of previous ages.

The big question for betraying NPCs is – is there a reasonable chance the players figure it out early and is the game still going fine if they do? You don't want an NPC betrayal to become a betrayal betwen you and your players. The players should have a chance to figure it out. I had a betraying quest NPC in my Dragonbane game and it was fine because the players figured it out right away and it gave them agency over how to deal with it. Give the players a good chance to figure out things are not what they seem and I think its ok. The main issue is when you have a main trusted quest NPC who drives the direction of the players and then it turns out THAT NPC has been leading them astray for a long time. That's bad. Shady NPCs are fantastic when the players know they're shady.

That sounds like a cool idea! I'm not familiar enough with Mythic to know exactly what this is but it sounds similar to the faction list I like to keep. I think rollable lists to help you build out ideas for your sessions can be really valuable tools so right on! Don't let it get out of hand though – I think we probably want to avoid a giant list of such things if they become a burden.

This might be an unpopular opinion but I don't think a lot of OSR-style procedures work well for 5e. 5e is, at its heart, a high-heroic fantasy RPG. Characters have a lot to enable them to be heroes and the rules generally handwave a lot of things that OSR games tend to empahsize. It's possible to put in OSR-style ideas for low level characters but when things like light are a cantrip, you're really getting away from managing lighting as a function of the game. This change gets more stark as characters increase in level: Leomand's Tiny Hut, Pass Without Trace, Create Food and Water, Knock, Arcane Eye, familiars, fly, and so on – all of these things become pretty standard and eliminate a lot of OSR functions for exploration, travel, and so on. That said, there *are* some procedures I think fit even for 5e games. You can still handle travel – just keeping in mind that characters often have a lot of capabilities to remove issues like food, water, lighting, and so on. Marching order and lighting can matter – not so much as whether you have access to lighting or not but whether you have lighting going and whether that means monsters can see you. I think you can put monster morale in. That fits regardless of the power of the characters. Same with behavior and distance and the other OSR things. But encumbrance isn't going to matter as much. So I think there are some procedures that work just fine and others where 5e hand-waves it away.

Yes! There are quite a few famous creators who have variants of this idea including calling it the "shitty first draft". Give yourself permission to make a shitty first draft. I think it was the director Robert Rodriguez who said you need to make ten crappy movies before you're able to make one good one. Same sort of thing. So yeah, I'm on board!

Yes! I have something like this in the Lazy DM's Companion and have it in the Lazy GM's Resource Document as well: "On a failed save, the character becomes stunned for 1 minute. The character can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of their turns and whenever they take damage, ending the effect on themself on a success. If the character's saving throw is successful or if the effect ends for it, the character is immune to this effect for the next 24 hours. A character can also choose to break this effect at the start of their turn by taking 4 (1d8) psychic damage per two character levels. A lesser restoration or equivalent effect likewise negates a stress effect." "(You can also apply this mechanism for breaking an effect by taking psychic damage to characters who are frightened, stunned, or incapacitated.)" https://slyflourish.com/lazy_gm_resource_document.html#stresseffects I think we can work with this technique in our game of choice to decide how characters can get rid of things like this. Another trick is taking control of their character but as a reaction and only during that reaction. A "quick charm" where, say, a vampire forces a character to charge another character and attack but only once.

Every time I repeat a secret it usually comes out differently. Sometimes players might say "I already know that" and you can say "this new situation reinforces what you know". Sometimes it's really good to repeat a secret more than once to hammer down the important parts with your players. So it's different than a repeated magic item where it's very clear they just got one. A secret might come out twice but that can still fit in the story.

Hi Thiago, You can contact us at support@slyflourish.com. We can't promise very much because stock in our European warehouse isn't unlimited and we're not going to be able to print more. Also, the costs for shipping across European boundaries goes up and up. But we'll see what we can do. Email us there, Thanks!

There's not a fantastic way to handle situations like this. My go-tos are having one-on-one conversations and making it clear what the situation is and what has to be done about it. There's no great way to sugar coat it or hope it gets better. We all struggle with moments like these and they're just not easy to handle. People absolutely hate rejection. It's wired into us as mammels. Anything we can do to help change the situation without making someone feel rejected can help. Best of luck, Mike

I'm still learning Daggerheart and it's been a while since I played 13th Age but I think the two definitely fall into the same pillar of a super-heroic fantasy RPG with big story-focused heroes and adventures. Right now I think 13th Age is more straight forward. I do remember icon rolls playing a big part that was harder to get one's hands around at the table. Aparenty the new edition handles that a bit by putting it in the hands of players. I do think Daggerheart asks a lot of GMs. Others disagree but that's been my experience. I think any story-focused game does too – 13th Age's icon rolls made me feel a similar way but it's not engrained so much in the rest of the story. But yeah, I think both fall firmly in the same space in RPGs.

I don't have a great answer for this not having much experience in those domains but I'd probably stick as closely to the core game as you can. Often things like leadership skills and diversity come through actual play (a variety of classes, each with their own specialties and backgrounds). I don't think I'd try too hard to build the adventures around those ideas – they just come out organically I bet.

I think in a 5e game, there's less worry about the timing of light since you have things like the light cantrip which can always be recast. In 5e, the stress point with lighting is perception on behalf of the monsters and characters. I don't think its too dirty to have monsters who live in dark caves be better at it than the characters who explore and I think its fun for the characters to have to decide between seeing poorly or giving up their position with light. Because many characters have dark vision, I dont hide the features of the map their characters can see and I wouldn't give different ranges of vision when putting out a map – I'd just use the vision of the best character to see the map. In my Shadowdark game, we used to use a big 30 foot circle that could reveal the fog of war on Owlbear Rodeo so they couldn't see what was ahead or behind. That was fun. But otherwise I wouldn't worry too much abot the details. The main thing is whether monsters are trying to sneak up on unsuspecting characters, characters are reavealing their position with light, or they're taking disadvantage on perception checks to stay in the dark. The main thing to ask is what sort of feeling you're trying to go for and is that the sort of feeling that fits in the high-heroic nature of 5e?

It's possible things like that can work. For our Patreon Discord server, I also have access to everyone there through Patreon so I could conceivably set up another server, like a Stoat server, and move there and tell everyone. But the reality is, I just can't see also shutting down or handing over the SF patreon server as well. I think bridge software might work but that's another layer of things that can fall apart or go wrong or just confuse people. I haven't looked into it so I can't be sure. Its a possibility.

My first recommendation is to go easy on yourself. Sometimes we can let our drive for perfection just get in the way of being relaxed and having a good time. Don't let the stress of trying to speak perfectly get in the way of just running your game with your friends. That's my big number one tip. Go easy on yourself. But, more specifically, you can jot down two or three features of a given scene or location in your prep notes and focus on those for your descriptions. I wouldn't go further than that by like writing your own read-aloud text or something like that. If you have a list of three features or three important things you want to bring up in front of you, its easier to focus on those things when you're narrating a situation. But really, go easy on yourself first.

It's hard for me to even remember some of the house rules my group are so accustomed to that I don't even bring them up but I'll try. A big one is my faster character creation house rule: https://slyflourish.com/build_dnd_2024_characters_quickly.html Basically separate ability bonuses, the starter feat, skills, and tools, and equipment from backgrounds and let players choose those separately in those steps. Its far faster than the default D&D 2024 method and lets players build fun backgrounds. As you say, luck and doom points are my other big house rule. I wouldn't run 5e without them. I have some theater of the mind house rules that I use: https://slyflourish.com/lazy_gm_resource_document.html#totmguidelines1 I usually limit source material to just a book or two. No other ones jump to mind.

For 5e, I'd go with the 2025 MM and a print out of the monster stats by CR table from FOF. I think the 2025 MM is still the best 5e monster manual for two reasons: it has a LOT of monsters, many more than other typical monster books and they're mostly well designed. I quibble about monsters with spells that aren't spelled out but that's what the FOF table is for when you want to rebuild them, rebaseline them, or just give them another reasonable attack. So yeah, for me, that's what I'd use. In my Sunday Tales of the Valiant game, however, I'm still using the ToV Monster Vault and it's totally fine so I really don't think its an all-or-nothing win for the 2025 MM. All of them are great.

I still think its easier to look up spells in the book than to come up with another sort of system to manage spell cards. The big issue I've seen is that you can't ever really trust what the spell card says. It gets cut off. People abbreviate. Sometimes there's an error. And when that comes up it totally slows down the game. I really wish players were more amenable to keeping a copy of the physical book on hand and writing page numbers on their character sheets so they could just look it up when they need it. In use, I think it's definitely faster – especially when you include possible errors or omitted material (which happens a lot). My friend Joe at Inkwell Ideas is working on a tool that lets you import markdown files and export a PDF of cards you can print. that's another option but again, space is the issue and you have to copy and paste the material. https://inkwellideas.com/free-tools/markdown-to-rpg-card-creator/

Hi Kreggar! I'm spending more time with the Dragonbane and Daggerheart core books since I'm running those. Lately I've been reading the Dolmenwood adventures and the Nimble 5e rulebook.

I'm not a fan of weaknesses and vulnerabilities for two reasons: 1. I forget them. 2. They dramatically make monsters easier a lot of the time. I actually really liked the 4e style of damage weakness and vulnerability where monsters took extra damage in a static amount so it was bounded. Taking double damage is crazy. I'm running a Tales of the Valiant game right now and one of the characters has unlimited access to sunlight so there's no point in me running vampires. They're just going to get stomped. This is one of those weird things where designers give characters access to stuff that *removes* elements of the game. Fighting vampires should be fun but it's not really fun if you just paralyze them and stomp them into dust with no challenge. It's a bit of optimizing out of the fun as well. So yeah, not much of a fan of vulnerabilities and weaknesses. When I'm able, I try to find ways to change it so it's not so dastardly. Mummies take an extra 5 damage from fire-based sources instead of taking double fire damage. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. For vulnerabilities in particular you can just increase monster HP to compensate, say 150%, with the expectation tehy'll get hit with the right elements to bring it back down to say 75%. That way it still has an effect but not quite as extreme. CR is a loose gauge so you shouldn't bother to worry about it once you know what your players bring to the table. You don't have to recalculate it. Instead, you can just note that a monster may be easier under certain circumstances or harder under others.

My core strategy falls into two categories: 1. Big Stuff That Matters. I love big set pieces that draw a lot of attention to the situation, maybe have cool lighting or other effects, and matter in the context of the in-game world. Big plants spewing out steam from the little steam machine they made. The big light puck in a cool demon portal door. Obelisks, braziers, diases, and other big centerpieces. I love that stuff and I wish DF would make a KS just focusing on that stuff. 2. Reusable terrain. The core dungeon sets, both vaulted and unvaulted are my favorite sets because of how re-usable they are. They're by far my most used set. Caverns comes in second and mountains third. Of all the stuff I have, those things all get used pretty often at my table because all three of those are common environments for adventuring in fantasy RPGs. Stuff that didn't work out so well for me: - village and town sets because I usually don't need them for big combat set pieces and they're not worth setting up if there isn't a big sequence there. - The castles set. It's in my basement gathering dust because its hard to set up and too deep to easily be able to see into. - My older DF stuff without magnets. The magnets make a lot of difference. I wrote more about all of this here: https://slyflourish.com/dwarven_forge_buyers_guide.html

I too have trouble with secrets at the end of a campaign because, largely, the characters learned everything they're going to learn so there's not much for me to throw in. I think it's fine to have fewer secrets nearing the end of a campaign. Definitely avoid throwing in any big twisty turny plot ideas just to fill out your list of 10 secrets at that point. Make sure to focus more on the ending players want and deserve.

On Strong Ends: I think it's really hard to plan any sort of clear ending for a session when you're running an ongoing campaign because you don't know where things are necessarily going to go or how long things are going to take. Instead, I think its important for GMs to both keep track of time and start thinking about what would make a good ending as you get closer to the end of the session. Then, look for a nice dramatic moment to put a solid end-cap on the session and keep players eager for more. Strong endings require both an excellent handling of pacing and an excellent handle on improvisation – perhaps the two most valuable skills GMs can work on. On strong starts, beginning with some personal chatter and a recap can work fine. I usually drop my strong start in then. Something happens. Something happens to draw the characters into the game. What is it? Does an NPC come visit them? Games can certainly work without a strong start but I find they get going much faster when I have a solid thing for them to start chewing on – something for their characters to get involved in an do. That's why I recommend it.

I ran 1e AD&D adventures for a recent D&D 2014 campaign and I really don't think it needs much conversion. Here's an article on the topic: https://slyflourish.com/converting_adventures.html Here are some specific tips: - Replace older monsters with new monsters. You don't have to make new ones all the time. - When you have to, build monsters using Forge of Foes stats. - Make the adventure your own. Some of those old adventures don't run as well as you'd think so don't stick to the source too closely. Let your own game grow out of the older material. - Hang on loosely. Use it as inspiration instead of a step-by-step instruction manual. Hope that helps!

Hi Slim! I have great news! The Lazy GM's Reference Docment is CC BY which means its available for commercial use and it contains the eight steps and tons of other stuff: https://slyflourish.com/lazy_gm_resource_document.html CC BY NC is tricker because technically any money coming in from any source, even if its just to pay for web hosting, counts as commercial. You can, and people can, always ask my permission for release for any given tool or product and we can talk about that. But the reference document is under a much less restrictive license that allows for commercial work. The only tricks are: - Make sure to follow the instructions for attribution. - Make sure to stick to the material in this document. Don't assume things from my books or other work are released in this doc. Use the doc itself to reference what you're looking for. Good luck with your project!!

Hi Dave! The intent is that you flesh it out with your own narration and descriptions based on what feels right for you at the time. I'd review the secrets and clues and see what you can use from those to flavor any given room as you need. You can use random lists from various sources to fill things out further if you want but you don't have to worry too much about it. Less is more. As far as pointers go: - Review the secrets and see what clues you can drop into any given room when it feels stale. - Improvise where the relic is hidden. You might think about who put it there, when, and why. - Think about clues the characters can pick up about who moved where. Did people move through here recently or have the tunnels been untouched for a long time? I lean towards helping folks learn how to improvise during a game. I think that's a key to really growing as a GM and running fun evolving games for our players.

Demon Cults and Secret Societies by Kobold Press is probably my favorite book of cults. There are, of course, other sources for cults you can dig into online and reskin into your own favorite cults. The Forgotten Realms has hundreds of them. Really any list of dark deities can serve as the basis for a cult. As far as adventures are concerned, Robert Schwalb's various short adventures for Shadow of the Demon Lord and Shadow of the Weird Wizard have probably the creepiest cults and setups. They're cheap too – like two bucks a pop. You might look at those.

I think its worth talking to the group ahead of time about the benefits of a session zero and how they can get both the benefits of some initial planning and still the fun of introducing their characters. For example, you might have them decide on classes together but them surprise the group with species and other background info. The main thing is that you don't want them building characters that don't fit well in the group or don't fit the theme of the campaign. That's the real value in running a session zero and building characters together I think.

I switched over to some old TSR modules for most of the campaign including D1-D3 and Q1. The rest was homebrewed. I didn't use a lot of other outside material.

This video covers how I feel about campaigns both homebrew and published. https://youtu.be/RzssBOo0b_A Since then I've run a couple of other campaigns and my Dragon Empire game and City of Arches campaigns are both close to the top of the heap. Commonalities are probably material thats flexible enough for me to have some good meat but not so much that I can't tell my own stories. My big revelation is that I much prefer homebrew adventures and campaigns using published worldbooks and campaign sourcebooks. https://slyflourish.com/homebrew_adventures_in_published_settings.html

I would use Obsidian as my permanent archive. I think it's fine to stash stuff on Discord so you can share it with your friends but anything you want to keep, store locally and use your 3-2-1 backup to make it permanent. I think the demise of Discord is a threat but I don't think its serious right now. Unfortunately, I think a lot of us are just stuck with it. We can't leave Discord realistically without losing a lot of our communities. I hate it, but I think thats the case. Good topic for the show!

It's tough to find the best bang for the buck with crowdfunding campaigns. Dwarven Forge is really a whole thing on its own so I'll set that one aside and focus on more traditional RPG crowdfunding campaigns. There's a little secret to successful campaigns – the higher the average pledge, the more you can put into marketing which results in more people backing. That's why you see more campaigns with more expensive PDFs these days, which, in my opinion, is a bummer, because those PDFs are as close as you can get to 100% profit (usually its 90% for Kickstarters and more if one sells them on their own store). Really, the best value isn't in crowdfunding campaigns but Bundles of Holding and Humble Bundles. These sales are lucrative for publishers and crazy good deals for customers. I'd focus more on those for things you might be interested in than Kickstarters. As far as physical versus digital – you're right that outside of the US, shipping can get really expensive. The publishers aren't to blame. Shipping just got a lot more expensive across the board and international shipping is really bad on top of that. For me, I really ask if it's the sort of product I want on my shelf for the rest of my life or not. Sometimes I get really excited for a campaign and back it. Othertimes I dont. These days I've been more conservative in the projects I back and if the PDF ends up being expensive, I often skip it completely. Hope that helps!

Yeah! First, I do think reskinning an exsiting stat block is the way to go or using a Forge of Foes generic stat block depending on the CR you want. Then pick one or two features, probably no more than three, that makes them feel like the thing you're trying to represent. What can an elven ranger do? Maybe teleport between shots with the bow once a turn. The warlock can try to grip people with tentacles, restraining them for a turn (or some other warlock thing – set them on fire). You can go really far with just narration but if you want something more mechanical, a single ability or two that defines them can really make a difference.

I do! Next week I'll be posting the next set of chapters for my big project this year which includes a lot of campaign building material. Chapter 16 has some of it and I just wrote an article with more: https://slyflourish.com/lazy_campaign_building_checklist.html I think writing up a campaign one pager with a focus on what you plan to focus on during your shorter sessions can be a benefit for both you and your players.

Sure, I think that can work fine. I'd make sure there's some way to export your notes so you can have a local copy of them if possible but it really depends on how temporary or permanent you see your notes. I like to have copies of my notes on my own machines so I know they'll last longer than the tools I use to write them but that's sort of my thing. Otherwise, use whatever tools help you prepare.

I got a lot of feedback from my first Lazy Dungeon Master book that it was really valuable for new GMs. I got the same feedback for Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. I don't think you can try to understand the principles of the Lazy Dungeon Master too early. Some disagree, saying these are techniques best learned after you've gotten your sea legs with GMing. But others definitely benefitted from it. So yeah, pass it along! For your friend, I'd try to reinforce that it's totally cool if they don't know the rules. I don't know the rules for the RPGs I'm running right now. I depend on players to help look things up with me. Some of it is having a prep process but a lot of it is just recognizing that you feel unprepared but things will be fine: https://slyflourish.com/you_are_not_prepared.html

First a couple of articles on the topic: https://slyflourish.com/flow_of_trap_detection.html https://slyflourish.com/passive_perception.html In short, yes, the flow you have is correct: - Characters either attempt to detect a trap with Wisdom (Perception) or you match the trap's DC against the characters' passive Perceptions. - The character learn there's a trap but don't understand it so they do an Intelligence (Investigation) check to learn what to do. - With that knowledge in mind, they can perform a Dexterity (thieves tools or slight of hand) to disarm the trap. Passive Perception is designed to give the characters a sense of something being off or not (assuming their passive perception is above the DC to detect the trap). Otherwise, they should be actively searching. One thing I would avoid is putting too many gates in place. If you ask them to describe how they're searching for a trap in detail, you shouldn't *also* require them to succeed on a perception check. One or the other should suffice. Timing can work too. You can use the concept of a dungeon turn in which it takes 10 minutes to search a room for traps and things can be happening elsewhere during that 10 minutes. That's one way to apply a cost for being too careful. The other side of this is that players love to find traps but hate when they fall into them. I'd lean towards the characters finding traps instead of trying to spring them on them. Hope that helps!

Probably setting up dwarven forge. I like doing it but it takes time and it sort of pre-supposes how things are going to go. Honestly, I don't have a lot of extra time for prep so I don't find myself spending a lot of time on things I don't think are vital to run the game. I could probably spend *more* time and improve my games a bit. I think spending time on world building and histories can be fun and might be useful if you turn them into secrets and clues the characters discover through their adventures.

I think the parchment and the ink themselves likely cost more than just the paper and ink you can get at the equivalant of a stationary store. There are special drying powders that seal in the magic, gold-flecked dusts and ink mixed with strange rare substances.

Yeah, prepping big encounters like this can be tricky. I think it's useful to develop some particulars for a complex encounter but be ready to change things up when you're actually running the session. Think about how things work in the context of the world and have some mechanics on-hand you can use to simulate that as needed but be ready to change things up if they're not working out like you think they are (and they often wont). Too much planning for when the boss does one thing or another presupposes that the characters can't actuall affect the outcome of the fight which isn't great. If the BBEG shows up, be ready for them to get forced into a force-cage or sent to another plane or some other big nasty thing. The idea that they can stick around for a while and leave can get frustrating for players who want to *thwart* that BBEG. This is where situation-based prep can help. Set up the situation and let it play out how it plays out. In my own game, the main boss of the whole campaign got killed on turn 3 with a well-placed slice of a vorpal sword. Are you ready for that? Build to improvise during the session instead of planning out how things are going to go would be my advice.

I don't know, I'd probably just go with initiative like usual, maybe giving advantage on who got the higher initiative. I'm assuming 5e is your system, of course. I don't really have a lazy fix but I think initiative is built to handle this sort of thing and I'd probably just stick to that. Sorry!

In a more narrative game, it can be tough to ensure you're giving enough information to foreshadow a trap without so much that players have an easy time with it. I think it's ok to lean towards telling players too much than too little. Staying in the fiction is important. Describe the rumbling sounds and seeing the rushed bones in the long wheel tracks. Focus less on the mechanics and more on asking the characters what they do. I'm no expert in running more OSR games so there's probably better advice out there. I might consider asking in the Shadowdark discord server about it. Trying to give as much info as is warranted is the trick but it's a careful balance.

Honestly, I really don't dig having NPCs using up turns and actions in the game. I feel like it's the GM playing with the GM. If you give them to players, now their turns get longer too. I actually do prefer having them use passive abilities that the characters can use on their turns as part of their actions like taking the help action or maybe boosting damage on an attack or something like that. 5e in particular has already maxed out the amount of stuff you'd want to throw into a turn. I'd try to find a way to add other capabilities that don't add more actions to a given turn.

For me, adding the Domains of Dread from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft into Wild Beyond the Witchlight was one of my favorite mashups but a lot of the time the core elements of a campaign setting are enough for me to get excited for them without having to mash up much more. Certainly if there are elements that grab us, we can drop them in but I don't think we have to seek out mashups for a lot of big rich campaign settings. I think the settings already have a lot of cool stuff going on. On occasion I'll drop in a small element. I put in a god from a Robert Schwalb Shadow of the Demon Lord book in my Midgard game because I just liked it. But that was a pretty small addition.

I agree with you completely and I think 6 to 12 sessions is good. I think you might be able to get a feel for a system with as few as four but I don't think one is enough, that's for sure. I'm trying to do this myself but my campaigns keep getting long =) I think you're on the right track!

You could use the flashback and just start in the burning warehouse and let them start to pick up the clues about how they got there. I'm not a big fan of flashback sessions because they have defined endings and the characters aren't actually making any real progress. Instead, you could put the background in secrets and clues and hand them out a piece at a time to catch the players up to what the characters know. That's one approach anyway!

I think my big advice would be to not get ahead of yourself. If the game is still young, focus on the things right in front of the characters recognizing this larger story element might be going on. The looser a grip you have on the larger story, the easier it is to let your campaign evolve as the characters naviigate it. It also has the added benefit of introducing other BBEGs or other forces that can keep the campaign going for years ahead. But you can't know what those hooks will be years earlier. They have to come up in the game as your players play them. Having a big story arc like the two parallel worlds is cool, but hang on with a loose grip and, instead, focus your attention on the here and now. What's your next session like? What's going on with the characters right now? Too strong a grip on the larger story and you'll end up pushing them down one path which defeats the purpose of a more long-term and open-ended campaign.

Requiring all of your players to be there for all games really does make a fragile game. It makes it really easy for any one player to derail the game for everyone else. I would suggest talking to them and explanining that you're going to keep running with three – which you can do – and that anyone who misses can jump back in when they're able to make it. I'd also do what I could to find another player to balance out the group. I know it's not ideal for all situations but such flexibility means more gaming for the people who can be there.

Hi there! I really don't know what the PF1 version of Dreadful Blessings would be. It could be that you just include them as-is and see how they work. Just throw it on as an added mechanic and see how it plays out. They're pretty simple. I don't know enough about how spell resistance works but it makes sense that it might replace something like that. I'd give it a shot and see. One nice thing is that you can try it in a single battle and see how it goes. Talk to your players ahead of time and see what they think.

yes! I think the fear mechanic is very much a built-in Dreadful Blessing and I love it. So is rolling with Fear in general. The "Yes but" is a powerful tool and Daggerheart gives us a lot of freedom to use it for "soft moves" and "hard moves". I haven't played enough Daggerheart to understand the full implications but I certainly don't seem to have the problem of characters dominating the battle too much other than a series of rolls with Hope which seem to happen a lot. I haven't yet gotten the economics of hope and fear down yet. But I don't seem to be having the problems with Daggerheart that I have with 5e. Instead, I have all new problems to explore =)

That's a tough one. Don't confront them about it in front of anyone else but it might not be unreasonable to ask them one-on-one about it. But that might not work either. You can, of course, change the material in the module. It's a little passive aggressive but you could state clearly "by the way, I'll be shifting things around in this module to keep it fresh" so they're at least aware that the chest with all the loot might turn out to be a mimic and vice versa. This is also one advantage of running homebrew adventures. But yeah, it might be worth a conversation to ask that they not read modules ahead of time. They're only robbing themselves.

Yeah, this is really tough. I've had players use Arcane Eye to try to reconnoiter an entire location over and over and it can be a real struggle. There are a couple of possible things to consider. First, you might work with your players to figure out a better way to handle familiars so your players like them and enjoy them but it still fits in with your style of play. Explain the situation and see what ideas they come up with. It's also reasonable to have the world recognize that some folks have familiars who spy on people and are prepared for it. Sort of like keeps being aware that there are flying spellcasters and are prepared to handle them. If the characters had a home base, what would they do to ensure pesky familliars weren't spying on them all the time? That doesn't work for locations with non-intelligent creatures but in areas with intelligent foes, they'd be working to ensure they're aware. Closed doors, wall-to-wall traps, and other things that stop familiar scan work well as well. But I'd probably have a conversation with your players about what might work and what you guys can agree on together to ensure the game remains fun.

Nothing yet. I'm only a few sessions into my Daggerheart game. I definitely have some elements I want to noodle through that don't sit well with me. Encounter building is one of those. I want to find a good way to improvise monsters. I have been using Balsera style initiative https://fate-srd.com/odds-ends/elective-action-order for initiative since I worry that it's too easy for some players to dominate the space otherwise. It's already had a big effect of ensuring quiet players are getting more spotlight time than they did. I'd love to houserule distancing too so it's more friendly to theater of the mind combat too. But I'm still very new to it so I'm not yet ready to throw some houserules around.

I would stick to Shadowdark and stick to the main rules without changing things too much. There are two things at play. First, the players are digging the current rules you're using so I wouldn't shift it on them until you're ready to play another campaign. Second, Shadowdark characters definitely get more robust as you climb the levels. If they've survived the first few levels, they'll have an easier time surviving in later levels. As long as the players recognize the risk of death is out there, I think you'll be fine. When you're done with this campaign, you can switch to a new one if you want, but I don't think I'd switch systems so dramatically mid-campaign.

If they noticed, they never cared and I kept using them to the very end. An easy way to use FoF generic stat blocks is for any non-boss monster, minions and sidekicks and the like. In my experience, players don't really care about the special abilties of lower-ranking monsters when there's bigger monsters with interesting abilities. I know, as a GM, I tend to forget (or just ignore) weird special features of the lower ranking monsters in a bigger fight. So yeah, I don't think there's any problem using generic FOF stat blocks. Players want to see their own characters do cool stuff. I don't think most of them care about weird things monsters do unless they're a big meaty boss monster.

I have it but I've never read it. I'll check it out! (this doesn't count as your question for the month if you don't want it to =).

It might be worth a conversation with him offline – not in email or text but voice or face to face if you can. Don't do it in front of other people and explain the situation – don't make it accusatory. Explain that sometimes you have a dramatic moment and it's ok to let the situation sit without trying to deescalate it with a joke. It isn't about the person, it's about the effect of the game. But in my experience the best way, and hardest way, to deal with a situation like this is a one-on-one conversation.

I preferred the natural language of 2014 much more than the board-game-like constant capitalization in 2024. I also feel like the rigidness of skill "moves" in 2024 limits doing things like doing free-action investigations or insight checks during combat to learn things. The whole thing feels more rigid than I like. It's like they wanted to do Powered by the Apocalypse style "moves" but this isn't that sort of game. Oh, there's also a lot of broken magic items in 2024 like enspelled things. 2024 does have a lot of improvements: - Fixed monk stunning strikes and paladin smites. - Fixed conjuring spells so one player doesn't take nine turns a round. - Fixed the overpowered nature of great weapon master and sharpshooter. - Lots of little changes that I think streamline the game a bit, at the cost of adding more stuff like weapon masteries, rogue kickers, and lots of other free-action actions. I still think 2024 is overall better but it's not a home run.

I'm not very familiar with the adventures in Dragon Delves so I can't give specific advice on how to tie them together. I think having a central hub with a quest NPC who can give players directions to tie them together might work. You can also slide in your own subquests or even an overarching main quest the players and characters are dealing with that better ties together the adventures in the book. Again, not being that familiar with it, I can't offer a specific idea but some type of dragon lord who's getting something from the dragons you face could be interesting. So that'd be my advice: see about adding a larger overarching quest beyond just steeping the egg and slide in some of your own adventures and quests that might better tie together the adventures in the book. Good luck!

Boom!! That was a wild time! Crypts of Karigulon went well! Quite a few deaths, though, I'll say. More than previous groups. I think two players had three deaths each in the first hour. No clerics definitely hurt. I did use the "no stabilizing at zero" rule and no one seemed to mind. They got that there's no value in having a character at zero with no way to heal anyway. I did use the "if you roll a 20 on a stabilize check, you bring them back to 1 hit point" and that worked well enough. I talked to Kelsey Dionne about it and she agreed that it's a good solution – particularly for a one-shot game. So yeah, I used the following house rules: - You don't lose a spell on a failed check until you've succeeded at it at least once. - No stabilizing at zero. You either have 1 hit point or you're dying. If someone rolls a 20 on a stabilize check, you come back to 1 hit point. - Torch timers are 60 - 1d12 minutes and using a timer is considered bad form. - I roll the 1d4 for dying characters in secret. I think that was it?

Hi Mr. Adventurer! One thing to consider is widening the physical scale of what's going on. While you have been focused around a starter town and moving into a region, you can put some bigger villains out there – servants of the Dark Lord – who are up to larger campaigns than just what's been going on locally. Examples could be scaling up an army for war, performing one or more big rituals, hunting for powerful artifacts, or building an alliance of powerful monsters. You can drop three such villains in with tehir own goals and then build possible quests and locations around their activities. This draws back the aperture and expands the overall focus withs some nice meaty tier two bosses to deal with. If you take Lord of the Rings as a reference, at tier 1 they were dealing with the Urukai hunters. At tier 2 it was Helm's Deep and Isengard. Tier 3 is Minas Tirith. Tier 4 is Mordor.

Hi Fred and the Dogs! Rule 1 is that your prep serves you, not the other way around, so you don't have to feel any guilt using whatever method works for you. I will, however, offer up some thoughts about why the eight steps are lined up the way they're lined up. For characters, even if its in your head I think it's worth thinking about the characters – who are they? how will they react to the things in your next session? Do the scenes you're considering make sense for them and have a way to showcase them? As far as your first scene being your strong start, that's something i've been doing too in my own notes. It's still worth considering that strong start and how it propels the characters and players into the game. Sometimes I mash up the eight steps into something that looks similar to your own setup: https://slyflourish.com/mashing_up_the_eight_steps.html One thing I do, though, is, when it makes sense, break out the components of scenes into individual lists to hell me **prepare to improvise**. This gives me the building blocks to build scenes during the game instead of being stuck with pre-defined scenes that might not make sense. Depending on the sort of adventures you run (see adventure types: https://slyflourish.com/running_dungeon_crawls.html ), breaking up encounters into locations, NPCs, monsters, and treasure might make more sense. Secrets are similar. Maybe you already know the things your characters might figure out or their embedded in your NPC notes or something, but I find it useful to have a separate list of secrets to reveal in the next game. Asking what you should focus on, I'd offer a few considerations: - What parts of your prep are working for you when you run your game? - What parts of your prep are no not really using when you run your game? Do you still need it? - What do you wish you had prepped when you're actually running your game? I think those questions really help you get your prep to the things that help you a lot. Otherwise, you can experiment with breaking things out if you think it helps.

Hi Meaghan! There are a couple of ways you can drop in hints of bigger fronts without immediately steering the players towards them. One way is to just tell them. "Just because you heard this information doesn't mean you have enough to go on. You're not sure where that's taking place". I'm a big believer in sometimes just telling players whats happening so they don't waste a lot of time or energy. But you can also foreshadow events without putting out enough clues for them to aim any given way. They might ask about someone they've heard hints about as they explore around but not enough to actually go somewhere. Instead, you can put out clear clues for the areas they *can* explore and perhaps find secrets and clues that can continue to lead them on. But, when in doubt, simply tell them that even though they've heard about something happening doesn't mean they have enough information to chase it down. Sometimes we have to be explicit with what's going on and I think that's fine.

Good question! This isn't tested yet but you might have it that the spell is only expended from the item when it first succeeds. This makes it more reliable so they don't blow the spell on their once a day use. OTOH, if that's the sort of grim game you run, that's really no different than how spellcasters normally work. Try it and see!

I didn't fill out Deepreach and I probably won't but I love putting little mini-mega-dungeons into campaign areas so you can fill them out and make them as small or big as you want. You can drop the maps from Dungeon of the Mad Mage or Barrowmaze or any other megadungeon you want. You can grab a bunch of Dyson maps and fill it out as you go. I do have a little bit of a megadungeon description coming out for City of Arches soon – one of my final City of Arches Hero-tier rewards, called Grand Lift of Depths Forgotten. It's not a true megadungeon but a list of twenty levels beneath the City of Arches. Fun times.

That's a good and hard question! One dwarven civilization might be different than another. You might try stealing material from published books wherever you can. Mash up several ideas if you have your own homebrew world. Then perhaps focus on some big themes with the architecture and style and the practical nature of how they build things. Think of the three Fs: Fantastic, Functional, Familiar. What are the fantastic elements of their architecture? How does it work? What parts of it would be familar to players? That's probably how I'd do about it.

Honestly, not a lot. I try to get access to the core book to my friends so they can hopefully go through it but I don't expect they're going to pick up a lot of it until we start playing. If they're experienced RPG players and the game isn't too weird, they'll pick it up. It's funny, I have a very experienced friend who played Cypher with us and after a year-long campaign said "I never understood how edges work. Ever". So you can get pretty far even if you don't pick everything up. So my answer is, I wouldn't expect much. Expect you're going to learn together at the table.

I would keep both copies of Alien because sometimes its fun to go back and look at old ones. For me, I don't delete a lot of stuff unless its like an errata of an older version of the same game. I have a lot of extra crap but digital storage is cheap so I don't worry about it. If your digital library is well organized, you can find what you need even if you have some extra copies. So yeah, I'm a digital hoarder. here's more: https://slyflourish.com/organizing_digital_rpg_materials.html

Hi Bernie! I love the idea of making and releasing random tables! It works for me to brainstorm concepts for random tables, trying to come up with twenty things for whatever the subject is. An important consideration is the context of the table. Is it too big in scope? Too small? I see a lot of random tables that are too granular to be useful like "patterns of designs on china tea cups" and a few that are too large like "planet descriptions". You want to find the right resolution to make a table useful. Is this a table you yourself can use? I've been making a ton of random tables recently for a book I'm working on and that has helped me a lot. Last, I recommend going for a walk and making the theme of your walk "come up with 20 things before I'm back home". I love doing that.

Hi Thomas! There's an overlap between traps and puzzles but I see them differently for a few reasons. - They’re easier to improvise - They often start with the fiction - They can more easily make contextual sense - You can show a living world with traps that already went off - Traps often have multiple solutions - Can act as both upward and downward beats I do think its worth asking the same questions though, to determine if traps are warranted: - Who set them? - Who resets them and how? - Who are they meant to trap? - Who can get past them and how? - Do they make sense in the context of the location and situation? Good question!

Honestly, that sounds like a ton of work and I don't know how well it can work. I think having a good organized system for your digital documents and a good search sitting on top of it can work better. I wrote about that here: https://slyflourish.com/organizing_digital_rpg_materials.html Otherwise you might spend more time tweaking your system than using it!

Good question! I wrote a lot about that in this week's Sly Flourish article and talked about it on this week's Readings and Reflections: https://slyflourish.com/building_situations.html I think a good scene has a few features: - An interesting location or monument to set the stage. - Usually multiple inhabitants involved in something. - A situation with some complexity to it – something for the characters to navigate. - A draw – a reason the characters what to get involved. Scenes are great vehicles for secrets and clues which can tie the scene to the rest of what's going on of the characters' interest. The main thing a scene shouldn't have is a defined outcome – only one way it turns out. This still happens, of couse, because sometimes scenes just lead to the next thing, but if we can include options, I think that works better. Play to see what happens!

The example you bring up can be a tough one for more folk-heroic games where death is right around the corner. Sometimes the rolls just go poorly. That's why I think its worth having a hand on the dial even in those kinds of games because I don't think a whole game should end just because you rolled sixes three times setting up the situation. For example, let's say you're rolling up a situation and roll 2d6 for the number of guards and get 10, which is a lot. You also roll distance and they're close. You also roll hostility and they're hostile. You roll for surprise and they surprise the characters. That's a lot of bad rolls. I might change one or two of those variables so its not quite so lethal. Whatever game we're running, I think it helps to have an idea how lethal an encounter might be just so you know that's a strong possible outcome. This is the intention of the lazy encounter benchmark for example – not to set a budget for a battle but to tell you if a battle is potentially inadvertantly deadly. Otherwise, I don't tend to envision an outcome. I like to see what happens. Hope that helps.

I think the Starter Set adventures by in large did a good job. The big thing I want to see in a 1st level adventure is a good understanding on the fragility of 5e characters at 1st level. Level 1 should really be its own tier so when I see a "1st to 3rd" level adventure, I know I don't trust it. Not all the starter set adventures manage that well but the third one, Dragons of Stormwreck Isle did a good job managing that one I think. It sounds egotistical as well, but I'm fond of my own 1st level adventures: Night Blades in Fantastic Adventures, Lair of the Cockatrice in Fantastic Lairs, Starsong Tower in Ruins of the Grendleroot and Golgoron Rising + Obsidian Skull from City of Arches. All of those are available for free in the samples for those books. For non 5e adventures I think Scarlet Minotaur in the Shadowdark Quickstart Rules is really good too.

Hi there! My second ever Daggerheart game is tonight! So far I have no tips for making Daggerheart monsters. The improvising adversaries on page 208 seems to have anything I'd expect to need. I'd need a lot more experience to get away from that.

This week's Readings and Reflections and the accompanying article may help a bit: https://slyflourish.com/building_situations.html There are a bunch of variables we can throw into even a single scene to give it multiple outcomes and interesting things to do: - Weather - Monument (faction, condition, origin, effect) - Two groups of inhabitants - What those inhabitants are doing - What might draw the characters into the scene. - The characters approach (the roles they took to get there and how well they did) - Attitudes, behaviors, and so on. That gives us a big soup of stuff going on at a location that we can put in front of the players and see how things work. In a recent Dragon Empire game I built a scene that worked really well where two evil undead dryads were attacking some sable elves protecting a branch of the World Tree. The complication was that the undead were allies of one of the characters allies. I didn't presuppose how it would turn out. You can see more of that here: https://youtu.be/HKFXKb_Sz-g

I answered a similar question just now in last month's Q&A. Some games have hardened procedures for play like some PbtA systems and games like Blades in the Dark. OSR games refine such procedures as well. Dolmenwood has a lot of them. 5e doesn't hang onto procedures nearly as tightly, which vexes some folk. That doesn't mean you can't bring procedures to 5e. I think one of 5e's advantages is that it has a lot of flexibility for procedures. I think, like the eight steps, it's nice to have clear procedures for play that you and your players understand but it's not necessary. Procedures might include something like: - Downtime - Quest selection - Travel - Dungeon delving and then back to the first part again. The One Ring by Free League has procedures similar to this with their Council, Journey, Combat sort of system. So for some, I think building procedures, even if its just for your specific campaign, can help. But it's not a requirement.

Like a lot of RPG creation and production, I wrote most of my advice in this article: https://mikeshea.net/how_to_make_it_in_the_rpg_industry.html It's not specific for RPG creation or playtesting but I think a lot of it overlaps. Finding people who could care about your thing, whatever it is, is hard and I don't think you can start too early working to get attention on it. Setting up a Discord server these days seems like the obvious move to start building a community and getting people together into playtest groups. Discord would let you run games right in the same server where people discuss it.

I'm sorry. I completely missed Cosmere because its not really a setting I know anything about so I never picked it up. I really don't know anything about it. Until you posted this, I didn't know there was a "plotweaver system". I'll have to go check it out!

It could be something to talk to them about and see. If they primarily like board games, they might not want anything more than that but you could ask them if they'd be interested in a longer campaign instead of just a one-shot here and there. Not a *huge* campaign, but maybe six weeks trying Dragonbane for example. Like a lot of questions, I think the answer is "talk to them and see". But be ready for the hard answer of "nah, we just like playing board games". Its possible you might put together a separate RPG night for those who want to play a longer-term campaign too. That might be an option.

I think you could say it clearly in a session zero or also make it clear when they're talking to quest NPCs. Just break character and say "look, Roselyn Zeshe isn't going to betray you or the queen but she has her own ways of doing things that you might not agree with". That's not betrayal. They know it's a risk. I think when you telegraph that certain NPCs have their own agendas, that's ok. But sure, you can make it clear in a session zero or during the game itself that an NPC isn't going to outright betray the characters without them knowing it is happening. Something like that.

I found playing in 5e, players felt like being "downed" was as bad as being killed. They'd often say "I died" when they only dropped to zero. So I felt like the threat was there anyway, even if I was just dropping them to zero. You can also have monsters threaten to coup-de-gras characters when they're down – telegraphing when they're going to do so so the other characters have chances to go stop them. This makes battles more dynamic when the fighter has to leave their current foe to go save the wizard from getting killed by the giant who just knocked them out. I found with modern 5e (A5e, TOV, D&D 2024, FoF) monster damage was high enough that they'd still be a really solid threat to even high-level characters. You can also telegraph some monsters who can actually kill characters if they reach zero HP. I wouldn't recommend doing it often but for some special monsters, this can put a lot of threat on the characters. If you're talking about general attrition of character power over time, ensuring there isn't a safe place to reset and limiting short rests is one way to do it when they crawl through a hostile area. There are lots of ways to basically say "you won't be able to take a [short or long] rest while in this location and if you leave, bad things happen". Make sure you tell players up front so they know not to blow all their best stuff in the early fights.

I think adding descriptions about how it would incinerate a mere commoner but for someone as powerful as the character it is but a glancing blow is fine. 5e is a super-heroic RPG when you cross 5th level or so. The battles get more brutal and I think going for that over-the-top bang zing pow superhero descriptions isn't a ba way to go. They're mortal but they're much stronger now. Hope that helps!