Q & A from Patrons of Sly Flourish on Upcoming Videos

Coming back to this with a question about encounter design. You've mentioned that big predictable encounters like boss fights should be well-thought-out beyond the hibachi style. I'd love to hear what your process for doing that might be, and what inspiration you might use.

Do you ever try using what I would call "meta systems", such as a counter for number of noisy things the players have done, or a list of consequences for bandits escaping the players in a combat scenario? If so, what do you think does and does not work (generally)?

How would you do Spiral Campaign Building differently in an Urban Setting? I'd love to hear more about your experience in this with the Sharn half of your Eberron game. Thanks!

How do you get players to flesh out their characters beyond stats / skills / and class features. I'm starting a new campaign and while we established the characters come from a particular region, we didn't figure out any bonds between them during our session zero.

Hi Mike. Can you offer some tips on running NPCs so they actually convey the information you need them to? It seems really unnatural for them to start blurting out important details. It’s especially hard with bad guys when it’s not really in their best interest to share. Is there a good way make sure my NPCs act more like characters and less like random normal people?

Hi Mike! I love all the adventure generators, especially The Heist. Do you have any tips on how to prepare and run a heist adventure?

How would you prep for a megadungeon, such as Dungeon of the Mad Mage?

Hi Mike, not sure if you've covered this already, but what is the Lazy DM's approach to world building? Not just altering or changing existing material but starting from scratch. I guess and ways to know if you'd be happier with a Homebrewed world or just an existing one that you alter to your liking.

Hi Mike, a recent player debrief on high/low points in a completed campaign revealed the high points to be moments of (unsurprisingly) laughter. Low points tended towards 'serious' roleplay moments - from either myself or the player. Emotional reunion, serious reveals etc. I think this stems from a limited understanding of the different ways in which a player can interact with the game. First person RP vs describing what your PC says/does etc. I'd like to hear you discuss the different ways in which all players (DM included) can 'play' the game. My belief is there are probably lots of different ways we just don't get exposure to.

Do you have any advice for a fairly new DM about going through a published adventure and making alterations to make it work for the group. I sometimes hear about things needing a fix but have no idea how to do that.

I’ve been getting into sourcebooks and adventures from older editions, and I appreciated your ranking of the 5e campaigns. Are there any books etc. from prior editions that you would recommend using as inspiration for a 5e campaign?

Hi, Michael. New DM here. Q1) I feel 5E like a medieval-superhero story from the start. How could I nerf a group for a few newbie adventures until they get some quests done and, only then, win the Goku status that level 1 players have? I know DCC and Warhammer Fantasy have this kind of approach, but my players are intrested in 5E adventures potentially. Q2) Are there any intentions in translating some of your books to, say, Spanish? Offtopic: I'm a lifetime nerd that's been hiding from TTRPG due to the time I thought it consumed. Your book taught me it could also be not like that. Now, with 31 y/o, I started directing 2 groups of adult newbies as an experiment to use TTRPG in teaching Language and Literature. Thanks for your inspiration.

A lot of both improving a scene and thinking about campaign development is about understanding the motivations of your NPCs to decide what they would do or say in a situation. What do you find to be the most useful types of motivations for NPCs? Does it vary by what role you have in mind for them (major antagonist, mentor, rival, potential ally, just flavor, etc.)?

I am interested in process you use to go from idea to finished published product. What advice would you tell yourself when you first started creating products? How do you find artist, mappers, layout artists and editors? How the sausage is made.. ect...

Do you create and track Fronts when you are running a published adventure? I'd really like a video tutorial on how to run a pre-written adventure from start to finish!

1. How does a lazy DM deal with a full party wipe in a long campaign

I love the talk about fronts and portents and the like and I wanna use them more. A couple questions about how to implement them: 1. I have two long running campaigns right now, would you recommend adding them mid-stream and if so, how would you do it? 2. How do you decide when a front moves forward with its next step to trigger the portent?

Hey! I'd love to hear your advice about moving beyond DMing for your group of close friends, and taking the plunge to DMing for strangers (online or whatever.) What do you have to do differently? How might your prep change? etc...

I love the concept of strong starts. I know that combat is a common and easy strong start situation, but my players don't always want to start with combat all the time. Most of the strong start suggestions in Return of the Lazy DM our strong starts for campaigns. I'd love ideas for how to very strong starts in a way that kept things meaningful and moving forward.

You've spent a lot of time talking about the laments of published WOTC adventures. Though I doubt this would be a full video, I'm curious how you would rank the published adventures. I'd also be curious if you had third party material that you felt fit really well with specific published campaigns (i.e. nautical supplements for GoS, etc)

I would love tips on actually _doing_ the improvization in game after preparing with the lazy DM tools for new lazy DMs. I had a bit of struggle when I first started using them, but they did make my games 100x more fun once I made them work for me!

Have you considered doing a video on how the Lazy DM's checklist can easily be "scaled up" for the purposes of campaign planning? It seems to me that your method can provide a great framework for brainstorming an entire campaign or campaign arc if you just "think bigger" when you're going through the steps. Once you've got the strong campaign start, primary fantastic locations, campaign-spanning secrets, and so on established, your list can inform the checklists you create for individual adventures as the campaign progresses. Maybe not a new idea--and perhaps you've done a video on this topic already that I'm not aware of--but if you haven't done this yet, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

I am currently running an open table/west marches hexcrawl at a mead hall every Sunday. As a consequence of that, I rarely know who my players will be in advance nor do I necessarily know what they will want to do once the session starts. I've got a kludge developing where I have Secrets and Clues broken out by region (i.e., these secrets can be found in a dwarf ruin, these clues can be found in the Marrowood, etc.) in addition to the standard character-focused S&Cs, but would welcome more ideas for applying the tools of lazy dungeonmastering to an open table environment.

Hi Sly, I love the videos and podcast content that you are putting out there! They're great for my drive to and from work! One thing that isn't a question, but more of a, "I'd like to see" are videos/podcasts about running the WotC adventures. I'm thinking of a video along the lines of the articles like this: https://slyflourish.com/running_curse_of_strahd.html I think that these are great resources and might be a good way to pull people into the Sly Flourish fanbase!

Could yoe make a video showing how you edit your PDFs, i.e. one page of the undiscovered secrets? More specifically, I would like to see the template you use. Fonts, background image, etc I like your document layout very much :-)

What are good campaign wrap-ups? I just finished watching you Dragon of Icespire Peak game with Enrique Bertram and you did a “six months later…” falling action scene. Do you always do this? Could this be an adventure generator on how to end a campaign well?

What is the social contract when it comes to a D&D group? What are tips for players to make their D&D experience a better thing instead of just relying on the DM to do everything?

What is your advice for writing up a Campaign Pitches document? Reference: Pitching your Campaign Matt Colville video. I’d love to hear your thoughts 🥰

How do you manage Player knowledge (is not a newbie in D&D, as already played a lots of session) vs is Character young Lv1, knowing nothing outside, other than is small village ? The question rise when in an encounter the player tell everybody to through a flask of oil because fire is the good solution, to not use slashing weapon against this one, use silver weapon, burn the corpse, etc... That doesn't fit to his young lv1 Character knowledge, but how to handle that ? I feel more confortable if he's playing a Lv3 Character, and that sounds more acceptable when is shooting advice to other Lv1 Character. Let's think also about player googleing in between session, and come back with this kind of unexplicable knowledge .

Please keep doing your 3rd party reviews. I love those and have picked up several great resources from those recommendations. I’d also love to hear you talk about your own older works as well. Even though you’ve probably already done this, for newer listeners it’s great and those who don’t want that audio content can always skip via time stamps.

How do you create NPC factions and organizations? What are three things every organization needs to feel real for your players?

The thing I always struggle with is when there's a skill checks in a group. Since characters can attempt things even if they are not proficient (picking locks). Do you just allow everyone to roll and try? Say the thief tries to pick the lock and fails. Can the other 4 members of the party each get in line and take a turn? How do you handle the case where conceivably everyone could give it a shot? And doesn't that apply to most situations anyway? How do we make characters with "special skills" more special? If any character cant give a shot and get a lucky 20, it seems to minimize the character specializations.

I'd love to have you make a video detailing how to combine Stat blocks, as briefly discussed in Ruins of the Grendleroot. Thanks!

I'm curious as to what your take is on some of the other 5e zines are that are going around. The specific 2 I have noticed more than any other is the Lair magazine by the DM lair and Broadsword magazine by Dave Hamrick and group at DM Dave.

I'm running my campaign in my homebrewed world that is still a work in progress. What kind of notes and details would you make to keep locations feeling unique, fleshed out, and easy to reference?

What to do when the storyline stalls, or goes stale? The same secrets and clues have been thrown out several times and for whatever reason the PCs don't take the bait - but they are kinda necessary or at least important storylines. Would you ever talk away from or across the table as "Mike" to get the game back on track? Is that appropriate in this circumstance?

I'm curious how you handled travel for a campaign like Storm Kind's Thunder. I know there are some point crawl articles on your site. When is one style of travel better suited than another?

Do you have lore continuity in your version of the Forgotten Realms? For example, if a player character becomes a hero, are they mentioned in a future campaign in the region? Or if a player character is granted a title, could future PCs have them as a patron?

Cover why you love the Cypher System!

Been participating in weekly one-shots lately and am curious about your thoughts on designing for them. Short (~1 hour), Medium (~2-1/2 hours) and long (4+ hours).

Is the "three bullet points" per location the tool you use to deliver concise and yet effective descriptions of locations? Any other tips? I always struggle in keep the "DM talk" short to let the party talk more.

I love your prep videos Sly! As someone who frequently gives feedback on other DMs campaigns, that I am not a part of and as someone who gets feedback from other DMs, I can say I love Co-DMing. Have you ever Co-DMed with anyone else? What are your stories about collaborative story and content development, like in the Fantastic Lairs? (Bonus question: What is the coolest thing from any other campaign that you have ever "borrowed")

Connected to Raymond Chans question - How do you fit in or balance the concept of writing a clear outline with the lazy DMing method, focusing on improvisation & "the next session"?. This is probably not such a big problem for published adventures (since the outline should be the book) but in a homebrew setting it can become an issue. Put another way, the question is: "How do you keep the story on track while still allowing for maximum improvisation and also "staying lazy?" ;-)

I noticed in a recent tips video that you don't use a DM screen, and I assume therefore that you roll in open. If so, how does this affect drama, opposition stealth rolls etc, and do you miss fudging?

One thing I struggle with and that could fit your style of "short and sweet" videos is: what are ways to flesh out NPCs more, in a way that they feel more like a person and less like me doing a funny voice?

What is the best way to introduce friends/family who aren't big into gaming to D&D? A quick one-shot with pre-gens? A different game such as Fiasco?

What are some of your favorite third party publications that came out this year?

I'm going to echo and restate some previous comments: How do you keep track of all the improvised lore that comes from pivoting the story? I struggle with "DM perspective" note taking that can slow down the game. I think my players care...

Do you still roll in the open? Do you reveal the monster stats to your players, as I seem to recall you saying in a podcast? How has that changed the experience for you and your players?

I know improv is a super valuable skill, but what do you do when the players do something *totally* unexpected and you have nothing prepped? For example, in Eberron, supposed I'm running a Sharn-centric campaign. I've prepped some NPCs, secrets and clues, and locations, but they're all within Sharn. How do I handle it if the players decide to take the Lightning Rail and go to the wilderness for whatever reason?

If you wrote The Lazy Player Guide, what would you include?

I love this idea! Here's a question: do you ever experience a sense of regret or disappointment after DMing a session? I often feel this because I forgot an important detail or fun game mechanic, or I had to improvise something important and it ended up not working well for the story. Maybe my players don't know what they missed, but I find it frustrating. Do you have any tips for dealing with this?

How do you deal with greater and greater deviation from plotted content when running long prewritten campaigns. I want to stay as lazy as possible without railroading the players.

I play PF2e, but I love your material and style, so anything that is not 5e specific is extra valuable to me.

How do you help a player remember cool abilities without managing their character for them? One of my players is a Gloom Stalker and never remembers that he is invisible to creatures that rely on darkvision.

What are your thoughts on running an evil (or morally ambiguous) campaign in terms of content planning? There is already some videos out there about how to set up the player (like make sure they have a reason to be together and not kill each other) but more like how you would change adventures and plot hooks and Maguffins?

What are ways to do "quick" capture of what is happening at certain moments in your game. I so often try to write a quick note about what was happening at the moment but I feel I lose a lot when I'm writing down a quick note.

You have stated before that we should not balance encounters and instead make encounters that make sense in the setting and situation. I completely agree. However, in my experience, a vast majority of the 5e player base expects balanced/scaling encounters. They expect every encounter to be winnable. How do you break this expectation and encourage players to gather information about the potential dangers of an encounter so they can make informed decisions and risk assessments?

Whoops. Maybe a little less 5e focus. Really liked the collab with Johnn Four. More of that would be fun. Would love to see you and Justin Alexander do something together.

A few things I’d like to hear about: record keeping and organizing (what did the NPC tell them eight sessions back?); how to keep players focused on stuff that matters without railroading them; more pep talks/tips for overcoming anxiety and burnout; stuff that isn’t

1. How to encourage more RP when your group has been playing for a year and mostly love the combat (mechanics) part of the adventure. 2. Tips on Using Inspiration to improve Role Play?

How does a DM handle instances where NPCs are talking to one another without boring the players?

What are your top three recommendations of books/ systems to read outside of 5e, simply to improve my 5e games, even if I have no intention of running those systems on their own?

How do you help players decide on a course of action? Ie. you’re infiltrating a castle and some want to sneak in and some want to talk their way in and everyone is being polite and doesn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. Do just say “the outer walls are well defended and it’s going to be exceedingly hard to sneak past?” I don’t mind out of character strategizing and I don’t want to just punish them by saying “as you were taking too long making up your mind a guard comes up and arrests you.”