Keeping Your Story Straight: How We Manage All the DM Details of Our RPG Campaigns

3 Wise DMs

No DM’s plan survives contact with the players. Between remembering the story you’re trying to tell, the details you had to improvise, and the players’ actions (which may or may not have made sense), it can be hard to keep the details straight in your RPG campaign.

How can you plan out the important stuff, capture improv details before you forget them, and make sure you remember it the same way week to week? Thorin, Tony and Dave each have their own tricks for keeping their stories straight. This episode digs into those as well as handling perception when players don’t remember the game the same way you do.

2:00 How do you keep your story straight as a DM?

5:00 If you can’t keep your story straight, your players definitely can’t: Session prep and Google Docs

9:00 The power of owing a favor … and making sure you, the DM, remember to call them in

14:00 DM Thorin’s tricks to keep details straight when improving without a prep doc

17:00 Control the session synopsis to influence what players remember and keep them moving forward

24:00 How not to lose player interest in the details and your game

27:00 DM Dave’s lasting misunderstandings in Barovia:

• The nagging ghost of Baby Walter
• Unintended Tarroka deck meanings
• Handling players who latch onto the wrong details so hard that they become part of the story — even if you don’t want them to

39:00 How these choices impact the tone of the game

41:00 The black dragon fiasco and the kind of details DMs can’t forget

49:00 How DM Tony kept Storm King’s Thunder straight with a ton of homebrew material

56:00 Plot holes are just potholes: If the game’s going well, you can keep driving forward

63:00 The real story lives in our heads

66:00 Sometimes the DM understands their story so well that we don’t appreciate how easy it is for the players to get lost

73:00 Final thoughts