Do THIS and players will fall in love with your D&D world

Use code "GINNY" for your discount!

▼ INDEX ▼
0:00 Intro
0:57 Let them do it!
2:32 Design their hometown
4:17 Design NPCs
5:47 Create spontaneously
7:00 Session zero
8:39 Cinderella's D&D game
10:04 Make collaborative worldbuilding work

Hey, dungeon masters — do you feel like your D&D players aren't all that invested in your worldbuilding? Here's one simple trick to make your players fall in love with your Dungeons & Dragons world.

Music from Epidemic Sound

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[GinnyDi]

Use code "GINNY" for your discount! Love, your fairy godmother 😘

[TheJourneyman]

I had a player ask for coffee in an inn and my innkeeper had no clue what that was as coffee didn’t exist in my game. This led to that player creating Caulfe, a drink brewed from a bean that only grew in the Fey Wilds. That campaign then had a long running side story of that player searching for doorways to the Fey Wilds for a cup of coffee. :)

[TheCrazeace]

My current DM is an extrovert and therefore is in tons of friend groups. He is able to DM three campaigns all that take place in this one homebrew world he created. The idea that while we're running our adventures we occasionally catch references to the other campaigns makes me love the world we are role playing in.

[micahrichmond]

I love doing player flashbacks with sentences like "you stand and gaze at the burning city bellow you. Who is standing next to you?" To let the player make their own story in front of everyone. So much fun

[jessecreegan]

I did an an entire pirate world build. Had a player come to me and ask why a cleric couldn't be played. I said i never built a religion for pirates. So she ended up making an entire pirate religion with religious text and all. With her building of a religion, holy book and all made for the best pirate bible thumping role play i have ever seen.

[davidjoshuasianghio]

My party is full of writers and artisits, so when we started and they started writing their own stories about my campaign, I immediately incorporated all of it into my game. They got so invested because it became our story, not just mine.

[CrispysTavern]

As someone who has been continuously building a homebrew world for my 4-year D&D group, this video is a godsend. While there are definitely things that I would like to remain in my own hands, when it comes to stuff connected to player characters, taking cues from my *actual* players has really worked out for me,

It saves time and builds a greater connection between the players and the story, because you know, they helped with it!

[MrTheMighty]

I've always enjoyed a sort of "yes, and" approach with my players. If they ask whether there's a certain type of shop, I'll coax them into giving me more details of what they'd like to find. Then I'll have that sort of shop exist, but also make up other things as I go to make it seem like that shop was always there. Had some really memorable NPCs come into existence that way.

[Maulwurm]

As I'm a beginner DM and everyone in my group is a begginer, the first thing I told a group member: "Your character is born in this city and knows all NPCs and what the others will find there. Guide them through your beautifully created city". Everyone in the group was so happy that they had the freedom.

[OniNoSweeney]

"...Glorp the two headed goblin stablemaster who also sells homemade glue."

Write that down! WRITE THAT DOWN!

[jenniferbolan]

I had a moment like this in my game tonight! We filled out some lore on some random hot springs.

[laurenjohnson]

my sister is new at dnd and somehow when I asked her for a character backstory in a paragraph she told me that her character, Therese, is from Long Island (where we're from) and moved to Rome (her dream city) and I think she's really going to be great at dnd bc she just laughed at my anguish when I realized she just made both locations, Long Island and Rome, canonical to our fantasy world.

[YTThatOneGuy]

I recommend everyone look at "Beyond the Wall's" optional rule for world building!
The world building/npc building session is so fun. It can easily be adapted to 5e and can be implemented easily into an existing campaign

[Beaurisque]

One of my favorite short campaign was loosely inspired by the game Children of Morta and was about a large family living in the woods when suddenly the nature rise against them. The first session was the setup of the relations of family members (players drawing the genealogy tree), the creation of the house (drawing the map of the house in a child style with bright colors) and the narration of their best family memories (each player was narrating one or two of these memories, with the collaboration of the others involved in the scene; something like "Jack, do you remember when we stole a looot of candies and hide in the tallest tree near the house?" / "Oh yeah, I remember! It's the first time you used your druidic powers, to facilitate the climb!" / And the mother jumps in : "I search for you for HOURS! I was so mad at you both but you had your lesson with the belly ache afterwards.." And after that narration, another player was already drawing the "Tallest tree / hide spot" on the map, behind the house, and it became relevant in combat (because most of the game was at that house, so the map they were drawing became a battlemap a few times).

[minaly]

Oh goodness Ginny, that fairy godmother dress is absolutely gorgeous. Also a good way to decrease 'pressure' for the players during mid-session world building is to utilise rolling tables/softly randomised assets like the backgrounds personality traits. Like rolling a 1d8 for the terrain/locale of their hometown, is it a swamp? desert? forest? Player can't decide? then roll for it. This could allow players who actually want to customise to have a good reference, while also speed things up a lot when you call someone who is less comfortable on the spot to decide something.

[CrimsonTemplar]

It’s great fun (as a DM) to watch your players perk up when you use something they made in the adventure - sometimes it’s excitement, sometimes it’s dread, but it’s always personal for their character.

[jumbobrian]

The most fun I ever had collaborative world building was actually in a subreddit of all places... Long story short someone set up a Civ 5 game with 60 CPU countries, and everyone had loads of fun filling in the lore of their adopted country. There were newspapers covering the "real life" events from the game, weekly updates on the state of the world war, even a Model UN with elected representatives (ok some of the elections may have been self-appointments)

It was fun to see how well everyone worked together considering we were all strangers and there were basically no rules. The world was big enough and everyone's narrative interests so niche that there wasn't much stepping on toes, and the stakes were low to nonexistent anyway

[elliedereyna]

I once spent days designing my character's home city for my DM and when we finally went there it was amazing to be able to lead the others around and introduce them to the place if my character's childhood

[gagglegames]

I often feel bad since my DM has put so much effort in their world, but my memory of all the names and places quickly fizzles away particularly when things get hectic, and I'm left with a string of notes full of names I barely recognise. Really sucks because the campaign is so much fun to delve into, and I worry my participation is annoying when I'm stumbling over what are pretty basic details.

[vryafoat]

Strongly recommend this. Currently in the cyberpunk setting I'm running, I have my players doing a combat encounter where they designed the house they live in and the things in and around it. So when bad guys raided them they got to use all the things they put into their house in combat.
So far they've shot a guy mid jump while bouncing off a trampoline, used pool floats to traverse the pool quicker, and unleashed their coop of mutant chickens on the raiders.