Dungeon Masters, the campaign you run is not your story, it is the party’s. There is no faster way to lose your players’ interest than to make them feel like their actions can’t shape the story and world around them. I’m the Storytelling Sage at Everhearth Inn here to help you tell better stories with your party.
If you’d rather watch this content than read it, check out the video at the bottom of the article.
A common pitfall for new DMs to fall in is to dream up some fun story for the party to go through. This is well and good but that often translates to telling the story to the party instead of with them. If you prepare an exact sequence of events for the party to follow, with all other routes being heavily discouraged or nonexistent (because you didn’t prepare for it), then your players are no longer players and are now observers, and will likely not care what happens.
Instead, focus on creating a world with interesting people and things that all have their own motivations. What does Person A have, want, and how desperate are they. These can be magical powers, key allies, a grudge, anything. Create this world and imagine what would happen after one slice of time, say 1-6 months. Who makes what moves, acquires what things, gets what done. Often, there will be an interesting conflict generated immediately. The forces of X attack the Kingdom of Y and steals this magical artifact they wanted.
During this slice of time is the short term backstory for the party. What they have been doing in the time in that first slice is what will buy their character in. The ranger while out hunting witnessed an army of the Nation of X heading towards the Kingdom of Y. Boom, they know that something is going down and their character has a reason to be interested.
In session 0, tell them this world is theirs to live in, and the events before them are entirely of their own accord. The story gets written at the table during the session. You can introduce hooks to suck them into a quest or conflict, but it should always be an option to do something else. Your players will feel involved, excited, and eager to see what they can do, and you’ll thank me later.
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