I’ve mentioned before that my approach emphasizes storytelling. We’ve talked about one of the major components of the story: the villain. Now I’d like to dive into the next major element of our story, the player characters. Here we have a complication in terms of traditional storytelling. 

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For my campaign, I wanted to make a villain that the players really wanted to destroy. Yet I wanted him to have qualities that the players could sympathize with at the same time. Not that I was expecting them to have a moral or ideological conflict as they pursued the villain, but I wanted them to at least intuitively understand how and why the bad guy came to be bad. I also wanted him to be the kind of villain where it would be entirely unthinkable to support his cause.

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My last major D&D project was a campaign that spanned about three years. I was fortunate to have a stable group of core players who were exploring a persistent and evolving world. Thinking about it now, I don’t think I anticipated that the story would last for so long. But looking back, I can see some of the things that made it all work.

Because of that experience, I find that when I sit down in the DM’s chair, my goal is to tell a story. It doesn’t matter if it’s for that years long campaign, or a single stand alone quest. I want to tell the story of someone or some group of people in a way where the players feel like they’re intervening into those individuals’ plight. And had they not appeared when they did, they might have heard the town crier report a bleaker story the next day in the town square. It’s a goal that sounds more ambitious than it actually is.

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