This short article is part of my series, ‘3 Tips in Under 3 Minutes’, where I provide quick, actionable tips you can use in your D&D game that take three minutes or less to read.
The topic for this article is for DMs, and it’s three quick ways to impress your players.
#1: Bring handouts. One is to bring a drawing of a monster they’ve never seen before. The age-old advice is to describe a monster to players rather than just say, “You see a carrion crawler.” This works best when they’ve never encountered that monster before. If you go with theater-of-the mind, just use a verbal description. But, if you can swing it, hand them a cool drawing and say, “You see one of THESE step around the corner and it looks really hungry…”
Another hand-out I have used in several of my campaigns are menus for the inn where the party is staying. I list foods and their prices. You can download the breakfast menu and the lunch/dinner menu as free PDFs here:
#2: Give your NPCs odd and hopefully memorable quirks. One I like to use is an irrational yet harmless fear, such as a shopkeeper who is afraid of feathers, thinking the bird they came from will seek revenge, hunt him down, and attack him in his sleep.
#3: Tap into real locations or people the players know. I’ve used town designs that are based on the same layout of a real town the players are from, then as the town gets explored and they see the map take shape, there’s a moment where they start to think, “This seems familiar.” It takes more than that, though. You can imply that the town they’re in is a parallel universe from the one they’re used to in real life. They’ll start making choices about where to go next based on that assumption.
