Summary

  • I think I only love D&D when it's my adventure.
  • With Baldur's Gate 3 behind me, I can write these adventures better.
  • Now the trick is convincing people to play D&D with me forever.

I've learned far more about Dungeons & Dragons in my year DMing games than I did in my previous three as a player. Though I took it seriously enough to not be a nuisance, when playing I mainly just showed up, played a version of myself rather than any particularly crafted character, and relied on the DM to know what rolls I needed to make, what attacks I could do, and how to get me out of any scrapes I found myself in. Now, I'm finding my understanding of D&D, and particularly the world of DMing, has been supercharged by Baldur's Gate 3.

I started my DM journey by writing a small adventure and creating some characters for it, plus a single map. I wasn't sure if I was even going to show it to anyone, but eventually played a few sessions with staff at TheGamer. This motivated me to write a full scale, eleven-level epic, and I haven't looked back since. We didn't even finish this first adventure - playing it I found its premise lousier than when it was sketched out - but it was enough to give me the bug.

The Fun Of A DM Is Writing New Adventures

Via: Dungeon Masters Guild

Fast forward a year, and the gang at TheGamer are nine chapters (around 20 four-hour sessions) into this adventure, the exciting conclusion twinkling on the horizon. While playing out this adventure, I started writing another. It's not a sequel - no characters, locations, or MacGuffins reappear - but it is an adventure in the same vein, following the same loose pattern. It's the Dragon Age: Inquisition to our current Dragon Age 2. Basically the same, but a little more polished.

Since I wrote it while playing through the early stages of the initial adventure, I didn't so much learn from my players' experience as I did from my own thoughts writing it, adding more of the scenes I particularly enjoyed, expanding on the scope with a bit of groundwork laid, and improving areas I thought were sloppy but perfunctory in the first. If you've read my article on fixing my BBEG problem, you'll have already heard that, but stay with me.

My third adventure doesn't follow the same 'inciting incident, chase lead, fight BBEG' path, which you'll also have heard if you read my BBEG, but instead features multiple smaller BBEGs that can be interacted with in a freeform order as part of a larger plot, which again, the BBEG piece. But as I'm sitting down to write the story inside this idea, and build up these much bigger, more interactive cities, I'm not just basing it on my own or my player's experience - I'm basing it on Baldur's Gate 3.

One of the key narrative elements of Baldur's Gate 3 is how stationary it is. You only have three major locations across the entire 150 hours of gameplay, split into the three different acts. In Act 1, it's a classic fantasy grasslands setting with some camps and a few hidden secrets. In Act 2, environmental hazards come into play, and exploration is more dangerous but sees you rewarded with more unique encounters, while you also take on a deep (narratively and geologically) dungeon. Act 3, you finally arrive in Baldur's Gate 3, and the city is your oyster.

Baldur's Gate Lets Players Discover Things On Their Own

There are a few plot threads in each area, but these are often advanced by accident as you wander into a new setting only to discover a new twist in the tale lurks within. It encourages you to seek out each corner of the map where fresh stories hide under each rock, waiting to be overturned. In my first two adventures, I designed towns with very clear 'go here for plot' locations, then a handful of other 'these places are labelled, they have side quests' buildings. Baldur's Gate 3 is helping me think of cities not as hubs for a hundred little stories, but as a story in itself, which you change the course of with each choice you make - even if you do not realise you are making it.

Rather than planning out this third adventure like a book, with each encounter meticulously written and the story waiting to be lit by the fuse of interaction, I'm thinking of it more like a game. It's odd that it needed Baldur's Gate 3 for me to think that way, when Dungeons & Dragons is itself a game, but actually, most components of D&D are books. If you want to run an adventure but don't want to write it, you can buy any number of books and, like my own adventures, the plot is written out in linear format, and often contains even more precise planning like specific scripted dialogue.

It's through playing Baldur's Gate 3, or more specifically hearing the million different ways other people have played it, that my thinking as a DM has moved from telling a story to building a world. My next adventure will have fewer settings, but far larger, and with a range of different activities that won't reveal their size or import until they're in motion, while the plot will hide in fresh corners of the map and may spring out unexpectedly. If my first two adventures are Dragon Age 2 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, then this third one is Baldur's Gate 3. Also the same, but like, a better version of the same.

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Baldur's Gate 3

RPG Systems 5.0/5 26 9.4/10 OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 96/100 Critics Rec: 98% Released August 3, 2023 ESRB M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence Developer(s) Larian Studios Publisher(s) Larian Studios Engine Divinity 4.0
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Baldur's Gate 3 is the long-awaited next chapter in the Dungeons & Dragons-based series of RPGs. Developed by Divinity creator Larian Studios, it puts you in the middle of a mind flayer invasion of Faerûn, over a century after the events of its predecessor.

Platform(s) PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC, macOS Powered by Expand Collapse