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View Full Version : D&D Brainstorm--Ideas that make a session great(3.5/Any)



Protecar
2010-06-22, 11:26 PM
So I'm a fairly new DM. And in our last session we had some laughs, some good times, and everyone seemed to enjoy it more or less--my weakness came where I didn't expect though(two fold):

The combat was too stale--big, foreboding tower...with nothing but some stair traps and undead in plain rooms. Yawn.
Two--new player to my scene was detect thoughts/detect magic'ing everything and revealed that I need to work on my improv skills. Consequently, to improv one must have familiarity with what is being improv'd(or so I would think).

So this thread is a brainstorm of good ideas you've had for part of your D&D sessions--from random plot twists, occurrences in the world around them, combat spicing, anything!

tl;dr: What do you do to make your D&D sessions better? I'm looking to make a list of events/anything to fire off in a session to spice it up and keep interest--especially in terms of developing plot/combat.

Allow me to start off:

1. Goblin raid--combat begins and arrows start raining from the surrounding trees. A secret assault--goblin archer ambush!

2. A dog trapped in a snare--its eyes seem strangely wise. Release it or no? (maybe someone on the wrong end of a PaO?)

3. Our intrepid adventurer's are traveling in town and one gets jostled by an elderly man--the one jostled now finds either a crucial item missing or a mysterious new item has appeared.

4. Combat begins against a fierce knight at a river's edge. When combat turns against him, he jumps onto a passing log. How are you going to stop him now?

5. Characters are in a cave and their light sources become nulled--now what? They also hear the chittering of kobolds...

6. Player finds a typical item(at first glance), gradually the item develops not so typical attributes(cursed item/blessed item/legacy-style item--maybe it's a "simple steel dagger" that you find out is adamantine and was enchanted to look plain. When that's thrown you for a loop, the character wielding it starts hearing the dagger talk to him in his dreams[intelligent item with ego score])


This is just the beginning of course, but I would like to make this as expansive as possible. Anyone else want to toss some ideas into the melting pot? :smallbiggrin: