How do you bring your campaign world to life? It’s a question lots of DMs and GMs ask from a lot of different angles. We’re all looking for ways to make sure our players have fun, but also have new experiences in the game that make it feel more like characters living out a story and less like tabletop Diablo.

Some of our best questions come from our listeners. That is once again the case this week as Thorin, Tony and Dave dig into three messages asking about different ways to make your RPG world a bit less hack-n-slash and a bit more immersive with interesting puzzles, rituals, and weather mechanics.

2:00 Listener question 1: Puzzles — the good, the bad, the ugly … and how we blew up Esmerelda’s wagon in Barovia

4:00 Puzzles and riddles: What we try to do, not to do, and how we involve the whole party

10:00 The puzzles the party ignored in Curse of Strahd’s Wizard Tower

12:00 The pros and cons of riddles

14:00 Should puzzles use character skills/talents or force players to rely on their personal knowledge?

20:00 How we design puzzles: If it’s difficult for you to explain, it’s probably too difficult for your players to solve

22:00 Puzzle ideas from Indiana Jones, The Fifth Element and The Lord of the Rings

26:00 The encounter mix: Where and when we use traps and puzzles

29:00 Listener question 2: Making rituals more immersive with tasks and skill challenges

39:00 If you made the players jump through a lot of hoops to do a ritual, don’t let bad rolls ruin it

42:00 It’s no fun to die (or have the story turn bad) due to bad luck

47:00 Listener question 3: How do you make weather a more impactful element in the game?

53:00 Ways we’ve used weather in different campaign settings, including Storm King’s Thunder, Curse of Strahd and Rime of the Frost Maiden

56:00 How much game time do you want to spend (waste?) dealing with the weather?

61:00 Final thoughts