What's a detail you've added to your own world that made it feel real? I'd love to hear from all of you!

I have learned that players are far more forgiving when stumbling upon a detail that doesn’t exist rather than a detail that steals their agency. Allowing them to be part of the builders of the world around them is so much more engaging then letting them play in a “finished” sandbox

Not a TTRPG, but I ran an OC community based off from a shared fictional world that we collectively created. After about a decade, the newcomers had to read like 50 core lore articles to even grasp what this place is, and if they were to dive any deeper, there was a literal 4-digit-long list of information to be checked (like literally, I was the one who did the counting, and it was almost 1,050 pages long).

At that point people just... stopped coming. So me and the staff members had to divide the articles into 3 layers: core lore, details, and trivia. We posted the 5 core lores on the front page, and put links that allowed anyone who got interested in certain parts of the story go for the details. Trivial articles were archived with tags to be more easily searched if anyone felt like it. It was a messy job, the older members arguing about what should be kept and what can be deleted. But once it was done, most of the members agreed that keeping the information simple is better than stuffing themselves with every detail.

One of my favorite bits of DMing advice comes from Monsterhearts - Ultimately, the PCs are stronger than any villain you introduce. Remember to treat your NPCs like stolen cars. They aren’t your property, so you don’t need to worry about losing them. Have fun with your villains, cause chaos with them, and abandon them the minute they’re played out.

Also, yes, a video on Obsidian, please! I've been using it to an extent, but I'm lazy with my notes and can't find a way to organize stuff in a manner that would help with future planning and preparation.

This guy has so much potential. In a few years, when he has millions of subs, Im gonna be a guy saying been subbed since 7k! So good, keep it up.

I might be wrong, but this feels more like a case of "present the right information" and "have a open and flexible mind" rather than "do not prepare to much world building".

If you have vast stores of lore and world knowledge to draw on it does make you more aware of the affairs of your own world. I think that as long as you are willing to work with your players rather then make them sit through a "live book" you can world build as much as you like.

That being said I can definitely see how people get overly attached to their world building projects and refuse to work with their players.

Over all it's a great video with good advice, I just feel the beginning part of the video could have been framed as "don't get to stuck in your own world building" rather then "don't world build to much"

I can't believe that wasn't a hook to a sponsor for World Anvil when you were like "I can't find the NPC - too many notes" - "use obsidian or something for free" Lol

We're 17 sessions into my campaign that takes place in one city.  Giving my characters a box to work in yields more creativity. "You are all retainer families to the emperor, tell me what your family is known for"

This is an ongoing theme with Edariad; the problem isn’t how we build the world, but how we present the world. As he says, front-loaded complexity will always turn off the players. I never present more than a few paragraphs’ view of the world from 50,000 feet up, emailed or posted on Discord before Session 0. And even that may be too much.

Rather than exposition dump, pique the players’ curiosity. In a Dwarven Imperial City, I might mention, “A sweaty, dusty dwarf runs into the middle of the market square, and a crowd forms around him. He shouts in Dwarven at the top of his lungs for a minute. The dwarven town priest gives him a wooden token that he strings with a bunch of other tokens around his neck.” I don’t just tell the players what this means. I let their characters try to find out, or ignore it, as they please.

While I agree that DMs mustn’t get too attached to the world as they made it, and it must be kept flexible, they shouldn’t make it too easy to change either. The characters shouldn’t be  the first people to think, “Couldn’t we negotiate peace between those two warring kingdoms?” If the obstacles to change in some longstanding problem weren’t seriously formidable, someone else would already have changed it.  So let them try to change the world, and let them succeed if they do well enough, but make it tough enough that by the end they know why only they could have done it.

In the simplest way, how I tend to personally write a larger factions with grand schemes and such is I write what they would have done if the party did not interfere. It lets me write a decently extensive world and faction interactions but doesnt lock me into anything. It also doesnt feel like my prep is "ruined" as it still establishes the goal and is all written to be disturbed.

I love almost everything about your content, but I have one huge request. I don't understand why nobody talks about it. Your videos are educational and pretty informative, so you structure them for better digesting. Then why not use the chapters feature? It would be so much more convenient if they were there, while their absence causes me so much frustration every time I need to rewatch a specific episode and have to click around until I find its beginning

Your videos are exceedingly useful for overly confident newer DM's such as myself. Many thanks

3:10 i think that's important, this problems surface when they can't even look up anything. One of the problems I once had when running a campaign in my setting was that a player wanted to know more, but couldn't without basically asking me tons of lore, while in a Classic FR setting he could Just open up a wiki and read about It.
Not everyone, but some players do want to have something to do in the week between sessions.
Having at least the general lore of you main reign/nations/continents/point of interest written down in a way that players can reference it's useful, and it's Just an option.
I had players think about being from a specific city and Born from parents that had relations to different nations that once waged war, a very detailed character that knew quite some things, and another that asked me: "there Is a desert, right? Do people live there? Yeah? Then I want to come from there and I'm a wanderer" and that was It.

Having some direction May limit the infinite possibilities, but do help a lot and can make for a Better experience.

Also, I get what you are saying with "let players worldbuild" and it's good, but with limits. Not everyone can do world Building, thinking about too much stuff May even become a burden and even annoying for themselves.
Having them handle small stuff it's something, having them think about Power balance stuff it's a bit too much.

Anyway, It Is a good video, nice

Your videos focus so much on connecting with your players and making them feel like a part of the world and the story, it's definitely something I want to strive towards as a beginner GM, and you keep planting useful ideas for that in my head, thank you. Also, though I love pen & paper, I'm curious to see how you use Obsidian as well.

This is some of the best DMing advice I've seen on YouTube. So much resonated with me as someone working hard on their own homebrew world right now. Honestly, this could have been split across 3 videos, there was so much good advice to absorb.

I like to think that keeping a good notes app like Obsidian, put everything in there. But your players don't need to know all of it. I do have a player that loves lore and notes so I send her all the paragraphs upon paragraphs of world knowledge that someone living in this world might know. A short paragraph for each place is enough to fill a book, even if it just is "this city is the capital, they like X city and hate Y city. They trade in logging and iron mining" per place. But most other players don't need to know all this stuff.

If I ever think there is relevant info for a given scene I just go "your character would know A, B and C about this topic". And often my players ask "Would my character know where to find X?", that often goes accompanied by an ability check with DCs based on their backstory.

If anything, it makes the "lore dump" sessions feel special, specially if it's lore about something they're already invested in. I literally had a player go to a library and just spend time researching a country. I asked if there was any particular thing he was looking for. I then gave a brief description of general history, and then gave details on just the relevant info he wanted to find.

At the end of the day, my world is a not a lego set that's glued together. It's a SANDBOX. Sure I built some sand castles, but the players have every right to build that castle higher or just destroy it. And I will happily watch them.

I presented my players with a bandit group and an abandoned mining city filled with monsters. They dispatched the monsters, defeated the bandits and instead of jailing them, they made a deal with them to populate the city and start mining operations again, as an honest group. That's awesome! I thought they might just kill the bandits. But I try to not set hard expectations. Their creativity always surprises me.

This bandit group was living in caves, so they had magical bucket toilets that spirit away your excrement to "a harmless demiplane". I just created it as a cool magical solution for a place without toilets. One of my player's first response was "so there is just a demiplane full of poop?" and started using the bucket to threaten enemies lol
"give us the info or I'll send you to the poop dimension!"

Lately I have asked "how would you like your character to have lived?" Then when they present me their ideas I go "oh, then you might like this place" and then explain how it goes there, if they like it we start asking "what does it know? What don't they know? Where in that place would have lived?" And so on

This channel is truly something special.  I almost never rewatch dnd advice videos yet here i am pretty much watching these on loop!

Terrific advice. It definitely takes a shift in mental perspective on the part of a DM to filter infoglut and only give characters these meaningful snippets that are digestible and engaging. You do a great job of explaining all this.