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Motivating Players

The Journey of a New DungeonMaster

By Merle GrootenboerPublished 7 years ago 3 min read
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Part of 9bit's edited charactersheet. All credits go to 9bit on enworld.org

The campaign is getting slowly into shape, but I still don't have the details of my players. I have no idea what kind of character they're gonna play, except for one guy, he's amazing and he's going to play a female halfling, a cleric. I even got her background story already.

Part of why my players haven't provided me with details is my own fault. I am not stimulating them enough, I don't ask every day if they have any idea what they want to do with their characters. I only ask them about it once or twice a week. Maybe I should ask them more often... But I don't want to become that naggy Dungeon Master, you know.

One of my players, my boyfriend, has pulled an annoying excuse as for why he hasn't started yet. He knows the race he wants to play, but doesn't have a name yet, or a class. The excuse he pulled was he wanted to wait until I come to his place. For now, it's quite a long distance between him and me, but when I'm at his place, he's still not motivated to do anything. So next Thursday, I'm going to nag about it all day.

Oh wait, I didn't want to be that naggy DM.

Okay, so, I won't nag, but I'm just going to sit him down to make his character with him. I cannot continue without the characters.

I could, but I can't or won't do it, since this is the first campaign I'm writing and the first one I will be the dungeon master of. If it turns out it's great, I'm going to write more campaigns for them, if it turns out to be bad, I'm going to see how I can improve.

But, back to the matter at hand. I have to motivate my players. I have no idea how I should do this. I have no idea how I got motivated by my own Dungeon Master when I was a player. I just knew I wanted to play a tabletop again and had no problem with sitting down to make a character and put in some work to make my character believable. She had quirks and flaws, but also good qualities. She wasn't overpowered, since that's quite impossible for a level 1 character, but she was fun to play because I wanted to play.

I didn't know anything about the campaign yet at that point, and somehow I feel like I can only motivate my players to start working on their characters if I tell them a bit about my ideas.

Maybe I'll just ask my Dungeon Master how he got us so motivated to make our characters, maybe he knows the answer.

Or maybe he doesn't, we'll find out soon enough, I think. I can ask him any time, but I might not get an immediate answer.

I can also just ask my players, what can I do to motivate you more? Since I do need their characters to have a bit of an idea how to keep the campaign rolling.

I know those campaigns you can buy online and in your local game stores (although these aren't local for me) have been written with certain players in mind, probably, but they managed to make it work for people they don't even know.

I can't do that yet. I desperately want to, but I get inspiration from motivated people and doing stuff. That's why, in my previous post, I started to work with Roll20 without having a clear idea what the first adventure would be like. But I can't even implement everything right now, since I also have to know the tokens I can use for my players' characters. Again, only the halfling cleric is there, and I don't even know where to place her yet. But that'll be alright once we're actually getting started.

I'll let you know how I managed to motivate my players in my next post!

Keep rolling!

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