Use Mothership to Become a Better Dungeon Master

Man, looking for Mothership reviews I stumbled with yours.

Definetily good content but yours was waaay more carismatic.

As I am not a native speaker I will be hearing your at least 2 or 3 times.
Greesting from Peru

This Warden Manual has made me raise my expectations of the 2024 Dungeon Master Guide. If a small company like Tuesday Night Games can do this in so little spcae, WotC should be able to make an awesome DMG. Ball is in your court WotC.

I will try and run Mothership games. 1.5 year Curse of Strahd burned me out on DMing 5e for now.

Great video! Only critique is the background music is a bit too loud for my liking. It distract from your voice, and what you say is worth focusing on. :)

I love your enthusiasm and the DIY ethos! I love stealing things from games and seeing what works. Mothership is great, can't wait to play more of it. :)

Terrific content. That music is a pain in the hoop though.

Hm, well here's a channel in need of more subs, [click].

My game group just finished a 3 year d&d campaign, and honestly the first one in my 23 years of playing it where a campaign actually "ended" - where it could just stop there or potentially pick up again far in the future where our characters will level up a bunch and we can flesh them out more without grinding and experiment with higher level stuff. It was magnificent, but also ended with the DM saying he needed a break. I've DM'd my own completely homebrew campaign and world that I loved building but that was years ago and I simply don't have the time to do something that massive again which led me to Mothership in the search of a new game that's lighter, easier to pick up, more module based, and with lots of engaging pre-written adventures to reduce the prep/psychic load. I've also run the game Dread a few times and I feel like I just love horror RPG games.

Your videos on Mothership are terrific. You're really passionate and both the game and you have really digestible advice. I can't wait to play it with all my friends.

This was a great video! I was wondering what music was playing throughout it, I liked it.

I found the music too loud. I had to stop the video.

ok you've sold me on this. heading to my flgs to nab this, just to help ease my journey as an everlasting newbie dm. thanks. so helpful.

I love Mothership! I've been playing since 0e. I am having a hard time going back to D&D. So much so that I'm running Cloud Empress, which runs off of Mothership's Panic System, to feed the D&D "itch"

Great Video! More Mothership content please!

I like what you're expressing but the music is sometimes at the same level of your voice and it doesn't help to process the info. My brain is stuck on trying to differentiate the two sounds…
And I'd love a video / tutorial about those Mothership rules, as a newbie. How to play encounters / combat… Even better some step to step best-first-adventure as a Warden :) Cause I don't know how to start.

Really interesting video, and made me remember I backed Mothership on kickstarter and had the deluxe box in a closet and hadn't gotten around to checking it out yet. It has now broken free from its prison and I'm making plans to make use of it, so thanks for the reminder!

Also your dog is freaking adorable.

Coming from Burning Wheel, off the back of Role master, Space master, Call of Cthulhu and Second D&D (yes I am that old) and having just run my first session of Mothership, I have to say I am impressed with the ease with which my players could create a couple of characters and get straight into the action. Don't get me wrong, Burning Wheel is a great game, but my goodness, character creation is a commitment, as is Role master to be fair. Thank goodness for the automated programs people have written. Don't need that with Mothership, character creation is super easy, barely an inconvenience. The one thing Burning Wheel really trained me to do was to make roles count, because of the way they are tied into the belief system. So for Mothership, it was easy to adapt that style, I told my players, your characters are super competent at their jobs, you'll only have to pick up your dice when the outcome is in doubt, and it really matters. On that basis, we managed to chew our way through a decent portion of the first act and get into the second, more ominous stage of the adventure at the first sitting. I think the dice were rolled five times in all. Otherwise, I just kept them in the "describe", "question", "answer", "act", "mostly agree to whatever reasonable action without the need to roll dice", and repeat. I try to treat "failure" more in terms of "non-optimal success". Eg. Yes you can fire at the monster in this confined space, undoubtedly, but if you fail there is a chance, say 50/50, that ricocheting projectiles from your weapon will hit one of the players at half damage - yes you are included in the term "one of the players". Still want to let rip? Or are you suddenly feeling less lucky? Yes, it is statistically possible you might kill yourself, it is also entirely possible the monster might save you the trouble. Then I would remind them to look at the situation and consider if there was anything that could be argued to their advantage. Which is similar to Burning Wheel in that you can argue to improve your chances of success for circumstantial advantage and help. Which I think is a good system in itself to keep the players engaged with the environment.

ICRPG is also great at providing tools to use with any TTRPG.

The fact I didnt notice the chihuahua for the first 9 minutes of the video was a little humbling 😅 But i think it speaks to your ability to capture the attention of an audience! Thanks for an informative video, gonna pick up my own WOM when I can!

To be honest, Call of Cthulhu could have done this even better before Mothership. Great scenario writing and great game system that can teach the GMs to be humble and more active and less dependent on the book and the rules.

Yoo this is a super eloquent version of the rant i sent all my friends after i ran my first mothership game. Nice video.

This is awesome. Thank you for sharing this knowledge.

Is Mothership only for horror or can I use it for classic LOTR style fantasy adventure?

Mothership was just a breath of fresh air after being in D&D for so many years. I was super impressed when I picked it up on a whim. Both for DM(or warden) and players, the game gives you so many good tips and advice on how to run/play a game that everyone can digest easily. Not only that, the GAME is super good. Our group keeps wanting to just play more Mothership instead of the next meeting at the tavern lol

Overjoyed to be subscriber 999 for you.
Upended horror for me and a system that I'm definitely going to get into and run as many versions of The Thing as I can 🤣

That inro and the background music made this feel SO COOL. I bookmarked this video so I could rewatch it and am glad I did.

Yuuusssss! More Mothership Please!!

I am liking and commenting for people like me.

What happens when you fail a check or roll low?
You lose time.
Time is a constant that is overlooked a lot. In D&D, missing means you lost a segment of time or things take longer. If there's no reason to worry about time, then there's no consequence.
So, make time valuable. Putting effort into this task means taking away time from something else and failure means a further loss of time.

Investigation checks
I always say that the most skilled character should always succeed at their one thing. Which, like the above, means players will try and put that character in the right place at the right time. They save time by being in that position. Characters with good investigation skills know what to look for, they identify what may be useful or not. They'll notice some little detail that is a big deal like the random scribbles on a piece of paper in a pile of papers. This will make players be excited to have their character shine. When you make a player roll on a skill that their character is supposed to be good at for the team, and they fail, it sucks. For everyone. No one is having fun in that moment. No one is excited about it. It's deflating. That character should either succeed right away, or save time doing that thing.

My only issue with using these tips to make D&D better is - if you change all the core rules of D&D, you're just playing some other game - so play some other game.

Slightly triggered by dog-eared pages... until I realized the cute dog did it. 🤓

Must know the name of the fur baby!

Content good, audio bad.

5e sucks

I am a DM for 25 years now. And I can say, in all the time, I've never seen a better guide to running a game, than the Motherships Warden Manual. I wish I had it back in the day, when I was learning by doing. I think I got very good at it, but beware kids! Being a good DM means, you will be the DM for almost all pen and paper games you join...
You can only lead other to the treasure you can never possess...

There are some pretty cool RPGS out there that Im just learning about now. I have ordered Heart and really want to get Daggers in the Dark as well. But this sounds like a pretty awesome game as well.

Great review of Mothership. Enjoyed the background music. Any chance you'd be willing to share your source?

How to fix 5e? Just play SWADE

I'm on the hook as DM for the next campaign as we start to close up the final chapter of the game we're playing. This has really helped me get into the right headspace for not just designing a cool world but actual good gameplay to run IN that world

Such a good dig into this book. Thanks so much.

Love your videos! <3
Can you please use a sidechain ducking gate on the music with your voice though?
I like the music, but I can't hear what you are saying when the music is in the way.

Wow!! Thank you!

Hey! My hometown Pacifica Taco Bell shirt, nice! Thanks for the video!

I see a video every week or two on how to 'fix' DnD, particularly 5e. Here's a novel idea, quit playing a terrible system.

I'd love to hear more about your Mothership experience. My game-master ran it (without me ☹) and said he could figure out how to run it as a campaign; it was too deadly. Thoughts?

Gods, I've performed all these GM SNAFUs so, so many times. This video was a splash of cold water in my face! 🤦‍♂

I DM-ed DnD for lets say 5-6 years continuously for my close friends and wife, we had a blast going through several campaigns. We have stopped only because we got way too busy for the moment but we are looking to continue at some point within the next year. During my time off as a DM I started listening to podcasts of various other systems both fantasy and sci-fi and man oh man I had so so so so many times the sentence appearing in my head "This is done waaaaay better then DnD". I realized that its better to play with a system that is created specifically for a theme/setting and it uses mechanics geared towards the specific setting. This way the players can actually feel that they are playing in Middle Earth ( The One ring RPG not the 5E version), in the Arthurian Legends with Pendragon, in a sci-fi setting with Mothership etc etc. I was amazed how a simple changing initiative every turn made the players always be on their toes and not being "Oh my turn passed, now I have to wait for 5-6 minutes before my go etc" or having different armor class on different part of your body in Runequest really made the players pay more attention and be involved in combat. There are many many more examples like these. All of this made me realize that actually DnD is pretty generic and not catching the imagination of players and has lots of problems that are not being addressed properly and most of the time can easily be fixed. Frankly I am no longer interested in playing DnD or if I will I will heavily modify the rules with home made rules based on great rules of other systems or instead just play Mothership, Alien RPG, The One Ring RPG, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, Blades in the Dark, Dune RPG, hell I will learn Vampire and run a small campaign :). I also backed the Diskworld RPG so more things to come. If anyone has reached this sentence and by any chance is a DnD DM - my advice to you is don't wait for years like me to check and run other systems. You and your friends can only benefit from exploring different systems even though a simple one shot ( most definitely there will be complains regarding - oh I don't know the system, why you make me create a character without the help of DnD Beyond, OMG...etc but you can overcome the complaining and have a great time).

There's more useful, actionable, directly gameable material in the 50 or so pages of the Warden's Operation Manual than you'll find in any official brand DMG you can buy from WotC.

Your music is overpowering your voice.

This was really great!

great discussion of warden principles applied generally🎉

Dang what a good video. But dang dude saying how you know that im good and smart. You earned my subscribe

love the arpeggiator running through out, did you make the music yourself? it's lovely