The Dos and Don'ts of the Early Campaign
There’s one mistake I’ve made over and over as a DM, and every time, it has sucked the life out of my campaigns. The worst part? I didn’t even realize I was doing it. But fixing it? That took just one simple change. Today, I’m sharing that tip with you—along with 12 others—to make sure your early campaign isn’t just fun but keeps your players hooked all the way to the endgame.IntroWelcome back to How to Be a Better DM, the show that helps you craft unforgettable D&D sessions. I’m Justin Lewis, and for over three years, my cohosts and I have explored every dungeon master challenge under the sun. Today, we’re tackling a crucial question: How do you make your campaign’s opening strong enough to keep players coming back for more? Whether you’re a new DM or a veteran, these 13 tips will help you sidestep common pitfalls and build a campaign that players can’t wait to continue.The first few sessions of your campaign determine whether your players stay invested—or quietly start looking for another game. If you get this wrong, you might find yourself scrambling to keep their attention, dealing with last-minute cancellations, or, worst of all, facing a total campaign collapse. But if you get it right? Your players will be hooked, excited, and fully immersed in your world. Let’s make sure that happens.Starting their first campaign is exciting yet nerve-racking for many people. You want to make sure you’ve gotten it all right! Most often, though, we feel we are falling short of where we want to be. That’s all right, though. Almost nothing is more instructive than doing things wrong and learning from them.Your campaign's early stages can be a pivotal period for your party and yourself as a DM. Everyone is still learning how to play together and the early stages of any campaign are when it is most fragile. It’s not that difficult to stop playing because the emotional investment hasn’t yet been made.So to help you safeguard your early campaign and help you overcome the fragility, here is a simple list of Do’s and Don’ts for your early campaign.And there’s one tip near the end of this list that completely transformed my campaigns. It’s something I overlooked for years, but once I figured it out, my players became way more engaged. I’ll share that one toward the end—so stick with me.Before I get deeper into this particular rabbit hole, let me just say that every DM has their own way of doing things—these are just my lessons. Take what works for you and leave the rest.Ok here are my do’s and don’ts for the Early Campaign.Do Plan out the Story ArcsBecause the early campaign is so fragile, one way to strengthen it is by planning out your story arcs. That’s why you should apply the CASE method. For those of you that don’t know that that is, check out episode 157, but in brief, the CASE method stands for Campaign, Story Arc, Session, Encounter.You use the case method to plan each portion of a campaign by building that portion with its smaller constituent parts, encounters build sessions, sessions build story arcs and story arcs build campaigns.Have you ever felt lost 2 sessions into your campaign? That’s why the CASE Method exists.In this case, that means that you storyboard and timeline the general story arcs you think are going to happen. You want to do this so that at the very minimum, you have a general idea of the flow of the campaign. Your Story Arc plan is not going to be what happens. Player choice and the natural flow of the game is going to dictate which story arcs get played and which simply fade into irrelevance. It’s important to have a general idea of the direction of the campaign so that you can tease certain things that are coming down the pipe (more on that when we get to number 13).For example in one of
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