“Sweet Yalme, another pint The Crab is quite alive tonight And allow me to recite the tale Of how your host, the gleeman Rascal Caught the mighty whale” Rascal the Gleeman, aka Rasgueado Vilhuela, aka John Henry Hastings, aka DM Chris Greetings, 3WD-verse. DM Chris here! The Bard class in D&D is a fickle thing. Much like being an actual musician, teasing the right notes out of your wandering minstrel can be challenging. As a guitarist myself, I’d often admired the cool eccentricities of the Bard from a distance, but when DM Dave first mentioned the Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen ..read more

The tavern. It’s the start of 23 different campaigns that DM Tony has been in over the last three decades. It’s a fantasy adventure trope and gets a lot of hate out there for being basic and unimaginative, but is that necessarily a bad thing? In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave return to our RPG Mythbusters series and test the myth, “Is a tavern the best place to start an adventure?” Will it be confirmed, plausible, or busted? If the podcast player below fails to load, click here to listen to the audio. 0:49 The return of RPG Mythbusters, all the way back to Episodes 39 and 42. 1:56 Everyo ..read more

With our recent Forged in Fire article series, DM Chris realized how many Conditions that monsters have resistance and immunity to, especially in 5e. With that, we began to discuss how much (or little) we play with Conditions in our home games, and how that might be limiting what we can do to craft engaging, thrilling, and challenging encounters. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave delve into the Conditions mechanic (both in and out of 5e), the issues we have with some of them, what ones we find to be somewhat limp, and the ones we would love to use more. We also delve into what we have fou ..read more

In a recent episode, we discussed a listener question about homebrewing magic items that are based off our favorite books, movies, myths, and television series. This is something that every DM and GM is going to do… heck, it might even be the reason you got behind the screen in the first place! We’ve done this in our own games, and wrote a recent article detailing our Top 3 items: He-Man’s Sword of Power, Zeus’ Thunderbolt, and DM Chris’ birthday present to DM Tony… a Demonic Bob Ross?!? With the response we received from the article and episode, we felt like we shouldn’t stop there… so h ..read more

ATTENTION! FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE! 3 WISE DMS HAVE INVADED YOUTUBE! That’s right, 3WD listeners… we’ve packed our Explorer’s Packs, donned our Breastplates and Shields (so as not to gain Disadvantage on Stealth checks!), sharpened our weapons and entered the “Dungeon of YouTube!” In an effort to increase our ever-growing community here and invite new listeners (and viewers!) to experience our unique, conversational brand of DM advice, we have begun uploading our episodes from our return this past March with Back in Black: The Players Wrap-Up to the Absolutely Epic Curse of Strahd Finale with Va ..read more

One of the beauties of TTRPGs is the ability to not just watch or read an amazing story, but to experience it… to create it. The mystery, the action, the climactic battle between good and evil; D&D gives us the ability to create our favorite stories. One of the most important aspects of that, as the DM, is creating a level of mystery to the story that the players get the chance to uncover as they delve deeper into the adventure. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss a listener question about their mystery that they’re planning on having last for 10 levels and ask, “am I being crue ..read more

In our recent episode, we discussed a listener question about homebrewing magic items that are based off our favorite books, movies, myths, and television series. Specifically, they were hoping to translate the legendary Shardblades from Brandon Sanderson’s epic series, The Stormlight Archives. We discussed several of our own homebrew items that we’ve instituted in our home games over the years and we thought it might be fun (and hopefully helpful) if we shared our top 3 homebrews: what they were based on, why we wanted them, how we translated them into our campaign worlds, and the stats we us ..read more

Homebrewing has been part of the game since its inception. Hell, the game itself is a homebrew of wargames! We’ve discussed homebrewing in previous episodes and articles, but a listener asks the question about how to homebrew magic items and monsters from well-known pop culture sources (like Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere Universe.) In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss their top nine tips to pulling in objects and ideas from existing beloved pop culture properties and making them have the same level of gravitas as the book, series, or movie that they come from. If the podcast player bel ..read more

Greetings gamers from all systems, places and timelines!  Spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 and Avengers: Endgame, in case you were living somewhere without access to the internet. Recently, I completed Cyberpunk 2077 on the PlayStation. While the game was enjoyable, I found it disappointing that the main character dies at the end – and not because there was an option to do something which was both awesome and reckless that shut down the antagonists forever. Nope, this was something that was just inescapable, as well as ironic . Early on in the game, it’s revealed that the main character is dyi ..read more

Birthday games. Several of our recent articles and episodes discuss our passion for running birthday games for our game group, whether it be D&D, the OSR, Avatar Legends, or the classic Marvel Super Heroes system; it’s become our thing. In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave discuss the recent Birthday Game they ran where The Doctor teamed up with the Sensational She-Hulk and members of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four to stop the impending Cyberman invasion orchestrated by the wielder of the Cosmic Control Rod, Annihilus, and do battle against the Brood in a giant Space Whale (believe ..read more