Implicit Story Telling, and how to do it | D&D 5E

Struggling with exposition, lore dumps or players not caring about your world backstory? Here's one thing I do in my games to help tell the story of my world without beating my PCs over the head with it!

The main tip is to make a part of the game that they care about tie into your world in some way. Some PCs like combat, others like exploration, some like haggling with merchants, and some insist on crafting things. Let's combine combat and crafting to tell our story, without explicitly telling our story.

What if you had a world where the races of the world are different. That is going to be the same as all other D&D worlds, but what if it was something specific that sets them apart. Taking the two typical fantasy whipping boys, dwarfs (yes, this is the correct plural of dwarf) and elves, let's take their two crafting styles and make them unique.

What I do is picture how dwarfs would craft something. Dwarfs, in my mind, a strong, stout and sturdy. They pride themselves on being strong, able to defeat enemies much larger than they are, so how are they going to do that? What if the weapons and armor they made are more dense? Weapons are more dense, so they deal +1 additional damage (not to-hit) and are non-magical. This gives players a reason as well to craft their gear and associate themselves with the world instead of just using standard magic items they find, because they can craft amazing things on top of something that already does more damage.

To contrast this, what would the elves make? Elves are quick, graceful and fight with flair. They cannot do this with heavy weapons, so let's make their weapons lighter by contrast. In game mechanic terms, we can give them +1 to hit (not damage) and are non-magical to contrast against the dwarfs and what they make.

We can do this same technique contrasting any two races and give them reasons to do so. You can have one race craft weapons that crit for more damage, adding an additional die, contrasting them against another race that crafts weapons that are easier to crit with, increasing your crit "range" by 1. There are an endless amount of ways this can be done. Experiment with your world, and see what your players like and what they interact with.

Video Title: Implicit Story Telling, and how to do it | D&D 5E

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