FRPG Tips — November 2025

Over on Bluesky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I post daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players. At the end of each month, you get the full collection of that month’s tips right here for your reading pleasure. And please feel free to follow me at either of the above locations to get new tips every day, fresh out of the idea forge.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Roll damage for an area effect as soon as you announce it, even if that’s before you’ve decided on location and targets. That way, you can total the damage up even while saving throws are being made to keep things moving.

FRPG GM Tip: Ask players to give you as much of a heads-up as possible when they need to miss a session. With advance notice, it’s often possible to tune the narrative and make sure a missing character has the least possible impact — or can even be sidelined for in-game reasons.

FRPG Player Tip: When you start out, you’ll need to ask for reminders of how certain rules in your game work, and players who’ve been at it for a while will help you. When you’ve playing for a while, new players will need reminders and you’ll help them. RPGs are so often about paying favors forward.

FRPG GM Tip: The best part about a big site-based adventure is watching its complex layout unfold. The worst part is having to constantly backtrack through that layout. Set up convenient portals or safe routes so characters can retrace their steps narratively or leave a location without a fight.

FRPG Player Tip: Give your character a theme song — or a whole suite of theme songs. You don’t have to play it for anyone else, or even share that information. But just like with backstory details, that level of personal interaction with a character can help bring them to life in a profound way.

FRPG GM Tip: When choosing foes to build an encounter, make sure to not accidentally end up with everyone imposing similar conditions or effects. When a couple of creatures can limit the heroes’ movement, it’s a threat. When all the creatures can, it’s a slog.

FRPG Player Tip: From useful terrain features to the potential for other creatures to shake up roleplaying, the GM probably hasn’t thought about lots of potential benefits that might play out in an encounter. But most GMs are quick to grant benefits to players who ask about them, so always ask.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Even if you’re not playing in theater-of-the-mind style, feel free to ignore fixed distances on tactical maps in favor of deciding, “Yeah, that looks about right.” As long as the characters and their enemies are playing by the same distance and area rules, it’s all good.

FRPG GM Tip: Conflict is what drives story much of the time, but conflict in a fantasy game doesn’t always have to mean combat. Conducting a strategy session in which the players and characters come up with a plan to avoid an encounter can be just as much fun as fighting.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Especially if you’re playing a game that tries to define the things characters can do by focusing first and foremost on the mechanics of action types, feel free to ignore that. Let characters and foes choose what they want to do, then figure out what action covers that. 

FRPG Player Tip: When a narrative scene is focusing on another player’s character, you can still look for opportunities to play a part. Asking the GM if there’s anything your character can do to assist the spotlight character is a great starting point.

FRPG GM Tip: Sometimes it’s fun to let the players and characters go off on a tangent where they suspect a benevolent NPC is up to no good. But sometimes you need to say, “I’m going to go meta to tell you this person is on your side.” Don’t let suspicion derail character interactions for no reason. 

FRPG Player Tip: You don’t have to keep a diary or anything, but make notes on important points of narrative development for your character as a campaign unfolds. Especially if their personal goals shift over time, the way your character grows and changes is great fuel for roleplaying.

FRPG GM Tip: Giving NPCs a humorous tone can greatly boost the players’ engagement with them. Even in a purposefully unfunny campaign built around serious themes and stories, look for opportunities to have NPCs engage in irony and slapstick from time to time to anchor their place in the story.

FRPG Player Tip: Like most fiction, campaigns are typically built around the idea of what the characters want to obtain. But some of the best roleplaying comes from thinking about the things your character has lost, and whether the things they hope to obtain will ever fill that void.

FRPG GM Tip: Whether by accident or by virtue of min-maxing, if a character is vastly overpowered in combat compared to the rest of the party, do not hesitate to have the toughest foes somehow sense that and focus on that character. Sometimes game balance is attained on a round-by-round basis.

FRPG Player Tip: When another player’s character does something you think is cool, make a note of that. Especially if you’re new to game, there’s nothing wrong with your character emulating what the other heroes are doing around them as they shape their own heroic style.

FRPG GM Tip: You don’t need unique stat blocks to play unique creatures. Just start with a stat block you like, then add one attack and one noncombat trait from two other creatures, and you’ll create a threat that’s likely never existed in the game before.

FRPG Player Tip: Never be afraid to ask out loud, “I wonder if what’s going on in the campaign is _____?” Knowing what you and your character are thinking will help the GM fine-tune the story as it unfolds — or might even inspire them to take a different approach based on your speculation.

FRPG GM Tip: Your boss villain doesn’t need to personally threaten the characters in the manner of directly attacking their loved ones. But their threat needs to feel personal. Keeping the characters’ personal goals in mind is thus usually your best guide for hitting those characters where it hurts.

FRPG GM Tip: Coming up with unique names is an endless task, but non-unique names should also be part of every fantasy culture. Have ten NPCs named your world’s equivalent of “John Smith” and dozens of hamlets called the equivalent of “Springfield” to underline that commonality.

FRPG Player Tip: It’s totally okay to enjoy maximizing your character’s mechanical benefits. But if you ever realize that that process is the only part of your character you enjoy, it might be a sign to step away from mechanics and delve into your character as a person with a story instead.

FRPG GM Tip: Even for players who love to be descriptive during a game, it’s easy to feel reluctant to offer up description from a fear of taking away from what the GM is meant to do. So make it clear when you’d love some input by asking for descriptions of tavern interiors, killing blows, and more.

FRPG Player Tip: Power gaming can be fun, but the hobby is filled with power gamers who will tell you how much more fun they started having when they focuses less on optimizing mechanics and more on optimizing story. Heed their wisdom and experience.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Whenever characters gain new benefits, features, or magic, players should feel free to talk about that and why it excites them. Sometimes that’s an out-of-game discussion, but it can also be an in-game moment of “My character dramatically reveals this new thing they can do!”

FRPG GM Tip: If you run your games on a virtual tabletop, prep way more encounter maps than you need. Being able to easily drop an easy random encounter into the narrative makes a great way to fill out a session if you’re not quite ready for where the characters want to go next.

FRPG GM Tip: Taking a stock monster and converting some of their damage to a different type is one of the fastest ways to customize foes. Skeletons with lightning swords or cultists whose fire spells deal poison instead can give an otherwise straightforward encounter a unique feel.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The right number of tests and checks to make in a game is the number that feels the most fun. If too many checks start to feel tedious, or if not enough checks makes it feel as if the characters aren’t doing anything, talk about what changes might make for a better balance.

FRPG Player Tip: If your character has a mount, a companion creature, a magical statuette that turns into a dire tiger, or what have you, personalize that pet to your heart’s desire. And don’t be afraid to talk to the GM about having story hooks revolve around a pet if that feels like fun.

Art by Dean Spencer

FRPG Tips — October 2025

Over on Bluesky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I post daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players — except for this month, because I’ve been on holiday in France! So instead of the full collection of this past month’s tips presented here for your reading pleasure, I’ve pulled together a selection of some of my own favorite tips from the first half of this year. Please feel free to check out the monthly tip archives on the blog if you’ve only started reading recently, or to follow me at either of the above locations to get new tips every day, fresh out of the idea forge.

FRPG GM Tip: Softening failures with small benefits can dramatically improve the fun of a game. The next time a character goes prone for the second time in a fight, give them a defensive edge against an area effect that mostly whooshes past over top of them.

FRPG Player Tip: Metagaming isn’t when you as a player know things your character doesn’t. Metagaming is when you try to turn that knowledge into benefits your character doesn’t deserve. The game is about pretending to be someone you’re not, so just pretend to not know what you know. It’s easy.

FRPG GM Tip: The characters’ backgrounds and backstories are often a big part of the campaign start, but can easily slip out of mind as time goes on. So make specific notes about those elements, then refer back to them regularly to let you build story that will feel personal to the characters.

FRPG GM Tip: For long narrative beats — travel scenes, describing complex dungeon locations, and so forth — give the players something to decide on so it’s not just you talking through the whole thing. “How far into the room do you advance?” “The path forks, so which way do you go?” 

FRPG Player Tip: A GM is often a much more generous source of magical loot than a video game algorithm. Use your potions and other consumables regularly rather than saving them for the best possible time, because a good GM will note you using consumables to do cool stuff and make sure you find more.

FRPG GM Tip: Some players find it hard to come up with shared-story campaign ideas on the fly, but most can easily tell you what their character got up to during the last downtime. Asking players to detail downtime narrative is a great way to work toward even greater levels of shared storytelling.

FRPG Player Tip: Always feel free to ask whether some element of an encounter can be used to your benefit — high ground, potential allies, whatever. Sometimes a GM plans such benefits and waits for players to uncover them. Sometimes they don’t plan them and are happy for you to discover them anyway.

FRPG GM Tip: A great way to get characters and players thinking is to throw a randomly generated powerful magic item into a treasure cache that no character has an obvious need for—or even the ability to use. Then see what kind of story ideas they come up with as they figure out what to do with it.

FRPG Player Tip: A lot of “old school” exploration tricks are worth picking up if you do a lot of dungeon crawling. A 10-foot pole to test floors and unknown recesses, a mirror for looking around corners, and extra rations to throw at hungry monsters have saved innumerable characters over the years.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially if you’re giving out magic items you’ve created or adapted yourself, spend as much time on an item’s description and a sense of how it feels to wield it as you do on its mechanics. Nothing makes magic feel less magical than reducing it to just modifiers and properties.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: It’s easy to lose track of time while playing, so don’t forget to move. Discuss with your group the idea of hardwiring regular 5- or 10-minute breaks into your sessions every hour or so, so everyone has a chance to stretch, snack, hydrate, unhydrate, or what have you.

FRPG Player Tip: If it’s been a while (or never) since you used a paper character sheet, try it. You can still use online tools for rules reference, but tracking a character’s foundation, advancement, and evolution in writing creates a tactile connection to that character like nothing else.

FRPG GM Tip: If players don’t want to kill every foe they come up against, fine-tune your campaign and house rules to accommodate them. Letting the characters know they can spare bandits, cultists, and other minor enemies without having them automatically come back for vengeance is a great start.

FRPG GM Tip: Between your set-piece encounters, energize mundane locations or exploration scenes with a bit of treasure, an unexpected magical effect, or a trap or hazard that’s easy to overcome. Help the players stay focused by creating an underlying sense that there are always things to discover.

FRPG Player Tip: The freedom to have your character be whoever they want to be is foundational to RPGs — but it doesn’t override the importance of the game being a group activity. If conflict and antagonism between characters threatens the group’s enjoyment, talk it through before the game suffers. 

FRPG GM Tip: Perfect encounters don’t happen by design. They happen because of all the unpredictable things that can unfold during a game. So the best way to encourage perfect encounters is for your encounters to be loose enough to absorb a maximum amount of unpredictability.

FRPG Player Tip: Don’t be afraid to make skill checks just because a particular skill isn’t your character’s forte. The one time you use healing to bring a friend back from the brink of death or spot the ambush everyone else misses will more than make up for any number of forgettable rolls.

FRPG GM Tip: Irredeemably evil NPCs can be great fun in a hack-and-slash campaign where everyone is fully on board with the idea of taking no prisoners. But if that’s not the case, NPCs who are misguided, corrupted by magic, or the dupes of evil overlords often make for a more interesting story.

FRPG GM Tip: Any spell available to the party — or to any character of the same power level if the party is short on casters — makes a perfect treasure reward. Whether a scroll, a potion, or a one-use magic item, another use of a spell the characters already have can’t possibly unbalance your game.

FRPG Player Tip: Spend some time before each session reviewing your character’s gear. Magical gear is especially important, but remembering in the moment that your character has rope, caltrops, chalk, a bell, or a hunk of strong-smelling cheese can make a difference to a scene in unexpected ways.

FRPG GM Tip: Thinking like a player is a great way to create challenging encounters as a GM. Don’t just focus on what the villains are plotting. Think ahead of time about what plans the players might hatch to counter those plots — and then expect to be surprised by the plans you didn’t expect.

FRPG GM Tip: Giving a name to a magic weapon found as treasure gives that weapon a useful degree of narrative weight in the players’ minds, even if the name is just a throwaway detail for you. Even better, doing so can inspire the players to name the weapons they commission or craft themselves.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The best number of dice to own is the number you routinely need to roll. Playing a damage-dealing caster? Have d6s and d8s on hand. Make a ton of attack rolls each turn? Have groups of d20s and damage dice. And if you ever come up short, don’t be afraid to ask to borrow.

FRPG Player Tip: Active listening might be best skill a player can bring to a game. Focusing on what the GM and all the other players are bringing to the table scene by scene is the best way to stay centered in the story — and to make sure the GM and other players are listening to you in turn.

FRPG GM Tip: When it comes to worldbuilding and adventure backstory, think “menu,” not “meal.” Players don't need a whole history prepped, cooked, and served up. They need you to give them a sense of what tastes the setup has to offer, then to let them order the specific entree they want to sample.

FRPG Player Tip: When making choices for a character, asking “What would I do?” is a good starting point — but don’t stop there. RPGs are about possibility. About being our best selves. So instead, ask: “What would I do if I could truly make a difference? What would I do if I wasn’t afraid?” 

FRPG GM Tip: A great many fantasy campaigns feature the idea of a present built on the bones of great ages of the past, so lean into that. Ruins in unexpected environments, lost dungeons under contemporary buildings, and art and relics of the ancient past can bring your world and your game to life.

FRPG Player Tip: The best type of character is one who’s an extension of you, reflecting your own interests and personality. The other best type of character is one who’s completely different from you, letting you explore new sides of yourself. Try one approach. Try the other. Meld them. Have fun.

Art by Dean Spencer

FRPG Tips — September 2025

Over on Bluesky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I post daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players. At the end of each month, you get the full collection of that month’s tips right here for your reading pleasure. And please feel free to follow me at either of the above locations to get new tips every day, fresh out of the idea forge.

FRPG Player Tip: At some point, you’ll get really fast at calculating the outcome of dice rolls for combat or skill-based interactions. When you start out, you’ll be really slow at that — just like all the more-experienced players in your group once were. Don’t let worrying about it get in your way.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If a saving throw is close to the target number but partial success isn’t part of your game’s rules, make it so. A character or foe misses a save against being stunned by 1 or 2? Maybe they’re dazed or slowed instead. Bending mechanics to serve the story is never a bad thing.

FRPG GM Tip: One of the easiest ways to help yourself keep your in-game description brief is to focus first on the most unusual, fantastic, or apparently threatening features in a scene. Then let the players’ “WTF is that?!” questions inspire which specific details you follow up on.

FRPG Player Tip: When showing respect for the other players by avoiding scenarios or themes they’ve asked to steer clear of, don’t forget the GM is a player too. If something at the table feels like it’s making the GM uncomfortable, take a break to talk about it and change direction if necessary.

FRPG GM Tip: Playing out scenarios where the characters are victimized by NPCs can be made easier with a comedic touch. Discovering that a con artist has run a successful scam on the party can easily get under the players’ collective skin, but making that NPC a bumbling joke will lighten the tone.

FRPG Player Tip: Sometimes being evil is a villain’s only goal. But if the GM is dropping hints that there’s more going on with the villain’s plots and plans, pay attention. Digging into those clues almost inevitably reveals the best ways by which you can thwart those plans.

FRPG GM Tip: When you have a monster whose feel and theme you love, pull elements of that monster and add them to other stat blocks to create unique themed creatures. Use undead traits to create necromantic variations, elemental traits to create evoker threats, and on and on. 

FRPG Player Tip: If you ever find yourself wanting to make a skill check first, then decide why you’re making the check afterward, stop and recalibrate. The game is about setting the scene and your character’s place in it. Rolling dice puts a certain spin on that process, but should never define it.

FRPG GM Tip: One of the easiest ways to keep things moving in a game with fixed initiative is to call out who’s acting next each time you call out who’s acting now. Reminding players that their turn is coming up puts them on a useful countdown for preparing what they’re going to do.

FRPG Player Tip: Elaborate backstory often gets a bad rap, and there’s nothing wrong with a “blank slate” character you can just start playing. But thinking about where your character comes from can provide a strong foundation for roleplaying — as well as story hooks the GM can use to engage you.

FRPG GM Tip: Environmental effects are great for making combat encounters feel unique. But especially for a large party, effects that require dice rolls can slow things down. Focus instead on effects that deal low flat damage or impose minor conditions automatically to help keep things moving. 

FRPG Player Tip: Asking questions is best way to engage with a scene. But if you find yourself asking questions that have already been asked and answered by someone else, make note of that. Active listening — not just to the GM but to the other players as well — is the heart and soul of the game.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially if you’re running combat on a tactical map, short-range teleportation is one of the coolest things you can add to an encounter. Let the characters and their enemies tap into unstable magic in an ancient ruin and fling themselves all over the battlefield.

FRPG Player Tip: If a trusted NPC betraying the party is going to ruin your fun, talk about that in session 0 or during a break in play. Establishing boundaries isn’t only about “mature” or potentially traumatic content. Narrative tropes that derail enjoyment are all potential topics for discussion.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Long-arc adventures have become the norm for published campaigns. But fantasy gaming’s origins are rooted in short standalone adventures that can be linked to create a narrative unique to your group, so if you’re not familiar with that mode of play and design, it’s worth checking out.

FRPG GM Tip: Avoid having an NPC offer up important lore or hooks that turn out to be lies, unless the players have a clear chance to figure that out. A deceitful NPC can sometimes make for great story, but you run the risk of having the players doubt every honest NPC you throw at them thereafter.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Playing in different games can show you a different side of your own approach to play. If you’ve never gotten into tactical combat, or in-character roleplay, or specific character types, seeing those things done by players who truly love them might give you a new perspective.

FRPG GM Tip: Contrivance and convenience bother us when they happen to other people. When they happen to us, we’re usually fine with that. So don’t forget that the characters are “us” when needing to feed them a convenient plot point, create tenuous connections to NPCs, and so forth.

FRPG Player Tip: In your first games, you’ll have an unrealistic expectation of how fast you need to think and react to what’s happening. Take note of when more experienced players need a moment to focus or have to backpedal from an initial decision, and remind yourself that you’re doing just fine.

FRPG GM Tip: If you play online using a virtual tabletop, don’t focus just on maps as the liminal space between your side of the game and the players’ side. Use your VTT to post notes, track party wealth, reveal images, or share anything else you’d share on the physical table for an in-person game.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: One of the best tips for speeding things up during combat play is rolling dice together. Roll your damage when you roll your attack so you’re ready if you hit. If you make multiple attacks, color-code your dice and roll all attacks and damage at once. 

FRPG GM Tip: The more transhuman you make your ancient wyrm, inscrutable lich, or alien brain boss villains, the more you want to give them a key mortal trait they’ve picked up by accident or have never been able to shake off. Then give the players a chance to turn that trait into a means of defeat.

FRPG Player Tip: One of the best gifts you can give a GM is letting them know what you enjoyed about the previous session. It’s not just about saying thanks for the work that goes into running a game — it’s about providing direction for future sessions you’ll enjoy just as much.

FRPG GM Tip: Even if it means running a bit short or long, trying to end each session on a clear break point or opportunity to rest can help you deal more effectively with a player who can’t make the next game session at the last minute. 

FRPG Player Tip: When playing a spellcaster or other resource-focused character, it’s equally cool to dole out those resources slowly as it is to blow them all at the first opportunity. Just let the other players know your preferred play style so they can work with it, not be surprised by it.

FRPG GM Tip: Monster health expressed as an average means that some monsters must have more health than that. If you’re running an encounter in which the characters initially take down more foes than you expected, all the foes remaining should be immediately upgraded into that above-average group.

FRPG Player Tip: Especially if it takes you a bit of time to calculate the modifier for a check or attack because of situational bonuses, just roll the die first. If the number rolled is high enough to succeed without your modifiers, you’ve just helped speed the game up a bit. 

FRPG GM Tip: An annoying NPC should get on the characters’ nerves, but shouldn’t ever irritate the players. If you feel an NPC crossing that line, look for opportunities to highlight something funny or ingratiating about them to lighten the tone. 

FRPG Player Tip: If you find yourself feeling meh about new options for your character as the campaign goes on, talk to the GM about customizing those options to be a better fit. Tweaking a subclass, trait, or feat to match your character’s story is one of the easiest bits of homebrew.

Art by Dean Spencer

FRPG Tips — August 2025

Over on Bluesky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I post daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players. At the end of each month, you get the full collection of that month’s tips right here for your reading pleasure. And please feel free to follow me at either of the above locations to get new tips every day, fresh out of the idea forge.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: That moment when your character or a key NPC does something you had no idea they were going to do is one of the best feelings you can experience in an RPG. Revel in it — and never be afraid to just let your subconscious sense of who a character is drive the story.

FRPG GM Tip: Whenever the party picks up a combat-ready NPC intended to fight alongside the characters, hand that NPC’s mechanics off to the players. Give one player the info for their attacks, another the info for their saves, another their hit points, and let the group run the NPC collectively.

FRPG Player Tip: If a campaign isn’t holding your interest, think about whether refocusing your character might make a difference. A character concept and a campaign story can both be great and still be out of sync with each other, but you can shape your place in the story any number of ways.

FRPG GM Tip: NPCs whose primary purpose is to aggravate the players can be great fun, but those NPCs work best when they’re clearly equal to or weaker than the player characters in terms of threat level. An annoying NPC who also holds real power over the PCs can get frustrating fast.

FRPG Player Tip: One of the best ways to expand your horizons as a player is to play with different groups. If you have a main game with players you love, that’s great. But try convention games, game store one-shots, pick-up games with other friends, and any other excuse to play in different ways.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially with a larger group where players sometimes can’t make it to game night, an episodic campaign where each session focuses on a specific location, mystery, or monster might be a better fit than a campaign built on complex, layered, multipart stories.

FRPG Player Tip: Insight checks and similar mechanics are perfectly valid ways to assess whether an NPC has something going on that they’re not showing you. But your own personal instincts based on what that NPC says and does are often a better gauge, so don’t be afraid to trust them.

FRPG GM Tip: As trivial as it seems, keep a list of the characters, their backgrounds, key backstory elements the players have shared, and their campaign goals at the top of your notes. You’ll be surprised how often reviewing that list will give you inspiration as you set up the campaign story.

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re having trouble thinking up a character’s backstory, start with them having a secret — even if you don’t know what that secret is. Backstory can be something you build in reverse, figuring out where your character came from in response to where the campaign takes them.

FRPG GM Tip: Detailed maps that you purchase or prep ahead of time might be the main way the players interact with a location-based scene. But don’t ever be afraid to add to those maps with a quick sketch on blank paper or your VTT. The players’ imaginations will make even the worst scrawl memorable

FRPG Player Tip: Having the story filled in while the GM spins lore should be as interactive as everything else in the game. Most GMs don’t like it when they have to monologue, so find the points in the lore that resonate with you and ask questions. Player engagement is what brings lore to life.

FRPG GM Tip: Villains whose goals are clearly evil work just great. Villains whose goals are clearly evil but look benevolent to them, or whose goals are clearly benevolent but turn evil unexpectedly, are usually way more interesting.

FRPG Player Tip: How many times you roll dice during a game can make it seem like rolling dice is the most important part of the game. It isn’t. The most important part of the game is you making the decisions that guide your character through the story. The dice simply tell you how the story reacts.

FRPG GM Tip: For a suitable location, pockets of unstable magic that can teleport characters and their enemies from place to place make a great tool for keeping creatures in motion on the battlefield. Or give enemies short-distance teleportation potions to keep the characters moving after them.

FRPG Player Tip: Running a game is a lot of work, but you can show your GM how you appreciate that by helping to make their job easier. In addition to staying focused, offering to keep notes, track initiative, or look up rules on the fly can all help the GM stay focused on more important things.

FRPG GM Tip: To avoid having forward progress lock down because of a failed skilled check, don’t treat failed checks as failing the activity they represent. Rather, think about how a character rolling low on a check might succeed in the worst possible way — then ask the players what that looks like.

FRPG Player Tip: If it’s your first time ever gaming, playing with a group of people you already know is ideal. If that isn’t possible, try to seek and find a group of people you’d like to know, because the relationships you’ll build at the gaming table can be remarkably strong.

FRPG GM Tip: If a player is sitting out combat because their character keeps failing a save to lift a restrictive condition, there’s nothing wrong with offering up a narrative option for auto-success. “That massive hit you just took snaps you out of being dazed/slowed/stunned/whatever.”

FRPG Player Tip: If your game were music, your GM should feel like your band’s lead vocalist — setting the direction, but leaving plenty of room for you to solo. If it feels more like the players are just the GM’s backup band, have a conversation about that — or look to make music with someone else.

FRPG GM Tip: Don’t beat yourself up over “lost opportunities” when running games. If you miss something, if you forget something, if you don’t pull a scene off perfectly, you’ll think of a dozen ways to adjust the narrative or make use of a great unused idea between one session and the next.

FRPG Player Tip: Even in a heavily tactical game, character optimization isn’t about the most damage, the most magic, or the best mechanical tweaks. The optimal character is the one that gives you the greatest sense of freedom when you play — and you’ll find that min-maxing limits that freedom.

FRPG GM Tip: Come up with way more ideas than you can use. Don’t waste a single moment thinking about whether they’re good or not. The act of spawning not-great ideas primes the creative pump for better ideas, and helps the best ideas stand out when you go back to choose which of them to implement. 

FRPG Player Tip: Sometimes you’ll feel like you’re standing at a distance writing your character’s story. Sometimes you’ll feel like you’re inhabiting your character directly. Planning is great, but learn to trust your narrative instincts as well when deciding what your character should do.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The guidelines laid down for play during session 0 are a starting point, but they don’t trump your instincts during the game. If another player’s words, silence, or body language suggest they’re having a bad reaction to something in the game, take a break to talk about it.

FRPG GM Tip: In an encounter with lots of related monsters (human bandits, gnoll raiders, whatever), using one stat block and adding on-the-fly bonuses and extra features to represent more powerful lieutenants and bosses can be a lot easier than running three or four different stat blocks.

FRPG Player Tip: Just because powerful magic items often have impressive names doesn’t mean you can’t give an impressive name to a baseline magic item — or even a mundane piece of gear. Your character is allowed to be on a first-name basis with any of the tools they routinely risk their life with.

FRPG GM Tip: Playing with detailed 3D terrain is cool, but don’t be afraid to take a pillow-fort approach to your combat setups. The same imagination that turns couch cushions into a citadel when you’re a kid can turn extra dice, building blocks, or any other knickknacks into terrain at the table.

FRPG Player Tip: Your character never needs an excuse to do something that feels dramatically satisfying. The adage “If it feels good, do it,” is never more true than it is in a story where you’re the hero.

FRPG GM Tip: Creating a unique creature or NPC for a roleplaying or combat encounter can be as easy as pulling one feature or trait from a different creature to add to a stat block. Give a hobgoblin boss the doppelganger’s ability to read thoughts or a fey’s local teleportation and see what happens.

FRPG Player Tip: Worrying over mistakes made in real life is always a waste of time. Worrying over mistakes made in the game is even more so. Keep a written list of every cool thing your characters have ever done, and review it each time you need to remind yourself how little a few mistakes matter.

FRPG GM Tip: Some players find it fun when enemies are keeping tabs on them from afar with magic. Some players find that implied threat frustrating with no way to respond. If you sense frustration, let the characters access magic to mask or protect them — perhaps as the subject of a fun side quest.

Art by Dean Spencer

Out of Time!

It has been an age and a bit since I last posted anything to this blog aside from the monthly collection of daily fantasy roleplaying gaming tips I drop on BlueSky and Mastodon dice.camp. The primary reason for that is that I’ve been working like a maniac as the lead editor for Draw Steel, the MCDM RPG. In fact, I’ve been working like a maniac on Draw Steel since late 2024 (and loving every minute of it), but the last four months or so have been especially filled with time crunch.

Despite that time crunch, though — and despite the downside of being so flat-out busy working with other wonderful folks that I run out of time to work on my own stuff — I still manage to run two CORE20 games every week on top of a D&D 5e game I’m playing in. And when you’re running low on time to sleep, finding time to prep the games you’re running can be a challenge.

For one of my CORE20 campaigns a couple of months back, I ran five sessions of built-from-scratch homebrew adventure, set up with about two hours of prep. Not two hours per session, but two hours for all five sessions — fifteen or so solid hours of gaming. And now that I have a bit of downtime again, I thought it would be fun to break down my process, which covers a number of specific approaches I’ve found useful for prepping games when the amount of time you have to prep games approaches zero.

The Framework

A while back, I talked about a framework for fast game prep that can help you create a solid two-hour one-shot session in less than 10 minutes. The process I’m going to talk about here reflects that approach to some degree, but expands to the idea of prepping multiple sessions for an ongoing campaign, not just creating single-session adventures.

Is it possible to treat a homebrew campaign or adventure as an excuse to never stop writing notes, ideas, NPCs, monsters, history, and more? Yes it is. And it’s fun to do so if time permits! But what I’m talking about here is a minimalist approach where what you’re looking for is the maximum return on your time, in the sense of being able to say, “This five minutes of prep will let me fill an hour of game time.”

Home(brew) is Where the Heart Is

As a general setup, fast prep is almost always about homebrew adventure design. Because over many years of running games, one of the odd truths I’ve discovered is that running your own homebrew adventures takes less time commitment than running published adventures. On the face of it, that might seem odd, given that published adventures do all that writing and story design stuff for you. But the reality is that doing the kind of close study and notetaking you need to really get a feel for a published adventure and a sense of how you want to run it takes a lot of time. Certainly, for a great adventure, that can be time well spent. But when your time budget is flat broke, something’s got to give.

Being only half-prepared to run a published adventure can be a tense experience. But being only half-prepared to run a completely homebrew session can be exhilarating, because you get a much better return on your creative investment from making things up on the fly than you do from looking things up on the fly as you try to remember where your published adventure is meant to go next. 

Lay of the Land

To build out an adventure quickly, start with a cool map. Or, as I did for the multiple sessions I needed to plan with no time, start with several maps you can easily link together. Two types of maps are ideal for fast prep — those with straightforward features that don’t require a lot of notes (wilderness, caverns, simple dungeons), and those that are so detailed you can just pull information off the map (detailed city locations, manor houses, fortresses, and so forth). Avoid locations such as a wizard’s tower where you’re going to need to think up a bunch of wild details to support that location. You want to be able to wing that sort of information on the fly, whether you’re coming up with generic details for an underground grotto, or saying “There’s an oak chest in the corner of the sitting room” because that’s what the map shows.

For my campaign, I scored five maps from Dice Grimorium — one of a number of cartographers I back on Patreon — all part of a “Cave Tunnels” series. Then I let the maps springboard the other fast-prep components of the extended adventure.

Thematic Inspiration

When you’re putting together a full adventure in a hurry, focus on a singular theme that you can use to suggest monsters, traps, and other mechanical components, and which you can easily fall back on as inspiration when you’re talking up description and mood. For my adventure, the cool colored crystals on the map immediately suggested “elemental caverns,” so that’s what I went with, setting up different colors of crystals on the different maps. One level each of earth caverns, water caverns, air caverns, and fire caverns. Then inspired by the theme, I grabbed a final level taken from a similar map series showing four eldritch cauldrons around a vast pit (seen above), which I decided would make a most excellent power source for the elemental caverns above.

Fight the Good Fight

If you’re playing any sort of campaign in which monster hunting is the characters’ jam, planning combat-focused sessions is one of the best ways to maximize your prep time, because setting up combat is way faster than the time filled out by running it.

While the characters figured out how to cross a chasm in the earth cavern, I decided that they’d come under attack from transfixers — the CORE20 upgrade to the piercer, which first magically dazes you, then launches from the ceiling to arc through the air toward their targets like a stalactite air-to-surface missile. It was a monster the characters had never encountered before, making the fight feel fresh, and a good fit for the location and the earth/rock theme.

For the water level, I worked up a tougher-than-usual wight guardian — breaking from the elemental theme in order to introduce a mystery (talked about below). For the air level, an air spawn (the CORE20 air elemental) was on guard and perpetually pissed at anyone trying to steal valuable elemental crystals (talked about at “Treasure” below). 

For the fire cavern, the elemental crystals embedded into the walls were the threat, erupting with energy randomly whenever the characters got too close. These weren’t set up as traps, though, but effectively static combat threats that the characters were fully aware of, then needed to “fight” their way through.

The combat encounters through the elemental caverns were fairly straightforward in terms of threat level. So then for the cauldron cavern, I got to break out the big guns for a climactic challenging encounter — a fiendish vrock drawn to lair within the flow of magic boiling up from the well and through the cauldrons. Oh, and each round, the cauldrons would lash out toward a random character with elemental energy — though not in the way they expected (see “Treasure!” below).

It’s a Mystery

Setting up a simple mystery the players can ruminate on and solve is a great way to heighten engagement — and comes with the benefit that players thinking through a mystery are doing most of the work while you play. For this adventure, the combat with the advanced wight led to the discovery of another group of wights, all previously destroyed (and thus inert), but with no signs of battle around them. Each showed wounds consistent with having been executed while alive, allowing them to be transformed into wights by corrupting magic in the cavern. But each had also then been executed again as a wight, with no signs of struggle or having been bound.

The strange nature of this seeming sacrifice was something the players latched onto immediately, and generated an awesome amount of discussion around what circumstances might have caused it. The truth behind the mystery — which the players figured out in good time — was that this was a group who had discovered the caverns, become corrupted by the energy of the cauldrons when they used one to destroy an enemy army above the site, and were transformed into servants of the cauldrons’ magic. The group collectively decided to end their lives rather than follow the cauldrons’ directive to leave the caverns and become walking conduits for destructive elemental power, with the advanced wight the last survivor. But if the players had come up with another explanation that felt even more dramatic, I would have absolutely made use of that instead. That kind of course correction in response to figuring out a mystery is a special gift to the GM who doesn’t have time to prep, wherein without even knowing they’re doing so, the players write up the backstory you didn’t have time to figure out. 

Raise the Stakes

The final piece of the no-time-to-prep prep process was setting up a clear conundrum for the players to deal with. This came in the form of the cauldrons, with the dead-wights mystery and the scouring elemental power witnessed during the vrock fight confirming that the magic of the site was far too dangerous to just walk away from. Dumping the cauldrons into the pit was an obvious solution to that problem, but doing so incorporated the challenge of each cauldron being too heavy for any one character to move, and programmed to lash out with corrupting power if anyone got too close. 

Destroying the cauldrons using a careful approach of moving in behind them, lassoing each of them in turn, throwing the rope across the pit, then pulling from the other side played out over most of one session — literally two minutes of prep time to set up a couple of hours’ worth of planning and roleplaying. Part of the reason that worked is that the characters had no access to any magic that could have destroyed the cauldrons outright. But if they had, I would have simply adjusted the cauldrons’ potency to make sure that a certain amount of discussion and problem-solving would remain.

Treasure!

The final piece of the campaign-building puzzle is the rewards to be bestowed upon the characters for facing off against the challenges you’ve laid out for them. Looking to your theme and your map locations for inspiration is a good starting point for rewards, and I did so to come up with two ideas. 

First, a certain small number of the elemental crystals found throughout the caverns had become saturated with elemental power that would remain in them if they were removed. With a sense that these special crystals would be valuable assets to crafters creating elemental-themed magic items, the characters were meticulous in locating and claiming them.

Second, the theme of elemental power and the idea of the wights having been corrupted by that power to become servants of it set up the idea that during the final fight, the cauldrons lashing out against the characters wasn’t actually an attack. Rather, it was an attempt to infuse the characters with magic that would eventually tie to them to the cauldrons as corrupted servants. For the first couple of cauldron “attacks,” the characters made their saves and so knew nothing about this. But when the first character failed their save and found themselves gaining the ability to cast a variant-damage fireball, the fight got more interesting. When one of the characters then realized that the power they were absorbing was tying them to the cauldrons, the fight got more interesting again.

Game On

It’s literally taken me longer to write up this post than it did to prep the fifteen-or-so hours of gaming whose setup I’ve described here. Doing campaign prep is fun for me, and I don’t begrudge myself time spent making notes, sketching out ideas, and assembling the building blocks of a cool adventure. But even if you’re like me and think of campaign prep as time well spent, focusing on a simplified framework for adventure design can be a good experience — especially when you find yourself in a time crunch and need a different approach.

FRPG Tips — July 2025

Over on Bluesky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I post daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players. At the end of each month, you get the full collection of that month’s tips right here for your reading pleasure. And please feel free to follow me at either of the above locations to get new tips every day, fresh out of the idea forge.

FRPG GM Tip: If you and your players enjoy minis combat, you don’t need printed maps or 3D terrain to bring a battle to life. Do sketches on paper or an erasable map, use any old objects to mark barriers, pillars, pools, and the like, and trust the players’ imaginations to bring it all to life.

FRPG Player Tip: The spells you choose as the player of a caster should be about your character’s spellcasting style, not just about optimizing damage and effects. If you want to burn things down as an evoker, go for it! But single-target effects and illusions can help you shape a cooler story.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Never underestimate the value and power of playing a game that simulates a world in which you can fight evil and make a stand for what’s right — especially while living in a world in which accomplishing those things sometimes feels impossible.

FRPG GM Tip: If you’re running a split-party combat in multiple areas, don’t let one side of the fight dominate. Talk to the players about adjusting initiative so the action switches between locations often, rather than letting each fight run long and risk players on the other side getting bored.

FRPG Player Tip: As a new player, the best way to figure out what you can do is to ask the other players, “How can I do this thing?” You don’t need to know all the rules up front. But as you learn how to do things, make note of the rules so that you’re not asking the same questions over and over.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Arguments between characters can be a fun part of roleplaying. Arguments between players can ruin a game in short order. If an in-character discussion starts to feel heated, stepping back from the game and talking together as players can help lower the tension. 

FRPG Player Tip: Playing a straightforward hero is a good idea when you’re new to a game. But even complicated characters like spellcasters can be simplified. Focus on one or two things you want to do with the character, even if that means ignoring other options while you get to know those options.

FRPG GM Tip: When it comes to worldbuilding and adventure backstory, think “menu,” not “meal.” Players don't need a whole history prepped, cooked, and served up. They need you to give them a sense of what tastes the setup has to offer, then to let them order the specific entree they want to sample.

FRPG Player Tip: It’s never “going meta” to talk to the GM about things you’d like to see in the game. Ask for more magic, or less magic, or more-lethal combat, or more roleplaying, or more foes that let you show off your signature moves, or anything else that would make the game better for you.

FRPG GM Tip: Whenever narrating a scene is necessary, work in break points where you connect what’s being described to things the characters already know, or where you invite the players to ask questions. Keeping exposition interactive helps keep necessary narration from feeling like a GM monologue.

FRPG Player Tip: Playing a support character can be a lot of fun as you aid other characters in combat, buff them with magic, or stand by ready to heal. But if you want to play focused support, let the GM know that, so they’re not creating encounters expecting that you’ll be front-line every round.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Four to five characters in an adventuring party remains the standard after decades of play. Whatever the number, though, talk about what everyone needs to do to make the party size work, from taking on side roles in a small party, to keeping things moving with a large party.

FRPG Player Tip: Most GMs would love to help you create or fine-tune your character — but well ahead of time, not during the game. Talk to your GM about what you need and arrange a time that’s convenient for them when you can meet up, or do your character building through email or text.

FRPG GM Tip: The best villains are smart enough to know that fighting heroes is a bad idea. Identifying and locating the boss makes a great ongoing quest, culminating in a showdown against their chosen lieutenants — or an awesome social encounter where those lieutenants agree to turn the boss over.

FRPG Player Tip: Always feel free to ask whether some element of an encounter can be used to your benefit — high ground, potential allies, whatever. Sometimes a GM plans such benefits and waits for players to uncover them. Sometimes they don’t plan them and are happy for you to discover them anyway.

FRPG GM Tip: Never waste time and energy worrying over a thing you overlooked or forgot to use in your last game session. Instead, plan to put that thing into a subsequent game session and focus on making it work even better the next time.

FRPG Player Tip: Sometimes you create a character who doesn’t play as well as you’d hoped, or who feels like the wrong fit for an evolving story. When that happens, there are any number of ways you can refocus a character to fix what ails them, so talk to the GM about what approach might work best.

FRPG GM Tip: Setting the players the challenge of figuring out the tactical setup of a battle map during a fight can be fun. But it can be even more fun to give the characters the map first, let them assess the lay of the land, then let the players meticulously plan their assault.

FRPG Player Tip: When bad things happen to your character or the party because you forgot a campaign detail that your character would have absolutely remembered, ask the GM to remind you of such things going forward. A GM who flat-out refuses to do so is probably someone you don’t want to game with.

FRPG GM Tip: Just as you might keep a list of potential upcoming adventure ideas the heroes can undertake as the campaign progresses, keep a list of potential nefarious plots and deeds the villains might get up to. Choosing from options rather than a fixed slate keeps things feeling unpredictable.

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re ready to try your hand as a GM, offer to run a one-shot for a group — then ask exactly what kind of adventure they’d like to play. Making sure the players have fun is a GM’s greatest challenge, and knowing they’re invested in the adventure ahead of time makes that easier.

FRPG GM Tip: Some players find it hard to come up with shared-story campaign ideas on the fly, but most can easily tell you what their character got up to during the last downtime. Asking players to detail downtime narrative is a great way to work toward even greater levels of shared storytelling.

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re new to the game, ask an experienced player what character options are the easiest to work with. The fewer complex mechanics you need to worry about for your first character, the more you can focus on having fun doing what your character is best at.

FRPG GM Tip: Warn the players when their characters are about to do something foolish by accident. Don’t worry about breaking the fourth wall, or verisimilitude, or letting the dice fall where they may. You’ll always have more than enough characters doing foolish things on purpose to keep you busy.

FRPG Player Tip: The goal of just about any roleplaying game is for your character to increase their knowledge, their power, and their place in the world as a result of the challenges they face. Don’t focus too much on making your starting character as potent as you can. Give them room to grow.

FRPG GM Tip: Just as you might make notes for a dozen locations or adventure seeds, then end up using only a few of them, make way more notes for your villains’ plots, pursuits, and sanctums than you’ll ever use. Then choose whichever elements feel best based on how the campaign is progressing.

FRPG Player Tip: Sometimes you really know your character — their goals, personality, eccentricities, and more — right from the start. Sometimes you need to get to know your character as a result of playing them over time. Sometimes you think you know your character, only to have them surprise you.

FRPG GM Tip: Keep notes at hand detailing the characters’ known family members, close NPC friends, important contacts, animal companions or familiars, affiliated factions or guilds, and other things important to them. You being able to talk about those things helps solidify the world of the story.

FRPG Player Tip: Basing a character on a favorite fictional hero is a tradition as old as RPGs. But you’ll find that the most interesting aspect of a character isn’t the look, personality, or theme you borrowed for them, but the ways in which you tweak those borrowed elements to make them your own.

FRPG GM Tip: Having the party pick up NPCs in dangerous circumstances can raise the stakes nicely, but make sure you have a built-in safe exit for them. A few combat veterans among a group of bystanders who can lead the others to safety without player-character intervention often does the trick.

FRPG Player Tip: When making choices for a character, asking “What would I do?” is a good starting point — but don’t stop there. RPGs are about possibility. About being our best selves. So instead, ask: “What would I do if I could truly make a difference? What would I do if I wasn’t afraid?” 

Art by Dean Spencer

FRPG Tips — June 2025

Over on Bluesky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I post daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players. At the end of each month, you get the full collection of that month’s tips right here for your reading pleasure. And please feel free to follow me at either of the above locations to get new tips every day, fresh out of the idea forge.

FRPG GM Tip: Uncovering hidden things — a concealed door in a noble’s bedchamber, a secret pocket on a cultist courier, a code in a mundane message — can provide a great sense of accomplishment for players. Whenever characters are investigating, slip in secrets for them to discover.

FRPG Player Tip: Playing a reckless character can be great fun — as long as they’re the only one affected by their recklessness. When a profound lack of danger sense puts the other characters in serious peril and is clearly irritating the other players, it’s time to dial up the caution a bit.

FRPG GM Tip: When the characters have pets, companions, and familiars, find ways to work those creatures’ goals and backstories into the game. Maybe a familiar’s magical nature lets them solve a puzzle or crack a code? What if a companion has a connection to an NPC their master doesn’t know about?

FRPG GM Tip: Within the boundaries of giving the players what they enjoy the most, always look to let different modes of play interrupt each other. Find room for roleplaying in combat. Interrupt long exploration with easy encounters. Work practical skills and physical challenges into social scenes.

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re having trouble deciding what to do, or if the party is stuck at a decision point, rank all the  choices you can think of from safe to risky. Then roll a die covering the number of choices, say “My character thinks we should do X” based on the roll, and see what happens.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The best number of dice to own is the number you routinely need to roll. Playing a damage-dealing caster? Have d6s and d8s on hand. Make a ton of attack rolls each turn? Have groups of d20s and damage dice. And if you ever come up short, don’t be afraid to ask to borrow.

FRPG GM Tip: Thinking like a player is a great way to create challenging encounters as a GM. Don’t just focus on what the villains are plotting. Think ahead of time about what plans the players might hatch to counter those plots — and then expect to be surprised by the plans you didn’t expect.

FRPG GM Tip: Irredeemably evil NPCs can be great fun in a hack-and-slash campaign where everyone is fully on board with the idea of taking no prisoners. But if that’s not the case, NPCs who are misguided, corrupted by magic, or the dupes of evil overlords often make for a more interesting story.

FRPG Player Tip: Few things excite other players more than being asked to help a new player build a character. But feel free to ask about simpler options if suggestions feel complicated. It’s easy for veteran players to forget when they were just as overwhelmed by all of a game’s choices as you are.

FRPG GM Tip: While you’re making notes about the boss villain’s carefully laid plans, also make notes on the things they’ve overlooked or forgotten about. Those omissions and gaps in focus will give the characters and players something to focus in on as they try to disrupt those plans.

FRPG GM Tip: The level of challenge for a monster is an estimate of how that monster stands up to an average party. But no party is ever average. Take notes of how your group fares against different types of creatures and in different combat scenarios, and use that to adjust your encounter design.

FRPG Player Tip: Conflict between party members can be fun if everyone is on board with that kind of roleplaying. But springing conflicts by surprise, or going behind other players’ backs to steal from or betray the other characters, is almost always a single-ingredient recipe for a failed game.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: You can step out of in-game mode or break character at any time if you’re not sure what’s going on or something’s making you uncomfortable. Pause the action and talk about plot developments, character choices, villain actions, or other details so that everyone’s on board.

FRPG GM Tip: If a character takes on a companion creature modeled after a pet they’ve lost, that character’s player is doing you the favor of bringing a level of love to your game’s narrative that nothing else can touch. Embrace that love and return it, and your campaign story will reap the reward.

FRPG Player Tip: The point of the game is for everyone to have fun, but it’s easy to lose track of that while focusing on rules and tactics during play. Every once in a while, don’t worry about the best tactical decision, and have your character do something that leaves the other players smiling.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially with a group of characters who don’t have enough common goals to create a strong party bond, set up a faction whose goals are broad enough that every character can bond with them. Then let a shared commitment to the faction create the glue that holds the party together.

FRPG GM Tip: Even the most comprehensive published adventure is intended to be the model you build your campaign around, not the campaign itself. Builder’s plans can show you every detail of what a house might look like. But the way you build and finish that house determines how you live there.

FRPG Player Tip: Active listening might be best skill a player can bring to a game. Focusing on what the GM and all the other players are bringing to the table scene by scene is the best way to stay centered in the story — and to make sure the GM and other players are listening to you in turn.

FRPG GM Tip: Setting up multiple ways to get into a site-based adventure is always a good idea — as is having the characters discover even more ways out once they’re inside. Not having to work back through previously explored areas helps keep a dungeon crawl or stealth fortress assault moving.

FRPG GM Tip: When running for a new group of players, think about a short campaign — five sessions, maybe. If the characters work and bond well, you can always continue the campaign. But if players realize they built the wrong character, changing that up in the middle of a long story can be tricky.

FRPG Player Tip: A lot of “old school” exploration tricks are worth picking up if you do a lot of dungeon crawling. A 10-foot pole to test floors and unknown recesses, a mirror for looking around corners, and extra rations to throw at hungry monsters have saved innumerable characters over the years.

FRPG GM Tip: If rolled initiative sees all the characters acting as one block and all the enemies acting as another, feel free to quietly adjust the enemies’ initiative to create a bit of back-and-forth. Switching the focus between the characters and their foes regularly helps keep combat engaging.

FRPG Player Tip: Your character sheet covers most of what you can do in a scene, but the details the GM lays down always add to that. Cover in combat, useful bystanders in a social encounter, advantageous terrain in exploration — all of it can grant you additional benefits if you look for them.

FRPG GM Tip: If you run villains with abnormally long lifespans — liches, dragons, and such who’ve been around for millennia — dial up the idea of what those villains have lost over the years. Every ageless undead loved someone once, and they’ve had a thousand lifetimes to obsess over that loss.

FRPG GM Tip: The classic presentation of monsters in games is the default, but it doesn’t need to be the norm. Give melee brutes an equally effective ranged attack. Have typically slow monsters move quickly. Give a leader type a one-off spell. Any small tweak can help make a monster unique.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: A last-session “Where are they now?” scene detailing the characters’ lives a year later makes a great end to a campaign. A game’s narrative unfolds as an ongoing present, and it can be fun to think about the future that the sum total of those present moments might create. 

FRPG GM Tip: Foes who drop or flee quickly create an upward beat in the narrative. Foes who deal out high damage create tension. So if you’re looking for one thing or the other at any point in the campaign, adjust hit points and damage on the fly to get the combat encounters you need.

FRPG GM Tip: Giving every party-interacting NPC a quirk or mannerism can seem trite, but nothing cements a character’s place in the story like a single detail the players can latch on to. It’s often hard to keep track of names, but everyone remembers the goblin mage who talked in a fast whisper.

FRPG Player Tip: Understanding actions is important, but it’s even more important to think about the possible activities actions represent. Don’t focus first on what actions are available. If you want to do something, tell the GM that’s what you want to do, then figure out what actions you need.

FRPG GM Tip: Characters interact with the world and its stories by default. But making sure the world and the story encourages debate and interaction between the players and their characters is key to a satisfying game. An RPG should never feel like four players telling a story in isolation.

Art by Dean Spencer