The Backup Campaign

As written about on this very blog (and in plenty of other places), there are lots of strategies a GM can adopt for carrying on the campaign with a less-than-full roster of players. But because I’m a GM who really doesn’t like running games with a less-than-full crew, I’ve been known to dabble in the one-shot backup campaign.

A backup campaign is a campaign that runs alongside the main campaign, custom built to pick up the slack when too many players in the main group have to bow out of a regularly scheduled session. But because running or playing in two campaigns is [quickly checks math] twice as hard as running or playing in a single campaign — and because running one campaign is hard enough as it is — the backup campaign has some very specific parameters.

For the GM

A GM running a one-shot backup campaign needs to economize on prep and story development as much as possible. The following guidelines can help make that easier.

One Session at a Time

Because you’re never hoping that players will be missing two sessions in a row — and because if they are, you have no guarantee that it’ll be the same players each time — the focus of the backup campaign is the one-shot. A single short adventure whose beginning, middle, and end fits nicely into the space of your regular session.

A Rotating Cast of Characters

Because you generally won’t have the same players unable to attend a game every time, the makeup of the party needs to fit the idea of different characters jumping in and out of the backup campaign session to session. So look for a foundational story setup that works well with characters coming and going. An exploring-the-ruin-of-the-week dungeon delving campaign works great for this setup. So too does a high-seas pirate campaign, a mercenary company taking on adventures for hire, or the party as a group of investigators working cases in a major city. With all these options, it’s easy to explain that certain characters are off doing other stuff while the remaining party members descend dark staircases, plot a heist from the harbormaster’s house, or hunt for a murderer on a noble’s estate.

Straightforward Adventures

Not all one-shot adventures are created equal, whether you’re writing your backup campaign yourself, playing published one-shots, or pulling a single-session scenario out from the narrative of a longer published adventure. Because you want to make sure you wrap up your adventure in whatever time your session allows, focus on keeping things simple so that you can keep things moving. Set a clear goal for the characters. Narrate any necessary setup and backstory if it feels like roleplaying through it will run long. Keep an eye on the clock and cut intermediate sections from the story to leave yourself ample time to play out your big finish. And if you run out of adventure a bit before the end, don’t worry about it. Completing an adventure comes with a built-in sense of accomplishment for the players, and finishing up a one-shot session early won’t take away from that.

Focused Combat

Depending on the length of your game sessions, you’ll likely want to shoot for one or two full-scale combat encounters in your backup campaign games — typically one easy and one hard fight, or two medium fights with some additional excitement (traps, environmental effects, a mini-boss, and so forth) in the second encounter. To avoid combat running long, make sure each fight features alternative end points beyond the “everyone fights to the death” baseline.

Embrace the Random

If you create your own adventures rather than running published adventures, a one-shot backup campaign is a great opportunity to flex your improv muscles. Creating an exciting dungeon crawl, wilderness adventure, or urban excitement one-shot requires little more effort than finding a map you like, a solid plot hook, coming up with two sets of foes for the characters to face off against, and interesting environmental effects or NPCs to bring your locations to life. Lots of books (including my friend Mike Shea’s Lazy DM’s Companion) feature random adventure generators that you can use to sketch out a one-shot scenario in just a few minutes.

For the Players

Playing in a one-shot backup campaign can be just as much fun as playing in a long-term campaign. But players should keep a few things in mind to maximize the fun — and to help make the GM’s job as easy as possible.

Focus the Action

Because you know that a one-shot game needs to move from beginning to middle to end within a fixed duration, do everything you can to keep things moving. Focus on the setup and backstory presented by the GM, and feel free to ask whether specific plot threads are more or less relevant to the adventure throughline as you play. When the game’s in combat, think about what your character is doing ahead of time, and have any references you need to spells, special attacks, and magic at the ready. Pay attention to what’s happening around your character so that you’re able to quickly build on that, rather than having to ask what’s going on. And if any of these objectives are things you sometimes struggle with in your main game, treat the backup campaign as a lower-stakes place to hone your keeping-the-game-moving skills.

Know Your Character

It can be really easy to lose the narrative thread on a character you play only a couple of times every few months. As such, put an extra level of focus on your character for the backup campaign. Make the time to review their build and backstory each time you play, and look for any and all roleplaying opportunities as a means of heightening the connection between the character and you.

Keep Things Simple

Because the backup campaign is all about one-shot adventures bookended within a single game session, don’t expect a ton of complex continuity between adventures. And hand in hand with that, think about leaning away from complex characters with deep backstory, convoluted goals, and several layers of secrets. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of any of that, of course. But the backup campaign isn’t necessarily the place for a complex character to shine.

Try Different Concepts

Single-session one-shot campaigns lend themselves to unique and interesting characters, and are a great excuse to try a character type or build you’ve never played before. Mix-and-matching character archetypes and concepts can be a lot of fun, but lots of players worry about a character who tries to do much becoming less effective than a more focused character in a long campaign. But in a one-shot campaign, you don’t need to worry as much about that. You might play the same character for a half-dozen one-off sessions or just a single game — long enough to have fun with the concept before moving on to something else.

 

FRPG Tips — April 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.

GM Tip: One of the best ways to give out magic items is to have foes use them against the party first. A character who gets to claim a weapon or a wand that someone else used to try to kill them makes for an especially sweet reward.

GM Tip: At the end of each session, remind the players what decisions they might need to make next session — which story threads to follow up on, which part of the dungeon to explore next, which NPC to go after, and so forth. Having time to think about choices can make it easier to choose.

GM Tip: Personal details are a great way to keep foes from becoming two-dimensional combat fodder. But be careful to not make it seem as if you want the players to feel guilty about defeating those foes. Every member of a debased cult carrying letters from loving family is probably too much.

Player Tip: It’s not metagaming to simply know things about the monsters and hazards of the game world that your character doesn’t have direct experience of. But it’s good to frame your player knowledge as a question to the GM: “Could my character have heard about this thing I know?”

GM Tip: If you run gridded combat, be flexible with distances to keep things moving. Let a character with a speed of 30 move 35 feet once to reach the boss. Don’t worry about ranged attacks being at long range unless the range is extreme. Counting squares shouldn’t get in the way of the fun.

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?” 

GM Tip: If a fight in a published adventure features a combat-worthy magic item as treasure but no enemy is using that item, have an enemy use that item against the characters. Any sense that NPCs and monsters are disconnected from the story undercuts the players’ engagement with that story.

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.

GM Tip: Making your own quick notes on the player characters’ backstories and the interesting things they’ve gotten up to in the last few sessions is one of the best ways to keep those characters front and center in your campaign planning and adventure design.

GM Tip: Let players tell you after the fact that they’ve activated long-duration buff spells or magical defenses that their characters would have remembered to use earlier. Forcing a player to roleplay that their arcanist somehow forgot to cast the spells that keep them alive is no fun.

GM Tip: Reskinning monsters is a great way to make combat encounters unique, but reskinning doesn’t need to mean rebuilding a monster from the ground up. Changing up a stock creature’s description and tweaking one attack’s damage type is often enough to make combat feel fresh.

Player Tip: An easy way to play your character more effectively is to pay attention to what the other players and characters are doing. Needing a bit of distraction to stay focused is fine, but checking out of the game entirely until it’s your turn means you’re only playing part of the game.

GM Tip: The best way to make sure players and characters don’t automatically assume every NPC is out to get them is to not have the NPCs out to get them. Reserve betrayal and subterfuge for key plot points, not a default mindset for every NPC merchant, contact, or bandit who asks for quarter.

GM Tip: A lot of players, especially first-time or young players, can feel put off by a game in which the heroes are expected to kill people because they have no other option. Make nonlethal resolutions to combat — including letting enemies surrender or flee — part of your GM’s toolkit.

GM Tip: If you’re finding that characters are earning far more money than they can spend, especially in published adventures, cut the gold and replace it with magic. It’s generally easier to adjust encounters to account for extra magic than it is to fix the broken economy of most fantasy games.

GM and Player Tip: Session zero is about way more than just safety tools. Before your game begins, talk together about the style of game you want to play, character ideas you’ve been thinking about, and anything else that might become an ingredient in an amazing story.

GM Tip: When a successful save against a spell means an enemy suffers no effect, a small narrative benefit can lessen the frustration for the caster’s player. Maybe the enemy moves away from the caster from fear of being targeted again, putting them in better position for an ally’s attack.

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.

GM Tip: Reskinning monsters is great fun, but focusing on reskinning can sometimes make running stock monsters feel like you’re doing something wrong. Never be afraid to just run threats straight from your monster book if that’s what fits the story.

Player Tip: Making notes on NPC names, factions, and other campaign details is always a good idea. But if you’re ever unsure what’s going on because you missed a bit of information, just ask. FRPGs are shared storytelling, and good players and GMs are always happy to summarize the story so far.

GM Tip: If you want the best sense of what your players are enjoying most about your games, don’t be afraid to ask them. It’s easy for players to assume that it’s obvious when they’re having a great time, but in all the chaos that comes with running a game, it’s easy for you to miss that.

GM Tip: If a party filled with melee-focused combatants does a bit too good a job of ganging up on and taking down powerful foes, giving those foes some kind of automatic-damage aura power can be a great incentive for the players to change up their usual tactics.

GM Tip: Giving a magic weapon the ability to cast a low-level spell once per day won’t break your game. Likewise, giving a weapon the ability to cast a higher-level spell once. If characters being able to buy scrolls or hire NPC casters is a thing in the campaign, just cut out the intermediary.

Player Tip: In a game in which the GM calls on players to add scene details, describe locales, summarize the party’s journey, or share the game narrative in other ways, don’t be afraid to join the fun. The campaign story is a story about you, and there’s no way for you to tell that story wrong.

GM Tip: Giving a stock monster the ability to use a couple of spells can upend expectations in a combat encounter faster than just about anything else, especially for experienced players. In a world in which magic is readily available to the characters, give their enemies equal access.

GM Tip: Look for any angle that can help turn a combat encounter into a social encounter, including having foes ask for quarter or offer badly injured characters a truce. Any monster who can talk can attempt to negotiate, and is intelligent enough to understand when they should negotiate.

Player Tip: If there are things about your character you find yourself struggling to recall, highlight your character sheet or keep a separate document with useful shortcuts. Can’t remember your initiative modifier or the names of useful spells that only come up once in while? Write them down.

GM Tip: Have a wide-ranging list of NPC names at hand that you can quickly look to whenever the players decide to talk to a barkeep, question a lackey, interrogate a cultist, and so forth. Nothing makes you look more in control than the illusion that every social interaction is already prepped.

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.

Art by Dean Spencer

Missing in Action

When I was a teenager, I spake as a teenager, I understood as a teenager, I thought as a teenager, and I played D&D, like, 36 hours a week. But when I became a man, I put away teenagerish things and now have to scramble to consistently book weekly game sessions that all the players can make it to. (With apologies to 1 Corinthians.)

I know that many other adults suffering under all the real-world pressures of adulting feel this same pain, and know the frustration that comes of having to cancel game night because one or two players can’t make it. So rather than cancel, GMs and players should talk about options for keeping the game going when someone is absent.

Whither GM?

Many players might be inclined to automatically assume that for sessions where the GM is unavailable owing to life stuff, there won’t be a session. And if so, it’s worth a reminder that anyone can be a GM. If you’ve been playing long enough, you’ve probably already absorbed everything you need to know about running a game from the GMs who’ve run games for you — so why not give it a shot? A night when the regular GM can’t make it is a great time to run your first game. Just grab a one-shot adventure or a starter set for your game of choice and go. You can even pitch your group about running a starter adventure that one or more of the other players have already played through if you like. With you running your first game for your regular group, people will be less concerned about getting a brand-new story and more focused on having fun.

The GM PC

For a GM who’s up for a challenge, running a character on the side is an obvious solution to the problem of a missing player. The player will need to make sure the GM has a current copy of their character sheet or details, with many GMs who are comfortable running player characters asking players to pass on a copy of their character sheets each time the characters level up. On the plus side, a GM willing to run a character probably has a strong sense that they’re capable of doing the job, and will be faithful to what the player would want the character to do. On the downside, a GM already has way too much to do, and running a player character on the side can make for a tough session.

Side Trek

If it fits the current continuity of the campaign, an effective way to cover for a missing player is to have their character go missing as well. Not in any nefarious way, but by having them step out of the main story for a session. This approach only works if the previous session ended at a natural breakpoint — the characters about to start a journey, undertake downtime, enter a ruin for the first time, and so forth. If it works for the setup, a playerless character might go ahead of the journey to act as a scout. They might slip away from the rest of group to deal with their own downtime stuff. If the area of the ruins is particularly dangerous, they might hang back and make sure no monsters follow the party in, then catch up later — which is to say, in the next session when the player returns.

The Backup Player

Players who are willing can volunteer to run another player’s character for a session. Aside from the other character’s sheet or details — obtained from the player or from a GM who has a backup of everyone’s character sheets — a player taking on someone else’s character needs to understand and respect how the other player typically runs the character, and should do their best to play the character the way the other player would have. This approach works best for a player whose own character is straightforward. Running a warrior whose entire personality is built around smashing things with a maul makes it relatively easy to also focus on running a side character — even a complicated character such as a caster. But the player of a spellcaster already dealing with casting mechanics, resources, and spell lists might have trouble taking on another caster at the same time.

Fade Into the Background

It’s often workable to have a missing player’s character present during an entire session, but just not really there. The character is understood to be with the party and part of the action, but they simply spend their time on the narrative sidelines while the other characters do the narrative heavy lifting. Having a character fade into the background in combat is easily done by splitting off a couple of foes who they can focus on alone while everyone else works together in the main fight.

Character as Mechanical Benefit

Sometimes the best way to deal with a character whose player is absent is to have no one play them, then make up for their absence in other ways. With this extension of the “Fade Into the Background” approach, the GM simply narrates the character’s presence during interaction scenes, exploration, or combat encounters, then gives the other players mechanical benefits from that presence. For example, the character might grant advantage to other characters’ skill checks during social encounters by acting as a support or a foil. They might allow a different character each round to deal double damage in combat in lieu of the playerless character making attacks. A character might also deal a fixed amount of damage each round to one or more enemies, with the GM coming up with a number that feels right rather than rolling attacks and damage.

Mix and Match

No matter which approach your group decides on when a player has to miss out on a session, you’ll find it useful to keep the other approaches in mind as well. Your GM might start out running a player character because the session starts with intrigue or action in which the character needs to play an important part, then have the character fade into the background as the session continues. Or the character might fade into the background at the start of the session, then be picked up and run by another player for a key combat or roleplaying scene. 

With any of these approaches, the most important takeaway is that having a player unable to make a session doesn’t need to mean cancelling that session. Especially for players with limited time, getting together to game is an important real-life social encounter. If a bunch of players all can’t make it, there might be nothing for it but to call for a rain check. But with just one player missing — or even two players in a large enough group — it’s worth the effort to find ways to carry on.

FRPG Tips — March 2025

Over on BluSky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I’ve been posting daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players. At the end of each month, I’ll be posting a full collection of that month’s tips 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.

GM Tip: Breaking a complex task into subtasks makes it easier for the players to dig into those tasks. Needing to decide between five things can be tough. Needing to do a thing, then choose between two things, then choose between two things creates a clearer throughline for success.

GM Tip: When thinking about fun roleplaying hooks for villains, focus less on the big boss and more on their lieutenants. The NPCs the characters go toe-to-toe with over and over again often create a more lasting impression than the boss who they face only in the final adventure arc.

GM Tip: Especially for starting characters, don’t be stingy with beneficial magic found as treasure. Claiming healing potions and useful scrolls after a tough fight always feels good — and is much more rewarding than having an adventure patron offer those things up front.

Player Tip: Enjoying playing your character is the ultimate goal of the game. So if that isn’t happening, talk to the GM about what might be going on. Sometimes the smallest changes to backstory, motivation, or feature choices can make a huge difference to how a character feels.

GM Tip: Giving players advantage on rolls is one of the best ways to reward and encourage roleplaying and out-of-the box thinking. Whether it’s a fervent speech at court before a Persuasion check or leaping off a balcony before a final strike, look to reward each player this way every session.

GM Tip: Some players aren’t keen on killing all their enemies, even when those enemies deserve it. If it suits your campaign, make use of having foes corrupted by supernatural evil, who then have that evil driven out of them when reduced to 0 health and are left unconscious and alive.

GM Tip: The best campaigns are built on foundations of the fantasy you love. For the purpose of the games you create with your friends, there’s no harm in paying tribute to your favorite books, films, and other media by outright stealing ideas, inspiration, plots, characters, and more.

Player Tip: It's fine to play an older starting character, but it’s good to know why your veteran sellsword or caster isn’t any better at what they do than the fresh young adventurers around them. An easy option: Turning their back on the past means they have to now relearn what they once knew.

GM Tip: In a freeform campaign where the characters’ choices drive the story, ask the players at the end of every session what the characters plan to do next. Doing so lets you optimize your prep time around one or two immediate goals, rather than trying to prep every possibility up front.

GM Tip: Especially for newer GMs still working on running multiple types of monsters at once, build encounters around a single moderate-threat foe plus two or three environmental effects. Because such effects play out the same way every round, they’re much easier to manage than additional foes.

GM Tip: Asking players for a list of three goals their character hopes to achieve is one of the easiest ways to keep a character grounded in a new campaign. Rather than trying to fine-tune encounters, reveals, and rewards based on what you think the characters and players will like, just ask!

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.

GM Tip: In campaigns favoring combat, having the heroes opposed by multiple groups of foes can easily push the threat level too high. But in campaigns that favor roleplaying and intrigue, characters can easily pit multiple groups of foes against each other rather than taking them on in turn.

GM Tip: For every encounter, have multiple end conditions in mind. In every combat, think about foes surrendering, bargaining, or fleeing. In every social encounter, think about diplomacy, observation, threats, or pilfering as equally valid options for the characters to get what they need.

GM Tip: Think of the games you run as serving your players a meal. When you notice that they really love what you served up in a previous session, serve that up again. For most people, it takes a long time to get tired of a favorite dish or dessert.

GM Tip: Some players love cliffhanger endings to sessions. Other players find them stressful, especially if the characters or the NPCs they care about are left in real peril. Talk about that in session zero, alongside asking if it’s okay for sessions to run long in order to avoid cliffhangers.

Player Tip: The reluctant hero is a great fictional trope. But characters not interested in adventuring can grind a campaign to a halt in a hurry. Always give the GM a clear understanding of what hooks will give your reluctant hero their “I will take the ring to Mordor!” moment.

GM Tip: Nothing in any game functions in isolation. In any encounter — combat or otherwise — stay open to what the characters’ actions in that encounter might lead to next. For every villain or NPC, think about what else they might do in addition to their primary narrative goal.

GM Tip: Using evil or corrupt organizations as the villains in your campaign is totally fine. But you can often build more interesting stories that favor roleplaying over combat by having a good organization fall victim to misguided motivations, leading its members to tyrannical acts.

GM Tip: The pacing of a game is often in the players’ hands, as they decide how much time the characters spend in exploration and roleplaying. Whenever possible, be flexible in how long your sessions run so that you don’t have to stop in the middle of a rich, complex scene in a clumsy fashion.

Player Tip: One old-school technique that every newer player can benefit from is writing things down. Digital character sheets are cool, but handwritten notes detailing stats, features, magic, gear, and more will burn those details into your brain far better than watching an app fill them in.

GM Tip: It costs nothing to let players retroactively decide they purchased common supplies at some point in the past. A player can forget to write down “rope” or “healing draught” on a character sheet far more easily than the character would forget such essential gear in the world of the game.

GM Tip: Improvising while running games shouldn’t feel overwhelming. Starting with a sense of “Anything can happen!” can freeze your creativity if it leaves you not knowing where to begin. So start instead with “One of the following four things can happen” and improvise within a set space.

GM Tip: When characters hit a turning point in an especially challenging fight, say so. “The demon goes down, and you see fear flash across the faces of the cultists.” Letting the players know they’ve gained an edge is a great way to reenergize a long combat.

Player Tip: It’s not metagaming to interact with and understand the world of the game as your character would. Pore over your game’s equipment and magic sections at will, and make notes on anything worth acquiring or seeking out that might make your adventuring life easier.

GM Tip: You don’t have to turn every moment of the game into a soliloquy, but try to punctuate key events and revelations with description. A critical hit, the realization that an NPC is a traitor, a clutch saving throw to avoid peril — go full-on theatric to bring those story beats to life.

GM Tip: Especially if you’re running your game online, don’t be beholden to battle maps. For straightforward encounters in common locations — a town square, a path through the woods, et al. — run combat without a map and have fun letting the action play out as description only.

GM and Player Tip: If everyone at the table hates sitting out combat because a character or monster is immobilized or stunned, introduce a house rule where you can take damage or lose healing to shake off effects that would leave you unable to act.

GM Tip: At different points in the campaign, make note of or ask the players about new personal goals or ambitions the characters have decided to work toward. Then look for ways to work those goals into the story while it plays out — especially as the campaign starts to come to a close.

GM Tip: It’s always good to end a session on a high note, but there are more ways to do that than a successful combat encounter. Figuring out a key plot point, achieving a roleplaying goal, uncovering sought-after lore, or avoiding an unexpected threat can all create a solid feeling of success.

GM and Player Tip: Don’t read your game’s core books with an exclusive focus on the mechanics and features you want to make use of. Read them to let yourself be drawn into the space defined by the feel of the game, so that story and characters can come fully to life in that space.

Magic Item Drawbacks

Since my very first days of playing AD&D, I’ve loved magic item curses. Though to be fair, I suspect some of that love might stem from me having been mostly a forever GM for those many years, so that I spend more time on the fun GM side of curses than the annoying player side.

I’ve made use of item curses in many a campaign. I wrote rules for magic item curses in 4th edition D&D that made their way into the magic item tome Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium. I’ve been “awarded” a cursed magic item or three in my day as a player and was just fine with that, because I truly and honestly love how things like curses can send the story of a game off in unexpected directions. But I totally understand that for many, many players, cursed magic items and their impact on character agency often make for an immediate stop to the fun. 

With those players in mind, I set up an array of magic item drawbacks (inspired by the type of item curse known as a drawback in D&D 3.5) for the CORE20 RPG. I find drawbacks just as much narrative fun as full-blown curses, but their effects are much, much milder, and thus less prone to wrecking the fun for players who don’t like their character story upturned as much as I do. So if those sorts of players are part of your 5e campaign, you can make use of those drawbacks, converted from CORE20 to 5e. 

You can roll randomly or choose a drawback for a magic item, or use the drawbacks presented here as inspiration for other story-complicating drawbacks of your own. A magic item with a drawback is never bonded to a wielder as a cursed item typically is, and so can simply be abandoned or set aside until its drawback can be dealt with. A drawback can be removed from an item with a remove curse spell. Any ongoing effects caused by a drawback are undone 24 hours after the drawback is removed from the item or the item is abandoned.

Drawbacks

1. Whenever you finish a short or long rest, your hair grows 1 inch longer.
2. Whenever you finish a short or long rest, you either shrink 1 inch shorter in height (1–3 on a d6) or grow 1 inch taller (4–5 on a d6).
3. The temperature within 5 feet of the item is always 10 degrees F cooler than the ambient temperature around it.
4. The temperature within 5 feet of the item is always 10 degrees F warmer than the ambient temperature around it.
5. Whenever you finish a long rest, your hair changes randomly to another color typical for your lineage.
6. Whenever you finish a long rest, your skin changes randomly to another color typical for your lineage.
7. A tattoo appears on your body of embarrassing, profane, or incriminating nature, as the GM determines.
8. Whenever the campaign enters downtime, you must succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or be affected by a random disease.
9. The item continually emits a disturbing sound (moaning, weeping, screaming, cursing, insults, and so on).
10. Some aspect of the item’s appearance randomly becomes conspicuously unusual (garish color, useless flanges or appendages, embarrassing sigils, and so forth).
11. If you are ever surprised, you panic and must attack the nearest creature on your first turn in combat. If you can’t do so, you are stunned until the end of your first turn.
12. The first time you use the item after you finish a long rest (the item is activated, is used as part of an action, has its bonus made use of, and so forth), you are stunned on your next turn.
13. Your eyes are blurry, imposing disadvantage on Perception checks involving vision.
14. Your hands tremble, imposing disadvantage on Sleight of Hand checks and checks made using tools that involve fine movement.
15. You are plagued by self-doubt, imposing disadvantage on Performance and Persuasion checks.
16. You have trouble catching your breath, imposing disadvantage on Athletics checks.
17. You mumble constantly to yourself, imposing disadvantage on Stealth checks whenever other creatures can hear you.
18. The first time you enter combat after you finish a long rest, you are poisoned during the first round of combat.
19. Whenever you finish a long rest, you must succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or have disadvantage on Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution saving throws (chosen randomly) until the end of your next long rest.
20. Whenever you finish a short rest, you must succeed on a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw or gain 1 level of exhaustion that lasts until you finish your next short rest.

The Character Crucible

My first really tangible RPG character (by which I mean a character I rolled up who I actually wanted to play long-term, as opposed to one of the many characters-of-the-week that 1st edition AD&D was so often about) was Morgan — a human fighter who was a direct lift in every way from the character Travis Morgan in Mike Grell’s comic The Warlord. I borrowed the name. I borrowed the look (though my Morgan favored chain mail over the comic character’s leotard-or-loincloth vibe). I borrowed the character’s philosophy of believing in a world where the credo wasn’t “Might make right,” but “Might for right.”

From The Warlord issue 7 (“The Iron Devil”),
written and illustrated by Mike Grell. 

My second really tangible character — rolled up not long after Morgan, and played alongside him as inseparable friends for many years — was a human magic-user named Stormhand, whose inspiration was largely, “What would it be like if I could cast spells?” Stormhand was a self-insert character, with no external inspiration and no real sense of what he even looked like beyond “usually brooding.” Playing him was entirely about giving me a chance to act like the forthright, driven, confident problem-solver I was pretty sure I could have been in high school except for all that incapacitating social awkwardness stuff.

From these two extremes, I learned pretty early in my RPG life that there’s no single right way to build a character. And over the course of having created many characters and having watched friends and family members build many, many more through decades of campaigns, I’ve noted certain key patterns of character inspiration that all players can tap into.

Fictional Inspiration

Here’s an important tip, especially for first-time players: No one else in the game will care if you lift your character concept straight from your favorite work of fiction. You can probably even get away with playing them under their own name, as I did with Morgan all those many years ago, though coming up with a new name can be most effective at disguising the character’s origins. Your acrobatic unarmed brawler on the run from the assassins guild that trained her? No one else will care that everything you throw into the character at the table comes straight from how much you love Black Widow from the Marvel-verse. That stoic elf archer who pulls out two shortswords when the monsters get up close and personal? You can probably even take a shot at using Orlando Bloom’s accent as you Legolas your way through the campaign.

You, but Better

I say “You, but better” with the following qualifier: You are already awesome, and I can safely say that without even knowing you because the fact that you play tabletop RPGs puts you in a special class of awesome people. But all of us, no matter how awesome we are, have things we yearn for that we don’t have the opportunity to do — and letting the character you play tap into those things can be an amazing exercise in personal fulfillment. On a basic level, we live in a world bereft of fantasy magic, so that playing an arcanist, a healer, or a wielder of primal energy can tap into a deep-seated yearning to know what magic might feel like. Likewise, there are plenty of monstrous and evil people in our world — a point that’s become especially acute at this particular point in history. But most of us are never in a position to directly oppose that evil the way our fantasy RPG characters can. 

With this mode of character creation, your character’s outlook, desires, and approach to life are all rooted firmly in your own life, your own philosophies and convictions. Then you get to push those philosophies and convictions to new extents by virtue of bringing who you are into the game, wrapped in the guise of the character the game lets you make. 

Product of the Past

Sometimes one of the most engaging ways to create a character is to have no strong sense of who the character is — because figuring that out is the point of playing the game. This mode of character building focuses almost entirely on backstory, as you create the strongest possible sense of where your character comes from. Then, armed only with that sense of what’s brought the character to the point where the campaign begins, you let the ups and downs of the campaign determine who the character becomes over time. This approach works especially well in a sandbox-style campaign with no set narrative arc, allowing the evolution of the character to help drive the campaign story, and vice versa.

That said, be aware that GMs are always on the lookout for backstory-driven characters who use that backstory as an excuse to resist being drawn into the campaign. Usually this takes the form of players complaining that their character isn’t feeling the incentive to go into the dungeon, rescue the missing prince, or what have you — so don’t be that player. It’s up to you, not the GM, to come up with reasons why your always-in-progress character wants to engage with the campaign story as it unfolds.

Goal Oriented

The opposite approach to focusing on your character’s past is to think primarily about what your character wants for the future. A goal-oriented character zeroes in on the traditional benchmarks for a character in literary fiction. What do they want? What do they need? How do the character’s want and need differ? And at what point do they realize that what they need is more important than what they want? A character with a rock-solid set of future goals will still definitely have a past that connects to those goals. But when building a goal-oriented character, you’ll usually find yourself leaving that past sketchy, then fleshing it out as the events of the campaign produce moments connected to your goals that you want to in turn connect to the past.

Mix and Match

Naturally, none of the above modes of character creation need to be adhered to exclusively, and you can combine any of these ideas in any number of ways. You might start with fictional inspiration and decide to make that fictional character you love into an avatar of your own beliefs and desires. You might start off with a goal-oriented character who suddenly generates a much more detailed backstory than you initially had in mind. You might start out with a solid backstory and a blank slate of where the character might go and why, then realize immediately that the character embodies a favorite fantasy archetype you hadn’t been thinking about.

If you’ve been gaming for a long while and have never thought about your character creation process, you probably draw from some of the frameworks above without actually thinking about them in these terms. Building characters is an instinctive kind of fun for most players. But thinking about the specific foundations of your process can make that process even more interesting — or put you in a better position to help newer players figure out their own process.

Avoid Character-as-Features

In addition to the four modes of character creation and development presented above, there’s a fourth mode that I generally warn people against, but which becomes ever-more prevalent as games like D&D 5e become ever-more feature focused. In a class-based RPG, deciding what class to play is often the first choice a player makes, and reasonably so. But a focus on choosing a class and subclass and all the special features that extend out from those initial choices makes it way too easy to create a character exclusively from the perspective of game features and mechanics. 

Now, there’s nothing wrong with loving the features and mechanics of a particular character class. If some aspect of playing a fighter or a paladin or a rogue or a warlock appeals to you, go for it. But in my experience — speaking both about the characters I’ve played and the many more characters I’ve seen other people play in the games I run — characters built primarily as a collection of class features in search of a story have a much harder time finding that story. As much as is possible, think about class features as something you build onto a character concept crafted in a more narrative-focused way, rather than hoping that the features will suggest a narrative to you. Because the story that mechanical features can tell is a lot more limited than the many other options your character-building imagination will come up with if you let it.

FRPG Tips — February 2025

Over on BluSky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I’ve been posting daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players. On the last day of each month, I’ll be posting a full collection of the previous month’s tips 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: 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.

FRPG GM Tip: We notice cliches and coincidence in fiction much more than in real life — and an RPG feels like real life when we’re in it. Don’t be afraid to have NPCs show up in taverns, or to leave convenient notes and journals lying around. As long as it advances the story, the players won’t care.

FRPG GM Tip: An encounter that feels flat can be easily energized by a ticking clock. A magical shrine threatens to explode. Guards have been called and the duke must be won over quickly. As long as any outcome advances the story, tell the players they have a time limit and see the tension rise.

FRPG GM Tip: When it’s clear that the players — especially young players — don’t want to kill every foe they meet, think about building the biggest battles of your campaign around constructs, undead, fiends, and enemies who have freely chosen a path of irredeemable evil.

FRPG Player Tip: Characters don’t necessarily need to be balanced in their features and roles to have a fun game, but balance in look and feel is usually a good idea. Your “Bob the Fighter” can feel out of place next to more “realistic” characters, so ask the other players how they feel about that. 

FRPG GM Tip: When characters attempt to sneak or hide, avoid opposed rolls in favor of setting a DC based on your sense of the challenge. Sneaking by a tired town guard at night? An easy check. Hiding by day from a pack of wood elf scouts all wired on amphetamines? Probably a hard check.

FRPG GM Tip: If the party ever ends up divided by circumstance rather than by choice, set out clear guidelines for how to bring everybody back together. Whatever subgoals emerge from being separated, make sure that reuniting is the overriding goal, and that the players know how to make that happen.

FRPG GM Tip: Players picking less-than-perfect builds or doubling up on party roles isn’t an excuse for you to run a game that’ll teach them a lesson about character optimization. It’s an invitation to show off how you can shape an adventure — even on the fly — to be a fun challenge for any group.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: When playing face-to-face, some folks are fine with food and drink at the table. Others prefer to keep game time and snack time separate. Talk to each other to make sure everyone’s happy with the snack situation. And if appropriate, snacks for the GM make a great thank-you.

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 GM Tip: For a first session with a new group of players — especially inexperienced players — let appropriate humor play out in the adventure, even in small ways. Laughing during a session can help players overcome initial nervousness, and quickly establishes that having fun is everyone’s goal.

FRPG Player Tip: Your character’s flaws or dark side should never become an excuse to disrupt or derail the game for other players — especially the GM. Antiheroes who don’t play nice with others make great characters in fiction, but a campaign is about shared narrative, not solo stories. 

FRPG GM Tip: Don’t do this for every foe, but key encounters can be made much more interesting by having one or two enemies flying. Flying magic exists in most games, so as long the characters have effective ranged attacks, give the bandit chieftain a potion and let them soar.

FRPG GM Tip: Writing little bits of in-game fiction is a great way to help players remember key developments in the campaign. But whether a letter, a journal, a cargo manifest, an arrest report, or what have you, keep it brief. Too much overall detail makes it more difficult to remember key details.

FRPG GM Tip: Asking for feedback is one of the most difficult things to do for any creator — but the campaign you create will benefit from it. Every few sessions, ask your players what they’re enjoying most about your games. Then ask what things you can do to make them enjoy your games even more.

FRPG Player Tip: Skipping the murder-hobo vibe of a fantasy RPG you otherwise love can be as easy as asking the GM, “Hey, can we skip the murder-hobo vibe?” Start by talking about house rule options for all attacks and spells to leave creatures incapacitated, so killing foes isn’t the only option.

FRPG GM Tip: A session where the players spend two hours planning how to undermine foes, then one hour in combat against those foes, can be just as much fun as the characters doing zero planning before spending three hours in combat. Embrace helping players avoid the trouble you’ve planned for them.

FRPG GM Tip: When thinking about which elements to make recurring features of your campaign, let the players decide for you. Take note of which subplots, NPCs, locations, and threats they talk about most after the fact, then prep those things for a follow-up appearance.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially for starting characters, a number of easy-threat foes are often a better combat choice than a single high-threat foe. A group of foes deals less damage each time one of them is taken out, but a single foe deals full damage right from the start of a fight to the end.

FRPG Player Tip: A good backstory is more about asking questions than making statements. Statements can only tell you where your character has been. Questions covering the things your character wants to knodw or is looking for will set up where you’re going, and that’s what the game is about.

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 GM Tip: One downside to loving the GM’s life is having no time to play in other people’s games. So make the time. Find a campaign to play in alongside yours. Pitch your friends on running one-shots. Nothing helps you see your own game from the players’ perspective better than being a player.

FRPG GM Tip: Thinking about your character’s story can be one of the best parts of being a player — so don’t forget to have that same fun with your key villains and NPCs. What are their ambitions? Their hopes and dreams? What are they afraid of? What secrets do they least want to see revealed?

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re new to the game, focus first on the narrative side of a character’s features and traits, not the mechanics. You can develop and fine-tune your understanding of mechanics as you play. But building a character story based on the rules of a game is almost always a bad idea.

FRPG GM Tip: Don’t be afraid to pass on tactical tips to the players that their characters would be well aware of in the midst of combat. If you know the front-liners will break if their captain is taken out, work that into the narrative of the fight — especially if the characters are struggling.

FRPG GM Tip: When asking players “What do you do?”, make sure two or three default options are already laid out. It’s great fun when someone picks the fourth or fifth option you hadn’t thought about, but having no sense of what’s possible can easily freeze up a player’s ability to make a decision.

FRPG GM Tip: Swapping damage types is one of the easiest ways to make foes stand out in a fight. Mercenaries of the Flameblood Company whose weapon attacks deal fire damage. Wolves serving pestilence druids whose bites deal necrotic damage. Even a minor change can make a stock threat feel fresh.

FRPG Player Tip: Arguments and disagreements can make for great roleplaying. But unless you know your group well and have established suitable boundaries, don’t look to create real conflict between characters. An adventuring party is about strength in numbers, and conflict eats away that strength.

(Art by Dean Spencer)