FRPG Tips — March 2026

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: Play doesn’t need to consistently be focused on action, but always look for ways to make it actionable. The most granular exploration or sedate roleplaying scenes still need to have choices the characters can make and things they can do that send the story forward in a new direction.

FRPG Player Tip: If your character wants to do a specific thing, let the GM know that. A monster you love to fight? Special interests or talents? Tactics your character excels at? Favorite downtime activities? Lay it all out so the GM has a chance to work those details into the campaign.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: When dealing with a lot of circumstantial bonuses for a die roll against a fixed target number, roll the die before doing the math. Because if the die roll is high enough to beat the target number on its own, you probably don’t need to do the math.

FRPG GM Tip: Historically, when people needed to build a new thing, they didn’t bother knocking the old thing down — they buried it and built on top of it. All the castles, temples, and towns in your game likely have a collective other world’s worth of forgotten chambers and tunnels underneath them.

FRPG Player Tip: Never be afraid to jump in if you’ve got easy access to a mechanic or a bit of lore a player or GM is seeking. Do you know a rule with certain clarity? Do you have your book open to the section someone else is poring over? Say so, and shortcut the time it takes to look things up.

FRPG GM Tip: In a published adventure, it can be good to replace a stock villain with an NPC the characters already know. But if the adventure’s villain turns out to be more interesting than a villain you created, turn your villain into a hybrid character by stealing features and plot hooks at will.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: There’s nothing wrong with a player telling a GM up front: “I’ve invested a lot in this character, and if they die, I’d like to bring them back.” Most games feature countless ways to cheat death, and it doesn’t lessen the fun to be thinking ahead on that topic.

FRPG GM Tip: Anytime the way forward in a scene is set behind a single die roll, you’re in dangerous territory, because a failed roll will leave you scrambling to figure out how to move the story forward. Always look for at least two obvious ways the characters might overcome any challenge.

FRPG Player Tip: If it’s the first time you’re playing a game, look for an uncomplicated character build so that the rules you need to know don’t undermine the story you want to tell. If you’re not instinctively sure which builds are the easiest to play, ask other players for advice. 

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Watching actual play games can make it feel as if doing character voices is an essential part of fantasy roleplaying. It isn’t. Like painting miniatures, it’s an extra feature that lots of people enjoy, but if you don’t, your games will be just as much fun without it.

FRPG GM Tip: Don’t be afraid to ask players to help you track complicated ongoing effects during combat encounters. Especially when running characters with a straightforward combat build, a lot of players are happy to have something else to do while waiting for their turn to come up.

FRPG Player Tip: The game is meant to be fun. So if you’re not having fun, think about what you feel is missing from the game that might change that. Then talk to the other players and the GM about what might need fixing. Your player group is a party, and party members look out for each other.

FRPG GM Tip: There’s nothing wrong with telling stories that touch on repeated settings and themes, especially if you run campaigns in the same world. But for any new campaign, coming up with at least one concept or angle you’ve never made use of before will help keep things fresh.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The best point in a campaign for the characters to get access to a headquarters, sanctum, or other home base is right now. Whether you’re using specific rules or just narratively winging it, a party headquarters is a perfect in-game space for collective creativity.

FRPG GM Tip: For most people, remembering things is about reinforcement, not cramming. If your schedule allows it, avoid marathon prep an hour before a game. Instead, let your session plans, stat blocks, and campaign notes sit for a day or two, then review and revise them to fix them in your mind.

FRPG Player Tip: Don’t be afraid to play a game you’re not crazy about if you get a sense that the other players want to use that game to create a story you’ll love. Likewise, feel free to steer clear of a game you love if there’s any hint that the story other players intend to tell isn’t for you.

FRPG GM Tip: You always want to build scenes with multiple outcomes, but players won’t always note those outcomes automatically. Connect each outcome to a clear choice the characters can see, letting them select those choices directly or use them as a catalyst for choices you didn’t expect.

FRPG Player Tip: Beyond their mechanical effects on attacks and defenses, ability scores are a great shortcut to roleplaying. Your character’s mental and physical presence in the game, even if that’s just describing how they explore a room, can always reflect what you’re naturally good or bad at.

FRPG GM Tip: Boss fights against single powerful monsters are cool and all, but it’s really easy for a single creature to get locked down by a large party, then quickly dispatched. For best results, set up lackeys in a boss fight — or bring them in partway through a fight — to broaden the challenge.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The point of any RPG is for players and GM to work together. The foundation of any RPG is a set of rules that can and should be customized at will to advance the goal of working together. The win condition of any RPG is having fun working together.

FRPG GM Tip: It might seem like a small thing, but using static damage for traps, monsters, and environmental effects can save you a ton of time during a session. And if you ever need to mix things up, just roll damage once in a while or adjust it up or down by 1 or 2 points at random.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If the other players in a campaign have more experience with the game than you do, rely on them as a resource. If no one playing has more experience than you, then take comfort in how you’ll all be making the same number of mistakes as you figure things out together.

FRPG GM Tip: On the list of things you should change as you see fit in a published adventure, the number and makeup of enemies in combat encounters sits right at the top. Add, lose, or swap out foes at your whim to fine-tune the difficulty of fights, the pace of a session, and the flow of the story.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If you game in person, and if you enjoy snacks while you game, but if you don’t have a consensus within your group about allowing food at the table during play, having a quick snack-pot-luck hangout before the game officially starts can be fun.

FRPG GM Tip: When the campaign is pushing through the necessary setbacks that make eventual victory sweeter, always try to offset failure with useful benefits. When the heroes are thwarted by the villain, let them discover beneficial magic or the lore they’ve been searching for in the aftermath.

FRPG Player Tip: If you find your caster working with the standard suite of spells that all casters seem to focus on, talk to the GM about mixing things up by reflavoring those spells. Maybe your character learned a version of a spell with a nonstandard presentation or a slightly different effect.

FRPG GM Tip: Whether you keep a stack of page-marked rulebooks beside you at the table or are a deft hand with your game’s online rules search, keep a cheat sheet handy that details the rules you most often have to look up or adjudicate. No book or search engine knows your needs as well as you do. 

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If it’s clear that a player’s made the wrong choice of build or backstory for a character, just change that character. Especially at the start of a campaign, a game can absorb even broad changes to character continuity much better than it can deal with players not having fun.

Art by Dean Spencer

The Art of the One-Shot

As the foreword to the original “white box” edition of Dungeons & Dragons said of the brand-new medium of fantasy roleplaying games: “While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed.” There’s no question that this concept of the campaign as a longform shared-narrative story is still the foundation and best part of the experience of playing a fantasy RPG. But at the same time, every campaign effectively starts out as a single adventure, and there’s something special about that experience that makes one-shot games great fun.

Why One-Shot ?

Even if your process of running games is focused entirely on a long-term campaign, opportunities and reasons to run one-shots are always present. At the top of the list for many groups, playing a one-shot is a great alternative to cancelling game night if most players can make it but enough are absent to make running the regular campaign game a nonstarter. Or in a campaign that features a significant break point between different parts of the story, including an extended downtime between the previous story arc and the next, taking a week or two off to run one-shots can help heighten that break.

Just as common is the opportunity to run a game for new players — friends, classmates, coworkers, and so forth — who have never played an RPG before but are keen to try it out. But whatever inspires your urge to run a one-shot adventure, the following things are worth keeping in mind.

Pregens For All!

A one-shot game by definition should be started and finished in a single session. This means focusing on the adventure first and foremost, and nothing gets in the way of that better than dedicating a big chunk of the session to character creation. Even with really straightforward games, brand-new players wanting their first taste of a fantasy RPG most likely have zero interest in the niceties of the character creation process. So ignore that process with a handy selection of pregenerated player characters. 

Some one-shot adventures might come with their own set of pregens, built specifically with the adventure’s story in mind. But if not — or if you prefer to homebrew your one-shot — the Internet is full of pregens for literally every RPG system out there. (If you’re playing D&D 5e and are looking for 1st-level pregen characters, feel free to check out the free, new-and-young-player-friendly heroes I created for the Hidden Halls of Hazakor starter adventure.)

Going Low

Especially when running a game for brand-new players, one-shots are often best when focused on straightforward starting characters. Even for players with plenty of experience in higher-tier campaigns, taking a break to go back to being a neophyte can be fun, and makes it more likely that players can focus on the fun of the single-session story as opposed to looking up rules for a higher-tier character whose features they’re not familiar with.

One option for a regular group who dip into one-shots to break up a long-term campaign is to treat their one-shot characters as side characters, letting them gain experience, new levels, or new features between one-shot games. Advancing characters by design this way is a good way to create higher-powered characters ready to play future one-shots, even as the lower-powered versions of the characters can be archived to be reused as needed.

Keep It Simple

Especially if you’re a GM who loves having your adventure scenarios challenged by highly focused, optimized characters, take a step back from that when running one-shot adventures. Complex and optimized characters are great fun in a campaign where players are building those characters over time. But it can be a huge challenge to process and master a complex character in the short time that a one-shot allows.

For your one-shots, encourage the use of simple pregens or straightforward character builds that be assembled in just a few minutes at the start of a session. Keep in mind the general rule that spellcasters are often more challenging for new players than combat-focused builds, and don’t be afraid to customize the one-shot to allow an unconventional party built around ease of play. If a group of brand-new players all want to run martial classes or warrior builds, run with that, directing your complexity-loving GM’s brain to reshape the adventure and let an unconventional party shine.

Standalone Adventures

One-shot adventures are in tremendous supply across the hobby, so even if you’re looking for a one-shot on short notice, you should have little trouble seeking out and finding one that feels like a good fit for your group. Among many other options, adventures created for organized play and convention games are often focused on a single three-to-four-hour session’s worth of gaming, and provide enough background information to let you run your game as a standalone even if the adventure is part of a larger series.

If you find yourself running a lot of single-session adventures, you can also keep an eye out for anthologies of one-shots or standalone adventures. (I am obliged to point you in the direction of Fantastic Lairs, a book created by Mike Shea, James Introcaso, and myself that provides a wide range of scenarios that can be run as one-shots or integrated into a larger campaign.) Or if you prefer to homebrew, I wrote up a short guide to designing a single-session site-based adventure in about 10 minutes that’s worth looking at.

Flexible Foes

Especially when running a one-shot for low-powered or beginning player characters, be ready to adjust the math of monsters and other challenges on the fly to keep the adventure fun. When a group of brand-new players ready for their first exposure to RPGs sits down for your one-shot adventure, having their characters fail badly or die outright makes for a bad introduction to the hobby. In a longer campaign, ups and downs are an essential part of the heroic narrative, with each failure the characters face making the victory that follows feel sweeter. But a one-shot should be focused almost entirely on wins for the heroes, making sure that setbacks are minor and easily overcome.

FRPG Tips — February 2026

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: Running theater-of-the-mind combat doesn’t mean maps should be forbidden at your table. Especially if playing online, a map can provide you and the players with a sense of shared space that helps bring the scene to life even if you’re not counting squares.

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re into sports analogies, not all of your character’s moves need to be a home run, a slam dunk, or a slap-shot goal. The social aspect of RPGs means that setting up another player’s chance to shine can be just as rewarding as standing in the spotlight yourself.

FRPG GM Tip: Keeping track of what the villains are doing is an essential part of campaign tracking — and is easy to forget as you focus on what the heroes are doing. Make thinking about the villains’ plans a regular part of your prep, especially when the characters can’t see those plans developing.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: How to handle character death is an important topic both for session zero and as the campaign unfolds. For some, grimdark lethality is fun. For others, losing a character makes the investment in that character feel wasted. Talk about what approach works best for your group.

FRPG GM Tip: The different modes of many fantasy RPGs — combat, roleplaying, and exploration — are often talked about as separate elements, even as they most often play best in combination. Look for roleplaying opportunities during battles. Have exploration trigger quick and easy battles.

FRPG Player Tip: When a new session picks up after a week of real time but only ten minutes of game time, you’re going to have trouble remembering things that would be fresh in your character’s mind. So keep notes of party goals, recent discoveries, upcoming plans, and more to close that gap.

FRPG GM Tip: The best way to improvise is to do so before your game as well as during. Ad-lib or generate lists of NPC and location names, wandering monsters, bits of discoverable lore, NPC mannerisms and secrets, and anything else you can think of, then pull randomly from those lists as you play.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The flavor of spell effects can almost always be reworked without breaking the game. Change up a spell’s appearance, components, damage type, or the way it’s resisted to create interesting cult casters, PCs and NPCs with unique magical backgrounds, and more.

FRPG GM Tip: Feints, red herrings, and unreliable narrators are great tools for fiction, but a campaign feels more personal than any fiction ever can. Using narrative subterfuge once to deceive the characters is fun. But doing it over and over again runs the risk of the players feeling deceived.

FRPG Player Tip: When joining a new game, definitely think about whether the system feels like a good fit for you. But every system is capable of telling a dizzying array of stories as it’s filtered through the players, so look first and foremost to the type of story the other players want to tell.

FRPG GM Tip: Villains should always be malleable. As the campaign advances — and especially if you’re running a published adventure — don’t be afraid to combine villains, switch their allegiances, or completely rewrite their goals and plans in response to how the story changes direction.

FRPG Player Tip: Having the game become unbalanced in the characters’ favor can feel like a windfall at first. But over time, things feeling too easy can undermine the heroic narrative that makes a game compelling. Let the GM know if house rules or story developments start to feel a bit too sweet.

FRPG GM Tip: For narrative scenes, have at least one obvious path the characters can follow. If an NPC is noticeably angry, trying to dial down that anger is an easy choice that will inspire other choices. But an inscrutable NPC can leave players so hesitant about what to do that they do nothing.

FRPG Player Tip: If you find it daunting or stressful when the spotlight of a roleplaying scene focuses on your character, always feel free to follow the lead of others. Talk back to a boss or expand on a roleplaying beat using elements another character has already introduced.

FRPG GM Tip: Most of the monsters you’ll ever run are a lot tougher than you. But on the flip side, your experience as a GM means you likely know more about the game’s mechanics and tactics than they do. Let enemies make mistakes in combat, especially in response to cool moves by the characters.

FRPG Player Tip: The win condition for any RPG is having fun, even when characters fail or suffer setbacks. So don’t lose sight of that goal even if a downbeat in the campaign is weighing on you. As one of the writers of the campaign story, you can always have your eyes on the next success.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Always, always, always ask questions, whether you’re wanting to clarify a player’s intent, double-check a bit of lore, remember something a character or NPC would know, or what have you. The game is a conversation, so never be shy about starting that conversation.

FRPG GM Tip: Nothing makes a campaign go flat faster than following a narrative line that the players have lost interest in. A campaign is a living, organic thing, constantly reshaping itself based on the players’ and characters’ goals — so pay close attention to those goals and how they change.

FRPG Player Tip: Whenever you end up playing a character who’s more complicated than expected, pick and choose simple elements of that character and focus on them one at a time. If your warrior has six combat moves, test them out over six different fights before you think about combining them.

FRPG GM Tip: If you struggle to come up with options for characters to “fail forward” on a tanked check or test, try a humorous approach. On a failed check to find a secret door, have the door already broken and let it fall on a searching character for minor damage before revealing the room beyond.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: For heroes and NPCs alike, when describing the action in a scene, focus on active sensory details. Don’t describe a character or NPC being angry. Talk about how they knock their chair over and set a hand to their scabbard as they stand in response to a rebuke.

FRPG GM Tip: Going over the top with worldbuilding is great fun, and there’s nothing wrong with doing so. But in almost all cases, the lore your game needs at any given moment should revolve around people, places, and history that the heroes can get caught up in with just a few days’ travel.

Art by Dean Spencer

The Fine Art of Failing Forward

“Failing forward” is simple in concept — but often difficult to put into play on the fly.

I recently posted a fantasy RPG tip online that gave a bit of advice for handling the idea of “failing forward” when a check or test made by the characters in your game goes completely south. Then I had someone reach out saying they didn’t fully understand what the concept of failing forward meant, so let’s talk about that.

Advancing Test by Test

In most RPGs, the characters’ forward momentum depends on them succeeding on checks or tests — rolls representing a specific action, whose result determines the outcome of that action. Make a test to convince an NPC to help the party, roll your percentage chance to climb a wall, make a check to see if you successfully jump over a pit, and that sort of thing. In many RPGs, including Dungeons & Dragons, checks and tests are binary in nature — you succeed or you fail. But that binary outcome creates problems when failure stops an adventure in its tracks.

If the characters need to find a secret door to get into the hidden second half of a dungeon, what happens if everyone’s checks fail? If the party needs a noble’s assistance to gather information about an assassin’s guild, what happens if all attempts at diplomacy result in rolls so low they can only leave the noble enraged? It’s always a good idea to set up multiple solutions to the problems the characters face, whether you’re writing your own adventures or adding to published adventures. You can make sure there’s another way into the secret dungeon if the characters can’t find the door, or have different NPCs the party can seek an alliance with. But especially with a published adventure that locks down forward progress behind a single check or test, you can always ask yourself: “How can this failure still push the story forward?”

What “Failing Forward” means

When we talk about failing forward, we don’t simply want to pretend that a failure isn’t a failure. On a really bad check to pick a lock, it can feel like cheating to tell a player, “The lock opens anyway. I guess it was easier than you thought.” Rather, failing forward involves thinking about ways that failing at an intended task can create its own alternative path the characters can follow toward where they want to go.

Failing forward is likewise different than the setup of games that dispense with a success/failure binary in favor of a wider scale of success (including Dungeon World, Draw Steel, and CORE20). Even in games where partial successes or successes with complications are the rule, you can still fail tests and checks — and those failures can still stop an adventure dead.

Here's the thing, though. Especially for games with a rigid sense of binary success/failure built into their mechanics, coming up with ways for the characters to fail forward is really hard. Even people who love the idea (like me) sometimes struggle in the moment to turn mechanical catastrophe into an eventually positive outcome and avoid the story grinding to a halt. So whenever you have a failure threaten to put the brakes on the campaign narrative, keep the following points in mind.

Failure is Still Failure

Failing forward should always come at some sort of cost over and above whatever resources were expended in failing the test or check. Failure is still failure. It should sting. The players and characters should feel as if they’ve gotten lucky in being able to work around their failure, but they should likewise be aware that there’s a price to be paid for that opportunity, or that the path opened up by failure is more difficult than the path they’ve missed out on. If cleansing a corrupted shrine is the endgame goal of an adventure, a failure on the attempt to do so threatens to leave the ending of the adventure feeling flat. So maybe that failure overloads the shrine, causing it to eventually burn out on its own — but after summoning monsters for a final unplanned combat encounter.

How Bad Can Things Get?

When a check or test goes bad, look past thinking about the outcome as a clear failure. Instead, ask yourself: “What’s the worst possible way for the characters to succeed?” For example, a failure to gain the trust of a noble might automatically bring the characters to the attention of another noble — who has exactly what the characters need but demands some kind of extreme payment or service in return. Or the noble might have a dire reputation that attaches itself to the characters, becoming something that sullies their own reputation throughout the rest of the campaign. A failure to overcome corrupted magic at the entrance of an underground temple might see the characters enter the temple anyway when the floor collapses beneath their feet. Or you might decide that the corruption carries with the characters, imposing penalties in combat or on subsequent tests that you improvise on the fly.

Side Trekking

When failure thwarts the party, ask yourself whether that failure can result in an interesting extension to the campaign story that you hadn’t thought about. If the characters screw up their plans to seek information from a one-off NPC or accidentally collapse the entrance of the ruin they’re meant to explore, a side trek might solve that easily. With the main NPC off limits, how can the heroes seek out an alternative source of lore or resources? Can the collapsed entrance be dug out, or does the collapse open up an alternative, more dangerous entrance to the ruins that the characters would never have noticed if not forced to seek it?

Side treks often work better in homebrew campaigns, where it can be easier to change maps and NPC rosters than in a published adventure. They also work best in an adventure where the characters aren’t under an extreme time crunch. Having a side trek make the characters’ overall time-sensitive goal more difficult is great, but it can’t cause the heroes to fail at that larger goal.

Just for Laughs

Turning failure into success can work to keep the campaign story moving. But it doesn’t necessarily do anything to counteract the hit of taking the failure on the chin in the first place. As noted above, it’s important for failure to sting — but as a general rule, heroes and players alike hate screwing up. So when you’re thinking about ways to let the characters fail forward, finding humor in the failure can help soften the blow.

For example (from the post linked at the top that precipitated this discussion), a failure to locate a secret door the characters absolutely need to go through right now is normally an awkward stop point. But that failure can be tweaked to keep things moving forward by having the door be previously damaged — and falling on the character who got the worst result on the search check. Likewise, if a failure in a social encounter leaves the heroes needing to seek out a different NPC as a resource, having that NPC be the most ridiculous, over-the-top caricature will feel better than having a competent mastermind remind the players of their failure.

FRPG Tips — January 2026

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: Coming up with holidays and celebrations is a great way to bring your campaign world to life, but holidays needn’t be monolithic. Different cultures, calendars, and traditions mean that characters might usher in the new year multiple times a year depending on where they travel.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If incorporating analogues of real-world events into your games makes those games harder to enjoy, set them aside. If incorporating analogues of real-world events into your games lets you find some measure of catharsis, embrace them. 

FRPG GM Tip: Especially if you’re running games on a virtual tabletop, don’t feel compelled to run a combat encounter just because you’ve spent time setting it up. Always let the players and characters bypass combat with strategy or subterfuge. 

FRPG Player Tip: Never be afraid to ask the GM, “Is this something my character would know?” You understand more about your character and their life than anyone else at the table, but not even you can remember all the things your character has seen, learned, and done.

FRPG GM Tip: Spells that allow enemies to be charmed or rendered into a magical slumber can upend combat faster than just about anything. Embrace that idea, and prepare for it long before it happens by making sure that every combat encounter is about more than just the fight.

FRPG Player Tip: Great stories are often built around strong goals and obstacles. What does a character want? What stops them from getting it? Giving the GM a clear sense of your character’s desires, alongside the hangups getting in the way of that, can tie you into a campaign better than anything.

FRPG GM Tip: The ideal number of environmental effects to add to an encounter area (whether a combat encounter or otherwise) is always greater than 0. The fewer other details the players need to focus on, the greater the usefulness of the environment to help them slip fully into the scene.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If your game focuses heavily on specific types of actions and what those actions allow the characters and their foes to do, don’t be afraid to improvise if your intended actions don’t fit the action economy. “What do you want to do?” should always be your starting point.

FRPG GM Tip: No one ever has as much free time as they’d like, but as much as possible, try to spread your free prep time over a number of days rather than one day. Prepping 10 minutes a day over the week will help focus your notes and ideas better than two hours’ prep only on the day of your game.

FRPG Player Tip: If there’s a particular game, genre, setting, or set of optional rules you’ve always wanted to play but haven’t had any luck finding a GM to run for you, congratulations! You’ve just given yourself the best possible reason to sit down in the GM’s chair for the first time.

FRPG GM Tip: It’s okay to have NPCs recap important details, especially in a complex, lore-driven campaign. But every such exposition scene should have something for the PCs to do besides just listen. One easy option: Have the recap come during a battle while the heroes fight to keep the NPC alive.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: In-game romance isn’t necessarily a hard line that needs discussion in session 0, but some folks find it uncomfortable. If you love romantic roleplaying and get the sense that other players don’t, respect that and take a moment to talk about how best to approach it.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially early in your GM career, keep an eye on the number of enemies in a fight to determine the maximum number of foes you can run without feeling overwhelmed. And if you ever have need to run more foes, seek out rules for running creatures as swarms or mobs — or write your own.

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re in a campaign with a strong, straight throughline, don’t be afraid to suggest side quests based on developments in the story. Especially if they’re running a prewritten adventure, most GMs love the idea of the campaign taking custom detours on its way to the endgame.

FRPG GM Tip: Never feel obliged to make use of every encounter, NPC, secret, trap, lore reveal, or other element of your game prep. Needing to throw things away during a game can make it feel like you’ve failed somehow, but anything you don’t use just puts you ahead on your prep for your next game.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Everyone on both sides of the table should make note of each named NPC who appears in the game. Not only will you want to refer to some of those NPCs later, but reviewing those names every once in a while makes for great touchstones to recall the events of the campaign.

FRPG Player Tip: If you realize a particular game or campaign story isn’t what you wanted, there’s never a great time to politely step away. But if it becomes necessary, don’t let things go past the point where not enjoying that specific game starts souring you on the idea of enjoying any game.

FRPG GM Tip: Leave descriptive details open-ended — even minor details — to encourage the questions that can maximize engagement. Don’t immediately say, “The air in this chamber smells like ____.” Say, “There’s a strange scent here,” and let the players ask and think as they figure out what it is.

FRPG Player Tip: Whether on paper or electronic, a character sheet is just the starting point for tracking statistics and details. Record your combat stats on a sticky note for easier access. Use index cards for tracking gear and backstory. Set up a separate doc for making notes as needs be.

FRPG GM Tip: The passage of time can rewrite the landscape dramatically through erosion, landslides, deforestation, reforestation, floods, and more. Any time the characters are using a hundred-year-old map to lead them to a desired site, be aware of how inaccurate that map is likely to be.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: It’s absolutely possible for half the players at the table to want a hack-and-slash game while the other half want deep, immersive roleplaying. The key to making that happen is for players on both sides to respect the different choices their fellow players make.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially with players you don’t know well, it can feel like going back on a ruling you’ve made will undermine your authority. In fact, the opposite is true. Players respect a GM who demonstrates that they’re willing to admit mistakes in the name of fairness and fun.

FRPG Player Tip: Never be afraid to suggest a house rule to your group and GM. Whether it’s something you’ve found useful in another game or a response to noticing an issue arising from the unique nature of your current game, trying new ways to make your sessions more fun is always worthwhile.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Sharing food is a noble gaming tradition, but be mindful when snacking. Not only do you want to avoid messing up books and character sheets, nothing slows your brain down faster than overloading on carbs. Unless you’re gaming while doing a marathon, go with healthier choices.

FRPG GM Tip: You probably instinctively avoid setting up multiple combats against the same foes, but be equally wary of fights with a too-similar feel. Constantly mix up mob battles, solo-monster skirmishes, environmental challenges, ambush scenarios, and other options to keep things feeling fresh.

FRPG Player Tip: Describing the action as your character fights is one of the best ways you can help the GM keep combat encounters moving and feeling exciting. And especially if you’re a player for whom coming up with description is easy, your example can encourage quieter players to join in.

Art by Dean Spencer

The Dream Tombs: Backstory as Adventure

As a GM, I’ve always been a big fan of when character backstory works its way into the campaign. I enjoy when players see fit to reveal secrets about their characters. I love when backstory is revealed in key moments to underline the drama of a roleplaying scene — or sometimes even a combat encounter.

Character backstory working its way into the campaign spontaneously often comes in response to specific beats of narrative pressure. Something happens in the campaign and a player sees the opportunity to have their character react in a way that reveals something about who they are. Other times, fate or the actions of villains push the heroes into a corner that inspires the revelation of a secret a character had hoped to take with them to the grave — but which their player has been dying for a chance to let slip.

Sometimes, though, the opportunities for characters to reveal backstory don’t come as often as we’d like, or certain players might not have as much emotional investment in backstory as others. So if you’re looking for an excuse to bring a bunch of backstory into your game in a fun way, the following adventure setup can help you make that happen.

What Dreams May Come?

This adventure setup is taken from a dungeon site called the Dream Tombs, which I set up for one of my weekly CORE20 campaigns. What follows is entirely generic, though, and suitable for pretty much any fantasy game.

To set up what I wanted to do, I sent the players the following email before our session:

Unlike many of the adventuring escapades we share together, the one we’ll be starting today comes with a bit of homework. I’d like you all to come up with three bits of backstory for your character that you’re comfortable sharing with the group. This can include story elements in the three secrets you all provided at the start of the campaign, but doesn’t have to.

What I’m looking for are specific meaningful events from your character’s life involving action, other characters, and so forth. So perhaps a pivotal interaction with family or comrades, a dangerous situation that had to be overcome, a moment during an important job that went really well or really badly, et al. Something momentous on a personal level that would make a good scene in a movie.

The “three secrets” mentioned in the email refer to the pre-session-zero character-building conversations I like to have with the players leading into a new campaign. It’s totally not necessary to make the Dream Tombs scenario work, and I find that even without that kind of preliminary framework, many players have a sense of a secret or two their characters are keeping to themselves.

Records of the Past

The Dream Tombs in my campaign were a complex of ancient crypts protected by powerful magic and holding secrets the characters were looking for. But the choice of location for this scenario is totally up to you. In addition to a tomb or crypt, the theme of secrets and backstory being brought forward into the campaign might be apropos for a magical library, a warded laboratory or guildhall, a ruined wizard’s tower, or any other location where suitable magic can come into play. 

As the characters explore the site, alongside whatever other location features you prep, work in one physical detail — small pieces of parchment that are scattered across or hidden within the site. Some of the parchment fragments are old. Others are relatively new. All feature notes in different languages and different handwriting, with each parchment a record of some incident or event, anonymous and unsigned. 

Describe the notes as seemingly written by someone wanting to record a thing they’d done, a conversation they had, or something that happened to them. As the characters have a chance to find more of the notes, describe them further as carrying a sense of yearning for the past — or in a many cases, a sense of regret or fear for that past.

Living the Memory

At any appropriate points during the session, the magic of the site triggers. This could be a thing that happens at regular intervals while the characters explore or linger, or in response to characters touching certain things, fighting certain guardians, and so forth.

Choose a character randomly and have their player choose one of the memories they came up with. Then have that player narrate that backstory memory. Describe the scenario as the character slipping into a kind of fugue state and going through the motions of the memory event, even as illusion magic unfolds around them to share that memory with the other characters. Work with the player to build up the description of the memory vision and make it real, asking questions to expand certain moments, suggesting additional details, and so forth.

Then, when the vision is done, tell the players that even as the illusion magic fades away and the character comes back to their senses, that character sees a piece of parchment manifest in front of them to fall to the ground. On that parchment, they see a written record of the vision just shared, magically scribed in their own handwriting.

Cost or Reward

Depending on the nature of the site where these dreams manifest, the revelation of backstory and secrets might be enough of a narrative reward to carry your memory scenes. But you might also attach benefits or drawbacks to each memory, so that the characters are rewarded or punished by the magic tapping into their psyches. For example, if the characters are making an incursion into an enemy site set to end in a boss battle, the magic might provide them with one-off benefits as their memories let them recall moments of past inspiration or draw new resolve from memories of failure. 

Alternatively, if the characters are exploring a site that calls out for putting pressure on them as they explore, each memory might impose penalties or conditions on the character experiencing it — or even on all the characters as they share that memory. (When I used this scenario, the Dream Tombs were that kind of site. The characters were searching for a specific tomb and the treasure it contained, and the longer they took, the more debilitating memory-visions they would have to face.)

Inspiration for Story

In addition to the fun of bringing specific backstory elements and secrets into your campaign within a solid narrative framework, this adventure setup can have the added bonus of inspiring players to think more about their backstories — especially players who are more about playing in the moment, and who might have given little thought to their character’s life before the campaign began. One of the best bits of feedback I got from a player after we finished our Dream Tombs scenario was their lament that they hadn’t gotten a chance to share all three of the memories they’d written up. Especially if the players in your campaign aren’t naturally big into backstory — and this can often be true of new players — bringing memories to life this way in the course of an adventure can be a great start.

Art by Dean Spencer

FRPG Tips — December 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: If there’s a particular magic item that you know would help complete your character concept, tell the GM about it. Most GMs fret endlessly about making sure treasure rewards feel special, so it’s great to have something special to drop into a hoard or turn into a side quest.

FRPG GM Tip: If your virtual tabletop doesn’t give players as much opportunity as you’d like to add notes or images to a campaign record, look for a different online solution for that part of the campaign. Having a digital space that everyone can share is a great way to encourage collaboration.

FRPG Player Tip: The best part of starting a new campaign with a brand-new character is that feeling of crafting a blank slate on which anything is possible. The secret to great gaming is that your character constantly evolving as the campaign unfolds means never having to let that feeling go away. 

FRPG GM Tip: Keeping downtime interesting is made easier by ensuring that everyone stays engaged. Set up downtime “random encounters” around interesting investigation or social tasks, then have those encounters seek out characters who don’t have a downtime activity they want to focus on.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: A quick recap of your previous game session is a great way to start off your current session. If one person likes to make notes, setting them up as your campaign’s chronicler can be fun. If not, let everyone weigh in with remembered details and sum up the story together.

FRPG GM Tip: Always try to avoid penalizing characters for doing what’s right. If a warrior fights with an unconscious comrade on their shoulder, don’t hinder their attacks or defense. Rather, impose some detriment — a condition or damage from physical strain, maybe — after the fight’s done. 

FRPG Player Tip: It’s the GM’s job to create a setup for how your character engages with the dangers of adventuring. It’s your job to create the reasons why your character wants to adventure. Figuring out how the setup and the reasons reinforce or oppose each other is what brings the game to life.

FRPG GM Tip: The more dice you roll, the better the chance of rolling closer to average — and the more time you’ll save just using the average. To provide a bit of variability, use average damage but roll a d4 and a d6, then add the d6 if the d4 rolls even, or subtract it if the d4 rolls odd.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Sometimes players want to steer clear of content connected to real-world issues or triggers. Sometimes they have no problem with a thing in real life but get uncomfortable seeing that thing played out in a story they’re part of. Be ready for these issues however they appear.

FRPG Player Tip: Character backstory expands the campaign, and that’s always a good thing. But backstory can be built as a wedge to be driven into the narrative from the very beginning, or it can be built as shims that create small spaces between ongoing developments. There’s no one correct way.

FRPG GM Tip: If you’ve created an amazing trap, hazard, or other encounter set piece that the heroes entirely avoid with great rolls or roleplaying, reveal what could have befallen them when the session’s done. Players love to hear about how bad things could have gone to underpin how well they went.

FRPG Player Tip: Make sure to reinforce for the GM that your character is being cautious during any scenario in which caution is warranted. Otherwise, it can be too easy to read your personal player urge to push recklessly into the next challenge as your character doing likewise.

FRPG GM Tip: Maps don’t have to be detailed to help the players visualize a location. A quick floorplan sketch, a side view of what’s on each level of a tower, a word cloud showing how different areas connect across a larger site — whatever lets the players’ imaginations cut loose is all you need.

FRPG Player Tip: When the characters inevitably stumble into danger that could have been avoided with a bit more care, embrace that mistake rather than beating yourself up over it. Sometimes the party’s mistakes are the catalyst for a campaign’s most interesting developments.

FRPG GM Tip: If some of your players are mechanics optimizers while others are story lovers, that’s not necessarily a problem. But be aware that you'll need different strategies to help optimizers not slow things down in combat and to help story lovers keep things moving out of combat.

FRPG Player Tip: Take every available opportunity to describe not just what your character is doing, but how they’re doing it. Fill in the details of the attack that dropped a boss. Talk about what making a stealthy advance down a dark corridor looks like. Description isn’t just the GM’s job.

FRPG GM Tip: You don’t need to make use of every element of every character’s backstory as the campaign plays out. But picking one or two touchstone elements can maximize player engagement. And if you’re not sure which backstory element to focus on, ask the player what they’d like to explore.

FRPG Player Tip: Keep different sets of dice on hand for different combination rolls. Most commonly, if your character uses different weapons with different damage dice in a d20 game, have a matched set of attack and damage dice for each weapon combo that you’re ready to roll as needed.

FRPG GM Tip: Award bonuses, advantage, or other benefits to encourage narratively interesting suboptimal play. If a mage places a huge area effect to take down just the evil boss because they don’t want to target the ten lackeys fighting with the boss, maybe those lackeys automatically surrender.

FRPG Player Tip: If you find yourself searching for specific information on your character sheet more than once, write that information down somewhere that’s easier to access. There’s no law that says your approach to recording your character’s stats has to look like anybody else’s.

FRPG GM Tip: If certain players in your group don’t naturally gravitate to the spotlight role during roleplaying scenes, look for opportunities for those players’ characters to get involved. Asking for checks to notice or observe things going on in the background of the scene is a great start.

FRPG Player Tip: Nothing helps bring a character to life more effectively than leaning into messing up from time to time. When your character tanks a test, loses a fight, or misreads a social encounter, describe how they roll with that. Celebrate failures with the same enthusiasm as victories.

Art by Dean Spencer