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)

The Focus of the Fight

The way combat plays out in D&D depends on a large number of factors, with the foes you choose to have face off against the characters usually chief among them. But the most memorable fights in the game are often the ones where the focus shifts beyond monsters and villains and the process of bashing away at them. Unexpected events, creatures doing things they don’t normally do, unusual environmental effects, and more can all inspire the players to engage with the fight on a level beyond baseline attack rolls and damage. Thankfully, there are plenty of easy ways to encourage that engagement for players and characters alike, including any of the following.

Talking Things Out

One of the most straightforward ways to shake up a combat encounter for most groups is to drop a social encounter into the middle of it. Have characters notice foes who look as if their hearts aren’t really in the fight — junior bandits, conscript cultists, monsters who realize the characters have them hopelessly outclassed, and so forth — and give them the opportunity to persuade or intimidate those foes into standing down. Successful roleplaying or skill checks can help thin the enemy ranks, but might also inspire those foes who are left to fight with renewed fury as they try to keep their side’s morale up.

Playing Against Type

Combats in the game often play out against a sense of how relatively tough each foe in the fight is and what kinds of damage and effects they dish out. As such, any minor adjustment to the foes’ baseline combat stats can easily freshen up a fight, especially for experienced players who know what monsters do. Changing up damage types is a dead easy tweak to make, with corrupt cultists dealing necrotic damage with their weapon attacks, monsters in an elemental shrine dealing acid, cold, or fire damage, and so forth. You can also add an extra 1d4 or 1d6 damage of a new type to just about any creature without messing up the difficulty of an encounter.

You can also make matched changes to any monster’s baseline stats to mix things up, pairing up a benefit and a detriment for balance. An easy example is lowering a monster’s AC to make them easier to hit, while giving them enough extra hit points to keep them in the fight for an extra round. Or in a group of identical monsters, let one attack with advantage even as you cut their hit points by half, creating a front-line foe whose combat prowess will freak the characters out, and whose early demise will feel like a huge win.

Turning the Tables

One of the best ways to make a combat encounter memorable for all the wrong reasons is to have a fight suddenly go way harder or way easier than you expected. One way to narratively adjust the threat level on the fly is to introduce some element during the fight — a conveniently spotted relic that a character grabs up, a suddenly active magical effect, a mysterious sound heard in the distance — that gets all the foes’ attention. Then have that element drive foes into a fighting frenzy with short-term bonuses or advantage on attack rolls to turn the heat up in a fight, or have it inspire a number of foes to flee if the combat is going unexpectedly hard. When the fight is done, you don’t even need to figure out why the chosen element has this effect on the party’s enemies. Instead, let the players speculate, then quietly adopt their most interesting idea.

Going to Ground

A static battlefield too easily lends itself to characters and foes not moving. So at the end of the first round of combat, have that battlefield go wonky. If the setting is a magical shrine, maybe that magic starts going haywire to turn stone to mud, to make the floor buckle, to cause creatures to spontaneously levitate against their will, and so forth. Out of doors, constant rain can fuel sudden ground-slips or sinkholes, or errant fire damage can set dry grass or trees alight to create quickly shifting areas of flame. Any ground-based effect that deals minor damage or imposes a short-term condition can help keep combatants in motion.

Where’d They Go?

Elements of the battlefield that hinder the perception of characters or their foes work especially well to keep ranged attackers and spellcasters from holing up at a safe location and strafing the other side. Shifting fog can be an easy addition to an outdoor encounter, while magical darkness might crop up around any old shrine or magical pool, or as a magical trap ready to be accidentally tripped during the fight. Keep areas of concealment moving whenever possible so combatants can’t just lock down alongside them. Or for an even higher-magic approach to the same end, have shifting pockets of teleportation magic scattered around an ancient ruin or wizard’s sanctum randomly fling characters into new locations, forcing them to move to regain optimal attack position.

Blast From the Past

Fighting in ancient ruins is a mainstay of the game, so don’t be afraid to let those ruins come back to life for a bit. When magic is unleashed or a character or monster crashes into a rusting lever, let the battlefield get nostalgic for what it once was. Have a dormant magical shrine come back to life, dealing damage or granting benefits to creatures who start their turns within a certain distance of it. Let an old fountain start spewing muddy water, whether laced with magic or simply making the floor around it dangerously slippery. Or have spectral threats manifest in response to being disturbed, whether as additional undead foes or deleterious environmental effects. 

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

FRPG Player Tip: A foundational character-creation exercise from fiction writing can go a long way toward shaping an RPG character with the durability for an extended campaign. Ask “What does my character want?” Then ask “What does my character need?” Then make sure those two things aren’t the same.

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

FRPG GM Tip: Full-detail maps are great, especially for online games. But don’t be afraid to sketch out a rough map on paper or drop basic shapes onto a VTT page to set up a combat scene. The players’ imaginations will fill in the details you describe. That’s literally how the game is meant to work.

FRPG Player Tip: A willingness to learn the rules as they apply to your character is essential. Mastery of those rules is optional. A group of players is as much a party as the characters are, so don’t be afraid to rely on your fellow players for rules help and advice when you feel you need it. 

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

FRPG GM Tip: Creating fiction for the public means shaping story that matters to a wide range of people. Creating fiction as the facilitator of the narrative of your game means shaping story that only needs to matter to the other players. So use that insight to shape the story the players want.

FRPG GM Tip: For published adventures, books make the best content delivery system and the worst reference setup. So create your own setup with a notes app or index cards, summarizing locations, scenes, NPCs, and foes, and using their page numbers as “links” to the book when you need to go there.

FRPG Player Tip: Setting a marching order for the party can feel archaic, but the strategy behind a marching order is a great way to organize party tactics. Who’s best at soaking up ambush damage? Who’s best at spotting that ambush? And how can those characters work together to best effect?

FRPG GM Tip: Game balance can always be attained by adding more weight to the game’s lighter side. If characters are hitting too hard, don’t worry about how your encounter-building math went wrong. Just let their foes hit harder with extra damage, and let extra health keep them in the fight longer.

FRPG GM Tip: For characters, combat has a tactical goal — defeating foes, fleeing danger, et al. But players have an emotional goal — a satisfying outcome. If a fight is fun, let it run long. But if combat becomes tedious, shortcut the characters’ tactical goal to feed the players’ emotional goal.

FRPG Player Tip: Looking up spells and other complex character features can be cumbersome during play, especially if they’re in different books. But by copy-and-pasting those features as text or photos into a document or a notes app, you can create a focused player’s guide that’s just for you.

FRPG GM Tip: Having dying foes explode for low area-effect damage when it feels thematically appropriate (undead, constructs, malignant cultists, et al.) is still one of the best means of messing with the characters in a way that will make the players go, “That was pretty cool, actually…”

FRPG GM Tip: For most people, it’s easier to be spontaneously funny than to be spontaneously dramatic. Using moments of humor to punctuate even the most serious adventure can go a long way toward encouraging roleplaying, especially for players nervous about showing off that side of themselves.

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

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

FRPG GM Tip: Splitting the party can be a great way to heighten tension and let characters focus on what they’re good at. But you don’t have to split the players as well. When each subgroup is doing their thing, let all players see what’s happening and weigh in with thoughts and suggestions.

FRPG GM Tip: Sometimes it’s fun when a foe with single-digit health hangs on for an extra round. Sometimes it’s fun when a healthy foe drops anyway because a character pulled off an awesome attack. Use the flow of the battle and the reactions of the players to guide you toward the correct choice.

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

FRPG Player Tip: Owning a ton of dice can be fun, but being happy with one set you love is just fine. If you need to roll a lot of dice from time to time but don’t have enough, use a dice roller app alongside your dice, or ask the GM about using average damage for spells and other high-damage effects.

FRPG GM Tip: Random encounters can become a slog if you treat every random encounter as automatic combat. But a random encounter can just as easily be about avoiding a fight through subterfuge or exploration, watching other creatures to learn information, or meeting potentially useful NPCs.

FRPG GM Tip: As long as your game uses health as a measure of character power, whittling away at health is a most effective way of raising tension outside of combat. Most characters will take a tiny bit of damage from the environment without caring. But do that enough times and it becomes a threat.

FRPG GM Tip: Don’t spend too long on a comprehensive description of the environment. Instead, break description up and reveal it in stages, giving the characters the opportunity to assess and ask questions at each stage. You always have permission to break up the boxed text in published adventures.

FRPG Player Tip: All players have different comfort levels regarding how much they like to talk. If you enjoy listening to others, it’s totally fine to be on the quiet side. But if you feel like you’re not being given a chance to speak, talk to the GM about setting up opportunities to do so.

FRPG GM Tip: Turning negative story beats into positive beats is one of the best ways to reward the players during a tough fight. Does a boss battle come with a magical or environmental effect that’s been pounding the characters? Let them figure out how to turn it against the boss in the end.

FRPG GM Tip: When describing scenes, think cinematically. A location is a wide shot. The creatures in a location is a medium shot. What the creatures are doing is a close-up. Then present your shots in the order that creates the most drama — including starting with a close-up in combat encounters.

FRPG Player Tip: Across almost all fantasy RPGs, magic-focused and spellcasting characters are more complex to run than straightforward combat- or skills-based characters. If complexity isn’t your forte, there’s nothing wrong with sticking with the simplest characters for as long as doing so is fun.

FRPG GM Tip: If the player of a noncombat-focused character starts to lose focus during a battle, let them be the one who notices a threatening environmental effect or a hidden foe. There are plenty of ways for characters to engage with a fight scene even if they’re not fighting.

FRPG GM Tip: For a campaign with a lot of active story threads, set up a point-form summary of those threads — discoveries, rumors, lore, key NPCs, and so forth — in an online document everyone can access. It’s hard for players with busy lives to remember everything their characters know.

FRPG GM Tip: The so-called average creature is an abstraction, whether in the real world or the game world. When running foes with average hit points, you know that most of them are tougher or weaker than indicated. So adjust hit points on the fly in whatever way feels most dramatic.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Fantasy has always been the most popular story type in RPGs because fantasy lets us slip into a world of imagination when the real world feels overwhelming. Even if it’s for an hour, joining friends in shared fantasy can make stepping back into the real world easier to bear.

FRPG GM Tip: Sometimes the ideal pace of an adventure will be undercut by the characters constantly resting. So drop in caches of potions, friendly healers, magical pools that restore limited-use features, and other opportunities for characters to gain the benefits of a rest without resting. 

FRPG GM Tip: If the players are uncertain about theater-of-the-mind combat, especially when playing online, try starting small. Simple encounters in familiar locations — a tavern, a city street, outside the dungeon entrance, and so forth — can be a great introduction to that style of no-map play.

FRPG GM Tip: Give foes whatever features they need to make them fight effectively. If an enemy monster’s ranged attack options are weaker than their melee attack options, just swap modifiers and damage to create an artillery variant capable of rousting characters who hang back from the fight.

FRPG Player Tip: It’s fine for the GM to ask you to play a specific character type because the party needs that role. It’s also fine for you to say no because it’s not your favorite character type or you had something else in mind. A need for party balance can be addressed in lots of different ways.

FRPG GM Tip: Use your own experience as a player to set the tactics of enemies in your campaigns. If your character would have wanted to set an ambush rather than rush headlong into a specific combat-focused scenario, then have the bad guys you’re running do just that.

FRPG GM Tip: Giving the characters access to short-term flying or climbing magic is a great way to liven up a long exploration scene. They won’t discover anything they wouldn’t have discovered from the ground, but being able to make use of magic makes the mundane more exciting.

FRPG GM Tip: Never be afraid to take the campaign in a new direction based on the players wanting to do something unexpected. But if that would force you to improv too much on the fly, use a prepared random encounter or two to fill out the current session, giving you time to prep for what’s next.

FRPG Player Tip: When you’re learning the rules for your character, make notes to shape your understanding. When playing, make notes of names, locations, and campaign events. Notes help anchor details in our memories, and are an essential player tool both during character building and during play.

FRPG GM Tip: Unless it truly disrupts the game, don’t worry about players breaking character or having out-of-game conversations. Knowing they can freely step away from the story for everyday discussions can make it easier for players to call for a pause when feeling uncomfortable or unsafe.

FRPG GM Tip: To get players and characters into the mindset that it’s okay to flee fights, turn one or more creatures in an encounter into magical or environmental effects. An undead with a necrotic aura might demand to be defeated. A roiling cloud of necrotic energy is something to run from.

FRPG GM Tip: Rolling out foes round-by-round is a great strategy for a big combat. It keeps the players guessing how tough the fight is going to be, prevents characters from focusing fire on the boss at the start, and quells the urge to lock down because the battlefield is so full no one can move.

(Art by Dean Spencer)

Roll for Narrative!

Everyone hates random encounters! Or at least that’s the common wisdom. Random encounters derail the throughline of an adventure. They break the momentum. They force characters to use up valuable resources that’ll be needed later in the set-piece encounters still to come. In the worst-case scenario of characters being so tapped out of spells and limited-use features after a random encounter, everything grinds to a halt while the GM figures out how to work a long rest into what was supposed to be a time-sensitive adventure.

And all of that is absolutely true — if you treat every random encounter as an automatic combat encounter. Particularly a random encounter in which the wandering foes are automatically set to fight to the death. But combat is only one part of the story a fantasy RPG can tell — and as the facilitator and outliner of that story, you can do way more with random encounters than roll for initiative every time.

What’s the Story?

I go on about story in D&D (and by extension, all of its many offshoot games) from time to time, because I believe quite strongly that story is the foundation and end goal of all RPG play. So it should come as no surprise that I treat random encounters as just another part of the GM’s story-generation machine, by focusing not so much on the mechanics of what kind of encounter is called for and how tough that encounter should be, but on what kind of narrative the encounter can help build.

In keeping with the general bent of the game to define itself as being supported on three pillars of social interaction, exploration, and combat, those three facets of the game make a good starting point for thinking about how every random encounter might play out. But we can then add an additional layer to our random-encounter triad, thinking about random encounters as a means of delivering lore and exposition in a nicely dramatic package. 

Social Interaction

As pretty much every version of D&D is quick to point out, not every monster is a monster. Which is to say, the world is filled with creatures who adventurers can meet, and those creatures can have motivations other than fighting, killing, or eating said adventurers. More interestingly, even some of the creatures who do want to fight, kill, and eat the heroes often have motivations that can tame those urges.

So how do characters find out what type of monster they’re dealing with? By talking, of course. A well-armed adventuring band is generally a daunting presence, giving a lot of monsters reasons to listen if the characters make an immediate offer of no hostilities. A group of wandering creatures with no real interest in what the characters are doing might simply agree that both parties should go their own way. The initial sense that combat feels imminent makes for a nice moment of tension, and a successful parlay to prevent that combat creates a sense of success that all the players can share in.

Lots of different kinds of social encounters can play out with a wandering band of intelligent creatures, from those creatures being lost and looking for directions, to creatures looking to trade equipment, magic, or information, to a protection racket where creatures more powerful than the characters ask for payment to let the party go. You can dial up the social aspect of that last encounter even more with some roleplaying or an increased payment, letting the characters convince the creatures to go ahead of them and clear out any other random encounters that might lie ahead.

Exploration

As has been said, the best offense is often a good defense, which makes avoiding a fight the ideal way to win it. Outside of a scenario where two groups confront each other coming around the corner of a dungeon corridor, you usually get to decide the distance at which a group of wandering monsters is seen. So by giving the characters enough lead time and a bit of initial cover, you can easily build any random encounter into an exploration mission dedicated to getting around or away from the imminent threat.

Exploration-based random encounters can be simple. Literally two minutes in game as you describe what the characters see coming toward them or following behind, and the players telling you what approach they take to staying unobserved while they go around the threat. But even the quickest and most seemingly uneventful avoid-the-monsters encounter helps flesh out the story, reminding the players and characters (and you) that the world is an active, dynamic place where things happen and the characters are going to stumble into those things from time to time.

Combat

All this talk about not making every random encounter into a combat encounter shouldn’t be taken to mean that random encounters should never be combat encounters. For most groups, combat is great fun. But you want to make sure that combat random encounters don’t start draining the characters’ resources in a way that’ll mess up the progress of the campaign.

First, focus on easy encounters that shouldn’t drain too many of the characters’ resources, whether that means combat with lower-threat foes or fights with more daunting foes who run as soon as they realize the characters aren’t going to fall as easily as first thought. And in the event that the characters do spend resources in a fight that you’d rather they didn’t, you can make sure a combat random encounter gives them a chance to replace some of those resources. If taking on debased cultists leaves one or more players with long-term conditions, give the cult leader a couple of spell scrolls of lesser restoration or greater restoration. If driving off a pack of dire wolves leaves the characters in a hit point deficit, maybe there’s a magical pool nearby that acts as a potion of healing once per week for any creature — and is what the wolves were protecting when they attacked the characters.

Lore and Exposition

Random encounters are often set up in a way that wants to detach them from the main narrative of an adventure. But beyond whatever fun you can have with them as you play, every random encounter can also serve to push specific bits of lore and exposition into the story — even lore and exposition you hadn’t thought about before. 

Lore and exposition are often most closely associated with the social encounter pillar, but both can be worked into combat and exploration as well. Whenever the characters encounter other creatures, those creatures might have information they can reveal. A behir has heard a rumor and is willing to trade it for a favor. Avoiding a gnoll ranger patrol lets the characters see the gnolls use a secret trail leading to their hideout. A bandit chieftain who flees a fight drops a satchel full of maps that will give the party an edge as they seek a lost temple. Any time you have information ready to drop into an adventure, a random encounter can make a great time to do so. 

But there’s another level of lore that random encounters let you play with, as you think about the encounter’s place in the adventure — letting the encounter becomes its own lore as you patch the appearance of monsters and other foes into the story. Roll up an orc war band during an adventure where the characters are going after evil stone giants? Guess what! You just determined that the giants are using orc mercenaries to patrol the territory around their lair, even if that wasn’t part of the adventure setup. Roll up a chuul in an environment where a chuul doesn’t make a lot of sense? There’s suddenly a portal to the Far Realm nearby that the players will never know you just made up on the spot.

Heroic Gifts 2

I had great fun with this concept last year. So I thought it would be fun to revisit the seasonally appropriate idea of gifts, awards, and recompenses for the heroes as potential story and adventure hooks. Any GM can leave a vorpal sword or a headband of intellect wrapped up under the tree for the characters this year. But a thoughtful GM can create the personalized gift of unusual offerings and honors that grateful benefactors, patrons, or persons saved from peril might bestow upon the characters, rewarding them for an adventure well done.

Unhappy Guardian

A grateful long-retired knight bequeaths the characters with a magical token given to them by the late king they once served. Though the knight never had cause to use the token, it is said that breaking it performs a one-time summoning of a powerful celestial who will defend the wielder and follow their orders. However, what the knight doesn’t know is that the celestial bound to the token was ordered to serve them and only them, and won’t react kindly to being summoned by others. When called upon, the celestial might grudgingly defend and assist the characters, then demand a favor or quest in return — or else. They might agree to aid the party in exchange for first taking over its leadership, then leading the characters into peril far outside their pay grade. Or the celestial might assume that the characters are ignoble sorts who’ve robbed and murdered their dear knight, and set about seeking retribution.

Borrowed Power

A powerful priest or the magic of a mysterious shrine might grant the characters a permanent magical boon in lieu of magic item rewards — a once-per-day combat assist, the ability to cast a cantrip or spell, a boost to AC or a saving throw, or some other benefit appropriate for the characters’ level. But what the characters don’t realize at first is that those benefits are fueled by life force stolen from villains cursed by the priest or shrine, who take an equivalent penalty or lose access to magic bestowed upon the heroes. Now those cursed villains are looking for a way to get back what’s been taken from them — and the characters are in their sights.

Noblesse Oblige

To show their gratitude at the party’s heroics, the monarch of a small, not-particularly-wealthy realm bestows upon each of the characters a noble title vacated because its previous holder and their heirs were slain in whatever war/disaster/monster incursion the heroes were instrumental in overcoming. However, what the monarch didn’t mention is that each of those titles comes with extensive debts and obligations — perhaps including obligatory and potentially deadly quests — that the characters are now on the hook for.

Shared Accommodation

The characters are gifted with a talisman that allows them to access a wondrous extradimensional space — a magnificent mansion, demiplane, or similar sanctum. But what they learn only after using the sanctum for a time is that the space appears to also be used by other heroes, with evidence of their presence appearing each time the characters enter the space. The characters might end up taking the other group’s treasures stored in the sanctum, assuming them to be some sort of magically appearing gift — or have their own stored treasures disappear for the same reason. They might find lore or notes left by the other group, which point to mysterious adventure narratives the characters can get caught up in while they try to track that group down. They might discover that the other adventurers using the sanctum are actually a group of villains related to their own quests, allowing them to use the space to seek those villains out — or to turn the sanctum into a deadly ambush site.

Giving What We Can

Rescuing or saving an impoverished community sees the grateful members of that community gift the characters things their meager incomes allow them — homespun goods, folk art, trinkets, and so forth. But over time, increasingly powerful monsters and villains start to be drawn to the party, and to one of those gifts in particular. Eventually, the characters realize that the innocuous gift is an artifact that was hidden away in that form by a deity or powerful spellcaster. Now the artifact is pushing them toward an adventure in which the characters are meant to restore the powerful relic to its true form — or die trying.

The Gift of Friendship

As a reward from a powerful high priest or deific agent, the characters receive a soul boon — a powerful magical ward that protects them against death in some way (advantage on death saving throws, boosts to healing, automatic temporary hit points, or whatever). But what they don’t realize is that the cosmic power who grants the boon does so by lumping all the characters’ souls together — along with the souls of other heroes the boon has been granted to. This soul mixing might manifest first as the characters learning each other’s secrets or having strange dreams of being other people. It might escalate to compulsions to engage in quests that other soulbound heroes failed at. And it might culminate in the characters seeking out the deity who granted the boon in the hope of figuring out a way to see its power reworked or undone before they lose all sense of their own identities.

Points of Interest

One of the interesting things about worldbuilding in D&D and many of the games it’s inspired is that D&D claimed to be set in a pseudo-medieval European realm — and then mostly ignored the actual demographics of medieval Europe. Though its population was nowhere near what it is today, Europe in the Middle Ages was positively full of people, most of whom lived in tiny settlements scattered between larger towns and occasional cities. However, D&D in its earliest days created a baseline sense of the adventuring world as being mostly frontier, with villages scattered at distances of a day’s walk apart or more.

A lot of fantasy GMs who are into this sort of thing got an initial sense of what a real pseudo-medieval milieu might feel like from “Medieval Demographics Made Easy” by S. John Ross, whose mechanics have been implemented all over the internet. That approach to fantasy game demographics talks about villages as being home to the largest segment of any territory’s population, scattered in large numbers and often less than an hour’s walk away from the nearest other villages. Of note, though, “Medieval Demographics Made Easy” shares with the D&D 5e rules the use of “village” to cover a wide range of settlements with populations of 1,000 or less. D&D 3e broke that category down into villages (maximum 900 population), hamlets (maximum 400) and thorps (maximum 80). And for me, hamlets and thorps set only hours apart from each other in settled lands have always been a great baseline for worldbuilding.

Using thorps, hamlets, and villages as touchstones while adventuring heroes are traveling is a great way to help create a sense of the world that those heroes are fighting for. Which is to say, small settlements remind characters that there’s actually a world of people around them, not just empty landscape. Villages, hamlets, and thorps are small enough that they don’t need a lot of development when the characters are just passing through. Random name generators for settlements are easily had, and a baseline sense of what a village, hamlet, or thorp looks like can be improvised fairly easily, inspired by prevailing culture, environment, and the industry derived from that environment (farming, mining, fishing, and so forth).  But on top of that baseline, you can make a village, hamlet, or thorp memorable with a defining unusual characteristic using the following table. This is the table I use in my own campaigns, including a current game focused on a lot of short-distance traveling through densely settled lands as the characters track down lore and secret dungeon sites long lost to history. 

Some of the features on the table are overtly magical. Some are clearly mundane. And some can swing both ways, letting you decide how far to lean into the fantastic in your own campaign.

Unusual Small Settlement Features

d100   Feature

1. Abundant household animals
2. A freshwater pool of unknown depth, its bottom never sounded
3. Locals wear distinctive clothing or jewelry
4. Old watchtower
5. Outdoor clock
6. Well water acts as a healing draught for ill and injured livestock and mounts
7. Copious flower gardens
8. Ancient statue randomly bestows magical benefits to those who touch it
9. Geothermal spring or vent
10. Ancient shrine sometimes bestows good luck to those who meditate before it
11. Raised walkways cross over difficult or dangerous terrain
12. Trained animal messengers
13. Colorful lanterns
14. Beautiful fountain
15. Ramshackle buildings
16. Brightly painted buildings
17. Outdoor gallery of statues
18. Clockwork labor-saving devices
19. Unusually large cemetery
20. Well dispenses limited amounts of holy water
21. Well-groomed parks
22. Wild green space
23. Several awakened animal residents
24. Polluted well
25. Extensive fishponds
26. Colorful flags
27. Tall spire
28. Burgeoning local theater or music scene
29. Tall spire
30. Unusual-colored stone in buildings and field walls
31. Proliferation of sign languages
32. Carnivorous domesticated animals (bears, lions, and so forth)
33. Glowing moss or flowers
34. Shrine holding ancient bones
35. Standing stones
36. Ruins hold a magically floating altar
37. Locals wear tokens of good luck
38. Scattered statues are clearly petrified creatures
39. Abundant birds
40. Copious pleasant arthropods (butterflies, crickets, and so forth)
41. Copious unpleasant arthropods (roaches, flies, and so forth)
42. Freestanding arches
43. Underground tunnels connecting buildings
44. Mechanical lifts for ascending tall buildings or steep terrain
45. Large heated communal pool
46. Vines or trees bear fruit even in winter
47. Life-sized statue of a dragon
48. Local landscape sometimes yields up cut gemstones
49. Old bell tower 
50. Superior local beer, wine, or spirits
51. Rooming house is a secret thieves’ guild safehouse
52. Elemental fire vent
53. Stone disks are intermittently functioning teleportation portals
54. Locals raise and competitively race dire animals
55. Crystal geodes are common decorations
56. Local oracle correctly predicts the future exactly half the time
57. Communal barn has a large extradimensional space within
58. Unseen creatures pilfer non-valuable items from those passing through
59. Ancient giant-sized structures repurposed to humanoid size
60. Protected by retired mercenaries
61. Noticeably cooler or warmer than surrounding environs
62. Fully lit up at night by swarms of fireflies
63. Local wild flying mounts (griffons, hippogriffs, and so forth) will transport characters in exchange for delicacies
64. Ancient shrine to a forgotten deity
65. Settlement protected by local lycanthropes
66. Fey creatures common in area
67. Wind chimes on most buildings play soothing music
68. Arched bridge doesn’t cross over any obvious obstacle or barrier
69. Teleportation portal connects to another nearby settlement
70. Grand statue magically takes on the visage of one random person in the settlement each midday
71. Ancient lightning rod retains electrical energy from recent storms, arcs out to zap anyone engaging in violence
72. Extensive and elaborate topiary
73. Settlement is built partly underground in repurposed dungeon ruins
74. Benevolent ghost of settlement founder watches over locals
75. Large number of gamblers
76. Proliferation of edible mushrooms 
77. One or more buildings are built on ancient stone foundations that float above the ground
78. Roving floating glass orb allows anyone touching it to telepathically communicate with anyone else in the settlement
79. Crumbling wall sends back unnaturally loud echoes
80. Healing spa bestows temporary hit points
81. Cheap alchemical reagents sourced from local bogs
82. Glass obelisk retains the images of the last people to look into it
83. Wild animals (bears, lions, eagles, and so forth) protect the settlement and patrol the outskirts
84. Area of wild magic grants a one-time ability to cast a random cantrip
85. Large magical sundial also tracks local weather for the next three days
86. Earthbound or swimming wild animals can magically fly within a hundred paces of the settlement
87. Built around the bones or skull of an ancient monster
88. The sound of wind is heard even when the wind isn’t blowing
89. Ancient shrine randomly summons low-threat creatures who serve nearby characters for 1 hour
90. Harmless giant arthropods escort travelers into and out of the settlement
91. Always shrouded in light fog
92. Exceptional local cuisine or baked goods
93. Natural scrying pool activates randomly once per month
94. Huge boulder grants spider climb ability to anyone while climbing it
95. Ancient pump dispenses limited amounts of lamp oil
96. Unusually high number of local poets
97. Visitors who eat local food learn one bit of secret lore
98. Ruined library contains a magically shifting array of books
99. Retired master smith repairs one nonmagical weapon, suit of armor, or shield at no cost in exchange for a promise to do good
100. Awakened tree willingly serves as a children’s adventure playground