FRPG Tips — July 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 and Player Tip: If your campaign takes place in a single well-defined nation, does that nation have a day celebrating its founding? What’s the story commonly known and told behind that founding? And what truths and secrets does that official story skip over or try to hide?

FRPG GM Tip: When making notes for narrative drops — histories, personalities, environments, et al. — work in bullet points rather than complete paragraphs. Focusing on highlights primes your GM brain to be engaging in the moment, but dense detail turns you into a person reading aloud at the table.

FRPG Player Tip: Every good RPG player wants to help new players figure out what they’re doing. If you’re with a group of players whose attitudes run counter to that, those players are very clearly telling you to move on and look for players who are better than them.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: More so than just about any other human pastime, RPGs are social activities. Planning for a nice block of social time at the start of a session is a great way to make sure the game doesn’t get sidetracked (or at least gets sidetracked a bit less) by out-of-game interactions.

FRPG GM Tip: Mysteries and intrigue adventures rely on NPC exposition, but do everything you can to turn an NPC’s monologue into a dialogue. Having to entice, bribe, threaten, or cajole an NPC into revealing big secrets is always more interesting than just having the NPC volunteer that information.

FRPG Player Tip: If your game makes use of ethos or alignment as a character metric, think about whether you want to play that as prescriptive or descriptive. Prescriptive means “Your character’s ethos defines what they do.” Descriptive means “Your character’s ethos is defined by what they do.”  

FRPG GM Tip: Rolling your dice in the open can make for a swingy game that often goes in unexpected directions. Rolling your dice behind a screen lets you stop things from going off the rails for no reason. Both approaches have merit, but you need to think about which one works best for your game.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Every campaign tells a story, and the story you and the other players are telling is more important than the rules of your game. Every game designer alive will tell you to bend the rules that they themselves have written if doing so means the story kicks more ass as a result.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially if you’re running a published adventure, make sure that close-quarters combat encounters give a party room to move. If most or all of the characters depend on positioning or area attacks to do their coolest stuff, move a battle in a crowded room to a bigger location.

FRPG Player Tip: House rules aren’t just the purview of the GM. If a minor tweak to the mechanics of your character would make that character more fun to play — especially a tweak that has both positive and a negative impact so there’s no overall power boost — pitch it to your GM for consideration.

FRPG GM Tip: If you’re running combat without a tactical map, you’re asking the players to invest more in imagining how the scene plays out. Reward that by having the scene play out in their favor when they’re asking which enemies they can target and seeking advantageous position.

FRPG Player Tip: Especially with a mechanically rich character, you’re going to inevitably forget about a certain option or trigger for something you could have done during a complex scene. Don’t sweat it when it happens — but make note when it happens as an aid to helping you remember next time.

FRPG GM Tip: If the ideal monster for an encounter is likely to feel a bit too familiar to the players, swapping out one of that monster’s features with the feature of another monster of the same power level gives you a brand-new monster the characters are guaranteed to have never seen before.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Whether you’re a GM setting the scene or a player describing your actions or backstory, focus first on the most important details. If your description were a film, think in terms of doing a close-up to get everyone’s attention, then pulling back to reveal additional detail.

FRPG GM Tip: Heroes fear nothing — but your players likely have the same fears many of us share, so use that within the bounds established by your safety tools. Even if the characters can take a diseased horde of giant rats in stride, the players’ reaction to that can energize an encounter.

FRPG Player Tip: Especially if your GM drops a lot of random magic-item loot in your games, let your character use an item that doesn’t fit their existing idiom and see how it feels. If it’s an item your character normally can’t use, talk to the GM about how to make that happen. 

FRPG GM Tip: A secret note passed to a player — either an index card at the table or through chat online — is a great way to keep the other players focused. With players you know well enough, dropping a note saying, “Everything’s fine but act like you’re worried and can’t say why” is especially fun.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If one character feels particularly overpowered compared to the rest of the party, it’s okay to have a conversation about reworking that character. It’s usually fun to have a character shine, but one character who outshines all the rest can bring your game down in a hurry.

FRPG GM Tip: The best villains are often those whose morality comes in shades of gray rather than as strictly monochrome evil. But if you have a lot of moral ambiguity in your campaign, make sure there’s at least one unambiguous bad guy the players can hate without reservation.

FRPG Player Tip: The amount of work your GM puts into creating the framework for the campaign story should inspire how much work you put into developing your character story. The best campaigns play out as a resonant call-and-response interaction, so when the GM’s story calls, be ready to respond.

FRPG GM Tip: Looking to favorite books, film, and TV shows for ideas is cool, but giving real life a sideways twist can generate great fantasy story. What would a world cup of magecraft look like in your campaign? Who are the sinister cultists running it? What corrupt leader are they kowtowing to?

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Becoming good at your favorite game doesn’t always mean becoming super fast with that game. For sure, learn the rules and study what you need to remember. But don’t ever worry about asking for help or looking something up if it’s a thing you haven’t done or seen before.

FRPG GM Tip: Keep a close eye on monster features that can absolutely ruin a fight based on the makeup of the party. Antimagic wrecks the fun for casters. Flying will frustrate melee-focused characters. Lockdown abilities mean that characters who need to be mobile might as well stay home.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If you’re playing online, don’t get hung up on trying to find a single platform that does it all. Your maps, video chat, character info, space for sharing notes and handouts — maybe all of that works in one VTT, or maybe it’s five different apps that do exactly what you need.

FRPG GM Tip: Whether you give out magic, swag, or more ephemeral benefits as treasure, add description and a story connection to the campaign when you do. Making every magic sword, every bit of jewelry, every eldritch blessing unique increases the narrative value of those rewards for the players.

FRPG Player Tip: GMs aren’t the only ones who can use published adventures as inspiration. If you read adventures (whether just for fun or because you’re also a GM), maybe the story or setting of a particular adventure features cool details that are just what you need for your character backstory.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially if you have one or two natural roleplayers or super-optimizers in your game, don’t be afraid to track how often each player gets the “I’m doing something amazingly cool!” spotlight. Then set up specific scenarios where the less up-front players and characters get to show off.

FRPG Player Tip: It’s easy to think of roleplaying as being focused only on big social scenes or intense moments of negotiation. But one of the most satisfying and ongoing roleplaying exercises in an RPG is you roleplaying your character in a way that supports and uplifts the other characters.

Art by Dean Spencer

All Things Random: NPC Details

A previous blog post talked about my love of random tables, and presented a series of such tables to create quick-to-build, easy-to-run NPCs for a broad range of fantasy games. In many cases, making a walk-on NPC memorable in your game can be accomplished by establishing their NPC lineage — and especially by paying attention to unusual lineages that will stick in the players’ imaginations and memories — along with a quick indicator of their personality, general appearance, and a quirk that lends itself to roleplaying. 

Sometimes, though, an NPC sticks around for more than just a walk-on scene or a couple of interactions with the heroes. In that event, make use of the tools presented in this post to further build out your NPC into someone truly unique.

What’s In a Name?

In a lot of cases, the basic setup of an NPC generated using lineage and any combination of personality, appearance, and quirk is all you need if that NPC’s place in the story is limited. But for an NPC who you plan to have stick around — or who the players take a sudden unexpected interest in, telling you that NPC will be sticking around whether you planned it or not — the first step in expanding that NPC’s identity is a name.

Names in a fantasy game can cover a broad range of in-game origins across both lineage and culture, such that it can be really hard to think up a name in the moment that feels properly connected to the space in which names exist in your campaign. Even harder is coming up with a name in the moment that has the right feel for a particular NPC. Thankfully, creating good NPC names is easy with the right tools at hand.

Random Names

You can make use of random name generators to come up with lists of names that you can pick and choose from while you build or play your campaign. I’ve been using random name generators online since they first appeared online, and one of my current favorites is fantasynamegenerators.com. You’ll find an abundance of names there, categorized by fantasy worlds, fantasy folk and creatures, real-world languages, and more. But don’t use a random name generator during your game. Rather, use a generator to come up with a manageable list of names you really like, keep those names at hand during your games, and cross off names you’ve used so you’ll know when it’s time to grab some more. Plan on going through twenty or more names to get five or six that feel right for your game.

Using the generators at fantasynamegenerators.com, here’s a quick selection of names taken from the range of lineages I use in my CORE20 games — dwarf, gnome, elf, halfling, human, essaruk, orc, goblin, hobgoblin, bugbear, kobold, and lizardfolk.

Change It Up

One of the things all of us share as regards our ability to process language is an innate sense of when a word in a language we know sounds correct or not. We all understand certain rules of grammar, spelling, and usage, but language is built on thousands of other rules we know intuitively but have no conscious understanding of. For that reason, a lot of randomly generated fantasy names can grate when we first read or hear them, as a random generator is more than capable of kicking out names that follow the rules for spelling but ignore the greater complexities of phonics and the way that names are a product not just of linguistics but culture.

Thankfully, our innate understanding of language gives us a way to create our own fantasy names with ease. Just take an existing name, shaped by the unknown rules that tell us, “Yeah, that sounds like a name,” and change up enough of it to make it something new.

If you need a name in the moment, grab the first name that pops into your head and change up some small part of it. “Scott” might become “Shott.” “David” can become “Thavid.” “Ronald” makes an excellent starting point for “Cranald.” Not the best names, maybe, but sometimes when you need a name in a hurry, an okay name will do.

Three-Step Fantasy Name Conversion

With a little bit more time (like, six seconds), you can make use of a simple three-step rule for turning real-world names into fantasy names that feel like truly authentic names. I’ve used this process for years and it hasn’t steered me wrong yet.

Step 1) Turn any Y’s in the name into I’s.

Step 2) Swap any vowels for other vowels as you wish, including turning any one vowel into a Y. Alternatively, add an E to any vowel to make it a double vowel.

Step 3) (Optional) Throw in a silent H somewhere.

When you need a name in the moment, grab one from real life. Let’s use “Emily,” one of the most reliably common names in English. Step 1 turns “Emily” into “Emili.” Step 2 gives us all kinds of possibilities, from “Umali” to “Omieli” to “Emylo.” For kicks, invoke step 3 to polish the last option up to “Ehmylo,” and your named fantasy NPC is ready to go.

Profession

Depending on how they’ve entered the story, you might already know an NPC’s profession. When the characters interact with the barkeep at a shady tavern or seek obscure lore from a sage, they know who they’re dealing with up front. For other NPCs whose interactions with the characters are separate from what they do, it can be fun to figure out exactly what it is they do, then let that inflect your description of the character and how you roleplay them. And even with an NPC whose current vocation you and the characters know, maybe they have a past profession — or a secret sideline — that potentially gives them a more interesting place in the story than a stock tavernkeeper, researcher, alchemist, weaponsmith, or what have you.

Certain professions on the table break out to a subtable that has its own roll. Feel free to add your own subtables to any profession that feels as if it needs more distinct variations in your campaign.

Obviously, no table of professions can ever be exhaustive, even in a fantasy milieu. So feel free to roll on the table and let the result inspire a profession not listed. For example, “animal trainer” might feel a bit too pedestrian as a former vocation for the NPC leader of a mercenary company — but maybe they once trained flying mounts for the royal guard instead.

This table isn’t meant to represent all possible professions in a fantasy milieu, or the relative number of people in a settlement or land with a given profession. In areas where you know specific professions would be more or less common, ignore rolls that don’t make sense, or choose another option above or below the option you roll. For example, an NPC shipwright isn’t likely to be living in the remote mountain town the characters are passing through, so unless you’re rolling for a former profession, go with scribe or soldier.

Art by Jackie Musto

FRPG Tips — June 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: Long-term campaign planning is great fun. But the more locked in you get to a sense of what’s supposed to happen, the harder it is to let the actions of the players and characters send the story off into amazing new directions. Plan setups and options, not destinations and outcomes.

FRPG Player Tip: Asking other players for help with a new character is a great idea, and most players and GMs love to talk character-building. But make it clear whether it’s mechanics or story you want assistance with, because getting the wrong kind of help can inadvertently make things worse.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If you’re playing with a group whose gaming style simply doesn’t mesh with yours, have a conversation about that, and don’t be afraid to bow out of a game you’re not enjoying. If anyone tries to make you feel bad for doing so, that’s a sign you’re making the right move.

FRPG GM Tip: The theme and tone you set up for a campaign carries half the weight of the story you’re shaping. The other half of that weight is carried by the characters, so talk to the players regularly about how their characters are navigating the theme and tone as the campaign unfolds.

FRPG Player Tip: If there’s a specific aspect of your character’s backstory, personality, or goals that’s important to you, look for a chance to subtly reinforce that in every game session. Doing so helps to make sure the other players are seeing that aspect as clearly as their characters would.

FRPG GM Tip: For published adventures, always adjust the creatures in a fight based on how much the characters and the players want to fight. It can be fun to throw a tough challenge at a party low on resources, but that should always be a choice you make, not something an adventure tells you to do.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: It’s a cliche for a GM to say, “Are you sure you want to do that?” when a character is about to make a fatal mistake. But cliches often build on things that are unnaturally common, so never stop asking that question as a GM, and always listen for that question as a player.

FRPG GM Tip: If you have multiple secrets to reveal during a session, rank them from least to most important and dole them out in that order. Hold the best secrets for last to create a sense of maximum drama, and skip over mid-tier secrets if time starts running out before the big final reveal.

FRPG Player Tip: In any preliminary campaign discussion, don’t skirt around the topic of risk and lethality. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a “let the dice fall where they may” game, especially with a ruleset embracing that style. But if that’s not your preferred style, it’s okay to say so.

FRPG GM Tip: Combat often feels like the go-to option when your game feels like it needs an infusion of action, but action comes in many flavors. An NPC with an agenda, a moment of mystery that gets everyone thinking, or an unexpected reveal can all help get things moving in different ways.

FRPG Player Tip: When asking other players for advice about which classes are best to play, check whether they favor specific classes because they’re easy to run or because they’re easy to optimize. Then think which of those approaches will work best for you.

FRPG GM Tip: Even if you have no plans for combat at a specific location, a map can help bring that location to life. A visual reference for a tavern, a village, an estate, a forest, or wherever the characters happen to be can help solidify the imagination’s connection to the scene you describe.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Playing through downtime activities can be fun, but a campaign with lots of downtime also gives players a great excuse to detail what their characters are doing between adventures. You can always ignore the mechanics of downtime and just make some shared story.

FRPG GM Tip: An ambush scene is great for dialing up the tension in a session — but not always in a good way. Avoid ambushes that deny character agency by leaving everyone unaware and surprised, and drop in clear opportunities for them to quickly turn the tables on foes expecting an easy fight.

FRPG Player Tip: It’s easy to say, “Don’t let bad luck spoil your fun,” but following that advice when the bad luck is all focused on you can be tough. When rolls aren’t going your way, look for things you can do — including supporting allies — that are more immune to the fickleness of the dice.

FRPG GM Tip: Multiple entrances are a mandatory part of any site-based adventure. But for best effect, make sure those entrances set up different challenges for the party — a frontal assault, a stealthy infiltration, a social encounter to bluff past sentries, and so forth.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Among the many things worth making note of while you play, keep track of amazing moments. A line of brilliant dialogue, a series of clutch die rolls, the moment when a campaign’s big secret is discovered — being able to look back and recall those things years later is a gift.

FRPG GM Tip: Anytime you’re describing something, don’t divulge everything all at once. If you need to reveal three details to set a scene, reveal one to start. Then let the players’ questions in response act as a catalyst for the other details — or for improvising new details to replace the others.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: For some RPGs whose rulesets lean toward the complicated side, that complexity isn’t about intentionally making the game hard to play. It’s about trying to make the game fun to learn, as you get more proficient and discover more wonders in the nooks and crannies of the rules.

FRPG GM Tip: Mastering the encounter-building math for most RPGs is a complex undertaking. Instead, focus just on the one monster metric that’s most likely to turn a fight deadly by accident — challenge rating, damage output, tier, threat level, whatever — so you can make sure that doesn’t happen. 

FRPG Player Tip: RPGs are never only one thing, blending narrative and mechanics, switching pace as the story unfolds, shifting the focus between players. But be aware of what mode the game is in as you play, so that you don’t accidentally push for one mode in a way that interrupts another.

FRPG GM Tip: If you’re playing in person, using miniatures is fun. Using expertly painted miniatures that are the exact fit for each PC and monster might be slightly more fun, but don’t let your inability to hit that higher bar stop you from having fun with minis that aren’t perfect for the scene.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: When the opportunity presents itself to run an impromptu one-shot game, nothing gets in the way of that faster than having to create characters for said game. Always have a set of pregens or a number of backup characters you’d love to play sometime ready to go.

FRPG GM Tip: Sometimes game balance is about ensuring things are evened up before the fact. Sometimes game balance is about wildly adjusting things on the fly that you thought were balanced but turned out not to be. Rebalance your game at any point if it starts sliding in a direction you don’t like.

Art by Dean Spencer

All Things Random — NPCs to Remember

I’m what is commonly called an old-school gamer, which means (in addition to having chronic age-related back pain) that I love me some random tables. On an older blog, I wrote about how working on the random dungeon tables in the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide was a highlight of my freelance editorial career with Wizards of the Coast. So I was naturally a bit dismayed when the 2024 DMG dropped most of its voluminous array of tables, many adapted straight from first edition AD&D. And from that disappointment (along with my need to work on this sort of thing for the Campaign Guide for the CORE20 RPG), I’ve decided it’s the start of random table season on the blog.

Random tables are one of a GM’s best friends. Tables can help organize complex content in a way that makes it easy to parse. They can help you see the process of building creatures, adventures, campaigns, and even whole worlds as a series of small steps, working table by table so as to not become overwhelmed. More importantly, though, random tables aren’t just about helping you generate ideas in the moment — quick details for your game or campaign that might interrupt your creative flow if you have to stop and think about them. Random tables are also meant to inspire your own ideas through the process of rolling a fixed result, then saying, “Now how can I play around with that a little bit?” 

Most people find it difficult to create brand-new ideas on demand, especially while under the time pressure that every GM feels when running a game. But taking someone else’s idea and tweaking it just a little is pretty easy. So anytime you need to catalyze your imagination in the moment, rolling on a random table is a great way to do it.

Up first: A set of tables I use in my weekly games for generating NPCs.

Lineage

Whether your fantasy game of choice calls it lineage, ancestry, species, or some less-thoughtful term, the community of folk from which an NPC hails is often the first thing the player characters will focus on in as a means of identifying and remembering that NPC. Lineage is thus a good thing to have fun with, rather than defaulting to whichever lineages feel like the most obvious choices in your campaign.

The tables below work with a baseline setup of a fantasy world that feels like a true cultural mosaic. In a world where folk of all kinds are travelers and explorers, those folk often end up far from their homelands, happy to be there, and ready to play a walk-on part in your adventures. Even if you’re running games in a realm where one or more of the “traditional” fantasy lineages are in the clear majority, that’s no reason why your NPCs can’t be unusual. Unusual means memorable, after all, and making an NPC memorable is an important first step to bringing them to life.

Breaking lineages down as common or uncommon obviously depends on the overall scope of your campaign world and the specific details of the lands in which your adventures are set. So adjust numbers and swap lineages around to your heart’s content. Likewise, add lineages from your campaign that aren’t covered here, and reroll any results that don’t work for your game. As an example, aasimar, dragonborn, and tieflings aren’t a thing in my own CORE20 campaigns, so I would swap in the essaruk (a new lineage in CORE20) for the dragonborn and ignore the other two.

As far as I’m aware, no fantasy game system has playable stat blocks for all the lycanthropes on this table — and that’s the point. Unusual folk should be everywhere in the world, and the quests of the heroes should bring them into contact with NPC lycanthropes like wereswans. If you ever need the party to actually fight a wereswan, reskinning is your friend. Just use a werewolf stat block, add a flying speed, replace a claws attack with a wing smash that deals bludgeoning damage, and you’re good to go.

Personality, Appearance, and Quirks

Roleplaying NPCs is never easy, and it’s a rare GM who doesn’t struggle at least some of the time when playing a dozen different extras in the dramatic presentation a game becomes when characters start talking. In real life, people are a complex mix of hundreds of different goals, needs, traits, mannerisms, and more, and anyone who’s written fiction knows how difficult it can be to fully bring a character to life. Thankfully, NPCs can work just fine with only three touchstone characteristics — a broad sense of personality, a loose nod toward appearance, and a quirk you can use to anchor your roleplaying and help fix an NPC in the players’ minds.

Clearly, any tables as short as these are going to be limited in scope. If every NPC in your campaign has one of the same twenty quirks as all other NPCs, it’s definitely going to feel weird. So even rolling on the fly, if you get a result that you’ve used before and recently, use that personality, appearance, or quirk as a starting point and see where your imagination goes. Rather than being enthusiastic to the point of annoyance, your new NPC might be reluctant, or afraid, or constantly negging the characters instead.

Art by Jackie Musto

FRPG Tips — May 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 and Player Tip: Having to look things up during play is an expected part of gaming, but focusing the ways you check rules and wordings can minimize slowdown at the table. Have frequently used rules bookmarked or written down on a cheat sheet so you’ve always got them handy.

FRPG GM Tip: If it doesn’t feel right to have a boss monster surrounded by powerful lackeys to prevent a party from focusing all attacks on the boss, look to the environment as a means of replenishing the boss’s resources and creating additional threats that can keep the characters busy.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Spellcasting characters and NPCs can challenge the resource-management skills of even the most experienced players. If the caster you’re running is feeling too complicated, focus in on one or two spells to start and don’t worry about the rest.

FRPG GM Tip: You don’t need a ton of stat blocks in every encounter. By reskinning melee attacks to ranged attacks, giving certain foes one-off spell effects, and adjusting defenses, you can turn one or two stat blocks into a uniquely varied enemy force — and one that’s remarkably easy to run.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Addition is usually faster and easier than subtraction. Whenever you’re tracking health or other resources that go down, rather than subtracting from full, just track how much you’ve lost and watch for when that number equals the amount you had available to lose.

FRPG GM Tip: Having the party scried by enemies should be handled with care. Having no chance to hide from foes can undermine character agency, so look for ways to turn being scried to the heroes’ advantage — for example, by making an enemy think the characters are up to something they’re not.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Even if you’re playing online via a virtual tabletop, running combat without a tactical map can be fun. Especially for quick encounters, just use a general overview map to set the scene, highlight environmental effects, and maintain awareness of the overall flow of combat.

FRPG GM Tip: Whether you roll your dice openly or behind a screen is up to you. There’s no right or wrong approach. Just be aware that rolling in the open can lead to unforgiving outcomes if a run of amazing rolls overwhelms the party without you meaning to.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Look for ways to work in and reinforce the goals of player characters and allied NPCs session to session. Doing so makes it easier for everyone to make sure that individual goals mesh together to a larger party goal that makes everyone happy.

FRPG GM Tip: If a character’s death hits particularly hard, don’t be afraid to pull out the clutch move of mysteriously bringing them back to life with no obvious explanation. You can then figure out later why that happened — and what kinds of cool campaign story you can work up as a result.

FRPG Player Tip: If your character rolls a bunch of dice for spell damage, sneak attack, or what have you, have those dice set up and ready to roll before you need them. A set of matching dice that are easy to find on the table or a dice-rolling script in your virtual tabletop are both worthwhile.

FRPG GM Tip: When it’s clear the players aren’t into min-maxing optimized characters — especially new players — build your combat encounters as if you were running for a less-powerful party. It’s easier to dial up the threat during a fight than to salvage a fight that’s accidentally overwhelming.

FRPG Player Tip: Especially as a new player, it’s easy to feel self-conscious when describing your character’s actions in combat in a big, action-filled manner. Do it anyway. The game is a collaboration, and the GM shouldn’t have to be the only one shaping the heroic narrative.

FRPG GM Tip: The best campaigns are often those that swing between dire circumstances and glorious victory — but always try to leave a hint of the next victory visible in the midst of setbacks and failures. Too many downbeats in a row can create a sense of a challenge that can’t be overcome.

FRPG Player Tip: As a general rule, GMs love to reward cool play and characters responding to challenges in unexpected ways. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box, push the envelope, or take risks — and don’t be surprised if doing so earns you a bonus or benefit.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially with published adventures, think about the characters’ strengths and tactics when setting up combat. A big fight against flying creatures is great fun for a party with strong ranged and area attacks, but becomes a complete slog for melee and close-in magic specialists.

FRPG Player Tip: Everyone understands the importance of an awesome portrait for your character, but art can lend even more weight to your larger story. Commission or look for images depicting your weapons, your armor, your hometown, your family members — then share those images with your group.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If you enjoy a game with complex character creation and a strong chance of dying, have each player run two characters. Then if a character falls, the game can continue with no break in play, letting the player take their time to build another character for next session.

FRPG GM Tip: Ideally, plan every encounter and scene with multiple ways forward. But if you get stuck in the moment with a single failed roll that threatens to derail the game, invert the failure to instead trigger the worst, most complicated, most dangerous way the characters can succeed. 

FRPG Player Tip: Even when you’re playing what feels like the most straightforward archetypal character, don’t be afraid to let the GM know exactly what kind of arc you’re looking for as regards that character’s story. Knowing your character’s beliefs, goals, and fears is pure story fuel for a GM.

FRPG GM Tip: Think twice before letting a session run way long to finish a big scene. Players who are tired or worried about the time often can’t focus on big reveals or climactic action. So break at a cliffhanger moment instead, and let the players come back anxious to see how things play out.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The more tabletop games you play and run, the more ideas you’ll come up with for house-ruling those games by pulling in ideas from other games you’ve enjoyed. The rules space of any RPG is a smorgasbord, not a fixed menu, so dig in!

FRPG Player Tip: If your game of choice has specific character roles (damage specialist, healer, tank, et al.), talk to the GM about how rigidly they expect those roles to be defined. Sometimes it’s fun to play an archetype. Sometimes it’s fun to break the archetype in the interest of roleplaying.

FRPG GM Tip: Foreshadowing by laying out clues to what’s coming up in future sessions is one of the best techniques for making your campaign flow. But don’t trust players with busy lives to remember every casual detail. “You all remember when you previously learned…” is a most useful narrative tool.

FRPG Player Tip: Lots of GMs like to ask players to fill in small details of the game world — descriptions of taverns, names of NPCs, and more. If that’s your GM but you have trouble coming up with ideas in the moment, jot down notes about commonly-asked-for story elements between sessions.

FRPG GM Tip: Enemies and rivals are two different pieces of the antagonist pie, and rivals often make for more interesting stories. Let the characters bump up against NPCs who have the same goals as they do — and who have no intention of letting the characters achieve those goals first.

Art by Dean Spencer

FRPG Tips — April 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: Whenever you find yourself writing high-level, world-encompassing lore (or reading it in a published adventure), always ask yourself, “How can this apply to where the heroes are and what they’re doing right now?” Then write up that lower-level lore as a core part of your campaign prep.

FRPG Player Tip: The best gift you can give a GM is to say, “I really loved it when we did [X] last week.” Sometimes it’s obvious when players are enjoying themselves, but the amount of information a GM juggles makes it really easy to miss those cues and end up feeling like a session didn’t work.

FRPG GM Tip: A fight against lots of low-powered foes is fun for the players, but can be a drag for you when you’re rolling a ton of attacks that mostly miss. So let enemies fight together, granting advantage or adding a nice bonus for assistance to roll fewer attacks with a greater chance to hit.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: As the campaign comes to an end, everyone should feel free to talk about what’s coming. GMs — foreshadow climactic events so the players are ready for them. Players — tell the GM if there are narrative loose ends you want your character to tie up before time runs out.

FRPG GM Tip: If there’s a particular spell or magical effect that you find hard to run for enemies during combat, it’s totally cool to just ignore it. But intentionally making use of the problematic effect in an easy encounter can be a great way to figure out how to handle it better.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If one player who loves making notes wants to volunteer to recap the previous session each time you play, that’s great. But if your group doesn’t have such a player, everyone recapping together is a great way to warm up your collaborative creativity.

FRPG GM Tip: In addition to monster mechanics, think about the setup and circumstances of a combat encounter. Whatever their stat blocks, bored guards might be too flustered to flank or make multiple attacks. But the same stat blocks used as the boss’s personal guards can be fully optimized.

FRPG Player Tip: The GM frames the campaign story, but you and the other players have just as much input into where that story goes. A wild insight into the villain’s plans that you come up with off the top of your head might feel so cool that the GM swaps it for what they were planning originally.

FRPG GM Tip: Backstory isn’t just for player characters and NPCs. Every ruin comes with a story of what it was before. Every trap features a story of why it was created and how well it’s worked over the years. At every level, keep the connections between the present and the past in mind during play.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Maintaining fictional immersion doesn’t mean you need to add dense flavor to every single die roll you make. Simply focusing on adding a bit of detail to important moments of success or failure is all it takes to keep the world of the game fresh in everyone’s mind.

FRPG GM Tip: Outside of a boss battle, don’t worry if a combat encounter turns unexpectedly easy. Surprise wins over tough foes can boost the characters’ and players’ morale better than anything, and you can work the knowledge of what made the fight go soft into your next combat encounter.

FRPG Player Tip: Sometimes your character is the main character, driving the story on. Sometimes your character is there to support the other characters as they become the focus. Here’s a secret, though. Being the support while someone else shines is just as much fun as taking the lead yourself.

FRPG GM Tip: Adding foes is the easiest way to boost the threat of a combat encounter, but be careful that doing so doesn’t extend the encounter to become a slog. Focus on additional minions or low-health enemies, and on creating clear area-effect options for dealing with those enemies en masse.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The improvisation at the heart of all RPGs can often feel more like improvising music than improvising story. And as with music, listening to everyone else puts you in the best position to follow as each player takes lead for a bit, and lets everyone stay in key.

FRPG GM Tip: Supporting the players is a baseline of being a good GM, and you should always look to reinforce that during downbeats in the campaign. Whenever things get dire for the characters, ask yourself what benefits you can work into the narrative to remind the players you’re on their side.

FRPG Player Tip: In a game where dice rolls get swingy, don’t be afraid to work outside your character’s comfort zone. The things you’re good at will always be your main focus, but trying something you’re terrible at and turning an amazing die roll into a clutch success is a great feeling.

FRPG GM Tip: Making bad decisions can be fun, so if the players are heading that way, don’t interrupt the discussion that might get them there. But make sure to weigh in with any information the players or characters might have overlooked or forgotten if that might lead to a better decision.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Of all the skills and insights you’ll master for every RPG you play, learning to ignore your mistakes might be the most important. If you mess up, laugh and move on. The game is about the next cool thing you do, not the last thing that didn’t work out.

FRPG GM Tip: The goal breakdown that helps shape fictional characters and player characters alike is equally important for the villains in your game. What do they want? What do they need? What keeps them from getting those things? Track the answers for all your antagonists as the campaign unfolds.

FRPG Player Tip: Playing imperfect characters of a less-than-optimal power level can be great fun — but make sure the GM knows you’re doing that. Especially for new GMs running published adventures, it takes practice to adjust combat encounters so that unoptimized characters don’t end up in trouble.

FRPG GM Tip: Even in combat, roleplaying games are about story. When thinking about a fight scene, think in story terms when deciding how foes and environmental effects enter and play out during the fight. What’s your act 1 setup? What’s the act 2 complication? How does the last act resolve?

Art by Dean Spencer

Attention, Attention!

An essential bit of weirdness lurks at the heart of roleplaying games when we think about the engagement and attention that goes into a great RPG session. On the one hand, RPGs are the most engaging form of entertainment ever created (at least so far). But on the other hand, the complex nature of social interaction can lend itself to distraction and defocusing when you’re engaging in a three-hour narrative improv conversation with six other people. 

During its best moments, a game session can make you forget that you’re a player sitting around a table, as you become your character and the story surrounds you. At the same time, all RPG players know the flipside effect of slipping out of the story from time to time as their attention wavers. However, thinking about why that happens is a great way to make sure it doesn’t become a problem.

Distraction Is Not the Enemy

It’s easy to think about the problem of players losing the thread of a game and respond by saying: “No distractions at the table (real or virtual).” No phones or devices, no distracting side activities, no reading the rulebooks unless you’re specifically looking something up in the moment. The problem with that approach, as so many players know, is that sometimes distraction is a useful tool for increasing our focus and attention. 

Every gamer alive knows the experience of having a comedic digression take over a game for a short while and do absolutely no damage to the game in the end. Lots of folks know the utility of devices like fidget spinners for helping decrease the residual stress that can hinder concentration. Lots of players doodle or draw while playing, imposing a level of right-brain calm that makes listening easier. So rather than simply focus on distractions, think about the nature of those distractions and the affect they can have on player attention.

Avoid Other Stories

In my own experience, the common component of bad distractions at the gaming table is narrative. Because an RPG is a shared storytelling experience, the story centers of our brains need unfettered access to the moment-by-moment, scene-by-scene developments of the game story as it unfolds. And nothing messes that up faster than having another story intrude on the game story.

Back in my early gaming days, heated discussions would often ensue when some people wanted to leave a weekend football or basketball game on the TV in the background, just to keep up with the highlights and the score. These days, every player with a phone can have video running in their peripheral vision, and for folks playing online, having YouTube up in a side window can seem harmless. But if you find yourself missing details in the game story, or uncertain what’s happening in combat because you’ve tuned out during other player’s turns, that’s a sign that video is a distraction that needs to go.

Likewise with reading during a game session, whether that means looking up lore, mentally shopping for your next character upgrade or magic weapon, or scanning the news during what seems like a quiet moment. The focus required to read for information immediately shuts down our ability to listen for information. Outside of focusing on your own character notes or looking up rules in response to something that’s happened in the game, reading is something to avoid.

Make Note of That

Despite the best efforts of most GMs, the necessity of having to do occasional lore dumps during a game session can easily cause players’ attention to flag. On the GM side, always try to keep lore dumps as short as possible, and look for ways to make lore actionable. (Show, don’t tell, as the saying goes.) But on the player side, if you ever find yourself tuning out during a brief history backgrounder or an NPC’s revealing-the-secret-plot monologue, make notes on what you’re being told. Especially when making notes longhand, the process of redirecting what you’re hearing to make it something you’re writing forces you to focus on it a way that makes it all but impossible to tune out.

Just a Reminder

As the GM, never be afraid to catch the players up to make sure they haven’t missed anything. As a common example, in a complex combat scenario, it’s easy for players to miss details regarding enemy tactics and positioning that their players would absolutely be aware of, so fill those things in every round if you need to. On the player side, never be afraid to ask for a reminder of specific details you’re not clear on. Again, your character knows and remembers far more about what’s going on the story than you do, and no good GM will begrudge you asking to close that gap.

At the same time, if you find that you’re needing to ask for catch-up details more than you’d like, think about making notes while you play. Keep track of key details such as NPCs you’ve met or specific locations the party passes through during travel. Jot down rumors or clues as the GM presents them, and then review those notes each game session. Not only will doing so stick those details in your mind, it’ll remind you to engage more fully with new details as they’re presented.

Them’s the Breaks

It’s a rite of passage for many gamers to engage in marathon ten-hour straight-through RPG sessions. Even for those of us with regularly scheduled weekly games, the urge to want to get as much done in a session as possible creates a pressure to just keep playing. But ignoring this pressure in favor of setting up regular 10-minute breaks during your games is one of the best tools for focusing everyone’s attention.

Taking a break every hour or every hour-and-a-half does a number of positive things for your game. It allows people to get up and walk around for a bit, avoiding the sedentary mind slump that can accompany sitting for too long. It reminds people to hydrate, or gives the opportunity to unhydrate without having to step away from the game. And it also hard-wires into your gaming schedule the opportunity to engage in some of the attention-sapping activities talked about above without compromising the game. 

During a break, you can check out that video that’s been calling to you, or you can look up esoteric rules that aren’t directly germane to the game session, or you can check the scores and highlights of your sports event of choice. A lot of the time, our attention as players can be hamstrung by a legit sense of needing to do something and feeling the pressure to do it right now even while the game is in progress. Knowing that we’ll have the opportunity to do the thing at the next break in the game can be a most effective relief for that pressure.

Illustration from the D&D Player’s Handbook.