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.

FRPG Tips — March 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Dean Spencer

The Art of the One-Shot

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

Why One-Shot ?

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

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

Pregens For All!

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

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

Going Low

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

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

Keep It Simple

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

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

Standalone Adventures

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

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

Flexible Foes

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

FRPG Tips — February 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Dean Spencer