The Fine Art of Failing Forward

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

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

Advancing Test by Test

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

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

What “Failing Forward” means

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

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

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

Failure is Still Failure

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

How Bad Can Things Get?

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

Side Trekking

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

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

Just for Laughs

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

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

FRPG Tips — January 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Dean Spencer

The Dream Tombs: Backstory as Adventure

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

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

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

What Dreams May Come?

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

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

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

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

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

Records of the Past

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

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

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

Living the Memory

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

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

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

Cost or Reward

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

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

Inspiration for Story

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

Art by Dean Spencer

FRPG Tips — December 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art by Dean Spencer

Heroic Gifts 3

For this third installment of an apparently ongoing seasonal series (see 2023 and 2024), here are a few more examples of unusual gifts, awards, and compensation for the heroes that come with their own built-in story and adventure hooks. When gold, gems, and magic start to lose their luster for experienced adventurers (and even more-experienced players), take advantage of any of these unique bequeathments suitably given as thanks for an adventure well-done.

Felt Cult, Might Delete Later

As a reward for putting an end to a depraved cult, the characters are gifted with a powerful relic the cult were planning to use to fuel a dread ritual. The item functions perfectly to produce whatever other magic you want to bestow upon the party. But over time, the characters discover that the item’s connection to the cult has suffused it with magic that attracts would-be cultists — who all end up treating the unwitting characters as their cult overlords. Initially, NPCs drawn to the relic might appear to simply be followers and sidekicks brought into the party under the game’s usual rules. But over time, those followers begin to engage in stranger and stranger behavior, treating the heroes less as employers and benefactors and more as quasireligious figures. If things go unchecked, one or more ambitious followers might ramp up their erratic activities — with the characters perhaps discovering that the newly active cult they’ve been investigating is secretly led by them!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

The characters are gifted with a magical talisman that promises to let them overcome the fickle notions of fate. A certain number of times (whether limited overall, once per month, or what have you), a character wielding the talisman can undo one recent event, dictating the manner in which the event should have unfolded (subject to any limitations imposed by the GM). But what the characters don’t realize at the outset is that fate is complicated, and the single change asked for inevitably comes with a number of other unexpected changes to complicate the campaign. The characters might discover that they have close ties to NPCs they’ve never heard of, have lost or gained magic items, owe money for services they don’t recall requesting, have inexplicably changed their appearances or names, and so forth. Figuring out the scope and scale of the changes can introduce a steady stream of side quests each time the talisman is used — or perhaps the talisman begins to unravel fate whether it is used or not. 

Haute Cuisine

As a reward from a powerful noble or royal, the characters are entitled to eat free for life at the finest restaurant in the land. But the head chef of this legendary establishment is secretly an archfey whose meals bestow magical benefits in exchange for service. Depending on how the players like their obligations set up, the heroes might partake of fine dining and learn of the meal’s magical benefits, then find themselves compelled to undertake a dangerous mission to make use of those benefits. Or the archfey chef might reveal a mission the characters can undertake, offering the magical meal beforehand as a down payment on rewards to come. Either way, eating at the restaurant or magically teleporting in a take-out order might become a regular source of plot hooks and valuable magical benefits as the campaign unfolds.

Investment Opportunity

As an offered reward or a side-effect benefit of a successful adventure, the characters receive an ownership stake in a successful business or mercantile venture — a profitable inn or tavern, a merchant company, a chain of businesses, and so forth. But even as the venture turns over steady profits to fund the party’s adventuring, the characters don’t realize that the business has secret connections to a criminal guild, a powerful supernatural figure, a secret school of magic, a clandestine organization of freedom fighters, or some combination thereof. Wherever the characters’ connection to the business is known, mistaken identity and expectations abound.

Clothes Make the Hero

Characters in an urban or socially-focused campaign might receive the gift of fine custom clothing, crafted by the most reputable tailor in the land. But what no one realizes at the outset is that this tailor’s crafting carries an eldritch essence, causing the clothing to act as sapient magic items focused on increasing the characters’ renown. As long as the clothing is worn, the characters find themselves invited to exclusive parties and engagements, accidentally bumping into powerful people, and just generally getting ahead socially. But at the same time, powerful nobles, wealthy criminals, and corrupt political figures grow suspicious of the characters’ inexplicable social rise — and attempt to stop it.

Sing-Along

Whether gifted as a commission by a grateful noble or organization, or created as a spontaneous offering by a skald whose folk were done a service by the party, the characters are immortalized in song as the subjects of a heroic ballad. However, the song proves even catchier than expected, quickly spreading from town to town, loved by young and old, and sung in every tavern — to the point where the characters are suddenly well known in every region they visit and every settlement they pass through. Endless pleas for aid accompany their musical notoriety, alongside challenges by villains and would-be heroes looking to make names for themselves. Undoing the effects of the song might require some skillful social engineering — or the discovery that the original creation of the song was some kind of magical setup meant to hamstring the characters’ adventuring potential.

FRPG Tips — November 2025

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

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Roll damage for an area effect as soon as you announce it, even if that’s before you’ve decided on location and targets. That way, you can total the damage up even while saving throws are being made to keep things moving.

FRPG GM Tip: Ask players to give you as much of a heads-up as possible when they need to miss a session. With advance notice, it’s often possible to tune the narrative and make sure a missing character has the least possible impact — or can even be sidelined for in-game reasons.

FRPG Player Tip: When you start out, you’ll need to ask for reminders of how certain rules in your game work, and players who’ve been at it for a while will help you. When you’ve playing for a while, new players will need reminders and you’ll help them. RPGs are so often about paying favors forward.

FRPG GM Tip: The best part about a big site-based adventure is watching its complex layout unfold. The worst part is having to constantly backtrack through that layout. Set up convenient portals or safe routes so characters can retrace their steps narratively or leave a location without a fight.

FRPG Player Tip: Give your character a theme song — or a whole suite of theme songs. You don’t have to play it for anyone else, or even share that information. But just like with backstory details, that level of personal interaction with a character can help bring them to life in a profound way.

FRPG GM Tip: When choosing foes to build an encounter, make sure to not accidentally end up with everyone imposing similar conditions or effects. When a couple of creatures can limit the heroes’ movement, it’s a threat. When all the creatures can, it’s a slog.

FRPG Player Tip: From useful terrain features to the potential for other creatures to shake up roleplaying, the GM probably hasn’t thought about lots of potential benefits that might play out in an encounter. But most GMs are quick to grant benefits to players who ask about them, so always ask.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Even if you’re not playing in theater-of-the-mind style, feel free to ignore fixed distances on tactical maps in favor of deciding, “Yeah, that looks about right.” As long as the characters and their enemies are playing by the same distance and area rules, it’s all good.

FRPG GM Tip: Conflict is what drives story much of the time, but conflict in a fantasy game doesn’t always have to mean combat. Conducting a strategy session in which the players and characters come up with a plan to avoid an encounter can be just as much fun as fighting.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Especially if you’re playing a game that tries to define the things characters can do by focusing first and foremost on the mechanics of action types, feel free to ignore that. Let characters and foes choose what they want to do, then figure out what action covers that. 

FRPG Player Tip: When a narrative scene is focusing on another player’s character, you can still look for opportunities to play a part. Asking the GM if there’s anything your character can do to assist the spotlight character is a great starting point.

FRPG GM Tip: Sometimes it’s fun to let the players and characters go off on a tangent where they suspect a benevolent NPC is up to no good. But sometimes you need to say, “I’m going to go meta to tell you this person is on your side.” Don’t let suspicion derail character interactions for no reason. 

FRPG Player Tip: You don’t have to keep a diary or anything, but make notes on important points of narrative development for your character as a campaign unfolds. Especially if their personal goals shift over time, the way your character grows and changes is great fuel for roleplaying.

FRPG GM Tip: Giving NPCs a humorous tone can greatly boost the players’ engagement with them. Even in a purposefully unfunny campaign built around serious themes and stories, look for opportunities to have NPCs engage in irony and slapstick from time to time to anchor their place in the story.

FRPG Player Tip: Like most fiction, campaigns are typically built around the idea of what the characters want to obtain. But some of the best roleplaying comes from thinking about the things your character has lost, and whether the things they hope to obtain will ever fill that void.

FRPG GM Tip: Whether by accident or by virtue of min-maxing, if a character is vastly overpowered in combat compared to the rest of the party, do not hesitate to have the toughest foes somehow sense that and focus on that character. Sometimes game balance is attained on a round-by-round basis.

FRPG Player Tip: When another player’s character does something you think is cool, make a note of that. Especially if you’re new to game, there’s nothing wrong with your character emulating what the other heroes are doing around them as they shape their own heroic style.

FRPG GM Tip: You don’t need unique stat blocks to play unique creatures. Just start with a stat block you like, then add one attack and one noncombat trait from two other creatures, and you’ll create a threat that’s likely never existed in the game before.

FRPG Player Tip: Never be afraid to ask out loud, “I wonder if what’s going on in the campaign is _____?” Knowing what you and your character are thinking will help the GM fine-tune the story as it unfolds — or might even inspire them to take a different approach based on your speculation.

FRPG GM Tip: Your boss villain doesn’t need to personally threaten the characters in the manner of directly attacking their loved ones. But their threat needs to feel personal. Keeping the characters’ personal goals in mind is thus usually your best guide for hitting those characters where it hurts.

FRPG GM Tip: Coming up with unique names is an endless task, but non-unique names should also be part of every fantasy culture. Have ten NPCs named your world’s equivalent of “John Smith” and dozens of hamlets called the equivalent of “Springfield” to underline that commonality.

FRPG Player Tip: It’s totally okay to enjoy maximizing your character’s mechanical benefits. But if you ever realize that that process is the only part of your character you enjoy, it might be a sign to step away from mechanics and delve into your character as a person with a story instead.

FRPG GM Tip: Even for players who love to be descriptive during a game, it’s easy to feel reluctant to offer up description from a fear of taking away from what the GM is meant to do. So make it clear when you’d love some input by asking for descriptions of tavern interiors, killing blows, and more.

FRPG Player Tip: Power gaming can be fun, but the hobby is filled with power gamers who will tell you how much more fun they started having when they focuses less on optimizing mechanics and more on optimizing story. Heed their wisdom and experience.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Whenever characters gain new benefits, features, or magic, players should feel free to talk about that and why it excites them. Sometimes that’s an out-of-game discussion, but it can also be an in-game moment of “My character dramatically reveals this new thing they can do!”

FRPG GM Tip: If you run your games on a virtual tabletop, prep way more encounter maps than you need. Being able to easily drop an easy random encounter into the narrative makes a great way to fill out a session if you’re not quite ready for where the characters want to go next.

FRPG GM Tip: Taking a stock monster and converting some of their damage to a different type is one of the fastest ways to customize foes. Skeletons with lightning swords or cultists whose fire spells deal poison instead can give an otherwise straightforward encounter a unique feel.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The right number of tests and checks to make in a game is the number that feels the most fun. If too many checks start to feel tedious, or if not enough checks makes it feel as if the characters aren’t doing anything, talk about what changes might make for a better balance.

FRPG Player Tip: If your character has a mount, a companion creature, a magical statuette that turns into a dire tiger, or what have you, personalize that pet to your heart’s desire. And don’t be afraid to talk to the GM about having story hooks revolve around a pet if that feels like fun.

Art by Dean Spencer

FRPG Tips — October 2025

Over on Bluesky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I post daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players — except for this month, because I’ve been on holiday in France! So instead of the full collection of this past month’s tips presented here for your reading pleasure, I’ve pulled together a selection of some of my own favorite tips from the first half of this year. Please feel free to check out the monthly tip archives on the blog if you’ve only started reading recently, or to follow me at either of the above locations to get new tips every day, fresh out of the idea forge.

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

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

FRPG GM Tip: The characters’ backgrounds and backstories are often a big part of the campaign start, but can easily slip out of mind as time goes on. So make specific notes about those elements, then refer back to them regularly to let you build story that will feel personal to the characters.

FRPG GM Tip: For long narrative beats — travel scenes, describing complex dungeon locations, and so forth — give the players something to decide on so it’s not just you talking through the whole thing. “How far into the room do you advance?” “The path forks, so which way do you go?” 

FRPG Player Tip: A GM is often a much more generous source of magical loot than a video game algorithm. Use your potions and other consumables regularly rather than saving them for the best possible time, because a good GM will note you using consumables to do cool stuff and make sure you find more.

FRPG GM Tip: Some players find it hard to come up with shared-story campaign ideas on the fly, but most can easily tell you what their character got up to during the last downtime. Asking players to detail downtime narrative is a great way to work toward even greater levels of shared storytelling.

FRPG Player Tip: Always feel free to ask whether some element of an encounter can be used to your benefit — high ground, potential allies, whatever. Sometimes a GM plans such benefits and waits for players to uncover them. Sometimes they don’t plan them and are happy for you to discover them anyway.

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

FRPG Player Tip: A lot of “old school” exploration tricks are worth picking up if you do a lot of dungeon crawling. A 10-foot pole to test floors and unknown recesses, a mirror for looking around corners, and extra rations to throw at hungry monsters have saved innumerable characters over the years.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially if you’re giving out magic items you’ve created or adapted yourself, spend as much time on an item’s description and a sense of how it feels to wield it as you do on its mechanics. Nothing makes magic feel less magical than reducing it to just modifiers and properties.

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

FRPG Player Tip: If it’s been a while (or never) since you used a paper character sheet, try it. You can still use online tools for rules reference, but tracking a character’s foundation, advancement, and evolution in writing creates a tactile connection to that character like nothing else.

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

FRPG GM Tip: Between your set-piece encounters, energize mundane locations or exploration scenes with a bit of treasure, an unexpected magical effect, or a trap or hazard that’s easy to overcome. Help the players stay focused by creating an underlying sense that there are always things to discover.

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

FRPG GM Tip: Perfect encounters don’t happen by design. They happen because of all the unpredictable things that can unfold during a game. So the best way to encourage perfect encounters is for your encounters to be loose enough to absorb a maximum amount of unpredictability.

FRPG Player Tip: Don’t be afraid to make skill checks just because a particular skill isn’t your character’s forte. The one time you use healing to bring a friend back from the brink of death or spot the ambush everyone else misses will more than make up for any number of forgettable rolls.

FRPG GM Tip: Irredeemably evil NPCs can be great fun in a hack-and-slash campaign where everyone is fully on board with the idea of taking no prisoners. But if that’s not the case, NPCs who are misguided, corrupted by magic, or the dupes of evil overlords often make for a more interesting story.

FRPG GM Tip: Any spell available to the party — or to any character of the same power level if the party is short on casters — makes a perfect treasure reward. Whether a scroll, a potion, or a one-use magic item, another use of a spell the characters already have can’t possibly unbalance your game.

FRPG Player Tip: Spend some time before each session reviewing your character’s gear. Magical gear is especially important, but remembering in the moment that your character has rope, caltrops, chalk, a bell, or a hunk of strong-smelling cheese can make a difference to a scene in unexpected ways.

FRPG GM Tip: Thinking like a player is a great way to create challenging encounters as a GM. Don’t just focus on what the villains are plotting. Think ahead of time about what plans the players might hatch to counter those plots — and then expect to be surprised by the plans you didn’t expect.

FRPG GM Tip: Giving a name to a magic weapon found as treasure gives that weapon a useful degree of narrative weight in the players’ minds, even if the name is just a throwaway detail for you. Even better, doing so can inspire the players to name the weapons they commission or craft themselves.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The best number of dice to own is the number you routinely need to roll. Playing a damage-dealing caster? Have d6s and d8s on hand. Make a ton of attack rolls each turn? Have groups of d20s and damage dice. And if you ever come up short, don’t be afraid to ask to borrow.

FRPG Player Tip: Active listening might be best skill a player can bring to a game. Focusing on what the GM and all the other players are bringing to the table scene by scene is the best way to stay centered in the story — and to make sure the GM and other players are listening to you in turn.

FRPG GM Tip: When it comes to worldbuilding and adventure backstory, think “menu,” not “meal.” Players don't need a whole history prepped, cooked, and served up. They need you to give them a sense of what tastes the setup has to offer, then to let them order the specific entree they want to sample.

FRPG Player Tip: When making choices for a character, asking “What would I do?” is a good starting point — but don’t stop there. RPGs are about possibility. About being our best selves. So instead, ask: “What would I do if I could truly make a difference? What would I do if I wasn’t afraid?” 

FRPG GM Tip: A great many fantasy campaigns feature the idea of a present built on the bones of great ages of the past, so lean into that. Ruins in unexpected environments, lost dungeons under contemporary buildings, and art and relics of the ancient past can bring your world and your game to life.

FRPG Player Tip: The best type of character is one who’s an extension of you, reflecting your own interests and personality. The other best type of character is one who’s completely different from you, letting you explore new sides of yourself. Try one approach. Try the other. Meld them. Have fun.

Art by Dean Spencer