FRPG Tips — February 2025

Over on BluSky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I’ve been posting daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players. On the last day of each month, I’ll be posting a full collection of the previous month’s tips for your reading pleasure. And please feel free to follow me at either of the above locations to get new tips every day, fresh out of the idea forge.

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

FRPG GM Tip: We notice cliches and coincidence in fiction much more than in real life — and an RPG feels like real life when we’re in it. Don’t be afraid to have NPCs show up in taverns, or to leave convenient notes and journals lying around. As long as it advances the story, the players won’t care.

FRPG GM Tip: An encounter that feels flat can be easily energized by a ticking clock. A magical shrine threatens to explode. Guards have been called and the duke must be won over quickly. As long as any outcome advances the story, tell the players they have a time limit and see the tension rise.

FRPG GM Tip: When it’s clear that the players — especially young players — don’t want to kill every foe they meet, think about building the biggest battles of your campaign around constructs, undead, fiends, and enemies who have freely chosen a path of irredeemable evil.

FRPG Player Tip: Characters don’t necessarily need to be balanced in their features and roles to have a fun game, but balance in look and feel is usually a good idea. Your “Bob the Fighter” can feel out of place next to more “realistic” characters, so ask the other players how they feel about that. 

FRPG GM Tip: When characters attempt to sneak or hide, avoid opposed rolls in favor of setting a DC based on your sense of the challenge. Sneaking by a tired town guard at night? An easy check. Hiding by day from a pack of wood elf scouts all wired on amphetamines? Probably a hard check.

FRPG GM Tip: If the party ever ends up divided by circumstance rather than by choice, set out clear guidelines for how to bring everybody back together. Whatever subgoals emerge from being separated, make sure that reuniting is the overriding goal, and that the players know how to make that happen.

FRPG GM Tip: Players picking less-than-perfect builds or doubling up on party roles isn’t an excuse for you to run a game that’ll teach them a lesson about character optimization. It’s an invitation to show off how you can shape an adventure — even on the fly — to be a fun challenge for any group.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: When playing face-to-face, some folks are fine with food and drink at the table. Others prefer to keep game time and snack time separate. Talk to each other to make sure everyone’s happy with the snack situation. And if appropriate, snacks for the GM make a great thank-you.

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

FRPG GM Tip: For a first session with a new group of players — especially inexperienced players — let appropriate humor play out in the adventure, even in small ways. Laughing during a session can help players overcome initial nervousness, and quickly establishes that having fun is everyone’s goal.

FRPG Player Tip: Your character’s flaws or dark side should never become an excuse to disrupt or derail the game for other players — especially the GM. Antiheroes who don’t play nice with others make great characters in fiction, but a campaign is about shared narrative, not solo stories. 

FRPG GM Tip: Don’t do this for every foe, but key encounters can be made much more interesting by having one or two enemies flying. Flying magic exists in most games, so as long the characters have effective ranged attacks, give the bandit chieftain a potion and let them soar.

FRPG GM Tip: Writing little bits of in-game fiction is a great way to help players remember key developments in the campaign. But whether a letter, a journal, a cargo manifest, an arrest report, or what have you, keep it brief. Too much overall detail makes it more difficult to remember key details.

FRPG GM Tip: Asking for feedback is one of the most difficult things to do for any creator — but the campaign you create will benefit from it. Every few sessions, ask your players what they’re enjoying most about your games. Then ask what things you can do to make them enjoy your games even more.

FRPG Player Tip: Skipping the murder-hobo vibe of a fantasy RPG you otherwise love can be as easy as asking the GM, “Hey, can we skip the murder-hobo vibe?” Start by talking about house rule options for all attacks and spells to leave creatures incapacitated, so killing foes isn’t the only option.

FRPG GM Tip: A session where the players spend two hours planning how to undermine foes, then one hour in combat against those foes, can be just as much fun as the characters doing zero planning before spending three hours in combat. Embrace helping players avoid the trouble you’ve planned for them.

FRPG GM Tip: When thinking about which elements to make recurring features of your campaign, let the players decide for you. Take note of which subplots, NPCs, locations, and threats they talk about most after the fact, then prep those things for a follow-up appearance.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially for starting characters, a number of easy-threat foes are often a better combat choice than a single high-threat foe. A group of foes deals less damage each time one of them is taken out, but a single foe deals full damage right from the start of a fight to the end.

FRPG Player Tip: A good backstory is more about asking questions than making statements. Statements can only tell you where your character has been. Questions covering the things your character wants to knodw or is looking for will set up where you’re going, and that’s what the game is about.

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

FRPG GM Tip: One downside to loving the GM’s life is having no time to play in other people’s games. So make the time. Find a campaign to play in alongside yours. Pitch your friends on running one-shots. Nothing helps you see your own game from the players’ perspective better than being a player.

FRPG GM Tip: Thinking about your character’s story can be one of the best parts of being a player — so don’t forget to have that same fun with your key villains and NPCs. What are their ambitions? Their hopes and dreams? What are they afraid of? What secrets do they least want to see revealed?

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re new to the game, focus first on the narrative side of a character’s features and traits, not the mechanics. You can develop and fine-tune your understanding of mechanics as you play. But building a character story based on the rules of a game is almost always a bad idea.

FRPG GM Tip: Don’t be afraid to pass on tactical tips to the players that their characters would be well aware of in the midst of combat. If you know the front-liners will break if their captain is taken out, work that into the narrative of the fight — especially if the characters are struggling.

FRPG GM Tip: When asking players “What do you do?”, make sure two or three default options are already laid out. It’s great fun when someone picks the fourth or fifth option you hadn’t thought about, but having no sense of what’s possible can easily freeze up a player’s ability to make a decision.

FRPG GM Tip: Swapping damage types is one of the easiest ways to make foes stand out in a fight. Mercenaries of the Flameblood Company whose weapon attacks deal fire damage. Wolves serving pestilence druids whose bites deal necrotic damage. Even a minor change can make a stock threat feel fresh.

FRPG Player Tip: Arguments and disagreements can make for great roleplaying. But unless you know your group well and have established suitable boundaries, don’t look to create real conflict between characters. An adventuring party is about strength in numbers, and conflict eats away that strength.

(Art by Dean Spencer)

The Focus of the Fight

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

Talking Things Out

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

Playing Against Type

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

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

Turning the Tables

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

Going to Ground

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

Where’d They Go?

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

Blast From the Past

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