FRPG Tips — March 2025

Over on BluSky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I’ve been posting daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players. At the end of each month, I’ll be posting a full collection of that 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.

GM Tip: Breaking a complex task into subtasks makes it easier for the players to dig into those tasks. Needing to decide between five things can be tough. Needing to do a thing, then choose between two things, then choose between two things creates a clearer throughline for success.

GM Tip: When thinking about fun roleplaying hooks for villains, focus less on the big boss and more on their lieutenants. The NPCs the characters go toe-to-toe with over and over again often create a more lasting impression than the boss who they face only in the final adventure arc.

GM Tip: Especially for starting characters, don’t be stingy with beneficial magic found as treasure. Claiming healing potions and useful scrolls after a tough fight always feels good — and is much more rewarding than having an adventure patron offer those things up front.

Player Tip: Enjoying playing your character is the ultimate goal of the game. So if that isn’t happening, talk to the GM about what might be going on. Sometimes the smallest changes to backstory, motivation, or feature choices can make a huge difference to how a character feels.

GM Tip: Giving players advantage on rolls is one of the best ways to reward and encourage roleplaying and out-of-the box thinking. Whether it’s a fervent speech at court before a Persuasion check or leaping off a balcony before a final strike, look to reward each player this way every session.

GM Tip: Some players aren’t keen on killing all their enemies, even when those enemies deserve it. If it suits your campaign, make use of having foes corrupted by supernatural evil, who then have that evil driven out of them when reduced to 0 health and are left unconscious and alive.

GM Tip: The best campaigns are built on foundations of the fantasy you love. For the purpose of the games you create with your friends, there’s no harm in paying tribute to your favorite books, films, and other media by outright stealing ideas, inspiration, plots, characters, and more.

Player Tip: It's fine to play an older starting character, but it’s good to know why your veteran sellsword or caster isn’t any better at what they do than the fresh young adventurers around them. An easy option: Turning their back on the past means they have to now relearn what they once knew.

GM Tip: In a freeform campaign where the characters’ choices drive the story, ask the players at the end of every session what the characters plan to do next. Doing so lets you optimize your prep time around one or two immediate goals, rather than trying to prep every possibility up front.

GM Tip: Especially for newer GMs still working on running multiple types of monsters at once, build encounters around a single moderate-threat foe plus two or three environmental effects. Because such effects play out the same way every round, they’re much easier to manage than additional foes.

GM Tip: Asking players for a list of three goals their character hopes to achieve is one of the easiest ways to keep a character grounded in a new campaign. Rather than trying to fine-tune encounters, reveals, and rewards based on what you think the characters and players will like, just ask!

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.

GM Tip: In campaigns favoring combat, having the heroes opposed by multiple groups of foes can easily push the threat level too high. But in campaigns that favor roleplaying and intrigue, characters can easily pit multiple groups of foes against each other rather than taking them on in turn.

GM Tip: For every encounter, have multiple end conditions in mind. In every combat, think about foes surrendering, bargaining, or fleeing. In every social encounter, think about diplomacy, observation, threats, or pilfering as equally valid options for the characters to get what they need.

GM Tip: Think of the games you run as serving your players a meal. When you notice that they really love what you served up in a previous session, serve that up again. For most people, it takes a long time to get tired of a favorite dish or dessert.

GM Tip: Some players love cliffhanger endings to sessions. Other players find them stressful, especially if the characters or the NPCs they care about are left in real peril. Talk about that in session zero, alongside asking if it’s okay for sessions to run long in order to avoid cliffhangers.

Player Tip: The reluctant hero is a great fictional trope. But characters not interested in adventuring can grind a campaign to a halt in a hurry. Always give the GM a clear understanding of what hooks will give your reluctant hero their “I will take the ring to Mordor!” moment.

GM Tip: Nothing in any game functions in isolation. In any encounter — combat or otherwise — stay open to what the characters’ actions in that encounter might lead to next. For every villain or NPC, think about what else they might do in addition to their primary narrative goal.

GM Tip: Using evil or corrupt organizations as the villains in your campaign is totally fine. But you can often build more interesting stories that favor roleplaying over combat by having a good organization fall victim to misguided motivations, leading its members to tyrannical acts.

GM Tip: The pacing of a game is often in the players’ hands, as they decide how much time the characters spend in exploration and roleplaying. Whenever possible, be flexible in how long your sessions run so that you don’t have to stop in the middle of a rich, complex scene in a clumsy fashion.

Player Tip: One old-school technique that every newer player can benefit from is writing things down. Digital character sheets are cool, but handwritten notes detailing stats, features, magic, gear, and more will burn those details into your brain far better than watching an app fill them in.

GM Tip: It costs nothing to let players retroactively decide they purchased common supplies at some point in the past. A player can forget to write down “rope” or “healing draught” on a character sheet far more easily than the character would forget such essential gear in the world of the game.

GM Tip: Improvising while running games shouldn’t feel overwhelming. Starting with a sense of “Anything can happen!” can freeze your creativity if it leaves you not knowing where to begin. So start instead with “One of the following four things can happen” and improvise within a set space.

GM Tip: When characters hit a turning point in an especially challenging fight, say so. “The demon goes down, and you see fear flash across the faces of the cultists.” Letting the players know they’ve gained an edge is a great way to reenergize a long combat.

Player Tip: It’s not metagaming to interact with and understand the world of the game as your character would. Pore over your game’s equipment and magic sections at will, and make notes on anything worth acquiring or seeking out that might make your adventuring life easier.

GM Tip: You don’t have to turn every moment of the game into a soliloquy, but try to punctuate key events and revelations with description. A critical hit, the realization that an NPC is a traitor, a clutch saving throw to avoid peril — go full-on theatric to bring those story beats to life.

GM Tip: Especially if you’re running your game online, don’t be beholden to battle maps. For straightforward encounters in common locations — a town square, a path through the woods, et al. — run combat without a map and have fun letting the action play out as description only.

GM and Player Tip: If everyone at the table hates sitting out combat because a character or monster is immobilized or stunned, introduce a house rule where you can take damage or lose healing to shake off effects that would leave you unable to act.

GM Tip: At different points in the campaign, make note of or ask the players about new personal goals or ambitions the characters have decided to work toward. Then look for ways to work those goals into the story while it plays out — especially as the campaign starts to come to a close.

GM Tip: It’s always good to end a session on a high note, but there are more ways to do that than a successful combat encounter. Figuring out a key plot point, achieving a roleplaying goal, uncovering sought-after lore, or avoiding an unexpected threat can all create a solid feeling of success.

GM and Player Tip: Don’t read your game’s core books with an exclusive focus on the mechanics and features you want to make use of. Read them to let yourself be drawn into the space defined by the feel of the game, so that story and characters can come fully to life in that space.

Magic Item Drawbacks

Since my very first days of playing AD&D, I’ve loved magic item curses. Though to be fair, I suspect some of that love might stem from me having been mostly a forever GM for those many years, so that I spend more time on the fun GM side of curses than the annoying player side.

I’ve made use of item curses in many a campaign. I wrote rules for magic item curses in 4th edition D&D that made their way into the magic item tome Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium. I’ve been “awarded” a cursed magic item or three in my day as a player and was just fine with that, because I truly and honestly love how things like curses can send the story of a game off in unexpected directions. But I totally understand that for many, many players, cursed magic items and their impact on character agency often make for an immediate stop to the fun. 

With those players in mind, I set up an array of magic item drawbacks (inspired by the type of item curse known as a drawback in D&D 3.5) for the CORE20 RPG. I find drawbacks just as much narrative fun as full-blown curses, but their effects are much, much milder, and thus less prone to wrecking the fun for players who don’t like their character story upturned as much as I do. So if those sorts of players are part of your 5e campaign, you can make use of those drawbacks, converted from CORE20 to 5e. 

You can roll randomly or choose a drawback for a magic item, or use the drawbacks presented here as inspiration for other story-complicating drawbacks of your own. A magic item with a drawback is never bonded to a wielder as a cursed item typically is, and so can simply be abandoned or set aside until its drawback can be dealt with. A drawback can be removed from an item with a remove curse spell. Any ongoing effects caused by a drawback are undone 24 hours after the drawback is removed from the item or the item is abandoned.

Drawbacks

1. Whenever you finish a short or long rest, your hair grows 1 inch longer.
2. Whenever you finish a short or long rest, you either shrink 1 inch shorter in height (1–3 on a d6) or grow 1 inch taller (4–5 on a d6).
3. The temperature within 5 feet of the item is always 10 degrees F cooler than the ambient temperature around it.
4. The temperature within 5 feet of the item is always 10 degrees F warmer than the ambient temperature around it.
5. Whenever you finish a long rest, your hair changes randomly to another color typical for your lineage.
6. Whenever you finish a long rest, your skin changes randomly to another color typical for your lineage.
7. A tattoo appears on your body of embarrassing, profane, or incriminating nature, as the GM determines.
8. Whenever the campaign enters downtime, you must succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or be affected by a random disease.
9. The item continually emits a disturbing sound (moaning, weeping, screaming, cursing, insults, and so on).
10. Some aspect of the item’s appearance randomly becomes conspicuously unusual (garish color, useless flanges or appendages, embarrassing sigils, and so forth).
11. If you are ever surprised, you panic and must attack the nearest creature on your first turn in combat. If you can’t do so, you are stunned until the end of your first turn.
12. The first time you use the item after you finish a long rest (the item is activated, is used as part of an action, has its bonus made use of, and so forth), you are stunned on your next turn.
13. Your eyes are blurry, imposing disadvantage on Perception checks involving vision.
14. Your hands tremble, imposing disadvantage on Sleight of Hand checks and checks made using tools that involve fine movement.
15. You are plagued by self-doubt, imposing disadvantage on Performance and Persuasion checks.
16. You have trouble catching your breath, imposing disadvantage on Athletics checks.
17. You mumble constantly to yourself, imposing disadvantage on Stealth checks whenever other creatures can hear you.
18. The first time you enter combat after you finish a long rest, you are poisoned during the first round of combat.
19. Whenever you finish a long rest, you must succeed on a DC 10 Constitution saving throw or have disadvantage on Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution saving throws (chosen randomly) until the end of your next long rest.
20. Whenever you finish a short rest, you must succeed on a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw or gain 1 level of exhaustion that lasts until you finish your next short rest.

The Character Crucible

My first really tangible RPG character (by which I mean a character I rolled up who I actually wanted to play long-term, as opposed to one of the many characters-of-the-week that 1st edition AD&D was so often about) was Morgan — a human fighter who was a direct lift in every way from the character Travis Morgan in Mike Grell’s comic The Warlord. I borrowed the name. I borrowed the look (though my Morgan favored chain mail over the comic character’s leotard-or-loincloth vibe). I borrowed the character’s philosophy of believing in a world where the credo wasn’t “Might make right,” but “Might for right.”

From The Warlord issue 7 (“The Iron Devil”),
written and illustrated by Mike Grell. 

My second really tangible character — rolled up not long after Morgan, and played alongside him as inseparable friends for many years — was a human magic-user named Stormhand, whose inspiration was largely, “What would it be like if I could cast spells?” Stormhand was a self-insert character, with no external inspiration and no real sense of what he even looked like beyond “usually brooding.” Playing him was entirely about giving me a chance to act like the forthright, driven, confident problem-solver I was pretty sure I could have been in high school except for all that incapacitating social awkwardness stuff.

From these two extremes, I learned pretty early in my RPG life that there’s no single right way to build a character. And over the course of having created many characters and having watched friends and family members build many, many more through decades of campaigns, I’ve noted certain key patterns of character inspiration that all players can tap into.

Fictional Inspiration

Here’s an important tip, especially for first-time players: No one else in the game will care if you lift your character concept straight from your favorite work of fiction. You can probably even get away with playing them under their own name, as I did with Morgan all those many years ago, though coming up with a new name can be most effective at disguising the character’s origins. Your acrobatic unarmed brawler on the run from the assassins guild that trained her? No one else will care that everything you throw into the character at the table comes straight from how much you love Black Widow from the Marvel-verse. That stoic elf archer who pulls out two shortswords when the monsters get up close and personal? You can probably even take a shot at using Orlando Bloom’s accent as you Legolas your way through the campaign.

You, but Better

I say “You, but better” with the following qualifier: You are already awesome, and I can safely say that without even knowing you because the fact that you play tabletop RPGs puts you in a special class of awesome people. But all of us, no matter how awesome we are, have things we yearn for that we don’t have the opportunity to do — and letting the character you play tap into those things can be an amazing exercise in personal fulfillment. On a basic level, we live in a world bereft of fantasy magic, so that playing an arcanist, a healer, or a wielder of primal energy can tap into a deep-seated yearning to know what magic might feel like. Likewise, there are plenty of monstrous and evil people in our world — a point that’s become especially acute at this particular point in history. But most of us are never in a position to directly oppose that evil the way our fantasy RPG characters can. 

With this mode of character creation, your character’s outlook, desires, and approach to life are all rooted firmly in your own life, your own philosophies and convictions. Then you get to push those philosophies and convictions to new extents by virtue of bringing who you are into the game, wrapped in the guise of the character the game lets you make. 

Product of the Past

Sometimes one of the most engaging ways to create a character is to have no strong sense of who the character is — because figuring that out is the point of playing the game. This mode of character building focuses almost entirely on backstory, as you create the strongest possible sense of where your character comes from. Then, armed only with that sense of what’s brought the character to the point where the campaign begins, you let the ups and downs of the campaign determine who the character becomes over time. This approach works especially well in a sandbox-style campaign with no set narrative arc, allowing the evolution of the character to help drive the campaign story, and vice versa.

That said, be aware that GMs are always on the lookout for backstory-driven characters who use that backstory as an excuse to resist being drawn into the campaign. Usually this takes the form of players complaining that their character isn’t feeling the incentive to go into the dungeon, rescue the missing prince, or what have you — so don’t be that player. It’s up to you, not the GM, to come up with reasons why your always-in-progress character wants to engage with the campaign story as it unfolds.

Goal Oriented

The opposite approach to focusing on your character’s past is to think primarily about what your character wants for the future. A goal-oriented character zeroes in on the traditional benchmarks for a character in literary fiction. What do they want? What do they need? How do the character’s want and need differ? And at what point do they realize that what they need is more important than what they want? A character with a rock-solid set of future goals will still definitely have a past that connects to those goals. But when building a goal-oriented character, you’ll usually find yourself leaving that past sketchy, then fleshing it out as the events of the campaign produce moments connected to your goals that you want to in turn connect to the past.

Mix and Match

Naturally, none of the above modes of character creation need to be adhered to exclusively, and you can combine any of these ideas in any number of ways. You might start with fictional inspiration and decide to make that fictional character you love into an avatar of your own beliefs and desires. You might start off with a goal-oriented character who suddenly generates a much more detailed backstory than you initially had in mind. You might start out with a solid backstory and a blank slate of where the character might go and why, then realize immediately that the character embodies a favorite fantasy archetype you hadn’t been thinking about.

If you’ve been gaming for a long while and have never thought about your character creation process, you probably draw from some of the frameworks above without actually thinking about them in these terms. Building characters is an instinctive kind of fun for most players. But thinking about the specific foundations of your process can make that process even more interesting — or put you in a better position to help newer players figure out their own process.

Avoid Character-as-Features

In addition to the four modes of character creation and development presented above, there’s a fourth mode that I generally warn people against, but which becomes ever-more prevalent as games like D&D 5e become ever-more feature focused. In a class-based RPG, deciding what class to play is often the first choice a player makes, and reasonably so. But a focus on choosing a class and subclass and all the special features that extend out from those initial choices makes it way too easy to create a character exclusively from the perspective of game features and mechanics. 

Now, there’s nothing wrong with loving the features and mechanics of a particular character class. If some aspect of playing a fighter or a paladin or a rogue or a warlock appeals to you, go for it. But in my experience — speaking both about the characters I’ve played and the many more characters I’ve seen other people play in the games I run — characters built primarily as a collection of class features in search of a story have a much harder time finding that story. As much as is possible, think about class features as something you build onto a character concept crafted in a more narrative-focused way, rather than hoping that the features will suggest a narrative to you. Because the story that mechanical features can tell is a lot more limited than the many other options your character-building imagination will come up with if you let it.