FRPG Tips — May 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: The best games feature a shifting focus that places different characters in the spotlight. When it’s your turn to shine, take advantage of it. But be aware of when someone else has taken the primary role in the story and let them explore that on their own terms.

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 Tip: Especially in a long campaign, nothing is harder to find on a moment’s notice than names — an NPC or minor foe, an inn where the characters met someone important, or any of the many other details that flow through your game. Keep a categorized list of such names to make things easier.

FRPG Player Tip: The fun of playing a spellcaster comes from using your magic, but the GM might not know your spell list as well as you do. If the chance to use your favorite spells doesn’t come up as often as you’d like — especially cool utility spells — talk to the GM about ways to change that.

FRPG GM Tip: It can be fun to give out magic treasure that lines up perfectly with the characters’ strengths and goals. It can also be fun to give out magic treasure randomly and see what the characters and players do with an item that isn’t an obvious fit for any character.

FRPG GM Tip: NPCs in published adventures can always be swapped out for NPCs the characters already know. Likewise, feel free to roll different NPCs together so the characters have a stronger connection to a friendly or malevolent figure, rather than dividing the players’ attention.

FRPG Player Tip: The best time to ask a rules question is during a break in play or after a session. The second-best time is during a break in the action. The third-best time is anytime you need to. Never be afraid to ask, but don’t let questions interrupt the flow of the game if it isn’t necessary.

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: An easy combat encounter is one of the best ways to energize a session and drop in the lore that’ll move the story forward. Quick victories give the players a sense of accomplishment without draining resources, and defeated foes can reveal all sorts of clues to lead the characters on.

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 you play with minis, don’t worry about not having the exact monsters you need. Players won’t care that the gnoll cultists their characters fight are using orc figures. Or they won’t know that you’ve decided to reskin the encounter so the gnoll cult is using orc mercenaries as muscle.

FRPG GM Tip: Ask each player to come up with seeds for five encounter ideas — locations they’d love to explore or fight in, monsters their character has a grudge against, treasure they’d love to find, and so forth. Then tap into those ideas to create encounters or customize published adventures.

FRPG Player Tip: Alignment, morality, and ethics should play as big a part in your character-building as you want them to. Creating a character who adventures to uphold their values makes for great story. But so does creating a character who adventures to figure out what their values are.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Fifty years of rectilinear dungeons have shaped the way many folks expect the game to be played, but nothing compels you to be bound to a grid. If you play with maps, learn to love things not lining up, and look to methods other than counting squares for measuring distance.

FRPG GM Tip: Just because a player is quiet during a game doesn’t mean their engagement in the shared story is lessened. Often, quiet players just need an invitation to put themselves and their characters in the spotlight, so look for specific hooks and plot points that can write those invitations.

FRPG Player Tip: Especially if your character makes use of material from outside your game’s core rulebooks, make it your job to truly know the mechanics of your character. Making sure the GM never has to look up the rules surrounding something you want to do in a scene is a great goal.

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 GM Tip: The best dungeon maps make use of secret doors, hidden tunnels, teleporters, slides, and more to create shortcuts between areas. Discovering such bypasses and avoiding danger by sneaking around it can be the most satisfying aspect of a site-based incursion for the players. 

FRPG Player Tip: Take note of who comes just before you in the initiative order, and use their turn as a reminder to finalize your intentions for your turn. If you have trouble remembering that, ask your GM to call out who’s up next alongside calling on the player whose turn it is.

FRPG GM Tip: If you notice one player who loves to focus in on lore and revealed details during your games, ask that player to be the party’s official note-taker. Having a separate record of NPCs, plot twists, and key highlights during the campaign makes a great addition to your own notes.

FRPG GM Tip: During or after your game sessions, make quick notes about moments the players particularly enjoyed, NPCs who came up during discussions, plot points that resonated, or speculation on unresolved mysteries. Then use those notes to guide the direction of future sessions and adventures.

FRPG Player Tip: Playing a spellcaster requires a focus on resources and record-keeping greater than for most other characters, so assess your comfort level with that. If you prefer simpler characters, a focused caster build — dedicated healer, magical destroyer, et al. — might be the best option.

FRPG GM Tip: If improvising during a game feels daunting for you, start small. Set up creatures for three encounters. Set up three locations. Then roll randomly during your session to see which creatures show up in each location, matching up area features to creatures’ combat tactics on the fly.

FRPG GM Tip: Keep a running written list of cool locations, conflicts, NPCs, set-piece encounter ideas, and more, drawn from fiction, film, adventures you’ve read, or any other source. You might never use them verbatim, but nothing fuels your own ideas like that kind of concentrated inspiration.

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: Whenever you ask the players “What do you do?”, make sure two or three obvious choices are easily identifiable. Fantasy games are great at “Anything goes!”, but having no clear choice is the same thing as giving players too many choices, and the game will bog down as a result.

FRPG GM Tip: For players who love to have their melee characters lock down into one location in combat, nothing gets those characters moving faster than a foe attacking from range in a wide-open location. If a stock enemy doesn’t have a ranged attack, reskin their main melee attack to change that.

FRPG Player Tip: As long as it doesn’t involve content you don’t want in your game, try playing outside your narrative comfort zone once in a while. Embrace a character type you’ve never played before. Take a reckless approach to combat or social encounters if you’re usually cautious, or vice versa.

FRPG GM Tip: The shape of a game session is tough to control, especially if you play a sandbox-style game or are running a published adventure. But starting with an easy combat encounter is usually a great way to kick things off and set an exciting tone for a few hours’ play.

Art by Dean Spencer

The Backup Campaign

As written about on this very blog (and in plenty of other places), there are lots of strategies a GM can adopt for carrying on the campaign with a less-than-full roster of players. But because I’m a GM who really doesn’t like running games with a less-than-full crew, I’ve been known to dabble in the one-shot backup campaign.

A backup campaign is a campaign that runs alongside the main campaign, custom built to pick up the slack when too many players in the main group have to bow out of a regularly scheduled session. But because running or playing in two campaigns is [quickly checks math] twice as hard as running or playing in a single campaign — and because running one campaign is hard enough as it is — the backup campaign has some very specific parameters.

For the GM

A GM running a one-shot backup campaign needs to economize on prep and story development as much as possible. The following guidelines can help make that easier.

One Session at a Time

Because you’re never hoping that players will be missing two sessions in a row — and because if they are, you have no guarantee that it’ll be the same players each time — the focus of the backup campaign is the one-shot. A single short adventure whose beginning, middle, and end fits nicely into the space of your regular session.

A Rotating Cast of Characters

Because you generally won’t have the same players unable to attend a game every time, the makeup of the party needs to fit the idea of different characters jumping in and out of the backup campaign session to session. So look for a foundational story setup that works well with characters coming and going. An exploring-the-ruin-of-the-week dungeon delving campaign works great for this setup. So too does a high-seas pirate campaign, a mercenary company taking on adventures for hire, or the party as a group of investigators working cases in a major city. With all these options, it’s easy to explain that certain characters are off doing other stuff while the remaining party members descend dark staircases, plot a heist from the harbormaster’s house, or hunt for a murderer on a noble’s estate.

Straightforward Adventures

Not all one-shot adventures are created equal, whether you’re writing your backup campaign yourself, playing published one-shots, or pulling a single-session scenario out from the narrative of a longer published adventure. Because you want to make sure you wrap up your adventure in whatever time your session allows, focus on keeping things simple so that you can keep things moving. Set a clear goal for the characters. Narrate any necessary setup and backstory if it feels like roleplaying through it will run long. Keep an eye on the clock and cut intermediate sections from the story to leave yourself ample time to play out your big finish. And if you run out of adventure a bit before the end, don’t worry about it. Completing an adventure comes with a built-in sense of accomplishment for the players, and finishing up a one-shot session early won’t take away from that.

Focused Combat

Depending on the length of your game sessions, you’ll likely want to shoot for one or two full-scale combat encounters in your backup campaign games — typically one easy and one hard fight, or two medium fights with some additional excitement (traps, environmental effects, a mini-boss, and so forth) in the second encounter. To avoid combat running long, make sure each fight features alternative end points beyond the “everyone fights to the death” baseline.

Embrace the Random

If you create your own adventures rather than running published adventures, a one-shot backup campaign is a great opportunity to flex your improv muscles. Creating an exciting dungeon crawl, wilderness adventure, or urban excitement one-shot requires little more effort than finding a map you like, a solid plot hook, coming up with two sets of foes for the characters to face off against, and interesting environmental effects or NPCs to bring your locations to life. Lots of books (including my friend Mike Shea’s Lazy DM’s Companion) feature random adventure generators that you can use to sketch out a one-shot scenario in just a few minutes.

For the Players

Playing in a one-shot backup campaign can be just as much fun as playing in a long-term campaign. But players should keep a few things in mind to maximize the fun — and to help make the GM’s job as easy as possible.

Focus the Action

Because you know that a one-shot game needs to move from beginning to middle to end within a fixed duration, do everything you can to keep things moving. Focus on the setup and backstory presented by the GM, and feel free to ask whether specific plot threads are more or less relevant to the adventure throughline as you play. When the game’s in combat, think about what your character is doing ahead of time, and have any references you need to spells, special attacks, and magic at the ready. Pay attention to what’s happening around your character so that you’re able to quickly build on that, rather than having to ask what’s going on. And if any of these objectives are things you sometimes struggle with in your main game, treat the backup campaign as a lower-stakes place to hone your keeping-the-game-moving skills.

Know Your Character

It can be really easy to lose the narrative thread on a character you play only a couple of times every few months. As such, put an extra level of focus on your character for the backup campaign. Make the time to review their build and backstory each time you play, and look for any and all roleplaying opportunities as a means of heightening the connection between the character and you.

Keep Things Simple

Because the backup campaign is all about one-shot adventures bookended within a single game session, don’t expect a ton of complex continuity between adventures. And hand in hand with that, think about leaning away from complex characters with deep backstory, convoluted goals, and several layers of secrets. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of any of that, of course. But the backup campaign isn’t necessarily the place for a complex character to shine.

Try Different Concepts

Single-session one-shot campaigns lend themselves to unique and interesting characters, and are a great excuse to try a character type or build you’ve never played before. Mix-and-matching character archetypes and concepts can be a lot of fun, but lots of players worry about a character who tries to do much becoming less effective than a more focused character in a long campaign. But in a one-shot campaign, you don’t need to worry as much about that. You might play the same character for a half-dozen one-off sessions or just a single game — long enough to have fun with the concept before moving on to something else.