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.