FRPG Tips — February 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: Running theater-of-the-mind combat doesn’t mean maps should be forbidden at your table. Especially if playing online, a map can provide you and the players with a sense of shared space that helps bring the scene to life even if you’re not counting squares.

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re into sports analogies, not all of your character’s moves need to be a home run, a slam dunk, or a slap-shot goal. The social aspect of RPGs means that setting up another player’s chance to shine can be just as rewarding as standing in the spotlight yourself.

FRPG GM Tip: Keeping track of what the villains are doing is an essential part of campaign tracking — and is easy to forget as you focus on what the heroes are doing. Make thinking about the villains’ plans a regular part of your prep, especially when the characters can’t see those plans developing.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: How to handle character death is an important topic both for session zero and as the campaign unfolds. For some, grimdark lethality is fun. For others, losing a character makes the investment in that character feel wasted. Talk about what approach works best for your group.

FRPG GM Tip: The different modes of many fantasy RPGs — combat, roleplaying, and exploration — are often talked about as separate elements, even as they most often play best in combination. Look for roleplaying opportunities during battles. Have exploration trigger quick and easy battles.

FRPG Player Tip: When a new session picks up after a week of real time but only ten minutes of game time, you’re going to have trouble remembering things that would be fresh in your character’s mind. So keep notes of party goals, recent discoveries, upcoming plans, and more to close that gap.

FRPG GM Tip: The best way to improvise is to do so before your game as well as during. Ad-lib or generate lists of NPC and location names, wandering monsters, bits of discoverable lore, NPC mannerisms and secrets, and anything else you can think of, then pull randomly from those lists as you play.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The flavor of spell effects can almost always be reworked without breaking the game. Change up a spell’s appearance, components, damage type, or the way it’s resisted to create interesting cult casters, PCs and NPCs with unique magical backgrounds, and more.

FRPG GM Tip: Feints, red herrings, and unreliable narrators are great tools for fiction, but a campaign feels more personal than any fiction ever can. Using narrative subterfuge once to deceive the characters is fun. But doing it over and over again runs the risk of the players feeling deceived.

FRPG Player Tip: When joining a new game, definitely think about whether the system feels like a good fit for you. But every system is capable of telling a dizzying array of stories as it’s filtered through the players, so look first and foremost to the type of story the other players want to tell.

FRPG GM Tip: Villains should always be malleable. As the campaign advances — and especially if you’re running a published adventure — don’t be afraid to combine villains, switch their allegiances, or completely rewrite their goals and plans in response to how the story changes direction.

FRPG Player Tip: Having the game become unbalanced in the characters’ favor can feel like a windfall at first. But over time, things feeling too easy can undermine the heroic narrative that makes a game compelling. Let the GM know if house rules or story developments start to feel a bit too sweet.

FRPG GM Tip: For narrative scenes, have at least one obvious path the characters can follow. If an NPC is noticeably angry, trying to dial down that anger is an easy choice that will inspire other choices. But an inscrutable NPC can leave players so hesitant about what to do that they do nothing.

FRPG Player Tip: If you find it daunting or stressful when the spotlight of a roleplaying scene focuses on your character, always feel free to follow the lead of others. Talk back to a boss or expand on a roleplaying beat using elements another character has already introduced.

FRPG GM Tip: Most of the monsters you’ll ever run are a lot tougher than you. But on the flip side, your experience as a GM means you likely know more about the game’s mechanics and tactics than they do. Let enemies make mistakes in combat, especially in response to cool moves by the characters.

FRPG Player Tip: The win condition for any RPG is having fun, even when characters fail or suffer setbacks. So don’t lose sight of that goal even if a downbeat in the campaign is weighing on you. As one of the writers of the campaign story, you can always have your eyes on the next success.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Always, always, always ask questions, whether you’re wanting to clarify a player’s intent, double-check a bit of lore, remember something a character or NPC would know, or what have you. The game is a conversation, so never be shy about starting that conversation.

FRPG GM Tip: Nothing makes a campaign go flat faster than following a narrative line that the players have lost interest in. A campaign is a living, organic thing, constantly reshaping itself based on the players’ and characters’ goals — so pay close attention to those goals and how they change.

FRPG Player Tip: Whenever you end up playing a character who’s more complicated than expected, pick and choose simple elements of that character and focus on them one at a time. If your warrior has six combat moves, test them out over six different fights before you think about combining them.

FRPG GM Tip: If you struggle to come up with options for characters to “fail forward” on a tanked check or test, try a humorous approach. On a failed check to find a secret door, have the door already broken and let it fall on a searching character for minor damage before revealing the room beyond.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: For heroes and NPCs alike, when describing the action in a scene, focus on active sensory details. Don’t describe a character or NPC being angry. Talk about how they knock their chair over and set a hand to their scabbard as they stand in response to a rebuke.

FRPG GM Tip: Going over the top with worldbuilding is great fun, and there’s nothing wrong with doing so. But in almost all cases, the lore your game needs at any given moment should revolve around people, places, and history that the heroes can get caught up in with just a few days’ travel.

Art by Dean Spencer

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