FRPG Tips — April 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: Whenever you find yourself writing high-level, world-encompassing lore (or reading it in a published adventure), always ask yourself, “How can this apply to where the heroes are and what they’re doing right now?” Then write up that lower-level lore as a core part of your campaign prep.

FRPG Player Tip: The best gift you can give a GM is to say, “I really loved it when we did [X] last week.” Sometimes it’s obvious when players are enjoying themselves, but the amount of information a GM juggles makes it really easy to miss those cues and end up feeling like a session didn’t work.

FRPG GM Tip: A fight against lots of low-powered foes is fun for the players, but can be a drag for you when you’re rolling a ton of attacks that mostly miss. So let enemies fight together, granting advantage or adding a nice bonus for assistance to roll fewer attacks with a greater chance to hit.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: As the campaign comes to an end, everyone should feel free to talk about what’s coming. GMs — foreshadow climactic events so the players are ready for them. Players — tell the GM if there are narrative loose ends you want your character to tie up before time runs out.

FRPG GM Tip: If there’s a particular spell or magical effect that you find hard to run for enemies during combat, it’s totally cool to just ignore it. But intentionally making use of the problematic effect in an easy encounter can be a great way to figure out how to handle it better.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If one player who loves making notes wants to volunteer to recap the previous session each time you play, that’s great. But if your group doesn’t have such a player, everyone recapping together is a great way to warm up your collaborative creativity.

FRPG GM Tip: In addition to monster mechanics, think about the setup and circumstances of a combat encounter. Whatever their stat blocks, bored guards might be too flustered to flank or make multiple attacks. But the same stat blocks used as the boss’s personal guards can be fully optimized.

FRPG Player Tip: The GM frames the campaign story, but you and the other players have just as much input into where that story goes. A wild insight into the villain’s plans that you come up with off the top of your head might feel so cool that the GM swaps it for what they were planning originally.

FRPG GM Tip: Backstory isn’t just for player characters and NPCs. Every ruin comes with a story of what it was before. Every trap features a story of why it was created and how well it’s worked over the years. At every level, keep the connections between the present and the past in mind during play.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Maintaining fictional immersion doesn’t mean you need to add dense flavor to every single die roll you make. Simply focusing on adding a bit of detail to important moments of success or failure is all it takes to keep the world of the game fresh in everyone’s mind.

FRPG GM Tip: Outside of a boss battle, don’t worry if a combat encounter turns unexpectedly easy. Surprise wins over tough foes can boost the characters’ and players’ morale better than anything, and you can work the knowledge of what made the fight go soft into your next combat encounter.

FRPG Player Tip: Sometimes your character is the main character, driving the story on. Sometimes your character is there to support the other characters as they become the focus. Here’s a secret, though. Being the support while someone else shines is just as much fun as taking the lead yourself.

FRPG GM Tip: Adding foes is the easiest way to boost the threat of a combat encounter, but be careful that doing so doesn’t extend the encounter to become a slog. Focus on additional minions or low-health enemies, and on creating clear area-effect options for dealing with those enemies en masse.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The improvisation at the heart of all RPGs can often feel more like improvising music than improvising story. And as with music, listening to everyone else puts you in the best position to follow as each player takes lead for a bit, and lets everyone stay in key.

FRPG GM Tip: Supporting the players is a baseline of being a good GM, and you should always look to reinforce that during downbeats in the campaign. Whenever things get dire for the characters, ask yourself what benefits you can work into the narrative to remind the players you’re on their side.

FRPG Player Tip: In a game where dice rolls get swingy, don’t be afraid to work outside your character’s comfort zone. The things you’re good at will always be your main focus, but trying something you’re terrible at and turning an amazing die roll into a clutch success is a great feeling.

FRPG GM Tip: Making bad decisions can be fun, so if the players are heading that way, don’t interrupt the discussion that might get them there. But make sure to weigh in with any information the players or characters might have overlooked or forgotten if that might lead to a better decision.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Of all the skills and insights you’ll master for every RPG you play, learning to ignore your mistakes might be the most important. If you mess up, laugh and move on. The game is about the next cool thing you do, not the last thing that didn’t work out.

FRPG GM Tip: The goal breakdown that helps shape fictional characters and player characters alike is equally important for the villains in your game. What do they want? What do they need? What keeps them from getting those things? Track the answers for all your antagonists as the campaign unfolds.

FRPG Player Tip: Playing imperfect characters of a less-than-optimal power level can be great fun — but make sure the GM knows you’re doing that. Especially for new GMs running published adventures, it takes practice to adjust combat encounters so that unoptimized characters don’t end up in trouble.

FRPG GM Tip: Even in combat, roleplaying games are about story. When thinking about a fight scene, think in story terms when deciding how foes and environmental effects enter and play out during the fight. What’s your act 1 setup? What’s the act 2 complication? How does the last act resolve?

Art by Dean Spencer

Attention, Attention!

An essential bit of weirdness lurks at the heart of roleplaying games when we think about the engagement and attention that goes into a great RPG session. On the one hand, RPGs are the most engaging form of entertainment ever created (at least so far). But on the other hand, the complex nature of social interaction can lend itself to distraction and defocusing when you’re engaging in a three-hour narrative improv conversation with six other people. 

During its best moments, a game session can make you forget that you’re a player sitting around a table, as you become your character and the story surrounds you. At the same time, all RPG players know the flipside effect of slipping out of the story from time to time as their attention wavers. However, thinking about why that happens is a great way to make sure it doesn’t become a problem.

Distraction Is Not the Enemy

It’s easy to think about the problem of players losing the thread of a game and respond by saying: “No distractions at the table (real or virtual).” No phones or devices, no distracting side activities, no reading the rulebooks unless you’re specifically looking something up in the moment. The problem with that approach, as so many players know, is that sometimes distraction is a useful tool for increasing our focus and attention. 

Every gamer alive knows the experience of having a comedic digression take over a game for a short while and do absolutely no damage to the game in the end. Lots of folks know the utility of devices like fidget spinners for helping decrease the residual stress that can hinder concentration. Lots of players doodle or draw while playing, imposing a level of right-brain calm that makes listening easier. So rather than simply focus on distractions, think about the nature of those distractions and the affect they can have on player attention.

Avoid Other Stories

In my own experience, the common component of bad distractions at the gaming table is narrative. Because an RPG is a shared storytelling experience, the story centers of our brains need unfettered access to the moment-by-moment, scene-by-scene developments of the game story as it unfolds. And nothing messes that up faster than having another story intrude on the game story.

Back in my early gaming days, heated discussions would often ensue when some people wanted to leave a weekend football or basketball game on the TV in the background, just to keep up with the highlights and the score. These days, every player with a phone can have video running in their peripheral vision, and for folks playing online, having YouTube up in a side window can seem harmless. But if you find yourself missing details in the game story, or uncertain what’s happening in combat because you’ve tuned out during other player’s turns, that’s a sign that video is a distraction that needs to go.

Likewise with reading during a game session, whether that means looking up lore, mentally shopping for your next character upgrade or magic weapon, or scanning the news during what seems like a quiet moment. The focus required to read for information immediately shuts down our ability to listen for information. Outside of focusing on your own character notes or looking up rules in response to something that’s happened in the game, reading is something to avoid.

Make Note of That

Despite the best efforts of most GMs, the necessity of having to do occasional lore dumps during a game session can easily cause players’ attention to flag. On the GM side, always try to keep lore dumps as short as possible, and look for ways to make lore actionable. (Show, don’t tell, as the saying goes.) But on the player side, if you ever find yourself tuning out during a brief history backgrounder or an NPC’s revealing-the-secret-plot monologue, make notes on what you’re being told. Especially when making notes longhand, the process of redirecting what you’re hearing to make it something you’re writing forces you to focus on it a way that makes it all but impossible to tune out.

Just a Reminder

As the GM, never be afraid to catch the players up to make sure they haven’t missed anything. As a common example, in a complex combat scenario, it’s easy for players to miss details regarding enemy tactics and positioning that their players would absolutely be aware of, so fill those things in every round if you need to. On the player side, never be afraid to ask for a reminder of specific details you’re not clear on. Again, your character knows and remembers far more about what’s going on the story than you do, and no good GM will begrudge you asking to close that gap.

At the same time, if you find that you’re needing to ask for catch-up details more than you’d like, think about making notes while you play. Keep track of key details such as NPCs you’ve met or specific locations the party passes through during travel. Jot down rumors or clues as the GM presents them, and then review those notes each game session. Not only will doing so stick those details in your mind, it’ll remind you to engage more fully with new details as they’re presented.

Them’s the Breaks

It’s a rite of passage for many gamers to engage in marathon ten-hour straight-through RPG sessions. Even for those of us with regularly scheduled weekly games, the urge to want to get as much done in a session as possible creates a pressure to just keep playing. But ignoring this pressure in favor of setting up regular 10-minute breaks during your games is one of the best tools for focusing everyone’s attention.

Taking a break every hour or every hour-and-a-half does a number of positive things for your game. It allows people to get up and walk around for a bit, avoiding the sedentary mind slump that can accompany sitting for too long. It reminds people to hydrate, or gives the opportunity to unhydrate without having to step away from the game. And it also hard-wires into your gaming schedule the opportunity to engage in some of the attention-sapping activities talked about above without compromising the game. 

During a break, you can check out that video that’s been calling to you, or you can look up esoteric rules that aren’t directly germane to the game session, or you can check the scores and highlights of your sports event of choice. A lot of the time, our attention as players can be hamstrung by a legit sense of needing to do something and feeling the pressure to do it right now even while the game is in progress. Knowing that we’ll have the opportunity to do the thing at the next break in the game can be a most effective relief for that pressure.

Illustration from the D&D Player’s Handbook.