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

FRPG Tips — November 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 GM and Player Tip: Roll damage for an area effect as soon as you announce it, even if that’s before you’ve decided on location and targets. That way, you can total the damage up even while saving throws are being made to keep things moving.

FRPG GM Tip: Ask players to give you as much of a heads-up as possible when they need to miss a session. With advance notice, it’s often possible to tune the narrative and make sure a missing character has the least possible impact — or can even be sidelined for in-game reasons.

FRPG Player Tip: When you start out, you’ll need to ask for reminders of how certain rules in your game work, and players who’ve been at it for a while will help you. When you’ve playing for a while, new players will need reminders and you’ll help them. RPGs are so often about paying favors forward.

FRPG GM Tip: The best part about a big site-based adventure is watching its complex layout unfold. The worst part is having to constantly backtrack through that layout. Set up convenient portals or safe routes so characters can retrace their steps narratively or leave a location without a fight.

FRPG Player Tip: Give your character a theme song — or a whole suite of theme songs. You don’t have to play it for anyone else, or even share that information. But just like with backstory details, that level of personal interaction with a character can help bring them to life in a profound way.

FRPG GM Tip: When choosing foes to build an encounter, make sure to not accidentally end up with everyone imposing similar conditions or effects. When a couple of creatures can limit the heroes’ movement, it’s a threat. When all the creatures can, it’s a slog.

FRPG Player Tip: From useful terrain features to the potential for other creatures to shake up roleplaying, the GM probably hasn’t thought about lots of potential benefits that might play out in an encounter. But most GMs are quick to grant benefits to players who ask about them, so always ask.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Even if you’re not playing in theater-of-the-mind style, feel free to ignore fixed distances on tactical maps in favor of deciding, “Yeah, that looks about right.” As long as the characters and their enemies are playing by the same distance and area rules, it’s all good.

FRPG GM Tip: Conflict is what drives story much of the time, but conflict in a fantasy game doesn’t always have to mean combat. Conducting a strategy session in which the players and characters come up with a plan to avoid an encounter can be just as much fun as fighting.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Especially if you’re playing a game that tries to define the things characters can do by focusing first and foremost on the mechanics of action types, feel free to ignore that. Let characters and foes choose what they want to do, then figure out what action covers that. 

FRPG Player Tip: When a narrative scene is focusing on another player’s character, you can still look for opportunities to play a part. Asking the GM if there’s anything your character can do to assist the spotlight character is a great starting point.

FRPG GM Tip: Sometimes it’s fun to let the players and characters go off on a tangent where they suspect a benevolent NPC is up to no good. But sometimes you need to say, “I’m going to go meta to tell you this person is on your side.” Don’t let suspicion derail character interactions for no reason. 

FRPG Player Tip: You don’t have to keep a diary or anything, but make notes on important points of narrative development for your character as a campaign unfolds. Especially if their personal goals shift over time, the way your character grows and changes is great fuel for roleplaying.

FRPG GM Tip: Giving NPCs a humorous tone can greatly boost the players’ engagement with them. Even in a purposefully unfunny campaign built around serious themes and stories, look for opportunities to have NPCs engage in irony and slapstick from time to time to anchor their place in the story.

FRPG Player Tip: Like most fiction, campaigns are typically built around the idea of what the characters want to obtain. But some of the best roleplaying comes from thinking about the things your character has lost, and whether the things they hope to obtain will ever fill that void.

FRPG GM Tip: Whether by accident or by virtue of min-maxing, if a character is vastly overpowered in combat compared to the rest of the party, do not hesitate to have the toughest foes somehow sense that and focus on that character. Sometimes game balance is attained on a round-by-round basis.

FRPG Player Tip: When another player’s character does something you think is cool, make a note of that. Especially if you’re new to game, there’s nothing wrong with your character emulating what the other heroes are doing around them as they shape their own heroic style.

FRPG GM Tip: You don’t need unique stat blocks to play unique creatures. Just start with a stat block you like, then add one attack and one noncombat trait from two other creatures, and you’ll create a threat that’s likely never existed in the game before.

FRPG Player Tip: Never be afraid to ask out loud, “I wonder if what’s going on in the campaign is _____?” Knowing what you and your character are thinking will help the GM fine-tune the story as it unfolds — or might even inspire them to take a different approach based on your speculation.

FRPG GM Tip: Your boss villain doesn’t need to personally threaten the characters in the manner of directly attacking their loved ones. But their threat needs to feel personal. Keeping the characters’ personal goals in mind is thus usually your best guide for hitting those characters where it hurts.

FRPG GM Tip: Coming up with unique names is an endless task, but non-unique names should also be part of every fantasy culture. Have ten NPCs named your world’s equivalent of “John Smith” and dozens of hamlets called the equivalent of “Springfield” to underline that commonality.

FRPG Player Tip: It’s totally okay to enjoy maximizing your character’s mechanical benefits. But if you ever realize that that process is the only part of your character you enjoy, it might be a sign to step away from mechanics and delve into your character as a person with a story instead.

FRPG GM Tip: Even for players who love to be descriptive during a game, it’s easy to feel reluctant to offer up description from a fear of taking away from what the GM is meant to do. So make it clear when you’d love some input by asking for descriptions of tavern interiors, killing blows, and more.

FRPG Player Tip: Power gaming can be fun, but the hobby is filled with power gamers who will tell you how much more fun they started having when they focuses less on optimizing mechanics and more on optimizing story. Heed their wisdom and experience.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Whenever characters gain new benefits, features, or magic, players should feel free to talk about that and why it excites them. Sometimes that’s an out-of-game discussion, but it can also be an in-game moment of “My character dramatically reveals this new thing they can do!”

FRPG GM Tip: If you run your games on a virtual tabletop, prep way more encounter maps than you need. Being able to easily drop an easy random encounter into the narrative makes a great way to fill out a session if you’re not quite ready for where the characters want to go next.

FRPG GM Tip: Taking a stock monster and converting some of their damage to a different type is one of the fastest ways to customize foes. Skeletons with lightning swords or cultists whose fire spells deal poison instead can give an otherwise straightforward encounter a unique feel.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The right number of tests and checks to make in a game is the number that feels the most fun. If too many checks start to feel tedious, or if not enough checks makes it feel as if the characters aren’t doing anything, talk about what changes might make for a better balance.

FRPG Player Tip: If your character has a mount, a companion creature, a magical statuette that turns into a dire tiger, or what have you, personalize that pet to your heart’s desire. And don’t be afraid to talk to the GM about having story hooks revolve around a pet if that feels like fun.

Art by Dean Spencer

FRPG Tips — October 2025

Over on Bluesky and Mastodon Dice Camp, I post daily fantasy roleplaying game tips for GMs and players — except for this month, because I’ve been on holiday in France! So instead of the full collection of this past month’s tips presented here for your reading pleasure, I’ve pulled together a selection of some of my own favorite tips from the first half of this year. Please feel free to check out the monthly tip archives on the blog if you’ve only started reading recently, or to follow me at either of the above locations to get new tips every day, fresh out of the idea forge.

FRPG GM Tip: Softening failures with small benefits can dramatically improve the fun of a game. The next time a character goes prone for the second time in a fight, give them a defensive edge against an area effect that mostly whooshes past over top of them.

FRPG Player Tip: Metagaming isn’t when you as a player know things your character doesn’t. Metagaming is when you try to turn that knowledge into benefits your character doesn’t deserve. The game is about pretending to be someone you’re not, so just pretend to not know what you know. It’s easy.

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: For long narrative beats — travel scenes, describing complex dungeon locations, and so forth — give the players something to decide on so it’s not just you talking through the whole thing. “How far into the room do you advance?” “The path forks, so which way do you go?” 

FRPG 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.

FRPG GM Tip: Some players find it hard to come up with shared-story campaign ideas on the fly, but most can easily tell you what their character got up to during the last downtime. Asking players to detail downtime narrative is a great way to work toward even greater levels of shared storytelling.

FRPG Player Tip: Always feel free to ask whether some element of an encounter can be used to your benefit — high ground, potential allies, whatever. Sometimes a GM plans such benefits and waits for players to uncover them. Sometimes they don’t plan them and are happy for you to discover them anyway.

FRPG GM Tip: A great way to get characters and players thinking is to throw a randomly generated powerful magic item into a treasure cache that no character has an obvious need for—or even the ability to use. Then see what kind of story ideas they come up with as they figure out what to do with it.

FRPG Player Tip: A lot of “old school” exploration tricks are worth picking up if you do a lot of dungeon crawling. A 10-foot pole to test floors and unknown recesses, a mirror for looking around corners, and extra rations to throw at hungry monsters have saved innumerable characters over the years.

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 and Player Tip: It’s easy to lose track of time while playing, so don’t forget to move. Discuss with your group the idea of hardwiring regular 5- or 10-minute breaks into your sessions every hour or so, so everyone has a chance to stretch, snack, hydrate, unhydrate, or what have you.

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 players don’t want to kill every foe they come up against, fine-tune your campaign and house rules to accommodate them. Letting the characters know they can spare bandits, cultists, and other minor enemies without having them automatically come back for vengeance is a great start.

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 Player Tip: The freedom to have your character be whoever they want to be is foundational to RPGs — but it doesn’t override the importance of the game being a group activity. If conflict and antagonism between characters threatens the group’s enjoyment, talk it through before the game suffers. 

FRPG GM Tip: Perfect encounters don’t happen by design. They happen because of all the unpredictable things that can unfold during a game. So the best way to encourage perfect encounters is for your encounters to be loose enough to absorb a maximum amount of unpredictability.

FRPG Player Tip: Don’t be afraid to make skill checks just because a particular skill isn’t your character’s forte. The one time you use healing to bring a friend back from the brink of death or spot the ambush everyone else misses will more than make up for any number of forgettable rolls.

FRPG GM Tip: Irredeemably evil NPCs can be great fun in a hack-and-slash campaign where everyone is fully on board with the idea of taking no prisoners. But if that’s not the case, NPCs who are misguided, corrupted by magic, or the dupes of evil overlords often make for a more interesting story.

FRPG GM Tip: Any spell available to the party — or to any character of the same power level if the party is short on casters — makes a perfect treasure reward. Whether a scroll, a potion, or a one-use magic item, another use of a spell the characters already have can’t possibly unbalance your game.

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: Thinking like a player is a great way to create challenging encounters as a GM. Don’t just focus on what the villains are plotting. Think ahead of time about what plans the players might hatch to counter those plots — and then expect to be surprised by the plans you didn’t expect.

FRPG GM Tip: Giving a name to a magic weapon found as treasure gives that weapon a useful degree of narrative weight in the players’ minds, even if the name is just a throwaway detail for you. Even better, doing so can inspire the players to name the weapons they commission or craft themselves.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: The best number of dice to own is the number you routinely need to roll. Playing a damage-dealing caster? Have d6s and d8s on hand. Make a ton of attack rolls each turn? Have groups of d20s and damage dice. And if you ever come up short, don’t be afraid to ask to borrow.

FRPG Player Tip: Active listening might be best skill a player can bring to a game. Focusing on what the GM and all the other players are bringing to the table scene by scene is the best way to stay centered in the story — and to make sure the GM and other players are listening to you in turn.

FRPG GM Tip: When it comes to worldbuilding and adventure backstory, think “menu,” not “meal.” Players don't need a whole history prepped, cooked, and served up. They need you to give them a sense of what tastes the setup has to offer, then to let them order the specific entree they want to sample.

FRPG Player Tip: When making choices for a character, asking “What would I do?” is a good starting point — but don’t stop there. RPGs are about possibility. About being our best selves. So instead, ask: “What would I do if I could truly make a difference? What would I do if I wasn’t afraid?” 

FRPG GM Tip: A great many fantasy campaigns feature the idea of a present built on the bones of great ages of the past, so lean into that. Ruins in unexpected environments, lost dungeons under contemporary buildings, and art and relics of the ancient past can bring your world and your game to life.

FRPG Player Tip: The best type of character is one who’s an extension of you, reflecting your own interests and personality. The other best type of character is one who’s completely different from you, letting you explore new sides of yourself. Try one approach. Try the other. Meld them. Have fun.

Art by Dean Spencer

FRPG Tips — September 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: At some point, you’ll get really fast at calculating the outcome of dice rolls for combat or skill-based interactions. When you start out, you’ll be really slow at that — just like all the more-experienced players in your group once were. Don’t let worrying about it get in your way.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: If a saving throw is close to the target number but partial success isn’t part of your game’s rules, make it so. A character or foe misses a save against being stunned by 1 or 2? Maybe they’re dazed or slowed instead. Bending mechanics to serve the story is never a bad thing.

FRPG GM Tip: One of the easiest ways to help yourself keep your in-game description brief is to focus first on the most unusual, fantastic, or apparently threatening features in a scene. Then let the players’ “WTF is that?!” questions inspire which specific details you follow up on.

FRPG Player Tip: When showing respect for the other players by avoiding scenarios or themes they’ve asked to steer clear of, don’t forget the GM is a player too. If something at the table feels like it’s making the GM uncomfortable, take a break to talk about it and change direction if necessary.

FRPG GM Tip: Playing out scenarios where the characters are victimized by NPCs can be made easier with a comedic touch. Discovering that a con artist has run a successful scam on the party can easily get under the players’ collective skin, but making that NPC a bumbling joke will lighten the tone.

FRPG Player Tip: Sometimes being evil is a villain’s only goal. But if the GM is dropping hints that there’s more going on with the villain’s plots and plans, pay attention. Digging into those clues almost inevitably reveals the best ways by which you can thwart those plans.

FRPG GM Tip: When you have a monster whose feel and theme you love, pull elements of that monster and add them to other stat blocks to create unique themed creatures. Use undead traits to create necromantic variations, elemental traits to create evoker threats, and on and on. 

FRPG Player Tip: If you ever find yourself wanting to make a skill check first, then decide why you’re making the check afterward, stop and recalibrate. The game is about setting the scene and your character’s place in it. Rolling dice puts a certain spin on that process, but should never define it.

FRPG GM Tip: One of the easiest ways to keep things moving in a game with fixed initiative is to call out who’s acting next each time you call out who’s acting now. Reminding players that their turn is coming up puts them on a useful countdown for preparing what they’re going to do.

FRPG Player Tip: Elaborate backstory often gets a bad rap, and there’s nothing wrong with a “blank slate” character you can just start playing. But thinking about where your character comes from can provide a strong foundation for roleplaying — as well as story hooks the GM can use to engage you.

FRPG GM Tip: Environmental effects are great for making combat encounters feel unique. But especially for a large party, effects that require dice rolls can slow things down. Focus instead on effects that deal low flat damage or impose minor conditions automatically to help keep things moving. 

FRPG Player Tip: Asking questions is best way to engage with a scene. But if you find yourself asking questions that have already been asked and answered by someone else, make note of that. Active listening — not just to the GM but to the other players as well — is the heart and soul of the game.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially if you’re running combat on a tactical map, short-range teleportation is one of the coolest things you can add to an encounter. Let the characters and their enemies tap into unstable magic in an ancient ruin and fling themselves all over the battlefield.

FRPG Player Tip: If a trusted NPC betraying the party is going to ruin your fun, talk about that in session 0 or during a break in play. Establishing boundaries isn’t only about “mature” or potentially traumatic content. Narrative tropes that derail enjoyment are all potential topics for discussion.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Long-arc adventures have become the norm for published campaigns. But fantasy gaming’s origins are rooted in short standalone adventures that can be linked to create a narrative unique to your group, so if you’re not familiar with that mode of play and design, it’s worth checking out.

FRPG GM Tip: Avoid having an NPC offer up important lore or hooks that turn out to be lies, unless the players have a clear chance to figure that out. A deceitful NPC can sometimes make for great story, but you run the risk of having the players doubt every honest NPC you throw at them thereafter.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Playing in different games can show you a different side of your own approach to play. If you’ve never gotten into tactical combat, or in-character roleplay, or specific character types, seeing those things done by players who truly love them might give you a new perspective.

FRPG GM Tip: Contrivance and convenience bother us when they happen to other people. When they happen to us, we’re usually fine with that. So don’t forget that the characters are “us” when needing to feed them a convenient plot point, create tenuous connections to NPCs, and so forth.

FRPG Player Tip: In your first games, you’ll have an unrealistic expectation of how fast you need to think and react to what’s happening. Take note of when more experienced players need a moment to focus or have to backpedal from an initial decision, and remind yourself that you’re doing just fine.

FRPG GM Tip: If you play online using a virtual tabletop, don’t focus just on maps as the liminal space between your side of the game and the players’ side. Use your VTT to post notes, track party wealth, reveal images, or share anything else you’d share on the physical table for an in-person game.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: One of the best tips for speeding things up during combat play is rolling dice together. Roll your damage when you roll your attack so you’re ready if you hit. If you make multiple attacks, color-code your dice and roll all attacks and damage at once. 

FRPG GM Tip: The more transhuman you make your ancient wyrm, inscrutable lich, or alien brain boss villains, the more you want to give them a key mortal trait they’ve picked up by accident or have never been able to shake off. Then give the players a chance to turn that trait into a means of defeat.

FRPG Player Tip: One of the best gifts you can give a GM is letting them know what you enjoyed about the previous session. It’s not just about saying thanks for the work that goes into running a game — it’s about providing direction for future sessions you’ll enjoy just as much.

FRPG GM Tip: Even if it means running a bit short or long, trying to end each session on a clear break point or opportunity to rest can help you deal more effectively with a player who can’t make the next game session at the last minute. 

FRPG Player Tip: When playing a spellcaster or other resource-focused character, it’s equally cool to dole out those resources slowly as it is to blow them all at the first opportunity. Just let the other players know your preferred play style so they can work with it, not be surprised by it.

FRPG GM Tip: Monster health expressed as an average means that some monsters must have more health than that. If you’re running an encounter in which the characters initially take down more foes than you expected, all the foes remaining should be immediately upgraded into that above-average group.

FRPG Player Tip: Especially if it takes you a bit of time to calculate the modifier for a check or attack because of situational bonuses, just roll the die first. If the number rolled is high enough to succeed without your modifiers, you’ve just helped speed the game up a bit. 

FRPG GM Tip: An annoying NPC should get on the characters’ nerves, but shouldn’t ever irritate the players. If you feel an NPC crossing that line, look for opportunities to highlight something funny or ingratiating about them to lighten the tone. 

FRPG Player Tip: If you find yourself feeling meh about new options for your character as the campaign goes on, talk to the GM about customizing those options to be a better fit. Tweaking a subclass, trait, or feat to match your character’s story is one of the easiest bits of homebrew.

Art by Dean Spencer

Missing in Action

When I was a teenager, I spake as a teenager, I understood as a teenager, I thought as a teenager, and I played D&D, like, 36 hours a week. But when I became a man, I put away teenagerish things and now have to scramble to consistently book weekly game sessions that all the players can make it to. (With apologies to 1 Corinthians.)

I know that many other adults suffering under all the real-world pressures of adulting feel this same pain, and know the frustration that comes of having to cancel game night because one or two players can’t make it. So rather than cancel, GMs and players should talk about options for keeping the game going when someone is absent.

Whither GM?

Many players might be inclined to automatically assume that for sessions where the GM is unavailable owing to life stuff, there won’t be a session. And if so, it’s worth a reminder that anyone can be a GM. If you’ve been playing long enough, you’ve probably already absorbed everything you need to know about running a game from the GMs who’ve run games for you — so why not give it a shot? A night when the regular GM can’t make it is a great time to run your first game. Just grab a one-shot adventure or a starter set for your game of choice and go. You can even pitch your group about running a starter adventure that one or more of the other players have already played through if you like. With you running your first game for your regular group, people will be less concerned about getting a brand-new story and more focused on having fun.

The GM PC

For a GM who’s up for a challenge, running a character on the side is an obvious solution to the problem of a missing player. The player will need to make sure the GM has a current copy of their character sheet or details, with many GMs who are comfortable running player characters asking players to pass on a copy of their character sheets each time the characters level up. On the plus side, a GM willing to run a character probably has a strong sense that they’re capable of doing the job, and will be faithful to what the player would want the character to do. On the downside, a GM already has way too much to do, and running a player character on the side can make for a tough session.

Side Trek

If it fits the current continuity of the campaign, an effective way to cover for a missing player is to have their character go missing as well. Not in any nefarious way, but by having them step out of the main story for a session. This approach only works if the previous session ended at a natural breakpoint — the characters about to start a journey, undertake downtime, enter a ruin for the first time, and so forth. If it works for the setup, a playerless character might go ahead of the journey to act as a scout. They might slip away from the rest of group to deal with their own downtime stuff. If the area of the ruins is particularly dangerous, they might hang back and make sure no monsters follow the party in, then catch up later — which is to say, in the next session when the player returns.

The Backup Player

Players who are willing can volunteer to run another player’s character for a session. Aside from the other character’s sheet or details — obtained from the player or from a GM who has a backup of everyone’s character sheets — a player taking on someone else’s character needs to understand and respect how the other player typically runs the character, and should do their best to play the character the way the other player would have. This approach works best for a player whose own character is straightforward. Running a warrior whose entire personality is built around smashing things with a maul makes it relatively easy to also focus on running a side character — even a complicated character such as a caster. But the player of a spellcaster already dealing with casting mechanics, resources, and spell lists might have trouble taking on another caster at the same time.

Fade Into the Background

It’s often workable to have a missing player’s character present during an entire session, but just not really there. The character is understood to be with the party and part of the action, but they simply spend their time on the narrative sidelines while the other characters do the narrative heavy lifting. Having a character fade into the background in combat is easily done by splitting off a couple of foes who they can focus on alone while everyone else works together in the main fight.

Character as Mechanical Benefit

Sometimes the best way to deal with a character whose player is absent is to have no one play them, then make up for their absence in other ways. With this extension of the “Fade Into the Background” approach, the GM simply narrates the character’s presence during interaction scenes, exploration, or combat encounters, then gives the other players mechanical benefits from that presence. For example, the character might grant advantage to other characters’ skill checks during social encounters by acting as a support or a foil. They might allow a different character each round to deal double damage in combat in lieu of the playerless character making attacks. A character might also deal a fixed amount of damage each round to one or more enemies, with the GM coming up with a number that feels right rather than rolling attacks and damage.

Mix and Match

No matter which approach your group decides on when a player has to miss out on a session, you’ll find it useful to keep the other approaches in mind as well. Your GM might start out running a player character because the session starts with intrigue or action in which the character needs to play an important part, then have the character fade into the background as the session continues. Or the character might fade into the background at the start of the session, then be picked up and run by another player for a key combat or roleplaying scene. 

With any of these approaches, the most important takeaway is that having a player unable to make a session doesn’t need to mean cancelling that session. Especially for players with limited time, getting together to game is an important real-life social encounter. If a bunch of players all can’t make it, there might be nothing for it but to call for a rain check. But with just one player missing — or even two players in a large enough group — it’s worth the effort to find ways to carry on.

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.

FRPG Tips — February 2025

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

FRPG Player Tip: The best type of character is one who’s an extension of you, reflecting your own interests and personality. The other best type of character is one who’s completely different from you, letting you explore new sides of yourself. Try one approach. Try the other. Meld them. Have fun.

FRPG GM Tip: We notice cliches and coincidence in fiction much more than in real life — and an RPG feels like real life when we’re in it. Don’t be afraid to have NPCs show up in taverns, or to leave convenient notes and journals lying around. As long as it advances the story, the players won’t care.

FRPG GM Tip: An encounter that feels flat can be easily energized by a ticking clock. A magical shrine threatens to explode. Guards have been called and the duke must be won over quickly. As long as any outcome advances the story, tell the players they have a time limit and see the tension rise.

FRPG GM Tip: When it’s clear that the players — especially young players — don’t want to kill every foe they meet, think about building the biggest battles of your campaign around constructs, undead, fiends, and enemies who have freely chosen a path of irredeemable evil.

FRPG Player Tip: Characters don’t necessarily need to be balanced in their features and roles to have a fun game, but balance in look and feel is usually a good idea. Your “Bob the Fighter” can feel out of place next to more “realistic” characters, so ask the other players how they feel about that. 

FRPG GM Tip: When characters attempt to sneak or hide, avoid opposed rolls in favor of setting a DC based on your sense of the challenge. Sneaking by a tired town guard at night? An easy check. Hiding by day from a pack of wood elf scouts all wired on amphetamines? Probably a hard check.

FRPG GM Tip: If the party ever ends up divided by circumstance rather than by choice, set out clear guidelines for how to bring everybody back together. Whatever subgoals emerge from being separated, make sure that reuniting is the overriding goal, and that the players know how to make that happen.

FRPG GM Tip: Players picking less-than-perfect builds or doubling up on party roles isn’t an excuse for you to run a game that’ll teach them a lesson about character optimization. It’s an invitation to show off how you can shape an adventure — even on the fly — to be a fun challenge for any group.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: When playing face-to-face, some folks are fine with food and drink at the table. Others prefer to keep game time and snack time separate. Talk to each other to make sure everyone’s happy with the snack situation. And if appropriate, snacks for the GM make a great thank-you.

FRPG GM Tip: Perfect encounters don’t happen by design. They happen because of all the unpredictable things that can unfold during a game. So the best way to encourage perfect encounters is for your encounters to be loose enough to absorb a maximum amount of unpredictability.

FRPG GM Tip: For a first session with a new group of players — especially inexperienced players — let appropriate humor play out in the adventure, even in small ways. Laughing during a session can help players overcome initial nervousness, and quickly establishes that having fun is everyone’s goal.

FRPG Player Tip: Your character’s flaws or dark side should never become an excuse to disrupt or derail the game for other players — especially the GM. Antiheroes who don’t play nice with others make great characters in fiction, but a campaign is about shared narrative, not solo stories. 

FRPG GM Tip: Don’t do this for every foe, but key encounters can be made much more interesting by having one or two enemies flying. Flying magic exists in most games, so as long the characters have effective ranged attacks, give the bandit chieftain a potion and let them soar.

FRPG GM Tip: Writing little bits of in-game fiction is a great way to help players remember key developments in the campaign. But whether a letter, a journal, a cargo manifest, an arrest report, or what have you, keep it brief. Too much overall detail makes it more difficult to remember key details.

FRPG GM Tip: Asking for feedback is one of the most difficult things to do for any creator — but the campaign you create will benefit from it. Every few sessions, ask your players what they’re enjoying most about your games. Then ask what things you can do to make them enjoy your games even more.

FRPG Player Tip: Skipping the murder-hobo vibe of a fantasy RPG you otherwise love can be as easy as asking the GM, “Hey, can we skip the murder-hobo vibe?” Start by talking about house rule options for all attacks and spells to leave creatures incapacitated, so killing foes isn’t the only option.

FRPG GM Tip: A session where the players spend two hours planning how to undermine foes, then one hour in combat against those foes, can be just as much fun as the characters doing zero planning before spending three hours in combat. Embrace helping players avoid the trouble you’ve planned for them.

FRPG GM Tip: When thinking about which elements to make recurring features of your campaign, let the players decide for you. Take note of which subplots, NPCs, locations, and threats they talk about most after the fact, then prep those things for a follow-up appearance.

FRPG GM Tip: Especially for starting characters, a number of easy-threat foes are often a better combat choice than a single high-threat foe. A group of foes deals less damage each time one of them is taken out, but a single foe deals full damage right from the start of a fight to the end.

FRPG Player Tip: A good backstory is more about asking questions than making statements. Statements can only tell you where your character has been. Questions covering the things your character wants to knodw or is looking for will set up where you’re going, and that’s what the game is about.

FRPG GM Tip: Any spell available to the party — or to any character of the same power level if the party is short on casters — makes a perfect treasure reward. Whether a scroll, a potion, or a one-use magic item, another use of a spell the characters already have can’t possibly unbalance your game.

FRPG GM Tip: One downside to loving the GM’s life is having no time to play in other people’s games. So make the time. Find a campaign to play in alongside yours. Pitch your friends on running one-shots. Nothing helps you see your own game from the players’ perspective better than being a player.

FRPG GM Tip: Thinking about your character’s story can be one of the best parts of being a player — so don’t forget to have that same fun with your key villains and NPCs. What are their ambitions? Their hopes and dreams? What are they afraid of? What secrets do they least want to see revealed?

FRPG Player Tip: If you’re new to the game, focus first on the narrative side of a character’s features and traits, not the mechanics. You can develop and fine-tune your understanding of mechanics as you play. But building a character story based on the rules of a game is almost always a bad idea.

FRPG GM Tip: Don’t be afraid to pass on tactical tips to the players that their characters would be well aware of in the midst of combat. If you know the front-liners will break if their captain is taken out, work that into the narrative of the fight — especially if the characters are struggling.

FRPG GM Tip: When asking players “What do you do?”, make sure two or three default options are already laid out. It’s great fun when someone picks the fourth or fifth option you hadn’t thought about, but having no sense of what’s possible can easily freeze up a player’s ability to make a decision.

FRPG GM Tip: Swapping damage types is one of the easiest ways to make foes stand out in a fight. Mercenaries of the Flameblood Company whose weapon attacks deal fire damage. Wolves serving pestilence druids whose bites deal necrotic damage. Even a minor change can make a stock threat feel fresh.

FRPG Player Tip: Arguments and disagreements can make for great roleplaying. But unless you know your group well and have established suitable boundaries, don’t look to create real conflict between characters. An adventuring party is about strength in numbers, and conflict eats away that strength.

(Art by Dean Spencer)

FRPG Tips — January 2025

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

FRPG GM Tip: Softening failures with small benefits can dramatically improve the fun of a game. The next time a character goes prone for the second time in a fight, give them a defensive edge against an area effect that mostly whooshes past over top of them.

FRPG Player Tip: A foundational character-creation exercise from fiction writing can go a long way toward shaping an RPG character with the durability for an extended campaign. Ask “What does my character want?” Then ask “What does my character need?” Then make sure those two things aren’t the same.

FRPG GM Tip: A great way to get characters and players thinking is to throw a randomly generated powerful magic item into a treasure cache that no character has an obvious need for—or even the ability to use. Then see what kind of story ideas they come up with as they figure out what to do with it.

FRPG GM Tip: Full-detail maps are great, especially for online games. But don’t be afraid to sketch out a rough map on paper or drop basic shapes onto a VTT page to set up a combat scene. The players’ imaginations will fill in the details you describe. That’s literally how the game is meant to work.

FRPG Player Tip: A willingness to learn the rules as they apply to your character is essential. Mastery of those rules is optional. A group of players is as much a party as the characters are, so don’t be afraid to rely on your fellow players for rules help and advice when you feel you need it. 

FRPG GM Tip: If players don’t want to kill every foe they come up against, fine-tune your campaign and house rules to accommodate them. Letting the characters know they can spare bandits, cultists, and other minor enemies without having them automatically come back for vengeance is a great start.

FRPG GM Tip: Creating fiction for the public means shaping story that matters to a wide range of people. Creating fiction as the facilitator of the narrative of your game means shaping story that only needs to matter to the other players. So use that insight to shape the story the players want.

FRPG GM Tip: For published adventures, books make the best content delivery system and the worst reference setup. So create your own setup with a notes app or index cards, summarizing locations, scenes, NPCs, and foes, and using their page numbers as “links” to the book when you need to go there.

FRPG Player Tip: Setting a marching order for the party can feel archaic, but the strategy behind a marching order is a great way to organize party tactics. Who’s best at soaking up ambush damage? Who’s best at spotting that ambush? And how can those characters work together to best effect?

FRPG GM Tip: Game balance can always be attained by adding more weight to the game’s lighter side. If characters are hitting too hard, don’t worry about how your encounter-building math went wrong. Just let their foes hit harder with extra damage, and let extra health keep them in the fight longer.

FRPG GM Tip: For characters, combat has a tactical goal — defeating foes, fleeing danger, et al. But players have an emotional goal — a satisfying outcome. If a fight is fun, let it run long. But if combat becomes tedious, shortcut the characters’ tactical goal to feed the players’ emotional goal.

FRPG Player Tip: Looking up spells and other complex character features can be cumbersome during play, especially if they’re in different books. But by copy-and-pasting those features as text or photos into a document or a notes app, you can create a focused player’s guide that’s just for you.

FRPG GM Tip: Having dying foes explode for low area-effect damage when it feels thematically appropriate (undead, constructs, malignant cultists, et al.) is still one of the best means of messing with the characters in a way that will make the players go, “That was pretty cool, actually…”

FRPG GM Tip: For most people, it’s easier to be spontaneously funny than to be spontaneously dramatic. Using moments of humor to punctuate even the most serious adventure can go a long way toward encouraging roleplaying, especially for players nervous about showing off that side of themselves.

FRPG Player Tip: The freedom to have your character be whoever they want to be is foundational to RPGs — but it doesn’t override the importance of the game being a group activity. If conflict and antagonism between characters threatens the group’s enjoyment, talk it through before the game suffers. 

FRPG GM and Player Tip: It’s easy to lose track of time while playing, so don’t forget to move. Discuss with your group the idea of hardwiring regular 5- or 10-minute breaks into your sessions every hour or so, so everyone has a chance to stretch, snack, hydrate, unhydrate, or what have you.

FRPG GM Tip: Splitting the party can be a great way to heighten tension and let characters focus on what they’re good at. But you don’t have to split the players as well. When each subgroup is doing their thing, let all players see what’s happening and weigh in with thoughts and suggestions.

FRPG GM Tip: Sometimes it’s fun when a foe with single-digit health hangs on for an extra round. Sometimes it’s fun when a healthy foe drops anyway because a character pulled off an awesome attack. Use the flow of the battle and the reactions of the players to guide you toward the correct choice.

FRPG Player Tip: Metagaming isn’t when you as a player know things your character doesn’t. Metagaming is when you try to turn that knowledge into benefits your character doesn’t deserve. The game is about pretending to be someone you’re not, so just pretend to not know what you know. It’s easy.

FRPG Player Tip: Owning a ton of dice can be fun, but being happy with one set you love is just fine. If you need to roll a lot of dice from time to time but don’t have enough, use a dice roller app alongside your dice, or ask the GM about using average damage for spells and other high-damage effects.

FRPG GM Tip: Random encounters can become a slog if you treat every random encounter as automatic combat. But a random encounter can just as easily be about avoiding a fight through subterfuge or exploration, watching other creatures to learn information, or meeting potentially useful NPCs.

FRPG GM Tip: As long as your game uses health as a measure of character power, whittling away at health is a most effective way of raising tension outside of combat. Most characters will take a tiny bit of damage from the environment without caring. But do that enough times and it becomes a threat.

FRPG GM Tip: Don’t spend too long on a comprehensive description of the environment. Instead, break description up and reveal it in stages, giving the characters the opportunity to assess and ask questions at each stage. You always have permission to break up the boxed text in published adventures.

FRPG Player Tip: All players have different comfort levels regarding how much they like to talk. If you enjoy listening to others, it’s totally fine to be on the quiet side. But if you feel like you’re not being given a chance to speak, talk to the GM about setting up opportunities to do so.

FRPG GM Tip: Turning negative story beats into positive beats is one of the best ways to reward the players during a tough fight. Does a boss battle come with a magical or environmental effect that’s been pounding the characters? Let them figure out how to turn it against the boss in the end.

FRPG GM Tip: When describing scenes, think cinematically. A location is a wide shot. The creatures in a location is a medium shot. What the creatures are doing is a close-up. Then present your shots in the order that creates the most drama — including starting with a close-up in combat encounters.

FRPG Player Tip: Across almost all fantasy RPGs, magic-focused and spellcasting characters are more complex to run than straightforward combat- or skills-based characters. If complexity isn’t your forte, there’s nothing wrong with sticking with the simplest characters for as long as doing so is fun.

FRPG GM Tip: If the player of a noncombat-focused character starts to lose focus during a battle, let them be the one who notices a threatening environmental effect or a hidden foe. There are plenty of ways for characters to engage with a fight scene even if they’re not fighting.

FRPG GM Tip: For a campaign with a lot of active story threads, set up a point-form summary of those threads — discoveries, rumors, lore, key NPCs, and so forth — in an online document everyone can access. It’s hard for players with busy lives to remember everything their characters know.

FRPG GM Tip: The so-called average creature is an abstraction, whether in the real world or the game world. When running foes with average hit points, you know that most of them are tougher or weaker than indicated. So adjust hit points on the fly in whatever way feels most dramatic.

FRPG GM and Player Tip: Fantasy has always been the most popular story type in RPGs because fantasy lets us slip into a world of imagination when the real world feels overwhelming. Even if it’s for an hour, joining friends in shared fantasy can make stepping back into the real world easier to bear.

FRPG GM Tip: Sometimes the ideal pace of an adventure will be undercut by the characters constantly resting. So drop in caches of potions, friendly healers, magical pools that restore limited-use features, and other opportunities for characters to gain the benefits of a rest without resting. 

FRPG GM Tip: If the players are uncertain about theater-of-the-mind combat, especially when playing online, try starting small. Simple encounters in familiar locations — a tavern, a city street, outside the dungeon entrance, and so forth — can be a great introduction to that style of no-map play.

FRPG GM Tip: Give foes whatever features they need to make them fight effectively. If an enemy monster’s ranged attack options are weaker than their melee attack options, just swap modifiers and damage to create an artillery variant capable of rousting characters who hang back from the fight.

FRPG Player Tip: It’s fine for the GM to ask you to play a specific character type because the party needs that role. It’s also fine for you to say no because it’s not your favorite character type or you had something else in mind. A need for party balance can be addressed in lots of different ways.

FRPG GM Tip: Use your own experience as a player to set the tactics of enemies in your campaigns. If your character would have wanted to set an ambush rather than rush headlong into a specific combat-focused scenario, then have the bad guys you’re running do just that.

FRPG GM Tip: Giving the characters access to short-term flying or climbing magic is a great way to liven up a long exploration scene. They won’t discover anything they wouldn’t have discovered from the ground, but being able to make use of magic makes the mundane more exciting.

FRPG GM Tip: Never be afraid to take the campaign in a new direction based on the players wanting to do something unexpected. But if that would force you to improv too much on the fly, use a prepared random encounter or two to fill out the current session, giving you time to prep for what’s next.

FRPG Player Tip: When you’re learning the rules for your character, make notes to shape your understanding. When playing, make notes of names, locations, and campaign events. Notes help anchor details in our memories, and are an essential player tool both during character building and during play.

FRPG GM Tip: Unless it truly disrupts the game, don’t worry about players breaking character or having out-of-game conversations. Knowing they can freely step away from the story for everyday discussions can make it easier for players to call for a pause when feeling uncomfortable or unsafe.

FRPG GM Tip: To get players and characters into the mindset that it’s okay to flee fights, turn one or more creatures in an encounter into magical or environmental effects. An undead with a necrotic aura might demand to be defeated. A roiling cloud of necrotic energy is something to run from.

FRPG GM Tip: Rolling out foes round-by-round is a great strategy for a big combat. It keeps the players guessing how tough the fight is going to be, prevents characters from focusing fire on the boss at the start, and quells the urge to lock down because the battlefield is so full no one can move.

(Art by Dean Spencer)

The Gamemaster Pipeline

One of the universal truths of roleplaying games is that players outnumber gamemasters by a significant margin. And one of the universal problems of RPGs is that players outnumber GMs by a significant margin — because without a GM, there’s no game to play.

An aside — I absolutely know that there are many amazing RPGs that don’t require a GM in the traditional sense of the baseline GM-plus-players setup that D&D invented. (One of those games — En Garde! — is almost as old as D&D!) But for the purposes of this discussion, most of us live in a world where no matter what our game of choice, if we’re players, we need a GM.

Eddie Munson, Gamemaster extraordinaire, from “Stranger Things"

I don’t know how ubiquitous this experience was for gamers of my generation, but back in the day and among the group of friends I played with, everybody was a GM. We all started as players in campaigns run by the two friends who had learned the game as players in other campaigns, but it took no time at all for us to start running our own games — because we all understood pretty instinctively that running games was an incalculable amount of fun.

It was also the case back in the day that it felt relatively easy to get players to try their hand at running even a one-off game or two because being a GM felt like the best way to understand the game. If you loved the game, if you enjoyed the experience of embracing the rules of the game, then why not explore those rules to the absolute maximum?

Regardless of my own experience, though, I get that a lot of players perceive stepping up to be a GM as a daunting task. And to be fair, those players aren’t wrong. It’s definitely more work being a GM building a narrative framework for the game and running a limitless crowd of NPCs and monsters than it is to simply focus on a single backstory and a single character. For me, though, all the things that make playing a single character fun are amplified a thousandfold in the experience of running games. 

So as experienced GMs, how do we express that idea to players? What can we do to show off the fun of running games and building worlds to those still waiting to take the first steps toward sitting on the other side of the screen or the map, then saying, “So what do you…?”

Finding Likely Players

In the games we run as GMs, we can easily set out to give players a small taste of what it’s like to do what we do. But as the first step of this process, we need to figure out which players are most interested in becoming a GM. In the best-case scenario, you’ll have a player who actually expresses that interest. But if not, keep an eye out for players already expressing a natural interest in some of the things a good GM does. 

Do you have a player who loves digging into the rules? Maybe even a player you make use of to remember rules details when you don’t? That’s an amazing candidate to take on the role of GM. How about a player who loves not just building a backstory for their character, but adapting that backstory to better fit the story of the campaign and the backstories of the other characters as the game progresses? That’s potentially someone with the interest in building shared narrative that’s a core strength of a good GM.

Moving Multiple Pieces in Combat

Once you’ve got players with whom you want to share a bit of what it feels like to run a game, think about asking those players to test out an essential GM skill by running multiple creatures in combat. In any scenario where one or more NPCs lends the party a hand in a fight, give the players those NPCs’ stat blocks and ask them to direct those characters tactically and narratively. Or if your party has a spellcaster who’s prone to summoning multiple creatures, getting multiple players to take the responsibility for those creatures out of your hands is a great way to lighten your load as a GM — even as it gives players a chance to develop a knack for thinking in parallel during combat.

Invitation to Improvisation

Outside of combat, a GM’s greatest skill is probably the ability to improvise — and improvisation is a great thing to have players take on from time to time in a campaign. For a lot of GMs, getting players to help with the improv nature of world-building in a game is a kind of Holy Grail. When asking players to engage with the game that way, though, keep in mind that improvisation is always easiest within a framework of possibilities. For GMs, that framework is our sense of all the things we know about the story that the players and characters don’t. But because the players don’t have access to that framework, we need to create one for them by establishing bounds on the kind and degree of improvisation we ask for. 

Here's an easy (and classic) example. The characters are entering a new town or neighborhood, and looking to find a tavern to ask around for information. Normally, you’d come up the name of the tavern, decide what it looks like, and provide details for the NPC the characters need to meet. For you, that’s probably easy, because as a GM, you have enough sense of the scene and the world around it to narrow down specific options from a broad range of possibilities. But if you ask the players to come up with the name of that tavern and the NPC, the broad range of possibilities might feel overwhelming in the moment. So instead, provide a name for the tavern and ask the players what kind of place it sounds like based on that name. Describe an NPC and ask the players what that NPC’s name is based on their appearance — or vice versa.

Likewise, whenever the characters are in a town or city that one of them knows well, ask the player what some of their characters’ favorite places in that settlement are. Anyone playing an RPG has the requisite imagination to easily come up with answers to all these questions and more — but giving the players a specific focus can help keep them from being overwhelmed by not knowing where to start. 

Magical Fun

Custom mechanical design — of encounter areas, environments, traps, hazards, magic, and more — is one of the biggest jobs of a GM. And although many of those things are outside the scope of what players can be reasonably asked to contribute to a game, there’s one bit of mechanical design that many players gravitate toward all on their own — magic items. To get a would-be GM’s creativity flowing, feel free to ask players not just for their wish lists of stock magic items (as many GMs do). Ask them to design a magic item they’d like their character to have, within any general creative boundaries you establish (including item rarity appropriate for the character’s level). For potentially more interesting results, ask each player in your group to design a custom magic item for another player’s character. 

Designing magic is something that it’s surprisingly easy to get players into — even those who profess they don’t have any real interest in digging into the nuts and bolts of the game. And each player who discovers how much fun it is to tinker with the wider world of the game is a potential GM in the making.

What’s the Story?

If you haven't seen it already, there's a new update on the CORE20RPG design and development blog: Skills and Story. And thinking about story in relation to skills — and specifically, thinking about how to describe the new setup for handling skill success in CORE20 — put me mind of the following.

• • •

When I talk about story in RPGs, and about story in D&D in particular, there’s often a response (usually measured; sometimes not) of: “But D&D isn’t a story game.” And that’s entirely true; but also not at all true, in the way of all conundrums that are less about fact and more about how we define the things we’re trying to factually assess.

For folks who define story games as games with specific mechanics for telling story, it’s absolutely true that D&D isn’t a story game. It doesn’t have those mechanics. No version of D&D has ever really worked on that level. But for folks (like me) who define story games as games in which a story can be unfolded and told, D&D has been a story game since its inception.

How do I know? I was there. I was there three thousand years ago, when Isildur took… Sorry, I mean I was there in the 1980s (which only sometimes seems like three thousand years ago), playing AD&D without so much as a standard mechanic for using skills unless you were playing a thief. And with those completely non-storytelling rules, I created stories with my friends that still resonate in my heart and mind to this day.

Were they good stories? Not always. But the characters we  created and the narratives we shaped never failed to hit all the touchstones for what story can and should be made of. Goals and desires. Conflict and tension. Secrets and revelation. Villainous monologues. Dramatically revealed character backstory. All that good stuff. 

For better or for worse, D&D is a game that lets people tell stories. And I like to think that the strength of the kinds of stories it tells — the kinds of allegorical tales that fantasy excels at — are a big part of the game’s enduring success. Much more so than mechanics, because there are many other games whose mechanics are much more elegant than D&D’s nearly-five-decades-old rebuilt war-game engine. 

Story ties to mechanics, to be sure. The randomness of combat and skill challenges can help create the uncertainty that defines the dramatic tension of an encounter or a scene, with the overall up-and-down movement of that tension tracking the shape of story as it unfolds. But even though the mechanics of D&D in its earliest forms ignored story completely, story became an unavoidable byproduct of the game nonetheless. And for me, that speaks to story as being the single most important part of the game’s ongoing legacy.