The Player's Handbook to RP

Have you wanted to play D and D or any RPG but were wondering how you can make characters, craft backstories, etc? Well, here's the blog for you!

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Whoops, dropped that ball.

There’s gonna be a quick hiatus just so I can catch up on life stuff, post should go up tomorrow though.

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Big Ol’ Meanies (or People who’ve lost their way)

So, villains. A wide and varied topic, that many writers struggle with creating, just because of how many ways you can do it. But to tell you the truth, my way may not be the best way. I’ve just assembled tips and tricks that help me, and the step by step process that I’m giving here is by no means the best way to do it. It’s just the way I do it. So here we go.

1. Motivation: What makes this villain tick? Why do they do what they do? This can go from “I just like money” to “I’ve lost everyone I’ve ever cared about”. Establish the villain’s motivation and a lot of the other steps can fall into place.

2. Backstory: Why are they motivated the way they are? Did something happen to them when they were young/middle-aged/older to change their world-view? Who are the people that connect with them within your world? This can also establish a good amount of world-building for later.

3. Interactions with Others: How does this person treat others? Are they respectful and honorable? Do they treat others like playthings, beneath them? Or do they just ignore all contact? This is something you should think about, as a good villain should interact with the player’s often.

4. Good Traits: What makes this person, you know, “human”? Unless you’re going for a Dio-esque villain, which I can totally get behind. Do they have a daughter/son they care about more than anything, semi-hypocritically?  Do they have a sense of honor that prevents them from taking certain actions? Do they volunteer at the local soup kitchen, not because of helping people (ew), but because there’s a really cute person there? Think about what makes them a person, not Cobra Commander.

5. Danger Factor: What makes them dangerous to our heroes (if at all)? Do they have a keen intellect that allows them to match our local Paragon’s strength with his secret weakness? Do they have some measure of telekinesis, throwing around heroes who are unprepared? Do they just wear really sick leather that just makes them look cooler than everyone else?

6. Achilles' Heel: What is their fatal flaw? What is the thing the heroes can push upon to bring them down? Are they incredibly arrogant? Do they have some sort of weakness to puppies and unicorns? Do they need to tase themselves at least once a day or lose all power? Think about this, as you don’t want to make a good villain unbeatable.

These are the things I think about when trying to write a good villain. Next time, we’re gonna talk about character flaws, from the perspective of a player.

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Session Set-Up and How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

So, your group is all together but you need to get your game ready. How do we do that? Well, I’ll tell ya.

1. Set up a basic plot-line for how you want the session to go. However, do not plan on your players doing exactly what you laid out, unless they're incredibly predictable. You never know what a player is going to do. Ever. 

2. Set up a couple of encounters (either social or combat). Social encounters basically just consist of conversations that you think will put out interesting hooks for your players. The farm-girl crying that her dad was taken by a bunch of strange lizards, the businessman asking for a party to investigate the disappearance of one of his trading caravans, the strange man who just showed up in town wearing rags and expensive jewelry, these can all be social encounters. Combat just requires a sense of balance and what your players are capable of. Creativity also helps as you can make some incredibly interesting encounters.

3. Be ready to improvise. Hard. This kind of links back to the first tip but needs to be stated. Have a backup plan in mind just in case your original plan gets firebombed.  And if that gets firebombed, that’s why you need to be ready to improvise. Just keep as many backup ideas as you can. Don’t feel the need to always stick to the plan though. It’s totally fine to just go along with what the party wants to do that session. In fact, that can lead to plenty of fun things happening.]

And that’s pretty much the most basic and easy way for me to explain the idea of session set-up. Fill in any blanks with things that you want to do. Next time, we’ll talk about my favorite topic, villains. And new plan for post schedule, thinking every two days. Anyways, see you next time.

[handbooktorp]

Getting Started...And Socializing (Ew)

So, like I said in the first post, I would consider this one of the hardest parts for some people. I’m not even talking about just the socially awkward, foot in their mouth kind of people. The reason this step is hard is because it relies on other people, instead of your own abilities. In fact, this part might even be harder than a lot of stuff in-game. However, I do have some tips and tricks to help you out.

1.Before you do any of this, you should probably have an idea of what you’re going to play. D and D is the classic, but there are plenty of other games to choose from. My personal favorites for new players are Fate Accelerated and basically any D20 game. If you understand D20, you can understand most games (besides Fatal. But no one really understands why that game exists anyways. Don’t look it up for your own sanity.)

2. Try asking some friends if they’d be interested in joining up. If you’re the one asking, you should expect to be the GM. However, if they say no, be a little persistent, but as soon as they give you the look of “Stop talking to me”,  you should probably stop asking.

3. If the whole “having friends who like the same things you like” doesn’t work out, try looking online! There are plenty of places to go to set up either PBP (play-by-post) or online RPG’s. My personal favorite is Roll20, a free resource that has character sheets already set up for many games, and is incredibly multipurpose, as you can do things like advertise to get people who might be interested in the same things you are, or even make it easier for real life friends to be able to play. I’ll link it and a couple of other things below.

Roll20

Myth-weavers (Another free resource for PBP, I haven’t used it much but it has plenty of great tools)

r/LFG (Another great place to find people interested in the same games you are)

All of the previously linked places are awesome places to go to find players.

So, now that you have players and you’ve chosen a game, what do you do next? Well, that’s easy. Set up the session! Which we will go over next time. See you then!

[handbooktorp]

Hello!

Hi! This is going to be a blog where I just post some advice on various things to do with RP, be it at the table or online, or anything in between. I’m going to limit myself to one post daily so that I don’t go overboard (as I sometimes do) but I’ll reblog anything that would be helpful to others, or even just link articles that might relate to the topic of that day’s post. There will technically be two posts today (already breaking my own rules, god) but that’s only because this one isn’t going to have any actual advice on it. Today, we’re starting with the hardest part. Actually getting started with the hobby. So, I hope that something on this blog will eventually be helpful to someone!