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I was recently in a pub, talking to a friend about their collapsed game of Dungeons & Dragons. I was somewhat frustrated by their tale of woe – perhaps the most common tale of woe. I imagined all these decades of people wasting time, just waiting for that one player to be free on Friday.
I decided to solve their problem by writing a patch for the 2024 edition of the D&D Players handbook.
There's a PDF to download in the link
Print it out and slide it in after Page 8.
Hey, I need a ptba (or ptba like) system to run for like two to six weeks between the end of one long campaign and the start of another. Please reblog with your favorite ptba game.
EPISODE 10 IS OUT AND IT'S TIME TO RUUUUUUUMBLE!!!!
That's right--it's fight night, baby! AKA the combat episode! This week, Kevin and Kayla talk pretend fighting and the false dichotomy of roleplay vs combat.
I made a video about how to deal with a certain kind of fatigue when running or playing TTRPGs!
3 elements of an RPG character
I've been thinking about my all time favorite RPG characters to play and run a game for, and I've condensed them down into the three basic elements that made them memorable.
Baseline
Flaw
Tether
Baseline is a little complicated to explain but basically it's a fallback behavior. "When in doubt, my character will act like X." This always helps me when playing a character because if I don't know what to do... the answer is always easy. I've also found that diviating from the baseline is just as powerful as sticking to it.
A flaw is pretty self explanatory. But I usually think about it less as a character defect, but more of "this character can't be happy because they do X." Like, something about them or the way they act is self sabotaging them from being fully happy. (This is really useful to know because if you want to wrap up thier story, all you have to do is show that they had overcome this flaw.)
Tether is another complicated one. I've heard it also called a knife, I think. In essence, it's a link to something in the world, something that could cause complications for the character, something they care about very much, or that cares about them.
An example character I made with the three elements, would be a character from a Star Wars game I was in. His name was Sier Viscar. He was a doctor who originated from the sith empire as it was falling apart (this game was set in the nebulous era between SWTOR and the High Republic). His baseline was nervous and he tended to pocket medical supplies whenever he could. His tether was that he had stolen the ship that the PC group used and thus, there was a bounty out after him. He also cared a great deal about the ship in general. His flaw was that he was a coward (sort of), Sier would rather run and hide than fight for what he wants, so he was always afraid of losing the things that he had. Thus his flaw stood in the way of his own happiness.
A very hot tip for rpg nerds trying to make professional looking battlemaps quickly - use Tiled, a pwyw, versatile map editor for pixel graphics that lets you quickly upload any image you've downloaded from the internet, convert it into a big list of clickable tiles, and then draw with those tiles to create maps.
If you just google "pokemon tileset" or search itch.io for "game assets" you'll find a whole bunch of beautiful tilesets (like this ninja one by pixelboy I used for the maps above). And whatever you find, you can use it to make maps. This tool is so good!
The difference between player and DM
What a player has on the table during an encounter: the Player's Handbook, their character sheets, some dice, and their notes.
What a DM has on the table during an encounter: the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Monster Manual, the Player's Handbook, Volo's Guide to Monsters, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, a map of the Dungeon, a ten pound notebook, enough dice for the entire group, and the character sheets for all the NPCs in the party.
And that, my friends, is why your DM says the table is too small.
How To Make A Game That Players *Can’t* Ruin - NPC Schedules and Avoiding the Railroad
TL;DR - When writing a new scenario for your players to interact with, don’t make assumptions about how they’ll react to it. Instead, write out a schedule for your NPCs to follow and just let your players react as they like.
Part 1: The Virgin Railroad
We’ve all been in that situation as GMs where the players do something we don’t expect that “ruins” everything we planned. Your notes for a session that starts a new adventure might have looked something like this:
The players arrive at the adventure location
The players see something happen
The players understand what is happening
The players react
The players’ reaction pays off and they learn something new
They decide to take action
For example:
The party arrive at the town of Lamas
At the inn, they see two suspicious men talking and one gives the other a note
By their scent, the werewolf paladin of the party realises that the two men are wererats
The party call out the wererats for what they are and attack them, looting the note off their bodies after the fighting is done
They read the note and find out that they were planning to attack and infect an innocent person with their curse as punishment for not keeping up with “protection insurance payments”
Now realising that there’s a wererat mafia at work in town, the party enlist the help of the local law enforcement to help them root out the rats
That seems fine, right? But this framework is fragile.
What if the players don’t attack the wererats right away? They haven’t done step 4.
What if the party’s rogue thinks that the suspicious transaction is a mere petty crime that they might be able to muscle into and profit off? They haven’t done step 3.
What if the werewolf paladin wants to ally with the wererats to learn more about her own curse? They’ve done step 4, but not in the way you wanted them to.
What if the party do nothing? They’ve stopped at step 3 (or maybe even 2).
Where do you go as a DM then? What do the NPCs do? How do you get the players back on track? Do you cancel the session and re-write it? Do you improvise? Do you tell the players to do the thing they were supposed to do?
[Image ID: a Rowlet, the grass-type owl Pokemon, looking distressed and clutching its head with tiny hands/wings. End ID.]
This is you right now. Adorable, but not having a good time.
Part 2: The Chad Schedule
I’ve heard advice before that you should consider four things for every encounter: Fight, Flight, Friend, and Freeze. These refer to coming up with what will happen if the players fight your NPCs, run away from your NPCs, try to make friends with your NPCs, or do nothing respectively. I think this is a fine way to set up encounters but it’s not my preferred method because it comes too close to writing a script for my players’ actions. Like the example above with the wererats, I’m making lots of assumptions about my players and the 4 Fs method somewhat does the same. What if the players fight but then run away? What if they run away and come back to fight later? There are too many possibilities for me to consider all at once.
My solution: write out what the NPCs will do if the party never even showed up. This may seem like odd advice, but bear with me. What we’re trying to do is to empty our mind of any expectations we have of the players and just write out the situation they’re being placed in.
Let’s go back to the wererat situation and rewrite it with this in mind instead:
The leader of the Greyfang Guild, a demonic rat king, learns that local alchemist Elania Knox hasn’t paid her protection money in over 2 months. It decides that she deserves the worst punishment they can give: infection with the wererat curse which will surely lead to her being banished from town.
A wererat of the guild heads to the tavern to pass a note to their man in town telling him the plan.
An hour later, at sundown, they meet outside Elania’s house. When the full moon rises they transform into their hybrid forms and break in, whereupon they infect Elania with the curse via a series of bites. For the rest of the night, they frolic in the sewers and steal from poor people.
Elania tells her only friends, Ben and his husband Cillian, about the incident the next morning. The three of them attempt to cross the nearby forest to meet with the Order of the Lycan for help but are killed by wild animals.
Yes, this is pretty bleak stuff. This is what the world of your campaign might look like without your players’ intervention. Good people get abused by those with power and no morals, having no one to stand up for them. You, as a DM, probably don’t want this series of events to come true and nor will your players when they catch wind of them.
But this is the trick! All your planning is to create something that you want your players to ruin. You don’t want Elania to get infected, you don’t want those wererats to go on an unimpeded crime spree, and you certainly don’t want Elania, Ben, and Cillian to die meaningless deaths at the hands (paws?) of wild animals. What you’ve done here, if you follow this method of writing a plot without the players’ involvement, is create scenarios that your players can disrupt (or perhaps “ruin”) in order to create a new narrative. If it’s done right, this method can create an exhilarating game for both the players and the GM, plus it works with pretty much any RPG that assumes the players are the heroes of the story in the same way D&D does.
Something to bear in mind while running this sort of game is that the NPCs will always try to get the schedule back on track. If you foil the wererats on the first night, they’ll return with their resident mage who can create moonlight as a spell during the day. If you stop the rats on their crime spree, they’ll up the ante and attempt an ever bigger crime the next day (perhaps even extorting the locals for aid in the scheme). If you rescue Elania, Ben, and Cillian from being killed in the forest, you’ve still got the Order of the Lycan to deal with (perhaps they’ll be even more dangerous than what lurks in the dark). This is a good thing. It means that you’ll pretty much always know what the NPCs want to do. When in doubt, check the schedule. The NPCs will always try to go back to the schedule, especially the bad guys.
So, to sum up:
Write NPC schedules, not PC plots - write what the NPCs would do if the party never showed up.
You can enjoy watching your PCs ruin everything you had planned, if you plan for them to ruin it.
You deserve to have fun as a GM and creating a scenario that you can’t easily predict can be part of that.
At its best, this technique makes your world feel a little more alive because your NPCs do things while the players aren’t looking in a way that feels natural.
