Preparation is among the most valuable tools at the disposal of a good dungeon master. It can help at every level of the game—encounters, both random and planned, quick reference to NPCs, pivotal plot points, and overall cohesion. There are times, though, when it is possible to over prepare, to the point where it can become an active detriment to your game.

Overpreparation is a fairly common pitfall for novice dungeon masters, though sadly not exclusive to them. It can occur when the DM wishes to present a smooth experience, or when he or she has a vision of an epic storyline in mind and wants to ensure that the players get to experience it just as it was initially imagined. The players are herded along, often more by stick than carrot, and sometimes even accompanied by a DM-controlled member of the party who will ensure that they stay on track by varying degrees of forcefulness—essentially a parole officer to make sure the players don’t get “lost” along the way to the next plot point.

This kind of DMing behavior is colloquially known as “railroading”, since the players are essentially on a fixed path from point A to point B without any chance of meaningful diversion from that path—much like a train cannot run where there are no rails. In short it negates the role of the players in the story and relegates them to being passive spectators to the DM’s vision of the plot. While there is nothing wrong with telling a story, the idea at the core of a roleplaying game is that everyone gets a chance to participate, and railroading diminishes or removes the ability of the players to do so.

One difficulty in avoiding railroading your players is that many of the techniques and intentions that lead to the adventure being “on rails” are simply misapplications of perfectly valid methods of DMing a game. It is entirely possible to have a DMPC who does not overshadow or direct the players, for example, or to have a grand and epic plot for your campaign without cutting out your players ability to meaningfully contribute to the outcome.

The main trick is to remember not to become overly involved in your preparations, or to prepare so thoroughly that you lose the flexibility to adapt to new ideas. The 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide advises saying “yes” to your players as much as possible, or at worst “yes, but”, rather than saying “no.” This is very good advice to keep in mind, within limits—sometimes you will want or need to say “no” for the good of your game. If you are inclined to say no, though, pause for a moment and determine why that’s your immediate reaction—and if it’s simply a knee-jerk response, you may want to change it to a conditional yes.

Another thing to avoid is lengthy periods of description or dialogue where the players are left listening to you talk. In many ways, a good DM talks as little as possible at the table, leaving the players in control. This advice is often difficult to grasp for novices, especially when working from pre-written adventures, since there is a tendency in those to run a paragraph or two of scene-setting flavor text. It can be very evocative to have such description, but again remember that the role of storyteller is only a part of the DM’s job, and is secondary to ensuring that your players are having fun. If your group loves the descriptions as you set the scene by all means, be as flowery as you like, but keep an eye on their body language. If on the other hand their attention begins to wander when your narrations run past a few sentences, keep the descriptions functional and brief, detailing only what they need to understand directly to function. If they want to know more, they will ask, and that’s when it’s generally better to describe in more detail.

The DMPC is a touchy issue. Some groups are more accepting than others of these characters, but there’s always the possibility that the DMPC will be viewed as a babysitter or warden, regardless of your intentions with the character. In general it’s easiest to avoid using them altogether, neatly sidestepping the problem. If you do decide to have an NPC accompany your group, consider making him or her a noncombatant or placing control in combat into the hands of one of the PCs and letting them run the character as a companion. No matter what, make certain that any advice or directions given by the character are suggestions at best, and that they will never overshadow the PCs role as the stars of the campaign. There is little more frustrating for a player than to fight against a seemingly impossible battle only to have an NPC appear to save the day through DM fiat.

Above all, remain flexible and remember that everyone makes mistakes. If your campaign begins a little rough, that’s fine—better to be rough than to be too restrictive. By the same token, it’s never too late to relinquish some of the control back to the players, if you HAVE been railroading. And the ultimate truth of gaming—as long as you’re having fun, you’re doing all right—still stands. If your group is satisfied with your game, don’t fret too much that you’re railroading them. Don’t assume, though, that simply because nobody is complaining it means nobody is unhappy. As I have repeated many times, communication with your players is key to making sure everyone is satisfied.

There are a lot of RPG blogs on the Internet, but two in particular stand out, in my opinion.

Kobold Quarterly is a Dragon-style magazine with a website full of new content. KQ frequently publishes articles to its website when there isn’t enough room in the print edition.

The latest interesting article at KQ is I Was a Gen Con Spy For TSR, an article from a TSR employee who was employed to spy on Gary Gygax at Gencon.

Critical Hits is one of the longest-running major D&D blogs. It has acquired some very well-known writers in the past year, including former WotC employee Chris Sims and Chatty DM from Musings of the Chatty DM. Just yesterday they acquired Logan Bonner, a recent WotC layoff who worked on D&D 4th edition.

Critical Hits recently posted an insightful article titled A DM’s Look at D&D Essentials, and Chris Sims’ 4E related Minions Are Spice.

Jeff Rients on why morale rules are important:

“I probably don’t need to tell you how big a difference that simple rule can make in play. Far fewer fights are to the death. Smart PCs will boldy strike large groups of scaredy-cats, alpha-striking one poor bastard in hopes of spooking the rest. And since 1gp = 1xp, you still get most of your experience even if the DM is a stingy bastard who holds back points on routed (as opposed to killed) foes.”
— Jeff Rients, more morale, please

Random encounters are a time-honored tradition in RPGs. When a party of adventurers goes gallivanting across the countryside, or through a stretch of otherwise empty dungeon, or wandering aimlessly through a city, one way for the DM to keep the game from becoming a rather bland travelogue is to throw in random encounters. At the same time, this idea can be difficult for a DM who prefers to be more carefully prepared for his or her game sessions, with combat encounters typically being more carefully planned set-pieces—random encounters don’t always fit into their world view. Today we will discuss a secret that will help you make more memorable random encounters if you already use them, or may help convince you to start, if you don’t.

Some encounters are more random than others. To put it more clearly, random need not be synonymous with unplanned.

Sure, it’s easy enough to write a random encounter chart with nothing more than a group of enemies as each entry, and sometimes that’s enough—if your party is exploring a dungeon, for example, you don’t have to worry about coming up with the features of the area on the fly, since they will be dictated by the environment and the room the PCs are in at the time. For those with more of a mind for preparation, though, you might think of some unusual scenarios that could be explored within the dungeon but don’t fit into the main theme—perhaps something that adds extra flavor fitting your campaign world, or even that introduces or advances a minor subplot in some way, but is not necessary to see it completed. If your setting features the spirits of the dead heavily, for example, your players could randomly encounter the ghosts of a group of slain adventurers in a section of dungeon that they have already cleared out, perhaps gaining insight into the history of the place, or a quest to communicate news of their demise to their loved ones.

For a countryside encounter table, though, you may want to invest a bit more time into your random encounter design. Instead of simply having a bandit attack, you could have your players stumble across an old abandoned windmill that bandits have converted into a base, and play out the combat in and around the windmill. You might have a group of gnolls harassing a family of peasants on the road, and the party might earn extra rewards for successfully defending the poor folks. And again, you might use it as an opportunity to flesh out your setting a bit more for your players.

It’s also definitely worth keeping in mind that an encounter doesn’t invariably need to lead to combat. You might include such entries as friendly travelers—traders or adventurers, hunters or local farmers. You could include strange noises, phantom lights, or ghostly visions of events long past, or any other atmospheric element you like. You could also include events that play out more along the lines of skill challenges—a young hoodlum cutpurse makes off with one player’s money pouch, and the players must engage in a chase to catch the little rascal, perhaps, or they stumble across a mysterious chest or door locked with a combination of magic and mechanics, holding some treasure within if only they can figure out how to open it.

A bit of preparation can obviously make random encounters much more entertaining and flavorful, then, but they are not without their own inherent problems, at the same time. One such problem arises in the form of experience rewards. If you run a large number of random encounters without considering the affect it will have on your experience totals it is possible that your players may outlevel the main adventure you have planned simply through wandering around aimlessly. You can avoid this in a number of ways—planning to include a certain number of random encounters as part of the total adventure experience, budgeting random encounters to a smaller total of experience share, limiting the number of combat encounters included on the table, or simply fudging experience in general.

Another potential problem is that you may prepare a number of encounters that go unused. This is alleviated somewhat by the ability to lift unused encounters and drop them wholesale into later adventures—assuming that they are not explicitly tied to the location of the current adventure—and by avoiding overpreparation. It’s not necessary to prepare dozens upon dozens of encounters at any given time, especially if they are intended for use as random encounters. You will still want to make the main focus of your design the encounters that you can be sure your group will get a chance to see.

Random encounters can be great fun, and a bit of preparation can go a long way in making them feel more connected, both to the specific adventure and to the world as a whole. Care in preparation can avoid most of the larger pitfalls associated with them, and proper use of these elements can make your world feel broader and more alive—like there are things happening independent of your player characters, without taking the spotlight away from them.

We live in a culture that is rich in media. Novels, comic books, movies, video games, television shows, and more—it is a constant stream of entertainment for those who want it. There may be times when your group wants to roleplay in an established universe—to explore the same worlds that the heroes of your favourite novels or movies have their adventures in. Sometimes, others have had the same idea and have adapted a system (or created one) to allow just that. Other times it will be left to you to do this work—or it may be that you like the setting but not the system associated with it. Alternately, perhaps you have a favourite adventure that was written for a system other than the one you play in.

The first step is to consider the basic assumptions of the setting you are adapting your game from, and work out how you will fit them into your game. Magic may work vastly differently. Harry Potter and his friends use magic quite differently from the way it is shown in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, and neither one is particularly well fit to the way D&D’s magic system functions—to say nothing of something like Xanth. Games like Final Fantasy, rather than elves and dwarves, have characters from bizarre races—unique to their particular iteration of the series in most cases, moogles aside. Gamebooks—Lone Wolf, or Fighting Fantasy—are typically designed as single-player experiences, and are frequently limited in options compared to a tabletop game, and rife with “gotcha” instant death choices. None of this is necessarily an insurmountable obstacle, but it is important to consider before you begin.

Next it is important to consider how rich the setting is for adventure. Some worlds are well fleshed out and deeply detailed, sufficiently to allow a wide variety of adventures to take place quite apart from the canonical ones by the original authors. On the other hand, there are settings that show only enough of the world to give backdrop for the story being told, and nothing more really exists beyond those scant few details. These settings can be more difficult to adapt, since they require much more fleshing out on the part of the DM to be usable, and often require a large amount of conjecture and guess-work to fill in the blanks. It may not be worth trying to adapt the setting rather than create your own if there is a dearth of setting detail in the original source material—you may wish to let your players know that the original work was amongst your inspirations, but that your setting is merely similar and not a full adaptation.

In a richer setting it may be worth deciding how much of the source material to use. For something like Star Wars, for example, there is a huge amount of verbiage dedicated to detailing every bit of setting minutiae, and in spite of the best intentions of all involved, not all of it necessarily fits that well together—there are certainly confusing contradictions present in several cases. (While Star Wars has had several RPG lines, it remains a valid example of setting richness for the purposes of illustrating this point.) Being selective can help reduce this confusion for your players, but one must always be clear about which elements of the setting are being used and which discarded up front to ensure that your players expectations match your own. Another issue can arise if there is material being released on a regular basis that introduces new setting elements—especially if the new content contradicts material you created to fill in gaps while you waited. Decide ahead of time how you will handle such contradictions and communicate to your players. An easy way to avoid this is to be clear that your starting point is based on the existing material and anything produced later will be included only if it does not contradict what your game has established to be true.

Once you have assessed how suitable the source is for adaptation, both in terms of mechanics and volume of material, there is one final question before you set about the task of adapting it to your game of choice—how much staying power will it have for your group as an RPG setting? If you’ve just watched the latest fantasy blockbuster movie and want to play a game based on the setting that’s great, but if you won’t still feel that way in two months then it’s probably not worth the effort of fully adapting the setting. On the other hand, if your players all played the same gamebooks as kids—Fighting Fantasy, for example—and you want to set your game on Titan and revisit favourite locations from the books as new adventurers, then you’ll probably be able to maintain interest in it for a good while. Again, this should not be taken as a suggestion not to play in the short-term adaptation, but rather to tailor the amount of effort you put into converting the setting to the amount of time you’ll spend playing it.

Playing in established worlds, or adapting existing material to new systems, can be a great timesaver and can be great fun for DM and players alike, for bringing forth feelings of nostalgia or fondness for the setting. It can be an interesting exercise in mechanical design—a part of the topic admittedly not covered in this article, simply because the scope is far too large. As with everything, though, communicating clearly to your players is essential, so they understand the rules of the adaptation—familiarity with the setting will do a great deal to enhance their comfort with the game, but at the same time if something doesn’t work the way they expect it to that will be jarring. Overall, it can be an interesting and exciting way to liven up a game, even for a few short sessions.

Creating a calendar for your campaign world is simple enough, and lets you track the passage of time in your game, following things like the phases of the moons or the passage of seasons, as well as adding a good deal of flavor through the names of days and months. To really flesh out a calendar, though, you need to create a variety of holy days, feasts, and festivals celebrated by the people in your campaign world. These can provide plenty of color to your setting, as well as potential plot hooks or interesting backdrops against which to set a session.

The first step to designing a holiday is to decide on the reason for the celebration. As usual we can draw on real world holidays for inspiration. There are myriad reasons behind the celebrations and observances that exist, but they can generally be grouped into certain categories. In many cases the nature of the celebration will also help determine the timing of the event, or at least suggest a possibility or two for when it can fall in the year.

• To honor or commemorate an individual or group – In many countries, holidays exist in honor of particular individuals or groups. Rulers and heroes are the most common, but in some cases celebrations exist to mark the failure or capture of particularly reviled criminals or traitors. Often these celebrations fall on the birthday or anniversary of the death of the individual in question, but occasionally they are remembered on the anniversary of a particularly momentous event in their lives.
• To commemorate an event – Sometimes it is not the heroes who are remembered, but the event itself. Military victories or the end of a long and devastating conflict might be observed, as might successful revolutions or the unification or founding of a new kingdom. More dramatic events, such as magical or natural disasters that shaped the world, might also be commemorated. Typically these celebrations fall on the anniversary of the event they are meant to remember.
• To mark the passage of time – Many holidays exist to celebrate the passage of time. The beginning of a new year, the first day of spring, or the completion of the harvest are all fairly common festival observances. Others might include solstices and equinoxes, or other seasonal markers. The timing of these kinds of festivals is fairly self-evident.
• To celebrate life itself – In a world where survival is a struggle, it can be important to make time to simply take joy in being alive. Festivals dedicated to love, children, family, or even to remembering those who have died are all possibilities for this kind of celebration. Sometimes a party needs no more excuse than chasing away despair.
• Fantastic or supernatural reasons – When detailing the feasts or celebrations of a fantasy setting it only makes sense that there would be fantastic reasons behind some. Perhaps there is a certain day of the year upon which the barriers between realms vanishes, allowing the spirit world or fey to interact directly with the natural world. Perhaps a strange celebration is actually an ancient and long-forgotten ritual that, if it is not performed, will cause the bonds holding an ancient evil to dissolve or some other disaster to occur. Or perhaps the celebration is based on folk tales and beliefs, and makes little sense to outsiders but is treated with utmost respect and gravity by the locals…
• Religious observances – Religious holy days can include any of the above reasons and more. Perhaps there are specific articles of the faith which must be observed—on the seventh day of each month, the faithful must witness the rising of the sun while engaged in prayer, perhaps. Other observances can include periods of fasting or abstinence, and may require forgiveness or absolution, either of one’s own trespasses or those of one’s neighbors. Religious observances need not be austere and somber affairs, however—many can and should be full of as much zest and joy as more secular affairs.
• Military observances – There are several examples of celebrations to honor the veterans or the fallen who have given their lives in defense of a nation or an ideal. Other celebrations with a martial tone could include parades or tournaments to improve morale. Tournaments get the added benefit of being an outlet for pent-up aggression and offering a chance to demonstrate skill and training—as well as providing a goal to work towards for that same training each year.

Once you have decided why and when a festival or holiday is being held, the next step is to determine how it is celebrated. Parades, wild parties, somber rituals, great feasts, tournaments, quiet gatherings of friends, or full blown festival merriment are all possibilities. The festival does not even need to be observed in the same way from place to place—one country may celebrate the harvest with a great deal of drinking, dancing, and merrymaking while the neighboring country offers humble prayer and quiet thanks for their continued good fortune to the gods or spirits of the harvest. Perhaps a festival for children lets them run amok without needing to listen to their elders for an entire day, ending at sunset. A festival for the dead could be somber and mournful, or a lively remembrance of their time among the living. Don’t forget to include a bit of magic into the mix. Maybe those who died during the previous year inhabit the bodies of friends and family for the day to take care of unfinished business—but what if a normally harmless and amusing festival where old grandmothers get one last dance with their dear departed husband in the body of their grandson suddenly turns violent as some strong spirit decides to thirst for revenge?

Where the festival is celebrated and by whom is also important. Very few celebrations are observed throughout the world. Perhaps the characters stumble into a small hamlet and encounter a holiday observed only by the villagers there; alternatively they might have heard of a grand tournament in a distant city held yearly with a fantastic prize for the victors and travel there specifically to take part.

Finally, if you want to make the festivals into an important part of your game, you need to communicate their existence to your players. If you have already created a calendar for your setting you can simply note the festival days on it and provide brief descriptions of those that are widely observed; this will allow the players to see that something noteworthy will happen on that day and hopefully pique sufficient interest for them to want to investigate. Even if you have not already created a full calendar, it’s easy enough to simply have a few NPCs talking about the upcoming festivities, or beginning to work towards setting them up in advance. Make your festivals memorable and lively, and they’ll be a fun addition to your campaign.

Publisher and game designer Chris Pramas has written a useful article on Running miniatures games at conventions.

The article gives some useful insights.

When I was about 12 years old, I “designed” my first wargame scenario. I tried to recreate the Battle of Kursk using Avalon Hill’s classic Squad Leader boardgame (I know, I know; I was 12). In practice this meant setting up four boards and filling them with as many German and Russian tanks as I could. My brother and I tried to play it and of course it was too big and unwieldy to finish. My attempt was a failure but it taught me an important lesson. Designing a good scenario takes more thought that just using everything you have and yet this is a trap many big games fall into.

Chris Pramas runs publisher Green Ronin, which published the Dragon Age tabletop RPG this year. You can hear more from Pramas in the Out of Character podcast episode 66.

It’s that darn real world intruding on the fun. The Unassailable Wall of Realism.

The UWoR never stands in the way of fantasy games. Because its fantasy, the GM can make anything up, and it’s as plausible as you want it to be, more or less. I don’t just mean handwaving mistakes away by saying “it’s magic” (although there’s some freedom in that too). I mean that the town guards don’t have to act like historical town guards or modern policemen. They can act like however you want them too, and it’s not incorrect. Since you make your own definitions in fantasy, you can’t do it “wrong.” You might create a fantastic situation that someone else doesn’t care for, but there’s no objective way to measure it all. It’s all subjective.

– Monte Cook, Top Secret.

A question that is often neglected when initially considering the details of a campaign world is how the inhabitants mark the passage of time. Precision measurements of time are relatively recent, but even tens of thousands of years ago people were calculating and measuring time. For your campaign world, defining a calendar and the common methods of measuring shorter intervals can be a very good way to add verisimilitude and character to your setting.

Tracking time can be considered from the smallest measurements right up to the largest.

Small units of time are likely to be imprecisely measured in most worlds. Seconds and minutes, or the equivalent thereof, are difficult to track accurately even for many modern clocks–the technology or magic available will determine how close to the “real” time one can determine. At the same time, seconds and minutes are less likely to be important to keep track of, for the most part, and rough estimates to the nearest quarter hour may be sufficient. Bear in mind before you decide to create your own small measurements–e.g. one hundred seconds to a “segment”, one hundred segments to a “bell”–that this kind of separation can make your world feel different from Earth, but can also make it confusing for players, who will almost invariably need to convert these times back to more familiar measurements to understand how long “three bells” is. This will probably be true for anything up to and including the length of a day. Simple equivalents (one bell is two hours) are more readily translatable without causing confusion or pauses while your players puzzle out the conversion.

Medium segments of time–days, weeks, and even months–can be changed more readily. A day might be slightly longer or shorter, but should remain fairly close to the 24-hour cycle your players (and you!) are used to, if only because it simplifies things. The concept of a week, though, is fairly easy to play around with. You might have a week be as few as five days, or as many as ten. If you do choose to use a different length for your weeks, it’s worth thinking about why it is grouped the way it is. Perhaps each weekday is dedicated to one of the gods in your world’s pantheon–our own weekday names are largely drawn from the Norse pantheon, in English, at least. You could also name the weekdays after elements, ancient heroes, or anything else you think thematically appropriate for your campaign world.

Months are similar to weeks in that it’s fairly easy to fiddle with the lengths of them. Perhaps on your world all months are of equal length. It can help to decide how many days are in a year on your world at the same time you choose to divide the months. For a 365-day year, wholesale lifting of the Gregorian calendar might work–or you could divide the year into six months of sixty days each, with a five-day period for the death of one year and the dawn of the next at the end of each cycle of months.

As with weekdays, consider what the months are named for. The Gregorian calendar uses a variety of sources for the names of months–September through December were originally named for their position in the calendar, January, March, May, and June take their names from gods, July and August honor Julius and Augustus Caesar, and February and April originate from the words for purification and opening, respectively. Your calendar could copy any or all of these inspirations, and more, for naming your months. Your player characters could even be honored similarly to Julius and Augustus–previously those months were numbered similarly to the latter months in the year. Most players would be fairly excited to have their characters immortalized in such a way.

Tracking the passage of years is relatively simple, by comparison. Pick an important event in your world’s history to start the year numbering from and work from there. It could be an ancient war, a religious event, a great cataclysm, or even the beginning of the reign of a given ruler–and again, your player characters could well be immortalized if their deeds are used as a starting point for a new calendar–”It is the third year since Hulkgar the Third and his stalwart companions overthrew the gods,” for example. If you are feeling truly ambitious you might name each individual year–the Year of the Shattered Sky, the Year of the Sun’s Betrayal, and so on–but it can be a lot of effort to do so for more than a very few years and maintain a consistent level of seriousness. Tread with care, or you may end up with names as ridiculous as Year of the Intimidating Porpoise–memorable, perhaps, but not easily taken seriously.

One benefit to keeping the year at 365 days (365.25, being precise) and simply renaming the months of the Gregorian calendar to match 1:1 with the calendar of your world is that it then becomes very easy to adapt a real-world calendar, electronic or otherwise, to track time in your game. Making your own calendar of a different scale may result in more work to track the time, but is not outside of the realm of possibility, or even an especially tedious amount of work once you have the framework decided on. Either way, knowing how time is measured and days are tracked in your world can add a very large dose of realism to your campaign–your players will be able to feel that things are happening at a much more concrete pace if they can look at a calendar and see what they were doing on a particular day in-game. Also, it can lead to more dimension in character backgrounds, as birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays can all be much more reliably tracked and used as plot hooks or roleplaying hooks if your players can see how the calendar works.

The myth is true: Warhammer six-sided dice roll 1s more often. That’s the conclusion of an American engineering professor who rolled dice 144,000 times and dissected them using a hydrogen-cooled diamond saw.

The experiment tested Games Workshop dice, Chessex dice, and precision casino dice. The GW and Chessex d6s rolled a ‘one’ 29% of the time, when the average should be one in six or 16.6%. That makes the dice almost 75% more likely to roll a ‘one’, giving your rogue a crappy damage roll or your Warhammer unit a pass on a leadership test. The casino dice were spot on at 16.6%.

The best theory is that rounded edges cause dice to keep rolling longer. Gravity paradoxically favours the heaviest side at the top, since gravity causes dice to stop rolling:

Game room logic, poor source of anything, would dictate that the side with the one is heavier and would therefore be on the bottom more. Unfortunately this is just not true, take popcorn or batholiths as an example. The 6 is too light to stop the momentum of the dice, the rounded corners cannot prevent the dice from turning due to the weight. In the end 1s are by far the most common result.

Dice inventor Lou Zocchi has a similar theory.

But who is this anonymous professor? Could he be a secret plant for the manufacturers of casino dice?

This article previously appeared on August 19th 2009. It reappears here as part of Brandan Landgraff’s World Building 101 series of articles.

At the end of a hard day adventuring, the most popular place for PCs to rest their weary heads is typically the local inn. It is the adventurer’s home away from home, base of operations, and the best place to celebrate a successful journey.

As it is generally one of the places that you can expect your PCs to be spending a lot of time, it makes sense to put a bit of effort into making the inn more than just a place to sleep. A memorable inn can be so much more—a place to introduce new characters and plot hooks both major and minor, and a place that actually feels like home. It could even be possible to run an entire adventure based solely in the inn, if it is set up correctly.

Continue reading this article »

Dungeons and Dragons, as with most any tabletop RPG, is at its strongest when the players and the Dungeon Master work together to create a world and a story that everyone involved enjoys and feels a sense of ownership towards. This sense of ownership comes readily to the DM, who creates the world and most of the population, behaving as the players’ senses and giving life to the NPCs they encounter. For the players, though, it can be less obvious where their role in world building comes in, and thus how their ownership of the world can begin.

As I have previously discussed in this column, getting player input on the world before the game begins can be a valuable tool to involve them in world generation—using the background hooks they provide with their characters invariably makes the player feel like his character is more than a simple stand-in or outsider, in the world but not of it. Collecting out of character feedback from your players is another way of finding out what they like, or dislike, about your setting and your campaign so that you can tailor it to suit their tastes.

Other ways exist to gain insight into what elements of your setting your players enjoy and what they do not, of course. One of the most important for any Dungeon Master to learn is what your players’ choices in-character suggest about their interests, and how to adapt quickly to incorporate their choices meaningfully into whatever plans you may have had for your campaign. I believe this can be illustrated with an example from my own campaign in which one of my players did something I wasn’t expecting.

A seemingly minor NPC—one who has been largely absent from the direct storyline the player characters have experienced, but who has and will continue to have a significant impact on the unfolding plot—was publically spurned by a major patron and ally of the PCs. I had included this as exposition and was expecting the party to be eager to move on to what I considered the meat of the session, but one of the players was interested in pursuing the spurned young woman and ensuring that she was taken care of.

In the short term, this forced me to improvise, as I had not given much thought to how the girl would react other than extricating herself from the humiliating situation she had been in, but the PC in question offered her comfort and actually arranged for new employment for her, since she had been summarily dismissed from the employ of the noblewoman who was hosting the party during which she raised a scene. In the long term, this PC’s interest in and interaction with the character has allowed me to place her in a position where I can more easily move the subplot involving that character, and furthermore has told me that this is a situation the players will likely find agreeable, since they themselves pursued it.

I could just as easily have had her flee too quickly for the PC to catch, or refuse to speak to him, but that would have been detrimental to the campaign in a variety of ways. First of all, and most importantly, it would have removed the player’s agency in affecting the world of the campaign and potentially his connection to it. It is essential that players be able to take actions that have an effect on the world around them, otherwise they are merely spectators to the story, and not participants—and may as well be reading a novel or watching a movie. Secondly, I would have then had to work harder later on to ensure that the NPC in question was visible and recognizable to the PCs when the story turns to her again, a task which I am now spared thanks to one of the players actively taking an interest in her well being and ensuring that he and the other PCs will be keeping an eye on her.

The idea that I am trying to illustrate here is that if a player shows interest in something in character, it probably means that player is interested in that element of the game out of character as well. Therefore, if a player character pursues an angle you weren’t expecting, your game can only improve by rolling with it rather than trying to shut it down. Improvisation is a key skill for handling this smoothly, but if all else fails, you can always admit to the players that you haven’t detailed whatever it is they’re pursuing all that heavily, and that you’ll need a bit to plan for it—you might even ask them for ideas on what they’d expect to find, giving them another chance to contribute to the world building.

This may not always be the case, however—sometimes players will seize on something that you mention in passing simply because they are trying to read you the same way, and mistakenly believe that it is important to the outcome of the encounter or the game. It can be something completely innocuous that you included for flavor—I have heard one DM mention that her players seemed obsessed with a squirrel she included as fluff, because “she wouldn’t have mentioned the squirrel if it wasn’t important”. Of course, the squirrel was in no way important, but the players weren’t sure…

Player agency, and meaningful choices, are what set tabletop roleplaying games apart from any other form of entertainment. It allows the DM to respond dynamically to unexpected actions and gives the players freedom to explore the world the way they see fit. Keeping that in mind, and working towards enabling it as much as possible, is one of the key steps towards creating a campaign your players will feel proud to be able to contribute to.

Television cliche wiki TV Tropes has an ever-expanding collection of common gimmicks and genre conventions that will be familiar to players of tabletop roleplaying games. (Be warned: TV Tropes is rather addictive, so expect to spend several hours clicking links.)

TV Tropes are especially useful for Dungeon Mastering ideas. One such trope is Schrodinger’s Gun, a rule defined as such:

“The state of anything in a Tabletop RPG that has not been observed by the players is undefined until the players’ actions affect it.”

–Schrödinger’s Gun

You are free to change any detail that the players haven’t seen yet. An example of this from my home game is when the players were looking for a prophecied hero named the Faith Scion, who I was going to have turn out to be one of the PCs all along. When that player left and another joined the group, I decided that the new player was actually the Faith Scion all along, and that his unusual choice of weapon played an important role in his backstory.

You can also use this rule when the players guess the ending to your mystery ahead of time, or an important NPC is killed unexpectedly. Reveal that the real villain was someone else all along, or that the mage they killed was actually a simulacrum created by the mage as a decoy. Use this carefully, as players don’t like to be robbed of their achievements.

Another rule is called Chandler’s Law, named for a piece of advice by pulp writer Raymond Chandler:

“When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

– Chandler’s Law

This rule applies readily to Dungeons & Dragons, and in fact I believe it appears in editions of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. When the game is going slowly, roll for initiative! Combat is engaging and interesting, and gives the opportunity to introduce new information or modify a difficult situation.

Some other useful RPG tropes include Pragmatic Villainy (see also the Evil Overlord List) and Dangeously Genre Savvy. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to read a few more hours of TV Tropes.

Frank Trollman at RPG forum The Gaming Den takes a rare look at a Cold War era Czech D&D clone:

So today we’re going to be doing a little bit of a review of the Czech exclusive RPG Drači Doupě Plus, or as it is known in short hand: DrD+. In case this wasn’t immediately obvious from the name alone, this is an old school Dungeons & Dragons clone. The things that make it different from any of a thousand fantasy heartbreakers you will never play is that this one was designed behind the Iron Curtain by Czechoslovakian gamers in secret, and then released to the masses shortly after the wall came down in 1990.

Penny Arcade posts a ten minute video on why D&D is important to players.

Dicecreator’s Blog posts a guide on making your own custom dice.

In an old post from Jeff’s Gameblog, Jeff Rients reminds us that D&D was just a fad and may never become mainstream popular. Harsh!

Big Ball of No Fun offers a use of the Insight skill to gauge enemy strength. This could also be applied to D&D 3e’s Sense Motive skill.

I’m particularly proud of this website’s Ioun stone guide, a collected list of over 154 different ioun stones from more than 15 different sources. Most are canon D&D sourcebooks, with some from third-party publications. The list has grown by 75% since originally posted, including 43 stones added this month from an AD&D sourcebook and six from a 1991 issue of Dragon magazine.

There’s a surprising amount of background story to the ioun stone. The ioun stone actually predates Dungeons & Dragons, appearing in Jack Vance’s 1973 short story “Morreion”. Vance’s works had a major influence on D&D and the ioun stone made its way into Dungeons & Dragons through The Strategic Review, TSR’s gaming magazine:

“FLASHING SWORDS! #1 (Dell, 1973) contained four excellent swords & sorcery yarns, including “Morreion” by Jack Vance. In this tale there was a magical item of highly unusual value — IOUN stones. Mr. Vance was kind enough to allow us to enlarge somewhat upon his creations and list them as a D&D “Miscellaneous Magic” item.”

– The Strategic Review #4, Winter 1975

Dragon Magazine issue #174 (October 1991) describes that according to Vance’s “Morreion”, ioun stones are recovered at great risk from the hearts of obliterated stars.

In that issue’s article, “Bazaar of the Bizarre: Ioun Stones”, Matthew Hargenrader offers a separate origin story for the ioun stones in D&D. Rare ioun stones grow gradually in the Demiplane of Mineral, a place where the Positive Energy Plane meets the Plane of Earth. This plane is hostile to human life and guarded by numerous crystalline creatures, but contains a wealth of gemstones and minerals, including the ioun stones.

TSR’s 1996 book Netheril: Empire of Magic gives an origin story for the ioun stones of the Forgotten Realms setting, where the NPC lich Larloch has a famous preference for the items:

“The Shadow King’s body was in stark contrast to that of Tam. While the Zulkir of Necromancy strove to maintain his human appearance, Larloch was nothing more than a collection of bones partially covered in fine garments. The Netheril lich’s bones were bright white in color, and trails of emerald energy traveled across his form. More than two dozen ioun stones circled his skull, and globes of red light gazed up at Szass Tam as he approached.”

– Netheril: Empire of Magic

The book describes the inventor of Ioun Stones, an Netherese arcanist born 4,000 years ago named Congenio Ioun. As this Ioun lived for over 900 years and was an extremely talented spellcaster, it’s not impossible that he ascended to become the deity Ioun of D&D 4th edition.

The earlier Dragon article dislikes the idea that a human wizard might simply have invented the ioun stones, considering it unworthy of the majestic star-cores of Vance’s Dying Earth series:

“This method lacks any spirit of adventure and is very straightforward: It is supposed that ultrapowerful wizards who live on some alternate Prime Material plane simply make these magical gems. The only interesting thing about this origin is that the magical effects created by such wizards are greatly superior to those encountered in a standard AD&D campaign.”

–Dragon magazine #174, October 1991, “Bazaar of the Bizarre: Ioun Stones”

I have to admit that I took this approach in Kobold Quarterly #6’s “Rolling Stones”, presenting new 15 new ioun stones as invented by a human inventor named Darven Regance. In deference to Vance’s work and other creation stories I wrote that only these new stones were man-made, and quite likely reverse-engineered from the original stones.

In retrospect, perhaps my character Regance is Congenio Ioun in disguise, or he simply took his “inventions” from the Demiplane of Mineral.

Eventually, every adventuring group will want or need to spend some time in environs more civilized than the wilderness or dungeons that are their bread and butter. From the smallest of hamlets to the largest of bustling capitals, your players will appreciate towns and cities with a bit more personality than a generic, nameless place that exists only to give them a place to shop and bunk down for the night.

There are a number of facets to consider when you design your settlements. One of the first you should consider is the reason the original inhabitants chose to settle that location. Towns are rarely built for no reason. It might have formed around a crossroads on a trade route, or a river landing. Perhaps it grew from a small fishing village into a major harbour, or from a mining town into an important fortification. More fantastic possibilities exist as well, such as wellsprings of magical power or the fiat of deities determining the location of a town. Knowing where the town was built, and why, can assist in visualizing the place and answering other questions.

Another thing to think about is how the town defends itself. The basic assumption of most settings is that the cities and towns are, if not completely safe, at least safer than camping out in the wilderness. How do the citizens keep safe from the various dangers of the wild lands? They may rely on mundane methods of defence such as city walls, from wooden stockades to thick stone walls. Perhaps they reside on an island, cut off from the mainland. More fantastic defences are possible as well—floating cities, or cities built on treetops, or within the center of a labyrinth carved out of a mountain, navigable only with the aid of a guide.

The amenities the town or city has to offer are important as well, of course. An inn or alehouse is generally a key location for adventures, and should be given full attention. The local places of worship—temples or churches—should also be considered, especially if they are the source of ritual magics to cure diseases or raise dead adventurers to life. Shops or forges may round out the immediate player character needs, especially in a roleplay-light campaign, but should not represent the entirety of the consideration you give to the town’s facilities. Local sages or experts, gambling houses, trading concerns, wealthy citizens who may act as patrons, and internal threats should also be considered.

Points of interest can add a lot to a town, as well. Perhaps there is a local haunted house, or a magical site of great power to visit. Local shrines to powerful beings or spirits could also make interesting places to visit, or possible adventure hooks. They also do a lot to give the town or city a more defined personality, to make it feel like more than just a dot on the map. In some cases, the point of interest may be the entire reason the city exists—whether or not the inhabitants know the original purpose, an ancient abandoned city built into the side of a cliff may be a tempting place to settle to be safe from wild beasts, even if the mysterious labyrinth deeper in the rock lead to chambers of unknown purpose where echoes of the original builders still sound endlessly.

The citizens of the town are of course essential to bringing it to life. Detailing some of the important townsfolk, both within the town’s hierarchy and those that the adventurers are likely to interact with directly in their daily business, can give you room to insert adventure hooks or potential interesting interactions. Nobles, sages, religious leaders, and local militia captains may be out of reach for beginning adventurers in the big city, but in smaller frontier towns they are likely to be the best paying source of employment for the kinds of work adventurers do best. Other key characters include innkeepers, shop owners, and anyone likely to come to the attention of your players, such as rival adventurers or instigators and agitators for whatever factions may be hoping to cause trouble in town.

A final point to consider is what threats are faced by the settlement. External threats are likely to be obvious. Bandits, marauding beasts, encroaching armies or dark powers stirring in nearby ruins are all likely points for your players to explore. Less evident but no less important are internal threats, from within the settlement itself. Smugglers, kidnappers, or cultists, or anyone else who may be trying to bring the settlement down from within, either intentionally or with the mistaken belief that they are helping. Don’t automatically assume that such characters will immediately confront the player characters in a combat situation, either—while this can be fun, it can also be entertaining to let the players meet several potential suspects and let them work out which one is the real troublemaker.

How much time and effort you spend on designing your cities and towns depends entirely on your personal preference, and the needs of your campaign. Don’t be discouraged if you spend time developing a town and your players never see half of the ideas you put into a town, either. In the worst case scenario, you will have a better idea for next time how much time to put into developing towns for that player group, at the very least. In the best case, you may be able to move the ideas or reuse them at a later point. Regardless, the effort of preparation can definitely make the difference between a cardboard-cutout city and one that feels more exciting and interesting to spend time in.

Recently I noticed that Paizo’s Pathfinder RPG system uses an alternative XP system from the D&D 3.5 system it’s based on. The observant will recognise a strong similarly to the “Level-Independent XP Awards” variant from Unearthed Arcana (page 213), described as “a way of easing the DM’s job of adventure design and the task of experience-point calculating at the end of a game session.”

The big difference with the Pathfinder/UA experience system is that instead of earning a different amount of XP from a creature depending on your party’s current level, you gain the same XP amount regardless of party level, but higher level monsters give much more XP, and you need more XP to level up. The overall effect is that the XP numbers get much higher (millions of XP to reach level 20), but players still level up at the same rate as normal.

The main benefit here is that DMs can combine monsters in encounters more easily and calculate XP rewards more easily. It’s now possible to calculate the XP total for an encounter in advance even if you don’t know what level the PCs will be. A similar system is employed by fourth edition D&D, although it’s unlikely Pathfinder copied 4E’s rule here: this system originally appeared in 2004’s Unearthed Arcana, four years before 4E.

Another change peculiar to Pathfinder RPG is the choice of three XP rates: slow, medium, and fast. Some groups prefer to level up frequently, while others prefer slower levelling.

Fast is closest to the Unearthed Arcana equivalent and therefore the standard 3.5 progress rate, requiring 1,300 XP or 13 average Pathfinder encounters to reach level 2, and 2,400,000 XP to reach level 20. Medium requires about 50% more XP than Fast, suggesting Pathfinder favours a more gradual levelling rate. Slow requires 50% more XP than Medium, and 2.25 times as much as Fast, with players levelling once every 30 encounters or so.

If you’d like to try Pathfinder RPG, even if only to mine for ideas or house rules for a 3.5 game, the 576 page full-colour PDF is a very reasonable $10 from Paizo.com. The new XP rules appear on pages 30 and 398.

Recently I noticed that Paizo’s Pathfinder RPG system uses an alternative XP system from the D&D 3.5 system it’s based on. The observant will recognise a strong similarly to the “Level-Independent XP Awards” variant from Unearthed Arcana (page 213), described as “a way of easing the DM’s job of adventure design and the task of [...]

As I said previously on the odds of each result when rolling 3d6, D&D was a lot more lethal back in 1981. Your character can start with as little as one hit point. Another odd quirk of the Basic D&D rules, which you can see in Labyrinth Lord’s rules (free PDF download here), is that characters [...]

Last week we discussed real world cultures as a shortcut for generating your own full-fledged cultures for use in your campaigns. This week we will examine some things to consider when creating your own cultures for your campaign setting. As always, remember that your efforts to detail your campaign world don’t need to be directly [...]