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Angela: I saw twelve goblins and at least six ogres.

Courtney: I don’t want to fight them in a big open room. If they surround us, we’re toast.

Shayne: Yeah, it would be a lot better to funnel them into a tighter space.

Courtney: Okay, what if we go back to the heliotrope hall and then ring your cowbell? They should hear that and come to investigate.

Shayne: That’s good. Okay, we’ll do that. What happens when I ring the bell?

GM: …nothing.

An “encounter” in an RPG can mean a lot of different things. To keep things simple, we’re going to start by just talking about combat encounters, which we’ll define roughly as “one or more bad guys that the PCs fight.” Furthermore, let’s consider the simplest possible combat encounter:

• 4 goblins

That’s it. That’s the encounter.

We know nothing about where these goblins are or how they might be encountered during the scenario, but this also means that we have almost infinite flexibility in how this encounter could be used.

Of course, we’ll often want to add more details and specificity to this encounter. For example, we might ask ourselves where these goblins are located and key them to a specific room. We could go one step further and specify what they’re doing in that room. We could even take a fairly general activity (“the goblins are painting pictures”) and make it even more specific (“the first goblin is painting a princess being eaten by a dragon, the second goblin is painting a blade of grass dripping with blood, etc.”). And, of course, all of this specificity could be done in a different way: They’re painting different pictures. Or they’re doing something other than painting. Or they’re located in a completely different room.

A specific location, however, is not the only type of specificity we might bake into an encounter. For example, maybe these goblins have been sent to assassinate one of the PCs. Or they could be keyed to a random encounter table (which serve any one of a wide variety of functions in the scenario/campaign).

As you’re thinking about how specific a particular encounter should be, there are a few broader principles that are useful to keep in mind.

First, there’s a central tenet of Smart Prep: Focus your prep on stuff that you can’t improvised at the table. If, for example, you’d be comfortable improvising what, exactly, the goblin painters are painting, then you don’t need to spend time specifying those details in your notes. (Particularly since it may never come up in play, in which case you’ll have just wasted that prep time.)

Second, there’s the electric thrill of dynamic encounters. Whether you’re using random encounters, adversary rosters, proactive nodes, or some similar technique, having the bad guys dynamically react to the actions of the PCs is a fantastic way to make the world come to life, create incredibly deep gameplay, and emphasize that the players’ choices are the heart and soul of what makes RPGs a truly special medium. All of these techniques, however, require encounters that can be flexibly and easily used in many different ways: The goblins need to be able to move around the dungeon. Or send one of their members to raise the alarm. Or split up. Or be sent on a mission to hunt down the PCs.

Third, on a similar note, there’s active play in general: You want to prep toys that you can use to actively play with your players. Set piece encounters can be fun and effective in their own way, but you can’t play with them.

PRECIOUSNESS

What we’re driving at here is a difference between specificity (additional details) and preciousness. To proffer a definition: The fewer ways in which you can dynamically alter or use an encounter, the more precious its presentation and/or prep becomes.

Here’s a classic example of precious encounter design, from Keep on the Shadowfell:

I won’t repeat the full text of the encounter here, but here’s a brief summary of how it was prepped:

• Goblin miners and their drake companions are placed in specific locations a specific room, as indicated on the map.
• The PCs need to arrive at the encounter from the staircase and their miniatures are placed on specific squares when the encounter begins.
• There’s a tiered Perception check made from the staircase, with prepped dialogue for the goblins depending on how well the PCs roll on the check.
• The goblin’s tactics, customized for this specific room and their starting locations, is detailed.
• Specific actions are scripted to the plans, ladders, and ramp.

What if the PCs make a bunch of noise approaching this room? Well, the goblins can’t leave this area or all that scripted content has to be thrown out. What if some of the other goblins in the dungeon retreat to this room? Once again, a bunch of scripted content has to be thrown out.

The encounter is precious because great value — in terms of prep and creativity — has been invested into details which are highly dependent on specific conditions and/or actions. And that value either shouldn’t be carelessly wasted or, at the very least, the GM will be unlikely to WANT to waste it by using the encounter in a different way.

We can begin to generalize here: Is the encounter tied a specific location? Does it have to be triggered in a specific way (e.g., the bad guys have to take the PCs unawares; or the PCs need to come through a specific door; or it needs to take place in a forest)? Does it require the PCs to lack specific abilities? Or have specific knowledge?

Not all specificity, you’ll note, is preciousness, because not all specificity limits the dynamic utility of the encounter. For example, we could imagine giving each of the goblins in this encounter a specific name. That prep may or may not prove useful in actual play, but it’s not dependent on the goblins being located in a specific room or meeting the PCs in a specific way.

PRECIOUS SYSTEMS

Another form of preciousness can come from the mechanical balance of tactics-based RPGs, in which PCs can usually regain most or all of their resources before every fight. This design removes the strategic play of resource-depletion over the course of multiple encounters, which also means that weaker encounters can never contribute to the challenge of the game.

Such games, therefore, have a fairly narrow “sweet spot” each encounter needs to hit: Too weak, it’s pointless. Too strong, it’s TPK. This, in turn, usually eliminates dynamic encounter design: If an encounter is precisely balanced, you can’t have the bad guys call for reinforcements because that will tip the balance.

This, of course, is a form of preciousness: Your ability to dynamically alter an encounter or use it in different ways during play is limited by the tactics-based balance.

In my experience, encounters in these tactics-based RPGs tend to also become precious in other ways: If your encounter design is already being locked into a narrow paradigm, you might as well lean into it.

TOO PRECIOUS

On this note, therefore, it’s important to remember that preciousness is not inherently a bad thing. It’s not that you should NEVER have Little John guarding the log bridge against Robin Hood, but rather that being aware of how and when you’re making your encounters precious — and also if/when the system you’re using forces preciousness — is useful.

What you want to avoid, though, is making your encounters TOO precious, something which I sometimes refer to sardonically as My Precious Encounter™ design. Broadly speaking, this means double-checking whether the preciousness you’re baking into the encounter is actually necessary, or if you’re just crippling your own prep for no reason.

OTHER PRECIOUS ENCOUNTERS

As I mentioned, we’ve been simplifying things by focusing on combat encounters, but you can find preciousness in other types of encounters, too.

In fact, just locking an encounter into being a “combat encounter” is a form of preciousness: After all, couldn’t we negotiate with the goblins? Or trick them? Or sneak past them? Or recruit them? Or convert them?

The reverse, of course, is also true. “This is the encounter where the PCs will negotiate with Sir William” (and the encounter is designed as such) is more precious than simply prepping Sir William as an NPC whose scenes could play out in myriad ways.

And, again, this isn’t inherently a problem: The principles of smart prep, in fact, encourage preciousness. (At least, up to a certain point.) There are plenty of situations in which you can have a very high confidence in how an encounter will play out at the table and you should be prepping it accordingly.

Even in these circumstances, however, I think you will find it useful to keep one eye — if not your primary focus — on the broader utility of what you’re prepping. In other words, make precious only that which brings value.

Your toys should not become so precious to you that you can no longer play with them: Take them off the shelf, take them out of the box, and see what you can create!

Go to Part 1

You can’t play an RPG without players. Plus, we all love RPGs and want to share with other people how awesome they are, so it’s always tempting to invite just one player to your game.

But every player you add to your table comes with an inevitable and unavoidable entropic cost.

Take your total amount of playing time and divide it by the number of players: That’s the maximum amount of spotlight time — the maximum amount of focus — that you can give to each player. The more players you add, the less time each player has. You can speed things up, you can cheat a bit around the edges with multitasking and other advanced techniques, but ultimately, no matter how good a GM you might be, you’ll reach a point where individual players are no longer able to participate enough to have a good time.

A fairly concrete example of this is the typical round-based combat system: A player takes their turn and then must wait for everyone else in the fight to take their turn before they can take their next turn. Consider a table with ten players: Even if you got the per-turn resolution speed down to a fairly fast two minutes per turn, it would still take twenty minutes to go around the table. In practice, of course, it’s even worse, because the bad guys also need to take a turn, and the more PCs you have in the party, the more bad guys you need to have in the fight. Once again, you can cheat this with stuff like off-turn actions (although these typically only increase the length of a combat round), but only to a point.

Imagine an episode of a television show in which a character was onscreen for just a couple of minutes. You’d consider that a bit part, right?

That’s what having a too-high player count at your table does: It turns every player into a bit part.

Another problem you’ll run into is niche protection: It’s very easy for an RPG group to fall into a pattern of “let the PC with the highest skill bonus do it.” This sidelines other PCs, but you can route around it in practice by having different PCs be the best at different things, so that everybody gets a turn at being the PC with the highest skill bonus (metaphorically or literally).

As player count increases, though, you start to run out of niches. Some RPGs are better at niche protection than others, but at a certain point you’re also dealing with scenario dynamics that extend beyond the mechanics: How many fundamentally different types of activities are there to do in a dungeon? Or while solving a mystery? Or during a heist?

Once you run out of niches, each additional player increases the risk of your game entering a fail state in which a PC is never the best at a given task, and therefore the player never gets to do anything: The bit player becomes a background extra.

THE SWEET SPOTS

If this entropic cost was the whole story, of course, the logical conclusion would be that the ideal RPG group would always have exactly one player. And that doesn’t sound right, does it?

The reality is that there are other factors at play in determining the ideal group size. (Pun intended.) Perhaps the best way to look at these factors is to run through the various group sizes, including the features and weaknesses of each in turn.

Some GMs will have one specific “sweet spot” for group size that they’re always trying to hit. I tend to think more in terms of, “What’s right for this game/group?” Nevertheless, this discussion will, inevitably, be shaped by my own biases, so take it with however many grains of salt you feel are necessary.

I’ll also note that the player counts here do NOT include the Game Master.

ZERO. There are an increasing number of solo-play RPGs and STGs, allowing you to get your narrative tabletop fix without any other players at all. These games have a unique dynamic and they don’t always scratch the same itch as running a game for players (or playing a game with a GM), but they do have the obvious advantage of being able to play whenever you want to.

ONE. One GM, one player. This table obviously has no problems with spotlight balance and it creates a very intimate experience. This intimacy, however, also creates intensity: The GM never gets a break while the players talk to each other, and the player, similarly, can never slip into the audience stance and recharge their creative batteries. I recommend taking breaks more frequently.

The other problem with having only one player is fragility. Combat is once again the easy example: When you have multiple PCs, a single PC getting knocked down to 0 hit points is a minor problem. When you only have one PC, on the other hand, it’s a campaign ending disaster. (So you’ll want to be very conservative when balancing combat encounters, try to frame fights with non-lethal stakes whenever you can, and probably limit the number of fights in general.)

This fragility, however, is not limited to TPKs. Consider a mystery scenario in which a clue has been hidden under a rug: For the clue to be found you just need one player to realize they should check under the rug. When you have lots of players, that’s lots of opportunities for the clue to be found, but with only one player you’re far more likely to run into blind spots. Plus, the single player has no one they can take things through with and no downtime to ponder things quietly without the GM staring at them, further limiting their ability to brainstorm problems.

TWO. Playing with a pair of players is still fairly intimate. There’s still a lot of fragility with only two PCs, but the players can now bounce ideas off of each other, which helps non-combat fragility a lot. (Two heads really are better than one!)

In practice, this dynamic also substantially dials down the intensity: The players will talk to each other, giving the GM a break. Focused interactions between the GM and one of the players are likely to alternate, giving each player the ability to intermittently slip in audience stance, relax, and regroup.

THREE. This is a very weak group size for me. It lacks the focus of one or two players, but combat fragility remains dangerously high. (This is not, to be clear, a specific mechanical problem: It’s a more fundamental issue of what happens when a group simultaneously loses one-third its firepower and the bad guys refocus their attacks on the remaining two PCs.)

If I’m looking at a group of three players, I will almost always try to figure out how to drop down to two players or step it up to four players.

FOUR. Having four players seems to be the sweet spot for a lot of GMs, and if we look at the issues we’ve been discussing, this probably isn’t surprising. Combat fragility is greatly reduced with four PCs and there are plenty of players to bounce ideas around. Everyone at the table has the opportunity to take short breaks, update their notes, or slip into audience stance during play, but it’s fairly easy to protect niches and balance spotlight time.

FIVE. To put my cards on the table, this is probably my default sweet spot. The dynamics of play remain very similar to four-player groups, but with one important difference: There’s an odd number of players.

This might seem like a minor difference, but in my experience, it has a huge impact when splitting the party. (And you should always split the party.) With four players, the group will always split into pairs, and at many tables they’ll end up being the same pairs every time. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a limited dynamic.

With a five-player table, on the other hand, the three-two divide has an inherent imbalance that seems to naturally lead the players to ask, “Which task needs the extra person?” This creates unstable sub-group formation, so over the course of a campaign you’ll end up with lots of different mixes of PCs. You’re also more likely to see some solo split-offs (four-one) and three-group splits (two-two-one or three-one-one). This not only creates a larger range of strategic decisions, it also results in a wider array of party dynamics, creating unique roleplaying opportunities between the players.

SIX. This is a maximum group size that I’ll run for, and I’ll usually only do it if there’s a special reason for the extra player. Basically, there doesn’t seem to be any advantage to running a six-player group compared to a four- or five-player group, but the entropic effects of player count really start kicking in here for me: Combat encounters become more difficult to balance. It’s increasingly difficult to keep things moving at the table fast enough so that players don’t become bored.

Once I get to seven or eight players, things start falling apart pretty quickly. You can certainly muddle through, but the experience is fundamentally compromised for everyone at the table compared to more manageable player counts.

The largest number of players I’ve personally run an RPG for was twelve. To make matters worse, it was a session of 1974 D&D in which most of the PCs had hirelings, sometimes multiple hirelings! The total party size was actually twenty-four characters!

It was a unique and fascinating experience. I don’t regret it. But I definitely didn’t want to repeat it!

I HAVE SO MANY PLAYERS!

Okay, despite my imprecations (and perhaps your best intentions!), you find yourself with an unmanageable number of players. The exact count we’re talking about will depend on your preferences, your skill, your game system, and your group, but unmanageable is unmanageable.

What should you do?

SPLIT THE TABLE

Eight players are unmanageable, but two tables with four players each would be awesome.  So the easiest thing would be to just split up the unmanageably large group into multiple smaller groups.

The two major disadvantages, of course, are that (a) the players don’t all get to play with each other and (b) now you need to prep and run two separate campaigns.

OPEN YOUR TABLE

You can expand on the concept of splitting your table by opening your table: Instead of having a dedicated group in which all of the players meet for every session, you instead boot up a campaign where players can show up whenever they’re available and you can run an adventure for whatever the impromptu group ends up being.

If you’ve already got an unmanageable number of players, then you’ve already got a solid player base for a great open table. Even better, an open table empowers you to invite even more players to your game!

Of course, your goal is to keep your player counts manageable, so you’ll want to impose a table cap for each session.

At first glance, it might seem as if this would mean that players would end up playing less, but the quality of that play will be substantially higher. And if you have a group that only plays if a certain quota of players is met, an open table can paradoxically result in every player actually getting to play more as the open table organically routes around scheduling conflicts.

The process for this is described in more detail as part of the Open Table Manifesto.

A SECOND GM

One way to turn the unmanageable into the manageable is to get more hands on deck managing it.

There are a number of different ways that a second GM – or, more accurately, a GM team-up – can be used to good effect, but one is to bring larger player counts under control.

This only works with very specific set-ups, though. Ideally, you want to be able to split the party. (In fact, you’ll want to encourage the players to do so.) And you’ll want to have a second playing space so that the second GM and their section of the group can step away and play separately.

This effectively doubles up large sections of your playing time, allowing you to steal a march on the clock.

MULTIPLE PCs

On the other end of the spectrum, what if you don’t have enough players? (Just one or two players, for example.)

You can, of course, adjust your scenario design to accommodate a small PC group, but this can be surprisingly difficult. (Ironically, games designed to protect niches for larger groups may make it difficult or impossible for a single PC to do everything required for a successful session.)

Apply enough elbow grease, of course, and you can always make it work somehow. A more straightforward approach, however, can be to simply have each player play multiple characters.

It should be noted that this can be quite difficult for players. Some players just won’t enjoy the character-swapping, since it can be disruptive to what they enjoy about a roleplaying game. But if it works, it’s a great way to make smaller gaming groups viable!

Even if you have players who don’t want to (or can’t) take on the challenge of multiple PCs, hirelings played by the GM may be another option. This, too, can be quite difficult, particularly with everything else you’re juggling as a GM, but it can be another easy option if it works for you.

Go to Part 18: Too Precious Encounters

Go to Part 1

GM: Okay, the orc stabs Derek’s paladin. Let’s see… We’re on… 17. Anyone on 17…?

16…?

15…?

14…?

Julia: I’m on 14!

GM: Okay, the goblins are, too. What’s your Dexterity score?

Julia: 12.

GM: You’ll go first.

(a minute later)

GM: Anyone on 13? How about 12?

Don’t be this guy.

If you’ve never experienced this at the table, you might find it hard to believe that this is a thing that actually happens, but it’s surprisingly common. I constantly find myself playing in games like this at conventions. I’ve even seen it happen in games using a VTT, which I find particularly baffling since it’s usually pretty trivial to set these up to auto-track initiative results.

It seems that for some people this is just the way they think RPGs are supposed to work.

The problem, of course, is pacing. Or, rather, the complete lack of it. In addition to wasting huge swaths of time with this inane call-and-response ritual, it also completely disrupts any sense of flow or build in the combat encounter. Each action becomes an isolated island floating in a vast sea of numeric chanting.

It’s also prone to mistakes and confusion, as calls are missed or initiative check results are forgotten.

WRITE IT DOWN

The solution, of course, is to simply write down the group’s initiative results, sorting them into a list so that you can tell in a single glance who’s turn is next.

This list not only eliminates the dead time of the call-and-response, it can also unlock other techniques for improving the pace of your combat encounters. For example, it allows you to put players on deck.

GM: Derek, you’re up. Julia, you’re on deck.

This lets the player know that it’s time to figure out exactly what they want to do, making it far more likely, when their turn arrives, that they’ll be ready to jump straight into action.

(The advanced technique is that you don’t always need to do this, as you’ll learn how to read the table and know when upcoming players need the cue to refocus. With some groups you may even be able to build on this by having player pre-roll their attacks and so forth, further improving the pace and focus of play.)

Of course, in some roleplaying games it won’t be necessary to write down initiative scores at all. For example, in the Infinity roleplaying game I designed, the PCs always go first (in any order they choose), but the NPCs can “jump” up and interrupt their actions if the GM spends a meta-currency called Heat. The only thing you need to keep track of in that system is which characters have gone on the current turn.

In other RPGs, however, writing down initiative may be easier said than done. To take an extreme example, consider Feng Shui, which uses shot-based initiative in which:

• Characters roll their initiative and that is the Shot in which they take their first action of the round, starting with the highest Shot.
• Each action has a shot cost, which is subtracted from the character’s current Shot value, creating a new Shot value.
• When the round counts down to that Shot, the character can then take their next action, subtracting the shot cost, and repeating until all characters have hit Shot 0 and the round ends.

It seems as if this system would basically require the GM to count down, right? Who’s going on Shot 18? Who’s going on Shot 17? Who’s going on Shot 16? And so forth.

But all that’s really required is a different form of recordkeeping.

This is, in fact, why Feng Shui includes a shot counter: a physical track that can be used, in combination with counters or miniatures, to keep track of which characters are acting on which shot. In practice, this counter should be placed on the table in full view of the players, allowing everyone to see at a glance the sequence of upcoming actions.

(See Feng Shui: Using the Shot Counter for a longer discussion of advanced techniques this tool can also unlock.)

GM DON’T #16.1: DON’T WRITE ANYTHING DOWN

Flipping things around, initiative is not the only part of a roleplaying game where you can run into these inefficiencies. Pay attention to any interaction where you’re repeatedly asking the players to deliver the same piece of information over and over again, and then eliminate that interaction by proactively recording the information so that you don’t have to ask for it.

Armor Class in D&D is a common example of this. How often are you asking your players what their AC is while resolving attacks? If it’s more than once a session (at most), it’s probably too often.

A good place to record this information would be a Post-It swap note for your GM screen, putting it literally at your fingertips whenever you need it.

There are, however, a couple of exceptions to this that are worth noting.

First, any value that is frequently shifting during play, since this increases both the hassle of bookkeeping and the likelihood of error. A technique that can work here, however, is to enlist the players’ help by making them responsible for keeping the reference up to date: This might be a tent card that sits in front of each player with the relevant values. Or, in a VTT, it might be a shared note or file that everyone can keep updated.

Second, you don’t want to accidentally preempt mechanics or abilities that allow the players to react to specific actions, particularly if it might modify the value in question. (“What’s your AC?”, for example, also doubles as a convenient notification that a PC is being attacked and has the opportunity to activate their salamander cloak.) You can frequently route around this by simply being aware of the issue and making sure to include the appropriate prompts without the extraneous numerical exchange, but it’s definitely worth being aware of the potential issue.

FURTHER READING
Random GM Tip: Collecting Initiative

Go to Part 17: Too Many Players

Go to Part 1

We’re nearing the end of a campaign, having traced a gaggle of strange incidents in which historical events (or at least replicas of historical events) have erupted into the modern world back to an eery city on the border of the Dreamlands. As we explore the city, we discover that it seems to be somewhere between a palimpsest and a jigsaw puzzle, formed from jagged pieces of different cities around the world and drawn from different eras in history (not all of them apparently our history). The whole place is completely deserted, however, and a strange white mist drifts through the streets.

While we’re checking out the apartment that once belonged to one of the PCs, there’s a car crash outside. Rushing out into the street, we see a girl with stark white hair racing away from the accident. We recognize her: Although she had black hair last time we saw her, she was being kidnapped by some of the strange wraith-cultists who seem to be mixed up in (or maybe causing?) all of this weird stuff.

We give chase and she leads us to the British National Museum (or a copy of the British National Museum?), but then she runs into the room with the Parthenon Marbles and vanishes. Our archaeologist notes that the marble sculptures have been altered and appear to depict a map of the city. We take a rubbing and begin using the map to navigate, visiting a number of strange locations where we experience enigmatic things.

Then, abruptly, a bright white light suffuses everything.

And the world ends.

Huh.

In the post mortem, we discovered what happened: After the car crash, we were supposed to check the trunk of the car. If we’d done that, we would have found the girl — still with black hair — tied up in the back. She would have been able to lead us back to the Home Insurance Building (the world’s first skyscraper) and then… something something something. I don’t remember the details. The cities of the world had all been linked together in a ritual using key skyscrapers and the Girl With White Hair was the black-haired prodigy’s mirror-self from an anti-life dimension.

We didn’t check the trunk, though, and so the world ended.

“It was really exciting to run a sandbox!” the GM said.

THE RAILROADER’S FALLACY

The railroader’s fallacy is surprisingly common:

I ran a sandbox, but the players didn’t follow the one plot that was available!

This often results in the railroader saying things like, “Sandboxes don’t work.”

First, let’s understand the nature of the fallacy here.

A sandbox campaign is one in which the players can either choose or define what the next scenario is going to be. In other words, the experience of a sandbox is more or less defined by a multitude of scenarios. So as soon as you see someone use “sandbox” to describe a campaign in which there was only one scenario — or, even more absurdly, only one plot — it’s immediately obvious that something has gone horribly wrong.

So how does this happen? And why does it seem to happen so often?

Well, we need to start with the railroader. Checking out The Railroading Manifesto might be useful if you’re not familiar with it, but the short is that:

Railroads happen when the GM negates a player’s choice in order to enforce a preconceived outcome.

Railroading can happen for a lot of reasons, but a common one is that the railroader lacks the tools to build RPG scenarios and therefore defaults to the linear plots they see in videos, movies, books, graphic novels, and so forth. This linear sequence of predetermined outcomes is antithetical to the interactivity of an RPG, and so the GM has no choice but to railroad their players into the predetermined outcomes.

At some point, the railroader gets the message that Railroads Are Bad™. The ideal outcome would be that they learn some scenario structures and gain the tools they need to run dynamic, awesome scenarios. Unfortunately, this often doesn’t happen.

One common response is rejection of the premise: “I railroad. Railroading is bad. I don’t want to be bad. Therefore railroading isn’t bad.” (Which is, of course, a completely different fallacy.)

But the other possibility is that they hear about sandbox campaigns. They probably erroneously believe that sandboxes are the opposite of railroads. (They’re not.) But they definitely hear that, “In a sandbox, you can do anything!”

And they think to themselves, “Let the players do anything? I can do that!”

Unfortunately, they still don’t have the tools to prep anything other than a linear plot. So what do they prep?

A linear plot requiring a predetermined sequence of specific choices and outcomes.

The only difference is that the players can now “do anything” (sic), so the GM no longer forces the required choices and outcomes. In the most malignant form of the fallacy, they won’t even signpost the choices.

The end of the world is actually fairly dramatic as an outcome. It’s far more common for the players to miss one of these blind turns and just… discover there’s nothing to do. There is, after all, only the one plot; the one path. Leave the path and there’s simply nothing there: You can try to engage with characters or go to interesting places, but nothing happens. You can “do anything,” but nothing you do results in anything happening because the only thing that matters is still the GM’s plot.

“Sandboxes don’t work.”

THE SOLUTION

The solution, obviously, is: Don’t do that.

If you’re going to move away from railroading (and you absolutely should), then you need to actually abandon that broken structure, not just pretend it’s not there. Check out Game Structures and the Scenario Structure Challenge to start exploring fully functional structures for your adventure design.

For more insight on how the scenario selection/creation dynamic at the heart of a sandbox campaign works, check out Advanced Gamemastery: Running the Sandbox. You might also find the extended practical example given in Icewind Dale: Running the Sandbox enlightening.

ADDENDUM

This post has been live a couple of days, and I want to clear up a point of confusion:

The scenario described at the beginning of the essay is not a railroad. If it was a railroad, the GM would have enforced a preconceived outcome.

The scenario described at the beginning of the essay is what happens when a railroader preps a scenario that requires railroading to work (because that’s the only thing they know how to prep), but then doesn’t railroad.

This is why I’ve said that railroading is a broken technique attempting to fix a broken scenario.

The fallacy is believing that non-broken scenarios are impossible (or bad or impractical) because your broken scenario doesn’t work.

Go to Part 16: Don’t Write Down Initiative

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You’ve just finished describing in your Feng Shui game how the evil cyborg clone of Jet Li has leapt through the warehouse window, sending a cascade of glass glittering across the oil-soaked floor and landing in a perfect three-point stance. You pause, but the players don’t immediately respond. So you keep talking: Cyborg Jet Li somersaults forward and raises his arm. The flesh peels back, revealing a machine gun… Oh, god. Still no response. Okay, so the machine gun fires, spraying the room with bullets. Then the cyborg dashes behind a forklift for cover. Then he shouts out, “Your deaths are all part of the program!” Then he summons a couple of his attack drones, which come flying in through the window. And then… and then… and then…

This is something I call fearing the silence. The GM finishes describing something and pauses… but there’s not an immediate response from the players. The silence, however fleeting, is like a vacuum, and the GM feels compelled to fill it. So they start talking again. And what can they possibly talk about? Well, whatever would happen next, right?

Gotta keep talking, gotta keep talking, gotta keep talking.

From the GM’s perspective — either consciously or subconsciously — the players aren’t engaged with the game. If they were, then they’d be declaring an action. But they aren’t. Which means the GM has done something wrong. So the GM has to do something — they have to say something — that will get the players engaged again.

(Oh god. It’s all going horribly wrong. What can I do? Gotta do something. Do something. Do something. Just keep doing things.)

But what’s actually happening is that the players are being boxed out. They can’t make declarations about what they’re doing, so it stops feeling like they’re interacting with the world and starts feeling like they’re just watching it.

This often becomes a cascading problem: Because the players lose “momentum” in interacting with the world, it can take a moment to sort of reconnect and get rolling again… except the moment they need is a moment of silence, and the GM is nervously filling it before they can get going.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

When I find myself fearing the silence and feeling a need to fill it, what I find effective is to consciously choose to fill it by saying, “What do you do?” or “What are you doing?”

In other words, very deliberately and very explicitly pass the ball to the players. Now the silence is their problem!

Or, more accurately, their opportunity.

You may also find it useful to think explicitly in terms of turn-taking, particularly if NPCs are involved in the scene. If all of your NPCs have had a chance to say something or do something, then it’s definitely time to make sure the PCs have a chance to say something or do something. (It’s a challenge to roleplay multiple NPCs talking to each other, but if you get into a rhythm with it, it can be surprisingly easy for the NPCs to just chat amongst themselves endlessly without the players being able to get a word in edgewise.)

It’s perhaps unsurprising that I’ve often seen this sort of problem in the first session of a campaign or the first half of a one-shot, only for things to improve as the game goes on: A lot of this is being driven by nervousness. As the GM settles down and the group finds its groove, the problem goes away. Of course, there’s only one chance to make a first impression, so it won’t hurt to consciously work towards avoiding the initial misstep.

GM DON’T LIST #14.1: BOTTOMLESS LORE

A similar problem occurs with bottomless lore. I commonly find myself falling into this trap when I’m improvising some cool new element of the world. Maybe the players have gone to a location I didn’t anticipate and so I’m creating it on the spot. As I describe the location, I keep getting cool new ideas.

So I Just. Keep. Talking.

There’s this… and this… and you see somebody doing this… and somebody else doing this… and there’s also this other thing… and also… and then the first guy does this other thing… but then…

There’s always more stuff to share about the infinite world! You’re once again stuck in a loop and the players are, once again, boxed out.

This is actually quite similar to the freeze-frame boxed text we discussed in GM Don’t List #13: Boxed Text Pitfalls, where the PCs get stuck while the GM narrates their way through a cutscene. The only difference is that in this case it’s happening spontaneously at the table.

THE REACTION POINT

The solution, however, is quite similar. You need to consciously identify the reaction point — the point at which something happens that the PCs will want to react to — and then you need to stop talking.

Another useful tip here is to set a mental description limit: What’s the maximum number of things you can describe before you need to stop talking. This isn’t hard or fast, but I recommend three to five, and almost never more than seven. (You, of course, don’t need to describe that many things. If you describe three things and that’s everything you need to set the scene, that’s great.)

This limit can feel constraining, but there are a few things to keep in mind that will help:

First, at the beginning of a scene — a new location, etc. — start broad, then specific. You’ve given yourself a “budget” for your description, and you’ll want to make sure the players know that they’re in a forest before you start describing individual trees.

Second, identify the reaction point before you start the description. Ideally, aim your description at the reaction point. At a bare minimum, when you’ve spent all of your “budget” except for the reaction point, arbitrarily stop describing anything else and cut to the reaction point. (“Okay, I’ve said four things about the hotel room. Now I need to mention the ogre with the gun and see what happens.”)

If you identify multiple reaction points in the scene, what you’ll usually want to do is prioritize them. Present the first, let the PCs react to it, and then present the second. Upon occasion there might be two reaction points that are truly happening simultaneously — e.g., the ogre pulls a gun at the very moment that kobold ninjas leap in through the window. That’s fine. It’ll just chew up more of your “budget,” since you’ll need to describe both reaction points.

(For more on reaction points, and why you should almost always put the reaction point at the end of your description, check out Random GM Tips: Reaction Points.)

Third, remember that description can persist through the scene. You don’t need to describe every single detail of the hotel room before the PCs react to the ogre pulling her gun. You may not have had time to describe the lamp, but as Antoine rushes forward to knock the gun out of the ogre’s hand, you can describe how the sickly light flickering out through the cigarette-stained lampshade throws his shadow against the far wall. Maybe you haven’t described what can be seen outside the window, but the kobold ninjas bursting through it gives you a chance to mention the “billboard declaring Mayor Thomas’ re-election campaign” behind them.

And so forth.

This is particularly useful if you find yourself bubbling over with bottomless lore: You don’t need to discard all those cool ideas that are sparking in your imagination; you just have to hit the pause button on them, drop the reaction point, and then look for the opportunity to weave them into the action.

GM DON’T #14.2: SAVING THROW MERRY-GO-ROUND

GM: The Lich-King waves his hand and a cloud of black miasma begins oozing up through the floor. Give me a Fortitude saving throw!

Player: 24.

GM: You quickly gulp in a breath of untainted air. But huge gouts of flame erupt from the ceiling! Give me a Dexterity saving throw!

Player: 15.

GM: You’re scorched by flame! As you grimace in pain, the Lich-King points a finger in your direction. There’s a lance of sickly green energy. Give me a Dodge roll!

Player: 9.

GM: It strikes you for 36 points of damage! The Lich-King pulls a lever on the wall, and a trap door opens in the floor beneath you! You’ll really want to make your Dexterity saving throw!

Presented like this, it’s pretty easy to notice that “the player gets a turn” doesn’t appear in this list of events. But this can often be harder to see at the actual gaming table: There are multiple players reporting results. The GM is weaving evocative descriptions of what’s happening in the scene as a result of the various reactive checks or saving throws. And it can certainly feel as if the PCs are doing a lot of stuff: They’re gulping in air! Heroically diving out of the way! Rolling dice!

And, of course, there’s a similar impulse that we’ve seen in fearing the silence and bottomless lore: You want the game to be exciting and engaging. That means you need to keep talking! And if you’re going to keep talking, then stuff needs to happen for you to describe. And you can make that stuff happen by using the playing pieces you control — e.g., the NPCs.

This is also why this problem most often crops up in action scenes: moments that seem to demand a breakneck pace, and so the GM feels pressured to keep things moving.

The solution to this is largely just Don’t Do It™. Which, of course, is not terribly helpful. Couple things that may help if you find yourself doing this:

First, if appropriate, get into an initiative order sooner rather than later. This doesn’t necessarily require combat or even the presence of NPCs. You can just call for initiative checks and use them to structure the scene.

Second, you don’t have to go for the ultra-formality of an initiative order to think in terms of turn-taking. The Lich-King created the black miasma. Has Sasha had a chance to go since then? If not, ask Sasha what she’s doing before the Lich-King takes another action. If you just make a point of thinking about this, you can probably keep track of it in your head. If not, make a list on the notepad in front of you and use tally marks when people take actions.

(This will also help individual players from dominating an encounter and boxing out their fellow players.)

CONCLUSION: CARE ABOUT THE REACTION

In the broader scope, the big solution to all of these problems is simply caring about what your players are doing.

Minimize the mindset of the Story you’re trying to tell or the World you’re trying to immerse them in. Your NPCs should be awesome, but they are ultimately not the stars of the campaign.

The mindset you want to emphasize, in my opinion, is: I want to see what the PCs do.

I’m having the ogre draw her gun because I want to see how the players react to that. (And I want to see how I react to what they do!) I can have a lot of fun playing around with all the cool lair actions the Lich-King can take, but ultimately the point of the Lich-King encounter is for the PCs to confront him.

It can be a subtle shift in thought, but when your primary focus becomes, “Oooo… I wonder what this will make them do?!” you’ll never forget to give them the opportunity to do it.

Go to Part 15: The Railroader’s Fallacy