Go to Campaign Status Documents

Generally speaking, my campaign status document is not the place for full NPC write-ups to live. Whether you’re using something like the Universal NPC Roleplaying template or even the briefest of write-ups, these NPCs will consume your campaign status document and choke the life out of it.

So NPC write-ups go somewhere else: Maybe that’s in a specific set of scenario notes or faction notes. Maybe you just have one big folder where all the free-roaming NPCs or notable NPCs from defunct scenarios get filed in alphabetical order.

But what I will keep in my campaign status document, when it’s appropriate for the campaign, is a list — or, in some cases, multiple lists — of the major NPCs in the campaign.

This is not, of course, a list of every single NPC they’ve ever met. That would just be a bunch of noise drowning out the signal. What you’re looking for is a quick reference of all the important, recurring characters. You’re looking for characters who:

• Show up in more than one scenario (or outside of scenarios entirely), because otherwise they would just be attached to that single scenario.
• Show up in more than one location, because otherwise they would just be in the notes for that location.
• Have some personal connection to the PCs or are otherwise important to them.

(Of course, some NPCs who start out as part of a single scenario or single location will end up clicking with the players or otherwise find their role in the campaign expanding beyond the original plan of action.)

You might title this section of your campaign status document the Cast of Characters.

To understand the function of this cast list, the key thing is Neel Krishnaswami’s Law of the Conservation of NPCs: Whenever a scenario or circumstance demands a new NPC, check to see if there’s an existing NPC who could fill the role. Each reappearance of an NPC will deepen that character and also inherently develop the PCs’ relationship with the character. This creates a lovely feedback loop, because the NPC being richer means that whatever purpose you’re turning the NPC to (exposition, scenario hook, dilemma, dramatic bang, etc.) will also become richer and more meaningful to the players.

For example, if the PCs go looking for information, instead of having some random dude tell them about it, consider having it be someone the PCs know.

The cast list, therefore, can ultimately be thought of as a menu: Whether you’re prepping a scenario or improvising in the middle of one, the campaign’s cast of characters makes it easy for you to quickly find the character you need to fit the hole you’re looking to fill.

You can also flip this around, looking through your cast of characters, identifying old favorites who haven’t put in an appearance lately, and figuring out how you can bring them back onstage. This can often be a great way to find inspiration for scenario hooks or entirely new scenarios.

TAVERN TIME

In some campaigns your Cast of Characters, or sections of your Cast of Characters, may become more specialized in their function. One example of this is the Tavern Time scenario structure, in which you develop a cast of recurring characters who give continuity and life to your PCs’ favorite tavern (or other home base).

You can see a detailed example of the Tavern Time system in action in A Night in Trollskull Manor. The full scenario notes are kept separate from the campaign status document, but I do find it useful to include the random table of tavern patrons, like this one for the Ghostly Minstrel tavern in my In the Shadow of the Spire campaign:

1	Sheva Callister
2	Parnell Alster
3	Daersidian Ringsire & Brusselt Airmol
4	Jevicca Nor
5	Rastor
6	Steron Vsool
7	Urlenius
8	Mand Scheben
9	Cardalian
10	Serai Lorenci (Runewarden)
11	Shurrin Delano (Runewarden)
12	Sister Mara (Runewarden)
13	Canabulum (Runewarden)
14	Aliya Al-Mari (Runewarden)
15	Zophas Adhar (Runewarden)
16	Talia Hunter
17	Tarin Ursalatao (Minstrel)
18	Nuella Farreach
19	Iltumar
20	The Ghostly Minstrel

Each of these characters then appear in their own write-ups, either as part of the write-up for the Ghostly Minstrel, as part of other scenario notes, or in my larger Ptolus NPC file. I personally just know where to find these write-ups, but you could easily include a direct reference in your list.

SYSTEMIC CONNECTIONS

In Technoir, during character creation, each player selects three Connections from the setting guide. These are, of course, relevant not only for roleplaying, but also because they’re tied into specific procedures of play. As the GM, I find it quite useful to have a quick reference for which PCs have a direct relationship with which Connections in the campaign, so during the first session I’ll make a point of jotting these down, and then I’ll transfer them to my campaign status document for long-term reference (along with any other notes about debts owed and the like).

Trail of Cthulhu similarly features Sources of Stability: NPCs created by the players during character creation who are the most important people in their characters’ lives. These characters are vital, serving as touchstones of humanity that allow PCs to recover the Sanity and Stability lost during their harrowing adventures. Although, as a result, the Sources of Stability are rarely made an active part of the action, I make sure to include them in my campaign status document so that they can be referred to and incorporated “offscreen” at appropriate moments. (I’ll also maintain a correspondence tracker featuring these characters.)

Another example along these same lines are the Friends & Rivals players create for their PC in Blades in the Dark. These lack the more formal procedural and systemic incorporation found in Technoir and Trail of Cthulhu, but also serve as a good reminder that this is something you can easily incorporate into the character creation of any RPG, not just those that include it in the rulebook.

However you go about it, finding a way to seed a supporting cast list at the very beginning of the campaign is just good praxis.

MAINTAINING YOUR SUPPORTING CAST

You’ll introduce some characters to your campaign with the intention of making them recurring characters.

As I mentioned earlier, though, you’ll also want to keep your eyes open: During the course of play, some NPCs are just going to “click” with the players. (And with you.) It’s going to be fun roleplaying scenes with them. Maybe your players will talk about the NPC in later sessions or even mention them during conversations outside of the game. (If your players start deliberately seeking the NPC out, that’s a dead give-away.) These are all characters that you’re going to want to get onto your supporting cast list ASAP.

On the flip-side, it’s also a good idea to periodically review your supporting cast list and remove any NPCs who are no longer relevant to the campaign. (If you’re not certain, maybe you could drop them into a Probationary section of the list and then purge them if they still haven’t shown up after three or five sessions or whatever seems appropriate.)

In some cases, this removal will be quite definitive: Maybe the NPC died. Maybe the PCs slipped into another dimension and left the NPC behind.

In other cases, the pruning is much more subjective: Do you still care about this NPC? Do the players still care? Are there any loose threads still attached to the NPC (in which case you might want to tie those off and then remove them)? Are they — in position, role, theme, or otherwise — still relevant to what’s happening in the campaign?

There’s also need to be too afraid of making a mistake here: Pruning an NPC from the list doesn’t mean they’re gone forever (although it might). You never know when they might come back onstage, find the spotlight, and earn their place on the list once more!

Let’s talk about encounter balance.

A common misconception is that the challenge rating system in D&D is meant to guarantee specific encounter outcomes: The CR = X, therefore the encounter will end with precisely Y resources depleted.

This isn’t really true. Furthermore, I would argue that it’s not possible for any challenge rating system to accomplish this (unless you so thoroughly constrain player choice as to choke out the creative heart of an RPG), because a challenge rating system is inherently limited in the systemic knowledge it can have about a specific encounter.

Factors beyond the scope of 5^th Edition’s challenge rating system, for example, include:

• Players’ tactical skills
• Variance in character builds
• Environment
• Encounter distance
• Stat block synergy (in both PCs and opponents)
• Equipment
• Random dice rolls

(I frequently get static on listing random dice rolls here: “But probability!” Yes, probability exists. But, first, the number of dice rolls in a single fight are often too few for probability to become truly relevant — for the results to conform to the expected value — except over multiple encounters. And, second, the entire point of random dice rolls is to have random outcomes. QED.)

Does this mean that the challenge rating system is pointless?

Not at all. The function of the challenge rating system is to help the DM identify monsters and build encounters that are in the right ballpark. Our first hot take today is that the challenge rating system is actually pretty effective at doing that. And, furthermore, that’s all it needs to do and, arguably, all that it should do.

Despite this, DMs are constantly lured by the siren call of hyper-precision: If we could just account for every single variable, we could guarantee specific outcomes! We wouldn’t even need the players at all! Their choices wouldn’t matter!

(That, by the way, is why this is not actually a desirable goal, even if it was achievable.)

There are several reasons for this.

Partly, it’s the allure of false precision: If we have a Challenge Rating Table, then the designers need to put numbers on the table. And no matter how many times they use words like “maybe” or “might” or “roughly” in describing the function of that table, this can create the expectation that hitting that precise number is important. (In reality, the difference between a 1,600 XP and 1,700 XP encounter is essentially nonexistent.)

The labels applied to different encounter levels also seem prone to misinterpretation. I find this varies depending on the methodology used for the label. In the case of 5^th Edition D&D, the designers have generally chosen a label which describes the worst case scenario. For example, a “Deadly” encounter doesn’t mean “this encounter is likely to result in a TPK.” It actually means that there’s a risk you’ll see at least one PC making death saving throws. (You can think of the possible outcomes of an encounter as being mapped to a bell curve: The outcome of an 8^th-level encounter might, in actual practice, be the average result of anything from a 4^th-level encounter to a 12^th-level encounter. The 5^th Edition label is generally describing a result somewhere a little off to the right side of the bell curve.)

But the final factor is linear campaigns.

THE PROBLEM WITH LINEAR CAMPAIGNS

I’m occasionally accused of hating linear campaigns. This is not the case. I dislike predetermined plots, but that’s not the same thing. I’ve actually talked in the past about how to design linear campaigns, and in So You Want To Be a Game Master I have several chapters and adventure recipes for creating linear scenarios.

(A linear scenario is also not the same thing as a railroad. It’s accurate to say that I loathe railroads, and everything I talk about here is probably ten times more true if you’re railroading your players.)

There are, however, consequences for using a linear structure. (Just as there is for using any structure.) This is particularly true if you only use linear structures, which can be the unfortunate case for many DMs who don’t have alternative scenario structures in their repertoire.

A linear scenario inherently means that you, as the DM, are preparing a specific sequence of experiences/scenes/encounters/whatever you want to call them. The players will experience A, then they will experience B, then they will experience C, and so forth.

A consequence of this style of prep, therefore, is that the DM is solely responsible for what the PCs will be doing. This creates an enormous pressure on the DM, because you’d better get it right: You’d better get the spotlight balance right and make sure that every single PC has an equal chance to shine, because otherwise you’re making it difficult or impossible for one of the players to participate. And you’d better get the combat balance right, because forcing the players into fights they can’t win is a dick move.

So the DM will, naturally, spend more effort carefully crafting each encounter to make sure it works. Ironically, the more specific their prep becomes for each situation, the more weight is placed on their shoulders to make sure they get it right. This can quickly decay into a vicious cycle, with the DM pouring more and more effort into every single encounter in order to meet ever-rising expectations. The result is often My Precious Encounters™, in which every encounter is lovingly crafted, carefully balanced, painstakingly pre-constructed, and utterly indispensable (because you’ve spent so much time “perfecting” it).

… and then the challenge rating system isn’t hyper-precise and the players mop up the whole thing with a couple of quick spells?!

This is an outrage!

I guess we’ll just need to lock down more choices, get out the shackles, and try even harder next time guarantee the encounter works exactly as we predetermined it should.

NON-LINEAR BALANCE

Some of you reading this may be thinking, “Okay… but what’s the alternative?”

And when I say that the alternative is non-linear scenarios, your gut reaction is likely to be, “You mean design even more encounters? And the players might not even encounter some of them? I can’t do that! Do you know how much work I put into these encounters?!”

In truth, however, non-linear design is a completely different paradigm: The players are now able, to at least some extent, choose the experiences they’re going to have. And because the players now have responsibility for what they do and how they do it, that weight is lifted from the DM’s shoulders.

Looking at just the issue of combat balance, for example, if the PCs run into an encounter in a linear adventure that they can’t defeat, that’s a disaster! They can’t move forward unless they defeat the encounter, and they can’t defeat it, so they’re completely stuck. It’s as if they lived on an island and the only bridge to the mainland was closed for construction.

In a non-linear scenario or campaign, on the other hand, if the PCs run into an encounter they can’t defeat (or which they just think they can’t defeat or which doesn’t look fun to them), then they can just change direction and find a route around that encounter. Or, alternatively, go and do something else until they level up, gain magic items, make allies, or otherwise become powerful enough to take out the challenge that was previously thwarting them.

You can see an analogous set of paradigms in video game RPGs: Some will allow players to grind XP, allowing them to dial in the mechanical difficulty they’re comfortable dealing with at their level of skill. Other CRPGs will level up the world around the PCs or limit the total amount of XP they can earn. The former games can appeal to a broader range of skill levels and the designers have a lot more leeway or flexibility in how they design the challenges in the game. The latter games have a lot less flexibility, and players can end up completely stuck (due to lack of skill, a mistake in their character build, disability, or any number of factors).

LINEAR BALANCE WITH MILESTONES

Okay, but you want to run a linear adventure. Maybe that’s the best structure for the campaign you’ve got planned. Maybe you’ve picked up a published adventure that uses a linear structure and it’s just not working: It’s too easy or it’s too hard, and you want it just right.

Fortunately, there’s an incredibly powerful tool you can use for balancing linear campaigns: Milestone leveling.

The trick is that you just need to ditch the idea of hardcoding the level ups to specific beats in the campaign. Instead, after each scenario, do an assessment of how your encounter balance is working in actual practice:

Are the players cruising through stuff? Increase the difficulty of encounters. If you’ve been designing 6th-level encounters, bump them up to 7^th-level encounters. (You can also change the balance of Easy/Medium/Hard/Deadly encounters you’re using, or do half-step bumps in XP budgets between levels.)

Are the players feeling challenged? You’re in the sweet spot. You can hold in that sweet spot for X sessions, with the number X being adjusted to your personal taste. Then you can start increasing the difficulty by steps again until…

Are things getting really tough for the PCs? Level them up (without immediately shifting encounter difficulty) and then assess.

One thing to be aware of is that this doesn’t work great for 1^st-level characters, which are very fragile (and kind of need special treatment when it comes to encounter building in general).

Another thing to keep in mind is that you need to miss very low and for a very long time for “too easy” to ruin your campaign; you only have to miss once for “too hard” to TPK the group. So, when in doubt, you’re generally better off aiming low and then adjusting up.

You’ll also likely discover that sometimes PCs will level up, feel like they’re in the sweet spot, and then suddenly everything gets easier and they’re cruising through encounters that are too easy. What’s likely happened is that the players have figured out how their new abilities work (and, importantly, work together), allowing them to perfect their tactics.

You can see the opposite effect happen if the PCs have been fighting one type of monsters for awhile, but then the campaign shifts and they’re suddenly fighting completely different monsters. Experienced difficulty may momentarily spike until they get a feel for the new creatures.

It’s also not a bad idea to check in with the players periodically and see how they’re feeling about the difficulty level in the campaign. They won’t always be right, but neither will you, so comparing notes can help you find the sweet spot for your group.

“Hey! Isn’t that actually Level Advancement Without XP?” Sorry, folks. The ship sailed on this one back in 2014 when every single official adventure started referring to “you pick events in the campaign when the characters level up” as milestone XP. “Milestone” is just too convenient a term for the form of level advancement best suited to these linear adventures. If you have any complaints about this, please address them to Wizards of the Coast.

LINEAR BALANCE WITHOUT MILESTONES

“But I don’t want to use milestone XP! I want to give XP for combat!”

… you just want to make things difficult, don’t you?

That’s okay. Once you understand the principles described above, you can accomplish the same effect with combat/challenge-based XP, it will just be a little more obfuscated.

Specifically, with XP awards, the PCs will be gaining levels at a certain pace. If they’re cruising through encounters, you just need to increase the difficulty of the encounters they’re facing at a faster pace than the pace they’re leveling at. (So in the time they’ve gone from 6^th to 7^th level with everything feeling too easy, the encounters you’re building will have gone from 6^th level to 8^th level or maybe even 9^th level. Or, conversely, if the encounters have been too tough for them, you might hold the encounter design at 6^th level even though they’ve leveled up to 7^th.)

In other words, it’s the same process of dialing in: It’s just made slightly more complicated by the PCs being a moving target.

OTHER FAQs

“Doesn’t this mean that my 7^th-level PCs could end up facing, I dunno, 11^th-level encounters?”

Quite possibly. Or your specific group of 7^th-level PCs might be better served by 5^th-level encounters. If it makes you feel better, even by-the-book 11^th-level Medium encounters are actually easier than 7^th-level Deadly encounters, so you’ve probably already been doing this.

More importantly, these are just arbitrary numbers. The important thing is that you and your players are having fun: If your players are really good at tactical planning or they’ve managed to get their hands on an unexpectedly powerful magical artifact, that can easily mean that they’re capable of punching above their by-the-book weight-class.

And you know what? That sounds fun to me!

“I’m running a published adventure. How do I ‘increase the difficulty’? Do I need to rebuild the encounters?”

Instead of adjusting encounter difficulty, just skip the next milestone level suggested by the scenario. You can see a similar technique in Random D&D Tip: Adjusting Encounters by Party Size.

“Couldn’t I use these same principles when designing non-linear scenarios or campaigns?”

Absolutely!

For scenarios, you’re generally targeting a certain difficulty in your encounter design regardless of whether it’s a linear or non-linear scenario. This technique is about dialing in what your current target should be in the challenge rating system, so it works just as well either way.

For non-linear campaigns, you want to avoid the potential pitfall of leveling up the campaign world. So if you’ve got a structure like a megadungeon or hexcrawl, where the players can already dial in their preferred difficulty level, this technique probably isn’t going to be particularly useful. But it can find application in some node-based campaigns and freeform sandboxes.

FURTHER READING
Revisiting Encounter Design
The Many Types of Balance
Fetishizing Balance
The Death of the Wandering Monster
Adversary Rosters

Our Let’s Read of the original 1974 edition of D&D continues as we open the eldritch tome of Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure. Topics covered in this video include:

• How did D&D transform our understanding of fantasy?
• What were the original three Tiers of play in D&D?
• Why do cloud giants have a keen sense of smell?
• Why are Arneson & Gygax directly responsible for the Twilight novels?

If you want to start watching from the beginning, you can do that here.

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It’s nice to talk to the Dungeon Master of None Crew about something more positive than the OGL fiasco. It’s so amazing to have the opportunity to chat with different people about the upcoming release of So You Want to Be a Game Master! It’s a great reminder that there are many different ways to become a Game Master, many different ways to be a Game Master, and many different reasons for opening the door to adventure. Every one of these conversations reveals more about what this book can be and what it will mean to people around the world, whether they’re first-time GMs or long-time masters of their art.

Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian joins Matt and Rob to talk about his upcoming book and about what he’s learned in his many years of GMing! Get a sneak peek of So You Want to be a Game Master and hear some PRO TIPS for your games!

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You can find links to my previous appearance on Dungeon Master of None at the Alexandrian Auxiliary.

GM: The blue-skinned humanoids approach and begin speaking in a fluted, lyrical tongue. Anyone speak Avariel?

(much shuffling of papers)

Rashid: Nope.

Sara: I’ve got Sindarin, Carcinan, and Ashkaral. That’s not the same thing, is it?

GM: I’m afraid not.

Whether you’re playing a fantasy, science fiction, or historical campaign, it’s not unlikely that PCs — who often go roaming far and wide — will end up running into a language barrier or three. Some GMs may choose to handwave this away, perhaps even invoking some diegetic device like a universal translator to justify the wave.

Language barriers, however, can also be fun: They create an unexpected challenge, and can often force the players to come up with creative solutions to work around them. In the real world, one way people work around language barriers is by using a pidgin — a simplified form of communication featuring a limited vocabulary.

BASIC PIDGIN

To establish a pidgin in your RPG of choice, have the PC make a Language skill check.

The margin of success on this check establishes how many words the PCs and the other language speakers can establish in common. In practice, treat this as a pool of points: The player can spend one point from the pool each time they want to use a new word. The words they’ve used to far should be listed, and they can use the established words (or new words purchased from the pool) however they want in an effort to communicate.

This works best in systems that will generate a margin of success roughly between 1 and 20.

• If you’re using a percentile system or some other system that generates high margins of success, you’ll likely want to divide the margin of success to establish the pidgin pool.
• If you’re using a success-counting system, decide how many pidgin pool points are created by each success rolled.

The NPCs are generally limited to the same pool of words which has been “unlocked” by the player, although the GM may choose to introduce additional words if they so choose. (These additional words will also be available to the PC going forward.)

Tip: The GM is also encouraged to include literal words from the unknown language in the NPCs’ speech. Clever players may be able to figure out what these words mean and be able to start using them without paying points from their pidgin pool.

ADVANCED PIDGIN

Here are some optional/advanced rules that you might use in combination with the basic pidgin rules at your discretion.

RELATED LANGUAGES: In the real world, it’s easier to establish a pidgin if you know a language that’s more closely related to the one you’re attempting to communicate in. (For example, the Romance languages are all more closely related to each other than any of them are to Japanese.)

If you have an established language tree, you could apply a penalty for each step of difference between the closest known language and the target language. (Or impose disadvantage beyond a certain threshold.) If you don’t have a language tree, this might be a great opportunity to start one! Alternatively, you can just make a call with your guy about whether or not the languages are Closely Related (bonus or advantage), Related (normal check), or Distant (penalty or disadvantage).

EXPANDING YOUR PIDGIN: Each successful conversation the PC manages to have in the pidgin can grant them the opportunity for a new check to add more points to their pidgin pool. What constitutes a successful conversation (i.e., did you successfully communicate what you wanted and did you understand what they wanted?) is determined by the GM.

FROM PIDGIN TO FLUENCY: Some RPGs are smart enough to include a mechanism by which PCs can learn a new language. If so, then the player can choose to transition from pidgin to fluency by simply spending the appropriate skill points, selecting the appropriate perk, or whatever that mechanism might be.

If your RPG of choice doesn’t feature such a mechanism for some reason, you might consider setting a progress clock at the same time that the pidgin pool is established. You could then use downtime actions (as described in detail in So You Want to Be a Game Master) to fill the progress clock; or perhaps successful conversations could similarly fill the clock (while conversations that go awry would do the opposite). When the clock is filled, the character becomes fluent in the target language.

Alternatively, the first time you fill the progress clock, the character becomes fluent enough to make social checks with a penalty or disadvantage. You can then set up a second progress clock, which can determine when full fluency has been achieved and the penalty/disadvantage can be dropped.