Go to Part 1

Let’s do some quick review.

The Three Clue Rule maintains that for any conclusion you want the PCs to make, you should include at least three clues.

Furthermore, we can classify clues as being either leads (which point to places where you can continue your investigation by collecting more clues) and evidence (which point to other revelations; e.g., the identity of the killer or the method for creating red mercury). This distinction is valuable because one is how you navigate the scenario, while the other is usually the goal (or goals) of the scenario.

(Plus, only leads need to obey the Inverted Three Clue Rule. See Node-Based Scenario Design.)

Now that we’re all up to speed, brace yourself because we’re about to go even deeper:

Leads can also be divided into two types: existential leads and access leads.

Existential leads literally indicate that the target node exists and/or that the PCs would find the target to be of interest (e.g., because they might find clues or treasure there).

Access leads, on the other hand, tell the PCs how they can go to the target node.

It’s not unusual for there to be little or no difference between these two types of leads because access to a node is often trivial: If the PCs know the Morning Star Nightclub is significant to their investigation, they can trivially use Google Maps to figure out where it is.

On the other hand, consider a runic inscription in some ancient ruins that says, “The Lost City of Shandrala is possessed of many treasures!” That’s an existential lead. It might get the PCs interested in Shandrala, but if they don’t know where it is, there’s nothing they can do about it. A map indicating the location of one of the Jade Portals that leads to the Lost City, on the other hand? That’s an access clue, allowing the PCs to go to Shandrala.

TROUBLESHOOTING

The distinction here might seem exceedingly esoteric, but it has practical applications.

First, it can be essential when troubleshooting a scenario. For example, you might look at your revelation list and say, “I’ve got three clues pointing to the Lost City of Shandrala! I’m good to go!” But if some or, worse yet, all of those clues are existential leads, then you haven’t actually fulfilled the Three Clue Rule.

This problem can even be hard to spot when it’s actively happening at the game table: If you think your players have all the clues they need, but they’re nonetheless spinning their wheels, it can be worthwhile to make sure that there aren’t roadblocks by a lack of access to the nodes they want to investigate.

The reverse can also be true: The PCs may have multiple leads giving them access to a node, but if they don’t have a reason to go there it may not matter! In my experience, this problem is much rarer because the dramatic nature of the game itself strongly implies that if something is mentioned, then it’s significant (e.g., I’m not giving you a random map with a location circled on it for no reason; therefore the location is inherently worth checking out). But particularly in a sandbox campaign, players not understanding the significance or value of a node may isolate material that you erroneously think is robustly linked to the rest of the world.

You can think of existential leads as pointing to existential revelations, and, naturally, access leads as pointing to access revelations.

In practical terms, as described in The Secret Life of Nodes, it’s not unusual for my node list to directly double as a revelation list. Most of the time this works just fine because, as we’ve noted, your existential and access leads for a node are usually one and the same thing. But when they’re not, obviously, your revelation list can become a trap, artificially conflating revelations that are actually separate from each other.

The solution, of course, is to separate your existential revelations into a separate revelation list and supply the proper clues for both lists. (In this sense, the existential revelations act much more like evidentiary revelations, insofar as they are conclusions you want the players to make, but which do not allow the PCs to navigate through the scenario.)

PAYOFF

The distinction between existential and access revelations can also be used to your advantage when designing scenarios by creating payoff.

Take the Lost City of Shandrala, for example. If the first time the players hear about it is when they find a map indicating its location with a hand-scrawled note reading, “Home of the Jade Masters!” that works: The clue combines both the existential and access leads, and it’s quite likely that the players will check out the Lost City at some point.

But consider what happens if you instead spend several adventures dropping existential — and only existential! — leads to the Lost City of Shandrala. Now you’re building a sense of enigma: Each clue builds the rep of the Lost City a little more, and possibly gives the PCs more and more reasons for finding it.

This built-up anticipation then pays off when you finally start delivering the access clues that will let the PCs plan their expedition to Shandrala.

To generalize: Separate and foreshadow your existential leads in order to build anticipation and turn the ultimate revelation of access into a reward.

(Check out Getting the Players to Care for more along these lines.)

Another technique here is that you can sometimes nest your existential and access revelations:

• You need to talk to the Immortal Sorcerer. (Existential)
• To talk to the spirit of the Immortal Sorcerer, you need the jade amulet. (Access)
• The jade amulet is hidden in the Lost City of Shandrala. (Existential)
• The Lost City of Shandrala can be accessed through the Jade Portals. (Existential)
• A Jade Portal is located at such-and-such a place. (Access)

You can see how this thread of the campaign builds over time. In fact, you could also imagine separate existential revelations about the Lost City of Shandrala that are built up over time, so that when the PCs also learn that the jade amulet they need is located there it will just pump up their desire to reach Shandrala even more.

Next: Hints

Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk can really only be described as a book of two parts, and it’s basically impossible to review it as anything else.

The first part is more or less a reprint of Lost Mine of Phandelver, the classic adventure that went out of print in 2022 when the original 5^th Edition Starter Set was discontinued. I strongly suspect that this was the entire modus operandi for Phandelver and Below: Wizards of the Coast wanted to replace the Starter Set with Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, but they knew Lost Mine of Phandelver was a great and well-loved adventure, so they wanted to find a way to keep it in print.

Unfortunately, Lost Mine of Phandelver wasn’t large enough to be its own hardcover release, and so it was grafted to The Shattered Obelisk, a Tier 2 adventure in which mind flayers search for the seven pieces of an obelisk which they can use to power a ritual which will transform the Phandelver region into… uh… let’s say an extrusion of the nightmarish Far Realm. The book is kinda vague about this, presumably because it will go to any lengths in order to railroad the PCs to ensure the pre-scripted outcome, so the specific details of what the mind flayers are trying to do doesn’t really matter.

On that note, it feels weird that “take a decent Tier 1 sandbox and then awkwardly bolt a Tier 2 railroad onto it” should be a recognizable formula from Wizards of the Coast, but I guess somebody thinks that’s a good structure for a campaign.

(It isn’t.)

And if you think that bodes ill for The Shattered Obelisk… well, strap in. Because we’ve barely gotten started.

GRAFFITI ON A MASTERPIECE

In my original review of the 2014 Starter Set, I described the original Lost Mine of Phandelver as being “the single best introductory adventure D&D has ever had.”

The version of Lost Mine of Phandelver found in The Shattered Obelisk is largely identical to the original, and it therefore remains a good Tier 1 campaign… mostly. The problem is that the designers have, in fact, made a bunch of minor changes, and, as far as I can tell, every single one of them makes the adventure worse.

Imagine you’re looking at Michelangelo’s David, but somebody has decided it would look better if they spraypainted some random graffiti on it. Fundamentally, it’s still Michelangelo’s David. It’s a masterpiece. But the graffiti seems problematic, right?

For example, the original adventure hook is that the PCs have been hired by Gundren Rockseeker to escort a wagon of supplies to Phandalin while he rides ahead to begin making arrangements for his business affairs. This hook is specific, detailed, and directly tied into the first encounter that actually kickstarts the campaign: The PCs find Gundren’s dead horse on the road, realize he’s been kidnapped by goblins, and need to rescue him.

For The Shattered Obelisk, the designers decided that they should include alternative hooks. This isn’t a bad impulse, but the hooks they came up with were:

1. The PCs randomly decide to head to Phandalin because… uh… maybe they can do something there (what, exactly?) that will impress the Harpers so that they can join up.
2. The PCs decide to head to Phandalin to meet with a representative of the Order of the Gauntlet so that they can then… join up somewhere else?

The problem here is not just that these are just generic mush. (Although that is a problem.) They’re also not hooked into the actual structure of the adventure. In fact, they actively muck up the organic pacing of the original Lost Mine of Phandelver, in which the PCs are assessed by local faction reps and offered membership based on their actions. Reversing cause and effect here isn’t a neutral change; it makes the adventure worse.

To be fair, the original Lost Mine of Phandelver never actually pays off the PCs joining one of these factions, which is too bad, but understandable because the adventure ends before that can happen (and it’s left as a seed that the DM can use to plan out their Tier 2 campaign). The Shattered Obelisk, of course, provides the Tier 2 campaign, and so it has the opportunity to actually develop and pay off the PCs’ relationships with these factions.

… an opportunity which it does not take.

This is really indicative of how half-assed these changes are, which is also evidenced by the fact that the opening boxed text of the adventure is completely unaltered and still refers exclusively to the original Rockseer adventure hook.

The immediately ensuing opening encounter, however, has also been changed: In the original adventure, the PCs discover two dead horses lying in the road. In the revised version, the two horses are still alive and just kind of wandering around the road.

Again, this seems like a minor change, but it isn’t: Dead horses send a clear message of DANGER, which is important because there are four goblins waiting to ambush characters who approach the horses. Furthermore, the tactics section for these goblins have been changed, making it much more likely that this initial encounter will result in an immediate TPK.

As I mentioned, these changes are frequent and the problems they create are pervasive, which can perhaps be best demonstrated by looking at the “foreshadowing” for the mind flayer portion of the campaign which has been introduced into Lost Mine of Phandelver.

Again, this makes sense. Obviously you’d want to foreshadow the new adventure and link it to the existing material so that the whole campaign would feel like a cohesive whole! And there are a bunch of obvious ways you could do that:

• The titular shattered obelisk is a Netherese artifact. The original adventure includes a Netherese archaeological expedition, so you could plant links there.
• The titular lost mine of Phandelver includes the Forge of Spells, a site where dwarves once studied arcane secrets. Maybe they studied the Netherese obelisks!
• There’s a nothic in the Redbrands hideout, a type of creature with specific ties to the Far Realms, Vecna, and the mind flayers in this adventure. We could link him to the mind flayers, perhaps as an advanced scout in the region?
• The Spider, who is the main mastermind villain of Lost Mine of Phandelver, seeks the Forge of Spells. Maybe he could also be looking for pieces of the shattered obelisk, allowing us to plant lore in his lair.
• We could actually just put an obelisk fragment in the Phandelver mine itself! Finding this fragment alerts the mind flayers to the presence of a shattered obelisk in the Phandalin region, triggering the next phase of the campaign!

But the designers do none of these things. Instead, they “foreshadow” the mind flayer plot by randomly pasting psionic goblins into various encounters. These psionic goblins do things that are best described as LOL-so-random-LOL, and it’s difficult to really convey just how dumb this is. Here’s the first reference to them, which comes from questioning the Cragmaw goblins from the first encounter:

Strange Goblins. Recently, strange goblins have sometimes joined the Cragmaws in their road-ambushes, though not today. These strange goblins have elongated skulls, and glowing green energy surrounds their weapons when they attack. The Cragmaw goblins don’t know who these newcomers are; the new goblins simply cackle and leave after each attack.

None of this makes any sense. Why would you allow random people to join your ambush? More importantly, why are the psionic goblins doing this? It’s not just the Cragmaw goblins who don’t know. The designers don’t either.

Even the decision to choose psionic goblins to be the minions of the mind flayers is fraught, because — as you’ve seen — the completely unrelated bad guys in Lost Mine of Phandelver are also goblins. You could have added the word “psionic” to literally anything else in the Monster Manual and it would have been a better choice: It would have mixed things up and helped keep the campaign fresh. It also would have made things significantly less confusing for the players.

STOP HUFFING YOUR OWN HYPE

I have unfortunately learned that if Wizards’ marketing promises some big, amazing thing in their next adventure book, it’s a virtual certainty that the book itself will completely fail to deliver on that promise.

• Dragon Heist doesn’t feature a heist (and also doesn’t include the promised links to Undermountain).
• Descent Into Avernus breathlessly promised Mad Max in Hell, but then only included a couple pages about infernal war machines before immediately forgetting that they exist for the rest of the book.
• Shadows of the Dragon Queen promised full integration with Warriors of Krynn so that you could play your own PCs on the battlefields of the wargame… and then just forgot to do that.

So when the marketing for Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk promised to reveal the TRUTH ABOUT THE OBELISKS which had been seen in previous 5^th Edition adventures like Tomb of Annihilation, Storm King’s Thunder, and Rime of the Frostmaiden… well, you know what happened.

First, the “truth” about the obelisks is completely irrelevant to The Shattered Obelisk. In fact, I’m uncertain how the PCs could even learn the “truth.”

Second, literally nothing new is revealed about the obelisks. The four paragraphs tucked away into the “Netherese Obelisks” appendix at the back of the book are just a rewritten version of the “Secret of the Obelisks” sidebar that appeared in Rime of the Frostmaiden back in 2020.

And, ultimately, this is really unsurprising. Because the Cylons Wizards’ designers don’t have a plan. They never had a plan. “Weird obelisk” is a common genre trope, so they just coincidentally showed up as flavor text in a bunch of different adventures. Then fans noticed the “pattern” and created a Grand Conspiracy out of it. In the context of The Shattered Obelisk as a book, this doesn’t even count as a flub: The book doesn’t need or even seem to want a grand “truth about the Obelisks,” so it doesn’t matter that one isn’t included.

But Wizards needs to stop selling their books by lying about them.

And if you were planning to buy The Shattered Obelisk because you were looking forward to learning the truth about the Obelisks… well, you deserve to know that it was a lie and you won’t get it.

Go to Part 2: Obelisk Hunting

Deep in its DNA, Dungeons & Dragons has a fundamental mismatch between the expectations of its players and the design of the game that goes back to its very earliest days.

If you look all the way back to Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign, the original tabletop roleplaying game and the world from which D&D was born, the game was designed with a structure of zero-to-hero-to-king: The PCs went into the dungeon beneath Castle Blackmoor. Those who survived earned money and power with which they would raise armies and eventually fight vast wars for the fate of the empire before being retired as the next best thing to legendary demigods.

But those earliest players also talk about how Greg Svenson was really smart because he never allowed his character to level up high enough to get retired.

Fast forward a quarter century to D&D 3^rd Edition, and you’ll find the E6 variant — which capped leveling at 6^th level, but allowed PCs to continue gaining new abilities through feats — resonating with a goodly portion of the fanbase (and probably would have resonated with even more if they’d known about it).

Through D&D’s history, we see this same pattern again and again and again: The game holds out the promise of characters advancing into truly epic levels of power — founding kingdoms in AD&D, becoming literal gods in Basic D&D, the Epic Level Handbook in 3^rd Edition, the Paragon and Epic tiers of 4^th Edition — but a significant portion of the fanbase has mostly been interested in playing Aragorn and Conan (i.e., fairly gritty fantasy heroes rooted pretty firmly in reality). And when the mechanics of the game have tried to push them into those epic levels of play, they have mostly just kept playing Aragorn and Conan while getting cranky that the high-level mechanics are returning “nonsensical” results.

The one exception to this is combat: They still want to play Aragorn and Conan, but they want to be able to solo Smaug.

D&D 4^th Edition tried to square expectations with mechanics by having the world level up with the PCs: The numbers get bigger as you level up, but the stuff the PCs are doing doesn’t fundamentally shift except for the set dressing.

D&D 5^th Edition, on the other hand, went the other direction: Just don’t let the numbers increase. Lock the target numbers in with bounded accuracy and unlock Smaug-tier monsters by increasing the number of hit points monsters have and the amount of damage characters can do.

Between the two, the 5^th Edition approach is almost certainly preferable, but not entirely successful, because you can also think of this problem as, “The players don’t want to leave the dungeon.”

Which makes sense: Dungeons are fun. We enjoy playing them. So why would we want to stop playing them?

But as you gain the powers of a demigod, the scenario structure of the dungeon — exploring an unknown location one room at a time — begins to fall apart: Teleportation. Scrying. Divination. Planar travel. All of this shreds the dungeon structure. This shift in play was entirely intentional in how the game was designed, but despite trying to move away from that shift in play, 5^th Edition nevertheless inherits the spells and abilities that make it inevitable.

THE FIRST SOLUTION

The first solution would be to fully commit to what at least one part of 5^th Edition’s schizo identity is trying to do: Eliminate all of those high-level abilities that shred dungeons and low-level structures of play.

This is basically what the E6 variant does, but arguably even better, because you can still use damage and hit point escalation to let the PCs level up into soloing Smaug.

But, frankly, I hate it. Not only do I enjoy taking characters into truly epic spheres of play, but I find the 5^th Edition dynamic — where you can trivially dispatch celestial titans and fight your way to the throne of Asmodeus, but knocking down a wooden door? Man, that’s a tough ask! —to be kind of ridiculous. But I would really hate to see the game cripple itself by lopping off the epic modes of play for those of us who enjoy them.

It would be a failure of imagination.

So I think the first true solution to this problem would be for D&D to offer an E(X)-style option so that groups can lock in the style of play they enjoy — whether that’s what we currently think of as Tier 1 or Tier 3 or whatever — with or without the option of continuing to boost combat performance for the all-important soloing of Smaug.

THE SECOND SOLUTION

But I think it might also be worthwhile to take a slightly deeper look at this problem.

Why, exactly, have players been so reluctant to move into the various “endgames” that D&D has offered over the years?

I said they wanted to play Aragorn and Conan… but both of those characters ended up being kings. So why does realms-based play seem to so often lie fallow, even in editions of the game that have tried very hard to include it?

Ultimately, I think it comes back to scenario structures. I’ve talked in the past about the fact that the only two game structures most DMs really know are dungeon crawls and railroading (and the DMG doesn’t even teach you how to run dungeons any more). We’ve already discussed how high-level D&D abilities shred dungeons, but they also shred railroads: It becomes increasingly difficult for a DM to force their players to do stuff as the power level and options available to the PCs proliferate.

If the only scenario structure the rulebooks teach is railroading, the game will fall apart at the point where PCs become powerful enough that it’s difficult or impossible for the DM to constrain their choices.

In addition, dungeons kinda become irrelevant to kings and gods. In order to go on a dungeon crawl, a king and/or god would really need to take a break from being a king or god to go on the adventure. So if the only adventures you’re running are dungeon adventures, being a king or god ends up just being a decorative element in the campaign; a distraction from what the game is actually about.

This spills over into official support products: If you don’t have a scenario structure for running a realms-based campaign, then you can’t publish adventures that will slot into that structure. So DMs end up with a nigh-infinite supply of books filled with dungeons, but nothing for would-be kings or demigods fighting interplanar conflicts.

It also spills over into mechanical design! High-level D&D characters get plied with abilities and spells all aimed to support the robust combat scene structure at the heart of the game, but it’s been more than two decades since there was an official edition of D&D that hardcoded realms-based play or any other post-low-level alternative into character advancement.

To boil this down, what you ultimately have is a DM problem: Even if you had players who wanted to, for example, become dukes and rule a realm, DMs aren’t being given the tools they need to successfully create and run those adventures. If they nevertheless decide to take the plunge, they’re basically just tossed into the deep end. Some of them might spontaneously figure out how to swim, but most of them will just drown and end their campaigns.

So the other solution would be to fully support the shift in play. Not just with rules, but with the scene structures, scenario structures, and campaign structures that would support realms-based play or divinity or whatever other styles of play you want to unlock at Tier 3 or Tier 4.

The concept of a “passive Perception score,” although somewhat derived from the Take 10 mechanics of 3^rd Edition, was introduced in the 4^th Edition of D&D. The basic concept is that, instead of having the PCs make Perception checks to see whether or not they spotted something, you pre-calculate a static value (10 + their Perception modifier) and simply compare that score to the DC of the Perception task.

Frankly speaking, it’s a bad mechanic that got even worse in 5^th Edition.

First, there’s no variation in result: PC A will always have a higher score than PC B, so PC B will never spot something PC A doesn’t see. This not only eliminates novelty (which can be valuable in its own right), the lack of variety is also inherently stultifying, making it more difficult for different players to take the lead in reacting to different situations.

Second, it combines poorly with bounded accuracy. The basic concept of bounded accuracy is that you push all the DCs into a small range with the expectation that the d20 roll will be relevant and then remove the d20 roll. The Dungeon Master’s Guide, for example, says “if the only DCs you ever use are 10, 15, and 20, your game will run just fine.” But any 1^st-level group, of course, will almost certainly have multiple PCs with a passive Perception score higher than 15.

Which brings us to the biggest problem, in my opinion, which is that in actual practice the whole thing is a charade. You, as the DM, will very quickly learn what the highest passive Perception score in your group is, which means that whenever you’re deciding what the Perception DC is, you’re really just deciding whether or not the DC is going to be higher or lower than the party’s score.

There’s nothing wrong with GM fiat, per se, but the passive Perception score ends up being this weird fake mechanic with a bunch of extra bookkeeping trying to mask what’s really happening. “No, no,” says the DM. “I didn’t arbitrarily decide you didn’t spot the trap! I decided that the DC to spot the trap was higher than your passive Perception score! Totally different!”

So, personally, I recommend that you don’t use D&D’s passive Perception scores. For a better way of handling perception-type checks — which can be used in a wide variety of RPGs, not just D&D — I recommend checking out Rulings in Practice: Perception-Type Tests.

With that being said, if you nevertheless want or for some reason need to use D&D’s passive Perception score, there are some best practices you can follow to do so to best effect.

MAKE A LIST

Ask your players for their passive Perception scores, write them down on a Post-It note, and attach that Post-It note to your GM screen.

This may seem obvious, but I’ve played in any number of games where the DM was constantly asking us what our passive Perception scores were, and there’s absolutely no reason for it. Collect them once, then use them instantly every time. Both the pace and the focus of play will be immensely improved.

Random Tip: While you’re doing this, go ahead and grab the PCs’ armor class, too.

Watch out for changing Perception scores. Some spells, abilities, and magic items may modify a character’s Perception score, grant them advantage on Perception checks, or the like. You’ll need to make sure to track this. (And, of course, you’ll also want to make sure you update your list when the PCs level up.)

In some groups, you may also discover that your players challenge surprise. When players see the mechanics being invoked, even if that’s just the DM asking for their passive Perception score, they’ll accept the outcome; but if it’s all being done invisibly behind your DM screen, some players will worry that they’re getting screwed over. “Did you remember that I have advantage on Perception checks in forests?”

The best way to handle this is to (a) make sure you’re getting it right, (b) reassure them, and (c) if it continues, have a transparent discussion about why you’re handling the passive Perception checks this way and how you’re doing it. You might find it effective to make a point of confirming their passive Perception scores at the beginning of each session, and you can also ask them to notify you whenever their passive Perception scores shift during a session.

(The next technique can also help with this, since they’ll at least hear the mechanics being invoked.)

REMEMBER DISADVANTAGE

One of the most overlooked rules in D&D 5^th Edition is that characters who are “distracted” are supposed to be at disadvantage on their passive Perception checks, which means that they should suffer a -5 penalty on their passive Perception score.

I recommend applying this aggressively in any situation where the PCs are not explicitly keeping watch and/or paranoid. Creeping down a dungeon passageway in hostile territory? On watch at night? You specifically said you were going to keep a lookout on the door while Arathorn ransacks the room? Great, you get your normal passive Perception score.

Arathorn, though? Apply the penalty. Also apply the penalty if the PCs are just walking down the street in a friendly city without any expectation of trouble or hanging out at a tavern with their friends.

In practice, this blunts the problems with how bounded accuracy interacts with passive Perception scores. It also encourages the players to be more specific with how they interact with and observe the world, instead of just coasting through the game on auto-pilot. (This is particularly important in making traps work right, for example.)

ROLL THE DC

You can sidestep the system being a camouflage of busywork for DM fiat by assigning a modifier and then rolling the DC of the check instead of assigning a static DC.

Basically take the DC you would have assigned (10 = Easy, 15 = Moderate, 20 = Hard, etc.), subtract 10, and use the remainder as the modifier for a d20 roll. (You can do the same thing with prewritten adventures that list a static DC.)

This is what you already do with Stealth checks, of course, but it may feel weird doing it for something like noticing the rune faintly inscribed on the ceiling.

The point, of course, is to reintroduce variability to the check so that you can make non-fiat rulings. (For example, I can decide the run is moderately difficulty to notice with a +5 check; but I don’t know whether or not the rogue with a passive Perception score of 18 will spot the rune or not.) But you nevertheless retain most of the advantages of using passive Perception scores, because you’re not making a roll for every individual PC (which would be time-consuming and also have a drastic impact on the probability of the check.)

RANDOM SPOTTING PRIORITY

Once the Wisdom (Perception) DC is set, you’ll know which PCs, if any, successfully noticed whatever the target of the check was.

If there are multiple PCs who succeeded on the check, randomly determine which of them noticed the target first.

This is a simple way of systemically spreading the “spotting something” spotlight around, giving different players an opportunity to call attention to a cool tapestry, sneak a gem into their pocket, or determine what the group’s reaction to approaching goblins might be.

Is this “fair” to the PC with the highest passive Perception score? Frankly, yes. Note that they’ll still get spotting priority more often than anyone else in the group, because (a) they’ll participate in more spotting priority checks than other PCs and (b) there will be some checks where they’re the only PC to succeed.

Alternative: If it’s a combat situation — or a potential combat situation — you might use Initiative checks to determine first spotter.

VARIANT: LET PERCEPTION RIDE

An alternative method for passive Perception scores would be to have the group roll Perception checks at the beginning of a delve, raid, or session and then let the result ride as their passive score for the run.

This means that for some sequences the rogue will have the highest passive Perception score and in other sequences it will be the barbarian or the wizard. It will move around the table, creating variable outcomes over time.

VARIANT: TAKE 0

To lessen the importance of passive Perception without completely eliminating it, base passive Perception scores on Take 0 instead of Take 10. In other words, a character’s passive Perception score is simply equal to their Wisdom (Perception) modifier.

Particularly at Tier 1, this will mean that passive Perception may not even succeed at Easy tasks. That’s okay, because in surprise situations you’ll be calling for a rolled Wisdom (Perception) check in these cases. It will also encourage the players to make active Perception checks, engaging with the environment to find stuff instead of just relying on their passive scores to take care of it.

In practice, when using this variant, you’re really just keeping a list of the lowest possible Wisdom (Perception) check possible, so you know the threshold at which it becomes pointless to roll the dice and you should just tell the PCs what they see.

Remember, of course, that this also applies to the NPCs.

Alternative: Base passive Perception on Take 5, so the score is 5 + the character’s modifier. Combined with consistently applying disadvantage for distraction, this will often create a baseline similar to Take 0, but with passive Perception still having a bit more of a meaningful role in the system.

There are many different types of RPG players. There have been many different attempts to categorize them, often reflecting the culture of gaming at the time. One category of gamer which has been around since at least the 1980’s and proven remarkably durable is the concept of the power gamer.

The power gamer seeks to make their character as powerful as possible. They analyze the rules and seek optimization: Character builds, mechanical tactics, party synergies — whatever it takes. Or, to flip that around, whatever will make them more powerful, they’ll take it.

Why does the power gamer exist?

Roleplaying games are fundamentally about exploring player choices. By creating characters who are powerful within the game system — i.e., who are more likely to succeed more frequently and/or at a larger range of tasks — the power gamer:

1. Maximizes the odds that their choice will be meaningful instead of being negated by failure.
2. Diversifies the number of game situations in which they can participate, thus increasing the number of meaningful choices they’re making.
3. Reduces the chances of their character being killed, which would result in a complete loss of agency for the character and often results in wiping out the significance of past choices.

Various factors can vary the importance of these motivations — for example, #3 is a lot more significant in lethal old school games — but a lot of this is fairly fundamental to virtually all RPGs, which is why the behavior so reliably crops up across different games and different GMs.

Another factor here is that the power gamer effectively turns an RPG system into a puzzle, which they solve by maximizing power. Solving a puzzle, of course, is an incredibly satisfying experience, and is a fundamental part of what makes games fun. In a game like Chess, the puzzle is usually, “How do I win?” RPGs, of course, usually don’t have winners or losers, and so the power gamer creates their own challenge.

DEGENERATE POWER GAMERS

There’s nothing wrong with power gamers. After all, a lot of RPGs — including the vast majority of the most popular ones — are built around the acquisition of power, which would be really weird if there was something fundamentally wrong with players seeking power in the game.

In some cases, however, a power game can degenerate into behaviors that are disruptive or debilitating to the group and the game.

For example, there are leeches. These are gamers who try to make their character the most powerful at the table by preventing the other players from having any power of their own. This might mean hogging the spotlight, stealing magic items, or even killing other PCs.

There are also munchkins. These are power gamers who want the power, but don’t want to work for it. What they want is for the DM to hand their 1^st-level character a +5 holy avenger. Or they’ll want to play a clearly broken homebrew sub-class. Munchkins are mostly harmless and can often have a ton of fun in a campaign with other munchkins, but they can be problematic in other campaigns if they feel entitled and become toxic when their wish-fulfillment isn’t granted.

(Munchkin campaigns also tend to have a lot of ire directed at them from gamers who are affronted that they didn’t “earn” their power or who believe that there’s a “right” or “balanced” way to play the game and that the munchkins are somehow “cheating” because they’re more powerful than they’re “supposed to be.” This tension, of course, can cause other interpersonal issues.)

Some power gamers will also become rules lawyers. There are a lot of different types of rules lawyers and a bunch of different reasons that people become rules lawyers, and I’m not going to dive into that here. A rules lawyer, though, is different than a rules expert. A rules expert is great: They have a mastery of the system, and that mastery can enhance both their play and the quality of play at the whole table.

A rules lawyer, on the other hand, is constantly trying to interpret the rules in whatever way gives them an advantage. (This will often include interpreting the same rule in different ways at different times, depending on which interpretation would be best for them in each situation.) Mild rules lawyering isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it can quickly degenerate into a situation where the game becomes overwhelmed without constant squabbles over the legalese of the rules, creating a bad experience for the entire table.

Finally, there are monomaniacal theorycrafters. Theorycrafting is when you’re building characters, experimenting with rules, or otherwise analyzing the mechanics of a game in the abstract (rather than in relation to actual play). There’s nothing wrong with theorycrafting — it’s a great way to explore and appreciate a game — but the monomaniacal theorycrafter becomes fixated on the idea that there’s a single “right” way to play the game, to the detriment of the actual game.

The root of the problem is that, in order to have the most powerful character in theory, you first have to nail down the key question of: Powerful at doing what? Because a character who’s optimized for solving mysteries is going to look very different from a character who’s optimized for running a Thieves’ Guild.

The most common answer monomaniacal theorycrafters tend to land on is combat, and it’s pretty typical for this to degenerate even further into a very specific type of combat encounter. I talk about this more in On the Slaying of Spherical Cows.

These degenerate forms of power gaming, unfortunately, can give all power gamers a bad rep. In my experience, though, having a good power gamer in your group is far more likely to improve your game than hurt it.