When we sit down to play a roleplaying game, there’s always some amount of preparation we need to do before we can start slinging dice. What, exactly, that prep entails will depend on the game and the group, but we’ve come to call this prep — whatever form it takes — Session 0.

(The term originally referred strictly to a session dedicated entirely to prep without any actual game play happening. These days it’s often just referring to this prep in whatever form it takes, even if it’s only a few minutes covering the basics before diving into the evening’s adventure. For more on this background, you can check out The Evolution of Session Zero.)

For most RPGs, there are four core elements that need to be hashed out during Session 0.

THE GROUP CONTRACT

A group contract is the group’s formal and informal agreements about how the game will be run and played. This includes:

• Basic functions of play, such as the game rules and/or setting to be used. (Including the details of how the group will handle the other three core needs described below.)
• Narrative elements, such as script immunity, the rule of cool, whether genre conventions will trump simulation (or vice versa), themes, and tone.
• Safety tools, whether formal (X-cards, lines-and-veils, etc.) or informal.
• Real world logistics, such as “don’t leave the back door open,” “message the group chat if you’re going to be late,” how long game sessions will be, how scheduling will work, and “if you miss two sessions in a row, we sacrifice you to Bahlbaroth.”

This mutual understanding of how this specific game with these specific players is going to work is, surprisingly, almost entirely unspoken and completely unexamined in most groups. It’s kind of just assumed that the group will do what’s “obvious” or just “the way we’ve done it before.” That’s OK if it works, of course. Not so much if it means the group is ramming their faces into the walls.

(Never great, you’ll notice. “Great” would mean checking in on your unspoken, and often unrecognized, assumptions to make sure they actually make sense for the game you’re getting ready to run. Or, even better, optimized for it.)

CAMPAIGN CONCEPT

The campaign concept, broadly speaking, is who the PCs are and what they’ll be doing. For example:

• They’re retired spies who now use their particular set of skills to hunt a global conspiracy of vampires.
• They’re CSI agents investigating crime scenes in Chicago, IL.
• They own and operate a boutique specializing in magical unguents (for which they must gather the required ingredients from fairyland).
• They’re the organizers of a science fiction convention, and somehow every year there’s a supernatural catastrophe and they need to prevent it from derailing the con.

Sometimes picking a game is the same thing as picking a campaign concept (or close enough that it makes little difference). For example, D&D comes with the prepackaged expectation that the PCs are going to be wandering heroes in a classical fantasy setting who seek treasure and fight evil.

In other cases, though, just picking a game will still leave large chunks of the campaign concept uncertain. Jonathan Tweet’s Over the Edge, for example, assumes the campaign will be taking place on the conspiracy-riddled island of Al Amarja, but the PCs could be almost anybody and doing almost anything. The most extreme example of this can be found in a universal RPG like GURPS, the selection of which will tell the group absolutely nothing about what the campaign concept is.

(On the other hand, John Harper’s Lady Blackbird – which features a specific campaign hook and pregenerated characters slotted into that hook – is a game with an even more specific and hardcoded concept than D&D.)

It’s not unusual for the campaign concept to be predetermined by the GM, but it’s also possible for the concept to be developed by the whole group in collaboration. This can be as simple as the GM saying something like, “I’m going to be running a Mothership campaign in the Onyx-S5 cluster. Who are your characters and what are they doing there?” and then seeing where the discussion goes.

SETTING

Setting is inherently connected to the campaign concept: You can’t be space pirates if the campaign is set in 12^th-century France, and if the campaign is set on Mars in the 22^nd century, you won’t be playing Roman legionnaires. (Well… unless your GM is Harry Turtledove.) Whether setting flows from concept or concept flow from setting – e.g., whether you decide you want to play space pirates and then building a setting around that or decide you want to explore the setting of Middle Earth and then figure out what you want to do there – is really a chicken-or-the-egg situation, and will be different for every campaign.

(And, of course, it’s not at all unusual for the both setting and concept to be basically built up at the same time in tandem.)

Whatever the case may be – and whether there’s an established setting, a setting the GM has created for the campaign, or a completely original setting that’s being collaboratively generated during Session 0 – ultimately what’s needed is a setting brief with enough information about the setting that the players can create their characters.

This is often a lot less information than you might think. In fact, it’s often ideal to keep this information as minimal as possible: An infodump that’s too large can overwhelm the group, resulting in them actually knowing less about the setting, in practical terms, than a tight, well-focused briefing.

Check out So You Want to Be a Game Master and Random Worldbuilding: Fast & Furious Homebrewing for tips on creating effective setting briefings.

Just like the campaign concept, developing the setting can also be a collaborative process involving the whole table. There are some games that will actually formalize this collaboration into a more expanded form of character creation. Luke Crane’s Burning Empires, for example, is about the PCs facing an invasion of alien parasites, and the game’s mechanics will guide the group through creating the planet they live on.

CHARACTER CREATION

The final core element of your Session 0 is for the players to create their characters. This includes both mechanical character creation and their character background, each of which will also generally be connected to a character concept. Some players will start with a concept and then figure out how to model that concept mechanically and flesh out the details into a full-fledged background. In other cases, particularly when using systems featuring character generation instead of character crafting, players may start with the mechanics and use them as a creative prompt for who their character is going to be.

The mechanical aspect of character creation, of course, will be handled by whatever RPG is being played. Character backgrounds, on the other hand, tend to be more freeform in their development. (Although here, too, inspiration can flow from the mechanics into the background and vice versa. For example, if the player picks Sniper Training skill pack, that might inspire them to describe where the character got that training from. Or, vice versa, describing their character attending the US Army Sniper School at Fort Moore might prompt the player to pick the skill pack.)

Note: Another common point of debate here is the difference between minimalist backgrounds and expansive ones. This is really a spectrum, typically ranging from a couple of sentences to multiple pages of detailed character lore. Like everything else, the “right” approach will depend on the player, the group, the game, and the campaign. Regardless of length, though, the same basic creative process of concept, mechanics, and background will apply.

Whatever creative path players might follow here — and exactly what role the GM might take in collaborating with them to create their characters — there are a few key core tasks that need to be accomplished:

• Setting Integration. The players’ characters need to be linked to the setting. This is usually a two-way creative process: The players are drawing elements from the setting briefing — locations, people, events, etc. — to flesh out their character backgrounds, but they are also likely creating elements that the GM should be integrating into the setting.
• Campaign Integration. As characters are developed, the GM should begin the process of weaving them into the scenarios and campaign they have planned. In some cases the campaign will flow from the characters (e.g., the players decide their village was destroyed by someone called the Crimson Overlord, and the GM’s campaign planning is figuring out how they can pursue him for vengeance). In other cases, this will be about figuring out how to weave the PCs into the GM’s plan — e.g., the GM is planning a campaign in which the PCs are fighting a vampiric Triad in 1980’s Hong Kong, so when one of the players describes his PC’s martial arts master being slain by a mysterious man, the GM might decide to make the killer the undead Dragon Head of the Triad.
• Bringing the Group Together. Finally, the players should figure out why their PCs are a group (and, if necessary, the details of how that group will work in actual play). Maybe they’re old war buddies who’ve decided to open a detective agency together. Or maybe they all work for the same government agency. Or maybe they’ve all been framed for a crime and need to prove their innocence. Whatever the case may be, there should be a reason why all these PCs are sticking together. This may be something that’s discovered through play, but in most cases it’s better to figure it out as part of Session 0. (And even if you don’t, you’ll probably still want to have at least some indication of what trajectory the PCs are on that will cause their paths to collide and merge during the first session.)

Note how the setting, campaign concept, and the core tasks of character creation are all intertwined. Although you’ll probably want to lockdown some basic details about the campaign concept and setting before brainstorming character concepts, these generally aren’t tasks you can do one at a time. Instead, the group will be alternating between them, using setting to build concept and concept to build character and character to expand setting.

SESSION 0 MODULES

While we’ve looked at the core elements of a Session 0, it turns out there’s a nearly infinite number of different methods you can use to actually achieve them. I’ve previously laid out my default Session 0 procedure, which I’ve developed and refined over countless campaigns with a multitude of players.

But what I’ve also discovered while reading, running, and playing a bunch of different RPGs is that there’s a lot of really cool stuff you can do as part of Session 0. Some of these are highly specific and really only useful for the game they’re designed for. Others, though, have a near universal applicability: You could use them in D&D or Call of Cthulhu or Numenera or Apocalypse World.

The goal of this series is to share some of these techniques. I’m calling them Session 0 Modules, because they’ve been designed — or adapted — to be things you can independently plug into your Session 0.

This also means that the intention is NOT for you to take all of these modules and use them in every single Session 0 you run. That would be overwhelming at best, and not infrequently contradictory. Instead, when getting ready to run a new campaign, peruse these modules as if they were a menu, thinking about which ones would be most useful — or most appropriate — for your group.

You could also think of these modules as a spice rack. Start with a core Session 0 procedure that works for you and yours, but then toss in one or two of these modules to mix things up. This might be something you plan ahead of time as part of your campaign prep, but you could also find yourself reaching out in the middle of a Session 0 to grab a module that you never would have imagined needing until the players started creating their characters.

In other words, these tools. Use them when you need them. Ignore them when you don’t.

CHARACTER MODULES

Hunted
Shared History

This will be an ongoing series at the Alexandrian, with new modules being added over time.

The rules for hiding and invisibility in D&D 5^th Edition have always been a mess. There’s lots of reasons for this — ranging from the designers of the game having a deeply held belief that being invisible is the same as standing outside on a moonlit night to the weirdly contradictory hardcoding of being blind, being heavily obscured, and being invisible — but the end result are rules that are difficult to use, in large part because they so frequently produce a result that’s completely counterintuitive to how we expect human eyes to work.

The 2024 edition of the rules tried to clean all of this up, but mostly just made a different mess. For example, Hide makes you Invisible. You can Hide if you’re Heavily Obscured, but Heavily Obscured means people are considered Blind when looking at you, and the only effect of that is identical to being Invisible except Invisibility also gives you advantage on Initiative rolls. Also, neither Hiding nor Invisibility prevent enemies from knowing your location.

This only scratches the surface, and I’m not really going to belabor or attempt to breakdown all the problems here. I think it would only distract from the real purpose of this post: To provide a comprehensive fix for the mess.

The house rules below are designed to slot into the existing D&D 2024 rules as cleanly as possible, while being built around a simple mental-mechanical model in which characters are either:

• Not Hidden
• Pinpointed (observers know where they are, but can’t clearly see them)
• Hidden (observers don’t know where they are)

This model makes it easier for DMs to run stealthy situations both in and out of combat with great clarity and confidence, while other elements of these rules simultaneously make them far more useful for making flexible rulings to cover unusual situations and cool ideas that your players might cook up.

REVISED HIDING & INVISIBILITY RULES

These entries completely replace the matching entries in the 2024 Player’s Handbook rules glossary.

HIDE [ACTION]

With the Hide action, you try to prevent people from knowing where you are (or possibly that you are there at all). To do so, you must be in a Concealable Location, such as being Heavily Obscured, behind Three-Quarters Cover or Total Cover, or otherwise out of an observer’s line of sight.

When attempting to Hide, you make a DC 15 Dexterity (Stealth) check. On a successful check, you gain the Hidden condition against all observers with a passive Wisdom (Perception) score lower than your check. If any new observers enter the area, you also gain the Hidden condition against them if their passive Wisdom (Perception) score is lower than your check.

When an observer takes the Search action, they can immediately attempt a Wisdom (Perception) check against the DC set by the Hidden character’s Dexterity (Stealth) check. You lose the benefits of the Hidden condition against any creature who succeeds at the Wisdom (Perception) check or who can otherwise see you (because they’re on the same side of the wall you’re hiding behind or due to a magical effect, for example).

Observers remain aware of where they last saw you or detected you.

HIDDEN [CONDITION]

When you have the Hidden condition, you experience the following effects.

• When you’re Hidden from a creature, they don’t know your location.
• If you are no longer in a Concealable Location or benefiting from another condition that allows you to take the Hide action, you immediately lose the Hidden condition.
• Concealed. You can’t be affected by any effect that requires its target to be seen if you are Hidden from the effect’s creator.
• Surprise. If you are Hidden from all enemies when you roll Initiative, you have Advantage on the roll.
• Combat Advantage. Attack rolls against a Hidden opponent have Disadvantage, and a Hidden opponent’s attack rolls have Advantage.
• Detectable Actions. If you make an attack or take some other loud or overt action (such as talking louder than a whisper, kicking open a door, or casting a spell with a Verbal component), other creatures will pinpoint your current location, allowing them to, for example, aim attacks at you (although you would still benefit from your Combat Advantage). In addition, taking a detectable action allows any observer you’re currently Hidden from to make a Wisdom (Perception) check to spot you (removing the benefits of the Hidden condition). Observers can use a reaction to gain advantage on this check.
• Leaving Concealment. If you are no longer in a Concealable Location or benefiting from another condition or effect that allows you to take the Hide action, you lose the Hidden condition. If this happens on your turn in combat, you lose the Hidden condition at the end of your turn. (If, after being revealed, you take the Hide action again, you can immediately regain the Hidden condition after losing it, but observers will remain aware of where they last saw or detected you.) If you Ready an action triggered by something that would reveal your location, you lose the Hidden condition at the end of your Readied action. (For example, you could Hide behind a closed door and then stab someone opening the door, while still gaining the benefits of Hidden on your attack.)

INVISIBLE [CONDITION]

When you have the Invisible condition, you experience the following effects.

• You cannot be seen. Any equipment you’re carrying or wearing is also invisible.
• You can take the Hide action without needing to be in a Concealable Position.
• You gain Advantage on checks that would benefit from not being seen, including Dexterity (Stealth) checks.
• Attack rolls against you have Disadvantage, and your attack rolls have Advantage.
• You do not gain the benefits of Invisible against any creature who can somehow see you. (For example, due to a see invisibility )

Thanks to piccamo, Hillsy, Grimmash, Lerris, Eshie, Yalim, Kobars Gnomies, zonerhunt, Angon, Noah, Alberek, and other members of the Alexandrian Discord for their feedback and immense help in refining these rules.

FURTHER READING
Random GM Tips: Stealthy Thoughts

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 43D: Escapades of the Ogre

Agnarr called Seeaeti off the ogre so that it could successfully regenerate. They wanted to question it.

But when it woke up, it was the one asking the questions. “Who are you?”

They naturally refused to answer. But although they tried to question it, threaten it, intimidate it, and scare it, the ogre just kept on asking questions. “Who sent you? What do you want?” And so forth.

But they resolutely refused to answer.

“Ah,” the ogre said at last. “I see I will learn nothing here.”

And it turned to gas… and then the gas itself vanished.

I think there can be a tendency for NPCs to be passive and reactive in conversations.

There are any number of reasons for this: The PCs are, obviously, positioned as protagonists. As GMs we’re juggling a lot of different elements, and it can be easier to juggle everything if it’s relatively stable (and, therefore, possessed of a certain passivity). Plus, at least for me, GMing is often reaction — the PCs do something and then we play to find out what happens. It can be easy for a conversation to slip into the same pattern, with the PCs setting the (only) agenda and the NPCs simply reacting to their efforts.

Unfortunately, a one-sided conversation is pretty boring. This inclination can also lead is into some bad habits, with NPCs who are either pushovers or complete intransigents who just senselessly say, “No!” to everything the PCs suggest.

Sometimes, of course, we key specific information to an NPC and their function is to deliver that information to the PCs: “Yes, I saw Sally down by the lake last night.” That has the advantage of giving the conversation some narrative substance, but it’s ultimately still pretty passive and placid.

To truly bring an NPC conversation to life, you need to ask one simple question:

What does this NPC want?

What is this NPC’s goal? What is the thing they’re trying to achieve? Why?

And perhaps most importantly:

How is this conversation going to help them get it?

What do they need the PCs do? What information do they want from the PCs? What do they need the PCs to believe? What do they need to hear the PCs say? What do they need to hide from the PCs?

This is the NPC’s agenda. You want to keep it simple, short, and actionable. And then you want to play it hard, with the NPC employing all kinds of tactics and conversational gambits to get what they want.

In this session, we see a particularly strong example of this with an ogre whose overwhelming motivation is figuring out who the PCs are, where they come from, and what their interest in the Banewarrens is. He also wants to make sure that the PCs don’t find out anything about his own organization or their intentions.

Since the PCs want the exact opposite, this puts them into a strong antithesis and the entire scene can boil out from there.

Importantly, however, this kind of open antithesis isn’t necessary to generate an interesting thing. The NPC just needs to want something different than the PCs, even if it’s only subtly different.

It’s also important to remember that, when antithesis does exist, that doesn’t mean it should never be surmountable. Yes, it’s dramatic when the Jedi Council refuses Qui-Gon Jinn’s request to train Anakin Skywalker. But it’s also a classic moment when Robin Hood convinces Friar Tuck to join his Merry Men.

In other cases the solution will be for the PCs to figure out how both their interests and the NPCs’ interests can be mutually achieved. That’s a puzzle for the players to ponder!

And, of course, achieving any of this will require first figuring out what the NPC actually wants! Some characters will politely (or not so politely) announce the intentions of course, but others will be quite sly about it.

Sometimes the conversation won’t be about overcoming or fulfilling the NPCs’ agenda at all! Nevertheless, the presence of the agenda — and the NPCs’ desire to fulfill it — will fill the scene with life.

In summary, for each meaningful NPC in a conversation, think about what the NPC’s conversational agenda is. Ideally, you should be able to state this in one clear sentence.

And then pursue it with all the strength you can muster!

Campaign Journal: Session 43E – Running the Campaign: Prepping Porphyry House
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 43D: ESCAPADES OF THE OGRE

October 25th, 2009
The 23rd Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

SEEKING THE FLAYER

Ranthir had a wand which allowed him to weave magical alarms. Moving systematically through the Banewarrens they laid down alarms at every major intersection, slowly cordoning off the complex. Ranthir also laid a glamer upon his eyes allowing him to see the hidden and the invisible, while Tee kept her sharp elven nose alert for any tell-tale scents.

They eventually reached the room with the massive iron cauldron. Activating her boots of levitation, Tee carried Ranthir up to look into the cauldron… and they spotted the flayer laying at the cauldron’s bottom.

But even in that instant, the flayer reached out into their minds and whispered, “Pass on. You see me not.”

“Yes I do!” Tee cried. And shot him.

The flayer lashed out with a mind blast, causing Tee to fall into the cauldron and Ranthir to land on the floor beside it.

Nasira hit the bottom of the cauldron with a spell that would heat the metal to dangerously hot temperatures. Unfortunately, the immense size of the cauldron delayed the effect to some extent.

Agnarr threw a rope over the top of the cauldron and braced it, allowing Tor to rapidly climb up to the cauldron’s lip… where he was promptly hit with a mind blast and fell backwards off the cauldron, striking his head on the floor as he fell into epileptic twitches.

Agnarr carefully backed up and then ran for the cauldron, leaping up to catch the rim and then hauling himself up. The flayer tried to hit him with another mind blast, but he shook it off and jumped down into the cauldron. Once there, he saw that, although Tee was beginning to burn from the heat of the metal (and the soles of his own feet were sore from it), the flayer was calmly floating three inches above the metal’s surface.

“Flying bastard!” Agnarr roared. “Flying squid bastard!”

In a few short, slashing blows from his sword he sliced the flayer up – its purplish-red blood spattering to boil upon the ever-heating metal. In the end, it was reduced to a pool of coagulate gore… which predictably soaked up into the back of Tee’s shirt before Agnarr finally picked her up and hauled her out of the cauldron.

ESCAPADES OF THE OGRE

With the flayer safely dead, they returned to the outer chamber where Elestra and Kalerecent were keeping an eye on Seeaeti and the mauled-but-still-regenerating ogre.

“Are we sure the flayer’s dead?” Elestra asked.

“Pretty sure,” Tor said.

“But is it regenerating like this one?”

Agnarr grunted. “Tee, turn around.”

Tee did.

“Okay, you see those squid guts all over her? It’s dead.”

Tee rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Agnarr.”

Agnarr called Seeaeti off the ogre so that it could successfully regenerate. They wanted to question it.

But when it woke up, it was the one asking the questions. “Who are you?”

They naturally refused to answer. But although they tried to question it, threaten it, intimidate it, and scare it, the ogre just kept on asking questions. “Who sent you? What do you want?” And so forth.

But they resolutely refused to answer.

“Ah,” the ogre said at last. “I see I will learn nothing here.”

And it turned into a gas… and then the gas itself vanished.

Nasira uttered a holy oath, banishing the invisibility effect. But this only resulted in causing the gas to reappear. Agnarr and Tor ran forward to attack it –  and they may have even caused some damage to it as their swords ripped through it in arcs of fire and electricity (although, on the other hand, perhaps it was only wishful thinking on their part) – but then a magical darkness popped into existence.

There was mass confusion: Tor became convinced that he had the ogre cornered (although it turned out he was only cutting away at empty air). Tee raced to block the entrance to the Banewarrens, but more darkness popped up. Then one of the alarm spells Ranthir had laid went off and they all rushed to the spot to find… nothing at all. A few moments late another alarm went off back in the antechamber and they realized that they had been completely outmaneuvered. Although they pursued him down the tunnel, the ogre had disappeared.

MORNING MISSIVES

In the morning Ranthir tracked down two scrolls detailing the creation of missive tokens. One he used to create a new missive token for Kalerecent to make sure the Banewarrens remained secure; the other he would study so that he could create them at will in the future.

The morning newssheets reported that, prior to the Midtown kidnapping, children had been disappearing from the Warrens for weeks… but no one had been reporting on it. (It was just the Warrens, after all.)

The more sensational headlines, however, reported three more killings on the Columned Row in Oldtown. Like the priest the night before, the victims had had their heads ripped open.

“Did we do that?” Elestra asked.

“No. I’m pretty sure—Wait, when did it happen? No, that wasn’t us.”

The murderer was being referred to as the “Columned Row Killer”.

Not long after, Shim reported to them. Physical scouting around Porphyry House had found no other entrances. He had tried to track down the architect responsible for the building, but nobody knew who had designed or built the place.

He was able to tell them that Porphyry House had first opened 12 months earlier (in Kadal 789). It had replaced a smaller, less prestigious brothel that had previously been built on the same site. There were rumors that, since that time, Porphyry House had been trying to force other brothels out of business in an effort to corner the market. The place was particularly famed for reputedly being able to instantly cater to the most specific (and perverted) needs of its clients. Shim had also learned that a major orgy was to be held at the House on the 18^th of Noctural.

Thanking Shim for what he had found, they focused their attention on forming a plan of action. They briefly revisited the idea of trying to break in through the sewers, but ended up rejecting it because they would need clairvoyance spells to pinpoint where to dig and they suspected such spells might trigger alarms within Porphyry House.

Instead they decided to use their stone-shaping spells to simply tunnel in through a side wall.

Running the Campaign: NPC Conversation Agendas – Campaign Journal: Session 43E
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Mouser: Okay. Let’s get out of here. I open the door.

GM: When the Gray Mouser opens the door, where’s everyone standing?

Pippin: Ahhhhhhh!!!!!!

Merlin: As far away as possible!

Conan: Rogue go boom!

On the Alexandrian Discord, CorpCord asked, “How do you avoid revealing that a decision is important by framing it, when the characters wouldn’t know?” In other words, there are lots and lots of little, incidental things that our characters do in the game world — e.g., choosing exactly where to stand in a room; picking which tie to wear; deciding whether to drink the white or red wine — that we don’t typically call out or interrogate at the gaming table.

But if a situation arises where that information suddenly becomes vital — e.g., the trapped door is about to explode— the fact that the GM is suddenly asking for it makes it difficult or impossible for the players to make the choice as if they were their characters: Their characters don’t know that their choice of wine is vital (because it’s poisoned), but the player does. And that metagame knowledge will either influence their decision, affect their immersion in the scene, or both.

Let’s consider a few other examples:

• They’re walking down a hall and a trap goes off… what was the marching order?
• The pressure plate for the trap is in the middle of the hall… so are the PCs walking there or are they hugging the walls?
• They’re all back at Suzie’s “safe” house when someone throws a pipe bomb through the window… who was in the living room at that moment?
• The businessman they’re meeting is a close friend of Adlai Stevenson… so is the PC wearing their I Like Ike button?

When dealing with a situation like this we can start by asking ourselves how much benefit of the doubt we should give the players. (For example, is it reasonable to assume that the group is always cautiously backing off whenever the rogue is opening a suspicious door?) This is actually a subset of figuring out the threshold for player expertise triggering character expertise, as described in The Art of Rulings.

The answer here is situational. (Do we assume PCs are as cautious opening a door at the local tavern as they are opening a door in the dungeon?) But it’s also about achieving desired gameplay. I generally recommend leaning towards giving the players the benefit of the doubt (because capricious or unfair “Gotchas!” usually aren’t fun), but if we just assume that the PCs are always doing the optimal action — they always check the chests for traps; they would have obviously hired an NPC security team to keep watch outside their safe house; their character would clearly know to make polite inquiries about the political allegiance of the businessman — then the game starts playing itself, and that isn’t fun, either.

In other words, you need player expertise to activate character expertise. Which means, sometimes, you have to ask the question and tip your hand.

So what can we do about this? Let’s break it down.

First, specific declarations by the players should, obviously, always be respected. For example, if someone said they’re standing in the hall keeping a lookout for goblins, then they’re in the hall. None of the techniques below will cause them to suddenly be standing by the door when the explosion goes off (unless, of course, they make another declaration changing their location).

Next, if there’s a particular type of information that you’re constantly finding yourself wanting, you should set up a standard operating procedure with the players to provide it. Marching order in a dungeon is a good example of this, whether it’s determining who gets hit by a trap or where people are standing when the group is ambushed.

In some cases, you might have multiple SOPs and the players can indicate which one they’re currently using. For example, in an urban campaign what you’re wearing might be frequently important, so the group might be in Adventuring Gear or High Social — and, in each case, everyone at the table will know what outfit each PC is wearing.

If you don’t have an SOP, then one technique is to lay down a false trail. In other words, don’t ask the players where their characters are standing ONLY when the rogue is about to open a trapped door. Instead, occasionally ask them for “incidental” details like that when there’s no risk. This obfuscates the metagame knowledge being imparted by the question.

You can also strategically use this technique to build up a bunch of false tension… and then releasing it with a feeling of relief when nothing happens. (If you’re wondering why you’d want to do this, check out how horror movies us this technique.) Even better, this can also result in the players getting lulled into a false sense of security. (“Justin’s just trying to scare us again. You’re not fooling me this—” BOOM!)

You can further throw them off the trail by using these declarations to, instead of assessing danger, paint the scene. For example, you can ask everyone where they’re at or what they’re doing in the safe house and then use that information to give a little description of what everyone is doing. This can help to draw the players into the reality of the game world (by getting them to actually form a specific picture of what their character is doing)… while also setting them up for those moments when the same or similar question is determining where they’re at when the pipe bomb goes off.

Another effective technique is to vary the right answer when asking these hand-tipping questions. Instead of a trapped door exploding and hurting everyone close by, for example, it might be a situation where everyone taking shelter suddenly finds themselves stuck outside the room by a force field. Or maybe when the rogue touches the weird, glowing blue sphere, everyone within ten feet gets blessed.

Building this type of variation into your scenario design means that, even if the players are triggered by the metagame knowledge that you’re asking the question, they’ll still need to think about what their answer will be. (Instead of just automatically running as far away as they can.)

Basically, all of this is aimed at allowing their character to be competently aware of the heightened stakes of a situation, while not necessarily giving them the equivalent of a spidey-sense that unerringly warns them of incoming danger. False alarms, mixed signals, reversed expectations, and the like can all help.

Along similar lines, you can disguise the question by getting the incidental information you need as part of a different question. For example:

GM: The door is locked.

Conan: I’m going to kick it open!

GM: Is anyone helping Conan force open the door?

This is a mechanically significant question (since it will give Conan a bonus on their Open Door check), but you’re also sneakily establishing who’s at the door. (And, using benefit of the doubt, you could then infer that anyone not helping is standing far enough back not to get hit by the trap.)

Another effective disguise can be hiding the question in a little throwaway add-on to a different question. For example, as you’re getting ready to transition to the PCs’ meeting with Paul Dubois:

GM: Okay, you finish feeding the corpse into the wood chipper and then dump the chunks into the tank. You’re covered in blood, but the sharks will take care of the body.

Suzie: Well… I probably shouldn’t walk around town looking like this. I’ll head back to the safe house and get changed.

GM: Give me a Stealth check to see if you can cross town without anyone noticing your appearance.

Suzie: 12.

GM: Great. You make it back to the safe house without incident. After stripping off your blood-soaked track suit, what’s your new outfit?

Here the question of, “What are you wearing?” (i.e., will you mention your favorite I Like Ike pin?) seems to just naturally emerge from the chain of events. You could even reinforce this by waiting for Suzie to describe her outfit, and then saying something like, “Okay, it takes about an hour to get cleaned up, but then Suzie walks out the front door in her beautiful blue dress…” (By using the information to paint the scene, you’ve also provided an explanation for why you collected that information.)

Finally, you can enhance all of these techniques by anticipating the decision. For example, if you know that the door out of the room is trapped, don’t wait until someone goes over to the door to figure out where everyone is standing. Instead, ask the question early. The players might get suspicious… but then nothing immediately happens, so they’ll assume you were just trying to spook them. Or you take that information and use it to re-establish the scene, so they just dismiss it as part of the natural flow of the scene. But then, having established the scene (“so while Conan is poking at the pile of rags, Merlin is studying the orrery”), you now know exactly where everyone is and will continue to be unless they explicitly declare that they’re moving.

Now, when the rogue over and starts checking out the door, you don’t need to ask the question again, and the players are never tipped off.

Thanks to CorpCord for asking the question that inspired this tip.