Go to Part 1

GM: So now, at last, Minas Tirith is besieged, enclosed in a ring of foes. The Rammas has been broken, and all Pelennor abandoned to the Enemy. All night the watchmen on the walls hear rumors of the enemy that roam outside, burning field and tree, and hewing any man they find abroad, living or dead. The numbers that have already passed over the River cannot be guessed in the darkness, but when morning, or its dim shadow, stole over the plain, you can see that the plain is dark with their marching companies, and as far as your eyes can strain in the mirk there sprout, like a foul fungus-growth, all about the beleaguered city great camps of tents, black or somber red.

Gandalf: Hmm… can I use my Fireworks skill to whip up a nuclear bomb?

GM: Sure.

Always Say Yes is a bit of GMing advice that gets circulated quite a bit. The example above takes it to a silly extreme, but it illustrates the central problem: There clearly is a point where the GM needs to say no, but the simplistic “Always Say Yes” not only doesn’t help them figure out what that is, it’s more likely to mislead them. Its sole saving grace is that Always Say Yes is at least preferable, in my opinion, to Always Say No, which is where railroading will often take GMs.

Always Say Yes comes from theatrical improv games. And the reason it’s bad advice for an RPG is that improv and RPGs have fundamentally different narrative structures.

In improv, the performers are collaborating to create a world. You always accept new facts about the world because negation doesn’t take you anywhere creatively:

Actor 1: Here we are at Disney World!

Actor 2: No, we’re at the White House.

But even in improv it can mislead performers, because Always Say Yes only applies to the worldbuilding (i.e., stated facts about the world). It doesn’t mean that your character can’t oppose or say no to another character. If the maxim is misapplied in this way, it becomes impossible for improv scenes to have any conflict, draining them of interest.

Note: This is also why Always Say Yes actually can be useful in certain storytelling games based around narrative control mechanics. Many of those games, although not all, feature collaborative world-building.

In RPGs, on the other hand, the GM creates the world and the players take on the roles of characters who live in that world. The players, therefore, are primarily playing a role, not worldbuilding, while the GM’s primary duty is being an arbiter of the fictional reality those characters inhabit. From a game perspective, this is much more like 20 Questions than it is an improv theater game: There’s a “truth” (e.g., the object selected in 20 Questions) that the GM knows to be true and which is being communicated to the players.

Imagine for a moment playing 20 Questions while always saying Yes: It’s technically possible. In fact, just like Gandalf setting off tactical nukes on the Fields of Pelennor, you’re almost guaranteed to “win” every time. And yet you’ve fundamentally broken the game.

So the improv-style Always Say Yes to Worldbuilding doesn’t work in an RPG.

What if we change the target to something like Always Say Yes to Player Plans? This is probably getting us closer to something useful, but it still doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. For a simple example, consider someone saying, “I cast a spell and teleport back to Dweredell!” Okay… but does your character actually have a spell that does that? RPGs have rules that mechanically define characters and what they can (and, importantly, can’t) do.

In addition to a character mechanically lacking the ability to do something, you’ve also got world state (e.g., there’s a teleport interdiction field there) and NPC actions (e.g., someone counterspells the teleport) that can – and at least some of the time should! – negate player intention.

At this point we can easily glide over into another common maxim: Say yes or roll the dice.

This can probably be more accurately understood as “say yes unless the mechanics say no” (since not all mechanics use diced outcomes), but even that’s still misleading because there can, once again, be non-mechanical reasons why a player’s proposed action won’t work (e.g., they want to go the local mage’s guild, but the GM knows there’s no mage’s guild in this village).

DEFAULT TO YES

All of which is why I prefer to use Default to Yes as my maxim of choice here.

Its meaning expands to, “When the players say they want to do something, you should default to letting them do it unless you have a specific and interesting reason not to.” It fulfills the same crucial function of steering the GM away from contrarianism, but also provides a clear standard they can use to figure out when they should be saying No.

Furthermore, if it turns out that there is, in fact, a reason not to Default to Yes, then you can also use the Spectrum of GM Fiat to find the appropriate response:

• Yes, and…
• Yes, but…
• No, but…
• No

And, if those aren’t right, you can always shift to, “Maybe, let’s roll the dice and find out…”

The underlying principle here is the players will generally propose doing things that they would enjoy and outcomes that they desire. So, generally speaking, letting them do and achieve those things will make for happy players.

So why not go back to Always Say Yes, then?

Largely because there’s other stuff that he players also enjoy. That might be challenge (e.g., knowing that they’ve actually earned their victories), simulation (e.g., they want to know that they’re exploring a “real” place), or drama (e.g., struggle is narratively interesting). To generalize, failure is interesting.

GM DON’T #20.1: PREP IS ALL, PREP IS LAW

If we return to our example of the PCs looking for a mage’s guild in a village where the GM knows no mage’s guild exists, however, there’s another pitfall you can stumble into while trying to enforce the fictional reality of the game world.

Imagine that the PCs have come to a large city, perhaps one with half a million people living in it. A player says, “Okay, I want to find a blacksmith who can repair my sword.” You check your description of the city, but it turns out that you didn’t include any smithies in your notes.

This is just like the mage’s guild, right? Your notes for the village didn’t include a mage’s guild, so there was no mage’s guild. Your notes for the city don’t include a blacksmith, so there are no blacksmiths.

… right?

Probably not.

Obviously a large medieval fantasy city is almost certainly going to have at least one smithy. The key insight here is that even if you have hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes detailing your city, you still won’t have recorded every single person, place, and thing. It would be a mistake to believe that the only things that exist in the game world are the things you’ve explicitly written down. Instead, when confronted with a situation like this, the question you should ask yourself is, “Given everything I know about the game world, would it make sense for this to exist? And, if so, what form would it take?”

And, once again, you want to Default to Yes.

If you know that there are no Ivy League schools in Kentucky, then it’s fine to say No if the players want to go looking for one in Paducah. But if they’re just looking for a university with an archaeology department somewhere in the state where they could ask some questions of an expert, then they should be able to find one somewhere in the state!

Once you’ve grokked that principle, the next thing to understand is that this extends beyond cities and states. It scales to almost every level of the game world.

For example, let’s zoom all the way in on a dungeon room. Here’s one from So You Want to Be a Game Master:

AREA 15: CRYPTIC LIBRARY

The room is of crimson and dark wood beneath a vaulted ceiling. A set of tall double doors, matching the ones you entered through, faces you on the opposite side of the room. A large pentagonal mahogany table stands in the center of the chamber. There are five large bookcases stuffed full of tomes and scrolls along the paneled walls. Sunlight streams in through bay windows with a built-in bench. The windows are leaded stained glass depicting a subtle pattern of golden florets.

Consider those bookcases. In our key, we might even include additional details about the books:

BOOKCASES

The books and other documents here are all of an occult nature. There is a focus on Natharran mythology, particularly an enigmatic figure known as Basp-Attu. A DC 15 Intelligence (Arcana) check identifies Basp-Attu as a dual-bodied demon said to have been born from the mixed ichor of two dead gods during the War of Falling Stars.

But even with all of this detail, we still haven’t completely detailed the bookcase.

• What if a PC wants to grab the heaviest book off the shelf and use it to bludgeon the cloaker that’s just ambushed them? How big is the biggest book? Is it big enough to do serious damage?
• “Are there are any books with a green cover? Maybe I can fool the goblins into thinking it’s a copy of the Verdigris Bible.”
• “I want to tip the bookcase over on top of the cloaker!” Have the bookcases been fastened to the wall?
• “What’s the single most useful book about Basp-Attu here?”
• “Are there volumes here that would be useful additions to the collection at the libram at my kolledzh?”

To be clear, the point isn’t that you should be prepping answers for all of these questions. The point is to recognize that you can never prep the entire world. The players will always have a question you don’t know the answer to and you will always be performing acts of creative closure at the table.

Unless, of course, you make the mistake of believing that you have prepped everything and that your prep is absolute and immutable law. If you do that, then you’ll have started walking down one of the many paths to pixelbitching — aka, playing a game of Guess What the GM Prepped.

Feng Shui, the roleplaying game of Hong Kong action films, actually pushes this concept of the uncertain game world and creative closure one step further by specifically giving the players unilateral narrative authority to simply declare that a prop they want is present in any fight scene. Want to fight with a ladder like Jackie Chan in First Strike? Bring a rolled up magazine to a knife fight like Jason Bourne? Throw your jacket over a support cable and zipline to the ground? You don’t need to ask the GM if there’s a ladder at the construction site, a magazine on the coffee table, or a cable attached to the building.

This works because when the GM says, “The elevator doors open to reveal a floor full of cubicles,” everyone at the table is, in fact, picturing a different place. There are some details — like the fact there are computer monitors on the desks — that are shared in all of our imagined spaces, but there are other details that aren’t. As we interact with and explore the space together, though, our visions adapt and converge. This mostly happens without friction and often without us ever really consciously thinking about how our mental image of the cubicle farm is morphing and changing.

While in my experience the GM’s vision of the space probably morphs less than the other players (because they are, in fact, the arbiter of the world), it’s important for them to understand that their imperfect vision will, in fact, also be adapting and becoming more fleshed out: I didn’t know there was a smithy in this town, but now I do. I had not specifically pictured staplers on those desks, but once Aaron snagged one I can clearly see them. I had no idea that The Two-Faced Demon by Attansea Millieu was a rare tome, but apparently there’s a copy sitting on this bookshelf.

Discovery is the great joy of collaboration, and if you can truly open yourself to that collaboration, who knows what exciting adventures those discoveries may take you on?

Go to Part 1

Sakurai: It was a good campaign, but I was surprised Seffi never showed up.

GM: Who?

Sakurai: Seffi. You know, the guy who betrayed my best friend and commanding officer, killing him right in front of my eyes and sending Kuradao into a fugue state?

GM: Oh. Yeah. I think I remember that. Kinda.

Whether on their own initiative or as part of a group effort to create campaign characters, your players will craft backstories for their characters. These backstories might be only a few sentences long or they might be ten-thousand-word epics, but either way they’re the foundation that the players’ characters will be built on.

And the PCs, of course, are going to be the main characters in your game. The action, the drama, the passion, the hopes, and the dreams of the entire campaign are all going to be focused on these protagonists!

Despite this, it’s shockingly common for GMs to go through all the rigamarole of creating elaborate backstories – often even encouraging the players to do so and collaborating with them! – only to immediately turn around, effectively throw those backstories into a paper shredder, and get down to the business of running the campaign they’ve prepared (and which has nothing to do with who the PCs are or what they want).

I think the influence of published adventures certainly plays a role here: The writers of these campaigns obviously can’t know anything about the specific characters that will be playing it, and so everything from the scenario hooks to the antagonists to the individual scenes must be, to at least some extent, comfortably generic.

So whether a GM is running a published campaign or simply following their example, it’s easy for them to unconsciously erect a firewall: The characters (and their backstories) are over there; the adventure is over here.

What you end up with are campaigns driven primarily, overwhelmingly, and even exclusively by a plot: By the simple sequence of what happens. It’s less than a plot, really, because even a plot in a novel or screenplay is generally understood to be the sequence of events driven forward by the actions of the protagonists. So what we’re left with here is just the shell or simulacrum of a plot; the most simplistic procedural elements of a story.

Note: What we mean by “plot” here is more expansive than simply the prepped plots discussed in Don’t Prep Plots, although prepped plots are probably even more susceptible to the problems we’re discussing here.

The problem, of course, is that our stories are not purely about plot. Arguably, the greatest stories are about the protagonists, and the plot is only a reflection of those characters (or an opportunity for those characters to be revealed and/or to develop and change).

Keeping our focus primarily on the PCs’ backstories for the moment, consider how much less interesting:

• Star Wars would be if Luke wasn’t Anakin Skywalker’s son and Obi-Wan wasn’t his former master.
• Die Hard if John McClane’s wife wasn’t one of the hostages.
• Inception if Cobb wasn’t fighting to return to his kids and if his wife wasn’t haunting his dreams.
• The Hobbit if Thurin was not the rightful heir of the Lonely Mountain.
• The Lord of the Rings if Frodo had not inherited the Ring from Bilbo.

And so forth.

USING THE BACKSTORY

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to use your players’ backstories and incorporate them into the campaign: You can either build the campaign from their backstories or you can adapt the campaign you have planned to include their backstories.

When it comes to adapting a campaign, I’ve previously discussed a technique called the campaign stitch that you can use to link multiple published adventures together into a single, seamless campaign. (The quick version is that you look for elements which can be unified:  Can the village in Adventure A be the same village as the one in Adventure B? Can you replace the dwarf who hires the PCs in Adventure B with the sorceress who hired them in Adventure A?) You can simply extend the campaign stitch, but this time using the characters’ backstories as one of your source texts. For example, instead of either the dwarf or the sorceress, what if the PC is working for their uncle?

If you’re using the Alexandrian techniques for collaboratively creating campaign characters, this stitch can go both ways: If there’s not a convenient uncle to serve as the party’s patron, see if there’s a way that you can work with one of the players (or all of the players!) to incorporate the sorceress from Adventure A into their backstories.

Do this for NPCs, locations, McGuffins, and literally anything else you can glean from your PCs’ backstories. It’s virtually impossible for a PC to be too connected to the campaign.

On a similar note, if you’re building your campaign from the PCs’ backstories, you’re basically going to loot anything that’s not bolted down. (And nothing is bolted down.)

Start by identifying the goals of the PCs. Each goal is at least one scenario, and likely more than one: They want a valuable item (a stolen heirloom, the cure for their mother’s disease)? Put it some place secure and you’ve got a raid. They’re trying to discover something (the identity of their brother’s killer, the local of the Lost City of Shandrala)? That’s a mystery, so start building your revelation list. (You can spread the clues around the entire campaign and/or throw it into a 5-node mystery or anything between.)

As part of this, identify the antagonists. It’s not unusual for the PCs’ backstories to be filled with people who have wronged them; people who they hate; people who stand opposed to everything they want to accomplish in life. Grab some or all of them and start setting them up as obstacles the PCs have to overcome to achieve their goals.

Once you’ve got this material lightly sketched in, simply link the scenarios together using whatever campaign structure makes the most sense. (When in doubt, use a 5 x 5 campaign.) Or, alternatively, arrange them into multiple campaign structures, each acting as a separate arc within the greater campaign (running either concurrently or sequentially).

Advanced Tip: These scenarios are easy to hook because the PCs are already motivated to do the thing or find the thing. But mix things up a bit with some surprising scenario hooks, where the PCs think they’re doing one thing only to discover halfway through the adventure that this is actually about the ONE THING THEY’VE ALWAYS WANTED. You can also heighten the dramatic tension by using a dilemma hook as a surprising twist: Someone the PCs’ care about tells them where they can find the McGuffin from their backstory… but only because they want them to do something completely different with the McGuffin than what the PC wanted.

Continue your work by harvesting setting material (locations, factions, etc.) and pulling your supporting cast. Not every single character and location from the PCs’ backstories needs to show up in the campaign, of course, so think about which ones are the most interesting to you. And which ones do the players’ seem most invested in?

While you’re doing this, do some stitching and look for opportunities to link the PCs’ backstories: Could an NPC from Character A’s backstory be marrying Character B’s sister? Can characters be from the same place or belong to the same organizations or work for one another? Can Obi-Wan’s former apprentice and Luke’s father be the same person?

(And, as I already mentioned, you can also collaborate with the players to take two different characters and make them the same person. For example, one of the PCs’ is friends with the druid Allanon and another PC has a very similar wizard named Gandalf who was friends with their adopted father Bilbo. Couldn’t these both be the same guy? If so, it could be a cool link between these PCs that explains why they’re adventuring together at the beginning or the campaign; or an easter egg that they only discover after journeying together for many moons.)

As you’re doing this, regardless of which approach you take to incorporating character backstories, make sure to balance spotlight time. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you should lay the groundwork that will ensure a future balance in spotlight time.) In other words, don’t build a whole campaign around just Frodo’s uncle and his magic ring, include some stuff about the kingdom Aragorn and Boromir have connections to; the lost dwarf kingdom Gimli apparently yearns for; and maybe toss in some elf havens since both Aragorn and Legolas talk about those in their backstories.

Similarly, don’t feel like you shouldn’t create your own stuff while doing this. In fact, you obviously should. Not everything in the campaign needs to be incestuously born from the PCs’ backstories.

Note: There are many RPGs that will help bring backstory elements into play by mechanizing them or incorporating them into core gameplay loops. For example, Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents both use Sources of Stability – major NPCs who the PCs have to interact with in order to regain Stability through a human connection in the face of a horrific universe.

TABULA RASA CHARACTERS

In order to use a backstory, of course, you first need to have a backstory. While some players will give you paragraphs or pages full of information, others might only give you a couple sentences or even nothing at all.

And that’s just fine.

You may feel like these players don’t care about the game, but that’s usually not the case. Most of these players just have a preference for sketching in a few broad concepts and then discovering and developing who the character is through actual play.

Such characters aren’t exactly uncommon in other mediums, either. Consider Neo in The Matrix or Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. At the beginning of their stories, both are tabula rasas serving as everymen that the viewer or reader can readily step into as a POV character. In an RPG, the tabula rasa character similarly serves as an easy role for the player to assume and begin exploring your world.

As you’re integrating or building from backstories, however, there are a few things you can do with tabula rasa characters. (After all, just because these characters are being developed during play, you don’t want them to be slighted when it comes to spotlight time.)

First, if you’re using the campaign character creation methods I’ve mentioned before, you can usually add a little flesh to the bones of these characters. Don’t feel like you need to dump a whole bunch of unwanted detail on the player — again, the tabula rasa approach is perfectly legitimate — but you can use this to plant a few seeds.

One particularly useful technique is to link them to some lore. Bilbo Baggins, for example, lives in the Shire. Bilbo’s background details can remain pretty sketchy, while the meatier lore of the Shire (and, for example, Gandalf’s long-standing relationships with the hobbits of the Shire) can do a bunch of heavy lifting.

Another approach is to link them to another PC. For example, consider Merry and Pippin from The Lord of the Rings. We know virtually nothing about them, but they’re friends with Sam and Frodo, which gives them a link to all the stuff in Frodo’s backstory that we’re building our campaign around.

GM DON’T #19.1: UNDERMINING THE BACKSTORY

Another major mistake you can make is undermining a PC’s backstory. The classic example is targeting characters from the PCs’ backstory and killing them off.

Part of the problem here is turning the backstory into an endless liability instead of a boon. It’s also about taking something that the player felt was fundamental to their character’s identity or that they wanted to be something fun to play with during the game and, instead, destroying it.

Players will respond to this by either creating tabula rasa characters (“if I don’t give the GM anything to destroy, then I’m safe”) or character backgrounds filled with endless tragedy (“if my character has already lost everything and everyone they ever cared about before the GM destroys them, then at least it’s on my terms and it’s the core identity of my character”).

The trick, though, is that the line between building on a character’s backstory and undermining it can be razor thin and very dependent on context.

Start by understanding the character’s goals and how those flow from the backstory. If you can understand the core concept of the character and how the player intends to run their character, you can make plans that harmonize with those intentions instead of harming them.

You can help yourself out here by, when the campaign is young, not leaping directly to destructive uses of the PCs’ backstories. Even if a player isn’t entirely happy about how you used their teddy bear, it’ll be a lot easier to course correct if you haven’t ripped off the teddy bear’s head.

I’m not saying that you should never burn down the PC’s hometown. I’m just saying that you’ll probably be more successful if that’s not the FIRST thing you do with their hometown: First, because after spending some time with the character (and possibly their hometown) you’ll have a much better understanding of where the players’ lines are. Second, because if the hometown has been in play for a while, then the player may have done the stuff they dreamed of doing with the hometown when they created their character and won’t feel cheated by the development. Third, because it’s more likely that such events will have grown naturally out of the narrative and the PC may even bear responsibility for what happened. (“I’m sorry your hometown got burned to the ground, but maybe you shouldn’t have told the Bloodtyrant where you lived before pissing her off.”)

Finally, when in doubt, you can just talk to the players and ask them. “What role do you see your hometown playing in the campaign? Are there any lines you don’t want me to cross?” With a little care, these are conversations you can have without spoiling anything. For more details on this, you can also check out RPG Flags: Wants vs. Warnings.

Go to Part 20: Always Say Yes

Go to Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

GM: …nothing.

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

• 4 goblins

That’s it. That’s the encounter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRECIOUSNESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRECIOUS SYSTEMS

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

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

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

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

TOO PRECIOUS

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

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

OTHER PRECIOUS ENCOUNTERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 19: Ignoring Character Backstories

Go to Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SWEET SPOTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other big advantage of the odd player count is that the party can’t stalemate when they disagree about the best course of action. With four players, two players can want to do X and while two players want to do Y, and the whole session can bog down to an endless debate. With five players, on the other hand, such stalemates will often be resolved with a simple majority vote  and play can quickly move forward.

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

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

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

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

I HAVE SO MANY PLAYERS!

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

What should you do?

SPLIT THE TABLE

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

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

OPEN YOUR TABLE

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

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

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

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

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

A SECOND GM

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

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

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

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

MULTIPLE PCs

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 18: Too Precious Encounters

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

16…?

15…?

14…?

Julia: I’m on 14!

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

Julia: 12.

GM: You’ll go first.

(a minute later)

GM: Anyone on 13? How about 12?

Don’t be this guy.

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

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

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

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

WRITE IT DOWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FURTHER READING
Random GM Tip: Collecting Initiative

Go to Part 17: Too Many Players