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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 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

Go to Part 1

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

16…?

15…?

14…?

Julia: I’m on 14!

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

Julia: 12.

GM: You’ll go first.

(a minute later)

GM: Anyone on 13? How about 12?

Don’t be this guy.

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

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

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

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

WRITE IT DOWN

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

Go to Part 1

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

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

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

Then, abruptly, a bright white light suffuses everything.

And the world ends.

Huh.

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

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

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

THE RAILROADER’S FALLACY

The railroader’s fallacy is surprisingly common:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sandboxes don’t work.”

THE SOLUTION

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

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

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

ADDENDUM

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 16: Don’t Write Down Initiative