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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAKE A LIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REMEMBER DISADVANTAGE

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

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

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

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

ROLL THE DC

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

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

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

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

RANDOM SPOTTING PRIORITY

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

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

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

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

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

VARIANT: LET PERCEPTION RIDE

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

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

VARIANT: TAKE 0

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s talk about encounter balance.

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

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

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

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

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

Does this mean that the challenge rating system is pointless?

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

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

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

There are several reasons for this.

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

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

But the final factor is linear campaigns.

THE PROBLEM WITH LINEAR CAMPAIGNS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is an outrage!

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

NON-LINEAR BALANCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

LINEAR BALANCE WITH MILESTONES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LINEAR BALANCE WITHOUT MILESTONES

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

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

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

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

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

OTHER FAQs

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

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

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

And you know what? That sounds fun to me!

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

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

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

Absolutely!

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

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

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

Something that I’ve often said is that the supposed divide between “roleplaying” and “combat” (with the latter sometimes being labeled as “rollplaying”) is an imaginary one. Combat is roleplaying: It’s filled with high-stakes, life-or-death decision-making, and that’s the perfect crucible for exploring, revealing, and developing characters.

What IS frequently missing from our combat scenes in a roleplaying game, however, is talking.

Which is a shame, because if we think about some of the all-time classic fight scenes, they can be as much about the dialogue as the fisticuffs or gun-kata.

• Inigo Montoya vs. the Man in Black from The Princess Bride.
• Neo vs. Agent Smith in The Matrix. (Note the nonverbal communication in this one, too.)
• Robin Hood vs. Sir Guy in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
• Hawkins vs. Ravenhurst in Court Jester.
• Iron Man vs. Captain America in Captain America: Civil War.

It’s not every fight, of course, but it’s a lot of them.

There are a number of reasons why it’s so rare to find interactions like this at our gaming tables.

First, we’re often playing in large groups with lots of characters. Even in other mediums, this complexity tends to cut down on the amount of dialogue, because there’s already a lot of different narrative elements that are being juggled.

Second, there are obviously also a lot of mechanical elements that you’re juggling in a typical RPG during a combat scene.

On top of that, you’re often trying to juggle those elements as quickly as possible; to resolve actions fast, keep the pace high, and get around the table quickly so that the players stay engaged with the game. In fact, I’ve given lots of advice aimed specifically at speeding things up in combat.

That being the case, it’s easy to fall into a smooth rhythm of resolving mechanics, evocatively describing those resolutions, and rapidly passing the ball to the next action declaration while literally not leaving room to get a word in edgewise.

The solution is to co-opt the mechanics: When you’re writing down the initiative list for the fight, simply include Dialogue on one of the initiative counts.

You might list it at the same initiative count in each fight (e.g. first in the round, last in the round, 10, etc.), but when I’ve experimented with this technique I’ve found actually rolling an initiative for Dialogue to be effective because it mixes up the pacing and placement of the initial interaction. (Your mileage may vary.)

All that you need to do now is honor the dialogue prompt: When you hit Dialogue in the initiative count, resist any temptation to skip over it. Take the moment to select one or more of your NPCs and have them say something.

• Taunt a PC.
• Debate the righteousness of their actions.
• Offer a bribe to get the PCs to help them.
• Trick the PCs with an offer of surrender.
• Try to sway one of the PCs’ allies to join their cause.
• Reveal that they’ve been a traitor the entire time.
• Curse the effectiveness of the PCs.
• Vow vengeance.

The possibilities are, of course, limitless.

You’ll often discover that just having the NPCs verbally engage with the PCs will draw the players out and get them to respond in the moment. If not, you can specifically prompt the players. And, in fact, I recommend prompting a specific player. For example, you might have your villain say something like, “You don’t think I know where you live?! When I’m finished with, I’ll make sure Robert rues the day he fell in love with you!” And then ask the player, “How does Clarissa respond to that?”

Clarissa’s response might be to stab him rather than talk with him, and that’s just fine. As such, it can be useful to look at the PC positioned immediately after the Dialogue prompt and target them. (Similarly, if you’re struggling to improvise dialogue, you might take inspiration from NPCs who are immediately before or after the Dialogue prompt.)

A FEW OPTIONS

In larger fights, you might want to roll up multiple Dialogue initiatives. Don’t overdo it, though. One is often enough, and if you put in too many you’ll likely find the temptation to skip them start to grow (which defeats the entire point).

On the flip side, the presence of a Dialogue prompt on your initiative counter should not prevent you from open repartee. In other words, the Dialogue prompt doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to talk during other points in the fight. On the contrary! The whole point of the prompt is to get loosened up. You’ll often find that as you get into the habit and rhythm of combat dialogue, the repartee will break free and start popping up all over the place.

When you hit a Dialogue prompt, don’t forget to consider dialogue from characters not directly involved in the fight. Bystanders, hostages, familiars, etc. It’s a great way of reminding the players about the wider environment in which the fight is taking place (and possibly the stakes they’re fighting for).

If you’re struggling, you might consider jotting down a villain’s catchphrase or a random table of one-liners. Again, these should not be limiters; they’re creative spurs to help kickstart dialogue interactions during the fight.

On a similar note, if a PC takes out a bad guy and the next initiative count is the Dialogue prompt, you might take that as a hint to prompt the player to provide a closing remark. (Think about the type of stuff James Bond or Arnold Schwarznegger quip. Or go for more sinister filler if that’s more appropriate for your campaign.) You can do something similar for villains who knock out a PC or kill one of their allies.

In addition to Dialogue prompts, I’ve also talked about a similar technique using Feng Shui’s shot clock to prompt environmental effects. You can read more about that in Feng Shui: Filling the Shot.

Andrew Stanton is the superstar creator of WALL-E, John Carter, Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story, and many more. In 2012 he gave the above TED talk collecting all the lessons he’s learned about storytelling.

A good story, says Stanton, makes a promise. That promise might be as simple as, “Once upon a time…,” but the crucial thing is that the audience believes that this will be a story worth hearing. The promise, therefore, invites the audience to engage with the story. It’s like a foot in the door. It’s incredibly important because, without that initial engagement (and the trust that comes with it), the storyteller has nothing to build on or with.

The nature of the promise also means that “stories are inevitable if they’re good, but they’re not predictable.” A statement which, I think, can be interpreted in many ways: That we may know where a story is going, but not the path which is taken. Or that we may know the direction of Fate, but not necessarily the specific form it will take. Or that when we look back at the story, it seems as if everything is perfectly aligned and could have gone no other way than it did, but we could not have foreseen it.

In other words, the story must faithfully keep its promise, but it should still surprise and delight the audience.

(For more on how you can achieve this effect in an RPG, check out Random GM Tip: Three Point Plotting.)

The promise also creates a window of opportunity for the storyteller, and they have to capitalize on that by making the audience care about the story.

There are many ways a storyteller can do this — character, theme, craft, etc. — but one particular lesson he talked about leapt out to me as a Game Master:

THE UNIFYING THEORY OF 2+2

The absolute best way to get the audience to care about the story is to get them involved with the story; to get them actively thinking about the story. And the best way to do that is to make them work for the story.

In other words, don’t show your audience FOUR. Show them 2 + 2 and make them do the math.

Note that 2 + 2 isn’t difficult. The point isn’t necessarily to challenge the audience. (Although it can be: There’s a reason why the mystery genre is popular. A properly placed insoluble problem can actually be even more effective, which his why everyone remembers the end of Inception.)

The point is that even the simplest act of connecting the dots engages the audience. It makes them, on a primal level, a part of the story. They are thinking about the story and they have opinions about it. Once you’re part of something, you care about it. As Stanton says, “A well-organized absence of information pulls us in.” We have a desperate need to complete an unfinished sentence.

Take Citizen Kane, for example. (Spoilers ahoy!) Imagine how much less effective would that movie be if, at the end of the movie, Orson Welles had Joseph Cotton’s character say, “Rosebud was his childhood sled. Despite the poverty and the hardship of his youth, he must have always missed the simple, uncomplicated joys of his youth and the unconditional love of his mother.” The beauty of Citizen Kane as a movie is, in fact, the immense artistry Welles employs so that, rather than spoonfeeding that moral to the audience, he has prepared the audience so that all the nuance and emotional complexity of that idea becomes as simple as 2+2 when he shows them the image of the sled.

(I’ll note that this can actually create paradoxes in storytelling, where sometimes the more effort you spend explicitly and plainly explaining something to the audience can actually result in the audience understanding it less, because the lack of engagement causes them to mentally skim past it.)

And it’s a “unifying theory” because it can apply to almost everything in a film: Characters, plot points, exposition, etc.

The trick, of course, is that the audience wants to work for their meal, but they usually don’t want to know that they’re doing that. So it’s also the storyteller’s job to hide the audience’s work from the audience.

To use our Citizen Kane example again, when you see the sled at the end of the movie, you don’t consciously think, “Oh! A tricky problem! Let me think this through!” Ideally, the storyteller has set you up so that you simply see 2+2 and reflexively think, “Four.”

(Again, there are exceptions, like the central conundrum of most mystery stories.)

IN YOUR GAME

Stanton, of course, is talking about animation and filmmaking, and we know that we can’t just take the same storytelling techniques that we see on screen and use them in our RPG games. RPGs are a different medium; one in which the players have an unprecedented freedom and for which plots should not be prepped.

But the Unifying Theory of 2+2 still works!

All you need to do is give your players the equation and then left them take the final step.

In fact, the interactivity of a roleplaying game can actually enhance the technique because the players can actively investigate. In a film, the audience has to passively receive the equation, but in an RPG, the players can go looking for the twos. Or maybe they have the twos, and they need to experiment to figure out the correct mathematical operator.

(I think I’ve broken the metaphor.)

Matryoshka techniques like matryoshka searches and matryoshka hexes are built around this idea that “completing the equation” will mean taking action as a character, and that doing so can give the player both ownership and control over the answer we find.

For other techniques you can use to help make your players care about your campaign, check out Random GM Tips: Getting Your Players to Care.

Let’s say that you want to skip over a large chunk of time in your campaign.

Actually, let’s back up for a moment. It’s possible that the idea of skipping time has never occurred to you. Much like dungeon scenarios can condition us to resolve everything one action at a time (much to the detriment of sequences run outside of the dungeon), so, too, can other scenario structures and situations trap us in a pattern of resolving every single day as if they were all of equal importance and focus.

When combined with the XP systems in D&D, for example, this can easily create a hyper-compressed narrative where the PCs are getting out-wrassled by giant rats one day and slaying Zeus a couple weeks later. But even without those kinds of advancement mechanics, getting stuck in a cycle where every day is jam-packed with adventure can be very limiting in the kinds of adventures you run and the scope that your campaigns are capable of.

(Conversely, some campaign structures and concepts can make it completely appropriate to remain laser-focused on the problem at hand. That’s just fine. I’m just pointing out that there are other options.)

It should also be noted that players are often motivated, for any number of reasons (including their own rote habits), to fill every day to the brim with stuff they want to do. So if you want to decompress the campaign a bit, you may need to push back against that impulse and/or incentivize taking realistic breaks from the breakneck action.

For example:

• Leveling up in D&D might require more than just XP. You could introduce a rule that in order to gain a level, PCs must spend a period of time training. (This period could be set to almost anything and you could justify it: A fortnight. One week times the character’s new level. A cycle of the moon. One full season. A year and a day. Whatever.)
• Mysterious dames with suspiciously missing husbands don’t show up on the doorstep of the detective agency every single day. Once the PCs wrap up their current case, there’ll be a fallow period of humdrum work until the next exciting adventure lands on their doorstep.
• The vampires are hunting them and the only way to get the Heat off them is to lay low for a while… maybe a long while.
• Yes, they’re adventure archaeologists: But now that the Spear of Destiny has vanished into vaults beneath the British Museum, there’s a lot of research to be done before they can identify their next expedition. And you can’t rush research!
• In Ars Magica, the projects and research performed by the wizards take one or more seasons to complete. The cycle of play, therefore, is broken down into season-long turns, and the wizards can generally only undertake a single adventure during each season as well.

On the flip side, it’s quite possible that the players will, without any kind of structure or prompting, want some downtime for their characters for any number of reasons.

Which ultimately brings us back to: Let’s say that you want to skip over a large chunk of time in your campaign…

SKIPPING TIME

First, determine how much time is passing before the next scenario is triggered (or whatever will signal the end of the skipped time). The amount of time may be obvious given the reason you’re skipping time in the first place, or it might just be an arbitrary decision on your part. (Or maybe you randomly determine it; e.g., 1d6 months.)

Regardless, frame things up by simple stating the period of elapsed time: “Three months pass.”

Next, go around the table and ask each player what their character did during that time. When it gets to your turn, as the GM, you inject event(s) that you want them to react to and/or develop the actions they’ve described.

In practice, the players will build off each other’s actions and the events you provide, weaving an interconnected narrative. You may also find it useful to:

• Play out short roleplaying vignettes.
• Use simple skill checks or similar mechanics to determine specific outcomes.
• Allow the PCs to use other mechanics (like downtime, research, or project mechanics) to advance their interests (or set things up for the next adventure).

But this isn’t strictly necessary. In any case, you want to make sure you don’t get too bogged down. You’re looking for a relatively high level of abstraction possibly coupled to a highlight reel. Don’t get sucked back into day-to-day logistics.

You can do just one pass around the table, but I find it’s often better to split the time up into three chunks. (Or, if you’ve got a certain number of events for them to respond to, an equal number of chunks.) Each additional pass gives the players more opportunities to weave their stories together and develop their own characters.

Your first instinct might be to have all the chunks be of the same length (e.g., we’re skipping three months and we’re doing three passes, so each pass will be one month long), but I often find it more effective to make each chunk progressively longer:

• “One week has passed. What has Charlotte been doing?” (go around the table)
• “Another month has passed. Where are you now?”
• “Now it’s July. What did you spend the last two months doing?”

The advantage of this progressive sequencing is that it allows the players to be fairly precise in their immediate reaction and follow-up to the dramatic events of the most recent scenario, and then slowly transitions them to thinking in the longer term.

You may or may not want to frame the final pass along the lines of, “In December, you all meet again in London. Tell me how you get there and where you meet.” (In other words, prompt the players to pull it all together and position them for the next scenario.)

EPILOGUES

The Eternal Lies campaign for Trail of Cthulhu by Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, and Jeremy Keller uses a similar technique to provide a satisfying epilogue to the campaign.

If you’re wrapping up a dedicated campaign, it’s likely something that you’ve spent weeks, months, or even years playing these characters. A big, satisfying conclusion to the campaign is great (and a topic for another time), but even after the conclusion, you want to give space for loose threads to be wrapped up and for the players to say goodbye to their beloved characters.

There are many ways to handle this, but one powerful and flexible method is to cue up a time skip… just without returning to game play on the other side.

• Where are you one week after the campaign ended?
• One month after the campaign ended?
• One year after the campaign ended?

The exact periods of time you choose for each pass will depend on any number of factors — the characters, the nature of the campaign, whether you’re planning to run another campaign in the same setting, how big the fallout from the campaign’s conclusion is likely to be, etc.

This technique can be particularly cool in historical campaigns, because you can relate the time skips to the passage of real world events. For example, if you were running a Fall of Delta Green campaign in the ‘60s, you could skip forward all the way to 2023 and discover where the characters would be today.

In some cases, you might want to drive all the way forward to the characters’ deaths. But that usually won’t be the case: To live is an awfully big adventure, and there are many forms of closure far more satisfying than the Grim Reaper’s icy grip.

ADVANCED EPILOGUES

As you’re prepping to run your epilogue (whether using the skipped time method or not), you should look back at the totality of the campaign and think about:

Unfinished Threads. It would be great if every single loose thread in a campaign was neatly tied off, but that’s usually not what happens. Real life can be messy, and so can the lives of our characters. Particularly in the big drive to the campaign finale, it’s likely stuff will get left unresolved.

For example, in my Dragon Heist campaign, one of the characters had a driving motivation to figure out what had happened to her mother. For one reason and another, however, it had never been prioritized during the campaign. (Neither by me, her player, nor the character herself.) This made it a perfect target for the epilogue.

Themes. What were the major themes of the campaign? These may have been planned. They may have emerged through play. (Quite probably both.) Either way, try to pull these themes into the epilogue. In some cases, themes may even have a resolution.

Characters. What members of the supporting cast were particularly memorable or important? Make sure to pull these characters into the epilogue and give them a sense of closure, too.

This will likely include mostly allies, but it’s not unusual for an enemy or two to still be hanging about. What happens to them? What’s their legacy?

Rewards & Consequences. The PCs fought hard to achieve things. (Or maybe they strived and failed.) Along the way, there were probably prices that had to be paid. Cementing those costs and payoffs and consequences in the epilogue is a way to invest the events of the campaign with even greater meaning.

It’s one thing to save a village. It’s another to see all the children growing up who would never have lived if you hadn’t.