“Heart of Ice” by jdhancock on Flickr

Lots of GMs want their campaigns to tell an epic, inter-connected story with plot threads woven over dozens of sessions. But as soon as they plan one, their players take a left turn two sessions in and never actually interact with 90% of the material the GM planned.

Here’s the secret: don’t write out what happens. Instead, develop big problems and big antagonists.

In other words, create an antagonist who has big plans, like raising an undead army, leading a military coup, or killing a god. Make it something that will upend the world. You can even create several antagonists like this.

Then place your antagonist most of the way towards his or her goal. Give him or her resources. The army is half-built, the country is destabilized, or the antagonist is only a few pieces away from assembling the Staff of God Killing.

You’re now ready to start the game, during which, you must make these situations visible and evident in the PCs’ every-day lives. Every town is attacked by undead, everybody’s talking about the weak leader, or every powerful mentor is scrambling to find adventurers who will find other pieces of the Staff.

As the PCs continue in their story, ensure that every major decision the PCs make for or against these antagonists has an impact. If they find a piece of the Staff, they’re attacked by the antagonist’s agents. If they ignore the undead attacks, those attacks intensify and the shops they rely on for supplies are destroyed.

Create a problem that the PCs ignore at their own peril, so that the game is defined by their actions relative to that problem.

“Lighthouse in Stavern” by lattefarsan on Flickr

You want to run Dungeons & Dragons for the first time. Awesome! You’ll have a great time. Here’s some advice for the absolute minimum you need to do for your first session to make it run as smoothly as possible.

Ahead of Time

Find a first level adventure. While this will take some work, it’s a lot easier for a first-time DM than building your own scenario. The “Lost Mine of Phandelver” adventure in the D&D 5th Edition Starter Set is a great start, and there are quite a few more on dmsguild.com.

Read this adventure thoroughly, multiple times, before you play.

Read the Player’s Handbook or other core rules thoroughly. Don’t worry about memorizing every rule, but the more familiar you are with the rules, the better.

Find an encounter sheet (like this one), which has space for several monsters, plus an initiative tracker. Print out a bunch of copies and fill in several for the encounters you think you’ll have in the first session. That way, you’ll have all your monster stats and initiative on one sheet of paper.

Setup at the Table

In your notes, have a sheet of paper or text file for the players’ characters. Write down each PCs’ player name, character name, race, class, and passive Perception score on this sheet. This will be very useful to glance at as you play, so you can address people as their characters and handle passive Perception checks.

During Play

If somebody has a question about a rule and you don’t know the answer, make a quick “ruling.” This is a temporary decision about how that aspect of the game works. Don’t worry about looking it up unless somebody already has the Player’s Handbook open near that rule. If anybody’s concerned about that, choose a player who will write down the rules questions you all have as you play. Somebody can look those up afterwards.

Related to that: If a player doesn’t understand some aspect of their character, encourage the player to look it up in their spare time. In other words, if they chose the “Light” spell, but only wrote down “Light” on their character sheet, then in-game asks you how “Light” works, make a ruling, then tell them roughly where it is in the Player’s Handbook and have them look it up later. It’s not your job to know how the PCs’ spells and special abilities work.

When you’ve finished describing a scene, ask the players some variation on, “What do you do?” Maintain the focus on them and their actions. Keep encouraging them to make decisions and move the story forward.

Good luck! If there’s anything I missed, please post in the comments.

“Construction Site Safety” by peronimo on Flickr

How much of your world do you need to prepare ahead of time to make the world appear fresh to your players?

Let’s avoid the obvious extremes of zero preparation on the one hand, and a binder full of notes on the other. Some people run successfully with one extreme or the other; this post is not for them. This post assumes that, if you personally invent a secret society during your game session, it’ll work, but it’ll feel made-up to the players, so you want to avoid that.

We’ll start with a principle: The most important elements of a world relate to people and geography, and how they conflict.

The Geography

You don’t need to define every country in your world ahead of time. You only need the current country and its neighbors.

For each country, you need to define each country’s conflicts with each other. So, what do countries conflict get into conflict over? Two main things: boundary disputes (usually resulting from previous invasions) and trade.

Boundary disputes imply prior military conflicts between these countries. You just need to write down what land is in dispute and a reason for now. The reason usually has to do with an imbalance of trade or resources; a strip of land that’s particularly fertile, or defensible, or indefensible. It could even be religious. This will help to define each country’s geography, too.

Defining the trade differences is a big help to your world-building, because that defines a few of each country’s major exports and imports. This will also tell you what professions will pop up most commonly in these countries.

One helpful way to think of conflicts between countries is answering the question: Why aren’t these countries at war yet? Pretend that war is inevitable between any two given countries, and ask A) why each country would go to war with another, and B) what’s prevented it from breaking out so far.

The People

You’ll want to define representatives of three broad categories of people: governmental, religious, and popular. There may be some overlap, and that’s fine.

For governmental people, I include hereditary rulers, elected officials, and even the military: anyone with major organized power. Who are the big movers and shakers? Who could start a war?

Role-players tend to shy away from religious elements in their games. That’s a shame, because religion provides some of the most interesting story fodder. Who are the major religious leaders in each country (or across multiple countries)? What religions or factions do they lead? Note that many influential religious leaders direct relatively small cults of followers, and they may be known more for their politics or activism than for the number of their followers.

Popular people lead informal groups, from school founders to martial arts masters to philanthropists to investors to major merchants. For this, you need each person’s name, the name of the organization they lead, and a reason why they’re particularly popular.

Define at least two characters in each of these three categories.  To define a character, I mean give them each a name, a simple personality trait, at least one connection to one other character (it can be a character that you haven’t defined yet), and the group(s) to which that character belongs (parliament, court, military, school, guild, religion, etc.).

You’re not quite done with people yet. Also name five other characters, and give each a simple personality trait. These will remain available to you for improvisation.

The Rest

Fantasy adventure requires one more significant detail:

What monsters commonly inhabit each country? For each monster, rough out a single prototypical enclave or encounter. You just need a rough map, location of creatures, and pointers to stats. The key here is to define a prototypical encounter, the kind that frightened townsfolk gossip about in the tavern. Stat that out and have it available in your notes.

Anything I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments.

Do you create campaigns to suit the player-characters? When the PCs reach a stopping point, do you move on from that world and create a new campaign?

Or do you create worlds that your PCs happen to adventure in?

Obviously, our games are never as cut-and-dried as this, but think about your general approach. In practice, does your campaign world exist separate from the PCs?

This difference in approach highlights a key distinction between old-school and modern play approaches.

Modern games create heroic characters who are the focus of big stories. The game is all about the characters.

Old-school games were set in a big world where characters lived and died. Blackmoor and Greyhawk existed regardless of who was playing it. The characters accomplished great deeds within those worlds, and gameplay focused on their heroics. But the world continued on.

Both approaches are useful. Just beware of getting stuck in one.

“Think Big!” by drphotomoto on Flickr

In an earlier post, I designed a simple RPG in which players can choose an Easy roll for a good chance at success, or a Hard roll for a low chance plus a coupon for automatic success later.

But success and failure are boring.

Let’s re-think success and failure in the context of a tabletop RPG. Success makes intuitive sense: getting what you want. Failure often feels like simply not getting what you want. Failure can be interesting, but we often have to force ourselves to make that failure interesting.

Let’s avoid those terms, and use more exciting ones: winning and losing. That may sound the same, but bear with me. Thanks to our social exposure to sports, losing sounds less dramatic and more temporary than failing. You can lose one game in a season and it won’t kill your chances at the championship.

So, you can win or lose your die roll. Winning makes sense. But what does losing mean? We know what that means in sports: a setback. If a team loses a game, they have a harder time getting to the championship.

As a result, in this game, losing a roll results in getting further into trouble.

Let’s fold that into our rules:

1. Creating Interesting Characters: Describe your character as specifically as possible. Describe activities that are effortless for your character, and those that are troublesome for the character. You do not need to stat your character, but you’ll want to be clear to the other players. If playing with a GM, the GM has final say over this.
2. When Things Get Dicey: Any time you want to get something for your character, succeed at a task, win a contest with another character, etc.: roll a six-sided die.
   1. Difficulty: You can make the roll Easy or Hard.
      1. You win an Easy roll if you roll a 2 or higher.
      2. You win a Hard roll if you roll 5 or 6. Just for attempting a Hard roll, you get a Plot Point (no matter what you roll).
   2. What Happens:
      1. If you win your roll, you get what you want (the item, the completion of the task, overcoming your opponent).
      2. If you lose your roll, you make some progress but don’t get what you want immediately, and you go deeper into trouble. The GM or the rest of the group can define the trouble.
3. Getting In Trouble: If playing with a GM, the GM can declare a task Troublesome for you. If playing without a GM, the group can declare a task Troublesome. This usually happens when a character attempts a task particularly unfit for that character (a weak character attempting to arm-wrestle a hulk).
   1. When rolling a Troublesome task, roll 2 dice and use the lowest number rolled.
4. Plot Points: You can trade in a Plot Point to bypass a die roll and automatically get what you want without trouble, or to narrate your own trouble if you lose on your die roll. You can’t use a Plot Point earned for a roll to affect that roll.

Thoughts?

(This system is still released under a CC-BY-3.0 license, so expand and play with it as you wish.)