The carrot is more effective than the stick. That’s especially true when running a game. In fact, failing to give your players enough carrots might cause them to lose interest and stop playing. But what makes a good carrot?
Continue readingIn our own world, there are people we love and people we hate. Our feelings about others might be distant or dispassionate, or they might be personal and urgent. Sharing a love for the people of a neighborhood, a country, a sports team, or a gang is a quick and easy way to bond with someone else—as is sharing a hatred.
As storytellers, we can use this.
Continue readingYou’ve all made your PCs. You’re all ready to dig into a big game. This time, you think, the game will be serious and deep, full of emotional complexity and resonance. And then someone makes a bunch of fart sounds, Boblin the Goblin is the only recurring non-player character and he’s obviously a joke, and your biggest emotional payoff is a PC’s binge-drinking celebration of their big gambling win.
You want a serious game full of big feels. You get a goofy game full of jokes and idiocy. The heartfelt depth and emotional bleed you came here for are nowhere in sight. Why? And how can you change that?
Continue readingAre you tempted to make every NPC in your game a deep and complex character?
Don’t.
I love creating and playing NPCs in my games, and it comes easily to me. Part of this is because I’ve done improv theater—lots of improv theater. But mostly it’s because I use a few basic guidelines when I’m coming up with NPCs.
Since I apparently haven’t written anything about making or running NPCs since that article about naming them from over a decade ago, I figure this post is overdue.
Continue readingConsent is vitally important to RPGs (especially horror RPGs), yet is often taken for granted. Often, consent’s building blocks—trust, plus shared social expectations, desires, and goals—are only analyzed after something has gone wrong and the illusion of agreement is broken. I don’t think anyone needs to constantly check for consent at every new moment in their games, but you can save yourself some anguish if you establish those building blocks before playing.
Why do I think consent is so important in RPGs?
Continue readingI write a lot on this blog about the social skills involved in being a storyteller, because I think many of our RPG books ignore the topic. What’s more, many RPG-related blogs and YouTube channels that I admire share advice about the mechanics and structure of RPG systems… but don’t cover the social dynamics. It seems like a collective blindspot. We assume that people will know what they’re doing, or that they’ll muddle along well enough.
Some of this has changed since I started running TTRPGs about 30 years ago. Many RPG books now include the basics of safety mechanics like lines and veils, the X-card, etc. But there isn’t much on how to find consensus or foster buy-in amongst your players. You have to learn the tricky art of building agreement and engagement in your own gaming group with few pointers and little advice.
On the one hand, I get it. I think the arguments run something like the following:
There’s so much variation in social expectations between gaming groups that no system could truly be one-size-fits-all. Those interpersonal connections are outside the scope of a roleplaying game. People should figure out what works for them, and do that.
But on the other hand, those arguments are an avoidant pile of crap.
Continue readingI was talking with a friend of mine recently about worldbuilding and how to teach the skill, and I realized that I’m not sure where to start.
I think my perspective is warped. I’ve been making up worlds for stories and games for so long, the whole process has become second nature. I haven’t consciously examined the process of worldbuilding in a long time.
Given that I’m planning to run a class for people who want to be DMs (or GMs, or storytellers, or whatever the hell you want to call the person running your roleplaying game), I think I need a clearer approach. I do have some ideas.
Continue readingThe 5e alignment system is a useful shorthand and a misleading trap. The Outer Planes as presented in the 2014 Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide only make the alignment system’s problems worse. The perfect overlap between alignments and planes—and the total lack of alternative Outer Planes—reinforces the alignment system’s worst inclinations: easy stereotyping, reductionist thinking, and a restriction of creative possibilities.
So what the heck are you supposed to do?
Continue readingHot take: clerics in D&D 5e feel like the blandest superheroes. Without a clear relationship with a greater power or a faith, it’s easy for them to float in the narrative void like a cornucopia of bandaids. The solution lies in placing more expectations on them, constraining them, and giving them a deeper connection with the story’s world and whatever they serve.
Continue readingI reviewed The Three Musketeers: D’artagnan recently, but I only realized I hadn’t yet reviewed it because I was deep in the process of creating a T3M inspired setting for an RPG. I knew I wanted the intrigue, the swordplay, the ambition, and the thrill of being small players discovering a much larger political game. So I hunted for and pulled out the themes that felt crucial to T3M’s fun, trying to find ways to create a setting that would evoke those while also incorporating the elements my players contributed.
I’ll lay some of it out for you.
Continue reading
Fistful of Wits 