The Army Painter Wet Palette is one of the most popular options on the market and it’s not hard to see why. In this article, I’ll take a quick look at the Army Painter wet palette and see if it’s worth the investment.

What is a Wet Palette?

First things first…what is a wet palette? A wet palette is a tool that artists use to keep their paint moist and workable for longer periods of time. They are typically made up of three parts: a tray, a sponge, and a lid. The Army Painter Wet Palette comes with all of these parts and more.

The tray is where you will mix your paint. The sponge is used to wet the palette and keep the paint from drying out. The lid helps to keep the moisture in and prevents evaporation.

There are also some additional features that come with the Army Painter Wet Palette. These include a mixing area, a brush holder, and a raised edge around the tray.

How to Use a Wet Palette

Now that we know what a wet palette is, let’s take a look at how to use one. The first thing you need to do is add water to the sponge. You don’t want to soak it, but you do want it to be damp. Next, add your paint to the mixing area. I like to use a toothpick or small brush to do this.

Now, take the lid and place it on top of the tray. Make sure that the holes in the lid are lined up with the sponge. This will allow the moisture to escape and keep your paint from becoming too wet.

Finally, give your paint a good mix and you’re ready to start painting. Whenever you need to, just add more water to the sponge to keep the paint moist.

The Army Painter Wet Palette vs. Other Wet Palettes

The Army Painter Wet Palette is designed to make painting miniatures a breeze. It features two compartments – one for holding water and one for your paint – and a special membrane that prevents the paint from drying out.

This means you can take your time painting without worrying about your paint drying out or getting clumpy. In addition, the Army Painter Wet Palette comes with a set of disposable paper palettes, making it easy to clean up when you’re done painting.

Whether you’re a seasoned miniature painter or just getting started, the Army Painter Wet Palette is a great choice for keeping your paint fresh and your brushes wet.

So, how does the Army Painter Wet Palette stack up against other wet palettes on the market? In my opinion, it’s one of the most popular palettes for scale modelers and miniature painters, and for good reason: It’s affordable, it comes with all the features you need, and it’s easy to use.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the Army Painter Wet Palette is not leak-proof. So, if you’re planning on transporting your palette, you may want to consider another option. For a more in-depth review of other wet palettes, check out this article.

What Does the Community Think About the Wet Palette?

I highly recommend The Army Painter Wet Palette for anyone of any skill level who wants to paint miniatures, terrain, and other accessories for their RPG games. I have been using The Army Painter Wet Palette for a few months now, and I have found it to be an invaluable tool in my painting arsenal.

Of course, don’t take my word for it. Check out some of the reviews from other users below.

“I am thoroughly enjoying using The Army Painter Wet Palette. I am a relatively new miniature painter, and it helps me work neater without worrying about paint drying too quickly on my palette. It’s fun!” – user review from Amazon.com

“…I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to improve their painting skills.” – user review from Amazon.com

“… has saved me a lot of time.” – user review from Amazon.com

I encourage anyone who is interested in painting miniatures to give The Army Painter Wet Palette a try.

Is it Worth the Cost?

Anyone interested in painting their models, from beginners to experts, would find the Army Painter Wet Palette to be a great investment. The wet palette is designed to keep your paint moist and mixed evenly, so you don’t have to waste time or paint by mixing it yourself. It also saves you paint in the long run, as less pigment is lost to evaporation when kept wet.

With a little practice, you’ll be able to use just the right amount of paint on your brush, and avoid making a mess. Plus, the Army Painter Wet Palette is affordable and easy to use, so it’s perfect for anyone just getting started with painting their models. So if you’re looking for a way to save time and paint, the Army Painter Wet Palette is the way to go.

You can find the Army Painter Wet Palette in most local game stores where hobby supplies are sold, or online at Amazon or other vendors. It all depends on where you live. You can even buy the Army Painter Wet Palette direct from Army Painter, too.

The cost of the Army Painter Wet Palette will depend on which retailer you purchase it from, but it is typically between $25 and $35 USD. So, whether you are looking for the best deal or the most convenient option, there are plenty of places available for purchasing the Army Painter Wet Palette.

Final Thoughts

After using the wet palette for over a year in my miniature painting, which you can see some of this work in my gallery (not all of it used the wet palette), I would say that given the choice to do it over, I would definitely buy the palette again. Of course, it depends on whether you want to explore the other interesting avenues and approaches that the miniature painting hobby has to offer.

Incorporating a wet palette in my workflow has allowed me to improve my skills as a painter and try new techniques that I would have never been able to do with a traditional dry palette.

Overall, the Army Painter Wet Palette is a good-value product for those who are looking for an easy way to keep their paint wet while painting miniatures. It’s also a good investment because it will help you avoid wasting paint, and make your painting sessions more efficient.

Yes, you’ll need to practice and get over that learning curve, first. But once you do, you’ll see why such a palette exists and is very popular with artists, hobbyists, and miniature painters.

Did you find this article helpful? Are you already using a wet palette and have suggestions? I’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment below.

Like any vacation, Gen Con is a mixed bag of mostly fun and minor frustration. Sometimes you roll a 20 and occasionally you roll a 1. This year was a mixed dice bag, but I’m grateful to have the opportunity to visit Indy, enjoy the Con, and hang out with my gaming fam. In this article, I will be addressing the good and the bad parts of the adventure.

The Good

There were a lot of good moments at Gen Con 2022, but for brevity’s sake I’d like to highlight three memorable events: one features an author, another a game store, and the third is the hotel stay.

Elevator Fan Girl

Steve and I are in the elevator going down to breakfast and there’s a sweet, shy man holding a sign that has the Slaying the Dragon book cover. (This book was referenced in an earlier Gnome Stew article-check it out!) I exclaimed and said, “Hey, I’m reading that book!” The man quips, “Hey, I wrote that book!” Ben Riggs probably wanted to fetch his coffee and escape from this elevator fan girl, but he was gracious. Steve and I stopped by his booth several times to have our copy signed, but the elusive Ben was away, so we ended up with a signed book card. That would suffice.

Good Games Indianapolis

We strolled down South Meridian Street, people-watched (lots of cosplay here), and ventured to Good Games Indianapolis. It’s a nifty shop that is much bigger inside than it looks from the outside. I can’t say enough good things about the staff and the merch, as they were friendly and helpful. I left the store with a Bard miniature for a new 5e character, a jumbo D20 die, and a game called Cat Lady.

Hotel

We were lucky in the lottery this year and ended up staying at our favorite place, The Hilton. The staff was also gracious to us and allowed us to commandeer a table and play our annual Saturday night game in their bar area. Check-in and check-out were seamless, and the discounted breakfast was tasty. Also, I had a new haircut, hot stone massage (highly recommend!), and a pedicure.

The Bad

I like to focus on the positive without being too Pollyanna about it. There were only a few blips this con. For us, the bad was due to limited mobility, schedules, and weather.

Limited Mobility

Unfortunately, I am currently experiencing post-op complications which limits my mobility to walk long distances without pain.  So, I couldn’t visit the Con as often as I would have liked. But I made my own fun by getting a new haircut, a massage, and a pedicure. (The spa at the Hilton is terrific! I made new friends there.)

Schedules

  This is the one bad instance that we can control, and moving forward, will do. Steve GMs four games for the Con, and that is awesome and all, but we hardly saw each other. Next year, Steve will either limit the number of games to run, or we will coordinate schedules better, so we have some time to spend together.

Weather

  Luckily, except for the Food Trucks, the Con is held indoors, so we’re not stuck inside on a tropical island. However, it rained most of the weekend, and it made travelling a little more difficult. Other than that, it wasn’t a big deal.

 Did you visit any conventions this year? How were your experiences?

Many would argue that it depends. There are pros and cons to using miniatures in RPG campaigns. The debate rages on…miniatures appear to be the standard in modern DnD games and other RPGs, e.g., Pathfinder, Starfinder, and more. Of course, in this post-Covid19 age, who is to say that miniatures are useful anymore.

Oh, why am I making this so complicated? I think it’s because it’s fun water cooler talk, or the type of conversation you have over coffee late at night in a diner, or when there’s nothing to watch on TV… or when a group of people with free time can’t decide what to do next.

This is that conversation: Are miniatures actually better than pen, paper and a good DM who can describe what’s happening to their players? Think Critical Role the show.

In this blog post, I talk about some of both sides of arguments for and against using miniature figurines in your tabletop RPG campaign!

Miniatures or Not?

Tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons aren’t played in a vacuum. Players and GMs at the table need to work together to achieve the best possible results. So, before you can decide how much or little to use miniatures in your campaign, you’ll want to understand what makes each person at the table tick.

Do the players at the table even like miniatures? Do your players or fellow gamers have a good imagination and can follow along in their heads what is happening? Is your DM even capable of managing a battle encounter without a physical map with tokens, minis, etc., whilst telling a story?

All these questions and their answers help determine whether miniatures are required. At the outset, I will say that using miniatures makes things easy. It makes story telling a bit easier, because you can show where things are to your players in space and time. You and your players don’t need to hear what’s going on — you can see what is happening!

Miniatures, I think, make the game flow much more organically.

The Problem with Miniatures in RPG Games

However, miniatures take up space, and can be knocked over easily if people aren’t careful. They collect dust in between sessions of play. And they can be expensive — especially when you start buying metal or pewter miniatures (the most cost effective) or you buy resin mini’s (which are much cheaper than metal, but you still have to clean them off and paint them).

Most of all, miniatures can (and will) break a sense of immersion at the table. Nobody needs all of their imagination to play and feel the game move. In fact, when you use miniatures, you have ZERO choice about what you’re seeing and experiencing. Where the miniatures are, is where YOU are.

RELATED: PAINTING MINIATURES, FUN OR NOT?

You can’t keep your eyes on what is happening in your head because you need to look down at the board — the tabletop — to see where everyone is, what they are doing, and how the terrain affects them. This isn’t a bad thing.

It is just different from how we all used to play RPGs back in the old days (when we played on grids drawn on graph paper like true geeks). I would date these times around the 80’s and early-90’s.

Think Stranger Things, and the nostalgia of that TV series. Sure they (we) used minis back in those days; but they didn’t have the weight miniatures have now. We RELY on miniatures in today’s games, don’t we? Well, at least most of us mainstream players do at least.

Technical Reasons for Using Miniatures

Is there anything wrong with using miniatures? Well, I think that depends on your players and what game system they are using. For instance, if you run anything on a grid system (and even some that are not), miniatures are the way to go. Your battle maps should have enough space for 1 or more minis per character or monster at the table.

If your standard combat map is 5 feet by 5 feet, then that’s 25 square feet on the game grid. That’s a lot of space your players are creating with just this one map. They have to describe what they are doing, where they are going, and what they’re trying to do in that space.

Something often forgotten about tabletop RPGs is that the most important thing you need remember when playing one is this: EVERYTHING HAPPENS IN THE PLAYERS’ MINDS. They have to be able to imagine it, and they have to put a lot of trust in the Dungeon Master (or GM) telling them what their character is going through during any given situation.

This means that your players have entrusted you with not only roleplaying their characters, but also playing their enemies. And everything is happening inside the player’s heads. This takes trust on both sides of the table — both yours and your players’.

When using miniatures in your game, you can’t break immersion by requiring each player to hold a miniature of their own PC or NPC. When you’re using miniatures, you do not need to stop the game to look at a sheet of paper to tell everyone what your PC or NPC is doing (unless your players want that). Instead, the GM can simply place any number of miniatures on the table as an indication of where their PCs and NPCs are in relation to one another.

This is very helpful in the heat of battles, or when PCs want to negotiate with NPCs. It can also be helpful during times of rest so that they don’t have to do a lot of extra bookkeeping .

Nowhere does it say you MUST play using miniatures. But if your players like them and you like running games as skillfully as you can, then why not? If that means buying a lot of miniatures , then go ahead. Your players will thank you for it.

When Miniatures are a Good Thing

So the question is, do you actually need to use miniatures in your game at all times? The answer is no. But it can be a good thing if you want to communicate what’s going on with the battle-map more effectively without needing PCs or NPCs to remember everything they need to be doing for their turn in combat.

When Miniatures are a Hard Pass

Using miniatures also might not be the best thing to do in your game. Not everyone playing the RPG cares about miniatures, since they might not think of what’s going on in their head when it comes to imagination . It also takes game time away from roleplaying, and slows down combat.

Some people find participating in battles by simply writing out numbers for hit points (HP) and damage taken (DT) to be more accurate and easier than using tokens and such. Players would rather have the DM describe what is going on than “see” it happening. There’s a sense of immersion that a good story teller can evoke when there’s only their voice and nothing else; kind of like reading a great story in a novel.

So you might even want to try the “no-miniature” method. You can still place markers onto your battle map if you need to, but it doesn’t have to look like some sort of war game simulation.

You can go as minimal as you want with the way your tabletop is set up. But keep in mind that it’s all about how much time and effort you put into your game.

Okay, One More Thing: What About Virtual Tabletop Games?

In this day and age, where everyone is still socially distancing or hesitant to gather in-person around a table, the remote TTRPG has risen to the forefront. Ah, technology.

Do we consider the digital medium a kind of “miniature” where tangible (but digital) pieces get moved around? Perhaps this is not ideal, but we may not have a choice, depending on who we play with and where we live.

And, I suppose here’s where my experience dwindles. Roll20 is an online service, which I’ve played with for games of DnD. There are other simulation environments, too, though I’ve not tried them. Of course, there’s also the popular Zoom teleconference avenue, which I find fascinating only for the fact that you can see your fellow gamers through the webcam and the DM must get creative with their storytelling toolset, e.g., theater of the mind, drawings held up to the camera, or employ the shared screen option.  I have never played any TTRPG games via Zoom without some visual representation.

But, I think that although virtual tabletops are great for TTRPGs, I continue to keep in mind that this is a different proposition than playing an RPG face-to-face. We lose the social experience of casual banter that feels natural when we are physically around our party — never-mind the absence of miniatures.

In this arena of post-Covid19 gameplay, I do not have a lot of insight or much additional thoughts. Rather, I only have a question to pose to our amazing community: What do you think about virtual TTRPG gaming? If you’re already a virtual TTRPG gamer because Covid19 forced you to separate physically, do you foresee yourself shelving this digital tool in favor of going back to real tables (with or without minis)?

Final Thoughts

I’ll admit that the question of using miniatures or not began on Reddit (not by me) that I like commenting on, but wanted to expand my thoughts. Ultimately, it was a great question because for many of us there’s a nostalgia of a time when DnD and other RPGs (well there weren’t too many back then) were played purely with pen/pencil and paper. Miniatures weren’t even a true consideration in the rulesets. Stories and the engagement with characters, conflicts, etc., all played out entirely in the minds and imagination of the players. Did we lose something by including miniatures in our games? I’m honestly not sure.

In the end, it’s certainly up to you and your game group if miniatures are included. Minis are definitely the more popular way to go. If your players think they are good for immersion and roleplaying, it’s obviously going to be the way forward. Of course, when it comes to the “fun” of any game, who you play with matters most. For example, a DM who can’t tell a good story or allow flexibility in how a game is played with their participants is going to have a lot of problems. On the other hand, a DM who can orate a narrative is worth their weight in gold whether or not they need or use miniatures at all.

If you have questions or comments on something I didn’t think about, feel free to let me know in the comments section!

In this article, I will share some observations of the symptoms of a narcissistic player, brief ways to deal with this sort of player, and offer suggestions on how some players might be able to cope with such players. Tabletop gaming is supposed to be fun and it’s hard to enjoy yourself if you’re constantly dealing with toxic players with narcissist tendencies.

READ MORE: THE LINK BETWEEN CREATIVITY AND ANXIETY

What is a Narcissist?

NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and presents in various situations; according to the DSM-IV-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), to be diagnosed with NPD, symptoms must be present in multiple areas of the individual’s life and must cause clinically significant distress or impairment.

In a word, narcissism behavioral patterns exist on a scale where they may not pose any problem at all. However, for this article, we will discuss narcissism of a more severe level where it can contribute to a poor social gaming environment.

How Does Narcissism Exhibit Itself?

Narcissistic people are always looking for attention and admiration. The narcissist is obsessed with power; they want to be in charge of everything, and have little consideration for their peers’ feelings. Their actions are usually lacking in empathy and concern for others’ well-being.

If you observe closely, a narcissist may exhibit a strong sense of entitlement often coupled with feelings of arrogance, haughtiness, and self-centeredness. They feel that they should be able to do anything they want and get whatever they desire at any given time.

Narcissists are extremely invested in their personal image; they work hard to maintain artificial and shallow relationships with others to enhance their public image. In any given situation, they will attempt to use whatever means necessary to make themselves look good and rise above their peers; if they fail to do so, they may become highly agitated or even feel humiliated.

When a narcissist is insulted or threatened in some way, it has an immediate effect on them, as insults and confrontations threaten the narcissist’s sense of superiority and image. They deal with these threats by lashing out at others in an attempt to reestablish their position.

Quick Observations of Narcissism in the Tabletop Gaming Community

Do you notice certain players doing these things?

• Interrupt other players
• Speak over other players
• Try to get involved in every situation
• Talk about themselves excessively

In some cases, you may also find that a narcissist seem to have a certain following of people who want to make the narcissist feel good. It’s as though the narcissist has an entourage of “pleasers”.

I’ve heard the same stories over and over again. It seems like if you’re part of a narcissist’s story circle then you gain social currency, which means you get invited to more games or you can be more often cited as a credible source. A narcissist may say, “Well, this person was at that session and they agree with me.”

What to Do if You Encounter a Narcissist in the Tabletop Gaming Community

It’s important to remember that there are many different types of narcissists just as there are many different types of people in the gaming community.

You cannot let a narcissist ruin your fun in tabletop miniature gaming. The best way to deal with one is to ignore them and do not give them any power: minimize or stop communicating with them in any fashion, just like you would if someone were cyber-bullying you. Narcissists feed off of attention; the more you give them, the worse it gets.

If this person is in your gaming group or you are with them at an event, ignore everything they say. Leave if necessary – be prepared to pay the consequences for doing so, though. If you do not fight back against their behavior, they will realize they are getting no reaction out of you and eventually stop.

It’s also important to recognize that you cannot change a narcissist, nor should you attempt to do so. Like everyone else in the community, they are responsible for their own actions; that is why it can be difficult to hold them accountable (unless maybe if they’re misbehaving at an event).

If you do not get any reaction from the narcissist, they will quickly move on to a different target. It is important to understand that a narcissist does not want a real relationship with you — All a narcissist wants in an interaction is for them to feel good about themselves.

Conclusion

A narcissist is difficult to deal with in any setting, but it can be especially taxing if that person is in the tabletop gaming community. Remember that you are not alone – there are other rational gamers who have dealt with this behavior before.

If you feel as though you’re being affected by a gamer narcissist, seek out others within the table top gaming community for support. The best thing you can do is to ignore the narcissist, as their feelings of being the center of attention are dependent on your reaction.

I have to admit I don’t understand how people are drawn to this type of behavior; it seems like a lot of energy and time is put into admiring themselves. But if you do encounter someone who seems to be a narcissist, there are several steps you can take to minimize the negative impact on your gaming experience.

I hope this article has been helpful to you in identifying narcissists in your tabletop gaming community. Do you know any toxic bullies in your hobby gaming community? How do you deal with them? If you have any questions or comments for me about this article, ask away and I’ll reply as soon as I can.

Pictured: the aftermath of stepping on a D4.

Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) games have changed the landscape in a lot of very positive ways, but the one that has resonated most at my table – even feeding into other games – is the idea of “failing forward.” That is, creating a partial failure that moves the plot, or at minimum makes things more interesting. This is an idea that’s been around for a while, but PbtA turned this idea into systems, primarily by saying that players may succeed even with a failed roll, but at a cost. This is a sea change for games that had for decades operated practically under the maxim that “failure means nothing happens,” and I want to be clear that this rocked my gaming world. It’s also something that’s almost trivially easy in theory to add to other games. In practice, it’s maybe not as obvious.

The scenario I see used most often is picking a lock. If a character fails, they still pick the lock, but alert the guards or trigger a trap. This is a great example: it’s quick, easy-to-understand, and keeps the game from screeching to a halt when all the plot is on the other side of that locked door. The problem with using (or over-using) this idea is that it can strain the fiction to always have guards or traps waiting in the wings for a failed roll. If nothing else, players will rapidly begin to take precautions against these consequences, which either slows the game, makes the players feel helpless when the precautions don’t work, or both. Also, most groups do more in a given game session than face an endless progression of locks and goblins.

So how can you vary your failures in ways that make a game more engaging?

First, Figure out Your “Menu of Options”

In theory, a really good, creative GM should be able to come up with complications and difficult choices on the fly. But they also say that about coming up with names, and

Remove Resources

Hit points are the easiest resource to remove, and this tactic works extremely well for lower-level or survival-oriented games where death is always close. At higher level or in more cinematic games though, taking away a handful of HP barely even registers to players, and the difference between your meat shield and your sorcerer can mean that a hit a fighter barely feels can kill another character outright.

Other options depend entirely on the game you’re playing. Games that use willpower, hit dice, luck points, spell slots, stunt points, or mana systems are good candidates for traps or situations that can offer your characters a choice. Simply say “you fail the roll, but realize that if you juice the system with some magic (or focus, or lean on your luck…) you can power through anyway.”

It’s important to remember that taking away resources that are usually under the player’s control (like spell slots) should always be a choice – give them the option to spend the resource and succeed. Other resources, like hit points, are usually considered to be under the GM’s control, and these can be removed without giving players a choice.

Create Challenges/Complications with a Choice

This is where the “the guard hears you” can come in. While “when in doubt, have a combat encounter” isn’t a bad choice for most sword-and-sorcery games, you can always mix things up a little by adding other kinds of complications. You may think you’re referring to your list more often than you should, but your players are unlikely to notice, or care. My list is below, feel free to modify or add your own and reuse liberally.

1. The characters are cut off from part of the map.
2. All skill rolls of a certain type (e.g. Deception) are penalized.
3. The characters lose access to a key resource or risk an additional combat encounter to gain it back.
4. The character succeeds too well, and must make skill checks to escape the consequences.
5. The character succeeds, but their movement is penalized.
6. The character succeeds, but all attacks are focused on them.
7. The character succeeds, but triggers a combat encounter.
8. The character succeeds, but a subsequent encounter or challenge becomes more difficult.
9. The character succeeds, but their advantage is counterbalanced by an advantage to their adversary.
10. The character succeeds, but must complete another, more difficult challenge to move on.

Add Conditions

Most games with a page count greater than a small town’s phone book have a list of conditions. Feel free to use them. Things like blinded, deafened, and exhausted almost always add to the game. But think about other options as well. Things like “stinky” after perforating the colon of a large monstrosity, or “loud” or “dazed.” Use other conditions as a template (or just shamelessly reskin one and call it something else). Make sure your players have an easy way of keeping track of how their rolls are being modified. If you’re playing in person I recommend spraying your players with patchouli oil if they get the “stinky” condition.

Some potential options here:

1. Stinky: your character smells to high heaven. If they can smell themselves, they are at disadvantage to all rolls, and stealth is impossible.
2. Dazed:  you really shouldn’t have eaten those mushrooms. Perception rolls are at advantage, but all other rolls are at disadvantage.
3. Captivated: whatever you just saw is fascinating. Maybe it’s magical, maybe it’s just really pretty. But either way, you cannot willingly move away from the thing until you’ve spent at least 1d6 combat rounds interacting with it.
4. Deluded: for the next scene, whenever your character attempts a roll, if they don’t succeed, they must re-attempt it until they do succeed, refusing to let anyone else try. Even if the roll no longer makes sense, they must prove that this is something they can do.

Another thing to think about is potentially (temporarily) removing access to a resource that the characters rely on. A broken sword or wand that’s on the fritz until time is taken to repair it (especially if your adventure is on a timer – which it should almost always be), can add some awesome tension.

Drive Toward DOOM

A DOOM CLOCK for your game.

Disaster! Woe! Think of what failure that doesn’t stop the plot looks like for the scenario the characters are in. Maybe they’re trying to retrieve critical information to stop a demonic incursion: they don’t get the information, but they do find out where the incursion is taking place in enough time to evacuate the populace. Maybe they’re trying to rescue a king – they fail, but learn what his final wishes were. Think failure with a way forward. Got it? Now we’re going to find a way to make that potentially happen.

Create a tracker from 1-8 (or so). Some failures will move the tracker up one toward The Bad Thing. Let your players decide whether they want to succeed at the cost of moving the “clock” toward abject failure for the first half of the “clock.” The first few choices are theirs. After that, the GM decides which failures move the clock forward.

Sometimes Failure is Just Failure

Let’s reverse course a little. The point of making some failures interesting is to keep the game from getting boring or predictable. Not every failure has to be a choice or change the landscape . Sometimes it’s okay to just let a failure be a failure.

This is particularly true for rolls that don’t especially move the plot forward. We all know the rolls I’m talking about: learning more about a monster, getting additional information from an NPC, or getting some additional intel about a potential encounter. In cases where your players are trying to build an advantage, it’s more than okay to just let them fail. The overall arc of the plot isn’t impacted, and it lets those rolls that you do make into difficult choices or consequences even more special and interesting.

Bonus: Map your Complications to Your Rolls

Now you have a “menu” of all the different ways that you can complicate a roll. You could just use the table at the end of this article to roll up consequences when a character fails and you want to make things interesting. That works just fine, especially when you need a consequence in a hurry. But if you really want to make this approach sing, try mapping out specific consequences to specific failures.

If you’re using a prewritten module, this can be as easy as picking a consequence and writing it in the margins of the adventure. If you’re running the adventure yourself, or are using a bare-bones outline, pull out some possibilities for consequences for each part of your outline – ask yourself “what kind of thing might happen in this area based on my list?” Then work backward from there.

Conclusion

All of this is just my approach. YMMV. Do you have some additional consequences you use in your game (or would like to?), sound off in the comments!

A Random Table For Your Convenience

Need a consequence in a hurry? Roll on this table. If the consequence doesn’t make sense, guess what? You can roll again.

In this think piece, I’ll be exploring “the line.” What’s the line? You know the line. That line in horror gaming that indicates how far is too far. Y’know? THAT line.

I’ve been in the horror gaming circuit for a few years now. I’ve seen that line swing like a pendulum depending on various factors. If you’ve written, run, or played horror games and ever pondered how far is too far… here are a few things worth considering.

Who Are Your Players?

Obvious, right? Who are the players? No matter the game, system, or genre, the people playing these games are real people, with real experiences, who may be carrying real trauma. Bear that fact in mind as you continue reading.

Are these players close friends that you know intimately? Or, are they complete strangers? There’s probably a difference between the horror material that you’d present to your home group compared to the material that you present at a gaming convention.

Why do you think that is? My take?

Each player character is being run by a real human being with complex feelings, emotions, and experiences. When you’re with known players, you have the advantage of intentionality in choosing which material would best suit your players (remember, even in horror gaming, the goal is enjoyment). For example, if you know that your friend Luke has a deep fear of snakes, you’ll probably avoid running a Call of Cthulhu Adventure featuring snakes or the snake-god, Yig. If your BFF Miranda just suffered a painful miscarriage, you’d probably avoid the miscarriage sections of Bluebeard’s Bride.

With complete strangers… that’s a whole new arena. Where do you draw the line? There are so many triggers, encounters, and circumstances to take into consideration. And all the while, you’re juggling these unknown items in the blind. It’s an unrealistic expectation to inquire, probe, and expect players to disclose their every trauma, insecurity, and fear during the 10 minutes it takes you to set up your game.

So, if you’re trying to find the line when it comes to players that you don’t know, I recommend setting everyone up for success by disclosing the game’s significant triggers or content warnings up front (prior to play).

“Hey guys, welcome to Rain, Rain, Go Away. Content warnings include harm to children, suicide and spiders.”

By taking this step, you give players the option to walk away, request a story revision, or to emotionally prepare themselves for your game.

I started including content warnings as a table handout prior to starting my games. Yes, sometimes the warnings spoil certain “shock and awe” parts of the horror. For example, one of my published horror scenarios includes veiled child abuse. The player characters never witness it, but they interview child abuse survivors and follow evidence that leads to this discovery. The overarching mystery is leveraged on unraveling these crimes against children. Total transparency, it’s challenging for me to show my hand prior to play, but I recognize its necessity.

And you know what? I’ve never once had someone complain. Not once. As I continue to offer content warnings prior to play, I further realize their value. Most players, I’ve found, appreciate knowing what’s included in your game.

Now, Creators and GMs? If you wrote/have a game that you’re ready to run, and the players aren’t on board with your content or line allocation, I 100% respect your decision not to revise, alter, or dial it back. If the entirety of your game is based on spiders and your entire table is arachnophobic, I (personally) don’t expect you to change your entire scenario to the lair of cobra king, or opossum den, or whatever animal everyone determines is safe. I respect the decision to maintain the creative integrity of your story. Those players just aren’t a good fit for that scenario. That’s fine.

As my momma says, “everythang ain’t for everybody.”

By disclosing those content warnings upfront, you open up the possibility to run something else or allow everyone else the opportunity to go and play something that they’ll enjoy.

Here’s your takeaway:

• When deciding where to draw that line in horror, consider your players. They may role play fictional characters, but those are real people driving these characters. Consider including content warnings prior to play. It’s an easy way to promote a safe environment and to set everyone up for success.

Where Is the Game Being Run?

Location, location, location. It’s not just a colorful phrase in the real estate market. Location should also be a major consideration on where you draw the line in horror.

Are you running at home? At your LGS? At a convention? Online? Let’s explore where to draw that line based on location.

If you’re running in a home environment, you probably enjoy some comfort liberties on how far you can push the line. It’s a controlled environment, right? If the players are cool with it, live your truth and push that envelope, right? Well, hold on friends… that’s not necessarily the case.

If you’re playing Bluebeard’s Bride, you may encounter sexual assault, suicide, rape, bulimia, or domestic violence. Does your host have a family member who is a rape survivor? They may not be at the table, but they may still be in the vicinity.  Be mindful of your environment, even when in the safety of your own home, or a friend’s home. That home has occupants who could suffer second degree burns from your table’s exploration of horror.

If you’re playing at your LGS, be mindful of your surroundings. I’ve had GMs specifically request private rooms or tables away from the general population for adult themed horror games. Hell, I’ve done it when I’m running Dread. Last thing I need is for Little Tommy to come running by and knocking over my Jenga tower mid-scene. The last thing you need is Little Tammy overhearing where that tentacle went.

If you’re playing online? Whew, honey. Look, it may feel like a home environment, because chances are… you’re sitting at home aaaaand gaming with your friends. Please be mindful and please be careful. If you’re not using a mic and we’re recounting a chestburster springing out of your ribcage, your kid in the other room watching Disney+ might have some trouble sleeping. If you’re not using video, you might not be able to see from my facial expressions that your line is pushing my lines.

Convention play? ALL of the above! In addition, check with your convention staff. They may have rules pertaining to the use of safety tools (see more below) or the types of content eligible for play.

Here’s your takeaway:

Be aware of your surroundings. Location matters. Don’t indirectly cause direct damage to a bystander because your line allocation wasn’t appropriate for the environment.

What System Are You Playing/Running?

Horror can pop up in any system or game. With that said, I was indoctrinated to believe that “if you’re sitting down to play a horror game, you know what you’re getting into, so take it or leave it.”

I believed that for a long time. I’ve grown out of that train of thought over the years. Horror isn’t a one size fits all type of genre. As outlined above, that line moves depending on several factors. Systems can definitely be a factor, but it’s not the end all be all of line allocation.

Can we agree that different systems have a different expectation of horror and where that line is?

For example, which system is going to splash you with the most amount of gratuitous blood? Call of Cthulhu, Kult: Divinity Lost, or Alien: The RPG?

Did an answer immediately spring to your mind? Cool. Unlearn that.

Which system are you most likely to encounter sexual assault? Bluebeard’s Bride, Cthulhu Dark, or Kult?

I know what you’re thinking. I thought it, too. Unlearn that.

Bluebeard’s Bride, for example, focuses on feminine horror. Anything and everything that may terrorize a woman is right there in the scenario. It’s universally understood as “part of the game.” If you’re playing Bluebeard’s Bride, expect to be sexually assaulted, have an abortion forced upon you, or be beaten for getting your makeup wrong. UNLEARN THAT! Sure, those experiences are included in the game, but I’ve played Bluebeard’s Bride multiple times. I can assure you, that line isn’t dictated by the system, it’s dictated by a myriad of other factors.

Call of Cthulhu has a different lore than Vaesen, Vaesen has a different tone than Kult, and Kult looks and feels a lot different than Alien: RPG. I hear you; I get it. A game system’s content typically draws different “line-drawing” variants of horror gamers. I know. I understand.

Here’s your takeaway!

• What I’m challenging you to unlearn is…Don’t hide behind a system. Just because a system focuses on feminine horror, doesn’t mean that it can’t be dialed back, altered, or revised. Just because a system includes sci-fi horror doesn’t mean that it won’t include feminine horror. Take into consider all of the items above when drawing your line in horror. Oh! And for the love the Old Ones, don’t ever tell me or anyone else that “the system made me do it.” No, boo. You did it. Don’t hide behind the system. You’re in control of that line.

Who Are You Writing For?

This is a big one for the creators out there! Who are you writing this content for? Are you writing it for your home group, convention play, your own personal amusement, or are you preparing it for publication? Sometimes the line in horror isn’t determined by you; it’s determined by the recipient for your content.

If you’re writing with the intent of publishing, you need to immediately stop, drop, shut it down open up…

No, seriously, stop and reach out to your publisher. You might kill kids all day in your home-brew campaign, but if you’re writing on another publisher’s license, you need to check their rules and guidelines before you go too far and lose a lot of time and energy.

Publishing companies have rules that dictate what they’ll allow to ride on their license. So, your line discernment choices may not matter if Free League Publishing or Chaosium says, “…we don’t do that here.” As a creator, it is 100% your responsibility to know where they draw the line.

Safety Tools

Ya’ll ready? I highly encourage the use of safety tools.

Now, those who have known me for years are probably reading this and saying, “What happened to Bridgett?!”

Why? Well, total transparency, I was adamant against the use safety tools for years. I had no respect for them, no use for them, and I thought the entire concept was ridiculous.

I’ve grown since then.

I’m not about to tell you how to live your life, run your games, nor tell your stories, but I will say this… the deployment of safety tools has significantly more benefits than drawbacks.

Safety tools (X-card, lines and veils, etc.), in my opinion, have a place at the gaming table. Why? If you’ve made it this far and can’t answer that question, I encourage you to reread everything above.

Real people play these games. Real human beings. They come to tables to play. Play. We’re here to play, which is indicative of having fun. Fun. I want everyone at my table to have fun. By offering safety tools, it’s my way of showing both humility and concern for the human beings at my table. Even if they don’t use them, that option is available to them.

Some horror gaming tables play by the, “you go low, we go lower” approach. The bottom of the horror barrel isn’t deep enough for them. They’re not satisfied until their fingers are pulling up dirt. That’s. Awesome. Play/Run horror in a way that’s fun for YOU and your table. If the safety tools are in play, and you don’t use them, that’s fine. What harm is there to make them available?

Are you looking to explore some safety tools? Monte Cook Games released a Consent in Gaming PDF that tackles some of the heavy lifting on how to “Tackle Mature Content with Confidence.” Best news? It’s free!

Author’s Note: We’ve discussed where the line is in horror and how it effects the players and the environment, but let us not forget about the GM. They have the ability to enact those safety measures as well. I’ve seen it happen and I absolutely LOVE how the table self-corrected out of mutual respect for the Keeper running our game. The GMs are people, too, guys.

In Conclusion

Where should you draw the line in horror? There’s no concrete answer here, but I think that we can agree that there are a few determining factors that should be taken into consideration.

I challenge you to think of the line with as much fluidity and mobility as possible. Maybe the line starts at a 10, drifts back to a 9, and eventually settles on a 5. Perhaps it hovers around a 2. Maybe it goes to a hard 11 and stays there.

There is no wrong way to run horror TTRPGs, but there ARE wrong ways to draw that line.

What other considerations should be taken into account when placing the line?

What have been your experiences been with the line?

Tell us in the comments!

Sometimes, ignoring advice isn’t the best approach.

Put away the ski mask, you absolute sociopath. This is about doing bad things in gaming, and what you do on your own time is between you and your defense attorney. If you’ve been gaming for any amount of time, you’re familiar with most of the old adages about how to make a good game: “show, don’t tell,” “don’t metagame.” “Don’t roll the dice by putting them in your mouth and spitting them onto the table.”

Those are all really good pieces of advice, for the record. But rules are made to be broken. This article is all about how to turn standard gaming advice on its head, and make a better game by doing so.

Tell, Don’t Show

Some time after World War II, it became an axiom of creative writing (and by extension its younger sibling, gaming), that an author should “show, don’t tell.” There’s some speculation that this was actually part of a broader movement to discourage broad social critiques in art, because communism.

Well, Comrade, buckle up. There’s a place for purple prose in gaming. It’s a very small place, no more than a sentence or two. Beyond that, you’re relying on your players to potentially navigate the kind of word count that would make James Joyce feel self-indulgent, picking out the bits and pieces they need out of a mess of adjectives and atmosphere.

So how do you tell in ways your players can use?

• Be concrete and specific. Beyond a very short setting of the scene, keep your descriptions to only those elements of a scene that characters can interact with.
• Connect the dots. When your players make, for instance, an investigation roll, tell them the meaning of what they’ve found before you give them the details. It’s fine to say that they find broken glass on the inside of a room near a broken window, but only tell them that after you’ve let them know that means that whatever it is that broke the window came from outside the room.
• Don’t be afraid to gamify it. If the characters encounter a room with an area effect, lead with the mechanical impact. Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan once called games a “foggy medium.” What he meant was that characters have a much more complete view of the world than a player ever will. If a room is so hot that it does damage when a character enters it, the character’s whole body will warn them almost before they register “heat.” They will have a reflexive understanding of what information means based on a whole lifetime of experience, and players can only imitate that understanding through mechanics. So give them those mechanics, clearly, unambiguously, and most importantly, first.

Metagaming

Metagaming is definitely a two-edged sword. There’s a world of difference between “I’ve played this scenario before and I know this room is trapped,” and “I don’t trust the way the GM said ‘you don’t see anything.’” The former is just bad gaming, and any player who does that should feel bad about it. The latter is, and I’m giving away a big GM secret here, the whole reason the GM said it that way.

Some of the best games I’ve ever run or played in have unabashedly used metagaming to tell a better story. This can take the form of “I’m an experienced adventurer, so this isn’t my first rodeo,” or a fully-genre-savvy modern character who’s seen a movie or two.

Metagaming can build tension in a way that pretending to be completely ignorant of the setting, genre, and world you’re playing in just can’t. Your players will have expectations and assumptions, whether you let them admit it or not. Your choices are to either pretend this is the first time anyone’s heard the word “wizard,” or to run with it and tell your players that metagaming is, in a way, encouraged. So how do you metagame right?

• Create assumptions, not certainties. “This dragon is red, so I probably shouldn’t use fire” is actually a completely reasonable conclusion to reach in most worlds. Whether it actually works out that way is up to the GM.
• Be explicit when you’re metagaming. If you’re drawing a conclusion based on your own experience with a world, it’s okay to say “look, I think my character has been exposed to enough to think this.” When you say it that way, it invites the group to think about what their characters might think, rather than assuming no one knows anything. If you keep it to yourself, you’re asking to be disappointed. Also, you never know–maybe that assumption you’re making is something the GM didn’t think of, and it will make the game better. You can only find out if you say something.
• GMs: just let it roll sometimes. It’s very tempting, especially if you view your role as GM as adversarial, to punish players for thinking out of the box. If a player makes an assumption and acts on that assumption, you have absolute power, and you can change things on the fly to make that assumption incorrect. “Well, sure the dragon is red, but I’ve decided it’s got a skin condition, and it’s actually invulnerable to ice!” Don’t–and I can’t emphasize this enough–do that. You’re a GM. You have absolute power. If your only goal is to just kill the PCs, drop a cow from space on them and be done with it. Then stop GMing, because you’re coming from the wrong place. If an assumption is a good one, consider going in the opposite direction. “Well, this thing is made of dry straw, so it would make sense that it’s vulnerable to fire, even though the stat block doesn’t say so” is a great way to reward players for thinking creatively.

Rules Lawyering

By my conservative estimate, there are eleventy gajillion pages of Dungeons and [redacted] content out there, with thousands of rules that interact with each other in weird, nitpicky ways. The same is true of any number of other systems. On the one hand, that’s part of the fun. Tweaking rules and seeing how they change the game is part of what makes choices meaningful, and gives the kind of uncertainty that keeps a game exciting.

But, uh. That’s a lot of rules, and as a GM, you’re already keeping track of a lot more than the average player is. That means, even if you don’t have that one player who knows the game inside and out, your players can, and often should be, more familiar with the rules that apply to them than you are. You can either pretend that you’re the only available source of rulings, or use that knowledge to make a better game. So let your players rules lawyer it up, with the following guidelines:

• Always reward players for rules mastery. If the player points out a rule that is to their benefit or the benefit of the group, that ruling is reward enough. If the player points out a rule that is to the detriment of the party, reward the player who pointed it out with an in-game resource like inspiration. Optionally, if they pointed out a rule that is to the detriment of the other player, reward that player, too.
• Remember that the GM is the final arbiter, but the rules still exist. This is a bit of a judgment call. Sometimes, a rule a player finds will completely derail an entire session–in those cases, a GM is completely within their rights to override that rule. But–and this is important–the players should not come away from that empty-handed. If the players find a clever rule that lets them bypass a challenging room, let them bypass the room. If they find a rule that lets them bypass an entire dungeon, put something in the dungeon they still need, but give them a powerful advantage when they go in anyway. This is a balancing act, and I’m not going to pretend it’s anything else, but as long as you keep “always reward the players” in mind, it should go fine.

Player Secrets

There are two kinds of secrets: character secrets and player secrets.

• Character secrets are things that one or more characters might know, but the others don’t. Key to this though, is that the other players know those secrets. Character secrets should always be discussed with the group, and if everyone’s on board, they can provide some great roleplaying moments.
• Player secrets are things that one or more characters know and others don’t, and that the other players don’t know. Like character secrets, they can provide some amazing scenes, but unlike character secrets, they have the potential to ruin an entire game.

So how do you make player secrets fun for the whole group?

• Avoid double-crosses unless you know for a fact (and have cleared with the group beforehand) the possibility that one of the characters will potentially betray the others. Of course, at that point, you’re halfway to having a character secret anyway. It’s been my experience that characters working against the group makes the whole game less fun for everyone involved. Honestly, I just avoid these entirely.
• Make the player secret something that adds to the whole group’s play. If a player is secretly a demigod or runaway royalty, when you reveal it to the party, do so in a way that makes things easier or more awesome for the whole group. Maybe a momentary flash of divinity gives the whole group the benefit of a night’s rest, or a guard that would have otherwise arrested the players looks the other way when she recognizes her beloved liege-in-exile. The point is that the reveal should always be a positive for the group to avoid resentment.

Roll-Play, Don’t Role-Play

A very smart friend of mine once said “RPGs can be anything from improv theater to chess.” If your group tends more toward the former, using rules only sparingly (if at all), that’s great, but odds are you aren’t reading gaming advice if so. As always, if it’s working, don’t break it.

With that said, there are a few problems with the “tell a story and don’t worry about the system” approach.

• It rewards louder or more socially adept players. As a friend of mine recently said “social engineering is my superpower.” Quieter or less creative players, without the crutch of a system, just don’t have the ability to engage as fully.
• On the other hand, a GM who is particularly aware of someone who has the tendency to suck all the oxygen out of a scene may be too on guard against a player who always has the clever solutions, and might develop a habit of leading with “no” for that player, which can quickly sap anyone’s enthusiasm and enjoyment.
• It lends itself to foregone conclusions. Game mechanics add uncertainty and resource depletion to stories. Without these, games can quickly become simply a recitation of pre-planned plot points that everyone knows are going to end a certain way.

So how do you keep the dice without turning a game into Yahtzee, but with plot?

• Start with the roll, and let the roleplay happen afterward. The same players who usually operate with an advantage will usually be more than happy to take any excuse to be either awesome or awful, as the dice dictate.
• Call for rolls whenever there’s uncertainty. I’m not talking about making players roll to walk across a room, but don’t be afraid to ask yourself “how could this go wrong?” and then make players roll to avoid it. This doesn’t have to lead to failure (in fact, it usually shouldn’t), but keeping a list of complications on hand can make even otherwise non-combat scenes feel more like a game than a “listen to X talk for 30 minutes.” The Cypher system does a great job of this with its “intrusions” mechanic.

Don’t Put the Dice Into Your Mouth

• Actually? Just don’t do that. It’s gross.

Everyone loves to ignore advice (people are like that). What gaming advice do you like to turn on its head? Sound off in the comments or on the social media platform of your choice. Gimme that sweet, sweet engagement and help me avoid the Stew.

Big thanks to Will M. and Elena for their ideas and input on this one.

If you’ve written more than a sentence about this castle, it’s probably too much.

I’m currently running not one, but two experimental campaigns on weekends in Roll20; the experimental question is “how little worldbuilding can I get away with?” And the answer, it turns out, is very little.

I started with this map from DeviantArt, made four gods, one quest-giver NPC, an evil empire, and set the players loose – adding a few details based on backstories that the characters thought were exciting. Surprisingly, it turns out that was more than enough to create a satisfying campaign for ten total players. It was like the spaghetti of RPG worldbuilding: there’s enough for everyone to feel full, and I didn’t have to do too much cooking. And like spaghetti, even when the results are under-seasoned, poorly-prepared (and often a little too salty), either my guests are too polite to complain, or they bring enough of their own side dishes to both make the whole meal fun and to stretch this analogy well beyond the boundaries of usefulness.

Just…take a look at that map (and everything else the artist has on their page–they’re super talented). Absolutely nothing requires explanation (or remembering that explanation) because it’s all right there. Looking at the map, my players have elected, with no exposition dumps, to visit the Stones of Prophecy, Rajashi, and Elvenhome, because the things they will find there speak for themselves. Even the most outrageous elements (like “the exotic city”–oof that’s a whole other article) can be explained as diegetic elements of the characters’ understanding of the world, while also allowing you to show off fancy words like “diegetic.”

There are a lot of reasons why relying on cliché can help do the heavy lifting for you, while making the game less burdensome for the players as well.

You are Not a Novelist (Here, at Least).

Maybe the most common problem I see new GMs run into is the desire to make a fully-fleshed out world with memorable characters, scenes and locations that players can interact with in detailed, pre-determined ways.

Players don’t do that. They try to punch your quest-giver, marry your Big Bad Villain, and demand the full life story of the nameless goblin urchin selling them apples in the small town named “Lucksburg” because you couldn’t think of anything better.

And you know what? That’s the game. That’s being a GM. You get maybe a sentence of heavy-handed narration before your players’ eyes glaze over. Scenes don’t happen in order (or at all), and that critical twist you spent hours setting up and preparing was built on a house of cards.

Your Players Want to Leave Their Own Stamp on the World

Another way that being a GM is different from being a novelist is that the characters themselves have agency–they want to press against the world you’ve built and see it change because of what they’ve done. This is really hard to do if you’re already invested in the world you’ve put hours of effort into, especially if the characters swing big. The more effort you put into your world being complete, the less space there is for your characters to complete it.

Well-worn clichés, like well-worn t-shirts, are full of holes and history. Places where they’ve been worn differently. Sometimes there are stains. But they provide a basis of familiarity for characters to latch onto while still leaving enough room for them to throw in the ideas that set their imagination on fire.

All of this is really vague, so let me bring it back down to a concrete example.

You’ve created a world with a whole kingdom for the players to occupy. You’ve mapped out all the duchies, baronies, counties, and marches. You’ve got the royal lineage dating back three centuries, and all the wars, alliances, and coats of arms to go with them. You know that the only heir to the kingdom is secretly in love with his page, and that he’s preparing to run away from an arranged marriage to live his life as a traveling minstrel (huge tracts of land optional).

Your setting book lands on the table with a resounding thump, and you ask your players what their character concepts are. One of those players says they want to play the heir to the kingdom–their concept is a royal paladin who feels burdened by the enormous responsibility she’s getting ready to shoulder, and feels like she needs to spend some time righting wrongs among the people to understand what’s truly at stake.

Oops. At this point, you have two options, and neither of them are good.

1. Tell the player to pick another concept because that doesn’t fit in your setting. Congratulations, you’ve whizzed in a player’s Cheerios, and you’re never getting that enthusiasm back.
2. Make the setting fit this new concept. Of course, you’ll have to rework the primary conflict, but if you’re creative and quick you can work with this. But now you have a lot of exposition to dump on that poor player if they’re going to be able to engage the conflict you’ve built without wasting all of your effort.

Option 2 sounds like a good idea, until you realize:

Remembering Stuff is Hard (and Players Won’t do it Anyway)

People can only remember about 7 things they don’t already know at once. This is your attention budget; spend it wisely. If you have a whole book of homebrew nations, gods, factions, NPCs, custom classes, laws, species and languages, you’re already attentionally bankrupt before your players even hit the table.

It may not seem like that big of a deal from your perspective, because you know all of the details in and out, but here’s the thing: you already know it. Lovingly, word by word, twist by twist, unpronounceable name by unpronounceable name, you’ve already “paid” for all of this complexity, and your players haven’t. If they want to play in your world, they have to pass what one friend of mine calls “the Citizenship Test,” and that is even less fun than it sounds.

The easiest way around this is to use things the players already know. Using an established setting is a great way to do this–there’s a reason why licensed properties with passive media (like movies and TV shows) are so popular: they create whole worlds that thousands or millions of people are intimately familiar with and love right off the bat. Because the world information is leavened with plots, memorable characters, and story arcs, learning all of this information doesn’t feel like work.

This is the default approach of the fifth edition of The Game That Shall Not Be Named.

Here’s the thing though: the more material a world has, the more potential for overload you get. The Forgotten Realms has (according to my quick Wikipedia research) 291 novels of wildly varying quality; 173 comics, graphic novels and anthologies; 89 game supplements; and 74 (ish) video games. At this point, those realms are only “forgotten” because only a PhD in comparative RPG settings with a focus on R.A. Salvatore can remember all of that.

If players aren’t already familiar with all of the information you’re bringing to bear, they’re going to drown in detail, and quickly. Of course, it’s easy to say “just take the stuff you’re planning on using and leave the rest,” but there are two major problems with this approach.

1. You’ve got to have a baseline understanding to know what you’re pulling out. I love the supplement books for 5e. I truly do (my checkbook weeps), but even for someone who’s consumed a big chunk of the media referenced above, it’s a lot to understand, and there are still a lot of assumptions baked into even the most basic starting point. Wizards, if you’re reading this: if you put out a short supplement like “Forgotten Realms: the Least you Need to Know,” new GMs everywhere would love you, or at least I would.
2. Even if you’ve got a good handle on what you’re going to use, at least one of your players is–guaranteed–going to know more or less than you. This is true of any property, not just ones with more canonical literature than some whole religions. Again, it’s tempting to say “this is my world, so it only has what I know,” but that’s punishing to your players who know more than you, and they’re going to have as hard a time adjusting their view of the world to what you’ve changed as you’ve had trying to accommodate them.

You know what doesn’t have all of these problems? Cliché. “This is an elven forest city” requires exactly zero processing for anyone with any mainstream media exposure whatsoever. At this point, “The Tower of Evil” is basically as well known as Washington, D.C., and frequently for the same reasons. Throw a few well-worn tropes together, and you’ve got enough world for your players to run around in. No citizenship test required.

Using Cliché Keeps You Out of the Lazy Sandbox

“If you want to bake an apple pie from scratch, first, you must first create the universe” makes a really great nerd anthem, but is terrible advice for RPGs. As a GM it is incredibly satisfying to set up enormous overarching conflicts that span continents and planes of existence. “The Empire of Evilomor has nearly crushed the small, plucky Protagonistia Kingdom” is an okay backdrop for a game, but doesn’t provide much more of a place for the characters to interact than a detailed description of the weather.

I cannot count the number of “sandbox” games I’ve seen grind to a halt without ever really taking off because the GM spent all of their energy creating dozens of pages of setting without putting any accessible conflict in it. It’s me. I’m the GM that happened to.

The characters may have an understanding of the overall geopolitical or religious background (if you’ve “budgeted” for it), but gameplay happens as a series of roleplaying moments, resource spends, and rolls. Those moments take place within challenges and obstacles, which take place within scenes.

If I’m being completely honest, it’s way more fun to make the overarching conflicts than it is to balance an encounter, and that’s why it’s dangerous. There are only so many hours you have available for game prep, and the more time you spend putting together the world (rather than a mishmash of tropes), the less time you’re spending on things that the players can actually do. Put another way: worldbuilding can be fun for the GM, but encounter-building is what makes things fun for the players. Make sure you’re creating a world your players can interact with, not a lecture on how creative you are.

The advantage of using well-worn clichés with this approach is that you can take a “bottom-up” approach to game prep. You can start with exciting combat encounters, cool maps, puzzles, or unique environmental challenges, then figure out how to slot them into a world that’s more possibility than an exposition dump.

Conclusion:

I’ve already used too many words, so I’ll stop here. What do you think? Are you inspired to use guilt-free clichés in your game now?

Last Survival – Art by Filip Storch – Licensed for the Dreamchaser RPG

Thirty minutes into the session, the moment we’ve all been waiting for, our unlikely heroes finally catch up to the malicious war band that ransacked their village. In the events of a single hour, our characters lives were forever changed by the savage pillaging for their war effort. They didn’t just steal gold and weapons from the village. They stole the lives of the people our characters cared for most. They may as well have stolen our characters’ lives as well. It was never going to be the same for them ever again.  

One bad die roll into our party’s fateful clash with their campaign’s most dire enemy and a player character is near death. A fate arguably worse than death at the table, the player character is now incapacitated and unable to act unless they “push” themself. Unfortunately, this isn’t a game with magical healing and we’re just thirty minutes into the game session at the start of a big scene.

How do you keep that player engaged at the table when they are resigned to their current fate? When they are resigned to the notion of “What CAN I do?” or “I’ll probably fail with a -1 die penalty to all my rolls.”

Rules as Written

I run a lot of different RPGs. So, I’m inclined to follow the rules as a GM and to see where the system takes us. I want to know what experiences the mechanics bring out in play. It isn’t like me to play with the same group very often, so I can’t always rely on pegging my players for their play styles. Whether I’m running games at conventions or online, I’m always catering to a large swath of different players that rotate through. As a game designer, I like the looks or insights I can take away from the variety of players I get to see at the table.

I don’t know about you, but I have a handful of horror stories at the table that stem from debilitating conditions. Depending on the game, this could be called harm, damage, trauma, stress, fatigue–you get the picture! Many games penalize player characters for getting hit, for rolling bad, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (as if the GM had no say in that). While I never miss hit points in games (they can seem so inconsequential, especially as they rise and rise), I’ve found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place as a GM. How do you help a player get enough spotlight at the table when their character is heavily restricted by penalties like -3 dice (out of 4)? You know, the kind of modifiers that render player characters null, their actions void.

Character death is almost easier. The player isn’t in such a difficult bind to figure out how they can contribute–how they can play.

These are the one-size-fits-all moments when a game system kind of betrays you (as written). It’s when the system, like some kind of Master to their pupil,  hands over the reins to the GM and says, you deal with it. These moments need a fine touch, a skillful storyteller’s hand, and some preternatural judgment. In other words, they are easy to fumble.

Once you know what this looks like at the table, you can see it coming. Not from a mile away, but just before it happens. At that point, you can’t necessarily avoid it unless you fudge the rules, but you do have enough time to make the “sacrifice” shine at the table. You can encourage the player to soak up the moment and roleplay the heck out of it. You can slow things down in the narrative and help to prompt the player to make the most of the moment. But, what then?

Let’s call the player Katy. I want Katy to be involved. I want them to act. Instead, they don’t know what to do. They stare at their sheet and see that any action they take is likely to fail due to the harsh penalties stacked against them. They resign their character to give up and fight again another day. But, the group still has so much to do–and the show must go on!

In theory, I love the idea of debilitating conditions. Player characters need to be threatened and put in difficult situations. Debilitating conditions remind players that their characters are mortal. They add risk. They force players to problem solve–to act. Until they don’t.

The rules are here for you (GM), they are a tool, not law. Rule Zero, you see it in the beginning of many RPGs tucked in the “What is Roleplaying” section. As a GM learning new games, I feel like you have got to try out the rules first, right? Step in the mud and realize what to do better next time. But, I hate apologizing at the end of a game session for how I let the game rules dictate the amount of time a player actually got to play. You did something cool, you took a chance, and now you don’t get to play unless I retcon or fudge the rules in front of the players (removing an element of risk from play).

So, what do I do?

• Do I break the rules of healing and recovery?
• Do I rewind the damage once I realize the player won’t act?
• Do I cheat the players invested in an epic scene by quickly bringing it to a close?

What do you do when the game has decided their character has done enough…

Voices of Reason – Art by Pui Che – Commissioned for the Dreamchaser RPG

I have a friend that once told me that you have to pace each session so that truly dangerous moments only happen towards the end. I remember thinking, that is ridiculous! Why should every meeting start slow? Does that mean that GMs need to hold their players back from the most dire moments, too? Should I pepper in obstacles to pace play in fear of a bad roll?  Not to mention, I hate being predictable! How long will it take for my players to catch on?

Now, I’m not so sure. Running a lot of one shots, I generally find myself following some sort of three act structure. Is that so different? I guess it would only be weird when used for subsequent sessions, when players are already in the thick of the action. Are you like me, always reaching for a cliffhanger ending?  If it has teeth, have you already set yourself up to fail? Clearly, I’m still working through this.

Going Forward

Setting clear expectations: At critical moments, take the time to explain to players what is on the line for them. We often do this with player characters but we don’t always step back to talk about how this could affect the player themself–how it could affect Katy.

The best advice? You should probably hold back any penalty that is going to totally debilitate a player unless the moment is right. Blind for a round? That’s ok. -2 modifier to hit? No big deal. -4d to all rolls (out of 5)? You may as well kill the character–or at least knock them out. Save the crushing blows for when the time is right, in the story and at the table.

How do you avoid players removing their character from the game?

How do you encourage a player to play when their character cannot fight (flashbacks, moral support)?

Do you have tricks for how you pace play to keep your players safe?

It’s only a Gamenstein if it’s from the Gamenstein region of your FLGS. Otherwise it’s just sparkling overdone joke.

Any given game that you pick up off a shelf (or grab from itch.io) is an experience, geared toward creating a specific type of story: a fantasy skirmish simulator, a Jane-Austenesque adventure in manners, or living life as a cozy lesbian snake to name just a few. But sometimes you want to mix and match a little, adding part of what you love in one game to another game, which was the topic of Gnomecast 107.

Two things to keep in mind when adding parts of one game to another game:

1. Be sure you’re still giving your players what they signed up for. Just because you’re interested in devoting a lot of attention to the ways in which languages rise and die doesn’t mean your players necessarily are. Get everyone on board before including these (or any) additional mechanics into your game, rather than springing it on them like some sort of bait-and-switch turducken with dice.
2. Be willing to walk away if it doesn’t work. You’re not a professional game designer (probably), and no one expects you to thoroughly playtest every fevered idea that runs through your brain before you flop it onto the table, but the natural consequence of playing fast and loose with complex systems is that sometimes things fail. When failure happens, be prepared to walk away.

The examples in this article (and part 2 coming up) are geared toward the Fifth Edition of the Game That No One Names for Weird Contractual Reasons, simply because it’s the most popular game out there. However, game mechanics are ideas plus decisions plus uncertainty, and all of these ideas can work equally well in any game, using that game’s preferred mechanism for inserting excitement (die rolls, cards, paper rock scissors, leg wrestling).

Note that I name a bunch of other games in this list, all of which do a much, much better job of their core idea than anything you can simply shoehorn into another game. This is both because they’re written by actual game designers rather than a pretentious hobbyist, and because they’re whole freaking games devoted to an experience.

If you really, really want a mystery game, play GUMSHOE. But if you want to play [game name redacted] with some mystery elements, graft away. Also, because I want to be respectful of the brilliant intellectual property of all the games involved here (as well as the word count of this article), I use only the broadest brushes to include this stuff rather than reproducing specific mechanics. If any of this seems interesting, absolutely get the games I’m referencing here. I’m only including the best of the best in this list, and all of these games are amazing.

Idea 1: Tactical Relationships

Sorry, Mandy, but by the third time we watched Brokeback Mountain together, I think we both knew what was going on.

When I say “tactical relationships,” I’m not talking about that person you dated for three months hoping your parents would finally approve. I mean relationships between PCs. Many, maybe most, games have these as a matter of course, but if you’re interested in having more “game” in your role-playing game, while still cramming in relationships with all the fervid devotion of a Chuck Tingle novel, this is the approach for you.

At its simplest, this is a matter of making the relationships between characters matter on a tactical level–trying to reproduce that moment when the hero flings themselves into the path of the attack that would have killed their friend.

Blue Rose does a great job of this with its use of relationship stunts, and the Cypher System incorporates snippets of world-building quirks into the ways powers or backgrounds work within a group. Finally, Fiasco has the brilliant idea of rolling dice and “buying” relationships between characters based on how the dice come up.

Note that many of these relationship abilities are relatively powerful (effectively imitating minor feats): that’s deliberate. The more your players use these abilities, the more they are reminded of the bonds that draw them together, which creates more roleplaying opportunities.

Step 1: Roll a number of ten-sided dice equal to the number of players you have +1.

Step 2: Going in order from quietest player to loudest player (or whatever order you want to use), have each player choose one a relationship corresponding with one of the remaining dice, as well as who that relationship applies to. Remove the result of that die roll from the “pool” so that the next player has one fewer relationship to choose from.

1. Make sure the other player is okay with this relationship. If no one is comfortable with the available options, reroll all the remaining dice until people are cool with the results.
2. Note that each of these relationships implies another “half” to the relationship. While both parts of the relationship are “true” from a story perspective, unless the other player chooses the corresponding relationship (e.g. “older sibling/younger sibling”), only the player who chose the relationship has access to the mechanical effect.

Idea 2: Mysteries.

Go-Go-Gadget Shameless Self Promotion!

Content Warning: these examples get a little grisly.

Mysteries are great, and many published RPG adventures include some element of whodunnit without any additional system work. That can work, but the GUMSHOE system is a masterclass in how to make a game focusing on this element of stories while still being fun. If you want to see one way of pulling all of this together into a single ready-to-go adventure, see my previous article, “Death in a Smoky Room”.

The first and easiest thing to pull in from GUMSHOE is also probably its most defining feature: the characters find clues. They don’t roll to find clues, and they don’t have to name specific objects in a crime scene to look for them if they name the proper skill. They just find stuff. The uncertainty (and plot!) comes in interpreting those clues.

First: during game prep, determine a set of clues that the characters can find, and the skills required to find them.

If the character has proficiency in the required skill, they find this clue, provided they name the skill (“I’d like to search with Investigation”). Generally three are enough, though coming up with a clue for additional skills is never a bad idea. The more detailed and atmospheric you can make these clues, the better. Again, GUMSHOE games are absolutely filled to the brim with examples (in particular, Double Tap for Night’s Black Agents). It’s not a bad idea to just keep a running list of clues you might want to use sometime. Examples:

1. [Investigation] Though the window in the room is broken, and previous investigators assumed it’s because the arrow that killed the victim came from outside the room, shards of glass and recent footprints you find in the rosebushes indicate that something inside the room was thrown outside to someone waiting nearby. Whoever did this was coming from inside the manor.
2. [Medicine]: there is a lot of blood in this room, but not enough for the victim to have died from blood loss. Closer inspection of the body reveals bruising around the neck with a clear imprint from a necklace (now missing). The body was clearly slashed after being strangled, but because the blood was no longer pumping, there was less than a discerning investigator would expect.
3. [Animal Handling]: The body has clearly been chewed on by some sort of animal, and previous investigators have taken this to be a cut-and-dried case of an animal attack. However, a player with experience with animal behavior will notice that while there are teeth and claw marks on the belly, the eyes and tongue appear to be plucked out without damage to the surrounding tissue. Further, while the body’s been picked over, there are large chunks of flesh remaining. This wasn’t the work of predators: this was scavengers working on a body that was already deceased.

Second: rolling the dice, because everything is more fun with dice.

Now that the players have determined what skills they are using to investigate, and have gotten the basic clues, a successful die roll can give additional details.

1. [Investigation] an imprint in the ground by the footprints indicates that whatever was thrown out of the window was initially dropped by the catcher. The item was surprisingly heavy, but small, and you can reproduce the broad shape of it based on the imprint, possibly even identifying what’s missing from the room based on that.
2. [Medicine]: The necklace used for strangulation was some kind of chain–verdigris on the bruising and the size of the imprint at the front indicates that whatever the necklace was, it wasn’t made of expensive materials, and whatever was on the front of it was heavy and awkwardly shaped–unusual for a victim this wealthy. Some kind of magical amulet, maybe?
3. [Animal Handling]: The teeth and claw marks on the victim’s belly weren’t, in fact, made by teeth or claws–the spacing and depth are too regular, and there isn’t enough blood surrounding the wound. Someone was trying hard to make this look like a bear attack. Except bears haven’t been seen in this area for decades. This was done by someone unfamiliar with the region.

If you like these game ideas, be sure to check back on February 3^rd for Bride of Gamenstein, part II of this series. Also, if you have any feedback or thoughts on any of these systems, please feel free to let us know in the comments, or on social media!