I’ve been mulling over the follow-up to my article On Dragons, Dungeons, and Dinner Parties for [ checks notes ] officially too long, but just this last week, I remembered a saying we used to have when I worked in theater arts: “The audience isn’t just coming for the show; they’re also coming for the experience.”

These words guided every decision we made, from the ticketing process to the music that played in the lobby to the snacks we served at concessions. It was all part of the experience, which brought me back to the idea of how to successfully host an online game experience.

How do we craft a good experience for our players when they’re just voices in our ears and videos on our screens?

There are plenty of articles and how-to videos out there about the technical skills you need to run a game online, but for this article, I want to talk about the charisma-based skill challenges we face when our campaigns are digital—the soft skills, the social stuff.

THE FIRST THREE THINGS YOU NEED

Whether you’re using Discord, Slack, or (gods forbid) Microsoft Teams, you will need some way to communicate with the people you’re playing with. That part’s obvious.

What isn’t so obvious is how you organize the chats. Plural.

I suggest a minimum of three different chat channels:

• An out of character channel where you can schedule sessions, socialize, and generally just, you know, chat.
• An in-character channel where players can send each other messages from their characters through sending spells, text messages if it’s a modern or future setting, or letters and missives if it’s a more fantasy-based setting.
• A rules-only channel where you can discuss the fiddly bits of the system and keep track of house rules.

Your Out of Character channel will likely see the most use, and I encourage you to keep that channel active between sessions. Share fun links or funny memes. Post gifs that remind you of what the characters did (the “Adam West Batman with a Bomb” gif gets a lot of use in our channels, as does the “Concern compilation” gif). Talk about your day. Use it like you’d use any social group chat.

TTRPGs are about having fun with your friends, so use the out-of-character channel to have fun with them.

Keeping the channel active between sessions means your players will get in the habit of checking it. This makes them more likely to see your game-relevant posts and keeps the game top-of-mind. It’s a great way to foster a healthy table and a flourishing campaign.

TABLE CHATTER

Healthy table chatter during a session is part of the game. When you’re sitting at an actual table, it’s easy enough for folks to talk through their moves during someone else’s turn, discuss the plot during someone else’s scene, or maybe even complain about their boss or something else non-game related if they need to vent.

The problem with table chatter in an online game is that, usually, everyone’s in the same voice channel at roughly the same volume, so it’s much easier to interrupt the session. Try relegating the cross-talk to the text channel.

My groups have taken to trading relevant GIFs back and forth as a kind of running peanut gallery when we don’t have the spotlight. It adds humor and levity to serious or tense scenes and keeps people engaged and – in a way – participating in what’s going on, even if their characters aren’t there.

THE RULES CHANNEL

When looking up a rule will take longer than the scene can sustain, good GM’s break out the tried and true “We’ll do it this way for now and clarify it for the future later.”

The rules channel? It’s the perfect place to do that “later” work. Not only will it give the more rules-minded people a place to discuss their interpretations, but it also acts as a running repository for the eventual rulings and a great place to drop house rules.

OPENING AND CLOSING RITUALS

An online chat space can seem…amorphous. It’s easy to get lost in a sea of notifications from other apps, pets begging for attention, or kids who don’t understand that Mommy needs her shiny math rock time right now. Rituals are one way we can help turn that amorphous, unformed space into a realm of wonder and imagination.

Whenever my players log into our Virtual Table Top, they see the same image: a kind of title screen with the name of the campaign and pictures of their characters. In technical terms, it’s just a gridless map in the VTT, but psychologically it has the same effect as a video game loading screen.

Likewise, I always open my games with the same phrase (borrowed from something Taliesin Jaffe once said on a podcast): “Grab a seat and a snack and attend carefully as we begin.”

Having a small ritual like this grounds players in the fictional reality we’re about to weave together.

I also end every session with Stars and Wishes. Not only is this a great way to get a glimpse into what your players want to see in future sessions, but it also gives them a chance to reminisce over the most recent session, and it’s a great way to signal that we’re done now.

(Rituals like this work great for in-person games, too, by the way.)

FREQUENT CHECK-INS

It goes without saying, but it’s kinda hard to read body language on a voice call. Even if your group uses video, it’s not easy to get a read on people if they’re not in the same room as you are. It’s not impossible, though. We all get used to the cadence and flow of conversations with our friends, and human brains are great at spotting both patterns and anomalies in those patterns.

You’ll notice changes in your friends’ usual tones, when the talkative one goes quiet, and when the amiable one gets curt. However, it’s almost impossible to know why precisely the vibe has changed. Maybe your talkative friend has gone quiet because she doesn’t like the way the scene is going, or maybe her cat pulled her mic cable out of her computer.

For this reason, it’s vitally important to check in with your players frequently, even if you think everything’s going great. Make a habit of checking in after breaks and at the end of sessions.

Your VTT should have plugins for other safety mechanics like the X card, and Demiplane has even created a new app that folks can use to anonymously alert their GM to aspects of the scenes that are making them uncomfortable.

Hell, I’ve even started doing what I like to call “Re-Session Zeros” after big milestone moments in the campaign. These out-of-character-only sessions give me a chance to make sure everyone’s still on board with the way the story’s been developing and give us all a chance to course-correct if we need to.

RAISE YOUR HAND

Speaking of making sure voices are heard: If you’ve got quiet players or players that don’t like to interrupt, creating a way for them to “raise their hand” when they want to interject is important. Personally, I keep a list of the PCs and put tick marks near their names as they take the spotlight. This helps me, as the GM, make sure everyone gets scenes and attention, but you could also institute a player-side mechanic depending on the chat program/VTT you’re using.

Roll20, for example, changes your character portrait based with a drop down menu. You could color code the portraits for folks who want to interject or take the spotlight. Zoom literally has a “raise hand” option.

TIME AND SPACE

Lastly, depending on your group, you’ll need patience in terms of timing and fictional spatial awareness. Just like during in-person games, one player may want a minute-by-minute accounting of their character’s actions while another might take a more, let’s say, narrative view on time, rushing through hours or maybe even days worth of tasks in a few descriptive sentences.

When you’re all together at a table, it’s easier to juggle the time stream, but even more, when you’re playing online, you need to make sure everyone else is aware of where and when their characters are. Consider taking a queue from video games and creating “overworld” maps to show characters’ general locations during downtime.

THE JOURNEY

This list isn’t exhaustive, obviously, and not every group will need every bit of advice given above, but even if you throw out all of the above, remember this one rule of thumb, and you won’t go wrong:

If you put as much care into all of the things surrounding your game as you do into preparing the actual game itself, then you’ll craft a wonderful experience.

After all, experience is more than the points that get handed out at the of the session. Experience is literally the friendships we make along the way.

I love a good front. Of all the tools to come out of Powered by the Apocalypse games, fronts are probably one of my favorites. (Second only to clocks, really.) Because fronts allow me to keep track of everything from the arrival of the catastrophic doomsday event to the minor rival NPC’s petty revenge plot, and they give me the tools I need to not only figure out what the bad guys are up to but also how they’re going about their nefarious deeds.

(Confession: Even though I’ve read a bunch of Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games, I’ve only ever run a single session of one (the original version of Dream Askew), and I’m pretty sure I ran it completely bass-ackwards. And yet my love of fronts endures.)

You know what else I love? Putting my PCs in positions of power. I love foisting eldritch artifacts or ancient magics onto their shoulders. I take glee in giving them influence within an important organization and seeing what they’ll do. It allows me to ask tough questions about how and when they use their great power responsibly (thanks, Uncle Ben). Plus, it gives my players the power to enact real change in the game – something all of us can sometimes feel powerless to do in our real lives. (My group’s go-to power fantasy is making the world a better place.)

These two loves, though – they are at odds with each other. At least, they are when it comes to my villains’ devious plotting because those fronts happen in the background. Yes, I can write down that Professor Bad Guy’s Ultimate Plan of Evil has six steps, and I can plant clues throughout the game’s narrative that could potentially lead my characters to put the pieces together and figure out his plan.

Still, I can be an anxious GM at times, worrying that my clues are too obtuse or that my players will reach the wrong conclusion. And if I fail to deliver, then they’ll fail to figure it out in time, and The Ultimate Plan will succeed without the players having had a chance to thwart it.

Now, I know some games have done a wonderful job of systematizing when fronts advance. Still, when you’re porting the concept into a game that doesn’t already have them baked into the mechanics, you’re basically running that background minigame on vibes. And on the one hand the GM can basically do whatever they want (as long as it serves the story and creates a good time for their players).

But on the other hand, the GM can basically do whatever they want, and oh gods, I was already working with themes of using power responsibly, so now I’m second-guessing my second guesses!

GIVE THEM A WAR ROOM

Fronts are meant to be a GM-facing tool — a little mini-game the GM plays with themself between sessions. When I run games, I like to flip it around and, instead, give the players a “war room.”

Maybe it’s an actual war room in the command center of their base. Maybe it’s an oracle-like NPC or familiar that keeps track of their enemies’ actions. Maybe it’s the murder board in their detectives’ office. Regardless, all of these war rooms have one thing in common – the threat map.

Just like fronts, the threat map is a big circle with all of the campaign’s (known) threats arranged around it like a clock. At the center of the circle are the PCs (or their town, their ship, their community, what-have-you). Each threat has it’s own number of steps, and as those steps are completed, they get filled in from the outer rim, moving towards the PCs in the center.

At the end of each session, I show my players the threat map, and together, we discuss what threats they addressed and those threats don’t advance (or get crossed off if they eliminated it).

The ones they didn’t deal with, though. Those tick down. Getting closer and closer to completion.

Of course, the threat map is fluid. As they discover more threats, they’re added to it. When they eliminate one of the threats, it’s removed.

A war room with a threat map gives your players several things – it gives the players a feeling of control (or at least the potential to feel in control), it gives them a way to prioritize the most immediate threats in the game world, and gives them a core list from which they can build out what they know about the villains’ schemes. It basically gives them a quest log.

Depending on the tone of the game and just how many enemies the players have made, I may also introduce a mitigation mechanic – some way for them to delay a threat without actually dealing with it in the session. Sometimes, it’s a die role at the end of the game. Other times, it’s a resource cost. (This is also a great place to use an NPC delegation system.)

Because while the threat map can keep your players focused on the main tasks at hand, it can sometimes make them too focused. Any mitigation mechanic you introduce will allow them to breathe and indulge in ancillary role-play that wanders a bit.   

IT’S NOT FOR EVERYONE

I don’t always use a player-facing threat map when I run games. It works best in games where your players have the means to not just react to dangers but also get out ahead of them. I wouldn’t use this tool in games like Shiver or Camp Murder Lake, for example, because those games are about not being in control.

That said, introducing the threat map at a point in the game where the characters have crossed a certain power threshold could be a great way of driving home the fact that they’ve got bigger responsibilities now.

THE LAST THING I LOVE

Besides my spouse, my dog, and my library of books and games, I love one other thing — a good template.

Here’s the threat map I used when I was running Starfinder. Feel free to download it and make it your own, and tell me how you think you might incorporate player-facing threat maps into your next campaign!

We know the meme: players latch onto the most insignificant goblin of a side character and ignore the walking plot hook in the fancy cloak. They’ll obsess over the most minor, minute details of a crime scene while completely missing the big obvious clue tacked to the board on the wall. They’ll squander all their time in the big city shopping and negotiating the price of a room instead of following the leads to the cultist sewer hideout you ever so painstakingly laid out for them.

The meme is funny because it’s true, but it can also be exhausting, especially if you’re not running a sandbox campaign and must steer your party back toward the plot. (And double-especially if you’re a newer GM or the type of GM that doesn’t handle curve balls well.)

Thankfully, there are techniques we can use to mitigate the “side character cinnamon bun effect,” as I like to call it. And if your players are stubborn, and you can’t seem to redirect their energy, there are ways to harness their attention for the benefit of your campaign.

It all boils down to how you describe things.

EYES AND EARS

As the GM, you are your players’ eyes, ears, and other senses. The choices you make when describing your game literally build the way they perceive their characters’ world, and their perceptions of the world will determine their actions. When they latch onto the wrong thing, be it the goblin barkeep instead of the mysterious figure in the corner, or the stale corner of bread instead of the bloody murder weapon, nine times out of 10, it’s a failure of description. Either you’ve got too much, too little, or the wrong kind altogether.

Let’s break ’em down, look at where things go wrong, and talk about how we can course-correct when they do.

TOO MUCH INFORMATION

Imagine this: your characters arrive in a big city. A central trading hub on the coast, bustling with merchants and guilds and religious orders, tourists, and travelers of all sorts. It’s a big change from their time blazing trails in the wilderness. It makes sense you’d want to describe everything from the ramparts to the docks to the magical castle in the center of town. But what happens after you spend five minutes recounting all the wonders the city has to offer?

Instead of dashing off like kids at Disney World, taking in all the wonderful and dangerous streets and districts you’ve prepared, your players immediately ask for the nearest inn and haggle over the cost of a night’s stay.

They could be playing in the moment and just want to establish a home base for their time in town. Or, it could be, in your attempt to impress upon them the grandeur of the location, you’ve overloaded them with information, and they don’t see the forest for the trees (so to speak).

If you find yourself constantly relaying a ton of descriptive information to your players only to be met with blank stares and “ummmms” when asked what they want to do next, you likely need to pare back what you’re relaying.

HOW TO FIX IT

Fixing too much information is kinda simple and really fun, and it’s all thanks to two little psychological tricks known as the primacy and immediacy effects. Basically, when we’re presented with a list of information, we’re going to remember the first thing we heard and the last thing we heard. The stuff in the middle? Might as well toss it into the sea. There are exceptions to this, obviously, but in general – first thing, last thing. Those are what’ll stick.

So let’s use these psychological effects to our advantage when we’re describing the city (or any other important aspect of the game world) by first making sure the two most essential elements we want to relay – in our example, the size and the sewers – come first and last. Then, we can devote extra time to describing those particular aspects while glossing over the stuff in the middle.

For example: “The port city sprawls out from the ocean like a giant squid that’s beached itself on the shore. The buildings fill your field of view, stretching from nearly one end of the horizon to the other.” (We’ve started by emphasizing the size.) “As sailors, merchants, and other citizens go about their busy days…” (And glossed over the unimportant details.)” You notice something odd – one of the metal grates covering the entrance to the sewer system has been pried open, and a trail of muddy footprints lead inside.” (And dropped the details about the sewer cult.)

TOO LITTLE INFORMATION

When your players seem to be latching onto random NPCs and making their own trouble when you want them to follow up the plot threads you think you’ve been subtly laying down for them, they’re likely suffering from a lack of information.

If I’ve learned one thing in over twenty years of running games, it’s this: when it comes to laying hints and clues for my PCs to follow, however subtle I think I’m being, I’m actually being 100x more obscure. Subtlety is an excellent technique for many, many forms of entertainment – a good mystery novel, a tense costume drama, a black-box stage play – but TTRPGs are not enhanced by subtlety.

HOW TO FIX IT

There’s an old marketing adage that says a customer must encounter information about your product 7 times before deciding to purchase it. It’s an old adage because the number of times has increased dramatically in the 21st century, but specifics aside, it’s still a good rule of thumb for how often you need to drop hints and describe clues before your players will start picking up what you’re putting down.

If you’re nudging your characters in the direction of a plot, repeat the hooks often throughout a single session. If you want them to realize the conspiracy to overthrow the king signals their allegiance by wearing the colors green and gold, then do not mention the green and gold robes of a single NPC once and then, four sessions later, note the streaks of green and gold dyed hair of the assassin NPC. That’s not enough repetition of information.

Instead, talk about a whole gaggle of green and gold-clothed individuals taking up a corner of the local cafe. Mention the proliferation of green and gold decorations in windows. The banners hanging from horses and wagons. The scarfs and hats worn by a large number of people in the city.

Don’t be subtle. Hit them over the head with the descriptions and then reiterate. Reiterate. Reiterate.

THE WRONG KIND COMPLETELY

This description faux pas is often some combination of the first two, and one I’ve personally fallen into numerous times throughout my tenure as a GM. What usually happens is you get so wrapped up in the description of a scene, focusing in loving detail on the fauna of the forest or the tapestries in the library or whatever your current personal fixation happens to be, that you completely forget to describe the important elements needed for your players to grok what’s going on in the scene.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve forgotten to describe a book, lever, or some other essential item while I was caught up describing the intricately designed marble fountain. And so, of course, my players focus on the fountain. I spent so much time describing it, it has to be important right?

Oops.

HOW TO FIX IT

Course correcting this error is easy-ish, depending on what you’ve prepped. Of course, the best option is to avoid mistakes altogether by keeping notes on important details so you don’t get away from yourself.

If you’re the type of GM who likes to prepare their descriptions beforehand, read them back a few times with a critical eye and make sure you’re hitting the important bits. If you’re like me and prefer to come up with most of your descriptions on the fly, give yourself some bullet points so you don’t get too carried away.

If, however, you find yourself far afield from where you intended, all is not lost. The easiest in-the-moment way to fix the wrong kind of description is to alter your plans and make that fountain the scene’s focus.

Sometimes, a little ripple like that can throw off your entire prep work, though, so in those instances, call for a perception check (and maybe fudge the results if you need to), and voila! The clever PCs have seen through your red herring and found the real clue that was totally there the whole time…

YOUR PLAYERS’ GIFT TO YOU: When Things Go Wrong

No one is going to nail their descriptions perfectly every time. And no group of players will stay on task 100% of the time, either. But when your players do decide to focus on the side character or the detail of minor importance, take it as the gift that it is: this is them telling you what they find exciting and compelling.

That’s not a failure; it’s valuable information that you can take back to your prep and use to your advantage the next time you run a game.

PRACTICING WHAT WAS PREACHED

Since there was a lot of information in this article, I thought taking some of the key points and repeating them would be helpful. Remember, when it comes to description, you should:

• Keep it short and direct
• Reiterate
• Reiterate
• Reiterate
• Ensure you focus on the important bits

What about you? When was the last time your players latched onto a completely unexpected minor detail and derailed your entire prep? Let us know in the comments section below!

As GMs, we walk a fine line between balancing a compelling narrative that incorporates our player characters’ backstories, making them feel centered in the campaign’s story while simultaneously making the world feel natural, as if it has a life outside the narrow view of the game sessions. If we go too far in either direction, the game will feel off balance. After all, if every single cabbage merchant they run across recognizes the long-lost father of the orphaned druid, or if every mention of a prophecy ties directly into the rogue’s shadowy backstory, our suspension of disbelief starts to get stretched. On the other hand, if nothing in the characters’ backstories impacts the world, we risk the PCs feeling like balloons without strings, drifting aimlessly in a world built for everyone.

Do you want to center your player characters’ backstories without making it seem like the whole world revolves around them? Do you want to create emotional bonds as strong as adamantine between not just the PCs and the NPCs but the players, too? Do you want to pull off an enemies-to-allies (or lovers if that’s your story of the game) arc without ham-fisting the heel-face turn? Well then, my friend, allow me to introduce you to a little trick in my toolbox I like to call Parallel Backstory Mirroring.

What the heck is “Parallel Backstory Mirroring”?

I’m so glad you asked. In psychology, “mirroring“ is what we call it when at least two people unconsciously mimic each other’s mannerisms. This helps create rapport and a sense of understanding between the people involved in the conversation (and it’s a handy trick you can use in job interviews). TLDR: whether we know it or not, we like it when we see ourselves in others.

We can tweak this psychological phenomenon for our roleplaying games by creating backstories for our major NPCs that mirror the PCs’ stories, but they do so on a parallel course. When you do this, your players will see their characters’ stories reflected in the world via the NPCs, and they’ll start to create unconscious emotional bonds with your cast, be they allies, villains, or something in between.

The important thing here is to refrain from copying/pasting the backstory exactly. (If you remember how bad the “Martha” reveal was in Batman V. Superman, you know what I’m talking about here, and if you don’t, consider yourself lucky.) No, you want to pick apart your PCs’ backstories and pick out the major themes and plot points, then file off the serial numbers and build your NPC’s story using the same skeletal structure.

For example, in a one-shot I ran a few years ago, a warlock had made a fae pact bargain to protect her sister from a degenerative genetic disease. The crucial beats revolved around making morally grey choices to protect a sick family member.

In the course of the adventure, they had to confront the leader of a thieves’ guild to retrieve a magic MacGuffin. Now, I could have just had them fight the thieves and loot the MacGuffin, but I wanted more meat to the encounter. So I gave the leader of the guild a parallel mirrored backstory: the leader, you see, didn’t steal because they wanted money. They stole so they could finance a cure for their son’s wasting disease.

See what I did there? Sick family member. Morally grey actions.

Suddenly, the PC had reason to pause and consider not just the actions of the supposed baddie but also their own. It was a great character moment that led to an emotional scene filled with roleplay.

Notice the other important element of Parallel Backstory Mirroring: the events you’ve extracted for the NPCs – they haven’t happened in the past; they are happening right now. When they recognize the reflections of their histories playing out in the world you’re creating together, they’ll experience an innate connection to the events and the characters that will make them feel seen and encourage them to take action.

If you need some help getting your players to establish goals and motivations (or need help creating goals for your villains), check out J.T. Evan’s articles on character goals and antagonist goals.

Controlling the Reveal

To put all my cards on the table, I am a big fan of putting all of my cards on the table. I try not to hold back information from my players for a BIG DRAMATIC REVEAL™ because I think players create more interesting stories when they have all the information right in front of them. Plus, players have lives outside the game and aren’t obsessing over every detail the way I do. That means subtle foreshadowing almost always gets missed. However, when you’re integrating parallel backstories into your sessions, consider the order in which you give your players the information because you can use that order to create different kinds of emotional impact.

Consider showcasing your villain’s actions before the players learn of his motivations. If your PCs are investigating a series of brutal cult sacrifices, then they’re going to build up a very specific image in their heads of the kind of person they’re chasing down. Then, when they find out that the villain is performing these rituals to contact the soul of his dead father, the ranger trying to redeem her mother’s soul will have some pretty big feelings surrounding that encounter.

Now, imagine giving them the information in reverse order. What if they hear about a powerful spellcaster attempting to contact the soul of a deceased loved one? Their realization that the ritual requires human sacrifice is going to hit differently.

When figuring out how you will handle the reveal, think about its impact on your characters. Especially if you’re trying to pull off a turn in the players’ perceptions of the NPC, ask yourself if you want them on board with the character at the start or end.

Bond Established. Now What?

So, what do you do once you’ve established these solid emotional ties between characters? Well, use them to your narrative advantage. When a player realizes this NPC is “just like me/my character,” they’ll be more inclined to trust the opinions of that NPC. Do with that power as you will – either to help guide the characters on their journeys or, you know, not.

You can also use the bonds to hold up a dark mirror to the PC. Use it to make your players consider, “This is what I could become if I continue down this path.” Use the bond to establish a solid foil or set up a hated nemesis.

Strong emotional bonds like these also ramp up the tension during social scenes, primarily if you use the NPC they’re bonded with as an obstacle to their goals in the scene. When an NPC they identify with has differing opinions on handling the impending wood elf invasion of the Capitol, will the PCs side with their friend, or will they push for their own strategies? If they do, what’s the fallout going to be like later?

Once you’ve established these bonds, you can turn up the heat.

A Caveat for Failed Perception Checks

Suppose you find yourself with a player or two who aren’t as big on introspection or self-reflection via tabletop blorbos. In that case, I suggest using a different NPC as a mouthpiece to point out and drive home the similarities in the themes. (Shakespeare deployed this character often, and if it’s good enough for The Bard, it should be good enough to use on your bard.) Alternatively, just ignore the advice above about copying/pasting the backstories and turn the obviousness of the connections up to 11. Tell ’em Martha sent you.

Parallel Backstory Mirroring Checklist

• Collect PC backgrounds and goals
• Strip down their stories and pick out major themes and plot beats
• Write NPC backgrounds using the skeleton of your PCs’ stories
• Make sure the events of the NPC’s story are happening NOW
• Decide what sort of emotional impact you’re looking for and dole out the information accordingly
• Use those bonds to turn up the heat!

What about you? How do you handle tying your player characters’ backstories into the world of your campaign? Let us know in the comments.

Ahh, January, that time of year when we make resolutions we are definitely going to stick to. Maybe you’ve resolved to improve your GMing in the new year. Perhaps you decided this would be the year you finally take your turn in the hot seat. Maybe you stumbled onto this article in the middle of summer and are just looking for a couple of quick tips.

Regardless of the promises you made to yourself, today we’re going to take a journey that begins with identifying our problem areas and ends with a plan to min/max the heck out of our GM-fu.

Ready? Queue up “Eye of the Tiger” because it’s time to do this!

STEP ONE: Identifying Our Problem Areas

The first step in min/maxing our GM skills is knowing where to devote our effort, and in order to do that, we need to get specific.

A Caveat on Anxiety: There can be a fine line between wanting to improve ourselves because we love this hobby and wanting to improve because we’re insecure in our abilities. A lot of self-improvement blogs use that line to get clicks and engagement, especially at the start of the year. But this isn’t one of those blogs.

So before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that there is no such thing as a perfect game master. To some extent, we’re all improv GMing our way through life. No one really knows what they’re doing, but those of us who care enough are trying hard to do better, and that’s what matters.

Even if we yeet our anxiety out the window, insecurity tends to cling to the trellis. How do we know the difference between the skills we need to work on and those the mind weasels use to keep us up at night?

The answer is simple: specificity.

If you can point to a specific aspect of how you run games and say, “Yes, this is what I want to improve. This distinct thing right here.” Then, congratulations, you have identified an area that needs improvement.

On the other hand, if you have a general fear that everything is horrible and nothing is right, that’s anxiety trying to crawl back through the window.

Don’t be like Stoick the Vast and Hiccup.

If you still need help, source your table. Talk to your players and see if they have constructive criticism, or try implementing a formal system of gathering feedback like the Stars & Wishes method developed by Lu Quade over on The Gauntlet.

STEP TWO: Getting (More) Specific

So let’s say you’ve soul-searched, brainstormed, and sourced your table to come up with a list that looks like this:

• Rules Mastery
• Improv Skills
• Storytelling and Roleplaying

That’s a great start, but those topics are way too broad. Like, those are Texas-sized topics, and we’re looking for topics the size of Pittsburgh. Take one of your areas and drill down. Then, drill down again. And again. Go until you get to the smallest bite possible.

Take “Rules Mastery” for example. This is one of the areas I want to improve this year, but I’m mostly running Pathfinder 2E, so that’s hundreds of pages of potential room for improvement. Instead of trying to eat all of that at once, I’ll drill down into a specific area of the rules. Combat is an easy example.

“I want to get better at the way I run combat” is a good start, but we can get even more precise. I want to get better at running more dynamic combats, combats with environmental hazards, and something as seemingly simple but rather complicated as starting combat from stealth.

Now my list looks like this:

• Running dynamic combats
• Mastering hazard rules
• Deciphering stealth mechanics

That’s the level of specificity we’re looking for, and once we achieve that, we can begin the fun part: research!

STEP THREE: Seeking Knowledge

Research can come in two forms, the first makes us feel like wizards in our towers, gathering spells and lore, and the second puts us in the audience of an exceptional bard, getting advantage through inspiration.

RESEARCH

Once you know precisely what you want to improve, you can hit the books (and the podcasts, and YouTube videos, and advice blogs). Your very specific topic becomes the basis for the search terms you’ll use to not only hunt down the knowledge needed but also help you narrow down the prodigious amounts of TTRPG content out there.

Since I don’t know the specific areas you want to improve, I can’t make bespoke recommendations, but I can advise you to read (and watch/listen/consume) broadly. You’re just as likely to discover helpful information in a book on novel writing as you are in a YouTube video on improv or voice acting, and nothing makes a dry self-help book on productivity or team management more enjoyable than figuring out how you can apply the techniques to your table at game night.

If you’re in the market for some general resource recommendations, well, you’ve already found Gnome Stew, but have you tried podcasts like Panda’s Talking Games or The Misdirected Mark Podcast / MM Plays? These treasure troves of knowledge heavily influenced much of the advice in this article.

INSPIRATION

Speaking of inspiration, we can’t forget to consume media we want to emulate. We are what we eat, after all.

Your inspiration doesn’t have to only come from TTRPG-related materials either. Play video games. Read novels. Binge-watch a series or fifteen! Look at how other people tell their stories, pull them apart, and see how you can use the pieces to improve your storytelling.

Say what you want about the reality of professional actual plays, but there’s nothing wrong with being inspired by professional work. Pro athletes have been inspiring people to go out for school sportsball teams, community intramural clubs, minor leagues, and even major leagues for decades, and shows like Dimension 20 and Critical Role can do the same for us.

They say comparison is the thief of joy, but I think this only applies when anxiety clings to the window ledge. Yeet that bugger off a cliff this time and approach media not as something to judge yourself by, but rather something to aspire towards.

STEP FOUR: Project Managing The S#!% Out of It

We’ve found the specific areas we want to improve, and we’ve begun collecting research materials; what do we do next? Where’s our training montage?

If your day job, like mine, involves you being a Very Professional Business Person™, then you might be familiar with things like SMART Goals or Agile Development. Those are incredibly powerful project management techniques, and we could use them to plan our journeys, but if you’re unfamiliar and you don’t want to add more items to your research list, you can use this simplified method:

• Create a schedule to research your topic, take notes, and just learn. A little bit of time every day or a bigger chunk occasionally throughout the week. Whatever works. The important thing is to stay consistent.
• Then, give yourself time to process what you’ve learned. Your brain needs to sit with new information before synthesizing it from theoretical data into practical knowledge. Don’t overload yourself. Remember: one bite at a time.
• Once you’re comfortable with your new knowledge, implement it into your game! Test it out! And then, once you’ve tried your new skills…
• Iterate and reiterate! Adjust based on how you performed. Tweak what you need to learn and practice for next time.

A note on your schedule: at the beginning of the year, it’s very common for people to over-promise their commitment to routines and then abandon them when they can’t keep up. (Hello, unused gym memberships.)

The trick to dodging this pitfall is to reevaluate your new routine after a few weeks. Check in with yourself and see how it’s going. Forgive yourself if you haven’t been able to keep up. If you have, ask if your pace is sustainable (and answer truthfully; just because you CAN suffer through a grueling routine, it doesn’t mean you HAVE to do it). Then, revise and start again. Repeat this throughout the year, and you’ll not only be able to stay on top of your tasks but even take on more as your tolerance increases!

We Are Mighty

To paraphrase the popular home repair TikToker, Mercury Stardust, learning something new can be scary, but we devote a lot of time to this dice-chucking hobby of ours, and we’re worth the time it takes to level up.

What GM skills are you going to work on this year? Let us know in the comments, and let’s help each other reach our goals!

I can only sorta cook. I can follow the recipes just fine, Google substitutions when my cupboard does not provide, and reliably under-brown onions. For most of my life, I really only cooked because (people claim) a person cannot survive on a diet composed solely of popcorn and French fries. However, in the last few years, I’ve found more and more joy in the preparation and serving of food. 

This all relates back to role playing, I promise.  

You see, by some lucky happenstance, I have found myself surrounded by friends and loved ones who are enamored with the intricacies of cooking. From amateur dabblers to full-on gastro-engineers, my friends know the ins and outs of a kitchen the way some people can dissect the perfect combination of multiclassing builds for ultimate damage output in popular d20-based RPGs. 

Truly more proficient than I could ever hope to be wearing an apron, these friends love making food and sharing the things they made with others. They’re good at it – great, I would say, but I’m biased. 

Cooking is their love language; they express it by gathering their friends together and hosting the Most Adult™ of all Adult social gatherings – dinner parties. 

One day, while prepping the next session for one of my ongoing campaigns with an episode of Master Chef on in the background, it occurred to me that there are a lot of similarities between hosting a dinner party and running a TTRPG session, and examining one can tell us a lot about the other.

The Guest List

Before you do anything, you need to know who you’re inviting. Let’s assume you’re kicking off a brand new campaign, and let’s also assume you are lucky enough to have a large pool of potential players to choose from (recognizing that this scenario is a privilege, not the norm). Assembling your list of adventurers is an important task. 

Just like a dinner party that aims to bring separate friend circles together to meet and mingle, inviting players into your campaign is a chance to introduce new people to each other and create new (potentially long-lasting) relationships. 

When making the list, mix it up a little. Try to introduce some variety into the group. Consider introducing someone who’s only ever played D&D to your new PbtA or Year Zero game. Or invite the friend from work who’s always been curious about TTRPGs; introduce them to your veteran players! Varying the group composition will create new and memorable experiences for everyone. Variety and the spice of life and all that, right?  

Preparing the Space

Monte Cook’s Your Best Game Ever has an entire section devoted to preparing your space to host a TTRPG game. Most of the advice is standard “getting ready for company” advice. It all boils down to this: if you do nothing else, clean your location as much as you are physically able, double-check the hand towels in the bathroom (and the T.P. situation while you’re in there), and make sure there’s enough seating for everyone.

Every extra bit you can prepare in advance will make the event that much more enjoyable, but also be kind to yourself if limitations prevent you from making your space, as my mother says, “Company Clean.” Your friends will forgive you (as long as they’ve got somewhere to sit.)

You can even prepare your guests’ mental space with a well-crafted invitation. A parchment-style bounty poster. Military-style orders. Or a secret encrypted message (followed up with the actual details in case they forget). These will get your guests ready for the game before they’re even at the game.

The Hors D’oeuvres

In their essay “Having People Over,” Sarah Gailey talks about welcome snacks – little bites of food that let people settle in as they arrive. Small tastes that set the mood. And while I am 100% behind anything that involves snack food, in our case, let’s ask what we can do to vibe-check our game night. The two obvious answers are lighting and music. Both of which can elevate the mood. 

Stage the environment as your guests walk in. Low lighting with some creepy violin music pairs nicely with a horror game. Neon and EDM for a cyberpunk run. Heroic fantasy? Light up your fireplace (or just this YouTube video) and toss on some Two Steps from Hell. 

How else can you subtly set the mood? Incense and candles, if you can safely burn them, and they fit the theme. Decorations and costumes if you’re feeling theatrical. Heck, even your actual snack choice can say a lot about the upcoming session (candy for a Kids on Bikes game, tea and biscuits for a costume drama, MREs for a post-apocalyptic survival game…okay, that might be going too far, but you get the idea).  

The Main Course

The main course is, of course, the session itself. The dungeon delve or shadowrun. The heist or mystery or caper. The meat of the evening. (Or protein if you don’t like carnivorous metaphors.) And there are entire books, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts, and more about how you go about preparing those. 

There are a few tips from articles on how to host a good dinner party that can translate to TTRPGs, though:

• Accept Help: if someone offers to help you make the salad or set the table, it’s rude to reject them. Likewise, accept the help your players are offering. Sometimes, that’s direct—the habitual note-taker becomes the party record keeper, or the rules lawyer becomes the system reference person. Other times, it’s more subtle, like when an eager player describes what they hope to find in the next town (hint: give them what they’re expecting with a monkey’s paw twist) or the bit of backstory you know the rogue character wants to avoid, but the player can’t wait to see come alive in the game. 
• Consider Your Guests’ Tastes: you’re (hopefully) not going to serve roast beef to your vegan friends, and similarly, you shouldn’t be running a horror game for the friends who cower under the blankets during Hotel Transylvania. Sprinkling in new flavors to help expand pallets is one thing, but know what your guests are allergic to. (I.E., know your lines and veils and use safety tools at your table.) 
• Don’t Make Them Do the Dishes: when hosting, clean up is your responsibility (though again if they offer…) So what does this look like for a TTRPG? Well, we can think of the cleaning up as the heavy lifting of the session. The chores that need to be done to keep everything neat and tidy. While that metaphor could be about knowing the system mechanics and organizing all your plot threads, it could equally apply to things like pacing and keeping the session going. Our time together is limited, so make sure the time is well spent!

Dessert  

This is the heartfelt bit of the article—a chance to be a little sweet. Whether you’re hosting a dinner or running a session of Pathfinder, you’re sharing a piece of who you are. You’re saying, “I made this just for you. I hope you like it at least a little or maybe even love it a lot.”

That’s a special gift you’re giving your friends; you should be proud of how brave and lucky you are to give that to them. 

Savor that time together and put in the effort to make it special. It’ll be worth it. 

The Online Caveat

This article focused on in-person games. Expanding it to a virtual space deserves to be its own post (which is currently in the works). But what do you think? Help me out: how would you take this idea and apply it to a VTT like Foundry or Roll20?

Turn that dumpster fire around

I’m running a horrible campaign, and my players love it.

Here’s the deal: several years ago, in the before times, I got my hands on a premade adventure. It was billed as a whole experience that would take characters from very low levels to mid-range powerhouses with all the incumbent thrills, chills, and excitement along the way. My husband and I were excited to play through the module with our local friends. We planned to get everyone together for a big session zero right after the holidays. The 2019 holidays.

So yeah, that premade sat unplayed for several years while a lot of life stuff (global, national, and personal) happened to all of us. When we were all finally able to gather again, nothing would stop us from playing through this adventure.

So, I sat down to prepare for our first game. The cover was evocative. The synopsis intriguing. The setting really cool. The story pretty interesting. But the actual adventure?

Not so much.

In fact, there were some pretty significant flaws with the entire adventure design (and we’ll get to those in a moment). But by this point, we were locked in. Anticipation had already been built. Characters had already been concepted. New dice had been bought!

Nothing as simple as a horrible game design would stop us from playing this damn campaign.

Before we go any further, I should note that, no, I am not going to name any names here. What I am going to do is show how I got something great out of something really not great and how the act of dissecting this beast has given my players a fantastic time at the table.

Good Story, Bad Adventure

So, if it was a good story, why wasn’t it a good adventure? Let me count the ways:

1. The structure was very narrative. Too narrative, in fact. You could read this adventure like a novel scattered occasionally with rules and stat blocks. And that fed directly into the next problem.
2. There was no room for (or even consideration given to) plot deviation. Every bad connotation the word “railroad” conjures is here in this text. And all of that meant that…
3. The players had ZERO agency. During one scene, the text actually says, “Your PCs will make a plan to do X.” Not, “may,” “might,” or even “should.” They will. Sir, have you ever actually met a player?
4. The text made BIG assumptions about what the players would and wouldn’t do. Let me ask you this: If you, as a person who reads articles about GM theory, were to set a scene in which a mysterious object of unknown power is shown to a group of adventurers, what are the chances that at least one player is gonna try to steal said object? There, you have now given more consideration to the potential actions of the players than this module did.

Any GM who’s been running campaigns for even a moderate amount of time can tackle these problems with a bit of preparation or some solid improv chops. But what if you’re not an experienced GM? What if this was the first premade you ever picked up? As soon as one player made one choice that took one tiny step off of the predefined path, you’d be shit out of luck.

The Teaching Moment

How did I retool the module, and what did I learn from the process?

First, reading ahead was vital. Not just one or two sessions ahead as I usually did when working with prewritten material, but reading enough to absorb the entire campaign from starting level to ending level. I needed the whole picture to know what sort of ripples player decisions would cause.

To the writers’ credit, they did include a synopsis of each session at the start of the chapters, and using those, I was able to pull out all of the story beats and see where the narrative pinch points were. Armed with that knowledge, I could triangulate how player actions could influence or alter subsequent story beats.

Next, to give my players even more agency and avoid too many dead ends in the mystery sections of the plot, I pulled a Gumshoe and divorced all of the relevant plot information from the scenes and locations. I reorganized it into Secrets and Clues a la The Lazy Dungeon Master’s Guide. (TLDR: Don’t hide the key to the next scene under one particular doormat. Just know that the key exists, and hide it wherever the players happen to be looking.)

Finally, I took big story moments that belonged to NPCs, and I gave them to my players. Secret prophecy about the captain of that ship? No, now it’s about a PC. Battle plans being drawn up by the captain of the town guard? Nope. Now, the party’s fighter is in charge of strategy. Oh, and those NPC deaths written into the plot regardless of the players’ actions? Now, they can actually save (most) of those people.

Basically, I looked for all of the ways my players could affect the story and added options for them to do that. Sure, this creates ripples, but that’s why I mapped out all the plot points ahead of time. Ultimately, running this prewritten adventure was a lot more work than I expected out of a module (and I have run many different kinds of modules in my day), but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it.

Thanks to that prep work, I was able to facilitate a scene where one of our players talked his way into the Big Bad’s secret lair, uncovered their dastardly plot, and wormed his way into their organization, all while the other PCs fought off waves of the Big Bad’s henchmen across town. It was a tense scene because the players knew their actions would have consequences, which meant the die rolls had meaning, and the people at the table weren’t just listening to a story told to them – they were experiencing a story as they created it.

You know, the dream.

Leveling Up

This is all well and good for one particular table playing in a specific campaign, but what can my experience teach us all about running and designing better adventures?

• First, how are you organizing your information? Are all your secrets and clues hidden behind very specific sets of events that must occur in a specific order before your players discover them? If your notes are long narrative passages, and you find yourself reading through your scenes like you’re reading through a story, then you probably need to ask yourself this next question.
• Are you giving your players opportunities to make choices, and do those choices matter? How do they matter? How can you show they matter? What ripples will the choices cause? This is the scariest lesson to learn because there’s a good chance it can throw all of your prep work right out the window. That’s why practicing with premade modules is such a gift. After all, it’s always easier to dissect someone else’s work than it is our own.
• What assumptions are you making? When planning your adventures, how often do you think, “My players WILL do X?” Stop it. “Could” is an excellent word to substitute. “Might” is even better. Obviously, if you’re familiar with your group, you’ll probably have an idea of how they’ll react to certain situations, but people can always surprise you. And if you’re prepping for a group you’ve never run for, then prepare a couple of broad contingencies to help you adjust on the fly.
• Finally, if you’re writing a module with an eye for publication (traditional, self, or indie), don’t be afraid to include notes on contingencies. Suggest ways the plot could branch and give your readers options for inserting their players into the scenario and giving them the focus (not the NPCs).

Are these revelations revolutionary? No, of course not. Can running a poorly written premade help drive these points home and set them up to live in your head with (at the very least) reduced rent? You bet your ass they can.

Of course, I don’t want you to have to run bad adventures to learn these lessons. In a perfect world, bad adventures wouldn’t exist. But I do want you to be able to run a kick-ass campaign regardless of module. So when in doubt, grab some dice, a fresh red pen, and get to work.

What’s the best lesson you ever learned from a lousy gaming experience? Let us know in the comments!

It’s all a web of connections!

S.O.M.O. (so•mo) | noun: Scared of Missing Out. A version of Fear of Missing Out that replaces the first word for a synonym so that the author of the blog article can maintain his alliterative title.

I have a problem with my campaign prep, but if you have the same problem, there might be hope for us. See, I’m the kind of GM who cooks up a bunch of plot threads and throws them all at the wall spaghetti-style to see what sticks. Lately, though, all of my plot pasta has been sticking, and now the wall is covered in pasta.

Invested players are a blessing; that’s not my problem! This is my problem: time.

Whether you’ve got too many plot threads or just too much world with interesting corners and compelling story potential, there’s just not enough real-world time to see and do everything.

In character or out, a single group cannot solve all of the mysteries, uncover all the forgotten secrets, and punch all the bad in the world.

So what’s to be done?

“Write fewer plot hooks,” You might say.

To which I reply, “No. Too simple. It would never work, and you can’t make me.”

Instead, let’s solve this problem by giving your players a way of harnessing an often untapped reservoir of power: their network of NPCs.

Activating Their Network

The campaign is the PCs’ story. They should be at the center of the action. Understandably, they’d be hesitant to delegate important story stuff to NPCs.

After all, it’s not satisfying to have a situation resolved off-screen, but also, no one wants the GM to hog the spotlight for two hours by roleplaying with themself.

You could just hand over the NPC sheets to the players and play the game normally, but then you at least run into the time problem again, and depending on your group, they might not enjoy stepping away from their characters for an entire session (or more).

That’s why this system agnostic system (yes, I’m aware of the oxymoronic vibe of that phrase) empowers your players to make significant plot decisions on NPCs’ behalf while also allowing them to experience more of the world, see more of the story, and tackle more plot threads. All in less than thirty minutes of real-world game time.

A Systemless System

STEP ONE: Set Up The Obstacles

The GM sets the scene, calling out the location and 1 to 3 major obstacles based on the task at hand, with more obstacles for more complex tasks. If you like, source the group for the obstacles!

For Example: Let’s say the PCs have finally uncovered the location of the Big Bad Cult Leader, and they’ve decided to chase him down. It’s going to take them far afield, on a raucous adventure through swampy jungles and ancient temples. BUT, they also know the cult leader’s lackeys are trying to acquire an ancient artifact of great power from the capital city’s black market. They can’t stop the artifact trafficking AND catch the big bad, so they send some trusted NPCs up against the lackeys.

The GM sets the scene: the shadow-filled back alleys that make up the city’s nefarious black markets.

Since this is your group’s first time using the systemless system, the GM sets two obstacles in the path of the NPCs – suspicious bruiser rogues who keep narcs and do-gooders out of the market, and an artifact dealer who’s afraid of what the cult will do to him if he doesn’t sell.

STEP TWO: Choose the Approach

At this point, the players decide how the NPCs would handle this situation. To choose an approach, no one has to worry about stats, spells, or abilities of any kind. Play it narratively. Would the short-tempered librarian they sent to fetch the artifact pull out daggers, weave some spells, or try to talk their way into negotiations with the black market dealer?

OPTIONAL: Faustian Pacts

Source up to a total of two tradeoffs the player-controlled NPCs would be willing to make to accomplish their goals. Each trade-off should have a kiss/curse element to it. It’s an immediate bonus for a later trouble.

COMMON PACTS INCLUDE:

• Unintended collateral damage to a friendly or neutral area
• A significant loss (either of reputation, money, or equipment)
• Finding themselves on the wrong side of a powerful faction
• Suffering some sort of physical or mental harm
• Incurring a debt or a favor to someone they don’t want to be in bed with

For each Pact your players create, give them a +1 bonus to their final roll result.

STEP THREE: Count the Assets and the Obstacles

Narratively speaking, add up every major asset or advantage the NPCs have at their disposal. Things like leverage with important government figures, access to magical artifacts, or juicy blackmail material.

• For every major asset, they get an additional D6 added to their die pool.
• For every major obstacle in their way (as described in Step One), they lose a D6.

Example: Your players have sent a short-tempered librarian, a himbo barbarian, and a street-wise urchin to snatch the artifact out from under the noses of the cult lackeys.

The librarian, while knowledgeable in the ways of ancient artifacts, doesn’t know know how to deal with criminals. However, they DO come from a wealthy family, so they can bring lots of gold to help in the negotiations. That’s one D6 in the pool.

The barbarian has a smooth brain but a bad reputation for smashing heads. That serves him well here. Add a D6 to the pool.

The street urchin knows her way around the nefarious merchants in the black market. That’s another D6.

That’s 3 assets minus 2 obstacles for 1 die to roll.

STEP FOUR: Roll

Roll your pool of D6s and choose the single highest result. Add any bonuses to the roll based on Faustian Pacts. Then determine how well the task goes by consulting the results below.

Example: The group decides their NPCs are willing to go into debt to procure the artifact, so they have +1 on the roll.  They roll 5 + 1 = 6. Success at a cost!

STEP FIVE: Collaboratively Narrate the Scene

The GM will set the scene and then toss narrative control over to the players, who get to describe how the events play out, succeed or fail.

If the roll result calls for it, the PCs can decide what doors are left open for future attempts.

As the GM, your job is to make sure each player gets to narrate at least one aspect of the scene, ensuring that everyone gets a chance to contribute.

Example: The players describe a tense bidding war with the cultists. They eventually win, but they have wiped out the librarian’s savings. This will prevent that NPC from financially aiding the PCs in the future, but for now, they have the artifact, the cult does not, and the Big Bad’s evil plans have taken a hit. The cult leader will be at a distinct disadvantage when the PCs finally chase him down!

A Few Tips

This system is designed to be zero prep, but it’s helpful to have a few obstacle ideas. One or two words written in the margins of your GM notes are enough.

The first few times you use the system, your PCs may try to play it safe. Especially when it comes to creating their own obstacles and creating A Faustian Pact, be sure to emphasize that big risks = big rewards.

If your players vibe with this system, use it for PC downtime activities. Use it to bridge large time gaps in the narrative or even handle single-player side quests!

Lastly, keep an eye on the impact these delegation scenes have on the world of your campaign. Too massive, and you risk de-centering the players as the main characters. Too inconsequential, and what’s the point?

You’re looking for a Goldilocks impact: not too much one way or the other. There should be consequences, and changes should occur, but don’t forget who the main protagonists are.

The Last Caveats

For those who have played a Forged in the Dark game, it’s probably obvious that this delegation system was hacked out of the engagements rules. Blades in the Dark is a product of One Seven Design, developed and authored by John Harper, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

All that is to say, this is a constantly-evolving work in progress, with plenty of room for making it your own.

How would you change this system to fit it into your current campaign? How do you encourage your players to delegate to their NPCs? What kind of shenanigans happens when you do?

Drop your thoughts in the comments.

The journey ahead

I don’t want to talk about Luke Skywalker anymore. Great guy. Loved him for years. But folks, it’s time to move on. His hero’s journey has been the go-to framework for our Big Epic Quests™ for far too long. In fact, the Hero’s Journey itself is far too flimsy a structure to build a TTRPG campaign upon.

Think about it: we’ve got a singular protagonist standing alone against the Big Bad at the end of the world. Sure, sometimes he has a Han Solo or an R2D2 along for the ride, but in the end, Luke is facing off against Vader alone.

And that’s the problem, right? TTRPGs aren’t about a single hero going it alone. (Okay, pedantic internet caveat: most TTRPGs aren’t about a lone wolf standing on his own.) They’re about a team. A squad. A group of plucky adventurers.

That’s why I suggest you run your campaign like a romance novel.

Why Romance Novels?

“A kissing book?” Some of you may say, and in response, I say, “Hell yeah, a kissing book!”

If you believe romance novels can’t reach the same epic highs and dark, horrifying lows as your favorite Hero’s Journey example, my friend, you don’t know what you’ve been missing.

After all, in a romance, good sex scenes and good fight scenes are practically the same things. Lots of thrusting and attention to positioning…

All kidding aside, though, whether you’re battling the antagonist on a crashing airship or making out with your rival under the harvest moon in a romance, the point of an action encounter isn’t the actions themselves but how the interaction between the characters reveals the depths of emotion, motivation, and history shared between them.  In other words: relationships.

And that’s the most important answer to “why romance novels” – because you might cheer for that critical hit that takes down the dragon or laugh over the nat 1 you rolled when trying to deceive the king, but the heartbreak you’ll feel and the joy that erupts when you focus on relationships, those things will be stories you’ll tell forever.

Even better, romance novels spread the focus around. Sure, a romance novel usually focuses on two specific leads, but those leads are supported by found families and unique oddballs, and if that doesn’t sound like a TTRPG campaign, I don’t know what does.

If you really want to see how to pass around the spotlight, and make all of the characters feel equally important, pick up a romance series. Often, the author brings side characters from the first book into the foreground of the sequels.

How do we actually do the thing, though? Well, just like plenty of action movies are built on The Hero’s Journey, a good number of romance stories are built on their own framework – The Heroine’s Journey (or, for our purposes, Heroines’ Journey).

Photo by Arun Prakash on Unsplash.

Say Hello to The Heroines’ Journey.

For those of you who like extra credit, Gail Carriger has written an excellent deep dive into the history and use of this particular plot structure, aptly titled The Heroine’s Journey. It was invaluable during the research for this article, and if you find yourself craving more info than can fit into one blog post, I highly recommend checking out Carriger’s book.

Source citing out of the way, let me state this clearly and with emphasis: anyone can be a heroine. It has nothing to do with gender or any sort of masculine vs. feminine vibes; it has everything to do with how characters approach problems and how the GM structures their narrative.

Heroes and heroines are both separated from society by some outside force. A hero isolates themself to train up their skills beyond mortal ken (usually with the help of a mentor, often during a montage set to an ‘80s power ballad). Then they return changed, usually pissed, and definitely all out of bubblegum. The changes are enough for them to topple the big bad, but then they find out they’ve shed too much of their everyday life to reintegrate into society comfortably. So they ride off into the sunset. Alone.

Heroines handle their problems differently. Heroes go it alone, but heroines tackle obstacles through connections. They network. They make friends and call them to their sides. They create new networks of support, usually by pulling together a found family full of misfits, outcasts, and other marginalized folks.

You know, adventurers.

Unlike a hero, who finds his strength when isolated, heroines find their power among groups. Working together, they solve problems they never could have on their own.

Illustrating By Example

If you’re already a fan of romance novels, you’ve probably already got a favorite series you can reference. If you’re not, here are some genre examples to get the gears spinning.

The Hero’s Journey has Star Wars, so what does the Heroines’ Journey have? Not to rile up old rivalries, but when it’s done right, Star Trek is a total heroines’ journey, and Discovery is the perfect example.

Early on in season one, the show focuses on Burnham. She’s the POV character. The go-it-alone hero. Later, though, when the focus gets spread around to the rest of the crew – that’s when Discovery starts to feel like a proper Star Trek series, and that’s when it switches from a hero’s journey to a heroines’.

Heist stories are another good example. I’m talking about your Italian Jobs, Ocean’s Eights, Leverage: Redemptions, and my favorite, Hackers.

Team of outcasts? Check. Coming together to take down a big institution? Affirmative. Do it by working together? Hell yeah! Confirmed: Heist story = Heroines’ Journey.

Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash

The Journey

A framework wouldn’t be very helpful without the actual frame, so here’s what the Heroines’ Journey could look like for a TTRPG.

NOTE: There’s plenty of room to rearrange the order of these milestones to fit your particular game. Use each point as its own singular arc for a session, or mash them up to create new and complicated problems for your players.

• The Descent: this is your story hook, the crux of your session or campaign – make sure this inciting incident severs your party’s connection to society and sets them apart. Maybe they’re accused of crimes, disavowed by their agency, or cut off from their families’ fortunes. This will give them room to make new networks later.
• Isolation & Danger: we all know the adage – never split the party, and we want them to work together, but here’s the thing: their teamwork will be much more impactful if they fail a few times on their own. The trick is creating situations where they’ll want to split up. What is the easiest way to do that? Give them multiple tasks to handle in a limited amount of time.
• Disguise & Subversion: heroines often disguise their identities to overcome a problem. Give your players a chance to sneak into that enemy base or an excuse to hide inside a fancy costume. Masquerade ball, anyone? Combine this milestone with Isolation & Danger, or Visit the Underworld for maximum tension.
• Visit the Underworld: this is when the heroines travel into the belly of the beast. Maybe they’re caught by the authorities or captured by the big bad’s minions. Perhaps they go to the actual underworld! Whatever the situation, make sure it’s huge and a drastic reversal from where they’ve been hanging out throughout most of the story so far.
• Friends & Family Render Aide: Bring back the NPCs your characters have helped along their journey. Show their network of friends operating at peak efficiency. Do a freakin’ Carebear Stare because this is the part when the cavalry arrives. When the team comes together. The Avengers Assemble. The ultimate “F’ Yeah!” moment.

And, of course, as with any good romance story, there’s got to be a Happily Ever After. In a traditional romance, that would be a kind of marriage — all hearts and angels singing as the protagonists kiss. But happily ever after for your group might be establishing a new town, taking back the family company from the evil billionaire, or something even more unique.

The point is, in the end, the characters should end up on top. Problems resolved in their favor. Future outlook, if not rosy, at least hopeful. After all, we all deserve a good win every now and again.