Last month, I had the chance to be on an episode of the Gnomecast with Phil and Ang, where we talked about why players might “turtle up” during a game and what you, as a GM, can do about it. During the discussion, I came to the conclusion that most, if not all, of the reasons someone might turtle comes down to a lack of trust – either in themselves and their abilities or (just as likely, if not more so) in the person running the game.

The memes of the megalomaniacal dungeon master viciously plotting ways to torture their players are real and funny, but they’re not really the norm when it comes to actual game tables. The players versus GM mindset is an older play style that’s fallen out of fashion, and instead, we all work together to build our campaigns.

And trust is a major component of that play style, too. So how do we – as GMs – earn our players’ trust, and more importantly, how can we make sure we keep it? Trust, after all, is a valuable commodity (and yes, I realize the problems implicit in referring to it as a “commodity”…money is the root of all evil, late-stage capitalistic hellscape, yada yada). It’s probably our most precious resource, not just in roleplaying games but also in all of our relationships.

It’s so important, that I thought it deserved a series of articles on Gnome Stew where we could dig deeper into what it takes to earn the trust of your table and what you should do with it once you have it.

Now, I’m not a therapist, and this series (probably) won’t help you fix that fight you just had with your significant other (if it does, though, let me know), but I do know a thing or two about learning how to vibe with the people at my game table, and I hope some of those lessons can be helpful to you too, so let’s dive in.

IT’S ALL ABOUT SOUL LISTENING

With all due respect, to the great profit Billy Joel, when it comes to building trust at your table, the first step is always learning how to listen.

Your players are going to tell you a lot of things – about their characters, about their day at work, about their kids or their pets, about how they’re feeling today – and not all of those things are going to be told to you directly or even spoken out loud. So, for those of us out there who (like me) must sometimes be beaten over the head before we notice subtle cues, what are the things we need to look for in order to improve our table listening skills?

BACKSTORIES

First, start with their character’s backstories. These are often wishlists full of clues as to the kind of stories they want to tell with you.

• Orphaned rogue who vowed vengeance? They’re probably looking for a story with a little grit and maybe (just maybe) a chance to unharden their heart and learn to forgive.
• A noble knight on a quest to save the king’s daughter? They’re looking to tell a traditional adventure with a hint of fairy tale whimsy seasoned to taste and maybe a dash of temptation to fall to the dark side for flavor.
• Archeologist wizard in search of ancient magics? They want to uncover deep history and learn ALL about the lore of your world. (Treasure this player, and do not let them leave your group.)

Even the lack of a backstory or a backstory that’s just a few tags cobbled together in a loose sort of list will give you an insight into what your player wants. Maybe their lack of backstory means they’re unsure of their character’s place in the world, or maybe it means they want a game that’s not so tied down to the past, and they’re looking to build their story as they go.

OR it could just mean they’re a busy person with other things going on in their life, and they didn’t have time to do any more than a short list of character tropes. That doesn’t mean they’re not eager to play – but it is something you need to listen to and incorporate into how you run your game.

And while we’re on the subject of that busy player? Maybe offer to hang onto their character sheet so they don’t have to keep track of it between sessions. Maybe make contingencies for the fact that they’ll probably miss more sessions than they’ll attend. Maybe talk to them about joining you for one-off board games instead of an on-going campaign. Your mileage will vary based on the situation, but a little effort on your part could go a long way towards making not just the busy player but everyone else at your table feel seen and heard.

CHARACTER BUILDS

Next on the list is how they build their character. If backstories tell you what kind of stories they want to play in, their builds tell you how they want to play out those stories.

What skills do they pick? What powers and spells? These are more than just mechanics you have to account for when prepping your encounters. These are signposts, pointing you at the kinds of problems they want to solve in the course of your game.

Skill lists are easy wins here – high diplomacy? They wanna talk their way out of or into situations. High stealth? Plan for at least one heist. But if you’re running a crunchy system like Pathfinder 2E, look at their class feature choices and feat selections. The monk that’s taken the power to slip out of a flanked position when attacked? They’re begging you to flank them because they’ll feel cool as hell when that mechanic triggers.

Are your players meticulously plotting out their level-up choices three or four levels in advance? They’re hungry to engage with that granola-like system crunch.

On the other hand, some players couldn’t care less about planning ahead. They’d rather just pick the powers that sound cool or the ones with the most flavor (as opposed to the ones that tip the math in their favor). Don’t ignore these blissful buckaroos blindly bounding toward that cliff like the Tarot’s own fool.

If you’re non-planners are stoked about a certain mechanic choice, reward their excitement by making sure it appears in the game. It’ll be a fun challenge for you to work it in, and it’ll be the highlight of their session when their narrative flavor choice pays off big.

BODY LANGUAGE

This is likely the trickiest listening skill to learn, because the nuances of body language can be so varied and hard for a layman like myself to describe, but also because so many games are online now-a-days. That doesn’t mean, however, that learning to read your players body language isn’t an important skill to at least practice, even if we don’t master it.

Obviously, there are the big moves like crossed arms, frowns, and downcast eyes. These can mean your players are disengaging with the current story for one reason or another.

Dice-stacking, phone-checking, and general fidgeting are other classic signs of boredom, but they could just as likely be the mild stimulation a person needs to engage. (Personally, I have two modes when I’m in the player seat – meticulous note taking or incessant doodling. If my hands aren’t working, my ears aren’t listening.)

Of course, there are the subtle clues, too – nodding along with descriptions, leaning in when the action gets intense, lots of eye contact, or even anxious nail biting. These smaller gestures can mean a lot of different things, and I can’t tell you exactly what because I don’t know the folks at your table.

You do, though, and if you pay attention, you’ll start to get it.

As for the online arena, you’re limited by your technology, but if you start paying attention, you’ll begin to pick up on things like vocal inflection, tone of voice, and even the speed at which they reply to comments. If all else fails, you can check in every hour or so to take the table’s temperature.

WHEN THEY KNOW YOU HEAR THEM

When you start listening to your players, they’re going to take notice. They’ll know that when they speak up, you hear them, because you hear them even when they don’t speak up.

That will give them the confidence they need to engage with your story in new and exciting ways. Ways you might not have anticipated but ways that I promise will be rewarding AF.

But listening is just the first step. Once you’ve earned their trust, you’ve got to keep it, and in the next article in this series, we’ll look at ways you can maintain the trustworthy relationship you’ve created by sticking to your promises as a GM (the explicit ones you’ve stated and the implicit ones you didn’t say out loud).

Until then, hit us up in the comments and let us know about a time when you realized you really trusted your GM (or if you’re a forever GM, a time when you knew your players really trusted you).

From the beginning of the hobby, there have always been many different methods to randomize how an uncertain event transpires in TTRPG. Because it is uncertain, there is a chance of failure. Because we have been trained from our very beginnings in life to seek success, many of us fear failure. What if I told you failure is a much more interesting outcome? (at least in TTRPGs)

For some, it might be a bit controversial. Getting to land that crit in the final boss to send them to their final slumber might be epic and rad af, but there are amazing stories to be told as well through failure. In fact, in many cases I would argue these stories are even MORE interesting than those that come out from successes.

Some time ago, I encountered this video from Dropout and Dimension 20’s Sam Reich, talking about why he prefers failure over success in TTRPGs. And you know what? I agree with him. So for that, I piled up all my reasons why and put them into this article. Feel free to debate with me in the comments if you believe I am right or not. How do stories begin in media? They start with a problem. How does the problem occur? That is because there was a failure either from one of the protagonists or the world itself. That is what creates a story interesting enough to deserve to be told. A story of a protagonist overcoming the odds after a failure, getting to learn from it, or maybe the other way around, succumbing to a path of corruption coming from that first domino piece. All in all, what is it that kickstarted it all? You know it – the failure!

Failure in life

There’s no better starting point than one’s own experience to begin my argument. We all experienced failure in our lives, in a bigger or lower scale. I am no different. In fact, you can search for some of the interviews I was done in the space, and you will find me talking about many of my failures. But I grew stronger from them all. I learned. I like to think I am a better person because of it, and will not trip with the same stone again. We all love the underdog story for a reason. We can see ourselves represented in it because (except for some crappy people) we have all been there. That is what makes our story interesting to tell. We better discover ourselves and get a good story from it through our failures.

Botching your check

A Natural 1, botching your roll, dropping the Jenga tower… however it is in the game you are playing that you get the worst possible result. Our character is going to have a terrible time. Look back in your memory lane to your most memorable moments in TTRPG. I am CERTAIN that at least one of those involves botching a roll. It may have derailed your whole campaign possibly. It has THAT level of impact at times. Not that a success may not have it, but failures are even more unexpected than successes, and that tells brilliant tales in my opinion.

Picture a normal battle against some bandits occurring. Basic, simple. Now, they place them in the middle of a gala, and have a ranger’s fire arrow start a fire due to a botched roll. By the next round, you are fighting bandits while rescuing people in a raging inferno of a mansion. That encounter went from boring to incredibly exciting only from the result of a roll. I am sure that will leave some consequences that will turn into an unexpected and incredible story going forward. As a simple example, the player characters may now be sought by the law for the disaster they caused, forcing them to become criminals from a mafia organization.

Learning and Character development

As stated before, I find nothing is better than failure as a learning experience. When you create your perfect cyborg in your futuristic game, it is when they get hacked due to a failure on their part and start to doubt their humanity that true character development starts for them. Overcoming a problem (success) may have plenty of impact in character progression, but where would that all be without a previous failure on the character’s part that put them there?

Degrees of success and failure

Part of these problems occur due to the binary types of results most of the popular TTRPG offer. You either succeed or fail. There is not much of an in-between point according to the rules. If the GM adds one, that’s more of a house rule or optional rule. However, nowadays we have plenty of narrative-first games like Powered by the Apocalypse games that bring with them the chance of more often than not moving the story forward, but with something else going wrong or happening. These degrees of success and failure are added into the games to solve this problem by adding more failure into the mix, instead of being mostly a 50/50 chance, or granting more success than failure.

Conclusion

As you see throughout the article, I have provided several reasons why I believe a botch is more interesting than a critical success. I tie it with how failure works in the narrative of a story, and indicate how a moment of utter failure helps in most cases characters and the setting around them grow in ways it wouldn’t normally. There are great things to come out of successes and critical successes, of course! I just want to open this debate and see what y’all have to say from your experience.

So… what’s your take? Do you believe I am a GM that likes seeing my players suffer? Do you agree with me wholeheartedly? What’s your position in this debate? Let me know in the comments below!

I love a campaign with a good central plot, but as much as I love those, some of my favorite times and revelations at the table come from the B-plots; those small scenes and stories that are tailored to one or a few characters. I find a place for them in nearly all my games. Over the years, I have a formula for working them into my games. So let’s talk about it…

What are B Plots? 

The B-plot, according to Google, is a subplot or secondary narrative, that runs parallel to the main plotline (sometimes known as the A-plot). In RPGs, these are little side scenes or stories that you work into the session. While they can occur at nearly any time in a story, they tend to appear more when the A-plot is not actively being worked on. This could be before or after the A-plot or during a break in the A-plot. 

A B-plot can center on a single character or a group of characters. My preference is 1-2 characters, otherwise, it’s creeping up on an A-plot. More about that in a few min. 

In the games I run, the B-plot gets 1-2 scenes before we move back to the A-plot. However for a full table of 5 players that may be 5-10 scenes, in which the entire session could be just various B-plots. I am comfortable with that for my home games, but in a one-shot or convention game, I may not run a B-plot and if I did I would not go past 1 scene per character.

What do they do? 

The B-plot can do a few things for your players and the session. Here is a short list:

• • Spotlight Time – When you create a B-plot scene focused on just one character, you are creating spotlight time for the character. You are dedicating a portion of the game for them to shine, to have the attention of the GM and the table. 
  • Depth of character –  Often the A-plot is about some larger thing happening in the world, and while the characters will grow by their interaction with the A-plot, with the B-plot you can narrow in on just one character and focus on their personal stories. The things you make up for these scenes and the actions the character takes will help to make the character deeper. 
  • Engagement – Combining these first two things…spotlight and personal stories create player engagement. The player will become more attentive and will be emotionally engaged. This will raise the quality of play at the table for that player and everyone else.
  • Experimentation – A-plots have a lot riding on them, and need to progress for the main parts of the campaign to be successful. Not B-plots. B-plots can be nearly anything, something taken from the character’s background, a wish the player had, or a GM thought experiment (i.e. I wonder what they would do if someone tried to steal their staff?). You are free to try stuff out, and if something doesn’t work, no worries it was just one scene in the game, you can find something new next session.

Some Tips for Good B-Plots

These are just some of my tips for making a good B-plot. They may or may not work in your game, story, campaign, or group. Like any buffet, take what looks good… 

• Simple – I keep my B-plots simple; few twists, no red herrings. They typically have a single large goal for the whole plot. For example: Chad will discover his uncle is embezzling from the family business.
• Episodic – My B-plots are episodic, meaning that whatever scene or two is played in that session, incrementally moves along the overall plot. In future sessions, the plot will be moved further until its conclusion. For example: In tonight’s session, Chad will see his uncle skulking around in the office after closing. He will have a chance to confront him or observe.
• Not tied to the main plot – My preference is for the B-plot to be something independent of the A-plot so that the player feels free to do what they want without worrying that it will affect the whole group. It also gives a break or a beat change from the A-plot.
• Only a Scene or Two – Most of the time, I have about a scene-worth of material prepared for this, and then break it into two parts to keep the spotlight moving.
• A B-plot for everyone – Every player character in my game gets a B-plot so that everyone can have some spotlight time.
• Phone A Friend – Sometimes, I like a B-plot to be for a single character, but if they want to pull others into a scene I welcome and at times encourage it.

Where to fit the B Plot?

I have a preference for where I put my B-plots. This is not the only way to do it. It is my preferred way to do it. 

I like B-plots between A-plot stories (not sessions). After an A-plot story has concluded, after any leveling up, and before the next A-plot story starts, I like to put in a round of B-plots. It looks something like this:

• Session 1: A-Plot Story 1 (start)
• Session 2: A-Plot Story 1 (middle)
• Session 3: A-Plot Story 1 (end), Experience, Advancement, etc
• Session 4: B-plots & Start of A-Plot Story 2
• Session 5: A-Plot Story 2 (middle)
• Etc

This way we have finished an A-plot story, the characters have progressed, and in most of my campaigns, some time will pass before the next A-plot story starts. This place, where time has passed, is a perfect place to put in these B-plots. 

It is not the only structure that works, it’s just one that is easy because the A-plot is out of the way. Depending on your game there may be other places where those could occur. For instance, if your starship was on a long warp jump, in the middle of the A-plot, you could switch to B-plots to see what the characters are doing during the jump, and then return to the A-plot as they come out of warp.

Just A Small Plot… it’s Wafer-Thin

B-plots are a nice break from the main plot of a campaign and are a great way to spotlight and build engagement in your players. Good B-plots are simple and incremental, moving along a larger plot or question, a scene at a time. An easy place to place B-plots is between larger A-plot stories, but with some creativity, you can fit them into other parts of the story.

Do you like B-plots? What is your favorite B-plot in a game you have played/run? Where do you like to run your B-plots in your overall campaign? 

After you have your story arc put together, you’ll notice that the PCs will need clues and information to get between the various plot points. The first bit of information they receive is the story hook. This launches the whole adventure. If the story hook doesn’t grab them, then the adventure screeches to a complete stop before it gets up to speed. You don’t want this to happen.

Your opening salvo of information needs to be timely, pertinent to the PCs, actionable, achievable, and not too horribly risky at first glance. Once you have momentum in the story, your future bits of information can be helpful in nature, but if you can make each piece of information along the way as vital to the PCs as the opening story hook, all the better.

Timely

If your opening story hook does not have a sense of immediacy or urgency, it’s going to fall flat, be ignored completely, or the PCs will decide to “deal with it later.” In gaming terms, the “deal with it later” category is a death knell for an adventure hook as now it becomes a casual side quest that will most likely be forgotten. Get the hook in their face and demonstrate to them how urgent the hook is.

Pertinent

Even if the plot hook is urgent, it needs to be pertinent to the PCs. A plot hook of “A scout has discovered that the goblin tribes are going to attack the village on the other side of the range of hills in a week,” will most likely not entice the PCs into action. Sure, it’s timely. They have a week to stop the goblin incursion, but it’s going after “that other village over there” not the village the PCs live and breathe in.

However, if the PCs have NPC connections to that village on the other side of the hills and it’s a four-day travel to get there before they can setup defenses for the village, then you have a pertinent and timely hook.

Actionable

Make sure the story hook has some action in it the PCs can take. If they have an unmarked, barely decipherable treasure map to a section of the world they’ve never seen, heard of, or can get to, that treasure map will go in someone’s pack until such time they feel like figuring out where the treasure map leads.

In my example above about the goblin tribes attacking a nearby village, the PCs can take a variety of actions to save their NPC friends in that village. They can travel to the village and setup defenses. They can venture into the nearby wilderness to directly confront the goblins and disrupt the tribes’ abilities to mount an attack.

Regardless of what actions the PCs can take, make sure the action that is similar to “I go to the capital city and beg the king to send his army to defend the village,” is off the table. Make sure the king or capital city are too far away to be of assistance. Make sure any “powerful wizard” (you know the ones I’m talking about) are conveniently out of town or away on vacation or some such. This will allow the immediate, pertinent actions to land squarely in the PCs’ laps.

Achievable

When presenting the story hook, make sure the PCs have a clear, understandable, and calculable chance of success. If “the goblin tribes” are too much, maybe scale it down to “a goblin tribe,” but definitely don’t use “all twelve hordes of demons from the underdepths below are going to wipe out that village.” Of course, if the party is higher level, then multiple goblin tribes may be what the adventure calls for. Likewise, if the party is very high level or has a great deal of competency and/or prowess, maybe they could face down all twelve hordes of demons.

Regardless of what power level you’re playing with in your game, do not throw the impossible (or something perceived as impossible) in front of the players. This will almost guarantee that they will call upon someone or something more powerful than themselves (like the king’s armies or that vacationing mega-wizard) and this will then make it “someone else’s problem.” You’re trying to create a cool story with obstacles for the party to overcome, not for them to circumvent by recruiting others to blow up the obstacles for them.

Risk

If a venture is not risky, then it’s a travelogue with lots of walking (or riding a horse or transporting in a spacecraft). There will be risk involved. The risks you are going to plant in front of the party do not need to be called out in the story hook. The risk should be implied in the presentation of the hook, but you as the designer and/or GM do not need to lean hard into this area. Here are some segments of sample hooks that imply risks. Can you figure out what risk (or risks!) these segments imply?

• The night of the lawless purge will arrive in the city in four nights, and you’ve been hired by a noble family to secure and protect their home.
• The treasure map you’ve found clearly marks the loot’s location as being in the center of a cemetery in the ruins of a large city five days horse ride to the north through the Gray-Finger Forest.
• The full moon is coming in five days, and your faction’s benefactor was bitten by a werewolf last night. You must find the cure before the full moon or prepare to kill your benefactor.
• A pyramid has risen from the sands outside the city, and demonic forces have poured from openings on all sides. While the demons aren’t approaching the city, they are disrupting trade, travel, and supply trains. Also, the largest oasis in the area happens to reside immediately next to the pyramid, and water supplies are running low. You are the city’s best, and perhaps only, hope of chasing the demons back into the pyramid.

See how easy that was? Of course, a hook can have more elements to them than my above samples, but I was trying to illustrate risk more than any other component of a hook.

Momentum

Once you have your initial story hook in place, you need to continue dropping clues that will get you and your PCs to the next section of the story in the adventure. This is where designing the adventure from back to front makes setting clues and hints easier. If you’ve followed my advice on this topic, you already know what is happening next. You just need to establish a set of clues that will point the party in that direction.

What kind of clues work as continuing story hooks? Well, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait around a few more months. This is the fourth installment of this series, and I do a deep dive on the clues, rumors, and connective tissues of adventure design in the eleventh installment. I apologies for you having to wait until then, but it’ll be worth it. I promise.

Upcoming Months!

The first set of information you established for your adventure was mood, tone, and theme. In the upcoming months, we’ll be breaking down the thematic elements of adventure design. Namely, I’ll be looking at thematic environments, thematic bosses, and thematic mooks across the next three months.

Since the beginning of the hobby, starting at a tavern has been the most cliche and stereotypical beginning for medieval fantasy campaigns in TTRPGs. They are that way for a reason! Taverns are meeting places for all different kinds of people to group up and find missions to get started. The tavern keeper always has some gossip or information to give, maybe some rats to kill in the attic. There is always that mysterious person in the shadows as well, ready to approach the group of wacky individuals and make a team out of them. I, however, come here to offer you something that is far better (in my opinion) than the tavern beginning, and it can easily be applied to any TTRPG.

The Wedding

Note that even though I say a wedding, many sort of similar parties apply. A “fiesta de quinceañera“, a funeral, a bachelor party, or any sort of meeting that encompasses people from different areas connected to one same person or group of people works fine. All of these usually have events going on during the meeting in which everyone is invited to participate. Apart from that, people are put in groups or they self-gravitate into forming smaller groups of people to chat with. Once they are all together in one same spot, within the same subgroup, it’s time for something to go wrong or have someone recruit the group.

I tried this approach at the start of two of the last campaigns I ran: one for Pathfinder 2e, the other for City of Mist (which you can see in a soon to come Spanish Actual Play by RolDe10). The Pathfinder campaign involved the wedding of the Emperor’s right-hand man, having all party members meet up and put into one table together with one NPC that was going to be important to the story. During the event, there is an assassination attempt on the Emperor’s right-hand man, and the story starts from there. For City of Mist, all player characters meet during the “fiesta de quinceañera” (an event celebrated in Latin America when a woman turns 15) and the birthday girl never appears, because she was kidnapped. Both events are kind of similar, having the players meet at an event without knowing each other (or having a few connections with each other), and something happens that kickstarts the campaign.

The best tutorial

Both times I ran this kickstart event for a campaign, I was teaching the players how to play the game. At the same time, they were getting to better know their characters. These meetings usually have events going on in them. It is pretty usual for weddings to have games, or have the classical “grasp the flower bouquet”. Think of them as the first checks or interactions the players will have with the system. It’s a no-risk situation that players always want to participate in because they are just fun. Even if they decide to have their character not participate in it, that also shows the kind of character the player is playing.

In Media Res

In media res, which is Latin for “in the middle of,” means dropping the players into the action from the very start. I have tried this several times, and it has never failed me. It immediately hooks the players and gets them into character. Being in the middle of a celebratory event, you can have them start in some low-risk but action-heavy event, such as dancing with an important NPC, or carrying a plate full of food as a waiter. Once you have them there, they describe their character, what they are doing and how, and they make a first roll. Players get to know a bit about the system immediately, allowing them to better know how their actions have consequences.

Campaign Kickoff

Once the big meeting has occurred, and all the key parts of the campaign have been introduced (players and important NPCs), it’s time to show what the campaign will be all about. This can happen by having something or someone break into the meeting, or by having an NPC approach the player characters to fill them in with information. As I said, I used both an assassination attempt, and a kidnapping as past examples and both worked excellently. Having a knight of the king break in, having the mother of the birthday person abducted by an alien, or having an NPC approach the PCs because they did extremely well in an event that transpired there could work just as well.

The 4 steps to make it work

In essence, this meeting will be separated into 4 different steps:

1. In Media Res Start. Start with a bang to instantly drop the players into the game. Have them rolling from early on and you will have them interested in no time.
2. The First Meeting. Players are put together at the start of the meeting. Maybe there was no one else they knew at the party so they are put with each other, maybe it’s a mere coincidence. Note that not all player characters must be together at the start, but it is recommended most of them do. That way it is not as difficult to put them together to continue the campaign.
3. The Mini Events: Just like minigames, the mini events are risk-free reasons for the players to interact with the system through their characters, as well as getting to know important NPCs. In funerals this may be doing a whole oratory about the now deceased person, in birthday parties hitting the piñata, etc.
4. Campaign Kickoff: Have something happen that sets the player characters in motion to work together for the duration of the campaign.

Conclusion

Simple, right? Next time you start a campaign, no matter the game system, try doing so with a wedding or similar event! You will see in no time how great of a campaign starter it is. It will also catch your players by surprise, who might be expecting another tavern beginning!

Have you ever started your campaign with a similar event? If so, let me know in the comments below, so we all can inspire each other campaign starters!

The fates are conspiring against me, working in the background to tempt my inner dice goblin to indulge his baser instincts. How else would you explain the plethora of shiny math rock kickstarters, fundraisers, videos, and freakin’ cool STL files that have made their way across my feeds as of late? Surely it can’t be some cold, unfeeling computer algorithm. No, it must be fate, and it must be my destiny to find a way to master all of these funky weird dice.

Seriously, though, the last few months, I’ve been thinking about dice a lot. Specifically weird dice. It all started back at the end of 2023, when my husband gave me this awesome dice spinner for Christmas.

It’s beautiful. It’s fun. But most important – it’s weird, and I love weird. So I started thinking about how I could use this weird artifact for more than simply generating a random number. A die (or dice depending on how you’re counting it) so unique deserves a special place at the table, in my opinion. Using it for every random guard’s sword swing or royal vizier’s bluff check would lessen the impact.

This train of thought took me to a lot of offbeat places I didn’t expect – like spending a week musing over the act of building a Cortex system dice pool and how just choosing the stats you’re going to roll with in that game becomes a kind of role play experience on it’s own – but ultimately it coalesced into philosophizing about the purpose of dice.

Because if we really dig into the raison d’etre of the math rocks it becomes clear that they’re not just randomizers. They are tension-makers. Suspense-creators. Engines of uncertainty.

That’s how all the systems tell us to use dice, isn’t it? When you don’t know what will happen, when you’re playing to find out, when success is uncertain – roll the dice.

Dice are the unknown. They’re luck. They’re – dare I tempt it by saying – fate.

Incarnate.

And fate can be fickle.

When we’re rolling dice, we’re taking a chance, and chances are dramatic. Chance creates tension, and when I understood this, I knew how to best use not just my dice spinner, but a bunch of different kinds of dice in weird and unique ways.

Below, you’ll find five weird ways to up the tension at your table using dice. I’ve collected these ideas and arranged from least to most weird. I’ve also tried to include links to the inspiration for the methods when I could provide them.

HIGH – LOW – EVEN – ODD

Credit for this one goes to my old college roommate (thanks, Jeremy!). I don’t know if he came up with it first, but he’s the first GM I’d ever seen use it.

The process is simple, take a D20 (or whatever die your system uses) and point at a player (preferably the one attempting to do the risky action that required a die roll) and say, “High, low, even, or odd.”

Let them call it. Roll the die. If they managed to call the roll, the action goes in their favor.

Essentially, it’s a coin flip and it works well in situations where pure luck determines the outcome of an action. But this works better than a coin flip because the player feels like they have more agency. Not much, but four options are better than two even if the math works out the same. Plus, it plays into dice superstitions such as “I never roll high” or “I really don’t want to ‘waste’ a twenty on this.”

If you really want to play with their emotions, grab a D20 from their dice jail and call for a high-low-even-odd roll. (This is the most evil version of this roll, and is only recommended for GMs who are willing to tempt every god of fortune at one time.)

ROLL UNDER A CUP

Inspired by Liar’s Dice, Yahtzee, but mostly this video on the Quinns Quest Patreon. (It’s a fun video and I highly recommend watching it if you can.)

Imagine this: the rogue has split off from the party to scout the villain’s keep. They’re sneaking through darkened hallways and creeping around corners, when they run into a guard patrol. You call for a stealth roll, BUT you tell them to roll under a cup (an opaque cup. Otherwise this doesn’t work) and tell them not to look at it until you say so.

Then you cut back to the rest of the party. You run a scene. Maybe even an encounter. All the while, the rogue’s player is staring at the cup. Wondering if they’ve been spotted.

When I heard Quinn describe this method, I immediately ran out and bought a set of special little bowls for my home game. I can not wait to watch my players squirm under the tension of not knowing if they succeeded or not.

And yes, you could just roll in secret, but then the answer is an ephemeral result in your brain, not a tangible die sitting just out of reach.   

ADD SOME DESPAIR (Dice)

Adapted from Edge of the Empire/Genesys.

Lots of games have their own custom dice – like Edge of the Empire’s Task dice or Fate’s Fudge dice. You can easily steal the special dice and import them into your game to add a little spice along with some nuance.

When a character goes to hack a computer system, toss them an Edge of the Empire difficulty die to roll along with their D20 and interpret the resulting narrative complications as you would if you were running that system. Or have them roll a Fudge die. On a minus they set off the alarms, on a blank they succeed with a “yes but,” on a plus they get extra information.

Sure, you can bake these gradients of success into a normal D20 roll based on how far below or above the target number they roll, but adding a special die points a huge ass spotlight on the action. It adds another layer of importance to the action and dials up the tension along the way.

ROULETTE DICE COUNTDOWN

Inspired by my Christmas present.

I timed it, and with a really good flick my roulette die will spin for about one and a half minutes, but that’s just an estimate. I’m not certain exactly how long it will spin. And what does uncertainty create? That’s right. Tension.

So, imagine this: you set up a scenario where your players have a limited amount of time to make decisions. Let’s say the jackbooted troops of the evil empire are hunting them through back alleys, trying to catch them before they reach their hideout. The group has to either act together or separately, but they only have until the spinner stops to tell you their actions. You set the stakes and give them the parameters of the situation, and then you start the spinner spinning.

“You have until this stops spinning to make your actions. The result on the die will represent the evil empire’s perception check to find you. Go!”

Will the empire succeed? Who knows! You don’t. Your players definitely don’t! All you know is that there is a limited amount of time to choose.

Now THAT’S dramatic.

SKILL-BASED DICE TOYS

Inspired by these incredibly awesome 3D prints.

These 3D prints turn standard dice rolls into actual real-life skill checks. They take the nail-biting challenge of those old tilt and spin puzzles where you try to navigate a ball bearing through a labyrinth without dropping it through a hole and combine them with either a D20 or a D6. The more dexterous you are at guiding the ball bearing through the maze, the higher your roll result.

Tons of fun on it’s own. Especially if you use it for something like disarming a trap or activating a complicated magical puzzle. But what if you added in a push your luck mechanic?

“The room’s ceiling is coming down and will crush you in three (real time) minutes. If you can ‘roll’ a 13 on this skill-based die, you can unlock the door and escape. But if you get a 17 you can stall out the mechanism completely and find the secret passage that will let you bypass the rest of the dungeon’s traps. If you get a 20…well something extra special will happen.”

These weird dice rolls can add spice to your sessions, drawing attention to pivotal rolls and heightening the tension to astronomical levels of excitement, but do remember to use them in moderation. After all, if every roll you call for has its own gimmick, they’ll lose their specialness real fast.     

I’m also still trying to find ways of adopting these methods for online play. The “roll under a cup” method can be replicated in the Foundry VTT by having your players make blind GM rolls and then you can reveal them in the UI when the timing is appropriate. Including Genesys or Fudge dice into the system could probably be done with a moderate amount of coding, depending on the VTT. Mailing your players care packages with the 3D printed skill dice could be an interesting way to add mystery to the session as well, but it of course has its own limitations.

Would you use weird dice like these in your games? How? Let us know in the comments.

Planning in RPGs is not a fun activity, so don’t do it.
Planning in RPGs is necessary so that we don’t get our characters killed.
Both of those statements are true.

The optimal way planning should work in your game is somewhere in the middle of those two statements. The optimal way is a combination of genre and play style. And if we were to discuss what that looked like up front, we could define how much planning was necessary for the game we were playing, so that our games had the right amount of planning, minimizing the un-fun-ness (take that Bob, our editor), and making it effective enough to keep the characters alive (at least most of them). Let’s talk about how to do that.

Is Planning Un-Fun?

I think so, and I say that as a person whose day job is planning things, and outside of work I plan everything else in my life. In RPGs, planning is just not that fun of an activity. It often consists of the table coming up with ideas and then saying “…but what about this?” going around and around in circles. If you are a player participating in the process, it can be a bit draining, but if you are the GM, waiting for the players to come up with a plan, then you are just sitting there on the outside. It is not how I want to spend my gaming time.

Is Planning Necessary?

Having a plan is a good idea because it aligns the group in terms of their goal and how they are going to achieve it. It allows the group the time to figure out how to best use their resources (equipment, powers, etc). These things greatly increase the group’s chances of being successful and surviving. 

The Components of a Plan

Let’s take a few moments and discuss what makes up a plan. A good plan has all of these, and lesser plans lack detail or are missing some of these parts: 

• The Goal/Objective – A plan must have an objective. What are we doing? This goal should be shared by the entire group. Are you going in to steal the money? Or are you here to rescue your ex-wife from the Prince? If you are not on the same page about the goal, the group may pursue different goals, split up their resources, or at worse come into conflict.

• Milestones – The smaller objectives you need to achieve to build up to the goal. It could be disarming the alarm system, or stealing a key from the guard. Some milestones will be in temporal order while others may occur at any time.

• Information/Intelligence – plans run on information. You can’t plan if you don’t know where you are going, what to expect, how many guards, the terrain around the location, etc. When you lack information you start to make guesses (see below).

• Risks – Risks are the things you don’t know but think are possible. Risks can be things like a hidden alarm system. Or something like, “What if we can’t take out the guards quietly?” In addition, Risks have a probability (how likely they are to occur) and an impact (how big of a problem it is when they come true). A lot of people who are bad with risks spend too much time worrying about how to handle low probability/high impact risks over high probability/lower impact risks. 

• Mitigation and Contingencies – Hand in hand with risks are Mitigations (how do we make risk less likely to occur — lower probability) and Contingencies (what do we do if that risk comes true — lower the impact). You can manage neither, one, or both of these. The trick is deciding for each risk what you want to manage. 

This is why Planning is difficult and may not be fun. It is a lot to manage and done well it takes time – time that you are not playing the game. 

The Trust Issue 

The reason that people tend to over-plan is that they fear that there is some piece of information that if the players knew before they put their plan into action, would ensure the success of the goal or prevent excessive harm/death to the characters. To combat this, players do one or both of the following: 

• Collect as much information/intelligence as possible; at times to excess. 
• Perform excessive Risk mitigation — naming risks, and coming up with mitigations and contingencies. 

In fact, as a GM, you will know this is happening in the game when these two actions take over the session. When characters feel like they know enough, is when they are ready to switch from planning to action. 

Genre and Playstyle

Before we get to the social contract part of this… we need to discuss two more things. 

Some Genres have plans as one of the tropes. If you are running a game about thieves and heists, or a military game about Spec Ops missions, then those genres require some degree of planning. These games are also best served by mechanics that help compensate for suboptimal planning or help mitigate the lack of planning that occurs at the table. Look at how Blades in the Dark and other Forged in the Dark games remove the need for extensive planning by using mechanics to simulate good planning done by the characters rather than the players.

The other thing is play-style. Some groups get off on playing the cat and mouse game, where the GM comes up with a plan and twists and the players face off to come up with a plan to outsmart the GM. Others want nothing to do with planning. Whatever brings your entire group joy, then there is no wrong-bad-fun, as long as you all, as a group are on the same page.

The Social Contract of Planning

The truth is that not all RPGs need the same level of planning, but unless you establish that fact, most players will assume they do. 

Some genres do not lean into detailed plans. Superhero games often rely on bold action and powers to overcome problems, not intricate plans. Pulp games also favor action over plans as well. So as you establish your game, consider what the genre and your setting should favor and then combine that with your play style. 

An example: My players had recently finished a Night’s Black Agents campaign. It was a game where planning was key, and the game had some mechanics to support planning. The players knew not to move from planning to action until they had enough intel. They would sometimes spend a session collecting intel and making a plan. Currently, we are playing Mutants in the Now, a game inspired by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game and comic. In our most recent session, the players were working on a plan for how to attack a Yakuza hotel where some mutant animals were being trafficked. They started to work on a plan worthy of Night’s Black Agents when I reminded them that this game was more action-based. They quickly simplified their plan to “We rappel to the top of the hotel and fight our way to the bottom while rescuing the other mutant animals along the way”. A perfect plan for the setting and genre. 

The key to having players not over-plan is trust between GM and the player. As the GM, I am telling the players that I am not going to punish them for choosing a simple plan. For the players, it is trusting that I am not withholding some key piece of information that would break their simple plan. 

That is not to say you cannot have a twist. The twist is a time-honored trope in all plans. The twist is the unexpected thing that the players have to deal with in the middle of executing the plan which can cause the plan to alter it on the fly. The difference is that what I am promising, as GM, is that the twist will not up-end or thwart the plan. Rather it will be a fun surprise that the characters can deal with.

This is the social contract of planning as a group, for the game you are running (genre and mechanics) and the way you like to play (style). Agree with how much planning is necessary for this game, in general. You can come up with things like this:

• This game is about a sci-fi Spec Ops team, and the mechanics are gritty, you are going to want to have a good plan before executing an operation. 
• This game is about mutant animals fighting other mutant animals and criminals, you don’t need more than a simple plan, as most things you encounter are going to be resolved by fighting.

By doing this you are creating expectations for the whole group on how you should handle planning. This is the social contract that you agree to and guides how you play. Establish this in Session Zero and you can set the tone for planning in your campaign, and help keep planning to exactly what it needs to be for your game.

A quick note. Even after you establish a level of planning as part of your game, you can have a story where you change the amount of planning for that session. All you have to do is indicate to the players the change so that they can reset their expectations.. 

Plan Out Your Planning

Planning is not always fun in games, and it can be worse if you are over or under-planning based on the game you are running. But like most things in RPGs, if we do some upfront communication and set some expectations we can dial in planning to just the right amount for the game we are playing. 

This expectation along with any planning mechanics that the game provides can make planning far less tedious while being effective, and make for an overall play experience. 

How do you handle planning in your games? How do you set those expectations with your players? What planning tools do you use or what planning mechanics do you employ?