Johnn Four, Author at Roleplaying Tips

Johnn Four

Author Archives: Johnn Four

What Makes An Adventure 11/10?

What Makes An Adventure 11/10? In my Master of the 5 Room Dungeon Workshop, I advocate that you can “amp up your adventures to 11.” In other words, we want engaging, challenging, and thrilling adventures our players will love. A workshop member asked me today, “What makes an 11/10 adventure for you?” Great question! Here’s […]

Streamline Your Gameplay With This Cool House Rule

Streamline Your Gameplay With This Cool House Rule On a podcast with Dr. Keith McNally, Jonathan from Sojourner’s Awake shared his three table rules. And one of them I wanted to forward along to you because it is very good. Here’s a link to the 29 minute podcast on YouTube. Watch My Face Jonathan’s third […]

d20 Ways To Hide A Golem

Dragon Magazine #139 offered great ways to hide a golem in a room. I love animated objects and golems as monsters. They need no air, water, or food, so make perfect dungeon foes. But if we serve up such obstacles and enemies the same way each time, it gets boring fast. So here are 20 […]

Unlock New Adventures: 5 Room Dungeons With a Twist

Today’s tips come in the form of a 13 minute video. When I sent out a recent invitation to my Master of the 5 Room Dungeon Workshop, several GMs responded that they didn’t like the method. Fair enough. There are many ways to craft an adventure! However, some readers mentioned that the five rooms get […]

How To Keep Story Arcs Alive

How To Keep Story Arcs Alive How do you keep campaign arcs alive? That’s how I’d summarize this tip request I received from Wizard of Adventure Sharon: Our party meets every two or three weeks for a four hour session. With family and life taking center stage between sessions and memories fade, it makes remembering […]

1d12 Most Common Encounter Mistakes

1d12 Most Common Encounter Mistakes nuqneH TEST! I don’t generally dwell on the negative. We’re here to have fun at every game, after all. However, sometimes it’s great to review a list of gotchas and see if any resonate. If some do, we can then take action to fix. So today I have 1d12 mistakes […]

Surprise Your Players: Betrayal Twist Mad Lib For Your Encounters

You know I’m a huge fan of adventure plot twists. That’s what Room V is all about. But we should try to add encounter-level twists, as well. Then we get to surprise and delight our players several times during sessions! Here is one of my favourite types of twists and d12 examples to help you […]

Get Ready to Roll: How to Plan and Prepare for GMing Successful Convention Games

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1224 We just played session #09 of my Basilica campaign that’s half sandbox, half Temple of Elemental Evil. The party was bequeathed land as reward for escorting settlers safely to the area. As it turns out, the land is a swamp with ruins of an old moathouse on it. Girding loins and […]

The Swamp Is Calling: d12 Swampy Tips

The Swamp Is Calling: d12 Swampy Tips Do you have any upcoming swamp encounters or adventures? To celebrate my newest GM Cheat Sheet for swamps that I released on the weekend ($3 on DTRPG, free to Wizards of Adventure), here are a dozen swampy tips to enhance your campaign. Play Up the Atmosphere Swamps are […]

Why Players Get Bored With Our GMing (But Might Be Afraid To Tell Us)

Why Players Get Bored With Our GMing (But Might Be Afraid To Tell Us) As a player who gets bored easily (thus I am a forever-GM :), here are three reasons based on my experiences why a GM can lose player attention and participation in a game. Hopefully these tips help keep your table engaged. […]

Save Your Village From Murder Hobos – 5 Quick Tips

Save Your Village From Murder Hobos – 5 Quick Tips How do we protect villagers from Murder Hobos? We planned some great roleplay in town, but then the party decides they don’t like being sassed and suddenly we’re rolling for initiative. Here are a 1d4+1 ideas, inspired by Dragon Magazine #109, on how we can […]

The Sneaky GM Trap I Spotted At Start Of This Adventure

The Sneaky GM Trap I Spotted At Start Of This Adventure I was reading an adventure last night (an adventure that I also played in January) and something troublesome jumped out at me from the initial encounter’s boxed text. Here is the first sentence: The stairs leading to the basement of the Otari Fishery creak […]

3 Early Warning Signs You’re Suffering From GM Burnout

3 Early Warning Signs You’re Suffering From GM Burnout A GM replied to my recent Master of the 5 Room Dungeon email and said they’d lost the spark for GMing. I asked them for more details in case I can help, and am awaiting a reply. Meantime though, I’ve suffered from apathy and burnout several […]

6 Ways To Spice Up Boring Combats

6 Ways To Spice Up Boring Combats Combats offer a delicious nexus between dice-rolling gameplay, storytelling, roleplaying, and tactics. Alas, many battles become boring slugfests that offer no variety. Here are a half dozen ways to spice things up in your next fight. 1. Add Space Fighting in a telephone booth restricts options and gets […]

Why Homebrew Adventures Suck

I’ve suffered through my fair share of homebrew disasters. For example, there was The Session Where Nothing Happened. The GM had been bugging me all week, bursting with anticipation of how awesome Saturday’s adventure would be. The weekend comes around. We roll up characters and started off in an infinite plane. We walked and walked, […]

How To Keep Dungeons Interesting – 5 Ways

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1223 How To Keep Dungeons Interesting – 5 Ways How do you make dungeon crawling perpetually interesting? This was a frequent tip request made in December’s Dungeon23 poll. I struggle with this too, whether it’s an endless series of rooms in a megadungeon, a series of 5 Room Dungeons, or just a […]

Tiny Prep: How to Enjoy Prep Even More

Do you struggle being consistent with campaign prep? Do you suffer a bit from writer’s block when you do manage to start a bit of prep? Has prep become a fun habit for you, or do you still struggle getting the job done? I hope today’s Tiny Prep tip helps. If you are doing #Dungeon23, […]

Prep This Instead Of Plans

RPT GM Steffen asks: Maybe you have a tip for a problem I’m having with prep. In my group, we sometimes play fairly open RPGs. Open in the sense of an open world. At the end of a game session, I don’t know how the players are going to approach a problem, and then I […]

A Way To Make MegaDungeon Rooms Interesting (Have Your Dice Ready)

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1222 A Way To Make MegaDungeon Rooms Interesting An RPT GM asks: Facing the Dungeon23 challenge, I wonder how to come up with different rooms instead of falling into tired tropes or ending up with repetitive floors. My answer: roll for it! First, theme your megadungeon and its levels. Next, make yourself […]

d12 Ways To Surprise And Delight Your Players And Their Characters

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1221 d12 Ways To Surprise And Delight Your Players And Their Characters Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were great. I spent mine eating way too much delicious baking. I wish I’d asked Santa for a bigger belt. The New Year always feels like a fresh start. So I am curious […]

My Worst Adventure Yet

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1121 My Worst Adventure Yet Allo dfdfd, The last time I ran an official D&D adventure it was a disaster. Princes of the Apocalypse cost me $65 in Canadian maple syrup dollars. And the wheels fell off in the very first chapter. I love, love, love having gorgeous books on my shelf […]

My Embarrassing Improv #Fail

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1120 My Embarrassing Improv #Fail Hola dfdfd! Last time I told you how terrible my game was when I tried running the published adventure, Princes of the Apocalypse. That was a 255-page $65 disaster. But if you don’t use published adventures, what do you do? Building adventures is tough. Where do you […]

My Secret For Effectively Building Epic Adventures

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1119 My Secret For Effectively Building Epic Adventures Hi dfdfd, After crashing on expensive published adventures, I tried to go 100% improv and pure sandbox. That just burned me out even more. I realized I need to build my own adventures again, like I used to before life got so busy. But […]

Simple Sandbox Economics – 4 Tips

A GM had this tip request: Any ideas of emulating/tracking a robust economy in osr style sandboxes? Good question. Here are a few tips and then I’ll end with some resources. Create a Treasure Budget I call this Treasure Crawl in my sandbox creation checklist. Forecast at each level or tier, to the projected end […]

Three MegaDungeon Tips

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #1220 Three MegaDungeon Tips So, in the coming weeks I’ll be sharing some megadungeon tips and resources. These will be for any megadungeons, not just Dungeon23 stuff, to keep it as useful to as many RPT GMs as possible. And today I have three tips for you based on questions from RPT […]

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