5 Room Dungeon Archives - Roleplaying Tips

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How To Conjure Incredible Sandbox Campaign Climaxes

Adventure Workshop GM Jeff B asked me this thorny question about how to finish a great campaign: If the adventure is not linear and the PCs aren’t railroaded, how can I get all the roads to lead to the big finale and tie up the loose ends? I like to have sandbox kind of stuff […]

The Subtle Gap You Should Close for Better Storytelling

When A Door Is Not Just a Door — The Technique of Transitions How your players go from one Room to the next will make or break your 5 Room Dungeon designs. If players have no choice, then that gets frustrating fast. If you give players choice, then what if they take an unexpected turn […]

An Example Of The Creature Feature For Your 5 Room Dungeon Designs

Without a key idea or theme, our adventures can feel like an uninspired assortment of random ideas. Our adventures fail to make an impact and they fall apart. One awesome solution is to create a Feature. Before you begin adventure design, choose a Feature. Pick a central idea and build your five rooms out from […]

Use The Feature Method To Make Adventure Design A Whole Lot Easier

Before you put pen to paper designing your next 5 Room Dungeon, do this one quick thing to greatly improve your design. When I build 5 Room Dungeons I often find it’s a struggle to make them more than just an assortment of encounters. Make It Pop A designer I worked with had a massive […]

How To GM Genius NPCs

I wrote this Bonus Musing for you on the weekend in response to a question from RPT GM and Patron Andy Fundinger. Andy asked me how you draw on an antagonist’s high IQ to build clever plans. Here are three ways. Think Ahead I was talking to folks at work about a plan they were […]

A Quick Tip On Session Prep

I got this tip while reading The Index Card RPG by Rune Hammer Games. Treat every session like you were prepping for a one-shot. If you’ve ever run a convention game or organized play type game, you know it’s a bit different than your typical campaign prep mindset. No one expects to play again after […]

How to Avoid a TPK When GMing Intense Encounters

With the Encounter Intensify Technique you increase the stakes during an encounter to give your players a jolt of adrenaline. Just when you think it can’t get worse or more desperate, it does. A reader asked me how to avoid wiping the party, because I advised picking a moment when encounter outcome seems dubious. Pick […]

Mad Lib 5 Room Dungeon Idea Generator For You

Use this Mad Lib to create a ton of 5 Room Dungeon seeds for your campaigns: [A GROUP] [IS DOING SOMETHING] with [AN ITEM] at [THE LOCATION] in order to [MOTIVE]. The location is the site or setting of your 5 Room Dungeon. The group is an NPC or faction from your campaign. The item […]

Think About Encounters Like Game Tiles for Better 5 Room Dungeon design

Pizza last night was awesome. I ordered my favourite. My wife ordered the house special sans shrimp (I’m not a shrimp fan). Mmmmmhmmm. I’m a lightweight these days, though. Five pieces and I’m full. The pizza metaphor doesn’t handle well what I want to talk about today. But a board game like Carcassonne or a […]

Psssst, How To Tell A Secret

“Here’s something about myself I’ve never told anyone.” It doesn’t matter what NPC says that, your players are going to stop fiddling with their dice and tune in. Everyone loves a secret. And one of the classic laws of GMing from the old Dragon Magazine column Dungeoncraft [http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/dnd/dungeoncraft/http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/dnd/dungeoncraft/] by Ray Winninger is to give everything […]

5 Room Campaign Planning

Roleplaying Tips reader Sean S. has great ideas about using 5 Room Dungeons in combination with story arcs. I neglected to mention how conversations I’ve had with Sean have influenced my thinking about 5RDs over the years (thanks Sean!), including making 5RDs within 5RDs, 5RD spawn points, and more. Today, Sean muses about how you […]

5 Room Dungeon Spawn Points

Ohayo %FIRSTNAME% You can make 5 Room Dungeons spawn points for deeper adventures. Here’s how. The basic formula is: Type: Ruins, campsite, tower, etc. Plot: Combat mission, quest, explore, etc. Room #1: Entrance or guardian Room #2: Puzzle or roleplaying Room #3: Trick or hazard Room #4: Conflict or climax Room #5: Reward or plot […]

Spikes Of Danger Tease Your Players While Filling Them With Fear

Even though we try to balance adventures, not so much for fairness but for fun, it is tough to get right. There are so many factors involved. Current character health. Whether it’s session start and players are fresh, or session end and players are making mistakes from fatigue. Whether the characters have just rested or […]

How To Create Your Own Plot Factory, Part IV

In this final part of the Plot Factory series, we confront a major problem some GMs have. So far we have solved two of our Plot Factory requirements: A fast way to create short adventures A way to keep all your plots and details well-sorted Robust hooks for those plots so characters get involved Let’s […]

How To Create Your Own Plot Factory, Part III

With 5 Room Dungeons as our core short-adventure building technique, we can introduce and intertwine multiple plots running at once in our campaigns. We do this so we put the odds in our favour that every session a climax or major milestone will trigger. This keeps our players engaged. And it gives you more control […]

How To Create Your Own Plot Factory – Part II

We add more NPCS to your campaign to create more gameplay options and interesting situations (you don’t jealously cling to and railroad NPCs when you have a wonderful abundance of them). We should add more plots or storylines for the same reason. Imagine if every session a plot thread was about to reach an exciting […]

How To Create Your Own Plot Factory – Part I

Unending plots become a grind. Encounter after encounter with no resolution or reward in sight causes players to lose enthusiasm. And when they lose their drive, game sessions fall off the wheels. When Players Sabotage Your Game For example, why roleplay hard to squeeze clues out of reluctant enemies when it’s not going to get […]

The Elvis Hook For PCs

One GM has a bard PC whose background involves being famous. So the GM has prepared a music festival in a town the PCs will travel to.