Encounters Archives - Roleplaying Tips

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How to Make Haggling Fun

“I despise haggling. I’d much rather have a bot handle it.” – A GM on the RPT Discord I hear that. Yelling numbers at players isn’t fun. I’m not sure when, but I stopped haggling for transaction purposes. Now my merchants want information instead of gold. It’s partly how I make villains seem three steps […]

Weaponize Encounter Weather With The Beaufort Scale

Use the Beaufort Scale to help make wind and storm rulings easier. I grew up on a street called Beaufort Avenue. When we moved there, it had no curbs or sidewalks. And it dead-ended a few blocks down the road. And we had some fantastic wind storms. The walnut tree became weather’s weapon during gales. […]

When Players Derail Our Prep

GM’s Log #7 went out to CampaignCraft members yesterday, and it teaches my 5 Actions Framework that anticipates 90% of encounter derailments and broken adventures. After you complete the tutorial’s six steps, players can still surprise you, but they’re much less likely to break your encounters. One of my favourite examples of players ruining my […]

How to Create Non-Combat Encounters

A Brief Word From Johnn Hola Game Master! First, a quick note to say that yesterday I fixed the broken video links in the 7-Day GM Organization Challenge. To get the fresh links, you can re-join the challenge or feel free to email me and I will send you the link list directly. Today’s tip […]

What’s The Heart Of An Encounter?

Read Time: 3 Minutes What’s one thing I do to make every encounter better? This morning I was drafting up a document explaining my CampaignCraft membership program, and I got to writing about my core GMing philosophy of encounters being the atomic unit of gameplay. Players judge our campaigns by how they feel last session […]

3 Tips For Keeping Gameplay Going

Welcome to the fourth and final part of my series breaking down Game Master V’s tricky session! We’ve explored how to handle passive players, the Multiball cognitive load of GMing several NPCs at once, and turning treasure into hooks. Today, we bring it all together by tackling the Hot Potato and how to keep the […]

3 Tips For Roleplaying Multiple NPCs In The Same Scene

Welcome back to our series diving into Game Master V’s tricky session! Last time, we tackled the problem of Passive Players. Today, we’re looking at a big cognitive load pit trap, which I think of as the Multiball problem. This is when too many things are moving at once and we lets things drop. “…the […]

3 Tips For Better Player Engagement

How can you get players engaged more in roleplaying encounters? Game Master Vildara presents this tricky session situation: Last night was a bit of a first for me and I find myself here looking for advice to avoid a situation like this. The crew is escorting a bride to her new husband on some backwater world. […]

3 Questions To Turn Boring Loot Into Instant Encounters

Here’s a great tip from Game Master Cam on how we can add zest to objects, items, and treasure: Dear Johnn, Your Man/Nature/Monster dungeon history idea makes me think of my object history table: Thanks Cam, this is a great approach. I especially like the last bullet: Who wants the object? I used to make […]

On Kidnapping Characters

Take Part in RPT Map Week #1 Hola Game Master! Starting next Monday, April 20, @Auke and I are running a fun, free, chill event on Discord for those who like to make maps. Each day for a week there will be a map hook I created. The theme is Locations Under Pressure. Read the […]

Anatomy Of A Back Pocket Encounter: The Screaming Ambush

Tuesday, I shared out the tip to create Back Pocket Encounters you can push into play in case you need to change the pace, stall, or provide a transition or clue. In response, Roleplaying Tips GM TT writes: Examples of each of the 3 Back Pocket Encounters would have been nice. Thanks for the suggestion, […]

Create These 3 Back Pocket Encounters For More Confident GMing

What do you do when the party gets stuck, the game gets bogged down, or you simply need to stall for time? In a recent Tiny Prep Challenge on our Discord server, one GM mentioned they were preparing a “backup/extra encounter to keep the fight-oriented players happy, if things go too lore-heavy.” This is an […]

The Skull In The Tree

I was chatting with @Kodia Tomekeeper in the #tiny-prep-daily channel. She’s embedding a skull in a tree in her campaign. That reminded me of faces carved into certain trees in some campgrounds around here. They look amazing. Faces are powerful. They symbolize and communicate. My favourite example would be the Magic Mouth spell. A friend […]

Use Moves To Beat Brain Freeze & Deepen Play

How to simplify things at the table and drop dynamic game pieces onto it. In response to a description tutorial I sent out, Wizard of Adventure GM Will asks: I want to know more about the “Moves” section Thanks Will. I first discovered Moves in the Dungeon World RPG. At first, I didn’t understand the […]

Make Melees Faster With Combat Outs

How to end combats without grinding down to the last health point every time. Roleplaying Tips GM Paul asks: One thing that has always been difficult is that when the party have relatively low skills in combat and magic. A fight can take up to 2 sessions to get through. Fatigue playing a major part […]

Quarrel at the Quarry: Bottom-Up Encounter Prep

Quarrel at the Quarry: Bottom-Up Encounter Prep Here’s how I’m building certain types of encounters in my Basilica campaign using world logic. By world logic, I mean starting with a map based on terrain and environment details, and then having plot and gameplay wrap around that. Using biome, hex, and other relevant details from my […]

Running Demons

How do you liven up gameplay when the characters are near max level? Here’s a question posted in the #demonplague channel in the RPT Discord: …the party finally came to the entrance of Xancrown’s Dungeon. I perused the 4th adventure shortly, have to read it in detail, but aren’t the enemies too weak for this […]

Join the Mapvember Challenge

I love maps. They’re my First Move when building an encounter or 5 Room Dungeon. It lets you think things through as you push the pixels or graphite around. I like to tell myself a story as I draw. Here’s the entrance and it leaves much to be desired, making them easy pickings for the […]

Bake In The Pokey Bits: Design For Interaction

I try to keep it simple behind the screen and let players make it complicated. Part of doing that involves me handling The What and players handling The How. For example, I was creating a 3 Line NPC just now. Liorin, the wizard who created a powerful artefact in my Duskfall setting millennia ago: My […]

Run Your Dungeon Maps Like A Board Game

I GM like I’m playing a board game now. Wait. Before you hit the delete button and say you don’t want chocolate board games getting mixed with your tabletop RPG peanut butter, hear me out. This might be a boon for your improvisation and encounter-building feats. First off, I’m speaking to GMing mindset and strategy […]

My New Dice Tower

Check out this sweet dice tower I made on the weekend with my father-in-law: It just needs a couple coats of stain. Then the critical hits can begin rolling down upon my players’ heads like bard tears at an orc wedding. I’m learning woodworking, thus this is my “build a bird feeder” first project. While […]

Gain +1 to World Building By Making Every Encounter Count

Guten morgen. A quick update for Wizards of Adventure: the recording of Saturday’s Q&A call is now available. Some of the things we discussed on the call: Wizards of Adventure: Watch, listen, and download the recording here. Or become a Wizard of Adventure today and also get access to exclusive tools, GM techniques, and GM […]

A Great Way To Design Hazards

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #882 You could slice-and-dice hazards a number of ways, pun intended. However, you might benefit by taking a step back and thinking about their game purpose and choosing them that way. Hazards have three cool combat and action scene effects: danger, senses, and movement. Add Danger Make encounters more lethal with hazards […]

Instant Encounter Inspiration

Today’s tip is inspired by Wizard of Adventure ExileInParadise who used images in a clever way for his session two weeks ago. He described each encounter in his 5 Room Dungeon to GPT. Then he asked for a representational image. Then he shared each image with players as they triggered the encounters. From there, it […]

A Surprise Bad Day in the Forest

So I’ve had this strange reading project for the last two years. I’ve mentioned it before. I have Dragon Magazines from Issue #55 to the final print issue. It’s time to part with them, so I decided to read each one, one more time. In so doing, I started piling up issues that I want […]

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