NPCs & Roleplaying Archives - Roleplaying Tips

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Solutions For The Tough Academic Wizard Problem

A while back, community member Sir Tainley brought up a great world-building quandary: In a D&D type system, and a magic-rich setting where spells are taught academically, professional spellcasters inevitably gain high levels and unrealistically large hit point pools. Are there existing guides or workarounds to balance NPC levels so a typical scholar isn’t physically […]

The Merchant Says No, But…

The gear and equipment tip the other day drew a large response. In the Roleplaying Tips Discord, for example, Game Master Ian offers this idea: re: Double prices then mine their gear. I think a better way is not to change prices but availability. There’s a system in ACKS that restricts the number of items […]

8 Things Worth Starting a Dungeon War Over

Just picked up Level Up by Courtney Campbell. It’s a small book of tables on random topics. And the first table I started reading spawned an article idea. The table is titled “Top Ten Dungeon Resources” and has this description: Well, you’ve got a dungeon. And you’ve got all these factions. Apparently they all live […]

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 […]

Balancing Magic, Bears & Hit Points

Happy Canada Day! While swatting mosquitoes and sipping cool bevvies, let’s look at a dilemma that community member Sir Tainley poses about explaining the strength of commoners in certain game systems: I’m designing a world for a D&D 5e clone. I want magic to be reasonably common, and taught in the universities. But, powerful enough spells […]

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 […]

The Sovereigns of Stink – My Lost Isle Troglodyte Faction

How do we take a standard monster and make it feel alive without writing pages of lore? Today during Tiny Prep I added the first faction to my Lost Isle campaign. I am running troglodytes I call the Sovereigns of Stink, though in-game they’re the Rotscale Clan. To bring them to life and make them […]

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 […]

Instant Puzzles: Give NPCs Secret Codes

We got to talking about living graffiti on the Discord and @ØCÇÜL? STOÒL shared this great idea: If you can’t see the image above, the message in part reads: I always pictured Druidic hobo signs to be a thing, like most folks that saw branches growing in a strange pattern might notice but someone proficient in Druidic […]

The Writing On The Wall – Using Graffiti For Clues And Foreshadowing

I like graffiti. I got the idea of adding vandals to my dungeons from Barrowmaze Complete by Dr. Greg Gillespie. Buried under the several feet of tephra that surrounds Obsidian Invictus is a vast network of crypts built in a former age to service a Beast. And the characters have discovered the way in. It’s […]

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 […]

How To Get Players To Like Your NPCs

How do you make an NPC likable so you can predictably say “The players will latch onto this one”? Right now, for many of us, it feels like a roll of the dice. RPT GM @Harebrained Tom asks this great question, and the top tip comes from @saket._.: I think overall my view is that […]

3 Ways to Stall

How can you stall the game for a while to give yourself a chance to recover from a player surprise? Here are three ways. Stall Tactic #1. It Was the Plan All Along This was posted recently on the Roleplaying Tips Discord: Never underestimate the power of saying “yeah, weird huh?”when you slip a massive […]

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 […]

A Trick That Gets Your Players To Roleplay (Works Great With New Players)

Here’s a way to combine world building with character building while using precious session time more efficiently. I’ve been seeing headlines in the RPG-osphere about campfire chats where, during the party’s rest time, you roleplay and explore the characters together. I have a specific method for this that works well, which I’ll share with you […]

Your World Is An NPC

Before I share today’s tip, a reminder for Wizards of Adventure that it’s the last Saturday of the month in a few days and that means it’s Zoom time! Hop onto a call with me this Saturday noon Mountain Time to get some help. Get tips, ideas, or feedback about your next encounter, monster tactics, […]

Golemageddon: Golem Ideas for Your Next Campaign

A couple of quick announcements. First, I was on the Roleplay Rescue podcast recently with Tiny Prep co-author, Che Webster. It starts off with a question: What would you do if you had a new player to add to your existing roleplaying group? And the convo evolves from there. Here’s the link to listen. Second, […]

16 Things Every Good D&D Adventure Must Have

A Brief Word From Johnn A quick note that Saturday is our monthly Q&A call on Zoom for Wizards of Adventure. Let me help you spruce up an encounter, tweak a plot, or solve a tricky campaign problem. Also, if you cannot make the call, hit reply with your question(s). We’ll address them on the […]

Two Villains That Shape Your Campaign

I’m back. Thank you for the emails and well-wishes. I had some unscheduled downtime, but all is well. More news on that another time. Been thinking lately about villains. They’re actually the topic of a writing challenge I started a few days ago to get me back into rolling up some words. There are two […]

The Woes of Rulership

Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #0110 A Guest Article By Jared Hunt To those on the outside, being the boss may seem like the best job around. Seen from the top, however, the sacrifices, responsibilities, and woes involved make being in charge a little less glamorous than it might appear. Here are just a few of the […]

3 Design Tricks for Unique Races

Adding strange, wondrous, and interesting races to your homebrew world can get challenging, especially if you have a long list of races to brew up and you want to make each one unique. Here are three tips to ensure each race is distinct and thematically fitting to your setting. 1. Start With a Unique Anchor […]

Kill An NPC Every Session

Let me clear up some potential misconceptions about, and make some amendments to, my kill an NPC every session rule. For example, from the RPT Discord: Hey all, I have been working to bring a new npc each session and then to also kill off one npc per session as Johnn has suggested. I find […]

Use Charisma as an NPC Personality Generator

There’s a great article in Dragon #243 about using charisma to determine personality. It supplied a small seven row table with examples. I love this idea. While definitions of charisma vary, it makes sense that it will affect an NPC’s personality, or at least, their surface personality. Further, tying a few personality traits to charisma […]

Death Straw

What if the way people in your setting mourn the dead could spawn new adventures? In response to this world-building detail about knocker-uppers, I received a nice tip from RPT GM Cheryl the Shadow: Hi Johnn, When someone died, it was considered respectful to keep it quiet around their home, so straw or hay was […]

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