Rewards & Treasure Archives - Roleplaying Tips

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Crafting Legendary Magic Items

Hola Game Master! GM’s Log #9: How to Build Legendary Magic Items was just published, and it cloaks my atomic unit of prep in the guise of juicy loot. What started as a quick way to outline NPCs in the 2010s has become my universal GM tool for instantiating any kind of game piece: NPCs, […]

The Minnie Haul GM

So I’m a cheap bastard. That’s number ten on The Gamemaster’s Hall Of Shame: Monty Haul’s Top Ten Cousins all the way back to Roleplaying Tips Newsletter #3: 10 Minnie Haul Players in previous campaigns joke about it. I like to pretend there’s no treasure chapter at all. Mice must’ve eaten those pages. But 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 […]

Sola Dosis Facit Venenum

For my Obsidian Invictus campaign, I’m aiming to make every magic item unique. Potions was a bit of a head scratcher. I don’t want a lot of extra prep. In fact, I want the opposite. But Roleplaying Tips GM Daniel saves the day with some cool ideas on making potions distinct. He sent me this […]

Designing Your Villain’s Vault

Where does your villain stash their cash? That’s the topic of a brand new weekly mapping challenge starting today on the Roleplaying Tips Discord called 5 Minute Map Fridays. Because villains need money to support their operation, lifestyle, and goals. And many settings only operate with physical currency, be it coins, bank notes, or other […]

How to Make Your Players Love Paying Taxes

Do you charge taxes? I got a chuckle from DaveW’s post on the RPT Discord about levying taxes on the characters: My current campaign has a silver per wheel and copper per leg toll for the fortified town the players start in. An ox pulling a four wheeled cart is 4 sp, 4 cp to […]

Add a Secret Level

The first rule of DungeonCraft: Give everything a secret. Ray Winninger’s Dragon column back in the day was fantastic and the first thing I eagerly read each issue. And his Rule #1 is something I abide by to this day, decades later. TigerShaman offered a fantastic tip along these lines in my Campaign Studio GM […]

Legacy Gems

Legacy Gems is a set of homebrew rules created by Wizard of Adventure Auke. In his world of Tem, certain gems can be incorporated into magic items to enhance their power. The strength of these Legacy Gems grows alongside the wielder, reflecting their mastery and dedication. Download Auke’s gem homebrew rules here (3 page PDF, […]

Start With a Treasure Bang

Looking for a way to captivate your players right from session start? Last game of The Dark Eye, my knight got a chance to clobber some nasty creatures infesting a mine as we quest to rescue a kidnapped witch. Jochen, the GM, had a very strong start to the session, which is one of my […]

10 Tips For Leveraging Influence in Your Campaign

A couple of quick things before we head into today’s tips about using social influence in your campaign. Rio Grande Flood Charity [BUNDLE] My friend Christian is running an RPG charity bundle to raise funds for victims of Brazil’s floods. You can get the details at DriveThruRPG here. The Quarry: A DCC Compatible Adventure Another […]

Dirty GM Trick: Reverse Rewards

Want to pull a mean trick on the characters? For a different project, I just finished curating a list of Honor-type rewards. On it were entries like: You might use such rewards to boost the party’s reputation and influence. Perhaps PCs get a bonus to their roll or an extra die. However, there’s a catch. […]

Can the PCs Earn Your Favour?

Add the notion of Favour to one or more cultures in your world. A Favour means doing something now for someone in exchange for the promise you can request something of them in the future, usually of commensurate effort or value. This makes it a form of currency. And therefore, a fantastic reward option for […]

Give an Unfortunate Player Competing Sentient Magic Items

Wizard of Adventure Arvindh shared this great idea on the Roleplaying Tips Discord for making a character’s life…interesting: I have a player with an over-possessive sentient bow called Nuji. There’s a lot of jealousy. This woodelf has two named bows. One, an inheritance. The other, looted from The Room of Living Legends. I run a […]

From Parchment to Potions: d12 DIY Prop Ideas

Physical, tangible, visceral props surprise and delight our players, and never fail to engage them. Here’s a fantastic example from Wizard of Adventure Carol: One of the coolest props ever was in a game my daughter is running. She gave my wizard a spell book that was locked with a code. Then she gave me […]

2 Ways to Make Your Mundane Items Marvelous

Imagine awarding a bit of equipment as treasure, and instead of the party fighting over the Wand of Orcus and Staff of the Magi in the treasure pile, they all fight over the 6 iron pitons. Ok, that’s an exaggeration, haha. But the point is, we can do a couple of simple things to make […]

Earn More Player Action With Push Points

Here’s a cool house rule sent to me by Jonathan Hardin from Sojourners Awake: My NEW favorite technique is Push Points. For every natural 1 or 20 you roll, you experience the consequences of the roll as usual, but you collect 1 point for experiencing that event. You can collect up to 10 points at […]

Poisonous Ideas for Plots, Encounters & World-Building

I was chatting with moderator @ExileInParadise on the Roleplaying Tips Discord about how poison can inspire toxic challenges and venomous adventures. Poison is any substance that causes harm to an organism. It basically attacks a single biological process and takes it out. There’s often a spot in the rule book for how to handle poison […]

Celebrate Character Birthdays (d12 Birthday Events Table)

Something I haven’t done in years is track the PCs’ birthdays. This realization came while I was reading an old Dragon Mag yesterday. We used to roll for character birth dates. When the calendar rolled ’round there was a celebration, even if it was a loaf of bread with torch mashed in to blow out. […]

Triple Hook: The 3 100% Motivating Factors

Got a great tip for you from RPT GM Ryan about motivating players. This tip works equally well for a question that came up on Saturday’s monthly Wizard of Adventure Q&A call about how to get players to hate NPCs. By the way, if you’re a Wizard of Adventure, you can catch the recording here. […]

How to Offer Diabolical Choices to Make Rewards Feel Well-Earned

This is Part II of a series on How to Make Encounters Fun. Read Part I, Part III, and Part IV here. There are three main things I look at when trying to make encounters fun: While encounters have many ingredients, dials, and levers, if you hit high notes with challenge, plot, and your energy, you’ll make […]

What Makes Encounters Fun?

This is Part I of a series on How to Make Encounters Fun. Read Part II, Part III, and Part IV here. What makes encounters a blast at your table? For mine, I consider two audiences: the players, and YOU, the GM. Let’s talk about players first. Our friends have many reasons to suffer through […]

The Riches of World-Building: Spending Party Treasure

A 5E GM expressed frustration to me over the limited ways in which players can spend their loot: The only issue with treasure as plot devices, and I already see it within the game. There isn’t anything to buy with the gold and riches you reward. In 5E, magic isn’t supposed to be bought and […]

Be The Ultima GM And Reward Tarot-Able Play

Here’s a fun way to reward virtuous roleplay. RPT GM Rafael reached out to me yesterday with this great tip about another use for tokens: For many years I have been doing something pretty similar to what you suggested as player rewards. It kind of looks like video game achievements, you know, when you do […]

XP For RP? The One Thing I Reward Roleplaying Experience Points For Now

If you have time, I’d love to hear how you award XP for roleplaying. I love the idea but my concern would be that I might turn into a judge – “your roleplay was pretty good, but not great, so you get 100 XP” etc. And players roleplaying for my amusement would become a not-fun […]

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