Your ability to control the ebb and flow of the game as GM means that you have the potential to create a great range of effects for your players. You might consider what your players are like and provide them with customized challenges, something that will appeal directly to the player(s). This is not terribly difficult to do; you can personalize your game's challenges for your players with a few simple considerations. And once your players are engaged in unique ways, you will be surprised to find just how much more invested in the game they are. Read on for the full guide on how to personalize challenges for your players.
The first thing to consider with these personalized challenges is what your goal is. Generally speaking, there are two different kinds of personalized challenges: skill challenges and content challenges. A skill challenge recognizes something that an individual player or group of players is struggling with or excelling at; the personalized challenge gives them the opportunity to learn from the experience. A content challenge, on the other hand, recognizes the things that players are interested in from an idea perspective; this kind of challenge gives the players more of what they want out of the game. You can employ both in most games, and to great effect.
Let's begin with skill challenges. As indicated above, there are two kinds of skill challenges: trying to strengthen a weakness in the player, and trying to give them the ability to succeed where they're already excelling. A weakness challenge works like this: begin by recognizing the things that your players are not doing well in. This could be an in-game thing, such as using magic spells in effective ways, or an out-of-game thing, such as roleplaying in a committed fashion. Recognizing these is more or an art than a science--there is no checklist of healthy or skilled player behaviors to reference, so you'll just need to use your best judgment. Does a player seem to be struggling? Are they lagging a bit behind the other players? These are the kinds of things you want to notice so that you can implement a weakness challenge.
Once you know what the weakness is, it's time to create the challenge. The challenge should be complex enough to be challenging to the player in question at that moment in time, but definitely not overwhelming. The first few challenges to a weakness should be almost assured victories so that your players can recognize the challenge and do their best to overcome it. Then you'll scale up your challenges over time to help them continue to grow. A few examples may help. A weakness challenge: you have a player who seems lost while roleplaying. You might refer that player to this guide on roleplaying, and then again, you might want a weakness challenge. So when the player characters are all interacting with NPCs or each other, have someone call out the player character in question (in a positive way to begin with). "Hey, nice helmet. Where'd you get it?" is a simple interaction, and yet it provides the player character in question with the ability to do some safe roleplaying. Later, we can have interactions of increasing depth with that character, add some conflict, and/or add some component to the story that requires this player to roleplay more. Most players won't immediately figure the whole thing out, but you will be gradually helping them to become stronger TRPG players, and that's what these challenges are about.
So then there is the other types of skill challenge: an excelling challenge. Many GMs have run games only to find that their players are exceptionally talented in one specific area of the game. Perhaps they're combat prodigies, or roleplaying experts, or story fiends, and so on. You can and should create challenges that appeal to that. Let's say you're running a game with players who seem able to talk their way out of anything. Their ability to defuse situations has become a recurring element of the game. So capitalize on it! With this smooth-talking party, I would try to put them in increasingly delicate situations; this would translate to them having to smooth-talk more often and with higher difficulty. Since the players are already good at this skill, by challenging them, I am offering them more moments to shine. And as the players continue along this increasingly difficult path, they will enjoy the satisfaction of emerging victorious from ever-greater stakes.
So with skill challenges, both weakness and excelling, the goal is to create scaling difficulty for whatever events occur in your gameworld. You're considering the playstyle of the players at the table and reacting to them in that fashion. But you can also personalize your story to the players. I've written before about creating an entire campaign from player suggestions, and indeed, the principle is the same. A content challenge takes ideas that the players have indicated interest in and expands those ideas to take up more of the gameworld. Content challenges may seem like they have more to do with writing a game ahead of time than adjusting it as the game progresses, but consider this: you don't just have to simply include the idea, but create struggles around it. Let's dig into an example.
Once upon a time, I was running a campaign based on the movie National Treasure. My players told me in the brainstorming session that they wanted vampires to the be the main enemy of the campaign. They also said that they wanted werewolves to be in the mix, but didn't specify how. So as the game progressed, and the party fought dozens of vampires, I started to slowly introduce the concept of werewolves. Initially, my players regarded werewolves as mindless beasts they needed to kill alongside the vampires. But I deployed a content challenge. At first, I had the party encounter an NPC who they adored; he, a human named Agrippa, or "Grip," was a badass bounty hunter with a humble streak, and they followed him around for in-game days. One night, the party saw werewolf tracks and couldn't find Grip. It was the first indication that Grip was a werewolf. After another day and increased suspicions, the party confronted Grip: was he a werewolf? Grip confessed that he was and said he was trying to make it to a werewolf enclave deep in a forbidding forest. The party followed him there and became immersed in the werewolf community they discovered. One player even requested that he be turned into a werewolf himself. My point is this: my players were ready to assault any werewolf they encountered. I turned them 180°--they suddenly regarded werewolves as the "good guys" in the lycanthrope war that was happening. I pushed my players to regard an element of the story that they chose in a new way, and that strikes me as a challenge to them and a victory for our game.
This method of integrating content challenges is pretty direct; not every group will sit down and tell you what they like. That's where your knowledge of your players out-of-game helps. I recommend that when you start a game with a group, you survey everyone to learn about their media tastes. What genres do they enjoy? Do they have a favorite kind of character? What gets them excited narratively? These are questions you may already know about your players if you're already friends. But if you're playing with people you don't know as well, poll the players for tastes. If you think you could integrate some of the ideas your players like into the game, then go for it! You may be surprised how much players appreciate this kind of personalized attention. If two or more players agree on certain themes and ideas, embrace them; if one player is especially passionate about an idea and you can insert it with minimal disruption to the rest of the story, go forward with the personalized challenges.
So to tie it all together, let's dream up a big hypothetical and create some personalized challenges. At the table, we have three players: Ashley, Brad, and Corinne. Ashley is a veteran player who specializes in combat, and she gets very shy outside of combat. Brad is an intermediate player who plays for the story, and he excels in diplomatic interactions. Corinne is a beginning player who is skilled in roleplaying, and she is especially interested in in-game lore about monsters. To a lot of GMs, this combination could be a failure waiting to happen: the players are interested in different things, and everyone's time at the table is going to be forced to share the spotlight with people with radically different playstyles. It could be a mess. (Then again, Listen Check featured an expert roleplayer, an intermediate tactician, and a beginning roleplayer, and it was perhaps my favorite campaign I've ever run. And that's because of the personalized challenges.)
So now, without changing the overall focus of the campaign, we can address our players' different needs with personalized challenges. When Ashley is not in combat, she gets shy. So, as GM, you give scaling social interactions to Ashley's character as a weakness challenge. At first, the interactions are just getting Ashley comfortable. Then, once she's more confident, we can place actual stakes on the interactions. Narratively, we can accomplish this by having NPCs very interested in talking to Ashley's character, and then later having storyline NPCs prefer speaking to Ashley's character. Then we had Brad, who is exceptional at talking his way through things. We present him with an excelling challenge: now, when he speaks to various NPCs, we can make them more inclined to be disagreeable; this way, Brad's interactions still allow him to do what he likes while also making his victories more meaningful. Brad and Ashley are now splitting time as the face of the party, and we can prioritize working on one or the other's challenges depending on the moment. Finally, we have Corinne, who is intensely interested in monster lore. So we develop a bit of monster lore into the story. Perhaps our story is about a specific dungeon which is deadly and lost to time; Corinne might be delighted to find out more about the monsters in the tomb via a document you create for her to read (either as a short document, a book, or notes). Corinne might also find herself in a tavern, listening to an NPC ramble on about monsters they've encountered. We can add a content challenge like this to make Corinne search out more information that she's interested in, and now she's more engaged because of a personalized challenge.
So you see that personalized challenges are not just a way to keep your players entertained; they also allow you to reach players in an individualized way even as you play with the entire party. By paying attention to what your players struggle with, excel at, and just plain enjoy, you can create an experience for them that could never be replicated by a more traditional game. One of the greatest assets of TRPGs is their customizability, so don't squander the chance to reach your players individually.
That's all for next time. Coming soon: how to help beginners learn the magic rules, common sayings by D&D race, and how to develop a historical event for your gameworld. Until next time, happy gaming!
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