Healthy Imperfection: An Argument Against Min-Maxing

You're running a game, and your players have carefully designed their characters. So carefully, in fact, that these characters are more powerful than the average levelled characters. In the parlance of TRPGs, these player characters, with their focus on maximizing character efficacy and their attempt to use only minimal character progression, are min-maxing the system. They are focusing their efforts as players on making their characters as powerful as possible. Is this an issue? Should we be concerned that the player characters are as powerful as can be? I would argue that this indeed is a problem, but perhaps not for the reason you imagine. Read on for reasons that a min-maxed character negatively impacts the game for everyone. 

Firstly, there is the cost to the player who is playing the min-maxed character. When people gather to play D&D and TRPGs like it, they are most often looking for a way to feel in control of their decisions. Min-maxing seems to resolve that by making players more connected with their character's chosen actions. But it actually creates a problem for this player. What makes choice and control so valuable in a TRPG is that there are limits to player choice; a player with a specific action in mind must be able to pass a check in order to be successful. This check creates drama and can create narrative if failed; if, on the other hand, the player character has been min-maxed, the check is almost guaranteed to be a success. There is no drama, aside from the potential of a natural 1. The player and their party mates don't get to enjoy the story of their characters being scrappy heroes; they walk in, resolve an issue, and there is no further excitement. 

One of the troubles with min-maxing is that players who do it often don't realize that they are cutting themselves short. They believe that the enjoyment of the game lies in winning, which they interpret as being the victor in the gameworld's smaller struggles. Crushing an enemy team in combat becomes more important than advancing a narrative or roleplaying a character moment. That is to say, the things that make TRPGs special (their ability to provide more than a combat simulation) disappear when players min-max. If you have a player or players who are min-maxers, I recommend both speaking with them about changing strategies (unless that's the kind of campaign you're running) and shifting the game's emphasis toward the storytelling side of things. 

So min-maxing short-changes the players who do it. But it also affects the players who don't. Allow me to provide an example from my mystery campaign: in this campaign, we have three players: a dwarven barbarian/druid named Beor, a tiefling wizard/monk named Ais, and an orcish bard named Montana. Montana in particular rolled exceptionally well when deciding ability scores, and as a result, Montana is the most statistically powerful of the group. Further, Montana's background states that he is a private investigator, which makes him very powerful while investigating a mystery. Further still, Montana's player chose to excel in investigative skills, and his array of magic spells allow him to use his magic to investigate in detail. Compared to Beor and Ais, Montana could be argued to be min-maxed to an extent. 

And sure enough, Montana is pretty much always the face of the party. He pushes the investigation further and more effectively than anyone else. If I were running a game where skill checks determined success for the players, Montana would be so over-powered that the other characters would be devalued. (As it happens, I opt to judge roleplayed actions more seriously than dice rolls, so Beor and Ais are able to contribute just as well as Montana. Success based on roleplaying will always offer a strong alternative to dice rolls.) And the thing about Beor and Ais being devalued is that it would destroy the campaign. The party is tied together in a way that makes them each equal contributors to their goals. If solely Montana were able to successfully navigate those goals, neither of Beor's or Ais' players would be having much fun. They would just be spectators in the Montana campaign. If all your player characters in a group are min-maxed, I suppose there's nothing that would hold you back aside from slight variations in powers, but I would still remind you that so far we've addressed the ways that min-maxing ruins the fun for both the player and their party members, and it goes further still. 

You as GM are affected too. Let's say that you're a GM who's interested in careful balance. No encounter exists in your game which you haven't carefully calibrated for your players. But if a character or two are min-maxed, your balance will be off. Min-maxed characters have significantly different profiles than average characters, sometimes to the tune of a character level or more. No longer are you building an encounter for a group of 5 characters of level 6; now you have to calibrate for 3 level 6 characters, 1 level 7 character, and 1 level 8 character (after inflation). But not only is your balance off, you have to content with an even more important fact: your players might not be having fun. 

As I have written before, the most important thing in a TRPG is the element of fun. I would go so far as to say that creating fun is your primary job as GM. And as we saw from the above examples of how min-maxing adversely affects the players of those characters as well as their party mates, min-maxing can impact the fun being had at the table. So if we're keeping track of all the points here: min-maxing robs players of the fun of being imperfect and not having a guarantee of success; it distracts from the goals of storytelling and roleplaying; it makes other players feel comparatively less powerful and robs them of their fun; it unbalances your game; and it violates the most important principle of gaming (it negatively impact fun). So in the end, the impulse to extend player control over the story via mechanics creates more issues than it solves. 

As I mentioned above, you can combat min-maxing if you are persistent about it from the beginning. Speak with your players before they've developed characters and share the idea that min-maxing will get in the way of the story you want to tell. Share this article if you think it would help. Take care to speak with your players not in an accusing way: no one is trying to ruin your game; they just need a touch of help getting in the right mindset. As people level up, offer advice to the players who seem to struggle with making strategic choices for their characters so that they have as powerful of characters as the more strategically-minded. And most of all, create challenges in your story and gameworld that don't reward min-maxing. Like I mentioned with my mystery campaign, if roleplaying rather than dice rolls is the heart of your story, you can eliminate the benefits of min-maxing and rely instead of player ingenuity. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: an age calculator for D&D races, architecture by D&D race, and a one-shot based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Until next time, happy gaming!

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How to Design a Custom TRPG

Much of the world of TRPGs--and much of this site, for that matter--is about Dungeons & Dragons. But there are many other games out there which provide different experiences for players, both well-known in the world of TRPGs and relatively unknown. What matters with a TRPG system is that the game's rules support the type of experience you want your players to have. And you can create your own system to meet the needs of your campaign and your players with a bit of time and attention; all it takes is thinking about what the players should experience. Read on for a guide to designing your own tabletop roleplaying game. 

I personally have created two tabletop games from scratch. I want to keep my descriptions of them here minimal, as I want to be able to retain publishing rights for later, but I will provide examples by way of these games in addition to directing the creation of a brand new TRPG system, one which revolves around the solving of mysteries (something near and dear to my heart). The first step is to devise a setting. You want something that is somewhat unique. For my first custom TRPG, which I call Algernon's Tower, I wanted a high-flying, spectacular combat system that allowed the players to creatively use their abilities. So Algernon's Tower is about combat, and in order to provide a variety of settings to enrich combat, I set the game in a dizzying tower where each floor of the tower provides a different setting: a lava level, an Old West level, a creepy museum level, etc. The second game I created I call A Time and Place, and it is dedicated to the concept of time travel; players choose a time and place from a set of options and can play sessions in three different time periods in that setting, trying to use time manipulation to creatively solve problems. The game is supposed to feature the setting heavily, so I chose places and time periods that would be broadly appealing, such as 1750s London or 1870s San Francisco. Finally, we have our to-be-designed system involving a mystery concept--we want a unique setting that also serves the mystery format. We might choose Victorian England for the game, casting it as a classic Sherlock Holmes-style game. We might similarly choose 1930s America and run a film noir-style campaign. But for the sake of making something that is more unique, let's pick a less reality-based setting. I am going to go with 1970s California; that way, we get a more modern setting that still doesn't have the narrative-destroyer that is the cell phone, and the setting is broad enough that practically any story could fit into it. 

Next, we need to consider win conditions and lose conditions. For some games, this is simple: as in Algernon's Tower, winning means being the best at combat, and losing means being defeated. It's more nebulous for A Time and Place; the GM will select a certain condition for winning, like "prevent such-and-such disaster from happening," and the players win when they prevent it; because the players can time travel, there is no such thing as a real loss condition, only more time spent trying to solve the problem. For the mystery system, which we'll call Truths for Sleuths (TfS) from here out, we need to know how the players win or lose. Let's say that the players must solve the crime correctly before a certain deadline in order to win; dying, identifying the wrong suspect as the perpetrator, or running out of time constitutes losing the campaign. 

Then we get to my favorite part of the design process: mechanics. This may be a surprise for regular readers of this site; I am a very storytelling-and-roleplaying focused GM, so designing numerical values is not exactly my wheelhouse. But it is very fun to determine mechanics because this is where your game really comes to life. You decide in this step how the players engage with challenges, and that means a great deal to the players. There are two main elements to the mechanics you'll need: player abilities and game mechanics. Let's start with abilities. 

In Algernon's Tower, players are outfitted almost entirely along the lines of combat. I created a series of five attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Knowledge, Thought, and Socialization) with five skills under each attribute (hit points and melee weapons under Strength, reading others and screen presence under Socialization). [Screen Presence refers to the fact that the fights in Algernon's Tower are broadcast live on television, and there is a mechanic whereby players advance through their powers by attracting more viewers.] Between these 25 skills, every action in combat should be represented. This is a system, which like most TRPGs, has a set selection of skills that the player chooses proficiency in. Your system doesn't have to work like that, though: in A Time and Place, the players choose their own skills altogether. It's a relatively simple system. Each player starts with a pyramid, with one slot at the top, two on the next rung, three on the next, and all the way down the the bottom. The pyramid has six rungs--one for each type of dice included in a standard set. The player places their most proficient skill in the top rung and rolls a d20 for it; the two next-most skilled areas go on the next rung down and roll d12s for their checks, and so on down the line. Players can choose any skill they choose; the more specific, the greater their successes, and the more broad, the lesser their successes (all as a mechanism to balance narrow versus broad skills). Now we need to design the player abilities for TfS. 

The most important thing in designing player abilities is in asking how they serve the players. This means we need to be thinking about how people will actually play the game, and that means you'll probably need to playtest your game to ensure that you've covered everything. Before you get there, though, you have to make some educated guesses. Let's shoot for a system that's somewhere in between Algernon's Tower and A Time and Place, a system that allows the players to use an array of skills, but with enough structure to allow for the creation of unique characters. For that, let's have a small number of attributes to work with and a slightly larger collection of skills related to them. I'm imagining three overall detective archetypes with a handful of skills underneath them, perhaps four or so skills per archetype. Let's go ahead and fill in those details.

For our three archetypes for detectives, we want to represent different styles of investigation. The classics that jump to mind would be brawler (a detective who gets into scrapes and fights his way out, like Bigby Wolf in The Wolf Among Us), a smooth talker (a detective who uses their wit and charisma to solve crimes, like Columbo), and a sneak (a detective whose specialty is moving about undetected, like some versions of Batman). This gives us some range to let the players express themselves, but all while providing a framework that reinforces the game's design and setting. 

Now we want some skills that can be associated with each archetype. The archetypes won't be something that the players are forced to stick with--they can choose skills from all three archetypes without issue--but they represent pure images of detectives. We might choose to grant a player a bonus for choosing all of an archetype's skills, and we may not, depending on what we want out of the structure. I'm of the mind that it's better to not grant a bonus, as I want my players to choose skills that inform their characters rather than build super-effective characters. So let's go ahead and create four skills for each archetype: 

Brawler:

1. Fists of Fury - Raises unarmed damage from 1d6 to 1d10. 
2. Pile of Bruises - When reduced to 0 hit points, you regain 3 hit points. This can be used once per day. 
3. Sap the Sap - Once per day, you can cleanly knock unconscious one distracted person with a sap.
4. Nerves of Steel - Once per day, you may intimidate someone into sharing what they know. 

Smooth Talker

1. Kind Eyes - Once per day, you may appeal to someone's emotions, convincing them to share what they know. 
2. Fast Talker - Once per day, you may confuse someone, possibly causing them to reveal what they know. 
3. Truce - Once per day, you may talk your way out of being physically attacked. 
4. Con Artist - Once per day, you can visually or audibly impersonate someone. Requires a roll of 1d10, and any roll of 4 or below blows your cover. 

Sneak

1. Right Place, Right Time - Once per day, you can overhear someone discussing important information. 
2. Silent Step - Once per day, you can approach someone without their noticing it. 
3. Shadow Strike - Once per day, you can render someone unconscious if they are unaware of you. 
4. Invisible - Once per day, you can create a distraction and evade anyone who had previously noticed you. 

You'll notice that none of these archetypes or skills are really related to intelligence--that's because I want all detective characters to have a certain intelligence to them, and I don't believe that any of the archetypes disqualify an intelligent character. Further, since none of the skills between archetypes have a monopoly on obtaining information, any character can be vital to uncovering the mystery. As written, these skills allow players to choose their strategy and roleplaying matches in almost any way they wish. I would advise awarding players either 3 or 4 skills at the beginning of a game and then awarding an additional skill each time a player levels up, which in this case will be determined according to progress through the story (as the players discover new secrets, they will be rewarded with new skills). 

So now we have both our archetypes and our skills. We just have a few more details to work out. I mentioned in the "Fists of Fury" skill that unarmed damage begins at 1d6 and goes up to 1d10, so let's fill in other weapon information. A melee weapon grants d10 damage, and a firearm grants 1d20 damage. Though it's tempting to add a "to hit" mechanic to combat, I don't really want combat to be the heart of this game, so I would rather simply say that any attack made by a player character or a non-trivial enemy should have a 75% chance of hitting, regardless of other details. We can have our players roll a d20 and opt for 6-20 being successes, or 26-100 on a d100, or 3-8 on a d8--whatever works best for you and inspires the most excitement. I think bigger dice generally equal greater excitement, but again what works for you is what matters most. 

Then we have the issue of hit points, which are mentioned in the "Pile of Bruises" skill. Again, combat isn't our focus, but detectives often end up in precarious situations, and we need to know how much punishment they can take. I intended 3 hit points to be non-neglible but also not huge; we want a firearm to be able to kill someone in one hit and the melee options to be more drawn-out. I think that a set 15 hit points would serve us well; that would be about three strikes from a melee weapon or one accurate shot with a firearm to render someone unconscious or dead. That's about the balance I want; my detectives are not meant to be running around killing people, but solving crimes, so quick and deadly combat works pretty well, as it will discourage players from spending too much time fighting. 

You may notice that most of these skills are not dice roll-based; rather, they grant the players daily abilities to act in special ways. This means that most of the game is based on strategy rather than luck, which is ideal for a mystery game. Generally speaking, storytelling- and roleplaying-focused games benefit from less randomization, and so I have opted for less dice rolls. But if you're designing a system that is chaotic or disorienting, lots of rolls should be factored into your system. 

This is enough of a framework to playtest. When playtesting, watch for which abilities seem to tilt the game away from where you want it to go, and pay extra special attention to the things your players get excited about. After playtesting, revise your system with your findings in mind; curtail the effects of overpowered abilities and expand on the things your players enjoy the most. But don't lose sight of why you designed the game this way in the first place--you want to keep the spirit you were aiming for alive throughout any revisions unless it doesn't serve you anymore. 

All you would really need now to run a game of Truths for Sleuths would be a story. You could turn to my guide for writing a mystery campaign, or you could use the following sample story, which illustrates how Truths for Sleuths might actually run. Let's pick something that suits our setting (1970s California). I think GMs should go where their inspiration guides them, and my inspiration reminds me that tarot cards (a great passion of mine) were of great popularity in California in the '70s. So this mystery will be a mystical one revolving around tracking down a deck of fabled tarot cards which were stolen from a medium. Now, as the players investigate the missing deck, they will meet a variety of colorful characters from the mystical reaches of California: the sniveling assistant to a mystic who dreams of one day being a master mystic themself, the retired detective who has reinvented themself as a palm reader, the eccentric millionaire who pays handsomely for the advice of the mystic. The deck will seem out of reach, always changing hands before the players can locate it. And as they investigate the mystical community, strange things begin to happen, things which suggest the mystics know more than they're letting on. 

So we started from the framework of "what do we want our game to accomplish?" and now, just a few pages later, we have a full TRPG system and notes for a campaign. It's really isn't too daunting if you take it a step at a time. Just remember to keep asking the question, "how do I create the experience for players that I'm imagining?" And don't be discouraged if your ideas come slowly or if playtesting reveals you need to return to the drawing board. This is just part of the process, and the more you work at it, the better your system will become for both you and your players. Good luck, and have fun!

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to roleplay learning new skills and abilities, descriptions of temples in D&D, and details about agriculture in the gameworld. Until next time, happy gaming!

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How to Manage a Boss Fight

It's the end of your campaign, and all that's left is the final boss fight. Your players dig in for combat, and you're prepared for the BBEG to show why they're so intimidating. But how can you ensure that your boss fight is dramatic enough to merit being the finale of the campaign? You don't want it to be over too quickly, but you also don't want to wipe out your party. So how do you set up your boss fight so that it excites the players but is also balanced? Some folks would say that the answer is a carefully, mathematically-balanced encounter, but I argue that you can do even better than that by breaking your boss fight into three parts that are more scripted. Read on for how to use this method to create exciting boss fights. 

I've written something similar before: a guide to improvising encounters. That guide takes a few basic considerations and turns them into encounters, but the premise is the same as what we're doing here: we're balancing our encounters to create dramatic moments. The key difference with a boss fight is that it matters more that it be satisfying and dramatic; it's the culmination of your whole campaign. So we'll use the same concept to create boss fights that are more interesting than simply the result of dice. 

As I mentioned, you can spend a lot of time working out a mathematically sound encounter. This requires considering challenge ratings, character levels and abilities, and other details like weaknesses and spells. But you can make it simpler for you and better for your players if you wing it. No, seriously. We'll plan for three parts of the encounter, and in the final part, the players will defeat the BBEG. It's as simple as that. Obviously, this approach isn't for hardcore combat simulators; this approach is about storytelling and getting the most drama for your effort. If you like the sound of that, consider the three parts of a boss fight:

There are generally three phases you want to include in a boss fight. Part one is where the players make their first attacks or other tactical efforts. During this phase, you want the players to be able to deal a good chunk of damage to the BBEG, but you also want the BBEG to attack in a way that exemplifies why they are the final boss--what makes them so much of a badass? Part two is where the players run into trouble. During this phase, the BBEG should use a tactic that weakens the party's strategy, and they should strike hard at members of the party. You want this part to feel like the BBEG is getting the upper hand. Finally, in part three, the players pull ahead again. The BBEG should be able to make a last-ditch effort to turn the tide, and should even be able to render unconscious at least one member of the party, but ultimately, the players will win with a dramatic strike. 

Let's get into the details with each part now. Part one: the players make a strong initial showing, as does the BBEG. In practice, this should look like the party getting opportunities to strike the BBEG. I generally argue that it's better to give your BBEG a higher number of hit points and a lower Armor Class; this means more dramatic successes for the players, but an ability on your part to string the encounter along. So set a relatively low Armor Class depending on your party's level. I like to give them roughly a 50% chance of hitting initially, so a party with an average +3 to hit should have a 13 AC; likewise, a +6 to hit should mean a 16 AC. I generally let this phase of combat go for about three to five rounds or so; you want the party to hit the BBEG enough that it seems like they've done about half damage total. 

At this point, let's address the BBEG's hit points. I don't start with a number set in stone. I might decide that it has generally about 150 hit points or something like that, but this number doesn't matter very much. Whether the party is scoring 30 points of damage or 90, it should seem like the BBEG is at about half health. This just means that the players should work for three or so rounds to damage the BBEG, and it works. Whatever they accomplish should be enough. If they deal more damage than expected, just grant the BBEG more hit points in your head, but if they deal less than expected, string this phase out for another round or two until you can tell your players feel like they have made good progress. 

Then we get into phase two of the boss fight: the players run into trouble. I like to deploy a dramatic flourish here generally, usually by employing an effect that makes the BBEG harder to hit. Perhaps it's magical armor (an artifact or "Mage Armor") or simply the BBEG going Super-Saiyan; the effect is that they pose more of a threat than previous. I like to boost the BBEG's AC by enough to make the players only 25% likely to hit. To provide examples, this would be a +3 to hit with a 15 or 16 AC, or a +6 to hit with an 18 or 19 AC. Now, your players are only succeeding in hitting the BBEG half as often as they were, which allows the BBEG to deal more damage relative how much they're taking damage. At the same time, boost the BBEG's saving throws to defend more against spellcasters. I recommend a +3 or 4 bonus, but this can be adjusted with good fudging of rolls on the BBEG's part. You can go the other route with this as well: improving the BBEG's likeliness to hit the players or deal greater damage can also add the imbalance you need to create some drama. This phase of the battle generally lasts another three to five rounds. Your players need more time to deal the damage they were dealing earlier in part one. Just as important to your consideration of when to move on to part three is how much damage the party has taken. When you have one or two party members who are at about one-quarter health or less, it's time to move onto part three. 

Part three is where the players turn the tide and win. I like to use the AC-improving effect as a story moment; sometimes players will strategically try to negate the AC boost, and sometimes, the effect simply wears off. In any case, it can be helpful to have the AC boost disappear in phase three so that the party can get back on top of the encounter. You can have the boost you've granted to your BBEG disappear when a player strikes them particularly hard--basically use anything that would allow you to change the battle back to closer odds. In part three, I like to have one or two members of the party go unconscious. This really ups the drama. The BBEG should look both poised to win the battle and in fairly bad shape; we're imagining at this point (the beginning of part three) that the BBEG has only about 25% of their hit points left. This part of the battle should again be about three to five rounds, granting time to do and take damage. Then, when one of your players deal a considerably blow (more than 10 damage, let's say), the BBEG has taken all they can, and they fall unconscious. I think it's more interesting to have the BBEG incapacitated than dead, personally, so I generally have the BBEG rendered helpless rather than kill them; it should be a player choice to kill or spare a BBEG, not mine as a GM.

You can absolutely mix up the makeup of your boss fights. Add minions to the mix, use interesting terrain to create strategy, give the BBEG special powers; whatever you want can work. This guide simply shows you how to pace your boss fights for the enjoyment of your players. And trust me, your players will almost always prefer a dramatic fight than a statistically random one. It's more engaging and exciting, and that's the point of playing. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to design a custom TRPG, how to roleplay learning new skills and abilities, and descriptions of what each deity's temples look like. Until next time, happy gaming!

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How to Create and Balance an Economy

Money is as inescapable in tabletop games as it is in real life. The players want and need supplies, necessities, and fun, and all of those things generally cost money. It's your job as GM to have answers about everything about your world, and money is no different. To keep things consistent, you need your money to be predictable and balanced, or else money in the gameworld becomes meaningless. But balancing an entire economy can be complicated. Use this guide to develop your own economy or borrow it wholesale; the goal is that you can consistently use money in your gameworld in a way that makes sense. 

In order to get values for our economy, the first thing we need to do is determine the distribution of wealth in the gameworld. I play with a high degree of inequality because I like stories about the divide between the rich and the poor, but you can create a more equitable world by just shifting the values around a bit. I operate on the premise that the poorest of the poor make about one copper piece per day of labor, which is just barely enough to cover food costs; this means it takes the whole family unit to manage a successful household. Meanwhile, the rich can make almost anything in an average day, but I rule that the average high roller makes about 5 silver per day minimum from their businesses. But in a more equitable world, these numbers would be closer together; the poor might make as much as 3 copper per day while the rich can only manage about 1 silver per day. Of course this all depends on how rich or poor an individual character should be for your story, but it's helpful to have a baseline. In my mystery campaign, I have established that the poor in Yamseth make as little as 4 copper a week (in a world with 9-day weeks), which means that the poor are struggling especially hard there, but your gameworld and your cities should match your plans for them. 

Then we set the prices for common goods. A simple meal and an ale costs one copper, which exhausts the average poor person's resources for a day. Alternatively, the more equitable world has the poor using one-third of the wages to eat and the rest for whatever purpose they see fit. Along the same lines as this meal, which is designed as a tavern meal, a person could purchase ingredients for a meal for less than one copper. This means that copper is no longer the cheapest coin, because we would be spending fractions of a copper, so I introduce into my world the concept of copper chits; these small rounded chits represent one-tenth of a single copper piece, and so they are used for small purchases. A few reference costs: a chicken costs one full copper piece, a pumpkin costs three copper chits, a flagon of decent ale costs five copper chits, and a simple tool like a shovel costs 7 copper chits. I have found in my experience that because TRPGs like D&D place so much emphasis on expensive items like magical weapons that the cheapest items get lost in the mix. The copper chit system allows you to buy and sell simple, common items more precisely instead of all cheap things costing one copper piece. This also makes it more possible for the poor to subsist on low wages, narratively speaking at least. 

Then we have common but less cheap items. The game rules set out costs for weaponry and armor, but what of less-adventure-oriented gear? What, for instance, does a simple house cost? This can be a complicated question, as houses are stratified into many different qualities. We need a sample house for the average poor person; a small shack big enough for a bed and a stove is enough to survive on, and it should be within reach of a poor person. Let's say that someone should have to save for most of the year to be able to buy a simple house--that means that a simple house should cost about 3 gold. Most poor folks won't be able to save up that much all at once, so there should be a lending industry in place to help them finance their homes. Interest rates in a fantasy world can be anything, but I set them a bit lower than real-life predatory lending practices. Let's say that a poor person borrows the 3 gold to buy a home and that they are charged another half of a gold (5 silver) over the course of the loan. Now we have an economic system in which the poor are likely in the process of paying back lenders. Meanwhile, a midsized house will cost 5 gold pieces, a fine house will cost 8 gold pieces, and a true mansion could cost as much as 12 gold. Custom work costs more as well, as much as 20% of the price of the house itself. 

Most of the other details about prices are covered by the TRPG's rulebook. Prices for weapons, lodging, mounts, and more are all the domain of plenty of writing. It's these other details that complicate things. How many times in your GMing career have your players set out to buy a building? If you're like me, that answer is "plenty of times." Having a set price for a building is helpful for more than just having a fully conceptualized economy. 

This covers most of the pricing issues you'll face, but there's another side to the economy: labor. What does the average person get paid for their work? As in real life, that depends on the job. Obviously, more complicated or difficult tasks will pay more--that's why the hard work of adventuring makes the players some of the wealthiest people in the gameworld. (In the mystery campaign, one of the player characters is Beor, a hermit-like barbarian/druid who lives a simple life. According to the official rules, Beor started with 40 gold pieces. 40 gold pieces! That's enough to build a custom mansion thrice and still have money left over. This is the kind of imbalance you're constantly fighting as a GM: you need to make the economy work well for non-adventurers, but also not let the economy break when player characters' wealth is added to the system. So what do we pay various professions for their labor? 

As mentioned above, common labor labor doesn't pay very well: about a copper piece per day. Climbing the ladder, the next rung is hospitality work: tavern and inn employees. These indispensable folks make a bit more money as well as tips, so they're a bit better off than manual laborers. Let's say that the average tavernkeeper makes 2-3 copper per day, plus another copper's worth of chits as tips. Similarly, we have shopkeepers. Shopkeepers may own the store, in which case they take the business's profits as payment (more on this below), but they may also just be hired to take care of the business, in which case they would be paid according to how much money the shop makes--high priced items or high bulk of items would both mean that the shopkeeper gets a little extra. Let's say that this ranges from 2-4 copper per day in most shops and 4-6 copper per day for nicer shops. Then you have specialized labor: healers, enchanters, smiths, craftspeople, and others. The payment they can expect is generally tied to the perceived quality of their product or service; an expert healer or a master craftsperson would get paid more than a run-of-the-mill smith or a novice enchanter. On the low end, these experts make 5-8 copper per day and 9-12 copper per day on the higher end. 

We can see at this point that the inequality I wanted to create is very ingrained in these values. An expert healer can make as much as 12 times the amount a manual laborer can--that's quite the disparity. And yet, in the world of most TRPGs, inequality breeds narrative; the greed of the rich or the suffering of the poor are both rich with story potential, and indeed the mystery campaign has revolved around investigating the hyper-rich in ways that the poor cannot do for themselves. And as the end of the campaign will reveal (when the time comes, of course), that inequality is at the core of the story I want to tell. Adjust your economy to the story you want--it will be a vehicle for a great many adventures. 

As I mentioned above, the rules are a little different for business owners. I generally create businesses where the owner is also the main shopkeeper, but that's more of a guideline than a rule. It depends more on the business and the personality of the business owner--is this business owner the kind of person who is hands-on and likes the public, or are they willing to forego some profits to stay out of the day-to-day workings of the business? A shopkeeper gets the wages described above, but a business owner gets to keep the profits, which is generally a more rewarding route. We can stratify businesses into categories: low, middle, and high quality. Quality may refer to the reliability of goods, the customer service provided by the shopkeeper, or how well the business serves its community. It may also refer to how many customers the business usually has. Low quality businesses (poor quality, few customers, or both) might net between 1 silver piece and 5 silver pieces per day. Medium quality businesses (average quality, average customers, or a combination of low and high quality indicators) might expect to make 3 silver pieces to 8 silver pieces per day. High quality businesses (good quality, many customers, or both) can expect about 5 silver pieces to 1 gold piece per day. Keep in mind that these are averages: a simple smithy that sells common tools might make lots of small sales in a day, whereas a magic item seller only needs to make one big sale in a period of several weeks to meet the same average. And of course, if you feel that a business is exceptional (it taps into a new market, its prices are substantially cheaper than competitors', it has both high quantity and quality of goods/services), it can and should make even more money. 

This should cover your needs for the gameworld. But your players are a big part of the gameworld, and it is practically their goal to break the economy. How do you keep it intact when money is both hard to come by and required in great amounts for powerful items? This is where you can reduce the role of money in advancing your players through the game. Traditional TRPGs pose challenges to players, who are rewarded with currency in the game so that they can obtain boosts to their power. But with so many details floating around and such distortion between common uses of money and player uses of money, this can be much more than you've bargained for. That's why I often eliminate money as a reward for my players. If they want to make money, they must get creative and find a place in the world that can provide them with funds. But rewards that advance the players' powers can be separated from money; you can simply award appropriate items to your players via the story. 

An example: in the last year, I started a D&D campaign with my immediate family. My brother and sister have both played before, but my mom is new to the game. We have a good time with simple quests and lots of roleplaying (my mom loves to threaten to light people on fire). When my family completed their first real quest, I wanted to reward them. But their characters are from a small town without lots of items available, and their main interest is in getting more powerful rather than amassing a fortune. So rather than add the middleman of money to the equation, I just reward them with magic items. My family's characters are a sorcerer, a cleric, and an Ancients paladin, so I offered a few classic D&D items: they offered +2 bonuses to charisma, wisdom, and strength, respectively. You'll notice that each of these items offers a boost to the most important stats of each respective class. This allowed me to reward my players with the kind of items that will help them the most, and all without the complication of awarding money which would only disappear as soon as they located a magic item vendor. I'll acknowledge that this removes some of the choice from the players--the cleric may have wanted to become stronger rather than wiser, or they may have wanted a magic sword which can light people on fire (which I'm awarding to my mom the next time we play). It's a trade-off you have to decide for yourself. My best suggestion is this: reward your players with items directly most of the time, but also give opportunities for obtaining the items of their choice. My favorite way to do this is to have a questgiver have access to an array of magical or otherwise powerful items, and they reward the party by granting them one item each from the collection. Then you can offer a variety of helpful items and put your players in the position of strategizing which ones they value the most. 

The biggest key with money is not to be overwhelmed. It's exhausting and sometimes pointless to put a monetary value on anything and everything. My suggestion is to work on your economy as part of your worldbuilding and develop a mental sense of what you would charge for various items. Once you can comfortably come up with values for most things in your world, get to playing. As players buy, invest, haggle, or sell, help them to understand the values you're assigning. Your players have a sense of money in the real world where we live, but they're unlikely to immediately grasp the more abstract way that money works in the game. When players estimate a price that is too high or too low by a wide margin, take an out-of-game moment to confirm that they want to offer something that is noticeably different from agreed-upon values. Your players may want to be over- or under-pricing something, but you should allow them to revise their estimation if your explanation of a reasonable price changes their mind. You never want to penalize a player for not understanding something about the gameworld, as anyone who actually resided in the gameworld would not make these kinds of mistakes. Eventually, your players will get a sense of your economy, but until then, hold their hands. It will help get everyone on the same page. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to manage a boss fight, how to design a custom TRPG, and how to roleplay learning new skills and abilities. Until next time, happy gaming!

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How to Deal with Party Splits

It's a classic conundrum: some of your party is motivated to do one thing, and the rest of your party is motivated to do something else. The party is at odds. Player agendas threaten to cancel each other out. It's the end of many campaigns, but it doesn't have to be. You can salvage a party split with the right story moves, and your campaign may even end up better for the split. Let me begin with an example of a time that a party split made a campaign better than it was before. 

I was just getting my feet under me as an intermediate GM, and I designed a campaign that revolved around killing off 20 members of the royal staff of a town. The players completed the first 2 contracts and then turned on the questgiver; the party was divided over the questgiver's goals, and about half the party went in either direction. The more rebellious characters decided to destroy the kingdom, and the more stalwart characters decided to defend the kingdom. At least 75% of the campaign's story became the struggle between player factions. The final battle was a showdown between anarchist forces and the palace guard, and the story resolved on the formation of a new future for the city. 

When the party split initially occurred, I was at a loss. How would I recover from losing my main quest and seeing the party divided? I wasn't sure, so I just kept running the game and hoping for the best. The players soon aligned themselves along ideological lines, which meant that disagreements about how to proceed could derail the whole campaign. But it didn't play out that way. The palace guards set to doubling down on defenses while the anarchist players worked on plans to assassinate the king. The story didn't so much disappear as reform; now I had a group of players committed to preserving a kingdom and a group of players committed to destroying it. In other words, I had two parallel campaigns that unfolded at once. This is how we should view split parties; they are two conjoined stories with one outcome. 

More recently, when I ran the Eastweald campaign, one of the three players used the final battle to reveal that he, a part-paladin named Carric, had formed a bond with Vecna, the evil god of secrets, and he turned on the other two players. The final battle became Vecna and Carric versus the other player characters. This party split is different from the one described above because it doesn't mean a reformation of the story so much as a twist. But the principle is the same. Carric turned against his compatriots, meaning that his conditions for success were mutually exclusive with the rest of the party's. Isn't this a problem? 

In both cases I've described, no one was truly bothered by the story's outcome. One player in the first campaign was troubled by the lack of consequences for the lead anarchist character in the story's denouement, but his character was in part responsible for that decision. Neither case saw the players involved feeling cheated or opposed to each other; they viewed their experiences in the story as evolving naturally from player actions and the other events in the story. Not every player will feel that way, but there are things you can do to resolve that. 

Before you begin adjusting your game for a party split, it's a good idea to check in with your players. Is everyone prepared for a party split game? Some players may find the idea unappealing, or even in opposition to what they find fun. If that's the case, you might try salvaging your campaign with an out-of-game appeal to your players: set aside your roleplaying differences and make the game work for the sake of everyone's enjoyment. It may even be possible that the campaign is simply over; sometimes players are neither willing to change their decision-making nor to face off against their friends. It may be better in that case to start a new campaign with better parameters than plunge into a game that will be unenjoyable for your players. But if your players are game for a little opposition, you have options for making a party split work. 

Perhaps the most common cause for party splits is alignment disagreement. I address this briefly in my guide to building a cohesive party; a lawful good character and a chaotic evil character in one party is usually a recipe for a party split. You can counteract this issue before it starts by building your party around a range of alignments. All good and all neutral alignments generally work together; all neutral and all evil alignments can be a good combination as well. Law and chaos are less divisive issues than morality (most of the time, at least), but divided moral alignments usually cause issues. (That campaign I described with the palace guards versus the anarchists? When I mapped the alignments of each of our nine characters, we had one character assigned to each alignment. No wonder it erupted in a party split.) So be careful at the beginning of the game and suggest the party agree on a range of alignments to prevent unnecessary party splits later. But you can work with party splits when they arise. 

The first thing to do when the party splits is to reorganize your story's stakes. Where once the party strove to solve problems together, now you have the party working against each other to further their agendas. So you need to move the conditions for success. Let's say you have a campaign where an evil god is promising lots of power in return for pushing their agenda--harming the innocent. Where initially the party was working to protect the innocent from this god, now you have a party split. Some characters insist on continuing to protect the innocent, but others find the god's promises of power too enticing to ignore. Now it's time to adjust the story. Instead of a blanket "protect the innocent," you develop a series of important communities. Each of those communities is both a population to protect and a group to target for the evil god. Now it's up to your players to square off and accomplish one or the other goal. 

Balance is very important in situations like these. If one group has a real advantage over the other, it should be for the sake of serious storytelling. For example, it would be a mistake to have the evil god offer magical help to the players supporting them; that gives them a big advantage over the defending players. You might offer this change to the story if the defending players are running away with the game and the evil god-aligned characters need a boost. Similarly, if it proves too easy for the evil god-aligned characters to target innocent communities, perhaps a good-aligned god steps in to help the defending players. Generally, though, you want your split parties to have equal shots at success, or else you will be dealing with players with sore feelings. 

The second big step to take is to become a more reactive GM. I talk a lot here about how you need improvisation skills to be a strong GM, and it's never truer than with party splits. The thing about a party split is that your story is no longer a path from point A to point B; it becomes an ideological issue for each character to address themselves. Developing your story still involves providing details and new events, but the meat of the story is now in how the players feel about the issues involved. For instance, in the palace guard scenario, the stepping up of guard activity would once have been a way to get the player characters to be working when something important happens. But after the party split, the palace guards respond to the increased patrols with vigilance and duty, while the anarchists respond to them with frustration and a greater need for creatively addressing their goals. As a result of this, your job as GM becomes less to advance a narrative (since your players will be doing that) and more to introduce ideas for the players to contemplate. 

An example of this in action: during the palace guard campaign, a common question was how harsh to be with the anarchists. Some players, like my younger brother, who played a sneaky orc named York, felt it their moral obligation to stop violence, but could not contemplate using violence to stop other violence. This put those characters in a position of moral quandary when dealing with the anarchists. But other players, like my best friend, who played an awkward dwarf named Barryn, were more conflicted in his beliefs. Barryn wanted to decisively strike against the anarchists, but was concerned about the moral impact of harming or imprisoning people who technically hadn't yet committed a crime. Many issues that law enforcers face in real life became the matter of the game's story, and it was a richer and more complex story for it. 

But it's not enough to react to the players and let them guide the story. You also need to let go of your ending. The stakes used to be the players versus the story, but now it's the players versus the players. I had envisioned the tragic fall of a kingdom and the players' shock at their involvement in it, but the players made the story about a struggle between powers and ideas. Similarly, you'll need to completely re-envision your story's conditions for ending. Let's return to that example about the players siding with or against an evil god. Where you once held the fate of a particular group of people to be the final stroke in the story, that ending will no longer work. The stakes have changed. Now your story is about the ultimate success of failure of that god's agenda as enforced by the players. As you may have noticed, a party split's effect on the story is often to magnify it and push the ending conditions into bigger territory. In this example, we go from the fate of a town to the fate of the whole world inasmuch as the god can change things. And that's fine! It's good to make your campaign about something bigger when party splits are involved. 

A word of warning, though: if your players said they're up for a party split, but you've noticed there's a negative change in the game afterward, you need to do something to address it. The most important thing in gaming is creating fun, and if the party split removes the fun, it's time to rethink things. I generally recommend letting a party split play out if your players are onboard with it, and I recommend using story forces rather than rules to solve the problem, but every situation is different. It may help to have some willing players create new characters who are onboard with the rest of the party's plans, and it may be a good idea to tweak the story so that everyone is closer to agreement. But the holistic way to solve it is to create story reasons to keep the player characters on the path they would naturally take. Think about how much fun you would lose if you had to roll a new character because the other characters were too different from yours. Is that fun? Probably not. I think most players would have more fun standing by their character's personality and finding new ways to engage with the story. So give a split party a chance if the conditions are right--your campaign may actually benefit from it. 

A final note on party splits: when I ran the palace guard campaign, even after the party split, I kept all my players together. I have heard of people running games where only the sub-parties play together, and I think that's a very interesting format. It really highlights the opposition of the parties and it eliminates the capacity of meta-gaming, which can be an issue in split parties. But with a group of well-meaning roleplayers, it actually helps to have everyone together. Watching another player take their turn and stymying your players is exciting and spawns one-upsmanship in a fun way. And in the case of the palace guards, it kept the social element of the game alive. Best friends sided against each other, romantic partners sided against each other, siblings sided against each other; losing these connections over the party split didn't make sense. By keeping everyone together, the joint story they all told became the central focus of the campaign rather than the many disconnected actions of the players on a grand story that was bigger than any one individual. Make this call based on your gut and player opinion; your players will have a preference for together or apart, or at least they will have an opinion after a session or two.

So the bottom line is this: a party split isn't the end of anything but your campaign as you knew it. You can and should encourage your players to keep at the story they're all telling together with some adjustments for their new roles. Rewrite your story's win conditions so that they allow the players more agency. And be ready to address smaller changes as you go, just as you would with any situation in TRPGs. With all that work, you'll be able to turn most party splits into interesting experiments in storytelling and roleplaying. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to include music in your campaign, how to use mirrors of your party to shake up the game, and what you can do with campaign continuity. Until next time, happy gaming!

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Glyphs: My Custom Magic System

Magic is one of the greatest draws to TRPGs like Dungeons & Dragons. Players long to have great effects on the world around them, and few moments in games are more exciting than when the right spell is used at the right time. But magic is also heavily regulated by the game's design, and spellcasters often find themselves in the situation of having to work creatively to get their spells to apply as desired. Perhaps, like me, you want to empower your spellcasters to make more meaningful decisions and have greater control over the effects of their spells. In that case, glyphs are perfect for your game. Read on for the way the system works and how you can implement it in your game. 

When I was running Listen Check years ago, we were at the forefront of a new technology and the beginning of the tabletop game boom of the 2010s. I was telling a story about a port city, full of criminals, and the designs of a vengeful god who wanted to see the city torn to the ground. The players were up against forces they struggled to understand let alone combat, and the group's spellcaster, Rupert, used his available spells as cleverly as possible to get by. But I wanted Rupert to have the tools to succeed against his foes so long as he was creative enough. So I dropped mention of a new magic system in a book Rupert had read (and which I had created in-game), and Rupert took to it immediately. I drafted the glyph system, and before long, Rupert was creatively solving all manner of problems with his experiments in magic. In the end, Rupert used a glyph spell to help defeat the vengeful god, so the system played a major role in the campaign--no way around it, these spells changed the trajectory of the game. 

Glyphs work simply. As I note in the instructions in my glyph resource, all you need to do is some quick subtraction. You take the level of the spell slot that will be expended, add two, and that's how many glyphs you can use to cast the spell. A cantrip allows for 2 glyphs, for instance, and a 3rd level spell allows for 5 glyphs. Spellcasters can reuse a glyph multiple times in a spell to emphasize it. From there, it is a matter of GM interpretation to determine the effect of the spell. 

The first set of glyphs; check out the link for all 13 pages of the symbols. 

A successful glyph spell includes considerations for each detail of the spell. The link above also leads you to the array of glyphs and their meanings. Combining glyphs takes the meaning of each symbol and combines them. Have your spellcasting character list the glyphs they use, in order (the order affects how predominant the effect of that individual glyph is), and then describe the intended effect of the spell. If you believe that the chosen glyphs align with the intention, the spell should largely succeed. If the glyphs are a bit off from how you think the spell should have been built, have it go wrong in some small way. Read on for examples of good and bad glyph spells. 

A traditional spell has a clear intention and definite limits. Glyph spells may or may not have either. Let's start with a more traditional spell, recreated with glyphs. "Enlarge/Reduce," a second-level spell, will work well. There are a number of ways to rebuild this spell with glyphs. A reliable start would include the direction the spell is supposed to work in: either "Limit/Restrict/Verge" or "Increase/Improve/Grow"  would be good indications of either enlarging or reducing. Similarly, "Calibrate/Adjust/Tune" could indicate that change is taking place, but a more specific glyph like the two above would be stronger indications of the intention. That gives us three more glyphs to work with. Let's say we're going for a general increase or decrease in size, which means we want to have a balanced growth/shrinking. We can cover several types of size with the following glyphs: "Fatness/Width/Abundance," "Height/Tallness/Altitude," and "Strong/Powerful/Potent" would all add up to proportional growth or shrinking. You might also use "Thinness/Spareness/Scarcity," "Smallness/Fragility/Fineness," or "Weak/Powerless/Stunted" if you're keen on shrinking rather than enlarging. These would be suitable and successful glyph spells. 

But your players might not put together a strong glyph spell without practice. You'll need to know how to describe an unsuccessful spell as well. Let's try "Enlarge/Reduce" again, but with some issues in two different version of the spell. The first goes like this: "Flesh/Body/Visceral," "Height/Tallness/Altitude," "Mastery/Conquest/Rule," and "Control/Influence/Impose." The spellcaster is trying to increase the size of the body with careful control. But these glyphs might be interpreted in other ways. The spell may backfire, causing the spellcaster to become tall and thin with the ability to control the shape of their body for the duration of the spell. Not exactly what the player was looking for. And that's okay! Glyphs do create the opportunity for spell failure, but the greater customizability of spells balances it out. Your players won't mind having a spell fail every so often if their successes are all the more spectacular. 

But the player might try a different tactic. Rather than a one-to-one reproduction of the "Enlarge/Reduce" spell, a player may try to customize. They use "Increase/Improve/Grow" to signify making the target bigger and "Strong/Powerful/Potent" to indicate the way the growth should be characterized. Then the add a few glyphs to focus on keeping the target safe from damage: "Defend/Guard/Steward" and "Damage/Destruction/Ruin," the intention being to guard the growing character as able to resist damage. If the spellcaster's intention had been to recreate "Enlarge/Reduce," the spell would fail, growing the target but not matching the growth with the kind of strength needed to do extra damage; instead of a damage boost, that character receives a small bit of damage resistance until the spell ends. But if the intention was to buff a tank character, it would be very successful. That character would become larger and more powerful with significant damage resistance. Intention matters a lot; the glyphs themselves understand a spellcaster's intention and try to act accordingly, though within the limits of what each glyph stands for. A spell that aligns with the spellcaster's intention should be especially successful. 

Now let's consider a custom spell unlike recreating a traditional spell. In Listen Check, Rupert used some of the more specific and uncommon glyphs to interesting effects. At one point, trying to develop an alternate identity, Rupert cast a spell to create an enormous tattoo that covered his back--its design was to be a symbol of his deity, Wee Jas. Rupert picked his glyphs carefully: "Scar/Tattoo/Piercing," "Wee Jas/Death/Magic," "Flesh/Body/Visceral," "Complexity/Nuance/Faceted," "Imagination/Artistry/Fantasy," and "Magic/Glyphs/Energy." Specifically, Rupert was creating a tattoo of Wee Jas that had some of the god's magic in the tattoo; it affected his body, had fine levels of artistic detail, and was itself a magical effect. The result was a stunning work of art depicting Wee Jas staring directly at the viewer, waves of magical energy coming off the tattoo, and it helped Rupert stay in contact with his god as the adventure continued. 

A successful glyph spell should be similar to a natural 20 in that it should be memorable and celebrate the success of the caster. On the other hand, failures should be closer to success than outright failure because the spellcaster has intention guiding their spell. It is more dramatic and interesting to have a near-success than a complete failure, as it makes the glyph-using character(s) more like scientists experimenting than experts in an established field. Glyphs are meant to lend some excitement to spellcasting, so consider the ways you can interpret glyph spells in terms of where it will take the story. 

Rupert could have failed with his tattoo spell, however. He might have used "Wee Jas/Death/Magic," "Ink/Charcoal/Paint," "Symbol/Suggestion/Allegory," "Identity/Personal/Private,"  and "Pattern/Design/Symmetry". Here, the first emphasis is on Wee Jas rather than the tattoo, and the glyph selected for the art itself is ink rather than a tattoo itself. Partnered with the other factors in the spell--symbolism, identity, and patterns--this spell could have radically different effects depending the GM's interpretation. If the spellcaster's intention is muddled here, I would have the spell fail pretty wildly. Rather than a tattoo of Wee Jas, I would have a drawn image of Wee Jas appear on a nearby building or sheet of paper, an image which depicts the goddess as powerful and alone in distinctive, symmetrical patterns. But if the intention is clear, the spell might come closer to succeeding. They may get a small image of Wee Jas in charcoal on their body where they wanted the tattoo, or they may end up with an image that is closer to a comic strip depicting a Wee Jas allegory than a single image. It all depends, as I said, on the GM's interpretation. 

I mentioned above that glyphs can break the game if you're not careful. I especially recommend it to parties with lots of spellcasters, as it makes the act of breaking down the glyphs a collaborative game rather than an opportunity for one player to shine. But with a responsible player, glyphs will not break your game. In fact, the only way that they can break your game is if you let them. If you're concerned about the power level of a spell, look to a few traditional spells of the same class. Is what the player wants to do in the same order of effects as the traditional spells? This informal style of balance works just fine, and you shouldn't feel hesitant to take your time to preserve this balance. But even better still is developing your own sense of difficulty based on effect rather than input. By this I mean getting a sense of how your players use glyphs--are they using them for roleplaying effects, like helping NPCs? Even if you did grant extra power to the spellcaster through glyphs, you wouldn't be breaking the game because they're using the spells to advance story moments. Are your players using the glyph spells in combat? Now we need a closer eye on balance. Keep your approximate levels of spell powers handy and don't let the creativity of glyphs ruin combat for your non-spellcasters. 

So perhaps you want to implement glyphs into your game--but how would you do so? It radically changes the way spellcasting works, and unless you implement it from the start, how would your spellcasters transition into glyphs? Well, it's actually not that bad. I implemented glyphs midway through Listen Check, and the transition was pretty seamless. In the show, I had an NPC named Tasselman who was something of a library scientist; when the party needed difficult-to-find information, they went to Tasselman, and he would dig up the information in question. Glyphs were mentioned in a book about magic use in the modern age, and Rupert sought more information on the mysterious symbols. I ended up writing the resource found in the linked glyph information as an introduction for Rupert, and soon he was casting all manner of custom spells with myriad effects. 

So to implement it in your game, all you need is a trip to the library or bookstore. Have your players find (or have recommended to them) Shadestepper's book and invite them to try the system out. Some players may find the range of choices overwhelming--it's important to not force them to use glyphs, as their fun is more important than trying out a new system. But if your players respond favorably to glyphs, there are practically no limitations on the adventures they can have. Familiarize yourself with the glyphs before using them so that you have a general sense of which symbols are best suited for which effects, and trust that your players will work to master the new system. Above all, have fun! Glyphs are meant to increase spellcaster agency, creativity, and novelty--the three things that form fun in a TRPG. So get out there, get casting, and have some fun with magic that's as wild as it gets. 

If your players really like the glyph system, you can let them lean even further in that direction with my custom class: the glyphist. With this class design, you can convert traditional magic to glyphs easily and provide your players with the challenge of collecting all of the symbols in their quest to master the dangerous art form. I wrote the rules based on the Wizard from D&D 3.5, but you can still use it for 5e games without much disruption, so long as you're consistent about how glyphs work. 

And of course you want to describe the effects of the glyph spell in an interesting way. Use this guide for describing magic, and especially use color associations with each glyph. If you do, each spell will be characterized by an array of colors and effects which can make glyphs even more dazzling. I like to run my game so that glyph casters cast by drawing the glyphs in the air in front of them, but you can choose whatever method of casting suits your campaign. The point is to make magic more fun, so go with whatever you think will be the most interesting to your players.

That's all for now. Coming soon: my expanded familiar table for every class, random events for traveling, and how to deal with party splits. Until next time, happy gaming!

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How to Keep Your Game Balanced

A classic concern in TRPGs is in keeping everything balanced. The developers of whatever game you're playing strove to make it a balanced experience, and they likely relied on hundreds of hours of playtesting and refining to strike the right balance. You as a GM can undo all of this careful balancing act with a single action. How do you keep things in the sweet spot, where all the players are equally powerful and no one can magically wave away serious story issues? The short answer is that everything is already kind of broken, and as long as you can compensate as you play, you'll be fine. But of course, it is more complicated than that. Let's dive in. 

Before I go further, let me address the elephant I see in the room. I am not a crunchy numbers GM. If you've seen my guide to improvising encounters, you know that I care more about momentum and storytelling than Challenge Ratings and to hit ratios. I cannot provide you a guide to keeping each number in check; rather, I can offer you a mindset for adjusting to the changes you make to the game. If you want a statistical balance, there are dozens of resources for each TRPG to keep it in line with the creators' intentions, but if you are interested in keeping your roleplay-oriented game balanced enough to be interesting, read on. 

I asked my mystery campaign group for some ideas to write about here, and both Montana's and Beor's players asked about balance. Specifically what they wanted to know was this: What do you do when a player tries to break the game (what if they succeed)? Bigger topic could just be about handling "failure" as a DM. And: How to politely decline character ideas and why you would do so. I.e., a character wants to play a god in a level 1 one-shot. I'd like to handle each of these ideas in turn. Let's start with a player trying to break the game. 

Many GMs have seen it: some players set out to break the game. Maybe they're a min-maxer; perhaps they are exploiting a homebrew rule you've set; they might just be ignoring the spirit of the game you've set out to be more powerful. Whatever the case, having a single player character who is significantly more powerful than the rest of the characters creates problems. People generally play to experience the agency associated with TRPGs, so feeling less able than another character can diminish the player's experience. Sure, some player characters are more capable of certain things than others--a wizard's powerful magic is counterbalanced by how frail and physically unintimidating they are, for instance--but if a character is far and away more powerful than other characters, the balance is off. Especially with beginning characters, we want everyone to feel relatively balanced. Here are some tips to keeping things in order:

For starters, one cause of an overpowered character is the line between beginning and experienced players. To a certain extent, it is your responsibility as GM to work against this. You can use this guide for beginning players to get them started, but you'll want to guide them through the character creation process so that they aren't completely in the dark with it. But there's always the chance that a player will use some knowledge of the game to get ahead. My first thought for an example is when players choose exotic races or classes--these have been less heavily tested and are more likely to be unbalanced. One might look back at Gerald from the Eastweald campaign as a bit overpowered; goliaths are unstoppable in combat, and his access to magic via his custom class made him highly intimidating in a way that other characters would struggle to embody. I generally try to discourage exotic races and classes unless the player is really connected to a specific idea, otherwise I run the risk of granting them unbalanced power. A good general rule is this: if the player has a significant story reason for their background, allow it, but if they're looking more to capitalize on numbers, encourage them to express that idea via the core backgrounds. I know that this generally runs counter to my philosophy of gaming, but consider this: I am not barring players from participating as they see fit--I'm asking them to engage with their characters in a way that benefits the story rather than the numbers. I recommend this for any roleplay-heavy game. As Orson Welles so famously said, "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." Give your players a few limitations (small suggestions), and they will create interesting characters who strike a balance. 

To keep your player characters balanced from the beginning, you'll probably need to use your first session as a diagnostic tool. Provide a few challenges in your opening session--some skill checks you plan to use regularly, an encounter, some roleplaying exercises--and take note of who is the most talented with each type of challenge. If the same player emerges as the best at most things (discounting the luck of the dice, considering only bonuses), consider adding a conditional handicap to that character. You can do this gauging of talent by just looking at character sheets if you're confident with that method, but there's no drawback to balancing after the first session. If a single player is overpowered enough to necessitate a change (if it affects how fun the game is for people, that is), you can develop a story reason to adjust that character. Perhaps they have upset their god, who revokes some of their unbalanced power. Or perhaps they are injured in a way that leaves permanent damage, lessening their impact. The main story might come into play--the BBEG might use magic to siphon off some of that character's powers, and only defeating them will restore their powers. You don't want your player to feel short-changed, though, so be judicious about this process. Only resort to this strategy if a player has successfully broken the game. You can rebalance the game later than the first session with a similar strategy, especially if a level up or a magical item unbalances things later on. 

One of the most important elements of this process is addressing it with the player. I personally opt for a direct conversation. "You built your character so well that the other characters can't compete. I need to have a collaborative spirit here, so I want to curtail your character's powers a bit. Will you work with me to balance the game?" Most players will understand and play along. What you absolutely do not want to do is come off as accusatory or blame them for breaking the game. They were trying to have fun and may not have recognized that their fun can put a damper on others' fun. Present it as a challenge to that player: how can you still succeed even after being powered down a bit? Once you are working with your player to solve the problem, it will be much easier to balance things. If the player is upset that you want to reduce their character's power, empathize with them; explain that you don't want to impact their fun, but the game as a whole needs to remain balanced for the good of the party. Remember to be diplomatic in this conversation, as you'll need that player's cooperation to make your balancing changes work. 

This leads us into our next issue: declining player decisions. Generally speaking, game-breaking behaviors are not a clear-cut issue. There is no action that would always be game-breaking, nor an action that would never be game-breaking. It all depends on context. I think back to the first session of the mystery campaign, when Montana used the spell "Speak with Plants" to question a dandelion in the alleyway where they found a murdered woman. I as DM had not considered that he could find a witness so easily--I had not considered that Montana could simply talk to a weed growing in an alleyway and have a description of the murderer. Using "Speak with Plants" is not a game-breaking action practically ever, but it meant that the party had cut a lengthy step in the plan completely out. It kind of broke the game. By a similar token, "Speak with Dead" could have turned the murder victim into an encyclopedia of information about the murder. (The reason for this unbalance is simple: D&D is not designed to tell mystery stories, so using the system for a mystery means that some effects are not intended for use with what I'm trying for.) Had "Speak with Plants" truly stymied my plans as DM, I could have denied the use of the spell. But doing so would leave a bad taste in the players' mouths--"Why can't we use a basic spell to investigate?"--so I would have needed an appropriate story reason, like the dandelion in the alleyway having been closed up because it was nighttime when the murder happened, thus not being able to act as a witness. But at the time, I played along because I liked the creativity of using the spell. (Side note: I think it is always better to let your players unbalance the game with creative thinking and then compensate for it rather than turning down ideas to keep your plans intact. Remember that improvisation and rewriting plans is part of your job as GM; don't deny your players' plans just so you don't have to work as rebalancing.) 

But let's say a player comes up with a truly game-breaking action that you have to deny. Perhaps you're running a game about protecting a royal family from assassination, and an assassin manages to get past your defenses and kill the king. Now the cleric in the party wants to cast "True Resurrection" on the king to negate the effect. (This happened to me years ago; the party had split and I had to decide between keeping the king dead after one player had killed him and allowing the king to come back via the spell.) To allow "True Resurrection" to work as intended would have made the killing of the king (the entire point of the campaign) meaningless; if he could come back as though nothing had happened, what was the point in protecting him in the first place? I had a decision to make as a DM, and I decided to deny my cleric's player. "True Resurrection," I ruled, could bring the king back, but in a weakened form and for only one week; further, should he be killed again, no spell could bring him back. 

This was a drastic choice. By reducing "True Resurrection" to such a weaker spell, I made it effectively impossible for dead player characters to regain life after dying. I made the assassin player's actions permanent. I made the cleric fundamentally useless to the king he served. But the other option seemed much worse. The whole campaign had been driving towards assassination attempts on the royal family. The assassin used stealth, invisibility spells, social cunning, and lots of strategy to kill the king. To deny all of that to preserve the spell's integrity seemed to defeat the purpose of the campaign. But you can see how balance factors in here: either player actions hold meaning, or game rules do. I chose player actions because I was running a roleplaying campaign. Choices like these are judgment calls, and you should make them based on what the goal of the campaign is. If balanced combat is your goal, then you would probably choose to make "True Resurrection" function as the handbooks direct. What matters, though, is consistency. Balance relies on the players being able to predict the outcomes of their actions to a certain extent--so if you're defending the sanctity of your story or the balance of combat, stick to your guns. Your players will learn (or you can explain to them) that you are making these choices with a consistent reason in mind, and that will improve their ability to participate. 

A note on this idea: it's tempting to view TRPGs are systems where the fun and the magic just naturally flow. But it's work, and it's more specifically group work. Everyone in a tabletop game has joined in a kind of compact: I put forth my time and energy, and I get in return a fun experience with my friends. More specifically, players are looking for a particular experience. Key to those experiences is balance. Balance keeps it so that all the players can meaningfully cooperate, and it makes it so that participating in the story or combat is open to everyone. Most players will understand when you have to curtail a certain detail about the rules or a character as long as it serves to balance everyone's experience. If it's not obvious (and it rarely is) why you're rebalancing things, have a direct, out-of-game conversation about it. It's better to have everyone on the same page than try to handle balancing solely in-game. 

Let's tackle something that was suggested by Beor's player: what do you do if a player wants to be a god even as a low-level character? This one requires even more out-of-game talking. I've written before about what to do when your players don't know enough about the game to play confidently, but what about the opposite, when the player is a little too confident (but still might not understand why they need to stay balanced)? This falls into two categories: your player is too confident because they know the game, and your player is too confident because they don't know the game. 

If your player is a veteran to TRPGs and comes in wanting to dominate the game, have a conversation with them. You might have already dealt with this issue when building your party; hopefully, you have selected players who all agree on what they game should be like. But let's say for illustration's sake that you have a player who's trying to min-max in a roleplaying-focused campaign, and it's thrown off your encounters. Talk with your player and try to figure out how to compromise. Maybe you allow them to remain excelling in combat but with the twist that encounters only happen when your players are focusing on roleplaying. Maybe you reduce the number of encounters in your campaign to maintain your focus. Then again, maybe your player gets into fights because they know they'll win. Then you have two main strategies. You can be a nice GM and address it with them out-of-game; explain that they should respect what everyone wants from the game and try to invest that player in roleplaying. Or you can be a mean GM: overwhelm them in combat (enemies target specifically that character because they're such a threat) or handicap their character (they might lose an arm, rendering two-weapon-fighting and shields impossible). Make the decision about whether to be nice or mean depending on how the player is acting. If their heart is in the right place, be nice; if they're trying to steal the spotlight or deliberately disrupting the game, be mean. 

But maybe your player is confident because they're new. You experience this with players who are strongly into video games most often, but anyone can come in a little too hot. It does create issues: an over-confident player can be reckless, they can drag the party into bad situations, and they might drive the focus of your campaign to the side in search of ways to display their power. Again, you can be nice or mean. A nice GM will scale up and down encounters in difficulty or frequency to suit the party. A nice GM also talks to the player in question and pushes them towards the focus of the campaign. You can take the advice from how to deal with players ignoring your story and meet them halfway--allow the player opportunities to shine in a balanced way while still providing the story you're telling. But you can also be mean: let the player get into as much trouble as they like, but have appropriate consequences. In the National Treasure campaign, I had one player who would kill any NPC they thought they could get away with. When they killed the head guard in a small town, they got the whole party run out of the area. This places the balancing on the other players, who can now roleplay being upset that their plans were scrapped due to this player's bursts of violence. Complaints from other players pretty quickly changed this player's tune, and the bursts of violence stopped. (This is a form of the "evil character in a good party" problem, which you can and should avoid by carefully building your party.) But when you can't solve that problem until after it's already happening like I did in that case, you can always push the story to meet the player's challenges. In that example, the party was run out of about 80% of the towns they initially visited, often because of this particular player. The other players adjusted in their own ways, and I made the guards in the towns they visited hardier and less corrupt to lessen the desire to kill them. It's rarely a numerical change that can fix these problems; story solutions not only solve the problem, but introduce new opportunities for roleplaying. 

Finally, Montana's player's big question: How do you handle failure as a DM? Failure, in this specific case, refers to a game becoming unbalanced. Well, as the solutions above suggest, I think the answer is in twisting the story. To illustrate this point, I'll refer to a mechanic I'm using in my mystery campaign. For each unit of the story that my players complete (learning a secret involved in the mystery represents a unit), I grant them a statistical bonus. For the first two sessions, it was a +1 to all Investigation checks. The third and fourth sessions grants a +1 to their choice of Persuasion of Insight checks. The fifth session, the halfway point in the story, grants a bonus of both +1 to Investigation and the player's choice of a +1 to either Persuasion or Insight. Investigation is one of the main skills in the campaign, so granting a small boost to each player character's skill represents both getting better at what they're actively practicing and a classic game reward: something that makes what you've been doing incrementally easier (while at the same time, the story-based checks go up by a similar increment). Likewise, Persuasion and Insight are important skills for getting the truth out of people, which are critical in my story (perhaps even more important than Investigation).  

But I'm granting bonuses without the party leveling up. Doesn't that throw off the balance? 5e is very sparing with skill bonuses, especially compared to 3.5; a bonus of as much as +6 is a huge bonus for 5e skills. And Montana began the campaign with a +9 to Investigation. Doesn't giving him an additional +3 over the first half of the adventure break the game? Especially when the core mechanic of moving the story is so far from an average score, this could radically affect balance. Montana is a professional private investigator, so it makes sense that he's especially skilled with this stuff, but what about Beor's and Ais' abilities to keep up and contribute? My answer is simple: yes, it all breaks the game, and that's okay because I can compensate for it. 

Especially in roleplaying campaigns, you'll have players whose characters are specialized in certain things. This goes back to classic party design (a balance of strikers, tanks, healers, and experts to keep a party ready for anything). It's not necessarily a broken game if every character has a time to shine. In the mystery campaign, all the characters have access to magic, so that doesn't unbalance them. Ais is actually from the city the game is set in, so she gets access to special information that only she knows. Beor has a variety of magical abilities like his werebear condition and his druid background that make him someone who often grants an important outside perspective on things. Montana's proficiency with investigation skills means he often plays the face of the party, but that doesn't mean he always is. In fact, Montana's high bonuses to skill checks mean that he is likeliest to notice important details, but due to the randomness of roles, he is not the only one who can notice these details. And his identity as a private investigator gives him an excellent set of reasons for being so well-suited to the task. Here we have a story reason for something that is unbalanced, which means we can counterbalance it with another story reason. 

So I've broken my game a bit by granting the players stat bonuses to what they're mainly doing. So what? I'm running a storytelling game with lots of roleplaying. Should dice really be the deciding factor in whether that story progresses? What if my players are all at a critical juncture and must notice a particular detail to progress, and everyone fails the roll? It would be ridiculous to hold them back just because the dice said so. Isn't it more interesting to grant the players a success based on their intentions? I have made my mystery players significantly more formidable as investigators, and that actually works well for my storytelling purposes. Not to mention, game design would call for the skill checks to get harder as the story progresses. Since 5e doesn't increase skills when you level up, my players would be always reaching for a particular DC which would grow further and further out of reach. So I broke my game a bit to compensate for the changing experience of the game. What appears to be breaking the game (adding stat bonuses) is actually a remedy for using the D&D system for something it wasn't designed to do (telling a mystery story).

Some GMs would look at Montana's +12 to Investigation checks and dismiss this as a broken game. But as I hinted out in the last paragraph, if you're using a TRPG for anything besides its directly intended purpose (often combat), you're going to need to compensate for the way you're breaking it by stretching its purpose. All of this is to say that an unbalanced game is never a failure. Failure indicates that the game is broken beyond repair, but unbalance in a TRPG just means you have some details to compensate for still. 

Exact balance in a game is for D&D battle royales, where the calibration of each number must be precise for the system to work. But for storytelling games, you don't need exact balance. You just need a system to work well enough to support everyone having the experience they're looking for. Some of the conditions I've described above might not even be problems to solve; for instance, a combat-focused player in a roleplaying campaign might be a welcome presence so that everyone knows combat is handled and can focus on what they really enjoy. Similarly, an overpowered character who doesn't diminish the roles of the rest of the party can be very helpful. (My most recent character, a cleric named Asa, is fairly overpowered by most standards due to high ability rolls and some great starting equipment, but since he's the group's healer, no one minds him kicking ass as long as he keeps the party healthy.) Pay close attention when diagnosing balance issues to whether they're causing the other players or the story to suffer. If they aren't, there's very little harm in allowing an unbalanced detail to stand. 

So, "failure as a DM" when it comes to balance is really about whether you can recognize balance issues and correct them if they call for it. Any unbalanced detail can be changed by the story to better reflect what you're trying to accomplish. If you're worried that your game is unbalanced, just determine what would fix it and develop a story reason to implement it. The only balance issues that signify "failure as a DM" come from DMs who fight so hard for mathematical balance that the reality of everyone's experience is lost. TRPGs are an art more than a science, so strive for the right effect more than the right method. 

That's all for now. I hope that as you strive for a balanced game, you are successful, and remember always to treat your players as unique ingredients in the meal that is your game. Coming soon: how to help players find their fun, what works when trying to tell a grand story, and my variant gods rules. Until next time, happy gaming!

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