My Chaos Table: Uses for it in Your Game

Years ago, when I was running the Eastweald campaign, I expanded the 5e Player's Handbook's Wild Surge Table for sorcerers into a wider resource; the original table includes 50 effects, but I expanded it to cover 100 effects. I kept the original 50 effects, which are mostly oriented towards combat, and added in 50 more, which are generally more inclined towards roleplaying. You can find my expanded Chaos Table here. 

Firstly, I want to acknowledge that there are many expanded Wild Surge Tables out there. Just a Google search of the phrase will turn up plenty of results. If you find another one that works well for you, go with it! The important thing is that the randomness fit with what you're trying to accomplish. If you want something that will spice up combat, most of these other options will work well for you. But if you're looking for a roleplaying option, I think mine works well. What I have linked to above is about 50% combat effects and 50% roleplaying effects. If you're looking for something that's 100% roleplaying effects, look no further than this roleplaying-specific variant. Literally every effect will be a challenge to your players to behave according to the strange rules contained in the table. 

I used the table initially for Gerald's surges; we ruled that a natural 1 or a natural 20 meant a roll on the table. Currently, I use the same table for the chaos storms in the mystery campaign. With that use, I have the players roll Dexterity saving throws to avoid the chaos bolts, but a failure means rolling on the table. I really like this application because it mixes up the game and really embodies chaos when the storm rolls in. But there are many ways you could use random effects like these in your game. Read on for ideas on how to implement the Wild Surge Table in your games. 

Because the Chaos Table is really about randomness, it suits the chaos storms well. But any campaign can use some chaos as a force in the story. For starters, if your game has a source of chaos--perhaps because you're dealing with the fae or because you're involved with a chaotic-aligned god--you can use it as you see fit. Imagine that the fae fight with chaos; when they strike a foe, you roll on the table. Or picture the god as trying to help the party with a bit of introduced chaos; the god litters the battlefield with chaotic effects. Of course any chaotic outlet is a good use for the table. 

But you're not limited to applying it in ways that make obvious sense. Let's refer back to my list of campaign ideas and work out some uses for the table with those as well. The first idea is about a gnome who is trying to take over all of the highly regulated segments of the gnomish capital. Gnomes are very lawful creatures in my world, so introducing some chaos would really mix things up in an interesting way. Let's say then that the rebelling gnome has tapped into chaos magic and uses the effects to disrupt the gnomes he is about to take over. Now the table functions as a bit of cultural warfare for the orderly gnomes. The player characters would have to learn to deal with the chaos in order to save the population of the capital. 

The third option on the idea list describes the appearance of goliaths on the shore of the campaign world; the goliaths are running from their "dangerous, unstable homeland." Perhaps the goliaths have retained some of the unstable energy of their homeland; now, the residual lingering effect of their home hangs over them, creating chaotic effects wherever they go. Seeking to help the goliaths settle in this world, the players must figure out how to reduce the effects of their chaos magic. A GM could insert a chaos effect at regular intervals, specific moments in the story, or whenever the goliaths take an important action. 

Idea number four on the list describes a mysterious plague that affects the denizens of a particular city. The disease itself could be chaos-fueled. Rather than only making victims sick, you could rule that it both debilitates the victim and releases intermittent chaos effects, only making the disease harder to treat. Thus, as the players struggle to identify and fight back against the disease, they will also be fighting against the chaotic effects of the disease. It would become vital for the players to develop strategies to contend with the chaotic disease in addition to solving the mystery of its cure. 

The tenth entry on the list of campaign ideas revolves around the appearance of wild animals in the sky above a town. This one practically begs for a chaos table use. The campaign idea itself deals with a chaotic effect, so expanding the effects of whatever is happening to the animals is natural. As the players deal with the persistent effect of the falling animals, they will also deal with the less predictable effects. This use of the table actually gives us some inspiration on how to write about the mysterious effect of the falling animals--it gestures towards a broader chaotic problem which will need to be investigated and worked against. 

Campaign idea twelve begins with a fortuneteller foreseeing a player turning into a sheep before the player wakes up covered in wool. The campaign itself is concerned with finding the fortuneteller again for more information, but it is ripe with potential for further chaos. The effects begin in a harmless way like the sheep's wool; from there, you could transition into the gentler effects of the table and then later into the more severe effects, or you could simply roll for effects. You could potentially ramp up how often you roll on the table as the campaign progresses, always forcing your players to deal with ever-stranger events. 

Idea sixteen describes a mysterious box that its owner won't talk about. You might spice up the mystery with the chaos table by depicting the box's owner carefully opening the box a crack; an effect from the table results from the box's being opened. The box's owner will not listen to reason and keeps opening the box occasionally; perhaps they are magically driven to open it. The box becomes more and more of a liability until it can be dealt with permanently, always driving the players to contend with its random effects. 

The twenty-second campaign idea on the list involves the players recognizing that they have lost all their memories. Such a powerful magic effect suggests that other effects are afoot as well. You might structure this so that memory loss is one of the major effects of the spell that caused it, and the effects on the table represent lesser manifestations of its power. As the players investigate the cause for their memory loss, they will begin to piece together an image of chaotic magic causing issues all over the land; in order to protect innocents from the chaos, the party must resolve whatever has caused the leakage of magic energy. 

The final item on the campaign list revolves around my custom magic system, glyphs. With glyphs, spellcasters are able to tailor custom spells using a language of magical symbols. The campaign calls for investigation of this new method of casting and facing off against a foe with considerable powers. But glyphs are fickle things and might leak chaotic energy. Every time your players cast a glyph spell, you must roll on the Wild Surge Table. As I note in the glyph introduction linked above, glyphs can be a little overpowered in some campaigns; having to introduce chaotic effects with each spell counterbalances the equation. 

So there are eight different campaign idea applications of my Wild Surge Table. With each, you are able to incorporate more randomness into your games with creative effects that will complicate combat or enrich roleplaying. No matter how you use the table, remember that chaos is fun, but you can't run a campaign that's completely random. Things need to be predictable enough for the players to function; these chaotic effects are there to add storytelling moments to your campaign, not destabilize the campaign for your players. But used carefully, these tables can spice up just about any campaign. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to keep a game balanced, my list of voices, and what to do when your players ignore your story. And, of course, if you have a suggestion for an article, comment below and I'll write about it. Until next time, happy gaming!

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Why TRPGs Are the Most Important Games of Our Time

I recently asked my players for some ideas about what to write about here; I wanted to approach the ways that my GM style can help folks who want to become better GMs. One of my players--the one who plays Beor in the mystery campaign--sent me the following response to my question, among other things: 

Other things that I think would be cool to read about are just the things you're most passionate about as a DM. What about being a DM do you LOVE? As a player wanting to DM at some point, I find I get most motivated when hearing about other people's passions as a DM (for ex: some DMs absolutely love puzzles, some really love story telling, some love combat, some really love making wacky NPCs, some are passionate about a world's religion...). I think there's a lot of inspirational power behind reading/learning about what someone REALLY loves and WHY.

I've made no secret about the fact that to me, the most exciting thing about Dungeons & Dragons and TRPGs like it is storytelling and roleplaying. But I want to expand on that and answer what Beor's player is getting at with his question. What about the game do I find inspirational, he wants to know. I am expanding that to answer this related question: why are TRPGs the most important games of our time? 

To begin, I want to address a few of the ideas I first wrote about in my gaming philosophy. I said there that collaborative storytelling is something that a TRPG is uniquely qualified to do. What I mean by this is simple. A TRPG is modeled from an early inspiration for D&D back in the 1970s; D&D creators Gary Gygax (who mostly developed the setting) and Dave Arneson (who mostly developed the numerical representations) were miniature wargamers before creating TRPGs. Their favorite hobby was creating miniatures who would fight in recreations of the Napoleonic War. But they toyed with a new idea: what if, instead of controlling dozens or even hundreds or troops in a battle, the player controlled only one individual soldier? From here, Gygax and Arneson developed D&D, a game where a single character allowed the player to interact with the world in more detail than wargaming would allow. What made D&D unique, that is to say, was the fact that a player could lose themselves in a single character--no other game at the time allowed this kind of direct control. (If the history of D&D is interesting to you, and you want more information about how it was created, check out the book Of Dice and Men by David M. Ewalt. It provides a gripping retelling of what D&D was like in the early days and traces it to the current day.)

From this framework, we can already understand D&D as pushing back against the established style of game-playing at its time. But it was more than that. Early D&D was very much the product of Gygax and Arneson's work, but they depended on their players to build the game. Modern players would be shocked to learn that some of the most iconic parts of the game were developed in response to player hijinks. Another story from Of Dice and Men: Arneson was running a game for his players early in the development of the game, and he asked his players what they wanted to create as a new part of the game. One player said they wanted to become a vampire, and so Arneson worked with the player for a few hours to develop rules for vampires. As the brainstorming session drew to a close, Arneson turned to another player and asked what they wanted to create, intending to get a leg up for next session. The player smiled and said they wanted to play a vampire hunter. That vampire hunter design, with its magical specialty against undead and its martial prowess, became the cleric. This illustrates that a class considered so essential to any game was invented not out of necessity but out of player choice. What a radical game that changes completely when a player makes a decision. 

So even early D&D delivered a unique experience--the players could, moreso than any other game or system, guide the game. Nowadays, with simpler rules and a range of modules, it is even easier for players to jump into the game. But a considerable truth cuts through the element of time in this equation: players in original D&D (or even the early draft called Chainmail) were as capable of telling stories centered on the players as players today with the refined and relatively intuitive 5e. D&D has been around for nearly 50 years, and the fundamental thing that has never changed is that the players impact the game. 

I don't need to tell you that players of other games can impact the proceedings as well, but the difference between taking a turn in Monopoly and taking a turn in D&D is obviously massive. There are precisely 11 outcomes when a player rolls the dice in Monopoly, and that's more or less the end of the story. But in a single turn, a D&D player can radically change the entire game. It's worth noting that Beor's player, who recommended this topic, once ended a campaign by turning on the party. A single choice changed everything. There is no single choice in a non-TRPG that affects every element of the game. But in TRPG, choices matter. 

And just as one player can radically change the game, we must remember that there is a whole party of players with the same capacity. Not only does each player affect the game, but they also affect each other. I've written about the way that each performer in a game affects every other performer, and it is undeniable that any agent, be they player, GM, or audience, will have an effect on the other agents. An experienced GM knows that allowing full choices to a group of players is basically playing with fire--there is no telling what will happen from the outset. 

Now let's put this in context. We have a game that allows players to do as they choose, players with the potential to change the game itself, and everyone being affected by everyone else's actions. Here's the big idea: this makes a TRPG the closest representation of real life that a game can be. Genuine choice? Check. Capacity to change the world? Check. Consequences for actions? Check. Video games attempt this kind of emulation of real life, but they can't manage it due to the infinite nature of choices. Sure, they can program in hundreds of possibilities, but players will always find reasonable ideas that aren't programmed in. TRPGs don't have that problem. A good GM can take a player choice and respond to it meaningfully, simulating that choice actually being made in the game world. And TRPGs are the only systems out there that allow for this. 

So if TRPGs are our best simulation of the real world, so what? The applications are endless, actually. A TRPG allows you to tell the most interactive stories possible, period. A TRPG allows you to experiment with decision-making, roleplaying, and storytelling, all done collaboratively. A TRPG can provide a safe space to explore emotional issues, as I did with my cleric Zig to learn to cope with guilt. In fact, I have been collaborating with an academic associate of mine to develop a variant of therapy that uses TRPGs' considerable tools for safe, constructive roleplaying. TRPGs can be used for educational purposes for any age, or as grounds for an improvised theater performance, much like we did for my podcast Listen Check. TRPGs excel in all of these things because they simulate the real world so well. 

But why do they simulate the real world so well? The rules help construct a reality we can recognize as similar to our own; we accept limitations on our actions because that is consistent with our world. The stories we write ourselves and use in modules are structured in logical ways; they allow us to become parts of a world that we understand. But both of these miss the crucial ingredient: the GM's and players' own internalized sense of the world. Whether you're playing a game that painstaking creates a gritty, realistic world or a picturesque high fantasy world, both the GM and that players have a sense of that world as real enough to inhabit, and it makes living in that world second nature. I might even extend this idea to say that it's not necessarily that TRPGs simulate the world in convincing ways per se, and that it is more an effect of humans being exceptionally geared toward roleplaying and world creation. We have been doing these things for about as long as we have been humans, so creating a game like D&D to facilitate making these world was both natural to humankind and only a matter of time. 

So why is this my favorite thing about GMing? Don't get me wrong: I love coming up with characters, both player characters and NPCs, both serious and wacky. I love storytelling and worldbuilding. I love the way players act when they're engaged in combat. I even like when the players are struggling over a riddle I was worried was too simple. These are all great experiences. But my favorite thing about GMing is the role of collaboration. My projected stories and notes are fine, but they won't win any book awards. My NPCs might be entertaining, but without the PCs, they would just be ideas in a vacuum. I can have all the details in the world about my homebrew world, but it's just a collection of hypothetical details until the players have been there. It's when the players start to make choices that the game comes together. 

Now I'm returning to my original claim. All of this might be true, but why does it make TRPGs the most important games of our time? Isn't that kind of a bold claim? It is, but I mean it. In my opinion, the world we have lived in across the globe for the last fifteen years or so (which coincide with the rise in TRPGs' popularity) has become increasingly structured to make certain experiences harder to get. Freely, creatively expressing ourselves has become more important to most of the world's cultures, but the ability to do so has been restricted. Connecting with other human beings is something we need for our mental health (particularly in the middle of a pandemic), but we are closed off from achieving that. TRPGs' benefits, like a feeling of agency and the ability to investigate our emotions and curiosities, are ever harder to find in real life. From this perspective, it's easy to see why TRPGs are more popular than ever; people want to feel the way the game makes them feel. 

So to put it all together, we have a system where one person is responsible for emulating a whole world for the investigation and experience of a group of players, who without realizing it, are the most powerful players of any game hitherto invented. This comes at a time when people are craving agency and connection. TRPGs are the soothing balm that treats the modern condition, in a sense. And for me, creating situations where my players can make meaningful choices, whether they succeed or fail, is the ultimate in expression through gaming. 

The thing that ultimately strikes me as funny about Beor's players question is that he lists several elements of the creative process of the game as potential favorites. But my actual favorite was "none of the above." It's not the act of creating that drives me the most; it's catering to players by reacting that floats my boat. The real magic of a TRPG will always be that the players have agency in a way that we don't feel in our day-to-day lives. Put another way, I love TRPGs because I can provide my players with the sense of creating something, helping decide what the story is, with being a part of a group, with being able to make meaningful decisions. That's the rush of a TRPG--the ability to truly take control of life, even if it's only fictional. 

That's the value of TRPGs as I see it. But I know there are lots of perspectives out there. Comment below with the reasons you prize playing roleplaying games, and be on the lookout for upcoming articles on uses for my expanded Wild Surge Table, how to deal with players ignoring the story, and my accents resource so you can keep your NPCs interesting. Until then, happy gaming!

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How to Build a Cohesive Party

D&D memories are rarely about specific rolls or the appearance of enemies; they are more often about the interactions between players and specific player choices. These kind of memories are not based on your actions as a GM, but rather on the way that players get along together. It is a long-pondered question how to build an ideal party of players, and some GMs struggle with the art of assembling a good party for memorable games. Fortunately, there are some keys you can keep in mind when you assemble your players. Let's get into the considerations you should make to ensure a happy party. 

The first question you must ask is what you want the tone of your adventure to be. You want to find players who match your goal. Let's say, for instance, that you want to run a campaign that focuses on roleplaying and storytelling. You should be on the lookout for people who are creative and spontaneous. Or perhaps you're planning a combat-heavy adventure. Then you want to seek out players who are systematic and strategic. Maybe you want a funny adventure full of hijinks--in that case, consider players who have strong senses of humor and who don't mind getting into distractions from whatever the main storyline is. If you drop the wrong player into the wrong campaign, you'll end up pushing someone to do something they don't want to do. So be mindful of player dispositions when you build your party. 

Let's get into some details as far as this process goes. There are three main ways you could be building your party. Firstly, you might be building a party from people who you know and who already know each other. If this is the case, you probably already have a sense of how these folks get along. Try to include people who get along and don't have any contention with other players. Don't just trust that people who generally get along will vibe together--TRPGs will test the limits of relationships at times, such as when players disagree about a particular strategy or when the story highlights delicate topics. Generally though, groups of existing friends will be the easiest to manage; just be wary of existing dynamics and how the game will affect them. 

You might also be composing a group out of people you already know who don't know each other. This was the model for the Eastweald campaign, and now those players are the party for the mystery campaign. I mention this because this can be a very strong way to build a party. When you go this route, you will have hopefully already covered the first step; my players are all people who take roleplaying somewhat seriously--they're all creative people who are spontaneous thinkers. This makes them a strong group. When you're considering people who don't know each other, you're going to have to do some guesswork. How will these people get along? What do they have in common? What will they all agree is important in the game? These questions should help you pick people who will work well together. Most important is that you build a bridge between players to help them get along--you can do this by starting a session with talking about shared interests or simply sharing a few details about the game and the players' interests in it. Once you have a shared dynamic, you're well on the way to turning your potential players into a cohesive group. 

The last option is increasingly popular these days. Folks are often now building campaigns out of groups of people even the GM has never met. With this model, you can't exactly make decisions about who will get along and who won't without gathering some information. One common method is to administer an interview, not unlike one would do for a job. There are resources out there for questions to ask potential players and how to process their answers. A resource like the one linked is a good start, but you should try to come up with questions specific to your adventure. In general, you want to have players who agree on which editions are best, which focuses of the game are best, and how the party is expected to behave and cooperate. If you're running a good-focused campaign, weed out any chaotic evil players, for instance; it's also important to consider experience levels. An experienced dungeon crawler may not get along well with a beginning roleplayer and vice versa, so decide accordingly. 

The basic focus of a campaign is the most important feature in assembling a party, but it isn't the the only important feature. For me, one of the most helpful tools in building a party is in something simple: everyone's sense of humor. A great deal of a TRPG session is built around players making each other laugh. Only the most dour, strategic campaign could be free of humor, and even those will still be rich in in-jokes and other comedic additions. Why does it matter if everyone's sense of humor is aligned with the rest of the party? For every minute spent goofing around, there is a minute with the potential to isolate a player who isn't on the inside of the jokes. 

How do you select people for sense of humor? It's easier than you think. When you're focused on building your party and considering individual people for the group, reflect on what kinds of things those people generally joke about. You don't want someone who finds dead baby jokes hilarious in a party with someone who finds those jokes repulsive, obviously, but it's equally important to group silly players with other silly players and jokester players with a group that appreciates their jokes. When I built my National Treasure campaign, I gathered a total of six people together. That's a sizable party, and a lot of considerations to make about how people fit together. Let's dive into that process:

I was working at a restaurant in Portland at the time that this campaign came together. I selected a handful of my coworkers and an old friend, plus a few additions made by the players. I'll describe each party member and why I selected them, with names changed to protect the innocent. In my first round of gathering the party, I selected two close friends, both of whom have dabbled in improv comedy. As you may know, I use improv as the basis for my games, so they were natural choices when it came to assembling a party. Both these players, Bobby and Mark we'll call them, have silly senses of humor and tend to make jokes of anything they encounter. They're always improvising, in a sense, and I wanted that energy in my game. Next I added Thomas, a quiet and thoughtful young man whose brain always seems to come up with the last thing anyone else would imagine. I wanted that creativity in the game, and Thomas' sense of humor is silly enough to get along with Bobby and Mark--in fact, the three of them often goofed around at work. I was considering this being the entire party, but I was contacted by my old friend Patty, who was looking for a game to join with her boyfriend, Brad. I didn't know Brad, but Patty is a very intelligent and irreverent person who is prone to silliness. So I knew that Patty would suit the party and hoped that Brad would be similar in terms of disposition. It turned out he was, and he added as much silliness as anyone else. Finally, Mark invited his friend Eddy, who I had only briefly met while playing Magic: The Gathering. Initially, I wasn't sure how to play with Eddy, who was playing a fairly reckless and amoral character in a group of folks who are generally do-gooders. But with a little time and nudging, Eddy leaned more into the silliness that the rest of the party exhibited and less into the finger-eating his character liked so much. I had on my hands a collection of silly roleplayers who were on board for any ridiculous adventure I threw their way, and I did it by almost exclusively considering sense of humor. 

If you're having a hard time gauging other folks' senses of humor, I recommend just asking directly. Have them name comedians or movies or shows or web series that exemplify what they like. If you find overlap with other players, or even near overlap, you're on the right track to building a party. But don't underestimate this tool--it can give you insight on how a group of people will play together in ways that interview questions cannot. 

My last piece of advice for building a party is to start by building a party and develop the adventure later. This may seem backwards to some GMs, but I assure you, it will allow you to tailor your game to your players far better than you might imagine. You can look back at my guide to creating a story based on player suggestions if that's a route you would enjoy, but it doesn't have to be all that involved. If like many GMs, you're having an easier time finding people you want to play with than you are coming up with a campaign that will be enjoyed by every party member, build your party first. Consider the general type of campaign you want to run and begin to build the party around that basic concern. Here is where you decide between story-rich, combat-heavy, roleplaying-focused, or other game type. Once you have a collection of people who generally want the same kind of experience, select for sense of humor. Now you should have a party that's ready to play harmoniously together, and you can set about building the campaign to match the players' desires. 

If you do go this route, consider the advantages you've given yourself as a GM. You have players who enjoy being together, who are oriented to cooperate since they've got similar goals in mind, and who are going to be able to make each other laugh, which is a bigger element of the game than most people acknowledge. You're in a position for success with your party. You're still likely to encounter player issues, but they will be issues of making the game work, not smoothing out things between players. From this point, all you have to do is dedicate time and attention to your campaign and leave behind all the party issues. 

Once you have your party, though, it's important to facilitate some bonding. Especially if your players don't all know each other, host an event where everybody can just get to know each other. You can double this time up with creating characters and drafting character sheets, but set aside at least an hour without gaming to get everybody familiar and friendly. If you did good work building a party by judging personalities, you'll find they get along quickly. By the same token, you'll notice any clashes pretty quickly as well, so take note of that. If it's a serious dislike you may have to remove a player. Go with your gut on that decision, but consider how it will affect the party dynamic. But more often than not, you'll have a group of people eager to game, and that's what we're going for. 

In the early session, I recommend lobbing some roleplaying moments into your game. Even if you're in a combat-focused game with little roleplaying, your players have made stories for their characters and they'll be most eager to share about them in the first moments controlling the character. Allow this to go as far as the players want to take it, especially if they're first time players. You want them to feel like they have choices because that makes their choices meaningful. Be sure to establish that they have agency to make any decision at all, and they'll get into character more fully most of the time. I like to make it so that my players are all playing characters who are strangers to another, and drawing them in together with someone calling for help. A short combat with some variant of thieves/bandits/guards brings the party together, and planting a questgiver nearby is enough to get the players talking to each other for most of the session, especially once they have a quest or reward to obtain. From there you have a group of adventurers who get to reveal themselves through roleplaying. So even if you were to run a combat-heavy campaign, your moments in battle would be informed by who the player designed them to be. After the early sessions, you can adjust your pace to fit the story, but a long beginning is not only room for players to continue to develop their characters but also instrumental to first-time players, who need just such a tutorial. [I play mostly with beginning players, historically. I would estimate I have taught about 60 people to play D&D (and other TRPGs occasionally) over the second half of my life. My goal with GMing is to always include the person least confident in the game as much as possible. But once they get the spirit of it, anyone can play. Similarly, anyone can learn to min-max or roleplay. Give your players the time to succeed in their own way, and it may teach you how to better address what they want out of the game.]

If your party of players and characters are both still rocky after the first few sessions, allow them a simple decision to make and some more time to roleplay. Both will help people find common ground. And you can stimulate your players' interactions by adding roleplaying exercises into the game. My favorite example of this comes from Dungeons & Daddies, my favorite D&D podcast. At the beginning of each episode, the characters all must provide a "Dad Fact," a random fact about their character that expresses what kind of dad they are. In a behind-the-scenes episode, the cast describes the Dad Facts as warmups to get the players into character and ready to improvise. I would recommend the same idea but applied to the kinds of character development questions you can find all across the internet. Pick some fun questions from any list, or write your own. Things like "What makes you irritated?" or "What's your favorite hobby?" are great questions for beginners as well as places to showcase the writing some players have already done. If your players enjoy the questions, consider including them at the beginning of each session. If they don't really respond to the probing you've given them so far, it's time to ask the Dark Question:

What happens when you have to kick a player out of a party? They're being abusive, they never show up to games, they don't get into the game and disrupt it instead; there are plenty of reasons you might need to remove someone from the game. Obviously you will know this person, whereas I, statistically speaking, do not, so I can't tell you exactly how to address it with them. But the big ideas here are to be polite but firm. Take ownership of the action as DM without casting it on the players, even if they agree, unless they ask how many people wanted them out. A general template might be this: "I have been thinking about it and I'm going to ask you to leave the game. [One sentence, respectful summary of why they have to leave] I'm doing this so that everyone else can have a positive space to play in." Further advice is beyond me. I'm more of a storyteller than a sociologist or psychologist, so I won't dabble further into dealing with conflict. I'm miserable at that. 

One final and relatively simple consideration is the alignment of the characters in the party. Experienced GMs know that a party with lawful good characters and chaotic evil characters will have troubles; you may wish to put a limit on the alignments players roleplay. Generally, you can do good through neutral characters together, and neutral and evil characters together; the law-chaos axis is generally less important than willingness to harm the innocent. To prevent a good-aligned character from butting heads with an evil-aligned character, encourage your players to collaborate on the general moral composition of the party. 

This guide should cover the framework you need to perform the art of selecting a party. Trust your instincts about it, but don't forget that people don't all have fun the same way. So get out there, gauge where your potential players stand on the relevant issues, and get ready to game. As always, if there's something I didn't cover here or you would like to see written about here, comment below! Coming soon: alternate uses for my expanded Wild Surge Table, how to keep a game balanced, and adjusting to players ignoring the story. Until next time, happy gaming!

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Material Components: The Physical Tools You Need to Run an In-Person Game

Most of my writing here deals with how to enrich your players' experiences as roleplayers, but there are other details to consider when you want to run a game. Specifically, as a GM, you'll need to have certain props and tools on hand to represent your game in action. There are the basics: dice, maps, and figurines/minis. And now that D&D is more popular than ever, there are a handful of extra tools you can procure to make things even more exciting. At the time of writing, there is a pandemic which has driven most D&D games out of the in-person mode, but we will return to in-person adventures eventually. Let's start with the basics and how to get them.

What every game will need is dice. You can roll digitally with any of the many tools offered for that purpose, but most players and GMs enjoy physical dice more. There's something pleasant about dropping a real die onto the table, and you can't stack digital dice, so you'll probably want to get some physical dice to play. You can get standard sets of the 7 dice pretty much anywhere, but if you're a GM and you're looking to start your collection, I recommend the Chessex Pound of Dice. It's between 80 and 100 dice of varying colors and patterns. Any given set will include a few full sets of mismatched dice. It's okay that they're mismatched--that means that your players get to build custom dice sets, and that's something they'll likely enjoy. 

You can and should also consider getting matched sets of dice. As I mentioned, there are many places to get sets of dice--there are entire companies which do nothing but create dice for tabletop games. I generally recommend starting with Etsy because there are so many good options out there (truly impressive dice sets which are absolutely unique). And you'll be supporting small businesses of gaming-minded entrepreneurs, which means you're contributing to the community. But feel free to branch out; there are more dice on the internet than you can imagine, so find the ones that suit you. I personally have a set of dice in each color to provide my players and myself with options, but whatever works for your game is best for you. 

Once you have dice, it's time to get a map. You have a lot of options with maps. You could grab some posterboard or butcher's paper and draw maps onto the paper, but this often means lots of prep time and it's hard to reuse your maps. You could invest in mapping products, like the ones that build 3D maps, but these can be expensive and difficult to reuse. My preferred method of dealing with the map problem is to go with Chessex again and get a battlemat. Battlemats are affordable, gridded for one-inch squares and hexes sized for miniatures, and endlessly reusable--just draw on it with a wet erase marker and you'll be able to depict any location with just a moment's sketching on the vinyl mat. Erasing is as easy as running a damp rag over the mat. If you get a multi-color pack of markers, you can depict a decent level of detail. And even if you're not a visual artist, your drawings will be enough to give your players a sense of what is where, and that's all that matters. 

An important consideration with maps for the average session is that it be the right size. Chessex offers three sizes of battlemat, and the smallest size is enough for most encounters. But for larger engagements that actually resemble a battlefield, you may need to go up a size. The largest size mat is big enough that many tables will struggle to hold it all, but the middle sized mat (the Megamat) is about appropriate for almost anything. I personally have one Megamat and two Battlemats (the small one), and I will usually draw a central location like a favorite tavern or an NPC's headquarters on one of the Battlemats and leave it for when the players return to it; I use the Megamat for encounters. Whatever strategy you choose, be ready to make the most out of your map. 

Finally, now that you have a map to put them on, you might want some miniatures. There are, like with dice, nearly endless places to find minis. You can shop individual minis at many sites like Miniature Marketplace, but for GMs starting their collections, there is a much more cost-effective way to build your mini army. My secret was eBay. If you browse eBay for D&D figures, you'll find entire collections of pieces for very cheap. An average individual piece at Miniature Marketplace will run about $8, but on eBay, you can get lots of pieces at a rate of about $1-$2 per piece. I managed to get a collection of about 200 pieces for $100 as well as sets of early D&D figures by renowned artists for very little money. My collection of D&D minis currently sits at about 1,000 pieces, which provides a great deal of customization for my players when they choose pieces. 

How will you store your impressive collection of minis now that you have them? I recommend tackle boxes (the fishing accessory). These handy boxes will allow you to easily transport your minis while keeping them organized. I personally have my minis organized by what weapon the figure is holding, and a tackle box keeps your pieces in order without any effort. Something like this will work well, but browse your options and consider which boxes will suit you best. What matters the most is that you get what you need from your materials, and it's important that you can rely on the organization you select. 

There are generally two kinds of minis you can obtain. There are the classic pewter or otherwise metal pieces, and there are plastic pieces. The metal pieces will always cost more--look for collections of them to make the most of your money. The metal pieces can be more attractive as options if you're looking to paint your minis, but you can paint a plastic piece as well. I'm not a committed mini painter--I've done a few, and they are very much the prize gems in my collection--but your own interest will guide you here. Getting into painting pieces is a pricy investment, so you may find that after obtaining all the necessary materials to play, you may need to put painting on the back burner. But if painting the minis is part of the appeal of the game, get in there and beautify your minis!

Since we're addressing necessary physical components, let me add this to your shopping list: paper and pencils. Even if you're using digital character sheets, the players should have access to scrap paper for taking notes, keeping a character journal, and otherwise tracking important information. Even more importantly, I recommend buying a multi-pack of mechanical pencils for your players. People need to be able to make erasable notes on their character sheets, and no one wants to stop to sharpen a pencil mid-game; the humble mechanical pencil resolves both of those issues. Make sure to have plenty on hand when you play. 

One simple prop that can help your game is a basic whiteboard. You're already using wet erase markers for your maps, and there are many applications of a whiteboard. You can get a small tablet for cheap, and I recommend recording initiative orders on the board and displaying it--this way, your players can easily reference the combat order and be ready on their turns. You can also write riddles on the board so players can mull over the details without your having to repeat them. And it always helps to be able to draw symbols and diagrams without cluttering up your map. A whiteboard is simple, but it has many helpful applications in a game.

As I have said, D&D has never been more popular, and as a result, there are more game aids you can buy than ever before. Many players like the thrill of dice towers--not a stack of dice, but a physical tower with randomizing bumps you can drop your dice into. Etsy again has a great stock of these, both in the form of ready-made towers and designs you can build yourself. And if you're sufficiently practical and creative, you can design your own. All it takes is looking at some designs and crafting your own take on it. 

A tool which can be helpful especially to beginning players that is new to 5th edition D&D is spellbook cards. Wizards of the Coast recognized the complexity of spellcasting and locating all the details of each spell, so they released the spellbook cards, which place every detail of a spell on a playing card-sized card so that spellcasters can simply leaf through the cards and know what they need to cast the spell. As I mentioned, these are great for beginning players, but even experienced players can benefit from the help offered by these cards. They can be a little pricy depending on where you look, but they are well worth the benefit. I have the cards for each class as well as two sets of the Arcane spells since three classes use them and there are sometimes more than one arcane spellcasters in a party. If you're like me, you'll want to keep these cards organized by spell level, so ask your players to be considerate of how they're organized. 

Likewise, you can add all manner of D&D peripherals to your game experience. Many players like to have a dice tray or other designated place to roll dice without the threat of losing them. Some players like to punish misbehaving dice with a turn in dice jail. And there are dozens of options for more specific tracking items, like inspiration trackers, spell slot trackers, and condition markers. I don't use many accessories like this, but they can be very helpful in making all of combat's complicated details more visible. The key to picking which tools will help you is in asking this question: Does this improve my players' experience of the game? If so, go for it; if not, save your money and make your game more special with your creativity. 

One physical item I have obtained which I think has been a bonus to my playing experience is something I had custom made. When I first designed my homebrew setting, I wrote that there was an inter-governmental treaty to share a common currency (my way of explaining how several different societies shared one monetary system). I designated who was on each coin and why--the orcish leader at the time appeared on the platinum piece because the orcish lands were richest in platinum deposits, for example. I designed images to appear on each coin and had custom poker chips made, so now I have a collection of chips that all look like my in-game currency. I'm proud of how they look, and when I have players engage in a real card game like Three Dragon Ante, they can use facsimiles of real D&D money. 

The designs for my homebrew currency. 

To make these coins, I selected portraits of D&D races that I liked as representations of the world; then I came up with translations for each metal for the circular text. I used a silhouette of the continent of the homebrew setting and a quote from the halfling who called for the coining of a common currency. This is a bit of a screwball when it comes to D&D accessories. No one really needs to have currency simulators, and in fact, the first custom chip company I contacted found my design so strange that they refused to do it (perhaps if I had asked for naked ladies on the chips, they would have agreed, since that appeared to be their main business). But I was passionate about my homebrew design for money, and having physical coins can be great for roleplaying experiences. I recommend that if you are passionate about an element of your homebrew setting and you conceive of an idea for how to bring it to life, do it! Your players will recognize and feed off of your passion, and the game will be richer for it. 

The coin chips in their carrying case. 

This may come as a surprise after this list of possible peripherals, but my bottom line advice is this: you don't really need any materials to play beyond character sheets. If you're looking to become a GM with all the materials, these will get you well on your way to that goal. But if you're simply looking to get players invested, you can do a lot more with a twisty story than you can with accessories. Remember that the most important thing is that your props and accessories help your players engage. If players are ignoring initiative order because they won't stop rolling with the dice tower, you may need to reevaluate what the real role of your accessories is. But by and large, tools like these will help players get invested more easily. Whatever routes you choose for your D&D peripherals, have fun! These tools amount for the most part to toys, and toys should be fun. 

Hopefully, this guide helps you to get a grip on the many decisions you'll face about how to run your game as a GM. Coming soon: how to build a cohesive party, alternate uses for my expanded Wild Surge Table, and why I believe TRPGs are the most interesting games of our time. As always, if there's something I didn't cover here or you would like to see written about here, comment below! Until next time, happy gaming!

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How to Describe Magic

I've discussed description before--how to describe critical rolls, how to describe combat, and how to describe narrative details. Description is perhaps your greatest tool as a GM, so it's important to use it to the fullest potential to create scenes for your players. And just as description is the key to GMing, magic is the key to a lively fantasy world. This means that your descriptions of magic will be especially important in painting a colorful picture of your gameworld. This guide will present some considerations to make when you describe magic so your players get a real sense of how magic functions in your world. 

The first question to ask yourself is whether you're going to use the magic rules of a game like D&D as presented or if you're going to approach it from the homebrew perspective. You can deviate from the rules as far as you would like. I created a custom magic system with room to separate from the game's mechanics, and it's surprisingly easy to do something like it. But for the sake of this guide, let's say that you're walking a middle path: you're using the D&D rules for magic and you're allowing mostly cosmetic changes to the way the spells work. This raises more questions for you to answer about how magic works. 

One of the most basic details of a spell is what it looks like. Some official D&D spells provide simple description of what a spell looks like--Magic Missile, for instance, reads, "You create three glowing darts of magical force. Each dart hits a creature of your choice that you can see within range. A dart deals 1d4 + 1 force damage to its target. The darts all strike simultaneously, and you can direct them to hit one creature or several." We get some basic information here: the spell creates three glowing darts which strike their target(s) simultaneously. Other spells offer much less information. Inflict Wounds, as an example, simply reads, "Make a melee spell attack against a creature you can reach. On a hit, the target takes 3d10 necrotic damage." This spell doesn't really tells us what it looks like at all. In my opinion, there aren't many spells at all that offer concrete details on what a spell looks like, and I believe that is so that you as the GM can offer those details on your own. 

So how can we spice up these descriptions? Let's start with Magic Missile. We have three glowing darts. But that's only three pieces of information: three, glowing, darts. We want to provide our players with more than that. So you could decide that all three darts are pale green in color and that their glowing light is faint. We can add that the darts are shaped like arrows or perhaps simply d4-like pyramids. We can describe the darts as moving slowly at first and then accelerating faster and faster into their targets; we could also describe them as flashing quickly through the air and exploding in dazzling bursts of light when they strike. The important thing is that the details make Magic Missile seem interesting and unique. And when a player casts Magic Missile again, you can return to your earlier description to keep things standard, or give it a different twist if it expresses how the situation has changed. 

Then we have the Inflict Wounds spell. We have very little to go off of here--all we really know is that the target takes necrotic damage. But that's still enough to go on. Imagine for a moment what this spell looks like in your mind. 3d10 necrotic damage averages to about 15 damage, which is a fair amount for early-level characters. And necrotic damage is especially brutal, as it directly removes life from the target. We can use these details to describe the spell more effectively. When the caster touches their target for the attack, there is a snapping sound and a burst of silver light from the place they touch their target. Then we can describe how the skin around the touched area quickly becomes dry and veiny. We can add that the target shouts in pain and grasps at the wounded area. We could even consider whether the target drops their weapon in pain and shock or decides to surrender rather than face such a blow again. The details give way to more details--this is how good narration functions. 

The visual details of a spell are important because they characterize spells which otherwise are simply rules. Whether you're in combat or not, it's a good idea to take a moment to describe what it all looks like. The easiest way to do this is to develop a sense of what colors different spells are represented by. You don't need to do a lot of work to accomplish this--just use your emotional associations with each color to associate effects with different hues. By way of example, I use green for vibrant energy like the Magic Missile spell above or anything that is nature-related. Light blue energy is for healing, reddish colors are for damaging spells, and white light is associated for me with spells that call on divine entities. You can and should think about how each color is related to an effect in your mind and use that as a key to what spells look like. 

A small note on using emotional associations for descriptions: you can do this for other effects as well. Magic is supposed to be otherworldly but still intuitive, and your associations are the perfect source for something that is both otherworldly (filtered through your subconscious) and intuitive (it fundamentally makes sense without thinking about it). And after all, this is really the place where GMing will come naturally to you--in the place that makes sense to you without working at it. Allow yourself into this place when you GM and you'll find that the results will reflect your vision for a gameworld better than you anticipate. 

The level of a spell is important, too. It follows logically that a cantrip shouldn't seem as impressive as a 9th-level spell. So take the level into consideration when you describe a spell. D&D's spells are already rated on a scale of 1-10 (cantrip through 9th level), so just think of the spell's level as a rating of how powerful it should be. A cantrip should be impressive enough as a spell in the first place, especially for a beginning party, but you should be ready to bump up the level of detail as the spells and the player characters become more powerful. Let's look at a pair of examples to illustrate this point. 

Let's say you're running a game with some 8th-level characters. That means your spellcasters have access to 4th-level spells. So when the wizard in your party casts Magic Missile (a 1st-level spell), you want to use your sense of what a 2 out of 10 is (since a 1st-level spell is the second step toward the top). When the wizard casts the spell, you describe its power as being a bit below moderate. Now when those three green glowing darts fire through the air, you can tell the other players that their characters feel a rush of wind and the sensation of static electricity from the impact of the darts. But when that same wizard casts Banishment (a 4th-level spell), we're now working with a higher threshold of power. We can relate this to a 5 our of 10 (since a 4th-level spell is the fifth step towards the top) and up the impact of the spell's effects. Now when the same wizard casts Banishment, we say that a creature is enveloped by dark purple lights which swirl around them before enveloping them; after a crash of thunder, they are gone. The thunderclap evokes some of the higher power we're talking about, but we can add more. When the thunderclap sounds, a smell of sulphur and burning hair fills the area. Now the effect of magic are far greater, and you can describe the different spells in a consistent way. 

Another aspect of spellcasting involves whether or not a spell succeeds. Some spells like Magic Missile automatically hit, but most involve a roll on the target's part to avoid at least part of the effect of the spell. A successful hit with a spell should be described as outlined above, but a failed spell requires a different tactic. Let's use the Banishment spell as an example. A wizard casts Banishment on a foe, and the foe rolls high enough to avoid being banished. But the spell still happened, so we need to describe it failing. I like to have my failed spells function as intended up until the moment of effect. So our failed Banishment spell encloses the enemy with the dark purple light and a sound of thunder in the distance booms closer, but the thunderclap dissipates with a hissing sound as the foe stands against the spell. The dark purple light wavers in the air and collapses, the foe standing with a resolute look on their face. Details like this create a sense of the spell's functioning and its failure in a way that dramatizes the spell despite its failure. 

What I have described so far is how to deal with spells in combat. But many spells are cast outside of combat, particularly in roleplaying campaigns. Because the momentum of combat is quick-paced, we generally want to offer detailed but brief descriptions of magic. If a few players are controlling melee combatants who roll to hit and end their turns, it doesn't make sense to take several minutes to go into the details of a spell. You want to temper your description given the demands of combat's pace. But out of combat, there are no such limits. I recommend taking out-of-combat spells further and describing more details as they appear. Let's consider some examples. 

The spell Remove Curse is a 3rd-level spell which removes malignant effects from a cursed individual. Let's say one of the members of a party is cursed in combat, and after the enemy has been dealt with, the party wants to remove the curse. Now we have the time and space to really get into the effect of the spell. You will have already described the effect of the Curse spell, and we'll say for the sake of example that you have described it as a dark red cloud that hums around the target, a whining sound and a wave of heat emanating from the target. That red cloud remains after combat. When the party's wizard casts Remove Curse, we describe it as outlined above: a pale bluish light in a sparking ball moves slowly from the caster toward the cursed individual; it crackles with energy as it encounters the cursed person, getting louder and brighter as its aura collides with the red aura. After a few moments of crackling energy, the pale blue turns white, and a loud snapping sound marks the disappearance of the curse. The person who had been cursed feels physically exhausted for a time, but can feel the strength returning to them as the seconds pass. 

This description is a touch longer than the earlier spell descriptions. And it works well because the moment of a player becoming uncursed is an important moment, and it deserves to be observed in detail by the players. This makes the wizard who cast the spell a valuable asset to the team, and the description of how the spell functions lends power to the wizard. Let's look at an example that's totally removed from a combat application to see how it can enrich a narrative moment. 

We'll use the spell Fabricate for this example. Fabricate allows a user to create an item out of a selection of resources, such as a wooden bridge from a clump of trees. The wizard in our party wants to create several outfits of average clothing from a heap of linen. When they cast the spell, it's time to provide the details we can. So as the wizard casts while standing over the heap of linen, you describe a vibrant yellow light emerging from the wizard's fingertips, coalescing into a swirling cloud of energy over the heap of linen. Tendrils of the yellow energy reach down from the cloud and begin to manipulate the linen, folding and stretching each piece. The linens move faster and faster until a blast of orange light explodes; when the player characters blink away the burst of light, five sets of linen outfits are laid side-by-side on the ground where the heap was. The clothing is warm to the touch, and the area smells faintly of fresh cloth. 

This description takes the foundation of the spell and fills in details so that it will entertain the players. It creates an impression of the power the wizard holds. And it makes a narrative moment out of what could otherwise simply be the wizard obtaining a set of clothing. Your players will take note of your descriptions and try to cast spells in ways that make the most of the detailed spell descriptions you provide. 

A final note on describing magic: it's easy for a magic spell to seem more impressive than someone trying to strike an enemy with a sword. And you don't want your players who are melee specialists to feel as though they aren't as powerful or valuable as spellcasters. My advice is to offer the best descriptions you can of magic and try to match that intensity with your combat descriptions--there are plenty of ways to make a melee attack more exciting than simply rolling the dice. Once your players are receiving detailed descriptions of their actions in and even out of combat, they will be eager to best their previous actions in terms of excitement. Once you have communicated that magic is something to get excited about, your players will get into the spirit of it and have fun with their use of spells. And that's your goal as a GM: get your players invested in the process of playing and making decisions. 

That's all for now. Good luck turning magic descriptions into something that enriches your game.As always, if there's something I didn't cover here or you would like to see written about here, comment below! Look out for a guide to the accessories you need to play, a guide to building a strong party, and uses for my expanded Wild Surge Table. Until next time, happy gaming!

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Mystery Campaign Session Notes 7

Last time in the mystery campaign, the party sold Clover Loom on a business plan for a natural healing center, attended a party with high rollers from the Above, and learned that both Loom and party attendee Edgar Hillerman were both affected by mind control spells which seemed to cause them to seek out someone to steal from and/or hurt Lyssbetonk Cogswagon. They were dismayed to learn that the mystery's ever-growing web reached even further than anticipated; instead of finding answers, they found more questions. 

So this time we played, I offered up a fairly broad set of options. I had my outline of expected events, but I resolved to keep those events sketchy so I could change details if it suited the moment. That's exactly what ended up happening. The players started in a direction that I hadn't planned for, and most of the session came out as a long, improvised exploration of the options open to the party. And given the momentum of the story at this point, as the players approach the adventure's halfway mark, it was perfectly suited to offering what the players needed to progress (even if their progress in the mystery moved only in shifts). 

As per usual, I'm going to provide some of the notes I used to prepare for this session, but with a small twist. My players seem to be reading the site now, so I don't want to offer my full notes--there are still secrets in this session that they haven't approached. Instead, I'll offer the framework that actually came into play in this session and talk about some specific moments and choices that came into play. Let's start with the basic notes for setup and characters involved:

Setup: The party has signs that both Hillerman and Loom have been mind controlled prior to their threats toward Cogswagon.  

The setup is information that places us in a new, distinct phase of the investigation. The party has moved from the discovery of the mind control to much larger questions: What's behind the mind control? Who cast it? Why target Cogswagon? These are questions I want the party to begin to answer, though some elements of it will remain in the dark for a few more sessions. To be candid, it seemed to me that at least some of my players feel put-upon by Portia, their questgiver, and they struggle with not having a better grasp of the facts. This is something I would like to address as DM, but it's delicate. To give a sense of certainty and direction at this point in the mystery would mean either giving away details meant for later or dropping in red herrings, and as we all know by now, we do not do red herrings. So my choices are simple: keep the party in the dark for now and offer some certain things to balance out the feeling of not knowing, or revise the entire campaign. And I think another session or two will really change the tone of the game by providing some serious direction forward. This is a delicate thing as a DM, balancing the players' engagement now with what is still to come. I'm hoping to strike that balance in the coming sessions, but we will have to wait and see. 

Characters: 

First Guard - Portia Rockhammer, 160 dwarf, fighter

Inventor - Lyssbettonk Cogswagon, 189 gnome, wizard/artificer

High Roller 1 - Clover Loom, 84 halfling, rogue

High Roller 2 - Edgar Hillerman, 51 human, rogue

Thief/Spy - Sippikup Magee, 111 gnome, rogue

Our characters for this one-shot ended up pretty appropriate for what actually happened. I did, of course, have to improvise a few characters to fill out scenes, but these were the people who were actually spoken to--most specifically Portia and Sippikup. And before finally diving into the summary, here is the clue that the party uncovered (one of four total for this session):

Clues: 

Sippikup Magee shows up to Hillerman’s tower midway through questioning and can verify what has been said--he adds that Hillerman contacted him three days ago, the same day that Loom hired him.

The verification of what Hillerman said refers to something Hillerman can reveal when the party questions him again, so that will remain undisclosed for now. But Sippikup was able to offer some additional information that both confirmed the party's suspicions and added some important details. I originally intended Sippikup to be able to offer only corroborating information, but I wanted to reward the party for seeking him out, so I had him offer some extra information. More on that in a moment. 

So what did the party do? Following their visit to Loom's tower and some planning at Ais' place, they resolved to investigate with Sippikup Magee. They knew from Hillerman's advice that they could likely find Sippikup at the Icy Stare, a rough-and-tumble tavern where you might be able to find a contract killer. But the Icy Stare, I decided, was a secretive bar, and it would be harder to find than simply deferring to Ais, who lives in town. Montana sized up the denizens of Yamseth, looking for a rough-looking person who might know about the Icy Stare. He spotted a man with an eyepatch and a mean demeanor and asked; the man replied that it was hidden under a trapdoor in an abandoned building at the edge of town. This was a bit of inspiration for me--I hadn't designed the Icy Stare, and when an appropriately rough-looking person was asked about it, I suddenly needed a detailed description of it. The trapdoor in an abandoned building satisfied the way that the bar could remain secret, but the direct giving of this information satisfied the way that the party would act on the information. Satisfied with the answer, the party continued to the edge of town to find the bar. 

As they made their way there, another chaos storm struck. Beor again failed to escape the bolts and saw Ais and Montana as copies of himself for over an hour; Ais' hair spontaneously fell out when she was struck. This second effect was the cause of some distress for Ais, who spent most of the rest of the day ruefully remembering that her hair had disappeared. With the damage done, they went and found the path to the Icy Stare and discovered it had a doorman who demanded a password. This was a little moment I wanted to use to characterize the man who had given directions; he gave the party enough to find the door but did not provide the password, and I thought that was a fun detail about his being a rough kind of guy. Beor managed to almost talk his way past the doorman, but ended up offending him at the last moment with a comment about his abnormal eyes. The party did manage to coax him into opening the door, and they were into the tavern. 

Surveying the room, they noticed three distinct groups of customers: those playing cards, those eating meals, and those playing a drinking game. Montana approached the drinking game and boasted that Beor could beat anyone here. A mustachioed human, who appeared quite drunk, pulled out a vial of green liquid and drank it, declaring that he had purified his body of alcohol and could face off against Beor. Beor managed to win the first round (a race to finish five hard drinks) by a bit and the resulting rematch by a greater margin, thanks in large part to his immunity to alcohol from the chaos storm days before. By the end, the mustachioed man nearly passed out, and Beor was deemed the winner. Upon winning, Beor simply said, "Sippikup" to see if anyone would respond, and a tired-looking gnome answered, "Do we know each other?" 

The party claimed to be working for Edgar Hillerman, which alarmed Sippikup, who feared his new job was lost. He cooperated and answered questions about Hillerman and Cogswagon, who he mentioned he had been watching for Hillerman for three days. He said that he witnessed the turbanned figure break into Cogswagon's through the front door and break out through the window; he further testified that he saw the figure duck into an alleyway where he saw Hildy's bleeding body moments later. He also added that the turbanned figure seemed to have a woman's body, which is only the second piece of information the party has discovered concerning the turbanned figure at all. This detail was improvised, but I plan to work it further into the mystery in ways that will hopefully surprise the party. Lastly, Sippikup said that Clover Loom also hired him to watch Cogswagon three days ago, and that a mysterious booming voice had been directing him to watch Cogswagon for the last nine months, though he knew nothing about the voice or its owner. Content with the information they had gathered, the party left the Icy Stare to head to the Briscoe Inn for a late lunch. 

The party arrived at the Briscoe Inn and greeted the barkeep Carl and ordered their meals. I want to take a moment to address their orders because each player decided on a deeply roleplay-focused level. Oddly enough, the easiest area for roleplayers to express themselves in my experience is in taverns. When I wrote my tavern reference list with unique bars and restaurants, I included sample menus. But if you're fine with it, let your players order whatever they want. Consider this: Ais, a tiefling, ordered a raw meaty leg covered in spicy sauce--this reflects Ais' nature and her tastes at that moment. I had Carl bring her a cow leg covered in a sauce of boysenberry, habañero, and rosemary. Montana walked up to Carl and played a song that he called "Kicking Rocks Down the Road" or something similar--this reflects Montana's self-expression through song and his trust in Carl to understand his abstract communication. I had Carl bring him roasted goat, grilled artichokes, and a tumbler of crindlin (a halfling alcohol made by distilling tree sap). Finally, Beor ordered a salad--which reflects his life as a druid and an outsider. I decided it would be fun if salads hadn't really been spread across Evanoch yet, so he had to explain to both Carl and the chef what a salad actually is. It took a few minutes of roleplaying the scene, but eventually Beor had taught the chef to make a salad. I joked with my players that in a game where you can do literally anything, we choose to explain how to make a salad to a person who doesn't exist. We all had a laugh and the party ate their respective lunches. I really can't stress enough: taverns are where players generally feel most comfortable roleplaying, so let them take it as far as they want in these scenes. 

After finishing lunch, the party reviewed what they know about the messaging spell Sippikup had described. They knew it had elements of Message, Thaumaturgy, and Minor Illusion, and they wondered whether the same spell caster had cast the mind control spells on Loom and Hillerman. They traded theories about whether it was one powerful mage or a conspiracy of mages. I want to break this step down a bit. It is a difficult art to give information about a spell to players to guide them in identifying it. You want to provide enough information to figure it out without just giving it away. If you're the kind of DM who plays hard and fast with the rules of magic, you'll want to prepare for these moments. But I run very loose with magic. Years ago, I developed a system of magic that allows users to create custom spells from a vocabulary of ideas that go into the spell. As a result, I can have a spell accomplish basically whatever I want it to with a high degree of precision as long as the caster is sufficiently talented. So for the mind control and messaging spells, I am operating off the framework that these are custom glyph spells. Thus, my description of the magic involved revolved around what traditional spells it was similar to (Message, Thaumaturgy, and Minor Illusion for the messaging spell, for instance). I've dropped hints about glyphs to the party before, and they haven't taken the bait yet, but by offering these powerful spells in the story now, I'm opening the door to their finding out about custom spells and how powerful a caster it takes to manage them. This will lead to further discoveries, but for now, the players knowing that the spell transcends traditional magic is enough. 

With some ideas about how to address the magic, the party headed back to Portia at the guard headquarters. They filled her in on everything since their last visit, before they had met with Loom. Portia listened intently and occasionally asked for clarification; eventually she had some suggestions for how to proceed, including questioning members of the Above about the party that had happened three nights ago. Then the party offered another reaction I was unprepared for: they asserted that they had the identity of Hildy's killer in the turbanned figure and argued that they should be relieved of duty. Portia apologized, saying that normally murder cases are quicker to solve than this, but she couldn't let them free until the turbanned figure was apprehended or dead. I think most DMs would be a little shocked if their players tried to shrug off the whole story, and I was not exactly sure what to do. I don't like the idea of my players feeling like their involvement in the story is compulsory. This is something I am working to address by making the following details more engaging, but it's going to be a few sessions before I can confirm that this isn't roleplaying not wanting to be invested in the murder investigation as opposed to genuinely wishing to free themselves of the responsibilities of the story. 

Our final scene before the end of the session was Portia allowing the party to select items from the guards' confiscated items and promising to obtain the rights to a repossessed property where they could build their natural healing center. Each character selected magic items; Ais took an invisibility amulet and an enchanted amethyst, for instance, while Beor selected a stoneskin jerkin and a ring of cure wounds, and Montana selected boots of pass without trace. I felt that it was appropriate at this point to reward the players with a selection of items. They have managed to complete almost half the adventure and could us a bump up; perhaps more importantly, they have discovered that their murder investigation is more than asking a few questions around town, and Portia is willing to help them with the case since it exceeds what she expected. In a roleplay-heavy campaign, it can be difficult to decide when and how to distribute more powerful items, but I felt that halfway through and with good story reason was enough to bestow some magic items on the party. 

That's the result of our seventh session playing in this mystery campaign. There are going to be escalating situations stemming from practically every development from here out, and I'm eager to see how the players handle these twists. Until next time, happy gaming!

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A Guide to Dice

I write most often about the higher-level thinking of TRPGs--about how to tell stories and create memorable games--but sometimes players' needs are more basic than that. I've written before about how to get started as a beginning D&D player, but your beginning players may still be struggling with more simple questions, like how to roll and read the dice. After all, one of the things that is new to experienced board game players who haven't played TRPGs is wrapping their minds around which die to use and when. This guide breaks down this component of gameplay for beginners. 

The first step is familiarizing yourself with how we think about dice. The first and most vital information is that a die is referred to by the amount of faces it has; you can also think of this as the die being referred to by the highest number it can roll. Let's start with the smallest die: the d4. 

You can recognize the d4 by its sharp pyramidal shape. This die is used pretty rarely in D&D; it is responsible mostly for rolling low-level damage, as from an unarmed strike or magic missile. Some beginners have a hard time reading this die; in the image above, the number that appears at the top is the selected number, whereas other d4s will list the number along the bottom. If you're not sure which your die is supposed to read, turn it without flipping it, and the number that remains consistent on the top or bottom will be your answer. Let's move to a more common die: the d6.

The d6 is the most recognizable die for most players. It's a simple cube, and it's the same die that most games of chance use. The d6 is used for a number of rolls, especially standard damage for simple melee weapons and early spells. It is also used to select your attribute scores (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) at the beginning of making a character. Keep a d6 handy when you're playing a lower-level character since d6 rolls are so common in the early stages of the game. The dice continue to grow, so let's look at the d8. 

The d8 is recognizable as being similar in shape to a top, or two pyramids stuck together at the base. You'll need a d8 for common weapons in the early game, most especially ranged attacks and martial weapons. Aside from damage, the d8 is pretty rarely used, but for some players, every successful attack will be followed by a d8 roll. Be aware that the d8 looks very similar to a d10, so be wary of how rounded its edges are; sharp edges like in the picture above are a d8. Let's move on to the more rounded d10:

The d10 is an exception among the the six types of dice you have as a D&D player. Whereas the other five dice are all ideal platonic solids, the d10 has a more irregular shape. Not all d10s are shaped the same way, but most generally follow the image above. D10s cross up a lot of beginners because there are two of them, but it's actually a fairly simple concept. A d10 can be rolled individually for higher level damage, but it can be paired with a second d10 with double digits on it to form a d100. If you were to roll both simultaneously, you would take the single-digit die as your ones digit and add it to your double-digit die, which would be the tens digits. Rolling a d100 is used sparingly according to the rulebooks--it is mostly for DMs to determine random information--but some DMs use it for player actions that require chance (I use it when players pray to see if their god answers). Overall, you aren't likely to use your d10/d100, but when you do, just keep in mind that a single-digit "0" is actually a 10 and not a 0. Let's move on to the d12: 

The d12 is, aesthetically speaking, my favorite die. Every face of the die is a pentagon and it has a pleasantly sturdy appearance. The d12 is used only very rarely, mostly for high-level damage from special weapons and powerful spells. Beginners can mix up the d12 and the d20 because they both have rounder shapes overall, but you can recognize the d12 by those pentagons (the d20 uses triangles). While you won't use d12s very often until you're a higher-level character, keep it in mind as you level up, as you may end up using it regularly with the right layout. Onto the final (and most important) die: the d20. 

The d20 is, without a doubt, the most commonly used die in the whole of D&D. Other TRPGs switch up the usage of dice; Call of Cthulhu uses primarily d100s and Don't Rest Your Head is only d6s, but D&D is a d20-based system. Let's break the numbers down. A single face on a d20 represents a 5% chance of coming up as a result, which means that there is a 5% chance you will automatically succeed with a natural 20 and a 5% chance of automatically failing with a natural 1. The results in between will be added to your respective bonus and compared to a Difficulty Class (DC) on the DM's part. The d20, with its triangular faces and nearly round profile ("the big one," as many beginners refer to it), will be most of your rolls. You roll a d20 to attack, to perform a skill check, to roll a saving throw, and to determine initiative order. If your DM asks you for anything with the word "attack" or "check" (as in skill checks), you need a d20. But don't get complacent with the d20--your damage will almost never be a d20 (only for very powerful spells). 

These pictures can be helpful, but a lot of players still struggle with learning which die is which. In particular, knowing which die is called for when the DM requests a d20, for instance, is something that takes time. You can give yourself a leg up, though, by laying out your dice with the highest number of each die facing upwards. If you do this, you can simply listen for the die that is being used and grab the die with that number on top. It should look like this: 

With this layout, you can easily grab the die you need without having to search or inspect the dice. If you keep your dice this way, though, you will be denying yourself one of the pleasures of TRPGs: dice stacking. It is a long venerated practice among TRPG players to stack the dice into towers, carefully strategizing which dice will stack on others in a stable manner. It's a game within a game, but until you're comfortably familiar with each die's appearance and can reliably grab the right one, stick with the layout in the picture above. You'll be inaugurated into the dice-stacking world soon enough, and your DM will delight in your joining a time-honored tradition in gaming. 

A very satisfying way to occupy yourself while the game progresses. 

That's basically all you need to know about the dice and how to use them. I recommend using this list as a guide for beginning players, so refer this to anyone who's just starting out and needs a leg up in familiarizing themselves with the dice. This is a major step in learning the game, so take your time to get to know the dice, and you'll be ready to take on any adventure. Look out for a guide to describing magic, a rundown of the accessories you need to play, and how to build a strong party. As always, if there's something I didn't cover here or you would like to see written about here, comment below! Happy gaming!

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