Reflections on Character Deaths

Different tabletop games have different likelihoods of player character death (Call of Cthulhu has a particularly treacherous likelihood) while games which are the "tabletop game version" of a media property (I played the Firefly ttrpg many years ago and found it very, very gentle). But in all games, dying is a big deal. You've made a character, and you presumably care about them and their goals, and you've spent considerable time with them, even if just in creating them. Character deaths are the thing of story and legend for better or for worse. 

I honestly have tried not to think too hard about the character deaths that I've been party to. I understand that it's necessary to have serious consequences for risky actions, and I don't think a deathless game or story would be more compelling than the alternative. I do believe that death should be a part of tabletop games . . . in theory. It's good that the option is there for when it's the right thing. But I think very frequently in the gaming community, character death is used by GMs as a way to tell a "shocking" story (rather than coming up with an idea that would be interesting, just kill somebody). 

Let's say that you are in fact using good wisdom on how to deal with character deaths. It's still going to be one of the defining moments of the campaign, so it needs to be handled gently and with consideration. In order to really fully get at my experiences with death in tabletop games, I'm going to reflect on the characters I've seen who didn't make it to the end of the quest. 

My first GM was a gentle man, a neighbor and father of a school friend who graciously invited me to learn at his table. He became something of a surrogate father to me, and I think he saw me developing as a GM even as I learned to play. My second player character ever was for an evil campaign, a horrifying self-scarring grim reaper-inspired orcish Barbarbian. My teammates mocked her name (Morana, which they said was basically "Moron," which they said she was) and me for having a female character (I would, many years later, come out as a transwoman). During the climactic fight that was to define our opening session, I charged forward to save an ally; the ally retreated, and the rest of the party fled and left my character to be overwhelmed and killed. It was awful. 

What stung the most was the intentionality of it. My party's players wanted to hurt my feelings, so they seized on the situation and maneuvered so that I would die. I never saw it coming. Morana was torn down by enemies (I don't even remember what type at this point), and my DM decided that perhaps this party was not the best home for me. He created a new group--fostering my interest in the game--with one of my best friends where we had our own evil campaign. I played a nasty little gnomish Wizard who terrorized the countryside and always figured out a way to stay on top, and his named was Loki (I was a high schooler, okay?). 

I have so many stories of Loki that it's impossible to know where to start. I mentioned wanting a castle, and my GM presented an expansion on elaborate keeps, and I took one over and began a trade empire. I met a man with a beautiful gold ring; I shook his hand and cast Incinerate (3.5E), plucking the ring from the ashes. My evil deeds spread, and an Inevitable was sicced on me; I tricked it into believing I was dead, survived its "just to be sure" attack, and went on being evil. Loki was everything you could dream of as a first real tabletop game character--he was bound only by my creativity, I was in a friendly, safe space (the GM really made me feel at home), and Loki was the star of the show every time I played--I got to see my little character be truly powerful. 

After high school, I did some scattered GMing; nothing was professional or refined, but it was quick and fun tabletop action. Later, when this scattered fun grew tiresome, I tried more ambitious projects. I set out on an experiment to see if I could get a party to assassinate an entire royal regime (the result: not at all). This party was, as an out-of-game construct, very turbulent. We began as a group of four: my best friend, my brother, my girlfriend, and my roommate. As the game continued--and it lasted nearly two years--we added more people--more friends, friends of other players, etc--and it swelled to eventually eight players by the end. It was, in a few words, entirely chaotic. 

This is especially true when you consider that the story ended up being about the division of the city where it was set splitting in half in a compacted civil war that destroyed the ruling class. The players ended up splitting into loyalists to the throne and anarchists trying to overthrow the city, and the result was something of a compromise: a democratically run council to replace the monarchy. The wrinkle is, with all this conflict built into the game and the long campaign time, there was a practical issue. 

I said in the end eight players finished this campaign. One did not. An original player--the guy who had been my roommate--and I ended up in a difficult situation. We were living together, working together (I was his direct boss), and our social circles all overlapped. We couldn't get away from each other. Eventually, things snapped, and I threw him out of the campaign. It was, I will admit, a childish move. I should have talked things over with him, I shouldn't have let my feelings get the best of me, and I definitely shouldn't do what I did next: I killed his character in a really mean way. Specifically, I said he was run over by a stationary cart, hoping to make a cruel joke at the expense of the character and the player. The party laughed, and every so often people who played in the campaign bring up the death. I feel awful about it, honestly. I was immature, and I turned character death (something heavy and not very funny) into a careless punchline. Looking back, I was an unconfident GM who felt like something shocking would work. To a degree, it did, but I'm happy to not do things like this anymore. 

I had a vision of what I wanted my tabletop games to be like--collaborative stories, though I couldn't have articulated that yet--and I had the skills to develop and improvise open world, so I set off running. I ran an audio actual play podcast and live radio broadcast of D&D in the early 2010s called Listen Check, and while we stretched what was considered possible in the artform at the time, we didn't stray into character death scenarios. They entered on many dangerous scenarios, but there was never a moment that placed them at death's door. I consider that a blessing as a GM since I wouldn't have known how to deal with it. 

I turned my focus on a mad quest that would span three campaigns: how could I grant the most possible control of the game to the players? I made a critically wrong assumption (that the empowerment would come from outside of the game) and set to work. I made a campaign in which each player submitted a storyline specific to their player character, each of which I would tie together. I made a campaign of mishmashed references, bits, settings, and comical NPCs for an antics party based on their insane list of inspirations (one of which involved me watching the National Treasure series for reference). I developed a mystery story using themes and details from player input. Their scrapes with death were unique and taught lessons not specific to death. 

In the first campaign mentioned, the Eastweald campaign (named for the large region of the map I created where the campaign took place). One player, my best friend, in fact, told me towards the very end of the campaign that he was dissatisfied with his character. He felt that the best thing that could happen was for his character, a somewhat disillusioned Paladin, to succumb to the depression and commit suicide. I was opposed to this for a lot of reasons. What I told him was this: we can change your character. The point is to have fun. Don't feel shackled to it. Change him in a way that feels fun. And shockingly to all of us (I think including the player), the Paladin threw himself at Vecna in the final moments of the campaign, only to find Vecna unwilling to defend a former Paladin, and the fallen Paladin was slain by the rest of the party. 

To have this Paladin kill himself accomplishes nothing narratively or for the character. Having him believe that darkness would enrich him and finding no hand to support him has a similar result--the Paladin dies--but with a more interesting choice and with an end that actually fits someone who would make the choice he made. To be honest, it's clumsy compared to something I might have come up with if I hadn't only found out about the Paladin's intention to defect as it happened, but it worked, and the player who made the Paladin maintains that it was a fitting end he doesn't regret. 

What makes the Paladin's death fitting is that it takes a meaningful action (siding with an evil deity) and provides it with a meaningful reaction (he is left to deal with his betrayal of his teammates alone). Had he committed suicide, there would be no meaningful action or reaction. And keep in mind--the player chose the betrayal. He called out to a trickster deity, asking for help without anything meaningful to offer. It was a desperate plan, and it didn't work, and death was unfortunately the only option I could offer him. 

The National Treasure campaign, as it was sometimes called (along with the Western campaign, the Goofball campaign, and other various nicknames), had no character deaths. I had essentially set up the large Western continent to be a sightseeing tour--a dozen unique and interesting places with story possibilities and colorful characters. The goal was not for them to be in danger so much as free. It didn't go as planned. The Goofballs earned the name every moment of every session (they were, for instance, permanently barred from ever returning to all but one of the towns they visited), but that was the point--they were having fun by being chaotic and wild and full of surprises, and making the world dangerous wouldn't contribute to that. It was a deathless campaign, as well it should have been. 

The mystery campaign was also deathless. To be fair, it was something of an experiment. To begin, we were using D&D (a system mostly focused on combat rules) to investigate a mystery (something that could have been done more easily with something like Call of Cthulhu or another more investigative game). Next, I knew from GMing experience that you can't make one piece of information that's especially hard to find and call that a mystery--there had to be a network of escalating clues that carried them from uninformed to the solution, and I had never done that before. Combat was rare, and we limited antics to a pretty rare frequency--we were really trying to tell a story and roleplay. There were death close calls, there were meaningful NPC deaths, and there were deaths that would change the gameworld, but the trio of player characters survived. 

In the interceding years, I got to try a handful of tabletop games that strayed from the D&D style to different degrees. I played characters in Don't Rest Your Head, Call of Cthulhu, Geist, Exalted, and the Firefly tabletop game, and fortunately for me, all of those characters survived. Not all my party members were so lucky. I saw Don't Rest Your Head allies fall to risks that went bad. I saw a Call of Cthulhu ally killed, it seemed, because she pissed off the GM. I saw a near party-wipe in Exalted when our GM fostered a party split and incentivized a player to snap. For the Don't Rest Your Head players who took one too many risks, I respect it. That's how the game is designed, and we accept those risks when we play. But the other two instances I mentioned--what amounts to GM malfeasance--it's awful. It should be avoided. Remember, the point is to have fun, and this kind of behavior is not fun. 

This brings us up to my most recent work, something I am immensely proud of. I call this campaign Of Gods and Dragons, a name that at once tells you that this will concern the most powerful forces in the setting with a linguistic flair, an indication that this is literary in a sense. And in fact, the party was abducted in the opening moments by an oppressive dragon, then rescued by another dragon, all before being set loose on a gameworld I've spent almost 20 years building. It was, as the mystery campaign was, a roleplaying and storytelling game, which was important given than I gave my players immense power to begin with (level 12 at session one--they easily could have wrought hell on almost any target if they'd chosen to be more chaotic. As it was, they chose to bring kindness. For one hundred years of epilogue, all three player characters improved the world. It is the peak of my GMing career so far.

No player characters died, but characters who were as important as player characters did die. I cast a group of ten characters as dragons, people empowered and made nearly immortal by their dragonhood. Seven survived. One of the three that died fell into an unfortunate scenario, catching the party at a time where she couldn't leave them alone and they couldn't leave her alive. Another was planned, the assassination of the man scheming to bring down the forces of reality in the name of destruction and empowerment. The last was a matter of closing loose ends, taking the last truly evil dragon out of commission so that the world would be, at least at the level of dragons, more good than evil by a greater margin, and so that the world would be safer from his potential threats. These dragons had been the source of conversation and planning for an out of game year, and finally facing them was unavoidable. 

Looking forward, I don't know what to expect when it comes to death in my campaigns. I'm eager to run other systems, and death is not a huge part of every game. I am especially intrigued by running a tabletop game I created in which players explore historically accurate versions of important times and places like 1750s London and 1930s Chicago (not to mention my projection of Washington D.C. in 2050). I don't suspect I'll be encountering a lot of player deaths in my future. 

So this next part isn't really for me. This next part is for GMs who are free with player death. I'll work backwards. Of Gods and Dragons taught me as the GM that death and danger are not necessary for a high stakes game. My various tabletop experiments taught me that when used irresponsibly, player death can ruin an experience. From my experiments as a GM with radical freedom, I learned that a well-earned consequence (including death) can enrich a story, and a poorly-considered consequence (including death) can ruin a player's experience of the story. My time DMing on the radio taught me that the story cannot precede the players and their experience--I often had to be changing game expectations based on radio broadcast, and I let the story and the listeners be more important to me than the players. My civil war campaign taught me to let the players define everything except reality. My clumsy DMing in college taught me to go beyond the cliches. And my time with my first DM, my neighbor and the man who spent weekends making popcorn and hosting movie afternoons in the basement, taught me that deaths are awful. 

Seriously! I spent a lot of time develop Morana. She was this fearless warrior who I wanted to be like, and she was strange but didn't care what people thought (something I was and desperately wanted to do), and she was covered in decorative scarring, not unlike tattoo art, which I was obsessed with (currently, about 50% of my upper body is tattooed). I cared about Morana. I looked forward to playing with her for weeks. I painted a mini for her, something that took endless hours and painstaking care. Watching her get hacked to bits while my supposed friends got away with the treasure was the kind of experience that would have turned a lot of people away from tabletop games. Most people, I would wager, would take that experience and decide the whole thing wasn't for them. 

But I didn't. I was hooked. D&D was a doorway that peeked in on the ideas of storytelling and roleplaying and imaginary play and game design that I couldn't just decide wasn't for me. The fact that my DM saw that and was willing to help me is one of the great kindnesses of my life. I didn't burn out because my character died--but I almost did. It was a bad thing that only happened because my DM's hands were tied--there was no way to fudge that my character survived. A separate campaign for me was the solution he had, and it still strikes me as incredibly generous. Because of my initial interest in tabletop games was strong, because I was given a kind recovery when I was betrayed, and because my interest was then fostered, I recovered. Lots of people aren't so lucky. 

Look, if a character straps explosives on themselves, runs into a goblin den, and detonates it, that character should die. If a character makes a few bad rolls and suddenly die from factors shouldn't really be deadly, that character realistically should not die. The dice and rules might say so, but you're the GM. You are empowered by the game to decide in the end what happens. Don't be afraid to do something. 

Ask yourself a few questions. First, what's best for the character? Does a death here serve a purpose? Has the character achieved everything they were designed to and this death would fulfill them somehow? Does the character still have unfinished business that would be unresolved if the character were to die? Things like relationships with other characters are less important here. 

Another vital question is, what's best for the story? Does this character still have some vital role to fulfill? Are there things later on you can think of that would be complicated or prevented by this character's death? You're not eagerly looking for an excuse to kill the character so much as looking for evidence that the character might benefit from a death; think of it like how juries work--you must be totally convinced that the character must die to kill them, otherwise they are innocent. 

Lastly, what's best for the party? If a character's death is going to have a major impact on the party, it's important to know going in that an issue is going to occur. One example, for instance, is if the party's sole healer would be killed, in which case all manner of complications could occur. Similarly, if the party leader is killed, the trajectory of the party could be massively affected. Or as I've had happen as a player, a crucial party member missing can stop the party from completing part of a quest. Any of these can affect a decision on what to do as far as a player character's fate. 

And finally, ask yourself what the player's experience will be if the character dies. Is this a hardened player who took a risk knowing the consequences, or a new player still learning the ropes of a complicated new game? Is this player being treated poorly at the table in a way that might affect their willingness to keep playing? Will this player keep playing tabletop games if their character dies? You may recoil at the idea of factoring this in, but our goal should be making more happy tabletop game players, not less. 

I made Morana when I was 17. I'm 35 now--that's half my life ago, plus a bit. Morana was, to be honest, a pretty hollow character. She was, like so many characters made by teenagers, meant to be cool without much thought as to roleplaying or anything beyond the lethalness of her scythe. But it still hurts to think of what I lost. Morana played one session before dying, and that meant that months or even years of gaming with her could have taken place. She could have been the character I carried with me in my heart as special, and instead, she was a fallen character who never had a story to tell. Her death hurt, and it could have driven me from the game. 

Instead, I stood my ground. I got some help from a good GM, and I set to playing and learning. Tabletop games slowly became more than a fascination--an obsession, and then a way of life. This website came together. Experimental campaigns happened. Tabletop games were created. My interest in D&D became something so much larger, and all of that could have been lost had I been shaken by Morana's death. There is a timeline in which D&D became "that thing I did in high school," in which I don't return to the stories and dice, in which that world is lost to me. I'm glad it wasn't. 

For a character to die in a tabletop game, you've got to be 100% certain it's their time. Think like a juror: is there no question that this character should die? Or is there reasonable doubt? The stakes are too high to make this decision without caution. This could be a defining moment for the player. Be gentle, be kind, and be reasonable--deaths are remembered, and you want to be remembered well.

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to not get weighed down by worldbuilding, reflections on the campaign of a lifetime, and what perfect GMing looks like. Until next time, happy gaming!

What I Look for in a Player

I have spent years writing on this site about how GMs can cater to their players. If there is a central argument to the 250+ articles here, it's that giving freedom to players is a good thing. And in all that time, I have spent comparatively little time talking about the opposite: how can the players cater to the GM? What does that even look like? It's hard to imagine, but it is possible and meaningful. 

First, let's rule out things that are not good ways to have the players cater to the GM. We don't want submissive drones who follow our stories exactly as imagined--that robs the players of agency, and it makes stories more boring without the element of surprise. We also don't want players who don't push boundaries narratively or within roleplay. As often as it might complicate GMing, the most beautiful moments in a game comes from players who are going beyond the obvious steps of a story. And we also don't want players who do and say what they think the GM wants--that removes the personality and agency of the player characters, reducing them to shadows of themselves. 

Instead, we're going to investigate the strategy of choosing players who will naturally fit with your GM style, and that means knowing what to look for in a player. This is, however, a complicated matter. What you do as a GM informs the kind of players you'll want to look for. That means that there's a broad answer for everyone as well as a more personal answer for each GM. Let's review them together. 

Firstly, your player should approach the game with the same emphasis you do. If you are running a silly antics game, you want players who enjoy and play along with silly antics campaigns. The same goes for a combat focus--if you want to offer strategic challenges and tough combat, you'd be best served by players itching for a fight. And if like me, you're looking for storytelling and roleplaying, you want players who are looking for the same thing. This may sound obvious, but I can't tell you how many times I've had player/tone mismatches in my games and games I've been around--if you just want to hang out with friends, this idea might matter less to you, but if you're looking to maximize your tabletop game experience, you need to be able to maintain style across the group. 

This is a hard lesson to learn, to be honest. I think we have to divide things: these campaigns are for hanging out with friends (if that's something you enjoy), and these campaigns are for getting the most out of the game (if that's something you enjoy). If you enjoy both, the division is necessary, or else you end up with a strong possibility of being let down by your experience--let me tell you about my experience with that. 

Many years ago now, I ran a Western-themed campaign on a little desert island. The setting was like a child to me--I'd painstakingly mapped a dozen cities and the sprawling island, I'd developed NPCs and politics everywhere on the map, and I'd come up with a handful of storylines to offer my party. They opted for the silliest antics campaign I have ever been a part of. They were banned from almost every town. They committed almost every crime known to humanity while purporting to be a "good" party. They ignored (and sometimes mocked) so many things about my setting. It was, in a word, a nightmare. 

The thing is, the party was my best friends at the time. It was a combination of old college friends and work buddies that got along great. Everybody came to play excited and left thrilled. Friendships were forged. It was socially an incredible game. But for me as the DM, the person responsible for guiding the game, I was always frustrated or overwhelmed. I learned a lesson from that. I needed to be more selective about parties when I was looking to maximize my game experience instead of socializing with friends. 

After that, I was very careful about selecting players. The campaign that followed was initially composed of my three best work friends and my girlfriend at the time. But crucially, my three best work friends were intelligent, somewhat reserved and very thoughtful, and eager to try something a little experimental. My girlfriend at the time did not necessarily have those qualities, and our inevitable break-up ended her time in the campaign, leaving a party that learned to work within how I GM (lots of narration and roleplaying with radical player freedom). After that, I stuck with the same party, and with a good chemistry as a group and me with refined GM skills, our party was incredibly rewarding for me. I was spending time with friends, but the way we were spending our time was pushing the boundaries of our favorite games. 

And that led me to a radical choice. For my most recent campaign, I cut a member of the trio I had been gaming with off and on for a decade. We're still friends--I attended his wedding not that long ago--so it wasn't a social factor. It was a gaming factor. This player, who we'll call Wilkes, was and remains a terrific improviser. Few can out-roleplay Wilkes, and he's always able to add a poignant note here and there. But the thing about Wilkes was that he was very competitive. He would bully NPCs. He would powergame, destroying a lot of narrative moments with (admittedly clever) solutions, frequently derived from metagaming knowledge. And he would challenge me as the GM, deliberately throwing difficult situations at me with a wry smile. It didn't ruin my experience, but it definitely deflated my enjoyment a bit. 

Deciding what to do was hard. On the one hand, Wilkes had been a close friend for a decade. We'd played some of the gaming I'm most proud of together. The trio Wilkes was a part of had been playing with me for a long time. On the other, Wilkes was making me enjoy the game less and especially making it harder for me to do what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, and what I enjoy. And for campaigns meant to entertain a group of players, I have always excused those things because I make player fun a priority over my own. But what I had planned next--Of Gods and Dragons--was not an average campaign meant to entertain; it was my attempt to at once experiment with the scope of my storytelling while also exploring the most arcane of lore in my homebrew setting. 

When it came time to pick a party for this campaign, I reflected. Wilkes posed problems in that powergaming, metagaming, and GM opposition would be very serious problems with what I had planned. I chose to move forward with the other two members of the party, who would become Brokk and Lethanin because I felt I had no reason to change what had been a historically fruitful and harmonious gaming relationship until then with them. For my third, I picked the woman who is now my wife. She is brilliant, creative, highly experienced with tabletop games, strategic while respecting the story and world, and generally an exciting player to watch, evidenced nowhere better than in her work as Aurora. I chose as carefully as I knew how, and the result is something I couldn't have been happier with. 

And the thing of all that is that I didn't chose to play without being with friends. The players of Brokk and Lethanin are my real life best friends who I happened to find I have good tabletop game chemistry with. I hope it goes without saying that I enjoy spending time with my wife, especially since she's learned to play my individual style of game. I got the best of both worlds, and so can you. 

So you've chosen your broad style: are you a storytelling, roleplaying GM with a world to explore; are you a strategic, tactical GM whose enemies are fearsome; or are you a GM who wants to laugh with your friends, using tabletop games as a way to hang out? Knowing this is really the first step, but it can be taken further. Let's further define the storytelling, roleplaying GM archetype. Within it are storytellers who focus on story, roleplayers whose acting and improv is the star of the show, worldbuilders whose creations take center stage, or combinations of these. And we can go further still. Our storyteller might present open prompts and respond to player action; they might guide player action through the world; they might railroad their players along a storyline; they may balance these in some way. Only now are we getting a really clear picture of an individual GM. I describe myself (as I did above) as a storyteller, specifically with lots of narration and roleplaying with radical player freedom. This is what a game at my table looks like: I am going to be describing NPCs and the world, I am going to be roleplaying as NPCs, and I am otherwise sitting back and letting the players lead. 

And that's a style that some people don't like. Some people don't seem to understand it. Some people think I'm not really playing tabletop games so much as adding dice to a collaborative story. All of that is fair. And knowing that people don't like it helps me. When I meet someone who says they play tabletop games, I ask them to tell me about their favorite moment from their experience. This question tells you a lot. I really struggle to connect to the combat style of play, and when I'm talking to someone who describes a cool battle moment as their favorite, I know I am unlikely to appreciate a game in the same way as them. So now I get to avoid playing with them and having a bad experience. 

There are other ways to gauge how people will fit into your style before you play with them. Ask them what they're looking for in a campaign. It's always okay to say that you have something already planned that doesn't really incorporate that style. Describe your ideas for campaigns or ideas about how tabletop games are played and see how people respond. You may get some opposition or polite dismissal, but the people who agree with you will be great gaming partners. And one tactic that has worked for me is directly asking players what they do and don't like as a player. If their don't list sounds like what I do, I accept it's a bad match and move on; if we sound compatible, I have a new player. 

Of course, all of the screening in the world will not prevent a surprise in a group of players. Wilkes was someone who was great on paper and whose only trespass was not fitting the tone of an experimental project, but screening didn't catch him. I've played campaigns with significant others who brought down the game before, and my judgment was too biased to meaningfully screen her. Someone can always be agreeable when spoken to and quite different at the table. There are no guarantees you can find the perfect candidate every time. You do eventually have to give people a try to know how it will go. 

While GMing, watch the player in question. How do they respond to your GMing? Are they connecting with you/the story/the party? Do you enjoy the things they do? These questions are not meant to judge the player as a person--by no means is this a reflection on the individual. But the point of tabletop games is to have fun, and you the GM deserve that fun, and if a player is deflating your fun, you can do something about it. 

Cutting a player loose is hard. It's a messy thing, and it never plays out well. I suggest starting with an intro session to most campaigns--if you use one, you can get rid of a bad fit before the party ever meets. By a similar token, you can play a one-shot or briefer campaign to get a sense of a player and how they fit in with the rest of the group before plunging into a longer campaign with an unknown. 

Once, when I ran my western campaign, a player showed up with a complete stranger to me who he insisted was also going to be in the campaign. I don't think he realized that this would likely take a year or longer, and I later came to believe that he didn't really know the stranger well either. The stranger, who I'll call Leif, turned out to make everyone else pretty uncomfortable. Down moments were filled with rants (often political), NPCs were irrationally slain, and conversation was not relaxed around the table. I felt awkward cutting Leif off--he told me every week that it was the high point of his week, and he was obviously lonely. In the end, I don't know what would have been for the best, or if there was a "best" in this case. But I do know that if I had run an intro session or a one-shot first, I would have had a chance to nip this in the bud. 

You may be saying, "this all sounds pretty mercenary. You're just cutting players off because you don't like them?" And yes and no is my response. Yes, I am deliberately choosing to include or not include the people who exist in my leisure activities and hobbies. And no, it's not because I don't like them. As I said about, Wilkes is still a close friend, and I have no ill will or judgment for Leif. But when I was honest with myself, my enjoyment of the game would improve with a different arrangement, and I have a right to pursue that. 

So what do I look for in a player? 

I like players who have some kind of intelligence. It can be knowledge or wisdom or cleverness or whatever breed it takes on in the individual. I am myself a pretty intelligent person who likes telling complicated, nuanced stories, and I want my players to be able to appreciate everything that's going on and be able to respond in a meaningful way. It also helps that I tend to get along best with intelligent people, so the social component of the game is helped in this way too. 

I also want a player who's willing to experiment a bit. Every major campaign I've ever run has ended up being in experiment in something--an experiment in following a party split to a massive conclusion, experiments in how the game is written, experiments in what the player experience is like--and not every player wants that. I've played with a lot of people who want a traditional experience (and there's nothing wrong with that) who would not enjoy my experiments. We need to be on the same page. Speaking of which . . . 

I need my players to be willing and able to roleplay and lead the game at times. This can be sticky for some players. Not everyone wants to roleplay a story when there's faeries and dragons and magic and adventure to explore and meet and slay. Not everyone wants to (or is able to) lead a scene with improvisation in a way that feels satisfying. I'm asking a high level of performance from my players, and that can be a complicated thing. I don't want anyone to walk away frustrated, so I choose players who I think are up to the challenge of some complicated gaming. 

The results speak for themselves. Of Gods and Dragons is, in my estimation, a work of art within the context of tabletop games. I gave three talented players (two of whom knew my world quite well) free rein to change my world as they pleased. Over the course of the campaign and the three epilogues we did covering 100 years of post-campaign life for Brokk, Aurora, and Lethanin, my players systematically set about improving my homebrew world. They eliminated sources of violence and oppression, they established themselves as forces of good, and they systematically improved life for common people. Those epilogues are collectively about 50 pages of text, and most of it is directly focused on being selfless and heroic. I set out to see what happened when I gave massive control to my players, and they wrote a love letter to my world. I never would have gotten that response--the love from my players and the satisfaction that I did something interesting--with the group that destroyed my Western setting. I needed to pick the right group to get what I was looking for. 

This is, of course, all a spectrum. You're not going to go out and recruit pro gamers you don't know. Tabletop games are games, and the point of games is to have fun--we should be playing with people we like. But we also want to aim for the middle of the Venn diagram on this--people who we like who also fit our style as GMs. That's not a radical thing to ask for, especially when we consider GM satisfaction, which matters. 

At the end of the day, it's all abstract anyway. How you enjoy something in concert with someone else when you're both adding creative ideas to a collective--that's a delicate thing. Creative groups like bands break up over stuff like that all the time. If it doesn't feel right, don't feel obligated to keep doing it. Keep the mantra in mind: this is for fun. This is for fun. Pick yourself a good party, and I promise you'll see it's worth the effort in being selective.

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to design and improvise NPCs and groups of NPCs, what exactly a tabletop game is, and how to balance kindness and antagonism as a GM. Until next time, happy gaming!

How to Work Well with Other Players

Beginner players in the world of tabletop games have a lot to learn. There's the rules of the system (which changes between games), their individual character's abilities, the plot being spun by the GM, the in-jokes the party has been crafting, the combination of group and personal goals to consider, and more. It's easy for decisions in the moment to overlook something, be it a minor detail, a glaring issue, or something more subtle. In my experience, one of the first things that drops off in tabletop games is good teamwork. This guide will give you some pointers on how to maintain (or create) a good working relationship with other player characters, something that's vital to having a good time playing. 

The first step is awareness of goals. What does the overall party want? What do individual players want? How can we see player actions as driven by what they want? Where do desires by players overlap or conflict? Answering these questions will give you a good sense of what direction you're headed in. It will also give you the ability to anticipate things better. The next level of this is figuring out what the players want from the game, which will also help guide our understanding of things.

Storytime: Once, I was running a campaign, and I had a player who was playing a paladin. But the player tired of being ceaselessly good and decided that the most compelling thing to do was have him turn evil. Actually, the player wanted to kill the character off and start over, and I insisted we find a way to make the paladin interesting. So we did an evil turn which was preceded by playing the character as increasingly disillusioned and hopeless. The player's intention was to have an epic, exciting turn in his character's story, and that overrode what the character wanted, and since the other players weren't factoring in their fellow player's goals, they were taken totally off guard. It was exciting, but the clues were there had the other players been looking. 

Once you recognize the motivations in your game, it's time to decide which ones you want to focus your energy on assisting. Your personal goals will almost certainly make this list, and the main story should be represented as well; deciding how and where to help your allies is another element of this process. This can be a simple or complex process. If you agree with the goal and the person with the goal is a friend and ally, the decision is simple. What if you disagree with the goal but want to offer an olive branch to the person who holds the goal? What if someone you detest wants to help with a goal of yours? All of these factors can grow complicated, so keeping our base desires (which goals we will prioritize) in mind matters a lot so we can avoid getting distracted. 

Another story: I got to play a con artist build I'd been dreaming about for years. Our DM put us on a sprawling, epic adventure that spanned a continent and multiple dimensions. There were endless fascinating details to latch onto, many of which inspired new goals in our group. We tended to these in the way that D&D players do--"yes, we just slayed a den of vampires, and now I'm eating 40 soft pretzels and watching a boxing match--leave me alone." In the end, our schedules fell apart. There were seven of us trying to coordinate together, and it got to be too much. Our DM gave us a written epilogue wrapping up the campaign and seeing our characters off into the sunset. We all felt similarly: there was more we wanted to do. We never saw the end of the story ourselves. We'd spent sessions frolicking and puzzling and chatting, and the actual story had eluded us. I think if we had kept in mind that real life time was an issue and been more diligent, we would have lived out that story, and while I'm not claiming you shouldn't goof around or explore, I do think that there's a balance to keep. 

Then it's time to coordinate. You know the goal, and you know who's cooperating with you, so you have to figure out who's doing what. Fortunately, tabletop games clearly spell out who has the best chance of success at a task via your skills--you can compare the skill rank of say, Survival, on two different character sheets and see which one is higher. Much of tabletop games involves getting a sense of who is good at what; it becomes intuitive, as having the most skilled person do something is classic and fairly obvious strategy. For more abstract challenges, though, teamwork is usually the solution: brainstorming solutions to problems, collectively convincing someone of something, and outright doing tasks in tandem are all common strategies in tabletop games. What matters most here is that you're strategizing consciously, not acting on impulse.

Storytime part three: In Of Gods and Dragons, my most recent campaign, I tried to pose all abstract problems to my party. I had designed the campaign to be about roleplaying and emotional experiences, and that meant using their wits and creativity to solve problems, not to mention diplomacy. You could see that it was pushing the players to their limits at times--everything was complicated and messy and directionless, and they had to sort it all out. But they persevered. They cooperated. They thought creatively. And when all was said and done, they had amassed enough power to steamroll over every other challenge in their way. But this was only possible because of cooperation. I have never seen a group so focused on the same goals; it was truly magnificent, and I hope to see that again as a GM some day. 

And then it's time to act. This is the easiest part to consider. You declare an action, you roll dice, your GM tells you the result. But! Then it's back to the drawing board. It's time to plan again. 

You may be saying to yourself, but this is all simple enough and can be done without thinking too hard about it. Perhaps. But I have been playing tabletop games for a long time. There are a number of things that happen in practically every party at every table with every game. Panicked decision-making is one of them. Unclear, poorly thought-out, conflicting plans are the bane of every group of tabletop protagonists' existences, and any player or GM who would claim otherwise is unaware of the chaos they live in. 

Storytime one last time, and of a very different nature. I grew up hating myself. I thought that there was nothing positive about me to be said, that people rightfully hated me, and that I deserved the bad things that happened to me. I tried therapies and antidepressants and religions and all kinds of stuff. I was still miserable. Then in my mid-20s, a therapist recommended a book. It was called Self-Compassion by Dr. Kristin Neff. It basically argued that if you are mindful--if you can be aware of what you are thinking while you are thinking it--that you can change your thoughts. You can make them gentler and kinder. You can teach yourself to love yourself. It sounded far-fetched like all self-help books, but I saw no reason to not give it a chance. 

It wasn't immediate. Mindfulness is hard and gradual and only as effective as you let it be. But I got into the swing of things and started shifting to gentler thoughts. I learned to like things about myself, then to hope for good things for myself, and finally to actually loving myself. It hadn't been far-fetched. It was neuroscience, and it worked for me. Mindfulness works on whatever you set it to--any change you want to make, even just in attention, is possible. It is, without hyperbole, a total gamechanger in terms of how you exist in the world. 

So what I'm addressing here isn't frivolous or too simple to discuss. If we can use a tiny dose of mindfulness--just a little constant check-in in your mind that asks some basic questions--we can make much better decisions in-game. These are questions like, "How does what we're doing right now relate to our goals? What other paths might we take to get there? How might we simplify our plans? How are my allies in the party and the NPCs we're working with interested in our plans?" These are simple, yes, but they are critical thought questions that keep us from getting caught up in crazy plans or overlooking important things. 

But finally, beyond understanding and contributing to plans well, there is one last key to working well with other players: friendliness. I don't mean your character should embrace a caricature of polite behavior or some kind of chipper demeanor. I meant that you, the player, outside of the game, should be friendly with a player when you work with them. It's a big thing to offer assistance in tabletop games, and a spirit of kindness goes a long way in terms of making that assistance into a meaningful moment in the campaign. We are all here to have fun, so try to embrace the cooperative in-game spirit with the same energy out of game. 

This will guide you in most things. When new situations arise, trust your intuition. Most of all, remember that this is a narrative game. Failure is just as interesting as success, and often more interesting. Don't be afraid to ask for help and guidance if you're nervous. And just have fun--that's the point. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to stop railroading, a profile on the island of Ramsey, and how to "win" tabletop games. Until next time, happy gaming!

Changes Made to My Homebrew Setting by Players (and Why It Should Be that Way)

I've been arguing for some time that player actions should have meaningful consequences. Doing something in-game and having no meaningful consequence feels hollow and flimsy, like a cardboard cutout of a real adventure. That's why I've dedicated so much of my DMing career to providing meaningful consequences to player actions. Recently, I realized just how much of my world has changed, with no small part of that coming from my most recent campaign, Of Gods and Dragons. And the thought struck me that it may be worth considering all these changes at once to see the world at large and how (and perhaps why) these changes have happened. To do this, I'm going to review the five campaigns that have taken place in Evanoch since I started DMing in the setting more than fifteen years ago. 

Campaign One: Talon Gorge

I set out to run a "twists and turns" kind of story about assassination contracts leading up the royal family, but the party didn't trust the questgiver and turned on them, resulting in a party split that led to a civil war. This meant the fall of the last monarchy in Evanoch, already a remarkable moment in the world, but the conspirator who had planned the whole thing escaped (with a player character at that). To date, I've never brought back the conspirator for more shenanigans, but it's nice to know she's out there. As a result of the fall of the monarchy, a democratic council was appointed which focused more on the needs of citizens than the old regime had. 

At the time, this felt like a pretty appropriate consequence. They saw the city through the civil war, they helped install democratic leadership, they ensured that the new leaders would be more progressive--there was no reason to not grant them a newly prosperous city. I stand by this. The whole crux of the campaign had been the safety of the city and its leadership, and the party fought long and hard to achieve that (the part of the party that remained loyal to the city, anyway). Meanwhile, the rogue agents who opposed the city did succeed in killing the king and dismantling some of the royal government, and that led to the compromise that the monarchy fell but a new progressive government replaced it. So within the context of the campaign, the consequence was fitting--the party saved Talon Gorge, and so Talon Gorge thrived in its new identity. 

This was the first campaign I ran in Evanoch. I had no idea the scope of running years of campaigns would mean. Looking back, Talon Gorge's reinvention as a progressive democratic city changed the balance pretty meaningfully. I had created an array of cities that represented different extremes and variations of all manner of details including government. Talon Gorge was the last monarchy, a conservative holdout amongst the major cities of the world. Talon Gorge swinging from most repressive to essentially the most progressive was a big impact. The balance shifted. Evanoch leaned toward a more progressive future and away from a traditionalist past, and I learned at this point that you can establish a world as a playground, but that means surrendering that playground to be changed by the players. 

What I would soon realize was that the point of the playground was the players having fun in it. It was not about creating a perfect world and a perfect story, but giving the players a stage to tell their perfect story. Acknowledging this, I decided to move forward by striving to create situations for players but not guide them and to encourage them to change the world. 

Campaign Two: Listen Check

I set my sights on something so ambitious that it's a wonder I didn't fail miserably. For my second ever for real D&D campaign, I elected to run a live broadcast D&D game as a radio show and podcast. It was called Listen Check, a pun on 3.5's skill name, and it was my baby. I chose special music every episode for each character, wrote over a hundred pages of in-game documents, illustrated an in-game children's book, wrote the opening seven chapters of an in-game novel, and more hyper-commitment to the art. And oh yeah, the party brought about a change in political leadership and killed a god. 

This was something of a mistake. An unintentional outcome, anyway. I'd meticulously made a table of random events and quest hooks that were specific to the gameworld and meant to be explore as non-hierarchical--they're all equal quests. But the first one the party encountered involved a quest from a god, which they took to be the main quest, and I had to develop a campaign about the god. I never intended it to work out that way, but I'd say it went well enough. However, the tunnel vision of creating a campaign around fighting a god got the best of me, and I didn't realize that the end of the line was killing that god. I introduced a dragon character to help the party, and my dragon lore was born. Soon, the god was slain, and I had a rift in time and space as well as the implied existence of more dragons (one of the party assumed a dragon mantle as a reward for his role in defeating the god). I more or less left this untouched as a hook for later stories (and ended up using it for my most recent campaign).

With the ambition that had led me there--a sprawling campaign with new-to-me methods that used a new technology to tell a story over years--the ending was ambitious too. Using a homebrew magic system, one player character stripped the god of its immortality, setting a dangerous precedent of how powerful the magic system was. I would offer it again to future players anyway, always turned down until my most recent campaign. But now the consequence was killing a god and becoming a dragon--taking immortality and gaining it. I recognized that I was flying very close to the sun so to speak, and I realized something conceptual about campaigns. 

All campaigns either take place within a narrative vacuum or within a larger context. If the problem that the party is solving as the main campaign only exists within the world in order to be solved, that's a sign of a narrative vacuum. If the DM started with a story idea and created set dressing around it to place it in the world, that's possibly a narrative vacuum. This isn't a bad thing, but a vacuum generally limits how many consequences will reach the larger world beyond the campaign immediately. Talon Gorge began as a vacuum--kill these people, get this reward, for instance, and I designed the city so that the campaign could take place. But it became a broader thing--"how do the people in town feel about political leadership?" is not a direct consequence of "kill these people and get paid." Listen Check began as and stubbornly remained within a larger context. It was a true sandbox that the players treated as something bigger than individual quests. So I noted where things had succeeded and scaled back. 

Campaign Three: The Eastweald

Except that years passed, and I forgot the lesson of ambition. I wanted to follow what I believed was at the heart of tabletop roleplaying joy--having agency. I even asked my players to suggest concepts for the campaign itself, a process I've outlined. The result was hard to work with. I had hoped to get aesthetic notes, story fragments that could be chained together or used as mid-level quests; I got a main quest idea from every player. The ambition returned and struck, perhaps lethally. I insisted I would string four main quest-level ideas into one big story. I did my best. My players say it was a success. I remain dissatisfied, wishing more of it had come together in the final sessions. But in the end, each storyline was concluded: a terrorist strike had been made against New Dalton, goliaths had arrived on Evanoch, a plague had been cured, and a traitorous deal with Vecna was made. 

I'm sure my displeasure comes through here, and I think on reflection that it just felt like while I took big swings, these were all vacuum stories. I made the Eastweald, a large stretch of forest with a gorgeous map to give the player characters a sandbox, but to tend to the stories, they spend most of their time in a few bigger cities. The storylines individually were interested, but connecting them was hard because none was related to the larger world. The Eastweald had all this potential to be a huge success, but I think that I might have been a little shy of offering huge consequences. After Listen Check, killing a god and becoming a dragon was a very high threshold of consequence, and I had a player dealing with a god, and I had another player planning state violence, and another introducing a new species to my homebrew setting--the possible consequences were massive. I uncharacteristically did not provide an epilogue because I didn't really want to push further consequences of the campaign into the canon history of my world. I regret that. I wish I had done a lot differently. At the very least, I'm glad I got to run something better with the same group later on to vindicate myself. 

In terms of consequences, this one remains pretty minimized. It has small ripple effects--Vecna, the god dealt with in this campaign, was largely characterized for me during the god's conversations. I treat the goliaths taking up residence in my homebrew Underdark as canon and plan to handle any future excursions to the Underdark with a full account of this campaign. I treat Woodhearth, the largest city in the Eastweald, as more important than its relatively small size would merit given the important crossroads it lies on (and sentimentality). But by and large, I gave vacuum stories and minimized consequences, and that's both why there are few marks left on the world and why I regret not doing better. 

I do want to acknowledge here again, though--my players said it was a grand time. They got personalized main quests! They got multi-genre adventure! There were backstabbings! There were bombs! There were antics and dramatic moments and big fights! It was everything D&D is meant to be. But I had done radio theater for three years, telling a cohesive and beautiful and frightening and infuriating and intoxicating tale that pushed the boundaries of every format it used--I wanted more. The question now was how to bring the aspiration I had to reality despite challenges. Humbled, I went on. 

Campaign Four: The Mystery Campaign

I took nothing for granted. Every step in a process that felt natural had to be analyzed--anything could be a bad habit. Too much narrative suggestion before--edit the suggestions more. The requests involved a mystery premise, the appearance of a dragon, a class divide, chaos, and other details. I hatched a plan for a murder mystery that involved a class struggle and chaos storms powered by a tortured chaos dragon. The players investigated. They formed relationships. They improved the city. They incited a rebellion. They ended the chaos storms. They solved the mystery. It was a careful process--nothing makes you more careful as a DM than any given piece of information spoiling the whole session or more, and I often had to adjust to strange and curious player actions (like starting a real band as a cover to talk to someone)--but it all paid off. The mystery campaign was satisfying to me to DM, it was a favorite for the players involved, and I would say that it fulfilled the artistic drive in me to do something special. I'll tell you: D&D is not designed for mystery storytelling, but I'm happy with how it came out. (To the readers shouting "Then play CoC/TTRPG of your choice!"--my players wanted D&D mystery, and I felt up to the challenge.)

The consequences of this campaign are not unlike those in Talon Gorge--peace and prosperity are granted, the evildoers are driven out, and all is well. But the scale here is different. The Mystery Campaign took place in the small mountain town of Yamseth. Talon Gorge was a leviathan, a powerhouse of a city; Yamseth was a town made specifically for the campaign. That does regrettably mean this is a vacuum narrative--because my players wanted the chaos storms, which do not exist in any city I had already established, I had to make something for them anyway. That just necessarily meant that what happened in Yamseth would cause less ripples, and given how far outside the canon I was working (putting a non-canon dragon in the campaign for the chaos storms because it was requested), I didn't entirely mind keeping the Mystery Campaign as kind of a contained story. 

I haven't used this campaign much in terms of consequences to the larger world since it's fairly limited in scope--by far the most limited of any campaign I've run. Talon Gorge was about the overthrow of the last kingdom; Listen Check was about standing up to a god; the Eastweald was about a thousand massive things; the Mystery Campaign was about three people solving a murder. The Mystery Campaign is about this little story that has no real impact outside of Yamseth, and in a way, I think I was driven to do that by ambition too. I think I wanted to see if I could tell a small story--when so many D&D stories are so big--and still satisfy my players. I'm really proud that I did. This campaign made me unafraid to really play with the small moments, which would ironically help me in my next campaign. 

The thing that strikes me now about the Mystery Campaign is that it took me out of my element. I am a mushy emotional feelings roleplayer, and I tell stories about the way people feel--and I can feel all that out in the moment. On top of that, I'm an improviser. I've been improvising in one way or another for most of my life. I can't do any of that in a mystery campaign. I have to mind the script, the details, the plot. I have to make sure the expression of feelings matches the plan. It's tight and rigid and careful, and I'm a fast and loose DM. So it was a big challenge, and I always recommend doing creative work that's hard--it stretches you, and you learn what you're missing when you engage with it. 

Campaign Five: Of Gods and Dragons

Okay, this one is aaaaaaaaaalmost done, but basically wrapped up enough to discuss. I did my time being careful with the Mystery Campaign; it's time to be ambitious again. That hole in divine reality from Listen Check? We're bringing that back. All the implied dragons? Now major characters. So are the gods. The highest level I'd ever had players get to before this campaign was 12. This campaign started at level 12. I gave a powergamer access to the glyphs that made a god mortal. I let a player introduce Tanarukk into my homebrew setting. Custom classes for everyone! Utter chaos, and all because I have the final say: all the NPCs they had to deal with with gods and dragons, levels 30-80. Besides, they can only really progress by leaning into my strength--mushy emotional feelings roleplaying! This is in part in jest, but I did genuinely set out to build a campaign where roleplaying had to be the way forward, and this allowed me to connect so many dots I had been itching to connect for a long time. In the end, the party brought together all willing dragons, restored reality to stability, eliminated threatening dragons, and dealt a blow against oppression. That's where the epilogues begin. Over one hundred years, all three player characters use their powers, resources, and alliance to make the world a better place. This includes changing the governments of several major cities (Mishara, Finiel, Underhar, Torga, Ringsdale) to democratic councils as well as instituting public services including free food and medical attention (Torga, Curagon, Ringsdale, Mishara, Underhar, Talon Gorge). Other more minor but still notable achievements and justices were obtained, particularly in the realms of public safety, shared culture, and education. 

Obvious takeaway to start--massive and plentiful consequences. At the beginning of my DMing character, I was humbled by the weight of one major city being changed. Here, in the space of the epilogue, practically every major city was transformed into a happier, healthier, safer, more prosperous place. I want to really bear down on this point. Remember at the beginning, when I was discussing Talon Gorge and its shifting government throwing off the balance? At this point, Curagon (anarchists without a government), Kruush (too small to merit a meaningful government), and New Dalton (ideologically opposed to progressive values) are not democratic councils; the other seven all are. More than half the world's major cities have socialized medicine. Taken with the other achievements, this represents a golden age for Evanoch which is unmatched in its history. This is not only a very important consequence, this is a massive shift in the course of humanoid history. A few individuals with benevolent agendas managed to change the world they live in so thoroughly that I can't just run my next campaign in the world that resulted like any other campaign. 

We've spoken of narrative vacuums. Of Gods and Dragons is as much the opposite of a vacuum as can be. Evanoch was a place that had been designed and then refined for over a decade and a half. No place in the campaign aside from backstory homes for player characters, had to be created for the campaign. And the problem doesn't exist outside of or apart from the world--it is all over the world. Of Gods and Dragons feels like, by far, the biggest success I've ever had as a DM. And I think that's because I was ambitious with a plan, because I learned from my mistakes, because I took inspiration from my successes, and because I handed over the reins to my world entirely. It was scary! I backed off giving lots of control to players after Listen Check, and it took me a decade to take that risk again. But I'm glad I did. I gave them control, and they made the world a better place. 

Which presents DM problems. In a world were there is struggle, stories are everywhere. But in a world where everything is perfect, what drives the players on adventure? There are obviously fixes--some great evil rises, corruption rots the peace from within, etc. But that feels cheap. I have this world I had players fixing and helping in small ways for years. I took the people who knew my world most, cared about it the most, and gave them control of the world only to see a golden age fostered. To say it just leaks away dishonors my players. I will need something truly special to really pay my players the respect they deserve. But that is a tomorrow problem. I still have a finale session to lead, and I'm not discounting dramatic happenings. 

So what changes have happened? When I've restricted my players to narrative vacuums, they have dealt cleanly with those problems with gusto. When I've allowed my players to meaningfully impact the world, they have improved it. They ousted corrupt governments across campaigns spanning almost twenty years. The more power they had, the more good they did. When granted epilogues, my parties' characters became benefactors, mentors, protectors. They used wealth to make material improvements for the public. They fought for good. I feel foolish to realize it now. I resisted my players changing my world for years only to see I'd been afraid of them helping the little NPC people I'd made for them. 

I will say, I wouldn't trust every party this way. I wouldn't strive to make every campaign transform your whole world. This is a special case scenario, one I'm only striving at because I'm compelling to try and because I have willing friends. I fully intended to shift to a more conventional D&D story if the experiment failed. It was a gamble, but it worked, and I do think that with most good groups, the same potential for trust and the drive to improve the world exists. Trust your judgment, but be open to considering if you might give your players free rein to take big actions that will affect the world. 

I think at the end of the day, I'd estimate that Evanoch as a whole has been changed more by my players than the average DM would be able to say. I'll acknowledge that Of Gods and Dragons skews things, but city topplings, god and dragon antics, city hopping, terrorist striking, and mystery solving are not neglible contributions from the other campaigns. And now that I've seen how it can go when I trust my players to shape the world, I think my future campaigns will trend in that direction.

That's all for now. Coming soon: how to work well with other players, how to stop railroading, and how to "win" a tabletop game. Until next time, happy gaming!

How to Get into Your GM's Story as a Player

One thing I know can be vexing as a player--this was especially the case for me as an early player, but the issue can happen to anybody--is struggling to get into the story when you're playing. Modules might be too simplistic to dig your teeth into, and homebrew material can be imperfect and strange. How do you get into the story the GM is presenting, even when you aren't sure how to do that? I have some suggestions about how to find your way to developing your own stakes on the campaign, and I think that with some roleplaying, it's possible to find a way to get your character into most stories. (I will say that some characters are just not made for some games. I once made a really terrifying lawful evil combat rogue in 3.5 and realized after playing him that he was all wrong for the heroic quest of good in the campaign. Sometimes, the fit just won't be right. But you can adapt to most other situations.) 

The first thing you need is a solid understanding of your character. What are they excited by? What values motivate them? What and who do they care about? Answers to these questions are important because they'll tell us who your character really is, and we'll need to know that to move forward. I've written before about really connecting to your character through exercises like these, but even just having a good idea of your character's personality can be enough. 

Then you want to do an honest reading of the story as you know it out of game. What interests you, the player about it? It is storytelling or details about a particular part of the world or the way the quests are structured or just how it feels to be in the world or to get to be your character at all? Be generous here. What are your favorite parts of the story so far? There's going to be something you like, and you can build on it. 

Then, with your combined knowledge of your character and favorite elements of the story, you pick out things that your player character is motivated to do. In what ways might your character be interested in the things you thought of as your favorite things? You can choose to engage with that more, even if it just means telling the GM you want to see more of something or asking NPCs about it. You may find that you're on the right track with the story, or that you've given your GM a chance to do something fun, and either case is good news. 

Let's use an example. I recently started a text campaign with my best friend, and my character is Daylight, a human Druid with the Haunted One background. For a while, I didn't really know how to play her. I defaulted to the Haunted One background and made her nervous around people given my backstory for why she was haunted. My friend and I played out a long moment in the story where my character recovered from her trauma and was able to function normally, but now I really didn't know what to do with her. So I did these steps. 

First, I needed a solid understanding of Daylight. I'd come to understand her as a direct and sometimes awkward conversationalist, a staunch advocate of nonviolence and nonlethal combat, and a devout follower of a homebrew god my friend had made who honors crafts (like Daylight's alchemy), protection (her efforts as a Druid), and honorable combat (her nonlethal fighting style). I knew that she viewed that people working with her on the main quest were good people who had forgiven her faults and wanted to show her appreciation by being useful to the mission. 

Then I asked myself, what am I interested in? I loved my friend's story--I was part of a team investigating and mapping the continent of the dragonborn, a place isolated for centuries. I liked talking to the different tribes, using diplomacy with them to form relationships and learn from them. Daylight is practical and knows the locals will know more about local wildlife than she can learn for herself, so these relationships are important to her. I also really wanted to see where Daylight could go with her greatest limitation removed--I wanted her to live up to her name. 

Finally, I combined these to answer the question of what Daylight should want to do. I think that for starters, I need to make Daylight more active. She was reactive before, and she made a pretty small impact on the story so far. I want her to be able to go out and forge relationships with dragonborn. I decided that and made it a priority to learn their language in my next session, and now I get to actually talk to dragonborn instead of hoping they understand my improvised sign language and don't attack Daylight (a hope that has been wrong before). This also helps her to forge relationships with the tribes, and that's a great double benefit. I can also make an effort to roleplay Daylight as more positive and warm so that she can be happier about how people see her. 

So now, moving forward, I have goals related to the story, and I can pursue my goals alongside pursuing the main story. I care more about the mapping mission because my character is invested in it. I gave my character the ability to speak to the residents of the island she's exploring. It's really all open possibility, and I'm excited to get to see where it goes. And it took me about ten minutes to think about--that's all it takes to recalibrate a character or get a new reason to enjoy a game.

So with an exercise that only takes a short amount of time, you can give yourself stakes in the story. Even if your style and your GM's style are totally different, you can still find something to enjoy, so just spend as much time as you can pursuing that in game. And if there's literally nothing you enjoy, it sounds like you might need to find a different group. Gaming is supposed to be fun, and when it isn't anymore, it's time to play a different game. 

I'll close by saying this--it's possible to enjoy a bad story. I've saved a few bad one-shots by acting really silly to embrace how chaotic everything was, and I ended up having a pretty good time despite the bad situations. I embraced silliness but also chose specific things in the game that interested me for my characters to fixate on, which let me indulge my interest while still roleplaying within the world. In my book, even a bad ttrpg experience is often preferable to no ttrpg experience, so make the most out of what you can. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: friendship in my homebrew setting, changes made to my homebrew setting by players, and how to work with other players. Until next time, happy gaming!

Why Trying Different Things Improves You as a GM and Player

When it comes to tabletop games, people tend to either be regular players or constant GMs. There certainly are exceptions, especially with groups whose GM slot rotates. I know that in my experience, I'm almost always the DM or GM--about 90% of the time. But I have gotten to be a player on important occasions, like my most recent character, Daisy, who I ended up writing four novels about. I've played seven tabletop roleplaying games as a player and GMed about five, and I've also created more tabletop games than I can count, including ones on this site like my time loop adventures or my movie adapted one-shots (but also a secret time travel project still being refined). I would say that my experience in tabletop games is pretty broad, and given this site's 245 articles as of this writing (not counting this one), I would say it's pretty deep too. So in all my gaming and developing and playing and creating, what has stuck out as the biggest lessons learned? For all that experience, what wisdom can I provide? In this guide, I'll seek to answer that. 

In order to dig in, I'm going to recount some experiences I've had with tabletop games. My introduction was D&D 3.5 in a neighbor's basement, her dad as DM. I learned the ropes and how to do more than slay monsters--and I set my sights on DMing myself. In college, I taught more than 50 people to play D&D 3.5 and ran 7 campaigns over the course of a year. Then I refined my interest to serious storytelling, picked a party, and ran the first campaign set in my homebrew setting. It was glorious and gave me a hunger for DMing in my own style, not for what I thought others would like (and it turned out, people liked what I did in my style!). A player in that first real campaign was a talented GM who allowed me to play in several new systems, and I learned a great deal from watching him GM. At the same time, I was running the first D&D actual play podcast, Listen Check, while finishing my time in college. Having to be able to DM while running the soundboard and keeping the talk going was a challenge that taught me a lot about pacing. And then it was time for DMing in my homebrew setting, six campaigns as of this writing over years of adding to my setting. And twice in that span of a decade, I got to play D&D with talented DMs, creating characters who have stuck with me for life. That's the history we're working with; so what did it teach me? 

First off, being a GM and a player are radically different experiences. Players are only participating for part of the time in most sessions, certainly while waiting turns in combat, while the GM is always participating. This could be learned from observation, but you don't really grasp it until you've done both. I once played a campaign with another player who would crochet for the entire session, only looking up from her stitching when her character came up, and a GM could never do that. Being tired, intoxicated, or distracted as a GM can bring a game to a halt in a very real way. What that means is that as a player, you have a responsibility to be ready on your turn without having to take 20 minutes to research abilities. As a GM, you need to make sure you're at your best and able to endure an hours-long session despite human limitations. 

But it's not just that. A GM is the authority at the table. That means being able to confidently answer most questions that will come up. That doesn't necessarily mean knowledge of rules, either--a combat campaign means being familiar with tactical rules, character class abilities, and monster abilities to keep the combat flowing; a hijinks campaign needs knowledge of how to improvise, what makes the players laugh, and interesting ideas about how to surprise the party; a roleplaying campaign requires knowledge of the world, the ability to play-act a bit, and a compelling story hook to start things off. Without that knowledge, a GM will struggle. But a player only needs to know the basics of their character and some simple rules about interacting with the world--other players and the GM can fill in the other information. For a player, gaming is about discovery: the ability to find something in the game that means something. So while a GM needs to prepare, a player needs to come into things fresh. 

One last key GM/player difference: there is a power differential. This is obvious, I know, but there's a layer that's less obvious. What is ultimately fun in tabletop games, I have argued, is having agency, the sense that you have some measure of control over your character and how they affect the world around them. Without agency, we're reading a book--it's a static story where the characters happen to be named by the players. With absolute agency, the players are unlikely to come up against dramatic tension, which would be boring. So what I'm driving it is this: the GM decides how much agency the players have. Finding the right balance for your story and your party is delicate, but I always advise stepping in only to respond for most of your GMing, letting the players have the agency to guide things to some meaningful degree. The player is responsible for using that agency to do something interesting, but the GM must allow them in the first place. 

And another obvious idea: different systems are good at different things. D&D does great with an epic high fantasy feeling. Exalted is fantasy as well, but more interstellar in nature. Call of Cthulhu has a great take on eldritch horror, and Geist does a similar thing with the concept of a tethered ghost. Don't Rest Your Head is a beautiful system capable of a lot, but which focuses on dreamlike powers and horror. I even played the Firefly TTRPG just to see what it was like--predictably, fun western in space stuff. Those are the aesthetics; the rules all vary, though all are simpler than D&D, and each makes the smart choice of building the powers in the game to match the aesthetics--low-powered player characters for horror, higher-powered for more epic stories. But what really hit me is that each game decides the kinds of stories you can tell in them. As a storyteller, that's exciting and frustrating at once. A lot of TTRPG fans are shocked when I tell them that I've played many games and still stick with D&D--I've learned to use D&D to tell any kind of story I want, to build the world to be whatever I want, and to improvise in a way that gives the players whatever I want, so why leave a world that has so much player character history? My honest advice is to find a game you like and make it bend to do what you want it to. It will work out better than trying to match a game you don't mix with. 

Let's get into more specific details. Let's say a player in a session uses a strategy you've never seen before. As a player, you're observing carefully, trying to decide how to implement the same strategy in your own way. As a GM, you're trying to figure out a way to make it so this new strategy doesn't foil your plans. This is one polarizing situation, but the rule applies generally. A good moment of roleplaying from one player--another player feels upstaged, the GM is overjoyed that there's a beautiful moment in the story. Something bad happens to a player's character--the character is frustrated and upset, but the GM is delighted to have a new story angle and knows that the inconvenience is temporary. These kinds of differing perspectives are common, and someone who's well-versed in both sides of the equation will be able to see both perspectives. This means that a savvy player will be able to take situations for what they are from a broader perspective, and a savvy GM will be able to anticipate the reactions of their players, which is almost always a benefit. 

GMs can pick up strategies from each other, too. I know that when I was playing Daisy, I had the amazing opportunity to watch my best friend, who's played Carric and Beor and Brokk in my world, DM a really incredible campaign. I obviously connected with my character in a big way--writing four novels about your character is not the norm--but I also got to really take in good DMing in a different style. Daisy's campaign involved a number of different tribes of elf, which got me thinking about tribes in my world, and it resulted in an eight-part series on important clans. That series is probably the most important worldbuilding I've ever done, and I wouldn't have had it without watching my DM. I also learned about how much space to give players to roleplay outside of the confines of the main story--I was allowed enough space to do some real character work, but I was also cautious not to ask too much. 

And that's perhaps the biggest change in any player-GM: courtesy. I've addressed previously how to run your game courteously, but the experience of both running and playing TTRPGs will teach courtesy in a whole different way. Before I had DMed, I saw and did some inconsiderate things toward my DM. I was fixated on a goal my DM wasn't interested in; he gave me what I wanted, but at the cost of his enthusiasm. When I started DMing a lot and looked back, I realized that my old DM had had an entire story prepared that he was excited to play with that I probably would have enjoyed. I don't make that mistake anymore. As a GM, I ask for player input on as much as I can, and I always listen to suggestions; as a player, I ask only for what I know is reasonable, and I try to help the GM by noticing when they are trying to do something and going in that direction. Something like this is courteous, but it goes beyond courtesy--it's about helping to make the game a better experience for everyone involved, and that's a good definition of a good player or GM. 

I will add that if you want to be able to make your own games, playing as many games as you can, even just reading their rules, is incredibly helpful. You cannot look carefully at the Player's Handbook and spin out a new game. You need to see what other people have done, if only to borrow good ideas. I know that when my experience was limited to D&D, I didn't think much about making my own games. But once I'd played one-shots and campaigns in other systems, I realized that anything was possible. From there, creating a from-scratch game just became an exercise in asking what the game should be like for the player--another instance of benefitting from being able to play and GM alike. 

As I reflect on all the hours spent playing TTRPGs, GMing TTRPGs, planning sessions, recording session notes here, writing advice and how-tos, creating games, worldbuilding, and writing about characters, I realize that all of it has been refined over time. When I focus my energies on TTRPGs, whatever the game, task, or role may be, I am thinking about other people. When I'm a player, I'm thinking about how to make the game fun for my party members and how to interact with the GM's world in a way that means something to them and to me. When I'm a GM, I'm thinking about how each individual player will respond to ideas, actions, people, and events so that I can give them an experience that's special and unique to them. At the end of the day, tabletop games are about people and what we share with them, and I think keeping that in mind always helps us to do our best as players, GMs, and game creators. When you play or GM, think about what you can do to enjoy yourself while also helping others to enjoy themselves--no getting caught up on "the story" or "my character arc" or railroading or any of the things that prevent everybody from having fun. Because at the end of the day, if we're not having fun, what's the point?

How to Know What Class To Play for D&D Beginners

As I've recently mentioned, I spend a lot of time GMing for kids. Everyone experiences games differently, but essentially all kids are petrified by the notion of picking a class for their first character. Picking any one of them means missing out on all the others, so it's a big choice. It's also a big choice because, whether a player knows it or not (be they child or adult), the choice of a class can define a lot about the experience of playing--maybe more than everything but the GM's style. And picking a class for beginning adult players can be tricky. All the same consequences still apply, and having fun or not could decide whether they continue playing. So to help make picking a class easier, I've created a guide to choosing the best one for you, stripped of all the technical talk, focusing on what your experience will be like. Read on to learn which class is best for you. [This guide focuses on the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, specifically the base 12 classes in the Players Handbook.]

One way to choose is based on difficulty. It's true that some classes are harder to play than others, and there's good sense to playing a character whose challenge level to play matches what you want. A pure spellcaster like the Sorcerer, Warlock, or Wizard takes a more developed understanding of the game to pull off and enjoy than most beginning players are capable of to start. On the other hand, a Fighter can be a much easier introduction to the world of D&D's combat, vital statistics, and game rules without additional systems to learn. In the ratings below, I will rank each class on a scale from 1 to 5 where 1 is easy to pick up for beginners and 5 is a more veteran challenge. 

Another way you might choose is based on what kinds of actions you'd like to be able to take. After all, playing a stealthy rogue and playing a rowdy barbarian are pretty different experiences. To that end, I've provided a short paragraph about the kinds of exciting actions that the class is capable of. These observations will be drawn from a combination of my own experiences playing these classes and my consideration of players playing those classes in games I have DMed. 

You might also be interested in knowing what specifically you'll need to learn in order to be effective with the class. If your character's survival being based on your understanding of how to manipulate rules makes you uncomfortable, there's a whole list of classes (spellcasters in general, clerics in particular, and rogues) that you'll want to avoid since mastering the rules is a core part of these classes. In order to express what types of things you'll need to learn, I'll provide a list of the types of ideas you'll need to learn. 

And finally, you may want to know what role the character will fill in the party. Now, it's worth noting before going any further than any class can have any personality, so if you're worried about roleplaying, make your choice on type of action primarily--class doesn't dictate personality. But if you know you prefer to be a support character or want to be one to serve the character idea, you have options (cleric and bard, most notably). There's a role for everybody, but it's important that you enjoy filling yours. I'll provide a brief analysis of the roles you can easily step into with each class. 

So, based on these four categories of information, I hope to help you find the best class to start with. Let's begin. 

Barbarian 

Difficulty: 1

Actions: Barbarians are best known for their ability to enter Rage, a state in which they are more likely to strike in combat and do more damage, also gaining hit points. Barbarians are a standby for combat-oriented players; this class gets the most health of all classes and can reliably deal among highest damage in melee. Every single special ability granted to barbarians revolves around being more effective in combat, including bonuses to initiative (how quickly your character acts in combat), extra attacks, and resisting damage. 

What to Learn: Tactics. As a barbarian, your greatest strength is combat; you can either be good at it or truly great at it. Without tactics, you'll do well, but with careful attention paid to maximizing your strengths, you'll destroy everything your DM throws at you. This also means getting familiar with the rules that govern your abilities. 

Role: Barbarians are usually tanks--hard to kill and good at killing. It would be possible to develop a barbarian into some other role, but the task would ultimately ignore that this class is meant to be a combat machine and little else. 

Bard

Difficulty: 5

Actions: Bards have a wide variety of abilities. They are capable of magic, have immense bonuses to skills, and are able to help allies succeed. In simple terms, bards are built for support, but are kind of a mixture of all the classes in the game--they're capable of combat, magic, and skills. Bards are not necessarily masters of as many things as they are strong in, so thinking on one's feet is usually another part of what bards need to do, especially since they usually function as the leader of the party. 

What to Learn: Everything. Because bards can do magic, combat, and skills, they need to learn the rules behind each of those skills. But knowledge of rules and mechanics won't be enough--you'll also need to learn to be a good support player and use your spells and class abilities in a way that actually helps your fellow players.  

Role: As with their abilities, bards can be anything. Charismatic and clever bards lead parties and entertain crowds. Tactical bards turns the tides of battles with buffs and healing. Sagely bards become expert spellcasters. You can be anyone as a bard. 

Cleric

Difficulty: 5

Actions: Clerics are the only class in the game given the full suite of healing abilities. Other classes (bards, druids, and paladins) are capable of healing spells, but clerics are specifically made to do so. This means every party could use a cleric, though they're not easy to play. Aside from healing, clerics can also fight undead, cast a huge array of spells, and specialize in an approach to magic that grants special abilities and extra spells (a domain). At the same time, clerics are equipped to be effective in combat. 

What to Learn: Magic rules to start. The cleric's skill as a melee combatant are relatively straightforward (tactics help here), but they're mostly important as a healer and support character, so being very familiar with which spells do what and when is very important. Knowing about the other player characters in your party is also important so you can better support them. 

Role: Clerics are great as a healer and support unit, but since their spell list is pretty broad, they're capable of quite a lot. It's worth noting that a cleric alone can be formidable, but a cleric with someone dangerous is greater than the sum of the parts, so be ready to work as a team. 

Druid

Difficulty: 4

Actions: Druids get several exciting abilities. The most famous is the ability to turn into an animal (Wild Shape), but they can also choose specific "circle" to belong to, meaning a specific region held dear by the druid. These circles are similar to cleric domains, granting special spells and extra abilities. Druids are able to cast magic, and they have fairly diverse spells, making them capable of quite a lot if they're creative about it. 

What to Learn: Mostly magic. Druids are largely defined by their spellcasting abilities--they are not bad at melee fighting, but their strength is in their magic. Once you've learned magic, the only major complication is in the Wild Shape rules--it can be tricky to keep track of which abilities you have in which form during a tense moment. 

Role: Druids are fairly powerful spellcasters whose magic tends to disrupt combat and swing things toward the party. This means that they're direct presences in combat, but standing outside of the fray. Druids are also good guides since they can navigate nature so well. 

Fighter

Difficulty: 1

Actions: Fighters' abilities, like barbarians, are almost entirely focused on combat. With the exception of the Eldritch Knight archetype, the abilities are all focused on making more attacks, doing more damage, and surviving attacks. The Eldritch Knight adds spellcasting to the fighter, but only in the form of protection and damage spells, so the effect is ultimately the same. Notably, the fighter gets to choose a fighting style which grants bonuses based on specific tactics in combat. 

What to Learn: Tactics. Most fighters tend to fight on the front lines, hoping for high rolls against enemies, so knowing how and when to move around the battlefield is a vital way to make the most of your abilities. 

Role: Fighters are invaluable as tanks. Since players tend to make fighters with the intention of focusing on combat, I've never seen a fighter used for some other role. In the hands of a sufficiently-committed roleplayer, I'm sure you could see a fighter party leader, but mostly fighters are fighters. 

Monk 

Difficulty: 2

Actions: Monks are martial arts experts on the surface. 5E has done a pretty satisfying job of coming up with special martial arts combat rules for monks (including different schools of martial arts), and most players who came for ninja-ing around leave happy. Monks also have a variety of very special abilities that help them transcend the laws of reality, which is very fun. But on top of this, monks have a great many special abilities that depend on selection of a monastic tradition, and they range from combat approaches to stealth applications to magic mastery. 

What to Learn: Kind of a lot, surprisingly. You need to learn the base game like anyone else, but the monk rules replace basically all of those rules (but learning them first wouldn't work because there'd be no foundation to start from). I mentioned lots of special abilities--if you don't use those abilities and use them well, you end up being just a watered-down fighter. So get used to the rules and the special monk variants. 

Role: Monks are a strange class in this way. On one hand, monks can be incredibly strong in combat. On the other, they can fill a lot of the same roles that rogues do (stealth expert, specialized attacks). And monks can even be leaders given their wisdom--it just depends on how you play it. 

Paladin

Difficulty: 3

Actions: Paladins are basically a halfway point between clerics and fighters (basically). You get plenty of strength in combat, plus some magic and a dose of healing. Most of the special abilities of paladins revolve around improving their abilities in combat, and the special oaths that paladins take let you decide between justice, nature, and vengeance as inspirations for more abilities. In essence, a paladin is a fighting character with the ability to add some support. 

What to Learn: Like with the cleric, paladins demand that their players learn to operate tactically in combat as well as the basics of spellcasting. Fortunately, the rest of the paladin's abilities function much like the fighter's, so simply focusing on tactics and magic will allow you to do well with a paladin. 

Role: Paladins are interesting in terms of role--they can act as tanks, as minor healers, and as party leaders (especially since their magic is fueled by charisma). It really comes down to what the party needs and how you want to play your paladin. 

Ranger

Difficulty: 3

Actions: Rangers are specialized combat classes as a foundation--they get special fighting styles, combat bonuses like extra attacks, and strength against a chosen type of enemy. At the same time, they get access to a range of spells and extra abilities that grant nature-based boosts and magic. They get the paladin's same abbreviated access to spells (level 5 maximum as opposed to a sorcerer/warlock/wizard's level 9 maximum), most of which are useful in the wilderness or in combat. 

What to Learn: I'll say that like all combat classes, tactics are useful here, and that like all classes with magic, learning the magic rules is useful. I'll add, though, that rangers are perhaps the easiest classes with magic to pick up. The shortened spell list and relatively straightforward spells are less intimidating than other lists, and the combat abilities are comparable to the fighter list. This could be a good first spellcasting class for a beginner. 

Role: Rangers can be a few different things easily: they can be tanks or strikers depending on the build. Some rangers can be stealthy, and others are practically barbarians. A ranger can be almost anyone so long as there's a place to be filled. 

Rogue

Difficulty: 2

Actions: Rogues have probably the most diverse and customizable foundation in the game. They're given formidable combat skills (sneak attack, uncanny dodge), broad subclasses (or "roguish archetypes" such as stealth, combat, and magic), and a load of powerful abilities that apply in many situations (evasion, cunning action). I've seen and played rogues who were assassins, con artists, thieves, and mages. For beginners without a clear sense of what you want your character to be, the rogue can present so many options as to be overwhelming, but the rogue can also be a great way to make an interesting non-combat character who can still hold their own.

What to Learn: Basic tactics will help you figure out how to use sneak attack correctly. Beyond that, you basically just need to keep your many abilities straight. Rogues have lots of abilities that only happen in certain conditions, and remembering all those details is probably the hardest part of playing a rogue. 

Role: Rogues can be, more than any other class, any role at all. A rogue can be an aloof and arrogant tagalong, the charismatic heart of the group, a brilliant expert, or the hilarious goofball--and all at once. The customizability of the class means it's open to your imagination. 

Sorcerer/Warlock/Wizard

Difficulty: 5

Actions: Let's clarify something: I'm placing these three classes together, but they are not identical, and they have different specifics when it comes to abilities. I am placing them together because, from the perspective of a first-time player, they are basically the same enough that we can talk generally about them. Now, these classes are entirely about spellcasting. That means that you have no combat abilities and few skills to back you up--your spells have to speak completely for you. So not only do you need to juggle dozens of spells, but you need to be fluent with using them, or you'll end up without remaining magic and be in trouble. If you're getting started with a magic-centric class, feel free to check out my guide to learning the rules of magic.

What to Learn: The magic rules. This will, in turn, lead you to need to learn most of the rules of the game. Any given spell might reference two or three rules, so knowing the rules and how they fit together really helps with understanding spells. I'd also recommend paying attention in-game to how fights unfold so that you can use that information to your advantage when casting magic. 

Role: Here's where things get especially hard to summarize. Wizards are fueled by their intelligence, so they often work differently in-game than the charisma-driven sorcerers and warlocks. Further, these two latter classes have different sources of magic, further characterizing them: sorcerers are inherently magic from their very blood, while warlocks have made a bargain with an elder god to obtain their powers. You can imagine that details like these might affect your game if story is concerned. In broad generality, though, spellcasters operate as strikers, doing considerable damage and turning the tides of battles. They can also be party leaders, especially the more charismatic of the bunch. 

That's the overview. Hopefully you have an idea of what class you'd like to play. If you have questions or just can't decide, I highly recommend talking it over with your DM. They can help you understand your choices in the context of the campaign you're playing, and they might steer you towards something that serves the game well. What matters most is that you have a sense of what you're getting into--D&D can be a lot, and going on with your best foot forward can help you find your fun. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: religious beliefs by cultural group in my homebrew setting, a dark time-loop adventure in an original system, and profiles on the major cities in my homebrew setting. Until next time, happy gaming!