Category Archives: Advice

Never Have Monsters Make Checks—Just Let the Players Roll

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Dungeons & Dragons started with slightly different rules for monsters and player characters. In the dungeon, doors that players left open always swung shut, but “doors will automatically open for monsters, unless they are held shut.” Mostly though, the same rules applied to heroes and monsters, a carryover from the game’s wargame roots. In the wargames that led to D&D, players competed to win, while the game master—the referee—just interpreted the rules. Even in early D&D games, players sometimes battled each other in the race for treasure.

By D&D’s third edition, the game’s symmetry reached a peak. The game rules served as the physics of the game world. A monster’s statistics built from the same rules that applied to player characters. By sharing a rules foundation for characters and creatures, the third edition opened customization options like feats and class levels to monsters.

More recent editions loosen this symmetry, so monsters no longer work like characters. Why should they? Monsters serve a different purpose and rarely survive longer than five rounds. Nonetheless, characters and non-player characters follow identical game physics of d20 tests and DCs during play.

But some roleplaying games break this symmetry so that for non-player characters, the game master makes different rolls or no rolls.

Players enjoy rolling dice. In D&D, that makes attacking more fun than casting spells like sacred flame where the DM gets to roll a save. Rules like the Cypher System used by Numenera and The Black Hack variant of original D&D have players roll to determine the outcome both when they attack and when they get attacked. Monsters skip attack rolls in favor of players making defense rolls to avoid hits. Some games feature even bigger differences between the mechanics for players and game masters. In the Daggerheart roleplaying game, monsters attack with a simple d20 roll instead of the more complicated 2d12 Duality roll reserved for players. Only player rolls produce Hope and Fear.

D&D’s symmetrical system of saving throws and attack rolls has proved too entrenched to swap monster attacks for defense checks. But some symmetry in the game seems more ready for elimination. Start with contests.

In my ten years playing hundreds of fifth edition games, I played exactly one contest. It came when an intellect devourer did its thing: “The intellect devourer initiates an Intelligence contest with an incapacitated humanoid.” A few other monsters like nothics and poltergeists also start contents. Why don’t these creatures’ targets just make saving throws instead? Sure, the numbers work a bit differently, especially because contests can skip proficiency or use different proficiencies, but usually when players try to avoid harm, they just roll saves. The fifth edition design typically favors consistency over fussy exceptions.

Despite the rarity of contests, characters match their abilities against monsters’ abilities all the time. Mainly, the rules distill common match ups to a single check. This simplification comes most often when a creature hides. “The DM compares the Dexterity (Stealth) checks of anyone hiding with the passive Wisdom (Perception) score of each creature on the opposing side.” Instead of rolling both abilities in a contest, the check’s DC comes from adding 10 to a Wisdom (Perception) modifier.

This D&D rule benefits from a change that adds a dash of asymmetry so that players always make these checks. Players like to roll dice, especially when the roll decides their character’s fate. If a PC hides, the player rolls a Dexterity (Stealth) check against a DC set by the monster’s perception; if a monster hides, the player rolls a Wisdom (Perception) check against a DC set by the monster’s stealth plus 10. Tales of the Valiant takes this approach. Monsters get stealth and perception DCs for players to roll against.

D&D includes lots of creatures proficient in Stealth. When these creatures can ambush, they show the traits that make them more interesting than a claw/claw/bite sequence. When monsters attempt to ambush a party, the stealth DC toolkit works. Set a DC based on the ambusher’s stealth score and add a +5 to account for the advantage of advanced preparation. When the time comes for the monsters to spring, have all the players roll Wisdom (Perception) checks. Those who succeed avoid becoming surprised.

The technique of adding 10 to a modifier to set a DC can replace any contest. Players always roll and their opposition always sets the DC. If the opposition has advantage or disadvantage, modify the DC by another +5 or -5.

Contests offer different odds than ordinary checks. A contest’s two dice gives bigger swings in the range of outcomes. So, with lucky rolls, a creature with no bonus can win a contest against someone with a +11 modifier. When that +11 adds up to a DC 21, a check with no bonus always fails. How often does such a large mismatch appear in play?

Also, the average roll on a d20 is 10.5 rather than 10 and rolls that tie the DC go to the person rolling. Both these factors give a little edge to roller, improving their odds in an even match. But D&D plays at kitchen tables rather than at casino tables. In play, a 1-in-20 edge and a rounding error that adds 2.5% hardly matters. Also, we could adjust the DC to offset the edge or ignore it. When players make the rolls and gain the edge, they have no reason to quibble.

From B1 to Pinebrook: Every D&D Adventure That Includes DM Advice and What They Taught

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Over the 50-year history of Dungeons & Dragons, the game has changed enough that some gamers prefer the early versions of the rules to duplicate the play style of 1974. Have the qualities of good dungeon master changed too? For a tour of DM advice over D&D history, I sought the D&D adventures that included advice, from In Search of the Unknown (1979), to Peril in Pinebrook (2023), and pulled the best, worst, and most dated guidance. Most advice remains timeless, revisited in print over the decades, so this post only mentions guidance when it first appears.

B1 In Search of the Unknown (1979) by Dave Carr

Most adventures that include advice aim to help new DMs through their first session. Later printings of the 1977 Basic Set packaged In Search of the Unknown as a start. Originally, this Basic Set just included unkeyed dungeon maps that DMs could cut apart and rearrange into different configurations. Following the original dungeon design standards, new DMs could just roll for monsters and treasure to stock the map. B1 keeps some of this learn-by-doing approach. The adventure included vacant locations along with separate lists of monsters and treasures to pair with the open locations.

Designate a caller

One player in the group should be designated as the leader, or ‘caller’ for the party, while another one or two players can be selected as mappers (at least one is a must!).

Early on, DMs proved much scarcer than players so groups often included 8-12 players and D&D co-creator Gary Gygax ran sessions for as many as 20. Designating a caller to speak for the group helped speed play. For more on the lost role of mapper, see The Dungeon Mapper: From Half of D&D to a Forgotten Role.

Make the game enjoyable and challenging

The DM’s foremost concern should be to provide an enjoyable game which is challenging to the players. A good DM does not attempt to influence player actions or channel the activity in a particular direction. Although you may set up situations to challenge players, you must understand that you are not their adversary, nor are you necessarily out to defeat them. However, if your players abandon caution or make stupid mistakes, let them pay the price—but be fair.

As Dungeon Master, you are the game moderator. This means you set the tempo of the game and are responsible for keeping it moving. If players are unusually slow or dilly-dally unnecessarily, remind them that time is wasting. If they persist, allow additional chances for wandering monsters to appear—or at least start rolling the dice to make the players think that you are doing so.

In the 1979 Dungeon Master’s Guide, Gary Gygax suggests speeding characters by rolling dice behind the screen, mainly to hint at the threat of wandering monsters. As random encounters fell out of favor, I figured this advice became outdated, but a recent adventure discussed in this post, The Hidden Halls of Hazacor (2018), recommends the same trick. For some of my advice on the subject, see Getting Players Moving, Especially When No One Wants to Drive.

Lastly, it is important to remember that the Dungeon Master is the final arbiter in his or her game. If players disagree with you, hear them out and reasonably consider their complaint. With human nature as it is, players will undoubtedly attempt to try to talk you into (or out of) all sorts of things; part of the fun of being a DM is this verbal interplay. But in the end, what you say is what goes.

T1 Village of Hommlet (1979) by Gary Gygax

By 1979, D&D publisher TSR had split Advanced Dungeons & Dragons from the original game. As an introduction to AD&D, Gygax penned Village of Hommlet, a module that added a village as a home base complete with non-player characters the players might not kill. For more on creating NPCs that players might not kill, see How to Create Loveable Non-Player Characters While You Supercharge Your Sex Appeal. (That title is not pure click bait; the post really does explain how to supercharge your sex appeal.)

Roleplaying NPCs

The persons met at the inn, along the road, and so forth, are you; for the Dungeon Master is all-monsters, NPCs, the gods, everything. Play it to the hilt. Do it with flair and wit. Be fair both to the characters and to yourself. Be deceitful, clever, and thoroughly dishonest when acting the part of a thief. Be cunning but just when in the role of a warding ranger. Actually think of it as if the part you are taking is that of a character you are playing, and act accordingly, but temper actions with disinterest in the eventual outcome and only from the viewpoint of that particular role. Wearing two, three, or a half dozen or more different hats is challenging, but that is part of being an outstanding DM.

For more on roleplaying NPCs and modelling good roleplaying for players, see Most Advice for Encouraging Role-playing Stinks, But I Found the Good Stuff.

B2 Keep on the Borderlands (1979) by Gary Gygax

In 1981, Keep on the Borderlands replaced B1 in the Basic Set. The adventure reprises the familiar advice, but Gygax adds a lofty pep talk for novice DMs.

As DM you are to become the Shaper of the Cosmos. It is you who will give form and content to all the universe. You will breathe life into the stillness, giving meaning and purpose to all the actions which are to follow. The others in your group will assume the roles of individuals and play their parts, but each can only perform within the bounds you will set. It is now up to you to create a magical realm filled with danger, mystery, and excitement, complete with countless challenges. Though your role is the greatest, it is also the most difficult. You must now prepare to become all things to all people.

If all of this seems too difficult, never fear! Just as your players are learning and gaining experience at D&D play, so too will you be improving your ability as a DM. The work necessary to become a master at the art is great, far greater than that necessary to be a top player, but the rewards are even greater. You will bring untold enjoyment to many players in your role as DM, and all the while you will have the opportunity to exercise your imagination and creative ability to the fullest. May each of your dungeon adventure episodes always be a wondrous experience!

Roleplaying monsters

When the players experience their first encounter with a monster, you must be ready to play the part fully. If the monster is basically unintelligent, you must have it act accordingly. Make the encounter exciting with the proper dramatics of the animal sort – including noises! If the encounter is with an intelligent monster, it is up to the DM to not only provide an exciting description but also to correctly act the part of the monster.

B10 Night’s Dark Terror (1986) by Jim Bambra, Graeme Morris and Phil Gallagher

In the 80s, the D&D line sold in a series of boxed sets. The Basic Set started players with dungeon adventures, and then the Expert Set expanded the game to the wilderness. Night’s Dark Terror helped introduce players to the great outdoors. This adventure rates as one of the best ever.

Fudging rolls

Adventuring is, above all, about enjoying yourself, and sometimes in order to do so it is necessary to overrule some dice throws. It is your job as DM to give your players an exciting and fun time, relying entirely on the dice is not always the best way to do so—they are an aid, not a means in themselves. But be discrete—you don ‘t want your players to get the idea that you are pulling any punches!

No other adventure suggests fudging die rolls, but when Peril in Pinebrook (2023) suggested that DMs play to avoid killing player characters, the recommendation took heavy criticism from some gamers. That adventure appears later in this post.

B11 King’s Festival (1989) by Carl Sargent

By 1989, most of the earlier introductory adventures lapsed out of print, so TSR started a new set with B11 King’s Festival.

Description and the senses

Never forget that you are the eyes and ears of the player characters during the game. Players are wholly dependent on you to tell them what their PCs see, hear, and so on. Good DMs are able to convey the feel and atmosphere of an adventure, the thrills and scares, by using good descriptions of what actions are taking place and what the PC can see around them.

A good DM details more than simply what PCs see. Don’t forget noises (scurrying vermin, voices, whistling wind, owl hoots, the scraping of something on stone-is it metal, chitinous claws, or something even more horrid?), smells (food, garbage, the reek of a filthy ogre aiming a club at a PC), and tactile senses (“you feel hair rising at the nape of your neck,” or “the stone feels cold and slimy as you touch it”).

For more, see Narrating Your D&D Game: The Essentials and How To Make Descriptions Vivid and Evocative.

DDA2 Legions of Thyatis (1990) by John Nephew

Legions of Thyatis continued the line of B-series adventures that started with B1, but TSR feared the high module numbers hurt sales, so they restarted the series with DDA1 and DDA2.

Characterizing NPCs

One quick way to characterize an NPC is to visualize him as an animal, and picture that animal as you describe and play him. Another way to create stock characters is to use foils, or opposites. One example is the wimpy, fast-talking thief teamed up with a hulking mountain of a thug.

Winging it

“Winging it” means running an adventure without a detailed script or area key. Like all skills, doing it will be easier after you’ve tried it a few times. When winging a plotted adventure, just identify the main turning points of the plot; how the players get there is less important than the fun they have doing it.

Don’t worry at first if the encounter sends the party away from the main plot—you can practice steering them back to it! Players depend on you dropping clues to guide them, and they can easily get lost if they miss something vital. Don’t panic; keep giving them chances to get on the right track until they connect, if your first clues were too subtle. If they don’t connect, you can decide after the session whether you want to get them back on track or modify the adventure to go in their direction.

If the player characters scatter, think ahead to the next point in your plot at which you can bring them all back together. Try to do this as soon as possible; it’s most important to have all the players in the game, for player boredom is certain death for an evening’s fun.

Finally, you may have a situation where things have gone out of control. In such cases, stopping the game for a few minutes to sort things out is perfectly okay.

WGA4 Vecna Lives! (1990) by David Cook

Unlike all the prior adventures on this list, Vecna Lives! targeted experienced DMs. However, this module aimed to create a more structured story and a more horrific mood than a typical D&D romp.

Story beats

Allowing the player characters to succeed against a seemingly major villain, deadly trap, or a puzzle increases their confidence. This victory may be followed by a stinging defeat or the discovery that their accomplishment was only a small part of something greater and more powerful.

This technique must be used sparingly, however. You don’t want to take away all your player’s accomplishments or they will get discouraged. Wait until they are overconfident and cocky, then give them a reverse and it will remind them that things are not as easy as they seem.

Building tension

To make your players sweat, you must let them know they are in danger before anything actually happens.

Which creates more tension—the player characters open the door and discover the monsters, or the player characters hear a strange noise on the other side before they open the door? In the second case, the players suddenly stop and have to judge the amount of risk. They know something is there, but don’t know what.

The trick is to give your players hints that they are in danger without revealing enough for them to avoid that danger. In movies, this can be done by showing the audience the threat (the monsters lurking behind the door) but not showing it to the hero (about to open the door). This is a little harder in a role-playing game, since players are both audience and heroes.

You can use foreshadowing techniques to some extent. Fleeting, incomplete, and inaccurate glimpses of the major villains will put characters on their toes. The characters can discover Vecna’s grim handiwork just moments after the fact. Ancient manuscripts suggest the full extent of Vecna’s power. Even his Hand and his Eye, as powerful artifacts, only suggest the full extent of Vecna’s power.

Eye of the Wyvern (1999) by Jeff Grubb

Eye of the Wyvern and its twin adventure Wrath of the Minotaur both teach the game using sections with titles like “Funky Dice,” “The Physics of a Gaming Session,” and “The Fine Art of Winging It.”

The adventures even include scripted text for the DM to read to new players who apparently have no idea what activity awaits them.

“What we’re going to do here is tell a story, a story that you’re going to help create. Each of you has a character: a fighter, a wizard, or a rogue. The story takes place in a world filled with monsters, treasure, and adventure. I’m going to be the Dungeon Master, or DM. I’ll describe what your characters see, and you’re going to tell me what your characters do in response.“

Dead characters

The adventure gives advice for character deaths that I’ve never seen before or since. “Just replay.” in video games gamers routinely replay bad outcomes often, but on the tabletop the suggestion feels like a violation of the social contract. Perhaps replaying should not feel like a transgression, especially with a table of new players.

With some lucky dice rolls for the ghoul and some unlucky ones for the characters, the ghoul might be able to paralyze and defeat all the characters if it decides to stay around and fight. This might be a cruel thing to do to the characters (and their players), but it would be a good way to show the players how dangerous a monster like the ghoul can be. (And you can always back up and start the adventure over, or just replay the scene in the library, if you want to give the characters another chance.)

Sock puppets

Eye of the Wyvern includes ravenous little lizard-gremlins called wyverlings, and Grubb gives DMs fun advice for playing them while using your hands as puppets.

One easy prop to use to show wyvernling action is to hold up your hand, thumb in front of the palm. Touch the ring and middle fingers to your thumb and extend the whole outward. You now have a rough approximation of a wyvernling head, which you can use to demonstrate all types of wyvernling activity. Sock puppets work, too, but this is good on the fly.

Crypt of the Smoke Dragon (1999) by Jeff Grubb

Despite already publishing two starter adventures in the same year, TSR later printed a third, free intoduction also by Jeff Grubb. Crypt of the Smoke Dragon uses a “demo version” of D&D that only requires d6s. It includes 3d6 rolls to hit and for ability checks. Plus, none of the foes have parents, so it meets another of my starter adventure rules. (See 6 Things to Include in a 1st-Level D&D Adventure.) It even includes a (smoke) dragon boss battle.

Make the adventure your own

When the heroes try something that isn’t covered in the text, just make it up! Even better, make something up in each scene so that the adventure is uniquely your own. That’s the fun of the D&D game.

Call to adventure

Crypt of the Smoke Dragon gives each pregenerated PC a motivation to go adventure even though the players will proceed just because they sat for a D&D game. One seeks the destruction of evil, one treasure, one knowledge, and one just feels loyal to the other PCs. For more on motivating adventurers, see The D&D Adventures That Stumble by Missing the Hook.

H1 Keep on the Shadowfell (2008) by Bruce Cordell and Mike Mearls

The fourth edition’s introductory adventure, Keep on the Shadowfell, makes subtle change that marks a big improvement. The 1999 introductory modules included four characters, three male and one female. This adventure leaves the names and genders of the pregenerated character blank so players set a gender. Too bad all the PCs’ illustrations appear male.

Way back in 1987, I embarrassed myself by creating a batch of male pregenerated for my event at Gen Con. A woman sat down and asked if any of the characters were female.

Hint: If you ever create characters for other players, always leave the gender unspecified. The (hopefully) ambiguous names I used for my last batch of PCs include Doc (cleric), Lucky (rogue), Sparky (wizard), Sprig (druid), Moxie (fighter), Roamy (Ranger). I could have left the names blank, but making names proved too much fun.

Make the adventure your own, part 2

You want to create a seamless world that seems both deep and exciting. You can accomplish this by adding story elements to the game when the opportunity arises.

Perhaps you think Wrafton’s Inn needs a bard stroking a lyre by the fire as he sings of Sir Keegan’s tragedy. Or perhaps you want to add flavor to a mundane object, such as the wyrmpriest’s necklace from the Kobold Ambush encounter.

Anything you can do to add your personal touch to an adventure makes it that much more distinctive and memorable to your players. Immerse them in the story, and you’ll all be rewarded with a unique experience.

The adventure recommends making NPCs distinct by giving them an accent or favorite saying, showing them with a favorite thing like a lucky coin or pet cat, or adding a personality-related adjective like “greedy, bored, suspicious, tired, enthusiastic, sly, nervous, dumb, zealous, and so on.”

Helping indecisive players

Sometimes when you ask players what they want to do next, they won’t know. If this happens, try to move them in a certain direction by asking a leading question. For example, if players spend a long time after the kobold fight considering what to do next, you can ask, “Are you ready to continue toward Winterhaven?”

This advice works for novice DMs running their first adventure, but if the players have already decided to travel to Winterhaven, you can typically let their decision stand without revisiting whether they want to continue. To break through indecision while giving players a better sense of autonomy, list their most promising three options, and then remind them that they can chose an entirely different action. See The Best DM Tricks for Helping a Party Make Choices.

Lost Mine of Phandelver (2014) by Richard Baker and Chris Perkins

Fifth edition’s introductory adventure, Lost Mine of Phandelver, still rates as one of the best for the game’s current version.

Don’t let rules questions stall the game

When in doubt, make it up! It’s better to keep the game moving than to get bogged down in the rules.

Be consistent. If you decide that a rule works a certain way in one session, make sure it works that way the next time it comes into play.

For advice on delegating rules questions, see Delegate to run better role-playing game sessions by doing less.

Share the narrative

It’s a shared story. It’s the group’s story, so let the players contribute to the outcome through the actions of their characters. Dungeons & Dragons is about imagination and coming together to tell a story as a group. Let the players participate in the storytelling.

Make sure everyone is involved. Ensure every character has a chance to shine. If some players are reluctant to speak up, remember to ask them what their characters are doing.

This reverses the early advice to designate a caller to speak for the party.

Read the table

Pay attention. Make sure you look around the table occasionally to see if the game is going well. If everyone seems to be having fun, relax and keep going. If the fun is waning, it might be time for a break, or you can try to liven things up.

Cloud Giant’s Bargain (2016) by Teos Abadia

When an Acquisitions Incorporated game streamed live to theaters, audiences received Cloud Giant’s Bargain as a perk. Although the adventure works for character levels 5-7, it also seeks to encourage fans of live play to run their first game.

If you are a new DM, it is perfectly normal to feel a bit apprehensive before your first session. Just remember: players need DMs to play. What you are doing is valuable and coveted. You don’t need a perfect understanding of the rules or to have Chris Perkins’ improvisational skills for players to have a great time. When in doubt, make decisions that you think the players will enjoy. The more often you run games as a DM, the easier it gets!

See Why Faking Confidence Makes You a Better Dungeon Master.

Name tents

Create a name tent by taking a note card or similar piece of cardstock and folding it in half. Open the fold to a right angle, so that it forms a display tent when the edges are placed on the table. Give one to each player and have them write their character’s name, race, and class on each outer side of the tent. This will allow you and the other players to remember character names and important details.

For advice on name tents and more, see 11 Great Dungeon Master Tips Revealed at Winter Fantasy 2020.

Going off script

If players lose sight of their goals or start chasing red herrings, the adventure recommends luring them back. “One thing to remember is that players often respond to something exciting, interesting, or profitable.”

An old school approach to failure

Unlucky dice can always turn against characters, however, allowing them to be overwhelmed. Defeat is always a possibility in Dungeons & Dragons-but that’s what makes victory so sweet.

The Hidden Halls of Hazacor (2018) by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Most introductory D&D adventures come directly from the TSR or Wizards of the Coast. After all, D&D’s publisher stands to reach virtually all new DMs first. Nonetheless this independent adventure, The Hidden Halls of Hazacor, gives first-time DMs an adventure stocked with guidance. And the adventure stands out for being the first and only adventure to give advice for some situations that have vexed DMs since 1974. The adventure targets kids and the writing aims for youngsters, but the advice works for any age.

Dealing with murderous treasure hunters

When some new players start playing a game that allows any choice of action, they relish the chance to shatter society’s rules of behavior, often in ways that disrupt the game for players who want to work together without making war with villagers.

Characters can be arrested in the stronghold for getting into fights, stealing from NPCs, climbing the stronghold walls, or trying to break into shops or apartments. So if any players talk about their characters wanting to do such things, it’s up to you to convince them it’s a bad idea.

Describe how there are guards everywhere in Purdey’s Rest, patrolling the streets and the market court. But also, characters will see guards eating in the taverns and visiting people at the inn. Purdey’s Rest is a safe place for its people, and the guards will keep it that way by kicking troublemakers out of the stronghold. If you need to, remind the players that they’ll have lots of chances to fight things in the dungeon.

For more on players who feel tempted to attack townsfolk, see Two weird D&D questions no one asks anymore, answered by the City State of the Invincible Overlord.

Helping distressed players

If you see that a player is uncomfortable with your descriptions, change what you say so it doesn’t seem as real. A player will feel better about monsters and scary descriptions after they play for a while. One way to help with that is to give the player a chance to feel like a hero. During combat, describe how a successful hit by a character makes a monster stagger or fall back. This lets the player know they are in control, and that they don’t need to worry.

For a time my scary descriptions may have wrecked the fun, see My 5 Biggest Game Mastering Blunders Ever and What I Learned.

Running for empathetic players

When you run adventures as a GM, you might see that some players don’t like the idea of killing intelligent creatures, or monsters they feel sorry for. Some players might be upset if they feel as though the game is making them kill other creatures. So it’s important for you to remind the players that they always get to decide what their characters do. Instead of killing intelligent creatures like orcs, goblins, and kobolds, the characters can defeat them in combat, then threaten them into leaving.

The crates, barrels, and boxes of loot that the orcs and the goblins have collected are all stolen from merchants and travelers. It’s okay for the characters to take the stolen loot and sell it if that’s what they want to do. If any players are worried about taking things that were stolen, they can return the stolen goods to the guards in Purdey’s rest instead of selling them.

Arguments among players

Sometimes arguments are more serious. But you can still solve many serious arguments by talking to the players. If two of them want their characters to kill goblin bandits but the other players want to let the goblins go, ask all the players why they feel the way they do. The players who want to kill the goblins might just be worried that the sneaky goblins will come back and attack the party again. So ask for Wisdom (Insight) checks if you want the characters to know that the goblins are too scared to come back, and that the players don’t need to worry.

Sometimes you might have a different situation. Most of the players don’t want to kill the goblins because they feel sorry for them. But one player says they’re going to kill the goblins just to make the other players feel bad. You might have a player who ignores other players when they want to talk to monsters, and who always attacks instead. Or a player might say that since their character killed most of the monsters in an encounter, they deserve more treasure than anyone else. Fixing those kinds of arguments is harder. Because when a player tries to wreck the fun for other players on purpose, that’s a kind of bullying.

Just like with other arguments and problems in the game, you should try to fix bullying first by talking. Remind everyone that characters do best in the game when they work together. Tell the player that as the GM, you want everyone to have fun, and what they’re doing is hurting the fun for the other players. But sometimes a player who’s being a bully won’t stop. And if that happens, that’s the one time when you get to use your power as the GM to tell the player that their character can’t do what they want. You might even need to tell the player that if they don’t stop, they won’t be allowed to play in your game.

For more on player cooperation, see A Roleplaying Game Player’s Obligation.

Summarize the boring parts

When you decide things aren’t important, you can give the players a short summary instead. Traveling is often best summarized. If the characters leave the dungeon to rest up, then come back, you don’t need to play out having them move through every room like you did when they first explored. You can just tell them that the dungeon is dark and quiet as they go back to where they left off.

See Just Because a Dungeon Numbers Every Room Doesn’t Mean Players Have To Explore Room-by-Room and What Choose-Your-Adventure Books Can Teach Game Masters About Pacing and Decisions.

Peril in Pinebrook (2023) by Shawn Merwin

Peril in Pinebrook is a free, introductory adventure designed for new and young Dungeons & Dragons players and inspired by The Practically Complete Guide to Dragons. For a more accessible experience, it includes a simplified version of fifth edition’s rules and premade character sheets.

Let players succeed

Use “Yes, and …” or “No, but …” Allow the players to succeed as much as possible, and let them participate in the telling of the story. If they want to try something unexpected, try to say “yes” and then work their ideas into the story. If you have to say “no” to a player’s idea, suggest options that let them do something similar.

Allow Alternatives. D&D is a game of fantasy, where heroes use wits, skill, and determination to overcome obstacles. Sometimes those obstacles are defeated with weapons and spells. But characters can succeed in other ways. Communicating with monsters, tricking them or frightening them away, or avoiding a fight while cleverly sneaking past a challenge can be just as much fun. Such options are ideal if anyone playing the game wants to avoid violence.

The advice to let players succeed reminds DMs to allow player ingenuity rather than looking for whatever solution we have in mind, but still acknowledges that not every idea works. See Challenging Your Players’ Skill Without Risking Frustration and Sometimes I Tell Players No, but “Say Yes” Made Me a Better Dungeon Master.

Listening as a safety tool

Encourage your players to speak to you, publicly or privately, if something in the game upsets them. Then respond appropriately. For instance, you can move past upsetting topics by quickly narrating a resolution to a scene, then quickly move to the next part of the story.

Avoid character deaths

Peril in Pinebrook started a controversy by suggesting ways for DMs to avoid killing new player’s characters. “You can intervene if the characters seem to be losing the battle. For instance, you can give the characters advantage on attack rolls or give the monsters disadvantage on attack rolls.” The adventure also advises DMs to avoid focusing fire on a single PC. For more on sparing characters, see How To Adjust Combat Difficulty on the Fly Using the Magic of Roleplaying.

Before scorning the advice, consider that even Gary Gygax recommended occasional mercy for characters. In the original Dungeon Master’s Guide (p.110), he wrote, “Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the long run you should let such things pass as the players will kill more than one opponent with their own freakish rolls at some later time. Yet you do have the right to arbitrate the situation. You can rule that the player, instead of dying, is knocked unconscious, loses a limb, is blinded in one eye or invoke any reasonable severe penalty that still takes into account what the monster has done. It is very demoralizing to the players to lose a cared-for-player character when they have played well.”

What Choose-Your-Adventure Books Can Teach Game Masters About Pacing and Decisions

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The play loop at the heart of a roleplaying game session focuses on decision making. The game master describes a situation. When the players face a decision they make a choice, and then the rules help determine an outcome and the game master describes that result. The situation changes, leading to a new decision. Repeat until everyone breaks for pizza.

In a role-playing game, scenes focus attention on the times when players fight a battle, talk to a non-player character, or or rush to escape the caverns beneath an erupting volcano. During scenes, players take moment-by-moment control of their characters. In combat, decisions come with each turn and the rules spell out the results. In roleplaying scenes, players speak for their characters and the game plays like a conversation. Scenes simplify the game’s core play loop so much that the game master can focus on running the players’ friends and foes.

Outside of scenes, game masters have a harder time knowing when to stop narrating and when to ask, “What do you want to do?” Every game master knows to pause to give the players chances to make decisions, but the challenge comes from finding the right moments to ask. If you ask players who lack a goal, they may just shrug. If you ask players with a goal who face no obstacles, then they only face a choice between carry on and quit. If you narrate past the moment characters want to act, then players become spectators. If you pause too often, then players feel mired in minutiae. But if you pick the perfect moments, the pacing in your game improves and players feel like they guide the action.

In a How to Use Scenes and Summaries to Focus on the Best Parts of a Role-Playing Adventure, I used the term summary for the game time out of scenes, dividing play into scenes and summary. That article helped game masters start successful scenes by looking for moments when the characters’ goal reaches an obstacle. A summary skips the uneventful parts of passing game time, speeding past the times when players travel a safe road, search a library, or collect a reward from a patron.

Buffalo Castle solo dungeon (1976) for Tunnels & Trolls

Buffalo Castle solo dungeon (1976) for Tunnels & Trolls

However, a lot of gameplay happens outside of scenes, and my categories of scene and summary fail to include most exploration. Scenes aside, the situation-decision loop most resembles choose-your-adventure books. Such books distill a roleplaying game’s core loop to a printed page. A passage describes a situation that readers imagine themselves in. At the end of the description, the text offers a menu of choices. The reader picks one and pages to the numbered passage that describes the outcome and sets the new scene. Solo adventures like the ones for Tunnels & Trolls follow the same format. Roleplaying games beat choose-you-adventure books by featuring a game master ready to allow surprising decisions and to run the supporting cast in scenes, but the pattern matches.

Choose-your-adventure books set a good example because they typically avoid the missteps that GMs make running the situation-decision loop in live games.

Choose-your-adventure books start characters with a goal. Characters need a goal or they have no reason to act. When D&D started, the game’s goal was to gather loot, but as the story and character started driving the game, players opted for higher goals. Nowadays, most players create characters with individual goals, often in collaboration with the group. See A Roleplaying Game Player’s Obligation.

To start an adventure, before you ever ask players for a decision, you typically hook them with a short-term goal for the whole party. The best hooks appeal to characters’ individual goals and often add an enigma to arouse players’ curiosity. When you don’t know the characters, create hooks that appeal to both paladins and rogues, to both do-gooders and treasure hunters. For more on hooks, see Whether You Call Them Rumors, Secrets, Clues, Hooks, or Leads, These Nuggets of Information Power Adventures and Campaigns.

Choose-your-adventure books offer choices that seem to lead toward the characters’ goal. Imagine trying to start an adventure by revealing that long ago a mighty warrior hid a magic sword in a long-forgotten location, and then asking the players what they want to do. The mere rumor would leave players with no clear choice of action, so the game stalls. Every adventure starts with a hook that (1) entices the characters to follow some goal and (2) reveals ways to reach that goal.

Even after you set the hook, future decision points should come when the players see options that might lead to success. Otherwise, players feel stuck. For more about options that lead to a goal, see How the Flawed Hooks in Descent Into Avernus Might Make D&D Players Feel Railroaded.

The Cave of Time (1979) choose your own adventure book

The Cave of Time (1979) choose your own adventure book

Choose-your-adventure books offer multiple options. The author of a choose-your-adventure book would never dare end a passage with one option, because the fun comes from choosing. But game masters never feel obligated to list the players’ options, so a lack of choices is less obvious. Nonetheless, if an adventure only ever gives one choice, players will notice the pattern. While dutifully following the one clear choice, they may feel railroaded.

As a game master, my favorite moments during a session come when I sit idle as the players’ debate the tough choices open to their characters. Each option balances hope with a price. All the options lead to consequences that will spin the game in a different direction. Watching these discussions, I know the game world has come alive. Players only occasionally face decisions so compelling, but a choice of one option becomes no choice at all. Asking for a decision just hides a shameful lack of options.

A D&D game can offer choices between two similar doors, and players will appreciate the option, but the best decisions come with enough information to make each selection different and promising.

Characters in a roleplaying game have freedom to attempt any action. Sometimes that latitude leaves players struggling to sift through options in search of a few promising choices. Too often, players may feel confused by their predicament in the game world. Either way, summarizing the situation and listing the most obvious choices cuts through the fog and brings focus.

If a decision leaves players struggling to choose an action, list the three most promising options, and then remind the group that they can also choose an option of their own. After all, unlike a book, you’re ready for anything.

For more on choices and information, see Dungeons Masters Can Make Fake Choices for Players, But Should You?. Also see How to improve your game by forcing characters into tough choices and The Best DM Tricks for Helping a Party Make Choices.

Choose-your-adventure books describe time passing until the character’s situation changes. Until the players face a decision, you can summarize any amount of game-world time in narration, from seconds to years. Don’t feel like you have to keep pausing to revisit decisions the players already made. Only pause when the situation changes.

If the players have already made the relevant choices, describe passing time until the situation changes, typically until players face obstacles. Pacing falters when DMs ask for a decision even when players just have a choice to keep going toward their goal or to give up. None of this means that players have to dutifully sit through narration that covers a month’s journey. Invite players to interrupt at any time. A good summary leaves players with a sense of passing events and with chances to pause and make decisions.

For example, dungeons tend to start with key choices over marching order, light, and strategy. Does the party plan to explore carefully or rush ahead to stop the midnight ritual? Will they listen at doors or check for traps? Does someone scout? Once these choices set a pattern and the dungeon starts to seem familiar, DMs can summarize the exploration until the situation changes. You can switch your pace between methodical exploration and summary many times during a session. In the areas with nothing new to discover and no threats to face, and no new decisions to make, take the shortcut of summarizing. Then when the players encounter something new, slow to a pace that lets them account for every action.

See Just Because a Dungeon Numbers Every Room Doesn’t Mean Players Have To Explore Room-by-Room.

Choose-your-adventure books end descriptions when readers feel eager to act. As a GM, you stop talking when (1) players have something to do or a decision to make and (2) the players understand enough to make a sensible decision. The barbarian needs to know about the lava-filled trench before making the choice to charge the dragon. All this may seem obvious, but it leads to some less obvious advice.

When you set a scene, the end of your narration should highlight something that dares the heroes to act. The best narration can skip the what-do-you-want-to-do question because they leave players eager to take action. Sometimes, that invitation to action comes from the monsters in the room. More often, some curious feature simply begs a closer look.

See End Your Descriptions With Something That Inspires Players To Act

Resist the temptation to start scenes late. The authors of choose-your-adventure books can succumb to the same weaknesses as game masters, I suspect we share a fault: As we narrate the start of a scene, things happen that make readers or players want to act. We talk about a changing situation, and then we keep talking. While choose-your-adventure readers can only grumble, players can stop the game.

If you run D&D for long enough, you’ll come to a situation where you must rewind game time because your enthusiasm for the villain’s big moment leads you to keep talking well after the players decide to act. Who can blame game masters? We planned for the bad guy’s monologue or culminating ritual and we want to follow it through before the players ruin it. Meanwhile, the players start throwing dice.

Sometimes even adventure boxed text suffers from the same authorial hubris. The author of a long, boxed passage becomes so eager to describe a scene develop that it becomes the tabletop equivalent to a cut scene. For a while, published adventures routinely offered boxed text that spanned columns. Sometimes the boxed text even narrated actions for the players. “As you step into the room…” In practice, no DM ever finished such readings before a player blurted, “I attack!” (In the authors’ defense, at times TSR published adventures written for an audience of readers rather than dungeon masters because no one could possibly play the avalanche of game content the company printed.)

The tempo of decisions sets the pace of the game. Gamers joke that in D&D, seconds of combat take hours to play out, while weeks of travel pass in seconds. Much of a difference in pace stems from how frequently players make decisions. Combat encounters and roleplaying scenes fill time with nonstop choices, but can still feel fast paced. During the game’s slower periods, the game master merely summarizes the passage of time with few choices. Either way, the amount of narration between choices affects pacing. By adding more descriptions, the game’s pace slows. This might give players a break from the intensity of a major battle.

Roleplaying game sessions typically alternate between fast-paced scenes where players face rapid decisions, and slower spans of time where players travel or explore while making fewer choices. This ebb and flow creates a pleasing contrast between intense action scenes, suspenseful periods of exploration and discovery, and easy breaks where characters recover and players plan.

Related: For D&D Travel, Steer Clear Of Rolls Versus Random Punishment

Shut Up and Fight This Thing!

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At a convention, Teos “Alphastream” Abadia and I played an adventure that featured fights seemingly contrived to fill the hours between the opening scene and climactic battle. Monsters just sprang and attacked, depriving us of any choices to avoid the battles. Later, Teos described the match ups as the DM saying, “Shut up and fight this thing,” and I broke out laughing.

“Shut up and fight this thing” dates to original D&D and the wandering monsters that threatened dungeon explorers. By those rules, parties needed bad rolls to land an unavoidable fight: rolls needed to bring an encounter at a nearby distance against unsurprised creatures that happen to be hostile. And if unlucky rolls served a dangerous foe, skilled players knew to flee.

Nowadays, “shut up and fight this thing” just means grinding out a fight. Good thing today’s adventurers typically enjoy impossible luck that lets them keep facing threats they can beat.

As a DM, I’ve served countless shut-up-and-fight-this-thing battles for one good reason and a couple of sketchy ones.

When a session goes too long without a chance to cross swords and spells, some players grow restless. Those players include me. Saying, “Fight this thing,” injects a dose of adrenaline. For years, if my 2-hour Wednesday night games lacked a battle, I knew players would go home disappointed.

As a DM preparing to fill the hours of a game session, nothing works as effortlessly. Just say, “Fight this thing,” and an hour passes.

Back when organized play adventures required an XP budget worth of monster battles, “fight this thing” delivered. Organized play insiders even coined the phrase obligatory thug encounter for any attacks needed to fill an XP budget and a 4-hour convention slot. Thugs, bless their black hearts, did the job without requiring any connection to the rest of the adventure.

I still sometimes say, “Fight this thing,” but before I do, I consider whether I’m losing any opportunities to prepare a better adventure. When planning potential combat encounters, I ask two questions:

  • Why would the players want this fight? When the players see that a fight will bring them closer to their goal and willingly throw their characters into battle, the combat feels like a meaningful part of the story of the adventure. Obligatory bandit encounters stand out from an adventure because they seem only tangentially related to the rest of the tale and because they fail to bring the characters any closer to their goals. At best, the players only want to fight for the XP. Among their characters, only the paladin seeks a chance to murder some thugs.
  • How could the players avoid this fight? During one of the first games I ran for organized play, the adventure ended with a literal OTE: a group of bandits attack the party for loot. Except in play, nothing went as the author planned; the party tried to talk their way out of the fight. Who could have expected such a twist? As DM, I hesitated. If the party skipped the fight, then the adventure would run short and I would fail my duty to deliver the full experience (and XP) printed in black and white. Now, I know to let the adventure spin in an unexpected direction, but then I stalled until a player noticed my faltering, took pity, and attacked. (This might rate just below my top 5 game mastering blunders.) Combat stands as just one of three pillars of D&D, and when players can choose to overcome obstacles such as monsters through roleplaying or ingenuity, the game becomes richer. It offers more variety, and the players can steer play toward the sort of game they favor. Plus, the additional choice of how to engage encounters can spin the game in surprising directions.

As a DM planning an adventure, asking why players might want a fight and how they could avoid a fight leads to better games. Plus, if players can choose a fight, then the option frees DMs from the burden of trying to balance foes so players can always beat them.

Related: The 4 Unwritten Rules No Dungeon Master Should Break

The Neglected Secret to Making Dungeons Fun to Explore

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The best dungeons build on the three Dungeons & Dragons pillars of combat, roleplaying interaction, and exploration—a pillar that depends on discovery. Dungeon creators rarely slight two of the pillars: Monsters engage characters in combat. Non-player characters and factions lead to roleplaying interaction. But for the last pillar of exploration and discovery, dungeon designers often stop at the map, and that counts as neglect. Interacting with a floor plan gets tiresome fast.

To engage players in exploration and discovery, dungeons need more than listings of rooms and inhabitants where characters open a door and discover their next opponent.

Typically, dungeons also feature a history as a tomb, wizard’s tower, cursed underground city, or the like. But while such themes add flavor, this mere color rarely includes enough discoveries to capture hours of attention. Dungeons need interactive features that give players the underrated pleasure of figuring things out, of trying things and discovering how the dungeon and its contents work.

The fun of exploring a tomb comes from interacting with the traps, puzzling inscriptions, and blessed shrines inside. The fun of a wizard’s tower comes from playing with the magical whimsy and the experiments gone wrong. The fun of lost city comes from the magic fountains, secret ways, and so on.

Whatever the location, dungeons need interactive features that characters can play with like toys, things that fire the player’s curiosity, and then invite the players to touch and experiment. Sometimes the toys might prove dangerous, other times they can reward with treasure, blessings, or useful information, but players who discover how something operates always feel rewarded for their brains and ingenuity. Good exploration leads to the powerful reward of such discoveries.

Adventure designer M.T. Black writes, “Adventures thrive on interactivity. Without it games become uninteresting. This is a big part of the exploration pillar of play, and I think it is neglected. Pick up the diary and it grows legs. Touch the holy orb in the chapel and a glass knight steps out of the window. The treasury looks empty but actually has an invisible treasure chest.”

When I first started creating dungeons, I aimed to pack my locations with the sort of lavish, interactive rooms in adventures like the Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain. Preparing for a single session took me hours of dreaming up elaborate locations that could confound and impress my players. I soon learned that I lacked the time to invest in so many detailed designs. Later, I found that I didn’t need to, because smaller, simpler toys can work as well. Every parent has unpacked and assembled an extravagent toy, only to see their kids become captivated by the box. Many players like me also become captivated by the boxes—or pools, orbs, runes, statues, and so on. All those things prove fun as long as playing rewards us with discoveries.

Now when I design dungeons, I focus on including things that both invite interaction and lead to discoveries. So, the pool might include and underwater passage that leads to another room. Or it might contain acid and a glass vial containing a map to a secret treasure room. Or it might bubble with fumes that make characters lightheaded enough to see a vision of a similar room elsewhere. The best toys often mix danger and reward, so those fumes might make characters fall unconscious, and then see visions as they start to drown. Surely someone in the party will save their dreaming friend.

Dungeons packed with such features feel like more than maps with monsters, they feel like toys that reward play with discovery.

Related: To Find the Fun in Traps, Did D&D Miss the Search Check?

Whether You Call Them Rumors, Secrets, Clues, Hooks, or Leads, These Nuggets of Information Power Adventures and Campaigns

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As soon as roleplaying game adventures left the dungeon, games needed rumors.

Traveller (1977) included rumors in the game’s encounter tables, and then developed rumors as a tool for game masters in its first adventure, The Kinunir (1979). “The term Rumor actually applies to a wide variety of information, including such concepts as leads, clues, and hints. Rumors have three basic purposes: to direct characters toward profitable endeavor, to misdirect them away from such endeavor, and to assist them after they have established a goal for themselves.” Without dungeons to structure play, Traveller designer Marc Miller pioneered new ways to drive adventures; Dungeons & Dragons took years to catch up. (See Why Dungeons & Dragons (and Role Playing) Took Years to Leave the Dungeon.)

In roleplaying adventures and campaigns, rumors and similar bits of information prove so useful that they earn several names. When rumors show a “profitable endeavor,” we call them hooks. When they point players closer to a goal, we call them clues or leads. And when they reveal unknown lore or uncover some of a villain’s covert plan, we call them secrets. “Secrets and clues are the anchors of our games,” writes Mike “Sly Flourish” Shea. “They’re a simple way to build out an adventure, create meaning and story for the players, and connect people, places, and things. Secrets and clues are the connective tissue of an adventure—and, more often than not, a whole campaign”

The term “rumor” suggests gossip from the local tavern (or Traveller’s Aid Society hostel), but bits of useful lore can come from endless sources: from the wags at the inn to dungeon frescoes, a captured letter, or a footprint in the snow. Often, I plan ways for characters to discover clues and accept that a party might miss some discoveries. Other times I take a looser approach advocated by Mike Shea. He prepares for each game by listing 10 secrets or clues that the session could reveal, and then improvises ways for players to discover some of these secrets. Some of his secrets reveal the game world, but others serve as leads for players.

Hooks

Most adventures start with a hook that (1) entices the characters to follow some goal and (2) reveals ways to reach that goal. If a hook lacks any clues the characters can follow to the goal, then the hook fails.

A good adventure hook appeals to both the party’s rogues and paladins. More than popular classes, rogues and paladins represent two ways players often imagine their characters’ outlooks. Steve Winter, a Dungeons & Dragons designer since second edition, writes, “Hooks aren’t about characters; they’re about players.” Rogues and paladins make popular character perspectives because they bring players escapes from either the restrictions or the unfairness of modern life.

In our world, we often feel bound by rules and obligations. Playing a rogue who’s free from ethical burdens and who boasts the power to ignore rules feels exhilarating. Much of the vicarious joy of playing a rogue comes from gaining wealth. Certainly, most players of rogue types would say their character is in it for the money.

In our world, we see misdeeds rewarded, good people suffer, and too often we feel helpless to act. Playing a paladin with the strength to punish wrongdoers, help the deserving, and right wrongs feels rejuvenating. Paladins seek chances to act heroic.

Hooks that only appeal to one type can leave other characters just following along because their players came to play D&D, so a good hook offers both a chance to help the deserving and to gain treasure.

The very best hooks also engage players by including a mysterious, third ingredient, which I will reveal later in this post.

Leads

Leads give players a sense of direction. They lure players through an arc that, looking back, will resemble a plot. In a sandbox campaign, leads can guide characters to the locations that both offer profits and offer fun challenges.

Blogger and game designer Justin Alexander has a rule for giving leads:

For any conclusion you want the PCs to make, include at least three clues.

“Why three? Because the PCs will probably miss the first; ignore the second; and misinterpret the third before making some incredible leap of logic that gets them where you wanted them to go all along.”

By Justin’s three-clue rule, every step in the scenario needs three clues that lead to another step. The surplus clues make the scenario robust. In game, players never wind up so clueless that they lack direction. In life, they’re on their own.

The clues can lead in different directions. Such diversity gives options, breaks linear adventures, and sometimes creates tough choices for players. To keep plots outside the dungeon moving, clues are the engine.

Beyond Hooks and Leads

Hooks and leads spur characters to act, but not every revelation should invite action. Enigmas engage players by teasing them with the unexplained, motivate them to seek new discoveries in the game world, and then reward them with the satisfaction of learning answers. They keep everyone playing, even if everyone feels certain the heroes will win in the end.

The most tantalizing secrets make players ask themselves, “How can this be so?” Call these enigmas.

  • Why have drinks served at the inn suddenly started sliding to the floor?
  • Why does a humble commoner’s name appear listed among the names of adventurers sought by a githyanki raiders?
  • Who ransacked a party member’s room and why did they ignore everything of value?

All these questions inspire curiosity because they need more explanation to reveal the satisfying order that we crave. Filmmaker J.J. Abrams calls enigmas mystery boxes and he champions them as a way to grab an audience’s attention by creating something mysterious, and then withholding an explanation. Mystery boxes sustained television shows such as Twin Peaks and Abrams’ production Lost. Both shows kept viewers tuning in by spawning unexplained events that teased curiosity. The puzzles propelled the shows for years, even though neither shows’ writers proved interested in delivering satisfying answers.

Those writers understood that a mystery box loses its power to captivate the moment an audience learns its secret. But the most pleasing secrets reward players by revealing the explanation to an enigma, giving a satisfying sense of order. So, when characters discover the newly dug tunnels under the town that caused the inn to tilt, the players gain the satisfaction of an answer and become confident that chasing other mysteries will lead to rewarding revelations. Relish the moments when players learn the answer that explains an enigma, and then dream up more teasers.

The absolute best hooks create enigmas that captivate characters and promise satisfying answers. Why did a child hand the party a note that includes his confession to a terrible crime?

Where do Enigmas and Clues Come From?

The best source of enigmas and clues come from the villains in your games and from the signs that show their evil plots advancing toward some goal.

Every villain must have a goal. For bad guys, the usual aims include wealth, vengeance, and ultimate power. To reach that goal, every villain needs a plan. In D&D, villains make plans to conquer kingdoms, bring worshipers to dark gods, and so on. Those plans shape the adventures of the heroes who aim to thwart evil and take evil’s loot.

In a typical D&D game, players must learn of the villain’s plans from rumors of disappearances, clues like the list captured from githyanki, enigmas like the suddenly spilling drinks, and so on. “One of the key components to creating tension is the slow burn,” Courtney Kraft of Geek and Sundry writes. “Don’t show your villain fully right from the start. Perhaps there are mysterious things happening around your heroes. The mystery is fun, so take your time.”

As your villains work their plans, ask how the plan will show in the world around the characters. Give the players enough leads to give them direction, but also create enigmas that tease the players without offering all the answers.

Such enigmas and clues foreshadow coming events, making the game world seem active and giving players a sample of where the game could go next, while keeping the players seeking answers. These hints show movement beyond the party’s view and give a sense of the larger world. When you’re ready for players to act, they become leads or hooks.

Related: Dungeon Masters, Instead of Plots, Prepare Secrets, Clues, and Leads

Event-driven D&D Adventures Aren’t About Events; They’re About Villains

The D&D Adventures That Stumble by Missing the Hook

How the Flawed Hooks in Descent Into Avernus Might Make D&D Players Feel Railroaded

Fourth Edition Improved D&D Design For Good, But One of Its Innovations Still Leads to Bad Adventures

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Some gamers say that ability checks make D&D less fun. These fans of an older style of Dungeons & Dragons prefer a game where instead of rolling perception to spot a trap door, characters tap the floor with their 10-foot pole. I like that style of play just fine, but I like ability checks too. Making a successful check gives me fleeting satisfaction. Checks give a clearer way of deciding success than the method Gary Gygax used in 1974. (He estimated the odds and improvised a roll.) Plus, rolled checks add a random element that can bring surprises, especially to DMs who call for a check despite being unprepared for failure.

Still, ability checks lack enough entertainment value to carry a D&D game. I know because lately I’ve played too many published and organized play adventures that leaned hard on ability checks for any amusement. I would share examples, but I’ve forgotten them.

Adventure designers hoping to plan fun D&D sessions sometimes string ability checks together into encounters, travel sequences, and even adventures, but those batches of ability checks just turn into forgettable games. I understand the temptation that leads to a reliance on ability checks. Dreaming up obstacles that characters can overcome with checks seems effortless. Traveling through the woods? How about a survival check. Talking to the innkeeper? Give me a diplomacy check. I could do this all day, and my game session only lasts a few hours. Inventing challenges that players need to overcome with their own ingenuity proves much more work. Besides, we DMs would all rather focus on the story behind challenges.

The fun of D&D comes from immersing in the role of a character, and from making decisions and seeing the results in the game world. But ability checks tend to eliminate the players’ decisions from the game. So one of the dungeon’s diabolical challenges just becomes a Wisdom (Perception) check followed by an Dexterity check. The Dungeon Master’s Guide explains, “Roleplaying can diminish if players feel that their die rolls, rather than their decisions and characterizations, always determine success.” Ability checks challenge characters while leaving players idle. “Today we’re playing White Plume Mountain. Everyone roll an ability check and tell me how your success helped the party win one of the three magic weapons.”

Some roleplaying games feature rules that make checks reveal character. Such mechanics allow talented experts to flaunt their skills, but in D&D, the d20 tends to make skilled, talented characters seem inconsistent or inept. A single d20 yields numbers like 1 and 20 as frequently as middle numbers, so D&D tests rolled on a d20 often result in the extreme numbers that cause experts to botch checks and the untrained and untalented to luck into success. In D&D worlds, the mighty barbarian fails to open a pickle jar, and then hands it to the pencil-necked wizard who easily opens the lid. (For help making the most of swingy d20 tests, see
How to Turn D&D’s Swingy d20 Checks Into a Feature That Can Improve Your Game.)

The joy of the d20 comes from how the die delivers extreme swings that can add surprising twists to a game session. This merit also means that game challenges built around bunches of skill checks play like a series of coin flips.

The most engaging adventures challenge players to

Adventure designers don’t deserve the blame for thinking ability checks can sustain a fun adventure. The fault lies with fourth edition and its skill challenges.

Ability checks entered Dungeons & Dragons 6 years after the game’s debut, and then checks took twenty more years to become a core mechanic. See (Ability Checks—From the Worst Mechanic in Role-Playing Game History to a Foundation Of D&D.) Even when third edition settled on a core d20 check mechanic, adventures rarely made batches of checks into a focus until fourth edition and its skill challenges reached gamers.

Skill challenges satisfied three design goals.

  • To give the non-combat parts of the game the same mechanical rigor as the fights. This helped refute the notion that all the rules for combat proved D&D was just a game about fighting. Plus the designers felt that if they “made things as procedural as possible, people would just follow the rules and have fun regardless of who they played with.” (See How Years of Trying to Fix Obnoxious People Shrank D&D’s Appeal.)
  • To make the DM’s role undemanding. Casual DMs could simply buy an adventure, read the boxed text, and then run a sequence of skill challenges and combat encounters. In a skill challenge, the DM just had to decide if a skill helped the players—but only when the challenge’s description neglected to list a skill in advance.
  • To avoid frustrating players who struggled to overcome an obstacle. Without checks, D&D challenges could sometimes lead to players becoming stuck, especially if a DM focused on one “correct” action required to overcome an obstacle. Fourth edition attempted to eliminate such frustrations by emphasizing skill checks and skill challenges over concrete obstacles and over players’ problem solving skills.

None of these goals aimed to add fun for the players, although players who dislike puzzles may approve of the third benefit. Tip: If players dislike brain teasers, skip those challenges or let stuck players make Intelligence rolls for hints. If everyone rolls, someone virtually always succeeds.

Ability checks aren’t much fun. I enjoyed fourth and as the designers say without fourth there would never be a fifth, but its skill challenges created the myth that a series of ability checks offer enough fun to sustain a game, and that myth has led to some dull games.

When the game emphasizes character skill, the players never need to make meaningful decisions or engage the game world. They just look at their character sheet for the best applicable skill. I suppose this improves on playing guess-the-solution-I-thought-of with an inflexible DM, but picking a skill and rolling is much less fun than D&D can be.

Related: My account of the story of fourth edition starts with The Threat that Nearly Killed Dungeons & Dragons—Twice.

D&D and the Role of the Die Roll, a Love Letter

The skill challenge: good intentions, half baked

Player skill without player frustration

How to Turn D&D’s Swingy d20 Checks Into a Feature That Can Improve Your Game

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Dungeons & Dragons uses d20 rolls to randomly determine success and failure. A single d20 yields extreme numbers like 1 and 20 as frequently as middle numbers, and this shapes the game. In the real world, experts attempting routine tasks rarely fail and novices making a first try rarely succeed. But D&D tests rolled on a d20 often lead experts to botch checks and the untrained and untalented to luck into success. The d20 often makes experts look inept, defying everyday experience.

Seeking a better match with reality, some roleplaying game designers create games with core mechanics that total the results of multiple dice. This creates a bell-shaped curve of probabilities that makes the highest and lowest numbers rare, and lets players build heroes that show the sort of reliable competence we see in fiction.

Meanwhile, in D&D worlds, the mighty barbarian fails to open a pickle jar, and then hands it to the pencil-necked wizard who easily opens the lid. Such outcomes feel wrong, but with the right mindset, that swingy d20 can become a storytelling feature rather than a bug.

To start, as a DM, don’t ask the barbarian for a check to open the damn jar. “Remember that dice don’t run your game—you do,” explains the Dungeon Master’s Guide. “At any time, you can decide that a player’s action is automatically successful.” This means skipping rolls on tasks “so easy and so free of conflict and stress that there should be no chance of failure.” For best results, rate “easy” generously. Let talented or skilled characters skip the rolls where only a comical fumble would explain failure.

For knowledge and information checks, drop the roll and tell players what their characters should know. I often reveal lore based on characters’ proficiencies and background. For instance, the druid knows of the cursed trees surrounding the grove, while the dwarf knows about the flooded mine. This technique works especially well for the information players must learn to continue. Essential backstory feels like a reward for a character’s choices. Players won’t know what knowledge comes from their characters’ aptitude and what you had to reveal to advance the plot.

If everyone at the table rolls a check with the swingy d20, someone usually rolls high. In D&D, letting everyone roll certain checks practically guarantees success. The one wizard proficient in, say, the Arcana skill will seldom roll a better success than every one of the other 4 know-nothings in the party.

For a real test that acknowledges the skilled and talented characters, allow fewer characters to roll. Limit the check to characters with proficiency. This rewards the cleric proficient in religion even if their knowledge is hampered by low Intelligence.

Granting an expert character advantage reduces the chance of an unlikely fumble, and improves the chance that talent will lead to success.

  • Limit a check to the active character, possibly just the person who asked, and then grant advantage based on the party’s advice and assistance. This encourages groups to have the character most suited to a challenge to lead the way.
  • Limit a check to the skilled characters and then grant advantage based on the party’s help. I love when this enables a quiet player to gain the spotlight based on their character’s aptitude.

When someone fumbles a roll, instead of describing the failure in a way that makes the hero or monster seem inept or comical, describe the stumble so the fault comes from tough opposition or an impossible situation. DMs feel tempted to narrate bad rolls for laughs. We can narrate a 1 with a description of how someone’s hat tilted to cover their eyes and gain an easy laugh that feels fun in the moment. But too many descriptions like that turn characters into clowns and their opponents into jokes. Instead, use a 1 to describe a foe’s superhuman speed or the swirling hot ash clogging the air and stinging the heroes’ eyes. When you describe outcomes, even the fumbles, flatter your heroes and monsters.

Despite all these techniques, the d20 brings extreme numbers that create shocking failures and inexplicable successes. To cope, treat the swings as a storytelling challenge to embrace. The dice make us surrender some control, adding the risk that the story won’t go as we plan. Events beyond our control make the game unpredictable and exciting. Savor that.

“As often as possible, I like to stick with whatever the dice tell me, partly because as a DM I love to be surprised,” explains D&D lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford. “I love that sense whenever I sit down at any table where I’m DMing. I don’t actually know what’s going to happen because I don’t know what the dice are going to say. The dice can turn something I thought was going to be a cakewalk into a life or death struggle.”

The dice nudge, and sometimes shove, D&D games out of their expected course. They give D&D games a way to surprise us, and to challenge us to become more creative—to invent storytelling twists we would not have imagined without the random nudge.

Why D&D’s d20 Tests Make Experts Look Inept and How to Make the Best of It

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Decades ago, I read game designer Steve Jackson explain why he swapped the d20 to-hit roll in Dungeons & Dragons for the 3d6 roll used in his alternative combat system Melee (1977). Steve considered the 3d6 bell curve so superior that he trashed the d20 without a second thought. His roleplaying games The Fantasy Trip and GURPS use 3d6 core mechanics. Then, I struggled to grasp Steve’s dislike of the d20.

Now, I understand Jackson’s disdain, but I love D&D. Like esteemed game designers such as Jeremy Crawford and Monte Cook, I find reasons to embrace the d20.

In Cook’s designer’s notes for his Numenera RPG, he describes the d20’s flaw. “Using the d20 introduces a great deal of randomness into a game. It’s difficult to use a d20 as a task resolution die and still have character aspects play a big part in success or failure without all of a sudden finding yourself using pretty big numbers.” He gives an example like this: Suppose two archers try to hit a bullseye by rolling a 20 or higher. An untrained person with a decent 12 Dexterity gets +1 and hits 10% of the time. In comparison, a 12th-level ranger trained in the bow and boasting an 18 Dexterity gets a +8, but still only hits the bullseye 45% of the time.

D&D games show this dynamic when the DM asks everyone to roll an Intelligence (Arcana) check to recognize ancient sigils, and then the brainy wizard fails while the barbarian knucklehead succeeds. That outcome may seem funny the first time, but similar scenes play frequently and can feel disappointing. Instead of rewarding the player who chose to make a character good at something, the d20 roll often makes experts look inept.

If D&D used bigger bonuses, then experts would get a boost. Suppose the expert archer gained a +25 and hitting the bullseye required a roll of 30. Now, the sharpshooter feels more like Annie Oakley. But that arrangement makes difficult tasks impossible for unskilled characters when we really want success to become rare.

Instead of using big modifiers, fifth edition’s bounded accuracy uses modest bonuses that give every character a chance of success at the price of making experts inconsistent.

Monte describes an alternative. “Now imagine that you used 2d10 instead. 2d10 gives us a more normal distribution. In other words, you end up with a much better chance of getting a 10 than a 20. Using the same bonuses, the archer still hits the bullseye 45% of the time, but the unskilled guy only 3% of the time. That makes more sense.” With a 2d10-based game, clumsy newcomers at Faerûn athletic competitions luck into fewer medals. (In one of my very first posts, I grappled with a related issue.)

This more natural range of outcomes leads game designer Steffan O’Sullivan to write, “I’m not fond of dice systems with a flat distribution. I’m solidly in the bell-curve camp.” O’Sullivan created the Fudge RPG, which became the basis for the popular Fate system. Both games use a set of four special 6-sided dice marked on two sides with a plus (+), two with a minus (-), and two blanks. “When you need to roll dice in Fate, pick up four Fate dice and roll them. When you read the dice, read every + as +1, every blank as 0, and every – as –1. Add them all together. You’ll get a result from –4 to +4, most often between –2 and +2.” No roll requires counting past 4, so even little kids add the results easily. “The fewer mathematical calculations used to figure out a dice result, the more likely you are to stay in roleplaying,” O’Sullivan writes. “So Fudge Dice were born, and I like them a lot. They’re a joy to use and don’t slow the game down at all, one of my early design goals.” The system’s bell curve makes results of -4 and +4 rare, but possible. So a +4 (1.23%) matches my real-life chance of a bullseye, while an Olympic archer scores a bullseye on any roll better than -4.

Despite the virtues of the bell curve, Monte Cook still opted for a d20 for Numenera and D&D creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson chose the d20 for to-hit rolls and saving throws. The d20 rolls beautifully, it generates a big range of numbers without adding, and the icosahedron feels deliciously different from the bland cubes in countless games like Monopoly. Gygax became particularly enchanted with the exotic new dice from Japan.

Most importantly, d20s yield predictable odds compared to mechanics that combine multiple dice. Monte Cook explains, “If you’re using a system where the GM has to assign a target number for a task, it’s a lot easier to do that on the fly with a d20 than, say 3d6 or 2d10. Why? Because with a d20, the difference between, say, 17 and 18 is the same as the difference between 8 and 9. They’re basically just 5% increments. With a bell curve, that’s a lot harder to figure for the GM, particularly on the fly.”

In 1974, D&D lacked ability checks. To decide between success and failure, Gary Gygax suggested that DMs estimate the chance of success, and then improvise a roll that fits the odds. A d20 roll made the math easy.

Playing D&D means learning to embrace the d20’s swings. To help gamers love the d20, D&D’s current rules architect Jeremy Crawford offered advice on the October 3, 2019 episode of the Dragon Talk podcast. “Any time the d20 is in the mix, that is a swingy die so get ready for the unexpected. What I encourage groups, players and DMs alike to do, is rather than viewing that as something to chafe against or be unhappy about, embrace it as a storytelling opportunity. Over the years, the longer I play D&D and DM D&D, the more I have come to love the unpredictability of the d20, because so often it will create moments that will challenge the DM and the players to really stretch their storytelling ability to come up with a fun reason for why this transpired. Why did the ace rogue who triggered this battle, why did she end up going last?

“When the d20 throws you a curve ball, catch it and follow through with the curve. Just see where it leads you rather than saying, ‘this is dumb’ or ‘this isn’t how it should play out.’ No, in D&D, what the d20 does is really showing how this is going to play out. Let’s ride it and see where this craziness goes.”

If I were magically transported back to a version of 1974 that somehow lacked Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, would my attempt to bring dungeons and dragons to the world use a d20? I might choose Fudge Dice, but I would never stop giving those new icosahedrons from Japan forlorn looks.

Related: D&D and the Role of the Die Roll, a Love Letter
When You Describe Outcomes, Flatter Your Game’s Heroes and Monsters
In D&D, Letting Everyone Roll Certain Checks Guarantees Success, So Why Bother Rolling?

For D&D Travel, Steer Clear Of Rolls Versus Random Punishment

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Dungeons & Dragons brings fun from many sources: from acting the roles of characters, from creating stories with friends, and from making choices and seeing their consequences in the game world. This post focuses on that last source of fun: Seeing choices play out, and sometimes surprise us, thanks to D&D’s volatile mix of rules, dice, and the hidden information behind the DM screen.

The choices players make during character creation lead to consequences throughout a character’s career. Every saving throw plays out the consequences of a choice made days or even years ago. But when choices quickly lead to consequences, D&D proves most engrossing. When my choice to play an agile rogue lets me dodge an explosive rune, I feel satisfied, but when I figure a way to trigger the trap from a distance, I feel pleased and engaged.

I once complained how casting the foresight made D&D less fun for me. Foresight erases the effect of a lot of the games choices. I thought gaining advantage on everything would prove fun, but it made the game less entertaining. Rather than making numerous small choices during a session to gain an edge, the wizard makes one choice to cast foresight and the rest matter less.

Originally, players rolling a D&D character faced no choices except for class. Now, players typically control every aspect of character building and most players talk about rolling a character in the same way we talk about dialing a phone. Most players like control over character creation, but that control also tempts designers to create situations that engage numbers on character sheets more than the choices players make in the moment.

Years ago, I played an adventure where the party floated on a raft down river with canyon walls on each side. As we floated, unreachable monsters atop the walls hurled down rocks and we made checks to avoid damage. The situation blocked any choices, so we could only ride along and take our licks.

The adventure’s designer surely hoped for a tense scene with plenty of action as characters race down a river dodging perils. On a movie screen, the sequence might have worked, but at the table it played as string of random punishments—an unwelcome chore.

To be fair, character-building choices factored into the outcome of the scene, but those choices came long ago when we chose how dexterous to make our characters. In a game, the most entertaining choices come in the moment. Character design choices come in second, often a distant second.

Surely some readers see the river raft scene as obviously flawed, but adventures by well-meaning authors include similar roll versus random damage sequences, especially when the party must cross from point A to B. That includes many adventures that I’ve played at conventions. Again, I understand the authors aims. After all, on the cinema screens in their imaginations, the sequences work, and besides authors learn by imitating adventure written by other pros who set similar patterns. Fourth-edition skill challenges often fit that pattern. “I learned it from you.” Sure, skill challenges offered choices, but typically with the obviously correct options of picking the skills with the highest options. Only small children find such decisions compelling.

The roll-versus-random-punishment dynamic often makes travel sequences fall flat. Suppose the party in Aglarond uncovers a lead that prompts a trip to Battledale. The DM decides to make the trip interesting and give a sense of distance by rolling for random encounters along the way. That approach creates a roll-versus-punishment sequence with only one choice: Quit (y/N)? So the party trudges on hoping to resume their story in Battledale soon.

Some might argue my point by recommending better ways to handle the travel sequence. Perfect! None of those better ways include the roll-versus-damage dynamic. They bring choices and the story to the journey, or they cut past the journey.