The Roadside Shrine Test

The PCs are traveling overland. Various NPCs (all controlled, of course, by the DM) tell them that it is important to donate to the shrine at the crossroads, to ensure a safe journey. The NPCs say that ignoring the shrine is sure to bring misfortune. The donation amount is a significant expenditure for the PCs.

There is a surprising amount of potential complexity beneath the surface in examples like this. In-game choices intersect with player choices via metagaming (and metagaming is good player behavior, not bad). What might the DM be doing here? The players may consider the following possibilities. 

Worldbuilding. The shrine is an opportunity for the DM to illustrate local beliefs and add some texture and life for the world. The PCs can engage with the shrine or not; it won’t have any direct bearing on future events in the game. 

Foreshadowing. The shrine decision itself has no actual stakes, but it is a theme the DM intends to iterate upon. The DM will later present a similar choice with higher stakes. The escalation of the theme may continue until the party engages with it or otherwise resolves the tension.

Consequences (direct). The shrine is literally controlled by some minor god, spirit, or genius loci, in just the way the locals expect, which will cause some explicit consequences for the PCs.

Consequences (framing). The DM does not do anything differently, but instead frames any setbacks in the subsequent journey as a consequence of skipping the shrine. In this instance there actually was no real choice, and the shrine “decision” was just a set to facilitate later spikes by the DM.

Consequences (retroactively diegetic). The shrine has no effect, but later, someone may cast Zone of Truth or a similar truth-seeking spell on the PCs, and ask them what choice they made. Their answer has social consequences.

Consequences (factions and fronts). Factions or fronts in society care about the shrine. They may even be forces the PCs haven’t yet seen. Refusing to donate to the shrine may escalate a clock or decrement a reputation ranking. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list! Players could be considering literally dozens of overlapping agendas and incentives when assessing this choice, although they are surely not consciously enumerating most of these points. None of these are strictly right or wrong (although some can certainly lead to an r/rpghorrorstories post with the wrong execution). 

RPG Scheduling: Making Peace Between the Anchors and the Corks

Scheduling is one of the most common subjects of complaints, memes, jokes, and Reddit rants in  the TTRPG world. A familiar lament: Players did not show up, game was canceled. 

I don’t typically write about the logistics of running RPGs. But I have not had a game canceled for anything short of illness or emergency in years. So just in case it is useful to anyone out there struggling with game attendance and player commitment – here are my thoughts, beginning with some simple psychographics.

Anchors Versus Corks

There are two types of schedulers in the world: Anchors and corks.

Anchors commit to participate in things and, barring emergency or unusual circumstances, it becomes a fixed part of their plans. They scope other commitments around that plan. It is solid. Their schedule is a world of anchored things among the shifting currents of life.

Corks bob and drift from engagement to engagement as the tides and winds carry them. For a cork, every event and social engagement is more aspirational than actual until it happens. They will certainly be doing something on a given evening, but they don’t quite know what it will be until that day arrives. 

No Judgment Zone

The definitions above may make it sound like I’m praising anchors and criticizing corks, but that’s not my intent. Well, maybe a little, because I myself am an anchor, as are most GMs (and more on that in a bit). I find anchors easier to understand, and I struggled for a long time to figure out the corks. They just seemed… unreliable, even sketchy people.

But I have grown to appreciate corks more over time. When corks do show up, they usually bring their best selves. An anchor will sometimes grit their teeth through a game they didn’t really have the energy or patience to participate in (I myself have occasionally been guilty of this). The cork won’t make that mistake. When they do show up, they are there because they unambiguously want to be there. 

And anchors need some corks in their game sessions to mix things up some of the time. Some of my all-time favorite sessions have featured rare appearances from corks who brought wild card energy to a table otherwise dominated by familiar anchor vibes.

Corks particularly shine in one-shots or GM-less games, where the lack of long-term commitment really lets them go crazy. Corks are usually extroverts and anchors are often introverts, although these categories don’t completely line up.

The Anchor DM versus the Cork PCs

Anchors and corks can misunderstand each other in many parts of life, but RPGs present a special challenge.

An anchor planning a party can get by on bulk alone, even if most of their corks don’t show up. Expecting 60 people, but only 45 actually come? It will probably still be a fun party, because a typical party doesn’t really depend on any particular participant being present, nor does the fun scale neatly with the number of people. And the anchor’s plans don’t change dramatically, aside from practical considerations, many of which can be controlled by common sense methods (e.g., asking people bring food and beverages means supplies will naturally line up with attendance).

But RPGs introduce a unique problem. They often pit a single anchor (in the GM role) against a group composed mostly or entirely of corks (the players). I think this is the most common source of the all-to-familiar “I had to cancel the game AGAIN ;_;” laments.

Because RPGs are really good at attracting cork players! Corks love anticipating an RPG session, even if they don't join it. The idea of creating a character and dreaming about the adventures they might have is exciting. Many corks look at your D&D night invitation the way someone in a hot air balloon might look at an impressive mountain; something exciting to admire from afar, but not something you think deeply about until the wind starts blowing you closer to its position.

GM-less, prep-less games can often be a good fit for a social group filled with corks, since they logistically work more like board games, versus the prep of the conventional TTRPG. But assume you are running a traditional GM plus players system. How can you make it work?

Knights of the Open Table 

Once we’ve accepted the differences between corks and anchors, it becomes easier to schedule with both of them in mind. And one of the best ways to do that is to run an open table.

When I hear stories about canceled sessions and failing campaigns, the most common theme is that the GM expected almost all or all of their players to be there for all or almost all of the sessions. The GM expected the players to be anchors, essentially. But some of them – or all of them – turned out to be corks. 

At a closed table, that immediately becomes a problem, because every instance of cork-like behavior disrupts the game for everyone else. The anchors are annoyed that the corks aren’t taking the game seriously and respecting others’ time. And the corks feel like the anchors are sucking all the fun out of what is supposed to be a game.

An open table avoids this issue by ensuring that no single player is essential to a particular session. Instead, the total number of players collectively provide enough “coverage” to ensure the session can happen.

My minimum quorum is usually three players (not counting myself as GM). To ensure at least three people show up, I typically invite 6-10 players to such games. People have sometimes asked me, what will I do if all 10 people show up? 

After I finish laughing, I explain that if that extremely unlikely scenario actually did happen, it would be fine. I have, on very rare occasions, run for very large groups, and while those sessions were noisier and more chaotic than normal, they were fine. The minor inconvenience of a (very unlikely) oversized session is not a big deal compared to the (much more likely) threat of an undersized one.

The Game Is Afoot, Statistically Speaking

If you are thinking that a binary of anchor versus cork is an oversimplification, you are correct. A more nuanced way to understand player attendance is to assign a predicted likelihood of attendance to each player. 

Don’t worry, you do not need to do risk-buffered forecasting via Bernoulli trials to get the answer. Back-of-the-envelope math is fine. If I were to invite six players to a game, I would feel pretty comfortable if at least two were 90% likely to attend (strong anchors); one was 60% likely to attend (anchor-leaning); and three were 25% likely to attend (corks). The specific composition might vary from session to session, but you’re almost always going to get at least three players (again, not counting the GM) out of that group.

Reassess When You Greenlight a New “Season”

While I love open tables, I will also acknowledge their biggest drawback: attendance tends to taper over time.

A new open table will draw a broad range of players, excited by the newness of the game. As time passes, the players who stick with the game will become more invested; you might even see some corks turn into anchors. But at the same time, the number of interested new players will fall off. Even if a game continues to advertise its open table status, many players will be reluctant to join if they learn that others have already been playing the game for months.

I get it. Even apart from any question of rules fluency or knowledge of the shared fiction, it just feels different to join an established group with dozens of sessions under their belt. Most open tables will eventually feature a lot of regulars, and no matter how welcoming they are, some number of new players will bounce off their established vibe.

When a game reaches that point, you probably want to talk to the players and decide how to proceed. The table may remain nominally open, but for all intents and purposes look like a closed table. It’s a good time to have a conversation about what the end of the game would look like, and to institute “seasons” that are up for renewal, with a satisfying end-point in mind.

Be Willing to Walk Away

You can do all of the above, and the same problems can occur. Too many cancelations, not enough games. You need to be able to walk away.

Your D&D group is composed of the people who show up. It doesn’t necessarily include the person who knows the rules best. Or the person who first convinced you to run the game. Or the best roleplayer. Or your sister or your spouse or your best friend. It is made up of the people who show up. 

If the game is struggling, the game is not happening. Do something else socially with those people that requires less commitment. Like a lot of things in life, a willingness to walk away when things aren't working is an important backstop for the health of the game.

The RPG Revelation: GM as Interpreter and Medium

I can’t turn off my GM brain when listening to an actual play podcast. As entertaining as the content may be, and as much as I can appreciate different styles of GMing, it is hard for me not to listen to an RPG session unfolding and say “I would handle that situation so differently.”

With that in mind, listening to 3d6 DtL’s recently concluded Arden Vul campaign has been an interesting experience. About 90% of the time, I'm on the same page as Jon, the podcast's GM. He prioritizes player choice, adjudicates fairly, and isn’t afraid to present consequences when the PCs get in over their head. 

But the 10% where we do things differently is the interesting part. One example is that Jon is quite transparent when the text of the Arden Vul campaign doesn’t provide the answer to a question the players have proposed. At times he even says something like “Richard doesn’t say,” referring to Richard Barton, the module’s writer.

Early in listening to the show, this made me wince. While I try not to be too precious with verisimilitude, I do make an effort to preserve it. Why remind the players of the layers of artifice at work between the creation of the game and their experience with it? Not just that they are playing a game, but that the game is being mediated from the author through the GM, and that there is no easy, in-session way for the latter to seek clarity from the former.

But the more I heard of this approach, the more I warmed up to it. Because it is entirely viable to cast the GM less as the storyteller and master of all knowledge, and more as an interpreter and medium of exogenous content. 

The GM is an interpreter in that they are taking an inherently incomplete text and attempting to translate it for the benefit of the players. Except perhaps for read-aloud text, everything in a published RPG product needs to be translated. Descriptive notes need to be translated into what the players can perceive. Tables need to be translated into actual events. A monster stat block must be translated into an in-fiction diegetic entity. And the text is partial, inevitably missing information that will come up in the game. The GM must emendate the text for the players, making reasonable decisions to fill in the blanks that the players will inevitably find. 

The GM is also a medium, in that they must intuit the will of the creator, going beyond what is on the page. Even a writer creating the most painstakingly thorough RPG product in the world is only going to anticipate a tiny fraction of the things PCs will do with that product. This is a feature, not a bug. The magic of roleplaying is that no matter how many times a new group runs Lost Mines of Phandelver or Keep on the Borderlands or any of the other most popular modules in the history of RPGs, the output is going to be different. The GM can act as medium, and allow the spirit of the creator to act through them. In a good RPG session, the writer is like a ghost that is dimly perceived, as the GM intuits their will beyond what was explicitly written on the page.

We can and should have strong opinions about the role of the GM. But we should also keep an open mind when observing how others run games. You never know what strange truths they may reveal. 

The RPG Prestige: GM as Stage Magician

Is the GM a referee? Or are they a performer? Are they adjudicating a game? Or curating an experience?

I strongly dislike the RPG habit of fudging. A GM fudges when they alter die rolls or other randomized elements of the game to steer a session toward a favored outcome. I have previously written about my issues with it. But I also believe it is worth seriously thinking about why fudging is so compelling for many GMs out there.

And one possible reason is that some GMs think of themselves less like impartial adjudicators and more like stage magicians. The verisimilitude is not some external thing that all the people at the table can independently verify, but rather an illusion or trick that the GM is performing for the players. 

And the players, like an audience at a stage magic show, have agreed to be deceived. Most people in audience at a magic show are not there to "see through" or "figure out" the trick. They are there to suspend their disbelief and enjoy the performance. A GM who is working with a stage magician mindset will be much more likely to fudge than a GM who is thinking like a referee.

Magician gif by Jude Coram

Lie to Me 

There isn’t a hard line between these styles. Most DMs are concealing at least some part of their process from the players. Sometimes when a particularly exciting and strange thing happens in a session, a player will ask me, “did you plan that!?” I’m reluctant to explain specifically which aspects of a session's events were firmly rooted in prep contingencies, and which emerged almost completely from the session itself. 

That said, I’m generally not a fan of the stage magic approach to GMing, for several reasons.

The exclusive society. GMing with this idea of "the prestige" in mind reinforces the idea that running games is an exclusive skill available only to the select few who, like magicians, have been inducted into the society of GMs. There is a bright line between the magician and the audience at a magic show. Applying the same idea to GMing discourages players from running their own games.

No room for error. When the illusion of stage magic fails, there’s no easy way to get it back. If a magician blows a trick, the audience is not going to believe anything that follows in the performance. The spell has been broken. Likewise, once a player realizes that the verisimilitude of the game is an illusion maintained by the GM's fudge, they're never going to buy into the magic spell again.

At least, that's my own experience as a player. Once I’m aware of how and why the GM is fudging, the nearly limitless scope of potential that makes RPGs shine shrinks down. The game goes from limitless possibilities to only those possibilities that fit with what the GM has predetermined as acceptable outcomes. 

In contrast, GMing primarily as a referee or adjudicator gives the GM much more flexibility. They are conversing and negotiating with the players, not performing for them.

Buy-in is difficult. Getting players to consent to this deception without conceding it completely is difficult. For stage magic, it is baked into the very experience that the audience is signing up to be fooled. But the same is not true of RPGs, because of course many games do not feature the prestige at all. Some players may want to be fooled, while others (like me) view it as a dealbreaker. 

For My Next Trick

As strongly as I feel about this, I am not a one-true-way GM. As I discussed in the steelmanning post linked above, I can see various reasons why a GM might still choose to fudge.

Ultimately, if the players keep coming back to the stage magician GM’s game, and keep saying they’re having a great time… it is pretty hard for me to argue that the GM is doing something “wrong.” My one request for stage magician GMs is that they ask players to buy in to this arrangement at session zero. Simply advertising the GM's style at the outset solves many of the problems of unaligned expectations.

Should Party Pace Be a Player-Facing Mechanic In More Games?

Should PCs in party-based roleplaying games – particularly fantasy dungeoncrawls – more explicitly choose their pace of exploration?

The following is implicit in how I adjudicate situations on the GM side, but it isn’t something that players historically see in a plainly stated way. I infer their pace from the actions they choose, and then rule accordingly. But I’ve been thinking about what it would look like if party pace was a formal, player-facing mechanic. 

I’ll mention advantage/disadvantage here as a shorthand, but equivalent benefits and penalties could easily be substituted for games that don’t use that mechanic. 

I’m certain this isn’t a brand-new idea. I’m sure there’s are systems and play styles that handles party pace in a similar manner. Pointers appreciated if what I'm describing is very close to something that is already out there.

Methodical. The party is moving very slowly, basically a crawl. 

Assuming ample light and no direct obfuscation, hidden information is typically found without any special action by the party. They have advantage on rolls to find secret information. The party is assumed to be moving stealthily, within reason, and may gain advantage on related rolls.

When moving methodically, the maximum amount of time passes – this is as slow as they can go. A random event is essentially guaranteed, although the party may gain advantage on a surprise roll, or some similar benefit. If there is a clock for antagonist action, or any other time pressure beyond random encounters/events, it will almost certainly advance.

Cautious. The party moves at a slow, steady walking pace.

The party can choose to focus on searching or stealthing, but not both. If the former, as long as they have decent light, they have advantage on rolls to find hidden information. It’s possible to find secret information, but will require pointed inquiry. Stealthing foregoes both the hidden and secret information, but is otherwise practical at this pace.

If some PCs want to search and others want to stealth, they can, but they must split up. Note that stealthing ahead of searchers and searching ahead of stealthers both present complications and dangers for the party. The traditional stealthy-character-scouts-ahead role is, by definition, limited to the Methodical pace.

Balanced. The party moves at a brisk walk.

This is the default party pace. Hidden information can be found with careful questions, but won’t be exposed by default. Secrets are almost never found at this pace. Stealth is difficult or impossible (usually requiring at least disadvantage on an applicable roll).

Fast. The party moves at a hurried pace, like a steady jog, or quick dashes from point to point.

Hidden information and secrets will not be found, but the PCs will still see landmarks. Mapping or orienteering is very difficult (roll with disadvantage, if it is possible at all). Less time passes, but random encounters/events will happen at about the same frequency as the Balanced pace, because the party is more conspicuous. There’s an increased chance for lights to be extinguished and for similar complications. No stealth. If characters moving at a Fast pace run into an encounter that could turn hostile, they probably have a good opportunity to run away. If they give chase to someone who flees from them, they have a good shot at keeping pace with them.

Reckless. The party charges forward, headless of the danger.

Random encounters/events trigger automatically, although there’s at least a good chance the PCs can outrun some of them. Organized non-local antagonist action doesn't really happen because there just isn't much time passing. Players may need to either stow or drop held objects. The party is only dimly aware of their surroundings as they move. No mapping or orienteering. Not only will they miss all hidden and secret information, but they may need to roll just to spot landmarks.

When moving Recklessly, the party can usually escape typical combat encounters (either without a roll, or rolling with advantage), but are likely to be separated or lost when doing so. They have advantage on rolls to escape a pursuer or catch quarry.

Moving at a reckless pace AKA me when I win at Bang! as the Renegade with a Mustang and no other gear AKA I will use any excuse to add Golden Kamuy to a post 

After Them!

We usually don’t care about the pace of monsters or NPCs, but in a chase scenario, it becomes important. PCs or monsters moving a category faster than their pursuer/quarry have advantage on rolls to escape/catch them. PCs or monsters moving two categories faster will escape/catch up as a matter of when, not if. Think about a monster’s abilities when adjudicating this question; some will only use one or two of the movement conditions above. Fleeing from an air elemental should feel dramatically different than fleeing from a giant slug.

Switching Gears

Moving to a faster or slower pace is always possible when conditions are normal and the PCs are in no direct danger. If they are in danger, they can only move down the list, toward the faster paces. Assume they can move by one category per combat round or equivalent unit of time. If a party is moving Methodically and suddenly is drawn into combat, they probably can’t immediately pivot to Fast or Reckless retreat; they need to change pace one stage at a time.

Certain circumstances may almost force them to change their pace. This kind of procedure can add a lot of spice to something like fear effects; frightened characters can only move down in the pace list, toward the faster categories, even if they're not in direct danger (and they may perhaps be compelled to do so, even if other characters do not do the same).

Splitting Time

If the party is moving at different paces, assume that a faster group can take twice as many actions for every step separating them. But they should also get more limited information during that process, in accordance with the landmark/hidden/secret distinctions above.

Player-Facing or Player-Unknown?

I’m always fascinated by which procedures and mechanics are player-facing in a game, and which are not. I don’t think any of the above needs to be player facing. In the old-school context, I endeavor to adjudicate the dungeon’s reaction to the players accordingly, and the players trust me as a fair referee to present the dungeon’s response to their presence in a measured and plausible way. 

But making this mechanism player-facing has a certain appeal for teaching the playstyle to modern players. Divorced from the Strict Time Records of yore, modern/OC/5E-style players will choose to do almost everything Methodically. And why wouldn’t they? What is the incentive to go faster if there are no clocks, no wandering monsters, no proactive enemy responses to their presence? I believe the above procedure, or something like it, can help them grok the pros and cons quite well.

No Game Needs to End Without an Ending

We’ve all been there. The game is going great. The players are excellent, the GM is doing a great job, everyone is excited to see what happens next. Who knows how this crazy story will end? We can’t wait to find out.

Then the group takes a short break so several players can handle some real-life stuff. The short break unofficially becomes a long break. Months pass. Everyone quietly realizes that the break is permanent and that the game is no more. We’ll never find out what happened next. We’ll never get our ending.

It happens. I understand that. But I think we give up on our endings too easily.

And I’ve decided that at least for games I run, where it is my choice, there will always be an ending. 

We can do things like make sure endings are an interesting part of the game. And embrace restarting a dormant game. But sometimes that’s not enough. Here are ways to end our games.

Plan A: Conventional session-by-session resolution. This is how most games aspire to end. You just keep doing sessions until everything is over. This is easier if you do “seasons” or use another mechanism to forecast endings. This is great if you can manage it. It’s probably the ideal way to end most kinds of games. But it’s not the only way to end the game.

Plan B: Zoom out. Maybe there isn’t time to resolve the story session-by-session. Time is tight. Maybe someone is moving out of town or starting a new job or going back to school or having a kid. There’s time for a few sessions. Maybe just one. How do we conclude without it feeling rushed?

Remember that time in RPGs is fluid. Just as the GM can narrate days or weeks of travel in a few minutes, nothing stops the group from collectively adjudicating entire adventures and arcs at a zoomed out level. They can either use freeform roleplay, or a collaborative system like Microscope, which is specifically built to enable zooming in and zooming out on game events.

Anatoly Fomenko

Plan C: Communal or individual writing project. There isn't time for even a single session, as detailed above for Plan B, no matter how zoomed-out it is. But if the players have time individually, they can end the game in writing. This could take the form of separate parallel efforts, or a single collaborative resolution, perhaps through taking turns, or editing a shared online document. It can be an exquisite corpse. Writing is the most obvious way to do this, but players could draw, write songs, whatever they want. How canon all of this is up to the group, particularly if players are writing different aspects of the ending that touch on others’ characters; but generally, it is a good idea to keep it loose.

Plan D: Solo writing project. Whether due to external circumstances, waning interest, or something else entirely, sometimes the players are simply done before the story is. Even Plan C is not going to happen. 

The GM still has the option to write the conclusion to the game themselves. 

Solo RPGs are great here. Even a simple oracle system can provide enough outside input to resolve the story in an interesting way.

To the degree the players may still care about their characters, the GM can frame this as head canon or merely one possible version of events. Some of the characters could be offscreen. The GM’s conclusion doesn’t even necessarily have to follow the players, per se. An NPC or even an antagonist could be the viewpoint character for the resolution of the story.

This is the last resort because it doesn’t involve the group; it’s just the GM (or really, whichever participant in the game cared the most about the ending). But it’s still better than no ending at all.

Maybe no one will ever even read it. That’s OK. Put it on your blog, if nothing else (if you don’t have a blog, now is a good time to start one). The point is that if you spent dozens (or even hundreds) of hours playing a game that kept you and your players interested for that long, it deserves an ending. You deserve an ending, and there’s more than one way to get there. 

TTRPGs Can Make Even Tic-Tac-Toe Interesting

I’ve written previously about how puzzles should be incorporated in RPGs and why tension and escalation makes them interesting. Let’s approach it from another angle and see how far a dead-simple system can go in powering a TTRPG scenario. 

Take, for example, tic-tac-toe*. Tic-tac-toe is a game many children learn to play. But they do not play it for long. They learn the rules, optimize their play, reach an equilibrium where no one can win, and then stop playing the game. You would not ask anyone (besides a young child who has not yet learned the rules) to play tic-tac-toe with you. It would not be a fun experience for either player. In a way, tic-tac-toe is like a very simple lesson in how to enjoy games, and by extension, how to design them.

Now think about Hollywood Squares**, the game show that has been on and off television for nearly 60 years (revived once again this year, Wikipedia tells me). It's a quiz show where players win by connecting a line on a three-by-three grid of celebrity panelists. 

Nobody is watching Hollywood Squares for that hot tic-tac-toe action. But everyone watching brings their understanding of tic-tac-toe to the experience. It provides a framework for the real entertainment. Tic-tac-toe is not in itself fun, but the show wouldn’t have lasted as long as it has without the structure tic-tac-toe provides.

Apply this idea to TTRPGs. You could play a “game” where both players roll a d20, and whoever gets the highest result wins, and there are no other mechanics. This would obviously be a boring game. But a lot of action in a TTRPG session basically boils down to “two people roll, and the better result prevails.” It’s interesting because we care about the fictional events the roll is resolving.

So a mechanic can be too flimsy to stand on its own, but can still serve as a tool in a larger game.

Imagine the following scenario (set aside for a moment the artificial premise and how or why this puzzle would exist in-fiction; this is an example only). A room is divided into nine sectors. Two opposing sides are in conflict to control it – say the adventuring party and an antagonistic faction. Creating a tic-tac-toe streak “wins,” allowing one side to prevail over the other. What constitutes marking a square is up to the DM; maybe just physically controlling a space, maybe overcoming an opponent in one-on-one battle, maybe something else. 

The players will quickly recognize that they’re playing tic-tac-toe, but the scenario is obviously more interesting than “regular” tic-tac-toe. For one, as described above, tic-tac-toe is facilitating something larger than itself, rather than carrying the entire weight of being fun through its rules and mechanics alone. And two, the open-ended nature of TTRPGs means that tic-tac-toe is only a loose framework, not a rigid structure. 

Can a marked square be returned to its blank state, or flipped by another team? Can PCs mark more than one square at a time, or otherwise break the turn order? Can they stop the opposition from marking a square? How can their characters’ abilities and equipment and knowledge be adapted to this unexpected scenario? 

Remember that many games and game systems can be combined in unexpected ways to create something that is more than the sum of its parts.

*AKA Noughts and Crosses

**AKA Celebrity Squares

In Praise of Location-Based Scenario Design

Two of the recent games I have run are “travel” games. In one, the premise is that the characters wake up on a train without their memories. The train moves from place to place, and as they explore each stop on the train’s journey, they uncover clues related to their predicament. In the other game, the players are afflicted with a mysterious magical condition that causes them to Plane Shift randomly through the multiverse, encountering dangerous and unexpected situations.

I’ve enjoyed running both of these games, and I don’t regret pitching them to the players… but they had the unexpected side-effect of making me miss location-based play.

You won’t typically see it printed on the label, but “location-based play” is important to old-school D&D and similar games. The dungeon is not just an abstraction, or the place where the monsters are, but also a literal constraint around the possible actions the characters can take. The location where the adventure takes place creates time pressure, facilitates antagonist action, and intrinsically offers a series of risks and rewards.

The traveling games I ran were more scene-based. The scope of action is less constrained, if at all. Pressure and conflict have to be induced more deliberately.

Running these scene-based games made me appreciate how much location-based play does some of the work on the GM’s behalf. Listening to 3d6 Down the Line’s excellent Adren Vul podcast also drove the point home. A fixed location like a megadungeon organically induces factions, monsters, NPCs, traps, hazards, treasure, and other “game objects” to bounce off each other. 

One of the best aspects of location-based play is that this occurs organically. The GM barely needs to think about it; these interactions intuitively descend from the character of the location itself.  

A scene-based game can and often should re-introduce known concepts periodically, yes. But it takes more work. How did they get there? Why have they shown up again in such a different context? Embracing serendipity as a law of the universe can help, but it will also tax verisimilitude more heavily than simple physical proximity.

A rich location can create its own intrigue and adventure -- illustration by Artur Skizhali-Veys

The difference between location-based and scene-based scenarios may seem obvious, but it’s quite common to see people mix them up. Take, for example, the five-room dungeon concept, created by Johnn Four. The five-room dungeon idea is a preparation shortcut for a TTRPG session. At a glance, “five-room dungeon” sounds like a location-based style of play; it’s a way to make a dungeon, right?

Not really; reading in more detail, it’s clear this is actually a scene-based approach. Four cites Joseph Campbell of “Hero With a Thousand Faces” fame and says “It's the story framework that matters most for great gaming.” That statement likely sounds fine to trad or modern gamers, but is antithetical to OSR gamers, i.e., those who most promote location-based situations. 

Four seems to recognize that the name is a misnomer, clarifying that it is not limited to fantasy games. To the degree five-room dungeons involve locations, they are essentially a way of building what old-school games would call a “lair”; a small dangerous place, perhaps waiting to be discovered while exploring a hex. The lair may have one or more monsters, and the possibility of treasure, hazards, and challenges. It’s probably enough to fill a single session of play. But it fundamentally lacks the promise of exploration that characterizes dungeons, and it is expressly linear. 

There’s enough confusion out there that I saw someone in one instance trying to create a megadungeon by clustering five-room dungeons together! Could that work? Well, maybe. But I think it would have to be done very carefully and deliberately, as it’s a matter of combining two scenario design techniques from diametrically different schools of play.

Modern Play Means Freedom From Restraint

Last week: The Big Difference Between OSR and Modern/5E Playstyles

To summarize last week's post, PCs in 5E and other modern games are free from social and political norms, institutions, and rules. And that freedom is more essential to the appeal of modern play than any particular combat loop or class power.

Examples are easy to find. Take Critical Role, one of the most prominent examples of modern-style play in the 5E age. Both the first and second seasons of Critical Role feature parties who violated laws, disregarded customs, and generally acted like real shitbirds. The characters were, to varying degrees, misfits and scoundrels. But they never faced the consequences that misfits and scoundrels would face in an OSR game. If they died, their deaths were dramatic and tragic, not mundane and tragicomic. And when they succeeded, their success was epic. Success wasn’t just a haul of gold to spend carousing in town. Both of those campaigns ended with world-spanning quests to save the world. OSR PCs who flaunted social and factional constraints the way Critical Role PCs would not save the world; they would die, quickly and unceremoniously.

Running 5E with an OSR mindset, I was constantly reminded of how many “get out of jail free” cards 5E characters had. That could be literal jail; at all but the lowest levels, most 5E PCs have a range of skills that trivialize mundane incarceration. But it also applies figuratively. Factions simply cannot hope to constrain PC action in a modern game in the same way they would in an OSR game.

Dragon by Millennium Hand

And this distinction is not unique to modern vs. OSR play. A huge part of PBtA-style games, and other story games, is tools baked into the core of the game that explicitly create leverage and seed consequences for disregarding social rules and laws, or for recklessly standing in opposition to powerful factions. Faction play is still useful in 5E; if nothing else, factions have numbers and time on their side, so they can act against PCs even in modern-style play, because those PCs simply cannot be everywhere all the time. But it takes a lot more work to make it happen.

Listening to 3d6 DtL’s Arden Vul podcast, I was repeatedly struck by how the idea that “the world reacts to your actions” created situations that the players could at best hope to endure, not overcome. When a dragon shows up and makes demands of the party, it is not a dramatic cutscene. It is not a preview of a boss battle a dozen sessions down the road, in which the PCs will almost certainly prevail. The dragon is orders of magnitude more powerful than the PCs, and if they don’t understand and appreciate that, they will die, suddenly, ignominiously, and deservedly.

To turn the question around, I have also found that modern-style players can adapt quite quickly to OSR play. When I run Knave for players who have no background or investment in the OSR, they very quickly grok the danger their characters are in, and intuit the risks of acting in defiance of the world they find themselves in. They start asking more questions, thinking further ahead, and generally taking the world and its factions seriously. Give a player a character with 2 HP and a rusty knife, and they don’t need you to explain styles of play to them; they figure it out very quickly all on their own.

The Big Difference Between OSR and Modern/5E playstyles

I ran D&D 5E for years with a behind-the-scenes OSR mentality. There are a lot of good reasons to apply an OSR mindset to a game for players with a modern (or “OC” or “neo-trad” or whatever) playstyle. Even if the players have no idea what OSR means, applying OSR principles to prep and adjudication creates a more immersive, convincing world, with more challenging obstacles and more rewards for creative play.

But systems matter, and not every OSR principle can apply to a modern game just because the DM has internalized the Principia Apocrypha. The idea that “the answer is not on your character sheet” is not going to translate when the system itself is very loudly and consistently telling players that many answers are, indeed, right there on their character sheets. And there’s no easy way to undo the super-heroic power level of PCs in modern play, without hacking 5E into a different game.

When talking about the modern style of play, as opposed to other cultures of play, we often focus on fluid, action-packed combat, where characters have specialized roles and neat action loops. And that is part of it. Certainly that’s a big part of D&D 4E and (to a lesser degree) D&D 5E. It’s part of Pathfinder. And it’s part of the new crop of games that rose in the wake of Hasbro’s self-inflicted OGL debacle.

Giant Pot-Tomb Demon by Andrew Porter

The Real Fantasy Behind Being Superman

So everyone understands that modern play features superheroic PCs who fight more like the Avengers, rather than fighting like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. But what is also interesting (and comparatively less-discussed) is how modern play changes gameplay outside of combat. Superheroes remain a good point of comparison to illustrate the difference.

A key part of the appeal of superheroes is their ability to act unilaterally, as individuals, without negotiating with or deferring to society’s rules. This expression of independence can be simple and direct. A heroic vigilante acts in defiance of law enforcement… but in a way that the audience mostly views as moral and correct. 

But it can also be a less literal form of unilateral activity, of defiance. I will posit that so many superheroes can fly because the idea of freedom from the law of gravity is a form of rebellion against law itself; in other words, flying is not a common fantasy because of something intrinsic to the act of flying itself, but because the act of flying is fundamentally a rejection of the rule of gravity.

Freedom is what really defines the power fantasy that many people explore when they first dip their toes into TTRPGs. A kid playing their first superhero RPG doesn’t want to be Superman so they can lift a bus over their head, so much as they want to be Superman because nobody can tell Superman not to lift a bus over his head.

Next week: Modern Play Means Freedom From Restraint

Ah 5E, Here We Go Again

After a year of running other games, I was asked to run D&D 5E again. While I have one big problem with 5E as a system, and many more particularized complaints with specific mechanical executions, I think 5E is a decent system. I have run hundreds of sessions with it. Thousands of hours. If I hated it, I would have found a way to get off that train. I said that I wasn't sure if I would run it again, but I'm not surprised that I am. My desire to run D&D outweighs my disdain for any particular D&D system. I have voted with my feet.

All that said, I am skeptical of the implicit presumption that 5E is the default choice for fantasy TTRPGs. When I have run other systems, with cleaner, more concise mechanical designs and ludological execution, I’ve been consistently impressed with how quickly players – whether versed in 5E, or entirely new to TTRPGs – grokked the system. I’m skeptical of the common belief that seems to exist in the TTRPG world, that 5E is the natural starting point for fantasy games, and players can then opt in to other games after they have tried out the industry standard. I don’t usually write about the 💿🐴 on this blog, but a kerfuffle over a popular actual play streamer’s defense of using 5E for games that don’t strictly fit its explicit and implicit system is instructive on this question.

I haven’t watched Brennan Lee Mulligan’s games, but I’ve wondered about the “5E as universal system” idea in other media that I have followed. I’ve been an on-again, off-again listener of the Adventure Zone, the TTRPG wing of the McElroy brothers’ podcasting family. They’ve run a variety of campaigns, some lasting dozens of sessions, and have shown a commendable willingness to experiment with different systems.

When they announced a campaign titled The Adventure Zone Versus Dracula, I thought “Ah, interesting! What system will they use? The Dracula Dossier… or something homebrewed, but still set in Night’s Dark Agents? If not, Urban Shadows perhaps? Undying? Maybe even a Vampire the Masquerade game, steering into (but also dissecting) the ‘90s edgelord reputation of that storied game?”

No. They chose D&D 5E, for… some… reason. It’s strange, because their style of play, and the podcasting format itself, really lends itself to PBtA and other story games. And the best Adventure Zone moments really sing with PBtA energy. Listening to their 5E episodes really grates my bacon, as the players, versed in PBtA play culture, wander around spamming 5E skills as if they were playbook moves. Every time someone on the Adventure Zone says “I’d like to make an Arcana check” without first framing their character’s actions in-fiction, a fairy flies into a bug zapper.

So the McElroys keep coming back to 5E. If they’ve explained why in an interview or blog post somewhere, I haven’t seen it, just like I haven’t seen that degree on Travis’ wall. I only know that it is a pain to listen to an engaged, creative, often laugh-out-loud actual play group struggle against the system they chose to play.

Roleplaying Games Are Nomic Games

Roleplaying games, particularly in their most freeform state, are often a kind of Nomic game. Per Wikipedia:

Nomic is a game created in 1982 by philosopher Peter Suber, the rules of which include mechanisms for changing those rules, usually beginning by way of democratic voting.[1] The game demonstrates that in any system where rule changes are possible, a situation may arise in which the resulting laws are contradictory or insufficient to determine what is in fact legal.

…

Initially, gameplay occurs in clockwise order, with each player taking a turn. In that turn, they propose a change in rules that all the other players vote on, and then roll a die to determine the number of points they add to their score. If this rule change is passed, it comes into effect at the end of their round. Any rule can be changed with varying degrees of difficulty, including the core rules of the game itself.

Peter Suber’s book, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, is available here. Appendix 3, beginning on page 199 by the PDF pagination, is about Nomic. But the Wikipedia summary is sufficient for understanding the basics.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

The logic behind Nomic subtly influences many kinds of games. Calvinball from Calvin and Hobbes is, of course, explicitly a Nomic game. It lacks the rigor of Nomic, as well as enough players to incentivize negotiation through voting, something Nomic’s rules specifically identify as an issue: 

Two can play, but three or more make for a better game. With only two players, there is no (initial) difference between unanimity and majority rule, which takes away a lot of the fun. 

But in spirit, it is so accurate to Nomic that I wonder if Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson read the original Scientific American article and got the idea there.

Other, more conventional games have Nomic qualities, insofar as there is almost always a socially navigated layer of agreement above the actual rules of the game. Common games played with standard decks of playing cards, for example, typically have many variations or house rules. The game cannot begin until the players agree on the rules they are using.

Even if the rules and procedure of the game are unambiguous, unforeseen events can arise that can only be resolved by group concurrence; which is to say, through a Nomic overlayer. What happens when a card is accidentally revealed? Do the players shuffle it back into the deck? Discard it? Is it replaced or not? Even a decision as simple as ending a board game before anyone has won involves a group discussion of whether to just conclude the game without a victor, or set the pieces aside to continue later. 

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

But TTRPGs are perhaps the most natural type of game to incorporate Nomic aspects. Even the loosest RPGs have some structure or rules; otherwise they would simply be freeform improv sessions (and there is nothing wrong with that; but it is no longer a "game"). And even the tightest TTRPGs, with the most intense procedure and the strictest rules, will inevitably require Nomic negotiation to amend and patch the rules, because as a game system, a TTRPG is an engine that produces corner cases, contradictions, and exceptions.

Nomic games cut directly to the idea of the social contract that is crucial to TTRPGs. Suber's anecdote about removing the rule that says "follow the rules" in the Paradox of Self-Amendment is instructive:

After Nomic was first published in Scientific American, a German philosopher wrote to me insisting that Rule 101 (that players should obey the rules) should be omitted from the Initial Set and made part of a truly immutable shell. He missed an essential point of the game. Rule 101 is included precisely so that it can be amended; if players amend or repeal it, they deserve what they get.

Surely everyone who has played TTRPGs – particularly at a young age – has encountered this problem, right? When my friends and I were kids, and D&D took the place previously held by purely freeform imaginary storytelling, we learned that while the rules were optional, we had something to gain by the constraints they imposed. The need to abide by rules to keep a game coherent is obvious and intuitive with a board game, and even more explicit with a video game, where (short of cheats and mods) one typically cannot alter the game’s rules much, if at all. 

But TTRPGs give the players more freedom than almost any other type of game. And with that freedom comes responsibility. There are no guard rails preventing you from changing, distorting, and ruining the game. And that’s what makes TTRPGs so fascinating.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

You Separate in a Tavern...

“You meet in a tavern” is the “It was a dark and stormy night” of TTRPGs. Cliches have their place, and people who work hard to subvert cliches are often missing the point by prioritizing novelty over usability. So naturally I will now subvert this famous cliche.

A group of strangers, by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are cursed. The source of the curse is incidental to this campaign premise. The important thing is that they don’t know each other before they are cursed, and perhaps don’t even get along. But the curse prevents them from leaving each others’ general vicinity for long. They are stuck together.

Shortly after coming to terms with their circumstances, the players learn (through villain monologue, friendly NPC expert, downtime spent on research, whatever) that the only way to break the curse is to find the mystical Tavern of Fond Farewells. This location is famously difficult to find, but is sought by those who need to truly let go; the grief-stricken, the lovelorn. 

How far apart can the characters get? What happens if they are forcibly separated? It could vary depending on the system and style of play. If I were to run such a game, I would investigate this question with the players at session zero.

Speaking of cliches, this is a tried and true gimmick in fiction. “People from different backgrounds are thrown together by fate; they dislike each other or come into conflict at first; but eventually come to like/respect each other despite their differences.” Genre-savvy players can steer into these vibes. Bonus points if two or more characters, at the end of the story, decide they actually want to remain friends (or perhaps more?) Audiences love that kind of twist. 

Grading Against Gremlin Game Design

I am a game designer! The great thing about TTRPGs is that anyone who has ever had to adjudicate something or make a ruling is essentially a game designer, even to a small degree. I have run games, hacked games, and even made some stuff that people I don’t personally know have used in their own games. Indeed, I think many people become game designers long before they name what they’re doing in that way.

So it was with interest that I read the Gremlin Game Designer's Creed, via the Indie RPG Newsletter featuring it. I found the 10 rules thought-provoking, so I went through each one in turn.

Rules are toys, and the process of rules-mediated play consists of smashing their faces together like little girls making their Barbies make out. Unless a rules module is explicitly intended to be enacted solo, it should present a generous surface area for other rules to bite into. The most elegantly self-contained piece of rules design is, collaboratively speaking, also the most useless.

This sounds sensible to me, but I would need to see a positive and negative example to really judge the worth of this rule.

The principal function of "player characters" as discrete collections of mechanical traits is to furnish each player with an assemblage of shiny things to show off to other players. Mechanical abstraction is well and good, but if you abstract away the act of curating one's collection of shinies, player engagement will suffer.

I’m less sure of this one. My rules-light brain gets suspicious whenever mechanical traits are in the spotlight, rather than the interactions they facilitate. At minimum, this obviously would not apply to solo games. Even in multiplayer GM-player-interaction games, I question how much to center something like this – what if others simply fail to notice or appreciate someone’s “shinies”? Is that a gameplay fail? 

All that said, I do agree that excessive abstraction is something to watch out for.

The GM, if present, is a fellow player. Ensure that they have their own toys and shinies to play with. The failure of a game to provide these is often a major contributor to why nobody wants to run it!

Seems fair, with the same caveat that we shouldn’t lose the forest for the trees.

The most effective way of encouraging players to do what you want is to make a number go up. This applies to both to rewards and to misfortunes; a number counting up to disaster a much more visceral motivator than a number counting down to zero.

This is the first one that really conflicts with my own experience. I have always favored countdowns, particularly for misfortunes. It’s so much easier to say “when it hits zero something bad happens” rather than having some moving target of a top number, different for each situation, even if I prominently display that number for players.

Crunch is good. The defining feature of tabletop roleplaying is that rules produce stories. The act of interpreting the outputs of the rules and the act of telling the game's story are the same activity. Be mindful of what kinds of stories your rules want to tell; you may find that their opinion on the matter differs from your own!

This again immediately raises questions. This would not be true of FKR games or matrix games. Are these less capable of “producing stories” than games with more crunch? And certainly I’ve played games where the amount of crunch was an obstacle to the telling of stories. 

Beyond that it seems fine – I agree that a lot of failed games seem to boil down to the GM and the players trying to tell a story that doesn’t fit with the ruleset employed.

Actually assembling your game's rules is as much a process of discovery as it is of invention. In the course of designing and playtesting, you may find that your own game has rules that you didn't know about. Where did they come from? It is a mystery.

This seems uncontroversial and correct. 

Randomised outcomes should be made mandatory with care and restraint; randomised outcomes should be made available with delirious abandon. As far as is practicable, players should always have the option of asking the dice what unhinged bullshit should happen next. Corollary: lookup tables are your friend.

This seems right and basically in keeping with an old-school approach, where dice might not be rolled for an entire session’s worth of traps and social negotiations, but will certainly come into play when the party drinks from the magic fountain. A lot of this comes down to maximum transparency about which courses of action will require a roll of the dice, and which ones won’t. The games I played didn’t state this specifically, but once I figure it out myself, I was struck by how many other issues it helped resolve.

Players don't need your permission to depart from the rules as written; granting it is arrogant. By the same token, however, it should never be unclear to players whether they're departing from the rules as written. Let the thought process behind what you're writing hang out for all the world to see; folks will be rummaging in the game's guts anyway, so give them easy access.

This seems fine as well, with the corollary that everyone should try to run every game as close to rules-as-written at least once, before departing from those rules. In other words, don’t start hacking a game before you’ve even played it (something I’ve been guilty of doing, oops).

If your game has a default setting, explain it as little as possible, but always let the rules and presentation reflect it. Seeing an entry for "poorly made dwarf" in a table of player character backgrounds will fire a group's imagination more strongly in three words than a chapter stuffed with worldbuilding lore could in ten thousand.

This is right, and I don’t think it’s an accident that they use the poorly made dwarf from Troika as an example. Troika lacks any kind of section explaining the world and the lore; it’s all implied through indirect references in various parts of the rules. The experience I first had reading the rules was just like what’s described above.

You don't need to be good at naming things as long as you're good at puns. Wordplay, alliteration and rhyme may also serve in this capacity, as, in a pinch, may a well placed dick joke.

I am one of those terrible people who professes to hate pun-based humor, then hypocritically uses it myself. My games are loaded with alliterative NPCs (Timothy Tyranny) and dumb homonyms (like an NPC who identified themself as “the trader/traitor,” intentionally pronouncing it ambiguously between the two words). I even put a Combination Pita Hutch and Tonic Well in the last one-shot I ran. A player’s offhand description of a giant parade float rat as “Icky Mouse” inspired an entire theme park parody arc. I am ashamed of this kind of thing but will probably never stop.

Parceling out the GM's Hats

There are TTRPG games with a traditional GM, and there are GM-less games. Is there any useful space in between? 

I previously wrote about games in which the GM role switches mid-session. As I said at the time, I think that mid-session-switching games will only appeal to a narrow band of experienced players. If your entire group is made up of GMs who have past experience running games, sure, no problem. But that’s not most groups.

I started thinking about this some more after some conversations with several players who had strong creative instincts, but were reluctant to run their own games. I generally believe that most people are too hesitant to try running a game. They believe it’s a unique skill that they don’t possess. I usually advise them that it’s much easier than they realize, and they should at least run a one-shot to try it out. And I still believe that.

But after those conversations, I also realized that the reasons players don’t want to run games are more nuanced than just hesitation. Some potential GMs love worldbuilding, but hate rules. Some are interested in tactical and crunchy mechanics, but don’t like portraying NPCs. Some are happy to act as a master of ceremonies, but don’t want to serve as a judge. 

Some of these preferences are things these people should interrogate to see just how deeply they are rooted. But some of them are just hard stops, and keep people from running games, if they aren’t comfortable wearing each of the hats on the GM’s many-armed hat rack.

So could we divide GM duties into different roles?

A couple caveats before I proceed. I have not (yet) tested this idea in a game, so it could shatter on impact with actual players. I’m also sure that some game has done this before; I just don’t know which game it is. I’m not suggesting that this is a completely new idea.

The Architect. This is the part of the GM job concerned with creating stuff during prep. It might be worldbuilding or dungeon maps or even creating monsters. Players who love laboring over intricate backstories and lore are well-suited to this role.

The Actor. This role characterizes NPCs. Players who enjoy roleplay itself will gravitate toward this role.

The Adjudicator. This is the judge, the GM who interprets the dice and the action of the world. Players who know the rules front to back often enjoy this role.

The Antagonist. The antagonist is simply a player who controls monsters and other hostile creatures. Their resources are limited to what the Architect has placed in the current milieu; but they can otherwise devote their tactical energy to providing a challenge for the players. A player who loves combat – or just coming up with complex plans and ambushes – can handle this role.

This is a simplified model; we could make a longer list if we needed to. And most games won’t need or want four different GMs. But two people could wear two hats each; for example, a creative type who enjoys serving as architect and actor, while leaving the crunchy stuff to a second GM who acts as adjudicator and antagonist. And these roles can’t cover everything the GM is required to do; the GMs would need to navigate places where their roles leave gaps, or overlap. But I believe it would be an interesting experiment.

Searching for the Answer

“Is there anything else interesting?”

“I look around some more to see if there is anything unusual.”

“I search the whole room for anything useful.”

Anyone who has GM’d more than a few games has probably heard variations on these statements from players -- particularly in games with serious exploration elements. The players know (or at least suspect) that there is something worth interacting with in the space. Something that will get them what they want – treasure, information, or an edge in a potential conflict. So they ask again for more detail on the place they're exploring. And ask again. And again.

I don’t think players are intending to misbehave here. Navigating a shared imagined space, primarily through question-and-answer, is difficult in the best of circumstances. The players are trying to engage with the fiction. 

But when players try to move forward by repeatedly executing general searches, it feels like moving around the room in a video game while blindly spamming the action/interact button. That’s understandable when you get stuck in a video game, as there are limited ways to communicate with the game. Sometimes you have to either look things up, or brute force it.

But the GM does not suffer from that limitation. The players can (and should) ask any number of variations on their questions. The GM just needs to help them understand how that dialogue works.

I’ve found it helpful to explain that when players want to extract more information from the physical space their character is interacting with, one of two things is possible*:

• When I (as GM) introduced the fictional space or set the scene, I listed everything that was of interest; I did not purposefully omit anything their character would be interested in.
• If there is something they would be interested in beyond what I identified at the beginning of the scene, it will only become apparent through deeper interaction with the objects and people already established.

*I suppose that “I forgot something” is another possibility, but that’s not something the player can solve; I need to correct those errors on my own time.

It can also help to simply prompt the player to be more specific. The illustrative examples I provided at the start of this post are characterized by their ambiguity and generalness. So the GM should ask more questions to advance the scene. 

• What do you mean by “interesting”? This tomb has been sealed for a thousand years, there are many “interesting” things within it. What specifically would be most interesting to your character in this space? 
• What do you mean by useful? Were you expecting to find something in particular in this space? What particular problem is front-of-mind for you right now?
• What do you mean by unusual? You’re exploring an alien spaceship. Everything about it is fundamentally unusual. Where are you focusing your attention?

Discourses on Cursory Curses, and Better Ways to Tempt PCs with Terrible Power

When a player new to modern D&D finds something confusing – vestigial rules, or weirdly specific mechanics – they may wonder why the writers put them in the game. A veteran player will just shake their head knowingly, and cite – chapter and verse – the edition or supplement that set the precedent that later designers felt compelled to follow, even if the game’s fundamental playstyle had since moved on.

D&D 5E.14 is the ultimate compromise edition. This is both its strength and its weakness. In contrast to D&D 4E, which was a stark break from previous editions, 5E sought to embrace and preserve room for any and every concept, playstyle, and idea from the game's history. So while cursed items don’t fit within 5E’s typical play culture – here they are anyway, conspicuous, purposeless, staring up at their ashamed creators. “Why, Wizards of the Coast? Why do we exist?” The cursed magic items receive no satisfactory answer.

The 5E.14 DMG contains a mere half-dozen cursed items. It’s not hard to imagine why 5E’s writers didn’t make more. To begin with, they are no fun. “A curse should be a surprise to the item's user when the curse's effects are revealed,” the DMG advises. This does not comport with modern play styles at most tables. "Gotcha" cursed items feel like a holdover from an adversarial style of play that worked in the tournament environment of early D&D, but made less and less sense as the play culture moved further and further away from that early model.

Sure, we could just leave the cursed items out of the game. I’m sure that’s what many (most?) 5E groups do. But how would we change them if we wanted to fix them instead? 

The Lure of Power

Cursed items in folklore and fantasy stories aren’t like 5E’s cursed items. They don’t masquerade as useful things until a character picks them up and the GM/storyteller shouts “it's cursed!” Instead, they offer legitimate power… at a price ultimately too dear to pay.

So the first part of the cursed item fix is “tempting the PC.” The cursed item must offer legitimate advantages. It must do things the PC normally couldn’t do. It should be a fast track to power.

Curse Removal Made (Too) Easy

Antagonist:

“Cursed be the hand that made these fatal holes!
Cursed be the heart that had the heart to do it!
Cursed the blood that let this blood from hence!
More direful hap betide that hated wretch,
That makes us wretched by the death of thee,
Than I can wish to adders, spiders, toads,
Or any creeping venom'd thing that lives!”

PC:

“I cast Remove Curse.”

Antagonist:

“Oh. Crap. Well, carry on then.” 

Removing a cursed item is too easy in 5E. If a party member stumbles into attunement with a cursed item, they only need to cast Remove Curse, a third-level spell, to remove it again. Clerics typically have access to all spells each time they take a long rest, so there isn’t a “spells known” opportunity cost here, as there would be for a wizard. A fifth-level cleric can select the spell on a long rest and cast it without much trouble (no material components required). In practice, most of these cursed items won’t bedevil their victims for more than a night’s sleep. So the second part of the fix is brainstorming ways to “break the curse” that are more interesting than casting a relatively low-level, catch-all spell.

Let’s tour through the cursed magic items from the 5E.14 DMG and think up some potential fixes.

Next week: Auditing the Cursed Items of 5E D&D