Tabletop RPGs

Last week, I posted Reponsive Role-Playing: A Proposal, basically a draft of "best practices" for RPG groups with some ideas for how to ensure that those practices actually happen consistently.

It turns out, that last bit is often the hardest thing about best practices: doing them consistently....

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Players get fed up and leave. DMs get burned out. Why? How can we prevent this? RPGs are social experiences that work best when the players engage in specific positive behaviors beyond simply following the rules of the system.

The group benefits from clarity of purpose, frequent feedback, and simp...

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Some monsters won't attack you on sight, but can be quickly antagonized. They work well as either a weird creature to seek out or as a remarkable enemy.

Occult owls are about twice the size of an ordinary owl. A strange third eye glows in the middle of an occult owl's forehead, leading to legends...

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Pity the average dwarven clan. They toil for decades, even centuries, in out-of-the-way mines deep in mountains, away from civilization, dealing with sudden dangers and unexpected discoveries.

Led by the tough matron Dalrun Blackaxe, after several decades of successful mining through rich veins of...

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The lovely manga Delicious in Dungeon features the monster I'm about to detail, and while your PCs can cook and eat a dryad flower after defeating it, just like the characters in the manga, they don't have to.

Dryad flowers look like beautiful, naked humanoids of a variety of genders (includin...

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I forgot to write a faction until this morning, apparently, so this one will be quick.

The Sages of Twilight are a mysterious organization that collects only lore related to ancient civilizations. They seem particularly interested in societies that collapsed suddenly and violently. Perhaps they se...

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Some factions are created by an environment.

So with Gaxton's Garrison, the soldiers that patrol Wintershold Castle in the coastal city of Blackcrag. Unusually for this part of the country, only about half are peasants fulfilling part of their duties to their lord by serving in the castle for a mo...

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I've been itching to write a fast assassin for a while, one that uses unusual mechanics.

Assassins tend to be very peculiar to a particular campaign, so I'm going with a popular name for this nasty fellow: Mack the Knife.

I want to do two things with this monster: make him deadly against his foe...

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