Dungeon Master Tools – Social Interations

The NPC

Let’s start out with the NPC. How do you create a good NPC as the Dungeon Master? We already talked about this in world building. You can read about that here. But let’s recap it for the basics. You want to create an NPC, add in these things: Name, Defining Feature(s), Brief Description. That’s what you want to start with for it. Maybe add in an occupation as well so you can keep track of who is a shopkeeper, a quest giver, or any other role.

Again, the mantra is keep it simple as you plan out the NPC. If you want to add more to the NPC, add it in the moment. Give the NPC an accent, jot it down where you created your NPC at. That way you remember for next time, though odds are your players won’t remember either. But the big thing is keep your NPC creation simple so that you aren’t over planning and over engineering them.

Social Interactions

This one is tough to give a ton of advice on. The biggest thing to create good and memorable social interactions is to have social interactions in your game. Why, because it just requires practice. There are things like “Yes and” that we’ll talk about with social interactions, but it really is true across the board for your RPG as well.

But let’s face it, as the Dungeon Master the hardest element is coming up with things on the fly. And while you can plan out some combats, and you might know the direction of a conversation with an NPC, you can’t know how the PCs are going to interact with the NPCs.

The player character is being aggressive with the king, what do you do? They are asking about the shopkeepers family, what do you do? They want hire a street urchin as an informant, what do you do?

You need to be able to react in the moment. And you get better at that the more you do it. It’s a skill for players to, what happens if the king becomes hostile to them? But as the dungeon master, you can plan for that, you can’t plan for the players interacting.

“Yes and”

So let’s talk about “Yes and”, it’s probably something you expected sooner. But this is an improv idea of going with the flow. If the players say, “I want to hire the street urchin as an informant” and that isn’t your plan, how do you go with the flow. “Yes and” is the answer. So let’s look at this example I’ve created.

Example – “Yes and”

Street Urchin: I saw the robber run down that alleyway.
Player: Thanks for the information. (pause) We think there is a group of thieves who just came into town, if you keep your eyes and ears open for anything suspicious we’ll pay you a silver a week for information.

As the Dungeon Master, this isn’t our plan, this is a one off NPC that we didn’t even plan ahead of time, now the players want to hire them. So we “yes and” it.

Street Urchin: Sure, I’ll help for a silver a week, but I’m not going to do anything dangerous, and I want a meal every time.

What We Did

So it threw us off our game, kind of. But we created some rules around it. The players now have an informant, it costs them a silver per week, it costs them a meal per week. And the Street Urchin has said that they won’t do anything dangerous. We created some guard rails around the character. And this being an unplanned NPC that matters now, it creates some of our world planning for the character.

Name: Street Urchin (until they ask for a name then have them name it)
Defining Feature(s): Always after a good meal and eager to chat, but is cautious if anything looks hard to do or dangerous since they can’t afford to get hurt.
Brief Description: They are a small, undersized human who is living on their own on the streets. They ran away from home after their village was attacked by goblins. As far as they know their family is dead. And they don’t have enough food or money to go back and find out. But they have been making it on the street by being careful and cautious around anyone who looks dangerous.

Other Social Tips

So what other things are worth noting about social interactions. Firstly, keep an eye on two things that the players do. Players will tend to find NPC’s that they like and NPC’s that they don’t like. Those are your key NPC’s for your game. When you need someone to give out a new quest, go with one of those, on either side. Because it is going to make it more interesting and gives you a framework for good interactions.

What do you do with them, let’s look at the different types.

NPC’s Players Like

So these are going to be the ones that you do a few different things with. The simplest is that the majority of them are just going to continue to be friends with the players. Let’s take the street urchin for example. They just want a friend, they are going to be nice to the players because the players feed them and give them money, they won’t turn on the players.

The next option is that you put them in harms ways. The players are going to want to protect them, so let’s again look at our informant street urchin. They try and be careful but these new thieves are good and realize that the street urchin is informing on them. So the group of thieves go and kidnap the street urchin to lure the players into a trap.

The final option is that you make them betray or always be evil. This is harder for the street urchin, in some ways, but the secret backstory could be that the street urchin is actually the head of the group of thieves and used them to get rid of a bad apple at the first meeting. And now they are feeding them just enough good information that the players trust them while they really are planning and executing a bigger and grander heist.

NPC’s Players Dislike

Now the flip can generally be true, in some ways. The NPC could just stay unlikeable and be a rival to the players. In fact, build them up as an adventurer who gets their own party and is beating the players to completing some things to really drive home that rival feeling. But that’s a rare case, mainly you just keep them antagonistic to the PCs.

It’s also fun, once in a while, to give them an interesting and truly heartfelt backstory. They are abrasive because they don’t trust adventurers. An adventuring party kidnapped their brother and made him work for them carrying around their packs and things like that. And they don’t know where their brother is, the adventuring party left and didn’t come back from an adventure so they fear the worst. But it comes across, until you get to know the NPC as just being mean to adventurers, which the players are.

Now, the final one is putting them in harms way. But why would the players care. Well, you need to tie that to more of the plot. They hire the adventurers to keep them safe, but the adventurers don’t like them, that’s some fun interactions. Or they get kidnapped, but they are important so there is a good reward for getting them back, can that tempt the players?

Final Thoughts on Social Interactions

The best advice that I can give is just do it. You are going to stumble, you are going to need a pause. I’ve ran a game where because of a social interaction we took a ten minute pause to use the bathroom, grab food, things like that. You don’t need to always figure it out on the fly, if you need to take the time to make it work, do that. And the more you have these social interactions the easier it will get. It might never be easy, but it will become easier.

Down to our final Dungeon Master Tools topics:

• Meta Game and Players at the Table

And let me know if there are other things to cover as well that you want to know more about, or help with. I think that there are a ton of different things that new Dungeon Masters are curious about or that feel intimidating. So I hope that I can help make them clearer and simpler for you.

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In our case we have our city of “paradise”, Zenefil, and there’s a deity in the world who has created this for the adventurers to find. Now, that sounds great for our adventuring party, but the world otherwise really sucks. There are powerful chromatic dragons that are ruling the lands with fear.

So this is clearly going to basically be the whole thing getting to the paradise of Zenefil, but generally if something sounds too good to be true, it probably will be. And the deity should definitely have put a limit on how many people can actually get in. So while I said adventurers, everyone and their mother is going to consider themselves adventurers and probably be willing to kill to try and get there. Plus, then you’d have the dragons who would be trying to stop the people from leaving because they need subjects to torture or it’s just dull.

Beyond the dangers of the other people going and the dragons, I’d make it sort of a puzzle/mystery sort of thing where players need to figure out clues and decipher things that the deity is giving them in order to eventually make their way to Zenefil. This will do two things, it’ll weed out some of the weaker NPC’s that they might run into for a while so it becomes less chaotic, it also kind of gives you points of timing for other NPC’s. Beyond that, it allows you, the further they get away from the dragon kingdoms towards Zenefil, they should start seeing more monsters and natural things like that.

You can also add in less natural things as well, depending on what you want to do with Zenefil. Do you want it to be an amazing sanctuary and refuge against the dragons, or do you want it to be a equally as bad, if not worse place. Now, you can have the players need to fight at this point and try and defeat the deity or the deities monsters/henchmen.

This is going to be more exploration focused in some ways as your clues can lead them to various landmarks along the way and put them into unique situations. Also it’ll be an exploration into what the player characters are deciding to do with the other NPC’s that are running about as well. I think that there’s going to be a lot of interesting stories to tell with that, will the PC’s help some less fortunate NPC’s, will they leave an NPC that is injured out there who can be brought back as a nemesis? Is there another group that is their arch rivals? Play around with those emotions and groups of people, heck, even family members.

So, would you run a game like this? Would this be something that you’d do for a whole campaign? For me, this is a higher level campaign, or the second arc of a campaign. If you can set-up the dragons as rulers in the first one somehow, then you could create the paradise/Zenefil part as the second arc at a higher level. It would give the players less competition and more reason to not just worry about their own survival.

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So what are Social Encounters?

It can be talking with the shop keeper to learn about her in order to figure out ways to get a better deals on things. It can be searching for clues to solve a mystery or trying to seduce a dragon, because you’re a bard and in way over your head.

While combat is more “roll play” the Social Encounter aspect is more role play. Like in combat, most social interactions are going to have some point to what the characters are doing. While they might end up talking to the wrong person in the bar for a little bit, give them some interesting information about what’s happening or maybe a new quest. There is a bit of a temptation to make everyone into a quest giver or everyone have something useful, but that isn’t always needed, give yourself leeway to make Social Encounters, like we talked about with Combat, something interesting.

So, like I did with Combat, here are some things to help keep Social Encounters interesting.

1. Make it Part of the Story
2. Balance Characters Being Truthful With Characters Who Are Liars
3. Give Players What the NPC Thinks Is The Answer (Unreliable Narrator)
4. If The NPC Doesn’t Know The Answer, Give The Players Another Option
5. Characters Who Know Nothing Should Still Know Something
6. Find The NPC’s Your Players Like And Reuse Them

1 – Make It Part Of The Story
First is pretty simple, even a random interaction with someone on the street can progress the story. Now, it doesn’t need to always, you can have the moment where the players realize that a character doesn’t know anything, but even that should progress the story. If the Archmage Deniphil sent the PC’s to talk to Lord Zuzu and Zuzu knows nothing and doesn’t even like Deniphil, well, maybe Deniphil sent the players away for a reason. Another example of this would be the Towers of Gods Session 2 that I just wrote about here. They are looking for two spies out of twelve different students, which include themselves, so two out of nine most likely. That means that they are having a lot of conversations that won’t reveal a spy to them, but it’s setting up a dynamic, friendships, enemies (?), that they’ll have to deal with in the story. It isn’t some big dramatic plot moment happening in each of those conversations, but it’s going to inform story going forward.

2 – Balance Truthful and Lying Characters
To me, this is one of the biggest issues that DM’s can run into with NPC’s. And that’s striking the right balance of the truth and the lies that the NPC’s are telling. More to come on the truth in point three, but here we’re talking about balancing the two against each other. The pitfall is that DM’s can have too many NPC’s lie, that’s the issue where it’s a bigger direction. That will mean that you’re PC’s/Players are going to start to treat each social interaction as an interrogation. Which, if you then throw a truthful NPC in front of that, now the PC’s are going to create enemies of NPC’s that maybe should have been their friends. So balance out the two, and by that I don’t mean an even 50/50 split, that’s lying too much. Use lying sparingly with NPC’s who have something to hide, even if it isn’t what the players might think it is. And using lying is even better when it seems like it could be a betrayal as well.

3 – Unreliable Narration
So, we just talked about lying, but I want to talk about the perceived truth at this point. And that’s talking about the unreliable narration of NPC’s. Much like in real life if you were to show people a scene and then ask them questions about it, separately, you’d get a wide variety of answers about things that might seem obvious. Two people who see a robbery happen might give very different description of a thief. Heck, a Gnome is going to see someone as much taller than a 6′ Dragonborn would. So let them get the general details right but get some specifics wrong here and there, and have them be inconsistent with others if it makes sense. This, unlike lying, isn’t being used to trick the PC’s. This is being used because NPC’s shouldn’t have photographic memories and remember every detail every time. There should always be something in there that can help point the PC’s to the right person that they are looking for, or the actual events of what happened.

4 – The NPC Knows Someone
So, sometimes it just makes sense that a NPC wouldn’t know anything. Maybe the players are talking to the wrong person in the bar. Or maybe the person, Lord Zuzu is clueless about where all the money in his land is going. That’s fine that those characters don’t give any story information to the PC’s. But they should be able to point the PC’s forward somehow. Get them closer to the person that they need to get the information from. Lord Zuzu might not know where the money in the land is going, but he’d have a treasurer that would be doing that for him, and he’d know who the treasurer is. The patron at the bar might not know anything, but if the PC’s are at the right bar, the NPC or bartender overhearing everything, will be able to point the PC’s in the right direction. I’d use this sparingly, unless you’re meaning to walk the players through several social encounters to eventually end up with the right person.

5 – No One Knows Nothing
To tie into the previous one, no one knows nothing. Aka, everyone knows something. I just got done talking about how the NPC should be able to point the players to the next person until they get to the information they want. But that isn’t always going to happen. In those cases, if the NPC doesn’t know who they should go to next or anything about what they are looking for, they should still know something interesting. This can be a side quest thing, this can be a contact that they know, it can be that they know about building ships or what mushrooms are edible. No one is going to just be a generic grunt who is able to lift things and punch things and know or care about anything else. Every NPC should have their one thing. This gives the players NPC’s to talk to in the future so that when they find a grove with thousands of mushrooms growing in it, they will remember that the one random NPC they talked in the bar and didn’t know anything useful then was an expert on which mushrooms are edible. Use this sparingly, it’s less interesting, and should maybe be in a situation where the players are going to be talking to a lot of NPC’s in a session to find the one they are looking for because they don’t know enough to narrow their search.

6 – Reuse the Popular NPC’s
Finally, but maybe as important as keeping it tied into the story somehow is keep track of who the players are attaching themselves to as a favorite NPC. Is there someone that they are trusting? Is there an interaction that people seemed to be having the most fun with? Reuse those NPC’s, even if they were just a one off NPC that you didn’t think was ever going to matter and you made up on the fly, if the players and PC’s love them, use them again. If the PC’s are tormenting them, use them again. Whomever the PC’s and players have a strong reaction to whatever way it might be, use them again. This can also give you future plot hooks if something happens to a favorite NPC or maybe a least favorite, but somehow beloved for how bad they are NPC is being framed for something. It’s going to give you leverage to get buy in on story hooks if the players care about the NPC’s that they are after or helping with.

I said that I was going to give some examples of this, and I think that Social Encounters are hard to give examples of because they should be closely tied into your game, so instead of an Encounter, here are some interesting NPC’s.

Marathe
– Shopkeeper
– She Likes to Smoke
– Doesn’t Like to Haggle
– Claims to have the best priced potions in town
– Was a fairly well known adventurer before something happened to her adventuring party

Golden Farb
– Investor
– Loves Money
– Very Shrewd with money
– Always on the lookout to make more money
– Will invest in questionable things but would never admit to it

Mic Taloc
– Barkeeper
– Warlock
– Bar Looks Normal But Actually is a Haven for Warlocks
– Willing to help Warlocks in Trouble
– Can Put You In Contact with Someone To Make a Deal

What I was trying to do creating those NPC’s is that they are all going to have something that they know. Marathe might be able to tell the players where a lost temple is, but also might have a bit of a history and some baggage if the players snoop around what happened to her party. Golden is going to always being try to show off his best side, so anything on a subject that’s questionable, he probably won’t answer. Mic is going to be able to help in a very specific situation when asking about Warlocks, but only if he thinks that you won’t be hurting or are targeting Warlocks.

Just by doing something as simple as that, you are going to have more interesting NPC’s, five simple things that are going to make them unique and hopefully more memorable. And, hopefully, even out of those three NPC’s, one of them will stick and be someone that the players are interested in dealing with or will consistently deal with in the future.

What are some memorable Social Encounters that you’ve had in your games?

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Combat is often just looked at as swinging your sword, shooting an arrow, a spell or two and you beat the bad guy. It’s a chance to roll dice and use most of your character sheet that’s focused towards combat. And that’s certainly some of what you’ll be doing. It does give you a chance to show off your character and what everything on the sheet says that they can do. But when it’s just that, even though it’s the generally the pillar supporting the most weight, it can be a fairly uninteresting pillar, unless you’re just there to be the best fighter that you can be.

Instead, combat should be part of the story, not a break from the story. Though, there may be times with random encounters that a combat doesn’t have a big story element to it, it should always be informing something going forward. Even a random encounter should be used to highlight how dangerous an area is, if there’s a chance of an encounter popping up. It should be a reminder to the players that the world isn’t safe, and while it might not progress the story, not getting in a long rest is going to stress out the players.

So, to build up Combat as a pillar you can do several things to keep it from just being the same thing over and over again, or from feeling like combat for combat’s sake.

1. Make the Combat Encounter Important To The Story
2. Use Alternate Combat Objectives
3. Use Smart/Engaging Monsters
4. Don’t Over Use Random Encounters

1 – Make The Combat Encounter Important To The Story
Already started talking about that a bit, but this is one of the biggest things that you can do to make combat interesting. I ran a one-shot recently where the players had to fight a group of bandits. Now, that wasn’t all that interesting in and of itself, they were just level 1 characters, the bandits didn’t put them in that much danger. However, they found, in the merchants wagon that had been stolen, some interesting documents. Combat was simple, but the documents are now something to lead them further into a story if we decide to continue that game. It’s nothing massive in terms of changing up the combat, but it makes the combat feel like there was a reason for it greater than just killing the bandits. And that bandit fight, since there was a new player to D&D, was mainly to give them a bit of all three pillars not because it was going to be super exciting, but because it was a combat. Only because there was a payoff at the end did it make it all that interesting.

2 – Use Alternate Combat Objectives
This one is one of the biggest, possibly as big as it being important to the story, things that you can do to improve your combat pillar. Not all combat has to be about killing everything. And most of the time you don’t want to kill everyone is because of some story reason. An example of this that you see in Video Games as well as RPG’s is the escort mission. Technically your goal is to get Ms. X from point A to point B without her dying. Now, you can do that by killing everyone you encounter, or you can do that by sneaking herself and your self around. That’s easier to avoid most of the combat in an RPG that way, but you still may have to fight to create a path for Ms. X to get through to complete the mission. Or it could be that someone might escape with something you want if you don’t get through their goons in a certain number of rounds. Or you may need to kill the High Priestess in a certain number of rounds before she can complete the ritual and summon a monster, end the world, whatever it might be. While the players are still using their combat skills throughout, it is going to feel like it’s different than just a hack and slash until everyone is dead.

3 – Use Smart/Engaging Monsters
You can always just do combat as mob of goblins attacking and then mob of bandits rushing in and attacking, and then mob of hobgoblins and so on as the players go up in levels, but that’s going to cause the combats to feel similar. It is kind of a blank canvas fight where you have two sides meeting in an arena or an open field, rushing at each other, fighting, and then one side wins when the other is dead. But goblins, bandits, and hobgoblins should all be smarter than that. In fact, even animals will often attack more intelligently than that. If they are facing off against an Owlbear and it takes down one of the PC’s (player characters), that Owlbear is probably going to try and take that body somewhere safe so it can eat it, not attack the players. So allow the monsters to do smart and interesting things, like run away. Now, maybe the players will shoot the fleeing goblins in the back and none will make it away, but what happens in your story if the goblin escapes? Do they come back with more goblins, do they try and set a trap after a straight forward assault doesn’t work, do they move on somewhere else and now the players are responsible for goblin infestation somewhere else? You can do a lot of interesting things, not just in combat, but after combat with smart combatants. Even in combat, the PC’s are in a bar fight, have whom ever they are fighting hide behind tables after flipping them over, swing from the chandelier (there’s always a chandelier), take a drink in the middle of combat or spit alcohol into a PC’s face. Basically no intelligent combatant is going to just rush straight in to their demise, so don’t run them like that, make the players have to get creative in their combat to beat them.

4 – Don’t Over Use Random Encounters
I already talked about this some, but random encounters generally have more of that animal stalking you while you sleep, rushes in for a kill, and then gets slaughtered, or dragon shows up randomly now PC’s need to run away or turn into ash. However, there are reasons to use them, and that’s because you want to show off what the players might be coming up against on the mission that they’re on currently. Or that the players might need to run or be worried about going through a certain area. I, in the Dungeons and Flagons campaign, used a few giant random encounters, they were meant less as combat but to show the players that they were taking a very dangerous route, shorter but more dangerous, to get to where they wanted to go. But if you’re making the players set-up traps, guards, and anything else they can do to protect themselves each night and it’s more about survival of the night than progressing the story, that might be too many random encounters, unless they are very meaningful.

So, I said I was going to give some examples to steal. Things you can do in your campaign, or interesting combats that you can possibly work in. And I’ll admit it, combat isn’t my specialty so these are going to be a little bit vague. That’s also so you can adapt it to your own game as well.

Combat Encounter 1 – Death of a Salesman

Set-up: The shop owner the players always go to has had something important stolen from his shop, in fact something that was very important to an important client that they’d ordered in especially for that client, the PC’s need to get it back. If not the client will have the shop owner killed.

Combat:
I’d set this in a thieve’s guild or some sort of organized crime set-up, give the players a house to explore and kill the bad guys in the rooms. But since the shop owners life is on the line, they can’t just kick the door down. This is a sneak from room to room and kill as quickly and quietly as possible so that the MacGuffin isn’t moved somewhere else.

This is a chance to do a longer combat where the players never really drop out of combat because it’s such a contained space. They might never be fighting more than two or three thieves or guards or whomever at the same time, but it would ratchet up the stress. Also, with there being a MacGuffin for them to get at the end, there is also an alternate objective. And they are fighting on the mob or thieve’s guild’s home turf, so their combatants would be smart in what they do.

Outcome: Either they get the MacGuffin or they don’t and the shop owner dies or is seriously injured. I’d also use this moment to let them find, no matter what, some information that helps them on their main quest.

Combat Encounter 2 – The Witches Circle

Set-up: There is a coven of witches (hags) who the players need to deal with, mainly because they’ve kidnapped someone for a sacrifice or an animal. This works well for a one shot, stop this thing or something bad happens.

Combat:
I’m throwing undead in here, I think that the witches have raised zombies or skeletons and the players need to fight through those to get to the circle of witches to stop the spell that they are trying to cast.

The witches themselves are in a circle, and killing a witch just makes the circle smaller and the spell have less of a chance of going off. But the main goal for the players is to stop the spell and rescue the person, let’s say not animal in this situation. So the players are going to need to fight through the undead, kill some witches, and all of this should be timed. Give them a certain number of rounds, and after that the spell happens.

Outcome: Either the players save the person, or if they don’t and they haven’t killed any witches, the spell goes off without a hitch. But for each witch from the circle that they’ve killed, say there are ten to start, there is a chance, and an increasing chance that the spell doesn’t go off. So I’d set the target number as rolling at or under a 20 to start, every witch that’s killed, subtract 2, and if all are killed, that means you’d be rolling to get under a zero, but if there are five of the ten left, that means if the witches roll over a 10, the spell fails, though the person still dies.

Combat Encounter 3 – The Beasts

Set-up: Players are out exploring on their way to some mission and they start to notice a presence stalking them. But not just one presence and not just once, several over several times.

Combat: This is an animal ambush, I’m thinking use something like Dire Wolves if that’s an appropriate level for your PC’s, and make them a little bit smarter. Have the wolves run in and out of the shadows and of the woods biting at players, make it so that most of the players clear shots at the wolves are going to be reaction attacks, so pretty mundane attacks. And have the Dire Wolves, beasts, focus on the smallest character first. Not the weakest, it might be that you have a gnome fighter so they can handle it better, but whatever looks like the smallest prey to the beasts, once the beasts have taken their prey down, the smallest prey, they’re going to try and leave with it.

Outcome: Players defeat the beasts who are clearly hungry or the players lose one PC to the wolves.

You can see how in none of these are the players just fighting for the life of their party. Yes, in the first encounter, they might very well all die, but that’s not the only losing condition. For both the Death of a Salesman and Witches Circle, the bad outcome isn’t death of the player characters, it’s death of someone else. In the last one, it’s about losing one player character. So even though they’ll be fighting, we have all sorts of different styles of whom their fighting, the end goal of the fights, and how they should go about fighting.

And that’s what good combat can really be in a game, instead of just hacking and slashing. Now, I don’t think that hacking and slashing is always a bad idea, but it can be lacking and it more so can get old. So be creative as the DM and create interesting combat encounters for the story that aren’t always just about killing everything.

What are some of the best combat encounters you’ve taken part in, either as a player or a DM?

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Since Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy setting, you have magic in the same, I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone. How much magic you have to vary a lot. Some worlds in D&D have a ton of magic with lots of people being able to use small spells and little things, like curing a small wound are going to be magically done or lighting a fire, magic might be faster. There are going to be other fantasy worlds where magic is extremely rare. If you have magic, you have way more value to the nations because of what you can do. In either of them, the PC’s (Player characters) who have magic are going to end up being more powerful than most other casters, because, otherwise, those characters would be saving the world, and you’d still be a farmer.

But within magic, there are a number of different ways that you can get magic or use magic. Which, mechanically speaking, are represented by the different classes you can be. A Cleric and Paladin get their magic from their gods whereas a Druid gets it through nature, a Sorcerer just has it, and a Wizard needs to learn it. That doesn’t even touch on the bard who signs theirs (but just kind of have it) and the Warlock who has made a deal for it. If you know you want to be a magic user, picking your class can help determine what sort of background you have because of how you got the magic.

Bard – This magical mischief maker generally gets their spells from their ability to weave word or song in such a way to alter the world around them either for attack or entertainment. A bard is generally going to be someone who has been trained, but not to improve their magic, but their performance ability. I think that the bard is a class that can be generally used for most backstories.

Cleric – The first of our magical classes that gets their magic from the divine. The god that they are worshiping is giving them the powers and has chosen them as special. In particular, they are giving them powers to help people, and while combat might not be their strong point, but healing and aiding other characters is what that character is going to be the best at. With a cleric, your backstory can be anything but you might want to focus more on a religious background and have it something you’ve been a part of for a while, not something that you just picked up.

Druid – The hippy of the magical classes, the druid is all about nature and their attunement to nature. In some ways, I would say that a Druid is a bit like the Cleric in that they get their magic from the divine, but for the Druid their divine is their connection to nature. The Druid is going to be the caster who has the most connections to nature and natural changes in the world. The outlander or hermit backgrounds actually make a lot of sense for a background for the Druid, because you need that strong connection with nature that makes most sense to be gotten on your own. The trick can be connecting back into the group.

Paladin – Our second divine caster, the Paladin is what is know as a half-caster. What that means is that they have a more limited spell selection and a smaller number of spell slots with which to cast spells. What the Paladin does get is some of the healing abilities of the Cleric but much better punching power with their ability to handle weapons. They also get the ability to channel their divine magic into even more damage, at the cost of casting spells, but I still feel like it’s a spell like affect and is part of their magic. For a Paladin, your background can be much more open, because while they do have that divine magic from a god, their devotion to their religion is less strictly guided like a Cleric’s feels, though, they do need to maintain that collection.

Ranger – Another and last half caster, the Ranger pulls a little bit like the Paladin does from the Cleric, but for the Ranger it’s from the Druid. They get some of the connections to nature that the Druid has, but also then gets more focus in their magic for hunting down their enemies. Unlike the Paladin who has extra abilities they can do with their magic, the Ranger is more focused on just using their spells as spells. Their background is generally going to be fairly open, being a scout in the military or being a hermit all make sense, and even some of the more scholarly ones can make sense.

Sorcerer – The natural of the magic world, the bard might just use music, but the Sorcerer just gets magic. And they get amazing control over their magic. The Sorcerer is an interesting class in that they get things called meta-magics and meta-magic points that they can use to improve their spells. This might mean that they can cast them farther or do so silently so it can’t be countered. This allows a player to specialize their character so that their Sorcerer feels different from others. The Sorcerer definitely can come from any sort of background since their magic can be something that just newly manifested. It’s the magic class that you do if you don’t want to be beholden to anyone or anything.

Warlock – If the Sorcerer isn’t beholden to anyone or anything, the Warlock 100% is. They’ve made a pact with some powerful being, fey, elder god, or demon that is giving them their powers. And the Warlocks magic works differently than everyone else’s. They aren’t a half caster, but they aren’t really a full caster. They get invocations that can really make their cantrips much better so they don’t need as many high level spells, which is good, because they don’t get many spell slots. But when they cast a spell it’s always at the highest spot possible. I don’t know that they are that much harder to play than other casters, but how they work makes less sense. They, because they can have just gotten their magic, do have it in common with the Sorcerer that most any background works.

Wizard – Final one and definitely the most iconic. The Wizard has learned magic. You could say that Bard might be considered a bit of that if you consider them learning their craft of storytelling and performance, but for a Wizard, there are Wizard schools and you study and you need a spellbook to be able to prepare spells for the day. But, as a Wizard, you have access to more spells than any other class. Their specializations also makes it easier for them to learn more spells in certain areas, and while other classes can be capped on how spells they know, a Wizard can always add in more spells if they have the time and money to transcribe them into their spell book. A wizard, the Sage background makes the most sense because they’ve spent at least some of their life in school, but that might not be the defining feature for them.

That’s a lot just looking at the classes and how they use magic, I’m going to spend some time coming up here going into more topics on magic such as spell slots and spells known or high or low magic worlds that I touched on that the top of the article. Some of them will be more player focused and others more dungeon master focused. Is there a certain type of caster that you gravitate to?

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This is a topic that I believe that I’ve touched on before, but I wanted to revisit it, because it’s been a while, and I think I wrote about it a bit more generally. Like I did with Greenfang and building out a town in Dungeons and Dragons, I want to go through the process of building out an NPC when I do it on my best days.

So let’s start out with, what is an NPC? An NPC is a non-player character. The players at the table are playing the PCs (player characters), and the DM is controlling the rest of the characters whom they interact with, whether it’s a shop keep, a quest giver, a priestess, or the BBEG (big bad evil guy/gal) of the campaign. Anyone whom the players are going to interact with and hear what they have to say is an NPC.

What do you have NPCs in your game? I touched on this some already, but the big reason is that it helps flesh out your world. If you have interesting NPCs in your game, you are going to have a world that feels more real and it’ll make the stakes of the story seem like they have more meaningful consequences. If the BBEG kidnaps the daughter of the shop keeper who the players always shop with and have gotten to know his family, that has weight for the PC’s.

Do you need to flesh out all of your NPCs? Yes, and no. You never know who the players are going to decide to follow and make important, so it’s smart to have some idea, but it takes work to make a fully fleshed out NPC. So, no, not everyone needs to have a full backstory, only the ones who are important. And that might mean that you have to come up with some of it on the fly, but when you see who the players are interested and interacting with, you can flesh out that NPC between sessions. And if there is an NPC that is going to be important to the story, you can flesh them out ahead of time as well. It would be too much work to flesh out an NPC every time.

What do you need to plan for a fleshed out NPC in the moment? Alright, so your players decided that the shop keeper Weasel Bob was going to be important and their main spot to do business, because he seemed like he was cool. They start asking you what Weasel Bob looks like and if there’s anything interesting about him. The important things to get started in developing your fleshed out NPC in the moment are going to be something about their look and something that they do or is unique about them. And you don’t even have to do all of this.

You don’t? No, you can ask the players to help flesh out an NPC in the moment. If they make the decisions for that NPC, it’s going to create more of a connection to that NPC as well. If you even have a generic shop keep who runs a generic shop and the players ask what the NPC is named, you can ask them to give you a name and what they look like and probably end up with a pretty good Weasel Bob. That also helps you know when fleshing out the character, based off of what the players said in the session, how to create a Weasel Bob that they are going to enjoy.

This technique works well in the moment when you want to have a bar with a number of people in it or to create a few important people in the bar. Have every player at the table go around and tell you about one person or one table full in the bar. Soon you’ll have a lot of characters that you can bring back into the game later and use again to create that richer and more vibrant world. And it means that you don’t have to generate as much content on the fly, because the players are helping to populate your world with NPCs.

So, now we’ve created a bit of a character on the fly in Weasel Bob, he, like I did with Greenfang is going to be the character that I spend some time fleshing out in future articles so demonstrate how you can spend some time and build out interesting and more fulfilling NPC’s in your game. Hopefully there’s been some useful information to grab from the article thus far on why we use NPC’s in D&D and how you can start to generate more meaningful NPC’s on the fly.

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LEEEEEEROOOOOOOOOY JENKINS!

The barbarian has now rushed the evil wizard. There is one way that this is going to end, with a TPK (Total Party Kill).

What do you do?

Now, there are plenty of ways that this can happen. The one that I gave above is actually one of the trickier situations because one player, the barbarian, has decided that the party is going to fight. And since it is D&D and the party will generally stick together, that probably means that you aren’t going to have them run away from the fight when the fight gets tough.

Before we talk more about what we do, let’s talk about a few other situations where a TPK might happen. The most likely situation is the final boss fight. It can go one of two ways, either the BBEG kills off all the player characters (PCs) or the PCs kill the BBEG. Another way that it can happen is that the players knowingly start a battle that is over their level. In the first example, if the whole party had planned to fight the wizard, that is the parties choice, and you can leave that choice for a likely TPK in the players hands. And finally, the players might be rolling poorly, and you might be rolling hot.

Let’s talk quickly about two of the examples I gave. With the BBEG or when the players know they are fighting above their level, those the players have chosen. It’s known that with the BBEG, the campaign either ends with their success or their failure, there isn’t going to be a next session, at least with the game world the way it is now. And if the players are fighting the wizard, for example, as a group decision, they know that they might not make it, or they should. So in both of these cases, you just play out the game, and you let the dice lie as they have been rolled. And you can get some epic stories of sacrifice or of triumph coming out of these scenarios, but either way the players are going to remember it.

Now, what happens in the case where you are rolling hot, or the player stumble across a conflict that is too dangerous for them, but they don’t know that. You’re in the situation as the DM where you have a few things that you can do.

First, you can pull your punches, if you want. There are two ways that you can do this, you could, for example, limit the power of a wizard. Maybe, in the example at the top, the wizard has already cast her high level spells for today, so she’ll be a challenge, but not as deadly for the player. And maybe, even the she’s down a few hit points. So this challenge that was clearly too strong for them is now going to be at their level. You can also pull your punches with your die rolling and strategy. If you don’t play optimally, and maybe turn a few more hits into misses or saves into fails, now the players are able to take on a higher challenge than they should be without the TPK happening. But this is a flawed solution, because it doesn’t teach the players that there are consequences for their actions. They are now always going to assume that they can fight anything. And, in fact, with new players who have mainly played computer RPG’s that strongly scale monster level, they are going to assume that in the first place.

Second option is that you can just TPK them. Or try to TPK them, make it clear that it’s so bad that they are probably going to need to run away. In the wizard example, have her target and take down the Barbarian. It’ll give the players a revenge story if they want, and hopefully it’ll remind the other players to just run away before they meet the same fate. And if the wizard takes down the barbarian quickly, you can make the reason that she doesn’t hunt down the rest of the PCs quickly is that they aren’t worth her time. So maybe pull your punches a little bit, just have her disintegrate the barbarian instead of dropping the fireball at 7th level on the whole party. This option, can work better, but is clearly harsh. You might end up in the situation where the players ignore all the road blocks and warning signs and still try it, and now you’ve potentially ended your campaign early if you do end up with the TPK.

So, is there a better option, is there something that you can combo together to make it work instead of a TPK?

I haven’t ever TPK’ed a party, but I have, on multiple occasions knocked them out. When they get into a fight above their level, you can just knock them out and take them captive, it might derail your story for a little bit, but it might be better than a TPK. Just come up with a reason that the bad guy is going to knock them out. This doesn’t work well if you come across a pack of ten wolves and the players are second level, but a pack of goblins, sure, they might not kill the players because they want to turn them into a stew later and everyone but the dwarf is too skinny. But, this can’t be the solution for every situation. Like I said, sometimes the creatures wouldn’t have a reason or the mental capability to think about just knocking out or down the players.

There’s also an option for divine or NPC intervention. With divine intervention, it can work in a couple of different ways. If you have a PC who is a Paladin/Cleric or deeply devoted to some deity, you can have their deity intervene. You can also have a deity intervene by making a deal, almost a warlock style pact with a PC. There’s also the option of just a stronger hero or NPC coming along and saving the players. Both of these should still be used sparingly because if you use them too often, again the players feel like they can just go in and fight anything and they’ll be fine if things start getting hairy. Or, you run into a situation where the players start to feel like you’re setting them up to fail just so you can have your NPC have the hero moment. Either case is less than ideal, so use it sparingly.

Finally, I do like the option of killing a PC. Again, this is used sparingly, because you don’t want the whole party to be new every few months because you keep on killing PC’s when they make poor decisions. But have the monster or villain they are fighting kill off one of them. If it’s a villain, they can kill one of them, and then get bored and leave because the party isn’t strong enough to entertain them. Or, if it’s more of a monster, like a pack of wolves, when the wolves get one of the PC’s down, let the wolves start eating that PC, definitely killing them, but that will then either allow the players to escape, or you can give them advantage on their attacks to finish off the wolves because the wolves are distracted. That one is definitely a bit grizzly (well, wolfy) but it would set the tone for the players that they aren’t safe.

With all of this, I think that you need to set the expectations up front. You need to tell the players that in your game, there are going to be things that might be too dangerous for them to fight and that they might need to run. And possibly remind them once in a while of that, because it’s likely that they are going to forget. And, really, sometimes, a TPK might just happen, if the players know what they are getting into, that’s fine. In the wizard example, if they all make the decision to try and fight, let them fight, don’t take that away from them, but maybe leave them nearly dead and trapped in a prison in that case.

Have you accidentally had a TPK? How do you do combat, is everything scaled to the PC’s level?

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So let’s get into some backstory. Out there between the planes there exists two factions of the Gith race, Githyanki and Githzerai. For a long time, they were both under the control of Mind Flayers, but they managed to buck that control and now both war against the Mind Flayers, but the Githyanki, an evil race, don’t really care who get in their way and will pillage and kill as they go tracking down Mind Flayers. The Githzerai are similar in their feelings about Mind Flayers, but tend to keep to themselves.

In our game, there will have been a massive mind flayer infestation that has cropped up in the underdark. Though, as the players, you don’t know that yet. But things on the surface are starting to get interesting.

Duergar and Drow are coming up from the underdark to attack Dwarven clans whenever they can and seem to be making a concerted effort and push to take over some Dwarven strongholds. This amount of coordination seems higher than what Duergar normally are doing, so the players will be sent to investigate the underdark, investigate, but not engage. Down there, they will run across a party of Githzerai, and knowing the players, they will engage them, and be knocked out. That will probably have them going back to the surface to report, where they’ll get sent back down again to confirm that there are mind flayers.

On the surface, there will be changes going on to the lands as a Githzerai tower will have appeared. This beacon is going to bring in Githyanki and their red dragon companions as well as their air ships. The players, when not in the underdark are going to have to try and stop some of the incursions from the Githyanki as well as figure out what the Githzerai tower is and what is going on there.

The interesting part of this game for the players will be the troubles developing on two fronts. If they focus only on keeping the Githyanki away, and the Githyanki/Githzerai hate the Mind Flayers with the burning passion of a million suns so they aren’t leaving, the Mind Flayers are going to continue building up power in the underdark. If they go after the Mind Flayers, the Githyanki and Githzerai are both going to stick around the surface and delve into the underdark as well. So what happens to the surface while the PC’s are gone? The Githyanki are going to do a lot of damage. And it also opens up the question, do the PC’s know enough eventually about the Gith and the two factions to know that the Githzerai could be used as allies without everything ending up being destroyed?

Eventually this game is going to have the players taking on the Mind Flayers, possibly with allies. But then there might be another act where the Githyanki are now seeing what is worthwhile from the material plane and the players are going to have to come back to the surface and deal with the Githyanki or the red dragons who are their allies.

What are your thoughts on this game idea? Would you be interested in a game where there are two battlefronts and you have to choose between the two.

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Do I want to do another epic story like the first season of Dungeons and Flagons where things are going crazy in the world and there are plenty of plane hopping and epic travels around the world and seeing new places?

Or, do I want to do a tighter more defined story that takes place in a single location over a shorter period of time?

That’s somewhat what the second season of Dungeons and Flagons was going to be, though I was adding scope to it to tie it into the previous season.

Now, I’m not going to say that there are either of them better than the other in terms of gaming, but they are both two very different things. And I would say that you should check with your group or give some game ideas, but I’ve been liking the idea of running that tighter more defined single location or small area story.

Why might you want to do one or the other of them?

For the smaller story it’s easier for the DM and the players to keep track of what is going on. There are fewer crazy things happening, and fewer places to really track. There are also going to be fewer NPC’s. In a larger game you are going to have NPC’s from each city and town that they visit. With that though you are going to see a greater variety of characters for the players to interact with and are going to have to plan the story less, in my opinion, because you can always create a new location for what you need.

The advantage of a bigger game is that you can play the fantasy that people think of. People think of Lord of the Rings and Kingkiller Chronicles when they think Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy. They aren’t really thinking about a game that might be more similar to a Dresden Files book where it’s a more tightly contained story. However, if you think about it, Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mordor and getting rid of the ring would make a pretty boring D&D game, what Legolas and Gimli are up to would make a better game, so there’s a balancing aspect so you don’t have to rush through everything to make your characters the main story of the game.

So what do I want to do in my next game?

I think that I want to do a smaller scope game. I liked parts of what I was doing in Season 2 of Dungeons and Flagons, but parts I didn’t too well. The part that I didn’t love too well was the fact that I wasn’t always prepared enough for a small story game. I think that a small location game, I guess I should say over story, requires more planning and focus as I’ve mentioned above. And I was very used to winging it as I had some general beats through the first season I knew I wanted to hit, but beyond that, they could do whatever. The tighter game is a bit more focused and some might call it a bit more rail road, I would disagree with that assessment, but some people might say that. There’s a difference on limiting the location for the story and making the players doing certain things in certain order so the story progresses as expected.

What sort of game do you enjoy? Do you like the big epic game or the smaller game?

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For the purposes of this post, I’m going to make a couple of assumptions:

1. You’ve already gotten the books
2. You’ve already roped some friends into playing with you

So, with those assumptions out of the way, let’s hop into the first topic:

Where in the World are you going to start?

I capitalized “world” for a reason — this part is going to be about world-building. It is one of the bigger things that eats into a DM’s time, and how you set up your world will make a big difference in your game. There are countries, continents, oceans, cities, and all sorts of other things that you need to think about when creating a world. You then follow that up with who is ruling this country, who is the mayor in that town, who runs the bar, what are the guards’ names, and so on. Next, you’ll need to come up with about 100k different Non-Player Characters (NPCs). Which sounds miserable.

Or instead of starting from scratch, you could spend a bunch of time reading D&D books to learn the history and lore of the land, and once you have all the backstory down, you could lay your own story on top of it — for example, you could develop your own version of existing worlds like the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, or Ravenloft. But again, this seems like a ton of work if you are just picking it up on the fly.

So what is one to do?

I’ve had luck with two different ways of world-building. I’ve used the Forgotten Realms as a base and placed my own city and my own little area on the Sword Coast and just ran a game that was completely unconnected to the rest of the D&D world but that was set in a place that already existed. I didn’t have to come up with what the land looked like; I could see it on a pre-made map. I was able to build out my own city creating a handful of different NPCs that the PCs (Player Characters) interacted with. This worked quite well, especially for a short game that ran for a handful of sessions. The players were in a limited area, and they were given solid direction within that area. If that game had been meant to go on any longer than just a few sessions, I would have needed to start studying up on the greater Sword Coast area.

The other way that I’ve done it (and the way I’m currently doing it for the world in Dungeons & Flagons) is to create a small chunk of the world as I go. I had only created the town of Green Sparrow in any depth, and knew some about the Lieth Barony. East Tadalia and Barbuga were both made up on the fly. Once I knew that the characters wanted to and were going to go to Barbuga, I sat down and came up with the seven pirate princes, and fleshed them out and drew a map of the island so I knew what that looked like. But even with this method, I still allowed Wizards of the Coast to do some of my work for me. For example, Chauntea is an actual D&D deity of nature, so I just piggy-backed off of that at some points.

Checklist Version:

1. Start by picking an area where the players are going to start the game.
2. Figure out what towns are nearby
3. Figure out any important taverns/buildings in the town
4. Figure out any important people in the town
5. Make it a living world

Item #1: Keep this a small area. I’m going to suggest setting it on a coast; this makes it easy to create a reason for all the players to be together. Also surround it with wilderness on the other sides. You don’t have to plan wilderness so much; you just need to know the type of terrain for it, and now you have a large play area to start with. You can draw a map of this area if you want, but it won’t always be needed. However, it might be necessary as you get to larger places, just for your own reference, even if the players never see it.

Item #2: Keep your main town smaller-sized. Even if the characters are from the big city, it is very possible for them to be traveling up and down the coast. And with a smaller city, you don’t need to plan out that large an area all at once.

Item #3: Most coastal towns are going to have a number of basic things going on. Docks of some sort, inn/taverns, and a handful of shops, for example. Decide what the important places are, and just focus on developing those, or allow your players to create them. The Stacked Fishwench, our tavern in Dungeons & Flagons, was clearly made up on the fly, and I didn’t even have to give it a name myself. But the name of the tavern clearly implies a bunch about the place, so I just ran with it.

Item #4: Again, keep this simple. Create the captain of the town guard, a mayor, the major players in the town, and not many others, to keep the number lower — both to make them easier to keep track of, and so you don’t have to do so many voices. For example, you can have a standard NPC bartender who has a single voice across multiple towns; you don’t have to be a person of a million different voices like Matthew Mercer to run an entertaining game.

Item #5: Even though you might have only built up a small section of the world, spend time making it a living world. Know how your PCs might affect what is going on in the world, for better or worse. Know that if they leave one thing alone, something else might happen elsewhere. Give the players real choices to make in your world, and as the world grows, have events happen that your PCs have only heard hints about; that makes the story even more immersive for the players.

Most importantly, make the world yours. If you want to spend the time up front to build a huge world in which you know the inns and outs of every town, you can do that. Just know that whatever you come up with, the important thing is to have fun doing it, and to give the players an ability to make a difference in the world.

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