Loaded Dice: Books 4-6: My Storytelling Guides

Copyright © 2024

Aron Christensen & Erica Lindquist

and Loose Leaf Stories

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-64319-148-5

Cover art by Tithi Luadthong

Edited by Erica Lindquist

This book and its author are not associated with any specific role-playing game company or system.

Well, except for Snake Eyes. But that’s our system, so it’s okay.

Find more of our books at LLStories.com

CONTENTS

Loaded Dice 4

Introduction

I. About Storytelling

Fixed points in time

Putting characters through hell

A whole new world

Does the Storyteller need to know all the rules?

World-building toolkit

When the game stops being fun

Nothing is carved in stone

Checking boundaries

I’m terrible at puzzles

Narrating your RPG

II. Plotting, Pacing & Running the Game

What would you like to do?

Mastering mastermind plots

Keep a shenanigans list

Map, Dragon, Treasure

Attainable, exciting, rewarding

Tanking for Storytellers

Crafting a big world

III. Non-Player Characters

Razorsnout, our best friend for five minutes

Quick and easy guide NPCs

IV. Rules & Mechanics

Luck of the dice

Running for large groups

The Rule of Cool

Opportunities

V. Players & Player Characters

Flexible PCs

Tragic backstories

Your audience

Phone home

Role-play amongst yourselves

Character backstories

Give your Storyteller a heads-up

Being the center of attention

Backstory versus personality

Player versus player

Also by Aron Christensen

More by Aron & Erica

Loaded Dice 5

Introduction

I. About Storytelling

How to tell what’s strange in an RPG world

No But

Basic descriptions

Your plot’s in the way of my character

Putting the pieces together

Transparency

Dramatic damage, part 1: Storytelling

Dramatic damage, part 2: Mechanics

What rhymes with riddle? Part 1

What rhymes with riddle? Part 2

II. Plotting, Pacing & Running the Game

Foreshadowing

When to roll for initiative

First impressions

The story the dice tell

Sweet & simple

Making waves

Chonkers: Large monsters versus hordes of small ones

Avoiding the wind-down

Fight scene flow chart

1 hit point left

Practice makes perfect

Maturing minions

Tactics shmactics

The battle of the hot potato

Random encounters

III. Non-Player Characters

What’s their name?

RPG crypto

RPG crypto follow-up

NPCing someone else’s character

IV. Players & Player Characters

Survival at a cost

What would my character do?

Focus at the table

Player paranoia

Ass out of you & me

Naive characters

Phasing out characters

Rules buddies

Players, characters & the waterslide

Also by Aron Christensen

More by Aron & Erica

Loaded Dice 6

Introduction

No one fix

I. About Storytelling

Role-playing makes us all children

No-win scenarios

Individualist parties

How to run a war

How to (and why to) be a total tool

Fair play?

My first X card

My party is sneaking past EVERYTHING!

Scaling evil

Encourage player interaction: Stir the pot

Grounding questions

Storytellers don’t need to be at a professional level

II. Plotting, Pacing & Running the Game

Challenging but not impossible

One way out

Value shifts

Down for downtime

Hurdles

It’s not just about the destination, but the journey to get there

The alley-oop

Challenge or certain death?

Difficult doesn’t have to mean confusing

Hurry up and wait

Divination

III. Non-Player Characters

Villain motivations: Greed

Villain motivations: Power

Villain motivations: Pure destructive drive

Villain motivations: Revenge

Villain motivations: They’re just evil

Villain motivations: Corruption

Villain motivations: Heroism

IV. Players & Player Characters

Players need to play along

Your party is a character

The worst laid plans

YOU can prevent Storyteller burnout – Part 1

YOU can prevent Storyteller burnout – Part 2

YOU can prevent Storyteller burnout – Part 3

YOU can prevent Storyteller burnout – Part 4

Mad & loving it

RPGs as catharsis

A diversified party portfolio

Too much of a good thing

Not my thing

Retirement parties

Slow cooking

Individual yet ensemble

The needs of the many

Reflecting level-ups in game

How do you want to do this?

High initiative can be high stress

Also by Aron Christensen

More by Aron & Erica

INTRODUCTION

Hello and welcome back to our fourth volume of Loaded Dice! Thank you once again to all of our readers and players who keep this whole thing rolling – pun intended!

After several years of writing for The RPGuide blog, our stack of posts has gotten deep. So here are our favorites from the fourth year. This volume has the all usual sections on Storytelling, plotting and pacing your RPG, non-player characters (NPCs), juggling game rules and mechanics, and advice for players about creating characters and then playing them in a team sport like role-playing games.

Whether you’re new to RPGs or have been gaming for years, come learn from our mistakes and take advantage of our experience. We highly recommend reading at least the first Loaded Dice, but also consider My Guide to RPG Story­telling, My Storytelling Guide Companion, or From Dream to Dice. You don’t need to read them, but it might help.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with role-playing games (RPGs), here’s a brief run-down from the first Loaded Dice:

WHAT IS AN RPG?

We get asked this question a lot. Erica and I like to go out and grab some food after game, and when asked what we’ve been up to, we answer role-playing… And get a lot of blank stares. If you’re here and reading our books, you probably know what a table-top RPG is.

But maybe not! A lot of people don’t know much about gaming. This chapter is for anyone who doesn’t understand what RPGs are, or who struggles to explain role-playing to someone else.

This is for your parents, your kids, your co-workers, your non-role-playing friends who are trying to imagine what is it you’re doing when you tell them what you’ll be up to this weekend.

Role-playing games are also known by the shortened acronym RPG. And these are the table-top variety, so they’re not video games on a console, your phone or computer. They’re not a field game like soccer or baseball. They aren’t quite choose-your-own-adventures like the books or Netflix’s interactive film, Bandersnatch – but they’re closer than anything else, so let’s use choose-your-own-adventures as our jumping-off point.

RPGs are like a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) in that they are centered on a narrative story that you have some influence over. In both an RPG and a choose-your-own-adventure, when a story event occurs, you get to choose what to do, which determines what happens next. Some video games – also known as RPGs – let you do that, too.

But a table-top role-playing game is far more open-ended. And you get to play with your friends! So grab some imaginary dice – we’re going to play a sample RPG.

Here’s how it goes, more or less. I’m the Storyteller – also called the Dungeon Master, Game Master, Holmeister, or several other titles depending upon the game system – and I’m marginally in charge. I’m the one who created the story and who narrates the events of the campaign.

You’re a player! I’m probably going to need more than one player, so bring some friends. We’ll gather in my living room or a table at the local gaming shop – hence the name table-top RPG – probably with some snacks. RPGs take a long time to play, so you’re going to get hungry.

Time to make the character who will interact with my story. Unlike a choose-your-own-adventure or most video game RPGs, you get to make your own character. Not just select their hair, cos­tume or gender – though you get to choose that, too. But what’s their name? What drives your character? What are their hopes and fears? Now we’re getting into something more like improvisational acting!

As you develop your character, the Storyteller – which is me in this example – will provide some feedback and guidance. Maybe my story is a fantasy tale of political and magical intrigue, and I don’t know how much fun you’re going to have playing the castle stable hand. But maybe the wizard’s apprentice…? If you like that idea, great! Then that’s the character we’ll create. If not, we’ll work to­gether to craft some other ideas.

Role-playing is collaborative, and I’m on the same team as my player to help them have fun.

Your character also gets stats – written up on a paper or digital character sheet – to determine how good they are at certain things, like running and fighting and solving riddles. Maybe you’ll have some special tricks or powers that your character can use, like magic spells, neat combat moves or wielding political clout.

So now you and your friends have a little band – or party – of characters. We’ve created them together because as the Storyteller, I need to make sure your character has a comfy place in the game (also called a campaign). You’ve got character sheets and a handful of the right kind of dice. Dungeons & Dragons uses a traditional D20 set, and White Wolf is rolled with a bunch of D10s, while Snake Eyes uses just a pair of standard 6-siders.

Usual notation for dice is a letter D, then the number of sides on the die – a D20 is a 20-sided die, a D10 has ten sides, and so on.

Next, you need something to do with your new character. So now it’s time to begin telling my story and playing the game!

I start off by describing a scene. I might give a little history, or talk about the state of the imaginary world your characters are a part of… Then I come to you! I will describe where your characters – player characters, also called PCs – are and what they’re up to when the adventure begins. Then I narrate something happening.

Maybe someone comes up to talk to your character. You – speaking as your character – get to answer their questions. Maybe you ask some questions, too, if you feel like it. All in your character’s voice, using those mannerisms and motivations that we worked out together.

Unlike a video game, there are no pre-set dialogue options to choose from. And unlike a choose-your-own-adventure book, you don’t just pick one of the possibilities and then flip to another page. In my story, you can say or do (just about) anything that you want. I’ll have all the supporting and background characters react to you. And all the players get to react to each other, too.

Maybe it’s not a conversation that starts things. Maybe the PC party is on the road and they’re suddenly attacked by goblins! Perhaps you and your friends fight back, or lead your attackers on an exciting chase!

This sort of action scene is what most people imagine when they think of role-playing, and it’s the meat and potatoes of table-top RPGs. You get to use those stats and dice in fights or chases, but you still get to make the choices. Of the monsters charging at you, which one do you want to go after first? What skills or powers or weapons do you want to use against it?

In a choose-your-own-adventure book, the reader only gets two or three options. In a video game, you have powers and weapons, but can only deploy them in limited ways. What if you don’t want to hit the bad guy with your sword? What if you want to catch the sunlight on its blade and shine it into the villain’s eyes to blind them as the other characters sneak in close?

In a table-top RPG, you can do just about anything you can think of. It doesn’t have to be written in advance like a book, or coded and scripted like a video game. If you can imagine something, then I can think of what your character needs to roll in order to do it. Now let’s roll those dice and see what happens!

The dice stay on the table and the rules remain on the character sheets, but everything else happens in the minds of the Storyteller and players. It’s playing make-believe with a few rules attached, so there’s a staggering number of options. And while you’re coming up with your own ideas, all the other players are doing the same thing. And the Storyteller is weaving it into a single narrative. It’s a collaborative story – one that all the players and the Storyteller create together.

When I play video games, I can’t help but grumble when I have to choose from a limited set of pre-determined dialogue options, none of which is what I really want my character to say. Or I try to shoot out a support to drop the roof on some villain’s head, but my video game bullets can’t damage background objects. I just can’t read a choose-your-own-adventure book when I can think of better things to do than the options on the page. I’ve been spoiled by the freedom of table-top RPGs, and the joy of creating a story with my friends… But it seems like a small price to pay to play in stories together. If you’ve never role-played, I highly recommend it.

FIXED POINTS IN TIME

– BY ARON –

I’ve been a Doctor Who nerd since the Pertwee era, but for those unfamiliar with timey-wimey antics and Time Lords triumphant, a fixed point in time boils down to this has to happen for the plot and nothing can change it.

We’ve written before about plot armor, where an NPC can’t die be­cause the plot requires them to live. That’s one kind of fixed point in time – a moment in the game that cannot be changed, no matter how much the players try to affect it. Another kind is where some­one has to die – the opposite of plot armor – and you can’t let the players save them, no matter what.

Whichever way it goes – keeping someone alive or making damned sure that they die – a fixed point in time is just another name for a plot hammer. But plot hammers are to be avoided. They make the players feel powerless, rob them of their agency, and break immersion in the game.

So if a fixed point in time is so bad, why are we talking about them at all? As we discussed with plot armor, sometimes you just really need that NPC and perhaps didn’t even mean to put them in danger. Or sometimes a fixed point sets up something crucial so that your plot can go forward.

In the game that I’m currently running, I have several NPCs on my plate. The story came to a point where it was very in-character for one of the NPCs to do something really stupid and get themselves killed. That’s one less NPC for me and if I play my cards right, a powerful emotional scene. Plus, then I get to take an under-used NPC and drop them into the dead one’s place.

So I ran with it and the NPC went off to be stupid and brave. The party healer tried to save the NPC’s life, of course. She’s the group healer, it’s what she does. And as she described her character running to the dying NPC and trying to save him – literally stuffing the poor guy’s spilled guts back into him – I thought to myself: She’s working so hard at this. How can I just make her fail?

I really wanted to shuffle some NPCs and needed to lighten my Storytelling load a little, but was that worth just shooting one of my players down? I decided the answer was no.

Not that I changed my mind about the goal, and I didn’t want to undercut the dramatic tension that was already building. The player characters pushed themselves to go after their runaway NPC friend and were willing to risk their lives to save him, so I didn’t dare take away the high stakes that I had set up. But what I could do was take a look at what other options I had for accomplishing my goal.

Goal: Remove NPC so that I have one less person to role-play. Replace with another NPC that’s not getting enough screen time.

Options: Kill the little bastard. Whew! Now he’s gone.

Usually that’s it for me. I used to be a real hard-liner on my fixed moments in time. I’m a writer, and I’m a story-first Storyteller. Plot over rules every time. And I got myself into a habit of prioritizing plot over dice rolls as well, which was sometimes hard on me and my players, and didn’t even have the effect that I wanted.

My players always follow my plots, but often surprise me with creative ideas. I just didn’t want to take that freedom and ram it through a plot-driven choke point. So I took a mental step back and looked at some other ways to accomplish the same goal.

OTHER OPTIONS:

Allow the wounded NPC to survive, but so battle-scarred that he can no longer do his job in the party and must retire to a new career path.

Allow the NPC to live, but become so embittered by his near-death experience and the dramatic circumstances that put him here that he drops out of the party.

The NPC lives, but they must strike out on their own to seek a resolution for the dramatic circumstances that almost killed them, so he drops out of the party.

No matter how it played out, I got what I wanted – removing this NPC from the player party and bringing in the new NPC. Instead of a fixed point in time that my players just could not change, I created a crisis on the spot for the healer to use her life-saving powers while the rest of the party held off the villain that mortally wounded their friend. I made it a difficult series of rolls, sure, but I put the death or survival – and the manner of that survival – back in the players’ hands.

The dice weren’t playing ball, and so it turned out that they couldn’t save the NPC. I got to use my last words speech unmodified – I came up with some last-minute alternatives in case he was just retiring – and got the whole table sniffling. The PCs hate the villain now, which is how they should feel. But they got to do something about the situation, and even if they couldn’t save the NPC, they got to take their shot.

I’m really pleased with how it went. And because it worked out so well, I think it helped me get out of the trap of falling into those fixed points in time. I may still need to have certain things happen from time to time, but the trick is to keep my mind open about how I accomplish my goal. How many ways can I think of to do what I need to? All of those options become avenues that the players can take now, giving them back their agency.

I want to point out that cutscenes don’t necessarily count as fixed points in time. I’m using the term cutscene, like a cinematic in a video game, to refer to something that I narrate to the players that is happening away from their characters. It’s out-of-game knowledge, and the characters don’t know what’s happening in the throne room of the big evil villain. But sometimes I want the players to know to set a scene or create tension. My gaming group is great and almost never metagames with that information.

In a cutscene, the villain might execute a prisoner or begin phase two of their evil scheme but in this case, the players don’t get to affect the outcome. They’re not even in the room.

If there’s a fixed plot point that just needs to happen in your RPG campaign, perhaps it should be a cutscene. If you put it in front of the characters and then refuse to let them impact what’s happening, then it’s just a plot hammer. But almost any fixed point of time in a plot can be unfixed. Even giving the players two outcomes instead of one, then letting them try to achieve the one they want is a huge improvement to your game.

PUTTING CHARACTERS THROUGH HELL

– BY ARON –

I recently sent the player characters of my game to hell. Literally. Specifically, a twisted realm of the dead called the Hell of Burning Scrolls, which was made to torment academics, scholars, and other thinkers. Appropriately enough, the party ventured into hell in search of knowledge.

Now, I figure that in any game, a realm referred to as hell is a truly terrible place. It’s not supposed to be a walk in the park, it is supposed to be suffering – but only for the characters, not the players. I worked very hard to walk the line on that, and my group really enjoyed their trip to hell – though their characters obviously didn’t.

SO HOW DID I LITERALLY TORTURE THE CHARACTERS WITHOUT TORTURING MY PLAYERS?

Hell is a dangerous place, so it would be easy to have high-level demons just slap the characters around, rain fire on their heads and push them right up to the brink of a total party wipe – or over it. But how much fun is it to get beat up like that? For the players, not much.

Instead, I use mood and setting to push my player characters to the edge of comfort (but not over), to that place on the edge of their seat where they’re on high alert, taking chances and covering their asses at the same time, and shuddering each time something new happens. Some carefully-crafted description and a little focused pressure establishes a mood, gets my players to engage, and to buy into the horribleness. Before long, they all creep themselves out worrying about what’s around the next bend in the darkened tunnel so that I don’t have to actually do all that much to their characters.

Let me tell you about the Hell of Burning Scrolls, and what it did to my players and their characters. The hell is a blazing plane of cracked and tortured earth. Stones burst out of the crust or stand stacked in tottering towers, all on the edge of falling – without ever tipping. Canals are gouged deep into the land, running with sullen red magma and flowing in twisted patterns that spell out unfathomable obscenities. The red sky is choked with black clouds, and sparks kindle as the air itself catches fire now and then.

So… it’s hot. Pretty standard for hell, right? Sure. So I gave the Hell of Burning Scrolls a twist – the landscape is covered in written words in thousands of languages, etched and scorched into the very stone and ash and baked earth. And then the characters caught sight of the first souls trapped in this hell – ragged forms crawling along the ground, reading the writing. The lucky ones have a few scraps of blackened paper on which to take notes, but most are forced to carve their findings into their own flesh with sharp stones or jagged bits of metal.

Why? Well, because the lord of the Hell of Burning Scrolls is a demonic scholar. He demands that the secrets inscribed on the rock be brought to him, and those that learn enough to pass the exams gain admittance to his library – a twisted tower palace powered by a demon furnace. Those who pass the tests enter and get promoted up the tower.

Those that fail the tests are demoted down the tower, and those that get demoted all the way down to the basement are fed to the furnace. What remains of these poor souls who didn’t study hard enough become Shushers – charred skeletons robed in smoke that can hush other souls like creepy librarians, literally smothering their voices and even magical mental communication.

As the PCs stood there, taking all this in, I narrated something on the tip of their tongue that they couldn’t get out, something that they forgot that they couldn’t quite remember. And as they looked down at the broken and burnt ground, they watched new words being etched into the land at their feet – their own knowledge sucked out of them and inscribed on the surface of the hell. All those souls out there, trying to scrape together enough secrets or wisdom to earn a place in hell just a little less awful, were cutting notes into their flesh even as the hell stole away their own memories and skills.

The PCs did have to run from an actual rain of fire because, well, this is hell. They finally made it to the dubious shelter of some caves where it was a little cooler, but also where rebel souls had holed up inside, preying on those who sought what little solace the caves could provide.

That’s what my group had to deal with. But what did I actually do to their characters? Not that much, really. First, the oppressive heat gave them all a universal penalty as the hell parched them and hit each character with low-grade heat exhaustion before they had gone two steps. It stung, but wasn’t a big deal.

Second, the Hell of Burning Scrolls was hungry for knowledge and began eating away at their memories. Everyone got a roll to resist the drain, and only one PC failed. He lost a tiny bit from one skill, player’s choice of which. And I explained how the hell would eat every bit of every skill until it began to gnaw on their intelligence. It would be a long process to fail that many rolls – no one was actually in danger of losing that much – but every single player shuddered.

Then the rain of fire did some actual damage to them, which is pretty standard fare. A few of the party got moderately hurt, but nothing they couldn’t heal – also nothing that they could afford to keep healing if it happened too many times, though. But still, they were on top of things.

The party found some shelter and began trying to discuss next steps. They had to discover the secret knowledge that they came here for, and they needed to get away from the hell’s power eating their own knowledge. Could they risk taking notes like all of the wretched souls out there? Gambling that they could find what they needed or reclaim what skills might be leached away before they lost even more?

And while they were discussing this, a Shusher floated by and silenced them. They had to stop talking while I narrated a ghastly thing with a blackened finger held up to lipless, scorched teeth, the wind prying ashy flakes from its body. The characters could have killed it easily – Shushers don’t even fight – but would that alert others? Would it do any good? So they huddled and waited until the Shusher left, hoping the whole time that it would leave before the hell ate anyone else’s skills.

And then they made it to the caves to fight against some des­perate souls who were looking for a way to die.

That was it. All told, the characters suffered a minor penalty, and one of them lost a little off of his least-favorite skill. They took some damage that they healed, and fought a combat that they handled competently.

That doesn’t sound like very much. No one was tormented, no one died, and I didn’t even beat anyone half to death. The characters didn’t actually suffer very much. But wow, were the players ever creeped out. They wanted to leave so badly! Every little thing that I described just made them curse this place. No one for a second doubted that they were in hell. Being there for a short time was awful, and every time I made them imagine being imprisoned there for eternity – using the wretched souls there as models – it just intensified their already terrible opinion.

But… my players had a great time. Hell was creepy but cool, they succeeded in their crises, and they have almost found what they’re looking for. (As of this writing, they’re still in the middle of this adventure.) They were engaged with the story that took them to hell, and with the hell’s theme and dangers. I didn’t have to club them over the head with giant monsters or do a lot of hit point damage to make them fear and loathe the place.

Over the course of most game campaigns, player characters go to dangerous places. That’s where villains live and scheme – so that’s where the hero’s journey leads them. But even in the nadir, the dragon’s cave or literal hell, this is a game and it should be fun.

A WHOLE NEW WORLD

– BY ARON –

For every gamer, there’s a first time that they ever tried an RPG, and a first time they’ve explored any particular game setting. Every time and for every player, there’s a learning curve. And it goes double for the Storyteller – they have to learn the setting and also teach it to the group. That’s true whether the players read the source material or not; not every player has the time or inclination to read a game manual or tie-in novels. And if you are running a home­brew setting, there might not even be anything like a manual.

If you feel comfortable doing so, jump right in! Wing it and learn as you go along with your players. It’s a fast and low-prep way to dive into your game.

But that’s not how I do things. I’m neurodivergent and every day is about controlling unknowns so that I don’t melt down. So I like to prepare.

I write up extensive notes for my home­brew settings, and even take notes on published game worlds, highlighting things that I want to use. I watch tie-in movies or read the novels obsessively before a game so that I can match the style and lingo, or draw on details to make sure that both I and my players are as immersed as possible.

But no matter how prepared I and some of my players are, some players show up to game without any research. Not everyone wants to make an obsessive study of a game like I do – and that’s fine! So then it’s my job to teach the game world to my groups, especially if I’ve made any changes or created any personalized canon, as I often do. And using a few pretty simple methods, I’ve introduced my players to game settings and home­brew worlds that they now know as well as any other media franchise.

It begins at character creation. A player may want to be a spellcaster or a warrior, but where those people come from and how they get their skills in this world may vary. Character creation is my first chance to share lore about the world, usually in fairly broad strokes. This kingdom over here is really magical, this alien species has a long warrior tradition, and so on. When they pick a kingdom or a world to come from, there are some things they should know about it. Who their ruler or governmental body might be, if they have any long-standing traditions – anything that an average person from that place would know.

When game begins, I’m pretty free with the exposition. I don’t ask that anyone make skill checks to know what the capital city is, or about basic history. While the American school system has got a lot of problems and some egregious oversights, most American kids know the three branches of government, who the president is, and some major points of national history. Pitching exposition from that point of view shapes the characters just like it does real people. Most every character has had a childhood in their homeland, and probably been taught that their nation or planet is the best one. Learning their own incorrect assumptions and the hidden lore of their home can come in later, with skill checks, role-playing and effort.

And when it comes time to make early-game decisions about things like which road to take or how to get in to have a talk to the local governor, I tend to give my players multiple choice options, instead of the open-ended What do you want to do? Where does the party want to go? Well, if they don’t know anything about the world and setting, how can they answer? They can’t decide to visit the astral kingdom if the players don’t even know that it exists. Instead, NPCs might put some jobs on offer, or even come to the party with a desperate quest to a specific place – and a backstory about the quest so that they understand what is being asked of them.

After they’ve learned to walk, then it’s time to run. As the players settle into the world and come to understand more about it, they can add their own touches to the lore, their character’s personal history – how they interact with the game world – and discover whatever dark secrets or hidden truths wait to be learned.

DOES THE STORYTELLER NEED TO KNOW ALL THE RULES?

– BY ERICA –

How important is it that whoever is running the RPG table knows all of the rules of the gaming system? The answer seems to vary depending upon who you ask. Entirely valid answers range from very important; it inspires confidence in the game, the story, and the Storyteller to not at all; it slows things down when you could be jumping into a campaign and learning as you go.

I can see the utility in both answers, and have played with Storytellers who run the gamut. It does inspire trust and helps the campaign run smoothly when the Storyteller knows the system very well. It’s also fine when they don’t know it well, and need to stop frequently to check the manual. It slows down play a bit, sure, but nothing that’s proved to be a deal-breaker.

So… what’s the point of this chapter? First, something that I’d like to warn you not to do. And then some thoughts about a middle ground on just how much studying to do before you jump into an RPG campaign.

There are a lot of ways to Storytell a game, most of them great. But mechanically, consistency is vital. If you don’t know the system, don’t just make it up! House rules are one thing, or if you can’t find some rule buried in the game manual and have to make a call before the session grinds to an absolute standstill. But we once knew a Storyteller who didn’t know the rules of the system that they were running at all… And more or less refused to learn them.

Everyone made characters according to the rules of the RPG, but he rarely used them to roll. Rather than look up just about any mechanic, he would tell the player to roll a 20-sided die, then tell them what happened. If players asked if a skill bonus applied, he just shrugged. There was no apparent consistency about what number the players should be shooting for – high or low rolls didn’t seem to matter one bit. They succeeded on 3s or 5s, and failed on 18s or 19s. Players offered to look up the grappling or crafting mech­anics, or desperately asked if their brawling or smithing bonuses applied, but that would be answered with another shrug. Just roll a D20.

It was a mess, with absolutely no agency for the players. The Storyteller determined everything, and the rules that they had all agreed to when they signed up for the campaign meant absolutely nothing. When asked to please explain