Category: advice

I was recently in a pub, talking to a friend about their collapsed game of Dungeons & Dragons. I was somewhat frustrated by their tale of woe – perhaps the most common tale of woe. I imagined all these decades of people wasting time, just waiting for that one player to be free on Friday.

I decided to solve their problem by writing a patch for the 2024 edition of the D&D Players handbook.

Here’s a PDF to download.

Print it out and slide it in after Page 8.

This is probably overkill, but it breaks my heart, and made me laugh. You can’t resist yourself sometimes. It is actively strange that RPG folks write rules about everything, but have avoided giving actual advice on basic play culture ideas. Generations after generations of players, falling into this particular trap. No more, I say.

Go! Print out! Stick it in manuals worldwide. This can be a better world, or at least one where people go down dungeons and fight kobolds more often.

It may work on other RPGs too.

I wanted to include it on the page, but I ran out of space, but a recent episode of Fear of a Black Dragon discussed this topic at length. If you want further inspiration, you can listen here. The segment starts 19 minutes in.

Thanks to this homebrew toolset which made the homage easy. It’s genuinely astounding work. Also, thanks to Stephanie Hans for letting me use her art from DIE RPG.

I wrote the original version of this as a way to explain how to prep an adventure session in DIE. It ended up being something much more about the fundamental structure of an adventure, full stop. You strip everything away, what does an adventure look like? DIE generates a lot of loose ideas, so giving some ideas of how to organise them felt important. Eventually as the core DIE Rituals game actually comes with a self-organising structure, it became less essential to the book, and so was cut. I was never quite 100% happy with it, but everyone else seemed to find it useful, especially folks who I was primarily aiming it at (as in, new folks.) I’ve tweaked it a little here to be less purely DIE – I think these basic structural shape is a useful way to think of prep in any game which works in this mode.

DIE Rituals has a standard format – a series of necessary encounters you complete before reaching the final encounter. It’s written with a self-creating structure – a check-list of necessary encounters you work though, turning the questions to the players when you don’t know what happens next and so on.

However, especially in a longer DIE Campaign, you may want to have a plan for a session, to arrange your material in something you can use, and the players can find their way through.

In practice, it’s merely a more elaborate version of: “Where are they at the start? Where are they at the end? What’s to stop them from getting from the former to latter?”

This is how we conceive of the various “Elements of an Adventure”.

1. Gates
2. Chests
3. Keys
4. Signposts
5. Smoke Machines
6. Menus

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This was first published via Kieron’s newsletter, a while back.

One of the things which I’ve been chewing over since getting back into RPGs is that there’s so much advice for GMs and so little advice for players. I keep thinking over why – though the whys aren’t what I’m about to write about. This is prompted by seeing some folk believe that there was no such thing as general player advice, and all advice is system/genre specific.

Which got me thinking. Do I think that’s true? As the list below shows, I don’t.

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