Fundamentals
- Be inclusive (roleplaying)
- Roleplaying games is about the players
- Three pillars of roleplaying games
- Social encounters is a pillar of roleplaying games
- Combat is a pillar of play
- Exploration is a pillar of roleplaying games
- Downtime & crafting could be a pillar of play
- Too much action drains the players
- The pace of a game
- Ask players what they want
- You can guess where the adventure will go, but not know
Campaigns & Game masters
- Dungeon master session preparation
- Prepare to throw any preparation away
- Campaign hook
- Session zero
- Building a lazy campaign
- Three fronts for a campaign
- Six truths
- Spiral worldbuilding
- Test boss fights
- Take notes of NPC - party relations
- Secrets and clues are anchors
- Remember the name of your players characters
- Call your players by their character name
Perspective & Perceiving the game
- Players want to be empowered
- Players want to do awesome things
- Players have different investments levels
- Rolling stats is fun
- Rolling stats is unfair
- New players who watch roleplaying streams are used to roleplay
- Breaking the boundaries of the game is fun
- Breaking the boundaries require sacrifice
- Routinely breaking the boundaries is not fun
- Let players summarise the previous session
- Background music is immersive
- Physical objects immerse players and GMs
- players want magic items
Story telling
- Upward and downward beats
- Rotate between pillars of play
- Villains think they’re justified
- ‘What do you do’ is an indicator to the pace
- The world reacts to player actions
- Collaborative storytelling
- Adventure front
- Magic items can be story hooks
- Location aspects
- Clues and secrets are natural adventure hooks
Challenges, Encounters and Combat
- Players
- Roleplaying encounter
- Encounter goals
- Encounter goals should not halt adventure
- The three pillars in every encounter
- Story based challenges
- Exploration encounters needs to be uncovered and interpreted
- Boss Fights
- Organic combat encounters
- Into the middle of things
(Non) Playable Characters
- Create characters together
- Bind characters together
- Characters should want to adventure together
- Character archetype
- Player Character background NPC might become major NPCs
- Villains or NPCs might not know what the players did
- NPCs have their own lives
- Magic items can define characters
- Sidecharacter NPCs evolve to important NPCs by players