Tell players the power level of encounters

Running a tabletop RPG is relatively forgiving. Most things can be fixed on the fly. It's generally better for both you and your players if you dive into the situation and figure things out as you go, rather than trying to plan it all out. There's a relatively small number of things that you have to think about at the beginning of the game.

But, one thing that you do have to think about is the tone of the game and the PCs' place in the world. Knowing how powerful a level 1 character is, relative to the ordinary inhabitants of the world, is one of the most important world-building decisions you can make, and it matters for role-playing from the very beginning. 

Do you want your level one characters to swagger around like they own the place, getting treated like powerful heroes from the first game session, or do you want them to start off scared and paranoid, knowing that they have to spend several levels of grueling effort to earn their place in the world? Either of those is a legitimate approach, as is anything in between, but you need to choose one. Make a decision, and communicate that decision very clearly.

NPC level determines tone

The rules of the game can support either play style and tone; it all depends on how tough the random NPCs are. For example, consider this scenario:

A female level 2 cleric is in a rural town buying supplies in the market. Two ugly and dirty men, their faces twisted by barely repressed greed and lust, walk up to her and try to start a conversation. What does she do?

If these two men have the stat blocks of commoners, she has absolutely nothing to fear, even if they have concealed weapons. She can do and say whatever she wants. If they try to start a fight, it'll be like one of those anime where the heroine effortlessly and humorously thrashes a couple of creeps to show how badass she is.

If these two men have the stat blocks of bandits, it's a tense but manageable situation. She must be on her guard, and can't let them get a surprise round, and is probably going to have to use a spell slot or two, but unless the dice go badly they won't overpower her. She should talk with them carefully, looking around to see if they have hidden allies in the crowd, and potentially looking for an escape route.

If these two men have the stat blocks of toughs, then she has no hope in a solo fight. She can only rely on bluffing or running or calling for help.

In real life, ordinary women learn from an early age that they constantly have to calculate the relative power and threat of every man they meet, and they usually get pretty good at it. An adventuring hero would be even more experienced at this. So she should be able to look at them and know their stat block. You as the GM should tell the player your best guess as to how hard a combat encounter would be if it turned into a fight.

If they've made an effort to appear tougher than they are, then maybe they get an Intimidate check opposed by her passive insight, to appear like their stat block is of a tougher enemy. If you do this, you must explain to your characters in session zero that this is a thing that can happen.

Tell players NPC level in session zero

In addition to openly explaining the relative power of characters whenever a potential combat situation arises, you should also explain it in session zero.  Look at that situation above. Basic decisions about how the party should conduct itself in a town, and whether or not they need to do their ordinary supply shopping in groups with their weapons ready, depend on this fact of the world. A world where the random creeps often have the stat blocks of toughs is a very different world, with a very different tone, requiring very different kinds of role-playing, then a world where all of the random creeps have the stat blocks of commoners.

Especially when introducing new players to the game, you should spend a lot of time explicitly telling them the relative power and social position of their character. They need to know what genre they are in, and if they guess wrong it can really mess things up. The line I like to use is something like "You are a hero, but not a superhero. You have powers, but not superpowers. You can take almost any civilian in a fight, but you cannot take on the town guard or a bar full of criminals without help." (Of course, once they hit level 5, they become a walking WMD and this changes, and you should explicitly tell them so.)

Give the level of every encounter

One of the biggest problems with the modern way of doing tabletop RPGs is that they train players to think that every combat is going to be fair and balanced. In the old days, players understood that it was their responsibility to pick and choose their battles wisely, but modern players have been trained to expect a narrative where they will defeat whatever shows up.

If you want to actually give players agency, and run a sandbox game rather than a linear narrative, then the players are going to have a choice of where to go and who to fight. Unless you're very lucky, you're gaming group probably will not understand the monster manual and game mechanics well enough to know what they can handle and what they can't.

Video games solve this problem by simply displaying the level of the adversary, with a color-coded indicator of how difficult they will be. In this situation, you should follow the example of video games and just tell the players how difficult an encounter would be if they fought. And you have to explicitly use a number. RPG forums often have stories of GMs trying to use words to explain how awful and terrifying a higher-level monster or encounter is, and the players ignoring that completely and rolling initiative instead of running.

 

"Sure, we can take all these guys at once. We just hit level 5!" 

This is actually more realistic than making them guess. The characters have spent their lives learning facts about the world. At a very early age, their caregivers told them about all the local monsters: how tough they are, how they act, and how to tell the difference between them. And when they start adventuring they will learn much more. When they go to a new area, assume that they are talking to people and picking up basic knowledge. The math is a quick shorthand for a lot of knowledge about the world that any competent person would know.

It's also good to use levels and stat blocks when talking about a noncombat situation. When the characters enter a town, just tell them the relative proportion of various NPC stat blocks that they see in the marketplace. In a peaceful civilized place, tell them that it's all CR 0 commoners, with maybe a couple people that look like they'd have the stat blocks of CR 1/8 bandits. In a rough frontier area, you might instead tell them that basically every guy in town has the stat block of a bandit, with many of them being CR 1/2 scouts or toughs, and maybe 5% of the people (and a much larger percentage of the ones that might cause trouble) having the stat blocks of CR 2 bandit captains.

 

Set Recommendations: 2025

I write my recommendation posts to help people develop a good 'GM tackle box' of characters, terrain, and monsters, and I assume a budget of about $150 a year. (Hello inflation) I recommend things that are useful out of the box, and that help level up your building skills, so you can make similar things with loose bricks.

The top recommendation this year is Surprising Spider ($13 list but most places are selling it under $10):

It's a 3-in-1 that also gives you a scorpion and a snake. Any one of the 3 builds is almost perfect for a boss fight. (To make it better, take some plates off the top so more studs are visible, allowing the characters to climb on top of the monsters.) Have the party disassemble it in game, then rebuild a different version for the next session.

There's also Medieval Dragon, but it's just too big, so I don't recommend it unless your party is already level 16+ and needs something more epic after years of fighting normal enemies. And if you want a big dragon, you are better off with Rontu which is cheaper and has four good minis.

Giant boss fights are fun, but you also want encounters with many enemies, and making minifig-scale monsters that can fit within a 2x2 space on a battle mat can be challenging. The $35 Creative Dinosaurs set is a good answer to that. It will make several monsters and terrain pieces, and you'll learn the skills to make your own minifig-scale brick-built monsters to match things in the monster manual.

The Classic and Creator lines are giving us a lot this year. They have a new castle, replacing the recently-retired one that I recommended in 2021, and it looks quite nice. But there's something even better: The $90 Haunted Mansion (review with more pictures)

This has five monster minis you will use all the time (six if you count that tree) and a dollhouse-style site to explore. You can use it as is, or break it into separate dungeon rooms and connect them with simple walls.

Rounding out the budget with a smaller set, you have a few options depending on what your campaign needs (or what you find on sale):

Green Forest Dragon and Dragonian Storm Village continue the Ninjago tradition of efficiently priced terrain and fun minis and weapons. This is good for many D&D games, although it will pull you towards a macho or combat oriented aesthetic that might not be best for some playgroups.

Charms Class is good terrain if you want a more sedate magical feel.

Mateo vs. Cyber Brain Mech if you want another boss monster with a Spelljammer or Planescape aesthetic.

Windmill Village Hut if you want a coastal or pirate setting.

Peely & Sparkplug's Camp if you want an adventurer mini with a good mix of terrain and monsters

Elphaba's Retreat if you want elves and a fae or druid-type setting

If you have a bit more to spend and want to broaden your collection out to more settings:

Pony Ranch is you want a happy village

Flying Lessons for more castle terrain. It is good to have multiple colors for different locations.

Yes, If

One of the main rules in improv theater is to respond to anything with a "Yes, and..." Running a tabletop RPG game is a lot like doing improv theater, so a good GM should react to almost anything the players want to do by saying "Yes, If you pass enough skill or tool checks."

This approach drives most of the action and plot in my games. I combine role-playing and rolling by adjusting the DC of the roll based on the story they tell, and how well it connects to the existing situation and facts of the setting. If they are trying to convince an NPC, I do a bit of role-playing and then have them roll for the final outcome, based on their approach.

Obviously, you should not allow players to make checks to that duplicate the abilities of a feat or another class. These rules are set and well-defined for very good reasons. You cannot let the desire for character options and agency in the moment reduce the overall definition and uniqueness of the characters, or trivialize the choices made in character creation. The rule to follow is that everything is either a character creation choice or a "Yes, If" situation. Let people make checks to do things if and only if it is not covered in the character creation or combat rules.

Aside from that, failure is never guaranteed, unless they are trying to do something very narrow or specific that breaks the rules of physics or the setting. Dice rolling is for accomplishing a goal in a complicated and chaotic environment, not a performance in a controlled athletic contest. (If there is a controlled contest, it is best to have the person with the highest score automatically win, only rolling if they are tied.) A character is not going to run a 4-minute mile or bench-press a thousand pounds just because they rolled a 20.

Success is also never guaranteed, even for things that may seem trivial. No plan ever survives contact with reality, and unexpected obstacles can always pop up. Dice rolls represent facts about the environment, and a natural 1 is always an opportunity for a plot twist that makes the story more interesting.

Combat Stunts and Pushing Your Luck

I do bend the combat rules a little, to encourage and reward skill-based combat stunts. The most common use of his is to allow people to roll checks to slightly boost their combat speed. It feels wrong and unrealistic to have a few feet make the difference between doing nothing in combat and getting their full attack action, and I don't want to run a nitpicky wargame. So if a character's speed is 30 feet, and an enemy is 35 feet away, I will allow them to move to it and attack if they succeed in a DC 10 Athletics check (The full houserule is DC 5 + 5 for each additional foot of movement they attempt). The flavor is that they are moving a bit faster than is safe, and failure means that they fall prone or suffer some other misfortune.

Hit Dice

Many things cannot be accomplished in a single action. Some might take months or years of dedicated effort. For this, you need some rules structure to force people to make choices about how where they want the plot to go, and how they want to manage their time and resources. They should be able to accomplish great and world-changing things, but only if they are consistent and dedicated and make it a real focus on their storytelling.

Also, although a role playing game is a lot like improv theater, it is also a game. There should be elements of strategic thinking and resource management, even in a game session that has little or no combat and is devoted to roleplaying. 

Hit Dice serve both of these functions, while also being a way to encourage equal participation and keep one person from dominating the session. I have written before about hit dice activities. The core concept is that in order to undertake a project, a character should spend a hit die. They then roll a skill check to see how the project turned out. If a player wants to do something grand and setting-changing that would take a lot of work, you say, "Yes, If you succeed at 25 hit-dice skill checks." When doing this, they should only get a long rest every two or three sessions, so this should represent consistent effort over at least half a dozen game sessions.

Name Generator

Use this to generate character names (and the names of their nuclear or most important family, usually parents) for a species-culture combination. Choose a culture that best matches your character, or see below for the naming conventions and choose the one you want. For species not on the list, pick one that has a similar vibe:

Species-Culture Name Generator

Species: Aasimar Dragonborn Dwarf Elf Gnome Goliath Halfling Human Orc Tiefling --- Air Genasi Bugbear Centaur Changeling Construct Earth Genasi Fairy Firbolg Fire Genasi Giff Gith Goblin Hadozee Half-Elf Harengon Hobgoblin Kenku Kobold Leonin Lizardfolk Loxodon Minotaur Plasmoid Satyr Tabaxi Thri-kreen Tortle Water Genasi Yuan-ti

Culture: Caravan City Factory Farmland Freehold Mystic Nomad Orchard Outcast Slum Suburb Tribal

Discussion

There are a lot of fantasy name generators out there, and I don't like them for two reasons:

First, they mainly just generate dumb collections of random syllables that try to evoke a certain feel. I want all of my names to have meanings. Almost all names originally meant something, before they became stuck as linguistic fossils as the language changed. I think character names are more fun and evocative when they are real words.

Second, different cultures should have different naming patterns:

Caravan names are a given name, and then one of current affiliation, route, position, or personal quest. This could change several times over a lifetime. A Caravan character might change their name to that of their adventuring party or location, and this would be a significant character-development moment.

City culture is the only one that assigns middle names, because those only developed in societies that had larger populations. The last name comes from one of several associated cultures.

Factory culture has profession-based last names. You decide if your character had this job, or if it was an ancestral name that was passed down.

Farmland culture is based around lineages and landholdings. If you are the heir, you get your landholding parent's name and a numeral. You do not automatically get their title, but it can inform your background. Other children get a parent's name with a descriptor, a number, and/or a diminutive created by shortening the name. It is traditional to reclaim the full name, or take a new one, if you become a landowner and start a family.

Freehold last names are based on a location. You decide if the location name is based on a feature of that location, or on the person who settled it. If named after the settler, you decide if this was a member of your character's family, and how recent the settlement was.

Mystic last names are based on a deed, profession, or affiliation connected to a (possibly sacred) concept, element, or object. You decide if this is a personal nickname or a family name, and whether or not it comes from an actual event in your or your family's backstory.

Nomad last names are based on a personal descriptor or circumstance. This could be assigned at birth or another important part of your life.

Orchard last names are based on tree or crop, either a varietal or your family's traditional relation to it.

Outcast last names are based on a family member. In most cases you decide if this is patro- or matronymic, or named after a cousin or other important relative. Nev- means 'neice or nephew of' and Fost- means 'fostered by'. You can also change the gender-neutral suffix to 'son' or 'dottir' if appropriate. Some Outcast families use a benedictory first name instead of the species naming convention.

Slum names are a (possibly ironic) nickname and then a given name, although official documents will often make the nickname permanent.

The Suburb culture makes the last name a portmanteu of two family first names, a system that I invented. If only one family, the last name is simply their name.

Tribal cultures list the group name first, then the given name.

This generator is gender-neutral, to keep the code simple and the characters diverse. Most cultures in the game world are gendered, some oppressively so, but they all have different ideas about what names should be attached to what genders. If you end up with a male character named Lily or a female named Wolf, work with it. Decide if that is a normal-gendered name for your species and culture, or if your name is gender non-conforming.

Set Recommendations: 2024

I write my recommendation posts to help people develop a good 'GM tackle box' of characters, terrain, and monsters, and I assume a budget of about $100 a year. I recommend things that are useful out of the box, and that help level up your building skills, so you can make similar things with loose bricks.

My top recommendation this year is the $15 Alien Planet Habitat:

The key to running an interesting game is to have the ability to put many different settings on the table. This set delivers an environment that could either the the Feywild, or something mutant and corrupted. It is also very useful to have things that could either be monsters or NPCs. Put those terrain and critters on a gridded map, and you have an intriguing encounter. Can you communicate with those things, or will you end up fighting them?

The second recommendation is Jay’s Mech Battle Pack, $10 for 4 people and a large humanoid. 

Those 'mech suit' things are very useful and versatile. They work well out of the box for things like ogres and trolls, and you can also use them for character transformations like polymorph and wildshape. It takes a bit of work, but making a build for the druid's favorite Large wildshape is fun. Put their mini in the torso when they transform, and take it our when they revert.

Next is the $16 Izzie’s Narwhal (review).

This one is fun and unique. Never underestimate how useful a whimsical Lego build is at generating a fun and memorable game experience. It draws the players in and gets them involved in the storytelling. Don't let the PCs have the sword or pauldrons at character creation; make it a treasure reward later in the game. And it's probably best to keep the hairpiece back to signify the effects of a spell or potion.

I don't usually recommend paying the licensed set premium, but the $30 Forbidden Forest: Magical Creatures is a good mix of exotic terrain, creatures, and minis:

You will end up using that spiderweb piece a lot if you put it on a separate base so that can be dropped into any scene as dungeon decoration, web spells, etc.
 

The $30 Shiz Uni set is also a good mix of terrain, magical boat, and unique minis. (review).

Those five sets together are about $100 for ten useful minis and a good mix of monsters, terrain, vehicles, equipment, and decoration. They give you many of the essentials that you will use over and over, like a flying mount and a small boat. And after assembling them from their instructions, you will have the experience you need to make more terrain, dwellings, and dungeon dressing from random bricks.

Some other sets worth getting if you see them on clearance or you prefer a more mundane and low-magic aesthetic are Baby Cow Shed, Baby Gorilla Encounter, Archery Range, and, if you want a treetop village, Adventure Camp Tree House.

On the other hand, if you want a wild and magical aesthetic and like the idea of large creatures and exotic locations, many of the sets from the Dreams line are worth grabbing if you get a good deal. I don't recommend them highly because large complex buildings are both more expensive and less useful in a game. But they have good elements and a lot of potential for rebuilding into dungeons and dungeon dressing.

Also, this year, Lego released official D&D sets. There are several glowing reviews of the D&D collectible minifigs. My opinion is that they are okay. It is about like any other collectible minifigure set; there are some things you will use often and others that you will not. (The number of RPG sessions where the party sees the Lady of Pain going down the street is smaller than the number of sessions where someone dresses up as a dinosaur, and definitely smaller then the number of sessions where the druid wildshapes into one.) But there are better options than paying $5 for a mini.

There's also the $360 Red Dragon's Tale, which also got glowing reviews from hardcore Lego bloggers. While I agree that it is good by the standards of expensive Lego sets that you display on a shelf, it is not good value for actually running a campaign. For that kind of money, you can get a much better variety of smaller sets that allows you to put many more environments on the table.