Levels, feats, experience, skills, gadgets, magic items... These are the things a power gamer craves.

They're missing out.

Connections. That's what leads to true power in a game.

Ah, the dramatic revelation. The best chance your character will ever get to hit someone while they're down.

Take full advantage of it.

It's an interesting roleplaying challenge to play a character with serious regrets about their past actions.

The good thing is that, depending on the game, you might be able to acquire some method of going back in time to fix it! Try that for a character/adventure hook some time.

Any character worth their salt can use a personal army. But be very careful about handing them out as treasure.

I think they were available as a 2% chance on the random miscellaneous items table under Treasure Type Q, or something.

You could end up with a Hero With a Thousand Soldiers.

The real question at this point in the movie is how did Anakin avoid making some sort of joke about Palpatine's appearance? That sure would have lightened the mood a bit.

I guess with that entire scenic window shattered, and this office being high in the air where there'd almost certainly be a lot of wind, Palpatine needs a nice warm cloak.

Man, it sucks when everyone seems to be turning against you. It's times like this that people in a position of power need a strong friend. Try to be that friend. (Unless all their friends end up assassinated, of course.)

Being on good terms with the king, or the president, or the CEO of an interstellar megacorporation is the best way to make sure nobody accuses you of plotting against them. Especially if you are plotting against them.

900 years old, Yoda is. He gets tired easily.

At that age you probably go to bed at 5pm and get up at 3am.

It's good to have ambition in a game. It's what drives characters to seek adventure. The desire for more wealth, influence, and/or arcane knowledge is the reason a blacksmith's apprentice takes up a sword and leaves town, an elven boatmaker leaves the forest to see the wider world, or an innkeeper's daughter travels to a distant city to seek a wizardly mentor.

And the good thing is you can always go a step higher. Run the kingdom? There's always one next door. Run the world? Try other planes of reality. Or other worlds. Power!

Power! Unlimited power!!!!

Things that are lost in roleplaying games tend to turn up again. At the most inopportune moments, if the GM is doing the job right.

If it's something you really don't want the PCs to have, this obviously means in the hands of an enemy.

When you're GMing a game, it's nice to have someone listen attentively to everything you say and just go along with it.

Unfortunately it usually means you're talking to yourself.

If you're going to use classic monsters in your games, the players will have certain expectations of how those monsters will behave, what strengths they will have, and what weaknesses can be exploited to defeat them. For some players, this is good and comforting. For others, this is uncreative and a path to boredom: "Ho hum, another kappa... We bow politely and deeply to it."

To mix things up and keep players on their toes, you need to adapt and modify. Make your evil faeries unaffected by iron, but vulnerable to copper. Have mummies wearing Rings of Fire Resistance. Take green slime and make it red so it's difficult to identify. This is all good fun and a great way to prevent player knowledge leaking into mysterious situations where their characters would be at a loss for what to try.

But there are certain lines that shouldn't be crossed.

If you're going to use classic monsters in your games, the players will have certain expectations of how those monsters will behave, what strengths they will have, and what weaknesses can be exploited to defeat them. For some players, this is good and comforting. For others, this is uncreative and a path to boredom: "Ho hum, another kappa... We bow politely and deeply to it."

To mix things up and keep players on their toes, you need to adapt and modify. Make your evil faeries unaffected by iron, but vulnerable to copper. Have mummies wearing Rings of Fire Resistance. Take green slime and make it red so it's difficult to identify. This is all good fun and a great way to prevent player knowledge leaking into mysterious situations where their characters would be at a loss for what to try.

But there are certain lines that shouldn't be crossed.

Talking about game stuff in public where people can overhear what you're saying can be fraught with danger. Most people don't play out fictional stories and events and so have no reason to discuss them as though they were the characters, which means that when most people hear such things they don't immediately reach the correct conclusion that you're talking about fiction.

This can make you sound depraved or insane. The best defence is to point out that no, you're actually just a nerd. Although some people may actually prefer to be regarded as depraved or insane.

Chewbacca an outcast? Lucky he's got a defence ready.

PCs naturally tend to do most of their talking with fellow PCs. But there are many cases in which it makes sense to call in an NPC.

Particularly if you're plotting behind your fellow party members' backs.

Here is a copy of the original alignment graph from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook (yes, without an apostrophe):

(Appendix III, page 119.)

It shows the two orthogonal axes of good-evil and lawful-chaotic, and the nine regions created by the intersection of the three values along each of these axes (neutral being the middle value on both axes). The alignment graph was a handy way of visualising how actions map to the game mechanical concept of alignment.

Most players want to play good, law-abiding characters. Traditionally this can be done by keeping you actions within the green zone and avoiding the red zone, as shown below:

It's important to make sure that other players in your game aren't going to take it personally if you get into an argument with their character, while playing your character.

It's important, but it rarely happens. Maybe we could all learn something from Jim.

Wait...

One of the eternal debates in roleplaying is whether or not to kill the children of evil races. Take orcs for example. They're evil. All of them*. The kids will grow up to be evil. So you should kill them, right? Except they're just kids! You can't kill them! But you have to! But you can't!

This is a serious issue, especially for high school kids struggling to figure out their own place in society and come to terms with how they relate to other people. Who says roleplaying can't teach you important lessons about life?

We decided to kill them. Like 99% of young roleplayers faced with this scenario in a game. Now that it's out of our systems, we hardly ever kill kids now that we're grown up.

* Well, except for the odd black sheep who bucks the racial tendency and becomes an angst-ridden beacon of protagonism. Like Drizzt Do'Urden**. And every single dark elf that anyone wrote about after him.

** Who was a dark elf, not an orc. It's an analogous scenario, not an identical one. Don't send e-mails.

NEWS: Got a question about Darths & Droids? It's probably answered on our Frequently Asked Questions page. And to save many of you a click: Yes, we will be doing Episodes IV, V, and VI. :-)

When dealing with Byzantine bureaucracies in a game setting, it's often best to take a ... flexible approach.

It works with telcos too.

When dealing with Byzantine bureaucracies in a game setting, it's often best to take a ... flexible approach.

It works with telcos too.

Wounded care is where characters in low-tech fantasy games actually have the advantage over modern or even moderately futuristic characters. Clerics can heal anything. Even death. Given the choice between a coronary bypass operation or a Cure Disease spell, I know which I'd take.

It's good to end a game session with a teaser for the next session. Wrap up the current scenario, but then lead into a two-minute set-up for something else. Keep your players guessing for the entire next week. They may even be excited to play as soon as they arrive next time, instead of sitting around eating pizza and yakking about computer games for an hour first.

For a smooth game experience, everyone should understand what the game is about. Basic rule of roleplaying.

We have suggested the opposite before: keeping details of the setting secret and deliberately building up false player expectations, in order to throw a surprise twist. We said it then, and we repeat it now: Only try that if you know your players very well.

If you're still feeling your way, or running your first adventure, keep things straightforward. You can save your apologies for more important things.

But just because everybody knows what the game is about doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't pull huge surprises within that premise.

Having a fantasy game where the heroes are seeking an evil necromancer turn into a post-apocalyptic setting where the necromancer is a nuclear scientist is one thing. Having the necromancer turn out to to be the long-trusted mentor of the party's wizard is another.

There's a reason the wizards and thieves stay at the back of the party and let the people with decent weapons and armour take point duty.

It's so much easier to avoid danger and sneak away with the loot while the rest of the party are engaged in combat.

For some fight scenes in games it's enough to throw dozens of faceless low-level mooks at the PCs - disposable henchmen they can despatch with a single easy hit. It's not necessary to have every fight be a life-or-death struggle. After all, if you have too many of those, your heroes may end up dying a lot! Sometimes you just need to set the scene and mood, having the heroes work their way up the ladder of bad guy competence levels from the beginning to establish that what they're facing is superior numbers, not superior skills.

Having an NPC narrate portions of the background story, rather than playing them out with the PCs included, is a handy device for revealing important bits of information. It's so good, Tolkien made heavy use of it. There, you have a precedent.

Bees are awesome. If you need something scary in your game, just add bees. Normal sized bees, giant bees, enormous bees - they're all good.

Bees! Bees! Bees!

Bees!

Scary, right?

As in real life, there are times in a game when it's best to keep your mouth shut.

As in real life, many of those times are when in the presence of authority figures.

As in real life, many PCs will totally ignore the consequences and speak up anyway.

If you know there's a big battle looming in your campaign, make sure you build it up beforehand. Set up the hopeless odds, the overwhelming superiority of the enemy forces, and the fact that reinforcements won't arrive until first light of the fifth day. The anticipation is half the fun of playing out a battle scene, so don't skimp on it.

This is a good use for sound effects in a game. Background applause during a significant NPC's speeches and public addresses.

You could even have it ready for when a PC gives a public speech. Just be sure to have an alternative track with jeers and boos handy too.

Chess motifs are always cool. Want to add an air of inscrutable supra-genius to your villains? Have them talk in chess metaphors. Or game terminology in general, really. Their plans are like unto games to them, anticipating every possible combination of move and counter-move.

How better to demonstrate the superior mental abilities of your evil mastermind than to have be a game nerd?

Sometimes you just need to throw low-level flunkies at the PCs so they have endless hordes that they can mow down easily in a huge battle scene, before facing the boss villain. Some games even have special rules for these types of cannon fodder bad guys, stating that you don't even need to bother keeping track of damage - one hit from anything will kill them (or at least effectively put them out of the battle).

This actually makes them considerably less dangerous than a normal rat in Dungeons & Dragons*.

* As listed in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1st ed.) Monster Manual II, p. 105.

There comes a time when the PCs have the villain cornered and helpless. When there is no escape. When the time is right for the bad guy to meet his ultimate fate. The PCs have laboured and sweated and fought their way to this point. This time, they deserve to win. The villain has always escaped before, but not this time. And he knows he's defeated.

Do not have the villain beg for mercy.

Let's face it. All PCs want to find treasure. Even if the setting doesn't really support the concept.

We're sure you could find characters in a game of prehistoric cavemen struggling against the forces of nature, bickering about how to split up a bear's jawbone that they just found.

Recorded messages and footage in a game can be a big clue for investigative scenarios, or a powerful revelation in other settings.

You can of course simply describe them using the usual GM information dump method. Or if you have the recources you can actually make an audio or video recording to play to the players at the right point in the scenario, when their characters uncover the vital clue.

Try to avoid the temptation to have them discover a clue-filled PowerPoint presentation, though.

At this point in the movie, Yoda and Obi-Wan have figured out that Palpatine and Anakin need to be stopped. Palpatine is on the same planet as they are, and Anakin has gone off somewhere and needs to be tracked down. Yoda and Obi-Wan both know that alone they may not be strong enough to take on either one of Palpatine or Anakin. They could go tackle Palpatine together and then together go find out where Anakin has gone and chase him down. So what do they do?

They split up.

That's one of the great things about roleplaying. It really improves your acting skills.

Try giving your players time for their characters to make soliloquy-like speeches. Actually, if you want them to do this, maybe even set aside a couple of minutes for such a speech and enforce it. We've never seen PCs make deeply introspective commentaries on their own internal motivations and feelings off the cuff before.

(We don't claim all the gaming comments we give here are good advice, by the way (especially the sarcastic stuff) - just something to think about.)

It always pays to look for hidden compartments, search for secret doors, and poke a ten-foot pole into dark corners on the ceiling. If by "pays" you mean "slows the game down interminably with totally unjustified in-character paranoia".

Always give NPCs you're negotiating with a choice of options. After all, you want to appear reasonable.

Just make sure that the option your prefer is accompanied by options that are even more undesirable from the NPC's point of view.

We're not aware of any spell, short of a Wish, that actually will work here. Doubly so because this isn't a fantasy game.

Remember that not all conflict is resolved through force of arms. Diplomacy, politics, debate, reason, the skills of statecraft and leadership - these are all worthy methods to achieving goals in their own right.

But not nearly as much fun.

To create a sense of horror and foreboding in a game, bring in elements of real life that cause grown men to tremble in fear.

For example, the phrase, "We need to talk."

See now, this is why recorded, known, and strictly played alignments are important in roleplaying games. They prevent this kind of stuff.

See now, this is why alignments are too restrictive...

Stay in character. Stay in character. Always stay in character.

Unless you shouldn't.

Be careful letting talk during a game become too personal in nature. It can lead to people taking over the entire Galaxy if you're not careful.

Ah yes, when the dire Prophecy you've set up early in the game comes back and is fulfilled despite all the best efforts of the PCs...

Actually, you can predict pretty much any dire thing and lay good odds on the PCs bringing it about in some way or another.

Try offering your players the chance to rule the kingdom, the world, the galaxy, or whatever, through some sort of obviously messed up bureaucratic bungle. The error should be clear to the PCs, but to nobody else. They really can live like kings and be in charge of everything - if only they take up the opportunity and don't tell anyone that there's been some sort of horrible mistake.

Some players will leap at the chance. Let them get away with it. For a while.

Other players... well, that's even more fun. Watch them squirm as they try to decide what they should do about it.

If you're going to start accusing a person in a position of authority and power, make sure you have superior firepower. And stay frosty.

Surrender is for NPCs. PCs don't surrender. They just win their fights. Unless everyone dies in a Total Party Kill, of course.

Maybe surrender's not such a bad idea now and then.

It is vitally important to remain calm in combat.

Otherwise you could end up excitedly throwing the dice anywhere.

Do you know who your character's mother was? It's a good litmus test of how well-developed your character background is.

Except now that we've mentioned it, everyone will write up a couple of lines about their character's mother and ignore everything else.

Anything in a game can be made better by putting an "EXTREME" in front of it.

Want to blast not just the enemy troops, but their entire castle as well? Use an EXTREME Fireball.

Want to detect what's on the other side of the planet? Use EXTREME Sensors.

Want to be at one with nature, but also have the ability to kick butt when necessary? Be an EXTREME Druid.

You might think that standard villanous doctrine would hide all of the vital systems and nerve centres of their secret lairs and complexes away somewhere safe and secure. This is wrong.

Always have vital systems lying around next to the most likely battle locations, so that you have good targets for critical misses in combat.

So I've been wondering ever since Episode I: Why are the Senate boxes shaped like Frisbees?

Oh, right, I see now.

Convection Shmonvection. Apparently being a Jedi makes you immune to being roasted alive over an enormous lake of lava. We'll see more of this as the fight progresses.

The most realistic rule in a roleplaying game for characters interacting with lava is from Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. If you touch lava and are not completely immune to fire, you die.

This is realistic.

Of course nobody in this scene actually touches the lava, but even being this close to it should be enough to blister your skin.

If there's one thing you can guarantee in a game, it's that as soon as you declare that you've won, you'll lose.

Being a good and realistic GM, you should ensure that this happens to the PCs a lot.

It's important to have an appropriate setting for the big fight scenes in your games. The top of a speeding train. A rickety rope bridge over an incredibly deep gorge with a crocodile infested river below. The enormous arch-villain's lair inside an extinct volcano, complete with piranha pit. (About the only thing that could make that one better is to use an active volcano, really.)

Make heavy use of cliffs, complicated whirring bits of machinery that can hack limbs off, molten metal, falling boulders, and sharp pointy things. And things that can be electrified. And acid. And boiling oil. And boiling acid. And rickety gantries that span lakes of boiling acid. And tigers.

Actually, anywhere you have a fight planned - or even wherever a fight that you didn't have planned breaks out - just add some tigers. It'll be awesome.

Player 1: Hey, remember that fight where those tigers showed up?
Player 2: Yeah, that was awesome!
Player 3: Wait, which fight where tigers showed up?

That scrape of nails on metal... aaiiieeee...

And remember that blackboard scene from Jaws? Double aaaiiieeeeee!!!

Which of course suggests that to get attention during a game you should have a recording of nails scraping against a blackboard handy. Just play that at max volume next time your players are quoting Monty Python instead of paying attention to the game!

At the start of this strip, Obi-Wan has an overwhelming tactical advantage in the fight at this point in the movie. He should simply win at this point and the fight should be over. After all, he has the high ground. Much higher than Anakin. Surely any lesser advantage that may occur later shouldn't be nearly as decisive.

United States politics would much later (in a galaxy far, far away from these scenes) adopt similar rules of civilised discussion. For gaming purposes, consider including formal rules for personal combat in your game world's political system. What could possibly go wrong?

It's important to celebrate big achievements in a character's life. Weddings, major birthdays, graduations. Becoming the major villain in the story.

Organise a cake. Both in-game and in real life. If you're lucky the real cake might even be as nice as the in-game one.

Simple rule of martial arts mastery: Never teach any students.

Because you can bet your bottom dollar that one of them will turn out to be better than you. And that student will be the one to eventually fight you in an epic battle to the death.

At least it will be if your GM pays any attention whatsoever to how martial arts stories go.

It's good to incorporate background legends and mythology in your campaign world. Stories that aren't necessarily true, but that characters within the world know as part of their cultural background. Most of the time this is just detailed world-building, but sometimes it can provide a hook for the players and the NPCs to hang important plot stuff on.

This is the basic goal of campaign world building: providing hooks. You need to provide plenty of hooks, because your players will pick and choose only certain ones to hang things on. The thing is, they'll have plot elements in their heads, just looking for these hooks. And if the hooks aren't there, they won't get things attached to them and any potential story can unravel and end up loose on the floor. You can end up with a world in which the PCs wander aimlessly from one encounter to the next, fighting monsters or villains, and then going in search of the next challenge, but without any over-arching theme or story arc.

(This is a risk - we're not saying it will happen. Diligent GMing is a multi-faceted discipline, and you can weave a story out of all sorts of threads if you spend the time and skill doing so. We're just suggesting one possible tool to make it easier.)

But with hooks in place, the players can pick them up and use them to weave their own story fragments. Build their own legends. Become a part of the world-building. This achieves two things: lightens your load as the GM, and gets them intimately involved in the world.

Which of these two ends is more important may depend on your GMing style, but most GMs will agree that at least one of them is worthwhile.

PCs are the heroes of the game world. By definition, they're the good guys!

Well, at least the guys the players are cheering for, anyway.

Intra-party conflict is nothing new, though. After all, would your thief be truly worthy of that title if he didn't occasionally attempt to pick the pockets of his compatriots? However it's rare that it escalates into actual fighting between PCs. Maybe if you catch that stinking thief you should just whip out your sword and teach him a lesson...

Sometimes the fate of the world or the universe really does come down to a single die roll.

There's a philosophical argument to be had here. Should you let the fate of an entire game world be decided by something so random and fickle as the roll of a polyhedral lump of plastic (or other material, depending on onhowexpensiveyourtasteindiceruns).

The answer? Of course you should!

It's important, as a Game Master, that you look out for the safety of your players.

Yes, that means serving your special extra, extra hot chili is a bad idea.

There's an optimum amout of jiggling that needs to be performed before rolling any die. Not enough and the result is not random enough, but too much and it's a sure way to make the dice hate you.

It's important to minimise distractions when gaming. This is the reason games are often played indoors, at night time, sometimes even in basements or rooms without windows. And why the gaming rooms at conventions are the small internal rooms of the function centre, without any natural daylight.

Think about it. You never see a group of gamers with their rule books, character sheets, and dice out in the park on a fine sunny day, or sitting on the beach, or sitting in the plaza in the middle of the city.*

* Chess players don't count. Chess is a poor substitue for a real tactical combat wargame anyway. Why do clergy members only move diagonally? How can a random foot soldier get a field promotion to Queen?? Where are the terrain and weather modifiers???

If your character is dying, it's time for the last request. Here are some good ones to get you started:

• Scatter my ashes amongst the moons of Viarlo, so that I may forever look upon the beauty of the world of my birth.
• Tell my husband that I love him, and I will see him again when it is his time to merge his consciousness into cyberspace.
• Give all of my treasure and magic items to that handsome bard lurking at the back of the tavern who looks like he might join the party in my place...

Never underestimate the symbolic importance of fire. Fire cleanses everything. Use it liberally in your gaming encounters.

(This advice is equally valid for both players and GMs!)

Books are important resources for gaming. You can get a game idea out of almost any book you care to name. Fiction books are pretty straightforward - you just take elements of the story, tweak them a bit to obfuscate the source, and integrate them into your game plot. But non-fiction can be equally as inspiring. Some books are fairly straightforward, while others require some imaginative interpretation:

• Krakatoa, by Simon Winchester. Your band of pirates is preying on ships in the East Indies when a nearby island explodes!
• Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945, by Leo Marks. You are an elite team of cryptographers in the Second World War. In between making and breaking codes, you have to run field missions to brief soldiers in new code techniques, often behind enemy lines!
• PC Technician Street Smarts: A Real World Guide to CompTIA A+ Skills, by James Pyles. You run a small business on the streets of Tokyo, troubleshooting for desperate netrunners whose hardware develops dangerous malfunctions due to running into insidious corporate black ice in cyberspace!
• The Elements of Style, by Strunk & White. You work for a cutting edge design firm using exotic matter to terraform asteroids into artistic statements for the gigawealthy and must face the sabotage and plots of rival designers, not to mention maintain your own media presence!
• Victoria's Secret Catalogue, by Victoria's Secret. Your group of steampunk adventurers stumbles across a mind-blowing conspiracy in a seamy underworld bordello of shameless ankle-exposing clockwork courtesans that might destroy the very fabric of the British Empire... if you live long enough to tell it!

It's quite an important event when players start to not worry about experience points any more and concentrate on simply playing the roles of their characters. We suggest marking the occasion with some form of ceremony.

Wearing black seems appropriate.

Any piece of equipment you have can be used in multiple ways. Don't be restricted to thinking of your 10-foot pole as merely a pole. It can be used to hit monsters, it can be used to probe floors and ceilings for traps (do not forget the ceilings), it can be used to hold up a tarpaulin to form a rain shelter, it can be used to brace an unsteady wall, it can be used to brace a door you don't want opened, it can be used to poke under a door you can't open and swipe monsters on the other side off their feet, it can be used to vault over pits or streams, it can be used to knock fruit (or monsters) out of trees, it can be used to tap on upper floor windows, it can be used to push a barge along a river, it can be used to whack bees' nests and gather honey, it can be used to fend off lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my, it can be used to hoist the heads of your enemies as a warning to attackers, it can be used as a really long pool cue.

And if you reverse the pole-arity, it can be used to fix warp engines!

Every profession can be dangerous. PCs don't need to be FBI agents, or Roman soldiers, or starship commanders to get into hazardous situations and adventures. Try these on for size:

• Librarian: A mysterious figure drops an overdue book in the library's after-hours returns slot. Long overdue. 90 years overdue. It's a book about the occult, and contains incantations and recipes for drastically extending life. The borrower's last known address is that old "haunted" house on the hill outside town. Someone need to go investigate to recover the overdue fees...
• Chef: A restaurant gets into an escalating rivalry with another establishment across the street. Discounts, special new recipes, and increasingly gourmet offerings fly thick and fast. Unfortunately, all the media attention is not to the liking of the local mob bosses who just want a decent pasta like they used to get...
• Plumber: An inner city office building makes several calls about blocked pipes in the same week. Then while working a job, an accountant from the seventh floor vanishes in the bathroom. There's something lurking in the drains...

Any interaction with medical staff is a prime opportunity to invoke as many medical drama and soap opera tropes as possible.

Actually, in a pseudo-medieval fantasy game try it with clerics!

Fighter: I need some healing. Can you cast a Cure Light Wounds?
Cleric: Is your insurance paid up?

Alien anatomy can be very confusing. To play this realistically, make sure the aliens in your game don't conform to the unrealistic almost human stereotype. Nothing makes an impromptu medical emergency more interesting than not even being sure where the victim's major life support and sensory organs are.

Tradition and continuity are important ways of maintaining links between characters in inter-generational campaigns.

And we don't mean naming the new fighter that the party meets in a tavern Gorrak II just because your previous character, Gorrak, died horribly two days ride to the west in a dungeon full of trolls.

There can be moments of appropriate solemnity in a game. But never let it get in the way of having fun.

Did anyone else think that table looked a bit like a space pool table? I wonder what the rules say about if the ship's artifical gravity fails...

The intertwined fates of parents and offspring is a trope heavy with tradition, from the story of Laius and Oedipus, to Theseus and Ariadne, to Vito and Michael Corleone, to Lorraine (and George!) and Marty McFly, to Livia and Tony Soprano, to Henry Jones and Henry Jones Junior.

For some of this mythical goodness, try throwing relatives of PCs into your campaigns. Imagine if the paladin finds the evil necromancer is her father. Or the grizzled space-freighter captain learns that one of the new crew recruits is the daughter he never knew about. Or two PCs discover they're half-siblings! The dwarf and the elf!

The intertwined fates of parents and offspring is a trope heavy with tradition, from the story of Laius and Oedipus, to Theseus and Ariadne, to Vito and Michael Corleone, to Lorraine (and George!) and Marty McFly, to Livia and Tony Soprano, to Henry Jones and Henry Jones Junior.

For some of this mythical goodness, try throwing relatives of PCs into your campaigns. Imagine if the paladin finds the evil necromancer is her father. Or the grizzled space-freighter captain learns that one of the new crew recruits is the daughter he never knew about. Or two PCs discover they're half-siblings! The dwarf and the elf!

Always heed the Prophecy. Even if you can't do anything about it, you should definitely heed it. Heeding in general is an all round good idea. Take a few extra levels in heeding, just in case.

Players never forget items that they acquire during a game.

They may not realistically be able to carry them, or walk through narrow dungeon corridors with them, or keep them from the prying eyes of the king's tax collectors, but they will never, ever forget that they have them.

Players never forget items that they acquire during a game.

They may not realistically be able to carry them, or walk through narrow dungeon corridors with them, or keep them from the prying eyes of the king's tax collectors, but they will never, ever forget that they have them.

It's important for NPCs to have their own motivations and goals. And not just enemies - allies are equally important. They shouldn't simply be puppets of the PCs and go along with whatever they want. So try giving them a scene or two to establish their identity, their role in the world, and their plans for the future.

And if things get in the way of those plans, that gives you seeds for recruiting the PCs into adventures aimed at setting things right again.

When NPCs start talking out of character, you know something isn't quite going right.

Sometimes in a game you need to do some things that some of the PCs know about, but that other PCs really don't know about, mainly because the characters are not present in the scene in question. You can do this with all of the players knowing what's happening, but this relies on their ability to keep player knowledge separate from character knowledge. And then sometimes you want things to be a genuine surprise to the players, as well as their characters.

In such situations, the usual thing to do is ask some of the players to leave the room for a while, or take a subset of the players aside into another room for a bit. If you thought passing notes to players was a good way to ramp up the paranoia, you ain't seen nothing yet.

In practice, this procedure should be limited to extreme circumstances, and the separate sessions kept short and sweet to avoid boredom in the unattended group.

On the other hand, we've seen games in which two different groups of PCs are being run through an adventure simultaneously, wwith a single GM running back and forth between rooms. The two groups don't know anything about what the other group is doing until they run into one another, at which point the sessions can be combined. Just a warning: the GM's job scales roughly as the number of separate groups squared. And the number of game-interrupting outbreaks of irrelevant conversation, Monty Python quotations, and people deciding to play Nintendo instead of the actual game scales roughly exponentially.

Communication is one of the most influential aspects of a game scenario. Splitting up the party is a lot different in games with no way to communicate between groups than it is in games where everyone has a radio or phone. If the party can communicate freely despite being on opposite sides of the military base they're infiltrating, then they're almost effectively not split up at all.

The major conceptual difference between medieval/historical games and modern/future games is not the weaponry. It's the ability to split up and still stay in communication.

There is never a moment so dark and grim in a game that you can't improve it with a dose of macabre conversation-halting awkwardness.

PCs always want armour. Armour is good. It stops you getting hurt in fights.

It also stops you: moving silently, climbing walls, climbing ropes, running, being able to swim or even keep your head above water, sleeping comfortably, being comfortable in hot weather, being comfortable in cold weather, in fact being comfortable at all.

But all of this is inconsequential to the fact that it stops you getting hurt in fights. So most PCs will always be in their armour.

Be very, very careful trying to pull tricks on NPCs with immense wads of power and the cunning to rise to that position through their own sweat and toil. It's like trying to blackmail Batman. It's just never going to end prettily.

When a PC does exactly what you want...

Celebrate! It's a rare event!

Then wonder what they're up to...

So, Alderaan is apparently Swiss Alps-world. I guess it was inevitable at this point of the six-movie series, since we hadn't seen any mountains anywhere else before.

This is the last deleted scene from Episode III. It's all of 33 seconds long, and makes a nice reference to Yoda arriving on Dagobah, where we'd see him again in Episode V. I believe it was cut because George Lucas felt it interrupted the flow of the montage of closing scenes, but Star Wars producer Rick McCallum has said he hopes it's included in cuts of the film released in the future.

Sunrise is an important time of day, heavily symbolic of new beginnings, renewal, and looking forward.

Most games don't take much notice of time of day or the weather, other than to tell the PCs that they need to make camp and sleep. Use the cues and rhythms of the natural world to set a scene, a mood, and to symbolise the story behind what is happening. The wolf attack should always take place during a thunderstorm. The rocket should launch by the light of the moon. Ships should sail on the morning tide with a fair wind - unless of course it's on a Voyage of Fate. Duels should occur in the hot sun of high noon. Deals should be made with underworld netrunners on the streets of Tokyo in a slippery grey rain that greases the steel and neon canyons with a sheen of modernity and slicked-down grime.

And midnight, when most of the party is asleep and a single weary member is on watch, is a great time to throw the undead hordes at them.

This is the end of Episode III, and the half-way point of Darths & Droids. Yes, for those of you who haven't checked the Frequently Asked Questions, we are doing the original trilogy (that has been our most frequently asked question). Our story is certainly not done yet, and we've been planning to do all six movies (and writing plot notes for all of them) ever since we began.

To give you a chance to digest the events of Episode III and all that has happened so far, we are going to take an extended break over the end of year holiday season before starting Episode IV, which will begin on Sunday, 8 January.

However, we will continue updating the site in the meantime with new comics on the usual three-per-week schedule. These comics will form an extended intermission, similar to the short intermissions we did between the previous films. We hope you enjoy them.

First up in the intermission before we start Episode IV is the GM's original adventure plan for what eventually turned into Revelation of the Sith.

This is the first deleted scene from the film that is presented on the DVD. It is a scene in which Anakin and Obi-Wan briefly meet General Grievous before finding Palpatine and Count Dooku. Grievous has somehow managed to capture the Jedi Master Shaak Ti and has her helpless on her knees. He then executes her in front of Obi-Wan and Anakin, and they have to escape by cutting their way through the floor and jumping into a tunnel waist deep in some sort of liquid. (It looks like fake CGI water, but it's apparently supposed to be fuel of some sort.)

We wanted to use this scene in the story. We even wrote a gag about Anakin and Obi-Wan falling into an area of the ship that the GM hadn't mapped, because he never expected them to cut through the floor, thus the incomplete special effects appearance of the liquid they end up sloshing around in. But it didn't fit into the narrative we planned with the revelation of General Grievous after the rescue of Palpatine from Count Dookû, and the presence of Shaak Ti was a problem as well. So we decided not to use this scene in the story. But we didn't want to let it pass unnoted, so we've used it here for this intermission strip.

We expect this to make sales of cyborg conversions go through the roof.

Our extended intermission continues...

... with this poetic description of events, using screencaps from the animated TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

The events described in this poem tell the tale of what happened while Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padmé, Yoda, R2-D2, and C-3PO were busy doing other things, during the last part of Episode III: Revelation of the Sith.

Uh oh...

Those with good in their heart, always passing too soon.

It's not easy staying out of sight of patrolling troops when you're on a landscape of rolling grassy plains with no cover.

Queen Neeyutnee is the successor of Queen Jamillia, who we saw back in Episode 262.

Think of the children!

"Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky..."

Nute Gunray having recently died on the other side of Naboo, as seen here.

Never engage in a staring contest with someone defending their entire planet.

So ends The Ballad of Jar Jar.

We wanted to tell the back-story behind Bail Organa's revelation in Episode 642 that Jar Jar had liberated Naboo from the Trade Federation, rather than just have it be a piece of significant action that is described by an NPC and is never shown. We hope you enjoyed it!

And this also concludes our extended intermission after Episode III: Revelation of the Sith. The next comic will be the first strip of Episode IV.

By the way, here is a list of reject titles for this strip:
Amfish, Rising Fish, Shadow of Fish, Fish Malevolence, Fishies, Downfall of Fish, Duel of the Fish, Bombad Fish, Fish of Darkness, Lair of Fish, Fish Captured, The Fish General, Fish Crash, Fish of Peace, Fishpass, The Hidden Fish, Blue Shadow Fish, Mystery of a Thousand Fish, Fish Trap, Storm Over Fish, Innocence of Fish, Liberty of Fish, Fish Crisis, Fish Heist, Cargo of Fish, Fish of Doom, Fish of the Force, Fishy Spy, Landing at Point Fish, Fish Factory, Legacy of Fish, Fish of Terror, Fish Invaders, Fish Intrigue, The Fish, Fish Lost, The Fish Plot, Fish of Temptation, Fish Murders, Cat and Fish, Fish Hunters, The Fish Beast, The Fish Beast Strikes Back, Death Fish, Fish Come Home, Lethal Fishdown, Fish Cadets, Fish Troopers, Fish Lines, Fish of Influence, Sphere of Fish, Evil Fish, Hunt for Fish, Fish on Both Sides, Fish on One Side, Fish on the Side, Fish of Peace, Pursuit of Fish, Nightfishes, Fishsisters, Fish, Fishlords, Overfish, Altar of Fish, Ghosts of Fish, Fish Citadel, Counterfish, Fish Rescue, Fish Lost, Fish Hunt, Water Maw, Fish Attack, Shadow Fish, Fish Warrior, Mercy Fish, Mercy Fish-on, Mercy Fission, Nomad Fish, Fish of Dissent, Plan of Fish, Carnage of Fish, Fishnapped, Fish of the Republic, Slaves of Fish, Escape from Fish, A Fish in Need, Friends and Fish, Fish on Naboo.

A good GM makes sure the PCs are always in danger. That's what PCs are for, after all.

Of course it doesn't hurt if your players make crazy plans and do insanely reckless stuff. But for the most part that's a given.

Apologies are severely under-rated in roleplaying games. Next time your character or party gets into trouble, try one of these on for size:

• I apologise for knocking you head-long into that puddle, milady, but it was two-for-one mead night at the Tipsy Tankard.
• Sorry, officer. I didn't realise there were restrictions on importing Aldabrian spice into the system, nor that its price on the black market was so high. Oops, did I just drop and lose a thousand credit banknote? How careless of me.
• Sorry, my lord, we didn't see your permit on the wall. But really, a dragon? As a guard dog?
• Please accept our sincere apologies for destroying the city, Mr Mayor. But you must realise it would have been worth it if we'd actually captured Dr Nemesis and his gang of thugs, right?
• My liege, we are most sorry we confused your mother with the orc overlord and razed half the kingdom.

Never let lack of suitable equipment get in the way of a good plan.

Or a bad plan, for that matter.

Crossfire is a great thing. Always make sure if a firefight breaks out, your players' characters are caught somewhere in the middle of two opposing sides who are shooting at each other.

The cool thing is that if you roll a miss on the dice for one of the opposing factions, you can simply assume it hits a PC!

Robes, cloaks, and capes are excellent garments for villains. Where would Dracula be without his cape? Or Xykon? Or the Evil Queen from Snow White? Or old, overweight Elvis?

If your heroes start pimping up by wearing a cape or a cloak, however, make sure it gets caught in any handy machinery that happens to be anywhere in the vicinity. Jet engines, escalators, soft-serve ice cream machines, rice threshers, whatever.

Mwah-hah-hah-hah-haaaaaa!!! <swoosh!>

Creating a diversion is always a good tactic.

As long as you're not the one creating the diversion, that is. If you are, better make sure you're buffed out, armed to the teeth, and get all the relevant experience points for both combat and good roleplaying.

Tricking a computer is of course very different to tricking a person.

It uses a whole other skill, and a different set of dice modifiers.

This is the patented "Scheherazade" method of keeping your mouth shut.

It can work in some cases when confronted by a demanding enemy after information. You just need to be sure you're actually making up false information.

When someone gives you an ultimatum, it's a good time to consider your options very carefully.

Particularly when they have their hand on your windpipe.

Of course your options at the time may be somewhat limited. Unless you're a ninja. Or Captain Kirk. They always have options.

Choose your poison: Wikipedia or TV Tropes.

Either way, everyone's gonna die.

Always know where the escape pods or life boats or similar such devices are located. This includes biplanes attached to zeppelins. Whenever you board a commercial vessel, scout it out and plan your escape route in case of iceberg, fire, or sahuagin attack. Memorise all paths to the means of escape, so you can follow them in pitch blackness. Even when carrying a cat cage and flamethrower and being chased by an alien carnivore.

And if it's your own vessel, keep all the pods/boats in working order. Test them often. If your ship doesn't come with any sort of safety escape means, install some. Have manual overrides so you can release them even if an enemy takes control of the ship's computer. Equip them with rations, water, first aid kits, and wooden stakes. Just in case.

Because all of these things will happen. Maybe even in the same campaign, if you're lucky.

There's a reason that evil empires with a "leave no survivors" policy were so successful. It's because they left no survivors. They burnt the villages, they salted the fields, they made sure that even the fleeing refugees hiding in caves had nowhere to go and no food to eat. They did not let random wagons pass by unscathed merely because they didn't look like they had any enemies in them.

Fancy painted miniatures are a great way to spice up a game. They add colour and life and visual reference points to a game otherwise mostly played in the imagination. They crystallise in-game locations, objects, and characters, making it easier to visualise the action and to plan your actions.

They also make it really easy to know what parts of the adventure to ignore completely while you concentrate on investigating trivial throw-away stuff that the GM only mentioned in passing for added detail.

Presumably in a galaxy where a 14-year-old can be elected queen, it's fine for 19-year-olds to be senators. Maybe being a senator is hereditary - after all, according to the movies her adopted father was one.

Occupational safety is very important, even in evil empires. Just look what happens if you don't have it.

It's important for a villain to have competent subordinates. At least ones competent enough to recognise their own incompetence, if nothing else.

If you're running a villain in a game, for Pete's sake, give them competent subordinates.

Of all the reasons to split up a party, the players arguing might actually be a good one. Sequester them in different rooms and pop between them, GMing each in turn.

Try designating part of each room as the "naughty corner" and insisting the recalcitrant players sit there until they can cooperate again.

If your players have an emotional maturity at least as developed as pre-schoolers, it might just work. Oh, wait...

The themes and tropes of the sea are evocative and powerful. The sense of distance and adventure, and a horizon to travel over. Winds and currents that push travellers at the whims of nature. Large vehicles called by the names and jargon of ships.

If you want to add instant atmosphere to a campaign, co-opt the flavour of the sea. Have jolly sailors, press gangs, and pirates. Transports that have large open decks where crew can wander around, getting a view, and being targets. Use words like "port" and "starboard" and "marlinspike".

And have some sort of huge, fast carnivores, just waiting for people to fall off those decks.

There's something comforting in the ritual of creating a new character. Starting with a blank character sheet and knowing that by your toil will be generated an entire personality. Moulding a complete living entity with nought but your bare hands, some dice, and a rule book. Someone with a purpose and a goal in life*.

It's a simple process of taking a step-by-step sequence, applying it to a blank slate, and adding a dash of your imagination, but it frequently comes up with a character that you end up caring about. There's magic in that.

* Even if it is merely to gain treasure and experience.

Never underestimate the offensive capabilities of your enemies.

The best way to do that is to never estimate the offensive capabilities of your enemies. Send the thief in to find out first.

Gamers often have a casual attitude to death in games. Try throwing some vivid descriptions of death and mutilation at them to shock them out of their complaceny and make the dangers seems realand horrifying.

And if you're not playing Bunnies & Burrows, ramp it up even further.

{awkward silence}

Mind control is both the GM's best ally and worst nightmare. Used against the PCs, you can get them to do whatever you want or, more to the point, not do whatever you don't want them to do.

But whatever you do, make sure this power doesn't fall into the hands of the players.

Aaaiiiieeeee!!!

One of the classic gaming scenarios is the prison break. You assemble the PCs in a secure cell somewhere, either by capturing them, or simply by starting the game there, and let them try to get out. Hilarity ensues.

These scenarios can be a lot of fun. For the sadistic GM. For the players... not so much. Unless you know your players really well and are sure they will take this challenge in stride, best to not make it too difficult and demoralising.

In other words, resist the temptation to lock them in a dingy cell with no magic or armour or equipment, and no hopes of retrieving them, no matter how many times they do utterly stupid things and end up getting captured. Throw them a bone. Or at least a wand of fireballs.

Young people these days. Mention "roleplaying games" to them, and the first thing they think of is a computer. This has progressed so far that games of the original style now have to be referred to as "traditional" or "tabletop" or "pen and paper" roleplaying games, just to make sure there's no confusion.

This is a natural evolution of lamnguage, and similar things have been happening to English for hundreds of years. Rather than lament this fact, use the same principle in your games!

Blacksmith {when a PC returns a sword that broke in a fight against some goblins}: Oh, you mean you wanted a non-practice sword?
Armourer: Well, you didn't ask for steel plate armour.
High Cleric: Oh, you should have specified a magical healing potion!

One of the cool things about roleplaying games is when a player comes out with something completely unexpected.

You think for a brief moment that something truly marvellous and new is about to happen.

And then you are reminded again that these are merely your players, not geniuses.

The easiest way to teach new players how to roleplay is simply to throw them in the deep end. Don't bother going through a bunch of rules or details about character creation, or what dice to roll in what situations. Just explain that everyone is playing the role of a character and start playing. When they need to roll some dice, hand them the right dice and tell them what they need to roll. That's all the rules you really need to know when you start.

You can run games with little kids this way. The game Toon is especially good for this. You don't need to tell them anything about how the game works... Just say, "You're a rabbit, you're a cat, and you're a tweety bird," and let them go.

(A lot of the "roleplaying advice" given in these annotations is very tongue-in-cheek, but this one is actually serious. Yes, we need a special note to indicate when we're not being silly...)

Dice, the most used gaming miniatures ever. See, this is why you need all those dice, in all those colours.

If ever anyone asks you.

Language difficulties are always fun to roleplay.

Well, for the GM, anyway.

If you get a warranty on products you buy in a game, make sure it covers the sorts of situations you're likely to get into. Extended firefights, explosions, car chases, falling from great heights, being immersed in water, tiger attack, ectoplasmic projection, gravity reversal, intense magnetic fields, radiation zones, superheated steam, buried in snow, exposed to the vacuum of space, struck by lightning, teleported, and dipped in lava.

Preferably all at once.

One of the major differences between face-to-face roleplaying and computer roleplaying is that when you are speaking to real people you can say anything at all (that makes sense in your language) and be understood. Computer games still struggle to interpret the full complexity of natural language. The stop-gap solution in early computer RPGs was to offer the player a selection of pre-canned dialogue snippets that they could choose from. The computer character's response could then be controlled to a small, finite* number of possibilities, from which further canned possibilities were offered to the player, leading to other computer responses, and so on. The resulting branching structure of the potential conversations is called a dialogue tree.

* It's an oddity of natural language that the adjective "small" applied to the noun "number" should make the additional adjective "finite" entirely redundant, yet somehow leaving out the "finite" feels like it's understating the point too much.

That's one thing about roleplaying games. You can be in them for the long haul. And you can put them on hiatus for various reasons - people move away, go to university, get married, get a job, have kids, other unimportant stuff that gets in the way - and still come back to them at any point in the future, and the gameplay will be just as good as you remember it. It won't feel outdated.

Oh, what? What do you mean Second Edition, Third Edition, and Fourth Edition? All the real roleplayers are still using First Edition! And loving it!

Now where did I put those weapon versus armour class adjustment tables...?

When a new player joins an established game, it's important to bring them up to speed with the story so far. Normally this would be the job of the GM, speaking out of character. But to really get the new recruit into the roleplaying spirit, try delivering the background in character, through the other players.

Some players might even be eager to share their adventures. Just keep an eye on them so that you get some actual new adventure into the session.

Every character needs a motivation to get them interested in the adventure that the GM lays before them. For some it might be a thirst for adventure, or a desire to travel and see the world beyond the town they grew up in. It may be a wish to do good deeds, to rescue the princesses of the world from the dragons, or to overthrow the evil despot. Some have a calling to serve the gods of their world. Others seek knowledge and arcane power. The occasional person may be seeking justice or revenge for a wrong inflicted on their family or village.

These are all good, flavourful motivations.

Then there's the character motivated by a desire to gain wealth. Which is also kind of okay. After all, many real people in our world are motivated strongly by this, so there are bound to be such people in your game world.

Now, imagine if when George Mallory was asked, "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?" he replied, "For the experience points."

Reverse psychology is about the only psychology that works on gamers. Sometimes.

If they're too genre-savvy you may need to go for reverse-reverse psychology. Where you say what you want them to do, so they think you're trying to trick them into not doing that, so they go ahead and do it.

Of course this leads to doubly genre-savvy gamers not falling for anything less than reverse-reverse-reverse psychology. Where you say you want them to do what you don't want them to do, so they think you're deliberately saying what you do want them to do so that they'll think you don't want them to do that in order to trick them into going ahead and doing that, only then they're too smart for that and decide not to do it!

Which leads to reverse-reverse-reverse-reverse psychology. Where... you get the idea.

Make sure to make maximum use of these principles when designing dungeon traps that the PCs either should or should not touch...

Character sheets are of course useful not just for recording your stats and skills, but also your loot and gear. And the players normally hold on to their character sheets. Where the GM can't always keep an eye on them.

Not that we're suggesting anything.

A neat way to make an adventure setting seem exotic and unique is to take something mundane and normal in our everyday world and tweak it a bit to make it slightly weird. Change the colour of something to some colour that it doesn't normally come in. Change the shape, or the smell, or the size.

Or for real fun, change the number of legs, the length of the teeth, and the amount of aggression towards humans.

If you're running an NPC who wants a PC to do something, you could do worse than starting with some praise for their past adventures.

"Ah, so you're the renowned heroes who rid the kingdom of the ravages of the goblin hordes! Excellent! So pleased to meet such loyal citizens, obviously destined for knighthood and other honours. I have a small favour to ask..."

Teach players early that they should fear the dice.

It's important to ensure that characters have motivations that are logical and consistent within the game world - rather than just doing things because they will gain experience or whatever. Even riches may not be the deciding motivating factor in a character's choices (as far fetched as that may sound).

After all, there's also power. And glory. And arcane knowledge that brings power. And glory. And riches.

Ah, okay.

There is of course a subtle distinction between the deterministically generated pseudo-random number algorithms used in electronic "random" number devices, and the true and proper random numbers you get from a carefully selected and primed die, tossed onto a surface with just the right combination of bounce and yield, with the perfect flick of the wrist so that it produces the number you want.

The skills a character can have would normally be restricted to a subset of the entire skill list in the game rules, based on what skills would be reasonable for the character to actually know.

This is why it's vitally important for your private detective to be an active member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, or for your wandering minstrel to have frequent hyper-realistic visions of men made of metal and people travelling to the stars in giant galleons.

Sleep can, of course, be skipped over when roleplaying.

Well, in cases where you're not attacked by wolves in the middle of the night. Or orcs. Or bandits. Or pirates. Or ghouls. Or giant vampire bats. Or lions. Or tigers. Or bears. Oh my.

In other words, don't ever skip over sleep when roleplaying.

The key to successful quest completion is to stay focused on your goals.

Remembering that all other goals come after looking out for number one.

Many games have "surprise" mechanics, which govern specific instances in which PCs or the opponents they are fighting are surprised. If the opponents are surprised, the PCs gain some brief advantage in the opening moves of any ensuing combat. On the other hand, if the PCs are surprised, the opponents get a chance to attack first with various bonuses.

Since it's difficult at best to accurately determine when the players are surprised, and this doesn't necessarily track when their characters are surprised anyway, surprise is often determined somewhat arbitrarily using a dice roll for randomisation, sometimes with modifiers based on traits such as the characters' perception statistics, circumstances such as darkness, and so on.

Or you can just use the tried and true GM technique of simply saying, "You're surprised".

Exotic hand-to-hand weapons are a staple of science fiction.

In fact, if the characters in your game are running around with any sort of weapon that can actually attack from a distance, then your campaign probably isn't science-fictiony enough.

Camouflage is a great skill. It allows characters to blend perfectly into their surroundings. Like a polar bear in a coal mine in some cases.

If you show up late to a game session... bring presents.

At least chips.

It's traumatic when a player leaves a gaming group. The dynamic changes, their character has to vanish (or be taken over by the GM as an NPC), and there's potentially a hole left in the skill set of the party.

So everyone's always happy when an old player returns!

Names are powerful evokers of character. They're even better when backed up by titles. Try to accumulate as many titles as you can.

Knight of the Realm. Lord Protector. Baron. Professor of Archaeology. Archduke. Head Wizard. He-Who-Shall-be-Worshipped. Emperor-King. Despoiler of Worlds.

Don't let anything divert you from your quest. Especially another quest.

The game can easily go all Scheherazade on you if you start getting into that sort of thing.

Another metal that has a ridiculously low melting point is NaK, or sodium-potassium alloy. Sodium melts at 97.7°C, so you could melt it with boiling water - remembering of course that sodium exposed to water reacts spontaneously and violently explosively, so be careful. Potassium melts at 63.4°C, which can be done with hot tap water - remembering that potassium is even more reactive than sodium and when it comes into contact with water the reaction is so violent that it also ignites the hydrogen released from the water, causing an additional source of explosive combustion.

Mix these two extremely safe molten metals together and you produce the alloy known as NaK. The melting point of the alloy varies with composition, and is a minimum with a mixture of 22% sodium to 78% potassium. This mixture has a melting point of -12°C. So it'll stay liquid, even in the freezer compartment of your fridge. Though any moisture whatsoever that gets into contact with it will trigger an explosion.

What use is this wonderful stuff? It's used to cool nuclear reactors! Because it stays liquid at much higher temperatures than water (and much higher temperatures than mercury too), and won't freeze solid in the pipes at room temperature.

What use is all of this for a roleplaying game?

Hello? Incredibly dangerous explosive material? Found in large quantities in nuclear reactors? The game scenario almost writes itself!

Polite, softy spoken insistence can work wonders.

Just hold the big stick in a not-quite-inconspicuous way.

Characters need history. A background that ties them to the game world, that gives them family, and the sense that other people out there in the otherwise anonymous wilderness might be interested in them. Something that connects them to wider events.

Given how the typical roleplayer generates a character, it might be a good idea to have someone else tell them all this stuff.

Every character needs a turning point. A fateful decision. A moment that defines the rest of their life.

Often this occurs without much fanfare. It could be a decision made in the heat of battle, amidst the whirls of blades and the roll of dice. Or something that occurs in a conversation with the king, that changes the course of empires because the GM has decided that the king's reaction will be based on what the PC does. You can set up situations like this.

But an interesting way to to approach them instead is to draw attention to them. Make it abundantly clear to the character (and the player) that this one decision will have the potential to change everything about the campaign from now on. Lead them by the hand. Say, "These are your choices." Explain what a decision either way will mean, and how it will flow on to affect things across the span of continents, worlds, and decades.

Then sit back and watch.

The Revelation can be a powerful moment in a character's life. They learn something that overthrows everything they (thought they) knew about themself and the world around them.

No reason not to make it a joyous occasion!

You can also use the Revelation to place all sorts of new and unusual dangers interesting and compelling character motivations upon PCs.

And yet another great way to add depth to a character. Have them inherit something from a previously unknown relative.

Something interesting.

Something unusual.

Something eldritch.

When given the floor in a game... make full use of it. Make sure everyone is listening to what you have to say.

By saying something like this.

Seriousness has its place in games.

Making sure there's enough pizza and snacks should be treated with deadly seriousness.

GMs: Never let players question your GMing decisions.

Players: Question everything.

This about sums up roleplaying gaming.

Sometimes you need to inform your players of certain things. Sending a memo is a bad idea. That's tantamount to asking them to read your campaign background notes before the first session.

Grounding can be an effective game mechanic, in a sense. The cartoon roleplaying game Toon has such a mechanic. Since cartoon characters never actually die as such, when you lose all your hit points you simply sit out of the game for three minutes (real time), then come back in with your hit points restored! In effect, you're grounded from the game for three minutes, as a "punishment" for losing all your hit points.

Now imagine applying this to other roleplaying games for transgressions such as talking back to the (NPC) king, picking up a cursed magic item in a dungeon, or taking the last slice of pizza when the GM wanted it.

We thought of adding in this line at the end:

Captain Antilles: {dead} Loot the bodies!

Torture is not a pleasant topic, but it is something that could realistically come up in many RPG genres and scenarios.

If there's a justifiable reason for PCs to be tortured in a game, try relieving the horror and foreboding by making the torturers really pleasant, cheerful people who enjoy their job.

Another neat tip is that it's difficult to physically torture your players(*), so it can be tough to elicit the desired information/confession out of their characters through player/character sympathy. So go for psychological torture instead! Follow the example of the Venetian Republic, which used to lock prisoners in a dark room with only the moderately painful inconvenience of being suspended from the ceiling by ropes tied around the wrists. Inform the prisoners that this is stage one of the torture process. Hire people to sit comfortably in adjacent rooms and scream hideously. Use the word "hideously" to describe their screams. Use it a lot.

This was the only form of torture used by the Venetian Republic. Records show that it elicited confessions almost without fail. That should be good for a hideous penalty on the PC's Will roll (or whatever other game mechanic is used to resist torture).

Mwuah-hah-hah-hah-haaaaahhh!!!

(*) Unless ordering not enough pizza counts.

Funerary customs differ widely in the real world. But in a roleplaying game, there are many reasons to burn the bodies of fallen enemies and allies alike.

Here are just a few of the reasons: Zombies. Ghouls. Vampires. Liches.

It always helps for everyone in the party to be on the same page with respect to their adventure goals.

Well, it would if it ever happened.

Of the four classical elements, fire is by far the most primal. The most challenging. The most dangerous. The most transforming. The most visceral.

The most fun.

Seriously, which enemies would cower in their tracks if you appeared in front of them and proclaimed yourself to be a great water wizard?

Be careful using superlatives when describing things in your campaign world. Because you can guarantee that if you describe a villain as the "most evil person in the world", then once he's been defeated and locked in prison, the PCs will challenge any other claimants to the title as exaggerating.

(Of course this is when you apply Joker Immunity and the Cardboard Prison, and let loose with the original bad guy again! So all is not lost. As long as you're willing to unleash the most evil person in the world on the world again. But hey, you're the GM, that's your job.)

Video is also a way to do it for certain kinds of stars.

Be a good citizen and recycle your gaming miniatures.

Take that fighter that got crushed under a ton of boulders in a deadfall trap and squash him flat under a pile of rulebooks, for reuse as a lurker. Take that thief who got sliced by blades while opening a treasure chest after a failed "detect traps roll" and chop her head off, for reuse as a penanggalan. Take that wizard who rolled a critical failure on the fireball, and apply a blowtorch, to reuse the miniature as a magma golem.

Roleplaying game truism #129: Once players starts questioning things about the campaign or the setting or the adventure, it's a short downward spiral to selling off bits of equipment that you never expected them to sell.

Sure, you thought the League of Good Guys needed a high-tech super-headquarters in order to monitor Megalopolis City for supervillain crime sprees. What the players see is a valuable piece of inner city real estate that they can swap for bigger guns.

Traffic cops are a trope that works in any form of game setting. Modern day, obviously. Future, sure - any time you have vehicles it's a given. Fantasy, not a problem - fantasy borrows many tropes from modern day life as it is (*cough*Terry Pratchett*cough*).

Historical can be a little more difficult. But if your Roman Empire campaign reads more like Gibbon than Goscinny & Uderzo, you're probably missing half the potential fun anyway.

When a player needs to introduce a new character to an established group, there are only so many possibilities.

How many possibilities, exactly?

One.

One of the problems with using miniatures or props for monsters is that you can never have enough different ones to represent all of the multifarious possibilities that you'll ever need. The solution is to use things you have lying around the house.

We're pretty sure the Daleks started out this way, when Terry Nation was running a sci-fi game with Ray Cusick and a bunch of their friends, and grabbed a pair of salt and pepper shakers.

One of the problems with using miniatures or props for monsters is that you can never have enough different ones to represent all of the multifarious possibilities that you'll ever need. The solution is to use things you have lying around the house.

We're pretty sure the Daleks started out this way, when Terry Nation was running a sci-fi game with Ray Cusick and a bunch of their friends, and grabbed a pair of salt and pepper shakers.

In the ladder of roleplaying game assistant characters, the sidekick is one rung above a henchman, who is a rung above a retainer. The sidekick can be expected to have a complete character sheet, and even possibly a personality.

Potentially more personality than the PC they're sidekick to.

Never forget that a character Disadvantage isn't actually a disadvantage unless it comes into play. Preferably at random times when the player least expects it.

Because they'll cerainly never let you forget the Advantages they got with the character points.

Bartenders in roleplaying games are not for ordering drinks. They're there to proffer randomly rolled rumours from the adventure rumour table. Viz:

Roll d20:

1. A spectral dog wanders the woods.
2. None have ever returned from the abandoned mill by the Black Stream.
3. Bandits lay ambushes along the mountain pass.
4. The mysterious owner of the castle on the hill is a powerful wizard.
5. A pirate treasure lies buried somewhere in the Goblin Marshes.
6. The "old wise woman" is not so old. Or so wise. Or a woman.
7. In the lowest level of the Necromancer's dungeon, walk only on the black squares, not the white.
8. The king offers a great reward for orc heads.
9. The food at the inn on the other side of town is prepared by an ogre chef.
10. There is no Necromancer - it's just a story to scare children.
11. Don't venture beyond the strange stone circle.
12. Nobody ever died from eating the food here.
13. That strange cloaked figure in the corner has been watching you all night.
14. The village druid grows some "special" pipeweed.
15. The Necromancer's name is Carl. But don't call him that or he'll get angry.
16. You're not safe walking around with all that gold. Better lock it up here in this back room.
17. The thieves' guild doesn't take kindly to out-of-town freelancers.
18. Dale a tu cuerpo alegria Macarena.
19. I can't hear you, I've got a banana in my ear.
20. Don't trust anything you hear from a bartender.

Let that be a warning against making small talk with inconsequential NPCs. You might tick off the GM by paying attention to stuff that has no background other than being there just as scenery.

Special bonus image:

If someone in a bar in a game setting pulls a weapon, they're probably just having a little fun. Best to laugh and move on, rather than over-react.

Unless they're not having a little fun. In which case over-reacting is the best policy.

Can't decide which? Roll a die. That's what the GM's doing anyway.

Music can be a good way to set the scene in a game.

And if you have control over the volume, can be an effective way to stop everyone chatting about last week's Doctor Who episode and get their attention back on the game.

Always agree on a price before accepting any sort of deal.

Especially with shady characters who look like they might have come from Sicily.

Especially in campaigns where there is no Sicily.

If you're up for a real roleplaying challenge, try a game in which you play other members of your gaming group.

The game doesn't need to be set in the real world. Imagine yourselves as wizards and warriors, or pilots and mechanics, in a world of the imagination. But the characters are based on yourselves. Greg plays a thief with a personality based on Marcia. Marcia plays a cleric with a personality based on Bobby. Bobby plays a wizard with a personality based on Alice...

Hmmm. This could break up your gaming group faster than playing a cut-throat game of Diplomacy.

"No questions asked" is a sure sign that what you're about to get into involves getting into some sort of trouble or illegal activity.

So the obvious response from a group of PCs is, "Sure! Let's go!"

The bar room brawl is a standard in any work of fiction in which characters enter a bar.

By all rights, it should happen in Star Wars.

That it doesn't is either a testament to the non-conformist creative genius of the young George Lucas, or an oversight of the highest possible magnitude.

In either case, ensure that whenever the characters in your game enter a bar, nobody leaves until at least 50% of the furniture is broken and used as makeshift weaponry.

The dawning realisation of what a character has really been up to for so long, right under the noses of the PCs without being noticed, is one of the finest experiences in roleplaying.

For wider application, have the villain, the big bad the PCs have been chasing for eight adventure sessions, turn out to be one of the people they trusted all along. The police comissioner. The tough-on-crime district attorney. The general who ordered them on the mission in the first place.

That is, of course, if your players aren't ridiculously genre-savvy and suspect the most innocent people right from the beginning. If they do suspect kindly old Aunt Harriet of being the supervillain, you're fully within your rights as a card-carrying member of the Devious GM's Guild to pull the old switcheroo and have her be entirely innocent! That should baffle them well and good!

Often characters in games will understand more languages than their players do. Particularly things like Elvish, or goblin, or Klingon.

...

Actually, it's probably a better than even chance that some of your players do understand some Elvish or Klingon.

So much for this annotation, then.

Often characters in games will understand more languages than their players do. Particularly things like Elvish, or goblin, or Klingon.

...

Actually, it's probably a better than even chance that some of your players do understand some Elvish or Klingon.

So much for this annotation, then.

Often characters in games will understand more languages than their players do. Particularly things like Elvish, or goblin, or Klingon.

...

Actually, it's probably a better than even chance that some of your players do understand some Elvish or Klingon.

So much for this annotation, then.

This is a bit of a meta-annotation. Judging from reader comments in various places, this is definitely the single most anticipated scene for our comic, in the entire six movies. There have been dozens of theories about how we would approach this scene - we've read many of them. The most common were variants on the GM initially declaring that Greedo (a green-skinned alien) shot first, followed by an argument over initiative bonuses that leads to him declaring that, okay, Han (the human) actually shot first.

While this is amusing, we didn't want to do something that many of you were expecting. We actually had about a dozen different ideas for how to run this scene - and we may show some of them to you later on.

We've never been about doing "the obvious joke". You can all imagine the obvious gags well enough for yourselves. We wanted to give you something completely unexpected. Thus... Jim's character.

We hope this take gives you something you never expected to get out of this scene. And we hope to keep subverting your expectations for another two and a half movies. :-)

It's interesting to think about the traditional character alignment axis of Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic and how it would actually work in practice. Especially among groups of villains.

Try giving your villains, if not strictly defined alignments, at least distinct personalities and approaches to what they want. Having your bad guys bicker amongst themselves a little bit gives them an air of realism. You probably shouldn't get too carried away with it though, lest they make your heroes entirely redundant.

It can be good roleplaying if a PC forms a strong attachment to something in game. Like a loved one, or an adorable street urchin, or a family heirloom with no value beyond the sentimental.

Ah, who are we kidding? There is no love more sincere than the love for a +5 Flaming Vorpal Demonslayer Sword that shoots fireballs on command.

Bargaining can be difficult if you live in a culture where it's not the norm. Especially when the only exposure you get to it is on trips to different countries, and those different places have their own unwritten rules and expectations built into the process.

For example, in various places in Asia, if you pay more than about half the initial asking price for anything, you're essentially being fleeced. When you ask how much something is, if they say 100, you're expected to offer them 20 as a starting point, and the to and fro process of bargaining is underway.

If you've learnt that and then you travel to, say, Peru, you might come across someone asking 100 for something. If you offer 20 in response, the reaction will either be that you have amused them beyond belief, or that you have insulted them beyond belief. You better hope they're in a good mood. Because there, if you bargain someone down to 10% off, you've done a good job.*

Roleplaying games tend to use bargaining a bit, but it's kind of expected that PCs buy goods at a set price as given in the rulebook equipment lists, and if PCs try to sell stuff, they pretty much know they can expect to get about half that price. Which makes the bargaining a bit perfunctory. Instead, try mixing it up a bit. Have the unwritten bargaining protocols change drastically from country to country, or even from town to town. Throw in some really unusual stuff, like the expectation that the buyer must also buy the seller a drink to seal the deal. Or that the first offered buying price must be deliberately over what the seller expects to get, so that the seller can make a point of how miserable an item it is, and in his humble opinion it's not worth nearly that much, perhaps the buyer would care to offer less?

Of course, if a foreigner is ignorant of these traditions, things can (and should) go awry. Doubly of course, PCs should be ignorant of these traditions until they need to buy or sell something...

* This writer speaks from harsh experience...

Always make sure you know the full extent of a quest before embarking upon it. You don't want to get all caught up in some affair with some dragon or other after simply agreeing to what you think will be an evening of entertainment and fine dining with a group of dwarves. That's how these things always seem to start.

If an NPC ever asks you if you remember some incident in the past, the sensible thing to do is to deny all knowledge!

Unless you actually don't remember it, in which case the sensible thing to do is say of course you remember it!

Exuding confidence and bluffing your way past all manner of things in a game is an important survival strategy. Do it often, and do it brazenly.

You'll thank us when you go to your next job interview.

Sometimes you need someone new and na&iun;ve to ask the questions that nobody else thinks of. Fresh blood can make you see things in a whole new light.

By that we mean try getting some new players now and then, not take your live-action vampire game to another level.

Han's line about the Kessel Run in the movie has a long and convoluted back-story. The various drafts of the film script include notes about Han's boast that the Millennium Falcon is "the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs". The problem of course is that a parsec is a unit of distance, not time. (At least in English it is - but then the characters are speaking English on the screen, so one may reasonably assume that words have the same meanings they do in regular English.)

The revised fourth draft of the film script makes it very clear what Han's line means. Immediately after the line, it says:

Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation.

In other words, Han is trying to boast, and using a word he doesn't know the meaning of, which makes it obvious to Obi-Wan that he's lying through his teeth. Even in the shooting script, Han's line is followed by a note stating that he is "obviously lying".

Which is all well and good, but unfortunately even the acting talent of Sir Alec Guinness did not make it quite clear enough that Han's line was intended to be interpreted as a completely bogus fabrication. The result is that masses of Star Wars fans have tried to come up with a reason why the Kessel Run really could be flown in "less than twelve parsecs".

If you take Han's line at face value (rather than a transparent lie), the most favoured explanation is that the Kessel Run is a smuggling route that skirts a cluster of black holes (known as The Maw). The standard, relatively safe, route around The Maw is somewhat circuitous and measures 18 parsecs long. Daring pilots can cut closer to The Maw, trimming distance off the route, at some risk to life and limb. Han Solo, being the daring pilot he is, managed to cut so close that he got the distance down to less than twelve parsecs, and thereby making the run in record time.

This explanation eventually became so favoured that it has been officially adopted into the Star Wars Expanded Universe canon.

Which raises a whole bunch of other questions about the consistency of what was actually intended versus what has later become canon. In short, a whole Galaxy of woe could have been prevented if only it was made clearer in the first place that Han was simply clueless.

If the authorities are after you, it's a perfectly reasonable reaction to open fire and flee.

GMs: Remember that when your players are playing police officer characters.

The entire cockpit is made of glass! Or so you'd think. Apparently someone realised this was a bad idea and decided that cockpit windows in Star Wars are actually made of something called transparisteel.

Phew!

Space travel can all too easily become routine in a science fiction game. But you should occasionally remember that to present day players it's something you actually can't do*. Space travel is exotic. Exciting. Unpredictable. Dangerous.

Keep it that way.

All sorts of things can go wrong, or be complicated. What if navigation for faster-than-light travel is incredibly complex and risky if you get it wrong? What if it's too chaotic to be done by a computer and the only way to fly safely through hyperspace is to have an experienced pilot at the helm, reacting instantly to tiny ripples and currents in the time-space continuum? Not mechanically, but by instinct. Artistically, because it really is more an art than a science.

And what if the only navigator capable of flying the ship is moody, or an alcoholic, or incapacitated?

* Unless you're NASA's resident astronaut/Call of Cthulhu Keeper. I wonder if, of all the things that humans have done in space, anyone has run a roleplaying game up there yet. Of course, being alone in the inky blackness, more isolated from the rest of humanity than it's possible to be anywhere else, where the stars are always right, what better game to run?

Minions often get a raw deal. Hanging out in an evil villain's lair for months or years while the boss goes about enacting plans for world domination, and then when something exciting happens, getting killed as one of the faceless crowd when the heroes raid the place and blow it up.

Give them some personality. Let them have a bit of fun now and then.

When PCs are busy being shocked by one shocking development, throw an even more shocking development at them.

It sounds simple enough, but this sort of planning can help make an adventure truly memorable. Uncovering a huge and startling revelation feels better if there's a lead-up of smaller discoveries and deductions along the way.

If the town burgomeister who hired the adventurers to save his daughter is actually the vampire himself, don't reveal it too early. Make the players think that the twist in the straightforward vampire adventure is that there's also a werewolf involved, by dropping some hints leading in that direction. Once the players starts thinking "werewolf", ramp it up by having the werewolf be the handsome blacksmith who was courting the burgomeister's daughter. You could even toss out hints that maybe the daughter is infected and a werewolf herself. But they rescue her, find she's free of the curse, and return her to her grateful father.

And then they start finding hints that he's the vampire...

Ah, the tender moment of reunion between parent and child.

Have you ever wondered who the parents of PCs in your game are? Your players probably never have either. Try introducing them at some point. They could be rural homebodies, whose progeny has made good by going out into the wide world to seek fortune. Or they could be adventurers themselves, approaching retirement, but still keeping a hand in with the orc-slaying business.

Or they could be the bad guys. Yes, it's been done. But that just means your players wouldn't dare suspect you of pulling this twist.

If you're going to have your bad guy do something despicably evil by destroying something huge, make it something that the PCs care about. Something they've fought for and made sacrifices to save.

Something they've actually heard of before.

The medic is a vital component of any adventuring party. In fantasy, they are clerics with healing spells or druids with herbal medicines. In contemporary games they can be literal medics, or doctors with field surgery skills. In the future they could be robotic or alien, as long as they have the skills to deal with injured compatriots and make them better.

Usually though, one is enough. After all, concentrating on healing skills means you have to make sacrifices in all the other skills you need to fight monsters and loot treasure!

Roleplaying provides an escape from reality.

A little too convenient sometimes.

With great power comes great responsibility.

In game terms: The responsibility not to injure yourself, mainly.

Characters in a roleplaying game are people too. So it's certainly possible for them to have hobbies that they engage in during periods of down time between adventuring activity. Some game systems have skills specifically for characters to take if they want to be good at things like sports and games. Putting a few points into such a skill can round out an otherwise adventure-focused character and make them more believable, and even fun to play.

Imagine a character who's a sports nut. Always keen to hear the latest scores. Idolises the star professional players. Plays a bit himself in a friendly local competition.

Imagine such a character in a dark fantasy world, where the sport is Blood Bowl.

Kids learn new things really fast. Everyone knows that. Their minds are geared towards learning stuff and gaining rapid experience from all the new things they see around them.

So if you play a kid in a roleplaying game, they should get an experience bonus and advance in skill levels faster than anyone else. Try that one on your GM next time!

As long as it all works out in the end.

That means you can do pretty much whatever you like in the middle of an adventure. If it all works out, cool! If it doesn't, then the GM probably wasn't going to let you succeed anyway!*

* Note: May not actually be the case in games other than Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay, World of Darkness, Ravenloft, Planescape, GURPS Horror, GURPS Cthulhupunk, Delta Green, Conspiracy X, ...

Uh, actually it might just always be true.

Mystical sight in fiction often involves switching off your normal senses in some way. It's just one of those things, in the same way that stripping down to skin-revealing rags decreases your chances of being hit by weapons.

If you're ever attacked in a game by a naked guy wearing a blindfold, run.

It is vitally important to keep your out-of-game knowledge separate from your in-character knowledge, and to act naturally when discussing stuff your character shouldn't really know anything about.

Some players learn this quickly. Others... don't.

Now here's a trick you can pull on an unsuspecting group of players. Have one of the players be secretly controlling one of their adversaries, unknown to the other players. The main difficulty is arranging it so that the GM can convincingly portray the antagonist as an NPC without arousing suspicion. Rather than go the detailed and clumsy route of passing notes for every single thing the antagonist says, it's better to have the GM and conspiring player meet for a bit to discuss general character motivations and directions, and then trust the GM to ad-lib within the parameters of that space.

This of course assumes the player you're conspiring with isn't a control freak.

Which might be okay, since usually in any game situation the biggest control freak will gravitate towards the job of being the GM anyway.

You don't wanna see a Code 113-A.

A good skill roll should always be cause for celebration. Just make it appropriate to the situation.

Celebrating a critical hit with a high-five in the middle of combat is marginal.

A full-scale Bollywod dance routine with hirelings serving as a chorus would be more suitable.

Mercenaries should of course be... mercenary. Any opportunity to turn someone else's misfortune into a quick buck should be grabbed and made the most of. There's no need to be impolite about it though. That's the one mistake PCs often make. Why raid a cave system full of goblins, slaughtering all before you at considerable risk to life and limb, when you can simply rock up to the front door, make pleasant conversation about how nice a cave system it is, and how it'd be a right shame if anything were to happen to it, while meaningfully picking your teeth with a two-handed sword?

Always do the last thing your enemy expects.

If you're clever, that means you should make meta-use of your enemy's genre-savvyness by not expecting them to do something completely stupid - so that they go ahead and do something completely stupid.

Looks like the Peace Moon commanders are meta-tactical geniuses.

Always do the last thing your enemy expects.

If you're clever, that means you should make meta-use of your enemy's genre-savvyness by not expecting them to do something completely stupid - so that they go ahead and do something completely stupid.

Looks like the Peace Moon commanders are meta-tactical geniuses.

Landing a spaceship is presumably a terrifying task requiring vast amounts of training. Landing a plane is a thing you need a lot of training for, and can be risky and nerve-wracking. Landing a spacecraft is a thing that only a handful of humans have ever done, and every single one of them was about as intensely trained for the job as anyone can be.

Yet this is usually abstracted away with a single skill roll in a game. Or even assumed to occur safely without any need for a roll at all, in the absence of complicating conditions. Which kind of makes sense from a logical point of view. After all, trained pilots do succeed in landing safely more than 99.99995% of the time*, whereas if you insist on even not rolling a critical failure with a +10 skill bonus in, say, GURPS, that corresponds to 1 accident in every 216 landing attempts. Clearly you can't take that as a realistic simulation of the piloting job.

But! Logic be damned! It's much more fun to have PCs try landing craft in complicated situations where all sorts of etxraneous circumstances come into play. Storms! Enemy fire! Aliens breaking into the cockpit while you have nothing to hold them back with but the plastic cutlery given to economy class passengers to eat their in-flight meals! Make every flight an event! Make every landing an adventure in itself!

Remember, any landing the PCs can walk away from means you didn't throw in enough complications.

* This page quotes accident rates of approximately 1 per 2 million flights, and presumably only a fraction of those are landing accidents.

Be very careful when issuing orders to NPC underlings. Anything can easily be misconstrued as a euphemism for something much more unpleasant.

PC: Hireling, clean my shoes!
Hireling: "Clean your shoes", eh? Yes, sir, right away, sir! Hurrr hurrr... those goblins won't know what hit 'em.

PC: Hireling, water my horse!
Hireling: "Water your horse", eh? Yes, sir, right away, sir! Hurrr hurrr... I'm sure the local Lord won't live that down for years.

PC: Hireling, have my sword repaired!
Hireling: "Have your sword repaired", eh? Yes, sir, right away, sir! Hurrr hurrr... I never did like druids.

Not that a GM would do that deliberately.

No, sirree.

The PA system can be a useful means of addressing characters in the right game settings. Consider its role in the classic TV comedy M*A*S*H - the PA announcements were virtually a character unto themselves.

The game Paranoia has The Computer, of course, which plays a similar sort of "voice from above" role that interacts with the PCs. But you could also incorporate it into other genres. Imagine a PA system making announcements at a passenger spaceflight terminal, or on board a long-haul cruise vessel when things start to go mysteriously bizarre. Or on a space station.

Or in the streets of London on an otherwise normal contemporary day...

NPCs should have a sense of self-preservation. Don't just line them up willingly, ready to be killed by the PCs.

Some games have morale rules to handle this. If an NPC is in danger, the GM makes a roll against some sort of bravery or loyalty or morale stat, and the result determines if the NPC stands his ground or turns tail and flees.

As a PC, you naturally want to encourage your enemies to hang around and fight, rather than flee. So you should do stuff to improve their morale, like complimenting them on their armour or offering them chocolates.

Generally speaking, if you're always coming up with plans while hiding from detection within the bad guy's lair, you might want to consider discussing things just a tad earlier.

On the other hand, if you're frequently hiding from detection within the bad guy's lair, you must be doing something right!

NPCs have jobs too, and some of them probably really enjoy what they do.

Imagine all those people in the supervillain's sub-volcano lair, doing maintenance on the rocket gantry, operating the monorail, providing the catering. Presumably many of them think they're working for some sort of legitimate company, and have varying levels of loyalty and enthusiasm for their job.

If the PCs meet some of these sorts of low level "villains", it may not be clear if they should fight their way through them, or inform them of what's going on and save them.

Interesting...

This is interesting from a roleplaying perspective. The scene shows an interaction with the PCs, but from the NPCs' point of view. Necessarily we have to run with that, since it's what we're given in the movie.

But you could potentially try something like this in a game. Have the PCs describe their actions, then resolve the situation and describe it back to the players from the point of view of the NPCs. I don't know how this would work in practice, but it's be an intriguing experiment, and might be fun.

Have you ever played tennis and ended up with a strained elbow? Or tried lifting something heavy and felt a nasty twinge somewhere? Or how about that time you sneezed really hard and pulled a muscle?

Now imagine what would happen if you were running around, hitting people, dodging weapons fire, and generally doing the sorts of things that PCs do all the time.

For increased realism, every time a PC does something strenuous you should roll on some sort of "pulling a muscle" table. Really, these guys should be falling apart and limping around all over the place.

(N.B. Implementing this idea may or may not increase your enjoyment of an actual game. Depending how sadistic a GM you are.)

Essential game night prop: air horn.

Of course the villains are going to have alarm systems of some kind in their lairs. Whether it be magical runes, a system of ropes and bells activated by trolls, or high-tech laser contraptions, it's important that you give the PCs a chance to deactivate the system and sneak in undetected.

A chance.

There are good reasons for splitting the party.

We can't actually think of any offhand, but we're sure they exist.

Some people are natural planners. They constantly come up with detailed ways and means in which the PCs' objectives can be achieved. They scheme and they plot, and they're never lost for something to do in any contingency.

Do not let these people decide what the party is doing.

Every good plan rests on attention to detail.

When infiltrating the lair of an orc horde, you want your barrels to be full of rough beer, not fine wine. And vice versa for elves.

Just don't ask what the barrels are for.

Yep, the helmet was a Magic Feather.

To pull this off in a game, you can actually give a PC some item and hint strongly that it's a +3 Dragonslayer Sword or a Belt of Charisma or what-have-you. Then put them in a fight against a dragon, or an opportunity to talk back to a king with bravado.

Then enjoy as the dragon slaughters them or the king slaps them chains. Ha ha ha!!

Oh wait... it wasn't supposed to work like that.

PCs don't need keys! That's what the "break down doors" ability is for.

Handcuffs are really just a type of small door, if you look at it in the right way.

A pane of glass between you and a cool bit of cybergear is also just a type of door if you look at it in the right way.

Negotiating a treaty with a diplomat from a neighbouring kingdom? Also just a type of door if you look at it in the right way.

Levelling up is always fun. In many games you get to choose cool new skills to learn, or existing skills that you want to improve on. Of course it makes sense to pick skill that you think will come in handy in the near future.

So, GMs, next time your PCs are about level up, make sure the players know that the next major challenge their characters will have to face is a winner-take-all, to-the-death, flower arranging and poetry competition against the campaign's major bad guy.

Always provide an opportunity for PCs to disguise themselves to try and sneak into some secure location, under the eyes of dozens of people who could potentially call them out and bring down hordes of armed guards on them.

Do we really have to spell out the rest?

Psychic impressions and uncanny feelings can be made very real in a game, in much the same way that magic and aliens and dragons can be. The cool thing is it's really easy. You just tell the player that they get a weird feeling about something, and tell them what it is.

It can be more or less reliable, depending on how well these things actually work in your setting. And you can drop them in at whatever moment is most dramatic. Or inconvenient. Or deceptive...

It's good to give your NPCs a personality, so they're not just one-dimensional mooks that the PCs blast their way through without getting any hint of individuality.

Lieutenant Shann Childsen is a case in point. Canonically in the Star Wars universe, Childsen is a species-ist bigot and bully. See, you totally get that from the nuance and inflection of his two lines in the film! What a great character!

The thing about PCs is that they're always (more or less) under the control of their players. A player can choose for their PC to become enraged and out of control, or can choose for them to remain calm and collected. But even when the player chooses to have go "out of control", the player is still in charge of their actions.

Unless you introduce some game mechanics to make the PC do random angry stuff. Several games have a "Berserk" mechanic, which allows PCs to be truly so enraged that the player really has no ocntrol over what they do. Often triggered by combat, the afflicted PC will, at either the discretion of the GM or by the whims of random dice rolls, continue attacking anything within sight, possibly including allies, even if circumstance dictates that withdrawing from the attack or accepting a surrender is the more sensible option.

Such a Berserk trait is usually treated as a flaw or disadvantage in the game mechanics, meaning you can get additional positive abilities for it.

But seriously. A disadvantage that makes you attack more?? No disadvantage at all!!

Uh... What's a reactor doing in the prison block?

In the movie... Why is Leia flirting with a stormtrooper? We can only suppose it was part of some daring plan to escape.

The sinister meeting room with sinister decoration and sinister long black table and sinister chairs set up for sinister meetings of sinister commanders and their sinister sub-commanders is an essential piece of stock architecture. Despite the heroes in an adventure not being privy to most of the meetings in such a room, the very existence of this room should be enough to send chills down their spines. If the PCs are exploring an evil lair, have them stumble across this room.

Describe it in terms so sinister that they can feel the dripping blood of all the people's deaths that have been ordered from within this room.

This is probably also the location of the evil villain's printer that always mangles the paper at the worst possible moment.

It should be black.

It's very important and realistic when using firearms to make absolutely sure that what you're firing at is a legitimate target/enemy.

Which means of course that PCs don't care about it.

Of course there should always be secret escape routes from the villain's lair. No self-respecting villain would build a lair without a way of getting out when things go horribly wrong (as they inevitably will - it's all part of being a villain).

Additionally there will be various ducts and chutes and tunnels and things leading all over the place. In fact, some villains have been known to use the ducts as the primary means of getting around, and merely utilise the main corridors for air conditioning. That'll fool anyone trying to sneak in via the ducting!

Human beings are visual animals, so it's natural that GMs will usually describe what the PCs can see when they enter an unfamiliar area. But one should not neglect the other senses. Sounds can convey plenty of information, and smells can be particularly evocative, even in description form.

Be careful about going too far though, lest your players insist on tasting everything they come across in order to get more information.

Jokes can contribute to an evening of gaming by helping to create an atmosphere of relaxed fun.

Jokes can also be used in character to defuse tension when confronted with a potentially hostile NPC.

Or by a definitely hostile NPC to make the captured PCs feel even more desperate about their perilous situation. Think The Riddler from the old Batman TV show... as if he was in a Christopher Nolan film version...

Ricochets are fun. You get to roll lots of dice, and any one of them could potentially cause serious injury to an unsuspecting PC!

Players might attempt to take advantage of ricochets by aiming shots carefully to bounce off objects and hit targets they couldn't otherwise reach from their firing position. You should definitely let them try this!

Don't mention that the odds of them accidentally hitting themselves may be higher than hitting their intended target.

Of course it's the sewer level.

There was a sewer level in the Episode III movie as well, but it ended up on the cutting room floor.

The trip through the planet core in Episode I was also a sewer level. And Kamino was kind of a sewer planet. As is Dagobah, really. So yeah, all six movies. We trust Disney will maintain the tradition.

A dianoga is in fact canonically not worm-like at all. It's more like a giant octopus/squid thing. Not that you could tell from the low budget rubber monster effects in the original movie, which really only represented a tentacle and an eye stalk.

You can use this trick in a game, too. Something similar to the Watcher in the Water from The Lord of the Rings. Have whatever the PCs initially fight and think is a minor inconvenience turn out to be just part of a much larger creature which is initially hidden.

This is sometimes done in movies (like Star Wars) for budget reasons, because you don't actually have to show the entire monster. But roleplaying games don't have special effects budgets, so you can unleash the full horror on them when the time is right. Like when they're down to half hit points or less, and think they've almost won the fight.

It's important to remember when running a game: No matter how bad things are for the PCs, there's nothing to say it can't get much, much worse.

As a GM, you need to remember every piece of equipment that the PCs have, and prepare your traps and obstacles so that they can be overcome, but not too easily. It's embarrassing to prepare a pit trap that should hold them long enough for the villain to escape, only to forget that they're carrying a ladder at the time.

Of course things will probably turn out the other way. Design a fatal trap with the obvious escape route using a piece of equipment they have handy, and you can virtually guarantee the players will either forget about it or decide not to use it.

You can assign a bonus to a die roll for good roleplaying of the circumstances surrounding the roll. Sometimes the roleplaying will be so good that the roll really shouldn't fail. But it's important to apply the bonus and make the roll, with the usual chance of automatic failure on the poorest die roll.

Because inevitably there are times when it'll be the other way around - applying a penalty so bad that the attempt really should fail, but you have to give the poor player a miracle chance to succeed.

Modern games need to deal with the fact that there exist vast quantities of electronic data, and there also exist the means to download and copy all of this data. Your modern spy wouldn't be caught dead without a state-of-the-art laptop with some sort of wacky experimental holographic display and gesture interface.

Or sometimes a USB stick will do just a well.

It's all very well to have the death trap. After all, it's a stock trope of heroic fiction. Make it deadly, and dangerous, and seemingly impossible to escape. By all means, thwart the first, second, even the third attempt by the heroes to get out alive.

But you have to remember that the other part of the trope is that the heroes always manage to escape. You don't need to provide an explicit means to escape. Just let the players come up with wacky plans themselves. They'll get a greater feeling of satisfaction if they come up with a means of escape themselves.

For this reason, it's better to use death traps that allow the PCs to at least move around a bit. Strapping them to a slab that is about to get bisected by a laser really only leaves them with Fast Talk as a means to escape. (Unless they have magic, or the modern-day equivalent, the magnetic buzz-saw detonator phone explosive wristwatch, which the villain stupidly left on their wrist.) Better to stick them in a room that is flooding with water, or in a plane without a pilot or something.

Or a plane without a pilot, that is flooding with water. We'll leave you to figure out how to do that one.

Maps are a vital component in many games. Players will make maps to remember where their characters are within a dungeon. GMs will hand out maps as navigation aids, or as a deferred sort of treasure. The treasure map is a significant literary device that cannot be overlooked for gaming potential. PCs in modern games will have instant access to detailed maps of all sorts via the Internet.

But maps don't always have to be correct, or complete. The best sorts of maps will have large empty regions with dragons drawn on them. Whether there are really dragons is a matter for speculation...

A vital member of any gaming group is the person who defuses any intra-group conflict. This applies both in-character and out-of-character. While in-character bickering can be amusing (see the X-Men or Avengers movies*), there needs to be someone who can put a lid on it in times of crisis when the group has to pull together to achieve a major goal. It can also wear thin easily, so remember that if it stops being fun, just drop it.

Player bickering is more serious, and has to be stomped on quickly. It helps to have someone good at interpersonal relationships in your gaming group. Someone with excellent emotional perceptiveness and social skills. In your group of nerdy friends... Yeah, quick, recruit someone!

* Actually, the X-Men and the Avengers would both make brilliant RPG campaign settings. There have been a few Marvel superheroes games, including a current ENnie award winning version. Maybe check it out.

It's good to let off a little steam after a stressful encounter or event in the game.

We also note that in this scene of the movie, it's quite clear that Luke has his lightsabre attached to his belt. So he obviously must have had it on him in the trash compactor. Yet he didn't use it.

Here's this mystical item, handed reverently to him by the allegorical wise mentor figure, passed down from the hero's father, who is presumed dead...

This is clearly a major MacGuffin. A Chekhov's gun that will certainly have a use in saving the hero's life at some point. It's the single most fantastic and significant object in the entire movie.

And Luke never uses it except to deflect some remote bolts during the training session on the Millennium Falcon. Basically, there had to be a sequel, just so Luke could actually use the darn thing.

The alias is a significant literary trope, and can often come up as a soution to a problem in a gaming session. The hard part is remembering to use it. So try to pick something even more memorable than your character's real name as your alias.

The only problem is then you might forget your real name...

It's completely normal for multiple simultaneous conversations to break out in a gaming group.

What's weird is if they're all in-character.

Overhearing conversation between NPCs is a good way for PCs to pick up clues, rumours, and other pertinent information about their adventure. GMs can provide such opportunities, and should keep an eye out for chances to do so that fit into the flow of the adventure.

Of course, the hints that are picked up in this manner are, quite literally, hearsay, and may contain variable amounts of truth, myth, misunderstanding, and falsehood. Untangling the useful material from this is part of the puzzle of an adventure. If the players are clever enough, they can pick up the relevant pieces. If they're really good, they can even use the overheard conversations against their enemies...

You can get a lot of mileage out of adapting jargon from a real-world field into fantastical or science fictional analogues. If you're running a fantasy world with bird-pulled sky-chariots, you can talk about flight paths and transit stopovers and holding patterns. Although it may pay to transmute the words into slightly archaic or expressly invented versions. (Terry Pratchett does this a lot in many of his Discworld novels.)

If you're running science fiction, it's if anything even easier. Modern day terminology won't particularly sound out of place. And for bonus points you can use archaic jargon to refer to futuristic concepts. Such as using 17th century nautical terminology (or 1950s hot rodding terms) to discuss spaceships. INstant atmosphere!

Pretty elementary, really. If the French had just managed to close to melee range, Agincourt would have turned out totally differently.

Of course... they didn't.

There's a lesson in that somewhere. But not that it applies to roleplaying characters!

Always take advantage of free weapons.

Where "free" means any of:

• Lying around unattended and obviously a piece of lost equipment.
• Lying around unattended and possibly a piece of lost equipment.
• Lying around unattended, in an enemy armoury.
• Lying around unattended, in any armoury.
• Lying around unattended, in a blacksmith's place or weapon shop.
• Lying around while the owner is looking the other way.
• Being held loosely by someone.
• Being held firmly by someone.
• Being wielded actively against you.

The party is never so split that you can't split it further.

If this involves independently moving disembodied body parts, all the better.

In the constrained artificial worlds of computer games, if you need some particular item in order to accomplish some task or quest, the programmers need to make sure that you can somehow get the item in question. What this means is, if you're exploring a castle and you come across a pineapple somewhere, you can be pretty sure that, for whatever reason, later on you will need a pineapple. It's probably the dragon's favourite food or something.

The upshot is that any item that looks even remotely arbitrary is not. If you get some odd piece of equipment, you can lay odds that you'll probably need to use it later on. (In some ways this is an old paradigm, and some modern computer games are more sophisticated, offering a great variety of objects to interact with, so it's much less obvious what is important.)

In a roleplaying game, this problem is less apparent. Some old (or "classic") adventures, particularly of the early Dungeons & Dragons style, hewed close to this significant item approach, scattering the obscure pieces needed to defeat the evil wizard throughout the dungeon, in such a way that it was pretty obvious that you needed to collect them as you went. But with a live GM it's much easier to provide a wide open world in which all manner of items are available. A spy infiltrating an office could expect to find staplers, printers, pencils, paper clips, pencil sharpeners, telephones, coffee mugs, rubber bands, and all sorts of other potential equipment just lying about, ready to be picked up and turned into some clever spy tool as easily as informing the GM that you want to do so. It becomes much easier to hide anything that really is potentially significant. If the spy might need a pineapple later on, it's easily hidden in a fruit bowl on the reception desk, next to a bunch of flowers, a tin of pencils, a pair of sunglasses, and pad of Post-its. And if the spy is clever, they can actually come up with some other way to defeat the pineapple-loving guard dog, using instead a slingshot made of sunglasses, rubber bands, and pencil sharpeners.

Handling in-game romance when the players are not romantically involved can be challenging. But ultimately it's just like acting. And we know that actors never end up getting into convoluted romantic entanglements with other actors...

On second thought: Handle these sorts of situations very carefully.

Moving targets should of course be harder to hit than stationary ones. Well, provided you're not moving in a constrained and predictable trajectory. And you haven't just left some perfectly good cover to do so.

Fortunately in such situations you're usually only being shot at by faceless NPC mooks.

Regrouping and carefully planning the next move, ah yes.

To see this at work in a game you need a few factors: Firstly, the current plan of attack has to be going poorly. So much so that the PCs can't continue to success without sustaining unacceptable losses of some sort. The sensible option at this point is to retreat.

Secondly, you need PCs who recognise this fact and will actually retreat, rather than pushing on regardless.

GMs can supply the first condition. Simply make the first attempt by the PCs at storming the villain's base go badly. For the second condition, you may need to drop ever larger hints. Don't simply kill the party outright if they push too far. Ramp up the danger until it becomes obvious that it's too dangerous to continue. Have a big ramp ready.

You can get a lot of roleplaying challenge out of offering your players a simple dilemma. A choice between two desirable outcomes. If you choose one, you don't get the other. You can take the money, or the mystery box. You can steal the plans, or you can get away safely.

The PCs of course will think they can manipulate the situation to get both things. And maybe they can, if they're clever enough. Always leave slack in your devious GM plans for devious PC plans.

Some less-than-scrupulous characters will go to great lengths to steal money, which they then use to buy various stuff. It can actually be a whole lot easier to cut out the middleman and steal the stuff you'd spend the money on in the first place.

The arch-enemy is a strong fiction trope, and can be utilised to great advantage in a game. The thing is, to establish an arch-enemy, you need an enemy that the PC cannot defeat. At least not for a long time. The arch-enemy, after all, has to recur several times in order to gain that exalted status.

To make the enemy even more intimidating and epic, have them seemingly die at the hand of the hero. But be careful to make it some sort of No One Could Survive That scene, in which the body cannot be found. Make it convincing, so that the PCs really do think that's the end of the villain. Don't bring the enemy back too quickly. Go three or four entire adventures without them. Let the PCs get complacent.

Then bring the enemy back, in an even bigger and more devastating plot. Don't reveal who's behind it all at once. Rather, drop subtle hints that look like the (figurative) fingerprints of the old enemy. Get the PCs speculating and guessing and going, "No, it can't be..." Then you can reveal that their arch-enemy survived somehow. The confrontation when they finally meet again should be suitably epic - it pretty much cannot not be by this stage.

And the really cool thing? You don't even have to explain how the arch-enemy survived the seemingly impossible-to-survive death scenario. Leaving it completely unexplained just heightens the mystique and aura surrounding them.

It's important to assign credit where credit is due. Especially when it's the villain's descent into villainy that is the thing being credited.

An important literary trope occurs when the hero tragically causes the downfall of the villain. If you can set this up in a game, it will make any confrontation all the more poignant - but you have to make sure to point it out lest the tragic irony be overlooked.

Or it could all be the bad guy's delusions. Still, it's good to make the heroes think.

Revenge makes a great motivation for villains. Apply it with whipped cream and a cherry on top.

After all, revenge is a dish best served cold.

PC plans should always be mutable so they can react to unexpected obstacles and setbacks.

Write them in pencil.

Fights often have onlookers. If a group of PCs gets into a brawl with some street ruffians, they will certainly attract a crowd of curious watchers. The authorities may arrive sooner or later, but until they do there will be various other people hanging around. And if modern-day behaviour is anything to go by, most of those will be involved in some variation of egging the fighters on or cheering for one side or the other.

You can adapt this to other locations and genres. Imagine trying to take out a guardroom of orcs, and having a large group of additional orcs charge in, and start cheering on their boys from the sidelines. It can be a good way to have more potential foes in the vicinity without completely overwhelming the PCs in the battle. If the orcs win, then the onlookers can cheer and hoot while the guards tie up the PCs as prisoners. If the PCs win, you have two choices.

First, the onlookers can take offence and charge into the fray, continuing the battle. But secondly, you can play it the other way. Have the onlookers look stunned that the PCs have prevailed, stare open-mouthed for a tense few seconds, then flee for the hills. By holding some of the forces back as onlookers, you leave these options open, depending on how challenging you want the overall encounter to be and how well the PCs' luck holds out in the combat.

For a spot of fun in any roleplaying campaign: Introduce the embarrassing parents of one of the PCs. AFter all, everyone has parents, right?

And a word of advice to players: Make sure you specify orphan on your character sheet.

Sometimes you know that you're not going to succeed at something.

Previously we've advised that you should always give players a chance to achieve something, no matter how unlikely. But like all bits of advice*, this needs to be applied with some degree of pragmatism. If the thief tries to walk across lava to retrieve the golden idol without some form of protection from heat, no saving throw in the world will save them.

Let's rephrase that opening sentence. Sometimes you should know that you're not going to succeed at something.

* Particularly the sorts of advice that we tend to give.

Disintegration is pretty much the ultimate way of killing someone. Oddly enough though, it's only a level 6 spell in Dungeons & Dragons, out of a list of nine spell levels. Which implies that roughly half the magic in existence is more powerful. (Actually somewhat less than that, since there are more spells per level at lower levels, but close enough.)

Having your component atoms ripped apart and scattered far and wide enough that there's no detectable trace of you left behind has to be pretty traumatic. Your Raise Dead spell is going to have a tough time of it. Particularly in settings where there is no Raise Dead spell.

It's important to have some numerical measure of performance against stated mission objectives.

It's also important to get administrative tasks from your work out of your head before you commit to an evening of gaming...

Before anyone says anything: We reality tested this comic.

One of the writers said, "Oh come on. How realistic is it for people to play games together for six years and not know what each other does for a living?"

Another writer said, "Well, my D&D group has been playing every week for nearly ten years... Actually, I don't know what Brett's current job is... Huh."

Darths & Droids, bringing you gaming realism at its finest.

Sometimes people make important life decisions.

Like whether to open that interesting looking treasure chest, or check for traps first. Make sure you make the right call.

Some players like it when things go easily. When the plan works, and the mission is achieved with minimal disruption and complication, and perhaps a few combats in which it is not too difficult to prevail with nothing more serious than some superficial wounds.

And then there are players who like a challenge. They want to beat the system, when the system is stacked against them. They enjoy the struggle, the setbacks, the unsurmountable odds. Would Frodo's adventure have been as memorable if he'd hopped on a giant eagle, dropped the Ring into Mount Doom from the safety of featherback, and been home in time for second supper? No - he decided it would be more fun to flee Black Riders by the skin of his teeth, get stabbed by the Witch-king of Angmar, freeze half to death on the Misty Mountains, almost get slaughtered by orcs inside the Misty Mountains, half-drown in the Dead Marshes, get paralysed by a giant spider, almost succumb to the influence of Ultimate Evil, and have his finger bitten off.

Much better experience all round.

The grave is a powerful symbol of a lost connection. Even if players state very clearly on their PC character sheets that they have no family connections, and you feel that resurrecting them or otherwise having relatives pop up unexpectedly isn't playing fair, you can still bring bring home an emotional connection by introducing the grave.

Harry Potter did it quite effectively.

Or you can always go the other way and riff on Pet Sematary or Poltergeist...

The love-hate relationship is a classic of literature, film, and all other forms of fiction. (Though for some odd reason TV Tropes has seen fit to give it an almost unfindable page title if you don't already know what they call it.) So of course you can give it an opportunity to find beautiful, lurid, over-the-top expression in your games.

If the players involved are comfortable with it.

And more importantly: If everyone else at the game is comfortable with it.

Any video gamer can shoot, of course.

Just don't tell them they need to take into account dexterity adjustments, target size adjustments, speed penalties, range penalties, weapon familiarity penalties, concealment and cover penalties, flinching penalties, recoil penalties, fanning penalties, thumbing penalties, rapid fire penalties, snap shot penalties, reload times, jams, black powder fouling, and the dozens of other things that can cause a shot to miss or a weapon to fail.

Let them find out about each one with experience.

Any rogue needs a well-considered reason for entering the rogueing profession. It's not an easy life, all appearances in fantasy and science fiction literature to the contrary.

For a good roguish background, simply adapt whatever the PCs did to some random group of NPCs in a previous campaign.

There is a danger that robots in a game (or in fiction) may appear as no more than a de facto slave race. You can either ignore the parallels to real world slavery, or bring them out as a potential social issue within the game.

Some gamers don't care for transplanting real world issues into games and just want to escape to a world of heroic adventure, but others may be intrigued by exploring such issues within a game setting. Try to check how your players feel about such things before you suddenly start having their pack mules stage a revolt.

Don't carry grudges about events that happen within a roleplaying game.

Save that for games of Diplomacy.

Good roleplaying in combat situations can be good for dice modifiers. Just remember that "good roleplaying" doesn't necessarily mean playing someone competent in combat, and "dice modifiers" doesn't necessarily mean positive ones.

Probability is the well-founded science of calculating how likely an event is to happen. It has a strong theoretical basis grounded in mathematics and can produce results that very accurately reflect the statistical properties and distributions of events in real life.

(Caveat: A roleplaying game is not real life. Toss everything you think you know out the window.)

Modesty can be an unusual trait for a character. Most players prefer to think of their characters as outwardly self-confident or even braggarts. This is fine for a heroic setting in which the PCs are true heroes and some of the most powerful people in the land. But even then modesty in certain situations can add interest and have benefits.

And then there's the flip-side of modesty: smugness. Perfect for annoying villains.

For variety, try reversing the roles and have smug heroes and modest villains. Just think about that for a bit.

After a hard-fought victory, allow some time for the PCs to celebrate and feel good about what they've achieved. Throw in some amusing anecdotes to lighten the mood a bit before heading back into the adventure.

Alternatively, now is the perfect time to hit them with another orc army/wave of zombies/alien fleet.

Communicating with the enemy is a field ripe with opportunity for roleplaying scenarios.

In low technology settings you can dispatch messengers, who can then become embroiled in various adventures of their own along the way. Messengers traditionally have a form of diplomatic immunity, in that they are allowed to convey messages between enemies without being the subject of hostile action as an agent of one's enemy. Breaching this immunity can be a serious breach of protocol, signalling the complete breakdown of communication immediately prior to overwhelmingly hostile action. See, for example, the movie 300 or Aragorn's treatment of the Mouth of Sauron in the film version of The Return of the King (though not the original novel - in which Gandalf explicitly respects the immunity).

With magic or at higher tech levels, remote communication becomes possible, allowing one to speak with an enemy without being in physical proximity. This is good for two-way conversations with affably evil enemies, or one-way taunting. A variant is the dropped note, à la The Riddler communicating with Batman. The cool thing about taunting is that it doesn't have to be the villain taunting the hero... it can just as easily be the other way around.

Paranoia could almost be listed under "Survival Skills" in any standard roleplaying game skill category list.

And apparently, as always, the Extended Universe has an answer as to where those guys they knocked out on board the Falcon went. It comes from the 1981 Star Wars radio adaptation.

Important confidential information should be encoded or encrypted when being transported or transmitted. The methods of encoding should be commensurate with the technology level of the campaign setting.

And the choice of terrible passwords and access codes should adequately reflect real life practises by the majority of people.

Anyone who has been in contact with the enemy could have been turned. Yes, even if that contact was only the brief intersection of their sword with the villain's body. You never know what kind of weird protective spells they might have that can affect the minds of people who try to harm them.

Have we given you any ideas for your own game?

We should have.

Moons of gas giants are indeed potentially good places for habitable planets. At least, they are now that we know that gas giants can be in orbits within the so-called "life zone", where the star's heat is enough to produce liquid water yet not boil it away, or that orbiting a gas giant further out can produce enough tidal heat within a moon to keep a subsurface ocean liquid. We didn't know that back in 1977. Then, the best theories we had of planetary system formation and evolution suggested that gas giants could only form in outer regions, beyond the cutoff where water would be present only as ice, and that any moons orbitng them would be dead, frozen worlds.

We praise George Lucas for his foresightedness!

Explaining the adventure plot so far to an important NPC is a good way for players to show off their knowledge of what's happened in the game so far. Make sure to give them plenty of opportunity to stuff it up.

You know it's a good plan if it requires someone to act as bait.

And hey, the more, the merrier!

Make good use of cover when approaching an enemy encampment.

A giant planet usually qualifies as Excellent cover.

The Briefing is an important part of any critical mission that is assigned by superiors. James Bond films include a briefing scene where Bond is given his mission by M. Military ops are bound to have a briefing. There were even briefing scenes in CHiPs, where Jon and Ponch were given the lowdown on what particular criminal of the week to look out for.

So naturally you should make use of the briefing scene whenever you have the opportunity to give a mission to a group of PCs. It's not only a great opportunity to leverage a well-known fiction trope in a game scenario, it also gives you the chance to lord a powerful NPC who they're not supposed to kill over the PCs.

And if they decide not to accept the mission... perhaps something will self-destruct in five seconds. In their faces!

Fight or flight are often the two primary options available when PCs get into a sticky situation. Run from danger, or confront the danger and fight for your very life.

Typically, PCs will choose to fight, because getting into cool combats is what many games are about. If the game leans towards realism and danger, and the players are appropriately wary, they may choose to flee. The best players may think of a third option. Why fight or run when you can steal everything?

The Refusal of the Call is a classic element in the archetypal Hero's Journey. Something happens which constitues a Call to Adventure - a circumstance or invitation crosses the hero's path, which requires the hero to take action. But in some cases the hero decides not to bother. It's too comfortable at home, or the journey seems too difficult or dangerous.

In the original film Star Wars, Obi-Wan invites Luke on an adventure. But Luke has too much work to do on the farm, and his Uncle Owen isn't letting him run off to have adventures. The Call only gets answered when Owen and Beru are killed by the Empire.

But even when dragged bodily into the adventure, one can still be reluctant and actively trying to refuse the call. Roleplayers generally play characters who never question what they're doing and if they want to be doing it. But you can get some depth by playing a character who doesn't really want to be there. Think Shaggy and Scooby in Scooby Doo. What if your thief isn't tagging along with the adventuring party because it's a good old frolic with lots of entertaining monster fighting and piles of treasure, but because it's a way to earn some money to pay off a debt before returning to his home town?

In most people's experience these days, computers produce answers and generally do stuff almost instantaneously. But those who program computers to perform complicated data analysis and simulation tasks know that they can sometimes take hours or even days to complete a calculation. This of course depends on the sheer volume of number-crunching required.

In a game context, what dictates the amount of time needed for a computer calculation can be dramatic necessity. Need to crack a pass code to gain access to the safe of an evil corporation? How long will it take? It's tricky to say in any realistic way how long such a calculation might take, especially given all the variables, including but not limited to the fact that the computing technology being used probably doesn't match any present day, real world computer.

Let's see then... if the guards will arrive in about five minutes... the computation will take about five minutes...

Sometimes it's just not appropriate for the leader to go into the field with the troops. After all, it's dangerous out there and you don't want your wisest strategic planner in the face of danger when they could be comfortably directing things from a safe distance. Captain Jean-Luc Picard exemplifies this eminently sensible approach.

Interestingly though, most roleplayers tend much more towards the Kirk side of the Picard-Kirk spectrum.

Miniatures for use in roleplaying don't need to be beautifully polished and detailed. It's nice if they are, but there's nothing stopping you using any old lump of plastic, or spare dice, or even cheese-flavoured snacks to represent various characters or machines on the tabletop.

In fact, you don't need miniatures at all. You don't need to spend time scouring hobby shops for model kits, modifying character figures to customise them with the right gear, or bashing together disparate parts form multiple sources to produce that perfect model. You can just get by imagining the layout of combat scenes in your head. But where's the fun in that?

Reader exercise: Work out which, if any, of the following tropes apply:

• Friendly Enemy
• Big Bad Friend
• With Friends Like These
• Vitriolic Best Buds
• Headbutting Heroes
• No Sympathy Between Mooks
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork

We've mentioned languages before, but consider the common trope in multi-species settings that all elves speak "Elven", all dwarves speak "Dwarven", all Martians speak "Martian", all furry blue things from Alpha Centauri speak "Alpha Centauran". Now think about humans.

There may be some strong arguments to fragmenting your non-human races into different language and culture groups. The local dwarves speak Galzuk, while the dwarves over the mountain range speak Zikbal, and they can't understand one another. This means translators become important, nay, vital for things like travelling and trading and generally not accidentally getting into trouble. Another approach is to have mostly mutually intelligible dialects that slowly transmute as you cross larger tracts of geography, until eventually you reach a point where the local dialect is essentially a different language. All of these reflects reality.

This is not to say that languages need to be fragmented like this. A uniform culture enforced over a large area can impose a single language. Although this may become a common lingua franca for dealing with strangers, with people in various parts of the empire reverting to their local tongues for more insular communication. Languages in fiction can be fascinating and lead to all sorts of complications and adventures. Just ask Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and later Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Everyone has to make a living somehow. Many games assume that adventuring PCs will make enough money off their various adventures to support themselves. They could do this either by collecting treasure and loot, or by accepting quest-like adventure commissions for a fee. If the king is offering 1000 gold pieces for slaying the dragon, that's as good a source of income as any.

But there's another paradigm that can be used: the heroes have regular jobs to pay the bills and adventures happen in their spare time. The GURPS roleplaying system notably uses this as its default assumption (although full-time professional adventurers are also supported). But playing a regular job is nowhere near as exciting as roleplaying the adventure parts, so GURPS provides the abstraction of a job table. This summarises the mundane jobs of the PCs - what they do and how much money they make each month. A single roll each game month determines if it's just a regular month, or if something exceptional happens at work that leads to a pay bonus, or perhaps an amount of damage from a work-related accident, if the job is hazardous.

At any rate, consider if your PCs make enough as full-time adventurers to live on, or if they should have other jobs as well.

Offer your heroes a choice of two equally cool and awesome things - but they only get to pick one. The dragonslayer sword or the invisibility cloak.

It's hard to balance the two options, but if you do it right, there should be intra-party violence as they fight over which one to accept.

It is possible to learn relevant real life skills from encountering them first in games.

Next time you come across electrum, a penanggalan, or a glaive-guisarme in your daily life, you can thank Dungeons & Dragons for teaching you what the heck it is.

Mercenaries should of course, above all, be mercenary. Since mercenaries of some description is a common career choice for PCs, this gives all the justification they need for ripping off paying clients, fleeing when the situation looks dangerous, and generally behaving in a slightly amoral way. It could even count as good roleplaying!

Better yet if they can make it sound like they're really doing what's best for someone else. Especially when it's actually just doing the best for themselves. Talent like that doesn't come cheap.

A way to attempt to flush out traitors is to confront them with their treachery. The problem is, this really only works if you're sure they're the traitor in the first place, which kind of obviates the need to flush them out in the first place.

A fun thing to do as a GM is to plant seeds of suspicion that someone in the group is a traitor. It's even more fun if nobody is actually a traitor.

The pre-battle scene where fellow combatants bond over the prospect of the danger and terror to come is a standard part of building the suspense in a story. Try devoting some time to it in a game, rather than rushing straight into the combat. Let the PCs know they have a few hours to wait, with nothing to do but ... wait. They can only clean and check their weapons so many times before they are left with nothing to do but ... wait. See what sort of conversations they get up to.

(We couldn't find a TV Trope for this, so you're spared a link.)

NPCs have personality too. All too often they are treated as nothing more than props for the PCs to interact with in a completely straightforward manner. But some of the characters in your world are going to be practical jokers, or people who can never take anything seriously, bunny-ears lawyers. Make sure the PCs meet some of these people.

It'll make their life more interesting, realistic, and fun.

And it's guaranteed to make your GMing job more fun too.

Death is often treated fairly casually in games. But it is a big deal in real life. Know your audience before attempting to dwell on it in a game.

Give everyone a role in the big end-of-adventure battle. Especially if they're not combat-oriented characters.

This goes in the other direction too. Give the combat monsters something to do in the kindergarten class supervision scenes.

And yes, Wedge is played by a different actor here (Denis Lawson) than in his earlier scene (Colin Higgins). The story is that Higgins didn't learn his lines and fumbled through the scene in the briefing room, resulting in him being fired and Lawson being given the part for the remainder of the film as well as the two sequels. And they simply didn't bother refilming the briefing scene with Lawson.

Author note: We know the foreign language sentences in the comic are really badly translated. They are meant to be that way.

Sometimes you just can't wait for all the information you need to carry out a plan successfully. If your GM is doing the job right, this might actually occur more often than not. But you have to go ahead and make the best of things anyway. Do things right even despite the lack of full information and the rewards should be all the greater.

Assuming you survive.

Never forget that NPCs can be afraid too. Often enemies are portrayed as essentially mindless mooks who rush straight into combat or other dangerous situations, champing at the bit to mix it with the PCs.

Some games have morale systems to help remind GMs that enemies aren't necessarily always keen on combat, and to suggest times when they might flee or surrender. But what if the NPCs are afraid of something other than the PCs?

What f they're afraid of something the PCs really should be afraid of too, if they only knew about it? If the orcs the heroes are fighting are all muttering something about how it's better to be fighting humans than to face the wrath of the dragon overlord, then it would be a good time for the PCs to know some Orcish.

You can plan all you want, and as carefully as you want, but sometimes there's no way to do the job without some sacrifices. Sometimes, in fact, there's no way to do the job at all. Like the Kobayashi Maru test, only for real, not merely a training exercise.

However, in a roleplaying scenario, you need not fear setting up unwinnable scenarios. Because, when it comes right down to it, you can never take into account all the sneaky things a group of desperate PCs can get up to. The third option is always there; even if you can't see it, they will.

In fact, this can be an interesting way to design scenarios. Send the PCs into a death trap from which there is no escape. Then watch them escape.

If all the players refer to something in your carefully crafted campaign by some preposterously wrong name, despite you reminding them repeatedly what the real name is supposed to be...

... you may as well just give in. It's a losing battle. It'll save trouble all round.

Author note: The positions of the diacritic marks on the foreign text may not exactly match between the comic and the transcript you see below. This seems to be an artefact of how the different fonts are rendered in Photoshop and web browsers; the actual character entities used are the same. We're not experts in this language, but we presume this is some sort of acceptable difference in writing the script (a bit like upper and lower case in English, or different letter shapes in different fonts), and that a native reader could read both versions equally well. (Modulo our crappy translation.)

Players always think they're going to win the adventure. The bad guys will be defeated, the monsters will be slain, the princess rescued, the treasure claimed. That's what they're there for!

The GM's job is to make that possible. Difficult, yes, requiring courage and daring and a dash of luck, certainly, but possible. In some ways this causes the exact opposite problem to what happens if you throw them into an inescapable deathtrap. You actually should be trying to make your deathtraps escapable for the PCs. And in case they miss one of the clues on how they can circumvent the trap, you can provide a backup escape route. And just in case they also miss that one, you can leave a big hint about a third possible way to avoid being killed horribly.

Guaranteed, if you make the trap completely inescapable, they'll come up with a dozen different ways to get out of it. If you provide three different ways to avoid or escape the trap, they'll miss them all and quite possibly end up having to create new characters.

Often in games equipment just works. Guns never jam, swords never shatter, armour never falls apart. Cars never fail to start. Basically, all the gear the PCs use is in perfect working order. They'll often tacitly assume that this will always be the case. Especially during crucial encounters or battle scenes.

Complacency can be a fun thing. That's all we're saying.

When the hero gets the first big breakthrough in a battle, it often feels like a big moment. Give it time to shine.

Note: Ideally we would have made this strip in landscape orientation, but there was the limitation of our chosen layout format. So we made it in landscape anyway and offer it as a bonus alternative version of this strip.

One way to build suspense before a climactic battle is to give the PCs an inkling of just how badass and well-prepared the enemy is. You can leak this information to them in a variety of ways. They can steal plans detailing the enemies forces. They can scout the enemy base. Or, perhaps best of all, the enemy can simply phone them up and taunt them.

A player fixating on one tiny aspect of the greater picture can cause dischord. It's important to keep your players from going off on a tangent when there's a clear story arc you want them to encompass.

Different units have different tactical roles in a battle. If you're aware of how this sort of thing works, you can use it to enhance the realism of mass combat scenes in games. If you care.

And if you don't care, no doubt one or more of your players will be all too happy to point out the tactical flaws in your NPC troop deployments.

(In future, you should recruit that player to help you plan the NPC side of the battle.)

It can be easy to get a bit carried away in the heat of simulated gaming battle, especially if things are going badly for the heroes. If things get a bit intense, make sure everyone is okay.

Speakerphones and similar not-easily-visible communications devices provide endless opportunities for PCs to say something when they're not supposed to.

Of course any meeting with a high-powered business executive has to have someone inconvenient listening in.

But imagine storming into the castle and demanding an audience with the king, bursting into the throne room and blurting out that his cousin is planning a plot to overthrow him and claim the crown for himself, only to have said cousin speak up from a previously unnoticed magical communication device, saying, "I told you you can't trust these lying so-called heroes!".

There's always a fallback plan. And it usually involves ramming something.

Thief can't pick the lock on the dungeon door? The fighters ram it with their bodies.

Security in the military complex you need to infiltrate to uncover evidence of a government cover-up of alien visitors is too tight? Ram the place with heavy construction equipment. (Preferably dropped from a zeppelin.)

Smarmy bad guy successfully sets himself up as the innocent victim while painting you as a crazed conspiracy theorist, resulting in the police dragging you away as you try to bust his lavish cocktail party to accuse him of being The Green Demon and plotting to destroy the city? Ram his face with your fist!

There's always a fallback plan. And it usually involves ramming something.

Thief can't pick the lock on the dungeon door? The fighters ram it with their bodies.

Security in the military complex you need to infiltrate to uncover evidence of a government cover-up of alien visitors is too tight? Ram the place with heavy construction equipment. (Preferably dropped from a zeppelin.)

Smarmy bad guy successfully sets himself up as the innocent victim while painting you as a crazed conspiracy theorist, resulting in the police dragging you away as you try to bust his lavish cocktail party to accuse him of being The Green Demon and plotting to destroy the city? Ram his face with your fist!

Normally players don't get to do anything for NPCs. But if the players' characters are actually in command of some NPCs, and ordering them to do various things, then it's not too much of a stretch to let the players roll the dice for them. Particularly if the NPC actions are happening right there and there's nothing particularly secret about the outcomes. If the results of the dice roll are going to be known instantly to everyone at the table anyway, there's really no reason for the GM to do them instead of the player who gave the order to the NPC.

Unless you want to hide the roll and fudge the result to turn out exactly the way you want it...

Of course you'll have a backup plan, and in case that goes to pieces (which it almost certainly will), a second backup plan. What you need as well as numerous layers of backup plans is the fallback plan. This is the plan you never actually need to discuss and, well, plan with your fellow players, because it's the same plan, no matter where or when it's needed, when all the other, more carefully considered and agreed, plans fail.

It doesn't actually have to be ramming, though. While ramming has all the features of a good fallback plan, consider also the merits of the following:

• Running.
• Dropping everything and running.
• Beseeching the gods.
• Releasing the hounds.
• An insanely overpowered fireball.

One of the tricks to building drama in a game is to make startling revelations to the characters. If they break into the office of an evil corporate executive to rifle through documents in the safe, they might find shocking evidence that he is the real father of one of the PCs. If they dig up the grave of the serial killer who died ten years ago to do some forensic work on the body, they may be startled to find the coffin is empty. If investigating the evil vizier on suspicion of kidnapping the sultan's daughter, they may discover the sultan himself has abducted her for some unspeakable demonic ritual and the vizier is actually trying to save her.

For even greater impact, drop something like this on the characters during combat.

PCs should exude confidence. After all, they are the heroes of your game world. Positive belief in themselves and their abilities is absolutely justified.

They should be confident that whatever they try will probably lead to disaster.

There is great mileage to be had from the literary convention of making things seem grimmest just before the final victory.

The PCs will prevail in the end. You know they will. They're the heroes, after all. They will win. Well, unless you're going for a deliberate total party kill, or they make some ridiculously bad decision and end up dying in some trap that they should easily have evaded.

Okay, so the PCs will prevail maybe 30% of the time. The point is that to make their final victory seem even sweeter, you pile on the impossibility of them winning through. Make the situation seem utterly hopeless. Send it from bad to worse, to downright despair. When they look utterly overwhelmed by the first 50 orcs, throw another 50 orcs at them. And then another. And a dragon.

Because when the PCs finally achieve their hard-earned victory, it will feel so much sweeter.

As a responsible GM, you need to cater to the enjoyment tastes of all of your players. And hey, some players just love adversity. They can't get enough of overwhelmingly poor odds, ridiculously overpowered opposition, and virtually inevitable defeat.

As a responsible GM, it behooves you to provide this. Even if you're not entirely sure that any of your players are like this - it can't hurt just to make sure you've doing the right thing and have all of the bases covered.

One of the fundamental tenets of roleplaying games is to give your players the ability to make meaningful choices. If the players don't get the opportunity to make decisions about what they are doing, you head down the path of railroading. It can be easier controlling an adventure this way, but it can end up being very unsatisfying for the players, who can start to feel that nothing they do makes any difference.

Giving players choices can be more difficult, but ultimately much more rewarding for everyone's gaming experience.

This applies to the GM running the game. Nothing says that the players have to give each other all the available information and choices.

If you're going to give a player a potentially game-breaking choice, you really have to make one of the options sharing rule of the world, or the galaxy, or the universe. It's the classic temptation. It has style.

The thing is, if you offer this to your average player, 6 times out of 10 they'll choose to accept co-rule the world/galaxy/universe with the person offering the deal. And then quietly proceed to plot their assassination so they can rule independently.

Make sure you have a handy Gollum waiting in the wings ready to bite off any necessary fingers to keep things under control.

There are the sort of players who get distracted by the least little event occurring outside the game, and then run off on tangents discussing anything but what's happening in the game. Like about 90% of them.

And then there are the players who get everyone focused again by staying in character and stressing the urgency of the time being wasted by everyone else's characters just standing around and apparently not doing anything.

There is a kind of paradigm here that the GM can in fact consider in-game time to be passing while the players are busily discussing the latest TV shows or movies or whatever. Learn if your GM is one of these people. This knowledge will come in very handy in combat situations.

The arrival of The Cavalry* is the release valve which allows the overwhelmed heroic forces to finally make a decisive blow against the enemy that threatens to wipe them out. Unfortunately this is a trope that's been played too often in various forms of fiction and has started to wear thin. Which means that to get it to work you have to do it right.

If the heroes were not expecting any help, and there was no reasonable way for anyone to know they needed help, then sending in a Cavalry is essentially a GM deus ex machina to get the players out of a hole. They may well have dug it for themselves, in which case it might be better to let them suffer the consequences. Hopefully the hole is not of the GM's making, as this is a sign of poor adventure planning.

On the other hand, if the heroes made specific arrangements to call for help, and they are just hanging on waiting for the help to arrive, then this is a perfect time to make use of The Cavalry. The game is now set up specifically to allow the heroes to stare into the face of defeat, and be saved at the last possible second, without feeling fake or contrived.

There's a middle ground too. Where the players might not specifically be waiting for some help which they expect, but there is a reasonable chance that someone actually knows they might need help and is in a position to do something about it. If they tell the townsfolk that they will be off exploring the haunted castle and slaying the dragon who dwells within, then if the townsfolk don't hear from them for a few days they might just mount a rescue party.

So if you're going to go trekking off into a dangerous dungeon, let the townsfolk know.

* A figurative "Cavalry", not necessarily a literal cavalry - although sometimes that works. Which just makes it cooler, really.

Many of the things we depict in the comics, we encourage you to try in your own games.

Not today.

We disclaim all responsibility where Pete's dice are concerned.

If a player messes up a crucial die roll that will change the entire outcome of the adventure for the worse, you can always give them a chance to recover the situation. Just come up with some plausible reason why they might be able to modify what they've done in time for it to make a difference.

It doesn't even have to be all that plausible. The players will go for it.

Actually, 90% of the time they'll be all too happy to come up with the excuses for you. All you need to do is listen to them try to justify why their cockamamie ideas might conceivably work if you tilt your head sideways and squint at them for long enough. Then pick whichever sounds the least ridiculously unlikely and ask for another die roll.

(You don't have to do this, of course, if you'd rather the real drama and tension of the adventure literally hanging on the outcome of one die roll. Which is also a valid approach in some circumstances.)

If the players are expecting something to happen soon...

...

...

... Make them wait a bit. A minute or two of real time won't hurt in-game, and will increase the tension over whether what they're expecting to happen will actually happen immeasurably.

If something in your game is about to be destroyed by the PCs anyway, you may as well take the opportunity to include a token of something you'd like to see destroyed with it. Think of it sort of like making a Voodoo doll and leaving it with a housebound dog for a few hours.

Interestingly, the very rules of a roleplaying game are designed to allow players to do things they have no idea how to do in real life. Their characters can wield swords and sling spells, fly spaceships and speak to aliens, combat supervillains and perform incredible feats of athletic agility. Doing something you don't know how to do is indeed a way of life for gamers.

If there's any possible chance that the bad guy can get away at the end of the adventure, make it so. You can always use a hook for the next adventure.

But nobody said you had to make it obvious to the players at the time.

Part of the fun of roleplaying is that in later years you can reminisce on all the great things that happened.

The weird thing is that some of the best memories come from those times when everything went wrong and the party got trapped, or severely damaged, or even completely wiped out.

When playing make sure you make plenty of those memories.

Medals and honours and titles and similar stuff make good rewards for PCs who have succeeded in a valuable mission.

Just make sure to grant these boons quickly, so the players can be appropriately pleased and before they notice they're not getting something they can easily buy more gear with.

There will be a three-strip intermission before the beginning of Episode V. This strip shows Jim's planning notes for the adventure he ran before Episode IV, and which is referred to a few times by the players during Episode IV.

There are many parallels between the story arcs in Star Wars and the Harry Potter books. For some time before the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, many people thought that there might eventually be a revelation along the following lines:

Voldemort: Dumbledore never told you what happened to your father.
Harry: He told me enough! He told me you killed him!
Voldemort: No. I am your father!

This is a version we wrote of this scene way back in about 2007 or 2008. As it turned out, our story and characters evolved so that we didn't want to use it this way. But it was too good to waste, so here it is as the final intermission strip after Episode IV.

Episode V will begin with the next strip.

As players grow older and begin careers and families, inevitably the time available to get together and devote to gaming dwindles. So you need to take opportunities when they come. You can cram an entire run through a classic dungeon adventure into a weekend visit from a friend who has moved out of town. After all, if they wanted to see their family over that weekend, they would have stayed a few extra days.

Maps are a big part of gaming. A traditional old-school way to involve maps is to let the players sketch a map piece by piece as they explore an unknown region, basing their sketch on the GM's descriptions. But in cases where the characters would know the region well, you can simply give them a complete map. This allows them to picture the setting in detail and get into even more trouble faster than ever before.

In a science fiction game, remote sensing equipment can sometimes be abstracted merely as "sensors" that seem to magically detect whatever needs to be detected at any given time. This is a perfectly fine way to approach the question in a game or other fictional setting, as evidenced by Star Trek.

On the other hand, you can break remote sensing gear down into a plethora of subcategories and differing sensory modalities. What is detectable by one sensor may not be detectable by another. In one sense*, even Dungeons & Dragons gets in on this, with its use of infravision and ultravision. With high tech gear, you can really go to town. You have the whole electromagnetic spectrum at your disposal, as well as vibrational waves including sound and seismic activity, and particle streams, plus any exotic science fantasy stuff you care to think of.

An alternative approach is to ignore the medium and build sensors that detect certain stuff, burying the technical details. You can have motion detectors, weapon system trackers, emotion sensors, or even precognitive sensors like in Minority Report.

The advantage of splitting your game world sensors up into numerous categories is that people might not have the right sensor at the right time...

* Pun definitely intended.

You can lead a horse to advanced roleplaying techniques, but you can't make them use them for the good of the party.

Sometimes allies will have abrasive personalities. All too often heroes will encounter allies who are nothing but helpful (barring the cases where they are traitors undercover) and pleasant. Try introducing someone who is a genuine ally and can truly be trusted, but who just doesn't get along with the heroes and rubs them the wrong way.

Sometimes you just have to lay low and hide until the heat is off.

Given how often PCs have the heat on them, you'd think they should be doing this a lot more than they seem to do...

Symbolism can be a nice way of reinforcing a mood. You can apply it with various bits of scenery description in your games just as easily as creators in other fiction media.

If you have a quarrelling couple thick with love/hate tension, you really can't go past a tunnel carved out of solid ice for heavy-handed symbolism.

Vampyrates, yeah. Apparently both vampirates and vampyrates are already things. We didn't realise this when we wrote this strip. Still, neither of those appear to be on fire. Or in space. Or on fire, in space. So Jim's version is still way cooler.

Making up all the campaign background for a large-scale game is a daunting prospect, and there will always be some details that no GM will have time to fill in. This is where you can use the players. If they say something while chatting in character that adds to your setting... write it down!

The converse is that if they say something that you don't want to be true in the setting... write it down and see if you can twist their words somehow. You can get some truly devious ideas this way.

Interplanetary commerce is a great theme for a campaign. Some planets will have a surfeit of certain resources, while other planets are bound to lack sufficient quantities of the same thing for their purposes. Entrepreneurial characters can make a killing carting these valuable commodities around the galaxy, from planets where they are dirt cheap to planets where the natives will pay through the nose for them.

The interesting thing is, these commodities don't necessarily need to be the sorts of things we conventionally think of as valuable. Gold is kind of scattered around anywhere there are rocky planets, so you could mine it locally and not have to buy imported stuff. But water...

Actually, bad example. Water is pretty darn common in the universe. If it isn't on a planet, then it'll almost certainly be found on asteroids or comets or other planets in the same solar system. There's absolutely no need to cart it across interstellar distances or invade other planets for it. Certain science fiction movies notwithstanding.

In fact almost any raw material is going to be had relatively nearby, at least within the same solar system, more easily than bringing it from another star system. Which means the most valuable interstellar trade commodities will probably be biological, technological, or cultural.

Yep, the vast star-spanning civilisations of the distant future will not be trading gold , silver, or jewels. They'll be trading ice sculptures, fine wines, and music videos. Remember that if you run a campaign featuring interstellar commerce.

It's natural for PCs to do everything they can to look out for and help one another. But in real life people trust one another to go their separate ways and take care of themselves every day. Try doing that within a game some time.

(The difference of course is that in real life people don't go off to fight necromancers, or raid evil corporations in a neurally connected cyberspace for dirty secrets, or take on superpowered villains in city-crushing battles. Okay then, if you do this in a game, then you might have fellow PCs end up splattered all over the place. We never claimed the ideas we write here are necessarily good ideas!)

Having different characters speak different languages and require translators in order to communicate can add realism to a game. But it can also add frustration and delays that the players will eventually start to get sick of. So use it occasionally to spice things up a bit, and for the rest of it, if it really would be the case that some translations would be required between people of various languages, you can rely on a sort of variant translation convention, in which it is understood that characters are speaking in their usual languages and translation is happening, but that you're skipping over that detail for the sake of player sanity.

Realistic economics can add to the atmosphere of your games.

If you want the atmosphere to be one of inflation, unemployment, recession, and all those fun things.

Better to just throw treasure hoards full of gold pieces around like they're going out of style and leave someone else to worry about what it's doing to the livelihoods of the peasants!

Hanging upside down is really underrated.

In terms of places for unconscious PCs to wake up, that is. Villains usually go for the bare cell, where you find yourself stripped of all your useful equipment. Or perhaps chained to a wall in the classic medieval torture chamber style. But upside down has its own unique charms. Try it in your game some time.

Always give PCs plenty of options for getting out of a sticky situation.

Nobody said you had to make any of them easy.

One way to motivate players to get a move on and stop dawdling is to enforce in-game time pressure. The ticking time-bomb, the dragon bearing down on them, or the cunningly constructed supervillain deathtrap. Often players have time to discuss strategies and come up with plans, even when in-game they really shouldn't have that much time.

But there are cases when it can be good to remind the players that they really don't have enough time to do anything but whatever they come up with in a brief moment of panic.

Some suggestions for achieving this: Use an egg timer, with various amounts of the sand already in the bottom bulb. Or a digital countdown timer (especially good for time bombs). You need to make sure the players can see the time ticking away - a surprise alarm is no good. Unless you're being really devious.

Graphic descriptions of the battle wounds inflicted by roleplaying combat can add to the realism and grit of your adventures.

Or they can turn players off. Check how gritty they like it first and dial up the abstraction level if necessary. Particularly important if they're playing vampires and you have practical medical training.

Tracking is a useful skill that PCs often like to have. It's great in wilderness regions where there are more or less obvious tracks. Skilled characters can read tiny marks and track target animals or people even in terrain where most people would have trouble spotting anything unusual. There are even ways and rules for tracking in urban settings such as bustling cities.

Chances of success can be essentially 100% - even a person with no skill can follow fresh footprints through clean snow or thick mud - right down to basically zero. Following a person through concrete city blocks an hour after they've passed is nigh on impossible without magic or science fantasy technology. And there is the full range in between. Games often use modifiers to a character's base tracking skill based on terrain, weather conditions, and time elapsed since the pursued target passed by. The good thing is these modifiers can be stacked and easily take the chances of success over 100% or below 0% - corresponding to the situations described above, for example.

In some cases the chances of successfully finding tracks can be so negative that the character can have a far better chance of finding the target by just choosing a direction at random and walking.

It's important to keep your troops motivated and happy. You don't want deserters. Particularly if they're PCs! Though this also applies particularly to the various men-at-arms, retainers, hirelings, and henchmen that PCs sometimes acquire.

Several games have morale and loyalty rules that govern how likely such employees are to desert or, worse still, backstab their employer and attempt to make off with their valuables. (Perhaps even to join the heroes' enemies and give them inside information on what the heroes are up to - GMs: file that one away in your ideas bank for later.) Rather than just apply a mechanical series of modifiers and dice rolls, you can also add elements of roleplaying, by giving the hirelings various motivations and expectations. A hireling who wants to look after injured animals is a very different proposition from one who is looking to make a quick buck, who is different again from one whose family was killed by goblins and who is itching for a fight.

And then there's the hireling whose brother was killed by the heroes several adventures ago - you know that evil high priest of the Cult of Stragmoth who was terrorising the village of Innocentdale? Yeah, he had a brother, and now he's found the people who did it and has an idea to take a job with them and get inside their confidence...

Another thing that games sometimes have rules for is exposure to various types of weather and temperature extremes. Often these rules never get used, since most of the time GMs just sort of tend to assume the weather is nondescript. That's fine most of the time (unless you are running a Viking colonists campaign in Greenland).

And it's often just easier to assume the weather is never bad enough to cause serious problems. Because weather is an insidious hazard - you can't beat it off like an attacking monster. It constantly gnaws away at your endurance and you just need to find shelter. And if you don't manage that, you're basically dead. So it's tricky to incorporate into a game and maintain a sense of drama without simply being too deadly. It works okay in fiction (see the attempted crossing of the Mountains of Moria in The Lord of the Rings) because the writer can always get the heroes to shelter in time. In a game, you need to be a lot more careful.

There is a science fiction aesthetic known as raygun gothic, which is essentially "The World of Tomorrow!" as imagined by writers who are now so far in the past that their ideas of the future look antiquated to our modern eyes. Which is not all that long ago.

Science fiction from the 1950s definitely counts. Science fiction from the 1960s almost certainly counts. Science fiction from the 1970s, in many cases, probably counts as well. And even some science fiction from the 1980s counts. Just look at that scanner Han is holding. Your iPhone or Android phone almost certainly has a thousand times the processing power. At least. The thing Han is holding probably has valves in it.

Not that this is a bad thing. A galaxy-spanning science fiction game with giant computers the size of a building processing hundreds of calculations every second on clacking relays and outputting data on punched cards would be awesome. You'd have a Morse operator on the bridge of your rocket ship for communications, and who knows, probably signal flags as a backup. And a robot with rubber arms shouting, "Danger! Danger!" at the drop of a hat.

The troops need some way to keep themselves amused during the long waits when nothing much happens. Make sure to provide them with suitable diversions, lest they make up some of their own. You don't want your retainers messing about and playing practical jokes on one another with:

• The strange alien artefacts recovered from the UFO crash site.
• The eerie glowing fluid dripping off the warp engine coils.
• The weird books bound in human skin and kept inside the pentagram in the dungeons of the castle.

Prejudice can be a touchy topic, but it can also be one that brings an element of realism and interest into a game. It's probably better to avoid real world examples (unless everyone in your game is exceptionally mature about it), but there are numerous examples of proxy prejudices in fiction: from the mutant scares in various versions of X-Men to Muggle haters in the Harry Potter books. (The TV Tropes link has dozens more examples.)

Somehow, moving issues of prejudice on to a group that doesn't exist in the real world makes it a lot easier to deal with in a more detached, fictional way. Some players will be perfectly happy with this, and may even want to explore issues of fantasy prejudice using such a proxy - so this can be a valid part of a game setting. If you're going for gritty and dark, you can have the oppressed minority (or even an oppressed majority) suffer mercilessly, without any hope of ever escaping from their persecution. Or you can make the fight for justice an integral part of the plot and use it to fulfil a morally uplifting theme in the campaign.

On the other hand, be careful. Some players may wish to escape reality and simply avoid such issues in games. Make sure you know before you start such a theme.

In a roleplaying game, just because you're dead doesn't necessarily mean you're gone. There are plenty of ways to come back or simply keep going. You can be resurrected, you can be reincarnated in another bodily form, you can have your personality transferred into a clone, you can be uploaded into a computer, you can become undead, you can move on to another plane of existence from which you might conceivably return. You could even never have been dead in the first place, despite all appearances.

This is all well and fine if applied to PCs, since they are the characters the players have invested time and effort into making an integral part of their gaming lives, and it's often intensely sad to see them expire.

But nobody ever said GMs can't apply this to villains as well...

Normally, talking is a free action. But sometimes it's important to enforce a limited communication channel. The heroes have 8 seconds before the bomb blows up, and that's only so much time to chat about the weather before getting on to the vital stuff about the supervillain's password scheme.

A way to enforce this in the game is to use a stopwatch and give the players the same amount of time to communicate before cutting them short and going ahead with the explosion or whatever. This can be a great way to ratchet up the tension but it can also—

It can be helpful and atmospheric when roleplaying to perform physical actions that mimic what your character wants to do. Standing up to deliver a dramatic pre-battle speech to the troops, beating your chest and ululating when summoning the creatures of the jungle to your aid, or whipping around your replica bat'leth when fighting off hordes of hostile aliens.

Just remember that your dexterity score is probably about 5 points lower than your character's, and be careful.

Sometimes you just gotta give it to the PCs on a silver plate.

And watch as they run off with the silver.

The rescue party can be composed of PCs, rescuing NPCs. Or it can be composed of NPCs, rescuing PCs.

One likely scenario: The PCs go out to rescue some NPCs. Then some NPCs go out to rescue the PCs who have gotten themselves into trouble.

Healing is an important ingredient in any roleplaying adventure. From the clerics of the original Dungeons & Dragons to advanced sickbay facilities in futuristic space games, you need to have some way of reducing the amount of damage an adventurer has sustained and getting them back on their feet again. In setting where technology is not up to the task, magic often steps in. This is why the deadliest games you can play are pre-industrial historic settings without fantasy elements.

And why if you're player and your GM suggests a pre-industrial historic setting for a game, you need to insist on having access to magic.

Facilities in a secret rebel base need to have code names, so that if you're accidentally overheard talking about them by the enemy, they won't know what you're talking about. Smart PCs will have all sorts of secret code names for things, including combat plans that can be shouted out in desperate situations so that everyone knows what they need to do without giving it away to the horde of attacking orcs.

Even smarter players won't bother, since you can always discuss plans in detail out of character in the real world minutes in between one orc releasing an arrow and the arrow hitting its target.

Having no arms might normally be considered a disadvantage. But with skill and good roleplaying you can turn a game-related penalty into something advantageous. Just make sure to neglect to remind the GM about any rule to the effect that a disadvantage that doesn't have an in-game drawback isn't really a disadvantage.

A good trick for intense roleplaying and adding a point of interest for your character is to pick one small detail of your character's background, or an early event in their adventuring career that alludes to something in their past, and keep bringing it up later. It makes a nice character point and detail - it gives a hook for other players to hang on to. They can recognise your character by that little detail whenever it is mentioned again, and it makes the character seem that little bit more realistic.

For example, you could have your character stop for coffee early in their first adventure. Then throughout their adventuring life, every so often they feel the need for a coffee and will seek it out. You could even develop it slowly into a preference for a particular type or style of coffee. Another example is that your character might have success in their first battle after crafting an arrow fletched with a red feather. In future they might insist on carrying a red-fletched arrow into any fight. If the arrow is used, they need to make another.

And so on. The point is that characters aren't just lists of stats waiting for the next trap or fight or treasure. They should have little personality quirks. That's what makes them memorable.

The traditional meal of roleplaying games is, of course, pizza. The two were demonstrated to have been established as a natural pairing as early in the history of roleplaying games as 1982 by one of the absolutely fundamental and crucial plot points in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: when Elliot's brother and his friends play Dungeons & Dragons and order (naturally) pizza.* One can deduce that the script writer (one Melissa Mathison) was well aware that the game and the food formed a pairing as intrinsic to the very fabric and nature of the universe as yin and yang, fish and chips, Hall and Oates.

One should not defy such laws of nature, lest the laws of nature inflict upon you the scourge of critical failures.

* Although the naïve may think that, on the surface, the Speak & Spell and Reese's Pieces played a greater role in the film, a deeper contextual analysis readily shows the prime importance of the Dungeons & Dragons game and the pizza, which clearly allude to a greater synthesis of the viewer's syncretic experience and identification with E.T. The alien being referred to as a "wandering monster" or a "goblin" is obviously designed to make us wonder how many XP he would be worth, and thus invoke a sympathetic response. At least to those of lawful good alignment.

Consider making one of the characters in your game have to live with a death mark. They are wanted, not alive, not dead or alive, but dead. Someone took a dislike to them in the past for some reason, and wants them eliminated as an act of revenge, or maybe to silence them so they don't reveal something embarrassing. Perhaps it was all a big misunderstanding, and the character didn't even do anything terribly unforgivable, but nevertheless, someone wants the satisfaction of standing over their grave.

It makes for an interesting piece of backstory, and can pop up actively in adventures now and then. Be careful not to overdo it though, lest the game turn into "avoid the assassin" for much of the time.

The classic way to tell if someone was a witch was to tie them up and throw them in water. If they lived, then it was because the water rejected those in league with Satan, so the accused was a witch and would be executed. If the accused drowned, it proved they were innocent. (At least, this is how the story goes when maximising the ridiculous irony. In actual practice the accused would be rescued before they could actually die of drowning. Sometimes.)

You can adapt this technique to all sorts of roleplaying situations. It's a great justification for "shoot first, ask questions later". See? All sorts of realistic roleplaying situations that occur many times in actual games.

It's important to have a good understanding of your characters capabilities and weaknesses.

So you can play up the capabilities and work around or, better yet, completely ignore, the weaknesses.

NPCs need a personality as well. One way to give them one is to play up any feature about them that the players latch onto. You may not have planned the merchant in the market square to be a ruthless haggler who will do anything to rip off a passing adventurer, but after a single encounter with the heroes he may come across that way. Since the players have now pigeonholed the character, you can play it up in any later encounters, and they'll always remember who they're dealing with.

The alternative is to have the NPC turn out to be completely the opposite in truth, just to give the players a lesson in judging books by their covers. This can be a good twist and add some spice to a later encounter, but don't do it often, otherwise your NPCs will get a reputation for being unpredictable above any other personality features.

Living in a vast galaxy, everything in nature should be interesting. Imagine an interplanetary druid, wandering the stars, seeking out new life forms, new civilisations...

Wait a second. That would be...

Fascinating.

If everything wil be fine for the PCs as long as one particular thing doesn't happen... of course it should happen.

This is not to say it should necessarily be a complete disaster. It should just be a challenging situation, as opposed to everything working perfectly and there being no adventure at all.

Healing is an important part of any adventurer's life. And thus so is dealing with healers. This provides ample opportunities for roleplaying scenes.

There is the well-known Nightingale effect*, where a caregiver falls in love with the patient, and there is also the inverse case, in which patients fall in love with nurses or doctors. With suitable healers looking after PCs you could develop this into a storyline.

Alas, not all patients can be looked after like Faramir, who was fortunate enough to be nursed back to health by Eowyn. Some get rather less endearing medical aid...

* Interestingly, the Wikipedia article on this effect claims that it was first referred to by that name in the film Back to the Future! We're not entirely sure we believe that, but there you go.

Coincidence is a useful thing. In real life it would look weird if you just happened to bump into your long lost twin brother or mortal enemy while out hunting deer in the King's forest, but in fiction (or games) this sort of thing happens all the time. So don't be afraid to play up coincidences and make them critical elements in your ongoing plots and campaigns.

And if the players ever get suspicious that there are way too many coincidences to just be random...

Maybe they're right. That should keep them up at nights for a long time.

Some magical or psychic abilities have a range that is "line of sight".

You can make an argument that any such abilities work over video links, potentially at world (or even galaxy) spanning distances.

Better make it a good argument though, as most GMs aren't gonna fall for it.

Three dimensions gives you a lot of space to work with. If there are a hundred battleships in orbit and you have to get off the planet... just aim at the enormous gaps between them. Most spaceship combat is going to take place at ranges of thousands of kilometres or more. If you're building a ship for a space game, make sure you equip it with the longest range weapons you can get your hands on.

And maybe pack some close range ones just in case.

Evacuations take time. You need to organise an order in which people go and prioritise resources like transports (which may be ships, lifeboats, or horses). Leaders will typically either go last, marshalling people ahead of them and keeping an eye on proceedings, or first, leading the evacuees to a safer area and avoiding any incidental dangers along the way (think Théoden leading the Rohirrim to Helm's Deep).

PCs are likely to be, or naturally adopt the role of, leaders if caught in an evacuation. Some of them may want to go first, some way want to stay behind. And since danger is imminent, it's easy for groups to get separated.

Sounds like a perfect way to split the party!

Plans should be evaluated for likelihood of success before you try them.

But most of the time when PCs are involved a post mortem will just have to do.

People like being asked about little details of their lives. You should make sure you ask little questions like this of any NPC you come across.

Your GM will appreciate your attention to roleplaying detail.

The Imperial walkers are actually one of the earliest examples of mecha (humongous mecha, even) in Western visual arts.

Awesome, but impractical.

But for a game, that's cool. Oh yeah!

There is a definite art in divining information about the foes you face from the sound of the dice rolling behind the GM's screen. The best players can tell exactly how many dice of damage the evil wizard's Fireball spell does just from listening carefully.

GMs who want to stay a step ahead can deliberately roll more dice than needed and just ignore the extras. It also gives you the option of not ignoring them if a player gets too obnoxious...

Vehicles often have additional capabilities that don't normally come into the awareness of roleplayers. But knowledge of these features can help save your skin in difficult adventure situations. For example, if your car breaks down in the desert, you can drink the water from the radiator.

If you're a GM you need to be on top of these sorts of things, to make sure you apple them realistically. For example, radiator water will probably have antifreeze or some other toxic chemical additives in it that may not be apparent to anyone trying to drink it.

Making your giant fighting machine anthropomorphic, or at least animalomorphic, is cool.* You can however go overboard and make it too animalomorphic, giving your fighting machine vulnerabilities that a non-animal-shaped machine wouldn't have.

In the right context, this could also be cool, of course.**

* Nonsensical, but cool.
** Even more nonsensical, but even cooler.

There's a reason most roleplaying games don't generally allow a single player to play multiple characters, and there's an even better reason they don't generally allow playing characters on opposite sides of a conflict. Things can get kind of convoluted.

During the events of a game, it can happen that characters change outlooks and allegiances. Examples include when heroes become corrupted by events or forces beyond their control, and descend into decadence and evil, or become pawns of a greater power. Many a hero has fallen victim to a vampire and become a thrall of the villain, or been compromised under similar circumstances. The general approach is to retire the character as a player character and have the GM take over as an NPC, leaving the player to pick up a new heroic character.

But you don't have to do things that way. You could have a player play a villain behind the scenes. Just be prepared for the out-of-character weirdness that can result.

Players generally don't have practical knowledge of military or skirmish tactics, yet are expected to be able to play such encounters with a modicum of intelligence. Fortunately games tend to have more or less abstracted rules that let you just announce an intention to damage a target and then roll dice to see if your character can do it. But adding some roleplaying into a combat encounter can be additional fun and give you the chance to try out some unconventional tactics in a situation which isn't going to be dangerous as it would be in real life.

Rather than just say, "I hit the goblin with my sword", you can try, "I point behind the goblin and yell 'What's that?!', then use the end of my sword to tip the oil lamp hanging on the wall on to the pile of straw bedding." Or something to that effect. Much more interesting!

Buttons are good. Buttons are lots of fun.

Especially the types with cryptic or even no labels at all, that are presented to player characters when they are locked in a room with water rising rapidly and spikes descending from the ceiling.

And then there's the type that are on the control panels of a foreign or alien vehicle when the PCs jump in and hope for a quick getaway from the hordes of hostiles chasing them.

Or the sort that simply says, "Don't press".

Oh yes. Buttons are excellent.

Communicating information from the GM to the players is usually done mostly verbally. The major exception is probably maps, which the GM can lay out or present piecemeal as the players explore. But don't overlook the power of illustration. Even if you can't draw very well, you can make a rough sketch to get across the layout of a scene or the weird sigils engraved on the cover of the evil wizard's book. Always have scrap paper and some pencils handy, and don't hesitate to scrawl something down when players ask what something looks like.

If they find a staff, hand them a piece of paper showing a quick sketch of a knotty, gnarled piece of wood with a strange knob on the end and some runes carved into it. If they find a potion, hand them a sketch of a glass vial with an odd shape and sealed with a blob of wax.

It can add a lot to the atmosphere of the game. And if you spring this sort of thing on them all of a sudden, also to player paranoia.

It's tough coming up with names for random NPCs who you just make up on the spot. Some GMs have a gift for it, but most people don't.

One trick is to use one of the many random name generators on the web (fantasy, modern, science fiction, take your pick), pre-generate a list of suitable male, female, (and possibly other) names, and pick one off the list when required. It's simple to do and saves stammering over answering the question, "What's the merchant's name?" whenever a player asks.

If you have the sort of players who like asking all sorts of questions about your setting and NPCs, just make sure you print out a long enough list.

The inspiring speech is a staple of heroic legend. So it's appropriate to use it on great occasions.

Just make sure that whoever's giving the speech has a high Charisma score.

Never abandon your buddies on the battlefield.

This goes triple in situations where they may rise as zombies and attack you later in the adventure.

Because if the GM is on the ball, they will.

You can add drama and suspense by giving characters a strict time limit to achieve something before something disastrous happens. However, if they happen to roll a critical failure on their Disarm Bomb skill one second before the bomb goes off... you have little choice but to let the bomb go off.

So unless you want to injure/kill PCs, set the situation up so that it's someone else in danger. And be prepared for things to go wrong. Because with things relying on player dice rolls, it will.

In a high technology setting, there's little excuse for PCs to ever be truly out of contact with one another. The simple expedient of a two-way radio or cell phone or whatever solves issues of communication when the characters are separated. The trick then is to come up with plausible excuses for why the communication might stop working: out of range, dead batteries, smashed equipment, locked in a radio-proof metal room with spikes descending from the ceiling and water rushing in...

You just have to be careful not to use the same means of failure too often, lest it become cliche and unbelievable.

The other option is to let the characters communicate, but still get into trouble anyway. It is a good way to arrange rescue scenarios, for example.

A GMing method to impress upon your players the magnitude of the problem they face is to give them some piece of equipment which has seemingly (or really) magical properties, which make it über-powerful. Get them to rely on it to solve all their problems. Kind of like The Doctor's sonic screwdriver - it pretty much always works, no matter what the situation is.

Then put them up against something which is immune to it.

Party getting a bit too reliant on the wizard's fireballs? Have them encounter a posse of creatures with total immunity to fire. Not only are the wizard's fireballs useless, but the creatures can use their own fire magic against the heroes with impunity, simply flooding the entire dungeon with flames.

Nothing beats that "uh oh..." moment when the wizard cockily tries the fireball, and the enemy simply stands there, surrounded by fire, and laughs...

Roaches are good at scattering when hit by light.

They are good atmosphere setters for horror games. When the party is exploring the run-down mansion on the hill, and shine their torches into cobwebbed rooms layered with dust, have them see cockroaches scuttle away out of sight. Better yet, have:

"Things, mostly unseen, but sensed on the edges of your vision - perhaps the very edges of reality itself, in that half-remembered twilight between dream and nightmare - scuttle out of sight, like cockroaches, except you're not really sure what they are, or if they were really there at all..."

A trick that can be used in a game with remote communication is to describe the action happening to one group of characters only by the sounds that another group of characters in a different location can hear. This can leave a lot to the imagination of the listeners. It can generate suspense or mystery, and might also potentially lead to incorrect conclusions.

It doesn't need to be radio either. You can separate an adventuring band in a dungeon with a sliding door and have ominous sounds drift through the now unopenable panel.

"Dead or alive" is a fun thing to specify. You can't really get away with it in a modern contemporary campaign set in the real world, but it gives an appropriately "frontier justice" feel to other settings such as Wild West, fantasy, and slightly dystopian science fiction.

WANTED: Dragon who burnt down the village. Dead or alive!

Of course, some things are much, much easier to bring back dead...

Talk about something (say, evil fairies) for long enough and the response turns from "Evil fairies, don't be ridiculous!" to "Evil fairies, I don't see them, where could they be hiding?"

Use this with a wide range of variants to ramp up paranoia. Have NPCs mention the werewolves that haunts the woods, or the gremlins that get into starship engines. A wide variety of people keep saying the same thing, despite no evidence ever turning up.

Keep it up until someone makes the critical turn of phrasing from "they don't exist" to "if they exist". Then soon after that something slightly odd happens. Not completely off the wall or impossible, but something that would be easier to explain if there were indeed active hostile forces at work.

Sit back and watch.

Percussive maintenance should always have a chance of success. Giving something a good whack can align misaligned components if you're lucky enough.

Even when those components are electrons. Just go with it.

Inter-party conflict can be interesting when it's in character. If it bubbles up at any point, act to enhance the need to work together by throwing the arguing parties into a desperate situation. Enemies attack, or they trigger a trap, or are stuck somewhere dangerous. Bonus points if you can make it look like the fault of someone in the party.

Many game manuals suggest giving bonuses to skill rolls for persuasion if the player provides a particularly inspiring bit of roleplaying of the persuading speech.

You can choose to apply this even if the thing being persuaded is inanimate.

Careful parties should always set up rendezvous points in case something goes disastrously wrong and they get separated. (What are the chances of that?)

If you're about the enter the Dungeon of Doom, arrange for people to meet back outside at the wilderness camp a half mile away if anyone gets separated. Then when it inevitably happens, you have at least some chance of regrouping even if it becomes impossible to track down where the separated party members have been imprisoned or teleported to.

This simple expedient could have saved thousands of adventurers who stepped through that mouth thing in the Tomb of Horrors. Well, it would have if [spoiler: highlight to read] the chosen rendezvous point was OBLIVION.

Someone has to be the last to arrive to a game session. It's best to use your telepathic powers to determine the topic of conversation before opening your mouth.

Roleplaying games give you conversation opportunities that don't arise in most other forms of social interaction. Switching from out-of-character to in-character (or vice versa) is a handy way to change the subject of the conversation, for example.

One response to this is to follow the change of mode and continue the same conversation in the other universe. This can lead to some interesting discussions, such as wizards and dwarves talking about the latest TV shows.

Actually, that could be an interesting idea for a setting...

Nothing good ever comes after "I have some interesting news". Especially in the middle of a vehicle chase scene with accompanying shooting. That is not the time to be bringing up "interesting news".

Which of course makes it the perfect thing to do so in a game situation. If you are acting as the GameMaster, you can have various NPCs bring up the interesting news. Or if you are a player, you can adopt the line yourself at appropriately hair-raising and dangerous moments.

In some games there is a Gambling skill. For any gambling game with any amount of actual skill, there's no problem. A person with a Gambling skill of 16 is more likely to win at poker than a person with Gambling skill of 13.

But in some of those games you can use this skill (in character) to influence the outcomes of games of pure chance. A person with a Gambling skill of 16 is more likely to win a coin toss, or at a slot machine, than a person with Gambling skill of 13.

In some sense, this may be justifiable. If the game is cinematic and plays loose with the laws of probability, for example. If you're playing James Bond, you damn well should have a better chance at winning at roulette or craps than some random shmuck off the street. So don't dismiss it as entirely silly.

In many game situations it can pay to be crazy prepared. You need an answer for everything the GM throws at you, and the less you have to think on your feet, the better.

The character you want to emulate here is Batman. He carries around a piece of kryptonite, just in case Superman turns evil.

You should carry around a piece of kryptonite too. Just in case an evil Superman shows up in your elven forest.

Bringing back an old character is a good way to provide continuity within an adventure. There's the recurring villain, of course, but you can also do this with friendly NPCs.

The bartender who the heroes met on their first visit to a certain town can be a regular feature of their visits whenever they return. The travelling merchant they rescued from bandits can show up in a completely different city a year or two later. You could even go the Androcles and the Lion route: The heroes end up in trouble somehow, and the merchant comes to their rescue.

Another option is to bring back retired adventurers. The warrior or wizard that one of the players played in a previous game might appear in a later game featuring new PCs. You can run the retired adventurer as an NPC, or perhaps have the original player reprise the role briefly. You can even do this by surprise - the players might not even be aware that they are adventuring in the same world as their previous adventures, just advanced a decade or two. Imagine a group of heroes going into a tavern and stumbling across the legendary Zakmort the Conjurer, who defeated that dragon all those years ago - when one of the players actually was Zakmort.

Moving so that multiple enemies end up pointing at each other (either with vehicles or weapons) is a classic ploy. If it's good enough for Bugs Bunny, it's good enough for a group of PCs.

You might take further leaves from old Bugs's playbook. Try the "Duck season, rabbit season" switcheroo when arguing or haggling with an NPC.

And if you get that one past a GM, try Point That Somewhere Else. Or Hammerspace.

Note: We tried to find the canonical identification of the Imperial captain visible in this scene, but couldn't determine it with any certainty. We think it's Captain Needa, but could be wrong.

If someone takes a head wound in a game, there are all sorts of dramatic things that can happen. In a light game you could simply have them see cartoon-like stars, or little birdies, floating around their heads. You can go for the dramatic and rapid growth of a lump on the head (covered in crossed bandages in the next scene).

More seriously, you can have the victim lose their memory. There's complete cinematic amnesia, where they have no idea who they or their friends are. Or maybe they remember most things but forget one important fact they should know or thing they are supposed to be doing.

Then there are other effects, such as loss of vision or hearing, or dizziness, or loss of balance and coordination. Basically, you can justify almost any game mechanical penalty you can imagine from a blow to the noggin.

Players: Consider a helmet.

Realistic space collision hazards are one of two things:

(a) Boring. At worst, you might walk through someone's ball of orange juice that they left floating in mid-air. Or...

(b) Incredibly lethal and so fast you don't have a chance to realise what just happened before you die. Any two random objects in space are likely to have relative velocities so high that if they collide one of them will simply punch a hole right through the other one. And you won't see it coming, let alone have time to react.

To alleviate this problem, use some artistic licence and populate your spacelanes with masses of rocks slowly drifting drifting in random directions. It makes no sense, but hey, neither do warp drives, psionic powers, or artificial gravity.

Two-dimensional thinking in space navigation has a venerable tradition. The classic science fiction RPG Traveller famously and unashamedly uses a two-dimensional star map, completely ignoring the third dimension in the relationships between stars. This was later justified in that the star maps represent navigable hyperspace "jump routes", with hyper-distances between stars happening to fall into a two-dimensional geometry that only partly reflects the real three-dimensional relationships between them. Essentially the hyper-distance between stars is measured along a projection of the real-space route onto the Galactic plane.

The one big advantage of this convention is that you can easily draw a map on a sheet of paper, rather than needing a rotating 3D model or some sort of holographic display.

And, as Captan Kirk once showed to his advantage, even geniuses sometimes forget that space has an up and a down.

Every party needs a good source of plans that are so crazy, they might just work. Better yet, have multiple sources! That gives you more options, after all.

And in the best cases you can combine plans to make to something even crazier. Which might just work even better!

One source of ideas for your characters in a game is your real world knowledge. This is obviously handy in a game set in the modern day. But it can also be useful in games set in the distant past, far future, or alternate realities. You just need to be slightly creative in adapting the terminology and technology to the setting.

Or don't bother at all and just claim you can dual-wield a crossbow in each hand because you can clearly demonstrate that you can do it in Final Fantasy.

A new planet is always exciting! This is one of the coolest parts of running or playing a game involving travel between the stars. If you think going to a foreign country is an eye-opening experience, wait until there are whole alien planets to get culture shock from.

But since we don't all have experience of alien cultures, it can be difficult to create such worlds for your players to marvel over. There are a few solutions. You can go the Planet of Hats route and give the locals some defining characteristic to make them interesting. Actually... let's just link to this planet trope index and let you explore on your own. You will get tons of ideas for creating new and strange planets from this.

Translation devices in fiction always work better than anything we have yet come up with. Translation is a difficult job and the translator needs a good working knowledge of not just the literal meanings of words in two different languages, but also of idiomatic usage, cultural associations, subtle changes of connotation depending on word choice, puns, well-known jokes, and basically almost everything about the cultures that speak the relevant languages. For a machine translator to know and use all of this stuff properly takes computational ability far beyond anything that current technology can manage.

For a science fiction setting, you get the free pass of "advanced technology". In fantasy, you can handwave some magic. In realistic historical or current day settings, you probably need living translators. All of these give you opportunities for roleplaying fun. Technology can break down, magic can stop working for arbitrary reasons.

And living translators bring with them all the complications of people with their own personalities and goals. Translators are normally "invisible people" - assumed to be there just to do this job and melt into the background, where they can easily be ignored. Try making a translator an important character in their own right. They are ideally situated to be spies, for example. Or they can be manipulated by third parties, giving them an insider in the communication channel. Or maybe a translator goes missing, and becomes conspicuous when suddenly communication with the foreign ambassador becomes difficult or impossible. You better track them down and find out what they're up to!

Landing on a strange new planet should always be an experience fraught with thrills and potential danger. Who knows if you can find a horizontal surface large enough to land your ship? Who knows if that surface is stable, or even solid? Maybe it has a cave right beneath the surface and is just waiting to collapse into a giant sinkhole the moment something heavy lands on top of it. Maybe it's slippery with ice, or organic slime, and the ship will skid around like crazy. Maybe the surface is covered with fine meteorite dust and the ship will simply sink into it.

That last one was actually a serious concern for the first space probes we sent to the Moon and to Mars. And not knowing if the surface is even solid was a concern for the Huygens probe that landed on Saturn's moon Titan.

Of course you can apply these sorts of problems to science fiction games, but you can also adapt them for fantasy. Imagine an island where the welcoming beach sands are actually sucking sands that swallow people up to their knees. Where apparently safe anchorage is treacherous with barely submerged reefs and rocks, and many-tentacled monsters.

Imagine a town with a welcoming looking inn, but which is surrounded by a deep ravine and a cliff, and forests full of wolves or worse. This is a nicely defensible position for a town, so it's not all that far fetched. But maybe they don't allow horses or wagons within the town, and the only access is over a footbridge. So you need to leave your transport (your "ship") out where it's dangerous. A town can also be on islands, like Venice, accessible only by boat. In these cases, realistically some sort of service town would grow up next to it, to cater for travellers who need to leave things outside the main town, but in fantasy you can break the rules. Adapting themes from across genres like this is a rich source for unique setting ideas.

Active scanning technology is things that emit some form of radiation in order to scan things. This could be radio waves (in which case the technology is called radar), laser light (which is lidar), infrared waves (which is how the Microsoft Kinect works), x-rays (x-ray imaging and CT scanning), sound waves (sonar, or ultrasound imaging), or even seismic waves penetrating the Earth, which can be produced by controlled explosions (seismic tomography).

Active scanning is good, because you can detect things which might not otherwise be visible or detectable in other ways. For example, radar can detect planes flying at night or in thick cloud. The problem with active scanning is that your scanner is emitting radiation, which makes it highly visible to anyone with the means of detecting that radiation. If you can detect radio waves of the appropriate frequency, then a radar installation will glow brightly and probably be the most obvious thing anywhere near you.

In a game example, you might want to scan for enemy ships. They are hard to see, but if you use radar you could easily find them. The trouble is, using radar gives your own position away and makes you highly visible.

The alternative to active scanning is passive scanning. In passive scanning, you observe radiation that is being emitted or reflected by other objects, but you don't send any out yourself to cause those reflections. One ubiquitous example of passive scanning is human eyesight. You detect objects near you by observing the light reflected off them or being emitted by them - but your eyes don't emit any light to illuminate them.*

Passive scanning is good because you don't give away your own position. All you are doing is collecting information that is already out there. On the other hand, it's not so useful in some fairly common situations, such as visual scanning in dense fog, or darkness.

Bringing this back to gaming, if your game involves appropriate technologies, you can pose the question to your players. Do they want to scan actively and be sure to detect everything, at the risk of giving themselves away, or do they want to scan passively, not giving themselves away, but at the risk of not detecting nearby danger. It's an intriguing question, which leads to many tactical roleplaying opportunities.

* There used to be an ancient theory that human sight did work by emitting light.

We've mentioned the Single-Biome Planetbefore. It's an easy (read "lazy") way to create a whole planet:

"What's this planet that I never expected you to visit like? Uh... It's a desert planet. It's covered in desert. It's hot and dry and sandy. All over."

The problem is less one of lack of realism and more that you start training your players to be overly genre savvy and expect all the planets to be like this.

Which of course makes this a trick ripe for subversion. Train your players to think all planets are single-biome planets, and then just when they're comfortable throw them a major curveball. A planet which has multiple terrain types, in a majorly plot-relevant way that is actively dangerous if they assume otherwise. (Details left as an exercise for the reader. We're sure you're smart enough to think of something.)

Here's a good way to rules lawyer something. If a trait exists in the game which explicitly gives you certain penalties, then if you don't have the trait, then those penalties cannot ever be applied to you under any circumstance.

Okay, maybe that's just a way to rules lawyer something, not necessarily a good way.

Good luck to you if you try it on your GM.

There is no situation so bad that it can't be made worse by not having the technology that you're used to. This applies equally well for low tech genres as well. Put a bunch of adventurers into a dungeon cell without their swords and armour and watch them escape with nothing but their wits and what they can scavenge.

Okay, so it's been done, but it just shows what you can do.

Odds don't work in a game like they do in real life. This is because games are designed (at least good ones, anyway) to provide a dramatic approximation of reality, not to be a slavish simulation. Another way to look at it is that games should provide a compelling narrative, much like a well written story. Author Terry Pratchett coined a term for this sort of thing: narrative causality. Things happen not because they would happen that way in the real world, but because it makes a better story.

In a complete turnabout, the game GURPS Discworld, based on Terry Pratchett's popular series, actually adopts narrative causality as a game rule, to ensure that things have a better chance of turning out as they would in a story, and not be foiled by any mere trifle like the laws of probability or nature.

One specific way of achieving this in a game rules framework is through the use of "hero points" (also called by other names in a few games). These are points that a player can spend during a game to, essentially, temporarily suspend the game rules and simply describe what they want to happen - and it happens.

Never tell a hero the odds.

If you don't know enough to talk expertly in character, you switch to out of character and describe what you are trying to do from that perspective.

We... offer you some advice on how to integrate this into your games and make them more fun.

Players: Understand that whenever a PC says, "It could be worse," it is absolutely incumbent upon the GM to come up with something that makes the situation worse. This is one of the inviolable social contracts of roleplaying. Any GM who lets a comment like this slide is simply not doing the job properly.

GMs: If a PC ever says, "It could be worse," try this: Just smile diabolically and say, "Nothing appears to happen."

Meeting new characters is always a fun and interesting experience. Or it should be. Inject some personality into your characters so that the players find them memorable. The more personality, the more memorable. You can never have too much personality.

NPCs are much more interesting if they are slightly mysterious. An innkeeper is just an innkeeper, and will more or less be ignored by any party of PCs. But an innkeeper who seems to know just a bit too much, or an innkeeper with an unrecognisable yet strangely familiar tattoo on his arm, or an innkeeper who has several mounted monster heads and a couple of large axes hanging on his inn's walls... now that's someone the PCs will spend time thinking about.

The doubly cool thing about this approach to NPCs is that you once you've established it, you can invert it. All of a sudden the NPC who doesn't have anything peculiar or interesting about them becomes even more interesting...

A way to add flavourful spice to your fictional roleplaying worlds is to adapt common sayings to use vocabulary peculiar to the time or setting.

Hold you hippogriffs! A lot of the time that actually sounds corny or just plain stupid. Be careful.

Conduits are sort of the general purpose "thing" to either go wrong or to have to fix on a spaceship. You could replace an entire spaceship combat hit location table with the following:

d%	Location
1-100	Conduit

It'd be just as effective. Or for bonus points add the following:

d%	Conduit type
1-4	Antimatter
5-8	Baryon
9-12	Entropy
13-16	Ferrofluid
17-20	Flux
21-24	Heisenfram
25-28	Hydraulic
29-32	Hydrocolloid
33-36	Hyperfluid
37-40	Intermix
41-44	Laser
45-48	Liquid helium
49-52	Liquid sodium
53-56	Microwave
57-60	Neutrino
61-64	Neutron beam
65-68	Non-Newtonian fluid
69-72	Phlebotinum
73-76	Plasma
77-80	Quasi-crystal
81-84	Steam
85-88	Superfluid
89-92	Tachyon
93-96	Vortex
97-100	Wavelet

Conduits are sort of the general purpose "thing" to either go wrong or to have to fix on a spaceship. You could replace an entire spaceship combat hit location table with the following:

d%	Location
1-100	Conduit

It'd be just as effective. Or for bonus points add the following:

d%	Conduit type
1-4	Antimatter
5-8	Baryon
9-12	Entropy
13-16	Ferrofluid
17-20	Flux
21-24	Heisenfram
25-28	Hydraulic
29-32	Hydrocolloid
33-36	Hyperfluid
37-40	Intermix
41-44	Laser
45-48	Liquid helium
49-52	Liquid sodium
53-56	Microwave
57-60	Neutrino
61-64	Neutron beam
65-68	Non-Newtonian fluid
69-72	Phlebotinum
73-76	Plasma
77-80	Quasi-crystal
81-84	Steam
85-88	Superfluid
89-92	Tachyon
93-96	Vortex
97-100	Wavelet

Be careful accusing people in game scenarios. Lest this sort of thing happen.

You know instructions are going to get misinterpreted and/or ignored.

That's what makes them so much fun.

At this point in the movie, Emperor Palpatine sends a radio message to contact Darth Vader, and Vader instructs Admiral Piett to move out of the asteroid field so they can get a "clear signal". So one could perhaps deduce that Palpatine's signal was kind of broken up and blotchy, similar to bad phone reception in a tunnel or something.

Only when they move out of the field and Vader takes the call, it's still messed up and dropping in and out. I guess that's science fiction for you. They can travel faster than light at the drop of a hat, but still use non-error-correcting low bandwidth analogue radio signals.

If you want to be a fun, jocular sort of GM and crack jokes during a game that all your players will laugh at...

Put the jokes in the mouth of an intimidating NPC superior.

Oh yes, the ominous fade. Never end a remote conversation with a cheery "Goodbye", or "Later", or "Talk to you next time!" Not when you can cut the communication off in a dramatic or foreboding way.

Phone conversations, radio links, conversations with your co-adventurer around the corner, palantíri, even scrawled warnings on subterranean walls - all can be cut off abruptly and ominously. And the worst thing about it is—

While running a game you need to have a quick answer whenever a player asks "why?"

Preferably the answer is something that makes sense and is convincing within the context of the game world and the game rules, and not just "Because I say so."

While running a game you need to have a quick answer whenever a player asks "why?"

Preferably the answer is something that makes sense and is convincing within the context of the game world and the game rules, and not just "Because I say so."

In a sense, roleplaying games are all about giving the PCs choices and letting them make them. Most of the time this is just part and parcel of the routine of buying equipment, choosing spells, and figuring out which dungeon to raid for loot.

Sometimes the GM offers a choice that feels like A Choice. Then you know some Real Roleplaying is about to happen.

Even better is when it can come from the mouth of a fellow PC.

If you ever get the chance to use the line "Not as stupid as you look" in an in-game context, you really must not pass it up.

Given how ridiculous most of the conclusions leapt to and plans made by PCs are, the chance won't come around very often.

Yep, it's a new game session!

Don't expect the game to actually start when the last players to arrive show up.

Don't expect the game to actually start soon after the last players to arrive show up, either.

Many people use figurines to represent their characters in a game. These can range from generic moulded figures simply left as they were purchased, to heavily customised figures with paint jobs and sculpting modifications. (One ultra-nerdy and hence ultra-cool option is to use LEGO figures, which can be easily customised with their various accessories. This is an even better choice for many roleplaying games with recent releases such as the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings LEGO sets.) These figures help the players and GM visualise the relative positions of characters during tactical situations.

You can of course go the whole hog and custom sculpt your own figures from scratch. At the very least, they will be distinctive.

Recipes provide plenty of scope for customising with game-related terms. When the PCs take a meal at a local inn or remote space outpost, be sure to describe the exotic ingredients and dishes available.

The more "ick"s in the reactions, the better!

Characters in games occasionally need to seek out training. Or at least they should. Often the game mechanic of skill progression is simply abstracted to "gain enough experience points, gain some new skills".

But this misses a golden opportunity for roleplaying. What if the only person who can teach you the skill you want to learn is an old hermit living on top of a mountain across the desert? Or found on an island two days' sail to the south, through pirate-infested waters? And what if when you finally get there, the teacher is reluctant to teach you? Or wants you to complete a quest to prove your worthiness? Or has simply passed away? A single twist like this placed on an otherwise standard game mechanical procedure can provide the seeds of countless diversions and give PCs a reason to cross landscapes to any location you want them to be for their next adventure.

Strictly speaking, parasites live on other living things, but you can extend the concept by straightforward analogy to things that live on and extract nutrition from equipment (often to the detriment of the equipment). Such exotic "parasites" can play an interesting role in roleplaying games.

From mundane shipworms that bore into and weaken wood-hulled ships, to psionic parasites that feed off the intelligence of wizards, the possibilities are limitless. There can be magical parasites that leach the abilities from magical weapons or other items. And high-tech parasites that suck electrical or other power from gadgets and vehicles. You don't even need to be quite so exotic. A creature that eats metal or plastic can be just as bad on a modern vehicle as one that eats gamma radiation energy, if that metal or plastic is part of a power conduit or computer system.

One can hardly blame Chewbacca. Talking is a free action, after all. May as well get plenty in before someone dies horribly.

Yes, we know eyes don't really pop out in a vacuum. And being a space scientist, Jim knows that too. It's just Han who doesn't seem to know...

Wait, what are we implying here...?

Exit, stage left!

The shortcut is a venerable piece of literary and cinematic plot device which doesn't get used often enough in roleplaying games. Seek shortcuts wherever and whenever you can. Hopefully one will come in useful at some point.

If your PCs aren't able to swap stories about having been eaten by various diverse giant creatures, then you're clearly doing something wrong.

(This piece of advice goes equally well for both GMs and players, by the way.)

Thinking where no Jim character has thought before!

There's a literary trope for doing what Jim attempted to do here. It's called... um... (ahem)... Summon Bigger Fish.

Exhaustion can be a factor when characters engage in strenuous activity. Try swinging a sword for a minute and see how you feel. Often this is abstracted away in game rules, but some games include rules for becoming exhausted during combat or when running or what have you.

Oddly enough, very few games have rules for becoming unfit from over-eating and avoiding exercise.

Real people gain skills and abilities by repetition and practice. Spending four hours a day hacking at a straw dummy with your sword for weeks on end is not exactly conducive to thrilling storytelling, though, so this part of an adventurer's life is usually glossed over or completely ignored within a game.

Some games have rules for covering the "down time" that occurs between adventures. In these periods the heroes can be assumed to be doing all the boring exercises they need to do in order to convert their worldly experience into actual skills. In some games you can even specify that X hours per day will be spent studying some skill you wouldn't normally otherwise learn about - either from books or a tutor - and once you rack up enough hours of study you can gain levels in that skill. So your swordswoman could learn to play piano on the side, if she really wanted to. You can do all this without the necessity of actually roleplaying 200 hours of piano lessons (although our GM here has a slightly different take on this idea - perhaps because of Pete).

This all assumes that you go to the effort of using such rules in your game. And that you don't keep throwing disruptive adventures at the heroes in rapid succession - which is another good way to prevent them abusing the system!

Sometimes as a GM you contrive and set up some really clever traps for your players to blunder into. But Murphy's First Law of GMing* states that the more effort you put into creating something, the more likely your players are to completely ignore it or avoid it.

The way to get players to blunder into a trap is to advertise that it is a trap. Stick a big red sign on the front saying "This is a trap. Danger. Do not enter." And then watch them walk straight in.

* Murphy's Second Law of GMing states that the throw-away piece of set-dressing description that means absolutely nothing in the context of the adventure will be the one piece of information the players obsess over, looking for hidden meanings and traps in, and generally think is of critical importance to their progress.

Caves are a natural drawcard for adventuring types keen on exploration, adventure, and the promise of piles of gold.

In reality caves are dank, dark, dangerous places, which become numbingly cold once you descend just a little way beneath the surface. There's a very good reason cavers wear hard helmets. Yet explorers in games seem highly unlikely to end an underground exploration unconscious and bleeding from the skull after cracking their head on the ceiling.

Presumably most caves found in game scenarios have been modified and made comfortable for living in by whatever hordes of goblinoids happen to inhabit it.

But then if you want to be cruel, remember that goblins (at least in Dungeons & Dragons) are only about a metre tall. They'd be perfectly comfortable with a ceiling 1.5 metres high.

It takes clever GMing, but if you can develop a situation where you have players doubting that what they are seeing is real, then you have plenty of opportunity to do interesting things with it:

• Present something which looks just unconvincing enough to have them doubt it is real.
• Present something which looks "incredibly lifelike".
• Present something which satisfies all their sensing equipment and every test they can think of to determine its reality.
• Present something which looks "obviously fake".
• Present something which looks "just a bit wrong, but you can't quite say how".

Cryptic messages from weird oracles or other strange sources can be an endless source of fun in a campaign. Of course the players are going to (a) misinterpret any real message you attempt to convey via them, and (b) come up with all sorts of amazing conspiracy theories as to what the message really means.

Naturally this means you can either stick to your guns have the players end up dead wrong when the time of the prophecy or whatever comes around; or you can simply do the trick of adopting whatever spurious theory the players come up with which sounds the coolest, and turning that into the reality within the game.

Fun for one and all!

Tests of character or determination or moral impeccability are a long-standing part of fantastic literature. What's potentially more fun is when it's a secret test, or a test that's not what the hero thinks it is. Heck there are so many variations of the test or trial that there's a whole index of tropes about them. This is a great mine for adventure scenario ideas.

Just be sure to come up with some twist that isn't described on those pages, so it'll still be a surprise and not a cliché.

If you set up a race, either against other characters or against time, make sure the heroes know it's a race. Start a huge timer with glowing red LED display or something. Impressing some form of urgency on them might just get them to go through the procedure of gearing up and then arguing over what to do first a little quicker.

Ah, no, who are we kidding?

Revenge is a classic literary motive. One potential problem with setting it up as a character point for a PC is that the PC needs to have some terrible event in their past which scarred them to the point of seeking awful revenge. If the player is okay with this, then fine - they can even help set up the backstory. But some players may not want you messing with their family and loved ones off-screen - which is a thing you should respect.

Instead you can go for something else that PCs value highly. They can be a starting character with nothing but the leather armour on their back and 40 silver pieces to their name, just like everyone else, but if you tell him he used to be a fabulously wealthy heir before his parents died (of natural causes) and the vizier (it's always the vizier) stole all his money and lands and banished him from the kingdom...

That should set things up nicely.

Ship names can add interesting flavour and fun to a campaign featuring vessels of the sea, or space. Don't pick something lame like Hello Kitty, or Tea and Scones, or Fuzzy Slippers. Pick something cool and heroic-sounding like Thunder Child, or Imperator, or Yggdrasil, or Jar Jar Binks.

It takes a special kind of outlook on life to see being chased by a huge thing as a great opportunity. Exactly the kind of outlook to make a great roleplayer! Eventually. Maybe.

Most communication in games takes place verbally. But this does not need to be the case. Set up a non-verbal gesture language with your fellow party members and you can convey messages in absolute silence while sneaking through a hobgoblin lair. Or agree on code signals flashed with lights. If you have a language slot free on your character sheet, go for something like sign language - it's going to be more useful than being able to speak bugbear or some other obscure monster language that you'll probably never need to use.

GMs: If your players go for this... um, well, actually it's not a bad idea. But maybe you could throw more bugbears at them or something. With shamans who can cast Darkness spells.

There's a lot of fun to be had in taking stereotypical types of people from the modern world and applying them to other settings.

The pushy unsatisfied customer in a magical potion shop. The nervous flyer on a spaceship. Or how about some paparazzi following around a group of adventuring heroes back from a dragon slaying expedition? What about a bard who keeps popping up unexpectedly in the oddest places - taverns, inns, public squares - singing a ridiculously catchy and annoying song?

Inspiration for colourful NPCs is everywhere!

The unexpected communication with the major bad guy is a trope* that can be used to good effect in a game. It happened in The Lord of the Rings, when Pippin grabbed the Palantír and copped an eyeful of Sauron to the face. You can also arrange it through various other means, such as the crossed telephone line, a mental intrusion during a cyberspace net-run, or even bumping into each other face-to-face while walking on the street of a busy city. Thrown into such a situation unexpectedly, the heroes will need to scramble to (a) avoid giving anything away, (b) try to extract anything useful about the bad guy or his plans out of the connection. And of there's the added bonus of causing a moment of panic, which is always good value.

* As far as we can tell, it's not a Trope, listed in TV Tropes. The closest thing we could find is Surveillance as the Plot Demands.

If something distracts a character while they're doing something physically demanding, it's fair enough to demand a concentration or willpower check or something to maintain control and not injure themselves.

Handy things that can distract a character:

• A nearby pigeon is spooked with a huge flurry of wings.
• A cat hisses and bursts out of a dark corner.
• The character accidentally steps on a rattlesnake.
• An avalanche.
• A satellite falls on a nearby house.

If there's anything better than bad news, it's compounding it with even worse bad news. (In a game context, of course.)

Electromagnetic transmissions do not travel well through water. (This is why submarines can be difficult to detect, or communicate with, when submerged.) You can take advantage of this by using water as a shielding material. It also slows down bullets really well, and shields you from most radiation.

Looks like those Gungans were really onto something, huh?

Riddle games are traditional in fantasy adventures, of course, but don't overlook the opportunity to use them in other settings as well. Imagine a cyberspace guardian program blocking the way into a black corporation's secret servers, which appears as a sphinx character and interrogates all comers with cryptic riddles in a virtual representation of password security.

Or an enigmatic alien who only answers questions about its background in circumlocutions that require the questioner to figure out the answers to riddles.

Or a supervillain who delights in setting riddles for the heroes to solve to track down the details of his next planned crimes...

Wait a second...

Come up with some interesting way for members of certain classes to settle differences. Maybe merchants who disagree about prices or shipping schedules or whatever have to duel with padded quarterstaves on a narrow plank over a river. Starship crew who get into arguments settle their feud in a holographic showdown with real electric shocks. Superheroes who have a grudge face off in a no-holds-barred battle in the ruins of a ghost town, so they can destroy the buildings and hit each other with cars with no consequences. Wizards hold ritualised magical duels of alchemy in which they prepare potions that the other must drink.

These all add flavour to your game world. And give you lots of good justifications for getting characters into grudge matches with NPCs!

Names are indeed powerful. In myth and legend, certainly. Knowing the true name of something often gives you power over that thing. So your true name is sort of like your third cat name: the name that you never will guess; the name that no human research can discover - But the cat himself knows, and will never confess.

These secret true names are invoked in some games as a mechanism for controlling entities such as demons or spirits or djinn. That sort of thing often doesn't turn out very well for the controller though. If you're in a game and you ever find yourself in possession of the true name of a powerful being... take the better part of valour and forget you ever came across it.

The "psychic powers" stance is a crucial part of using mental powers. You need a look of intense concentration on your face, and a hand extended out towards whatever it is that you're trying to influence or control. Some visible muscle tremors are a nice addition.

If PCs fail to adopt this pose when using psychic abilities, feel perfectly free and justified in giving them a skill penalty!

Always go for best of three when in a duel situation. Because...

Just because! It's cooler!

Never let anyone get the last word over you in an in-game situation. That implies weakness! Why do you think James Bond was always so cocky when tied to a nuclear bomb and about to be lowered into a shark tank? And he always won in the end!

If you're designing a space ship for a game... Put sensors on it that can tell when another entire spaceship is stuck to the outer hull!

Robots can be fine choices for PCs in games. But you need to be aware that they have their own package of advantages and, importantly, disadvantages that humans or other living creatures don't have. They don't need to eat or sleep or breathe, but equally, they require a power source and can potentially be switched off or affected by electromagnetic radiation that wouldn't bother living beings. And water can present a very serious problem - especially salt water.

So don't be surprised if your robot character suddenly needs to take a long sea voyage on a leaky wooden ship for some reason.

A great way to introduce a new significant NPC is with the phrase: "There's this guy I know..."

Just throw that around and watch your GM scramble to come up with stats and a personality and a backstory for them!

Naming things in a fictional universe can be really difficult.

Just recite that sentence when anyone complains about the names you come up with.

Setting up surprises for players adds a sense of discovery to a game. Keeping things secret from all the players until they discover them is a fundamental aspect of unravelling the adventure set before the players. But keeping things secret from some of the players because in character some of them would know the information while others wouldn't is a different kettle of fish.

Normally, PCs will tend to share all of the information they know, because they are usually working together. It helps if you encourage the players to have some little personal secrets in their backgrounds - things which they alone know and would not like to share with their fellows. Get them into the habit of not automatically spilling the beans on everything they learn.

This can cause things to go horribly wrong when some of the PCs do something they wouldn't have done if they knew everything their compatriots knew. But then, that's half the fun!

Props can help enliven a gaming session. They can create a greater sense of immersion, or they can show off in-game features or objects so the players get a better idea of what their characters are seeing. Simple props include printing out letters or documents so the players can read them. Use appropriate fonts and print on textured paper, perhaps even artificially age the paper by crumpling or singeing it.

You can go further and make mock-ups of statuettes or other macguffins. Full sized reproductions of monsters would be pretty cool. Imagine filling a bedroom with a gelatine mixture to make a gelatinous cube.

It can be hard squeezing in game sessions between appointments and commitments of busy players. The secret is to really squeeze them in. Got two rare days when everybody is available? Play 36 hours straight!

You know the old cliché about not knowing the meaning of fear? Well, PCs know the meaning of fear, all right. Just tell them that a treasure chest "looks like it is not trapped", and watch them do everything they can to avoid being within 60 feet of it when they open it.

What PCs don't know the meaning of is subtlety.

When players point out how they are abusing the rules of the game...

Go buy a lottery ticket.

"Fight or flight" is a phrase often quoted as encapsulating the two options available in a stress or potential combat situation. But there is a third option, and one which should not be discounted: hide.

Preferably embellished as: hide, sneak up undetected, attack from behind with +4 to hit, and inflict triple damage.

Making maps for gaming can be a time-intensive task. You can draw them by hand, or there are various software tools available for making professional looking maps relatively quickly. Some resources, both for map-making software and for tips on drawing game maps:

• Hexographer - old school roleplaying style mapping software.
• Campaign Cartographer - a long-standing game mapping program.
• The Cartographers Guild - a site devoted to providing resources for game mapping.
• Map-Making in Games - Google+ community for game mappers.
• Observations of the Fox - blog by Michael Wenman, full of game mapping goodies.

Detailed back-stories are really good for getting to grips with a character, allowing the player to have a history which underlies their actions. A good background makes it clear in the player's mind how the character would react to various situations, and provides motives for acting in certain ways.

A good back-story also provides plenty of hooks for the GM to build on - NPCs in the character's past, events that the character would rather forget about, and so on. All sorts of things that can come up unexpectedly and cause complications in the present.

So make sure your players give you some back-story for their characters!

Rebellions are prime subject material for gaming. They give the PCs a cause to fight for - either on the side of the oppressed and subjugated populace who are struggling for nothing less than their basic dignity and slipping the shackles of indentured servitude, or on the side of the divinely ordained, rightfully ruling elite who are trying to keep the disordered and ungrateful rabble from destroying the very foundations of civilised society.

Pick a side, any side! Fun for one and all!

There are many reasons for adventurers to adopt aliases. And all of them make good adventure material. Because if they're concealing their identity, you just have to ask the simple question: What if they get found out?

You don't necessarily have to have anyone find out who they really are, but this question should always be uppermost in their minds. Any slip or clue at all dropped by the heroes can lead to panic, or desperate measures. And fun for all!

When you're using a secret language like, for example, thieves' cant to engage in message passing between your fellow party members under the watchful eyes of someone you don't want eavesdropping... first make sure they're not also a thief.

Meeting old friends is always interesting. For various values of "interesting". In a game context, some values are more to be preferred than others.

Any new NPC that is introduced to a game can potentially have already met one or more of the heroes. The circumstances of these previous meetings can vary widely, so exploring the possibilities can create all sorts of opportunities for circumspection, amusement, or conflict.

Making up maps on the fly is an important skill for a GM. Because you know that even the most casually described location is going to get searched exhaustively and the players will want to know the details of every building and room and tree and rock to make sure they don't miss any secret doors or hidden loot.

A good diversionary tactic to use to give yourself more time to come up with this stuff is to suddenly demand a saving throw. If you make the reasons for it mysterious and not fully revealed, that should keep the players occupied with other things for a good few minutes, and may even make them want to go somewhere else - like maybe the area you have prepared in advance.

Cybernetic augmentation features heavily in the gaming genre of cyberpunk, but can also make an appearance across most other science fiction, both futuristic and retro versions such as steampunk. A common theme in cyberpunk games is the dehumanisation of people who have replaced some of their body parts with cybernetic implants - as they literally become more machine, they also mentally become more coldly logical and less warm and empathic. This is used to good effect game mechanically, because other than monetary cost there is no other particularly compelling reason why a character who seeks to be physically and mentally superior (as PCs tend to do) would not replace their frail organic body parts with stronger, faster, more damage-resistant options. The loss of empathy and humanity can supply a balancing negative effect which assists in keeping the game under control.

Interestingly, the loss of humanity concomitant with the mechanical replacement of body parts is also a strong theme running through the entire Star Wars saga. It also shows up in fantasy as well, as exemplified by the famous Dungeons & Dragons artefacts known as the Hand of Vecna and the Eye of Vecna.

By the way, if you've never read the classic gaming story about the Head of Vecna, your gaming education is woefully incomplete. Go here and scroll down to the entry for December 6, 1996.

Some NPCs should definitely be worth talking to. The noble who offers a reward for completing a significant quest. The wizard who can assist with magical knowledge. The reporter who has seen something weird going on at the old mansion on the hill.

Conversely, talking to some NPCs should be a complete waste of time. The mad witch who cackles and offers the heroes bundles of useless herbs. The drunk in the bar who babbles incoherently about voices in the woods. The starship technician at the spaceport who talks in a bored monotone about warp engine parts and nothing else.

Importantly, it shouldn't always be clear which category any given NPC falls into.

The noble just wants someone to do his dirty work for him and has no intention of honouring the offered reward. The witch is a skilled herbalist and the herbs she offers have healing powers. The wizard has long ago been driven insane and any advice he gives is not only wrong, but dangerous. The drunk has overheard a band of raiding orcs preparing to attack the village and can provide directions to exactly where they are camped. The reporter saw a cat and nothing more. The starship technician has been infested with a parasitic alien which is controlling her mind and needs to be stopped before she sabotages the engines of every ship in port.

Give characters a chance to make a speech or heroic monologue of some sort. If put to the test, it's amazing what players can come up with when addressing a group of NPCs in character. A good speech can be good for positive reaction modifiers.

A bad speech... well that can be fun too. Don't forget that many NPCs are farmers and probably grow tomatoes.

If you really want a PC to do something inadvisable (for the hilarity drama), the best thing is to advise them not to do it.

Revelations communicated by psychic or mystical powers are usually only revealed to one character at a time, so it's a sensible occasion to use note-passing to convey what knowledge is gained. Even if the PC immediately shares the information with the other characters, it becomes filtered through how they interpret the note from the GM, rather than having everyone hear the same words direct from the GM's mouth. This one step of removal can create a very different message for the characters who don't see the note, as it's easy for details to be left out, embellished, or interpreted in ways that would not otherwise happen. So notes can add more flavour to a game than just mere secrecy.

Walking into great danger is what it's all about when you're an adventuring hero, after all. You'd be nuts not to do it.

Good old reverse psychology.

Don't use it against your players, whatever you do. It'll only cause them grief.

All plans should have a most important part. So the PCs know which bit to mess up.

Scrounging is an important skill for adventurers and heroes. The ability to find equipment or the components to build equipment in the least likely places is extremely valuable. Anywhere becomes a resource for MacGyvering together precisely the gadget you need to save the day.

In certain fantasy settings, gnomes have a natural ability at this. Other characters could learn a thing or two from gnomes. (It's not often one gets to say that...)

All things considered, it really saves time if PCs simply go around expecting to be shot. Or at least shot at.

It doesn't even have to be bullets or blaster fire. It can include arrows, crossbow bolts, magic missiles, fireballs, lightning bolts, cursed runes, trapped chests firing poisoned spikes, or nasty glances by basilisks.

Be very, very careful saying "Over my dead body" in a game context. Someone might just take you literally.

Always be on the lookout for lucrative business opportunities.

Just because you're a superhero who goes around foiling supervillains doesn't mean you can't make a good sideline charging old ladies to get their cats down out of trees.

Dropping the main villain into play at an unexpected time can cause an interesting surprise for the heroes in a game. Choose a time when they are relaxed and expect to be completely safe.

For example, nobody is going to expect trouble when they're buying equipment from the local blacksmith in the village a good ten miles away from the Dungeon of the Lich Lord. Least of all the Lich Lord himself striding into town to seek vengeance against the retired warrior blacksmith who raided his lair two years ago.

The masked villain is a powerful trope. There's always something sinister about someone who won't show you their face. So play it up for all it's worth. If you've never had one of your bad guys wear a mask, consider it for next time.

One of the reasons to wear a mask is indeed to conceal a hideous visage. So if the heroes ever unmask the masked villain, this is one of the potential jaw-dropping revelations you can make.

Another cool thing is if the villain has no face at all. We'll just let that sit there while your brain processes it.

Any time a villain mentions your "still-beating heart", you know things aren't looking too good. Try it on the PCs in your game some time.

Embarrassing family members are something you can import from real life to a game setting. But rather than harmless uncle Bernie and his awful jokes, make it auntie Maleficent di Cruella and her realm-spanning reign of sorcerous terror. Over and above being merely embarrassing, this can be downright dangerous when the peaceful villagers learn of your family relationship.

And it almost goes without saying in the context of Star Wars, but for even more fun, have the PCs unaware of the family connection until a suitable inopportune moment when they discover the awful truth.

Heroic characters are well known for engaging in drunken revelries and other assorted entertainments during their off hours. Presumably the next morning they suffer the inevitable consequences. Penalties to coordination and intelligence and stamina, at a minimum.

A good time to hit them with a surprise ambush by a horde of orcs, we say!

Torture is a delicate subject, even abstracted in the context of a roleplaying game. You can roll a few dice against the victim's willpower or other appropriate stat, and perhaps inflict a few hit points of damage, and be done with it that way without getting into any gory details. But unless your gaming group is both mature and expressly willing to contemplate the darker side of human nature, it's better in a game context to simply avoid the question altogether and have even the most heinous villains not resort to torture. Honestly, nobody's going to complain about their PCs not being tortured!

Being in the clutches of the enemy is daunting and dangerous. But it can lead to some memorable adventures, such as the classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure module In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, in which the heroes begin the adventure imprisoned, with no equipment or weapons whatsoever, and have to use cunning and guile to gain their freedom.

Actually starting the heroes in captivity can be a bit heavy-handed, though. But such tricks aren't really necessary, as any group of PCs will probably do something stupid enough to get them captured eventually. So always have an "escape" scenario ready, just in case.

The retired adventurer (or police officer) makes a great significant NPC in a campaign. They can have a worldly wisdom that comes of years of experience, and a surprisingly well-sustained reserve of physical prowess, hidden by a middle-aged spread and greying hair. They also come with a good excuse for not accompanying the heroes or getting too involved in their adventures ("I'm retired! I'm not going galavanting all over the countryside!"), or a good excuse to accompany them and get involved if necessary ("One more outing - ah, how I've missed this!"). They can be pretty much whatever the situation requires, which is always a good thing to have up your GMing sleeve.

One of the coolest things about roleplaying games is that you can take any genre and twist it in all sorts of unconventional ways. Take a fantasy campaign and add a crashed spaceship. Take an Arthurian campaign and add time travel. Take a Victorian era campaign and add space travel.

In fact, take any two (or more) genres and mix them. Vikings in cyberspace! Post-apocalyptic survival with high elves and hobbits! And dinosaurs!

(Actually, anything goes better with dinosaurs.)

Planning is all well and good. Don't forget that one of the most important parts of making a plan is informing your colleagues in time for them to stop you if it happens to be an astoundingly bad plan.

At some point it can be interesting to really let the heroes of an adventure get in way over their heads. Have them totally outclassed in a combat, or captured, or in serious trouble with the law, or whatever. Of course there should be a way out, but you don't have ot make it obvious or easy.

One trick is to do this really early in an adventure. Make the very first encounter with the bad guys overwhelming, so the heroes feel outclassed and have to slink away to lick their wounds and ponder how they can possibly prevail. Don't worry, they'll think of a way, and it will be epic - all the more so because of how badly they were defeated the first time.

If the enemy always knows what the heroes are up to, there are several possible explanations. There could indeed be a traitor. Or perhaps there's a spy who the heroes don't notice. Or bugging and tracking devices. Or maybe the heroes simply aren't covering their tracks and keeping their plans as secret as they think they are.* Or maybe the villain has access to powerful spy satellites and ubiquitous eavesdropping and surveillance systems. Or potentially even magical or supernatural powers.

The cool thing is you don't even need to decide this in advance. Just have the villain always be one step ahead for no readily apparent reason, and watch the players come up with possible reasons. Then pick the coolest one to be true!

* Hint: Don't use Facebook to plan your assault on the evil megacorporation's black ops data centre.

The law-abiding officer who gets in the way of the heroes is a well-worn literary figure. Often in literature the officer is mistaken, and merely thinks the hero is a criminal and/or deserves to be hunted down because of some misunderstanding.

In a game situation, however, given the behaviour of most typical PCs there's pretty much always some justifiable rap you can pin on them.

The damsel in distress is of course a standard adventure hook. Which means it's ripe for subversion or deconstruction. Make it a large, muscular man in distress, and see how your heroes react. Or an orc or goblin in distress.

Or going the other way, make it a damsel who appears to be in distress, but who is really über-competent and in no need of any help from bypassing would-be heroes, thank you very much. Or perhaps the damsel is really the evil mastermind and is only appearing to be in distress to draw adventurers into her cunningly laid trap.

The d20 roleplaying system allows you to "take 10" on a skill roll for which you would normally roll a d20. This means you can settle for an "average" result of your skill check, without bothering to roll to see if you do any better. Taking 10 also means there is no risk of performing badly at the skill, which may carry a penalty if, for example you roll the die and roll a 1.

Another option is to "take 20", which means you spend a long time trying the skill repeatedly, until you eventually achieve a result equivalent to rolling a 20. This can be used, for example, to pick locks, where repeated failures carry no penalty apart from the time taken to try again. Eventually you'll get it right and, if the lock is at all within your capability of opening, you open it. If you take 20 on a task for which there are penalties for failure, you automatically trigger those penalties, since it assumed that you actually fail your skill check several times before succeeding. So you can't take 20 to sneak past a sleeping dragon, for example, unless you don't mind waking the dragon.

For better or worse, there is no mechanic for "taking 51" on a d20 skill roll.

In some cases it's better to be inside the prison cell than outside. Not many cases, but if anyone can find them it's a group of player characters.

To get through the trapped room safely, it is imperative that the heroes don't think about pink elephants. The sign outside helpfully informs them of exactly what they need to do to avoid the trap.

Baiting the trap, a classic villain ploy. Kidnap someone the hero/es care about and place them in peril. Or at least what the heroes perceive as peril.

But what about having the heroes employ the same tactic against the villain? Not all villains are completely heartless - they may well have some loved ones of their own. Or at least some personal possession which is important to them for some reason. Lure them out of hiding with it.

(We're far from the first to suggest this tactic. A certain fellowship of hobbits, men, a dwarf, and an elf, led by a wizard, tried this one.)

"Good news and bad news" is always a fun way to introduce bad news. And worse news.

Sometimes you just have to tell the bad guy exactly what he wants to know. Or at least lie about it while it looks like you're doing so. Or give them too much information, so they become confused and unable to act. No need to risk your skin by holding out when the alternatives can be so much more entertaining.

Sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind and let fly when the situation is hopeless. If there's no chance you'll get out alive, you have nothing to lose, after all.

Except perhaps looking stupid. Yeah, maybe better to restrain yourself! Dying in a game is reversible. Looking stupid is something your fellow players will remember forever.

Sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind and let fly when the situation is hopeless. If there's no chance you'll get out alive, you have nothing to lose, after all.

Except perhaps looking stupid. Yeah, maybe better to restrain yourself! Dying in a game is reversible. Looking stupid is something your fellow players will remember forever.

Awkward pause is...

...

...

... awkward.

Many situations can be helped by adopting a scary pose. If you frighten your enemy, then you already have an advantage.

And if they're too busy laughing at you to fight, you also have an advantage!

If you can't make a good getaway, at least make a good set of last words. Annoying your arch-enemy is a good bet, since they won't have a chance to beat you up over it. And if they do, that means you have somehow evaded certain death - either way you win!

Being betrayed is never easy. Well, the actual being betrayed part is easy - you don't have to do anything except be vulnerable to betrayal. And have friends who are scum of the Earth and would sell their own grandmother for a quick buck, but who you trust implicitly. And not notice that they're up to something until it's too late.

Okay, so it's not exactly like falling off a log. It's not easy at all. Which is where we started!

If you're going to sell out your allies, make sure to do it for a huge amount of money. Paid in advance.

There's being paranoid, and then there's being crazy prepared. The distinction is that if it's you, you're crazy prepared, but if it's anyone else, they're paranoid.

Don't let this stop you being crazy prepared for anything in your games, though.

Sometimes a golden opportunity for a humorous line presents itself during a game session. When it does, don't look a gift horse in vermouth.

When a character dies, it's not often that the players consider disposing of the body. Of course in some cases there's nothing to be done, as the ex-PC crumbles to dust under the withering touch of a lich, or is burnt to a crisp by a dragon. But when the body is just left there after expiring, the question might arise.

A standard approach would be to carry the body back to the nearest town for a decent burial, or cremation on a longboat, or whatever the local tradition happens to be.

A more pragmatic approach might involve selling the body to an organlegger or a necromancer.

When you're playing a game, everything is obviously a trap.

Because everything really is a trap, so it's obvious through sheer genre-savviness.

Before meeting the main villain in a final encounter, it's common to have an encounter with a deputy or subordinate, who provides a substantial challenge, but one which falls short of the deadly dangers the heroes will face when they finally meet the Big Bad Guy. Although this concept has been systematised in computer games, it has relevance to pen and paper roleplaying games as well. The challenges throughout an adventure should ramp up in difficulty so that the heroes can gauge their readiness to tackle the main villain. If they have serious difficulty beating the sidekick, then they need to retreat and rethink their plans and resources before they take on the big guy.

At least in theory. What they actually do when faced with such a setback is anyone's guess.

It's good to be proud of your in-game achievements.

It must be hard being a clone. Doubly so the cinematic sort of clone which also copies the personality and memories of the individual, not merely the physical body.

Here's an idea. Have a PC discover in-game that they are a clone. Not just a body clone, but a copy of the original's memories and personality. And the original is still alive somewhere.

Hilarity ensues!

The good old Involuntary Group Split. Normally PCs will do anything in their power to avoid splitting the party. At least the genre-savvy ones will. Which is a good thing because GMing a split party can be a nightmare. But sometimes you want to split them up fo some reason - to remove party members who could too easily solve a problem, or to heighten drama and tension. And when you need to, there are plenty of ways to do it. An intervening door is probably actually the least creative.

When a Punch Clock Hero is opposed by a Punch Clock Villain, the ensuing conversations can turn somewhat bizarre. It's not done often in a game setting, but can be part of a light-hearted campaign, for example based on parodying the superhero genre. Or imagine a fantasy campaign where the orcs and dwarves all clock out at the end of a hard day of warring against one another and go grab a beer together.

I dunno. Seems straightforward enough to us.

There's great mileage to be had in running a campaign that is a light-hearted spoof of some genre or other. Imagine campaigns based not on James Bond, but on Get Smart; not on The Great Escape, but on Hogan's Heroes; not on Blake's Seven but on Red Dwarf.

Just make sure the players know it's a light-hearted spoof!

Because it's not what the genre is underneath, it's what they do that defines it.

Trash talking is a venerable tradition in epic fights. And in a game you can take advantage of the fact that talking is a free action to really lay down some heavy insults and innuendos.

But to avoid situations like this, we suggest you carefully script and rehearse your trash talking speeches before the game session.

Sometimes the PCs in a scene don't really have much to do except observe the actions of NPCs around them. This is when it really pays off to have a good backstory for all of your NPCs.

Or to be a fantastic ad libber.

Never release someone who says, "Are these handcuffs/ropes/restraints really necessary?"

At least not unless you like dying of genre unsavviness.

The purpose of trash talk is to get the opponent mentally wrong-footed (to mix a metaphor). Just be careful not to lose your own footing because you're concentrating too hard on your oratory gymnastics and not your actual gymnastics.

If you don't like the idea that talking is a free action, you could enforce dexterity penalties for combatants who insist on talking too much while they fight. (Not sure this is a good idea - it's just an idea for something different.)

Apprenticeship is a good way for budding heroes to gain the skills and experience they need to become the stuff of legends. Every first level wizard had to learn their first spells from some teacher; every beginning fighter had to have someone show them how to swing a sword and fire a crossbow.

Rather than assume this is background, completed by the start of their first adventure, you could run an adventure with the players playing characters who are adolescents still in training. Give them stats and skills a little sparser and lower powered than a typical beginning character, and assign them mentors and tutors. Young thieves could be part of a guild, young superheroes could be juvenile sidekicks learning the ropes, young spacefarers could be the high-tech equivalent of military cadets or civilian scouts.

They get take along on some adventure by their seniors, as a sort of training run. It's all good fun, with the teachers taking most of the risks and showing off their high-level prowess in the field, while the apprentices mostly watch and contribute a little bit as they can. Until something goes horribly wrong and an accident or hostile encounter kills the adults, leaving the youngsters to fend for themselves in the wild...

And if they survive this, they might get enough experience to elevate them to the giddy heights of a starting first level character.

The broken pedestal is a powerful character moment. Someone you look up to and aspire to be like turns out to be an arrogant jerk when you finally meet them up close. (Or actively evil, if you like playing closer to the ends of the moral spectrum.) Yet another trick up your sleeve for a gaming context if one of the PCs has someone in the game world they look up to.

The Rescue is a noble adventure paradigm. And all you need to do to set it up is have one of the heroes be silly enough to get captured. It virtually writes itself!

The villain monologue over the vanquished bodies of their foes is a great piece of theatre. Of course most of the time there's nobody there to hear it except he villain. So try to work something out.

Parents like to care for their children, naturally. So what if an adventurer's parents come to visit for the weekend?

"You're doing what? Going to fight a dragon? Oh, no you're not - you could get killed! You're going to sit right here while I make some cookies and run you a nice warm bath!"

Be careful when saying you'll take something to your grave. It might be a short trip.

In a game you could potentially have some sort of Death by Dramatic Irony rule. If a character says something that typically foreshadows their own tragic demise in works of fiction, they get a penalty to defence and saving throws for the next few turns or something. (If nothing else, this is a good way to get players to avoid spouting clichés during combat.)

There is no situation so hopeless that you can't roleplay your way out of it.

Just keep asking enough questions and eventually your GM will crack.

When characters meets up again after splitting the party, it's technically necessary to fill each other in on what's happened to each group while away from the others. Of course, in reality the players of both subgroups will usually be aware of what the others got up to.

Unless you go to the bother of physically splitting the players up and enforcing quarantine of information. This is a hassle to do - but then the hassle of bringing each other up to speed on what they've been doing is such a hassle that your players might learn the lesson and not split up again.

Seriously, if any players in your game try something this lame-brained, you should let them hit and take out a critical system.

Taunting your foe can be a good way to distract them from attacking any of your allies, thus giving your friends a chance to formulate a counter-attack and make the most of their opportunities to take out the adversary without being threatened.

If you do this, make sure you have allies in the fight with you.

Good news, everyone! We found The Lost Orb of Phanastacoria. It was behind the sofa all along, wrapped up in a strange list. There's something weird about it, but we're just happy to have it back again.

For the more demonstrative roleplayers in your group, ensure you have a ready supply of something relatively light and harmless at hand. Dice can really hurt.

If a character really needs or wants to succeed in some action, you can let them have a bonus in exchange for some trade-off penalty in something else that potentially has a side effect on the action being attempted. For example, a character might be able to jump a greater distance than normal, in exchange for some Fatigue points or a chance of pulling a muscle. Maybe they can pick a lock faster than normal, in order to evade a palace guard without being seen, but if the roll fails they drop their lockpicks noisily.

Some trade-offs like this are built into some rule systems, especially for combat manoeuvres such as All-Out Attack or All-Out Defence, but you can go a long way adapting a system to increase flexibility by inventing new trade-offs that characters might want to make. There's no need to to spell them all out beforehand either - a good GM can concoct such things on the fly when a player expresses a desire to concentrate extra hard or put extra effort into doing something critical.

Many times in the films, R2-D2 is shown lagging well behind the others as they run somewhere, clearly incapable of keeping up, and then when the scene cuts to wherever it is they're going, R2 is right behind them again.

This one is a particularly interesting case.

"Last drinks" is the call by a barkeep to indicate that it's almost closing time, and patrons should order their last drink for the evening. It can be adopted into many styles of game as a mechanism for converting a pleasant evening in a tavern into a bar room brawl if, against all reason, one has not yet broken out. If the call of "last drinks" itself does not set off the hair-trigger for the inevitable brawl, simply have the barkeep state that there are only enough drinks left for half the people in the bar.

If there's one thing that the prequels got right and which the original trilogy completely failed at, it was the presence of advertising. Advertising of goods and services is ubiquitous in any civilisation, and we see it in neon signs on Coruscant, but nowhere in any of the original trilogy.

Turning this back to your own games, when a group of heroes enters a new city or town, they should see advertising, whether it be high-tech billboards promoting virtual vacations by implanting memories, or parchments nailed to posts advertising a need for an alchemist's apprentice - must be able to follow instructions carefully and tolerate bad smells and occasional explosions.

Mixing the cliffhanger with the literal cliffhanger just never gets old.

Well, okay, it's been done for hundreds of years, so it's literal old, even if it's not old.

It's not enough to kill the villain. You need to have the villain confess to their crimes first. At least for some righteous avenger character types.

Imagine playing a character of this sort who insists on doing this not just for the Big Bad, but also for all their henchmen, lackeys, guards, servants, and also the hordes of orcs and goblins who inhabit the dungeons around the main lair.

"No, don't kill him! Let me talk to him! You! Goblin! Were you part of that raid on the village last week?!"

A good pithy motto or slogan can be a great way to add some atmosphere to various aspects of a game. In democratic societies, of course there will be election slogans, but you can also use mottos to represent monarchs, chivalrous orders, fantasy religions and deities, or even social clubs and adventuring groups. An adventuring party can put their memorable motto onto the flyers they post around town when looking for work.

When there's something strange in your neighbourhood... Who you gonna call?

As one travels across different parts of the known world (or universe, as the case may be), one encounters different accents and ways of speaking, even when the language is ostensibly the same. This is usually ignored for simplicity within a game context, but if you have a linguistic bent you can make great use of it to add flavour to your world. It can serve both to slightly confuse and also to provide clues for the observant adventurer.

The thieves' cant in the city of Rivendeep uses an unusual lisping sound, which instantly marks any thief as originating from that city, wherever they may travel across the continent. And if you happen to run into another who uses the same sounds elsewhere, an instant bond of camaraderie and mutual assistance is formed.

Computer hacking is almost always depicted unrealistically in fiction. Because the reality is dull and undramatic.

But here's a thing: If you're trying to access a computer system which is completely unfamiliar to you - it uses an operating system you've never seen before, a file system totally unlike any you've ever used, permissions and commands utterly foreign to you - you're basically going to have zero chance of getting anywhere at all with it. (Corollary: If you want to make a system secure, write your own operating system.)

This is where the other side of hacking comes in: social engineering. For any decent system it's much easier to obtain information by dealing with the people who work with that information, or by physical intrusion into a facility, than to try to break into the system itself via a computer network. Which is actually cool, because it makes for more interesting roleplaying adventure. So there's a good reason to be "more realistic" about computer hacking and basically disallow anything but the most simplistic hacking tricks.

Computer hacking is almost always depicted unrealistically in fiction. Because the reality is dull and undramatic.

But here's a thing: If you're trying to access a computer system which is completely unfamiliar to you - it uses an operating system you've never seen before, a file system totally unlike any you've ever used, permissions and commands utterly foreign to you - you're basically going to have zero chance of getting anywhere at all with it. (Corollary: If you want to make a system secure, write your own operating system.)

This is where the other side of hacking comes in: social engineering. For any decent system it's much easier to obtain information by dealing with the people who work with that information, or by physical intrusion into a facility, than to try to break into the system itself via a computer network. Which is actually cool, because it makes for more interesting roleplaying adventure. So there's a good reason to be "more realistic" about computer hacking and basically disallow anything but the most simplistic hacking tricks.

Consistency of environment is a key part of immersion in a scenario.

If the heroes have cleverly circumvented a spiked pit trap on their way into the dungeon by taking their time and being very careful, it's almost imperative on you to make sure that when they return through the same corridor they are running for their lives.

People get attached to their vehicles. Despite being essentially inanimate mechanical objects, vehicles often hold a place within the heart of those who travel in them, and can become almost like characters in their own right. Think of all the cool cars and ships and other nifty vehicles in heroic fiction, from James Bond's Aston Martin to the General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard, to the starship Enterprise.

You can use this for dramatic effect. When PCs get attached to a vehicle, you can grab them emotionally by having something threaten or even destroy the vehicle, without actually putting them in danger themselves (although the two can be linked if the danger hits while the heroes are in the vehicle). Think of the emotional impact when Kirk was forced to destroy the Enterprise in The Search for Spock. Threaten a beloved vehicle, and you can achieve much the same impact in a game.

If you have an ace up your sleeve in a combat, you don't pull it out immediately. You wait until you can get the most bang for the buck with it. Something that will distract your foe is best used when it will allow you to seize a decisive advantage.

Or when it might possibly be your only way to avoid being killed.

Player characters might be able to win a fight with the Big Boss villain, but they should never be able to win an argument with them. Enforce this rule for all it's worth.

Player characters might be able to win a fight with the Big Boss villain, but they should never be able to win an argument with them. Enforce this rule for all it's worth.

Picture the year 1980. There were no mobile phones, there were no iPods, there were no CDs, there was no Internet. There were barely even personal computers.

Three years earlier, a movie had changed the world. Now, in 1980, the sequel was released, to levels of anticipation never seen before for a film. The Empire Strikes Back.

Picture the crowds of people emerging from the cinemas in 1980. They had just watched one of the most shocking revelations that any audience has ever witnessed. Here's what they were saying about it:

I can't believe it. There's no way Darth Vader could be Luke's father!

No, it can't be true. Vader is lying.

I don't know, what if it is true??

No way! He's got to be lying!

A lot of people simply didn't believe it. Others argued that it was probably true. The thing is: nobody knew. People left that movie shocked, horrified, and not knowing what to believe. And they would not find out the truth for three whole years.

This is one of the most iconic scenes in cinema history, and we wanted to do it justice. We wanted not only to provide a deft joke that would leave you chuckling slightly until the next strip. We wanted not only to twist the story of Star Wars that we all know and love into an affectionate parody that a bunch of unknowing tabletop gamers could have produced by accident. We wanted to to let you - many of you who may not have been around at the time - to let you feel what it was like in 1980, watching The Empire Strikes Back as a new release.

That thing you've been feeling since the previous strip? That's what it felt like.

(Oh, and don't worry. We're not going to make you wait three whole years.)

Never give a magic item to an NPC unless you are okay with it falling into the hands of the PCs. Because it will.

Never give a magic item to an NPC unless you are okay with it falling into the hands of the PCs. Because it will.

Three almost dead people in one strip. That's a record, even for us!

The GM of a roleplaying game has to adopt many roles during the play of the game. Of course, there is the in-character playing of NPCs, in which the GM acts the way in which any specific character would act. This may include telling lies, if that accords with the NPC's personality and motives.

But the GM plays another important role - that of impartial narrator. This happens when the GM is speaking in narrative terms, such as describing the scenery of a wilderness, or what the PCs can see in a dungeon chamber, or what they can hear when listening at a door. In this role, it is usually expected that the GM will be truthful.

But the truth you tell can be from a certain point of view - that which is evident to the PCs at the time. So being a truthful narrator doesn't mean you have to tell the whole truth, until such time as the players make enough progress to realise they didn't have the full story at the time.

Some roleplayers like adhering to good/evil archetypes, while others like to explore more nuanced morals. Some begin their gaming careers at the nuanced end, but many develop from the former in their initial forays into gaming, towards the latter as they become more experienced.

It's all good, as long as people are having fun!

Just about the only method of attaining some form of immortality open to real life is to pass your legacy down to your children, and then hope that they continue to live up to it once you die.

Not so in a roleplaying game! In the fantasy genre, you can transcend mortality by becoming undead, or through magic (or both), or perhaps even by ascending to godhood. And within science fiction there are also numerous possibilities: brain uploading, cyborgification, anti-agathic drugs or technology, and so on.

Still, having kids who want to maintain your legacy isn't a bad idea, as accidents can happen.

What are all the lights in this giant shaft for?

And if you thought the lights in the giant shaft were odd - why are there lights in these tubes? And why so many?

Factions are good. Never throw away a good faction when you can reuse it later on to add spice to a political situation.

The rise of review sites like TripAdvisor and Eatability and so on make it more difficult for people to be truly surprised by something when they travel. Imagine you've set up this spooky encounter in an out-of-the-way motel somewhere in the backwoods of the Pacific North-Western United States. Your PCs are driving along the road as evening approaches and they spy a dilapidated sign: Nates Motel.

"Just a sec, I'll check TripAdvisor. Hmmm. 'Avoid like the plague. Stayed one night and husband got mysteriously murdered.' 'Something weird about this place. Reported awful decaying smell to town sheriff, but strangely he never showed up.' Okay, let's keep driving."

Bang! There goes your carefully planned adventure.

The mysterious phone call can be a trigger for adventure. Either an unexpected call from a friend or relative, calling for help of some kind, or a call from a complete stranger which opens the doors of mystery and investigation. It can also provide additional clues or tip-offs mid-adventure, if needed. Don't ignore the power of being able to inject information - or misinformation - from almost anyone at any time in a modern day adventure.

PCs will naturally associate with various people in their adventures. But they won't always know everything about them. Perhaps they'll become friends with a gregarious and helpful innkeeper who looks after them when they return after tough stints of monster fighting in the wilderness.

Imagine then if they find clues that lead to the conclusion that twenty years ago the innkeeper was the infamous necromancer who ravaged the countryside for miles all around, apparently now retired.

Or is he...??

CloneBook is a great social network for clones. You're automatically friends with everyone else.

Catching a falling person is one of those things you see done all the time in fiction, but which is actually really, really hard in reality. People get killed when other people fall on them. And if someone is falling from more than 3 or 4 metres, even if you catch them one of you is probably going to end up injured at the very least.

Of course you can ignore all of this for a game! Dramatic licence and all that.

If there's something you really need to tell someone, don't waste time telling them there's something you really need to tell them. Just tell them! Those few seconds could lead to a catastrophic explosion, or a dam bursting, or huge crash.

Or something much, much worse. Yuk!

A supernatural investigation campaign could be a cool thing to run, with a group of young itinerants in a van seeking out spooky mysteries to poke their noses into. But rather than make everything have a mundane explanation, or even have everything be genuinely supernatural, mix it up a bit for variety. Keep 'em guessing, basically - a fundamental ingredient for any campaign.

We are living in an age where there is near universal instant communication available between almost anyone, anywhere (at least in the developed world). In the future, it's only going to get easier to communicate, and for people (or entities) to control systems remotely. Any science fiction game set in a future extrapolated from our current technology might want to deal with this. Why actually travel to Hong Kong to infiltrate a corporate headquarters if you can do it from the comfort of your own home with remote-controlled robots or drones?

This bites both ways, of course. You can raid the villain's jungle lair, fight your way through masses of traps and guards, only to discover he's running the operation from a secure bunker in Iceland.

We're guessing the reason for Chewbacca's mistake in the original movie is that droid heads are not only so modular that they can be replaced onto any droid body, but were also designed by the same people who designed USB plugs, so that you never quite know if you're inserting them the right way around or not until you try it.

Family ties can be very strong, almost mystically so. And literally mystically so in a game with fantasy elements. Characters might get a sudden feeling of dread or gloom when a close family member is in danger, no matter where they might be at the time.

Imagine exploring the cellars beneath a dockside warehouse for clues to something, when one of the PCs suddenly gets a chill down their spine and the eerie feeling that their mother is in terrible danger back in their home village. What does the character do?

If you're going to have a big heroic moment, really make sure that you build up the bragging rights.

If that involves artificially engineering the heroic moment just so you can build up the bragging rights, so be it.

Some things should really only be used when there is maximum return in terms effectiveness. This is a sensible approach to make the most of your resources. No point wasting a fireball on a few goblins, when it could just as easily kill a vampire.

It depends a bit on what your view of "effectiveness" is, though. Why waste your fireball killing a vampire when you could use it to make an insanely cool interjection at a meeting of the town elders to decide whether or not to pay your adventuring group for ridding the town of goblins?

You can never have too much power.

You just know there's always that one player who will try to wire the output from the nuclear reactor, antimatter engine, or demon-summoning ritual directly into a weapon of some sort. If they can get it to work without blowing themselves and their allies up, good on 'em!

If you need a source for villainous plans, look no further than some of the ridiculous ideas originally had by players. Bonus points for recycling a stupid PC plan as a mastermind villain's diabolic scheme without the players noticing.

"We've had worse" is not a good endorsement for PC plans. Because it's always possible to say that truthfully. Always.

Villains should always have subordinates who can remind them of all the silly little things that they really should think of doing. Those are the subordinates worth having for a villain.

Imagine if only Oddjob had been able to talk and say to Goldfinger, "Okay, now that you've captured James Bond, instead of slicing him in half with a laser or handcuffing him to an atomic bomb, just shoot him. Right now!"

Villains should always have subordinates who can remind them of all the silly little things that they really should think of doing. Those are the subordinates worth having for a villain.

Imagine if only Oddjob had been able to talk and say to Goldfinger, "Okay, now that you've captured James Bond, instead of slicing him in half with a laser or handcuffing him to an atomic bomb, just shoot him. Right now!"

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

With some careful planning and a decent bit of worldbuilding, you can set up a situation such that a group of adventurers might think this is a sensible course to pursue. The operative word being think, of course.

If you have the sort of heroes who are likely to steal... sorry, "borrow"... vehicles in order to make quick getaways, then it's only a matter of time until one of those vehicles has some interesting flaw or malfunction which isn't evident until it becomes truly interesting.

After all, the chase scene is so much more exciting when the heroes are having to deal with no brakes, repair an oxygen leak, or bail water at the same time.

Imagine some linguistics nerd creating a constructed language, and then writing a whole bunch of fictional history around it to explain various quirks of the language.

Yeah, what an incredibly pointless exercise.

If you want to be clever, you need to be careful not to be so clever that nobody ever manages to figure out how clever you are. To achieve this, you may need to drop more and more hints as time goes by, if nobody is picking up on things.

This is a crucial lesson for GMs running convoluted villain plans. It's no point having the villain be so clever that the heroes never figure out just how brilliant your adventure plot is! (Also, it helps if the heroes have a chance of defeating the plan, rather than just sitting back and watching the villain be brilliant...)

A good GM will play to the strengths of each of the players. Some players like action and fighting, so to please them you have to have some combat encounters or chase scenes. Some players prefer character roleplaying, so give them some interesting NPCs and social situations to interact with in conversations. Some players like investigating and following clues, so give them intriguing snippets of information which they can piece together to deduce what's happening.

And some players enjoy treating the game as a system of rules within which they can try to optimise their outcomes - these are the players for whom you create intricate deathtraps that need to be outfoxed, or puzzles that rely on interaction with game mechanics. (The treasure is on a rock ledge 60 feet away, across a pool of lava. You have 50 feet of rope, a potion of levitation, and a crossbow.) If MacGyver was a gamer, this is the sort he'd be.

The extra dimension of space makes a huge difference to the more usual two-dimensional mapping and travelling that people generally engage in. Even a multi-level dungeon with two-dimensional levels connected by stairs and ramps is nothing compared to the full freedom of three-dimensional navigation.

Mapping three dimensions for a game is non-trivial. You can record star system coordinates as Cartesian triplets and calculate distances using Pythagoras's theorem, which will do the job, but visualising the "map" is tricky without complex graphing tools.

Various people have used tesseracts as dungeons, notably the original Baba Yaga's Hut adventure published in Dragon magazine #83, but these are generally just two-dimensional maps with macro-geometry folded in four dimensions. But imagine setting a game in a four-dimensional (or higher!) space, where the heroes can actually travel not only east, west, north, south, up, down, but also some other set of mutually perpendicular directions.

Second-hand shops are great places for adventurers to pick up gear. It's tried and true, and significantly cheaper.

Need we say that it could also be shoddy, or cursed? No, we didn't think so.

You definitely don't want to leave anyone around who will tell stories that conflict with your version of events. And on the other hand, you can always find more people who will verify your version of events. For a reasonable price.

It's possible for players to discover or develop previously unsuspected talents while playing roleplaying games.

Well, hey, you don't spend all those years playing Dungeons & Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.

Ending an adventure with everyone still alive can be, depending on the circumstances:

• A straightforward foundation for greater success.
• A good start.
• About as good as could be expected.
• Somewhat unlikely.
• Incredibly fortunate.
• Highly suspicious...

It's always darkest before the dawn.

It's also incredibly dark when you're stuck in an inescapable trap with no hope of rescue, and everyone is about to die horribly. Be careful not to mix these up.

This marks the end of Episode V. There will a three-strip intermission before we begin Episode VI.

In this first intermission strip we have a sneak peek at the GM's original adventure plan notes for the Episode V adventure. Once again, things didn't quite go as planned.

One does not simply... get the title.

The title wants not to be got.

What is Lembas snow, you ask? It's snow infused with midi-chlorians. It makes it slightly colder.

We wrote many, many versions of this scene. Here's one we didn't use in the actual story.

This is the last intermission strip before Episode VI, which begins with the next strip.

Circumstances change over time, but with technology, you can now continue your games with friends in remote locations. It can actually work surprisingly well. The restrictions can work to reduce time wasted on talking about other stuff and concentrate participants on the game.

Sometimes.

It's good for the GM to set the scene at the start of a new adventure. And rather than do it in descriptive mode ("A pilot and co-pilot fly a shuttle towards the Peace Moon."), you can do it in demonstrative mode, following the old axiom of writing: Show, don't tell.

It's also a lot more fun.

Behind the giant supervillain lair, there have to be people looking after the little details like paying for the power bills, getting the plumber in, and making sure there are enough of those fancy biscuits with the sugar sprinkles to have with afternoon tea.

You really don't want to see the wrath of a supervillain who has nothing to dunk in their tea.

There are subtle tricks of memory that can be played, not only with electronic beings, but also organic brains. If a living brain can be hacked to implant or suppress memories, then almost anything becomes possible. And when it's possible, you can use it in a game to interesting effect. Just look at Total Recall for some possibilities.

Sometimes planning can take so long that some players get frustrated and just get up and go in and raid the base, guns a-blazing.

When this happens when they are planning what equipment to buy from the friendly local blacksmith or ship-chandler, you know things are taking way too long.

Sometimes giving players a bit of free rein to interpret things their own way can lead to interesting new developments in the game action. But usually it just ends in a mire of movie quotes and in-jokes.

Not that this is a bad thing, mind.

Sometimes you just gotta roll with player expectation. Genre savviness is at its best when you can exploit it for dramatic effect. Or just to make the players feel even more paranoid.

One of the easiest ways to make an alien is to take an animal and make it humanoid, thus ending up with a sort of human-animal mixture. Fox-people, bear-people, walrus-people, and of course pig-people. To make slightly more exotic aliens, go beyond mammals: bird-people, snake-people, spider-people. This is about as far as most authors or GMs go, but you can push this further to get more alien aliens if you really try: termite-people, starfish-people, jellyfish-people, sponge-people.

Next time you're thinking of designing an alien for a game, think about pushing it a bit further out on the spectrum.

Players are used to exploring dungeons and basically just making their way through more or less abandoned rooms, dealing with monsters, and picking up treasures. What if they go into a dungeon crawl adventure expecting to loot an old abandoned complex of monster-riddled corridors, only to have a butler or majordomo greet them at the front entrance and offer to escort them to the master of the dungeon?

Flattery will get you, if not everywhere, at least into a lot of places where you can have cool and dangerous adventures when things inevitably go wrong.

Given modern communications technology, you can make use of the "phone a friend" option at almost any time. Sometimes this is good for consulting or planning, while at other times it's just perfect for smug bragging.

Rolling lots of dice is sheer sensory fun.

Rolling LOTS of dice can be somewhat of a chore.

Ventriloquism is one of those skills that virtually nobody knows in real life, but which every second rogue and rascal knows in a roleplaying game.

If the real world had a similar skill distribution to your average game world, then half the people you meet on the street would be able to climb a sheer wall to get to the roof of a three storey building, sneak past a sleeping guard dog without waking it, and crack a safe within 30 seconds.

(And the other half would be able to throw explosive balls of fire from their bare hands.)

Always have a back up plan. It doesn't matter if it's terrible, because honestly all PC plans are terrible anyway. The thing is to just have way more than one plan - that way maybe one of them will have a chance of working.

It helps if you make your random encounters not look like random encounters. Every encounter with a potential enemy or ally should appear to be an important part of the adventure...

Except when you want to push the players to hurry up because they're dawdling. In that case it's important to make sure they know they are random encounters and they can expect to gain absolutely nothing relevant to the adventure - rather the only thing that can happen is that they lose health/resources. So in such cases make sure the players are aware that you're rolling up an encounter on a table.

(Our GM here is not applying this advice perfectly.)

Obfuscatory response is one tactic to dealing with questions from anyone you really don't want to help.

Make sure to use this when roleplaying NPC bureaucrats that the PCs have to interact with.

There's often a trend in speculative fiction to invent names for things which pretty much describe their function - case in point: restraining bolts. They are bolts that restrain droids. This is an easy way of naming things, but it does mean that characters can often figure out what something does just by learning the name.

In the real world this is not always the case. Take for example... (looking around)... Google Chromecast. If you didn't already know what this gadget does, you'd have no way whatsoever of figuring it out just from the name (without looking it up online, I mean).

So in your games, consider naming gadgets with less descriptive words. Instead of calling something a "proximity triggered anthrax deployment intruder deterrent unit", call it a "Fluffy Bunny brand WelcomeFlower(TM)" or something.

We're just imagining an all-musical stage version of the Star Wars saga.

Actually, it looks like we don't have to fully imagine it...

But imagine an official version, with full-on John Williams music. This thought is either something that horrifies you, or makes you want to see it happen.

This is the sort of mistake you really don't want to make when maintaining an elaborate long-running ploy to save your life. Like running a roleplaying game with hard-to-please players. Take notes.

Maintain suspense by not explicitly describing what is happening to NPCs who are dying horribly off-stage. Although drop plenty of horrible hints.

When thinking of ways to disguise your character in a game, consider this option! If you're a short thin female, disguise yourself as a tall fat man disguised as a short thin female! Nobody will suspect a thing.

Caveat emptor. This should apply to any purchases PCs may wish to make during the course of a game. There are many unscrupulous sellers around, of course, particularly in your average adventuring world. If your sword happens to be badly made, or that wand of fireballs is only good for two shots before blowing up in your own face, there are interesting ways to find out well after the seller has vanished with your gold coins...

In the right genre setting you can survive with surprisingly little of your body intact. Science fiction of the cyborg variety can effectively stick your head onto a robot body so you can get around, and even potentially be stronger and better equipped than a normal person. The weird science category can stick your disembodied brain into a jar and have you control an empire. And then there's magic, of course, which can sustain nothing more than your empty skull as a viable ongoing character.

Naturally, this doesn't just have to apply to PCs. Consider making villains and adversaries slightly less than whole physically. Of course they'll get to compensate in various ways...

The old Trojan Horse technique of infiltrating an enemy encampment is a classic.

Of course there's the fact that this trick worked once, according to a legend written nearly 3000 years ago, and people have been savvy to it ever since. Still, never let that get in the way of a good roleplaying game plan!

Escape plans should be subtle enough that your captors don't notice them. But they shouldn't be so subtle that your compatriots don't notice them.

Satisfying both these conditions simultaneously may be impossible, of course.

You can have a lot of interesting conversations with a puppet. Even moreso if you use them as props in a roleplaying game when other players are present.

Probability plays an important part in any game that involves dice. But it helps if you can detach your mind from the real world probability calculations and think more in terms your character would actually be considering at the time.

Just don't detach it completely.

Act before you think! The motto of at least one fabulous roleplaying game.*

* Okay, it's Toon, but still, advice that many players seem to take to heart, no matter what system they're playing.

Normally roleplayers wouldn't let anyone else make a dice roll for them, doubly so a critical roll such as this. But extreme circumstances sometimes dictate equally extreme measures.

Playing groups all have their house rules for what to do when a die lands in an awkward position, cocked on the edge of a book, or fallen on the floor, or what have you. But there is always the fear that one day a die might land in a configuration or position not covered by the existing rules.

The solution of course is to make your dice rules as exhaustive as possible, to cover any conceivable situation! Because being overly prescriptive and pedantic about rules is what gaming is all about!

It's common practice in games for a party to sleep at night with a sentry posted to rouse everyone in case of a sudden attack, so everyone can fight instead of being slaughtered in their sleep.

Considering the way most people wake up, the sentry needs to have time to make a pot of coffee and give everyone else a good half hour or more to wake up properly before the opponents attack.

Amnesia is a nicely cinematic condition which you can make use of in games, as the result of a blow to the head, magical effects, or insanity induced by beholding things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

Of course, the player* will remember stuff, so it's important to have them play their character with an appropriately frayed memory.

* At least, some players anyway. Character amnesia can actually work better with players who tend to forget their character stories.

Slime and mucus both serve important and distinct roles in a game setting, as do sludge, ooze, gunk, goo, and phlegm. Use these nouns liberally in your dungeon descriptions. Also use them when describing less savoury parts of town, in both fantasy and modern settings, and certainly in science fiction settings, particularly when aliens with enormous mouthparts and fangs are present.

Disguises are occasionally useful. And what better disguise than the classic false moustache! In fact, an effective strategy is to always wear a false moustache, so that when you need to disguise yourself, you can simply take it off, and nobody will believe it's you!

We fully expect every adventuring party out there now to insist on all wearing false moustaches all the time.

It's a bit like when a bunch of ninjas attack the hero, and the ninjas all go in one at a time and get flattened, rather than all attacking at once and overwhelming the hero by sheer force of numbers.

Ninjas always do this when faced against heroes. It's part of their secret ninja training.

(There is no commentary or transcript because my computer has suffered hard drive failure. these will be added as soon as possible.)

(There is no commentary or transcript because my computer has suffered hard drive failure. these will be added as soon as possible.)

(There is no commentary or transcript because my computer has suffered hard drive failure. these will be added as soon as possible.)

Any master villain worth his salt is going to have a trap door in the floor right in front of his desk/throne/Seat of Command. Bonus points for having piranhas or crocodiles underneath it.

Frankly, anyone who stands right in front of the seat of power of a master villain and makes any sort of demands (or in fact does anything at all other than grovel in supplication) pretty much has this coming to them.

Trope-aware gamers may of course spot the danger inherent in approaching the villain's desk/throne. So consider giving your villain the superpower of manifesting a trap door in the floor right in front of him wherever he happens to be standing. On a street, on a football field, on a cruise ship - doesn't matter! Get too close and boom, you're falling into a pit.

Student-style pranks in a world of high fantasy or incredible science fiction technology can be a lot more interesting than in the real world. Just think of some of the "amusing" things that happened to Harry and Ron at Hogwarts.

So when a new character joins an established group, think about ways to have fun with them. Imagine a team of superheroes, who when a new up-and-coming superpowered human wants to join their Power Justice Squad, subjects the newcomer to a series of super-pranks. Awesome.

There are improvised weapons everywhere. Make sure you have a handy random table to roll up something that a desperate character might find in the area to pick up and use as a weapon. If you need some ideas, use this one:

Roll 1d20:

1. Stick
2. Rock
3. Horseshoe
4. Chair
5. Beer mug
6. Candlestick
7. Kitchen knife
8. Bucket
9. Rake
10. Scythe
11. Pitchfork
12. Anvil
13. Book
14. Shovel
15. Skull
16. Electronic tablet device
17. Bunsen burner (lit)
18. Vegetable peeler
19. One of those miniature Eiffel Towers that everyone buys in Paris
20. Musical instrument, roll 1d8:
    1. Flute
    2. Lute
    3. Guitar
    4. Viola
    5. Trombone
    6. Piano (upright)
    7. Piano (grand)
    8. Theremin

The "jam something in its mouth" combat technique works well against a variety of opponents, from giant space monsters to honey badgers to crocodiles.

And if you don't have a handy bone to jam in there, just remember that your fist is full of bones.

Ah, the old "way that looks like an escape route, but in reality is a dead end". If you've never used this in a game...

What are you doing??

We thought Luke threw a rock, right up to the point where I started getting screengrabs to make this strip. Turns out what he throws at the door control is a skull! Who knew?

See, it's always cool to have skulls around as random dungeon dressing.

The old story about how the Roman Emperors used to judge the efforts of defeated gladiators by indicating either thumbs up (they fought well and should be spared) or thumbs down (they sucked and should be despatched by the victor) leads to some cool gaming opportunities to play on the trope. (It has some basis in truth, but the specific details have been lost to history.)

Anyway, you can certainly play on it in a game setting. After all, opportunities to use it, when the heroes are fighting a bunch of mooks in the presence of an observing boss, should arise fairly regularly in any decent game.

Even the most hardened killer or most horrible monster can have someone who cares about them, and who will mourn their passing.

We'll just leave that there to sink in, for when you need to come up with a challenging plot after the heroes have successfully slain the Big Bad of their current adventure.

Cases of mistaken identity are always fun. Especially when the person you're being mistaken for is in even more trouble than you yourself would be at that point.

Believe it or not, some characters deliberately disguise themselves as other people in some cases.

Yeah, you know what to do.

Always have an alibi. It helps if it's the truth, but it helps a lot more if the truth is actually believable.

Indeed. Always have someone waiting in the wings to take over if a planned menace falls by the wayside. It's natural to have an apprentice in training for the eventuality of taking over, so have them ready if the eventuality is precipitated by the heroes.

And if the players question this, all the better, because then you can quote the line: "Always two there are..."

Try to keep a straight face.

If you're in trouble with the law, you can (in some cases) get out of it by establishing mental incompetence.

Actually establishing mental incompetence can be the tricky bit, though given the exploits of most PCs it shouldn't be all that hard.

The first time doing anything should be a momentous occasion. This should apply to new adventurers starting out on their life's journey. The first time they encounter goblins and have an actual life or death fight is a huge step beyond whatever they have been doing previously to get to this point.

Experienced roleplayers may consider such a fight trivial, but try to get into the heads of your puny first level characters and think of the encounter as something truly terrifying and life-changing. Which by all rights it should be. Sometimes it pays to just take a step back and think about what your adventure would be like if you were really doing it.

You know, if villains actually did test their death traps before putting the heroes into them, they might end up with fewer heroes escaping from them. Remember this if you ever become a cinematic villain.

Generally speaking, as an adventure designer you can put whatever traps and defences you like in the place the heroes are supposed to infiltrate. In fact, the more the better. You can cover all the possibilities you can think of - there's no need to leave any sort of vulnerability. Because the PCs will inevitably come up with some wacky plan that avoids all of the pre-planned countermeasures.

The problem only arises if you don't put enough countermeasures into the adventure design. Because if you have just one single, lone, solitary trap, on the expectation that the heroes will easily avoid it by any of a number of obvious ploys - then you can absolutely guarantee that they'll blunder straight into it.

Except when it works the exact opposite way.

Doing impressions of famous people is a good way to come up with different voices for speaking in character as various NPCs. You can imagine in your head that the blacksmith is Sean Connery, the priestess is Cate Blanchett, the tavern keeper is Christopher Lee, the sassy barmaid is Whoopi Goldberg, and the bombastic mayor of the town is William Shatner. This gives you a hook to getting the voices consistent each time you need to play one of these personas.

And it doesn't matter if you suck at impressions - in fact all the better, because then your players won't have any idea where these ridiculous voices are coming from.

Changing career paths has been a feature of roleplaying games ever since the days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, with its mechanic for multi-classing. Essentially, you could begin your adventuring career as, say, a fighter, and then after gaining a few levels you could - if you had the requisite ability scores - switch to being a magic-user, or a thief, or whatever. The benefit is that you have the skills you learnt before switching, plus you pick up a bunch of new skills related to your newfound profession. The drawback is that you have to start again from scratch, learning the new skills at a low level.

Anyway, you can extend this sort of thing to any game you are playing. If someone is sick of being a pilot or a journalist or whatever, they don't need to retire and bring in a new character. You can simply have them switch career paths and start learning something new. It's realistic, and you get to muck about with someone at clueless newbie level in your current adventuring group!

Gaming is thirsty work, so there should always be drinks handy. Whether you go for soft drinks or something with a bit of a kick to it depends on just how crazy you want the heroes' plans to get over the course of the session.

This is one of the cool things about roleplaying. You get to make plans that no sane person would even contemplate, and have the expectation that they just might work. That alone is worth the entry into the world of tabletop gaming.

Creating a distraction or diversion is something we very rarely get to do in real life (unless you actually are a secret agent or criminal of some sort). So when the opportunity arises in a game, make it good! Act like William Shatner for all it's worth!

Plans of course need to be communicated to other members of your adventuring group, lest they go hilariously wrong. This is why all good villains should make sure to separate the group so they can't easily communicate with one another. After all, everyone enjoys a plan going hilariously wrong - especially a villain!

Having PCs deal with slave traders is a tried and true trope going back all the way to TSR's classic Dungeons & Dragons module A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity, first published in 1980. (Reissued as part of Scourge of the Slavelords in 1986.)

It makes a bit of a difference when people are creating slaves... and when it evolves organically so that the people involved are blind to the moral questions involved. Now there are some ideas for a setting.

If you want to describe an alien or fantastic monster to a group of players, avoid saying anything like "it's like a <real world animal>". Because that just leads to an endless stream of questions and assumptions which might not line up with what the creature is really like.

Although on the other hand, if you say "it's like a hamster" and it actually has razor sharp venomous claws and fangs, then that might be good for a few laughs.

You don't hear about sprays of blood in roleplaying games as often as they would actually happen if people in real life did the same sorts of activities as the adventuring characters.

Yeah, maybe that's a good thing.

Making up grand-sounding titles is fun. Bestow them liberally on any characters you get a chance to!

Rejected additional line for Jabba: "And my parents were officially married, as you can determine by checking the records at the social registry office on Nal Hutta..."

Admittedly, telling the villain that something is "the right thing to do" is pretty much a guarantee that they won't do it. Not that that should stop the hero from trying.

Actually, you could try a kind of reverse briar patching, and say that something heinously evil that the villain would actually want to do is "the right thing to do", so they don't do it, just because they think you want them to.

Try it in your next game and let us know how it works out. (Preferably with a GM who doesn't read this comic...)

Putting on a character, a bit like a suit, is a technique from acting (method acting) that can be useful for gaming. Instead of thinking what you, the player, would do in any given game situation, put yourself in the mindset of your character and think what they would do in that situation. Ideally you do this regardless of your considerations as the player, in terms of the game mechanics.

This is not by any means a revolutionary approach, and many roleplayers already do this to some extent. But if you haven't tried it, give it some thought. To do this successfully, you need a well-developed sense of who your character is, what their background is, what motivates them, and what their desires and goals in life are, and so on. Even if you don't go the whole hog into method acting your character, at least thinking about the background like this can certainly help in roleplaying.

Always have a nice long story ready to tell if ever the situation arises. Much like Kerim Bey to the bound and gagged Russian agent Benz in From Russia With Love:

Kerim Bey: I've had a particularly fascinating life. Would you like to hear about it?
{Benz tries to grunt "no."}
Kerim Bey: {delighted} You would?

Oliveira: My friends, let me introduce me nephew Alvaro [Tintin in disguise], just arrived from Portugal... He's an orphan, poor lad... I've taken him into my family... Just between ourselves he's a little... well... a bit simple.... Not surprising after what's happened to him... A dreadful story... Just imagine, his father, who was a well-known snail farmer... Excuse me, just a minute...
Oliveira: Be a good boy, Alvaro... While I'm busy with these gentlemen, you run and play in the garden... I'll call you...
[...]
Oliveira: ... So his father, who'd married the daughter of DaCosta the pirate from Lisbon, suddenly found himself in the middle of an extraordinary adventure. One day...
[...]
Oliveira: ... Alas! The poor woman never got over it. She died of grief and shame, at the age of ninety-seven. Her husband, broken-hearted, soon followed her to the grave. But that wasn't the end of the terrible tragedies this unhappy family had to suffer... One day, their son...
[...]
Oliveira: ... At that moment the count stepped forward. Aha! he cried in Portuguese (you mustn't forget Portuguese was his native tongue) and without a moment's hesitation he flung open the door... He stood frozen with horror! ...

One of the great archetypes is the reluctant hero. (It's so archetypal there's also a Wikipedia page!)

And there is no hero more reluctant than a supporting NPC.

It's important to have accurate inventory of all your expendable assets, so that you can use them up efficiently when needed.

Gold pieces, rope, healing potions, iron spikes, arrows, spell scrolls, NPC allies...

Sometimes you just have to think on your feet. Or off your feet, if the situation is really desperate. Any cool moves you can do while suspended in mid-air are valuable assets - make sure you learn some.

The minions and mooks of major villains are almost certainly not getting paid enough to put up with the sort of things that PCs tend to do to them. They really should be spending most of their time just trying to get out of the way of the various weapons and spells being slung in their direction. Try playing them that way once in a while for a change.

Also, Luke's sword gets extremely close to Chewbacca in this scene.

Normally when a major villain's mooks are getting slaughtered all around them by the heroes, the villain slinks off through a secret escape tunnel, or hightails it to an escape vehicle of some sort (possibly carrying their fluffy white cat with the diamond-studded collar with them).

For a change, how about having the villain enjoying the carnage? Revelling in the havoc and mayhem. Sitting back and just wallowing in the bloodshed.

Try to insinuate that they're not panicked for a very good reason.

You have to be extremely careful and precise when specifying the names of items of equipment to players.

Lest they lead to an outbreak of punning.

Here's a thing you don't see too often. Normally when a group of heroes/adventurers gets into conflict with a bunch of the villain's mooks, it's simply a case of fight them until they're dead/incapacitated.

But how about trying to engage them in conversation? Taking an interest in their welfare? Convincing them they are working for the wrong side and that they should betray their master?

Next time you get a chance in a game, try giving this a go. And watch your GM squirm as things go completely off the rails.

At some point in the combat, just when the heroes seem to be getting the upper hand for the first time, more bad guys should arrive. And ideally they should present an escalating threat by being more competent and better armed.

This principle is evident in Star Wars from the very first combat of Episode I, where the low level mook battle droids give way to the arrival of the reinforcing droidekas. It's also used in Episode IV when Vader and his elite personal squadron of TIE fighters join the Death Star battle. No doubt you can find many other examples throughout the history of film and literature, and of course its highly applicable to roleplaying games as well.

Random hit location tables are good for determining exactly where someone gets injured when hit, and the concept can easily be extended to cover vehicles, buildings, and other things. Here are two examples:

Realistic vehicle hit location table (d8)
1 - Drive wheel / thruster (lose 50% of speed)
2 - Controls (vehicle cannot turn or stop)
3 - Manoeuvring wheel / surface (lose 50% of manoeuvrability)
4 - Fuel line (lose 25% of fuel)
5-8 - Chassis (no effect beyond cosmetic)

Cinematic vehicle hit location table (d8)
1 - Chassis (no effect beyond cosmetic)
2-8 - Fuel tank (vehicles explodes in huge fireball)

We were watching this scene as part of our script writing session, and tossing out suggestions for lines of dialogue, when someone said, "Wait. How does that thing even do that?"

Then we spent the next 20 minutes arguing about how it could possibly work without breaking fundamental laws of physics, and coming up with more and more ridiculous explanations. By this time we'd spent so much time developing these ideas that we had to use some of them, so as not to make the writing session a complete write-off.

This is your Star Wars fan dollars at work, folks.*

* Not actually.

Blofeld: Kronsteen, you're sure this plan is foolproof?
Kronsteen: Yes, it is. Because I have anticipated every possible variation of countermove.

— From Russia With Love

The cool thing is, in most roleplaying games the players will inevitably forget vital information, thus not only rendering flashback recaps from NPCs useful, but virtually requiring them.

If you record your game session, on audio or even video, you can make this easier by just replaying the relevant scenes later on when the players need to be reminded.

Many real world people appreciate art, so it's good to have a character who appreciates art.

In the same way that The Joker appreciates humour.

Setting up a web of lies is a great way to guarantee that you'll be found out sooner or later. As a GM, you need to be on the lookout for any slip, because the characters are certainly going to notice these things that don't fit with what they previously knew. Picking up on inconsistencies is really just part of providing a realistic roleplaying experience.

In the oldest traditions of roleplaying, from the earliest days of Dungeons & Dragons, there was the concept of a caller, who was one player designated to be the mouthpiece of the PCs, and to relay information from all the other players to the DM/GM. This concept died fairly early, as it gave way to the more streamlined and simple option of players just announcing their own actions.

Also make sure that one player doesn't assume the role of a caller and speak for everybody when discussing metagame issues as well.

It's great to have someone appreciate the effort you put into giving personality and drama to your NPCs.

If it has to be another NPC, so be it.

Some games have specific rules and mechanics for characters going insane. Particularly horror based games, such as Call of Cthulhu and others, in which exposure to horrors beyond mortal ken can twist people's minds to the point of breaking. These rules are naturally most often used to track the deteriorating mental stability of PCs - but never forget that NPCs can be seriously unbalanced as well.

There are two sorts of details:

1. The sort that PCs don't notice.*
2. The sort that PCs notice and spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing over.†

* a.k.a "the important ones".

† a.k.a. "the unimportant ones".

The focus in this scene is on the eccentric Jabba's fate at the hands of the protagonist Leia. It's cool if you can give the weaker and less combat-oriented characters in your game a chance to shine in a straight out slug-fest, such as in this iconic section of the film.

When the heroes are in the midst of a running battle with the bad guys, it can be good to keep them on their toes by tossing in some random innocent bystanders or NPC allies. Upping the peril factor and providing distractions that the PCs need to deal with somehow (or else risk the consequences of ignoring) can add spice to what might otherwise be a run-of-the-mill combat scene.

Significant NPCs should be granted memorable last words before they eventually expire at the hands of the heroes.

Except when it would be cooler for them not to.

Of course the skiff gets hit again by the "rail" gun. That skiff is almost entirely a railing.

Usually the job of the faceless mooks or the hordes of orcs is simply to charge heedlessly at the PCs in a full-on attack and get cut down by the heroes' superior combat skills.

Try giving just one of them a greatly enhanced sense of personal safety and the smarts to do something much more sensible. Given the approach of most PC groups, this simple trick could be enough to completely flummox them.

Players like fighting villains and henchmen and evil races and people who generally get in their way. But every once in a while it's nice to have a fight against something that just wants to eat them.

Then the clever tactics need to deal with somewhat baser instincts.

We could provide some sort of sage advice like: "Don't badmouth someone, in their presence, when your life is in their hands."

But really, are any players as recklessly crazy as—

Actually, don't answer that.

That guard who fired the blaster was clearly barking up the wrong tree.

A weapon between old friends lets them see each other plain.

The trick to allowing extremely powerful items in your campaign is to multiply the power level by the duty cycle of possession by the PCs versus time spent missing or lost. If an artefact is 100 times as powerful as a typical item that they might possess all the time, simply make sure they only have it 1% of the time!

When the heroes in your game finally despatch the Big Bad Villain of the campaign, they are likely to leave behind a selection of mooks and lackeys who the PCs haven't got around to dealing with yet. Suddenly leaderless, these NPCs can react in a variety of ways.

Some might continue to blindly follow orders, despite the demise of their boss. These can present more or less formidable obstacles to the exit and safe return of the heroes to civilisation. Others, however, may rejoice in their newfound liberation. This can provide amusement, or can present problems of its own, as the heroes are suddenly confronted by hordes of less obviously evil people who might claim to have been coerced into servitude.

Killing the main villain might only be the beginning...

Rejected title for this strip: "Sacrebleu! Mon Calamari!"

(Rejected because it would be confusing in two completely different ways, not merely one.)

It's good to be wary of items that you find, lest they be cursed.

Of course you don't say this, lest you give your GM ideas.

Confusing computer interfaces are a prime source for amusing situations in games. Whenever the PCs need to interact with a computer, imagine if the user interface has been programmed by someone competent who actually knows something about usability... or not.

Refer to this classic comic for some inspiration.

Vehicles in film and television tend to blow up whenever they hit a pothole. Of course this is not realistic.

Which is why it should happen in your games.

New players of course don't know the detailed back-stories of events, characters, and objects within an ongoing campaign. But rather than tell them all about it or hand them a dossier when they join the game, having them learn things organically during play is both* easier, more realistic, and ultimately more satisfying.

And provides opportunities for byplay when they figure out and state with amazement something that everyone else already knows.

* Yeah, we know. There should be a single word in English that means "all three of".

Making do with improvised weapons or tools is great. Just make sure your GM doesn't have a degree in electronics or engineering. Or chemistry. Or happens to be a blacksmith.

You can argue quite convincingly to someone with no blacksmithing experience that with nothing more than a forge, tongs, a hammer, and an anvil, you can make a T-1000 series Terminator.

(By the way, if anyone gets away with this in an actual game, please let us know.)

There are no coincidences in a game setting. If you lose a powerful item, you can bet your boots that you'll see it again, somewhere. You just better hope the somewhere is not in the hands of your enemies.

If Middle-earth was a game setting, tossing the One Ring into a volcano would have been the worst possible thing to do with it.

Evil is relative. In some games it takes a necromancer raising armies of the dead to maraud across the lands of the good farming folks to qualify as evil.

In a slightly lighter campaign, the person who jumps the queue at the supermarket might be public enemy number one, and deserving of the attention of a group of trouble-seeking, vigilante PC heroes.

Some game situations don't necessarily need to roleplayed in detail. Rather, a summary of the action can be described briefly and perhaps accompanied by a dice roll or two to determine the outcome.

Some games use systems such as this to resolve actions such as mass combat involving hundreds or thousands of troops engaging on a battlefield. Since the game is supposed to be concentrated on the exploits of a handful of heroes, not the gruntwork of all the troops under their command, it can bog the game down too much to play out such a thing in detail.

Similar time-saving abstractions can occur with processes that take inordinately long amounts of time in real life, such as courtroom trials, building a castle, or applying for a driving licence.

Some game situations don't necessarily need to roleplayed in detail. Rather, a summary of the action can be described briefly and perhaps accompanied by a dice roll or two to determine the outcome.

Some games use systems such as this to resolve actions such as mass combat involving hundreds or thousands of troops engaging on a battlefield. Since the game is supposed to be concentrated on the exploits of a handful of heroes, not the gruntwork of all the troops under their command, it can bog the game down too much to play out such a thing in detail.

Similar time-saving abstractions can occur with processes that take inordinately long amounts of time in real life, such as courtroom trials, building a castle, or applying for a driving licence.

Intuition can sometimes serve a PC well.

If it ever happens in your game, take a note of it and write it up on a blog, because all the other GMs out there will be very interested to hear that it can happen.

In a technological society, virtually anything a character might want to acquire could well be available from online auction or sales sites. Ubiquitous communication allows ubiquitous commerce. Legal items are going to be simple to obtain, and of course there are always darker avenues for shadier equipment.

In the 1950s, getting your hands on plutonium would be virtually impossible. In the 2050s, it might be a lot easier.

This does not mean you have to artificially restrict supply. After all, if the PCs want lots of illegal equipment, there are much more fun things you can do to them than deny the acquisition...

Never turn down a drink from an NPC.

This actually goes double if you suspect it's poisoned. In that case, accept graciously, and then dump the drink into a nearby pot plant* when they are not looking. Because refusing would be bound to be worse.

* For American English speakers, this means a plant in a pot, not what you were probably thinking of. Although that would do fine in a pinch.

Bluffing is a major part of games such as poker, but it can also play an important role in roleplaying games. You get to try to deceive another character into believing something which is not true, as a way to gain something you want or avoid conflict you don't want. In other words, it should be the all-purpose go-to skill for social interaction! Diplomacy and Persuasion are for suckers!

The Hermit is a classic story character, and particularly so in the role of the Hermit Guru. So adapting one for a significant role in a game is certainly something to consider. Most hermits in games will necessarily be NPCs, as they are solitary loners by definition (though Sally here seems to have managed an exception).

When it comes to playing a hermit, there are many directions you can go in. They can wise, or cryptic, or insane, or repositories of forgotten knowledge, or oracles of the future. Or all at once! The wisdom and knowledge parts are good reasons for PCs to seek them out, and the just plain crazy ones can be amusing planned wilderness encounters in remote locations.

There are many different possible axes of ethics and morality. Good and evil is the classic one, but from Dungeons & Dragons we are also familiar with the law versus chaos dichotomy. But there's no reason to stop at just two! Other possibilities include the needs of the individual versus the needs of the group, nature versus artifice, reason versus emotion, and so on.

One might guess that Pete has devised his own all-encompassing morality system comprising six different orthogonal axes. Or maybe ten, giving a node at each vertex. Or 30 overlapping axes, corresponding to the edges. Well, something incredibly well thought out and overly complicated, anyway.

Sounds like perfectly good gamer logic, that one should learn about evil in order to do good.

After all, why else would warriors want to wield those life-draining swords or wizards want to study all those tomes of dark magic in great detail? Only for the very best of intentions, surely?

Paraphrasing the rules for legal trials from GURPS:

A trial is a contest of Law skills between the prosecution and the defence. Most people will hire a lawyer and make use of their Law skill. Do you really want to defend yourself and use Law at the default skill level?

Wise sages often speak in metaphors or other forms of circumlocution. Which means they're a great way to lead PCs astray and into danger, while maintaining plausible deniability - that all the information you gave them was in fact technically correct.

If interpreted correctly.

If you set a puzzle for the PCs to solve, you can bet they'll go about trying the most literal approach first.

The consequences of this for setting in-game puzzles are left as an exercise for the reader.

Realising you're going crazy is actually a sign that you're not all that crazy. Yet.

Of course, not realising you're going crazy is a sure sign you're going crazy.

How many times have PCs realised that they're going crazy?

Learning new powers and abilities is frequently a main goal of character development in games. Some training can be done by studying tomes of knowledge or practising on one's own, but many require a teacher.

Seeking a suitably skilled teacher can be a quest in itself. And if the only person who can teach you the powerful fire spell you desperately want to learn is a cantankerous old wizard who hates company, all the more fun!

Spies can be important sources of information. In some cases, the PCs themselves will be the spies, infiltrating an enemy network to recover vital intelligence. But sometimes they will have to rely on information obtained by third party NPCs. In that case, you want to make sure you can trust your source. Because whoever heard of a double agent in a work of fiction?

Actually, it's been shown that in many universes, there are actually more double agents than just plain agents. So suspecting your spy allies of being double agents is often a safe bet. Unless of course it's even worse than that.

Sometimes bad news is good news in disguise. At least if the main villain has all the things needed to dominate the world, you pretty much know where you have to go.

If Sauron had had the Ring, the Fellowship never would have had to break up. They just could have gone straight to Mordor and kicked his arse, rather than faffing around in the Forest of Fangorn and all that other stuff.

(Yes, we're drawing a parallel between Frodo and R2-D2 here. Think about it: They're both short with big feet, have an important quest to accomplish, are often overlooked by taller and more powerful beings, have a loyal but overly verbose companion, are honoured by royalty, team up with a crazy old wizard in a robe who dies and comes back more powerful than you can possibly imagine, sustain serious injuries and are assisted back to health by their loyal companion, and lust after an object of incredible cosmic power.)

If there's a bright centre to this piece of news, you're on the planet that it's farthest from.

"There isn't enough space" is a good generic excuse when you want to weasel your way out of anything.

"Carry this load of rations." "There isn't enough space in my backpack."

"Scout the orc camp and tell us what you see." "There isn't enough space to squeeze between the trees."

"Open this treasure chest." "There isn't enough space for all of you to run if it's trapped with a fireball."

It's important during briefing scenes with superiors of the PCs that you don't give them too much information and end up making the mission too easy. Keep details vague and give them just enough to get them out in the field and into danger. Any actual intel they should have to work for, rather than being presented with it on a plate.

But try not to make the superiors look incompetent, or the players might start to wonder how they got the job...

Anything you ask an NPC to do has consequences.

As a GM, you can resolve these sorts of things by thinking what situations they could get intom, rolling a few dice, and developing a story that fills in details of what happened to them when the PCs weren't around. This sort of storytelling using minor characters can add a lot of depth and flavour to a campaign.

Fun "Fact": General Madine's hair was enhanced in the Special Edition version of Return of the Jedi.

"Someone said" is a great way to introduce stuff that you want the listener to think is true, but which the narrator knows to be false. Variants include "Everyone knows", "According to X", and "It's common knowledge that". You can see it in action in the early Harry Potter books, which have a bunch of "Everyone knows" statements about Professor Snape.

You can learn some great GMing tricks from narrative tricks in literature. Keep an eye out for them next time you read a novel.

The disembodied voice that only one person can hear is a classic trope in fiction. It can represent a person's own conscience, a guiding spirit, or the voice of madness. But in any form it's a great way for the GM (or another character) to slip information to someone.

Try the "voice of madness" route some time. Pass notes to one of the players telling them they can hear a voice telling them things. If they mention it to the other players, tell them that nobody hears anything. Pass the player actual useful information this way. Information that they couldn't possibly have known by themselves.

And wait to see how long until the rest of the party start getting suspicious of them...

A small innocuous short-range passenger transfer vehicle is not mutually exclusive with "loaded to the rafters with weaponry".

At least not to any group of PCs worth their salt.

Sometimes the heroes would actually prefer sneaking around to all this straight up fighting. Give them a chance to avoid the deadly encounters now and then.

The bonus is that sneaking around requires more planning than just charging in with guns blazing. Seeing what sort of wacky plans they come up with often makes it all worth while.

Special announcement: This is General Madine's last appearance in Episode VI.

That is all.

If you have allied NPCs floating around, be sure to give them significant jobs so they don't feel left out.

And also so they can do the risky stuff and let you coast to an easy victory with minimal danger.

The Magic Feather is a venerable literary trope, and one which can be used in a roleplaying game as well. Simply have some magical or technological item which appears to do something amazing for the character wielding it, then have them go through a quest to end with the realisation that the device does nothing, and they were performing the amazing feats unaided all along.

Just don't let them realise this too early, lest they go on a power-mad rampage that you can't stop by temporarily removing their item. You know they will.

Sorry, this one was a bit of a howler.

With Chewbacca, this point is a bit of a Dymo-sore.

It can be amusing to put PCs in charge of a vehicle with controls that they have no idea how to operate. For extra fun, actually have the controls labelled. In a foreign/alien language. Or with incorrect labels.

The venerable roleplaying game Paranoia did a version of this in one of its published adventures. The PCs had to attempt to use a vehicle and were given a printout drawing of the vehicle's control panel, and no instructions other than to tell the GM what buttons they wanted to push or levers to pull.

Proper cinematic villains should of course get soliloquies. Indulge your florid writing skills and purple prose composing to the maximum.

Just remember to come up with a good excuse for inflicting them on your players.

Bad guys pretty much always have flunkies hanging around. Even if you don't mention any explicitly, it's often a safe bet that PCs can assume they are there.

As a player, you can usually just assume some silent bystanding goons, and execute plans that involve their presence. A good GM will just roll with it - unless they've explicitly stated that there aren't any henchmen or other subordinates in the vicinity. And yes, you can quote us on this to your GM.

If you gotta bluff, may as well go all out. The more brazen a bluff, the more likely the bluffee is to assume you couldn't possibly be that stupid as to attempt what it looks like you just attempted, and so they're more likely to just let you get away with it on the assumption that you have the proper authority and are just an idiot.

Use this argument to get a bluff bonus when trying something ridiculously unlikely to work. (And let us know if your GM falls for it.)

Code cracking is often handled unrealistically in movies and TV shows. Make your games more realistic by having codes be completely unguessable and uncrackable - without social engineering to obtain the codes from someone who knows them, by stealth or deception.

Well, unless you're running a game in a school and people are using the pigpen cipher.

Code cracking is often handled unrealistically in movies and TV shows. Make your games more realistic by having codes be completely unguessable and uncrackable - without social engineering to obtain the codes from someone who knows them, by stealth or deception.

Well, unless you're running a game in a school and people are using the pigpen cipher.

If you have radios and a command base, you should be reporting in regularly - the only exception being if you're surrounded by enemies with the means to detect your signals. Yet it's amazing how often operations teams in fiction or in gaming don't report in, even when radio silence is not really needed. The feeling of autonomy adds to the drama of course, and people have come to expect that over years of watching TV and movies.

But try inverting it. Give your PCs some mission, and require them to report in regularly. The command base might be supportive, or potentially interfering, or offer suggestions or orders which are not optimal under the field circumstances. How the PCs react to such communication can lead to interesting roleplaying situations.

If percussive maintenance actually works, then explosive maintenance should surely be better, right?

... And if one explosion is good, two must surely be better!

Roleplayer logic at its finest.

When things go horribly, disastrously wrong, the top priority for any seasoned group of PCs should be figuring out which player's fault it was.

If you're going to have a memorable war story, you need to get your facts straight.

It's amazing how often the correct place to go to is directly towards the main enemy concentration.

You can virtually never go wrong with that, really. After all, they have supplies, weapons, ammo, food and water, possibly medical facilities. They may well have treasure. Secrets worth more than their weight in gold. Magic items.

Really, why would you want to go anywhere else at all??

If you're ever lucky enough to overhear chatter between enemy forces, it may just pay to listen to what they have to say, rather than leap out and attack them immediately.

This is assuming your GM is the sort who offers useful clues, rather than deceptive and dangerous misinformation...

Natural settings are fun for technological games. Most people are used to living in cities, with all the modern conveniences close by - such as paved paths to walk on, for one. Having to hack your way through untrodden forest or jungle is a very different experience, and one which can't easily be overcome with any technology less than automated forest clearing machinery. Not to mention that wherever you step is likely to be the home of some animal or other.

It's things like this that start to make hoverbikes look practical even in densely treed forests.

Many game systems have a surprise mechanic, which gives one side in a combat encounter the advantage of doing something before the other side can react or prepare. This of course echoes reality, where combatants with the element of surprise have a big advantage in the initial stages of a fight.

So getting the surprise advantage is an important bit of tactical roleplaying, that players are often prepared to put considerable effort into achieving.

Which makes it all the more fun when it goes horribly wrong and they end up on the wrong end of the surprise stick.

Of course there are more mooks waiting to flee and raise the alarm. This is standard GMing practice in a mook fight.

Or it should be.

Never overlook the obvious solution to a problem within a game setting.

Of course it may not work, or reveal your location and plans to your enemies, or be a virtually inescapable deathtrap, but that's no reason not to throw caution to the wind and just try it!

Parties who split up mostly tend to do it either at their own instigation when faced with multiple things that need doing at once, or when separated by a trap or some sort of barrier that appears unexpectedly. But it can also happen in the confusion of battle. You see it all the time in TV and movies.

Rather than have everyone fighting in a single dungeon room or wherever - where it's all neat and the PCs can regroup easily after defeating the enemy - try having a running fight that covers a lot of terrain, with individual PCs needing to make lightning decisions on which enemies to pursue. Have the players make their decisions without knowing what the other players are doing (write them down, or use a secret ballot or something). Only when the fight is over and the PCs stop to gather their breath do they notice that not all of their comrades are still in the vicinity.

People in movies always come up with great lines at the best moments.

Try and emulate that in the dramatic moments of your games, with spur-of-the-moment quips.

Because even when you fail to think of something awesome, and you will, the results are at least amusing.

PCs in games always drive too fast. So you can always throw some police in hot pursuit behind them. They'll always be ready, lurking behind a convenient billboard (or tree, or whatever), to take up the chase behind the PCs. Because a vehicular chase scene isn't a real chase scene until you have multiple cop cars (or other vehicles) slamming into buildings, other vehicles, and each other due to the shenanigans of the PCs and whoever it is they're chasing.*

* Or is chasing them, if you want to play it the other way round. Which can be fun too!

Hey, if there's a lever or button somewhere, don't question it, just use it!

No characters ever got into trouble that way...

Have some long, poetic descriptions of explosions ready.

The speeder bike careens into the tree and blossoms slowly into an expanding rosette of flames and sparks, accompanied by the air-crushing rumpling noise of tortured metal rupturing and oxidising instantly in the building conflagration, reaching a crescendo of orange brilliance that briefly outshines the sun as the fuel is voraciously consumed by the destruction.

Slowing down the action is a great chance to show off your composition and elocution skills!

If a trick works once, it might work again.

Unfortunately too many GMs have heard the advice that:

If a player tries a trick like throwing sand in an enemy's face, you give them a combat bonus. But then pretty soon they'll be trying to throw sand at every enemy they encounter. If this trick worked every time, then people would go around carrying bags of sand instead of swords - so don't let it work every time!

So leave it just long enough that they might have forgotten about the last time you used it.

People should totally do this more.

Do some research prior to a game session and think of a likely scenario that might happen. Then think of an appropriate song from a popular movie or theatre production, possibly tweaking the lyrics a little bit. Learn the words really well and practice singing it.

At an appropriate point in the game, bust out into song! For bonus points, have a recording of the music cued up and ready on your phone or whatever, and play that as backing. We absolutely guarantee that this will be the coolest thing that has happened to your fellow players and GM that day.

Assuming you pick the right song.

Good advice generally. If you successfully fast talk your GM into giving you some sort of ridiculous concession, take it and run. Pushing your luck can only lead to tears.

Succeeding at a skill roll doesn't always mean you achieve what you wanted. Especially when what you're trying to do is being actively opposed by another person. They might well get a chance to prevent, mitigate, or undo what you've done.

As a GM you need to remember this. Your antagonist NPCs have skills too, and can use them to foil what the PCs want to do. This is built into the combat rules of many games (where defenders might get a block or parry roll, for example), but it can pop up in other places too. Don't let your NPCs be saps.

It was going to be "Rule of Tree", but we twigged onto another pun.

If some tool won't work for some job, just increase the power level. What could possibly go wrong?

Never miss an opportunity to brag about your achievements within a game.

Also never miss an opportunity to cut someone down to size if they're bragging. Ah, in-game banter!

GMs, be careful to avoid giving your players' characters an army of followers, lest this sort of thing happen.

Or maybe you should do it just so you can see this sort of thing happen. Since it will.

Many NPCs do nothing but react to the actions of PCs. It's a good idea to have an NPC drive the conversation occasionally. This is likely to happen if the heroes meet the king, or some sort of authorities, but try doing it with a relative nobody, who just happens to be pushy and asks a lot of questions - but who the heroes have to deal with if they want to make progress, so they can't just ignore them.

If you have to have an NPC hand out information to the PCs, be stingy about it. There's no point just giving them everything on a silver platter.

Unless of course it's a fake silver platter, coated with contact poison.

Poking your head out from behind cover while people are shooting at you is a great way to get shot. And sitting blissfully unaware on a log while snipers take careful aim at you is an even better way to get shot.

It's extremely fortunate for Leia in this scene that the stormtroopers can't hit any organic being they shoot at, even when given the luxury of a completely unsuspecting target and plenty of time to aim.

Trash talking is a time-honoured tradition of fighting. However be careful to keep it to standard generic banter and ritualised "yo mama" insults. Because if you try and get too creative, or customise your talk to what you actually know about the opponent, and accidentally touch a trigger issue and really rile them up, you may well regret it.

Preparing maps before an adventure takes time. Another method is to make the scenery up on the fly during the game, jot it down as you go, and have that become the map of the region the PCs are in. The disadvantages being that you have to be on the ball the whole time, and it's easy to forget some detail that the players will want to come back to later.

Because you can bet your life that the one thing you forget to record will be the one thing they start obsessing over. Even more so since you'll suddenly be stumbling over the fact that it may or may not exist, thus only serving to increase the players' suspicion that it must be important.

Some game systems let you take various abilities and skills, balanced against various flaws or disadvantages. Often these elements relate mainly to ability - what you can or cannot do. But sometimes they refer to actual physical differences in your body (which in turn affects what you can or cannot do as a side effect).

So yes, in some games you can take differently sized limbs or body parts with unusual strength... or other unusual aspects. Presumably if you take a big liver, you'll be really good at digesting fatty foods and alcohol. Which could come in handy, given the typical diets of many adventurers!

Being summoned by a superior always happens at the worst time.

So use it in a game! Lex Luthor has just revealed a nefarious plot to join forces with General Zod and lay waste to Metropolis... and Perry White calls Clark Kent into his office - pronto! - for an important discussion about what's happening to the quality of the sandwiches at the Daily Planet. And Kent better listen up and listen good, because White's pretty peeved!

Here's a cool thing to try in a game:

Have some wise old sage or someone like that give the PCs a quest, which they need to fulfil in order to convince the sage to give them something they need, be it an object or information. They go on this arduous quest, travelling through monster-infested wilderness or whatever, to the trap-riddled ancient lair of the evil Arch-lich, defeat the boss, retrieve the thing the sage wants at great personal risk, and then undertake the dangerous journey back.

And when they get there, the sage has died. Maybe he just passed away peacefully of old age, leaving no notes or clues about the thing the heroes desperately wanted off him.

Or, to avoid being a completely malicious GM, perhaps he was murdered - for the very thing that the PCs want. And there's a trail of clues leading to the culprit...

Tracking quarry is a vital skill for any gaming situation. It not only applies to wilderness, but also tracking suspects through cities or other urban terrain. Some places, with lots of objects that can show signs of passing traffic, are easy to track in. Others, such as following the "tracks" of someone walking down a street, are more difficult.

But if a player ever argues that you can track someone through outer space, then they're either deluded... or playing a Star Trek game.

It just makes sense that you should always be suspicious of traps. After all, a trap is designed to capture or hurt you. Of course you shouldn't trust one.

Given that, and the fact that traps are often concealed or not obviously traps, it makes sense to always be suspicious of anything that might be a trap, or that looks like it might be a trap.

And given that traps can be concealed anywhere, it follows logically that you should always be suspicious that everything is a trap.

Roleplayer logic at its finest.

To give your group of PCs a real roleplaying challenge, let them encounter a trap. But rather than obfuscate or try to hide it, state plainly and clearly, up front, in all honesty, that it's a trap. Tell them they can see the trap mechanism and it's obvious how the trap is supposed to work, and if they just press this button, or pull that lever, they can see plainly that the trap will be rendered completely harmless. But they can't get past it until they disarm it.

Sit back and watch the fun.

Pizza is universal. You can get it anywhere in the modern world. You can get it in the future, in space, and in other timelines. You can also make a good case for getting it in historical time periods. Even if it's not historically known in any given time and place, some enterprising person can easily invent it, given nothing more than some grain, some dairy, and some of whatever other food is around.

Try inventing it next time you're playing in a period where it would otherwise be unknown. You'll quickly become rich and famous! Or can at least make that argument to your GM.

There was an infamous exchange of articles and letters in the early days of Dragon magazine, about falling damage in Dungeons & Dragons. The gaming blog Grognardia has a good summary of the major plays in thesearticles, which make various assumptions about how much damage people (and elves and dwarves and so on) should take from falling, and what physical principles should, or should not, apply.

This is a good example of the obsession with "reality" that crept into roleplaying in the mid-80s, as expounded on by another post from Grognardia, which also mentions the falling damage articles.

Anyway, these articles are great fodder for bringing up as heartfelt mid-game discussions with your GM. Bonus points if you start the discussion while your characters are falling.

Planetary system dynamics can get pretty exotic, but "falling up" is probably restricted to anti-grav technology or magic. Since - by definition - "up" is the way you don't fall.

Of course, given ultra-tech or magic, there's nothing stopping you making small zones where the gravity is inverted compared to most of the world around it. This is one of the most fun things a GM can do.

Unless you're a player, in which case it's one of the most annoying things a GM can do.

Encounters with NPCs or monsters don't necessarily have to lead to combat.

Sorry, we'll just let that one sink in for a bit before continuing.

Rather than attacking, you could try negotiating! This is an unusual tactic in which you use vocal (or other) communication in order to attempt to determine what interests the other party has, and then to try to come to some sort of mutual agreement in which you make an exchange, or a compromise, or otherwise let each other go about their business without fighting.

Be aware, though, that only the most experienced and creative GMs are properly equipped to handle the bizarre nature of this strange interaction.

Contracts and licence agreements are some of the most annoying things in real life. So adapt them for endless fun in your game!

If your PCs visit a strange city or planet, have it be a bureaucratic nightmare, with everything needing to be approved with forms in triplicate, and a multitude of bizarre laws and loopholes that the native inhabitants just deal with naturally, but which visitors find confusing.

Give them some forms to fill in at the city gate (or starport, or whatever is appropriate) for starters. And don't just say the characters need to fill out forms - make some actual forms as props and have the players fill them out for the characters. Make them declare all dangerous items, without defining anywhere what is considered dangerous. Make them list their last three jobs. Ask for next-of-kin and their contact details. Religious beliefs. Have a random question about whether they eat carrots or not, with no explanation. Ask something innocuous which will actually have a major impact on how authorities treat them during their visit.

Oh, and make it clear that entering false information is punishable. A nearby heavily muscled guy, standing casually with an executioner's axe, is a good hint.

There are times to fight, and there are times to think about pretending to go along quietly before attacking by surprise.

Never let a quest go unfulfilled and abandoned. It'll no doubt come back to bite you some time later.

The villagers wanted you to clear out the kobolds who have been raiding from the hills? You went there and killed a few, and found a wandering monk who told you about the great evil building in the mountains, where rumours say that the lost treasure of the great dwarven cities lies? So you decided that was more in keeping with your growing heroism?

It'll turn out that the evil sorcerer will have recruited the kids of those kobolds you killed. And they watched you slaughter their parents, and they know your weaknesses...

Rejected titles for this strip: We Are Region; A Rot of Nutes; Many Nutes Make Right Work; Many Nutes Ago; Innuterable; You Can't Teach An Ewoc Nute Ricks.

You don't even want to see the titles we rejected for the rejected list.

When the PCs think the situation can't possibly get any worse... you can always make it worse by making it humiliating.

All good primitive villages need a shaman. Someone who attempts to read the omens and predict the future, and is proved wrong and pushed into the background by a meddling group of more advanced heroes when they breeze through the area on some adventure or other.

Good idea, making the shaman - the person with potential supernatural powers - the one you upset.

Haggling with traders is a time-honoured tradition in roleplaying games. The problem is that the laws of supply and demand get warped by the singular and unusual circumstances of a one-off transaction taking place without an effective larger economy.

Many packaged adventures state that in the specific village on the edge of danger where the adventures find themselves, prices are inflated and run at 2 to 10 times or more the standard prices listed in the rule books, and that the villagers won't lower their prices. This is a rough cut at the idea that adventuring supplies are more expensive where they are most needed, but the rigidity of the rule is unrealistically inflexible.

For any individual transaction, it's possible for the seller to hold out only as far as the buyer is willing to entertain the exchange. If you don't really need a new sword, there's no chance you'll pay 10 times the greater market value for one. On the other hand, if you've lost your weapon and absolutely must have a new one, you'll pay whatever it takes, and the seller - if aware of this situation - can hold out for much more.

But usually the seller isn't aware of how desperate the buyer is, so needs to set an initial price somewhat higher than what they would actually accept. And thus begins the dance of haggling. The lowest acceptable selling price is determined by outside market forces, of which traders would only be aware of inasmuch as they determine the general environment and gut feeling for the "fair price".

In short, it's fine to set a "fair price" that the traders are willing to accept, and have it be inflated due to low supply or high demand. But the traders should always aim higher, and be open to negotiation down to the fair price. And if they've had a poor day and need to make a sale, sometimes they can even go a bit lower. Just make sure to accompany it with appropriate lamentations about the trader's starving children.

* Exactly What it Says on the Tin.**

** But hopefully you didn't realise that until after you read the comic. Therein lies the humour.

Although... never underestimate the damage a blunt bludgeoning object can do. This is especially the case in a high-tech setting where you can accelerate large objects up to a significant fraction of the speed of light.

If you run the numbers, you find that it's much more efficient to bombard a planet with big rocks from orbit than to do any other sort of planetary attack or invasion. Assuming hostile aliens really want to wipe us out, that'd be their best modus operandi by far.

Imagine running this as a game scenario. Not your typical alien invasion, fighting bug-eyed monsters on the ground or in the air - instead they just implacably launch asteroids at Earth from the safety of the Moon or further away. The only way to fight them is get someone up there before all launch capability (and the entire biosphere) is wiped out, and perform some sort of infiltration mission.

Witchcraft is a cool thing to play with in a game setting. In various traditions and stories, witches are looked upon as everything from malevolent entities allied with demons or devils, to bastions of rustic wholesomeness protecting the world from evil. Basically, you can take any societal role and make a witchy version of it.

• Police: Witches are law enforcers and crime investigators.
• Doctors: Witches are healers and midwives.
• Entertainers: Witches use magic plus stagecraft to provide amusement and diversion.
• Teachers: Witches are charged with looking after and education the children of society.
• Criminals: Witches run an underground organised crime racket, preying on the wealthy and gullible.
• Leaders: Witches use their power to establish and maintain rule over societies. Either benevolently or malevolently, according to taste.

Basically, you can take any segment of society and add a dash of magic and occult, and then explore what such a world would be like.

A market economy operates in the real world because of the complex interactions of many people, all of whom have their own best interests at heart. It can be difficult simulating this in a roleplaying game world, especially if you don't have a degree in economic theory. Which is why game world economics tend to be simplistic and not particularly realistic.

But you know, that's okay, as long as none of your players have degrees in economic theory.

(Or if one of them does, and complains about it, you can get them to create rules for how the economy works.)

Be careful when bargaining for release from captivity that you include everyone you intend to. All the people could easily be interpreted as not including elves or dwarves or aliens or whatever.

On the other side, this makes a great loophole for setting up agreements with potentially untrustworthy or hostile negotiators. Or just ones you want to rip off.

The reunion after a danger that separates the party is always a joyous event.

The operative word being after. During the reunion, when everyone is busy celebrating, is a great time to spring a surprise attack on the group!

Non-player characters, commonly known as NPCS, can of course flout the normal rules for player character generation and advancement, since they don't need to be balanced as members of the adventuring party. In fact most of the population of the adventuring world will be significantly less powerful and influential than the PCs, since games usually assume the PCs are heroes of some sort. And there will be a few NPCs who are substantially more powerful than the PCs as well - the rulers of the land, corporate barons, senior wizards or superheroes, or what have you.

Of course if any of these ever has reason to turn into a player-controlled character for any reason, the odds are highly in favour of it being one of the less powerful types. Both for reasons of statistics, and any GM would be nuts to allow a player to control one of the latter types of NPC.

In-story recaps are a great way to bring other characters up to speed on what has transpired earlier in the adventure campaign. Rather than just have the players say something like, "We tell the king what happened during our expedition to the goblin caves," make them actually tell the story.

Besides being fun and good roleplaying, it's always hilarious hearing their version of events as told to the king, when all of you know what really happened.

A good entrepreneur can find a way to profit from anything. Besides souvenirs, the other obvious thing to sell is snacks. Particularly of the sausage-inna-bun variety, hawked from a cart that can quickly be moved away from the eyes of any constabulary.

Such vendors also provide suitable NPCs to question about things they may have seen, since they tend to see a lot of interesting things happening on the streets. Just be prepared with some persuasion of the monetary variety.

Orating to a crowd is a good way to stir public sentiment to your cause. Just make sure it sounds like a good cause.

If you can't outsmart 'em, confuse 'em! Actually, even if you can outsmart 'em, it may be simpler and better to simply confuse 'em anyway.

PCs tend to be natural leaders. Or at least, they naturally end up in positions such as when the peasants of the village look to them for leadership against the raiding monsters. Which is a cool way to get them to think about more than just themselves for a bit of a change. So it's worth trying on occasion.

And just because the people consider them leaders doesn't necessarily mean they have all the resources they need to lead the fight.

As a GM, you can show your appreciation for good roleplaying from your players... by showing them some of your own!

A tip to make it easier is to make sure you define the personalities and conversational styles of all your significant NPCs. Get into their mindsets, understand their motivations, goals, and quirks of personality. And then play those roles, jumping back and forth between them in separate compartments in your mind.

An exercise you can try is to think of two very different characters from a TV show or movie you know very well, and pretend to have a conversation between them. Make each one distinctly like their on-screen personality, and switch from one to the other in a kind of verbal table tennis. When you can hold a convincing conversation between two different people - entirely by yourself - then you're ready for some serious and hard core GM showing off in front of your players.

If you can't afford to buy a whole thing, buying a bit of it might be just as good. A person can't sensibly take off with an entire ship if you own the rudder - that'd be stealing your property. This is a good legal loophole you can use to restrict people from absconding with something you don't want absconded with. And besides preventing movement of the property, you could also make using the property difficult or impossible by choosing a vital component.

GMs will want to try it around the other way. Sell the heroes a castle, but the mad wizard who was the original owner wants to keep ownership of the mysterious tower, which must stay locked at all times. And woe betide anyone curious enough to try to break in...

If you purchase property or valuables of any sort in a game, make sure you get a receipt and a certificate of ownership.

What, you didn't get those for that Holy Avenger sword you say you "bought" from a guy in a dark alley three weeks ago - the self same sword that has been an heirloom handed down in the family of the Lord Dumphrie for centuries? I hope you like explaining that to the King's Justice.

Some GMs like to include puzzles in their games, which require the players to actually solve them to make progress. This is fine, but care should be taken to ensure the puzzles aren't too difficult for the players to figure out! It's surprisingly easy to make a puzzle way too hard, because the person making the puzzle knows how it works, and often ends up thinking certain things are easier to figure out than they are for someone coming in cold.

So if you want to include puzzles in a game, make them somewhat easier than you expect is required. And always provide some way to work around them if the players can't solve it at all. Pinning a Total Party Kill on the fact that the players don't know about some obscure property of prime numbers or something is verging on evil GM territory.

There are always options for transport, especially if there are enemies around. Infiltrating the enemy camp of barbarian Huns to steal their elephants would be an awesome mission.

Need we say more?

The background for this image was stitched together from a long vertical panning shot. It's so beautiful we've saved a full-sized version without the other panels laid over the top for you to enjoy. Click the thumbnail on the right for the full resolution image.

Of course there's a trope for this.

Take any opportunity you can to play this one into a game. As soon as any PC starts talking badly about someone who is not present - see if you can make them present. It's not always plausible, but when it is it's worth the effort!

Hey, it was worth a shot. Could have short-circuited the GM's whole adventure there.

That's always worth a shot in a roleplaying scenario!

Having a dark past that keeps popping up is an intriguing backstory for a player character. Perhaps they're trying to get over it, put it behind them, but occasionally they'll come across someone who knows what they've done, and sees them in a completely different way to everyone else.

Unpredictability is your ally. If you know the only possible outcome is failure, that's no good. And if you know you're going to succeed, that's just too easy.

It follows quite simply: If you have no idea how your plans will work out, that's the best possible thing!

This lesson in roleplaying from the School of Jim.

And so turns the wheel of fortune...

If you are running a game and one of your players ever expresses a desire to run an adventure some time soon:

1. It gives you a chance to relax a bit and play as a player instead of a GM.
2. Even if it goes horribly wrong - especially if it goes horribly wrong - the player will have a better appreciation for how much hard work you put into every session.
3. Accept the offer before they can retract it. Grab it with all possible appendages as quickly as you can!

You can use a simple variant of click bait in roleplaying games. Present some interesting riddle or puzzle to the players, and sit back and watch their characters investigate it to the point of endangering themselves. Because you know they will. It's even better if it obviously looks dangerous, because then they'll start to think it can't be that dangerous, really.

You could even put up a big sign saying: "Big obvious trap. If you trigger it you'll die. And there's no treasure in here anyway."

All they need to do to avoid the obvious trap is to ignore it and walk away. But what self-respecting group of adventurers is going to do that?

This sort of thing is known as Schmuck Bait in TV Tropes parlance, and they have so many roleplaying examples that it fills a whole separate page. (Spoiler warnings for several published adventures. But hey, you're still going to want to try triggering these traps, because your GM might have modified them to be less lethal and more profitable, and you don't want to walk away wondering...)

Making lists can be a vital part of enjoying a game. Lists of equipment, lists of desired magic items, lists of NPCs you've offended and who will probably try to kill you next time you meet them...

A cool character quirk can be the propensity to constantly make lists of things. Most often this will involve listing "things that can go wrong" whenever another character proposes a course of action.

Epic tales of warfare raging across the land demand that armies be led. And who better to lead them than heroic PCs?

Well, pretty much anyone. Give a PC control of an army and you just know they're going to use it for something questionable at some point.

It's good to have a back-up plan. Even if the back-up plan is "go berserk and kill as many enemies as possible before being cut down", it's still better than the back-up plan of 99% of adventuring parties.

It's good to have a back-up plan. Even if the back-up plan is "go berserk and kill as many enemies as possible before being cut down", it's still better than the back-up plan of 99% of adventuring parties.

For a fun change, how about actually drafting the PCs in a game into some sort of military or other service? They'll find rejecting a mission or adventure much more difficult when it's been given to them by Higher Authorities, on pain of treason.

Or for a variant, on one of the inevitable occasions when they end up getting a bit too drunk in a tavern, have them ake up in the hold of a ship, several miles out to sea. With no weapons or equipment, other than the buckets and scrubbing brushes, or possible oars, handed to them by the posse of burly sailors enforce discipline. Fun for all!

Speaking of pizza cutters, here's a cool scenario. The heroes need to defuse a bomb. Easy, you say?

Put it on a large passenger vehicle, like a plane, or a cruise ship, or a passenger spaceship. So you can't easily evacuate innocent bystanders.

Or go and get suitable tools.

Put it in a part of the vehicle that experiences serious vibration, and/or noise, and/or exposure to the elements.

Give it a sensitive magnetic containment field. So if the heroes try to use metal tools, things could go horribly wrong as soon as they get near.

So forget about using cutlery from the vehicle dining area. Wait! They have plastic cutlery!

This brought to you by an actual game I ran where the PCs indeed had to defuse a bomb - did I mention it was nuclear? - with plastic cutlery, while clinging to the outside of a spaceship.

Use game-term-speak when ostensibly in-character at your peril. NPCs might think you're raving mad.

Thinking of ways that NPCs can take game speak literally in-character and creatively misinterpret it is one of the more advanced and esoteric arts of GMing.

Generating a diversion is a classic battle tactic. Which means it will no doubt show up in every roleplaying game at some point.

Don't forget that GMs can also use this tactic against the PCs as well. (A reminder to both GMs and players!)

After all, there's no point being stealthy if nobody knows you're being stealthy.

Henchman NPCs and NPC groups can be very useful for getting the PCs out of various pickles they find themselves in.

And they will find themselves in pickles. PCs virtually live in pickle jars.

Be careful making allied NPCs too competent, lest they dominate the game as the players let them do all the dangerous things. Competent NPCs are best saved for enemies, or non-adventurers such as political leaders or the village blacksmith who strangely has 16 levels in Sword and Battleaxe (as well as the mandatory 20 levels in Ripping Off Adventurers Who Need New Weapons).

Sometimes NPCs know a lot more than the players think they do. Quite a lot of the time, actually, when you really stop and think about it. So make sure and bamboozle them with mind-blowing knowledge sometimes. They can know stuff that the players believe nobody has any right to know.

And the good thing is, you never have to explain how they know it. Leaving it mysterious is much more fun than explaining it.

There's lots of fun to be had with mixing up figurative and literal interpretations of what players or characters say. Because when you think about it, quite a lot of English (and I suspect other languages too) is actually idiomatic. People tend to drop idioms into speech without even realising it.

Try dropping in a character who always takes idioms literally. This is the source of much humour in Star Trek, both the original series with Mr Spock, and The Next Generation with Data. Just imagine a character like that, and you're halfway to playing one.

Parley is a great tradition. According to its principles, potential enemies or combatants may meet under a truce to talk and discuss matters of import without threat of being attacked.

This of course relies on the concept of honour: both having it yourself and trusting that your opponent also has it. So things can sometimes get a little sticky if the two sides really don't trust one another.

Which makes it a perfect thing to suggest in a roleplaying game. Have the PCs about to launch the Earth-shattering final assault on the Big Bad they've been chasing across a dozen separate adventures to bring the year-long campaign to a glorious climax... and the enemy walks out defenceless in front of them and requests parley.

Playing an insane character can be challenging, but there are potential rewards to be had. When the heroes seek out a reclusive sage, or a helpful wizard, or even the king of the land to have a serious chat about the hobgoblin armies forming on the borders, it can come as a bit of a shock when they slowly realise that this important and significant NPC who wields great power or has access to vital information... isn't entirely there.

How they end up dealing with this problem can be entertaining, and may even be a mini-quest unto itself.

Appealing to a bad guy's good side might be a losing proposition... but what about offering to help them? If they're bad just because they're lashing out at a world they think hates them, then maybe some well-timed compassion and understanding can create a chink in their armour...

And then you go in for the kill.

Of course one should always be carrying a bunch of explosive charges. Just in case.

Honestly, it's the high tech-level equivalent of a 10-foot pole.

Keeping watch is a time-honoured tradition in many games.

Because you know that the one time you don't post a watch will be the time that a pack of dire wolves attack during the night.

Normally dice rolls are not needed for routine actions like tossing something aside. But if a player accidentally makes a roll when one is not needed, you should feel free to interpret creatively.

On the player side: Try making pre-emptive rolls for stuff like this and see if you can confuse your GM enough to get some sort of advantage out of it.

To give your NPCs unique and interesting personalities, have some of them adopt the mannerisms of player characters. The various things that PCs do can give you an endless source of inspiration.

Looking at this big screencap carefully, particularly juxtaposed with 3PO on the forest moon's surface, we couldn't help noticing that it's night directly under the Death Star... but at the same time it's daylight where 3PO is, near the shield generator, under the Death Star.

There's an online analysis of the time sequencing of the events which notices the same thing, and resolves it by positing that Han, Leia, and Chewie are captured inside the shield generator (the previous strip of Darths & Droids) during the day, then the Rebel fleet arrives during the night, a bit before dawn (as seen here), and then the next scene where we see the Imperials march Han, Leia, and Chewie outside must take place the next day, after spending the whole night inside the shield generator building.

This interpretation is not supported by any other observation you can make from the film - and makes so little sense, especially given that Luke's encounter with the Emperor is shown intercut as though it's happening at the same time - that we prefer to just think of it as a continuity error in the film and move on.

The alternative to having PCs play commanding roles in significant battles is to have the battle be completely out of their control, and have them helplessly watch from the sidelines. Or even more remotely, the battle happens elsewhere and they only hear about the result afterwards.

While this can be unsatisfying if the battle is the direct logical outcome of their actions, you can use this sort of remote battle as a tool to make your campaign world seem alive, rather than a static sandbox in which the pCs are the most important motive forces.

Have a messenger arrive in a tavern and breathlessly announce to all that the neighbouring kingdoms have gone to war, and vast expanses of land have changed hands already. Or when the PCs arrive at a destination planet they are shocked to find that there's been a violent overthrow of the government, and the previously friendly port where they sold cargo for profit has turned into a dictatorship where their kind aren't tolerated any more.

Peripheral friendly NPCs are a great resource. They provide an anchor point of familiarity, and become trusted resources who can be used to feed the players little snippets of information.

And once the players start relating to them and caring about them, you have a lever for enemies to take advantage of, with things like threats and hostage situations. Invaluable!

A sheriff needs a deputy. A PC needs a subordinate to relay orders.

Who else are you going to blame if things go pear-shaped and you don't have a handy NPC deputy nearby?

Safeguarding communications against interception is something that few players or PCs think about. So it's often easy to set up a scenario where an enemy overhears conversation or intercepts a message, and takes action based on the information gained.

Be careful using this in a game, however, unless you want your players to insist that whenever they are talking or sending messages it is done in code, forever after.

Fights can't always be easily won by the heroes. There will be setbacks. Even losses.

Particularly when you're level 1 and a single goblin with a rusty dagger can inflict a fatal wound with one hit. Ah, those were the days.

The precise razor of logic is the finest weapon that PCs have against cunningly arranged deathtraps and other dangerous puzzles that the are set in their path.

This is why so many of them die.

People often don't think beyond their immediate goals, to what they would do after.

This is seldom a problem for characters in a game, however. What you do with treasure and powerful items is use them to get more treasure and more powerful items. Obviously.

It's not all that unusual for heroes to receive battle reports from their troops.

It is somewhat unusual for the heroes to receive them from the enemy troops. But that's okay - and probably means you should give it a try at some point.

It's important to identify whose side a potential enemy is on before you take any hostile action, since they may turn out to be on your side.

For some fun with this, have an allied messenger or something approach the heroes to deliver some important news. But make the messenger look like an enemy. Maybe the king has hired an unusual good-aligned goblin to serve as a messenger or something. (Actually, that's a pretty good way to make sure your messenger doesn't live very long. But still, you don't need to worry about little things like logic.)

Sounding a battle horn is a traditional way to signal the start of a massed attack. It's good because the signal carries a long way. This also means that the defenders will probably hear it too, which can go either way - perhaps they will get some warning of the impending attack and be more alert, or perhaps the ominous signal will send a shiver of fright through the defenders.

Here's a thing to try with an adventuring party. When they're camping overnight in the wilderness, have them woken by (or the person on watch hear) the sound of a horn call. Maybe it's off in the distance. Maybe it's quite close by, just off a few tens of metres in the thick forest. The adventurers should expect some sort of imminent attack. And then...

Nothing.

Do this three or four nights in a row for maximum paranoia.

Firing into a mixed group of enemies and allies is always a situation you should avoid if possible. Because you just know what's going to happen.

(Unless of course your shooters have semi-mystical or legendary level training. And the game style is highly cinematic. And the GM is feeling really generous.)

There was a bizarre bit of rules logic in the old original edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons concerning throwing other combatants. If you were strong enough to pick someone up, you could throw them. I forget the exact details, but there was some conflict between the amount of damage the thrown person would take when they landed (which might have been figured as falling damage), and the amount of damage they could do to a third party if they hit them (figured as being hit by a relatively soft improvised weapon - as opposed to being hit by a sword, say).

Or maybe there was a conflict between the amount of damage you'd take if you fell onto a hard surface, versus if you were thrown onto the same surface. Like if you fell onto it with a certain velocity you'd take a certain amount of damage, but if you were thrown onto it at the exact same velocity, you'd take a different amount of damage.

Or maybe it was a conflict between the amount of damage you'd take because of impacting a hard surface, depending on whether you hit the hard surface, or the hard surface hit you (at the same speed). Essentially violating the principle of relativity. (Not even Einsteinian relativity either - just plain old classical Newtonian relativity.)

Actually, knowing the original edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, there were probably logical conflicts in all three of these cases.

As MacGyver and the Mythbusters have taught us, anything can be rigged to explode. Honourable mention to Q Branch as well.

{whistle} Rule, Britannia...

"Chicken walker" - the term - is totally a thing. Not only is there a TV Tropes page about them, there's a Wikipedia page too. So no ragging on your players if that's what they choose to call them, despite your insistence on calling them "bipedal battle mechs" or whatever.

Aerial forces are often decisive in combat situations. Conventional historical battles before the 20th century essentially had no aerial forces (other than balloon observation posts, used for reconnaissance rather than weapons platforms). So the addition of fantastic aerial forces, either through use of magic, anachronistic technology, or fantastic creatures, can make a huge difference. Mass battles in many game settings will plausibly more resemble modern warfare, with diverse forces with different capabilities on land, sea, and air, rather than simply a few thousand men charging at each other across a muddy field.

The other consequence of this is that traditional medieval style defences, such as plate armour and castle fortifications, become much less useful. There's a reason people don't build castles for defence any more, and soldiers don't wear plate armour or chain mail any more. Modern attack forms render them much less effective, and aerial dragon squadrons and flying wizards would do the same.

Just something to think about when running a fantasy game.

War is not fun. Make sure to bring out the tragic side.

War is not fun. Make sure to bring out the tragic side.

There's often more than one approach to solving any given problem, and many different possible skills that can be brought to bear on it. Some skills might have a better chance than others, while some might be relatively useless for various reasons under the circumstances. But it doesn't mean you should have only one possible path to success.

If your players want to try breaking out of a cell by dissolving the bars with orange juice and a car battery, rather than trying to lift the keys off the guard as you'd planned, let them go ahead.

And definitely give them bonus XP for having the presence of mind to bring orange juice and a car battery.

There's little better than working a classic joke into an appropriate context within a gaming session. For some people, anyway.

Make sure you have a good repertoire of them ready for any occasion.

Data transfer speeds are frequently used in fiction as a way of establishing tension between a desire to do something and a time limit. If you had unlimited data transfer, you could accomplish various tasks instantly and not have to worry about the bomb countdown or whatever. So using them is not only realistic, but useful!

Just be careful not to get too specific about what the transfer speeds are in real units, and let the plot drive how long it takes to do something.

If something should be obvious to the PCs, resist the temptation to have an NPC point it out to them. The players will enjoy it better if they notice the thing and realise its significance for themselves.

Although what usually happens is it gets to the point where they should be slapping themselves for not noticing that thing earlier. Then you can either go ahead and have an NPC point out the obvious, and let them slap themselves, or let them suffer the consequences of not noticing the thing, and let them slap themselves. It's win-win, really.

If you're running a campaign in a world or culture which is not our own, it becomes tricky to keep your idioms logical. So many idioms rely on the background of shared culture we have that it's easy to drop them into conversations where they actually make no logical sense being used.

• "It's a piece of cake" - what if the setting has no such thing as cake?
• "What on earth are you doing?" - what if the setting isn't on Earth?
• "He's on a sticky wicket" - what if the setting doesn't have the sport of cricket?

What to do? Purge them from allowable conversations taking place in the game? Well, you could try, but that way lies madness. It's better to retain natural language and just gloss over the problem.

There's a long tradition of using targeting beams or other methods of seeing more clearly the interaction between where you're shooting and where you want to shoot. Tracer ammunition is the traditional approach with guns, in which some of the bullets or shells have pyrotechnics in them to make their trajectory visible. This allows the shooter to correct their aim.

You could even adopt a similar approach in a pseudo-medieval or even earlier setting, with some sort of "tracer arrows". Or in magical settings there might even be tracer spells!

If you really want to make it clear to players that the situation is hopeless: Totally outclass them with something that obviously isn't even the enemy's most powerful attack.

This is justifiable from a game balance perspective in that you don't want to wipe out the PCs before giving them fair warning, and from a reality perspective in that of course a villain isn't going to use the most powerful attack from the beginning, because which villain would be so sensible as to do that?

The movement of the Rebel fighters around the Peace Moon in response to this order from R2 and Ackbar, by the way, triggered a discussion on the relevance of the hairy ball theorem to to flow of ships relative to the moon's surface. So much so that we almost considered titling this strip "Hairy Moon Theorem".

Battle maps have a tendency to spread to take up slightly more than the available space.

Yeah, we don't have a tip for this. You just gotta live with it.

A bit of mild deception can go a long way when convincing people to do something they wouldn't otherwise. Use this trick in games by leaving out minor details when coaxing NPCs to do things. Like accidentally failing to mention the dragon, or the evil necromancer, or whatever.

Your GM does a difficult, thankless job, week in and week out, for no reward other than the look of anguish on your faces when the monsters ambush you because of your own stupidity, or you fall into a deathtrap because of your own stupidity, or when you inadvertently insult the Emperor because of your own stupidity.

So show some heartfelt appreciation from time to time and get excited when your GM presents something new and at least potentially interesting.

Some game systems try to provide "generic" rules that let you deal with different genres, ranging from high fantasy to galaxy-spanning science fiction to gritty cyberpunk to classical Greek to high-powered superheros. This involves dealing with variables on vastly different scales, with things like movement speeds, travel distances, and - pertinently - damage and armour. If you start with a game system that assigns a moderate amount of damage points to relatively advanced weapons - say 1d10 for a sword, or a pistol even - then any weapon which is less dangerous that that has to logically do less damage. And if there are several classes of lesser weapons, you end up squeezing the available space. And you can't assign an effective weapon a damage of zero, so the minimum damage per attack has to be 1 point.

In the first edition of (Advanced) Dungeons & Dragons, this infamously led to the statistics of a common domestic cat, as published in the Monster Manual II having an attack sequence consisting of a scratch with the forepaws for 1-2 points of damage, plus a bite for 1 point of damage, plus a special attack raking with the rear claws for an additional 1-2 points if the forepaws hit. This adds up to a total of 1-5 points of damage, assuming at least one hit in a combat round.

In this edition of Dungeons & Dragons, a normal non-adventuring human (say, a farmer) has 1-4 hit points. Which means that a domestic cat has a very good chance of killing your average farmer. In a single combat round. Adventurers are of course hardier stuff, and will have time to fend off the cat before it can inflict fatal damage.

Similar considerations can end up setting a high powered gun or other high-tech weapon to a certain amount of damage (e.g. a blaster pistol to 1d10), and then, independently, low-tech weapons to similar or even greater amounts of damage (e.g a staff to 1d12). Especially if the game designers don't check to see how the high-tech and low-tech rules work when combined.

Try to find the good points of whatever equipment you have available, rather than lamenting a lack of anything superior. You'll be happier, and you'll be better able to come up with ridiculous rule-bends that you can slip past your GM.

If you think you have immunity from something, make sure you really have immunity from it before tempting fate. Like if you have a ring that you think makes you immune to fire damage, stick a candle under you hand before you try swimming across lava.

From the other side, this is a cool limitation you can put on protective items. Sure, a Ring of Fire Resistance will let you get away unscathed from sticking your hand in a forge, or standing at point blank when a fireball spell goes off. But who says it'll work just as well for dragon breath, after you walk out confidently in front of a huge angry red dragon and taunt it with insults about its mother?

You can get circumstance bonuses on various skill checks for things like having appropriate tools for a tricky job, or buttering up an official while trying to fast talk them, or having the high ground when attacking someone.

If you have a favourable circumstance for one sort of skill check, then logically it should apply to all your skill checks. Right?

Playing dead in a running combat situation is a decent strategy. We're not sure it ever happens in roleplaying games though. Maybe give it a try one time when you think you're facing a superior force and things look like they're going badly.

At least the look on your GM's face as the wheels turn inside their head should be priceless.

Public Service Announcement: Do not text on your phone and co-pilot a ship in a huge space battle at the same time.

Unless of course you're a true badass with the leader of the Rebellion as your girlfriend.

NPCs have stories and friendships too.

Actually, they probably have more realistic lives and interpersonal interactions than most PCs.

PCs generally don't need much encouraging to do something rash. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't encourage them. Because with any luck they'll do something even more rash than you could have imagined, and that's when the fun really starts.

Heavy artillery is often decisive in a battle, so it makes sense to take it out of commission as soon as possible, if you can manage it.

If this involves attacking it hand-to-hand, so be it.

Never nitpick over realism with your GM.

Unless you enjoy your wounds being infected with gangrene, rather than healing with a long rest.

Having lots of different coloured dice is always useful for rolling lots of different things at once. And for showing off your collection and impressing the other players with it. In fact, the biggest dice collection should probably be worth bonuses in-game. It shows your character is likely to be obsessive and completist, which means a good eye for otherwise trivial details that other characters might miss.

Try that one on your GM and see how it goes.