It was late after work, and we were sitting around the table, dice in hand, talking.  The scene had been set by our DM. We were a ragtag band of religious missionaries trying to save a city from being slaughtered by Coalition forces.  After the enemy army had ambushed the army in a nearby field, the Coalition forces besieged the local city nearby, blaming a spy for the ambush. If we weren’t able to locate the spy within a week’s time, the Coalition forces would raze the entire city and slaughter the innocents.

We were faced with a pressing problem.  Unfortunately, our problem wasn’t finding the spy.  We had four hours to play, and we had spent over an hour discussing the best path forward and failed to come to a definitive plan.  Here we were playing along in a world of our creation, and we seemed to be paralyzed by the idea of messing up, doing the wrong thing, and dying.

This experience made me think a lot about what Dungeons and Dragons and other Tabletop RPGs represent.  I think the best way to sum up my thoughts is this: Losing isn’t what you think it is.

For many people, the point of games is to win them.  Winning typically means accomplishing the task set before you.  In chess, this means putting your opponent in checkmate. In D&D, this typically means accomplishing the goal the DM puts in front of you or achieving your character’s desires.

Despite this, it’s important to remember that the potential outcomes of D&D don’t always correlate with whether or not your characters accomplish their stated goals. When you walk away from a session, whether or not you succeeded is a very small aspect of what’s important.  The most important part of any particular game is this: did you have fun?

Take my game as an example.  By the end of the session, we identified the spy and saved the day, but we had spent half of our entire session just discussing strategy.  I was content that we had succeeded. We had done everything so safely. Somehow, we had managed to avoid a single mistake, and this meant there hadn’t been any risk.  Never once did I think my character was in real danger. While my party members enjoyed the session I lot, I enjoyed it but still felt hungry for more action.

When I discussed this with my friends, they said they understood my point, but they mentioned how much it would’ve sucked if something had messed up.  “We could’ve died!” said one friend.

This is where “winning” is so non-traditional in D&D.  You win in D&D if you have fun, and you can have fun if you make great stories.  Whether they are stories of triumph or a fun tale of how your party botched their mission, you have fun when you’re talking about a session for months afterward. 

On the upside of making a risky choice in D&D, you might have more fun putting things on the line, and if your risk succeeds, your character is even closer to the goal, which feels good. 

On the downside, your character is farther from your goal, which might stink, but these sticky situations can make for great stories.

How do your characters pull the party back from the brink?  If they don’t recover, how does a character heroically die? While a character death or TPK might occur, both of these leave you with more stories and more fun. In both the positive and negative outcomes, you’re having fun.  You’re winning the game.

While I know this might be my own opinion, I’d recommend all D&D players to take more risks.  Remember that the worst that can happen is a character death that leads to a new character sheet and new stories.  Make memories with your friends, and don’t shy away from risky things. Remember that D&D is made up for a reason. It’s a time to feel epic, to feel powerful, to be the hero of the story.  While failure might not feel like a goal, any epic quest has its ups and downs. It’s better to have your triumphs and despair than your small wins and losses. Better to have mountains and valleys than hills and troughs.  So please, take risks. Losing isn’t what you think it is.

Last time I wrote a piece about bandits, but this time we’re going to talk about another monster with a very specific narrative role. Except this monster isn’t a monster at all. It’s just an animal.

Those of you who read my last article saw this one coming a mile away. I’m talking about wolves.

Seriously, why is it always wolves? Well, wolves provide an important storytelling tool. They show the adventurers that the wilderness is dangerous. The thick forests and jungles which lie between settlements are often fraught with peril, not just from other humanoids, but from the very earth itself. Nature is a foe no less dangerous than a bandit with a knife. 

Except wolves don’t need to be the only predatory animals you can use to showcase this. Seriously, I think that I’ve fought a pack of wolves in every D&D campaign I’ve played in, and I may well have thrown packs of wolves at most of the D&D parties I’ve run games for. It’s easy to see why we’d default to using wolves. Fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and werewolf fiction have turned the wolf into the apex predator of the forest. 

If you’re considering using wolves, I’m assuming you’re likely going for a northern European vibe, but consider this – panthers have the same Challenge Ratings as wolves. Naturally you find them in jungles, not forests, of course, but perhaps you’d consider relocating your campaign to a more tropical setting so as to vary up your toolbox of wild animals?

But, if you are set on a European setting, you’ve got an easy alternative: a boar. They’re territorial, ill tempered, and they’ve got big-ass tusks. If you think a wolf howling at the moon is scary, imagine a pack of wild boars rushing at you.

However, nature can be deceiving, and animals do not always behave in ways we expect them to – especially when they’re enlarged. No one questions a giant spider eating people because we view spiders the same we view wolves, with an atavistic dread, even though in real life normal-sized spiders are absolutely terrified of humans. What other animals would become a lot more threatening if we scaled them up? 

Badgers. Your party may well come across a giant badger in the woods and think it cute, think it harmless. But real-life badgers are meat-eaters – they love earthworms, grubs, insects, eggs, and baby birds.

Yup. Real-life badgers eat baby birds. Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? Now imagine the appetite of a badger the size of a semi. Suddenly that giant badger isn’t looking as cute, is it?

You can play with your players’ expectations by having normally cute animals suddenly get nasty once they’re scaled up to giant size. This teaches them the first law of nature – survival of the fittest. Once a badger is big enough to eat something larger than earthworms, it will, regardless of whether that something has a face or not. And in doing so, you warn your players that nature is not only unpredictable, but also apathetic. It does not care about them. And that makes it all the more dangerous. 

Beasts aren’t the only option, of course. For monsters of nature, we can also look at the Fey and Monstrosity categories – after all, Monstrosities are basically just Beasts that are big and scary and have no real-life analogues. I’d make a mention of the Plant enemies in the Monster Manual, but most of them are too high-level CR for your first-through-third level parties, except for blights and the awakened shrub (the former of which are pretty boring, the latter of which is…just a bush).

And if you really want to mess with your players’ expectations, throw a pack of velociraptors at them. Even if you never feature another dinosaur again, your players will spend the rest of the campaign wondering what else might be lurking out there in the woods. 

When playing D&D, I find the most important and hardest step is character creation.  You’re given a slew of options and need to build a narrative, a personality, quirks, and a functioning stat line.  Most importantly, your decisions are permanent. If you’re preparing for a campaign, you might be locked into the same class and backstory for months or years.  If you’re a worry wort like me, you might fear you will have to play a character you don’t like for hundreds of hours of game time. It’s stressful.

In order to help others assuage their fears and worries about character creation, I wanted to detail the moments in character creations that have led to my having the most fun.  In this first piece, I wanted to discuss shared backstories.

When we first started playing D&D, our first encounter would always include our characters meeting each other.  Our DM would savor the moments describing us, reading from our scribbled descriptions of ourselves and highlighting the look, feel, and mood of our characters.  Once we were done being introduced, the characters would begin to talk. After saying our names, someone would begin to squabble with someone else. The rogue would steal a bottle of vodka from the bartender, and the paladin would turn him into the police.  The two players in real life would begin to argue. The “fun” continued the whole night.

The dolts we were, we would often play several sessions with a diametrically opposed party.  While the DM tried to shepherd us from one encounter to the next, we would constantly pursue our own agendas.  These campaigns never lasted long and, to be frank, they weren’t very entertaining.

This all changed the day that our DM sat us down before our newest campaign.  “Okay,” he said, taking out the character sheets he was always kind enough to print out for us, “today, I’m not starting the encounter until everyone in this party has a reason why they know each other.”

The mood of character creation changed immediately.  Instead of us sitting in quiet consternation and leafing through the player’s handbook, we were cracking jokes and coming up with stories.  We built our characters with the other players in mind, choosing our quirks and interests so they complimented each other. We had a ton of fun collectively story-telling, and that fun continued in the actual adventure.  Suddenly, our characters worked together. We usually stayed on track, and, more importantly, when we strayed from the plot, we strayed as a team. Our characters cracked inside jokes. We loved and despised NPCs together.  It benefited our play immensely.

Over the years, I can attribute shared backstories to some of my favorite campaigns.  In one campaign, a friend of mine and I played as two brothers, one an assassin and the other paladin.  While they disagreed with each other’s ways, the familial bond made their relationship one of respectful disagreement.  Additionally, these shared backstories strengthen your character’s development by encouraging them to push each other in dialogue and action.

Not everybody wants to work on shared back stories, and not everyone can (it doesn’t always make sense in a one-off environment).  However, if you’re interested in building more parties based on shared backstory, I wanted to share some tips for creating your party I’ve learned over time.

1. You like and respect each other

Parties that get along can often collaborate to get up to amazing antics or accomplish phenomenal deeds.  I’d recommend that every party starts party creation with the assumption that every player character likes each other.  This doesn’t actually limit the party at all. As mentioned in the paladin and assassin example, two seemingly opposite characters can respect each other and become fun narrative foils.

2. Always ask the other player what they would like

In one rough character creation session, a rather new player was working with a more seasoned veteran.  The new player wanted to be a character with a noble background. When the veteran asked him how the character would fit into the party, the new player said, “Well, I’ll be your former lord.”  The veteran looked at him confused and replied, “No, I don’t think that’s going to happen.” The table sat quiet for a second. The DM jumped in to explain to the new player how he couldn’t dictate others’ backstories.

If you’re building backstories with others, lead with questions.  Ask them what they would want. Don’t accept anything until you land on a shared story that both of you are happy with.  If it’s not a “hell yes!” from both of you, it’s a “no.”

3. Ideally, you all know each other

I’ve found that there is a positive correlation between the number of characters that have a shared background and the amount of fun the party has.  Characters can know each other from different moments in their life. Three characters can all be childhood friends; two could have fought in a war together; two more worked together on a heist.  The more connections the party has going into it, the better the party will be. This gives each player more to draw from for storytelling, and it gives the DM more to use.

If you’ve ever played a long campaign, you can likely remember the fun of having a shared history and chatting amongst your characters now that they’re old friends.  Why not start there?

Hopefully, you can these rules to build a better party and have more fun.  As always, these are just suggestions. However, I hope you try them out!

Do you have any of your own rules for crafting parties?  Comment them below!

This month, I’m lumping goblins and kobolds in together because they’re pretty much interchangeable in terms of their world-building role. They’re diminutive but clever humanoids that eke out meager lairs in caves and grottoes, generally underground – hence why they tend to be the default enemies for Player’s First Dungeon. Another reason they make great foes for Player’s First Dungeon is that they’re humanoid enough to have relatable motives (greed, a love of shiny things, the will to survive).

They’re skilled trappers and hunters, and towards evil, but their villainy is somewhat limited in scope. However, when they have time to prepare their defenses and work together, they teach the players not to underestimate enemies based on size alone, and also about the value of teamwork. Goblins make use of basic guerilla warfare, making hit-and-run attacks before ducking back out of sight, while kobolds utilize their strength in numbers through their Pack Tactics trait.

So, we want enemies that require smarts to make the most of their abilities, be that stealth or sheer numbers. We want them human-esque, but suitably monstrous. We want evil, and we want it lurking in an underground warren, the typical dungeon setting.

Lets talk about grimlocks.

What the hell is a grimlock? you might ask. You’d be right to. I’ve never used them. I’ve never seen them used. I’ve never even heard of an actual player encountering one.

Well, the concept of the grimlock is that they’re the evolutionary descendants of underground-dwelling peoples. They hunt by smell and hearing, as they have no eyes. They’re devolved, savage creatures, but they’re smart enough in their primitive mindsets to set up traps and snares, as well as crafting simple tools and weapons. And they’re not picky about what they eat…

This might all sound very familiar to fans of the science fiction genre. They’re effectively clones of the Morlocks from The Time Machine, if you’ve read the book (or seen the movies). Other Morlock clones throughout scifi include the mutants from Pandorum and the ghilliam from Warhammer 40,000, or any other flavor of “devolved underground nocturnal humanoid”.

Grimlocks are ambush predators. Their pebbly grey skin gives them advantage to stealth in rocky terrain – such as the underground lairs where the vast majority of dungeons are set. Their weakness, Blind Senses, means that they can’t “see” if they’re deafened or cannot smell, meaning that cantrips like Prestidigitation-analogues, Minor Illusion, and Thunderclap will all have a lot of utility. This has the added benefit of teaching players to use their abilities in creative ways, and to size up their foes for potential weaknesses that can be exploited. If you want to take this even further, you can make your grimlocks vulnerable to Radiant Damage. Telegraph this to the players by putting a hole in the dungeon’s roof, letting sunlight from above come in. A charred grimlock corpse lying on the edge of the spotlight will say all you need.

If you want to spice up a grimlock encounter with some more variety, you can give them some domesticated beasts such as giant lizards or giant spiders to use as steeds or riding beasts. Grimlocks can use rust monsters as excavators and guard dogs alike – their iron scents allow them to seek out mineral-rich caverns to feast on, and then the grimlocks move into the hollow left behind. The rust monster can also use its sense for metal to warn if surface dwellers are near (grimlocks craft their weapons from organic materials such as wood, bone and leather, so rust monsters pose little issue to them). Grimlock lairs will also be set up with conventional traps such as tripwires, deadfall pits, and breakaway urns containing swarms of insects, along with cultivated clusters of mushrooms such as shriekers and violet fungi.

Grimlocks have no naturally occurring spellcasters, so any magic-users will be those who have gotten ahold of magic items looted from dead adventurers. These grimlocks are also likely to act as the chieftain of the tribe they lead. They won’t be able to use any items that require attunement, and the rust monsters will have eaten anything metal. Unlike with most monsters, glitter or shine holds no interest to the blind grimlocks – they prefer things with interesting textures, smells or sounds, such as Bags of Tricks, Dust of Sneezing and Choking, Eversmoking Bottles, nonmetallic Figurines of Wondrous Power, Oil of Slipperiness, Pipes of Haunting, and any manner of Potions.

Next week, we look at the staple of the wilderness encounter – the wolf.

The bandit in D&D is a strange creature. Medieval bandits were bullies who wanted money, so they hid out by the roads of trade routes or pilgrimages and then threatened to whack people with big sticks. The D&D bandit, however, is wealthy enough to afford leather armor, a scimitar, and a crossbow with ammunition, yet is somehow still poor enough to need to turn to a life of crime. What’s more, these bandits aren’t content to simply ambush unarmed civilians and bully them for money – for some reason they love to pick fights with heavily armed and armored Player Characters (presumably for the greater rewards of their weapons, armor and gold).

So in D&D, what narrative role does the not-so-humble bandit fill? Even if the bandit makes no sense in-universe, a bandit company provides a humanoid threat for early-level adventurers, which means they’re more relatable than orcs and goblins. Easily understandable goals – such as greed for material goods – drive the bandits.

More importantly, bandits are geographical creatures. Bandits set up their lairs near abandoned human structures, preferably on the edges of the wilderness where lawbringers are found in fewer quantities. Abandoned mills, dilapidated farms, as well as mines and caves all have the little nooks and crannies that bandits love for stashing loot and gear, especially if they’re near a road where there’s high civilian traffic. Once the bandits have set themselves up in position, they won’t go on the move until someone gets sent to clear them out – *cough cough like the Player Characters*.

They’re greedy, territorial thugs that like violence and loot, taking sick thrills from preying on the weak. The NPC Bandit is to the PC Murderhobo.

You know who else are greedy, territorial assholes who like to dunk on the defenseless? Faeries.

Everyone has this image of fairies in their head. It’s Tinkerbell. Faeries are supposed to be small, sweet, and kind-hearted. But even in Peter Pan, Tinkerbell was a jealous prankster. In most traditional folklore, faeries are nasty tricksters at their best, and downright vicious antagonists at their worst. They’ll tie your hair to your bed frame, steal your money straight out of your pocket, kill your pets, magically enchant you to dance until your feet break, and kidnap your babies to raise as their own. If you’re lucky, they’ll leave a changeling behind which looks like the child they abducted, which will stick around until it hits puberty, at which point it scurries off into the woods to return to its faerie kin.

What’s more, like bandits, they’re aggressively territorial. Don’t go into a faerie wood. Don’t.

So, when we stop and think about it, bandits and faeries fulfill very similar archetypes. However, fey have more magical abilities, which forces the players to use their own magical abilities to counter them. This makes fey more interesting tactically than bandits.

Blink dogs are effectively the faerie equivalent of a mastiff, serving as hunting dogs and trackers. However, blink dogs can use their teleport ability to disappear after attacking in melee, re-appearing behind cover to protect themselves from ranged attacks before their prey has the chance to counter-attack.

Satyrs serve as your mainline bandit analogues, armed with bows and swords, and you can use them the same way you’d use normal bandits. Sprites can also be used to backup your Satyrs and fill the gap of less deadly but still dangerous enemies.  Sprites don’t deal much damage on their own, so they use their poisoned arrows to debuff characters, making the job of fighting easier for the rest of their team. Sprites will target low-AC characters who look physically frail, such as wizards and sorcerers, to maximize the chances of their arrows landing and poisoning their targets.

A trio of a Satyr, a sprite, and a blink dog will make a good challenge for a second-level adventuring party. If your party is higher-level, you can add more enemies or throw in a dryad as the group’s leader. The dryad will use her tree stride ability to keep at a thirty-foot distance from the main body of the party, casting entangle on as many players as she can to slow them down and lock them in place for ranged attacks from the satyrs and sprites. Once that’s done, she attempts to charm whoever looks the weakest-willed, targeting obvious brutes like fighters and barbarians first. 

Instead of just sending the players to clear out another bandit encampment, pitting them against fey can provide a very different type of adventure than players might be used to. Encounters with small groups of fey can foreshadow the presence of a planar gate to the feywild, possibly taking the form of a secret pools, a wild groves of shifting mists, or a circle of mushrooms and standing stones. How the players choose to proceed with this knowledge will lead to new narrative and world-building options for your story.