It’s Ask Angry time again!

Every so often, I select one or two or more questions sent in by readers to answer with my characteristic mix of sarcasm, hyperbole, insults, and brilliant correctitude.

Want a shot at being one of my future Ask Angry victims? Just send your question to ask.angry@angry.games. Remember to cut to the chase — I get bored quickly reading anything not written by me — and tell me clearly what I should call you.

Tyler asks…

When preparing to run the first session of a campaign for a group of first-time players, what do you think is most important to include in order to help teach the game?

You know what I love most about this question, Tyler? Apart from the fact that you told me what to call you, asked me a complete question in one two-line sentence, and included a nice little note thanking me for my pure, undiluted awesomeness? I love that this question is really easy for me to answer. Seriously. I literally have a formula for this. In fact, it’s the formula I used when I wrote my introductory adventure module, The Fall of Silverpine Watch, which, for legal reasons, claims no compatibility with one of the world’s roleplaying games.

Anyway…

Rather than plug my work for the umpteenth time, I’m just going to distill it down to its essence so you can write your own introductory adventure for newbies. How does that sound? Well, I don’t care how it sounds. That’s what I outlined. That’s what I’m doing.

But first…

Angry’s General Advice for First-Time Adventures

Before I tell you how to structure your own first-ever roleplaying game adventure, I want to give you a few general tips and best practices. Some are new, some I’ve said before, so disregard the ones you’ve already heard.

Also, Tyler, I noticed on my final pass through this whole thing that you used a very specific word in your question that I missed on my first five reads through it. One that indicates that you’re probably going to ignore at least one of my general tips. You’ll see it when it comes by. Ignore it accordingly. It’s far too late me for to do a rewrite on this. That said, I really do think you should rethink. That’s assuming this whole thing isn’t moot given the weeks that have passed since you sent in your question. Sorry about that.

My first tip is to give the players pregenerated characters. Do not ask new players to make characters. Do not make that shit their first experience with roleplaying gaming. It’s an awful way to bring people into the game.

When you make pregenerated characters, keep them simple and don’t put anything on the character sheet that won’t actually come up in the game. Will background abilities matter? If not, don’t include them. Don’t even give the wizard a full-ass spellbook and ask him to pick spells to prepare. Just give him a list of already prepared spells. Same with the cleric.

Keep it simple, restrict yourself to the most salient stuff, and abbreviate the hell out of things. I could probably do a whole thing on making pregenerated characters for newbies if someone asked me nicely and waited a month for me to get to it.

The reason to keep the characters simple isn’t that new players can’t handle it or that they might get overwhelmed, but rather, because it’s clutter and it has nothing to do with what you’re trying to accomplish. The goal of a first adventure is to make the players want to play again. Make them want to make their own characters and dive into the full complexity of the game and forge their own stories. It’s more of a sales pitch than it is a play experience. Or, rather, it’s reinforcing the sales pitch that already got the players to the table.

Which is why your first adventure should never, ever start a campaign. Run one adventure. Then, if the players want to come back, start a real game from scratch.

That’s the part you probably won’t listen to. Or already didn’t. It’s fine. Moving on.

Most Game Masters think teaching people roleplaying games is about teaching them the rules. It isn’t. The rules don’t matter that much. The players do eventually need to know enough of the rules to make decisions and follow instructions, but most of the fiddly little specifics don’t need a residence in the players’ brain boxes. That’s what you’re there for. You’ll call for rolls, you’ll remind the players how things work, and you’ll adjudicate anything odd or strange. Most players with years of experience don’t even know the rules. That’s just how it be.

What you’re really trying to teach the players is how a roleplaying game works and how it’s played, and you’re also trying to draw them into the game’s world. That has nothing to do with the rules. Or at least, it has very little to do with game mechanics. I’ll explain that more below because it’s shot all through my Angry’s Awesome First Adventure Ever Template which is what I’m building up to here.

The other thing to remember is that a first-timer’s game experience can be really intimidating, even if it’s exciting and awesome. There are a lot of triggers when you sit down at the table. There’s a whole bunch of rules to learn, a complex sheet of statistics, a bunch of weird dice, and a whole lot of terminology that may or may not be familiar due to pop-cultural osmosis, but is nonetheless jargonny and confusing. Especially if there’s any cross-pollination from other gameplay experiences. Then there’s the fact that roleplaying games have a very unique, open-ended dynamic that puts a lot of pressure on the players’ decision-making and creativity. Roleplaying games are just built different. On top of that, there’s performance pressure and social pressure. It’s a social game and the host seems to be a brilliant expert, so no one wants to make a fool of themselves at the table.

Given all of that, players not only need, but greatly appreciate solid, straightforward things to focus on and limited demands on their creative and performative abilities. At least initially. Some players flourish at the table. Or they do once they calm down. The game can open up for them a bit as it plays out. The others need to be allowed to take their time.

One thing lots of introductory adventures do that I absolutely, positively hate is starting with the goalless, unstructured, You Guys Can Roleplay And Stuff Now scene. I ran Cubicle 7’s Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying Game Starter Set last year, and it hits the ground running with that horeshit. “You guys are in a marketplace. You can talk and shop and stuff. Okay, go!” It didn’t give the characters reasons to be in the market. It didn’t even give them anything to shop for. Fortunately, I wasn’t running it for rank newbies, but even those experienced players were a little wrong-footed.

Don’t do that shit. If you like that slice-of-life romantasy modern-world-in-Ren-Faire-kit play, fine and dandy, but you can’t do it out of the gate. You have to ease the players into being the masters of their own destiny and living magical lives in a fantasy world of monster-on-lesbian romance at the Wizard University Starbuccaneers.

Make sure the players have a goal and that they know what it is from the start. Don’t ask them to start interacting with each other before they’ve started to understand the basic game flow.

Finally, because the goal isn’t really to explain the rules, but rather to teach the gameplay, you don’t want to spend too much time explaining anything, and you sure as hell don’t want to spend the first hour of the session lecturing the players about the rules. Instead, start them playing the game and explain things the first time they come up, and only to the extent that the explanations are necessary. You can call attention to the wizard’s spells and say, “As a wizard, you can cast spells. You have four on your character sheet. Take a look at the names and basic descriptions I wrote down for you so you know what you’ve got at your disposal.” After that, you don’t have to explain about slots and saving throws until the player says, “Hey, can I cast friends here? It seems like it would help.”

Those are my general tips. Now, let’s get down to actually structuring an adventure one step at a time.

Angry’s Awesome First Adventure Ever Template

What follows here is my standard template for building first-time adventures. When I’m introducing new people to roleplaying games, regardless of the system, this is the format I use for the first part of the adventure. Think of it like the tutorial area. I can usually burn through it in half a session, and then the rest of the session and all of the next session is real, honest-to-goodness adventure.

Whatever adventure you’re going to write for the honest-to-goodness adventure part, remember to keep it simple, but also, don’t make the whole thing a tutorial. The tutorial should eat up a quarter to a third of the adventure. Your goal is to create a linear sequence of encounters that start the adventure off and introduce the right things in the right order, and then let the adventure open up.

In Fall of Silverpine Watch, the players are hired by a merchant to escort her to a distant village. The first several encounters, the tutorial encounters, are a series of minor events that happen on the road. Then the party reaches the titular fortress and finds their passage blocked. They have to enter the fortress, do a dungeon crawl, fight a ghost, and solve a mystery to win. It’s a fun, real adventure with some tutorial encounters that are also fun and let the players learn by playing.

Introduce the World And Also the Concept of Play Through Narration

Right off the bat, you want to do two things. First, you want to invite the players into the fantasy world and, second, you want them to understand that the game is primarily about the Game Master describing shit and then the players responding to that shit.

This is really easy to do. Just write a short, digestible paragraph that describes a world full of dungeons and dragons and fantasy adventure that the characters live in, and maybe do something to tell the players it’s as dark and dangerous as it is wonderful and mysterious, but that it’s also nothing like the real world they live in. Even traveling to the next town is a risky endeavor.

Obviously, modify this for whatever setting you’re running and whatever you think makes your world uniquely exciting and different from reality.

This seques nicely into…

Tell the Players the Goal of the Adventure

Whatever the goal of the adventure is, tell the players now. It’s best to assume they’ve already been hired and that the actual game is starting with them setting out on their adventure. This is where you switch from talking about the game and the world to talking to the players directly. This is where you refer to the players as “you” as if they and their characters are one. Because that’s the next thing you want to teach them. While the game is going on, players are basically their characters. They act as their characters in the game’s world.

In Fall of Silverpine Watch, I start with some general, dark age, world of fantasy adventure fluff, then tell the players they’re travelers just starting their adventuring lives. Each left home recently to seek their fortune. Then, an early winter stranded them in a fantasy city, and they were stuck living off pocket change waiting for the weather to break. That’s me setting up the world and establishing that it’s not like the real world. You can get stuck for months because bad weather makes travel impossible.

Then, I tell them that spring is finally here, they’re desperate for money and to move on, and the halfling merchant, Oona Tealeaf, has hired them to escort her through Silverpine Forest to a distant village. The goal is to get Oona and her cart safely to her destination.

Let the Players Introduce Their Characters

Now it’s time to get the players to interact a little bit. You want to ask them to introduce their characters. But you don’t need to do this in character. In fact, it’s better if it’s only lightly in character. I actually prefer not to have the players even pick their pregens from the pile until this step. That’s up to you. Either way, let the players read over their characters, ask any questions, and then go around the table and have each player give their character’s name, race, gender, and some specific detail that they can find on the character sheets. Maybe ask everyone to say what arms and armor they’re equipped with. Or ask everyone to pick hair, eye, skin color, height, weight, whatever, and then share that.

The First Interaction

Now it’s time to set up your first interaction scene. This is where you get your players used to the idea that they interact as their characters. You don’t want to leave this shit up to the players to do. You want to mediate the interaction. Set up a scene in which the players have to interact with an NPC that has an excuse to speak at least once to each of them.

Oona Tealeaf, for example, strikes up a conversation with each character while they’re on the road on the first day. She asks each character one or two specific questions about their background. Stuff that’s on the character sheet. It’s best if you don’t ask the players to invent details just yet.

You could have the party talk to the gate guard on the way out of town. The guard asks each person their name, where they’re going, and why. Or maybe a priest at a roadside shrine offers each a blessing of the gods, one at a time, but interacts with them a little first. “You carry that sword well. Are you a warrior? Very good, I shall bless it for you in the name of Kord, god of strength and courage.”

All of this shit is grounding the players in the world, in their characters, and in the general idea that the game ultimately plays out as a conversation that mostly takes the form of call-and-response. It also comfortably eases the players into thinking of themselves as their characters and the world as a real place. And it only takes about fifteen minutes to do all of this shit. And when I say that, I mean fifteen minutes from the very start. Fifteen minutes from “Welcome to world of Donjons and Dagrons!”

The First Challenge

With the gameplay dynamic and basic concept of roleplaying now established, it’s time to introduce the idea of action adjudication. The idea that you, the Game Master, will present situations, obstacles, and challenges; that the players will come up with ways around them; and that you will then use die rolls to determine the outcome. This is also where you teach your game of choice’s core mechanics.

Design a situation or obstacle that can be dealt with with a single skill or ability check and whose approach is reasonably clear. My adventure involved a fallen tree blocking the road and the need for a Strength check to shove it aside. You could use a narrow river with a boat tied up on the other side that someone has to swim to. You could use something to climb or something to break or something to sneak past. It doesn’t matter. Easier is better.

… And Other Challenges As Assigned

Here’s where you’ve got to decide if there’s any other major action-based mechanics you need to teach as their own thing instead of teaching as they come up. That depends heavily on your system. For example, if your system has a procedure for resolving Complex Checks or Protracted Tasks or Skill Challenges or some shit like that, and you plan to use that later in the real adventure, you might want to have a specific tutorial for it. If you’re doing a mystery-focused adventure, you might want to do some investigative stuff first.

Obviously, at some point, you’re gonna want to introduce combat. I prefer to do that later rather than earlier, but it’s all part of this same clump of other challenges.

Two things I definitely like to hit, though, that are easy to overlook because they’re not about mechanics, are the Everyone Doing Everything All At Once encounter and the Now You Explore On Your Own Initiative encounter.

The Everyone Doing Everything All At Once encounter asks multiple characters to take different actions simultaneously. It lets me show that I’ll sometimes delay resolving an action to keep the clock in sync as different characters act independently of each other. I spent a lot of time on this one in Fall of Silverpine Watch. There’s a scene where the horses are spooked by a snake in the road, Oona falls and hurts herself, the cart gets stuck, and there’s a snake hazard somewhere. Someone’s got to tend to Oona, someone’s got to calm the horses, and someone’s got to deal with the snake if they see it. It’s a nicely urgent scene that demands immediate action. As soon as someone says, “Oh, shit, Oona is unconscious and bleeding? Can I help her?” I can say, “Sure. Danae the cleric runs to Oona and kneels down to tend to her wounds. While she’s doing that, though, the horses are still trying to tear free of the stuck cart and might damage it or hurt themselves. Does anyone else want to act while Danae plays doctor?”

The Now You Explore On Your Own Initiative Encounter is a scene that’s interactable, but not urgent, and it invites the players to poke and prod and ask questions instead of reacting to a problem or threat. You can imagine the sorts of things that work here. A strange monument or shrine; an abandoned or destroyed campsite; a wrecked cart; or a library room or study with books, a chest, a tapestry, and a desk to examine.

Again, these are more about introducing play dynamics than about teaching rules. Of course, the rules certainly come up.  You’re teaching mechanics in every one of these scenes, but you’re also teaching gameplay dynamics. The spooked horse incident includes damage, healing, saving throws, death saves, and possibly even spellcasting. It also reinforces the action resolution stuff that came up earlier.

Obviously, somewhere in here, you want to do combat if combat is a big thing in your game. Combat is always a big thing in my games because combat is awesome. Your combat encounter should be reasonably simple, straightforward, and of modest difficulty. It shouldn’t be a cakewalk — I don’t even recommend building it too low on the difficulty scale — but it should be pretty standard and unambiguous. Something jumps out, snarls, attacks the party, and won’t give up the fight.

I like to do the combat after I’ve taught the Everyone Doing Everything All At Once thing, but before I do the Now Explore On Your Own Initiative thing. It just fits best there. You’ve moved on from “one challenge, one resolution, one character” to “everyone might have their own thing going on,” but you’re not quite up to, “you drive the pace from here on out.”

A Chance to Campfire and Chill

After the combat, or at any point that feels natural thereafter, you should deliberately provide the players with an opportunity to rest and encourage them to do so in no uncertain terms. If you’ve got an NPC with the party, that’s super easy to do. Especially if she’s their employer and she’s got a head wound and her horses just got bitten by feral dogs.

This is especially important if your game has any kind of rest mechanic, but even if it doesn’t, there’s still a gameplay dynamic to demonstrate here. The pause after tension creates both relief and an opening to interact. Which you also want to invite.

Again, if you’ve got an NPC in the party, it’s easy to get the players talking to each other in character. If not, the players may talk amongst themselves on their own. If not, you can ask them to describe what they’re doing at camp and, more importantly, suggest things their characters would or should or could do. For example, you can suggest that the fighter tend to her weapons and armor, you can suggest that the priest pray to his gods, you can ask the bard if she plays music, you can ask whoever has a cooking skill if they’re starting a fire and roasting some sausages, whatever. You can then feed that back, describing the scene, and letting it sit for a minute to see if anyone starts talking.

Another thing you can do is just talk to the players about the game in the hopes of starting a conversation between them. Even if they’re not talking in character, just getting them used to interacting with each other about the game is important. Especially during pauses in the action.

And Now the Real Adventure Begins… But Show, Don’t Tell the Players

Here is where the tutorial ends and the real game begins. To this point, everything has been a linear sequence of events, and the players have been reacting, following directions, responding to prompts, and learning. How you structure that depends on the adventure. I did it as a sequence of events on the road between the town and the actual adventure site. That might not work for you. For example, if you’re starting the heroes in a dungeon right off the bat, you might have to set these encounters in a sequence of one-after-the-next rooms.

Whatever you’re doing, though, it’s important to mark the transition with some kind of threshold. In my adventure, everything changes when the players arrive at Silverpine Watch and find the road blocked and the fortress abandoned. Even the weather changes. I ain’t subtle. Technically, though, the actual transition is the Now You Explore On Your Own Initiative scene wherein the players find the exsanguinated body of a traveler in the road and get to poke it with a stick. That just goes to show how rigid my template actually isn’t.

If you’re doing a dungeon, consider setting the real, actual adventure in the basement and the put linear, tutorial encounters in the ruined surface building. Maybe the party has been sent to the ruined temple to retrieve healing water, and the temple itself provides the linear series of tutorial encounters which end at the stairs to the underhalls.

Remember, the important thing here isn’t to follow this rigid structure and check off the boxes. Instead, you want to design a good, fun gameplay sequence that hits the important notes in the right order, and then opens up a bit to show the players the freedom that roleplaying games also provide. Even though you know you’re designing a tutorial teaching adventure, you don’t want the players to know that. You just want them to think they’re playing the game.

And with that, Tyler, I wish you good luck with your newbies.

Unless you’re already done with this shit because it’s been almost four weeks since I got your email. If that’s the case, I hope it didn’t suck.