This Feature is part of my ongoing True Campaign Managery course. If you’ve not been following it from the beginning — or you don’t know what the hell I’m babbling about — visit the True Campaign Managery Course Index to catch up.

A Note From Professor Angry

I gotta acknowledge that this course has gone a little off the weed or however you say it. I started with a pretty solid outline and presentation order for True Campaign Managery but an outline is just a plan and execution must include adaptation. Thus, as I wrote, I went deeper into some topics than I planned and bounced around in ways I didn’t intend. That was partly because I felt it necessary and partly in response to questions and comments so I ain’t sorry for it and it wasn’t wrong.

That said, I need to move on from the social dynamical shit for a while and get back to more game-related topics before finishing up with the big ole planned finale that is Conflict Resolution for True Campaign Managers. Given that — and given this Feature wasn’t going to get any less late — I spent some time rebuilding the outline to right the ship as it were.

If today’s Feature — and the three that follow it and then the multi-part module that follows them — seem like they’re coming right the fuck out of nowhere, that’s why.

Anyway… on with the show. Lesson. Feature. Glorified blog entry by a guy who’s still stuck in the early twenty-aughts of Internet content creation.

True Mechanical Managery

Take your seats, kids and kidettes. Get out your pencils and shut your noise holes. Class is in a session. And we’re starting a whole new topical module thingum today. Unlike the previous social crap, this actually has to do with tabletop roleplaying games and the playing and running thereunto pertaining… of… with… whatever.

Specifically, today’s lesson — and the several that follow it — are all about the rules of your game and how you manage them. Which is actually different from using the rules to run the game.

Not that the rulebooks will tell you so.

Figure It Out For Yourself

Most tabletop roleplaying gaming rulebooks are really good at giving you the mechanical code that runs the gameplay universe. They’ll tell you, for instance, that when a party kills a monster, they earn 500 Experiences and when a fight breaks out, you flip the Initiative Coin to figure out who goes first and when a character runs out of Meat Points and fails two Comeback Rolls in a row, stick a fork in them because they’s done. Or whatever your rules du the jour tell you. I literally don’t care what system you run. I don’t sell systems — yet; it’s coming — so just play whatever floats your shit.

The rulebooks don’t usually tell you, though, how to record and remember and step through the turns in a fight in the proper order. That’s for you to work out. Maybe buy one of the dozen different purpose-made tools on Etsy or pick the virtual game space with the best turn tracker or reject that shit and download a mod.

Likewise, the rulebooks tell you when a character dies, but they don’t tell you what the hell to do about it. Because, seriously, dead characters disrupt the game. All of a sudden, you’ve got a player with no character to play, a party that’s down an entire member’s-worth of resources and abilities, and — assuming your players don’t suck ass at playing their characters like actual people — a group of sentient beings who just lost an ally forever in a pitched fight to the death and now have to face the question of what to do with the remains, how to pay their proper respects, and whether to disregard their sacred duty to respect the dead as they’d respect the living for the sake of pressing on on their graverobbing treasure hunt.

And, of course, while the rulebooks tell you how many Experiences every thing is worth and when each character crosses the Experience Ping Point, they don’t tell you when to do the math, award that shit, and do the hour of fucking bookkeeping required so all the spellcasters can suddenly, magically have new spells in their spellbooks.

In short, the books tell you exactly what to do mechanically, but they don’t tell you how to do it or why it matters. Because it does matter.

This Shit Matters

The issues I raised with my trademark hilarious sarcasm — shut up, I’m a damned delight — the issues I’ve raised ain’t trivial things. How you handle the whole Experience and Advancement thing? That affects game balance, obviously. Suddenly, the characters are more powerful relative to their upcoming challenges. It also affects pacing because, to dole out Experiences and Ping Up, you’ve got to stop playing the actual game. Moreover, all this shit about Experience and Advancement represents some very intrinsic and extrinsic gameplay incentives. It affects how players feel about the game. Most Game Masters don’t realize what they’re losing with bullshit Level-by-Fiat or Milestone Leveling or Plot-Point Advancement or whatever the hell you call your, “You get levels when I damned-well say you do and you’ll thank me for it” approach to character progression. I don’t care which term you think is correct so don’t start with me. Yes, I’m looking at you. You know who you are.

If you think Experience and Advancement are a big deal, that’s nothing compared to how Character Death matters. Even if you don’t choose to make Character Death a part of your game — you pussy — that’s still got repercussions and you’ve got to figure out how to handle that shit. With Character Deaths comes balance issues and resource management issues and pacing issues, but, there may also be serious plot issues considering one-fifth of your campaign’s plot plots just got cut off. Depending of course on how you structure your campaign. Then, too, there’s this little issue with a player being completely — albeit temporarily — eliminated from the game. This then brings about all the mechanical, resource management, and plot considerations that come with working in a replacement character. Every Character Death issue also comes with all the issues that arise from Creating Character Life.

Funnily, all the same Character Death issues crop up when and if you lose a player from the group due to scheduling bullshit or external realities or because you have to take the Conflict Resolution equivalent of the nuclear option. The New Character Life issues arise when you either invite a new player to your group or find a replacement for Steve after nuking him.

If I was an angry, opinionated, judgmental egotist… wait, let me rephrase that.

Given that I am an angry, opinionated, judgmental egotist I have to point out that roleplaying game designers totally fail in their duty to us consumers by not giving us firm, hard rules for how to handle this shit. It’s nice to have options — to a point; I’ll get to that in a few paragraphs — but it’d greatly improve these games if the rules said shit like, “When you die, make a new character at this level with these resources and meanwhile, dole out Experiences at the end of every session and you can only level up in town” and shit like that. Provide optional approaches in the sidebars, obviously, but don’t just give me a bunch of vague, wishy-washy essays that say, “Handle this however you think is best, it’s your game” without actually exploring the mechanical, pacing, plot, gameplay, and psychological considerations of each choice.

That said, if Perkins and Crawford did the jobs you paid them 50 damned dollarydoos a book to do, you wouldn’t need me. So thanks, Chris and Jeremy. Without you, I’d have to get a real job.

But speaking of options…

Written Optional Variant Alternatives to the Rules as Written

There’s a whole other side to this whole Managing the Mechanics thing. If you pop open the Options menu in your Donjons et Dagrons campaign, you’ll find dozens of little checkboxes and settings you can toggle and tweak. What the hell am I talking about? I’m talking about Optional and Variant Rules. They’re scattered throughout the rulebooks and it’s your job — because you were dumb enough to volunteer to Manage a Campaign — it’s your job to sift through all those options and decide which to check and which to uncheck.

Modern D&D gamers — especially players — don’t even know how many optional rules there are in D&D. Hell, you’re probably using a bunch yourself and don’t even know they’re optional. Do you make your players roll dice for their Ability Scores? No? Do you use the Standard Array or Point-Buy? Congratulations, you modded your game. Do you let players choose Feats? That’s a mod too. Do you use miniatures or tokens on some kind of map to play out your fights? Technically, you ain’t playing vanilla D&D, you filthy modder.

My point ain’t to call you out for not running pure D&D. Like I said, I don’t care. My point here is to point out that there are vast wodges of optional rules in every system. Each and every one changes the game somehow. Some emphasize certain themes over others, some change the gameplay pacing or the mechanical depth and complexity, some offer new options, some remove options for streamlining purposes, and so on and so forth and cetera and nauseum.

True Campaign Managers actually sift through all that shit and make careful, thoughtful, deliberate choices while Mere Campaign Supervisors just operate on assumptions and do whatever it is that they’ve always done or whatever everyone else does which is why everything thinks Point-Buy and Feats are core rules instead of variants. Moreover, True Campaign Managers dumb enough to do the whole Group First Campaign Vision thing really should go through all the alternatives and options and checkboxes with their players when they make their Campaign Vision Boards.

Open the Damned DMG Dumbass!

Wouldn’t it be cool — assuming you want to make a big thing about divine magic — if there was a stat to track each characters’ relationship with their patron deity? It’s on DMG 23. Did you think that Loyalty system I put on allies and henchmen was cool? Think D&D should have had something similar? Check DMG 93. Morale’s there too, by the way, on DMG 273. Want to add some specific injuries to the Meat Point system so players have to seek specific kinds of healing after critical hits or getting downed in a fight? There are Injury rules on DMG 272. Do you miss being able to spend Healing Surges in the thick of battle? Do you wish characters had to expend healing supplies to patch themselves up during a rest? Do you want to do the horror thing and want some Fear and Sanity rules? All of that and more can be found in your Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Every last thing I just mentioned is a thing that someone’s pissed and moaned about D&D lacking and begged me to design for them. I ain’t saying every one of those things is fully realized, mechanical gold. It’s a mixed bag. Obviously, I was less than impressed with the DMG’s take on Loyalty and Morale so I wrote my own subsystems, but I wasn’t plugging a hole the designers forgot to fill. When you tell me that D&D doesn’t do something that I know it has a rule for, all you’re telling me is that you can’t be assed to know the rules of the game you claim to be a Master of and your laziness means I have to work twice as hard.

Of course, I get paid for that shit too. So, I’m glad you’re lazy but understand that you and Jeremy Crawford occupy the same space in my brain. It’s not a nice space. So open your damned books.

Splatbooks: Giant, Steaming Piles of Option

I know I’m dating myself with the term Splatbook, but I have to date myself because no one else will. I’m so alone. Why won’t anyone love me?

Sorry…

Splatbook’s an old-timey — and it hurts me to refer to things from my youth as old-timey, but that’s life and it’ll happen to you too, someday — Splatbook is an old-timey term for the rulebooks publishers publish after the core rulebooks are published to pump players’ wallets a little more. It’s what we called DLC back when we had to game with sticks and rocks because there was no electricity yet so we couldn’t turn on our computers and download electronic content.

In D&D, you’ve got your three core books — the Player Book, the Monster Book, and that one book with the magical items and a bunch of other crap no one reads — and then you’ve got books like Xanthem’s Guide to Everything and Tasha’s Uncontrollable Hideous Cash Grab and so on. For Pathfinder, you’ve got a giant beast of a core book and the Book of Beasties, and then you’ve got add-ons like Oh No, More Gamemastering and The Advanced Handbook for Advanced Players and Guns, Germs, Steel, and Other Unforgivable Equipment Anachronisms and So You Thought Magic was Complicated Before? and a bunch of other shit like that.

Each splatbook’s loaded — for a given definition of loaded — each book’s loaded — WotC, for example, has a very anemic definition of loaded while Paizo goes for a “struggling to breathe under the dense morass of the load they dumped” approach — each book’s loaded with bunches of optional rules and systems and new equipment and options and new optional ways to option already existing variant options.

The point is, you’ve got options, but that probably doesn’t surprise you. After all, if you belong in my True Campaign Managery course, you’ve been riding in this rodeo long enough to know you can prance around on anything from a basic Appaloosa to a fucking Equestreon 2024 Cyberhorse with Enhanced Nanocarbon Myofiber Cyberleg Technology™. You don’t need me to tell you options exist.

I’ll tell you why you actually need me and what the hell I’m driving at in a minute. But first…

Character Creation: The Straw-Covered, Broken-Backed Horse of Roleplaying Gaming

If there’s one part of the whole tabletop roleplaying game thing that really shows how the game can strain under the weight of all its options, it’s Character Creation. These days — well into the D&D and Pathfinder edition cycles when there’s a metric ass-ton of optional options — Character Creation is kind of like taking five kids to It’s Sugar, the NYC candy department store and literally largest candy store in the world, giving each a thousand-dollar gift card, and then saying, “Okay kids, we’ve got fifteen minutes before we’ve got to be on the uptown train so, you know, grab what you want and let’s go.”

Most Game Masters — self totally included — want nothing to do with Character Creation. Let’s be real: Character Creation is meaningless, boring, and unrewarding, and it’s the least game part of the entire game. If you ain’t actually making the character, Character Creation is like watching a stream of someone playing just the character-making part of Baldur’s Gate III for anywhere from two to seventeen frigging hours. The more options and sliders and build choices and sub-build sub-choices, the longer it takes and the less meaningful and impactful every one of those choices becomes.

Worse yet, if you’re shepherding inexperienced players through the process — not complete newbies, mind; that’s why God invented pre-generated characters — if you’ve got inexperienced players to get through Character Creation, working through all the options — and making sense of them given each players’ limited contextual understanding of the game itself — is a full-time workday without a paycheck at the end.

This shit only gets worse once the game starts. If you’re trying to actually run an actual roleplaying game as a roleplaying game and thus you’re trying to actually fit the characters into the fictional world in a way that makes sense, you have to carve a place for every race and class and build and spellcasting subsystem every player’s brought and they’ve all got to make sense relative to each other too. Of course, if you’re laying the world’s foundation before you let the players make their characters — an approach I call The Right Fucking Thing to Do — then you have the simple task of making sure every option ever fits in the world somewhere.

Of course, it’s also your job to mechanically resolve everything everyone does in the game. That’s what Game Mastering actually is. Most players can’t — or just don’t — keep track of how their characters work so that’s on you. You have to know what every character can do and how it all works and every option you can’t resolve without cracking a book or reading a card is another drag chute tied to your already flagging campaign.

Given all of this, it’s appalling to see most Game Masters barely even think about the Character Creation process. They just turn their players loose on D&D Beyond or in their Pathfinder library. “Just make characters,” they say. “The game starts in two weeks.” It’s not that they — the Game Masters — feel overwhelmed or they’re afraid to set limits, they’re just careless and thoughtless.

Nothing exemplifies the difference between Mere Campaign Supervisors and True Campaign Managers quite so well as how each handles Character Creation. The lack of thought and deliberate care is the entire point of the next several lessons I’ve got chambered and ready to blast you in the face with.

Manage. Your. Mechanics,

Count yourself lucky I don’t do emojis or else I’d have done that obnoxious clapping thing in that heading.

Anyway…

It’s like this… there’s more to the game’s mechanics than the raw rules of the game. Character Advancement is about more than how many points you give out and when the characters power up. Death is more than just what happens when characters die. There’s more to optional rules and rules options than the options the rules add. There are impacts beyond the mechanics.

True Campaign Managers recognize that shit and so, True Campaign Managers, take time before the game starts to make thoughtful and deliberate choices about how they’re gonna manage the mechanics. They do it before they let a single player toss a single die or spend a single point on any attribute. It’s part of planning a campaign.

Make the Rules Work for You

First, note that making good Mechanical Management choices can emphasize, de-emphasize, highlight, or downplay aspects of your game’s setting, themes, or, really, anything at all. Proper Mechanical Management can completely change how it feels to play your game.

You can really juice up a good vision with good Mechanical Management. If your game’s all about honor and personal achievement and shit like that, Renown and Honor rules are a no-brainer, right? But consider how the races and classes you allow can communicate that. At the very least, you might want to drop rogues, assassins, and necromancers. Consider too how dealing Individual instead of Group Experience awards might make the players think about their personal contributions to each glorious victory and how it might change their actions.

This ain’t just about visions and themes either. If you’re stuck with an inconsistent schedule, streamlining to avoid losing table time to bookkeeping can really help the game succeed. That might mean anything from only allowing less complex characters to ensuring that Advancement, Character Creation, and replacement Character Creation all happen away from the table. If your inconsistent game is also really deadly, you might even require each player to have a backup character ready-made and on deck.

But, whereas the right choices can amp up your game, the wrong choices…

Don’t Get Bogged Down

The wrong Mechanical Management choices are to a solid gameplay experience what a crowbar is to a kneecap.

Consider, for example, that really inconsistent game. Imagine what it’d do to the game if you stopped at the end of every encounter to dole out Experience Points and if you stopped the game to let players level up their characters the moment they tick over. What a waste of gameplay time.

What if you’re doing that Honor and Glory game — say, honorable members of an ancient Empire struggle to hold their values while fighting off foreign invaders — and you open the Character Creation floodgates. Let everyone make whatever they want from every option ever published. On top of that, you skip the math — because math is hard — and just do Session-Based Group Experience. You just give everyone the same XP total just for showing up and not dying.

Consider too what I said about shepherding newbies through Character Creation if you open those Character Creation floodgates. If you let everyone choose anything that’s ever been published on D&D Beyond.

Obviously, the wrong Mechanical Management choices can ruin a great vision.

And then there’s the danger of making no choices at all…

Solve Problems Before They’re Problems

Think back to that whole, long Scheduling and Attendance thing I did. I told you the whole point of all of that was to have a plan so you wouldn’t be sitting with your thumb up your ass saying, “What do I do? What do I do?” when obviously predictable and inevitable problems — like players missing games or snowstorms canceling sessions — arose.

The same’s true now. The first time a character dies at their table, every Game Master ends up with their thumb up their ass saying, “What do I do? What do I do?” Why? There are rules for death in the book and life-or-death battles whose outcomes are determined by random numbers. How the hell did you not see the possibility that a character might die?

If you’ve never had a character die at your table, I want you to imagine you’re running your next session right now and, due to a mix of shitty die rolls and piss-poor decisions, one of your players’ characters kicks it. What do you do? You have zero seconds to answer. Because zero seconds is all it should take. You should already have a plan.

By the way, I’m not asking you to share your plan. That’s for a future lesson. Don’t bother with it in the comments. Besides, no one believes you’d come up with that plan before I asked and you’re a damned dirty liar if you claim you did.

Certain things are always clunky problems at the roleplaying gaming table. Death’s one. Character Death is a possibility in every actually good roleplaying game. That means it’s gonna happen eventually. The less likely it is to happen — because D&D makes it pretty rare — the less prepared you’ll be for it so the more you need a plan. Moreover, the kind of campaign you’re running can make certain problems worse. If you’re running a campaign about destined chosen heroes who are the only ones with the power to defeat the Dark Lord, you’d better be ready in advance when the dice override destiny and put one of the chosen few in the ground.

And no, dumbass, the answer isn’t, “See, that’s why you never run a game about destined chosen ones.” Games about destined heroes are awesome. You’re just cutting out an entire class of perfectly valid fantasy tropes because you can’t handle your mechanics. Loser.

Meanwhile, even if you never need to deal with a dead character, you’ve also got a plan for when you have to kick Steve out of your game because he’s an asshat. Or when you invite Tanya to join your group to replace him.

Characters are gonna gain Experience Points. They’re gonna level up. But, still, every Game Master running their first campaign gets blindsided when the party gets enough XP to level up and someone says, “So, do we level up now or… what?”

True Campaign Managery is about giving your campaign the best chance to be the best it can be for as long as you want to run it. That means making good Mechanical Management choices. You want to support the game you’re running, avoid weighing it down, and have a plan for the problems you know are coming.

A Two-for-One Module Introduction

This is the start of not one but two extended, multi-part lesson modules. That’s right, I laid the foundation for something like six lessons in one go. I’m just that awesome. Given that, I really hope you’re picking up what I’m putting down.

I hope you know, first, what I mean by Mechanical Management. I mean making good, logical, deliberate choices about how you plan to use the game rules and what game rules you’ll use to give your campaign the best chance to succeed. I hope you recognize that the game’s mechanics have impacts beyond what happens at the table. That how you apply and administer the rules can affect your game’s pacing, balance, plot, and overall gamefeel. Certain campaign visions and choices can amplify drastically the effects of your Mechanical Management choices.

True Campaign Managers make deliberate, thoughtful, forward-looking choices about how they’ll manage the game’s rules at the table and — especially — how they’ll respond to particularly troublesome game mechanics either for roleplaying games in general or in the specific campaign they’re planning to run. True Campaign Managers don’t want to be blindsided.

The next three lessons will comprise the module I’m calling True Mechanical Managery. I plan to teach you how to make the best Mechanical Management decisions pertaining to Character Advancement, Character Death and Replacement, and finally, sifting through all of a game’s Optional Rules. I ain’t gonna tell you what choices to make and which approaches are best. Instead, I’m gonna help you decide which choices are the best for the game you’re running.

After that, I’m going to launch into the next multi-lesson module. That one’s all about how to handle all aspects of Character Creation.

And with basically four months of content now planned and set-up, this lesson’s over. Get the hell out of here.