Most campaigns rely on a single Game Master (GM) to guide the game and bring a crafted world to life for a group of players (a party), typically ranging from 3 to 5 individuals. The GM serves as the essential connection between the imagined setting and the players, ensuring the narrative flows smoothly and the game remains fair. Yet, the role of the GM is far more multifaceted than just arbitration, as they take on numerous responsibilities to shape the game’s experience.
What is a Game Master?
You might already know what a Game Master is. The likely definition, if you’re reading this, is “you.” But if you don’t know, a Game Master (or GM) is the player who arbitrates the rules of the game and controls the actions of every game element that isn’t explicitly controlled by the other players. But as any experienced Game Master knows, being a GM is also much, much more.
- Host: Game Masters are the unifying force behind most of the game, not just organizing a social event but providing excitement and entertainment for those who participate.
- Mastermind: GMs work to keep a game’s momentum moving in directions that entertain all the players while exploring the stories and settings they desire. To such ends, a GM manipulates dozens of elements, from how narrative components unfold to what rules are used and how they function in every situation.
- Mediator: Just as GMs make sure all of a game’s plots and rules work together to entertain, they must also ensure that the players themselves mesh and cooperate.
- Actor: Through the GM, the cast of entire fantasy worlds takes the stage. In a given session, a Game Master might play a generous peasant or a conniving king, a rampaging dragon or an enigmatic deity. Whatever the persona, the GM’s characters are only as convincing, endearing, despicable, or memorable as the person who portrays them.
- Patron: While GMs constantly confront their players with all sorts of dangers, they also serve as the source of every reward the PCs ever gain, from each experience point to treasures of legend.
- World Builder: GMs control nearly every aspect of an entire fantasy reality. With not just one world, but perhaps even multiple planets, planes, or even stranger settings under the GM’s direction, the more insight and forethought invested into the ways and workings of locations, the more believable these become.
- Storyteller: Among a GM’s most important tasks is imagining and telling engaging stories.
- Game Designer: Even with the vast range of options available, only GMs know what threats their players might face or powers they might come to control. Just as GMs arbitrate the rules within their games, so can they manipulate, repurpose, and wholly invent new rules to improve their games.
- Director: Over the course of a campaign, Game Masters have need of dozens of characters and hundreds of encounters, choosing and customizing each and presenting them, however, best aids the overarching plot.
Regardless of skill or experience as a Game Master, it’s likely that every GM can identify one of these roles as an area in which she lacks experience or confidence. This site seeks to address such needs, counseling on challenging aspects of campaigns, contributing new options and inspirations, and refreshing the game’s classic elements. Most importantly, the countless tools herein are designed not to change games or tell GMs how they should play, but rather to inspire new stories and save effort, leaving GMs with more time to run exactly the adventures they and their groups want to play—or have been playing for years.
Multiple Game Masters
Although uncommon, it is not unheard of for a campaign to have multiple GMs working together to craft and run the game. This collaborative approach can create a richer, more diverse world, but it requires careful organization to avoid chaos. Without clearly defined roles, the campaign risks becoming disjointed, often leading to a “too many cooks” scenario. To ensure smooth gameplay, specific responsibilities—such as encounters, game design, or roleplaying NPCs—should be assigned to each GM. This division of duties helps prevent overlap and keeps the campaign cohesive while allowing each GM to contribute their strengths to the experience.
Customizing Your Game
Roleplaying games are, at their cores, simulations, with most rules focusing on how to perform epic feats and participate in the fantastic adventures of legendary heroes.
When to Design?
Part of a GM’s fun is not just coming up with exciting adventures, but devising new ways to present his adventures. While Chapter 2 discusses many techniques a GM might use to make his campaign more captivating, good organization, tracking tools, handouts, and the like aren’t always enough. Sometimes, a GM might find that there’s no perfect fit within the existing rules for an encounter, creature, or other element he’d like to include. Yet rather than being deterred and having to reimagine his adventure, it’s completely within the GM’s purview to get creative with the rules to make what he wants or a campaign needs. Ultimately, while the rules are designed for ease of use and to promote fairness in a game, they exist to help a GM tell his story, and should never be a hindrance to play. If revising the rules or reworking them to better suit a situation improves an adventure, the GM is within his rights to make any adjustments he sees fit. At the simplest level, such changes might be purely cosmetic—using the stats of an existing monster while describing some new threat, or describing a magic item differently from its typical interpretation, for example. In other cases, actual rules might be altered as the GM chooses, though the balance and fairness of the game should always remain a consideration. There’s nothing wrong with increasing the hit points of a major villain or monster if the PCs risk breezing through a campaign’s climax, or increasing the DC of a disease meant to be especially virulent. In such cases, though, the GM should consider if not making a change is actually bad for a game. Sometimes real heroes slay a dragon in a single round or shrug off the world-ravaging plague, and such things make the players feel special and remain memorable long after the adventure ends.
Occasionally, though, an adventure might call for a change that a cosmetic alteration or a random adjustment won’t satisfy. In such cases, GMs have the option of creating their own simple subsystems to handle exactly the circumstance they desire. Aside from what a GM determines, there’s no other authority that a rule or subsystem must appease for use in a game. While published rules typically have the benefit of professional design and extensive playtesting, there’s nothing preventing any GM from designing his own components. This could be basic, like using existing rules to create magic items or monsters; more complex, like using existing spells as guidelines to create new ones; or wholly new, like many of the subsystems in this chapter. While GMs uncomfortable with the details of a game may want to keep things simple or mimic existing rules, those more experienced might attempt to design any element they feel could improve their game.
Designing new elements for one’s game doesn’t need to be daunting, and taking cues from existing examples serves as a fantastic departure point. A GM might design wandering monster tables for his specific adventure, customize a new kind of staff for a villain, or create a new kind of flaming tornado hazard for a side trek onto the Plane of Fire. In each of these cases, templates or components exist for such elements, requiring just a bit of customizing on the part of the GM, yet feeling completely unique to the players—which is all the matters. On the other side of the spectrum, should the GM have need of complex rules for arguing in court, climbing on titanic beasts, or firing a laser canon, he might be forced to rely on his own ingenuity. In such cases, simple, flexible systems tend to work best, especially when they rely upon established rules. In the case of courtly arguments, one might devise a scale for a king’s opinion, and have the actions and urgings of PCs and NPCs affect the scale in one way or another, creating a more nuanced system for argument than a mere Diplomacy check. GMs should try to test their rules systems before games begin, compare them to existing rules, and then let the players know that they’re trying rules the GM has created himself. If things go poorly, the GM can adjust elements on the fly or even abandon the system in favor of more standard rules—and go back to the drawing board after the game. If things go well, though, the GM might solicit feedback and make additional adjustments, tinkering until he’s devised a useful new tool.
When to Disguise?
Often the appearance of a rule works just as well as a rule. For a GM faced with a situation for which there seems to be no obvious reference in the game’s rules, yet who also lacks the time or interest needed to create a new subsystem, good storytelling, even-handed arbitration, and a bit of deception can typically solve the problem and keep a game moving along. When need for a new rules element unexpectedly comes up mid-game, that’s rarely the time to stop and begin designing new rules. While you can easily make a few cosmetic changes to existing rules and stat blocks if you know of elements that might serve as good stand-ins, sometimes players come up with plans no rules system could account for. Say a PC wishes to run, leap off a cliff, and attack a dragon soaring past, digging in his axe to maintain a hold on the soaring beast. While rules exist for elements of the action, sticking and hanging onto a weapon embedded in another creature is not part of the game system. Yet rather than denying a character the opportunity to attempt a heroic feat, you could easily rely on the results of the rules you do know to arbitrate those you don’t. For example, if the same character rolls high on his Acrobatics skill check and significantly exceeds his target’s AC with his attack, you could declare that her plan works and she’s now being dragged along by the dragon. Alternatively, if the PC botches either roll, she might be in for a long fall. Either way, interpreting existing rules in an unconventional way, or even just calling for an ability check to suggest either a good or poor result, can save you from paging through volumes of rules trying to find a nonexistent perfect fit. And with some shuffling of notes and hidden dice roles, no player should be the wiser to such an improvised ruling.
Designing Encounters
The heart of any adventure is its encounters. An encounter is any event that puts a specific problem before the PCs that they must solve. Most encounters present combat with monsters or hostile NPCs, but there are many other types—a trapped corridor, a political interaction with a suspicious king, a dangerous passage over a rickety rope bridge, an awkward argument with a friendly NPC who suspects a PC has betrayed him, or anything that adds drama to the game. Brain-teasing puzzles, roleplaying challenges, and skill checks are all classic methods for resolving encounters, but the most complex encounters to build are the most common ones—combat encounters.
When designing a combat encounter, you first decide what level of challenge you want your PCs to face, then follow the steps outlined below.
Step 1—Determine Average Party Level (APL)
Determine the average level of your player characters—this is their Average Party Level (APL for short). You should round this value to the nearest whole number (this is one of the few exceptions to the round down rule). Note that these encounter creation guidelines assume a group of four or five PCs. If your group contains six or more players, add one to their average level. If your group contains three or fewer players, subtract one from their average level. For example, if your group consists of six players, two of which are 4th level and four of which are 5th level, their APL is 6th (28 total levels, divided by six players, rounding up, and adding one to the final result).
Step 2—Determine Challenge Rating (CR)
Challenge Rating (or CR) is a convenient number used to indicate the relative danger presented by a monster, trap, hazard, or other encounter—the higher the CR, the more dangerous the encounter. Refer to Table: Encounter Design to determine the Challenge Rating your group should face, depending on the difficulty of the challenge you want and the group’s APL.
Table: Encounter Design
| Difficulty | Challenge Rating |
|---|---|
| Easy | APL –1 |
| Average | APL |
| Challenging | APL +1 |
| Hard | APL +2 |
| Epic | APL +3 |
Step 3—Build the Encounter
Determine the total XP award for the encounter by looking it up by its CR on Table: Experience Point Awards. This gives you an “XP budget” for the encounter. Every creature, trap, and hazard is worth an amount of XP determined by its CR, as noted on Table: Experience Point Awards. To build your encounter, simply add creatures, traps, and hazards whose combined XP does not exceed the total XP budget for your encounter. It’s easiest to add the highest CR challenges to the encounter first, filling out the remaining total with lesser challenges.
Table: Experience Point Awards
| CR | Total XP | Individual XP | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1-3 | 4-5 | 6+ | ||
| 1/8 | 50 | 15 | 15 | 10 |
| 1/6 | 65 | 20 | 15 | 10 |
| 1/4 | 100 | 35 | 25 | 15 |
| 1/3 | 135 | 45 | 35 | 25 |
| 1/2 | 200 | 65 | 50 | 35 |
| 1 | 400 | 135 | 100 | 65 |
| 2 | 600 | 200 | 150 | 100 |
| 3 | 800 | 265 | 200 | 135 |
| 4 | 1,200 | 400 | 300 | 200 |
| 5 | 1,600 | 535 | 400 | 265 |
| 6 | 2,400 | 800 | 600 | 400 |
| 7 | 3,200 | 1,070 | 800 | 535 |
| 8 | 4,800 | 1,600 | 1,200 | 800 |
| 9 | 6,400 | 2,130 | 1,600 | 1,070 |
| 10 | 9,600 | 3,200 | 2,400 | 1,600 |
| 11 | 12,800 | 4,270 | 3,200 | 2,130 |
| 12 | 19,200 | 6,400 | 4,800 | 3,200 |
| 13 | 25,600 | 8,530 | 6,400 | 4,270 |
| 14 | 38,400 | 12,800 | 9,600 | 6,400 |
| 15 | 51,200 | 17,100 | 12,800 | 8,530 |
| 16 | 76,800 | 25,600 | 19,200 | 12,800 |
| 17 | 102,400 | 34,100 | 25,600 | 17,100 |
| 18 | 153,600 | 51,200 | 38,400 | 25,600 |
| 19 | 204,800 | 68,300 | 51,200 | 34,100 |
| 20 | 307,200 | 102,000 | 76,800 | 51,200 |
| 21 | 409,600 | 137,000 | 102,400 | 68,300 |
| 22 | 614,400 | 205,000 | 153,600 | 102,400 |
| 23 | 819,200 | 273,000 | 204,800 | 137,000 |
| 24 | 1,228,800 | 410,000 | 307,200 | 204,800 |
| 25 | 1,638,400 | 546,000 | 409,600 | 273,000 |
| 26 | 2,457,600 | 820,000 | 614,400 | 409,600 |
| 27 | 3,276,800 | 1,092,000 | 819,200 | 546,000 |
| 28 | 4,915,200 | 1,640,000 | 1,228,800 | 819,200 |
| 29 | 6,553,600 | 2,184,000 | 1,638,400 | 1,092,000 |
| 30 | 9,830,400 | 3,280,000 | 2,457,600 | 1,638,400 |
For example, let’s say you want your group of six 8th-level PCs to face a challenging encounter against a group of gargoyles (each CR 4) and their stone giant boss (CR 8). The PCs have an APL of 9, and Table: Encounter Design tells you that a challenging encounter for your APL 9 group is a CR 10 encounter—worth 9,600 XP according to Table: Experience Point Awards. At CR 8, the stone giant is worth 4,800 XP, leaving you with another 4,800 points in your XP budget for the gargoyles. Gargoyles are CR 4 each, and thus worth 1,200 XP apiece, meaning that the encounter can support four gargoyles in its XP budget. You could further refine the encounter by including only three gargoyles, leaving you with 1,200 XP to spend on a trio of Small earth elemental servants (at CR 1, each is worth 400 XP) to further aid the stone giant.
Adding NPCs: Creatures whose Hit Dice are solely a factor of their class levels and not a feature of their race, such as all of the PC races detailed in Races, are factored into combats a little differently than normal monsters or monsters with class levels. A creature that possesses class levels, but does not have any racial Hit Dice, is factored in as a creature with a CR equal to its class levels –1. A creature that only possesses non-player class levels (such as a warrior or adept) is factored in as a creature with a CR equal to its class levels –2. If this reduction would reduce a creature’s CR to below 1, its CR drops one step on the following progression for each step below 1 this reduction would make: 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6, 1/8.
High CR Encounters: The XP values for high-CR encounters can seem quite daunting. Table: CR Equivalencies provides some simple formulas to help you manage these large numbers. When using a large number of identical creatures, this chart can help simplify the math by combining them into one CR, making it easier to find their total XP value. For example, using this chart, four CR 8 creatures (worth 4,800 XP each) are equivalent to a CR 12 creature (worth 19,200 XP).
Ad Hoc CR Adjustments: While you can adjust a specific monster’s CR by advancing it, applying templates, or giving it class levels, you can also adjust an encounter’s difficulty by applying ad hoc adjustments to the encounter or creature itself. Listed here are three additional ways you can alter an encounter’s difficulty.
- Favorable Terrain for the PCs: An encounter against a monster that’s out of its favored element (like a yeti encountered in a sweltering cave with lava, or an enormous dragon encountered in a tiny room) gives the PCs an advantage. Build the encounter as normal, but when you award experience for the encounter, do so as if the encounter were one CR lower than its actual CR.
- Unfavorable Terrain for the PCs: Monsters are designed with the assumption that they are encountered in their favored terrain—encountering a water-breathing aboleth in an underwater area does not increase the CR for that encounter, even though none of the PCs breathe water. If, on the other hand, the terrain impacts the encounter significantly (such as an encounter against a creature with blindsight in an area that suppresses all light), you can, at your option, increase the effective XP award as if the encounter’s CR were one higher.
- NPC Gear Adjustments: You can significantly increase or decrease the power level of an NPC with class levels by adjusting the NPC’s gear. The combined value of an NPC’s gear is given in Creating NPCs on Table: NPC Gear. A classed NPC encountered with no gear should have his CR reduced by 1 (provided that loss of gear actually hampers the NPC), while a classed NPC that instead has gear equivalent to that of a PC (as listed on Table: Character Wealth by Level) has a CR of 1 higher than his actual CR. Be careful awarding NPCs this extra gear, though—especially at high levels, where you can blow out your entire adventure’s treasure budget in one fell swoop!
Table: Character Wealth by Level
| PC Level | Wealth (gil) |
|---|---|
| 1st | Variable (see class) |
| 2nd | 1,000 |
| 3rd | 3,000 |
| 4th | 6,000 |
| 5th | 10,500 |
| 6th | 16,000 |
| 7th | 23,500 |
| 8th | 33,000 |
| 9th | 46,000 |
| 10th | 62,000 |
| 11th | 82,000 |
| 12th | 108,000 |
| 13th | 140,000 |
| 14th | 185,000 |
| 15th | 240,000 |
| 16th | 315,000 |
| 17th | 410,000 |
| 18th | 530,000 |
| 19th | 685,000 |
| 20th | 880,000 |