Join Ang along with Josh and JT as they talk about how to navigate the curveballs life throws at us and gets in the way of us playing RPGs. It’s going to happen at some point or another, so let’s figure out how to handle these speed bumps!

LINKS:

Podcasts JT Listens To

Just Dice Kickstarter

Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey

Astarion BG3 Prequel by T Kingfisher

The tabletop role playing experience is a collaborative one. That’s a well-established fact. To properly collaborate, everyone at the table needs to be aware of the interactions at the table. I’m not talking about what NPCs the PCs know or how the Big Bad Villain interacts with their lieutenants and such. I’m talking about the “metagame” interactions that exist between the humans sitting at the table. This is a complex web as each player has a relationship with each other player and the GM. The more people you have at the table, the more complex this gets. I would hope everyone is friendly toward one another (if not, find a new group).

To lean into those interactions both in the game level and at the table between the people sitting in the chairs, I have a set of advice here (and in next month’s article, too) to help everyone get along better and deepen the game experience. Yeah. That’s right. This is a two-parter because I have enough to say on the matter to have enough content for two articles.

Each section in these two articles will focus on how the GM can enhance the game with their interactions to the players. In addition, I’ll have advice for the players on how they can act, react, respond, and interact with the game to make things better.

Be Their Biggest Fan

As the GM, you should cheer on the players when they come up with great ideas, make awesome rolls, or perform spectacular feats with their characters. Even if your carefully curated plans are completed foiled by what the players do or come up with, you need to be proud of their accomplishments. Don’t get salty if they find a logical shortcut to what you had in your mind as a solution. Don’t tamp down on spectacular abilities or if a player finds a way to stack up bonuses to get +40 on their athletics skill check to jump between ships to get to the bad guys’ captain more quickly than you had imagined possible. Find those events amazing and congratulate the players on putting things together just right.

For the player side of things, support the GM’s storylines. This is more than just taking the bait to start an adventure. If an important NPC gets introduced, lean into a conversation or interaction with them. If the GM throws you the spotlight for an encounter or scene, then take that light and shine in it. Don’t brush off opportunities to do things or become even more awesome than you already are. The GM has spent time coming up with these things (or has spent copious time studying a published adventure) to enhance your game play. Be eager to delve into the storyline!

Reel Them In

In one of my Adventure Design articles, I talk about good story hooks and starting adventures. The article delves deep into the topic, but the gist of the article is that you need a strong start. Give the players some bait on the hook to latch onto when the adventure starts. It’s hard to catch a fish with a naked hook, so you have to make it appear juicy on the surface. There also needs to be some good content under the surface to keep the momentum going once the players latch on.

As a player, you need to take the bait. Grab the hook. Actually, don’t just grab the hook. You need to swallow it whole! If the GM has dropped an obvious setup for an adventure, don’t complain about it being irrelevant to your character. You don’t know that yet. This may just be a starter session to get things rolling, and it’ll become more obvious later to you that events really are relevant to you and your character.

Higher Powers

Game masters are not a higher power. They are not a deity of great power. Yes, the GM may have home brewed an entire world for the players to romp around in, but this does not make them the all-powerful, all-knowing god that is in control of everything. If you, as the GM, have this concept in your head, I assure you that you have less control over the events that are underway than you think.

For players, you are not to worship the person on the other side of the GM’s screen. They are imperfect and will make mistakes. If you spot a rule being misused and it’s a detriment to the game, bring it up in a nice and friendly manner. If it’s not a detriment to the game, wait until after the session (or between sessions) to bring it up. If you see a flaw in the story or a contradiction in who is recalling past events, ask some questions to get clarity on the situation. Don’t step up and directly challenge anyone (the GM or your fellow players), but some questions of clarification come across as less confrontational and can lead to better storytelling down the road.

Trust But Verify

If a player is about to make a horrible decision or take a less-than-smart action with their character, it’s perfectly fine for the GM to ask, “Are you sure you want to do that?” That opens the door for a conversation about what the character would know versus what the player perceives as reality for their character. There are many times when the character would inherently know something that the player might be oblivious about. This is because the character “grew up in the world” while the player may have only read a “three page summary” of the world. As Ang has said many a time on the Gnomecast, “Trust the competency of the characters.”

For the players, if you get a strong hint from a GM, stop and listen. Consider your planned actions and the ramifications of those actions. It might not mean the death of your character, but it could lead to a paladin being stripped of their holy powers or a druid losing spells due to violation of their neutral stance in the world, or something similar. These are great times for open and honest communication between the GM and the players to ensure everyone is on the same level with the same information. Of course, after the conversation, you can still proceed with your declared action at your own risk. At least you’ll be doing it with full information.

Conclusion

As I said at the top, this is the first part of a two-parter. Next month, I’ll be talking about four additional aspects of how to handle the interactions between GMs and players.

Join Ang along with Jared and Tomas as they talk about short campaigns. They cover the major differences between a traditional long campaign with a short one, the reasons we might want to run one, and many things to keep in mind.

Links:

Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG

Pirate Borg Starter Set

Goth Borg

Join Ang along with Chris and JT as they talk about Narrative Positioning! What even is that and what does it mean for our games? They dig in and have a conversation about it.

LINKS:

The Streets of Avalon

MinMaxed

Tentacles and Tales

Origins Game Fair 2026

Never let it be said that Gnome Stew doesn’t keep up with the times. We’ve heard all this buzz about LLMs and CCCs and ROPs and whatever and we know that the future is AI. It’s one of the few rare advancements in technology that comes with no downsides and has no drama around it.

So, to keep up with the times, and hopefully put all of our gnome authors in the stew quicker, we have been hard at work synergizing the future and maximizing sharegnome profits with our own AGI – Artificial Gnome Intelligence! Introducing HATGPT – the next evolution in gaming and gamemastering advice!

While still in the initial phases of development, we have made sure our AGI is fully environmentally friendly. Well, it’s powered by hamsters on play wheels being force fed french fries, so there are some… undesirable… outputs from the power source. We tried to bypass the hamsters and just go with potato batteries, but the spuds were a dud so we cut them up and moved onto plan C. Unfortunately the Chipmunks started a band and got popular on tik tok, so we tried and tried again, finally – plan H for hamster provided viable results.

The thinking engine of the AGI is built from innovative future forward technologies and is 100% small batch and organic. You see, when you make stew out of gnomes, there are some parts that don’t cook well. Thanks to groundbreaking recycling efforts from Dr. Gnome-en-stein, we were able to take those leftover bits of greymatter, clump them together, wire em up, and stick them in a jar. One console input later and we were able to  launch HATGPT.

10 Years

Wow.

I’ve been roaming these halls and avoiding the stew pot for 10 years now.

Just wow.

Rough Start

I’ve been writing for Gnome Stew for ten years now. My first article dropped on March 28, 2016. It was an attempt to describe the differences between gaming, narrating, and simulation. This is a huge topic, and I probably wrote 3,000 words in my first draft on this topic because it needed 3,000 words to delve into. However, I took the Gnome Stew guidelines to heart (being a new Gnome and all that). The guidelines for our articles are to keep them “bite-sized” and between 700 and 1,000 words each. I managed to carve my 3,000 words down into a 973 word article. It didn’t do it justice. I should have done an intro and a series of articles about each aspect of gaming I was trying to tackle. In short, I’d bitten off more than I could chew, and I produced a subpar article that deserved (most of) the hate it received in the comments and in social media. Some of the more egregious and hateful comments have been deleted since then. I almost quit Gnome Stew immediately based on the hateful feedback I’d received from some folks that are no longer allowed to comment on articles. Fortunately, John Arcadian (Head Gnome at the time) came to my rescue and gave me a much needed pep talk. He said my article was fine, but was probably too much content for a single article. He was right. I’ve learned my lesson on how to break out articles into longer series.

Series

I’ve done a handful of series articles since those days. I’m not going to link to the articles because that would be annoying, but if you search for the keywords I’m about to drop, you can find the articles.

The series that I’ve dropped on Gnome Stew include:

• PC Backgrounds
• Interesting World Building (foods, weather, foliage, urban locations, fauna, rural locations, magic appearances)
• Adventure Design (which was a 13-part, 15,000 word effort)

Lots of Words!

During my time at Gnome Stew, I have (not counting this article) written almost 130,000 words of advice for a wide variety of players and GMs across a wide variety of topics. You can see my 100,000 word retrospective that I wrote back in 2023 that covers my highlights since I started in 2016. I also have a 40 year retrospective about my 40 (now more) years in gaming and how I’ve seen the TTRPG arena evolve in that time.

Indie Explosion

Since those two retrospectives, I’ve seen shifts in interest from the larger publisher to more indie publishers in terms of popularity. Sure, Wizards of the Coast with D&D is still the 800-pound gorilla in the TTRPG room. However, the explosion of new games (too many to list) since WotC/Hasbro caused the OGL debacle three years ago has done nothing but improve the options for all types of players and GMs out there in the world. For me, I’m extremely happy to see all of the different ideas, concepts, rules, and tools that have come about since then. It truly is an exciting time for gamers.

Those Other Games

Scrolling back in my own history back to the early 1980s, there was one RPG: D&D. Period. End of Story. Yes, I’m now aware that back then there were other games available during that time, but finding them on the shelves of B. Dalton Books or Walden Books was nigh impossible. For those of you that are much younger than me, this was also before the days of the Internet and World Wide Web. There was no “search engine” to find alternative games. It was either on the shelf at the bookstore or it didn’t exist. It wasn’t until my mid-teens that I was lucky enough to have a friendly, local game store in my hometown. Even then, there were the three shelves of D&D and the one shelf of “those other games.”

I was fortunate enough that one of “those other games” included a good variety of games like Top Secret/SI, Gamma World, Tunnels & Trolls, Traveller, and so on. I loved playing all those non-D&D games in addition to D&D itself. The fact that I could expand my world beyond “only D&D” really helped me improve my RPG chops as a player and GM. Based on my past experiences, I urge you with extreme fervor to play more games than “only D&D” in order to expand your horizons and have more fun with TTRPGs than the “typical fantasy” that D&D presents. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing D&D, but there are more spices to taste than that one flavor.

Hope You Continue Hanging Out

To wrap up, I’m still super happy to be here at Gnome Stew, and I’m grateful for John Arcadian’s pep talk to keep me here. I’m also extremely humbled (even to this day) at the initial invite John sent my way. I can’t wait to see what ideas bubble up to the top of my idea list in the future.

I hope you’re here along with those ideas to see what they bring.

Define Free Play vs. Core Play

Let’s set up a few definitions and then work out from there. I use the term free play, which is borrowed from Blades in the Dark, which are scenes where the “characters talk to each other (or NPCs), do things, and make rolls as needed”. In Blades, this is in contrast to the Score Phase and Downtime, both of which are more regimented in their goals and rules. To broaden out that definition a bit, free play is play that is outside the core loop of your game.

Core Loop? That is the main set of activities and actions that form the game. In a game like Night’s Black Agents, the core loop is to collect clues until you are ready to take an action, then take an action, repeat until the mission is over or the mystery is solved. 

Core Play is then when you are playing through the core loop, and is in contrast to free play, which can be play that is not advancing or supporting the core loop. 

What does a Free Play session look like? 

You don’t have to do a whole session, and we get into that below, but for the sake of giving an example, here is what a free play session looks like in my Blades campaign. Every player gets an objective they want to achieve for the night. For example: making new contacts in the occult underworld. That objective is broken up into two scenes, an A scene and a B scene. 

During the session, I go around the table doing the A scene for everyone. The A scene always sets up some challenge to achieve that goal. For example, you meet this cultist, but you need to prove to them that you are worthy of learning more. They may get an action roll during that scene, but it’s not always required. After the A scenes are done, we do the B scenes. These scenes are always centered around taking action to achieve the goal, and will often include one or more action rolls. 

Why is Free Play good for your campaign?

Free play does a few things in your campaign. First, it is a change of pace. It breaks up repetition. This is nice because when something repeats too long, people go numb to it. Your group will only delve so many dungeons or solve so many mysteries before they want to do something different. A free play session does just that. It breaks up that repeated core loop. 

Second, the scenes are character-focused. Free play scenes can focus on one or more characters, primarily giving good spotlight time for the original character. This allows the players to do some role-playing, which helps to add depth to the characters, and gives players a chance to exercise their role-playing skills. 

Third, the scenes are centered around advancing personal goals. Your wizard may want to be able to unlock the secrets of the Obsidian Staff, but he can’t do that by trudging through dungeons. She needs some lab and library time. Free play allows you to have those scenes and to help advance the character’s agenda. This, in turn, creates emotional investment because players are seeing their wants and desires come to fruition in the game. 

Working Them Into Your Campaign

There is no magic formula for setting up free play scenes in your campaign, but there are some questions that can guide you into finding the right type of free play for your campaign.

When/How Does Free Play Occur?

The first thing to consider is where in your campaign you fit free play. Is it between stories? Between adventures? Only when the characters reach a town? After a campaign arc? At the start of every session? 

What helps to define this is when the characters are not in the core loop(s) of your game. If your core loop is dungeon crawling, then it is when they are between dungeons. If they are a starship crew, perhaps it’s between missions while traveling in space. Finding those “between” times will depend on your game, but if you look, you will see in your campaign where they are. 

Frequency – How often do you want to have free play scenes? 

Do you want to have a free play session in every “between” space? Or after a fixed number of core loops? Or perhaps you don’t want to have a schedule for them, and want to go by either your instincts or by request from the table. 

There is a sweet spot to this. Done too frequently, it slows down the core loop of the game, which in turn can affect the progress of the story arc, and could slow down the mechanical progression of characters. Done too infrequently, and the players don’t progress their personal goals. 

Sadly, there is no universal answer to this. It will depend on a few factors. How long is a given core loop, in sessions (and real time)? How frequently do you play? How long is the campaign?

Format – How are your free play sessions structured?

When do you have a free play session? Does everyone get their own set of scenes, or are they in small groups? Do they get one scene or multiple scenes? How will you distribute the scenes, around the table popcorn style (the current person picks the next)?  

Other Considerations

Do these scenes all take place at the same time? Meaning that everyone is busy at the same time? Or are these scenes all taking place over a larger period of time, so characters can be in each other’s scenes? Is there a limit on how many people can be in a scene? If the whole party is in a scene, are they really advancing one character’s story? Do you want these scenes to be non-combat (sometimes combat can be long to resolve, or deadly when alone)? 

My Blades Free Play Sessions

As mentioned above, my Blades free play sessions come up after 4 to 5 scores. They have a two-scene format. In addition, they take place during a period of a few weeks, so players can include other characters in their scenes. I don’t prep them that way by forcing characters together, the player whose scene it is has the option of pulling in other characters. 

Because Blades has a Downtime phase and mechanics, these scenes are typically things that are not covered by a downtime action. Mostly, they are social interactions with NPCs. They can result in new Scores or in Downtime actions, such as projects.

Sometimes You Have to Let’em Play

The free play session is a nice way to break up the core loop of your campaign while at the same time showering some attention and spotlight onto the characters. There is a bit of work to figure out how to set them up for your campaign, but once you do, they create a break that everyone looks forward to. 

Do you have free play sessions in your campaign? How are they set up? Do you have any unique rules or qualities about them? 

Join Ang along with Jared and friend of the show, Carl Lehman, as they talk about four different player types we often see at our tables. We go over the good and the bad they can bring to the table and offer advice how to turn these tendencies towards helping the game.

Links:

Symphony Entertainment

Sanguine Arch

Marvel Multiverse: Marvel Rivals Timestream Adventure

THAC0 with Advantage: Episode 60

Join Ang along with guests Jason Haskins and Mike Mistele as they talk about the components that make for a good convention one-shot!

Links:

Origins Game Fair

Matinee Adventures

What is Prep?

There are a lot of answers to this question, but regardless of the content of your prep, prep has one purpose. Prep is whatever you need to be comfortable GMing the game. This is why prep differs in content and length. It is why, in Never Unprepared, you can learn to hone your prep to be just the things that you are less comfortable doing on the fly. For some, this can be a few notes on a Post-It note, and for others, an elaborate binder with sections and indexes. Whatever gets you to the table. 

Prep is Aspirational 

Another characteristic of prep is that it is meant to be aspirational. It is what you hope or think could happen, not what is going to happen. Just because you put a trapped bridge across a chasm in a dungeon does not mean that is the only way the characters can cross the chasm. It is the one that you aspire to, the one you hope will happen. Sometimes the characters will cross that bridge and find the trap (in both the good and bad connotation), and sometimes the players will break out a magic item you forgot about and transport themselves across the bridge, never encountering the trap. 

As I said in the previous article, play deviates from prep, and that is a feature, not a bug. 

Prep is not Authoritative 

To further make that point, prep was never meant to be authoritative, that is, to direct a specific outcome. Just because there is a trapped bridge over the chasm does not mean that the players must cross that bridge. In fact, in order to make that happen, you have to possibly rob players of their agency, shutting down other ways to cross, and now you have begun to railroad your characters. 

Note, I am very specific about the term railroad. A railroad is not a linear plot, but rather when the choices you make do not affect the outcome of the game. If every choice you make leads to having to cross the bridge on foot, then you are railroading the players onto the bridge. 

To be clear. That is a problem.

Prep Is Your Guide

Prep serves as a guide. It gives you a narrative construct from which you can start to narrate play and to have some idea of how different things connect or interact with each other. The construct allows you to convey information to the players. If your prep includes the details of a town and its buildings, and someone asks where the Tavern is, you can tell where it is because the Tavern and its relationship to other buildings in town, who is in it, etc, are in your prep. 

The narrative construct can be more than a map of a town. That narrative construct may be a web of clues and relationships in a murder mystery. Having that prepped allows you to answer questions from the players, even ones that you did not expect. 

In fact, when we get to last month’s topic of deviations, this is where your prep acts as a guide. When play moves away from your aspirational prep, you can use the constructs in your prep to understand how the deviation affects the narrative construct. You can then adapt your construct to the deviation and still draw upon it as play continues. 

That is not to say that you need prep to do those things. You can ad lib anything or everything in a game. There is nothing wrong with not having the location of the tavern and making it up on the fly, or creating a clue in the moment.

In fact, since few things are black and white, the sweet spot for your prep should always be the right mix of things you prep and things you ad lib, and knowing which things should go into which column for you. You might ad lib the name and location of the tavern, but prep the key clues that link the Baron to the murder. 

Prep As Your Aspirational Guide

Stitching these ideas together, your prep should… 

Be all the things you need to be comfortable enough to run your game. That could be maps, names of NPCs, a web of clues, stat blocks, snippets of rules, etc. That is the core function of prep.

Be aspirational in that it is one way that the game may play out, but is open to change, so that you do not force play to follow your prep. 

Be a guide to help you navigate the game. Your prep should help you understand the narrative, locations, relationships, etc, that you can draw from to answer questions and react to the players. You can adapt that construct based on what the characters do and keep playing. 

My Prep Aspires To Be a Good Guide

The relationship between prep and play is tricky. On one hand, if you come up with some cool ideas and prep them, you want to see them come to fruition at the table. On the other hand, players outnumber you and will nearly always find a way to do something you did not expect. That does not mean your prep is worthless; we need to use the prep as a baseline and then adapt to what has come up in play. 

There are always people who dismiss prep, and they are entitled to their own way to play, but for me, in the 40+ years I have gamed, I am my most comfortable when I have prepped my session and have some idea of how it will go, and then being fine in play adapting to the choices my players make and the outcomes of the dice. 

How about you? How do you manage the aspirational nature of prep? Where is your sweet spot of prep for the games you like to run?