DMing with Charisma

I used a lot of puzzles during the Great Tower of Oldechi. The tower was divided into seven sections, each with a different manager. Each manager built a section of floors on a certain theme, like the classical elements or gothic horror. The fifth section, floors 19 through 22, was based on puzzles. Each floor was actually one giant puzzle, often with smaller puzzles of various types scattered throughout. When I later asked the players later which floor was their favorite, every one of them picked on of those floors (and among the five players, they picked all four floors). Remind me to talk about that someday.

But this story is about a different puzzle. The party was breaking into a tower in modern Tokyo, on the run from the military because a thousand-year-old police officer was chasing them (it was that kind of campaign). They had to disable computers in a server room, but they had to only mess with computers that were already running because doing anything else would trigger the alarm. So I gave them this:

The players solved it quickly, so I gave them a slightly harder one to represent the next server farm. When they solved that, they moved on.

Fast forward two years, to the Eight Arms and the Memento Mori. The party’s ship had gotten damaged by some sort of sharks with ankylosaurus tails or something. Without sails or a steering mechanism, they drifted to a ship graveyard populated by elementals from the plane of carpentry. In order to find shipwrecks of sufficient integrity to provide salvageable parts, they players had to determine where the ships were knowing only how many their divers could see from the side.

I gave them the same puzzle. Not just the same type of puzzle, but the exact same puzzle. The rules, clues, and solution were exactly the same. Two of the players were in both campaigns and neither recognized it from before. Heck, I didn’t even remember I had used the same puzzle until I was going through old notes to prepare for this article.

I suppose a pessimistic reader could see this as “your puzzles are so uninteresting that no player wants to remember them”, but since the puzzle was something like the third or fourth most exciting part of that session I’m not too bothered. More than that, this is an example of the power of reskinning. The exact same puzzle becomes unrecognizably different when presented in a different way, and that’s a good thing.

The key to reskinning a puzzle to fit your story is to have the two meet somewhere in the middle. Don’t come up with a brilliant story and try to shoehorn a puzzle into it, because it will feel out of place. But for the same reason don’t come up with a brilliant puzzle and try to staple it to your session. Puzzles work best when they work into the story better than “the bank vault for some reason requires Sudoku”. Even if it’s a somewhat flimsy argument (“The bank manager is a former Sudoku champion, and he designed this lock specifically to waste a would-be thief’s time”), players are a lot more forgiving when there’s an argument at all.

This means that it’s easiest and most satisfying to start coming up with a puzzle when you know roughly what the session and potential obstacles are but while they’re still in a sufficient state of flux. Given the above example, you can justify Sudoku as a bank vault combination. But instead, what if the combination was a nine-digit code that could only be determined from a Sudoku in the bank manager’s office? It’s basically the same justification, but now it feels more real because you haven’t already decided that the puzzle must be in front of the vault door, so you have some wiggle room.

I’ve also found that players are happiest when you don’t plunk a puzzle in front of the characters and say “solve this puzzle, orc barbarian!”. You can get away with doing that to the players, yes, but to the characters it would feel like a sudden cognitive break. This is why the example from my sessions framed the puzzle in the form of turning off servers or finding shipwrecks, because it made some sense for the puzzle to exist in the world. Solving a logic puzzle to get a bank combination is a little weird, but solving a wiring puzzle to short out the door lock feels a lot more realistic.

Given these tenets, the ideal puzzle is setting-agnostic (good job building that puzzle around dwarf culture, but you won’t be using it in your Star Wars game) and able to represent a number of things to make it easier to reskin. Following up from the last article, we also want a puzzle to be solvable by logic or reasoning rather than blind intuition and we want it to be challenging without being frustrating. And since we’re trying to marry it with a group of players, the ideal puzzle is also somewhat mutable, so that its difficulty can change a little if that’s what you need for your session.

Now for one of my dirty little DMing secrets: there are a few sites I’ve been using for years that fit all of these criteria. One hosts a wide variety of logic puzzles with unique solutions, different rules, and escalating challenge levels that I’ve been able to tweak to fit any number of sessions. If you’ve seen a puzzle by me, there’s even odds that it originally came from Erich’s Puzzle Palace. Case in point: the very first picture on that page is a link to and solution for the puzzle I posted above. So, you know, spoilers in case you’re playing at home.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t link to the page for Conceptis. A lot of their puzzles require pen and paper manipulation, making them more appropriate for handouts than for solving by simple observation, but they provide many difficulty options for each puzzle type so you can escalate at your leisure. If you’re not a fan of registering with strange websites, a lot of their puzzles are available on Kongregate (and if you are a fan of registering with strange websites, I’ll be happy to provide you my Kongregate referral link).

Both of these sites contain puzzles that can be slotted into any number of situations. Consider one of my favorites, Hashi. The general idea is that each number represents an island and each line represents a bridge, so it’s easy to give this to the players as a “connect all the islands” puzzle. But it could be anything where you need to connect objects without connections crossing each other. Each number could be a power terminal that needs to share energy with other terminals or be at risk of explosion. It could be an orc camp that needs a supply route with another camp, where the routes can’t touch because that might encourage banditry. It could be a glyph that needs to connect to other glyphs in a specific way to power a spell (here, feel free to replace the numbers with arcane symbols and give your players a key to correlate symbols with numbers—it’s no harder and it increases the immersion).

Once you strip a puzzles to its bare essentials, you can pile anything you want on top of it to make it specific to your session or campaign. This is sort of an extension of what I suggested in my post on designing a session in one hour. Training yourself to file the serial numbers off a plot or character is different from training yourself to figure out the root of a puzzle, but they serve similar purposes in that both allow you to take something designed by somebody else and change it into something all your own.

The easiest way to do this is to think of a description of the puzzle, then take all the nouns in that description and change them to “thing”. When you stop thinking of Hashi puzzles as “islands” and “bridges” and start thinking of them as “things that need connecting” and “connectors” you start to see the possibilities. Similarly, full house puzzles aren’t “touch all the floor tiles once” puzzles, even though that’s the most obvious application. They’re “touch all the things once” puzzles, which opens up power, supply route, exploration, and even communications reskinning opportunities.

This makes it easier to go the other way as well. If you know you need a puzzle where the players need to place magic symbols that interact badly in certain prohibited arrangements, you could look for a puzzle all day. If you think of it as “place things so they don’t affect other things”, you have many more options.

There are plenty of other options for puzzles, but these are the easiest I’ve found to reskin. If you’re willing to put in more work you can turn almost anything into almost anything else. A great example of this is the room escape genre of games, where the player is put into a situation (usually “trapped in a room”) and must perform tasks, solve puzzles, and combine and use items to work his or her way out. Given the sheer number and variety of such games they’re probably the king of non-sequitur puzzles. More than once I’ve had to rotate discs into a picture to open a desk drawer, the exact mechanics of which are neither explained nor necessary. A full room escape game is probably not appropriate for D&D given players’ predilections toward bursting through a door whether or not it’s locked by the triangle key, but bits of the games are right at home in a session. I’ve provided some links below.

Of course, if you want to create a massive, arc-spanning puzzle, you’re better off designing something brand-new. The simplest way is to have your MacGuffins be pieces of the puzzle, so the players must travel far and wide to collect segments of the puzzle’s solution. A more complex but more rewarding option is to present players with a prophecy or other tract open to interpretation that the party solves gradually. In any case, a puzzle that size becomes one of the points of the campaign, and that merits something group-specific and personal.

When I first started adapting puzzles from other sources, my biggest concern was that a player would recognize the puzzle and solve it immediately. With puzzles like this, that’s not a problem. A player who solves every puzzle I’ve linked above or player every room escape game is likely to have forgotten exactly how he or she did it and would be willing to do it again. If I’ve proven nothing else with puzzles in my games, it’s that the act of solving a puzzle is greater enjoyment than the knowledge that a puzzle has been solved, which is why players only ask for hints or leverage the “but my character is Reed Richards!” argument when they’re well and truly stuck. As such, I’m not nearly as bothered by linking to these sites as I would have been a few short years ago.

In fact, I hope one of my future DMs grabs some of these puzzles, repackages them, and gives them to me. I’ve been meaning to solve a bunch of them and haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Mild Escape by TESSHI-e: Especially pretty given the genre, and they rarely rely on searching for specific pixels to find items or combining clues in a haphazard, moon-logic way.
Crimson Room: The first room escape game I played, arguably one of the first at all. It and its sequels are fairly good, if a bit reliant on pixel-hunting and only occasionally solvable depending on whether a certain website opts to cooperate in a given day.
Jay Is Games: This is where I get most of the room escape puzzles I play these days. The quality varies wildly. As I write this, one of the first articles is “The 12 Best Escape Games You Might Not Have Played”, which is a decent introduction to the genre even if some of the games they list aren’t my cup of tea.

So rather than griping more about what puzzles don’t work in D&D, this time let’s go over making puzzles that do. Last time I outlined four points that I feel make puzzles worthwhile:

Good puzzles challenge players, not characters.

“Challenge the players, not the characters” is something of a mantra around these parts. It refers to the distinction between a difficult encounter in-character versus a difficult encounter out-of-character. An enemy with astronomically high numbers and terrifying powers is a challenge, but one that normally relies on pure luck more than any effort or investment from the players (unless you expect your players to realize this early and flee, which is very rarely a safe assumption). Instead consider an enemy with tricksy powers, an environmental advantage, or a weakness that’s difficult but rewarding to exploit. This becomes more of an exercise for the players themselves, interacting with the enemy via their characters, and it gives their choices some weight that “I need to roll a 16” doesn’t.

To give an example of how this relates to puzzling, consider a room full of lore that the party must translate and interpret to find some important artifact. This is an intellectual exercise for sure, and it seems like a break from running and jumping and fireballing. But if the translation is resolved by a Linguistics check and the interpretation by Religion, it’s no different from any other skill checks except that the bard is good at them. This isn’t a puzzle, it’s a trap where failure causes lost time or story stagnation instead of damage.

Instead give the players something to do. Write the document you want them to read in a text editor, then change the characters around via a substitution cipher. If you’re being fancy, change the muddled text to a fantasy font before printing it. Let the players do the translation instead of leaving it to a roll, and let them perform their own interpretation (and, if theirs is better than yours, steal it). Give them a chance to exercise their own minds instead of their characters’.

If this sounds like more work on your end than adjudicating a die roll, that’s part of designing a puzzle. And if this sounds like it will take more time at the table, good:

Good puzzles take time and/or effort to resolve.

Nobody’s satisfied by a combat that only takes five seconds unless the explicit point is that there’s a huge power gap or extreme luck involved. Similarly, nobody’s satisfied by a puzzle that they solve at a glance. A one-minute puzzle isn’t really part of a session for the same reason DMs don’t schedule a certain amount of time for Monty Python references.

Puzzles that take time but no effort are actually worse: they consume a valuable part of the play session, but there’s no engagement on the part of the players. It’s like fighting the same goblin encounter for the sixth time. Puzzles like this generally require taking rote actions over and over until a solution occurs; examples include a fifteen puzzle and the Tower of Hanoi. The first time a player sees them they’re interesting, but once you’ve solved one you’ve solved them all. The older your players are, the more you can assume they’ve already seen the puzzle and the more likely it is that at least one player has a solution or method memorized.

Most rote puzzles have some more interesting version that let players think instead. If you’re dead-set on having players push blocks around, consider a Sokoban or any of the innumerable sliding puzzles with blocks of multiple sizes like Klotski. Puzzles where the players build towers aren’t as common, but any sort of pentomino usually works.

Good puzzles have points where the players can feel they are making headway.

Players (read: humans) like knowing when they’re doing something wrong or right. If the wizards hits the robot with a lightning attack and it takes extra damage or shuts down for a round, it rewards the player for finding the robot’s weakness and encourages them to try it again. Equal and opposite, if the robot instead takes little damage or immediately responds with a lightning attack of its own, this discourages further lightning attacks but still rewards the players (if they survive) because they’ve learned about the monster. A party should know when their cause has an effect, even if it’s as simple as “I killed the orc, so now we only have to fight three instead of four”.

In a sense, I think this is actually part of the design aesthetic of 4E. Since my first campaign players have asked me “how damaged do I think the enemy is?”, something the rules don’t cover at all. We ended up deciding that a Spot check could give the players a rough idea, and good Spot checks gave more specific health information. In 4E players are allowed to know when a monster become bloodied and vice versa, and healing is more static and thus more predictable.

Puzzles are the same way. This is why mazes are much-reviled even though every DM tries them at least once—there’s no way to know whether a character is any closer to the exit and no sense of accomplishment until the very end. In games where puzzles can span more than one room, a lot of moon logic puzzles fall under this umbrella; the party knows they have the rooster key, but they have no idea whether that’s something they need to open the moon door or if they needs to explore the eastern wing of the dungeon first. The party could be tantalizingly close to the solution (shine light on the rooster key so it crows, turning the moon door into the sun door, which the key opens) but there’s no way of knowing it unless they’ve exhausted their other options. And if they shine light onto the rooster key in another room, they even don’t know which puzzle they’re solving.

If the players shouldn’t know exactly how close they are to a solution, they should be allowed to know that they’re getting closer. Sometimes this works by giving the players a map and letting them see the whole room at once, like the aforementioned Sokoban. When the players have five crates out of six on solution squares, they’re closer than when they only had two out of six. If a puzzle has multiple rounds, each success brings the players closer to a goal and may increase the difficulty to underscore the advancement. It’s about the ability to look back at the puzzle and say “at least we’ve done something” rather than “we’ve been here a half-hour and all we’ve determined is that orange is not green.”

Puzzles with progress also serve a secondary goal in that they make it much easier for you to give hints. A frustrated player has every right to point out that their wizard is very smart and should be able to figure out something about the puzzle. You can say something like “for a second you think you visualize a workable solution, and before your brain gets it muddled with every other possibility you latch onto the fact that this crate needs to be over here” without giving away the whole thing.

Good puzzles let everyone have fun.

Of course a puzzle lets players have fun. That’s why we’re here. The important word in this item is “everyone”. A puzzle is not good if it’s printed in small font on one sheet of paper. This means that one player actually works on it while everybody else strains their eyes trying to catch up. That’s swell if you’re dedicating the cleric to the document of religious lore while the rest of the party explores the room or talks to the ghost librarian, but lousy if it’s supposed to be a task for everybody.

This came into stark contract for me when a player complained about one of my puzzles. To me, it was a puzzle I really liked and one that the party solved after some significant effort. To her, it required a way of thinking that she couldn’t quite follow, so she wasn’t able to participate at all. It was like I’d paralyzed her for an entire combat, or left her to stew for an entire session in a hag’s larder while the rest of the party got to have adventures. A puzzle that only part of the party can solve is not a successful puzzle.

It’s why my puzzles rarely require small handheld props that only one player can manipulate at a time, and why they more often take place on our gaming screen or drawn large on the mat. One well-received puzzle from The Great Tower of Oldechi involved jumping over pits from one side of the room to the other. Though the party was all in one location, half of the players started solving the puzzle from the entrance and the other half started from the exit. When they met in the middle they knew they were onto something. It’s also why I tend to prepare two smaller puzzles rather than one big one, because it lets a player jump from one to another if they’re up against a wall. If the party knows they need to deduce the sequence of two locks before the door opens, it makes perfect sense that a character can cross the room and see what the other lock looks like.

Just as with combat, few puzzles survive contact with the players. There’s a chance that a player blows through the puzzle quickly, or that the party gets stuck early, or that one player you thought would love the puzzle came to the session very hung over. Usually if a puzzle only meets three of the above criteria I still consider it a partial success (but just in case, I try to prepare some variants of the puzzle with varying difficulty in case I need to change my plans—for every puzzle my players end up seeing, I have at least one they don’t).

Now we know what puzzles work and what puzzles don’t, at least theoretically. That still leaves the question of integrating them into the game. In the next post I’ll give some examples from my sessions, touch on reskinning stock puzzles to fit your session, and provide some links to my favorite puzzle sources.

Puzzles have a long, fine tradition in tabletop gaming, right up there with arguing about grappling rules and casual racism. Whether in the form of a simple question or a campaign-spanning myth arc, puzzles have worked their way into the milieu of both the game itself and the player’s view of it. Even years later my players (and, for one session in particular, casual observers around the table) fondly remember some of my better puzzles, and I recall with similar vividness the worst puzzles I’ve ever been asked to solve because that’s sort of my thing.

Unlike running a small business, haggling, relationships, or other tasks that one might assume fall under the rules only tangentially, the rules for D&D barely discuss puzzles at all. Rather, they provide only the most meager advice and trust the DM to come up with something that players will like. The most thorough treatment of puzzles comes in, of all places, Savage Species, but many DM-facing books touch very briefly on puzzles. Most of the time the books discuss how to deal with a situation where the players are stuck rather than how to build a puzzle that doesn’t get them stuck in the first place. Given this framework, it’s not surprising that a lot of tabletop puzzles are really, really bad.

I think the root of it is all the way back in The Hobbit et al. I haven’t read all eight-six books in the Tolkien canon, but even with my limited knowledge I’m aware of two situations where puzzles factor into the storyline. The following contains spoilers, in case you’re working your way through all the world’s literature chronologically and you’re still at King Lear.

The shorter one is when Frodo et al arrive at Moria and are faced with a sealed passage and the inscription “The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. Speak, friend, and enter.” The solution is to interpret the instructions literally: when a person says “friend” in Dwarven, the door opens. This is a quick puzzle with a simple answer, one that was solvable because a member of the party spoke Dwarven and another member of the party made an appropriate leap of logic. Not a great puzzle for reasons I’ll discuss later, but not a huge problem.

The longer one is when Bilbo and Gollum enter into a contest of riddles, and this is where I think we start getting into trouble. “Riddles” hold a too-large place in the Venn diagram overlap between “puzzles” and “D&D” due in no small part to this exchange. On the surface a riddle looks sane: each puzzle is small enough to fit on a trading card, there’s a simple solution to each, there’s little or no cultural requirement, and there are no complicated steps, props, or descriptions necessary to understand or complete it. All it requires is a bit of roundabout thinking or the aforementioned leap of logic.

And therein squats the toad. A riddle assumes that your players can make a given leap, and generally they can. But DMs, and published adventures, rarely consider what happens if they don’t. If the players can’t figure out the monster’s puzzle, they can’t enter the dungeon, and the adventure stalls. If they can’t decipher the smarmy villain’s clues, they don’t know where he’ll strike next, and the adventure stalls. Good adventures come up with a contingency, allowing the players to progress if they accept that they don’t know the answer and accept some penalty, but many don’t.

Even then one of the upsides of puzzles becomes a downside. Unlike combat or other physical skills, a riddle doesn’t challenge the characters as much as it challenges the players. This is good until the players can’t solve it. Then it’s not about “Rogar wasn’t strong enough to lift the gate”, it’s about “you, the player, Hank, aren’t smart enough to figure out the riddle”. No matter how smart a player is, there are puzzles that will stump them, and the last thing a DM wants is for this game to become a referendum on the players’ lateral thinking skills.

“Aha!” shouts the DM who has read the rulebooks but not designed a puzzle, “I have a solution! If the player is stuck, have them roll an Intelligence check! A sufficiently smart character will be able to solve the riddle even of the player can’t, or at least to get a hint. Bow before my solution and weep!”*

And this works, for some groups, sort of. It does make sense in that a smart character may be able to solve puzzles their player can’t in the same way that I can’t double-jump. But it does make me wonder why I should bother with making (or, let’s be honest, stealing) a riddle in the first place if I’m going to treat it like everything else. Allowing a solution to come via skill check removes the point of giving the players a puzzle because it turns the puzzle into a character challenge instead of a player challenge. There’s no difference between “A pit! *clatter clatter* I jump over it.” and “A puzzle! *clatter clatter* I solve it.” besides giving the wizard something to do in between all their other skill checks. Even a hint doesn’t make a lot of sense for a riddle because a hint is a way of getting halfway to a solution. But a riddle is binary. There’s only one step between you and the answer and there’s almost no room for the partial success that a hint would provide. What player, after a decent but not smashing Intelligence roll, is comfortable with saying “I don’t know what the answer is and I have no evidence or experience to support my supposition, but I think it’s something you would find in a kitchen.”?

It’s far, far too easy to err on the other side as well. A quick, simple riddle seems like it’s fine on its face but tends to fall flat when presented to a group of thinking players. Riddles are a children’s joke for a reason. Giving easy riddles to a player doesn’t do much besides waste their time.

Ideal puzzles are a lot like ideal combats: they challenge players, they take some time and/or effort to resolve, they have points where the players can feel they are making headway instead of hurling themselves at a wall, and in the end everyone feels like they had fun. A very good riddle can satisfy as many as two of these points and most fail at even that. Regardless of what comparatively classic literature suggests, a D&D table is no place for riddles.

So what puzzles do work? We’ll cover that next time.

* — This is what I think other DMs sound like. It’s what I sound like.

I’ve never been sailing. I’ve only been on a boat once, twice if you count those two-person ducky boats you can paddle around the harbor. I don’t know port from starboard, preferring to use the directions “that way” and “no, the other way”. I know a thirty-foot boat is longer than a twenty-foot boat but I couldn’t tell you what that means for performance, crew, or price (besides, presumably, higher). Yet I just finished a campaign where the players spent three months on the high seas, ostensibly hunting monsters and committing as little piracy as reasonable.

Most DMs have to run something they don’t know at some point. I think I’ve only run games for two players who have crewed a boat, one who’s swung a sword, two who have ridden a horse, and three who have cast magic. I expect most DMs have similar ratios pending circumstance. (Games run at a naval base probably have a higher amount of boat experts and fewer horse experts. Same amount of magicians though.) But we know players are going to ask questions like “how much does my horse eat*?” and “why can’t I deal more damage swinging a sword vertically*?” We also know that we don’t know the answer, and the players know we’re making things up.

There’s a lot of good information out there about knowing what you don’t know lest you run headfirst into something you think you know that you really don’t. Leveraging the expertise of the players is a valid way to answer questions one DM can’t. I can ask the boater a question about boats, and his answer is just about guaranteed to be more detailed and accurate than mine. I can ask a historian, or a businessman, or a paramedic about things that happen at the table.

Indeed, my actual expertise is completely alien to tabletop gaming. I’ve worked in white-collar, service-oriented offices for my entire career. I work with numbers, text, and bureaucracy. I create, file, read, proofread, and disregard reports. I deal with angry customers, angry clients, angry colleagues, angry managers, and on very rare occasions people who are not angry but merely vexed. It’s decent practice for a numbers-oriented, parlance-heavy, people-management hobby like D&D but it’s not the sort of thing where I can leverage my expertise for the story. Nobody’s ever looked at me across the table and asked how stock prices work.

But very recently a player wrote a letter to a large company and received a very formal response. I wrote this response using generic business-speak, which I hoped would make it seen a little impersonal and distinct from the other letters the party had recently read. I did not expect that the players would treat it like the greatest show on ice.

See, none of my players work in the sort of industry or business I do. My players don’t spent their slow days reading fifty letters like that and writing ten or fifteen more. What to me was a form letter, the sort of thing I write a dozen or more times on my slowest days, was to the players a unique and effective tool for moving the plot forward and building the world around it. As irrelevant as I thought my proficiencies are to D&D, as soon as I leveraged them I saw how fresh it looked to everybody else.

Generally gaming groups are made of somewhat disparate people. Players have different occupations and different skill sets, all of which are interesting (or can be made interesting) to the others. Even among a group that all attends the same classes or works in the same office, the players have different families, hometowns, faiths, beliefs, and experiences. For every player who needs to know about boating skills and jargon, there’s another player who’s never worked on a million-dollar deal, a third who’s never been to an emergency room, and a fourth who doesn’t understand a thing about professional wrestling.

…Okay, pro wrestling may seem out of place in that list, but this applies to more than professions. For example, I like puzzles. Not just jigsaw puzzles, but logic and reasoning puzzles of nearly all kinds. I play puzzle games, I solve puzzles in papers and online, and I keep a book of puzzles on my desk in case I need to come up with something for a session in a hurry or club an intruder. I even watch televisions shows about solving puzzles, and finding those is no mean feat. Over the last few decades, I’ve amassed a respectable number of completed puzzles and I remember most of my favorites, at least in structure if not exactly.

Puzzles aren’t my job (usually) but they’re something I enjoy and I’ve sought out a lot of them. When it comes time for my players to challenge an ancient temple or an intelligent enemy, I have something on-hand that I can use in a session or reskin to a believable challenge. I’ve been known to use puzzles as a pacing mechanism, giving players a breather between fights or limiting the speed with which they burn through a dungeon. Since I’ve done so many puzzles of so many different types, I can just about guarantee that not only have my players not already solved a given puzzles, they’ve probably never heard of anything like it.

A connection between puzzles and D&D makes sense (not that you’d know it from reading the books…but that’s another post), but what about other hobbies? If you look hard enough, you can use your experience in just about anything to make your sessions better. Like movies or television? Imitate an obscure character to give a recurring NPC a little more realism and distinction. Like video games? Use some of your favorite levels, maps, or mechanics when you’re designing a dungeon. Like paintball? Hit your players with a coordinated team of snipers who outthink them at every turn. Like astronomy? Space is full of places and events that would give even epic-level PCs pause, places and events that don’t require any magic and could be home to any number of beasts or civilizations. Name anything you like, some hobby or interested or activity, and you can find a way to use it to make session new and fresh to your players.

Every DM has some story, skill, or knowledge that his or her players don’t. The trick isn’t using that uniqueness in a game. DMs can do anything, so if you really want to get something out of your years as a newsroom intern or all that time you spent in Call of Duty you can find a way to make a plot revolve around it. The trick is in recognizing that it’s something worth doing in the first place.**

* — The answer to both of these questions is the same and is left as an exercise for the reader.

** – If you’ve read the comic and you’re confused about its relevance to what I’m saying, read the advice below the comic.