You are reading Lore Building, in this series I lay out some tips and tricks for aspiring and new GMs for how to keep your TTRPG sessions more engaging for your players, with a focus on narrative storytelling. If you GM more than, let’s call it three campaigns, you have certainly been here. A player who is engaged and enjoying your world starts talking to a random NPC on the street, and asks their name. And in that moment the flow of the game is broken as you just… freeze. You’ve written out a hundred names for every major villain and ally through this potentially years-long adventure, but not for this one singular NPC. So, after far too long you blurt out “Bob Hoskins” because you just rewatched Who Framed Roger Rabbit last week (which holds up better than you expected it to.) After the party is done giggling, and at least one of them has to google the name, they all start talking to Mr. Hoskins. Over time he morphs from a funny moment to a main character of your campaign. Indignity u...

  Most board games have turns. Unlike a video game or sport where the action tends to happen in real time, the nature of board games makes them unsuited to process player actions without some kind of turn structure. Anyone who has sat down to play a game of Monopoly or Risk knows basically how to take a turn in a board game. It is a rare board game that can eschew turn taking altogether, and those games usually intentionally lean into the chaotic nature of everyone trying to do different things all at once. Captain Sonar is my favorite example of a game that utilizes a turnless system, and it can be a particularly loud and hectic play experience as a result. But assuming (for this article) that you aren’t recreating Two Rooms and a Boom we can leave these outliers and move into the topic with the understanding that you need to have some kind of turn order to make your game functional. TTRPG and board games have a set turn order for each player to perform their actions in sequence. ...