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. When you are r unn ing a TTRPG campaign you are called upon to bring life to a myriad of NPCs. Through your voice and actions they are made real in the minds of your players. While I may do a broader article later on how to juggle running so many characters, I am going to hone in on one aspect of GMing. Playing a villainous character. More specifically we’re going to discuss one way you can improve your villains at several different layers of depth. The idea we’ll be getting into is answering the question “Why is this character doing villainous things?” Starting shallow with a rudimentary motive, and getting more involved each stage until we have a deep understanding of the reason your villain behaves the way that they do. This understanding in turn will help you to portray those...

This is a part two from my previous article, you may want to read that one to get my definitions of the terms I’ll be using, like gamer rage. Because I might be using it in a different way than you would assume. To recap briefly anyways, last article we went through the definition of gamer rage, why it is important to consider when designing a game, and have begun to zero in on why it manifests the way that it does. We finished last time outlining the type of gamer rage that is caused by being cheated by fate. Meaning random chance aligned in such a spectacular and improbable way that a player feels frustrated. Today we’ll discuss the other two ways to incite gamer rage, being cheated by game balance, and being cheated by teamwork. And we’ll cap it off with some conclusions. So first, what does it mean to be cheated by game balance? This is a problem in many competitive games where each player does not have access to the exact same abilities. Stepping out of the realm of board games fo...