d20 Ways to Get Un-RPG-stuck
When you want to do creative rpg work, whether it's GM prep or solo gaming or writing content, things can get... blocked up. Here's a table of creative laxatives.
I get into ruts. A lot. I have bursts of passionate playing and working and reading and writing, and then feel drained, disinterested, unmotivated.
To try to rejuvenate those lower moments, I have been asking the question, “What do I do when I don’t really want to do anything?” When I don’t have the energy and time and motivation to play a solo session or sit down and do some campaign prepping, but I still have the urge to do something, I want a small, tangible, meaningful thing to do, to feel like I still did something.
What I won’t do is tell you to “take a break” or “self-care” stuff. That advice is trite, and you don’t need to read a blog article to know if you want to take a break from doing something.
So here’s a d20 table of ideas for what to do when you don’t wanna.
Write up and Roll up a new Player Character. Maybe this turns into an NPC in your home game or a backup character in your solo campaign, but the joy and thrill of discovering new player characters doesn’t have to be reserved for the start of a campaign. It can help you come up with new ideas, fresh steps on well trodden paths of your setting.
Generate a new town, settlement, city. Aim for small, or at most medium sizes. Too large can become its own daunting task, and there are better options for breaking those down anyway. But a small town is a few buildings, a road or two, some unique defining characteristic. Add some names for NPCs and maybe a historical event or two.
Magic. Sword. Do I really need to say more?
Create a historical event. This can be really fun. First, write what really happened. It could be big, like a war or a famine or a world changing discovery, or small, like the writing of a beloved play or song, or when a town was saved by a hero. Then, take that and turn it into myth and legend. What details were lost to time? How was it reinterpreted and co-opted to turn it into a fable, a parable? What does the other side say about the same event? This is a fun one.
Write a few mundane paragraphs of some slice of life moments. What is your character’s life like when they aren’t out saving the day or ransacking old temples for gold? What do they do when there’s nothing to do? What’s a conversation like with the people they need to talk to? The stakes on this are so low, you can’t get it wrong.
Build a monster from scratch. If you’re one of those lucky people blessed with the ability to draw from imagination, you’ve got a head start on this one. Maybe you start by mashing up some different ideas, or roll on some tables (my personal favorite source is the Tome of Adventure Design). Give it some ecological details, and maybe some rumors and myths about it that locals might know.
Introduce a new deity or cosmic entity. Whatever the cosmology you’re working with, there’s likely to be some sort of supernatural forces at play. What does it look like to come up with a new one? Is your pantheon fixed, meaning you need an explanation for why it’s not there anymore, or why nobody knows about it? Or is it more fluid, and these gods come and go, rise and fall? (The solo game Deify has been very satisfying for this!)
Detail a city street. Urban areas are often underdetailed simply because they are so vast and offer relatively small RPG value compared with the wilderness. But the process of elaborating a city street can reveal so many truths and adventure hooks and people. When I read Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser chronicles, Lankhmar reveals itself as a full-fledged character that the eponymous characters interact with.
Start a new spark table or oracle for your setting. Spark tables can be the engine that drives the improvisation of your world. Oracles at the table can get you out of a jam. These tools provide a truly remarkable return on investment. Start a new one, or add to an existing one in progress. Cairn has some great advice on spark tables (which is functionally similar to oracles.)
Draw a bit of map or some hexes. Building out some new geography is sure to spark some creative flames for you. Stuff has to go somewhere, so start with somewhere and fill it with stuff.
Jot down some terrible ideas. Sometimes, shit sharpens steel. Get some really terrible stuff out there, get it out of your system. Who knows - maybe in a few weeks it won’t seem as terrible as it does today. But until then, vomit some nonsense onto your ugliest notebook.
Procure a soundtrack for different parts of your game. Playlists of tracks for exploring the world, or just playlists that get you into the mood to do some of the workplay that we’re talking about here, or playlists of music that you think would be heard in your world! Whatever it is, do some musical exploration and see if that brings some rhythm to your sessions.
Design a little procedure, subsystem, minigame. This one’s for all the procedure lovers out there. If you expect a certain thing thing to happen in your game - lock picking, aero dog-fighting, cypher translation, whatever sounds fun - make a little minigame out of it. Write some simple rules, test them out, put them in your folder to have on hand for later. If you like it enough, you’ll find reasons to use them sooner rather than later.
Play an adjacent, but different game. When I lose the thread of my solo campaigns, I switch to solo dungeon crawling games like Ker Nethalas or NoteQuest. It’s a break from routine, but still in the same neighborhood. I’ll often feel like I’m working some different muscles, giving the old ones a break, and strengthening myself overall.
Kill an NPC in dramatic fashion. Sometimes the game just gets a little stale. If you really want to shake things up, get interested again, and have something to pursue, kill off a darling NPC, or even better, a highly important one. How does the world react to this sudden death? This sort of “GM Fiat” in a solo game may seem strange, but pulling the strings is sorta the whole point. Whatever gets you playing.
Tell a different story in the same world with a different system. The Lone Adventurer podcast is a fantastic example of this. He has three seasons of his main campaign, in his homebrew world, and they use different systems in each season, sometimes even using more than one system in a single season. This lets you tell totally different stories and makes the world feel more diverse and interesting.
Tell some part of your story from the perspective of the villain. This is easier in solo play, where you can assume the perspective of the antagonist and learn about what they’re doing while your protagonist makes their own way. But even in group play, you could give your players a glimpse of “what they don’t see”. Or better yet, run a one shot as the enemies, and give your players enemy characters to play. It’ll be that much more satisfying when they come back and get their comeuppance later.
Give your world to someone else, and see what they do in it. This one will rely on you having kept great, well organized notes about your world and what’s going on in it, or at least regular after-action reports that you can hand over. But to see someone else explore some part of your world that you’ve never visited, to see how they do things differently, to have a chance to look over their shoulder and see what sparks joy in them… that’s good stuff.
Choose a location, and detail its sensory experience. This one’s great practice for GMs especially. Decide a location, big or small, that is important to your characters or the setting, and describe what it smells like, looks like, sounds like, feels like. Grab all of these senses and describe each one of them. Get into detail. Interrogate it - why does the temple smell like pine needles? This is a great skill to hone, and it takes only a few minutes.
Create a menu, a list of services, or a list of goods for your world. One of the wonderful things about games like Vaults of Vaarn is that the list of items you can buy at a shop or an inn tell you so much about the setting and the system. What pieces does the blacksmith work, or not work? Why does the inn serve only bird meat? Make a list of items you’d like to play with, or see your players play with.
That’s it. D20. Took me a while to come up with 20, and some of them may not be as inspired or fun or flexible as the others. Feel free to hit me up in the comments if you have other suggestions along these lines. Until then, get back to your game!
A solid list 🎲