Game Balance
Clever players will find ways to assemble a collection of synergistic traits which makes their character much more powerful than the other characters in the game.
- Work with your game group to make sure everyone shares the same ideas about powergaming and min-maxing. Use the Mini-SamePage tool below.
- Tweak traits to be more or less powerful depending on your experiences.
- Join the community at reddit.com/r/Tavern_Tales and call out underpowered traits that need buffing and overpowered traits that need nerfing.
Tips for Running Challenges
New setbacks and threats will arise naturally from players’ bad tales, so you don’t have to always be menacing them with a present danger. You need to be aware of pacing, however. If things have gone too well or too badly for too long, it’s time to mix things up. One way is to use your Neutral Tales to “menace them with a present threat”. If they’re at sea, introduce a killer whale. If they’re in the demon-infested scorched wastelands, introduce a few demons.
Allow the players to come up with their own objectives. Don’t assume you know the best way to deal with a threat. Your job is to translate their objectives into appropriate challenges.
Pacing, Tempo, Pressure, Story Beats
From time to time, PCs need a chance to recover resources. To do this, they need the opportunity to make some easier rolls without active opposition.
Good storytelling and good game design both require variation in the amount of pressure applied to the protagonists. If the players just finished a difficult challenge, consider easing off the pressure and giving them some downtime. You can still give them challenges, but you can make their rolls easier if there’s no active opposition.
See: Downtime, Rest, Recovery
Smooth RPG 