Running the Game

The Narrator’s job in Level Up is to guide the story and create the world for the other players to adventure in. This includes all of the elements required to create that adventure. The Narrator builds a world and populates it with monsters, people, treasure and traps. They create villains in their towers, allies met on the road, angry blacksmiths and bar staff in posh parlours. The Narrator also runs combat, acts as rules referee, lore repository, and of course improvises when the unexpected happens.

Level Up is a Game for the Narrator Too!

The Narrator is a player too, albeit one with many, ever-changing roles. If any part of the Narrator role isn’t fun, there’s no rule against changing it so it is. If a Narrator doesn’t enjoy doing voices, all NPCs can sound the same. If maps and miniatures don’t work for the Narrator, encounters can be designed that won’t rely on them. Some elements of the Narrator role—such as tracking initiative or double checking rules—can even be delegated entirely to players to make things easier and more fun for the Narrator.

The Narrator

The Narrator’s main role is to outline the adventures that the players will navigate. Usually this involves coming up with a problem for them to solve or a task to complete in order to get a predetermined reward. 

An adventure can be as short as a single session of a few hours, or it could involve many such sessions over a span of weeks or months. A longer running adventure such as this is called a campaign, and is generally a big adventure made with building blocks of smaller adventures each session. For example, a single adventure may involve solving the mystery of a string of violent break-ins in a small village. That adventure could be the start of a campaign to take down a dangerous organized crime network that puts an entire realm in jeopardy.

To prepare an adventure, the Narrator usually outlines locations, monsters and enemies, treasure, traps, and notable NPCs (non-player characters), as well as the overall mission for the players. How the players interact with all of these things will be unpredictable, and so a Narrator’s job is to guide players towards their end goal, adapting and changing the environment in response to their actions. 

Scheduling Your Campaign

Getting player schedules to line up for regular gaming sessions is magic far beyond anything described in the Level Up rules. However, some best practices include:

• Maintain the same day and times for game sessions—when everyone knows to keep Wednesday night from 7 PM to 11 PM open, it’s easier to schedule time away from other activities.
• If the group is social with one another, plan an appropriate amount of time for people to catch up before the session starts to better anticipate how much material will be needed with that in mind.
• When it becomes clear that a player will often be late, plan in some padding time for the sessions they aren’t punctual.
• Keep a group discussion going with texts or chat between sessions to keep everyone engaged, and use it to remind the players when the game is coming up.

Is Planning Even Possible When Player Actions Are Unpredictable?

Yes! With a good session zero the Narrator can let the players know the rough aims and outline of the campaign or adventure (without spoilers) so they can make appropriate characters, and air any concerns they have about any topics or activities that may come up in the adventure (see Safety Tools ).

In the example campaign centered around taking down an organized crime network, without a session zero uninformed players could well create criminal or shady characters who would have no problem allying with and joining the network. A lot of the Narrator’s planning around making enemies of the network would be wasted, leaving them scrambling to improvise new scenarios for their party of ne’er-do-well adventurers each session.

Conversely, a campaign designed to aid and grow the criminal network would be cut short if a largely good and law-abiding group slaughter their criminal contacts in the first session. 

A productive session zero allows the Narrator and the players to play along with each other’s expectations and make sure that everybody has fun. 

How to Run a Game

Most of the Narrator’s adventure or campaign planning will happen away from the gaming table. So are things handled while at the table? The Narrator is the player whose job it is to get things going and keep them on track, so other players will look to them for guidance and structure.

Most rules expectations and table-specific rules can be ironed out in session zero, but here’s some insight into the most vital parts of a Narrator’s role.

Setting Up

Setting the players up so they can decide how to react is the fundamental part of the Narrator’s job. Here’s an example of how to begin a gaming session.

"Okay everyone. If you remember you’d gone down to the basement to investigate possible escape routes for the thief, because Oswin the innkeep said she’d heard a door slam downstairs on the night of the theft. The stairs down to the basement are narrow and made of stone. Cold air along with the smell of stagnant water and mold greet you as you descend in single file. 

What’s your marching order please?... 

Okay, Naivara and Whisper, if you’re at the front, you’re the first to see the basement. Water runs down the stone brick walls, they’re about ten feet high. The water has flooded the space up to about three or four feet. It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, it’s stagnant. You hear the occasional drip echo as the water descends, but nothing else. 

Rotting, broken furniture floats in the murk. With your passive perception and the light from Whisper’s torch you can see that it used to be much finer and more ornate than any of the furniture in the inn upstairs... 

So what are you two doing? Remember Nia and Gregor, you can’t see this yet."

Here the Narrator has: 

• reminded the players of their actions last session.
• described the next scene in their adventure.
• used a few sensory cues in their description to create an immersive experience.
• asked an open-ended question to give players a chance to act or ask clarifying questions.

All in just a few sentences that take only a couple of minutes to run through.

Dice Rolling

Every table will have slightly different rules for dice rolling, and each player will have different expectations based on their previous gaming experiences. The Narrator can determine what everyone expects during session zero. It’s important that everybody is on the same page so miscommunications and tension don’t interrupt the adventure once it begins.

  Some good dice-specific questions for a Narrator to ask at session zero are:

• Who will roll openly and who can roll in secret?
  • Some tables welcome the Narrator or sometimes players rolling in secret, while others may feel cheated.
• Can players roll skill checks when they see fit, or should they wait for the Narrator to ask for a specific check?
  • Some Narrators welcome players who take the initiative, while others find it difficult to keep track of the outcomes of rolls they weren’t expecting.
• Can players roll to attack without the Narrator calling for an initiative roll?
  • Again, some Narrators would enjoy the chaos, while others might prefer to keep a tighter handle on combat.
• Can the Narrator ever make rolls on a player’s behalf?
  • Sometimes tension and immersion for players can be enhanced if the Narrator rolls a check on their behalf. For example, being uncertain whether a character has rolled high or low on a Stealth check in a high risk situation could make things more exciting for some players. Other players may not enjoy this, or feel as though their agency has been taken away.

  None of the options in the above list are right or wrong, but they’re variations that should be discussed for each table before the adventure begins, and as the person taking charge the Narrator leads these discussions.

Ability Scores

Another of the Narrator’s key roles is to set the Difficulty Class (DC) for skill checks, as well as deciding which skill check should be made in a given situation to move the adventure along.

  A player’s basic ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, Intelligence, Charisma) affect their ability to perform the many possible skill checks a Narrator can call for. For all of the rules around skills and ability checks, see Chapter 6: Ability Scores.

Example Skill Check

Gregor: Can I see any signs that a thief has come through this way?

Narrator: Let’s see! Make a Survival or Investigation check for me.

Gregor: I’m trying to rely on my experience with hunting, but instead of using my intuition I’m focused on keeping an eye out for clues and deducing what they could mean. Can I make an Intelligence check with Survival?

Narrator: That sounds reasonable—roll it!

Gregor: Can do! Got a 17.

Narrator: You notice some moss on the wall to your left has been disturbed, as though someone had grabbed it to keep their balance.

In some situations, more than one check may make sense, and ultimately it’s the Narrator’s decision which ability check and skills are used and how high the DC is. However the Narrator may also give a player options of which ability check or skill they use in a particular situation. Which ability score can be used with each skill depends on the circumstances and how an adventurer is trying to achieve an objective. In this case, Gregor wanted to use Intelligence with his Survival check because it’s his highest ability score, and his reasoning for it made good sense.