Nicholas Potter/Xortberg

How Nicholas Potter/Xortberg runs games

I'm a strong believer that the unique strength of TTRPGs lies in how the mechanics we all agree to play by interact with and, ultimately, create the narrative we experience. As such, I tend to stick as closely to the rules as I can in the moment, and will hold my players to the rules as well, all in service of creating a story that can only be told in a medium that's equal parts a creative endeavor and a guided, rule-bound experience. I bring as much energy as I can to my scenarios, trying to feed you narrative prompts as well as obstacles and encounters that require some application of the game's rules to overcome. I expect a reasonable amount of game knowledge—for my beginner adventures, I don't expect much more than for you to know fairly well how your own character operates on the understanding that you'll try to learn more as we go, while for adventures not specifically for beginners I'll expect at least a basic understanding of what all of your teammates can do as well. I also don't enforce arbitrary limits on what "your character can know." If I'm using pre-existing monster statblocks, I operate on the assumption that at least one player probably knows something about them, and so I design encounters that don't hinge entirely on some piece of the creature's statblock that's meant to be hidden. Instead, I try to design interesting encounters with alternate victory/defeat conditions, hazards that the monsters use to shore up their weaknesses, or—when the occasion calls for it—a simple encounter where the players are expected to steamroll the enemies, for a nice change of pace. That isn't to say I play *against* the players, though the enemies you face do want to win and survive and I'll generally play them as such. It just means that I try to create obstacles that are interesting and unique, even if I am just using building blocks that everyone's already familiar with.

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