Forty-plus years of rolling dice teaches you a few things. Chief among them: the game’s scaffolding—your basic five-room dungeon, your tavern-to-adventure pipeline—works because it’s reliable. But reliability can calcify into routine, and routine can drain the magic from even the most magical of games.

After running my homebrew Port Haven campaign for three years with the same core group, I found myself wrestling with two familiar DM problems: how to give individual characters meaningful spotlight time without boring the other players, and how to elegantly convey complex plot information that had become tangled over years of play. Rather than reach for conventional solutions, I decided to experiment with the fundamental structure of how we play.

The Rotating Spotlight Solution

The first experiment tackled the solo adventure dilemma. When you want to give a character deep personal development, the traditional approach leaves two-thirds of your table as passive observers. My solution turned spectators into participants by casting the other players as carefully crafted NPCs.

For each character’s spotlight scenes—two scenes per character—I created detailed NPC sheets for the non-spotlight players. These weren’t just stat blocks but character briefs: motivations, attitudes, relationship dynamics, and specific information they needed to convey. Each player controlled four different NPCs across the evening while also experiencing their own character’s solo adventure.

The magic happened in the threading. Each solo adventure appeared tailored to individual character interests but carried connecting tissue that wove all three stories into a single conspiracy. When the characters reunited for the evening’s climax, they brought puzzle pieces that only made sense in combination—information that led them to foil a criminal plot and uncover a twist that has them eager for next session.

The technique worked because it preserved agency for everyone at the table while creating genuine interdependence. No one was watching; everyone was performing.

The Doomed Character Gambit

The second experiment addressed exposition elegantly by embracing mortality. I asked each player to create a throwaway character with full knowledge that this character would die during the session. These doomed adventurers would experience events crucial to understanding the main campaign’s increasingly complex plot threads.

Death wasn’t the endpoint—it was the doorway. These characters’ deaths transported them to an afterlife directly relevant to the ongoing story arc. There, they learned information that could help their main characters succeed, but with a crucial constraint: they had to devise creative methods to transmit this knowledge back to the living world.

The approach solved multiple problems simultaneously. It gave me a vehicle for exposition that felt earned rather than handed down from the DM’s throne. It helped players reconnect with plot threads that had frayed during gaps in our play schedule. Most importantly, it created a genuine puzzle: how do you get information from one character to another when those characters can’t directly communicate?

The information segregation forced players to think creatively about in-world solutions rather than simply sharing out-of-character knowledge. It also meant that when that information does return to their main characters—via whatever ingenious method they devise—it will feel like a earned revelation rather than a convenient download.

Why These Work

Both experiments succeeded because they preserved what makes D&D compelling while subverting expectations about how the game must be played. The rotating NPC approach maintained everyone’s engagement without sacrificing character depth. The doomed character session provided exposition while creating rather than removing player agency.

Neither technique would work as a permanent replacement for standard play, but as periodic variations, they reinvigorated a table that had settled into comfortable patterns. They reminded us that the game’s flexibility is one of its greatest strengths—that the dice and character sheets are tools for storytelling, not constraints on it.

After four decades of play, I’m still discovering new ways the game can surprise me. These experiments won’t revolutionize anyone’s campaign, but they might spark ideas for breaking your own table’s patterns. Sometimes the best way forward is sideways.