Intro
Let us talk about the greatest RPG ever made.
It is video game month here at Roll With Advantage, where we are going through the games that have shaped us most as Dungeon Masters. Joe will be along in a few weeks to talk about Uncharted. Today it is Fallout: New Vegas — a game that genuinely redefined how I design tabletop campaigns, and one I think storytellers of every flavour should look at.
If you have played it, I hope this offers some reflection on what it does so well. If you have not, do not worry: I am not going to spoil anything that ruins the experience. It is admittedly clunky and buggy now, and it can only stay running for about eight minutes at a time. There is still a reason so many of us keep coming back with new builds and new characters.
Before we start, the question underneath all six of these:
How open is your story going to be? Are we in an absolute sandbox, or are we being guided through something closer to a film? Most campaigns land somewhere in between — but working out where on that spectrum you sit is one of the most important decisions you will make, because it determines whether you and your players are getting the same thing out of this game.
1. Framing the story
New Vegas is an open-world RPG like every other Fallout, but it does a few things that put it right in the middle of the linear-to-sandbox spectrum. You are never on rails — but the story has a frame, and that frame flavours everything you do.
Here is the setup. You are a courier. Your latest package — a mysterious platinum casino chip — has been stolen, and you were shot in the head by the man who took it. You barely survived. You know very little about him, but you know you want your package back and possibly some comeuppance for, you know, the being shot in the head. You learn quickly that he is in New Vegas.
That is reason enough to head there. But there is much more going on.
The city sits at the centre of a war between two factions: the bureaucratic mess that is the New California Republic, and the imperialistic slaver society that is the Legion. They are going to have it out any day now for control of the region. And a third party, Mr House, the autocrat currently running the city, is very interested in keeping things exactly as they are.
So the story begins in two layers:
- The surface layer — you are a courier who wants their package back. Immediate, emotionally clear, easy to act on.
- The deeper layer — while travelling, you are learning about a political conflict you will inevitably have a horse in. Who ends up controlling New Vegas may have a great deal to do with what you do with that platinum chip once you have it.
That structure alone is excellent advice for any campaign. Hook the players with something immediate and emotionally legible. Let the complicated thing — the nuanced factional conflict where both sides have real flaws — rise slowly. It will not grab anyone in session one, but with enough context it becomes the thing they actually care about.
Everything fits inside the frame
The genuinely impressive part is the lengths the game goes to so that everything comes back to the central question: who gets to control New Vegas?
You are technically free to do anything. You are never railroaded. But that random gang you stumbled into? Turns out they were pushed off their land by the NCR. That random NPC you bought a gun from? He escaped Legion slavery.
The structure is a bit like a sketch of a Christmas tree. Wide sections you are free to roam, then the occasional linear gate. You have to reach New Vegas at some point, but you can get there however you like. Once you do, there is the business of the chip — another wide open section that narrows again. And on it goes.
So in a game as open and unpredictable as D&D, maybe this is the ideal structure. Can you find a central conflict for your campaign and make sure every open-world activity has some small correlation to it? An opinionated person involved. The fallout of a faction. A bad side of people the party thought were good, revealed through a side quest.
If there is a big conflict casting a shadow over everything, your players will not feel discouraged from exploring — and no matter how much aimless mucking about they do, they are always contributing to something they care about.
Concretely: tell them you need 5,000 gold to be welcomed into this part of town, and then let them work it out. Trust that however they do it, they will be engaging with your main story along the way. By the time they have the money, they walk through that door with far more context and are far more ready for what is behind it.
Where you sit on the sandbox spectrum is worth choosing on purpose rather than drifting into — I went through five very different shapes a campaign can take in more engaged players: five campaign structures worth trying.
2. Guidance without restriction
Now that we have the Christmas tree, let us talk about how often and how firmly the game guides you.
At the start, the goal is simple: get to New Vegas. An NPC offers two routes.
- The short way. Almost directly there — through a no-man’s-land inhabited by some of the toughest creatures in the game.
- The long way. A highway that loops miles out of your way, days of travel, but relatively safe — and along it you gather resources, learn about the region, and maybe pick up more information on the man who shot you.
That is essentially the only guidance you get. It is entirely up to you whether you take one, the other, or wander off, find a cave, fight a gang and do a quest instead.
Most players end up on the long road. The intended one. The one that introduces you to the world properly, sets up more quests, gets you more XP, and shows you more of the cool things the developers made — a feeling I suspect every DM can relate to.
So how does the game know they will, with only that one nudge?
Guidance plus consequences, not walls
Guidance comes from NPCs, hints, and clues in the world. Consequences are what happen when a player goes down an ill-advised path.
It is not our job as DMs to put our foot down and stop them, or to be annoyed when they mess around and find out. What we can do is offer guidance and consequences that illustrate something true: this world does not bend to their will. There are forces out there more powerful than they are. There are bad courses of action no matter how clever or strong you are. And if they want to get through the campaign intact, it might be worth planning a little, gathering some insight, and listening to the expertise of the people around them.
Because the game has the confidence to let you fail, it never needs restrictions. There are no invisible walls. No alert saying this is a level 25 zone, come back later. Nothing that actually removes your control. You can absolutely take the short path at level one — it is just extremely hard.
Translating the consequences
The catch is that New Vegas simply kills you when you get it wrong, because it is a game with save files. D&D usually is not. So pick different consequences:
- Instead of a death, a companion is killed.
- Instead of being killed, the party is captured and has to engineer an escape.
- They lose a valuable resource.
- They run out of time to accomplish something because of everything that went wrong on the way.
Tell your players where they need to go, but let them get there however they like. Tell them what the NPCs of the world think is best, but let them heed or ignore it. Let them do dangerous things and face the results. That is how you build a believable world and a story that keeps moving under its own momentum, guided by choices the players made of their own volition.
This is the same argument as failing forward, arrived at from a different direction — Joe covers that, and the rest of the narrative toolkit, in eleven lessons from Avatar: The Last Airbender.
3. Making every skill matter
Like most RPGs, New Vegas has a Speech skill for talking your way through problems. Unlike most RPGs, it is nowhere near the only skill that affects how you communicate. Every single skill on your character sheet can come up in conversation, in ways a silver tongue simply cannot reach.
Sometimes knowledge in a field matters more than how well you phrase things. High Science lets you explain to someone how the computers here work. High Medicine lets you convince someone you genuinely know what you are talking about regarding anatomy.
My favourite example is very early. You can get dynamite from a townsperson, but it requires 25 in Explosives to convince him to hand it over.
I love that detail for two reasons. One, if you picked Explosives at character creation, it makes that choice feel like it mattered. Two, it tells you something about this man: he does not care whether you have the gift of the gab. He wants to know you are not going to blow your thumb off, and no amount of flashy words will demonstrate that. You have to show you understand the device.
The result is that you can play a character with terrible Speech who still meaningfully shapes social encounters. Every skill you invest in pays for itself twice: once in the field, and once off it, while you are talking to people and sorting out information — which is most of what New Vegas is, and most of what modern, social-heavy, character-driven D&D is too.
Two ways to do this at the table
Let non-charismatic classes roll other skills socially. If you are haggling with a shopkeeper over an herbal supplement, a Medicine check to say I know exactly what this herb does and it is not worth what you are charging makes more sense than a Persuasion check to plead your case.
Use what I am calling passive skill checks. We already write down passive Perception and passive Insight, because those are number games the table needs. But I like to imagine that proficiency in any skill is running passively all the time — that your characters notice things and have insights from their expertise even when nobody is rolling.
To do it, write down what every PC is proficient in at the start of the campaign, and use that list to steer your narration:
- Ranger, with your proficiency in Nature, you notice the plant life in this dungeon is all various poisonous species — which might say something about what lives down here.
- Rogue, with your Sleight of Hand, you notice the barmaid you are speaking to is working those copper pieces between her fingers far too dexterously for a barmaid. There may be more to her.
This does two things at once. It pulls those players directly into scenes where they would otherwise hang back while the Charisma character works, and it gives them something concrete to roleplay from. It makes Athletics matter when nobody is jumping and Religion matter when nobody is praying.
And if they want to dig in and actually roll on what you just told them, even better — you have changed the flow of the conversation using knowledge the face of the party never had.
Giving every class something to do outside their one pillar is the same instinct behind ten secondary objectives to make your combat better, which solves the equivalent problem inside a fight.
4. Dialectics and opinionated NPCs
At some point in the hunt for the platinum chip, you will probably end up talking to Caesar — Kaisar, as the Legion says it — and learning how he justifies what he does.
His core philosophy is, I think, also the core design philosophy of the whole game: dialectics. The truth that lies between two opposing ideas. Set two extremes against each other and, out of the conflict, something more nuanced and complete emerges — a third thing built from the best of both. Caesar believes that a society pitted against its direct opposite eventually synthesises into a better one, and that is how he justifies his war with the NCR. Whoever wins, the region benefits, because the two forces sharpened each other.
Two enormous caveats before anyone applies that logic. First, he cites Hegel, and for reasons well beyond the scope of this article he has a badly simplified and hacked-up reading of Hegel. Second: he keeps slaves.
So no, do not use dialectics to justify Caesar’s nonsense. But absolutely use it when designing complicated conflicts. It is not good or bad. It is not the truth or the lie. It is something in the middle that the players have to sort out themselves.
There are not really any good guys in New Vegas. There are certainly some bad ones. But the actual antagonist is the setting — and the conflict is everyone trying to cope with it. How do you run a system of government two hundred years into a nuclear apocalypse? Should it look like the recent past? The distant past, like Rome? Something entirely new?
The game carries all that complexity through some of the most opinionated NPCs I have met in any open-world RPG. People who will tell you exactly what they think about the factions, the circumstances, and what you personally ought to be doing about it. And after synthesising dozens of those opinions, you are left to decide — because who controls the city is partly up to you.
Applying it when you do have a big bad
D&D is high fantasy, and there often is a big bad. There is only so much nuance available for a demon lord who eats children. Fine. But even then, build the nuance around them.
Say your villain is a straightforwardly evil vampire lord. Consider:
- Some of the legal, political and economic systems this vampire duke put in place have genuinely helped people. Remove him and perfectly innocent people lose resources and struggle.
- There is a band of vampire hunters already pursuing him — but their internal politics are so corrupt that they are nearly as bad as what they hunt, and maybe not worth allying with at all.
- His rule is the most stable this region has been in centuries, and killing him opens a power vacuum that some believe will help nobody and plunge the area into decades of chaos.
Those are just ideas. The principle is the one that matters: no single NPC should have the whole truth.
That forces your players to wade into the middle. They may never reach a clean answer — but by the time they start making decisions, they will feel like they earned the right to, because they pieced it together from a dozen partial perspectives. They will feel like the people with the unique insight to know what to do.
When there is no right answer, the answer your players invent is usually the interesting one. Dialectics is just the permission structure that lets them invent it.
Nuance around the villain rather than inside them is exactly the approach in six tips to never have a boring BBEG again — particularly the crossroads of whether your villain regrets what they did.
5. Quests that defy simplicity
Enough theory. Meat and potatoes: how does this game handle quests?
The main thing every New Vegas quest does well is all four of the above at once. They fit into the broader picture. They offer guidance without forcing your hand. They have multiple solutions involving nearly every skill you could have taken. And there is usually some complication where there is no clean right answer.
On top of that, they use the two-layer idea. There is a hook that is easy to understand at the start, and then something surfaces around halfway through that you did not know about and that changes everything.
Quests are the most directly stealable thing in any video game — you could lift several of these wholesale and run a great session or two. So here are the best of them. (Yes, this is now a list inside a list. We are not going any deeper than that. We are going to be fine.)
The sharecropper water quest
Something has happened to the water supply at an NCR farmland, and it is choking out the crops. That is the hook: find out what is happening and whether any crime has been committed.
Crimes have been committed. But they were committed by a man from an underserved community — people the NCR is supposed to be supplying with water and is not. He did it to keep his people alive.
From there you have half a dozen options. Let him go and lie about it. Reprimand him. Kill him outright, if you think that is a proportionate punishment — I would question that, but you can.
The beauty is that it takes the most stereotypically good faction and complicates its inner workings: the bureaucratic hell, the carving up of the pie, the gerrymandering and annexing and disenfranchising, and the people who suffer from it. It makes you ask whether this is a bad thing you tolerate because the NCR is still the best option, or reason enough to sever ties entirely.
Which is one of the most political questions there is: do I work to improve the status quo, or fight to change it?
Even if your players end up supporting the good guys anyway, something like this takes a flat faction and gives it real depth — and makes the choice of who to align with an actual choice.
Ghost Town Gunfight
The quest that effectively starts the game. The town you wake up in after being shot in the head — remember, you were shot in the head — is about to be raided by a gang. You can rally the townsfolk and fight them off, join the gang and scavenge what you can from the people here, or walk off into the sunset as a third party.
It is probably the single best quest in the game for the every-skill-matters idea. There are many allies to recruit and many unexpected skills that will get them on your side.
But the real value is the consequences: when the attack happens, whoever dies, dies. It is technically possible for the player to be the only survivor of an absolute bloodbath. That is how you add serious consequences without bringing the story to a halt.
It sets out the game’s whole philosophy in the first hour: here is a problem, solve it however you like, and here are the consequences — live with them for the rest of the game.
A quest like this at the start of a campaign gives your players a spectrum of failure and victory conditions, and teaches them early that some things will slip out of their grasp and the story will press on regardless.
Which makes it a superb session-one template, for exactly the reasons in the worst way to start a D&D campaign.
Arizona Killer
Kill the president. That is the hook — that is the quest’s hook, I am talking about a game, I am talking about a game.
Caesar wants the NCR President assassinated while he gives a speech, to gut morale. There are scripted approaches you can discover, and then there are infinite possibilities limited only by the combat engine. Blow everyone up. Snipe from a tower. Plasma. Have your companions do it. Start a general ruckus and use the confusion.
It is essentially a Hitman level inside Fallout, and here is a problem, find your own solution is a fantastic thing to hand players. Give them a few discoverable paths, then let their own loose odds and ends do the rest. Do they try to be professional and end up in a nail-biter where it nearly falls apart, or do they just cause as much havoc as they can? Entirely theirs to decide — with guidance and consequences, not restriction, keeping it honest.
Beyond the Beef
You trail a missing-persons case to a casino, only to discover that a member of that establishment is trying to get the family back into cannibalism, and the missing person is who he intends to eat.
This is the prime example of offering the player as many choices as you possibly can. Rescue the missing person. Expose the family’s corruption. Go in guns blazing. Substitute one of your own companions for the victim — you monster. Or participate in the cannibalism, because that is a thing you can do in New Vegas. There is a perk. You can get better at it.
And it is the cleanest demonstration of the two-layer idea. “Find a missing person” is not what this quest becomes — it is what gets you in the door, so the deeper layers can unfold while you are already committed and still have a clear goal. By the end you are doing what you set out to do, succeed or fail. The shape of it is nothing like what you expected.
6. Making it all matter
In most open-world RPGs, the conclusion of the game is just the conclusion of the main story. All that other stuff — the rebel faction, the mages guild, the dozens of caves — had nothing to do with where you ended up.
In New Vegas, it does. Because of the frame. Because of the Christmas tree.
All of your wandering adds up at the Hoover Dam in a way I have not experienced in almost any other game. Thirty to fifty hours of aimless exploring comes back. That faction you made inroads with might show up to help. That strange group with the bomber jets might send one. There are so many small details that surface and remind you of decisions you made hours and hours earlier.
It works because everybody has a stake in this fight. Who runs the city affects every single person on that map, so when you offer them the chance to sway it, a lot of them are willing to get involved.
The result is that the ending of Fallout: New Vegas feels equally like an ending the developers wrote and an ending you discovered. You wandered. You did things you never planned, stumbling into quests and factions and places. And none of it was noise — the allegiances you made and the favours you did changed how those people behaved on the final day.
That is the gold standard for a D&D campaign. Narrative-focused but guided without being restrictive. Open-world wandering encouraged, and all of it returning at the end. Every decision counting.
Both D&D and New Vegas are collaborative storytelling experiences where your input as a player genuinely matters. So steal the Battle of Hoover Dam: make sure the moments that came up organically — the ones you never planned as the DM — find some way to affect the final conflict, however small.
Closing Thoughts
Those are the six, and together I hope they make the case for why Fallout: New Vegas has stood the test of time, and why people still hold it up as narrative gaming done right.
Ever since I played it I have thought about how to give an open story a framework. How to guide without restricting. How to make every skill my players invest in matter. How to surround them with NPCs who do not merely hand out loot and stat bonuses but genuinely change what they think about the world. How to write quests that hook. And how to build an ending that ties all of it together and makes every small decision count.
That is what makes it my pick for the Dungeon Master’s video game — the one anyone running D&D should play at least once, to see what in it might inspire them.
If you want the rest of the shelf, Joe’s list of the stories that shaped how I DM covers the books, films and games he keeps stealing from.
Have you lifted something from a video game straight into your campaign? I would love to hear what — drop it in the comments on the video.