Razorsnake Tango

…romantic, but dangerous

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Confessions Of A Dungeon Master

How I Learned To Think Fast, Or, Players: Chaos On Two Legs

One of the very first things every Dungeon Master/Game Master learns is to think fast. By about your third session, you’ll learn to pull everything from monsters to names to entire cities out of your ass with barely a moment’s hesitation. You’ll come up with new areas of the map and lots of new plotlines. You will abandon in a flash your carefully crafted adventure in favor of a night of bar fights and petty theft.

Because if you don’t, your players will leave person you once were.

It is a hard fact that players and their characters will go off on tangents at the drop of a hat or the sight of a shiny object. If you try and force them to do what you want to get them into and through an adventure, that is railroading and it’s not good. You’ll soon either be without players or your players will start to actively tear up your rails.

So that’s where quick thinking and improvisation come in. Using your wits, you can eventually bring the characters around to what you intended, or barring that, at least build a nice new adventure.

For me, and I suspect for most DMs, the first instance of being fast on my feet came in the early in my very first campaign. The 4 players I had were total noobs to D&D, with the exception of one guy who had played a couple of games with his brothers. For our first session, I had about an hour of town adventure, then another two hours of exploring a small dungeon. That dungeon was smallish, but meant to occupy them for a couple of future sessions.

I think we were about 20 minutes into the town adventure, which was mostly buying equipment and having a dustup with a couple of young punks, when they went to the bulletin board outside the tavern. Now, I had made up a small bulletin board out of cardboard and taped notes on it, to use as a prop and keep me from reading the notes to them. A few notes were just stuff like “Cow for Sale” or “Room to Rent”. A few more were rumors, vague stuff about exploring far off lands in the Royal Navy, help wanted cleaning out a house, etc. The big ad that was supposed to grab them was for someone to go explore the dungeon for the local Mage. It offered good pay and a share of any magic items.

So of course they decided to take the job cleaning out the house.

I grabbed a sheet of graph paper and hurriedly marked off a single level house with seven rooms. I told them it was the home of the recently deceased former mayor of the town. In talking to the mayor’s son, they asked several questions about both the place and the mayor. I answered them and they took the job.

And then they spent two and a half hours cleaning the house out and going through the dead guys stuff. I was making random die rolls for loose change, how much liquor was still in bottles and all manner of other things. I was tossing out flavor text without thinking because hey, new DM. In hindsight, like, a few minutes after I told them things, I realized I was making trouble for myself. This was proven when they found an odd coin under a large chest.
They naturally assumed the coin was valuable, enchanted or both. I gave a 30% chance of the former and only a 10% chance of the latter and rolled the dice. First roll was under thirty, second roll was a three. They were filled with joy, pocketed the coin and finished cleaning the house.

The session ended and they all thanked me for a great game. We agreed to meet again in a week. They left my apartment and I poured myself a glass of bourbon. A bit later, while dressing for a date, I resolved to just play things by ear and have generic stuff ready. That was a very good plan, seeing as how the entire next session was them going around finding out what people knew about the coin. Finally, I had a sage tell them that it was enchanted to light their way through the dungeon in the forest. THEN they finally explored the goddamn dungeon for our final two sessions together.

That group, and pretty much every group since then, are why I very seldom plan things out in advance. Oh, sure, I have a 40 year old game world with lots of people and places and things, but I learned that letting the characters and players do as they want is both fun and makes my life easier. I have always been quick thinking, so once I stopped planning out Great Adventures, games generally ran smoothly. Not that players and their character have not made me crazy on occasion, but that is something for a whole other article.