Transcript
You guys are making your way up the crowded street, cobblestones wet under a soft rain, the sound of bells and cries of seagulls coming from the harbor ahead. You spot the distinct golden sails of the Queen’s ship amongst the forest of masts in the distance. Your target, the galleon that ugly thieves’ guild enforcer swore holds the shipment of dream dust you’ve been after for weeks.
Is there a lotta people on this street?
Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s late afternoon, it’s fairly crowded, traders and dock workers, merchants and city folk doing their thing.
Excellent! One should never let a good opportunity go to waste. Uh, do I happen to see any uh rich folk walking around?
Ugh. The ship is right there!
Roll a Perception check.
Well this day keeps getting better and better, that’s a 21!
Sure, you see one or two figures that sorta stand out, they’ve got maybe a little retinue of guards and there’s one wearing a pretty extravagant set of robes, very expensive, and his attendant holds a silk umbrella up to keep the drizzle off him.
A silk umbrella. In the rain. Yeah, that’s my mark!
Gah! I knew it, I knew it!
He looks wealthy, no doubt, and his four guards kinda support that notion. Do your thing.
Let’s go baby, go! Uh, a one? A nat 1?
I told you to put that die in the dice jail!
Dang it!
Okay, so you sidle up the merchant’s group, slip between the guards and at just that moment, the merchant looks down at your hand stuck in his robes. He looks from your hand up to your face, you guys lock eyes. You get the feeling you might be … in trouble.
I get the feeling you’re stalling. Little bit.
All right. Role for initiative, as the merchant grins at you and whips back his embroidered cloak to reveal a torso wrapped in black bandages and a hole the size of a cannonball where his heart should be. His four guards are whirling and turning about, bristling with freshly drawn steel!
Welcome to D&D, where most of the time, we’re just making shit up.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we just contradict previous videos and just … make stuff up! Except for thanking our patrons, that’s always sincere and we never make that up. Cheers!
All right, this is just sort of a bunch of random small tips for new DMs on how to get comfortable with living on the fly when you’re running a DnD – or any tabletop rpg – session.
There are of course lots of reasons for this, but a main one is to keep from railroading your players in uncomfortable ways and to not sweat how your players navigate the world. Playing dnd means playing in a truly open world and your players can theoretically do anything they want at any time. And so can you.
There is one thing I hope everyone can take away from this and it’s a concept championed by the super awesome Hankerin Ferinale on the Runehammer youtube channel. It’s one that I initially felt truly hesitant about, but in practice, I’ve found him to be right. And that’s the notion that you can be honest with your players about essentially not knowing what’s next. If, and when, that happens. If you’re in a spot that’s way off any map or notes you have, you can just … tell ‘em. You guys are all playing a game together and decent individuals are not gonna fire you as their Dungeon Master just because you let ‘em know you might be discovering the world along with them.
I did truly sorta bristle at this idea at first. And I don’t think you wanna overdo it, or, over share your inherent position of con man but once in a while it’s okay to break the immersion by letting your players know you might need a minute to, you know, come up with what’s next. I typically feel like I want to maintain the illusion for the players no matter what, that whatever they’re doing or wherever they’re going already exists in some way outside of ourselves. But of course the reality is we’re all just making something new moment to moment.
We’re just making shit up.
And that’s literally the core activity of this entire category of games. So, the moral is: don’t stress, just have fun.
Do you have to already be a good bullshit artist to DM or GM a game? Not at all, you can learn as you go. There’s this thing with writers, the notion of being a “plotter” or a “pantser”. Pantser means flying by the seat of your pants. Or writing by the seat of your pants – much less cool but you know.
Plotters are folks who maybe start their writing projects with full outlines or synopsis. Synopses? Synopsises?Whatever, they like to map out a story structure or plot before writing a single word of actual story. And a lot of times in my life I’ve wished I was a plotter, but for better or worse, I definitely lean more towards the panster way of things. Check my 401k if you think I’m kidding.
Let’s say you’ve got an adventure going, you’re running something someone else wrote or you’ve got your own notes and maps laying out all your points of interest and plot points and NPCs, et cetera. And you’re thinking “what the hell is this dude jabbering about? I’m not making anything up, I got all these piles of information right in front of me.” And I’m sure you do. I’m also 100% sure that at some point your players are gonna do something or go somewhere that takes them off the rails, you’re gonna have to – say it with me now – make shit up.
Sometimes I feel the best, most accurate allegory for what a Dungeon Master is doing while running a game is summed up in this Wallace and Grommit clip.
That’s what DMing is to me. So there’s no reason to freak out if your players don’t talk to Mister X to get the map to Location Y. If your players ignore Mister X, they are probably gonna run into Mrs. Z, and when they do, lo and behold, she’s got this strange map.
Or, you know, you’ve described for your players the ruined monastery at the top of the mist-shrouded mountain just outside the town. The one the townsfolk have been complaining about because of the ghost and the ghoulish … ghouls running around in the the courtyard, wreaking havoc on the local flora and fauna. And then your players snare themselves in a scuffle with the town bully and his drinking buddies and there’s a chase and all of a sudden you’ve spent 3 hours making up different locations in this town for your players to go crash through and fight in.
And of course, underneath that monastery on your map is your multi-level dungeon, completely prepped and ready to eat your players alive. It’s full of bad guys and traps and most importantly, treasure! There’s no way you’re gonna let that location go to waste.
So when your players disregard every hint and NPC that begs them to go and end the ghost haunting the monastery and instead decide to follow some throw-away news item you conjured up as flavor detail in the local paper – do medieval villages have local newspapers? No, probably not, but this is fantasy. Leave me alone.
When your players go walkabout investigating the rumors of that made-up criminal enterprise working out of the basement of the local tavern, well, when they sneak into that basement, they find it empty, aside from the barrels of ale and sacks of dry goods … and that one weird iron door set in the furthest corner of the room. Of course, that door now happens to lead to a multi-level dungeon full of bad guys and traps and most importantly, treasure!
Now, it might just be that I possess a certain skill that you simply don’t have. Right? And that skill is called “painting oneself into a corner”. I often excel at that kind of paint work. Because I like to riff on open-world descriptions, I often put things into the players’ minds that to me are just off-the-cuff flavor text but to them, are subtly shiny clues and hints. But it’s all good, wherever they go, my job is to make sure there’s something for their next foot to land on when they take a step.
Maybe DnD is really just one big trust exercise.
Anyway, conjuring up images and things does come relatively easy to me. That’s not to say they are logical or have any sort of depth to them, I typically have to work to make my made-up nonsense make sense for the players. And you might be saying, “hey man, conjuring up images is NOT relatively easy for me!”. And that’s okay too, you don’t have to imagine fresh stuff all the time, you can rip stuff off from movies and books and video games, you can just swipe to your heart’s content. You’re not infringing on copyright or copping out or failing at Dungeon Mastering when you’re making stuff up on the fly. You’re just playing a game with friends. You’re giving players ambiance and things to consider.
And something else that comes up quite a bit is that your players often end up becoming an unwitting source of inspiration for you. They’re gonna say things and do things that you didn’t think of and those things can immediately become part of your imagined scenarios and world. Even when you’re working with written material, you should always keep in mind that you can change any of that written stuff at any time in any way you feel like. Obviously you’re hopefully working towards giving your players a good time, so it’s not like you’re gonna change that orc in room 23 to a dragon that’s ninety times more powerful than your players … I mean, unless you sorta want ‘em to run away in a different direction, you know, there’s that.
Everything’s on the table when you’re running a game. It’s up to you to tailor your imagination to what you think your players enjoy and you just gotta pay attention to how they react to what you’re laying down for ‘em.
You could technically run an entire combat encounter without ever rolling a single die for your monsters. Now, don’t call the rpg police on me, jeez. You could just make up whether the monster hits or not, you could make up a number for how much damage they do, you can make up some weird power they have or some weird action, you could literally do all that on the fly. Now of course you want to fit what you’re making up into the structure of the game rules so the players have ways to engage and interact fairly with everything, sure. I’m just saying, we can acknowledge the bottom line here. That running a DnD session or a Blades in the Dark session or a Pathfinder session or a Shadowrun session, or a whatever rpg session is truly, at it’s core, just making shit up.
I’ll point out one caveat here, and this is just sort of par for the course, whether you’re making stuff up on the fly or running a prebuilt adventure: whatever is put out to the group becomes part of the imaginary world, and consistency is something to be cognizant of. So when you move that multi-level dungeon from the mountain monastery to the tavern basement, you basically gotta make a note of that detail, cause now that’s officially where the dungeon is. Cause now you’re made up nonsense is part of a consensual group hallucination. That sounds self-explanatory when discussing something huge like a dungeon location but it’s the smaller details that are more difficult to keep track of and some note-taking is definitely in order during a game. Just for items or details that are of particular interest to the shape of your imaginary world and it’s characters.
So, go run a game. And make stuff up. Or don’t. Use somebody else’s made up stuff. Just have fun and don’t stress too much.
See ya!