Essentialisms

Before beginning today's post, I want to inform readers that the Authentic Wiki will go offline on September 30th, as the company handling the server is relocating. A temporary server is meant to take over during the transition, but this won't happen until October 2nd, two days later. There is a chance of complications with the carrier, but I've been told that the company is expected to be fully operational by October 4th. If the wiki is not restored on October 2nd, which is a Wednesday, rest assured it should be back up by Friday, October 4th.

I hope this doesn't disrupt anyone’s D&D game or spoil any plans. To reiterate, the server will go down on Monday and, if everything proceeds smoothly, should be up again by Wednesday, October 2nd.

Today's post is about balancing our preparatory workload against what's essential for the players and the actual session. This requires a reasonable, practical estimation on our part of how much time we have, and how important it is that the party's needs are given priority. This is not to say that we must work on the upcoming session, but rather, we will be better prepared for that session, and therefore more proactive as dungeon masters, if that session is given a sufficient amount of preparation.

The key word in the above is "essential"... the less we judge to be essential, the less preparation we have to give them, and the more time it allows for the rest of our campaign design and other preparation. Some basic framework is desirable here; "essential" is an abstract concept, one that will differ for every DM, every party and every edition or genre of role-playing game. To start, we should judge these last two, edition and genre, by what kind of time we have and how realistic these rule systems are where it comes to soaking up our time with pre-game prep. Many DM's deliberately choose simpler game models for this reason... by changing the player's expectations, by using a work like "basic" to describe the form of dungeons and dragons that we're playing, we reduce the hurdles we ourselves need to climb. Even the words said to a player, "Well this is only basic after all," is a way of deactivating a player's demands that we put more work into our campaign.

Naturally, this sort of obfuscation is undesirable. Yes, it's used, and even malevolently in some cases... but it's better if we choose, instead, to adapt ourselves and our time to the edition or genre we've chosen, as a point of honesty between ourselves and our players. We want to do right by them. We want to measure up to a standard that we set for ourselves that impresses them. We don't want to play a basic game merely to justify our laziness.

At the same time, there aren't a lot of doctors or lawyers who are building campaigns and running D&D games. For those of us who are committed to 70 hour a week jobs hundreds of miles from civilisation, hell, if there's time to run, screw the prep. I write this as a fellow with a cushy homelife, whose child has grown, who can go to bed when he pleases and only sets the alarm a few times a month; I can afford to get lost in worldbuilding and fascinating details that may see no value during an actual session for several years, if ever. There is, recognisably, a scale between these two extremes; it's up to the reader to locate where they fall upon it.

Up front, engage with the situation immediately in front of the player: threats to their existence, the actual physical halls they're going to be moving through, or detailed clues that need to be physically drawn or written out — so we don't mess up. This kind of information lets the players navigate their environment; realistically, we need to put just enough environment in front of them so they don't run out of it before the end of the session. If they run out the minute the session ends... we've done an excellent job of estimating.

Repeated sessions with the same group, and with the same game structure and style, increases the skill we have at estimating how much detail is needed. Changing the game from week to week, or restarting the campaign, makes this a challenge, as different genres changes the parameters of what's being estimated. An additional player to the campaign also does this... as does a player who fails to come to the session. In fact, this is the most trying of this preparatory difficulty: realistically, we need to prepare not just for the party we expect to show up, but for the party that DOES show up.

Are we prepared, for example, if we expected five players and only two appear? We should think about this ahead of time, giving thought to what would could do if this should happen. Consider... it may feel like three people not showing up for a session is evidence that the session is dying. On the other hand, having only two players brings a golden opportunity, if we're prepared for it. These two players get more of our time, they get a larger share of the treasure, we can go faster with two and potentially, the session can be distinctly designed for them.

This does rely on our knowing which two it's going to be. To some degree, we can probably guess; alternately, we can imagine the creation of five mini-adventures, with details for each player, and then mash up any two of them into something we can present at will should it be needed.

The golden opportunity comes from our being able to really gain the interest and trust of these two players, as a measure of what we can do for them. This helps "sell" our game, if not to the other three players, potentially to still others who are impressed by our more reliable clients and the stories about our game that we tell. What we do not want to do with the two players is say, "Well, if most of us didn't show up, what'ya say if we just call the game tonight?" We should be prepared for NOT having to do this.

For those of us who have played a lot of games on the fly, but don't see this as the end goal of DMing, there's much to learn in discovering what kind of preparation works best in adapting the session to be run upon a change in circumstances. Sessions sometimes take unexpected turns; players decide to take different actions, and this must also be prepared for.

It's supposed that when performing improvisation, the actor wholly relies on whatever phrases or limitations the audience throws out. What's not generally understood is that the audience is limited to only a few things — usually character, setting and situation. This leaves out a vast number of possibilities, such as what profession my "improved" character has, whether or not my improved character is married, how old I am, do I have a wooden leg ... and hundreds of other details that I can "improv" time and again before different audiences, who don't realise that I've pre-invented months ago what additional details these "off-story" additions can bring to the apparently amazing off-the-top-of-my-head performance.

Like an actor, a DM should have numerous pre-invented moments and "off-story" details that can be applied to unexpected player actions in a powerful, though apparently off-handed way. This kind of thing can stun a party, who can't understand how it's possible that we "roll with the punches" so easily. It is easy when we predict the punch and choreograph the roll weeks, months or years before the session. There are such scenes that I've run with my own players that are no different than something I ran in the 1990s or 80s with other players.

This illusion of seamless improvisation is nothing more than the stockpiling of enough ideas, details and scenarios to provide an "inventory" we can draw on for this particular moment. If necessary, we can slip off to the bathroom and think though half a dozen, so that one's at hand in our minds the moment we sit down again. Getting ourselves a cup of coffee is another good sort of "time wasting" that feels completely normal but gives us time to dredge up our memories.

So much for underestimating the players needs; what about overestimating them? Here I don't mean creating three sessions in advance, when the third session's presumptions may all be useless by the time the players get there. Instead, let's consider info-dumping, where a DM tries to insert more detail into the session than is really necessary. The players don't need the villages history or how the architecture has evolved over the last five centuries, or even the name of the local burgher or lord... and we don't need to know every single NPCs character, rolled out in hour after hour of wasted time, as well as our having chosen a name for each. The players don't care. "The bartender" is perfectly fine until the players specifically ask for a name, whereupon we can call him whatever name first pops into our head. I knew a DM who simply identified every bartender as "Fred," every apothecary as "Liam" and every guard as "Sam," which made it quite clear that he did not care about names and preferred we spend less time on trying to engage NPCs in dialogue and more time actually getting on with things. The humour of shouting out "Sam" at a strange guard and having him turn and say, "Yes, what do you want?" soon passed away and the game went on without that detail really mattering.

"Essential" really means exactly that. What do we need to create in order to make the game run smoothly? What details can't be made up in an instant in our heads (like the hit points of something) and really require some serious brain sweat (like, for example, would this ton of wheat bring if it were bought here and dragged fifty miles by the party to another town). Anything that can be invented in a finger snap is unlikely to get in the way of the game's smoothness. But not having anything written down about what a complex magic item does, or why the players should invest their time and effort to stop a war, is going to gum up the works pretty bad. Thus, we spend time preparing difficult things; easy things don't need preparation. In fact, it takes more time to find a number of hit points written down on a sheet of paper than to invent a number at once. Remember, the number doesn't actually matter; so long as its in and around the average number a typical monster of that type would have, we're fine.

Pacing matters more than details do... but if we can maintain both, our game is better for it. Remember, again and again, if we prepare nothing, the game still works. It still "plays" fine. Preparation isn't critical... it's merely beneficial. Cake with icing makes a nice treat. It's better if the icing is pretty, with flowers and a sweet phrase, but no one's going to turn down cake because it's not pretty. When we approach preparation, then, we should do it for what we want to ADD, not as something the game's going to fail without. This removes the pressure, reminds us to pay attention to what we want to add, and concentrate on the fact that we're improving our game, not "rescuing" it from failure.