I’ve been curious about this for as long as I’ve known about D&D, and especially after I started playing D&D based computer games (Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, etc.). I know roughly how it’s supposed to work, as I’ve even looked at Players Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide a few times. But in practice, I can’t see how a DM (GM?) can possibly do a decent job at juggling all the various things that need to be juggled.
First of all, the DM has to know incredible amounts of rules and numbers on the fly… or does he? Do DMs just pause the game and look stuff up a lot?
More importantly, if PCs are indeed free to do whatever they want, how the hell does a DM react to them in any sort of coherent manner? Let’s say the DM has prepared a nice adventure romp into the Dungeon of Lesbian Werewolf Pirate Slavetraders. He’s constructed a map, placed encounters, and created some cool bad guys. But then, the PCs decide they’d rather, uhm, teleport to the Underdark and fuck up some drow. What’s a DM to do? His adventure that he spent a long time planning is now being ignored. Moreover, the PCs are now in a place for which the DM has prepared nothing at all! What if the DM knows nothing about the Underdark? Is he supposed to make up cities, caverns, adventures, people, political intrigue, etc. on the fly? How is that even possible? What if PCs start asking questions of random NPCs about what’s happening locally? Are only master improvisational storytellers allowed to run the game?
Basically: how does a real D&D session actually play out?
In most groups, there’s a sort of unwritten rule that the players will pay at least token attention to the DM’s plot hooks. If the players stray too far from what the DM has prepared in advance, typically one of three things will happen: First, the DM might wing it, but very few are good enough at this to even try. Second, the DM might subtly or unsubtly tell the players that he’d appreciate it if they didn’t do that (ranging from a polite request to a bolt of lightning striking anyone who has anything resembling a creative idea). Third, if the DM doesn’t want to be a wet blanket to the players’ independence, but also doesn’t want to try to wing it, he might call it a night, and prepare material for the players’ new course before the next session.
As for the rules, again, there’s a sort of gentleman’s agreement to not pull in rules the DM’s not expecting, or that the players (DM included) don’t understand very well. As an example, grappling rules in many games can be somewhat Byzantine, so many players just don’t choose to get into grapples. On the other hand, if one player has built his character as the world’s greatest wrestler, who can pin a stone giant, then the DM will know that in advance, and knows to bone up on the grappling rules.
But yeah, DMing is inarguably a lot of work. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the number 1 cause for D&D groups falling apart is that nobody wants to be the DM.
Yeah, as **Chronos **said, players usually don’t try to *intentionally *break the DM’s world-building efforts. I’m running a campaign right now for my son and his friends. If they all decided they wanted to explore the Underdark then I’d be happy to pull an adventure together along those lines, as long as I had a few weeks to prepare for it. It would be great, actually, to have them that invested in the direction of the campaign. Mostly they’re just happy to go wherever I hint they should, which puts a whole lot of the creative burden on me. (They’re only middle-school kids so I don’t really expect much more of them.)
Remember also, that the DM is essentially GOD. If I make up something on the fly that doesn’t match published canon, my version trumps what’s in the books. So I don’t need to know *everything *about the established rules, settings, and monsters. I just need to know enough that it feels like everything fits together.
Players want to have an enjoyable game, so really it’s just in their best interests to at least partially go along with the DM’s plans - waiting around while the DM goes to look stuff up every five minutes isn’t exactly the most interesting of plans. Really, it’s an unstated compact - the players aren’t going to go too far off the rails, and in return the DM plans a campaign that they’ll enjoy playing through. If you end up with players who do want to go off and do random things, or a DM who’ll railroad you constantly, then simply enough the others probably won’t want to play with them again. Too, once you’ve DM-ed or even just played with a group for a long enough time, you get to understand the kind of things they’re likely to want to do and so focus your efforts on building up some interesting things in that area.
DM-ing is a lot of work. If you’ve played through on the player side for a good while, chances are you’ll know most of the rules since you’ve played through them on the other side, but there’s the occasional more esoteric question which you’ll probably have to check up on. I’d say the actual playing work is less difficult rules and more simply having a lot to keep track of at once. And of course there’s the actual planning, which can really be massive or simple depending on how you do it.
It’s really not that hard to come up with an adventure on the fly. And if you’re not good at that, and have to have everything planned, you come up with contingency plans - at the very least, having the random encounter chart at hand - for if the players don’t want to do what you want.
And it’s NOT possible to do literally ANYTHING.
The rules, and GM’s rulings, limit them, as does their own desire to have an enjoyable game, playing as a character type.
The example you give, BTW, is prevented by the rules - you can’t just Teleport into a random unknown location - you have to know where it is, and what the layout is. So, some place you haven’t been, or been given information on is impossible to get to. There’s also a range limit, so, especially trying to go to the Underdark (several miles down, eating up your teleport range that much faster), you can’t just go anywhere.
There’s also GM rulings - magical interference, or ‘that place doesn’t exist’, for instance, are perfectly legitimate answers if the players try to do that.
So are ‘there’s no logical reason for your character to do that’, and ‘stop being a disruptive prick, Dave’.
One thing helping a GM avoid wasting time looking things up is the GM screen, a convenient wall behind which the GM has his notes which will have abilities for the important characters and monsters they’ll run into written down, maps, a rough outline of adventure points, and anything else that they might find handy. Usually the GM screen is also printed with convenient rules reference for whatever system you’re using so most of the commonly referenced rules are right in front of them the entire time.
OK, what you guys are saying makes sense. In terms of big-picture campaign things, I can see how this implicit cooperation between player and DM works, even though, as Chronos mentioned, being a DM still seems like hard ass work.
But how about within a campaign, when a player is distracted by, say, a throw-away NPC the DM put in an encounter or in an inn or something. What if the player decides to strike up a conversation with the tavern wench and wants to know about her life, backstory, etc. He decides that she’s intriguing and decides to spy on her and follow her home to observe her family life. Now the DM has to construct the house and the dynamics between mother and father and five brothers and sisters out of thin air. What if a combat ends up happening (PC is discovered, for instance). Now there needs to be a map (at least a combat grid) of the house’s layout for combat positioning or escape routes.
Once out of the house and on the run, the PC is on the street and looks around. How does the DM respond? “It’s a street and there are a lots of houses on it.” But what if the player is looking for strangers whose coat and hat he wants to steal to disguise himself with. I guess the DM could say “You see a gentleman with a fedora and his lady friend emerge from a house a hundred meters down the road”. What if the PC decides to run into that house? Now the DM has to construct a whole new family that probably knows their neighbors, and probably the tactical layout of THAT house too.
And this is just a really stupid, simple example of how PCs may interact with and be distracted by random things the DM has them encounter. The town was originally just on the way to the adventure, but now it’s become an adventure in its own right. How do DMs deal with these distractions into random people and things? Are they expected to always be able to conjure tactical layouts and personalities and life stories on the fly? Or would they try to nudge the players away from being interested in these peripheral interactions?
If the stalker character insists on hijacking the game, albeit temporarily, there are ways to discourage others, at least. Thr DM can easily have him get caught, arrested, jailed, or otherwise inconvenienced…possibly to the point of not being able to further participate in the evening’s gaming.
This is where you start getting into Schrödinger’s Details-- Details do not actually exist until they’re observed. In your example, the players say they enter a bar, and the DM might say something like “The bartender gives you a gruff look, and a barmaid is serving drinks to six people at assorted tables”. At this point, the barmaid (and everyone else in the bar) has no description whatsoever-- Their descriptions literally do not exist. Then the players ask what the barmaid looks like: “She’s a tall blond, and would probably be quite pretty, except that she overdid it with the makeup and the padding in her blouse”. Or some other throwaway description-- I just made that up on the spur of the moment, and I’m not exactly the world’s greatest storyteller. If the players follow her home, you can just say “It’s a small, low-rent house, but it seems to be kept pretty clean”. At this point, you still don’t have anything resembling a map of the house, since you probably won’t need it. If, players being players, a combat does manage to erupt, you just draw a box with two doors on graph paper and say that’s the living room, but you still don’t need to put the kitchen and the bedroom on the map. At the end of the day, sure, you might have ended up having to do a lot of work for that barmaid, but notice that you still haven’t done one lick of preparation for the bartender, or that mysterious stranger sitting alone at the table in the corner.
Of course, if your players start chasing down on a path you haven’t prepared, you can also just give them the most boring answers you can think of, to try to get them to lose interest.
Some DMs too will have generic details on hand just in case. Say, a set of stats for a particularly stocky peasant, that could be applied in case of a bar fight the players start, or attacking him on a road somewhere, and so on. A generic building floor plan in case the players want to go somewhere, that could equally be a house, or an inn, or whatever. You might only get to use them once, but occasionally it’s useful to have such things ready to go if an opportunity arises.
I did this to one of the ‘Daves’ - he did something disruptive (broke up the party, while the others chased down the actual hook I’d set up), and, honestly, stupid, even outside the context of disrupting the game (murdered an NPC, using a very distinctive weapon), so he ended up with a price on his head. Also didn’t get XP while the rest of the party did.
Eventually, I ended up kicking him out of the game, and letting one of the other PCs collect the price on his head.
Not if the DM doesn’t want to. You just tell the player something like this: “You follow her to a house down near the wharfs. She goes inside and locks the door. All the windows are shuttered. You try to peek in, but you can’t see anything but empty, darkened rooms.” What’s the player going to do at that point? Roleplay hanging out in a deserted street for eight hours? Try to break in? If he does break in you can tell him the house is empty … obviously the occupants heard him and ran out the back down to get the city watch. And so on. It’s not hard to steer any course of action into a frustrating dead end. And in the meantime the other players will probably be griping at the guy to quit dicking around so they can get on with doing something fun.
Sometimes if the hijack is something fun, you run with it. One of the kids in my campaign is a cheapskate. They were crossing river on a ferry and he tried to sneak on board instead of paying the ferryman and got caught. So I made up a name for the ferryman and gave him a gruff personality and let them roleplay their way out of the situation. Now the ferryman is a reoccuring character who recognizes the cheapskate PC and doesn’t like him.
But none of that had to happen if I didn’t want it to. I could have just let him sneak on board and left the ferryman as an anonymous non-entity.
There are also a lot of tools available for GM’s online. Whenever I’ve run a game I’ve always run off a batch of about 20 randomly generated peasant NPCs. Usually that’s enough info to give them a hook for a personality and stats in case the players get into a fight. Really, though, it just comes down to practice and being ready to roll with things. My friend who GMs often always has a list of names on hand in case the players get interested in one of the nameless NPCs and that’s usually plenty for him.
Also, most successful campaigns I’ve been in have tended to be pretty contained geographically. There will be one town or city or whatever, and the GM will have plotted out enough details to deal with nosy players. The action will either take place in the town or an area nearby. Leaving the area is a pretty big deal and will invariably mean the end of the session for the GM to prepare. And of course the players will have told the GM where they are going. The fact that pretty much everyone in my gaming circle prefers creating their own campaign settings rather than using official ones also means that we tend to have lots of leeway in coming up with details on the fly.
As for rules, it’s generally been that everyone is expected to know how their character works and be honorable about it. Between everyone in the group, we’ll usually be able to recall a rule when needed.
This sort of stuff is actually pretty easy to invent off the cuff. The best advice for a GM is to steal like a motherfucker. Need to invent a quick family for an NPC? Think of any sitcom you want, and plug it into your scenario. The barmaid lives with her husband, her ditzy mother, and loud-mouth father who hates elves and is always fighting with his idealistic son-in-law. Bonus points if you can do a good Archie Bunker impression.
Not necessarily. You don’t need to draw up a map for every fight. In this case, depending on how you want to spin it, you can have the player easily over power a few low-level guards, or throw so many guards at him that he’s got no real choice but to hoof it. Either way, you don’t need a battle map.
And, if it turns into a serious battle that needs to be tracked on a grid, it’s honestly pretty easy just to make up a map on the fly. Houses are pretty much the same - living room, kitchen, bedrooms, maybe a bathroom if your campaign has indoor plumbing. You can probably sketch one out in the time it takes your players to find their dice and roll initiative.
Also worth keeping in mind that most RPGs are not nearly as tactically oriented as D&D. The vast majority of RPGs on the market deliberatly eschew the need for detailed maps that are common in Dungeons and Dragons, and the arcane combat systems that make them a necessity.
The other limiting factor here is that D&D style combat is pretty time consuming. If the players are getting into a detailed fight at every location they go to, they’re not going to get to too many locations. This puts a practical limit on the number of maps a GM will need to invent per session, because just playing through each map he creates is going to take a good thirty minutes, or more. If they fight is shorter than that, then it probably wasn’t necessary to draw the map in the first place. An experienced GM can usually tell how long a fight’s going to take, and make a good guess as to how much detail he needs to create on the fly for a given encounter.
More or less, yes. Improv really ain’t all that hard, once you know what you’re doing. Like any other skill, it improves with practice.
GMing isn’t for everyone. A lot of people just don’t have the temperment for it. Other people absolutely live for it.
One thing to keep in mind is that, while there are players who act the way you describe, these are generally considered problem players. A GM should be prepared to handle a certain amount of randomness from his players, but when they start getting obnoxiously stupid (like stalking random barmaids, then engaging in a string of daylight forced entries in the middle of a busy town) it’s time to start bring down the Darwin on that character. That guy in the fedora you randomly decided to mug because you wanted a disguise? Turns out he’s an archmage, and he’s disintegrated your character. While you’re rolling up a new character, the rest of the party is going to go get started on the actual adventure. Most players will pick up the lesson pretty quickly. The ones who don’t, don’t get invited back to the next session. If you’re really lucky, the other players will help police the situation. I was running a campaign once, in an X-Files type of setting (Alternity’s Dark Matter, for those that remember it) where one of the players decided that the best way to get information from the kindly old professor was to threaten him with a knife. I didn’t have to do anything in that scenario, because the rest of the party quickly beat that character to a pulp and turned him over to the police. The professor was so thankful for being saved from that “ruffian” that he gratefully told the rest of the party everything they needed to know, and the ruffian’s player got a time-out while his character waited in a jail cell down town for his arraignment.
Any halfway decent player is just as invested in the process of creating the story as the GM. You think of it as if you’re all working together to make a really cool movie, and you avoid things that would look stupid in a movie. Would Lord of the Rings been improved by a segment where Viggo Mortensen spazzes out in downtown Minas Tirith for forty five minutes before getting dogpiled by the town guards? No? Then the player knows not to act like that.
In a really good group, the players are as actively involved in creating the setting as the GM. I’ve started playing about once a month with a new group I met recently, and it’s really been a mind blowing experience, how dedicated these guys are to the concept of collaborative story telling. We played a game called 3:16, which is a very simply, irreverent space marine type of game. The GM, who is one of the best I’ve ever played with, did something that was absolutely revolutionary to me. Our marines had just blown the door on the enemy base, my character’s the first one in the door, and the GM turned to me and said, “Okay, you’re in the base. What do you see?” It was, to me, an amazing moment, where the GM actively co-opted the players into creating the universe, instead of allowing them to merely react to it. It turned into one of the coolest gaming sessions I’ve ever experienced, and the GM did it with precisely zero setup. Going into the adventure, he had absolutely no idea what he was going to do with it - who we would be fighting, where we’d be fighting them, why we needed to beat them. Everything was invented on the fly, and not just by him.
I think this is the key, it’s been a few years since I played D&D, which I enjoyed as both player and DM, but the group we had were alll close friends so we knew what the others enjoyed and set up the adventures accordingly with our own additions of course.
Typically things would kick off with a bar room brawl and then the rest of the quest would follow, many times we made it up on the hoof and it was more fun than following a script. I think I only bought 1 or two D&D modules in the whole time we played (over 10 years), the rest was made up. Similarly we didn’t use much of the official D&D worlds and preferred to use our own. My main failing was my love of undead villains and I had to stop myself from using them too often so that players didn’t always say “not a vampire lord again”.
I learned to play D&D back in the '70’s. Back before the notion of RPG’s on computer was on anyone’s mind.
A lot of what I was going to say has already been said: the players as a rule are going to cooperate with the GM/DM. Going into a prepared adventure the DM will have notes on the most important items. Yes, once in awhile you time out to look up some obscure item, but since gaming sessions can last hours most folks are welcome for the opportunity to go the bathroom, grab a drink or a snack, or just stand up and stretch for minute.
I did eventually accumulate some “standard” layouts for when I needed to produce a house or whatever on short notice. You don’t need to make every location unique or detailed since a lot of the pencil-and-paper game takes place in imagination.
I did one dungeon based on our high school - in which case everyone present already knew what the place looked like as we were familiar with the real building on which it was based. This is an example of me shamelessly “stealing”.
I also developed a “chain” of inns/taverns so after a few campaigns everyone knew what that one looked like, the menu, the basic NPC’s, and I’d modify it as needed for a game, but I didn’t need to do that very often.
Yes, there was a lot to juggle but with the players helping it was all manageable. And if anyone got too out of hand there were always lightning bolts to throw.
We had one player who started to lose the distinction between the fantasy roleplaying and reality - it’s worse than it appears from that statement as his character was a fire-specialist magic user. After he tried to set my hair on fire in real life we stopped telling him where the games were going to be and that solved that problem. The pyro problem was the worst one I faced during my DM years and had nothing to do with rulebooks or dice.
We did have what we called the “random dungeon”: everything - the terrain, people, monsters, loot, everything - was determined by dice roll. It got very weird at times, but we had a blast.
The thing is, the rule books were a framework, not carved in stone. Outside of tournaments you could do whatever the hell you wanted. When the computer games came out I found them too constraining, actually, and never got into them much (well, I play WoW and Guild Wars but those are pretty big worlds)
My only complaint about being DM is that I was the only one in my group who did it - no one else wanted to, and those that tried had trouble doing it. So I never did get to play characters as much as I wanted to. Everyone else was up around level 15 or so and my highest was at… 3. Maybe.
Oh and as a occasional Dungeon master/storyteller who will indulge players going of the reservation, one thing I learned was when you introduce a new NPC you just made up on the spot, write down his/her name and some details, because you can bet that if you forget the NPC details, your players will remember him/her and try to use them as a contact or what ever…
I’ve retconned characters in this case. ‘No, seriously, his name is X’. If the players do remember better, I’ll go with the original name ‘oops, my mistake’. It’s not too hard to flesh out the character as I go, if I have to.
I’ve asked my players ‘what was the name, again?’ a few times - most recently, the name of the ship they’re on. I realized I hadn’t named it when they arrived in the port they boarded in, so when I needed its name again (not for the game, but for a prologue story I’m writing), I had to ask.
As to making stuff up on the fly…
I recently not only created multiple NPCs and locations, but seriously altered the Elven culture of my world, all on the fly, just because my PCs weren’t biting at the hooks I’d set, and I wanted to get something interesting in that session. It wasn’t hard for me, it was apparently interesting for the players. It also lost me a major NPC, since he left the party.
It’s also a potential adventure hook for a more prepared adventure down the line.