The Lazy Dungeon Master

by Michael Shea

  In Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering and the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2, Robin Laws defines different groups of players into particular categories. Robin also describes the “emotional kicks” these particular groups might get out of a typical roleplaying game. When writing out 3x5 cards for each PC, consider adding the emotional kick you think that player gets out of playing D&D. Examples might include:

  “Enjoys flirting with nobility and authority”

  “Loves killing lots of minions”

  “Wants to take on the biggest baddest badass in the room”

  “Loves treasure with history”

  “Loves exploring the deepest ruins of ancient societies”

  “Loves creating political drama”

  “Is happy following the group”

  If your players are not as forthcoming with character details or emotional kicks, you can bring out a few details from their choices of backgrounds, themes, or relationships. Later on, we’ll discuss a way of building character-focused relationships to give characters more detail and bring groups together while simultaneously building out the game’s world and generating interesting story hooks.

  Keeping the End in Sight

  There’s a big problem with character-focused open-ended stories — they often fall apart at the end. Even great writers like Stephen King and George R.R. Marten can suffer from these loose endings. Their stories are brilliant, thought provoking, and unpredictable, yet often at the end, they completely unravel. Take the end of The Stand as an example. It’s one of the best fantasy books every written, yet it ends with the hand of God appearing and detonating a nuke in the middle of Las Vegas with no actual interaction with our main characters. Why the hell did Larry and Ralph haul their assess from Colorado to Vegas only to have God nuke them? Whoops, spoiler alert!

  Your character-focused D&D game faces the same risk.

  There’s a good reason for this problem. When a story grows organically from the actions of rich characters, there IS no clear ending. These characters drive things forward, building up momentum in directions you never thought about when you started. Then, suddenly, you find yourself out of time or money or pages and you need to end it, however you can.

  Don’t sell an ending you can’t deliver

  Consider the recent remake of Battlestar Galactica and its tagline, “They have a plan”. They DIDN’T have a plan. The writers of the show didn’t know where it was going to go. The X-Files had the same problem. All of the X-Files mythology episodes, the ones with the crazy ink-in-the-eye aliens and the smoking man and the syndicate — there was clearly no real end to that story when they started and, by the end of the show, we all knew it.

  The worst thing you can do for a character-driven story is sell an ending you can’t deliver. Don’t pretend to have some detailed intricate plot thread that doesn’t actually exist. Don’t have your group chasing so many seeds that, by the end, you have to tie them up in some sort of horrific mutated knot.

  The single-line campaign seed

  Instead, focus your campaign along that single campaign elevator pitch we talked about earlier. Focus on a single event or outcome that helps drive your players forward. Don’t make it more complicated than it has to be and don’t deviate. If you sell your campaign on preventing the arch-lich Xythar from destroying the Nentir Vale, stick to it and ensure you’re heading in that direction.

  A simple single-line seed leaves lots of room for the story to twist and weave as the characters and situations push it in new directions. Yet the primary goal always remains in focus.

  Ask your players what they want

  Lucky for you, you don’t need to do a focus group or a survey to find out if you’re going to hit the mark with the story. All you have to do is ask your players if things are heading in the direction they want. After a few sessions into your campaign, ask them what sorts of things they want to do. They might come back with things like “fight a dragon” or “find old artifacts in ancient ruins” or “kill Azmodeus”. Take note of those things and add them to the fuel of the story. When the time is right, you can bring these things forward. Do it early and often enough and you will have time to gently push the story in the direction they seek without simply reacting.

  When you ask a question like this, you have to be prepared to change the course of the campaign based on the answers. It’s no good to ask it one session before the end of the campaign.

  The advantage of the mini-campaign

  Another way to ensure that your campaign’s ending doesn’t get too convoluted is to keep your entire campaign short. The fewer number of sessions you run, the harder it is for the story to deviate or stack up complications until it gets out of hand. Your players’ investment in the story also remains low. Instead of tying up three years of adventures, you’re just tying up a three-month mini-campaign, sort of like a TV mini-series or a short novella. A focused series of adventures lets you build a specific theme around a single clear idea. Knowing the ending is always just around the corner keeps it in your mind as the story progresses.

  It’s always important for you and your group to have that single shining star far off to guide the game, but like the rest of the ways of the lazy dungeon master, hang on with a loose grip and focus on the journey instead of the destination.

  World Building Through Relationships

  Of recent story-focused roleplaying games, Fiasco stands out for group storytelling fun. In Fiasco, players build backgrounds, relationships, and stories through a series of dice rolls, letting the story grow with every round.

  You can use a stripped-down version of this technique to help players tie their characters together in a way that works far better than the old “you all meet at a bar” storytelling technique.

  How Fiasco-style relationships work

  During the first session of your campaign or mini-campaign, use a list of twelve to twenty relationships to tie together each pair of PCs. Pick a player to begin the roll. That player rolls the appropriate die. The relationship tied to that result is the relationship between the rolling player’s PC and the PC on his or her left. The roll now goes to the player on the left who rolls for the relationship between his or her PC and the PC of the player on his or her left. This goes around the table until each PC has two relationships, one with the PC on the right and one with the PC on the left. If someone rolls the same number as someone else, have them re-roll. You want unique relationships between each pair of PCs.

  This is a difficult concept to understand from simple description. To see an example of Fiasco in action, watch Wil Wheaton run a Fiasco setup on Tabletop.

  Weaving the fabric of the story

  This new network of relationships builds the bed of the whole rest of the story. Give the players time to explore these relationships, making sense of the ones that, on the surface, may seem contradictory. Give them time to build out their stories from these relationships. Take careful note of the relationships and think about how they will play into the sandbox you’ve created for the adventure.

  Building your campaign in the first session

  One way to build out your campaign’s environment is to use the first gaming session of that campaign as the world-building session. Come to it with loose ideas about the game’s world and the area in which the PCs might start. While your players develop characters and roll for relationships, give them ideas about potential themes such as dungeon exploration, political intrigue, nautical combat, war, or other overarching themes. As they develop their PCs, you can use their PC hooks to begin threading together the rest of the game world.

  Example: The relationships of Yellowtop

  In the example town of Yellowtop, characters might roll on the following relationships:

  Former salt miners

  Former mercenary soldiers

  Nieces or nephews of Davins

  Apprentices to Lavasque

  Guards of Lord Kanzlif Graystone

  Explorers of the salt mine ruin
s

  Displaced villagers sent north

  Acolites of Chauntae the Greatmother

  Orc hunters

  Secret agents of the neighboring kingdom

  Ancestors of the Graystone noble family

  Survivors of a hobgoblin ambush

  From group to group, different relationships will result in completely different stories. This is handy for one-shot adventures that will turn out differently every time you run them. You can find more PC relationships in appendix A.

  Building your relationship list

  You can build out your relationship list from the seed of your world, the major NPCs of that world, and the locations of that world. If you’ve followed the rest of this book, that material is quite thin at this point, but these relationships begin to help you flesh it out even more. These relationships spark ideas in your mind, even if the relationship never gets rolled.

  When building out a list of relationships, keep the following concepts in mind:

  Keep relationships abstract from other character concepts: You won’t know any other details of a character when the relationship is defined. A relationship should work even with a strange mix of race and class. The relationships don’t always need to make perfect sense. Relationships such as parent or child or sibling can be explained by adoption.

  Relationships should not contradict one another: Because each PC has two relationships, they have to work well together. As you write out your relationship, make sure it makes sense working out with each of the others.

  Keep them specific, but open to interpretation: Relationships should give a player enough detail to understand how it affects their character but not so much that it leaves them no room to fill it in on their own. Because you don’t know the mix of relationships, you want them loose enough that the players can work out how these things all really work together. It’s this combination of relationships that builds out the story, not each individual one on its own.

  Relationships should tie PCs to the world: These relationships should help players see how their PC is tied to the world around them. It helps guide their motivations, but with a soft hand. Use these relationships to build out the world and make the PC a part of it.

  Let players use them as they will: Some players may use relationships heavily in their choices and actions. They might love the potential depth it brings. Others want to tell their own story, regardless of the relationships and others still might simply not care to delve deep into such a story. Don’t force them to use these relationships. Let them use the relationships as much or as little as they choose.

  A buddy system for roleplaying

  The ties between two PCs help bring players together as well. One player strong in roleplaying now has the chance to work with another player who might not be as inclined. They might partner up, each teaching the other more of their style of play. Each pair of players can work as much or as little together to build out their relationships and thus their characters.

  A tool, not a requirement

  If your players are particularly creative in their character backgrounds and understand how to tie these backgrounds into the rest of the game, you don’t have to stick to the relationship list. You might consider using it as a guide more than a requirement. The list of relationships might trigger their own ideas that fit in even better. Don’t force the list on those who would rather build their character on their own.

  The nature of these relationships ensures the story isn’t simply one you build and tell to your players. Instead, it is a story built from you, your players, and the dice. It forces you to stay away from over-writing your story and gives you enough control to have an idea where the story might go. Far better than a traditional story outline, this relationship list gives you the feel for the story in a tool directly used by your players to tie their characters to the world you all build together.

  Building From Frameworks

  The life of a lazy dungeon master gets much simpler as your bag of tools fills out. Building entire worlds from scratch, however, or creating deep and meaningful characters from thin air takes considerable time. Luckily, other great writers have already built so many models, all we need to do is pick and choose. Instead of building out worlds, characters, monsters, stories, or encounters from scratch; use ones already built as a framework . With some subtle tweaks you can turn these frameworks into something that appears brand new, yet as deep and rich as the originals.

  Simply put, a framework is a character, story, setting, or physical area you can use as a model for a component in your game. It’s a quick and easy way to add an element to your game that feels rich and textured but took only a few minutes of your time. Let’s look at some examples.

  Story seed frameworks

  As we’ve discussed earlier, we don’t need a complete story spelled out from beginning to end. All we need is a good starting seed and an idea from which potential stories might grow. We can steal the ideas for these stories from just about anywhere including movies, TV shows, books, or even other games. Here are some example story ideas:

  A creature of the heavens plummets to earth leaving a path of destruction in its wake. (Diablo 3)

  An evil army attempts to uncover a powerful ancient artifact. (Raiders of the Lost Ark)

  Two groups fight for power among the ruins of civilization. (The Stand)

  A small isolated village must be protected from bands of marauding raiders. (Seven Samurai)

  A small frontier town finds itself sitting on riches beyond imagination and becomes the focus of many powerful forces. (Deadwood)

  Kill Graz’zt. (Kill Bill)

  When considering story seeds, avoid choosing story seeds based on the growth of NPCs. Main characters, the PCs, don’t yet exist in these stories. As tempting as it is to build a story around an NPC, no group enjoys playing the secondary part to a main character controlled by the DM.

  Because a seed is only necessary when first planning out an adventure or mini-campaign, fewer models are necessary than you might think. A seed might last you three months or a year or four years depending on how long you want your campaign to go.

  Character frameworks

  Character frameworks give you deep NPCs without having to write entire novels of backstory. Build a list of some of your favorite characters and use them as both physical and mental models for NPCs in your game. Slight shifts in their character, such as changing genres or changing their sex, will make them appear completely unique to your game. Here are some example character frameworks for NPCs or villains:

  Walter White from Breaking Bad

  Al Swereangen from Deadwood

  Wesley Wyndam-Pryce from Angel

  Wayne Unser from Sons of Anarchy

  Sam Merlotte from True Blood

  Colonel Saul Tigh from Battlestar Galactica

  Anton Sugar from No Country for Old Men

  Example: Mike Ehrmantraut as the grizzled war vet

  Let’s look at Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad as an example. We have a 70-year-old-guy who still acts as the head of security for a major drug distributor. He’s deadly and cunning even if he appears to move slowly and always looks half asleep. We can take his character and easily turn it into the grizzled war veteran the PCs might encounter as advisor to a king or as a town guard who has seen many days in defense of the struggling town. His appearance, voice, background, and mannerisms give us everything we need to flesh him out during the game with almost no preparation ahead of time.

  There are thousands of potential character frameworks you can use in your game. Keeping a list of twenty of your favorites on hand can help considerably when you need a quick NPC. Wrap a notable NPC in your game with one of these character frameworks and you have a rich character ready to go in seconds.

  Setting frameworks

  As we discussed before, it’s much easier to use one of the published D&D settings than it is to build your own. It also helps your players know their place in the world. As mu
ch as you might enjoy building your own unique world for your game, you have to recognize that it’s not only a lot of extra work for you, but your players as well who must now learn all the histories, sociologies, politics, ecologies, and geographies of your new world.

  Save yourself time and choose a published game world as your campaign framework. That said, there’s nothing stopping you from throwing in your own unique variable into the mix. What if Athas in Dark Sun was the fifty thousand-year post apocalypse of Eberron? Just make it clear to your players that the Athas they might know isn’t necessarily the same as the Athas in your campaign.

  Sometimes using a published setting might appear to be more work than building your own game world. When you use a published setting, focus on one particular region and only worry about the details of that region. You also have full freedom to ignore canon, rename cities, move around the history, and built it into your own world as needed.

  Location frameworks

  Location frameworks help you paint the details in the physical area the PCs might explore. The more detailed your framework, the more realistic it will appear at the table. Appropriate real-life locations work very well. The texture of the tower of London can make for a perfect dungeon location. A two-story bar might make a perfect inn.