The Lazy Dungeon Master

by Michael Shea

  Now an Eladrin Battle Dancer isn’t quite the same thing as a half-orc assassin, but you can make most of your changes in simple description. For instance, instead of describing her dancing blade ability as an intricate dance of death, change it to powerful set of accurate blows. You MIGHT change the mechanics a tad as well, changing the invisible component of her attacks into knocking her target prone. For these changes, you don’t have to prepare anything. You can just change it at the table.

  This sort of reskinning requires a little bit of understanding of the basics of monster design. You don’t want to replace one ability with another too weak or too powerful, but it doesn’t require much experience. With enough games under your belt, you’ll know not to put too many dazes on monster attacks.

  While reskinning monsters might save you tons of time rebuilding and designing monsters, it doesn’t need to end there. Reskinning works any time you want to transfer the mechanics of one thing to the flavor of another.

  What to look for with reskinning

  When finding a suitable subject to reskin, you want to start at the lowest level — the math. Find a creature or element roughly the right level with the right amount of hit points and defenses.

  Next, look for attacks that act like the attacks you want your reskinned monster to have. It doesn’t have to be thematically close, but it should be mechanically close. For example, a dragon’s fiery breath might instead turn into a lich’s cloud of magic ice daggers.

  After that, you just want to tweak any of the mechanics enough that your group can’t tell the difference. Experienced players might see something that feels like the signature move on another monster, so try not to reskin a monster whose mechanics are so distinctive that players will recognize it. Beholders and dragons, for example, might be easily identified by how they act in combat. Still, both of these can be reskinned quite successfully if the flavor is right.

  If you’re reskinning a monster into one of a notable origin such as an elf, halfling, orc, or some other notable race; you’ll want to ensure that you bring over the right race-defining abilities. Players should be rewarded for understanding the rage-like abilities of orcs or the sneaky nature of halflings.

  Reskinning encounter areas

  With so many published and digital adventures on the market, you have access to a wealth of professionally designed encounters to steal and re-use. You can easily reskin parts of these encounters — such as turning acid pools to lava or orcs into human brigands. An encounter on a boat might turn into one on an astral skiff. All of it easily transforms from one situation into another.

  Avoid tinkering

  You may love to tinker with stuff like this but it’s a temptation to avoid. You might find yourself driven to rewrite a stat-block or change up some effects. If you’re spending a lot of time tinkering, ask yourself if that time might be better spent on some other creative activity that you’re subconsciously avoiding. There may end up being a good reason to tinker, but it’s always worth questioning how valuable that bit of tinkering might actually be.

  Thinking bigger

  Reskinning works with whole towns, dungeons, cities, and even game worlds. All you have to do is find the right tweaks to the flavor, and a whole world can change. Just find the right element or two to wrap around your original subject and you might save hundreds of hours of rewriting.

  Lazy Encounter Design

  Of 452 surveyed dungeon masters running Dungeons and Dragons 3rd, 3.5, 4th Edition, or Pathfinder games weekly or more; 39% spend more than 30 minutes each week preparing encounters. Building well-balanced and well-tuned encounters can take significant time and it’s one of the trickier components of Dungeons and Dragons to improvise at the table. Jeff Greiner, creator of the Tome Show, and Tracy Hurley, freelance writer and creator of Sarah Darkmagic, say that encounter preparation is key to building their 4th edition D&D games.

  With such a demanding mix of mechanics and story, how can you make encounter design easier? Let’s take a look.

  The components of encounter design

  If you break down encounters into their most basic required components, you’ll end up with the following list:

  The scenario

  The battle space

  The combatants

  Terrain effects

  For the lazy dungeon master, you need to draw upon your bag of tricks to build a complete encounter from these components at the table as the story demands it. Let’s look at each of these components and determine what tools you might need.

  The scenario

  During his podcast on encounter design, Wizards of the Coast developer and published Dungeons and Dragons author Chris Sims, discusses building encounters first and foremost from the story of the game. Instead of slapping a bunch of mechanics into an encounter, the encounter should instead flow from the story itself. This means the components may not come together at all during your game or may come together in completely different ways.

  For example, although you have a host of hobgoblins at the fortress in the mountains and a host of mercenaries in the town of Yellowtop itself, you won’t actually know where your band of adventurers may run into these foes. In this way, you split monsters and environments from each other to let them come together at the appropriate time as the story unfolds.

  The scenario, however, might include ways for the battle to end early. Coined by Dave Chalker as the “combat out”, you should aim to become comfortable with ways to end a battle early without simply calling it over or having all the remaining enemies run away or kill themselves.

  You don’t always have to plan these outs ahead of time. Teos Abadia, for example, used to plan his combat outs, but now lets the situation during the game guide the appropriate end-state. As you get more comfortable with different potential combat outs, you will find opportunities to incorporate them into your encounters as they run.

  Appendix A contains a list of twenty different ways to end combat early.

  The battlespace

  A good portfolio of pre-built battlespaces can alleviate the need for a lot of design up front. In his article Schley Stack, Chris Perkins describes and offers samples of the maps he keeps handy to help him whip out encounter locations in very little time. Portfolios of maps, like the one described by Perkins, help you build out encounter locations quickly and easily as you need them.

  The portfolio of pre-printed encounter poster maps, mentioned earlier, also helps considerably by offering fully designed encounter location areas ready to drop into your games.

  Monsters

  Trusty monster manuals give you all the mechanics you need to run monsters in your game. As you plan out your three potential encounter areas, you should have an idea which sorts of monsters might lurk there. You don’t have to plan out every room, but you might want to know that around 25 kobolds inhabit a cave your PCs might end up visiting soon.

  Example, The Monsters of Yellowtop: In the Yellowtop adventure, two dozen hobgoblins prowl in the fortress in the mountains, about twenty human mercenaries loiter in the town of Yellowtop itself, and a host of undead lurk in the abandoned mines below the mountains. We can use standard versions of these monsters from the appropriate monster manual and place these monsters out at the appropriate locations. By not assigning them to any particular area, they are free to move about as the situations warrant.

  Terrain effects

  Although not always required for an interesting battle, terrain effects add a new layer to an otherwise familiar battle. Most dungeon master’s guides contain lists of potential terrain effects. Keep a list of these effects on hand, and learn which ones work well for the types of battles you enjoy running. When considering potential adventure areas, it can’t hurt to consider which effects your players might encounter. Sometimes, however, the best ideas for terrain effect placement happens in the middle of the battle. As long as you don’t tip your hand, your players will never know you made it up on the spot.

  Appendix A cont
ains a list of twenty terrain elements you can use to generate these effects.

  The risk of over-preparation

  With time saved in other areas, you may get to design many enjoyable encounters, and that’s a fine way to spend your time. Your group may fondly remember a well-balanced and exciting encounter. However, like other areas of game preparation, once you commit the time to build an encounter, you may find yourself pushing your group to use it. If your group comes up with a creative way to avoid your encounter, you might force them back into the battle simply to use what you prepared. No one wants to waste their time on an encounter that a group will never see.

  The less you prepare your encounters, the less committed you are to their execution.

  Keep things simple, use what works well, and build a portfolio of maps, monsters, and effects to keep your game moving in the direction taken by the will of the group.

  Lazy Treasure and Experience

  Of 766 3.5, 4e, and Pathfinder dungeon masters, 84% spend less than 30 minutes preparing loot. 33% spend no time at all. If you find yourself spending considerable time preparing loot and experience rewards for your characters, consider how those 33% of DMs manage to not do it at all. This chapter looks at a few ways to handle loot and experience without spending any time on it. The ideas behind lazy treasure and experience preparation lets you instead focus on aspects of your game that help it come alive. Let’s begin by looking at experience.

  Level PCs when it fits the story

  The easiest method of calculating and rewarding experience is simply to ignore it and level the PCs as the story determines it. Increase character levels every two or three games when your PCs complete a major accomplishment or finish a large quest. As an experienced DM, you can best determine when it makes sense for characters to increase levels. Unlike most computer-based RPGs, you don’t really need an experience reward calculation system. You can just figure it out for yourselves.

  Effort-based experience rewards

  If simply leveling PCs based on story rewards isn’t your cup of tea, consider simplifying your life by rewarding effort-based experience rewards. Instead of calculating all the potential experience points for monsters and dividing them among the PCs, determine how much experience any single PC might get at any given level for an easy, normal, or hard challenge. Use this number to reward PCs for the effort they face in a given situation. If they easily complete a quest, give them a smaller amount of experience. If they find themselves particularly challenged in a battle, give them a larger amount of experience. This way PCs are directly rewarded for the challenge they actually faced instead of the potential mathematical calculations done before hand.

  Finding easy, normal, and hard levels of experience is usually a matter of looking at the experience reward for a like-leveled monster. For example, if a level 5 gnoll is worth 200 experience, that is the right amount of experience to give a level 5 PC for a normal-level challenge. 200 experience would also be the right amount of experience for an easy challenge for a level 6 PC or a hard challenge for a level 4 PC.

  This sort of reward isn’t as simple as leveling PCs when it fits the story, but it doesn’t require as much work as calculating out the entire set of monsters, traps, and hazards and then dividing it up among the PCs.

  Treasure: Setting the right baseline

  Different versions of Dungeons and Dragons handled the bonuses of magical items differently. Depending on your version of D&D, you might have to reward a standard baseline of magical items to your PCs simply to keep their attack and defense bonuses in the right place when compared to equally leveled monsters. In 4th edition, for example, the bonuses of magical armor, neck items, and weapons are figured into the math for the game.

  In 4th edition D&D, using inherent bonuses all the time is the easiest way to ensure that your group doesn’t fall behind the power curve. The 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 describes the use of inherent bonuses in 4th edition D&D games. Other versions don’t quite have the same requirements for magical items but 3rd edition and Pathfinder characters will find themselves falling behind if they don’t get magical items sometime.

  If you want to ensure that PCs meet the right baseline for magical power, let them purchase any generic magic items that provide base bonuses without any special features. This lets your players ensure that they can keep up with the rest of the party by simply spending gold and takes away your requirements to reward well-matched gear for their defenses and attacks.

  Random treasure

  With a baseline of power established, you can instead focus your primary treasure rewards on simple random distribution. Most versions of D&D have random loot tables available, either in the Dungeon Master’s Guide or in various tools and tables online. If you happen to be playing 4th edition D&D, you can use Sly Flourish’s Random Loot Tables for 4th Edition loot.

  Random loot tables add spice to your game by giving your PCs unknown items that they might never have chosen if they had a choice. To ensure that PCs can use treasure from the lists, don’t pre-define the item. Instead let the players decide what type of item it is or decide yourself once the roll occurs. For example, if your random treasure roll comes up with a “weapon of defense”, let the players decide if it is an axe or a dagger or a longsword based on which PC ends up wanting it. This helps ensure that you don’t overload your PCs with equipment they can’t use.

  The PC wish list

  Another way to handle loot is to ask your players for their wish lists. You might even have each player come up with their own list of ten items and use that as a random loot list they can roll on. Now each time your group would be rewarded treasure, you can decide or roll a die to determine which PC gets a piece of gear from their loot wish list.

  Loot as a story and quest reward

  Occasionally you will want to reward a particularly nice piece of loot as part of a quest or story. This lets loot rewards act as an actual piece of the story, maybe even a key to a future adventure. If a piece of loot adds to the story and captures the imagination of your players, don’t worry about spending too much time using loot to build out your story.

  Seek the path of least resistance

  However you decide to reward loot and experience, choose the path that takes the least amount of time and adds the most fun to the group. If you find yourself spending a lot of time calculating experience or choosing treasure rewards, ask yourself if that time might be better spent developing NPCs, tying PCs to the adventure, or building potential adventure locations.

  Using Published Material

  Published books can be of great help or great detriment to the lazy dungeon master. Published world sourcebooks, location guides, and adventures give you a wealth of material to sift through, twist, and use to your advantage; but it comes at a cost — your time.

  Books that contain a fair bit of game mechanics, such as monster manuals or treasure books, give you material that would otherwise take you hours to build yourself. Published books often give you professionally designed and edited rules you can insert, rebuild, or reskin into your game right at the table.

  Inspiration, not gospel

  It’s important to remember that we have full authority and responsibility to use these published works however we wish. We should not feel obligated to run material from these books “as written”. We should use the components from these books however we wish to make our games fun. These books can be fantastic sources of inspiration and models for the worlds we want to run at our table. They save us hundreds of hours creating details better left to professionals.

  The problems with published adventures

  Many DMs either love or hate published adventures. As sources of inspiration, they give us a wealth of material we might use. They could, however, turn our game into something stale and bland if you’re not careful.

  Phil Vecchione, author of Never Unprepared: The Complete Game Master’s Guide to Session Prep and writer for the game mastery blog Gnome Stew wr
ote an article entitled I Don’t Like Published Adventures that summarizes the issues of published adventures well. In summary, the article points out the following problems:

  They’re too generic. They aren’t built around your players or their PCs.

  They take away your ability to build out your own story as you go. They pre-package the story instead.

  They cost money.

  It takes too much time to hack them into something new.

  These are all solid reasons to treat published adventures with caution. However, published adventures do offer benefits to the lazy dungeon master:

  They seed ideas built for Dungeons and Dragons. Sometimes you need a little push to get your imagination going in the right direction, and published adventures can give you that push.