The Lazy Dungeon Master

by Michael Shea

  They include well-designed maps, locations, encounters, traps, and adventurous situations you can steal and use in your own game.

  The more recent Dungeons and Dragons adventures include poster maps — a powerful tool for lazy dungeon mastering as we have already discussed.

  As Phil Vecchione describes in his article, we can easily hack published adventures into their own stories. We just have to know what to use and what to toss away.

  The core issue of published adventures, however, remains the same. They don’t save you time and, in many cases, can take more time than if you had built your own adventure.

  If you do plan on running published adventures, follow the wise words of Teos Abadia and spend the time understanding it and preparing it for your group. Running published adventures as written requires a commitment lazy dungeon masters might best avoid.

  Make it your own

  Taking published works and making them your own is the key to getting value from these sourcebooks. Hold onto these books with a loose grip, using them for inspiration when you need it and using the well-designed mechanics found within them to help you run your game at the table. Many published authors agree that the reader and dungeon master who uses these works should twist, tear, and rebuild them into material that works well for them. It will be hard, however, not to fall into the trap of over-preparing. As Phil Vecchione described, it can often take more work to run a published adventure than your own home-brewed adventure.

  Delegation

  Delegation is a wonderful tool for the lazy dungeon master. Delegating out portions of the game not only saves you time and energy as a dungeon master but builds a bigger commitment in your players to the operation of the game beyond their character sheets.

  Here are a few elements of Dungeons and Dragons easily delegated to your group.

  Delegating initiative

  As a dungeon master, you have a lot on your plate handling the progression and growth of the story, the operation of monsters, and setting up encounters. You don’t need the extra burden of handling initiative as well. Assign one of your players as your official initiative tracker. He or she will call for initiative rolls, manage the turn arrangement, and act as the caller for turns during the battle.

  Delegation of initiative becomes much easier for the whole group if you make your initiative order visible to everyone. A whiteboard on the wall or some folded-over 3x5 note cards help keep the whole group informed. When the whole group can see the initiative order, everyone has the ability to keep it on track, even with a dedicated initiative caller.

  Tracking monster damage

  Buy yourself a good hand-held white board and give it to one of your players to track damage on monsters. There’s no worry that you’re giving too much away because any of your players could be tracking it already if they cared to. Delegating monster damage saves dungeon masters a lot of time and helps break past the perception that the DM represents those monsters instead of considering them elements of the overall story.

  Revealing monster defenses

  It’s not exactly delegation, but making your monster defenses and difficulty checks visible can dramatically speed up the game. Instead of constantly asking you whether they succeeded or not, they only have to check a visible board to determine if they succeeded or failed. Revealing monster defenses has the added benefit of proving to your players that you aren’t changing the rules behind the screen. This technique might take away some of the mystery of the game, but the benefits to combat speed and the inclusiveness it brings to your group tend to outweigh this disadvantage.

  A big white board on a wall is a good tool to help you keep these sorts of things visible including these defenses, initiative order, and the often forgotten names of monsters or villains.

  Delegating rules moderation

  “Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule book upon you.”

  E. Gary Gygax, 1st Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, 1979

  We’re all familiar with the rules lawyer, the one person at your table who takes great pride in not only knowing the rules backwards and forwards but also takes great joy in correcting others. Instead of trying to crush the spirits of the barracks room lawyer, employ him or her. Give him or her the official title of rules lawyer and the authority to interpret rules and judge disputes. Of course, as the DM, you have veto privileges, but you should almost always accept the judgment if it’s fair.

  This requires, of course, that the lawyer has a fair and objective view of the rules and isn’t simply trying to bend the rules in the favor of his or her character or the group. You will find, however, that the more you delegate the enjoyment of the game to the group, the more objective the rules lawyer will become. When he or she realizes the authority and responsibility he or she has, the rules lawyer is much more likely to use it fairly.

  Delegating storytelling

  If your group is particularly story-focused, work on delegating portions of the story to them. You’d be surprised how rewarding it can be to build a story among a group of smart, imaginative people. Be sure to let them know what they’re about to get into before you spring it on them, or else you’ll be looking at a bunch of deer in headlights.

  You can start small with things, such as the names and histories of magic items in their possession. You might have them describe the insides of inns or taverns. Be sure not to open the door only to slam it shut on them when they go outside of the lines you had in your mind. If you’re following the rest of this book’s ideas already, you know there AREN’T really any lines and those you do have are drawn in pencil and easily erased.

  Of all of the elements of delegation, the delegation of the story is the trickiest and requires the most trust of between you, each of your players, and among themselves. Discuss it with your players beforehand to give them an idea how it might work before you simply spring it on them.

  The Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 has a whole chapter on this topic well worth your time to read.

  Delegate to the most distracted

  To whom you delegate these functions is as important as the function you intend to delegate. In general you might delegate to the person best able to handle the job. Sometimes, however, you can use these delegated jobs to keep your players’ attention on the game. If you find you have a player easily distracted by cell phones, iPads, or personal computers; call upon him or her to manage the table’s initiative or track monster damage. If you find, however, that he or she still fails in this job and it ends up hurting the overall enjoyment at the table, maybe it’s best to simply let him or her be distracted.

  It’s our game, not yours

  The key advantage of these forms of delegation isn’t that it makes your life easier, though that is certainly a plus. Delegation like this shows your group that the enjoyment of the game is everyone’s responsibility, not just yours. It ties you closer together as a group and creates a bond that breaks down the walls between DMs and players. Everyone should be having a great time at your game, including you.

  Improving Improvisation

  More than anything else, proper improvisation tools and techniques help a lazy dungeon master run a great game. The better you can improvise, the less you need to prepare. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of guts to get better at improvising, but the end result saves you time and makes your game more exciting. Improvisation is the key trait that helps you build a game that lives and breathes instead of one painted by numbers.

  Enjoyment at the table: A lower bar than you think

  In his article A Lesson in Mediocrity, Chris Perkins describes how a game he thought went terribly turned out not to be too bad for the rest of the group:

  “Despite my less than stellar performance, the players had a great time. When the session ended, my players thanked me for the terrific game, to which I responded with silent surprise.”

  Most of the time, our group
doesn’t have high demands. They want to get together, have a few laughs, eat some junk food, and escape the real world for a few hours. They don’t demand the depth of a Stanley Kubrick movie with the choreographed action of Robert Rodriguez. They just want to relax for a bit.

  You need to relax a bit, too.

  If you paid for this book, you likely hold yourself to a high standard as a dungeon master. You likely hold yourself to a standard higher than your players expect. There’s nothing wrong with demanding more from your game, but don’t let that get you down at the table. When it comes to your game, take it easy and let the game go where it will. Remember that, above your epic story and your well-tuned encounters, people just want to have fun. If that means throwing stuff away, throw it away. Unlike Chris Perkins, you don’t have three thousand people watching you run a D&D game at PAX, so quit worrying.

  Preparing for improvisation

  There’s a careful balance between feeling prepared and feeling relaxed. The less you’ve prepared, the more nervous you might feel. Preparing for improvisation steers you the right way. Fill your toolkit with aids for improvisation instead of tools that force your game down one particular track. You can find many of these tools in appendix A.

  Trust

  Steve Townshend often discusses the importance of trust in our D&D groups. In a podcast and follow-up article on improvisation, Townshend talks about the importance of looking at your players not as an audience, but as partners in the show. You have to trust them and build their trust in you. The more open you are to them, the more trust flows around the room, the more fun you will all have. The safer you will be to explore your cohabited imaginations.

  Act as if

  You may never feel fully relaxed when you run your game. We put a lot of energy into these games and we want them to go well. Use the common trick of both great leaders and recovering alcoholics everywhere: act as if. The folks at your table look to you to lead them. You’re not taking a hill in ’Nam, but they still look to you and your behavior to guide them. The more relaxed you are, the more relaxed they are. Don’t apologize. Don’t fret over small stuff. Go with the flow. Listen, laugh, and say yes.

  Yes, and …

  Good improvisors know when and how to interact with “yes, and…”. This is a powerful aid and the cornerstone of improvisation. Each person at the table has something to contribute, and has the ability to take the game in a certain direction. Your job is to include their ideas and build off of them, giving them something back in return. As your players bring up ideas, find ways to include these ideas into the story and build off of them, adding a component they might not have considered or a way to tie their idea back into the central theme of the story. Being inclusive is critical to group storytelling and breaks down the walls between DMs and players. Should a player use these ideas as opportunities to steer the game away from the collective enjoyment of the rest, find ways to steer them back again by building off of the idea.

  Putting yourself into your character

  Another acting tip has you putting yourself in the mind of the character, in many cases, is an NPC or villain. What are they thinking? What are they doing? The more you see things from their point of view, the more you will easily react to the actions of the players as they interact with these NPCs. As you build these ideas, drop a few notes down on those NPC 3x5 cards you built for your game.

  Go with humor

  We love our games, and sometimes we love our serious storylines. Players might use humor to break the serious tension of a game. Don’t totally shut them down — build off of it. Let them have their moment of comedy. It doesn’t mean your game can’t be serious and that you can’t return to moments of drama. Consider the mix of tension and humor in the game World of Warcraft. You have the tragedy of the Lich King and the threat of Deathwing on one side and the humor of the Harrison Jones quests on the other. Both comedy and drama can co-exist in your own game.

  Humor can help you enjoy the wacky things that happen as you improvise. If you say something stupid, double-down and have fun with it. Use it to make fun of the NPCs and villains if they say something dumb.

  In his article “Ham Acting Across the Table” Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood describes the value of our wacky voices as the catalysts for the shared memories our games create. We all might make fun of the bad Monty Python quotes, but in the end, it’s what makes a game unique and memorable for years to come. Humor is a powerful tool.

  Follow the masters

  To see an expert dungeon master using all of these techniques, watch Chris Perkins run D&D games for the Penny Arcade crew in the Acquisitions Inc games. Chris improvises many of the scenes and situations in these videos, changes voices often, and continually says “yes and…” to keep the stories evolving around the players.

  Practice

  None of these techniques for improvisation come overnight. You’ll have to work at them. The only way to get better is to actually improvise again and again. This means running games, lots of them, and paying attention to the moments when you can let things slip out of control and watch them blossom into something else. Put yourself in situations which require improvisation. Volunteer to run a game ten minutes before it’s about to start. Continually refine your tools, adding those that help and removing those that don’t. Focus on the tools that help you feel prepared without forcing your game down a single pre-determined direction.

  Immerse Yourself in Fiction

  “Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.” - Stephen King, On Writing

  Preparing yourself for improvisation at the table is no easy task. Beyond simply writing pages of text, gathering tools, or buying a good stack of poster maps, you have to train your brain to react to the game as it happens in front of your players. Immersing yourself in fiction rebuilds your mind and fills it with ideas, character portraits, scenes, and environments.

  King focuses heavily on reading, and he’s right to do so, but there are a lot of crappy books and a lot of excellent movies and TV shows from which to draw ideas. The more you immerse yourself in excellent fiction, the more your mind will create stories, seeds, and ideas using the same principles. The more you read and listen to great dialog, the more you’ll be able to come up with it at the table. The more characters you’re exposed to, the more characters you can draw upon when you need to.

  Many dungeon masters recommend the list of books and authors in appendix N of the original Dungeon Master’s Guide. Of course, many other great fantasy novels have been written since. Build your own appendix N fiction list to help influence your own games.

  Don’t make the mistake of assuming that fantasy is the only genre you should follow. Great characters come from any genre. They cross genres easily. Whether it’s Sipowicz from NYPD Blue, Calamity Jane from Deadwood, or Saul Tigh from Battlestar Galactica; the alcoholic champion makes a great character in any genre.

  If you’re not a big fan of the written word, audiobooks can be a great way to absorb such material while you’re stuck in the seventh layer of hell: the daily commute.

  It’s not all fiction

  In his article I Got Your Back, Chris Perkins describes his love of non-fiction and shows how it influences NPCs in his own games. Your characters and story seeds need not all come from fiction. Real world people, places, and situations can all make for fantastic inspiration for your game. Good ideas come from everywhere.

  Take What Works

  We all have our own ideas about how best to run our game. It took quite a few rewrites to ensure that this book didn’t come across as too directive. Your ultimate goal is running an enjoyable game for yourself and your players. Consider anything that gets you closer to this goal and omit anything that does not.

  The way of the lazy dungeon master isn’t a “right way” to do things, it’s a set of ideas and a set of levers to help you potentially gain some efficiency in your activities. The ultimate goal of this book is to get more out of your preparation
and increase the enjoyment of your game at the same time.

  If you try out some of the techniques in this book and they don’t work, toss them out. If you find ways to modify the ideas, go for it. Each of us has our own style when it comes to preparing and running D&D games. Each of us wants to grow and improve this style to make each game more fun than the one before.

  Whatever paths you take, whatever tools you use, always keep your eye on the end goal: running a great game for your players and yourself.

  Now get out there, relax, and build a great game.

  Appendix A: Lazy Dungeon Master Toolkit

  Below you will find a series of lists to help you build your lazy D&D game. Use them either directly or as examples to build your own lists. Print them out and keep them tucked in your DM kit to help you improvise when the time is right. Add your own lists as you need.

  20 adventure seeds

  Dwarven explorers uncover a mad wizard’s vault.

  Undead attack an old monastery protecting an evil artifact.

  An isolated village seeks heroes to defend it from monstrous attackers.

  Hobgoblin slavers allied with a demon-blooded dragon terrorize local farmsteads.