Tips for Embracing the GM’s Truths
A number of truths underlie the process of running RPGs, and they’re worth the time it takes to regularly review them.
Everyone—you and the players alike—plays an RPG to have fun.
Players often don’t care as much as you think.
Players want to see their characters do awesome things.
As the GM, you are not the enemy. A GM should always be a fan of the characters.
Players love breaking the game. You should too—and then let the game evolve rather than have a game-breaking scenario become the norm.
Chapter 28: Lazy Dungeon Master Tricks
Throughout this book, we’ve taken a high-level view of running RPGs. We’ve looked at some big ideas for how to prepare less and run a better game. Now we’re going to look at a few specialized tricks—a handful of small tips that can make your life easier without taking away from the game.
You might not like some of these tricks. You might even hate some of them. That’s perfectly fine. Each of these ideas can help make your game a little easier to run, but you might find that they take too much away from how you’re used to playing.
If you hate one of these ideas, skip it and check out the rest. If you hate them all, skip them all, and enjoy the game the way you like to play. But as with all the advice in this book, think about trying these tricks out just to see how they feel.
Award Levels instead of Experience Points
Awarding levels at appropriate times in the campaign story requires much less bookkeeping than calculating and tracking experience points from session to session. Likewise, letting the whole group level up at the same time, even if some characters have missed sessions, makes the whole campaign more manageable. This style of story-based advancement has actually become the default of many published Dungeons & Dragons adventures.
Improvise Ability and Skill Checks
You might be tempted to plan out the Difficulty Classes for accomplishing particular acts or overcoming particular obstacles in your game. Or instead, you can improvise those DCs as you need them. Instead of figuring out exactly what it will take to bluff a guard or persuade the king’s chancellor, wait for those scenarios to arise. Then come up with a DC in the moment, based simply on the situation.
You might even ignore DCs completely, and simply react to a general sense of the results of an ability check. The higher the roll, the better the result. The lower the roll, the worse the result.
Skip Initiative and Take Turns Around the Table
Many times during combat, one group of opponents gets the drop on the other. Maybe the characters are jumped by a pile of orcs. Maybe a bunch of drunken bandits are surprised by the characters. However these kinds of encounters start, you can skip rolling initiative for fights where one side has the initial upper hand. Instead, take turns going around the table, either starting with the monsters or ending with them. Whenever this scenario repeats, you can switch the order of play around the table, to ensure that players who went last in the earlier encounter get to go first next time.
Skipping initiative rolls and taking turns around the table speeds up the game considerably. You can do this during any encounter in which the order of attacks has little importance to the battle. But ask the players before you ditch initiative to ensure that they’re okay with this approach.
Delegate Initiative Tracking and Other Tasks
You have a lot of things to handle during combat, especially in encounters featuring large numbers of monsters. At the same time, the players are typically focused only on their single characters, with a fair bit of downtime in between each character’s turn. As such, delegating some of your tasks to the players during combat can make your life as a GM a lot easier and keep the players more engaged in the game.
Handling initiative is one obvious example. At the start of the campaign (or at the start of each session if you want to pass the responsibility around), ask one of the players to take on the job of writing down initiative rolls and keeping track of the order of combat. Then when battle begins, initiative becomes one less thing you need to worry about.
If the players enjoy taking on such additional tasks, you might consider delegating other combat-focused activities such as tracking monster damage. And many players might also enjoy the responsibility of keeping campaign notes, in and out of combat.
Use Static Monster Damage
Some roleplaying games provide static monster damage values—an average of the monster’s damage roll based on its damage die type and modifiers. While using static monster damage might seem to make monsters too predictable, the variance in the number of monsters and the results of attack rolls tends to make up for that.
Not having to roll and calculate damage on every monster attack saves a surprising amount of time during combat, but it makes little difference to the flow of the game. Multiple attacks, different attacks from certain monsters, and attacks from multiple monsters will provide more than enough variation to the amount of damage characters are taking. In many fantasy RPGs, monsters live only a few rounds anyway—not long enough for the players to even notice that you’re using average damage. For a higher-challenge fight, you might even go from average damage to maximum damage, turning the dial up on the difficulty.
Assign a Rules Lawyer
The dreaded rules lawyer is often seen as a disrupter to the flow of a game, and many Gamemaster books talk about how to deal with this potentially problematic player. For the Lazy Dungeon Master, a rules lawyer can be a great benefit. As long as a player who loves the rules is fair and accurate in how they want to see the rules applied, you can assign them that job formally, letting that player cite the rules when a question comes up.
Whether one or more players have the game’s rules on hand or have encyclopedic memories, allowing other voices to help arbitrate rules debates is a fine way to let the whole table feel empowered when it comes to improving the fun of the game. Make sure the players understand that you still have the majority vote—or even a veto—on rules decisions. Most players will accept that as a fair trade-off for being asked to help you adjudicate particular cases—especially if you go with their decisions whenever you can.
The only time you’re likely to have trouble sharing responsibility for rules adjudication is when you’re faced with a table full of players interested in dominating or defeating the game. If that’s the case, there are bigger issues to deal with in your campaign—and you’re probably not having a lot of fun anyway.
Run Low-Level Campaigns
It’s harder to run high-level games than it is to run low-level games. Characters have many more options available to them at higher levels, making a more complex array of tactics and features for you to think about when designing encounters. Combined with especially skilled players, this can make it really hard to challenge high-level characters without turning the campaign into a combat-heavy grind.
Certainly, high-level games can be extremely rewarding. It’s always fun to watch characters go from heroes to superheroes, exploring the world and the multiverse in increasingly fantastic ways. But for the Lazy Dungeon Master, focusing a campaign on the lower levels of the game makes things so much easier. There are still any number of great stories for you and the players to experience in the lower levels of the game. So don’t be shy about running a campaign just up to the middle levels, before higher-level options start to make your game bog down. Then wrap up with a climactic adventure and start up a new campaign.
Checklist for Lazy Dungeon Master Tricks
Use any of these tricks that appeal to you, and skip those that don’t feel right—but don’t be afraid to try a trick just to see how it works in your game.
Award levels at key points in the game’s story instead of calculating and tracking experience points.
Improvise ability and skill checks by choosing DCs during play, or ask for a check and describe the result based on the roll without matching it to a spec
ific DC.
Skip initiative and have players take turns around the table when turn order doesn’t matter.
Ask the players to handle initiative tracking and other tasks.
Use static monster damage to save time on dice rolling and calculations.
Make one of the players an official rules lawyer, with the responsibility for looking up rules questions when they arise.
Ask all the players to help adjudicate particular rulings, and go with their results whenever you can.
Run low-level campaigns to avoid the grind that can result from the wider range of features high-level characters have access to.
Chapter 29: Final Thoughts—Developing Your Own Style
“There are other worlds than these.”
—Stephen King, The Gunslinger
We’ve walked many paths through this book, and have explored many ideas. But each of us is still only at the start of our own personal journey. As GMs, we all develop our own individual styles for running RPGs. We make use of ideas we like and throw away those we don’t. Some groups play the game with a loose style, glossing over details and focusing on big heroic fantasy. Other groups love to dive into those details. Ultimately, whatever style of play you and your group prefer is the right one.
Whatever your style of play, if the concept of the Lazy Dungeon Master resonates with you, you’re likely looking for ways to make game preparation and execution easier. Hopefully, as you’ve read or skimmed through this book, you’ve found ideas that you can make use of in your own personal GM’s toolkit.
The quotations and statistics that appear throughout this book have been chosen to support the hypothesis that less game preparation results in a more entertaining game. Other self-help books do the same thing—choosing studies that support their premise, while conveniently leaving out studies that contradict that premise or support an alternative hypothesis. So let me give you some alternative statistics and information to avoid this trap.
In the 2016 Dungeon Master survey I’ve cited repeatedly throughout this book, 16 percent of the 6,600 surveyed Dungeon Masters spend less than an hour on preparation, while 83 percent spend an hour or more. In general, a GM using the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist should require about fifteen to thirty minutes to prepare a game. And yet only 16 percent of DMs spend that little time.
In an interview I conducted with Matthew Mercer, the Dungeon Master for the popular Critical Role streaming game, Matt stated that he can spend up to three hours preparing for each hour of his game. Sure, Critical Role is broadcast to thousands of viewers, so Matt is more likely to want to spend time preparing for his game than you or I would. That doesn’t mean we can dismiss how much time he believes is important to prepare his games.
Matt isn’t an amateur GM who simply doesn’t know enough to reduce his prep time. He believes in the importance of his preparation. When we discussed NPC improvisation, Matt stated that if he had to improvise all his NPCs, it would “certainly spike my anxiety.” Avoiding anxiety is exactly why we want to spend some time preparing for our games.
Throughout this book, we’ve described a process for building an entire campaign with little more than a theme, six truths, and some fronts. Many GMs build out entire detailed worlds, featuring pantheons, continents, empires, ancient histories, and huge political struggles. Developing these sorts of worlds is the “lonely fun” that makes fantasy RPGs come to life for those GMs. They love doing it. Just by virtue of how much effort it takes, building an entire world certainly isn’t lazy—but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Creating that kind of detailed background is only wrong if it takes away from the fun of the game itself.
Each of us will build and develop our own individual process for preparing and running our RPGs. This book focuses on reducing prep time to improve our games. It’s offered many ideas built around this central goal. In the end, though, only you get to choose which tools to add to your own personal GM’s toolkit, and which tools will ultimately become a permanent part of your own gaming style.
Prepare what benefits your game.
Mike Shea
August, 2017
Appendices
The 2016 Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master Survey
This book makes frequent references to the 2016 Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master survey, conducted at the Sly Flourish website between October 28 and November 28, 2016. This appendix contains a summary of the results of that survey. You can find the full results, along with the raw data, at http://slyflourish.com/2016_dm_survey_results.html
Survey respondents came from multiple online D&D communities, including the Dungeons & Dragons Google Plus community, the Reddit D&D Next community, the ENWorld forum for D&D, the Facebook D&D community, and on Twitter. There were a total of 6,600 responses. The results below have all been rounded to the nearest percent.
Here are the summarized results relating to games and game preparation.
Frequency of Games
More than twice weekly: 2%
Twice a week: 6%
Weekly: 43%
Twice monthly: 26%
Monthly: 13%
Less than Monthly: 10%
Length of Games
About an hour: 1%
About two hours: 5%
About three hours: 28%
About four hours: 44%
About six hours: 17%
About eight hours: 4%
Preparation Time
None: 2%
About 15 minutes: 4%
About 30 minutes: 10%
About an hour: 23%
About two hours: 24%
About three hours: 14%
About four hours: 8%
More than four hours: 14%
Other Results
In addition to providing a strong sense of the relationship between play and prep time for GMs, the survey covered a wide range of other information.
Primary Game Play Locations
Home: 55%
Roll20: 16%
Another private location: 14%
Local game shop: 5%
Another public location: 4%
Another online site: 2%
An equal mix: 2%
Fantasy Grounds: 1%
Campaign Worlds
Personal setting: 55%
Forgotten Realms: 38%
Another D&D campaign world: 5%
A non-D&D campaign world: 2%
Types of Adventures
Personal adventures: 64%
Published adventures: 36%
Combat Style
5-foot gridded combat: 63%
Abstract maps: 19%
Theater of the mind: 18%
Time Spent on Preparation Activities
Part of the survey broke out the time spent on individual DM preparation activities. The results are as follows.
Story and Adventures
None: 6%
5 minutes: 7%
15 minutes: 18%
30 minutes: 26%
1 hour: 26%
2 hours: 8%
More than 2 hours: 10%
Campaign and World Building
None: 8%
5 minutes: 6%
15 minutes: 17%
30 minutes: 24%
1 hour: 23%
2 hours: 8%
More than 2 hours: 14%
Combat Encounters
None: 9%
5 minutes: 12%
15 minutes: 22%
30 minutes: 26%
1 hour: 21%
2 hours: 5%
More than 2 hours: 3%
NPC Development
None: 10%
5 minutes: 20%
15 minutes: 28%
30 minutes: 24%
1 hour: 13%
2 hours: 2%
More than 2 hours: 3%
Exploration and Roleplay
None: 16%
5 minutes: 17%
15 minutes: 25%
30 minutes: 23%
1 hour: 13%
More than 2 hours: 3%
Treasure and Magic Items
None: 23%
5 minutes: 31%
15 minutes: 25%
30 minutes: 13%
1 hour: 5%
2 hours: 1%
More than 2 hours: 1%
Props and Handouts
None: 45%
5 minutes: 20%
15 minutes: 15%
30 minutes: 11%
1 hour: 6%
2 hours: 2%
More than 2 hours: 2%
Facebook Dungeon Master Survey Results
Before and throughout the writing of this book, I posted a number of small polls on the fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons Facebook group, containing more than one hundred thousand members. I posted these polls to gauge how DMs view various topics when it comes to D&D game preparation.
The results are not perfect, as they don’t represent a true random sampling of all DMs. They are, however, better than any one person’s guess or opinion, or a bunch of biased personal anecdotes. You can find more survey results like this on the Sly Flourish website at http://slyflourish.com/facebook_surveys.html
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