Chapter 2: Running the Game
What a Dungeon Master does is commonly called “running the game.” That’s a bit of a loaded phrase, since it suggests that the DM is in charge, an absolute authority, and responsible for the rest of the players. This chapter is not about just the DM’s job, but everyone’s responsibility for keeping the game moving smoothly. This chapter includes the following sections.
✦ Preparing and Getting Started: Learn how much time you need to invest to prepare and how to prepare effectively, and how to kick off your game session.
✦ Modes of the Game: The D&D game unfolds in different modes—setup, exploration, conversation, encounter, and passing time. Understand what you need to run the game in each mode.
✦ Narration: A big part of the DM’s job is letting the players know what’s going on. Give the players the information they need and keep it lively.
✦ Pacing: Keep the rhythm of action and anticipation going in your game.
✦ Props: Bring your game to life with props and handouts.
✦ Dispensing Information: Give the characters the information they need to make smart choices.
✦ Improvising: Learn to wing it—and have fun!
✦ Ending a Session: What’s the best time to end a game session?
✦ Troubleshooting: How to deal with some of the most common problems that come up in the game.
✦ Teaching the Game: How to introduce new players to the D&D game.
Preparing
The more you prepare before your game, the more smoothly the game will go—to a certain point. To avoid being either under- or over prepared, keep in mind the one-hour rule of thumb and prioritize the tasks of preparation within the time you have available.
THE ONE HOUR RULE OF THUMB
Any game session has 15 to 30 minutes of easing into the game and 15 to 30 minutes of wrapup time. Most groups get through about one encounter in an hour of play. So if you play one encounter, it usually takes about two hours for a game session. If you play two encounters, it takes about three hours.
PREPARATION TIME
These guidelines assume that you’re running a straightforward, dungeon-based adventure. Many of the same principles apply when you run more interaction-focused or investigation-heavy adventures.
If you spend one hour each week preparing for your game:
✦ Select a published adventure to run.
✦ Flip through the adventure. Keeping in mind the length of time you’re going to play in a game session, figure out how likely it is that your players will play each encounter. Prioritize them as: definite, possible, or unlikely.
✦ Carefully read each encounter you marked as “definite.” Review the monsters in the encounter, including their special abilities and tactical information. Create some tactical notes if you have to. Note any special rules that apply to the terrain in the encounter.
✦ Consider how each of these definite encounters relates to the particular motivations of your players. If you have one or more players who are left in the lurch by the encounters you have planned, think about elements you can add to the encounter to hook those players in. For example, if the night’s encounters don’t give your actor player a chance to roleplay, find a way to inject some negotiation into the start of an encounter.
✦ For an encounter that focuses more on interaction, make notes about the relevant NPCs in the encounter—their motivations and goals. Pick a quirk for each important NPC to help the character stand out in the players’ minds, focusing on something that’s easy to play.
If you spend two hours each week preparing for your game:
✦ Carefully review each “possible” encounter and any monsters used in them. If you’re creating an adventure of your own, prepare a few more encounters and build some more options into the map, creating more possible encounters.
✦ Devote any time you have left to creating improvisational aids (see page 28).
With four hours to spend, you can take the time to craft an adventure of your own that’s not quite so rushed. Build in elements designed to appeal to each player. Design a major quest to lead the characters on the adventure, a handful of minor quests to spice things up, and at least two or three definite encounters and a like number of possible encounters. Make notes about the encounters you’ll design next week.
NO TIME TO PREPARE
Sometimes you have no time to get ready for your game. Check out the sections on “Improvising” (page 28), “Random Dungeons” (page 190), and “Random Encounters” (page 193) for ideas on what to do.
Getting Started
Don’t expect to show up at the appointed time and start rolling dice at the top of the hour. Settle In: D&D is a social activity, and taking a while to get settled and socialize is a time-honored ritual. Don’t try to fight it. A game group works better together when the people in it have had time to talk, joke, and catch up before jumping into the dungeon. If that time coincides with a meal, so much the better— neither conversation nor dinner plates will get in the way of the game once you get in gear. Over time, many game groups develop a signal to indicate when it’s time to begin play in earnest. One player might say, “Game on!”, everyone might put their dice on the table, or the DM might set up the Dungeon Master’s screen. Recap: Just as many television series do, it’s a great idea to start each game session with a recap of what happened the week before. This time helps players get back into the story and the mindset of the game. It also helps any players who missed the previous session catch up with what’s been going on. You can give this recap, but the recap is a great task to delegate. When a player (or the group) summarizes the events of the last adventure, you get a glimpse into the players’ minds. Actor or storyteller players shine here. They might even decide to talk in or write the recap in character. Listening to a player’s recap lets you see what the players remember and what they think is important, shows you their understanding of the story, and can even give you ideas for future plot twists. Listen: The recap is one of the most important opportunities you have to listen to your players and get a sense of their experience of the game. Be sure to pay attention to each player’s contribution to the recap. Even a snide comment or joke can tell you a lot about what your players are getting out of the game.
DELEGATING
You shouldn’t be afraid to delegate some of the job of running the game to your players. If there are parts of the game you find burdensome, assign them to players who enjoy them. If you don’t want to break your narrative stride by looking up a rule, designate another player to be the rulebook reference expert. If you don’t like tracking initiative, have another player do it for you. Players can make the DM’s life easier in a lot of little ways, from never making you pay for pizza to helping to flesh out the background of the campaign world. You have enough to do—delegate what you can. When a group of players shares the responsibilities of running the game, everyone has more fun. Best of all, the players feel as though it’s their game, not just yours.
Modes of the Game
Over the course of a session of D&D, the game shifts in and out of five basic modes—setup, exploration, conversation, encounter, and passing time. The five modes are also five different kinds of tasks or activities the characters engage in during their adventures. Part of the job of running the game as DM is figuring out what mode the game is in based on what the player characters are doing. The shifts are generally smooth and organic, and you might not even notice the change from one to another unless you’re paying attention. Your role as DM is different depending on which mode the game is in. You interact with the players according to the mode the game is in. You provide the scene, describe and play the NPCs and monsters, and dispense any information the PCs need or gain. You ultimately determine the group’s success or failure based on the players’ choices, the difficulty of the situation, and the luck of the dice.
SETUP
The game is in setup mode when you’re telling the players what they need to know about the adventure and they’re gearing up for the first encounter of the gaming session. The characters might be buying supplies or working out plans. You might be reading a short introductory paragraph about the adventure, perhaps summarizing events that have brought them to where they stand at the start of the adventure. Setup can evolve into conversation, particularly if the players have questions about the quest they’re beginning. For example, they want to ask more about the bandits that have been raiding merchant caravans. These questions could even evolve directly into a skill challenge if they believe that whoever is sending their characters on this adventure is deceiving them or withholding information, or if they try to negotiate the reward they’ve been offered. Setup also naturally evolves into exploration. If you give the players a summary of events that have brought them to the entrance of a dungeon, your next words might be “What do you do?” That question is a hallmark of the beginning of exploration mode.
EXPLORATION
In exploration mode, the characters move through the adventure setting, making decisions about their course and perhaps searching for traps, treasure, or clues. The game spends a lot of game time in exploration mode. It’s what usually fills the space between encounters. It usually ends when an encounter begins. Follow these steps to run the game in exploration mode.
1. Describe the environment. Outline the options available to the characters by telling them where they are and what’s around them. When you detail the dungeon room the PCs are in, mention all the doors, chests, shafts, and other things the PCs might want to interact with. Don’t explicitly outline options. (Don’t say: “You can either go through the door, search the chest, or look down the shaft.”) That’s putting unnecessary limitations on the PCs’ actions. Your job is to describe the environment and to let the PCs decide what they want to do with it.
2. Listen. Once you’re done describing the area, the players tell you what their characters want to do. Some groups might need prompting. Ask them, “What do you do?” Your job here is to listen to what the players want to do and identify how to resolve their actions. You can and should ask for more information if you need it. Sometimes the players give you a group answer: “We go through the door.” Other times, individual players want to do specific things, such as searching a chest. The players don’t need to take turns, but you need to make sure to listen to every player and resolve everyone’s actions. Some tasks involve a skill check or an ability check, such as a Thievery check to pick the lock on a chest, a Strength check to force open a door, or a Perception check to find hidden clues. Characters can perform other tasks without any check at all: move a lever, take up a position near the entrance to watch for danger, or walk down the left fork of a passage.
3. Narrate the results of the characters’ actions. Describing the results often leads to another decision point immediately or after time passes. “Behind the door is a passage stretching off to the left and right” gives the characters an immediate decision point. “The sloping hall leads you hundreds of feet down into the earth before finally ending in a door” sets up a decision point after some time. Whenever you reach another decision point, you’re back to step 1. A character’s actions can also lead right into an encounter. “When you look down the well, a gigantic tentacle snakes up from its depths and starts coiling around you!” leads straight to a combat encounter. “When you move the lever, a block of stone slams down across the entrance, stirring up a cloud of dust. With a horrible grinding sound, the walls begin to move slowly inward.” That description leads to a skill challenge.
CONVERSATION
In conversation, the PCs are exploring the information inside an NPC’s head, rather than exploring a dungeon room. It’s not a social skill challenge, with specific goals and a real chance of failure. The PCs just ask questions, and the NPC responds. Sometimes a check is involved—usually Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidate, Insight, or Perception. Often the characters and NPCs trade questions and answers until the PCs have the information they need to make a decision and carry it out. Conversation mode ends in one of two ways: The conversation ends and the PCs move on their way, lapsing back into exploration mode. Or, the conversation escalates into a social skill challenge or a combat encounter.
ENCOUNTER
Encounters are the exciting part of the D&D game. They have tension and urgency about them and a chance of failure. They involve lots of die-rolling (often in the form of attack rolls) and strategic thinking. They give almost every kind of player something to enjoy. The rules of the game are most important in encounters. The rules are all about determining whether you succeed or fail at the tasks you attempt— and thus whether you successfully complete the encounter.
PASSING TIME
The game has a rhythm and flow, and the action in the game is interspersed with lulls. These lulls are like the places where a movie fades to black and comes up again with the understanding that some time has passed. Don’t give these situations any more time than the movies do. When a rest period passes uneventfully, tell the players that and move on. Don’t make the players spend time discussing which character cooks what for dinner (unless the kind of group you are playing with finds this useful for building characters). Gloss over the mundane, unexciting details and get back to the heroic action as quickly as possible. At times, the players discuss the events of the game or spend time laying their plans. You don’t need to be involved in those discussions at all unless they have questions you need to answer. Learn to recognize the times when it’s fine to sit down, rest your voice, or replenish your snacks. Give yourself a breather, and then get back into the action as soon as everyone’s ready.
Narration
Just like the narrator of a novel, a play, or a movie, you serve the essential function of telling the players what is going on in the game world. The game relies on your descriptions and players’ imaginations to set the scene. Using a few time-honored techniques of effective narration helps paint a vivid picture in each player’s mind and bring the game to life.
LEAD BY EXAMPLE
When you roleplay and narrate with enthusiasm, you add energy to the game and draw the players out. Encourage them to follow your lead and to describe their actions in the same vivid way. Then incorporate their narration into your accounts of their successes and failures.
BREVITY
Don’t describe everything. Most players’ eyes start to glaze over after about two sentences of descriptive text. Give just enough information to excite and inform the players, then let them react or ask for specific details.
✦ Don’t over describe. Anything you describe in intricate detail sounds important, and players sometimes waste a lot of time trying to figure out why insignificant things matter.
✦ Don’t omit important details. Make sure the players know about important terrain features before the fighting starts—if their characters can see or perceive them.
✦ Don’t give only the most important information all the time. If you do that, you encourage metagame thinking. The players quickly realize that anything you take the time to describe must be important. Remain brief, but add touches of atmosphere and enticement in your narration.
ATMOSPHERE
Describe a setting’s features and sensory impressions: emotional overtones, lighting, temperature, texture, and odor. A rich environment has plenty of innocuous but interesting sensations that alert explorers pick up on. Little details are important, such as a lingering smell of ash or tiny beetles scurrying along the dungeon floor. Small anomalies—a tiny flower blossoming in the otherwise desolate and gloomy graveyard—help establish the overall atmosphere of a place.
CINEMATIC STYLE
It’s a cliché, but it’s also an important rule of narration: “Show, don’t tell.” Imagine how the environment would look and sound in a good movie, do your best to describe it that way, then add details of smells and texture that a movie can’t communicate. Don’t tell the players that there’s a pool of bubbling acid nearby, show it to them with a vivid description. Think about how acid might smell, talk about a cloud of noxious vapor hovering above the pool, and describe what the pool bubbling sounds like. Your Only Limit Is Your Imagination: Your imagination is the only boundary in your description. You aren’t limited by a special effects budget. Describe amazing vistas, terrifying monsters, dastardly villains, and bone-crunching fight scenes. Your enthusiasm and liveliness are contagious, and they energize the whole game. Portraying Rules Situations: It’s easy to fall into the rut of describing events merely in terms of the applicable rules. Although it’s important that the players understand what’s going on in such terms, the D&D game can be at its dullest if everyone talks in “gamespeak.” You know you’ve fallen into this trap when the table chatter is: “That’s 26 against AC,” “You hit, now roll damage,” “31 points,” and “Now we’re to initiative count 13.” Instead, use such statistics, along with your knowledge of the scene, to help your narration. If 26 is barely a hit, but the 31 points of damage is a bad wound for the enemy, say: “You swing wildly, and the dragonborn brings his shield up just a second too late. Arrgh! Your blade catches him along the jaw, drawing a deep gash. He staggers!”
ENTICEMENT
Your narration helps players find the fun, enticing them to explore details of the environment that lead to encounters or important information. Anything you describe with extra, subtle details draws the players’ attention. Give them just enough to invite further exploration, but don’t describe the equivalent of a flashing neon sign reading, “This way to adventure!” If the players come to a decision point where the options seem indistinguishable, you can use little sensory details to distinguish the options. Should the characters take the left fork or the right? Perhaps the left fork smells of ash, while the faint sound of lapping water emerges from the right. Unless the players know they’re specifically looking for fire or water, these details don’t steer them, but they make the choice of one option over the other seem less arbitrary.
REALISM
Your narration of the fantastic world of the game needs to seem real—not as a simulation of the real world, but as if the game world were a real place with coherent, logical rules. Actions should have logical consequences, and the things the PCs do should have an impact on the world. The people and creatures of the world should behave with consistency in ways that players can understand. Sometimes realism is a matter of very small details. If two wooden doors appear to be exactly the same, but one requires a DC 16 Strength check to break through and the other one requires a DC 20 check, the world feels arbitrary and inconsistent. It’s fine for one door to be harder to break down, but your description should give cues about why one door is so much sturdier than the other, whether it has adamantine reinforcements or a noticeable aura of magic sealing it shut. That makes the game world seem realistic.
ROLEPLAYING
You don’t just set the scene for adventure, you also take on the roles of villains, monsters, and other people and creatures that the heroes encounter in their travels. Putting a little effort into portraying these people and creatures has a big payoff in fun. Portraying Monsters: When a monster is involved, it’s usually easy for the players to imagine its actions, especially when you’re using representative miniatures and the creature is a simple beast. Appropriate sounds and vocalizations are entertaining, as are descriptions of how a monster reacts to the environment and the PC actions. For example, a wolf snarls at its enemy, savages a downed foe, and whimpers when wounded. If your wolves (even your dire wolves) do that, your game comes alive. Portraying NPCs: Nonplayer characters, including humanoids and magical beasts, are people of some sort. They have abilities and quirks that make them unique and memorable to the players. Use these to help you roleplay. Consider how the NPC’s intelligence, goals, and quirks play into the scene at hand. Don’t be afraid to act in character and even use a unique voice for the NPC. Keep track of the way you have important NPCs act so you can maintain consistency if the same character appears again. The “Cast of Characters” section (page 116) of Chapter 6 helps you determine some aspects of important NPCs. Even when an NPC isn’t very detailed, use the racial or monster description to help you along. For instance, orcs that shout fearsome battle cries and that roar and hurl insults in battle are more fun to fight than those who act like silent axe-wielding bags of hit points.
SUSPENSE
Part of the reason players keep coming back to the table is that they want to see what happens next. Will their characters succeed? How will they accomplish the great task set before them, and at what cost? That’s suspense. Suspense exists in the game when the players can see how they want things to turn out, but they don’t know for sure how to make it happen. It’s excitement mixed with a little bit of worry. When you use narration to create such dramatic tension, you keep players focused and excited about the game. Then they drive the game forward to see what’s going to happen next. Small Doses: During an encounter or a series of encounters, add small elements of uncertainty in your descriptions that lead to a payoff within a reasonable amount of time. For example, the PCs could notice a sickly sweet smell in the ancient tomb. When they encounter guardian mummies, the smell becomes overpowering—it’s the odor of the spices and oils used to embalm the mummies. When they smell the odor next, it sets them on edge, but here you throw them a curveball: They find embalmed but inanimate corpses in the next room, spicing up a scene of pure exploration. Just before the climactic encounter, the smell rises up again—wafting from under the door where the mummy lord awaits them. The players are rewarded if they remain cautious and prepare for a fight with a mummy. Use a controlled hand about throwing too many curveballs like the harmless corpses. If you use such narrative tricks too often, you dilute the impact of the suspense you’re trying to create. Also, make sure that your narrative details point to something useful within a reasonable amount of time. If the characters spend hours wondering what the smell is, they end up bewildered, not in a state of suspense. Big Picture: Suspense builds as the players learn more about the adventure situation and what they have to do to accomplish their goals. With each bit of new information, the original situation takes on new facets. It might change entirely when the players uncover a dramatic twist. The players and the characters have to adapt, maybe even change their goals as the truth unfolds. The unfolding of layered events and information builds suspense within an adventure or even within the whole story arc of a campaign.
Pacing
Pacing is all about ebb and flow—a rhythm of action and anticipation, of building tension and climactic excitement. Just like in a movie or play, a book, or a video game, pacing is what keeps the game exciting, interesting, and fun. Glossing over mundane details is an important element of good pacing as you run the game, but respect the need to punctuate running excitement with natural breaks, and set up your game sessions for good stopping points—including judiciously setting up cliffhangers for optimal suspense. Building Anticipation: When the game is in exploration mode, the pacing is relaxed. That doesn’t mean exploration mode should be boring. It should be a period of building tension. Exploring a dungeon shouldn’t be a matter of walking casually down hallways and throwing open doors, but an experience of brooding menace building to the action of an encounter. In exploration mode, build tension. Use a lower tone of voice, avoid dramatic action, and stay in your seat. Take your time with your narration, indulge in a little extra description, and create the sense that danger could erupt suddenly from around the next corner or behind the next door. See if you can get the players leaning forward in their seats to see what happens next. If you’ve got them hooked, it’s even more startling when you jump to your feet and describe the sudden attack of a horrible monster. Finding the Fun: Don’t make players search for the fun in exploration mode. When the players can’t find an option that leads to action, the dramatic tension dissipates, and the game becomes a slog or a stalemate. Make sure that you give the players enough clues (or ways to find clues) to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles. Climactic Action: When exploration turns to encounter, shift from building anticipation to pulsepounding action. Communicate the excitement and danger of the encounter with your voice and body language. Get to your feet, talk faster and a little louder, gesture broadly, and pour as much energy as you can muster into your narration. In the middle of an encounter, don’t let the action grind to a halt. Be prepared: Know the rules that are likely to come up during the session, or flag the relevant pages in your books. Don’t let the game get bogged down in rules discussions. Put questions on hold until the end of the encounter. Speed through the initiative order, spurring your players to take their turns as quickly as they can. Be ready when your turn comes up as well! Taking Breaks: At the end of an encounter, the tension you’ve been building dissipates until you start building it up again. If you or your players need a break, take one at this natural point of pause. Use the restroom, eat or get fresh drinks, let the players (and yourself) catch their breath. Then start building the tension again toward the next encounter. Wrap-Ups and Cliffhangers: As you progress through a session, keep an eye on the clock. You should have an idea of when the session’s going to end, and you should make sure that the game comes to a good stopping point around that time. You can’t end every session with a cliffhanger, and you probably shouldn’t. Let a session end when an adventure comes to a natural end or resting spot. But try to leave the players with something to look forward to, some clear idea of what they’re going to be doing next, to keep some dramatic tension lingering from session to session. The best place to stop the game is when the players want more—a cliffhanger moment. The characters throw open a door and see the villain they’ve been pursuing, but they don’t get to roll initiative until next week. They open a treasure chest and find a tome that holds a startling revelation, but the session ends before they can do anything in response. Think about the times a television show has faded to black with “To be continued” on the screen, making you yell back at the screen in protest. That’s how you want your game session to end—with the players eager to find out what happens next.
Props
Some players can get deeply immersed in the game purely by listening to your evocative description and imagining the scene in their heads. For the rest of us, there are props. Props are concrete. They give players something they can see, read, and handle, helping them to engage and participate in the game. Use every prop you can to enhance immersion and fun, but keep the narration lively just the same.
DEPICTING COMBAT ENCOUNTERS
✦ Battle maps
✦ Miniatures
HANDOUTS
✦ Illustrations
✦ Maps
✦ Notes
✦ Objects
ATMOSPHERE
✦ Music
✦ Other atmospheric elements
Items to Depict Combat Encounters: Battle maps and miniatures are perhaps the most fundamental props. They confirm that everyone around the table imagines the same number of combatants arrayed around the encounter area in the same locations. They also help players imagine the monsters they’re fighting—including the size of those monsters. (When you put a Gargantuan dragon down on the table, encourage your players to look at it from the level of their characters’ eyes. It’s a very different perspective from what even a scale drawing gives.) A battle map drawn with colored markers on a wet erase vinyl mat isn’t the most evocative prop in the world, but it does help the players understand what’s in the room and where. Printed maps (such as in D&D adventures and D&D Miniatures products) and D&D Dungeon Tiles are even better. They show professional artistic representations of common and fantastic dungeon features. D&D Miniatures portray the monsters of the D&D game as no other miniatures can, and they include a helpful prop for your own use—a card that summarizes the monster’s statistics and abilities for easy reference. You can also use other miniatures or plastic toys at an appropriate scale. Unusual figures can even spark ideas for new monsters. (Some of the classic monsters of the D&D game were born in exactly that way.) Handouts: Props can be just as important and evocative outside combat. Handouts often depict some element of the game world. Well-done illustrations are worth a thousand words of narration, and they’re easy for players to refer back to. Published D&D adventures include illustrations you can use as handouts to give your players. For adventures of your own creation, look for fantasy art that sparks your imagination. Check the Wizards of the Coast Web sites (www.wizards. com and www.dndinsider.com), fantasy calendars and book covers, photographs of incredible real-world landscapes, or screen shots from computer games. Maps are great reference during an adventure, and can spark adventures all on their own. It’s a time-honored ritual of the game for players to draw their own maps of dungeons as they explore them. You can also let the players find a map in the course of the adventure. Such a map might be a classic treasure map with the location of buried gold marked on it—but without any mention of the horrible monsters that guard it. It could be the record of a past explorer who made it into the depths of a dungeon but didn’t quite make it back out. Any time the characters find something written down—a coded message in the dead assassin’s pouch, an incriminating letter from the baroness to the hobgoblin warchief, or a riddle carved into a stone door—think about giving it to the players as a handout. You can use a special computer font and print it out on parchment paper, or scrawl it on notebook paper if you’re in a hurry. If the players will want to refer back to the text again, having a handout available saves everyone a lot of trouble. Don’t stop at printed handouts such as art, maps, and letters. Try coins (foreign currency or plastic coins work well), unusual dice or playing cards, statuettes or figurines, or any strange knickknacks you find. Antique and secondhand stores are great places to find this sort of thing. Look for anything that sparks your imagination. Atmosphere: Finally, don’t neglect the impact of background music. The right music works with your narration to create an atmosphere. Try playing orchestral music, world music, and movie soundtracks. Depending on your game, you can create atmosphere by lighting candles, burning incense, draping gauzy fabric over lamps, or using spooky sound effects. Whatever works for you and your players is great. Just remember to use sensible safety precautions, and keep in mind that players need to be able to see their character sheets and their dice and hear the conversation.
Dispensing Information
As Dungeon Master, one of your important tasks is figuring out exactly how much information to give to the players and when. Sometimes you just describe the scene, giving the players all the information. At other times, you tell the players only what their characters can detect using their skills, their knowledge, and the use of divination rituals. When you’re creating an adventure, be sure to note the appropriate DCs for skill checks.
THE INFORMATION IMPERATIVE
If there’s information the PCs absolutely must have in order to continue the adventure, give it to them. Don’t make them have a chance to miss the information by failing a skill check or not talking to the right person or just not looking in the right place. The players should be able to uncover important information by using skills and investigation, but for crucial information, you need a foolproof method to get it into the players’ hands. Tell them.
PASSIVE SKILL CHECKS
Passive skill checks are a great tool to help you know how much to tell the players about an object, situation, or scene right away. Without bringing the game to a halt by asking for skill checks, you can keep the momentum and suspense building. It’s a great idea to use passive checks regularly, saving active checks (the checks that players request when they want to use skills actively) for when the PCs want to learn more based on the cues you give them. Make a List: To make using passive skill checks easy, keep a note of each character’s passive skill check modifiers (10 + skill check bonus) for Perception, Insight, Arcana, Dungeoneering, History, Nature, and Religion. Perception: Passive Perception checks help you set the scene. They tell you right away how much of the details of a room or encounter area the characters notice. Very alert characters can instantly pick up on significant details and hidden creatures or objects that would go unnoticed by others without a more thorough search.
✦ Make sure you give enough cues at lower Perception DCs to encourage PCs to make a more rigorous search of important features.
✦ Don’t rely too heavily on passive Perception checks. Make sure you give the PCs information they need to find the fun in your adventure, regardless of their Perception modifiers.
Insight: Passive Insight checks provide information from social and emotional intuition and awareness that can serve a character in social encounters. You often use the result of a passive Insight check in social interactions as the DC for the Bluff check of a nonplayer character. (In other words, as an opposed check, Insight vs. Bluff.) If the NPC’s Bluff check result is lower than any character’s passive Insight check result, that character should get a sense that the NPC isn’t being straightforward. When you give the player this information, make sure to mention that the Insight skill is the reason behind the knowledge. This lets the player feel good about the choice to take training in Insight (if he has done so) and suggests that the player might want to make an active Insight check to learn more. Knowledge: You can use passive knowledge checks to let characters gain some basic information about their surroundings and the creatures they encounter, based on past experience and education. Use passive checks for characters in the situations noted here.
✦ Arcana: Magic, the elements, the Elemental Chaos, the Feywild, the Shadowfell, the Far Realm, elemental, fey, or shadow monsters
✦ Dungeoneering: Underground environments and terrain, navigating underground, stonework, fungi, subterranean animals, and aberrant creatures
✦ History: The history of a region, the chronological record, arts, literature, geography, warfare, nations, historical figures, laws, royalty and other leaders, legends, customs, traditions
✦ Nature: Natural environments, navigating through wilderness, the outdoors, terrain, climate, weather, plants, seasons, natural creatures, handling a natural beast, foraging
✦ Religion: Gods, holy symbols, religious ceremonies, clergy, divine effects, theology, the Astral Sea and divine dominions, immortal and undead creatures
INFORMING PLAYERS
All the information the players need to make their choices comes from you. Therefore, within the rules of the game and the limits of PC knowledge, Insight, and Perception, tell players everything they need to know. You don’t have to reveal all aspects of a situation or hazard in one go. You should, however, give enough information that the players know what’s up and have an idea what to do—and what not to do. “Gotcha!” Abilities: Pay attention to monster abilities that change the basic rules and tactics of combat, and give players the cues they need to recognize them. Describe the ability as it might appear in the game world, and then describe it in game terms to make it clear. For example, if the characters are fighting a pit fiend, whose aura of fire deals fire damage to creatures within 5 squares, you might tell the players (before their characters come in range), “The heat emanating from the devil is intense even at this distance. You know that getting within five squares of it is going to burn you.” Game States, Conditions, and Effects: Since PC abilities can sometimes hinge on a game state, condition, or effect that affects their opponent, make it clear to the players how their enemies are doing. Be descriptive, considering the source of the condition, but also be explicit. The most important combat state is bloodied, which is a gauge for the players on how the fight is going as well as a cue to use certain powers. Tell them when an enemy is under any condition, is bloodied, or under an effect and tell them when it ends. Further, if an adversary heals, the PCs should notice, and the players should be told—especially if the monster is no longer bloodied. For example, when a monster gets bloodied by lightning damage, you might say, “Lightning courses over its body, forcing it to stagger backward, opening small wounds and burning its skin. It’s bloodied.” When the characters’ troll opponent regenerates, say, “Recent cuts knit together before your eyes. It’s regenerating!” If a creature is dazed due to a fear-inducing power, you could say, “Its eyes bulge wide, and it starts to shake. It’s dazed.” Hazards, Traps, and Obstacles: Be sure to include any important setting details the players need to know. If the PCs can sense a hazard or obstacle, you should emphasize that element. It’s better for the game if the PCs sense hints of impending danger. Tell the players how dangerous something looks, or tell them the PCs aren’t sure how dangerous something is, and more investigation might be required. A little prompting can go a long way. Further, knowing that something might be dangerous actually builds tension and fun. A hazard that springs out of nowhere has none of that appeal. For example, if a weak floor might collapse under the PCs, you might describe the floor as cracked or sagging slightly. A trap could leave behind signs from its past victims or the times it was tripped and missed. Rubble from a cave-in might let air through, hinting that the PCs might be able to get through, whereas rubble that slowly lets water through lets the players know that removing the debris is a bad idea. Crackling lightning on an unattended weapon might mean the weapon is dangerous (some sort of trap), but it could just mean the item is magical. Magic Items: Speaking of magic items, when the characters get over their fear of the lightning-charged magic sword and pick it up, tell them what it is and what it does after they’ve examined it over the course of a short rest (see page 263 of the Player’s Handbook). It’s not fun to make characters guess what a magic item is or try to use a magic item without knowing its capabilities. You can make an exception for really special items, including artifacts. Even then, tell the player at least any numerical bonus the item gives. You don’t want to hear, “I hit AC 31 . . . plus whatever this sword’s bonus is,” for hours or weeks on end.
PAYING ATTENTION
Make sure you look around the table occasionally to see if the game is going well. If everyone seems to be having fun, relax and just keep going. If the fun is waning, ask the players what they want or need to bring it back, and take their opinions seriously. Refer to “Player Motivations” (page 8) and “Troubleshooting” (page 30)—especially “Balancing Player Tastes” (page 32)—if you run into problems.
Improvising
No matter how carefully you prepare for a gaming session, eventually the players do something unexpected, and you have to wing it. Relax. A lot of DMs feel a lot of anxiety about being caught unprepared, and they over prepare as a result, creating tons of material they never have a chance to use. With a little bit of focused preparation, some familiarity with basic improvisation techniques, and a lot of flexibility, you can handle any curve ball your players throw at you. You might even be surprised to realize that the game is better than it would have been if it had stuck to your original script.
IMPROVISATIONAL AIDS
When you have some extra time in your game preparation, spend it preparing some tools you can use to help you improvise when the need arises. Assemble lists of names for use in the future, design a variety of modular encounters, collect a packet of mini-dungeons, and keep your campaign lists up to date. Lists of Names: The names in Chapter 3 of the Player’s Handbook are a good starting point of lists of names. Time you spend putting together such lists (organized by at least gender and race) pays off when you have to create an NPC on the spur of the moment. You can use baby-naming books or search the Internet for multiple resources for fantasy-flavored names. Encounters for Every Taste: Keeping the particular tastes and motivations of your players in mind, design modular encounters crafted to appeal to their interests. Put together groups of monsters or thugs who could kick in the door and attack at a moment’s notice, and the slayers in your group are happy. For straightforward combat encounters, use the encounter groups in the Monster Manual as a starting point. The sample skill challenges in Chapter 5: Noncombat Encounters can also provide a foundation for similar encounters that are more customized to your campaign. Once you’ve designed them, you can use these encounters to keep things moving when the players make an unexpected decision or pick a surprising route, or to make sure that all your players are staying interested in the game. Mini-Dungeons: Keep a small supply of encounter area maps on hand—not just little dungeons (a ruined mill house with its cellars, a jailhouse, or a cave behind a waterfall), but also unusual wilderness and urban areas. Combined with the encounters you design, these maps can provide a whole session of adventure if things go awry or you just run out of time to prepare one week. Don’t forget that you can carve up larger published adventures into their component encounters and loot them. Or rotate an older encounter map to a different orientation and change the names in a pinch. D&D Insider provides many short dungeons and encounters you can also use in short notice. Campaign Lists: Keep track of what’s going on in your campaign. Keep the story of the adventure and the whole campaign in mind, and keep a list of things that can happen to drive the story forward. If the PCs decide to wander off to an unexpected place and you end up using one of your prepared maps and some random encounters, pull something off your campaign list to tie the whole excursion into the broader story. This one element tied to the ongoing story makes the players think you had the whole thing planned from the start, no matter how random the encounters seemed!
One of the cornerstones of improvisational theater technique is called “Yes, and . . .” It’s based on the idea that an actor takes whatever the other actor gives and builds on that. That’s your job as well. As often as possible, take what the players give you and build on it. If they do something unexpected, run with it. Take it and weave it back into your story without railroading them into a fixed plotline. For example, your characters are searching for a lich who has been sending wave after wave of minions at them. One of the players asks if the town they are in has a guild of wizards or some other place where wizards might gather. The reasoning goes that such a place would have records or histories that mention this lich’s activities in the past, when the lich was still a living wizard. That wasn’t a possibility you’d anticipated, and you don’t have anything prepared for it. Many DMs, at this point, would say, “No, there’s no wizards’ guild here.” What a loss! The players end up frustrated, trying to come up with some other course of action. Even worse, you’ve set limits to your own campaign. You’ve decided that this particular town has no association of wizards, which could serve as a great adventure hook later in your campaign. When you say yes, you open more possibilities. Imagine you say there is a wizards’ guild. You can select wizards’ names from your prepared lists. You could pull together a skill challenge encounter you have half-prepared and set it up as the encounter that the PCs need to overcome in order to gain access to the wizards’ records. You could use a mini-dungeon map to depict the wizards’ library if the PCs decide to sneak in, and then scrape together an encounter with a golem or some other guardian. Take a look at your campaign lists, think about what would help the PCs find the lich, and tell the players they find that information after much digging through the wizards’ records. Instead of cutting off possibilities, you’ve made your campaign richer, and instead of frustrating your players, you’ve rewarded them for thinking in creative and unexpected ways. Make a note of the things you just invented about this wizards’ cabal (adding them to your campaign lists), and use the cabal again later in your campaign. Everyone’s happy!
Ending
As we discussed under Pacing (page 24), two great times to end a game session are at a natural rest point after a climactic encounter or at a cliffhanger. Whichever ending you choose, make sure you leave a little time at the end of the session to wrap things up. The end of a session is a casual time, a return to the social energy of the session’s start. Listen to your players during this time, even if you have other things occupying your attention, like handing out experience points or treasure. The things the players say or do at the end of the session are the best feedback you receive from your players, as well as a great source of ideas for your preparation. At the end of a session, players will tell you what they most enjoyed, whether the challenges and rewards felt appropriate, what they think the villain is up to, and where they plan to go next. They won’t usually tell you all this directly, but they’ll reveal it as they talk about the night’s adventuring at the end of the session. Use this information to say yes to your players, as we just discussed under Improvising. Prepare for the players to do what they discussed they would do at the end of the session. Maybe their thoughts about the villain’s plans are better than your ideas were, or their notions can add an extra dimension to what you already have sketched out. Listen, and make your next plans accordingly, and your players will feel as though they are a part of the story.
Troubleshooting
Sometimes your game group, your adventure, or your campaign runs into problems. Remember that gamers play to have fun, and the people are human beings before they are gamers. They have real-life needs and motivations that can affect the game. The best things you can do are remain calm, be fair, and listen and respond to what the players have to say when there are problems.
CHARACTER DEATH
Adventures involve risk by definition. With every encounter, the characters can fail. In the case of a combat encounter, one cost of failure is the chance of death—of a single character or an entire group. Players get attached to their characters. That’s natural. A character represents an investment of a lot of time at the table, and a big emotional investment as well. The biggest problem resulting from character death is hard feelings. The best way to avoid hard feelings connected to character death is to be fair and to make sure the players know you’re being fair. Rolling dice in front of them helps that perception. The players know that you’re not cheating in the monsters’ favor, or singling out a single character for punishment. (See “Rolling Dice,” page 15, for the benefits and pitfalls of rolling dice in the open.) Don’t ever punish a character for a player’s behavior or some personal grudge. That’s probably the quickest way to undermine your players’ trust in you as DM and as a fair arbiter of the rules. Let characters face the consequences of their stupid actions, but make sure you give enough cues for the players to recognize stupid actions and to give the players every opportunity to take back rash decisions. Your players also have to know that you’re fair in designing encounters and are not stacking the odds against them from the beginning. It’s fine to throw tough encounters at them and sometimes to let them face monsters they can’t beat. But it’s not fair if the players have no way to know they can’t win the fight or have no way to escape. Scare them, but don’t trap them. When a character does die, it’s usually up to the players as a group to decide what happens. Some players are perfectly happy to roll up a new character, especially when they’re eager to try out new options. Don’t penalize a new character in the group. The new member should start at the same level as the rest of the party and have similar gear. You might want to discourage players from bringing a clone of the dead character in as a “new” character, adding “II” to the character’s name or altering it slightly, but otherwise leaving the character unchanged. It’s obviously artificial and interferes with the players’ sense of the fantasy world as a believable and coherent place. On the other hand, copying a character might be fine depending on the style and seriousness of your game, and it does keep the game moving forward with no delay. If the characters have gained at least a few levels, the death of a character is the loss of a significant investment of time and energy. Fortunately, dead characters can be brought back to life. The most common way is through the Raise Dead ritual described in the Player’s Handbook (page 311). Usually, a dead character means that the party has to take at least 8 hours to use the Raise Dead ritual and rest afterward. By epic level, many characters can return from death in the middle of combat by a variety of means (epic destiny abilities, potions, and so on). At that point, death can be little more than a speed bump, but the consequences of failure can be much worse than death.
FIXING YOUR MISTAKES
It’s going to happen sometimes: You make mistakes. That doesn’t make you a bad Dungeon Master. It means you’re human. What matters most is how you deal with those mistakes.
You do not have to have a perfect mastery of the rules, and you should be open to at least some discussion of the right way to apply a rule in any situation. But you also want to keep the game moving, which means that at some point you have to cut off discussion. When you do, tell one of the players to make a note of the issue and how you resolved it, and reopen the discussion at the end of the encounter or the end of the session. If you realize you made a mistake, admit it. If you don’t admit it, you’ll start to lose your players’ trust. Then, if you need to, make it up to the players. If your mistake had a significant effect on the outcome of the encounter, do what it takes to correct for your mistake. You can give the characters a little more experience or a little more treasure, or you can resolve the issue within the context of the adventure. Maybe that goblin didn’t escape to warn the ogres after all.
It can be hard to judge ahead of time just how tough an encounter is. Throwing a 13th-level monster at a 9th-level party is often fine, but if the creature has regeneration that negates all the damage the characters do to it, they will be hard pressed to survive that fight. If you see the characters obviously overwhelmed in an encounter, you can:
✦ give the characters an escape route;
✦ make intentionally bad choices for the monsters;
✦ “forget” to roll to see if monsters recharge their powers;
✦ come up with a story reason for the monsters to leave the fight; or
✦ let the monsters win, but leave the characters alive for some reason.
If you let the characters beat an encounter that was too hard for them, don’t give them full experience for that encounter because it wasn’t as challenging as its level indicates. Reduce the XP award by about a level’s worth.
Usually, this isn’t a problem. If the adventure assumes that the encounter is hard (for example, you need the villain to escape but the players figure out a way to prevent that), you can step up the difficulty as you go. Bring in reinforcements. Give the villain a new capability the players didn’t know about.
Characters can become too powerful if you give out too much treasure, or if you create special effects that are more powerful than you intended. For example, the characters might vanquish a villain they weren’t intended to defeat and acquire his magic sword, which is six levels above their level. Or, you could place a magic fountain in your adventure and decide that drinking from it gives a character an extra encounter power that deals way too much damage for the characters’ level.
✦ In-Game Fix: Figure out ways to remove items from the players’ possession. Perhaps the villain’s sword has a mind of its own and the means to travel by flight or teleportation. Retrieving it could become a quest that occupies the characters until they’re high enough level to wield it without unbalancing the game. The power granted by the magic fountain could turn out to have a limited number of total uses. Once they’re spent, the magic fades.
✦ Out-of-Game Fix: Talk to your players, explain that you made a mistake, and ask them to voluntarily relinquish the overpowered items or powers. Mature players recognize that the game is more fun when challenges are meaningful, and they help you deal with the problem.
GROUP SIZE
This book provides rules and guidelines for running a group of four to six player characters. If your group varies from that size, you have some specific issues to deal with.
The general encounter-building rules scale easily to larger or smaller parties. If you have only three player characters, use three monsters of their level as the baseline encounter. If you have seven, use seven monsters. You should still try for a balance among the different monster roles (see page 54).
Small groups can’t cover the four basic character roles. If you have only three player characters, you can do without a controller or a striker at the cost of a little damage output. It’s hard to play an effective game with only two player characters, but you can do it. A striker with a leader is probably the best. It pairs high damage output with a tough character who can keep the pair alive. If you’re running a game for only a single player character, a defender or leader is best—staying alive is the most important consideration. See “Building a Party,” page 10, for more information on character roles and how to adjust for missing roles.
The biggest problems with large groups are maintaining order at the table and keeping combat moving. Outside of combat, have the players designate a party leader, who is then the only person who tells you what the group is doing. It’s too difficult to listen to six people who are all trying to tell you what they do at the same time. In combat, keep the players on their toes. Make sure you have a solid way of tracking initiative (see page 38), and force characters to delay if their players take too long to decide on their actions. With a particularly large group, make sure that your encounters take place in areas big enough to hold all the characters and all the monsters while leaving room for movement and tactical positioning. An area about 10 squares by 16 squares is a good minimum for parties of seven or more characters.
Adventure design is also important. Don’t send a large group on quests that require infiltration, scouting, or negotiation. Large groups do better in military-style situations and straightforward fights against similarly large groups of monsters. Small groups, on the other hand, are ideal for quests that require stealth or subtlety, especially if the players build their characters with that in mind. Adventures focused on espionage, intrigue, or interaction can be very effective with a small group.
PROBLEM PLAYERS
Sometimes the problem at your game table is not your game, but your players. We can’t tell you how to deal with every kind of problem between friends. A few situations are unique to the game environment, though, and we do have some advice on handling those. Because these issues are really problems with players, to solve the solutions you need to address most of these issues outside the game.
Most player problems occur because you and your players have different expectations for the game. You want different things out of it or enjoy different aspects of it. Often, you can keep the game going smoothly by being clear about your expectations before problems arise and by making sure you understand your players’ expectations. Take their opinions and desires seriously, and make sure they take yours just as seriously. Ideally, you’ll find a style of play that everyone enjoys.
People often play D&D because it lets them, through their characters, do things they can’t do in real life— fight monsters, cast spells, defeat evil so that good can triumph. Some people play because D&D lets them run wild, wreaking havoc in towns and going on what amounts to crime sprees or betraying their allies. What they want in the game has nothing to do with heroic adventure, but with using the game rules to act out antisocial fantasies. Talk to your players, reopening the conversation about the kind of game you want to play. If it’s just one player causing the trouble, it’s perfectly appropriate to issue an ultimatum: If an out-of-control player wants to continue playing with the group, he has to stop being disruptive and play as part of a team.
Some players feel that the game should center on them, even if they’d never say it in those words. They hog the spotlight, tell other players what their characters should do, claim the best magic items for themselves, and verbally bully the other players. Away from the game, point out that the player’s behavior is spoiling the fun for everyone else and ask him to tone it down, or if necessary, ask the player to leave the group.
You don’t have to be a rules expert to be the DM, but that doesn’t mean one other player should assume that role. A rules lawyer is a player who argues against the DM’s decisions by referencing the rules. You should welcome players who know the rules. They help when you’re stuck or you make mistakes. But even helpful rules lawyers become a problem if they correct you continually or give you rules advice that’s just wrong. Much worse are players who can’t stand negative results, and who comb the rules for loopholes and misinterpretations that their characters can exploit. A table rule about holding rules discussions until the end of the game is enough to dissuade some rules lawyers. Stay open to minor corrections, though, as long as they’re not too frequent. If the game grinds to a halt while a rules lawyer tries to find a specific rule or reference, invite the player to take as long as he wants to search for it while you and the rest of the players continue the game. The rules lawyer’s character essentially steps out of the game for as long as it takes. Monsters don’t attack him, and he delays indefinitely. This solution makes the other players happy, because they get to keep playing D&D instead of letting one player stop the game.
Plenty of gaming groups share very similar tastes and motivations. Whole groups made up of actors or slayers aren’t uncommon. It’s easy to run these groups, as long as your tastes are similar. It’s more difficult to please players in the same group who have very different tastes. You can avoid problems by first identifying the motivations of each player in the group, and then varying the encounter mix in your adventures. The discussion of player motivations on page 8 suggests ways to please every player. Don’t try to put a group of actors through a run-of-the-mill dungeon crawl, and don’t expect a group of slayers to negotiate their way through the intricacies of royal politics. If you spend some of your preparation time reviewing the adventures you’re planning to run with player motivations in mind, and then designing additional encounters or encounter elements to make sure something has something they fun among the encounter mix, you avoid most problems stemming from differing player taste. Other problems arise when players assume that their particular style of play is superior to others, and they lose patience with encounters aimed at other players. This attitude surfaces most often with actors who look down their noses at slayers and power gamers. Deal with this issue by reminding the offending player (away from the table) that you have a group to please, not just one player, and that the slayers are patiently enduring the roleplaying-intensive encounters. The actors should extend the same courtesy to the slayers in the group. In game, though, you can also design single encounters that appeal to multiple player motivations. Imagine a fight pitting the player characters against a small army of orcs, making the slayers happy. A young dragon wanders into the middle of the fight. Suddenly the fight can swing one of two ways: The dragon could help the orcs against the party or help the party against the orcs. It’s up to the actor in the group, set off in his own small roleplaying encounter, to persuade the dragon to help the party. Everyone’s happy!
Teaching the Game
When siblings, spouses, new friends, or children of existing players join the game, you face the happy task of teaching a new player how to play D&D. Teaching new players isn’t just your job. It’s something the group can share. What Is D&D?: The first, most important, and possibly hardest part of teaching a new player the game is explaining what the game is. A lot of people are familiar with the concept of a roleplaying game from past experience or computer gaming, but people also have some weird misconceptions about how you play the D&D game. Chapter 1 of the Player’s Handbook covers the basics. The Core Mechanic: Explain the core mechanic of the game: Make a check and compare it to a defense. Make sure the new player can recognize a d20, and then explain that a check means rolling the d20 and adding some number. That’s the core mechanic in a nutshell. What You Can Do in the Game: Explain that the character can try anything the player can imagine, and it’s up to you to determine whether it works. Explain the three main types of actions in combat: standard (the important thing), move (getting around), and minor (the things you do so you can do other things). Make sure the player understands trading down (using a move action instead of a standard action, for example). Reading a Character Sheet: Highlight the key information on the character sheet. (You might want to use a highlighter to mark these spots.) Explain these concepts:
✦ Class and level describe your role in the group and how powerful you are.
✦ Hit points are how much damage you can take. Healing surges are how many times you can be healed in a day, and how much you heal at a time.
✦ Defenses (AC, Fortitude, Reflex, Will) are the target numbers that the monsters try to hit when they roll an attack against you.
✦ Speed is how many squares you can move with one action.
✦ Initiative is what you use to determine who goes first in combat.
✦ Powers are the attacks and other special things you can do in and out of combat.
Mentoring: Finally, make sure one more experienced player at the table has the job of helping the new player, particularly in combat. Then start playing! The best way to learn is by playing.