DMing Improvisation

[ralphmelton]

All day today, I've been thinking about something Seth said in response to my latest round of whinging about my D&D game:

The part I didn't like: the players quite dramatically outplayed me.

And that's because you let them. You need to realize that any time they do things like this, you're allowed to improvise to respond with an appropriate challenge. They don't know what goes on behind your DM screen, and you don't have to let them know.

It is true that I tend not to improvise during the course of a session of play. I do plenty of improvisation beforehand, but I tend not to fudge rolls, and I tend not to say, 'those three orcs I had planned are now mind flayers in disguise!' It's worthwhile to look at the reasons, to leave this not an unexamined assumption:

- One reason is that I tend not to think of it as an option. I forget even the in-game options that characters have, and I forget the out-of-game options too.

- Another reason is partially the fault of D&D. D&D has a very strong groove; there are some pretty strong guidelines for monster development, for example. And having such a strong groove makes me much more inclined to stay in that groove; I think I'd be more likely (though perhaps not much more likely) to change things on the fly if I was GMing Adventure! or Nobilis.

- The biggest reason, though, is a hard-to-articulate sense of fairness. I have a strong gamist streak--I would get very upset as a player if the rules were to change out from under me, and so I don't want to do that as a GM. Even when I don't know what the rules are, exactly, it's important to me to believe that there are rules, and what's happening at the detail level is not wholly arbitrary. And it's important to me as a player that the game be winnable in theory, even if it requires rolling five 20s in a row.

Now that I write this down, it doesn't seem to make sense--it's not required that an RPG be that way. But it is part of my gut, and it does shape the way I play.

Comments

[drakemonger.livejournal.com]

If one of the rules is "Ralph will do what he can to make this exciting and challenging", then improvisation is not breaking the rules, it is sticking to them.

The three orcs being mindflayers in disguise might be a bit of a stretch, but having the orcs' owner, a mindflayer, come onto scene a bit late and, ah, flay some minds, wouldn't.

And the purpose of a GM screen is, in part, to allow you to fudge your own die rolls. This can work for and against the players... you might give them a challenge too tough, and then at the last minute roll a critical failure, for instance.

Exactly!

[sethcohen.livejournal.com]

That was the direction I was heading, even if I didn't articulate it so clearly. Here's an extreme example:

*players determine that in order to save the world, they'll have to kill all the bunnies everywhere*
*group goes and stomps bunnies for a while, then gets bored when nothing interesting happens*
Ralph then thinks, "Hmm...even though they're saving the world, they're not especially having fun. Something's not right..."
*Ralph performs a deus ex machina from behind the GM screen*
*something different happens*
*players have a different experience, and thus so does Ralph*
*everyone gets more out of it*

And here is a more concrete example:

Last night, because two players have left my group, I added a new player. He hasn't been playing the last 4 months, so he's not familiar with the group's history. We had only two sessions left, so I said to him (out of earshot of the others) "Okay, you can play one of the characters left behind by the departing players, you can play this new character I drew up for you, you could play one of my existing NPCs...and, if you want, you can be the Big Bad (in disguise) if you so desire." Paul chose not to be the big bad, and chose the new character I drew up for him...which meant that I only had to explain little things rather than enormous history that his character had experienced but he himself had not been there for. That made his gameplay easy, but complicated mine. But not by much.

This left me the Big Bad. The big bad is a 700-point monster, and the players total point score is about 600 (GURPS can scale that way, to some degree). So, the players will need help, attacking the monster in his lair. I set it up at the end of the evening that they have lots of NPC help...and depending on how the Big Bad does, or how they do, I'll fudge the fight one way or another during the course of the last session to keep it interesting for everyone. They don't need to know how much damage he takes, and if he takes out too many of my players, I'll have the NPC's step up to take him down some notches so that they can get the kill. And, at the very end, if I want, I can pull the rug out from under their feet, and have whatever they killed be the Big Bad's minion. I haven't guaranteed them that they're finishing things off, only that they're having a fight next week.

[nickjong.livejournal.com]

I've never been a DM, so I can only speak from the perspective of a player. I agree strongly that a sense of fairness is important. When the party comes out on top, I don't want it to be because the DM let us have it; if the party barely survives, I don't want it to be because the DM arbitrarily improved the bad guys' rolls. However, I certainly don't want my DM to constrain himself to simulating the results of the party's actions in the world he's created. Any aspect of the world the players haven't observed yet exists in a state of uncertainty, subject to the DM's limitless control in the name of storytelling and dynamic game balance. After we have a harder time than expected breaching the castle walls, how are we supposed to know there was originally a hulking captain of the guard waiting just inside? Alternatively, after getting a cheap kill by knocking the captain of the guard off the castle wall, how are we supposed to know there wasn't originally a barracks full of reinforcements on its way? Of course, I realize that such seamless revisions to the matrix are harder to pull off than I'm making it sound, but this is the ideal I will strive towards if I ever DM. On the other hand, maybe I will discover that it's too much work to create such contingency plans and contingency bad guys.