Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
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The Three Grim Portents: What three visible steps show the progress of this front?
Example Fronts for “The Scourge of Volixus”
Using the expanded version of our “Scourge of Volixus” adventure, we can define the following three fronts:
Front: Volixus
Goal: Construct the infernal war machine, use it to level Whitesparrow, and then uncover the secrets that lie beneath.
First Grim Portent: The hobgoblin half-dragon Volixus restores the war machine using ancient fiendish plans and gnome ingenuity.
Second Grim Portent: Volixus hunts down the infernal gemstone required to power the war machine.
Third Grim Portent: Volixus opens the gates of Grayspire, sending the war machine and his army toward Whitesparrow.
Front: Thuron
Goal: Take over the valley surrounding Whitesparrow and make it a new infernal home.
First Grim Portent: Servants of Thuron recover the knowledge to open a gate to the devil’s realm in the Nine Hells.
Second Grim Portent: The servants of Thuron open a gateway between hell and the valley of Whitesparrow.
Third Grim Portent: Thuron enters the world.
Front: The Cult of Dusk
Goal: Bring eternal shadow to the land for their secret master, Thuron.
First Grim Portent: The Cult of Dusk retrieves ancient arcane lore from a lost library.
Second Grim Portent: The Cult of Dusk causes an hour-long solar eclipse using their newfound magic.
Third Grim Portent: The Cult of Dusk builds an altar to Thuron, from which they can cause the sun to be eclipsed permanently.
We’ll keep these fronts loose and lightweight, just as we do for the rest of our plots, plans, and notes. And we’ll remember that these fronts will change dramatically as our game goes on. Original steps will be thwarted, and new steps will appear. Entire fronts might fall away. And when they do, new fronts will arise to replace them.
Steering the Mind Away from “What Might Happen?”
Fronts can help you steer your attention away from making assumptions about how the game is going to go. When you look at your three fronts and assess what’s happening with them, you don’t know which campaign threads the characters will chase down or cut off. You don’t know which fronts will careen off the rails and never come to pass. You’re not trying to predict the future of your game—you’re looking at the major actors in the story in real time, and thinking about where they’re headed. You don’t worry about what might happen. You worry only about what is happening right now.
Checklist for Lazy Campaign Preparation
Prepare the overall campaign in the same manner that you prepare your next session. That next session always matters the most.
Develop a spiral campaign that focuses on what matters to the characters right now, and which spirals out as the characters move out into the larger world.
Build a campaign hook that focuses the campaign on a single major goal everyone can understand.
State the six truths of your campaign that separate it from other campaigns. Use the six truths to help the players build characters that fit the campaign theme.
Define three fronts—the major actors for the campaign—including their goals and three grim portents that show their progress.
Chapter 17: Running Session Zero
Before we get too deep into a new campaign, it helps to run an initial game session with the players, often called a “session zero.” During this session, rather than engaging in a typical adventure, GMs get together with the players to talk about the campaign, the world, and the place of the characters in that world before any of these things have been fully realized. This is also a great time for everyone to discuss their expectations for the game.
Describe the World
Session zero isn’t like a typical gaming session. You don’t follow the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist to prepare for this session, because you don’t yet know enough about the campaign to prepare for it.
Instead, session zero begins with the Gamemaster describing the world and the campaign hook. Is this going to be an adventure built on intrigue and politics that takes place in a big city? Is this primarily a murder investigation that extends into ever-deeper mysteries? Is this an adventure built around the exploration of ancient elven ruins in a vast swamp filled with mutated horrors? This is a great time to discuss the “six truths” of the world, along with any other general themes and expectations for the game.
Manage Expectations for the Campaign
Sometimes you’ll have a good idea about the campaign already, particularly if you’re running a published adventure. In that case, you can use this session zero to tell the players about the campaign and what they can expect.
Other times, you might have only a general idea of what you want the campaign to be. If so, you can use session zero to get more information and ideas from the players. The backgrounds of the characters can turn into major themes of the campaign. Rivals or villains in a character’s past might become a major front. The more you’re able to incorporate the backgrounds of the characters into the campaign before it has solidified, the more invested the players will be.
This can go in the other direction as well. If you describe the themes of the campaign before the players have created their characters, they can build backgrounds, traits, and bonds around those themes. This approach can shape session zero into a unique improvisational exercise, in which the information that GMs and players give each other helps everyone build out the game and the characters together, creating a tightly knit fabric for future stories.
This is also a great time to ask the players if there are any themes you should avoid in the campaign. Players might not be comfortable with particular themes or situations that might come up in a campaign such as racism, slavery, violence towards children, overt sexual tones, or descriptions of torture. When you describe your campaign, ask the players if they have any concerns about the theme of the campaign or any themes or situations you should avoid as it moves forward.
Tie Characters Together
Session zero is also a good way to tie the characters together. You can break away from the tired “You all meet in a tavern” trope to find more interesting connections between the characters before the game begins.
The list below presents twenty possible bonds that can easily connect two or more characters in a session zero adventuring party:
Sibling of…
Saved by…
Served with…
Protected by…
Adventured with…
Friendly rival of…
Childhood friend of…
Magically bound to…
Survived with…
Escaped with…
Apprentice of…
Acolyte of…
Idolizes…
Drinking buddies with…
Business associate of…
Lost a bet to…
Indebted to…
Trained by…
Dueling partner of…
On the run with…
You can give this list out to the players as part of session zero to give them ideas about how their characters might be connected to one another.
You can also customize these bonds based on the campaign and the world. In our “Scourge of Volixus” example adventure, some of the characters might be veteran soldiers who served with Ruth Willowmane, now sheriff of Whitesparrow. Others might have escaped from the Cult of Dusk before their dark initiation into that order.
Tying Characters to a Single Faction
Instead of building a web of personal relationships between characters, you can instead tie all the party members to a single in-world faction—a guild, a church, an order, a mercenary unit, or some other organization. The characters might all serve the same elven lord. They might be agents of a large and powerful dynasty. Or they might all be agents of a dark network of spies.
Tying the characters
to a single faction not only breaks past meeting up in a bar, it also builds in a strong hook for the characters to engage with that faction. It’s easy to implement and easy to use during the game. Even as it provides the characters with motivations, quest-giving NPCs, and backgrounds, it lets you tap into the common background of all the characters at once. The players should work together to choose which faction to connect to during session zero. Once they’ve selected a faction, you can capitalize on making use of that faction for the rest of the campaign.
Guide Characters Toward Cooperative Adventure
In the course of using session zero to help set up the campaign, you can help guide the players toward building characters that fit the campaign. Characters built on themes that don’t work for a particular campaign can lead to boredom and frustration—for both the players and you. Though you want to give the players a wide range of options for their characters, you can also give them a core guideline designed to help the whole group have more fun:
Build characters with a clear reason to adventure with the rest of the party.
This helps everyone avoid the “Why would my character spend time with you jerks?” problem that comes up from time to time in tabletop RPGs. Sometimes players get too creative, building outlandish character backgrounds that seem interesting but really serve no purpose in the campaign. Everyone wants to find new ways to make the game original and creative. But a fantasy RPG typically has a clear design and framework built on action, exploration, combat, and adventure.
Run a Quick Adventure
Once the overall planning is done, you might have time to run a quick adventure in session zero. You’ll have to improvise a lot, since you won’t have gone through the Lazy Dungeon Master’s checklist for the campaign yet. While the players are discussing their characters, you might think up a strong start you can use for this short adventure. It doesn’t have to be much, but a quick set of encounters covering NPC interaction, exploration, and combat at the start of session zero can be a fun way to hone your improvisation skills and get the players into the game.
Checklist for Running Session Zero
Use your first game session to help players build characters relevant to the campaign, and to steer the campaign toward the backgrounds and motivations of the characters.
Describe the general campaign theme and the “six truths” you put together as part of your campaign planning.
Use session zero to manage the expectations for the campaign.
Develop ties between characters, and connect the characters to the world.
Consider tying all the characters to a single faction. Let the players choose from a selection of such factions.
Guide the characters toward cooperative adventure by asking players to give their characters a clear reason to adventure with the rest of the group.
Run a quick and heavily improvised session with some NPC interaction, some exploration, and some combat.
Running Your Game
Chapter 18: Top Traits of Good GMs
On a Twitter and Facebook survey asking players to describe the top traits of good Dungeon Masters, about 160 responses revealed a focus on three traits: flexibility, creativity, and improvisation. These three traits stood out above all others, including knowing the rules and being fully prepared. Whenever we look to improve our skills as GMs and acquire additional tools to help us run great games, the most useful skills and tools are those that will help focus our flexibility, our creativity, and our ability to improvise.
This chapter talks about a few techniques that can be used to improve these three core GM traits.
Relax
“Work. Don’t think. Relax.”
—Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
You can’t be flexible, creative, and able to improvise if you’re tense. And yet running RPGs is stressful. When a game session goes bad, it usually isn’t because everyone’s taking it too easy. Often it’s the opposite. People hang on too tightly. Everyone has expectations for the game, and by the gods, those expectations will be met! Players stop listening. You find yourself saying, “No.” You rule harshly against characters whose actions piss you off. You demand to finish every scene in that published adventure, whether those scenes are any fun for the players or not.
Being able to relax comes with experience. It comes from trusting your tools to help you run flexible, creative, and improvisational games. It comes from remembering that the players are your friends, and that everyone is at the table to have a good time.
When it’s getting close to game time and you start to get nervous, that’s a good time to take a deep breath, review your notes, and remember how you’re going to start the game with a bang. Once you’ve started strong, you’re off to the races.
Listen
“Listen more than you talk.”
—Chris Perkins
Flexibility, creativity, and improvisation all require one supremely critical skill from a Gamemaster: the ability to listen. Hundreds of books and articles discuss the improvisational technique of “Yes, and…” That’s the concept of taking ideas from others and figuring out how to build off them. This technique can’t work if you’re not listening to the players.
You can actively listen by making eye contact and not interrupting. You can use your game journal or campaign worksheet to make a few notes on what’s being said while the players are talking. Active listening gives you insights into what the players see in the story, what they see in their characters, and what they want out of the game.
This is especially important when you’re running games over a virtual tabletop. When you and the players aren’t all in the same room, a lot of physical cues that most people take for granted—including eye contact and general body language—are lost. So don’t be afraid to be more direct in drawing information out from each of the players, ensuring that you’re keeping everyone engaged with the game you’re running.
Once you’ve listened—once you’ve really heard the players—you can take ideas from what they’ve said and feed it back into the game. Because the way of the Lazy Dungeon Master encourages flexibility, it makes it easier for you to incorporate the players’ ideas without feeling like you’re throwing away endless pages of your own material.
Trust Your Tools
All the steps in the Lazy Dungeon Master checklist have been built to support the flexibility, creativity, and improvisation needed to run your game. You’ve designed your secrets, clues, scene descriptions, and fantastic locations so you can use them when needed—or so you can throw them out when better ideas show up.
It might take you a few sessions to see how all your material works when put together. But when a player describes a piece of their character’s background and you use that in a secret or a clue later on in the campaign, it brings your game to a new level. Likewise, when the characters go off track but you’re able to drop in one of your fantastic locations to accommodate them, it changes the tone of the game.
Your ability to work with the players makes it clear to them that you’re not just sticking to a script—but that you’re also not making it all up randomly as you go. It shows them that the world of the game is real, even as it also adapts.
Sharpen Your Skills
Among all the many different ways to improve as a Gamemaster, improving your flexibility, your creativity, and your improvisation skills will serve you well as long as you’re playing roleplaying games. The more you practice, the more you learn from other GMs, the more you talk about your process, and the more games you watch and participate in, the better you’ll get at these skills. And the better your games will be as a result.
Checklist for Flexibility, Creativity, and Improvisation
The best DMs embrace flexibility, creativity, and improvisation.
Learn to relax, and focus on your strong start when it’s getting close to game time.
Actively listen to players by making eye contact, not interrupting, and taking note of what they sa
y.
Build off the ideas players give you, and connect them to secrets and clues.
Trust your preparation material to help you run a creative, flexible, and fun game.
Continually sharpen your skills by watching other games, reading about the experience of other GMs, and talking to other GMs.
Chapter 19: Summarizing the Previous Session
“A short, snappy, fast-paced game of ‘What awesome and interesting stuff do we all remember from the last few sessions?’ can work absolute wonders for keeping the party—both in-character and out-of-character!—on track, immersed, and engaged with the campaign.”
—Clinton J. Boomer, Kobold Guide to Plots and Campaigns
“Hearing them recap is like a huge stethoscope on the campaign.”
—Matt Colville
Every game needs to start somewhere—so why not start with an activity that can help bring the players into the game and the campaign in a strong way?
When we’re ready to start a game session, we can start by asking the players to summarize the previous session—and then carefully observe the responses we get. This sort of feedback helps us understand how our games are really working.
Give the Players Free Reign
Like many aspects of the way of the Lazy Dungeon Master, this technique offers multiple benefits.
First, it helps all the players—including those who might have missed previous sessions—remember where things left off and where things were headed.