Imagine the world as a living place.
Monsters and NPCs fill out locations and roles as they would in the real world.
The world and the NPCs within it react to the actions of the characters.
Chapter 23: Using Multiple Combat Styles
In the survey of 6,600 DMs, more than 60 percent of respondents stated that they use gridded maps and miniatures for combat, roughly 20 percent said they used abstract maps to represent a combat area, and roughly 20 percent said they used the fully narrative theater-of-the-mind style for combat.
Some fights work well with a simple narrative description of the battle. Other fights are complicated or difficult enough that a battle on a 5-foot-per-square grid gives players the details and agency they need to succeed. Sometimes all we need is a loose visual map to understand the shape of the area and the relative locations of the characters and monsters.
Lazy Dungeon Masters have no need to choose only one style for running combat. Depending on the situation, we can choose whichever one of these styles works best for our games.
Running Theater-of-the-Mind Combat
Fully descriptive theater-of-the-mind-style combat focuses on the core interaction between GMs and players: GMs describe the situation and environment, players describe what they want their characters to do, and the GM adjudicates the results.
This is the mode of core interaction for the whole game already. As such, you can simply keep this style of play going even when you switch from NPC interaction or exploration into combat.
Combat in the theater of the mind flows right into the rest of the story. Just as you’re describing scenes of NPC interaction and exploration, you can describe how a battle plays out. Narrative combat also doesn’t require any special materials. You don’t need miniatures. You don’t need a battle map. You don’t need 3D terrain. You can simply describe what’s happening and let the players’ imaginations build the environment.
Theater-of-the-mind combat works best under certain circumstances, including the following:
Combat that clearly favors the characters.
Combat that’s going to be over quickly.
Combat that takes place in a simple environment such as a hallway, a square room, or an open field.
Combat that includes more monsters than you can represent with miniatures, such as holding a castle gate against two hundred orcs.
Scenes that might result in combat only under certain circumstances, such as a heated negotiation.
Scenes that might be resolved with a large change to the environment, such as a collapsing cliff that crushes a force of hobgoblins below.
Situations where any of the players cannot see the battle space, such as running a game online or if any of the players are visually impaired.
No matter what the circumstances, though, running theater-of-the-mind combat requires trust. The players must trust that you will adjudicate fairly, and you need to maintain that trust. You should discuss how combat works with the players before running a theater-of-the-mind battle, explaining how you’ll be handling movement, range, positions, cover, and the number of creatures that fall within an area of attack. The Sly Flourish website contains a detailed guide to narrative theater-of-the-mind combat, referenced in the “References and Additional Reading” section at the end of this book.
Running Tactical Gridded Combat
Whether it’s a big boss fight or a battle with many different types of monsters in a complicated environment, running combat on a 5-foot-per-square grid gives everyone a better understanding of the situation and the characters’ tactical options. Though the cost for miniatures and terrain can be significant, tactical gridded combat can be a great way to draw players even deeper into the game.
Gridded battles work best in the following situations:
Combat that includes a number of different types of monsters.
Combat in a complicated but mostly horizontal environment.
Combat that poses a strong challenge to the characters.
Boss battles with lots of potential environmental options.
Any battle where the details of movement, range, and the size of areas of effect can have a big impact on the outcome.
One reason to not choose gridded combat is simply because you find yourself in a situation where the players don’t trust you as a GM. Combat should never be a contest between you and the players. You must earn the players’ trust even if you run a more tactically focused game. But when you use a gridded map and tactical combat, there’s a risk that you go from being the facilitator of the story to being an adversary of the players. A game that focuses too much on tactics can easily go from collaborative storytelling to an opposed miniatures war game if you’re not careful.
While running tactical gridded encounters, don’t be afraid to remind yourself that you are a fan of the heroes. You can put difficult challenges in the way of the characters, but your goal is to watch them do awesome things. It’s easy to forget this sometimes when you’re buried in the minutiae of combat rules and 5-foot squares.
A Hybrid Approach: The Abstract Map
A third option bridges the gap between fully narrative theater-of-the-mind combat and fully gridded combat: the abstract map. This approach isn’t new. In fact, GMs have used this style of combat for as long as people have been playing RPGs.
When you use an abstract map, you draw pictures of the encounter environment but reinforce to the players that it isn’t drawn to scale. The abstract map shows the environment and the relative position of the characters and the monsters. It shows what’s close by, what’s far away, who can see what, and which combatants are close enough to attack each other.
Abstract maps work best in the following circumstances:
The battle benefits from everyone seeing the environment.
The general locations of characters and monsters are important.
The characters’ and monsters’ specific positions, speeds, distances, and ranges for attacks are not that important.
A number of different types of monsters are part of the battle.
Miniatures, a map, or 3D terrain will add to the fun of the game.
Abstract maps give you the benefit of everyone being able to see the same battle space without getting buried in the minutiae of the rules involved in fighting on a grid. This style still requires that the players trust you, and you must adjudicate fairly. As it does with theater-of-the-mind combat, this style of play works best in scenarios that default in favor of the characters.
As with theater-of-the-mind combat, you should describe to the players how a battle on an abstract map will work before combat begins. Two things that are important to define on an abstract map are how far characters can go with a move and how many creatures can be targeted by area effects.
Using the Right Tool for the Job
As a Lazy Dungeon Master, you hold no allegiance to any one style of play over another. You adapt. You learn. You get better. You use whatever tools make your games easier to prepare, easier to run, and more fun for you and the players. You might have one style of combat you prefer, but that doesn’t mean you need to throw away the other styles. Even if you prefer gridded combat, running a theater-of-the-mind battle when it’s just two guards in a hallway or five bandits on a darkened street can make sense. Like a golfer choosing the right club for the right shot, you let the situation inspire what tools you use.
Checklist for Using Multiple Combat Styles
Use theater-of-the-mind combat when the battle favors the characters, fast battles, small skirmishes, battles with many more opponents than you can represent with miniatures, or if any of the players can’t see the battle space.
Use gridded combat maps with miniatures for battles with lots of different kinds of monsters, complicated battle areas, boss battles, or battles that require a good deal of tactical nuance.
Use abstract maps for complicated battle areas and lots of monsters, but where the fight doesn’t require the
tactical detail of a 5-foot grid.
Both abstract maps and theater-of-the-mind combat require that the players trust you, and that you remain a fan of the heroes—not an adversary.
Explain how these combat systems work before you run them.
Use whatever combat method fits the situation best.
Chapter 24: Maintaining the Pace
“Good pacing is probably the most important trait a GM can have.”
—Monte Cook, Numenera
Understanding how to keep the pace of a game moving and keep its energy level high requires a tremendous amount of depth and understanding. Maintaining a good pace is hard work. But Lazy Dungeon Masters don’t like hard work, so let’s look at some other options for maintaining an entertaining pace in our games.
“What Do You Do?”
“When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”
—Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder
No matter how much storytelling goes into your games, it always has to lead you to one question: “What do you do?”
As with the strong start, you want to keep each scene of your game as close to the action as you can. How often you say the words, “What do you do?” shows you how close you are to the actions of the characters. If you have a sense that you’ve been talking for a long while without having said, “What do you do?”, it means that you haven’t been putting the characters into the middle of the story. They’ve just been observers.
It’s easy to narrate the things that happen in the world to the players. But it’s far more important that you put situations in front of the characters and let them act. The actions of the characters make your games come to life. It’s up to you to build the environment and set the stage quickly so that the characters can do things.
Clarify Choices
Even when you’re conscious of keeping the game in the hands of the characters, it’s sometimes not clear to the players what, exactly, their characters should be doing. In an improvised style of play, the players define their own quests and goals based on what happens in the world. But that doesn’t mean you can’t help clarify those quests and goals.
When the pace of the game starts to flag, you can help pick it up again by clarifying the characters’ existing choices. You might reiterate long-term quests that have fallen to the wayside, remind the players of villains they’ve forgotten about, or restate the characters’ overall goal when they enter a dungeon. You can even write these things down on 3×5 cards for the players. You shouldn’t push any one quest over another, but you can help the players refine their options and keep the game moving.
Maintain Beats of Action and Relaxation
Too much action all the time in a game can drain the players. Instead, an ideal campaign needs a cyclical pace of action and relaxation. A scene of discussions with NPCs might lead to a battle. That battle might lead to the exploration of an old ruin. Overall, the pace of the action flows in a pattern of low–high–low.
The way of the Lazy Dungeon Master makes it easy to break up the scenes you create for a session by rotating through exploration, NPC interaction, and combat. Then keep that structure in mind as the choices of the characters push the story in different directions.
If things have been combat heavy, you can give the characters a chance to learn some of the secrets and clues you’ve prepared by investigating ancient markings on the walls of the chamber where the fight took place. If they’ve had too much dungeon delving, maybe it’s time they received an invitation to a formal dinner from a rival. When they’ve had too much walking around town bargaining with vendors over the price of healing potions, it might be time for an insane efreeti to escape from its prison in a mundane marketplace object when the party’s rogue fondles the item the wrong way.
You won’t know these story beats until you’re running your game. As such, you need to be prepared to improvise new scenes so that the pace of the action is always changing. Even if your game happens to follow your loose outline of potential scenes perfectly, it’s always possible that the characters’ discussion with the innkeeper took too long, and a couple of players are reaching for their phones. Time to change the pace.
Understanding Upward and Downward Beats
“Stories engage our attention by constantly modulating our emotional responses.”
—Robin Laws, Hamlet’s Hit Points
In Hamlet’s Hit Points, Robin Laws describes the story beats of three movies and talks about how to identify these types of story beats in your games. In particular, various beats aim either toward “hope,” “fear,” or are emotionally neutral. Hope beats occur when the characters learn something valuable to them, gain an ally, defeat a monster, complete a quest, or receive a new magic item. Fear beats might include facing terrible foes, discovering an unresolved question or mystery, triggering a trap, learning a grim fact, or facing an unknown path filled with potential peril.
Mixing these upward and downward beats keeps players interested in the game. But just as when talking about action and relaxation, it’s always about balance. Give the players too much to fear and the whole game feels hopeless. Too much hope and it feels stale and boring.
Improvising Beats
“Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.”
—Murphy’s Law
You likely won’t know while preparing your game whether you’re going to see too many hope beats or too many fear beats in a row. As such, you’ll have to improvise beats during the game to maintain the modulation between hope and fear beats. To do this, it’s helpful to have a few general ideas about how you might drop in a hope or fear beat as you run your game.
Tweaking combat is one way to change a beat from fear to hope, or vice versa. You can do so by adding monsters to make the fight harder, or removing monsters to make it easier. If the characters have been having an easy time of it, they might walk into a room full of armored ogres training and sparring. If they’ve been having a hard go of it, maybe they stumble across a lone ogre, face down and asleep in her plate of raw meat.
Here are ten examples of upward beats that you can drop into the game when the situation warrants it:
The characters stumble through a secret wall into a forgotten treasure chamber.
An adversary mistakes the characters for allies, spilling her secrets before she realizes her mistake.
An enemy of the characters’ enemies unexpectedly joins their attack.
The environment has a negative impact on the monsters, but not the characters.
The villain’s lackeys all flee.
The monster’s weapon shatters.
An evil cultist is accidentally immolated by a miscast spell.
A raiding party rides out from the keep, giving the characters a chance to creep in.
The characters find a font of healing energy that restores their vitality.
A character finds a powerful forgotten weapon on the ancient corpse of a fallen explorer.
And here are ten examples of downward beats, ready to be dropped in when things are going a bit too well for the characters:
The villain shows up—and is revealed as the advisor to the lord who hired the characters.
A lone guard runs into the characters while unexpectedly returning to the barracks.
The worst storm the city has ever seen hits on the very night of the characters’ planned heist.
The sewers overflow.
The inn catches fire.
The paladin’s intelligent sword decides that now is the perfect time to force its will upon its wielder.
The masked assassin pulls away her cowl to reveal that she is the sister of one of the characters.
The warlord wakes up because he has to pee, just as the characters are quietly rifling his bedchamber.
An important key falls down into a sewer grate.
A burgled merchant happens to be the cousin to the master of the local thieves guild.
Checklist for Maintaining the Pace
Stay close to the action by asking the players, “What do you do?”
Clarify the choices and options that can inspire the characters’ and the players’ decisions.
Rotate through exploration, interaction, and combat to keep the pace cycling between action and relaxation.* Understand the upward and downward beats of hope and fear.
Be ready to improvise hopeful or fearful beats during the game to send the action in one direction or the other.
Thinking About Your Game
Chapter 25: Priming the GM’s Brain
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
—Stephen King, On Writing
The more we prime our minds with great fantasy and fiction, the easier it becomes to build great RPGs and improvise characters, locations, and events during a game. We can prime our brains by literally surrounding ourselves with images and art from high fantasy, and with people who love that fantasy as much as we do. We can also prime ourselves more directly by digesting as much great fiction as we can. The more high fantasy and adventure we absorb, the better we wire our brains to run great games.
Priming with Books, Movies, Games, and TV shows
“Watch some movies, read some comics; get heroic fantasy into your brain.”
—Dungeon World
Many RPG sourcebooks include lists of inspirational reading. This section offers a short list of recommended books, movies, TV shows, games, and comics to prime your GM’s brain:
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