The Lazy Dungeon Master Read online

  Table of Contents

  About This Book

  The Mantra of the Lazy Dungeon Master

  Being Lazy is Hard

  The Dangers of Over-Preparation

  Five-Minute Adventure Preparation

  Beginning Your Adventure

  The Three Paths

  Character-Driven Stories

  Tying PCs to the Story

  Keeping the End in Sight

  World Building Through Relationships

  Building From Frameworks

  Colliding Worlds

  Six Traits About Your Game’s World

  Tools of the Lazy Dungeon Master

  Reskinning

  Lazy Encounter Design

  Lazy Treasure and Experience

  Using Published Material

  Delegation

  Improving Improvisation

  Immerse Yourself in Fiction

  Take What Works

  Appendix A: Lazy Dungeon Master Toolkit

  Appendix B: The Dungeon Master Survey

  Appendix C: Dungeon Master Preparation Questionnaire

  Acknowledgments

  References

  A Word About Piracy

  About The Author

  Copyright 2012 by Michael E. Shea.

  http://mikeshea.net/about

  Cover art copyright 2012 Jimi Bonogofsky.

  http://jimidoodle.blogspot.com

  Page design by Erik Nowak.

  http://eriknowakdesign.blogspot.com

  Visit http://slyflourish.com/ for Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master tips

  Visit http://twitter.com/slyflourish for daily D&D DM tips

  Dungeons and Dragons is a registered trademark of Wizards of the Coast LLC.

  First printing November 2012

  “I don’t have to do much prep at all, I just kind of wing it. But they think I spend hours and hours and hours actually planning all this shit out.”

  - Chris Perkins, senior producer of Dungeons and Dragons and dungeon master for Acquisitions Incorporated

  About This Book

  This book builds upon two ideas. First, many dungeon masters spend a great deal of time planning and preparing their Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) games without necessarily bringing more enjoyment to their players or themselves. Second, and potentially more profound, less preparation may result in a more enjoyable D&D game. With these ideas in mind, this book aims to:

  Save you time preparing for your D&D game

  Help you focus on the elements of your game that bring the most enjoyment to you and your group

  Show you how preparing less results in a more dynamic and exciting game

  You probably love preparing your D&D game and these ideas come as a bit of a shock. We all love building great D&D games, that’s why we’re running them instead of just playing in them. You don’t have to lose the joy of preparing your game. Instead, you’ll see what and how to prepare so that you can focus on the things that bring the greatest joy to you and your group.

  Who is this book for?

  This book is intended for experienced dungeon masters who have run dozens, if not hundreds, of Dungeons and Dragons games. This is not a book for a novice. Books such as the various Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guides and my own Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips are aimed at newer dungeon masters who need to get a better handle on the basics. Although this book doesn’t require true expertise in dungeon mastering, it assumes that you know the basics and have significant experience running games at the table. The more games you have under your belt, the more useful the contents of this book will be.

  Like Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips and Running Epic Tier D&D Games, this short book focuses on tips, tricks, discussions, and resources to help you spend less time building a better D&D game. Like the very goal it undertakes, reading this book will take little of your time and offer you practical solutions to build open and exciting D&D games. Every idea in this book may not resonate with you or your preparation style. There is no one true way to prepare a great D&D game for every group. This book should, however, give you something to consider as you prepare for your games. Use what works for you. Discard the rest.

  Now let’s make our games great.

  The Mantra of the Lazy Dungeon Master

  “Of all the prep you do, maybe 10% will actually come into play.”

  - Mike Mearls, head of Dungeons and Dragons research and design

  We begin with a simple core concept, a simple statement to keep in mind while preparing our games. It is the concept around which the rest of this book revolves:

  Prepare only what most benefits your game.

  A simple statement yet difficult to follow. We all know the maxims “keep it simple” and “less is more”. Regardless, many of us live lives that are far from simple. Figuring out what truly benefits your game takes considerable thought. Every time you pull back the reins on your overactive imagination, your mind will buck and kick and spit as it tries to push forward, to fill in all the blanks, define every variable, and build out every detail before your game has even started.

  The success or failure of a game does not depend on the amount of time you spend preparing it. The story exists among a group of people at the table and is as good or bad as what those people bring to it.

  Prepare only what most benefits your game.

  What will you STOP doing?

  Good creative works come from what gets eliminated, not what gets added in. What will you remove from your game and your preparation to refine it? What will you eliminate to keep your time and energy focused in the right area? Appendix B presents the results of a survey with 817 dungeon masters on their game preparation techniques. Looking at the list, which activities do you find most beneficial to your game? Which ones are least beneficial? Why do you still do them?

  “But I LIKE preparing my game!”

  This will likely be the single biggest criticism of this book’s ideas. We like building our games. We like setting up detailed encounter areas and figuring out all the nuances of our story. We love building worlds and histories and political webs. We enjoy all of that work, and it makes our games better, right?

  Maybe not.

  What feels productive might not be. You might spend a good deal of time designing a monster or a scene or an encounter area only to have it fall apart when your players come to the table. Sometimes all the preparation in the world won’t result in a better game for your group. As an example, according to Michael Mallen, writer of the Id DM blog, the worst session he ever ran was the one for which he felt most prepared.

  All the time you spend preparing your game might feel useful, but instead it might be steering you away from the most important activities you may be subconsciously avoiding.

  Creativity and the Resistance

  In his popular self-help book, The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield writes about a concept called “the Resistance”. In the book, Pressfield describes the Resistance as an insidious force that prevents people from making and finishing creative works. The Resistance is anything that gets in the way of true creation, whether justified or not.

  In fact, this is one of the most interesting and challenging things about the Resistance; the Resistance might be something perfectly reasonable and rational. How can you write a novel when you’re fighting cancer? How can you quit your job and learn to paint when you have four kids to support and two mortgages? No one would expect you to dive into these creative enterprises when you are faced with such reasonable limitations.

  But they’re still the Resistance.

  The Resistance is anything, rational or not, that gets in the way of true creativity — whether it’s writing a novel or preparing for your
weekly D&D game.

  The Resistance and game preparation

  This is where things like monster building get interesting. You might look at monster building and think it’s good creative work. You have a goal and an output. You know when you’re done. But is monster creation truly creative? What if what you thought was a creative output is actually the Resistance?

  What could you be doing instead? What are you avoiding?

  Some of the areas that have the greatest impact to your story may end up being the most creatively challenging. Improving improvisation is one such example, one we’ll discuss later in the book. Building your campaign around the stories of the player characters (PCs) might be another. Sometimes the most creative enterprise is simply learning to let the game build itself at the table.

  Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing.

  Being Lazy is Hard

  “Quit trying to control everything and just let go.”

  - Tyler Durden, Fight Club

  We all love this hobby. As dungeon masters, we have the drive to create worlds, tell stories, design dungeons, build encounters, and craft non-player characters (NPCs). It takes trust and energy to let go of our games and leave off the preparation. It takes a surprising amount of energy to stop doing things. That drive to create still exists in us and will continue to exist even if we decide to go lazy and skip a lot of things we used to prepare.

  Just let go

  Much of this drive comes from being afraid to let things leave our control. None of us want our games to suck, and we assume that a lack of preparation will result in a terrible game. If we’re not prepared, how can the game possibly go well?

  Learning to let things get out of control feels counterintuitive, and it’s really hard to do. Running a D&D game isn’t the same as writing a book, and even the best authors of fiction know that wonderful stories don’t come from a lot of planning but instead from letting the story live and breathe on its own. Your stories, too, aren’t created when you write up an adventure, plot out a story, or build a new monster. They’re created at the table when six people bring a story to life.

  Yet the drive remains to plan and prepare. How might you steer that energy to the right place?

  Channel the drive to create

  Channeling your energy toward the right goals will keep you feeling useful before a game. You can use the energy you would normally spend on less useful activities in areas that will directly benefit your game. Two main areas merit your focus. First, you can build the bedrock for adventure, such as interesting NPCs, and fantastic locations. Second, you can focus on developing the tools and techniques you need to improvise and react to the evolving story of your game as it unfolds. We will cover the details of these ideas further in this book.

  The Dangers of Over-Preparation

  “No plan survives contact with the players”

  - Davena Oaks, The She DM

  Being a lazy dungeon master isn’t just about saving time. It’s about spending time where it has the most impact on the enjoyment of you and your group. There are other more dangerous things than simply wasting time. Let’s explore some of the potential dangers of over-preparation.

  You spend your time in areas that matter little to the game

  Of 470 surveyed dungeon masters who run weekly D&D games, 38% spend 30 minutes or more designing monsters (read about the DM survey in appendix B). The most popular versions of Dungeons and Dragons (we’ll stick to Pathfinder, D&D 3.5, and D&D 4th Edition for this discussion) contain hundreds to thousands of monsters across all levels. There’s little need to build one more, regardless of your desire to do so. This all makes logical sense until you feel that drive to custom-build a new villain. It might take you fifteen minutes or an hour to build a monster depending on the edition, and that monster might get killed in only a couple of rounds of play. You might never get to show off the true capabilities of these monsters.

  You build up too much stake in your material

  The more time you spend preparing for your game, the more you want your players to experience what you prepared. If you spend three hours setting up a beautiful three-dimensional encounter area, how likely are you to let the players find a creative way to skip it? How pissed off will you be when a pain-in-the-ass wizard casts “fly” and everyone soars over it like a flock of seagulls (including the hair)?

  Every bit of time you spend preparing for your game emotionally commits you to use those results. You want your players to see the stuff you make. Therefore, the more stuff you make, the less likely you are to let your players deviate from that course.

  It comes down to the feeling of control. What frightens dungeon masters the most is the feeling that our game will suck because we didn’t bother to prepare. The more control we apply to the game ahead of time, the better we feel.

  But your game isn’t about controlling the story; it’s about letting the story run free. Think back over the games in your life, to the most memorable moments of those games. How many of those moments were pre-scripted by the DM and how many of them were memorable simply because no one at the table had any idea what was about to happen? This doesn’t mean your planned ideas are useless, but they might serve better as ideas to tap later than as a fully-filled out story.

  You build a story before it should be built

  DMs might often think the stories happen when they type out their adventure notes or build a map, but the true story is told while the game runs at the table. How much should we write ahead of time for a story that is supposed to happen during our game? How do you prepare for a spontaneous story to erupt? You certainly don’t do so by writing up six pages of prose you expect everyone to follow.

  The story of our games occurs at the table, not beforehand. The more you try to fill out the story ahead of time, the more likely you’ll fall into a scripted, rehearsed, and potentially boring plot.

  There are ways to avoid all of these and still have fun preparing for your game. It isn’t about building stories, though — it’s about building the stage, weaving in the backgrounds and desires of the PCs, wiring in personalities of the NPCs, and building the world in which the whole group tells their story at the table, not on your computer a week earlier.

  Five-Minute Adventure Preparation

  “How little can I possibly prepare and still have a satisfying and interesting game?”

  - Robin D. Laws, author of Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastery and co-author of the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2

  Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips contained a checklist of the twelve steps needed to build an adventure. We’re going to shorten that to three simple questions:

  Where does your adventure begin?

  To what three areas might your adventure lead?

  What are your three notable NPCs up to?

  These three questions give you enough to feel like you have a general handle on your next game without giving you so much detail that the game can’t head in new and interesting ways on its own. In order to capture the answers to these three questions, let’s use a DM’s best tool: the 3x5 card.

  3x5 card adventure design

  The 3x5 card has many advantages as a dungeon master tool. It’s cheap, it’s simple, and it’s constrained. It gives you the freedom to build out your world but forces you to remain within the boundaries of the card. The next few chapters will show you how to use a 3x5 card to build out an entire adventure or the seed of a complete campaign. For now, let’s look at a quick summary.

  Where does the adventure begin?

  First, you must understand where your adventure begins. There will be a moment as your group settles down when they look to you to start the game. This is one part of the game you can’t improvise. You need to know where things start. The actual preparation for the beginning of the game might be nothing more than a single sentence such as:

  “We begin in the audience chambers of Lord Grahm, lord of the town of Winterfell, and he’s pissed because orcs continue to
harass merchants along the White Flint Road.”

  You don’t actually read that statement aloud to your group, but it gives you just enough to know where to start and clue you in to some potential options. As your core mantra revolves in your head, you know not to go overboard. You might want to fill out all the details in the room or understand the depth of Grahm’s angst. Don’t succumb to these feelings. Let it go and work instead on building Grahm into a character that you and your friends know and understand.

  What paths lie ahead?

  Instead of building out an entire campaign, world, or multi-threaded adventure, narrow your story down to just a few potential options. Choose enough to give your players some real choices, but not so many that they become paralyzed. Keep your choices down to three.

  These choices help in a few ways. It gives players a few options from which to pick without making things too narrow. If your group tends to look to you for direction, you have three directions for them to take. It also shows them there is enough room to potentially choose a fourth or a combination of two of the three choices.

  Most important, writing down three options helps you feel prepared. If you feel prepared, you’ll be more comfortable before and during the game.

  What have the NPCs been up to?

  The third question gives your game the true depth it needs to be a living, breathing world. Where have your NPCs been? What have they been doing while the PCs have been going about their business? How have the NPCs collided with one another? These questions breathe life into the game. They help move things and shift things in new directions game to game, and when your players see the results, they know they’re in much more than a dungeon full of monsters springing from closets.