III. BEING LAZY IS HARD
āQuit trying to control everything and just let go.ā ā 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 weāre not prepared, how can the game possibly go well?
Learning to let things get out of control feels counter-intuitive, and itās really hard to do. Running a D&D game isnāt the same as writing a book, and even the best authors of fiction know that wonderful stories donāt come from a lot of planning but instead from letting the story live and breathe on its own. Your stories, too, arenāt created when you write up an adventure, plot out a story, or build a new monster. Theyāre 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.
IV. THE DANGERS OF OVER-PREPARATION
āNo plan survives contact with the playersā ā Davena Oaks, The She DM
Being a lazy dungeon master isnāt just about saving time. Itās 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. Letās 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. The most popular versions of Dungeons and Dragons contain hundreds to thousands of monsters across all levels. Thereās 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 āflyā 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 didnāt bother to prepare. The more control we apply to the game ahead of time, the better we feel. But your game isnāt about controlling the story; itās 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 doesnāt 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 donāt 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 youāll 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 isnāt about building stories, though ā itās 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.
V. FIVE-MINUTE ADVENTURE PREPARATION
āHow little can I possibly prepare and still have a satisfying and interesting game?ā ā Robin D. Laws, Author of Robinās Laws of Good Game Mastery
Sly Flourishās Dungeon Master Tips contained a checklist of the twelve steps needed to build an adventure. Weāre 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 canāt head in new and interesting ways on its own. In order to capture the answers to these three questions, letās use a DMās best tool: the 3x5 card.
3x5 card adventure design
The 3x5 card has many advantages as a dungeon master tool. Itās cheap, itās simple, and itās 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.
VI. BEGINNING YOUR ADVENTURE
Of the three areas upon which to focus your energy, the first lies in understanding where your adventure begins. As with the rest of your preparation, you should focus on what matters most and eliminate the rest. This means keeping your beginning as small as it needs to be with only the details required to start things off and give your players enough to let the story unfold at the table.
More than starting in a bar
If your introduction is too generic, it probably wonāt help. An overused general beginning doesnāt set your adventure apart and doesnāt fire up the engines of the imaginations at the table. You want enough detail to make the setting unique and raise an eyebrow or two.
Hereās a poor example:
āThe party begins at the adventurersā guild while awaiting new missions.ā
Now here is an example with flavor:
āThe party begins at the adventurersā guild in Whitefall, where they overhear of the deaths of their friendly rivals at the ruins beneath the Blue Twins mountain.ā
The adventureās elevator pitch
How would you summarize your whole adventure in a single sentence? If it takes you more than a sentence, itās probably too long. Keeping things simple leaves your game lots of room to evolve into something beautiful, unique, and entertaining.
Example: Yellowtop Seed
āIn the salt-mining town of Yellowtop, tyrannical mercenaries leave the body of a resistance leader in the street with a dagger in his chest.ā
VII. THE THREE PATHS
Once you have our gameās beginning seed written down on the top of your 3x5 card, write underneath it the three paths your game might take. Sometimes these paths might be linear ā the three scenes that will occur as the party navigates a relatively linear dungeon. Other times, they might represent the three main choices the group might make to decide where theyāre headed next.
Steve Townshend refers to this idea as his āthree things.ā He begins planning his adventure by deciding first where the PCs will end up, then decides where they begin, and then what they might find in the middle.
Example: The Adventure Locations of Yellowtop
- Graystone Manor: Former noble house, now mercenary headquarters.
- The Saltmines: Former center for industry, now closed down after finding a dark power buried deep within.
- Ashland Fortress: High in the mountains, a ruined keep now inhabited by hobgoblin and ogre mercenaries. Two trebuchets threaten the town.
Now this little micro-universe is coming together, but without over-writing the details. We have enough to feel like thereās some adventure to be had, even if itās not all tied together yet. What do we use to tie these locations to our adventure seed? Non-player characters.