One of my great beliefs about running role-playing games is that I can stay fresh and avoid burn-out by always being in a learning mode. I learn new things all the time – it’s one of the reasons I play as well as DM, because you can learn so much by taking part in a game run by someone else. In that spirit, I thought I would write about some things I have learned in the the past two years of DMing and playing 4e Dungeons and Dragons.
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1) Not every battle has to be an epic conflict
One of the hot topics regarding 4e has always been the length of combat. “It takes too long, why does it have to last so long?” and “How do I shorten it and still make it meaningful?” are two questions that I have heard repeatedly over the last couple of years. Theories abound about how to accomplish the short-but-meaningful battle, most of them have to do with fiddling with numbers and statistics. I have learned, though, that it doesn’t have anything to do with numbers for me and my group. It has to do with my attitude as the DM. I decided to be okay with non-epic battles in the game. No, that doesn’t mean that battles are meaningless, it just means that they don’t all have to be long, drawn out, almost TPK territory battles to be challenging. I embraced the idea of the simple battle. Here’s how:
a) use fewer creatures that do a little more damage than normal
b) be more willing to let creatures retreat and flee successfully
c) make the point of the battle go beyond killing the monsters
d) be okay with your players whipping total monster butt without taking much damage sometimes
e) use interesting terrain and more traps/puzzles outside of combat
For example: last night my players entered an encounter with two spiders. The trigger for the encounter was one of the players noticing a loose stone in a fireplace. When the PC climbed up and removed the stone, he lost his grip and the stone went crashing to the ground, but he then saw a small metal box (locked) inside the alcove and removed it. At that point, two spiders emerged, one from a nest on the ceiling and one from the fireplace. No surprise since the PCs saw the spiderwebs and inspected them, aware of what type of creature may have made them.
What made the encounter quick?
Only two monsters vs 6 PCs. Were they in danger of a TPK? No. Were they challenged to the point of almost dying? No. Were they surprised and overwhelmed, feeling the need to fight an overly heroic battle? No. Did they have fun? Yes. Was it meaningful even though they destroyed the spiders in only two rounds? Yes. Why? Because the players were fighting for something – the contents of that little metal box. And they hadn’t even opened it yet. That made the battle meaningful and challenging.
Make it okay for you, as the DM, to devise short, relatively easy encounters in order for the players to accomplish something. If you are okay with it, and the players have a reason to be fighting other than just to kill monsters, they’ll be okay with it too.
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2) Bigger is not always better
I like dungeon tiles. Scratch that, I love dungeon tiles. I love making all sorts of different lay-outs for the lairs, taverns, caverns, castles, etc. that my players will venture into in search of treasure, prestige, and the joy of leveling. But a neat looking set-up does not a great game session make. Sometimes small campaign arcs and short quests are what the party needs to build that notoriety they so crave in your fantasy world. Every single session doesn’t have to be the grandest session yet. Sometimes it’s the little things about the world that makes the players feel more immersed.
This also goes for NPCs. I love making over the top voices and having out-spoken NPCs populate the world. It should be said, though, that not every NPC that the PCs meet should be an over the top caricature of the happy shopkeep, the burly blacksmith, the fancy-pants tailor, or the voluptuous barmaid. Sometimes the PCs need to meet the average Joe of the campaign world. Let them meet people that have no bearing on the outcome of the campaign. Now, some of you would argue that those aren’t true NPC’s, but that is beside the point. If everyone that the PCs meet is fantastical, they won’t believe it when you have them meet an average peasant. Sometimes interesting things happen when your players think a person in the world is supposed to be something they aren’t. You could use that moment to enrich the world the PCs live in.
It doesn’t take much prep time to come up with a list of names for craftsmen and merchants in the unknown town to which the PCs are traveling. Let the PCs explore their world, populated, sometimes, with only regular sized, mediocre people. Give your players the chance to add flavor to the regular town once in a while – if you allow them, they will probably do a good job.
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3) Don’t railroad yourself
There has also been a lot of talk about how to not run your players on a railroad track, making all decisions for them, or (more often the case) not giving them any decisions to make in the first place. I’m here to tell you that you shouldn’t do that to yourself either. Don’t prep so much that you have a set-in-stone idea of how each session should go. Even if you come up with 4 different choices for the players to make (thereby feeling like you are not actually railroading them), even if you come up with 10 things they could explore or decide upon – don’t get married to the idea of how it will turn out. If you start a campaign and you already know how you want it to end, then why are you playing? Why not just tell the players that their PCs are subject to the laws of fate and they have no choice in how the end will turn out. Because that would be no fun, that’s why. Don’t be so detailed in your preparations that you railroad yourself into the “right” ending of a session or campaign. Let your players mess up your plans. And then let that be okay.
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4) Involve everyone only so much as they want to be involved, a.k.a. Let the players be content in their individual styles
The very first chapter of the 4e Dungeon Master’s Guide goes into great length about playing styles. It talks about Power Gamers, Thinkers, Storytellers, and Instigators (among others). It tells you that each player will likely have different motivations and levels of comfort with certain aspects of the game. Some people like to act when they role-play and some people go into a vegetative state until the next combat starts. So what? Well, you need to learn to accept that about your players. Let your players be comfortable with their own play styles, and learn to accept them for what they bring to the game without trying to change them.
I’m getting into dangerous territory here, because some (maybe many) readers will not agree with me. Some will say that they just know that their quiet player just needs to be encouraged and then he will come out of his shell and role-play till the cows come home. So let me tell you that I am not saying that is wrong. If that is your instinct, then go for it and everyone will probably have fun – it is good to stretch your abilities as well as your player’s abilities, and it usually turns out fabulously.
However, if you have a player that has a playing style that doesn’t mesh with your idea of a group, let them play the way they want and have fun in their own way. Learn to be okay with that playing style at your table and don’t get easily frustrated when he/she doesn’t do what they aren’t comfortable with. Frustration can cause DM burn-out and that is the quickest way to sink a game – and then no-one is having fun.
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I hope you enjoy my blog. Is there something you wish I would address? Is there a topic you would like discussed? Did you use something posted on this site and want to give me feedback about how well it went (or didn’t go)? Please post a comment and let me know (or send an email to the address below). If you have an adventure hook you would like me to flesh out and post here, or you have fleshed it out yourself and want it posted, send an email to:
DMSamuel AT IronNeuronEnterprises DOT com
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Until next time, I wish you good gaming!
~DM Samuel
I completely agree on that last point. I think you have to be flexible with your players; not everyone is a role-player. I have one guy in my game who only really plays because the rest of us do. It’s not that he doesn’t enjoy D&D; he likes the combat, and he has fun at the table. He even contributes some interesting stuff from time to time, and his character is one of the more interesting, thematically. D&D, however, is not his favorite thing to do. Give his druthers, he’d probably rather play a board game than an RPG.
And that’s fine with me. He’s willing to play once a month when we get together, he’s willing to put the game before himself, and he’s willing to just have some fun and not take it to seriously. I’m not going to push him to hard. Occasionally I’ll ask him questions about his character, or I’ll prod him for a little more information, but I try not to go too much further. He’s having a good time, and he’s helping everyone else have a good time, and that’s good enough for me.
Now, as to your first point, let me just say: I never even thought of that. I consider myself to be a fairly experienced DM, and I try to create lots of exciting, dynamic, and challenging encounters. It never even occurred to me to make an encounter that is exciting and dynamic without being challenging. I may have to try that sometime soon.
Awesome – I too have had players that have greatly differing styles, especially when you look at the combat vs role-playing ratio.
I didn’t exactly mean to say that you should make an encounter so easy it is un-challenging – I just meant that it can be challenging in other ways, not tactically or TPK-wise. The spiders I used in the example were poisonous and dangerous – they could put a serious hurt on one or two PCs, just not all the PCs. The point of the battle was to make quick work of them so that they could take possession of the box, not to have a massive battle.
Glad you found the article interesting.
Cheers!
Perhaps I phrased that wrong. I think I understand what you meant in the original post (and your clarification reinforces this), and I think it’s a great idea. I may, in fact, re-tool one or two of the encounters in my upcoming session to be a little less epic, so that maybe the party has a chance of finishing the rest of the dungeon in one session. Looking at the adventure, I think that a couple of my encounters are actually structured that way to some extent. That is, the monsters aren’t a huge threat on their own, and wouldn’t take that long to kill; combined with other factors, like the environment and such, the encounter itself is a threat, though.
My players once ambushed some soldiers in a spur-of-the-moment thing, so I wasn’t prepared. Without having time to make up a cool/challenging fight, I just decided that the soldiers should be about 5th level, and that there should be about six of them. The PCs (10 heroes) made quick work of the soldiers in only two rounds.
Afterward, we were all kind of happy with that fight, because the group kicked ass right when they should have – It was refreshing. Had I made up that encounter beforehand, I very well may have ruined it by making it a “level-appropriate” encounter.
So yeah, not every fight has to be epic.
-Tourq
Hi,
I agree with you, but the gaming industry does not. Or maybe they don’t want to? You see what makes money, is monster books!
Traps: Trap books don’t! The Grimmtooth books had a lot deadly traps and that is not what works. We need to involve the party (Or most of it) in the traps defeat. Most traps do not work often and often get tedious with your rogue stealing a lot of the lime light. We need a book on designing traps to challenge the party. The Fantasy Craft system for building traps stat blocks is A-1. But they need a list of challenge types that involve the party. A book with challenges that involve the party would be great.
Puzzles: I have not seen a real good book of fantasy puzzles or how to make them or design them. Why, it would be too hard to sell. Online sources seem to fall short and I have found no good source that really embraces the FtF-FRP games. A good source book is wanted dearly. Not just a list of puzzles but on how to design a puzzle that works. Some video games do some cool things but are hard to do at the table.
Riddles: The party loves the easy ones and hates the hard ones. But again there are few sources and even fewer that really tie into a fantasy game. The Cloud Kingdom books were okay, but many of them were not very fantasy oriented. Again source books on this subject are sorely needed.
Terrains: Wow, what a book this could be. We need this badly. I try to come up with terrains that change battles all the time. I have done some fantastic ones. But I don’t do it that good with the more mundane terrains. I would love some ideas on different terrain elements and their effects; something that you could drop in a dungeon or wilderness with a stat block. Describe the terrain, its effects and what you need to deal with it.
I would love books on all the things above, the pretty monster books with their stat blocks are easy to use as a GM, players instantly know what to do to defeat the bulk of them and the industry can create them easily with all the previous material that has gone before. So what will happen? Most likely the companies will put out tons of supplements to make players feel powerful and monster books to help the GM do that as well.