Delivering encounters that empower player decisions, Pt 1

Players want to engage with your encounters (read: the game) to accomplish some goal, be it one you've given them or they came up with themselves. That's D&D in a nutshell. The problem: DMs often fail to give their players enough information to permit that engagement.

To make meaningful decisions towards a goal, players need to exercise agency. As any number of fantastic essays will tell you (http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/ is a pro at this), information is the key to player agency. If the players don't have information to power their decisions, then they're like fish flopping on the ground. They might go in a particular direction, but they don't know (or probably care) why they went there. Or they may do nothing at all. So, when building and delivering an encounter, how do you make sure to communicate the necessary information to the players to enable them to make meaningful decisions?

The first thing I like to do is make sure the player's have a clear goal available. This might be part of the encounter itself (get the dragon's treasure or save the ogre's captives), or it might come from the PC's (we want to get past this room without waking up the goblins sleeping here). Either way, make sure you're either giving the PC's a clear goal(s) with the encounter, or that you know what types of things they might want to get out of it.

This is important because your map and encounter set up need to convey the information necessary for the PC's to achieve their goal, and everything else is fluff. Fluff is good and all, but by definition unnecessary. If you're giving your players great descriptions of the dragon's lustrous scales, but fail to sufficiently describe the open pit trap in front of its hoard, your players will be pissed.

Second, make clear whatever info the PC's need in your map (if you're using one. personally, I like to just write on the grid things like "15 ft fall, steep climb up"), or in your area description.  Do not wait until a player specifically asks about the floor to mention that it's covered in slime and difficult terrain. Give the players all the info they need up front to understand the encounter area and how to do whatever it is they want to do. Players will appreciate a "Gotcha" moment when it is part of a game mechanic (your friend the NPC was really a polymorphed succubus all along!), but will get furious when that moment is about information you could've conveyed but didn't (you try to walk over to that ogre but fail to reach him because there's a pit in front of him).

Now you may be asking, but what about hiding certain information from the players? What if I want them to fiddle with something, or they need more exploration to get the information they need? Those are totally reasonable things to wonder about. In part 2 of this short series, I'll cover managing player assumptions, which I think addresses this topic.

Good artists steal or whatever blah blah

No one creates anything in a vacuum. No one sits in a cave and just pumps out great adventure ideas ex nihilo. Gygax read like every Robert E. Howard and Fritz Lieber story and a million other things on the way to creating Greyhawk. (As an aside, Of Dice and Men is a great history of the creation of D&D and well worth a weekend read).

So, what that means, for me at least, is to be constantly hoovering up culture and ideas and whatnot and digesting them and turning them into stuff you can use. It's always awesome to stumble across great things you can really use, and trawling r/DND is great for that.

This Post has some awesome ideas for a city built around the living body of the Tarrasque, from which you can grow an entire campaign. Well worth a look.

First thing's first

So I probably think about D&D generally, and the game I am running specifically, like 3 hours a day. I spend time reading blogs and articles about how I can be a better DM and run a better game for my group. I bug my players with questions and emails and gchats when they'd rather be working. As a result, I think, I've gone from being a pretty crap DM to one that at least can run a fun game for my players once a week.

What I'd like to do in this space is chronicle that journey. Actually that sounds really pompous. What I'd like to do is write about being a DM and working to get better at it, because it's a craft that I love and want to be better at. If someone else reads this and it helps them too, then cool.

When I started two years ago, I was not a good DM. That isn't to say I am now, just that I know I was not then. I had interesting story ideas, NPCs, monsters, blah blah but my minute to minute execution of DMing the game was dogshit. I was imperious, opaque, and frequently annoyed with my players. I wanted them to play the game I wanted to run, rather than running the game they wanted to play. I had yet to learn the first rule of playing D&D, dumb as that sounds. Somehow I played a dozen games over a dozen years and never learned the first rule. What a moron.

What is the first rule? The purpose of playing the game is to have fun playing a game together. It sounds so obvious and I even feel a bit dumb writing it down but I think it bears repeating, early and often, even with the most veteran groups of players.

When you keep the first rule in mind, you write a game your players will enjoy, rather than the game that sounds best to you in your head. When you keep the first rule in mind, you're communicating effectively with your players about their environment and their characters, empowering them with agency. When you keep the first rule in mind, you're empowering the players to accomplish their character's goals rather than trying to thwart them with devious traps and monsters and invisible walls.

So that was the first, most fundamental thing I had to learn. Once you grok that though, you can start to build out of rest of your skill set with that guiding principle.