#dm toolbox

Overhauling Exploration with the Illuminated Room System

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Despite playing D&D for over 20 years, every so often I'll encounter a bit of DM advice that completely changes the way I run my games. When it happens, it often feels like I've discovered a way we were always SUPPOSED to be playing, solving a problem that I'd had for years and sending me into a rage spiral about why no one seemed to figure this out back when I was first learning the game.

Lo and behold, two of my favourite online DM channels happen to hit upon the same idea mere months apart.

TLDR: To improve the efficiency and clarity of our exploration based gameplay, we should borrow from videogame UI design which makes it easy for players to know what to do by highlighting things players can interact with. From there, escape room design takes over, as interaction reveals new information, challenges, and puzzles. 

More ideas about how to use this system (and my own ideas about spicing it up) under the cut.

DM Tip: My Time, Threat, Tension Method

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Inspired by playing the new updates to Blades in the Dark and a recent discussion on the best way to use information gathering skills like perception and investigation, I wanted to share a technique that's quickly become a fundamental part of my DM toolbox when it comes to designing scenarios in D&D and other TTRPGS.

This technique is useful for building individual encounters, but can scaled up to provide structures for entire sessions or adventures. It's the closest I've come to formalizing the supposed "exploration" pillar of gameplay that WotC is so fond of mentioning but never provided any rules for.

Here's the rundown:

Figure out what your party is trying to accomplish (gather information, rescue a hostage, get through a door to the next area of the dungeon)

Establish at least one or more threats that would impede the party trying to accomplish their goal (raising an alarm, getting attacked by a deadly monster, letting their rival gain the upper hand)

By and large the thing that's going to separate your party from suffering the consequences of these threats is going to be time: a resource they have a limited amount of because you're going to arrange circumstances to maximize the drama. You don't need to keep track of individual minutes, more of an abstract sense of "everyone in the party gets to do two things before I mention they hear footsteps approaching the door."

Players are allowed any amount of surface information they'd like and a bit of faffing about on the side, but if they want to get closer to their goal they're going to need to spend time. Some actions are going to cost a flat amount of time, while others (especially those that are up to luck when time is of the essence) are going to require the party to roll. As an example: finding a secret door in a room by noticing the lack of dust on a hidden lever vs. spending ten minutes tossing the room and bruteforcing the solution.

Place a few diversions in their way, whether they be outright red herrings or time sinks that get them something but not the progress they want. (emptying the villain's safe doesn't uncover the secret diary the party is looking for, but it's rewarding in a way other than progress).

You can also be a bastard and put some traps in, not just the type that spring up and deal daamge, but the kind that make threats happen sooner (alarms, surprise guardians) but the kind that introduce new threats (curses, lurking poisonous animals, evidence left behind that alerts their foes)

It's also a good idea to scatter some hints amid the initial setup/diversions to generate those delicious "AHA!" moments and reward players who are paying attention. When someone acts off a hint or guesses the right course of action there's no time cost or roll required. They solved the puzzle, let them move on.

Depending on the scenario you might swap out time with safety, influence, or limited materials as the "resource" being consumed for the sake of the goal.

Random Encounter: Rift Events

The thinking DM’s alternative to “rocks fall, everyone dies”

Sometimes a the heroes fuck up catastrophically. They fail to stop the dark ritual in time, they sever one of the anchors of reality in the midst of a battle, they drop the doomsday artifact down a very long flight of stairs and it ends up breaking. You could end the campaign right there, improvising a hasty epilogue and send your party home for a couple weeks while you prepare to start from scratch.  Alternatively, you could use the narrative stakes you set up for yourself and do something interesting. 

One of the most important writing lessons I’ve learned as a DM is to ask myself “what happens if the party fails” as a means of giving my writing richer dramatic stakes, because unlike most forms of fiction a d&d campaign can’t have an ending predetermined by the author. To that end it’s a good idea to have some options in your back pocket for when your party goes so far off the map that you couldn’t have possibly prepared for this eventuality. Taking inspiration from the “Doomscars” of Kaldheim, a rift event represents a breach in the fabric of reality accompanied by a natural disaster, the result of either a catastrophic release of magical energy, the fracturing of fate, or planes smashing into eachother with the force of sizemic shifts. 

To quote Jason from The Good Place: “I'm telling you, Molotov cocktails work. Anytime I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem.“ And that’s exactly the ethos we’re looking to bring to the table with a rift event. Whatever stakes your campaign had at the moment, whatever crisis your heroes were gearing up to face, they suddenly have a VERY different crisis which you can eat up the rest of the session ( or the session after a cliffhanger) with to buy yourself more time to figure out the long term implications of what your heroes have done.

Consider some options below:

Your party, every one, and everything are suddenly sucked into a different plane as the world is overturned around them, giving you time to move the plot forward back in the material plane while they play out a short “ get back home” arc. The Astral Sea is a great place to dump them out, as it’s not only a shocking contrast to your mundane campaign world but can also provide novel means of transport home.

The area your party is standing is now having an earthquake, which they desperately need to escape through skillchallenges and cooperation. When they finally get clear and survey the damage, they realize that not only did they put a dent in the world, they went and created a portal to some other reality, which is now bleeding mosnters and weird magic into the material plane. Bonus points if the villain/loved ones/the mcguffin is now on the other side of the rift, forcing the party to choose between dealing with the newly emerged threat or go perusing their original goal.

Awaken a Kaiju. No really, having your mid to high level heroes inadvertently release the tarrasque or some other giant beast is a great way for them to get back to the monsterhunting days of the early campaign, AND a convenient way to not have to explain why no one mentioned the campaign ending threat lurking in the wilderness before now.

DM Tip: Puzzling it Out

While puzzles seem almost quintessential to the d&d experience, one of my greatest criticisms of how the game is currently handled is that there's almost no advice available to dungeonmasters about how they should go about designing or running puzzle encounters to maximize the fun at their table. We've got vague ideas about riddle doors, big setpiece traps, and clever envriomental mechanisms from the media we consume, but no idea how to translate those things into a format that works well in TRPGs.

Part of the problem is that there's no head's up display or physical feedback in a game of imagination like d&d: players are purely at the whims of the DM and what information they're willing/capable of providing, forcing everyone to spend a lot of time asking clarifying questions or trying out options that won't work. This grinds sessions to a halt, as not only do players need to figure out how to solve the puzzle, but spend twice as long figuring out what the puzzle is on top of figuring out if there even IS a puzzle in the first place.

Below the cut I'm going to give specific advice about how you as a DM can be better about implementing puzzles for your players in game:

My number 1 piece of advice for running a puzzle is to be OBVIOUS about it: Hint at the mechanisms involved when you initially describe the room and make them do something when the players poke at them. One of the greatest tools I've given to my party is letting them ask " what's the puzzle here?", at which point you describe the goal of the puzzle, the problem that they're faced with, and the different options they can interact with. You can keep some things out of the description, hidden or missing imputs, broken mechanisms that need improvisation or repair, but if you can be perfectly clear with what the puzzle is at the beginning , the party can dedicate their brains to trying to solve it from the get go, rather than spending most of their time at the table poking around in the dark. When they've done what you need them to do, make it obvious: have the door pop open, play the zelda "puzzle solved" sound, scream " YOU'VE SOLVED MY FIENDISH PUZZLE" in the dorkiest wizard voice you can manage, anything to let them save time and get back to the rest of the session.

No skill checks during puzzles: nothing's more annoying than knowing the answer to something and then being forced to try and retry because the dice aren't being kind. Players likewise shouldn't need perception checks to figure out basic elements of a puzzle's functionality anymore than they should need to roll to figure out if a door blocking their way is locked. The one exception to this is when they've devised a bullshit way to circumvent the challenge that's too flimsy to work on its own and needs a bit of the luck-gods blessing on order to work.

Puzzles eat up session time, so if you want to get things done this session use them as gates for optional content. Alternatively, Consider introducing a puzzle at the end of a session giving the party a whole week to think about solutions to get past it. People are generally really bad at problemsolving under pressure, and there's no reason your precious game time should be sacrificed just because the group doesn't feel like doing verbal trial and error for three hours.

Tableskills: The Proactive DM Voice

One of the most fundamental lesions I learned over the course of becoming a great DM was that it was my job to push the story forward, not my players.  When I was younger I was terrified of taking any agency upon myself for fear of railroading my group, thinking that my job was merely to read out prepared text and design a playground for my players to explore as they saw fit. Needless to say, no matter how much planning i did or how big I made my campaign world it never made my party any more energized, instead bleeding out their attention until they became listless and the group/campaign dissolved. 

Once I made the change to DM driven play, things changed almost instantly. My once distracted players became excited collaborators, looking to steer the runaway engine that was my narrative. Where as before they were directionless, having infinite shallow options, they were now focused on the road ahead of them, trying to dodge upcoming hurdles while reacting to the unexpected ones.  

This change took some getting used to, but became most evident in how I narrated my games, cutting down on extraneous calls for rolls,  chaining together scenes until a big finale at the end of the session, using my infinite power as narrator to push receptive players into interesting situations that progressed both the story and their character arc. Over time I began to think of these changes and a bunch of others as “proactive DM voice”, a skill that I think players and dungeonmaters alike could benefit from learning. 

Lets look at an example, lifted from one of the very first modules I ever ran: The party stands at the edge of a tremendously large fissure, and has to lower themselves a hundred or more feet down to a ledge where they’ll be ambushed by direrats.  You could run this in a rules literal sense: reading out the prepared text then waiting for the party to come up with a solution, likely dallying as they ask questions. Have them make athletics checks to descend the ropes, risk the possibility of one of them dying before the adventure ever begins. Then you do it two or three more times as they leapfrog down the side of the canyon, wasting what was perhaps half an hour of session time before you even got to any of the fun stuff. 

Or you could get proactive about it: 

Securing your ropes as best you can, you belay over the side of the fissure, descending down in a measured, careful pace aiming for the most stable looking outcrop of rock, still a hundred or so feet above the canyon’s base. A few minutes and about two thirds of the way through your decent [least athletic PC] looks like they’re struggling, their hands are coated in sweat and they can feel unfamiliar muscles burning in complaint.  I need [PC] to make me an athletics check

Rather than waiting for the players and the dice to make a story for me, I took the extra step in my prep time to think of something interesting that might happen while they’re venturing through this section of the map. I specifically designed things so that happenstance wouldn’t kill off one of my heroes, but they might end up damaged and in a perilous situation should the fates not favour them that particular moment. 

Likewise, this planning has let me prepare a number of different angles that I could use to prepare the next scene: with an injured player ambushed by multiple rats while their allies dangle a few rounds away or with the party saving their friend and descending together, too much of a threat for the rats to tackle all at once, leading them to stalk the party through future encounters.

This is already getting a bit long, but for those interested in more ways you can adopt a proactive DM voice, I’ll give more examples under the cut

DM Tip: Can't we All just Get Along?

I think there's two elements at play here, the first is whether these people should even be playing as a group to begin with, and the second is a matter of table moderation.

First let's address the former: It's the sad truth of our hobby that not everyone can play together, personalities clash, expectations differ, and sometimes the vibe just isn't there. There's no shame in that, and part of coming into your own as both a player and a DM is realizing what sort of group you'd like to have and taking steps to find one. This is one of the many reasons I don't play in store games, because for me the true magic of the game is only possible when I have the right alchemical balance of players around my table. For me, No D&D is better than bad D&D, so I am exceptionally choosy with what games I do end up playing in and will drop a game the second I determine it isn't for me. I encourage you all to have this exact same mentality, as it will lead to a higher degree of enjoyment to be had by all.

Second, lets talk about fights at the table: It has been a long, long time since I've had anything resembling open player conflict while I was running a game, and I credit that to a decision I made well over a decade ago that I wasn't going to be the sort of DM you heard d&d horror stories about. Instead, I dedicated myself to ensuring that the people around my table were going to have the best time possible, which is the only real metric of success a DM can really have.

To do this, you need to be utterly open and utterly heartless when you sense conflict arising at your table. Someone doing something that makes another player uncomfortable? Quash it, right then and there, and tell everyone why you did it. Person getting overly heated or demanding and bringing everyone down? Call a time out, get some snacks, and talk it through. Player have their feelings hurt? Pause, check in with them emotionally, assure them that it's alright to step away, then continue on.

Like any relationship, a d&d group only works when the participants are invested in eachother's wellbeing, and take that into consideration when determining their own actions. People who don't care about how they affect others are problem players, and problem players need to either be corrected or ejected for the health of the group.

Here's some things you can do at your table to avoid conflict:

Use Safety tools: A lot of people have said it a lot more eloquently than me, but there are lots of resources available to help you and your group manage the stresses that might come up during play.

Writer's room it: when describing what d&d is, I literally always start with "It's a collaborative storytelling game", despite the fact that most people forget about the collaborative part. The campaign isn't just the DM's story to tell, and the players should be given a chance to stretch their authorial power when it comes to deciding what happens. This goes double for moments of conflict, when one of the players feels the actions of another might ruin the story for them. When these sorts of things happen, zoom out, talk to your players about what's going on and what their take on current events is. This change in perspective will often let a player go from feeling that they were personally wronged, to seeing this setback as something they can use to further the story. Do not hesitate to use bribery saying: " if you're ok with your character taking a loss here, something good will happen to you later on." This advice obviously doesn't apply to anything that might violate a player's personal boundaries, which you should simply not let happen.

Say No: D&D, when done right can be one of the most intimate and cathartic experiences imaginable, to the point where it's recognized as a therapeutic tool. On a more casual level, people are there to enjoy themselves and in both instances Players shouldn't have to contend with assholes who get a kick out of ruining their fun. You as the DM are invested with the authority to let things happen/not happen, from whether or not you actually play to whether an action your players decide to take is canonical to how the story proceeds. Don't indulge the asshole, if someone does something that makes people uncomfortable, don't narrate them doing it up until one of the players gets triggered.

Encourage them to be open: everyone at the table needs to be fully up front with how they're feeling, and if one person's not enjoying themselves, you should stop. Players likewise need to be open about their own feelings so as to not get them confused with how the characters might be feeling. It's fine if your characters argue, but only if the players signal that they're cool for that level of antagonism happening in game.