D&D General No Fixed Location -- dynamically rearranging items, monsters, and other game elements in the interests of storytelling

[Shiroiken]

Let me start by saying that fudging numbers is against my DM code. I would never do it. However, I find myself engaging in a different kind of fudging more and more: changing item locations (and other elements) mid-adventure.

Really this is an issue in adventure design, because a well done adventure doesn't need editing on the fly. If you find yourself wanting to edit on the fly, you might want to re-evaluate you adventure design. If you're running official adventures... be ready to edit on the fly regularly (they're often not complete).

Rewarding Exploration
The party is investigating an old house with a lot of fireplaces in it. Only one fireplace has any treasure inside (behind a loose brick). It would suck if the players investigated one fireplace, found nothing, and were discouraged from investigating any others. So instead of putting treasure inside only one of the fireplaces, the treasure now has no fixed location. It's inside whichever fireplace the party happens to investigate first.

Two solutions: either split up the treasure into several fireplaces (if they miss some, that's their fault) or give clues. If the treasure needs to be in one place, then leave a scrap of paper from a diary, scratches on the stones, or even missing stones nearby indicating that something is wrong with the fireplace. If the player's miss it, it's on them.

Advancing the Plot
The party doesn't know it, but there's an important document inside the dungeon that will turn their world upside down and send them on their next adventure. Since finding the document is imperative to the plot, giving it a fixed location wouldn't necessarily be the best idea -- the party might never find it. So instead, the document is wherever the players happen to look. Do they search an old desk? Papers. Do they find a treasure chest? Papers. Do they search someone's body? Papers. It might seem ham-fisted, but it's better than having to nudge the party in the right direction later.

Adventure design should NEVER be left to chance, unless success is completely optional. If the party MUST find the scroll, then you leave it in the culmination of the adventure location, such as with the BBEG. This is the one place the party must go to, and thus they have to find it. If they find it early, it might also end the adventure early, since they may feel the need to respond to the information immediately.

Imparting Information
The party is struggling through a dungeon that ends with a fireball-casting wizard. You want the players to know what they're up against so they can prepare accordingly (by preparing absorb elements, boosting their Dex saves, acquiring fire resistance, etc.). There's a clue in part of the dungeon -- maybe a large scorch mark that any Arcana-proficient character can recognize as the aftermath of a fireball spell. But if you want the party to have this information, then why leave it up to chance? Drop it into any room that the party happens to visit.

If you want to give warning to the PCs in advance, they should hear about it in town beforehand. Once they're in the dungeon, it's probably too late to prepare, unless you also give them a safe place they can long rest. If you do, then indications should already be in the adventure, with various soot marks and burnt material scattered throughout.

 

[Tallifer]

Add me to the chorus of dungeon masters who alter things as the adventure unfolds. Indeed is all part and parcel of improvisation and roleplaying.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think you should be cautious in doing this, because following the dice can lead to more unexpected results, and more unexpected often means more memorable. In the final encounter of a 4e campaign I was in, my barbarian reduced Orcus to single-digit hit points with a typical barbarian big damn hurricane of attacks. But then the finishing blow came from the pacifist cleric with the one damaging at-will spell he'd never used, for the first damage he'd ever dealt in the campaign.

Nope, no caution necessary. I've run enough games to know that my instincts on when to fudge produces stronger results than running games with unfudged dice. Especially when my tables have 7 or more players at it, and the distribution of magic items have not been meticulously curated. As a result, my encounter building is wild and wooley by necessity and thus I have to course-correct quite often. And that is done by adding/removing monsters, encounters, and boosting/losing HP to "fix" things I had just guessed at previously when I created the encounters in the first place.

But as has been mentioned in several other threads... my style of game appears to be much more narrative and story-driven than most others, and as a result game mechanics hold a much lower place in our esteem in terms of importance. And thus holding the dice up as some holy grail is entirely unnecessary.

 

[Oofta]

I rarely run published adventures, and in my home campaigns I don't plan out much in the way of physical layout. In large part that's because I run a very open sandbox, and it's rare that the PCs go where I actually expect them to go.

So some of this may apply, some may not.

Rewarding Exploration

I frequently try to reward skills people take. If someone has made their work as an armorer important, now and then they'll notice some detail about the enemy's armor that others may have missed.

Same thing with exploration. It may not find the treasure, but it may find clues to where the treasure is.

Advancing the Plot
The party doesn't know it, but there's an important document inside the dungeon ...

I don't run plot based campaigns per se. More event, motivation and choice driven campaigns. So there will never be that one important document. Yes, if the PCs come across information they can use it's great and rewarded. They get to advance directly to GO and collect their 200 GP. Or fight the wizard, whatever.

I do try to give multiple hints and options to find the information they need, but what if that fails? Well failure can be just as interesting. They didn't stop the wizard so they attacked the town, but one of the survivors of the attack gives other hints on how to find them.

Sometimes the PCs lose. Hopefully that just makes eventual success all the sweeter. Where you have to be careful with this is that ideally they will know exactly what clues they missed. There should be a "Oh crap. Remember when _ and we didn't _?" moment. It's no fun to think you had no chance to be the heroes, but realizing you could have been the heroes and just missed it can be quite memorable. In a good way.

Imparting Information
The party is struggling through a dungeon that ends with a fireball-casting wizard. You want the players to know what they're up against so they can prepare...

Again, I would give multiple clues but if they miss all the clues then they miss them. Maybe the encounter is so difficult that they have to run away in a less than valiant retreat. I don't do this very often because it's too easy to misjudge how clear my clues are. I don't expect players to read my mind.

So yes, I adjust things on the fly all the time. No, I don't guarantee that the party is always going to win, I just adjust the story so that the adventure continues. Most of the time when a door closes (or it's hidden and they miss it) another door opens. Unfortunately for the party the new door has rusty hinges which alerts the guards and everybody needs to roll initiative. Oh, and the guards have a cave troll.

 

[aco175]

I'm with you.

Last campaign, had a big dramatic battle vs. a character's nemesis. After a satisfying battle, that character critted their nemesis, and the damage ... left them with 3 HPs.

My response: "Tell us how you killed him."

And phooey on everyone who says that I'm invalidating player agency in doing that.

I have also gone the other way with the BBEG not dying the first round and having a few more HP to get to act on hit turn for one more round before dying. Trying to balance player fun with challenge and sometimes working for the reward while also rewarding smart player play. It all mixes into decisions.

 

[TwoSix]

That's just it, though: why is it so important that the adventure keep going where it otherwise wouldn't? Read in a negative light, this sounds like something a railroad-y DM would say; and you've never struck me as one such.

Because all the fun times I remember in D&D are the times I remember things happening, not the times we looked for something to happen in pursuit of unneeded verisimilitude.

This fetishization of a "living, breathing world" is just that, a fetish. It is neither the only nor optimal mode of play. As long as I give my players agency to not follow the current plot (and I do), leaving the bulk of the world details to only be finalized in play has worked for me for decades.

 

[TheSword]

I like to have things planned out in advance. I do a lot of conversion from other systems and like to have stat blocks prep-printed. Treasure/rewards already worked out and skill DCs set etc.

However I make mistakes, because I’m human. So instead of punishing players for getting something wrong, I correct as I go, where I can. I heartily agree that the whole campaign exist in a state of flux, until it hits the table - and even until the last damage dice is rolled.

The problem with expecting things to be pre-arranged is that it relies on two things: exhaustive preparation and an infallible DM. They first is onerous and the second is imaginary!

Sure I’m not a fan of games where DMs make the whole session up on the fly but we have to acknowledge that as long as the Players are all having fun it’s groovy.

In my campaign the rogue of the party had to deliver some potions of mind reading to an unknown person. Along the way they were stolen and the party recovered them but not before finding out that they were actually deadly poison. The rogue made the delivery to a person who turned out to be someone they already met and quite liked. She needed the potions of mind reading for a party she was intending where she intended to rob the host.
The rogue wanted to follow orders though and didn’t mention the poison to her. The adventure had ‘written’ that if this happens the thief gets poisoned and maybe survives to take revenge.

After speaking to his contact and the rest of the party he changed his mind and wanted to prevent the poisoning. He worked out the location of the party, they laced the servants breakfast with emetics so they couldn’t work, one of them posed as a noble who volunteered to help his ‘neighbour’ by loaning his own servants for the soirée. The pcs then acted as servants, badly serving dinner until able to slip the unaware thief a note saying the potions were poisoned... just in time.

The whole second paragraph was made up on the fly, the noble, the dinner party, whether emetics that could incapacitate servants existed and were available... everything short of the thief NPC. Now would it be better to say the thief was dead or an enemyand not give them the chance to correct the earlier decision?

Making things up, and changing things is a DM’s responsibility where it makes the game more fun.

 

[TwoSix]

Again another method but much more elegant would be to assign different targets which might be achieved in any order and each covers 1-2 level range in difficulty.

Agreed. Most of the time when I'm doing site based exploration, if function more like "Betrayal on the House on the Hill". I have certain clues, items, and monsters I want them to encounter, but the actual layout of how they encounter them is mostly random.

 

[miggyG777]

Let me start by saying that fudging numbers is against my DM code. I would never do it. However, I find myself engaging in a different kind of fudging more and more: changing item locations (and other elements) mid-adventure.

Maybe it's not fudging. Maybe it has a better name that I'm not aware of. All I know is that it's a great and dynamic way to handle pacing and storytelling within a game. It can be used to reward exploration, advance the plot, or impart information. Let me give a few examples:

Rewarding Exploration
The party is investigating an old house with a lot of fireplaces in it. Only one fireplace has any treasure inside (behind a loose brick). It would suck if the players investigated one fireplace, found nothing, and were discouraged from investigating any others. So instead of putting treasure inside only one of the fireplaces, the treasure now has no fixed location. It's inside whichever fireplace the party happens to investigate first.

Advancing the Plot
The party doesn't know it, but there's an important document inside the dungeon that will turn their world upside down and send them on their next adventure. Since finding the document is imperative to the plot, giving it a fixed location wouldn't necessarily be the best idea -- the party might never find it. So instead, the document is wherever the players happen to look. Do they search an old desk? Papers. Do they find a treasure chest? Papers. Do they search someone's body? Papers. It might seem ham-fisted, but it's better than having to nudge the party in the right direction later.

Imparting Information
The party is struggling through a dungeon that ends with a fireball-casting wizard. You want the players to know what they're up against so they can prepare accordingly (by preparing absorb elements, boosting their Dex saves, acquiring fire resistance, etc.). There's a clue in part of the dungeon -- maybe a large scorch mark that any Arcana-proficient character can recognize as the aftermath of a fireball spell. But if you want the party to have this information, then why leave it up to chance? Drop it into any room that the party happens to visit.

So, what would you call this sort of thing? Is it fudging? And what do you think of it as a DMing tool? Is it wrong? Is it good? Do you ever do it yourself, or is it against your DMing code? Let me know!

I would never even consider to run a game differently. Not doing the things you described will create a very boring game, since there will be no dynamic elements at all. The whole reason for D&Ds existence is to allow a more dynamic approach than say a computer game. It's based on the dynamics between the DM and the players. That is the TRUE art of D&D style story telling.

 

[Oofta]

One more thought on this. I don't fudge dice (with one exception), but I do fudge tactics sometimes. In both ways.

For example, for whatever reason I was really beating up our poor monk last session. So next session I'll probably make sure to focus a little more on some of the other PCs. Which is about the only place I fudge the dice - if there are multiple targets and no best choice from the perspective of the monster - I'll roll randomly to see who gets hit. So that's the one exception to my rule above. I roll and then decide who should be attacked, ignoring my result.

At other times I'll hold back that second wave, not focus fire if the PCs are having a tough time of it, go after the tank fighter with a super high AC so he can ignore the attacks and so on.

Going the other way, if the party is facing highly intelligent or tactical enemy I'll adjust things on the fly occasionally. The NPC may know the party extremely well, understand their general tactics, know who should be targeted. Sometimes they'll have a spell I didn't think to give them ahead of time and so on. A super genius should be able to think two steps ahead even if I can't.