Is the DM the most important person at the table

[hawkeyefan]

I spent some time drawing locations. My group plays online so even when I use theater of the mind, I like to give the players at least a floorplan to look at. 5E tends to have more enemies on the board so for most battles I build a encounter map. Since I do not rail road players in general, I normally need to make multiple avenues fro them to pursue as well so some of that doesn't get used until later"I try and keep everything and sooner or later do end up happy that I did".

Okay, the online element is definitely a piece that I have minimal experience with. I do play in an online game through Roll20, but I have not yet GMed D&D online. The game I play in uses the published material from WotC, which includes the maps and handouts and the like.

I am planning on running an online game soon, but it's not going to be D&D, and will be theater of the mind.

Do you enjoy drawing all the maps? Honestly, for me, that would be something I'd eliminate. I mean, an encounter map if you're playing with minis, or with tokens online, is a bit of a necessary evil. But are these other maps you're providing necessary?

Would using published material be an option? repurposing images and maps from a published adventure?

I also created nine npc's. Some of those will not see use but some will,no way to really know till the players do their thing.

When you say you created nine NPCs, what do you mean? What level of detail? Are they each unique, or can some of them use the same or similar stat blocks?

I tend to bank NPCs and stat blocks for future use as needed. So if my PCs are facing an evil wizard, I already have a stat block ready to go, with maybe a couple of tweaks in order based on level.

Then I had to write a lose chart on what npc went where and did what. To help keep it all strait some game time and even long after to help with remembering it all even months later.

Why do you need this level of detail months later? Please don't take that as a challenge, I'm curious.

I generally don't take notes during play, nor post play until I do my prep for the next session. Then I kind of take the previous session as a starting point.

Then I created the actual encounters. Some took longer than others and will not get used now, but eventually they will. Then I made up two players maps to hand out to the players in game and out. I also made three handouts and loaded a ton of pictures to roll20 to use with npc's I really don't expect the party to fight.

Then I took out some paper and sketched some ideas out for if the party doesn't do anything I want/expect. If instead of working for the accused guardsman they just don't bite that idea and instead go to the docks and see if anyone is hiring. I made a at sea short adventure and reused npc's from another adventure like six months ago to fill out the crew. I didn't so much make all the encounters but got a general idea of how it might all work out. Since I don't expect the party to do this im not putting a lot of time into it but....better to have something to work with if I need it.

Here's where my inexperience with DMing online limits me.....what goes into designing an encounter for play in Roll20?

oh...then I went and reread the party backstories again and altered the game to reflect a couple of things in those backstories, one is likely to happen and one not. For kicks I changed the Captain npc for the what if adventure to one in a pc's backstory and had to make that npc.

That's cool. I don't have PC backstories at hand like that, but they're generally well known, and my players are all personal friends who I can reach out to if I need a detail like that. Generally speaking, their histories are all relevant enough to play that I have a good sense of them. But I definitely tailor things for these specific characters.

After thinking about some of my treasure ideas a second time"i tend to either give too much treasure or not enough......I added to it a little and wrote down a couple of magic things I can throw in if the party doesn't do a great job at winning or discovering some of the other rewards.

I was tempted to take a second look at the encounters after I realized the main adventure total was so high but then figured why mess with it. The pc's are not likely to do it all but if they do hunt down every last bit of it ,,,why should I stand in there way. Will just lease it as is.

Treasure is a very minimal concern for me. I tend to give my bad guys some gear, especially consumables and other small scale items, and then kind of determine additional stuff on the fly. I find that observing play gives me ideas of what may be in order for the PCs. Again, I do kind of tailor things to the specific PCs.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The idea of a 'dungeon' is a real stumbling block when it comes to talking about D&D and other prep styles and play styles. Dungeons are traditionally the very model of prep-heavy it's-all-on-the-DM style prep work. The DM has to draw the map, populate the dungeon, balance encounters, and so on and so forth. I agree with @Lanefan that cooperative dungeon design would suck. My example from earlier was about cities or provinces where the players would be expected to have some significant prior knowledge. Dungeons though, they are the unknown, and they're fun because you never know what's coming.

The other thing dungeons don't have is any kind of support structure. No familiar locations or NPCs in between encounters with the unknown. No character area knowledge or other information, unless directly provided by the DM as a clue. The players don't know anything about the dungeon. This makes it hard to see how players could 'help' drive the narrative and the party relies on the DM for pretty much everything. The players can help, and there are people that run stuff like dungeons off the cuff, but it's hard compared to other adventuring environments, or at least it takes getting used to.

If you picture an urban environment like a dungeon, the idea of support starts to makes sense. The party still moves from encounter to encounter, each an new unknown. But the 'hallways' in between are all the familiar city where the players know people, locations, lore, politics, factions, secrets, and whatever. That gives the players a whole lot of handles to help drive the narrative in interesting ways and indeed add to it with character driven play.

The more plot arcs, up to a point, in play also adds to the ability of PCs to drive the narrative. If you have some sort of major crisis narrative, as is common for D&D, plus some character driven shorter arcs, and some goal oriented decision making, the players have a lot of decisions they can make about exactly what to next. In most cases it will be to follow one of the arcs in play, either the major crisis arc, or something else they have a personal stake in. Players investment takes a lot of the sting out of sandbox-y play because the players want to do X and Y.

Yeah, the Dungeon as adventure is definitely a big part of it. The amount of dungeons that I run is minimal, and I tend not to play in a traditional "keyed location" kind of environment. The more a game leans toward that direction, then the more specific prep is required.....maps, NPCs and monsters in specific locations, treasure in each area, traps and other obstacles.

So some of that is going to be a necessity if you are going to run a dungeon delve. Or at least, it's going to be more likely that you'll need it. It certainly is possible to design the location in a location based adventure on the fly, but that takes some getting used to. The method is the question....do you rely on random tables to create rooms/encounters? Or do you improvise on the fly? Or do you have some blend of methods?

 

[Nagol]

The idea of a 'dungeon' is a real stumbling block when it comes to talking about D&D and other prep styles and play styles. Dungeons are traditionally the very model of prep-heavy it's-all-on-the-DM style prep work. The DM has to draw the map, populate the dungeon, balance encounters, and so on and so forth. I agree with @Lanefan that cooperative dungeon design would suck. My example from earlier was about cities or provinces where the players would be expected to have some significant prior knowledge. Dungeons though, they are the unknown, and they're fun because you never know what's coming.

The other thing dungeons don't have is any kind of support structure. No familiar locations or NPCs in between encounters with the unknown. No character area knowledge or other information, unless directly provided by the DM as a clue. The players don't know anything about the dungeon. This makes it hard to see how players could 'help' drive the narrative and the party relies on the DM for pretty much everything. The players can help, and there are people that run stuff like dungeons off the cuff, but it's hard compared to other adventuring environments, or at least it takes getting used to.

If you picture an urban environment like a dungeon, the idea of support starts to makes sense. The party still moves from encounter to encounter, each an new unknown. But the 'hallways' in between are all the familiar city where the players know people, locations, lore, politics, factions, secrets, and whatever. That gives the players a whole lot of handles to help drive the narrative in interesting ways and indeed add to it with character driven play.

The more plot arcs, up to a point, in play also adds to the ability of PCs to drive the narrative. If you have some sort of major crisis narrative, as is common for D&D, plus some character driven shorter arcs, and some goal oriented decision making, the players have a lot of decisions they can make about exactly what to next. In most cases it will be to follow one of the arcs in play, either the major crisis arc, or something else they have a personal stake in. Players investment takes a lot of the sting out of sandbox-y play because the players want to do X and Y.

It's not just dungeons: it any form of heavy player exploration. For example, a hex crawl suffers a similar problem. Should the party push through the swamp or trust skirting the edge is enough? Heck, I've run exploration-heavy soap-opera superhero games where the primary exploration was relationships and personal secrets.

Another example is my current campaign. Exploration isn't one of the three main pillars. It is THE pillar holding up the tent. It is a modern X-Files - style game with very strong and identifiable factions that the PCs started off knowing absolutely nothing about. Now, 7ish years later, the players can start to figure out the opposition within minutes of starting a new mission. They still struggle with how a couple of the factions relate to others, but they have a strong sense of their place in the world.

Exploration-heavy games restrict players' ability to add to the world because to collaborate requires information sharing that'd undercut the campaign premise.

 

[Fenris-77]

Running an unknown faction game is very cool. You could still do coop work on a city if you had a home base location, but barring that the coop planning is tough. However, I think I'd run a lot of that kind of game as very very character driven, so there's always options (that's just me of course, I'm not trying to dictate anything).

 

[Nagol]

Running an unknown faction game is very cool. You could still do coop work on a city if you had a home base location, but barring that the coop planning is tough. However, I think I'd run a lot of that kind of game as very very character driven, so there's always options (that's just me of course, I'm not trying to dictate anything).

Sure! you can collaboratively design available and known locations. Modern games generally don't need much design work spent there though. I use google maps and run the "normal world" as the normal world. Exploration-heavy campaigns generally don't spend too much time in known territories unless the exploration is in a different "space" like relationships so much of the time design of know territory isn't that important.

 

[Hussar]

So, just so's I'm clear.

People are arguing that it is perfectly acceptable to expect the DM to spend 2-4 hours of time away from the table preparing the adventure, but, adding advice and concepts to the game so that players would spend 1 hour away from the table and reduce DM prep time to 1 hour is completely unacceptable?

Is that correct?

Note, my Dirty Dungeon example above is only one example. It's not meant as the be all and end all solution. There are other things that could be done.

Also note, again, with a collaborative adventure, you STILL have exploration, even in the sections that the player generated, because the point of the DM's end of the preparation is to change elements of each section. So, even though you designed this 1/4 (or whatever the divide comes down to) of the adventure, you can't actually be sure of what's in that quarter. So, we still preserve exploration.

 

[Hussar]

I spent some time drawing locations. My group plays online so even when I use theater of the mind, I like to give the players at least a floorplan to look at. 5E tends to have more enemies on the board so for most battles I build a encounter map. Since I do not rail road players in general, I normally need to make multiple avenues fro them to pursue as well so some of that doesn't get used until later"I try and keep everything and sooner or later do end up happy that I did".

I also created nine npc's. Some of those will not see use but some will,no way to really know till the players do their thing.

So, right here. Would it have been impossible for the players to create those nine NPC's? Could you not have assigned 2 or 3 NPC's per player, even if it's only the scut work of generating a stat block for each?

Then I had to write a lose chart on what npc went where and did what. To help keep it all strait some game time and even long after to help with remembering it all even months later.

Again, could we not apply the Dirty Dungeon approach here? Each player generates three NPC's, some of which will likely not see use, and also give a loose outline of where they went and what they did? And, again, the DM injects changes after the fact?

Then I created the actual encounters. Some took longer than others and will not get used now, but eventually they will. Then I made up two players maps to hand out to the players in game and out. I also made three handouts and loaded a ton of pictures to roll20 to use with npc's I really don't expect the party to fight.

As someone who also does a ton of play online, I get the issue. I've certainly dived down the rabbit hole of trying to find and then crop and edit just the right image. It can be very time consuming. But, since we're dumping all this off on the players, it's no longer our time being consumed.

Then I took out some paper and sketched some ideas out for if the party doesn't do anything I want/expect. If instead of working for the accused guardsman they just don't bite that idea and instead go to the docks and see if anyone is hiring. I made a at sea short adventure and reused npc's from another adventure like six months ago to fill out the crew. I didn't so much make all the encounters but got a general idea of how it might all work out. Since I don't expect the party to do this im not putting a lot of time into it but....better to have something to work with if I need it.

No reason that this can't be done no matter who is doing the prep.

oh...then I went and reread the party backstories again and altered the game to reflect a couple of things in those backstories, one is likely to happen and one not. For kicks I changed the Captain npc for the what if adventure to one in a pc's backstory and had to make that npc.

But, since we're getting the players to do this, they can generate NPC's that apply to the PC's. With the advice that they should create NPC's for other players and not just their own.

After thinking about some of my treasure ideas a second time"i tend to either give too much treasure or not enough......I added to it a little and wrote down a couple of magic things I can throw in if the party doesn't do a great job at winning or discovering some of the other rewards.

I was tempted to take a second look at the encounters after I realized the main adventure total was so high but then figured why mess with it. The pc's are not likely to do it all but if they do hunt down every last bit of it ,,,why should I stand in there way. Will just lease it as is.

Again, this sort of thing can be done by anyone including the DM. There's no particular reason it shouldn't be done by the DM.

There, I just cut your prep time down to about 1 hour, maybe 2. Players have to submit their elements, say, three days before the session and you're good to go. Exploration elements are kept because only 1 player knows what's going on in each scenario and there is no reason for any particular scenario to be used over another. So, even if we use Bob's scenario this week, there's a very good chance that we won't use one of Bob's scenes next week. Plus, you now have a lot more material than you would have had, meaning that you can take unused material and put it into your "use later" binder.

Every player is engaged. Every player is exploring. And, now, the DM has a fraction of the workload.

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Now, the bigger question is, do you find the DM workload difficult? Is it too much or not? If it's not too much and it's stuff you enjoy doing, then fair enough, why change? Why would you change if it's something you like?

My point is that the advice in RPG's should provide OPTIONS. A choice between the DM prepping 100% or splitting it between the DM and players in whatever ratio that group feels comfortable with. As it stands right now, there is no choice being presented. The DM must prep 100% and this is why everyone talks about DMing being hard. Well, if people feel that DMing is hard, then wouldn't the solution be to make it less hard? How can we make it less hard? Well, one solution is to offload some of the DM's workload onto the rest of the group.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

 

[Nagol]

So, just so's I'm clear.

People are arguing that it is perfectly acceptable to expect the DM to spend 2-4 hours of time away from the table preparing the adventure, but, adding advice and concepts to the game so that players would spend 1 hour away from the table and reduce DM prep time to 1 hour is completely unacceptable?

Is that correct?

Note, my Dirty Dungeon example above is only one example. It's not meant as the be all and end all solution. There are other things that could be done.

Also note, again, with a collaborative adventure, you STILL have exploration, even in the sections that the player generated, because the point of the DM's end of the preparation is to change elements of each section. So, even though you designed this 1/4 (or whatever the divide comes down to) of the adventure, you can't actually be sure of what's in that quarter. So, we still preserve exploration.

No. No one has argued that. The primary argument has been nothing has been presented that in fact would reduce DM time for the specific request (a currently running 5e game). A secondary argument has been there is no indication players are willing to adopt consistent prep time of any duration. After examining the Dirty Dungeon, it is extremely gameable by rational players and would need substantial alteration -- basically a complete revision to make it into any game I'd run. Even in its current form, it strongly cuts into table time probably by an hour or more per use.

Whether or not collaborative exploration makes sense depends mostly on the type of exploration in the campaign. It there is something for the players to actually discover, as opposed to reveal at the table, collaborative construction won't work. For example, I couldn't tell my players enough to let them intelligibly offer exploration elements with respect to the Conspiracy-X campaign. All the factions act within very specific guidelines and the point of much of the exploration is to unravel what those are.

 

[Nagol]

So, right here. Would it have been impossible for the players to create those nine NPC's? Could you not have assigned 2 or 3 NPC's per player, even if it's only the scut work of generating a stat block for each?



Again, could we not apply the Dirty Dungeon approach here? Each player generates three NPC's, some of which will likely not see use, and also give a loose outline of where they went and what they did? And, again, the DM injects changes after the fact?

<snip>

Generally, it would be impossible, yes. The players creating NPCs unless the NPCs are fluff to begin with, grants too much insight and ability to build in their own entry paths. Reviewing and editing other people's work is time consuming. Reviewing and then applying changes that I'd need to dream up is probably no shorter than building 9 personalities and stat blocks.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Most everyone would. There is a huge reason games like D&D are king and games like Dungeon World"a game I do like,just not as much as D&D" struggle to lift off.

I mean, seriously, game elitism in the service of supporting your preferred style of play? Don't forget that TSR ran into trouble and sold to WotC because they lost market share against White Wolf, which didn't feature a game like D&D. 5e is a very good game -- bland enough to not rankle and just spicy enough to be enjoyable. It's an absolute marketing success, although a good bit of that is serendipity rather than a comment of the quality of 5e. 5e is, undoubtedly, the current king of the market for RPGs, no close competitor. I don't think saying that a very popular indie game without all of the benefits the current edition of 5e has is somehow lesser because it doesn't have as large a market share. And I don't think that you, as someone who likes 5e, inherits any legitimacy from this. Nor does 5e inherit any more legitimacy because people like it.