DM ad libbing

[Shadowdancer]

I'll make minor changes on the fly when running a canned adventure, based on the flow of the game and how much fun the players are having.

But for in-between adventures, when the players are in their home city -- I make all of that up as we go along. I have a few NPCs with basic stats and stuff written down, and if I plan for something important to happen in the city, then I might jot down some stats beforehand. Mostly it's all ad-libbed. If I feel things are dragging, or the players are getting bored, I'll have them get ambushed by some thieves, or stumble across an attempted assassination, or have a monster crawl out of the sewers.

As long as we're all having fun, it doesn't hurt anything to ad-lib or make changes on the fly.

 

[SableWyvern]

For me, the issue of adlibbing or not is not the important one.

I consider it one of my highest priorities to provide the players with the sense that they are in control of their destinies (although not necessarily in control of how everything else around them acts/reacts).

Anything that occurs in game, whether consistent with my plans or totally contrived, should appear to the players to have occured for a good, logical reason; influenced by their decisions, where appropriate.

If the PCs can't see a logical reason, then that should mean that there is information outside of their sphere of understanding that would make it make sense.

In short, if the players can't tell when you're making stuff up on the fly, you're doing well. If, OTOH, they know when you're altering the gameworld to cover your own short-sightedness or their wierd decision making processes, you risk creating a sense of contrivance.

 

[StalkingBlue]

In combat, I make all die rolls in the open, which is what my players want as well. Sometimes this gives them a tougher time than I'd planned, so as a general rule I'll let them benefit from my bad rolls to compensate. I may make exceptions (eg. adjust hp up or down), but I won't fudge every other combat just to "get the story right".

I've found that I have to adjust in mid-encounter more when I run a module as opposed to the stuff I've prepared myself. But that's probably just part of fine-tuning a module to our group.

 

[Psion]

I've kinda got the impression that many of the persons on the boards feel that a DM should not apply any metagame infuence to scenario building and more importantly, should plan ahead of time for encounters rather than doing anything ad hoc.

Someone mentioned earlier in another threat the situation where the DM was getting fed up with a particular fighter and in the next encounter forcecaged him out of the combat. Unless there is a good reason that the NPC would know to target that particular character (e.g., he had been scrying on the party), that is sort of cheesy.

But if you think about it, some amount of metagame knowledge is implicit in session planning. Think about it. The DMG defines expected encounter layouts in terms of party levels... planning encounters based on character statistics is essentially metagame. Same thing if you pick out a published adventure based on your party's level.

I think of this sort of as the party being the right people in the right place at the right time. The NPC adventurers who failed and died where the ones who went in at too low of a level. Still, I do like to use "status quo" encounters to remind PCs that they aren't the biggest fish in the pond.

Usually, once I have decided what the party is facing, I only tweak it midstream if I overstimated the party. Frex, in my tuesday game, the 16th-17th level party managed to do the right thing against an invisible 16th level sorcerer lich, a pair of cornugons, and a pair of devourers, and the combat was much less nasty than I expected it to be... I let it stand and took it as lessons learned for the planning of future encounters. OTOH, one time I face a 4th level party with half-dragon dire wolves. After the first round of combat, it was obvious that the party was not a match, so I downgraded them to regualar wolves midstream. The players, of course, were none the wiser.