For DMs, define "winging it" and give examples

[dreaded_beast]

Have you ever had a game where you planned an adventure, made notes on every conceivable encounter you could imagine, planned for every contingency, then had it all fall apart because the players decided to turn back?

While the above example is a bit extreme, I'm sure everyone out there has had to "wing" it at one time or another.

My DM style, more out of laziness than anything else, is mostly "winging it". I have a general idea in my mind of what the overall story is, but lack written documentation or the notes that I do have, don't really apply to that current adventure.

Anyway, I'd like to hear how you define "winging it", your experiences, examples, and tips on how to "wing it".

 

[Crothian]

5 years ago, we set aside a ful saturday to game. We plan to get together at 10am and play well into the night. The party agrees to go on a big, epic style planar adventure. I plan for that. THe day off though, they decide to go do something else entirely. So, I make up on the spot them exploring what is referred to as the Fire in the Ice, then from there they go to the dwarven lands and I improvise the trial of the dwarven hero (one of the PCs). So, a nice 14 hour session of un planned improved adventure.

 

[reveal]

d20 Modern campaign. 2 of the players had contracted Lycanthropy via Wererats at the end of the last session.

I planned for the players to go to this little Greek island to do something, but they never got to the island. They landed in Greece and the players ended up killing an NPC in a barfight. The entire session was me improvising the fight, the police involvement, the flight, 2 groups of PCs (two Wererats and two non-WR) going through the city separately, the sanctuary in the local church and the eventual curing of the PCs.

It was about 5 or 6 hours and lasted for the entire session. It was one of the best sessions we had.

 

[Eolin]

How about this?

Super Bowl Sunday. Which means there isn't anything on TV. The guys want to play some DnD. Being the good sort that I am, I agree to DM. I have them make first-level characters. I've got a character who I hardly ever get to play designed for a campaign that never got off the ground. So he becomes my pet NPC and sets them off on a mission -- his lands are being attacked by orcs, and he needs to know why.

These first level guys mostly get slaughtered save one. I then have them make 5th level characters, with the one that survived getting to play the same character. A dwarven barbarian I believe.

Rise, repeat. Eventually they get to 20th level characters. I believe there was a cleric of Al Bundy, a sorcerer with Wish (what else matters?), the dwarven barbarian (with an artifact-level weapon of orc-slaying that belonged to my favored NPC). I through an iron golem at them that could only say "None Shall Pass!"

They left it, and wound up fighting The Tarasque. They murdered my poor little Tarrasque.

Great Fun. We ignored the rules where appropriate and just had fun. Too many of our games have major plot arcs and are put the PCs in tragic situations. While those're good, the occasional fun romp is great, too.

 

[cybertalus]

Probably the best adventure I ever ran I came up with on about an hour's notice. I was out of town visiting a friend and had been planning to run a d20 Modern session for a few members of the group he usually DMs D&D for. This was the weekend between x-mas and New Year's, so I was told to expect three players. I got seven instead.

What I had planned for three people was totally not gonna work for seven, so while everyone was making characters I began frantically going through ideas and themes I'd been thinking about for other d20 Modern adventures. I wound up coming up with an audience at a gunshow being taken hostage by a group of ecologically-minded elves. It played out as mostly role-playing (which is the easiest to improvise and the thing I enjoy most as DM), until one of the bolder characters planted an explosive in the back of the auditorium, then it got active.

I had a lot of fun, the players seemed to have a lot of fun. My only regret from that session was that I didn't get to try out Modern's car chase rules like I'd planned.

Not that winging it always works out so well. Most of my earliest attempts at DMing were pretty short on prep work, and those tended to turn out horribly, though not as horribly as the times I tried to run modules.

 

[dead]

Is it cheating for a GM to make an adventure up off the top of their head?

I've got no problems with GMs "winging-it" to fill in unaccounted for "gaps". But I do have problems with GMs who just waltz up to the gaming table and run an adventure pretty much "off the top of their head".

I feel so insulted. I feel like the GM hasn't even bothered to think about the adventure. Instead, he insults the player's intelligence by just "driving" them through a game based on whatever whim he comes up with.

I think a GM should consider his campaign and think about the plots he shall weave before a session. You are entertaining and your friends are counting on an intelligent, well-considered session. Sure, it can go off the beaten track, and the GM doesn't have to pick out every detail, but it's nice to show you've thought about *some* things before you run.

 

[skippy_the_witch]

My entire current Campaign is mostly winging it, at least the actual running of it. The Campaign background is highly developed, as it is a heavily modfied Technomagic pseudo-post apocalyptic D&D 3.5 world. I am still not done tinkering with everything to get it just right, but my players have been very patient with me on that.

No, except for pre-prepared monster stats and items, I don't even bother to really do any long term detail for the various game sessions, for two reasons. First, I run for a college game group, so I am never sure who is going to be there week to week. Second, the players keep surprising me, either through their own initiative or through their rolls. This game has been heavily influenced my d20 rolls of "1" and "20".

Here are a few examples:

The initial 1st level adventure was your basic treasure hunt idea. One of the characters goes into the House armory and picks up a pistol which was owned by an Idiana Jones style adventurer. The pistol was one of the few things that returned to civilization when the guy disappeared in the great swamps. Inside, he finds a datachip, goes to another player to de-code it. The other player, a gnome technomancer (modified artificer) with hacking capabilities, first rolls a 20 to build a special chip reader (chip out of date). Then rolls a 20 to COPY chip (which she was NOT supposed to do), which means she got a perfect copy. Being paranoid, she never lets on about the copy to anyone, and so when the spooks come in to grab the original chip, they think they have covered their trail. Later, she rolls yet another 20 to decode. It went from what was supposed to be the decrypting of a partial map and maybe a few journal entries about swamp goblins to this detailed journal that may point to a long term plan to overthrow the government of the Federation (the high tech area of the Cursed Earth).

Later, this same gnome rolls a 1 on Computer Use to open a email sent to her by her smuggler uncle on safe routes out of Federation. This leads to file being corrupted and unreadable, and since uncle is on the run himself, party has to cross the border without his instructions (i.e. which guard is bribable etc). Again, this session went from "you cross the border using uncle's instructions" to me having to come up with a scenario and players having to create a cover story and fake documents to get accross, leaving a trail that the spooks could easily follow (and giving me more potential villians to throw at party later).

Glitch, the gnome, has also accidently blown things up while trying to figure out how they work, which has become a running gag (so much so, that she actually gets a sizable bonus to Disable Device skill rolls to sabotage anything she has accidently blown up). I know I don't have to let the players 1's and 20's influence the game so much, but it has lead to a very rich and detailed Campaign. What was a simple treasure hunt has now become a chance for one of the players to redeem the honor of his ancestor, another to save his House (he is a noble man) from ruin, another to save his race's savior (an angellic like being), and possibly even save the Federation (although with this party, they are more likely to start a civil war by accident).

skippy
GM of The Cursed Earth

 

[Chingerspy]

About 7 years ago I ran Shadowrun 2nd ed for a group of 6 friends. Every Saturday and Sunday we'd turn up like clockwork for the game round one of the players houses. Now I'd never have the time to work out adventures prior to the session due to schoolwork and after school job. Therefore I made up loads of NPCs on index cards (still got them somewhere) and then made a random mission generator. I rolled the missions up with the characters before each new session and we chose to play the best one.

I then "winged" the mission from that point on. No notes, just the index cards and an imagination. Most missions started with "You are contacted by Mr. Johnson..." I had certain NPCs show up often and once had a sniper harass the group throughout 5 missions then go quiet. The players decided they wanted to go find out what happened to the sniper! Creating more games And it was great for 2 solid years Probably the most I've ever gamed before or since.

 

[Olibarro]

I've got no problems with GMs "winging-it" to fill in unaccounted for "gaps". But I do have problems with GMs who just waltz up to the gaming table and run an adventure pretty much "off the top of their head".

I feel so insulted. I feel like the GM hasn't even bothered to think about the adventure. Instead, he insults the player's intelligence by just "driving" them through a game based on whatever whim he comes up with.

And yet sometimes, people want to throw a game together, and having a talented GM who can effectively improv is a far better thing than having no game at all.

On average, games I've prepared for and put a lot of thought into turn out much better than the times I just wing it. Usually, if I've had to improv for a big part of a session, everyone has a great time, but afterwards I always think of so many things that could have been better or should have been considered. But the point is that even with that, we still have a good time.

You sound like your experience with improv GM's involves a lot of railroading. That's a shame. My experiences as both a player and GM have been much more positive. And while I prefer a well-planned game, sometimes things come out of improv that you never would have had otherwise, and I certainly prefer gaming that's rough around the edges to no gaming at all.

 

[Psion]

Big preamble statement:
There are different shades of "winging it."

Example that serves not to show how to wing it, but an example of how "off track" players could take a campaign:

Once I created a campaign surrounding a faegold staff. Faegold is based on the idea of the Rhinegold, a cursed but desirous treasure. The faegold staff was created when a powerful wizard gathered all the faegold the could find and bound it into a staff, and artifact that promised to doom the world. To stop this, the players would have to find the one artifact that could destroy the faegold staff, and the one person who could wield it, and convince her she needs to do this.

Well, my players found the faegold staff, and dealt with it in another way. I had given them a deck of cards that made gates to other planes or places. They hurled the staff into another plane. Now this promised loads of repercussions, but in the meantime, my whole campaign idea was scrapped. (And I am not the sort of GM who likes to compensate on-the-spot for player cleverness. I prefer to reward them for clever thinking.)

Philosophical statement to take away from this thread:
The title of an old dungeon article gave this sage advice:
If you are going to wing it make a flight plan


Finally, a real example:

In one campaign I had, I had layed out, in very general terms, a number of paths the party eventually needed to take. IIRC, they boiled down to:
1) Find the Prince who psions from Drakar (the resident Evil Empire) had kidnapped.
2) Pursue the Drakarians to a post apocalyptic world to prevent them from getting some fantasy WMDs
3) Find out what happened to the legendary Queen Ariel so she could deal with the issue that the Drakarian emperor now held the artifact that could only be wielded by the destined leader of the land.

They had completed #2, and the way things were staged, #3 looked like the most likely next step, so that's what I planned my session around.

But guess what happened? Yup, they decided it was time to go save their Prince.

But this did not prove to be a total disaster. Though I hadn't planned that for the session, I did have a general idea of where I was going with that particular adventure. I knew he had been sequestered (per the spell/psionic power) and was being displayed "Han Solo in Jabba the Hut's parlor" style in a keep in an isle of an opposing nation. I knew that one of the character's long lost fathers was long lost because he was part of an underground movement to overthrow the said nobles. So, I threw in some creatures from a new toy (at the time, the MMII) and pulled up a castle floorplan from Darkfuries Castles & Keeps, threw in a whimsical encounter on their way into the castle (they caught the lord's daughter messing around with a guard, which made for a great combined roleplaying/infiltration scene as they started to mess with them.)

Not only did the winged session worked, I feel it came off better than many of my planned sessions.

Yet usually if I wing something without the benefit of knowing what I WANT to do, I find myself struggling to find something to do, and spend the first hour of so of the game looking for direction. So the moral here is when you know you have to wing it, at least pick out some goals/objectives/plot points/activities you want to cover, i.e., if you are going to wing it, make a flight plan. It makes all the difference.