D&D 5E How often do you fake it as a DM?

[Halivar]

It's Saturday night, everyone wants to game, but I have absolutely nothing prepared. I bring a Monster Manual and whatever adventure I'm running. It starts out okay, I'll go through a section of the adventure related to where they are, and I'll see in bold letters six skeletons. I realize, suddenly, that I am too lazy to pull the MM out of my backpack. So, I close the adventure book to make room for a blank sheet of paper, on which I write the number 10 six times, and start X'ing them out as combat progresses. When the fight is over, I decide I'm too lazy to pull the adventure book back out again. The rest of the session is a "side adventure," which is a code word in my circle of DM's for "DM'ing with nothing but a scratch sheet of hit-points because I'm just not feeling it right now."

My players don't notice, usually, and my feelings of fraud-hood are somewhat alleviated by the praise they give me for a job well done at the end of the night. Our retrospective for our Temple of Elemental Evil year-long campaign went thusly: they mostly hated the slog, except for some parts that they absolutely loved, all of which were not a part of the adventure and were made up whole-cloth on the spot.

Do you ever do this? If so, do your players know and how do they receive it?

 

[The Human Target]

Not ever really.

I need some degree of prep.

And if I'm not feeling it that much I usually just call the game off and suggest we play a card or board game.

 

[Relax]

I think this is a large part of what DMing, or at least old school DMing, is all about, especially if you have a group that looks at a map you've drawn and always say, "Let's go there!" and point to somewhere off the map...

 

[practicalm]

I run a group at church and I'm never sure how many people will be there. I've had as few as 2 and as many as 11 on a given session. I have a plan and an outline but when the number of people are not what I am expecting I have to improvise.

 

[Manbearcat]

The stray map notwithstanding, my GMing motto is probably something like "if it can't fit on the front and back of a single index card, it's too much prep." So I guess I "fake it" all the time!

 

[iserith]

I bring as much enthusiasm and energy to the game when I prep as when I don't and that's all that seems to matter to the game experience.

 

[TerraDave]

I find I am best at improvising...

...when I am well prepared.

 

[kbrakke]

I would say that it's a solid 70/30 in favor of improv now. The biggest example is my current long running Eberron campaign. When it started a few months ago I would actually plan out encounters by doing math. Put down some motivations for NPCs and detail likely way their plans would unfold etc. Two sessions ago while running them through a very altered castle Ravenloft they came across his treasure room. Rather than just letting them in as the module suggests I decided to have a nice big boss fight. I wrote down some large 3 digit number and tried to remember the paragon monsters stuff from the angry gm. From essentially nothing came a huge multi-stage boss battle that they will remember for quite some time. I find most days I just think about what's been happening in the game during my work commute and write some notes if it seems important. Because I have spent so much past time DMing for them I can improv the details when we play. At this point I don't bother telling them if something was prepared or not, and they seem to keep having fun.

To modify TerraDave's post. I'm best at improvising when I've been planning adventures with the same group for months.

 

[redrick]

It's Saturday night, everyone wants to game, but I have absolutely nothing prepared. I bring a Monster Manual and whatever adventure I'm running. It starts out okay, I'll go through a section of the adventure related to where they are, and I'll see in bold letters six skeletons. I realize, suddenly, that I am too lazy to pull the MM out of my backpack. So, I close the adventure book to make room for a blank sheet of paper, on which I write the number 10 six times, and start X'ing them out as combat progresses. When the fight is over, I decide I'm too lazy to pull the adventure book back out again. The rest of the session is a "side adventure," which is a code word in my circle of DM's for "DM'ing with nothing but a scratch sheet of hit-points because I'm just not feeling it right now."

My players don't notice, usually, and my feelings of fraud-hood are somewhat alleviated by the praise they give me for a job well done at the end of the night. Our retrospective for our Temple of Elemental Evil year-long campaign went thusly: they mostly hated the slog, except for some parts that they absolutely loved, all of which were not a part of the adventure and were made up whole-cloth on the spot.

Do you ever do this? If so, do your players know and how do they receive it?

I definitely make up monster stats sometimes, especially for mook-like monsters. Does it matter if that creature is stat-ed as having +3 to hit vs +4 in the MM? Or having 10 hp instead of 8? As long as I stick with it once they hit the table, it doesn't matter that they don't match the monster manual. If I grossly under-stat or over-stat a monster vs its MM original, I might recalculate its CR for xp the next day when I send out the xp report.

As far as situations and encounters, yes, any time the players do something I'm not expecting, that's what it comes down to. I do find that I am better off if I have at least some script to follow in the event that they do do what I expect. I have improv'ed myself into some pretty bad corners before when I walked in after a 12 hour work-day with no prep whatsoever and just start running a session. I would particularly recommend against making up puzzles on the spot. (I knew that there was going to be a puzzle in that room, and I had thought up a basic setup for it, but I'd never actually bothered to figure out what the solution or mechanism for the puzzle was. And since I was running the whole session seat of my pants, I forgot this fact, so I set up the puzzle as I remembered planning it and then, once the players started interacting with it realized, "Crap. I never did actually figure out what the goal of this puzzle was and now I'm fresh out of ideas.")

I've also had several situations where I actually have stuck or less to my prep, but players have "accused" me of faking it, or pulling something out of my butt. Not sure what that tells me.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

It's Saturday night, everyone wants to game, but I have absolutely nothing prepared. I bring a Monster Manual and whatever adventure I'm running. It starts out okay, I'll go through a section of the adventure related to where they are, and I'll see in bold letters six skeletons. I realize, suddenly, that I am too lazy to pull the MM out of my backpack. So, I close the adventure book to make room for a blank sheet of paper, on which I write the number 10 six times, and start X'ing them out as combat progresses. When the fight is over, I decide I'm too lazy to pull the adventure book back out again. The rest of the session is a "side adventure," which is a code word in my circle of DM's for "DM'ing with nothing but a scratch sheet of hit-points because I'm just not feeling it right now."

My players don't notice, usually, and my feelings of fraud-hood are somewhat alleviated by the praise they give me for a job well done at the end of the night. Our retrospective for our Temple of Elemental Evil year-long campaign went thusly: they mostly hated the slog, except for some parts that they absolutely loved, all of which were not a part of the adventure and were made up whole-cloth on the spot.

Do you ever do this? If so, do your players know and how do they receive it?

This is pretty much my modus operandi every week[1]. I exaggerate slightly (I do think ahead about villain names, number of monsters in the vicinity, etc., so I can wing things better; and I also frequently run mock combats with monsters I'm planning on using soon) but my players have at least as good of an experience simply basing on monsters as they do with proactive villain NPCs who have goals and motivations and backstories and stuff. Therefore, 75% of our game time is spent on things I have prepared only the vaguest outlines for.

Normally I try to run a sandbox, but when I just pull stuff completely out of nowhere with the intention of making up an explanation later, I call it "ghetto D&D." ("Suddenly an assassin attacks you.") And the players love it. I guess I probably would too, as long as the DM does the work afterwards of stitching the random stimuli into a coherent whole so I don't feel schizophrenic.

[1] Well, I don't "fake" monster stats, which I now realize is a large part of what you meant by "faking it." So I guess I'm talking about faking adventures, not encounters.