Players: do you feel cheated if DM improvises?

[tarchon]

Nah - as a DM, it doesn't bother me if the players improvise either.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I initially started to get annoyed at this thread, seeing the title - because after all, every DM has to improvise. If you can't, the game just ends.

But after reading the initial post, I understand where you're coming from. Improvising too many things can certainly lead to a sub-optimal game. I've played in games where it's really very difficult to know from session to session what you should be doing, because the DM changes it all from session to session, whether by not remembering what he did in session 1, or by deciding he has a better idea in the time between sessions.

Some players may be more forgiving of this than I am. I like to play characters who make good use of the world around them, and if the world is ever-changing because the DM can't remember what he decided about a town the last time we came through six months ago, I lose any incentive to really think about the game much. And then, when there actually is a reason for something to be wierd, I dismiss it as just another of the DM's odd tangents, rather than seeing it as the plot point I would in another game.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

There's a certain level of improvisation that's necessary. I type up a vision and give it to the players. Will they interpret it correctly? Will it yield useful information? Will they seek out aid in interpreting it? I don't know. So, if the paladin decides to go into the cathedral and inquire about the dream and its interpretation, I have to make something up on the fly. I give him a spot check to notice the figure in the stained glass window that matches a figure from his dream. I decide whether the priest he collars will be old or young and given to flights of fancy or down to earth and whether he will take the vision seriously or treat it as someone wanting attention. There's little you can do about that. No matter how many options you anticipate when preparing or writing, you won't be able to anticipate everything the players do.

Now, the players accept a quest and begin to search for the mythical Jade chapel. I could throw random hippogriffs at them attempting to eat their horses or pull owlbears out of the wilderness to attack their camp at night. However, essentially random hardships are inappopriate for a Quest. The players' reaction would justifiably be to simply kill or drive off the monsters and hope to get things over with as quickly as possible before fighting griffons, hippogriffs and owlbears gets boring and I need to use feral advanced dire bears to keep things interesting. If I am going to have any unity to the story and make the journey a journey of development for the characters, I need to engage in a little planning. So, I put a troll under a bridge as a test of courage. The players can leave it alone and ford the bridge downstream but doing so isn't what is expected of a questing knight so that's one failure point for them. (I figure I'm going to determine what the rewards of the quest are by seeing how they react to situations on the way). So, next I give them a celestial eagle and they follow it and see a bandit who killed one of their parents working as a common laborer in a field. It's supposed to be a test of mercy because he'll beg for mercy and forgiveness and then we see what the PC does. After that, they meet a damsel on the road who asks them to escort her because thats what damsels do when they meet knights and there's a rejected suitor who she thinks might be planning on kidnapping her. If they defend her, of course, the damsel leads them to her father's house where, if they are good guests and bring a gift, her father will give them advice about the quest and a gift of a magic weapon that will be able to injure the demon they will have to face before the gates of the chapel.

I could improvise the whole quest but it won't be as good as it will be if I put some thought into it. For instance, I could eschew all shame and improvise a D&D version of Chretien de Troyes Knight of the Cart only with a different goal. Start out with the cart, move on to a challenge from a foolish knight whose father doesn't want him to fight and then a moral dilemma when a knight asks for mercy after losing a duel but a damsel asks for his head. Then I could put in the Sword Bridge and a castle where there is a tomb to the best knight in the world and the PC has to open it. However, were I to simply do that there would be several disadvantages. First, I'm not exactly improvising. I'm stealing a structure from Chretien de Troyes and hoping that my players haven't read the story. That in itself is not so bad but if I have to pick a structure at random, I may end up with a structure that isn't as appropriate to the story I'm telling. (The Knight of the Cart would need more than a few changes if it's a quest for a chapel taken out of patriotism and faith rather than a quest for a lady taken out of love. For instance, the battle with Melegaunt and Lancelot's willingness to lose in order to simply continue to gaze at Guenivere couldn't be duplicated if the goal is to storm into the chapel like the man in the vision at the House of the Interpreter in Pilgrim's Progress). Also, while I'm pretty good at quickly throwing together a statblock or two, it's unlikely that my knights will be significantly different from each other if I am improvising everything. No time to make one a mounted combat master with a lance but who must keep moving and charging to be effective and another a specialist in the light flail who is fond of disarming and sundering. That requires a bit of work before the game. If I'm improvising, I either need stats right there or a simple and obvious set of stats that I only need to write down once. I probably won't be able to structure my treasures to prepare the PCs for future challenges either. And, most importantly, without the benefit of being able to consider and rearrange the order of events, I may not get the order right. For instance, I am planning on taking a trip through a pool into a kind of phantom realm where the chapel will be found. Were the PC to encounter the man who murdered his parents there, in a clearly supernatural place, the dilemma would not be as accute since it's clearly a test that does not actually involve granting mercy to an actual murderer but is a phantom designed to test the character's reactions. So, when I think about it, I move that encounter to the front of the story so that it's clearly real.

So improvisation is fine and a certain amount of improvisation is necessary. However, preparation enables one to tell better and more coherent stories than improvisation does.

 

[Sejs]

Nope, I don't feel cheated if the DM wings it. I know from my own DMing experience that it's just necessary from time to time. Sometimes things go in an unexpected direction, other times you have difficulty coming up with a fully fleshed out story or concept.


However! As a word of advice to DMs out there when you do have to improvise: for the love of god, don't let on to your players that you're making crap up as you go.

If you present the picture of confidence, your players will in turn be more confident and satisfied. If you have the burning need to confess, do it after the game. Saying something like "uh, hell I don't know.. there's some stuff back there. kobolds or something." while play is on just kills the mood.

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

Chalk up another "it depends; I only feel cheated when it's done poorly" over here.

I don't mind if a GM improvises everything, provided that it's done well enough for the game to be fun and for me to feel like there's some kind of coherent plan behind it. It doesn't have to be a very specific plan, it just has to make sense, you know?

Personally, I find that there are a lot of things about the system in D&D that make it difficult for me to just improvise everything; using all the various monsters and spells properly and to good effect more or less requires me to sit down and write down some stuff, just so I won't forget it under the pressure of actually running a session. But if I could run that kind of thing off the top of my head without screwing it up, I likely would.


I think it also helps if the players can't easily see the parts that are being completely improvised. Again, this is easier in some systems and with some players, and nearly impossible in others.

For example, in our current game I occasionally get miffed at our GM, because he has a tendency to throw in magical traps and uses for spells that don't match up with the rules; as the guy playing the wizard (and having had to spend much more time looking at the magic rules than anyone else in our group, and much much more than I'd ever want to), I often feel like I'm getting cheated. NPCs can crank out bizarre, complicated, and occasionally nonsensical magical traps (or items, or spells) literally overnight at zero cost to them, and meanwhile I'm actually being held accountable for all the time/gold/xp costs when I want to do something similar. It's not an intentional double standard, but it seems to be the inevitable result of him improvising things with his NPC wizards, and I don't think it would be happening if he was actually sitting down and trying to make everything work within the rules.

I generally let it slide (arguing over rules in the middle of a game is much worse than an NPC getting a free ride on an ignored rule), but as we run into more and more wizard opposition, it's coming up more frequently. And I don't really blame him for not following the rules to the letter on stuff like this, because, good lord, the only reason I studied the magic rules so much was because I knew if I didn't I'd be a genuinely lousy wizard. But still, when I want to do something unusual with my PC, I have to discuss it with him out of character and we go through the rules and apply them for that, so I'm afraid that "cheated" turns out to be just how I feel when I see NPCs skirting the edge of the rules just because the GM doesn't want to spend time to really work out something in advance.

So that's kind of a bad thing about improvisation; unless you're very careful about only improvising with the things you know really well, you run the risk of making on-the-fly rulings that only apply to the NPC you're improvising with and get right up the noses of players who realize that they will never be able to do the same thing.

--
but as risks go, that isn't a game-wrecking one
ryan

 

[Derulbaskul]

I improvise a lot but I make sure that it's within an overall plot and consistent with the campaign world. However, my players have no idea that I improvise and I make a show of consulting notes even when I am just making it up.

 

[tetsujin28]

As a DM I have become lazy, so I improvise most of my adventures on the fly. Until then I did prepare NPCs, but now I have discovered that also improvising creatures and NPCs stats was cooler for me. Of course, I am unable to improvise everything, and will have to have a few notes vaguely written on some scrap of paper, plus having a fairly good idea of what should happen during the adventure. Nonetheless, and despite this system gives good results (better than when I used pre-made adventures - pre-made by me or someone else), I always take a great care in having the players believe that everything is planned, written down, etc. I believe that should they discovered I am improvising almost everything, they would feel "cheated" / deceived. In fact, it would be me as a player discovering the DM improvises, I certainly would.

What you think about this?

Uh, that's not being lazy, man. That's something that a lot of GMs have worked a long, long time on, and still can't get a hang on.

Me? I don't even bother with plot, anymore. My players do what they want to do. I sometimes throw in a situation, but the game is driven by the players and their characters, not by me. Story now, baby.

 

[S'mon]

A good improv GM is fantastic - better than a pre-planner, I'd say. But different styles suit different GMs. I disagree it's unfair for a GM to improvise a challenge, however they should allocate XP according to the difficulty of the improvised challenge. I think if a GM improvised all challenges and gave XP unrelated to the difficulty of the challenge overcome, it wouldn't feel very D&D-ish to me, though it could still be a good game.
Personally I find that 3e is so complex (eg, stat blocks) I improvise much less than I used to, and my game can suffer as a result. I've been bringing back more improv & I think it's benefitted the game.

 

[Stormfalcon]

In player mode, I'd say "Heck, no!" If anything, if the GM isn't forced to improvise at some level, then we as players are just slacking off!

In GM mode, I'd also say "Heck, no!" How else are we supposed to deal with smartass players who love to deviate and throw monkey-wrenches into our lovely plots and stories?

 

[Gothmog]

Interesting question. I improvise a lot. Most of my prep work is a skeleton of what might happen. I gave up trying to anticipate everything that the PC's might do a long time ago and now I focus on what the interaction with the PC's will be. Then, when they go off on a tangent, I have a reaction that is in-line with the NPC's/environment.

I also try to drop possible story arcs out there that the PC's can pick up and pursue. If they aren't interested in that particular story arc, then I will either drop it, or I will turn it into background information that they will hear about.

My involvement with individual character backgrounds is kind of a seperate deal. I will pick up elements for a character, mull them around and present them as a possibility that the PC can run with, or not. It's just another opportunity in life and the PC can embrace or ignore it. But, I try to have actions with consequences. So, something the PC does today, might have repurcussions tomorrow, or next week, or next year. I don't necessarily plot out how the PC will achieve long-term goals (Heck, I would be happy if all my players could give me pretty solid long-term goals), but I will plan the opportunities I will probably present that would help the PC on the road toward those goals. As I said, the PC's may or may not seize that opportunity.

I do try to work with my players to keep things interesting and to keep the game moving where everyone is having a good time. In many ways, I use improvisation as one of the tools toward achieving that.

Yep, what he said. I do exactly the same thing for all my games. If I do prep anything its stats for major NPCs, a one page outline of events that would take place during the adventure without PC intervention, and motivations for all the major NPCs. Sometimes I sketch out a map beforehand if I need it (for unusual or unique locales), but most of the time I wing the map.