As I put together the Game Moderator’s Guide for Hundred Dungeons, I’m thinking about how formative our first play experiences can be, and how little control we have over the influences that shape them.
Back when I started taking GMing more seriously, about 20 years ago, I spent hours reading blogs and guides and (later) watching videos that shared tools and advice. I also played with strangers every chance I got. Through those experiences, I pieced together a big-picture understanding of different styles, and found my own style that worked with my skill set.
It’s a little dangerous giving advice. You don’t always know your own hidden talent that makes certain areas of play particularly easy for you. Those are the things you tend not to think about at the table. I’ve learned that with my background in improv comedy, I tend to move quickly and play instinctively with rising tension, so pace isn’t something I struggle with. That makes it harder for me to give advice on the topic.
Despite the risks, I’m sharing pieces of the advice I’m including in Hundred Dungeons in hopes that it might reach more people and be helpful. What follows is one excerpt from the upcoming GM’s Guide for Hundred Dungeons. While it focuses on that game, the advice is broadly applicable to any game involving open, creative play.
Note: My understanding of GM principles has been shaped by many, many sources of wisdom over the years (which added to my own thoughts gained GMing for hire full-time for years). I don’t think I could possible cite everyone who’s contributed to those ideas, but I owe a particular debt of gratitude to David Perry, Ben Milton, and Steve Lumpkin for their work on Principia Apocrypha. I’ve benefited greatly from The Alexandrian, DIY & Dragons, Sly Flourish, Ben Robbins, Hack & Slash, Chris McDowell’s Electric Bastionland, Matt Colville’s Running the Game series, and many, many more. Thanks for the education and fun you’ve given me!
What follows is an excerpt from the upcoming GM’s Guide for Hundred Dungeons. While it focuses on that game, the advice is broadly applicable to any old-school game, or games focusing on creative, open play.
Map by Dyson Logos
GM PRINCIPLES
Every GM has their own style. While there’s plenty to learn from one another, no one has cracked the code on how all GMs should run a game. Experience, observation, and careful listening will teach you. The goal of becoming a great GM is a long-term pursuit, but there’s no better time to start than now.
Your game is your own. The tools in this volume can help you with tips and tricks, and point you to the wider world of creative and inspired GM advice, but in the end, you should embrace what brings the most fun to you and your players. The conversation on how to GM roleplaying games is an ever-flowing river — so let’s get swimming.
GET BEYOND THE RULES
Rules guide your players’ expectations and help you maintain consistency. Many GMs refer to “rule zero,” a reminder that you can agree to change any rule that’s interfering with the fun of the group. You may want to give the game a try as designed, but I’m not your boss.
The rules should serve your goals. You don’t serve theirs. Throwing rules out can be the right choice when they’re disrupting a smooth game, spoiling an effect or tone you want, or damaging relationships. As we said at the beginning of Volume 1, you can reduce the rules down to players describing actions and the GM describing consequences, and the game still works.
Some rules are really tools in diguise, presenting opportunities for players or the GM to create and interpret new elements. Examples include traits, conditions, spells, crafting, investing gold, called shots, and more. Use these tools to enshrine how the player characters reshape the world around them.
In Hundred Dungeons, we want players to think creatively, try things that no one else would think of, and express their characters’ personalities. To accomplish this, you need to get their minds off the rules and into the fiction of the game.
Lead with the Fiction
The number one thing you can do to create a sense of immersion and engagement is to lead with the fiction.
Whenever you or a player describes something that happens in the game, start by describing what happens in the fiction: what they do that the others see, hear, feel, smell, or taste. Describe your spell components and how you use them. Describe the way you leap or swing a weapon or open a lock.
Once you’ve described what happens in the fiction, then you can clarify what’s happening in the game rules, such as declaring which spell you cast. This may take practice to remember, but it will get your players invested and thinking from their characters’ point of view.
Use Traits to Inspire Action
When they don’t know what to do, players will sometimes look to their character sheet for help. When this happens, encourage them to focus on their traits, which provide clues to who they are and what they do. These traits are interpretable, which is far more useful for creativity than seeing what exploits and spells will let them do. Traits from NPCs and the area being explored offer similar opportunities.
CREATE AT THE TABLE
A roleplaying game creates a narrative, but it isn’t a “storytelling game,” at least not in the sense that players are recounting stories. The story in your game emerges organically from character choices. Don’t dwell too much on pre-written or pre-planned stories. Let the game be decided one turn, one description at a time. That’s your story, and it belongs to everyone at the table.
To that end, the GM shouldn’t plan a list of scenes that happen in a prescribed order. Let the players lead by deciding where to go and what to engage with. When they come up with strange ideas, reward and embrace them.
So how do you know what to prepare if the players get to decide where to go and what to do?
Prepare Situations
If you prepare a pre-determined story, you’re making assumptions about where the players want to go, what they’ll do, and in what order. You might not be wrong, but as soon as they make a choice you didn’t expect, your plans are broken. There’s a lot of opportunity for that in a prescribed linear story. It’s brittle.
A rewarding game isn’t about players guessing where you want them to go so their story can play out. Instead, we want to prepare a flexible, resilient scenario where choices can change the course of events and nothing is set in stone.
The best way to create these scenarios is to prepare a situation filled with opportunity. It has boundaries that keep your preparation manageable, but the players have agency to move and act as they want within them. This is often called a sandbox.
In this metaphor, the sand represents the map key, where descriptions of each location can be found. But a sandbox usually wants more than that. You need some sand toys, which represent NPCs, items, mysteries, events, factions, and other tools for you and players to move around the map and smash into each other.
Manage the Scope
You control the scope of the scenario you’ve prepared, and thus the amount of your preparation. For contained scenarios of one or two sessions, keep it to one major location surrounded by some interesting but brief things to discover. These sites or encounters should directly tie into the major location.
Surprise Yourself
Dynamic scenarios use tools that can respond to what the players do. Empty locations or ones with static contents are at risk of being boring. The chaos of the unexpected brings uniqueness, surprise, and fun because it requires creativity and interpretation.
Randomness introduces chaos and delight to your game. If that appeals to you, most of the tables in Hundred Dungeons are numbered, so you can use them for table rolls for a little extra randomness in your scenario. Experiencing surprise as the GM is a rewarding way to keep up your own engagement. You’re a player too, after all.
CHALLENGE PLAYERS, NOT THEIR DICE
A game of Hundred Dungeons should offer more than trivial challenges and unnoticed consequences. This is a game of facing danger! But challenge isn’t just about difficulty level. “Roll X on your die to keep going” repeated thirty times over the course of an evening isn’t what roleplaying games are about.
Opportunities, not Barriers
The challenges in your game should present choices with equally interesting ramifications. If failure means the game can’t continue, you’ve fallen into one of the classic blunders of scenario design.
Part of this involves not determining in advance what the players need to choose. If there’s a big “boss fight” in one location, and that boss never moves or takes action, then you’re already putting players in the position of needing to find where you’ve hidden their fun.
Similarly, don’t lock crucial items or interactions behind pass-or-fail dice rolls. The secret door should hide optional content. Failing a lockpick roll isn’t game over.
Keep Solutions Open
Don’t decide in advance on a single solution to a challenge. Monsters can be bribed or distracted. Locked doors can be blasted or circumnavigated. The unexpected answer is often creative and more fun, so stay open to oddball solutions. Similarly, try challenges to which you haven’t thought of any answer. Just be sure to keep another path available.
Combat is not the "Real" Game
Because a number of rules in the game apply to combat situations, it can be easy to think of a scenario as a string of enemies that need to be killed in order to get at the rewards. Video games have in many cases exacerbated this misconception.
Consider the deadly risk of combat, and that XP is awarded not for killing enemies, but for accomplishing goals and investing treasure in important causes. In light of this, using trickery, persuasion, or careful planning to avoid combat is often a wiser course.
Don’t fall into the trap of treating Combat as the phase where the “real” game takes place, and reducing other activities to noninteractive “cutscenes.” The real game is pursuing character goals through whatever means introduce the greatest chance of success.
Don't Balance Threats, Telegraph Them
Imagine a GM announcing that no challenge will ever overcome the player characters, and that risk of failure is zero. All the tension and drama of adventure would be gone. Your job is to adjudicate consequences to player choices, and that involves allowing them to experience the chance of failure.
The most enjoyable series of challenges has variety. Some are easy, some are serious. When players choose, they will often end up in deadly situations, or situations in which success is nearly impossible. Of course, that can be frustrating.
Rather than painstakingly balance every challenge, offer chances to gather clues and discover information about the nature of the threats the characters face. Especially where risk of death appears, giving players hints and warnings preserves their agency.
None of the above is to say that it’s wrong to adjust challenge level during play. Often published scenarios assume things like character level, number of players, or player expertise. If you feel you’re putting too much hurt on your players, or that the challenges have become too trivial, adjust. We’ll discuss ways to adjust challenge level during play in the next chapter.
CONVERT INFORMATION INTO CHARACTERS
Fantasy games are filled with information: monster lore, historical events, and conflict dynamics between factions or otherworldly beings. As the GM, you probably care about this stuff before it gets communicated to the players. But they’re hearing it for the first time, and may struggle to absorb or contextualize it.
When you share information with the players, there’s a serious likelihood they won’t remember it the next time you play. But you can call on a fantastic tool to help them care and retain information: introduce an NPC who embodies the information.
Non-player characters are the perfect vessel for information, and players remember it better if the NPC can attach a perspective, attitude, or memorable face to it. As humans, we have a funny knack for caring about other people more than we care about dry data.
If the players enter a town with warring merchant guilds, introduce an NPC from each side of the conflict. Need to remember what amenities are in a specific settlement? Make each shopkeep memorable. Want to establish a theme of regret and making amends for mistakes? Approach the player characters with a paladin seeking to regain the favor of her deity.
Customize Allies and Enemies
The specific statistics for various creatures you can use to populate your scenarios are found in Ch. 2: Allies and Enemies. Each creature has a stat block, which distills the creature to essential information you’ll need on hand to use it in the game.
A creature’s stat block is only a starting point. You’re free to choose optional features from its entry, change its level, add traits, and give it equipment and resources. The real impact these creatures have, however, is their relationship to the world and how they help or hinder the player characters in their own pursuits.
A monarch doesn’t need a high Strength score to rule with an iron fist. A merchant might be weak, without weapons or magic, but connections to a dangerous faction might make them entirely unassailable.
MOVE THE WORLD
The environment is dynamic. This principle extends from the widest scope of the campaign map to the smallest area of the dungeon. Making the world feel alive is as easy as noting changes it experiences during play, and determining what else changes while player characters have their attention elsewhere.
Keep something to jot notes on nearby while you run the game. When something happens that should have lasting consequences, write it down. After the session, you can think about how it would impact the scenario in the future. List steps your NPCs will take to accomplish their own goals, and what pieces of evidence that leaves behind for the PCs to piece together later.
Use Dynamic Environments
Every area needs something that moves or can be moved. Embrace this principle, and your players won’t be bored by poking around a dungeon. Area traits are an excellent way to do this, since they represent an active element within the environment the players are exploring.
When your scenario doesn’t provide a description that works as an area trait, make one up! Place a slippery grease puddle, a broken lever, a heap of clay jars, a leftover illusion, a friendly ghost haunting, a forgotten ring, a ring of mushrooms, a bloody spoon, a mysterious device, or a dark chasm. Especially if you don’t know what it’s for, these traits add interaction to the environment and encourage players (or your NPCs) to hatch creative plans.
DEVISE NEW MAGIC
This is a game of swords and sorcery. The swords are provided by the players, but in many instances the sorcery is provided by the setting and the environment. Strange residual magic, perilous entities from other planes of existence, and ancient enchanted artifacts should fill your scenario to the brim.
Player characters in Hundred Dungeons are by design anchored in reality. They discover, collect, and learn magic, but it’s rarely part of their nature. To achieve the sense of genre that this game aspires to, you must intrude on that reality.
When describing a location, push toward extremes. Create magical effects that are specific, surprising, unique, and not simply mathematically powerful.
As we established, the magic detailed in the Player’s Guide isn’t the extent of the magic that exists in the world. You can and should add new items, spells, crafting formulae, and places of power to your scenarios to lend a sense of depth and infinite possibility to magic.
IMPROVISE
You’ll often hear GM advice use terms from improv performance to describe good moderation. The most common is to say “yes, and,” a rule of thumb that emphasizes accepting new ideas and adding to them.
Saying “yes, and” is about avoiding the impulse to reject something that you didn’t previously decide on. Often when collaborating in the moment, we have a knee-jerk reaction to stick with what we have and give our own idea preference.
As a GM, your role is almost the complete opposite: embrace new ideas and highlight what the players find interesting. Of course, it’s hard to do that when you’ve prepared a pre-scripted scenario. Let’s look at a few other improv rules that can help us get a broader idea of what it means to accept players’ ideas without losing focus or fun.
Listen Actively
This is good advice for any leadership role, but it’s especially crucial for a GM: listen far more than you speak. Answer questions, but don’t offer precise solutions, and leave space for your players to talk to each other. They often say things that give you ideas for developing the events of the game.
Sometimes the pressure of being in charge makes us feel we need to hold the reins tightly or else we’ll get bucked out of the saddle. In reality, if we give extra space for the players to talk (even if it’s a little quiet and awkward at first), they’ll start filling the silence with their own ideas. In other words, they have time to become invested.
Find the Game
In improvisational comedy, the “game” is a pattern or dynamic that performers can riff on to create momentum. It’s often the first interesting thing that happens.
In roleplaying games, you can find the game by embellishing the first interesting thing the players engage with. There’s a joke that you might spend time preparing motivation, backstory, and even quotes for one NPC, but the players will always become attached to a random town guard you gave no thought to. The reason this happens is that you’re forced to embellish and play loose with the random guard because you didn’t prepare anything. You’re unconsciously finding the game.
If you can embrace finding the game, even when you prepared something else, it’ll be easier for you to stick with the thing your players show interest in, and follow it to truly surprising places.
Drop Bombs
Another way of saying “yes, and” is to actively build toward a moment of revelation. Surprising information can drop into the story like a bomb and leave characters dealing with the aftermath. When things start to drag, drop a bomb.
This might take the form of an NPC intervension, a sudden shift in priority that leads to new challenges, or an exciting piece of information that helps players clarify their goals. The best moment to drop bombs on the game is when tension is highest: usually right before the end of the session. Kill an ally, find an artifact, or ambush them with orcs, and your players are sure to wake up a bit.
MODERATE WITH CARE
I sometimes joke that one-third of roleplaying game GMs are teachers, another third are software engineers, and the last third did theatre. There’s a reason why these personalities have become archetypes of the GM: they require a specific blend of enthusiasm, judgment, and curation that are also vital skills in running a game.
Your enthusiasm is infectious. It directly impacts the fun at the table, so run a scenario that you’re excited to run. Keep a positive attitude. When you need to correct or teach, do so with care. GMs who bring an adversarial attitude, or one that says “I don’t care about your feelings,” will quickly lose players.
Your judgment in applying rules will open or close the group to creativity. Stepping aside and staying quiet when players are on a roll is as important as proactively stepping in to adjudicate or answer questions. Try not to monolopize attention or show off. Make each other player look cool, and it will elevate the whole experience.
Your curation of conflicts, creatures, and magical forces that confront the party sets the tone for the game. You play every part of the world around the PCs, so draw on art, books, movies, and TV that fit the distinct style of fantasy you want to portray. These things fill your tank, creatively speaking, and give you ideas to draw on.
Apply these principles, and you’re well on your way to moderate a meaningful game.
