Matt Mercer DM Tips: Improv and the Unexpected

THIS IS A AN AUTOMATIC CAPTION TEXT from YouTube, so it’s not “perfect”. My advice is to use it just to help people like me that are not english speaking, to understand the Video/Podcast MATT: Hello! My name is Matthew Mercer. I am a voice actor and the Dungeon Master for Critical Role here at Geek and Sundry, and today’s episode is going to go a little deeper in the idea that running a game is about improv and the unexpected. Now, running any form of roleplaying game puts you in a position where you become the ringmaster of possibilities! You prepared a solid central story, a cast of characters, a handful of possible challenges, and some juicy rewards for your clever players. It isn’t until you start that adventure that you realize how much of that plan gets jumbled, wind-tossed, and sculpted into something crazier and often cooler than you initially expected. The key to providing such atmosphere is being open to let the players take hold of their own agency and guide the story themselves. While it may seem kind of scary to follow the unknown, you can find a level of comfort in allowing this to happen while figuring out how to get back on track– or just following where the rabbit hole goes! (pained laugh) After you’ve worked on and knocked out your main story thread and throughline, I would recommend taking a little time to loosely develop some side plots that may lead back to the main story, possibly. Here’s an example: your main plot involves being hired to investigate a local lodge of strange activities, leading the party to a shore-side wreck-site where the lodge turns out to be a cult plotting a dark ritual. Now, to the side of the story, you could develop a brief element of a drunken fisherman who’s trying to prove he’s not crazy for seeing weird things at night by the ocean! Or you could beat out a plot regarding a private collector who’s seeking obscure things for his collection that are actually for this same dark ritual (chuckles). Maybe a dancer whose lover was recently replaced with a doppelganger who is currently working for that same cult. Now, these are all threads you don’t need to fully flesh out, and they may never even come to fruition, but even just having them at the ready will help you tie them in should the party deviate too far from the main story. Any that happen to get unused thankfully can always be altered or recycled for future sessions. I would also recommend developing a number of stand-alone NPCs that you can just have at the ready. While they may not be important to the story, per se, it’s always helpful to have a cache of colorful characters that you can just pluck out of the aether. Maybe keep some sheets or note cards with basic NPC information on them like their name, their race, their sex and occupation, any special skills they may have, their disposition to the world at large, their personality traits, voice type, goals, fears– even equipment if you wish. No need to put all these on there, but what things you think may be interesting and helpful to your story to pull out. Now, even if none of these NPCs come into play during your session, they will still be there ready for use for most future sessions as well, so no time is wasted, and you’ll honestly be thankful that you have the comfort of these options at your disposal. You can even keep a few stat cards with various combat templates for all types of common folk, just in case a battle goes down and the party needs help, or things go terribly, terribly wrong and they end up killing a bunch of people that you wrote… Because that’s what happens sometimes in the game and you’re just like, “All right, guys, kill them. It’s fine, they were important at some point… But now I know, at least, what they’ll do in combat…” You can also create a few traps and encounters that can be pulled and plugged into your game at any given point in time. Now, the traps can range from mundane shop owners deterring burglars with falling barrels and sleep glass to wall-mounted flamethrowers and bladed pillars spinning through, protecting some sort of underground vault! That works too. Encounters that you have prepared can be ravaging goblin packs, a trained protector chimera of a certain location, or even just a group of bandits that are eliminating witnesses that happen to stumble upon their work. Also, it helps to have a list of rewards or items tuned to the party’s current power level that you can quickly access. Following unexpected story threads and directions can lead to unexpected rewards, and you don’t want to stiff your PCs because you didn’t really plan any loot. You can quickly come up with an appropriate monetary award, and equipment find, or some sort of a social boon to accompany an improvised PC success. This might be a little scary, but for the moments you really aren’t prepared for, begin by just painting a scene. When they enter a location you hadn’t really considered, let your instincts inform you of what you’d expect to find there and describe the impact to your senses as you figure them out. This includes sight and lighting, the smells and sounds you would experience, the temperature of the very air itself are easy gateways to an immersive location, and you can just let those details emerge naturally as you come up with it. Even if you aren’t sure where it’s going, trust that, once the party beings to talk amongst themselves, you can probably scramble through your previous notes and prepare to tie it to something you already have. Please, you need to take notes! Like, seriously, take notes– you’re going to be so thankful you take notes. Get a scratchpad, take notes, always notes. Because as you make up elements of the story and characters and spontaneous plot hooks, you want to write it down to remind you of the things you just made up, or you’ll forget them in the next ten minutes. They’ll just be gone, and the party will call you back and be like, “That guy we talked to 30 minutes ago, let’s go talk to him!” and you’ll be like, “What– I… Oh, yeah, I think his name is… Steve?” You’ll see Steve come up a lot in my games… It might not play out within the session right now, but you can always flesh out those aspects between the games and try to incorporate them into the main plot down the road. You’ll be very thankful that you took notes. Anyway, I hope some of these notes and tips have been helpful for you as a GM. You can find more episodes of GM Tips here at geekandsundry.com. My name is Matthew Mercer, thank you for watching, and I’ll see you on the Internet.

@vonbeanikus @GeekandSundry I’ve run a handful of fun Evil campaigns, but you need the right minded folk!

— Matthew Mercer (@matthewmercer) October 27, 2016

@vonbeanikus @GeekandSundry Not against it, just generally find that a lot of players lack the maturity to make it fun for others.

— Matthew Mercer (@matthewmercer) October 27, 2016

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Matt Mercer DM Tips: Improv and the Unexpected

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