Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 87 - Inspiration from the 5e DMG Disclaimer

Episode Date: August 22, 2021

At the beginning of the D&D 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide there is a paragraph that was likely only included as a joke and it reinforced my belief that inspiration for good DMing really can come from anywhere.  During this episode, we go over the paragraph and Jeremy gives some advice that all of us can take from this unusual source.

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Inspiration for gaming and gaming tips can be found in all kinds of places. I'll usually hear a nugget of wisdom or two no matter where I look. Kids cartoons to superhero movies. From historical documentaries to garden design shows. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in to episode 87 of the Taking20 podcast. This week, getting inspiration from the D&D disclaimer statement at the beginning of the 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide. This week's sponsor, The Undead.

Skeletons will always stand up for what they believe in. Why? Because you can clearly see they have a spine. Please consider leaving a comment or even liking or subscribing to the podcast. Also, if you like it, please tell your gaming group or friends about it. I'd love to see this podcast grow. I've run long I think the past three episodes or so, and I'm hellbound and determined to keep this episode less than 20 minutes, but do you all mind if I run long?

I mean, am I more concerned about keeping it at 20 minutes than you are? Please leave me a comment or send me feedback to feedback at taking20podcast.com and let me know. The point of this entire episode can be summed up as inspiration can be found in the strangest of places. On the first page of the Dungeon Master's Guide, written in small italicized font, is the following statement. Disclaimer. Wizards of the Coast does not officially endorse the following tactics, which are guaranteed to maximize your enjoyment as a dungeon master. First, always keep a straight face and say okay, no matter how ludicrous or doomed the player's plan of action is. Second, no matter what happens, pretend you intended all along for everything to unfold exactly the way it did. Third, if you're not sure what to do next, feign illness, end the session early, and

plot your next move. And then when all else fails, roll a bunch of dice behind your screen, study them for a moment with a look of deep concern mixed with regret, let loose a heavy sigh, and announce that Tiamat swoops from the sky and attacks. This may seem like a weird-ass topic to talk about one smart-ass paragraph at the beginning of a core rulebook, but inspiration truly can be found everywhere. And after I read that, the more I thought about the paragraph, the more I thought there's good advice in here for dungeon masters,

and I wanted to break it down for discussion. So, let's take it piece by piece. It begins, So, let's take it piece by piece. It begins, Wizards of the Coast does not officially endorse the following tactics which are guaranteed to maximize your enjoyment as a dungeon master. Okay, it's a funny start, but there's one thing. Nothing is guaranteed to maximize your enjoyment as a DM or as a player, for that matter.

Every table is different, and every game is different. Hell, every session is different. That being said, the advice that was given in the paragraph will contribute to the tendency towards a more fun gaming session. Second sentence, always keep a straight face and say okay no matter how ludicrous or doomed the player's plan of action is. There's lots of good advice here in one sentence. Allow your players to make choices. Never take their agency away from them. If you give the PCs enough information and they go through with a stupid plan anyway, well, that's on them.

Conversely, if you haven't given them enough information and they're making choices based on an incomplete view of the situation, be sure to give them all the information before they make their final declaration of what they want to do. Even if it requires you to say, Okay guys, there's something I forgot to tell you. The blue dragon is standing on top of a 20 want to do. Even if it requires you to say, okay guys, there's something I forgot to tell you. The blue dragon is standing on top of a 20-foot ridge. Try not to influence the PCs whether their choice is a good one or a bad one. Players buy in more when the choices are theirs to make with minimal influence from the DM.

Don't take the game too seriously. It's a game. It's supposed to be fun and heroic, daring and improbable and stupid and crazy. Most of all, fun. As a corollary to that, don't get wrapped around the is-it-realistic axle. You're playing a game with magic swords, talking portals, ropes you can sleep in, flying ships, and yes, dungeons and dragons. I've started running the Pathfinder Skull and Shackles

adventure path. Yo ho yo ho, it's a pirate's life for my players. Wait a minute, I think I just called myself a ho. The shoe may fit, but moving on. I built a ship combat system that was really realistic in preparation for the adventure path. The one included sucks. As they define naval combat in the adventure path, there's no other strategy that makes any sense than to shoot the ship's steering device. It has very few hit points, the same armor class as the entire fucking ship, and once it's disabled, the ship can't steer. That felt unsatisfying, so I designed my own. I borrowed from about three different game systems, a little bit of Starfinder, a little bit of Fire As She Bears, a little bit of Pathfinder,

to try to build a really good ship-to-ship combat system. I put the rules together. I had ship's officers with actions per round. It was detailed and realistic and fucking awful. It wasn't fun. I ran a couple of test sessions with a couple of different people, and it just, nobody had fun playing it. It was realistic as hell, but would be boring at the table.

So I simplified the rules, took out a lot of shit, and it works much better for the campaign. I was so concerned about making the system realistic that I forgot the most important rule. It's got to be fun to play. So never lose sight of that purpose. The game should be fun for everyone at the table, including you, my beloved DMs. Third part of that paragraph, no matter what

happens, pretend that you intended all along for everything to unfold the way it did. In other words, a good chunk of dungeon mastering is improvisation or improv for short. In episode 26, I talked about the basics of improv and how it can help you DM. Yes, anding the story forward. Coming up with realistic consequences for choices. Making NPC reactions believable. Showing and not telling. And finally, fucking your fear.

Go give that episode a listen if you want more details on how to be a better improvisational DM. Your gaming session will not go the way you planned. The players zig when they should zag, they run when they should fight, and fight when they should negotiate. Damn, that sounds like a quote from the movie Serenity. Oh god, I need to watch that movie again. Anyway, behind the screen, you'll probably need to adjust the story to fit the choices the characters make.

They'll visit places you didn't prepare, talk to NPCs you didn't expect, and make merry chaos of your session plans. As I've said countless times before, that's okay. That's even a good thing. Players should be free to make the choices they want to make, handle situations the way they want to, and be big white knight heroes or dastardly bastards who leave areas worse than they found them. You as the DM will constantly be deciding how tightly you're going to hold the reins of a narrative. If you're running through a D&D

adventure or Pathfinder adventure path, eventually the players will need to get back to the adventure and may require a gentle hand to guide them back. Or you may need to rearrange the component parts of the adventure behind the screens to get players back on track without the players even knowing it. Don't be afraid to let the players run with something, though. But have an idea on how you can get them back to the adventure that you had prepped or the adventure as designed. While DMing many years ago, I was running the Shackled City adventure, which is a good one, by the way.

One of the players picked up a curse. He was a rogue, and the curse was that he had butterfingers. He had a percentage chance to drop his weapon every round of combat. I had decided that the curse would gradually fade and go away, but the players got it in their head that they were going to find who had placed this curse on the chest the rogue had opened, and they were going to make them pay. That's not the direction we were supposed to go. I mean, they're supposed to talk to a person who wandered the plains and ask their help to go to find a particular lost castle and kill an undying dragon. Nope. They

wanted to find the creator of a random curse, place on a chest, and stab them in their chest. The adventure didn't have any details about who did it, so I just said, screw it. It was the undying dragon they needed to find anyway. So I improvised a few clues to the dragon, and the party's back on track. After they slayed the dragon, well, actually, I think they just made it dormant for 24 hours, I told them that the curse was lifted and they continued on to the next step of the adventure, which was some sort of secret ritual involving a beholder. It's been a hot minute since I ran that adventure, but it's a good one. I do remember that. If the players are making choices you don't anticipate, be as nimble as you can,

looking for ways to get them back on track. It doesn't invalidate the choices that they make, and it increases their buy-in to the campaign at large. Also from that paragraph, if you're not sure what to do next, feign illness, end the session early, and plot your next move. I'm not sure I'd end my session with clutching my chest and screaming, I'm coming to see you, Elizabeth, and slumping over on the couch. It didn't work for comedian Red Fox, just like it didn't get me out of my last doctor appointment. But there is good info here about knowing when to end the session. First, yes, there will be times when you, GM, have no idea where to take the story.

You can certainly decide to end your session then, break the story there. This gives you a week or two weeks, or however long it is between your gaming sessions, to figure out what the next challenge will be for the adventuring party. The next combat, social interaction with an NPC, the next challenge that you'll lay before them. Whether it's a massive story beat reveal, getting the mechanics down on how the party will cross a fast-moving river, or how the car's AI will respond to the players. It's best to judiciously use cliffhangers to create tension in the moment and anticipation that will carry the players to the next gaming session. That's not the only solution to the oh shit what do I do now moment that we all DMs have. You can push the spotlight towards the players and encourage them to role play among themselves. Ask the players what's going on inside their character's head, what they're thinking,

feeling, what concerns they have. Let the players speak as their characters to one another. You can always fall back on an easy-to-prep or no-prep encounter for your players, like a very simple combat or shopping. Like if you're desperate to buy time, you could have a wandering monster that you've previously prepped show up, and you may know the monster by heart, so it requires no prep on your part. It stumbles on the party when the monster is hunting, or curious, or on the way to the shitter. The party is trying to figure out what to do next when a minotaur rounds the corner with a roll of toilet paper in one hand and a newspaper in the other. As an aside, if there's a lot of monsters in a dungeon,

wouldn't it make sense that the dungeon would either need a dedicated place for all these monsters to go to the bathroom, or the whole place would just be full of feces? That was one of the original purposes, by the way, of having a gelatinous cube in a dungeon. It served as kind of a janitor of sorts. But it's funnier in my mind to have a dedicated bathroom area, and all the monsters have agreed, okay, no killing each other near the turlet. If you need time, you can always let the players do some shopping, though. If your group is like, well, hell, all of mine, there's no such thing as a quick shopping trip.

There's a lot of cussing and discussing about what to do with the money that they have, both individually and collectively. Bracers of archery would be nice, but oh, we could also use another bag of holding. Our cleric keeps dying every friggin' fight, so maybe we should get a wand of cure light wounds. Our tank has an armor class of, what, 19? And now he has more scars than skin. Maybe we should get better armor for him.

A staff of electricity? Screw that, we don't have 30,000 gold, shut up. And so on, and so on, and so on. Another way to buy more time is to give the character some downtime during which they could craft, research, make money, or prepare for the next big adventure. Obviously this would need to be done in a village or town, so only do this if the story would allow for it and make sense in the narrative. But doing any of these things, ending the session early,

tossing the spotlight to the players, throwing in a simple combat that you know by heart, shopping or giving them downtime, gives you time to reorient yourself, read through your notes, and find that next challenge or story beat. Back to that paragraph. When all else fails, roll a bunch of dice behind your screen, study them for a moment, a look of deep concern mixed with regret, let loose a heavy sigh, and announce that Tiamat swoops from the sky and attacks. First tip from there, it's okay to roll behind a screen.

One of the arguments I see way too often online is whether DMs should make their rolls in front of the players or behind the DM screen, and by extension, should DMs fudge their die rolls. I talked about this in episode 36. Ladies and gentlemen DMs, it doesn't matter. If you want every die roll to be in front of the players, go forth and be happy. Similarly, there's nothing wrong with hiding every single roll from your players. That's fine too. If you roll your dice behind the screen and want to fudge your die rolls to create more dramatic stories and more tension, then do it. What I would ask is that you let different DMs DM their way. It may not be your way, and that's okay. But no matter what, make sure the players know that you are on their side. Looking down at your dice and getting a concerned look on

your face non-verbally signals to your players that you're rooting for them and shit's about to go down. And you should be rooting for them. They should enjoy the game just like you should. As I've said it before, and I'll say it again, you may be playing the antagonists of the PCs, but you're not there to be antagonistic to the players. Another thing you can pull from this sentence is that humor has a place at your table. I could fill the next five minutes about nothing but cautions about using humor. Humor is subjective. It's impossible to make something funny to everyone all the time. Some sentences of humor are clean, rude, ironic, sardonic, slapsticky, or even punny like mine. Yes, you may throw out a

joke that you're convinced is the funniest fucking thing in the world and get nothing from your players. One of your NPCs may be named Oedipus and people in town keep calling him motherfucker and your players don't react at all. That's okay. A buddy of mine from an improv comedy troupe that I used to perform with, he said, jokes are like grenades. You pull the pin and throw it. If it doesn't go off, it was a dud. Throw the humor out there anyway if it's appropriate for the emotional timber of the episode. If it's in the middle of a funeral for one of your PCs who died saving a town from an Umber Hulk invasion, I'm not sure a prominent NPC speaking during the service should make a, oh, he was a warlock that

neither found a war nor a lock joke. Or that he was searching for the eldritch cookbook, the Necronomonomonomicon. This is not the time. But if you want to inject some humor, do it. It's a game. It's supposed to be fun. Hell, I'll throw in a joke or two even during horror-themed one-shots. One one-shot I ran featured a country bumpkin racist undead named Earl Bob Billy Bob Joe Bob Ray. He was trying to drum up support for a war on the living. Earl Bob was a type of undead called a white, W-I-G-H-T. They're an undead with a nasty life drain ability. And their group was called, stick with me to the end here, the White Power Movement.

Is that a clean joke? Absolutely not. But the players in that group all had improv backgrounds and we all had great senses of humor. The groans and laughs at the white power joke made all the work setting it up worthwhile. Another featured an undead developing an underground society with a shop called Aberzombie and Lich. Still another joked about having a ghoul-proof plan. Humor has a place at your table, but remember, not everybody's going to find it funny. I guarantee you somebody listening to that W-I-G-H-T power joke

just turned the episode off. Inspiration for gaming and gaming tips can be found in all kinds of places. I'll usually hear a nugget of wisdom or two no matter where I look. Kids cartoons to superhero movies. From historical documentaries to garden design shows. From talks with my relatives to the opening joke paragraph in an RPG book. Always be on the lookout for lessons that you can apply to your table and help make your next game your best game.

Tune in next week to the next episode of the Class Series, Clerics and Druids. I once again want to thank our sponsor, The Undead. If you're looking for zombies and can't find any, head to a cul-de-sac. They're dead ends. This has been episode 87, taking inspiration from the D&D disclaimer statement at the beginning of the 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and since I've already said my next game best game line, I just want to end with a request. Love one another. Support all gamers new and old alike. All of our games will be better for it. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube media production.

Copyright 2021. References to game system content are copyright of their respective publishers.