Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash

Started playing Dungeons & Dragons again and I’m easing back into being a dungeon master, something I enjoyed as a child.

I’m fascinated with the idea that you can sit around and talk, yet this structured, elaborate immersive experience unfolds.

Now we have a regular tuesday game online, and a one or two in-person games each month, and I’m starting to warm up to the idea of being a Dungeon Master again.

I first tried it when we first got back into the game, but I got so overwhelmed by the amount of preparation involved. I spent 2-3 days reading and planning to bring the world to life for the players.

The reality of playing DnD as an adult is that time is scarce. And preping for a game as a Dungeon master takes up a lot of it.

Spontaneous Preparation – How to plan a DnD one shot

Robert Peake, over at the Spontaeous DM came up with a great one-page one-shot concept.The major arc of the story broken into three acts all on one page.  

The specifics of each act are discovered during game play using tables. Rolling the dice against the tables lets me that the mysterious InnKeeper has one dead eye, is poorly dressed and used to be a former prostitute…and wants to help the party because he has a gambling debt to pay off.

I discover this with the players in the game.

Less preparation. More fun.

I’ve gone from spending days reading through a campaign’s manual, scrambling to figure out how to prepare for the game.

Now it’s down to about an hour of prep for a one-shot.

Here’s a 33 minute video of exactly how Robert Peake uses the one-page system and the tables to prep for a game

The best bit is that I’m looking forward to discovering what happens in the game, rather than rehearsing a script.

Wielding narrative tension in one-shot adventures

So far there have been two main challenges to being a DM: Preparation time and understanding how to wield narrative tension

Better preparation is a solvable problem. What intimidates me are the subtle dynamics of tension.

Knowing how to build tension, and when to release it, is the key to a good game. At any given point, players need the just right amount of narrative thread to keep things interesting. Sometimes you have to take the thread away and make them work for it. Other times you need to provide enough slack for them to stay engaged and keep the story moving.

This is a whole other type of storytelling. And what surprises me is how little guidance there is on the subject. There are so many resources on character creation, monster stats, and world-building, but not much on the art of interactive storytelling.

I’d love to know if there’s a specific term for this skill and if there are resources out there that explore it at depth. Understanding the contours of what makes for good interactive storytelling—and how to do it well—feels like it’s at the beating heart of creating memorable games.

So essential, yet oddly unexplored.

The best term I’ve found for what I’m talking about is ‘Gamemastery’. Justin Alexander’s writing on the topic have been endlessly entertaining.

The 3 Clue Rule and the importance of not prepping plots are both great places to start.

Bought his book and I’m halfway through. Got Sly’s ‘Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master‘ and Sclander’s ‘Practical Guide to Becoming a Great GM ‘ lined up to read next.

I guess I’ll have more to say on tension once I’ve finsihed reading all these books.