DUNGEON MASTER’S GUIDE TO ROLEPLAYING

If you we’re looking for the simplest possible definition of a games master, it might well be “the one who thinks up obstacles for the rest of the group to overcome.”

Sometimes these obstacles are strictly literal. There might be a mountain range sitting in the way of the party’s path, or a forcefield keeping them out of the corporate vault. Other times they might take the form of monsters that need to be slain or traps that need to be disarmed before things can progress.

Often, they’re almost completely ephemeral – a debt that needs to be paid off could pose just as much of an obstacle as a locked door, as could a grumpy shopkeeper that needs to be sweet-talked into parting with valuable goods. These have the added advantage of being much harder to solve with the application of a sledgehammer. At least, so long as you don’t want the local police getting involved.

Without these roadblocks, the stories we tell and battles we orchestrate would be fairly meaningless. They’re what drives the conflict and drama of any RPG, whether you’re playing a super-casual hack-and-slash dungeon crawl or the most artsy of story games plucked from the A5 pages of a zine.

While most of our thoughts and planning likely go towards creating cool problems to drop on our parties, however, sometimes it pays to think about how our friends might go about solving them.

SINGLE FILE

Depending on who you speak to, rail-roading and strictly linear gameplay are some of the scourges of the roleplaying world. Nobody likes to feel like they’re being forced down a single path sketched out by the GM ahead of time.

Usually, people talk about this in terms of the story and plot of a game, where the heroes are fulfilling the specific destinies already decided for them. However, even if you like to think that you’re keeping things open-ended on the macro scale, it’s easy to find yourself accidently creating linear obstacles for your party to overcome.

Let’s take the most obvious kind of linear obstacle out there – a magical puzzle sitting in the middle of a dungeon. Something involving rotating statues into some formation laid out in a dreadful poem stuffed with slant-rhymes and awkward metre. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about.

Anyway, while these are a backbone of classic RPG adventures, they can often be dreadfully linear. They have one way that they can be overcome – deciphering the poem, spinning some stone – and that’s it.

If the puzzle isn’t too hard this isn’t too much of a problem, but what happens when your careful allusions aren’t quite as obvious as you thought they were? What if the player carrying the scroll that would have explained it is sucked into a portable hole? What if the barbarian is overly committed to the “I solve everything with my fists” trait scrawled across their character sheet in red ‘ink’?

This can scale up to plenty of more abstract situations. If the only way that your gang of rambunctious cyberpunks can break into the ganger warehouse is through a carefully plotted sewer tunnel it can feel as though you’re limiting the players’ choices. Likewise, if the only possible way to resolve a conflict with an important NPC is through one specific topic of conversation or favour, it can get frustrating if the players find that other, perfectly sensible ideas fall on stony ears.

THE RULE OF THREES

Now, I’m plenty guilty of dreaming up these kinds of barriers in the past. I’ve had poorly-written puzzles that left parties sitting, stumped, in ancient tombs until an unexpected NPC popped by to explain some vital part of the rhyme they’d ben puzzling over. I’ve constructed fortresses that were so tightly-designed that there was one and only

one way to breach it, which would naturally lead to a half-dozen carefully constructed encounters.

However, these days I try to avoid this by applying the rule of threes. And, no, I don’t mean the one where the youngest of the three brothers marries the princess, nor the one that says that every protagonist needs to be accompanies by a pair of wise-cracking foils.

No, this specific rule of threes says that when I think up an obstacle for the party to overcome, I need to think up three potential ways they might tackle it.

These three approaches don’t need to be equally successful – in fact, some of them are allowed to be downright terrible choices. Nor is it a question of planning, either (though, thinking up some potential paths the party might take does help out with my notes).

Rather, the simple fact that I can think up three approaches off the top of my head is a decent litmus test for whether I’ve made an obstacle too linear. If even I, as the omniscient GM, can only think up a couple ways to tackle the problem, there’s a good chance the players might feel funnelled in the obvious direction too.

While this may sound like a rather onerous task to add onto your session planning, in reality it’s rarely that much of a hassle. For example, a simple locked door almost always passes the test.

Unless the door is particularly special you can usually deal with it by picking the lock, kicking it down or (and for some reason adventurers almost never think of this one) finding the key. Boom, three potential routes, each of which come with their own challenges and consequences.

FAIL CASE

So, what do we do if we find that we can’t think of three paths to success? Well, the easiest thing to do is to add some.

Take the statue and poem puzzle nonsense from earlier, for example. We already have one obvious way to solve the problem, which is to answer the riddle, but what are a couple of alternatives?

Maybe the rotating wall the puzzle was guarding can be forced open with a sufficiently high strength check, but jams at a point where the larger adventures can barely squeeze through the gap and might have to leave some of their bulkier gear behind. Maybe a stream of water is running out from behind the wall, and the party can risk swimming upstream, where, naturally, they run into a squad of aquatic guardians.

Just a little bit of a change to the description of a room can open the options hugely.

THE RULE OF… ZERO?

The rule of three has worked wonderfully for me. However, one of the great things about RPGs and rules is that you get to break them whenever you feel like.

The one time I’m happy to dispense with the test is, perversely, when I can’t think of any obvious paths at all. When I can’t think of even a single way to overcome the obstacle, let alone three.

Often, this crops up because the party is trying something truly audacious. They want to assassinate the king despite all his guards and magical wards. They want to raid the capital planet of a hostile alien empire. They want to break into the cult headquarters.

Sometimes, though, it’s just because I want to throw something cool in front of the players and see how they react. Here’s an angry dragon. What are you gonna do now?

And, somehow, I’ve never encountered a party that didn’t immediately have some kind of left-field idea I would never have thought of in a thousand years. You have never seen a more creative bunch that a team of RPG players faced with a seemingly impossible problem.

Now, whether or not their plan works… that’s another question entirely.