Hello fair readers this is just a quick note because today is Mother's Day and I will be spending it with the two mothers I have in my life, my mother, who we moved in with us last year, and my wife, the mother of my son.
Today I am going to post a piece that was previously published in the Anchorite APA. I will be back next week, until that time remember the words of the two great ones, "Be excellent to each other!"
Become a Better Improvisational DM!
I can put together a pretty decent meal from whatever happens to be in the refrigerator and the pantry. I like the challenge of this sort of improvisation, the rigor of limitation and sometimes having to take a risk. - Chang-Rae Lee
You find yourself at a gathering and have an hour to kill. To fill the time your significant other volunteers you to run a game. Your pucker factor goes through the roof, the pressure is on! How good are you at running an off the cuff game? How does one become a better improvisational DM? With practice of course! In this piece I hope to give you some tips on how to generate and run a scenario at the drop of a hat which I hope will give you the confidence to get in that all important practice at running off the cuff sessions.
The first thing you need is a simple system that you are familiar with, you want the game to go quickly and looking up rules during the game is a sure way to bring the session to a sudden stop. For me ‘Barbarians of Lemuria’, ‘Million Colored Sun’, David Dudka’s ‘One-Shot RPG’ system, or better yet ‘Risus’ and the numerous offspring of ‘Lasers & Feelings’ all fit the bill. If you have a writing implement and some paper, or your cell phone, you have everything you need. Dice help but a die roller on your cell phone would also work. If you carry a pocket notebook, pen and three mini d6s you would be set. Still if you have a couple things downloaded on your phone, or internet access, your phone could work fine but it would be a little clunkier and slower as you switch app to app.
So you have a system and the bare necessities, the next step is an adventure. There are a number of simple scenarios that you can run with hardly any set up such as raiding goblins kidnapping someone that they players have to rescue. If you spend a few minutes you could jot down half a dozen or dozen simple adventures. The other easy thing is to steal the basic plot from a tv show, movie or book. I enjoy watching episodes of old western tv shows and the plots of those episodes are very easy to adapt to any genre of game.
Because of the time constraint you can get away with a more linear adventure but do not forget to give the player’s meaningful choices, ideally they should have at least three options at any one time and you should be open to player’s doing things you did not anticipate. The other thing is to keep the adventure simple, the goal is to be able to finish the adventure as opposed to setting up a follow on session.
If you have a system already picked out ahead of time you could also have premade characters which could speed things along. If you can get character creation down to just a few minutes (another advantage of games like ‘Risus’, ‘Million Colored Sun’, and ’Lasers & Feelings’) there is no problem doing it on the spot. Remember that you can condense the rules for these sorts of games so consider using stat arrays or instead of having six attributes have the players pick two attributes that are above average and give them +1 or +2 to their role depending on the system. See Matt Jackson’s YouTube and blog (https://www.msjx.org) for how he runs a simplified version of ‘White Box’.
One useful thing for a impromptu dungeon crawl is having a random dungeon generator. There are tables and sets of cards but the one that has really caught my attention recently is by Dan “Delta” Collins. It is not robust enough for a longer term game but for a one to two hour romp it is just right. Dan has outlined a way to use a single D6 with pips instead of numbers as an easy dungeon generator. It is pretty genius and can be remembered on the fly without having to reference a chart.
I have run impromptu games just to practice doing it and they have gone fairly well. I remember putting out a call one evening on discord to run an impromptu game and someone said they knew a group of players from somewhere else which was great because I did not know any of them. We chatted for a few minutes and I ended up running a space cowboy adventure based on the land grab plot of the classic western ‘El Dorado’ using Deep7 Press’ 1PG rules. It was a great way to stretch my comfort zone and we all had a great time.
I do recommend doing this with your friends before you try with strangers but I think as long as you know the system well and come across confidently you should do fine. The tricky part is watching the clock and knowing when you have to move things along and being able to cut to the final scene if needed. This is something you really need to learn by doing which is where playing with your friends, if possible, helps. Running game for conventions, both in person and virtual, will also help you hone this critical skill
Of course instead of running an impromptu RPG you could just carry a card game and press that into service, and there are some great ones, but where is the challenge in that?
I hope, gentle reader, that you will be able to leverage at least one of the tips mentioned to heighten your improvisational game. As always if you have any tips to share I would love to read them. Of course in the end there is no substitute for experience so get out there and run some off the cuff games, if I am free when you do I will be happy to play in them.
I want to give full credit where it is due, this piece was inspired by the YouTube video DMing on the Fly | Running a S&S Game With No Materials | Wandering DMs S07 E06 from 23 February, 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/live/aMiT_isZ2qo?si=Q0gBxj1VoXMNWv2K
