Improvising - How To Make It All Up
There comes a time for every Game Master to start a session and let a bunch of players run rampant through their carefully crafted world. The players loot, destroy, tear down, and bring joy to the world and its inhabitants, and more often than not, regularly go off whatever it is that you might have planned for that session.
So what is a Game Master to do when the party just heads off in a random direction or falls in love with a farmer who you didn’t even have a name for two seconds ago?
Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2008 Wizards of the Coast
Improvisation and Planning
There can be a bit of fear when it comes to improvisation, what if your party does something that you weren’t prepared for? What if they kill a major NPC you wanted to use? What if you can’t think of anything when the moment comes?
Maybe you actually like prepping and don’t like the idea of coming to a session ill-prepared. You might even feel a bit reluctant when it comes to improvising, even if it is subconscious. You may have spent hours prepping for the game and you don’t want to see it wasted. You don’t want to end up wasting the time you had prepped and so you are resistant to going ‘off-script’.
But you can prep for your games while keeping yourself open to improvisation.
Don’t Prep a Story, Prep Ingredients
When you sit down to prepare for a campaign, a story arc, or just for the next session you may have a very specific idea about what you want to happen and what that might look like. There is the temptation of coming up with big moments in your game that you want to guide your table too, have specific descriptions for events that will arise when the players do a specific task, as well as plan out your villain’s monologue when the party inevitably will follow a specific path through the fortress to get to them.
I get it. I’ve done it. But that isn’t the proper way to prepare for a pen & paper RPG. That’s how you prepare for writing a novel or story that others don’t have an impact on.
In games like Dungeons & Dragons, the players are going to have an impact on the story. They are going to do things you hadn’t thought of. They are going to enter into the final room with the boss that won’t work well with the pre-written flavor text you had meticulously written when you had envisioned your party entering the room.
What you don’t want to do is spend all your time prepping for how you want your players to act. Instead, you are going to want to spend your time prepping ingredients.
Prepping Ingredients
To get the most out of your prep, and ensure that your players have complete freedom and you can improvise against what they do, you need to spend your time only developing the ingredients that make up a story.
This means you aren’t making choices or assumptions for the players who must follow a specific recipe that you have carefully laid out, but rather you allow the players to take any approach that THEY want with the ingredients that you have created.
But what are the ingredients you are developing? These things include events, factions, magic items, people, and places. These are the ingredients you can use to create a recipe, or story, that your party will be interacting with. In a sense, you create all the ingredients while your party decides on the recipe, or what they are going to do with those ingredients.
Once you create a series of ingredients it is then up to the players to put those ingredients in whatever order they want to create what is effectively a recipe for their story. What this means is that you can create a trap, a castle, a cave, a cursed relic, and a villain, but don’t decide on exactly where that trap is located in a castle, or that the cave holds the cursed relic. Instead, what your players do decides on where the trap is that you created, which could be in the cave if the players are very paranoid of a trap and they keep making checks to locate a trap. You can then bring out that ingredient that you had made beforehand and the game is not slowed down because you have to think of a trap while still rewarding the players with a trap that they find due to their paranoia.
Over time, you will have a huge variety of NPCs, monsters, locations, traps, treasures, and other ingredients that you can grab and shove into different locations that your players can build a recipe out of.
Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2008 Wizards of the Coast
This isn’t to say, though, that you have no say over the recipe as it were. You still decide on the theme of the recipe, be it a horror and survival game or a happy romp through the wilderness. You can still decide that the campaign will, ultimately, be about taking down some evil eldritch being, but you don’t know how your players will do that.
Yes, And / No, But (How/What About)
Everyone talks about “Yes, And” how it is the number one rule for improvisation. “Yes, And” is a way of improvising where other people come up with situations, effects, ideas, and other recipes and then you, as the GM, are to then agree with them, and then add on your own ingredients to their proposal. While many will talk about how you should always be “Yes, And”ing your players - it’s not the only way to improvise as sometimes, player ideas just don’t mesh well with the world you have created or the type of story you want to tell.
This is where “No, But” can come and be used to continue the improvisation. Now, some people dislike hearing the word “No” when it comes to improvising as they believe it creates tension between GM and players as it is effectively the GM shutting down someone else’s idea. In this situation, you could say “How About” or “What About” to avoid using a negative word like “No”.
When you say “No, But” you have the ability to tell a player “No” and that in your world, that type of situation can’t happen. This might be like if a player wants to shoot someone in the eyes and blind them permanently, but the game rules don’t support that and you don’t want players cheesing combat like that. In this situation, you could say “No, But” (or “How About”) and then provide a solution to the player that still uses their original idea, but reworks it to the system and setting you are playing in.
It is important when you say “No, But”, that you are still encouraging your players to continue to come up with ideas, which is why you still need to take their original idea when you offer them a different solution. For example, when the player wants to shoot the target in the eye, you could instead say that if hit the target, and the attack roll is whatever above their AC, then they could blind the target until the end of its next turn or that the player needs to spend a resource, like inspiration, spell slots, or some other meta-currency, in order to complete their idea.
“No, But” is not about creating restrictions for your players and their ideas, but rather providing them additional options for their ideas that are more aligned with what your world is or the system you are playing in. By using “No, But” and “Yes, And”, you have two powerful tools that can improve your improvising at the table.
Practice
The main way of getting better with improvising is by simply practicing. Practicing is how you get better at anything that you do. You don't immediately know how to play baseball just because you picked up a baseball bat and a baseball, just like you won’t immediately know how to improvise just because you're standing behind a GM screen and you have an evil laugh.
And the only way to practice is by playing games where you improvise by taking the ingredients you've created, throwing them into the game world, and allowing your players to use those ingredients to create their own recipes. As you get more comfortable with this type of play, the easier you will have at creating those ingredients that you need to successfully improvise.
Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2008 Wizards of the Coast
Using Pre-Written Adventures
I myself use pre-written modules very often to help run games, especially as I like a ton of time to create ideas for entire campaigns for three different tables. I take those pre-written adventures, I read through them, and then I strip out all the valuable ingredients from the adventure. I ignore the pre-written recipe of how to use those ingredients, but rather just take the ingredients and allow my players to romp through the world - and even if they do go off on a side quest, you can slowly ease them back into the main quest by littering ingredients that will point them in the right direction.
By stripping all of those ingredients it's saved me a ton of time of having to create NPCs, of having to create names, monsters, magic items, and more. It also means I don’t feel restricted or that I have to restrict how my players can respond to the different ingredients placed before them. They have the freedom to simply take the ingredients and do what they want with them.
I highly encourage you to try this out instead of creating the entire story from scratch. You can save yourself so much time by untying ingredients from a specific recipe (story) and simply allowing your players to guide the story and create their own unique recipe.
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