The Case of the Invisible Jelly
May 16th, 2011
My little brother recently disclosed to me that he was going to start up a D&D campaign, and that he was going to try his hand at being a DM. Knowing that I had a little experience in the field, he asked me for a few quick pointers for his first time. I gave him a few of the simple responses that you've seen in previous articles I'd put out with DM advice. Like all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed neophyte DMs, he couldn't help launching into an extensive description of what plot he had in mind, and all the gory details about his first dungeon, a Fire Temple.
One thing of which he was quite proud, and which ultimately led to me settling on writing this article, as an encounter with one of his favorite monsters: the flesh jelly. For those of you not familiar with this monster, it's a very unpleasant ooze from the Monster Manual II, with a CR somewhere in the high-teens or low-twenties. What was it doing a fire temple, you ask, let alone any dungeon intended to be plumbed by level 1 adventurers? Worry not: it was safely hidden behind an unopenable door, and the PCs were not meant to encounter it. Rather, it was there because it was my brother's plan to include one such creature in every dungeon in the campaign.
This brings me to the overall point of the article. Like supervillainy, being a good DM is all about presentation. When you take up the screen, you are taking a certain amount of responsibility for the fun and entertainment of everyone else in the group. This isn't to say that you're the group jester, and need to dance at their command, but the point is that they expect you to provide something fun to do every week, whether that means a compelling plot, cleverly-detailed encounters, awesome treasures, or whatever it is that your players are looking for when they show up with dice and sheets in hand. It's important that you have fun too, and obviously they're responsible for their own fun as well, but in the same way that the writers, actors, and everyone else behind your favorite TV show is responsible for entertaining you once a week, you're responsible for entertaining your group.
In fact, there are a lot of ways in which DMing is similar to making a TV show or a movie. You can't rely as much on visual effects, of course, and you have to be more careful about what sort of plot devices you use, as your actors are going to have an unpleasant tendency to go off-script frequently, but at the end of the day, your job is to show your characters whatever experience, scene, character, or the like that you want to express. Good DMs make sure that what they're expressing is what their audience wants to see (just like television shows and movies tend to be aimed at a certain target audience, and gives them what they want), but even if you're simply intent on shoving your artistic vision down their throats, you're still trying to show them something.
Now, I don't have any Hollywood experience. I've never worked for any television programs, never really even had particularly strong dreams of being a writer (at least, not that kind of writer). I didn't even take any relevant classes in college (I did take a creative writing class, once, but if I learned anything from it other than "people who take creative writing classes are really pretentious, and write incredibly trite dribble, myself included," I promptly forgot it. What can I say? I was 16 at the time.). On the other hand, I do read a column by someone who did, so, I figure I'm probably good to compare the two. After all, how hard could that industry possibly be?
The problem with the flesh jelly is obvious. In fact, it's written right into the explanation: the players are never supposed to see it! What earthly point could there be in including a monster that the PCs are never supposed to see? Your goal as a DM is to put on a show for the players, so anything they're not going to see is a waste of effort. Though the flesh jelly is a very clear-cut and extreme example of this, this is still something that a lot of DMs (including myself, from time to time) struggle with.
The biggest offender is randomized generation of, well, just about anything. Don't get me wrong, I love random treasure tables, random encounter tables, randomized shop inventories, randomized rumors, randomized inn patrons…and so on and so forth. Sometimes randomization is even a useful tool: a random name generator (or a random inn patron generator) is a great way to help fill in blanks that are minimal-impact, and so don't require a whole lot of attention.
The trouble with randomized generation is when we start using it as a primary driving force for our games, because we get a tickle out of the "realism" behind setting up a table which is supposed to accurately represent, for example, the denizens of some forest, and then letting the cards fall where they lie, rather than carefully crafting the forest's encounters in a way that makes a good story. It does make it more realistic and organic feeling, but let me ask you this: what is the ultimate effect, from the audience's perspective? It isn't really that important whether they're generated randomly or not, for the most part, and by deliberately defying all of the Hollywood fakery and convenience that they use to make their stories flow, you tend to get sub-par story. If realism were that much more compelling than good storytelling, we probably wouldn't all gather around the table every week to play, would we?
I promise you that 9 times out of 10, an encounter that was designed in advance and set up by the DM with a goal in mind (even a goal like "it'd be cool to have an encounter that makes use of ability X that monster Y has," or "I want a scene involving a fight on a bridge over lava") is going to be much more fun and exciting than one rolled up randomly on the spot. Similarly, 95 times out of 100 a treasure hoard hand-picked by the DM is going to be much more exciting and rewarding than one rolled up at random.
I'm not saying to cut randomization out of your games, I'm just saying that you shouldn't let it run your game—at least, not if you have the time and the energy to do things properly. For some people, randomized results can serve as a sort of muse, giving them a starting point to build off of. If you find yourself with writers' block, you may want to consider rolling on a table, and then building from what you get—just make sure to do it in advance, so you can flesh it out and build on it in fun and exciting ways.
My brother isn't the only neophyte DM in my life: someone in my group recently had the job thrust upon them, and they've been struggling with an issue which ties in closely to the issue of randomized tables. In a nutshell, they're afraid to make any declarations, because they don't feel that they have the authority to do so. "I couldn't have the artifact be a fake," this person would say, "that's not very realistic." The same sort of thing came up time and again throughout their adventure, and whenever the players' actions threw the plot for a loop, this DM had difficulty recovering, due to a fear of making a declaration that would be "too much of a stretch."
Once again, maybe it would be a bit of a stretch for the artifact to have been swapped out—especially considering the DM had never planned for it. On the other hand, a plausible explanation could certainly be concocted, and if the players even needed an explanation (believe me, they rarely do), all you would need to do is find a way to give it to them. Unlikely things happen in movies, TV, and books all the time. Sometimes they're handled well, and sometimes they aren't, but it's a generally acceptable practice to bend and play with the truth a little bit, as long as it accomplishes one thing:
It needs to make the story better. As long as what you're going to do is going to impact the game for the better, and allow you to do something cool and exciting that the players will appreciate, consider yourself to have carte blanche. The end-all-be-all goal of DMing is to give your players a show (they get to act in it too, but let's not quibble over details in the metaphor now, shall we?). Don't let anything—whether it's realism, a guilty conscience, or a perverse love of flesh jellies—get between you and that goal.
As a final parting thought, some of you may be wondering why the flesh jelly would really be a problem, as long as the PCs can't reach it. The answer is that it's behind a big, ominous, unopenable door. To borrow from Mark Rosewater, it's a first-act gun. Players expect the big, ominous door to eventually open, and to be able to go inside and find out what's up with it. Even if they eventually forget about it and move on, by putting it in there at all, you're ultimately distracting your audience (the players) from what you want them to pay attention to: in this case, the rest of the fire temple.
That's all for this week. Next week is Armor Week, so be sure to stop in and check out my article on how to make sure yours is nice and shiny. In the meantime, don't sacrifice your scene for the benefit of a single line.