An Impromptu D&D Game
You’re at an awards ceremony for celebrity time walkers. Sitting at the table with you are Yul Brynner, Eleanor Roosevelt, Wyatt Earp, and Etta James. You’re talking with Eleanor and she asks what you do. “I’ve been nominated for an award, Best Use of a Tavern in an Opening Scene by a Dungeon Master.”
Wyatt Earp says, “Yer one of them Dungeon Masters, eh? Fer Dungeons & Dragons, right? That game I keep hearin’ bout?”
You nod.
Yul Brynner says, “Is that the game where I can be a king?”
You smile and say, “You can start off as a paladin and work your way up, sure.”
Eleanor Roosevelt says, “I’ve always wanted to be a lumberjack, I mean a delicate elf that casts spells. Can I be a delicate elf that casts spells?”
You say, “Of course you can.”
You glance over at Etta James and say, “And you can be a bearded dwarf ranger if you want to.”
She smiles back and says, “At laaaaaaaaaaaaaast!”
You reach into your pocket and pull out a handful of dice, because what Dungeon Master doesn’t show up at an award ceremy without some math rocks in their pocket.
“Let’s play D&D,” you say, confident that you know exactly where to start.
Introduction
There are times when, as a dungeon master, you are called upon to run a one shot adventure with little or no prep. That has happened to me many times, although not at any award ceremonies for time travelers. Over the years I’ve learned a few tricks to make it go smoothly. You can do this too, even if you’re not an experienced DM. In fact, even if you’re a player that gets thrust into the DM role without warning, this article just might save your life. Well, your gaming life anyway.
So why worry about how to run a one-shot with zero notice or prep? Well, there are several reasons why this may come up. For instance, let’s say you are the DM for a group of five players and three don’t show up. Do you keep your campaign going for just two players? Probably not.
What if you are asked on a spur-of-the-moment basis to run a quick adventure for a group you’ve never played with before? Let’s say you’re at a gathering and someone finds out you’re a DM. They are curious about D&D and ask if you could run them through a short game to give them a sense for what the experience is like.
Here’s another situation. You’re a player in a group with four others. The DM can’t make it to your regular game night, but you all want to play anyway. You go with rock-paper-scissors until you become the chosen one to run the other players through a one-shot. Obviously, if you’ve never DM’d before at all, this will be an even bigger challenge, but you’ve already seen how it’s done from the front side of the DM screen, so you’ll probably be able to wing it enough to get by. Plus, none of the other players are expecting you to be an expert DM if you’ve never DM’d before at all, so they’ll cut you some slack. Hopefully. Dave might not, but that’s to be expected at this point.
Okay, you find yourself needing to run a game without notice. Here are my tips and advice for how you can run a one-shot adventure with little or no prep.
I’ll start with the most important bit of general advice I have: pick something, one thing, and then expand on it. You don’t have to create an elaborate campaign idea with tons of depth to it. I often start with the setting. Pick a location where the adventurers start off, even if it’s a trope. Those often work great for one-shots anyway.
What I suggest is to pick a setting or location that you’re familiar with. This can either be a location inside the world you’re running, whether it be the Forgotten Realms or the World of Greyhawk or your own homebrew world, or you can choose a real-world setting that you know. This can be an area where you’ve camped or engaged in some other outdoor activity. Just use what you know as a seed. That pays big dividends when it comes to improv.
The party could start off outside a tavern, or walking down a forest path. These are trope-worthy locations and offer a lot of versatility, although I tend to shy away from the tavern scene because then you have to improv the patrons and innkeeper, too. I suggest you keep it simple.
Throw in some weather to add flavor.
Is it raining or snowing? Is it mid-summer and hot as hell? Those kind of details are easy to come up with but add a lot of depth to your impromptu adventure. It can also inform later steps. If it’s snowing, you won’t be thinking later on about desert monsters, for instance.
We’re now going to build on that. Ask yourself: why are they there, and what’s their motivation? What triggers them going into adventurer mode? This can be an event, such as they see one monster attacking another. Or they hear a scream of someone needing help in the near distance.
Their motivation doesn’t have to be a monster. It can be a strange object. Perhaps they come upon an overturned wagon along the road, with a blood trail going off into the trees. Maybe they hear a noise, see something glowing that doesn’t normal glow. And so forth.
We’ve got three key elements already figured out. Location, weather and trigger.
I’ve pointed out before that it’s easier to edit than to create. It’s also easier to add a layer to something, and do that layer by layer, than it is to come up with the final onion all in one fell swoop.
Those three things are really all you need to begin play. Start there. The players will ask questions, but those are usually tactical things. You are their eyes, ears, noses, and so forth.
Again, stick with the basics. You don’t have to be overly elaborate in your descriptions unless that’s something you enjoy and have decent competence at achieving it. Stay within your lane. It’s better to make a simple dish well than to prepare a complex dish poorly.
At this point, you’re probably already in a state of normal gameplay. Most DMs find it easier to improv once the game is going than to make it all up beforehand. Without realizing it, you’re probably following the “Yes, and…” fundamental by taking what’s already there and extending it. You’re adding one more layer to the onion as you play.
Before I go further, here’s one really useful trick if you’re an experienced DM. It’s a bit of a cheat, but a very effective one, and it’s so simple some of you may say, “That’s super obvious!” Well, it is. Pick an adventure you’ve run before but with a different group. It doesn’t have to be new, it just has to be new for these players. Use that as your foundation. It’s that easy.
Let me reiterate the fundamentals of how this works. Pick the location, define the trigger, and then add details as needed and as things progress.
I’d like to give you an example of an adventure I ran for some of my players. Our normal game was unexpectedly limited to just three players out of our normal six. We decided we didn’t want to tap into the regular campaign, so a one-shot was requested.
So, I started with the location. The first place that came to my mind is a small town about fifteen miles upriver from the coast where my grandparents lived. I visited them every summer as a kid and knew the area like the back of my hand. At this point I’m tapping into my own vivid memories for the location and environment, and it was super easy.
The next thing I needed was a trigger. I told them that they were bored yet experienced adventurers, who needed something to do, so I had them rent some canoes and paddle up the river to go fishing. They overhear screaming at a small building up on the bank.
They get out of their canoes and go up the bank to investigate. They discover a small building of a blacksmith who’s being attacked by a troll. I don’t know why I chose a troll, other than that area is very verdant and green and I guess I just thought “green monster … troll”. Creativity is like that sometimes.
Gameplay had already begun because the three players immediately knew what they had to do: save the blacksmith by killing the troll. It was a quick and easy combat, three experienced adventurers against a single troll.
I needed something else. More trolls, of course! So all I had to do was have the blacksmith say there are three more up the hill by the old church.
That’s all I needed to run a 2+ hour one-shot adventure for three of my players with zero notice. They had a blast and so did I.
Here’s some final advice that may be the most important of all. As a Dungeon Master, you have a million things to know and think about during the game. It’s a challenge, so learning how to manage it all is something you gain with experience. One of the things experienced DMs learn is to identify what you don’t have to manage.
You delegate, you prepare ahead of time so you don’t have to come up with things on the spot. I have a list of many different names pinned to the inside of my DM screen so I can come up with a name for that impromptu innkeeper at the drop of a hat and make it look like it was planned all along.
When doing a spur-of-the-moment one-shot, remember that you don’t have to think of everything. Only worry about what is immediate to the players. Start there, then add a layer. The players themselves will provide little seeds of creativity as you go, so listen to what they say and use it as a potential seed for new ideas. It’s actually rather surprising how much you can come up with as you play by feeding off of what they players do and say.
D&D really is a dynamic story-telling kind of game in that way, so let that be yet another source of inspiration.
Of course, practice helps, but you don’t necessarily have to be an experienced dungeon master to pull off an impromptu one-shot without any prep. Follow these basics and build your adventurous onion one layer at a time. You’ve got this!
Oh, and if you run into Yul Brynner at the next Time Walker’s convention, tell him he still owes me $10.
Cheers!
