Have you ever sat down to run a D&D session, planning for your party to finally confront the big bad, only to watch them spend three sessions chasing after a missing chicken, investigating a side alley, and negotiating with the town cobbler about shoe prices? Suddenly you’re left wondering what happened to the main story.
Or maybe you’re a player and you can barely remember what the campaign objective was because your party keeps going after side-quest after side-quest in some sort of recursive nightmare where you’re going after side-quest after side-quest in some sort of recursive nightmare where you’re going after side-quest after side-quest in some sort of recursive nightmare.
STOP ENDLESS SIDE-QUESTING!
That situation of seemingly endless side-quests has a name: yak shaving. I’m going to explain what yak shaving means, how it shows up in D&D, and why you, as a Dungeon Master or even as a player, should be careful not to let endless side quests take over your game.
What Is Yak Shaving?
Yak shaving is a term borrowed from the programming world. It describes a situation where you’re trying to do one simple thing, shave your pet yak, but you keep getting pulled into other prerequisite tasks.
So let’s say you want to shave your yak. You need clippers to do that, so you go to the drawer where the clippers are stored. The drawer squeeks when you open it, so you go looking for some WD-40. As you’re rummaging around in the garage for that, you realize that one of the two lightbulbs in the ceiling is burned out, so you reach for the ladder only to discover that you forgot the lower rung is broken and the ladder needs to be replaced. You get in your truck to drive to the hardware store to buy a new one and notice that you’re low on gas, so you head over to the gas station to fill up.
By dinner time, you’ve spent all day busy as hell but your yak remains as hairy as ever.
I think you get the point.
The same thing happens in D&D all the time. Let’s say the party is trying to recover a powerful artifact but they keep following detours. They help villagers, solve unrelated mysteries, or run errands for NPCs. Each step feels important at the time, but together it can stall the campaign’s momentum.
Why Endless Side Quests Hurt the Game
Side quests are not inherently bad. In fact, they can be wonderful when they add flavor, spotlight a character, or give the party a change of pace. The problem arises when they pile on endlessly. Instead of deepening the campaign, they bury it.
Momentum stalls when the main quest gets pushed so far to the back burner that the party starts to forget what it is. The tone drifts when constant tangents dilute the urgency of the main quest. Players who prefer story progress may get impatient, while others wander in circles. And for the DM, improvising endless side content can feel like they’re building a whole new campaign they never planned to run.
How to Nip Endless Side-quests in the Bud
The good news is that yak shaving can be managed at the table. If you’re a DM, clarify the party’s goal at the beginning of each session. If you don’t want to be that overt about it, drop reminders through NPC dialogue or world events that keep the central story visible.
Another method is to limit the number of hooks that show up in the game. Not every locked door or mysterious villager needs to generate a new quest. Introduce time pressure by the villains advancing their plans if the party delays – just make sure the players are aware that particular clock is ticking. And when you do add side quests, make sure they tie back into the main plot or the characters’ personal arcs, so even detours feel like forward progress.
Sandbox Play Without the Chaos
Now, some of you might be thinking:
“I run a sandbox campaign. Aren’t side quests the point?”
And you’re right—open-world games thrive on freedom and player agency to go where they will. Players want to explore, poke at the edges, and see how the world responds. The danger is when that freedom becomes a spiral of distractions that never reconnects to anything meaningful.
The key is to offer freedom with structure. Instead of scattering a hundred unrelated hooks, seed your sandbox with choices that all eventually feed into your main themes or conflicts. Let players wander, but let their wandering reveal consequences, villains advancing, or threads that circle back into the bigger picture. That way you keep the open feel of a sandbox without losing the story’s momentum, or by railroading your players.
If the players choose to pursue in-game events and clues that have a consistent theme, let them. If they ignore those tie-ins, let them do that as well.
Go Forth And Shave Your Yak!
The next time your game starts veering into an endless chain of distractions, remember this: side quests should enrich the story, not replace it. If the players begin rummaging around in the garage for ladders instead of shaving their yaks, it’s your role as the Dungeon Master to step in and guide them back to the core of the adventure. Or at least remind them that it’s there.
If you’re a player and the other players are ignoring the main quest or seem to have forgotten about it, bring it up. If the group consensus is to drop it and go on to something else, be up front with the DM about it so they don’t waste prep time preparing a Thanksgiving dinner when all the guests would rather eat frozen pizza.
