You’re running a scenario. The PCs have a fistful of leads telling them where they’re supposed to go next. (If you’re using node-based scenario design, they might have a fistful of clues pointing them towards multiple places they could choose to go next.) But instead of doing that, they head off in a completely different direction.

And there’s nothing there.

Maybe they’ve made a mistake. Maybe they’ve made a brilliant leap of deduction which turns out not to be so brilliant after all. Maybe they have good reason to look for more information in the local library or the newspaper morgue or the records of the local school district, but there’s nothing to be found there.

It’s a dead end.

And dead ends like this can be quite problematic because, once they have the bit in their teeth, players can be relentless: Convinced that there must be something there, they will try every angle they can think of to find the thing that doesn’t exist. In fact, I’ve seen any number of groups convince themselves that the fact they can’t find anything is proof that they must be on the right track!

Not only can this self-inflicted quagmire chew up huge quantities of time at the table to little effect, but once the players have invested all of this mental effort into unraveling an illusory puzzle, their ultimate “failure” can be a demoralizing blow to the entire session. The effort can also blot out the group’s collective memory of all the other leads they had before the wild goose chase began, completely derailing the scenario.

Fortunately, there are some simple techniques for quickly working past this challenge.

IS IT REALLY A DEAD END?

First things first: Is it really a dead end?

Just because they’re doing something you didn’t explicitly prep, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there. In fact, the principle of permissive clue-finding means that you should actually assume that there is something to be found there.

So, start by checking yourself. Is it really a dead end, or is it just a path you didn’t know was there?

Maybe the players thought of some aspect of the scenario that you didn’t while you were prepping it. (That can be very exciting!) And even if something is a wild goose chase, there can be interesting things to be found there even if they don’t immediately tie into the scenario the PCs are currently engaged with.

(This is also why I’ll tend to give my players more rope in exploring these “dead ends” during campaigns than I will during one-shots: The consequences of doing something completely unexpected can develop in really interesting ways in the long-term play of the campaign, but don’t really have time to go anywhere in a one-shot, and are therefore usually better pruned. Also, if the scenario runs long because you had a really cool roleplaying interaction with Old Ma Ferguson that everyone enjoyed — even though she has nothing to do with the current scenario — it’s fine to hang out the To Be Continued shingle in a campaign and wrap things up in the next session, which is, once again, not an option in a one-shot.)

If it’s not really a dead end, then you should obviously roll with it and see where it takes you. If you don’t feel confident in your ability to improvise the unexpected curveball, that’s okay: Call for a ten minute break and spend the time throwing together some quick prep notes.

Although you don’t need to announce the reason for the break, it’s generally okay for the players to know that they’ve gone diving off the edge of your prep. Most players, in fact, love it. The fact you’re rolling with it shows that you creatively trust them, and they will return that trust. It also deepens the sense of the game world as a “real” place that the players are free to explore however they choose to, and that’s exciting.

FRAME PAST IT

But what if it really is a dead end? There’s nothing interesting where the PCs are heading and, therefore, nothing to be gained by playing through those events.

Well, if there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there.

At its root, this is a problem of pacing. And, therefore, we’re going to turn to The Art of Pacing for our solution. In short, you’re going to frame hard into abstract time, quickly sum up the nothing that they find, and then move on.

For example:

• “You spend the afternoon asking around the Docks for anyone who’s seen Jessica, but you can’t find anyone who saw her down here.”
• “You roll up on Jefferson Sienna, haul him down the precinct, and grill him for four hours. But you come up dry: He doesn’t know anything.”
• “You drive over to Mayfair to see if the library has the book you’re looking for, but their selection of occult books is pretty sparse.”

The most straightforward, all-purpose version of this is to simply tell the players, “You’re barking up the wrong tree. This isn’t the solution, there’s nothing to be found here, and the scenario is in a different direction.” But this direct approach is usually a bad idea: You know all that stuff I said about how much the players love knowing the game world exists beyond the boundaries of your prep and that they’re truly free to do anything and go anywhere? Well, this is basically the opposite of that. Even if you don’t strictly mean it that way, the players are going to interpret this as, “You can only go where you’re allowed to go.”

The distinction between “this isn’t the right way, try something else” and “you did it and didn’t find anything, now what?” might seem rather small. But in my experience the difference in actual play is very large.

(I suspect the difference is partly diegetic: One is a statement about the game world, the other is a directive from the GM to the players. But I think it’s also because the formulation of “you did it” still inherently values the players’ contribution: I didn’t tell you that you couldn’t do the thing you wanted to do; I was open to trying it, you did it, and it just didn’t pan out. It’s a fine line to walk, but an important one.)

The key here, once again, is to quickly sum up the totality of their intended course of action, rapidly resolve it, and then prompt them for the next action: “What do you do next?”

A good transition here can be, “What are you trying to do here?”

This pops the players out of action-by-action declarations and prompts them to sum up the totality of their intention. You then take their statement, rephrase it as a description of them doing exactly that, and then move on.

Player: Okay, I’m going to drive over to Mayfair.

GM: What are you planning to do?

Player: I want to check out the library there, see if they have a copy of My Name is Dirk A that hasn’t been stolen yet.

GM: Okay, you drive over to the Mayfair library to see if they have a copy of the book. But their selection of occult books is pretty sparse. It doesn’t look like they ever had a copy for circulation. It’s about 6 p.m. by the time you pull out. The sun’s getting low. Now what?

It’s a little like judo: You just take what they give you and redirect it straight back at them.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUES

Where appropriate, further empower the players’ intention by calling for an appropriate skill check: Streetwise to ask questions around the Docks. Detective to interrogate Jefferson Sienna. Library Use to scour the stacks at Mayfair Library.

The check can’t succeed, obviously, since you already know that there’s nothing to find here: Jessica wasn’t at the Docks. Jefferson Sienna isn’t involved in this. Mayfair Library doesn’t own the book.

Calling for the check, however, is part and parcel of allowing the player to truly pursue the action they want to pursue and resolving it truthfully within the context of the game world, while also letting the player know that this is what you’re doing.

If the group is currently split up, you can also “disguise” the simple judo of this interaction by cutting away once they’ve declared their intention and then cutting back for the resolution.

GM: Bruce, you find Jefferson Sienna smoking outside of his club. What are you planning to do here, exactly?

Player: I want to haul him down to the precinct and grill him about the missing diamonds.

GM: Great. Give me a Detective check. Tammy, what are you doing?

[run stuff with Tammy for a bit]

GM: Okay, Bruce, you spent the afternoon grilling Jefferson Sienna in Interrogation Room #1. What did you get on your Detective check?

Player: 18.

GM: Hmm. Okay. Unfortunately, you come up dry: He really doesn’t know anything. What are you doing after you cut him loose?

SCENES THAT DRIVE INTO A DEAD END

Sometimes it’s not the whole scene that’s a dead end (whether you planned it ahead of time or not): Jefferson Sienna wasn’t involved in the heist, but he’s heard word on the street that Joe O’Connell was the one fencing the diamonds. That’s an important clue!

… but then the PCs just keep asking questions. They’re convinced Sienna must know something else, or they’re just paranoid that they’ll miss some essential clue if they don’t squeeze blood from this stone. The scene has turned into a dead end.

Now what?

First, you can give yourself permission to just do a sharp cut: If the scene is over, the scene is over. Frame up the next scene and move on.

However, if the PCs are actively engaged with the scene and trying to accomplish something (even if it’s impossible because, for example, Sienna doesn’t actually know anything else), this can end up being very disruptive and feel very frustrating for the players.

You can soften the blow using some of the techniques we discussed above. (For example, you might cut to a different PC during a lull in the interrogation and then cut back to the PCs who were doing the interrogation while framing them into a new scene. You can also just ask, “What’s your goal here?” And when they say something like, “I want to make sure we know everything Sienna has to tell us,” you can judo straight off of that to wrap up the scene.)

But we can also borrow a technique that Kenneth Hite uses for investigative games: When the characters have gained all the information they’re going to get from a scene, hold up a sign that says “SCENE OVER” or “DONE” or something like that. The statement cues the players to let them know that there’s no reward to be gained by continuing to question the prisoner or ransack the apartment or whatever, while using a sign is less intrusive on the natural flow of the scene (so if there’s something they still want to accomplish of a non-investigative nature, the scene can continue without the GM unduly harshing the vibe).

You can adapt this pretty easily to other types of scenes, too. You’re basically signaling that the essential question the scene was framed around has, in fact, been answered, and you’re inviting the players to collaborate with you to quickly bring the scene to a satisfactory conclusion and wrap things up.

Then you can all drive out of the dead end together.

Possibly the single most important skill for a GM is pacing: Cool challenges, awesome drama, incredible roleplaying, stunning set pieces, breathtaking props. These are all great. But they can be rendered almost irrelevant if your sessions are bloated with boredom or choked with dead air. It won’t necessarily kill your game deader than a doornail, but the constant drag from poor pacing will make everything else a little harder and a little worse.

So a very large part of being a great GM is developing the tools and techniques to keep things moving and to keep the players engaged at the table. I’ve already written a whole series about the pacing of narrative elements, but effective pacing also includes the more practical elements of managing the moment-to-moment details of the conversation at the game table.

When it comes to mechanics, this often just boils down to resolving things swiftly and efficiently: Virtually any time that you’re interacting with the mechanics, the right answer is to move through the interaction as quickly as possible.

Note: This isn’t because we inherently don’t like mechanics or mechanical choices. It’s because the actual rote execution of the mechanic is usually not the interesting bit of the game and you want to get to the next interesting bit (which can just as easily be another mechanical choice as a cool character detail or dramatic dilemma). There are also MANY exceptions that prove this rule. For example, knowing when to build the stakes up around a specific, momentous die roll so that everyone at the table is holding their breath through every jittering bounce of the polyhedron can be a very effective technique.

A large part of this efficiency, of course, is simply knowing the rules. But it can also be techniques that let you essentially fake knowing the rules – like using a cheat sheet, prepping your scenario notes using a hierarchy of reference, or identifying the rules guru at the table who you can provide that mastery by proxy.

Of course, this can only take you so far. However, once you’ve more or less maximized your efficiency in mastering the rules, you can still push things farther still by multitasking – i.e., resolving multiple mechanical interactions wholly or in part simultaneously.

There are a number of ways that you can do this, but today we’ll focus on one of the easiest: Rolling multiple dice at the same time.

ATTACK + DAMAGE

Start by rolling your attack die and your damage die at the same time.

I’m not sure this really needs more explanation: Do it just a few times and you’ll quickly realize how much time you’re saving. Teach your players to do it, too! In a typical combat with fifteen combatants, your group will be making ninety attack rolls (or more!). If you’re saving just four seconds per roll, that adds up to 5 minutes per combat. Running three or four combats per session? That’s fifteen or twenty extra minutes of play!

This, obviously, assumes that you’re playing a game like D&D that has a randomized component to damage. But it broadly applies to any mechanic that uses two-step rolling: These mechanics rarely have a decision point between the two rolls, so there’s no reason not to make both rolls at the same time.

ROLLING MULTIPLE ATTACKS

On the GM side of the screen, you’ll often be making rolls for a whole gaggle of NPCs. Stop rolling them one at a time! If you’ve got five bad guys who are all attacking, scoop up five dice and roll all those attacks at the same time!

Often these bad guys are all using the same stat block and may even be attacking the same target, so it won’t really matter which die gets assigned to which bad guy. (You can almost think of a mob of eight goblins in melee as just being one mass that makes eight simultaneous attack rolls.)

But you can also use this technique with disparate stat blocks and/or bad guys attacking different targets. You just need to figure out how to assign the dice in front of you:

Color coding. Use dice with different colors and assign those colors to the different attacks. In my experience, this tends to work best when you can make long-term color assignments. (For example, when I make iterative attacks in 3^rd Edition I use red dice for the first attack, black dice for the second attack, and blue for the third.)

On the other hand, trying to remember that the ogre was blue, the goblin was red, the other goblin was purple, and… Wait was the ogre purple and the second goblin blue? … Yeah, it tends to bog down. There are workarounds for this (or maybe your memory is just better than mine), but you may want to use a different technique for assignments that vary from one encounter to the next.

Tip: One work-around that DOES work smoothly, though, is when you’re rolling for two groups of bad guys that are numerically distinct – five goblins and three ogres, for example. Roll five blue dice for goblins and three black dice for ogres and there’s really no confusion about which color goes with which group. This might also be “the five halflings attacking Alaris and the three halflings attacking Dupre.”

Read left to right. When you roll the dice, they’re generally going to scatter across the table. I tend to roll across the table in front of me (instead of in a straight line onto the table), so my dice tend to spread out left-to-right. I can then just “read” the dice left to right – assigning them to the bad guys on my list in the same order.

(You might find a top-to-bottom reading of the dice works better for you. Whatever works.)

Geometric reading. This is a similar technique, but rather than linearly assigning the dice, I’ll equate the cluster of the dice on the table to the grouping of the bad guys in the game world. A simple version of this is to take a left-to-right reading of the dice, as above, and then, similarly, look at the bad guys on the battlemap left-to-right from my point of view. But you might also look at the battlemap (or imagine the scene in your mind’s eye) and see that the bad guys are arranged in two ranks with three of them in the front rank, so you just grab the three dice closest to you for their attacks.

You can also flip this around and group according to target. So if the PCs are standing three abreast in a dungeon corridor, for example, the dice on the left will be those that target the PC on the left, and so forth.

The most important thing with these techniques is to not over-think it: Whatever method you’re using, quickly shift the dice for clarity (if at all) and then move immediately to resolution.

Note: Sometimes when I describe this technique, people will express concern about the possibility of cheating – e.g., assigning your best rolls to the bad guy with the most powerful attacks or whatever. Basically… don’t do that. If you want to cheat (and you shouldn’t), there are ways to do it with a lot less rigamarole.

If you’re concerned, hard-coded color coding avoids the issues entirely. In practice, it’s not really a problem: When I’m assigning the dice, I’m treating them as objects. It’s only after I quickly and definitively shift them to the appropriate stat blocks that I actually starting processing the numbers on the dice.

This technique of rolling fistfuls of dice is often only use to the GM, but there are systems where it may be useful to also teach it to your players. For example, the aforementioned iterative attacks of D&D 3^rd Edition: The groups where I can get the players to simultaneously roll all their color-coded attack dice and matching-colored damage dice at the same time sees combat resolve MUCH more quickly than in the groups where I can’t make that happen.

PRE-ROLLING

A final dice trick for speeding up resolution is to pre-roll the dice. For example, while the PC wizard is counting up his fireball damage you look ahead and see that the horde of goblins is going next: You know that regardless of the fireball, they’re going to attack the paladin. So you can scoop up those d20s, roll them, and have them ready to go once you’ve finished adjudicating the fireball.

There are two keys to pre-rolling:

• You have to be nigh certain that the circumstances of the battle aren’t going to change the character’s intended action.
• You have to be able to stick with the intended action even after seeing the roll and realizing it’s not going to work. (Some people find they just can’t resist the temptation to switch things up. That’s not a sin. Just be self-aware enough to avoid the problem by not using the technique.)

What’s really great is when you get a group of players who are mature enough and trusted enough that they can ALSO use this technique without any problems. I can’t express how amazing it can be to say, “Okay, David, what you are you doing?” and for David to immediately say, “I’m attacking the ogre, hitting him for 32 damage.” (In this case, David has also used an open difficulty number to good effect.)

And when you get a whole sequence of players doing the same thing – pre-rolling attacks, pre-rolling fireball damage, etc. — it can be like you’re playing a totally different game! You can just roar through the mechanical portion of combat, which then immediately opens up all kinds of space for the group to instead focus on the strategic choices, dramatic dilemmas, and narrative description of the conflict!

So grab those dice and get rolling!

In Numenera cyphers are one-use items scavenged from the ruined technology of an elder age. Often the utility of these items as perceived by the PCs will be only tangentially related to the item’s original function; the ultra-tech equivalent of ripping a laser out of a CD player and using to signal your squad mates. I’ve talked about cyphers at greater length in Numenera: Identifying Items, but the core concept is that they let the PCs do something cool once and then they’re cycled out for another cypher. Examples of cyphers include stuff like:

• A metallic nodule that can be attached to an item, allowing one to telekinetically manipulate it with a paired rubber glove.
• A disk-like device that shoots out paralyzing beams.
• A set of goggles that can be used to perceive out-of-phase creatures and objects.
• A metal amulet that surrounds the user in a field of absolute blackness.
• A cannister dispensing foam that transforms metal into a substance as brittle as glass.

Now that you know what a cypher is, here’s the tip:

To quickly create a memorable bad guy, roll on the random cypher table in Numenera and have the bad guy do that as “their thing.” When the fight’s done, the PCs will be able to scavenge the matching cypher from their corpse.

For example:

• A synthetic octopodal creature that telekinetically hurls large items at the PCs.
• A slender ungulate with “antlers” that are metallic discs emitting paralyzing beams.
• An invisible assassin droid that launches attacks from the out-of-phase interdimensional space where it lurks.

This technique works particularly well in Numenera because, as I discuss in Numenera: Fractal NPCs, creating NPCs in the Cypher System can be literally as easy as saying, “He’s level 3.” But then you can expand that to whatever level of detail you want (hence the “fractal” in “fractal NPCs”), which in this case would be adding the cypher-based ability.

However, you can achieve a similar effect in almost any system by simply grabbing an existing NPC stat block and slapping on the ability. (The only drawback is that scavenging may not be an assumed part of play in your game of choice, so you may lose that depth of experience unless you make a special effort to incorporate it.)

For example, if you wanted to make a tribe of orcs a little special, you might have them worship Glaubrau, Demon of the Nethershade. Take a standard orc stat block and then have them cloaked in absolute blackness. (The PCs can harvest their black blood to make an oily potion that imbues a similar effect.)

I’ve actually found myself using the Numenera cypher lists to achieve this effect across multiple systems, but there are often local equivalents. For example, random potion lists in D&D are somewhat more limited in their range of effect, but can work in a pinch. (If you’re running 5^th Edition, however, you might just cut to the chase by grabbing a copy of Arcana of the Ancients, which adapts a whole slew of cool stuff from Numenera for your D&D game, including some random cypher tables.)

Over the past couple decades, a design concept that has become fairly entrenched in D&D culture is that the PCs need to face X encounters of Y difficulty per day. The general idea being that the game is balanced (either intentionally or unintentionally) around their resources being chewed up across multiple encounters: If they face fewer encounters, there’s no challenge because (a) they will still have lots of resources left at the end of the day (thus suffering no risk) and/or (b) they burn up LOTS of resources per encounter (making those encounters too easy).

There is obviously a kernel of truth here, but there are also, frankly speaking, A LOT of problems with this design ideology. But that’s somewhat beyond the scope of this article. What I’m mostly interested in focusing on today is one specific element of game play that becomes a really problematic dilemma when combined with this design ideology:

Wilderness encounters.

See, the basic assumption is that the design of Dungeons & Dragons should be finetuned around X encounters of Y difficulty per day in which the value of X reflects the number of encounters in a typical dungeon. There are some problems with this idea that dungeons should be designed as a one day excursion, but laying that aside, this makes a lot of sense: The dungeon is the assumed primary mode of D&D play; therefore the game should be balanced around dungeon adventures.

But, of course, the density of encounters in a dungeon is inherently much higher than the density of encounters in a vast wilderness. Furthermore, even if you increased the density of wilderness encounters, the result would be to turn every wilderness journey into an interminable slog. If you assume that

X = a dungeon’s worth of encounters = one day’s worth of encounters

then a wilderness journey that took ten days would “logically” have ten times the number of encounters in a typical dungeon.

You don’t want to do that, so you make one wandering monster check per day in the wilderness: The players know that they’ll have at most one “dangerous” encounter per day, so they just nova all of their most powerful abilities and render the encounter pointlessly easy.

So what do you do?

Do you just strip wilderness encounters out of the game entirely? They’re pointless, right? But to delete an entire aspect of game play (and something that routinely crops up in the fantasy fiction that inspires D&D) feels unsatisfactory.

Perhaps you could artificially pack one particular day of wilderness travel with X encounters, turning that one day into a challenging gauntlet for the PCs. But that’s really hard to justify on a regular basis AND it still has a tendency to turn wilderness travel into a slog.

For awhile there was a vogue for trying to solve the problem mechanically, primarily by treating rest in the dungeon differently from rest in the wilderness. In other words, you just sort of mechanically treat one day in the dungeon as being mechanically equivalent to ten days (or whatever) in the wilderness. The massive dissociation of such mechanics, however, could obviously never be resolved.

Long story short, the dynamic which has generally emerged is for wilderness encounters to be REALLY TOUGH: Since the PCs can nova their most powerful abilities when facing them and there is no long-term depletion of party resources (including hit points), it follows that you need to really ramp up the difficulty of the encounter to provide a meaningful challenge.

In other words, dungeons are built on attrition while wilderness encounters are deadly one-offs.

There are several problems with this, however.

First, it creates a really weird dynamic: Instead of being seen as dangerous pits in the earth, dungeons are where you go to take a breather from all the terrible things wandering the world above. That doesn’t seem right, does it?

Second, the risk posed by these deadly one-off wilderness encounters is unsatisfying. In a properly designed dungeon, players can strategically mitigate risk (by scouting, retreating, gathering intel, etc.). This is usually not true of wilderness encounters due to them being placed either randomly (i.e., roll on a table) and/or arbitrarily (“on the way to Cairwoth, the PCs will encounter Y”).

(A robustly designed hexcrawl can mitigate this, but only to some extent.)

Finally, this methodology – like any “one true way” – results in a very flat design: Every wilderness encounter needs to push the PCs to their limits and thus every wilderness encounter ends up feeling the same.

So what’s the solution?

THE FALSE DILEMMA

The unexamined premise in these attrition vs. big deadly encounters vs. skip overland travel debates is often the idea that challenging combat is the only way to create interesting gameplay.

Partly this is the assumption that all random encounters have to be fights (and that’s a big assumption all by itself). But it’s also the assumption that if the players easily dispatch a group of foes that means nothing interesting has happened because the fight wasn’t challenging.

Neither of these assumptions is true.

Let’s back up for a second.

You’ll often hear people say that they don’t like running random encounters because they’re just distractions from the campaign.

Those people are doing random encounters wrong.

The “random” in “random encounter” refers to the fact that they’re procedurally generated. It doesn’t mean that they’re capricious or disconnected from their environment. I talk about this in greater detail in Breathing Life Into the Wandering Monster, but when you roll a random encounter you need to contextualize that content; you need to connect it to the environment.

And because the encounter is connected to the environment, it’s meaningful to the PCs: Creatures can be tracked. They can be questioned. They can be recruited. They can be deceived. The mere existence of the encounter may actually provide crucial information about what’s happening in the region.

Random encounters — particularly in exploration scenarios — are often more important as CLUES than they are as fisticuffs.

They can also be roleplaying opportunities, exposition, dramatic cruxes, and basically any other type of interesting scene you can have in a roleplaying game. As such, when you roll a random encounter, you should frame it the same you would any other scene: Understand the agenda. Create a strong bang. Fill the frame.

Once you recognize the false dilemma here, the problem basically just disappears. If the PCs have camped for the night and a group of orcs approaches and asks if they can share their campfire… do I even care what their challenge rating is?

If I roll up the same encounter and:

• The PCs subdue and enslave the orcs.
• The PCs rescue the slaves the orcs were transporting.
• The PCs discover the orcs were carrying ancient dwarven coins from the Greatfall Armories, raising the question of how they got them.
• The PCs follow the orcs’ tracks back to the Caverns of Thraka Doom.

Does it matter that the PCs steamrolled the orcs in combat?

I’m not saying that combat encounters should never be challenging. I’m just saying that mechanically challenging combat isn’t the be-all and end-all of what happens at a D&D table. And once you let go of the false need to make every encounter a mechanically challenging combat, I think you will find the result incredibly liberating in what it makes possible in your game.

The PCs kick in a dungeon door.

Description #1:

With the sharp crack of splintering wood, the door smashes open, revealing a room about forty feet across. The high, curved walls are lined with built-in shelves of cherry wood filled with books and warmly lit by a crystal chandelier that hangs from the middle of the domed ceiling. Five goblins are ripping books off the shelves, but their heads whip in your direction.

Description #2:

With the sharp crack of splintering wood, the door smashes open, revealing five goblins who whip their heads in your direction. The room is about forty feet across. The high, curved walls are lined with built-in shelves of cherry wood filled with books and warmly lit by a crystal chandelier that hangs from the middle of the domed ceiling. The goblins have been ripping books off the shelves.

Which description is more effective?

What we’re broadly looking at is whether it’s better to describe the monsters in a room FIRST or LAST.

(Disclaimer: Descriptions are an artistic expression and the given circumstances of any particular moment at the game table are limitless. So there will be a bajillion-and-one hypothetical exceptions to any general principles we might discuss. Think of anything I advocate here in the same way you’d interpret “don’t cross the line when shooting reverse angles” in film or “sentence fragments are bad” when writing fiction. Know the rules so you can break the rules.)

The argument for Monsters First is that it mirrors the crisis perception of the characters: If you opened a door and saw a slavering beast, all of your attention would be immediately focused on the monster. You wouldn’t take your time inspecting the rest of the environment and only THEN look at the monster!

It seems like a logical argument. The problem is that it ignores the actual experience of the characters: If you opened a door and saw a slavering beast, you would immediately want to REACT to that slavering beast. That’s the adrenaline-pumping crisis response (fight or flight!), and it’s why Monster Last is the correct technique. You want the player to be able to immediately react to the monster just like their character would. You don’t want to blunt that reaction by forcing them to wait until you’ve finished the rest of the description.

Note that this isn’t just a matter of associating the experience of character and player. It’s also about effective dramatic presentation: A director of a horror film, for example, wouldn’t follow up on a jump scare with an establishing shot that slowly pans across the scenery before showing the main character’s reaction to the monster!

Okay, but can’t we resolve this dilemma by just not describing the room? The character’s focus would be entirely on the slavering monster. If they’re not focused on the rest of the room, we just won’t describe it to them!

Description #3:

With the sharp crack of splintering wood, the door smashes open, revealing five goblins! Their heads whip in your direction.

Unfortunately, this approach ignores the limited bandwidth by which information about the game world is transmitted to the players (i.e., the GM’s voice).

Although the character may be fixated on the monster, their peripheral vision is immediately processing the environment: Where are the exits? Where can they hide? What are the defensible position? How can they attack? Not only can they take in the totality of their sensorium, they’re also capable of taking action while simultaneously continuing to observe their environment.

The player can’t do that: When they communicate their intended action to the GM, they’re monopolizing the same channel that would be used to give them a description of their character’s environment.

Two outcomes become likely:

First, the player will recognize the problem and ask clarifying questions to obtain the understanding of setting they’re lacking. (“Are there any obstacles that would stop me from charging them? Do I see anything I can dive behind?”)

Second, without understanding the environment, the players will take nonsensical actions. (You didn’t mention the giant chasm that runs across the room between them and the rabid mammoth, so now they’re charging straight into it even though that would be a ridiculous thing for their character to do? Whoops.) This, of course, will force you to stop and correct them, explaining the important context they didn’t know (even though their characters would have).

In either case, you’ve reverted to interjecting an environmental description between the revelation of the monster and the reaction (Monster First). Only it’s actually gotten worse because the presentation is now awkward and frustrating.

WHAT ABOUT A BATTLEMAP?

If you’re using a detailed battle map couldn’t you just reveal it to the players to provide essential environmental information? And then just verbally announce the five goblins in the room?

Sure thing! You could also use other visual references. Pictures are worth a thousand words. In terms of technique, though, this is still Monster Last: You’re use using the visual presentation to handle the room description.

(Or, at least, to make that presentation more efficient: I’ve found that even the best visual aids usually benefit from additional verbal details. The great thing is that you can multitask, usually delivering the additional details at the same time that you’re drawing or revealing the visual reference. The usual single channel of information at the game table briefly becomes multi-channel, which is great!)

WHAT ABOUT INITIATIVE?

Wait a minute. What about initiative?

We’ve been talking about that moment of instantaneous response as if it looked like this:

GM: Five goblins are ripping books off the shelves, but their heads whip in your direction. What do you do?!

Player: I yell, “Fire in the hole!” and throw a fireball in the room.

But doesn’t it actually look like this?

GM: Five goblins are ripping books off the shelves, but their heads whip in your direction. Roll initiative.

(rolling dice)

Player: 14.

Player: 8

Player: 21!

Player: 15.

Player: 16.

GM: (also rolls dice and does math) … okay. Looks like Bob is first. What are you doing, Bob?

This is actually something I addressed in the very first Random GM Tip I posted to the Alexandrian:

Have your players roll their initiatives at the end of combat. Use this initiative for the next combat. (Initiative modifiers essentially never change, so it doesn’t really matter when you roll the check.) When it looks like the PCs are about to encounter something, roll for its initiative and slot it into the order. If they don’t encounter it for some reason, no big deal.

Using this method, by the time combat starts, initiative is already completely resolved. As a result, there’s no delay while you ask for initiative, the dice are rolled, your players tell you their results, and then you sort the results into order. This allows you to start combat off with a bang and keep the ball rolling with that same high intensity. It means that when the players are ambushed, you can maintain that adrenaline rush of surprise instead of immediately undermining it with the mundane task of collecting initiative.

This method also means that initiative results are generally being collected at a time when other bookkeeping chores are being done anyway: After the heat of battle, wounds are being healed; corpses are being looted; equipment lists are being updated; and options are being discussed. Juggling a few extra numbers does not detract from that moment.

And you’ll notice that the reason for moving the resolution of initiative is the same reason for using Monster Last scene description: To capitalize on the moment of reaction to drive the players’ excitement into launching the new scene.

THE REACTION POINT

I’ve been talking about the initiation of combat, but there’s a general principle here:

1. Identify the reaction point (the point at which your players WANT to react);
2. Focus your description to that point; and
3. Clear away any detritus that gets in the way of the players immediately reacting.

The stronger the players’ desire to react, the more important this becomes.

You can also think of the reaction point as being literally the point where you’re asking the players for a response: You want that point to be as interesting as possible because you want to provoke a strong response from the players. Because that’s what will drive the action forward in interesting ways, which will let you easily frame the next reaction point to be as interesting as possible.

Examples outside of combat might include:

• Even though you just rolled the random wilderness encounter, make sure to set up the terrain first before describing the merchant’s wagon coming over the hill.
• Noticing that the eyes of the painting in the haunted house are following you should probably be the last thing described in the room.
• A beautiful, blue-haired man blows you a kiss from across the tavern’s common room.
• They notice someone following them.
• The Federales warchief demands the ship’s instant surrender.

Now, here’s the dirty secret that sort of inverts the idea of putting the most interesting thing at the reaction point: If you instead want the players to preferentially react to something in an otherwise undifferentiated list, put it at the reaction point. Psychologically this is due to recency effect. (The other strong position is to mention something first due to primacy effect. But for immediate choices – i.e., a direct response to a described scene – Miller & Campbell, 1959 identifies the last position as the stronger preference.)

For example, if there’s a pit trap under the fancy tabaxi rug in the middle room, drop the description of the rug in the middle of the room’s description and mention the shelves covered in knick-knacks on the far side of the room last: You increase the odds that a curious PC will cross the room (and the rug) to check out the shelves first.