Well my usual track record of poorly maintaining any sort of blog continues. Ah well. Saturday we had a smaller group of players than usual meaning the meat grinder, ass destroying dungeon I had been working on for the past few weeks was probably going to be a bad idea. So after an afternoon of hellish, neurotic introspection I quickly slapped together a two hour adventure. And hey, the players really seemed to enjoy themselves.
The tendency exists, especially when you have a group as cat-herdingly likely to get together as ours, to try and get a five to six hour game in. But such a game can also lead to boredom, which in the world of hand held wireless internet, can lead to looking at cat pictures and porn at the gaming table, which leads to the ADD, porn addicted DM to stop to look, which force feeds the Ouroboros of suck that you find yourself in. The quick pickup game can be an enthusiasm shot to the arm your game needs. It's a chance to try little quirky ideas that you might not be able to shoe horn into a large adventure. It can also be a chance to work out your free-form muscles, especially if you tend to be a DM that over plots things.
I myself use them for this. I tend to over plan and overwrite when prepping an adventure, which leads to the infrequency I run games. It's a good exercise to say, "OK. This is the situation. Let the players work through this and I'll respond in kind." While I don't endorse loosey-goosey games all the time since they can lead to players milling around confused, its at times better to run that then nothing.
For example, the last game the party was given the task by Dwarven Mr Miyagi as voiced by Scruffy the Janitor to retrieve a crystal that is needed to open a door into the dungeon I had planned. It was being used as a bit of bling by an ice oni that had taken over a tribe of frost giants. Now what I did was work out a few set pieces and design the giant camp and think to myself a few ideas of what the players *might* do to get in and get the gem key so I wasn't completely unprepared.
It went well. The party managed to negotiate with one of the giants for entry, who as a whole weren't real thrilled with the sadistic oni running things. Now the party could have attacked the giants, they could have tried to hide from them and try to sneak into the camp, they could have done any number of things I didn't anticipate. But the cool thing is the party got to work things out themselves rather then have it rammed down their throats. It lead to a fun, challenging fight with the oni and a couple of his goons and some fun role playing moments that might not have happened with a larger group.
You don't have to have a smaller game be free form. I simply prefer my more free form games to be smaller since the shorter the time the less chances of you doing a royal pooch screw. Free form games are fun, but are a juggling session. The longer you have those balls in the air the better chance you have of dropping them. You can run a very fine, well prepared shorter game and I have done so many many times. But don't be afraid of improvisation.
Running a game with little prep is great exercise every now and then and will help your DMing in the long run. Thinking on your feet is an acquired trait and has little to do with how smart you are. Some of the smartest people I know are horrible at it. It's something you're only going to learn by putting yourself out there. It's the nature of the beast and it's best to get used to it. Now before we get ahead of ourselves let me caution don't step out cold into the game. Even the best comedians have a lot of their material pre-memorized. Sitting and thinking through as to what you think your players might do is a very good idea so you're not caught completely flat footed. Understand though that nine times out of ten they're going to do something you didn't think of, and a lot of times the best thing you can respond with is, "Yes."
It's a tendency of DMs to panic when an idea comes up they didn't think of. I'm as guilty of this as anybody. But I've learned if the idea isn't hand roasting hot dogs stupid ("I wanna hug this clearly trapped statue! Pass the Buffalo Sauce! Woogadity WOO!") go with it. Stop a second and think it through when you're shooting an idea down. Are you doing it because it's a moronic idea or because you didn't think of it and your knee-jerk reaction is shooting it down? Trust me; going with it leads to much better free-form games that your players will like a heck of a lot more.
Well this post kind of drifted off subject but ah well. As a final note I am currently working on a story, which a lot of my wanting to write mojo has gone into. If there is any interest outside of the people that have already seen it I'll post some of it here to see what people think. As always please feel free to leave comments so that the black hole is my ego can be fed. I'm telling you, when this sucker gets a 100 views I'm going to post a video of my polypy self dancing a jitterbug. Just cause.
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