Dungeon of the Week. How GMing other systems made me a better DM

It may surprise some people to know that there are other TTRPGs out there other than DnD. Ok, that’s unfair. I think we all know that other TTRPGs exist, the idea that DnD is the only one comes largely from the popular imagination, influenced by lazy pop culture references. The real question is, how many DnD players and DMs have actually played in, or GMed for different TTRPGs other than DnD?

I suspect that the answer is quite a lot, but not not a huge percentage of total players. This is not in itself a problem. You don’t have to play games other than DnD. But I think the all-pervasive dominance of DnD over the hobby is detrimental in some ways. I think the lack of exposure players and DMs have to different ways games are designed and intended to be played leads us to assume that DnD can only be played in certain ways because we’ve never known anything different.

Take splitting the party. It is a bit of a cliche in DnD that splitting the party is a bad idea and a good way of getting characters killed. But in some game systems, splitting the party is actively encouraged. I’m currently DMing a DnD group where we frequently split the party for large parts of sessions and I think it has made the game more fun and the story more realistic. There’s probably a whole blog post about how conventional wisdom, such as “don’t split the party” is not necessarily true and can be safely ignored if you have the right mindset as a DM.

That’s not this blog post though. This post is all about how playing other games, or specifically one other game, has made me better at DMing. The game I want to talk about is called Monster of the Week (MotW). A game made by Michael Sands based on TV shows like Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files. I’m not singling out MotW because it’s the best alternative to DnD (although it is very good), I’m singling it out because it’s the only other game I’ve ever GMed! I’m sure there are many similar or equally interesting lessons to be learned from using other systems, I just haven’t.

MotW uses the Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) system. In this system, you roll 2d6 and add your relevant modifier. On a 10+ you succeed. On a 7-9 you succeed at a cost, on a 6 or less, you fail and something bad happens. That’s it. That’s the basic system. Each game obviously has its own spin on these rules, but you could play any of the many PbtA games right now with only dice you can find in most board games, a sheet of basic moves and a 1 page character sheet. No need for a set of dice with at least seven different dice, or a four page character sheet full of complicated rules and words you don’t understand. Simple.

We can’t bring that simplicity into DnD. We don’t really want to. DnD is relatively complex, and that’s part of what makes it robust and fun to play. But there are certain elements of the way in which MotW is designed that I bring into my DMing style, and it makes my games better. I can definitively say that since I started GMing for MotW, I am a better DM.

I want to talk about three things that I use in basically every game I run, which I have taken directly from MotW. Firstly, the range of success and failure on dice rolls mentioned above. Secondly, the use of a countdown when creating threats for the players to combat. And thirdly, the philosophy that the game is a conversation between the GM and the players.

Dice rolls

Dice rolls in DnD can often feel very binary. Meets it beats it. If you roll a dice and you meet or exceed the number the DM made up, you succeed, if you don’t, you don't, and there’s rarely a real consequence to a failure except that you don’t progress the story.

It doesn’t often matter whether you fail by 1 or by 10, likewise, whether you meet the number or fly past it often doesn’t make a difference. Sure, the DM might describe how well or badly you do, but mechanically there is little to distinguish a success by lots from a success by few, and a fail by many from a fail by few. Some abilities do have a “fail by more than 5” condition, which I like, and individual DMs will often confer extra benefits or penalties to extremely high or low rolls, but this is not systematic.

Instead, I use something very similar to the PbtA system described above. Usually, I split the range of rolls as follows:

<5 - total failure resulting in some kind of consequence - damage or the character being put into a difficult or awkward situation

5-10 - failure, resulting either in a less severe or no consequence.

11-15 - mixed success - the character gets some of the information, they are able to do most of what they were trying, or there is some kind of hard choice or price to pay for the success.

>15 - total success - the character gets exactly what they wanted.

I don’t use this for every single roll. There are some things like deception checks where the answer generally is pretty binary, so it doesn’t always work. Similarly, at higher levels where modifiers start to get a bit silly, I would shift the matrix above to make it harder. But generally, I either plan die rolls with the above matrix explicitly stating what each state grants the player, or improvise it when a player makes a roll I hadn’t planned for (which is most of the time).

Once you get the hang of it, this is not much more complex than setting a DC, and makes for more interesting results. There are levels of success, so rolling really well has some mechanical benefit. Similarly, if you roll only ok, it makes sense that you get some but not all of the way there. Most importantly, failure has a consequence, which is more narratively interesting and can help to progress the story.

In the PbtA system, failures are often just as interesting and impactful on the story as successes. Failures allow the GM to progress the plans of the enemies and increase the tension in the story. Failure is bad for the character, but it is often better for the story than a success. DnD isn’t designed like that. Often failing a roll just means players miss something important, or can’t solve a problem, so the story doesn’t progress. Failure becomes boring, when it should be fun.

Using countdowns to make enemies more interesting

In MotW, when you plan your session, you base it around a countdown clock, which sets out what the antagonists would do if the heroes never showed up and stopped them. This gives the GM a really clear idea of the antagonists motivation and plans, and allows them to respond to the choices of the players.

As the players arrive and start to find out about, or even disrupt these plans, the countdown clock advances. If players thwart some element of the plan, other elements may be progressed, or different wrinkles in the plan get revealed, increasing the tension in the story. The session becomes a race against time for the players to stop the antagonists from succeeding in their plan.

This way of planning forces you to focus away from the PCs and onto the character you actually have control of. This shifts your planning focus away from working out what the players will do, which often leads to railroading, or can leave you floundering when the players do something you hadn’t thought about. Your antagonists will become more fleshed-out, with more detailed plans, which will add realism and depth to your story. Rather than sit around waiting for the players to come along and kill them, your NPCs will be more active and therefore more of a threat.

The nice thing about this style is that you can have several different groups of antagonists working on different plans, so when the players deal with one of them, the others’ plans will progress, as the players weren’t there to stop it. This allows the wider story to keep ramping up in intensity, even while the players seem to be being successful.

Most importantly, it allows you to let the players do what they want to do, without worrying that the game will stall. If players want to ignore your plot hook and go shopping, that’s fine, because once they’re done faffing around, the situation they’re supposed to be dealing with will have got worse, and that’s their problem. Equally, if players throw you by doing something that you hadn’t anticipated, that’s ok, because you just need to work out how the antagonist is going to respond to this move.

The game is a conversation

This style of GMing allows the story to grow organically. Rather than the GM being the sole arbiter of the story, with the players trying to fit into the GM’s vision, suddenly everyone around the table is a collaborator. The GM knows what the antagonists are trying to do, the players are trying to stop whatever it is from happening. There are no planned ways in which they do this, they have to work it out for themselves.

I think this is what we mean by a ‘sandbox’ game. It’s not that the players just wander around aimlessly, tripping over plot hooks and exploring places without any real aim. I don’t think that would be very fun, and it would put an unfair amount of pressure on the GM to either prepare everything the players could do in advance or improv it all on the spot. Instead, the players are presented with a problem that will keep getting worse the longer they ignore it, and what they do about it is up to them.

The result of this is sessions that are collaborative, and a story that has evolved based on the choices of the characters in the story. It makes the game a conversation between the players involved, not a process of working out the right way to progress through the story the GM has made up.

This philosophy can go even further. Worldbuilding can be a conversation. You don’t need to have everything decided, or be able to improv an answer to every question. Why not let the players decide? Their characters inhabit this world, let them define parts of it. Let these choices affect the story. It’s ok to answer a question from a player with “I don’t know, you tell me?”

DMing is a lot of work. It would be disingenuous of me to say that implementing the above tips makes it dramatically easier, but I think adopting these ideas will make your games better and once you’re used to them, it does make planning easier, as you have less to think about, and removes the pressure on world building. It might make your job at the table harder, because you have to improvise more, but the more you practice, the easier this gets too.

I’m curious to hear whether any other DMs reading this have had similar experiences with other game systems. Do you port mechanics or design philosophies from other games into your DnD sessions? How does this improve the gameplay experience? Hit me up on twitter, tumblr or in the comments below, I’d love to have more ideas to steal!