The Dragon Speaks Common

I was DMing a one-shot the other day. Our usual DM (my wonderful wife) didn’t have time to plan a session because of work, so I threw this session together at pretty short notice. The game was set in the DnD equivalent of the wild west, where everyone talks with very bad cowboy accents and guns are common. These occasional one-shots that interrupt our main campaign tend to be very silly and I tend to use them as an opportunity to do more experimental stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily do in a full campaign, like throwing a Purple Worm at three level 5 characters (that’s a story for another time).

This game was designed to be a bit like an old-style dungeon crawl, with quite a lot of combat and the players worked their way through some caves full of fire elemental creatures like Azers and Fire Snakes, until the reached the end of the dungeon and found a Young Red Dragon, fighting which would be the dramatic finale of the session.

What actually happened was really very different from what I had planned, and I think there are some interesting lessons in the art of DMing from what transpired.

So, here’s how the session went. The players started in a tavern (classic) and we chatted briefly about how they had got to this point. Some of the characters had featured in these games previously, but there was one new character (the player’s previous character having been eaten by a Purple Worm - see, told you there was a story there) and some of the characters had not played together due to not being able to make sessions previously.

Suddenly, someone burst into the tavern proclaiming that “Fire Dwarves” (Azers to you and me) were attacking again. After some encouragement, the players swaggered out of the tavern and made short work of the encounter. They talked about recent events with some townsfolk and agreed to go investigate the source of the attacks. So far, so according to plan.

The players quickly found the right general area, and spotted a patrol of two Azers and a Fire Snake coming towards them. They hid with the help of Pass without a Trace, despite two stealth rolls under 5 (I hate that spell!), then followed the patrol back to the cave entrance. Having seen that the patrol went into the cave and was replaced by a new patrol, they reasoned that taking out the new patrol now would buy them more time, as it would take longer before their absence was noticed (They could have just gone into the cave at this point, but who was I to argue?).

With Pass without a Trace (I really hate that spell), the players were able to get a surprise round on the patrol, killing them before they were even able to take an action. Unfortunately, the Warlock decided that in order to kill them quickly, he would use Shatter. THE LOUDEST SPELL IN THE GAME. This of course brought every fire elemental in the area down on their heads, so between stealth checks (without Pass Without a Trace, concentration having been lost) and casting Rope Trick to create an extra-dimensional space in which to hide, the players were able to avoid notice.

They then decide to take a short rest. Yes. Having alerted everyone to their presence, then successfully lured their enemy out of their cave with Shatter (THE LOUDEST SPELL IN THE GAME), they decided that now would be a great time to sit down and chill for an hour. Again, who was I to argue?

While the players were resting, the Azers and Fire Snakes went back to their cave, back to the Elemental Plane of Fire and got a Salamander to help them defend their cave. Because they thought they were under attack, so sent for reinforcements. This Salamander wasn’t part of my original plan, because I wanted to save the big fight for the night for the dragon, and I had decided that a Salamander with a couple of allies would be too big of a fight and slow the session down too much to be worth putting in. But now it made no sense for there not to be something scary guarding the entrance to the cave. If the characters sit around doing nothing for an hour, then the bad guys are going to be making their own arrangements.

Once the players had finished their rest, they returned to the cave entrance and, after a bit of indecision, where they contemplated climbing the cliff-face and going in through the hole they had spotted up there, they decided an all-out frontal charge was appropriate. A pretty epic battle ensued, as players were being careful not to use their guns or loud spells, so had to get in close. In the heat of battle I forgot about the contact damage fire elementals have, which should have made the fight even better, but what can I say, I suck!

At this point we’ve been playing for a while (it’s a very slow, indecisive group), I can see my wife flagging on the sofa next to me, and despite my forgetfulness, the players were pretty beat-up from the Salamander. I try to hurry them along into the caves and through the dungeon that I had thought would take up most of the session. I scrapped a whole section of obstacles and challenges that they had to overcome, as I thought it would take too long, and got them fairly quickly to the dragon’s chamber, all the while racking my brain about how I could bring this session to a satisfactory conclusion, without spending 45 minutes to an hour on a fight with a dragon, by which point I think my poor wife would have been asleep!

I described the dragon’s chamber and the slightly comical horde of nicknacks and semi-valuable objects that the Azers had amassed for the dragon, lit by the sunlight streaming through hole in the cave ceiling. I did not describe the dragon being there though. It was out hunting or something, I decided on the fly. Some of the players stayed back, but a couple went rummaging through the horde for anything valuable or of sentimental value to the townsfolk that they could steal. As they were doing so a shadow fell across them as the dragon returned.

This was dramatic, I thought. Thieves caught in the act. Maybe they’ll run away and the dragon could chase them. But then I realised that the previous session we’d played at ended with a creature the players had no hope of fighting (a Purple Worm) chasing them through an abandoned mine (story!), and that felt repetitive.

Then I looked down at the Dragon stat block and looked at a section that I’d never really looked at before and I saw something. The Dragon. Speaks Common.

Maybe this is my lack of DnD experience coming through (I’ve only been playing and DMing for about 18 months), but as far as I was concerned, Dragons were monstrous creatures. They don’t speak the lingua franca. I didn’t think they even had the physical capacity for human speech. But there it was. In the stat-block. Common. The dragon speaks Common.

So instead of a dramatic battle, the players get a dramatic confrontation with a greedy and slightly megalomanic dragon, who demands that the players serve him and bring him trinkets. They say that they will (deception check, please), and manage to escape to fight the dragon next time my wife is too tired to plan our regular campaign.

So what is there to learn from my misadventures in the old west?

Well, firstly it pays to look at the whole stat block of your creatures, because the information can really help to inform how the monsters work, and therefore how to roleplay them.

Secondly, I think it’s not only possible, but desirable, or at least not undesirable, for sessions to sometimes end without a big confrontation. It’s possible to have a really dramatic finale that actually doesn’t require many dice rolls. I was frantically improvising throughout this scene. I felt like Gromit laying tracks in front of the train as it was moving. But it was fun. It was dramatic. It made a satisfying conclusion when I’d judged that the conclusion I had planned wasn’t achievable. Of course, you can plan for non-combat dramatic finales too. You probably should. It doesn’t always have to come down to a fight with the big bad.

The last, and I think most important thing is that things don’t always go to plan. In the session, players made a number of decisions that I didn’t expect and that were probably sub-optimal. They should have rested in town after fighting the Azers. They should have just gone into the cave when they reached it the first time. They shouldn’t have taken that short rest when they did. But those are their decisions to make.

As a DM, it’s not my place to impose my preconceived notions about how the adventure should play out on the players. They’re the players, their job is to play. As a DM, your job is to respond to their choices. Because they chose to cast certain spells, or take certain actions, the enemies responded in reasonable ways. Because the adventure took rather longer than I had expected and I wanted to rap things up in one session, things shifted behind the scenes. A lava lake disappeared, as did a sheer cliff and a tunnel of steam vents.

These were cool things that I had planned, but they mostly existed to provide a different challenge from just fights, wear down players’ hit points and extend the dungeon to make it more interesting. They weren’t necessarily, so they could go.

This is what DMing is all about. The dragon speaks common, the lava pit doesn’t exist, there’s a Salamander guarding the entrance. These are all things that weren’t true when the adventure started. They became true because of decisions the players made. It’s wrong to try to force a session to take the shape that you thought it would, because that’s not collaborative. The game is a conversation between the DM and the players. The DM leads the conversation, but what the players say and do matter. They can teach whole species how to speak.