Improvisation: Good or bad?

[Silus]

With relation to being the DM.

One of my players mentioned an annoyance with my "making it up as I go" style of DMing for my Horror session, so I just wanted to get some feedback from the Playground on ya'll's thoughts about this.

It's not that I don't know where the players are going, it's that I don't know what the condition of the road will be. For example, last session, I pulled a 1408 on them and pulled them back into the evil house they were in before a few sessions ago. In the basement is a large surgery room. Before, there were just corpses and surgical tools. This time, I, on a whim, had the room spiral 180 degrees (Started right side up, then about the center it had spiraled so the ceiling was the floor and vice-versa) with the gurneys, tables and whatnot staying on the "floor" (defying gravity). And when one of the PC's threw a coin across the floor, the coin held onto the curvature of the room (Bounced up onto the ceiling), but when they walked through, they were restricted to gravity. Didn't plan that ahead of time, but I think it worked and since I didn't expect it to happen, I'm pretty sure the players didn't expect it to happen.

[Keld Denar]

Its a GREAT spell. My bard casts it all the time!

Oh...wait...right...no further comment...

[Thufir]

Definitely good.

I mean, if you don't do anything you haven't planned in advance, you're liable to find you have to pause the session five minutes in to do some more planning.

[LibraryOgre]

I don't see a problem with it. IMO, the main goal of a DM needs to be a continuous game... if you have to stop to look everything up, it's annoying and breaks the flow. Making stuff up on the fly is fine... so long as you don't stare at them for 30 seconds with each new room.

[MammonAzrael]

A lot of it is personal preference. Mine is a good mix of planning and improve. You should have a general idea of what is going on in your world, that grows more specific the more likely it is to affect your players. And unless it is explicitly a sandbox game you should have at least the outline of the story you wish to tell. That being said, your story needs to be able to adapt and react to what your players do, and allow them to change and influence things in your world.

And be ready for those actions completely out of left field by being able to roll with them and integrate them.

[Kiero]

Not simply good, but a necessary part of being a GM.

[Callista]

Very necessary, but no substitute for preparation.

My general approach is to make up a pile of NPCs and locations the characters could encounter and patchwork them in as necessary.

[DMfromTheAbyss]

I'd say from my years of DM (GM)-ing experience that being spontaneous is an important and good thing for a DM to be, on account of no matter how much planning you do the PC's WILL find something you hadn't planned for.

Planning IS important, especially for new DM's but sometimes the spontaneous things you come up with are much cooler/better balanced and take into account what's going on than any plan, becouse you as a DM can adapt to make things more fun for everyone. (having a whole slew of traps for the dungeon crawl planned.. then the Thief doesn't show for the game kind of thing)

That being said you have to make the things that happen make sense within the larger framework of the game, remember to ask WHY and HOW it happened.

You had a cool psychological Horror thing happen that the PC's couldn't explain, just remember there has to be an actual reason it happened. (My guesses would be Haunting phenomena from a powerful ghost screwing with the living, a planar rip with the far realm, ritual gone wrong, sprites with illusions, or least satisfying A wizard did it.. though that gets acceptable if you can name the specific wizard responsible.) This leads to using those inspiring moments to build on for the game, as a good GM never turn down a good source of ideas for further trouble for the PC's.

[aquaticrna]

I personally have had to almost completely forgo almost planning because my players always managed to do things so out from left field that even my best laid plans became useless. I usually show up to a session with a sentence or two about what i would like to see happen and then go from there. The main exception to that is when the party is approaching a major boss fight/lair/dungeon, that i can me sure enough of to actually draw maps and design rooms and crazy stuff like that. So i guess what i'm saying is improve: critical; planning: good, great if you have a party that is really super predictable

[Rixx]

Improvisation is good if you're using it to change on the fly what you have planned. Going into a session completely blind with no ideas is bad.

[Silus]

I'd say from my years of DM (GM)-ing experience that being spontaneous is an important and good thing for a DM to be, on account of no matter how much planning you do the PC's WILL find something you hadn't planned for.

Planning IS important, especially for new DM's but sometimes the spontaneous things you come up with are much cooler/better balanced and take into account what's going on than any plan, becouse you as a DM can adapt to make things more fun for everyone. (having a whole slew of traps for the dungeon crawl planned.. then the Thief doesn't show for the game kind of thing)

That being said you have to make the things that happen make sense within the larger framework of the game, remember to ask WHY and HOW it happened.

You had a cool psychological Horror thing happen that the PC's couldn't explain, just remember there has to be an actual reason it happened. (My guesses would be Haunting phenomena from a powerful ghost screwing with the living, a planar rip with the far realm, ritual gone wrong, sprites with illusions, or least satisfying A wizard did it.. though that gets acceptable if you can name the specific wizard responsible.) This leads to using those inspiring moments to build on for the game, as a good GM never turn down a good source of ideas for further trouble for the PC's.

*Laughs* I just explained it as "It's an evil fething house".

Spoiler

Show

The father found a "Thing" in the basement (A copy of the Carcosa Codex), and everything started getting weird. His wife and daughter died via a strange illness, and he slowly went mad trying to decipher what the Codex was and trying to reanimate his daughter (Herbert West style). The house and the foundation began getting saturated with the evil strangeness of the Codex, and reality began warping until the entire house became a malevolent quasi-sentiant construct with reality warping powers and a hunger for souls driven to madness (It manifests the souls as oozing shadows (Like the Shadow Temple place from Fable 3 where you encounter The Crawler for the first time)).

[Dralnu]

Necessary, as others have said. Planning can only help you so much, and excessive planning can become an enormous time sink / burden. I find that the best campaigns are a good blend of planning and improvisation.

That's the true beauty of D&D campaigns, in my opinion. You tell the story. You're not bound by a set-in-stone campaign, nor should you be. If something awesome pops into your head that wasn't planned, who says you shouldn't add it in? It's not like the players know anyway. All they know is that it kicks ass.

[valadil]

Absolutely necessary. A GM who can't improvise is hardly a GM IMO. Not that you want to pull a dungeon out of thin air, but you have to be ready to improvise when the players go in a direction you didn't predict.

[fortesama]

You'll need improvisation as no matter how you carefully craft your games, your players are guaranteed to do some completely unexpected things at unexpected times, or otherwise grind your plot into fine paste.

Besides, that's part of the fun of being a GM.

[Zaq]

Like everything else, it's good when it's done well, and it's bad when it's done poorly. I've seen (and done) both, as I'm sure we all have. Good improvisation can lead to some of the most memorable sessions you'll ever play, and bad improvisation can lead to stuff you'll be regretting for months (unless you force yourself into a retcon).

[Savannah]

As a rule, it's good and frequently essential to keeping the game running. However, given the "making it up as you go" comment, I'm wondering if the player is feeling it's unfair. If you're making stuff up just to screw with the players, then it's bad (barring an explicit agreement prior to the game that everyone wants to play that sort of game).

Is this the same player from your earlier thread who doesn't care for horror games? Horror tends to have more "unfair" things happen to the players, and that player might just not like it when s/he doesn't feel like everything's using the same rules.

[Mastikator]

It's either improvisation or blatant railroading that are the options, because players always will derail whatever you've set up for them and it's impossible to think of everything in advance.

[Silus]

As a rule, it's good and frequently essential to keeping the game running. However, given the "making it up as you go" comment, I'm wondering if the player is feeling it's unfair. If you're making stuff up just to screw with the players, then it's bad (barring an explicit agreement prior to the game that everyone wants to play that sort of game).

Is this the same player from your earlier thread who doesn't care for horror games? Horror tends to have more "unfair" things happen to the players, and that player might just not like it when s/he doesn't feel like everything's using the same rules.

No no, different player. The guy that does not watch horror things actually things I'm playing the house straight.

I think the comment stemmed from my comment beforehand that I'm kinda making things up as I go. I then clarified that I know where the PC's have to get to and what they have to get done, I'm just a little fuzzy on how to get there.

The unfair bit I think may be justified though. They are currently stuck in an area inspired by the Library in Karazahn (raid dungeon from World of Warcraft) with non-euclidean geometry and massive twisting, spiraling bookcases. All around them, just outside of the bounds of the Aasimar Paladin's Daylight spell, are Shadows. Like, legions of them. It gets less dangerous as they head upwards, but the Shadows have begun to pool into a vast lake of inky blackness on the ground floor. I've more or less ruled that if they even TOUCH the Shadow masses, the things latch on and devour them like the "Vashta Nerada" from the Dr. Who episode "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead".

The House is getting ready to enter the Endgame, and things are only going to get worse.