How to go with the flow while running adventures
#024 - Insights and reflections from two decades of gaming
This blog post is for GMs and purely based on my individual experience in running TTRPGs since the early 2000s. But I already feel that I’ve picked a challenging topic in that there is a multitude of ways to having fun with (OSR) adventures. There’s not just one way to run them. Various referees / GMs will bring different approaches to procedures, pacing, roleplaying, etc., and different groups will enjoy varying styles of play. Thus, don’t read this as the definitive guide to running adventures.
I’m a passionate GM and take on the role of game master in almost every session I’m lucky enough to be a part of. And for many years, I was very anxious and nervous about doing everything right and putting in a “good performance,” whatever that means. And most of the time, that made things worse.
The following tips offer helpful advice on how to approach sessions with a more relaxed mindset. Above all, this means “going with the flow.”
1. Don’t drown them in details
Topic: Immersion is very important to me. While not every single session needs to devolve into long role-playing segments filled with deep conversations between the characters, I’ve learned that being able to immerse oneself a bit in the world—and especially in the specific setting of the session—is important for a smooth-running game session.
Problem: When I was younger, I spent a lot of time preparing descriptions. Way too much. I would describe to my players, as they rode through a wooded valley, the individual plant species, the color gradients on the mountainside, rock layers, the lighting in the mountain villages, artisanal items, and where each NPC had pimples on their face (okay, it was not quite that bad...).
Until one player told me, “You’re not Tolkien, are you?” She just wanted to get to the point and start playing. Ouch. That 10-minute immersive monologue didn’t help. It ruined the pacing before we’d even gotten started.
Solution: Keep it simple but specific. Yes, you do want specifity, but don’t bore them. Look at Gavin Norman’s OSE style nails this: The screenshot below from his classic adventure The Incandescent Grottoes has it all: colors, smell, sound, direction, specific details, but not too many. You can describe the scene in a flash and get going. Even better: choose the details you are describing so that they enable the players to make meaningful decisions or understand the setting better.
2. Read the adventure (or prep your own)
Topic: Especially in the context of OSR gaming, it is often implied that an adventure is particularly good if you can run it straight from the book without any preparation. I can’t agree with that. Yes, there are some dungeons that are actually so simple and well-structured that this is possible. The example shown above is one such dungeon. Nevertheless, I would advise against it.
Problem: You’ll miss important details that, for example, would allow you to foreshadow certain aspects of the adventure, or perhaps you won’t understand the factions’ motivations and won’t be able to respond meaningfully to the players’ exploration on the spot. In the worst case, you’ll have to spend a long time flipping through the book or your notes, which can disrupt the flow of a session and ruin the suspense.
Solution: Read and prep the adventure. At least the parts that players are likely to experience. This tip may sound obvious, but I feel I have to mention it. Yes, a (pre-written) adventure should present its information in a way that’s easy to access and find thanks to excellent layout (see our blog post about that), but it’s your job as the GM to maintain an overview.
3. Focus your preparation on tangible game material
Topic: Right, so prepping too much and in too great detail is a problem, we’ve covered that. But you definitely should prep. So, what would be a good thing to spend a little time on before a session? Let’s stay with Gavin Norman for a while and look at his recent release Dolmenwood, which I currently run bi-weekly for one of my groups. It is undoubtedly one of the richest, most detailed OSR settings around, and thus sometimes marketed as a low-prep game. I love it, but that’s far from my experience.
Problem: A game like Dolmenwood gives you a ton of material to work with, which in itself can be a source of anxiety if you’re really committed to bringing the richness of the setting to life at the table. The screenshot below shows an excerpt from the game’s monster book: in addition to an illustration and the obligatory stats, it includes further details such as the characteristics of individual specimens of this monster type, specific scenarios for encounters, and ideas for where this creature might hide. That’s fantastic and very useable, but if you look deeper, it creates a lot of “work,” if you try to generate this at the table.
As the referee, you roll for all these details, only to realize that other creatures are involved in this specific encounter, which you then have to look up, read through, and individualize. Perhaps there are herbs, spells, or items involved that you need to keep in mind or look up, too. Generating such an encounter at the table on the fly can easily lead to a ten-minute interruption in the game.
Solution: Prep encounters beforehand. I took two hours to create a very detailed encounter table for the region where my players are currently traveling. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to handle the sheer volume of material during the live session. Of course, few games are as meticulously detailed as Dolmenwood, but this example is meant to show what kind of preparation pays off: gameable, highly specific material that you can immediately incorporate into a scene.
Specific stuff like doors (as described by Murkdice).
4. Embrace random tables mindfully
Topic: Creative, funny, and interesting random tables—not just for encounters, but for all sorts of things—are, in my opinion, definitely part of what makes OSR so appealing. You can pull out a table during the most absurd, epic, or ordinary moments and steer the story in an interesting direction with a single roll. Do that.
Problem: Issues arise when you try too hard to stick to what the dice tell you. Although I would generally recommend embracing randomness and incorporating the dice roll into your game, it often happens that the flow and pacing suffer if you stick to this too rigidly. Recently, toward the end of a session, just before the satisfying conclusion of a subplot, I rolled for an encounter with a pack of rather dangerous monsters. Had I run the encounter exactly as the dice dictated, I would have robbed my players of their sense of accomplishment and might even have overwhelmed them.
Solution: Go with the rolls, but trust your gut and make decisions based on the situation. In the example above, I simply had my players come across the corpses of these monsters, and letting them complete their task really paid off in terms of the overall atmosphere.
5. Don’t fudge the dice carelessly
However, the example above isn’t meant to suggest that you should always ignore the dice. On the contrary, as this story proved to me last year:
The 1-in-1,280 Death
The odds were 0.078%. Or 1 in 1,280. It wasn't a dramatic boss fight. No showdown. No epic final move. A fight against smugglers that my players had instigated themselves. The battle was almost won, one of the last remaining, already wounded opponents – a nameless NPC – fired a quick, untargeted shot at one of my PCs, actually the leader of the party. A…
6. Read the room and listen to your players
Topic: We referees and game masters don’t sit at the table alone, nor do we bear sole responsibility for the success of a session. But even if not all groups have the opportunity to discuss feedback in detail, there are ways to learn about the players’ preferences and use that information to make for a great session.
Problem: When you’re so deeply immersed in your pre- and post-game preparations, as a GM you always run the risk of getting carried away in a direction that doesn’t align with your players’ interests. If you go with the flow, you’ll create better gaming experiences than if you try to force your plans on them.
Solution: In the Mothership Warden’s Operations Manual, Sean McCoy calls the player characters’ set of skills a wishlist. In a very clever way, he shows that the skilly players choose indicate what topics they are interested in, what stories they want to experience, and also what they hope to do with their characters. It made me understand how much my players are telling me without words.
The same is true for the class the players might be choosing, their characters’ gear, and so on. For example, a few weeks ago, I was preparing to run a homebrew cinematic scenario of the ALIEN RPG on a weekend. Initially, I created a scenario within a derelict, half-flooded research station. It would have been a lonely, claustrophobic survival experience. When making characters with my players in Session 0, though, they decided to portray a charismatic band of smugglers with many sociable characters.
Although my players had never said so outright, it became clear to me that they were actually hoping for an adventure with interactive NPCs for the upcoming weekend. So I rewrote my scenario, and we played a game set in a bustling colony, which suited the group’s mood much better.
7. Get their feedback immediately
Topic: You learn with experience. To really know what worked and what didn’t, you need to speak with your players. You need to learn about your audience. This will make you much more comfortable with running games and improvising scenes for them.
Problem: If you ask for general feedback after a gaming session, you often don’t get anything useful. You either get vague, insubstantial praise (out of politeness) or equally vague criticism. In the worst-case scenario, someone gets hung up on some minor detail they didn’t like, which means everyone goes home with a sour taste instead of the excitement they’d felt just minutes earlier at the end of the session.
Solution: A technique called Stars & Wishes did the trick for me. Instead of soliciting generic feedback, all players are asked to name one highlight of the session. This could be a scene, another player’s performance, a plot twist, a good roll, or anything else. In this way, positive experiences are shared collectively. However, this isn’t just about self-congratulation; it also shows the GM what’s going over well and what’s working. Of course, this doesn’t mean you have to follow every single suggestion, but it does offer potential for new insights. After that, the players are asked if they have any specific requests for the next session. I’ve learned a lot this way.
8. Let them laugh
Topic: Sometimes you have to remind yourself that this is a game, after all. We all (?) want deep, immersive experience, but in the end the players need to let off some steam and catch their breath every now and then.
Problem: Back when I was very anxious about creating the perfect game experience, I thought that clearly conveying the lore of a gameworld (and players who dive right in and memorize it) was very important for a good session. It certainly can be, but there’s no guarantee. Being strict with and upset about players not engaging with the lore as intended, makes it easy to scare off people who just want to have fun at the table.
Solution: Just relax. Players laughing and having fun at the table helps you. Not only will people come back to play again, but being relaxed and jokey for some time will make the awe-inspiring moments of your story even more memorable. Laughter doesn’t break immersion. It resets it.
9. Get your pacing right
For that, explore the following blog post we shared about pacing last year:
Wandering Monsters Never Sleep
As in most years, all my TTRPG groups (there are several …) took their summer break in July/August. They have all resumed playing in September and some of our respective first sessions didn’t go too well. They weren’t bad either but somewhat sluggish, which is not unusual after a long break. And although I was simply exhausted after the
Going with the Flow
After all these years, I’ve realized that running a good session isn’t about getting everything right. It’s not about knowing every detail, using every table perfectly, or delivering the most immersive description possible. It’s about keeping things moving.
What did you learn about going with the flow of your game sessions?
Just a few updates about what’s new at Golem Productions:
New translations of our adventures are being negotiated.
Our Ravaged by Storms books have arrived in the US, but haven’t cleared customs, yet.
This is the last week of our pre-order store. After that, we close.
“From pebble to monolith—your journey matters. The Golems have spoken.”
Alexander from Golem Productions