Short backstory: About 3 months ago, I was designated to DM a table of mutual friends. There are 4 players, with varying levels of experience (1 has played in 5 previous campaigns, 1 has dabbled in TTRPG's such as Pathfinder, 1 listens to a ton of podcasts and the other has absolutely no idea what is going on). I was given 2 weeks notice to have a session prepared. I made an executive decision on the Hoard of the Dragon Queen module. Players were indifferent to the setting as they were just excited to play.
It's been an endless source of anxiety for me whenever I think about Saturday evenings. As this is my first time ever being a DM, after only 3 previous sessions of TTRPG's at all, I don't know how to balance player actions vs. an appropriate setting response. I will admit, in some cases I felt it necessary to railroad my players into moving the plot along. The players thus far have taken it in stride and we've had some exciting character building moments because of it. In those moments, I do feel confident in what I do. However along comes a moment where I simply have no idea how to respond.
My lightly experienced player (Tiefling Path of the Beast Barbarian) has a backstory that details a lineage of dragon hunters, and has come up with an idea to light a large fire at the entrance to a cave, to effectively suffocate anything alive inside, that has some module imperative (I think) moments. My struggle comes from the battle of "Rule of Cool/I don't get to control PC actions" vs "I don't know how to provide these PC's with module imperative knowledge/key items.
This isn't the first time an idea has been posed that circumvents what the module had in mind for potential player actions, so I have NO CLUE how to proceed.
First of all, props to you for taking on the task of being a DM without having much experience. It's not easy and, guess what: you're doing just fine.
Modules are more newbie-friendly than homebrew campaigns because some of the heavy lifting is already done for you, but they do not (and cannot) account for what will happen in a given session. Players will constantly do things you don't expect that force you to pull something out of thin air. This is normal for even the most seasoned DMs. You're not bad at balancing agency and story, you're just...one of us.
So what can you do when you get thrown for a loop? Here's some tactics:
1. Breathe. If you need a minute to think, take it. Your job is hard and you cannot be expected to have all the answers all the time, without hesitation. It's perfectly okay to say, "Yeah, I wasn't prepared for that. Gimme a sec to figure this out." It breaks immersion, sure, but you're learning on the job, here. As you get more experience, you'll be able to do this on the fly. Trust me, the improv gets better.
2. Consider the greater objective and do your best to point the party toward it. If your players decide to burn down a town that had important secrets, well, them's the breaks. You can have them find vital intelligence in the form of a half-burned communique instead of an encounter with an NPC, if it's critical to the story progressing. And if it's not, then it's the players' responsibility to figure out what to do next. Or...
3. You can say "yes, but". You can also decide that a player's actions don't have too much bearing on what will happen. Sure, the party can smoke out the baddies in a cave, but maybe instead of sitting in place and suffocating to death like lemmings, some decide to brave the flames and escape. Maybe they douse the fire with dirt and water and stumble outside, coughing like crazy. You can even leave it up to the dice. Maybe the baddies roll CON saves against the smoke. Basically, what a player envisions does not have to happen exactly like they want. You can have narrative agency and balance it with your players' agency. A good rule of thumb I abide by is, "If you (the players) can do it, so can my NPCs. If you'd want a chance to survive something, then it's only fair my monsters get the same chance."
On the proactive side of things...
4. Spend time brainstorming alternatives. My own agents of chaos have a tendency to "solve" problems with the most powerful spells in their arsenal even when it isn't necessary. So when I plan for sessions, I take a little time to look over their character sheets and try to imagine how they might approach a problem. Does it forestall all deer-in-the-headlights moments? No. But it at least gives me an idea of the resources they'll be working with.
5. Be prepared to railroad. It gets a bad rap, railroading, but when you think about it, all campaigns need a little firm guidance from the DM to keep things moving. If you let your players try things and take risks, they won't begrudge you the times when you need to push them in a specific direction. And to be honest, they probably won't even realize it most of the time.
Finally...be kind to yourself. You're new and you're doing your best. With time, you'll get more confident and more in-tune with your players. And if you continue to feel dread for Saturdays after that, then maybe someone else should step up and run the game for a while. You're a player too, and you have the right to enjoy game nights just as much as everybody else.
Something else I forgot to mention with respect to proactive measures:
Know your adventure. The more familiar you are with the story, NPCs, and setting, the easier it will be to think on your feet. You don't have to stick to the book, either. If you decide the Cult of the Dragon should be a bunch of kobolds who wanna be dragons when they grow up, you can. Think of the sourcebook more as inspiration and springboard than holy text. This will also make it feel less stressful when your players decide to go toward uncharted territory. As long as you have notes about what is in your world, you'll be able to adjust.
You had this role thrust upon you with little time to prep. You'll be learning a lot and making mistakes, and that's great. Give yourself permission to be fallible, and above all, make sure you're having fun too. In the end, you're a person playing a game with friends. You don't owe anyone anything.
@theologyofbagels hit some very, very strong points. I'd like to emphasize that running something that is pre-written will be less time consuming and require less "heavy-lifting" in the creative department. The downfall of not creating something yourself is that you will unlikely have the breadth and depth of knowledge and familiarity with the material that the original author did. What this points to is the lack of familiarity with the content has a tendency to make us hesitant and unsure. The only surefire way to combat the unknown is to study it, learn the content.
As you DM more sessions, you will find your stride and become aware of new things that you want to change, improve, and in some instances, never repeat again. You will find what succeeds at your game table and what DMing style you tend towards. You will begin to notice things your players do, and you will become aware of their tendencies towards certain playstyles. Primary focus is: You have to do the thing to get better at it. SlyFlourish has a pep talk that is far better than anything that I could deliver. Battling the Resistance That Wants You to Fail at D&D.
So on to what to do in your current adventure. I'm assuming that you are at the Raiders Camp and that starting a fire in the mouth of a cave would be where the cultists are hiding some items and people of interest. My suggestion might be: How is your player going to light a fire large enough to effect the creatures inside the cave, without becoming the target of everything outside the cave? Lean into how the player is going to accomplish the plan, not how you should either allow or not allow it to work. What happens when the character interacts with the game world? Would the game world not want to react to something poking at it? DMs aren't supposed to provide a solution to everything, we just provide a challenge or obstacle to overcome.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
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Short backstory: About 3 months ago, I was designated to DM a table of mutual friends. There are 4 players, with varying levels of experience (1 has played in 5 previous campaigns, 1 has dabbled in TTRPG's such as Pathfinder, 1 listens to a ton of podcasts and the other has absolutely no idea what is going on). I was given 2 weeks notice to have a session prepared. I made an executive decision on the Hoard of the Dragon Queen module. Players were indifferent to the setting as they were just excited to play.
It's been an endless source of anxiety for me whenever I think about Saturday evenings. As this is my first time ever being a DM, after only 3 previous sessions of TTRPG's at all, I don't know how to balance player actions vs. an appropriate setting response. I will admit, in some cases I felt it necessary to railroad my players into moving the plot along. The players thus far have taken it in stride and we've had some exciting character building moments because of it. In those moments, I do feel confident in what I do. However along comes a moment where I simply have no idea how to respond.
My lightly experienced player (Tiefling Path of the Beast Barbarian) has a backstory that details a lineage of dragon hunters, and has come up with an idea to light a large fire at the entrance to a cave, to effectively suffocate anything alive inside, that has some module imperative (I think) moments. My struggle comes from the battle of "Rule of Cool/I don't get to control PC actions" vs "I don't know how to provide these PC's with module imperative knowledge/key items.
This isn't the first time an idea has been posed that circumvents what the module had in mind for potential player actions, so I have NO CLUE how to proceed.
First of all, props to you for taking on the task of being a DM without having much experience. It's not easy and, guess what: you're doing just fine.
Modules are more newbie-friendly than homebrew campaigns because some of the heavy lifting is already done for you, but they do not (and cannot) account for what will happen in a given session. Players will constantly do things you don't expect that force you to pull something out of thin air. This is normal for even the most seasoned DMs. You're not bad at balancing agency and story, you're just...one of us.
So what can you do when you get thrown for a loop? Here's some tactics:
1. Breathe. If you need a minute to think, take it. Your job is hard and you cannot be expected to have all the answers all the time, without hesitation. It's perfectly okay to say, "Yeah, I wasn't prepared for that. Gimme a sec to figure this out." It breaks immersion, sure, but you're learning on the job, here. As you get more experience, you'll be able to do this on the fly. Trust me, the improv gets better.
2. Consider the greater objective and do your best to point the party toward it. If your players decide to burn down a town that had important secrets, well, them's the breaks. You can have them find vital intelligence in the form of a half-burned communique instead of an encounter with an NPC, if it's critical to the story progressing. And if it's not, then it's the players' responsibility to figure out what to do next. Or...
3. You can say "yes, but". You can also decide that a player's actions don't have too much bearing on what will happen. Sure, the party can smoke out the baddies in a cave, but maybe instead of sitting in place and suffocating to death like lemmings, some decide to brave the flames and escape. Maybe they douse the fire with dirt and water and stumble outside, coughing like crazy. You can even leave it up to the dice. Maybe the baddies roll CON saves against the smoke. Basically, what a player envisions does not have to happen exactly like they want. You can have narrative agency and balance it with your players' agency. A good rule of thumb I abide by is, "If you (the players) can do it, so can my NPCs. If you'd want a chance to survive something, then it's only fair my monsters get the same chance."
On the proactive side of things...
4. Spend time brainstorming alternatives. My own agents of chaos have a tendency to "solve" problems with the most powerful spells in their arsenal even when it isn't necessary. So when I plan for sessions, I take a little time to look over their character sheets and try to imagine how they might approach a problem. Does it forestall all deer-in-the-headlights moments? No. But it at least gives me an idea of the resources they'll be working with.
5. Be prepared to railroad. It gets a bad rap, railroading, but when you think about it, all campaigns need a little firm guidance from the DM to keep things moving. If you let your players try things and take risks, they won't begrudge you the times when you need to push them in a specific direction. And to be honest, they probably won't even realize it most of the time.
Finally...be kind to yourself. You're new and you're doing your best. With time, you'll get more confident and more in-tune with your players. And if you continue to feel dread for Saturdays after that, then maybe someone else should step up and run the game for a while. You're a player too, and you have the right to enjoy game nights just as much as everybody else.
I'm going to bookmark this thread. It's everything I wasn't aware I needed to hear. You're a paragon.
Something else I forgot to mention with respect to proactive measures:
Know your adventure. The more familiar you are with the story, NPCs, and setting, the easier it will be to think on your feet. You don't have to stick to the book, either. If you decide the Cult of the Dragon should be a bunch of kobolds who wanna be dragons when they grow up, you can. Think of the sourcebook more as inspiration and springboard than holy text. This will also make it feel less stressful when your players decide to go toward uncharted territory. As long as you have notes about what is in your world, you'll be able to adjust.
You had this role thrust upon you with little time to prep. You'll be learning a lot and making mistakes, and that's great. Give yourself permission to be fallible, and above all, make sure you're having fun too. In the end, you're a person playing a game with friends. You don't owe anyone anything.
You got this, DM. One curveball at a time. ;-)
@theologyofbagels hit some very, very strong points. I'd like to emphasize that running something that is pre-written will be less time consuming and require less "heavy-lifting" in the creative department. The downfall of not creating something yourself is that you will unlikely have the breadth and depth of knowledge and familiarity with the material that the original author did. What this points to is the lack of familiarity with the content has a tendency to make us hesitant and unsure. The only surefire way to combat the unknown is to study it, learn the content.
As you DM more sessions, you will find your stride and become aware of new things that you want to change, improve, and in some instances, never repeat again. You will find what succeeds at your game table and what DMing style you tend towards. You will begin to notice things your players do, and you will become aware of their tendencies towards certain playstyles. Primary focus is: You have to do the thing to get better at it. SlyFlourish has a pep talk that is far better than anything that I could deliver. Battling the Resistance That Wants You to Fail at D&D.
So on to what to do in your current adventure. I'm assuming that you are at the Raiders Camp and that starting a fire in the mouth of a cave would be where the cultists are hiding some items and people of interest. My suggestion might be: How is your player going to light a fire large enough to effect the creatures inside the cave, without becoming the target of everything outside the cave? Lean into how the player is going to accomplish the plan, not how you should either allow or not allow it to work. What happens when the character interacts with the game world? Would the game world not want to react to something poking at it? DMs aren't supposed to provide a solution to everything, we just provide a challenge or obstacle to overcome.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad