D&D Nerd.com

As Dungeon Masters, we generally don’t have much of a choice as to whether or not to improvise with something. No matter how much we try to get our players to go through a dungeon and/or adventure that you’ve carefully crafted, they are eventually going to do something that we didn’t anticipate.

To Be, Or Not To Be Lame
Now, of course, there are a couple ways to handle players doing the unexpected. I know there are several DMs out there who will simply come up with an excuse that the player can’t do such an unexpected action. Having ridiculously high DCs is one such way. Or perhaps the player gets caught, if it’s something they’re not legally supposed to do (though, this goes along with ridiculously high DCs). And then there’s the old fashioned “You can’t do that” excuse. Quick, simple, and utterly lame.

Any decent DM will go along with their players, letting them do as they wish. Sure, it may deviate from what was originally planned, but what the players want to do can open up a massive realm of opportunity for fun! And the whole purpose of D&D is to have fun, after all. Telling players that they can’t do something simply kills the fun, and can eventually result in losing them.

What to Make Up
So, what can you improvise? Well, pretty much everything, to be honest. You can just make up a random town, a random NPC, or even some random name. Heck, you can even make up a totally random monster, and even random loot. (Ok, yeah, a lot of randoms here… )

What about other things, besides names and lists? There’s dungeon generators, town and city generators, and even generators that can create full character stats. Honestly, I think this list can go on and on.

There’s another source you can use as well, rather than relying purely on random generators. Oftentimes, your players will create histories for their characters, which can detain details on how that character grew up, people that were a part of that character’s life, etc. You can take that information, and just plug into where ever you need it. Not only do you have the satisfaction of having something easy to use off-hand, but your player will be very pleased with using something from their character’s history in your campaign!

An Example
I’ve recently done this myself in my last session for my Eberron campaign. A player had create this island that wasn’t a part of the official campaign settings, along with a religion, and some key NPCs involved. Of course, her character was involved with that whole affair.

During the course of that session, the player characters learned of an attack on that very island, apparently lead by an NPC who was once a PC (I’ll explain this some other time). The PCs went to the island, and saw the church, and even one of the key NPCs involved. The player who had created all that originally was very pleased with this. In fact, her eyes even lit up with excitement when I did this!

But I didn’t even plan for it ahead of time. At most, I pondered it briefly as I did other preparation before the session.

Just Use Your Imagination!
Of course, no tool is better than your own imagination. This is really where the heart of improvisation lies. If players do something unexpected, be creative and make something up! More than likely, it’ll end up with a lot of fun being had by all.

Now, if you’re a veteran DM, you probably already know this. But for someone who’s new to DMing, this can be very valuable. While some players are ok with hand-holding, not all of them will be. It’s far more fun, in the long run, to let players do what they want when they want. But in order to let them do that, you’ll need to know how to improvise.