What’s a GM to do when their best-laid plans are derailed by pesky players? Andy and Chris discuss the many ways roleplaying game sessions can go awry.

Transcript below provided by Barbara Tozier!

Episode 2: How to stop derails from happening?

[opening music]

Chris: Hello and welcome to _Roll for Topic_ an RPG podcast. This is a podcast where GMs discuss various elements of running the game. So let’s do some quick introductions. My name is Chris Salzman…

Andy: …and I’m Andy Rau.

Chris: Andy, what exactly are we going to do first here? We typically have a role at the beginning of the session. What is that that for?

Andy: Yeah, so what we do on the show, Chris, if you weren’t aware, is we roll a D10 and we look on a chart to find out exactly what topic we’ll be discussing. I have a chart in front of me numbered one through 10 and you’re going to roll a D10 and that’s going to determine what we talk about.

Chris: Okay, cool. All right, so I’m going to roll that right now.

[sound of dice rolling]

Chris: It’s… Oh, I got a 10!

Andy: A 10. Okay. Chris, what we will be discussing today according to our chart, is how to deal with session derails. So that that would be players going off-plot or players doing something that the GM was not expecting.

Chris: Well my players always stick to exactly what I was planning for. So I don’t know about you…

Andy: Well this is going to be a really short show then, because my players always do the exact same.

Chris: Yeah whatever I prepped is exactly what they seem to want to do.

Andy: That’s perfect. Yes.

Chris: Yeah, this is actually a really interesting one that we rolled on, because my last session was maybe you could almost call it 100% a derail. This was a session we went more or less completely off book. They just decided to… they were wrapping up a plot point and they decided to do it in a way I was not expecting, that involved most of the townsfolk.

And: Okay

Chris: In a town that they were in, pretty much all the NPCs that they had been relating with were at this public trial of the big bad evil person in the campaign that they were running. So they held this public trial and everybody showed up and so there was a lot of very cool interactions between different NPCs and different motivations coming out of the woodworks, and I was just kind of sitting behind the screen going, “Oh goodness, what am I gonna do? What am I going to do?” as it just got a little crazier and crazier. But yeah, it ended up being a really, really fun session. And they had no combat rolls whatsoever.

Andy: Wow.

Chris: This is a _Dungeons & Dragons_ game so that’s sometimes rare for that to happen.

Andy: What did you feel like when you started seeing things going off of course, the course you had imagined it would take? Was that a scary feeling? Or were you like, “Hey, this is really fun. Let’s see where this goes.”

Chris: I think it depends on your GM style, right? I sort of like this thing as long as there’s a framework to fall back on. So if they had come to a brand new town for example, and we were introducing a bunch of brand new NPCs, then that would have been hard and scary. But since I had a good handle on what was going on in the town and who wanted what out of the trial, it just made for a lot of fun at that point. I think the other thing, too, that I always try to keep in mind is the players just assume that you’re on top of things most of the time, I guess, unless you’re very bad GM. They sort of assume that you have some vision in your head. So even if you don’t necessarily have it ahead of time, and you’re just inventing it on the fly, it tends to work ou