Today, I’m killing something like seven rocs with one rock. And thanks to that, I could call this feature basically anything and it’d fit my mysterious feature classification system.

Okay… that’s a hell of an overstatement.

It’s like this: after my last Table Tale, literally everyone — or at least two of you — asked me about that mass battle at the sailor’s camp. Meanwhile, literally everyone else — or at least two other different yous — asked me about the second half-of-the-point I promised to make. And after I dropped a comment in my last article about why Angry ain’t worrying about DBox One and you shouldn’t either, literally everyone who hadn’t already e-mailed me about the previous two things — are you sick of this running joke yet — asked me to explain.

Turns out, I can handle all that s$&% in one article. One that’s half How to GM, half Bulls$&%, and all Table Tale. And unlike the last Table Tale, this time I’m gonna start with the Tale.

The Big Boneyard Beach Battle

Pull up a chair, kids. Let Old Uncle Angry tell you a story. Or let him continue a story, anyway. Because he already told you the beginning.

Once upon a time, some newbie adventurers — PCs all — boarded a ship bound for the part of the Angryverse where Angry keeps all his classical mythological s$&%: Old Zethinia. But, on the way to the Zethinian town of Mitrios, wannabee Poseidon — or someone — blew his volcanic stack for as-yet-unrevealed reasons. In the volcanic fallout, still a day from town, the PCs and the crew of the Aster were forced to abandon ship. They got stuck on a narrow stretch of beach surrounded by rocky bluffs. And, as if that volcanic explosion thing didn’t suck bad enough, it turned out the beach was cursed as f$&%.

Whoops.

I can’t explain the curse because the players failed their knowledge checks to know literally any tiny thing about it. Thus, they have no idea if the curse is related to the volcanic thing or if it’s just another example of the standard fantasy trope whereby literally every corner of the fantasy wilderness is cursed in one damned way or another and therefore constantly disgorges monsters on the unwary. They may never know. And neither may you.

Sorry.

So it’s a dark night. The darkest night. Thick, volcanic clouds blot out the sky and ash drifts through the air. The party’s managed to secure a camp in the middle of the beach. It’s not a bad camp, really. The sailors salvaged supplies from the ship as it sank. And big boulders make it reasonably defensible. It looks like this:

Once everyone’s settled — and keep in mind, the party doesn’t know they’re basically camping in the backyard sandbox of the Poltergeist house here — once everyone’s settled, the party grabbed some torches to scout the perimeter. And to check something out. Because, earlier, through the clever use of light spells and a wizard’s familiar, the party spotted a bunch of things that looked like grave markers a couple hundred yards from the campsite. They wanted to check them out. Make sure they’re not the sort of things that disgorge monsters to attack unwary campers.

The things that looked like grave markers? They’re swords. Ancient, rusted, rotten, useless swords. And spears. Well, spearheads. All driven point-down into the beach. Dozens upon dozens. The party wracked their collective brains and made some abysmal Knowledge skill checks and determined… absolutely f$&%ing nothing.

Well, not nothing. The wizard was able to detect a disturbing flow of necromantic magical energy spreading across the beach from the swords as the evil, red moon was getting set to rise. The party couldn’t see the evil, red moon, but Angryverse wizards can feel the red moon because it f$&%s with magical fields the way sunspots f$&% with cell phone reception. That’s just another crazy thing about the Angryverse.

Anyway…

The party figured something was about to happen. And they decided they wanted to see it when it did. Because it involved necromantic magic and a moon that I have repeatedly described as evil and red, naturally, the party decided ground zero was the best place to be when whatever was going to happen happened. Minutes ticked by, the evil, red moon — her name is Krisma, by the way — evil, red Krisma rose unseen behind the impossibly thick clouds, and… nothing happened.

Then some skeletons wandered up behind the party and said, “hey, what are you all looking at?” But they said it in skeletonese, so it just sounded like “clackity clack clack clickity clack.”

I’m kidding. The skeletons f$&%ing attacked. They’re skeletons. And because they’re D&D 3.5 skeletons and I rolled three crits in four rounds, it was a f$&%ing nightmare. For the players. I was having a blast. I love undead in D&D 3.5. They’re the worst s$&% to fight; not the easiest. That’s how it should be.

The party dispatched the skeletons and exhausted their meager healing abilities to get themselves back from dying to painfully limping, and then they trudged back to camp cursing about “the Angry GM and his f$&%ing crits.” When they got close to the camp, they heard trouble. They couldn’t see what was going on because only the dwarf could see beyond the party’s torchlight, so they picked up the pace.

The party wasn’t the only one that had skeleton issues. The camp was under attack. And there began the Big Boneyard Beach Battle.

The situation was like this: the party approached from the southwest. They saw — when they got close enough — a bunch of skellies fighting a bunch of sailors. Several with injuries. The sailors were fighting with improvised bludgeons — which gave them a minor advantage over the party with their fancy swords and knives — but the sailors were also 1st-level commoners. So, yeah.

The players rolled initiative to join the fight already in progress and spent their first round fast-slogging through the beach sand to join the fight. Meanwhile, I kept the fight going between the skeletons and the sailors. Rolling dice behind the screen, applying damage, describing results, that sort of s$&%.

When the party got close enough, they could hear a second fight raging on the other side of the camp and out of sight. And as that fight raged, all in the same initiative order, I described what the party could hear happening from that direction.

In other words, I had a fight going, round by round, half hidden by fog-of-war and cover-of-volcanic-nuclear-night, between three PCs, an NPC scholar priest, ten sailors, the ship’s captain, the first mate, six unarmed skeletons, and four skeletons armed with ancient swords. Which is why I’m not going to give you a detailed blow-by-blow. I’ll just hit the highlights.

Due to some piss-poor die-rolling, the party stalled clearing the southern front for a bit, but eventually, they destroyed the last skeleton on the south side and dashed across the camp to join the northern skirmish. By the time they got there, a couple of sailors had gone down and the captain had joined the fight, raking his dagger uselessly down skeletal ribcages with comical cartoon xylophone noises. The party had to take some time to get into position while the skeletons and the sailors and the scholar and Gilligan and the Skipper took turns dishing out damage, but eventually, they cleared the rest of the skeletons and all fell calm.

And that was the Big Boneyard Beach Battle. At least, that’s how it played out on the players’ side of the screen.

Later, during the post-game bulls$&% session, one of my players said, “I gotta ask you: how did you actually manage that fight? Because I struggle to handle even one NPC helping the party and you had two-dozen good guys and bad guys fighting on two different fronts.”

And like any good but egomaniacal magician who’s torn between bragging about his brilliance and keeping his secrets, I asked, with a mischievous smile and a twinkle in my eye, “are you sure you want to know?”

Are You Sure You Want to Know?

I’m about to reveal my deepest, darkest GMing secret. Just like I did that night, two weeks ago. And I know that, for some of you, that secret’s going to ruin s$%& for you. It might ruin the games you play under other GMs you respect. It might ruin everything I’ve ever written. It might ruin me. It’s a loaded question.

Once, Penn Jilette was asked to explain how an old-timey duo of radio psychics pulled off an amazing trick. And he said he’d reveal it, but he also said that it wasn’t going to make anyone feel good. Because magic’s always ugly. It’s never elegant. It’s never wonderful. The secret never makes you feel good. Because the secret’s a hideous mishmash of magnets and misdirection, of tricked cards and trickery, of outright lies and Rube Goldberg nightmare contraptions that have no right to work as well as they do.

What I’m about to tell isn’t just how I ran one big, complex fight, it’s also how lots of great GMs do lots of things that you wish you could do. Maybe even how your GM does the s$&% he or she does. So it might ruin every GM and every game ever.

So…

Are you sure you want to know?

The Big Reveal

How did I manage the Big Boneyard Beach Battle?

I didn’t. I f$&%ing didn’t. I made the whole thing up.

I wasn’t really running a mass battle. Not at all. I ran the parts nearest the PCs; the parts the PCs were directly involved with. And I made just enough die rolls and pulled just enough faces and made just enough noises in response to make it seem like I was running every moment of the fight. When a sailor took damage or a skeleton dodged an attack? I made that s$&% up.

“Oh no! Eight Toes is down!”

I f$&%ing killed Eight Toes. Not the dice. Me.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Because I didn’t really make everything up. I just can’t actually tell you what s$&% I did make up and what I didn’t. It was more like this. “The party’s been stuck at the southern skirmish for a while,” I said, “I’ll roll some skeleton damage and apply it to Eight Toes.” Or, “I’ll roll this sailor’s attack and damage for real this time.” Basically, in each round of combat, I made one or two real, actual die rolls — attacks, damage, whatever — and a handful of fake ones. And I rolled way fewer dice than I would have if I’d really been running things by the book.

Beyond that? I was just moving minis on a map and telling a gripping story.

Hell, that’s still an exaggeration. Because I did way more than that. It just had nothing to do with the sacred rules as written.

Consider this: last time, I told you I was grading the players based on the number of sailors they kept from getting dead. And I just admitted that I killed a sailor by gut feeling and fiat. Well, that’s not the whole story.

First, what actually happened was that two sailors got dropped in the fight. When the fight was over, they were bleeding out. Which ain’t a thing that NPCs normally get to do. But that gave the PCs a chance to help. They tried. One PC burned a spell and one failed a Heal check. So, one sailor lived and Eight Toes died.

Second, two sailors were precisely the right number of sailors to go down. Why? Because two things happened to put the sailors at risk. And both had to do with what the players actually did.

Though both three sailors and one sailor would also have been precisely the right number of sailors to go down. Hopefully, by the end of this feature, you can wrap your noggin’ around that because I ain’t explaining it further.

First, the party went out scouting and left the sailors to defend the camp themselves. And when they discovered evil magic was spreading across the beach, the players chose to stay where they were instead of heading back to the camp. If they had returned to the camp, they’d have been on hand for the start of the Big Boneyard Beach Battle instead of coming into the middle of it. From outside.

Second, the party got held up. Partly because of their crappy die rolls and partly because of the tactics they used — or didn’t use — it took the PCs a while to down the skeletons attacking the southern edge of the camp and so they didn’t get to the northern skirmish very quickly.

Do not misunderstand me. I did not punish the players for their bad choices and unlucky die rolls. These days, everyone thinks punishment and consequence are synonyms. They ain’t. If the party had fought the southern skirmish differently, they might have broken through faster. They didn’t fight wrong. But the fight did take a lot of rounds. That is a thing that happened. And it left time for Eight Toes to die.

Likewise, the party didn’t make the wrong choice when they chose to scout or watch the magical nexus point for trouble. They figured s$&% was about to go down and that it might threaten the camp and they decided to face it right there. It was a perfectly fine, perfectly valid guess that just happened to be the wrong guess for the situation. And the party had incomplete information. Mainly because they can’t roll dice for s$&%.

It wasn’t their fault that they weren’t in the best place to protect the sailors, but fault doesn’t matter. They still weren’t there. I didn’t punish s$&%. I didn’t murder Eight Toes. I evaluated the player’s actions and determined the consequences. That’s my f$&%ing job. A job that’s far more important than any rule in the book. And I did it way more fairly and even-handedly than a plastic random-number generator would have.

Do Rules Matter or Not?

I started the last Table Tale by asserting that the game’s mechanics matter. That they’re important. And they do. They are. Now I’m saying I dropped those mechanics the moment they got inconvenient and made a bunch of s$&% up instead. And I did. I do. And I’d do it again. Because it ain’t my job to apply rules. The rules aren’t my job, they’re my tools. And I don’t have to use them if I don’t need them. Or don’t want them.

Come on! If I’d run the fight I described by the book, even with my amazing talent for keeping a fight flowing, it would have taken forever. And it would have been dull as s$&%. Ninety percent of it had nothing to do with the PCs anyway. Until one of the heroes got to the north side of the camp, there was nothing they could do to affect that skirmish. Hell, the PCs had no way to affect the fight that happened before they got back to camp either. Do you think I’m going to roll dozens of dice to resolve s$&% the players can’t f$%&ing change? Hell no I’m not.

Professor Dungeon Craft — or whatever the hell his name is — did a great video about this s$&% vis-à-vis the DBox One playtests. A video I wish I’d thought to do first. Because he said nothing in that video I wouldn’t myself say. I’m going to embed it here. Watch it.

Most GMs — especially the ones who’ve been at this s$&% for a while — most GMs ignore 90% of the crap in the book. Which book? Any of them. Pick a system, pick a book; the best GMs ignore 90% of that bulls$&%. It’s mostly useless crap. Does it really f$&%ing matter whether I carefully calculate the exact DC of a specific Climb check to be 17 or I just wing it and say it’s 15? It does not. Hell, it wouldn’t matter if I said it was 25.

Consider that no one actually reads the rules anyway. Do you really think most people read all the rules? Did you? Don’t lie. Have you actually read all the rules for the game you’re running from cover to cover? Especially if it’s the latest edition of a game you’ve already been running for years. That’s why so many people didn’t even realize that a natural 20 wasn’t an automatic skill success and a crit to boot when DBox One threatened to make that the RAW.

Truthfully, I’ve been secretly training you to ignore the rules for years by writing new rules for you. I s$&% you not. Consider those companion NPC rules I wrote. The ones for carefully statting NPC allies and writing quirks and loyalty powers and all that s$&%. Do you follow them? Maybe you did. When I first wrote them. Maybe you built every companion NPC carefully. But there came a day — or there will — when you decided not to bother fully detailing a quirk. Or your players recruited an NPC you hadn’t prepped in advance. So you scribbled some quick notes — or no notes at all — and said, “I’ll handle this however I have to.” And then, suddenly, you were just running NPC companions.

The fact is that, while it’s nice to be able to build balanced stat blocks for NPCs, the loyalty and personality crap is something a GM can just, you know, do. It doesn’t need tracking or mechanics.

I know that s$&% happened because lots of you told me it did. I recently admitted in one of my Supporter Live Chats that I expected most of you to get sick of writing detailed stat blocks for companion NPCs and just start playing companion NPCs right once you knew what playing companions right looked like. And in reply, I got lots of, “you got me Angry; I totally gave up on the writeups but kept playing NPCs” in response.

Most of the systems I present are me just trying to write a systematic way to do the s$%& I just sort of do at my table without any mechanics. And I’m hoping you’ll use them for a bit and once you realize how this s$&% should work, you’ll give up on the mechanics and just make the right things happen at your table. When you do that, you’re running the Angry way.

So, do the rules matter or don’t they? It depends. What’s it depend on? It depends. There’s just no easy way to answer this s$&%. The rules matter when they do and they don’t when they don’t and you’ll know the difference when you know the difference.

But I’ll tell you this: the rules do matter until you realize they don’t. That is, following the rules — the ones in the book and the ones sexy gaming geniuses like me write — following the rules is a good way to start. Because that’s how you learn how a game should work. How it should feel. How it should play. So you have to start by following the rules.

Eventually, though, you learn the rules aren’t set in stone. And that your judgment counts for a lot. That’s when you start making rulings. And writing your own rules. House rules. Hacks. All that s$&%. You have to do that too. That’s how you learn how to tinker with the game and improve the experience. And how you learn to trust your judgment. And also how you learn to take risks.

And then there comes a day when you realize that you’re always there. You’re always at your table. And you’ve always got your brain. The same judgment that helped you tinker and hack, the same judgment you learned to trust, it’s always with you. So you don’t really need the rules. The rules are a middleman. You know what makes for a good gameplay experience. You know it’s about consistency and fairness and agency and engagement and verisimilitude. You know it’s about assessing player actions and making them live with the consequences.

And that’s when you realize only a very small number of the rules actually f$&%ing matter.

In the meanwhile, you’ve earned your players’ trust. So, when you do dump the rules and make a bunch of s$&% up behind the screen and you cover it with smoke and mirrors and clever patter to make it look like you’re using the rules, you can also tell the players that that’s exactly what you’re doing. And they’ll still come back next week.

The ones you actually want at your table will anyway.