And now allow me to confuse the motherloving f$&% out of y’all. I mean, given this recent kick I’ve been on about open-world gaming and just running D&D without a bunch of rules and prep and mechanics and s$&%, today’s article is going to look like a total reversal.

See, I’ve been working on this bonus content pack think for my Frienemy-tier patrons — the folks who pay me so you get all these free articles every week — and that pack of bonus content includes a bunch of fiddly little rules for adventuring in crappy weather. Rules to represent how rain and wind and lightning make adventuring completely f$&%ing miserable. And dangerous. And I found myself thinking, “man, I am going to get a lot of s$&% for this.” I mean, the rules ain’t too heavy or complicated or anything. They’re small and easy to reference. But they’re fiddly little niggling corner case rules nonetheless. And didn’t I just get done telling everyone to stop weighing their game down with complicated rules and subsystems and s$&% like that? So, what gives?

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading all the “feedback” I’ve gotten about The Quicksand Incident. And while a lot of the feedback was actually pretty positive, there were more than a few folks who took issue with my mention of things like travel pace and travel tasks and levels of alertness and marching order. All the mechanical crap that I assumed I had done before I started hypothetically running my Neverending Story re-enactment with Alice standing in as the horse. “How the hell would I know I’m supposed to keep track of s$&% like that,” people demanded. “How do I even know what to keep track of? And how do I keep track of it?”

Naturally, I politely and professionally pointed my readers to the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook and specifically to pages 181 through 183. Because I’m always polite and professional when I’m challenged. And the responses I got back ranged from “wow, I didn’t even know that s$&% was in the PHB” to “oh, I don’t pay attention to those rules. They’re just a bunch of boring, useless bookkeeping that don’t add anything to the game.”

“Besides,” everyone then added, “you said mechanics don’t make the game so I just throw away all the rules I don’t want to be bothered with.”

Meanwhile meanwhile, I’m still getting e-mails every f$&%ing day begging me to invent a set of exploration rules for D&D because “it hasn’t got any and that’s stupid because the creators claimed exploration is one of the three fundamental pillars of Dungeons & Dragons.” And I really don’t know why people keep asking me to invent new systems. I haven’t even finished inventing the systems I’ve already invented.

And f&$% me but you all drive me crazy.

So, this article. This article’s about the rules of the game. About using them. Why you should use them. And why using the rules is actually way more important than creating meaningful choices or making travel interesting or building exploration rules. Even if the actual rules of the game are kind of crappy.

Oh yeah. I’m going to get some great feedback from this one.

Today’s Lesson: Know the Rules, Use the Rules, Don’t F$&% With the Rules

Let’s talk GMing basics today. In my last article — The Quicksand Incident — I blasted all you experienced GMs out there for sucking at the fundamentals. But I did at least admit that I, myself, had stopped talking about the fundamentals years ago. Which put all my newer readers at a severe disadvantage.

So, today’s a very basic lesson in GMing. And I’m covering it because there’s three things that I just keep hearing from readers and I’m frankly sick as s$&% of them.

First, everyone keeps asking me how to fill their games with meaningful choices.

Second, everyone wants to know how they can make the travel parts of the game interesting.

And third, everyone is always pissing and moaning about how D&D and Pathfinder totally fail to provide good, useful exploration mechanics.

Now, this article is inspired by those questions. But it won’t answer those questions. Instead, this article’s going to — hopefully — demonstrate why those questions are stupid questions you should stop bothering me with.

By the way, today’s lesson — as already revealed in the f%$&ing heading — is this:

Whatever game system you’re running: know the rules, use the rules, and don’t f$&% with the rules.

Yeah. Knowing the rules and properly playing by them? That’s important if you want to run a good, fun, interesting, meaningful game. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you don’t need to worry about knowing the rules or getting them right.

It may shock you to learn this, but I don’t create meaningful choices for my game. I don’t give a wererat’s left a$&-cheek about creating meaningful choices. But my game does have a lot of meaningful choices. I know it does. I know because every time I try to share a story about what’s going in my game, I have to provide a whole bunch of context and background and reference prior events and player motivations and all sorts of s$&% like that. A choice that makes zero f$&%ing sense when devoid of context, background, and motivation is, ipso-f$&%ing-facto, a meaningful choice. It’s a choice only a specific player or group could make based on a specific situation and as a result of specific past experiences.

See, most people think meaningful choices must involve moral dilemmas or deep, emotionally charged character moments. But most meaningful choices aren’t that heavy. And people can’t take too much of that s$&%. It’s f$&%ing exhausting. But even minor choices about what action to take in combat or whether to risk pressing on or return to town can reveal s$&% about the characters, the players, their experiences, and the world. And that’s what matters.

I also don’t try to make travel interesting. I mean, it usually ends up being interesting. Sometimes it’s just mildly interesting for a few minutes. But other times it’s stressfully, worryingly, anxiety-inducingly, delightfully life-threateningly interesting. But it’s rarely boring. And when it is boring, it just gets boiled down to a single sentence about how the party crosses this or that piece of terrain and then arrives at the dungeon or whatever. Either way, when the party starts traveling, my players don’t say s$&% like “this sucks; I’m going to watch TikToks on my YouTube. Let me know when we get to the dungeon.”

And I don’t try to design exploration rules either. Because that’s not how rules work. Or how exploration works. And if you sat and thought for even two minutes about what exploration is and what you’re asking for, you’d know that. Particularly if you referred back to a very old article of mine about why people even play games.

Instead of explaining things and swearing at you, though, I want to just throw an example at you. And I want you to watch what happens as the example plays out. This specific example’s going to center on travel and exploration. Which, by the way, are not the same things. Anyway, this example’s about travel and exploration. But the central lesson will pertain to pretty much every interesting, meaningful part of the game. Every way there is to engage with a role-playing game. Even combat. And I know that’ll probably confuse some of you because you think there’s a specific set of combat rules and there should therefore be a specific set of exploration rules. But…

F$&% it. I’m just going to focus on exploration and travel. And I hope some of you will be able to extend the core lesson to all other aspects of RPGs. Even though hope’s a stupid thing for morons. At the very least, I’m probably going to get enough feedback to write a whole other article from this one.

Lets Plan a Road Trip

Here’s a hypothetical party of adventurers. Let’s call them Team Streptococcus. They’re planning a trip. Specifically, they’re planning a trip from the village of Perrin’s Mill — where they’re at — to the town of Highgrove — where they want to be.

Want a map? Here’s one.

As you can see — maybe, because the scale’s really crappy — as you can see, Highgrove’s 20 miles from Perrin’s Mill as the dragon flies. Problem is Team Streptococcus ain’t dragons. They’re just low-level PC losers. They can’t fly over rugged, rocky hills and overgrown forests. They can’t even afford horses. So they’ve got to walk. Fortunately, there’s a handy, dandy road that winds its way from Perrin’s Mill to Highgrove. Unfortunately, the handy, dandy road goes way all the way around the aforementioned rugged, rocky hills and overgrown forests. So, it’s a 50-mile trip. But it does pass through the city of Graybridge.

Thus, Team Streptococcus can either walk 20 miles over the hills and through the woods or they can walk 50 miles along the road. Got it? Good.

Okay, boys and girls, which route should Team Streptococcus take?

Do you have your answer? Great. You’re wrong. Because the correct answer — the one any smart, experienced player would give — is “it depends.” Or, at least, “I don’t have enough information to make that call.”

Smart, experienced players, for example, would want to know what kind of speed Team Streptococcus can manage over the road and through the trackless wilderness. Fair enough. Laden in their armor as they are, the Streps can cover 2 miles an hour across open ground or 1 mile an hour in rugged hills or dense forest. That translates to about 16 miles a day on the road or 8 miles a day in the wilds. This means the road trip will take them just over three days whereas the trip through the hilly woods will take them two days and a bit.

Smart, experienced players would also worry about food and water. And how much food and water the team can carry without slowing themselves down. After all, once they’re away from town, they’ve only got what they brought to eat. So let’s say that, if they spread their supplies out properly, the party can carry about five days’ worth of food for each member without being significantly encumbered.

So far, so good, right?

Smart, experienced players might also worry about navigation. Sure, if travelers follow roads or rivers, navigation’s a non-issue. But in the trackless wilderness, s$&% ain’t so simple. We’re talking about a medieval fantasy world here. The heroes have vague maps on scraps of paper, not US Geological Survey Maps. And there ain’t no latitude and longitude marked out. And navigating by the sun, moon, and stars ain’t that precise. I mean, sure, someone with an astrolabe and a sextant and a compass and s$&% like that can probably figure out the party’s global position within a couple of miles, but that’s no use unless you have an equally accurate map to put a “you are here” sticker on.

Most overland navigation comes down to following landmarks and dead reckoning. Basically, you point yourself toward a visible landmark or a cardinal direction and you start walking and you guess when you’re supposed to arrive at your destination based on how far the trip is supposed to be and how fast you think you can walk. And with lots and lots of miles of wilderness and what with anything that isn’t super tall or huge disappearing below the horizon just two or three miles away unless the world is as flat as an ocean, you don’t have to be off by very much at all to completely miss a destination and never see it. And it’s easy to be off your mark when you’re trying to walk in a cardinal direction. I mean, east and west are big places and the sun only sits on the horizon at two moments a day and unless you’re on the equator, it moves more east-ish to west-ish than actually east or west. You can navigate by the stars, sure, but only at night. And, again, they’re pretty high up. So they’re an imprecise tool without some fancy navigational equipment. And math. Not only that, but you really need the weather and the terrain to cooperate. Bad weather can hide important navigational features like distant landmarks, the sun, and the stars. And rough terrain with rugged hills and trees everywhere and the occasional stream or gully often impedes your ability to just f$&%ing walk in a straight line for eight hours. And even gentle, rolling meadows can f$&% with the terrain enough to hide a small village or site from view unless you’re practically on top of it.

Never thought about all of that, did you? Yeah, that whole “navigation check” is really more of a “can the party manage to walk in the direction they think they’re walking for an entire eight-hour stretch” check.

With all of that in mind, look at the map again. Team Streptococcus can definitely head for Highgrove through the wilderness. They just have to head northwest-ish. And even if they can’t keep completely true, they’re not going to get hopelessly lost. Eventually, they’re going to come out of the forest on the road that runs through Highgrove. Of course, they might be east of Highgrove or they might be west of Highgrove and they’ll have to guess which direction to head along the road, but with the distances involved, they’re not going to be more than half a day from Highgrove unless there is a major navigational disaster and some serious fairy magic involved.

But the trip could take an extra day or two because of those navigational concerns. If they hit the road, pick the wrong direction, walk a day the wrong way, turn around, and walk the other way until they hit Highgrove, that could turn the two-day trip into a five-day trip. And they can only carry five days of supplies without slowing themselves down.

While the distance thing and the travel time thing and the food thing are just math problems, the minute you introduce random elements of risk like navigation fails, it becomes a risk-reward issue. There’s a three-and-a-half-day sure thing and a two-day risky thing that might turn into four or five days depending on the whims of some plastic polyhedrals.

Speaking of plastic polyhedrals, smart, experienced players also know a thing or two about random encounters. Each hour you spend traveling outside of town carries a chance of tripping over some unexpected bit of fun. A dangerous creature, a less dangerous creature that amounts to some free XP, a natural hazard, a supernatural hazard, an unnatural hazard, a non-hostile traveler, a unique point of interest, a hitherto unknown dungeon chock full of adventurey goodness, whatever.

Let’s assume I’m a reasonable, intelligent GM. Because I am. In this world, if you stick to roads in civilized areas, you’re less likely to trip over hazards or wild beasts and more likely to encounter non-hostile travelers like yourself. That said, some dangers gravitate to roads. Bandits, goblins, bandit goblins, you know. Also, if you stick to roads in civilized areas, you’re less likely to make unique discoveries or find opportunities for adventure. Because the stuff near the road’s been explored pretty thoroughly and all the good stuff’s marked on maps already. In the trackless wilds, there’s more dangerous beasts and wilderness hazards, but there’s also more unique and interesting discoveries.

Now, all that’s mechanical s$&%. That’s all game rules. Everything I cited there comes from the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Seriously. Even that s$&% about how visible stars and terrain affect navigation and how navigation’s basically a matter of picking a direction and trying to stick to it. And even the stuff about how sometimes, you’ll have a random encounter, but sometimes you’ll find a forgotten statue of an ancient deity and sometimes find a talking crystal cave that can answer questions. And yes. I do mean the 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide.

Now, given just those game rules, how should Team Streptococcus proceed?

If you said, “it still depends,” you’re right. The mechanical s$&% just provides a sort of pro-con list. A highly situational pro-con list, by the way. I mean, what if the road was 100 miles instead of 50? What if the wilderness between Perrin’s Mill and Highgrove was a swamp instead of forested hills? Or a blasted demon waste?

But here’s the thing about pro-con lists. And the reason why the answer is still “it depends.” See, it’s pretty rare to get a pro-con list that’s so heavily stilted one way or the other that the “correct” answer is obvious to everyone. Pro-con lists ain’t objective things. Sometimes, a certain pro is worth two cons. Or a certain con outweighs ten pros. And sometimes, one person’s con is another person’s pro.

Let me tell you about Team Streptococcus. They’re adventurers. In every sense of the word. I know all D&D characters are ostensibly adventurers, but there’s adventurers and then there’s adventurers, right? Some adventurers are, frankly, pussies. They want to win big with as little risk as possible. And some adventurers are more like gophers. They want someone to tell them where to go and what to do and to pay them for doing it. They’re questers. Not the Streps, though.

They’re bored in Perrin’s Mill. It’s just this little bucolic nowhere. They’ve fought some goblins, they’ve raided a tomb, and they’ve had enough. They want some bigger, better, fantastic adventure s$&%. They’re heading for Highgrove because they need a dot on the map to head toward but they’re secretly hoping to find something awesome on the way.

Given that, which route should Team Streptococcus take?

What about if I told you that Team Streptococcus was a bunch of questing winners. They want to find quest-givers, do quests, and win. They can’t function without a goal and a finish line. They’ve tapped out the local supply of quests in Perrin’s Mill and they’ve heard there’s a lord in Highgrove looking for adventurers for a job or three? Given that, which route should they take?

What if they’re questers but they’re on a quest? And what if that quest is to see an NPC safely to Highgrove. A non-combat NPC scholar. Basically, a Fabergé egg with legs and a mouth?

What if they’re on a quest to retrieve medicine from Highgrove and bring it back to Perrin’s Mill? And the person that needs the medicine might succumb at literally any moment? Like, they are hanging on by a thread and making Constitution saving throws every day? Now which route?

What if Team Streptococcus has a ranger whose favored terrain is forests?

What if Team Streptococcus consists of a bunch of true adventurers who want to wander the wilderness and find every exciting thing there is to find, but one of the PCs has agreed to escort a non-combat NPC scholar Fabergé egg to Highgrove? What if the Fabergé egg is sick and needs medicine from Highgrove and might die? But what if there’s also a ranger whose favored terrain is forests?

Do you see what I’m saying? Do you? Do you see how the meaningfulness of the choice just kind of pops out once you add a certain level of detail? That’s because depth of play and meaningful choice comes from the players interacting with the mechanics. It’s not just the players motivations and preferences. It’s not just the game mechanical constraints that define the costs and consequences for each choice. And there’s no one particular mechanic or system that’s the lynchpin of meaningfulness. Everything’s just a grain on the scale. On one side or the other. And everyone at the table is also putting a finger on the scale. On one side or the other.

And no, the player’s choices and preferences alone don’t make things deep or meaningful. I mean, absent any other constraints, the explorers will always explore and the questers will always quest. The winners will always minimize their risks. Those choices are meaningful once. After that, you need the rest of this s$&% — all those other grains on the scale — to ask questions like “what will it take to get you to stop exploring” or “how high do the stakes have to be for you to take a big risk” or “what mystery is engaging enough to get you to drop your quest and take a side trip?”

Let’s Take a Road Trip

Now, some of you have already taken my point. Good. Great. But there’s a lot of you f$&%ers who usually need more persuasion than that. And so far, all I’ve talked about is a choice. One choice. I mean, that’s all the whole road trip plan is. It’s one choice. It’s how the players decide what to say after the GM says, “okay, you’re in Perrin’s Mill; what do you do?” It’s how they decide between saying “we’ll buy five days worth of food and then strike out east along the road toward Graybridge” or “we’ll buy five days worth of food and then head north out of Perrin’s Mill into the forest, angling toward Highgrove.”

But a D&D game’s about more than planning. It’s about how that plan goes wrong. Or right. And how the players handle it does. Because the situation’s always evolving and the game’s a series of choices growing from choices growing from choices.

So, Team Streptococcus heads north from Perrin’s Mill into the wilderness. Actually, they’re pretty smart. They decide to follow the shore of Lake Helagh and then break off and head north once the lakeshore veers west. That’ll make navigation less risky. And maybe they’ll discover a cool island or a Merlock encampment or something. Who knows?

As the GM, I ask them all the questions I’m supposed to ask when the party starts tromping across the frontier. Questions about marching order and travel tasks and pace and s$&% like that. And I start rolling dice too. Navigation checks. Random encounter checks. Random weather. All that s$&%.

The party can’t get lost along the lakeshore, and the weather is good, but let’s say the Streps have two dangerous encounters early in the first day. Bad luck. They burn through a bunch of spells and hit points. They’re worried about what’ll happen if they run into any more trouble. They start debating the merits of finding a safe place to hole up for the rest of the day until they can make camp and sleep. Or just heading back to Perrin’s Mill and starting fresh the next day. Or pressing on. Ultimately, they decide to hunker down for the rest of the day and then sleep off their wounds. They find a safe, sheltered place to make camp, wait out the rest of the day, pass the night, and then get moving.

But the next day is cloudy, rainy, and miserable. They can’t see the sun. By midday, they have to veer off from the lake and head into the woods. Their navigation’s penalized. They don’t know it, but they broke off from the lake a little too soon and they’re headed too far east of north. I rolled that.

The next day, they encounter a swollen stream. Not wide, but running high and fast because of the rain. They try to ford it and one of them gets battered and bruised and nearly swept away. They give up and head downstream to find a better crossing. That muddles their navigation even more. They keep traveling, but then I tell them the trees are thinning out and the terrain’s turning rugged and rocky as evening approaches. Now they suspect they’re off course. They look at the map and conclude they’re coming out of the forest and heading into the Howlwind Hills. They decide to stop traveling and make camp and figure out what to do in the morning.

Morning comes. Thankfully, it’s a bright, clear, sunny day. One of the PCs climbs a tall tree to get above the woods and see what they can see. Sure enough, the edge of the forest’s a couple of miles away and the jagged, rocky Howlwind Hills are rising not too far off to the right. Ahead, the PC sees miles of rolling grassland. Somewhere beyond sight is the road. But back in the woods, about a mile away, the PC spots the roof of a ruined structure. Mostly overgrown. And that causes some excitement.

Now, the party knows where they are. Vaguely. At least, they know how to get to Highgrove. Head north out of the forest and across the grasslands until they hit the road, then turn west. They have no idea how far from Highgrove they are though. Probably no more than a day. But the party’s only got two days of food left. They want to check out that mysterious ruin, but if they burn a day there, they could run out of food. They could risk rationing their food and exhausting themselves a little. They could stay put and try to forage. Or they could give up on checking out the ruin and finish the trip to Highgrove. If they do that, though, they’ll probably never find their way back to this particular spot. The ruin’s hidden in the forest and they have no idea exactly where they are anyway. Maybe they can come up with some kind of clever way to mark the trail or draw a map based on some local landmarks or something.

Are those meaningful choices? Is this an interesting trip? Is the party playing a game about exploration? Do you get my f$%&ing point?

Breaking the Watch One Gear at a Time

And now I want you to take all that s$&% I said — all Team Streptococcus’ plans and experiences and all the hypotheticals — take all that s$&% and imagine I start plucking rules out of the game. Imagine, for example, that I don’t like f$&%ing with random encounter tables. Because I think everything has to have a purpose. It has to advance the plot. So I don’t do random encounters. Or, every trip no matter how long has one — and precisely one — random encounter. Imagine I don’t like asking my players to track encumbrance and supplies. Imagine I don’t care about travel time. Imagine the players get everywhere at the speed of plot. Imagine I don’t do weather.

The problem with most GMs is that they evaluate every rule and mechanic in a vacuum. They look at something like encumbrance and ask, “what is this doing for the game by itself?” And they try to imagine a situation where encumbrance and encumbrance alone would drive an interesting and meaningful decision. But there aren’t any. Because, as noted above, all this s$&%’s just pros and cons for a list. It’s just grains on a scale. And since they can’t find any good reason to keep encumbrance in the game in isolation, they drop it. And that’s one grain less on the scale. No big deal by itself, right? But then they do the same with random encounters. Or weather. Or attacks of opportunity. Or travel tasks. Whatever.

Meanwhile, those same GMs flip frantically back and forth through the rules looking for the exploration. Looking for meaningful choices and interesting travel. And they can’t find them because that s$&%’s emergent. Occasionally, a good GM can set up a meaningful choice. But more often, such choices emerge from the complex interplay of external constraints — game mechanics — and internal motivations — the players’ and the characters’ needs and wants.

In short, GMs open up their watches and start pulling out gears and springs and screws that don’t seem to be doing anything and then they can’t understand why they don’t know what time it is anymore.

Now, I ain’t saying the D&D 5E rules are perfect. Or even particularly good. But they’re way better than most of you f$%&ers think they are. You just don’t know it because you don’t use them. You don’t even know what’s in there most of the time. And you gut them out without really knowing how they work.

I run my games as close to “by the book” as I can manage. Yeah. Me. The guy who’s so bogged down inventing new rules that he can’t finish any of them. Notice that I don’t really advocate very often for removing rules. I rarely hack rules out. Most of my hacking isn’t even adding things in. It’s just streamlining things so they work better. I mean, did you know that the D&D 5E DMG suggests tracking and adjusting companion NPCs’ loyalty scores. I s$&% you not. It’s in there. I didn’t come up with that crap, I just came up with a streamlined way to manage it and an easier way to keep track of how it should affect the NPC’s behavior.

I mean, remember, I’m the one who started that Quicksand Incident by citing the travel time rules from the PHB. And you can say, “yeah, but you have all this experience with D&D 5E and an encyclopedic knowledge of everything.” Maybe. But I have literally no more experience with D&D 5E than anyone else. It came out in 2014. I didn’t get to play it before you did. Unless you’re new at this.

All that aside, the lesson today is a simple one. If you want to run D&D, open the f$&%ing book and learn how to run D&D. And run it the way the book says for at least six months before you touch a single f$%&ing thing. Are there contradicitons? Yeah. Are there presentation issues? You bet. Are some things unclear? Definitely. You’re going to have to make some judgment calls. That’s what being a GM is all about. But you sure as hell should do your best to run the game the way it’s written for a while before you think you know enough to fix it.

And you definitely need to know the rules before you ask me to fix them for you. Because I’m going to call you on your ignorance every damned time.