When Jung and I began talking with our daughters about their birthday party this year, S and J told us they wanted their party to be a sleepover, and to feature a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) role-playing game session. At first J volunteered to run the game (to be the “Dungeon Master”) but I thought that as one of the “birthday girls” she should be able to relax and play so it would be better in this case for me to run the game. As it turned out, J was a fantastic coach and teacher to her friends, helping them sort through their different options and offering advice without trying to control her friends decisions, and she could only play this role because she was a fellow player rather than the Dungeon Master. In all, the game was a huge success, and that was a big relief for me.

I am not a very experienced Dungeon Master (DM). I have run a few games for my daughters and/or their friends before, but nothing as involved as what they were expecting for their birthday party. Running a smooth D&D game takes a significant amount of preparation. It’s not unlike writing a “choose your own adventure” novel: plot points, conflicts, vivid characters and rewards all need to be worked out in advance. It’s also a bit like preparing for a performance because the DM needs to be able to call on these characters’ names and personalities quickly to keep the energy of the game going. On top of all that, the DM needs to stay flexible because more often than not, the players will choose to do things that the DM didn’t plan for, and that’s the fun of a tabletop role-playing game. Video games have limits on what the characters can do and where they can go. If it’s not programmed in the game, players can’t do it or go there. A tabletop role-playing game is only limited by the imaginations of the players sitting around the table. However, this does make the DM’s job challenging as she or he tries to come up with new characters and parts of the world on the fly when the players decide to cut through the woods rather than taking one of the trails, jury-rig a raft rather than go around the lake, sweet-talk the monsters rather than fight them, or any of the other myriad possibilities they could think up.

That is why preparation is the key for making a truly fun role-playing game session. For the entire week before the birthday party I tried to find time to prepare but soon I felt like it had become a running joke for me to say to Jung, “I’m going to do ‘x’ and then I’m going to sit down and prepare for the game.” The problem was that there were so many “x”s that the days ticked past without me having any time at all! One night I stayed up late to gather some story ideas from the Dungeons & Dragons website, but by the time the party day had rolled around, all I had done was to read through the materials I printed out from the website and select two adventure ideas to create my story out of. I had no characters, no plot, and no idea of how I was going to pull all this together.

I ended up with about fifteen minutes just before the game while Jung was with S, J, and their friends. I went into our bedroom, closed the door, and pulled out the printouts and a pad of paper. I figured out a “two act” story where the first act was a heavily modified version of one printout I had, and the second act was a barely modified version of the other. I wrote down a number of character names, decided who they were and how they might interact with the player’s characters if they ran into each other, and that was it.

There were some “minor details” that I had to come up with on the fly. For instance, when the characters arrived at the estate where the grand ball was being held, I realized I had no idea what the building looked like. As I described it, I had to draw a hasty sketch for myself so I wouldn’t contradict any details later! Naturally, two characters did something completely unexpected and snuck out of the ball to search for a particular room. I had to decide quickly where that room was in this building so I would know if they came to it or not. On top of all this, in the second act, the final battle was taking so long (way past the bedtimes of any of the kids) that I had to find a way to end the battle prematurely while making it feel natural and satisfying. (“Suddenly all the bad guys vanish in puffs of smoke” wasn’t going to cut it.)

What amazed me at the end was that even with my minimal preparation and all the modifications I had to make on the fly, everyone had a great time. One of my daughters’ friends, who had never played D&D before, immediately said that we had to arrange more games in the future!

After all the kids headed off to bed, I thought about how staying in the moment and remaining flexible enough to roll with the player’s decisions and energy turned out to be far more important than preparation. If I am honest with myself, I must admit that in real life as well, I can never be certain what is beyond my current step. I want to remember the lesson of that game and be centered in the moment and remain flexible enough to roll with whatever life brings my way.

This game session also taught me that being willing to throw some things out (such as when I had to shorten the final battle) can make the game far more fun. Sometimes I have a tendency to stick to my plans, even when a change in the situation has made my plan less relevant. I was glad that in this case I stayed open to the true purpose of the adventure which was not to complete a game as written, but to feel challenged, to feel victorious by working together, and in the end, to have fun. In this case, a big part of the fun for me was being challenged to stretch myself as Ambassador of Play and create an experience which began with D&D, but turned into a game session customized for maximum fun for these five young players.