Leaning In - Running D&D For the Players

There are a few areas in D&D where I feel that I am an outlier, at least if social media discussion of the game is to be taken seriously. 

An example of this is character backstories. I avoid them as much as possible. I find they create too much work for the ref, once they are set down they become sort of a roadmap for the issues that the campaign has to address. So if the party fighter’s parents were killed by evil Lord Gogam, then the campaign has to involve evil Lord Gogam in some way. Multiply that by a 5 PC party and it gets kind of ridiculous.

I prefer to let the players play, let the PCs adventure, and that creates the “backstory” for the PCs. 

There are other areas where I find myself out of step, and I read a thread this AM on one of those topics that made me kind of sad. The post was complaining that the PCs liked to go “shopping”, and that this activity should be relegated to between session emails or something like that. A few complained it was a “waste of time” and could take up whole sessions. 

I see similar comments about combat sometimes, it drags, it takes up too much time, it’s too slow, etc., and then people ask for ways to speed it up or even avoid it entirely.

The thing I find fascinating about this is that, in my experience at least, players LOVE to shop, and LOVE to fight. I run an after school game for kids, most of which haven’t had the opportunity to have “their own” money to spend. So going shopping for stuff makes them feel “grown up”. All of my groups have been jazzed to buy equipment, mounts, henchmen, etc.

I learned something early on with D&D. 

In one session, one of the PCs, a thief, was in the process of sneaking into a keep, he was tasked with opening a door to let the rest of the PCs inside. He was passing down a hallway and found a locked door. It wasn’t a door to the outside, but he wanted to check it out, so he picked the lock and looked inside. It was a weapons room, filled with swords, hammers, shields, knives, spears, crossbows, etc. The player knew that the longer he took the more likely someone would show up. I rolled every turn to see if he was spotted, the player KNEW that I was rolling, every time I did they saw it. But he insisted on asking what weapons were there, checking them out, doing an inventory of the room. He didn’t think they were magic weapons, he just loved the idea of finding out what was there and stealing something from the NPCs in question, even if he could easily have purchased any of these weapons himself at any time in the city.

The important bit here is that the player found this engaging. I didn’t find it engaging, I didn’t see the point. But it’s NOT ABOUT ME. It’s not about me being “engaged” all the time. When the PC wants to poke around a room full of weapons for fun then my role is to support that. 

Players being interested in something is the gold standard, buy-in, immersion and interest are all what you want in a TTRPG. When the players TELL YOU what they want, get stuck in there.

My role as a ref is to make an immersive, exciting game world for the players to engage with through their PCs. That’s the job, IMO. What that means for me is that the PLAYERS decide what they are going to do. Whatever that might be. Of course, some of their chosen tasks will be challenging, and they can fail, but it isn’t my role in the game to tell them what to do. 

I create the game world, I run every NPC/Monster, I set the events, control the weather, make the cultures and groups and factions, set the encounters, design the encounter tables, and set the odds for tasks. I do ALL OF THAT. 

The players have one task, to run their PCs. 

That’s it. 

So they have COMPLETE autonomy with respect to what their PCs want to do. 

So that means, for me, that the role of the ref at the table is to have the game world respond to whatever they choose to do. For me, dissuading players from doing things that interest them in the game is robbing them of their already limited agency in the game. They don’t get to control much, but their PCs choices should be sacrosanct. 

So when the players want to “go shopping”, it makes me sad that the response to this is often, “UGH, the players went shopping AGAIN this session”, or “they spent the entire 2 hour session buying mounts, what a waste of time!” 

What I see here is self-involved refs that are running the game for THEMSELVES, not their players, curating some hermetically sealed experience and making it about what interests THEM, not what interests the group. 

For a TTRPG community that goes on about agency and player freedom, I find it remarkably odd that their response to the players ENGAGING WITH THE GAME ON THEIR OWN TERMS is to dissuade them from doing so. I have read dozens of threads here about player engagement, “how do you keep them interested”, “my players aren’t engaged with the game”, but when the players STATE WHAT THEY WANT AND ARE ENGAGED WITH SOME ASPECT OF THE GAME WORLD many refs respond by hurrying them through like a high school tour group at the museum.

My approach to this is to identify what engages them and lean into that. Many of my groups like “shopping” in D&D, so when they want to shop, I’m ALL IN! 

Maybe the answer to lack of player engagement is that the ref isn’t meeting the players where they live. 

Shopping in D&D can be a blast. My players shop for weapons, mounts, equipment, henchmen, you name it. They shop for animals (pets), they shop for esoteric equipment (spyglasses, sealable flasks for strange ichors they find in the dungeon, barding for their war dogs), the list is long and weird.

The process of finding what they want can involve interaction with the game world, asking for directions, asking who in town would make X, Y and Z. My players have made so many interesting connections with NPCs through “shopping” for stuff. One of the reasons refs have to elide over various aspects of dungeon crawling is that the players often lack the equipment needed to do things, as they avoid things like shopping, so refs hand wave various environmental challenges. They want to roll checks all the time, and walk away from tasks that have no immediate spell/ability to address them, because they often lack the equipment to try something. 

The rules also help here. There are still random encounters to be rolled for when “shopping’, getting to and from places in town when shopping for stuff can involve encounters, as can entering into shops. Shopkeepers can be interesting NPCs as well, they can be connected to various factions in the game, and by patronizing their shops the PCs can become involved in those factional intrigues. 

I’ve dropped important hints to the PCs through shopkeepers, after the appropriate encounter reaction rolls. PCs have picked up henchmen, grabbed key equipment, and discovered new options for their characters through “shopping” for stuff. They have been pick-pocketed, gotten into fights with NPCs due to bad reaction rolls, and even run afoul of the city guards as they got into disputes with the shopkeepers that became heated.

PCs shopping also gives you the opportunity to bring in character skills. Refs lament all the time that D&D doesn’t have a “skill system”, but it does have secondary skills for every PC, and these can come into play when they are shopping. One of the PCs in my Friday group has the secondary skill of “animal husbandry”, so when they go shopping for guard dogs or mounts, I give that PC a bonus when picking the animals they buy. 

One of our favorite things to do is to shop for mounts. In my game world there are a range of mounts used, not just horses, and deciding which mount to pick is almost a mini-game in and of itself. Which mount is fastest, which has the most HP, which does the most damage if it attacks, which can carry the most, which has the best endurance and can travel the furthest in a day, etc. 

Players, in my experience, LOVE to ask questions about this sort of stuff and to make optimization decisions about what to pick. And then they have to decide about tack and harness, and training. Do they purchase more expensive mounts that have been trained, or less expensive mounts that are less trained? Do they just want a saddle, or saddlebags? Barding? Players become attached to their mounts and animal companions, and the shopping experience is part of this process.

Obtaining henchmen is another great example of how shopping can be a fun part of the game. Henchmen have to be equipped, so it becomes a bit of a mini-game selecting armor and weapons, and I get to have some fun naming the henchmen and giving them a personality when they meet the PCs.

The players in my game have had many hours of fun buying equipment, mounts and henchmen, going to sages for research, spending time doing things that many refs, if I’m to believe what I see on Twitter, simply hand wave. I think their games are poorer for this, and their game worlds become less immersive. 

It’s an old joke that players force their refs to name every NPC as kind of a punishment. And sometimes it is, they are just messing with you! But I think they also do this for a more interesting reason, they are leaning into the game world, every NPC has a name, asking the ref to provide it isn’t being a jerk, it’s thirsting for immersion. Every NPC with a name is another piece of your game world, every time you give an NPC a name, your game world is given more depth, it comes to life.

Every shopkeeper, every animal handler, every weapon they buy, every mount they try out, every henchman they hire, these are all locus points for creating an immersive, “real” game world that engages the players. 

It may not be your idea of “exciting fantasy role play”, but I would encourage you to stop making the game solely about what YOU like, and start leaning into what the players want. You may find that their enthusiasm and interest in the process, if you embrace it, makes it exciting and interesting for you as the ref as well. And once you do lean into this, you can use the process to show them things about your game world, pass along lore, pass along information they need for their next adventure, create alliances, create enmities, and move along the game in ways you didn’t anticipate.

Lean in, you won’t regret it.