What's My One Rule?

Saturday Night:     The players are level 6, delving into a dark monastery on the orders of their guild.

The Forbidden Monastery is stalked by skinless monsters, spider aberrations, and an overwhelming sense that a trap waits around every corner. Even the treasure isn't safe from the Dungeon Master's trap-laying hand. Its overseer, a former Wizard named Kylaan, has been communing with an Extraplanar traveler. Everything has thoroughly gone to hell.

The party has arrived at Kylaan's chamber, seen the extent of his evil, and made the executive decision to end his dark work. Alcinia, the group's Illusion Mage who loves to avoid a fight, summons a great illusory beast of spider, snake, and demon parts. A thorough chimera of terror. This chimera tries its best to convince Kylaan of his wrongdoing, of his failure, but Alcinia slips up and calls her illusion a demon rather than an Extraplanar being. Kylaan starts to recover his ground. It looks like the illusion is going to fail.

Being a Dungeon Master means playing a lot of roles. The different Handbooks like to call you part deity, part judge, and part den mother. The comparisons are sound. Players are there to enjoy the world a DM serves as the gateway to.

Within storytelling, it's very important to establish a world's rules and stick to them. Deux Ex Machina robs the audience of their emotional pay-out. If the heroes struggle to achieve victory then the victory is sweet. If the victory is handed to them then it tastes bitter.

At the gaming table there are a lot of rules. That's an understatement. THERE ARE A LOT OF RULES. Even if you only use the Big 3 (Player's Handbook, DM Guide, Monster Manual) that's still almost 500 pages of text you should have read and another 250 you might need to reference quickly. Those rules are important. They're the system in which a Tabletop Campaign functions. I'll go into my opinion about those rules at a later date. Right now I'm going to focus on the most important rule I have come upon in my travels.

One day, some months before, I was going through my usual routine: jumping from Tabletop blog to Dungeon Master forum, mining them for gems I might bring to my own table. Deep in those mines I found my one rule for being a Dungeon Master:

Always say yes.

The party wants to try cool things. They want to try crazy things. Sometimes they want to try stupid things. If you tell them no then that ends the moment. They'll leave the table that night saying "man I wish I could have tried X! That could've been so cool!" On the other hand, if you let them try to combine oil, alchemist's fire, and acid to create a makeshift terror bomb they'll leave the table saying "I can't believe those rusts monsters cracked and buckled like that! That was the beeeeest!!!"

Every time you say 'yes' you offer the party two outcomes. Something incredible happens that they will talk about for weeks and months and even years to come, or something terrible happens that gives them the opportunity to recover.

They will want to talk about the time they broke a party member out of prison by starting a riot and looting the evidence room, but they don't want to talk about the time they didn't get the chance to even try. They will want to talk about the time they tried to push a guard off a roof, missed, and fell, leading to that very prison break.

When my player wanted to create an illusory demon to convince the end boss to commit suicide in his insanity I said "Yes, that's awesome!" When she made a mistake and nearly turned the tide against the party everyone was tense. They were afraid for a moment that it wouldn't work. Kylaan burned through his spells trying to fight an illusion and then a few Charisma rolls later he let himself die. The party took a deep breath, cheered their victory, and charged the pile of loot.

What's my one rule? Always say yes.