Leaving the Rules Behind (CSC)

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There are also times in an adventure when the DM may decide to wander away from the official rules of the game and focus on the action of the game, making judgement decisions as to whether characters successfully use skills or monsters detect the presence of intruders rather than rolling dice for an answer.
Too often in a game, the DM gets in the habit of consulting dice to make his decisions. The player's want to perform an action. The DM considers the options and rolls the dice. Even though he may have weighted the success chances one way or another based on his estimation of the chance of success, he's still relying on random chance to determine the outcome. True, random elements can affect player actions, but just as easily randomness can ruin a chance for drama within an encounter, spoil the excitement in an adventure or ruin the players' plans.
Chances are, the rules say to roll dice to resolve a given situation, such as "roll a d20 to determine success" or "there is a one in six chance that the character detects the hidden door." Yet in some situations, its better to ignore the rules and rely solely on the DMs judgement skills.
Go watch some young children playing with cars, trucks, action figures, or dolls, the kind of toy doesn't matter. Without a game master or a complex set of rules, they play out complex fantasy encounters. In their childlike way, they role-play more effectively than most older players. Minor disagreements aside, they work together to forge their shared imagination into a single story line, a fantasy lived out through their toys. As we have grown older, we've found a need to impose structure on our lives, to replace toys with tools, imagination with rationalization, and free-form play with rules.
The effective DM will draw upon both the imaginative child within him and his abilities as a story teller to stir the imagination of his players. He will find whatever opportunities he can to free himself from the constraints of rules and concentrate on giving the players an extraordinary role-playing experience, where the shared fantasy of the adventure, the telling of the tale takes precedence over the mechanics of how it is done.
Leaving the rules behind does not mean that the scenario is no longer an AD&D® game adventure. Far from it. The DM should still keep actions and results within the scope of possibility offered by the rules (or at least close enough to be believable). Consider the following:
Fleeing from bandits, the party takes refuge in the oddly intact ruins of a long-dead wizard's tower. The bandits do not immediately follow, for they are afraid of the fiend rumored to dwell in the tower. The cowardly bandits slowly work up their courage to follow—maybe the PCs and the fiend will wipe each other out and they can clean up whatever's left. Meanwhile, during the course of exploring the tower (looking for something that they can use against the cowardly bandits who grossly outnumber them and tend to shoot lots and lots of arrows from the safety of the surrounding trees), the PCs kill a minotaur, and even dispatch the fiend (who actually did live in the tower, but left behind no earthly remains upon his demise).
Unfortunately, the fiend left the PCs in poor shape for dispatching hordes of cowardly bandits (remember, lots of arrows from the trees?), so they concoct a plan!
They will scare the bandits when they come through the front door.
Using paint found in the wizard's lab, they paint the minotaur carcass fire-engine red, haul it to the top of the stairs (which conveniently end at the front door) and sit it atop a shield. At the top of the stair a burly fighter holds the brightly painted minotaur carcass upright while a wizard stands ready with a few simple spells to provide special effects. The rest of the pes smear themselves with blood and soot and lay arolll1d the entryway doing their best corpse imitations and hoping that the bandits don't have time for a body count when the door opens.
As expected, the bandits soon manage to break down the front door and begin to charge into the tower, pausing for a second to look at the unusual scene around theme. Tension hangs in the air as the player's hope for the success of this highly improbable trick. The DM, on the other hand, is doing his best to remember which section of the Dungeon Master's Guide deals with fire-engine-red minotaur corpses and their ability to terrify charging bandits. Hmmmm. It doesn't seem to be covered...
As you can see, the success of the players' depends on about a zillion complicated factors coming together to create a single desired effect-making the bandits believe that the PCs are dead, that the fiend (who looks like a bright red minotaur) still lives and has his heart set on bandit pot roast for dinner. When the wizard casts his phantasmal force spell and the fighter gives the body a shove and sends it sliding down the steps, will the bandits tum and flee? Or will they burst out laughing and proceed to slaughter the characters?
Now the DM running this situation could yank out his d20s, d100s, d6s and so on, decide on a chance for each piece of the plan separately, i.e., do the bandits believe the pes are dead, do they believe that the minotaur corpse is truly the fiend they have heard so much about, does it slide down the steps smoothly when pushed, and of course, are the bandits scared? After rolling for each item, he discovers that one part of the plan fails and the characters are all killed.
The DM who works things out that way is not being very much fun. Sure, the rules say to make skill checks and random dice rolls to resolve encounters, but rules are really only needed as an alternative to imagination. The players have put a lot of imagination into solving the problem of their immediate survival. They set up an opportunity for a dramatic, exciting, and even humorous encounter, which has a slight chance of saving their lives. The DM in twn has given responsibility for its outcome over to a few chunks of geometric plastic. By slavishly following the rules, he has condemned the characters to a pointlessly brutal doom. Look now at the players' plan as it occurs when the DM decides to rely on his judgement instead of his dice.
The aging door to the outside suddenly bursts open and the bandits peer cautiously in. In the gloom they see the carnage wrought upon the dead pes (the DM decides that it's dark enough for the ruse to work, at least until the bandits inspect the bodies). As the horror of the pes' doom begins to settle in, they are startled by a booming voice from above.
"What! More intruders? You shall die even more horribly than those who came before." The bandits look up to see a horrible, homed, scarlet fiend barrelling down the stairs toward them before they are blinded by the brilliant bursting flares of light which shower down around them (the DM decides that the phantasmal force spell covers a multitude of discrepancies between the appearances of the fiend they have heard so much about and a red minotaur). The bandits scream in terror and flee the tower. Their fellows in the woods presume the worst and they, too, run. Meanwhile, back in the tower a muffled voice grunts "will somebody get this lousy minotaur off me, [ can hardly breathe!"
Similarly, the DM may find himself in situations where the player's must make a skill test to discover something in his game. If they fail the test, the characters miss out on what the DM has in store for thein. Rather than rely on the dice, the DM simply allows the characters to fimd the door. Yet, if he does it right, the situation adds more to the game than the rolling of dice.
: DM: "The blood trail ends near the south wall."
: Player: "We check the wall for secret doors."
: DM: "You don't find anything that looks like a door, secret or otherwise. But the elf hears someone fumbling with the lock on the north door. "
: Player: "Quick, what's the south wall look like?"
: DM: "Lots of detailed pain tings, mostly landscapes. Most of 'em are pretty big."
: Player: "I move the one closest to the trail."
: DM: "Doesn't move. Hey, that sounded like a key in the lock."
: Player: "Uh, um. Uh, what's that painting look like?"
: DM: "It's a winter scene. It looks like footprints in the snow, trailing off into the distance. Every so often, you can see a splotch of bright crimson amongst the footprints. In the distance you see what looks like a warrior. The door's starting to open."
: Player: "I, we, wn, guys, everybody follow Thuenor. He's climbing into the winter wonderland picture."
: DM: "The door opens and the wizard enters. He doesn't seem to notice that one of his paintings now contains portraits of a bunch of adventurers."
A third area where leaving the rules behind can help the DM create a world of wonder is that of magic. The AD8d3® game magic system allows for a great variety of magical powers. Nevertheless, the DM may find that his imagination can create magical devices, artifacts, and environments that defy description within the bounds of the magic rules.
Suppose that the DM creates a scenario that involves living beings encased within stasis cocoons of transparent crystal. Based on the magic rules for creating magical items, no spell or spells exist for making this work. The DM is then faced with a choice: use this creation of his imagination and present it as an object of wonder, or throw it out because it doesn't fit the rules. The DM probably knows our recommendation already.