A few weeks ago, I was running my Blades in the Dark campaign, in the Free Play stage, waiting for the players to finish gathering information to kick off their score. I figured they needed to get a few details uncovered to be ready. I had even given them a few hints in the narrative prelude, which I released the day before the session. Roll after roll, and question after question followed, and I started to realize that the players were not even close to what I had prepped for the evening, and had chosen an unexpected chain of actions. The interesting part was that through these actions, they were going to reach the same end scene that I had prepped for in the score, that is, to encounter a powerful Faction that could help them, if they were willing to make a deal. I decided then that we did not have to keep with the prep or even the normal structure that Blades recommends, and rather, just let the session, in its organic way, play out. 

Sometimes, play deviates pretty far from prep. 

And that is ok. 

All Play Deviates From Prep

On some level, all play deviates from prep. No GM can ever prep for everything players could do and for every outcome of the randomizer of the game. When we prep our own material, what we tend to prep is the most probable actions and outcomes. We put a room of Orcs in the dungeon, we prep it for a combat scene, but the players might use stealth or negotiation. When play deviates from prep, the GM needs to improvise what happens, often engaging the rules of the game and their own story skills to come up with how that scene is handled and how it flows into the rest of the story. 

Today, I am much more into the philosophy of prepping situations but not solutions. The players will come up with a solution, and the rules of the game will determine the outcome of their solution. As long as I understand the general story, the setting, and its characters, I can determine how the story incorporates the outcome. Today, I consider a good session one where the players surprise me with their choice of solution or how the outcome of their choices plays out. 

This is not to say that “play to discover” is the one true way. I don’t believe in one true way to GM. I am saying that it’s the way that creates my current enjoyment of the game. Before this, when I ran games prepped tight to the expected actions of the players, I enjoyed plenty of those games, and so did my players. Find your enjoyment in this hobby however you like (within the limits of Safety). 

Small Deviations vs. Large Ones

All that said, there are small deviations from prep, and there are large ones. Small deviations typically resolve themselves within the same scene or in a scene or two. You might have to move a few things around in your prep to make that happen. For example, the detectives (characters) decide not to interview the bartender, and miss the opportunity for a specific clue, and you decide to move that clue to another NPC, later in the session. 

Large deviations in prep are the kinds of things that take a sharp turn from what you expected to happen in the story or session. They may not resolve themselves within the session or story, or open up an entirely other storyline that was not expected. For example, your prep for the night includes the detectives (characters) working the murder at the nightclub, but after getting started on that case, they put it on hold to reopen a case they recently closed, to chase a clue they had left unresolved. 

This is A Feature, Not a Bug

While RPGs have similarities to other media (i.e., movies, streaming, or books), they are by their very nature an improvisational form of entertainment. In other media, you may not know what is going on while you are observing it, but the writers locked in the events of the story through the creation of the media. RPGs are not like that; we are both the writers and consumers of the media at the same time. 

Play in RPGs is erratic and sometimes downright strange. Players come up with all sorts of ideas, sometimes based in the game world and sometimes in the real world. They bleed their own emotions into the game, making sometimes irrational decisions for their characters. Dice do not follow “the script,” and key rolls are blown. But it’s supposed to be this way. It is what makes this hobby so much fun. 

Dealing with Deviations

As a GM, the sooner you get comfortable with handling small and large deviations, the better your games will be. You will never prep the deviations away, so lean into them and get good at handling them. 

Here are a few simple tips on handling deviations, but this list can’t do this skill justice. If you are new to GMing, use this as a starting place; if you are a more experienced GM, you likely have done most of these things.

Don’t Prep Solutions

Going back to Dogs in the Vineyard, prep situations and not solutions. Learn to let go of what the “correct” or “optimal” solution is for a given situation, and just create the situation. You can’t deviate from the prep if there is no prep. You may want to, for the sake of efficiency, cover a few bases, but don’t lock anything in as being the only way to conclude the scene. For example, prep some stat blocks for the Orcs, since combat is a possibility, and you don’t want to break out your Monster Manual should the players draw swords.

Move Elements Around

For smaller deviations, you can always move some elements around. If the key was supposed to be found in room three after the combat, and the players stealthed through room three and never searched it, move that key to another room. Or do away with the lock the key was intended for. As mentioned earlier, this is good for small deviations. 

Soft Corrections

Sometimes you can nudge the players with a hint, a comment from an NPC, or a skill check that gives the characters some information. For instance, the players start to theorize that the blue plasma could be the cause of the ship explosion, which would take them completely off the mystery, so you call for a science check, and when successful, you tell the players that their character knows that blue plasma is ionizing and could not cause an explosion. I like this technique when the characters may know something that the players don’t, and giving them that info helps the game progress more smoothly. 

Hard Correction

Other times, you have to take more of a direct intervention and speak to the table, GM to players. I reserve this for larger deviations, where the players are going to do something that is going to take us right out of the story that was planned for and into something new. At this point, I will pause play and tell the players what is going on, and offer the choice to continue their new course of action or help to work the game back to the prepped story. 

As a caveat, I am comfortable enough as a GM to allow for either of those situations to occur, but you might not be, or you might be playing something published and don’t have anything else to work from, so you may only want to offer how to get back onto the prepped material. That choice is up to you based on your comfort with your game and your table. 

Toss The Notes

Lastly, you can just let the deviation happen. You don’t have to correct it; you can just play the ball where it lies. See what happens and play from there. This is going to require that you be comfortable improvising the game from this point on. If you are, and you are curious about how this deviation could play out, then put your prep away and keep playing. 

Hold Your Prep Securely, But With A Loose Hand

Prep is a great tool to help you organize your game and minimize the “dead air” of having to look things up or try to think of what to do next. Prep is what we think could happen in the game. Players are a wily lot, and sometimes they don’t do what we think they will. At that moment, we have a choice to make. Do we try to fix the deviation, or do we let the deviation drive the game? There is no right answer. It is a decision that you make as the GM, based on your expectations and comfort levels. In the tenure of my decades of GMing, I have done both and have had both work and fail at different times. 

In the case of my recent Blades game, the players were quite satisfied with the outcome of the session, although we never ran the score, but rather Free Played into a solution. When I commented to them about the deviation after the session, they didn’t care. They thought the session was just fine. Next session, I suspect we will go back to a good old score again, but we all had fun playing. The players got the outcome they wanted, and I was entertained by how it came about. 

Deviations from prep are an integral part of the game, and the sooner you are comfortable with that, the more relaxed you will be running your games. There are techniques to minimize deviations, correct them, and embrace them. Like all things, these techniques are tools in a toolbox; you use the right one at the right time. That is the real skill, to know which one to employ when. 

How do you handle deviations from prep during your sessions? Are you a play-to-discover kind of GM, or are you more ‘stick to the script’? What are your favorite techniques for dealing with deviations?