The Appeal of Powerlessness

"Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today." -- Alan Watts

There is a certain boredom to planning out campaigns, I find, and even more futility. Any twists I write, I already see coming, and am robbed of their full effect; anything I plan, only to have it skipped or ignored, is wasted effort. There is, of course, something to be said for re-using material, but there is a fine line between re-use and a "quantum ogre" situation. So, what, then? Just stop planning?

Stop and imagine for a moment with me. What if you were to surrender to Chaos, by solely let the dice decide? Everything can be put on a table; everything can be randomized; everything can be outsourced to your notes on the milieu, from encounter tables to travel events to weather to entire NPCs. The only way to become a truly impartial referee (as the Patriarchs Gygax and Arneson intended) is by letting go of the urge to cling onto control, to plan, and to calculate (that is, to divorce yourself of the stylings of today's "dungeon masters"), supplanting them with intuition, probability, and improvisation.

By surrendering the narrative power "granted" to you by the paper-rules of the game, you cease to be the foreground of the narrative, merely acting as the conduit between the players and the milieu, or perhaps occasionally as a rules-engine. No more will players complain of railroading; how can they, when you have no plans to begin with? No more will you spend countless hours preparing and refining encounters, balancing them perfectly against the DMG's guidelines, only to have the battle immediately escalate into a bloody, one-sided massacre. Only the dice, and your notes on the world will remain; and only you will be capable of translating them to the other players--because now, you are free to be one, too.