I Don't Care about Being Surprised as a GM
I'm taking a break from discussing structures today to do the thing the internet was created for in the first place: spewing forth hot takes! (Disclaimer: actual temperature of the take may be very tepid, hotness not guaranteed)
So:
I don’t care too much about “being surprised” as a GM by the actions the players take.
I don’t dislike being surprised as a GM either, that can indeed be a very pleasant and memorable moment at the game table. But I feel like a lot of RPG Discourse™ overly emphasizes it, and, as usual for this hobby, we could probably temper this absolutely valid observation with its equally valid opposite – or what is, in truth, an observation that seems to be the opposite but that really isn’t, because we often see opposing binaries where there are none.
I’m going to state my opinion on this in a slightly inflammatory manner for emphasis and to be truthful to the underlying feeling of it! But stick with me to the end and I’ll temper things down again.
Let me say it clearly: correctly anticipating what your players will do and prepping accordingly feels great! Running a session where you never feel like you need to come up with something really important that you would rather have thought of in advance feels great!
It is an achievement in GMing / refereeing / whatever you want to call it, and I see no good reason why you should set your sessions up with the expectation – much less the goal – of being surprised by your players. You should make them earn the moments where they surprise you instead. Being surprised because you just didn’t try to anticipate what they would do is cheap!
Don’t neglect to think through what the natural vectors of approach to the situation you’ve set up are. Consider how someone, with all of the affordances the PCs in your game of choice have, would go about getting what they want as quickly and safely as possible. Take note of what the players’ usual approach is. Know what motivates their characters, know what motivates them as players, and use that to predict what actions they’re most likely to take.
Then, you can use the fact that you’re one step ahead to forge a cool path in the directions you know they’ll be going. Place engaging mechanics there, though choices, profound consequences, interesting characters, dramatic reveals. That’s when you get to have the Cool Shit that you want to put into your game placed there with intentionality and care, all without sacrificing the players’ choices. They still choose, afterall: you just know what choices they’re likely to make before they make it, because you’re paying attention!
Similarly, don’t be surprised when the dice behave exactly how statistics (not dumb gut intuitions) expect them to! Don’t be surprised when the result that has a 5% chance of happening comes up – that stuff comes up 5% of the time, and you should be aiming for 100% coverage of the outcomes of die roll! Don’t be surprised when you’re asked to come up with consequences for failures, or partial successes – that shit will be happening pretty goddang frequently!
Take pride in a session where you saw every one of your players’ hare-brained schemes coming from a mile away! Take pride in the fact that you prepared for it and the session flowed smoothly because of it. Take pride in the fact that the players never caught you with your pants down and they can’t tell what you were improvising and what was your plan all along – because you prepped everything you needed to only improvise that which you can improvise with confidence, so even your improvisation was prepped!
And, on the flip side, feel that twinge of remorse every time you fail to prep something that, in retrospect, was obviously going to be important – and vow to do better next time! Take note of the times you were flustered by having to create important game pieces on the fly. Take note of the times the players looked bored waiting on you to look up a rule or come up with a ruling you could have had ready in advance. Take note of all the bathroom breaks you called for just because you needed some time to think, and ponder: “could I have taken the time to think about this before the session? Could I have saved this bathroom break for when I actually needed to use the bathroom?”
And again, this isn’t really opposite to liking being surprised as a GM. I also like being surprised! It’s great when the players really throw a curveball that causes the entire scenario to swerve in an unexpected direction! They are deep, organic moments that can really only happen in tabletop RPGs, and I cherish them! - even when they strain my capabilities as a GM.
But my goal when prepping is to be as ready for anything as I can be, and even more ready for the things my players are most likely to do. That’s when I can focus on keeping the pace of the session flowing smoothly, on earnestly portraying my NPCs, on making sure I conveyed all of the information my players need, on noting down everything my players are doing, on being honest about what the fictional world is and how it reacts. There’s a lot of things to do while running the game – the more of it I can offload to my time before the game starts, the better! When I spend the entire session reacting and scrambling after my players’ decisions, I can’t do any of that as well, and the session will be a little bit worse for it.
To be very clear: what I’m advocating for here isn’t about covering every possibility (since that is impossible), but it is about covering the most likely ones. It isn’t about maximalist prepping, or spending more time prepping, or writing down detailed plans for all eventualities. It is about having effective prep, which gives you the tools to feel confident and prepared while running – and this is something that is achievable without exhaustively defining every minute detail of an entire fictional setting. This is much easier to do when you don’t treat the players as a black box of mystery and chaos that could never be tamed or reasoned with. So anticipate them, and don’t be surprised unless they are really thinking out of the box!
Or don’t! I’m not advocating for the One True Virtue of GMing. You should read every essay of this kind, where people are espousing something like a “philosophy” of how the game should go, as someone just pointing out some way that they enjoy the game. I think a good framework for reading these is to either recognize the technique or feeling in your own games and appreciate them more, or, if you’ve never experienced it yourself, learn about a different form of running games – whether or not it makes you want to try it for yourself.
TL;DR: I love sessions where nothing the players do surprises me. Those are the sessions where I know that I did my homework, efficiently and effectively.