The forest quakes as the heavy footsteps of the dragon shakes the trees. The critters are running away from the flames of the dragons breath. The village, not too far away is raising the alarm with a clanging bell, but that seems to be drawing the dragon’s murderous attention towards it and the bell ringing is quickly cut off.

*queue Benny Hill music*

And our adventuring party has arrived.

Should D&D be a serious game, a silly game, or both and how can you keep the tone that you want?

First, I’ll say, there isn’t a right way to play D&D, you can have a serious game in a grim dark fantasy world or you can have a light and fun game where everyone who seems at all bad can be killed off by your roving party of murder hobos and that’s completely fine. But setting a tone and being willing or able to adjust if need be is something important to be able to do.

So with setting the tone, when and how do you do that?

I’m going to go to one of my favorite answers, Session 0. So, before you start playing when you are pitching ideas, you can talk about what sort of story it is going to be, but talk about how serious the game is going to be. It might be that a story with drow fighting a war and being a group infiltrating that, might seem like a time for silly high jinx for players, but you might have meant that as a serious game. Or maybe it’s a decent into the 9 hells, and your demon lord is going to be like Satan from South Park, but the players think it’s going to be very serious. So, in session 0 when pitching things, talk about what sort of fantasy setting it is, and how serious a game it might be or might not be as that might influence how much players like the idea or what type of game that they want to play.

But beyond that, as a DM, you need to be able to adjust the tone as you continue to play. This can be done in a couple of ways. Maybe you start out with a serious game, but the characters keep on doing goofy things or off the wall things and making it more light hearted or less grim dark at least. Then you have to adjust your DMing in one of two ways in game.

The first one is that you can adjust your game to be more light hearted, maybe that is what your players really wanted and they just didn’t want to say that in session 0. This can be tough to do, because your story might be focused in on a more serious setting. So you might not be able to use the whole idea like you had planned for the players. So adjusting might mean setting aside some of that idea for a later game. Or it might be taking what you had planned and making it less grim and serious.

The second option would be to almost double down on the more serious or more light hearted tone. Focus on providing those moments that really enforce the tone that you’re going for, and when the players do something against that tone, if it’s being serious in a lighter situation or goofy in a serious situation, have the NPCs react to what the PCs are doing. This one is tougher to do because you might be pushing against what the players want in a game. So I’d lean towards adjusting with the first option, though, there is a third out of game option that I’d recommend.

The best option, is out of game, and less passive aggressive, and that’s just to ask the players what tone they want. If, for example, you had planned a more serious game, you can ask the players if they want the game to stay serious or if you should adjust the story to more of a lighter game. It might be that they didn’t realize they had shifted into doing lighter and goofier things, especially if that’s how they are used to playing. Now, conversations out of the game can be a bit trickier, especially if you talked about it in session 0. but generally it’ll be what helps your game the most.

But, let’s say that you have a group where you’ve played for several years and always played lighter games, and now you want to play a grim dark game. How do you go about doing that?

If you are used to playing light games without many consequences and without tracking things like arrows, food, etc., it’s going to be a big change. Instead of going for all of it at once, I would slowly build up to it. So start tracking arrows at the start, but keep the players so that they are always ending up in a town before food would be an issue, and just tell them that they are spending a bit of money to reload. And once they figure out that they need to track arrows, then they can start tracking food as well. And the same with theme as well, start with what seems like a more standard quest, you can then start to add in more grim dark elements to it. And the same goes with going from a more serious to a lighter game, go slowly, it’s going to be an adjustment if people only know it one way.

Now, there are going to be other things that you can do to adjust, and there are going to be ways to keep a game on track, such as rewarding role playing that fits the type of game that you want to run. But I’d really say, session 0 is going to be your best friend for planning out the game and I can’t overstate the importance of it.

How do you set tone in your game? Are there certain things you do to describe or set-up the story in such a way to help enforce a tone?

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