It is an old saw that players are bad at executing their plans. Imagine this common scene: the party have some big job that requires planning; perhaps robbing a guarded caravan. They quibble over details and methods. They identify issues that need to be planned for (which the referee probably never considered). The planning meanders. Someone is always coming up with a new wrinkle, or a whole new plan they’re certain makes the old one obsolete. In my experience this only ever ends when someone (the referee if need be, though preferably an experienced player) takes charge of guiding the whole table to a consensus.

This process can take up a huge chunk of session time, but that’s totally acceptable. Working out a complex plan is a form of play in itself. Eventually though the planning is over, and the referee says “Alright! So, the time is here. You’re positioned outside the place, and the event you’re waiting for is about to happen—”

and this is where the referee fucks everything up for everybody

“What do you do?”

Why do they (we) do this? Like we’re testing the table, asking them to reproduce the consensus that was arrived at so arduously. Maybe it’s because the long planning session has thrown us off the usual pattern of running a game, or maybe the heist format is just so alien to the brain of a dungeon crawler that we simply can’t intuit how this is meant to go.

Instead, we should simply be describing the party’s plan back to them, except now it is in motion:

“When the forward guards are past the target spot, Yusef cuts the rope. The tree you sawed through early this morning comes crashing down right on the cart driver. Yusef, go ahead and roll 4D6 for the damage. Meanwhile, the rest of the party attacks the rear guards. Everybody make attack rolls. Finally, in all the chaos, Balzac tries to slip into the carriage unseen. Give me a DV 2 Skill check to determine if anyone spots you.”

Of course, once the players have first-hand contact with a situation they’re going to learn things that weren’t revealed during the planning stage. The referee should highlight that stuff, give the players an opportunity to process and respond to it, but should not treat new information as a new beginning to the plan.

“As the trade caravan comes up the hill, you notice that their guards include several red-hooded figures, with half-nocked arrows that blaze with magic fire. Does anyone want to take precautions against that in the minute you have before they reach the ambush point?”

And obviously, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Things will go awry. But it’s the referee’s job to help the players stay present in the world by framing the problem within their plan:

“Balzac, you were going to sneak through the tailor’s shop to meet up with Chae-Young so you could hand her the Wand of Orcus you just stole. But now, the tailor shop is on fire. How do you get to her?”

Whenever I’m doing this sort of thing—describing a characters’ actions to their player—I make a point of leaving longer-than-normal pauses in my speech. These give the player an opportunity to interject if I describe something they don’t want their characters to do.

It’s also worth remembering that players are better at responding to false choices than they are at responding to open-ended ones. When I say something like “The path to Chae-Young is on fire. How do you get to her?” Balzac may decide to simply flee the scene on his own, or he may throw the Wand of Orcus, or he may charge through the burning building. All of these choices are a rejection of the question I asked, but that’s fine. My goal in framing it the way I did wasn’t to guide Balzac’s actions, but to center him in the situation, and avoid the mind-blank that sometimes results from a completely open-ended “what to you do?”