GM Toolbox: The Quantum Kobold
It is a great honor to run a role-playing game for people, and even more so to be trusted to run an entire campaign, taking players and their characters from humble edgy beginnings to far-reaching heights of valor and failure. Preparing a session or campaign for a group can be a massive undertaking. Depending on your system of choice, it can be fraught with a multitude of decisions regarding balancing monsters, traps, and villains. As the game master you want to be prepared for what your players might do when you sit down for a session, and the more games you run the more you realize one thing: The players will ALWAYS surprise you. They will turn left instead of right, they will talk to the random goblin at the bar instead of the quest giver in the corner, they will come up with a massively complicated plan to solve a problem that they have fabricated without your intervention. They will always do something that is unexpected, eventually. As they should be doing, because the truly unique aspect of a tabletop role-playing game is the ability for the characters to make decisions with as much freedom as possible. The concept of the “Quantum Kobold”, or “Quantum Gnoll” (I’ve heard the concept described by many names) is a tool in the box for game masters to focus their prep time while maintaining the feeling of an open and vibrant world.
