Let the systems merge!

Last Sunday I had a Duet D&D session with my wife, and it led me to think about something related to DMing (GMing, Refereeing) that many of us will take for granted, but it bears repeating for those that don't: games are not sealed compartments, and what you learn in a game can and will make it easier for you to run better games in any system.

Let's start with a bit of context: this is a D&D 5e campaign that started over a year ago with me as the DM and my wife and a friend of mine as the players (plus one sidekick and a DMPC to make it a party of 4) set in Eberron, my favorite "official" D&D setting. Sadly, after just a few sessions the campaign ran into an abrupt stop because of...life happening, and it was put on indefinite hold.
Recently I found myself wanting to get a regular weekly TTRPG night with my wife, including solo and GMless games...and it felt like the best opportunity to bring this back as a Duet game. We are 3 sessions in at the moment, and it's going pretty well.

First we finished the adventure we were in the middle of when the campaign derailed, the one from the Eberron setting book...and I had to intervene a lot to make it better because, let's face it, most of the time official WotC adventures are not that good out of the book, suffering from heavy railroading and assumptions of "after this happens the party will want to go there and do this" without leaving any space for the possibility of the players having a different idea; but I managed. Next, I had the player choose between 3 quests, and she picked one I wrote at the time, a year ago, which had a very simple premise: the wuest giver has heard that a faction has found an excavation site for dragonshards (items used in the creation of magic items in Eberron) and wants you to get some, it's up to you how. And I meant it: I did not have a prewritten way of this adventure would go, all I had was this map I drew,
 

a random table of the guards of the camp (orcs, gnolls, harpies, an ogre and similar) and an idea about what the leader of the camp wanted, to make him react to whatever she would come up with; I had a vague idea of what he would ask the party as a favor in exchange for a few shards, get rid of a couple of spies of an opposing faction that are bothering him, but of those spies I only had a number and their allegiance with said faction. I decided to not prep more than this and see what would happen, something that is usually not done in D&D 5e.

The PCs were extremely cautious, a good idea because I clearly telegraphed the guards as numerous and dangerous, and after meeting the leader they agreed to get rid of the spies. This is where my wife surprised me: instead of threatening them or attacking them, she decided to join forces with them for a night raid at the camp, sneaking in to steal the shards with the rest of the party and the spies as backup in case things went South. Suddenly this adventure became a heist with parameters wildly different than I could've imagined beforehand!

To not waste too much time in planning the heist I allowed her to go in and, should the need arise, make a check to have a Blades in the Dark-style flashback to tell me how she actually prepared for what's happening (in the end it wasn't necessary, but it was on the table) and once she found the leader sleeping in his tent she was unsure on what to do because, rules as written, even if she was to attack a sleeping helpless target she'd get advantage at the most: this clearly made no sense, and I told her that I'd allow her a roll to see how well whatever she wanted to attempt would go. She wanted to knock him unconscious ("the D&D equivalent of chloroform"), rolled a Nat20 and proceeded to find a pressure point that made sure the poor guy would keep sleeping through whatever she wanted to do.

She grabbed some shards (but not too many, hoping the guy would not realize he had been robbed), went back to her group, gave some of them to the spies to make them go away, then the next morning went back to the camp to collect the reward for the accomplished mission! That surprised me, but she rolled very well in any check I asked her to do, so the dice wanted this story to be told. In this way she ended up with almost double the shards I planned on giving her initially and with favor gained with both factions! I was surprised as much as her, and seeing it all unfold was one of the best experiences of my DMing career.

Most of the fun of this session was indubitably due to her thinking outside the box and immersed in the world ("I don't want to straight up attack them, this is not a videogame and I'm not sure who is the good guy here"), but also to the fact I was not bound to the Rules as Written: if I had run this adventure a year ago I'm not sure I would've left so much to interpretation or have the quick thinking of borrowing from OSR's "rulings over rules" mentality or Blades in the Dark's flashback mechanic (even though I don't own or have played Blades yet).

My point, and the reason for this whole post, is: read as many games as you want and can, don't be afraid of adding to your collection, and let all these different playstyles and mentalities merge and interact with each other, because the result will be a much more fun game both for you and for your players!

Do you have any specific mechanic or mindset from a game that you transfer in any other system you play? If so I'd like to know which ones, please let me know!

This is all for this week, see you next Sunday for my next post!

May your dice never betray you,
Kirhon