Advice for a newb GM


Advice

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My main piece of advice is that practice makes perfect.

To build on that: write down the things you and your players didn't know, mistakes you or your players made, and similar things. Instead of trying to figure stuff out when it's not convenient and slow things down, just make a judgement call, make a note of it, and improve on it in the future.
At the end of the session you can look at the notes and look up all the information that wasn't addressed. Sometimes players can also do this while not participating in some event, or while the DM is busy, which can work well too, at least if it's a simple issue.

That said, preparation helps a lot. One of which is having all the resources handy:
printout/bookmark of all the conditions, printout of combat basics, and all spells the characters and NPCs have prepared printed out, bookmarked, or memorized.

A great thing for preparation is to have your players send you their characters either in person or over the internet, and to foresee and prepare for anything that they may do, as well as to address any problems you may see with them.

If you have the time to do character creation during a session fine, but in my opinion it can be quite slow, and doesn't necessarily give time to look them over either.


It turns out I'm only really half-GMing, but this will be helpful for when I become the actual GM. I'm designing the encounters and the dungeons, while the other GM is running it.


Sorry if I was wasting everyone's time with this...


These bits of information will carry you through your GMing career, it was certainly not a waste of time. So are you a player now? Being a player is awesome too! Don't be down, you'll still have a blast.

Scarab Sages

Silent Justice wrote:
Sorry if I was wasting everyone's time with this...

Psshaw. We're giving free advice on a forum, if you even consider using it you're wasting less time than most posters.


Well that's SECONDS I'm never getting back. Thanks, guy! :P


What a complete waist of time to fill out yet another record of how to GM that I can link too when trying to correct the seemly disproportionate amount of bad GMs in the world.

No worries.
:)


Thanks for the advice, everyone!

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