New Gm Assistsnce

[weirdbraxto]

Hello there friends, me and my friends are new to more official table top rpgs, and I am going to be our resident gm. I'll always wanted to do such, and watched and read a bit over all of pathfinder. I have the core rule book, game mastery book, and two lvl one adventure books. M problem lies with playing out an adventure itself. I understand the rules of play very well but I don't know how to run an adventure from adventure path books at all. Now, this may come from a lack of self effort, but the adventure books seem very hard to follow from a beginning a perspective. The story is scattered throughout the whole book, and all of the storytelling is very nonlinear and hard to follow from a gm perspective. Does anyone have some tips on how to make the adventure books seem a little more manageable and easier to follow?

[Lady-J]

read through it a few times it gets easyer to understand after a few reads then you as the gm can summerize some things you deem to be in exess for the players

[Java Man]

Sit with the book and run through a mock session in your head. Starting from the intro ask yourself "what might the players do, where might they go, at this point?" Now go find the info to explain what happens in that event.

Goiing through the beginning bits that way and learning the organization of the book will usually clue me in on how the authors structured things.

Note: this is an exercise for the GM alone, not a way to run the game.

[PK the Dragon]

As a newer GM myself, I totally know the feeling. Here's how I started:

Start by reading through the book once, just casually to get an idea of what the general adventure flow is. Next, try to break it down into parts. Most adventures have multiple parts, like a town, a dungeon, an explorable region. Make sure you are aware of each general section. Next, I usually do two things for each section- I start listing out every encounter with monsters or hostile NPCs and the composition of the encounters, and I make a list of major events that can happen to the NPCs (these two lists usually overlap some, that's ok). Another important thing to do is make a list of friendly/nonhostile NPCs that the party can interact with, and their classes and alignments.

So, you have three lists of key pieces- events, monsters, and NPCs, as well as a general idea of the flow of the game. In making those lists, your understanding of the adventure should have increased, but this is when you reread the adventure closely to ensure you understand why each event happens, what the motivation for each NPC is, and any other key plot notes. It should be much more easier this time, because you are so familiar with the building blocks of the adventure.

The nice advantage of this approach is that by becoming familiar with the key pieces of the adventure, it becomes easy to reorganize the adventure if needed, instead of playing from the book 100%.

That's how I do it. Hopefully this helps.

[Mark Carlson 255]

The advice above is great but I would also tell the players (maybe more than once) that you are new to this as they are and you are likely to make some mistakes so please bear with you as you are all here to just have fun.

It has been said also that the GM can put in 1-4 hours of game prep for each hour of game time. So expect to spend some time with the material to get to know it.
IMHO, you do not have to go to the extremes of the famed Director Alfred Hitchcock, where it was said he was so mad at other people for not knowing the script as well as him since he had run though it up-teen gazillion times in his head (so it was second nature). But spending more time often helps with doing things in game. That is until you get very familiar and can just run things on the fly (but not everyone gets to this pint either).

MDC

[PK the Dragon]

See, the nice thing about my approach is that it saves you time later- I strongly recommend, when making your lists of Monsters and NPCs, you list the page number of the stats, so that later on when you are running the game, or later in your planning when you need to check something's stats, you have a nice reference document.

An event list, on the other hand, has a ton of advanced uses, but if it helps save time by helping you understand the plot.

(I'd define an Event as something that happens to the players that is not presented as a straight combat encounter. I'd further define major events, which involve major NPCs and villains, and minor events, which don't. If you want to get further detailed, you could think about what triggers events- some happen automatically, some require some sort of action on the PCs part. This gets into the nitty-gritty of running a game, but nevertheless is helpful in understanding the logic of the adventure)

Also, other lists are useful to make- cheat sheets for your PCs and enemy's main stats, treasure lists, and anything else you might think of. But the main three I recommend (NPC, Monster, and Events) fill a double function of helping you understand the adventure AND helping you run it, and that makes any time spent creating the list worth spending.