GM Tips, Tricks and Suggestions

[Brian Turner 355]

I am reading the core books so that i can start GMing my own games. The Game Mastery Guide has lots of good tips but i was wondering if anyone had any Tips, Tricks or Suggestions that the Game Mastery Guide may not have covered. I am a beginning GM so all info is appreciated. Thanks.

[Brian Turner 355]

Bump

[Cuenta]

You being fluent in the setting you're using and knowing how your players will react to things is worth more than many hours of preparation. With enough of this, you can run a game with no more prep than a five word plotseed.

And learn to improvise.

[CoI]

Have spare EVERYTHING. Maps, npcs, plot hooks ect. If everyone is new, try a published adventure or 2 first to get an idea of how to put together an adventure, and also to see how you and your players like that sort of thing. As said above though, learn to improvise. Be passingly familiar with the rules enough so that when the time comes you can at least look things up quick. Bookmark sections you keep referring back to. Pop culture is your friend. Borrow ideas from movies, books, anime anything that gives you ideas. You'd be surprised how often I intend to lift something wholecloth from a movie and end up with something new.

[CoI]

Also have notes you can easily refer to. Npc basics, rules you might need, spells and what they do, anything to speed things up.
For npcs get a feel for their personality if they're going to be reoccurring. That way you don't have to plan everything they might do. If you're going to have your big bad confront the party ask yourself who are they? What are they like? Are they brave or cowardly? Are they logical emotionless monsters, or can they get thrown into a rage? Do they have a code they live by? 10 minutes of thinking about these things has saved me HOURS of work. It let's you improvise easier.
And don't get discouraged when, not if, your players decide to ignore your carefully planned adventure and go to the pub. Some of my best times role-playing has come about because of that sort of thing. And once you really get to know your players, and their characters, it's easier to avoid such things, but it's still going to happen. If it doesn't, let us know. Perhaps we can learn from you ;-)

[Prometeus]

There are tons of amazing advice that you can look on these forums, one thing that worked amazing on our table was to delegate certain things to my players.

Player 1 take care of initiatives
Player 2 of enemies damage
Player 3 of moving the PC on Map Tool
Player 4 control a NPC

And we rotate the task on each session, this way I keep them focused on the fight and have more fun doing things.

Also we have a 1 minute timer for actions, if the player didn't take we go to the next one in the initiative list. We also roll to hit and damage at the same time

And don't forget to play with the personalities of your friends on the table, adapt the story according to your players

Go easy on the rules and have fun

[Abraham spalding]

Thread

Abraham Spalding's Guide to optimizing your GM

[GM 1990]

Here are a few links to GM Advice topics.

Battle Map and tiles

World Building

Adventure Design

Campaign Log

Making Combat Interesting

Beyond that I strongly recommend this series of GM tips on running sessions from Matt Corville (15-25min long in most cases, and pretty system neutral).

Running Your First Game

A few other pointers (I've been working with my 12 year old and now my 10 year old to pick up GMing).

1. Start small. Make a small village, name a few key businesses and their owners (give each a couple notes about appearance, voice, what they want, and what they fear). Keep things wild outside of towns, maybe the roads are relatively safe, but even a mile away from towns in the real world there is wilderness and patches of woods that human eyes haven't seen for years - anything from goblins to grey-ooze to ogre-wights could grow/inhabit those places in a fantasy world.

2. From that village you can launch the PCs on several adventures (old crypts under the town; abandoned castle 1/2 a day walk from town; rumors of a kobold/lizardman burial mound a day's walk away into a nearby swamp). You can also have a few things like bandit groups or such that operate out in that wilderness around town and between the village and those places you create small adventures for.

3. Try to have a twist or follow on hook at the end of or imbedded into each small adventure. This will plant the options for the players for future adventures. One way I try to do this is thinking about who else/what else could be associated with either the monsters (allies/enemies) or the loot.

4. Create the challenges for the encounter, and have ideas how the players might overcome them (which can help you design the encounter) - but don't become attached to your idea of how to solve it. Players rarely do things the way you think they will, and that's ok because its one of the unique things about RPGs.

5. For a group of 4 players, I plan for about 30-45 minutes per "encounter" when figuring out how much material to have ready for a session. (6 players you may go more like 45-60 minutes) An encounter is: Any level appropriate combat; any room I expect them to search/explore and find something in such as loot or a trap/secret door; 2-3 mundane rooms that don't have anything beyond a few lines of description text.; a role-playing encounter with an NPC. Using this equation, you can see that a little material always goes a long way. My point here is that don't let perfect planning/prep get in the way of good enough. I've never gotten as far in a session as I thought we would..never.

6. The PCs are the hero's, they're helping you explore the story hook and story arc you've thought up. Be aware of getting too attached to either your bad-guy, the plot as you thought it would play out, and the outcome you had in mind. By letting the players drive the story forward in ways you didn't think of you're going to enjoy the game more - because its unique for you as well that way. If they do something different than you thought, let it happen, and then consider what the consequences of how they did it are on the overall plot line. If they totally skip an encounter - you can often find a way to use it later. If its a cool tid-bit about the world (or a hook to the next or bigger story arc, then find a way to insert it sooner. But always be cautious of forcing it on the players. IE: Never say - hey...you know you didn't check out these other 2 rooms. Are you sure you don't want to check them?? Rather, whatever clue/hook you had planted there can be inserted somewhere else and the players will never know the difference. If all they missed was some loot...well that's on them.

7. If you want to keep a bad-guy alive beyond 1 encounter to become their key antagonist/nemesis, then you need to have the party dealing with their minions a few encounters/sessions first, and when they finally get a chance to see/face them, they need to have -lots- of protection and escape early using something like potion of sanctuary, potion of invisibility/spiderclimb. I've even had the first face-to-face take place in a very public location where the PCs can't reasonably just assault their nemesis w/o collateral damage. however, refer to point 6 above. if the PCs somehow one-shot or in some way take down their nemesis earlier than you'd planned - don't stop them, this sucks when it happens to you as a player. And trust me...they will come up with something you didn't think of so this is a real possibility anytime you let them encounter their nemesis. That being said, if you had plans for a longer plot arc with this nemesis and/or their organization, then a simple "trick" is that the nemesis wasn't actually the top of the chain for that organization - or their assistant picks up where they left off etc. I've used this in a couple games, and it starts making the organization the true nemesis, while still having a leader the group can go after.

Good luck - GMing is an awesome endeavor!

[Broken Zenith]

Top 10 Tips for New GMs

[Irontruth]

Don't worry about creating a long, well-plotted story.

Think of it like this, with a long story, the goal is to have good sessions, all leading up to an amazing payoff. The difficulty is that you first have to have good sessions.

So instead of focusing on some distant goal of a long story, just focus on having fun, cool sessions. Once that comes easily and naturally, start linking the story in the sessions together more concretely and pay attention to the continuity.

[Smutly]

Brian thanks for asking this question as I am in same situation and thanks for all the advice peeps.

[Lamontius]

start small

[Outland King]

feel free to make up stuff if you need to, in order to keep the game rolling. obviously try to know rules that pertain to the events you're DM'ing. but fudging something every now and then to keep people interested and keep the game flowing helps out.

remember that the point of the DM is to keep people engaged and make sure everyone is having fun. the rules are just a means to an end.

also try to set up your campaign so that each character has a little time to shine. if you just have a level 1 combat campaign the fighter is going to crush everything and the sorcerer is going to be pretty useless pretty quickly.

[Brian Turner 355]

I would like to thank all of my Peeps for this awesome information. I know im not the only one who will find it useful. I'm still reading the books and letting the info sink in. I know i need to be familiar wit hte rules but im still giving the main books a read so that i can find them in a hurry. Thanks again everyone.