First Time GMing

[Valdras]

Hello all,

This weekend I am having a go at being the GM.

I wanted to run Master of the Fallen Fortress, and then have it lead into Skulls and Shackles.

The reason I am running Master of the Fallen Fortress first is due to the time constants of the first session, and also to learn the ropes of GMing.

Any advice for a noobie GM?

[russdm]

Murder the PCs first chance you get....

On a serious note, remember this one handy fact: None of your plans will survive contact with the player characters. They will break in some way no matter what.

[Ravenica]

Hello all,

This weekend I am having a go at being the GM.

I wanted to run Master of the Fallen Fortress, and then have it lead into Skulls and Shackles.

The reason I am running Master of the Fallen Fortress first is due to the time constants of the first session, and also to learn the ropes of GMing.

Any advice for a noobie GM?

run "we be goblins" instead

it is a VERY good intro module for a new dm, and a fun one for players new or old, use the premade characters, and then create new ones for skull and shackles

[JusticeZero]

You think you are clever.
You aren't.

Do not start houseruling things. Period. All the time I see people posting things that amount to "I made a (completely wonky and unbalanced) house rule. Now my players are doing ridiculous broken things with it! What do I do?"
Then there are people who start nerfing the heck out of some of the weakest classes in the game. (Rogues sneak attack is a favorite for this for some reason.) It's really annoying to work out that the character you are playing isn't up to par with the rest of the party, only to have the GM announce that the only thing that you had going for you to make you at all worth dragging along is "overpowered" and nerf it into oblivion.

Do not make your setting too complex. Just have a couple of organizations and monster groups interacting. The more you have going on, the harder it is to figure out what's going on, and it's kind've your job to know what's going on.

Restrict first, restrict hard. To start out, "Core only" is good. This isn't because Core is the ultimate in balance, it's because everything you add means you have more to pack into your world and a chance for wacky synergies. Core is familiar. Some people chop it back even more, and/or put specific addons into the mix. It's a lot easier to lock down the starting stuff in the first place than to try to ban things that someone pulled out of an obscure third party splatbook after the fact.

Spot, listen, sense motive, forgery: Find what the numbers for those are assuming that the players Take Ten and keep them on your side of the desk. When you want to see if they notice people sneaking around etc, use those. Now and then, roll dice randomly for no reason.

The players aren't there to enact your story, they're there to make one. If they do something unexpected, roll with it.

Never have an NPC do anything that a player can do, ever. I've been in several games where one of my main schticks was "I'm the Notice-Stuff Guy!" only to have various Short-Round type tagalongs that we need to babysit for the plot consistently notice everything first. Annoyed me like you wouldnt believe.

[Valdras]

Ravenica: that's actually what I am runnign before this, I just figured doing We Be Goblins with the pre-gen characters, then running Master of the Fallen Fortress would make a game session, as we have 10ish hours. Then the group has expressed a want of pirates, thus I was going to take their almost leveled PCs from MotFF and have them captured by pirates, who had probably turned up to loot the tower.

[Ravenica]

sounds like a plan

how experienced are the players? what level of optimisation do you expect? How many players have you got?

[Valdras]

I have 4 players.

1 is our usual GM, who is more than happy to be playing instead of running, and a veteran of many many games, both as GM and player.
2of them are Newbies, both have 2 modules and half of kingmaker (which we gave up on because hex exploring is boring.)
and the last one is a Vamp player, who has had a little DnD experience, but prefers RPing to optimizing.

So far, I have the GM confirmed he is a rogue, no archetype, and trying to convince me he can play a goblin, even with my insistence that normal settlements and most NPCs would try to lynch him.

[Ravenica]

heh goblin is a substandard race but it's playable if the race guide is allowed, with that level of optomisation I'd recommend running fast experience track though