Best Advice For DMs

[Gale]

What is the best advice you have for dungeon masters, new and old?

I'm mostly looking for advice for myself, as I'm not the greatest DM. But I figure this could be a useful resource for others as well.

[Doctor Awkward]

What is the best advice you have for dungeon masters, new and old?

I'm mostly looking for advice for myself, as I'm not the greatest DM. But I figure this could be a useful resource for others as well.


1. Read!

Read everything. Read the rule books. Read the history of the setting in which you campaign takes place. Read the splats you plan to allow in your games. Read the published module you are running (or borrowing from) back to front and upside down.

The more familiar you are with what is going on in your world and how everything works, the easier it will be to make quick and decisive decisions to keep things moving along at the desired pace.


2. Plan ahead

When you are creating encounters for the players, know ahead of time what your NPC's are going to be doing to the players and how they are going to be doing it. This means sitting down and creating stat blocks for anything you are not running directly out of the book. Generally, I do about two or so hours of prep for every hour of time actually gaming, but there is no magic universal number or standard because games all have different needs. I'd also suggest stopping by YouTube to look around for the various videos regarding DM gaming hacks for little tools and tricks to help you keep things organized.

And perhaps most importantly...

3. Constantly expect all your plans to go out the window

Be able to work out something on the fly when the players go completely in the opposite way you expect. This is where your system mastery will come into play (How hard should it be to break into X random citizen's house? Well he is a merchant with money to burn and this town has a big problem with thieves already so... reinforced wooden door with a DC 30 lock). Coming up with a character on the fly is something else that takes practice. I'd suggest reading a book on improv acting, or taking a class.

[Sky]

Play. Play a lot. A lot.

Run games, play in games, read campaign logs, watch recordings.

Steal Legally use with permission/acknowledgement everything you can from someone else.

Fail a lot. Have fun anyway.

Play more games.

Repeat and have fun. :smallsmile:

[Manyasone]

Gentlemen's agreement is also important. Communicate with your players what exactly you'll be playing, be it a published adventure path or a sandbox. If you have but one player who gets it into his skull to go into the complete opposite direction when you're playing an AP, out of the premises of the adventure, just for the 'lulz' you are probably boned. Gentlemen's agreement can prevent this behaviour. Very important

[Telonius]

Respect and communicate with your players. Communication is part of your job description. Remember that, even if they're playing a Psion, they do not actually have telepathy.

[Zakerst]

Players are clever: they'll find unexpected and unforseen solutions to nearly all problems from the simple, triggering a tile trap with a corpse to the excessive: filling a acid proof boat with acid only to use it later to melt the floor under a reinforced door.

Paradoxically players are dumb: rather than getting the key to said door off the corpse they threw into the trap they open the door that way. They'll miss or ignore seemingly obvious solutions to problems. Or just give up on things that seemed easy to you.

Not everyone likes every thing. Sometimes you'll get players who just aren't there to play the same game you are or the other players are there for. With that I mind it may not always be possible to please everyone and sometimes cutting someone lose is the best solution. Other times it is possible just add different challenges for each person to excel at.

[NerdHut]

Don't be afraid to bend the rules and homebrew if it makes the game more fun. Does one player know all the monsters in the Monster Manual by heart? Tweak a few stats on the Beholder and call it an "Eye-stalk Hydra." Feel like the Half-orc race is underpowered? Get rid of one of its stat penalties or give it an ability appropriate for the player/character.

On the other end of that, don't make ridiculously complex homebrew. One of my DMs can't stop doing this. I've got several cards full of notes on how a single system of power-ups works which will be used in a single battle. Ability boosts, skill changes, power points, special ability point costs, healing costs, conditional modifiers to everything listed before, timers, you name it. For some reason, he can't add power without also adding exponential complexity.
If you want to give temporary bonuses to your players, you should typically go with some mixture of static bonuses, static defences and/or offences, and a number of uses of an uncomplicated ability.

Make the game your own. But start small. It's much easier to start off restrained and let things loose as you get comfortable than it is to try to get something under control that was more than you bargained for.



A lot of people will tell you not to "railroad" your players. That's generally good advice. But it's easy to hear than and then think you need to make the game completely free form. That's fine, too, but it's hard to keep under control. Instead of visuallizing your game's story as a single railroad the players must ride on, it's best to plan out something like a system of streets. The players may still need to get from one specific plot point to another, but they should be able to get there through a number of different methods or paths.

You can also utilize obstructions. This isn't just an insurmountable wall put in front of the players to tell them NO. It should be something the players need to weigh the costs and benefits of. For the sake of more visuallizations, imagine your players are walking alongside a white-water river. They see the ruined tower they've been searching for on the other side. It's clearly very dangerous to cross the river here and it could easily kill someone without proper planning (this is your obstruction). The players also know there is a bridge several miles upstream. Railroading, as I see it, would be to never let them try to cross the river here no matter how much they want to. You have an NPC at that bridge you want them to talk to, after all. In my opinion, the most proper thing to do is to let them cross here if they're dead-set on it, but to make sure they know that this is incredibly ill-advised. Something should come of their deviation from the path. Maybe a character nearly dies, or someone loses half their stuff. They knew the risk, and they took it. That's adventuring.



I hope that actually made sense and I wasn't just rambling.