PDA

View Full Version : DM Help Gamemastering advice for Beginners and how to get started



Yora
2017-05-22, 06:28 AM
In another thread the issue was coming up that there is always a scarcity of GMs and that the task is percieved as being quite hard and time consuming. And I have to admit that in all my years of playing I've never seen two people competing about who is allowed to be the GM. Compared to the number of people who set up a game and invite players, there is a much larger number of people who don't want to be GM or feel that they are not able to do it.

Encouraging more people to set up and run games themselves is always desireable. Perhaps not much of a priority for people who already run games themselves, but certainly something highly beneficial for everyone who is looking for campaign but can't find anyone to run it.

So I want to start this discussion to share advice from GMs with experience and directly respond to the questions and uncertainties of players who think the task is too big for them. If you have advice, share it; if you have questions, ask them.

I think probably the biggest obstacle to getting more people to run games is that the estblished standard for rulebooks is to have collections of rules and mechanics, but not really going into any detail about the processes of setting up and running adventures beyond the most basic and common sense scratching at the surface. Many games come with a GM book, but these generally consist of mechanics that the GM uses behind the scenes out of sight of the players, as well as magic items and monsters. What little advice there is to setting up an adventure or even a whole campaign is generally a joke. Correct, but utterly insufficient. Knowing the stats of doors and traps doesn't tell you anything about how to make a good dungeon. Knowing the stats of NPCs tells you nothing about how they interact with the players. And have you ever seen a rulebook talk about dungeon layouts and pacing?
If you want to learn about gamemastering, you have to do the same thing as 40 years ago. Get other GMs to explain it to you. Fortunately, these days we have the internet so GMs willing to make the effort to teach things are much easier to reach.
I am quite a fan of Justin Alexander (http://thealexandrian.net/) and The Angry GM (http://theangrygm.com/) for explaining advanced things about setting up adventures that are far from obvious, and I think Matt Colville (http://www.youtube.com/user/mcolville/videos) does a great job at explaining all the basic elements of running a game for beginners. (I've also found some really great advice for my own games on the sites of Chris Kutalik (http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/) and Joseph Manola (http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/), but there are dozens of people writing content like this when you start looking for it.) But all of this might probably be a bit overwhelming at first and not actually make a good point that gamemastering is not that hard and can be learned quickly. So maybe leave diving into that whole world for a bit later when you have some basic experience.

Aside from that I believe that most people have unreasonably high expectations of what makes a good campaign. When people share stories about their amazing campaigns, then it's because these were outstanding and exceptional. And while good GM skills help, many of them actually turned out much better and quite different from what was originally planed. Expecting that your campaign will be incredible is unrealistic. And that goes even for experienced GMs and of course much more so for new beginners.

One common and well established approach in the mainstream to force a great epic story is the Adventure Path in which you have everything prepared and figured out from the start. Which somewhat unfortunatly has become the measure which new GMs assume they have to live up to to run a good game. Whether a complex prepared plot is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of taste, but the important thing to understand is that this approach is still very hard and labor intensive. Having a full campaign plotted out for you may seem like a big help and saving a lot of work, which in a way it is, but it's still a style of play that is pretty high up on the difficulty scale to do really well. It's a big task and a daunting one.

But the goal of playing an RPG should not be to have a campaign that can be chronicled and has you end up with a Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time in your hands when it's completed. The goal is to have fun when you play at the table right now. Having fun playing right now is much more important than havin a big payoff some time later. Having fun playing a simple short adventure is a much better outcome than starting a massive world saving campaign and giving up in frustration after four sessions. What good is your epic story and all your preparation when the beginning is not fun and everyone gets bored before getting to the good parts?

So if you wish you could run your own campaign yourself, set your expectations of what you have to accomplish realistically.

This doesn't mean to aim low, but to aim small. Try to run an adventure that is simple and running it really well. There's a number of people who like to say that improvisation is easy and you don't really have to prepare much in advance. Which sounds like improbable boasting but is actually the case, provided that the scope of your adventure and campaign is small. You can not run a huge war between kingdoms without lots of preparation and simply improvising as you go along. But you can run the exploration of a dungeon holding treasures or the hunt of a beast that keeps attacking a village at night with very little work.
In fact one of the most difficult parts of running an adventure is to make sure that certain things are happening and that the players learn important details. A sneaky way around this whole issue is to not have a story planned to begin with. That is what makes a search for treasure in a dungeon such a great adventure for beginners. In the end, the PCs will make it back to the village loaded with treasure and having gained XP, regardless of whether they killed all the monsters and found all the secret doors.
It's not a grand epic story that will go down in history. But the important thing is that you played. When the alternative was that you didn't play because there was no GM. And as a GM you have made more experience and can make the next game even more fun. Don't think that playing is not as fun because the adventure is small. A small adventure is much essier to do well than the beginning of a huge adventure, and a small adventure done well is much more fun that a session of a huge adventure done poorly.

1337 b4k4
2017-05-22, 10:08 PM
Starting small is probably by far the most important thing. No matter what your game, no matter what your campaign, start small. All the greatest stories, all the epics you know and love started from something small. Famously, The Hobbit started with the phrase "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." scrawled on a blank piece of paper. Dungeon World (who's GMing section should be mandatory reading for any GM in any game) give 3 items that should be on the GMs agenda all the time:


Portray a fantastic world
Fill the character's lives with adventure
Play to find out what happens


Note that nowhere in that is "create a massive sprawling campaign setting and story with 200 years of history and the next 5 years worth of games laid out." Later they also suggest to "Draw Maps, leave blanks", advising that you shouldn't (and don't need to) make a complete map. Just make some locations and some small connections and let everything else get filled in as you play. That advice can be extrapolated to everything you do as a GM. This doesn't mean you have to improvise everything, but let things come as you play, and leave blanks that you can fill in as you go.

So what if that means your first handful (or even first 20) sessions are largely unconnected single shots? No problem, you don't cover every moment of the characters lives, role playing every minute they aren't actually adventuring. There's no reason you have to role play every adventure either. Today's game completed unconnected to last weeks? Fine, before you get going, ask every player something their character was doing since the last adventure and why that brought them here today. Then take notes and now you have background and story hooks to use later. The player that says they went on a bender and got drunk for a week? Maybe they puked on someone's shoes, or insulted them, or stole their love. Now you have an antagonist to use. Sure, they may not be a "world ending evil sorcerer" but who cares, they don't need to be, they're just one step along the adventure path.

As an example of, I'm about to kick off a Traveller campaign for my group. A game around exploring the vast expanses of space and a massive imperium with worlds and star ships and I could spend months building up a sector, with hundreds of worlds and governments and people and patrons and star ships and armies and battles. And I could drive myself crazy building all of this out and then going nuts as my players never get to them, and go off the rails and otherwise be completely unexpected like they're supposed to be.

Instead, I'm starting the campaign with two planets, one government, one trade organization and an explosion. No starship, grand conflict. I don't even know who's responsible for the explosion yet. I have some ideas about who could have done it and what motivations they have, but I don't need that yet, I just need to see where things start going once the dice start getting rolled.

Start small newbie GMs. Grand adventures are built off of many tiny adventures.

Martin Greywolf
2017-05-23, 03:39 AM
You know, none of this is DM advice. Well, okay, it is advice for a very small part of what a DM has to do, but still.

What you have here is some advice on worldbuilding, not even on building campaigns - just on how to build a world to set the campagin in. It's solid advice for that, but it barely even scratches the surface.

If we want to even start with DM advice, we must know what a DM does. This can be divided at the very roughest level into two broad categories: preparing a game and running a game.

Preparing the game

This can be divided between three subcategories, usually: build a world, design sessions and stat your creations. Most DM books give you solid advice on the last one only, how to create encounters appropriate for your PCs etc etc.

Building a world is its own thing, and there are people specializing in it. More than that, there are differences between building a world from scratch, adapting an existing world from a book written for TTRPG and adapting a fictional world from other media (e.g. Naruto). All of these need different advice. Thing is, these are reasonably well-covered by internet resources, How to build a world tutorials are a dime a dozen, and you can go and use the tutorials originally meant for book authors with little trouble.

It's the third part that has incredibly little useful advice, designing a session. To be good at this, you need to grasp the basics of storytelling - three act structure, pacing, heroes' journey - and then need additional skills on top of that because players will change things. Only system I saw do this is FATE Core (and maybe Planet Mercenary, but I want to wait for the final version to be out before passing any judgement), its scenes and driving questions will keep your players interested in what's going on, but even that has its flaws - lack of proper guidelines for pacing and lack of scenes meant to simply set up things - or advice on how to do both set up and plot movement in one scene - are as important as they are missing.

Add to that that the third part also transcends just one session into designing arcs - those are, after all, just sessions with some carefully chosen aspects tweaked to fit into a wider, longer narrative - and you have a huge area of DMing that is almost completely devoid of advice.

Running the game

Again, there are subsets to this: adjudicate the rules, describe the world and resolve disputes. Rules stuff if usually described well in every decent system, so no sweat there.

Describe the world, well. I saw very, very little useful advice on this. Almost none, to be honest. What this part is is essentially theatre - DM has the roles of both NPCs and the narrator, and he needs/wants to do them well. Any tips on this are a disjointed mess of dirty tricks without any advice on how to get systematically better at this. There are techniques that allow you to keep three separate NPCs not only separate in your head, but that will also let your players tell which one is talking when without you having to spell it out every single time. There are ways to get past stage fright, ways to alter the way you speak without sounding too hammy or killing your vocal chords, and you can even do reasonable accents with a little excursion into linguistics.

None of this is described anywhere. I have learned more about being a good DM in this area from all the LARP and theatre workshops that I attended than from the books. Which, incidentally, is where I suggest you go seek advice on this, if you have the time.

Third part, resolve disputes, well, you need people skills. Demanding full tutorial on this from any DM book is somewhat unreasonable, and most of the books do mention it and give some solid basic guidelines. Still, is anyone wants to write a book/thread of advice for DMs, this aspect cannot be ignored.

What should be done

Now, that's the real question. What to do to make this better.

One option is to write a system-independent book for DMs, but that needs time, writers and eventually, buyers. If it was written well, it would probably be the ideal solution.

For DM guides in various system books, only thing that can be done is to at least give equal focus to all 6 aspects of DMing, instead of just 2 or 3. It won't be comprehensive, but it'll be a start.

Yora
2017-05-23, 01:12 PM
Of course it's gamemastering advice! By what logic is chosing what tasks to give to the players not gamemastering?
The same advice to start with simple adventure can also be applied to the creation of a setting, and many people do advocate this very strongly. I find it too uninspired myself. I see very high value in keeping the worldbuilding focused on what is relevant for the campaign instead of building a complete world, but that's it's own topic that has been discussed in other places.


Describe the world, well. I saw very, very little useful advice on this. Almost none, to be honest.

There seems to be at least common consent about how not to do it. Everyone always complains about box text. Four sentences to describe the appearance of a room or NPCs are not that bad, but when the GM has to do a 5 minute monolog it's universally awful.

Seto
2017-05-23, 01:30 PM
I'm currently on my phone which makes it a hassle to provide the link, but AKA-Bait had opened a similar thread here, that got stickied at one point. It contains useful information (and to address Martin's point, it talks about the practical points of running a session, dealing with problem players etc)

draken50
2017-05-23, 02:21 PM
Don't try so hard. It's meant to be fun.

Are you a new DM? try to get new players. Experienced players seem to come in two variants. Those that are helpfull with new GMS and those that get bored and try to mess with the game for their own entertainment. New players are best for a new gm.

Run the game you are capable of running, not the game you want to run.

Read a whole bunch of stuff online about interwoven stories and character development and that sweet sweet roleplaying xp?

That's nice, but if you've never run a game keep it simple. Have a town, kill some goblins ect. Do the standard level 1 adventure for level 1 characters. If you have new players... they've never done it. The ranger rolling d20's to shoot at goblins is the first time the player's ever done it, so it's fun, try to stay flexible, remember you're going to screw up and that's okay... People knock the you start in a tower and rescue a person/thing from goblins/khoblds... wolves whatever, but

and remember the biggest rule. People do this for FUN! Don't stress yourself to far out about. You can stretch and challenge yourself once you're comfortable with the basics. Including being able to tell, and help ensure, that your players are having fun too.

Also, don't invite *******s, they are rarely less assholish in game and usual more.

Frozen_Feet
2017-05-23, 06:17 PM
Let me start by pretentiously quoting myself:


Depending on game, a game master has several different roles.

During a game, a GM is:

1) An arbiter: the GM is supposed to know the rules, watch that they are heeded, mediate rule disputes, penalize players who break the rules and either annul rules or create new rulings when existing rules prove incomplete. This duty is what "GM has final say" really means. It tells where the buck stops so players know when to stop arguments during the game. While this is colloquially called "rule zero", it's actually the final rule.

2) A chairperson; a tabletop game is fundamentallya meeting of N people. The GM exists to facilitate smooth discussion and make sure everyone gets their turn to speak.

3) A narrator: the players' characters are the viewpoint characters of a game. The GM provides them with that viewpoint via telling (=narrating) them what their characters see, hear etc.

4) Player of Non-viewpoint characters; the GM is also a player, his characters are all the non-viewpoint characters in the game. The three greatest subgroups are:

a) the environment: the GM details the mood and atmosphere of locations and inanimate things and how they react to actions by players' characters.

b) support: the GM details motives, actions and reactions of animate characters needed to facilitate the world the players' characters live in, whether that be animals, shopkeepers, townspeople etc.

c) antagonists: when players are not playing their characters against each other, they are usually playing against the GM's. So GM details motives, actions and reactions of all characters opposed to the players'.

This where some of the work can most easily be offloaded to other players. In a minimalist game, a GM can play just the environment while the players play against each other, with no animate non-viewpoint characters present.

---

Before a game, a GM is:

1) A content maker. Whether this means drawing maps, writing fiction or building miniatures, the GM is largely responsible for making all the pieces their game system doesn't provide.

2) a scenario designer; if not in possession of a ready-made scenario, the GM also has to set them up for a viable starting situation for the game.

3) a game designer; the GM now has to fit all the pieces from previous two steps with whatever rules system they have. Where the system does not provide fitting rules, they now have to make them.

You can offload these to a professional game designer by using ready-made game materials.

---

Socially, the GM is:

1) a group manager: the GM typically is responsible for finding the players for a game, scheduling the game, making sure everyone shows up in time and managing social relations between players as pertains to holding the game.

2) a game host: quite often, the GM is also responsible for finding and securing the physical location for the game. This includes providing all physical items required for the game, such as rulebooks, dice, pens, paper etc.

3) a bouncer; the GM is responsible for making sure the players behave and removing people who are disrupting the game event.

All three can be offloaded to other people but a GM who can't do at least 1) is pretty useless.

---

Games without GMs distribute these roles between players or perform these functions via some group decision model, such as voting or consensus.

So let's do this, category by category:

How to become a good arbiter?

1) Know your rules. Whatever system you are using, read the materials thoroughly. As you use the system, memorize or bookmark those parts which are frequently needed during play. Ideally, you should know the rules better than any other player at your table.

2) Know why you have those rules. This is much harder, because many game systems are awfully documented in this regard. It should tell you something that 1st Edition AD&D still stands out as an example of a game which explains why its rules are what they are. Live by the maxim "you must know the rules to break them". This means: for every rule, there is a function they're supposed to serve. When you know what this function is, you can tell when a rule is no longer serving that function, and hence know when to overrule or change it.

3) Be consistent. In similar situations you should make similar rulings. When you make a new rule or ruling, write it down so you won't accidentally contradict yourself. Purposefully contradicting yourself is fine if you can provide a good reason why - see above.

4) Learn to hold your ground. The entire point of you having a final say is to prevent the game from halting due to a rules argument. It may be preferable to stick to your guns even when you're wrong just to get the game out of a deadlock.

5) Learn to take feedback. Learn to admit mistakes. The best time for this is after or between sessions. It bears repeating: you have final say during the game so that the game won't halt because of an argument. When the game's not going on and when time's not of essence, you can relax this standard and not be so absolute. Again: the ideal is that you will know your rules better than anyone else. But you're still human. No-one's perfect, everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes a player is plain smarter than you. Acknowledge this and try to recognize when it happens.

6) Learn to make snap decisions. When you're struggling to decide between two or more rules interpretations or rulings, flip a god-damn coin or roll a die. This is what they're at the table for.

7) Be empirical. No-one can deduce exact utility of any rule without testing. Resist the temptation to switch rules just because they look or feel bad. Try to play at least one session with each ruleset.

---

How to become a good chairperson?

1) Participate in or watch videos of meetings. Not just tabletop RPGs, any kinds of meetings. Scout meetings, business meetings, diplomatic meetings etc. Observe how chairpersons facilitate discussion. Open a Wikipedia page on consensus and other decision making processes.

2) Have a method of gaining attention. Whether it's a hammer you hit a table with, a referee's whistle or just clapping your hands loudly, select some signal which immediately tells people to shut up and listen to the person at the end of the table.

3) Have a watch, an hourglass or some other method of keeping track of time. When someone is taking too long to make their point, tell them to shut up. When someone else has been quiet for a suspicuously long time, point at them and ask "You. What is your opinion? What will your character do?"

4) Teach everyone to signal when they have something to say. You went to school, right? And most people you are playing with also went to school. What did the teacher most likely tell you to do when you have something to say? To raise your hand. It shouldn't be difficult for people to raise their hands to signal they want to speak. It's much preferable to a shouting match.

5) Remember to pay attention to the signal you taught. Few things are more frustrating than a chairperson who ignores such signals for prolonged time.

6) Teach people to stay on topic. Hint: the topic is usually their characters' actions and opinions. Not last tuesday's hockey match, not how fat player A's mom is, not how ugly player B's face is, not what's for lunch. Also stay on topic yourself. Few things are more annoying than a chairperson who flies off a tangent.

---

How to be a good narrator?

1) Read. A lot. Read many different things, describing many different situations and things.

2) Have someone give directions to you and then try to follow them. If you screw up, go ask them for clarification. Repeat untill the directions work for you. Good. Now remember these succesfull directions. They are an example of good narration. Remember also all the unsuccesfull directions. They are examples of bad narration.

3) Get two identical sets of Lego bricks. Build something out of one set and give the other set to your players. Now put up a screen between you. The task of your players is to build an identical thing to whatever you built, based on verbal description only. Every time they think they're done, they show the construct to you. If they got anything wrong, you tell them to start again. You repeat this exercise untill they get the construct right. Then you switch roles with them and repeat it untill you get it right.

4) If you are too much of a cheapskate to buy Legos, you can substitute them with pencil drawings.

5) Get yourself Alias. You know, that game where you're trying to explain what exact word is on your card without actually saying it? Now take all the cards and explain all the words to your players. Repeat untill they start getting it.

6) Play twenty questions. That is, the game where you describe some utterly bizarre scenario, and the players are trying to figure out exactly what lead to it by asking binary yes/no questions. Repeat untill everyone's good at it.

---

How to become a good player of non-viewpoint characters?

1) Realize that for playing individual characters, your job doesn't much differ from those of other players. Your primary tasks, just like theirs, are to decide what your character is doing, how, and why. You're just doing it in bulk now.

2) roleplaying in person is fundamentally acting. The better actor you are, the more diverse roles and hence greater variety of characters you can pull off. Take a look at theater and what exercises actors do.

3) roleplaying through a written medium, such as a forum, is fundamentally writing. Take a look at literature and exercises writers do.

4) Start small. Come up with as few characters as you can get away with for the initial session, gradually add more as your skills increase.

5) Non-viewpoint means that big or small, important or not, your characters are only in the focus when the players' characters are paying attention to them. Majority of their what, how or why will hence only take place in your head. Don't waste too much time on the details if they don't look likely to come into play.

6) Don't get too attached to your characters and remember the player/character distinction. It is the nature of non-viewpoint characters to catch much more flak than the viewpoint characters. Very few, ideally none at all, of the players' characters' attacks against your characters are attacks against you. Characters are allowed to be bastards towards other characters, don't use that as a standard for a player being a bastard towards other players.

7) Following that, seek to build a single standard of character interactions. For a game where you play both support and antagonists to be succesfull, your players have to grok that your co-operativeness can vary from character to character. If they can grok that about you, they can bloody well grok that about each other. Come up with a way to telegraph when a character of yours is "playing fair" and when they're not and then teach that to your players. Once successfull, it will be much easier to offload support and antagonist characters to other players.

8) When playing antagonists, you can play to win, but you can just as well play to lose. Learn to experiment and screw up on purpose.

9) Learn to improvize. The better you are at it, the faster you can adapt to surprising events. You can get there step-by-step, by first creating short algorithmic behaviour scripts with concrete if/then-clauses, and then moving towards more general motives and abstract principles. F.ex. you start with "if someone steals sword from X, then X gets angry", then move to "X is very jealous of his possessions" and then to "X is objectivist". Once you have memorized and internalized enough of such concepts, you can come up with huge number of potential actions or reactions based on a very short description.

10) Use archetypes and stereotypes. Yes, you will have a million people telling you to not do this. They're wrong. You need to learn how to walk before you can run. In order to create characters in bulk fast, use those things you are familiar with and can conceptualize easily. Then you can continue by mixing and matching them and abstracting them untill they no longer look so arche- or stereotypical.

---

How to become a good content creator?

1) Practice. Lots and lots of practice. There are no real shortcuts. If you want to write good fiction, this means writing millions of words of drivel firdt. If you want to draw pretty pictures, you need to sketch untill your hands are sore. So and so forth.

2) Becoming good at just one aspect of content creation is a hobby unto itself. You need to do it for more than just RPGs for it to be worthwhile. Hence, think carefully about what sort of content you really want and need to do by yourself, and offload everything else to others.

3) Mimicking prior masters of an art is a good place to start for any art.

---

How to become a good scenario designer?

1) Play games. Lots of games. Not just RPGs, but tabletop games, videogames, children's games etc.

2) You can start with classics, such as Chess. Familiarize yourself with basic rules and then look at how different table arrangements can be used to create various Chess puzzles. Good. Now imagine the white pieces are the players' characters, while the black ones are yours. The moves they can make are analogues for possible in-character decisions. Now, how many different scenarios can you come up with just this Chess analogue?

3) familiarize yourself with all the ways a situation can become "unwinnable". Open up Wikipedia pages for Lose-Lose, Prisoner's Dilemma, Kobayashi Maru, Morton's Fork, Catch-22, Zugszwang etc.

4) As with the actual roleplaying part, start small. Begin with a single event, such as a single battle. Then move on to a slightly larger scope, such as a short series of battles, or a small location, such as a single building. As you become comfortable designing and running these smaller elements, pile them up to create larger wholes.

5) Run the same scenario to multiple different people. For example, enlist as a convention GM and run the same scenario over and over again, taking notes and feedback each time. You might even get a free convention ticket out of it.

---

How to become a good game designer?

1) All of the above plus you need to learn math. Take your dice and 9th grade math book and read untill you understand basic probability, algebra, geometry and polynomials.

2) Take a look at the most critically acclaimed and the least critically acclaimed works in whatever genre you're working in. Where do they differ? Where are they similar? Steal all the best parts and dodge the worst parts.

3) Remember differences caused by medium. For example, Dwarf Fortress is in many ways the platonic ideal of a randomization-heavy, freeroaming adventure game. But it's way too computation-heavy to be run as tabletop game. A living human might be able to reproduce something similar to the results, but couldn't reproduce the processes.

4) At the other end of the CRPG spectrum, the heavily book and movie inspired linear storylines of many games exist because its computationally easier to make such games. If you find yourself backporting such structure to a game with a living GM, you are doing things backwards.

5) if you are working alone, you should focus your attention to games which were also done by lone people or small groups. It gives you much more realistic picture of what you can achieve. It will also show you that some people are crazy workaholics and you might not be able to do the same while still having a life.

---

How to be a good group manager?

1) Buy a calendar. Learn to fill it by hand. You actually remember things better when you write them down manually. Besides, one of the advantages of tabletop games is that you don't need electronic appliances to do them. If you always rely on gadgets, that advantage is lost.

2) Take your phone. Call everyone you have the number of within the next 24 hours. Why? Because chances are you belong to the sad majority of people who feel awkward even calling their friends because "they might be doing something important" or something. You need to get over that. You need to grow the spine to pester people with the ultimately unimportant act of getting in your game. If they actually have some more important thing to do, it's their job to spit it out. You might actually want to say that to them while at it.

3) Learn basic psychology, group dynamics and leadership. It is almost guaranteed you can get some version of a Scout Leader's Handbook or Drill Sergeant's manual in your local library. Any advice for a team sport managers or youth counsellors also applies. You may not be able to use them as-is for your RPG group, but they're a start. As a bonus: anything you learn from such books doubles as advice on how to play characters of such roles.

4) If something in the above paragraph made you shake your head and go "psychology is for professionals", slap yourself. Hard. There's plenty of psychology that is both accessible and useful to laypeople. Knowing basics of human psychology doesn't entail proclaiming yourself a shrink. On the contrary, it will make you better equipped to spot when you or someone in your group is in actual need of professional help.

5) Pay attention to interpersonal relations among your players. You don't need to befriend all of them or make them all befriend each other. But you need to be able to recognize and stop bullying and such. Your game is your business, and by extension, anything that affects your game is your business. If people don't want you on their case, they better GTFO of your game.

---

How to be a good game host?

1) Stock up on game supplies. Act as if all your players are seven, heck, they might actually be, mine sometimes are. This means: you bring the game books. Multiple, preferably, so players and you can look at different parts of the rules simultaneously. You bring the pencils, the dice, the character sheets, loads of empty paper, game markers, and everything else necessary for the game. Never trust any other player to bring these.

2) if it's your house you're playing in, clean it. Dust the mattresses, wash the dishes, mop the floors and hide the porn mags. Hide or disable any distractions, such as game consoles, computers, televisions or the neighbour's kid.

3) If it's not your house, get familiar with rules of conduct for that place, make sure you will not be a distraction, and make sure no-one else is distracting you. Clean up afterwards. Your goal should be to leave the place in better shape than it was before.

4) get ready and on-site before anyone else. Everyone will justly hate you for showing up late, or not at all.

---

How to be a good bouncer?

1) Well if you live in Finland at least, you can relatively cheaply take a basic course in security. This has many benefits, starting with teaching you how to use your voice, how to defuse conflicts, and what are your legal rights both as a layperson or as formal security to boot out misbehaving people from the premises. As a bonus, you might be able to get a free convention ticket or two by enlisting as a volunteer in some convention.

2) You need to learn how to say NO to people. People wax poetic about how a game master should be all "yes, and..." or "yes, but...", but that only applies to in-character actions which are within scope of your game. When it's clearly the player, without any veneer of player/character distinction, being needy, whiny, rude, distracting or just chronically late, you need to be able to tell them to stop that upfront. Say no to people fiddling with their phones or laptops during game. So no to getting drunk. Say no to complaining about genre of the game mid-session. So on and so forth. Failure to be healthily aggressive about things like this results in passive-aggressiveness and everyone looking like god-damn fools.

---

How's that for a light start?

pwykersotz
2017-05-23, 06:37 PM
There's always something new to learn, and that learning makes you a better GM. So don't stop trying to learn new things. Sometimes this means you'll try an awesome new idea and it will actually be terrible. Don't worry about it, learn from it. And always remember that your players are your barometer. Not the internet.

Jama7301
2017-06-01, 05:20 PM
If I may, I am looking for some advice.

I've been off-and-on planning a 5e campaign for a few months to run for some friends to run as a play-by-live-chat sort of thing. Scheduling conflicts and new issues arising, players have had to withdraw before the game has started.

As the months come along, and I piece things I want to do together, adding bits of advice I find here and elsewhere, I'm getting more and more nervous about running the game. I've run a couple rough one-offs in 3.5, and a weekly 4e game that lasted a few months for some new players, but I wouldn't say I'm an experienced GM. The more I read, the more I'm starting to psych myself out of running this game.


Should I just try to hurriedly gather some players, before I get cold feet, or should I wait and run with a group of players I'd be more comfortable with, or is there some more information I should look for to ensure this doesn't derail?

pwykersotz
2017-06-01, 05:59 PM
If I may, I am looking for some advice.

I've been off-and-on planning a 5e campaign for a few months to run for some friends to run as a play-by-live-chat sort of thing. Scheduling conflicts and new issues arising, players have had to withdraw before the game has started.

As the months come along, and I piece things I want to do together, adding bits of advice I find here and elsewhere, I'm getting more and more nervous about running the game. I've run a couple rough one-offs in 3.5, and a weekly 4e game that lasted a few months for some new players, but I wouldn't say I'm an experienced GM. The more I read, the more I'm starting to psych myself out of running this game.


Should I just try to hurriedly gather some players, before I get cold feet, or should I wait and run with a group of players I'd be more comfortable with, or is there some more information I should look for to ensure this doesn't derail?

You're most likely just overthinking it. I've been in a similar position before. What has worked for me is to put the game on the shelf and stop thinking about it. If you get the D&D bug, think about another sort of campaign you might like to run one day, or design something completely independent. Then, once you manage to confirm a game, pick it back up a week or two before the time comes and restart your prep. You're probably nervous at least partly because as you refine it more and more, the desire to make the game something worthy of the effort you put in is mounting. If you shelve it for a bit, you might come back to find that it's really much more manageable than you thought.

That's my experience, anyway. :smallsmile:

Yora
2017-06-04, 01:44 AM
I would say forget about the idea of having a successful campaign. Just have a game and take it one adventure at a time. Concentrate about having one fun adventure without worrying about the longterm campaign. That makes the preparation a lot easier and greatly reduces the number of things you need to keep in mind while running the game. No matter how it turns out, you will learn from it and make a better adventure the next time.

The Cats
2017-06-05, 07:04 PM
This thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?525271-101-Specific-DM-Tips/page2) has a number of specific tips for new DMs (or GMs). Specific in that they're not in-depth guides or discussions on good DMing skills and habits like I see here but things like: ideas for homemade minis; useful additions to DM screen; things to keep in mind when designing an encounter. Stuff like that.