"Make their choices count" is great advice. I recently was running a game where the players stopped off in a Halfling village that was primarily just supposed to be a one-off rest-and-resupply point en route to an adventure. But some of the characters got really into it--the Bard gave a stellar performance that earned him renown with the villagers, and the Dwarf fighter started hitting on the young halfling ladies. Suddenly I had to come up with names for the NPCs they were meeting and I wrote them down, and decided to completely re-engineer the adventure I had planned for the next session. Goblin and Bugbear raiders showed up and carried some of the halflings into slavery, including the apparent new love interest of the fighter. Now the heroes had a meaningful mission that was created essentially because of choices they made, so it really struck a cord with them. When that young lady was revealed as a sorceress at the end of the adventure, it spun off all sorts of new possibilities that I had never intended until the fighter said, "I go flirt with the most attractive young woman." I think that is a good way to capture the "Matrix" feel that Nate talks about.
There are many ways to DM, and any DM will find that their style will change and evolve over time. You'll notice that your starting DM style will involve a lot of preparation. You'll be writing a lot down, making maps, accessing a lot of information and learning as you go. As time goes, you'll see how the preparation is replaced with improvisation because you'll be learning the system. You'll start knowing what the monster stats are, or how certain spells work, so you'll spend less time accessing that. Eventually, you may find yourself accessing the material less and storytelling more. Everyone has their way and speed at this growth. This topic has come up a lot, but some things never change: - Play to your strengths. Prepare to where you're comfortable, but no farther. - Watch your players and see where they are going as characters. You never know - inspiration may come. - Use player agency, and collaborate on storytelling! If you tell the story WITH the players, you may pick up great ideas. - STEAL those ideas. >:) If you put "that place" or "That guy" in "That town", they'll think that they figured out the puzzle without knowing they wrote the puzzle too. ;) - Relax, have fun, and remember it's a game - Everybody is learning. No one ever stops. Greenhorns and veterans. We all learn. We stop learning when we're dead.
A lot of the popular RUclips games are actually railroad games. They *are* very good at what they do, but their goals are not necessarily the same as most people's regular gaming sessions. What they want to do is to showcase narration and role-playing, and to make sure that the sessions fit within particular time parameters. They are "cinematic" in the way that popular films are, and what makes popular films popular is that they don't stray far from a certain predictable script (hero, villain, explosions, happy end, etc.). And maybe people who are just starting out can stick with the railroad, because it's much easier to achieve success. For a truly good sandbox, you need a lot of different ingredients. One, a comfort level with the rules, so you don't need to be constantly going to the books, which slows down action. This allows greater facility with improvisation, too. Two, regardless of what you actually prepare in writing for a particular session, you should have the basic themes of the world thought through. What's the basic theme you want to get across? What are the major processes going on behind the scenes? And how much do you want to reveal to the players at this point. Missteps are not necessarily fatal, but if the players know what's going on early on, know who the main bad guy is, and where that person is located, the sandbox is compromised. And if you are aware of the main themes, you won't ever be completely lost if the players make unexpected choices. Three - and this is key - find the kind of players that you are fairly certain will buy in to what you are doing. If you have that luxury. It's not always possible, but good improvisation (in say, music) is only possible when you have a good sense about the other players being "hooked" by the same things as you. My main group consists of people who are getting back into D&D after a very long hiatus. Most of them I've played with before, but one is a friend from a non-game related context. He was used to a very dungenony type game, and didn't really get the point of developing a character background, and all of the clarifying questions I asked, at first. But he is probably my most active player now during the time between sessions - making proposals, trying things, and working to develop his character. He told me recently that he now "gets" what the character creation process was all about (and wishes he'd done more then). That kind of player really provides a lot of juice to a DM, and I trust his motivations to the extent that it makes new tangents much easier to develop. And I think it's all because our non-game interests were well-aligned to begin with, so I had a strong sense that I could hook him with the things I was going to throw at him.
I got my wife into Dungeons and Dragons while we were dating. I'm usually the DM for our group, but recently she has been contemplating running a campaign as well. I gave her my recommendations to get acclimated with running a game vs when I first started out, get a module (I bought her Hoard of the Dragon Queen for a birthday present) and familiarize herself with it. HotDQ is fairly linear and not a sandbox like Princes of the Apocalypse (which is what I'm currently running for our group) She's also fortunate that our regular group of players enjoy playing and don't like to try to derail the DM, so she should have a fairly easy time running her first campaign. She's been pouring over it and is asking me questions and tips and generally getting excited to run, she's a shy introvert, so this is a huge thing for her! When I first started running in my freshman year in college, I never did any prep work, I had a stupid overpowered DMPC (yes I was one of THOSE guys) and one player in particular who would try to derail and break the game. I was baptized by fire in my first campaign, lost track of things too much, never prepared, made encounters too hard or too easy, never said "no" to my players (resulting in a level 3 monk having the Vow of Poverty from the Book of Exalted Deeds) and by the end of the VERY brief campaign the party was just following my DMPC ego wank through encounters as he swathed a path of destruction through dungeons...I DO NOT recommend this method for anyone, I didn't have fun and my players certainly didn't either. For me, I didn't come into my DM stride until I began to realize one major thing: The DM's job is not "out to get" the party, they are supposed to challenge the party and equally reward the party for overcoming obstacles. I started running with modules because it took some of the pressure off me to prep, (though I do still review the module in between sessions) it allowed me to focus on helping the players IMMERSE in the world and the story through words, and I became excited to play. I want to see the story unfold along with my players, I'm just as curious how things will happen as they are, and why would I get in the way of that?
I love The Lazy DM and one of the things I really appreciated about it when I first read it was that it takes the time (much like you do here) to say "if you're new don't try to do all these things". It gave me confidence as a new GM to read it as to get ideas as to where I'd like to be rather than feeling like I should be running my game like Sly does.
I do voices and get into character from my background in theater in high school. I seem to be pretty adept at improvising when needed, but I feel the strength of the DM comes from their players as well. Currently the group I have going isn't really very RP oriented, but they try. They have admitted to me they love the way I run the game, but as players they are kind of lazy at reading anything I present to them on the background of the world and playing within the world. So, for me to try and improvise they can take away from what your strengths could be or will drive you to focus on where you are lacking. I agree with the whole session zero thing and I think it's up to the DM to recognize what you'll need to run a successful game from the session zero. Over time I think its up to the DM to push your players as well to evolve as a player as well as you as a DM to eventually become a great role-player/DM. There are so many ways to be a great story teller. As Nate said, you could just have attention to historical detail or are really good at descriptive combat and so on. Great Tips Guys!
In professional level poker we constantly search for ways to enhance our skillset, just like a game master does in an rpg. One phrase that holds a lot of weight is "Reach for the low hanging fruit first", which means you should try to make the easiest adjustments first when trying to improve. Bolster your strengths as much as you can and then work your way down the list, making the easiest improvements first, that way you get the greatest amount of progress for your time.
While I mostly agree, I believe that learning to improvise is a core GMing skill. It's not easy at first, but it gets easier and a little prep can make it easier still. I find that my most useful prep tends to be about character motivations; everything else is secondary. Maps are useful, but I can fudge them a little; character stats are useful, but unless it's a major NPC all they need are some hit points, saves, an attack bonus and how much damage they do; and while having an intended path through the adventure feels more useful at first, I prefer to have a timeline of what would happen if the players didn't get involved, then use that and character motivations to work out what happens when they do (or what happens as a consequence if they choose not to - which should always be a valid choice with its own consequences).
I'm thinking I'll have my players write down their goal for the character (head of a knightly order, criminal mastermind, etc.) and their character's goal (survive until tomorrow, pay off debt, etc.). In some cases these two goals might be dynamically different and the end result might be somewhere in the middle. Once I know those goals I can throw in obstacles for the player/character to overcome. In the case of Luke Skywalker, George Lucas' goal was to make Luke the villain for the next series of movies, Luke's goal was to redeem his father, and the final result was that Luke remained a Jedi (mostly due to projected fan backlash).
I think better than giving players choices naming things is to ask them for adjectives or colours or animals etc... then use that inspiration to either make the name of the place or together use the inspiration to make the name. The players might have input but its directly out of one players mind.
I do a really great deep, growling voice that I use for a lot my monstrous NPCs. Unfortunately, when I do it too long my voice starts to crack and I end up sounding like Yoda. :\
Where I've been struggling is answering my players questions in character. I'm not sure if it's improv or flavor text I need more work on. I'm trying to hit the 5 senses but it always reverts to smells and sounds for some reason. I've got the illusion of choice "matrix sandbox" down but I always get the one or two really good questions that catch me off guard that I forget to plan for.
Any suggestions on preparing/improving skills for on the fly information to the players? I usually only prepare relevant text to the quest at hand. For example I have a leader of a guild who wants the party to spy on a rival guild. I've prepared the information as to what each guild does and the names of those involved where to go what the objectives of the quest are and the potential reward. I'll have a player step in and ask something irrelevant to the quest at hand like "what happened to start this feud? And why don't you just let it go?" Or "why do they call your guild the rat liners?" Flavor text like that that are perfectly valid questions just I can't anticipate all of the time?
+KRGOOD with your example three routes to go. 1) Make something up on the fly and go with it . Take notes for later. 2) Give the player agency. Perhaps the npc asked the question "What have you heard about?" Build off whatever the player says. 3) The npc refuses to answer the the question and maybe even gets a little offended. Just some suggestions. Sometimes there just isn't an answer to be had and you can leave there as an open loop. - Nerdarchist Dave
+Nerdarchy It's also possible to give the players agency without them realizing it. For instance, ask them to make a skill check of some kind to answer the question, but offer them a bonus for any supporting information they can provide. The players will then give you the clues that they think help to answer the question. Use that material to build an answer that will satisfy them and help them to feel like they worked a little to uncover a mystery. If they wise to what you're doing, fess up and compliment them on all the great ideas they come up with. As Dave and the others say, mine your players for their good ideas.
I realize that I am 3 years late to the discussion, but I've got to say that the Session Zero advice is remarkable in how unhelpful it is. In this day and age, regular face to face meetings of the same group of gamers every week with lots of coinciding disposable time is more rare than ever before. The rest of us are gaming when we get chance in shorter sessions often with new faces. The last five games I ran were all one-shots played over Discord with new acquaintances in blocks of two hours or less. We see converging little blocks of time when a handful of gamers can play at the same time, and we take advantage of that. If I only have two or three hours at most, am I really going ro spend over an hour of that performing a Session Zero, or will I push through and we all deal with the resulting problems as they occur?
I am just wondering what style of game ryan likes. i know ted likes sandbox as well as dave and probly nate....so my question is for ryan, do you run linear or non-linear games.
Reddit's /lfg community (which stands for Looking For Group) is all about gamers getting together, and most of their games are online. You'll find Discord is the most popular platform right now for it. I'm part of a Discord community named Fellowship of the Table, and it's a great fit for me.
"Make their choices count" is great advice. I recently was running a game where the players stopped off in a Halfling village that was primarily just supposed to be a one-off rest-and-resupply point en route to an adventure. But some of the characters got really into it--the Bard gave a stellar performance that earned him renown with the villagers, and the Dwarf fighter started hitting on the young halfling ladies. Suddenly I had to come up with names for the NPCs they were meeting and I wrote them down, and decided to completely re-engineer the adventure I had planned for the next session. Goblin and Bugbear raiders showed up and carried some of the halflings into slavery, including the apparent new love interest of the fighter. Now the heroes had a meaningful mission that was created essentially because of choices they made, so it really struck a cord with them. When that young lady was revealed as a sorceress at the end of the adventure, it spun off all sorts of new possibilities that I had never intended until the fighter said, "I go flirt with the most attractive young woman."
I think that is a good way to capture the "Matrix" feel that Nate talks about.
There are many ways to DM, and any DM will find that their style will change and evolve over time. You'll notice that your starting DM style will involve a lot of preparation. You'll be writing a lot down, making maps, accessing a lot of information and learning as you go.
As time goes, you'll see how the preparation is replaced with improvisation because you'll be learning the system. You'll start knowing what the monster stats are, or how certain spells work, so you'll spend less time accessing that.
Eventually, you may find yourself accessing the material less and storytelling more. Everyone has their way and speed at this growth.
This topic has come up a lot, but some things never change:
- Play to your strengths. Prepare to where you're comfortable, but no farther.
- Watch your players and see where they are going as characters. You never know - inspiration may come.
- Use player agency, and collaborate on storytelling! If you tell the story WITH the players, you may pick up great ideas.
- STEAL those ideas. >:) If you put "that place" or "That guy" in "That town", they'll think that they figured out the puzzle without knowing they wrote the puzzle too. ;)
- Relax, have fun, and remember it's a game
- Everybody is learning. No one ever stops. Greenhorns and veterans. We all learn. We stop learning when we're dead.
Mike Gould my suggestion is only start DMing after you have played a few games.
A lot of the popular RUclips games are actually railroad games. They *are* very good at what they do, but their goals are not necessarily the same as most people's regular gaming sessions. What they want to do is to showcase narration and role-playing, and to make sure that the sessions fit within particular time parameters. They are "cinematic" in the way that popular films are, and what makes popular films popular is that they don't stray far from a certain predictable script (hero, villain, explosions, happy end, etc.). And maybe people who are just starting out can stick with the railroad, because it's much easier to achieve success.
For a truly good sandbox, you need a lot of different ingredients. One, a comfort level with the rules, so you don't need to be constantly going to the books, which slows down action. This allows greater facility with improvisation, too. Two, regardless of what you actually prepare in writing for a particular session, you should have the basic themes of the world thought through. What's the basic theme you want to get across? What are the major processes going on behind the scenes? And how much do you want to reveal to the players at this point. Missteps are not necessarily fatal, but if the players know what's going on early on, know who the main bad guy is, and where that person is located, the sandbox is compromised. And if you are aware of the main themes, you won't ever be completely lost if the players make unexpected choices. Three - and this is key - find the kind of players that you are fairly certain will buy in to what you are doing. If you have that luxury. It's not always possible, but good improvisation (in say, music) is only possible when you have a good sense about the other players being "hooked" by the same things as you.
My main group consists of people who are getting back into D&D after a very long hiatus. Most of them I've played with before, but one is a friend from a non-game related context. He was used to a very dungenony type game, and didn't really get the point of developing a character background, and all of the clarifying questions I asked, at first. But he is probably my most active player now during the time between sessions - making proposals, trying things, and working to develop his character. He told me recently that he now "gets" what the character creation process was all about (and wishes he'd done more then). That kind of player really provides a lot of juice to a DM, and I trust his motivations to the extent that it makes new tangents much easier to develop. And I think it's all because our non-game interests were well-aligned to begin with, so I had a strong sense that I could hook him with the things I was going to throw at him.
I got my wife into Dungeons and Dragons while we were dating. I'm usually the DM for our group, but recently she has been contemplating running a campaign as well. I gave her my recommendations to get acclimated with running a game vs when I first started out, get a module (I bought her Hoard of the Dragon Queen for a birthday present) and familiarize herself with it. HotDQ is fairly linear and not a sandbox like Princes of the Apocalypse (which is what I'm currently running for our group) She's also fortunate that our regular group of players enjoy playing and don't like to try to derail the DM, so she should have a fairly easy time running her first campaign. She's been pouring over it and is asking me questions and tips and generally getting excited to run, she's a shy introvert, so this is a huge thing for her!
When I first started running in my freshman year in college, I never did any prep work, I had a stupid overpowered DMPC (yes I was one of THOSE guys) and one player in particular who would try to derail and break the game. I was baptized by fire in my first campaign, lost track of things too much, never prepared, made encounters too hard or too easy, never said "no" to my players (resulting in a level 3 monk having the Vow of Poverty from the Book of Exalted Deeds) and by the end of the VERY brief campaign the party was just following my DMPC ego wank through encounters as he swathed a path of destruction through dungeons...I DO NOT recommend this method for anyone, I didn't have fun and my players certainly didn't either.
For me, I didn't come into my DM stride until I began to realize one major thing: The DM's job is not "out to get" the party, they are supposed to challenge the party and equally reward the party for overcoming obstacles. I started running with modules because it took some of the pressure off me to prep, (though I do still review the module in between sessions) it allowed me to focus on helping the players IMMERSE in the world and the story through words, and I became excited to play. I want to see the story unfold along with my players, I'm just as curious how things will happen as they are, and why would I get in the way of that?
I love The Lazy DM and one of the things I really appreciated about it when I first read it was that it takes the time (much like you do here) to say "if you're new don't try to do all these things". It gave me confidence as a new GM to read it as to get ideas as to where I'd like to be rather than feeling like I should be running my game like Sly does.
I do voices and get into character from my background in theater in high school. I seem to be pretty adept at improvising when needed, but I feel the strength of the DM comes from their players as well. Currently the group I have going isn't really very RP oriented, but they try. They have admitted to me they love the way I run the game, but as players they are kind of lazy at reading anything I present to them on the background of the world and playing within the world. So, for me to try and improvise they can take away from what your strengths could be or will drive you to focus on where you are lacking. I agree with the whole session zero thing and I think it's up to the DM to recognize what you'll need to run a successful game from the session zero. Over time I think its up to the DM to push your players as well to evolve as a player as well as you as a DM to eventually become a great role-player/DM. There are so many ways to be a great story teller. As Nate said, you could just have attention to historical detail or are really good at descriptive combat and so on. Great Tips Guys!
In professional level poker we constantly search for ways to enhance our skillset, just like a game master does in an rpg. One phrase that holds a lot of weight is "Reach for the low hanging fruit first", which means you should try to make the easiest adjustments first when trying to improve. Bolster your strengths as much as you can and then work your way down the list, making the easiest improvements first, that way you get the greatest amount of progress for your time.
Good advice.
- Nerdarchist Dave
While I mostly agree, I believe that learning to improvise is a core GMing skill. It's not easy at first, but it gets easier and a little prep can make it easier still. I find that my most useful prep tends to be about character motivations; everything else is secondary. Maps are useful, but I can fudge them a little; character stats are useful, but unless it's a major NPC all they need are some hit points, saves, an attack bonus and how much damage they do; and while having an intended path through the adventure feels more useful at first, I prefer to have a timeline of what would happen if the players didn't get involved, then use that and character motivations to work out what happens when they do (or what happens as a consequence if they choose not to - which should always be a valid choice with its own consequences).
I'm thinking I'll have my players write down their goal for the character (head of a knightly order, criminal mastermind, etc.) and their character's goal (survive until tomorrow, pay off debt, etc.). In some cases these two goals might be dynamically different and the end result might be somewhere in the middle. Once I know those goals I can throw in obstacles for the player/character to overcome.
In the case of Luke Skywalker, George Lucas' goal was to make Luke the villain for the next series of movies, Luke's goal was to redeem his father, and the final result was that Luke remained a Jedi (mostly due to projected fan backlash).
I think better than giving players choices naming things is to ask them for adjectives or colours or animals etc... then use that inspiration to either make the name of the place or together use the inspiration to make the name. The players might have input but its directly out of one players mind.
In the old days of 1st edition, "Strong DM" was a joking refference to a DM that hadn't showered in a few days.
lolz. That's the kind of DM I can do without.
- Nerdarchist Dave
Have you guys considered doing another episode on interesting combat and more of your favorite hazards, traps, and environments?
At some point we'll forget we did those videos and probably revisit them by accident :)
- Nerdarchist Dave
I do a really great deep, growling voice that I use for a lot my monstrous NPCs. Unfortunately, when I do it too long my voice starts to crack and I end up sounding like Yoda. :\
kellogsbeast just have a monster that sounds like yoda : )
This is so helpful! Thanks!!
Where I've been struggling is answering my players questions in character. I'm not sure if it's improv or flavor text I need more work on. I'm trying to hit the 5 senses but it always reverts to smells and sounds for some reason. I've got the illusion of choice "matrix sandbox" down but I always get the one or two really good questions that catch me off guard that I forget to plan for.
Any suggestions on preparing/improving skills for on the fly information to the players? I usually only prepare relevant text to the quest at hand. For example I have a leader of a guild who wants the party to spy on a rival guild. I've prepared the information as to what each guild does and the names of those involved where to go what the objectives of the quest are and the potential reward. I'll have a player step in and ask something irrelevant to the quest at hand like "what happened to start this feud? And why don't you just let it go?" Or "why do they call your guild the rat liners?" Flavor text like that that are perfectly valid questions just I can't anticipate all of the time?
+KRGOOD with your example three routes to go.
1) Make something up on the fly and go with it . Take notes for later.
2) Give the player agency. Perhaps the npc asked the question "What have you heard about?" Build off whatever the player says.
3) The npc refuses to answer the the question and maybe even gets a little offended.
Just some suggestions. Sometimes there just isn't an answer to be had and you can leave there as an open loop.
- Nerdarchist Dave
+Nerdarchy It's also possible to give the players agency without them realizing it. For instance, ask them to make a skill check of some kind to answer the question, but offer them a bonus for any supporting information they can provide. The players will then give you the clues that they think help to answer the question. Use that material to build an answer that will satisfy them and help them to feel like they worked a little to uncover a mystery. If they wise to what you're doing, fess up and compliment them on all the great ideas they come up with. As Dave and the others say, mine your players for their good ideas.
I realize that I am 3 years late to the discussion, but I've got to say that the Session Zero advice is remarkable in how unhelpful it is. In this day and age, regular face to face meetings of the same group of gamers every week with lots of coinciding disposable time is more rare than ever before. The rest of us are gaming when we get chance in shorter sessions often with new faces. The last five games I ran were all one-shots played over Discord with new acquaintances in blocks of two hours or less. We see converging little blocks of time when a handful of gamers can play at the same time, and we take advantage of that. If I only have two or three hours at most, am I really going ro spend over an hour of that performing a Session Zero, or will I push through and we all deal with the resulting problems as they occur?
That breathing at 7:20
I am just wondering what style of game
ryan likes. i know ted likes sandbox as well as dave and probly nate....so my question is for ryan, do you run linear or non-linear games.
I can pull a voice out but for some reason it always ends up Russian after enough time passes.
Ted, thanks for swatting that bug at 8:19. I would have missed the last 10 minutes of the video...
Ted bug slayer!
- Nerdarchist Dave
How do I get in on an online d&d game
Reddit's /lfg community (which stands for Looking For Group) is all about gamers getting together, and most of their games are online. You'll find Discord is the most popular platform right now for it. I'm part of a Discord community named Fellowship of the Table, and it's a great fit for me.
Great info guys
Sorry but got to ask Ted where do you get all these awesome shirts ????
I'm gonna start auctioning off Ted's wardrobe it's very popular.
- Nerdarchist Dave
Looking for the lazy GM info you where talking about. do not see it yet. Did I miss it?
go over to Nerdarchy.com you can find a banner for it on the side bar of any of our articles.
- Nerdarchist Dave
More videos like this one works be bomb
i'm really not very good at voices.
Matthew Mercer, masterclass at all things DM. :D