CzePeku | Thousands of high-quality digital maps for your RPGs! Website: www.czepeku.com/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/czepeku Game Masters, it’s time to level up! The Secret Art of Game Mastery will help you have more fun with less prep for any system and any genre! Kickstarter launches August 2023. www.kickstarter.com/projects/thedmlair/the-secret-art-of-game-mastery?ref=77qgbg
One of my favorite GM hacks that Luke had actually mentioned before in another video, is to use your players ideas in secret. If one of your players theorizes a situation or solution to a problem, feel free to use the idea without revealing that it was not your idea to begin with. The player gets to feel cool that he "figured it out" and you come off looking like it was well thought out and planned all along.
I saw that video. In the vertical next session it happened lol. I had my players lost in magical darkness inside a tomb of a fallen paladin. The darkness caused hallucinations and they kept having undead endlessly attack from the dark. Earlier before that, I described a statue on a wall as holding both hands out palms up (just a random position). It was only meant to have a secret room behind it. Later in the darkness they come across another statie holding an orb in the air that gave off 30 ft of light and when in it, undead vanished. One person finally reaches for the orb and and when they touch it, they immediately vanish with the orb a d the rest are attacked jn the darkness again. Their only way out, the sword they looked from the fallen paladin that allowed its weirder to see in magical darkness. The other player appeared in a tiny room with a second statue holding another orb. They took it hoping to be transported back but nothing happens. Later the rest of the group comes across the statue with the palms turned up and can see the light from the orbs glowing from behind it. They solve the puzzle in the room and the statue slid aside releasing the other player but the orbs stopped glowing. Now at this point, they were meant to only have gained a set of gatestones and finish using the sword to leave the tomb. However, someone decided to place an orb in each of the statues hands. This wasn't supposed to happen. I went with it and sprung the statue to life and both orbs began to glow again. It then escorted the group out of the dungeon safely. Now, earlier, one player got separated from the group in the dark and fell down a bottomless pit they had encountered earlier. He had been falling endlessly for a few rounds. As the statue approached, he found himself lying on the ground, screaming hysterically like a dummy. So he got up now that the light ended the hallucinations, and walked out with the rest of the group. It turned out to be one of the coolest moments of the encounter and it was never meant to happen.
My DM secret is: Write a story / campaign / one-shot whatever you call them, that you would want to play. The passion you put into creating the game will be infectious.
I would also add to this to write your thesis/what you love about the concept down, especially if you are planning a longer campaign. That way you can always refer to it to remember why you are putting in all this effort or see whether your prep is actually accomplishing your goal.
I watched this and went through each point going "hmm, I've done this... and this... and this? Am I... actually _good_ at DM'ing?" (Considering my players keep coming back every session and I've got a backlog of players who want to play in my game, I should have already known that answer. But it feels good to hear it from Ed Greenwood via one of my favorite RU-vidrs. 😁)
I feel like the best advice I have learned as a DM is that Random Tables are your best friend and don't be afraid to improvise. In my personal experience, players can turn everything you've planned, hours of prep work on it's head, on a whim. I use prep time to get general ideas, but anything can happen at the table
On point two, dont forget small changes to the world. My players once placed an X in the ground near an golddigger town. They wanted to see if some magic water they found would create magi plants. OFC i knew there would not grow some magic plant from that water, but the X lead some crazy golddiggers to dig up the area to find the gold under the X
I recently had to deal with problem #3 where 2 of my 3 characters had zero positive interactions, but narratively I needed to put a lot of pressure on the party. I decided to send them to the astral plane after a round of combat with no rests and a psychic storm killed both players. Instead of writing up new characters, I had them appear before the Empire's central deity and had them judged and given mercy because the fate of the race of man depended on them. Then I had them run through a Snake Way sort of path while Death itself followed after them slowly. If it caught them, they died permanently. At the end of the path would be their bodies. And as they travelled this path, the spirits of the NPCs they murdered or didn't save appeared in reverse order of campaign appearance. As a DM, I framed this section of the session as Combat, which was super important. Every successful hit against the spirit would cause it to disappear and the next spirit would show up near by. After a few hits, they realized the nature of the spirits AND that they weren't attacking, and instead decided to apologize to them. At this moment, the spirits vanished and an NPC that one character gave charity to (a stolen ruby ring from one of the NPCs they killed) appeared saying that he was hanged for that murder. The players were crushed and now intimately tied through the shared experience. In one session I solved both murder hoboing and party cohesion issues. AND made a player cry grieving the loss of an NPC they were attached too. The players said that after this happened, they were able to use the session to reflect on their own lives and consider the times they failed to do good or actively did awful things and decided to make an effort to change. Honestly, I'm blessed with great players.
I think there's a difference between overprep and good prep. I've run games where I largely improved and games where I prepped way too much (yes there is such a thing) because I was prepping the wrong things. I think eventually most good GMs find the balance for them. Nowadays I rely on outlines rather than writeups, situations rather than plots for the characters to interact with and many tools from Sly Flourish so I can focus my prep. So I'm completely prepped for the session I'm running but not spending significant time on extraneous things that never impact the game.
For #8 (World Rolls On), you can add even more drama by having a competing/rival party complete the other quests. Imagine the PCs coming back to the city to find a parade being held for their rivals.
“…uncommonly used abilities/items _that they’re good at/that do something they can’t otherwise do_ and create opportunities to shine.” I really like this, but the important part is to make sure you’re playing up the parts of their character that the player _cares about,_ not just every stat on the character sheet. In theory, everything on a character sheet is a “flag” that the player is waving saying “I wanna use this!” But in practice, with games like D&D there’s gonna be a bunch of junk there, too. Do they not use this ability much because it rarely comes up? Or because they’re the fifth-best in a party of 4 (even the paladin’s _horse_ is better than them)? Or because they don’t care about that skill but they had to put 3 points in to qualify for that cool feat? Maybe they took a level of fighter because at 3rd level the party kept getting whupped because not all the PCs could do melee, but now that they’re 12th level the melee-focused characters can handle it, and the wizard’s player doesn’t care that they never get to use their melee ability anymore. So make sure you’re highlighting lesser-used parts of a character that the player _wants_ to use. (Which in some game systems will be “everything on the character sheet.”)
Great tips. Thanks for sharing them. I would add that while preparing more is better, preparing certain parts of the adventure are more important than others. It's been my experience, both in games I've run and in games I've played, that the PCs' interactions with well thought out NPCs was the thing that players appreciated the most and remembered long after a campaign ended.
Thank you for singing the praises of advance preparation. I dunno where people got the idea that an RPG should be nothing but random encounters & improv, but it drives me up a wall. Every "sandbox game" I've been in has been boring as hell. I'd like an adventure, please.
Here’s a tip that some but probably not all GM’s know about. I use the Donjon tool to make my own custom calendar for my world. I included my own astrological events and the effects on the world during those cycles. Then I just crossed days off the calendar as they go by and when and event pops up they have to deal with whatever the real (game) World effects are in them. Just a simple way to breathe a little more life into the campaign. My players seem to enjoy it.
I have been using what I call the "railroad station" method for my recent campaigns, and it's been helping me a lot. Basically, my parties are members of a guild with a mission board. They're free to pursue any mission they want, but occasionally they have to catch a connection (a.k.a. a story mission not associated with the guild) to make it to their final destination. They enjoy the free nature of it as well as the inherent structure behind it. They still get to make options, but aren't just given the world to explore.
For making the world feel alive, I think factions from Worlds Without Number will do wonders. Just rolling a turn of whatever is going on with 3-4 active factions every time a party finishes a short adventure or part of a long one will give you so much background content!
@@dddddd-ut7ud thank you very much. I am the DM, we are useing Forbidden Lands to play in our own fantasy World. I plan on useing only the faction mechanic of WWN because I like the idea of not exactly knowing what will happen. And perhaps at some point I will intruduce the players to this meta game to (if they have there own castle or something on those lines)
@@lycaonlycos2140 Alright! So, when creating factions, you probably don't want more than 3 or 4. That's usually the perfect number. You may have more factions in reality, but keep only 3 or 4 "active" at a time. If a faction or multiple falls out of the player's view and won't likely to come up soon, just drop it. You may run some turns if players return to the region, but running it every single time is tedious. On the other hand, don't fear to introduce new ones if they feel appropriate or the number of active factions is too low! When creating factions, you, as the book suggests, will want to decide their size, and that will definitely depend on the scope of the campaign. At low levels several small factions, like a kobold lair, a small town and a cult will surely be enough, and you can introduce a nearby city later as players level up. But they not need be of the same size. Sometimes having an "underdog" faction plotting in the background and striking only when needed is perfect If you have the classic one-for-the-whole-story BBEG, you sure can make him a major faction. When deciding goals for factions, make sure they will force conflict, at least some of them. It may be convenient for everyone to select the "Peaceable Kingdom", but that doesn't make for interesting situations. Make it lore oriented, and make it their end game, with some major event happening when they are going to reach it. Some goals land to it perfectly, like destroying another faction, while subtler ones like wealth of kingdoms, may prompt a fair, celebration or something. Speaking of! Every faction action, even discreet or peaceful one must generate a news headline, rumor or a quest hook. Someone creates a Wealth 1 "Cooperative Businesses" asset? Make a new shop open and show it to the players. "Blackmail" got a big hit by the local guard? Reference the crackdown and maybe one of the wanted informers will pay the characters to get him out of here ASAP no questions asked. “Farmers” that belong to kobolds got successfully activated? Oooh boy, there’s a sudden spike in missing children all of the sudden. By the way, be not afraid to reskin the assets to be appropriate or interesting. Magic school’s “blackmail” may be a divination wizard while thieves’ guild “arcane laboratory” may be a contract with some shady guys from aforementioned magic school which source them magic items. As for players interacting with the system: they ignore all the rules. If they succeed in a quest to destroy stuff, the stuff doesn’t get a defense roll and they just destroy it, regardless of HP. If they want on to go on a quest to restore that cooperative business they liked and they succeeded, the faction gains that asset back at no cost and no turn expenditure. Likewise, factions need not necessary spend an action to attack the players with an asset, at least most of the time. And the most important part: factions are aware of this property of the players. They know that adventurers are a literal nuke and they will definitely either use them, or try to destroy them. If someone is losing hard, is losing their most important asset or is just a “Peaceable kingdom” in need of an army by their doorstep gone, you bet they will ask the adventurers for help. I suggest taking a turn whenever the players finish (or are close to finishing) whatever adventure they were going on and don’t have too much on their plate already. Also, if you can, check the faction rules for Stars Without Number. They are almost the same, but in there they provide an example of a turn and some tips that were useful to me. The faction section starts at page 212 and, like WWN, the book has a free tier
@@lycaonlycos2140 Also, you owe me a small report on how it all turned out now ;P Definitely would love to hear what epic shit is/will be going on in your campaign
Start with a mystery. It doesn't need to be related to the plot you want, nor does it need to be a whodunnit. Give them something to intrigue them, and by the time they solve it, they'll be invested and then you can start the story. Plus it can be a good tutorial into your world.
Thank you Luke! My input is that limiting session time and ending before GM knowledge is not pressed beyond what is prepared is important. End the session with questions to be answered in the next session.
In the game I'm presently playing, I'm the calendar master, the one who's mostly tracking time, keeping us reminded of the events that happened, and potentially interesting dates. No, for a change, I'm not the DM here. Instead, I publish Gwyn's diary after every session, keeping track of what day it is, and what (to my knowledge) happened on that day. This is an excellent job to give to a player. If one is willing. As a DM you can/should be on top of your own calendar, especially as regards the machinations of the evil NPCs, but it helps to have a PC also tracking time and date. For the DM it's one less job.
A good secret hack I've learnt as a game master is : if you REALLY want your players to "go somewhere / chase someone", steal their some stuff. They will travel the WORLD AND HELLS to take it back !
Plan a break in the middle of the session. It's a floating time of course, but when that time approaches, look for opportunities to call a break. Players come back from the break refreshed and with new ideas.
After about an hour focus start to diminish. So having breaks every 1-2 hours is good. It's also good to just move and stretch once in a while, for many reasons.
My hack is run your campaign from a tavern. I was in a group once that had several players that wanted to experiment with different characters. The dm did a one shot to introduce the new characters where the souls of our original characters jumped into the bodies of the new characters. I didn’t want to change, so my character just went to its own body. Instead with my next campaign I ran the campaign from the tavern I. Our main town. When they wanted to swap characters it was as easy as saying that next mission so and so was caught up in another quest and so someone else filled their spot. This allows characters to leave, come back, die, and give flexibility in a long campaign. If someone isn’t able to show up for a session, plausible storytelling is built in. It also allows for better side quest integration. A lot of people suck at role play, myself included. I hate when you have a huge city to explore but no real guidelines. In a tavern the dm can just put stuff out. You overhear some pirates talking about a crashed treasure ship… you see a halfling snatch someone’s purse while they are drinking… as you walk into the tavern everyone is in excitement chanting a song for the upcoming tournament. A tavern also allows you to experiment with new items. Players love wondrous and rare items. They aren’t super overpowered, but they make you feel special. A wandering salesman can come into town selling weapons that are not better stat wise, but maybe they have a cool feature. In my upcoming campaign I plan on having the barmaid sell enchanted baked goods. The first in the list will be sir Richard Astley’s rolls of loyalty. Whoever willingly eats one will be magically unable to attack you, alert someone to your presence, to abandon you, they cannot lie to you, and they cannot take an action against you or your goals. Then you play never gonna give you up. The tavern is the base, even if they have a base. It’s where everything exciting comes from.
Yeah, I've definitely made things too sandboxy by accident. The players would never directly ask me for more obvious hooks, but we all realized what the problem was.
PC backstories and player theories are free real estate. Most players will enjoy getting a quest or story that touches or focuses on their character's background. They will also enjoy finding out that their theories are correct. This helps especially if you're struggling with coming up with good hooks for adventure, story ideas, story twist ideas, and alternate solutions to puzzles and other problems.
Personally I think that every long campaign needs at least a couple of world changing events... A war between two big nations, the crowning of a new king, a massive volcano exploding! The pc's could be more or less involved in such a change but the aftermath allows you to change the feeling of the gaming world, and keep it fresh!
For my group I plan to do an adventure that opens up an old dwarven road, a big tunnel through a mountain that has been long closed. Well in thanks for open the old route they carve the heroes in stone at the entrance that when I play a campaign with the same players but different PCs the PCs get told of the heroes that helped open the ancient route and restore trade to the valley.
*If you prepare more than less (with what to do instead):* - _You create attachment to what you create which might lead you to push the PCs to do something they don't want to because "it's cool"._ - _You waste time. Time is a resource you never get back._ - _You have much more to scour through when you need to find that one piece of information in your notes._ *Instead:* - _Make tools that are versatile. Like dungeons and encounters with interesting elements which are non-specific. A cave's design can be made to be interesting with goblins in it at level 2, ghouls at level 4 and Destrachan at level 12. A ruin with skeletons / zombies and evil priests at 2, a cult of devil worshipers at 7, or a resting war party of drows at 10. Lists of NPC names by culture, description of art items because why have all the wealth in gold pieces._ - _Prioritize what makes the game fun in your prep time, both for you and your players. Props, scenarios which are not a race to 0 HP, opportunities for the Players choices in character creation/progression to truly matter, elements of players' backgrounds propping up without being used as cheap collateral to motivate the players, new content..._
Indeed you must be ready to make dramatic changes to your world. The PC saved the baron but ignored the plague in the capital. They now have a powerfull ally but the kingdom fell apart because the royal family is dead. Major changes in politics, economy and law.
the best GM secret i figured out is one you already said. prep work. you can create a wonderful "sandbox" world. but if you don't prepare for what the players are going to do in it, its going to look like some of those recent, shoveled out, open world games. piles of empty bordom.
I really hate the idea of "the more you prep the better" as much as I hate the idea "you shouldn't do a lot of prep" It's entirely based on you. My players immediately noticed an improvement when work got to busy for me to do as much prep as normal. Things ended up feeling more natural. On the flip side when I'm a player I normally get way more out of my character if I do a lot of prep between sessions.
Here’s one: If your players come up with a cool way to roll over a challenge, let them. I try to put solid challenges in front of my player, be it a combat, some detective work, or a puzzle. However my friends I run for are smart people. So, sometimes a challenge I put in front of them isn’t that tough for them. That’s ok, let them have the occasional easy win when they earn it and then move on. Not every thing they deal with needs to be a nail biter. On the flip side of that, if the players blindly walk past and fail to pick up the treasure/reward tied to an adventure, let them do that too.
The whole point of the toroidal propellers is to use less energy and make less noise for the same work, they are not necessarily faster... Also, eyeballing it probably won't be enough to have an optimal design, since it was designed for air density in the first place...
I am a firm believer in the world moving around the players. They chose to ignore signs of a cult in a city and now an entire city block of people are dead from an unknown source. Now, I have their attention.
I love doing stuff like you talked about in your first point. I think the first time I did this, my murder hobos cleared out a goblin cave, to find a warren in back with the goblin kids. Oh.
6:02 #6 is really 3 different things in one. (A) tracking the passage of time, so you know when things have happened, how long it’s been, etc. I agree, this is crucial on a micro scale (rounds and hours) and important on the mid-scale (anything that happens within a single adventure). But on the macro scale, it really depends on the playgroup and the kind of game you want to run. Maybe you’re fine with TV aging (when a kid goes from newborn to precocious 8-year-old between seasons, even though all other indications are that only a couple years-or a few months-have passed. Maybe time pressure (“the ritual will take place during the blood moon, which as 17 days from now, so we need to gather all 5 Guardian Scepters, each on a different continent, before then!”) is important for your game. Maybe it’s not. (“Having gathered all 5 Guardian Scepters, you realize that arranging them creates an astrological calendar that tells you when the ritual must happen, and it’s 1 week from today!”) Maybe you’re running a really episodic game, where really the only meaningful orientation points are the PCs, and exactly how long it’s been since the last adventure doesn’t really matter. (Think: most TV shows. Even when the big time scales are clear, often the time between episodes isn’t: we know a year passes for each season of Babylon 5, but not how much time passes between most episodes, or even how much time most episodes cover.) (B) having things happen to mark the passage of time, like festivals and even just weekends [sure, they’re a bit anachronistic for the kind of world most D&D worlds are built to resemble, but if your world has them, have them mean something.] This, I agree, is really helpful for verisimilitude. But setting lore like this is a balancing act: you want as much as the players find interesting and engaging and can keep track of, but beyond that you’re just wasting your time and theirs. At best, it becomes Peanuts-speak. At worst, the players get frustrated trying to keep track of all this and the GM gets frustrated at the players failing to keep track of all this. Make it verisimilitude garnish, not homework. Also, the more of it you put in, the more of it _you_ need to keep track of. (C) Things happening because time marches on and people and organizations do things whether the PCs are involved or not. Again, this goes back to playstyle. I generally like this, but it’s not the One True Way™ to play. You can have an amazingly fun game where everything is effectively scheduled around the players’ actions. That doesn’t need to mean there’s never any time pressure, just that whatever is going on is set up to make the PCs the focal point. Let’s face it: “you get there too late and the ritual is already done and the world has ended” is rarely as satisfying as “you get there and the ritual has already begun-you’re not sure how much time you have left to shut it down before it becomes permanent”. Things happening elsewhere should be happening because they will make the game more fun and story more interesting _for the players_ - making the world more interesting or more realistic in a way that doesn’t improve fun for the players, or hurts their fun, isn’t valuable.
Ah yes, prep. I spent ages prepping things for my campaign and each sessions, just to have my players decide not showing up for months was a good idea, even after changing session times and days to fit everyone. We'll my plot hook came up one session when only 2 of my 6 players were there. Pity it killed them off. Now I'm just trying to build a new group that will show up and play. I also had things happen, like the season of reaping, a living tree city that literally grew and or died as the players meandered around, defend its occupants and help visitors find where they needed to go. And having a boss type person intervene and complete a quest when the players took to long to complete it then berate them for not doing as they were told when they were told to do it.
The only caveat I would add to the prep is realize you will prep a lot that your players will miss. I had one GM get frustrated because the players missed something she had prepped a lot on and she started taking it out on the characters.
A good solution to that is to reuse missed materials. If it never entered the game, the players don't know about it, so you're still free to plop it into the world wherever and whenever you want. That awesome NPC you wanted the PCs to meet at the gate of the town? They'll now meet her resting at an oasis. The entire dungeon they completely missed the hooks for in favour of running after a butterfly on the road? The butterfly is attracted to the magical energies of the dungeon. Prepared shops can appear at any location. Encounters can happen everywhere. You might need to be reskin the content somewhat, but that's much easier than creating new content.
prepare the right way and things Experience count for nothing if is not used the right way The fun of every player in the group is the responsibility of every player
Tie the PCs together. I always insist that every PC has at least one bond to, and at least one secret about every other PC. So the thief and the mage might be cousins. And the thief might know that the mage is the secret daughter of a local lord (the mage doesn't know that herself.)' Meanwhile the mage knows that the druid is seeking the sacred staff that was stolen from his grove.
The idea that more prep makes your game better is a myth. I find that having notes is more often a hindrance then helpful. It takes me out of the moment and can lead to effectively just attempting to check stuff off a list. If you have ADHD you can probably run the game without prep better than with it if you are any good at improv. Also, when you don't prep you get to be surprised by what happens next in the story because you just "wrote" that bit on the spot. It can keep you from railroading your players as well. The players have to improvise all of their actions why can't I do it with all the other people that inhabit the game world?
It's different for everyone. A lot of DMs get anxious and stressed out if they don't have enough prepared. That makes the game less fun and more like chore or job. Sure, if it works for you to not prepare, good for you. But if it doesn't work, well, you need to prepare more.
1:57 #2 is a tricky balance, however. If the PCs are too important or too powerful, the world feels too small or uninteresting. And it can feel weird that there are all these powerful monsters and villains, but the PCs are the only powerful heroes. Especially when you consider that a D&D5E party can go from 0-level to 12th-level or higher in the span of a few months (or even weeks!) of in-world time. Surely the PCs can’t be the only people in the whole world who’ve tried to become heroes and survived long enough to gain some power‽ But go too far the other way-too many or too powerful of NPC heroes-and there are a couple pitfalls. Instead of the players thinking “this world feels more complex and real” they might think “whatever we do, the GM always makes sure there’s a better or cooler or more powerful hero out there”. Or it can feel like it doesn’t matter what the PCs do-there are plenty of goodguys in the world, so if the PCs don’t solve the problem, someone else will. Or it doesn’t matter because no matter how much good they do, evil keeps happening somewhere else-it can feel like whack-a-mole. “You saved the city, cancelled the demon pact, and helped them set up a new, corruption-free government.” “YAY!!” “While you were doing that, the dracolich has killed all the unicorns and raised them as terrible undead steeds for its cavalry. They are sweeping across the plains, and 3 border forts have fallen so far.” Or there’s so much detail about “background” events that players lose track-or worse, tune out any time you tell them about things off-screen-and so the clever hints become lost and if it really _is_ just trying to “bring the world to life” it does so without the players actually engaging. It’s like a newspaper you don’t read: you’re aware there are things happening because the newspaper keeps getting published, but you have no idea what those things are. That’s a lot of effort the GM is putting in for very little gain. Or some of that background detail is _important_ and the players get overwhelmed trying to track it all and piece together which parts are “clues” or “hints” and which are just “background” to make the world seem more lived-in. Or miss the important parts. Or the GM has to flag the important bits anyway, so the players learn they don’t need to pay attention to the rest because the GM will let them know if it matters. And all that’s _without_ the dreaded “GMPC” showing up and becoming the spotlight character. None of these are inevitable-they’re just really easy, really common traps to fall into in the process of trying to make sure the PCs aren’t the only movers and shakers. I’m absolutely _not_ saying “don’t do this”-just pointing out that this is a tradeoff, not a case where it’s _always_ better _in every way_ to make the PCs not the source of all the big changes. Sometimes going the Dungeon World route (where the PCs are explicitly unique) makes for a better game-just depends what you and your group want.
Kind of how I do open world... more than one plot arc open at the same time. While the PCs handle one plot arc, the others "age" potentially getting worse, or getting solved by "some other party" Maybe not changing. Depends on importance to main BBEG plot as to how the discovered but not dealt with plot arcs develop. Maybe the PCs ruin the original intended BBEG's plans and someone else becomes the BBEG.
Never understimate the essentials! After 10+ years of DMing i have enough evidence that my players at the table have fun... STILL, i get lazy from time to time, and some reminder on the important stuff can be useful to get a feeling of "yeah, i should do that more"
@@valeriodestefano3784 For sure. Keeping track of more than 9,000 things that are going on at (and in support of) the table can be a struggle. Boiling it all down to the essentials, is essential. Will just flow naturally from there.
I start my player characters as nobodies, no matter what they wrote up as a back story, and let them know that like this one, the fantasy world doesn't care about them. The world doesn't revolve around them. Yet. Subject to change as they grow in power and wealth. I also start them off with a Patron that recruits them to send them off on adventures. The Patron, with or without the players knowledge, is part of a secret society managing change in the world. Every group I run gets the same world, but for some the Patron is a force for good, for some - not so much. The Patron is an easy way to explain why these diverse personalities have come together to adventure. As far as preparation goes, I try to have stuff ready, but the problems I run into are as a simple as I have a forest trek planned, so my party stays in the city. Or, they start digging around in an underground cavern system, and I have next weeks stuff ready, so they go back to town instead and want to rob some shopkeepers, or decide to trek across the wilderness. Great, I whip out my forest encounters, just in time for them to decide to take the King's Road by horseback to another city. Or, instead of taking the game trail around the lake to a destination across it, they'll Water Walk across it and avoid the goblin patrol in the woods. I'm constantly outsmarted by my parties expertise in not staying on task.
I write my own stuff. I do not like running other peoples stuff. There's nothing wr... No. There is a flaw in running other peoples modules but it's not an avoidable flaw. If you are not a good writer or just don't have time, then there is nothing wrong with it. See, I tend to write my scenarios in chapters. One chapter at a time. YES I have an overall plot I have in mind (often on paper in stupid levels of detail) and that the NPCs are working towards. BUT I never know how my players will handle the scenario. So, periodically at the end of a session I have to tell my players I will need a week or so to write the next chapter. And this allows for something that few players ever see. The story is about THEM. The players, When you run some one else's module, the writers have no idea what the PCs will do to handle events along the way. So, if there are events and not just a bunch of rooms inhabited by monsters and puzzles, these events sort of have to be inevitable. You standard prewritten module has nothing to do with your PC's because they cant. Certainly a decent GM can make some of it pertinent to the extincting characters. But the story itself CAN'T be about them. If you have a GM or DM that writes stories about your character, consider yourself lucky. I still do it on rare occasions. But Covid has messed up my gaming groups badly so it hasn't happened in a while. The other guy in our group who sort of did this sort of thing... He had to start taking meds that left him... less than creative. He's a lot happier for it but the spark is sort of not there. So he runs other peoples modules now. I am sad. If you have that person in your group. Hang on to them. Bring them Chinese food and donuts. Whatever it takes. That's my GM & Player tip.
TL;DR as i got carried away: Dont be afraid to change things up a little on the fly if something just doesnt feel right to the story told so far. Maybe run it past the group first if you're not a close out of game friend group or have other surrounding factors that you think it may upset the players, though. _____ For bosses, our dm's use moving goalposts. The amount of times we had anti-climatically killed a boss creature in just a few hits (three of our five pc's in one game have a 'high score' of over 200 hp, with my rogue/monk's own high score being 289 against someone) sometimes they will just double a creatures hp without letting us know when it happens (our dm for the campaign my rogue is in admitted after one session he had to double it four times as it was supposed to be the conclusion to a major story arc and with eight months of weekly games -the only thing lockdown was good for lol - just for the paladin to reach it's max hp in the first hit and the rest of us did much the same amount of damage with our first turns). As players we know this happens now, as after the first couple of times the dm wanted feedback on him doing it and whether to keep doing it. and we all prefer it to a fight we have lead up to lasting less than even sometimes a single whole round. Especially when the rp towards it has been super fire. ...It also may or may not now be a background unofficial contest between the players to see how many hp changes we can force, and the dm encourages our bs because he loves the chaos. Luckily our friend group is compromised of similar personalities and we dont have too many issues with clashing ideologies on rp and what we expect from sessions. Especially in higher level dnd, the balance for combats can be exceptionally meh to just go raw, it really feels like dnd creatures arent built to be in a campaign higher than level 12. (For reference, we are level 16 and although we dont care too much about spod fights and how quickly we can get them over with, but the rp story arc fights we want "anime levels of epic" i believe was the term thrown out. We want a chance to use our cool-ass magic items and high level abilities we got excited about hitting the level for and the high level spell slots we hoarded through the dungeon, and we want it without the villain folding like a cheap deck chair so we are challenged when it feels _right_ storywise to be challenged.)
The best laid plans of a DM, will ALWAYS get destroyed by the players. Learn how to be spontaneous and add lib at the drop of a D20. And don't freak out that players decide that don't want to go to A, B, C, or D, but want to go to Q, R, S, and T instead and do something you never expected them to do. But don't penalize them for it.
7:10 I wasn't at this Con, but I must say... I think you took the wrong meaning away from Ed's comment... Yes, its better to overprep then under... More is better then Less... But I think HE ment in terms of your world, not a session. If you overprep your world; know its celebratory days, know when the events are, know when bad things are happening...then you can run a game in your world, even if you haven't prepared something specific for that session. I take this from his meaning, because Iv been watching his talks on RU-vid on his channel, and he talks about minute details about the Realms that I doubt any 5E DM running FR has ever even thought about. That there's Trezzor under Buldar's Gate... that Waterdeep runs on its underworks... that Neverwinter's power is entirely made up... that there's a friend's you can make in the darkest places, and enemies who offer you work... Obviously, he knows the Forgotten Realms and Toril; but its that info that no longer is printed, that makes Ed talking about the Realms, such a big thing... because, otherwise, he's just some crazy Canadian Wizard! :D
if you need to attend a convention to know this basic truths of dming than maybe you should stop dming and think for a while and then maybe start dming again or just leave it for good.
One hack I’ve encountered: don’t over-write. Include only the information you need to set the mood and add hooks for the areas they visit. Everything else you can and should describe based on the reactions your players give you. You will never know everything the players will be interested in, and you can surprise yourself and your party with your instinctive creativity. Save prep time and stay flexible. And take notes.
You will get out of the game session what you put in, unless someone else decides to torpedo the whole thing, so now you got two reasons not to be that person.
The last time i put a random mysterie in a game that didn't have anything to do with the plot it derailed the entire session because my Players went completely out of their way to find an explaination for it 😂
