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New DM, Looking for Advice!

   
New DM, Looking for Advice!

Hello! My name is Sammich, and I am going to try to DM this summer! I've been in two sessions throughout my lifetime, and both of the separate DM's I talked to had drastically different advice for me. That said, I had a question to ask.

What aspects make a campaign good?

A thing to keep in mind; I am leading a party of five, using D&D 3.5 for the system, and is really cheap so I am using dice rollers online and using Microsoft Paint for my maps. (Bee tee dubs, are there any cool programs to use for mapping and stuff?)

Thanks for reading!

Moved to Gaming Discussion; Game Planning is for planning games that are to be run on Myth-Weavers.


That is a very broad question. I'm not surprised that two different GMs gave you two different answers; I think that if you polled all twenty thousand-some active member of the Myth-Weavers community, they might all have a different answer to that question. What I'm going to give is some very broad and high-level advice that might be hard as a starting GM, but if you can master it you'll be above a lot of others I've seen.

Never say no.

Now that's confusing advice, and it requires a bit of explanation. Basically, if you players come up to you with a wacky, crazy, zany scheme or idea, don't shoot it down just because it doesn't feel totally in the scope of the campaign, or because you can't think of the rules to support it right off the bat. Give your players room to explore their options, let them have enough rope to either hang themselves or swing into action with. In improve this is the principle of Yes, And. When someone offers a line, you never say no to that; you say yes, and you add more detail to it, to flesh it out further. I've also heard it referred to as the Producer Principle; view your role as a Hollywood producer. Whenever the players pitch an idea, encourage them to develop it to the point where you feel it can work in your game.

I've just come out of retirement after 7 years (Some of my old RPG friends did some waterboard torture to get me to run again..... I only saw the plank and the towel and i volunteered lol), but in the past i gave the players what they wanted. I asked what type of scenario they wanted, they told me and i took it from there.

As far as the game goes; let it flow, it the characters want to do something different, role with it. A bit of adlib doesn't hurt anyone and you can always steer the players back on track to keep your scenario moving.

Relax and be yourself and the game will flow.

I Hope this helps

The most important tip is to do what makes you happy.

You're not a trained monkey designed to bring the players amusement, sacrificing your fun so that they can be happy. You're a guy who loves doing whatever you love doing, whether that's bringing a fully realised sandbox world to life or crafting some pre-imagined story or ad-hocing your way through a session by the skin of your teeth.
Run the game that you would want to play in.

As for your first time out, definitely run a module and definitely keep your players in the loop regarding your learning experiences. You can expand out into your own stuff afterwards if you want.
I'd recommend rolling your dice in the open, at least for the first few sessions, so that other people can help you on rules and such.
If you're running a module or pre-planned storyline, remember that your players can and will mess it up somehow. Have some backup stuff available (the One Page Dungeon Contest is good for this) for any time you need to plug a gap.

Overall, have fun! And if you're not having fun, find what's wrong and change it.

Usually the best way to go about it, do something that excites you and never saves cool ideas. You will always have cool ideas. Everybody like to plan for big epic encounters at the end of the campaign while nice and all, the hard work of the campaign is to keep it going until you reach that point. Mostly why, you should always go all out, you never know when it is going to be the last session for whatever reason. You want to have a floating head shooting laser beams? Just do it. If your players see you engaged in your story, they will follow.

Welcome to the dark side

As a new GM you'll probably feel a bit overwhelmed; this is normal and it will pass as you spend more time in "the chair".

A couple of tips:

- Get organized. One of your primary responsibilities as a GM is to be a data repository of "the environment", to include factions, NPCs, PC motivations and everything else. But do not despair! Something as simple as a composition book with dedicated pages you can refer back to is all you would need to keep the information. Staying organized is a key component that will prevent your group from bogging down looking for information. While it may not seem that much to keep up with at first, the more time you spend in your world the more you will have to keep up with. No matter what method you decide to use try to be consistent.

- Run your game as though it was your business. What I mean by this is that you should treat it as though your hobby provided an output that is high enough quality to be sold. Have fun, enjoy (and be) yourself, but always consider your world your end product. You never know, someday you could publish your campaign world and we'll all be reading about your greatness!

- Ask for feedback from your players. Something that I do at the end of every session is taking five minutes to ask three questions: What went well in this session? What didn't go well? What would you like to see in future sessions. While you don't have to commit to altering your campaign just to please the players simply asking these questions could provide you with insight that you may not have had previously.

- As others have previously stated, "Yes, and..." needs to become a key part of your vocabulary when running the game. Consider viewing the game as cooperative storytelling, where everyone at the table is adding to the story and adding value to it through each session.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jammers View Post
The most important tip is to do what makes you happy.

You're not a trained monkey designed to bring the players amusement, sacrificing your fun so that they can be happy. You're a guy who loves doing whatever you love doing, whether that's bringing a fully realised sandbox world to life or crafting some pre-imagined story or ad-hocing your way through a session by the skin of your teeth.
Run the game that you would want to play in.
Quoted, because this is pretty much what I'd say. It's a game for all involved, and not everyone grasps that. I've run into my fair share of folks who just don't get the amount of work that can go into DM'ing as they've never done it before. You don't want to be running and prepping for a game that you don't enjoy, and neither do the players want to play in it. It won't be fun for anyone, and resentment will start. I've been down that road, and everyone gets worked up, burnt out, and its no good for anyone.

Organization is key. You'll keep running into things you forget regularly, and need reminding of. You'll want a cheat sheet of some kind early on of key rules and chart locations to help speed up your referencing things. Don't be afraid to make your players hand you page number and book name for whatever they are asking questions about either. A DM processes massive amounts of information each game, and before each game when prepping for it. Everyone likes things their own way, so as Raveled said above, everyone will likely give you a different answer for a variety of things. Find things that make your life easier and use them.

Personally I've used Maptools for my mapping needs since 2007 or 2008. This is freeware, and is a longstanding 2D Java based virtual tabletop complete with dice roller, Fog of War, Tokens, and a community to support your inevitable "What do I do with ....??!" questions that will come up. Find it here: http://www.rptools.net/

Lately I've been doing all of my prep work in Google Drive. It's free, I can sort with folders, create text documents to ramble on, and spreadsheets to store my data.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/ Is my free Pathfinder source for all my DM'ing needs.
http://www.d20srd.org/ Much more restrictive, but still free 3.5 source.

Between these and http://plothook.net/tools/pointbuy.htm I have what I need to DM.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hypelord Timelord View Post
Hello! My name is Sammich, and I am going to try to DM this summer! I've been in two sessions throughout my lifetime, and both of the separate DM's I talked to had drastically different advice for me. That said, I had a question to ask.

What aspects make a campaign good?
A difficult question to answer in the general. The aspects that make a campaign good vary from genre to genre and person to person.

The best way to figure out what would make a campaign good for your group is to figure out what drives the players to play. This can be difficult as many people can have difficulty articulating what they like.

Watch the players as you play. What piques each one's interest?

Generally, here are some basics:
Start out simple. Since you are looking at 3.5, choose as few books to include as you are comfortable with initially. Get a handle on the rule basics before adding extra complexity. As a new DM, I recommend you pick an adventure to run. There can often to a temptation to fiddle with the rule set / adventure when starting out. Some rule sets are more brittle than others and don't handle change that well. Don't necessarily muzzle that desire, but ask yourself the following questions: Does this change make the game more fun for all the players? Is there extra bookkeeping or adjudication involved? Is the solution worse than the problem being solved? Is the table going to remember the change during play? Are there unintended side-effects to the changes -- does the change favour one character type over another or are there ripples into other rules? If the change involves a random element, what happens when the unlikely results occur?

Give the players variety, both in terms of visualisations, and how situations can be approached. This helps you identify what interests each player and gives the players another dimension to consider. This is a limited value if you are running some else's work.

Keep the world moving. Nothing can kill energy like the group being stymied by a situation that they can't find a way out of especially if the situation is a empty one "There's nothing to do!" is a terrible cry. Make certain the players feel they have things they can try. Note the emphasis on the players' feeling here. As a DM you are privy to inside knowledge and will see 'obvious' things the players could be doing at every stage. That doesn't mean the players can see the options. Don't feed the options to the players, but make certain your descriptions are sufficient for the players to find the linkages themselves. If the players are missing key components, engineer ways to bring the connecting pieces back to their attention. Avoid the DMing trap of requiring a specific key by used to get out of a situation. The "yes and" and "yes but" DMing advice helps here.

Encourage and reward player interest. A player attempting to interact with the game world is singularly string signal of what interests that player. The "yes and" and "yes but" DMing advice helps reward the attempt. Once you identify something in the game world the players are attached to, involve it in interesting ways. Note the interesting qualifier.

I agree with most of what has been said. My input us use the suggestions to create your own style.

As far as mapping is concerned, I use OpenOffice Draw. You can see some of my maps in the games I'm running presently. I have found it superior to anything out there (at least for me).




 

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