Quote:
Originally Posted by TatteredKing
Oh, here's another.
Learn stalling tactics. One thing I have done is plan a handful of 'random' encounters to drop into a session to stall until the end of the night. That gives me until the next week to plan.
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Great advices have been given, I heartfully agree with all of them. What can I add?
* Give a voice to your NPCs. I mean that litteraly. You don't need to have
Critical Role-level voice actor skills, but setting a particular tone, a few mannerisms of speaking, fleshes out a character way faster and more effectively than any long description you will make. Plus, it's awfully fun.
* Learn from the best you know. You've been a player for years, that means you've have experiences with various GMs already. You probably had a better time with some more than others. Ask yourself who, and why, and what you can try to replicate or emulate, based on what made you tick when you were on that side of the board.
* While you have the upper hand as the GM, don't hesitate to ask your players, in between sessions, what they thought of what you did, what they liked, what they'd want next or see emphasized. If all your players aren't new to this, if by any chance one of them even has more experience, knows the mechanical rules better than you do, there's no shame in leaning a bit on her, including during the game.
* Don't despair if you're not immediately as great as a GM as you'd wish to be. We're all newbies at some point.
Speaking of that, already written scenarios are convenient especially when you begin (I guess we're a lot who started with that), but in case you'd feel the limits of the exercise over time, here's two more advices, for the same price. They're more aimed at GMs writing their own adventures, although I guess some parts of it may apply there too.
* Vary your pleasures. Investigation, social interactions and atmosphere; exploration and "dungeoneering"; fight and dices rolling... There are different possible aspects in roleplay and in a campaign, and not everyone enjoys the same ones the same way at the same time. Don't hesitate to put a stress on what you like the most; but don't stay stuck on it excluding everything else: one single tone going on forever isn't music, it's noise. If all is going well, your tastes and your players' tastes should be reasonably aligned, but even then, few people like to eat their favourite meal twenty times in a row. Be it during a session or from one to another, try to devote time to different types of play.
* "Railroaded" scenarios are the easier to prepare, but demand skills to prevent the players to feel constricted in roles they didn't script, whose choices do not really matter. "Sandbox" scenarios, on the other hand —where you define in your notes the playground, the stakes, the NPCs, what would happen if no one interferes... and then drop the PCs in the middle of all that with the freedom to act as they see fit—, are certainly more immersive and tend to be more rewarding for the players, but they suppose a tremendous amount of upstream work and preparation, a good part of which will probably never serve (this is where Yamazaki's advice about recycling comes handy...!). Once again, try to keep a balance between the two approaches during different phases of your game.
Have fun, and as the Tattered King said, please keep us informed of your adventures.