Many of us, have read GM-sections in RPG, RPG blogs, forum discussions, and sometimes books about the storytelling art.
All of these contains tons of interesting tips/techniques (and some will contradict each other, you don’t GM a gritty mega-dungeon and high-school drama game the same way), so I am curious which ones are your favourite and how do you use them in your game
I love SlyFlourishs Lazy GM approach tip with the secrets (prepare n, say 10, secrets but don’t define where or how the PCs will find them). Helps me think about what the session / chapter can entail and make sure the PCs get the info required to continue the story without locking me or them into specific ways to do stuff.
A few favourites from the Alexandrian:
- Don’t prep plots. Prep scenarios. If you give the players a goal and a world, they will make the plot themselves, and it’ll be more interesting. And it’s not like you wouldn’t need those things for a railroad plot anyway.
- Don’t plan contingencies. Instead of explaining everything the party could do to get past the guard, just describe the guard. It’s a lot more flexible, and it takes less time to prepare.
- With the 3 clues rule, make sure to have different clue types. If all your clues are pieces of evidence, then a party who prefers to talk to people is clueless.
- If you feel the need to ask “are you sure you want to do that”, there might be a miscommunication to figure out. Maybe you didn’t explain the situation clearly, or a player misheard you, or the player has an item to help things work out.
- When creating a system within your setting (eg, nobility), add two exceptions to the neat and tidy rules. “Each region is ruled by a count, except for those over there which are ruled by comtes.” This adds history to your world while making it less daunting to add more exceptions if you need them later.
Addendum to the “Are you sure you want to do that” bullet: if a player ever does something that seems nonsensical to you, ask them what they expect to achieve by doing that. Understanding their motivation is often what resolves the miscommunication and/or allows you to steer them towards a better way to do what they’re trying to do.
The players won’t care about how pretty you make your maps. Make them functional and ugly, and you’ll save up so much time for other prep.
I found a map-making site that is, let’s be honest, shit. The maps it makes can only ever be “good enough”, and never great. This means I don’t waste time trying to make them great, and can actually finish the dang things. Plus, if the players decide not to go to the noble manor, then it’s no big loss.
This idea goes for a lot of the game, actually. If you spend less time on the story, then it’s no big loss if the plot takes a tangent. And they probably weren’t going to be as invested in a forced narrative as they would be for something more organic.
Wow, you guys are actually giving really good and useful advice.
I was about to comment “When one of my players asks whether they can do something completely unreasonable I look at them, roll a D20 openly on the table and without checking the result, say ‘no’”
But now I just feel bad :D
I was about to comment “When one of my players asks whether they can do something completely unreasonable I look at them, roll a D20 openly on the table and without checking the result, say ‘no’”
Actually, saying no is one of weakness, so the PC wanting to do something completly unreasonable led to some pretty great player driven session or even campaign arc.
I just ask them how do you plan to do-it and suddenly the non reasonable plan becomes a suite of small reasonable tasks so I want the peace in the world, it’s easy just give the love drug to world leader and they will all start to love each others, so first step is to put my hand in enough drug, the second is to get access to the water factory that will provide water at the next diplomatic summit, do you think the militaro industrial complex will be happy with this terrorist action ? OK that one is a bit extreme but you get the point, suddently the PC are the one writing the campaign and it’s pretty cool.
Sometimes that can be fun, but only if everyone at the table is onboard for a wild tangent. If the other players are bored as shit while the special snowflake starts a unicorn breeding operation, it’s time to use that No. And you, the DM, are included in that too; if your players want to drag you off to write every book in the library and that’s not fun for you, you have the right to say “hey maybe you should play the game I made for you instead.”
