After skimming the Final Fantasy D20 site, it made me really want to try running a game of it. However, the last- and first- time I tried dming was the lost mines of phandelver module from the D&D starter set. Basically, it went horribly. I had no idea what I was doing. Everybody got rekt by the gobbos in the first encounter because I followed the module too closely. In hindsight, I should have created a simple slay a dee man in a forgotten temple quest instead.Anyway, what do you guys recommend for a dm starting out?
Frankly, the only real way to do that is to know your players and how much they prefer having a more linear adventure compared to an open-ended one. And the best way to do that is to talk to them before the game on what their expectations are, like if they have any particular goals they want their character to achieve and form an overarching narrative or if they don't want anything grand and are just there to roll dice and eat pizza with the boys.And while ideally you should create as few limitations as possible and just let the players do as they will, there's always a chance you'll end up with that one that either has choice paralysis or just doesn't really care to come up with picking something on their own. Those guys it's okay to prompt them by helping them break down which immediate possible choices sound more appealing to them, even if they decide they ultimately don't care and just go with the general party's direction or even reject them all in favor of something else.
Define "railroad" and "sandbox" in this context.
>>96571234Lost Mines is a case where the starting combat is somewhat overtuned if you don't have a larger party of players, especially if you play it as an explicit ambush with the goblins being very smart.That doesn't really have anything to do with being a sandbox vs railroad, and more how not even WotC seems to have a solid grasp of encounter difficulty. If you're running for your friends or for people who are accepting of the fact that you're a new GM, you shouldn't worry about needing the game to be extremely open-ended. Coming up with a handful of plothooks or just running modules should help in terms of getting experience. And experience helps a lot more than theory. Some more broad advice is to focus on the small things first. Keeping a game confined to a single kingdom/valley/island/etc. helps to limit the scope for a smaller campaign. Worry about what's in front of you first before what'll be happening 20 sessions from now.
>>96571641Play some games, you'll learn what they mean.
>>96572001I play plenty of games.I just want to know what your retard-speak translates to in English
>>96573982Prove it, kid. The OP's text is clear as fucking day. It's just not interesting.
>>96571234>Anyway, what do you guys recommend for a dm starting out?Stop asking stupid questions and read the damn rules of whatever system you're trying to run
>>96571234There is, unfortunately, no universal golden answer to your question OP. It is something you can only get a feel for over time.Its important to also consider that your players have just as much input here as you do. You mention that in your first GMing attempt the module went poorly. Were your players just as inexperienced? If so, its possible that the reason that the fight went sideways wasn't simply because you were following it "too closely", but that the players themselves were making poor decisions born of inexperience that meant that an encounter that they had all of the TOOLS to beat was a failure because they didn't USE those tools as expected by the module. Tools, in this case, being class abilities and combat actions just as much as any in-game equipment. In regards to your initial question, the best advice that I can give is this: don't write stories, write scenarios and timelines. Never write up an adventure under the assumption that the players will do X, then Y then Z and follow your script. Instead, come up with a scenario that is already in progress when the player characters arrive on the scene, with a firm understanding in your mind of what will happen if the players *do nothing at all*. If the players were not here, what would have happened? Then, if and when the players interact with the scenario, reflect those changes. You can have outcomes you hope will happen because they lead to more interesting things, and if the players are CLOSE to that happening you can fudge some numbers and move some pieces to make that happen more easily, but never have a single adventure 'path' planned out with the expectation that the players will do it. Unfortunately, getting comfortable with improvisation is your only consistently useful tool as a GM of any system.
>>96571234Just run normal-ass adventures.This isn't a real problem. Railroading and Sandbox are such extreme ends of the spectrum that almost no game ever really reaches either one. Write your adventures. Prep for them. Respond to what the players do, and don't tell them they're "not allowed" to do things. You know: the way 99% of all ttrpg sessions have always gone. You won't be railroading, and won't leave them to flounder in a sandbox either. They'll have structure, and it'll be up to them how well they adhere to it. They'll mostly adhere, but will surprise you, sometimes.
>>96575198As a basic example: after a successful adventure of some kind, the players are invited to a ball being put on by the Duke who wishes to hear of their adventure. Unbenownst to both the Duke and the players, there is going to be an attempted assassination of the Duke during the ball. If the party does nothing, the Duke survives but his captain of the guard dies defending him and the assassin gets away, prompting a manhunt. If the players refuse the invite and never go to the ball at all, what happens? The above plays out and they hear about it after the fact, and maybe they choose to get involved. If the party goes to the ball, what do they do there before the assassin makes his play? They could stand back and not interrupt the assassin, and the above plays out and they just witness it firsthand. They could come to the defense of the duke, and either kill the assassin, save the guard captain, or some other outcome. They could do something annoying early on in the party that keeps the captain of the guard occupied (like trying to steal something from the manor and getting caught doing it), which draws the guards away to deal with your stupid rogue and as a result getting the Duke killed because the guard captain isn't there to defend him. And so on.Lots of possible outcomes, but all of them stem from having a setup, and knowing what will happen by default if the players do nothing, and then reacting to whatever changes they introduce. If you know your players you can maybe guess what they will do in advance, but you don't force those actions. You let your players feel like they get to make choices that matter, which creates engagement. but there are still events that you know will happen (the ball, the assassination attempt) that you can plan and build the session around in advance, its what happens AFTER that which is what you have to be flexible on.
>>96575198>In regards to your initial question, the best advice that I can give is this: don't write stories, write scenarios and timelines. Never write up an adventure under the assumption that the players will do X, then Y then Z and follow your script. Instead, come up with a scenario that is already in progress when the player characters arrive on the scene, with a firm understanding in your mind of what will happen if the players *do nothing at all*. If the players were not here, what would have happened? Then, if and when the players interact with the scenario, reflect those changes.Terrible, god-awful advice.Write your stories and plots and dungeons and scenarios. Adapt to the players. It's not that fucking hard. Most of the time? The players want to play a story. That's what we're fucking doing here. When they surprise you? Let them. Voila.
>>96575254To be fair, anon, OP admits that he doesn't have a lot of experience GMing. If you were a fresh GM poisoned by /tg/'s common meme threads, you'd probably also have a very distorted view of what running a game looks like and the terrible, unforgiveable sin of railroading or the divine hyperborean task of sandbox games.
>>96575271That's fair. I guess my advice then would be "Holy shit read the book and don't get advice from /tg/ what the hell are you thinking?"
Hey I made the FFd20 thread I'm glad to see people talking about it. Not alot of RPG on /tg/ today. For a new group or a new system, especially one as crunchy as FFd20 I think starting with something more linear or railroady is appropriately. You can always open the game up into a sandbox later if your group hits its stride. Start with a dungeon, see who the party really is ( I find that a character's dont crystalize as much when they are just a sheet but emerge more after a first session) and how everyone plays together, then it will be easier to run a sandbox
>>96575302Me personally, to help OP, I'm going to recommend an easy format for a game that I'm stealing from a podcast for adventuring seeds known as "Challenge, Focus, Strike". It basically goes like this;>Challenge: [The premise, a general overview of the situation presented to the party that should ideally make them want to actively participate in the adventure]>Focus: [The set-up, the events and factors driving the situation forward that may or may not require the party's intervention but still impact the adventure]>Strike: [The metaphorical monkey wrench, the complications or factors that ensures the party's intervention/non-intervention and overall decisions are integral to resolving the adventure]It's not perfect, but it's very easy to set up an adventure seed this way, especially since it doesn't mean you need to go into the level of complication or detail that a module would, just the bare-bone necessities.Actual example:>Challenge: A rogue ronin is attacking people at a crossroads at midnight>Focus: A survivor tells the party a description of his attacker, a person wearing a straw basket who fights with his left hand>Strike: If the players decide to challenge this ronin, they may discover that he is the teacher at a local dojo who claims he is there in disguise looking to hunt down the real serial killer due to him supposedly sharing the same left-handed dueling style as the school's and bringing dishonor upon the school's name. It helps that usually there's no specific outcome written out so that the players can decide for themselves how invested they are in getting the outcome they want.
>>96571234>Anyway, what do you guys recommend for a dm starting out?Not using DND.
>>96576260That sounds pretty cloe to CATS, Concept, Aim, Tone, Subject Matter. I don't use it, but I have sat down with a certain type of game in mind and regretted not checking that everyone was on the same page.
>>96575259Not that anon, but the advice is actually great, and you sound like you're just parroting what you heard some random DnD-only talking head spout on Youtube.The irony is that you're just advocating for a less interesting version of what that anon suggested: a world that doesn't exist outside the PCs and their actions, and is effectively in a state of suspended animation until they come along and hit the event flags. That works for inexperienced players, but for people who actually give a shit it feels boring and cheapens the actions of their characters. It also actually makes the emergent plot/stories feel WORSE, because the players are no longer the ones driving it. They're just bit parts in the GM's story, one which only alters course when the players force it to.
>>96571234You don't railroad. At all. You also don't sandbox. At all. Those are both retarded ways to run a game.>Total GM control where the player's choices don't matter>Total Player Control where the GM has to take it up the a- I mean make shit up on the flyBoth are things you should avoid. The order of events goes as such:>Ask your friends (players, they should be the same thing, if they aren't you've already failed) if they want to play [concept for the game you want to run]>You should include the system, tone, and initial plot hook that is open enough for the players to finish it how they choose; don't say "kill the dragon" say "deal with the dragon" is my go-to example.>If they say yes, run the game, give them the common knowledge for the setting and any restrictions on system material (Race/class/perk/feat/power/whatever) and any house/variant rules you're going to use. If they ask for more in setting stuff for their character that the character might know, then provide it so they can make a better character.>Run the game, give the players goals that are similarly open to the first in how they can be completed, and progress the game based on how the players choose to solve problems presented to them and what NPCs they interact with and how>????>Profit
>>96576412Why are you, a nogames, trying to give advice on running games?
>>96577487Sure anon, of course if you don't like DND you don't play RPGS. Obviously.
>>96571234The starting encounter of the Lost Mines of Phandelver is notoriously overtuned; it's really not your fault, it's just the module being badly written.I know, I know, you might think, "But anon, surely the official module created by the company themselves to introduce new players to the hobby would not have an extreme, obvious flaw that can easily cause TPKs in the very first encounter!" Sadly, you would be wrong.Main way to avoid this sort of thing, when working with modules, is to look at discussions/reviews of them; good ones will highlight bad encounters. Some adventures are literally unplayable as written; others are structurally shit; even some of the best WotC adventures will just randomly stick vital info at a different place than it's meant to be introduced at the table, or smear info about a key character in 4 different places in the book.
>>96577559There is a direct inverse correlation between number of posts bitching about D&D and number of games played; the more times you whine about the most popular TTRPG because you're a hipster subhuman faggot, the fewer games you play, and given your track record, well, I can safely say you play 0 games.
>>96577599This. The rewrite, Dragon of Icespire Peak, is a much better module because it not only presents a much better progression system that newbie GMs can use in their own games later, but it also isn't full of as much utter bullshit. And hey, you even get to fight a dragon at the end. Y'know, instead of halfway into the fucking module at level 3.
>>96571234I'm sorry that your introduction to things had to start with the infamously malicious lie that D&D is a great game to start with and that it's so easy to learn for new players, and that the starter set would be a good place to start.I'd recommend taking some time to read the DMG. Not necessarily for any explicit steps and guidelines for running a better game, but so you can peak under the proverbial hood and start to wrap your mind around how the game is intended to run and what you are expected to do with it. There are some handy rules and options in there, but really what you're going to have to do is feel out the game over many sessions, both figuring out how and when to best apply the rules in a way that feels right for both yourself and your players.
If you're a beginner, then don't worry too much about running a sandbox. A sandbox campaign is sort of an "endgame" for experienced DMs. If you and your players lack experience, you won't be able to run it properly, and your players won't be able to capitalize on the freedom anyways."Railroading" just means that you invalidate or undermine your players' choices. One thing worth mentioning is that the players do have an unspoken responsibility to not make obviously retarded choices; the exact definition of "obviously retarded choices" changes as they become more experienced. But even a completely linear adventure can still offer players choices:>how to approach an obstacle>how to use their abilities in combat>when to retreatLinearity is a perfectly legitimate tool for DMs, and you can add more branching paths as you gain experience.
>>96577559Sure anon, I always bitch about DND here. Occupies all my time.Of course, the post you referred to was "bitching" as well, and not a "this game is not good especially for starting out". Obviously.
