Looking for stuff that's changed the way you have GMed. Here's a few that really changed how I GM.1. Stop describing the player's actions. Instead of "how do you want to do this" only on specific moments, let the players always describe how they do the thing they do. Let success equal narrative control for players.2. Encourage in-character. Everything is in character. Planning is in character. What is spoken at the table is spoken in character. People go by their characters names. This absolutely changed my tables.3. Descriptions are brief. After describing the general area, you can use three adjectives and the adjectives should call upon at least two different senses, if possible. "Damp, echoing, musty" "Bright, smooth, metallic". For every little site I write down, I include only a few evocative adjectives. You can build on that.4. Player action > rolling dice. We roll to much. Rolling dice is fun, but let the players be clever.5. Tension comes from cost and pressure. You can make encounters infinitely more interesting if you add two compelling choices but the players cannot achieve both outcomes (unless they can, of course). Build anticipation. Don't show everything at once.6. Write problems but not solutions. Prep encounters but not plots. That's what your players do.7. Compelling puzzles/mysteries come with neat tricks: show the lock before the key, have many names for the same thing, every clue points to a lead, clues are easy to discover but piecing them together is where it gets hard, use more clues than you think you need.Give me your best.
>>97552491Always Keep Things Interesting!Remember that at the end of the day, everyone’s here to have fun and hangout, so you should make sure that whatever you are doing in and with the game, it’s in the service of making the game more interesting and engaging. Even something as simple as a shopping session, where the PCs are just wandering around town spending their money on gear and pawning off crap they took off dead adversaries, find a way to make it interesting. And that also goes for adding optional or homebrew mechanics, is its inclusion going to innately create more interesting situations? Or are you expressly planning on doing things with that mechanic to create interesting situations? If not, then it’s just mechanic bloat and is going to only add tedium to the game.You should never let the game get boring (for the players or you), and if it’s starting to slow down, find a way to spice it up.Now fun fact: TTRPGS aren’t just communal storytelling, it’s also a game. Which does give you some leeway. Not everything has to be narratively interesting, you can also introduce obstacles or problems that the players need to work out solutions to (a puzzle that doesn’t present as a puzzle). They may not make for good television, but it could make for good gameplay.
>>97552491>"Genuinely Good GM Advice">advice is only applicable to collaborative storytelling systems and improv theater activities
Too much.I'll have to internalise each of these tips one at a time.
>>97552665Yeah, he said GM.
Include ticking clocks. If the PCs waste time or make too much noise, bad shit happens. Even better if the ticking clock is something you can put on the table so everyone can see it tick down. I use a stack of poker chips.Don't run battle on featureless plains. Add cover, changes in elevation, dangerous hazards, things that can be broken, and things that can catch fire.Make your monsters smart. Play to their strengths, like goblins striking from ambush, or kobolds using traps. If they're losing, they run away. If there's noise coming from the next room, they investigate.
>>97552491To springboard off of #6, write down both the things that happened in the session and your GM idea of the natural consequences. If a party member wins a highly publicized contest, figure out if that means a person will like them more or less and if that will push them to some new course of action. This also serves as an easy reference to recap the game if you have a long time between sessions and/or you or your players are too retarded to remember smaller details.
>>97552966GM = unbiased rules arbiter and general game management
If the players are being indecisive, pounce on the slightly dominant strain of their discussion. "It sounds like Henry and Camilla want to sneak into the library's basement. Is anyone strongly against that?" Now the ditherers are put on the spot and will have to exert more effort to slow things down. Customize adventure hooks to the party's abilities and backstories and use your knowledge of the players themselves. EG if a player is a new father he'll probably have his character to go to help if there's a rumor of an orphanage being in danger. That said, following hooks is part of the basic social contract of gaming. We're all busy people here and you shouldn't play DnD if you don't want to bash monsters with your friends or play CoC if you don't want to pursue eldritch mysteries. If players are running in the opposite direction from them it probably means they're checked out and you should think about wrapping things up. If someone makes an inappropriate joke, laughing at it or acting freaked out will encourage more such behavior. What you should do is play dumb and try to get them to explain the joke(which always makes jokes less funny). If they backtrack and want to get back to the game, let them off the hook. Otherwise you can act vaguely weirded out. "So the joke was about molesting the goblins? Oookay. Anyways..."Don't reschedule. This punishes the people who didn't bail and you need the regular game night fixed in peoples' brains so it becomes a habit. Only three players are coming? Just do a side-story or something. One to two players, play a card game or put on a movie. Have some kind of fun finale and while the game is still exciting instead of letting it drag on. If you time it out right everyone will be jazzed for the next campaign.
>>97552491The only advice you will ever need.
Well I could tell you, or I can present it in song! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krxU5Y9lCS8 you are under no obligation to give players what they want, but you should always try to give them what they need.
>>97553136No.There is nothing fun about that. The GM should be having more fun than the players.
Understand the three pillars of TTrpg1: exploration 2: combat3: role playingNot every player (or GM) likes all three, having a session zero can really make sure everyone is playing the same game.
>>97555602roleplaying is what you do while exploring and battling things. It's kind of weird that it is also its own pillar. Unless you wanted to type "social interactions" or sumsuch and got really confused.
>>97552582This is non-advice dressed up as advice. Like "Keep the game fun!", "make sure the characters have an interesting thing to do!", "Remember if you are having fun you are doing it right!", "make sure people aren't bored!"Here's tangible advice: it's not your job to play the game for your characters and it's not your job to create their fun. If players are stalling, the best way to move things forward is to introduce a new complication or conflict. If players feel aimless, ask prompting questions: "What is X trying to achieve in this moment? What leads does X feel like they should explore?" Force the players into decision making more to elicit actual goal-directed play.>TTRPGS aren’t just communal storytelling, it’s also a game.Ice cream sundaes aren't just dessert, they are ice cream with toppings on them. Your advice to introduce an obstacle or problem is good advice, though.
>>97552966So, what does the "G" stand for?
>>97552665Wrong. Stories emerge out of immersive and intentional roleplaying. Pre-writing stories is railroading nonsense. Some amount of improv is mandatory, but roleplaying isn't acting. If you don't know the distinction, you probably should try a different hobby.>>97553086This is good advice. I'll add one: battlemaps, minis, projected terrain and other items like this don't reinforce immersion or roleplay. They rob it. If you must, use pictures to engage imagination. Use scratch pads if placement is critical. However, the best combat is in the shared theater of the mind. This also means allowing characters the benefit of the doubt to avoid "mother may I" loops.
>>97553136To be fully impartial is impossible, but noble. >>97553131I like this a lot. This encourages player engagement in the setting. I'll add one on: have your players tell you what they plan to do the following session. This assists massively with prep.>>97554482Excellent advice.>>97554700>>97554515Witty and true.>>97555602The third pillar should be "social interaction with the world". Roleplaying should be happening in every pillar. I'll go a step further, you *must* have all three, or you aren't really experiencing the hobby to its fullest.
He was always right. Rest in Peace you degenerate weirdo.
>>97555602>>97555640>>97555753I feel like framing the one of the pillars as "combat" is similarly reductive. I think it should be something along the lines of "conflict." Not every game must have big fights.
>>97553136>>97555731It stands for "gay," reflecting the orientation of those inevitable theater majors who insist on "GM" over the correct "DM" or pretentious but acceptable "referee."
>>97556373I don't play D&D so why would I call my GM a dungeon master.
>>97554482>If the players are being indecisive, pounce on the slightly dominant strain of their discussion. "It sounds like Henry and Camilla want to sneak into the library's basement. Is anyone strongly against that?" Now the ditherers are put on the spot and will have to exert more effort to slow things down.Or you could just flip the 15 second hourglass and move on with what you want to do.In combat, just make them lose their turns, openly declaring "X froze for the duration, too shocked to react"
>>975524911) One-page cheat-sheet: make sure there is at least one of those on the table, containing all the useful and important stuff. Make sure it is easy to eyeball.2) Three sentence rule: always describe things in no more than three sentences. Work on it, until it's natural3) Five sentence rule: always make sure you can boil down your entire scenario into just five sentences. If it makes sense - great, run it. If it doesn't or you can't reduce it - work on it.4) Scenes, not plot: never write an actual scenario. Just highlight the events that you want to happen today. Never make more than five of those per session5) Keep things moving: if players stall or are indecisive, throw events at them because of that. There is nothing worse than losing momentum.
The hardest-won thing I've learned during the course of my own play, and probably the thing that has saved me the most grief over the course of the decades I've been running games, is: world-building is for you.The players only care about what happens on the table. They've got their own goals to chase and the other party-members to bounce off of. 90% of their world is contained in those things. They might really enjoy that you set up a whole speculative-fiction ecosystem, or that each of the rivers in this country have such long names because they're given an extra syllable each time a new king comes to power, or that your world has two suns and six seasons, but it will never be commensurate with how much time you spent putting that together. If you prep things for your players--outside of the general, barebones stuff required to actually run a functional game--it will never be "worth it." They will never appreciate it as much as you'd like. And when you expect them to do "A" and they choose "B" (which happens shockingly often no matter how long you've GM'd), you'll be disappointed, because you put so much effort into "A", and you really wanted them to see "A", and now they won't. And you might even be tempted to flex your GM muscles a little bit to get "A" to happen anyway, at which point you've robbed yourself of the best thing about having other people at the table: the chance to be surprised.After you've put together what you need for the next session, you are "done." Everything you do after that, do it for you, and do it without any expectations. Anything else just saps the fun out of the hobby.
>>97556995>Made it five points, in three sentences eachWell, at least we know this guy is serious about this stuffBut jokes aside, #4 is pretty much one of the most important things to learn as a GM and solution to the endless "how much do I need to prep", along with the idiotic sentiment of "no plan survives contact with players"
>>97556995These are excellent points.Here's a controversial one: Success and Failure are narrative control. Unless they are in doubt, give up the reins to players. Let them describe things about the world around them and their interactions. Encourage players to freely engage with their roleplay rather than call-and-response "I try X" "GM narrates what *actually* happens" unless there's a failure.
Players need information. For making complex decisions, they need a lot of information. You know it's wrong to loredump them for two hours, so if you want them to make complicated decisions, that has to happen in a long campaign where they amass that information over multiple sessions. This seems trivial, but every time your players fail to make a decision (that is, fail to play the game), this is why. Every game should start simple.I don't think "simulationism" is the right word for it, but preparing worlds where things influence other things in a predictable way and in which most of the players' preconceptions of what life is like hold lets the players have more information from the get-go. It helps if the rules work in a predictable manner. Rule complexity, in my experience, doesn't matter.
>>97561782I agree with some of what you are saying here, but I'd like to offer a different situation here. And, like >>97555990 mentioned, Shonner/Runeslinger/and a really REALLY good GM I played with back in the early 2000's really lead me on this: I think players fail to roleplay because of how they are *taught* to roleplay.Think about it, what's many folk's introduction to roleplaying? Perhaps its a preplanned module with a specific solution. Players are taught "to get the information you want, you need to ask the right questions". Players are taught that narrative control exists with the GM and GM alone. If you don't believe me, remember how many people thought Mercer popularizing "how do you want to do this?" became a "homebrew rule" for so many people? My ENTIRE session is "how do you want to do this". Players have much more freedom to describe what they know, or want to do, than what is conventionally understood. If they don't know it, they don't know it. If they do know it? Add to the fiction. Maybe what you know doesn't comport with my worldbuilding? There's a safe way to deal with this: knowledge is imperfect. Don't ask questions, tell me what you try to do. If it's not likely to succeed under normal circumstances, I'll tell you what you should know (how likely are you to succeed) and, generally, what might be rolled (you can pick the approach).The secret to getting players to do this is basically to force them to roleplay. When they ask a question, don't answer it outright. Ask them back "what are you trying to do?" and when they start meta-narrating it, encourage them by saying something like "no, tell me what Character is trying to do, roleplay it out", rather than asking "Mother may I" style questions.
>>97561672I consider this to be the default (this is how RPG operate in my country for at least 20 years now, once the old guard thankfully retired with their bullshit).What remains still controversial is that randomness of rolls, along with failure, isn't a problem nor it derails the game. If you have your game written as scene concepts and only a small handful of those, you can't get cockblocked with someone failing. It's just cascades down on how those scenes play out, but they still can happen, with consequences.Too many people design their games to either be "win or lose", where failure means you can't progress (looking at you, Chaosium and your terrible tips along with modules) or they do this retarded "fail forward", where you still follow linear path and still can get cockblocked by your own inflexible, linear game.tl;dr scenes, not script
>>97561867This advice is peak
>>97552491My top for the day is this: parsimony. For any new scene or idea, ask yourself "could this be someone we already know?" Could the investigative lead head back to someone established? Could the black market item be in the hands of someone from a previous session or a PC background? Could I do this encounter idea with a monster I've used before? For locations too: could we revisit a previous locale to do this?Consequences require a past that comes back. Players can act more confidently and immersively with knowledge. As you play on, giving players a second bite at the cherry becomes valuable. Note that you shouldn't be completely stingy with new content. My rule is 50% with NPCs and 30% with monsters or locations. I use a die roll on my prep to try and stay honest on it.
>>97562686Similarly, change the world (even lower case W) based upon the choices and actions of the players. It rewards investment
>>97555753>have your players tell you what they plan to do the following sessionThis is one of My favourites. Unfortunately My players are dead fucking silent everytime I've ever asked, leading Me to write stuff and present it only for them to ignore it. But that was all quite a few years ago and we haven't played much since.
You roll the dice when there's a consequence, not when something is hard. That way you:1. Think about challenges in a way that won't block things if they fail, you start knowing what they're risking.2. You avoid dumb meaningless rolls that turn things into slogs.3. Characters feel capable because they can do their thing consistently in low stress scenarios.
>>97558619>picrelThese players are faggots and the GM should execute them via gunshot
>>97561867One I say a lot when playing with new players>That sounds great, what does your character do to achieve that? What are we seeing?
1. The attached image2. The GM sections from the Dungeon World book
>>97553086>Even better if the ticking clock is something you can put on the table so everyone can see it tick down.This shit is gay and retarded and usually forced as fuck. The characters should feel a sense of urgency from the plot in general, i.e. catch the killer before he can strike again, defeat the cult before they can complete their ritual, etc. but some fake-ass timer is retarded.
>>97561867>The only game in existence is DnD and the only way to get into the hobby is via modulesFound your "problems"Pro tip: you are bitching about wrong things for the wrong reasons.And average player is introduced to the hobby via vidya. Which in turn imposes on them glass ceilings and "scripting" problems. As in - passively waiting for things to happen on their own, the "now script will activate" issue.>tell me what you try to doThis is easily the most horrible advice possible, leading to yet another awful player behaviour: instead of DOING things they are TRYING to do things.This cockblocks any actual action, removes confidence and effectively teaches people to be indevisive as the default state of playing.>The secret to getting players to do this is basically to force them to roleplayIt's funny that you spend so much time writing about roleplaying without defining what it even is or means. Of course, you will now tell "it's obvious".Effectively, you sound like the type of fake grog who played some in high school during early 00s, never touched the hobby again, but feel confident enough anyway to give advice.Well: your advice is ass, and your reasoning is rooted in a make-believe
