Professor Idle said:
I'm playing a Dungeons & Dragons game with my friends online at the moment, and it inspired me to host my own D&D game in the real touchy-feely world!
I've noted a few problems the current Dungeon Master seems to have when creating his world of make-believe, and it got me thinking. Any really obvious traps new Dungeon Masters fall into? Any life-saving advice that totally sparked off your saga as a Dungeon Master?
Even if you have nothing to add, feel free to mention any really sucky stuff that happened to you while playing D&D. It might teach me something and it should provide me with a laugh or two at any rate.
I'll give you a few bits of advice, some of it seemingly contradictory from a very experienced GM (me).
1. Above and beyond everything else remember people are there because they want to play, they aren't going to jump on you for making mistakes or not being the universe's best, most flawless, GM, so relax. Confidence comes with time.
2. Come up with a game theme before the game begins, in terms of the general style of game you want to run, and communicate this to the players. One mistake a lot of GMs make (which is something others encourage people to make) is setting no real guides during character creation. This means you might wind up with a bunch of outright contradictory character types that play tug of war with each other and perhaps even your own campaign concept. Diverse characters and skill sets DO complement each other but only with some forethought. It's very easy to say wind up with a game where you have some "kill everything" battle rager character whose idea of social graces is to not blow his nose on his sleeve in front of a dignitary, and someone else who is a complete diplomat with no combat skills at all. While such a team might be amusing in a novel, in an actual game you can easily wind up with a situation where one or the other's player gets bored and winds up doing something else while the game focuses on a style of game for one that the other cannot participate in much at all. What's more non-combat characters rapidly wind up becoming baggage when you get down to the nitty gritty of the heroic fantasy stuff, and it can be annoying for a GM to literally be put into a position of somewhat arbitrarily killing someomes "deep RP character" because they are just not suited for the inevitable rigors
of dungeon crawling. Some players will argue "well I RP, and am based around this awesome personality so I should be immune" and a few GMs get behind that but it ultimately winds up castrating the game.
When your developing characters I recommend getting everyone together in one room, as opposed to doing them one at a time, or having people make characters on their own. Tell the players what you have in mind for a game theme, whether it's at it's center going to be Viking like, based around using one village or city as a headquarters, roving from place to place, or whatever else. Then let everyone come up with their characters, and you as GM can make suggestions and steer things in directions that will create a party that will be to the likings of the players, but also be able to co-exist peacefully in of itself, and will be able to survive in the environments your setting up.
When it comes to making characters I've gradually arrived at a sort of "F@ck it" conclusion, and generally tend to let the players create what they want without worrying too much about die rolls for attributes and stuff. While there CAN be some fun in random rolls for attributes and such it leads to a lot of problems. For one there is no way to guarantee a functional party, it's very possible in many systems that nobody will even qualify for all the basic adventuring skills a party needs, with say nobody rolling high enough in wisdom to be a healer, or high enough in dex to be a thief. What's more random roll systems can lead to player dis-satisfaction when say someone who wants to play a fighter for example winds up rolling a high intelligence and being stuck as an apprentice mage. For every story about people coming to love their unexpectedly awesome random characters, there are probably ten that end differently. This is why I tend to favor games that have a "point buy" system which I can adjust for my game's power level, and also why so many PnP RPGs are moving in similar directions. When it comes to games that are based around random mechanics I typically will let players set their own attributes and negotiate with them based on the power level of the campaign. I have never really run into a player who say in a old school D&D game will hear this and immediately set all attributes at 18 or anything like that, and of course as GM I'm not going to approve that anyway.
At the end of the day ideally each player should be happy with their character and have something they want to play, the GM should be happy with the characters fitting into his campaign theme, and ideally all of the characters should be able to co-exist and cooperate within the plot. As fun as it might be in a novel or whatever to have infighting, I as GM tend to disallow PCs with some "deep dark secret" that nobody else in the party could possibly know, characters defined as "sociopaths", and shit magnets (oftentimes linked to a secret) that pretty much mandate I throw a constant stream of character oriented bad guys at the party and inconvenience everyone in ways I wouldn't do otherwise specifically for that one PC. One of the quickest ways to drive a wedge in a party I've found is that if everyone seems to spend all their time protecting another PC against backround-inspired weirdos rather than being able to focus on their own stuff. Again, what works in a fantasy novel, does not always work in a PnP RPG.
3. While some GMs will thrive off of ad libbing or "letting the party make their own adventures" that fails as much as it succeeds. In part because a lot of players are going to show up and expect some adventure or plot to be presented and a goal to generally work towards. At least to begin with being a GM takes a lot of work, and planning, and you can never expect the players to take the brunt of the campaign's direction and creativity, though that might at some point happen.
While an Anathema to some, if your interested in GMing, especially for the first time, I actually recommend checking out and using a few adventure modules, of which there are literally thousands out there. Heck there are entire sites full of out of print PDF copies of old adventures, and PnP sites where GMs have been known to put up their own tested creations. Running something like say the ancient "Keep On The Borderlands" or "Isle Of Dread" or perhaps for the more ambitious the truly classic "Temple Of Elemental Evil" or "Night Below". Simply reading modules for ideas and advice isn't the same as actually running them and seeing how the encounters play out, especially in the long "campaign length" ones which escalate the encounters along with carefully programmed PC growth. Something like TOEE has been a GM boot camp for generations of D&D players nowadays, in part because it works, you can learn a LOT from running that where it starts out very easy for both players and GMs but gradually becomes more complex on both ends until the level 15 finale.
4. Be consistent, remember that part of what makes this a "game" as opposed to a collaborative creative writing exercise are the game rules. Feel free to change and modify the rules and make what judgement calls you will (confidence sells it, but when you do stick to your own rulings and be fair about it. If you wind up waffling back and forth over the same kinds of situations constantly that's when your going to run into problems and things will degenerate into a mess of rules lawyering.
Also in terms of being fair, remember also that you need to be fair to the players as well. Case in point, let's say a player comes up with a combination of abilities that is constantly allowing him to grandstand and make a mess out of the campaign to the point where it's ruining game flow and also bugging the other players. For example perhaps some kind of swashbuckler bard build that has him parrying and counter attacking every melee battle to death with minimal risk, which he starts using to pick unlikely and unreasonable fights. What's more the party fighter, who is supposed to be the party's primary melee muscle (with the bard as his backup, given the bard does other things as well) has largely become irrelevant, especially considering the galling point that all he does is fight melee and the Bard could probably trounce him in a straight fight as well as having tons of other skills aside. As a GM you probably want to step in here, but in doing so you don't just want to strip the bard of all of his abilities or make him ineffective, or punish the player for simply using what he had up until that point. If you say reduce the Bard's melee abilities, you should not do so right before putting him in a death match against the king's champion, a guy he never would have challenged if his fighting ability was so much less, or have a bunch of previously trounced opponents show up to curb stomp him now that he can't fight back as well. In extreme cases it's probably best to allow someone to re-build a character, or simply replace the character in mid-game (say the original bard decides to elope with the princess, where a new character is then introduced to the party). The key point here is that as a GM you need to be careful to avoid being vengeful in your rulings and their results even when something annoys you.
5. "It's that unfinished part of the dungeon we feel strangely compelled to avoid"... while rare, sometimes as a GM it's best to do the unheard of, and just explain outside of game why someone can't do something. If say your running an adventure of your own creation and the party is blowing through content much faster than you intended and winds up getting beyond anything you intended for that session... well sometimes it's better to just explain that, than it is to make mistakes in trying to ad-lib it's continuation without planning ahead.
As a GM even when creating my own stuff, I like to have a few modules I'm familiar with handy just in case things go wrong. Sometimes a needed adventure hook doesn't work out quite as planned (the hump backed old man crawls up to the party's table in a bar and immediately falls dead with a treasure map in his hand, and the party ignores it, or charitably has the local temple collect the body and covers his raise dead fees), or the party finishes what I had ready for that session (perhaps cleverly bypassing some stuff) early, it's nice to have something to pad things out while I catch up.
The point is that out of game communication with the players, and pointing out your only human (even if you do it a lot) tends to work out better than trying to play super-GM and imitate the other GMs you "hear about" online and such and cover everything smoothly is in many cases the better option. Many GMs (including me) have GMed themselves into some awkward corners trying to compensate for things they weren't ready for.
6. Once you become more experienced and comfortable that's when you can start doing things like people using characters created for other campaigns, however in doing so it's important to both make especially careful note of what these characters can do and what they are about, and understand that when you are doing something like this your also taking on a bit of extra baggage. However in most cases simply by bringing an old character to a new GM the player is expecting to make changes and work with the new GM. In such cases however if such a character winds up not working out, it's always wise to give them a respectful departure from the game.
The important bit, which also goes for advice on character generation for your own campaign, is that above and beyond the numbers (you can always miss things, especially when it comes to combinations of abilities) is to ask flat out how
a character plays, especially in combat and what their basic strategy and mechanics wind up being like. This is how you avoid problems like the Swashbuckler bard example I mentioned above, and avoid "surprises" like someone say having an apparently crappy armor class, but actually being built around using highly enhanced block/trap actions from the combat and tactics books to override aspects of the usual combat system and outright deflect/parry attacks by forcing enemies into a contest of Dex with a character with maximum Dex and additional skill based modifiers as well (the GM say missing that a +4 on parries does not simply mean 4 extra points of AC). When asked directly most players are honest, and really they can't hide something like this, if someone lies to you, you can always flat out say "it will work as previously discussed".
