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 talk only as much as is necessary to paint the scene and hurry to prompt player action.
There’s an old bit of advice I read somewhere that the sooner you ask players, “What do you do?” the smoother your game is running.
Those really old AD&D modules with 3/4th the page taken up by boxed text? People tend to zone them out. WotC did studies on this and figured attention starts to drift after 2-3 sentences.
But it goes beyond boxed text. Any time the GM is sitting there talking, be it narration, exposition, or – worst case scenario – two NPCs having a conversation, that’s time the players have to sit there trapped in an unskippable videogame cutscene.
Read George Polti’s The 36 Dramatic Situations. It’s a list of plot elements that have a snappy title, a list of participants in the plot element, a brief discussion of how it works, and then (unfortunately dated) references to dramas that used them.
Using this when building a world, or a campaign, or a local setting, lets you quickly set up a bunch of conflicts (ideally with interlaced participants so that single NPCs (or PCs) can be in different roles in different dramatic situations. Then you just let the events flow logically, and as the dramatic situations get resolved you get a plot. PCs can interfere with these dramatic situations and thus have an impact on resulting plots even if the overall setting is far larger than they are.
For depth in world-building I use a rule I call “Y-cubed”. (I got it from somewhere else but can’t recall the source anymore.)
For every detail you make, you ask the question “Why” three times.
So a village the characters have reached stop all work every 77 days for a festival. Why? It celebrates an ascended local hero who saved the village from a magical blight. Why 77 days? It took 77 days for effort for the blight to be defeated. … And so on.
This is a rapid way to both build depth in your setting quickly, as well as inspire possible mysteries and intrigue for investigation later.
A slight modification works also for giving NPCs depth.
@Ziggurat When putting a settlement on a map that you don’t expect the party to go anywhere near soon, you only really need three pieces of info (beyond its location, anyway):
Name
Size (city/town/village)
Product (apples, silk, sheep, etc.) or service (government, knowledge, trade hub, etc.)Why a product or service? It helps establish how trade happens, gives the town a reputation for the group to hear, gives you a hook from which to improvise NPCs from there, and so on.
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.
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.
Also make maps that people in universe would use, not a god or modern satellite images. Romans used maps that showed main roads and villages, why would a random adventurer need a super detailed map with borders on it.
• I refer to this as the ‘Video Game Rule’. In the last thirty years the visual aspects of the hobby have become more important because we’re think we are ‘competing’ with video games. Once we realize we are making a different kind of experience it allows the story (that is the narrative elements) to outshine the graphics, if you will.-
Indeed, that’s a huge one.
Remember before streaming and VTT? You would do sketch on a white board and be happy. Some committed GM may have had a white board with a grid and copy the map from the scenario on it.
Nice textures are nice on video games, but not on rpg
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.
When I first started DMing as a kid, my dad told me the best thing I could do to prepare was just know the whole world. He then told me about an adventure he was running where the players, for literally no reason, started digging in the middle of a tunnel. There was a whole dungeon set up for them ready to explore, and they went 50’ into the tunnel and started digging their own tunnel.
I think better advice in that situation is to find players who want to play the game you’re running. It might be fun to make a tunnel-exploration campaign, but I’m running that dungeon over there. We’ll do the tunnel thing another time.
Also, to rephrase your dad’s advice, know enough of the world to be able to add shit where you need to. I don’t even know if the world is round, but I don’t need to. If the players are in a church, I’ll make sure to know the popular religions in case I need to roleplay as a priest.
I don’t even know if the world is round, but I don’t need to.
The players will find a way to make you need to.
No, the world is enormous and you only need to worry about a small part of it. There is literally nothing over there, and no reason you’d want to go there. The game is over here. Leaving this area is the same as leaving the game, which you are free to do.
Use every opportunity to turn planning into information gathering.
I try to use every opportunity to stop the planning “phase” of the game and go to the information gathering before continuing the planning. This can be pretty much any unknown that the characters bring up, like some if -statement in their plan, some fact they are unsure about etc.
The information gathering might be anything from a simple skill check to a full adventure and after that we go right back to the planning.
This has removed a lot of planning hours that wouldn’t have had anything to do with the situation they are going into.
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.
I start,
My most “classic tip” is never lock a clue behind a roll if they need to find the love letter hidden under the bed to find-out about the affair explaining the murder, just make sure they find-it (the failed roll can still mean they are caught searching the room)
Another of my classic one is to ask players about their character friend and foes, it helps populating a setting, you have a black smith the warrior met while serving in the army or the young ambitious political advisor the bard went in a tavern fight with and gives pretty great plot hooks So your little sister is in the school witchcraft club, and looks like they summoned something too big
For one shot, I recently experimented a lot with LARP-style black boxes in order to play a scene which occurred before the game start, as it helps giving a clear view about everyone character and their ties while keeping these scenes shorts. It’s IMO a good compromise between loosing time in playing mundane life to get a feel on the character, and jumping to the action with unclear character ties/roles or expectation about normality
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
Of the responses so far, this one brought me the most joy.
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’”
Oh, GM Fiat… I always preferred the GM Camaro, but you do you… ;-)
What’s… What’s GM camaro?
It is much faster than a GM fiat.
oh its a car joke ffs
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.
If you need to “cheat” (e.g. fudging a roll because you made your monster way too powerful) then never tell the players, it will only ruin their sense of immersion.
Try to do voices, players love them even if they’re shit and it helps distinguish the NPCs. The voices don’t have to be remotely good and you don’t need to be good at accents, just try things like “gruff voice” for the grizzled mercenary or “weirdly enthusiastic” for the mad old wizard.
I recommend players make their characters together. Fate’s rules for it are pretty good, and can be ported to many systems: https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/phase-trio . The whole “You all meet in a tavern for the first time” mode is a valid way to play, but I’ve had friends do that and then struggle with how contrived it feels to fight to the death for people they just met, or go on a whole dangerous sidequest for someone else’s hobby.
I also recommend reading other systems. Not everyone needs to know dozens of games, but if you always play d20 games spending some time in a different branch of the RPG family tree can really be eye-opening. Or if you’ve only really played really light games, looking at how something crunchier does detail can be insightful.
