Most of the time these mistakes are small. They won't break the game or send your group running for the hills. But everyone wants their first time to go well, and the more mistakes you can avoid the better it will be for everybody.
1. Read, Read, Read
It happens to every GM. At some point, you forget a monster rule that totally messes up a fight, or you misunderstand part of the adventure module you are running and cause problems for yourself down the line, or at the very least you forget a rule and have to stop the game and go flipping through a bunch of books trying to find it.
This may seem obvious, but the hands-down best way you can prepare for your first stint as a GM is to read all the material cover-to-cover beforehand. Read the main rulebooks for the system you are using. If you are running a pre-made adventure, read the module all the way through. Before a fight, read the monster stat blocks to make sure you understand everything it can do. Even if you've read the rulebooks before, back when you were a player, read them again. You pick up on different things when you are reading them to learn how to play than when you are reading them to learn how to GM. You might even find that your regular GM has been misinterpreting a crucial rule!
Not only is this great preparation work, but it is also a good way to come up with new ideas. You might come across a set of rules that doesn't get used much in your group and decide to build an encounter around it. When I was reading through the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide while preparing for my first time as a GM, I got really inspired by the section on fire and heat hazards and decided to add a house fire into the scenario. The result was an exciting non-combat encounter that gave a new player an opportunity to feel like a hero.
2. Keep Things Simple
I don't mean keep the story simple, I mean keep the rules simple. Stick to the core rules until you're comfortable enough GMing with them to move on to the stuff they add in later books. If you play Pathfinder, I suggest telling your players that you will only be allowing races, classes, feats, and spells found in the Core Rulebook. Later on, you can start adding in stuff from the Advanced Player's Guide, Ultimate Campaign, Mythic Adventures, or whatever, but for now keep it simple. I know this may sound strange coming from someone who is basically a purveyor of house rules and homebrew content, but just stick to the core books for now.
I tried to do this my first time, but I failed. I told my players I was only accepting races and classes from the Player's Handbook. Pretty soon I had a 12 year old druid boy with an Eberron dragon mark riding his wolf around, and a grey elf who was some sort of homebrew witch class throwing overpowered evil eyes at everyone. Be firm! Be firmer than I was! You never want to be in a position where you don't fully understand what the player characters are capable of.
3. Give the Characters Agency
Part of the GM's job is crafting a story, but it is important to remember that the players are the main characters of that story. As the main characters, they have to have agency - they have to be able to make choices and go where they want to go and do what they want to do. A story where the main characters don't have any agency is bad; a game where the main characters don't have any agency is even worse. If you treat you gaming group as the audience for your totally awesome story, they probably aren't going to like it very much.
RPGs are a collaborative effort between the GM and the players. The GM works to create a story that the players will want to be a part of. Their characters, in turn, drive the story to its conclusion. You are not a storyteller, you are a story facilitator.
Over-planning is an easy way to take away the characters' agency. It might be that you've created so much cool content that you will not rest until they've seen it all. Don't be a tour guide - let the players choose where they want to go and what they want to see. If there is something that they end up skipping over, you can always recycle it for a later session.
4. Don't Just Wing It
RPGs like D&D and Pathfinder give GMs a lot of helpful tables for generating random encounters, random characters, random dungeon rooms, random treasure, and even random tavern names! One could almost think that you could create a whole adventure on the fly just by rolling on random tables. Don't! Those tables are there to help GMs do prep-work before the game. Players are not dazzled by the experience of watching their GM roll dice and flip through books.
As I've been saying, a good RPG session is like a story. Would you enjoy a story about a group of adventurers opening doors to a series of random rooms and fighting a series of random monsters? Stories need a sense of direction, a sense that they are going somewhere. They need set-ups and pay-offs. It is very hard to create a satisfying story purely by improvising it. Take the show Lost. When Lost first came out, people were really excited about it - there was so much mystery, so much we didn't know, and the show creators had promised that they had it all planned out. But, as rapidly became apparent, the show creators had no idea how all their shit was supposed to fit together, they were making it all up as they went along, and most of the mysteries would remained unsolved (I'm looking at you, giant bird that says Hurley's name). People can tell when a story isn't really a story, and it makes for an unsatisfying experience.
Later, when you've got more experience under your belt, you might find yourself doing less and less prep-work on paper and more of it in your head. Then you might feel safe throwing in some improvisation, or even improvising entire game sessions. Until then, just do the prep work! Or, even easier, run a pre-made adventure!
5. Be Confident
Or at least pretend to be confident. You are the GM and your word is law. You are in charge of the underlying fundamentals of the characters' world. You can't be wishy-washy here. You can't afford to be. Players can sense weakness, and they will exploit it - often without even realizing it.
Of course, it helps if your confidence is backed up by knowledge. If you did the readings, you should know most of the rules you'll need, and for the ones you don't know off the top of your head you'll know where to look them up quickly. Don't ask the players to resolve a rules issue - you have the authority, not them. It might be tempting, if there is a more experienced GM in the party, to rely on them for help, but that will only encourage the other players to look to them instead of to you.
When a player asks about something you didn't prepare for (like the name of the barkeep), don't hem and haw or say you don't know - make something up and stick with it. "Uh, Crowbar. His name is Crowbar. It's a nickname, actually, but he won't say where he got it."
If you really need some time to think, just roll some dice and pretend to consult your notes. That's half the reason the GM screen is there in the first place!
-your firm d20 despot
No comments:
Post a Comment