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
@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.
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.
Let them look cool.
Too much time is spent working around the players’ abilities to make a fight challenging. Some fights should look hard but have a player ability break them. Let them use the powers they earned.
This slightly ties to the idea that the game is not the players against the DM, it is the players against the world, while the DM narrates.
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.
