1,000 GMing Tips

[Janx]

10) Almost never try to capture the party, and certainly NEVER write "the party will be captured" on your adventure notes

This advice has exceptions, but an inexperienced GM should follow it. You might break this rule if you are "saving" the party from a TPK or something. Getting arrested (a form of capture) might be a logical outcome of doing crime. But otherwise, scripting in a party capture attempt is fraught with peril for the GM.

At the extreme end, writing "the party will be captured" is a form of railroading. It sets the GM's mind into throwing ever increasing forces at the party to override their desire to be free. It gets ridiculous quickly as the GM struggles to complete the directive on the piece of paper he wrote.

Now let's look at the more practical side of this advice. You have a reason that make sense for somebody to want to capture the party (maybe they committed a crime).

How are you going to do it? Send twice as many cops as their are PCs?

Now you have dead cops, and a reason to escalate.

How you escalate quickly becomes an arms race as you try to counter their powers, some of those attempts become dubiously justified of GM abuse of power and knowledge (in that you know more than the NPCs in charge should about what the PCs weaknesses and abilities are).

Nextly, what happens when you are successful? The party is in handcuffs and off to jail.

Now you need to stop the game for the night, and design a jail that has the potential for escape. Because otherwise, you just stopped the party from doing anything, because they are in jail in an escape proof system.

There's extra fallout from this. A smart warden will strip the PCs down to their undies or worse. Now the PCs are emasculated.

Which leads to prison sexual assaults and such. Guess how many women in the US already face such things. 1/5. I hope you don't have any women in your group, or you've just made them VERY uncomfortable.

The short of it is, if you actually capture and imprison the PCs, that's not actually a good thing in many cases. So if you're not prepared for it, aware of the pitfalls, etc, it is worth avoiding until you are.

And that can mean realizing that capturing the party leads to a different set of encounters/adventure where you've set up opportunities for escape, etc. Where the jailors are not perfect. Because perfect imprisonment is pretty much a game breaker.

 

[Janx]

11) Don't save your best, coolest ideas for 3 years from now in the campaign

Statiscally gaming groups do not survive more than a year without campaign ending or players dropping out. The result is, you can't Strazynski your way through 5 years of Babylon 5 campaign arc and expect to not get canceled.

So shorten up your epic quests and get to the good stuff. Particularly because making me slog through a year of grinding before the epic boss battle may have players dropping out of your boring campaign in the 3rd month.

 

[innerdude]

12) NPCs and locations deserve a name. And maybe a trait or two.

It's easy as a GM to get caught saying stuff like, "You stop at random Tavern on the Road #12, and talk to Nebulous Barkeeper #37."

Naming people and places makes the world more real, and often inspires players to interact a bit more.

If you're not good at coming up with names on the fly, build a Random Table of Naming Taverns and NPCs, or check out the AEG Ultimate Toolbox.

 

[Celebrim]

13) There is almost a bit of advice that is always applicable. Don't let yourself get hidebound to solving every problem in the same way. GMing is as much an art as a science.

 

[Celebrim]

14) It is better to be over prepared than underprepared. But it is impossible to be completely prepared, so you should also be prepared to improvise.

 

[Janx]

15) If your players are asking odd questions, or trying to do something that doesn't make sense to you, it is because there's a misunderstanding. Stop and figure out the mismatch of information

The classic Gazebo joke comes to mind where the GM says the party comes to a field and see a Gazebo. Because the players don't know what a Gazebo is (it's a building), they think it is a creature and ask a bizarre set of questions (to a GM who knows it is a building and doesn't know they players think it is an animal).

For the joke, it's funny when they ask if it sees them, and so on.

For actual players, this is frustrating as their picture of what's happening does not match the GM's and they can't get a straight answer. So the sooner you realize that somebody is confused, the sooner you can get back to useful gaming, rather than looking stupid because of miscommunication.

 

[innerdude]

16) As much as is possible / reasonable, do session post-mortems with your players.

Ask them how you're doing --- are they having fun? Are they getting what they want out of it? Was there a particular ruling you handled really well, or was there something they felt you could have handled better?

If both you and the players can do this from a place of honest desire to make your gaming better all around, you'll get fun, practical, constructive advice (and many times praise) on what you're doing.

 

[innerdude]

17) Take GM-ing advice with a grain of salt.

Every gaming group is different. What works wonders for one GM may fall flat for your group. That said, there's a number of general principles, guidelines, and techniques that are nearly universal. Trust your instincts as to what will work and what won't, for you know your group better than anyone.**

**Unless of course your instincts seem to be failing you, in which case refer to item 16).

 

[Rhenny]

18) Always remember that variety is the spice of life.

Don't get stuck using the same type of encounters and don't get married to combat encounters of any specific difficulty level. Use interesting non-combat encounters, exploration events, social interactions, strange combat situations, combat encounters of varying difficulty, and let players experience different locations/atomospheres (dungeon crawl, tomb raiding, swamp trek, forest adventure, mountain climbing, desert, frozen landscapes, towns, cities with different rules or customs, etc.).

 

[Cristian Andreu]

19) Instead of puzzles with specific solutions, put the PCs in challenging situations with multiple elements they can toy around with and watch how they end up creating a puzzle themselves.