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Can't Find Trees- Damn Forest. Secret of Good DM'ing?
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<blockquote data-quote="Nareau" data-source="post: 1799773" data-attributes="member: 969"><p>OK, so some of this is just restating the great advice already given:</p><p></p><p>10) Remember, the players are smarter than you. It's always better to present them with challenges that have multiple solutions than try to predict one specific outcome. Give them situations where they can come up with a solution on their own--it's almost always going to be cooler than what you had in mind. And as an aside to that, don't base your entire campaign on them following any one course of action.</p><p></p><p>11) Forget every plot you've seen on Star Trek or played in Final Fantasy. All too often new DM's try to pull a plot device from pop culture, forgetting that pop culture is incomprehensibly stupid.</p><p></p><p>12) Figure out the major story of the campaign, then break it down into workable chunks. Try writing your campaign like a TV series. Say you want the campaign to take the characters from 1st-10th level. That's about 40 sessions. A good story arc is usually about 4-6 sessions (sorta like a short TV season). Each session can be broken down into scenes; my sessions are usually about 4 or 5 scenes. Figure out more or less what's going to happen in each scene, and how they're going to tie together. All this can help keep the campaign cohesive, make writing it much easier, and keep the action flowing at a good pace.</p><p></p><p>Spider</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Nareau, post: 1799773, member: 969"] OK, so some of this is just restating the great advice already given: 10) Remember, the players are smarter than you. It's always better to present them with challenges that have multiple solutions than try to predict one specific outcome. Give them situations where they can come up with a solution on their own--it's almost always going to be cooler than what you had in mind. And as an aside to that, don't base your entire campaign on them following any one course of action. 11) Forget every plot you've seen on Star Trek or played in Final Fantasy. All too often new DM's try to pull a plot device from pop culture, forgetting that pop culture is incomprehensibly stupid. 12) Figure out the major story of the campaign, then break it down into workable chunks. Try writing your campaign like a TV series. Say you want the campaign to take the characters from 1st-10th level. That's about 40 sessions. A good story arc is usually about 4-6 sessions (sorta like a short TV season). Each session can be broken down into scenes; my sessions are usually about 4 or 5 scenes. Figure out more or less what's going to happen in each scene, and how they're going to tie together. All this can help keep the campaign cohesive, make writing it much easier, and keep the action flowing at a good pace. Spider [/QUOTE]
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