DMing advice
So, I got bored and wrote an article on DMing. I would love some suggestions, comments, or any interaction really
Running a Great Game
DMing is not difficult – anyone can grab the core rules, flip to some monsters in random and be a DM to the other players. Being a great DM, running games that will be remembered and cherished and enjoyed, is of course much more difficult. There is no single answer on how to accomplish this, but here are my thoughts on the subject.
A great game is composed out of great sessions. Each session is several hours long, and is supposed to be
fun or all players (that includes the DM), that what's makes it great. It is the DM that directs the session, and you should plan it accordingly. That's right, you should plan not just the
adventure, you should plan every
session. Try to make each one a complete story, with the plot structure, accessories, ambient music or NPC acting to elicit the desired effects. Design each session to provide an emotional rollercoaster for your players – a rollercoaster sometimes speeds crazily in mind-boggling heights and turns, but sometimes all but stops or builds up speed towards a looming turn – and so must your session provide a good, varied, emotional ride.
Different players enjoy different things, as do DMs. If your players want to play a high-octane action-packed game and you plan for a romantic comedy, you may be in for a surprise. Talk to the players before and after sessions (not just before the campaign) to try to get what they want, what they like, and what they dislike. If you feel it would be useful, there are those that categorize players into different groups of needs (Gamers, Simulationists, Drama Queens, and so on) – you can google it or buy a book like
Robin's Laws of Good Dming to help you understand your players' needs. Fit the plots and adventures to this, and try to include elements that all players will enjoy. If the differences are too great consider breaking the group, you can't have everything. I'm always puzzled by players or DMs playing games they don't enjoy.
A d20 adventure uses the d20 rules, and with that comes the excellent CR and EL system. Use it. EL allows you to measure the depletion of the character's resources. Keep it in mind as you plan the adventure and session. An encounter that would be a walkoever for a fresh party can provide a real danger for an exhausted one, and a tough encounter for a fresh one could very well end in a total party kill (TPK) after they have been through some others. Provide safe places for the characters to heal and rest, to resplendish their resources. The hard part is to fit this together with the plot flow. I suggest you first figure out the plot, then assign ELs and arrange resting points so that together each day will be challenging, and finally assign CRs and build NPCs according to the EL.
Finally, an adventure spans several sessions, and a campaign several adventures. It helps to keep a blurry idea of the campaign's main plot line in mind, and even that of a few future adventures. You can then sprinkle hints and foreshadow them in the current one. Sprinkle some red herrings too, it's always fun to see the player's stumble around aimlessly following one and their fears often give rise to your greatest ideas. Don't let them fumble in the dark too much, however – keep a tight squeeze on your current plot structure, and use the wild goose chases as diversions, interludes, comic relief, or other elements
within the overall structure. Above all,the players will invariably make a mess of your long-term plans (probably your short term ones too), so DON'T invest too much into them. This is an easy mistake to make – don't fall into that trap. You have limited creativity and time, use them to enhance your current adventure and leave future adventures flimsy enough so you can abandon them without great loss and sorrow.
Weaving all of this together is a difficult and complex matter. But there is a trick to handling complex matters – you break them up into little chunks until each chunk is small enough to be handled on its own. With that in mind, let's take a closer look at each of these parts: starting a campaign, writing or adapting an adventure plot, designing a session emotionally, designing and picking combat encounters in d20, and weaving sessions into adventures and adventures into campaigns. Fortunately, we are not the first to struggle with any of those issues and there are tools to help you out, you don't need to invent the wheel here.
Starting a Campaign
Perhaps you have this great idea for a campaign – “ninja pirates fighting off the evil general Chu-Mi-Li!”, you have all the plot set right down to the general's last words in the climatic ending. Or perhaps you have no idea what you want to run. Don't worry, both can lead to a great game. Really! The important thing about a campaign is NOT the initial grand idea, it is how the campaign is played out.
Even if you don't have a campaign idea, you probably have a “what I want to do” idea – you want to play a certain kind of game. Don't sweat the campaign setting then – just choose one that you think will be easy to implement and stick with it. Some prefer well-detailed settings for this, such as the Forgotten Realms, while others prefer undefined homebrews so that the only things known and decided are those that were important enough for the game and they have lots of leeway. Choose your preferred option, and go for it.
It is a good idea to devote one session to brainstorming with your regular or intended group, or at least to talk things over in some other medium. Make it very clear what the mood of your game will be - “I want to run a standard D&D game, you know, hack, slash, take the loot” or “I want a wuxia-movie style, with flying-like acrobatics and ninja-fu!” or anything like that. Don't say “In this particular campaign I would like to emulate the baroque stylistic aspects of Titus Groan, in a clever allegoric tale that will teach us about our moral beliefs and deepest desires”; that kind of stuff just doesn't wok in practice (in my experience), all you can really promise is how you intend to game in terms of mood and how your games usually are. Maybe you will manage to weave a fantastic moral epiphany out of it, but things rarely turn up as planned and you'll often just won't tell the tale you intended to.
This is also a good point to ask about character backgrounds, decide on campaign issues, house rules, generate characters, and so on.
Don't fall into the house rules trap. You don't need as many house rules as you think. Try to stick to the ones that actually make a difference large enough and improve the game for the players enough to make them worthwhile. As much as it bugs you that Dodge provides only a +1 bonus instead of +2 (for example), it isn't worth fiddling with it. If on the other hand a player complains that he never remembers to apply Dodge and it annoys him that he almost died because of it, it might be wise to have Dodge as “+1 dodge bonus to AC against all opponents”, even if that makes it “too powerful” slightly. Make the changes that improve your actual game or are necessary to the world (“no teleporatation magic”), not the changes that will make it a better game. And above all, try to keep them to a minimum; long documents of house rules are generally only read by the persons that wrote them. And that's a fact.
You may not be great at coming up with names (I'm not). You may have trouble portraying NPCs, or adjudicating rules, creating believable worlds, or something. Don't sweat it – everyone has his weaknesses, this isn't that bad. If you want to work on your weaknesss fine, you can purchase books on the matter, delve deeply into rules discussions to become a rule guru, or whatever. But in my experience this isn't all that important. Delivering a good fun game can be done by everyone, everyone just naturally does it differently.
You can consider appointing a beta-DM. Perhaps you can annoit one of the players as a Rules-Lawyer, to judge all rules questions unless you say otherwise. Or have someone else design the geography of the world, perhaps working together on the cultural background and stuff. Or have someone be the Greyhawk Encyclopedia, answering questions about the world unless you say otherwise. Make sure you ARE the final authority (or have some method of working together), someone needs to be the last arbiter and it better be you or your adventures may run into problems.
By now you should have a good idea on the type of stories you want to play in the campaign, and maybe even an overarching story arc for it all. You should now choose a few adventures you want to play in it – one to begin it with, and preferably a few more. They don't have to be consecutive, and you don't need to know them well. You just need to know their basic premise and decide there are tales you want to explore in your campaign.
You can do worse than browse through published adventures. Even if you don't like them or the levels don't match or something, good ideas always help. Or you could quickly jot down possible adventure ideas for the future; make a list of 10 or 15 adventure ideas. Lists help, you'll be surprised at your own creativity.
Don't delve deeply into any of them at the moment. Just have a rouge idea, don't memorize them or anything. You have limited time, the whole idea here is to get an idea of what future adventures would be LIKE and to decide on the first adventure.
Adapting an Adventure Plot to Play
You'd think that if you purchased an adventure all you have to do is to read it and then play it out, and you're all set. You'd be wrong. While that can work if you're pressed for time, it really is better if you adapt the adventure to your particular game. Hardly any experienced DM plays an adventure as-is (from my experience), even ones he wrote himself! If you plan your own adventure, keep it very loose at this stage – just the general hook (preferably several!), main idea, and perhaps some great scenes you want to try out or some rules you want to test/exploit or some future plot element you want to insert (“you find the One Ri... errg... an unassuming golden ring. Yes, that's it.”).
Consider your players, of course, and try to see what in the adventure will interest or upset or bore each. Try to remove the boring or upsetting stuff, even one such player can ruin a session. Try to make sure each player has something grand, some great moment in the adventure – feel free to modify it to include one! Even if it never comes about, it often will and the players will enjoy those times. Now weave in the backstory – change the story to reference the character's background, and link them to it if at all possible. Change the place and names to fit your setting. Insert foreign elements from your own setting and previous adventures to make it fit within the world. And sprinkle a few clues or hints of those adventure ideas you had earlier. A few red herrings off the top of your head too, you never know what these will develop into.
Don't redesign the published adventure or completely write down your original one, that's way too much work and as you'll see below wasted work. Instead, just jot down the ideas on how to adapt it all. Even ideas that don't sit together. That way you have a toolkit of solutions to go to when you run into the unexpected in-game. And you will.
If you purchased an adventure, read it thoroughly. Preferably twice. Take note of the little details on that second read though, but you don't need to know it all by heart – you're not going to run it all in one go! If you create your own adventure, you can skip this stage of course. You'll discover this actually can SAVE time – sometimes it's quicker to whip up an adventure then it is to adapt an existing one.
When you do this, take a hard look at the adventure and try to sum up the plot. Just the main plot. It helps to abstract it, for example “Party hired by Mysterious Agent to find the McGuffin, travels to Exotic Land and gets captured by Bad Guys, make deal and help them against second Bad Guys, then get McGuffin as reward”. Something along those lines – just enough to give you the twists and turns of the plot, but abstracted enough so it will help you see beyond the specific details of the adventure. The plot structure is more important than the actual details. By keeping the plot structure in mind you can more easily change or add details without disrupting the adventure.
You are not ready to play the adventure yet from start to finish, as you may have noticed. The thing is, you'll never do that anyways, so you never need to be able to. The same adventure should not be run the same way twice, after each session it should be altered to better fit the next session so it's best to work with it on a session-by-session basis. The whole point in making all those notes and adaptation ideas is to allow you to prepare for the next session. So let's get to that.
Designing a Session
Designing a session is actually harder than adapting an adventure or running it, at least to me. But without a properly designed session adventures will often fail. Fortunately, it isn't
that hard.
A session is several hours long, so you MUST have diversity, and for that you need structure. I recommend going to some online site and looking up some script structure, there are several theories and they are all good (you can use different ones at different sessions, it helps keep the players off-guard). Find one that gives you an actual timeline (the hero discovers the Awful Truth at about 2/3 into the movie, he prepares for the final rundown at ¾, and so on); try to stick to it (ROUGHLY, you can't edit the players like a director can) during the session. You should also take into account the emotional impact of out-of-character things – presenting the players with handouts, putting the huge painted mini out of the box, calming down as you eat the pizza, and so on; these are moments in the emotional “plot” just like any other.
Put as much of the adventure's plot that you think you can go through in the session into the structure. It won't fit. That's where all the adaptations ideas come in – change, warp, and mutilate the adventure until it does fit. (Of course, you might want to choose a different structure if it's too hard.) You're going to give the players a whole “movie” in one session, even if it kills the original adventure.
The real difficult thing about this is that you never know what your players will be up to. That's why the plot structure is so important – if you have the plot structure in your head in abstract form, you can adapt to the player's delaying here or messing up there by dropping or adding elements as you go along while at the same time providing the same basic experience that you planned to supply. Even if they go on a completely different path the plot structure can help you wing it out of nowhere. (By “in your head” i mean “on a sheet”, of course.)
It helps if you have all the relevant Bad Guys ready at a draw, and perhaps some “random encounters” and surprises you've shored up from previous adventures or times. Having the monsters in the MM or a statblock doesn't really help here, you want THEMATIC ELEMENTS not meat grinders. A little note like “Gold Dragon fighting Blue in air (EL 12)” might be much more handy when you're frantically thinking how to introduce the Unexpected Ally your story needs. Of course, you should have some statblocks when they are needed, it's just that they alone aren't your salvation.
To properly design the session you need to know what your characters will be able to endure. In combat, character resources get depleted and it's essential that you plan accordingly. If your plot requires the characters to overcome several combat encounters in a row, make sure their ELs are right. If not, adjust the EL (by changing the numbers, levels, or type of opponents, adding templates or advancing monsters, or changing the encounter's role within the adventure by adding or subtracting elements from the adventure). Make sure not to rely on EL and CR alone – these are averages, and if your party has a means to circumvent DR, has no spellcasters, has few tough fighters able to dish it out in melee, or so on different beasties will be quite different to handle. It is best to know the key capabilities of your characters and plan accordingly (hmm, Fightus has +15 to hit, so he won't be hitting this guy much, but Magicus has 19 effective caster level and +9 to DCs so he'll probably punch through...). It's not easy. But the EL system DOES generally work (if you use Upper Krust's or Grim Tales system,t hat is) to judge attrition ASSUMING the monsters and party are fairly normal.
Another good point is to take a look at the character's capabilities and make sure they can utilize it in the adventure. If the character has the Great Cleave feat, provide low-level flunkies for him to cleave through. If the party's mage has teleportation, have them need to be at some far away place instantly. Try not to neuter their abilities, USE their abilities within the plot.
I stressed the importance of story structure a lot, but I want to make it clear that what's important is only the ABSTRACT structure. The details must be left to player discretion. If you force players to go down your plot and only your plot then you are guilty of railroading and while some enjoy that most don't. If you make sure that whether they choose to go to the King's Road or travel by sea to their destination they will have a quiet journey so they could heal towards the next series of encounters, you are doing fine.
Of course even such a wide plot has rails and can be derailed by adamant players. Let them. The idea behind coming up with a plot for the current session is to have a game-plan, you CAN try to game without it – it is just more likely to fail to be a great session.
Every now and again (too often with some parties) your plans will just go kappoie, as the characters will for some reason decide they must enter the evil dragon's lair instead of infiltrating the Dark Monk's order. (The most annoying part of that will be later, when they'll look at you with cow's eyes and say “but you WANTED us to go against the dragon! Why else would [insert totally unimportant character's name] say [insert totally misinterpreted “clue”]?!!”. Players!) You are in a tough spot, there is no use denying that, but you still have a chance to get out of it in with dignity.
For one thing, you have your plot structure to fall on. OK, so the “Heroes Hired by Mysterious Figure” won't work, but maybe you can just let it slide with “Heroes Accept Dangerous Mission” as an abstraction and work from there? Try to see how you can whip up an adventure plot to fit the plot line you outlined for the session. Or maybe the one from last session, as long as you stick to a reasonable plot line all will be alright. You can use the prepared encounters and plot ideas from the session preparation, from other adventures, from a moment of inspiration, monsters from the monster manual – whatever works to save the day. Feel free to ask for 5 minutes to think things over, but it's best to actually not if you can disguise it as taking a break to order food or something). Don't rush into it without a plan, though – asking for time off isn't that bad, going in without a game plan can be. Don't plan on your feet while trying to DM either, you can't do it all at once.
It helps to have a list of prepared “diversions” lined up. Published
short adventure (or collections such as
En Route) are excellent in that regard – tiny adventures that are plug-and-play, you can just use them on the fly to save the day. It is still best to modify them to fit the mood and ideas of the adventure, and to tie in to the major plot somehow. DON'T just use a “wondering monster” or meaningless discussions or descriptions to fill up the session, it's the plot not the combat that drives the session and, ultimately, the campaign.
Finally, you can be frank and tell the players you aren't ready for them to storm the dragon's lair. “Timeout: I haven't prepared for that and frankly don't know how to run it, would you mind doing something else?” usually works. “Hmmm.... metagame moment here: the dragon is CR 26 and you are at level 2, are you SURE your characters are suicidal?” works too. Sometimes the characters will act differently, sometimes you'll all just play something else (sometimes the party will go in and have a TPK, but that's usually means you weren't paying any attention to what they wanted and they called it quits). But if you have no idea how to make the unexpected detour FUN (not how it will turn out, but how to make it fun) then it's best to not do it at all.
(I'm not saying here not to allow characters to make stupid choices. If they end up doing something foolish MOST players will want to suffer the results, including TPK, as it diminishes the experience if there is no price for failure. Make sure you talk about this, too, when you decide on your campaign. What I'm talking about is characters acting so far out of the planned story that you can't apply your preparation and that you can't come with a fun POSSIBLE plot to make out of it. )
It is hard, but actually very rewarding. The look on the player's face when they realize you've been totally unprepared for their actions the entire session and still provided an excellent session is priceless.
Weaving A Campaign Together
Now a campaign is just a series of sessions. If you prepare for each session to be enjoyable, modifying what's left of the current adventure or the beginning of a new one each time to maximize the enjoyment out of every session, then you'll do alright. There are, however, things that enter a long campaign that make it more than a collection of great sessions.
The most important thing is to use future and past elements in the current adventure. Always try to have something both of the past of the characters and something from their future in each adventure. It may be as simple as being hired by a past acquaintance and finding a magic item that will lead them to the next adventure. It may be as sneaky as having the character that they volunteered to aid in the first adventure turn out to be the main villain in the last adventure. Generally, the sneakiest the better, with people or things appearing time and again and often with plot twists.
Another important thing is plot resolution and creation. It is important to have resolution – if the character begins his life with a dedicated cause to fight Takhisis, the campaign should end in or include a defining moment in this struggle (perhaps he founds an order of knights, perhaps he fights her to the death, something). It is equally important to develop entirely new plots – this is more difficult. Try to get your characters to annoy new bad guys (fairly easy), alienate former friends (not so easy), and develop specific aspirations within the game world (hardest of all). Misdirection and misunderstanding or partial knowledge go a long way. Asking for specific aspirations usually doesn't work, but is still worthwhile for when it does; presenting random ones in-game as red herrings also works at times. Rewarding XP for background and plot hooks can also help.
Bringing It All Together
So, since I've written that much all my sessions must be great and my games a dream come true, right? No. Knowing what's the right thing to do isn't the same thing as doing it. I often fumble, come unprepared, fail to notice things, or just make mistakes. Most often, I just don't follow through on preparing properly and jump right into a campaign without thinking things through. But I do believe that to the extent that I kept to these guidelines I had good games, usually better then when I didn't. So I wrote it all down, and hope someone will find something useful in my ramblings and have fun with it.
Have fun at every session,
Yair
).
Whoa! Great article! I think I agree with nearly everything there (and the stuff I don't agree with is just a matter of style), so nice job!
