I'm the DM for a game of DnD. I've never DM'd, and my players have never played. Starter DM tips?
pic not related
>>47747036
Don't create NPCs that are your pet characters that will hog the spotlight. These are called DMPCs and they generally suck. Let the PCs hog the limelight.
Don't do that shit where you overthink your story because you've read people's accounts of shitty, boring, uninspired, bland sessions. If you want to deliver a cliched story straight up from an 80s dungeon crawler and make your world derivative, do so. The players will form the tone of the story themselves and will play out those segments themselves. So steal.
If you really want to literally run A New Hope in a fantasy setting for your guys, do so. Maybe they will play it straight. Maybe they will murderhobo the whole thing and Leia will end up sold to slavery while they take over Han's ship and decide that they now want to become mercenary smugglers themselves. Maybe they will fuck up and will have to concede Yavin and you'll have to change the story up. You don't have to be ashamed that your session looks like it was written by Christopher Paolini. It's okay.
If someone told me that when I was starting out, I wouldn't have fucked up so much and I wouldn't have had anxiety about that.
Don't be afraid to kill your players off. The game isn't meant to be about you raping the players' orifice, but you have to make them realize that the risks they take are very real.
One thing that tabletop does that computer RPGs - a common avenue to tabletop - often neglect is that killing is not the #1 way of dealing with encounters and that even the precious XP points can be gotten through other ways. Encourage them to sneak around powerful enemies and negotiate with people.
Of course, if your group wants to mostly be in it for the action and want high kill counts, make sure to provide it for them and you might want to fudge some rolls (in secret, that's what the DM screen is for) if it's dramatically appropriate - nobody likes to die on the campaign's first session because of a dire rat's lucky crit, and making a new character so soon again is just busywork nobody needs.
But overall if someone fucks up they will die. And that can be a nice plot hook for a future session to get that player ressurected.
>>47747399
>If you want to deliver a cliched story straight up from an 80s dungeon crawler and make your world derivative, do so.
Yeah, nah. Faced with that shit I'd walk away from the table and do something more interesting. I might not straight up walk out there and then, but the chances of me coming back for session 2 would be very low.
Make something interesting, OP. Doesn't have to be super amazing Hugo-award winning stuff, but do have a few interesting ideas in there.
As a pure vanilla D&D adventure, get a big 1" square grid paper from Office Max and draw some 3x5" to 5x8" rooms, with hallways connecting them. Call it the "Dungeon of the [Insert impressive sounding bad guy]". Then each room has some monsters (try orcs or gnolls or lizardmen) and some treasure. Keep a blank character sheet in front of you to remind yourself of hte possible skill checks, and ask the players to try some skill checks in each room to discover clues. When in doubt, give advantage or disadvantage. Finallty at the end of the dungeon put a hard boss (use the Flameskull stats but call it something else like a Gnoll Warlock), and if they beat him they get the "Treasure of [whoever]" and are the heroes and save the day.
>>47747532
I think it is still good to just keep it simple and to not worry about using some common plot hooks and gimmicks. It's certainly better than letting a complex session fall apart when players decide to step out of the rails. And then there's the kind of "innovation" where you basically just say that your elves or dwarves are the same as the usual stuff but they do X instead of Y.
Of course it's a game of imagination and you should imagine whatever you think is cool, just don't be afraid to use inspiration from your favourite media and remember that the players can and will make the experience at least somewhat unique.
>>47747532
You sound like a pretentious cunt and I'd be glad to have you away from my table, faggot.
>>47747460
>>47747532
What can we learn from this:
Establish the right tone early on.
Ideally, ask what kinda characters the players wanna roll, and make a campaign mood around that, i.e piratey campaing? a crusade? A grande fantasy heist?
I made this mistake when I first DM'd. Made a 2spoopy eldritch-horror campaign, and literally half of the players showed up as jolly Halflings, the rest were all very much light comic-relief style characters.
In Hindsight, I would've loved running a whimsical high-fantasy campaign, but instead wound up with a weird tonal mess.
>>47747556
This is really good advice for a first time DM if your players aren't veterans. You don't necessarily have to have an elaborate plotline or storyline setup before the first session. If your players are playing just adventurers, dungeon crawls could be exactly what they're looking for.
>>47747657
>Eldritch horror campaign
>Jolly halflings
That actually sounds funny as hell
>>47747657
I'll dump some basic DM tips, it's better you learn them now, rather than later.
1) Write a big list of generic names; NPC names, village names, tavern names and ship names (I find these 2 surprisingly interchangeable) -- Not having to make one up on the fly will save time, and there is nothing worse that being stuck with a cumbersome and unwieldy name for a recurring character/location
2) Make a generic list of encounters.
I've played with some of the same people for years, and the party size has always been 4 or 5.
As such, I've got a list of varied encounters, each suitable for different party levels. This way, you can chuck and ambush at the players if the game is slowing down too much.
>>47747789
>Write a big list of generic names; NPC names, village names, tavern names and ship names (I find these 2 surprisingly interchangeable) -- Not having to make one up on the fly will save time, and there is nothing worse that being stuck with a cumbersome and unwieldy name for a recurring character/location
Best way to make up a name on the fly is to use combinations of random foreign language words.
All of my generic Warhammer Fantasy towns are silly German names. Froschhaufen or Frischeluft, for example.
>>47747709
Try Running it though.It actually ended up being a great, heavily improvised campaign, but throwing out all your prepared campaign notes is a bit like abandoning your baby downriver
Speaking of which...
>>47747789
3) If you want an encounter to be special, change something.
The PCs (and the DM, to an extent) will begin to take things for granted, like the reliability of their attacks, AC, their speed, etc.
Next time, put an encounter in the middle of a rushing river -- everyone has half movement speed, ranged attacks become more useful, and anyone knocked prone floats downstream (for example)
Don't start off with "kill the bandits" or other busywork. Get the plot started right off the bat. People hate filler for good reason. It doesn't mean you can't use cultists and orcs, but it does mean they should have a good reason to be where they are in the plot.
>>47747815
>silly German names
This. I happen to speak a fair bit of German, so I once rolled a barbarian who didn't even speak Common, just a strange regional variant -- speaking IC was done auf Deutsch. Made for a pretty funny campaign.
Hand signals helped, but they tend to understand if you shoutVORSICHTloudly enough
>>47747866
4) Hate is fantastic player motivation. If you want them to hate a villain enough to hunt him down to the ends of the earth, have the villainsteal the party's loot, shallow bastards
>>47747036
>Archive
>Ctrl F "DM"
>Look for tips, advice, new x threads
>>47747036
Get a good notebook and take a bunch of notes. Beforehand and during the game.
Beforehand write down a few dozen names, places and random things you might be able to describe in a dungeon, haunted forest, tavern, etc. and any cool stuff you think of that you can't place yet but might be interesting.
During the game write down things players say, what they're interested in, what stuff they pick up. It might be handy later.
>>47747969
>But Anon, I want advice to make me an EXTRA GOOD DM
5) Describe smells. Do it whennever there's a significant change in location, eg the party has gone to the city's port (the cold, slaty air), or has just gone into an underground dungeon (the fetid, musty smell of abandoned corpses)
Stupid as it sounds, it helps with player immersion, and makes you seem like some kind of ultra-prepared super-DM, and it's pretty easy to reckon how a place would smell, even on the fly.
Let the players describe how they hurt the enemies and encourage describing in general.
Dont shove quests in their faces, you can pretty much sneakily fit in anything you have planned earlier or later than you think.
>>47748121
That's probably enough from me. Parting advice: be prepared to have things go differently from what you planned.
Maybe the players don't wanna seek and destroy the ancient evil terrorising the realm, they just really REALLY wanna steal a ship and be vikings for a while.
Your job is to roll with it, or (even better) adapt what you had planned.
Maybe, during their adventures of nautical banditry, they hear tell of buried treasure on a cursed isle -- only to discover some of the buried treasureis a magical prison for the ancient evil, which explains why it was buried and hid away from the world
Adhere to Murphy's law, and adapt.
>>47748240
This.
I do this especially with spellcasting
>tell me, what colour is your magic missle?
>>47748342
>blue.. no! YELLOOOOOOW
Also, if you plan encounters that have different difficulties, prepare for roflstomps and surprise deaths.
>be our party
>win two DR20 encounters in 2-4 rounds
>lose no health
>be our party
>Lose two best characters on party to a DR18 encounter
>???
>>47747036
First off, pic related.
>>47747556
This is excellent if you're totally green and aren't expecting long-term stuff yet.
As for the rest:
Give players agency. Being a TTRPG player and having freedom of choice goes hand-in-hand, and to force their characters to be a certain this-or-that or to follow a story they don't care about becomes tedious for all involved.
Don't plot extensively, PREPARE extensively. Prepare a small grab-bag of NPCs/locations/names/encounters (as >>47747789 said) to be used at your leisure and you'll find being 'flexible' becomes easier.
Ask questions, both to yourself and your players. Just stopping to ask yourself "is this right? Does that makes sense?" helps, and asking your players what they want to do reinforces that the ball's in their court. They can and should be in control of their actions. Nobody wants to play a Final Fantasy cutscene at the table.
>>47748240
This is a good time to mention what's sometimes called "Floating Islands". Ever see The Wrong Trousers, when Gromit is laying track in pace with the toy train? Players are the train and you're Gromit:
>Have Dungeon A near Town A
>Expect players to take hook
>They decide to explore Town B instead
>Use Dungeon A anyway because they never saw it to begin with
Be ready to improvise and everybody wins. They make their choices, you get to strut your stuff.
On the topic of tone, just chat with your players to get an idea of what kind of story they want to play in, or if there's any books/movies they enjoyed that you can take a page from. That sort of investment goes a long way when enjoying even the basics.
>>47748544
Other stuff:
Remember all five senses. Don't go overboard and try to use all five at once, but if, say, you're describing a fire, you can mention the colour or thickness or smell of the smoke. If a dungeon wall is "just" generic grey brick, maybe it has an unusual slimy texture, or makes audible drips. Going out of your way to describe something other than sight speaks in volumes for the players.
Like >>47748240 also said, let players say what they're trying to do, whether it's combat, drinking a strong wine, or discreetly climbing into a window. When they nail a critical hit or defeat something important, let them say how they did it. Allow them their moment.
Also remember that you don't need all the answers right away. As >>47748316 put it, things can and will go differently than you expect, so don't overextend yourself making things go a certain way. The players already have the wheel, so you may as well let them drive.
On that note--you don't need to have all the answers right away. Sometimes the players can even do that for you, but what I'm getting at is: the rules aren't god, so if it's more fun to ignore them every so often, do it.
>>47747036
good suggestions all around!
i'd add that being aware of the players' needs at the table and being able to throw different types of challenges at them to really engage everyone is crucial.
does the guy playing the fighter seem really into making tactical decisions? add in challenging combat with interesting mechanics (like in the middle of a river as a previous anon mentioned).
does the gal playing the wizard seem concerned with calculating the amount of space a spell of fireball will occupy so that she can pull off her crazy plan involving a 10 foot corridor and a horde of rampaging orcs? have all of her spells and their full descriptions written down on index cards or a notepad so that you can add in additional layers of verisimilitude ("the fireball rushes down the corridor before exploding in the middle of the cluster of orcs. the ones in front are blown forward with the blast, denying them a chance to make a DEX save. a wave of hot air rushes out from the doorway, bathing you in heat and the smell of cooking orcs.")
does the guy playing the rogue often get carried away talking to npcs in character and seem genuinely shocked, scared, or joyful at different plot points? have a list of personalities, little 1-2 sentence descriptions of NPCs that are age, gender, and location independent so that there is always someone there for him to talk to. improvising dialogue is hard to do but giving descriptions of what the NPC says rather than verbatim is perfectly cromulent.
last piece of advice: if a player asks if they can do something reasonable, either say yes or roll the dice.
>>47747250
DMPCs are only acceptable for the purpose of driving the plot when the characters are clueless, providing exposition on the world, and typically only doing major skill checks or the like when the party fucks up astronomically.
Basically, my current DMPC is a simple Eldritch Fighter that serves as a questgiver that helps in combat. No super-broken builds or meta-gaming tactics, just a fighter that provides direction.
Sometimes I use him to warn the party when they're about do something drastically stupid.
>first room into a dungeon
>player isn't the brightest out there
>"you find a chest"
>"I use mage hand to open it"
>"it's unlocked, inside the chest you find 3000 gold worth of gems"
>"I TAKE THE GEMS"
>DMPC pipes in "Hold up, why would they put an unlocked chest in the middle of-"
>"FUCK YOU I TAKE THE GEMS"
>"roll a d20 add your dex"
>crit fail
>long story short the chest was a mimic, he lost his hand, moaped a bit then commited sodoku so he could reroll a ten-fingered character
>>47749461
>>47747036
In general, the worst you should say is "Yes, but..." because flat denial is boring. Same goes for even failing checks. One example I remember was a bard attempting to swing from a chandelier onto a table a floor below.
The player ought to make their choice, whether it's savvy or stupid. Feel free to nudge them in the right direction, but they have the right to make their call.
The player, should they fail, shouldn't be told "you failed", since it's dull. And in this case it's inconclusive. Did he fail to start the swing at all? Did he fall off-course? Et cetera.
In the example, the bard fails the roll, but the DM rules that he reaches the table. The bard promptly crash-lands, knocking beer steins everywhere and greatly angering anyone nearby.
It's still a failure, but it's a wonderful, entertaining failure.
Rolled 6, 6, 15, 6, 10, 10, 12, 19, 13, 20, 1, 5, 9, 10, 20, 4 = 166 (16d20)
>>47748662
