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What ive learned in my 10 years of DMing or KISS rules to DMing
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House Rules
• When making house rules, make sure they do the following
• Does not create something else for the DM/Players to Track
• Does not slow down the game
• Speeds up the game or clarify existing rules
Poker Chips
• Use poker chips to show the status of players and monsters
• Red = Bloodied
• White = Monster Mark
• 1 color per player for their various marks
• They can stack to show multiple effects
• Don't have one for each status in the game, there are 19 of them, you will slow the game down remembering what color is each. 2+1 per player is all that is needed.
Tiles & Miniatures
• Tiles
o If you use Tiles and miniatures for your games, the following tips should help you greatly.
o Construct the encounter before hand, map out your tiles on a graph paper so you know how to quickly re-build it
o Use sticky tack to pre-build your encounters on a piece of cardboard before hand
o Use foam to raise the level of the dungeon higher
o Use toilet paper rolls with slots cut in them at 2" to have multi level tiled encounter
o Use large zip lock bags to sort your tile sets so you can easily find the tiles you’re looking for.
• Miniatures
o use dice to show how many squares up a flying creature is
o use portable bait like boxes to separate and store your miniatures
o Block off one section for players only
o Group monsters by type, skeletons, wizards, ranged, melee, rogue-like etc. This will help you when building encounters to grab the monsters that make most sense.
Burst / Blast
• Cut out some bristle board to the size needed; only make it roughly 2 mm (millimeters) thick so there is a large hole in the middle.
• This will help you to quickly place the blast/burst on the map without moving anything around.
• Can also be done with coat hanger wire.
Magic Item Generation
• I recommend using http://www.asmor.com/
• Run the Quartermaster, increase the number of players by 1 more than there actuly is (this gives each player a magic item every adventure)
• Create a list/matrix of items for each player
• Weapon M, Weapon R, Shield y/n, preferred armour, Implement
• This will help you generate only the treasure you really want
• Generate after you’ve created all the encounters, then divide up as to what makes sense to you.
Alternate Rewards
• At the end of each adventure (or every other) try and include some non-standard rewards
• Mounts, titles, Lands, Tattoo’s (even the new magical ones)
• The reward should have some sort of benefit, even if only RP benefit
• For the most part these items should be things the party is not willing to sell
• My rule of thumb is Non monetary reward every even adventure, every odd adventure progresses the story of 1 adventurer's back-story.
Initiative
• Tracking initiative is one of the toughest things for DM's. Find a solution that
1) doesn’t slow the game down,
2) easy for you to use
3) doesn't cause any confusion
• Here are a few ideas
o Have the encounter printed off listing all the monsters and their pre-rolled initiatives, list the players at the top, and have them roll. By using graph paper you can mark off what round they just completed, and track any spent action points, or any ongoing damage
o Magnetic whiteboard with player named titles, move up and down as initiative goes, and just write in the monsters initiative. Can also be used to track monster hp, player status, action points and ongoing damage. DIY for under $10 the size of a piece of paper
o Many of the thousands of ways to track initiative listed on the internet, as long as it follows rules 1-2-3 above.
Plan your encounters
• Build your encounters on your computer, each encounter should go no more than 2 pages long.
• Ideally stick to an average of 1 page.
• Things to put are a list of all monsters, how many of them, where they can be found (book/page), or even a copy of each monster on the page. Include treasure (a copy of the item as well) a mini map of the encounter with starting positions of all monsters, traps and items. And a brief plan of attack.
• If using miniatures put aside some miniatures that make sense for you. A small zip lock bag with the encounter number written on it should be great to keep track of it.
• Use Recycled paper, and recycle your encounters afterwards.
End of the Night
• Fill out a status card
• Copy everyone’s Current Hit points, Action Points, Daily's Used, Healing Surges left.
• Thank them for coming out
• entice them with something for next week (or whenever you play)
Building Encounters
• Monster Lister tool at http://www.asmor.com/ is another great tool
• When building the encounter ask, how does this encounter or these monsters make sense in my adventure/story. Change what you need to in the encounter, not the adventure/story.
• Put a * next to monsters you will take out in case you have one less person, or duplicate in case you get a extra guest
Start of the Night
• Thank everyone for coming
• enjoy the non-d&d chit chat at the start of the session, these people are your friends (or should be)
• Quickly review last weeks status card
• Cover the encounters occurred last week
• Recent campaign activities since last adventure
• Once a month, recap the entire campaign history, does not have to be fight by fight. but should cover the key things the party learned, did and accomplished. This is why we play d&d
Rules questions
• Give yourself 10 seconds to make a call during an encounter, have a (1) player looking up the ruling while you continue
• At the end of the encounter review the rule and compare to your ruling.
• Award additional xp if your ruling made it tougher, not because you were wrong.
Great things to have on hand
• TV dinner trays
• Great for players to keep their crap off your world (aka the table)
• Extra pencils, erasers
• Reusable plastic bowls & cups
• Extra standard white 6 sided dice (always handy for something)
• For those rich buggers out there, extra set of un-opened dice (for when someone eventually forgets their own dice)
• Books & Computer, pretty standard these days to look things up
• Ambient Music
o Your voice should be the most powerful thing in the room
o How much time is this taking away from the game
o everyone’s music tastes are different
Most of the horror stories on boards that I've come across almost always lead back to player doing book legal, but bad for the game. Ie super stacking powers, race-feat combos that are crazy, and the like.
It's fine to let the player know that they made a really really powerful combo, just let them know it doesn't fit in your game.
i'd have to disagree with saying no. i have embraced the 4th edition 'say yes' and watched as my players expaneded on new ways to do things, and inventive uses for skills. its actually sped up combat, and added more role playing into the game by saying yes.
Several 4E monsters have powers that recharge on a die roll at the top of their turn. My idea is to use a magnetized whiteboard to track initiatives, and have a given power for each monster written on a piece of paper that's glued to a small magnet. On the other side of the paper would be "Recharge 6" or "Recharge 5, 6" to indicate when the monster regains use of the power. Use the monster's listed power, flip the magnet over to show the recharge conditions. Roll that number on the die, flip the magnet back over to indicate the power is available again.
It'd take several of these power magnets (some monsters have several rechargeable powers), and it'd take some advance planning to know which monsters you'd need power magnets for, but it might help keep track.
In the campaign I keep telling myself I'll build (and jeez, if Florimel would quit launching new campaigns maybe I could finish it!), I've actually got in my wiki that I reserve the right to say no to character builds if I'm not comfortable with them. My reason/excuse is that I'm totally new at the world-from-scratch thing, and it'll be hard for me to not take it personally if I see somebody "exploiting" the reality I've presented.
There is a difference in letting players do new things that are cool and interesting. My point was that a DM should always feel free to say no to an idea that they feel will cause problems with their campaign. Just because the rules say that if the party does a b and c they get Z magical item, doesn't mean that the DM has to allow that, if they feel that the magical item in question will break the game.
Other examples from 3.5 edition include a goblin book legal character that took full advantage of some seriously broken class game design to have over 1000 in every stat by level 7. I can't think of many campaigns that would be helped by the DM saying "Yes!" to that.
Which I guess comes to a side point... Say "No" when you need to, but have a good reason for doing so.
I really like 4E. The character generator is great as is the encounter generator. I have a notebook where I jot down general outlines for cool encounters and then when I am ready to have the party run into it (when I see it happening in the next few sessions) I put in the party level and generate an appropriately difficult encounter.
I do let my PC's run with the story. If they want to narrate for awhile, I let them. I'm just there to tell them what they see when they run around the corner. That being said I have events and NPC's that drive the story, its not totally free form and my players have never gotten out of hand, I don't think they realize their full narrational powers. I keep enough going that they are usually reacting to their environment, which is how life works, I think.;-).
As for saying Yes and No to Players. My Opinion is that before or After the game is the Best time to deal with builds that are abusive. If you missed something that is unbalanced that comes up during play, say Yes temporarally, but let the player know that it is a temporary ruling. That way you aren't causing drama during game time that kills your other player's enjoyment of the game. Also it allows the rhythm of the game to move along.
If the players pull something out of their hat that trivializes your "grand last encounter", just roll with it and realize that the players will have something to celebrate. Hell reward the party for their ingenuity in coming up with a tactic that you hadn't thought of. Then make sure that the next time you do better. Coming up with on the spot nerfs for player Characters isn't much fun for the party, and make you as a GM look bad.
Tasha
It doesn't need to be as bad as facing down the Borg, for those of you who get that reference, but it does keep things interesting if the same trick doesn't always get the same results. My first ever HERO character had a 12d6 presence attack (given to me AFTER the fact by my GM), which my teammates and I used to great effect against swarms of mooks - I'd just go in there and tell them to lay down their weapons, and they'd either do that or just sit there drooling at my boobs. (We really didn't want to kill the mooks - they were only a threat by dint of numbers, and we were the good guys, after all.) As we started moving against higher-profile targets, though, the swarms of mooks had leaders in them who had strong enough presence attacks that I didn't get the complete successes I had in the past. So I had to switch tactics - instead of telling them to not attack at all, I'd tell them to target me. It was a command mostly in line with the orders they were already given, so I was back to having strong successes, and it meant the rest of my team could focus on the leaders.
Spend the 1st level of play ("transition level") with heavy action and clear, easy motives. Introduce a few new NPCs.
Give the PCs 3 adventure path choices with clearly distinct reward types: lots of money, rare/powerful magic item, morally very good thing to do (rewards for this will be things like honorary memberships to elite training, rare spells, travel favors, or property).
Adventure path should take the party up 2 to 5 levels (I tend to aim for 3). Apply the "World of Warcraft" technique of multiple quests for a dungeon, but do NOT do the repeat returning; instead, after the party picks their goal, on the way have them encounter NPCs that add side quests in the dungeon "South of the dungeon entrance is an old graveyard, a goblin wizard with a powerful staff has moved in and is raising the dead" and when in the dungeon "You find in the goblin dungeon a baby elf" and maybe also, "The back of their main lair has a large door with skulls framing it, but the goblins apparently weren't interested in going through it as they have piled a large volume of junk in front of it."
Basically, as they seek out their primary quest, you give them a half dozen other quests as they go, perferably some such that they can either do A or B, but not both. A will make NPC1 happy, B will make NPC2 happy. In this way, the NPCs pick their allies as they progress through your story.
Wrap up that chapter and go back to step one, the "transition level", introduce more NPCs (that show up to congratulate the party on their good deeds and possibly have something for the party to do), give 3 new adventure paths (possibly update the first 2 by having their "situation" get worse and thus the level of monsters has gone up to match party).
Create an overall campaign path of 10 steps and the order in which they need to happen. Preferably, steps don't all have to happen in perfect order, use the "transition levels" for when you MUST have the party do something.
This allows you to tell an over-all story, but the players get to make the adventure "their" story.
For individual sessions:
Try to open with action.
Each "dungeon" should have:
1 trap, 1 role playing encounter, 3 to 4 fights. Mixing these 3 types together can add extra pressure.
First find out what is in there and what the dynamics are in the absince of the party entering. This usualy gives alot of oportunities to suprise players with interesting encounters or modifiers to encounters. Also it alows you to adjust any wondering encounters the players might happen upon.
The real trick to this is it can lead to vacumes in some instances. Think about it this way, Most barracks do not have any traps in the common areas exspecialy if the fort or barracks houses some in-experinced low level encounters. Or maybe there are no monsters in it... say like a hidden vault of some acient civilization fallen befor the rise of animation magic. The thing with these sites is to think through it.
Some key points to look for are:
traps
1. Traps are placed usualy for two reasons to slow some ones egress or slow their Ingress.
2. Traps usualy are placed in areas that have few optional walk arounds (narrow halways, rooms that serve as the only intrance to another area, single entrances to important rooms)
3. Traps used for killing do just that they kill, if you where hunting tigers for their pelts you would use a trap that is mst asuradly made to deal as much damage to the animal as to either kill it or injure it enough that death is eminant.
4. Traps are used sparingly, insidious traps that are apart of the structure all togather are hard to designe with out defeating the structures integrity. Like wise traps easily impliminted uusualy lie on the out side of the structure and are easier to detec.
5. Traps are racial, in the way they are built kobolds create traps that fit with kobold life style. Usualy this is somthing modifing the original structure or somthing added all togather. Alot of their traps use poisons, and are set to either detain, hamper, kill, or in conjunction for a fast complex attack.
Monsters
1. Monsters need to eat
2. Monsters need sleep most of the time
3. Nothing is so powerfull not to need some form of protection. In real animals it is seen that even apex hunters have a trait to lair or find "safe" refuge in one form or anouther. It sould be no different with most monsters (excepting alien style inteligence or aberation type monsters)
4. Intelignet monsters are just that, any inteligent monster that poses a threat to the party will most likely have deffense plans and patrols inset to defend there lair.
5. Monsters do not necisraily get along with other monsters. Be it inteligent or animal like thinking, monsters that enter in to compition for resorces (food, water, space) usualy will not deal with one another. Deenses are set up, battles break out ect. GMs can use this to create interesting facets of a site.
The site
1. If not a natural site, then what was the original purpose?
2. How old is the site this in combination with the construction technuiques could show places to put traps what would other wise not happen. (crumbly bridge)
3. How long have current residents occupied the area, this question will advise you on several things. How well the dizeins know the sight, time they have had to prep defenses and stuff. this could be very usfull. If the evil team runs into the cave after a long chase, they probaly don't know every nook and crany; nore have they had the time to set up insidious traps.
I find that this way works better to make the game imersive than using any of the formulas for 1A 3 B and what not. This is not to detract from the usfullness of Dustin_00's post, as his advice works well when running a game initialy. In actuality I use every thing he says except for the dungeon should have list. Course styles differ with every one.