5 Tips for New DMs + BONUS TIP!!

Stop overprepping! Let your players come up with solutions! Stop calling for meaningless skill checks! These tips are things I wish I knew when I first started!

[sirvile]

"This is when you take notes." - Baron
I've been doing that one for decades!
Best advice I've heard on DMing.

[garryame]

0:16 Too many dice checks. "Only roll skill checks if failure is interesting"
(Note: replace useless checks w/ taking 10/20 minutes)
1:39 Prep small and light
2:50 Tropes are good. "Don't worry about being original"
3:39 Quest deadlines
4:26 Make problems, not solutions
5:13 Paranoia as world building. (Use player speculation)

[iron_rush_theater]

"Your players are more paranoid than you - listen to them" - I have been using this advice exactly as described for over two decades! That "new GM" idea never gets old.

[DoubleCritFail]

This is some golden advice. Especially the part about not overplanning solutions to problems. I used to do that, and often found that the players came up with much better solutions than I ever could.

[CrowePerch]

The "Too Many Die" checks is something that immediately resonated with me. I was so used to checks just being thrown in for every single thing from previous GM's and it drove me mad. Want to do some cool trick where you're just flicking a gold coin as you're talking to an NPC? Uh oh looks like you gotta make a Sleight of Hand check for EVERY single time you flipped the coin.

[NomNom]

DUDE! Been playing since 79 and DMing since the mid ninety's. I wish I had heard this advise in the eighty's, it would have advanced my game so much. I found your channel recently and have been super impressed. Thank you for sharing! I like the suits, it took me a bit to get used to though.

[edathompson]

I agree with everything in this video. I think DMs creating finite solutions comes from modules. Just getting into the game, it's sometimes the first and only exposure to how an adventure or campaign is created. Solutions are presented to almost every encounter, so new DMs think is the best way because professionals wrote the book.

[johnleonard]

Just a quick addition to rule 1.

I recently ran a game where the party had access to two rooms connected by a small hole.
Each time a party member went from room to room I had them make an acrobatics check and described how gracefully they traversed the hole... Or not.
On the face of it, I was breaking this first rule however, what I knew and they didn't was that danger was coming. Once it arrived, multiple people were trying to pass through the hole in the same round. What before had been a slightly amusing delay in the story telling suddenly became dangerous.

I am fairly certain that if I had let them navigate the hole freely before and then only called for checks once the encounter started, it would have felt to the players like I was trying to trip them up maliciously, however, as we had established beforehand the difficulty of the task, the players had a good feel for how tricky the situation they found themselves in was.

[Atmoseeker]

Fantastic advice here! Really boils down the important parts of prepping for a game and makes it way less scary for new DM's

[m_d]

I like the video and this has good advice. As for brevity, ahem, having ADHD makes that excruciatingly hard. I am extremely verbose. I'm getting better. Each room has one page, but I use only half for needed info and the top half for a sketch map with enemies and goodies on it. It gives me an instant tracker sheet per room. Makes it easier for my rattle brain to keep track of items found, enemies/monsters killed or bested (add bonus for interesting or unique solutions).

[andrewszigeti]

As an experienced DM, I can only bow to your mastery. Some of these things I've done, others are new to me.

I do have to say, some of 'my' best ideas were ones m players came up with in game, causing me to toss whole sections of adventures aside so I could run with their much better idea.

And they're always so thrilled when they can say "I KNEW it was (whatever they speculated earlier)..."

[samchafin]

Excellent advice in a concise package. Thank you!

[steadili]

This is a great compilation of advice from videos and forum posts before. Thanks for prompting me to FINALLY write tips like these down!

[richfredrickson]

That last tip is basically movie writers checking out what the theory crafters are writing on Reddit.

[alexanderdaly]

One of the best encounters I ran followed No. 5: I took a cavern map from Dyson's Maps, called North "up" and adjusted the scale so that the players (all third level) were facing 90' to 150' drops. That's all I did; to run it I just sat back and adjudicated the distances and revealed parts of the map. Since they didn't know how deep the caverns ran, if they would encounter another patch of brown mold, or how far some of the drops were, the group was fascinated the whole way down. Mystery and exploration, tangible and predictable risk, and a plot beat motivating them to get to the bottom combined for one of the two or three sessions I ran that call perfect. (Interestingly, when I prepped it, I was so anxious the players, a pretty seasoned group of RP-heavy character-optimizers, would find the mundane task of scaling the walls too boring!)

[Letham]

That last tip is some pretty good advice. You give the players some ambiguous bits of information and watch as their imaginations go wild. 1) This kind of mindset is great for creativity. 2) What they come up with is a good indication of what interests them. 3) There's the satisfaction from feeling that they solved or discovered something.

[cameronframent]

I really like the last tip. Bridlewood Bay is a PbtA mystery game with a cool mechanic where the players accumulate clues until they think they have solved the mystery. Then they give their crazy theory and roll to see if it's true. Also playing solo games over the last couple years made me realize that when your GM-ing for 4 players you have 5 times the creative power. So you should encourage your players to build out the world with you.

[LittleGiantCrafts]

Great tips! I've only run a few one-shots, but this is all great advice I'll have to remember.

[remyxedfern]

These videos are awesome! Short, concise, and INCREDIBLY helpful. Your videos have really helped me get started on writing my first real developed adventure.

[CCMinis]

Fantastic info, going to be super helpful coming up here when I try DMing a one shot. Also nice snake plant in the background