5 Tips for New DMs + BONUS TIP!!

Been playing with my friend group for nearly 2 years now with the same DM. We're testing the waters by cycling DM (for 1 shots or other campaigns) so I'm taking notes. These sound very useful! Thanks for sharing. (b^^)b

Great tips! You are a really experienced GM ! Thank you !

As an 80s kid I can't understand the modern resistance to planning. It's like... most of the fun for me as a referee. Coming up with things, researching to improve historical accuracy, considering geopolitics, considering people's everyday lives and economic forces, considering religion...the effects of immortality/vastly differing lifespans... designing encounters, considering ecology, considering how the world reacts to the PCs... considering how groups will act with incomplete information; stealing ideas from other people, watching D&D content, cobbling together pre-made adventures... there's just so many different ways to enrich and improve your world. I was always thinking about my worlds, jotting down ideas I thought of... and I learned so much growing up, simply by wanting to make the richest world possible for my players.

I am soooo glad I'd been playing RPGs for a couple years before I ever played my first video game.

Though I don't know if it counts, because my first video game was Donkey Kong Jr.

I would add one more thing that delves more into social contract/session 0 stuff: Remember that you're at the table with other people and you are all there to have fun. You don't need to be amazing, it's a group effort.

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

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

Great video, and I really appreciated the quick summary at the end of the video.

That last one is gold!

Most of us come from a video game background? Dude, when I started playing D&D, the only videogame I'd played was Missile Command and Asteroids on the Atari 2600.

I think Interesting is the wrong word for skill checks. I feel a better phrasing would be only roll a skill check where failure has repercussions beyond time and easily replaced resources.

Excellent advice in a concise package. Thank you!

There is a conflict of design philosophies particularly about the first point. If you're advancing through plot, then skipping those insignificant checks is the way to go. The opposing view is to model the attrition and resource management of an expedition, simulating the experience rather than a narrative - that 1d6 fall damage from a failed check might matter, when you're barely clinging to life later on in a battle.

That being said, the first is vastly more popular and the latter is... kind of frustrating.

too many dice checks don't work for every system. Palladium systems you get experience for making skill rolls 25 per so let's say they don't roll 4 times they should have that's 100 exp. One other thing is in other systems how characters differentiate themselves is by having unique skills that don't come up that often. So let them roll that becuase when else is ks:byzantine architecture going to come up.

Also, as I got more experience as a gm, I realized I am bad at giving loot so if i don't write down some loot they will have almost nothing most of my prep work is that just coming up with stuff to give the players make sure the magic item isn't going to destroy my campaign.
The last problem is my players don't have the enthusiasm they used to. I try to get them thinking and nothing it just bounces off nowdays
Otherwise, I agree with you.

My god you'd be a great DM I'm jealous of your players whenever you run games

Expanding on the too many checks: when you're describing the "auto success" (when you just let them do it because failure is not interesting), use the character's stats to inform your description. If the character is dextrous or strong, describe how awesomely competent they are. If they aren't, describe the fear or how much they struggle. Maybe mention that the more competent party members give advice or provide help.
It can make ability checks more impactful, either foreshadowing the expected successes or failures, or bring joy or fear at the unexpected success or failures.

I’ve been playing for five years, am I a new dm?

Regarding Paranoia as World Building...
I had a group of adventures investigating a poisoned water supply in a cavern that also happened to have zombies. Before the adventures went to investigate the townsfolk went to investigate too. One of the players said, "What if the water is turning the townsfolk into zombies?"....me in my head "It does now!"

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!)

"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.

Most of the advice is okay, but I hope new DMs don't take it as "gospel." Run your game/prep for your game as you see fit. Take what you like and ignore the rest.

the rule is never give the DM ideas. if players have better ideas use them. players have decided how they want to interact with the world and hell if it is better go with it.

I approve of the click bait title

Great advise, even though I’ve been DMing for a while now, little things like discussed always makes our game fun.

“Your players have more brains than you” should be taped to any DM screen worth having.

seriously WHO KEEPS GIVING ASIAN SUBTITLES TO ENGLISH VIDS?!

are you really doing the clickbait thumbnail thing? :/ not great. watch veritasium's video on clickbait. it'll show you how to do it without being... kinda scummy.

Also, the trick to a good twist is that, if the players knew what you knew, it would be obvious.

For example, in a megadungeon campaign I planned for AD&D, there's the ruin of what was once a wizard's tower. The wizard was a black hearted necromancer who committed vile atrocities in his quest for lichdom, which he finally achieved. The tower was destroyed in the same battle that destroyed the lich.

Close by, there's a wizard's academy which remains politically neutral; the children of nobility and wealthy merchants go there from not only the whole kingdom, but from the surrounding kingdoms too (let's say it's really close to the borders of four countries). It's a pretty good place to go for advice once the players have discovered some form of magical door that they don't know how to open. The headmaster of the academy tells them that there's the possibility that the old lich's notes are still down there, and that they need to be kept out of the hands of the unscrupulous - the path to lichdom involves many evils.

What the players don't know, is that the headmaster is sick, and no clerics have been able to aid him. He believes it's a curse from an ambitious underling, who may intend to use the school as a means to gain political influence. In order to prevent this from happening, he has decided to become a lich, and as such, will do whatever he can to aid the party in bringing him those notes.

Knowing the above, there are many ways that some or all of this information could eventually be revealed to the party - including, if they are incredibly incurious, the population of a nearby village going missing, and the headmaster now being a lich.

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)..."

Brilliant video. I hope every new dm sees this.

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

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.

ive seen a lot of dm tips for beginners this is the most succinct. thank you

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.

Your conclusions to these videos are excellent.

Over prepping is my doom.

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.

On the paranoia as world building point. I have a player in my games. He has been "trained" by evil DMs to be paranoid AF. He's really useful both as an idea generator and as a way to make the party move forward.

Once, he decided to engage in conversation with an monk NPC that I planted there mostly as decor, so I answered everything with cryptic (read nonsensical) phrases. He believed there was a puzzle to solve there, he noted every single answers. At some point I had to sit down, read the whole thing (I had to ask him for his notes because I had no recollection of what I said), and find some meaning in my own gibberish so I could plan something that he would link to the cryptic lines and think he found out their meaning.

I'm so glad that the amount of DM advice has exploded recently. Between this channel, Matt Colville, and Seth Skorkowsky, it's made prepping to run my first Traveller game much easier. Mostly by giving me permission to not prep, make a few bullet points and a flow chart, and wing it

One thing to use as a DM is passive skill scores. As was mentioned unless failure would have a major impact if a passive score is equal to or above the DC of a skill check then there is no need to roll the check. This really helps with Perception and Stealth cutting down on the number of die rolls but works with any skill.

"roll if failure would be interesting" is so true!
learned that running Alien. the wording in that game is "only roll if the stakes are high enough that failure adds to the conflict"

Another trick to GMing is to treat as many elements as modular as reasonably possible. If the player characters never swallow that plot hook that brings them into the dungeon, the dungeon always has existed for a whole different reason - it stays available for future plot hooks. I especially like to do this with NPC backgrounds. Basically, I have a few personal stories which I ripped from things like soap operas. When the player characters start to care about an NPC, this situation then is part of their life. It creates an illusion of depth when the NPC was just a blacksmith which I randomly decided to play as very melancholic.

Good advice!

I haven't watched the whole video yet but the fact that the beginning of the video and the thumbnail both say 6 is so funny to me because in the actual title it says top 5🤣🤣🤣

I’m really liking your vids,

You should caveat this advice by informing the viewer you have selected Theater of the Mind's Eye as your medium. You can't, for example, quickly provision a map in a VTT, and if you do select one for your Goblin Kitchen, it'd better have kitchen art on it...

Good advice all around 👍. Great vid, take care and stay safe 😎 🤘 🍻

Climbing never allowed take 10 or 20 your example is horrid and I also disagree