forum The GM's Workshop

Started January 29, 2018 by @Noydian Slip

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Sometimes you need a little help as a Game Master. This thread is here to help! Ask advice from fellow GMs on any number of topics!

Creating your own world, but not sure what to put in it? Ask!

Have a sweet idea for a quest line, but not sure how to flesh it out? Ask!

Players throwing a wrench into your plans and you're not sure what to do? Ask!

NPC generation. Story creation. Home-brew rule fine-tuning. Random encounter ideas. Integrating PC backstories. Handling PC death scenarios. Reward systems. Using the rules. NOT using the rules. The madness of being GM means a lot of things on your plate at once. How can you manage it? Ask!

I'm having a real hard time with creating life life, political parties systems, and relatable characters, (I also lost my 20,000 word document where i was starting to set all that up) BUT thats besides the point!

Creating life, huh? Does this mean you're making your own creatures/plants and so on? Or do you mean you're having trouble setting up what everyday life is in your world?

For political party systems, I find that an "opposite factions" approach is the easiest to keep track of, flesh out, and tweak to make sense. Start simple: Let's say I want three political parties to be the dominant/majority options for the world. What makes them different? For this example, I'll call them the Lemon Meringue, Key Lime, and French Silk parties. Starting with one detail for each party party, lay out the skeleton of their UNIQUE political beliefs.

The Lemon Meringue Party believes that the current segregation of fruit and non-fruit pies is wrong and needs to end.

The Lime Party believes that this segregation is needed because non-fruit pies are deemed to be mutants and dangerous to the fruit pie public.

The French Silk Party believes secession is needed for non-fruit pies to ever attain equality.

Three options, each with a different PURSUABLE goal. That part is important, assuming the players are going to be even somewhat involved with the politics of the world.

From here, we flesh each one out with the classic question of why.

Why does do the Lems want this? Perhaps a war has waged on too long over this issue? Maybe the threat of secession may doom the nation economically? What if the leader of the Lem party is being bribed or has a personal agenda? Choosing one, add it's counterpart to another of the parties. In two pages of skeleton notes, you'll be able to pull together a political climate that makes sense without getting convoluted to the point of losing player interest.

For the last one, creating relatable characters is something that can be incredibly difficult depending on how well you know your players. My advice is this: for characters that the players encounter and TALK TO, give them a slight detail on the character at introduction, and expand on it if opportunity presents itself in conversation. Keep in mind that they will not all be winners, which is fine because making everyone relatable simply does not work to make a good story. Being relatable using theater of mind starts with aesthetics: Let the players form in image of the person/thing they are speaking to.

Example: Classic bar scene. The PCs go to speak to the bartender. Rather than launch into the conversation straight out, give a tiny description first. "The bartender is a rotund man with a huge mustache. His fingers twirl at one end of it as you approach." It takes just a second and gives the players an image of this NPC in their heads. He is a man of grooming now, not just a quest hook.

If the NPC talks back, speak with a mannerism or tone. This sounds like an obvious fact from a GM 101 class, but I often catch myself talking in monotone or with my standard speaking voice more than once a session. If you don't present the character as having feeling or form, the players will not perceive them as having feeling or form. It doesn't take a lot to make "Bartender 1" into Big Gerry, the bartender with a heart of gold and mustache to match. How would such a man act? Confident? Discerning of other's facial hair? Jovial? Perhaps he's a curmudgeon that softens up when people compliment his mustache? From such a small detail, an entire persona can rapidly appear.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have more details or need more advice!

THANK YOU!!! see my problem is im so spread out with my whole world im building my world, while building story arcs, which in a way helps because it helps form my thought of the wprld as well, but then im spreading myself between 2000 different things, all while trying to still flesh out geography cities NPCs items, and other such things that need to be made haha

Hello! I'm currently doing a lengthy campaign with adventure arcs that lead into an over-arching plot.
I kind of want the over-arching plot to be tied together by a prophecy which foreshadows everything super vaguely. Also then it would make sense as to why my player characters are important to the story because they are in the prophecy. So everything isn't pure coincidence, but more that their fates are tied together. So every couple of sessions I'll reveal a line or two of the prophecy. Or are prophecies just stupid? Do I need to provide some context? Thanks!

@Yasmin Haq

I LOVE this idea! Here's a few thoughts I have on this story structure in regards to how it works and how to make it work as well as possible:

My first thought is how the prophecy is structured. Given this idea, I would structure it in one of three ways: 1.) Adaptive, 2.) Branching, or 3.) Predestined.

1.) The Adaptive method is the most free-form of these. Here, the prophecy is not "finalized" until very shortly before it comes into fruition. This allows the most freedom and story impact for the players, but is the most difficult to pull off for the GM. This is because the end point of the prophecy is perpetually mutable by the players' actions until it happens and requires the GM to be prepared for any number of possible outcomes. The end is impossible to predict, essentially. Using this, the players feel like they really are making the difference in the world, because they are!

However, this method comes with problems: The players may opt to change the prophecy to the point that the story is either ruined or taken so far off the rails that you can't pull things back on track without meta-gaming. This method is also has a higher probability of the players getting lost (or being uncertain of where to go) than the others. As GM, your improvisation skills will be tested using this method, so make sure you take diligent notes on player choices so that when the endgame of the prophecy approaches, you can reference the pertinent player choices that have happened and wrap it up in a way that makes sense.

An excellent way to run an Adaptive storyline using a prophecy is to have few different options for how the final event unfolds, and have what happens in the game steer the prophecy to the most appropriate end goal. Consider the following example:

For my Adaptive prophecy, I'll have four "final" outcomes. Let's say a massive uprising of the undead is soon to happen through an unknown party's influence. Any and all corpses will reanimate and kill all living beings around them. Here's four end options I can have where is the base scenario:

• The uprising happens, and all life is destroyed.
• The uprising happens, and all life is NOT destroyed.
• The uprising is prevented, and the party responsible is dealt with.
• The uprising is prevented, and party responsible is NOT dealt with (escapes, disappears, is never found out, etc.).

Working behind the scenes as GM, start with option #1 as the end point, and start the players with options to change that end point to any of the other three outcomes. Perhaps a rumor of a necromancer stockpiling bodies in a nearby tower has a town concerned. This necromancer, in turn, could be an agent of an evil deity that wants the uprising to happen. After that, the deity may turn its attention to the players specifically and make active efforts to hinder them. This is only one of MANY ways to start a prophecy-driven story. The beauty of the prophecy is that you can transcend time and linear storytelling in a believable way.

After each choice is made, adjust the revealed informational tidbit of the prophecy to reflect how the end point has changed, or not changed. Of course, the exact details are up to you, but I find the details much easier to fabricate with a general goal in mind. Do the players kill the necromancer before getting any information out of them? Do they talk it out and let the necromancer live? Is the necromancer even involved in bringing the prophecy to reality? How does that change the end point? Doing this after every major plot-related choice guarantees the end event will make sense and be adapted to what the players have done, without telegraphing what that result was going to be.

2.) The Branching method is the easiest method to use for a game that still allows the player's choices to affect the end point with with less grey area for them to get lost in. This is because it is slightly more restrictive in what the players can do to change the outcome. For this method you must have a set number of ending scenarios at the start. I'll use the same four end points from the first example.

Again, start with option #1 as the event that will happen if left to fate, and again, give the players a quest hook to change it (the necromancer). This time, however, when the players confront the necromancer, you as the GM have two or three certain options for how the encounter will turn out. Let's say you've mapped out the storyline and the options that come up for the story to progress are either A.) The necromancer says nothing and fights to the death, or B.) The necromancer talks and reveals information when beaten. Using your story map, each of these outcomes leads to a different scenario. Option A leads to the players communing with the evil deity directly on accident, and option B leads to them finding out about a meeting of undead sympathizers happening in three days. The players never need to know that only two outcomes were possible, because you don't have to tell them!

The problem with this method is steering the story toward set number of options when things that are unexpected happen, and they WILL happen. What of the rogue sneaks in and manages to get into the necromancer's lair undetected? You don't want to completely invalidate the players efforts too often! So, instead the necromancer talking, the rogue finds a journal in his desk that reveals the same information. It's easier to improvise when you know what the outcomes are going be.

When mapping out a Branching storyline, you start with one point (the uprising and total death of all life) and end with just a few (the four options stated above, or in most systems, just two options where option is total success and option two is total failure). After each choice is made, reveal in the prophecy a small scene from the scenario that will cause the next branch in the path to happen. In this case, the players get the info out of the necromancer, and subsequently have a vision of a massive ritual where a dragon is being revived to life. When they arrive at that point, they must have choices to make, which will determine their next vision. The trick here is to reveal enough information about the next plot point to keep the players interested without eliminating their ability to make choices on how to handle it. The end points are usually pretty evident early on ion this model, so it's up to you and your map of branches to make the journey interesting!

3.) The Predestined method is the most straightforward way to tell a story. Here, there is only one end point. The first one. Each prophetic vision granted to the players is predetermined after each "choice" is made. Except it's not a choice, it's the illusion of choice. The most important thing to remember as a GM for this method to work is to NEVER make it evident to the players that the end is not changeable. Give them the quest hooks, let them accomplish tasks and change things in the world, but never change the end goal. Some unseen force or a unfortunate coincidence seems to oust the players' attempts to steer fate.

This method also has problems to be dealt with. First and foremost, keeping the balance between player accomplishment and failure. The players should never feel, much less know, that their quest is fruitless and doomed from the start. Let them thwart evil powers and seem to win, only to have the visions continue and a new danger show up greater than the last. The example I use is extreme, and having a final campaign plot point fall in the camp of "total failure" can leave the players a bit empty at the end (my players very much liked it, but you should absolutely make your end point in this method one that the players will appreciate if not enjoy. Happily ever after is a perfectly acceptable and often wonderful result).

These are only three of several ways to make this work, tweak any of them to suit you, or even use more than one at different points in your story! Maybe some plot point are totally changeable while others are absolute! In regards to providing context through prophecy: give less in the Predestined method, give more in the Adaptive method, and treat the Branching as a middle ground giving context only when needed to make the next choice apparent.

I hope this helps. If you have more questions, please ask! I'm happy to offer my opinions on anything that any time, and I'm glad to clarify on any points I made above. I can really ramble when I want to…

Thanks! This is really valuable information.

I have another question…How do you structure a campaign? I have an endgame in mind, and we've already played the very beginning of the campaign. Everything in the middle (adventures and the lot) is a blur, although I have a couple of ideas. l've never played or run a campaign before this, so any tips would be awesome! Thanks.

I have another question…How do you structure a campaign? I have an endgame in mind, and we've already played the very beginning of the campaign. Everything in the middle (adventures and the lot) is a blur, although I have a couple of ideas. l've never played or run a campaign before this, so any tips would be awesome! Thanks.

First and foremost, keep it straightforward. If you've never run a game, take a couple of sessions to figure out what style of GMing suits you. Once you're comfortable with what you're doing, build the complexity and depth of detail in your world.

This same strategy is good to apply to your actual campaign. Start simple with something like a solitary plot-important quest hook or a leisurely "wait for further instruction" period. Use this time to gauge your players' reactions to what you're doing. What do they like? What interests them? What DOESN'T interest them? Use this information to decide where to point the party in the campaign. Pick the missions and quests that cater to their tastes, be them combat-heavy, RP-heavy, just plain goofy, or whatever balance you find makes the game good for the players.

For how to specifically structure a campaign, here's what I did for my first one:

First, get the party together and on the road, preferably in one session (which you've already done, very nice!).

Second, kick-start the main storyline with a plot-driving quest to let the PCs get to know each other and their styles of play. Make it simple, make it easy. Take your time to get all of the information you want the players to have to them. The journey should get more challenging with time.

Third, side quests and silliness! Distract from the over-arching storyline with smaller quests and random encounters. Let the players have some fun, and give yourself an opportunity to use ideas that may not have fit into your main story.

Fourth (and finally), balance between the main story and side stuff in a way that never lets the main plot become a secondary objective for the party. Your sessions handling matters related to the main plot vs. sessions spent putzing around off the main path should be near 3-to-1, at least for your first campaign. Obviously, this is just an advisory guideline, so set your pace according to what the players want to get done and what you want to accomplish as a storyteller.

Let me know if you have more question or needier details, I'm glad to help out!

Yes! Thank you so much! If I have any more questions, I'll definitely ask.

@"Noydian Slip"

I love that you are doing this. I am a first time DM as well. I am actually fairly new to D&D in general, and somehow got sucked into being my groups' DM. I have an overarching story. I have great plot twists, and I have objectives that need to be accomplished to progress the story. My issue is every week, I feel like I'm completely lost in how to prepare for the next session. Sometimes I go in and just wing it, taking some of the encounters I prepared for the previous week but didn't get to, other times I set up a number of options for encounters, and when a good time for an encounter comes up I roll a dice and go with the option chosen. I feel like I am left improvising everything, and sometimes I feel like I have no idea what I am doing or how I am doing it. Do you have any suggestions or advice to prepare to a point that at least you, as the DM, feel like you are at least in control?

Since I'm not exactly experienced, I don't know if I can be of any use…I'm in the same situation. But I used to write very detailed notes, so that I would be prepared for everything when I started. Now I've become pretty lenient with myself. As a DM, half the beauty of it is making things up on the spot to challenge or please your characters. However, here's a couple things I do to prepare:

If you have an overarching story, I'm assuming your going to have several arcs/adventures? If so, what I've done is begin with an event that sparks the plot into action. For example: As you hike up this path, you hear a screeching sound coming from farther up. As you investigate, you see an injured hawk with a note attached to it. It reads: Help! Send reinforcements. Suddenly, a boom fills the air. You think it may have come from above.(sorry about this dumb example).

Another thing I do is create NPC's that the characters can rely on for instruction. This character explains what the characters need to do or give background information. This is helpful if your players have never played DnD before too. Give the NPC an alignment and 3-4 adjectives to describe personality or looks. This will also help you push along the adventure.

One last thing. Sometimes players will try to question your authority as DM or get off topic. I'm assuming that this happens to many DMs. Your players do respect you, but they just don't understand the work that goes into DMing unless they've done it themselves. Don't be nice to your players. And sometimes you can have authority over their characters if needed.

I hope this helped? I'm running my first adventure arc right now. My party has just completed the exposition of my campaign. I'm probably not the person you were expecting advice from, but I tried my best. :)

@PsychoBacon86 Sorry for the late response, I've been away! @Yasmin Haq makes some good points. Here's my take on how to help and some advice going forward:

To cut down on having improve so frequently, I use "roots". The idea here is that for any given story arc, main or not, there are two "trees". The beginning tree (the story hook) and the end tree (story conclusion). The roots are stepping stones with small details between these two trees that I pull from to flesh out the journey on the fly. It's improv, but since I already have a basic idea of what's happening, it's easy and sounds like I had it prepared the whole time. Here's an example:

The beginning tree - An ancient artifact is stolen from a museum in broad daylight by a masked assailant. The party is hired to track down the thief and return the artifact.

The end tree - The party recovers the artifact and sees justice done.

Now, what roots can I use to make a treeline to bring everything together? Start simple and stay simple. The party is given a lead on an NPC that is sitting in jail that may know something. The root here is just this: "Jailed thief has connections to gang, gang is rival to the organization the artifact thief worked for, jailed thief is low ranked."

With just this information, I can fabricate details much more easily while leaving plenty of wiggle room for changes when the PCs inevitably destroy my plans.

After this, another root: "Jailed thief gives info on an upcoming battle in the gang war. Three days from now, a raid on an enemy warehouse is planned."

And another: "Party witnesses gang battle, finds orders dropped by raided gang. Name of "captain" is found out, with time and place of their next thieving job."

And so on. I find this system works well for me because if (or indeed, when) the PCs veer off-course of the story or handle a root situation in a way that I didn't expect, I can come up with another root to follow it quite easily even if it's on the fly. Maybe the PCs get pulled into the gang fight, kill everyone, and leave without the orders. Perfect! Instead, the gang puts out a hit on the party, and if the party deals with the assassins, they find the same name on the kill orders. The story goes where it needs to, where I want it to.

The players keep the freedom of choice and the power of change over how the campaign plays out in this format. The drawback here is that it depends a lot on a more linear story progression. To counter this, I have three or four side quests, each with a few roots, saved for a rainy day when the PCs just aren't on track or become tired of blazing the main quest trail.

Preparation is excellent, but leave space to change! For an average session (4-5 hours) I have two pages or less of notes to pull from. Enough to manage the chaos while still letting it happen.

Hope this helps, thanks for posting! Let me know if I can offer advice on anything else.

Can this apply to Pathfinders?

Can this apply to Pathfinders?

Of course! Indeed, Pathfinder is the system I myself prefer to play. Whether you play any edition of D&D, Pathfinder, Starfinder, or the myriad of other roleplaying games out there, hopefully this thread will serve to help make your games better than before!

@"Noydian Slip" Okay, thanks!

I know that this is probably dead…but I'm hoping to run a campaign in the summer. (Warning: this post is where I'm semi-ranting on a character-please forgive that)
I am very creative, initiative, and am lenient most of the time (I prefer fun times over rules)
Currently, we have:

• A Tabaxi Monk (Male)
• A Tabaxi Bard (Female)

And…

• Our Dragonborn Paladin! (Male)

The "special" thing about all of this is: Every character was previously made for a campaign that's just started, which may be a good thing, but there's a special feature to our paladin, who's been homebrewed by the player. He has two forms: LG and CE, and he can only transform to his CE form in dire situations, and even then, it's a 1/4 chance. Pretty balanced until you get to the CE form's abilities and…something else.
Our paladin (in CE form) has wings and can fly, can summon up to 3 lesser devils, and has an evil aura surrounding him so that any creature within 10 feet of him takes 3d6 necrotic damage. Also, there is…the coin.
The coin is a relic that the player says was given to them by their god, Janice (Roman god, essentially the god of good and evil, decisions, etc.) Every time the character decides-whether it be fighting the BBEG, choosing to either save an ally or deal the last blow on an enemy, or whether to become super PO'd on the one annoying character, so much so he hits them-he has to flip his coin so that his god decides what his character should do.
Right off the bat, I do not like this. It is unique and can cause some hilarious moments, yes, but in a campaign I was playing in, his character stole the spotlight, along with our barbarian, leaving me (the warlock), our druid, our cleric, and our ranger…just there, like we were just going along for the ride. Please keep in mind that…the paladin guy in the campaign I'm playing in is our DM. I support DM's playing a character and having fun, but I don't normally like it unless the DM is also giving other people the spotlight.
I'm trying to determine whether to play along with them, making sure as to not steal the spotlight. I also have a pretty good idea of my world, how it works, and who the main BBEG is and their motives. I just don't know how to guide the players all the way to the end.
I've watched Matt Mercer's videos (and many others!) on how to be a good DM-but creating a good plot that the players and characters will enjoy and freely interact with has always been a struggle-I'm used to banking off of someone in RP's, and I know that can't happen in D&D, otherwise it would bore all of us.
I was hoping to end this off on a good note, like how I've been spending as much free time I have on this, but I think I need help from an experienced person. After all, saying "no" isn't exactly easy for me.

Is anyone familiar with Powered By the Apocalypse (system that runs monster of the week, among other things)? I'm trying to do a version of it called "The Sword, the Crown, and the Unspeakable Power," and I'm struggling with enemy encounters currently.

HI @Momentia, if you still need advice I could lend a hand. This paladin seems to have something that I refer to as "chosen one syndrome". He wants to see himself as the main character of a story and be the hero. Which in its self is not a bad bad thing, but when it translates into a player treating other players charters as sidekicks it can make everyone at the table a little upset especially when everyone is supposed to be a team.
.
He homebrewed a special paladin type that sounds OP (Depending on level) and the coin actually is a cheap copout on RP if they leave choices up to random chance then they are really making no choices. In the end, I feel this is more of an NPC than a PC and from the origins of this character being DM's PC, the only reason it got cleared for play in the first place was that it was possibly a DM self insert. (I personally would not have allowed this character at my table).

First, If you are a New DM or even an experienced one you can make the excuse that you don't want any homebrew in the game so there is a less gray area within the rules or even impose Adventure League rules.

Second, you could ask them to tweak everything to balance it more. For example, his character also takes the 3d6 necrotic damage, limits his fight, lower the number of devils and/or imposes a turn limit in the CE form say it can only be maintained for 5 turns or 1d6+1 turns per combat.

Lastly, the most simple, but maybe even the hardest, solution is explaining that you are not comfortable with the character. It can be hard telling someone no especially if they like the character. but in the end, the DM has the table to think about and if everyone would have more fun if he played a different character then he should.

And if none fo this works for you kit out your other players, let them earn gear that lets them take the spotlight. I don't recommend this do to the simple fact that you may end up having a hard time creating problems they can't solve instantly

I hope this helps and Good luck

AvaM_Star

P.S. As a DM I personally would not play a DM PC. It just makes another thing for you to keep track of within a world other othering you need to manage. And in combat you the DM will have another turn you are taking that the PCs are not. When I'm running BEG and his ten minions I don't want to say, "And now that the monsters are done it's my turn." As the DM I'm already getting to play the most at the table both in and out of combat and I enjoy the breathers I get with the party talks amongst them selfs.

@Bec_to_the_future, I run a modified system of "Powered By the Apocalypse" that uses d10's rather than d6's and I understand encounters can be hard and I may be able to help. Are you have problems balances encounters or running them in-game?

I just don’t know how to approach encounters at all. This is my first time writing one.

From what I've experienced is that encounters in the PBTA system work best when everything else reacts to the characters. By making an attack they open them selfs up to a counter-attack. Charters will only take harm from the consequences of their own actions. So my best advice for constructing an encounter is to pick and BBEG that fits in your story and figure out their general harm that they would deal on a counter-attack.

From my experience, PBTA is a system that works best telling a story rather than being a combat-based game. If the characters can avoid combat by being clever and outsmarting the opponents, is just as good if not better than actually fighting them. Granted my system is filled with monsters that could end my players with barely any effort and I don't know much about your setting.

Ah, okay! The system I’m running on is a dark fantasy setting with human enemies, and some magical shenanigans. This encounter is just going to be the standard brigands though.

Ok, that a great start, try not to put too many enemies in front of your characters it can become a major problem especially if people are not use to the system.

Yeah, I was careful about that for sure. I have a party of 5, so would 3 or 4 enemies cut it?