RPG Advice I Wish I Had Received As A New GM
Fairly basic tips that I don't see repeated enough.
This is a post where I try to summarize some ideas about running TTRPGs that I wish I knew about from the very beginning.
My goal here is to provide a list of tips that are:
actionable: I try to avoid vague guidelines like “remember that the GM is a player, too!” Those aren’t useless, but here I intend to provide a list of specific choices you can make.
underemphasized: I try to exclude tips that appear in every single “new GM advice” thread on the internet.
low-homework: I won’t tell you to grow your GM muscles by watching more fantasy movies, reading more history books or doing creative exercises (though all of that would probably help!) While some of my tips require effort, it’s not meant to be extra effort but rather alternative effort (I assume you’ll put in about the same amount of work, but of a different kind).
Disclaimer
(skip this section unless you care about my credentials and originality)
Writing this post gives me a bit of imposter syndrome. While I am no RPG newbie, I cannot in good faith call myself a veteran, either1. If you ever see a veteran contradict anything written here, they’re probably right.
Also, virtually none of the advice below is original to me. It’s mostly universal stuff everyone figures out eventually when playing2, or something I gleaned from rulebooks, conversations, or blogs like Bastionland, Goblin Punch or The Alexandrian. Still, I do think I have distilled or paraphrased these ideas in a way that might make them click for someone, so I do consider this worth posting all the same.
One last thing: there are many different ways to play RPGs; my advice mostly applies to the “characters explore an open-ended world and solve problems with ingenuity” playstyle.
Below are seven tips, followed by some discussion of common RPG advice that I think is sometimes unhelpful. Enjoy!
1. If you can’t say yes, say no ASAP
A truism: the essence of RPGs is player freedom. “Don’t plan outcomes”, “let the dice fall where they may”, “prep situations, not plots”, etc. I agree with this; you should always err on the side of more options.
But some adventures absolutely need certain assumptions to hold, like:
the players will accept the mission
the players will work together as a team
the players will be heroes/adventurers/criminals
the players will stay within the bounds of the city/region/planet
If that’s the case, then it’s totally fine to disallow choices that would contradict those assumptions. But disallow them explicitly! Don’t waste your table’s time by trying to manipulate them into making the “right” choice like you’re playing pinball.
Example: In my first ever session, I decided to do the “traditional” thing of starting the player characters in a tavern and having a questgiver NPC ask them to investigate trouble in a nearby salt mine. They accepted the quest, but not before mischievously contemplating rejecting it just to see what happens, which made me a little nervous as I wouldn’t have known what to do then.
If I ran this session today and they did actually reject the quest, I could probably improvise a short unrelated adventure to occupy their time. But I probably just wouldn’t bother with the tavern. “You start in the salt mine, having previously accepted a quest to investigate trouble herein.”3 You can just make it happen!
2. Don't disguise cutscenes as gameplay
This point so similar to #1 that I considered merging the two, but they are subtly different, and I consider this an important enough idea to be worth repeating.
In brief, just as you shouldn’t act as if an unavailable path is available, so should you also not pretend that a meaningless choice is meaningful.
Example: I once played in a campaign where the first session started us off with character introduction scenes. One player’s character was fighting in a gladiatorial arena, another’s was running through city streets, while the third was traveling through the wilderness.
The scenes were fairly prolonged (the gladiator fight was resolved via normal combat rules), but eventually every single one of them ended with the PC getting poisoned, falling unconscious, and then all of them waking up on the same ship, en route to a big island where the campaign proper was meant to take place.
And, well, if this was a book or a movie then that would have been a pretty strong start. Many stories take their time showing what a character’s life had been before the story’s inciting incident.
But in this game, we spent most of the session making choices that ended up being mostly meaningless because the outcome had been predetermined.4 That’s not a great use of valuable session time!
If you really want to flesh characters out a little bit before throwing them into the real action, you should use flashbacks. “You awake together on a ship, the last thing you remember was being poisoned and losing consciousness. How did end up in this situation? Let’s play this out in a few short scenes!”5 And after you’re done with that, you can move on to the actual gameplay.
3. When stumped, roll a d6
As they explore your world, the players will inevitably ask questions whose answers are neither obvious nor covered by your prep:
does this liquor cabinet contain any liquor?
is the city’s mayor elected or appointed?
how long can mermaids survive on land?
Don’t spend time contemplating the “most balanced” answer. Instead, just think of two meaningfully different answers (e.g. yes and no), assign them any probability that fits on a six-sided die6 (e.g. 1-3 = no, 4-6 = yes), roll it and let it decide. You may roll in secret or have the players do it.
In my experience, this is the secret to low prep. You can leave most of the adventure blank and make the call as it comes up. If you’re rolling for it, it doesn’t feel biased towards or against the players!
(random tables are also good for this)
4. If time is a resource, it should be tracked
Gary Gygax once boldly proclaimed (emphasis original):
One of the things stressed in the original game of D&D was the importance of recording game time with respect to each and every player character in the campaign. In AD&D it is emphasized even more: YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.
Was he right? If you’re running a game where time is a scarce resource and players are rewarded for allocating it prudently, then I think yeah, he kind of was. As Arnold K puts it:
Every action in the dungeon has a cost. Searching the bone pile takes precious time. Torches will burn down. There is the chance that a random encounter might occur. Searching the bone pile is a bit like a shop where items are purchased with torchlight and blood.
I see some games suggest solving the “failures on a skill check are boring” problem with guidelines like “let it ride” (a skill check’s outcome cannot be changed until the circumstances are different) or “fail forward” (don’t just say “nothing happens”, both success and failure must push the story forward). I admit that I haven’t played those types of games enough to evaluate these guidelines. But I argue that with time tracking, they’re not strictly necessary.
Your thief failed to pick the lock? Sure, they can try again, but precious minutes have been wasted.
What does time tracking in RPGs look like, exactly? Old School Essentials (a retroclone of B/X D&D) presents rules like this: (selected rules, edited for brevity):
Movement
Exploring the unknown: When exploring unknown areas of a dungeon, characters can move their base movement rate in feet per turn. [1 turn = 10 minutes in-game time] This very slow rate of movement accounts for PCs exploring in a dark, unknown environment, moving carefully and stealthily, and mapping their progress.
In familiar areas: When PCs are moving through dungeon areas with which they are familiar, the referee may allow them to move at a faster rate. For example, the referee might allow PCs to move at three times their base movement rate per turn, when moving through familiar areas.Resting
Frequency of rest: Characters must rest for one turn every hour in the dungeon.
Penalty for not resting: A –1 penalty to attack and damage rolls is incurred until the characters rest for one turn.Searching
Time: Searching takes one turn.
Referee rolls: The referee should always roll for the character searching, so that the player does not know if the roll failed or if there are simply no hidden features present.
One chance: Each character can only make one attempt to search a specific area or item.Wandering Monsters
Frequency: A check is typically rolled once every two turns in the dungeon.
Chance: The typical chance of encountering a wandering monster is 1-in-6.
Distance: Wandering monsters are encountered 2d6 × 10 feet away, moving in the direction of the party.
There are upsides to being this thorough. But if you want, you can make it much simpler. Into the Odd, my go-to RPG, just says this:
In populated areas, the Referee rolls d6 each time the group moves into a new area, loiters, or makes loud noise. A roll of 1 means the group encounters something, a roll of 2 means they hear something approaching or nearby, and 3–6 means there is no encounter.
That’s it! It really is a very simple way to add a lot of depth to character decisions. I cannot recommend it enough.7
(also consider a handy time tracker sheet like this one)
5. Quick character replacement is more important than realism
If a character dies and you don’t have spare NPCs to be turned into PCs, have the replacement conveniently wait around the corner, and (assuming it’s a cooperative game) ask the players to consider immediately accepting them as an ally.
This isn’t super realistic, but it beats the alternative of the player having nothing to do for several hours, or wasting time on long introductory conversations.
If you feel this makes the game too easy, offset the convenience by pairing it with a cost, e.g.:
the replacement rolls a Charisma check (or equivalent), if they fail, the party wastes time arguing (see #4 above)
the replacement is accompanied by an enemy or hazard
the replacement adds £1000 to the party’s collective debt in administrative costs (this one’s from Electric Bastionland)
6. At least read a few adventures
I once ran a one shot for a group of mostly first-time players. One of them got so inspired after just one session that he started building his own game world the morning after. His girlfriend posted a photo of him at his desk, drawing a region map on his computer.
That was, and still is, heartwarming, and I would never discourage that sort of creativity. I really hope the guy ended up running a game (I never followed up).
Worldbuilding is a perfectly good reason to get into GMing. But even if you know a lot about what makes a good fictional setting, that’s not the same as knowing what you need to prepare a good adventure for a game in that setting.
I think the best thing you can do here is learn from published adventures.
I won’t tell you to run them if you’re eager to play in a world of your own. But at least read a few of them!8
Here’s a short list of free adventures to check out, roughly sorted from most to least dungeon-centered9:
Tomb of the Serpent Kings (“tutorial dungeon” with commentary that explains its design choices)
Lair of the Lamb (introductory “funnel” dungeon where each player controls a handful of “level 0” characters that aren’t all expected to survive)
Supercapacitor (puzzle-y electric dungeon)
The Sky-Blind Spire (non-Euclidean tower dungeon)
The Sepulchre of Seven (dungeon with a big backstory involving long-gone heroes)
Prison of the Worm Queen (weird city neighborhood + manor + dungeon)
Trouble in Twin Lakes (two mysteries in one region; rural area + wilderness + dungeon)
A Fistful of Feathers (forest with giant geese)
Jack-o’-Lantern Nightmare (Stranger Things-style suburban Halloween adventure with kid protagonists)
Lady Blackbird (romantic steampunk space journey with an established cast of characters and relationships; driven by drama and collaborative worldbuilding, not tactical at all)
Also consider following a game-oriented worldbuilding procedure like the Gygax 75 Challenge.
7. You will never have a campaign that spans IRL decades
You might have read one of those news articles about a group of friends who have been playing in the same long continuous campaign for 20 years. They have a big, organic world whose history has been shaped by their previous adventures; their current characters are grandchildren of the ones they’d been playing as in the year 2005, and so on.
You might have then fantasized about playing in that kind of campaign with your own friends. And I’m here to tell you that you will never get to experience this. Sorry!
Okay, “never” is, of course, hyperbole. You may very well encounter people in real life who get to boast of superlong campaigns like that. But it’s unlikely.
Think about what you’re asking for. You need a group of people who will never move or grow apart, whose lives will never get in the way of the campaign schedule, and who will continue to enjoy not only the same hobby and the same game system, but the same continuous game in that system. You think you’ve got better odds than the Beatles?
I don’t disagree with those who argue for long campaigns on the grounds that length provides depth. RPGs are about player choices that change the game world, and those changes are much more meaningful if you get to experience them in a future session10. By all means, aim for this goal. Just be aware that a fizzling out or an “indefinite hiatus” are very possible even if everyone involved does everything right.
What can you do about this?
Plan a longish campaign but with a predetermined climax. Example pitch: “your ship has crashed on an undiscovered planet. You can travel wherever you want, but at the end of session #24 a comet will hit the planet, killing everybody. Whether you prevent it, escape, or perish, that will be the end of the campaign.” Dreaming Dragonslayer offers more pitches like this.
Run short campaign “seasons” in the same world. Do what TV series do: plan a short campaign (~8 sessions), conclude it where it makes sense, take a break, and then ask your players if they’re interested in a sequel. If they do, repeat. You may very well get a long chain of seasons this way, but if not, you’ll still end up with something you can call a satisfying finale.
Embrace the anticlimax. Who said you need to go out with a bang? In a way, RPG characters are less like movie or novel characters and more like real people, in that their lives are not planned out in advance. Anything can happen, and just because you have to say a premature goodbye to a character doesn’t mean the relationship wasn’t worthwhile. So just run a campaign for as long as there’s interest, and then let it die, with or without loose ends. As long as you’re aware of the possibility, you don’t have to hate it.
That was my advice to you. Below you may also find some discussion on some very common RPG advice that I don’t exactly disagree with, but sometimes find unhelpful. My opinions here are more controversial, less actionable and less certainly held, so rather than include them in the list of tips, I’m calling them “addenda” instead.
Addendum: on hacking and “making the game your own”
(or, “new players don’t know what they want”)
The wonderful thing about RPGs is that is that the GM is in charge of all the rules, so if they don’t like anything about the rulebook, they can just change it. This makes all GMs game designers in a small way, which is great.
But sometimes this doesn’t work out. You may discover that your amendments sound good on paper but make the game worse when implemented.
I would hate to discourage boldness here. “You dare invent house rules? Who do you think you are?” If you love experimentation, indulge!
I would merely point out is that if you or your group have no RPG experience, then your idea of what you are likely to enjoy in a session is limited. It’s very plausible that, if you give rulebooks as-written a chance, you will discover that you don’t need to hack them after all!
You will probably be better off if, at first, you follow the following process:
Pick a game whose concept appeals to you
Try running it by the book
After some time, make minor changes to it (if you want)
If you feel the need to make major changes, consider putting it away and starting again from step 1.
This advice especially applies to the fifth edition of The World’s Most Popular RPG.11 While it has been (implicitly) marketed as a game that can do anything, it has actually been designed to support a particular playstyle (one that involves tactical combat, character builds, hero-to-superhero growth, a motley crew of over-the-top adventurers, and a high magic world). These are the things it does best; if 5e is the game you want to start with, you should probably give this playstyle a chance. If that sounds totally unappealing, you’re better off starting with another game.12
Just to reiterate: I would really hate for this section to scare anyone away from adopting a DIY attitude to RPGs. DIY is great! I’m not saying that you’re not yet ready for it, only that you don’t yet need it. It’s not “don’t mess with the original recipe!” it’s “try it as-is, maybe you’ll like it!”
Addendum: on minimalism
Even though I prefer RPGs with simple rules, I am a bit conflicted on whether I would recommend them to new GMs or their players.
Obviously, a very complex ruleset is too inaccessible to be a good starting point. But I also feel like non-minimalistic rules can serve as a helpful structure for new players who are overwhelmed by the tactical infinity of RPGs. “What should I do? Let me look at my long skill list… Ooh, I can try Animal Handling!”
The same goes for GMs. A more complex ruleset may feel like more work but it may also provide more structure to resolve specific situations instead of saying “just wing it” when you’re not yet a seasoned winger.13 It’s a bit like learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels at first, and later taking them off.
That said, here’s a counterexample: I recently ran The Alchemist’s Repose for a group of mostly first-timers, in the aforementioned Into the Odd, a minimalist system. And it went really well! The minimal rules were easy to explain and this let them focus on creatively engaging with the diegetic details of the scenario, which was exactly what I wanted.
I guess my conclusion here is I really like Into the Odd. The ruleset is small but it’s really efficient, i.e. its few rules still do (relatively) a lot of legwork. Go play Into the Odd. (Or one of its sequels or hacks.)
Addendum: on “fun is the most important thing”
When you wish to understand an idea, it might be useful to think about its historical context. What was this or that opinion articulated in response to?
When people give advice like “remember that the #1 rule of gaming is that everyone at the table has fun!” or “if it’s not fun, it’s not worth doing!”, it’s probably because they witnessed someone so obsessed with rules/competition/whatever that they lost sight of that ultimate goal.
And yeah, I totally agree. If you’re consistently miserable while gaming, you’re doing something wrong.
But it does kind of feel like people are sometimes equivocating between “fun” and “quick gratification”.
“If it doesn’t provide quick gratification, it’s not worth doing!” Doesn’t sound right, does it?14
Look, I promise I’m not silently judging you if you treat RPG as a silly little pastime where you drink beer and eat pretzels with your friends.15
But if you’ve ever finished a difficult novel, or put on a stage play, or went on a long hike, you know that sometimes long-term enjoyment comes at the expense of short-term friction.
It’s not just a different preference (“some people like to take it easy, while others like to exert themselves”). Maybe they do, but it’s moreso that they like the fruits of said exertion.
Dwarf Fortress players like to say that losing can be fun. But even if losing is unpleasant, it might be worth enduring if that adds meaning to victory.
Think of gaming as a casino where instead of gambling with money, you gamble with your enjoyment. Suppose that if you play a particular game, your fun level will be:
6/10 if you lose
7/10 if you don’t play (instead you just hang out with your buddies)
9/10 if you win
Is this a fun game? If you’ll definitely lose, then no; not compared to the baseline. But if you stand a chance, then maybe!
I’m especially inexperienced when it comes to long campaigns; almost all of the games I have run so far have been one shots.
I give some example stories of RPG mistakes in the post, some of them my own but others made by my friends. Writing about the latter makes me feel kind of bad, like I’m embarrassing them publicly. I will only say that those same friends also taught me positive RPG lessons, and I appreciate our gaming experiences together a lot.
An acceptable reply to “but my character wouldn’t have accepted this quest!” is “fine, they do something else; meanwhile, please come up with a spare character who would have”.
This is related to the perennial “quantum ogre” debate. In short: suppose the GM really wants the players to fight an ogre. There’s a fork in the forest path, and if the players turn left, they encounter the ogre, but if they turn right, they also encounter the exact same ogre. Is this bad GMing?
The anti-ogre people say that it is, as the GM has invalidated the players’ choice. The pro-ogre camp replies that because the players had no way of knowing that there was also going to be an ogre on the path not taken, the illusion of naturalism holds, and so it’s fine.
I’m firmly anti-ogre; I think that if you keep throwing “random” things at players that are just a little bit too elegant and convenient, they will notice it (or their brains will). I think the best thing to do is to put the ogre on the left path and something meaningfully un-ogrelike on the right.
That said, if you really insist on the ogre, just eliminate the fork. Have only one path through the forest, and put the ogre there. It’s a bit restrictive, but it’s not deceptive, so I think that’s okay.
You can reduce the number of real choices, just don’t give them fake ones.
Powered by the Apocalypse games call this “asking loaded questions”. Why did you accept the mission? How did you get your scar? Which other PC is your biggest rival? etc.
Sometimes called “the luck die” or “the die of fate” in this context. Traditionally, high rolls favor the players.
Why d6 specifically? It doesn’t have to be, but I’m guessing many feel that probabilities lower than 1-in-6 aren’t worth bothering with here.
Advice #3 and #4 are about what RPG designers call procedures, GM-facing rules that help the GM randomly and impartially resolve game situations. For more, see idiomdrottning’s post on new GM advice or the procedure-heavy game Errant.
Didn’t I promise not to assign you homework? Well, think of it this way: you’re going to spend some time prepping your session anyway, so instead of starting with a blank page, why not take someone else’s finished work and then make liberal alterations to it until you get what you want? If you’ve never made soup, it’s probably less effort to riff on a soup recipe than to try to invent your own from scratch.
Another disclaimer: I have enjoyed reading all of these but have only had the chance to run two of them myself.
Example: I once played in a convention one shot where, as a reward for their heroism, our characters got to make a wish. “Are there any restrictions on wishes?”, we asked. The GM flipped through the rulebook. “Hmm, the rules mention certain risks and limitations… but since this is the end of our one-session game, I guess it doesn’t really matter, so just wish for whatever.” And so we wished for a post-scarcity utopia.
If that wish really came true (the GM decided at the last second to keep it a mystery) then that was, objectively, the greatest positive impact I’ve ever seen an RPG character make on a fictional world. And yet it didn’t feel that way. The GM was right: we weren’t ever going to revisit this world, so it didn’t really matter.
Yet another disclaimer: D&D 5e was my first RPG but has since become not my cup of tea, and I do wish there was more RPG system diversity. Me arguing against playing it feels like a conflict of interest (“if you follow my advice you will steer the RPG scene in the direction I want it to go, but it also just happens to be the optimal advice for you personally, trust me”). Oh well!
Example: I once played in a fairly normal 5e campaign whose GM later decided he wanted to run a gritty low fantasy game in a world where magic is uncommon. He thought it best to modify 5e instead of switching to a new system; he accomplished this mostly by just removing all magical classes and subclasses from the game (leaving only fighters, rogues and barbarians).
That’s not even a particularly radical change. Those three classes have sufficient variation between them, and it’s not as if going from “you can play as a nonspellcaster” to “you must play as one” is some huge leap. And yet I enjoyed that second campaign a lot less. Combat in particular was more boring, as it was presumably designed around the assumption that someone involved will be casting spells.
Example: My first time running a non-D&D game was a session of Lasers & Feelings, a well-known one-page RPG. I thought the simplicity would make it easier to run, but I actually ended up not knowing what to do in several situations, and the session was not very fun as a result.
See also: the “tyranny of fun”.
I cannot find it now, but I once saw a blogpost that made a point which went something like “if you say that you only play RPGs for fun, you should ask yourself if it’s really more fun than just unstructured hangout time; and if it’s not, then it might not be worth it”. I think I agree with that idea; if you’re not taking the hobby even a little seriously, then why put in all the time, effort and money into it?