What’s your favorite tip or trick for running games?
I’m a big fan of @slyflourish@ttrpg.network’s trick of preparing secrets, clues, or general plot point revelations in advance and without anticipating the context of where or how they will be revealed. That is, you just prepare a list of ten facts or details that will engage the players if and when they learn them, and you improvise how they learn them at the table. It’s great for when a player character unexpectedly goes to the library to aimlessly look for clues, or the PCs start talking with an NPC and you need to drop some nugget of info to make the conversation feel worthwhile.
Play the game the way it wants to be played.
Each game has a specific style/way it’s designed to be played. The system is for that specific thing, and usually it’s worth playing through at least a quick start, starter set, or simple module to figure out what that game demands.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hack or homebrew, but you should keep in mind what the system wants when you’re bolting things on to it.
A thousand games of political intrigue and noir detective work run in DND 5e just cried out in terror.
I feel (rightly & legitimately) called out 😭 I literally got two months into my renaissance political intrigue campaign before I discovered Court of Blades. It’s a perfect fit for my interests, but now my campaign is lousy with so many d&d tropes (Tieflings! Dhampirs! Changelings! Dragons!) that I more than likely couldn’t switch systems without home brewing everything out the wazoo 😓
I ran into my friends who are going to start a new pair of D&D 5e games. They don’t want to play the recommended encounters per day, and want to also use milestone leveling.
I just can’t understand why they buy 5e modules, then run them against 5e design? (Yes, most wotc modules are bad, but CoS at least can be run in the right way).
They would have so much more fun with Dungeon World, or an OSR system.
“make failure interesting or don’t roll”
Do not prepare a plot. You are not an author writing a story. You want to prepare an interesting world and an interesting situation, and the plot happens when your players interact with it.
I highly respect this bit of advice. It’s a classic. But I have also found it can assume a certain kind of player, and that there do exist players which seemingly desire a storyline they can just follow. They still want to have agency and make interesting and consequential decisions, but I still find them a bit aimless and lost when I drop them in a sandbox.
In fairness to this received wisdom, I think the phrase interesting situation is doing more work than I have historically given it credit for. It’s not just about it being interesting in the abstract, but (at least with some players and parties) presenting a status quo and then introducing (or threatening) the prospect of changing that status quo. I suppose my tl;dr is that with interesting situations inaction should feel like a meaningful choice. The orphanage will burn down, the criminal will escape, the freedom fighter will be caught. (Ideally, you leave the determination of whether they’re a criminal or a freedom fighter up to the players.)
You can still have an evolving story happen and it’s not about the player building that story. But the story results from the choices they make in the situation you present.
More here:
https://slyflourish.com/letting_go_of_defined_encounters.html
Mine is: in combat encounters, you want to roleplay the enemies, too. Doesn’t matter which system it is. As the GM, you want to prevent unrealistic tactics from your combat encounters. Match your players’ expectations. A pack of wolves or bandits might be smart enough to employ tactics such as skirmishing in combat or moving around the game board, but a group of mindless zombies wouldn’t be able to think like that. Not every creature is capable of powergaming. I see this mistake a lot from new GMs. This can and will affect the difficulty of your games, and in a system that heavily relies on tactics, might result in an unintentional TPK.