6 Skills for New DMs

Regardless of the game and title, running a RPG for the first time can be nerve wracking.  Even if your players are your good friends you’ve played with for years, sitting in the hot seat can rattle anyone.  There are encounters, backstories, plot, NPCs, and general game balance to all keep track of, and keeping your head above water can be challenging, much less having fun.  As a long time DM and roleplayer, here are six skills I wish I’d learned far earlier in my career and can be applied by DMs, GMs, and Storytellers across a variety of tabletop RPGs.

1: Communication

While it seems remedial, talking to and having a conversation with your players fixes a plethora of issues.  Go to any RPG message board, Reddit, or Facebook group and you will find countless topics basically boiling down to “Someone did something I don’t like; what do I do about it?”  

Do you have a player who isn’t taking the game seriously?  Talk to them about it.  Do you have someone who is making people uncomfortable? Talk to them about it. These conversations can be extremely awkward, but by stepping into a DM role, you are entering a social contract that you are a leader in the game’s social space. Sadly, awkward conversations are part of this.  People you play with might be friends, but if playing with people at a public gaming space (like with people playing through a local gaming store or gaming club), enlisting a shop owner or club president to assist with these conversations can help.  

Less negatively, asking players what they liked and fostering conversation during and after a session can help you figure out if you’re doing well as a DM or if your experimental session didn’t work. Talking to them about their characters and asking for backstories (especially making character backstory creation a collaborative effort between them and you) can make characters fit better into the world and build points of interaction between your story and the characters. This also builds rapport which is helpful if you do have to enter an uncomfortable conversation with a player. 

Not being confrontational or accusatory also helps.  Using verbiage like “behavior like this makes the game uncomfortable” and avoiding finger pointing by not using words like “You” or “Your fault” and framing things as “behavior like this” can help the person better understand the situation without becoming defensive.  Having a Session Zero with clear game expectations and safety tools can help alleviate this as well.  What are those?  Well…

2: Have a Session Zero and Use Safety Tools

If you haven’t heard of Session Zeros and Safety Tools, there are countless articles out there with much more information than I’ll get into with this article.  This article from Drama Dice outlines a lot of really good Safety Tools as well as answers several concerns about using them.  Many games (World of Darkness and most games put out by Magpie) have these baked into the game and devote word count to them. 

It may seem touchy feely to some, but a good Session Zero and Safety conversation is more than just catering to sensitive individuals. These are valuable tools to tell your players about the game, bring them on board with the tone and setting you want, and set expectations around what behavior you want to see at your table (and what behavior won’t fly). Some of the most common Safety Tools are Lines & Veils, Consent Checklists, and the X Card.  

Lines & Veils are a discussion of what you and the players do not want in the game.  A Line is saying “we don’t want to see this theme at all,” and most players are pretty consistent (rape, sexual assault, and child abuse are pretty common).  Veils are things the table wants to avoid, but mentions of them are fine as long as the game doesn’t focus on them or deal with them often (slavery, animal death, and racism are common).  Having this conversation means that people aren’t made uncomfortable (or potentially made to relive traumatic memories) during a previously fun game session.  

Consent Checklists are more formalized Lines & Veils conversations, typically presenting a list of common Lines & Veils on a piece of paper and having people check off what they want in each category and writing in things not present.  

The X Card is for when a Lines & Veils conversation or Consent Checklist fails.  It’s usually a physical card with an X on it on the table or maybe a safe word or hand signal that signifies the player who uses it is not comfortable with what is going on.  It is a sign for the DM to move on from that scene and not take it further (and it is extremely important that the DM honors that).

Session Zero is usually when the Safety Tools are presented to the players, but it is also a great time to discuss a variety of things like the tone of the game, genre you’re going for as a DM, seriousness level, and any house rules you may have.  It’s also a great time for your players to talk and make background connections with their characters which tends to build investment in the game and fosters roleplay and in-character decisions. It also gives you a chance to talk to your players and see what they’re excited for in a game.  You might find they’re all into political intrigue or really into ocean adventures and then you can adapt your plot accordingly to everyone’s benefit. 

3: Remember You Are All Playing the Same Game

This seems reductive to a certain extent, but it can be very easy to get caught up in a Player VS. DM mentality.  While some groups may appreciate the back and forth of pulling one over on each other, an adversarial mindset between the DM and their players creates major issues over time.  You as the DM are in charge of creating and running a game in which all of you have fun. Sure, hitting them with a nasty trap is exciting, but make sure there is a way out or way for them to succeed.  They might not succeed (and the ridiculous player decisions leading to their downfall can be just as fun as if they succeeded), but it is important to remind yourself that your job is not to end them; it is to provide them with challenges.  

I personally like taking this a step further and like to remind myself to “Be a fan of your players.”  Think of your favorite Actual Play, TV show, or Movie.  You want to see the characters face problems or challenges, but you want them to also be badass and overcome things and have cool moments.  Building these cool moments into the game makes it more enjoyable for everyone.  Session Zero and Communication play a huge role here.  If you know what your players like and want and are familiar with PC back stories, you can build these moments more often.  

By all means, force them to face terrifying monsters, kill beloved NPCs, make them regret actions, and even allow characters to die in combat.  All of those can make memorable moments, but at the end of the day, make those things memorable, and remember you are doing that to the characters and not the players.  Make sure you are all on board with the moments created (this is a great topic for a Session Zero), even if they are heavy.  Some of the most memorable media moments stem from tragedy.  Just remember to give them a moment to shine or overcome later on. 

4: Be Flexible and Don’t Overprepare

It’s so tempting to have a complete storyline laid out with 800 NPCs with important backstories and plot lines and ways to interact with characters and encounters laid out to challenge players from levels 1 to 20.  The players, on purpose or not, will invalidate at least 60% of your work within the first 2 sessions and head off to do things you had no plan for whatsoever. What many DMs will say is to prepare some major plot points, major NPCs, and then improvise the rest.  Improv is hard though, especially if it isn’t something you’re used to, but there are a lot of tools to help guide you along.  

My favorite is a list of NPC names, races, occupations, and a 2-3 word “personality” guide that I can mix and match and pull from at the drop of a hat when the players wander off to talk to random guards or townspeople.  I can immediately grab Tynna Kel the Half Elf Baker who is Fussy and Annoyed off my list.  

Another favorite is the location agnostic encounter.  A lot of DMs use random encounter tables, and while there is a charm to them, I generally avoid it (especially for fist time DMs), because pulling a random monster means having to be familiar with an unfamiliar stat block and abilities.  However, if your players are traveling between towns, having a pre-made encounter with a pre-read stat block for a creature you have prepped a fight with that you can plug and play at any point the journey becomes stale is invaluable.  A lot of the time, I have 3-4 of these in my back pocket in case I need to shake things up.  I might not use them for sessions, but there’s always that one week where work was rough or you’re tired, and having a pre-made prepped encounter to just throw in is always fun.  You don’t even have to always have them be combat.  Sometimes it’s fun to just meet random NPCs, and if players like them, that’s a seed for a random fun encounter for later!

Instead of prepping story arcs, prepare plot events.  Don’t have an entire write up of the villain’s plan at every moment of the game.  Instead say “when the players hit level 7, the Necromancer will invade X city with their undead army, causing these effects.”  That way you have a cool fight or scene prepared, kinda like our location agnostic encounters, but don’t have to worry about preparing a million little things that lead up to that which the players might totally have ignored. 

 

5: Let Them Have It!

The single greatest aphorism I’ve ever heard for a RPG is “If it is not interesting if the character fails, do not make them roll for it.”  Does your plot fall apart if nobody notices a clue when searching a house?  Don’t make them roll Perception checks to find it.  Does the dungeon fall apart if the party can’t get across a chasm?  Don’t make them roll for it (or maybe don’t have the chasm there to start).  There comes a point in many games I’ve played in the past where it felt like the DM would ask me to roll to see if my character could walk or remember to breathe.  Dice rolling is fun, but it’s significantly less fun and impactful when there aren’t stakes behind it.

Let Them Have It can also apply to powerful items, or even things like leveling up.  It is fun to have cool stuff, and a lot of players have played low level characters many times.  Watching a party deal with a powerful item (and possibly the villains who want it noticing the party) or even having to come into their own as heroes can be more rewarding than grinding along in a sewer hunting giant rats.  Obviously, there are ways to overdo this, but don’t be afraid to give your players cool stuff. 

6: Know When To End It!

A scene where players are discussing a plan goes on forever, eating up hours of session time.  One of the players is on their phone, not even paying attention.  Another has had 2 bathroom breaks since anyone has taken a meaningful game action.  It’s time to end the scene and have the players pick up in the action.  Sometimes stopping is the most powerful, exciting, impactful thing a DM can do.  The death knell of many a session is the DM saying “just roleplay among yourselves” and nobody has anything impactful to do.

Going back to point number three, think back to your favorite Actual Plays, TV Shows, and Movies.  Conversations don’t always wind down to their natural conclusions, planning sessions might be handled in montage, and we sometimes cut away from important information.  This can be great in a RPG as well.  Blades in the Dark is a fun RPG where heists are a huge focus, and it has the characters start during the heist, not in a planning session, and plans are handled during flashbacks to overcome issues encountered during the heist.  This is a great tool, especially if you have players who tend to over plan mixed with players who find planning boring (if your whole table loves to plan, let them have their fun). 

Social scenes can be awkward as well, or just be useful for small info dumps.  Having a chancellor give information to the characters and then just cutting to the characters acting on that information instead of having them bumble around a castle for several minutes.  Travel too is sometimes boring.  Instead of having them roleplay a 5 day trip between towns, if nothing important or interesting is happening on the way, just say they get to the next town and deduct that many days of rations from their inventories. 

Even just ending a session or taking a break is important.  Sometimes your players completely derail your plans and expectations and make you have to make something up on the spot.  There is no shame in saying “Wow, give me 10 minutes here and take a break. I’m gonna have to figure out what to do with that.”  

Sessions often come to natural endings, and it can be much better to end 30 minutes early than to have to pick up mid combat in your next session.  Using this time to recap, talk about goals for the next session (or the game in general) or even give kudos to the players for certain actions can be a much better use of time than forging ahead.