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Tips, Tricks, And Hints For Dungeon Masters

Between managing dozens of characters, keeping up with the pace of the story, and trying to predict what the characters do next, running a game for others can be a complicated affair.

Most game masters have found their own way to manage it.

For my part, in regards to handling the overall storyline, I like organizing a series of events with alternatives. What happens if the player do nothing, and what happens in response to the most likely ways they can interfere.

So, fellow storytellers, have anything to share in this regard?

And for those who enjoy those stories, are there any methods that particularly captivate your interest?

Masters Dungeon Hints Tricks Tips

I always have a choice A, a choice B and can always follow them if they choose to go to C or D. My games are very flexible and having a Dungeon Master who can go with the flow of everything is always good. You never know what choices the characters will go with. This is why I do not do modules. I have my own world and all is game. Never know where one will show up or experience. The down side to that is sometimes the characters go someplace that makes it a real challenge for them.

Tips, Tricks, And Hints For Dungeon Masters Reviews RPG & Card Board

Open world huh? How far do you go to populate it?

Or to put it another way, I presume you don't have everything established for the entire plane down to all the characters. How thorough is the skeleton prior to us getting involved in an area?

Masters Dungeon Hints Tricks Tips

You would be surprised how populated it is. I have a working knowledge of all the towns and where they are who the ruling parties are even some of the shop owners and what they sale. I random roll where a new group will start from. Being desert, woodlands, hills or mountains, arctic, swamp land or a combination of them. Are you close to a sea or far from it. I have been working on this world for a few years. Even have the ability to take parties beyond level 20. It is always a work in progress because some things always change.

Masters Dungeon Hints Tricks Tips

I have a fairly populated world as well and I tend to let players go where they will. On very rare occasions I may send an NPC to throw a strong hint to players if there is something critical to something the players are trying to accomplish, but often I just let them go.

Tips, Tricks, And Hints For Dungeon Masters

I don't know if I'm up for a full world yet. Creating branching story-lines has proven a significant effort as it stands.

Perhaps I'm just approaching it the wrong way.

Tips Tricks Hints Dungeon Masters

Daishain,

The world I use I've been working on off and on for the last 17 years or so. It's focused in an alternate Far Eastern setting. After that much time it's easy to have a highly populated world. I've actually been thinking of building another world based on ancient Greece, Egypt, and Persia. It would be a medium magic world. It would take a while to get where I am in my Far Eastern setting and until then I would use your approach. In fact, using your approach is how I help to populate the world.

Tips Tricks Hints Dungeon Masters Board Card & RPG Reviews

One of the things that I enjoy doing, and Diashan being a player in one of my games you may have noticed, is that I like to put some of the responsibility back onto the players especially low level world building. I ask the players to come up with a new NPC, assign some characteristics to them. Sometimes I have the players describe elements of a scene or at least add details to it

Tracking NPCs can be a daunting task, especially after a few sessions or adventures when the NPCs start to pile up. One thing I try to do is to use the NPCs that are already developed as often as I can as opposed to creating all new ones. I tend to use a cloud drive a lot to manage all of this information, sort them into folders associated with each game and the different elements of a game, etc. The advantage of using something like a cloud storage is that you can access it on any computer that has internet access which makes it helpful when I go out of town or something or when I take a break at work I can easily access the information and use it to form a post.

I try to keep a balance in my world building between focused local/regional development and larger world or continent development. The larger world does impact the regional and local levels and so I feel like I need to have at least a sense of what is going on regarding this larger scale but focusing too much there creates a situation where there is a great deal of information that the party will either never come across or is not relevant to them. This being the case I do try to lean a little more toward focus on local/regional development in my worlds.

Again I take bits and pieces of elements created in previous games and tweak them or adjust them a little to fit the current game but my timeline of events is generally pretty short and vague because first off it needs to be relevant to the characters and second the characters are going to wind up driving it anyway through their actions. Most of what I do as a Game Master is responsive rather than preparatory. I try to minimize preparation and I don't spend a lot of time on developing alternatives.

For example the last adventure that I ran using the 5E Dungeons & Dragons, the one Diashan plays in, the entire concept of one of the characters being captured, the idea of her captors having a life draining tree, using spiders as mounts, etc. None of that was prepared. The only thing I really prepared was the hook/opening situation (Characters escort a VIP though the frontier), the concept of the tribe that they encountered and the first combat encounter. Everything else was feeding off the players/characters and coming up with things on the fly really.

The hardest part for me is simply keeping track of what has happened already and trying not to contradict that in the current situation. I try to keep a campaign log and NPC list with notes to help me with this, but I still struggle with it and will sometimes throw something in that has one of the players saying "Hey, wait a minute… that doesn't make sense with what has already happened."

Edited: Aericsteele on 22nd Feb, 2017 - 11:23pm