3. The dice (or whatever you use) aren’t God, you are. Fudge the rolls occasionally in the players’ favor if the players are invested in their characters. If you’re running a death gauntlet, roll in the open!
3a. You may fudge the rolls against them to prevent an anticlimactic end to a dramatic confrontation or scene.
4. Only add a DMPC if the players badly need a role filled in the party. Generally though, parties will seek out challenges that fit their skillsets. If they do not, ask if they’d like a DMPC to help them.
4a. If you have to have a DMPC, don’t make them any more powerful than any of the players. If you want to sneak one in, make an NPC interesting enough and useful enough for the players to keep with them.

5. Don’t bother planning in detail more than a few sessions in advance. They will go off the rails. Let them. Railroading to get them started is generally accepted, unless they actively resist it by ignoring obvious plot hooks. If they seem to change genres enough that the rules become clumsy to use, ask them if they’d like to actually change systems.
5a. If they ignore all the plot hooks you dangle, they probably don’t want to play your game.
5b. If the players misinterpret your plot hints, go with their interpretation if possible. If you must use your original plot plan, make it a deliberate deception by their foes.
6. Reward players according to their style.
6a. “Real Men” get opportunities to be badass.
6b. Roleplayers get plenty of chances to roleplay.
6c. Munchkins get equally broken opponents to fight (and loot to steal)
6d. Loonies are their own reward. Laugh, or play along. You’re trying to have fun, remember?

7. Puzzles. Either you can make good ones yourself, or you can’t. Figure out which you are early.
7a. If you can’t, check online. There’s plenty out there.
8. Before returning to play, review what occurred last game with the group.
9. Worldbuilding is hard. Here’s some ideas I think are good.
- Write everything down, and be organized. Have a vague map (filled in as the players adventure), an NPC database, and a good idea of what happened last game and what the players should be aiming for this game.
- For NPCs: Using notecards, write short descriptions of as many personalities as you can think of. Try to have more than 20. Number them. Now, as your players encounter new NPCs, draw a personality card. Write the name of the NPC (if they’re important) down, along with the number of their personality and important facts about them.

- Write down names of a few villainous organizations, along with their goals. Use a few of them in your game, and let your players run into them in no particular order. As they eventually focus on one at a time (either on purpose or accidentally), have the other evil groups gain power or force some form of setback on the heroes. Sometimes, have the evil groups oppose each other, and let the players watch their foes kill each other.
- Memorable villains are not always sympathetic villains. Sometimes a scenery chewing madman is more fun than the man with once noble intentions.
- Don’t bother trying to outline a whole city. Just describe distances between locations if need be.

- If your players interpret some details in a way you never thought of that’s interesting, steal their idea. Don’t let them know until much later, you’ll seem like a master storyteller.
- If because your players wander into an area that you wanted to contain high level threats at early levels, do not kill them. If they were warned of the danger, let them get captured or otherwise prevented from proceeding. If they were not, you put too much planning into your world, didn’t provide enough detail to the players, and need to move the big threat away and replace it with a small one.
- BE ORGANIZED!
- Write down and think of ideas for plot hooks and challenges in your spare time, like while commuting.


10. Don’t be a dick.

Sources/Inspiration: /tg/ for many bad and good DM stories.

Sagiro's Story Hour (a good 2e/3e/3.5e campaign, worth a read.) Been running for over 15 YEARS.
http://stevenac.net/sagiro/StoryHour.htm

Seriously, you can see Sagiro go from a newbie DM to an amazing one over the course of the campaign, and he has better and more clear ideas on how to world-build.

Feel free to contribute, /tg/, this is just a start.

I needed this so bad. Newfag to roleplaying here. Learned so much that it got me out of my week-long depressive rut.

Thanks.

Not a bad list but needs more content.

Players should contribute what their DM has done right, if they can. Here's one of mine:
- A campaign with a bunch of "real guys" can be more railroaded than one with roleplayers. They might not notice or even appreciate a little DM nudging.
-You can't campaign with Munchkins. you can only set them increasingly arbitrary and ridiculous challenges to overcome.
-Roleplayers want the most control over the plot, and might even want to assist with worldbuilding. This can make a DM's job easier - just come up with appropriate adversaries and drop them in on whatever the players have already decided to do. Non-combat challenges and opponents (like winning a king's favor in court) can be the most important part of the game.
- If every player is a loonie, you can only pick how your world will start. They're too unpredictable from there.

Bumping in the hope someone else contributes besides OP and myself.... or criticism, or whatever.

Bump.
<< How to be a good player.

>>14037159
>Temporary TripFag
But you don't have a tripcode.

My advice would be to steal from everything. Read a lot, watch films, watch tv, read webcomics, read creepypasta and generally talk about weird stuff. If you see an idea you like, take it.

If you're running D&D read fantasy. If you're running Exalted watch over the top anime. If you're running World of Darkness watch horror and other... stuff. Dark Heresy? Film Noir. And so on, and so on.

>>14037582
Well, that depends. That's a good player in some systems, but if the GM is trying to run a grim and gritty detective story then it's massively out of place.

>>14037626
So put a fedora on each of em, and it'll be fine.

Well in a recent campaign the two options the GM set out were take a train somewhere and save time but leave our heavy cargo robot with most of our supplies behind. Or take the robot and walk 400 miles. He did not expect me to try and attach the robot to the back of the train since it was too big to fit on it but he went with it instead of just vetoing it.

Someone on /tg/ once said "Never create an NPC you aren't prepared to have the PCs kill. If you make an NPC essential to a storyline they WILL kill it as soon as possible." So true...

>>14037964
Man, there are some shitty players out there I guess.

Protip: get some players who are smart/mature enough to understand that the GM is not their opponent and this sort of thing won't happen.

need more.