So I did my first ever session as a DM on Saturday and it was a TON of fun. I have always loved story telling and loved DND since I was old enough to remember my parents playing it in the mid 90's.
For context we played "Death House" as an opening to Curse of Strahd.
Possible mistakes:
Over explaining every single room. Even though the general look of the first 2 floors is basically the same. Took some time out of the game.
Looking up basic rules. I'm new to the 5e system so this will be fixed over time.
Another thing that I notice I do, which I'm not entirely sure if is a mistake or not, is no matter how prepared I am I end just changing things on the fly. For example the opening of the story I had a small monologue written but instead of using it as I finished the first sentence I ended up just going off the cuff. Same with pretty much anything I had written for myself. I'm not sure if at the time my brain just thinks of something that I find better or I don't trust my writing or what it is. Just curious about others experience with this. Do other DM's do this often?
You're asking about other DMs improvising after preparing content? 100 percent.
Intuitively improvising the game is almost always Plan A. Anything written on paper is Plan B.
The process of creating notes and writing monologues/descriptions is a great way to internalize a scene, and provides a fallback option, giving DMs the confidence they need to go off script.
The trick is to discover your style as a DM. If you are finding it is not useful to you to prepare this or that, and are sure you will go off script anyways, then don’t. It seems you are comfortable enough describing opening scenes on the fly and don’t need to prepare for that. Same with me. Get a feel for what you do feel is useful to prepare. Maybe maps or making dungeons, or fleshing out an NPC your party likes, or setting up encounters.
Stick to preparing what you don’t do well, and improv what you do do well. Essentially that’s my advice.
1) Congratulations! It’s great that you found success. Self-betterment can always be made, but successes make it all worth while.
2) The players will tell you if you’re over explaining rooms. If you spend time on a monologue and they try to immediately go to the next room, that means they aren’t really interested. This is fine. It’s human nature to ignore information until it’s useful. It’s important to acknowledge that they too are under some stress (trying to keep in character, remember their abilities, react to what comes their way). We need to give them the information they can use immediately: tone, basic expecation of the area, things that they would immediately react to. When they are less stressed, you can probably be more flowery with details.
3) Depending on the experience of your players, knowing the rulebook may not really matter. In my experiance, players love to work out how thier character works, and will learn thier ins and outs for you. However, it’s important to be honest with everyone about where you’re at. The DM doesn’t need to get everything right, but they do need to set expecations and precident. If something isn’t working, tell your group and inform them of any decisions you plan to make in the future.
4) With regards to preperation a lot of things are highly personal. The only thing that really matters is what happens at the table. Your prep is there to give you the confidence at the table, but once you’re in the there, you’re job is to watch the players and react to their needs. It’s 100% natural to prepare things that end up on the cutting room floor. That doesn’t make them useless. That stuff got you where you needed to be. The hard work is knowing if it was all required to get you where you need to be. You’ll over prepare and under prepare. Just make sure you’re not driving yourself crazy.
Antedote: I spent a week obsessing over a wererat who was singing in the sewers. I practice singing songs that would tell the wererat’s backstory in game and forshadow a conflict to come. When the moment came, my players “noped” out of the whole thing. I still love my Liberachi Wererat. I know that I had an awesome plan. Knowing this allows me to move forward with my next plan: The Eatting Habbits of Gnomes. My players will never care. But they might, and when they do I’ll have confidence in my answers.
I find much the same in terms of prep, I will sit down and might write out a whole monologue of information that an NPC needs to impart, but in a good session that monologue is more a way to prepare myself for what the character knows, wants, needs and anything else. Hopefully the information will come out in a 2 way engagement with the players as opposed to just another exposition guy.
Of course sometimes I need to talk at the characters but I try and make this as rare and as brief as possible.
When I am giving any sort of presentation, be it work, when I was at uni or in school, I always prepared a script, had notes and handouts and then, ad lib it. The fact I was so prepared means I can give a more relaxed seemingly off the cuff performance rather then just dryly reading from a sheet of paper.
DMing is the same, I write out a mix of bullet points through to npc exposition, I am constantly thinking through what might happen and preparing it in my head. Then, in session I let the players lead knowing I am prepared enough to get my ideas across
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So I did my first ever session as a DM on Saturday and it was a TON of fun. I have always loved story telling and loved DND since I was old enough to remember my parents playing it in the mid 90's.
For context we played "Death House" as an opening to Curse of Strahd.
Possible mistakes:
Over explaining every single room. Even though the general look of the first 2 floors is basically the same. Took some time out of the game.
Looking up basic rules. I'm new to the 5e system so this will be fixed over time.
Another thing that I notice I do, which I'm not entirely sure if is a mistake or not, is no matter how prepared I am I end just changing things on the fly. For example the opening of the story I had a small monologue written but instead of using it as I finished the first sentence I ended up just going off the cuff. Same with pretty much anything I had written for myself. I'm not sure if at the time my brain just thinks of something that I find better or I don't trust my writing or what it is. Just curious about others experience with this. Do other DM's do this often?
You're asking about other DMs improvising after preparing content? 100 percent.
Intuitively improvising the game is almost always Plan A. Anything written on paper is Plan B.
The process of creating notes and writing monologues/descriptions is a great way to internalize a scene, and provides a fallback option, giving DMs the confidence they need to go off script.
The trick is to discover your style as a DM. If you are finding it is not useful to you to prepare this or that, and are sure you will go off script anyways, then don’t. It seems you are comfortable enough describing opening scenes on the fly and don’t need to prepare for that. Same with me. Get a feel for what you do feel is useful to prepare. Maybe maps or making dungeons, or fleshing out an NPC your party likes, or setting up encounters.
Stick to preparing what you don’t do well, and improv what you do do well. Essentially that’s my advice.
This is great advice! Thanks for the tips guys appreciate it!
1) Congratulations! It’s great that you found success. Self-betterment can always be made, but successes make it all worth while.
2) The players will tell you if you’re over explaining rooms. If you spend time on a monologue and they try to immediately go to the next room, that means they aren’t really interested. This is fine. It’s human nature to ignore information until it’s useful. It’s important to acknowledge that they too are under some stress (trying to keep in character, remember their abilities, react to what comes their way). We need to give them the information they can use immediately: tone, basic expecation of the area, things that they would immediately react to. When they are less stressed, you can probably be more flowery with details.
3) Depending on the experience of your players, knowing the rulebook may not really matter. In my experiance, players love to work out how thier character works, and will learn thier ins and outs for you. However, it’s important to be honest with everyone about where you’re at. The DM doesn’t need to get everything right, but they do need to set expecations and precident. If something isn’t working, tell your group and inform them of any decisions you plan to make in the future.
4) With regards to preperation a lot of things are highly personal. The only thing that really matters is what happens at the table. Your prep is there to give you the confidence at the table, but once you’re in the there, you’re job is to watch the players and react to their needs. It’s 100% natural to prepare things that end up on the cutting room floor. That doesn’t make them useless. That stuff got you where you needed to be. The hard work is knowing if it was all required to get you where you need to be. You’ll over prepare and under prepare. Just make sure you’re not driving yourself crazy.
Antedote: I spent a week obsessing over a wererat who was singing in the sewers. I practice singing songs that would tell the wererat’s backstory in game and forshadow a conflict to come. When the moment came, my players “noped” out of the whole thing. I still love my Liberachi Wererat. I know that I had an awesome plan. Knowing this allows me to move forward with my next plan: The Eatting Habbits of Gnomes. My players will never care. But they might, and when they do I’ll have confidence in my answers.
I find much the same in terms of prep, I will sit down and might write out a whole monologue of information that an NPC needs to impart, but in a good session that monologue is more a way to prepare myself for what the character knows, wants, needs and anything else. Hopefully the information will come out in a 2 way engagement with the players as opposed to just another exposition guy.
Of course sometimes I need to talk at the characters but I try and make this as rare and as brief as possible.
When I am giving any sort of presentation, be it work, when I was at uni or in school, I always prepared a script, had notes and handouts and then, ad lib it. The fact I was so prepared means I can give a more relaxed seemingly off the cuff performance rather then just dryly reading from a sheet of paper.
DMing is the same, I write out a mix of bullet points through to npc exposition, I am constantly thinking through what might happen and preparing it in my head. Then, in session I let the players lead knowing I am prepared enough to get my ideas across