This relates to running pre-written adventures, such as Curse of Strahd or Tomb of Horrors or what-have-you.
PRACTICAL ADVENTURE RUNNING ADVICE 1. With regard to treasure... Static +1 bonuses are easy treasure to hand out but they're hard treasure to GM around. Every +1 bonus your players accrue is essentially permanent, unless you wanna be a that guy and have bandits loot them in the night or break out the magic-eating rust-monsters. That means those permanent +1s are going to contribute during every fight thereafter. That can really ruin combat-math. I'm not saying never give these out, just... be careful. What's better? Giving away quirky single-use items. Yes, your players might steamroll an encounter above their weight class because they drank their potions of polymorph and turned into jungle giants, but that's a single encounter down, and besides, don't you think they'll remember it fondly? And isn't that what it's all about?
2. Read the whole adventure, then read it again. Change anything that strikes you as tedious or boring. If you're bored reading it, your players will be bored playing through it. If you still didn't pick up on a detail after your second read through, guess what? It was boring. Leave it out or change it.
3. Maps don't need to be complex to be interesting. Don't waste the session drawing every corridor or getting the dungeon layout just so. Likewise, not every room has to be an awesome blade-trap-with-enraged-air-elementals in order to be memorable. Sometimes interrogating the goblin NPC will be the highlight of the whole thing.
4. Most module layout is horrible. Seriously, it's like they expect you to memorize the damn thing. Do yourself a favor and make some notecards and type up a cheat-sheet for the most relevant stuff. Photocopy the map so you're not constantly flipping through the book. Being a little extra productive before the game pays off in huge dividends.
5. Handouts are great and everybody loves them.
6. Long-ass rhyming riddles are garbage. Nobody wants to hear your dungeon-crawl poetry jam.
7. Think ahead to the next module you want to run before you start running the current one. If you can throw in a little clue or scrawl or reference, it helps tie a whole bunch of disparate parts together. It's so worth it to see the wand of delay poison they got at second level be useful in the Final Battle at level nineteen, and to have your players recognize that if they'd only done that one thing, they'd have the +7 Singing Sword of Mosquito Jones right now instead of this dinky +2 dagger!
There are more ideas like this on my blog. It's not monetized, I'm not advertising - it's just where I normally write about this stuff and you can find more ideas there: www.dreadweasel.blogspot.com
+1 weapons are the easy ones. They don't matter. The +1 bonus is going to do nothing to the math. Remember you can have up to +5 from an ability an extra +1 isn't going to matter especially if you start with the standard array. (also you can increase all ACs by 1 if it gets to be a problem)
@NightsLastHero: True. A better way to phrase it would be +X bonuses. +1 bonuses are negligible, but if you throw out enough of them, especially cumulative bonuses (i.e. +2 to STR and a +2 longsword), even spread across several players, it will change the way the game plays out. This is far more true of 3rd Edition and older editions of D&D than it is of 5th Ed, but new DMs might be surprised at how these small bonuses accrue over time and change the combat math.
4. Most module layout is horrible. Seriously, it's like they expect you to memorize the damn thing. Do yourself a favor and make some notecards and type up a cheat-sheet for the most relevant stuff. Photocopy the map so you're not constantly flipping through the book. Being a little extra productive before the game pays off in huge dividends.
This is a useful list - especially agree with point 4! Dreadweasel, interested in how a module could be a laid out better? Is it better to have everything the DM needs for each scene/room in one place? That would involve a fair bit of repetition I guess. The other problem I often find is content for the DM, content for the players and background fluff all get mixed up together, which is not helpful.
Maps don't need to be complex to be interesting. Don't waste the session drawing every corridor or getting the dungeon layout just so. Likewise, not every room has to be an awesome blade-trap-with-enraged-air-elementals in order to be memorable. Sometimes interrogating the goblin NPC will be the highlight of the whole thing.
This is critical information for a DM. Meticulously exploring every single square of a dungeon in live player & DM detail is painful. It's old school and can be fun for a session or so, but not for much more than that unless everyone really keys into that play style. It's far better to detail the interesting places and then parse the things in between as flavor and detail.
"You travel in toward the heart of the abandoned down. The buildings do show signs of abandonment, but maybe only months. The porches aren't swept. Shutters swing loosely on their creaking hinges. Brush and shrub grow untrimmed. What's eerie is that you aren't finding any stray cats or dogs. There are no birds in the trees. It's all just quiet save for the rustling of the wind through the trees and eaves. Nearing the town center you see what looks to be a few men tilling at a small garden at the far end of the town green. Directly across from what looks to be the local church. Their movements are just a hint off. The motions are right for someone farming but... they are still jagged looking."
vs.
"You approach the town from the edge. There's a farmhouse to the left and a Inn to the right. Both are closed up. Beyond each are more buildings. A few look to be shops, other's are probably homes. Which one do you want to look at first."
If they are all empty and the action and items of interest are in the town green and church... get the players there fast. Everything else is table dressing.
Maze of the Blue Medusa (the print version) has the best layout of any D&D-related thing I've ever read. It's hard to find a print copy, but it's a great example of what adventure modules should aspire to with regard to layout.
Secret Santicore does a one page dungeon contest that has produced some really good, ready-to-go concepts.
Honestly, WotC and Paizo published adventures are so locked into pre-designed templates, and those templates are so outmoded, it's frustrating. Each adventure should really have its own layout, optimized for the content. And modules are NOT novels! They're games! If you've got ten pages of NPC backstory but you put the manticore stats in another book, all you're doing is creating more work for the DM - precisely what the DM wanted to avoid in the first place by purchasing a module.
This relates to running pre-written adventures, such as Curse of Strahd or Tomb of Horrors or what-have-you.
PRACTICAL ADVENTURE RUNNING ADVICE
1. With regard to treasure... Static +1 bonuses are easy treasure to hand out but they're hard treasure to GM around. Every +1 bonus your players accrue is essentially permanent, unless you wanna be a that guy and have bandits loot them in the night or break out the magic-eating rust-monsters. That means those permanent +1s are going to contribute during every fight thereafter. That can really ruin combat-math. I'm not saying never give these out, just... be careful. What's better? Giving away quirky single-use items. Yes, your players might steamroll an encounter above their weight class because they drank their potions of polymorph and turned into jungle giants, but that's a single encounter down, and besides, don't you think they'll remember it fondly? And isn't that what it's all about?
2. Read the whole adventure, then read it again. Change anything that strikes you as tedious or boring. If you're bored reading it, your players will be bored playing through it. If you still didn't pick up on a detail after your second read through, guess what? It was boring. Leave it out or change it.
3. Maps don't need to be complex to be interesting. Don't waste the session drawing every corridor or getting the dungeon layout just so. Likewise, not every room has to be an awesome blade-trap-with-enraged-air-elementals in order to be memorable. Sometimes interrogating the goblin NPC will be the highlight of the whole thing.
4. Most module layout is horrible. Seriously, it's like they expect you to memorize the damn thing. Do yourself a favor and make some notecards and type up a cheat-sheet for the most relevant stuff. Photocopy the map so you're not constantly flipping through the book. Being a little extra productive before the game pays off in huge dividends.
5. Handouts are great and everybody loves them.
6. Long-ass rhyming riddles are garbage. Nobody wants to hear your dungeon-crawl poetry jam.
7. Think ahead to the next module you want to run before you start running the current one. If you can throw in a little clue or scrawl or reference, it helps tie a whole bunch of disparate parts together. It's so worth it to see the wand of delay poison they got at second level be useful in the Final Battle at level nineteen, and to have your players recognize that if they'd only done that one thing, they'd have the +7 Singing Sword of Mosquito Jones right now instead of this dinky +2 dagger!
There are more ideas like this on my blog. It's not monetized, I'm not advertising - it's just where I normally write about this stuff and you can find more ideas there:
www.dreadweasel.blogspot.com
https://dreadweasel.blogspot.com/
+1 weapons are the easy ones. They don't matter. The +1 bonus is going to do nothing to the math. Remember you can have up to +5 from an ability an extra +1 isn't going to matter especially if you start with the standard array. (also you can increase all ACs by 1 if it gets to be a problem)
@NightsLastHero: True. A better way to phrase it would be +X bonuses. +1 bonuses are negligible, but if you throw out enough of them, especially cumulative bonuses (i.e. +2 to STR and a +2 longsword), even spread across several players, it will change the way the game plays out. This is far more true of 3rd Edition and older editions of D&D than it is of 5th Ed, but new DMs might be surprised at how these small bonuses accrue over time and change the combat math.
https://dreadweasel.blogspot.com/
Yeah, if your point was cumulative +1 bonus' from multiple sources, that becomes more of an issue.
This is critical information for a DM. Meticulously exploring every single square of a dungeon in live player & DM detail is painful. It's old school and can be fun for a session or so, but not for much more than that unless everyone really keys into that play style. It's far better to detail the interesting places and then parse the things in between as flavor and detail.
"You travel in toward the heart of the abandoned down. The buildings do show signs of abandonment, but maybe only months. The porches aren't swept. Shutters swing loosely on their creaking hinges. Brush and shrub grow untrimmed. What's eerie is that you aren't finding any stray cats or dogs. There are no birds in the trees. It's all just quiet save for the rustling of the wind through the trees and eaves. Nearing the town center you see what looks to be a few men tilling at a small garden at the far end of the town green. Directly across from what looks to be the local church. Their movements are just a hint off. The motions are right for someone farming but... they are still jagged looking."
vs.
"You approach the town from the edge. There's a farmhouse to the left and a Inn to the right. Both are closed up. Beyond each are more buildings. A few look to be shops, other's are probably homes. Which one do you want to look at first."
If they are all empty and the action and items of interest are in the town green and church... get the players there fast. Everything else is table dressing.
Im typing on my phone so no hyperlinks, sorry.
Maze of the Blue Medusa (the print version) has the best layout of any D&D-related thing I've ever read. It's hard to find a print copy, but it's a great example of what adventure modules should aspire to with regard to layout.
Secret Santicore does a one page dungeon contest that has produced some really good, ready-to-go concepts.
Honestly, WotC and Paizo published adventures are so locked into pre-designed templates, and those templates are so outmoded, it's frustrating. Each adventure should really have its own layout, optimized for the content. And modules are NOT novels! They're games! If you've got ten pages of NPC backstory but you put the manticore stats in another book, all you're doing is creating more work for the DM - precisely what the DM wanted to avoid in the first place by purchasing a module.
https://dreadweasel.blogspot.com/