Exactly as the title says! As the guild begins to build up and I’m setting up events for everyone to participate in, I’m reflecting on my own experiences on DMing events in the past.
I think, over the years, I’ve learnt that not everything needs to be planned out and set out for the group. Through my own experiences, and through feedback, I’ve been told that it leads to players feeling as if they lack any sort of purpose besides just… existing for the sake of having NPCs. Letting the participants have a bit of freedom in their choices, and having reasonable influence over events lets them feel empowered and important. Improvision keeps things interesting, and stops you from keeping your players stuck on a single train-track. No one likes writing a story about something they don’t care about.
…Also that you don’t need to have /RW NPC messages that are literal paragraphs long. Yes, I do in fact remember doing that, once upon a time… And yikes.
That’s honestly all I can say. A big fat yikes.
I know all too well how cutting it feels to get your emotes tossed aside and harshly reprimanded when you don’t do things exactly as the leader intended. Things go from being fun, to being super un-fun very fast.
Perhaps everyone else could be a bit different, though! What’re your experiences, the lessons learnt, and the trials by fire that you’ve all experienced to get where you’re at?
For my group, the most memorable moments have been the ones where I’ve gone “yeah, bump it, go for it”. In WoW, we have a roll system in place. It’s been worked on for…a few years at this point. It’s comprehensive. It can account for the entire ebb and flow of combat.
And yet the most memorable parts are people going “Hey, I can’t exactly do this…but I wanna try it?”
…bump it, roll for it. If they fail, I let them fail spectacularly. But if they succeed, it’s talked about for the next couple months.
I’ve kinda used that for all aspects of DM-ing. Is it dope? Then let’s friggin run it. Combat, non combat RP, different directions with the story…rule of cool always wins.
Also, one thing I’ve learned through a bit of trial and error, is that keeping my descriptions short for most things has been the effective way to go. Give them just a good enough idea so they know who or what they’re fighting, talking to, etc.
That way, if they reach a pivotal moment, I go all out with the description. As much colorful language as I can muster. They’re not used to it, so the emotional weight of the moment really sinks in. Bit of a cheap trick, I know, but their enjoyment is the end game, so I’ll run the playbook.
I’ve learned that I do not have the patience for it, lol. I remember the first time I ran an event went well enough, if a bit bland, but the second time went… badly. An officer of the guild I was in planned a spontaneous event over the one I had planned for a week and because he was incredibly popular… mine got flat out ignored.
Thanks, bud.
The third one went fine, though there was one guy in the group who was consistently whining about me skipping his turns because he wasn’t paying attention and didn’t realize I… wasn’t.
Honestly, everything Colepain said is basically true. You want everyone to feel involved, like they have purpose and aren’t just there to be there - give them an opportunity to be a hero that’ll be talked about, or to accidentally take out an ally with their butt after an accidental blink spell gone wrong. (That happened to my Mage. It was a crit-fail gone wrong. Or right, depending on who you asked.) Let things go smoothly, don’t overplan, and just… remember, everyone is there to have fun. So try to let them have fun!
Edit —> Oh, also, rescue the guildie events are easy but incredibly boring. If you let members of your guild run events, which you absolutely should, make sure to advise them if you see a problematic trend start to crop up like that.
Rule of cool makes everyone have fun, despite us primarily doing things d20 i always and even more so recently promote folks to be creative because if an action is creative and cool af i’ll almost always let it happen so long as it contributes to the event.
I planned a three day siege (three day’s of events) of our Stronghold, Day one numerous members had the idea of blocking the enemies movements, combined with cool emotes, flipped tanks and lots of d20 crits they essentially crippled the siege on day one. Such has turned into a mighty story for our clan that we still talk about recently.
I learned to work with your preferences. I prefer smaller groups (2-4 people) and to find things other than outright combat. For example, the other day I ran an event that was basically insult sword fighting(if you’ve played Monkey Island) and the players were allowed to mind control the person who had to win the fight to feed her insults and comebacks. We didn’t use any rolls, we just decided to get a feel for if that would grant a point for the round. I’m always finding ways to not really get the group into turn-based fighting, though for some people that will be exactly their thing.
I also don’t do a lot of pre-planning. I get a general feel going of what I want to accomplish and improv along the way, just as players might.
When DMing a combat scene for a group, it sometimes helps to put a cap on how long player emotes can be, but don’t be strict about it. It depends on your group, of course. If it’s taking over an hour for 3 people to emote one attack, it might be worth considering.
Also, variety. When every event is /roll combat against the flavor of the week antagonist, it gets real old real quick for a lot of players.
It all comes down to characters. Not their outer abilities, but their wants, needs, goals, and motivations. Find out what matters to the characters, and if they don’t give you anything but blank slated, then find out what matters to the players. Use that to fuel conflict.
If you want an NPC or antagonist worth remembering, make the conflict less about who lives/dies but more about who’s perceived as having achieved/failed in their greater goals.
Make use of “no, and”, “no, but”, “yes, but”, and “yes and”. Always try to think of how things can affect other things, and affect other’s perceptions.
If you have a world and the personalities for NPCs in mind, you won’t have to plan much out. The characters will do what they do, you’ll react, and things will happen from there!
Don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s perfectly fine to limit the size of your participating group to a number you feel comfortable with - just announce that you’re only looking for 10 (or whatever your number is) ahead of time.
Don’t be afraid to run something for only a couple of people. If it’s only you and a couple of guildies, you can give them a little more personal attention.
Kind of playing off of what Annaida said but in the opposite direction, don’t skip your players’ turn order. Have an initiative system of some type and stick to it. Everyone should get a turn. And that includes if you’re RPing combat with more than one group. Don’t let group A have all the fun while group B sits there.
Also playing of what Annaida said, if you tell someone it’s their turn and they’re in an afk or ninja-afk, skip 'em. If you sit for 5-10 minutes waiting for them to come back, it drags the RP. You can put them back in at the end of the turn or back to their normal rotation spot for the next turn.
If your RP is going on for hours, expect that people will need a break for bathroom, letting dogs out, grabbing food, etc.
Don’t get so caught up in chatting in voice that you aren’t keeping up a good pace in the RP.
Don’t be shocked if some of your RPers do things a little differently and don’t let it bother you. For instance, in combat, some will emote, then roll. Some roll, then emote. Some won’t emote on a failed roll. Some will want to do death save rolls or rolls to see if they end up with a permanent injury; some absolutely will not.
If you have a really cool thing planned out if the players go down the left path, and then they go right, swap it to the right path. They’ll never know.
Sometimes it’s fun to let the dice fall where they may, and sometimes it’s better to not let the other players see your rolls. If you have someone who misses continually or feels like their rolls always do, hide your defense rolls for the mob they’re attacking so you can sometimes let a lower roll hit. There’s nothing more discouraging to a new RPer than constant fail. However, if you hide your rolls for one person or encounter, do so for the entire event.
I wanted to add as a note that I wasn’t skipping their turn - their turn hadn’t arrived yet and the turn order was a bit more complex than 1.2.3.4.5 due to reasons. I had also made the turn order absolutely public.
This is a neat idea. If I do DM events, I may very well use my own personal dice roll generator so as to keep peeps in the dark on that in-case I need to do what you suggested, flub the rolls to make things a little less unfair for people who aren’t getting lucky.
One guild of mine also suggested that rolls not determine the chance you hit unless you volunteer for it deliberately - have the roll determine how much damage you do. 1-5. Beyond that, have fun, within reason. If you want to do an epic fail, add a little extra roll to determine if you do or not!
What have I learned? If you actually didn’t plan anything because of laziness or procrastination? Throw a puzzle at the group. It took a D&D table two entire hours trying to figure out that 4+4=8
In my experience, the most important thing is pacing. This is mostly something that comes up if your guild has a roll combat system, and your event involves combat (as many adventure-y events probably do). You want to get through the turns fairly quickly, so that people aren’t left standing around feeling like they’re doing nothing.
Likewise, during the non-combat portions, it’s important you know when to keep things moving, whether through narration, NPC dialogue, or just your character pushing things forward. It’s good to give people a moment to stand around and talk or react to what’s going on. But letting it drag on too long will kill your event’s momentum.
In both cases, I highly recommend you pre-write some of your responses. I usually keep notepad open while I’m running events, and I’ll have it filled with narration I write up ahead of time, or NPC/enemy reactions that I can quickly write up while the players are still in the middle of talking or describing their actions.
Obviously you do need to be willing to adjust that pre-written text to account for things the players may have done. But it’s faster to rewrite 20% of a post than it is to write up the whole thing at the time, so it’s still a time-save, and that time saved helps keep your event’s momentum going.
It’s kind of like game design, which means it needs to be about the players, not you.
I try to design unique events that involve either making choices that will matter mechanically, or giving them basic freedom to move around - but not aimlessly.
I mean, I also run more basic “anyone can join in” roll events, but I always feel a tad lazy for resorting to them (even though they’re perfectly valid).
What sort of roll system do people use? Proportionately, I haven’t participated in a whole lot of roll events but the ones without modifiers, they just go so far sideways. The only time it’s gone okay was a PvP Roll-Play siege a long time ago. Homebrew? 5th edition? WoW RPG?
Initiative is based on raid group. Group 1 goes first, then Group 2, etc.
Everyone in the group rolls 1-20 to hit or defend. Sometimes there’s a predetermined “everything above 10 hits” and sometimes the DM rolls for the mob to see if it hits or defends.
Everyone has around 4 health points and each hit basically loses 1-2 depending on how epic the hit is.
And then other people have a huge roll system with modifiers and specific rules for things like stealth, healing, AOE attacks, crits, attacks of opportunity, etc. My group has one of these printed off in pdf form. I think it’s around 17 pages. If you take out the illustrations, text is about 12 pages.
Our guilds’ rules are very abstracted in order to keep things rolling along.
At the beginning of a combat scene, you decide if you’re going to be focus on support/healing, offense, or defending. That’s the order we go in. No rolling for initiative.
Your average character has 3-4 HP. Some may have more/less. Roll a d20…
1-6: Miss
7-12: 1 Damage
13-18: 2 Damage
19-20: 4 Damage, you can spread out the damage.
Emote out the results. You can also attempt non-attack actions in the hopes of imposing various statuses or messing with the world.
Most of the customization is on the player end. Depending on the role you picked above, you can either remove damage, deal extra damage, or negate damage. Everyone can also get a special trick or something if they like. There’s also conditional modifiers of course.
But getting rid of initiative and separate rolls for hit/damage really cuts down on time and makes it less about cheesing the system mechanics and more about reacting to what’s actually happening.