I’m new to tabletop role-playing games or I’ve never been a DM before — how do I start my own campaign and run it well?
So you’ve played in a tabletop campaign before, but never run one yourself. Or you’ve seen an episode of Critical Role or Acquisitions, Inc. and wondered how they do it. Or you’ve heard tales of a game like Dungeons and Dragons and never got the chance to play, but the idea has caught you. You may feel lost about how to get started, but worry not! I am here to help.
To provide some context as to who’s giving you this advice, I’m a Dungeon Master who has run multiple campaigns, several one-shots, and TA’d a course on how to write for Role-Playing Games at Carnegie Mellon University. In this article I’m tackling basic advice and common starting mistakes that new DMs tend to make.
Section the First: Your Players and You
The first thing to know about being a Dungeon Master or Game Master in a Role-Playing Game is that you are a storyteller. Except your job is more complicated than a normal storyteller’s job. You have a task that is inherently collaborative and the story you are telling changes according to how your players act and react within the bounds of your game.
But how can I tell a story if all these people are doing unpredictable things?
Understanding player psychology is important if you plan to run your own game. It can be tempting to think of players as being random, and that you either need to have a story so fixed that it cannot be broken (the railroad approach) or one so loose that any action they could possibly take can fit within it (the sandbox approach). While there is nothing inherently wrong with these methods, they may not help you tell the story you want to tell while keeping your players center stage.
The way to do that is to balance two sets of information you know about your players: what they want, and what their characters want. This turns their behavior from random noise to predictable patterns that you can plan story arcs around.
In general, players fall into a few different categories:
- Min-Maxers tend to have the most fun when they are squeezing the maximum amount of power the mechanical system allows a character to have. You can expect this type of player to pursue equipment, gold, magic items, and anything else that can make them feel more powerful.
- Roleplayers tend to have the most fun when they are embodying a character. Speaking in-character, acting out NPCs (non-player characters), providing story hooks and involving their backstory and character-specific goals will help this type of player enjoy your game.
- Observers are around because of the friends and the setting. You’ve made (or are bringing to life) a cool world that they just want to experience. They may hang back during sessions and get involved less, but they are no less engaged than your other players. Remember to include moments that spotlight their characters if you normally forget people when they are quiet.
In addition to these player types, there are a few things that almost every player wants: information and safety. One of your main tasks throughout your campaign will be to force them to enter danger in order to obtain information, as it is one of the few things that is an almost guaranteed interest hook for players, even more than magic items or an NPC in need.
Section the Second: You, the World, and the Game
You represent the totality of the environment and history of your world. Every ally, enemy, blade of grass, and gust of wind exists only so far as you pretend it does. The limits of the world you create are bounded only by the imaginations of your players and the information you reveal at the table.
This unique identity is usually coupled with the fact that you will be the most well-read on the rules and topics surrounding your games, and that you decide what rules apply and whether you are introducing your own. You can — and should — twist the rules of the game to fit your setting.
If you want to encourage role-playing at your table, you have to start with yourself. A lot of people are shy, and since you’re already sticking yourself out there in a vulnerable position, you might as well go the whole distance.
One way that I specifically encourage some of my quieter players is to have an NPC I am playing ask them a question directly — this both gives them a small spotlight and encourages them to respond in character, further immersing them and making it more likely that they’ll feel like their input is valuable in the future. Another technique I use is to judge roughly how much each player speaks in a session, and encourage the more verbose ones to defer to their quieter friends when they begin to speak.
The Goal
The whole point of this enterprise is for your players to have fun. And, as the great Matt Colville would say, their fun is your fun. I want you to keep this in mind as we proceed through the next sections. Everything you do in this game is aimed at that goal.
Section the Third: You and Your Players
You are the arbiter of all rules disputes, lore questions, and player arguments. This means that you are going to have to brush up on conflict resolution, and understand fully what your role at the table is.
1. In the construct of the game, you hold all the power.
When it comes to a rule, or a roll, or a judgment, what you say goes (assuming you’re using a system like D&D rather than a more collaborative system). You must use this power judiciously and be focused on the Goal. Your priorities are to make fair rulings given the information you have at hand and to keep the game moving, so as not to spoil the fun. When a rules question or dispute comes up and you don’t know or have time to check, make a call that applies to this session until you have time to look it up.
2. Being able to handle people is absolutely necessary.
Even the best players will have bad days, and you need to keep the game fun for everyone at the table. You cannot let one person ruin the session for the group. Do not make the mistake that many novices do to punish out-of-game behavior (talking over other players, being an ass) with in-game consequences (your rogue gets crushed by a falling tree). This resolves nothing and will leave the players with the correct assumption that you are abusing your power. When someone does something you don’t like, pull them aside and talk it out. If it’s minor, wait till your next break. Sometimes a disruption will be large enough or offensive enough that you need to pause the session to address it. This is OK, but hopefully will not happen if we follow some rules for preparing for a session later on.
3. You and the players are on the same team, even if it looks like you aren’t.
See here’s the big secret. It’s not you versus the players. It’s the enemies versus their characters. You want them to succeed. If it were a deathmatch, you’d win every time due to being the sum total of the universe. If you wanted to win, you could set a dragon on a party of first level characters, or drop a meteorite from orbit and cause a Great Extinction. No, you want to create problems and drama that challenge the players and characters, and make them think, push them to the brink without destroying them, and force them to grow. When your players win (after a hard uphill battle), you get to share in that victory.
Section the Fourth: How to Prepare for a Session
Rules, Expectations, and Character Creation
There’s a concept called a Session 0, where before you meet up to run the first session of the campaign, you gather all your players and discuss your group’s rules and begin character creation. As an example, for my first One-Shot (a short campaign that is designed to take place over a single play session) I used this ruleset:
Expect this session to take several hours, much like a normal session. You’ll need to walk your players through the character creation process, which is time consuming, and they will have a lot of questions, so study up beforehand!
I also recommend using a character relationship web so that the characters start by knowing each other in some form and know how they feel about each other:
Preparing Areas and Environments
There’s a lot of advice out there on how to get an environment from your head into your players’ heads, so this might be a review for some of you.
First off, you’ll want to write a brief description in your notes about the area they’re going to be in. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feel — try to get something for each of the senses. Are they in a vibrant colorful bazaar with the rich smell of meats, spices, and perfumes? The heat of the blazing sun beating down on them? Or perhaps in a dim and dank cavern, the air cool to the touch, the smell of rotting corpses and moss, the air tasting of metal. Writing these descriptions will help center you when you walk them through the area, which can be invaluable for maintaining your campaign’s atmosphere.
As an example, here’s the introduction I used during a recent one-shot:
You walk into a large circular room. The air is cool and dry on your skin. The floor and walls are made of closely-fit stone, and the hall is lined with empty torch sconces. Thirty-five feet up, an enormous dome made of stained glass allows moonlight to filter through the chamber, scattering blues and silvers and greens across the floor. A large plush purple carpet covers the center of the room — a symbol of wealth. This shade can only be acquired from a seafaring people far to the south, where they crush shells to create the dye.
At the far side of the room is a large raised dais propping up a giant ornate golden throne. In its arms sits a dark figure who shares Casimir’s features. The emperor Dragoş von Morogravia gazes down at you, looking almost impressed that you’ve made it this far. He stands, locking his eyes with his son’s “It seems you are not a total disappointment after all, boy. Vell? Have at me!”
Roll for initiative.
Second, you may want to have a map, even a rudimentary one. If this is a space you want your players to navigate, you probably want to know where things are, and having a map will help you feel confident and prepared. Another trick you can do is have your players make their own maps, and see how well they match up with your original copies. This kind of note-taking will make your players more spatially aware, but make sure you have a note-taking group before you try this method.
Third, you may want to have some concept art and background music. Few things can set tone like music, and having art of the area can give players an idea of what they’re exploring that is a little more concrete than just your descriptions. I recommend the Hollow Knight and Castlevania soundtracks in dark, mysterious circumstances, or Zelda and Ghibli music when you want to inspire an adventurous spirit.
Preparing and Running NPCs
Something important to know when we get into NPCs is that while every NPC is your character, no NPC should be your character. Perhaps that was phrased in a confusing way, so allow me to elaborate. Each of your players will be playing one character. The entire time they are in the game, they are aligned with that character’s goals and feelings. The same cannot be said for you. When you play a character, it is temporary, and while that character might act in their own interests, the rest of the world should not — you have to be able to switch perspectives and not identify too strongly with any one NPC over the players. Remember the Goal.
So you have this large and complex world, littered with people of all shapes and sizes and backgrounds. How do you bring them to life? Well, there are a few ways to get started.
- Figure out who they are and what they want. Where does your NPC come from? What are some life goals? What is their personality like? Do they respond well to conflict? What’s their social status — rich? poor? a member of the clergy? What are their relationships with other NPCs? What about with the player characters?
- Figure out how they speak. I recommend developing a unique speech pattern, tone of voice, and accent for each NPC as it will make differentiating them much easier for you and your players without you having to preface it with “And then Evgeni says…” This will also boost player immersion, as they will be interfacing with the NPC directly rather than through you, making their own in-character performances easier.
- Know their short-term goals. Many people struggle with the issue of roleplaying a discussion versus rolling for a result. I use a system where I keep track of an NPC’s wants and needs, and players who meet those wants or needs in their speech succeed without rolling. A good bit of roleplay that doesn’t hit one of those goals will grant advantage, whereas a terrible speech might warrant disadvantage. Naturally, going against one of the NPC’s listed goals is an immediate failure, if it’s something they’re not willing to compromise.
Section the Fifth: How to Run a Session
You may understand all of this so far and still be nervous about running your own session, so here’s some advice straight from the heart, much as I just gave it to a friend trying out DMing for the first time.
The first rule of DMing is to always pretend like you know what you’re doing. Even though you have planned extensively for your session, and you know your story well, a lot of — possibly even most of — your sessions will be improvised. You’ll get good at the skill soon, and will be able to fabricate stories on the spot. This is purely an issue of practice.
When you start off, you will feel lost. This is OK. Your players have done way less research than you, so you are still the table’s font of knowledge and final decisions. Remember Rule 1, and you’ll do fine.
Don’t be afraid to not answer questions you don’t have answers to. Leaving things open-ended will make your setting seem more mysterious, put-together, and expansive than it actually might be at that point. This also forces your players to theorize and speculate, and maybe they think up a better idea than what you originally had planned. Now, whatever your thing used to be, it’s that now (this also makes your players feel smart for predicting something in your world). Your players will give you free plot ideas all the time once they’re used to the setting because they are paranoid as all hell.
Practice a smiling poker face. You may need it. A lot. Sometimes the only answer you need provide to a question is a small smile to set your players on edge. Few things ramp up the tension like them thinking you have something nasty planned right around the corner.
And the most important tip of them all, the most powerful tool in your set, is this eight word sentence:
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
These words, spoken slowly and calmly, are like a spark of sanity lit in a player’s mind. This sentence can turn a character away from jumping off the edge of a cliff “to see what happens,” or a player attempting to Leeroy Jenkins a boss fight. This phrase is so important that it is immortalized in fan communities and by Wizards themselves in the Player’s Handbook:
Disclaimer: Wizards of the Coast is not responsible for the consequences of splitting the party, sticking appendages in the mouth of a leering green devil face, accepting a dinner invitation from bugbears, storming the feast hall of a hill giant steading, angering a dragon of any variety, or answering yes when the DM asks: “Are you sure?”
Tune in later when I tackle Encounters, Boss Fights, and the kinds of campaigns you can run, and what stories they support. I’ll also tackle how you can alter the mechanics of your system to better suit your group’s needs.
Need hours of content to tide you over to my next blog post?
Check out Matt Mercer’s GM Tips series, or Matt Colville’s Running the Game series.
