True Heroism
“I have some campaign ideas.”
That’s the first stepping stone. The idea. After watching games crumble and fall apart, either from scheduling or from lack of interest, you can’t help but poke at the ashes of your latest dead campaign and say, “I could do better!” It’s what happened to me. Now it’s happening to Gunslinger.
It doesn’t really matter what the idea happens to be either. It’s the spark of creativity that counts. Maybe it’s the underwater campaign you’ve always dreamed of, replete with pirates and krakens and benthic horrors. Maybe it’s a prehistoric setting with lots of barbarians vs. dinosaurs. Maybe some obscure system has caught your eye, and you want to run your players through a high fantasy magical internet hacker game. The particulars aren’t important. It’s the creative urge that counts.
So you lurk the boards. You sit in on your buddy’s game. You watch Critical Role, crack open a few rule books, then go to YouTube so someone can explain to you what the rulebook actually said. Whatever it happens to look like for you, this is the necessary prep work. All of it is at the service of the idea. But then comes the scary part. The moment that our perpetually lonely Gunslinger now faces.
“So uh… I’ve never really GMed before. This is my first ever session. Go easy on me, guys.”
Helming your first game takes courage. You’re terrified of screwing up, forgetting rules, or delivering a dull experience. That’s why you see so many, “Any advice for first-timers?” threads on the web. It’s also why, all the way back in 2015, I decided to write this comic. We grow by sharing our ideas and experiences. That’s what The Handbook of Heroes has been to me over the years. I hope it’s served you just the same.
As GMs, we are driven by our own creative urge as oral storytellers. But then, something extraordinary happens. Other people show up. Players come along and invent characters and backstories we’d have never dreamed up in a thousand years! By some strange alchemy “my idea” becomes “our story,” and is better for it.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we share our own origin stories as GMs? What was it like running your first game? Were you nervous? Excited? Did you accidentally TPK your players by misunderstanding what “CR” meant? Whatever your tale, let’s hear all about it (for the penultimate time) down in the comments!
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I FREAKING CALLED IT! I *KNEW* IT, AND I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO GLAD TO BE RIGHT! Get ’em hooked and never be lonely again, Gunslinger, you deserve it!
Also, what I’m *hopefully* going to be running soon (once one of the players stops being cursed by the DND gods – seriously, three late shifts and then her computer fried its own hard drive!) is…sorta my first game? I ran something in a different system with just two players a while back, but I was never very good. This is my first game with my roommate and my romantic partner. I’m starting off with a published adventure, and I have a few ideas for how to expand it involving aboleths, dead gods, and heroes making an extradimensional being bleed, but I’ve really got very little idea where I’m going. Wish me luck!
Gunslinger’s absence was somewhat conspicuous in the last comic. Good call. XD
Good luck with the game! Nobody is “good” at GMing at first. It’s all about getting the practical experience. I think that published adventures are a great way to start though. They give you a vision of what the game’s creators intend. Then you can mix and revise and make it your own as you get more comfortable behind the screen and figure out what you and your group enjoy.
Oh, this isn’t an official D&D published adventure, this is an adventure with a whole lot of homebrew made by this one third-party group I like a lot. But my prior game was run with a system based on a video game I liked, and the setting was based there too, and it kinda died out quickly because the rules were a morass of confusion. So let’s hope this goes better!
I want to say, I’m really going to miss the biweekly “tabletop talk” prompts, maybe just as much as the comic itself.
Some of my favorite conversations of life have been game theorizing at late:30 in the morning, shutting places down while solving all the world’s RPG problems with my buddies. Those moments are rare though, so we get the internet instead. Handbook or no Handbook, we’ll always find those conversations.
Sorcerer? Inquisitor? Keep your mouths shut and unroll those eyes!
Nobody else wanted to step up, and Gunslinger has been waiting. We know he loves the setting because he so desperately wanted to be part of it and kept trying.
Let him take his shot.
let the Gunslinger take a shot,
haha good one.
Mom’s spaghetti moment for the halfling with the firearm. Let’s hope he’s up to it!
I think he’s well-motivated to get people to play with him. 🙂
And he’s done his own adventuring, so he knows the ruleset; and he’s been all over Handbookworld looking for a place to belong, so he should have a good grasp of the setting! 😉
If nothing else, he deserves his chance to be at the center of a game.
I wonder if folks IRL ever teach themselves systems by solo gaming? I’ve never tried it myself, but it seems like that’d be a useful exercise.
Well, I learned Fighting Fantasy by solo gaming, but it was designed for that, so it probably doesn’t count.
Only when Advanced Fighting Fantasy rolled around did it becme a game for multiple people.
(Still Gobo, I’m so bad at not putting in the wrong name)
I’m so delighted for Gunslinger here. This really is the ending I both anticipated and really wanted, a happy ending for the comic’s biggest punching bag.
On the subject of origin stories, I started running when I was, like, 9, and it was purely incoherent “number go up” nonsense for a long time, running for my siblings because my older sibling was tired of doing it. Games never really went longer than second level, I cheated constantly to help out the PCs (especially my beloved GMPC, Eldon the halfling rogue with the inexplicable greataxe), and it was barely even the game at all. Later, being rural and thus starved for players, I took a couple stabs at PbPs, but my first “real” campaign was me getting a bunch of friends at my teen writing group and running weekly Pathfinder games at the coffeeshop. I ran a lot, because nobody else wanted to, but a lot of my play–both as player and GM–was mired in insecurities about not wanting to be “powergamey”, not wanting to play “Mary Sues”, not wanting to “take things too seriously”, not wanting to do “cringey romance storylines” (especially not while, gasp, crossplaying, that’s so weird, who would do that)… It’s funny, but it’s taken me nearly twenty years to start running games that really fit what I actually want to run, groups that embrace sincerity and angst and tragic backstories and optimized tactical builds, groups that, most importantly, embrace the endless cavalcade of blatant romancebait NPCs. Nobody makes fun of how many NPCs–ally and villain–seem to be pretty ladies, because they’re totally here for it.
Like, I know I’m veering way off-topic, but I guess it’s like… the genesis of my GMing doesn’t spark a lot of nostalgia for me. Like most of my childhood, it was a very gradual process of unraveling, slowly emerging from my egg to become what I actually wanted to be. As a Game Master, I mean.
That’d be a cute creative project, honestly: Adaptations/campaign journals/retellings for one’s oldest campaigns. You know, the ones with characters like Gobby the Friendly Goblin.
Fighter and Summoner would like a word. 😛
I see what you did there.
And I hear you about defining yourself against what you DON’T want to be rather than embracing the things you love. Revealing your sincerity can be intimidating.
“Here’s something that I love and care about!”
And if people don’t accept that, then my word! You’ve been rejected and emotionally eviscerated! And the fear of that unlikely scenario has a way of stymying creativity.
Good on ya for getting out of the mindset!
Killed my own DMPC in the very first encounter. This was in elementary, so we had no idea what we were doing.
A worthy fate for any DMPC, lol.
I swear, self-teaching these games is a giant process of coming back a day later like, “Hey guys. So I’ve been doing some reading, and here’s a small list of 27 things from last session we got wrong.”
Freshman year of college in the early 90s, I was in a “Sick sword” type of game first semester and got tired of it. I said I’d run a game for whoever wanted to show and I was allowing all alignments but they needed to be able to work in a party.
17 people showed up. The four from the “sick sword” game where first perplexed when they realized the others were not murder hobos and then stunned when the rest of the party truss d them and delivered their characters to the guard.
Party implosion diverted to team building exercise by sheer luck.
The group shrank down to 11, eight of which were constant for the next 75ish sessions to the culmination of my “rod of the 9 parts” inspired campaign, with 2-4 people cycling every semester or so.
Downside is I am leery of less than 6 in a group as I’m used to something approximating mass combat now.
What is a “sick sword” game? Never heard the term.
It’s always crazy to me to see giant games like that. You must be lightning fast as a GM to cycle through so many players in a combat! I mean like… How do you keep folks from getting bored when the game focuses elsewhere?
Egg timer and enforcing that the players pay attention when the other players are doing their thing “OR ELSE”. They know there is a stash of tootsie rolls or rubber dice with their name on them if they stray from that. And tootsie rolls sting when huffed with enough force.
lol. I like that getting free candy softens the blow.
“Sick Sword” was a Usenet story set in a 1e d&d world. (I am ooold).
The characters didn’t even qualify as two-dimensional. They didn’t get real names, but their magic items did and they were known by their gear. Aka “this character has a Sick Sword!” “Cool. I’m Flaming Falchion.”
It was a giant pile of rules abuse (i.e. there was a 1% chance a centaur has a diamond worth 1,000gp and gp= xp in 1e, so centaur muggings were a daily occurrence to speed level), power gaming. Everything was max level, had max stats, alignment was a way to get class combos, and everybody “totally ruled!”.
It was ultimately about a GM who couldn’t get anyone to play with them but had found their older sibling’s game books.
So Jeremy with no friends, alone in his basement, making up characters with no character.
One uber-cool (read “horribly derivative and wish-fulfillment”) DMPC. Add zero context or party considerations (“You guys can make whatever classes you want!”) Combine with every cool-looking monster you found in that not-really-compatible 3rd party european publisher rulebook on discount in the back of the gaming store. Microwave gently over a plot inspired by a close misreading of the lyrics to a current pop song no one else at the table was listening to.
…Wonder why, two encounters in, everyone stops building dice towers, roles up new characters, and asks the forever DM to rerun Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh again.
Ouch, lol.
But you bounced back from that mess! It sounds like you learned and grew and become the forever DM in turn. So goo on ya for getting back on that horse!
I became a GM due to my love for Shadowrun. I remember at the time i watched Ghost in the Shell, Oceans 11 and stuff like Deus Ex (or was it 2?) and played my fair share of SR3. So i took the chance and played with the people who knew the rules and worked with me to flesh out my bare bones ideas. I was lucky with that. I hab an awesome safespace to experiment and learn. But I still was nervous most of the time before the session started
Over the time i found my own style, tried to work with my voice and gesture when creating npcs or destribing locations. Thats all so long ago now. Today i GM my way through so many worlds. Be it L5Rs Rokugan, SR Seattle, DnD Forgotten Realmy an Homebrew and so many more. I think i’m a decent GM now. I’m good with NPCs and spontaneous events but still lack some skills in worldbuilding and overarcing plots. ohhh well. You live and learn
I think that’s an important one for all of us to remember. When your buddies are trying to find their feet as GMs, patience and kindness go a long way. It’s scary enough to put yourself out there! Ain’t no call for being overly-critical straight out of the gate.
Me? It started with me deciding “hey, this Pokémon game looks interesting and I happen to know a handful of nerds that would be all for it.”
I wound up being wrong about the game and have since switched systems, but oh well.
…it’s also worth noting that this was my first major experience with tabletop as a whole. As well as one of my players’. I had to correct them once that we were not playing D&D.
It’s tough to make that break sometimes. Play one genre for long enough and everything begins to look like, “Go into room. Fight monster. Solve puzzle. Loot.” That play loop defines dungeon bash fantasy. So when you move on to something else, it can be tough for longtime dungeon delvers to recognize what actual gameplay is supposed to look like. In the worst cases, GMs fail find a satisfactory replacement for dungeoneering, leading to directionless find-the-plot flailing and dull sessions.
As for Pokémon, I’d be curious to hear about your own point of failure. Where did teh system let you down?
HE DID IT! OUR LONELY BOI DID IT!! I’M SO HAPPY FOR HIM!!!!
Essentially, the issue for the game was that it tried too hard to replicate ALL of the mechanics of the video games, and not doing enough simplification. Which meant that I was doing like three or four calculations for every attack. On starter characters. I got burnt out pretty easily.
Also, Claire, I think you misunderstood. This was not “somebody had only ever played D&D”; this was “this player was so green to the field that they didn’t quite seem to clock that there was a difference.” It’s the way that people used to call consoles “a Nintendo”.
I’m *very* rules and numbers oriented, which is what landed me the role of GM after my group’s original GM left—I was the only player who was familiar with all of the game’s rules. You better believe I ran that game with technical perfection, but boy was it bone dry. No passion or evocative descriptions; I just presented everything like I was going over fiscal reports at a business meeting. Took me a couple months to develop a basic sense of dramatic storytelling (and I’ll never have a true storyteller’s flair), but that group was patient and stuck with me for years.
I dunno… I think that having a dramatically absent GM can be a boon sometimes. With less “narrative voice,” it becomes easier for players to inject themselves into the world. (I know that because I sometimes have the opposite problem, putting too much spotlight on myself during descriptive moments.)
Yes the Hakkapeliitta campaing is a go. Guns blazing, charging to melee for god and king. If GM by end isn’t paraphrasing the german prayer players didn’t do their best(worst).
Seriously though my first GM was for d20 Starship Troopers, it was the ever familir 3.5 ruleset to me so only nervous was if the players would enjoy it. Couple had seen the first movie but none had read the book or seen the roughnecks the rpg was more based on and none of them had military training so when I started with bootcamp I really had to hammer home some military culture and habbits, like using sir when talking to superiors. Even though my brain does insist on going Mister “rank” ascorrect terminology.
Heh. At least you had an easy theme song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkszNmr6Qh0
Fun connection to Starship Troopers: My old boss worked on the movie at Hell’s Half Acre. You can still find spent shell casings from the production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell%27s_Half_Acre_(Wyoming)
nah the original march or https://youtu.be/oU1jgB004GI?si=ogjgo4EDD6Wq-M6Q .
I was the one who wanted to bring the group together. It started out as lunch table sessions in between classes at highschool – now it’s weekend games every few weeks and online games with friends from college. I think I was too lenient the first time; I let my players harvest the dragon they (amazingly, since it was supposed to bail halfway) killed for armor and weapon materials and then had to deal with really high ACs for the martial characters. It was till fun though.
Poor dragon. That’s one way to learn the lesson:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/minimum-safe-distance
My first attempt at DMing? An overly complex oneshot that ran for two sessions with a third planned that group scheduling* killed. I’m quite fond of the idea: a planned gang attack on a theatre in Waterdeep, with the PCs having to comb the building, cast and crew for information, booby traps and weakpoints to uncover the moles in the cast, the plans for the attack and the reasons why this is happening. It definitely needs a few tweaks, but there’s a lot of ways this could play out depending on the PCs’ choices and successes and I’d love to run an updated version someday.
* seriously, it took months to get session 2 ready, by which time none of the players had any idea what was going on _because none of them took notes_. Meanwhile the other dm could drop a vague text message and get everyone in line, on time, every fortnight…
Also, in terms of the comic, I’m wondering about what’s going to happen when Gunslinger takes up BBEG’s mantle. If this involves him literally becoming the new BBEG, with an alignment shift and all, I can see him taking out a lot of frustration on the residents of Handbook-world…
I’ve learned my lesson about one-shots. If you want it to end in one session, you either get “investigation + single combat” or “five room dungeon.” Anything else requires multiple sessions.
Stay tuned!
our DM moved overseas (continental Europe to UK counts, right?)
so I volunteered and kept it running until the players lost patience with each other.
Implosion is a common hazard. Sad times.
But hey, at least you got some experience! Next one gets to be all yours.
Mine was what I’m sure was a large chunk of first time DMs experience. Our DM got in a snit (my fault, though he really needed to be called out for constantly changing the rules for his NPCs benefit) and quit. No one else had anything prepared and no desire to run. I’d already been working on my homebrew (though it was still 90% AD&D at that point), it was mostly my fault, and I was pretty sure I could run a game until someone else had something ready. I became a “forever DM” that day.
And YAY! Gunslinger will be an amazing GM!
I only realized belatedly how much my DMing had served to hold my old friend group together. If no one else steps up to run, it’s easy to drift apart. Good on ya for taking up the mantle.
And yeah, I think Gunslinger has the stuff. 😀
My first GMing experience was what I call an “Anthology Campaign.” While everything was theoretically in the same nameless town and usually had the same PCs, there was no continuity or overarching plot – just one or two wacky encounters I’d come up with. This ranged from “a bunch of zombies have popped up in the cemetery” (a random tavern patron shouting “Not again!” upon hearing this was my primary piece of worldbuilding) to a duel with an extraplanar being that wants to test its skills (specifically at tripping people and unloading infinite Attacks of Opportunity when they fall or try to get up) to a barn full of bear traps covered in straw with a bugbear in the rafters shooting down. It was silly fun with inconsistent player attendance, but it was good starting practice, and helped me shape my bookkeeping methods.
For my first “real” campaign, The Dark Island, I deliberately stranded the PCs on an island to minimize the chance of them wandering into places I had not foreseen. This… somewhat worked. It’s nice to make your first campaign (or at least the first adventure of your first campaign) real real simple. Deep complexity and long-form storytelling can come later.
I remember running into a friend of a friend years back. Lady said she had a great idea for campaign. Said she was, “Almost done fleshing out the pantheon.”
I remain firmly of the opinion that worldbuilding a GMing are two separate skills. They inform one another, but confusing them can lead to all manner of woes. So good on ya for reigning in the scope!
My “first” time GMing:
Horrifyingly enough, it was at a (small) convention. The student gaming society I was part of was running it’s own con and was begging for people to fill out their schedule.
…I sometimes have trouble saying no to people.
…I felt like having a firm deadline, like making a promise to other people, would give me the psychological push I needed to finally get to GMing.
…I was told that there would a preparatory presentation or two on “How to DM” from the more experienced members of the club.
…I didn’t need to to come up with my own plot. Someone else (who was running another event) would write the adventure for me. I had committed to DnD 3.5, he pitched an idea for a humorous adventure with a party of kobolds trying to sabotage some other kobolds before they could do something that provokes the wrath of adventurers.
I *did* run at the con.
…The presentation/pep-talk never materialised.
…Neither did the kobolds; instead, a party of fairly convential adventurers delved into a buried town unearthed by an earthquake.
…Some con-goers were treated to a fairly generic dungeon-crawl, which ran out of time after fight with a Gelatinous Cube dragged on too long.
I know that no-one’s first time GMing is going to go smoothly; I just feel bad for the players here.
But that wasn’t my first time running a role-playing game.
My *actual* first time GMing was years before, running Riddling Reaver for my big sister.
https://fightingfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/The_Riddling_Reaver_(book)
I didn’t think of it as GMing at the time because I didn’t know the terms “Gamesmaster” or “roleplaying”.
It wasn’t until years later that I was talking to someone about how Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf had been a gateway drug into RPGs, when it struck me that “Hey! That one book *was* a role-playing game!”
Running a con game is especially nerve-wracking. Running a tight ship and cutting corners to stay on target is a tough skill for even experienced GMS. So I say good on ya for getting out there and giving it a go!
So, technically my first time trying to DM was at a Boy Scout camp when I was like 11. It basically ended almost immediately because I had no idea what I was doing. I vaguely recall having like 13 players and throwing a pair of fire giants at them.
First “serious” attempt was during college, embarked on an epic campaign in Planescape, with the party trying to gather artifacts from every plane to stop the BBEG from unleashing the Blood War across the planes. I’m honestly surprised it lasted as long as it did (~3 years), but it eventually fell apart after multiple player/character swap outs.
During and after that, I got heavily involved in the Living Greyhawk worldwide campaign and judged (DMed) plenty of those adventures. Also wrote a module and a couple interactives for it. After that ended, I began to DM more and more and slowly metamorphosed into the Forever DM.
I believe my very first time was with 2 players in my freshman year dorm. Had a big roll of butcher paper and just drew the map as I made it up.
“Rolling high is good, rolling low is bad,” was my entire system. It was goofy and glorious.
As far as I can remember I think my first time GMing was my turn at a round robin style Teenagers from Outer Space game. I sadly have no memory at all of what I did for that or most of my turns as GM for that.
After that was just a bunch of homebrew games, again none of which I remember in any detail.
After that was picking up for some late game stuff for the 3.5 game I’ve mentioned here several times before, but that was all side stories and an epilogue.
So really by the first time I ran a game of my own from the start, I’d been far past the point of my “first” enough that I don’t recall much of what I felt in particular. I would assume a general mix of excitement/nervousness. *shrug*
> round robin style Teenagers from Outer Space game
Nice place to start. You wind up taking some of the pressure off when you don’t have to do “epic narrative” for your first time behind the screen.
For sure. Just “being silly” is pretty low stakes. Was definitely key in making everyone comfortable taking their turns.
I used to check RPG handbooks and game guides and walkthroughs out from the library all the time and vicariously play the game through reading the strategies, and if I ever *did* manage to get to play the game, I already kinda knew what it was about! I did spoiler the Wheel of Time series for myself by reading through the WoT RPG handbook, but I also think the clearer expectation of what the characters were going to be by such-and-such a book helped me take a new kind of interest in seeing the various important benchmarks that got them there ANYWAY, I digress.
The first time I DMed, I tried to run Palladium’s “Heroes Unlimited” for another kid at a church event group camp. I’d read this book cover to cover half a dozen times, and was sure that I knew how to make a hero that was *definitely* the strongest and he could do *anything* that you want a strong hero to do! And so I helped this guy build his character, and tried to keep my bias out of it but to my great delight he also thought that plasma beams were definitely the best! Yes! Awesome!
And then I got to him stopping a small time heist because obviously that’s what you fight first. He flew in bravely and melted the guy into the asphalt he was standing on with a basic plasma beam. Awesome! Wait…what do I do from here? Who could possibly fight this guy? Isn’t melting a guy for a bank robbery kind of a lot? Uh…hm…I think…yeah, I think I kinda messed this up. He went off and did something else, and I packed my book up with the character sheets and thought about it.
Ultimately I think I came up with some pretty good answers, and am having a great time freeform STing a Changeling game 😀
OOOHRAH GUNSLINGER, GET IT SON!
I’m so proud of our socially awkward homie!
Yeah, in short, I agree, Gming is a nerve-wracking experience and I’ll never shake the faint suspicion that I’m doing it wrong.
You know what separates me from all those could have, would have, GMs though?
Even if I’m buggering it all up, I’m still getting out there and giving it a go.
And really that’s all it takes, giving it a chance, trying despite mistakes!
So get out there and do that thing!
And just as corollary, my first ever campaign sucked, it was awful!
Derivative, unoriginal, plagiarized and full of mistakes from one end to the other!
It has also been my players favorite campaign to date, I’ll still hear them talking about it five years on.
Part of that might have been the Arabian nights aesthetic, which actualized better then I had thought possible, but I suspect the greater part was simple enthusiasm.
None of us had ever really played before (barring some abortive first efforts) so it was a learning experience for everyone, you never forget your first campaign after all!
First campaign lasted a single session, but the players thought it a success so I kept at it. Star Wars using the old Fantasy Flight rules freshmen year of college. Set during the Sith Attack on Couruscant during the Old Republic era. Each of the players made their character independently, and they each had the same mission, extract a particular senator and get off world past the blockade. They didn’t realize until session start that they were all there to grab the same person. Mexican standoff dissolved into party working together once the troopers arrived and made it clear that they were all hostile to them. Alas, scheduling and IRL stuff prevented following up on that first session and things never quite picked up again for that story. I’ve been the “fill-in” DM for our group for a few years when the “forever-DM” needed a break. Finally got the soup right on my latest outing and now I am the serving DM for the past year with my own setting that seems to have them properly hooked.
“So, while our DM’s schedule is fucked I could run a short campaign. I have some ideas” That’s how it started, and the rest is history.
When I started GMing, no one I knew played RPG’s. So I gathered the clueless neighborhood kids and we tried and I was AWFUL at it… but also, the neighborhood kids had no imagination. They all wanted to be outside playing SportsBall and it showed. So in 1998, armed with an iMac, 56k internet, and little more than a hunch, I went to Palladium Books website in attempt to get into a Rifts game.
Overwhelmingly, people wanted to play, but no one wanted to GM. I may not have been very good, but I was like well… I can track initiatives, I know the rules ok (I didn’t), I can track enemy health… what the hell. It was either GM or no one plays.
For about 5 or 6 years, I GM’d dozens of one shots and dabbled with campaign continuities. The second was impossible because even my so-called friends would ghost me on part two or part three. About two years into that, I found a group of players that were imaginative and curious about RPG’s and finally made a campaign group.
Every one of those games was awful, but we had fun and I definitely learned things. I became sort of our best GM locally who ran challenging combats and fun characters. Sure, my stories were lacking, but the story *from the GM* doesn’t matter that much in these games when they’re about the adventures of the characters, so that worked out.
A couple decades later, I have tools I wished ages for and while my storytelling and plot making is only somewhat improved, my art and game management have improved exponentially, and I’ve become much more innovative in setting up table tops, encounters, and all manner of things. And overall.. I’ve learned that no GM is a master of all the things. That I’m good at the things I’ve managed and have a comparatively weaker spot is fine as it turns out. I’ve also developed some spreadsheets to help balance encounters since CR is weird.
It’s a bit frustrating being somewhat of a perfectionist-I think people who participate in this hobby tend to be perfectionists-but I also think that if we just accept what we do and what the others bring to the table, we build the whole thing together and the parts that you or I suck at get support from those other goons.
And if they ever get frustrated with our shortfalls, you just look ’em square in the eye and say “So I’m hearing you’re ready to GM. That’s fantastic, I have some GREAT character ideas I’ve been wanting to run.”
The vast majority of the group’s first game experience had just fallen apart because everyone had gotten fed up with the DM’s ‘being a shit person’ problem.
But, most of us agreed we liked the in-character interactions we had between players, and wanted to still do tabletop stuff. No one really wanted to step up and be the DM though, because… well, no one wanted to follow in the footsteps of That Asshole.
So, I found a different system I’d been dying to play, and convinced a small group that since I was running a published adventure, we wouldn’t run into the ‘First time GM homebrewing a campaign sucks at it’ problem.
We learned pathfinder 1st edition, and we ran Dragon’s Demand, which I stand by even 8 years later as a quintessential Baby’s First Tabletop module experience. It’s a 1-7 module with a solid premise, and an interesting final boss with a gimmick- A dragon that’s super overlevelled for the party, but the party also gets super overlevelled dragon-slaying gear to bring against it and level the playing field.
I loved running it, and certain moments established running jokes that even now still come up, like the party’s wizard raising a skeleton that the group of kobolds hiding in the cave physically couldn’t damage, so he stood there and starved them out by just standing in the doorway to block their exit- We still have an edit of the skeleton’s head on Sundowner’s armor. Or the fact that the wizard with the constitution of FOUR somehow survived the entire 1-7 module without ever being in danger of dying.
I still remember how it ended, too. The gunslinger finally passing her will save against the yet-unharmed dragon’s fear aura, right as its breath weapon recharged- turning around, taking a knee, and putting a bullet through its head for more than its max hp in a single decisive shot- thank you bullet of dragonslaying, and thank you hard 2 on the dragon’s fortitude save, putting it exactly 1 under the DC to pass.
Constitution of FOUR?
Just reading that makes me need to make a save vs death.
Four…
I’m so proud. Good job, Gunslinger!
My first DM experience was thinking that the Pathfinder books I’d seen in the store looked cool. I had a few friends who were also interested, but nobody wanted to take the plunge.
I decided to be the first to kick down that particular door. I bought the Core Rulebook, read it three times, came up with some ideas, and it honestly wasn’t very good. I was more of a worldbuilder than a campaign writer back then, so the players praised my cool setting while swiftly losing interest in the plot.
I bought an adventure path (Jade Regent) to learn more about how a real campaign works. I ran it three different times with three different groups, each time getting better as I learned what worked and what didn’t last time.
Since then I’ve played many systems, run many adventures, and written my own. I’ve created my own rules for a spy RPG, and I’m in the final stages of designing my own version of D&D. I’m playing in one campaign, DMing two, and soon to start DMing a Neopets campaign for a group of mostly newbies.
It’s been a long, winding journey.
Ok. That takes me back 35 years? There, in the mistst of time, I had this book/game, and I was super excited about it! Adn I really really wanted to play it! Alas, nobody wanted to Gm it, but a few people were interested ebnough that they wanted to play it. So I was “forced” to GM. As the game in question was/is Pendragon (KAP-King Arthur Pendragon) and as I was a history nerd, and had/have the illusion that I know about the Middle Ages, and am capable of presenting a believable picture of that in a game, I set of, with my interested friend, on a journey that is still ongoing… (Not that particular campaign, but GMing Pendragon). The first session was, in a way, both easier and harder than I feared. Easier, because the system is fairly simple, and the world description and building came rather easy to me, and harder because the players, as all players are wont to do, didn’t pick up the, in my view broad, hint, didn’t follow the leads, or at least not in the way I imagined, and did things that were very logical within the world, and the situation, but still unexpected by me. In short: it was a typical RPG session, and afterwards I was, both by my players, and by myself, congratilated on a good session. So then I became the Pendragon forever GM for the following 19 years… But no (or at least very small) regrets! I love the system, and the world, and both teached it to (un)countable others, and made and became friends with wonderfull people because of it.
I’ve never GMd and honestly I’m a little afraid too. At least for other people. I was thinking of running a solo campaign with a group of my own characters. I bought a book of random tables that works for pretty much any system.
I have been playing TTRPGs for most of my life, and while I had GM`ed various ad-hoc mechanics light one shots before, it wasn´t really to a degree that I would describe myself as a GM. So my first proper experience was when I did some One-Shots set in, and later took over a long running campaign.
Making my first couple of one-shots was fun. I enjoyed building the places it took place in, and think about how everything fitted together. Since the usual GM of the game wasn´t really all that savvy when it came to the game rules (I was the most experienced player at the table, by far), I also wanted to make combat feel exciting, so that he might get some inspiration, and so that he and the other players could learn that combat doesn´t have to just be “Fight against 20 identical goblins whose only tactic is to run up at you and try to hit you with a sword”. And seeing the players enjoy what I had made and start to think creatively about things was just a really enjoyable experience.
When I then took over the long-running campaign, it was rather overwhelming. Not helped by the fact that the few notes the former GM gave me were not only incredibly vague, but also because it turned out that the things the party enjoyed the least or had the least attachment to, were the most critical part of the whole game. So I pretty much had to make everything up from scratch. Which involved a lot of retracing our steps and going through my friends player notes to rebuild the world. But it was a fun and enjoyable experience. And I especially enjoyed seeing my friends start to flourish and grow as players.
But I love playing with new GMs (Even if they are only new to me). I feel like I learn something new every time I play with one. How they rule, how they narrate, the things they focus on. I almost always feel like there is something I can bring with me to my own table.
I actually did make the “misunderstanding how CR works” mistake my first time running 5e! It was back in high school, and I was doing a little adventure set in a high-magic version of my hometown. The players were tasked with tracking down a monster that had laired in a scrapyard, which turned out to be a young black dragon.
Given the level the PCs were at, a wyrmling would have been more appropriate. My first TPK…