Learning to DM

[wolfie]

The DM in the area around here thinks he's the dictator. He believes that he is completely in charge and that the players don't get to make any choices. Even refusing to kill someone (because I'm playing a healer devoted to saving lives, for example), makes him angry.

He doesn't get that he's merely the world creator, not the tyrant, and that he's to follow what our characters do, not take away our choices to force us to do things his way.

He needs to have the law laid down - "Are you a DM or a storyteller?" A storyteller, naturally, controls all the characters, and the audience just listens. A DM sets up the scenario, controls the NPCs, and adjudicates results. The players control the PLAYER characters.

[SongsOfDragons]

Aha!! DMing!! I loooove DMing ^^

The oft-spoken rule from my gaming group is "You give your players the options of A, B or C, and they'll take option 7."

Oh the times we've done this ^^. Once we were playing a non-dice-based RP called Asylum which I own but I was a player in. Unbeknownst to us we killed our important NPC contact in the first ten minutes and ruined the DM's plans...and eventually culminated in us destroying the world When we finished, very happy with our 'success', Stein went "What the hell was that? " then told us what we had done. We were very happy. It didn't help that we gave the strongest most experienced roleplayer the Megalomanic character... (Asylum is tiny, one maybe two books and I can't find the other. It's based on coloured glass beads you pull out of a bag. Oh, and everyone is nuts - everyone has some sort of mental disability, which the authors cover, explain and translate into stats very well IMO.)

Drawing maps and using things like Kinder toys or dice to represent characters is good, because you can build in little plot hooks into the map that the characters may or may not trigger during the RP. It doesn't need to be a good map. The last one I did was done on A3 with Sharpies.

My friend Sam ran a '5-minute-roleplay' once, where we played ourselves and she simply used a mystery story she'd been rolling around as a scenario. Ended up being an hour and a half, but it was fun.

Here is a great multi-generator of encounters, places, taverns, etc. Something that helps me is to meticulously plan the setting - not the plot as such, just so I can build up the visuals to give the players more ideas. Research helps - an RP set on Mars was improved by IRL photographs (esp of one of the earth from Mars' surface) and another set in London worked so much better with road and Tube maps.

Also sometimes you'll have to lay down the law. Our group uses a tactic of rolling a d20 when the players are standing around gossiping in dangerous situations - if you hit a 20 they get an encounter. Works well with zombie roleplays. (You have no idea how much damage a zombie chihuahua can do!) Arguing in character and ignoring the plot is one thing - arguing with you isn't - hopefully your other players will sit on them till they shut up. Almost every preset RP book I own has some sort of message within that reminds you that the rules aren't sacrosanct and can be changed or ignored as you will when building your RP/genning characters/etc. Rules lawyers can also be sat on, because you're the DM - you are God.

[Jay 2K Winger]

I'm of the belief that game mechanics come secondary to telling a good story. By all means, craft the world and setting to fit the scene(s), take input from the players and use that input to make the story more interesting not just to the players, but relevant to the characters.

Although I never got that far in the RP I ran here on CS.com, I took input from the players about people that were important to them, as the intent was to later have some threat endanger those people. Not necessarily because the villains were targeting them, but because the world was going to hell (or Hel, if you will) in a hand-basket and stuff like that was happening all over the place.

If some characters are getting more attention than others, try to come up with a problem or situation in which the less-used characters get a chance to shine.

But above all, HAVE FUN. That's always the point of this sort of thing, after all.