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#1 0:23 - Not knowing your World #2 2:44 - Not understanding your players' characters #3 6:42 - Not building modular game elements #4 9:44 - Not creating pool of ideas #5 15:51 - Not having backup plan #6 22:23 - Not using "Yes, and..." #7 27:12 - Overusing "Yes, and..." #8 29:40 - Trying to do everything yourself #9 31:19 - Expecting to improve without practice #10 33:08 - Not redirecting your players #11 36:30 - Not reskinning #12 39:13 - Not buying time #13 41:38 - Not delegating #14 44:51 - Ignoring clues from your players #15 47:43 - Not eating enough bacon
Thank-you! It pisses me off when TH-camrs make these long list videos and don't give us chapters. I tend to leave them as I cba watching most of the ones I already know. You deserve a medal!
I learn the game blades in the dark to get over that hump. I leveled up as a GM with that game. I highly recommend the playthrough on Third Floor Wars.
May I give you a special trick ? In need of improvisation, or even to plan an adventure quickly, refer to something you know and like, familiar to you, as a background canvas. You have seen a circus, a show, a comedian ? There is one in this village arriving... You like looking at "Formula 1 " ? In their region an annual chariot race is organised... You know well the mall of your town ? The adventure lead them to a crowded market... You are a secret fan of Sailor Moon or Lady Bug ? Suddenly some enigmatic women mages seem to confront an unknown enemy... Of course, you do not precise your references, you describe and build around them... 😉 You may be a fan of castles, or course, but also of a science fiction film and adapt it... All may be useful, becoming original from you... Good luck !
I heard of a dude that has a bucket of npcs that he writes down a name, profession, race, a problem that character is looking to fix, and three random sentences about that character and drops them into a bucket. Every time he gets a neat idea he does a new one.
If any time PCs show mercy the bad guy/kobolds/whatever come back later to do more havoc, the PCs will never show mercy again and just kill everything. They'll kill every mook they capture for questioning. They will hunt down any monster trying to retreat from battle. Consequences do matter, but they also matter when the PCs show kindness. If the PCs are punished for being kind they will never be kind again.
I once did a reverse of that. My party cleared a goblin camp and they let two last gobs live, but make them promise they do good. Sometime later they fought a necromancer, a zombie giant and couple zombies at lvl 1 (this was my 3rd time DMing, 1st self made one-shot, and I had 4 DMs as players who wanted it hard) and things looked grim. Suddenly two goblins rode into the cave on a wolf, tangled rope around giants legs, and barbarian pushed it, toppling it into a ritual acid pool crushing the giant, necromancers plans, and creating one of the most memorable moments for me and them both in our TTRPG experience.
I agree, you shouldnt punish non-murder hobo behavior unless you want that to be the whole game. Instead have the Kobolds use the money you gave them to create a start up. Have them come to the aid of the players. This will give them far more agency than just punishing them. This is why you DONT just spam yes/and to everything because everything will be half baked crap.
You can also mix it up. Let them spare a couple villains, have one go back to evil, and they deal with them. Later, they find another that has completely turned their life around, or approach the group for help so they don't turn back to their villainous ways
I think it would be interesting to make it so there a rough systems of how the PC handle a thing, each type of NPC would handle it differently. Imagine if you are dueling a Knight and you slay him but bury him according to his customs, now he cant be revived as a Ghost to hunt you down but mock his body and he is more then willing to get help to hunt you down. Or if you are trying to talk down a bad guy, it can either scare them, piss them off or cause them to be distracted. Something that reflects their opinion and may help.. get a sneaky facestab on the ones that get carried away.
Your teacher was correct. Practice makes permanent. If you practice something incorrectly it solidifies that behavior. Perfect practice means deliberate, constructive, methodical repeated attempts. You have to know the goal and the steps to achieve it. For instance learning an instrument. Playing each movement slow and deliberately, making sure you hit each note correctly and in time.
Perfect practise also includes preparation before practise and choosing the right things to practise. Like voice exercises and listening to recorded practise sessions.
That's right - Vince Lombardi is credited with the quote: "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect". The point isn't that you have to be perfect to practice, it's that you have to practice doing it pefectly or you'll never be perfect at it. If you practice something wrong, it doesn't matter how many times you do it, you'll never be perfect at it.
I think there's some relativity to this theory. Something like playing an instrument follows this idea perfectly, with more precise instruments being even more appropriate. Poor form for the violin or piano is terrible, but less so for non-classical guitar. Ballet is not necessarily baseball. And then when it comes to something with more subjectivity, like visual art or heaven forbid - improv (yikes) sometimes doing it poorly is an incredible learning opportunity. As long as you can determine what people responded to or not. Make bad art is also a common mantra. I think it's two sides of the same coin.
39:25 I had to put a bridge into a region that didn't have one. "Let's check out the bridge." Caused an oh crap moment. Now, all of the sudden, there is a bridge guarded by half orc thieves. I planned a fight, the players decided to put smart them.
I have one player who likes to uniquely investigate areas, which leads to great opportunities for me. After a fairly basic forest encounter he wanted to climb a tree to see if there were any unusual structures he could spot from a higher vantage point. I had nothing else planned in that area, but i said "sure, you see a bizarre outcrop from the mountain side which is vaguely tower shaped". I turned this into a broken down, abandoned lookout tower of a drawven tribe who no longer inhabited the mountain. It gave me a location to reintroduce a pair of NPCs who were using the spot as a campsite, and built in another layer of history and plot devices to the campaign.
42:42 I do this a lot with mundane tasks. I put them in a camp setting. "You prepare a celebration for ...." Then I let them take over. It usually has positive benefits that I could choose to reward. Maybe they are on a short rest but, morale gets a boost. Maybe I restore a little extra HP or reward XP for the morale boost. "I want to go fishing." Okay. "You cast out your fishing pole. After a few casts, you pull in a shellfish trap." I award a trap of some sort. Now they can both fish and hunt shellfish if they so desire.
I do mostly improv for my story as my players like sandbox play, but I meticulously plan out towns and dungeons that happen to be on the path of the players and I just need to do a little re-theming to make them work.
Welp, I was like "I do pretty much all of these", though my favourite method of stalling is "You stop for the evening; did X want to discuss their issue with Y in the last encounter?" and my (admittedly extremely wonderful) group starts RPing in character, I get some time to prep things, AND also listen to their chatter to make long term plans. Then you added tip 15, and... I'm allergic to bacon/pork/ham etc. So that's a mistake I can't rectify!
Sometimes when i listen to my players, they come up with something that they think is happening that is in my mind better than what i came up with. When they get to the thing, i like to reward that player, or players an inspiration.
In my recent game my players came to a hermit wizard after hearing in some tavern that he's offering some well paid job. After being asked "what's the job and how good is payment" I came up with some nonsense like "oh, well, no need for dungeon crawling, it's just some odd-job around the house, piece-work pay, you'll get 1 gold coin every day [that's a good payment in my games for such work], also you can do unilateral termination of the contract at the moment's motice" And then my players went whispering "the hell?? So IS IT piece-work pay OR 1 gc a day? And if the payment is so good, where are the others workers? Seems like the wizard doesn't even now how to bullshit about payment, seems like he had never paid ONCE. He's totally a vampire or some demonologist. Hey wizard, where are the other workers?" -"Ehhmmm, some died because of accident, some earned good money and walked out, some was stupid alcoholics and I fired them myself" And I was sitting and thinking like "Oh crap... nevermind, looks like fun!" In the end I gave wizard a daughter, long dissapeared wife, odd-jobs included some esoteric stuff (to drive away the fairies who stole magus wife and want to steal his daughter now) and that deceased workers just didn't do the job EXACTLY as were asked and because of that fairie did tricks on them causing stupid deaths like falling from roof. And my players now coming to Feywild through mushroom faerie circle on the backyard, trying to find long dissapeared magus wife
29:05 You've heard of Yes, but; Yes, and and No, but; now get ready for: No, and. "I think the villain's in the forest". "No, and you get ambushed by a Displacer beast while you investigate".
I wouldn't go so far as to say perfect practice makes perfect. Mindful practice is what you need. Not just doing it, but paying attention to how you're doing it and the results.
That statement is originally speaking to how if you’re practicing the wrong thing or information then that’s exactly what you are mastering (instead of what you intended to) Which is fine for developing something new But if you were trying to make a cake and practiced by using inedible ingredients; you won’t having something you can eat (which is what you set out to do) Sort of like reinventing the wheel; if you’re not practicing in the correct way, you’re gonna be way off.
An excellent video Luke and some of these points I make good use of myself, especially playing for time/stalling. It's particularly useful when it comes close to when I'd decided to end the session and say something like "guys that's a great point to end the session on and we'll pick it up next time". That gives me plenty of time to plan and have something good to bring next session. Also, sometimes a good/lucky improv leads to all sorts of fun you didn't expect. In my recent Slavelords campaign, the party unexpectedly freed & healed up some humanoid prisoners that were close to death in an evil temple. I didn't have names for them but the party took an interest in them so I just cobbled some names together and said they belonged to local tribes in the region. The party gave them some weapons and helped them escape the temple so they could go back to their tribes. Well, when the party was travelling through the region to get to the next location they had to go through these same humanoid areas but got a free pass cos of what they did to free those hostages. Worked out neat all round!
11:00 This is (in my opinion) a terrible idea - basically ruthless murderhobos factory. Not the mere use of puzzles from earlier stages of the adventure, but teaching players that sparing anyone will only bring them trouble in the long run. Maybe the kobolds are now trying to make an honest living working on the farm, but their lives and those of their employer are threatened by local thugs?
'nother great vid, Luke! At the denouement of the current adventure, take several (3-5) ideas from your pool and turn them into rumors. Your ideas should have 6 elements, who, what, when, where, why, and how. Roll d3+2 to create an incomplete rumor, maybe roll % to determine how truthful the rumor or each element of the rumor is. Salt your characters ears with these rumors as they rest, shop, level up, or whatever. Take notes as they discuss or argue over the rumors and what they might mean. They may come up with much better ideas than yours! Also, you get to choose which of the Players gets to shout, "I knew it, I was right!!" We all want to do that. You need a couple of introductory encounters or NPCs for each rumor to finish out the play session, then you'll have a week or 2 to complete a new adventure you know they'll use because they chose it (and helped create it) themselves! Hope that helps!
A great resource for drag-and-drop dungeons are the 1 page dungeons. There are tons of those out there designed for different enviroments, player levels, etc. And they can be 2-3 hour adventures that you dont need to write or improv, just pull out the page and run it.
Even with one page dungeons and one-shots, players can still throw you curveballs 😅 I've only been DMing since November and only ran one-shots (dnd night at a games cafe) and still had to majorly improvise some things, couple of times I've been completely flabbergasted by what my players were doing and needed a few minutes to work out how the hell to deal with the situation😅 great fun all round though
Excellent video on improvising and also on keeping things fresh and to have finished stuff you have already planned out waiting to be used. I’m super excited to see the secret art of game mastery come out as I’m sure many of the ideas presented in your video will be put into written form that a GM can use to his or her advantage. Great video Luke. Thank you!
One of my favorite times of not going with "Yes, and" was a player becoming convinced that he was going after a green dragon. The signs coincidentally added up, such as heavy fog, a deep forest and nobody wanting to go near the island. It turned out to be a hag coven which made for a great twist!
On the topic of #15… kinda… don’t forget to eat. On days I DM I get so engrossed in the game (and nervous!) that I forget to eat or don’t feel like eating. Eat before the game.
We have a system where each week one player brings a dish to eat before the game. So far its worked out well! I am doing a lamb ragu and gnocchi for our game tomorrow 😊
@@ArcaneSpells For real I have run a few sessions without eating prior, and those sessions are rough. Food fuels the mind as well as the body, and DMing can be mentally taxing at times, which makes a solid meal a must for me.
As my chaotic ass is pretty much hit and miss with improv - I absolutely love this list of tips. Really, really thank you :D And one little bonus: Have a list of names. It's the easiest thing to set up just names. 10 Names - 5 male 5 female fitting the region your adventure is set. Players love to question exactly that one NPC you just made up on the spot. And if they ask, you an go like: "Oh let me just check my notes real quick" and answer with the first name on the list. This helps with immersion, as it feels as if the people weren't just made up on the spot - and it helps you to disguise which NPCs are important and which aren't. You can go haywire and have names for every species, culture and stuff prepared, and a few for businisses, dungeons or taverns also.
on GameSetting knowledge: Its the same reason jotting down the goals, wants and general opinions of NPCs makes it easier to run them. Your brain has good general guidelines for how to run a thing and doesn't have to do as much heavy lifting around generating a place or person from the void.
You're constantly displaying a masterful balance of advice (like "use 'Yes And'... but don't overuse it!) and that's why I love this channel. It forces me to consider suggestions I don't agree with, but tempers that with advice that balances perfectly, making me see the needle you're threading in stark resolution.
Toastmasters is a really good tool for getting better at improvising. Also, progression board or strategy games are a great way to build the same kind of "stiff upper lip" that it takes to kill (or rethink) your darlings. Blood Bowl is my favorite, but there are others.
Agreed. The only downside is that after years of Toastmasters and professional competitive public speaking I started courses in (voice) acting and hear all the time that I deliver speeches more than talk/act natural. It's hard to unlearn.
@@DMKarinZeeland tell me about it. I grew up on D&D books and premodern through early 20th century fantasy, so as a kid I just naturally talked in Old High Gygaxian. Everyone wanted to play in my game but otherwise pretend they didn't know me lol.
24:16 A tip from somebody who has fairly recently gotten comfortable with DM'ing for his group: Don't do this if you struggle with improv. This is the number 1 way to trip yourself up. I remember doing this when I was still very new and I just kept putting myself into situations with no outs, because I was still shit at improvising. Do this when you're more experienced, not when you're new. Making your players wonder as to why something doesn't make sense can be a very effective storytelling tool, but ONLY if you know the actual reason. If you don't know the reason and keep making stuff up without thinking about it, it'll often just anticlimactically fall flat or become frustrating/meandering.
@@theDMLair Understandable, but again, that can be very difficult for newer dungeon masters. Furthermore, it's also table-dependant. Some players might spend the next 30 minutes theorising together, while another table will just want to press on and find out about this thing you're setting up at the end of the tunnel; which makes it really awkward when, in actuality, there's nothing there. Blurting out poorly thought out stuff thus leads to the DM having to unravel his own web, because he knows as little as his players do. So therefore, be careful with this, or avoid it if you're new. Mind you, there are a lot of other very helpful tips in this video! It's just this one that made me perk up and say to myself: "Oh, that's a bad idea."
Knowing when to use "yes, and" and "No, but" is the hardest skill set I've learned as a DM. I still sometimes get it wrong sometimes but when it does go right my lord is it a fun session
"No, but" is always wrong. You can "yes, and" your way around anything. The most crucial thing is crafting around the players so it doesn't interrupt flow. That doesn't mean they get to do whatever they want - there are consequences for some actions. The hardest thing as a DM is to figure out how to "yes, and" your way out of difficult situations, such as the death of a PC.
@@Hawk7886 "No, but" is perfect also, the solution the players think doesn't always work, but maybe trying to make it leads them to discover another solution. I like the GinnyD "Yes and-Yes but-No and-No but" method.
Lots of great ideas here. I really like the #4 point about creating the pool of ideas, but both of the examples given (i.e. the boss and the Kobolds) might encourage murder-hobo-adjacent, "must-kill-all-enemies" mentality with players. This might be fine in certain campaigns, but rewarding a "must-kill-everything" mentality is something many GMs would like to avoid.
Unfortunately I don't have a group to play with:( However, I have created 6 different lvl 1 characters. 1 of which is a Female Astral Elf Paladin (planning Oath of Conquest) with Anthropologist background. Part of her plan/desire is to conquer part of the Mortal Plane and establish a new Queendom with a new Pantheon. Part of the new Pantheon idea is restoring Garagos to full Deity Status destroying Tempus' & Red Knight's power. Also other parts of the Pantheon will be other Lost/Dead/Weakened Deities and only a few current existing Deities will be included/saved.
When I need to stall for time I like to act as if there's some kind of important event that's about to happen or be revealed, and then to build suspense I tell the group to take a 10-15 minute break. Generally by the time we come back everyone has been thinking and/or talking about it long enough that in addition to what I came up with during the break I can steal my player's ideas on the fly. It's pretty great.
I love your Yes and technique. Being a big improv. GM I really do that but didn't realise it until you kinda put it in word. That's why I often say I don't really make the Story the players do... because I'll build upon what they throw at me. I normaly have no idea where stuff will go... the story surprise me has much as them :)
"Perfect practice makes perfect" is a result of people trying to make catchy sayings instead of useful ones. "Bad practice reinforces bad behaviors" is what they really mean. Or what they should mean. I dunno, some people buy into sayings way too much.
@@doombat04only if you have perfect fundamentals. The people who misunderstand "perfect practice makes perfect" never stopped to think about it. It doesn't mean you'll be perfect if you practice, it means that you need to slow down and break it down so you know the perfect way to do something, _and then practice that._ If you don't practice perfectly, you can reinforce bad habits, which will stifle your growth.
25:40 And, it you could also just say that the NPC that the players are talking to may not have the full info either, or may have been lied to, memory altered, is themselves lying, the info used to be correct but is no longer true, due to some unforeseen events, among other things
I just started DMing this week. Did two sessions in two days, 90% improv. I realized my first idea wouldn't work as I wasn't experienced enough as a dm to take advantage of it, and a dungeon where almost all they would do was fight fight fight wouldn't be the best introduction for first time player, so I had to restart my prep 3h before starting the session. It went well, but what you said near the end resonated with me. The more improv I can avoid the better 😅
before my first ever game I was so incredibly anxious to have to improvise. Turns out I'm pretty damn good at improvising, but I'm always looking to improve so this video was great. To other new and nervous GMs, once the game gets going you'll do absolutely fine.
The backstory one is great. I'm in a game now where I was told by the DM "we don't have time to get into anyone's backstory. It tiring, uninspiring, and anything we think of that is "out of the box" gets shot down
27:58 This is when you use no but. As in no that didn't happen but. This is what is going on with that instead and it links out to something else or back to the target. So no the bandit isn't in the rivine. But their is a watch post for the bandit group he is attached to from it. Tree house. Their was a recent storm and the dc visibility of the sentury point is below one of the players.... Passive perception. Allowing the story to move forward.
41:13 - That's the one big advantage the really short sessions I have with my players (2-3 hours each week) have. If they decide to go some ridiculous path that needs prep work, I'll just throw a fight or an exploration site in front of them and wait it out.
This has got to be the single greatest video for a new DM! I’ve been running games for years and this was the most enjoyable, and informative presentation I could have asked for. Thank you
22:11 I am actually working on a plot twist that's based on a plot point. My players have a character who brought up a rival clan. They are currently tracking down the rivals. On their way to the rival village something will happen (I'm now considering the "help us" idea) that leads them to finding out that the rivals don't actually have a grudge against my party member's clan. Instead they are being controlled by a Giant Overlord. Now , rather than vanquishing the rivals, they must help them by defeating the Overlord.
The kobolds greet the player characters warmly as friends. They are confused when the pcs are angry at them and asking why the kobolds started doing bad stuff again. The kobolds claim that they haven't! That they used the shiny stuff to buy the barn and goats from the farmer, but then the farmer tried to make them give it back without paying for it. Now the players have to figure out who is telling the truth.
47:44 As meme as the not enough bacon sounds, getting comfortable is a good thing to do to help improvise. Putting yourself in a good mood is probably what helps me best to improv
As always, this is very helpful advice. I'm not super good at improv, but our last session I had to improv some stuff because I added a social random encounter and then my players interacted with it in the way they usually do. They are bullies so they bullied this NPC. It turned out really well, IMO. And now they are banned from Neverwinter for a year.
So as a player what I have started doing is fleshing out some connections for my characters and then if things come up, pass those along to my GM as possible NPCs or my GM will give me a bit of "free reign" to come up with some things for a place we are going to that my character has been at before. I didn't do this initially because the game has changed quite a bit since I had last played (back in the 1e / 2e days) when it was a bit more "hack and slash" / "dungeon crawl".
31:49 Your teacher was right; practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. This is why even experts continue to practice. As you get better at your skill, you also get better at practicing it.
I find the best way of improvising in a premade setting like Forgotten Realms is to remember that it's actually your world. I've run a few pre-written campaigns that were set in the Forgotten Realms, but I've never bothered immersing myself in the lore of those settings, beyond what the campaign requires. If I don't know something, I make it up, which is frankly more fun. Some of my players are really into the novels, so if anything it's a boon to me to do my own thing. I don't want my players to know more about the world than the DM. I always point out at the start of the campaign: some things may be familiar, but don't take anything for granted. Just because you read something in a book, doesn't mean it happened in this world.
Funny thing, you nailed "omnipotent" on the first try. For future attempts with "verisimilitude," keep in mind that it has six syllables, with stress on the first and fourth.
as a newer DM, i was surprised how good i was at improv turns out i was better than i thought. I also don't plan out the towns the PCs are from, I get them to do that, and tell them if the town's wealth is unreasonable [if to high or low]. Saves Quite a bit of prep
I loved listening to my players when they planned their next steps. They knew I did this and in one campaign where they were about to fight the ultimate bad guy they actually met at a coffee shop (I wasn’t invited) to plan their infiltration and fight. It was great fun when we got together. It was epic and we still talk about it years later.
Luke, I love your videos. They are incredibly structured and you have an amazing way of communicating information. I also like to dive into the live streams from time to time because your ability to speak off the cuff is phenomenal. Just wanted to let you know that I would love love love love love a DM Lair podcast. Not sure if this exist already or has ever been a consideration, but I feel a mixture of the scheduled videos and the live streams in a podcast format would be absolutely incredible. Thanks for the amazing content!
This is kind of an improvisational event that has happened to me a few times. Here's a recent example: There was an assassination attempt made by a group of Dark Elf thieves that my party witnessed. Since the party was there to see what happened, the thieves made a hasty retreat by teleporting away. When our heroes rescued the victim, they searched him and found an eye agate among his belongings. Now, I had rolled this randomly and it was intended to be just a mundane gem; however, when they discovered it, the female druid of the group blurted out, "This could be a magical gem that might be used to spy on us!" I took note of this and worked it into the storyline. The moral is: Always be open to allowing your players to contribute to the creation process of the details of your stories; just don't let them know you're doing this. This randomly rolled item has become a crucial plot device and it was all based on a spontaneous thought blurted out by one of my players. Thanks for reading.
#14 will blow your mind Again, this is not a video, this is a masterclass. I hope this video does well. Maybe it is too long for most viewers, but the ones that stay till the end can get a lot of excellent advice out of it. Thanks a lot for the effort.
When you said "Players will definitely do what you don't expect," I was reminded when the GM was running what should have been a scavenger hunt for the level 3 characters. One clue had us go into the personal demiplane/prison of an ancient red dragon. There was a (in hindsight) clearly marked safe section that we were supposed to stay in to get the item. But we misunderstood and wandered out of the safe zone. The poor GM had no choice but to have the dragon catch us and turn the whole thing into us trying to escape the demiplane, along with a captive tribe of Kobalds.
Hey, Luke. Have you considered making another video about creating a campaign? Maybe it could be a stream, so people could suggest random stuff when they donate to Stack-Up or something
If you know your campaign setting fairly well, use Tarot cards to "tell the future" of an area, a village, a mountain, or the adventuring party. If you know your campaign, you know who the Empress is. You know who the inverse Empress is, or the Knave of Staves, or what the 3 of Cups refers to as it pertains to your setting. Each card in a "lay" or "throw" is an element of an adventure. And so you fill your pool with ideas.
15:39 the straw in the barn starts catching fire, “ quickly rescue the goats, open the doors of the pens, and form a bucket line from the well!” Getting rid of the kobald infestation won’t matter if the farmer loses everything to the bank because he lost all his goats goat feed and all of the farm equipment in the barn.
My biggest fumble as a DM was not being willing to move things around. I had a campaign on a cursed island that eventually led to a side adventure within “the space between” bags of holding. One of my PCs was playing a Tau from the 40k universe, searching for an artifact called the A.S.S. As soon as they entered the bag his detector stopped working and he completely ignored combat just so he could dig, and ofc was disappointed that nothing was there. I was so set on the A.S.S. being part of a dragon’s horde at the end of the adventure but our sessions stalled out before we could get there! That campaign was a mess to begin with, I was DMing for 7-10 players each session and the vibe was more house party than serious D&D session… but I learned a lot from it that I will be implementing for a new campaign with a smaller group!
The secret to improvising is using familiar things whether it be locations, experiences, or events, and you can draw that from history, movies, books, your own old ideas or something your players mentioned. Players are great for inspiration and shooting from the hip. A lot of my improv comes from my laundry list of ideas in my saved notes on my phone or from unused preparations from previous experiences.
What if the Kobolds dont force the farnwrs out, but rather yse the shinies you oaud them to rent the barn and buy the goats as livestock they can slaughter over time? Husbandry kobolds!
After you said not to buy crap at MacDonald's I got an ad for it, lol. I already used many of these tips myself. I guess one thing you could add is a bunch of interesting NPCs that you can sprinkle in. Merchants, farmers, city folk, nobles, some unsavory folk, bards, all kinds that you can drag and drop in when the players pull something unexpected.
I've heard perfect practice makes perfect explained as don't practice until you can do it right, practice until you can't do it wrong. That was for music class, countless moons ago.
32:07 "Perfect practice makes perfect." This is actually good advice, but it's lacking context. Lets take an athlete, who is practicing to be the best at high jumping. But they're high jumping from a standing position, and they're doing belly-flops. Over time, that person will 100% get better at high jumping in that particular style, but their technique is so inefficient that they'll never compete at a higher level. Perfect practice comes from trying out and researching different techniques and seeing what brings the best result.
I don't get the DMs who zone out while the players are talking or roleplaying among themselves. For me as an DM the interaction between the players is half of the fun. :D
In regards to number 11 and just moving the tower, at what point does that get to the dreaded rail road? I get linear stuff (and that is my preference running the game) and not wanting to waste prep time, but allowing them be "wrong" make them feel like they have a choice?
Years ago, when I was in my teens. I started out running one shots. I'd draw up a dungeon in my free time, then everybody would roll characters straight up, 3d6 str to chr. Build off you're stats, then I'd improv the entire one shot. Ad&d 1st edition. But idk why the concept couldn't work for 5e. It's practice and you just make a night of it, just keep the dungeon kinda small.
Like you said, always listen to your players. We have one home brew world, but different DMs for each region. Gods allow some variance, but some me things are beyond even the gods . BLT for the win.
One thing i do is, if I have a puzzle I want to use but the players are just not getting it, or I have an idea for something, but I just can't come up with a way to finish it to my satisfaction, don't. Just let the players play around with it, until they hit on something that I can accept and then let them flesh it out. No hints, no outside intervention. Occasionally you can have them make a roll, for some skill or other, that slows them down or speeds them up or whatever, but just let them run it down.
About the Pool of Idea thing: i think you presented this point to negatively. not everything has to bite the players in the ass. this gives the players long term the feeling of, they shouldnt leave any loose ends. and this could prevet them from doing good deeds. i mean yes we DMs draw from possible drama but we also shouldnt make things bleak and hopeless. so instead of letting the kobolds taking over a farm, maybe they could start to build one on their own. holding on to the oath they swore to the players, then the big bad from three months ago could show try to recruit them but they dont want to. so they contact the players saying "hey here is this big dude, comanding us, we dont want that, can you help" so the players fight the big baddy again this time with the helb of the kobolds and in the end the kobolds thank them by gifting them one of their own goats they now have on their own farm in the middle of nowhere. boom still pool of ideas but not everything turns out to be bad i am certain you do something like this already but i thought it was worth mentioning in the context of this video
Thank you! For a Druid PC would the Rollable Table be the only way to allow the PC to have many different Character Sheets connected with each different image, or is that not possible?
Oh, I wish that my players would not kill every NPC villain so they might come back to stab them in the back, but I am playing the standard murder-hobos!
My players are quite new and I would like to point out that when I prepare a part of the module I am running, we do about three sessions with it. So I would advice newer DM's to just grab a module or something to have all this work done for you. I was getting worried when I heard I need to read up on the world and have modular elements ready. You can improv just fine with pre-made stuff and just going with the flow. 😊😊😊
I'm running a campaign with 4 newbie players and one veteran. I've known them for years outside of gameplay, so I assumed I knew what they would do. But this is also only my second time running for a group, so I'm a new GM. They were tracking down a kidnapped princess and I had this whole mini dungeon for the sewers planned, assuming they would enter. I added traps, giant rats and exploding skeletons. But then they decided that the sewers were gross. They refused to go into the sewers even after skeletons started pouring out of them. I knew that the boss was a necromancer, so I just plopped the dungeon into a mazalium and said it looked more recently dug out. Added more undead and poof. All my hard work didn't have to go down the drain after all... Except that I forgot they had leveled up and I had to increase the encounter challenge on the spot 😅 But it turned out to be a pretty good challenge anyway. And most importantly, we all got to have fun and the players were satisfied.
I created my own world/setting from scratch. In some ways, it's easy to know/improv things, but if it's something I haven't thought of yet, I am lost and always stall for a minute while I come up with stuff 😅 I've been creating this world for about 10 months, and I've been getting caught off guard less and less as I build, but I agree that knowledge of the world is pretty key
I do like bacon! As for perfect practice makes perfect? No one is perfect, and perfection isn't something we can actually achieve, so we just... always practice! And that's a good thing! You mention after that even after a couple decades, you still have "trouble speaking" but you've got plenty of practice in, right? Keep practicing! Lol But that point remains: perfect practice makes perfect. We're not perfect? Guess that means no perfect practicing! But can we simply practice over and over again and get better even if it will never be perfect - but always better? Certainly! Edit: Honestly flabbergasted; i was responding to the pop-up for first time commenters, before I got to tip No#15! Absolutely love your presentations!
Here's a fun tip that I heard about on Reddit to improv names of book titles in a book store. Think of song titles and make them into books. Like make Megadeth's Number of the Beast a book about Demonic Numerology filled with mathematical formula's for wizards that deal with the chaos nature of demons and creating demon circles to trap them. Lady Gaga's Poker Face can be about a bard that travels from town to town gambling and getting into trysts along the way. Taylor Swift's You Belong with Me is about a angel in Mount Celestia that is jealous of a mortal woman and man's love.
Improvising stat blocks: it comes down to knowing the general mechanics. If you have a general sense of whether something is easy or difficult and how that changes the system (i.e. DC), you would be amazed at how accurate your estimates can be. Challenge: pick a baddie in your system, make up a difficulty to hit based on how easy it would be logically and you'll likely be within one or two points of the written block. The longer you've DMed/GMed in the setting the more accurate you're likely to be. It may not be perfect but, it will be close enough to create a balanced encounter for the npc your murder hobos decided to attack for no reason. 😂
You can MAKE terrain too. You don't have to buy it. Also a sheet of clear vinyl from a fabric store is cheaper than a battle matt and works with both dry and wet erase markers.
There is the idea of "don't be afraid of the ridiculousness." as in, if you or your players have an off the wall zany idea, maybe you should run with it becuase it is cool. But, you shouldn't be afraid of the obvious either. Sometimes running with a trope is fine. it is trope for a reason, it works.
I remember playing a game once and the DM tried to redirect us, the same way you described, an NPC was being attacked by goblins or something. Instead of rushing to help, we decided it was too dangerous, because pain hurts, so we just watched for a while then walked away. The DM even tried tempting us with a cool sword. There was a reason we decided to purposely make things difficult, I just don't remember what it was, we were always dicks toward each other.
Counterargument to the "have mercy come back to bite your PCs" thing: if you do it a lot, expect the PCs to start murdering everyone without a second thought. If we know no good deed goes unpunished, we will stop doing good deeds. *Variety* is key in keeping players engaged. The third time someone we were nice to tried to kill us, my party stopped having internal mixed feelings about striking people down asking for mercy on automatic.
I really enjoy your videos even if they're geared towards newer players and nit seasoned vets. I've been improving for DECADES and I know my strengths but I'm still going to implement some of your suggestions. Always grow, right?
Gotta love the Yes, and. It isn't useful for just improve but also for unremorsefully swiping the player's theories and running with them because you think it sounds cooler than something you had in mind. After all, the dm is also a player too and we love it when the cool shit happens just as much.
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#1 0:23 - Not knowing your World
#2 2:44 - Not understanding your players' characters
#3 6:42 - Not building modular game elements
#4 9:44 - Not creating pool of ideas
#5 15:51 - Not having backup plan
#6 22:23 - Not using "Yes, and..."
#7 27:12 - Overusing "Yes, and..."
#8 29:40 - Trying to do everything yourself
#9 31:19 - Expecting to improve without practice
#10 33:08 - Not redirecting your players
#11 36:30 - Not reskinning
#12 39:13 - Not buying time
#13 41:38 - Not delegating
#14 44:51 - Ignoring clues from your players
#15 47:43 - Not eating enough bacon
This man's the real MVP right here.
You the man/woman!
Thank-you! It pisses me off when TH-camrs make these long list videos and don't give us chapters. I tend to leave them as I cba watching most of the ones I already know. You deserve a medal!
You are a saint
Thank you so much omg! Very helpful!
As a newer DM who is worried more about fumbling improv than anything else, this video has perfect timing.
100 percent with you on this one.
I learn the game blades in the dark to get over that hump. I leveled up as a GM with that game. I highly recommend the playthrough on Third Floor Wars.
Yes, especially the part about bacon.
May I give you a special trick ?
In need of improvisation, or even to plan an adventure quickly, refer to something you know and like, familiar to you, as a background canvas.
You have seen a circus, a show, a comedian ? There is one in this village arriving...
You like looking at "Formula 1 " ? In their region an annual chariot race is organised...
You know well the mall of your town ? The adventure lead them to a crowded market...
You are a secret fan of Sailor Moon or Lady Bug ? Suddenly some enigmatic women mages seem to confront an unknown enemy...
Of course, you do not precise your references, you describe and build around them... 😉
You may be a fan of castles, or course, but also of a science fiction film and adapt it...
All may be useful, becoming original from you...
Good luck !
I heard of a dude that has a bucket of npcs that he writes down a name, profession, race, a problem that character is looking to fix, and three random sentences about that character and drops them into a bucket. Every time he gets a neat idea he does a new one.
If any time PCs show mercy the bad guy/kobolds/whatever come back later to do more havoc, the PCs will never show mercy again and just kill everything. They'll kill every mook they capture for questioning. They will hunt down any monster trying to retreat from battle. Consequences do matter, but they also matter when the PCs show kindness. If the PCs are punished for being kind they will never be kind again.
I agree. I have had npcs betray the pcs, but I’ve also had some die for them
I once did a reverse of that. My party cleared a goblin camp and they let two last gobs live, but make them promise they do good.
Sometime later they fought a necromancer, a zombie giant and couple zombies at lvl 1 (this was my 3rd time DMing, 1st self made one-shot, and I had 4 DMs as players who wanted it hard) and things looked grim. Suddenly two goblins rode into the cave on a wolf, tangled rope around giants legs, and barbarian pushed it, toppling it into a ritual acid pool crushing the giant, necromancers plans, and creating one of the most memorable moments for me and them both in our TTRPG experience.
I agree, you shouldnt punish non-murder hobo behavior unless you want that to be the whole game. Instead have the Kobolds use the money you gave them to create a start up. Have them come to the aid of the players. This will give them far more agency than just punishing them. This is why you DONT just spam yes/and to everything because everything will be half baked crap.
You can also mix it up. Let them spare a couple villains, have one go back to evil, and they deal with them. Later, they find another that has completely turned their life around, or approach the group for help so they don't turn back to their villainous ways
I think it would be interesting to make it so there a rough systems of how the PC handle a thing, each type of NPC would handle it differently.
Imagine if you are dueling a Knight and you slay him but bury him according to his customs, now he cant be revived as a Ghost to hunt you down but mock his body and he is more then willing to get help to hunt you down.
Or if you are trying to talk down a bad guy, it can either scare them, piss them off or cause them to be distracted. Something that reflects their opinion and may help.. get a sneaky facestab on the ones that get carried away.
Your teacher was correct. Practice makes permanent. If you practice something incorrectly it solidifies that behavior. Perfect practice means deliberate, constructive, methodical repeated attempts. You have to know the goal and the steps to achieve it. For instance learning an instrument. Playing each movement slow and deliberately, making sure you hit each note correctly and in time.
Perfect practise also includes preparation before practise and choosing the right things to practise. Like voice exercises and listening to recorded practise sessions.
That's right - Vince Lombardi is credited with the quote: "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect". The point isn't that you have to be perfect to practice, it's that you have to practice doing it pefectly or you'll never be perfect at it. If you practice something wrong, it doesn't matter how many times you do it, you'll never be perfect at it.
I think there's some relativity to this theory. Something like playing an instrument follows this idea perfectly, with more precise instruments being even more appropriate. Poor form for the violin or piano is terrible, but less so for non-classical guitar. Ballet is not necessarily baseball. And then when it comes to something with more subjectivity, like visual art or heaven forbid - improv (yikes) sometimes doing it poorly is an incredible learning opportunity. As long as you can determine what people responded to or not. Make bad art is also a common mantra. I think it's two sides of the same coin.
39:25
I had to put a bridge into a region that didn't have one.
"Let's check out the bridge."
Caused an oh crap moment.
Now, all of the sudden, there is a bridge guarded by half orc thieves.
I planned a fight, the players decided to put smart them.
I have one player who likes to uniquely investigate areas, which leads to great opportunities for me. After a fairly basic forest encounter he wanted to climb a tree to see if there were any unusual structures he could spot from a higher vantage point. I had nothing else planned in that area, but i said "sure, you see a bizarre outcrop from the mountain side which is vaguely tower shaped".
I turned this into a broken down, abandoned lookout tower of a drawven tribe who no longer inhabited the mountain. It gave me a location to reintroduce a pair of NPCs who were using the spot as a campsite, and built in another layer of history and plot devices to the campaign.
That is some absolutely solid crafting dude, I love it.
42:42
I do this a lot with mundane tasks.
I put them in a camp setting.
"You prepare a celebration for ...."
Then I let them take over.
It usually has positive benefits that I could choose to reward.
Maybe they are on a short rest but, morale gets a boost. Maybe I restore a little extra HP or reward XP for the morale boost.
"I want to go fishing."
Okay.
"You cast out your fishing pole. After a few casts, you pull in a shellfish trap."
I award a trap of some sort. Now they can both fish and hunt shellfish if they so desire.
I do mostly improv for my story as my players like sandbox play, but I meticulously plan out towns and dungeons that happen to be on the path of the players and I just need to do a little re-theming to make them work.
Damn that sounds like a ton of work, I wish I could prep like that.
Welp, I was like "I do pretty much all of these", though my favourite method of stalling is "You stop for the evening; did X want to discuss their issue with Y in the last encounter?" and my (admittedly extremely wonderful) group starts RPing in character, I get some time to prep things, AND also listen to their chatter to make long term plans.
Then you added tip 15, and... I'm allergic to bacon/pork/ham etc. So that's a mistake I can't rectify!
Allergic to pork? Damn I couldn't do it.
@@Hawk7886 You'd be surprised at how easy it is to avoid things when your throat closes in on itself when you do it :P
Sometimes when i listen to my players, they come up with something that they think is happening that is in my mind better than what i came up with. When they get to the thing, i like to reward that player, or players an inspiration.
In my recent game my players came to a hermit wizard after hearing in some tavern that he's offering some well paid job. After being asked "what's the job and how good is payment" I came up with some nonsense like "oh, well, no need for dungeon crawling, it's just some odd-job around the house, piece-work pay, you'll get 1 gold coin every day [that's a good payment in my games for such work], also you can do unilateral termination of the contract at the moment's motice"
And then my players went whispering "the hell?? So IS IT piece-work pay OR 1 gc a day? And if the payment is so good, where are the others workers? Seems like the wizard doesn't even now how to bullshit about payment, seems like he had never paid ONCE. He's totally a vampire or some demonologist. Hey wizard, where are the other workers?"
-"Ehhmmm, some died because of accident, some earned good money and walked out, some was stupid alcoholics and I fired them myself"
And I was sitting and thinking like "Oh crap... nevermind, looks like fun!"
In the end I gave wizard a daughter, long dissapeared wife, odd-jobs included some esoteric stuff (to drive away the fairies who stole magus wife and want to steal his daughter now) and that deceased workers just didn't do the job EXACTLY as were asked and because of that fairie did tricks on them causing stupid deaths like falling from roof. And my players now coming to Feywild through mushroom faerie circle on the backyard, trying to find long dissapeared magus wife
Hell yeah
"They told me 'practice makes perfect'. Then they told me 'Nobody's perfect' so I stopped practicing." - Steven Wright
My 1st grade teacher always used to tell me "practice makes progress"
haha i love him
29:05 You've heard of Yes, but; Yes, and and No, but; now get ready for: No, and. "I think the villain's in the forest". "No, and you get ambushed by a Displacer beast while you investigate".
I wouldn't go so far as to say perfect practice makes perfect. Mindful practice is what you need. Not just doing it, but paying attention to how you're doing it and the results.
That statement is originally speaking to how if you’re practicing the wrong thing or information then that’s exactly what you are mastering (instead of what you intended to)
Which is fine for developing something new
But if you were trying to make a cake and practiced by using inedible ingredients; you won’t having something you can eat (which is what you set out to do)
Sort of like reinventing the wheel; if you’re not practicing in the correct way, you’re gonna be way off.
An excellent video Luke and some of these points I make good use of myself, especially playing for time/stalling. It's particularly useful when it comes close to when I'd decided to end the session and say something like "guys that's a great point to end the session on and we'll pick it up next time". That gives me plenty of time to plan and have something good to bring next session. Also, sometimes a good/lucky improv leads to all sorts of fun you didn't expect. In my recent Slavelords campaign, the party unexpectedly freed & healed up some humanoid prisoners that were close to death in an evil temple. I didn't have names for them but the party took an interest in them so I just cobbled some names together and said they belonged to local tribes in the region. The party gave them some weapons and helped them escape the temple so they could go back to their tribes. Well, when the party was travelling through the region to get to the next location they had to go through these same humanoid areas but got a free pass cos of what they did to free those hostages. Worked out neat all round!
11:00 This is (in my opinion) a terrible idea - basically ruthless murderhobos factory. Not the mere use of puzzles from earlier stages of the adventure, but teaching players that sparing anyone will only bring them trouble in the long run.
Maybe the kobolds are now trying to make an honest living working on the farm, but their lives and those of their employer are threatened by local thugs?
'nother great vid, Luke!
At the denouement of the current adventure, take several (3-5) ideas from your pool and turn them into rumors. Your ideas should have 6 elements, who, what, when, where, why, and how. Roll d3+2 to create an incomplete rumor, maybe roll % to determine how truthful the rumor or each element of the rumor is.
Salt your characters ears with these rumors as they rest, shop, level up, or whatever. Take notes as they discuss or argue over the rumors and what they might mean. They may come up with much better ideas than yours! Also, you get to choose which of the Players gets to shout, "I knew it, I was right!!" We all want to do that.
You need a couple of introductory encounters or NPCs for each rumor to finish out the play session, then you'll have a week or 2 to complete a new adventure you know they'll use because they chose it (and helped create it) themselves! Hope that helps!
A great resource for drag-and-drop dungeons are the 1 page dungeons. There are tons of those out there designed for different enviroments, player levels, etc. And they can be 2-3 hour adventures that you dont need to write or improv, just pull out the page and run it.
Even with one page dungeons and one-shots, players can still throw you curveballs 😅 I've only been DMing since November and only ran one-shots (dnd night at a games cafe) and still had to majorly improvise some things, couple of times I've been completely flabbergasted by what my players were doing and needed a few minutes to work out how the hell to deal with the situation😅 great fun all round though
Excellent video on improvising and also on keeping things fresh and to have finished stuff you have already planned out waiting to be used. I’m super excited to see the secret art of game mastery come out as I’m sure many of the ideas presented in your video will be put into written form that a GM can use to his or her advantage. Great video Luke. Thank you!
One of my favorite times of not going with "Yes, and" was a player becoming convinced that he was going after a green dragon. The signs coincidentally added up, such as heavy fog, a deep forest and nobody wanting to go near the island. It turned out to be a hag coven which made for a great twist!
On the topic of #15… kinda… don’t forget to eat. On days I DM I get so engrossed in the game (and nervous!) that I forget to eat or don’t feel like eating. Eat before the game.
We have a system where each week one player brings a dish to eat before the game. So far its worked out well! I am doing a lamb ragu and gnocchi for our game tomorrow 😊
@@eva9996 similar! I usually get out of cooking though lol. Sounds delicious!!
@@ArcaneSpells
For real
I have run a few sessions without eating prior, and those sessions are rough. Food fuels the mind as well as the body, and DMing can be mentally taxing at times, which makes a solid meal a must for me.
As my chaotic ass is pretty much hit and miss with improv - I absolutely love this list of tips. Really, really thank you :D
And one little bonus:
Have a list of names.
It's the easiest thing to set up just names. 10 Names - 5 male 5 female fitting the region your adventure is set.
Players love to question exactly that one NPC you just made up on the spot. And if they ask, you an go like: "Oh let me just check my notes real quick" and answer with the first name on the list.
This helps with immersion, as it feels as if the people weren't just made up on the spot - and it helps you to disguise which NPCs are important and which aren't.
You can go haywire and have names for every species, culture and stuff prepared, and a few for businisses, dungeons or taverns also.
on GameSetting knowledge: Its the same reason jotting down the goals, wants and general opinions of NPCs makes it easier to run them. Your brain has good general guidelines for how to run a thing and doesn't have to do as much heavy lifting around generating a place or person from the void.
Yes, exactly!
You're constantly displaying a masterful balance of advice (like "use 'Yes And'... but don't overuse it!) and that's why I love this channel. It forces me to consider suggestions I don't agree with, but tempers that with advice that balances perfectly, making me see the needle you're threading in stark resolution.
Thank you! Glad to be able to help!
Toastmasters is a really good tool for getting better at improvising. Also, progression board or strategy games are a great way to build the same kind of "stiff upper lip" that it takes to kill (or rethink) your darlings. Blood Bowl is my favorite, but there are others.
Agreed. The only downside is that after years of Toastmasters and professional competitive public speaking I started courses in (voice) acting and hear all the time that I deliver speeches more than talk/act natural. It's hard to unlearn.
@@DMKarinZeeland tell me about it. I grew up on D&D books and premodern through early 20th century fantasy, so as a kid I just naturally talked in Old High Gygaxian. Everyone wanted to play in my game but otherwise pretend they didn't know me lol.
24:16 A tip from somebody who has fairly recently gotten comfortable with DM'ing for his group: Don't do this if you struggle with improv. This is the number 1 way to trip yourself up. I remember doing this when I was still very new and I just kept putting myself into situations with no outs, because I was still shit at improvising. Do this when you're more experienced, not when you're new. Making your players wonder as to why something doesn't make sense can be a very effective storytelling tool, but ONLY if you know the actual reason. If you don't know the reason and keep making stuff up without thinking about it, it'll often just anticlimactically fall flat or become frustrating/meandering.
The trick is to figure out WHY while the players are wondering about it.
@@theDMLair Understandable, but again, that can be very difficult for newer dungeon masters. Furthermore, it's also table-dependant. Some players might spend the next 30 minutes theorising together, while another table will just want to press on and find out about this thing you're setting up at the end of the tunnel; which makes it really awkward when, in actuality, there's nothing there. Blurting out poorly thought out stuff thus leads to the DM having to unravel his own web, because he knows as little as his players do. So therefore, be careful with this, or avoid it if you're new.
Mind you, there are a lot of other very helpful tips in this video! It's just this one that made me perk up and say to myself: "Oh, that's a bad idea."
The party are about to be killed by a group of Trolls... suddenly a band of Kobolds charge in and aid the party!
Knowing when to use "yes, and" and "No, but" is the hardest skill set I've learned as a DM. I still sometimes get it wrong sometimes but when it does go right my lord is it a fun session
"No, but" is always wrong. You can "yes, and" your way around anything. The most crucial thing is crafting around the players so it doesn't interrupt flow. That doesn't mean they get to do whatever they want - there are consequences for some actions. The hardest thing as a DM is to figure out how to "yes, and" your way out of difficult situations, such as the death of a PC.
@@Hawk7886 "No, but" is perfect also, the solution the players think doesn't always work, but maybe trying to make it leads them to discover another solution. I like the GinnyD "Yes and-Yes but-No and-No but" method.
Lots of great ideas here. I really like the #4 point about creating the pool of ideas, but both of the examples given (i.e. the boss and the Kobolds) might encourage murder-hobo-adjacent, "must-kill-all-enemies" mentality with players.
This might be fine in certain campaigns, but rewarding a "must-kill-everything" mentality is something many GMs would like to avoid.
Great video! It was worth the extra length. It inspired me to try a couple new things in my next session prep!
Unfortunately I don't have a group to play with:(
However, I have created 6 different lvl 1 characters.
1 of which is a Female Astral Elf Paladin (planning Oath of Conquest) with Anthropologist background. Part of her plan/desire is to conquer part of the Mortal Plane and establish a new Queendom with a new Pantheon. Part of the new Pantheon idea is restoring Garagos to full Deity Status destroying Tempus' & Red Knight's power. Also other parts of the Pantheon will be other Lost/Dead/Weakened Deities and only a few current existing Deities will be included/saved.
OneNote is good for keeping ideas in and notes on the campaign.
Some good ideas
When I need to stall for time I like to act as if there's some kind of important event that's about to happen or be revealed, and then to build suspense I tell the group to take a 10-15 minute break. Generally by the time we come back everyone has been thinking and/or talking about it long enough that in addition to what I came up with during the break I can steal my player's ideas on the fly. It's pretty great.
I love your Yes and technique. Being a big improv. GM I really do that but didn't realise it until you kinda put it in word. That's why I often say I don't really make the Story the players do... because I'll build upon what they throw at me. I normaly have no idea where stuff will go... the story surprise me has much as them :)
"Perfect practice makes perfect" is a result of people trying to make catchy sayings instead of useful ones. "Bad practice reinforces bad behaviors" is what they really mean. Or what they should mean. I dunno, some people buy into sayings way too much.
Good point!
"Practice Makes Permanent" is what my high school English teacher would say.
I like to say practice makes better
@@doombat04only if you have perfect fundamentals. The people who misunderstand "perfect practice makes perfect" never stopped to think about it. It doesn't mean you'll be perfect if you practice, it means that you need to slow down and break it down so you know the perfect way to do something, _and then practice that._ If you don't practice perfectly, you can reinforce bad habits, which will stifle your growth.
25:40 And, it you could also just say that the NPC that the players are talking to may not have the full info either, or may have been lied to, memory altered, is themselves lying, the info used to be correct but is no longer true, due to some unforeseen events, among other things
I just started DMing this week. Did two sessions in two days, 90% improv. I realized my first idea wouldn't work as I wasn't experienced enough as a dm to take advantage of it, and a dungeon where almost all they would do was fight fight fight wouldn't be the best introduction for first time player, so I had to restart my prep 3h before starting the session. It went well, but what you said near the end resonated with me. The more improv I can avoid the better 😅
I'm going to watch this video on repeat continously until my game next Tuesday.
before my first ever game I was so incredibly anxious to have to improvise. Turns out I'm pretty damn good at improvising, but I'm always looking to improve so this video was great. To other new and nervous GMs, once the game gets going you'll do absolutely fine.
The backstory one is great. I'm in a game now where I was told by the DM "we don't have time to get into anyone's backstory. It tiring, uninspiring, and anything we think of that is "out of the box" gets shot down
27:58
This is when you use no but.
As in no that didn't happen but.
This is what is going on with that instead and it links out to something else or back to the target.
So no the bandit isn't in the rivine.
But their is a watch post for the bandit group he is attached to from it.
Tree house.
Their was a recent storm and the dc visibility of the sentury point is below one of the players.... Passive perception.
Allowing the story to move forward.
41:13 - That's the one big advantage the really short sessions I have with my players (2-3 hours each week) have. If they decide to go some ridiculous path that needs prep work, I'll just throw a fight or an exploration site in front of them and wait it out.
This has got to be the single greatest video for a new DM!
I’ve been running games for years and this was the most enjoyable, and informative presentation I could have asked for.
Thank you
22:11
I am actually working on a plot twist that's based on a plot point.
My players have a character who brought up a rival clan. They are currently tracking down the rivals.
On their way to the rival village something will happen (I'm now considering the "help us" idea) that leads them to finding out that the rivals don't actually have a grudge against my party member's clan. Instead they are being controlled by a Giant Overlord.
Now , rather than vanquishing the rivals, they must help them by defeating the Overlord.
The kobolds greet the player characters warmly as friends. They are confused when the pcs are angry at them and asking why the kobolds started doing bad stuff again. The kobolds claim that they haven't! That they used the shiny stuff to buy the barn and goats from the farmer, but then the farmer tried to make them give it back without paying for it. Now the players have to figure out who is telling the truth.
Lots of great information here. Thank you!
47:44 As meme as the not enough bacon sounds, getting comfortable is a good thing to do to help improvise. Putting yourself in a good mood is probably what helps me best to improv
As always, this is very helpful advice. I'm not super good at improv, but our last session I had to improv some stuff because I added a social random encounter and then my players interacted with it in the way they usually do. They are bullies so they bullied this NPC.
It turned out really well, IMO. And now they are banned from Neverwinter for a year.
So as a player what I have started doing is fleshing out some connections for my characters and then if things come up, pass those along to my GM as possible NPCs or my GM will give me a bit of "free reign" to come up with some things for a place we are going to that my character has been at before. I didn't do this initially because the game has changed quite a bit since I had last played (back in the 1e / 2e days) when it was a bit more "hack and slash" / "dungeon crawl".
31:49 Your teacher was right; practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. This is why even experts continue to practice. As you get better at your skill, you also get better at practicing it.
I find the best way of improvising in a premade setting like Forgotten Realms is to remember that it's actually your world. I've run a few pre-written campaigns that were set in the Forgotten Realms, but I've never bothered immersing myself in the lore of those settings, beyond what the campaign requires. If I don't know something, I make it up, which is frankly more fun. Some of my players are really into the novels, so if anything it's a boon to me to do my own thing. I don't want my players to know more about the world than the DM. I always point out at the start of the campaign: some things may be familiar, but don't take anything for granted. Just because you read something in a book, doesn't mean it happened in this world.
Funny thing, you nailed "omnipotent" on the first try.
For future attempts with "verisimilitude," keep in mind that it has six syllables, with stress on the first and fourth.
as a newer DM, i was surprised how good i was at improv turns out i was better than i thought. I also don't plan out the towns the PCs are from, I get them to do that, and tell them if the town's wealth is unreasonable [if to high or low]. Saves Quite a bit of prep
I loved listening to my players when they planned their next steps. They knew I did this and in one campaign where they were about to fight the ultimate bad guy they actually met at a coffee shop (I wasn’t invited) to plan their infiltration and fight. It was great fun when we got together. It was epic and we still talk about it years later.
Luke, I love your videos. They are incredibly structured and you have an amazing way of communicating information. I also like to dive into the live streams from time to time because your ability to speak off the cuff is phenomenal. Just wanted to let you know that I would love love love love love a DM Lair podcast. Not sure if this exist already or has ever been a consideration, but I feel a mixture of the scheduled videos and the live streams in a podcast format would be absolutely incredible. Thanks for the amazing content!
This is kind of an improvisational event that has happened to me a few times. Here's a recent example: There was an assassination attempt made by a group of Dark Elf thieves that my party witnessed. Since the party was there to see what happened, the thieves made a hasty retreat by teleporting away. When our heroes rescued the victim, they searched him and found an eye agate among his belongings. Now, I had rolled this randomly and it was intended to be just a mundane gem; however, when they discovered it, the female druid of the group blurted out, "This could be a magical gem that might be used to spy on us!" I took note of this and worked it into the storyline. The moral is: Always be open to allowing your players to contribute to the creation process of the details of your stories; just don't let them know you're doing this. This randomly rolled item has become a crucial plot device and it was all based on a spontaneous thought blurted out by one of my players. Thanks for reading.
#14 will blow your mind
Again, this is not a video, this is a masterclass. I hope this video does well. Maybe it is too long for most viewers, but the ones that stay till the end can get a lot of excellent advice out of it. Thanks a lot for the effort.
Wow, I loved those tips, thank you do much!❤️
Thank you. Informative and useful. Hopefully it makes my games better. Drag and drop, wonderful idea. Retread old events even better. Again, thanks.
When you said "Players will definitely do what you don't expect," I was reminded when the GM was running what should have been a scavenger hunt for the level 3 characters. One clue had us go into the personal demiplane/prison of an ancient red dragon. There was a (in hindsight) clearly marked safe section that we were supposed to stay in to get the item. But we misunderstood and wandered out of the safe zone. The poor GM had no choice but to have the dragon catch us and turn the whole thing into us trying to escape the demiplane, along with a captive tribe of Kobalds.
Hey, Luke. Have you considered making another video about creating a campaign? Maybe it could be a stream, so people could suggest random stuff when they donate to Stack-Up or something
A fresh campaign creation video is probably in order!
@@theDMLair oh, wow. That's great :D
These are some of my favorite Luke videos!
Outstanding advice video, thank you so much!
If you know your campaign setting fairly well, use Tarot cards to "tell the future" of an area, a village, a mountain, or the adventuring party.
If you know your campaign, you know who the Empress is. You know who the inverse Empress is, or the Knave of Staves, or what the 3 of Cups refers to as it pertains to your setting.
Each card in a "lay" or "throw" is an element of an adventure. And so you fill your pool with ideas.
I have to say man, your stuff just keeps getting better and better.
15:39 the straw in the barn starts catching fire, “ quickly rescue the goats, open the doors of the pens, and form a bucket line from the well!” Getting rid of the kobald infestation won’t matter if the farmer loses everything to the bank because he lost all his goats goat feed and all of the farm equipment in the barn.
Great practical advice man - thanks for the recap and the reminders!
My biggest fumble as a DM was not being willing to move things around. I had a campaign on a cursed island that eventually led to a side adventure within “the space between” bags of holding. One of my PCs was playing a Tau from the 40k universe, searching for an artifact called the A.S.S. As soon as they entered the bag his detector stopped working and he completely ignored combat just so he could dig, and ofc was disappointed that nothing was there. I was so set on the A.S.S. being part of a dragon’s horde at the end of the adventure but our sessions stalled out before we could get there! That campaign was a mess to begin with, I was DMing for 7-10 players each session and the vibe was more house party than serious D&D session… but I learned a lot from it that I will be implementing for a new campaign with a smaller group!
The secret to improvising is using familiar things whether it be locations, experiences, or events, and you can draw that from history, movies, books, your own old ideas or something your players mentioned. Players are great for inspiration and shooting from the hip.
A lot of my improv comes from my laundry list of ideas in my saved notes on my phone or from unused preparations from previous experiences.
What if the Kobolds dont force the farnwrs out, but rather yse the shinies you oaud them to rent the barn and buy the goats as livestock they can slaughter over time? Husbandry kobolds!
After you said not to buy crap at MacDonald's I got an ad for it, lol. I already used many of these tips myself. I guess one thing you could add is a bunch of interesting NPCs that you can sprinkle in. Merchants, farmers, city folk, nobles, some unsavory folk, bards, all kinds that you can drag and drop in when the players pull something unexpected.
I've heard perfect practice makes perfect explained as don't practice until you can do it right, practice until you can't do it wrong. That was for music class, countless moons ago.
32:07 "Perfect practice makes perfect." This is actually good advice, but it's lacking context. Lets take an athlete, who is practicing to be the best at high jumping. But they're high jumping from a standing position, and they're doing belly-flops. Over time, that person will 100% get better at high jumping in that particular style, but their technique is so inefficient that they'll never compete at a higher level. Perfect practice comes from trying out and researching different techniques and seeing what brings the best result.
I don't get the DMs who zone out while the players are talking or roleplaying among themselves. For me as an DM the interaction between the players is half of the fun. :D
In regards to number 11 and just moving the tower, at what point does that get to the dreaded rail road? I get linear stuff (and that is my preference running the game) and not wanting to waste prep time, but allowing them be "wrong" make them feel like they have a choice?
Number 15 explains so much. Who knew all my problems could stem from this one issue.
Years ago, when I was in my teens. I started out running one shots. I'd draw up a dungeon in my free time, then everybody would roll characters straight up, 3d6 str to chr. Build off you're stats, then I'd improv the entire one shot. Ad&d 1st edition. But idk why the concept couldn't work for 5e. It's practice and you just make a night of it, just keep the dungeon kinda small.
32:48
I struggled with improv at first. Now I can almost improv the entire campaign. I try not to but, I could.
Like you said, always listen to your players. We have one home brew world, but different DMs for each region. Gods allow some variance, but
some me things
are beyond even the gods
. BLT for the win.
One thing i do is, if I have a puzzle I want to use but the players are just not getting it, or I have an idea for something, but I just can't come up with a way to finish it to my satisfaction, don't. Just let the players play around with it, until they hit on something that I can accept and then let them flesh it out. No hints, no outside intervention. Occasionally you can have them make a roll, for some skill or other, that slows them down or speeds them up or whatever, but just let them run it down.
30:22 "There must be something unnatural for these facts to all be true at once...."
As a dm who only improvises and does no prep, I thoroughly agreed with most of the stuff he said.
I really love the Yes And I’ve used that for years and my world has been built out in partnership with my players. The stories just wrote themselves.
32:00. Practice doesn't make perfect... we are imperfect beings. Practice does make better though.
About the Pool of Idea thing: i think you presented this point to negatively. not everything has to bite the players in the ass. this gives the players long term the feeling of, they shouldnt leave any loose ends. and this could prevet them from doing good deeds. i mean yes we DMs draw from possible drama but we also shouldnt make things bleak and hopeless. so instead of letting the kobolds taking over a farm, maybe they could start to build one on their own. holding on to the oath they swore to the players, then the big bad from three months ago could show try to recruit them but they dont want to. so they contact the players saying "hey here is this big dude, comanding us, we dont want that, can you help" so the players fight the big baddy again this time with the helb of the kobolds and in the end the kobolds thank them by gifting them one of their own goats they now have on their own farm in the middle of nowhere. boom still pool of ideas but not everything turns out to be bad
i am certain you do something like this already but i thought it was worth mentioning in the context of this video
Thank you! For a Druid PC would the Rollable Table be the only way to allow the PC to have many different Character Sheets connected with each different image, or is that not possible?
I steal random info from Warhammer and this is working.
Oh, I wish that my players would not kill every NPC villain so they might come back to stab them in the back, but I am playing the standard murder-hobos!
My players are quite new and I would like to point out that when I prepare a part of the module I am running, we do about three sessions with it.
So I would advice newer DM's to just grab a module or something to have all this work done for you.
I was getting worried when I heard I need to read up on the world and have modular elements ready.
You can improv just fine with pre-made stuff and just going with the flow. 😊😊😊
I'm running a campaign with 4 newbie players and one veteran. I've known them for years outside of gameplay, so I assumed I knew what they would do. But this is also only my second time running for a group, so I'm a new GM. They were tracking down a kidnapped princess and I had this whole mini dungeon for the sewers planned, assuming they would enter. I added traps, giant rats and exploding skeletons. But then they decided that the sewers were gross. They refused to go into the sewers even after skeletons started pouring out of them. I knew that the boss was a necromancer, so I just plopped the dungeon into a mazalium and said it looked more recently dug out. Added more undead and poof. All my hard work didn't have to go down the drain after all... Except that I forgot they had leveled up and I had to increase the encounter challenge on the spot 😅 But it turned out to be a pretty good challenge anyway. And most importantly, we all got to have fun and the players were satisfied.
I created my own world/setting from scratch. In some ways, it's easy to know/improv things, but if it's something I haven't thought of yet, I am lost and always stall for a minute while I come up with stuff 😅 I've been creating this world for about 10 months, and I've been getting caught off guard less and less as I build, but I agree that knowledge of the world is pretty key
I do like bacon!
As for perfect practice makes perfect?
No one is perfect, and perfection isn't something we can actually achieve, so we just... always practice! And that's a good thing! You mention after that even after a couple decades, you still have "trouble speaking" but you've got plenty of practice in, right? Keep practicing! Lol
But that point remains: perfect practice makes perfect. We're not perfect? Guess that means no perfect practicing! But can we simply practice over and over again and get better even if it will never be perfect - but always better?
Certainly!
Edit: Honestly flabbergasted; i was responding to the pop-up for first time commenters, before I got to tip No#15!
Absolutely love your presentations!
Here's a fun tip that I heard about on Reddit to improv names of book titles in a book store. Think of song titles and make them into books. Like make Megadeth's Number of the Beast a book about Demonic Numerology filled with mathematical formula's for wizards that deal with the chaos nature of demons and creating demon circles to trap them. Lady Gaga's Poker Face can be about a bard that travels from town to town gambling and getting into trysts along the way. Taylor Swift's You Belong with Me is about a angel in Mount Celestia that is jealous of a mortal woman and man's love.
Have a random encounter table/wandering monster table at hand, and you never need to worry.
Improvising stat blocks: it comes down to knowing the general mechanics. If you have a general sense of whether something is easy or difficult and how that changes the system (i.e. DC), you would be amazed at how accurate your estimates can be. Challenge: pick a baddie in your system, make up a difficulty to hit based on how easy it would be logically and you'll likely be within one or two points of the written block. The longer you've DMed/GMed in the setting the more accurate you're likely to be. It may not be perfect but, it will be close enough to create a balanced encounter for the npc your murder hobos decided to attack for no reason. 😂
You can MAKE terrain too. You don't have to buy it. Also a sheet of clear vinyl from a fabric store is cheaper than a battle matt and works with both dry and wet erase markers.
There is the idea of "don't be afraid of the ridiculousness." as in, if you or your players have an off the wall zany idea, maybe you should run with it becuase it is cool. But, you shouldn't be afraid of the obvious either. Sometimes running with a trope is fine. it is trope for a reason, it works.
I remember playing a game once and the DM tried to redirect us, the same way you described, an NPC was being attacked by goblins or something. Instead of rushing to help, we decided it was too dangerous, because pain hurts, so we just watched for a while then walked away. The DM even tried tempting us with a cool sword. There was a reason we decided to purposely make things difficult, I just don't remember what it was, we were always dicks toward each other.
Counterargument to the "have mercy come back to bite your PCs" thing: if you do it a lot, expect the PCs to start murdering everyone without a second thought. If we know no good deed goes unpunished, we will stop doing good deeds. *Variety* is key in keeping players engaged. The third time someone we were nice to tried to kill us, my party stopped having internal mixed feelings about striking people down asking for mercy on automatic.
I really enjoy your videos even if they're geared towards newer players and nit seasoned vets. I've been improving for DECADES and I know my strengths but I'm still going to implement some of your suggestions. Always grow, right?
Gotta love the Yes, and. It isn't useful for just improve but also for unremorsefully swiping the player's theories and running with them because you think it sounds cooler than something you had in mind. After all, the dm is also a player too and we love it when the cool shit happens just as much.