GLoGtober 22: GM Tips

 No, YOU fell off the bandwagon you built while following unrelated creative tangents. For Day 22, “GM tips”, this is my philosophy for designing adventures for other people to run. I’ve read through and used smattering of modules, and have been writing adventures for my blog for a bit.

1. Start with a no-nonsense run down of the adventure background and the PC’s goals going into it- save the cute little “keeping the GM in the dark” to preambles and book jackets.

2. From there, put on your “new reader” brain. What would you want to know immediately after reading the introduction? Start writing that, and carry forward. In what order would you need to learn the information in the adventure to best make sense of it or look it up during play?

3. Paragraphs, and even full sentences, are overrated. Keep the cognitive load as low as possible, and present as little information as you can, so the DM is comfortable improvising and has freedom while preparing and running the game.

4. Read-aloud text is overrated. A DM should get a feel for whatever it is you’re presenting within 10 seconds of starting to read the chunk, they shouldn’t need you to tell them how to describe it.

5. There are some hot tips as to how to notate things in your adventure for maximal use.

Complicated backstories: Paragraphs, though try and chunk relevant information under headers, and try and consolidate into a timeline or bullets if you can help it

Sparse rooms/overland map: table next to map

Dense rooms: Nested bullet points

NPCs: Fit the format they’re nested in. If in a simple dungeon, pop a couple words about them on the table. If they’re in a wall of bullets, go bullet format. If they’re on their own, short 2-3 sentence paragraphs are good.

Complicated if/thens: Flowchart

Sequences of events, past or future: Timeline

Something strange: A specialized (probably visual or table-based) model

6. Whenever you can, use roll tables. Roll tables have a few benefits: it offers DMs the option to choose options beforehand or customize the table to suit their needs of the adventure, it encourages a lot of ways for the adventure to be played and replayed, and it allows a DM on a time crunch to ignore all the results until they need to generate one instead of having a paragraph to read through.

7. Keep formatting consistent. Every time you have a room, follow the same conventions in notating it. Every time you have a piece of loot, keep your descriptions and language as consistent as you can, so you can pick up on the patterns when reading it.

8. Always include d6 or so twists at the end, little tweaks that change the adventure or add an extra moment of revelation for the players. It makes the module appeal to more DMs- if your core premise isn’t interesting, one of the twists might make the adventure worth running. Plus, it’s damn fun to roll and find out how the adventure gets flipped on its head while you’re prepping.

I hope that advice helps you when you write your adventures. I always like to see more amateur adventures released, so I hope this encourages someone to take up the mantle and write a short adventure or dungeon for the internet. Thanks for reading, and happy gaming!