Speaker 1: Every table has rules, but the best stories usually begin
when someone ignores them. A risky move, a broken alliance,
a perfect role at the worst possible moment, and suddenly
it's not just a game anymore. It's the victory nobody expected,
the argument everyone remembers, and the story your friends will
still be telling years from now. I'm Scott Ralph and
this is table tales, where board games, card games, and
role playing adventures become stories worth retelling. So pull up
a chair. The next tale is already on the table.
Speaker 2: Yes, you know, what do the different ability checks mean?
And saving throws? What does that mean? And how can
you implement them in your games?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And it might be that you're both new as
a DM and playing with the entirely new players.
Speaker 2: In makes case you.
Speaker 3: Should all give yourself a break. Yeah, and take you know,
take things really slow almost, don't try and have the
role play level in there in a sense, maybe just
have a short session of will work out how a
fight works.
Speaker 2: I'll put these tester sessions.
Speaker 3: I'll put these three wolves in against your four players.
We won't try and set up anything beyond this tiny
bit of thing, and we'll just see if that works.
Because that will fill an hour and a half to
two hours, particularly if none of you are aware of
how it resolutely. So allow yourself that time as a
bit of prep to see if everyone's comfortable, then everyone's
on the same understanding, and use that time to iron
out any issues you may have, or any misunderstandings between
two sets of people.
Speaker 2: Sure, and I think it's probably worth it to say,
in a practical sense, the PHB is all you need.
You don't need the Dungeon Master's Guide. You don't need well,
maybe the Monster Manual, but even then you don't even
need that. The PHB has some monsters in it.
Speaker 3: It does. The Internet is your friend.
Speaker 2: Internet is also your friend. You can google pretty much
any stat block and you'll find it. And even if
you get stuck at any point, as I says, even
if you're taking your time and you want to set
up a little star session, don't be afraid to just
make a ruling. No one's going to know better anyway,
and it's better to keep the game moving and fun
than to slow it and grind it to an absolute
halt in discussion and debate and arguing about a specific rule. Yes,
just make a comment, run with the rule and correct
yourself the next time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, either on the next turn if it's something that's
going to be readily fixable, or in the next game
when you give yourself a time to go and look
at what the true ruling is on it. Do ait
a little bit of research. There are many discussions out there,
so you can always find an answer. You might find
the answer that you initially gave, you might find the
one that your player gave. You'll probably find people arguing
for both, because that's the nature of the internet.
Speaker 2: Is a little bit. Yeah, there's a little bit into it,
and a little bit of nature of some of the
D and D stuff in lieu of reading the Sage
Advice companion. But you can always correct yourself, and you
can always continually learn and improve game to game. You
don't start knowing everything, but you have to start somewhere,
So start better as best you can, and don't be
afraid to just run with what you think and and
and get better for the next time. Yep, that's me
on that one.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, I'm going to move on to another.
Huh go for it is?
Speaker 2: Where where?
Speaker 3: Where?
Speaker 2: Where?
Speaker 3: So I touched it again a little bit on this earlier,
give yourself some setting. So they said, there's plenty of
source material out there if you want to grab some
of the ready made stuff. Otherwise, if you want to
go to the time and effort of preparing your own
little world, then that is fantastic and there's a lot
of fun to be had. Certainly for myself, I love
drawing maps, and a proper little map nerd. Even on
roll twenty, as tricky as it is to manipulate, I'm
enjoying making the maps. But otherwise, use a nice, simple
source material. Familiarize yourself with it so you know the
week up to your running your first game, you don't
need to remember everything, but have a you know, pick
out the major town if that's where you're going to
be doing it. Pick out a couple of big landscape areas,
so the classic one in the Sword Mountains, you've got
the coast itself, You've got never Winter, you've got water Deep,
you've got Fandolin in the middle. Pick up one or
two things that give you a solid setting, and then
use that to relate to your characters.
Speaker 2: I think, in association with starting small, your map does
not need to be super detailed. If it's in a town,
just a few a couple of shops, couple of interesting
points of note, absolutely, and outside of that maybe a forest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, there's any session one, a bit of terrain
and a place to be. I've literally run an entire session.
It was about four hours. It was okay, it had
two rooms to it essentially, and if you're counting rooms,
but it was plenty because that was all the setting
required for what was happening there. All right, I'll.
Speaker 2: Move on to my next one, yes please, Okay, So
my next one is have no fear, which seems trite
when someone is somewhat anxious about doing as something initially
intimidating as dming, but genuinely, don't be scared of looking silly.
Don't be afraid to throw yourself wholeheartedly into that role
of the NPC or the monster. I love coming up
with new character concepts and getting into that. I mean
everyone's different, of course.
Speaker 3: Yes, I almost pointedly left out the do voices kind
of thing. Yeah, for sure, It's not a mandatory requirement
by any means. I'm on the same same kind of
track as you. I love coming up with how well
I can create a voice and.
Speaker 2: A character habit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not that I'm just speaking with a funny accent.
It's that that person at the moment is in the
back of my head and they're the one speaking. But
that's not one hundred percent essential I think for yeah,
I first started the end, but not in terms of
the voice, but the I think a driving concept.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think even less. Don't worry about accents or
voices or anything like that. For me, this is more
about the letting loose a little bit, don't be afraid
to look a little bit silly, D and D. I mean,
come on, everyone's everyone's going to be having fun anyway,
and everyone, trust me, has got your back.
Speaker 3: If you've got anyone sat around you, I mean, it
will depend on where you are. We both play at
the comic shop quite regularly, and that gives you a
whole range of different people coming in on any given day.
But if you're playing with people you know specifically or particularly,
they're not going to give you shit because you're the
one who's got to the effort of arranging and running
this game. Absolutely, if you are playing with someone who
is looking at you funny and laughing for putting in
some effort and giving.
Speaker 2: It a go, then you have to ask yourself, do
they belong at your table? Absolutely so for me, I'm
all for the bomb bast And it's especially if you're
somewhat anxious about maybe public speaking. But this is still
something that you've always wanted to do again, like everything else,
start small and build into it and eventually, after a while,
you'll also learn to love inhabiting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you will. It's completely true. I've been playing for
a year and a half, not even a year and
a half. I've never done anything with silly voices. I
say silly voices. I can't help but say silly voices
because they are silly voices. But they helped for me
at least at this point. And this is slightly getting
it off track, but they helped me become the character.
So when I start talking like this, and you know,
you become that northern dwarf and bustard. Yeah, and he's
not going to take your ship, and he's going to cast.
He's going to cast like an Imbolt level four and
it will mess you up. And you should have bloody
well listened to me. It's not that I'm just talking
with an accent. He's actually got an attitude behind him
for sure. But a year and a half ago, I
wouldn't have done that. I wouldn't have been sat here
recording a podcast with you. We'll put my voice on
the internet.
Speaker 2: Have you heard?
Speaker 3: Have you heard what I sound like? But now?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, absolutely, that always Aroma Smith's are always Scottish.
I mean, come on, does it have to be that way? Yes,
yes it does, Yes, it does so, and they don't
have to be good. They don't even have to be accents.
But putting yourself into a role will help you with
the dming.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And side note on accents, if you do choose
to go that route, you aren't doing a Scottish accent.
You are doing the accent of said character. They might
sound a bit like Scottish from the real world, but
you're not in the real world. So if someone says
that's a rubbis Scottish accent, say no, it's a very
good Dwarfish accent, thank you very much.
Speaker 2: This is exactly what they sound like in my world.
Speaker 3: Absolutely so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So have you got another once to have a
chat through? I've got one more, one more, and I've
got one more.
Speaker 3: Good. This is a hot hot probably in some ways
covered this already, but give yourself and the players a
goal or goals, both immediate and long term. So today's
session will be find the thing and but the campaign,
if you're running a campaign, is find a thing and
kill it because you need to recover the thing that
it has inside it that will lead to the thing
in four sessions time. If you want to have that
style of play, so give yourself both a long and
short term goal. It will depend on the kind of
game you're running. You might be doing a one shot
and it is just the town's being under attack by
a bunch of knolls. They're in the woods north of here.
We very much need you to go and clear them
out before they utterly wreak havoc for the last time.
And that's all the What you need is a basic
premise of a driving goal for the group. If you're
running a longer campaign, then it might be well, sure
we've done that in one session. What's next, Well, what
brought the knolls there? You know? What's why were they
constantly attacking the town and leaving again? And you don't
need to have all of that prepared again, it's keep
things small to start with. But if you're thinking about
a longer running session, then give you try and place
those watts around your world once you've built it.
Speaker 2: Having objectives will give the players motivation.
Speaker 3: I think so yeah, it always works better if the
players essentially get told what it is that they want
to do. It might sound weird you're telling them what
they want to do, but they will want to do
the thing that they want to do. It's the thing
you put in front of them. Because, as we said,
any decent player will acknowledge the fact that you're suggesting
a thing, or you have what appears to be two
or three different things that are essentially all the same thing,
or you slightly plan out each of those little things.
The one thing that.
Speaker 2: Extrapolate on that as a little DM trick, you have
one quest and the quest results in your players getting treasure,
but there are three ways to trigger that quest. As
far as the players are concerned, that's three different quests,
so it doesn't matter you've only got one planned. Whoever
they go to to trigger that quest gives them that
one quest, and then for the next session you can
plan the other two. So again it's keeping things flexible,
keeping it light. Having some objectives those what's dotted around
will give your players drive and they'll they'll want to
go get them, especially if there's a promise of something
shiny or a new interesting reveal about their character.
Speaker 3: Yeap, people undoubtedly like treasurer and experience points correct myself included.
Speaker 2: For sure my last one. I think for any DM
of I'm almost hesitant to say any level, but I
do think this is genuinely sound advice, but especially for
new dms. Have a session zero with your players before
you do anything. Oh yeah, before a dice is rolled,
before pen gets put to paper, before character can before
any of that. And what is a session zero? How
do you describe a session zero? Signon?
Speaker 3: Essentially is to meet an agree in expectation between what
the DM wants to run and what the players want
to play.
Speaker 2: I think that's a really nice succinct definition of that. Yeah,
for sure, it's management of expectations. It allows you to
get your player's thoughts on the sorts of game that
they enjoy. Do they like a battle heavy, combat centric experience.
Do they want to role play more? Do they prefer
a world or environment that is interesting to explore with
hidden secrets and nooks and crannies and secret doors everywhere.
Do they want their backgrounds fully integrated into the environment,
or do they want their player characters to be fairly
you know, just blank slates and they just want to be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, some people just want to generic superhero. It's almost
irrelevant where they're from or who they are, It's just
they are. I'm here, I've got a big shiny blade,
let me at it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am Davis McMillan, the Paladin from the Northern Mountains.
I'm here to smite evil. Yep, that's all I need
for a backstory, show me evil. I want to smite it.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: That's it. So getting those expectations, aligning them between you
and your players will make things so much smoother in
well the short, medium, and long term. It helps you
iron out any potential issues with regards to rule interpretations.
If you have any homebrew this is maybe later on,
or some or some your own homebrew rulings on certain things,
then now is the time to introduce them before you
roll the dice. Make sure everyone knows what those differences
from the PHB are going to be.
Speaker 3: Or equally denote the fact you don't have any homebrewer
correct there are people out there here you have only
ever played with homebrew rules. What do you mean you
don't run flanking Yeah, Corre, well, that is optional and
it's not in my game. Stop hangling for it. Yeah, so,
rather than having that conversation, have it in session zero.
I don't run flanking rules. It's I don't think it
offers much to the game, and it takes away from
other players options that do have specific things that give
them advantage on a text.
Speaker 2: Yeah so I think that's. Yeah, that's absolutely a good point.
And it also allows you to set expectations from sort
of player behavior. It outlines the sort of game you
want to run. You can use that time to outline
a table etiquette, which I guess it sounds a bit
more serious than it is, but I find it very
useful and I've always I always outlined it at the
beginning when I'm doing Adventures League. I don't have to
do it now with my ongoing campaigns, as everyone knows
sort of my expectations. But if you have a table etiquette,
do it early and try to enforce it. Some things
that you might want to implement in that is making
sure not more than two people are sort of talking
at the same time, because it can quickly devolve into chaos.
And if you're a new DM and you're trying to
keep track of things and make notes and prepare, well,
it's hard to do that if you've got a cocophony.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't need that distraction. You want to be
able to have your interaction with the players, the players
interaction with each other that have them succinct and distinct
from each other and not all having at.
Speaker 2: Once correct and having that in place helps people respect
each other's time and allows them all to be involved
in the scenes at the table that are being played
out before them. And also there's some other small things
I've written here, but I think they're less important than those.
And one that I think is probably gonna be quite
good for you is to unless it's being used for
the game, no phones or tablets at the table. Yeah,
it goes hand in hand with making sure people respect
each other time and all that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've never really understood people's in distraction with phones
whilst playing D and D. I'm one hundred percent D
and D obsessive and we'll spend as much time within
it as I can, and I'm happy to have that
distraction from my phone, if you will, Whereas for other
people they liked having the phone as a distraction. Thankfully,
not too much at any of our table.
Speaker 2: Zone think No, I think we're quite lucky in that respect.
Speaker 3: But definitely something to bear in mind. And of course,
if people need a bit more detail on what to
possibly advise the players for good etiquette, listen to episode
one of our podcast for tips on how to be
a good role player.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how they're the top five things that make excellent
role players so awesome. Role players will will respect that time,
and they will respect you as a DM, and they'll
pretty much help you all along the way for implementing
this stuff and making that leap to becoming a dungeon
master or games master. And I can guarantee when you
start it, if you start it right, you'll fall in
love with it and you'll thoroughly enjoy it. Despite how
trepidacious and anxious you might feel at the beginning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you might still lose sleep, but instead of from worry,
it's because you need to keep designing that dungeon or
writing down that backstory of the next character. I've genuinely
had dreams and woken up and had to write staff down.
Speaker 2: So it happens. It happens, So let's wrap up. Yes,
and then we'll call it.
Speaker 3: We've rambled on so to recap, and I think the
fact that we both had this one start is good
and a strong point. Start small in every way, So
your table size, your expectation of what you'll be able
to achieve in any one given session, your world size,
your activity. The things that just will generally happen within
the game will all be a lot less than you
think you might achieve in your first session. I've then
got who, what and where, so have a list of
names and descriptors of characters that will be met, both
named specific NPCs to be able to help with plot
development and direction, and then just a random list of
extra names. So when they run into or ask about
is there a tavern? Is there an inn? Is there
a blacksmith in town? Oh? Yes, that's Old Dabney over
in the Horseshoe Falls. Well all right? The where give
yourself an environment to work in. And again it doesn't
need to be an entire map. It doesn't even need
to be an entire city. You can spend three hours
exploring a quarter, or you know, a particularly long avenue
or a park. They just need to then populate it
with enough stuff for things to be happening. And that
can be your who's. It might be that it's a
particularly busy street, so fill it with lots of people.
And what is it that they're looking to do is
it might be a specific item they're looking for. You
might be an objective they're trying to achieve. And be
flexible with all of those things, so if you need
to adapt and move things around, don't be afraid to
do that.
Speaker 2: Very nice, very nice. So as we signed, my very
first one was to start small if the big plans
can come later, and they will. The big trick is
making your players believe it was planned all along, when
really you only need to plan what's in front of you.
React to your players. You can't predict what they're going
to do, and you certainly can't account for it. So
just react to what they're doing, react to what they're
interested in, and prepare the things that they are going
to latch onto. That they are latching onto. Don't be
scared to ask them what they're interested in. Don't be
scared to ask them, what do you want to do
next time. Make sure you're taking notes, and they will
tell you in a roundabout way what they want to
do next. I think it's good to have a good
base knowledge of the PHB, to know your stuff, and
don't be afraid if you're not sure about a rule,
to just make a ruling and run with it. It's
better to keep the game moving than to grind it
to a halt, and you can always correct yourself in
the next game. Dming and learning. This game is a
state of continual improvement. You will always learn a little
bit more, and you'll always improve next time. It's a
never ending journey and it's a great avenue for self expression.
My next one is to say to have no fear.
Don't be scared of it, don't be scared of potentially
looking a little bit silly. Feel free to throw yourself
into the roles of NPCs or enemies. You don't have
to put on an accent, you don't have to do
any voices, but that little bit of characterization and losing
yourself a little bit will one hundred percent communicate with
the players a center urgency and impetus and involvement in
the world that really they want and finally have a
session zero. Before all of this, make sure that you
and your players are aligned with what you want to
run and what they want to play. Outline any table etiquette,
any particular nuances to the rules that you might want
to implement. Don't be afraid to call it out if
some if people at the table aren't behaving as you expect.
You have fun with it and with all of this
stuff that is probably the key thing. It's a game
that the DM should be having fun with as well.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, I never fail to enjoy myself as
a DM, possibly even more enjoyable than as a player.
That's not say it doesn't come without some stress of managing.
But I am laughing my ass off watching my players
ruin the plans I've made and then nearly destroy themselves
just because that's what they do.
Speaker 2: That's what players do.
Speaker 3: And then there's a lot of lot of fun to
be had sitting that other side of the d M
screen and going.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, are you sure you're doing what? Okay, fine,
so yeah, have fun with it and yeah it's infinitely
infinitely rewarding and yeah, absolutely hilarious. So I guess with that,
if you've got any ideas or tips hints for beginner
d MS, then don't be afraid to share them. Stick
them in the comments below.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'd love to see and read them if if
we've missed something, which we inevitably have, we're still learning
absolutely yeah, always constantly learning.