Theo Dudek, Ultimate Game Master

Recently a friend of mine announced that he was going to try running a D&D campaign (at lunch at school) for the first time, so I made a list of suggestions for DM-ing his first game. ^_^ (He’d never even played in a game before, which is super-impressive! Even I played in a game before I ran one, and now I DM at the college level, and sometimes for people in their 20s.)

(BTW, some people have asked if I only play D&D, and if this makes me a corporate shill for the Hassenfeld Brothers. But of course, I run all kinds of RPGs – it’s just that D&D is so popular that you really *have* to know it. If you are doing international business, you need to know English or Chinese (or maybe Spanish). But if Gaelic and Ainu and the various Andaman languages died out, that would be a tragedy. In the same way, it is useful to know D&D, but it is also useful to appreciate all the other minor RPGs about various trivial topics. Should I make a principled objection to D&D, because it is owned by a megacorporation? I say no! In the same way, indigenous peoples who wish to resist occupation and colonialism must nonetheless fight back with modern tools and weaponry.)

FIRST-TIME D&D TIPS (PART 1):

CHARACTER CREATION
* The ’standard’ D&D 4e rules let people allocate their points to create their characters instead of rolling dice. But you can let them roll dice instead if you want — it’s up to you and them. Personally, I think random dice-rolling creates more interesting characters because they have serious highs and serious lows. (A character with all 12s and 14s is kind of boring, but a character with two 18s and a 6 is ‘interesting’ because they have strengths but also a weakness… ) But if you do random dice rolling, some people will want to keep rerolling until they get an almost-perfect character. I have mixed feelings about this, but really, even if a player cheats in chargen, it’s not the end of the world. I mean, if you want, you can always hit them with monsters so tough that it doesn’t matter how high their ability scores are. -_-
* When people are making characters, ask your players a little bit about the backstory and history of their characters. This way, you can adjust the game world/backstory to account for the player characters. (Like letting the player come up with a Secret Society of Paladins, and then having NPCs show up who are also part of the Secret Society. Or having the PC’s NPC friend or family member show up.) Some players might have lots of ideas, others will have none, and that’s fine. You’re just trying to be polite after all, but if they don’t come up with any backstory, it just means that there will be no NPCs to mourn them when they’re dead. In some cultures, it’s believed that ghosts only persist as long as they are remembered by the living, so if your campaign’s cosmology operates by these rules, this will be punishment.

ROLEPLAYING
* Roleplaying NPCs and monsters is incredibly fun. Remember, YOU control all the 5,000,000,000+ creatures — plants, animals, outsiders and aberrations — in the game who are not controlled by the PCs. (For this reason it can be helpful to start out by running a game set in a small space, like a dungeon crawl, a late 1800s rural commune a la “The Road to Wellville”, or a locked-room murder mystery.) Looking at it from a philosophical standpoint, only the PCs have ‘free will’ in the true sense – everyone else naturally and unthinkingly obeys the will of the DM. (Although, a good DM can compartmentalize parts of their mind so that the NPCs behave independently, like when writers say that the characters are ‘writing the story for them.’) Remember, monsters can talk to the players and encounter them in out-of-combat ways (if they’re intelligent monsters) too. And the PCs can get in fights with NPCs too, even when you don’t expect it. (If PCs get in an NPC fight you don’t expect, just use the stats of an appropriate-level monster from the Monster Manual, like one of the Human or Goblin or Kobold monsters, and change the descriptions so it fits the NPC.)
* When I’m preparing a game, I usually write down some basic information about the most important NPCs (their name, appearance, personality, if I am basing their voice or behavior on some actor or some person in the dorm, etc.).
* For unimportant NPCs, like when PCs talk to some storekeeper or some random person on the street, I like to keep a list of random NPC names handy. This makes them feel a little more real and keeps me from having to make up names on the fly. There’s a good one on the web which you can use to print out random names in different styles (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~pound/).
* If PCs are using “social skills” like Bluff or Diplomacy or Intimidate, it’s more fun if they roleplay them out too. You can either just tell the players to act it out, or you can give them a skill bonus (like +1 to +3) if they act it out well. Another option is to make them roll first and then force them to roleplay out a ‘bad’ attempt at Bluff/Diplomacy/Intimidate if they roll badly.

(to be continued)