Blog: First Time DMs

This is the inaugural blog post for my out-of-character musings, processes, tips and techniques, navel-gazing, and otherwise talking to myself. They are by no means required reading to interact with the world of Ostelliach and are instead an exercise in introspection that feels arrogant until I remember it was requested several times.
Additionally, although Ostelliach is built in the context of a D&D 5e campaign at this point, these tips are system-agnostic and may even be applicable in other storytelling outside of tabletop games. Enjoy!

So, it's your first time as a DM, huh? Maybe you've always wanted to try. Maybe you were bullied into it because everyone wants to play but somebody has to do it and everyone knows you're the project manager/daydreamer/most extroverted. Maybe you are a storyteller in another form (LARP, novel writing, the best watercooler standup routine at work) and it seemed like a natural transition. Maybe you've watched a lot of Matt Mercer, Griffin McElroy, or Brennan Lee Mulligan and god, they're just so cool, you want to be cool and funny and deep like that too! (I say this with zero judgement.)
There are quite literally entire books written on tips for new DMs. There are summer camps, podcasts, college courses, professional coaches, and 18 thousand other blogs about this. I pretend neither to be an authority nor saying anything wholly interesting. But the working theory here is that something in how I've crafted my world and campaign specifically caught your eye, so you're here to hear my specific take. Daunting yet ringing endorsement, thank you, holy shit.
All this is to say that I'm not pretending to be a genius, creative master, or smart person. I've just got a lot of opinions.

DM, aka Dungeon Masters, aka Game Masters (GM) or any other variety of titles that means "the person creating, facilitating, and/or controlling the flow of the gameplay behind the scenes."

What do you know about it anyway?

Here is where I dump a list of credentials to seem impressive, I guess. I have been a storyteller (ST) of various mediums, including creative director/head ST of different live action roleplays (LARPS) and a DM of a few sufficiently creepy one-shot campaigns (non-D&D). I've been writing various stubs of novels, fanfic, poetry, short stories, forum RP, and daydream scenarios for as long as I've been a conscious person. I read voraciously and got my degree in mass media communications & the scholastic study of pop culture (specifically comic books and graphic novels).
But more than that, I think the reason people have asked for this blog is because when I decided I was going to DM a tabletop campaign, I went all-the-fuck in. I decided I didn't want to stress myself out by memorizing all of the minutiae of an established setting's canon, so I created 100,000 words of worldbuilding of my own unique homebrew. (It's a different kind of stress, okay? The kind where no one can tell me I'm wrong since I wrote it all.) Not that making a lot of things up is anything inherently worthy of mentorship status, but it shows a sort of creative sticktuitiveness that is uncommon enough to warrant study via a blog. Allegedly.

What makes a good DM?

• A head for logistics. A DM is a facilitator of an experience. This entails a level of logistical, detail-oriented approach much like a project manager. You must be ready to deal with the unglamorous parts of a campaign: scheduling the meeting and then ensuring people stick to it or communicate their absence; deciding tools for communication and coordination; moderating a Discord server, fighting with Roll20, making sure everyone remembered to bring their dice and character sheets etc. If you aren't comfortable with that, you need to work on it because congratulations, friend...you are the Adult here.

• People management skills. As an autistic person myself, I know that phrase can be not only horrifically ambiguous but also terribly frightening. I do not mean here a mind reader, a coddling parental figure, or the world's biggest extrovert. Instead, it means a calling to remember both in and out of character that you are the one meant to energize, streamline, diffuse, moderate, corral, or otherwise influence every interaction. Is one of your players bored or uncomfortable? Is everyone getting a chance to speak? Is the conversation taking way too long? Does your NPC need to step in and move things in a specific direction or step back to let someone at the table shine? These are the things you have to be able to intuit. It takes time, especially if your players are new to you or each other while you learn the different communication styles and needs, but you have to be able to do it. You're not just the Adult; you're the fair, helpful, respectful, compassionate Adult who makes sure everyone is actually enjoying themselves.

Here's the point where some readers might fall off. I'm a firm believer that a campaign should be fun for everyone, even if that means fudging the rules, telling someone to sit down and be nice, banning the edgelord character that griefs his party for fun, stopping a scene because 1 in 7 people are triggered by it. If you think that's too special snowflake, there are plenty of other avenues for you besides my blog to validate your power fantasies.

• Flexibility & creative improvising. Creativity of course belongs in this list, but specifically I'm emphasizing here in-the-moment creativity. Even if you're following a pre-written campaign with guides on steering and character motivations, you'll inevitably run into your players doing something that was not scripted...likely within the first 2 minutes. It is up to you to help nudge them where you need them to go, ideally without them feeling like they've lost all agency. You have to understand what points of a tale are critical to get to the party somehow, including if they never talk to the NPC you expected or totally miss the treasure chest in the corner. You have to be able to spin up a character on the fly to fill a niche scenario. You have to know how to respond to off-the-wall battle tactics, roleplay strategies, or unexpected character flirting. What do you do when the party destroys something crucial, kills a vital character, denies the power offered to them by the mysterious voice of a god? It's good to have backup plans and contingencies, but you will never be able to plan for everything your players do and you have to be cool embracing that.

In short, you cannot just be creative and you cannot just want to boss your friends around for 3 hours a week and you cannot just want to run a pre-written scenario to see how it plays out. You have to be a multi-faceted gem, adaptable and intuitive. Swift as the coursing river, with all the force of a great typhoon. Et cetera, et cetera.

How do I even get started?

This is definitely going to be a post or three of their own, going into the different things to consider when worldbuilding. In brief, however, there's really only one question you need to start with.
Why do you want to DM? What are you wanting to do?
Your answer will take you in different directions.
For instance, if you just want to hang out with friends, perhaps you choose a pre-written adventure to remove some of the guesswork. If you want to push yourself creatively, maybe you sprinkle your own homebrew content in (or start your own world from scratch if you're a real hooligan like me). If you want to adapt an existing creation (like adapting a fantasy novel's world to the table, whether it's your IP or someone else's), that will influence a lot of your decisions as you find the game to fit your needs.
Really sit down and ask yourself critically what you're hoping to achieve. This will give you a head start on some of the other decisions you have to make as a newly appointed DM, such as:

• What system (ex: Pathfinder, D&D, Fate, Powered by the Apocalypse) you use

• How many players you want (because you can feasibly play a game entirely by yourself or with just one other person...or stack your table with 8 ne'er-do-wells)

• How long you want the campaign to be (from one-shot to years-long)

• What tone you want for the gameplay (from funny and silly to deeply emotional or maybe both depending on the moment)

Assuming you care at all about the fate of your campaign and the enjoyment of everyone at the table, you'll ask questions similar to these to potential players to ensure everyone has aligned expectations. That's a topic for another blog post but I mention it here to really emphasize how important it is to think of this. (And your answers, the answers of your players, may change over time too! So get good at asking this touchy-feely introspective stuff now.)
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I believe that's more than enough for a kickoff blog, but hopefully it was helpful. Stay tuned for future posts and feel free to leave a comment with feedback, other topics you'd like to cover etc.
Thank you and be good to one another!