Before the Game Starts

While writing and running the game are the main priorities of a Game Master, a good habit of managing key preparations on the day of a session can save headache in the long run. Creating a comfortable, distraction-free space for your players makes the experience smoother for everyone

Set up a space, a room or a table, dedicated solely for the game during the session to minimize distractions. Find your dice, paper and pencil, and the rulebook. Test your sound system, review your notes, and generally prepare yourself however you feel you need to. Do not forget snacks!

Tools of the Trade

While TTRPGs mostly take place in the players’ imaginations, I still recommend acquiring the following items:

• Laptop: your notes will be easier to keep track of if they are online, and it will minimize clutter on your side of the table.
• Dice: Physical dice provide a tactile experience that draws your players into the moment. Rolling them is synonymous with TTRPGs for a reason. In a pinch, online dice or random number generators are viable alternatives.
• Game Master Screen: This is a small screen that hides your side of the table from the player’s view. You can buy one or create your own out of any material.

Let Your Players Settle In

When people arrive to play, make sure you get everyone situated and comfortable. Set aside around 15 minutes before the game starts so that everyone at the table can catch up and chat.

If your players do not already know each other, this is also a great time for them to get acquainted. Have snacks prepared, and make sure everybody has their character sheets at the ready.

When you have everything aligned and feel that players are ready to get going, you can start the game.

Setting the Scene

Begin the game by describing an initial scene. You can think of this like the opening shot of a movie, showcasing the wintry sprawl of a snow-caked city, the draining heat of a barren mesa, or the exuberant bustle of a festival market. This image will remain imprinted in the minds of your players, giving them context for other scenes and sparking their curiosity about the gameworld.

For the initial scene, Jeff describes a barren, dead land. He makes sure to emphasize how the powdery, ashy soil crunches underfoot and how the heat of the sun has been baking the characters for days.

After this initial scene, the characters should be introduced. Based on how you have written the beginning of your adventure, the characters could already be involved, or there could be some sort of event that brings them together. As the characters meet each other, ask the player to describe their character to the table, including their physical appearance, name, and current situation in life, making sure that everyone at the table knows the basic facts about each other’s characters. This gives players an initial defining agency over their own characters.

Each player describes his or her character: Melinda’s character is a tall and proud warrior, her face covered in scars, with a perpetual glare. Diego’s character is a malnourished, nervous-looking druid covered in dirt, with a determined expression, wistful of a time when the lands were green. Ethan’s character is a weary bard, the sand having set the laugh lines on the side of his face into stone and faded his once-bright clothes.

During the Game

Once the game has begun, you can let the players’ drive to reach their goal push the narrative forward. However, it is easy to get stuck, and players often need a helping hand pointing them in the right direction.

Moving Along the Flowchart

In TTRPGs, players have extreme agency in how they approach obstacles, behave in locations, and interact with NPCs. Because of this, players are extremely adept at catching you off guard. Players often do not progress from one encounter to another in the ways you expect, and this can send the narrative careening away from what you have laid out for them. In these situations, the best thing to do is to think about how the other elements of the world would naturally react to the actions of the players and adjust, while subtly pointing them in the right direction.

At the settlement, the party learns that one of the raiders is currently in the settlement with them. Instead of pursuing him immediately, they opt to wait for him to leave the settlement on his own and stealthily follow the raider back to his camp. While this was not what Jeff initially planned, he decides to give the players a chance and has them all attempt to stealth. They succeed, and circumvent the wolf encounter laid out in the flowchart. Jeff reasons that Warner is most likely lying in wait for the next traveler no matter what, and has Warner attack the raider. This leaves the players the choice of whether to intervene or allow Warner to kill their only lead in this situation.

Descriptions

Because TTRPGs are mostly a medium where the scene is painted in your players’ minds, vivid descriptions of their characters’ surroundings and descriptions of the consequences of their actions are instrumental in creating a fun game.

Melinda’s character has a high strength score. However, the character’s strength only exists as a number on Melinda’s character sheet unless the Game Master acknowledges it. As Warner and the raider grapple, Jeff describes how Melinda’s character is able to separate the two effortlessly, tossing them aside like toys and knocking out the raider in one swift blow, which shatters one of the plates of his helmet.

In describing how the character’s strength changes how they affect the world, Jeff has taken Melinda’s character’s strength and made it real in the world of the game.

Improvisation at the Table: “Yes, And”

In TTRPGs, improvisation is a key aspect, both for players and for Game Masters. Sometimes it can feel like the antics of the players are deliberately intended to undermine the careful planning and preparation of the Game Master. In these situations, instead of trying to contain your player’s radical choices, try building off of them yourself to create a more fun narrative for everyone at the table.

When your players make a choice that does not align with your expectations, instead of shutting it down, entertain it for a moment. Think about how it would change the game if the players were able to pursue their course of action. This of course does not mean that you have to entertain your players’ antics forever, and if something that they do would impede the flow of the game, you can steer them away from it.

While the party was waiting for the raider to leave the settlement, they decided they wanted to go to a tavern. While Jeff could simply have said that there is no tavern since his notes do not include one, he decided to lean into it. He painted the tavern as a slipshod establishment, the drinks served as bitter, and the patrons as suspicious. However, when the party started talking about their plan to attack the raiders, other patrons joined in and talked about the abuses they have suffered at the hands of the group of raiders. They wished the party luck, and when they set out, the party knew that the remaining groups of the wasteland support them in their goal of bringing hope.

Failing Forward

Another improv principle that can be applied to TTRPGs is the principle of Failing Forward. When players meet an obstacle and fail to surmount it, the action should not stop. In the end, important moments in games are often left up to a roll of the dice, and you as the Game Master should not freeze when the characters fail somewhere they were expected to succeed. In these situations, failure should mean a deterioration of the characters’ circumstances in a meaningful way, which pushes them to have to act differently, instead of just barring their progress.

The party antagonizes Warner, and he naturally refuses to tell them where the camp is. Warner not befriending the party means that they do not know where to go next. In order to progress the adventure, Jeff allows them to still find the bog through some searching. Failing to befriend Warner and antagonizing him should still have some consequences, however. Jeff plans that Warner will then run ahead of the party and warn the raiders, meaning that sneaking into the camp will be much more difficult.

Over-the-Table Management

In addition to creating the game and bringing it to life for your players, the Game Master is also responsible for creating a welcoming environment at the table. You can think of yourself as the referee, and it is your job to ensure that everyone at the table is enjoying themselves. This includes making sure that every character receives their moment in the spotlight, and that no character is allowed to make every situation about themselves. In addition, if a player is shy, asking them how their character feels about something or giving them a small moment or decision to gradually bring them into the spotlight is a good practice.

At the End of the Game

All the trials and tribulations of the players and characters should eventually lead to a satisfying end. This can occur naturally, but due to inevitable time constraints and the randomness of the dice, a satisfying ending can be difficult to reach.

Failure of the Mission

Failure for the party is always a possibility, and can happen in many different ways:

The adventure can end somewhat badly if the players fail in their overarching quest.

The final combat encounter is going well. The players rush into the raider camp, and Ethan communes with the stones to enhance his spells. Jeff has the raiders employ a last resort, threatening to kill Melinda’s character’s sister unless the party surrenders.

Melinda chooses to respond to this by hurling a javelin at the raider captain. She misses, and the raiders kill Melinda’s character’s sister before being killed by the characters. The characters have failed in their goal of saving the sister, but they have achieved other goals. They drove the raiders from the region, and managed to communicate with the druidic stones to revitalize the plant life of the forest. This gives the adventure a bittersweet ending.

Total Party Kill

The characters can also fail if their entire party dies. This is called a Total Party Kill (TPK). A Game Master should allow for the death of characters in order to heighten the stakes of combat and other challenges, but a TPK simply brings the action to a stop. If everyone had fun, the ending does not have to be perfect and a TPK can be a good stopping point. The table might even return to the game world during a different game, hoping to fix what the original characters set out to do. After all, an adventure can become a legend for future generations of characters to learn about.

Tipping the Odds in Your Players’ Favour

While the dice exist to act as an equalizer for the game, they can sometimes resolve situations and adventures in incredibly anti-climactic ways. In these situations, the Game Master can subtly bend reality by secretly lowering the hit points of remaining enemies, announcing that rolls made behind the screen were lower than they actually were, and so on. This can be a powerful tool to shift the narrative and avoid unsatisfying endings where failing forward is not an option.

However, you must be careful in using this tool. If players realize that you are letting them win an encounter that they would not otherwise, the stakes of the narrative immediately drop, and the game becomes much less exciting. On the other hand, in some circumstances it can be a smart choice to boost the morale of the party with an unexpected win. A good Game Master always reads the room and adjusts accordingly.

Jeff knows that Melinda’s attack would miss due to her rolling low. However, because he knows that this is an unsatisfying ending, and the characters have already surmounted all the challenges before this, he rules that the attack hits. This allows Melinda to kill the raider captain and allows the party to save Melinda’s character’s sister.

While you should try to protect the players from the unfairness of the dice, you should never shelter them from the consequences of their actions. If a player makes a clearly nonsensical decision after you tell them it is unlikely to work based on their characters’ estimates, you should not pull your punches if it does not work out for them. In this way, the world seems more real and the choices that characters make matter more.

Time Constraints

Sometimes you simply run out of time. TTRPGs often take longer than expected, and time windows are never infinite. Ideally, you as a Game Master are watching the clock and pushing players along on the flowchart when they are slowing down the pace. If the clock is looming, you can skip parts of the adventure and simply not introduce obstacles or NPCs and instead focus on more critical parts of the adventure. Your preplanned obstacles and NPCs can be useful in your next campaign, so no work is wasted.

If the clock does run out, there are a few options. The first option is to simply schedule another meeting and pick up where you left off in the adventure. This is a good option if the party is around the midpoint of the adventure, as the second meeting will have as much content as the first one.

If you cannot schedule a new meeting and the clock has run out, you can opt for montaging the events of the adventure. This is similar to simply cutting the adventure short, but allows for the players to know what happened to their characters. In this approach, you cut the action short around 20 minutes before your time window ends. You then paint a vivid picture of the ending of the campaign by simply narrating what happens to the characters as the adventure comes to a close. You can narrate specific scenes and ask the characters to make rolls or choose what to say in a specific conversation, but beyond that the story is completely in the Game Master’s hands. You can think of this like fast forwarding to select clips of a movie in order to spoil the plot and ending, but with the goal of humoring your players who are disappointed that time ran out.

Conclusion

This guide has been my effort to make your experience of dipping your toes into the waters of TTRPGs a positive experience, and I largely made it because of my own personal expreinces. When I firts started playing, I had little idea what I was doing and followed the format and apparent rules of published modules, blind to what actually made the experience fun. It took years of trial and error for my players and I to discover the capabilities of TTRPGs, and I created this guide to try and make sure new players did not have to go through the same struggle.

The advice given in this guide is all intended to allow you to find the fun in your games, and as such can freely be disregarded if you think that it will cheapen the experience for you and your players. In an increasingly cold and disconnected world, TTRPGs are a poweful tool for fostering human connection and creativity, allowing players and Game Masters to rediscover their own imagination.