WORK IN PROGRESS

Scenarios and Adventures

From the simple hack and slash dungeon crawl to the Machiavellian intrigues of a royal court every good roleplaying game session needs a scenario to drive it.

Campaigns

A campaign is a series of more-or-less linked scenarios, often with the aim of taking the characters from relative obscurity all the way to saving the world.

Settings

Whether your making it up as you go along or using a published game world a good setting is vital to any decent roleplaying game.

The Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons is an excellent example of a diverse and complex world that successfully combines fantasy cliches with original ideas.

What You Will Need

• A copy of all necessary rulebooks.
• At least two of any dice necessary for playing the game.
• A neat and easy-to-follow copy of the scenario you are running¹.
• A notepad.
• A pencil.
• A pencil sharpener.
• A rubber².

These represent the bare minimum any good GM should have at every session they run. Even if you're planning on bringing a laptop with everything needed for the game on it, you should still bring most of the things on that list because you never know when you might need to pass a note to a player, or if someone might have forgotten their copy of the rules³.

Describing The Action

This is a lot more important than many give it credit for. The simple fact is that just reeling off a list of dice roll results is boring, it's much better to describe those results in exciting terms that give a real sense of action.

Compare:

Your roll of 18 was enough to hit the orc and [pause] 4 points of damage was enough to finish it off.

With:

You swing your battleaxe into a gap in the orc's armour and with a crunch of bone you swiftly send the creature to whatever hell awaits it.

Taking this one step further is the 'begin and end with the fiction' principle. This encourages actions to be described rather than simply rolled for, where a good, detailed description plus the response from the Games Master can replace the dice rolling and stat lookups entirely, turning the experiene into pure roleplay.

However you approach it the importance of good descriptive monologues cannot be overstated; this is how you engage your players' interest and keep hold of it.

Immersion and Setting the Atmosphere

This is strongly linked with the above. A casual 'pizza and beer' dungeon-bash does not need much immersion, usually, but if you're running a low-combat horror game it's difficult to keep things going if the players (and you, for that matter) are getting destracted by inappropriate background music, chatting about what happened on Game of Thrones, or flicking through the rulebook⁴.

The right lighting and a few simple props can help immensely with getting everyone in the right mood and properly immersed. Instead of illuminating the table with a 60-watt ceiling light, try having a couple of standard lamps nearby with a few candles on the table itself⁵. If you can, have an MP3 player or laptop handy with a few appropriate pieces and sound effects chosen for the setting. Quiet, eerie ambient music sets things up well for a journey to a spooky castle, but would not work if you're trying to run a modern vampire game with a scene set in a loud nightclub.

Dos and Don'ts