First time DM and freaking the fuck out.
Do I use a visual aids? Auditory? Grids? Miniatures? Take is serious? Make it a comedy? Which system do I use? Should I create my own? Should it be 100% original or should I use an existing franchise and swap the parties (you're the Fellowship of the Ring)?
I would use too many visuals. Some is fine but you want to learn how to evocatively describe things and using too many pictures will hamstring that
Grids and minis can be helpful if you/your group can't into theatre of the mind.
Silly or serious is more of a group decision and something that will come into focus naturally as you play together. Just go for neutral-serious and roll with the punches
I personally suggest kind of remixing things from other media and renaming the identifiable elements. You do it well and your group will think you're a genius, and eventually you'll be remixing things so hard you'll essentially have just made your own thing
Most of all, though, have fun.
Visual aids: cool and helpful. Minis can be fun but it can be a bitch to find something for everything. It's a game of imagination, don't worry about having a miniature visual representation for everything, save those for important moments. Chris work fine. I find fate style zones easier than grids and less autistic on the amount of detail. Find a system you like and won't confuse you. I recommend the cypher system for new players to make shit on the fly (a threat level is 1-10, target number to hit thing successfully is 3x that)
Never be 100% original or you'll die of exhaustion. See things you like and how their ideas worked, take the good parts of around a dozen of those and nobody will know how derivative you are. Originality on a thing that might not get off the ground is like blowing your load before she touches it. Save that and sprinkle it around in the places that matter.
I play online, so maybe my advice is unfeasible depending on how you play.
Use the visuals. Use ALL the visuals. I've ran two campaigns, both had the same players and were pretty much the same plot-wise - full of politics and intrigue.
However, the first time I didn't use handouts - so the players kept getting lost, confused and forgot NPCs with their ridiculous names.
The second time, I DID use handouts. Quality of the game went up, by a lot, and players are now making complex conspiracy theories by themselves, and never once I had a situation where players went like "Wait, who is this asshole, and why is he angry at us?"
Oh, and make your story flexible to the seriousness of the game. Don't get hung up on the occasional fun, play into it, but make that tone shift to serious when shit goes down
Bumping for interest
Decide what game you're playing, before you do anything, the rest will come by simple necessity.
>Do I use a visual aids? Auditory? Grids? Miniatures?
If you feel they would really help your session and have time to properly prepare them, go for it, but otherwise I wouldn't overcomplicate things for your first time.
>Take is serious? Make it a comedy?
90% chances that players will turn it to comedy anyway
>Which system do I use? Should I create my own?
Use a premade one. Making a good system is a hard times and you shouldn't really try that until you have experience with at least few different ones
>Should it be 100% original or should I use an existing franchise and swap the parties
Nothing wrong with taking inspiration, but don't be too obvious or 100% copying. If you absolutely have to adapt something from beginning to end make sure they will at least not realise that. That is a bad idea however, since players will NEVER act exactly as you expect them to. Preparing a scenario is good, but you have to be able to improvise when(not if) they break its boundaries.
Other than that, if you don't have a group yet I strongly suggest running for friends or at least people you know. Makes the whole thing more fun and much less stressful, even if you're doing poorly at times. Just take it easy, I came up with my first scenario(it was the first session ever of our entire group) literally on my way from toilet right before starting and didn't even know half of rulebook properly. It was simplistic, it was shitty looking at it in retrospect, but we still had shitload of fun.
buy the 5e starter shit and run lost mines of phandelver. it's fine dude.
Don't do that.
Do this
Don't listen to this guy
Don't do this
Don't listen to these guys
Listen to this guy
Take it easy it's a game after all. If it's not fun for you or your players, stop and you tell your lads you need to work on it more.
GMing is like cooking crepes, the first one is almost always crap. Whatever you prepare it won't be 100% awesome. So do what you can without doing too much work and expect your players to not be cunts. If they are critical or rude just tell them you stop there and will work on what you learned during the game.
Please try to enjoy it too, after all it's a game between friends.
Don't listen to this guy
Do this
Don't do this
Listen to this guy
Stop it.
How do you know when you've sufficiently prepared? When does it become over-preparation?
The thing is, players 99% of times WILL do something you completely didn't expect them to. You can never prepare for everything. And although preparation is surely a good thing, I feel that preparing too much can make you less flexible when it comes to those cases. How much is enough really depends on what sort of scenario you are running, what is your group's playstyle, how good your improvisation skills are and many other subjects, it's impossible to give a clear answer really. But basically my preparations checklist usually look something like that:
>come up with a plot and work it up until you're satisfied of it. Depending on how open or closed you want the scenario to be you can just prepare a list of events that are supposed to happen, but keep it rather vague and open, or write it up in more detail
>prepare simple characteristics and descriptions of most important NPCs, locations etc.
>if there are any dungeons or other locations for which layouts are important draw up at least a simple map of them
>write up stats of any enemies the PCs might encounter, and generally check, remind yourself of and possibly write down all the most crucial mechanical/numerical stuff so that you won't have to search for it later
>If you're feeling like it and have time, prepare the soundtrack, handouts and all the other immersion building shit that you want to use
And... I guess that's pretty much it. I mean, if you're good at improvisation you don't even have to prepare much at all, don't stress yourself about that too hard.
Not panicking would be a good start user.
>Visual aid
A map for your player, a GM screen, a rough outline of the events of the session and of the ennemy stats can help you smooth out your gming, don't get carried away in your notes though
>Auditory
Music is hard to use properly, as a beginner don't go there yet
>Take it serious, Make it a comedy
Depends on the system and setting, but eitherway don't get (or let your players) carried away to much by OOC jokes or shit like that
>Which system VS creating one
Don't create one right now (you don't even need to even after GMing for long time, its not an easy task); you have to know what you like (simulationist; narrativist; laid back rules wise? There are thousands of system to pick from).
Don't try to be 100% original, pick a system (a good system for beginner would be Barbarians of Lemuria ) and pick a story module to do a small one shot before going for very long campaign.
And don't panick user
>Do I use a visual aids?
Yes, a map, tokens or minis
> Auditory?
Go ahead and talk
> Grids?
It helps combat
>Miniatures?
Yeah, or at least paper cutouts
> Take is serious? Make it a comedy?
Read the tone of your game run the situationally appropriate.
>Which system do I use?
The one you know
>Should I create my own?
Only if you need to, after learning ones that already exist
> Should it be 100% original or should I use an existing franchise and swap the parties (you're the Fellowship of the Ring)?
Whatever your comfortable with. Take small steps tho.
just dont think about it too much
everything will be derailed anyways so yeah
ask your players all of this shit, not us. we don't give a shit, they do.
Other anons are giving some sound advice, but I'll supplement this Be prepared for the chaos. Embrace it.
What you planned WILL go out of the window the very second it comes into contact with players. They'll want descriptions of stuff you didn't think of, want to talk to random people, do random things. Don't panic when that happens. Don't punish them for it. It's natural to be scared, but you'll need to learn to improvise. The best GMs aren't the ones who have every single situation planned out, but the ones that have only some stuff planned out but are excellent at improvising.
On auditory aids.
Try to use them sparingly, maybe some quiet background, and I mean background as in "actual background music" not "some doing from the radio I just made really quiet".
A bit more advanced is using a more striking song as a form of intro, a song that might also fit well during climatic battles against enemies with huge plot importance.
It's basically conditioning your players to the cue "now important things happen".
>Do I use a visual aids? Auditory?
Optionally. As a first time GM, you might be better off focusing on other things though.
>Grids? Miniatures?
Depends on the type of game you want, really. I've never used them, but some groups couldn't do without them. They can be helpful for giving people a better idea of the layout of the battlefield, but you risk hurting immersion and turning things into a miniatures wargame. I'll do a quick sketch or use dice to show people the relative location of belligerents if the battlefield gets complicated or confusing, but I can usually just describe shit.
>Take is serious? Make it a comedy?
If you were playing with me, I'd tell you to take shit seriously, but that's just my personal preference. Tailor your game and its tone to best suit your group.
>Which system do I use? Should I create my own?
If you're a first time GM, you probably shouldn't be making your own system, as you don't understand how they work well enough to do a good job. With that said, you can always wing things as necessary while using an established system. As far as which system goes, you that depends partly on whether you have an established group already. If you need to attract players, you'll have a much easier time if you're playing a popular system, which probably means 5e D&D for you. If you've got a group that's down for whatever, then I'd recommend with starting with a fairly simple game with less going on to get bogged down in. You're gonna have plenty to do just figuring out how to manage a group of role-gamers, role-playing, and weaving shit together into a coherent adventure, without having to spend all your times looking up rules and doing complicated calculations. Maybe look at something like Barbarians of Lemuria?
>Should it be 100% original or should I use an existing franchise and swap the parties (you're the Fellowship of the Ring)?
I wouldn't straight-out run an existing story, but you should feel free to steal ideas from them.
Make it simple on yourself. Test one thing at a time. If you throw 100 ingredients into the soup and it tastes like shit, how will you know which ingredient was wrong? Instead, add 1 ingredient at a time.
>Do I use a visual aids? Auditory?
No. It'll just distract you and distract your players. Wait until you have a little more experience.
>Grids? Miniatures?
Sure.
Just don't waste too much time trying to draw maps for every possible location ahead of time. Just draw things on the fly when you need them. It's ok if your first few combats are just a couple orcs in a box.
>Take is serious? Make it a comedy?
Just go along with your players. If in doubt, plan for "serious". It's easy to throw silly shit into a serious world. It's a lot harder to make a silly world serious.
>Which system do I use?
Whichever system you have the most experience with.
You said "DM" so I assume that's D&D. Pick whichever edition you've played before, or whichever edition you own the books for. 3.5, 4, and 5 all have lots of adventure books, starter kits, and DM tips.
You could also try Dungeon World. Even if you don't use the system, the Dungeon World book is full of really good DM advice.
>Should I create my own?
NO. No no no no no no. Nooooooooooo.
Listen, would you try writing a book if you've never read a book before? Would you try filming a movie if you've never seen a movie before?
Don't even think about writing an RPG system until you've got some more GM experience.
>Should it be 100% original or should I use an existing franchise and swap the parties (you're the Fellowship of the Ring)?
Existing settings are ok. It works best if everyone at the table is familiar with the setting.
Making your own setting is good too, but don't feel like you have to be "100% original". Your setting could just be "LOTR, but in the future and with more magic" or "Ancient Rome with wizards and orcs".
Don't waste too many hours/weeks/months overthinking your world.
Have a session zero. Sit down with the group, talk this stuff out, expectations and wants and desires and so on.
People don't have time for that. Literally the only time everyone can be there for any significant amount of time is when you can play. DM expected to have it all worked out.
It varies by group
My opinion? Prepare as much as you think is fun. When it becomes a chore you'll know it's time to stop. After the end of the game you come to realize you overdid it, do less the next time. It's most likely you WILL overplan for your first session, but it's fine if you had fun doing it
if your players can't do a session 0 they can't do a session 1 either.
This.
So true. Any group that isn't willing to do a session 0 won't be a good group