I was planning on using this evening to continue working on a forest crawl adventure that I am looking to publish as a PoD product on DriveThruRPG at some point, but a recent bandwagon caught my eye.
Bandwagons are fun!
This time we're doing cheap/simple GM tricks, a great bandwagon that already has loads of great tips and tricks loaded onto it by Phlox, Cosmic Orrery, Sundered Shillings and Eldritch Fields.
Big thank you to Phlox for the great idea!
Now that I've soent my evening thinking about and writing these down, a lot of these feel to me like general new GM advice rather than some neat timesaver hacks or tricks, but here's some that I could think of based on my experiences with the hobby so far.
1. Occasionally asking "what does it look like as you do so?" can add a lot of flavour to things regardless of situation or character class.
2. Offload some of the narrative load to the players as well. Ask them what they have heard of about the surrounding region when they enter a new area, ask them what happens during their nightly watch, let them describe the day they spent shopping in town before or after the book keeping is done.
3. Players will make content and draw out conclusions out of the smallest details, you just have to remember to mention them. This is free real estate to base future adventures on.
4. When a player describes something they want their character to do, ask what are they aiming to achieve with that. This can make it much easier to adjucate for the action as well as help solidify why and what their character is doing to the player, potentially bringing up reasons it might not work as well.
5. Monsters, spells etc are much more mystifying and interesting when you don't immediately blurt out their names when speaking about them. Let the players name these things and stick with those names yourself for extra fun.
6. Use as generic tokens as you can when you need to represent stuff on a tabletop to prevent all your great descriptions falling flat because the players are clearly seeing that you just placed down generic goblin miniatures #1 - #6 on the table.
Personally I've come to like chess pieces as tokens in my online games since they are distinct enough without betraying any solid information on what they represent.
7. Having a list of names, one name for each letter of alphabet, that you cross entries off of an replace them as they get used is god given for not having to fumble with names every time the party meets a new npc.
8. Each caravan or circus should have a fortune reader, players love paying for tarot readings even if you have no real clue on how they should be done.
9. Having customs that people in your world follow can make the world seem much more alive. Simple things like "always say a prayer when crossing a river or a body of water."
10. When exploring an area with low amount of encounter/wandering monster rolls, roll wandering monster check as well as the dice that determines the encounter table entry at the same time. If the wandering monster wasn't triggered then give an omen instead of that creature being in the area.
This gives the impression of the area not being deserted even if no monsters are being encountered.
11. Ask your players to do the recap before each session rather than doing it yourself, you'll find out what things really stuck with them and what they glossed over.
12. Good "I search the body..." table will keep going through random thugs' pockets interesting, potentially even creating new adventure leads.
13. Don't plan out entire plots, rather think up short "In the next episode" type of high points you want to reach in your game. This way you don't get too stuck up on things having to go exactly the way you planned and you have notes on what kind of events to introduce in the game.
It's good to stay flexible.
14. If you can make a ruling and move on, do so rather than grinding the game to a halt and taking everyone out of the fiction in order to hunt down a rule you're unsure about.
15. As a GM you dictate where the camera is pointed at all times, if there are boring parts you'd rather skip you have all the power to do so.
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