Hey guys,
I'm going to be DMing for basically my first time with some friends down here. It would be really nice to get some helpful tips or advice, especially from Zane and Tyson. Just want to make sure I don't make any major mistakes. For one, like how fully do you guys conceive of the overarching plot? Do you leave a lot of it loose because character's constantly change it?
I'm not Zane or Tyson, but...
What I usually do is come up with ideas for what's basically going to be going on in the world (whether that's at a small scale or cosmically kind of depends on what level the PCs are at, and what level I think they'll play to. Near term plans take precedence over longer-term ones).
So let's say the game is fairly low level, and so I don't have to worry much about them plane-hopping out of my plot hooks, or whatever. Then I'll decide that Warlord X is going to invade City-State Y, and at the same time Bandit Z is going to be raiding on Road 1. I'll then let the PCs know about these things somehow (they see a job posting for caravan guards to defend against Bandit Z), and let them go after whatever they want. I'll have encounters made up before hand for these things, and maybe a few other "random" encounters to use, just in case they do something totally different.
What the PCs do
can affect how things unfold, but if the PCs
don't intervene, I'll have a timeline for how Warlord X's invasion goes without them, and so on. I'll also have general ideas for several NPCs, if not outright stat blocks. I usually have a bunch of characters from older games (made as PCs or NPCs, it doesn't matter much) that I can use in a pinch, also. So in this way, I can avoid railroading, while at the same time not have to come up with everything totally on the fly.
As the game evolves, I'll kind of generate new directions based on how it has went, etc. So if the PCs have a big fight with Bandit Z, and he escapes, and now they hate him and he hates them, then he'll be plotting their deaths and they'll probably be trying to track him down.
Don't underestimate the ingenuity and stubbornness of the PCs. This leads to my next two points:
1) I don't worry too hard about having a specific solution for every problem I throw at the PCs, because I can never think of every contingency. I just come up with a problem, which I am reasonably sure isn't certain death, and let them work out how to address it. I usually have at least one way that I know of that they can solve the problem, but I try not to be dogmatic about forcing them to use that solution. If they come up with another way that I didn't think of, I just roll with it, even if I have to rearrange my plans a bit.
2) Don't introduce anything to them that you are not ready for them to at least know of. That may sound self-explanatory, but there was just recently a DM horror story posted on here about how the PCs had uncovered the "great secrets" of what was supposed to be the end of the campaign in like adventure 1, all because the DM decided to have the end BBEG scrying on them, and they detected it, and then did a bunch of stuff to figure out what was going on, for example.
And don't throw any NPCs in front of them if you're not ready for those NPCs to be killed immediately.
If you'd rather them survive, then give them in-game ways to do so using the rules, that are level-appropriate. Players hate nothing more than the DM's pet NPCs that always escape in some ridiculous manner that would never be allowed if the PCs tried it (and for good reason). But even then, if the PCs get a lucky crit, or the NPC fails a crucial save, just let them die, and deal with the plot consequences (which you should have already planned for, at least a bit).
