(09-26-2017, 01:03 PM)Thorbought Wrote:I'll second these two points in particular.
- Work on time management. This is something you learn through experience but most people DMing for the first time will create this elaborate events with multiple parts but they find that they are only able to get through maybe half of what they planned and they either have to run the event for a LONG time or they have to cut if off. You don't want to have to do either of those. I'd say plan your event for 3 hours max as that's where people may start to burn out. A simple idea can usually last you a long time. I remember when I first started dming, I had an elaborate idea and it took 3 hours to get out of the starting point and get through the first battle because people were talking so much. So try to have a simple idea first.Â
- For the story, I would suggest you start with something simple as well. This is because not all your members can be there all the time so you don't want them to be completely lost when they miss an event. Also, it lets your players be able to influence the story and be the main drivers in it.
The first one actually reminds me of a hint regarding scheduling for meetings. You may think a meeting will take half an hour, but you'll still schedule the meeting to be an hour or an hour and a half. Because things tend to always come up that will cause things to take longer - people arriving late, folks asking questions, technical issues. That can all cross over to RP as well, especially if you're an experienced DM.
I'm sure there's plenty who have a story of having a puzzle they thought would be "easy" that the players end up taking an entire session to figure out. Or get distracted by a throw-away bit of fluff you added and spend a lot of time delving into that instead of the intended plot hook.
Which leads into the other quoted bullet point for a whole other reason. You'll want to keep your event plot simple for all the things mentioned, and just so it's loose enough to adapt to whatever curve balls your participants throw at you. I've had a few DnD sessions that I felt terrible about afterward because I had a very strict sequence of events that I wanted to have happen that I ended up putting more importance on the story I wanted to tell than on the player participation. Which makes the situation very railroad-y.
I find it helps that, if there are things you LIKE to have happen... it's not bad form to keep them in mind. But also be willing to allow it not to happen if the participants take a different tack with it. For example: "the caravan is waylaid by bandits" might - in your mind - involve them successfully stealing some item of value that is important to the plot. But, don't just railroad it into being an inevitability - if the heroes look like they're going to successfully fend them off, just make a point of highlighting the item. Or, if one of the robbers gets captured or swayed to their side... have them mention that they were told that item was Very Important.
Like any form of DMing/event running... I think it ultimately boils down to just getting the practice and the experience under your belt. You will make mistakes, and that's okay. Hopefully the participants will roll with it and you come out of it all the wiser. Plus it'll give you stories to regale others with later.
And, of course, as with any RP thing. Communication is paramount. Talk with your participants, see what they want to do. See what they don't want to do. Maybe they have an idea for something to happen that could catch your fancy, or maybe they want to run their own little scene that could add some additional flavor and offload some of the pressures on you to lead everything. In one of my events, I wanted to do a three-prong assault on three different facilities, so I had "mini-DMs" in the groups that did their own scenes while I helped from a more managerial position.
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