GMing 101: Top DM Tips from Dragon Steel Nexus

So Way of Kings, Elantris, Mistborn, a lot of really great books. He's an amazing author and it was awesome to be able to panel at his convention. Honestly, kind of one of our first experiences paneling.

So stick around. But before that, let's get to today's show. Also for you YouTube watchers, sorry, we don't actually have the video. So you'll just have to content yourself with a nice logo screen while you listen to our content.

Thank you much. And we'll, we'll talk to you after the show. All right. Hey, welcome to GM 101 guys. Thank you so much for being here. So we're going to start out real quick by introducing ourselves and then we'll, we'll get to some more fun stuff.

So why don't you start? Cool. I am Justin Lewis. I am one of the hosts of How to Be a Better DM, which is a podcast that's designed to help you become the world's best dungeon master. Statistically, you're out there somewhere.

So hopefully you're in this room and hopefully I get to meet you. We have shows every or episodes every Thursday give or take we also have an actual play podcast You can find all that in session zero studios calm Also for those of you in the back if you can't hear us at any point during this conversation Do this or something crazy and we'll talk louder probably tell you to sit down or something like that Okay,

hi everybody. My name is Colby Paulson. And as you can see I am expert I Run a YouTube channel called d4 D&D deep dive Thank you. I Yeah, I've been doing that for about four or five years. I've been playing D&D since I was 12 And I just really love all things Tabletop role-playing game and so I'm just happy to be here and geek out about more role-playing game stuff Hi, I'm Darcy Cole I am a fantasy author.

and I think I got through like eight or nine, and so it was a really cool exercise and a lot of fun. I learned a lot about the story of gaming and that kind of stuff, so like Colby, I'm just happy to be here.

Hi, I'm Lydia Sun. I lost my name play after moderating the MOASH panel earlier today, so please accept my shame in handwritten form. I am a game designer, lead writer of the Cosmere RPG, so holler at me back, Matt.

Thank you, y'all are awesome, and I also do a lot of work for Edge Studio, so like Arkham Horror RPG and Adventures from Rokugan, as well as Neon Vigil, which is a new indie RPG which is launching here in the Exeter Hall, so very exciting.

Nice. All right, so as far as the organization of this panel, we will give you guys opportunities to ask questions. There is an audience mic right there. We're gonna break for questions every few minutes probably, and also we'll leave as much time at the end as we can.

So first, so that we can get to know you guys a little bit, please raise your hand if you've been playing Dungeons and Dragons for a year or more. Okay, put your hand down. Oh, well, wait, yeah, or...

longer okay keep them up keep them up or you can stand do you guys want to stand you probably don't want to stand if you've been playing for more than five years keep your hand up okay more than 10 15 20 25 okay now we got to have you guys stand and how many of you guys have DM'd or GM'd games before Wow that's a lot okay so good so maybe a lot of the stuff we say you guys are already know maybe you guys should maybe you should be up here to be fair neither did we yes that's true All right,

a couple more fun questions of those GMs, who has accidentally killed their party? The whole party, TPK. The whole part, TPK, oh jeez, okay, hands down. Who has made a player cry? On purpose. On purpose?

How about on accident? On accident. Yeah, there you go. And how many of you have spent longer planning a session than the session actually took? There it is. Awesome, okay, so some common experiences among us perhaps.

So right now we're gonna kind of bounce back and forth. We each kind of came up with three of our top tips for GMing, so we're gonna start with Justin, and we're gonna kind of bounce around some different things, and if you guys have questions, feel free to stand up and go over to the mic, okay?

So go ahead, Justin. Perfect, so I saw, excuse me, I saw that there were a lot of people who did not raise your hand, and presumably you're here to look at our beautiful faces. No, you're probably here because you are interested in becoming a GM, right?

And this is exactly the place to be, because we're gonna help you, maybe have the confidence to take those first steps. And I think for a lot of GMs, the scariest thing is knowing how much to plan or what to plan or knowing when you're ready to do the first session.

And so I'd like to recommend using what I call the CASE method. It's just a little framework you can use to kind of scope out what you need to plan. And CASE stands for campaign arc, as in story arc, session encounter.

And it works just like a Russian nesting doll. Encounters fit inside sessions, which fit inside story arcs, which fit inside a campaign. this is helpful to you because you can know where the story lies, right?

Where the, if it's a campaign level story you're telling, if it's a story arc story you're telling, if it's just a single session or just an encounter. And that can help you know how long you need it to go.

You can plan how many story arcs are in the campaign, you can know how many sessions are in the story arc, and obviously I mean no plan survives contact with the enemy, right? You guys know that. Once you make a plan you give it to your players and then the plan's gone.

But at least you have a plan. It's also helpful because you can create themes that exist within their particular scope. When you're only focusing on the particular story arc you can step back from the campaign theme for just a minute and explore other themes.

And then when the campaign's done you can show how all of the story arc themes fit together. And I like this way because it helps me remember that when I'm planning my next session, I don't have to plan the campaign.

When I do have ideas for the campaign, I can write those down and I can save them for later. And when they show up, I'm happy. But all I need to do is plan my session, which means my encounters, basically.

I really liked seeing you mention that in our chat because having done so many one shots, it really is that session and encounter, right? Because that's all you're doing for a one shot. You don't have to worry about a longer character arcs or story arcs or anything like that.

You're just doing that section. And so that was one of the kind of things that I wanted to talk about was the short form versus long form planning and storytelling, right? Because as a person who writes novels, me, I had this idea of what a story arc looked like and trying to fit that into a single session doesn't work.

You can't do that, right? And even looking at, like I would start with a, originally I started with a beat sheet. Like I would outline a novel and I'd have a beginning and a midpoint and an ending, that kind of stuff.

And I found that it was way too many points. Like honestly, when you're planning a session, you really only need like three or four, you know what I mean? And your players will fill in the rest. Like they are your characters.

And so if you give them that freedom to kind of explore and discover the world that you've created or the module that you're using, they'll do it. You just have to kind of give them the reins. Yeah. You hear a lot of times people will explain D&D and say, well, it's kind of like.

improv comedy, right? It's a series of yes and moments. And I think sometimes we forget, we can forget as DMs that that's supposed to happen with us to between us and our players, not just between the players themselves, right?

And sometimes we get in the habit of over planning and over preparing. And, you know, I was on a panel earlier today, and I don't know if any, any of you were there, but one person talks about how, you know, it's like, I'll spend six hours planning out this amazing castle that like, I want my players to go to and then as soon as the session starts, they're all like, Oh, look at that caravan over there.

Like, we don't want to go in the castle. And you're like, but this castle is really beautiful. Please go in the castle though. They don't want to. And so yeah, that's, that's always the risk. And that's not to say that you couldn't use that castle later.

Right. And maybe now it's a different castle, but it's actually the same castle. Or maybe it's not a castle, it's a dungeon, but it's basically the same thing that you've already kind of planned, you know, so you can, you can Having plans and being prepared for, you know, what your players might do to kind of go sideways is a good thing and being able to continue to use stuff that you have prepared,

you know, be open to finding ways to put that in at later points if the opportunity presents itself, right? Having that flexibility of story, right? But also, if I can add, I think that might be one big thing that holds a lot of possible DMs back is trust, or DM, GM, sorry.

Being a GM, you know, you have to develop these meta skills and one of them is trust, both with yourself and your players and I think a lot of GMs don't have that trust in themselves to know what to do next when they don't go with the plan, when they, you know, go into the gray area or things like that.

I mean, you know what to do, right? You make stuff up every day because you don't follow a plan going to, you know, the bus stop or whatever it is, right? Just make it up, guys. Like, be prepared to make it up.

So, let's see. I think I... Any question? Go ahead, yeah. I'll say that, no, but it's the goofiest kind of wall of your own players, you know. The question was, what was the goofiest curveball your players have ever sent you?

Also, as a reminder, there's a mic right there in case anyone does in the future. Anybody wanna take that one? I'll take it. With one from, I was running demos for Stormlight RPG here. I see some of my crew in the audience, hi.

We had a ridiculous moment. So, we were just teasing some of the Stonewalkers adventure, kind of running that and I had a group where there was a scholar who the whole time would not participate in combat.

To everybody's, everyone's like, please just use your knife. do something, and it became this bit where the scholars like, okay, the only thing I would do to attack somebody is throw a glob of wax at them.

And I'm over here like, I'll let it happen, right? Like, whatever, not not my consequence, you know, like mess around and find out. So this is a bit, it's very ineffective, the entire four hour demo, until right at the end, when they're fighting the big bad, who is extremely dangerous, has killed almost all of the allies is now coming for the party, has one hit point left, and it's about to be his turn again,

where he's going to just decimate everybody with an honor blade. And what does a scholar do? Throws the glob of wax. And I'm like, cool, whatever. We'll just, you know, end on a silly note, whatever you are consenting to a TPK, whatever, all good.

Nat 20 with a opportunity on the plot die, which is our special mechanic, which is a double opportunity. I'm like, listen, I'll give it to you. Like, that's fair, like, I'm not gonna intervene. So I think that takes the cake for the silliest for me.

That's amazing. I got one too. I was taking my party through, we were playing D&D, and it was an arc going through my version of the Astral Sea, which is kind of in this campaign, was similar to like Treasure Planet, and like, I don't know, just, you know, it was just all of the science fiction fantasies that I wanted to go through.

They ended up on a planet called Market City, which is just a big market, right? And one of my players is a real estate agent and has pretty good understanding of how money works, like lending, hard money lenders, stuff like that.

I don't. So he and the changeling sorcerer, also a bad idea, they essentially conned a hard money lender to give them like 70,000 gold, and conned the hard money lender, it was me, because I'm an idiot.

And then they ended up stealing a spaceship that they were gonna buy the gold with, so they had the gold and the spaceship. And again, I don't know how money works. So like, I was just, I was in a bad spot, but that was fun to deal with.

I ended up sending debt collectors to go get the ship back from them, and they were scared, so, they didn't know, funny, but I was pretty sad. I think mine is not, not when I was a GM, but when I was a player, we were, it was, and I don't know if this is funny so much as, maybe sad.

It was the very first session that we were playing with our kids, our sons, and they didn't have a great idea of how the game worked yet. We were on, you know, on a road. My husband is covering his face.

We were on a road to... like traveling to our next city or whatever, and we had a random encounter. We encountered a, what was it called? An oncag. And it was only the three of us, and we were only level one.

So it did not go well. We probably would have been fine except that our 12-year-old decided to try to intimidate the oncag instead of fighting it, which resulted in me dying. So then they had to go on their own little quest to get a diamond to revivify me.

And so it ended up being fun for them, but it was definitely a curve ball for my sweet husband. Mine will be quick. In a cursive straw campaign, I was doing my best to discourage my brand new level one players from actually engaging in the dire wolves that were clearly coming and that they were clearly not prepared to handle, and they just refused to run.

and they insisted on standing their ground and fighting, and they TPKed. And I'm just like, I'm not going to pull my punches here, guys. This is a dangerous place. I'm trying to help you understand that this is a dangerous place, and you're just not getting it.

So I'm just going to show you. When the GM says the safety is off, the safety is off. Yeah, exactly. But sometimes the players also have to go through that learning curve as players, right? Sure. Yeah.

And to that point, if I had been GMing that, I would have probably gone through that, gone through the TPK. And because I am such a softie, I would have been like, let's rewind. Let's try that again.

Yeah. Strahd showed up, and he reprimanded them all for being not entertaining enough and gave him a second chance. That's amazing, I love it. But yeah, anyways. All right, we have a few questions. Shall we take some?

Or first? Do you want to finish? Yeah. All right, I'm going to just. Real quick. Yeah, we have a little bit of planned programming. So what I was going to talk about today is just group communication.

As a GM, this is something oftentimes people don't really think about. It's something that's not as flashy to talk about. But it will really help you have better games. It will help your campaigns last longer and your players to stay engaged.

And it will help you to be a more versatile GM. So the first thing I'm going to kind of touch on, who here knows what safety tools are in RPGs? OK, a few of us. Who here knows what a session zero is?

OK, yeah. So a session zero is this beginning talk. You get together with your group. Just like in writing, your first chapter makes promises to the reader, sets the tone. Your session zero is going to make promises from the group to the group, and set expectations for the game so that everybody has buy-in from the very beginning.

Everybody's engaged. Everybody knows what behavior. behavior they should be keeping to within the gameplay. Safety tools are just different types of things you can use as a GM and as players to agree on what content is going to be acceptable in your game and what things, how to tailor the content to everybody's needs.

And you know, you wanna be deliberate about this. If I say, hey, as a GM, I'm not gonna GM anything above PG-13. That's my bar, right? Like if I have a player say, hey, I'm really not comfortable with like romance or flirting or intimacy in my game.

I'm like, cool, yeah, we'll do something else. You know, it's a group coming together to figure out what game is gonna be mutually beneficial and enjoyable to everybody. This is gonna help players stay engaged throughout the game and help kind of mitigate any potential scheduling issues which we all know is a true death of a campaign.

I'm like, hey, there really is. So going on to kind of this next point, genre and theme expectations are extremely important. And if you are playing a certain system, and I have a lot of experience with this, I work on a lot of different systems, those genre and theme expectations might be a little bit different than another system.

For example, I wrote the GM chapter for Arkham Horror RPG, which just came out recently, and that's a Lovecraftian game. There's a lot of things going on there. And a lot of times with Lovecraft, you end up with these really tragic, demoralizing, slow burn descent kind of stories.

And for us, we said, that's great. That's a valid Lovecraftian RPG experience. It's not for everybody, but it's valid. Also valid, a really fun, fast and loose kind of silly, more like pulpy, pulp fiction kind of vibe, where spooky things are happening, but you might do something silly to kind of interact with it.

Silly breaks horror. I've worked on a lot of horror RPGs. Silly can be the enemy to horror. If you have a jokester in your group, like that's good and fine in certain games, but if you are running horror, your whole group needs to talk.

Are we gonna be cracking jokes the whole time, or are we gonna let ourselves get immersed into the creepy, right? So it's just kind of having these discussions with your group, figuring out what is the appropriate vibe, what's the tone we're all gonna set.

If we all like scary, what kind of scary is not okay with some of us? What kind of scary do we love? Like safety tools are not just, or you know, session zeros, player communication, it's not just about what we don't want, it's a lot about what are we gonna load up our campaign with, so it's gonna be the coolest thing we've ever done.

You know, what excites us, right? To that point, I would say, I would just add like, be very, very specific on this, right? If there's something specific, like in movies or in TV shows, that you're like, ooh, I don't like that, right?

You probably won't like it in your game. And if, but on the flip side, if your character is really good at something and you're excited to use that skill or that's tool, like bring it up to your GM and they can put that in the story.

Yeah, just like an example of this is I even use safety tools when I run demos at cons. I run demos at cons like this, Gen Con, and I'll just kind of check in with everybody. So for example, with Stormlight RPG, like we know that there are some very strict gender roles in canon.

And like, you know, I have worked with Brandon to make sure that our materials are canon and everything is up to standard and even include some cool new canon. And so I care about canon a lot. My day job involves a lot of gatekeeping canon, right?

At a table, at a game table, if somebody's like, hey, I want to play a born woman, but I don't want to have to bother with safe hand pouch or, you know, a glove or whatever, that's not interesting to me, or I want to play a singer character.

but I just don't want to have to mitigate weirdness with having been previously enslaved, you know, before the ever storm or whatever. I'm like, OK, we're just not going to focus on that in the game, right?

We're not going to talk about that. There's plenty of really cool stuff on Roshar that we can, you know, investigate together and play with. We don't need to focus on that. So, again, this is just your group figuring out what do we like?

What do we not like? And then the last kind of tool is player etiquette and call ins. Set an expectation with your players. What is acceptable behavior? Is talking over each other acceptable? Is being on your phones acceptable?

Like these things are OK in some groups, right? Just figure out what feels acceptable to your group. And then what happens if somebody breaks these rules, right? Like running a lot of con games. Luckily, I've had really good luck lately.

But sometimes there are people who just want to make the entire game about them. They want to make everything about their their character. They want to infringe upon other people's turns. And as a GM, you have to be able to calmly pull that back, right?

And make sure every everybody gets their piece. So, however, you need to do that is up to you. Some people can be more direct. I'm usually kind of soft. I have this joke with my coworkers. I have a consit when I run demos where I put like one knee on a chair and like lean forward because if somebody is introverted and isn't getting their moment, I will like lean across the table and make eye contact with them and be like,

OK, wait, we're going to hear from you, you know? So whatever your tool is to get to kind of draw the introverts because they deserve to take up space to whatever your tool is, just be willing to be like the leader, you know, pause and say, OK, we're going to wait a minute.

We're going to make sure everybody gets their piece. So those are kind of my my general tips on group communication. And I would I would add, like, most most group issues are going to come back to communication.

Like you have to have and it's going to take practice, right? If you've never GM'd before and you're nervous about this stuff, like your problem. going to mess up. It's okay, right? Just know that when you have an issue, take a breath, take a step back and talk to your players.

You can talk to them one-on-one. It doesn't have to be during the session even, like address it. Because if you don't address it soon, it will become a problem. I think that's a good tip just generally for really any issue.

I think too often as DMs, we almost get the sense that like we're performing and like we need to be on all the time and kind of perfect, you know, just like Justin was talking earlier about, you know, kind of being prepared for when things go sideways and there's nothing wrong with, you know, saying, okay, I was thinking you guys were going to go to the castle.

I wasn't really planning on you following the caravan. Give me five minutes. Like everybody, like take a bio break, whatever, get a drink of water, like give me five minutes. Let me just think about some things here for a second and then we'll come back and like and keep going and that's fine, right?

There's nothing wrong with and especially I mean Hopefully the people that you're playing with like that's a safe space, you know, I mean you can just be like hey like okay Like I'm absolutely willing to run with this direction that you guys are wanting to go right now Give me a second.

And let me just kind of figure this out for a minute and then we'll keep going, right? Do you have anything to add? I was just gonna say Honestly, this is why I think everyone should try GMing at some point in their life because it'll make you a better person Yeah, no, just a person like a normal person because you'll have to learn Interpersonal communication you'll have to learn how to be a leader You'll have to learn how to deal with conflict and these tools you use them all the time you come back to session zero In between sessions during sessions whenever you need to because they're so useful because it's you Collaborating with people so you can tell a collaborative story Yeah,

I think one thing one other thing regarding communication. I Tend to do a lot of homebrew and house rules At our table. There are a lot of things that in in the DM guide and in the players handbook that we're like, you know so we So and in order to make our games more fun for us, we change some things around That is something that you want to talk about during session zero for sure.

Make sure everybody agrees and you know, if you are in the middle of a campaign you you know, you maybe you home brewed a cool weapon for somebody and it Turns out that they end up killing all of the bad guys instead of all the other players and they nobody else gets a turn Fix that right Reevaluate back it up Be ready to Balance things you want everyone to be able to have equal time like you were talking about Everyone to be having fun and if not everybody's having fun and enjoying their experience then something's got a change in shift.

So Did you guys have any other points you wanted to talk about real quick not on session zero stuff? Yeah, I have some other points. Did we want to move forward? Or maybe we should take a question or two.

Let's take a few questions and we can get to you guys. Yeah, that's okay. Go for it. My name is Daniel and I have a question about if you have like a player, some players that want to cover something that you're not necessarily an expert or qualified to cover it, how can you best prepare yourself so you can still give them the experience that they want?

What do you mean by that? You're not an expert on covering, like give us an example. Like one example, like Jesse's example. Like using a hard money lender in your game. Okay. Or even like if it's someone that wants to touch on ideas of like racism and how to overcome that or trauma and overcome that or even money lenders.

So, so I would. That's pretty what I talk about. Right. So first of all, I would say that if you're not comfortable addressing it, then maybe that's just not something you do at your table, right? If they want to do that.

then maybe they need to find a different GM, right? Or be a GM themselves. Or be a GM themselves, exactly. But if it is something more simple like that, what do you think? I mean, first of all, if it's in the moment, you're screwed.

There's not a lot you can do. I mean, you could ask Chad GBT, I guess. If you have some time, you can obviously research it, right? A lot of writers research things. You're supposed to write what you know.

Being a GM is no different. You're supposed to use what you know and portray that. There is also nothing wrong with doing your best, right? I'm a big fan of the actual play show, High Rollers, out of the UK.

Yeah, yeah, you guys are awesome. Mark Helms is awesome because he'll kind of do his best. And then me as a listener, I'm like, that's wrong. Like, I know. But you know, it's just, it's a story and he goes through it and they get through it and it's fine.

So does that answer your question at all? I think too, you know, you could, that's definitely an opportunity to kind of communicate with your player and say, hey, if you want to like take a deep dive into some sort of like, you know, traumatic experience that your player had as a child, you know, in their backstory and we want to kind of find a way to help them work through their trauma or something like,

great, I'm not a therapist, but like, let's work together on this. And like, what do you think healing might look like for them? And you know what I mean? And maybe we can kind of plan out some touch points now, you know, on their journey, stuff like that, right?

As long as it's not in the moment and you can say, hey, let's, you know, let's talk about this offline, maybe between sessions and make some plans. So I have a quick thing to add. I have worked as a sensitivity consultant.

I've worked with many, many sensitivity consultants in other areas for TT RPGs. And I have written the safety guide to many RPG books and it is tricky, but there are things to do. First of all, ask you or your player, ask yourself, why is this?

story one that we're telling at the table right like if it's to be just a fun story hook or something maybe not the right choice right why why are you telling the story first of all second of all this story are you the appropriate person to tell it right like I would argue that I would probably not be comfortable with a white player trying to have a black characters whose main story is about the racism that they're experiencing like I don't think that that's probably the appropriate situation right with that said it's not like you can never play a character who's not like you I think there are just a few things you want to do to be careful so if it if this is something that your player relates to whether that's like you know an aspect of their characters background that they relate to as a GM I would let them take the lead like if I'm not an expert there I'm gonna let them tell that story how they authentically know to tell it And like,

for example, in the Stormlight RPG, one thing we did is if your character has a disability, it's like you can work with the GM if you want to represent that mechanically, or you don't have to, right?

But like, we're gonna let the player lead. We're gonna let the player be able to tell that story as long as they're doing it respectfully and earnestly. So like research is important, but yeah, just kind of checking in what feels good.

If something doesn't feel good to you and you can't explain why it doesn't feel good to you, don't do it, right? Like your instincts are telling you that this is not a good situation, right? Just err on the side of keeping people comfortable, keeping people safe, and avoid major issues.

Like in Adventures in Rokugan, which is this Japanese-inspired setting I worked on, in the safety guide, it's like, let's not use fake Japanese accents that has such a history of racism. Let's not do that.

Let's not only tell stories about honor and have that be like a one-dimensional character. So things like that, you know, just feel it out. If it feels wrong to you, you can't explain why. That's okay, that's still valid.

There's probably a reason why you don't tread on that, you know, territory. Yeah, I think constant check-ins too. Like if this is something that's important to your player, that is also important to the character, you know, that you're not familiar with, be checking in with them and be like, how did I handle that?

Was that like, was that good? How should we do it differently next time? That kind of stuff, so yeah. Hi, my question has to do with creating campaigns. Like whenever I make one, I always know how I want it to start and end, but the middle, I get stuck a lot.

This question, I was wondering if you have any, like a process that you go through in filling out the middle section. Sure. Process guy. Yeah. Process guy. Absolutely. So this is kind of back to what I was saying with the case method, right?

Campaign is nothing more than story arcs, which are filled with sessions. So all you need to do is figure out what story arcs do you want to tell? And the nice thing about it is you don't need to have everything in the middle filled.

out. You're not writing a book, which is a great thing if you're playing a TTRPG because your players are going to be, I don't know, 75% of what actually happens because they're going to make choices and then you're going to react to those choices and then say, okay, what if they did this and try and make them make other choices or just, you know, you're going to kind of be fiddling with them.

So what I would suggest is you know where you want to start, you know where you want to finish. Theoretically, that means you have the big bad, right? That's the problem. Now, you need to cut that problem into how it affects different things and how those minor problems get dealt with.

From there, I would dig heavily into your player's backstories and build story arcs out of those. And in fact, you can probably interchange those two steps, right? But once you have kind of the general ideas for these story arcs.

Then you can get started on the second story arc or maybe the third if you already have the second one started You don't need to have like four five six, however many you have ready You just need to have an idea of what's going to come up later, right?

Like we know Spoiler harry potter at some point is going to fight voldemort, but he's also going to maybe you know Discover some secrets along the way. Maybe find a girlfriend, right? Those are all different story arcs, but they don't happen in the first book right Anybody else want to add to that?

Um yeah, as far like I In so I it's much more it's sorry brain. Um It's much easier for me to Create from scratch. I have I struggle to do modules. So I really enjoy homebrewing um, and so and I tend to Do like justin is saying I I have a beginning we have our players.

I have an idea of what I want the ending to be and like you said you look at your players backstories and pull start pulling on those threads right what I liked to what I like to ask myself is um My players I I asked them for like what's their character's greatest fear?

What's their? Uh, what do they really want in life? You know what I mean those kinds of deeper questions and Then I ask myself What does this character need to face? In order to grow and change and then I develop a story arc out of that Right and so within that story arc then you have sessions you plan for NPCs for them to meet that are going to push them in that direction, right you plan Cities or locations that they can potentially go to and you don't have to plan the whole world You just have to plan one session at a time,

right? Um, and it's it it can be a little nerve-wracking Knowing that you know, you kind of don't really usually it's like a car with headlights at night. You know what I mean? you only really see about 20 feet in front of you.

But as long as you can see that 20 feet, like you can keep going, right? So, yeah, does that help? Yeah, it does, thank you. Cool. Next question. I like all the talk about planning, but we all have those weeks where time gets away from us, but we still really wanna play.

Do you have any tips and tricks for winging it? This can be. Look up on D&D Beyond the monster list, and find one that looks fun. And stick it in front of your players and see what happens. I would just add, one of the roles of the GM, sorry, is to be a mad scientist.

I mentioned you kind of fiddle with things, right? It's always nice to ask these what-if questions. But that's a nice way to plan a session without really having anything planned, right? For example, in my campaign, that in my private window I'm doing right now, I hope none of my plays are in here, but I doubt it.

They essentially went to this memorial service for someone that they didn't even know. The speech got interrupted. Someone summoned an ancient red dragon, right? And all the sorts of other monsters. They're level 11, which they still might die, which is actually a big fear for me, right?

I don't want to kill them. So I'm thinking, what can I do? So I ask this question, what would make them have this moment of pause? What if one of their enemies showed up and offered them a truce while fighting the red dragon in order to fight something else that may or may not be a bigger enemy or just a different enemy?

What would they do? I don't know how next sessions are going to go, but I know for me it's going to be interesting. So if you can develop these sort of what if questions or what would they do, and if either suggestion is interesting to you, then you at least have a general idea of where to go.

And if that doesn't work, then a handful of encounters and you're ready, right? Yeah. I mean, you can always do. I mean, if your players want to continue kind of playing their same characters and they're not really interested in, hey, let's do a one shot or whatever.

I mean, dream sequence, you know what I mean? Like, it's easy to just be like, OK, here we go. And it can just be like a big encounter. I've done and had my GMs do with us, kind of a gladiator arena kind of thing, just kind of felt a little bit out of nowhere.

But at the same time, we're all kind of like, hey, we want to play and have fun. And we get that like, it's been a busy week for you this week. So I don't know, we all got thrown in jail for some shenanigans that we got up to last session.

And now it's a jailbreak or whatever. I mean, it's, I think, fairly easy, as long as your players can be understanding and are willing to just kind of. go with you if the idea is hey we want to play and have fun and even if this is a little bit sideways or kind of next to the actual story that's happening that's fine right something that we do often too is if the GM is really busy or didn't have time to plan or or if somebody cancels often someone else will be like well I can run something you know which is always fun like who doesn't love building characters like I love building new characters and so it's like I sure I'll whip something up and you know just tell me what level and how many magic items I get and like I'm good you know you know yeah very much agree it's all about expectations you know just say that just say you know we're just here to have a good time and you know when like TV shows run a little too long and the plots getting really messy and it's like musical episode yeah and you're like wait I want to find out what's happening with the serial killer I don't like we're side-questing it's okay each vacation episode Yes,

filler episodes. And you're just like, we're going to have a musical episode. It's going to get zany. It's going to get a little weird. And we're just going to roll with it. And maybe the stakes are low, right?

If we have a really cool storyline that's been building and building and building, we're afraid of messing that up. We're like, oh, there's a two week waiting period before we can gain admittance into the city we need to go to.

Maybe we're just going to hang out around camp. Let's go to a costume party. Yeah, I don't know. Just figure out, just have that expectation. I'd also just add, there are lots of tools out there. And I'm a big proponent, if you're not trying to monetize your game at all, I'm a big proponent of using any tool that allows you to have fun with friends as often as possible.

So there are a lot of generative tools out there, like worldsmith.io, other ones, chatgbt. And I know that's probably going to spark a few more questions. But you can use that as starting points to get where you want to go so you can have a fun experience, right?

Because I mean, it's a game at the end of the day, right? For sure. Can we take a question break and talk about combat? Yes. Of course we can, Colby. So I want to quickly give my top three tips for making combat as fun as possible for your players at your table.

You might not agree with all of these. I know we've got a lot of experienced DMs in the house. And that's OK. So thing number one, and this is like my biggest, maybe, pet peeve that I see with GMs do sometimes.

And it's don't make combat in your game like a tactics game where it's you versus your players, right? And you're constantly trying to counter their build because you think they're too powerful or something, right?

The point of us playing these games is to have fun. And for anybody who watches my YouTube channel ever, you know, I'm always making these optimized, whatever, min-maxed characters, and sometimes they're just like, well, this character does a lot of damage, and sometimes they're weird, like the warm hug that your son is playing right now, which was all about like someone who casts heat metal on themselves and then grapples their enemy to do damage.

A red dragon born who is immune to fire. Yeah, and so, and that's fun, right? But a lot of times I get comments on videos and they're like, that's not even a bad one, like it gets way worse. It gets worse.

But, you know, a lot of times I'll get comments on the videos and people will be like, oh, this build is so easy to counter, all I have to do as a GM is, blah, blah, blah, right, fill in the blank. Making flying enemies, or if everybody has dark vision, then it's not gonna be, and it's just like, yeah, but please don't ever be a GM at my table, because why would you do that to your player?

If your player comes to you and says, okay, here's my character concept, hear me out. It's kinda weird, but I wanna be a character who only does damage if somebody attacks me, and then it returns damage via armor of Agathys, and spells like that, and for your GM to be like, oh, well, I know how to defeat you, it's like, well, that's not the point, right?

The point is for your players to have fun and feel powerful. Now, that doesn't mean don't make combat challenging for your players, right? There's a difference, but just be careful that you're not getting in the mindset of, okay, how can I foil their plans?

Like us against them. Yeah, it's not, the best GMs, I think, find what their players like to do and then help enable them to do that thing, right? And that's not always combat. That could be roleplay, that could be utility stuff, whatever, but yeah, just look for ways to do that.

In that vein, second point, there are spells and abilities in-game that players can use that are a lot of fun for a player to use. They don't work as well if you give them to your monsters, right? And this is another thing that I see a lot of times where it's like, well, if the players can do it, then my monsters can do it.

So be careful to use silvery barbs or whatever, right? And silvery barbs aside. And again, I kind of go, well, look, it's really cool for me to do things that will control the enemies and take them out of the fight, right?

Doesn't work as well. And some of you might disagree with this and that's okay. But my opinion, casting Wall of Force on your players so that they can't do anything because they didn't take Misty Step or whatever, that's not fun as a player to be mind controlled and you can't do anything, right?

I mean, combat can already be slow and long and it might be 30 minutes before you get another turn. And if on your turn, you just go next person, you know what I mean? Like, that's not fun. And so again, like the mindset should be, I think like, okay, what can I do in this combat encounter, maybe specifically to help my players feel cool and powerful and fun.

Again, not saying don't challenge your players. There are ways to challenge aside from, you know, trying to counter them or remove them from being able to do anything in game, right? Final tip. Like I just said, combat can sometimes turn into a slog.

And so just be very aware of like little things you can do to try and speed it up at the table, right? So making sure that you let somebody know, okay, it's your turn and you're on deck, right? Just so that they can go, okay, right, yeah, it's my turn next, okay, what am I gonna be doing?

If you've got groups of monsters that kind of do the same thing, especially if they're exactly the same monster, like consider having them all make their attacks at the same time. Consider instead of rolling for damage, just using like the average damage that it always gives you in the monster manual if you use that, right?

This is their average damage. Don't roll for it. Just say, okay, you take 10 damage and you kind of move on, right? So little things like that that can just kind of help keep it moving. If it's been a big fight and there's like two goblins left and it's very obvious that like the players have one at this point, like maybe the goblins can run away or if your players are murder hobos and they're gonna chase them,

just you can hand wave it and be like, okay, yeah, you guys, you took them out, like good job and maybe somebody makes an attack and they just happen to take out two at once, whatever, right, you can kind of hand wave things at the end so that an already lengthy process can be a little bit sped up.

And those are my combat tips. I think too, it's very important to understand, again, going back to what I was talking about about balance, understanding that some of these like control spells are gonna be really, really bad when your players are low level, right?

But when they're a little bit higher, it might be okay. Like maybe somebody has counterspell, maybe somebody has Misty Step or has taken that or something like that, right? Like taking those kinds of things into account.

Yeah, and I wouldn't say like never try and control your players or whatever, but I would say do it sparingly. Yeah, for sure. Do it sparingly and find other ways to challenge them. I heard I heard a story of a group that where their their fighter got What is it stunned and was stunned for like Eight realms.

Yeah, which is ridiculous and like they had people you know Like the paladin was giving him a plus three and like like he had all of the things going for him And he just kept failing and it's like at that point is the GM like There's not a lot you can do Right So so just be yeah being careful about that making sure everybody's having a good time.

So yeah, you go back to questions Yeah, yeah, we got a lot. Yeah, we've got a big line. So let's get through as many of them as we can Okay, many question first Colby. Can I get a picture with you after this?

Sure. Yeah One of my favorite youtubers at least from the D&D genre. That's awesome I love your bills and stuff and I want to dyslexic wizard one day Okay actual question now when I had the privilege of being able to DM for my, for my brother and some childhood friends of ours.

But as we were doing the campaign, it was just really hard for me to keep up like the energy and the desire to want to do it to want to prep for it and that kind of stuff. I kept having I kept trying to have these interesting ideas.

And they just always seem to fall flat with them. Like for example, I had this it was Halloween was coming up and I was like, Oh, let's do a little side adventure where this haunted house appears. I sent in a thing to the group champion like, Hey, is this something you'd be interested in?

They were like, Oh yeah, that sounds cool. So I set up this haunted house. And I set up like different challenges. And they had to do like enough for each of them to get an amulet to get into the basement.

And instead, they ended up prying up the boards to the basement and going in through that way. It wasn't even a fight because they just had the high ground. And I made the mistake of having not very I made a mistake.

Yes, they had the high ground. They should have learned from Anakin. I should have learned from Anakin, because they had the high ground. My beholder could barely do anything to them. And so like, my question is, is like, how do I can make sure that I'm having fun as the game master in the future?

Because I really liked it when I was able to like, do a special thing and give one of my characters a special sword that had to do with the religion his paladin was, and it was going to be upgraded as he went along.

Like I had this cool thing with that. It was fun to get to do that with him. But when the time came for me to do something and said something like I thought of that I was cool a lot of times just didn't seem to.

Yeah. So question. Yeah, very good question. In the in the specific instance, you're talking about where like you had something planned in the basement, and they went through that way, right? What I have done in the past is just have the flexibility to like, put the bad guy in the last place you play.

look like it doesn't have to be in the basement if they go in through the basement put it in the attic if they go in through the attic put it in the basement like you know if they spend 30 minutes deciding on which way to go in like it's gonna be it's gonna be in the opposite place guys like and that's and that's fine right have that kind of flexibility but also like the things that the things that excite you are are going to be what you do right but you do also have to have the the expectation of like maybe this is gonna go sideways and if it does go sideways what are you gonna do in response you know I mean maybe another beholder comes up behind them instead at that point right different different strategies like that does that make sense yeah so try to be more flexible and comes to for example maybe because they weaken the floor the floor reports game then maybe they fall through the base yeah exactly now they're they took 2D8 bludgeoning damage or something,

not to punish him. Not to punish me. And they were lower level, so it was a weak, it was one of the watered down beholders. Because I didn't want to kill them, I just wanted to have a fun signature shadow monster coming to attack.

What else do you guys do to try and ensure that you're having fun as a GM? Because that's so important, right? If the GM gets burned out, then nobody gets to play. So you got to make sure that you're enjoying yourself as a GM.

So what you're talking about is burnout, right? And that happens when you're doing something repetitively and you don't see the benefit, you're not enjoying it, right? So change things up. Do things that are different than you normally do, right?

If you are having sort of GM burnout overall, take a session off and have someone else GM for you and cause them problems, right? Do everything that they do to you, not in a spiteful way, but like feeling out what players can do, right?

When am I doing a group now? I always say I'm willing, I'm very happy to do one shot. Exactly, exactly. Also changing up themes, right? If there's something that you do all the time, do something different.

Changing up encounters. If you never do puzzles, throw more puzzles in, right? Puzzles are either really hard for players or really easy, right? So that's kind of nice way to change things up. But change things up.

And I think you have to rediscover the playfulness with which you first approached being a GM. And when you're preparing for sessions often, you're like writing things down or looking things up and that can get pretty tedious, except when you're like, oh, I have this really cool freaking idea.

I can't wait for our players to see it. You have to find some way to get back to that where you're just excited just to do it, right? And I think just doing anything that you find even remotely interesting is kind of the spark to get that started.

So kind of what I'm getting here is keep having that fun. Keep having those like, oh, hey, here's a haunted house. And then when the player is shenanigans their way out of something. flexible and pull something out of you know which end in order to have in order to keep it it's not yes and it's it's not it's not yes oh yes and now you won because you outdid me it's right yes and now I'm going to challenge you a different way exactly or maybe they did win but that's the worst consequence that could happen right like them winning is the bad thing okay thank you very much I really great question so we have about 20 minutes left so we'll try to get through as many of these questions as we can I would ask try to keep them pretty general we don't want to be asked answering like super specific questions but try to keep them as general as we can and we'll get through as many as as possible so here we go speed round okay so this is a bit of a two-parter if you just want to address part one totally fine so I have never GM'd before I am GM curious but I am never actually yeah and what I get stuck on is getting that initial seed of an idea.

So my main question is, where do you look to get that seed of an idea? Because when I think of movies and books and stories that inspire me, and look to them for inspiration, and just, I think, well, maybe if I copy and pasted it into a RPG system, and that's kind of all I've got.

And then- That's not a bad idea. You're ready. Okay, that's okay. I like to ask my players what they're excited about. I know one of the first sessions I GM'd was for a gal who does speed shooting with pistols and stuff, like she competes.

And so we did an Old West style. And it was really fun for her, she loved it. So that kind of thing. I mean, I would say don't be afraid of running pre-written modules either, especially as a first-time GM.

Sometimes they can get a bad rap, but I mean, some of the most fun I've had as a player and as a GM have been with official Wizards of the Coast modules, right? Or, you know, doesn't have to be D&D, obviously.

I know there are other game systems out there. But yeah, they're done by professional writers and they're pretty good, right? Like, and so look up. And even if you want to just do maybe a series of one shots or kind of smaller campaigns, it doesn't have to be Curse of Strahd or, you know, Tyranny of Dragons.

It could be Wild Beyond the Witchlight, you know, and they've got like some good little just quick kind of one, two, three shot campaigns in there that can kind of help you get your feet wet and kind of, but sort of hold your hand a little bit more.

And then you might just take it from there and run into something like that's totally home brewed or, you know, move those players onto another module. I'd also add, you're talking about like a plot hook, right?

And I like to coincide with that. side campaign starting plot hooks with galvanizing events where you need something to get the party to stay together for some time and for that to happen the party needs to be in the same location have the same motivations and go in the same direction so as long as they're in some location and then you start asking them about their backstories you can easily come up with some sort of galvanizing event meaning hey here's a quest you guys need to go on or hey all of you guys have been framed for murder and they're running towards you from this direction you know that's a pretty easy way to start an adventure and then you're kind of you're rolling from there thank you yeah I had a quick question actually not about modules but homebrew specific so something that I have a hard time with is kind of stepping back and doing that process thing specifically with world building I want to flesh out every single town and then it gets way too bogged down.

I had this with my first campaign that I homebrewed for and it was a little bit of a headache. What are some ways that I can still inspire my like take stuff from their backstories and make a world that they enjoy without getting too much in the nitty gritty and like what's the best ways that you guys have done homebrew that I can try for myself?

That's a lot in that question. I'm sorry. No, that's good. I for non-monetized games, I use chat JPT a lot. I tell it like give me a list of 10 townsfolk and their occupations. Right. Give me a list of 10 businesses within this town or whatever so that if I so that if my players are going somewhere, I can say, oh, you want to go into a metalsmith shop?

I did not prepare a metalsmith shop. Here's the shop owner's name. What are you looking for? And I roll a dice to see if they have it or not. Right. It's it's all in the yes and right. You want to you know, if it makes you excited to prepare as much of that as possible and you're and you're eager to do that, that's fine.

There's nothing wrong with that. Just understand that your players might not go to every place. You know what I mean? And you shouldn't try to make them go to every place. Right. Let them go where they are excited to go and and explore what they're excited to explore.

That's the sandbox. Right. So does that help? Yes, that gives me some. Yeah, I'll add some to that. I love to the RPGs because the story is bound by time and space. Right. Things happen here at a certain time.

Meaning if you want your world building to be relevant to the story, put your players somewhere and let them start doing stuff. And you'll naturally you'll build stuff around the world, but you'll build more out where they are.

Yes. And until they go. somewhere else you don't need to really fully worry about that and I'm I'm fairly certain Critical Role did this with you know their first campaign their second campaign they spent most of their time in one area and then they kind of moved and kind of expanded as they leveled up.

I find that very helpful because even in the DMG it says you know levels one through five you're like a local town hero. Exactly and then as you level up your sphere of influence expands. Yeah start with the place that they are and and and just focus on that place and and if you want to think a little bit about the political factions and neighboring towns and what the Pantheon looks like and all of that kind of stuff like fine but don't get too into the weeds because it might not ever even come up in game right I would say start with where they are and and let them sort of help guide you to what comes next.

Thanks guys yeah. We do have about five minutes left, just so you're aware. All right, question from a mom of young kids who would love to dabble in GMing but feels very overwhelmed by the sheer amount of prep that can go into it.

What are the top two to three things you would say are absolutely essential in prep versus what can fall to the wayside? How old are your kids? Preschool. Okay, get some stuffed animals and those are their, those are their characters.

Okay, I genuinely, I did this with my sons. Oh, I'm talking like dabbling with my friends playing. Oh, gotcha, gotcha, okay. I'm not starting, I'm not starting my kids yet. So she doesn't have a lot of time.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Not a lot of time. Gotcha, gotcha. That's a different question, sorry. Yeah, okay, so what are the most important things to prep? Yeah, versus what can be skipped for now. When time is of the essence.

Yeah. I mean, I was lean on modules, I think. You know what I mean? Read through a chapter, make sure you're familiar with it, and if you think there's any holes there, like, think about it, fill them in, but I mean.

Yeah, like, like give yourself a week or two or three and say, hey, you know, next month we're gonna play, you know, this module, this is, you know, and then that'll give you time to read it on your spare time and kind of go, okay, it looks like there's kind of a gap between what happens here and what happens here and how am I gonna help them get from point A to point B and just sort of you know,

plan it out a little bit in your head, but yeah, I think leaning on modules is big there because it's gonna take the burden of the world building largely off your shoulders, not completely. Also, you don't have to run the rules to the extent that they exist, if that makes sense.

So, like, focus on the core mechanics. So, a lot of like D20 systems, you're like, okay, everybody at the table, at times we're gonna test, you know, do a skill check and you're gonna roll a D20 and then we're gonna figure out what happens with that.

You could even start so easy as to say, we're not gonna worry about modifiers right now, we're just gonna focus. on the one die rule, and then you start introducing things as you feel comfortable and your players feel comfortable, don't worry about being like, I have to download the entire SRD to my brain and run this perfectly somehow, or I'm like setting the gods or something.

Just focus on what is the heart of the system, what are the stories we want to tell. Scale up as your comfort level goes. This is fun and it's not necessarily correct, but we're just going to go as we go at our own pace, and to the point of a session zero, make sure your players are aware that like, hey, I'm starting, give me some grace, make sure that they're forgiving to you and you're forgiving to them,

and just roll with it. I'd also add, I know we're short of time, being a GM means you do have to develop skills. Improv is a perfect skill to develop in this instance, and you can practice every session.

You don't have to plan everything, and using pre-written modules, you can yes-and the module. almost creating problems for yourself to work on later, right? Like, oh, great, I gave them this item. What is the item?

That's a problem you can work on and kind of help yourself do session prep, but improv, definitely a good thing to work on. Thank you. Thanks. Maybe the last question. Where's our person that's going to have our mics?

I don't know. I don't know. They left. Will they just push us out of the stage? Go ahead. So my question has to do with introverted people. When it comes to how do you encourage shy players or introverts to participating in games, I work at a lot of game stores.

So I see a lot of people come in. And some people are really like to participate. Some people come in and they're a little shy. And is there any tips or tricks you can give to help encourage people at the table?

Yeah, back story hooks. You know, like when they sit down, you're like, OK, what's your character's favorite tea? I don't know. Like, you know, who's a family member? They care about whatever. Just really simple bite-sized things.

And if I see other players really engaged with what's going on and introverted characters may be a little shy or something, I'm like, oh, this is interesting because this one, you know, your favorite tea is like somehow involved or something.

And like, you need to be able to interact with that to help your whole group figure something out. Or like, this family member of yours shows up and they're acting very suspiciously or something like that.

So you just grab a few simple hooks. Easy questions to answer. You know, these are just simple, tiny hooks. And you just pull them into the story as you need to to make sure they get equal engagement.

Their character is equally material to the plot. And I would add there are probably a lot of players who are maybe shy, but also don't really know what to do. You know what I mean? And so the question, what would you like to do, is a really good just like, hey, you haven't said anything in a few minutes.

Is there anything you'd like to do right now that your character would like to do, right? Yeah, and not necessarily like, what are you? are you going to do on your turn? Are you going to make an acrobatics check to do something?

You know what I mean? But like, what would you like to do? Like, right now, in this moment, what would your character enjoy doing, right? And they might say, huh, I wanna punch some bad guys. Or I wanna swing from the chandeliers.

Like, whatever, you know what I mean? I wanna do a performance at the tavern, right? Like, you can, you know, help them do that. And maybe help them understand what that might look like, right? Okay, well, then, you know, in that case, why don't you have a chat with the bartender and see if, you know, they're looking for somebody to perform for the tavern guests tonight, et cetera.

Yeah, awesome. I'd just finish that up with, take what you can get and then use positive reinforcement, right? Anything they do, awesome. Real quick, before we end, do any of you four have your favorite, like, resource for answering GM questions?

like a subreddit or Facebook group or something like that. There's a lot of great YouTubers out there that I love and follow and not my channel. But also subscribe. If you're looking for a big bad to challenge your players with, then yes.

But if you're looking for like good DM tips, you know, the dungeon dudes, like there's so many out there that have really great, you know, Matt Colville, I mean, there's lots of lots of great content creators out there that have wonderful like tips, tricks, ideas, suggestions.

Also, there's there's great resources out there, too, to help. I love describe if anybody's familiar with that. Like if you're looking for just like, oh, my players are going to be at a graveyard. Go on to describe and just type like graveyard and it'll give you like this great like descriptive box text that you can read that when your players approach, you can have this like it makes it look like you're really like good and you've planned and prepared and written this beautiful description about your graveyard or whatever.

Right. So, yeah, those are my two. Did you have anything to add? I mean, just like final thoughts, final thoughts. If you haven't GM'd yet, go do it. I don't know what you're waiting for. If you're waiting for the perfect session, so am I.

So good luck. But I'm still waiting for the world's greatest dungeon master out there. So whichever one of you is it, come talk to me. And then I would just say this sounds like a weird one. But don't be afraid of trying different systems.

D&D 5e is not the only system out there. You don't know if you like something until you try it. So just be willing to experiment. A game just really quick. Dan Wells introduced me to his 10 candles. That game broke my brain wide open, made me a way better game designer, way better GM.

So just play with different systems. It'll teach you a lot more range as a GM. And then you can bring that back to whatever you're doing. I was at my local game store last week and found a game called Thirsty Sword Lesbians.

And I was like, I want to play this game. It looked amazing. So yes, there are a million out there. So if anybody still has questions, you guys please feel free to come up and we can try to address those.

Otherwise, thank you so much for coming. You guys, we really appreciate you being here. It was so fun. Thanks everybody. Thanks again for tuning in to today's episode of As I mentioned, today was a very special episode, particularly special for me.

Being able to do that. It was my first experience doing that very cool experience. And I'm going to talk about that in just a second in the Patreon only portion. But before that, I want to give you the listener a challenge based on today's show.

Obviously, the content of today's show was about getting into GMing, I guess, and really pushing yourself. you don't feel like you're ready doing it anyways. I would give you all the challenge to go try out a different game system and then bring back something from that game system to your next D&D session.

Try something new, push yourself out of your comfort zone and see what new horizons you discover. Thank you so much for listening to today's show. We've over the last few years grown a lot and it's just I feel so lucky and blessed honestly.

Where we are now I could never have imagined. So I just want to give you a big thank you and yeah just here's a big digital hug from me even though I'm not a hugger. Before we close the show some other thank yous that are due.

First of all thank you to Benj Weyland who is our new graphic designer. You'll see more designs from him coming out also kind of a spoiler alert but we are changing our branding so we're gonna leak that out little by little you'll probably see bits and pieces here and there but thanks Ben and if you guys need graphic design work definitely let us know we'll connect you with Benj and he does good work.

Next we'd like to thank our discord moderators they are awesome awesome people so we got Jukka we got Tek Senpai and we got TJ Maxx. You guys are doing such great work on our discord and just making it a way more fun place and doing things that me and Tanner never really could make happen on our own so you guys are indispensable.

Lastly we want to thank our patron the main patron right now which is Foxybeard you are helping us keep the lights on. Come back next time for another special episode with our guest and friend Jay Foster from Swell Initiative for round two.

He's the first podcast guest to make a double appearance on the show technically Ashley Mayking was the first one. but that's because I messed up and didn't record her first episode, whatever. So come back next time for that special episode with Jay Foster and see that handcrafted special episode just for you.

Until then though, let's go ahead and roll initiative.

So I did. Surprisingly, they reached out. I was, I was really surprised. They wanted to do an interview. So I did an interview with them and things looked really promising about doing the panel. They seemed really nice.

They seemed like they were interested in having me come on. There was some mix up in terms of having all of us come on versus just me as well as like being able to playtest Brandon Sanderson's new TTRPG.

So mix up there. Uh, so at the end of the day, between all of the mixups, I was the only one that went, uh, I was the only one on the panel. I was the only one from sessions, your studios that, uh, went to Dragon Steel, even to playtest anything.

I didn't, I didn't end up playing testing stuff, but they only gave us one ticket, which was just for me, obviously, cause I was the panelist, but I was understandably very nervous and I didn't want to go alone.

No one could go with me. So going that day, it was, it was on Friday, I believe, or maybe it was Thursday. I can't remember. It was in the evening. It was in the afternoon. I took the, I took the day of work off and going that day, I was like extremely lonely.

Um, and, and, uh, this might, this might end up being kind of like a therapy session for me, but, uh, hopefully you Patreon viewers, hopefully you care. But the whole time I was walking or cause I got there a little bit early, just to walk around the convention, kind of see things and make sure I could get to where I needed to go as well as I wanted to talk to the, the AV company to make sure that we could get the recording of the.

panel. And so I got there much earlier than I really should have. And I also had been like really sick the week before and I was still getting over the sickness. So I didn't feel great. I didn't eat like anything.

And I was just wandering around the convention. It was all super, super cool. But I felt so lonely. I felt like such an imposter, a pretender. I felt like nobody knew who I was or like, I don't know.

I was just comparing myself and how to be a better DM to all of the booths that were there. People who are like making money doing what they love and just doing these amazing things. And I felt a lot of inadequacy and it was really, honestly, it was really hard for me.

I remember sitting, I would sit down in like multiple places. There was one place where there was like this ring set up and people were being taught how to fight with speeders, which was pretty cool.

If you've read Brandon Sanderson's books, but I remember sitting down and then kind of FaceTiming my wife showing her the convention a little bit. Then she had to go and I was just, I was really sad and, and obviously nervous.

Like I just, I felt like such a sham, such an imposter. And I went to go to the place where I was going to do our panel and I was just sitting in on the panel before us, which first of all, I really liked Brandon Sanderson stuff.

I had no idea how in depth people are with Brandon Sanderson stuff. Spoiler alert, by the way. So there were people who were, there was like a whole panel about Hoid and his place in every single book, what he's doing and kind of theorizing what his goals are and stuff like that.

That was the panel before ours, which was crazy. Actually, no, it was the panel before the panel before ours. The panel before ours was about magic systems, I think. Anyways, so the time comes for us to get up on stage stage.

So I had never met any of our co-panelists. We'd only talked over discord and thrown out some ideas, really just kind of tossed around some ideas and things to do. And honestly, I was pretty nervous because I was the only, the first panel I did, by the way, some context, the first panel, which you didn't get to listen to, unfortunately, because Dragonsteel wanted to do some content with it, understandably,

because the first panel was about being a game master and authoring TTRPGs for authors. That's what it was. The idea was to talk about two perspective authors, aspiring authors and people who are game masters and kind of connect the two topics.

And I was on the panel with three other people. One was Fonda Lee. Uh, gosh, let's see if I can remember the. other two they took down the server on discord oh well one was fondly and then there were two other authors I was the only one up there who was not an author so I was a game master and it was it was scary and I even on stage I sort of felt like a an imposter because I didn't have any authoring experience I didn't have I was just I don't know I felt like this nobody and I still kind of do but as the conversation wore on it was really fun because we talked about a lot of things that actually did have experience in and I was able to calm down and I don't think I did very good in that first panel but it was a lot of fun it was good experience and the cool thing was after that panel I went into kind of the main area saw the the big stage and Brandon Sanderson was up there talking with one of the authors that I just panel up paneled on and they were having a fun conversation and it was nice to kind of be able to think that I was on the same stage as him who's now on the same stage as Brandon Sanderson.

But then when it came to our next panel, the one that you just listened to, this one was a lot more fun. I was a lot more loose. I was able to kind of think more clearly. I was, because I'd been there, I'd done that, so I didn't feel so bad.

I felt pretty good actually. And I think the other panelists and I just had a little bit better energy. And actually I think I want to bring on at least Colby on the show because I really enjoyed his perspectives and his energy and kind of just chatting with him a little bit.

So I think I might have him come on the show at some point. But it was it was super fun to just talk and have that conversation in front of so many different people. And actually now that I think about it, would hopefully, if you're listening, let me know.

Would you be interested in us doing sort of panels on the show bringing in like multiple different guests and having them talk about the same concept. But the biggest thing that I learned about that is that it doesn't matter if you feel like you're an imposter before, during, or after, right?

Because you can still do the thing regardless of how you feel. I think that panel was a success. I mean based on the amount of people that ask questions and the audience's reactions. Was it a full house?

No. But all this is to say, for your dungeon mastering, feel free to do things you don't feel prepared for. I know that that was kind of the crux of what I talked about earlier with the challenge for the audience.

But if you don't feel ready to DM for 10 people at a time, just do it. If you don't feel ready to DM for your session tomorrow, just do it. There's so much on the other side of fear, hesitation or frustration that if you can get there, it'll be so much more worthwhile.

And not just that, but I mean, I think everyone at the end of the day is kind of just making stuff up. That's basically what I do. That's like all I do. I just, you know, think about what would be useful or helpful and whether or not I'm right, I say it.

And then, I mean, there's been lots of times where I kind of think back and I'm like, oh, that's that's wrong. And actually, one example is from today's panel. So I mentioned coalescence or I mentioned galvanizing events.

I've been using that term for a while. And then like only a couple of weeks ago did I look up what galvanizing means. And it doesn't mean exactly what I wanted it to mean. So I changed the name of the idea to a coalescence event.

And I said galvanizing event on a stage in front of like. 50 people, maybe Maybe 60. I don't know and Listening to that. I just thought of myself as like a really big idiot because it's like it's not the right term But regardless like there's gonna be things you're gonna mess up, you know But if you can just keep going and push yourself and do better each time It'll all be worth it.