Hello again dear community.

My first real experience with RPGs has been here, online. I have found I am more than comfortable running a game/story here. I have become so enamoured with RPGs, that I've decided to rope in a couple of friends to attempt a tabletop session of Call of Cthulhu.

In the lead up to the decision to play a tabletop sesh I downloaded some Actual Play Podcasts (http://actualplay.roleplayingp...ems/call-of-cthulhu/) to see what a session sounds like. And I have to admit - they're clearly two very different styles: RPOL & tabletop.

I enjoy RPOL because I have the luxury of time. I can craft a post, review it, post it, even edit it... and the other players might not even see the post for hours. I get to flex my creative writing muscle, and I love it.

Ok...

So now I'm preparing for this tabletop sesh and I've become anxious.

Looking over the short(er) campaign I want to run, I'm somewhat dumbfounded by the sheer amount of detail...

At first I started highlighting passages I thought were important... then I realised I was starting to highlight almost every third phrase. The page became difficult to navigate.

So then I whipped out pen & paper, and tried to make some notes on the basic flow of events... but then I got caught up writing so much detail about each little event, just in case the investigators ask, or want more detail; until I realised I was basically copying the campaign into my own handwriting!

The published materials are all very paragraphy, and not broken up into short enough chunks that are easy to skim. So in my re-writing I tried to make it skimmable, by making dot points, mind-map style links between details, etc... then I looked at my chaotic page of notes and felt sick.

UGH...

I want the session to have some flow, and be entertaining for everyone... But I have this sinking feeling I'm just going to be READING to them; either from notes or the published materials. All of a sudden running this campaign seems like it will be boring, and difficult.

I'm starting to re-think this whole thing, and just whip out some board games instead.

Deep down, I really want to give it a try. It just feels like there is no way to simply prepare!

What do I do?
This message was last edited by the user at 12:24, Thu 18 Sept 2014.

With many years of RPG crafting and running under my belt (mostly CoC the past decade or so), I still tend to greatly overwrite my stories, but I've gotten better.

I suggest that you start small. You don't have to prepare a whole campaign right now, just the first two or three sessions. If the story will exceed that, you naturally want to have the broad strokes thought out and noted down, but you don't need detail up front. In fact, not going into detail too far in advance will free you to adapt to the players' choices.

I generally have any descriptive set pieces prepared. Also, I write out lines for any major NPCs will cover, mostly to give each a distinctive voice and try not to miss anything important. Beyond that notes and bullet points are sufficient.

Make sure those NPCs are well defined in your mind (and notes). What do they look like, sound like, act like. Give them some distinctive appearance and quirks to help them live for the players. Any combat opponents should be sketched out in terms of characteristics, weapons, spells, etc. I always keep these notes in one place, rather than scattered through the scenario.

More later.

At first glance this may sound even more scary than ever, but bear with me.

Make no notes at all.

The scenario you're running does not have to match what is written to the letter, in fact, as long as you and your players are having fun, it doesn't matter what the story is.

Read through the written scenario, commit the outline to memory, and play the rest off the cuff. The result will have more flow and fun than having you haltingly reading from a sheaf of papers.

If you really, really must have a crutch, I would suggest you use a single postcard (or if your writing is phenomenally large, a single sheet of A4) just to jot down a few essentials, in no more detail than a brief character sheet.

When your players ask questions, make something up. If it's important, you will remember it from the materials, if it isn't important, who cares what the author dreamed up? Dream up something of your own.

You may find your players take you down an entirely different route anyway, so you may end up creating on the fly regardless of what you've written.

Just go have fun with a few mates. What's the worst that can happen? If the bottom falls out of it, enjoy the beer and pretzels watching a video together and try again next week. :)

Honestly: Wing it.

Long as everyone is having fun who cares?

I use several different games but if someone does something unexpected, just well wing it.

Have FUN! :)

Preparation:

if you're doing a dungeon crawl have the map, enemies and treasures planned out.
If you're not doing a dungeon crawl have the following things:
A list of names to assign random and not so random NPCs
a general idea of where you want things to go and what to happen, a simple flow chart could be helpful
stats for generic opposition
stats for the antagonist(s)

Actual game play:
this is were you really wring it more like icosahedron152 and Rez have said.  no matter how hard you try, the players will quickly and easily make all your hard work for nothing unless you rail road them, and that's just not cool.

Lie and cheat:
as a GM your job is to tell a story, apply some resistance to the characters, and make things fun.  If they walk through your BBEG in one round and it wasn't cool (like a crit with max triple damage or something like that) keep the guy around to increase the tension and challenge.  Its the BBEG it should be a challenge to overcome but it shouldn't be impossible.

If the players need to find some random clue in order to keep things going but they all roll for crap, well they find it anyway.  Maybe not as easily or not without some strings attached but they find it because they NEED to find it.  don't let the game stall out because of a few unlucky rolls.

Make GM calls on rulings.  Yes many of us can be pretty anal about the rules but sometimes just make a GM call instead of spending the rime to look up a rule or debate rules that aren't a critical life and death thing.  you may be right, you may be wrong.  if you're wrong then own up to it and play it right from that point forward.  If you screwed a player, apologize and make it up to them.  Keep the flow and the fun going.

that's my advice.

There's more information than anyone could ever need in many published adventures. The idea is not that everything gets transmitted to the players, the idea is to give the person running the session a decent idea of what's going on, give them some ideas of their own, some 'hooks' to use to reel in the players if they don't seem to know what they're doing.

A face to face session works better if you focus on the fun of the group and don't worry too much about what's written down. If it's not fun at the time, change it or skip it, etc. If the players have a crazy idea the adventure isn't prepared for, you will have to decide if it's more fun to let them succeed. Generally a face to face is only a few hours so you probably won't go through the whole adventure.

Like plans, published adventures don't survive in the face of actual players. You will have to throw everything out and make stuff up as you go along sooner or later.

Also, be prepared to be terrible at running the adventure. You can go ahead and apologize in advance if that helps. Just being terrible at running the adventure doesn't mean it isn't a fun session though.

Face to face is more about having fun as a group than plumbing the world's depths or whatnot. There's nowhere near the level of dialog and roleplay I find, much more rollplay and crazy ideas meant to entertain each other. There's no victory condition achieved by following the story as it's written. The only victory is having fun as a group.
This message was last edited by the user at 01:08, Fri 19 Sept 2014.

Remember that gaming is pretty much storytelling with rules.  The best tabletop GMs are those who develop a rhythm and style of presenting details that's entertaining and engaging to the players.  You probably won't have that starting out, so don't worry about it.

The stereotype of a first time GM and first time players is indeed the GM very obviously reading a few paragraphs from the written module.  If you can get away from that, great.  If you would feel more comfortable having pre-written narrative to read to your players, do feel free to write it yourself.

However, try to put some hard limits on yourself if you think you'll wander into info-dump territory.

The opening setup you give the players should ideally tell them Where they are, What they're doing there, Who they are, and Why they're there.  Ideally you and the players have tackled some of these points ahead of time.  So they know they're a ragtag group of occult investigators that travel the country/world/etc, digging into whatever mysteries they find.

If you want to write something down for this, go ahead.  Maybe put a limit on it though.  Maybe it shouldn't take you any longer to read/say than 60 or 90 seconds.

When they go to the old church, city hall, city library, creepy mansion on the outskirts of town, maybe give them 3 or 4 sentences of description.  An individual room or interior maybe gets 1 or 2 unless it contains something important they should be looking at (context clues from the GM can be both obvious and subtle at the same time) then maybe it has 1 more to include that thing.

If you can improvise, do.  But I think Kouk gave the best advice.  Don't be afraid to suck.  Failure leads to growth, and only practice will make you better at anything, including running games.  As long as you set the right expectations for everyone, and everybody has fun, you'll be fine.

Thanks everyone so far... your advice has been duly noted and absorbed.



^ I like this.

--

So I will make a few dot points of the flow of the campaign; key plot points like 'arrive here', 'discover ruins', 'stumble onto cultists' etc... and then wing it :)

The advice in this free ebook (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t...A-gnO6zp4xkUepATSrcA) is what works best for me. The book generally focuses on ways to use your players' ideas to generate content for your game. It gives suggestions for ways to put published adventures to use, by seems to discourage running them right out of the box. It suggests a bit of a balance between completely winging it and carefully planning out every detail. The author also goes over a lot of pitfalls that can tend to bog tabletop games down.

Also this little booklet (http://anticheese.pojpo.com/Old/RPG/Play%20Unsafe.pdf), I feel, establishes from pretty good principles for tabletop roleplaying. The author pretty much suggests completely winging it and seems to come from the impromptu-acting side of the house.

Good luck with the game! ;D

Know your NPCs, know what motivates them, what their strengths are, and where they are at.

Keep notes of stuff you've said. People, places, things. I've run into issues where I want an NPC to refer to another NPC, I might forget who the mayor is or what not.