I recently ran a TTRPG for the first time. I’ve played a lot of D&D – plus other systems including Mothership and Candela Obscura – with various marvellous people as DM/GM. Having spent so many enjoyable hours in worlds created by others, it felt like time to repay the favour. So – with encouragement from our regular DM Tom – I agreed to run a Kids on Bikes one-shot for Halloween. But I needed some GM tips.
I asked our brilliant listener community for advice, and they came through in fine style both on Bluesky and Discord. Some suggested it was ambitious to record my debut as a podcast – and to those people I say: “Good point.” But I did it anyway. Here’s what I learned:
Trust thy players
Many of the GM tips from the online community were about control: don’t try to control everything, don’t be too rigid, don’t write the story, don’t choose an ending in advance. “Railroading” players appears to be the cardinal sin.
I took this seriously. I felt I needed some basic plot points – I wasn’t confident enough to invent everything on the fly. So I gave the players a haunted house, a sinister force within it, and some innocents to rescue. Beyond that, I tried to sit back and let the players drive the action.
Keep quiet
As an anxious first-timer, my instinct was to talk too much – to fill every silence with a new twist, each one bigger than the last. But a few people suggested that good DM/GMs don’t take “all the oxygen in the room”. Instead, they can live with silence.
I was blessed with supportive, creative players who picked up any slack and drove the action in unexpected and hilarious ways. Based on my experience as a player, I assumed GMs usually know where things are going – but I found it amazingly rewarding to let the players decide. This also kept my brain free to plan and react to their shenanigans (and remember all the GM tips I’d been given).
It also allowed the characters to interact and develop, leading to a lovely ending where our teenage heroes faced a tricky moral challenge. In that final 20 minutes, I hardly said a word. I just sat back and enjoyed the story the players were telling.
Don’t lose sleep
One night before recording, I couldn’t sleep. I had created a slightly complicated magical puzzle at the heart of the story, and I was worried the players might “break” it. I had imagined a few ways for them to resolve it, but I didn’t want to signpost these too strongly (see above on railroading). I worried that they’d come up with something cool and clever that might unravel the laws of magic I had created – leading to confusing contradictions in the story.
In the event, they came up with something cool and clever that – with a bit of adjustment from me – worked out fine. In fact, it was better than what I had planned. So maybe everything comes down to trusting your players. If you don’t, you’re probably at the wrong table.
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