Game Master Tips

The Game Master has a big impact on how much fun Adventure is to play. Here are some tips and principles to make it as easy and successful as possible for you.

You can find a one-page GM cheatsheet on the downloads page.

The Role of the Game Master

The GM runs the game, and is generally not a player themselves (though they can be).

They introduce situations and narrate outcomes. They throw challenges at the players. They narrate the world and the creatures in it. The GM’s job to keep the pacing, action, and suspense at the right level for the skills and age-level of your players.

Running the Game

At the start of each game, a problem or situation arises that needs the help of a group of adventurers. The Game Master reads the game introduction to the players.

Feel free to use toys, props, sketches/drawings, and fun voices to add to the excitement and mystery.

Improvising

As an open-ended role-playing game, the players can take an adventure in a lot of directions. As a Game Master, you’ll probably have to improvise and make stuff up as you go along.

If you’re using a pre-made adventure, it’s a good idea to read through it before playing, so you have a better sense for the places players can go, and the types of things they might find there.

Ask Questions

You can make your life a lot easier as a GM, and get your players far more engaged in the game, by asking them questions about the world.

At the start of a game, you can ask them why they’re there, and what they’ve heard about the problem or situation. You can work these hooks into the story and use them to fill in missing details.

Later in the game, rather than just telling players about a location, you can ask them what they see.

Balancing Campaigns

When you first start GMing games, finding the right balance between “not too tough” and “not too boring” can be hard. There’s a few things you can do to help balance games in real-time as you play.

More Exciting Dice Rolls

Adventure is more exciting when rolls aren’t simply pass/fail. One way to do that is to make the outcome more intense the more above or below the Difficulty Rating the player rolls.

Random Effects

If players discover an item and they’re not sure what it does, you can roll some dice to create a random effect. Here’s a table you can use.

Easier Combat & Damage

In big battles, managing damage and attacks from all of the players and monsters can get a big complicated. Here are some ways to make it easier.

Average Damage

When creature deal damage to players, you if you don't want to roll for damage, you can use average damage instead.

• D6: 3-4 HP
• D6WR: 1-2 HP
• 2D6: 6-7 HP
• 3D6: 9-10 HP

Improvised Damage

Sometimes, players get hurt by the environment itself. They fall, get caught in a rock slide, or trigger a trap. Use this guide to calculate how much damage to assign.

• Bruises & Scrapes: D6WR
• Cuts: D6
• Broken Bones: 2D6
• Deadly: 3D6

Group Attacks

If multiple monsters deal damage to a player at the same time, take the highest damage die from among them and roll that.

Then add +1 to the damage for each monsters that dealt damage beyond the first.

For large hordes of creatures, rather than tracking each monsters’s HP individually, you can create a pool. Whenever a player damages one or more of the creatures, subtract from the pool.

Creating Quick Monsters

You might need to spin up a new monster in the middle of a game. Here’s a reference you can use to do that quickly. (Alternatively, you can browse the monster list.)

Difficulty Rating: 3 (or 10 for the D20 variant)

• Does the monster have armor or scales? Add +1 DR (+3 for D20 Variant)
• Do they have extra heavy armor or scales? Add +2 DR instead (+6 for D20 Variant)
• Are they extra tough or resilient? Add +3-5 HP
• Can they attack more than once? Add Multi-Attack
• Do they have any special abilities or traits? Describe them

Total Group Knock Out

If every member of a group loses all of their health points, that’s a called a Total Group Knock Out (or TGKO).

A TGKO can happen if the difficulty of a particular challenge isn’t properly balanced for the skills of your group. It can also happen if luck just doesn’t work in the players’ favor (a series of low die rolls, for example).

Since a TGKO would otherwise stop the adventure in its tracks, the Game Master can use their creativity to save players from this situation.

• A pet belonging to one of the players (see House Rules) runs off and returns with healing potion, or a non-player character that can help.
• Players awaken some unknown time later. The monster is gone, along with what they were looking for and a bunch of their gear and items.
• Players awaken to find themselves trapped in a locked room, unsure of where they are or how they got there. They must use their skills and items they can find in there surroundings to escape.

This can add a really fun new aspect to the game, so don’t be afraid to get creative!

A Sample Game

To help this all stick, let’s look at a sample game. In this game, Mercer is a knight, and Ashley is a wizard.

As you can see, the game is a series of choices, actions, die rolls, consequences, and next steps. Every choice the players make, and every random outcome of the dice, leads to the next logical step in the story.

Most stories have a natural arch to them, but it’s important to not force a specific direction if the players’ actions lead it somewhere else.

Adventure is a collaborative story you make up as you go. Lean into it.

How to Create Adventures

You can get by for a long time on pre-made adventures. But eventually, you may want to create your own.

Start with a Hook

What are the players supposed to do, and who has asked them to do it?

Most adventures fall into one of a handful of archetypes:

• Retrieve/rescue an item or person from somewhere
• Deliver an item or person to somewhere
• Escape from somewhere/something
• Something in the village is different/no longer working

The players could have been specifically asked to complete a quest by someone directly, or may have heard a rumor or overheard a conversation that drew their interest.

Fill in the Details

Once you have an adventure hook, you can fill in some details.

You don’t need to have all the details figured out, though. A lot of blanks can be filled in by asking the players questions and through playing the game itself.

Here are the key things you want to work out:

• Some initial locations the players might visit
• Some monsters they may encounter
• Some events that might happen, based on what the players do in the world
• Some questions you might want to answer about the situation while playing

Monsters and events can be tied to specific locations, or be standalone challenges you use to help improvise if players go off the beaten path.

Inspiration for Adventures

Here are a few ways to come up with fun ideas for adventures.

• Take the main plot from a favorite movie or story and change some of the details.
• Mash-up stories for a few different books are movies to create something unique.
• Is there a superpower you wish you had or a mythical place you wish you could visit? What would happen if it were real?
• Take a look at some of the maps at 2-Minute Tabletop. Imagine exploring them. What cool stuff would your adventurers find there?

Using Maps

A good map can really bring a world to life, and help players get a better sense for where they are, where they can go, and what's possible.

• Ready-to-go maps created ahead of time are useful if your game has well-defined locations
• Improvised maps are built in real-time as you play, are great for games that have more improvisation or open-ended exploring.

You might mix-and-match both styles in an adventure. Players may explore well-defined location, and then venture down a hidden path in a direction you didn’t plan for.

You can also choose to use maps for certain areas, and nothing but your imagination and the theater of the mind for others.

Professional Maps

The site 2-Minute Tabletop has an excellent collection of professional RPG maps. Many of them are free or “pay what you want.”

If you’re not confident in your drawing skills, this can be a really helpful resource.

Drawing Your Own Maps

Your maps don’t have be professional quality to be fun and useful. If you want to learn how to draw your own maps, Esper the Bard has an excellent YouTube series on creating fantasy maps.

Physical Maps

Depending on the age and interests of your players, it might be fun and interesting if you added a physical element to the game. You can create maps for locations by building them with blocks, or using toys and figurines for characters, monsters, and NPCS.

Building Immersive Worlds

Adventure is all about immersing players in a new world.

You can create any type of fantasy world you want, but I’ve put together an imaginary land, Farfaria, that you can use with my premade adventures. An intro is included with each adventure.

This video on Dungeons & Dragons GM Matt Mercer is chock full of tips on how to be an awesome Game Master (warning, some R-rated language in this video).

Non-Player Characters

Depending on the skills of the players and the difficulty of the challenges they’re facing, it can be interesting to add Non-Player Characters (NPCs) into the game.

These are characters that the Game Master creates and controls. They can be friends, foes, or somewhere in-between.

NPCs can provide critical information that players aren’t picking up on, give them misinformation to send them on a bonus encounter, jump in to provide extra fire power for an epic battle, or thwart their efforts if they’re finding an adventure too easy.

They could be shopkeepers who can sell useful items to the players in exchange for favors or gold. Or they might be inn keepers who provide a place to rest before a big campaign.

Use NPCs as much or as little as needed to keep the game fun and interesting.

Duration and Complexity

Games of Adventure can take as little as 30 minutes, or can last several hours.

As the Game Master, you have a lot of control over the length and complexity of each game. You can add more monsters and optional encounters, adjust Difficulty Rating for encounters up or down, and save the day with non-player characters you introduce to the game.

You can also spread an adventure over several sessions, stopping after an encounter, and picking things back up another time.

Character Growth

A player’s character carries over from one came to the next (if they want). They bring with them any skills and items they acquired on previous adventures.

To keep Adventure exciting, you can reward players with new skills and items that they can use in future adventure.

Reward ideas

• Equipment like weapons and armor
• New Spells
• A 10 HP bump in Max/Current Health Points
• A second specialty
• New skills relevant to the adventure they just completed
• Increased combat skills, like ignoring Worst Roll on unweaponed attacks
• Extra damage dice (an additional D6 over what they currently have)

Be careful not to give characters too much power all at once or it will throw off the balance of the game.