Inspired to try your hand at running a new roleplaying game? Approaching an unfamiliar ruleset can be daunting, but with the right tools, you can learn the mechanics more quickly and easily, making for a smoother first session when you finally have a chance to play! Here are my five tips for teaching yourself a new RPG system.

Tip #1: Equip Yourself with a Beginner Game, Starter Set, or Quickstart Product

Publishers have tried to make it easier than ever to pick up and start playing their games. Rather than starting out by reading the whole core rulebook cover to cover, you might want to check your friendly local gaming store, DriveThruRPG.com, or the publisher’s website to see whether an introductory product is available.

Beginner games and starter sets are meant to ease new players and game masters into the rules through play, which makes learning a new system fun and low-stress. Many physical beginner products come with everything you need to play the game, from dice to maps and handouts to pre-generated characters. The rulebooks are condensed, so they don’t take as long to read, and the adventures are designed to highlight the essential aspects of the rules.

So-called “quickstarts” tend to be PDFs or small booklets that serve a similar purpose, although you might need to add your own dice or print/photocopy your own character sheets. You might also look for digital downloads of Free RPG Day offerings from past years, which typically contain quickstart versions of the rules along with a short adventure.

Your players have sent you their character info for your next campaign and, as their game master, you want to incorporate their backstory elements, but you’re not sure where to start. Here’s how to break down their histories into manageable pieces and utilize them throughout your campaign in a way that resonates with players.

Create Obstacles Between the
Characters and Their Goals

One of the ways to make an RPG campaign that truly engages players is to craft a story that features their goals as subplots, sidequests, or even the central story arc. First, however, you need to know what the characters want most. It’s your job as the GM to make achieving those goals both challenging and rewarding. Ignore those character goals, and you risk monopolizing the campaign with your own storylines, leaving the players wondering why their heroes would be on the adventure in the first place.

If you’re like most game masters, you probably got your start running dungeon crawls. But after a dozen or so sessions, when the player characters are ready to emerge from the darkness and step into the limelight of society, the skills you’ve used to run dungeons don’t quite translate to social encounters. Crafting a compelling social encounter is a different challenge, but with a little bit of practice and preparation, you can add compelling intrigues to your tabletop RPG sessions.

Tip #1: Determine Who, What, and Why

Like all RPG encounters, it’s important to define the player characters’ (PC) objectives early on. Before diving into play, ensure the PCs understand whom they need to talk to and why. If the PCs don’t know, have an NPC make their goal clear. Don’t be afraid to swoop in and talk directly to the players as GM, recapping what they already know and what they still need to find out.

Most social encounters, boiled down to their most basic level, have one of two objectives:

• The PCs must figure out what an NPC wants, knows, or is doing
• The PCs must change an NPC’s allegiance, beliefs, or course of action

Both of these situations can be flipped so that the NPCs are in the active role, but you should ensure the PCs have some goal they’re actively working toward, otherwise they might feel powerless or even bored.

During prep, starting with the objectives allows you to assemble a cast list that hits all the plot beats you need. Once you have the essentials covered, then you can sprinkle in characters to serve as set dressing and red herrings. Begin with the end in mind to avoid ending up with too many extraneous NPCs, dangling plot threads, or conversations that lead nowhere.

Great social encounters also include new, secondary objectives that the PCs can discover through play. Besides the immediate excitement of a new quest or mystery, these subplots can add dimensionality to the main objectives (e.g., you didn’t change so-and-so’s mind, but you did gain another unexpected ally!). The rewards for accomplishing these secondary objectives might be the leverage needed for the main objective, something that relates to a PC’s backstory, or items and information that will help the PCs in later encounters.

Are you gearing up to run a new RPG campaign and not sure how to keep track of the cast of characters, world information, and session notes? Do you need to get a better handle on your long-running game to more easily pull up information during the session? The following overview of different organization methods can help you choose the campaign management option that best suits your group’s needs and your personal prep style.

A Three-Ring Binder and Notebook

Put the “pen and paper” back in pen and paper RPGs.

It’s for You If:

• ✔ You’re on a budget.
• ✔ You’re a crafty, DIY, or “by hand” type of person.
• ✔ You want flexibility: you can fill the binder with handwritten and printed notes, and you can be as vague or detailed as you please.
• ✔ You like to run your games in electrically challenged locations.
• ✔ You want to enjoy a beautiful campaign keepsake at the end.

It’s Not for You If:

• ✘ You’re constantly forgetting to bring things with you. There’s no backup or cloud access with this analog option.
• ✘ You want a “Search” function for your materials.
• ✘ You want to let players or a co-GM reference campaign material on their own time.

As with any activity that requires you to perform in front of other people, GMing can be nerve-wracking. Some amount of nervousness is to be expected, but when your fears overwhelm you and you consider canceling the session at the last minute, you can unwittingly put your entire campaign in jeopardy.

Many of us creative types know how anxiety and depression can interfere with the way we want to live our lives. If you haven’t already heard Wil Wheaton’s powerful talk on anxiety, depression, and recovery, you owe it to yourself to have a listen. Our inner demons are insidious, but you can empower yourself to mitigate their effects on your game.

Arm Yourself with the Tools You Need

It’s natural to worry that you haven’t prepped enough for a given session, but have you ever felt so unprepared that you wanted to cancel the session outright? If you feel this way often, it’s time to take stock of your current prep habits. Maybe you need to try a different method (I’d recommend Engine Publishing’s Never Unprepared for ideas). Can you devote more time to prepping, or can you switch to an adventure that requires less prep, such as a published module? Alternatively, you might investigate improvisational techniques for RPGs (again, check out Engine Publishing’s Unframed) or games that are designed to be run with minimal prep. If you have the time to prep for your game, yet you still find yourself falling prey to procrastination, perfectionism is probably rearing its ugly head.