Probably the biggest error I made when I started to learn game mastering was trying to do too much too fast.

I get excited and, in my ignorance, under appreciate the difficulty or complexity of what I’m attempting. I realize my error once I get under way. My game fails to launch, crashes and burns or is not as entertaining as I think it will be.

One of my first attempts at running a campaign started by creating a complicated top down world. I wanted to create a big, deep world that players would be eager to explore and learn everything about. They would read my awesome backstory between sessions. They would write their own adventure summaries and draw pictures of their characters.

I created an overpowered monk/psionicist character class, history, house rules, home brewed magic items, and a map of an entire continent.

I wanted players to engage with all the cool stuff I had created.

That didn’t work out.

The players mostly paid attention to how they could min/max the combat mechanics, ignored the setting background, and had to be reminded of the house rules. The only detail of how the campaign went I remember is that they were able to kill a powerful demon I had spent a lot of time trying to make AWESOME in a single round of combat.

I found a handout folder I created for that first 2nd Edition AD&D campaign while going through some old file boxes. It is embarrassingly bad. Overwrought. Cliche.

Through the late 80’s and early 90’s I was a player in other people’s campaigns. Most of them were fun but not AWESOME.

A few were very good. The “very good” ones, I have come to realize, tended to be games where the referee had been game master for years and they picked a game they had played an run a number of times, they selected well designed setting or spent a lot of time developing one. They were also sandbox campaigns. I suspect the referee’s were doing a lot of their campaign building as we went along and improvising a lot more than I realized at the time.

A better approach

I have to moderate myself when trying a new game system or building a campaign for a game I haven’t run before. I’m better off to start with something simple. I’ll look for three or four simple, easy to run adventure scenarios. Run some one off, episodic adventures with throw away player characters.

I keep notes about parts where I struggled. I’ll go back and re-read the rule sections I found confusing. I create reference sheets or down load play aids someone else has already created.

I’ll read different game master’s ideas about how to handle those situations. Not everyone’s methods are a good fit but I usually find something worth considering.

I want to develop some fluidity with the system or setting before I start doing anything complicated. Complicated scenarios with a lot of interactions usually leads to an unsatisfying experience for everyone. While I won’t get the grand EPIC campaign by starting simple and small, I’ll develop a sense of how the game runs. I learn the game well enough to be able to produce the epic campaign in the future.

I won’t get it 100% right. There will be some sticky points. There will be some things that suck. There will be some things that are OK but could be better. All that is fine. The point of playing role-playing games is to play. If the game is reasonably well designed, we’ll have fun even if I struggle a bit.

As long as I put in a reasonable amount of effort to learn the game and the scenario, it will be good enough and players don’t care that I flubbed a few rules here and there.