If you end up playing with yourself, you're DMing wrong. Powerful advice.

The hardest thing for new DMs to understand at first is that games are not TV shows.

Seth- "Don't play with your self." Seth- puts on accents instead of actual having people help him make videos.

I've "kidnapped" a PC before. but i'd discussed it with him beforehand and had him play one of the NPCs he liked for that session.

What if you kidnap an ABSENT pc to get them out of the session for the day and backfil them later so they arent sitting their bored

We always called #2 the Shower Scene, since the GM is just playing with himself.

Sometimes I forget that's Seth wearing fake mustaches and pulling fake accents.

The NPC monologuing for #2 was epic.

A tip I give novice GMs is to always paraphrase text read aloud to players so that you’re talking to them rather than at them. It’s quite boring for players to sit doing nothing while the GM reads a page & a half of text at them ☺️

One that makes me very petty is when the DM disregards you backstory, "Oh, you're sister isn't you're sister, you were kids that lived together in the same lab, your memories are all made up"

I would argue the NPC scene can work IF: -You ask your players beforehand -You keep it short -There is no combat the PCs can't engage with

wasnt expecting a skorkowsky video at 2AM, but ill take what i can get in these trying times

Glad I'm not the only one staying up late to watch rpg KZfaq videos.

You know things are going to be serious when Seth whips out Into Darkness references.

1st love the shirt. 2nd I had a player once tell me love an Npc and wanted to have him as a backup opinion if his character died and had started playing his character more recklessly. So I had his character kidnapped while he took over the npc to help rescue his original character after saving his character he had his love for his rekindled allover again. It was a fun chance for him to get a short break from his character and came back to the character stronger.

That's a pretty nice shirt! Those three guys look kind of familiar.

I started laughing my butt off when you began rolling in a combat between the Thurmond brothers. It felt like watching a nightmare being built.

"NPC Scenes" My brain: Fight the reflective cringe... fight it! (I swear, my players looked interested... the first few times. X.X) Great vid as always Seth. Just joined your Patreon at a measly 1 buck a month but I hope you take it as a small sign of thanks for your awesome content. Keep doing your thing! Still planning on getting a book of yours, just finishing up my first read of Gibson's Sprawl trilogy! Cheers.

The Bespectacled RPG Man delivers his wisdom again!

Back to OG lists I’m liking it Seth!

Also a possiblity for your first point is to abduct a PC and let him play his back up character with the rest of the team. It still keeps the tension up, let the player play , lets him experiment with its back up in a way that makes narrative sense and make it easier to introduce him to the party.

The fight between Lord Thurman and his brother really made me laugh!

I always wonder just how closely based Todd, Mike and Dweebles are on Seth's own group. Surely there must be some resemblance :)

In that second scenario... What if (aside from shorter dialog between the brothers) when the one pc offered to stand as champion the brother who challenged ordered his knights to attack the players? That way they have their own battle and are still able to witness the end of the brother's battle.

I got such cringe chills from the DM solo skit I had to skip it. Well done Seth on recreating awful moments so well!

1:20 considering his t-shirt, he's probably ok with that.

1) Kidnapping a player character can actually allow the game to go forward when a player can't make it for a few weeks, e.g. because he's away for work or on holiday. I'd highly recommend discussing it with the affected player, though, preferably away from the rest of the party. Usually, it turns out great. The player feels appreciated that you make his character the focus of a story line and that you allow him to be on your side of the table, you could actually give him a few bits of information that his character would gain during being kidnapped that he can then relay to the rest of the party after he is rescued, turning him from damsel in distress to a key information giver and pulling him out of the passive role again. And the rest of the party will like that the game doesn't stall just because one of them cannot be around for a week or two. 2) Exposure dumps are horrible, agreed, but in highly social games (like my favorite Vampire the Masquerade) unfortunately hard to avoid since the player characters are usually not among the high ranking beings around and observing something is often more informative than interacting with it, and it gives the PCs the chance to gather information without exposing themselves, which may be preferable in scheming and backstabbing societies. If an exposure dump is necessary, my solution is usually to get the players involved by letting them tell me what they do, what they watch, what they focus on, have them roll spot checks and pick up social cues, try to give each of them a bit of information that only their character gets so they will eventually come together after the scene and share that information among them to puzzle back together the whole picture, generating RP that way. And whatever you do, avoid rolling down a battle between NPCs, nobody cares about that. :) 3) I actually studied statistics and got my degree in it to ensure my house rules don't break the game. No joke. My thesis is on game rules and balancing effects, how to avoid overcompensation and regression analysis on player and equipment stats to ensure long term viability of rules under growing player power and how to balance it against NPC progression. Did it allow me to bring balance to the for... game? Nope, sorry. Players are better at abusing game mechanics than statistics is at keeping them from doing it. So, take my advice, don't suffer through courses like I did, it doesn't pay. My suggestion here is, talk to the players before implementing a house rule. Tell them that you want to try something, that you think it could enhance the game, but also tell them that it will be reverted if it breaks the game. In general, players are in this for the same reason you are, to create a fun and interesting game and they are usually quite willing to try something, even if it turns out to not work. Yes, they'll not enjoy it when you take their magic blood away or whatever other powerful artefact they have, especially if they went through some serious hardship to acquire it, but in general, if you can explain it to them and how it keeps the game from being exciting, because if there is no chance for failure, what reward does victory still hold, they usually will agree. 4) Very good advice. Every GM has made decisions on the spot that eventually turned out to be horrible moving foward. I usually just let it stand as it was, tell the players before the next game session that this decision was wrong and, while it will stand, it's not gonna be how we're gonna move forward, then simply close the lid on it. 5) Reruns are less of a problem in my experience than persistent plot themes. Some GMs have a tendency to run the same kind of story over and over, changing out the backdrop and costumes but essentially running the same plot over and over. I vividly remember one GM who thought it's clever to run murder mystery based plots where the culprit is always the least likely one, leading to parties going to bizarre lengths to find out the NPC that is the least involved in the plot and could by no means be the culprit, because that usually was it. A bit of variety goes a long way.

Funnily enough, I watched this just after finishing my game today, which involved a player getting kidnapped Of course though the player also woke up after being knocked out and got to actually do things, like helping find where they were. Also turns out being a ninja means youre pretty good at fighting people while blindfolded and cuffed to a table

Always paranoid when these start that I'm going to find something I'm doing wrong as a GM but glad when I don't 😂

"I suggest Game Masters try the rules as written first" THIS! I can't tell you how often I've seen GMs who think they're so much smarter than the game designers and they start houseruling and homebrewing before they even run their first session. I'm a huge proponent of "run it as written first, get a feel for it, THEN start fiddling with it one you've seen the rules in action." Edit: On inconsistency. This is something I had to deal with recently because 5e DnD has an issue where Investigation and Perception overlap. I started forgetting my own method of appilication and the module I was running wasnt consistent in their usage either. So, addressing that frustration with my players, I sat down and wrote a bunch of sub-rules for how to apply it in a consistent manner that can be referred to by all of us.

Great episode. I've seen and suffered through all of these except for The Rerun. My honorable mention for this list goes to dragging out the start of a campaign. I'm sick and tired of playing out how the characters meet and gain each others' trust, encounter some kind of quest giver, negotiate rewards, buy equipment, and so on for several game sessions. When I GM, I just plop the characters into the first room of the dungeon and say something like "You clearly remember Lord Sootbeard's words 'I want that golden scepter, find the damn hobgoblin that stole it!' There are two doors leading north and one leading east. What do you do?"

Great T-shirt Seth, really love your actors, they deserve more screen time.

Here's a fun trick to try with the NPC on NPC dialog, and I used it to great effect in one roleplay heavy game, though it does require players willing to play ball and not go murder-hobo on you. Get some index cards for the NPCs that will be in the scene and put 3 stats on them (for D&D, I do Combat, Social, Stealth. For others, I do physical, social, mental), and rate them appropriately. Next, on a second index card write down the motivations and goals for that scene, as well as a few notes on their personality (try to keep each less than three sentences). Take all of that and put it in a sealed envelope, which you will then write the name of the NPC and a player on. When the scene comes up, hand the envelope to the chosen player, who will then play that NPC for the scene. As they're NPCs, they are ultimately under your control and you have final say on what they will and won't do, but this allows players to be active in a scene where the NPC has center stage, especially in one where the PCs aren't present.

A great variation to the rerun I sometime use if some players are old and some new is to have returning locations in a somewhat revolving world. For example the town of silvercliff has appeared in all of my campaigns, it's always a big economically thriving city, but the rulership changes, power dynamics flipped between the lower class and the upper class, complete anarchy or destruction. This lets my old players feel at home in a town they finally recognize and lets them kind of use that veteran card while the newer players get to explore a massive city with plenty of fleshed out details.

The Re-Run GM ... I love running the same adventure over ... but for different groups just to see how different groups approach the same problem. I have never had two groups run an adventure the same way and that is the fun of it!

Heh, might have been fun if when you chatted about game balance, we saw Jack with an oversized ray gun that is completely overpowered for the adventure. :-)

For an example of tinkerer having an impact. I played a character in Only War (40k Imperial Guard RPG) who's main non-gun combat style was specced into grappling. We were on the trail of some alien mercenaries called Kroot who were stowed away on the ship and managed to fight them to the point the leader was about to run away. Now when my character grappled the leader, a Kroot which is a mutant and psychic Kroot, I inflicted a negative effect (via the luck of the dice I was hoping for) that meant it could only take a half turn on its next turn. The shaper had the power to turn insubstantial as a half-turn move and the GM wanted it to do that to have it escape. However I told the GM that by the grapple rules, which my character was built around, it couldn't because when you are the grappled character you MUST spend your first half-turn of any turn you're grappled by taking the grapple action yourself to try to either resist it, escape or take control. The GM pulled Rule Zero and I felt like what could have been a cool moment, my character risking his life to pin down the BBEG of the session so it couldn't escape for just one more desperate turn, was taken away just to preserve the life of an NPC that never came up again in the narrative.

I've only experienced the first mistake. I was playing a very twitchy and paranoid Malkavian vampire in Vampire: The Masquerade. Having written 3 pages of backstory on the character, and shared it with the Storyteller, I felt perfectly in character as I had Violet run out of a spooky mansion where she sensed there would be an ambush. She decided to lurk outside near the windows and follow the party's progress stealthily at a close distance. Well, there was indeed an ambush in the next room, and rather than rewarding me for both the excellent roleplaying as well as allowing Violet to help the team from outside via her insight, the Storyteller decided that I was making his life a little harder having to deal with what amounted to a split team and promptly said, "A gargoyle swoops down and carries you away, then locks you in a barrel of blood." No rolls, no nothing, just being put into the naughty corner on a whim. The rest of the party survived the encounter, which took over well over an hour to resolve before he let me out. What fun! Subsequently, when Violet acted erratically (as intended) in the next session, he said, "I don't like characters who are rats." apparently meaning that he only wanted strict adherents to the Masquerade with no deviation, and created a special subplot to "redeem my character" from her wrongheaded ways. Basically meaning that I couldn't play the character that I created and shared with him before the campaign started. In retrospect, this was so bizarre that I wonder if the character reminded the guy of his mother or something and he couldn't handle it, because I've never before or since seen so much being singled out and controlled in over 40 years of playing RPGs.

I've done the Tinkerer a few times, but, thankfully, none of the others. Great advice, as always. Keep up the good work and stay safe!

I ordered The Gang shirt the other day. Even my wife, who does not play RPGs, likes watching the videos when The Gang is present.

#5 ... oh that's me, I use one same area in all my campaigns. good thing there's tons to do there. like 11 different bosses and you can only really deal with 2 before everything comes to a head and you need to leave, so in a way it's different but it's still the same.

Very good advice all around. As regards kidnapping, however, one of the things I love about Monster of the Week is how it allows the GM to "get away with" certain narrative contrivances via player moves. For instance, if a Chosen player picks the move that gives them visions of the upcoming adventure and fails their roll, the GM gets a point that they can "spend" to screw them over later. This doesn't feel cheap, because A)the player chose that move to begin with fully knowing this could happen, B)the player had to fail a roll for it to turn out this way, and C)MOTW, like other Apocalypse World-inspired games, gives you XP for failing rolls, so at least they got something out of it anyway. Similarly, the Mundane class (whose special gimmick is being a normal person in a team of weirdos) has special moves that give them XP for running off alone to investigate, and another one that gives them MORE XP for being kidnapped by the monster! If you build a Mundane with both of those moves, the GM is practically obliged to kidnap your character at least once a session just to ensure you get good mileage out of your moves! And again, this doesn't feel cheap at all, since a player who built such a character would practically be signalling the GM that they wanted their character kidnapped regularly to move the plot forward.

As soon as you mentioned Kidnapping I remembered the infamous "bubble" that my friend got captured in for an entire session. He was isolated and restrained with no rolls that could help him out but worst of all the actual player had to watch us traverse the entire dungeon while the DM engaged with him maybe twice. This was the first session of this campaign too, so he didn't even get to use his character. Also we've also encountered the Re-Run campaign too. It was more that we hadn't played in so long that we lost track of where and what we were doing so we made new characters. But honestly it just didn't feel right, so it just kind of died out after 2 sessions.

I have seen kidnappings work well but rarely. Best example was when a PC got himself arrested and toss in a prison. He spent the session working his own escape plan whilst the party executed a daring rescue. Surprisingly it worked out and the players had a blast. Key point... every single player retained the ability to play their character during that session.

I was just looking for something to watch as well. Excellent.

Great advice, as always. Thanks Seth!

Excellent as always! :D

Keep up the great videos seth

The gang kills me. Sign of an incredible DM and actor - each one has their own distinct character and is distinguesed only by a hat and fake facial hair. Amazing!

That was a great video my man. Keep it up

These are some of my favorite videos on the internet.

As soon as I see a new video upload from Seth Skorkowsky, I'm watching!

Love the t-shirt dude. You are the best without a doubt!

YaY a new Seth video keep it up man!!!!

Yes! Another video from Seth. I love your content man, can't wait for the next video!

Luv your channel Seth!!!!

Hi Seth 👋 thanks for the great video! Always great to see sci-fi ttrpg play examples in videos!

Good job again Seth! Keep on going :)

These videos are golden! Thanks for posting, Seth.

Great video. As usual.

Your cut scenes just kill me! So funny!

Awesome, love going to sleep and a Seth video comes out. Totally serious actually. So fun to listen to before nighty night.

These make me smile, love your videos

Ya mistake 2 is the one I really had to learn to change because I used to approach important NPC on NPC dialogue like a cutscene in a video game . Luckily I learned to discard this behaviour quickly because half the time when I would start this sort of "cutscene" it would turn even the most excited and engaged players to bored unenthusiastic players. I didn't know why until I ran into the same situation as a player

An entire party being held captive sounds fun, especially as an inciting incident. The player characters could have all been strangers captured for different reasons but now they have to work together to escape!

Thanks for the video. There's always room for GMs to improve, and it's good to be reminded of that once in a while. :)

Awesome as always!

Another Fantastic video Seth... Great advice AND laugh out loud funny 👍

Seth your videos are without a doubt the most equally informative and entertaining. Always enjoy them.

I had a fun npc scene in curse of strahd with the werewolf fight, basically trying to rig the fight while in the audience using blood magic as a blood hunter.

Absolute quality video as always. I have learned a lot from your channel. Totally identified some problems I had as a GM. Thank you, please keep doing what you're doing Sir!

Love the shirt!

Glad to see you continue your series buy could you share more war stories, those are my personal favorite

More of these please!!!!!

#1 Reminds me of all the times a buddy always started a Star Wars campaign with Tatooine Manhunt or a Brave New World campaign with the Ripper adventure.

3 and 4 are ones I struggle with.. Especially inconsistency! I get so worked up and anxious every single time running a game that I forget rules or plot points or characters or events I have written down in my notebook. A lot of DMing is just giving up the control instead of seizing the control

Your movies examples are always spot on illustrating your point. "Atlantic Rim"... lol

The only time I've successfully pulled off the abduction storyline was when I replaced the character with a doppleganger. I spoke to my player before the game and she had great fun role-playing a doppleganger who was role-playing a slightly naive fighter type. I had a blast watching her subtlely portray the frustration of being the smartest person in the room but being forced to act like an idiot. We only pulled it off because the player is an excellent role player and I was prepared to toss the whole plot thread out if she wasn't comfortable trying it.

Really enjoy your idea of RPG philosophy. I don't play the same specific games as you, but I find great insights that are transferable to really any system in quite a few of your videos. Thanks!

The rerun happened to me once by accident. In both a superhero game and a fantasy game that ended months and months apart, we had: - a PC to die from falling -A party member get paralyzed from the waist down -A climactic battle in the sky involving dragons -The group all having to hold off a giant monster at once -An NPC companion unable to finish off the BBEG alone, but the party giving them the literal and figurative push so they can save the day I didn’t even mean to do this.

Been a long time since I last saw one of your videos. Oh well that means more content to consume during quartinen :)

Omg love the shirt!

One GM issue might be Not being Aware of Supplemental Materials, with a related one being Not Reading Them. Now, if you only have the core rulebooks, okay, but if someone says that they are using a supplement, it might be a good idea to borrow the book and read it between sessions. I actually got my DM on that one. (D&D5e) We'd had a minor argument over if the Celestial warlock was Official - to be fair, I had no proof, but I thought that it was. Then I borrowed Xanathar's Guide to Everything from the library, and found it. Next session, I was going to show it to them, when I found that another player (who hadn't been at the previous session) had the very book itself.... I got him to show the page to the DM, who was sport enough to read it. The DM froze, and did one of those thousand-yard stares. Two things to note - guy had been playing for about 20 years, and had served as a Marine overseas in Afghanistan, and had seen a few things. I don't know what all happened to him in his mind at that moment, but when he looked at me, there was a mixture of shock and awe. Then I got him on a basic Ranger ability in regards to favored terrain and tracking capabilities.

I definitely had a tinkerer GM at one point. He was sort of workshopping something that he couldn't seem to perfect, using our group as the test case. Unfortunately, he hadn't warned us that would be the case when it started. We all went in really invested in our characters and the story, but each week he'd try to change the rules so they'd recreate...something he couldn't seem to articulate. We never figured out just what he wanted from the game, but it only took a few sessions for us to all figure out we weren't going to get much out of it. If he'd said he wanted to experiment and then given us some idea of what he was aiming for, we'd have probably been OK with it and helped the best we could.

As always, another GREAT video! Kidnap - I've done this and asked the PC player to sit this game out and we would play a 1x1 after and run it as two separate games. It was fun and the players loved it.

One of the most memorable and beloved scenes in a campaign I've run was probably around 30 minutes of a tense espionage scene between two NPCs that the PC (it was a solo session) "watched" through a psychic link. It's been years and the player still brings that scene up as one of his favorite experiences in the entire campaign. I think what made it work was that the player character was the one to come up with the plan and set it in motion, and the scene was just the payoff. The character had sent his intelligent magic item/construct to pretend to be a salesman of magical beasts in order to distract the villain and, if I remember correctly, get some information from him. I'll spare you the details, but the construct's diplomatic ineptitude and the villain's personality played off each other hilariously, and the player got to watch the results of HIS plan. Of course, having made the plan himself, he was probably aware that he was about to watch me talk to myself for a while. He was engaged (and laughing) the entire time, occasionally interjecting with comments or advice sent through the psychic link. If it'd gone on too long, or he'd had to watch combat that he couldn't participate in, he probably would've lost interest. The fact that it was a solo session probably also affected things, since PCs get a lot more individual attention during solo sessions, so he'd had plenty to do beforehand and knew he'd get a chance to do more after.

As a GM I had a way to describe NPCs-only scenes without harming the game : I wrote them in e-mails between 2 game sessions. It was supposed to be like a dream shared by the PCs, that would recall the events of the previous session and add some insight about NPCs. It became pretty funny when the NPCs would comment the actions of the PCs, trying to make sense of them or making deliberately false assumptions.

Love ya work.

Thanks for the advice.

The like to dislike ratio is literally a thousand to one. You are awesome, Seth. Always funny and informative.

Him stacking dice ROFL. I have been there.

@3:36 got a boisterous laugh out loud moment from me. the lead up was perfect. Well done Seth.

Welcome back

Regarding the "cutaway to NPCs talking among themselves," I've actually seen a couple of streamed games where the DM includes interludes like this. I think as long as it's a stylistic choice and is consistent throughout the adventure, then it's fine. For example, Adam Koebel does this in his games. I think it helps the players (and audience in the case of streamed games) know when NPCs are more important or as a way to introduce sideplots/scheming without it coming out of nowhere.

I discovered this channel when I was researching pulp cthulhu and since then I can't stop watching these videos. I wonder if seth might review Mutants and Masterminds 3rd Edition or Starfinder in the future, regardless I like these vids

This had some really sound advice. I've done a few of these myself as a GM, but not all of them. Hopefully now I can watch out for it in the future (=

I've got a number of scenarios that I unleash on various gaming groups - but I've never thought of tying the players to chairs and dressing them in my dead mother's clothes. Awesome idea! Can't wait to try it... In all seriousness, though, it's really fun seeing how different groups of players respond to the same situation. No two groups ever play a scenario the same, so even though I've run a particular scenario multiple times, it's always fresh.

Seth.... love your videos. I really wish you would stream a game. I would love to see you in action. Thanks!

Holy shit, Mike changed gis moustache! New wax product? Lol That was awesome, Seth. As a novice DM I'm constantly making dumb little mistakes but thanks to your stern but fair tutelage I've managed to avoid the more egregious things like trying to beat the players or forgetting to have fun. Thanks for the awesome videos, dude :)

Nicely done. That last one is not a problem for me. I usually never rerun a scenario. It becomes part of my game world once I run it.