New GM

[terminalchillness]

Hi gang.

I've been listening to the Drunks and Dragons podcast for roughly a month and a half, and I'm on something like episode 215. It's inspired me to seek out friends to start a campaign with (Pathfinder, at my brother's suggestion), and it looks as though I'll be GMing it.

A friend and I are meeting tonight to do a very basic runthrough to feel out game mechanics and whatnot, and I'm finalizing notes about the setting and the encounters I have planned. (It will be very railroaded due to its nature.)

I'm hoping someone can give me advice on how to organize GM notes, specific details not to overlook, and maybe even an image of your notes so I have somewhat of an outline for organizing my world.

Thanks in advance!

[ralf.tiede]

Hi terminal!

I'm in a similar situation. Trying to put a group together to play the Fantasy Flight Star Wars RPG. I must assume you may have had your first session already, so share your thougts!

A couple years ago I tried running a GURPS mission set in Renaissance Italy, with a very specific plot and lots of detailed NPCs and visual clues... it didn't go well. Everyone got drunk, and less than halfway through my carefully written story they all stopped paying attention. By the second session, no one had the remotest idea of what had happened in the first.

So this time, rather than spending hours developing a mission that no one will have the attention span to unlock, I'm gonna keep it much more free-form. I'll have some very large scale narrative "point of interest" for the players to steer towards, and everything else will be improvised. Hopefully I'll have some good random name generator handy and maybe several pre-made enemy stats. We'll see how it goes!