Discussions from the Convention: You Don’t Need an Entire World to Run Your First Game

One of the conversations at our first convention began with a newer D&D player asking how to roleplay her character.

Eventually, the conversation turned toward running a game and another concern I have heard many times:

“I would like to be a Game Master, but I would have no idea where to begin.”

Running a tabletop roleplaying game can look overwhelming from the outside. There are rules to learn, encounters to build, characters to create, locations to describe, and an entire world waiting beyond the edge of the map.

A new Game Master may believe all of that needs to be prepared before the first session begins.

It does not.

You do not need an entire world to run your first game.

You only need enough of it to begin.

Start With What the Players Can Reach

A campaign may eventually cross kingdoms, continents, planets, or planes of existence.

The first session probably will not.

The players may begin in a small town, a space station, a roadside inn, a ruined temple, or at the entrance to a dungeon.

That starting point is where your preparation should be focused.

What is happening there?

Why should the player characters care?

Who can they speak with?

What immediate danger are they facing?

What happens if they do nothing?

Answering those questions gives you enough material to start playing.

You can build the rest as the players move toward it.

My Next Campaign Is Planned—Mostly

My next planned campaign is a Pathfinder Second Edition game built around a Xenomorph-like alien invasion.

I know how the campaign begins and where I expect it to end.

I know the major sections of the ship the players will likely explore. I know about the artificial intelligence that will help them, the smaller queen they will encounter, the praetorian protecting the hive, and the final queen waiting near the campaign’s conclusion.

I have a general path through the campaign.

What I do not have—and do not need—is every room, encounter, conversation, and creature completely prepared before we begin.

I could start the campaign with the opening location, the introductory conversations, the first signs that something is wrong, and the first few combats.

That would be enough.

The players do not need the complete map of the ship during the first session.

I do not need every conversation with the artificial intelligence written in advance.

I certainly do not need the final queen completely prepared before the players have even encountered the first signs of the invasion.

Those things will matter eventually.

They do not matter yet.

Know the Beginning and the Destination

The beginning of a campaign deserves preparation because it establishes the situation and gives the players something to act upon.

I also like having a general idea of where the campaign may end.

For my alien campaign, I know the larger threat and the final confrontation toward which everything is building.

What I do not know is exactly how the players will reach it.

I do not know which allies they will trust, which sections of the ship they will explore first, what resources they will preserve, or which of my plans will collapse along the way.

I know the beginning.

I know the possible destination.

The players will help determine the route between them.

That is most of what a Game Master can reliably control anyway.

The Middle Belongs to the Table

You can make all the plans in the world for the middle 90 percent of a campaign.

Your players will, intentionally or not, ensure that much of it does not happen as expected.

They will overlook clues you thought were obvious.

They will solve problems in ways you never considered.

They will distrust helpful characters and immediately trust suspicious ones.

They might argue for an hour about whether to board an airship until the Game Master finally has Captain Kangaroo tell them to get on or be left behind.

And I cannot even blame the Game Master for that one.

I was one of the players arguing about whether we should board the airship.

They will avoid encounters you spent hours preparing and become fascinated by people, places, or details you invented ten seconds earlier.

That is not the campaign going wrong.

That is tabletop roleplaying.

A campaign is not a finished story that the players are expected to follow correctly. It is a story created by the Game Master, the players, and the dice.

The Game Master creates the situation.

The players decide what they do about it.

The dice occasionally decide that everybody’s plans were stupid.

The middle belongs to everyone at the table.

Preparation Is Not the Same as Predicting Everything

There is another advantage to building only what you need.

It keeps you from becoming too attached to your plans.

If you spend six hours designing a dungeon the players never enter, there is a natural temptation to find some way to push them toward it.

If you have written twenty pages of history for a kingdom they decide to leave, you may feel like something has gone wrong.

But nothing has gone wrong.

You simply prepared something that did not become part of this particular story.

Preparation should give you tools to respond to the players.

It should not create tracks they are required to follow.

Knowing the immediate situation, the important people involved, and a few possibilities for what might happen next gives you something far more useful than a perfectly scripted campaign.

It gives you room to adapt.

Build Enough to Begin

Your first game does not need an entire world.

It needs a place and something happening there.

It does not need hundreds of fully developed characters.

It needs a few people with whom the players can interact.

It does not need every session planned before the campaign begins.

It needs enough material to run the first one.

Know where the campaign starts.

Have a general idea of where it might end.

Prepare enough of the middle to run what comes next.

Then start playing.

The players will make decisions. The dice will complicate them. You will invent things you never expected to need, and some of those things will become more important than ideas you spent hours preparing.

That is not a failure of preparation.

That is the game.

You do not need an entire world before you sit down behind the Game Master screen.

You just need enough of one to open the door and let the players step through.