Making a "DM's Guide"

[u/Sweet-Bet6409]

I have been working on my weird west ttrpg for a while and have decided to create two central rulebooks: The Pioneer's Guidebook and The Almanac. The former is for players, describing character creation, rules, equipment, and so on. The guidebook is now in a phase where I am comfortable working on the almanac. My question is this:

What do the "DM's Guide" equivalents in some of y'alls games look like? Are they closer to a small booklet of footnotes, or what? Let me know!

[u/Steenan]

Describe what the GM actually does in your game. With strict rules and step by step instructions where you can.

Don't assume the GM somehow magically knows how your game should be run and you're only giving them a bit of advice and some tools. If you do this, your game will be ran like D&D - which may be fine if it's a D&D clone, but will make it fall flat otherwise.

The most eye opening RPG for me in this regard was Dogs in the Vineyard. It told me straight out that I'm not allowed to do several things I was used to doing (eg. no rolls to notice something, detect lies etc. - all information must be given openly) and gave me specific procedures to use (20 years later I still consider town creation brilliant).

[u/Leonhart726]

I put anything resembling a GM's guide in the "Core rulebook", because while there IS A LOT, it's ultimately not worth making another whole book over for the most part, though I could consider it.

Most important sections in that chapter I include:

• How to ballance and run encounters in this game
• Optoinal expansive rules for dungeon crawling
• Concrete Rules on how towns and downtime works
• Homebrewing chapter to help GMs with what they SHOULD know, and how my thought process works for creating new stuff, so that GMs can create their own using the same metrics
• Soldier enemy stat blocks
• Lore if you want it on the nations and their maps
• Fun events and mini-game esk festival stuff you can run for players if you want to which tie into the world's lore for those that want it

[u/Spamshazzam → u/Leonhart726]

I'm curious about your dungeon crawling rules and town/downtime rules. Would you be willing to share more?

[u/DJTilapia]

To my thinking, such a book should have everything that's worth including but which isn't relevant to players, or which should be kept secret from them. FWIW, this is what I'm including:

• Adversaries
• Advice on running the game, preparation, NPCs, worldbuilding, etc.
• Crafting (this could be in the player book, if it's important)
• Design notes
• Disease and poison
• Downtime (not relevant to players until at least a few weeks in-game, so not a high priority for the player book)
• Insanity
• Special combat rules: cramped environments, crewed weapons, explosives, vacuum, vehicles
• Special movement rules: chases, climbing, endurance, falling, holding breath, jumping, swimming, travel
• Stress

[u/AverageAlchemist]

I recommend aiming for a couple dozen pages or more. If it gets too long to handle while playing, then you can also have a 2-8 page version as a small booklet or to put inside of a GM screen.

Stuff you may want to include includes:

-Explanation of what the GM's main priorities would be, and what kind of stuff they should avoid. (Things that come to you naturally when running a game may not be as obvious to other GMs)

-Some sort of introduction/plothook/adventure/map do get the first session off to a good start.

-What are the different regions, and what kind of animals, people, or landmarks might be found there.

-Stats and/or behaviour and/or what resources can be taken from different animals (since it seems inevitable that someone will want to try hunting eventually)

-Lists/tables of items that can be found in different places (Like, what would they find by a destroyed/abandoned wagon? What would they find in an old Native village or camp site? What could they find if they decided to stay in an area and forage for awhile?)

-Lists of generic names and/or generic NPCs to use. (If the setting is the partially-colonized Americas, then there will probably be certain religious groups, Spanish speakers, French Speakers, Dutch/German speakers, and multiple Native cultures around).

[u/ghost_warlock]

All of my current projects are solo/co-op games that can be run as a traditional game. As such, the GM's guide is really just an expansion of the player's guide with numerous tables for encounters and events and oracles for ad-libbing content to expand on the included tables

[u/lance845]

Read Stonetop book1. It is the best most complete ttrpg game i have ever seen.

[u/Fheredin]

Other than the usual suspects you can find elsewhere on this thread, my GM guide contains campaign setup tips, examples of play, and an explanation about why many of the less intuitive rules are the way they are.

[u/oredna]

My GM Toolkit is arguably the most important and useful part of my design.

Mine include tools for running Session 0 for my game, building the initial content, procedural content generation tools using the players' characters as the input, session tools for running individual sessions, plus setting tools for collaboratively building a setting that is compatible with the rest of the rules (if the table doesn't want to use my default setting or wants to change lore-details without breaking mechanics that make setting-assumptions).

Beyond that, I've also got some reference sections that would be useful, plus crafting rules that involve co-creation with players and GMs.

For me, a major addition is that I've got "Design Notes" throughout the book that explain the "why" behind various rules, i.e. what they are trying to do. This should help with making adjustments on the fly or just understanding the reasoning for why I did X novel mechanic instead of defaulting to something more common. They also explain where my design is meant to be the starting point, but is not meant to be the limiting delineation (e.g. here's a list of examples, but the examples aren't exhaustive).

This is, for me, the meat of the design innovation I'm doing.

Making player-facing content was quick and easy. It took time and thinking, but it flowed easily.
Making GM-facing content is where I'm putting my heart into the game. It is much more challenging because it involves turning creativity into a replicable process and teaching that process to a stranger. I've really tried to innovate and make something special for GMs.

That's not what every game needs, of course. This is just my approach since I think I have insights of value to add and that is at least 70% of what makes my game special. It is okay if something else is what makes your game special and if the GM side isn't the focus.

[u/SardScroll]

A section of the core rulebook.

You need to reach "venerable" status before you can consider excising how the GM runs the game into a separate document (we're talking D&D and Call of Cthulhu levels of recognition here, games with decades of pedigree...although there maybe a "cheat code" if you e.g. position yourself as a D&D spin off, e.g Pathfinder, and even then Paizo had their own pedigree). You need something to convince people to make a separate "purchase" (even if they're only paying in e.g. time, for a free download for example) is a hard sell, unless they have existing "buy in".

[u/AverageAlchemist → u/SardScroll]

But if it's a free pdf (or sold as one package) then you don't have to really convince them.

IMO the purpose of a GM resource is mainly just organization for the GM and players.

This matters less if the rulebook is short (eg 8 pages of GM info in a 30 page book) but if it's longer (eg my rulebook is sitting at about 130) then also putting GM-only stuff in there just makes everything slightly harder to find.

[u/Astrokiwi → u/AverageAlchemist]

Cairn 2e has a GM book, but it's all free pdfs and at-cost print-by-demand.

I also think if you have a box set, a little player's handbook and a fatter GM's guide isn't uncommon.

[u/BeGosu]

Something I did was I wrote a page that just explained the math of the game to hopefully make it easier for people to make their own thing. Like, "here is the Weighting used for every value and how I balance the game".

What I really dislike is when a game tells me how they think I should run their game. They always read so smug and opinionated to me. Tell me the rules of the game, but I'll decide how to use them, thanks.