First Experiences as a DM
Or what you quickly learn what not to do.
So I have been absent for a good few months, and in that time I’ve been busy running the game, building a house and finishing up my college life. Suffice to say things have fallen by the wayside but picking back up as able.
Anyhow here is a list of things I learned in the time spent thus far DMing my own game, starting with the playtest versions of ACKS II after having learned a good chunk of the rules as a player. A note as well, I did not start with novice players but those well versed in ACKS and it’s mechanics as well as having the ruleset changing during play, approximately from v127-155 thus far.
I think I’ll start with general approach to things, and then cap off with what procedures I’ve found most helpful in ACKS
Limit your scope, both your own and your players. As a DM, your own preparedness for the campaign overall is dictated by the first, and your week to week preparation is dictated by the latter. For your own scope, I highly recommend you just grab Capital of the Borderlands, and Sinister Stone of Sakhara, and you will largely be concerned by your players ambitions and you’ll have a easy time of slowly learning the rules, and can take your time digesting the ACKS Setting Building Process if you so choose to build your own on the side. However, if you’re a new DM, new to ACKS DMing or just plain stubborn. Here is my advice.
You will need, absolutely need, to limit both your own action and the players. Yes, ACKS is a game centered around a sandbox experience. Yes, ACKS does making things quickly and easily great. But it isn’t instantaneous. And unless your players are very understanding and actually dedicate themselves to doing what you do set up for this initial game, you will fall behind. ACKS is a great toolset that takes time to learn, and all the time you need to learn, get processes understood and implemented will slowly lose the battle, no matter how familiar you are with ACKS rules. So you will need to constrain yourself to a dungeon you either make, or grab off the shelf and will need to constrain your players to that dungeon. If they try and wander 80 miles in any given direction, end the session there and tell them to come back in 2 weeks time. This will suck. This will end any rhythm the game has going. But for a new DM trying to do their own setting, while learning the rules, this is crucial. I know some DMs likely start DMing as they wish to make their own setting and use their own ideas and that’s great. But it’s gonna be overwhelming. This is where the classic Old-school game advice of 3 dungeons, 1 town, and similar advice is probably most felt and applicable.
For the players scope, ACKS has a very very broad switchboard of things players can do. You’re gonna have to limit it. I recommend keeping it to the ACKS II Revised Rulebook only class wise, and only let them break out the campaign rules after a good dozen sessions. If a player requests otherwise, only allow one class or rule set per player. As well you will get requests from players to let them decide henchmen classes when they level up from 0 to 1. I allowed this. That was a mistake. I recommend you do not follow. It may allow some great fun for players, but some classes bring more rule checking than others and I would recommend against adding to your plate at this point.
You will get faster, fast. ACKS does make this easy, and can be also easily automated via excel or other script tools. There are some tools in the ACKS Community that can help lift alot of the heavy weight, but also making your own tools is a crucial skill to immediately start practicing. Snip and copy paste tables onto a excel spreadsheet along with your encounter table for the evening. Note specific details unlikely to change like the climate code for the area if you use the weather rules (Fairly easy 3 sets of 2d6). Don’t be discouraged by continually flipping between rules. You’ll eventually need to less and less.
Don’t be afraid to change rulings. While typically as a DM you want to be consistent with your rulings, I have learned its worse to live with a ruling mistake than come back later and remand earlier statements. Some stuff will be on the spot as rules are not being read correctly or in the correct context at the time, some stuff will be just not up to date depending on rule sets used and need updating. My point here being that by living with mistakes you’re affecting more of your game overtime.
And now for specific procedures that will immediately make things easier on you or add some more fun to your game.
Pre-Roll Encounters and Weather. Take 20 minutes before the session, roll out about 6 hours worth of encounters in dungeon, 3 days in wilderness and 3 days weather. This is easy, and also helps get prep for the session started(Or might be the entirety of it if the party is in a already prepped dungeon). If you don’t use any of it, just save it and put it aside for the next session. This is immensely useful for just having basic notes that you can adapt on the fly to circumstances without slowing down to roll the size of the encounter and other details like shamans, witchdoctors or guard animals.
Start up a note repository for NPCs. Organization now will save time later. Important notes will be level, location, name, and relations. Disposition and the like can be fairly easily added in during the game depending on what you feel and how players interact, or alternatively easily added in when looking over a area.
The secret formula to ACKS combat being highly cinematic and also testing player endurance is remembering the dungeon is alive, and enemies are not dumb. To do this there’s a couple of ways but the easiest and the one you’ll have the most success with, is wave style warfare. Space out your enemies in a large enough room that there’s a 2nd group around the bend, or far off, or something to that effect. Make it roughly 30-80’ to get to this 2nd group, who will notice the melee the players start, and rush to reinforce. By time this 2nd group has formed up from every day tasks (1 round), and moved to join combat, the players should have the first fight roughly mopped up. By having this 2nd group join in, the remaining enemies now have a chance again, and player resources are stretched. Perhaps the players don’t have the HP, or the Mage is now out of spells, or they don’t have enough military oil now or are awkwardly positioned to use it. In any case, this will stress the players to stick it out, or retreat. Maybe a PC goes down, or a henchmen. But this will be where players will feel the stakes, and the enemy is both manageable and dangerous. You can evolve this over time as you employ the listening rules and start to space out patrols and guard posts in reasonable distance to hear combat elsewhere, but for now this works great.
Individual initiative. You will find any combat your play without this to largely be who wins the roll, and your game will suffer for it. Only do group initiative’s when it is a large battle, with more than 40 enemies on the monsters side. And only in groups of 2-5. This is critical to making sure combat goes nicely, fun, and appropriately heroic. Do not neglect this rule.
Anything the players can do, so can the monsters. ACKS monsters aren’t stupid by and large, and will adapt to players. Too many patrols going missing with survivors telling tale of adventurers? Group up the tribes champions into a ambush. Military oil ruining the monsters day? Throw some their way and watch as their stockpile of 30 bottles of military oil explode. Or just throw a torch onto their cache. Note, this isn’t advice to be antagonistic as a DM, this is to make the challenge evolving and testing of player skill. I think we can agree having a fuel bunker inside a dungeon probably isn’t a great idea for the monsters, why would the players? And this might lead to your players adapting in turn, and learning to fight better. Maybe they start leading their hellfire military oil bombardment from stealth. Or leading the enemy into ambushes where they light a fuse and watch as entire patrols go up in flame.
This is where I have fun with ACKS, and having this continually evolving combat, with changing enemies and ways to approach problems, and I aim to have this occur for my players.
Roll up treasure even before session for lairs and warbands, distribute magic items among leadership. I’ll admit to having forgotten this a few times and it does scratch me the wrong way when the beastmen chieftain who could have done more when he had a magic sword or shield in his storage room just decided not to bring it out today. You don’t have to roll all the treasure, but the magic items do enhance and give variation to enemies.
At some point I think I will detail the experience further, but for now this is my collection of points I would have used at least some of myself at the beginning. I hope someone finds some of these points useful.
Absolutely, all good stuff.