rpg

I talk only as much as is necessary to paint the scene and hurry to prompt player action.

There's an old bit of advice I read somewhere that the sooner you ask players, "What do you do?" the smoother your game is running.

Those really old AD&D modules with 3/4th the page taken up by boxed text? People tend to zone them out. WotC did studies on this and figured attention starts to drift after 2-3 sentences.

But it goes beyond boxed text. Any time the GM is sitting there talking, be it narration, exposition, or -- worst case scenario -- two NPCs having a conversation, that's time the players have to sit there trapped in an unskippable videogame cutscene.

Read George Polti's The 36 Dramatic Situations. It's a list of plot elements that have a snappy title, a list of participants in the plot element, a brief discussion of how it works, and then (unfortunately dated) references to dramas that used them.

Using this when building a world, or a campaign, or a local setting, lets you quickly set up a bunch of conflicts (ideally with interlaced participants so that single NPCs (or PCs) can be in different roles in different dramatic situations. Then you just let the events flow logically, and as the dramatic situations get resolved you get a plot. PCs can interfere with these dramatic situations and thus have an impact on resulting plots even if the overall setting is far larger than they are.

For depth in world-building I use a rule I call "Y-cubed". (I got it from somewhere else but can't recall the source anymore.)

For every detail you make, you ask the question "Why" three times.

So a village the characters have reached stop all work every 77 days for a festival. Why? It celebrates an ascended local hero who saved the village from a magical blight. Why 77 days? It took 77 days for effort for the blight to be defeated. ... And so on.

This is a rapid way to both build depth in your setting quickly, as well as inspire possible mysteries and intrigue for investigation later.

A slight modification works also for giving NPCs depth.

@Ziggurat When putting a settlement on a map that you don't expect the party to go anywhere near soon, you only really need three pieces of info (beyond its location, anyway):

Name
Size (city/town/village)
Product (apples, silk, sheep, etc.) or service (government, knowledge, trade hub, etc.)

Why a product or service? It helps establish how trade happens, gives the town a reputation for the group to hear, gives you a hook from which to improvise NPCs from there, and so on.

A few favourites from the Alexandrian:

• Don't prep plots. Prep scenarios. If you give the players a goal and a world, they will make the plot themselves, and it'll be more interesting. And it's not like you wouldn't need those things for a railroad plot anyway.
• Don't plan contingencies. Instead of explaining everything the party could do to get past the guard, just describe the guard. It's a lot more flexible, and it takes less time to prepare.
• With the 3 clues rule, make sure to have different clue types. If all your clues are pieces of evidence, then a party who prefers to talk to people is clueless.
• If you feel the need to ask "are you sure you want to do that", there might be a miscommunication to figure out. Maybe you didn't explain the situation clearly, or a player misheard you, or the player has an item to help things work out.
• When creating a system within your setting (eg, nobility), add two exceptions to the neat and tidy rules. "Each region is ruled by a count, except for those over there which are ruled by comtes." This adds history to your world while making it less daunting to add more exceptions if you need them later.

The players won't care about how pretty you make your maps. Make them functional and ugly, and you'll save up so much time for other prep.

Let them look cool.

Too much time is spent working around the players’ abilities to make a fight challenging. Some fights should look hard but have a player ability break them. Let them use the powers they earned.

This slightly ties to the idea that the game is not the players against the DM, it is the players against the world, while the DM narrates.

Use every opportunity to turn planning into information gathering.

I try to use every opportunity to stop the planning "phase" of the game and go to the information gathering before continuing the planning. This can be pretty much any unknown that the characters bring up, like some if -statement in their plan, some fact they are unsure about etc.

The information gathering might be anything from a simple skill check to a full adventure and after that we go right back to the planning.

This has removed a lot of planning hours that wouldn't have had anything to do with the situation they are going into.

I love SlyFlourishs Lazy GM approach tip with the secrets (prepare n, say 10, secrets but don't define where or how the PCs will find them). Helps me think about what the session / chapter can entail and make sure the PCs get the info required to continue the story without locking me or them into specific ways to do stuff.

I start,

My most "classic tip" is never lock a clue behind a roll if they need to find the love letter hidden under the bed to find-out about the affair explaining the murder, just make sure they find-it (the failed roll can still mean they are caught searching the room)

Another of my classic one is to ask players about their character friend and foes, it helps populating a setting, you have a black smith the warrior met while serving in the army or the young ambitious political advisor the bard went in a tavern fight with and gives pretty great plot hooks So your little sister is in the school witchcraft club, and looks like they summoned something too big

For one shot, I recently experimented a lot with LARP-style black boxes in order to play a scene which occurred before the game start, as it helps giving a clear view about everyone character and their ties while keeping these scenes shorts. It's IMO a good compromise between loosing time in playing mundane life to get a feel on the character, and jumping to the action with unclear character ties/roles or expectation about normality

Wow, you guys are actually giving really good and useful advice.

I was about to comment “When one of my players asks whether they can do something completely unreasonable I look at them, roll a D20 openly on the table and without checking the result, say ‘no’”

But now I just feel bad :D

If you need to "cheat" (e.g. fudging a roll because you made your monster way too powerful) then never tell the players, it will only ruin their sense of immersion.

Try to do voices, players love them even if they're shit and it helps distinguish the NPCs. The voices don't have to be remotely good and you don't need to be good at accents, just try things like "gruff voice" for the grizzled mercenary or "weirdly enthusiastic" for the mad old wizard.

I recommend players make their characters together. Fate's rules for it are pretty good, and can be ported to many systems: https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/phase-trio . The whole "You all meet in a tavern for the first time" mode is a valid way to play, but I've had friends do that and then struggle with how contrived it feels to fight to the death for people they just met, or go on a whole dangerous sidequest for someone else's hobby.

I also recommend reading other systems. Not everyone needs to know dozens of games, but if you always play d20 games spending some time in a different branch of the RPG family tree can really be eye-opening. Or if you've only really played really light games, looking at how something crunchier does detail can be insightful.