Ed's shared a lot with us over the last two decades and gives freely of his time and ideas without urgent concern for compensation. That's pretty damn awesome if you ask me. So I thought I'd give back by highlighting some of the DMing lesson I've learned from Ed based on all that he's written.
Lesson 1: The lives and times of NPCs don't hinge on the player character's actions; rather they run concurrently with the player character's actions.
As a DM (especially one short on time to plan ahead for the next gaming session) it's easy to set up NPCs as pure antagonists to the player characters: each NPC's action/reaction being contingent on what the player characters do.
What I learned from reading Ed's adventure notes is that it's far more fun, realistic and immersive in a game of Dungeons & Dragons (regardless of what edition of the game you play) if the NPCs have their own interests, goals and desires, such that these all move forward in time at the same rate the player characters are advancing their own goals and interests.
For example: It's one thing for a War Wizard to investigate the theft of a rare family heirloom from the palatial home of a Cormyrian noble family and focus all of his efforts on pinning the blame on the player characters as the culprits, another for that same mage to be willing to curry favor with the noble family and even work with the player characters to recover the heirloom, if it advances the War Wizard in standing opposite the Royal Mage and the noble family in question.
It's not easy to roleplay NPCs this way (for me that is; you may have skills I've yet to learn) but if you have smart, cagey players and can hint through roleplaying what it is that matters most to an NPC, your players will often pick up on it and focus on roleplaying against the NPC as opposed to playing against you as the DM.
What are some lessons, if any, that Ed's taught you about gaming or the Realms in general?
Lesson 2: Uncovered facts should pose more questions than they answer.
It was always one of those design paradigms of the Realms that I liked the most: for every question a sourcebook answers, it should pose two or three more.
This philosophy works great in D&D campaigns too.
At its most basic level this idea is nothing more than the act of slowly parceling out information. For example, if the player characters discover a map depicting the layout of a Sword Herald refuge, the DM can describe how the map shows what appear to be four levels to the refuge, but there's no obvious indication how one goes from one level to the next.
Then the DM can put strange words or phrases on the map for the players to puzzle over (perhaps they are command words to turn off the Helmed Horrors the map says are in the entrance chamber, or maybe they activate teleportation magics that move one from one level to the next, that sort of thing).
On the campaign scale of things, this philosophy works great for resolving "hanging questions" that have been left unanswered since the start of play.
Suppose the players characters encounter a gang of Zhentarim led by a thieving mage who steal the only known blade key (a longsword with a gem encrusted hilt) that can access the Sword Herald refuge the players have the map for. The mage manages to escape while his minions hold off the player characters. The mage's fate is unknown as he isn't seen again by the players.
After a lot of game time has passed and the PCs advance several levels, the players discover another enchanted blade key and decide to go back to the refuge and explore it.
Once inside, they discover the moldering, hacked up corpse of the Zhentarim mage, blade key in hand, lying on the ground before three ominous looking Helmed Horrors that guard the way into the refuge (and who the players quickly deactivate by shouting out the words on the map).
Lesson 3: Sound it out ahead of time before you go and say it in front of your players.
OK so Ed's filled our gaming vocabulary up with terms like "spell beggar" and contractions of common words, giving us a bit of Realms-flavored goodness to throw into the dialogue of NPCs in our Forgotten Realms campaigns.
But one of the keys to the successful use (and more importantly, creation) of such terms is to say them aloud in order to confirm they don't sound stupid ahead of time. This helps also if you know how your players will react to new NPC, especially those who try to exert authority over the PCs.
I failed at this recently. One of my players is not very attentive (not on an ADD level, but he occasionally misses things, no doubt about it). So when I introduced Ombrier Thurlkast into our Realms campaign to arrest the player characters, this player only half-heard the name and when it came time to address this NPC, the player proceeded to twist the name into "Hombre", which the other players picked up on.
Fantasy names are fun, but if players can tweak them to tweak the DM, they will.
Older gamers like me may remember being introduced to the Forgotten Realms through the pages of Dragon magazine before the Realms existed as a published world.
Ed's articles were about magic items and spellbooks and all of them were unique: there were no generic +1 longswords is those articles, everything has a history. Reading those articles made me realise something was missing from my own DMing and that was a sense of history.
So, the lesson is that items, magic items and spellbooks in particular, do have histories and those histories can make the game world come alive for the players. And when an item has a history then it suddenly becomes more valuable for the player (as opposed to the PC) even if is simply a +1 dagger.
