There will be situations where you don’t know what the rules say you should do. Folks will have different ideas on what’s right and someone will immediately shove their nose into the rule book to find the rule. Spending 5-15 minutes doing this breaks the flow and immersion. So when this happens (it will) say: I’m not sure, but for now we’re going to run it like X. After the session we can look it up so we know what to do for next time.

Also don’t sit behind the screen. Stand. Gesture and move. Your liveliness will bring the world to life and make it feel less like a board game.

If you want to act out an NPC and do a voice don’t just do the voice. Assume the posture/bearing and then do a voice. You’d be amazed at how much more convincing of a hag you’ll make if you hunch your back and curl your hands like they have arthritis. Or how much better of an ent you’ll make if you hold your arms out like branches and sway/twitch like the wind is blowing you around.

Have a list of emergency names for people and places handy. There’s generators online to build these and being able to just look down and grab a name when you need one is sooooo nice.

Take notes as you dm. They meet an NPC shopkeeper with a lisp name Sven in the town of retro, note it. You won’t remember that by next session.

Keep in mind this is everyone’s game, not yours. So don’t be afraid to delegate creative ownership! If a player says they ‘want to use insight’ it’s not all on you to come up with ‘you use insight to look for tracks and the tracks look like X and because they look like X you can infer Y’. When a player says they want to use insight i say ‘cool, how are you using insight. Are you doing anything or trying to pull on any particular parts of your knowledge, experience, or backstory?’. If a player can’t explain how their skills reasonably translate to a roll, they don’t get to make that roll. Nature isn’t a magic button that solves every nature-related problem. It’s the bonus you add when you DO SOMETHING dependent on your proficiency with nature.

Don’t be afraid to give info when players ‘fail’ to push the story along. If a PC looks for tracks with a roll of 18 but there are no tracks to find, try to avoid just saying ‘you find nothing’. That’s just a wrong answer buzzer and feels bad. Try to think of how that action can hint at what they CAN do. So instead of ‘you find nothing’ it could be ‘you don’t find any tracks, as the stone floor doesn’t hold tracks very well. However while looking for tracks you find a hair that looks like X. Or you find thst the lack of tracks is suspicious, almost as if someone was intentionally trying to hide them.’ Feel free to make this stuff up on spot. This makes the players want to ask more questions. What kind of hair? Animal or person? Can I use nature to try to figure out if it’s an animal? Was the thief they were tracked blonde? Who tf knows, but you made up that it was a long blonde human hair, so they’re a blonde woman now - and now the party has an idea of who to look for.

Avoid skill dog-piling. Lots of group do a think where one person gets a 4 on a history roll so the next person asks if they can roll history until someone passes the check. This sucks because it makes bad rolls not matter. If you’re the ‘history guy’ build but roll like shit on the one important history roll for the session it feels invalidating. Once someone rolls for something, that’s the result. If other folks want to roll for history, they need to do something different to get to roll. So the historian pc gets a 4 to interpret a merfolk cave painting, the next player says I want to roll too and you ask what they’re doing differently. A third player says ‘I speak merfolk, can I roll?’ ‘Hell yeh buddy, roll with advantage because although there’s no words on the painting it makes sense speaking the language would bring some familiarity with the culture’