I last DM'd back in the mid-80's, and I really hated how I ran those games. Some of the mistakes I think I made:
- I ran a Monty Haul campaign. In fairness, I ran all official TSR modules, so I was just "following the script". I still had a responsibility to keep track of the overall loot levels for the party, to make sure it wasn't ridiculous. But ridiculous it got, the party was loaded for bear pretty much from level 4 onward.
- I tried to trick the players into playing their classes as I would play them. I would make loot specifically for certain PCs, and instead of letting them divvy up the loot themselves, I would say "but I put that +1 flaming scimitar in that chest specifically for that druid, it's his". I would also use the Alignment Hammer to preach at them for the goofiest of misdeeds.
- I always had an NPC in the group with them, acting as an actual player. This had the effect of being a railroad mechanism, now I realize what a terrible idea that was.
- I was afraid to kill the players. I was always pulling punches for the monsters, or not using all their abilities, or play them with bad strategy (although, in my defense, it was my first time DMing and I never really understood monster strategy).
In my new campaign, 30 years later, I'm trying to fix things.
- I'm trying to write all my own content, or intentionally modifying previously published content, so I can really keep the loot under control. The party is 3rd level, and they have only two +1 daggers, a handful of heal potions, and some specialty items I created (low-AOE sleep and smoke bombs). There is one "high power" item in the party, a cloak of barkskin, which grants the wearer the effects of barkskin when worn, that does not stack with armor. So yes, one PC has a high AC (20) at 3rd level, but that's it. There's also not a lot of coin (the party wizard complained that he doesn't have enough gold to copy a spell into his spellbook). They did defeat a psychotic necromancer and recover her spellbook, but I made it written in a cryptic script akin to the journals in the movie "Se7en", and wrote a convoluted series of skill checks the player must complete in order to decode it (if you follow the odds, he basically has to study it full time for a couple of weeks to understand and be able to start to copy the spells down -- with the added bonus of finding other clues important to the overall campaign).
- I am totally hands-off on player interaction. I am there to provide the scenarios, give the descriptions, adjudicate and resolve skill checks and combat, and play the part of the NPCs and monsters. I avoid getting involved in the party's internal debates. In fact (thanks to the wonders of Roll20), I'll often excuse myself from the microphone while they're debating what to do, and then come back and ask them what they're doing. It's an immensely handy tactic when the players are so far down the wrong track and the DM has a terrible poker face.
- I only use NPCs as side characters, quest givers, information sources, or folks to be rescued, all as impartial as possible. This is SO much better, it lets the players have their own dynamic with each other, without me getting in the middle of it (a lot of this is "ego-checking").
- On the last one, being afraid to kill the characters: I'm still afraid I'm not harsh enough. I technically did kill the rogue at 1st level, but I took it back because I realized I made the trap too dangerous for that level. I think that was fair, it was our absolute first 5th Edition session, so a do-over was appropriate. After that, though, I still feel I pull my punches, so I have to really work on that. And I need to really work up monster strategies beforehand and stick to them, character death be damned.
What past DMing mistakes have you managed to correct?
(cross-posted from my own WOTC blog http://community.wizards.com/content/blog/4180736)
"wrote a convoluted series of skill checks the player must complete in order to decode it (if you follow the odds, he basically has to study it full time for a couple of weeks to understand and be able to start to copy the spells down "
Oops. While everything else is great, this bit sounds like tedium. Have you considered writing a D&D-themed crossword instead? Or even one related to your campaign? I mean, if you've got to go through some kind of cypher, I feel like it should be fun.
(Unless I'm wrong and it's totally fun).
My own sins? Largely same as yours. Sins of youth and inexperience. Then later, sins of apathy. Now I bring my A game as much as I can.
My very first DMing 'campaign' started with the players somehow coming across a "meeting of the dragons" where the Oriental dragons were meeting with the 'regular' western dragons. (This was soon after Oriental dragons first came out).
The 'campaign' was supposed to revolve around an upcoming war between the two factions.
The initial adventure was Soooooooo bad we never got to session 2. (hence why 'campaign' is in quotes)
I had everything for the meeting all planned out, and there was really nothing for the PCs to do except listen to me talk about what was going on in the meeting.... boring, unempowered, helpless, tedious.... afterwards even I realized there should never be a second session.
As a younger GM, I took joy in killing PCs. To the best of my recollection, I didn't use any 'Gotchas!' but I laughed in the players' faces when their characters died. I understand better now how invested some players can become with their character, and deal with PC death in a more dignified manner -- I laugh behind their backs!
But seriously, PCs become (almost) as important to me as they are to their players, because I invest a lot of time in tailoring my stories to them. When a PC dies, it means I have to rethink plot points, and probably discard content I prepared specifically for them. In the distant past (ca. 90's) this was never an issue because the PCs were 'in my story' and not 'driving our story.'
bawylie wrote:
Well, I'm running 5E after not running D&D at all since ealry 3E. I ran an AL game so it was pre-packaged rather then my own design. It was over two nights.
The first night, I was juggling a lot. It was a complex situation and looked tough so I gve them some NPC ogres to bolster the party. When com bat finally happened,
I totally forgot some key enemies and the ones they did fight werent as tougha s I had imagined and they toasted them. Thatw as mistake one.
SO... I read crefully and carefully considered the next scenario, now that their enemies knew they were coming. I put the enemies I had left out into the next combat,
and I discuraged them from resting before the next segment...
And I made exctly the opposite mistake and under estimated how hard ot woudl be (it didnt help that they were also down a few party members that night) and I worked them
pretty bad and had to go out of my way not to just kill them.
I learned a few things, Among other things i learned that well prepared mages of medium levels in an open environment kick ass in 5E. It also reaffirmed my feelings that
balacning D20 encounters is hard. And I really hould have let them take that rest, even if in terms of story pacing it felt like a really strange place to do it.
Nevvur wrote:
Long story short our drunken heroes accidently saved the day thanks to defenestration.
Yunru wrote:
Mistakes that I have made are a, luckily, short list:
- I have made the error of doing what a rulebook suggested when I already thought that it wasn't going to result in fun - I remedied this years ago, basically immediately upon seeing that I was correct in my original thought that the rulebook wasn't giving good advice.
- I have made the error of trying to force players to have a certain view of character death (that it was a normal part of the game, not with quitting a campaign over, and should be seen as an opportunity to add something interesting to the story rather than a punishment), rather than letting players come to terms with character death at their own pace - which I also remedied many years ago.
- I let myself feel trapped with disruptive players because I was hosting a game at a game shop, and did not feel that I had the authority to ban anyone - I never had the chance to remedy this one since that store closed down, and I don't host games in shops anymore, but I regret not accepting the risk that maybe my attempt to keep the gaming table clear of disruptive players would result in me, rather than them, being asked to leave the shop.
I've found that the easiest way to avoid mistakes is to only ever focus on the folks at the table having a good time - since hitting that one goal tends to make it impossible to have messed something up.
I'm in a similar situation. Got called in to DM after a few decades of total RPG inactivity with no "player time" to get back into the swing of things. I did a lot of what you describe. Using player feedback I've changed, but alas I think that I'm just a story driven GM, at least when using my own material and not a published adventure.
Some tips:
A) communicate with your players OFTEN. Try to create a non-confrontational atmosphere where they can tell you what they didn't like (felt too railroady, didn't have character agency, not feeling their character, etc) and remember that it's not ALWAYS the DM's problem. Some players are casual "go with the flow" and will be happy just rolling dice, others are demanding, constantly try to find your weak spots and won't just accept your campaign plot drops. Players should adjust to the DM (meet halfway, or leave the game) and not just expect the DM to flog himself into an anxiety attack trying to meet all their expectations.
B) Don't get invested in any of your stuff. That badass NPC they one-shot unexpectedly? Oh well. That dungeon you spent hours crafting and they ignore it? Too bad for them. Either they follow your lead (within reason) or they just do their own thing and accept that the quality of what they experience is limited by the short time limit they impose on you. This is especially troublesome if you are doing a VTT like roll20 where the desire to have stuff pre-loaded is very strong.
C) Have fun yourself. If your idea of DM fun is crafting intricate games with lots of plot events that the PCs occasionally have to just accept, then the party has to be on board or find a different game. Otherwise DMing becomes a chore for you and then what's the point?
D) Take breaks. Make the other players DM one-shots so you can see the game from the player perspective and vice versa. I think being a DM is extremely undervalued by many players (despite most players running from the job like mad) and it is easy to lose your way with no time as a player to recharge the batteries and see other DM styles. If you don't know "what right looks like" it is hard to bootstrap yourself into being a good DM. As kids we tolerated a very different game than as adults.
My biggest sin as a young DM in the 80s was to be a computer. We treated the rules as simulation algorithms and left everything to chance. Now I'm much more story oriented. (My epiphany came in the 90s reading the game masters book for West End's Star Wars RPG. The section on when a blaster runs out of charges was a single sentence: When it's dramatically appropriate for it to do so.)
Ranthalan wrote:
After 25 years, if there's a mistake that can be made, I've made it, learned from it, and carried on. I still make mistakes, sometimes even when I know better. But that's just how it goes.
I am guilty of being too soft in combat. When a PC falls, all focus shifts off the fallen PC and they inevitably survive with no problem. This past weekend I had an epiphany: rolling a homogenous group of monsters' attacks rolls at once. For the first time in 7 sessions of DMing 5e, a player was actually fearful for his character after it fell to -14 hp from a kobold sling-line. He also had 2 death save failures which added to the tension, before finally being healed by an ally.
The moral of this story is that sometimes it's appropriate to toss the entire piggy bank rather than nickel-and-diming a PC.
Yeah I'm soft in combat as well. Mind you I'm not sure that's a bad thing since no-one I play with likes dying. If it's not fun, why do it?
My biggest mistake that I still have to work on are:
1) making solutions, instead of problems
2) telling players can't do "x"
3) dragging out mundane tasks
Now I try to do:
1) only worry about the challenge, players never do what you think they will anyway
2) tell them the DC and the result of success & failure
3) do a lot more automatic successes
Archon007 wrote:
bawylie wrote:
bawylie wrote:
The issue with PC killing is two fold -
1. It needs to be because of player choice - if you force a combat to happen and then the dice kill the player, they are still a little 'but I didn't wanna have a fight'. If you wrote a script that said they have to go to the dread swamp that doesn't make it any better because encounters are likely in the dread swamp, it's just forcing them into something that will then force them into a combat.
2. How do you have any play if the players avoid all the dangerous stuff? Particularly when XP is tied to combat (yes, I can hear you people shouting 'you can assign XP for doing things other than combat, when you're GM!!'. If so then you needn't shout. For you #2 is already solved. But not everyone wants to do it your way). So you're kind of stuck having some very easy cake walk combats to run for if they don't do anything more dangerous. I'm not sure what to do there - make sure the XP per RL hour is atleast half as much as moderate encounters would garner. Granted, they might get to level 20 by killing twig blights, but that's another problem.
Ranthalan wrote:
Noon wrote:
bawylie wrote:
So what is the DM to do? Assign a trivial obstacle a higher difficulty to make the player feel like his random dice rolls are driving the story? Does he make the player roll to walk and chew bubblegum at the same time? I admit I'm being hyperbolic. Killing an opponent should have a tense feel, but that tension does not need to be created by tying the narrative to rolling dice.
Nevvur wrote:
And the player can always roll a 1. That also makes for creative storytelling. "As you lean forward with your dagger, the evil priest sneezes, doubling over and bumping back into you."
DarkRexx wrote:
I agree with Aaron. Players "win" a situation or scenario by robbing randomness of its power. They can do this by stacking the deck in their favor (builds, expertise in areas, whatever) or by moving into checkmate. How they go about it is up to them.
But if they've moved into checkmate, I'm not introducing randomness for its own sake - they've won already - they do not require the dice to ratify that win. I didn't throw the ball through the hoop - they did. Earned it already.
bawylie wrote:
A few mistakes from the days of old:
- Scripted the adventure to turn out how I wanted, more of a "choose your own adventure" than an RPG. Fun of an RPG is having a framework and letting the story create itself.
- Always keeping the characters alive, eventually they develop a "devil may care" attitude. Players respect the game more when you don't bail them out, keeps the impact of decisions and dice rolls at the forefront of decision making.
- Telling players how they could have done it better (after a disastrous combat, but really any scenario would be bad)
- Letting in cheesy concepts. Third Edition and Pathfinder were notorious for cheesy character concepts that sought to fleece the system for numerical advantage rather than for role-play. When other players did not do so, it exacerbated the issue. Other players expect the DM to take control.
Touc wrote:
Nevvur wrote:
"B) Don't get invested in any of your stuff. That badass NPC they one-shot unexpectedly? Oh well. That dungeon you spent hours crafting and they ignore it? Too bad for them. Either they follow your lead (within reason) or they just do their own thing and accept that the quality of what they experience is limited by the short time limit they impose on you. This is especially troublesome if you are doing a VTT like roll20 where the desire to have stuff pre-loaded is very strong."
The other day, a really funny thing happened.
-- I created a swamp scenario.
-- The clues to the plot monster were supposed to craft a trail of clues to follow.
-- The main "plot monster" was to the west.
-- I tossed in a fairly unimportant and uninteresting crocodile ambush for flavor.
On game night:
-- the party skipped right past all the clues with amazing speed (not entirely true, they did use tracking).
-- The main "plot monster" was defeated, and now the party is like "wtf?", and now it's a reverse investigation. Now it's "something attacked us, let's find out why!" instead of "there's something weird here, let's find out what it is".
-- The totally pointless, pure filler crocodile ambush WAS THE HIGHLIGHT OF THE NIGHT!! Holy crap I did NOT think that would end up the way it did AT ALL!
You have to go with the flow. Enjoy writing your scenarios, and then enjoy it no matter what happens!
There may be another lesson here, which is "add a lot of variety to your adventures". Throw in mystery, throw in raw combat, have plot monsters and nearly-pointless encounters, toss a lot of stuff together. You never know what will make the night memorable.
Forgetting about npcs in both combat and role playing situations.
It's something I always slip up on.
DarkRexx wrote: