The biggest red flag I've experienced so far: During Session 0 Me: can I play this homebrew race? Here's the details, let me know if I should make any changes. DM: Nah, it's cool, go right ahead. DM proceeds to focus fire and kill my character in the first hour of session 1 DM: Next time, pick a real race.
Similar situation, I once saw a player get quite dissatisfied with the character they were playing not working out the way they wanted so they asked if they could swap characters between sessions. DM: Sure whatever. Next session DM introduces the new character then proceeds to have a super high DC monster kill the new character in one hit. When the player started to protest the DM said something like: "Well that's what you get for switching characters." Like. "???"
@@pinkdaveandchaps3697 For real. If you as a DM have a problem with something, be up front about it instead of being a passive-aggressive prick. You'll at least get more respect for it, if nothing else.
Personal rule: When it comes to mechanics, I divorce myself from any relationship I have with my players. And all my players are friends. This way I’m as fair as possible. They know this. I’m described as “harsh but fair.”
I literally allowed my player to play a half duck species because she wants to have a duck army. So far, i never had to nerf anybody. I think nerfing player is a bad, since it just means you can't adjust to what the players throw at you. Also, isn't it cool when your player remember their races speciaities and use them at a good time? I love to marvel at them when they come up with aomething i nevrr thought about
My red flag: half bragging about how they "accidentally" traumatized a character so much that the player had to retire them. My old dm ruined his best friend's character from a previous group by throwing horrifying trauma after horrifying trauma at the character until the PC could not function in the world without acting radically out of character. EDIT: All these traumatizing events were within the span of a few sessions, *not* over the course of a campaign. He said he had fixed his behavior when he and I played together, and then proceeded to do almost the exact same thing to my (first ever) PC. I've learned that people like that don't actually recognize what they have done is wrong, and they are solely focused on trying to break the spirit of the party and/or enact their need for torture porn.
it's one thing to have traumas placed on a character because of a bad roll, my first ever TTRPG character had that happen because I botched the first roll of the game when the group entered an apartment and saw the eviscerated bodies of one of the other PC's roommates I got what would essentially be a nat -3 and had a phobia of gore added to my character because of that, my group likes the more gritty and dark style. it's a complete other thing to do it purely because the DM can and have it completely ruin a character, to tie it back to the previously explained situation it wasn't done with any malice or "DM vs PCs" mentality it was purely a consequence of the die roll and helped to establish the dark nature of the setting as it was a phobia that could be worked over as it wasn't mandatory unlike my character's phobia of snakes, if you haven't guessed the game in question is Vampire the Masquerade V20 and I made the stupid decision of making a Malkavian with a phobia as the derangement, which was mandatory for the clan they were in. sorry I tend to ramble, my point is that you can talk about a campaign where a PC gets traumatized because of events in the game to explain how you like to DM (more forgiving or more punishing to put it broadly), it's completely different when it's talked about like it's one of the best things to happen in the campaign despite it going completely against what the player wants and was not done within the context of actual story beats within the game and instead came from a mentality of "DM vs PCs"
@@gearsfan6669 Oh yeah I totally agree! I love darker stories and love adding new elements to my characters. (One drow Paladin of mine had to roll an anxiety check whenever he saw a spider lol.) But for a bit more clarification, I'm talking purely from a roleplay/story investment point of view. This dm did not mention this was going to be a dark story. I made a full orc LG wizard (a very silly character combo with a fairly simple intended story arch about overcoming toxic masculinity and misogyny). First session, DM dumps us in Fantasy North Korea. I am tasked with watching a noble we need to escape with, and he wanders off and gets horrifically murdered and strung up on a pike in the middle of town. Session 2 begins with my wizard finding his father not only dead, but a zombie, and has to kill him or else the other characters would have and bye bye entire character arc. Then (same session) finds his mother who explains that half of the family is now dead. As a pacifist character, I found him very hard to play after that cause logically... what was he supposed to do? His entire reason for adventuring got thrown out the window/sped through. (Also, the dm later revealed that if my character wasn’t in disguise, his mom would have told him he wasn't really an orc but a demi god. Like... WHAT?? How the f does a character function after all that bs?)
Depends. I traumatized a player character before. But it was more the characters past coming back to bite them in their old age more then just traumatizing them to traumatize them. That character ended up dying to save the rest of the party
I have a question about something like this. A Player of mine (my romantic partner) ended up falling in love with a spell caster. The spell caster had to stay to train further, and the player went on adventure to finish a quest before returning to the spell caster. In the meantime, however, Bounty hunters are going to basically slaughter everyone, including the spell caster, and hang them. (One of the Bounty hunters likes to keep a theme). This is going to be the first major terrifying thing to happen in the campaign (after about 4-6 sessions after leaving the spell caster). Is this okay?
One that I'd throw out there is that same texting red flag of one word answers (or overly short answers). I had a DM describe that we were in a wizard's tower, when I asked what does the room look like. His answer, "a room." I was quite stunned tbh, then curiously asked, "are there any doors?" "yeah, there are doors." "How many doors are there?" "8." "Do they have any defining features making them distinct from one another?" The convo continued, but I think you get the picture at this point. I almost wanted to ask him, "does my character have functioning eyes, and if so could I be told what said eyes see in plain sight?" I guess I should be glad he didn't require me to roll perception in order to see if I can see the plain sight doors.
One red flag that I think not many people watch out for: A DM that doesn't set good boundaries. Now this one can just be inexperience but I've found that in most cases if the DM has a well developed world, there are things that just won't mesh with that world and there's likely to be player requests that don't fit with the vision that the DM has for the world. A good DM will take the player input and discuss with the players how they could change it to fit the world/story. But some DMs have issues saying anything other than yes and in my mind this behavior will inevitably lead to a bad experience for all involved.
Liking because this is an important one, especially the 2nd part Because an inexperienced yes-man DM might not ruin everyones fun, but it will ruin their own, and the DM is as much as a player as anyone around the table
The first group I ran a game for hesitantly decided to let me DM. Nothing against me, but because the last DM said to everything even if it didn’t make sense. It had gotten to a point where no one was having fun because things were just happening with no logic. They ended up enjoying my DMing and it made them actually like the game whereas before they disliked it. This isn’t meant to sound like a humblebrag, but im just giving an example of how a DM that says yes to everything can lead to a bad time
"is my homebrew Plasmoid pirate ok?" Uh the tech level, society, and creatures of the setting are literally inspired by the epic of Gilgamesh and ancient Egyptian mythology. "Cool, Plasmoid pirate it is."
DMs who punish players for picking a race the DM doesn't like WITHOUT saying "hey I'm not a fan of this race, please choose something else." My first ever DM never told me about his burning hatred for elves, I played an elf ranger (this was back in 3.5) and he proceeded to humiliate my character every chance he could. NPCs would shit talk him, all my actions would have bizarre negative consequences and I had to have the rest of the party buy my own gear.
@@annoyanceking yeah but that's totally different from what I mentioned. I was given no warning about the DM's hatred for elves whatsoever and wasn't allowed to change characters after that.
My red flag was our dm kicking a guy out for eating the snacks we bring. If you say from the beginning that we have to bring snacks for everyone, you better be ready for those snacks to be consumed. Our DM made pizza and we all brought snacks, including the 'problem player' but was mad he ate more than everyone else. Like bro, what the fuck do you think we brought that shit for? It ain't decorative
@@catbatrat1760 The only reason I could see is if he's literally just gobbling it down leaving little for other people. Like yeah that'd be an asshole move. But if he just ate more than other people then so what lol.
You’re bringing up snacks, reminds me of the two food related incidents in my first campaign group. The first one being, I was gifted a birthday cake, specific kind of birthday cake I’ve been eating since I was a very young child, it’s very much like coffee cake, it’s top only with powdered sugar. Anyway, I knew I should not be eating that by myself, I eat the whole thing, not knowing why, at the time. So, given the composition of my DND group, I decided to bring it to them. Did not complain when I only had one slice left, but I promptly ate it three that morning, as in that morning. Other time involved me buying a Donatos pizza and accidentally getting the wrong size, which would be more food than I can handle. Guess what I did? It got demolished. Don’t worry, I wasn’t the only one bringing food, one guy brought chips and guacamole, or the chips and salsa? I forget which
As an aspiring dm and relatively new player the biggest red flag for me is just a lack of safety tools. I was in a group that I was initially stoked to be with because it was a My Hero Academia dnd rp, I'm kind of obsessed with heroes but, the problem is I don't know these people very well and I'm autistic so I don't always react well to teasing because my brain can't really tell if someone is just using dark / mean humor or genuinely being rude. It's a struggle that I and many others in the spectrum have where it's hard for us to read sarcasm and certain tones. So when a dm or group makes certain jokes and makes no effort to include you in or make sure you're okay with that kind of humor it can make things difficult. I have nothing against humor or even sexual jokes but, it's important that everyone at the table have an understanding of each other so that nothing gets mistranslated.
You've got this! Keep in mind your players feelings when doing stuff & how this is thier story equally as it is yours & you'll weave a beautiful tale with friends. Works 100% of the time, 90% of the time 😁🤙
If you do find things don't work out, go back, look at the books, ask the players what they think went wrong. Sometimes it will be very obvious (See source: my first time, i party wiped everyone with a bear because i mistranslated challenge ratings vs party level) other times it will be more subtle (First home brew I made I had a party that fell out of love for the campaign because they thought i was going too soft on them so they didn't feel like they had achieved anything). I have run some premade games successfully, and both of the parties i've subjected to my latest homebrew have had a great time because i went back and learned from my mistakes. Even if it doesn't work out, part of being a DM is figuring out how best to tell the story to your group.
@@nedgirl1361 my session is next week and I think I’ve built some challenges that are good for an early level campaign, I think I just got the pre-session DM jitters haha, and I remember a good tip which was scale the DC and HP on the fly depending on how the encounter is going, if the players are dealing too much damage for what I thought would be a difficult encounter, just add some more hitpoints to the monster to keep the fight going longer, or if I as the DM am kicking the players asses a little too hard when I thought it’d be fair, then lower the enemies hitpoints and DC, maybe even throw them a bone and just make the next round of attacks finish them off. But yeah, I think it’ll be a fun night.
Had another DM who made his setting racist against Dragonborn because a king used dragons to take over the world, so everybody hated anything remotely draconic. I took one look at that and said “Bet” and made a good-hearted Dragonborn Cleric who gained incredible spiritual resilience from the shite he went through because he was Dragonborn. Trauma just didn’t faze him, the dude did the right thing no matter how people saw him for it. No matter what the DM threw at him, he stayed true to his heart. That campaign didn’t end well (it got cancelled because of scheduling changes), but I made one of the coolest characters I have ever played. It left a mark on the other players as well.
That doesnt sound like a bad dm at all if he gave you a reason and warned you before hand, it sounds exactly like the kind of great stories you can make in such a setting, I would only hope that at least the ones you helped had a bit of a change
@@proxy90909 that's probably what would decide it. If the Characters actions had an effect on the world, changing people's opinions, then it's actually a good story beat. But if the DM insisted that everyone's attitudes remained completely static, no matter what happened, than it's a bad decision
I dont see that as a problem. If its a world that has been devastated and terrorized by dragons or a dragon, obviously those people will dislikes dragons/DragonBorn if it was a setting where there was no reason for it and everyone just hated dragonborn for no reason, thatd be different. Like during slavery in America, do you think it'd be wrong for the black slaves to hate the white people for enslaving them?
@@General_Flores the white people didn't enslave the blacks, it was their fellow Africans. Why don't they hate Africa? Instead of imagining it as wakanda?
I honestly think it's appropriate to tell players how they character feel or how a character acts in situations, like: "you enter a dark dungen and can't help it but feel a chill down your spine." But i always encourage players to tell me thats not how there characters react, like:" i don't feel a chill down my back, i grew up in Dungeons like this, strangely my character feels at home." I had great experience with this method
To a degree the DM can enforce emotions upon people. There is a reason systems have things like fear checks, etc. But it should be up to the player how their character deals with it (roleplaywise) as long as they incorporate the mechanical drawbacks if there is one involved. I would not consider telling a player that they feel a chill down their spine to be anything egregious. That's just setting a tone. And unless the character has some very specific reason that it doesn't make sense (e.g. they're a mechanical construct, or they have some kind of fearless trait or whatever) it's not like you can control when you feel something involuntary like that.
In the JRWI: Riptide podcast, there was a moment where the puzzle was "Do an act of love!" so Gillion decided to kiss Chip. The DM described them seeing the wall crack open, forming a doorway to the next room. Chip's player said "I don't notice" and explained that Chip would be too stunned to do anything other than stare at Gillion, so only Gillion reacted to the newly-opened door.
Not only is this great for roleplaying, it's a good rule for general narrative story telling. If you call the BBEG's castle a "Large menacing castle, with an ominous atmosphere", that is less informative and more prescriptive, while describing it as "A castle with scorched basalt walls, with heavy dark clouds threatening to release a storm" that is both more descriptive and also allows the players to make their own judgements about the appearance of the castle (Maybe a PC is a dwarf who grew up around basalt, or a frog-folk who sees a oncoming rainstorm and feels a good appetite for waterlogged earth worms ready for picking).
This small list of DM red flags was all giving to me from my first DM that introduced me to the ttrpg life. 1.Punishing the players for creativity and doing well in game by placing impossible obstacles or enemies in front of us. For they thought it was too "easy for us." 2. Running official modules and calling it their own home brew. 3. Always "losing" the character sheets. I now hold onto my character sheets because of this. 4. Always no matter the game, character, or setting has all npcs hit on my girl friend. 5. Reference to #3 calls it a "campaign" but never gets passed game or session one. The longest we ever played was 4 games. 6. Interpreting the rules or abilities differently to favor his story or to give his bad guy the "advantage." 3 examples are me playing a redemption paladin in 5e and trying to use my channel Divinity to reflect incoming damage and was told, "It's the staff doing the damage to you not the Caster and it says you target the hostile creature and the staff isn't one." Then playing a World of Darkness and I punched a ghost with salted Knuckle raps, "character an experienced man fighter may I add," crit success and preceeded to fly throw the ghost full force, breaking my hand and forearm on the sink.Then playing a Shadowrun game as a Drone Rigger and never being able to use any form of drone cuz it "scares and startles people" in a futuristic setting and always got caught. 7. Rage quit a game when we handed his mini boss, big obstacles or BBEG their ass from kicking it so hard. 8. Never looking over the tables character sheets before the first game and then disapproves either the whole character, specific items in the inventory, or by over powered the character is. Example when I played Icons with this Speedster that can duplicate and had 4 arms wielding swords and cleared a whole building of goons before the BBEG of the game noticed. Then over powered the boss by speed and out numbering them. "If I knew this character was this powerful I wouldn't have let you play it." Me, "Then why when I handed the sheet you looked at it and said it was ok and I asked are you sure?" Overall I will say I learned alot from this and decided to try DMing myself and asked my friends that were playing with me at the time and we've playing and having fun with all ttrpg's we've tried since for 7 years now.
1. Agreed about punishing players for creativity, but some tasks/obstacles being impossible (for the PC's) is fine I think. I'm not a fan of players who think they should be able to do anything with their current PC's "if they just roll good enough". Players should know when to not push their luck because they're being dumbos.F around and find out, basically. It makes the world more "real" and immersive. 2. Lol I've never seen that before 3. this seems less of a DM red flag and more about what type of person you don't want to give responsibilities. 4. Wut. If a PC is very attractive it makes sense for people to hit on them, but if it's happening constantly and only to your GF yeah that's weird lol. 5. At this point starting to think this guy is maybe just not suited for DM'ing. 6. In general fudging rules and skills as a DM is actually a pretty good skill to have as a DM. But you should do it in a way that makes the game better and without players realizing it. Sure this can lead to your BBEG getting away with something where he probably would have died by the mechanics. But it could also mean the PC's surviving where they wouldn't have. But it shouldn't be abused or overt, and it shouldn't be done just because you want the story to go a certain way (players should feel like they have an impact on the story and that their choices matter). If you do fudge things and it does seem weird to players, it's usually best to be mysterious about it. Then you have more time to come up with a reason justifying it. 7. Sounds like he's treating it more as a game of GM vs Players, instead of wanting to enjoy a cooperative story. 8. Yeh GM's should not complain about a character after they've OK'd it. That's dumb. At most they can say something like "I didn't realize it was going to work like this, so I think we have to tweak things a bit before the next session". You can alter stuff for the future or change your mind, but not complain like it's the players fault that they made the character they made despite you OK'ing it.
That’s usually my reason. That or if it’s way unbalanced for the intended power creep of the campaign. I also tend to ban LA races in low start campaigns. I’m fine with LA 1 and maybe 2 for campaigns that start at lvl 1, but I’ll only allow my more seasoned players LA 2 and up, since they’re more likely to understand the delayed growth, and not feel like they’re being left behind.
I'm creating a world that's murderously racist towards Fairies and Kender for different reasons, and I fully intend on letting my players know that picking these races is like playing on hard mode
I banned warforged, kenkus, and undead in my Exandria campaign. Warforged, because the game was set prior to Vox Machina, and the warforged/aeormatons were still extinct in that time period. Kenkus, because they can't talk and I didn't want to deal with a mute PC (my dmpc was a kenku though, specifically so I wouldn't be tempted to give hints through her). And undead, because my dmpc was a grave cleric and there's no logical reason she would tolerate being around an undead. Luckily, none of my players wanted to play any of those races, so it barely came up.
An obsession with horrifying gore scenes outside of when they are meant to happen. Note that when I say gore I mean anything beyond bloody, disgusting, and vile, including things that are outside of a dead body (things that traumatize people for life IRL). “Gore” is a simplification for things that I’d get canceled for immediately if I wasn’t anonymous. If it is in an extremely dark fantasy campaign, then I don’t mind the intense gore at every corner. It makes sense, and adds to the depressing, terrifying, hopeless, dark atmosphere. I also don’t mind it if it is every once in a while in a regular fantasy campaign. However, some DMs out there are OBSESSED with gore, to the point where you feel uncomfortable even wandering through a regular, inhabited castle’s dungeon. One of my DMs was like this. If you entered a weak kobold den, you’d likely find several bodies, dead or alive, that have been “gored”. If you fell into a trapdoor in a dungeon that opened into a floor of spikes, you’re fall would be cushioned by dozens of dead bodies piled up, with excruciating details from the DM about what the gory mess looked like. You’d think the descriptions would be less uncomfortable and gross since they are merely spoken, but with my (and frankly all D&D players’s) strong imagination it quickly comes to life in your mind. I’ve felt sick a few times just hearing what vile things this woman thought up in her head. She’s my favorite DM for dark fantasy campaigns. But we absolutely forbid her from DMing regular sessions. We only allow a moderate amount of tragedy in her own characters’ backstories when she isn’t the DM, else she’ll make her character extremely traumatized from vile Shit that no person, fantasy race or not, would feasibly have to suffer
Omg! This one is a big one for me! I love a good dark campaign/Horror film, but all the time is a big nope. Had a dm that would constantly try to horrifically traumatize the party like every session. I think in the first 3 sessions, my character alone had someone they were supposed to be protecting eviscerated on a pike, had to kill his own (now undead) father, and learn that half his family was slaughtered. Was real hard to play that character as intended after that.
As a group, we decide before every campaign, what was to be "off limits" usually any signs or signal of sexual assault are off limits. Intense gore as well just seems unnecessary.
I had a GM who loved to make everyone uncomfortable. We were constantly fighting poo monsters, encountering gore and horror, slavery etc, having things injected into our backstories that made us cringe (incest, etc), and the GM really got off on knowing we weren't happy about any of it. Once when we were objecting, he actually said "I will not censor my art!". Well, he lost a lot of players over the next few sessions; I don't envy anyone who stayed. Dude has more problems than that, though: he's a very clear-cut case of narcissism and he liked to be in control and hurt people emotionally. Since then, I've associated an excessive love of gore with that type of personality.
@@danielhale1 Slavery is fine in D&D, it can be an important part of the world and a great setup for world building. As long as it isn’t too intense, I think that is fine.
Its one of my current dms. I am playing a Dwarf-Orc called Torwynn. She's a bit of a dummy but very strong. My issue was her father (who died when she was 10) was turned into a monster she had to fight and kill twice using the axe her father gave her, all while sobbing. What annoyed me, was that I and my character wasn't given time to grieve or process what happened and were immediately thrown into another dumb combat situation where the DM did stealth fails of 'you fart' or 'your ass cheeks clap together so loud you're heard'. I was really mad at him for a while and considered leaving the game altogether. I later went and wrote what I wanted to happen and accept that more than what happened in session. It helped me get through it, mostly because I'm not ready to let go of Torwynn yet.
When I was younger and dumber I took my character (non-dnd rpg where the dm had characters) and she went from a mentally and emotionally strong person to a mentally unstable vessel for their inner demon (now physically manifested) to control. An interesting concept if done right and filtered accordingly. This was a whole campaign in itself and I overused the villain, didn’t communicate with my players (sisters) about themes they were uncomfortable with, and made them feel like there was no solution (there was, the demon just manipulated them a lot, not an excuse though). After that era I realized what I was doing and my sisters and I mentally burned anything related to that campaign. This event happened when I was an edgy 14 year old and I have since become a better DM. Me and my sisters still roleplay together and we have long moved on from that dark era.
A red flag for me is DMS that script player character death without talking to the player first. I've played under a couple DMS where a player showed up and was informed "hey you're character is dead because 'plot,' time to roll up a new one."
The Matt Mercer reference is actually not terribly valid as an example. Matt actually had a situation where he COULD have done something like the op is saying. It happened MUCH earlier and it was when his Boss npc should and would have levitated up but this character had no legendary actions. He stuck to his actions even though that character would have known better. If the gorgon experience is anything it was Matt learning that legendary actions are needed when so many players actually know what they are doing. Liam O’Brian’s was underestimated in the earlier encounter so Matt started being a little more thorough with combat encounters.
Ehhh I'd say it depends. If my party decides that they want to maybe find a back entrance to a pirate cove to sneak in undetected in the middle of the night, I'll make a back entrance to said cove, and maybe add bedrooms here and there to make the strategy actually work. If you're changing the dungeon purely to screw over the party, however... then I agree.
@@yourface2464 should’ve specified, yeah that’s what I mean. Like if the dm says the wall is 30 ft tall with no guards. Then the rogue says “oh I have 50 ft of rope.” Now suddenly the wall is actually 80 ft with watchtowers
i got one ignoring your characers moral stances or even how they act entirely so i started my first campaign our dm was my ex friends brother i made my character to be a pacifist and didnt like killing there enemies so the first swarm i said i wanted to knock them out you know not kill them i roll a nat 20 so the dm litterally said i ripped off the enemies arm and beat them with it causing them to die from bloodloss the i started beating the others to death i didnt know much about dnd but this swayed me away from it until i found good friends to dnd with now i love dnd
@@gregorysoldatman to actually spite it could be "You attacked them with the Intention of knocking them out,But you accidently punched them so Hard that your hand went right through the chest,The other Two were so terrified of you after seeing that they Started Fleeing" or smth idk That would be a Good way of Spiting Op(Make his character kill because of the Crit) while at the same time maintaining the character Personality of a Pacifist
I have a character concept in my brain that I might use as a litmus test if I ever join an in-person D&D group--a blue Tiefling Vengance Paladin. If the DM gives me shit about making my Tiefling blue (and doesn't have some sort of lore reason to justify it), then they're probably gonna give me shit about anything not RAW.
I mean just because it isn't RAW doesn't mean that you can't just ask your DM for it. But the DM may want to play up how strange a blue Tiefling is unless you ask them not to make a big deal out of it. Besides it's not like you're asking to start off with a shotgun.
@@pinkdaveandchaps3697 That last sentence is exactly why I'm doing it--if my DM is gonna die on such a minor hill (again, without lore reasons to justify why a blue tiefling can't exist in-universe), then he's probably just low-key a control freak. As far as it being treated as odd, again, if there's a lore reason for why a blue tiefling is so rare that it would get everyone's attention then I can live with that as long as I'm told in advance. Even if it's just "Yours is the result of a rare mutation never seen before by most", give me something to justify it. But if it comes right tf out of nowhere then it'll just come off as passive aggressive.
I think having ppl be drunk or high is only fun if it's either kept to moderate, non-impairing quantities (like 1 glass of wine) or EVERYONE is drunk/high. Otherwise it just feels like everyone else has to babysit the ntoxicated people and you're not on the same wavelenght.
Dictating characters actions/feelings is the biggest for me. If it's not magical compulsion (and not constant if that) you need to lay down the law or walk.
This- then when a magical effect -is- effecting a character the DM might tell the player what effect they're under and ask how the character reacts/feels to put it back in their hands. Ex: You are under a fear effect and are frightened how does (Character Name) react? Mind you, because of the effect (Character Name) can't move any closer to the enemy.
That's one of the worst. Many people put great effort into developing their character's personalities, so such behavior from the DM (other than being intrusive) makes them feel like all this work doesn't mean anything.
I had a player walk from my table when he encountered a creature with a fear effect that he failed the check against, he insisted that I was taking away his agency and disrespecting his backstory since his character "didn't know fear." I had to make his character immune to fear effects or he wouldn't come back, at level 3.
I like the script-writer's commentary! Adds another point of view rather than just reading what happened. Not that it wasn't good with just reading, but both is nice.
Only red flag that made me turn around was when I put out a generic looking for a group application in this one discord. Got one guy offering to let me join his, but I had to tell him how much I knew about Japanese culture/history and be willing to read his 20+ pages of homebrew. This *could* have been a decent game but going off d&d horror stories the odds whern't in its favor
DMs who decide that when they kill a PC, they will mutilate the PC so revival is much harder (beheading, torn limb from limb, etc). I had a plauer get gutted, but not in a way that stopped revival. And even then, that player and I already had a system of Revival in place as he was NOT the body, but a Symbiotic Mask worn by said bidy. Also, dms who not only share art a player shared privately with them, with the entire group without asking said player. But also those who share NSFW art without asking the party if they are okay with it.
As far as body mutilation, this used to be a major part of the game, with higher level, more expensive spells needed for reviving players who are disintegrated or maimed. If the players and the DM are both okay with playing that kind of game, where life is cheap and death is cheaper, that's fine, but it's definitely a matter of taste. You seem to have found a talent for that type of gameplay, but if you don't enjoy it, what's the point?
Thank you. This was the channel that showed me what end was. 4 years later, I've stopped watching you for a while but I always come back, and it feels like home. Thank you
My biggest red flag is DMs who insist on having DMPCs in the party. I had a DM who had a rule of always having a minimum of 1 DMPC per player on the table, sometimes 2 per player. To make matters worse it was obvious the story always revolved around them to the point where he hijacked another player's background villain to be about one of his characters instead. We overheard the villain talking about how he doesn't care about that player's character anymore and is now only worried about the chosen of the fairy goddess (one of his many DMPCs). When I tried to tell him his focus on himself was ruining the game he refused to listen to me, saying I was the only one who didn't like it. At that point, what was originally a 4 players game had already been reduced to just me and one other girl who kept sending me Crit Crab videos and comparing it to our DM, but he still thought I was the only one who didn't like the game...
I joined a group off of the official dnd discord server once. The dm decided that the way we were going to level up was by killing our characters. (With free revives but still) on top of this, it seemed like nothing we did really mattered, as he would just kill us in every situation we found ourselves in. I did not stick around for session 2.
I am enjoying the script writer adding to it as I feel like more commentary from experts are really helpful to understand and enjoy these games. I like listening to Matt Mercer talk about the rules and ideas but never watch CR as that's their game, not mine.
I am SO GLAD you brought up Commander Shepard and Garrus in response to the cross-species romance discussion. I am currently playing through the Mass Effect series for the first time and I LOVE Garrus and am attempting his romance arc. I got a little indignant when the op said "why would a reptilian Vesk be attracted to a mammalian humanoid," so I am SO happy you brought that up because I was thinking the SAME FREAKING THING. Garrus is best husbando.
No, no no no, no, it's not "A little over the line" for the gm to decide, describe and draw attention to a player character getting an erection at the sight of an npc. it's creepy, and weird, and 100% of the time it should be the player who says if they are attracted to an npc or not. Gms do not just get to make things happen to player characters for jokes. Especially sexual stuff. That is a giant pile of red flags and something I would absolutely walk from a table over.
My Red Flag: Encouraging Player vs Player Conflicts. I joined a Curse of Strahd game half-way through the campaign, only to find out that half of the party was changelings or vampires actively screwing over the rest of the party. My own character got turned into a werewolf in that game, and the DM took control of my character in the final fight and used my character against the rest of the party against my will.
I'm not against encouraging PvP if that's what the players are down for. --but keeping what kind of game you are playing secret from the players is a major red flag. I know that old-school werewolf rules actively encouraged DMs to take control of were-beast PCs while they were transformed, to make the inability to control the homicidal monster personality an actual threat, like in '70s werewolf movies, but ever since 3.5 that has been strictly a sidebar rule covered in caution tape. It firmly laid out that you should seriously discuss this with players before introducing this mechanic, at least after they find out they have been transforming, and that you should only use this tool if you know exactly what you are doing.
I run a DnD campaign that takes place in an apocalyptic scenario. The world slowly coming to life. Literally. Turning into a fleshy, eldritch monster with hair instead of grass, for example. Organs instead of underdark caves, too. I have this murder hobo character in our party. Well, not murder hobo, more like "beat up everyone and do what I want despite the obvious story." He'd randomly beat up NPCs if they even made one wrong move. He once abandoned the party during a bossfight just to run away with his pet boar. And then he opened a door to another world, a world he made, which was just Camelot. His character is themed around knights and King Arthur. I had to improvise on the spot, "the world you once knew has been consumed by the forest and bushes, your kingdom long since abandoned-" (he's been gone for 127ish years). And he responded with, immediately, "no, it's not. It's thriving." Keep in mind, he hadn't told me any of this beforehand. He didn't even make a map for me to use. He just did this because yes. Fortunately, though, he listened to me next campaign when I told him I was uncomfortable with the idea of having to do two campaigns at once, one in his world and one in ours. And then it grew worse. He's back to beat-up hobo mode. And it kinda helps, as we need combat in the place we visited. A kingdom with rapidly-dwindling supplies, since the world's crops are turning into... fertilizer. 😶 There's this corrupt castle in the middle of the kingdom, with a King who feeds on the starving townfolk for survival, keeping the queen locked in the basement. The queen being his sister. This is a "we must keep the bloodline pure" family. Later, we encounter their son. Who's obviously got some birth defects, mostly physical and some mental. But a kind soul, with a rather inquisitive mind and good intentions. His motivation for helping us? "I wanna do good. I wanna... I wanna see the trees again, I wanna see grass..." He's 4 years old, too. Beat-up hobo, out of character, begins to make fun of the kid because of how ugly he looks, and begins to call him a freak and laugh more. Then, in-game, he has his character grab the kid by the arm and scream at him to interrogate him on the location of the kid's father. This begins an argument at the table with us and him about how abnormally cruel the Knight is to this kid, WHO IS FOUR, and how he didn't ask to be born like that. That it's not justifiable to make fun of him for being "freakish."
Biggest red flag: The DM isn’t lenient or fun with creativity at all. There are two DMs that stand out to me when it comes to this. One was super fun and let us do all sorts of wacky shit (within reason as to not ruin the game), and the other had a stick up their ass and would literally pull out the most recent rule book if she suspected anything. If I asked if my poison gas spell(? might be cantrip) was flammable, the first DM would say “Sure, why not, but only if the gas isn’t too thick in the area” and I would have to release a small amount of poison gas and then ignite it to create a small explosion. The second DM would likely kick me from the session by having a “gang of mountain barbarians kidnap me in my sleep” or just straight up kill me and make a bullshit excuse as to how I am still alive in the next session.
As a lifelong DM myself I have some empathy with strict DMs. In the back of my mind, I'm always generalizing creative ideas that my players have and ask myself "Could they do this to trivialize the next 10 encounters I throw at them?". From where I'm sitting your cool idea could well be the end to most challenges I can throw at you. That being said, my answer is still "Yes" 90% of the time and if I decline it'll always be a "No, but..." answer that still lets you be cool. After all, that one time your party completely trivialized an encounter with an adult black dragon by using a BoH full of sodium hydroxide (neutralizing the dragons acid in a VERY volatile way) is something that will still be talked about at your table years from now. In those cases it's best to just take the L and let your players have their moment
As that rare species of DM who also has done enough being a PC, I always create a campaign that the group should love. Not just myself. And all I ask is the group at least tries to play along and experience the work I put in. If the DM has some obvious hooks when i'm a PC, I throw them a bone and take a few of them. Not always, but thats how i see how it should be done. Your all working to create a story together.
I tend to feel when a DM hammers in certain buzzwords such as "Gritty" "dark fantasy" or "realistic" they're codes for "You're going to be miserable so don't play"
Creating a world where characters can be miserable while payers are still having fun is a lot harder than it looks, and sadly a lot of people attempt it before they are ready.
I've said this in comments before and I'll say it again. Forcing draws of the deck of many things just when it's visible whether they are wanted or not, rolling against doing them. Also with another dm, attempting to beef encounters literally just to kill off a character (my barbarian) cause he kept getting random magic stuff, not my fault the dm decided to roll all loot random.
Personally, I wanted to thank you Brian for the kind and motivational words at the end of the video. I recently struggled with a person that did that kind of thing constantly. He would belittle my hobbies, how I would do things, and would constantly question why I enjoyed certain things, only to throw in exactly why he didn't like like doing those same things. Needless to say, I have quite the story. Recently I had to not only kick out a member of one of my tables, but also tragically ended a friendship with someone who had some of the stereotypical red flags, both in DnD and in the general social life. We were starting up a custom homebrew of my own design. It was session 0 and I could already sense that this particular person was already setting things up his 'usual' way whenever he would come to the table as a player. Whether or not he did this to take advantage of new DM's, or to purposefully manipulate situations into his favor, I can only speculate. Nevertheless, he had multiple red flags present even before session 0 of my homebrew kicked off. Starting off my own campaign, as a requirement of mine, I had my players share copies of their character sheets. Because of him I had to create a custom homebrew rule to clarify that the players may choose one background at level 5, but could 'study' for a second. His character sheet was already overpowered with all sorts of customized items, skill proficiencies, and abilities that I hadn't heard of before, and, being a newer DM in his own homebrew, my gut feeling felt something was fishy. It didn't help his case as this player would use manipulative tactics such as, "Does that mean I get two backgrounds? I think so, I shall get two backgrounds," before I could make an objection, or he would ask questions of "would that be a dc of 5 or 10?" before I could answer him to try and get away with a lowered save difficulty. He would do this constantly as a player, to myself and to my roommate who would also occasionally DM for us. As a result of this player having two backgrounds on session 0, I enforced the rule that his character could not have two "PHD's" which gave him the multiple backgrounds. (I know this sounds controlling on my part, but I could already tell I was going to have problems with this person). I informed him that he would start with one "PHD", and work for the next in pertaining to the lore of my campaign. Part of the campaign was that any formal education was gained through a large prestigious school located in the capital city, or you could gain education by finding a master to help you learn a skill and then take a mastery test at said capital's school. You would get one background "for free" from this school starting out, but had to work on getting more as your character developed. He made 0 changes to his character sheet, and proceeded to overly criticize the campaign as soon as it started. This player has been notorious for creating characters with exceedingly high stats to where they were difficult to hit, and would guarantee a success on pretty much any roll of a commonly used skill, minus a nat 1. He was also known to become passive aggressive, or he would 'sulk in the corner,' whenever he didn't get his way in a situation, or if this same group of friends did something else that he didn't want to do. He was notorious for becoming passively aggressive when things were not done perfectly or by the rules 'as he understood them' or by the book and would try to manipulate situations to where people would feel uncomfortable. He was known for being a rules lawyer at times, especially when he was DMing his own version of Curse of Strahd (pretty sure he would play favorites with certain players as some players would incur steep penalties while others would get away with a whole lot o loot; I could never confirm this). Yet during his times as a player, he would attempt to sway in rules (abuse the 'rule of cool') in order to dodge penalties such as taking damage or would interrupt game play to explain something to where he would completely ruin the mood. He would constantly stall games and combats arguing as to why he should be allowed (or to disallow someone else) to do something. This happened all throughout my homebrew's first session. Reguardless, my campaign's session 0 concluded and everyone, minus him, was happy with the outcome. My other players thanked me for the action packed session and they all went home. (The players were still on session 0 technically as they hadn't met up at the true player bonding point yet). Next morning outside of session I get a text from this player that he and his then girlfriend, her also being one of my best friends didn't feel like they got the plot of the story. (He liked to take it upon himself to speak for her as he thought he always knew best; something that she eventually came to hate). Before the game began, the players were textually informed that there were rumors of a particular artifact that existed, and the players needed to go after said artifact by which of their own reasoning for obtaining such an item. This factor was explained in the prologue to session 0 before game play even began, though I realized that this was a mistake on my part and have changed how this will start up. As a result I decided to scrap the original start of the game, and restarted the campaign over with a brand new beginning to give my players a different experience while tying in the plot. Needless to say, this player's girlfriend and the rest of my players were not very happy about my feeling I had to restart a whole campaign because it didn't fit his liking, but they respected my decision. Incredibly this was a decision of which, come to find out later, actually worked out in favor of all of us. In an incident unrelated to DnD some time between sessions, this player caused some drama with his now Ex girlfriend, of which myself and a few other of my players had to intervene in order to calm her down and get her away from him. After dealing with that situation, which triggered some issues with some of my own past trauma, we all came to the conclusion collectively that this person was not only never allowed to play DnD with us again, but that we were never going to interact with this person due to the level of toxicity he portrayed. As it currently stands, this person will never join a table with me, and is now out of my life for good (hopefully). As for my own self, I will be kicking off the new year with fewer toxic people in my life, a better group of friends, and a better start to a custom homebrewed DnD campaign.
I actually try to flavor combat according to rolls and what the players fighting styles are like, mainly because it's hard to get my players to attack with anything more descriptive than "I got a 17." Nobody has expressed any problems with this before, and in fact I've been complimented on illustrating a complex battle scene. Of course, the system isn't D&D specifically, and generally there's only 1 attack per turn, but I want my players to have a clear mental image of what's going on. In contrast, I'm a player in a separate campaign where players will just say things like "Make a wisdom save DC 16" - DM says, "Fail." - Player says, "He takes 11 psychic damage." And I'm like what the heck is going on? I don't need the spell name but like... what does my character actually see happening?!
My big one is when a dm insists that ever encounter must be "deadly." This makes the players make stronger characters, so the dm makes the monsters stronger, so the players make their character stronger... on and on it goes until every fight is a bitter war of attrition that leaves everyone miserable. I call it the doom spiral.
My favorite example of the opposite of this is the Baldening from JRWI: Riptide. It was a combat encounter where the enemies' only goal was to shave off the hair of the party members. Nobody used lethal force, and any damage the PCs took was in the form of getting their hair clipped.
one of my biggest deal breaker ones that i ran into just a few minutes ago is DMs that seem obsessed with not letting your stats be your stats basically his argument was that my wizard with +8 INT and +6 to arcana knows next to nothing about magic regardless of rolls because the party is level 1 i put forth the argument that even a level 1 wizard has already spent years reading, researching, and experimenting his reply? "as god i reserve my right to be a terrible person" except so much more assholey than that i blanked the exact wording from my memory. i replied that i had no interest in playing skyrim with extra steps and walked out immediately. for context the knowledge in question was what the ethereal plane is and how bags of holding work. no this was not in an attempt to cheese anything.
If they call for a saving throw with no reason given for why it's needed, and then giggle when someone fails or express disappointment on a success. That just says to me 'how much can I traumatize this character/player?'
If you have learned to dread a person's happiness, that is not a good person and you should stop being around them. As a DM I love the drama that can emerge when players struggle a bit for their victory, and a few curses and poisons that pile up over the course of a dungeon can give them a sense of dragging themselves to the finish line. It makes them feel like they earned a win, instead of snowballing over some trash mobs. If you have cheesy players who resent the traditional stat penalty curses, because they like rolling hits and whatnot, you can invent sillier situations for the dungeon defenses to slap them with. Half of the party is now floating 3" off the floor and is unable to pick up objects, so if they need anything from down there, they'll need to ask for help. The orc fighter now only speaks elvish. The handsome swashbuckler has an allergic reaction to the toxic dart and his face is purple and swollen for 2d6 days, and must figure out who he is without his looks. The passage to the exit collapses and there is no way to go except forwards, so I hope you weren't planning to fall back to camp for a long rest after every encounter (You know who you are).
I once had a DM send me a homebrew class telling me I should play it. I had wanted to play a cleric, but the class he sent me seemed cool so I just ran with it and made my character. Now one thing I should mention about this DM is, while this was my first time playing with him, the other players had played a campaign he DMed before and informed me he doesn't allow feats because he thinks they're overpowered. Anyways, there was a built in class feature that let this homebrew class attack a creature twice pretty early on, I think it was either 1st or 2nd level. When I used this in the first combat he told me that it was overpowered and I can't do that anymore. On it's own I probably would have said, "sure whatever," but they fact that he sent me this class to play and didn't even know what it did and changed what it did when he didn't like it made me upset and I never played with him again after that session.
@@mrosskne you're not wood elf, you're drow, you're not leaving home because you're the 7th of 12 children, and have no hope of inheritance, you're an only child.
@@mrosskne ah, looks like you're one of those fake gigachad type people that goes around saying the worst type of shit for attention on every comment so he can come off as "based". a _real_ gigachad would mind his own goddamn business.
As a DM I kinda have beef to pick with the first complaint about "player creativity". There's a very fine line with what should and shouldn't be allowed with creativity, and the applications of it are hazy at best. Everyone knows it's very satisfying to create a solution to a seemingly unsolvable situation, it's a great feeling. However, a common problem with "creativity" is that a lot people confuse a smart way something might be used with how something is actually used. For example, a bridge is going to collapse because the ropes are cut from the center while you and your party are on it, and a smart player might try to cast something like cast web before it snaps. Holding it together. This falls in line within reasonable expectations of the spell, albeit not explicitly written in it. A fair use of creativity. However, a bad example (I've had this exact situation happen before) is lets say an enemy is going to blow a war horn and alert the camp that there are intruders, and the Artificer casts Air Bubble inside the instrument to block the sound. Now see, Air bubble doesn't do that. (In fact, the creature has to be willing to even have it cast on them). The spell creates a sphere of breathable air, it doesn't block sound or prevent air flow or anything that would be effective here. This is a player going "I want to cast X and win". This was a bad feeling because in this case the creativity was a crutch they tried to rely on, instead of actually thinking of a solution they could actually do. Which is the main problem. It encourages players to attempt to use spells/abilities for things that spell/ability can't reasonably do. Such as freezing a river with cone of cold, (even though there is a specific spell for this EXACT kind of situation). A player will try to use "creative" solutions as a way to be lazy instead of coming up with a "real" solution. Which sounds objective, but part of the game aspect of DnD should be working with tools you have, not tools you wish you had. You can't just make a potion that does exactly what you need today, you can't just find the item you need right now when you need it. Players should feel the agency of their decisions, their items, their choices in spells and a DM should play into what the players want to do so the players feel like those choices matter. A player might feel like "This DM is shutting down my creative solutions", but in my opinion, going that far out the bounds of how spell is used, shows a lack of creativity, because you're just making up a solution you don't reasonably have. Our bard in the second example didn't have silence prepared, and he was honest about it so he couldn't solve that situation. However, it made him think, "in stealth ops I should really have this spell!" Which is a good learning experience and shows that he's thinking about how to apply spells to situations outside of just combat.
When I was a much Younger Dm meaning back in the mid 80's I was the bad dm limiting races and classes for campaines and oneshots and even handing out premade character sheets so the characters would fit the world.. a couple times it ended terribly, figured out the premade characters can work if you at least let the players choose who they want to play rather then assigning them. Had a player call me out as a DM for not allowing artificer or warforged in my games and one shots last year, They threw a fit even though I told them that I didn't have the books for that class or race. That player kept at me to the point I almost broke with the group I was DM'ing for, fortunately I now have those books and on a couple occasions I even Homebrew specific classes or races for the players. I still dm and play with the group, I have lost a few groups over the years mostly because of players or myself moving out of the area.
I still say that limiting player races, classes or subclasses (as long as they aren't PHB) is fine if something makes you uncomfortable. Especially if you don't own the book it's in.
Sometimes we do have to rush the players along in certain scenarios though and I mean that's just kind of how it is like when I pitched the game that I had written out recently to my current three players I told them this is specifically designed to take for or five sessions and I wrote it that way because I knew I would only have 5 weeks tops that I could dedicate the time slot to dming that particular game and I gave them the parameters of it before we all started and made sure to explain the limited scope of it all and now two sessions later I'm getting complaints that it feels like where like I'm boxing them in. I've had to remind two of them already that I specifically stated I wrote this game out to last four or five sessions two of the three of them expected to go into perpetuity I clearly said it was quite literally the second line in the game pitch quite literally the second line in fact it might have actually been the second sentence they were all made very clear on that topic and that point before we started and they've already forgotten two sessions later we can't wrap up a game in 4 to 5 sessions if the players just go completely into left field and go do something entirely irrelevant like I understand that railroading is bad but playing a module is also railroading and what I wrote was a module everyone agreed to play it and then all of a sudden nobody wants to do that so forgive me for rushing my players along if they can't be asked to actually read the game pitch
DMs who find joy in "beating" the players. D&D isn't about purposely trying to make the players lose, and DMs who see it that way are immediately off the table for me. Another would be the DM that treats D&D as a... activity you should do in private... if you know what I mean. It's never happened to me yet, but I remember seeing an example of it in the video on "what made you nope out of a campaign" and it disgusted me to no end.
That very last one (enforced LGBTQ) is a blissfully rare thing in TTRPGs, but in the MUD/MUCK/MUSH world of online text games it's way more common. The number of characters I've had get crap for not being X or Y is too damn high. "She's not interested" gets treated like a personal attack. And pointing to the PCs I've made that *are* didn't much help in said cases. (sidenote, LGBT players tended *not* to be the people prone to that behavior, if anything they call that out as unfair when they see it. It's Cishet who do it in the MUD world and I have no idea why.)
It's called "white-knighting", a.k.a. people "defending the honor" of others to "keep them from being offended" (when most of the time those people aren't offended at all by the action in question).
I once had a DM who would always cry about how horrible her campaigns were, but never actually try to improve. The list of things they did included: Extreme railroading. Dmpcs stealing the spotlight and we couldn't get rid of them for plot reasons. Ignoring when a player was uncomfortable with their character being de-clothed and pushing through with it anyways, and many, many more incidents.
Biggest red flag for me when I played D&D 4.5 is that the DM didn't reprimand the other players who deliberately punishing my character in game simply because I made a in-character decision that they out of character didn't like, and basically said DM just makes excuses for their behavior needless to say I had to leave the group despite my attempts to not start a fight when said DM allowed say asshole players to kill my character in her sleep for BS reasons.
DMs who are more interested in their story than yours. Example: Had a DM who seemed super into his own story, but whenever the party say, wanted to RP with a family member, he'd seem super out of it. Thankfully I've gotten better DMs since then, but it did sorta make me afraid of making my own story.
I once had a DM face a 1st level party with a Revenant in a situation where the party had to flee and leave their paralyzed friend behind. The only possible outcome was that one party member dies first session. In our case 3 of 5 party members died. This wasn’t an isolated incident. In nine months of playing with that group I lost 5 characters and never reached 5th level. The DM would just say “this is old school dnd we’re characters die a lot” or “sometimes the dragon wins”. Some of the players never lost a character because they ran away from every encounter and the fighter types got left holding the bag. I was happy when Covid hit and the group broke up.
“Anything said at the table is audible in game.” My first and favorite gaming group had this rule. In combat it didn’t matter because it would just be us tapping tactics. In RP it made it more engaging. You had to think before you spoke, so staying in character was easier and lead to incredibly dramatic moments at major character arcs. The rule was if you didn’t want to say it, somebody just needed to say “out of character, but…”. This would allow us a couple minutes to clarify any questions we had pertaining to how the situation came about, to ask the DM if there were details we were missing for a situation, etc. but it was always for the benefit of the RP experience. Never a detriment.
What I dont like about that rule is that People might not have the same intelligence or Charisma as their character. Just like I dont force players to actually lift a metal door or slash through a monsters head IRL I also dont force my players to off-game solve puzzles or flirt to succeed ingame. I do ofcourse allow roleplay to a high degree and encourage it, but on those types of rolls (especially social) I ask for their general approach + goal and then we role. The role then gives us the outcome of the talk which then makes it easier to roleplay :)
I was worried for a moment when I heard the "Starfinder, disallowed races". When I first picked up the corebook, I read through it and saw that Vesk/Solarians are a bit OP when combined. I told my group I wasn't allowing them for balance issues until I could find an errata to make sure I wasn't reading too far into it. As for my person red flags in a DM: I had a DM, in one of the few times I got to be a player, who had a board behind him with tick marks on it, and written across was "TPK Counter". It had close to twenty tick marks. Asked about it. "When I get bored of a group, I just TPK them and we start something new." I just left. That didn't sound fun at all.
DM's who nerf pc skills/spells. Had a dm once that got pissed because my warlock had a quasit (pact of the chain) that had invisibility and could fly, so i could basicly scout ahead. He did not know i had the quasit as he didnt bother to ask/check what kind of characters the players had, and as we were about to enter a cave, i sent out my quasit to scout, and the dm said it ruins the whole campaign. Suddenly the whole cave had a magical barrier that basically made my quasit blind in there...
Cheers to Starfinder from this Vesk boarding Marine combat engineer turned high risk salvage operator. Need a derelict cleared of zombies to rip out the leaky reactor core? He's your beer-swilling lizard!
Had a DM where the DM couldn’t give their full attention to the game because they had infant siblings running around in the background all the time. And they had to focus their attention away from the game to respond to the usual toddler mishaps that we never overheard in specific but it was obvious that it happened. There was also a strained undercurrent of “OMG I have no idea how to do this but Imma do it anyway”, which I respected the moxie of but required HECKIN patience to wait through. DMs, arrange your time and space so you can give your full attention to the session. If you can’t do that? Then rethink DMing. The players feel either that they are suffering through your distractions with you, or they feel that you don’t respect their time and energy to make characters and play through your campaign. Neither is desired, and both make it harder for players to stick around. That DM had promise, but they DESPERATELY needed better organization.
"No arguing with the DM" or any variation of that. The fact that it has to be there as a rule in the first place is a red flag. Because either it indicates problematic players or DM universally in my experience. It's the job of the party just as much to say "not cool" or whatever else is necessary as it is the DM's job to keep players in line.
That seems more or less reasonable. What I'm talking about are the "DM is always right & can do no harm" sorta types. I'm not saying folk should start arguing for extended periods during the game but everyone should be able to go "Hold up! That's not ok!" If the DM(or player) does something that is clearly not ok.
I just want to say that I do ban certain races but I have good reasons for it, I ban all the ones that let you make your own custom race because I let players backstories and the rest of their ideas mold the world before they start playing so the least they can do is let me have the races I know how to work with instead of just making one up, I also don't like flying races because in order to make balanced encounters I have to either limit the flying ability by fighting in buildings so they won't just fly off and act like gun drones the entire encounter or I have to make flying enemies, both of these make it feel like I'm targeting the player which I don't like and I've had players complain that I'm singling them out because I have things that only effect them, so I just gave up
So, my red flags are more so for cruelty. And certain encounter and the other is just a denial of an idea. 1. When any sort of dire animal appears that doesn't normally show up as a dire variant. SO MANY SMALL ANIMALS BECOME HORRIFYING WHEN DIRE. We had two moments with this. 1. Dire Humming Birds, wing beats when it groups give negatives to pretty much all checks and drink blood like vampires. 2. WASPS. BRUH. Things were the size of large cats we didn't even try to engage. We noped out, it was like the DM just liked to throw horrifying projects at us to test them. Not such a bad "red flag", the DM wasn't so much "bad" just so horrifying. Second thing. I got a lecture for carrying out my Kitsune's curiosity for potentially outrageous outcomes. Like, an actual lecture for trying to "derail" everything. Look, I totally get that some experiments can add badly. I mean, the character quirk pretty much altered everything when ever he did something. Two examples. 1. We had come across eventually both a bag of holding and a portable hole. Bright idea, what would happen if a portable empty space was put into a sealed of space inside the bag? Let me tell you, nothing good. Second example. We had time to prepare for an attack that was gonna happen to us in a fort. Bright idea with the mage and my kitsune. We found the the most isolated room, only one way in; the door. Right inside behind the door, we made two "gates" one on the floor and one above the door. Which, we tossed coins and other objects into. Caltrops, poison needles and other goodies. You ever see the game portal where you could potentially end up in a constant falling loop with two portals? It was that. It worked so well that they never even got close and we avoided like three major encounters from it.
When the DM makes a gritty realism game, doesn't tell you as a first time player what that will mean for you as a sorcerer, then proceeds to constantly fuss you for hoarding your spellslots when you DO learn what it means for your sorcerer. Then immediately throws you and the group into a 3 boss gauntlet in the next session after you relent, no short rest between each, and oh yeah dominated by the mindflayer after the 3 boss gauntlet
Red flags "I'm great at RP but I don't do role-playing in one shots because there's no time to include that." Tells me their bigger campaigns are going to have subpar roleplay because they're not as good as they think they are. Second red flag, inconsistent rules for a themed rpg. Dm wanted s campaign eith characters based on aspects of us irl. Required any performance checks to actually be performed, like you had to improvise songs and sing them irl, most characters couldn't ve talker than you were irl, etc. But things like strength checks for his girlfriends somehow super strong character weren't based on what she could lift irl, among other exceptions made for her and his best friend compared to the other players.
Personally I think that any DM who offers premade characters to players right in the beginning without even asking whether they want to make their own characters or not have already failed to set the mood for their game.
I was brand-new to Traveller, which is notoriously difficult to make a character in, and the DM handed me his character sheet so I could get the hang of it. Thankfully I knew what I was doing by the time that character died
1. A dm not explaining in advance if your character is unsuitable for a setting. 2. Taking away the entire point of a class, subclass, or other feature because of this. My dm is awesome at story telling, world building, and being open to all our ideas. But I had chosen a necromancer. In Curse of Strahd. Now I can get a dm attacking me or my gaggle of ghouls but it really diminished my experience for a few sessions when he’d hinted a strong enough vampire or lich might be able to wrestle control of my undead. Now I get it could happen especially in a dark fantasy like CoS, but had he told me my main ability could not only be useless but turned on my group I would have probably used a different character or subclass from the start for a better experience. Luckily we changed my subclass to something more suitable a few sessions later at a convenient plot point.
Ten rules of being a DM: 1. Don't be vindictive against characters. 2. If you want to ban something, ban it. Don't allow it and then punish the player for doing it. 3. Clearly explain why you want to nerf certain abilities (e.g. flight) 4. Maintain separation between what happens in-game to characters and out of game to players or yourself as the DM. 5. Do not take control of a player character for no good reason. Don't force them to become the BBEG. Don't control their weapons. For the love of Gods don't make an NPC automatic succeed at seducing them or describe their character's physiological responses to that. 6. Your players probably don't want you to railroad their PCs to be constantly sadistically tortured and abused. If that's the kind of campaign you want to run, find players who are ok with stuff like that from the start. 7. Do not try to increase the challenge by increasing the likelihood of a TPK for every single encounter. If you want to make very challenging encounters common, design them so that there are a broader range of possible outcomes besides one side winning by annihilation and roleplay the enemies like they are people, not mindless zombies (unless they are zombies of course). Do not think of combat as a duel to the death but a complex battle with both sides having complex objectives. 8. Make your rulings consistent and don't ban something arbitrarilly unless it just wouldn't work in the campaign or is blatantly OP or ruins the game somehow. 9. Do not ban cliche character designs for being cliche. Remember, the character's story isn't written yet. A cliche backstory will quickly diverge from the cliche. 10. Do not ban character designs based on identity politics categories alone unless it just wouldn't work with the story and the party, or contains excessive real life political baggage not necessary for the character concept which makes it problematic.
Idk if this is a red flag but i remember a DM, it was my first game and i was still really new. They just made me feel bad for not knowing things and forgetting what each dice was for. It made me really down cause i felt like no one wanted me there so i ended up leaving cause of mental health
I'll admit, I don't normally allow dragon born characters if it's one of my home brew story's because there generally over powered, especially with the breath weapons, but if the player talks to me about it, and we come to an agreement, then yeah, cool, play a dragon born, but generally, I don't allow them. Mainly bc of the breath weapon, or because of there special skill depending on the type of dragon born, and there's always lore behind it
i can get not allowing races to fit the setting but how are dragonborn overpowered? Their dragon breath isn't really that strong if we are talking about php dragonborn
I've not had the experience of beimg under another DM, all my time in ttrpgs has been as the dm so far. But this is helpful on what to keep an eye out for both in myself and others.
One of the biggest red flags I've ever experienced, although it's not with the GM, is a player that creates the character with a specific personality, and then roleplays the complete opposite of what the character would do. We have a shy character in the campaign, and he's the one talking to everybody and doing everything, clearly not roleplaying the character but instead doing what he thinks is the coolest, like he's participating in a live roleplaying session like it's being streamed or something
Used to be a ban hammer DM, because I went through a stretch of some 4 years where I kept running into insufferably problematic players. Finally ran into a very good, very chill group who helped me realize that I needed to eliminate my list of forbidden things and concentrate it down to simply one rule: "don't be a jerk." And I started holding players to that. Was amazed that I had fewer problems by simply warning players at the start of the game that I would immediately boot them if they were egregious problematic. This gave players with problems the opportunity to adjust their behavior, and it taught me to bend a lot more and be more tolerant. For example, I banned tieflings for the same reason a lot of DMs do, but I changed my ban to a simple rule: only one tiefling per campaign, and the tiefling could not be an edge lord. Had a player emphatically thank me, because he had only been playing for a year, and every group he tried to join forbade him from playing a tiefling, even though it was the reason he got into the game, and he had promised not to be a jerk. He played a tiefling guy who was like a witch hunter eldritch knight, acting gruff and cranky but secretly harboring a heart of gold. Was a fun character
The DM who adds new mechanics to a spell or combine two spells into one and ignores player feedback. A DM who thinks players should have fun the way the DM thinks they should have fun. For example combining the cloud kill, stinking cloud and a random direction roll every round while you are in the area of effect.
DMPCs are a huge red flag to me. I know that they can work if in the right hands but never experienced a ‘good’ one myself (always end up taking over the game or using meta knowledge etc).
It depends, if the dmpcs are plot hooks or plot points, or just meant to be a source of information like a barkeeper in a main city, they should be good. If they travel with the party, they should usually have an excuse made to keep them out of combat so they don’t hog the spot light/ or have the players cycle through rolling for that dmpc. Thus letting the players get more time.
I've got a DMPC, however he's just meant to be a fun character and was a carryover from a previous "campaign." He's the adopted son of my old character who was a Blue Dragon Lagiacrus hybrid raised by a gentlemanly professor. My character, Seastrike, was a quadraplegic human who was reborn as a Raptor-Allosaurus combo with the powers, colors and traits of an Abyssal Lagiacrus. He's the adaptable hunter who can and will learn techniques from ARK dinosaurs, and he hangs out with any given team. He's taken over as the "dad" of the crew, and he's also a bit of a comic relief. As a DM, I know we should be able to play in our worlds too, but leave a lot open to players, for it's their story too. The way I describe my gameplay style is, "Our game is vanilla with lots of chocolate sprinkles, but my guy is a drizzle of chocolate syrup on top of sprinkles." I'm carefully playing a boss class and I know it. I usually make Seastrike the "Blue Dracoraptor" use support moves unless he's hunting or he is attacked. We don't take anything seriously other than some roleplay moments, and even then we try to make each other laugh. I try to make combat center around all of our characters' combined capabilities, what I think we can pull off. Or I'm silly enough to roll a die and possibly doom the party. We don't do permadeath unless it's a sacrifice, and unless it's a boss fight all encounters are carefully calculated chocolate. If I screw up an encounter's balance, I have the Goddess rescue the team and break the fourth wall, asking me "Talon, what were you thinking?" Also, add a unique plot element. Aerobrine is a master of spacetime, so I used that as a plot hook for a one shot by making a familiar Deinonychus squeak his favorite doll, opening a portal to the Aether realm. This gave us an excuse to make encounters Rivals of Aether fights, recruit our favorite characters, and two of my favorite moments in D&D resulted from it, one of which I'll be putting in a flashback. This was also used to displace our team into a new world as I was the only person who could be a consistent DM and I had ideas we could all toy with, such as monster partners like in Monster Hunter Stories. DMPCs are easily misplayed. As long as the DMPC is not used as an extension of the bad DM's iron fist, it's fine. The most meta I get is breaking the fourth wall by squirting a player or having the Goddess talk straight to the players if they think about destroying the world we're going to be working on. I even have Seastrike break the fourth wall on occasion by making a joke that the characters wouldn't get, but we'd all laugh at. I've got an event lined up where a friend has a chance of landing on his new Yoshi style saddle, making the SMW Yoshi noise. General rule of thumb, if your DMPC is beloved, you're doing it right.
@@Goldencat44 that’s an npc. A Dmpc is a player character made to permanently join the party so that the dm can play along with the party (regardless if they’re involved in the plot). Having Barry Bluejeans or whoever temporarily join the party to lead them somewhere/etc is just an npc.
@@supernintendosp skipped to last para as it’s the only relevant part. Glad it worked out for you and seemingly doing it well. Not sure what was intended to be added or debated though.
@@toshi9742 agree to disagree, I have seen dmpcs that come and go from the party throughout the campaign for a session or two at a time usually when one party member will be gone for those sessions. But always seems to be in the background.
The DM saw I was going to play a paladin and went into a tirade about how celibates could never adventure, and it's easy to get them to renounce their vows. I told him I'm playing an Oath of Ancients paladin who enjoys wine, song, and good company, there wasn't anything about celibacy in his backstory and he's probably going to party if he has the opportunity. I was told that's not how paladins work and I would lose my spellcasting if I indulged at all. I didn't bother showing up to the first session.
I played as a DM a couple of times and I‘m very glad that I did none of the things that are mentioned in your various videos. I admit that I do two things tho that are not quite to the rules. First when I give my players several options to choose from I tend to have the end result be the same. For example: they can choose between two ways through a forest, but in the end the same stuff happens bo matter if they go left or right. Just because it would be far to complex for me to have all those options ready. Second, I sometimes change the HP of boss monsters a bit on the fly so that the fight isn‘t too boring or that we don‘t have a TPK. I feel like cheating for this one. I probably am not good enough with the CR to properly set the enemies. Last session I didn‘t do this and the end fight was over too fast so that not every team member could show their abilities. Which was a shame. Would interested in what others think about this. #1 is excusable I think.
It sounds like you're doing just fine as a new(?) DM. The option of choice can be a way to set the tone of the area or could be as simple as it being fun to give the party options. As for the encounter issue, there's nothing wrong with running a couple mock encounters as dm prep. You can gague roughly how your players would react, play them accordingly, and adjust the encounter as needed. Maybe the evil wizard should be a higher level and have 1 less kobold henchman. If you're still DMing, I'm sure you'll figure out what works best for you and your players in due time.
Pretty sure every DM has done the first one at some point if not frequently, making a truly open-ended adventure would be a nightmare. As long as you're not being rude about railroading I don't think you have anything to worry about. To be fair, the cr system is a bloody mess and quickly becomes inaccurate at higher levels, and you're using a quick flexible workaround to keep the pace up. Personally I set aside some time to look through a dozen-ish foes that are around their level; then check if a given monster has a glaring weakness to the party, and if it can exploit a weakness in the party. If I want it to be a challenge then I'll pick out something that isn't obviously weak to their synergy; but if I pick something that can take advantage of them, I make sure it's not the same characters being cheated as last time. Usually works, but when it fails it's often unexpectedly corny.
a dm who hosts a campaign with more than 8 players, even the best dms cannot handle 15 players, and i will not join another game with 8 or more, or 15 players, it was chaos and i almost stopped playing dnd cause my first dnd campaign had 15 players. I will still attend campaigns with 5-8 players cause that is reasonable
A big red flag I've seen was forcing certain races into certain classes. We've all seen the "Elves are Rangers" and "Halflings are Rogues" guys, but the worst DM I've seen had a literal list of race/class combos that were allowed and they were all the stereotypes for that race. (And no one was a wizard because and I quote "Wizards are dumb and nerds." Like humans could be anything "EXCEPT wizards")
Unfortunately my brother have show alot of red flags, here a list Not letting us roll ANY saving throw (we try talking to him but he won't let us, he roll them and not tell us) Hard Nerf feats that reduces speed And the last one Hard Nerf on some sub-class that weren't OP in the first place (talking about Cavalier) I think I'm forgetting some if I remember I'll edit this comment Edit: I just remembered the last one and I fell stupid for not remembering it earlier Making EVERY monster immune to Prone because he believes it waste time.
the "he rolls our saving throws for us and doesn't tell us the result" reeks of the DM using it as an excuse to fudge rolls and make people fail on a whim without having to give justification because "you failed your saving throw."
TLDR: Lack of Safety Tools / Ignoring when humor and banter makes someone uncomfortable. (Details Included Below I actually would like advice on how to handle this properly as I've not yet left the group causing this issue) Important Information: I am one of only two women in this group, and I'm autistic so things like spoken rp and taking certain types of humor is difficult for me when I don't know the group very well. I'm patient and try not to be a bother but, my discomfort was ignored and the more I play with this group the more I'm worried I'll need to leave it. As an aspiring dm and relatively new player the biggest red flag for me is just a lack of safety tools. I was in a group that I was initially stoked to be with because it was a My Hero Academia dnd rp, I'm kind of obsessed with heroes especially MHA. My character is named Hanabi Matsuri and her quirk or Superpower works like Sai from Naruto with the ability to bring anything she draws to life but, at only level 1 she can't really make anything that big yet without it causing her to pass out. Also she's one of the only characters at the table who actually have their backstory written out. Our first session happens but, I don't get to really do anything as I showed up late, okay no big deal and this is going well it seams. Next session the first one where I get to actually do something we're doing the UA entrance exams ripped straight from the anime and it's going great at first we have some cute conversations and even have canon characters make appearances but then the combat portion starts, I'm being attacked by two robots, and none of my moves are working because I can't seem to roll anything higher than an 11 this session, I had chosen what I thought was a safer location, and immediately got teased for it. Hearing another player say "Of Course the girl picks the worst spot to be in." Now I'm new to this group and don't know anyone close, I'm autistic and sometimes teasing like this gets to me when it shouldn't because until I know someone well enough I can't always tell how much of it is a joke and how much of it is genuine. So I as calmly as I can and without seeming too whiny, I attempt to express that I don't really like that kind of humor since I don't know them well enough to tell when it's a joke but, it gets brushed off as me being too sensitive the other girl in the group wasn't bothered by it probably because she knew them better than I did. So I imagine the teasing that made me uncomfortable was just normal for her Shortly after that the DM I guess felt bad for me and did a 'cut scene' I was struggling, and I was starting to think my character wouldn't pass, that on top of too many people talking at the same time made it impossible for me to form any words. I should mention I'm not good at spoken rp I'm a writer yes but, my brain doesn't always like to push the words out of my mouth. So my brain works like a computer while my mouth can only spit about the same as a type writer that's low on ink. The cut scene goes well, I have my anime moment which was fun and made me feel better, like I hadn't totally managed to mess everything up. Though, the next session which was several weeks later (they have literally no schedule despite how many times I've begged for just an IDEA of when our sessions will be since I'm not in college like they are and I'm an adult living in an apartment alone, it's super easy for me to just be late if I don't know what's going on because my dm decided to message me while in the middle of making dinner or something. I don't like to be the annoying one unprepared because I just don't know when I need to be.) So in this second session t some point everyone started making gay jokes, not very flattering ones either but, I try to participate by making a point that I'm bi. Nobody responds to me, so I say it again just trying to participate in the laugh, we're on a discord call so I think maybe they just didn't hear me but, then I'm teased again and shot down which just soured me a little. We're trying to do the USJ arc and everyone gets scattered around the facility by 2 groups live and run back on their own but my character doesn't have the kind of mobility that they do so she gets sucked into the warpgate and sent into a randomized area. We roll to see what area we get and OF COURSE my girl lands in the water zone the only place where her ink based power just doesn't work like it should because if you've ever seen Batman Beyond, water washes the ink away. So I'm not entirely sure how that's going to work out. Overall I'm worried though that these constant jabs, and this uncomfortable environment is going to get more toxic since they don't seem to care if something they say comes off the wrong way or not. I don't feel comfortable confronting people I barely know of my concerns either seeing as my disorder was largely brushed off already and I don't want to seem like I'm trying to use it as a crutch it just happens that in some situations my symptoms flair up and there's not a lot I can do about them when they happen without a little help from those around me to just be a little patient with me. Luckily this isn't the only campaign I'm in, I have a Final Fantasy Homebrew that one of my best friends runs, a star wars rp I adore, and I am working on my own varient of Villains and Vigilantes soon.
I don't play DnD, but I think if the question of whether or not to leave a campaign due to player conflict comes up and it's clear that their behavior won't change, that's when you need to leave the campaign. I know where you're coming from about not wanting to seems like you're trying to use autism as an excuse to have your way and how you feel uncomfortable bringing up your concerns with the people in your group because of it. I'm also autistic and I'm not great at talking with people either, so I relate to a lot of what you've said here actually. However, the only way this issue could possibly be resolved imo is by talking with the other people in the party. If they don't know you have autism you don't have to say it explicitly, just mention you're having trouble understanding whether or not they actually mean the disrespectful things they're saying or if they're just meant as jokes (though even if they are, they're in poor-taste). If they're not willing to clarify things and try to work out the problem with you, it's not worth staying in the group. If you feel uncomfortable doing that, I recommend maybe talking with the other female member of your group and asking her opinion on their behavior. You've already made your concerns with the game somewhat clear by the looks of it, but perhaps she just isn't good at confrontation either and has been keeping her concerns to herself (and if not then you can at least ask for her perspective on things. Maybe it's just a case of missing social cues, in which case you could gain some insight and better understand why they act that way). Perhaps if you were to discuss the situation together beforehand and she feels the same way, it will be easier to confront the rest of the group since you'll be able to back each other up. The important thing is to do all of this out of game, in between session. Don't wait until the next session to get on call with the party and talk about your concerns. Perhaps send a message in a group text or something of the sort laying out all of your concerns with the game. If they don't get back to you before the next session, then don't show up and tell them you won't be joining until your concerns are addressed.
Your reactions to the 'tease' was absolutly not too much. Seems like you tried to handle it perfectly, but they ignored you. You were not too sensitive. They were assholes.
If the whole group straight up ignores the issues you have, they are just inconsiderate assholes. From what you've written, I understand that you didn't do anything wrong, so in your place I wouldn't go any further than giving them one final chance to consider your issues before living the group
@@aquabluerose7734 thank you, I was concerned about being too hasty, and didn’t want to risk jumping the gun these comments make me feel a bit more justified in feeling this way.
First ever Red Flag I experienced was in a session online using Roll20, a session with a DM that built the entire campaign around killing the players over and over, due to them resurrecting immediately after dying outside of wherever you were. I think I witnessed the same character die twice, losing more of himself every time from dying due to hidden traps or creatures that couldn't be found, no matter what you rolled, and you couldn't save anyone who got trapped in said trap (e.g, walking into a completely translucent gelatinous cube and becoming permanently stuck, or being dragged under the water and held there with no chance of escaping.) I was eventually kicked from that campaign on it's soft reset, mostly because the characters I made were made to have very hard to exploit weaknesses. They were extremely hard to kill, and because of that, I was removed. Second Red Flag happened in a DnD campaign as a Female Shifter Ranger/Fighter/Druid, and my group found ourselves locked up in prison with no way out. Guards were kept far away from us and magic was disabled, and it was pushed we needed to get out. So, I thought seducing the guard was the best option, get him in to unlock the door, so we could break out. Without a roll or a check, the guard calls over his friends and, every character there was shackled and raped against their will. I retired the character then and there, and stopped playing with that DM, because his explanation was, "You were asking for it."
The 2nd one is just horrible... With my current DM we talked about no gos before starting the first campaign. He specifically asked for it and i'm really thankful that he is so considerate and doesn't just put the players in such an uncomfortable or even triggering situation. One of the things we agreed to exclude was rape.
My biggest red flag so far, was in part the DM's playstyle and in part the enviornment. My GF at the time (now wife) joined a game with a few friends from college. The DM would host games at his APT. The first game was fine-ish. We stuck with the group long enough to meet the BBEG. The BBEG was a Mystic. None of us could touch him. None of us had any abilities that even made a scratch on him. The DM boasted about "Hah mystics are so broken lol." While we were fighting him. We were level 13. Now the biggest redflag was the game space, their apartment. I saved the best (worst) for last. The toilet had black mold on it, there had never been a vaccume on the carpet, and the kicker... when he scheduled the next game he told us. "Oh yeah, we have a flea infestation, but it's fine come on over." We dropped that group and never played with them again.
Playing favorites. I was in a group where the asshole player was friends with the gm. When my Yuan Ti pureblood of all people called his character out you know something’s wrong. Yet my character kept getting punished and he kept getting away with being a douchebag in game and out.
3:38 i agree on this BUT if they started to discuss how to kill and get away from the guards that they are in front of them for the past 10 minutes. Imma make them do a stealth check to see if they were wispering low enough or if the guards have now another reason to be worried. [Edit] This vid made me worry less. My players have been enjoying the game so far but i kind of felt that i may be doing some things wrong, even tho i talked with them separately and was told "describe more" and tried i wasnt really sure of if i was doing well. This reassured me a good amount. I was waiting to see a few of my habits here. Glad i didnt see any exept for the previously mwntioned moment.
Any DM that can't communicate clearly, and with a logic and intent behind their actions. And I don't mean logic in the way some players do, where logic is code for: "Here's all the reasons why I'm right so you should let me shout over you, and railroad the session to do what I wanna do", because that person can also catch these hands. But DMs who hit you with stuff like, for instance. Original 5e ranger being banned from the game, for being too op. Wizards and clerics being buffed, for being too under powered. Randomly getting afraid, refusing to talk to you about their concerns or stuff they might wanna address, and just generally always assuming that the players are out to get you in some way shape or form. My favorite story, that I will never forget was a DM getting uppity about detect magic and deciding that as a spell, it only worked in the area you casted it in. When I asked about the reasoning behind that, I was told, by the DM and his friend of several years that I quote, "Just didn't get it, this makes perfect sense," and was dismissed out of hand, because I was the youngest at the table (26 at the time.)
Your script writer has GOD AWFUL takes. The whole bit where he tried to justify/defend the lizard boner is a HUGE red flag. None of the reasoning hold up to even a basic amount of scrutiny - EVERY PLAYER AT THE TABLE NEEDS TO CONSENT AND BE OKAY WITH SEXUAL ACTIONS AND THEMES BEFOREHAND. "No right to be offended on their behalf" seems to be an attempt to ignore or skirt around the fact that erotic elements suddenly appearing in a campaign surprising the players is a breach of personal boundaries in and of itself, regardless of the outcome.
The only correct way for a gm to declare the actions of a pc is for the gm to say, "hey, here's an idea I think is fun/funny/appropriate, if you do it then you can have advantage/fate/hero points"
I just started dming my first campaign with a party of entirely new players and I'm watching this video to make sure I'm not majorly fucking everything up :""")
Ive a forever DM and when i finally get to play i'm always wary when a DM says "I'm bringing my longtime friend I've been laying with for years" to a completely new group. Sometimes it ends with a kick ass co-op kinda deal, MOST of the time it's an insufferable jerk who the DM let's get away with everything. Ruins games for me.
the 'anything is allowed at my table' DM, what this has always meant to me has been 'the players can rape, murder, abuse everything and anything and that's ok as long as it's something the character would do'
...and? It's understandable if you're not interested in that kind of game, but some people are. There's nothing wrong with playing a terrible person in a tabletop game.
@@Enderdragon1201 'terrible person' characters are fine, but if they think RPing rape and abuse is fun then nevermind being at the same table, i wouldnt want anyone who thinks that any where near me
Player and DM here. Had a fair share of awful and great DMs and players. Most of these are not red flags, more like personal preferences or actually red flags for players. Do you guys talk to your DMs before playing with them? Also, banning races is ok, DM should have fun too, maybe the guy just had enough. He can be great DM that just tired of awful players that happend to play tieflings. So here are my red flags for DMs: -Not communicating setting, homerules or anyrhing out of the ordinary to players before session 0. -Bad prep. If you see a DM that has almost no prep work, reading adventure from his phone, not remembering his own NPC names etc. If that happens on first session - most likely thats gonna be the golden standart of his. -For people who love fights - theater of mind games are huge red flags. Most likely there will be almost no fights, tactics wont matter, rules of combat as well.
I'm at fault with the forgetting NPC's names. I do the prep, write the names that are gonna pop up in the session and than misread them when they come up. For a while my party thought they where going to face twice the hags since each of them appeared to have a double with a twisted version of their name
![A Crap Guide to D&D [5th Edition] - Dungeon Master](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ANdG2DGm0CQ/mqdefault.jpg)
The biggest red flag I've experienced so far:
During Session 0
Me: can I play this homebrew race? Here's the details, let me know if I should make any changes.
DM: Nah, it's cool, go right ahead.
DM proceeds to focus fire and kill my character in the first hour of session 1
DM: Next time, pick a real race.
Similar situation, I once saw a player get quite dissatisfied with the character they were playing not working out the way they wanted so they asked if they could swap characters between sessions. DM: Sure whatever.
Next session DM introduces the new character then proceeds to have a super high DC monster kill the new character in one hit. When the player started to protest the DM said something like: "Well that's what you get for switching characters."
Like. "???"
@@pinkdaveandchaps3697 For real. If you as a DM have a problem with something, be up front about it instead of being a passive-aggressive prick. You'll at least get more respect for it, if nothing else.
Ah yes, good old "saying A doing B". Just awful
lmfao gigachad dm
@@Sl4wt3r nah you'll eat shit and like it
When a GM nerfs the race you wanted for your character not only once, but TWICE, but their significant other is getting away with whatever they want
Obviously you need to become the GM's gf instead. Learn to optimize.
@@mrosskne minmaxers always find a way
Personal rule: When it comes to mechanics, I divorce myself from any relationship I have with my players. And all my players are friends. This way I’m as fair as possible.
They know this. I’m described as “harsh but fair.”
To be fair, draconeans are OP as fuck
I literally allowed my player to play a half duck species because she wants to have a duck army. So far, i never had to nerf anybody. I think nerfing player is a bad, since it just means you can't adjust to what the players throw at you. Also, isn't it cool when your player remember their races speciaities and use them at a good time? I love to marvel at them when they come up with aomething i nevrr thought about
I once had a grey skinned tiefling character and i got called out for "racism" for "practically doing blackface at the table"
So you're party were all white liberals got it.
Looks curiously at drow
Bruh. What?
It feels like the old adage "It is racist if you do it is racist if you don't."
but tieflings can br be whatever color they want. that's the beauty of tieflings. so dumb
@@atsukana1704 the drow you're looking at shifts uncomfortably...
My red flag: half bragging about how they "accidentally" traumatized a character so much that the player had to retire them.
My old dm ruined his best friend's character from a previous group by throwing horrifying trauma after horrifying trauma at the character until the PC could not function in the world without acting radically out of character. EDIT: All these traumatizing events were within the span of a few sessions, *not* over the course of a campaign. He said he had fixed his behavior when he and I played together, and then proceeded to do almost the exact same thing to my (first ever) PC. I've learned that people like that don't actually recognize what they have done is wrong, and they are solely focused on trying to break the spirit of the party and/or enact their need for torture porn.
it's one thing to have traumas placed on a character because of a bad roll, my first ever TTRPG character had that happen because I botched the first roll of the game when the group entered an apartment and saw the eviscerated bodies of one of the other PC's roommates I got what would essentially be a nat -3 and had a phobia of gore added to my character because of that, my group likes the more gritty and dark style. it's a complete other thing to do it purely because the DM can and have it completely ruin a character, to tie it back to the previously explained situation it wasn't done with any malice or "DM vs PCs" mentality it was purely a consequence of the die roll and helped to establish the dark nature of the setting as it was a phobia that could be worked over as it wasn't mandatory unlike my character's phobia of snakes, if you haven't guessed the game in question is Vampire the Masquerade V20 and I made the stupid decision of making a Malkavian with a phobia as the derangement, which was mandatory for the clan they were in. sorry I tend to ramble, my point is that you can talk about a campaign where a PC gets traumatized because of events in the game to explain how you like to DM (more forgiving or more punishing to put it broadly), it's completely different when it's talked about like it's one of the best things to happen in the campaign despite it going completely against what the player wants and was not done within the context of actual story beats within the game and instead came from a mentality of "DM vs PCs"
@@gearsfan6669 Oh yeah I totally agree! I love darker stories and love adding new elements to my characters. (One drow Paladin of mine had to roll an anxiety check whenever he saw a spider lol.)
But for a bit more clarification, I'm talking purely from a roleplay/story investment point of view. This dm did not mention this was going to be a dark story. I made a full orc LG wizard (a very silly character combo with a fairly simple intended story arch about overcoming toxic masculinity and misogyny). First session, DM dumps us in Fantasy North Korea. I am tasked with watching a noble we need to escape with, and he wanders off and gets horrifically murdered and strung up on a pike in the middle of town. Session 2 begins with my wizard finding his father not only dead, but a zombie, and has to kill him or else the other characters would have and bye bye entire character arc. Then (same session) finds his mother who explains that half of the family is now dead. As a pacifist character, I found him very hard to play after that cause logically... what was he supposed to do? His entire reason for adventuring got thrown out the window/sped through.
(Also, the dm later revealed that if my character wasn’t in disguise, his mom would have told him he wasn't really an orc but a demi god. Like... WHAT?? How the f does a character function after all that bs?)
Depends. I traumatized a player character before. But it was more the characters past coming back to bite them in their old age more then just traumatizing them to traumatize them.
That character ended up dying to save the rest of the party
I have a question about something like this.
A Player of mine (my romantic partner) ended up falling in love with a spell caster. The spell caster had to stay to train further, and the player went on adventure to finish a quest before returning to the spell caster. In the meantime, however, Bounty hunters are going to basically slaughter everyone, including the spell caster, and hang them. (One of the Bounty hunters likes to keep a theme). This is going to be the first major terrifying thing to happen in the campaign (after about 4-6 sessions after leaving the spell caster). Is this okay?
@@dunmaglass6016 its perfectly fine. Great plot point for revenge
One that I'd throw out there is that same texting red flag of one word answers (or overly short answers). I had a DM describe that we were in a wizard's tower, when I asked what does the room look like. His answer, "a room." I was quite stunned tbh, then curiously asked, "are there any doors?"
"yeah, there are doors." "How many doors are there?" "8." "Do they have any defining features making them distinct from one another?"
The convo continued, but I think you get the picture at this point. I almost wanted to ask him, "does my character have functioning eyes, and if so could I be told what said eyes see in plain sight?"
I guess I should be glad he didn't require me to roll perception in order to see if I can see the plain sight doors.
You are lucky you didn't ask the eye thing cuz he could've answered something stupid like "walls"
Your DM was a cultist of Vecna
"Roll perception"
18.
"You appear to be in a place."
One red flag that I think not many people watch out for: A DM that doesn't set good boundaries. Now this one can just be inexperience but I've found that in most cases if the DM has a well developed world, there are things that just won't mesh with that world and there's likely to be player requests that don't fit with the vision that the DM has for the world.
A good DM will take the player input and discuss with the players how they could change it to fit the world/story. But some DMs have issues saying anything other than yes and in my mind this behavior will inevitably lead to a bad experience for all involved.
Liking because this is an important one, especially the 2nd part
Because an inexperienced yes-man DM might not ruin everyones fun, but it will ruin their own, and the DM is as much as a player as anyone around the table
Basically, a DM who is a doormat. Can definitely see that being a problem
The first group I ran a game for hesitantly decided to let me DM. Nothing against me, but because the last DM said to everything even if it didn’t make sense. It had gotten to a point where no one was having fun because things were just happening with no logic. They ended up enjoying my DMing and it made them actually like the game whereas before they disliked it.
This isn’t meant to sound like a humblebrag, but im just giving an example of how a DM that says yes to everything can lead to a bad time
I struggle with this one as a DM
"is my homebrew Plasmoid pirate ok?"
Uh the tech level, society, and creatures of the setting are literally inspired by the epic of Gilgamesh and ancient Egyptian mythology.
"Cool, Plasmoid pirate it is."
DMs who punish players for picking a race the DM doesn't like WITHOUT saying "hey I'm not a fan of this race, please choose something else." My first ever DM never told me about his burning hatred for elves, I played an elf ranger (this was back in 3.5) and he proceeded to humiliate my character every chance he could. NPCs would shit talk him, all my actions would have bizarre negative consequences and I had to have the rest of the party buy my own gear.
based DM, fuck knife ears
@@annoyanceking yeah but that's totally different from what I mentioned. I was given no warning about the DM's hatred for elves whatsoever and wasn't allowed to change characters after that.
I have a friend who hates elves with a burning passion too. Imagine hating a fake thing so much you ruin the experience for everyone else ever.
@@Swaggerbobable based, fuck elves
@@Swaggerbobable I have a friend who hated Tieflings
That friend simply didn't allow them in their game
My red flag was our dm kicking a guy out for eating the snacks we bring. If you say from the beginning that we have to bring snacks for everyone, you better be ready for those snacks to be consumed. Our DM made pizza and we all brought snacks, including the 'problem player' but was mad he ate more than everyone else. Like bro, what the fuck do you think we brought that shit for? It ain't decorative
Oh boy thats a rough one
That's just a straight-up "wtf" moment right there. Why on earth would eating snacks, let alone when the DM himself requested it, be a problem?
@@catbatrat1760 The only reason I could see is if he's literally just gobbling it down leaving little for other people. Like yeah that'd be an asshole move. But if he just ate more than other people then so what lol.
ah yes, the "snacks are an offering for thy dungeon master" DM
You’re bringing up snacks, reminds me of the two food related incidents in my first campaign group. The first one being, I was gifted a birthday cake, specific kind of birthday cake I’ve been eating since I was a very young child, it’s very much like coffee cake, it’s top only with powdered sugar. Anyway, I knew I should not be eating that by myself, I eat the whole thing, not knowing why, at the time. So, given the composition of my DND group, I decided to bring it to them. Did not complain when I only had one slice left, but I promptly ate it three that morning, as in that morning. Other time involved me buying a Donatos pizza and accidentally getting the wrong size, which would be more food than I can handle. Guess what I did? It got demolished. Don’t worry, I wasn’t the only one bringing food, one guy brought chips and guacamole, or the chips and salsa? I forget which
And being someone who is DM’ing for the first time since high school this month, I’ll be watching this particular video VEEEEEERY closely. Lol.
As an aspiring dm and relatively new player the biggest red flag for me is just a lack of safety tools. I was in a group that I was initially stoked to be with because it was a My Hero Academia dnd rp, I'm kind of obsessed with heroes but, the problem is I don't know these people very well and I'm autistic so I don't always react well to teasing because my brain can't really tell if someone is just using dark / mean humor or genuinely being rude. It's a struggle that I and many others in the spectrum have where it's hard for us to read sarcasm and certain tones. So when a dm or group makes certain jokes and makes no effort to include you in or make sure you're okay with that kind of humor it can make things difficult. I have nothing against humor or even sexual jokes but, it's important that everyone at the table have an understanding of each other so that nothing gets mistranslated.
You've got this! Keep in mind your players feelings when doing stuff & how this is thier story equally as it is yours & you'll weave a beautiful tale with friends. Works 100% of the time, 90% of the time 😁🤙
It's good to make mistakes.
If you do find things don't work out, go back, look at the books, ask the players what they think went wrong. Sometimes it will be very obvious (See source: my first time, i party wiped everyone with a bear because i mistranslated challenge ratings vs party level) other times it will be more subtle (First home brew I made I had a party that fell out of love for the campaign because they thought i was going too soft on them so they didn't feel like they had achieved anything). I have run some premade games successfully, and both of the parties i've subjected to my latest homebrew have had a great time because i went back and learned from my mistakes. Even if it doesn't work out, part of being a DM is figuring out how best to tell the story to your group.
@@nedgirl1361 my session is next week and I think I’ve built some challenges that are good for an early level campaign, I think I just got the pre-session DM jitters haha, and I remember a good tip which was scale the DC and HP on the fly depending on how the encounter is going, if the players are dealing too much damage for what I thought would be a difficult encounter, just add some more hitpoints to the monster to keep the fight going longer, or if I as the DM am kicking the players asses a little too hard when I thought it’d be fair, then lower the enemies hitpoints and DC, maybe even throw them a bone and just make the next round of attacks finish them off.
But yeah, I think it’ll be a fun night.
Had another DM who made his setting racist against Dragonborn because a king used dragons to take over the world, so everybody hated anything remotely draconic. I took one look at that and said “Bet” and made a good-hearted Dragonborn Cleric who gained incredible spiritual resilience from the shite he went through because he was Dragonborn. Trauma just didn’t faze him, the dude did the right thing no matter how people saw him for it. No matter what the DM threw at him, he stayed true to his heart.
That campaign didn’t end well (it got cancelled because of scheduling changes), but I made one of the coolest characters I have ever played. It left a mark on the other players as well.
That doesnt sound like a bad dm at all if he gave you a reason and warned you before hand, it sounds exactly like the kind of great stories you can make in such a setting, I would only hope that at least the ones you helped had a bit of a change
@@proxy90909 that's probably what would decide it. If the Characters actions had an effect on the world, changing people's opinions, then it's actually a good story beat. But if the DM insisted that everyone's attitudes remained completely static, no matter what happened, than it's a bad decision
What's wrong with racism?
I dont see that as a problem. If its a world that has been devastated and terrorized by dragons or a dragon, obviously those people will dislikes dragons/DragonBorn if it was a setting where there was no reason for it and everyone just hated dragonborn for no reason, thatd be different.
Like during slavery in America, do you think it'd be wrong for the black slaves to hate the white people for enslaving them?
@@General_Flores the white people didn't enslave the blacks, it was their fellow Africans.
Why don't they hate Africa? Instead of imagining it as wakanda?
I honestly think it's appropriate to tell players how they character feel or how a character acts in situations, like: "you enter a dark dungen and can't help it but feel a chill down your spine."
But i always encourage players to tell me thats not how there characters react, like:" i don't feel a chill down my back, i grew up in Dungeons like this, strangely my character feels at home."
I had great experience with this method
Im guilty of it sometimes but i prefer to show then tell
There's a beautiful balance that can happen when the dm asks how the character feels in the moment and then plays off the emotions the player gives.
To a degree the DM can enforce emotions upon people. There is a reason systems have things like fear checks, etc. But it should be up to the player how their character deals with it (roleplaywise) as long as they incorporate the mechanical drawbacks if there is one involved.
I would not consider telling a player that they feel a chill down their spine to be anything egregious. That's just setting a tone. And unless the character has some very specific reason that it doesn't make sense (e.g. they're a mechanical construct, or they have some kind of fearless trait or whatever) it's not like you can control when you feel something involuntary like that.
In the JRWI: Riptide podcast, there was a moment where the puzzle was "Do an act of love!" so Gillion decided to kiss Chip. The DM described them seeing the wall crack open, forming a doorway to the next room. Chip's player said "I don't notice" and explained that Chip would be too stunned to do anything other than stare at Gillion, so only Gillion reacted to the newly-opened door.
Not only is this great for roleplaying, it's a good rule for general narrative story telling. If you call the BBEG's castle a "Large menacing castle, with an ominous atmosphere", that is less informative and more prescriptive, while describing it as "A castle with scorched basalt walls, with heavy dark clouds threatening to release a storm" that is both more descriptive and also allows the players to make their own judgements about the appearance of the castle (Maybe a PC is a dwarf who grew up around basalt, or a frog-folk who sees a oncoming rainstorm and feels a good appetite for waterlogged earth worms ready for picking).
This small list of DM red flags was all giving to me from my first DM that introduced me to the ttrpg life.
1.Punishing the players for creativity and doing well in game by placing impossible obstacles or enemies in front of us. For they thought it was too "easy for us."
2. Running official modules and calling it their own home brew.
3. Always "losing" the character sheets. I now hold onto my character sheets because of this.
4. Always no matter the game, character, or setting has all npcs hit on my girl friend.
5. Reference to #3 calls it a "campaign" but never gets passed game or session one. The longest we ever played was 4 games.
6. Interpreting the rules or abilities differently to favor his story or to give his bad guy the "advantage." 3 examples are me playing a redemption paladin in 5e and trying to use my channel Divinity to reflect incoming damage and was told, "It's the staff doing the damage to you not the Caster and it says you target the hostile creature and the staff isn't one." Then playing a World of Darkness and I punched a ghost with salted Knuckle raps, "character an experienced man fighter may I add," crit success and preceeded to fly throw the ghost full force, breaking my hand and forearm on the sink.Then playing a Shadowrun game as a Drone Rigger and never being able to use any form of drone cuz it "scares and startles people" in a futuristic setting and always got caught.
7. Rage quit a game when we handed his mini boss, big obstacles or BBEG their ass from kicking it so hard.
8. Never looking over the tables character sheets before the first game and then disapproves either the whole character, specific items in the inventory, or by over powered the character is. Example when I played Icons with this Speedster that can duplicate and had 4 arms wielding swords and cleared a whole building of goons before the BBEG of the game noticed. Then over powered the boss by speed and out numbering them. "If I knew this character was this powerful I wouldn't have let you play it." Me, "Then why when I handed the sheet you looked at it and said it was ok and I asked are you sure?"
Overall I will say I learned alot from this and decided to try DMing myself and asked my friends that were playing with me at the time and we've playing and having fun with all ttrpg's we've tried since for 7 years now.
1. Agreed about punishing players for creativity, but some tasks/obstacles being impossible (for the PC's) is fine I think. I'm not a fan of players who think they should be able to do anything with their current PC's "if they just roll good enough". Players should know when to not push their luck because they're being dumbos.F around and find out, basically. It makes the world more "real" and immersive.
2. Lol I've never seen that before
3. this seems less of a DM red flag and more about what type of person you don't want to give responsibilities.
4. Wut. If a PC is very attractive it makes sense for people to hit on them, but if it's happening constantly and only to your GF yeah that's weird lol.
5. At this point starting to think this guy is maybe just not suited for DM'ing.
6. In general fudging rules and skills as a DM is actually a pretty good skill to have as a DM. But you should do it in a way that makes the game better and without players realizing it. Sure this can lead to your BBEG getting away with something where he probably would have died by the mechanics. But it could also mean the PC's surviving where they wouldn't have. But it shouldn't be abused or overt, and it shouldn't be done just because you want the story to go a certain way (players should feel like they have an impact on the story and that their choices matter). If you do fudge things and it does seem weird to players, it's usually best to be mysterious about it. Then you have more time to come up with a reason justifying it.
7. Sounds like he's treating it more as a game of GM vs Players, instead of wanting to enjoy a cooperative story.
8. Yeh GM's should not complain about a character after they've OK'd it. That's dumb. At most they can say something like "I didn't realize it was going to work like this, so I think we have to tweak things a bit before the next session". You can alter stuff for the future or change your mind, but not complain like it's the players fault that they made the character they made despite you OK'ing it.
Not having a session 0 and not establishing any of the world before the beginning of a campaign
Very true, but I find at session 0 my players just don’t pay attention, or show up
Banning races could be fine if that is very clear from the beginning and they have a good world building/story reasons.
That’s usually my reason.
That or if it’s way unbalanced for the intended power creep of the campaign.
I also tend to ban LA races in low start campaigns. I’m fine with LA 1 and maybe 2 for campaigns that start at lvl 1, but I’ll only allow my more seasoned players LA 2 and up, since they’re more likely to understand the delayed growth, and not feel like they’re being left behind.
I'm creating a world that's murderously racist towards Fairies and Kender for different reasons, and I fully intend on letting my players know that picking these races is like playing on hard mode
I banned warforged, kenkus, and undead in my Exandria campaign. Warforged, because the game was set prior to Vox Machina, and the warforged/aeormatons were still extinct in that time period. Kenkus, because they can't talk and I didn't want to deal with a mute PC (my dmpc was a kenku though, specifically so I wouldn't be tempted to give hints through her). And undead, because my dmpc was a grave cleric and there's no logical reason she would tolerate being around an undead. Luckily, none of my players wanted to play any of those races, so it barely came up.
An obsession with horrifying gore scenes outside of when they are meant to happen. Note that when I say gore I mean anything beyond bloody, disgusting, and vile, including things that are outside of a dead body (things that traumatize people for life IRL). “Gore” is a simplification for things that I’d get canceled for immediately if I wasn’t anonymous.
If it is in an extremely dark fantasy campaign, then I don’t mind the intense gore at every corner. It makes sense, and adds to the depressing, terrifying, hopeless, dark atmosphere. I also don’t mind it if it is every once in a while in a regular fantasy campaign.
However, some DMs out there are OBSESSED with gore, to the point where you feel uncomfortable even wandering through a regular, inhabited castle’s dungeon.
One of my DMs was like this. If you entered a weak kobold den, you’d likely find several bodies, dead or alive, that have been “gored”. If you fell into a trapdoor in a dungeon that opened into a floor of spikes, you’re fall would be cushioned by dozens of dead bodies piled up, with excruciating details from the DM about what the gory mess looked like. You’d think the descriptions would be less uncomfortable and gross since they are merely spoken, but with my (and frankly all D&D players’s) strong imagination it quickly comes to life in your mind. I’ve felt sick a few times just hearing what vile things this woman thought up in her head.
She’s my favorite DM for dark fantasy campaigns. But we absolutely forbid her from DMing regular sessions. We only allow a moderate amount of tragedy in her own characters’ backstories when she isn’t the DM, else she’ll make her character extremely traumatized from vile Shit that no person, fantasy race or not, would feasibly have to suffer
Omg! This one is a big one for me! I love a good dark campaign/Horror film, but all the time is a big nope. Had a dm that would constantly try to horrifically traumatize the party like every session. I think in the first 3 sessions, my character alone had someone they were supposed to be protecting eviscerated on a pike, had to kill his own (now undead) father, and learn that half his family was slaughtered. Was real hard to play that character as intended after that.
As a group, we decide before every campaign, what was to be "off limits" usually any signs or signal of sexual assault are off limits. Intense gore as well just seems unnecessary.
I had a GM who loved to make everyone uncomfortable. We were constantly fighting poo monsters, encountering gore and horror, slavery etc, having things injected into our backstories that made us cringe (incest, etc), and the GM really got off on knowing we weren't happy about any of it. Once when we were objecting, he actually said "I will not censor my art!". Well, he lost a lot of players over the next few sessions; I don't envy anyone who stayed. Dude has more problems than that, though: he's a very clear-cut case of narcissism and he liked to be in control and hurt people emotionally. Since then, I've associated an excessive love of gore with that type of personality.
@@danielhale1 sounds like had the dm lmao
@@danielhale1 Slavery is fine in D&D, it can be an important part of the world and a great setup for world building. As long as it isn’t too intense, I think that is fine.
Its one of my current dms. I am playing a Dwarf-Orc called Torwynn. She's a bit of a dummy but very strong.
My issue was her father (who died when she was 10) was turned into a monster she had to fight and kill twice using the axe her father gave her, all while sobbing.
What annoyed me, was that I and my character wasn't given time to grieve or process what happened and were immediately thrown into another dumb combat situation where the DM did stealth fails of 'you fart' or 'your ass cheeks clap together so loud you're heard'. I was really mad at him for a while and considered leaving the game altogether. I later went and wrote what I wanted to happen and accept that more than what happened in session. It helped me get through it, mostly because I'm not ready to let go of Torwynn yet.
When I was younger and dumber I took my character (non-dnd rpg where the dm had characters) and she went from a mentally and emotionally strong person to a mentally unstable vessel for their inner demon (now physically manifested) to control. An interesting concept if done right and filtered accordingly. This was a whole campaign in itself and I overused the villain, didn’t communicate with my players (sisters) about themes they were uncomfortable with, and made them feel like there was no solution (there was, the demon just manipulated them a lot, not an excuse though). After that era I realized what I was doing and my sisters and I mentally burned anything related to that campaign. This event happened when I was an edgy 14 year old and I have since become a better DM. Me and my sisters still roleplay together and we have long moved on from that dark era.
Hey sometimes plots just dont work out at least you learnt from it
A red flag for me is DMS that script player character death without talking to the player first. I've played under a couple DMS where a player showed up and was informed "hey you're character is dead because 'plot,' time to roll up a new one."
Holy fuckin shit...
I got chills running up my spine just from reading this, what the actual fuck
Based, keeping pl*yers in line
A wise person once said, "If the players aren't going to have any input or agency, just write a book."
The Matt Mercer reference is actually not terribly valid as an example. Matt actually had a situation where he COULD have done something like the op is saying. It happened MUCH earlier and it was when his Boss npc should and would have levitated up but this character had no legendary actions. He stuck to his actions even though that character would have known better. If the gorgon experience is anything it was Matt learning that legendary actions are needed when so many players actually know what they are doing. Liam O’Brian’s was underestimated in the earlier encounter so Matt started being a little more thorough with combat encounters.
Changing the dungeon based on what the party plans is a huge red flag
Ehhh I'd say it depends. If my party decides that they want to maybe find a back entrance to a pirate cove to sneak in undetected in the middle of the night, I'll make a back entrance to said cove, and maybe add bedrooms here and there to make the strategy actually work.
If you're changing the dungeon purely to screw over the party, however... then I agree.
@@yourface2464 should’ve specified, yeah that’s what I mean. Like if the dm says the wall is 30 ft tall with no guards. Then the rogue says “oh I have 50 ft of rope.” Now suddenly the wall is actually 80 ft with watchtowers
Aah so you mean more like 'counter the players abilities to make things go the way DM planned?'
What if the dungeon is sentient, telepathic, and polymorphic?
@@mrosskne That would certainly make for an interesting albeit infuriating encounter lol
i got one
ignoring your characers moral stances or even how they act entirely
so i started my first campaign our dm was my ex friends brother i made my character to be a pacifist and didnt like killing there enemies so the first swarm i said i wanted to knock them out you know not kill them i roll a nat 20 so the dm litterally said i ripped off the enemies arm and beat them with it causing them to die from bloodloss the i started beating the others to death
i didnt know much about dnd but this swayed me away from it until i found good friends to dnd with now i love dnd
I get a feeling that said DM just wanted to spite you, because that crit seems extremely gruesome, especially for a pacifist character
@@gregorysoldatman to actually spite it could be
"You attacked them with the Intention of knocking them out,But you accidently punched them so Hard that your hand went right through the chest,The other Two were so terrified of you after seeing that they Started Fleeing" or smth idk
That would be a Good way of Spiting Op(Make his character kill because of the Crit) while at the same time maintaining the character Personality of a Pacifist
I have a character concept in my brain that I might use as a litmus test if I ever join an in-person D&D group--a blue Tiefling Vengance Paladin. If the DM gives me shit about making my Tiefling blue (and doesn't have some sort of lore reason to justify it), then they're probably gonna give me shit about anything not RAW.
Blue tieflings are present in officially licensed D&D stuff. Idle Champions has Jarlaxle.
@@CodaBlairLucarioEmperor Isn't Jarlaxle a Drow?
ETA: Yeah, I play Idle Champions and his race is labeled Drow.
@@Pineapply_Queen Sorry.
I mean just because it isn't RAW doesn't mean that you can't just ask your DM for it. But the DM may want to play up how strange a blue Tiefling is unless you ask them not to make a big deal out of it. Besides it's not like you're asking to start off with a shotgun.
@@pinkdaveandchaps3697 That last sentence is exactly why I'm doing it--if my DM is gonna die on such a minor hill (again, without lore reasons to justify why a blue tiefling can't exist in-universe), then he's probably just low-key a control freak.
As far as it being treated as odd, again, if there's a lore reason for why a blue tiefling is so rare that it would get everyone's attention then I can live with that as long as I'm told in advance. Even if it's just "Yours is the result of a rare mutation never seen before by most", give me something to justify it. But if it comes right tf out of nowhere then it'll just come off as passive aggressive.
When a player drinks too much every session. A few beers or cocktails are fine but outright drunk isn't fun for anybody else who isn't drinking.
Only waterhomies, only hardcore
This is the worst, I hate players that drink heavily and ruin a game session because of it.
I think having ppl be drunk or high is only fun if it's either kept to moderate, non-impairing quantities (like 1 glass of wine) or EVERYONE is drunk/high. Otherwise it just feels like everyone else has to babysit the ntoxicated people and you're not on the same wavelenght.
My red flag as a dm seems to be getting excited before the session. Someone always gets downed or worse when I'm enthusiastic.
That's not a red flag, that's simply a telegraph
Dictating characters actions/feelings is the biggest for me. If it's not magical compulsion (and not constant if that) you need to lay down the law or walk.
This- then when a magical effect -is- effecting a character the DM might tell the player what effect they're under and ask how the character reacts/feels to put it back in their hands. Ex: You are under a fear effect and are frightened how does (Character Name) react? Mind you, because of the effect (Character Name) can't move any closer to the enemy.
That's one of the worst. Many people put great effort into developing their character's personalities, so such behavior from the DM (other than being intrusive) makes them feel like all this work doesn't mean anything.
I had a player walk from my table when he encountered a creature with a fear effect that he failed the check against, he insisted that I was taking away his agency and disrespecting his backstory since his character "didn't know fear." I had to make his character immune to fear effects or he wouldn't come back, at level 3.
Walk then. You won't be missed.
@@legionare117 That's why I listed magical compulsion.
I like the script-writer's commentary! Adds another point of view rather than just reading what happened. Not that it wasn't good with just reading, but both is nice.
Only red flag that made me turn around was when I put out a generic looking for a group application in this one discord.
Got one guy offering to let me join his, but I had to tell him how much I knew about Japanese culture/history and be willing to read his 20+ pages of homebrew. This *could* have been a decent game but going off d&d horror stories the odds whern't in its favor
Yeah, that question is vague enough to suggest the asker does not know enough to know how much he doesn't know. Major red flag.
Was probably pretty good if we wrote 20+ pages of homebrew
DMs who decide that when they kill a PC, they will mutilate the PC so revival is much harder (beheading, torn limb from limb, etc). I had a plauer get gutted, but not in a way that stopped revival. And even then, that player and I already had a system of Revival in place as he was NOT the body, but a Symbiotic Mask worn by said bidy.
Also, dms who not only share art a player shared privately with them, with the entire group without asking said player. But also those who share NSFW art without asking the party if they are okay with it.
As far as body mutilation, this used to be a major part of the game, with higher level, more expensive spells needed for reviving players who are disintegrated or maimed. If the players and the DM are both okay with playing that kind of game, where life is cheap and death is cheaper, that's fine, but it's definitely a matter of taste. You seem to have found a talent for that type of gameplay, but if you don't enjoy it, what's the point?
Thank you. This was the channel that showed me what end was. 4 years later, I've stopped watching you for a while but I always come back, and it feels like home. Thank you
*3 years. It just feels like 4 2020 felt like 6
My biggest red flag is DMs who insist on having DMPCs in the party. I had a DM who had a rule of always having a minimum of 1 DMPC per player on the table, sometimes 2 per player. To make matters worse it was obvious the story always revolved around them to the point where he hijacked another player's background villain to be about one of his characters instead. We overheard the villain talking about how he doesn't care about that player's character anymore and is now only worried about the chosen of the fairy goddess (one of his many DMPCs). When I tried to tell him his focus on himself was ruining the game he refused to listen to me, saying I was the only one who didn't like it. At that point, what was originally a 4 players game had already been reduced to just me and one other girl who kept sending me Crit Crab videos and comparing it to our DM, but he still thought I was the only one who didn't like the game...
Hey most dms dont actually get to play its not suprising they bring dmpcs
@@shadowlord1418 right, as the forever dm I know this feeling well.
I joined a group off of the official dnd discord server once. The dm decided that the way we were going to level up was by killing our characters. (With free revives but still) on top of this, it seemed like nothing we did really mattered, as he would just kill us in every situation we found ourselves in. I did not stick around for session 2.
I am enjoying the script writer adding to it as I feel like more commentary from experts are really helpful to understand and enjoy these games. I like listening to Matt Mercer talk about the rules and ideas but never watch CR as that's their game, not mine.
Holy crap, don't call me an expert! I'm just a guy with a lot of playing/DM'ing experience. But thank you for the kind words.
I am SO GLAD you brought up Commander Shepard and Garrus in response to the cross-species romance discussion. I am currently playing through the Mass Effect series for the first time and I LOVE Garrus and am attempting his romance arc. I got a little indignant when the op said "why would a reptilian Vesk be attracted to a mammalian humanoid," so I am SO happy you brought that up because I was thinking the SAME FREAKING THING. Garrus is best husbando.
Best boyfriend indeed.
Right below Grunt when I learned he buys porn and action figures with his checks.
No, no no no, no, it's not "A little over the line" for the gm to decide, describe and draw attention to a player character getting an erection at the sight of an npc. it's creepy, and weird, and 100% of the time it should be the player who says if they are attracted to an npc or not. Gms do not just get to make things happen to player characters for jokes. Especially sexual stuff. That is a giant pile of red flags and something I would absolutely walk from a table over.
My Red Flag: Encouraging Player vs Player Conflicts. I joined a Curse of Strahd game half-way through the campaign, only to find out that half of the party was changelings or vampires actively screwing over the rest of the party. My own character got turned into a werewolf in that game, and the DM took control of my character in the final fight and used my character against the rest of the party against my will.
I'm not against encouraging PvP if that's what the players are down for. --but keeping what kind of game you are playing secret from the players is a major red flag.
I know that old-school werewolf rules actively encouraged DMs to take control of were-beast PCs while they were transformed, to make the inability to control the homicidal monster personality an actual threat, like in '70s werewolf movies, but ever since 3.5 that has been strictly a sidebar rule covered in caution tape. It firmly laid out that you should seriously discuss this with players before introducing this mechanic, at least after they find out they have been transforming, and that you should only use this tool if you know exactly what you are doing.
@@MrFelblood In 5e, the blurb that talkes about PC's becoming werewolves also says that when they become infected they just become an NPC straight up.
I run a DnD campaign that takes place in an apocalyptic scenario. The world slowly coming to life. Literally. Turning into a fleshy, eldritch monster with hair instead of grass, for example. Organs instead of underdark caves, too.
I have this murder hobo character in our party. Well, not murder hobo, more like "beat up everyone and do what I want despite the obvious story."
He'd randomly beat up NPCs if they even made one wrong move. He once abandoned the party during a bossfight just to run away with his pet boar. And then he opened a door to another world, a world he made, which was just Camelot. His character is themed around knights and King Arthur.
I had to improvise on the spot, "the world you once knew has been consumed by the forest and bushes, your kingdom long since abandoned-" (he's been gone for 127ish years). And he responded with, immediately, "no, it's not. It's thriving."
Keep in mind, he hadn't told me any of this beforehand. He didn't even make a map for me to use. He just did this because yes. Fortunately, though, he listened to me next campaign when I told him I was uncomfortable with the idea of having to do two campaigns at once, one in his world and one in ours.
And then it grew worse.
He's back to beat-up hobo mode. And it kinda helps, as we need combat in the place we visited. A kingdom with rapidly-dwindling supplies, since the world's crops are turning into... fertilizer. 😶
There's this corrupt castle in the middle of the kingdom, with a King who feeds on the starving townfolk for survival, keeping the queen locked in the basement. The queen being his sister.
This is a "we must keep the bloodline pure" family.
Later, we encounter their son. Who's obviously got some birth defects, mostly physical and some mental. But a kind soul, with a rather inquisitive mind and good intentions. His motivation for helping us? "I wanna do good. I wanna... I wanna see the trees again, I wanna see grass..." He's 4 years old, too.
Beat-up hobo, out of character, begins to make fun of the kid because of how ugly he looks, and begins to call him a freak and laugh more. Then, in-game, he has his character grab the kid by the arm and scream at him to interrogate him on the location of the kid's father. This begins an argument at the table with us and him about how abnormally cruel the Knight is to this kid, WHO IS FOUR, and how he didn't ask to be born like that. That it's not justifiable to make fun of him for being "freakish."
Biggest red flag: The DM isn’t lenient or fun with creativity at all.
There are two DMs that stand out to me when it comes to this. One was super fun and let us do all sorts of wacky shit (within reason as to not ruin the game), and the other had a stick up their ass and would literally pull out the most recent rule book if she suspected anything.
If I asked if my poison gas spell(? might be cantrip) was flammable, the first DM would say “Sure, why not, but only if the gas isn’t too thick in the area” and I would have to release a small amount of poison gas and then ignite it to create a small explosion.
The second DM would likely kick me from the session by having a “gang of mountain barbarians kidnap me in my sleep” or just straight up kill me and make a bullshit excuse as to how I am still alive in the next session.
That second DM isn't even being non lenient. That's just straight up bullying your players.
As a lifelong DM myself I have some empathy with strict DMs. In the back of my mind, I'm always generalizing creative ideas that my players have and ask myself "Could they do this to trivialize the next 10 encounters I throw at them?". From where I'm sitting your cool idea could well be the end to most challenges I can throw at you.
That being said, my answer is still "Yes" 90% of the time and if I decline it'll always be a "No, but..." answer that still lets you be cool. After all, that one time your party completely trivialized an encounter with an adult black dragon by using a BoH full of sodium hydroxide (neutralizing the dragons acid in a VERY volatile way) is something that will still be talked about at your table years from now. In those cases it's best to just take the L and let your players have their moment
As that rare species of DM who also has done enough being a PC, I always create a campaign that the group should love. Not just myself. And all I ask is the group at least tries to play along and experience the work I put in. If the DM has some obvious hooks when i'm a PC, I throw them a bone and take a few of them. Not always, but thats how i see how it should be done. Your all working to create a story together.
I tend to feel when a DM hammers in certain buzzwords such as "Gritty" "dark fantasy" or "realistic" they're codes for "You're going to be miserable so don't play"
Creating a world where characters can be miserable while payers are still having fun is a lot harder than it looks, and sadly a lot of people attempt it before they are ready.
I've said this in comments before and I'll say it again. Forcing draws of the deck of many things just when it's visible whether they are wanted or not, rolling against doing them. Also with another dm, attempting to beef encounters literally just to kill off a character (my barbarian) cause he kept getting random magic stuff, not my fault the dm decided to roll all loot random.
Personally, I wanted to thank you Brian for the kind and motivational words at the end of the video. I recently struggled with a person that did that kind of thing constantly. He would belittle my hobbies, how I would do things, and would constantly question why I enjoyed certain things, only to throw in exactly why he didn't like like doing those same things. Needless to say, I have quite the story.
Recently I had to not only kick out a member of one of my tables, but also tragically ended a friendship with someone who had some of the stereotypical red flags, both in DnD and in the general social life. We were starting up a custom homebrew of my own design. It was session 0 and I could already sense that this particular person was already setting things up his 'usual' way whenever he would come to the table as a player. Whether or not he did this to take advantage of new DM's, or to purposefully manipulate situations into his favor, I can only speculate. Nevertheless, he had multiple red flags present even before session 0 of my homebrew kicked off.
Starting off my own campaign, as a requirement of mine, I had my players share copies of their character sheets. Because of him I had to create a custom homebrew rule to clarify that the players may choose one background at level 5, but could 'study' for a second. His character sheet was already overpowered with all sorts of customized items, skill proficiencies, and abilities that I hadn't heard of before, and, being a newer DM in his own homebrew, my gut feeling felt something was fishy. It didn't help his case as this player would use manipulative tactics such as, "Does that mean I get two backgrounds? I think so, I shall get two backgrounds," before I could make an objection, or he would ask questions of "would that be a dc of 5 or 10?" before I could answer him to try and get away with a lowered save difficulty. He would do this constantly as a player, to myself and to my roommate who would also occasionally DM for us. As a result of this player having two backgrounds on session 0, I enforced the rule that his character could not have two "PHD's" which gave him the multiple backgrounds. (I know this sounds controlling on my part, but I could already tell I was going to have problems with this person). I informed him that he would start with one "PHD", and work for the next in pertaining to the lore of my campaign. Part of the campaign was that any formal education was gained through a large prestigious school located in the capital city, or you could gain education by finding a master to help you learn a skill and then take a mastery test at said capital's school. You would get one background "for free" from this school starting out, but had to work on getting more as your character developed. He made 0 changes to his character sheet, and proceeded to overly criticize the campaign as soon as it started. This player has been notorious for creating characters with exceedingly high stats to where they were difficult to hit, and would guarantee a success on pretty much any roll of a commonly used skill, minus a nat 1. He was also known to become passive aggressive, or he would 'sulk in the corner,' whenever he didn't get his way in a situation, or if this same group of friends did something else that he didn't want to do.
He was notorious for becoming passively aggressive when things were not done perfectly or by the rules 'as he understood them' or by the book and would try to manipulate situations to where people would feel uncomfortable. He was known for being a rules lawyer at times, especially when he was DMing his own version of Curse of Strahd (pretty sure he would play favorites with certain players as some players would incur steep penalties while others would get away with a whole lot o loot; I could never confirm this). Yet during his times as a player, he would attempt to sway in rules (abuse the 'rule of cool') in order to dodge penalties such as taking damage or would interrupt game play to explain something to where he would completely ruin the mood. He would constantly stall games and combats arguing as to why he should be allowed (or to disallow someone else) to do something. This happened all throughout my homebrew's first session.
Reguardless, my campaign's session 0 concluded and everyone, minus him, was happy with the outcome. My other players thanked me for the action packed session and they all went home. (The players were still on session 0 technically as they hadn't met up at the true player bonding point yet). Next morning outside of session I get a text from this player that he and his then girlfriend, her also being one of my best friends didn't feel like they got the plot of the story. (He liked to take it upon himself to speak for her as he thought he always knew best; something that she eventually came to hate). Before the game began, the players were textually informed that there were rumors of a particular artifact that existed, and the players needed to go after said artifact by which of their own reasoning for obtaining such an item. This factor was explained in the prologue to session 0 before game play even began, though I realized that this was a mistake on my part and have changed how this will start up. As a result I decided to scrap the original start of the game, and restarted the campaign over with a brand new beginning to give my players a different experience while tying in the plot. Needless to say, this player's girlfriend and the rest of my players were not very happy about my feeling I had to restart a whole campaign because it didn't fit his liking, but they respected my decision. Incredibly this was a decision of which, come to find out later, actually worked out in favor of all of us.
In an incident unrelated to DnD some time between sessions, this player caused some drama with his now Ex girlfriend, of which myself and a few other of my players had to intervene in order to calm her down and get her away from him. After dealing with that situation, which triggered some issues with some of my own past trauma, we all came to the conclusion collectively that this person was not only never allowed to play DnD with us again, but that we were never going to interact with this person due to the level of toxicity he portrayed. As it currently stands, this person will never join a table with me, and is now out of my life for good (hopefully). As for my own self, I will be kicking off the new year with fewer toxic people in my life, a better group of friends, and a better start to a custom homebrewed DnD campaign.
The only time i think it’s fine to tell someone what their character does is skill checks to describe how they did
I actually try to flavor combat according to rolls and what the players fighting styles are like, mainly because it's hard to get my players to attack with anything more descriptive than "I got a 17." Nobody has expressed any problems with this before, and in fact I've been complimented on illustrating a complex battle scene. Of course, the system isn't D&D specifically, and generally there's only 1 attack per turn, but I want my players to have a clear mental image of what's going on. In contrast, I'm a player in a separate campaign where players will just say things like "Make a wisdom save DC 16" - DM says, "Fail." - Player says, "He takes 11 psychic damage." And I'm like what the heck is going on? I don't need the spell name but like... what does my character actually see happening?!
@@LarryJ2022 i love this so much! I do the exact same in the campaign I'm running and a few players started doing their own as well :)
My big one is when a dm insists that ever encounter must be "deadly." This makes the players make stronger characters, so the dm makes the monsters stronger, so the players make their character stronger... on and on it goes until every fight is a bitter war of attrition that leaves everyone miserable. I call it the doom spiral.
My favorite example of the opposite of this is the Baldening from JRWI: Riptide. It was a combat encounter where the enemies' only goal was to shave off the hair of the party members. Nobody used lethal force, and any damage the PCs took was in the form of getting their hair clipped.
one of my biggest deal breaker ones that i ran into just a few minutes ago is DMs that seem obsessed with not letting your stats be your stats
basically his argument was that my wizard with +8 INT and +6 to arcana knows next to nothing about magic regardless of rolls because the party is level 1
i put forth the argument that even a level 1 wizard has already spent years reading, researching, and experimenting
his reply? "as god i reserve my right to be a terrible person" except so much more assholey than that i blanked the exact wording from my memory.
i replied that i had no interest in playing skyrim with extra steps and walked out immediately.
for context the knowledge in question was what the ethereal plane is and how bags of holding work.
no this was not in an attempt to cheese anything.
If they call for a saving throw with no reason given for why it's needed, and then giggle when someone fails or express disappointment on a success.
That just says to me 'how much can I traumatize this character/player?'
If you have learned to dread a person's happiness, that is not a good person and you should stop being around them. As a DM I love the drama that can emerge when players struggle a bit for their victory, and a few curses and poisons that pile up over the course of a dungeon can give them a sense of dragging themselves to the finish line. It makes them feel like they earned a win, instead of snowballing over some trash mobs.
If you have cheesy players who resent the traditional stat penalty curses, because they like rolling hits and whatnot, you can invent sillier situations for the dungeon defenses to slap them with. Half of the party is now floating 3" off the floor and is unable to pick up objects, so if they need anything from down there, they'll need to ask for help. The orc fighter now only speaks elvish. The handsome swashbuckler has an allergic reaction to the toxic dart and his face is purple and swollen for 2d6 days, and must figure out who he is without his looks. The passage to the exit collapses and there is no way to go except forwards, so I hope you weren't planning to fall back to camp for a long rest after every encounter (You know who you are).
I once had a DM send me a homebrew class telling me I should play it. I had wanted to play a cleric, but the class he sent me seemed cool so I just ran with it and made my character. Now one thing I should mention about this DM is, while this was my first time playing with him, the other players had played a campaign he DMed before and informed me he doesn't allow feats because he thinks they're overpowered. Anyways, there was a built in class feature that let this homebrew class attack a creature twice pretty early on, I think it was either 1st or 2nd level. When I used this in the first combat he told me that it was overpowered and I can't do that anymore. On it's own I probably would have said, "sure whatever," but they fact that he sent me this class to play and didn't even know what it did and changed what it did when he didn't like it made me upset and I never played with him again after that session.
I had a DM ask for a back story, which he decided to overwrite and remake her how he wanted her to be.
Guess you should have written a better back story.
@@mrosskne you're not wood elf, you're drow, you're not leaving home because you're the 7th of 12 children, and have no hope of inheritance, you're an only child.
@@sherylcascadden4988 sorry about your stroke i guess lol
@@mrosskne ah, looks like you're one of those fake gigachad type people that goes around saying the worst type of shit for attention on every comment so he can come off as "based". a _real_ gigachad would mind his own goddamn business.
@@axain7784 stay mad :)
As a DM I kinda have beef to pick with the first complaint about "player creativity". There's a very fine line with what should and shouldn't be allowed with creativity, and the applications of it are hazy at best. Everyone knows it's very satisfying to create a solution to a seemingly unsolvable situation, it's a great feeling. However, a common problem with "creativity" is that a lot people confuse a smart way something might be used with how something is actually used.
For example, a bridge is going to collapse because the ropes are cut from the center while you and your party are on it, and a smart player might try to cast something like cast web before it snaps. Holding it together. This falls in line within reasonable expectations of the spell, albeit not explicitly written in it. A fair use of creativity.
However, a bad example (I've had this exact situation happen before) is lets say an enemy is going to blow a war horn and alert the camp that there are intruders, and the Artificer casts Air Bubble inside the instrument to block the sound. Now see, Air bubble doesn't do that. (In fact, the creature has to be willing to even have it cast on them). The spell creates a sphere of breathable air, it doesn't block sound or prevent air flow or anything that would be effective here. This is a player going "I want to cast X and win". This was a bad feeling because in this case the creativity was a crutch they tried to rely on, instead of actually thinking of a solution they could actually do. Which is the main problem. It encourages players to attempt to use spells/abilities for things that spell/ability can't reasonably do. Such as freezing a river with cone of cold, (even though there is a specific spell for this EXACT kind of situation).
A player will try to use "creative" solutions as a way to be lazy instead of coming up with a "real" solution. Which sounds objective, but part of the game aspect of DnD should be working with tools you have, not tools you wish you had. You can't just make a potion that does exactly what you need today, you can't just find the item you need right now when you need it. Players should feel the agency of their decisions, their items, their choices in spells and a DM should play into what the players want to do so the players feel like those choices matter. A player might feel like "This DM is shutting down my creative solutions", but in my opinion, going that far out the bounds of how spell is used, shows a lack of creativity, because you're just making up a solution you don't reasonably have.
Our bard in the second example didn't have silence prepared, and he was honest about it so he couldn't solve that situation. However, it made him think, "in stealth ops I should really have this spell!" Which is a good learning experience and shows that he's thinking about how to apply spells to situations outside of just combat.
When I was a much Younger Dm meaning back in the mid 80's I was the bad dm limiting races and classes for campaines and oneshots and even handing out premade character sheets so the characters would fit the world.. a couple times it ended terribly, figured out the premade characters can work if you at least let the players choose who they want to play rather then assigning them. Had a player call me out as a DM for not allowing artificer or warforged in my games and one shots last year, They threw a fit even though I told them that I didn't have the books for that class or race. That player kept at me to the point I almost broke with the group I was DM'ing for, fortunately I now have those books and on a couple occasions I even Homebrew specific classes or races for the players. I still dm and play with the group, I have lost a few groups over the years mostly because of players or myself moving out of the area.
I still say that limiting player races, classes or subclasses (as long as they aren't PHB) is fine if something makes you uncomfortable. Especially if you don't own the book it's in.
Sometimes we do have to rush the players along in certain scenarios though and I mean that's just kind of how it is like when I pitched the game that I had written out recently to my current three players I told them this is specifically designed to take for or five sessions and I wrote it that way because I knew I would only have 5 weeks tops that I could dedicate the time slot to dming that particular game and I gave them the parameters of it before we all started and made sure to explain the limited scope of it all and now two sessions later I'm getting complaints that it feels like where like I'm boxing them in.
I've had to remind two of them already that I specifically stated I wrote this game out to last four or five sessions two of the three of them expected to go into perpetuity I clearly said it was quite literally the second line in the game pitch quite literally the second line in fact it might have actually been the second sentence they were all made very clear on that topic and that point before we started and they've already forgotten two sessions later we can't wrap up a game in 4 to 5 sessions if the players just go completely into left field and go do something entirely irrelevant like I understand that railroading is bad but playing a module is also railroading and what I wrote was a module everyone agreed to play it and then all of a sudden nobody wants to do that so forgive me for rushing my players along if they can't be asked to actually read the game pitch
DMs who find joy in "beating" the players. D&D isn't about purposely trying to make the players lose, and DMs who see it that way are immediately off the table for me.
Another would be the DM that treats D&D as a... activity you should do in private... if you know what I mean. It's never happened to me yet, but I remember seeing an example of it in the video on "what made you nope out of a campaign" and it disgusted me to no end.
That very last one (enforced LGBTQ) is a blissfully rare thing in TTRPGs, but in the MUD/MUCK/MUSH world of online text games it's way more common. The number of characters I've had get crap for not being X or Y is too damn high. "She's not interested" gets treated like a personal attack. And pointing to the PCs I've made that *are* didn't much help in said cases.
(sidenote, LGBT players tended *not* to be the people prone to that behavior, if anything they call that out as unfair when they see it. It's Cishet who do it in the MUD world and I have no idea why.)
It's called "white-knighting", a.k.a. people "defending the honor" of others to "keep them from being offended" (when most of the time those people aren't offended at all by the action in question).
Nah, it's overwhelmingly the alphabet weirdos that ignore boundaries and think they're entitled to everyone else's attention / affection
@@Scorpious187Ironically, most of the people who white-knight tend to be white too. I doubt you would get that from anybody else.
I once had a DM who would always cry about how horrible her campaigns were, but never actually try to improve. The list of things they did included: Extreme railroading. Dmpcs stealing the spotlight and we couldn't get rid of them for plot reasons. Ignoring when a player was uncomfortable with their character being de-clothed and pushing through with it anyways, and many, many more incidents.
Biggest red flag for me when I played D&D 4.5 is that the DM didn't reprimand the other players who deliberately punishing my character in game simply because I made a in-character decision that they out of character didn't like, and basically said DM just makes excuses for their behavior needless to say I had to leave the group despite my attempts to not start a fight when said DM allowed say asshole players to kill my character in her sleep for BS reasons.
DMs who are more interested in their story than yours.
Example: Had a DM who seemed super into his own story, but whenever the party say, wanted to RP with a family member, he'd seem super out of it.
Thankfully I've gotten better DMs since then, but it did sorta make me afraid of making my own story.
I once had a DM face a 1st level party with a Revenant in a situation where the party had to flee and leave their paralyzed friend behind. The only possible outcome was that one party member dies first session. In our case 3 of 5 party members died. This wasn’t an isolated incident. In nine months of playing with that group I lost 5 characters and never reached 5th level. The DM would just say “this is old school dnd we’re characters die a lot” or “sometimes the dragon wins”. Some of the players never lost a character because they ran away from every encounter and the fighter types got left holding the bag. I was happy when Covid hit and the group broke up.
“Anything said at the table is audible in game.”
My first and favorite gaming group had this rule. In combat it didn’t matter because it would just be us tapping tactics. In RP it made it more engaging. You had to think before you spoke, so staying in character was easier and lead to incredibly dramatic moments at major character arcs. The rule was if you didn’t want to say it, somebody just needed to say “out of character, but…”. This would allow us a couple minutes to clarify any questions we had pertaining to how the situation came about, to ask the DM if there were details we were missing for a situation, etc. but it was always for the benefit of the RP experience. Never a detriment.
If implemented correctly this can be great to focus the players on keeping conversations in game. But done incorrectly becomes a nuisance really fast.
What I dont like about that rule is that People might not have the same intelligence or Charisma as their character.
Just like I dont force players to actually lift a metal door or slash through a monsters head IRL I also dont force my players to off-game solve puzzles or flirt to succeed ingame.
I do ofcourse allow roleplay to a high degree and encourage it, but on those types of rolls (especially social) I ask for their general approach + goal and then we role.
The role then gives us the outcome of the talk which then makes it easier to roleplay :)
I was worried for a moment when I heard the "Starfinder, disallowed races".
When I first picked up the corebook, I read through it and saw that Vesk/Solarians are a bit OP when combined. I told my group I wasn't allowing them for balance issues until I could find an errata to make sure I wasn't reading too far into it.
As for my person red flags in a DM: I had a DM, in one of the few times I got to be a player, who had a board behind him with tick marks on it, and written across was "TPK Counter". It had close to twenty tick marks. Asked about it. "When I get bored of a group, I just TPK them and we start something new."
I just left. That didn't sound fun at all.
DM's who nerf pc skills/spells. Had a dm once that got pissed because my warlock had a quasit (pact of the chain) that had invisibility and could fly, so i could basicly scout ahead. He did not know i had the quasit as he didnt bother to ask/check what kind of characters the players had, and as we were about to enter a cave, i sent out my quasit to scout, and the dm said it ruins the whole campaign. Suddenly the whole cave had a magical barrier that basically made my quasit blind in there...
Cheers to Starfinder from this Vesk boarding Marine combat engineer turned high risk salvage operator. Need a derelict cleared of zombies to rip out the leaky reactor core? He's your beer-swilling lizard!
Had a DM where the DM couldn’t give their full attention to the game because they had infant siblings running around in the background all the time. And they had to focus their attention away from the game to respond to the usual toddler mishaps that we never overheard in specific but it was obvious that it happened. There was also a strained undercurrent of “OMG I have no idea how to do this but Imma do it anyway”, which I respected the moxie of but required HECKIN patience to wait through.
DMs, arrange your time and space so you can give your full attention to the session. If you can’t do that? Then rethink DMing. The players feel either that they are suffering through your distractions with you, or they feel that you don’t respect their time and energy to make characters and play through your campaign. Neither is desired, and both make it harder for players to stick around.
That DM had promise, but they DESPERATELY needed better organization.
No idea if you're still in touch, but it sounds like play-by-post might be a great method for them.
"No arguing with the DM" or any variation of that.
The fact that it has to be there as a rule in the first place is a red flag. Because either it indicates problematic players or DM universally in my experience.
It's the job of the party just as much to say "not cool" or whatever else is necessary as it is the DM's job to keep players in line.
We generally have 'the GM is the final arbiter when playing. If you disagree with a ruling, write it down and bring it up after the session'
But it isnt a rule actually... it is more an agreement
That seems more or less reasonable.
What I'm talking about are the "DM is always right & can do no harm" sorta types. I'm not saying folk should start arguing for extended periods during the game but everyone should be able to go "Hold up! That's not ok!" If the DM(or player) does something that is clearly not ok.
Players can't leave if you shatter their kneecaps.
@@mrosskne
I mean I suppose so...
I just want to say that I do ban certain races but I have good reasons for it, I ban all the ones that let you make your own custom race because I let players backstories and the rest of their ideas mold the world before they start playing so the least they can do is let me have the races I know how to work with instead of just making one up, I also don't like flying races because in order to make balanced encounters I have to either limit the flying ability by fighting in buildings so they won't just fly off and act like gun drones the entire encounter or I have to make flying enemies, both of these make it feel like I'm targeting the player which I don't like and I've had players complain that I'm singling them out because I have things that only effect them, so I just gave up
PANR has tuned in.
That crystal problem of yours was solved? Or just everyone uses it as sugar now?
Have a great day. 18 o'clock here.
So, my red flags are more so for cruelty. And certain encounter and the other is just a denial of an idea.
1. When any sort of dire animal appears that doesn't normally show up as a dire variant. SO MANY SMALL ANIMALS BECOME HORRIFYING WHEN DIRE. We had two moments with this. 1. Dire Humming Birds, wing beats when it groups give negatives to pretty much all checks and drink blood like vampires. 2. WASPS. BRUH. Things were the size of large cats we didn't even try to engage. We noped out, it was like the DM just liked to throw horrifying projects at us to test them. Not such a bad "red flag", the DM wasn't so much "bad" just so horrifying.
Second thing. I got a lecture for carrying out my Kitsune's curiosity for potentially outrageous outcomes. Like, an actual lecture for trying to "derail" everything. Look, I totally get that some experiments can add badly. I mean, the character quirk pretty much altered everything when ever he did something. Two examples. 1. We had come across eventually both a bag of holding and a portable hole. Bright idea, what would happen if a portable empty space was put into a sealed of space inside the bag? Let me tell you, nothing good.
Second example. We had time to prepare for an attack that was gonna happen to us in a fort. Bright idea with the mage and my kitsune. We found the the most isolated room, only one way in; the door. Right inside behind the door, we made two "gates" one on the floor and one above the door. Which, we tossed coins and other objects into. Caltrops, poison needles and other goodies. You ever see the game portal where you could potentially end up in a constant falling loop with two portals? It was that. It worked so well that they never even got close and we avoided like three major encounters from it.
I must admit that I am one of the DMs and Players who LOVE using 'dire' animals (and other types of alternate beasts)
But I alway make sure my players are okay with it
When the DM makes a gritty realism game, doesn't tell you as a first time player what that will mean for you as a sorcerer, then proceeds to constantly fuss you for hoarding your spellslots when you DO learn what it means for your sorcerer.
Then immediately throws you and the group into a 3 boss gauntlet in the next session after you relent, no short rest between each, and oh yeah dominated by the mindflayer after the 3 boss gauntlet
Red flags "I'm great at RP but I don't do role-playing in one shots because there's no time to include that." Tells me their bigger campaigns are going to have subpar roleplay because they're not as good as they think they are.
Second red flag, inconsistent rules for a themed rpg.
Dm wanted s campaign eith characters based on aspects of us irl. Required any performance checks to actually be performed, like you had to improvise songs and sing them irl, most characters couldn't ve talker than you were irl, etc. But things like strength checks for his girlfriends somehow super strong character weren't based on what she could lift irl, among other exceptions made for her and his best friend compared to the other players.
Personally I think that any DM who offers premade characters to players right in the beginning without even asking whether they want to make their own characters or not have already failed to set the mood for their game.
I was brand-new to Traveller, which is notoriously difficult to make a character in, and the DM handed me his character sheet so I could get the hang of it. Thankfully I knew what I was doing by the time that character died
1. A dm not explaining in advance if your character is unsuitable for a setting. 2. Taking away the entire point of a class, subclass, or other feature because of this. My dm is awesome at story telling, world building, and being open to all our ideas. But I had chosen a necromancer. In Curse of Strahd. Now I can get a dm attacking me or my gaggle of ghouls but it really diminished my experience for a few sessions when he’d hinted a strong enough vampire or lich might be able to wrestle control of my undead. Now I get it could happen especially in a dark fantasy like CoS, but had he told me my main ability could not only be useless but turned on my group I would have probably used a different character or subclass from the start for a better experience. Luckily we changed my subclass to something more suitable a few sessions later at a convenient plot point.
Ten rules of being a DM:
1. Don't be vindictive against characters.
2. If you want to ban something, ban it. Don't allow it and then punish the player for doing it.
3. Clearly explain why you want to nerf certain abilities (e.g. flight)
4. Maintain separation between what happens in-game to characters and out of game to players or yourself as the DM.
5. Do not take control of a player character for no good reason. Don't force them to become the BBEG. Don't control their weapons. For the love of Gods don't make an NPC automatic succeed at seducing them or describe their character's physiological responses to that.
6. Your players probably don't want you to railroad their PCs to be constantly sadistically tortured and abused. If that's the kind of campaign you want to run, find players who are ok with stuff like that from the start.
7. Do not try to increase the challenge by increasing the likelihood of a TPK for every single encounter. If you want to make very challenging encounters common, design them so that there are a broader range of possible outcomes besides one side winning by annihilation and roleplay the enemies like they are people, not mindless zombies (unless they are zombies of course). Do not think of combat as a duel to the death but a complex battle with both sides having complex objectives.
8. Make your rulings consistent and don't ban something arbitrarilly unless it just wouldn't work in the campaign or is blatantly OP or ruins the game somehow.
9. Do not ban cliche character designs for being cliche. Remember, the character's story isn't written yet. A cliche backstory will quickly diverge from the cliche.
10. Do not ban character designs based on identity politics categories alone unless it just wouldn't work with the story and the party, or contains excessive real life political baggage not necessary for the character concept which makes it problematic.
Idk if this is a red flag but i remember a DM, it was my first game and i was still really new. They just made me feel bad for not knowing things and forgetting what each dice was for. It made me really down cause i felt like no one wanted me there so i ended up leaving cause of mental health
...That ain't no red flag. That's a CRIMSON flag.
I'll admit, I don't normally allow dragon born characters if it's one of my home brew story's because there generally over powered, especially with the breath weapons, but if the player talks to me about it, and we come to an agreement, then yeah, cool, play a dragon born, but generally, I don't allow them. Mainly bc of the breath weapon, or because of there special skill depending on the type of dragon born, and there's always lore behind it
i can get not allowing races to fit the setting but how are dragonborn overpowered? Their dragon breath isn't really that strong if we are talking about php dragonborn
*laughs in high elf and mountain dwarf*
@@ebertgameandstuff 1d10 damage in a 15 foot cone isn't overpowered at all. Some cantrips do 1d10 damage. You don't even get unlimited uses.
@@firstnamelastname7244 why are you replying to me? I don’t think they are overpowered dude
Lol dragonborn overpowered
I've not had the experience of beimg under another DM, all my time in ttrpgs has been as the dm so far. But this is helpful on what to keep an eye out for both in myself and others.
One of the biggest red flags I've ever experienced, although it's not with the GM, is a player that creates the character with a specific personality, and then roleplays the complete opposite of what the character would do. We have a shy character in the campaign, and he's the one talking to everybody and doing everything, clearly not roleplaying the character but instead doing what he thinks is the coolest, like he's participating in a live roleplaying session like it's being streamed or something
Used to be a ban hammer DM, because I went through a stretch of some 4 years where I kept running into insufferably problematic players. Finally ran into a very good, very chill group who helped me realize that I needed to eliminate my list of forbidden things and concentrate it down to simply one rule: "don't be a jerk." And I started holding players to that. Was amazed that I had fewer problems by simply warning players at the start of the game that I would immediately boot them if they were egregious problematic. This gave players with problems the opportunity to adjust their behavior, and it taught me to bend a lot more and be more tolerant. For example, I banned tieflings for the same reason a lot of DMs do, but I changed my ban to a simple rule: only one tiefling per campaign, and the tiefling could not be an edge lord. Had a player emphatically thank me, because he had only been playing for a year, and every group he tried to join forbade him from playing a tiefling, even though it was the reason he got into the game, and he had promised not to be a jerk. He played a tiefling guy who was like a witch hunter eldritch knight, acting gruff and cranky but secretly harboring a heart of gold. Was a fun character
The DM who adds new mechanics to a spell or combine two spells into one and ignores player feedback. A DM who thinks players should have fun the way the DM thinks they should have fun. For example combining the cloud kill, stinking cloud and a random direction roll every round while you are in the area of effect.
DMPCs are a huge red flag to me.
I know that they can work if in the right hands but never experienced a ‘good’ one myself (always end up taking over the game or using meta knowledge etc).
It depends, if the dmpcs are plot hooks or plot points, or just meant to be a source of information like a barkeeper in a main city, they should be good. If they travel with the party, they should usually have an excuse made to keep them out of combat so they don’t hog the spot light/ or have the players cycle through rolling for that dmpc. Thus letting the players get more time.
I've got a DMPC, however he's just meant to be a fun character and was a carryover from a previous "campaign." He's the adopted son of my old character who was a Blue Dragon Lagiacrus hybrid raised by a gentlemanly professor. My character, Seastrike, was a quadraplegic human who was reborn as a Raptor-Allosaurus combo with the powers, colors and traits of an Abyssal Lagiacrus. He's the adaptable hunter who can and will learn techniques from ARK dinosaurs, and he hangs out with any given team. He's taken over as the "dad" of the crew, and he's also a bit of a comic relief. As a DM, I know we should be able to play in our worlds too, but leave a lot open to players, for it's their story too.
The way I describe my gameplay style is, "Our game is vanilla with lots of chocolate sprinkles, but my guy is a drizzle of chocolate syrup on top of sprinkles." I'm carefully playing a boss class and I know it. I usually make Seastrike the "Blue Dracoraptor" use support moves unless he's hunting or he is attacked. We don't take anything seriously other than some roleplay moments, and even then we try to make each other laugh. I try to make combat center around all of our characters' combined capabilities, what I think we can pull off. Or I'm silly enough to roll a die and possibly doom the party. We don't do permadeath unless it's a sacrifice, and unless it's a boss fight all encounters are carefully calculated chocolate. If I screw up an encounter's balance, I have the Goddess rescue the team and break the fourth wall, asking me "Talon, what were you thinking?"
Also, add a unique plot element. Aerobrine is a master of spacetime, so I used that as a plot hook for a one shot by making a familiar Deinonychus squeak his favorite doll, opening a portal to the Aether realm. This gave us an excuse to make encounters Rivals of Aether fights, recruit our favorite characters, and two of my favorite moments in D&D resulted from it, one of which I'll be putting in a flashback. This was also used to displace our team into a new world as I was the only person who could be a consistent DM and I had ideas we could all toy with, such as monster partners like in Monster Hunter Stories.
DMPCs are easily misplayed. As long as the DMPC is not used as an extension of the bad DM's iron fist, it's fine. The most meta I get is breaking the fourth wall by squirting a player or having the Goddess talk straight to the players if they think about destroying the world we're going to be working on. I even have Seastrike break the fourth wall on occasion by making a joke that the characters wouldn't get, but we'd all laugh at. I've got an event lined up where a friend has a chance of landing on his new Yoshi style saddle, making the SMW Yoshi noise. General rule of thumb, if your DMPC is beloved, you're doing it right.
@@Goldencat44 that’s an npc. A Dmpc is a player character made to permanently join the party so that the dm can play along with the party (regardless if they’re involved in the plot).
Having Barry Bluejeans or whoever temporarily join the party to lead them somewhere/etc is just an npc.
@@supernintendosp skipped to last para as it’s the only relevant part.
Glad it worked out for you and seemingly doing it well.
Not sure what was intended to be added or debated though.
@@toshi9742 agree to disagree, I have seen dmpcs that come and go from the party throughout the campaign for a session or two at a time usually when one party member will be gone for those sessions. But always seems to be in the background.
Inflexibility in ruling against players but homebrewing everything else is a big red flag for me
The DM saw I was going to play a paladin and went into a tirade about how celibates could never adventure, and it's easy to get them to renounce their vows. I told him I'm playing an Oath of Ancients paladin who enjoys wine, song, and good company, there wasn't anything about celibacy in his backstory and he's probably going to party if he has the opportunity. I was told that's not how paladins work and I would lose my spellcasting if I indulged at all. I didn't bother showing up to the first session.
Allowing one player to just be ingame 'bullied'
I played as a DM a couple of times and I‘m very glad that I did none of the things that are mentioned in your various videos. I admit that I do two things tho that are not quite to the rules.
First when I give my players several options to choose from I tend to have the end result be the same. For example: they can choose between two ways through a forest, but in the end the same stuff happens bo matter if they go left or right. Just because it would be far to complex for me to have all those options ready.
Second, I sometimes change the HP of boss monsters a bit on the fly so that the fight isn‘t too boring or that we don‘t have a TPK. I feel like cheating for this one. I probably am not good enough with the CR to properly set the enemies. Last session I didn‘t do this and the end fight was over too fast so that not every team member could show their abilities. Which was a shame.
Would interested in what others think about this. #1 is excusable I think.
It sounds like you're doing just fine as a new(?) DM.
The option of choice can be a way to set the tone of the area or could be as simple as it being fun to give the party options.
As for the encounter issue, there's nothing wrong with running a couple mock encounters as dm prep. You can gague roughly how your players would react, play them accordingly, and adjust the encounter as needed. Maybe the evil wizard should be a higher level and have 1 less kobold henchman.
If you're still DMing, I'm sure you'll figure out what works best for you and your players in due time.
Pretty sure every DM has done the first one at some point if not frequently, making a truly open-ended adventure would be a nightmare. As long as you're not being rude about railroading I don't think you have anything to worry about.
To be fair, the cr system is a bloody mess and quickly becomes inaccurate at higher levels, and you're using a quick flexible workaround to keep the pace up.
Personally I set aside some time to look through a dozen-ish foes that are around their level; then check if a given monster has a glaring weakness to the party, and if it can exploit a weakness in the party. If I want it to be a challenge then I'll pick out something that isn't obviously weak to their synergy; but if I pick something that can take advantage of them, I make sure it's not the same characters being cheated as last time. Usually works, but when it fails it's often unexpectedly corny.
a dm who hosts a campaign with more than 8 players, even the best dms cannot handle 15 players, and i will not join another game with 8 or more, or 15 players, it was chaos and i almost stopped playing dnd cause my first dnd campaign had 15 players. I will still attend campaigns with 5-8 players cause that is reasonable
How anyone can force people to play LGBT characters, but then ban Tieflings, which is like the queerest of the races is beyond me.
A big red flag I've seen was forcing certain races into certain classes. We've all seen the "Elves are Rangers" and "Halflings are Rogues" guys, but the worst DM I've seen had a literal list of race/class combos that were allowed and they were all the stereotypes for that race. (And no one was a wizard because and I quote "Wizards are dumb and nerds." Like humans could be anything "EXCEPT wizards")
I find this hilarious because in old DND humans were one of the few races who COULD be wizards. Particularly necromancers
Unfortunately my brother have show alot of red flags, here a list
Not letting us roll ANY saving throw (we try talking to him but he won't let us, he roll them and not tell us)
Hard Nerf feats that reduces speed
And the last one
Hard Nerf on some sub-class that weren't OP in the first place (talking about Cavalier)
I think I'm forgetting some if I remember I'll edit this comment
Edit: I just remembered the last one and I fell stupid for not remembering it earlier
Making EVERY monster immune to Prone because he believes it waste time.
the "he rolls our saving throws for us and doesn't tell us the result" reeks of the DM using it as an excuse to fudge rolls and make people fail on a whim without having to give justification because "you failed your saving throw."
TLDR: Lack of Safety Tools / Ignoring when humor and banter makes someone uncomfortable.
(Details Included Below I actually would like advice on how to handle this properly as I've not yet left the group causing this issue)
Important Information: I am one of only two women in this group, and I'm autistic so things like spoken rp and taking certain types of humor is difficult for me when I don't know the group very well. I'm patient and try not to be a bother but, my discomfort was ignored and the more I play with this group the more I'm worried I'll need to leave it.
As an aspiring dm and relatively new player the biggest red flag for me is just a lack of safety tools. I was in a group that I was initially stoked to be with because it was a My Hero Academia dnd rp, I'm kind of obsessed with heroes especially MHA. My character is named Hanabi Matsuri and her quirk or Superpower works like Sai from Naruto with the ability to bring anything she draws to life but, at only level 1 she can't really make anything that big yet without it causing her to pass out. Also she's one of the only characters at the table who actually have their backstory written out.
Our first session happens but, I don't get to really do anything as I showed up late, okay no big deal and this is going well it seams. Next session the first one where I get to actually do something we're doing the UA entrance exams ripped straight from the anime and it's going great at first we have some cute conversations and even have canon characters make appearances but then the combat portion starts, I'm being attacked by two robots, and none of my moves are working because I can't seem to roll anything higher than an 11 this session, I had chosen what I thought was a safer location, and immediately got teased for it. Hearing another player say "Of Course the girl picks the worst spot to be in." Now I'm new to this group and don't know anyone close, I'm autistic and sometimes teasing like this gets to me when it shouldn't because until I know someone well enough I can't always tell how much of it is a joke and how much of it is genuine.
So I as calmly as I can and without seeming too whiny, I attempt to express that I don't really like that kind of humor since I don't know them well enough to tell when it's a joke but, it gets brushed off as me being too sensitive the other girl in the group wasn't bothered by it probably because she knew them better than I did. So I imagine the teasing that made me uncomfortable was just normal for her
Shortly after that the DM I guess felt bad for me and did a 'cut scene' I was struggling, and I was starting to think my character wouldn't pass, that on top of too many people talking at the same time made it impossible for me to form any words. I should mention I'm not good at spoken rp I'm a writer yes but, my brain doesn't always like to push the words out of my mouth. So my brain works like a computer while my mouth can only spit about the same as a type writer that's low on ink.
The cut scene goes well, I have my anime moment which was fun and made me feel better, like I hadn't totally managed to mess everything up.
Though, the next session which was several weeks later (they have literally no schedule despite how many times I've begged for just an IDEA of when our sessions will be since I'm not in college like they are and I'm an adult living in an apartment alone, it's super easy for me to just be late if I don't know what's going on because my dm decided to message me while in the middle of making dinner or something. I don't like to be the annoying one unprepared because I just don't know when I need to be.)
So in this second session t some point everyone started making gay jokes, not very flattering ones either but, I try to participate by making a point that I'm bi. Nobody responds to me, so I say it again just trying to participate in the laugh, we're on a discord call so I think maybe they just didn't hear me but, then I'm teased again and shot down which just soured me a little. We're trying to do the USJ arc and everyone gets scattered around the facility by 2 groups live and run back on their own but my character doesn't have the kind of mobility that they do so she gets sucked into the warpgate and sent into a randomized area. We roll to see what area we get and OF COURSE my girl lands in the water zone the only place where her ink based power just doesn't work like it should because if you've ever seen Batman Beyond, water washes the ink away. So I'm not entirely sure how that's going to work out.
Overall I'm worried though that these constant jabs, and this uncomfortable environment is going to get more toxic since they don't seem to care if something they say comes off the wrong way or not. I don't feel comfortable confronting people I barely know of my concerns either seeing as my disorder was largely brushed off already and I don't want to seem like I'm trying to use it as a crutch it just happens that in some situations my symptoms flair up and there's not a lot I can do about them when they happen without a little help from those around me to just be a little patient with me.
Luckily this isn't the only campaign I'm in, I have a Final Fantasy Homebrew that one of my best friends runs, a star wars rp I adore, and I am working on my own varient of Villains and Vigilantes soon.
I don't play DnD, but I think if the question of whether or not to leave a campaign due to player conflict comes up and it's clear that their behavior won't change, that's when you need to leave the campaign.
I know where you're coming from about not wanting to seems like you're trying to use autism as an excuse to have your way and how you feel uncomfortable bringing up your concerns with the people in your group because of it. I'm also autistic and I'm not great at talking with people either, so I relate to a lot of what you've said here actually.
However, the only way this issue could possibly be resolved imo is by talking with the other people in the party. If they don't know you have autism you don't have to say it explicitly, just mention you're having trouble understanding whether or not they actually mean the disrespectful things they're saying or if they're just meant as jokes (though even if they are, they're in poor-taste). If they're not willing to clarify things and try to work out the problem with you, it's not worth staying in the group.
If you feel uncomfortable doing that, I recommend maybe talking with the other female member of your group and asking her opinion on their behavior. You've already made your concerns with the game somewhat clear by the looks of it, but perhaps she just isn't good at confrontation either and has been keeping her concerns to herself (and if not then you can at least ask for her perspective on things. Maybe it's just a case of missing social cues, in which case you could gain some insight and better understand why they act that way). Perhaps if you were to discuss the situation together beforehand and she feels the same way, it will be easier to confront the rest of the group since you'll be able to back each other up.
The important thing is to do all of this out of game, in between session. Don't wait until the next session to get on call with the party and talk about your concerns. Perhaps send a message in a group text or something of the sort laying out all of your concerns with the game. If they don't get back to you before the next session, then don't show up and tell them you won't be joining until your concerns are addressed.
It sounds like you might want to leave the problem group, since they sound inconsiderate in general. You're not overreacting, their vibe is bad.
Your reactions to the 'tease' was absolutly not too much. Seems like you tried to handle it perfectly, but they ignored you.
You were not too sensitive. They were assholes.
If the whole group straight up ignores the issues you have, they are just inconsiderate assholes. From what you've written, I understand that you didn't do anything wrong, so in your place I wouldn't go any further than giving them one final chance to consider your issues before living the group
@@aquabluerose7734 thank you, I was concerned about being too hasty, and didn’t want to risk jumping the gun these comments make me feel a bit more justified in feeling this way.
First ever Red Flag I experienced was in a session online using Roll20, a session with a DM that built the entire campaign around killing the players over and over, due to them resurrecting immediately after dying outside of wherever you were. I think I witnessed the same character die twice, losing more of himself every time from dying due to hidden traps or creatures that couldn't be found, no matter what you rolled, and you couldn't save anyone who got trapped in said trap (e.g, walking into a completely translucent gelatinous cube and becoming permanently stuck, or being dragged under the water and held there with no chance of escaping.) I was eventually kicked from that campaign on it's soft reset, mostly because the characters I made were made to have very hard to exploit weaknesses. They were extremely hard to kill, and because of that, I was removed.
Second Red Flag happened in a DnD campaign as a Female Shifter Ranger/Fighter/Druid, and my group found ourselves locked up in prison with no way out. Guards were kept far away from us and magic was disabled, and it was pushed we needed to get out. So, I thought seducing the guard was the best option, get him in to unlock the door, so we could break out. Without a roll or a check, the guard calls over his friends and, every character there was shackled and raped against their will. I retired the character then and there, and stopped playing with that DM, because his explanation was, "You were asking for it."
The 2nd one is just horrible... With my current DM we talked about no gos before starting the first campaign. He specifically asked for it and i'm really thankful that he is so considerate and doesn't just put the players in such an uncomfortable or even triggering situation. One of the things we agreed to exclude was rape.
THAT ADD SCARED ME! XD
My biggest red flag so far, was in part the DM's playstyle and in part the enviornment. My GF at the time (now wife) joined a game with a few friends from college. The DM would host games at his APT. The first game was fine-ish. We stuck with the group long enough to meet the BBEG. The BBEG was a Mystic. None of us could touch him. None of us had any abilities that even made a scratch on him. The DM boasted about "Hah mystics are so broken lol." While we were fighting him. We were level 13.
Now the biggest redflag was the game space, their apartment. I saved the best (worst) for last. The toilet had black mold on it, there had never been a vaccume on the carpet, and the kicker... when he scheduled the next game he told us. "Oh yeah, we have a flea infestation, but it's fine come on over." We dropped that group and never played with them again.
9:00 I feel like it's okay to delight in your players' suffering every once in a while, but you shouldn't make it a habit.
Playing favorites. I was in a group where the asshole player was friends with the gm. When my Yuan Ti pureblood of all people called his character out you know something’s wrong. Yet my character kept getting punished and he kept getting away with being a douchebag in game and out.
3:38 i agree on this BUT if they started to discuss how to kill and get away from the guards that they are in front of them for the past 10 minutes.
Imma make them do a stealth check to see if they were wispering low enough or if the guards have now another reason to be worried.
[Edit]
This vid made me worry less.
My players have been enjoying the game so far but i kind of felt that i may be doing some things wrong, even tho i talked with them separately and was told "describe more" and tried i wasnt really sure of if i was doing well.
This reassured me a good amount. I was waiting to see a few of my habits here. Glad i didnt see any exept for the previously mwntioned moment.
Any DM that can't communicate clearly, and with a logic and intent behind their actions.
And I don't mean logic in the way some players do, where logic is code for: "Here's all the reasons why I'm right so you should let me shout over you, and railroad the session to do what I wanna do", because that person can also catch these hands. But DMs who hit you with stuff like, for instance.
Original 5e ranger being banned from the game, for being too op.
Wizards and clerics being buffed, for being too under powered.
Randomly getting afraid, refusing to talk to you about their concerns or stuff they might wanna address, and just generally always assuming that the players are out to get you in some way shape or form. My favorite story, that I will never forget was a DM getting uppity about detect magic and deciding that as a spell, it only worked in the area you casted it in. When I asked about the reasoning behind that, I was told, by the DM and his friend of several years that I quote,
"Just didn't get it, this makes perfect sense," and was dismissed out of hand, because I was the youngest at the table (26 at the time.)
Your script writer has GOD AWFUL takes. The whole bit where he tried to justify/defend the lizard boner is a HUGE red flag. None of the reasoning hold up to even a basic amount of scrutiny - EVERY PLAYER AT THE TABLE NEEDS TO CONSENT AND BE OKAY WITH SEXUAL ACTIONS AND THEMES BEFOREHAND. "No right to be offended on their behalf" seems to be an attempt to ignore or skirt around the fact that erotic elements suddenly appearing in a campaign surprising the players is a breach of personal boundaries in and of itself, regardless of the outcome.
The only correct way for a gm to declare the actions of a pc is for the gm to say, "hey, here's an idea I think is fun/funny/appropriate, if you do it then you can have advantage/fate/hero points"
I just started dming my first campaign with a party of entirely new players and I'm watching this video to make sure I'm not majorly fucking everything up :""")
Ive a forever DM and when i finally get to play i'm always wary when a DM says "I'm bringing my longtime friend I've been laying with for years" to a completely new group. Sometimes it ends with a kick ass co-op kinda deal, MOST of the time it's an insufferable jerk who the DM let's get away with everything. Ruins games for me.
the 'anything is allowed at my table' DM, what this has always meant to me has been 'the players can rape, murder, abuse everything and anything and that's ok as long as it's something the character would do'
...and? It's understandable if you're not interested in that kind of game, but some people are. There's nothing wrong with playing a terrible person in a tabletop game.
@@Enderdragon1201 'terrible person' characters are fine, but if they think RPing rape and abuse is fun then nevermind being at the same table, i wouldnt want anyone who thinks that any where near me
@@zeriul09 you don't have to partake in it
@@zeriul09 I get where you’re coming from.
@@delfinenteddyson9865 i know and i dont and i dont play at a table which lets it happen
Player and DM here. Had a fair share of awful and great DMs and players.
Most of these are not red flags, more like personal preferences or actually red flags for players. Do you guys talk to your DMs before playing with them?
Also, banning races is ok, DM should have fun too, maybe the guy just had enough. He can be great DM that just tired of awful players that happend to play tieflings.
So here are my red flags for DMs:
-Not communicating setting, homerules or anyrhing out of the ordinary to players before session 0.
-Bad prep. If you see a DM that has almost no prep work, reading adventure from his phone, not remembering his own NPC names etc. If that happens on first session - most likely thats gonna be the golden standart of his.
-For people who love fights - theater of mind games are huge red flags. Most likely there will be almost no fights, tactics wont matter, rules of combat as well.
I'm at fault with the forgetting NPC's names. I do the prep, write the names that are gonna pop up in the session and than misread them when they come up. For a while my party thought they where going to face twice the hags since each of them appeared to have a double with a twisted version of their name
@@demetriopedrini8201 red flags are not always red flags. If that is your only problem, that is ok
DM insisted on playing his "homebrew" world. About halfway through session 1 we all realized it was entirely based on anime.