I love this video, b/c the bad GMs are NOT watching and the good ones, those who want to be better ARE watching. Keep up the great work, a bad GM may stumble over this by accident and have an epiphany!
I've done several of these, but in a strange way. I regret some of my rulings and decisions, but hey, it's my first campaign ever, I've never been a player and I made a Homebrew world that progressively feels more alive the more players explore. My first mistake was "playing favourites" sort of... You see, I've written something about a Dragon god of Valor and Victory who chooses avatars in times of need, though they need to be of a certain bloodline. And one of the players happened to play a Dragonborn Sorceress of that very bloodline. So she is the god's next chosen. Others are too old, too young or arrogant for this burden. But I made it so she has to earn these powers and also, her brother who she thought was dead is with the evil cult after they manipulated him and he was chosen by the god's evil brother and is a corrupted version of that avatar. Though the players either don't mind it or they like it, so I was lucky there. What I also regret is not giving my players a break. Always one plotline leading to the next and dare they take a day of doing nothing, something happened to push the story along. This is such a terrible thing to do. I only realised after my sister pointed out, the characters haven't taken a break from adventuring and fighting for over an in game month. So now I run the games with events happening with wider gaps of Freedom between them. They have certain deadlines for quests they pick up and they are aware of the exact or approximate time they need to complete them at and consequences if they don't. For example: The second of the silver cities has been overtaken by cultists. They know, because they were there when it happened. The queen has tasked them to conduct a stealth mission to scout out weaknesses and intel before they try to reclaim the city. They may set out on the mission whenever they please, however, the attack must happen in 30 days or less. Because if it doesn't, winter comes, rendering the city invincible. And since the country needs it to supply coin, it might not survive for long without it. What about you? Any ideas or improvements I should make? What matters to me most is the players having fun and see them cheer when they win. Even at the expense of my ideas or plans.
Two other types of DM that most people wouldn't like: 1. The Oversharing DM: The kind of DM who explains everything that could've happened if the party made different choices, or points out exactly what details they didn't plan (if you change details on the fly, DON'T TELL YOUR PLAYERS YOU CHANGED SOMETHING). Oversharing kills immersion, either by giving players details their characters explicitly shouldn't know, or by making clear that the world they're exploring isn't something that existed before you found it 2. The Backseat Driver DM: Different to the control freak, in that they aren't trying to railroad events. Instead they're constantly pointing out the "smarter option" to players, either before or after the player does something the DM thinks they could do better if they were the player. A bit of friendly advice here or there is nice, especially for newer players, but you don't need to point out every single thing you'd do differently in the players shoes
I have a current DM that does this. At the end of every chapter she says congratulations, you've leveled up, we all feel good about ourselves and then she ends up (not maliciously) shitting on our accomplishments by telling us all the items we missed, the conversations we could have had, etc.
I always worry that I'm oversharing with my players because I get really excited about what I plan and tell them some vague things out of the game. This is just small things like talking about how we could roleplay with their characters and small hints of future plotlines I might wanna try out,
After playing TTRPGs for the past 35ish years I have been guilty of everything listed. However, I got better through feedback and listening to everyone at the table. Great content!
Hi I'm about to run my 1st ever game, and your comment cought my eye. Since i don't know anyone playing TTRPGs for so long, ( all of my friend, me included are more of a casual lvl players and we did only few one shots in past few years and this is the firsth campaign we want to do for a long run), do you have any good advice for a new DMs on note taking? Thanks in advance in case you'll pay any attention to this :)
@@Bedna101 Absolutely. Luke, here on DM Lair, has an episode (#7) about D&D Organization in the Dungeon Mastering 101 playlist. Great stuff there. In my opinion, when running the game, everyone should be taking notes at the table. Luke covers using several different programs so you can take advantage of the cloud instead of lugging around binders and notebooks. Unless you like hard copy. I write notes like I would for a class in school when I'm running a premade. If you made your own campaign; this part will be easy since you know all the moving parts. Remember, notes are to help keep information concise and easy to reference. You can also search for note taking skills if you've struggled with taking notes. Hope this helps and happy gaming!
I’m glad that our DM knows how to improvise. He is currently teaching a guy to DM. He lets him take over sometimes. There was something that none of us wanted to do but apparently it was an essential thing. We were in a carnival and we were constantly offered food. It was constantly appearing in our hands. Only one person decided to eat it. Everyone else was against eating it. Every time it appeared in our hands, we’d have to roll to see if we ate it. We kept succeeding on our rolls and continued to get rid of the food. The guy our DM is teaching was like “well you are going to have to eat it so we can get to the next stage.” Our DM let him know that it was fine and we never got on the eating the food subject again. We were still able to advance to the next part. I’m not sure if he just assumed we ate the food or if he did something else to advance us to the next step. Either way, the game went on and it was fun. There’s been times where the other guy has taken over and asks us to just go with it if he can’t figure out how to improvise. He enjoys it but he has alot of learning to do before he can DM on his own.
Honestly, him asking you to just go with it could be a good thing lol. It's a game after all. Sounds like y'all are good players too, helping a new DM out.
As a (now) very experienced DM who often looks back on my first few sessions as a baby DM, I appreciate you helping out your new DM as he finds his groove. It means the world to us.
Some of the best GM advice I got was from Reddit (I know. Go figure) A linear adventure is one in which the next adventure WILL BE in the castle over there. Railroading is saying that in order to get to the castle the party MUST walk along the road. A party that refuses to go to the castle are being jerks to the DMs time and effort. The DM who shuts down the parties attempts to get to the castle any way except walking on the road are jerks.
Burnout. It's real. My approach has been to break my campaign into discrete chapters. It means we have a series of natural end points, and if I'm on the ropes, I can ask one of the players to step in and run a short game (5-8 sessions) or a one-shot. I get a chance to play, to refresh and to lay in some serious prep time for the next chapter.
Listening to this, it reminds me of one experience I had with one of my DM's. We were doing a one shot in a world that our other campaign was going to end up in. Luckily he was a good DM because we ended up in a totally different way. He had intended for us to go on a fetch quest for one side of a war, with the possibility of the magical migufin ending up with one side of the war. The actual end result was a giant pvp battle with 4 different end goals between the 6 PC's. In the end neither of the two wearing countries ended up with the migufin and we ended up giving the all powerful weapon to a kid and introducing him to the intercontinental spy ring because I had randomly decided to have my PC for this one shot be a retired spy. 😂. If our DM had been a storytelling DM or one of the purely lore dm's that would have ended up very differently. But because he decided to go with the chaos that we were causing it ended up being one of my favorite one shots and characters I have played!
I used to be the control freak, this was when my sisters and I created the game when we were young. I stopped being the control freak at sixteen, now I’m the struggling lore master at nineteen heh.
The thing that helped me, being a bit of a loremaster myself, was accepting that world building and researching official lore are fine hobbies in and of themselves - I do enjoy doing both after all. Therefore, my players only need to know stuff that they have reason to care about, because creating lore that they don't see is, in fact, *not* a waste of time or a missed opportunity. Also, I find that once I world build a region, the plot hooks basically write themselves, and if I manage to make my lore relevant to the game, my enthusiasm carries over and makes the game better for everyone.
@@chrizzlybear5565 That’s a good way of looking at it, a hobby overall but one that may have some use if the players are interested. I also love the idea of having things going on in the background for players to potentially get hooked on. I’ll take your advice chrizzlybear5565, I appreciate your suggestion :)
4:11 - DM of 44 years here. Many times, I've been forced to improvise entire sessions because the players went in a direction that I did not plan for. And surprisingly, those games went better than I could have hoped. HOWEVER, those occasions were very few and far between. Far better to plan, and not rely on improvisation.
Personally, I think fudging dice rolls is fine, as long as it helps the players. For example, I once rolled a crit on a first level character that would have killed them. I changed it to rolling max damage and the players managed to win the fight and level up. Or my players were really excited to try out a plan, i rolled a really good check that would have made it fail, but they looked too excited so I let it work, they had a ton of fun and im so glad i did it
Ah the loremaster thing definitely depends on your players. My players love lore dumps. Like grab a big fat notebook to make sure they get this written down and dont miss it! Which as a story based dm (Not the type mentioned here, I try to spin my players choices into affecting the world and enhancing the story) the lore DOES matter quite a bit
I totally agree with the early level loot dump. I'm in a game where one player started with a homebrew green shotgun, and two others started with a blue each. By level 4, there were about 15 or so magic items ( 8 of which were on one person), split among the party. Magic items are supposed to be rewards for overcoming adversity or bought on a shopping trip because you've earned it by completing multiple tasks.
My GM horror stories: - GM quits after X sessions (were X < 10) inspite of all players wanting to continue - happened to me in 3 different systems with 2 GMs - GM interpretes rules differently (and doesn't care game creators disagree with him e.g. on Sage Advice) - GM makes new house rules every few sessions, making previous decisions (including character creation) meaningless - GM lies about the setting (I've played once a Fallout game with a twist - after few sessions GM told us it's a Fallout x My Little Pony crossover) - GM requires players to (partially) roleplay intimate scenes - GM rewards player skills/actions, not character skills/actions - GM allows one player (his buddy) to take 70% of "screen time", from which the vast majority is "remember our last campaign when your dwarf was fighting the fire dragon?" etc. - GM allows creation of an OP build (above normal character creation limitations), then adjusts all encounters to match the total power of the party, making the fight peace of cake for one character and almost impossible for others - GM wants to kill/punish the whole party because we managed to outsmart him or the system (i.e. we used the best of our abilities in previous combats and some combats ended prematurely, we also enslaved or made deals with some of the bosses instead of killing them) - we barely managed to escape alive (it took a lot of planning and coordination and a revival of a fallen comrade), it was one of the most epic battles and we liked the campaign even more because of that (yeah, some battles can't be won and we were ok with this) and the GM was surprised we liked it and told us why this battle was so hard and a diplomatic mission ended as a trap... he quit next day :((( - GM ignores some characters' goals in a system were achieveing these goals is rewarded every sessions - there are systems were your character has short-term goals (from a list of goals) and doing something to achieve them gives significant XP rewards - but unless the GM gives you a chance to achieve them, you could be the most proactive player and get 0 XP whereas other player could get those XP for being passive and making one insignificant decision during the whole session - the result was one character being much stronger than other characters after few sessions - GM disregards rules for storytelling purpose I guess - it's not always bad (e.g. when the story's great) but often it kills the game for me; the one example I won't forget was me playing a character with passive skill not allowing to be hit by a surprise attack (some kind of 6th sense, automatic evade) and the GM made a surprise attack on my character - I reminded her of my passive skill but she disregarded it because she wanted my character immobilized in that moment
I think that one type of DM that falls under the radar, and is far too common is the absent DM. Not physically absent, mentally absent. They don't involve the players, they don't weave player backstories into the world, they don't worldbuild enough, or they rely on the players to flesh out the world in their own minds instead of providing enough lore and description for the players to build an accurate picture.
I currently have a horrible combo of these in a DM for one of my games. I play in two games with him, in one - he has killed now 4 PCs of one player. He ignores the hard lines we have set in place and honestly taunted the two people triggered in recemt session, WROTE my backstory and told me that he wanted me to play this specific person... doesn't even do anything with it and lets another player play an almost identical character. Do we really need two dhampir twilight clerics in Strahd. No we do not. My character is not totally useless, I do next to nothing. They also made me- a person from an Irish Traveler family- a Vishtani (based off nomadic cultures like Romani and Travelers) with the promise of having changed the tone around them in Strahd... but no... reinforces the nomadic people being criminals ect which kinda feels like a personal attack, because they just make a joke of my feelings about it. If i didnt have my game buddy who i adore RPing and playing with, i would have run for the hills. If nothing else Crispy will get a horror story out of my current game.
Great video! Meaningful reminders to watch out for and avoid. Thank you. Boundaires in game play are not about the players personal strength of character, it's about player fun at the table. If someone needs graphic descriptions of the results of violence or injury to have fun, they may need to seek a different outlet for that desire rather than call it "gameplay." Take, as an example, an Fire/Rescue EMS worker. They may be indifferent at the table about graphic descriptions, but that is because they have now "left" their play mode to re-enter teh compartmetnalization of work. Avoiding it at the table is not an issue of stregnth of individual character it's about relaxing. Want graphic descriptions of human torment and injury, gore and bodily destruction, human depravity? Just have them tell their war stories and try not to internalize that mental trainwreck. Good times that can never be forgotten. The goal is fun and enjoyable engagement as a group.
I had the last gm type, and in 2 different variations: one of them knew the rules but didn’t care in the favor of players and other one didn’t know the rules at all. And now i have pre-written questions for dms when i am invited to their games: first one obviously is “do you know the rules?” and second one “how often do you use them?” Great video, thanks 🙏
10. The GM who doesn't communicate. Dead silences that can go on for minutes, often prompting the players to scream, "Earth to DM! Hello?" Player questions that go unanswered, until the DM finally asks, "What was that again?" This is especially frustrating in online play, where the DM might just run a monster up to a PC on the VTT map, roll dice, and roll damage without even telling the player they are about to be attacked (bypassing defensive reaction options).
I went a bit control freak last night. My group was chasing a fleeing lesser villain who had taken a hostage and was using her as a meatshield as he was fleeing across a snowy field. Immediately the ranged players and magic users started going "oh is he within 600 feet? I start shooting him." "Oh is he within 120 feet? I start casting Eldritch blast." I went: "Tell you what, I'm just going to put the two of them at the top of this map and you guys at the bottom 80 feet away from them. As he sees you are closing in on him with drawn weapons and magic blazing, he yells at you that if you get closer or attack him he will cut the throat of the hostage. We are not in initiative yet though, unless you decide to go through with your attacks. Now what will you do?" It's not that I want the encounter to go a certain way but I wanted it to feel like an Encounter and not just pew pewing from an entire field away.
I DM DnD 3.5 and I planned the first session and the campaigns areas that I wanted them to go thru. But every encounter and most dungeons are improvised. I have already a picture of the things I want them to face in that session but I let their fantasy and discussions flavour the details. I try to give every player a role in what happens so they feel involved. I dont do xp, I pick when in the story it fits to level up. Sometimes I roll the dice so the players think I rolled, because the situation will benefit a narrative solution instead of a dice ruled one. Its a balance but it makes it more fun for me and the group.
On the storyteller issue, you’re right, man. Don’t bring your unpublished (unpublishable) fantasy novel to the game table. It’s communal storytelling, meaning everyone, with help from the dice, is telling a story together, while playing a game. It’s an awesome combination of wonderful things.
I've experienced every DM type mentioned. Hate them all. It took me a number of years to realize I did not have to accept it and just quit. I really wanted to play, but I finally learned no game is better than a bad game. However, a few occasions talking to the DM did fix it, and the game continued on just fine. I was the wishy-washy when I first started to DM due to nervousness of being so new to DMing. I got over it.
Next video: how not to be number 5? I am not willfully avoiding consequences, but we're also playing 5e, and it seems a bit difficult to introduce them :/
I have been struggling to let characters due myself because they were still new. But I have heard my players talk about having new concepts doe characters, so I might just roll with it, the next time, since they are level four by now. And consequences can be NPCs or factions getting hostile towards the party.
Your PCs will face consequences. Its only essential for you to consider what will happen out of their actions? Slaying the goblins might not wield any consequences as it was part of the dungeon. BUT if a goblin escapes? That can lead to consequences. See, its quite contextual and maybe some consequences take their time, others are kinda instantly. Treat the bartender bad? Your beer suddenly costs 1 GP, and they suddenly have all rooms rented out. Do him a favor, they may take a week nighting for free. And so on. Its not only about battle you know ;) And regarding battle is a whole different topic. In general, if you create logical reactions to the actions of the PCs you will get naturally consequences that are appriorate.
And another note, player deaths happen. It has to be dramatic tho, because there is nothing more frustrating than dying to a fireball on 2nd Level bc you stood just in the wrong place. Happened to me and it was SO frustrating. But the new character I made, I still play to this day (since 4 yrs), so, even out of this grew something good. But if possible, do make the player death at least somewhat dramatic and not cheap.
In one of the recent games I've played, I was warned ahead of time that the story would try to "feature" the Paladin player and his story. "That's fine," I said. Not realizing that between the Pally (whom ALL the action was centered around) and the halfling rogue (who took every minute to make his character important, whether that was sneaking ahead or just "going to" the place where the action was happening, whether that made sense or not, or just to include himself in every moment, or incessant shopping) my character would get pretty much ZERO time/energy from the DM. MAYBE the DM was waiting for me to assert myself? Or maybe he just didn't give a damn about my character.
I'm trying to get everyone's backstory so I can make a vox machina kinda thing and make everyone feel special and important. Since it is an out of the abyss campaign, there are a lot of random, boring encounters set by the book and I'm just gonna replace all of this bullshit with actual character building stuff. I'm really looking into those videos because since it is my first time DMing I'm trying my best not to be a red flag DM and trying to give my players all the freedom I can possibly give without making everything lose it's sense, your vids are being real helpful
Good luck on your beginning journey! Just remember, Vox Machina are played by professional actors. It's okay if your game doesn't equal or compare to that. Give yourself and your players grace and focus on having fun above all else. The story will come if having a good time is your priority. Sounds like you've got a good start!
@@ClarkyClark Absolutely! I do keep that in mind, it is more about the animated series and how every character is given some level of protagonism and how I want to add this to my game. Thank you
As someone who was a player in a by the book out of the abyss campaign, I can assure you that throwing out all of the plot and just keeping the setting as a backdrop for your own thing is a great idea. Maybe add a place or two where the pcs can actually let their guard down and you're golden. Don't worry too much about making mistakes, that will happen inevitably. Just make sure you're communicating properly with your players and you'll get pretty good pretty quickly.
I am finding OOTA doesn't work too well with integrating well with backstory that purely happen above the surface, before they were kidnapped by the Drow, but I do try
@@Perturabo404 Agreed, the beginning is absolutely atrocious: Horrible for backstories, too many NPCs at once, prison scenes are horrible for player agency. The worst part for me were the mismatched expectations: I made a conquest paladin with 8 dex but heavy armour and a motivation to take the underdark from the demon lords, as that is what the adventure is supposedly about (at least on the later levels I've been told, we stopped playing once we reached the surface). Instead I started without armour (in prison) and had to spend 8 or so levels running away. I basically had to break my oath multiple times before leveling up to swear it and ended up abandoning the character in favour of a character that actually fit the first half (!) of the adventure.
One of the guys I play with was asking our DM why he is always the one getting attacked. The DM pointed at me and was like “have you not noticed much damage our barbarian takes every encounter?” 😂 my character almost dies in almost every encounter. I play a barbarian centaur that enjoys cutting off heads with his great axe so he gets in close.
My first dm back in high school was good, except for an early detail being fsr too vague and nobody had thought to ask a very particular question, so we spent two game session weekends wandering because we did not ask what KIND of tree's wood a door was made out of
Honestly I have a friend who is a good gm but he does 30-45min exposition dumps that drive me insane. I literally am falling asleep at his table. He plays soothing music to and half of us are asleep because of these long drawn out periods of expo dumps. He’s very sensitive about his GM skills and I’m certain doing so would make him beyond upset. Any advice how to approach him?
I played a game once where the GM threw an overpowered monster at a group of raw 1st level characters. Half the party died and had to roll up new characters, the other half got boosted to third level from the encounter. Then, those same characters were boosted to fifth level just from the level-up training, while the rest of us re-entered the game at first. By the time the pizza got there, I had lost three characters and was trying to keep up with level 11 characters facing level 15 challenges and I still hadn't reached second level. I wonder if there was ever another session . . .
It's a constant learning experience being a DM. I've definitely got shades of control freak, coddler, and tourist - but I like to think that I'm getting better at improvising, taking firmer stances on my rulings and seeking help and inspiration when a campaign starts to feel stale and there are other things tugging at my interests. One of the biggest lessons I've learned recently is to be a lot more trusting of Standard Array and Point Buy stats rather than rolled stats. I grew up playing earlier editions of DnD with a GM who liked powerful builds in their own characters and felt like that was just the best way to have fun with a build - have the odds stacked for a far more powerful character overall and beef up the numbers. So I did that too. But since joining a different game that required us to use standard array or point buy, I've really felt the difference in the stakes as a player. I'm getting hit more, missing more, my save DCs are lower - but combats are far more engaging because the stakes are much, much higher. Since then, I've run a couple one shots with characters built using point buy and the difference as a DM is out of this world. I've gone from scrambling to improvise ways to buff encounters on the spot just so the monsters last more than two rounds, to actually needing to pull back just a little bit to prevent a TPK. The encounters haven't changed, but the power level of the party was affected so much, that I don't want to go back. It's not about punishing the players or trying to 'win' or anything like that, it's just such a relief as a DM to be able to throw some interesting creatures at a fifth-level party that aren't CR12 and actually get to see some of the weird and wonderful abilities these creatures have before they are turned into meat paste.
I had a DM that oddly rings true here. - Story teller, rail roady. You can't do this becasue X. - Favoritism, DM gave the Barb in out group 2 free smites (he was a 1st level paladin 6 barb, 2 fighter total min maxer crit fisher with GWM), allowing him to oneshot a boss dueing another charecters bit story arc conclusion. - Also saw him LITTERALLY say in a different discord server, "I hope my players know to run lol, they don't stand a chance to win the fight thier about to enter" Yes he was bragging. - Thought balance was a boss that can one shot a front liner in one round. - Also changing rules on the fly becasue they want something spacific happen - accuses the player of do things behind the DM's back - 'Forgetting or not bringing up obvious things that the charecters would have noticed but the players didnt ask at the time (or it was changed later/deliberatly left out to keep a reveal hidden. Example, A creature has PURPLE blood, as where it would normally have red (or in this case yellow blood) and not mentioning to the players. I have a whole story about this one.
our best games were the two where I improvised Diehard in space and Battlefield LA on a colony planet. both ended in a TPK. Battlefield LA because it was the first game in Starfinder ever, and Diehard in space because the players all made combat monsters, and they repeatedly failed skill checks to disarm the bombs until they went off.
I'm definitely in the too much loot and improvisation camp, but I've recently been trying to balance more encounters around these new items. Finding a balance around the loot is a bit tricky to get right.
I’m doing an Anime Homebrew and it’s fun and hilarious. I have the team do more of the story telling than me. I prepared a bit and wing most of it. This time I’m preparing this session cause I forgot names and places. So far everyone is having fun and I’m looking foward to doing better for them.
Yeah I'm a coddler. Some of my players would absolutely not have character death, and would constantly reroll just because she was sick of rolling bad (her definition of "rolling bad" became quite loose), and she would straight up rewind scenes to avoid her character "being embarrassed," but I was close friends with her and the other players and didn't know how to say no. Honestly I'm kinda glad that royal dissolved, the campaign never would've worked out without some degree of regular drama that I didn't know how to resolve fairly.
im curious what you mean by unbalanced. I mean the game is already unbalanced, and it's up to the dm to tweak the encounter difficulties based on what the characters do and don't have to keep things balanced. Thus having too much or too little loot / levels /etc shouldn't matter
Well, call me a horrible DM, but we were a session or two into a new campaign, and a "friend" of the folks who owned the house we gamed at wanted to join. I showed up 2 hours early to help this person roll up his bard and shop for his equipment. Game starts. The bard walks in the exact opposite direction the rest of the party is going, into the woods, tosses ALL his new equipment on the ground and sharpens a stick as his new weapon. Seriously, did we really need to spend all that time buying equipment then? I immediately wrote the player/character out of the game. "And he traveled westward and may be traveling in that direction still." Was that really a bad? Was it unreasonable of me to ask that he respected the extra time I'd given him, and at least tried to stay with the group/show a bit of loyalty to me and his hosts?
I remember Luke saying Stefan was his favorite character in the CoS campaign and then that same character ended up blind, dominated and then corrupted by a hag. Out of context it sounds terrible, but it was so funny and Kevin seemed like he was having the time of his life.
This video, and the ideas it endorses is a good example of why more people don’t want to try DM’ing. Newsflash, the players opinions aren’t the only ones that matter.
@@louieadams540 this kind of content is exactly what drove me to become a DM. I’d played so many games with these types of DM’s (the ones resistant to this kind of feedback) that I decided I could do it better, and so far I think I have. The DMs I played with in the past may have been doing the heavy lifting, but without their players it means nothing. When those DMs lost their players because of their behavior, and then hit us up weeks later wondering why the campaign fell apart… the answer was obvious. Players opinions aren’t the only ones that matter, but they are still the most important opinions at the table if you want to gather a group of players. I really wanted to run a gritty survival based west marches campaign with very limited carry weight and a few nerfed spells… it would’ve been a very cool campaign, but when I was looking at the prospect of losing all of my players because that wasn’t quite the kind of game they were looking for, I had to re-evaluate. The campaign has taken a direction I never could’ve anticipated, and we are all the better for it. I’m way happier with saying “OK, let me retool how this west marches looks” than I would be saying “ you guys just don’t get what I was trying to do, fine I’ll find another group” (newsflash, I’m not finding another group. These are my friends and this is the game they want to play.)
I had a GM once who fitted into multiple of these categories: favourites, adversarial and control freak. Your example with the control freak and the door resonated me with a lot because that's literally what happened in our case. This GM would also antagonise us about things out of game over the Discord server, and to "avoid playing favourites" (in his words), he would constantly make his then partner suffer a humiliation conga from the most minor of mistakes or bad rolls. Nobody else suffered as badly as she did. He also suddenly introduced sexual content in one session - yay! Thank the gods I got out of that group.
I'm trying not to be THE NEXT BIG THING GM. I am bored of this long campaign I'm running.I'm trying to stick with it, after this I'm running shorter adventures. I want to run some Savage Worlds, that way I could switch genres and use the same rules.Great vid as always Luke!
Confession time: I'm absolutely DM #6 and #7... kinda. I spend a lot of time worldbuilding for my campaign, but it's often whenever i'm a player at the table and my next time GM-ing won't be for a while. Times like that, i figure that i can take the time to build my world so it will be fully fleshed out in time for me to run it. I don't shove the lore down my player's throats, though. Instead, i give a debriefing of important things to know about my world during Session Zero. And the second thing about rushing through or cutting campaigns short... i did end a campaign early on because i ended up not being happy with how it turned out and i just felt like campaign sucked, so i cut it short.
The thing is, if you think your gm is terrible. Be sure to look in the mirror as well. I have had groups that if you give them agency they just sit there. My current group is wonderful as they constantly add to the story and the setting through roleplay but to my experience this is not typical of ttrpg groups. Most groups are lucky to have one proactive player.
@@dreamcream3738 next time you are playing just ad lib something and mention a new npc “this one time when I was working for duke chardryt of longreach blah blah” and see if your gm appreciates it or not. The secret is “yes and” always be additive to the game and not trying to just babble past a problem”
Nobody has shared the video with me, even though I am probably close to the Tourist GM of #7. But I found that I can get my campaigns to an end if I plan them from the beginning to be only short campaigns anyway. I usually give at least twice the amount of XP or whatever advancement currency there is to let the players taste the stuff they would otherwise not get. And well, I like rules light systems, so there is usually not much investment (neither monetary nor timewise) needed. So, at least I am not mad about this video, I actually think it can be useful to know what kind of flaw one has a GM.
I have with my current game become the "Wishy washy DM". Prior to my current group, I never had this problem... but these guys.. unless I somehow let them do what they want, then intentionally consistently mock me and my rulings, and find ways to make almost every situation incredibly frustrating... which leads to a pretty consistent environment of frustration for me. I'm a RAW DM, because that normally makes the game easier to run, however these guys, some of whom are super optimizers are among the best rules lawyers I have ever encountered, and consistently demand that I prove 90% of the rules for my adjudications. They also go incredibly slowly and screw around, refusing to engage in more than one encounter a day, always going to rather extreme lengths to make sure that they always have a Long Rest between encounters.... yet, knowing this is a milestone game. are quite often irritated if they don;t level up when they think they should based on number of sessions (even if they have actually only completed 3-4 encounters after leveling at levels 6-7.
I am a game master that makes a ton of stuff to find and interact with, whether it is NPCs, loot, combat, treacherous areas, dungeons, etc. I call this the sandbox method, where the story depends solely on the players exploring and interacting with the world.
I don't like to give a lot +1(2or 3) weapons and armor often or any obviously useful items like rings of protection. I give them but sparingly. I love to give expendable items. My players use healing potions, especially when clerics run out of spell slots. But other expendables they never use "In case they need them in the future. There was an adventure where being invisible would make their lives easier so before that adventure I gave each of them a potion of Invisibility. They get to the location, a cave with no other way in (too low level for passwall type spells). I casually remind them of the potions but they don't use them in case they need them later. Surprise, the heavily armored fighter failed their stealth check and makes it so much harder on themselves. They still never used those potions As I said earlier i don't like to give a lot of +1 weapons armors etc. SO another player finally decided to DM a game (Yay, no longer a forever DM). after two adventure he decided he was going to be the super nice DM and gave everyone a +3 item. We were level 4. He then complained that we ran through his encounters too easily. My comment was, now you know why I sparingly give those type of items. Though he was not as experienced of a DM as I was (since 2e) but he was DMing a game for other people for over a year at that point, but was running a Premade (I believe CoS)
i homebrew all of my campaigns (so far) but use the actual rules of the game. if a heavy shopping spree is incoming, i make it an entire session (pretty much) so we can take the time to balance homebrew purchases as a group. works great from my group, but be careful
I'm a new DM and im pretty sure i fall into at least two of those, the loot fairy and the world builder. I appreciate this video it helps to be self aware!
Great video. thanks! Love your content. I'm an old school referee (since Jr high in the 90s), and full disclosure, am guilty of allot of this way back then. It's one of those things you never actually master, but continually learn and grow. Got a question. I still take away player agency on occasion, and with careful judgement, and high respect for the player given the situation. Failed a save vs Charm, for example. What's your take on that?
I've got very minor aspects of a few of these. I think sometimes you have to be a bit bad as a gm to get an idea of what happens when you do. Sometimes you have to do things because if you dont the game might also get worse. For example if you made a boss fight and the players just roll over it... you might wanna add a few hit points to make it feel a bit longer and not such a disappointment.
The worst GM I ever had to deal with was a good friend in high school. He designed well written and excellent adventures. The execution of it, however, was one horror story after another until none of us wanted to play anymore. The story and and ideas were amazing until his particular friend would come over, and ruin it for the rest of us. He would allow this particular friend get away with anything, and allow this player to, quite simply, torture or kill or mind control or whatever, the rest of us. Much of it was truly messed up, and I probably shouldn't detail it here. This friend would also show up uninvited or quite late. What usually ended up happening is the adventure would end, and the GM and his buddy would just start playing pool or something else. Even after all these years, that friend of his is still quite the jerk. An honorable mention taking second place was a gal that wanted to be a GM, but 30 minutes into the game, we would have to listen to all the drama going on in her life. We wanted to play a game. Beware of a GM that uses a game as a trick to unleash all their misery on you. These can be the worst kind. It's a gaming session, not a therapy session.
I once had a GM that showed favoritism towards his girlfriend who was playing in our D&D group. He never let her PC die, her PC’s backstory was the ONLY backstory he ever used, and he never punished her for problem behavior. After a game session one night, me and several other players decided to have a chat with our GM. We explained to him that we knew he was favoring his girlfriend and that we wanted the favoritism to stop because it was unfair to the rest of us. At the next game session, the GM apologized to us and promised not to show unfair favoritism toward any player ever again. To this day, he no longer favors any of his players and we have a great time playing D&D.
A few good points though another one I would like to add is a DM that does not respect their player's time. I have seen this a few times and players can also be guilty of this but I have one specific incident in mind. Short version GM stated the time and day the session was starting at and asked all the players where their character would be. When I gave me answer the GM replied with an extremely vague are you sure and having nothing to go or hint to how it needed to be adjusted I said yes. Was then told an attack happened at a certain location a few characters were already at and the rest happened to be nearby except for my character who he then said was 2 hours away and I should have listen to his hint and not participating in the combat that ended up taking the entire session was my fault. That just felt wrong. At the very least a better question would have been why is your character here or some guidance on how my answer would have needed to be adjusted. There ended up being other issues with the group that ended up having me decide to leave but that's something else all together.
I'm definitely a (barely) recovering Loremaster who is turning into a Next Big Thinger, but in my defense, each game we were playing had a system designed from scratch by me, so I'm basically learning what my players like, what works, and how to obsess over lore less.
I disagree. If you have a problem with graphic violence, go play something else. Leave the table. You're not welcome. It's people stabbing each other and whatnot. You're playing the wrong game if you don't like fantasy violence!
I've definitely been guilty of being... generous... with the amount of loot I've given out. I've definitely learned from that mistake though and found a nice balance.
Another on to look at, the game writer. They tell you about the wonderful game they are developing. You have a fun session 0 where you make new characters and learn the basic rules. Session 1 goes well with a few hiccups. When you arrive for session 2, they inform you they have re written a lot of the rules and everyone needs to update their character for the changes. An hour later after some frustration, you start play. Occasionally the dm stops the session because a new rule was missed. This continues for every session as the dm gets progressively more frustrated that they can't write the perfect system and the players getting frustrated that things they thought were working well enough keep getting dropped. The dm eventually rage quits his own system out of frustration.
So I’m curious if this is problematic lore building gm behavior. So sometimes I like to write side stories with NPCs just so they’re doing something. I never require the party to read them it’s mainly because I enjoy it. But I’ve also been writing journal entries from the BBEG in the dungeon they have been creating to give the party’s hints on how to find them. (Cause they have never met in person but know that these dungeons need to be stopped to prevent environmental disasters.) Usually they’re like 10 pages and covers their philosophy, back story, methodology, personality, and gives some insight to other people the part is suspicious of. Is that bad? The party seems to enjoy it, but you never know. They’ve only found 2 in the 15 sessions we had so it’s not like I’m over exposing them.
I think what your doing is very creative and overall a great experience for your players. I also don't believe your dumping too much lore on your players. After all, even if they found all the pages, it's not like that have to read every one of them, right? Keep doing what you enjoy. As long as your group and yourself are enjoying what each of you do, that's what's important to any ttrpg game. The only thing I would have to caution about (Like Luke himself) is just don't spend to much time on the journal entirely (the "lore") and make sure your adventures are exciting.
BBEG's are important to the story, characterizing them gives the campaign an extra layer of depth. Also under the circumstances you described it seems the most efficient way to do it. Besides, you already said the players like it so I think you're in the clear.
@@DentonHolmes Of course I usually spend time with the players and have them do what they want to do. I also have had them face some of the choice they have made which has lead to great character growth.
@@dandrive3249 Then sounds like what your doing is great! You know your players and exactly what they truly care about most in the game. Keep up the great work Dungeon Master.
I worry about the loot too, but strangely I keep count whilst another dm doesn't making me repeat sea sickness saves despite my character wearing a periapt of health her ONLY magical item! In return I had them run into wererats back when I wasn't aware they're immune to physical damage (would alter that to resistant now that I know about it, but then...). I gave them a unique item like a cape that gave advantage to a character's main skill, a reqliquary for the cleric allowing him to summon a lantern archon, 4 bards for the party rogue functioning as the backing band for the sorceror performer her literal thieves guild and an enchanted sword. Should have simply had the reliquary give advantage too with the enchanted sword a moon touched blade that increased in power with the wielder if they kept it. I Should have limited those bards to just one but it was a work in progress. Also a mistake but how else do you learn if you don't make mistakes?
I'm playing for the first time, and I was mostly attracted to the character-driven story creation aspects. Unfortunately, my DM is a storyteller who doesn't let us get much RP in, and more than once has told me I can't react a certain way to an NPC because I have to do XYZ for the story to work. I'm so disappointed.
The Rules Problem GM can be mellowed by a player who is recognized by all as The Rulebook. For example, I really want to take one of the guys in my oWoD games to be the Storyteller, but he doesn't know a lot of the rules, because he only started the system a short while ago. So, I told him "Don't be afraid; I know the rules and will help you out". He did a great job until he unfortunately got sick and I had to take over again... And the Underprepped GM... I'm one of those, but not by choice. I would often have the time to prep, but my ADHD makes me forget tasks constantly (not only in RPG), even if I put reminders in place. So, if I don't prep right after the session, I'll most probably end up frantically skimming bestiaries to see which monster would fit in that situation five minutes before or even during the game. But, it made me good at improvising 😀 I can literally answer a call to GM-arms in five minutes as long as the characters are done (and it's a system I'm familiar with, of course). Oh, and I'm a loot fairy. But since I usually play only homebrew adventures, I can easily adjust challenges for higher equipped PCs.
Luke I really like your content of most of the things you said. I would not go out of my way to defiantly inflict/trigger a person's phobias just to be malicious. BUT, perhaps those persons should not play a game like D&D? I try to have session 0 to run my disclaimer of what to expect from me( as a DM). There are some things I will not have and tell the players my policy about touchy subjects. I tell them what I would expect from the PCs as well. They know what they are getting into so they can decide if they want to continue.
do you believe that not allowing a player to create modern war machines is taking player agency away or switching from pathfinder 1e to dnd 5e while keeping the same campaign, just in another setting is bad?
To answer your questions- 1) If the modern war machines clash with the setting of your game, the question becomes "Why did this character have the idea to pull this and for what purpose?" For the second) it depends on how well it's executed. Critical Role did just that; their game was a Pathfinder game that transitioned to 5e D&D
Im the story teller but i love to see the PCs having their adventures like a narrator that doesnt know what the characters Will do, i love being surprised when players foil the worlds happenings.
Well technically there is another one. It's a hybrid between the second one. It's the bribed DM. They bring Cheetos. They bring snacks for you to eat just for you. The DM I should know I've had this done to me as a DM And I agree it's hard not to pick favorites when they do stuff like that for you. And they got screwed at the end of the game. It was sad. I should have tried to do something but what they did was let's just say they had it coming. I say they kind of abused knowing that I felt like I had to. It's hard to explain
Wow, after this i fell such a lot better as a master. I can recall many of those issues encountered in my campaigns over the years but a good talk with my players has alwais changed my prospective enough to fix those problems in very few sessions
I scientifically balance the rules, by usign the fun scale as a reference. Scientifically approved system. But yes, there are some DMs that homebrew a lot so much the players end up play PF2e instead of 5e.
Imagine a player encountering a deep hole and choosing to jump in. Once inside, they realize they can't return the same way and there's only one way forward. However, the player refuses to proceed and threatens character suicide if not allowed to backtrack. Do you think removing the option to leave in this situation takes away player agency?
16:40 so, like, 90% of people still using D&D 5E, who will modify the hell out of it to get it to be something they want... ...instead of playing the pre-existing TTRPG of that, because they erroniously believe "5E is better"? Or they just dont wanna learn a new system, despite the fact they've modified 5E so much, it doesn't resemble 5E anymore?
No plan survives contact with players, thats something I actually enjoy as it feels like I'm getting decent feedback which I can use to improve on. Sometimes it requires I make changes as I go along and from my viewpoint improves the game I'm running.
#10, The Frustrated Player turned GM - the one who is constantly frustrated in another's world. Thinking they can do it so much better, but they fall into one or more of the first 9 types you have listed. #11, The Bacon Hater - enough said.
God dang it! I've seen myself in the coddler and too much loot GMs. 😅 Maybe I should dial back my love for my players and don't let them push me over, if I dare to take away one advantage in a certain situation. 🙈
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I love this video, b/c the bad GMs are NOT watching and the good ones, those who want to be better ARE watching. Keep up the great work, a bad GM may stumble over this by accident and have an epiphany!
I've done several of these, but in a strange way. I regret some of my rulings and decisions, but hey, it's my first campaign ever, I've never been a player and I made a Homebrew world that progressively feels more alive the more players explore.
My first mistake was "playing favourites" sort of... You see, I've written something about a Dragon god of Valor and Victory who chooses avatars in times of need, though they need to be of a certain bloodline. And one of the players happened to play a Dragonborn Sorceress of that very bloodline. So she is the god's next chosen. Others are too old, too young or arrogant for this burden. But I made it so she has to earn these powers and also, her brother who she thought was dead is with the evil cult after they manipulated him and he was chosen by the god's evil brother and is a corrupted version of that avatar.
Though the players either don't mind it or they like it, so I was lucky there.
What I also regret is not giving my players a break. Always one plotline leading to the next and dare they take a day of doing nothing, something happened to push the story along. This is such a terrible thing to do. I only realised after my sister pointed out, the characters haven't taken a break from adventuring and fighting for over an in game month. So now I run the games with events happening with wider gaps of Freedom between them. They have certain deadlines for quests they pick up and they are aware of the exact or approximate time they need to complete them at and consequences if they don't.
For example: The second of the silver cities has been overtaken by cultists. They know, because they were there when it happened. The queen has tasked them to conduct a stealth mission to scout out weaknesses and intel before they try to reclaim the city. They may set out on the mission whenever they please, however, the attack must happen in 30 days or less. Because if it doesn't, winter comes, rendering the city invincible. And since the country needs it to supply coin, it might not survive for long without it.
What about you? Any ideas or improvements I should make? What matters to me most is the players having fun and see them cheer when they win. Even at the expense of my ideas or plans.
Too true m8
I like how your video about bad GMs with a “because I’m the GM” shirt on 😂
Good perception check
He rolled a 17 for a dc of 10 there was no he wouldn't see that
Two other types of DM that most people wouldn't like:
1. The Oversharing DM:
The kind of DM who explains everything that could've happened if the party made different choices, or points out exactly what details they didn't plan (if you change details on the fly, DON'T TELL YOUR PLAYERS YOU CHANGED SOMETHING).
Oversharing kills immersion, either by giving players details their characters explicitly shouldn't know, or by making clear that the world they're exploring isn't something that existed before you found it
2. The Backseat Driver DM:
Different to the control freak, in that they aren't trying to railroad events. Instead they're constantly pointing out the "smarter option" to players, either before or after the player does something the DM thinks they could do better if they were the player. A bit of friendly advice here or there is nice, especially for newer players, but you don't need to point out every single thing you'd do differently in the players shoes
I have a current DM that does this. At the end of every chapter she says congratulations, you've leveled up, we all feel good about ourselves and then she ends up (not maliciously) shitting on our accomplishments by telling us all the items we missed, the conversations we could have had, etc.
I always worry that I'm oversharing with my players because I get really excited about what I plan and tell them some vague things out of the game. This is just small things like talking about how we could roleplay with their characters and small hints of future plotlines I might wanna try out,
After playing TTRPGs for the past 35ish years I have been guilty of everything listed. However, I got better through feedback and listening to everyone at the table. Great content!
Hi
I'm about to run my 1st ever game, and your comment cought my eye. Since i don't know anyone playing TTRPGs for so long, ( all of my friend, me included are more of a casual lvl players and we did only few one shots in past few years and this is the firsth campaign we want to do for a long run), do you have any good advice for a new DMs on note taking?
Thanks in advance in case you'll pay any attention to this :)
@@Bedna101 Absolutely. Luke, here on DM Lair, has an episode (#7) about D&D Organization in the Dungeon Mastering 101 playlist. Great stuff there. In my opinion, when running the game, everyone should be taking notes at the table. Luke covers using several different programs so you can take advantage of the cloud instead of lugging around binders and notebooks. Unless you like hard copy. I write notes like I would for a class in school when I'm running a premade. If you made your own campaign; this part will be easy since you know all the moving parts. Remember, notes are to help keep information concise and easy to reference. You can also search for note taking skills if you've struggled with taking notes. Hope this helps and happy gaming!
@@twitchunlimited7450 It helps a lot. Thank you for your insight and the refference
I’m glad that our DM knows how to improvise. He is currently teaching a guy to DM. He lets him take over sometimes. There was something that none of us wanted to do but apparently it was an essential thing. We were in a carnival and we were constantly offered food. It was constantly appearing in our hands. Only one person decided to eat it. Everyone else was against eating it. Every time it appeared in our hands, we’d have to roll to see if we ate it. We kept succeeding on our rolls and continued to get rid of the food. The guy our DM is teaching was like “well you are going to have to eat it so we can get to the next stage.” Our DM let him know that it was fine and we never got on the eating the food subject again. We were still able to advance to the next part. I’m not sure if he just assumed we ate the food or if he did something else to advance us to the next step. Either way, the game went on and it was fun. There’s been times where the other guy has taken over and asks us to just go with it if he can’t figure out how to improvise. He enjoys it but he has alot of learning to do before he can DM on his own.
Honestly, him asking you to just go with it could be a good thing lol. It's a game after all. Sounds like y'all are good players too, helping a new DM out.
As a (now) very experienced DM who often looks back on my first few sessions as a baby DM, I appreciate you helping out your new DM as he finds his groove. It means the world to us.
Did you ever find out why he wanted you to eat the food so badly?
Some of the best GM advice I got was from Reddit (I know. Go figure)
A linear adventure is one in which the next adventure WILL BE in the castle over there. Railroading is saying that in order to get to the castle the party MUST walk along the road.
A party that refuses to go to the castle are being jerks to the DMs time and effort. The DM who shuts down the parties attempts to get to the castle any way except walking on the road are jerks.
Burnout. It's real. My approach has been to break my campaign into discrete chapters. It means we have a series of natural end points, and if I'm on the ropes, I can ask one of the players to step in and run a short game (5-8 sessions) or a one-shot. I get a chance to play, to refresh and to lay in some serious prep time for the next chapter.
Listening to this, it reminds me of one experience I had with one of my DM's. We were doing a one shot in a world that our other campaign was going to end up in. Luckily he was a good DM because we ended up in a totally different way. He had intended for us to go on a fetch quest for one side of a war, with the possibility of the magical migufin ending up with one side of the war. The actual end result was a giant pvp battle with 4 different end goals between the 6 PC's. In the end neither of the two wearing countries ended up with the migufin and we ended up giving the all powerful weapon to a kid and introducing him to the intercontinental spy ring because I had randomly decided to have my PC for this one shot be a retired spy. 😂. If our DM had been a storytelling DM or one of the purely lore dm's that would have ended up very differently. But because he decided to go with the chaos that we were causing it ended up being one of my favorite one shots and characters I have played!
I used to be the control freak, this was when my sisters and I created the game when we were young. I stopped being the control freak at sixteen, now I’m the struggling lore master at nineteen heh.
The thing that helped me, being a bit of a loremaster myself, was accepting that world building and researching official lore are fine hobbies in and of themselves - I do enjoy doing both after all. Therefore, my players only need to know stuff that they have reason to care about, because creating lore that they don't see is, in fact, *not* a waste of time or a missed opportunity. Also, I find that once I world build a region, the plot hooks basically write themselves, and if I manage to make my lore relevant to the game, my enthusiasm carries over and makes the game better for everyone.
@@chrizzlybear5565 That’s a good way of looking at it, a hobby overall but one that may have some use if the players are interested. I also love the idea of having things going on in the background for players to potentially get hooked on. I’ll take your advice chrizzlybear5565, I appreciate your suggestion :)
Once had a GM literally tell me my backstory didn't matter after we had spent an entire session with their favorite player's ingame sibling.
good stuff Luke Easy to be a bad DM hard to always be a good DM
4:11 - DM of 44 years here. Many times, I've been forced to improvise entire sessions because the players went in a direction that I did not plan for. And surprisingly, those games went better than I could have hoped. HOWEVER, those occasions were very few and far between. Far better to plan, and not rely on improvisation.
I have found in my experience that a lot of terrible GMs exhibit several of these traits.
Personally, I think fudging dice rolls is fine, as long as it helps the players. For example, I once rolled a crit on a first level character that would have killed them. I changed it to rolling max damage and the players managed to win the fight and level up. Or my players were really excited to try out a plan, i rolled a really good check that would have made it fail, but they looked too excited so I let it work, they had a ton of fun and im so glad i did it
Ah the loremaster thing definitely depends on your players. My players love lore dumps. Like grab a big fat notebook to make sure they get this written down and dont miss it! Which as a story based dm (Not the type mentioned here, I try to spin my players choices into affecting the world and enhancing the story) the lore DOES matter quite a bit
I totally agree with the early level loot dump. I'm in a game where one player started with a homebrew green shotgun, and two others started with a blue each. By level 4, there were about 15 or so magic items ( 8 of which were on one person), split among the party.
Magic items are supposed to be rewards for overcoming adversity or bought on a shopping trip because you've earned it by completing multiple tasks.
My GM horror stories:
- GM quits after X sessions (were X < 10) inspite of all players wanting to continue - happened to me in 3 different systems with 2 GMs
- GM interpretes rules differently (and doesn't care game creators disagree with him e.g. on Sage Advice)
- GM makes new house rules every few sessions, making previous decisions (including character creation) meaningless
- GM lies about the setting (I've played once a Fallout game with a twist - after few sessions GM told us it's a Fallout x My Little Pony crossover)
- GM requires players to (partially) roleplay intimate scenes
- GM rewards player skills/actions, not character skills/actions
- GM allows one player (his buddy) to take 70% of "screen time", from which the vast majority is "remember our last campaign when your dwarf was fighting the fire dragon?" etc.
- GM allows creation of an OP build (above normal character creation limitations), then adjusts all encounters to match the total power of the party, making the fight peace of cake for one character and almost impossible for others
- GM wants to kill/punish the whole party because we managed to outsmart him or the system (i.e. we used the best of our abilities in previous combats and some combats ended prematurely, we also enslaved or made deals with some of the bosses instead of killing them) - we barely managed to escape alive (it took a lot of planning and coordination and a revival of a fallen comrade), it was one of the most epic battles and we liked the campaign even more because of that (yeah, some battles can't be won and we were ok with this) and the GM was surprised we liked it and told us why this battle was so hard and a diplomatic mission ended as a trap... he quit next day :(((
- GM ignores some characters' goals in a system were achieveing these goals is rewarded every sessions - there are systems were your character has short-term goals (from a list of goals) and doing something to achieve them gives significant XP rewards - but unless the GM gives you a chance to achieve them, you could be the most proactive player and get 0 XP whereas other player could get those XP for being passive and making one insignificant decision during the whole session - the result was one character being much stronger than other characters after few sessions
- GM disregards rules for storytelling purpose I guess - it's not always bad (e.g. when the story's great) but often it kills the game for me; the one example I won't forget was me playing a character with passive skill not allowing to be hit by a surprise attack (some kind of 6th sense, automatic evade) and the GM made a surprise attack on my character - I reminded her of my passive skill but she disregarded it because she wanted my character immobilized in that moment
I think that one type of DM that falls under the radar, and is far too common is the absent DM. Not physically absent, mentally absent. They don't involve the players, they don't weave player backstories into the world, they don't worldbuild enough, or they rely on the players to flesh out the world in their own minds instead of providing enough lore and description for the players to build an accurate picture.
I currently have a horrible combo of these in a DM for one of my games. I play in two games with him, in one - he has killed now 4 PCs of one player. He ignores the hard lines we have set in place and honestly taunted the two people triggered in recemt session, WROTE my backstory and told me that he wanted me to play this specific person... doesn't even do anything with it and lets another player play an almost identical character. Do we really need two dhampir twilight clerics in Strahd. No we do not. My character is not totally useless, I do next to nothing. They also made me- a person from an Irish Traveler family- a Vishtani (based off nomadic cultures like Romani and Travelers) with the promise of having changed the tone around them in Strahd... but no... reinforces the nomadic people being criminals ect which kinda feels like a personal attack, because they just make a joke of my feelings about it. If i didnt have my game buddy who i adore RPing and playing with, i would have run for the hills. If nothing else Crispy will get a horror story out of my current game.
Great video! Meaningful reminders to watch out for and avoid. Thank you.
Boundaires in game play are not about the players personal strength of character, it's about player fun at the table. If someone needs graphic descriptions of the results of violence or injury to have fun, they may need to seek a different outlet for that desire rather than call it "gameplay."
Take, as an example, an Fire/Rescue EMS worker. They may be indifferent at the table about graphic descriptions, but that is because they have now "left" their play mode to re-enter teh compartmetnalization of work. Avoiding it at the table is not an issue of stregnth of individual character it's about relaxing. Want graphic descriptions of human torment and injury, gore and bodily destruction, human depravity? Just have them tell their war stories and try not to internalize that mental trainwreck. Good times that can never be forgotten.
The goal is fun and enjoyable engagement as a group.
I had the last gm type, and in 2 different variations: one of them knew the rules but didn’t care in the favor of players and other one didn’t know the rules at all. And now i have pre-written questions for dms when i am invited to their games: first one obviously is “do you know the rules?” and second one “how often do you use them?”
Great video, thanks 🙏
10. The GM who doesn't communicate. Dead silences that can go on for minutes, often prompting the players to scream, "Earth to DM! Hello?" Player questions that go unanswered, until the DM finally asks, "What was that again?" This is especially frustrating in online play, where the DM might just run a monster up to a PC on the VTT map, roll dice, and roll damage without even telling the player they are about to be attacked (bypassing defensive reaction options).
I went a bit control freak last night. My group was chasing a fleeing lesser villain who had taken a hostage and was using her as a meatshield as he was fleeing across a snowy field. Immediately the ranged players and magic users started going "oh is he within 600 feet? I start shooting him."
"Oh is he within 120 feet? I start casting Eldritch blast."
I went: "Tell you what, I'm just going to put the two of them at the top of this map and you guys at the bottom 80 feet away from them. As he sees you are closing in on him with drawn weapons and magic blazing, he yells at you that if you get closer or attack him he will cut the throat of the hostage. We are not in initiative yet though, unless you decide to go through with your attacks. Now what will you do?"
It's not that I want the encounter to go a certain way but I wanted it to feel like an Encounter and not just pew pewing from an entire field away.
I DM DnD 3.5 and I planned the first session and the campaigns areas that I wanted them to go thru. But every encounter and most dungeons are improvised. I have already a picture of the things I want them to face in that session but I let their fantasy and discussions flavour the details. I try to give every player a role in what happens so they feel involved. I dont do xp, I pick when in the story it fits to level up. Sometimes I roll the dice so the players think I rolled, because the situation will benefit a narrative solution instead of a dice ruled one. Its a balance but it makes it more fun for me and the group.
On the storyteller issue, you’re right, man. Don’t bring your unpublished (unpublishable) fantasy novel to the game table. It’s communal storytelling, meaning everyone, with help from the dice, is telling a story together, while playing a game. It’s an awesome combination of wonderful things.
My take is that if I want to tell a story, I'll write another novel. I play D&D to discover the story that arises out of what we do at the table.
I heard someone say the other day that D&D isn't about telling stories but looking back at the stories we told via roleplaying
I've experienced every DM type mentioned. Hate them all. It took me a number of years to realize I did not have to accept it and just quit. I really wanted to play, but I finally learned no game is better than a bad game. However, a few occasions talking to the DM did fix it, and the game continued on just fine. I was the wishy-washy when I first started to DM due to nervousness of being so new to DMing. I got over it.
Next video: how not to be number 5? I am not willfully avoiding consequences, but we're also playing 5e, and it seems a bit difficult to introduce them :/
I have been struggling to let characters due myself because they were still new.
But I have heard my players talk about having new concepts doe characters, so I might just roll with it, the next time, since they are level four by now.
And consequences can be NPCs or factions getting hostile towards the party.
Your PCs will face consequences. Its only essential for you to consider what will happen out of their actions? Slaying the goblins might not wield any consequences as it was part of the dungeon.
BUT if a goblin escapes? That can lead to consequences.
See, its quite contextual and maybe some consequences take their time, others are kinda instantly. Treat the bartender bad? Your beer suddenly costs 1 GP, and they suddenly have all rooms rented out. Do him a favor, they may take a week nighting for free. And so on.
Its not only about battle you know ;)
And regarding battle is a whole different topic.
In general, if you create logical reactions to the actions of the PCs you will get naturally consequences that are appriorate.
And another note, player deaths happen. It has to be dramatic tho, because there is nothing more frustrating than dying to a fireball on 2nd Level bc you stood just in the wrong place.
Happened to me and it was SO frustrating. But the new character I made, I still play to this day (since 4 yrs), so, even out of this grew something good.
But if possible, do make the player death at least somewhat dramatic and not cheap.
The DM that keeps leveling too slow needs a kick to the nuts.
In one of the recent games I've played, I was warned ahead of time that the story would try to "feature" the Paladin player and his story. "That's fine," I said. Not realizing that between the Pally (whom ALL the action was centered around) and the halfling rogue (who took every minute to make his character important, whether that was sneaking ahead or just "going to" the place where the action was happening, whether that made sense or not, or just to include himself in every moment, or incessant shopping) my character would get pretty much ZERO time/energy from the DM. MAYBE the DM was waiting for me to assert myself? Or maybe he just didn't give a damn about my character.
I'm trying to get everyone's backstory so I can make a vox machina kinda thing and make everyone feel special and important. Since it is an out of the abyss campaign, there are a lot of random, boring encounters set by the book and I'm just gonna replace all of this bullshit with actual character building stuff. I'm really looking into those videos because since it is my first time DMing I'm trying my best not to be a red flag DM and trying to give my players all the freedom I can possibly give without making everything lose it's sense, your vids are being real helpful
Good luck on your beginning journey! Just remember, Vox Machina are played by professional actors. It's okay if your game doesn't equal or compare to that. Give yourself and your players grace and focus on having fun above all else. The story will come if having a good time is your priority. Sounds like you've got a good start!
@@ClarkyClark Absolutely! I do keep that in mind, it is more about the animated series and how every character is given some level of protagonism and how I want to add this to my game. Thank you
As someone who was a player in a by the book out of the abyss campaign, I can assure you that throwing out all of the plot and just keeping the setting as a backdrop for your own thing is a great idea. Maybe add a place or two where the pcs can actually let their guard down and you're golden. Don't worry too much about making mistakes, that will happen inevitably. Just make sure you're communicating properly with your players and you'll get pretty good pretty quickly.
I am finding OOTA doesn't work too well with integrating well with backstory that purely happen above the surface, before they were kidnapped by the Drow, but I do try
@@Perturabo404 Agreed, the beginning is absolutely atrocious: Horrible for backstories, too many NPCs at once, prison scenes are horrible for player agency. The worst part for me were the mismatched expectations: I made a conquest paladin with 8 dex but heavy armour and a motivation to take the underdark from the demon lords, as that is what the adventure is supposedly about (at least on the later levels I've been told, we stopped playing once we reached the surface). Instead I started without armour (in prison) and had to spend 8 or so levels running away. I basically had to break my oath multiple times before leveling up to swear it and ended up abandoning the character in favour of a character that actually fit the first half (!) of the adventure.
If you're saying I play favorites, you're wrong. I love all my players equally.
:earlier that day:
I don't care for Gob.
One of the guys I play with was asking our DM why he is always the one getting attacked. The DM pointed at me and was like “have you not noticed much damage our barbarian takes every encounter?” 😂 my character almost dies in almost every encounter. I play a barbarian centaur that enjoys cutting off heads with his great axe so he gets in close.
I just bought a "Tears of my players" coffee cup.
I made a new group and didn't invite half my current players.
My first dm back in high school was good, except for an early detail being fsr too vague and nobody had thought to ask a very particular question, so we spent two game session weekends wandering because we did not ask what KIND of tree's wood a door was made out of
Honestly I have a friend who is a good gm but he does 30-45min exposition dumps that drive me insane. I literally am falling asleep at his table. He plays soothing music to and half of us are asleep because of these long drawn out periods of expo dumps. He’s very sensitive about his GM skills and I’m certain doing so would make him beyond upset. Any advice how to approach him?
Be honest and tell him the truth. If he has common sense, he should understand you and speed up a bit
I have been that DM of too much lore. I need to give less lore and let them ask if they want to know something. ( or not) Thanks.
I played a game once where the GM threw an overpowered monster at a group of raw 1st level characters. Half the party died and had to roll up new characters, the other half got boosted to third level from the encounter. Then, those same characters were boosted to fifth level just from the level-up training, while the rest of us re-entered the game at first. By the time the pizza got there, I had lost three characters and was trying to keep up with level 11 characters facing level 15 challenges and I still hadn't reached second level. I wonder if there was ever another session . . .
It's a constant learning experience being a DM. I've definitely got shades of control freak, coddler, and tourist - but I like to think that I'm getting better at improvising, taking firmer stances on my rulings and seeking help and inspiration when a campaign starts to feel stale and there are other things tugging at my interests.
One of the biggest lessons I've learned recently is to be a lot more trusting of Standard Array and Point Buy stats rather than rolled stats. I grew up playing earlier editions of DnD with a GM who liked powerful builds in their own characters and felt like that was just the best way to have fun with a build - have the odds stacked for a far more powerful character overall and beef up the numbers. So I did that too. But since joining a different game that required us to use standard array or point buy, I've really felt the difference in the stakes as a player. I'm getting hit more, missing more, my save DCs are lower - but combats are far more engaging because the stakes are much, much higher.
Since then, I've run a couple one shots with characters built using point buy and the difference as a DM is out of this world. I've gone from scrambling to improvise ways to buff encounters on the spot just so the monsters last more than two rounds, to actually needing to pull back just a little bit to prevent a TPK. The encounters haven't changed, but the power level of the party was affected so much, that I don't want to go back. It's not about punishing the players or trying to 'win' or anything like that, it's just such a relief as a DM to be able to throw some interesting creatures at a fifth-level party that aren't CR12 and actually get to see some of the weird and wonderful abilities these creatures have before they are turned into meat paste.
I’m like a year into planning and world building a campaign that my wife jokes will never be finished or played. Feeling personally attacked here lol
I had a DM that oddly rings true here.
- Story teller, rail roady. You can't do this becasue X.
- Favoritism, DM gave the Barb in out group 2 free smites (he was a 1st level paladin 6 barb, 2 fighter total min maxer crit fisher with GWM), allowing him to oneshot a boss dueing another charecters bit story arc conclusion.
- Also saw him LITTERALLY say in a different discord server, "I hope my players know to run lol, they don't stand a chance to win the fight thier about to enter" Yes he was bragging.
- Thought balance was a boss that can one shot a front liner in one round.
- Also changing rules on the fly becasue they want something spacific happen
- accuses the player of do things behind the DM's back
- 'Forgetting or not bringing up obvious things that the charecters would have noticed but the players didnt ask at the time (or it was changed later/deliberatly left out to keep a reveal hidden. Example, A creature has PURPLE blood, as where it would normally have red (or in this case yellow blood) and not mentioning to the players.
I have a whole story about this one.
hey luke. hey LUKE> HEY LUKE. Hey he told us he was going to get yelled at in the comments.
I have words of wisdom about game balance from 20 years ago I need to impart!!!! .... but that's not what this video is for. :)
our best games were the two where I improvised Diehard in space and Battlefield LA on a colony planet.
both ended in a TPK. Battlefield LA because it was the first game in Starfinder ever, and Diehard in space because the players all made combat monsters, and they repeatedly failed skill checks to disarm the bombs until they went off.
I'm definitely in the too much loot and improvisation camp, but I've recently been trying to balance more encounters around these new items.
Finding a balance around the loot is a bit tricky to get right.
I’m doing an Anime Homebrew and it’s fun and hilarious. I have the team do more of the story telling than me. I prepared a bit and wing most of it. This time I’m preparing this session cause I forgot names and places. So far everyone is having fun and I’m looking foward to doing better for them.
Yeah I'm a coddler. Some of my players would absolutely not have character death, and would constantly reroll just because she was sick of rolling bad (her definition of "rolling bad" became quite loose), and she would straight up rewind scenes to avoid her character "being embarrassed," but I was close friends with her and the other players and didn't know how to say no.
Honestly I'm kinda glad that royal dissolved, the campaign never would've worked out without some degree of regular drama that I didn't know how to resolve fairly.
im curious what you mean by unbalanced. I mean the game is already unbalanced, and it's up to the dm to tweak the encounter difficulties based on what the characters do and don't have to keep things balanced. Thus having too much or too little loot / levels /etc shouldn't matter
Well, call me a horrible DM, but we were a session or two into a new campaign, and a "friend" of the folks who owned the house we gamed at wanted to join. I showed up 2 hours early to help this person roll up his bard and shop for his equipment. Game starts. The bard walks in the exact opposite direction the rest of the party is going, into the woods, tosses ALL his new equipment on the ground and sharpens a stick as his new weapon. Seriously, did we really need to spend all that time buying equipment then? I immediately wrote the player/character out of the game. "And he traveled westward and may be traveling in that direction still." Was that really a bad? Was it unreasonable of me to ask that he respected the extra time I'd given him, and at least tried to stay with the group/show a bit of loyalty to me and his hosts?
I remember Luke saying Stefan was his favorite character in the CoS campaign and then that same character ended up blind, dominated and then corrupted by a hag.
Out of context it sounds terrible, but it was so funny and Kevin seemed like he was having the time of his life.
CoS?
@@mujiescomedy279 Curse of Strahd
This video, and the ideas it endorses is a good example of why more people don’t want to try DM’ing. Newsflash, the players opinions aren’t the only ones that matter.
@@louieadams540 this kind of content is exactly what drove me to become a DM. I’d played so many games with these types of DM’s (the ones resistant to this kind of feedback) that I decided I could do it better, and so far I think I have. The DMs I played with in the past may have been doing the heavy lifting, but without their players it means nothing. When those DMs lost their players because of their behavior, and then hit us up weeks later wondering why the campaign fell apart… the answer was obvious. Players opinions aren’t the only ones that matter, but they are still the most important opinions at the table if you want to gather a group of players. I really wanted to run a gritty survival based west marches campaign with very limited carry weight and a few nerfed spells… it would’ve been a very cool campaign, but when I was looking at the prospect of losing all of my players because that wasn’t quite the kind of game they were looking for, I had to re-evaluate. The campaign has taken a direction I never could’ve anticipated, and we are all the better for it. I’m way happier with saying “OK, let me retool how this west marches looks” than I would be saying “ you guys just don’t get what I was trying to do, fine I’ll find another group” (newsflash, I’m not finding another group. These are my friends and this is the game they want to play.)
I had a GM once who fitted into multiple of these categories: favourites, adversarial and control freak. Your example with the control freak and the door resonated me with a lot because that's literally what happened in our case. This GM would also antagonise us about things out of game over the Discord server, and to "avoid playing favourites" (in his words), he would constantly make his then partner suffer a humiliation conga from the most minor of mistakes or bad rolls. Nobody else suffered as badly as she did. He also suddenly introduced sexual content in one session - yay! Thank the gods I got out of that group.
That's weird. I'm not sensitive to topics but I'm not trying to have fantasy sex with a bunch of people in a dnd session. That just sounds so awkward.
I'm trying not to be THE NEXT BIG THING GM. I am bored of this long campaign I'm running.I'm trying to stick with it, after this I'm running shorter adventures. I want to run some Savage Worlds, that way I could switch genres and use the same rules.Great vid as always Luke!
2:53 It could be anyone of us. It could be you... it could be me...
Confession time: I'm absolutely DM #6 and #7... kinda. I spend a lot of time worldbuilding for my campaign, but it's often whenever i'm a player at the table and my next time GM-ing won't be for a while. Times like that, i figure that i can take the time to build my world so it will be fully fleshed out in time for me to run it. I don't shove the lore down my player's throats, though. Instead, i give a debriefing of important things to know about my world during Session Zero.
And the second thing about rushing through or cutting campaigns short... i did end a campaign early on because i ended up not being happy with how it turned out and i just felt like campaign sucked, so i cut it short.
The thing is, if you think your gm is terrible. Be sure to look in the mirror as well. I have had groups that if you give them agency they just sit there. My current group is wonderful as they constantly add to the story and the setting through roleplay but to my experience this is not typical of ttrpg groups. Most groups are lucky to have one proactive player.
Analysis Paralysis is a legit issue, and I fall into it as well.
I like agency, but I as a player need *structure*
@@dreamcream3738 next time you are playing just ad lib something and mention a new npc “this one time when I was working for duke chardryt of longreach blah blah” and see if your gm appreciates it or not. The secret is “yes and” always be additive to the game and not trying to just babble past a problem”
Nobody has shared the video with me, even though I am probably close to the Tourist GM of #7. But I found that I can get my campaigns to an end if I plan them from the beginning to be only short campaigns anyway. I usually give at least twice the amount of XP or whatever advancement currency there is to let the players taste the stuff they would otherwise not get. And well, I like rules light systems, so there is usually not much investment (neither monetary nor timewise) needed. So, at least I am not mad about this video, I actually think it can be useful to know what kind of flaw one has a GM.
thanks for the video , i DM'd for ad&d and have been playing 5e for the past 2 years and want to get back into DMing .
I have with my current game become the "Wishy washy DM". Prior to my current group, I never had this problem... but these guys.. unless I somehow let them do what they want, then intentionally consistently mock me and my rulings, and find ways to make almost every situation incredibly frustrating... which leads to a pretty consistent environment of frustration for me. I'm a RAW DM, because that normally makes the game easier to run, however these guys, some of whom are super optimizers are among the best rules lawyers I have ever encountered, and consistently demand that I prove 90% of the rules for my adjudications.
They also go incredibly slowly and screw around, refusing to engage in more than one encounter a day, always going to rather extreme lengths to make sure that they always have a Long Rest between encounters.... yet, knowing this is a milestone game. are quite often irritated if they don;t level up when they think they should based on number of sessions (even if they have actually only completed 3-4 encounters after leveling at levels 6-7.
I had a stint in a mental hospital, I was allowed to bring my Laptop and phone, and I tried DMing from that, also with almost no prep. It was Terrible
I only increase hitpoints when players let me know in advance that they are using a combo that is REALLY REALLY GOOD.
I am a game master that makes a ton of stuff to find and interact with, whether it is NPCs, loot, combat, treacherous areas, dungeons, etc. I call this the sandbox method, where the story depends solely on the players exploring and interacting with the world.
I don't like to give a lot +1(2or 3) weapons and armor often or any obviously useful items like rings of protection. I give them but sparingly. I love to give expendable items. My players use healing potions, especially when clerics run out of spell slots. But other expendables they never use "In case they need them in the future. There was an adventure where being invisible would make their lives easier so before that adventure I gave each of them a potion of Invisibility. They get to the location, a cave with no other way in (too low level for passwall type spells). I casually remind them of the potions but they don't use them in case they need them later. Surprise, the heavily armored fighter failed their stealth check and makes it so much harder on themselves. They still never used those potions
As I said earlier i don't like to give a lot of +1 weapons armors etc. SO another player finally decided to DM a game (Yay, no longer a forever DM). after two adventure he decided he was going to be the super nice DM and gave everyone a +3 item. We were level 4. He then complained that we ran through his encounters too easily. My comment was, now you know why I sparingly give those type of items. Though he was not as experienced of a DM as I was (since 2e) but he was DMing a game for other people for over a year at that point, but was running a Premade (I believe CoS)
i homebrew all of my campaigns (so far) but use the actual rules of the game. if a heavy shopping spree is incoming, i make it an entire session (pretty much) so we can take the time to balance homebrew purchases as a group. works great from my group, but be careful
I'm a new DM and im pretty sure i fall into at least two of those, the loot fairy and the world builder. I appreciate this video it helps to be self aware!
Also,
A LOT of homebrew is actually 'optional' rules in the DM handbook.
Great video. thanks! Love your content. I'm an old school referee (since Jr high in the 90s), and full disclosure, am guilty of allot of this way back then.
It's one of those things you never actually master, but continually learn and grow.
Got a question. I still take away player agency on occasion, and with careful judgement, and high respect for the player given the situation.
Failed a save vs Charm, for example. What's your take on that?
I've got very minor aspects of a few of these. I think sometimes you have to be a bit bad as a gm to get an idea of what happens when you do. Sometimes you have to do things because if you dont the game might also get worse. For example if you made a boss fight and the players just roll over it... you might wanna add a few hit points to make it feel a bit longer and not such a disappointment.
Alternatively, just give the boss a Phase 2 so the players get a tiny bit of relief before the oH NO strikes
Amazing video!
pocket bacon
The worst GM I ever had to deal with was a good friend in high school. He designed well written and excellent adventures. The execution of it, however, was one horror story after another until none of us wanted to play anymore. The story and and ideas were amazing until his particular friend would come over, and ruin it for the rest of us. He would allow this particular friend get away with anything, and allow this player to, quite simply, torture or kill or mind control or whatever, the rest of us. Much of it was truly messed up, and I probably shouldn't detail it here. This friend would also show up uninvited or quite late. What usually ended up happening is the adventure would end, and the GM and his buddy would just start playing pool or something else. Even after all these years, that friend of his is still quite the jerk. An honorable mention taking second place was a gal that wanted to be a GM, but 30 minutes into the game, we would have to listen to all the drama going on in her life. We wanted to play a game. Beware of a GM that uses a game as a trick to unleash all their misery on you. These can be the worst kind. It's a gaming session, not a therapy session.
I once had a GM that showed favoritism towards his girlfriend who was playing in our D&D group. He never let her PC die, her PC’s backstory was the ONLY backstory he ever used, and he never punished her for problem behavior. After a game session one night, me and several other players decided to have a chat with our GM. We explained to him that we knew he was favoring his girlfriend and that we wanted the favoritism to stop because it was unfair to the rest of us. At the next game session, the GM apologized to us and promised not to show unfair favoritism toward any player ever again. To this day, he no longer favors any of his players and we have a great time playing D&D.
A few good points though another one I would like to add is a DM that does not respect their player's time. I have seen this a few times and players can also be guilty of this but I have one specific incident in mind. Short version GM stated the time and day the session was starting at and asked all the players where their character would be. When I gave me answer the GM replied with an extremely vague are you sure and having nothing to go or hint to how it needed to be adjusted I said yes. Was then told an attack happened at a certain location a few characters were already at and the rest happened to be nearby except for my character who he then said was 2 hours away and I should have listen to his hint and not participating in the combat that ended up taking the entire session was my fault. That just felt wrong. At the very least a better question would have been why is your character here or some guidance on how my answer would have needed to be adjusted. There ended up being other issues with the group that ended up having me decide to leave but that's something else all together.
I'm definitely a (barely) recovering Loremaster who is turning into a Next Big Thinger, but in my defense, each game we were playing had a system designed from scratch by me, so I'm basically learning what my players like, what works, and how to obsess over lore less.
hey I'm doing a homebrew campaign and it's likely Star Wars themed. any tips?
Yes, mirror the structure with dnd and research people who've done homebrew with items and spells so you can keep balance as much as possible
@@108MCruz my group and I ended up going a different route but thanks I will keep this in mind if I ever go back to that!!
I disagree. If you have a problem with graphic violence, go play something else. Leave the table. You're not welcome. It's people stabbing each other and whatnot. You're playing the wrong game if you don't like fantasy violence!
I've definitely been guilty of being... generous... with the amount of loot I've given out. I've definitely learned from that mistake though and found a nice balance.
The players I like the least are ones who aren’t motivated to make decisions, my toxic trait as a DM is thinking I can help them make decisions
Another on to look at, the game writer. They tell you about the wonderful game they are developing. You have a fun session 0 where you make new characters and learn the basic rules. Session 1 goes well with a few hiccups. When you arrive for session 2, they inform you they have re written a lot of the rules and everyone needs to update their character for the changes. An hour later after some frustration, you start play. Occasionally the dm stops the session because a new rule was missed. This continues for every session as the dm gets progressively more frustrated that they can't write the perfect system and the players getting frustrated that things they thought were working well enough keep getting dropped. The dm eventually rage quits his own system out of frustration.
So I’m curious if this is problematic lore building gm behavior. So sometimes I like to write side stories with NPCs just so they’re doing something. I never require the party to read them it’s mainly because I enjoy it. But I’ve also been writing journal entries from the BBEG in the dungeon they have been creating to give the party’s hints on how to find them. (Cause they have never met in person but know that these dungeons need to be stopped to prevent environmental disasters.) Usually they’re like 10 pages and covers their philosophy, back story, methodology, personality, and gives some insight to other people the part is suspicious of. Is that bad? The party seems to enjoy it, but you never know. They’ve only found 2 in the 15 sessions we had so it’s not like I’m over exposing them.
I think what your doing is very creative and overall a great experience for your players.
I also don't believe your dumping too much lore on your players. After all, even if they found all the pages, it's not like that have to read every one of them, right?
Keep doing what you enjoy. As long as your group and yourself are enjoying what each of you do, that's what's important to any ttrpg game.
The only thing I would have to caution about (Like Luke himself) is just don't spend to much time on the journal entirely (the "lore") and make sure your adventures are exciting.
BBEG's are important to the story, characterizing them gives the campaign an extra layer of depth. Also under the circumstances you described it seems the most efficient way to do it. Besides, you already said the players like it so I think you're in the clear.
@@DentonHolmes Of course I usually spend time with the players and have them do what they want to do. I also have had them face some of the choice they have made which has lead to great character growth.
@@dandrive3249 Then sounds like what your doing is great! You know your players and exactly what they truly care about most in the game. Keep up the great work Dungeon Master.
I worry about the loot too, but strangely I keep count whilst another dm doesn't making me repeat sea sickness saves despite my character wearing a periapt of health her ONLY magical item!
In return I had them run into wererats back when I wasn't aware they're immune to physical damage (would alter that to resistant now that I know about it, but then...).
I gave them a unique item like a cape that gave advantage to a character's main skill, a reqliquary for the cleric allowing him to summon a lantern archon, 4 bards for the party rogue functioning as the backing band for the sorceror performer her literal thieves guild and an enchanted sword.
Should have simply had the reliquary give advantage too with the enchanted sword a moon touched blade that increased in power with the wielder if they kept it.
I Should have limited those bards to just one but it was a work in progress.
Also a mistake but how else do you learn if you don't make mistakes?
Bad DMs fight against the players, good DMs make the players fight amongst each other whilst you observe the carnage.
I'm playing for the first time, and I was mostly attracted to the character-driven story creation aspects. Unfortunately, my DM is a storyteller who doesn't let us get much RP in, and more than once has told me I can't react a certain way to an NPC because I have to do XYZ for the story to work. I'm so disappointed.
The Rules Problem GM can be mellowed by a player who is recognized by all as The Rulebook. For example, I really want to take one of the guys in my oWoD games to be the Storyteller, but he doesn't know a lot of the rules, because he only started the system a short while ago. So, I told him "Don't be afraid; I know the rules and will help you out". He did a great job until he unfortunately got sick and I had to take over again...
And the Underprepped GM... I'm one of those, but not by choice. I would often have the time to prep, but my ADHD makes me forget tasks constantly (not only in RPG), even if I put reminders in place. So, if I don't prep right after the session, I'll most probably end up frantically skimming bestiaries to see which monster would fit in that situation five minutes before or even during the game. But, it made me good at improvising 😀 I can literally answer a call to GM-arms in five minutes as long as the characters are done (and it's a system I'm familiar with, of course).
Oh, and I'm a loot fairy. But since I usually play only homebrew adventures, I can easily adjust challenges for higher equipped PCs.
Luke I really like your content of most of the things you said. I would not go out of my way to defiantly inflict/trigger a person's phobias just to be malicious. BUT, perhaps those persons should not play a game like D&D? I try to have session 0 to run my disclaimer of what to expect from me( as a DM). There are some things I will not have and tell the players my policy about touchy subjects. I tell them what I would expect from the PCs as well. They know what they are getting into so they can decide if they want to continue.
do you believe that not allowing a player to create modern war machines is taking player agency away or switching from pathfinder 1e to dnd 5e while keeping the same campaign, just in another setting is bad?
To answer your questions-
1) If the modern war machines clash with the setting of your game, the question becomes "Why did this character have the idea to pull this and for what purpose?"
For the second) it depends on how well it's executed. Critical Role did just that; their game was a Pathfinder game that transitioned to 5e D&D
Im the story teller but i love to see the PCs having their adventures like a narrator that doesnt know what the characters Will do, i love being surprised when players foil the worlds happenings.
Well technically there is another one. It's a hybrid between the second one. It's the bribed DM. They bring Cheetos. They bring snacks for you to eat just for you. The DM I should know I've had this done to me as a DM And I agree it's hard not to pick favorites when they do stuff like that for you. And they got screwed at the end of the game. It was sad. I should have tried to do something but what they did was let's just say they had it coming. I say they kind of abused knowing that I felt like I had to. It's hard to explain
Please tell me that’s a set of the wheel of time series on the shelf left center of the camera view
I'm the weird gm watching this video to self-evaluate lol
I'll admit It: I'm the Tourist 😅
Wow, after this i fell such a lot better as a master. I can recall many of those issues encountered in my campaigns over the years but a good talk with my players has alwais changed my prospective enough to fix those problems in very few sessions
The player that tells you they are going to DM. When all the players show up. That person tells you that they would play. If you find a DM.
I scientifically balance the rules, by usign the fun scale as a reference. Scientifically approved system. But yes, there are some DMs that homebrew a lot so much the players end up play PF2e instead of 5e.
#4 The Gary Gygax. :D
Imagine a player encountering a deep hole and choosing to jump in. Once inside, they realize they can't return the same way and there's only one way forward. However, the player refuses to proceed and threatens character suicide if not allowed to backtrack. Do you think removing the option to leave in this situation takes away player agency?
Nah. Jumping in a hole can have consequences. If one of them happens to be that you can't leave then that's the game. That just a bad player
The hardest part of being a DM, not being terrible at it.
16:40 so, like, 90% of people still using D&D 5E, who will modify the hell out of it to get it to be something they want...
...instead of playing the pre-existing TTRPG of that, because they erroniously believe "5E is better"? Or they just dont wanna learn a new system, despite the fact they've modified 5E so much, it doesn't resemble 5E anymore?
No plan survives contact with players, thats something I actually enjoy as it feels like I'm getting decent feedback which I can use to improve on.
Sometimes it requires I make changes as I go along and from my viewpoint improves the game I'm running.
Experiencing those gms is so valuable for a gm to learn how not to do it and how to recognise it. Not for too long though.
Short and simple... Good vid
#10, The Frustrated Player turned GM - the one who is constantly frustrated in another's world. Thinking they can do it so much better, but they fall into one or more of the first 9 types you have listed. #11, The Bacon Hater - enough said.
God dang it! I've seen myself in the coddler and too much loot GMs. 😅
Maybe I should dial back my love for my players and don't let them push me over, if I dare to take away one advantage in a certain situation. 🙈
"Because I'm the DM , That's why."