Everyone is different so you just got to find the right table and group you can vibe with. I know the DM is trying to help the players. If I ever finded out my DM did that I will leave the table. Everybody I played with does not like that and we go with dice say. Even if it's horrible we need to make sure that we helped the DM tell the story. Good or bad we just roll with it.
@@redmaxxs You might want to implement some sort of safety valve then, to make it less likely you'll be killed off by the RNG gods in an otherwise reasonable encounter. One that we frequently use is "last man standing" which goes as follows: If everyone else in the party is incapacitated, unconscious, dead, missing, or otherwise not capable of taking actions (making you the last man standing), _and_ you have Inspiration to spend (which we try to hand out fairly easily), then you can spend your Inspiration as a Legendary Resistance _after_ failing a saving throw which would take you out as well. You don't re-roll, you just succeed instead. If you're hopelessly overmatched, this isn't going to save the party. But if it was a fair fight that just broke badly, this frequently _will_ save the party.
@@redmaxxs I concur with what @mal2ksc said, though I use a different safety valve. If a player would die, they can instead stabilize themselves but take on a curse, injury, or other severe impairment based on the situation. They won't be able to come back from diving into a sphere of annihilation, but most everything else should be fine. They are then unconscious for 1d4 hours. Now, my game *is intended* to have death spiral situations. My players know that Exhaustion and Sanity/Madness are both on the table, so being able to *not die* but at a significant penalty is par for the course. Plus, quests to find ways to recover are part of the story. I expect them to do a detour to find someone to cure their disease or regenerate a limb, etc etc.
@@redmaxxssome of my best memories are deaths. I was low level and we were defending a building so I stayed atop the tower firing arrows down while everyone else dumped oil and did the CQC… then two unarmed fighters with fly potions who were supposed to just sneak in and jump us beat and hog tied me, DM mercy, but the lob of fire arrows began to light the place and I pointed out the barrel of whale oil i had there. The party hears a huge explosion from the tower and knew he was lost
Everyone should do the duty at least once so you can understand what it's like behind the screen. If you are unsure of your abilites, run one of the starter modules.
Nobody does, lol. But you can run an improve one shot of silliness, or a more constructed 2~3 shot. While Lost Mines of Phandelver and Dragons of Stormwreck Isle are decent beginner adventures, you need not run a whole campaign when you're starting out. A word of caution though: Don't start DMing with something you love. Give yourself something that you can get into but also walk away from. Your dream project can wait until you gain experience.
"The monsters can do the same" is a good advice, actually, it just should be used sparingly, and not just to spite. Makes everything part of the same world. The rules are mostly the same for PCs and NPCs for a reason, too, and the differences are mostly just to speed up and make the DM's turns easier.
Sure, NPCs might not exactly be built the same way, but there's NPC versions of most player concepts, including the spellcasters. There's entire societies that have been using magic to torture and kill people for millennia, if you could nuke someone by warming them enough to cause a nuclear explosion, most societies with wizards would have blown themselves to smithereens by now. While there are settings that have been very magically exploded, they tend to have not been exploded by a cantrip.
In AD&D and 2e, the monsters played by almost exactly the same rules as the players. This changed slightly in 3e, and was completely tossed out the window in 4e and 5e.
Also, if you want enemies that do the same stuff that the PCs do, make a group of NPC adventurers of roughly equal power. Have them show up on occasion for a friendly competition or some sparring. Don't make those NPCs kill the PCs unless the PCs actively choose to become enemies with them. You want rivals, not foes.
For the Antagonistic DM thing, I think that certain factions or groups WOULD use tactics like targeting the wizard first or using saves on the high AC character. But NOT EVERY single goblin is going to be a master tactician.
I tend to run encounters that way. Smarter enemies like Drow and Yuan-Ti will focus fire at casters if possible. Goblins tend to just dogpile the closest enemy, but at least they'll flank and generally focus their attacks. And mindless undead will just rush forward and smack the closest thing with a pulse.
This. You can actually make fights more fun when you consider their intelligence and tactics. A berserking monster may not bother with Tactical plays, a pack of animals may gang up on one at a time, and smart enemies with try to focus the precieved healers and casters of the group. And when you mix different mindsets in? It can make fights super dynamic.
I run every encounter based on the enemy nature and give each a basic personality template based on whatever action I take first with them. These 4 goblins ain't just 4 goblins there Bagoo the hothead that doesn't like it when things don't go his way and charges in head on Jagoo the coward that refuses to go anywhere within reach of something scary Lagoo the smart one, he's gonna shoot that filthy magicker hiding in the back rather than act like an idiot And Magoo, the hotheads dumb friend who goes in with him cause he's dumb loyal.
On tracking HP: So I do track HP, but I will shift it around slightly if I can tell that the fight is starting to drag. Mainly if the monster is on death's door and no one can seem to roll enought to kill it, I just let the next hit finish it to get a move on.
I use Matt Colville's method of tracking enemy HP in the open, by counting UP (total damage) rather than DOWN (hit points remaining). The players know how much damage they're doing, so I'm not giving them any information they don't already possess. What they may or may not know from prior experience is how much damage they need to do to kill the enemy. This also means I can let _the players_ track damage _for me._ I just have to watch for when the damage hits 50% (and I say "they're bloodied") and for any creature that starts with over 30 HP, I also call them "wobbly" when reduced to less than 10 HP or 10% of max (whichever is greater). When dealing with regenerating creatures like trolls, I might choose to take the damage tracking back into my sole control once it becomes obvious the creature is regenerating. But most of the time I don't have to!
@hellfrozenphoenix13 I slowly phased him out of my life. Dude would drag everything to a screeching halt if things didn't his way even if he wasn't the one behind the screen.
Here's my dnd advice. If what you're doing works for your group, don't change it because "it's wrong" it's all about your tables enjoyment not someone elses opinion
"It's okay to just make up new rules on the fly, and if your players get upset about them then it's their fault for not asking you how they work." I wish I was kidding. Some Troglodyte recently actually told me this. His table must be hell to play at.
When I was DMing for the first time, all of my notes looked like “if the party does this blank happens” just a plan out a few different scenarios. Planning this way actually help me out one time with the puzzle. It was a very simple puzzle that could only be solved one way and then I thought to myself “what if they end up doing blank”. The encounter the puzzle for the first time and they do exactly what I thought they would do. New DM me wouldn’t have been able to improv that puzzle if I didn’t plan for it before hand
That was unironically me in the first 5e game I ever ran. Had no idea how to balance combat back then and figured my group could handle it. The only reason they survived is because the last three goblins fled when their leader died.
A level 1, 5e party can easily handle 10 goblins. Depending on how they're positioned, a single judiciously applied AOE spell can wipe out half or even all of them. Then the clean up crew finishes them off. Cast Sleep, boom 3-4 are down. The other three players will likely drop 2 goblins between them, and by the end of round one you've cleared half of their number. I would estimate that a group of smart players would mop up ten goblins in a span of three turns. It'd tax your resources pretty heavily, and if everyone whiffs init, you could be fucked. It's a risky encounter but by no means impossible. So it's not an appropriate encounter when the game design assumes like 8 in a day, but it's certainly not a death sentence. And remember, players don't have to just charge in and fight like idiots. If they see ten goblins and figure they shouldn't push their luck, they have options. They can flee, go around them, set a trap and lure them into ambush.
"You are the DM. That means you are against the players." Sorry, I would like to have my players enjoy themselves, and not just feel like they have to "win".
ive never understood where that saying comes from. like its just completely wrong as you as a dm are the one telling the story. you are not there to win. If that was the case then it would literally just be level 1 parties facing ancient dragons session after session after session. it is a ttrpg, a game. everyone should have fun. and while yes as a dm you should challenge your players the goal should never be to kill them. if they die that is just a risk of the game. but it should never be the end goal to kill a player character without the players direct consent on that plot idea.
@@svartrbrisingr6141 I generally avoid killing characters, unless it's meant to be epic, or the player is being an idiot or metagaming AF. I know my brother was DM for a Gundam RP one time, and one player wanted to start in a mobile suit, during a peace conference that was going to fall under attack, and we kept telling this one player that no, he can't go take his mobile suit for a test drive, because there was a warning put up. he kept trying to metagame so much, that I took my brother aside since he was getting frustrated, and I told him that the player wants to fight you and win the game, not properly go through the adventure. So I advised him that he needed to do something about this player who refused to listen or play along (He had a good backstory, IIRC) with the group, I told him he needed to send him a message that he can't be metagaming to that extent. A peace conference between various members of a number of colonies who are trying to establish peace after decades of war, is not the time to go test out your DIY Mobile Suit. You will get arrested, especially if your piloting papers are not in order, and permission isn't given to you. So I told my brother that he had to kill his character in a way that there was no way to bring him back. So there was a hole in the colony that was hit, then his mobile suit was shot right in the cockpit, and the entire thing got pulled out in the vacuum of space. We made sure he was SUPER dead. That was the only time I advocated in an RP to kill a character to the DM. And I didn't do it lightly. The guy even wanted weapons on the Mobile Suit he put together for the test ride. Needless to say, he ragequit since he couldn't get things his own way.
i seem to remember a story about a terrible DM who went to EXTREME lengths to prevent the players from "winning". and i'm talking random encounters with dragons every ten feet!
I think the most underrated piece of advice covered is "plenty of advice is group dependent". One table might appreciate the more cinematic experience you get from fudging rolls; some will dislike the tilting of the scales and will prefer all rolls to be real. Being a DM means being aware of the vibe of the table and adapting to it.
I had one supposedly expert DM tell me if you close out a major plot of your campaign without at least one player character dying, you failed as a DM. "By the end of a full campaign, no one from the original party should have survived." What is this, Darkest Dungeon?
That requires a HYPER specific campaign style. Killing players should be a threat, but not a goal. The risk being there is part of the fun. Not the goal.
4:10 this is exactly how I've been dming. I'm a new dm running my first campaign. I try to plan for what directions they could go. They absolutely have still thrown my plans completely for a loop (thanks for not fighting that kraken guys lol). Having prep planned for the directions I anticipate them going has made it so so much easier for when they go a completely different direction than i expected.
I disagree on thinking "enemies can do it too" being bad advice. Just do it wisely and warn players of it before you implement it. And do it due to health of the campaign, not saltiness. If a spell makes combat obsolete, talk about enemies using it for back and forth or ban it instead. It comes down to the golden rule: communcate with your players.
It reminds me of "The customer is always right", which is taken out of context in the first place. I work in IT and the customer is (almost) NEVER right in my experience. Just because the players want to do the wankiest shit for the lolz doesn't me it's fun to allow everything. It gets old very quick if they can behave like gag characters...
One actual good advice here: use your enemies int/wis stats to determine how they fight. Trust me getting into the chaotic headspace of a Trex vs the thinking mind of bounty hunters should show in the tactics or lack there of in the enemies. It leaves room for your players to make decisions based on the way the enemies take action
I've told my players the "whatever you can do, so can enemies" thing, just to keep them from sitting around waiting for enemies to come to them while they all decided to hold action to gank whatever came around the corner after they alerted all the bad guys, so that way they wouldn't try to just make noise and wait every time they went into an enemy stronghold, and would let them know the enemies wouldn't use one shotting tactics like that either lol
Believe it or not, just because something worked one way in the past doesn't mean it's how it should be run, and changes with a system, shockingly, can be for the better. There's a reason that (typically) players get death saves and monsters don't, because the only thing that sucks more than PC death is being insta-killed with no prior anticipation.
You can be mad about it if you want, but there's nothing wrong with saying anything the PCs can do, the baddies can do. It keeps them from cheesing the fights, like "I CAST CREATE WATER IN THE BBEGS LUNGS!" That stuff is lame.
Had a guy try to use Mage Hand to give someone a heart attack once. Gross misuses of spells like that need to be slapped down. There's clever uses of spells, and then there's trying to turn a cantrip into Power Word: Kill
not just the worst advice i've ever heard, but the worst advice for a DM period: "the players are your enemy. the role of a DM is to kill every player as quickly as possible. if they reach 10th level, you have failed as a DM."
That makes me question how this DM even plays the game. Throw a Red Dragon at every party? That should get your players dead. I, personally, have origin characters like BG3 present in my campaign. Yes, my players will frequently leave them at camp and even if they're in the party, my players will command them about, but it gives me a strong motivation to support my party early on before I start getting invested in backstories.
I was taking a coworker home when we started talking about playing dnd and lead to asking about my play style as a dm. I just told him im a half and half but i want my players to feel important and powerful. His reaction i thought would be "oh nice i agree" or "interesting" but instead he told me im playing dnd wrong and the dm is supposed to make everyone argue and fight at the end and hate each other. I kinda started to realize what kinda person he was after that. 😅
12:40 my campaign is very centered on the gods (norse mythology based where they don't know it yet but they are trying to prevent ragnarok) even then I haven't gone super in depth with my pantheon. They have a list of the important gods and their respective general domains but that's it it's not crazy in depth and it makes it so much easier for me
"You should treat DM prep as a part-time job". This advice is surprisingly common, given how bad it is; it reduces the idea of prep down to just an amount of hours you should put in, and offers zero nuance. Overprepping can lead to burnout as the DM overworks themselves, and overdoing it can result in a lot of that work going to waste. At the end of this week's session, my DM admitted that he has 12 entire quests that he prepped that cannot be used anymore due to our party moving past the areas said quests were built for, some of them complete with maps and NPCs made for said quests. Prepping is taking up the majority of his free time, and I'm trying to coach him out of prepping for every possible path, and learning to lean into improv more, as that's a more effective strategy for dealing with DM burnout long-term.
@@ZyvenZ Part of the issue is we just had a TPK, so the campaign has shifted settings after we bribed our way out of purgatory. We blew up the place where almost half those quests were based... As well as ourselves. He's getting better though; he used to prep 5-6 quests per area in advance and we'd only get to 4-5 of them before moving on. He now seems to be learning that not every big thing that our group interacts with has to be tied to a quest, so he's been introducing independent puzzles and NPCs that aren't tied to a big story. Like, we spent half of one session trying to open a door, he doesn't need to work so hard creating half a dozen storylines per area and tying them into the overarching campaign storylines.
@@azurewraith2585 Then I haven't become efficient even after 8 years of 5e. I'll easily put 6 hours into a not-plot-critical dungeon that lasts three sessions, and two hours of prep for every one hour of table time for the parts that _are_ plot-critical. (And this is _with_ random generators and software support tools.)
In regards to the "whack-a-moel" story, I am GMing a 2e Pathfinder game and it actually had a rule that limits how many times a person can be healed from 0 HP, giving a player a "wounded" condition for a max of 3. Wounded also count as failed death saves and remain with you until a long rest. Also a player that is healed from 0 doesnt wake up, someone has tp physically wake them up if they are stabalized.
A bit misleading according to base rules, because Treat Wounds (a very important action for alot of parties parties to have access to) also removes the wounded condition and only takes 10 minutes. But yes, wounded is a great mechanic. And Unconscious (player core pg446) actually says that "if you are restored to 1 Hit Point or more, you lose the dying condition and uncoscious conditions and can act normall on your next turn." Checked the pre-remaster rulebook, it also had a ruling that you automatically wake up if you ever have 1 HP or more, page 459 in "Dying".
@@sorilnik thanks for the catch, admittedly it has been a bit since I've last read through the core rules for dying and wounded and mosly typed what i could remember off the top of my head. For the last 20 sessions my group has been super careful and not let anyone go under 15hp. With a dedicated healer to make sure that no one else goes down after they had a scare with an npc they liked. Despite the harsh setting of my campaign dying and wounded is something has only shown up in session 1.
@@ronine9231 No worries, for my players we have no healers, so I'm very familiar with these rules because in the last difficult fight all but one player character went down (a creature having burrowing speed and players being unfamiliar with it is no joke, almost TPKed to one creature that was a low difficulty encounter due to it getting a lucky crit on the gunslinger).
My players have told me to stop overpreparing, but I dislike having to halt the momentum of the session just to improvise something that should have already been prepared.
Learn to recycle the stuff you prepare but don't use. They won't know it's recycled since they never saw it before. Maybe you upscale the monsters, maybe you save it for the next party.
"If it sounds cool, let the players do it" Sometimes the DM needs to just put their foot down when player antics get to far out of hand. Despite how "Cool" it sounds. Sometimes its okay to allow this if it won't derail the campaign in a single move. But there is a limit
"Nerf characters if they become any better than any other character" it turns into a race to the bottom where players are switching their spells and classes because its been nerfed to the ground.
"never tell your players no." is meant for dm's like me who will reflexively say no to anything that derails the intended order of events, even if it leads to an alternative path that the players 100% deserve. it's probably meant to encourage the dm to allow more creativity and to let them do wacky stuff even if it means they accidentally undermine some (probably ultimately unimportant) part of the story. *but in the wrong hands* it's a recipe for bloody fucking chaos, story beats will be stepped right over, builds will become a nightmare to balance, and important characters will die at the drop of a hat. And the of course the players will (probably rightfully) blame you when the campaign begins to fall apart because you decided to suddenly be allergic to intervention.
My personal philosophy as a DM is thus: "Always TRY to find a way to say 'YES', or even 'YES BUT'", before a 'NO' is reached. In terms of intervenrionary issues that need to be intervened on, however, that's the time to absolute 'NO'. Good calls bruv!
Worst advice is that if I nerf things then my players will resent me so just create situations where their exploits won't be available. This was in relation to Eldritch blast being "too strong" that somehow led into a conversation about coffeelock. I basically checked out after that
Banning combos like coffeelock is completely acceptable; D&D is not Magic The Gathering. But Eldritch Blast being "too strong" is nonsense. Yes, it is the best attack cantrip in the game, because it has a great damage type, scales best and can be powered up further by spending Eldritch Invocations (basically mini-feats exclusive to warlocks), but has the person saying it was too strong seen how many spellslots warlocks have in comparison to sorcerers?
@@schwarzerritter5724 Eldritch Blast is the majority of what Warlocks have going for them. Sounds to me like the guy just has a problem with multi-classing.
Lmao "EB is too strong" is the same as saying "water is too wet". EB + Agonizing Blast + Hex is literally the average/normal damage output at every level in benchmarks for optimizing builds.
@tehrulefoo Exactly that. They were saying that it wasn't fair that someone could take one lvl in warlock and EB as good as a full Warlock. Then shifted goalposts when I brought up invocations or delayed class features. Eventually ended with "Valorlock deals 175-200% more damage than average"
"You are not a filmmaker" Thats actually a good advice! You are not making a film or writing a book. You create a word to enjoy, playing as a DM and also discover consequences of you NPC(that you are playing as) and your players actions. Again you are not creating a story. Story in TTRPG is maiden with you and your players. You don't do it on your own. Because it just not how TTRPG works.
My opinion on fudging rolls as a DM is this, it is situational, for instance if you are constantly rolling high, then fudge the roll by making it lower, and if you are constantly rolling low, then fudge the roll making it barely succeed; for instance one of the few times I've DM'd I was rolling Nat 20s more consistently than normal, so I fudged a few of them, that way everyone still had fun
I disagree on the comment to "what players can do, monsters can aswell" - i handle it the same. But now you have to differentiate. Are the "monsters" a highly-searched, ruthful band of war-nomades, plundering through the landscape, or some wererats? of course the wererats wont match the inteligence of a decorated Marshel who served in 2 Wars already and tries to bring down an empire... you can expect enemies to react smarter, or less smart compared to the "i kill everything"-barb. I learned this lesson in playing Shadowrun with my group - they started to abuse civilians and objects, plundered way to many things for alternative explosives and grew super strong in a short time. So i threw in more difficult enemies. Did not work. After a battle-mech got distryoed, and the driver used drugs, my players realiezed pretty quickly, that this is only phase 2 ... before phase 3 i told them to escape, otherwise they wont go out alive as this guy used EVERYTHING he could. (especially enviromental stuff, which i told my players before the fight aswell). After that, we agreed to not exploit too much and talk about stuff. I am always on my players side, so i would allows 3 out of 5 things to be exploided. No reason trying to "beat" me. I always want my players to reach the great final.
"If you don't like something, ban it or nerf it to the ground" A lot of DND advice like that. Don't like powergaming and multiclassing? Ban! Don't like certain spells? Ban! There are more creative solutions to that
I disagree. If you as a DM dont enjoy dealing with certain subclasses, spells or builds at your table, then just tell your players how you feel and ask them to play something else. Preferably at session 0 though. It would suck for a player to invest a lot of levels into a build only to have the carpet pulled out from under them.
@@tehrulefooforever DM that recently started being a player. I’m very lenient in my games and will just adjust enemies on the fly to deal things I don’t like. DM of the game I joined has banned about 1/3 of the subclasses cause he doesn’t like them which really made it feel DOA to me. Still giving it a shot I don’t want to back out of it just cause of that but I really would try not to ban classes
@@loopdeloop1600 That seems really excessive. But I guess I could see a DM being upset about power creep. Probably just better to make your encounters more difficult against a party like that though. My ban list is quite short. 1. Peace and Twi Clerics in general. And Moon Druid in tier 1 for being far superior to other options 2. Any race with a built-in Fly Speed 3. Silvery Barbs because easy access to re-rolls is obnoxious. Especially when the rerolls work on enemy saving throws. 4*. If you're going to use Conjure Animals, you are responsible for keeping track of your animals and making your turn go fairly quickly. If you cant make that happen, please consider another build. Other than that, I allow pretty much whatever. I've even started allowing players to use homebrew/Third-Party stuff so long as I review it first and its not egregiously OP
For the recoil for spellslots thing: could work if tweaked. Id make it take from their max health instead. And they would have to use hot die to recover max HP, but not the hP with it. This way, it could allow a player to do some epic spells, but it would limit how much it could do. Risk-reward.
If you give Frodo a Lightsaber, you must also give Sauron the Death Star. The whole point of the Death Star was that it was impossible to take on in anything resembling an even fight, which is similar to Sauron. What is not similar is the fact that Sauron is more of a corruptor than a general, even though he has a gigantic army, he’s the keystone to it. If Palpatine was the main face of the Empire, it might work. However, he’s not. Tarkin the general is, with Darth Vader as the hint of something more. If it was the Death Star 2, then it might make more sense, but it isn’t. Darth Vader becomes the face of the true antagonists, the Sith. Another one that aggravates me is “You need to make your storyline darker, the stakes aren’t high enough yet.” J.K. Rowling followed that advice, and I can’t read the last two books because of that idiocy. Yes, make it dark, but you need light too. Think of it as painting a picture. You wouldn’t want a picture with no light to see would you?
About not having to create pantheons of gods: I run Pathfinder 2e. If literally any player wants to play, like, a cleric, it could be pretty important to have those gods for the player to choose from. Why? Well, a god provides different boni to a cleric. They all have a favored weapon, which the cleric becomes proficient in and gets for free at the start of the game, they might get a certain stat boost depending on a background, and also a number of spells from outside what is essentially the cleric's spell list. Gods also have their own edicts and anathema, representing what a follower should do to gain or lose favor with the god, respectively. Doing so can grant boons or curses. Of course, you could just decide these things with the player in question, but giving them what is essentially a list of gods to peruse can make your world seem livelier and larger. I might be a bit biased as I greatly enjoy worlbuilding, but even so, the pros of creating these things beforehand shouldn't be overlooked. Not entirely, at least.
You should always remember that general advice might not be built for your issue. General advice is always accounting for the dumbest/most lost person in the room, so they too can get something out of it. The answer to your quarry might lie in going against the conventional wisdom. I do things you’re “never supposed to do” and it works great because I make it work. DnD campaigns can be literally anything, so your approach can be equally as flexible. I feel like loads of DMs/Players are way too conservative about how things ALWAYS need to be and that makes me sad. My advice is, spend as much time as you can on the topic of game design. Read other ttrpg books, watch video essays about it, look at the differences between simple and complex board/card games. It can only make you better. Same thing with world building. DMing combines multiple skills and a lot of bullshit doesn’t even happen in the first place if you do your homework.
8:10 if there is one thing i know as a DM for a FACT, its that it makes the game way more enjoyable if you play in the strenghts of your player, someone has fire resistance, throw fire at them to make them feel like choosing fire resistance was a good call, but i do like to break that mold sometimes, it keeps it engaging
In my opinion, the best GMs are those that hate fudging rolls but don't entirely refrain from doing it. Those that follow the rules properly (not slavishly, mind you), except for that situation that happens once in a while, where fudging actually improves the game. But when I see people gleefully talk about fudging rolls like that's the entire point of the game... Well, I'm glad I'm not playing at their table. If you find yourself constantly fudging rolls and bending rules to the breaking point, just so the PCs can do call things, then, sorry, but you're playing the wrong game. I know, many D&D players hate it when it gets pointed out to them that other systems exist and would suit them better... But other systems do exist and would suit those people better. Like Outgunned, an action movie RPG that's all about the PCs doing cool things. In general, the worst kind of GM advice is that you HAVE to do something in a certain way. Sadly, there are a lot of extreme opinions going around. I mentioned some in the last comment I made here (like about fudging tables that aren't inherently bad) and there are many others. "You should never fudge rolls/Always fudge rolls", "never track HP/always track HP down to the last number, no matter how annoying the fight is getting", "always improvise everything and make no notes"... One comment in the video pretty laments that as well. Sadly, there's also at least one example of this here too (the guy blabbering about gods, who acts like world-building is bad). The truth is, there are only few absolutes in TTRPG ("make sure that everyone has fun and nobody feels uncomfortable" and such) and every table has their own wishes and needs.
The game belongs to the DM so it's their rules go. This does not work if you are any kind of empathic or cooperative DM, who tries to listen to player feedback and adjust things accordingly. Although there is a time and place to be firm and a time and place to bend things. Example: I recently had a player feel targeted because they walked into a dangerous situation without looking. There was a lot of misunderstanding on both sides but thankfully, we both found a path forward.
Worst dming advice is when dm's scold you when your players don't do things "as scripted". I stopped asking for any advice on Reddit as every time I did a bunch of elitist so called dm's reply with "if they did X you're doing things wrong" it's infuriating xD
While I don’t use the HP that;’s set in the books,I ballpark it depending on encounters. All of my players have never complained. The only reason I did this because I had one problem player who kept min maxing and knew every monster HP. So it got old fast whenever we had encounters with this player
i dont track some monsters hp. bosses especially but also horde type enemies as well. my bosses are some of the encounters my players love the most as they know that while i dont track hp its so that everyone can not only have their chances to shine but also for the party to be able to come up with strategies other then "do as much damage as possible as quick as possible." for standard fights i do track hp but i also use almost exclusively homebrew enemies so i would never have to worry about someone like you had to deal with
"Your job is to ensure the players have fun, you can never kill a player or make things to hard, but have to make it hard enough to be fun." Worst advice anyone can get going into DMing. Being the DM is not a job and the DM has every right to have just as much fun as the players. If your players think you as a DM are not meant to have fun and are just there to entertain them you have horrible players. D&D is not DM vs players, but a player dying in a hard combat as long as that combat is not specifically designed to be a TPK is fine. You should root for your players to win, but never pull your punches to ensure they do. As for the fudging rolls, I will never do it. Other then death saves, loot tables, or vital roles for role play scenes I make all my rolls as DM in the open, particularly in combat. Fudging rolls can lead to massive conflicts at the table if it is discovered, including no trust in any roll you make. Get a legit nat20 that will not down anyone and are known to fudge your players will think you fudged in your advantage. Miss several attacks in a row when things look grim and your known to fudge, you just took all the drama out of the game, and so on.
The DM is the ref, or a fellow storyteller, but he is BY NO MEANS the players' fucking servant. Even the most spineless, low self-esteem DM would get burned out playing with the stereotypical entitled narcissistic modern 5e player.
RE: injury systems - what about something similar to Mabinogi's wound system, wherein: A. The penalty is to max HP, rather than rolls. B. All rests can fix injuries, although long rests do a better job. C. Injuries can also be fixed with a Wisdom (Medicine) check.
The one that said that watching Critical Role for tips is just insane (and that’s coming from someone who loves critical role). No-one is going to have the time to go through hundreds of 2-4 hour episodes just to pick up a few tips from someone who has been dming for most of his life and who got very famous from how good at it he is
I'd say maybe one, or two provided you have the free time for it, IF you REALLY want to get an example of very descriptive narration and npc acting for your GMing. But ONLY as a source of inspiration, not as a source of learning tips and all. There are much more digestible sources for that, plus what the people in CR do isn't something everyone can reach, as acting IS their job after all. Not to mention Mercer literally put short videos on youtube with advices, so if you REALLY want to learn his ways, just go there.
Taking the idea of letting players do whatever they want the extreme. And by that mean letting one or more players make someone else uncomfortable. For example, I've sat in on a game where a player had their character rape another person's character 😬
"you need to tailor the story to the players" said by a player who's PC was ADAMANT that they get out of the city they were in as soon as possible to destroy a magic sword. the only issue? I was running a pre-made module as my first time DMing so I was unfamiliar with the world, the lore, or anything outside the city. that player is no longer part of my games. Now I admit, in a homebrew game? that works out fine. but the entire story of the module was in that city. I didn't design it, I didn't take it apart and look at it. it was 100% me learning with the players.
Make characters row for a test even if they wouldn't succeeded, this would keep the suspense of what if the player had rolled higher. Most players I met gate this.
It was a manifesto of a particular person rather than an advice, but "The GM is roleplaying as the world and it's all they do; they aren't, to any extent, responsible for players' fun". I agree that the GM isn't *fully* responsible for players' fun, and I know that in some styles of ttrpgs the GM don't actually design the advanture, but the GM still needs to care for it being an enjoyable game for everyone, at least not less than players
I have to echo this idea, but it needs to be expanded a bit. Part of the rise in DM burnout that we're seeing these days is due to the expectations placed on the DMs. They are expected to take responsibility for the fun level for each and every person at the table, and many players are showing up with a minimum amount of effort put into the game or understanding their characters. It cannot be one person that's responsible for the fun level of everyone at the table. I believe that shifting the mindset from the DM to the table as a whole is necessary. In other words, if something isn't fun at the table, then the table should be able to communicate in a way to find a solution. None of the "DM vs players", but leaning more into the group mentality. I'd also go further and mention that the DM is uniquely positioned to have the most influence on the game, so they should absolutely lead these efforts. The best way I've found is to foster a group mentality, where we are all part of the collaborative story telling experience. This should emphasize non judgmental communication and trust. Regardless, the players need to be able to trust the DM to do what's best for the table. This includes quickly dealing with problem issues, and being receptive to feedback. This also means that, while the fun level is not solely their responsibility, they do have the obligation to lead the table to find a solution. I firmly believe that a shift in the prevalent mindset for TTRPGs is necessary for the players and DMs to enjoy the game together.
The DM's job is to be an arbiter between the players and the rules. They are NOT responsible for whether or not the players have fun. The most they can do is create the environment in which fun can be had.
@@Overkill2217 I completely agree with you. But the initial idea wasn't that. It was a response the GM would give to any feedback we tried to give him (of which it was a lot), basically "if you don't like something, it's you problem". When I wrote him to say that I wouldn't play anymore, because I really didn't like the first session, he seemed to be honestly sure that other players were the problem and that I just got unlucky to get in that group, so it's not even passive aggression, it's really what he believed
@@Drago5899 "not less than the rest of the players" is the key part. The initial statement was a response to any attempts to give him a feedback, and he was absolutely sure that the only reason we didn't like the game were each other and not him failing to ever explain us much of anything and making fun of us for not being able to stay on top of his very weird decisions
I was once told to be homicidal toward the party, which can be fun in moments, but not for the entire game. There's more than just hack/slash fighting through a game. I like to offer a range of role playing opportunities, not just kill or be killed.
Casting exhausted spell slots from HP could be cool, but it *is* very much caster favoring, and should probably be tweaked such that you can't expect to get more HP out than you put in. 9:25 Ah. I see the problem here: The players were, in fact, taking so much damage they *needed* the whack-a-mole. But instead of dealing with that he made whack-a-mole worse. (As solutions go, there's also the option of 'healing a downed character leaves them stable, but unconsious for X rounds') The solution to the 'should you fudge rolls' question is to implement IP protection (Fate rerolls, etc) like _literally every RPG post 2000_ It's even in the DMG! Kinda. I'll raise something from the GURPS rulebook: 'NEVER give minor characters wildcard skills'. For the record, Wildcard skills are skills that can be used for a whole *category* of skills. In a game where there are nearly a hundred skills, it is an *extremely* good idea to just give your random thug characters Thug! skill - any thug-related action, like smacking a hero with a big club, intimidating witnesses, standing around looking menacing, gains the bonus. GURPS has... honestly a lot of weird-ass advice.
(Not a bad advice comment) I love Critical Role but even Matt Mercer would tell aspiring DMs to play their way, don't try to perfectly emulate them because they each have strengths and flaws and a different style of play
"The Rules As Written are the LAW. You must follow them at all times." No I don't. Sometimes, I don't have the time or the momentum to look up a niche ruling. So I just go for it and keep the tension up. Also, there are times when I want to use the dice rolls and mechanics to invoke a certain feeling or vibe. At first, you should play as close to the RAW as possible to get the intended play experience. But once you are comfortable with it, go ham.
Oh gosh. I have NIGHTMARES about dealing with a problematic player who is best friends with my best player. Said problem player drove me to multiple anxiety attacks.
honestly. ive personally never used a session 0 I run online games and I will talk at length with each player before they even get into the server, run my rules by them, get a rough feel of the player themselves. and then once in the server i have them read through the lore and then me and them work together indepth to fill out a character backstory. why they are in the party, their story before then. all kinds of things. and its never once had any issues outside some players just ending up not liking how my dming style is in game itself. which that ain't something a session 0 would really do anything about as it takes playing a session to get that feel.
Sometimes just throw in an encounter to amp up your players. Just some bandits not knowing who they are mugging. Hype them up and them bring on something more challenging.
It's also important to know when to tell your players "Yes, BUT". Just because they have an insane idea doesn't mean it can't work... but you need to make sure they know that playing stupid games can win you stupid prizes. I sometimes won't track HP, but only for *major* boss encounters with characters I intend to be recurring opponents for the party. These bosses are typically underlings of a world-ending threat, and not the sort of basic bitch that's going to get blasted into oblivion by one round of lucky rolls... partially because they're smart enough to know when to flee, and partially because the nature of their existence means that the BBEG could just recreate them if their physical forms were destroyed. There's a guy I went to college with who believed that every game should subscribe to the Dwarf Fortress idea of "fun"... the idea that "Losing is fun." Every trap should kill at least 1 PC, every fight should kick your player in the balls so hard they shoot out of their noses... that sort of garbage.
Fudge Responsibly. I am not 100% for or against fudging. I use D&D for both combat and narrative simulation however, so my heroes dying in anticlimactic ways would ruin some of the drama I'm hoping to inspire. It's usually not needed later when the party is more equipped and leveled, but it sucks to lose a character at level 1~3 before things get rolling, or before you get a chance to really play your role.
Funnily enough, I have a stronger opinion about whether or not you should let players know that you fudge. I asked my main group straight up "I want to roll privately. Do you trust me?" They understand and the game feels fair without being punishing to them. I casually let them know my above post and ethos on fudging. I won't save them from encounters that are intended to be deadly and apply pressure, nor will I save them from their own mistakes. But those goblins? They were just there to eat up resources. I personally tend to rage against the machine when RNG works against me, so I would appreciate a DM letting me know up front if they fudge. That open honesty will help me trust that the DM knows what they're doing and aren't trying to make the game unfun for me personally.
"Don't let the players be rules lawyers." Not only do I have to put up with players that know the rules _at least_ as well as I do, I provide them a challenge mechanism when they think I'm wrong. If they disagree with my interpretation of the rules, they can call time out and then they have one minute to decide if they want to make a formal challenge. If they can demonstrate that my ruling is contrary to Sage Advice or even more official statements, then I'll reverse it on the spot. If they can't, then we play on with my ruling -- BUT they're doing it under protest, and if it turns out that my interpretation was hideously wrong, then they'll get to replay the encounter from the point where they protested but under a correct interpretation of the rule. If they don't speak up, then any decisions I make are final, even if it can be shown later that I contradicted a rule. You have to speak up _in the moment._ I'll try to retcon or handwave so that the events make sense in light of the correct rules, but I won't change the events unless I (and to a lesser extent, _we)_ decide the original ruling was taking us places we don't want to go.
Probably the worst I've heard was "you shouldn't care if the players are having fun or not, you're there to tell a story, if they're not having fun, they should be trying harder to have fun".
To the advice about not cracking open a dmg, anyone who’s not trying to improve every pillar of their game is either already done it, or are failing in leveling up parts of their gm’ing game.
5:43 planting someone to put a crazy PC in their place isn’t a unreasonable thing to happen though. You aren’t the only adventurers and certainly not the best. Murder hobos get reputations and bounties too
I feel a little bad for the people who make a DnD thing that gets insanely popular because its gonna get compared to regular DnD way too much and have to think "Wow... I ruined DnD and how its meant to be seen"
Ugh, posting so much on this. I have many opinions nobody asked for. This time about the pantheon post. A pantheon is not necessary for the majority of campaigns. If the players won't see it, it doesn't matter. But a few notes can't hurt. Just in case someone gets curious. Oh, and you may want to specifically focus on any deities the party works for or against. I have taken the time to pick existing pantheons and fiddle with them slightly to meet my needs, but they're mostly there to help me fill out holidays on the Calendar that I *ALSO* didn't need to make. It helps me with world building and I like knowing about the greyhawk setting that we're playing in, but you needn't kill yourself over stuff the players may never ask about or encounter.
"The DM is always right and determines the rules!" I dont know how often i heard that on r/dnd and it scares me. And in the similiar way:"Your character doesnt care for the physics of the world, the gods make those and no one questions it!" ... Why play a group game if you want to run a solo show?
Personally as a GM, I roll openly and roll with it. If my players get hurt or heavily injured, its the dice that spoke, not me. 😈 However, it's never such a big enough problem, I am fortunate enough to not yet have a player defeated in combat, but there has been some close calls.
Ok so I was coaxed into a second post by the "If the players can do it, so can the monsters." I feel that is a valid bit of advice, and the criticism is valud, but the interpretation of the saying is wrong. You shouldn't arm every enemy with the same tools the players have, nor should their counters be frequent. You *also* shouldn't run your monsters like they've seen these tactics before (unless they have seen these tactics before). But if your wizard could figure out a cool spell combo, then surely other wizards might have as well. Not all of them, but some.
"Don't make dmpcs" depending on the campaign you're running, this advice might be harmful, as sometimes the players might need extra support or just a competent guide. I'm my campaign that's I've been writing and making an entire system for (revising the phrasing of certain sentance in order to make them legible) actively requires having characters follow the party at certain points. • the literal king of the world who's aiming to take down a rebellion without starting a full blown war. • a cultists aiming to become god of medicines. • random dude the party doesn't trust. Etc. At some point one of these guys has to have some form of competence and be able to do what a player has to do in certain scenarios. Like if players actually attack one of them and the npc is important to the story. As a DM you should at least give some NPC's the pc treatment so the players don't accidentally do something to derail the whole shabang.
The theatre of the mind vs grids situation is dependant on the situation and the group. Some players will be better immersed into the game if you provide them an illustration, instead of putting board game tokens on the table. And they will not do worse or take longer, because they wouldn't have taken advantage of the exact layout of the battlefield anyway. I've used theatre of mind for a fight inside a 15x15ft hut. I don't know how much having tokens could have improved it, but it would've taken time to set up, breaking the flow. With good enough imagination and communication skills, you can even do advanced tactics in theatre of mind. For more complex environments, you need a map, for sure. You don't need a grid tho. It was funny but is now tiring to see when someone says "dont use grid movement" and the reaction is "but how do i use tactics in my tactical game?". First of all, d&d is not a tactical game in itself, you can just be tactical if thats fun for you. Second, not being able to be tactical in theatre of mind is a skill issue on part of the DM or the player. Third, i dont actually recommend theatre of mind, as it can be exhausting or impossible to keep enough things in mind, but I recommend using the default method of playing d&d: map and minies, but no grid movement.
"Let your players contribute to the campaign" That's how you end up with favoritism, as well as gaining inside knowledge of the campaign among select players. I'm sure there are plenty of arguments to be made to the contrary, but only if EVERYONE'S input is valued and applied equally and fairly. Which is hard to do, because some players might be better at offering reasonable ideas than others
Worst advice I’ve had was none, because as a DM of my custom campaign, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. In the end, my brother loves how chaotic everything turned out so I don’t care too much anyways. I’m just happy he got to watch a shark kill itself by rolling a 1 and concussing itself on a brick wall.
I keep a book of Canon… Because my players will make endless shenanigans and find loopholes and everything and intelligent monsters In theory can do what the players can do if they do some off-the-wall shenanigans and I allow it. It goes in the book of Canon for that campaign somewhere potentially a bad guy may do the same thing not all of them have a lot less murder hobo tendencies from my group.
Don't attempt to get an understanding of who your players are and what kind of game or story they want to play. Don't plan a general idea for the BBEG to follow and adjust it as the story goes. Don't have a few generalist NPCs in your back pocket you can slot into the first town the party is in. Don't give your player characters any in-game consequences for their in-game actions and decisions. But above all else, when you hear that a player is no longer going to be playing with your party but has time for one final session for a send off, do absolutely put a villain from a series they hate to be a simple, easy to hate and cathartic to take down final BBEG for that one session to give them an epic finale in their final session. Your player will absolutely want to smash the villains face in, proceed to do so, then ride off into the sunset happy with the ending to their play in the campaign. Your player will definitely not hate the contrived crow barring in of a random villain that doesn't fit into the story and has nothing to do with their character's back story, and absolutely will not see it as a simple spite villain to piss you off and then proceed to yell at you about how you're ruining their final session for an hour plus because they're so wound up with all of the stress of everything else going on in their life that is stopping them from playing this campaign with the rest of you that they will miss even if they'll never admit it. So do put in a random spite villain that has no place in the story instead of giving their character a proper, well thought out and heart felt riding off into the sunset moment that is all they really want in the first place.
i dont track the hp of my bosses. if i did i would have to give them hundreds of hp just to last more then a single round against my party. but my party also knows I don't track boss hp and my boss fights end up being some of my players favorite sessions since i build my boss fights around the party giving them all their chances to shine during the battle rather then just whoever does the most damage having the spot light. its not a inherently bad rule to play by. it just has to be done right. if you are not tracking hp either have the enemy basically have 1 hp or do it like I do and only for boss fights with the players knowing very well that the bosses hp is not tracked. this way they wont learn accidentally and feel cheated out of all their previous wins but also lets them know that just going the route of deal as much damage as possible won't have the same return which makes players much more likely to experiment with strategy and tactics.
“Never fudge rolls” Your job as a DM is to tell an engaging and fun story, NOT to adhere to math and TPK your party in a random encounter because they roll like shit. Fuck them up Make it fun and memorable Tell a good story
In regards to the pantheon thing, I'm currently home brewing my own unique setting for my next game. It's too much work building an entire Pantheon so guess what? Players get a world with only one deity. This isn't a bad thing though as my players Love the idea that instead of following a God pertaining to their domain, they now flavor their domain as how they worship the One deity!
i do a similar thing with cleric domains. i have more then one god in my world but they don't really have one for all the domains. and i personally always hated having to follow a god based on the domain as it really restricted play. so how clerics work in my world is their clerical powers is just the natural manifestation of their faith in something. a god, concept, individual. it dont matter. and the domain is the more unique way that their faith manifests itself. this not only opens freedom for clerics who dont want to worship gods. but also as my gods are a very real thing in my world and new gods ascend and old ones die decently often it helps me not have to always worry about having one for each culture that fits a specific domain.
@@svartrbrisingr6141 that's cool, I like your concept as it opens room for players to play a cleric who follows "the ancestors" or whatever else their imagination can think of. Reminds me of a cleric I played once who thought he was a god and believed it soo much he manifested his own divine power. It was funny getting to ask NPCs if they wanted to follow a new god and when they asked who I would simply say "ME!" Lol
@@darthjuyo9258 yah, it also is because the gods of my world are technically not really gods. they are mortals who grew powerful enough to then ascend. aka 20 character levels and a special item. And while they have their standard god portfolio and what not they dont have control over those aspects within it. they draw power from it but thats it. also divine intervention is literally just the players faith made manifest in such a way that it seems like a god is doing something.
some fudging can be helpful for the game. I for example have very rarely fudged a roll that could end with a tpk happening. its a matter of time and place to do so. overall though no don't fudge them.
@@svartrbrisingr6141 I absolutely refuse to fudge rolls, and make that very abundant to my players. If you're gonna fudge them, then why bother rolling? And you fudge one, who knows how/when you're fudging others? I've had TPKs because of this, but sometimes that's just the way the dice fall.
@@jasonrustmann7535 i dont ever let my players know i fudge any dice on the very rare case I do. but you do as you do, i overall still do not fudge dice but do not treat me as if i am always fudging them. people like you on the side of "never fudge" act like its an affront to everything holy when its done and seem to think that if a dm fudges once then they will somehow loose the ability to decide to not fudge the next roll they make.
@@svartrbrisingr6141 easy there tiger. I'm not saying you do, I'm pointing that out from the perspective of the potential players. And as long as you're keeping that fact from them, it's not gonna mess with your game. I wasn't trying to insinuate anything, or trying to come off as all high and mighty about how I avoid fudging dice at all (which isn't even true. I've had to at the very least have a player reroll a carousing roll when the result wasn't really possible at the time). Anything that might have given that impression was probably just from my own frustration at dealing with a DM that has made it painfully obvious that he does fudge pretty much all his rolls. So apologies if that's how my previous comment came off lol
I'm not an absolutist about it, but yeah...if you find yourself fudging the rolls a LOT, then there's some larger problem that needs to be addressed. Either you're over-tuning (or under-tuning) the encounters, or maybe the rules system in general is a bad fit for your table's play-style.
I hate to burst your bubble, but 1 longsword attack does as much as a cure wounds, without a resource, and players will almost always be either outnumbered or punching above their weight. The negative health thing just makes healing worthless
I don't agree with that last one at all. Gods can very quickly become very important and the players will get all kinds of questions that you don't have the answers to. Especially if there are religious classes involved. Also recommending to do minimal prep... No. No no no. That is a recipe for disaster.
I loathe the anti-railroading crowd. I play with a bunch of Autistic, Adhd addled insomniacs (myself included) that are hard enough to get together let alone get them to participate in the level of cooperative story telling needed for open-world esque campaigns. These dorks need the bumpers on, they know it, and I know it. Sure I give them points where they can choose the next story line to follow. But it will usually loop into the other two they didn't so they get to experience the story at their pace, but ultimately still experiencing it.
I don’t like the idea that spell casters can just hide at the back of combat and everyone ignores them. Like yeah the big guy with a sword is a priority, but in a world of magic everyone knows casters are dangerous and usually easy to take down. They make sense to be first targets and the players will often do the same. So long as the fight isn’t like specifically targeting their group it makes sense for enemies to target the glass cannon first so long as they can
I learned this from shadowrun. Litterly in the rulebook under section "Spellcaster" the first sentence is "Magic is weird. Weird is Dangerous. Dangerous needs to be shot. As a Mage, you will be focused by a lot of people, when they realize your powers. And not only people, corps and goverments aswell." You CHOSE to be the WORST. Deal with it... no one else can melt down high-military-gear in seconds with their minds.
"Fudge every roll."
Even the players, reach over the table and move their dice
Everyone is different so you just got to find the right table and group you can vibe with.
I know the DM is trying to help the players. If I ever finded out my DM did that I will leave the table. Everybody I played with does not like that and we go with dice say. Even if it's horrible we need to make sure that we helped the DM tell the story. Good or bad we just roll with it.
@@redmaxxs You might want to implement some sort of safety valve then, to make it less likely you'll be killed off by the RNG gods in an otherwise reasonable encounter. One that we frequently use is "last man standing" which goes as follows:
If everyone else in the party is incapacitated, unconscious, dead, missing, or otherwise not capable of taking actions (making you the last man standing), _and_ you have Inspiration to spend (which we try to hand out fairly easily), then you can spend your Inspiration as a Legendary Resistance _after_ failing a saving throw which would take you out as well. You don't re-roll, you just succeed instead.
If you're hopelessly overmatched, this isn't going to save the party. But if it was a fair fight that just broke badly, this frequently _will_ save the party.
@@redmaxxs I concur with what @mal2ksc said, though I use a different safety valve.
If a player would die, they can instead stabilize themselves but take on a curse, injury, or other severe impairment based on the situation. They won't be able to come back from diving into a sphere of annihilation, but most everything else should be fine. They are then unconscious for 1d4 hours. Now, my game *is intended* to have death spiral situations. My players know that Exhaustion and Sanity/Madness are both on the table, so being able to *not die* but at a significant penalty is par for the course. Plus, quests to find ways to recover are part of the story. I expect them to do a detour to find someone to cure their disease or regenerate a limb, etc etc.
@@redmaxxssome of my best memories are deaths. I was low level and we were defending a building so I stayed atop the tower firing arrows down while everyone else dumped oil and did the CQC… then two unarmed fighters with fly potions who were supposed to just sneak in and jump us beat and hog tied me, DM mercy, but the lob of fire arrows began to light the place and I pointed out the barrel of whale oil i had there.
The party hears a huge explosion from the tower and knew he was lost
Be a DM.
Sir, I do NOT have the brainpower for that!
You do, you just don't have the time for all of that note taking even if you are planning on improvising 90% of it.
Everyone should do the duty at least once so you can understand what it's like behind the screen. If you are unsure of your abilites, run one of the starter modules.
@@darienb1127 it makes many entitled narcissistic players less entitled when they know what a DM has to go through. i agree.
Nobody does, lol. But you can run an improve one shot of silliness, or a more constructed 2~3 shot. While Lost Mines of Phandelver and Dragons of Stormwreck Isle are decent beginner adventures, you need not run a whole campaign when you're starting out.
A word of caution though: Don't start DMing with something you love. Give yourself something that you can get into but also walk away from. Your dream project can wait until you gain experience.
"The monsters can do the same" is a good advice, actually, it just should be used sparingly, and not just to spite.
Makes everything part of the same world.
The rules are mostly the same for PCs and NPCs for a reason, too, and the differences are mostly just to speed up and make the DM's turns easier.
Sure, NPCs might not exactly be built the same way, but there's NPC versions of most player concepts, including the spellcasters.
There's entire societies that have been using magic to torture and kill people for millennia, if you could nuke someone by warming them enough to cause a nuclear explosion, most societies with wizards would have blown themselves to smithereens by now.
While there are settings that have been very magically exploded, they tend to have not been exploded by a cantrip.
Giving enemies a bonus action or ANY lv1-3 feats is all u need 😆
@@vampire9545 sprinkling some random feats to humanoid NPCs is in fact one thing that I am doing!
In AD&D and 2e, the monsters played by almost exactly the same rules as the players. This changed slightly in 3e, and was completely tossed out the window in 4e and 5e.
Also, if you want enemies that do the same stuff that the PCs do, make a group of NPC adventurers of roughly equal power. Have them show up on occasion for a friendly competition or some sparring. Don't make those NPCs kill the PCs unless the PCs actively choose to become enemies with them. You want rivals, not foes.
For the Antagonistic DM thing, I think that certain factions or groups WOULD use tactics like targeting the wizard first or using saves on the high AC character. But NOT EVERY single goblin is going to be a master tactician.
I tend to run encounters that way. Smarter enemies like Drow and Yuan-Ti will focus fire at casters if possible. Goblins tend to just dogpile the closest enemy, but at least they'll flank and generally focus their attacks. And mindless undead will just rush forward and smack the closest thing with a pulse.
This. You can actually make fights more fun when you consider their intelligence and tactics. A berserking monster may not bother with Tactical plays, a pack of animals may gang up on one at a time, and smart enemies with try to focus the precieved healers and casters of the group. And when you mix different mindsets in? It can make fights super dynamic.
I run every encounter based on the enemy nature and give each a basic personality template based on whatever action I take first with them.
These 4 goblins ain't just 4 goblins there
Bagoo the hothead that doesn't like it when things don't go his way and charges in head on
Jagoo the coward that refuses to go anywhere within reach of something scary
Lagoo the smart one, he's gonna shoot that filthy magicker hiding in the back rather than act like an idiot
And Magoo, the hotheads dumb friend who goes in with him cause he's dumb loyal.
I always try to get in my monster's head and ask " what would a bear do?"
Yep. Role-playing enemies is a crucial part of playing a DM. Sometimes that even means running away.
On tracking HP: So I do track HP, but I will shift it around slightly if I can tell that the fight is starting to drag. Mainly if the monster is on death's door and no one can seem to roll enought to kill it, I just let the next hit finish it to get a move on.
I use Matt Colville's method of tracking enemy HP in the open, by counting UP (total damage) rather than DOWN (hit points remaining). The players know how much damage they're doing, so I'm not giving them any information they don't already possess. What they may or may not know from prior experience is how much damage they need to do to kill the enemy. This also means I can let _the players_ track damage _for me._ I just have to watch for when the damage hits 50% (and I say "they're bloodied") and for any creature that starts with over 30 HP, I also call them "wobbly" when reduced to less than 10 HP or 10% of max (whichever is greater).
When dealing with regenerating creatures like trolls, I might choose to take the damage tracking back into my sole control once it becomes obvious the creature is regenerating. But most of the time I don't have to!
"Don't allow firearms or the Gunslinger class. They don't fit the lore." Said to me, The GM, in a 1e Pathfinder game...set in ALKENSTAR!
Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.
@foureyesisafish7968 yeah I just looked at him like he had 3 heads.
I was close to saying he had a point until you said alkenstar.
Does he suggest no aliens in Starcraft as well?
@hellfrozenphoenix13 I slowly phased him out of my life. Dude would drag everything to a screeching halt if things didn't his way even if he wasn't the one behind the screen.
I would constantly say "hey we should play a WHFRP campaign" just to fuck with him.
Here's my dnd advice. If what you're doing works for your group, don't change it because "it's wrong" it's all about your tables enjoyment not someone elses opinion
"It's okay to just make up new rules on the fly, and if your players get upset about them then it's their fault for not asking you how they work."
I wish I was kidding. Some Troglodyte recently actually told me this. His table must be hell to play at.
Yikes! Yeah, I'd be noping out of there so fast you wouldn't see me for dust.
might've been my old gm lmao, we kicked him out for being a bigot if that narrows things down
When I was DMing for the first time, all of my notes looked like “if the party does this blank happens” just a plan out a few different scenarios.
Planning this way actually help me out one time with the puzzle. It was a very simple puzzle that could only be solved one way and then I thought to myself “what if they end up doing blank”. The encounter the puzzle for the first time and they do exactly what I thought they would do. New DM me wouldn’t have been able to improv that puzzle if I didn’t plan for it before hand
"Put 10 Gobelins for the first encounter they are weak so it’s ok". Even worse is that he knew my party was level 1 and counted 4 players.
That was unironically me in the first 5e game I ever ran. Had no idea how to balance combat back then and figured my group could handle it. The only reason they survived is because the last three goblins fled when their leader died.
@@tehrulefoo It’s okay, it happens! Running my first game was hard too!
I mean, I think a couple or a few (3-4) would be fine as long as the encounter isn't in a goblin lair.
@@adamschank7703 Yeah, maybe. Though it was the first game of my players.
A level 1, 5e party can easily handle 10 goblins. Depending on how they're positioned, a single judiciously applied AOE spell can wipe out half or even all of them. Then the clean up crew finishes them off. Cast Sleep, boom 3-4 are down. The other three players will likely drop 2 goblins between them, and by the end of round one you've cleared half of their number.
I would estimate that a group of smart players would mop up ten goblins in a span of three turns. It'd tax your resources pretty heavily, and if everyone whiffs init, you could be fucked. It's a risky encounter but by no means impossible. So it's not an appropriate encounter when the game design assumes like 8 in a day, but it's certainly not a death sentence.
And remember, players don't have to just charge in and fight like idiots. If they see ten goblins and figure they shouldn't push their luck, they have options. They can flee, go around them, set a trap and lure them into ambush.
"You are the DM. That means you are against the players."
Sorry, I would like to have my players enjoy themselves, and not just feel like they have to "win".
ive never understood where that saying comes from. like its just completely wrong as you as a dm are the one telling the story. you are not there to win. If that was the case then it would literally just be level 1 parties facing ancient dragons session after session after session.
it is a ttrpg, a game. everyone should have fun. and while yes as a dm you should challenge your players the goal should never be to kill them. if they die that is just a risk of the game. but it should never be the end goal to kill a player character without the players direct consent on that plot idea.
@@svartrbrisingr6141 I generally avoid killing characters, unless it's meant to be epic, or the player is being an idiot or metagaming AF.
I know my brother was DM for a Gundam RP one time, and one player wanted to start in a mobile suit, during a peace conference that was going to fall under attack, and we kept telling this one player that no, he can't go take his mobile suit for a test drive, because there was a warning put up. he kept trying to metagame so much, that I took my brother aside since he was getting frustrated, and I told him that the player wants to fight you and win the game, not properly go through the adventure. So I advised him that he needed to do something about this player who refused to listen or play along (He had a good backstory, IIRC) with the group, I told him he needed to send him a message that he can't be metagaming to that extent. A peace conference between various members of a number of colonies who are trying to establish peace after decades of war, is not the time to go test out your DIY Mobile Suit. You will get arrested, especially if your piloting papers are not in order, and permission isn't given to you.
So I told my brother that he had to kill his character in a way that there was no way to bring him back. So there was a hole in the colony that was hit, then his mobile suit was shot right in the cockpit, and the entire thing got pulled out in the vacuum of space. We made sure he was SUPER dead.
That was the only time I advocated in an RP to kill a character to the DM. And I didn't do it lightly. The guy even wanted weapons on the Mobile Suit he put together for the test ride. Needless to say, he ragequit since he couldn't get things his own way.
i seem to remember a story about a terrible DM who went to EXTREME lengths to prevent the players from "winning".
and i'm talking random encounters with dragons every ten feet!
@@ericb3157 Taking the JRPG approach to random encounters I see.
I think the most underrated piece of advice covered is "plenty of advice is group dependent". One table might appreciate the more cinematic experience you get from fudging rolls; some will dislike the tilting of the scales and will prefer all rolls to be real. Being a DM means being aware of the vibe of the table and adapting to it.
I had one supposedly expert DM tell me if you close out a major plot of your campaign without at least one player character dying, you failed as a DM. "By the end of a full campaign, no one from the original party should have survived." What is this, Darkest Dungeon?
Yikes!
That requires a HYPER specific campaign style.
Killing players should be a threat, but not a goal. The risk being there is part of the fun. Not the goal.
My goal is to at least have one player with a pegleg or magic limb.
4:10 this is exactly how I've been dming. I'm a new dm running my first campaign. I try to plan for what directions they could go. They absolutely have still thrown my plans completely for a loop (thanks for not fighting that kraken guys lol). Having prep planned for the directions I anticipate them going has made it so so much easier for when they go a completely different direction than i expected.
I disagree on thinking "enemies can do it too" being bad advice. Just do it wisely and warn players of it before you implement it. And do it due to health of the campaign, not saltiness. If a spell makes combat obsolete, talk about enemies using it for back and forth or ban it instead. It comes down to the golden rule: communcate with your players.
My god "never tell your players 'no'". God I hate that advice so much.
It reminds me of "The customer is always right", which is taken out of context in the first place. I work in IT and the customer is (almost) NEVER right in my experience.
Just because the players want to do the wankiest shit for the lolz doesn't me it's fun to allow everything. It gets old very quick if they can behave like gag characters...
Yeah it’s ruining a lot of expectations
The player is always right in matters of taste.
One actual good advice here: use your enemies int/wis stats to determine how they fight. Trust me getting into the chaotic headspace of a Trex vs the thinking mind of bounty hunters should show in the tactics or lack there of in the enemies. It leaves room for your players to make decisions based on the way the enemies take action
The worse DM advice I ever got was "Dont use buff or debuff spells as it ruins player agency."
Pretty sure no girls aloud is just rage bait.
Facts
It certainly would be more believable if they didn't claim that Laura Hickman just happened to be on the same table.
@@Viehzerrer I am pretty sure that it's a story _from Laura Hickman_ ... though probably not posted by here.
I've told my players the "whatever you can do, so can enemies" thing, just to keep them from sitting around waiting for enemies to come to them while they all decided to hold action to gank whatever came around the corner after they alerted all the bad guys, so that way they wouldn't try to just make noise and wait every time they went into an enemy stronghold, and would let them know the enemies wouldn't use one shotting tactics like that either lol
The solution to whack-a-mole combat is death at zero. That's not homebrew, that's how the game worked for the first 4 editions.
Believe it or not, just because something worked one way in the past doesn't mean it's how it should be run, and changes with a system, shockingly, can be for the better. There's a reason that (typically) players get death saves and monsters don't, because the only thing that sucks more than PC death is being insta-killed with no prior anticipation.
@lynkcrafter8923 Still works just fine for me.
“Your players are your enemies, make them cry and think about committing “Sewerslide”…needless to say, I ran away from that guy
You can be mad about it if you want, but there's nothing wrong with saying anything the PCs can do, the baddies can do. It keeps them from cheesing the fights, like "I CAST CREATE WATER IN THE BBEGS LUNGS!" That stuff is lame.
Had a guy try to use Mage Hand to give someone a heart attack once. Gross misuses of spells like that need to be slapped down. There's clever uses of spells, and then there's trying to turn a cantrip into Power Word: Kill
not just the worst advice i've ever heard, but the worst advice for a DM period: "the players are your enemy. the role of a DM is to kill every player as quickly as possible. if they reach 10th level, you have failed as a DM."
Reminds me of Gamers 2
That makes me question how this DM even plays the game. Throw a Red Dragon at every party? That should get your players dead.
I, personally, have origin characters like BG3 present in my campaign. Yes, my players will frequently leave them at camp and even if they're in the party, my players will command them about, but it gives me a strong motivation to support my party early on before I start getting invested in backstories.
@@MHWorldManWithFish Hmm. That's an interesting idea. You could also go with giving players the _option_ of running premades?
I was taking a coworker home when we started talking about playing dnd and lead to asking about my play style as a dm. I just told him im a half and half but i want my players to feel important and powerful. His reaction i thought would be "oh nice i agree" or "interesting" but instead he told me im playing dnd wrong and the dm is supposed to make everyone argue and fight at the end and hate each other. I kinda started to realize what kinda person he was after that. 😅
12:40 my campaign is very centered on the gods (norse mythology based where they don't know it yet but they are trying to prevent ragnarok) even then I haven't gone super in depth with my pantheon. They have a list of the important gods and their respective general domains but that's it it's not crazy in depth and it makes it so much easier for me
My answer: pretty much anything posted to reddit
"You should treat DM prep as a part-time job". This advice is surprisingly common, given how bad it is; it reduces the idea of prep down to just an amount of hours you should put in, and offers zero nuance. Overprepping can lead to burnout as the DM overworks themselves, and overdoing it can result in a lot of that work going to waste. At the end of this week's session, my DM admitted that he has 12 entire quests that he prepped that cannot be used anymore due to our party moving past the areas said quests were built for, some of them complete with maps and NPCs made for said quests. Prepping is taking up the majority of his free time, and I'm trying to coach him out of prepping for every possible path, and learning to lean into improv more, as that's a more effective strategy for dealing with DM burnout long-term.
If possible see if the DM can alter those quests to fit the new area. It's a shame to lose so much work.
@@ZyvenZ Part of the issue is we just had a TPK, so the campaign has shifted settings after we bribed our way out of purgatory. We blew up the place where almost half those quests were based... As well as ourselves. He's getting better though; he used to prep 5-6 quests per area in advance and we'd only get to 4-5 of them before moving on. He now seems to be learning that not every big thing that our group interacts with has to be tied to a quest, so he's been introducing independent puzzles and NPCs that aren't tied to a big story. Like, we spent half of one session trying to open a door, he doesn't need to work so hard creating half a dozen storylines per area and tying them into the overarching campaign storylines.
Typically I’d say that if you are being efficient you should never need to spend more than 1 hour on prep per session you are running.
@@azurewraith2585 Then I haven't become efficient even after 8 years of 5e. I'll easily put 6 hours into a not-plot-critical dungeon that lasts three sessions, and two hours of prep for every one hour of table time for the parts that _are_ plot-critical. (And this is _with_ random generators and software support tools.)
In regards to the "whack-a-moel" story, I am GMing a 2e Pathfinder game and it actually had a rule that limits how many times a person can be healed from 0 HP, giving a player a "wounded" condition for a max of 3. Wounded also count as failed death saves and remain with you until a long rest.
Also a player that is healed from 0 doesnt wake up, someone has tp physically wake them up if they are stabalized.
A fellow man of culture
A bit misleading according to base rules, because Treat Wounds (a very important action for alot of parties parties to have access to) also removes the wounded condition and only takes 10 minutes. But yes, wounded is a great mechanic.
And Unconscious (player core pg446) actually says that "if you are restored to 1 Hit Point or more, you lose the dying condition and uncoscious conditions and can act normall on your next turn."
Checked the pre-remaster rulebook, it also had a ruling that you automatically wake up if you ever have 1 HP or more, page 459 in "Dying".
@@sorilnik thanks for the catch, admittedly it has been a bit since I've last read through the core rules for dying and wounded and mosly typed what i could remember off the top of my head.
For the last 20 sessions my group has been super careful and not let anyone go under 15hp. With a dedicated healer to make sure that no one else goes down after they had a scare with an npc they liked. Despite the harsh setting of my campaign dying and wounded is something has only shown up in session 1.
@@ronine9231 No worries, for my players we have no healers, so I'm very familiar with these rules because in the last difficult fight all but one player character went down (a creature having burrowing speed and players being unfamiliar with it is no joke, almost TPKed to one creature that was a low difficulty encounter due to it getting a lucky crit on the gunslinger).
My players have told me to stop overpreparing, but I dislike having to halt the momentum of the session just to improvise something that should have already been prepared.
Learn to recycle the stuff you prepare but don't use. They won't know it's recycled since they never saw it before. Maybe you upscale the monsters, maybe you save it for the next party.
"If it sounds cool, let the players do it"
Sometimes the DM needs to just put their foot down when player antics get to far out of hand. Despite how "Cool" it sounds. Sometimes its okay to allow this if it won't derail the campaign in a single move. But there is a limit
"Nerf characters if they become any better than any other character" it turns into a race to the bottom where players are switching their spells and classes because its been nerfed to the ground.
"never tell your players no." is meant for dm's like me who will reflexively say no to anything that derails the intended order of events, even if it leads to an alternative path that the players 100% deserve.
it's probably meant to encourage the dm to allow more creativity and to let them do wacky stuff even if it means they accidentally undermine some (probably ultimately unimportant) part of the story.
*but in the wrong hands* it's a recipe for bloody fucking chaos, story beats will be stepped right over, builds will become a nightmare to balance, and important characters will die at the drop of a hat. And the of course the players will (probably rightfully) blame you when the campaign begins to fall apart because you decided to suddenly be allergic to intervention.
My personal philosophy as a DM is thus:
"Always TRY to find a way to say 'YES', or even 'YES BUT'", before a 'NO' is reached.
In terms of intervenrionary issues that need to be intervened on, however, that's the time to absolute 'NO'.
Good calls bruv!
So railroading. Which isn't good and players aren't fond of
Worst advice is that if I nerf things then my players will resent me so just create situations where their exploits won't be available. This was in relation to Eldritch blast being "too strong" that somehow led into a conversation about coffeelock. I basically checked out after that
Banning combos like coffeelock is completely acceptable; D&D is not Magic The Gathering.
But Eldritch Blast being "too strong" is nonsense. Yes, it is the best attack cantrip in the game, because it has a great damage type, scales best and can be powered up further by spending Eldritch Invocations (basically mini-feats exclusive to warlocks), but has the person saying it was too strong seen how many spellslots warlocks have in comparison to sorcerers?
@@schwarzerritter5724 Eldritch Blast is the majority of what Warlocks have going for them. Sounds to me like the guy just has a problem with multi-classing.
Lmao "EB is too strong" is the same as saying "water is too wet". EB + Agonizing Blast + Hex is literally the average/normal damage output at every level in benchmarks for optimizing builds.
@tehrulefoo Exactly that. They were saying that it wasn't fair that someone could take one lvl in warlock and EB as good as a full Warlock. Then shifted goalposts when I brought up invocations or delayed class features. Eventually ended with "Valorlock deals 175-200% more damage than average"
"You are not a filmmaker"
Thats actually a good advice! You are not making a film or writing a book. You create a word to enjoy, playing as a DM and also discover consequences of you NPC(that you are playing as) and your players actions. Again you are not creating a story. Story in TTRPG is maiden with you and your players. You don't do it on your own. Because it just not how TTRPG works.
My opinion on fudging rolls as a DM is this, it is situational, for instance if you are constantly rolling high, then fudge the roll by making it lower, and if you are constantly rolling low, then fudge the roll making it barely succeed; for instance one of the few times I've DM'd I was rolling Nat 20s more consistently than normal, so I fudged a few of them, that way everyone still had fun
I disagree on the comment to "what players can do, monsters can aswell" - i handle it the same. But now you have to differentiate. Are the "monsters" a highly-searched, ruthful band of war-nomades, plundering through the landscape, or some wererats? of course the wererats wont match the inteligence of a decorated Marshel who served in 2 Wars already and tries to bring down an empire... you can expect enemies to react smarter, or less smart compared to the "i kill everything"-barb.
I learned this lesson in playing Shadowrun with my group - they started to abuse civilians and objects, plundered way to many things for alternative explosives and grew super strong in a short time. So i threw in more difficult enemies. Did not work. After a battle-mech got distryoed, and the driver used drugs, my players realiezed pretty quickly, that this is only phase 2 ... before phase 3 i told them to escape, otherwise they wont go out alive as this guy used EVERYTHING he could. (especially enviromental stuff, which i told my players before the fight aswell).
After that, we agreed to not exploit too much and talk about stuff. I am always on my players side, so i would allows 3 out of 5 things to be exploided. No reason trying to "beat" me. I always want my players to reach the great final.
Re the DM who didn't use track HP but just did "hits": these are literally hit points.
"If you don't like something, ban it or nerf it to the ground"
A lot of DND advice like that. Don't like powergaming and multiclassing? Ban! Don't like certain spells? Ban!
There are more creative solutions to that
Like what?
I disagree. If you as a DM dont enjoy dealing with certain subclasses, spells or builds at your table, then just tell your players how you feel and ask them to play something else. Preferably at session 0 though. It would suck for a player to invest a lot of levels into a build only to have the carpet pulled out from under them.
@@tehrulefoo discussion is the key. Just banning something without talking to players is most of the times not the best way
@@tehrulefooforever DM that recently started being a player. I’m very lenient in my games and will just adjust enemies on the fly to deal things I don’t like. DM of the game I joined has banned about 1/3 of the subclasses cause he doesn’t like them which really made it feel DOA to me. Still giving it a shot I don’t want to back out of it just cause of that but I really would try not to ban classes
@@loopdeloop1600 That seems really excessive. But I guess I could see a DM being upset about power creep. Probably just better to make your encounters more difficult against a party like that though. My ban list is quite short.
1. Peace and Twi Clerics in general. And Moon Druid in tier 1 for being far superior to other options
2. Any race with a built-in Fly Speed
3. Silvery Barbs because easy access to re-rolls is obnoxious. Especially when the rerolls work on enemy saving throws.
4*. If you're going to use Conjure Animals, you are responsible for keeping track of your animals and making your turn go fairly quickly. If you cant make that happen, please consider another build.
Other than that, I allow pretty much whatever. I've even started allowing players to use homebrew/Third-Party stuff so long as I review it first and its not egregiously OP
For the recoil for spellslots thing: could work if tweaked. Id make it take from their max health instead. And they would have to use hot die to recover max HP, but not the hP with it.
This way, it could allow a player to do some epic spells, but it would limit how much it could do. Risk-reward.
If you give Frodo a Lightsaber, you must also give Sauron the Death Star.
The whole point of the Death Star was that it was impossible to take on in anything resembling an even fight, which is similar to Sauron.
What is not similar is the fact that Sauron is more of a corruptor than a general, even though he has a gigantic army, he’s the keystone to it. If Palpatine was the main face of the Empire, it might work. However, he’s not.
Tarkin the general is, with Darth Vader as the hint of something more. If it was the Death Star 2, then it might make more sense, but it isn’t. Darth Vader becomes the face of the true antagonists, the Sith.
Another one that aggravates me is “You need to make your storyline darker, the stakes aren’t high enough yet.” J.K. Rowling followed that advice, and I can’t read the last two books because of that idiocy.
Yes, make it dark, but you need light too. Think of it as painting a picture. You wouldn’t want a picture with no light to see would you?
About not having to create pantheons of gods:
I run Pathfinder 2e. If literally any player wants to play, like, a cleric, it could be pretty important to have those gods for the player to choose from.
Why?
Well, a god provides different boni to a cleric. They all have a favored weapon, which the cleric becomes proficient in and gets for free at the start of the game, they might get a certain stat boost depending on a background, and also a number of spells from outside what is essentially the cleric's spell list. Gods also have their own edicts and anathema, representing what a follower should do to gain or lose favor with the god, respectively. Doing so can grant boons or curses.
Of course, you could just decide these things with the player in question, but giving them what is essentially a list of gods to peruse can make your world seem livelier and larger.
I might be a bit biased as I greatly enjoy worlbuilding, but even so, the pros of creating these things beforehand shouldn't be overlooked. Not entirely, at least.
You should always remember that general advice might not be built for your issue. General advice is always accounting for the dumbest/most lost person in the room, so they too can get something out of it. The answer to your quarry might lie in going against the conventional wisdom. I do things you’re “never supposed to do” and it works great because I make it work.
DnD campaigns can be literally anything, so your approach can be equally as flexible. I feel like loads of DMs/Players are way too conservative about how things ALWAYS need to be and that makes me sad.
My advice is, spend as much time as you can on the topic of game design. Read other ttrpg books, watch video essays about it, look at the differences between simple and complex board/card games. It can only make you better. Same thing with world building. DMing combines multiple skills and a lot of bullshit doesn’t even happen in the first place if you do your homework.
8:10 if there is one thing i know as a DM for a FACT, its that it makes the game way more enjoyable if you play in the strenghts of your player, someone has fire resistance, throw fire at them to make them feel like choosing fire resistance was a good call, but i do like to break that mold sometimes, it keeps it engaging
This guy gets it
In my opinion, the best GMs are those that hate fudging rolls but don't entirely refrain from doing it. Those that follow the rules properly (not slavishly, mind you), except for that situation that happens once in a while, where fudging actually improves the game. But when I see people gleefully talk about fudging rolls like that's the entire point of the game... Well, I'm glad I'm not playing at their table.
If you find yourself constantly fudging rolls and bending rules to the breaking point, just so the PCs can do call things, then, sorry, but you're playing the wrong game. I know, many D&D players hate it when it gets pointed out to them that other systems exist and would suit them better... But other systems do exist and would suit those people better. Like Outgunned, an action movie RPG that's all about the PCs doing cool things.
In general, the worst kind of GM advice is that you HAVE to do something in a certain way. Sadly, there are a lot of extreme opinions going around. I mentioned some in the last comment I made here (like about fudging tables that aren't inherently bad) and there are many others. "You should never fudge rolls/Always fudge rolls", "never track HP/always track HP down to the last number, no matter how annoying the fight is getting", "always improvise everything and make no notes"... One comment in the video pretty laments that as well. Sadly, there's also at least one example of this here too (the guy blabbering about gods, who acts like world-building is bad). The truth is, there are only few absolutes in TTRPG ("make sure that everyone has fun and nobody feels uncomfortable" and such) and every table has their own wishes and needs.
The game belongs to the DM so it's their rules go. This does not work if you are any kind of empathic or cooperative DM, who tries to listen to player feedback and adjust things accordingly. Although there is a time and place to be firm and a time and place to bend things.
Example: I recently had a player feel targeted because they walked into a dangerous situation without looking. There was a lot of misunderstanding on both sides but thankfully, we both found a path forward.
Worst dming advice is when dm's scold you when your players don't do things "as scripted". I stopped asking for any advice on Reddit as every time I did a bunch of elitist so called dm's reply with "if they did X you're doing things wrong" it's infuriating xD
While I don’t use the HP that;’s set in the books,I ballpark it depending on encounters. All of my players have never complained. The only reason I did this because I had one problem player who kept min maxing and knew every monster HP. So it got old fast whenever we had encounters with this player
i dont track some monsters hp. bosses especially but also horde type enemies as well.
my bosses are some of the encounters my players love the most as they know that while i dont track hp its so that everyone can not only have their chances to shine but also for the party to be able to come up with strategies other then "do as much damage as possible as quick as possible."
for standard fights i do track hp but i also use almost exclusively homebrew enemies so i would never have to worry about someone like you had to deal with
"Your job is to ensure the players have fun, you can never kill a player or make things to hard, but have to make it hard enough to be fun."
Worst advice anyone can get going into DMing. Being the DM is not a job and the DM has every right to have just as much fun as the players. If your players think you as a DM are not meant to have fun and are just there to entertain them you have horrible players. D&D is not DM vs players, but a player dying in a hard combat as long as that combat is not specifically designed to be a TPK is fine. You should root for your players to win, but never pull your punches to ensure they do.
As for the fudging rolls, I will never do it. Other then death saves, loot tables, or vital roles for role play scenes I make all my rolls as DM in the open, particularly in combat. Fudging rolls can lead to massive conflicts at the table if it is discovered, including no trust in any roll you make. Get a legit nat20 that will not down anyone and are known to fudge your players will think you fudged in your advantage. Miss several attacks in a row when things look grim and your known to fudge, you just took all the drama out of the game, and so on.
The DM is the ref, or a fellow storyteller, but he is BY NO MEANS the players' fucking servant. Even the most spineless, low self-esteem DM would get burned out playing with the stereotypical entitled narcissistic modern 5e player.
RE: injury systems - what about something similar to Mabinogi's wound system, wherein:
A. The penalty is to max HP, rather than rolls.
B. All rests can fix injuries, although long rests do a better job.
C. Injuries can also be fixed with a Wisdom (Medicine) check.
Dude seriously tried to say girls can't play in the presence of Laura Hickman? REALLY?! What a maroon.
I hope she critted him for a ton of psychic damage.
the last one is the necromancer school of dming
I have a question. What do you do about analysis paralysis? As a DM or player.
The one that said that watching Critical Role for tips is just insane (and that’s coming from someone who loves critical role). No-one is going to have the time to go through hundreds of 2-4 hour episodes just to pick up a few tips from someone who has been dming for most of his life and who got very famous from how good at it he is
"You underestimate my power!"
I'd say maybe one, or two provided you have the free time for it, IF you REALLY want to get an example of very descriptive narration and npc acting for your GMing. But ONLY as a source of inspiration, not as a source of learning tips and all. There are much more digestible sources for that, plus what the people in CR do isn't something everyone can reach, as acting IS their job after all.
Not to mention Mercer literally put short videos on youtube with advices, so if you REALLY want to learn his ways, just go there.
Taking the idea of letting players do whatever they want the extreme. And by that mean letting one or more players make someone else uncomfortable. For example, I've sat in on a game where a player had their character rape another person's character 😬
"you need to tailor the story to the players" said by a player who's PC was ADAMANT that they get out of the city they were in as soon as possible to destroy a magic sword. the only issue? I was running a pre-made module as my first time DMing so I was unfamiliar with the world, the lore, or anything outside the city. that player is no longer part of my games. Now I admit, in a homebrew game? that works out fine. but the entire story of the module was in that city. I didn't design it, I didn't take it apart and look at it. it was 100% me learning with the players.
Make characters row for a test even if they wouldn't succeeded, this would keep the suspense of what if the player had rolled higher.
Most players I met gate this.
It was a manifesto of a particular person rather than an advice, but "The GM is roleplaying as the world and it's all they do; they aren't, to any extent, responsible for players' fun". I agree that the GM isn't *fully* responsible for players' fun, and I know that in some styles of ttrpgs the GM don't actually design the advanture, but the GM still needs to care for it being an enjoyable game for everyone, at least not less than players
I have to echo this idea, but it needs to be expanded a bit.
Part of the rise in DM burnout that we're seeing these days is due to the expectations placed on the DMs. They are expected to take responsibility for the fun level for each and every person at the table, and many players are showing up with a minimum amount of effort put into the game or understanding their characters.
It cannot be one person that's responsible for the fun level of everyone at the table. I believe that shifting the mindset from the DM to the table as a whole is necessary.
In other words, if something isn't fun at the table, then the table should be able to communicate in a way to find a solution. None of the "DM vs players", but leaning more into the group mentality.
I'd also go further and mention that the DM is uniquely positioned to have the most influence on the game, so they should absolutely lead these efforts. The best way I've found is to foster a group mentality, where we are all part of the collaborative story telling experience. This should emphasize non judgmental communication and trust.
Regardless, the players need to be able to trust the DM to do what's best for the table. This includes quickly dealing with problem issues, and being receptive to feedback. This also means that, while the fun level is not solely their responsibility, they do have the obligation to lead the table to find a solution.
I firmly believe that a shift in the prevalent mindset for TTRPGs is necessary for the players and DMs to enjoy the game together.
The DM's job is to be an arbiter between the players and the rules. They are NOT responsible for whether or not the players have fun.
The most they can do is create the environment in which fun can be had.
@@Overkill2217 I completely agree with you. But the initial idea wasn't that. It was a response the GM would give to any feedback we tried to give him (of which it was a lot), basically "if you don't like something, it's you problem". When I wrote him to say that I wouldn't play anymore, because I really didn't like the first session, he seemed to be honestly sure that other players were the problem and that I just got unlucky to get in that group, so it's not even passive aggression, it's really what he believed
@@Drago5899 "not less than the rest of the players" is the key part. The initial statement was a response to any attempts to give him a feedback, and he was absolutely sure that the only reason we didn't like the game were each other and not him failing to ever explain us much of anything and making fun of us for not being able to stay on top of his very weird decisions
I was once told to be homicidal toward the party, which can be fun in moments, but not for the entire game. There's more than just hack/slash fighting through a game. I like to offer a range of role playing opportunities, not just kill or be killed.
Casting exhausted spell slots from HP could be cool, but it *is* very much caster favoring, and should probably be tweaked such that you can't expect to get more HP out than you put in.
9:25 Ah. I see the problem here: The players were, in fact, taking so much damage they *needed* the whack-a-mole. But instead of dealing with that he made whack-a-mole worse.
(As solutions go, there's also the option of 'healing a downed character leaves them stable, but unconsious for X rounds')
The solution to the 'should you fudge rolls' question is to implement IP protection (Fate rerolls, etc) like _literally every RPG post 2000_
It's even in the DMG! Kinda.
I'll raise something from the GURPS rulebook: 'NEVER give minor characters wildcard skills'. For the record, Wildcard skills are skills that can be used for a whole *category* of skills. In a game where there are nearly a hundred skills, it is an *extremely* good idea to just give your random thug characters Thug! skill - any thug-related action, like smacking a hero with a big club, intimidating witnesses, standing around looking menacing, gains the bonus.
GURPS has... honestly a lot of weird-ass advice.
(Not a bad advice comment) I love Critical Role but even Matt Mercer would tell aspiring DMs to play their way, don't try to perfectly emulate them because they each have strengths and flaws and a different style of play
"The Rules As Written are the LAW. You must follow them at all times."
No I don't. Sometimes, I don't have the time or the momentum to look up a niche ruling. So I just go for it and keep the tension up.
Also, there are times when I want to use the dice rolls and mechanics to invoke a certain feeling or vibe.
At first, you should play as close to the RAW as possible to get the intended play experience. But once you are comfortable with it, go ham.
Oh gosh. I have NIGHTMARES about dealing with a problematic player who is best friends with my best player. Said problem player drove me to multiple anxiety attacks.
Ok, I don’t have specific health bars for enemies. Most monsters I homebrew, but I Measure the damage and see if something can reasonably kill.
honestly. ive personally never used a session 0
I run online games and I will talk at length with each player before they even get into the server, run my rules by them, get a rough feel of the player themselves. and then once in the server i have them read through the lore and then me and them work together indepth to fill out a character backstory. why they are in the party, their story before then. all kinds of things.
and its never once had any issues outside some players just ending up not liking how my dming style is in game itself. which that ain't something a session 0 would really do anything about as it takes playing a session to get that feel.
What you do literally might as well be a session 0.
@@ProfX501 Yeah, they're basically just doing an individual Session 0 for each player.
Sometimes just throw in an encounter to amp up your players. Just some bandits not knowing who they are mugging.
Hype them up and them bring on something more challenging.
It's also important to know when to tell your players "Yes, BUT". Just because they have an insane idea doesn't mean it can't work... but you need to make sure they know that playing stupid games can win you stupid prizes.
I sometimes won't track HP, but only for *major* boss encounters with characters I intend to be recurring opponents for the party. These bosses are typically underlings of a world-ending threat, and not the sort of basic bitch that's going to get blasted into oblivion by one round of lucky rolls... partially because they're smart enough to know when to flee, and partially because the nature of their existence means that the BBEG could just recreate them if their physical forms were destroyed.
There's a guy I went to college with who believed that every game should subscribe to the Dwarf Fortress idea of "fun"... the idea that "Losing is fun."
Every trap should kill at least 1 PC, every fight should kick your player in the balls so hard they shoot out of their noses... that sort of garbage.
Fudge Responsibly.
I am not 100% for or against fudging. I use D&D for both combat and narrative simulation however, so my heroes dying in anticlimactic ways would ruin some of the drama I'm hoping to inspire. It's usually not needed later when the party is more equipped and leveled, but it sucks to lose a character at level 1~3 before things get rolling, or before you get a chance to really play your role.
Funnily enough, I have a stronger opinion about whether or not you should let players know that you fudge.
I asked my main group straight up "I want to roll privately. Do you trust me?" They understand and the game feels fair without being punishing to them. I casually let them know my above post and ethos on fudging. I won't save them from encounters that are intended to be deadly and apply pressure, nor will I save them from their own mistakes. But those goblins? They were just there to eat up resources.
I personally tend to rage against the machine when RNG works against me, so I would appreciate a DM letting me know up front if they fudge. That open honesty will help me trust that the DM knows what they're doing and aren't trying to make the game unfun for me personally.
"Don't let the players be rules lawyers."
Not only do I have to put up with players that know the rules _at least_ as well as I do, I provide them a challenge mechanism when they think I'm wrong. If they disagree with my interpretation of the rules, they can call time out and then they have one minute to decide if they want to make a formal challenge. If they can demonstrate that my ruling is contrary to Sage Advice or even more official statements, then I'll reverse it on the spot. If they can't, then we play on with my ruling -- BUT they're doing it under protest, and if it turns out that my interpretation was hideously wrong, then they'll get to replay the encounter from the point where they protested but under a correct interpretation of the rule.
If they don't speak up, then any decisions I make are final, even if it can be shown later that I contradicted a rule. You have to speak up _in the moment._ I'll try to retcon or handwave so that the events make sense in light of the correct rules, but I won't change the events unless I (and to a lesser extent, _we)_ decide the original ruling was taking us places we don't want to go.
Probably the worst I've heard was "you shouldn't care if the players are having fun or not, you're there to tell a story, if they're not having fun, they should be trying harder to have fun".
To the advice about not cracking open a dmg, anyone who’s not trying to improve every pillar of their game is either already done it, or are failing in leveling up parts of their gm’ing game.
5:43 planting someone to put a crazy PC in their place isn’t a unreasonable thing to happen though. You aren’t the only adventurers and certainly not the best. Murder hobos get reputations and bounties too
I feel a little bad for the people who make a DnD thing that gets insanely popular because its gonna get compared to regular DnD way too much and have to think "Wow... I ruined DnD and how its meant to be seen"
Ugh, posting so much on this. I have many opinions nobody asked for. This time about the pantheon post.
A pantheon is not necessary for the majority of campaigns. If the players won't see it, it doesn't matter.
But a few notes can't hurt. Just in case someone gets curious.
Oh, and you may want to specifically focus on any deities the party works for or against.
I have taken the time to pick existing pantheons and fiddle with them slightly to meet my needs, but they're mostly there to help me fill out holidays on the Calendar that I *ALSO* didn't need to make. It helps me with world building and I like knowing about the greyhawk setting that we're playing in, but you needn't kill yourself over stuff the players may never ask about or encounter.
In defense of the "Don't read the DMG" guy: the 5e DMG is actually pretty useless besides looking up Magic items
Railroading is unavoidable. The good GM knows how to make you think you are not being railroaded.
"The DM is always right and determines the rules!" I dont know how often i heard that on r/dnd and it scares me. And in the similiar way:"Your character doesnt care for the physics of the world, the gods make those and no one questions it!" ... Why play a group game if you want to run a solo show?
Personally as a GM, I roll openly and roll with it. If my players get hurt or heavily injured, its the dice that spoke, not me. 😈
However, it's never such a big enough problem, I am fortunate enough to not yet have a player defeated in combat, but there has been some close calls.
Ok so I was coaxed into a second post by the "If the players can do it, so can the monsters." I feel that is a valid bit of advice, and the criticism is valud, but the interpretation of the saying is wrong. You shouldn't arm every enemy with the same tools the players have, nor should their counters be frequent. You *also* shouldn't run your monsters like they've seen these tactics before (unless they have seen these tactics before). But if your wizard could figure out a cool spell combo, then surely other wizards might have as well. Not all of them, but some.
"Don't make dmpcs" depending on the campaign you're running, this advice might be harmful, as sometimes the players might need extra support or just a competent guide.
I'm my campaign that's I've been writing and making an entire system for (revising the phrasing of certain sentance in order to make them legible) actively requires having characters follow the party at certain points.
• the literal king of the world who's aiming to take down a rebellion without starting a full blown war.
• a cultists aiming to become god of medicines.
• random dude the party doesn't trust.
Etc.
At some point one of these guys has to have some form of competence and be able to do what a player has to do in certain scenarios.
Like if players actually attack one of them and the npc is important to the story.
As a DM you should at least give some NPC's the pc treatment so the players don't accidentally do something to derail the whole shabang.
The theatre of the mind vs grids situation is dependant on the situation and the group. Some players will be better immersed into the game if you provide them an illustration, instead of putting board game tokens on the table. And they will not do worse or take longer, because they wouldn't have taken advantage of the exact layout of the battlefield anyway. I've used theatre of mind for a fight inside a 15x15ft hut. I don't know how much having tokens could have improved it, but it would've taken time to set up, breaking the flow.
With good enough imagination and communication skills, you can even do advanced tactics in theatre of mind.
For more complex environments, you need a map, for sure. You don't need a grid tho.
It was funny but is now tiring to see when someone says "dont use grid movement" and the reaction is "but how do i use tactics in my tactical game?". First of all, d&d is not a tactical game in itself, you can just be tactical if thats fun for you. Second, not being able to be tactical in theatre of mind is a skill issue on part of the DM or the player. Third, i dont actually recommend theatre of mind, as it can be exhausting or impossible to keep enough things in mind, but I recommend using the default method of playing d&d: map and minies, but no grid movement.
"Let your players contribute to the campaign"
That's how you end up with favoritism, as well as gaining inside knowledge of the campaign among select players. I'm sure there are plenty of arguments to be made to the contrary, but only if EVERYONE'S input is valued and applied equally and fairly. Which is hard to do, because some players might be better at offering reasonable ideas than others
Worst advice I’ve had was none, because as a DM of my custom campaign, I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. In the end, my brother loves how chaotic everything turned out so I don’t care too much anyways. I’m just happy he got to watch a shark kill itself by rolling a 1 and concussing itself on a brick wall.
You should run everything as theater of the mind. The whole grid thing is entirely unnecessary.
I keep a book of Canon… Because my players will make endless shenanigans and find loopholes and everything and intelligent monsters In theory can do what the players can do if they do some off-the-wall shenanigans and I allow it. It goes in the book of Canon for that campaign somewhere potentially a bad guy may do the same thing not all of them have a lot less murder hobo tendencies from my group.
Don't attempt to get an understanding of who your players are and what kind of game or story they want to play.
Don't plan a general idea for the BBEG to follow and adjust it as the story goes.
Don't have a few generalist NPCs in your back pocket you can slot into the first town the party is in.
Don't give your player characters any in-game consequences for their in-game actions and decisions.
But above all else, when you hear that a player is no longer going to be playing with your party but has time for one final session for a send off, do absolutely put a villain from a series they hate to be a simple, easy to hate and cathartic to take down final BBEG for that one session to give them an epic finale in their final session. Your player will absolutely want to smash the villains face in, proceed to do so, then ride off into the sunset happy with the ending to their play in the campaign. Your player will definitely not hate the contrived crow barring in of a random villain that doesn't fit into the story and has nothing to do with their character's back story, and absolutely will not see it as a simple spite villain to piss you off and then proceed to yell at you about how you're ruining their final session for an hour plus because they're so wound up with all of the stress of everything else going on in their life that is stopping them from playing this campaign with the rest of you that they will miss even if they'll never admit it. So do put in a random spite villain that has no place in the story instead of giving their character a proper, well thought out and heart felt riding off into the sunset moment that is all they really want in the first place.
i dont track the hp of my bosses. if i did i would have to give them hundreds of hp just to last more then a single round against my party.
but my party also knows I don't track boss hp and my boss fights end up being some of my players favorite sessions since i build my boss fights around the party giving them all their chances to shine during the battle rather then just whoever does the most damage having the spot light.
its not a inherently bad rule to play by. it just has to be done right. if you are not tracking hp either have the enemy basically have 1 hp or do it like I do and only for boss fights with the players knowing very well that the bosses hp is not tracked.
this way they wont learn accidentally and feel cheated out of all their previous wins but also lets them know that just going the route of deal as much damage as possible won't have the same return which makes players much more likely to experiment with strategy and tactics.
“Never fudge rolls”
Your job as a DM is to tell an engaging and fun story, NOT to adhere to math and TPK your party in a random encounter because they roll like shit.
Fuck them up
Make it fun and memorable
Tell a good story
PANR has tuned in.
Umm the random hits to til death vs HP is actually legit advice.
Statically, combat lasts 3-5 rounds. Soooo 😆 it's not for newb DMs tho
In regards to the pantheon thing, I'm currently home brewing my own unique setting for my next game. It's too much work building an entire Pantheon so guess what? Players get a world with only one deity. This isn't a bad thing though as my players Love the idea that instead of following a God pertaining to their domain, they now flavor their domain as how they worship the One deity!
i do a similar thing with cleric domains.
i have more then one god in my world but they don't really have one for all the domains. and i personally always hated having to follow a god based on the domain as it really restricted play.
so how clerics work in my world is their clerical powers is just the natural manifestation of their faith in something. a god, concept, individual. it dont matter. and the domain is the more unique way that their faith manifests itself.
this not only opens freedom for clerics who dont want to worship gods. but also as my gods are a very real thing in my world and new gods ascend and old ones die decently often it helps me not have to always worry about having one for each culture that fits a specific domain.
@@svartrbrisingr6141 that's cool, I like your concept as it opens room for players to play a cleric who follows "the ancestors" or whatever else their imagination can think of. Reminds me of a cleric I played once who thought he was a god and believed it soo much he manifested his own divine power. It was funny getting to ask NPCs if they wanted to follow a new god and when they asked who I would simply say "ME!" Lol
@@darthjuyo9258 yah, it also is because the gods of my world are technically not really gods. they are mortals who grew powerful enough to then ascend. aka 20 character levels and a special item. And while they have their standard god portfolio and what not they dont have control over those aspects within it. they draw power from it but thats it.
also divine intervention is literally just the players faith made manifest in such a way that it seems like a god is doing something.
"Don't fudge your rolls."
I have been in an awful game where the DM obviously and constantly fudged rolls. I it is why I roll openly.
some fudging can be helpful for the game. I for example have very rarely fudged a roll that could end with a tpk happening. its a matter of time and place to do so. overall though no don't fudge them.
@@svartrbrisingr6141 I absolutely refuse to fudge rolls, and make that very abundant to my players. If you're gonna fudge them, then why bother rolling? And you fudge one, who knows how/when you're fudging others? I've had TPKs because of this, but sometimes that's just the way the dice fall.
@@jasonrustmann7535 i dont ever let my players know i fudge any dice on the very rare case I do. but you do as you do, i overall still do not fudge dice but do not treat me as if i am always fudging them.
people like you on the side of "never fudge" act like its an affront to everything holy when its done and seem to think that if a dm fudges once then they will somehow loose the ability to decide to not fudge the next roll they make.
@@svartrbrisingr6141 easy there tiger. I'm not saying you do, I'm pointing that out from the perspective of the potential players. And as long as you're keeping that fact from them, it's not gonna mess with your game.
I wasn't trying to insinuate anything, or trying to come off as all high and mighty about how I avoid fudging dice at all (which isn't even true. I've had to at the very least have a player reroll a carousing roll when the result wasn't really possible at the time).
Anything that might have given that impression was probably just from my own frustration at dealing with a DM that has made it painfully obvious that he does fudge pretty much all his rolls. So apologies if that's how my previous comment came off lol
I'm not an absolutist about it, but yeah...if you find yourself fudging the rolls a LOT, then there's some larger problem that needs to be addressed. Either you're over-tuning (or under-tuning) the encounters, or maybe the rules system in general is a bad fit for your table's play-style.
I hate to burst your bubble, but 1 longsword attack does as much as a cure wounds, without a resource, and players will almost always be either outnumbered or punching above their weight. The negative health thing just makes healing worthless
I don't agree with that last one at all. Gods can very quickly become very important and the players will get all kinds of questions that you don't have the answers to. Especially if there are religious classes involved.
Also recommending to do minimal prep... No. No no no. That is a recipe for disaster.
I loathe the anti-railroading crowd. I play with a bunch of Autistic, Adhd addled insomniacs (myself included) that are hard enough to get together let alone get them to participate in the level of cooperative story telling needed for open-world esque campaigns. These dorks need the bumpers on, they know it, and I know it. Sure I give them points where they can choose the next story line to follow. But it will usually loop into the other two they didn't so they get to experience the story at their pace, but ultimately still experiencing it.
Since I started playing on a VTT, I refuse to ever play theatre of the mind for combat ever again.
Wait at least 30 minutes after eating before you go back to DMing.
...or is that something else?
Testing stuff like the cumulative -1 is fine in a one-shot, testing is testing for a reason... That whole thing just sounded like a whine player tbh
agreed
I don’t like the idea that spell casters can just hide at the back of combat and everyone ignores them. Like yeah the big guy with a sword is a priority, but in a world of magic everyone knows casters are dangerous and usually easy to take down. They make sense to be first targets and the players will often do the same. So long as the fight isn’t like specifically targeting their group it makes sense for enemies to target the glass cannon first so long as they can
I learned this from shadowrun. Litterly in the rulebook under section "Spellcaster" the first sentence is "Magic is weird. Weird is Dangerous. Dangerous needs to be shot. As a Mage, you will be focused by a lot of people, when they realize your powers. And not only people, corps and goverments aswell." You CHOSE to be the WORST. Deal with it... no one else can melt down high-military-gear in seconds with their minds.
Just don't read like 60% of the DMG. There is a lot of useful stuff.