The 4 forbidden Dungeon Master techniques.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 มี.ค. 2023
- Today we are going to discuss some techniques used in popular TTRPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons. These dungeon master techniques , if used, should NEVER be revealed to your players and only admitted to use in the most anonymous of forums.
These are great. Looking forward to more videos to come.
Wow, this is also "the secret video of the 4 forbidden..." I am glad I found it though.
It looks like you are getting back to posting vids...good! You really need to do that in order for the dreaded algorithm to put your stuff out there.
my first guesses were thst "fudging the dice rolls" and "pulling their punches/or the opposite" would be in this list. i see #1 was fudging and i suspect that at least 99% of DM's have done this at some time or other, because maybe they want to show off that cool power their monster wants to do and the players are defeating the enemy too easily, so the DM fudges a dice roll.
pulling punches, i thought that would fall under a separate category, but i dunno. i guess it's the same thing? like the enemy crits, and then the DM lies and says it didn't crit, because the dm doesn't want to kill the player? and i know that it's coming from a place of goodness. the dm wants the players to have fun and it's not fun to get critted and killed in one shot at level 1. .
but then, another way to "pull punches" or the opposite is modifying combat encounters behind the scenes. like you initially planned to have 5 orcs there and then the players open the door and you decide there's only 3 orcs there, or 7.
maybe you see that the players are taking down your boss monster way too quickly, so you change its max hp from 50 up to 100. and hopefully you don't have a situation where a nerdy player says "i hit the enemy for 50 damage" and you say "it's still alive" and then the player says "but actually. . that's BS, because i read the monster's stat block and they only have 6d8 max hp, so the most it could possibly have is 48. . " , to which i would just say "well, this guy is the boss, he is stronger than a regular one, he has more. That's why he's the freaking boss!"
my only rule would be to be consistent about it. only change info that hasn't been revealed yet. don't change things that have already been revealed.
like with that boss situation, if i changed it to 100 hp, up from 50. i would stick with that and not just keep changing it, because then that's just getting silly and suspicious and the players will call you out on it.
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#3 - The False Choice
i like to call that one "the Schrodinger Technique" because you have that fork in the road, that leads to 2 different places but you only have one place planned and you want the players to end up there, so you put it in a "superposition" between both paths and then "collapse" it onto whichever path the players chose, making the choice meaningless, but then , maybe that choice isn't meaningless, as long as you are consistent. as long as once you establish a certain place, that the specific village is down the left parh and then keep it there. once you reveal the info to the players, stick with it, even if they go back and choose the other path later.
hopefully, the players don't bait you and go down one path, only to turn back halfway, but then i say, nothing truly exists in your world until you reveal it. so if you really want the players to stumble on the dragon's lair, that lair literally can be anywhere ahead of the party, until it has been revealed.
if you don't want them to stumble onto the cult leader's temple yet, just move it behind the scenes as long as it hasn't been revealed yet, it doesn't exist.
if you really want the players to meet a certain NPC, just change it so the NPC lives in whatever place the players end up. if you never established it, or revealed it before, then it's not cheating.
my only thing would be to be consistent. once it has been revealed, just be consistent.
Not happy you have exposed us GMs to the world. Kidding, what you have described is called "being the GM". These are the things required to do you job. Your best advise is don't misuse them. I have been a GM since 1979 and have used them all and still do. At the end of the day, we are all at the table to have fun, make sure everyone is.