DMs: what have you learned from PLAYING that has made you a better DM?

[fba827]

If you're playing with the same group that you DM for (such as switching DM turns/campaigns) you get different insight in to the other players. Info such as 'what types of things bore/interest them more' either at the table or what they're talking about/referencing a week later (things you might not have noticed while you were staring at DM notes or a subtle eye gesture that one of them would make, etc).

[Wraith Form]

Originally Posted by CharlesRyan

It took me a while to figure out why, but then I realized: his bad guys always had a plan to win. They were never there as speed bumps or XP pellets or just the next routine fight. They attacked and fought not just with intelligence, but with a strategy and a goal. It was as though they actually expected they could win--and sometimes they almost did!

Could you elaborate on this, please? Maybe by giving an example or five? And how does his method relate to minions in the current incarnation of the game (which appear, to me, to be speed bumps/XP pellets/the next routine fight).

[Wraith Form]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw2

"Unbelievable" is relative. I read that situation and don't have any problem believing it, even when you say it's impossible. Sometimes it's possible to suspend your sense of reality.

Exactly. Otherwise, how else could Anakin and Obi-Wan have had their second-to-last big falling out?

[Wraith Form]

Originally Posted by MadLordOfMilk

Sometimes I use a battle grid, sometimes I don't. I think running a game without a battle grid is useful, because it helps some players visualize things more; however, the strategic aspect of combat really shines with a battle grid!

I'll be the jerk to put it out on the table (and no, I'm not trolling or aiming for a flame war about D&D4):

D&D4 basically requires that you have a battlemap, otherwise you're blunting or dulling the effectiveness of certain characters' powers (push, pull and slide powers, specifically). Once you neuter the characters' powers, the players start really crying and resenting, and who wants that?

[Wraith Form]

Originally Posted by Ycore Rixle

Pacing is the biggest thing I have learned from sitting on the player's side of the table. Always, always, keep things moving.

I want to clarify: pace suggests "movement, then rest...movement, then rest."

You're saying "always movement".

I ask because, as a somewhat inexperienced DM I don't really understand pacing, yet it's been mentioned and emphasiszed in every thread (including this one), article or chapter (DMing for Dummies in D&D4, I'm looking at you) in all of the DM-self-help stuff I can find.

[Wraith Form]

I didn't mean for my posts to sound confrontational, if they did (and I apologize if they did).

I'm trying to glean understanding from others who've experienced DMing so that I can absorb that experience and be a better DM. So instead of confrontational, my comments are meant to be....challenging to you (i.e. I challenge you to clarify or elaborate upon your experience so that others may gain from it).

[GnomeWorks]

Remember that the player has a vision of how their character is and thinks and in what ways s/he is capable; so long as that vision is backed up by numbers, then at least do something to acknowledge that the character has a skillset that the player may lack; be it giving them a hint or - heaven forbid - roll dice for a relevant skill.

Don't completely and utterly negate certain aspects of the system by saying that you hate that subsystem and will "just wing it" or somesuch, because then characters who invest in that subsystem get screwed because you're too much of a stick-in-the-mud.

Do not screw the party because you're being slavishly adherent to the system. Wealth guidelines are called guidelines for a reason; you can break them. If the party is having internal disputes over cash because the wizard is being a prick and wants all the loot, throwing treasure at them that is only really useful to a mage is just fuel for the fire.

If you plan on completely screwing the party out of things they've earned, such as by sundering equipment, then at least have reasonable repair methods in place, or don't do it while you're screwing the party out of cash, at the very least.

Binary effects, such as - and specifically - save-or-suck, suck. Use sparingly. Even save-or-die is better, because then at least the player can get excited about a new character. With save-or-suck, you get to sit there for two hours while everybody else is doing useful stuff. Specifically fear effects can do a lot to screw with a player's perception of their character.

Even if the rules say that multiple fear auras from the creatures of the exact same type stack, and even if you save against four, the fifth can still make you run screaming like a little girl - your reaction as DM should be "...wait, what?", not "Haha, sucks to be a fighter, don't it." Don't screw the players over with stupid rules.

[SilvercatMoonpaw2]

Originally Posted by Nai_Calus

Sure. When it's plausible and sensible. Epic-level character with fire resistance out the arse? Hell, lower-level character with fire resistance? Adventuring on the Paraelemental Plane of Magma where you've prepared for, well, running around a bunch of sodding lava? Sure.

Random mountain interior designed to be a test for warriors? Uhh... Level 9 Bard 4/Swashbuckler 5 wearing the standard Studded Leather armor a L1 character would have, whose only magical item was a cold iron longsword which was presumably the stock +1, who doesn't have resistance to anything? Umm... Nope. Not plausible at all.………

………Some concepts in some situations are simply so patently ludicrous that they simply cannot be handwaved.

This particular puzzle was a glorious example of really bad design. Room slowly flooding with lava due to cannons shooting holes in the wall. This was something that had supposedly been used before by the local population for testing warriors. Uh... Right. They reset it how? How are they planning to reset it after this? Why can't I jump on the cannons? Are they greased? 1 inch wide? They're not really cannons if they are now are they, more like guns. I've got a +10 Balance mod and a +9 Jump mod, I like my odds. I've got 83 HP, why can't I jump through that wall of fire and just soak up some fire damage? I'll use some cure spells on myself later. What, you mean later on in the puzzle after I've solved it much to your chagrin by accident I have to convince this NPC with me to jump through a wall... Of the same kind of fire? That he takes no damage from? What the hell was stopping me then? And this is on top of, yeah, magic antireality lava that does no damage until you're in it. (And no, it wasn't actually magic lava) Nevermind that a wall of stone thin enough to be shot through by a cannon likely wouldn't hold back molten magma very well...

Yes, yes, complaining about realism or the lack thereof in D&D is pointless/etc, but some things are just too much. Selectively hot lava. Any dragon living in a cave with tunnels smaller than it is. Some things just plain are stupid.

I'm not going to complain about realism in D&D specifically. I am going to ask, however:

Why do you believe that a fictional world will work as you expect it to work rather than possibly having rules that allow it to operate in ways antithetical to your perceptions?

[billd91]

Originally Posted by Lonely Tylenol

In 4E, the DM needs to ask himself, "is this easy, hard, or average difficulty?" That's a pretty easy question to answer. And he can do it after the roll is made:

Player: I want to do this other thing.
DM: Roll for it.
Player: I get a 25.
DM: (thinking) Is that a failure or a success? Well, he was trying to do something wickedly difficult, so I'll set a hard DC. (checks to see whether a 25 beats a hard DC at that level)

It takes a lot of the arbitrariness out of adjudication, and helps to solve the problem of the DM who always says no, or who just makes things up on the fly all the time.

This is actually one thing I hate about 4e, from a player perspective. I don't want the DCs to be set based on my level + difficulty. I just want them set by difficulty. I want the investments I've made in my character to matter more than that. I want challenges that would have been impossible when my character was less experienced to become routine.

[Kask]

Originally Posted by billd91

This is actually one thing I hate about 4e, from a player perspective. I don't want the DCs to be set based on my level + difficulty.

Yes building the "Uncertainty Principle" into a game rules engine is pretty lame.

[Mallus]

Originally Posted by billd91

This is actually one thing I hate about 4e, from a player perspective. I don't want the DCs to be set based on my level + difficulty. I just want them set by difficulty.

That's not exactly how 4e works. 4e presumes the characters normally face challenges commensurate with their level. That doesn't imply 4e characters always do, however. In those cases, say like a mid-paragon tier character attempting a low-heroic level task, the DM should either set the DC really low, or better yet, simply declare the PC succeeds.

I want challenges that would have been impossible when my character was less experienced to become routine.

If the DM isn't allowing that to happen, then they're running 4e incorrectly.

[Mallus]

And now... to answer the originally question.

The most important thing I've learned from playing is to run with player input. Nothing is more satisfying than the feeling your PC can have an effect on the game world. And most importantly, an effect of your own choosing. The worst thing a DM can do is design the only appropriate solutions to the problems they set before the PC's.

Let the players push against world. Say 'yes'... then challenge them.

edit: oooh, just thought of something else. I learned to trust that players often ask for things to make the game more interesting, not just for things that make 'winning' easier.

[Toben the Many]

Originally Posted by Lonely Tylenol

This is exactly why I love, love, love the by-level skill DCs in 4E. I think that Mike Mearls points out in one of his Design & Development articles that in a lot of cases skill rolls go like this:

Player: I want to do this thing.
DM: Roll for it
Player: I get a 25.
DM: (thinking) Hmm... is a 25 a fail or a success? I hadn't really set a DC for that before he rolled. If I set it higher than 25, it's a fail, but if I set it lower, it's a success. I guess I just need to decide whether he should succeed or fail...

In 4E, the DM needs to ask himself, "is this easy, hard, or average difficulty?" That's a pretty easy question to answer. And he can do it after the roll is made:

Player: I want to do this other thing.
DM: Roll for it.
Player: I get a 25.
DM: (thinking) Is that a failure or a success? Well, he was trying to do something wickedly difficult, so I'll set a hard DC. (checks to see whether a 25 beats a hard DC at that level)

It takes a lot of the arbitrariness out of adjudication, and helps to solve the problem of the DM who always says no, or who just makes things up on the fly all the time.

I think this is precisely how a lot of arbitrariness happens in RPGs. The GM calls for a roll, but hasn't decided ahead of time what the DC or target number should be, etc.

Then, all of the sudden, the GM is sort of caught in a "should they succeed or should they not succeed" moment. Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of GMs live in that moment.

A great point about 4e DCs and that's another reason I like Savage Worlds, too.

[Kask]

Originally Posted by Toben the Many

I think this is precisely how a lot of arbitrariness happens in RPGs. The GM calls for a roll, but hasn't decided ahead of time what the DC or target number should be, etc.

Really? A GM would have to be brain dead to do that. Best to make sure a GM has a brain before you game with them. LOL

[Lonely Tylenol]

Originally Posted by billd91

This is actually one thing I hate about 4e, from a player perspective. I don't want the DCs to be set based on my level + difficulty. I just want them set by difficulty. I want the investments I've made in my character to matter more than that. I want challenges that would have been impossible when my character was less experienced to become routine.

I don't see that as being in conflict with the system. Things like climbing walls, picking locks, remembering facts about monsters...they have static DCs you can look up. When performing tasks that aren't static DCs, I think there's an assumption that the characters are operating in an environment in which things are appropriately difficult. Where a heroic-tier rogue might balance on a 1-foot ledge over a 10-foot drop, the epic rogue is balancing on a rope in the wind over a lava pit while being attacked by archers.

Here's a rule of thumb, though, to adjudicate things that aren't set as static DCs: When setting the difficulty, consider whether the task itself is heroic, paragon, or epic. So if your character is heroic, they should be doing heroic-level things most of the time. If they want to slide under a table and kick over a barrel, it's a heroic check. If they want to pick up the table and throw it across the room, it's a paragon check. If they want to pick up the table and throw it through a wall, it's an epic check.

If the character is attempting a check appropriate to the tier, it's normal difficulty. If they attempt a check appropriate to the tier above, it's hard, and the tier below is easy. If they're trying something that is easier than easy (i.e. epic character trying to do heroic things) just let them do it without rolling. The tier above epic is "impossible", so if an epic character tries to do something in defiance of reason and physics, it's a hard DC. Then you can enjoy narrating it to make some kind of sense if you like. The tier below heroic is "mundane", so if a heroic character wants to do everyday things like fastening an oxcart or catching a fish or dribbling a basketball, it's an easy DC.

There's still some question of why it's suddenly easier to do things at 11th and 21st level, but who cares? It's just an abstraction to make adjudication of task resolution easy on both players and DMs. It lets you do things appropriate to the power level of the character without doing a lot of paperwork to figure out how to do them.

[roguerouge]

What I've learned from playing recently:

• It's completely okay to run modules. They're fun on both sides of the screen.
• The players are responsible for making sure that their party complement works. The DM can nudge things a bit one way or another to compensate for unusual choices, but eventually, the party's going to pay for their decision to have two blasters, three skill monkeys, a cleric and a tin can. Sometimes the fault lies in yourselves, not the designer.
• Rangers are a terribly designed character class, especially as meleers. Track never gives you mission-critical information, as what happens if you blow the roll? They suffer from a scorching case of Multiple Ability Score Dependency. They can best hit low AC brutes who will absolutely clobber them due to the Ranger's low AC and medium HP. And the depend on DM Fiat/Pity for their favored enemy stuff to elevate them to inadequacy.
• Physical scouting does not work in DnD. The risks vastly outweigh the rewards.
• Your skill as a DM is not measured by your plot.
• Leave multiple clues and don't punish players for needing them. Give rewards if the players don't need them.
• Once a few PC deaths occur, there is a real danger of a party-wide death spiral.
• Adjust your plot hooks to allow PCs to rest. The worst thing you can do is to force PCs to take on the BBEG in their 4th or 5th encounter of the day. I ran a player of an 11th level bard (with several minions) through Crown of the Kobold King and she died because the "save the children" plot hook made resting impossible and implausible. That module was allegedly for a party of 4 2nd level characters!

[Dragonbait]

What I have learned from playing that will help me GM

• How magic works in 3ed
• A little Player vs. GM attitude helps the players start to feel like they need to rely on each other
• Let the players lead the story if you want character development.
• Avoid situations where many players have nothing to do in an encounter/scene unless they choose to do nothing.
• Players rarely notice the little things that make a setting unique unless if affects their character directly.
• When GMing for people with ADD, get out what you need to say in the first two sentences. All other sentences are fluff.
• Don't read box text. Put it in your own words, especially if you are a poor reader or are prone to saying "Um" and "Uhh" a lot. People's reading voices tend to drone unless they are good public speakers.
• (MY) players generally like long fights when it comes to "boss" fights.
• If you have specific plans for a campaign, let the players know upfront.
• For class-based games, make sure the group has a session where everyone gets an idea of their role. When people create their character without any idea of what the other characters are going to be, there are problems.
• When starting a session, a simple mini warm-up fight works well, as does a well-placed epic song or major story element.

[Bullgrit]

This is exactly why I love, love, love the by-level skill DCs in 4E. I think that Mike Mearls points out in one of his Design & Development articles that in a lot of cases skill rolls go like this:

Player: I want to do this thing.
DM: Roll for it
Player: I get a 25.
DM: (thinking) Hmm... is a 25 a fail or a success? I hadn't really set a DC for that before he rolled. If I set it higher than 25, it's a fail, but if I set it lower, it's a success. I guess I just need to decide whether he should succeed or fail...

In 4E, the DM needs to ask himself, "is this easy, hard, or average difficulty?" That's a pretty easy question to answer. And he can do it after the roll is made:

Player: I want to do this other thing.
DM: Roll for it.
Player: I get a 25.
DM: (thinking) Is that a failure or a success? Well, he was trying to do something wickedly difficult, so I'll set a hard DC. (checks to see whether a 25 beats a hard DC at that level)

It takes a lot of the arbitrariness out of adjudication, and helps to solve the problem of the DM who always says no, or who just makes things up on the fly all the time.

Don’t you and Mike Mearls know that this exists in D&D3, too. In fact, it’s simpler because it doesn’t scale by level – you don’t have to check to see if a 25 beats a hard DC at that level.

Right out of the D&D3 PHB:
Very Easy = DC 0
Easy = DC 5
Average = DC 10
Tough = DC 15
Challenging = DC 20
Formidable = DC 25
Heroic = DC 30
Nearly Impossible = DC 40

See, this is one of those “Look what neat shiny D&D4 has” moments that makes me say, “Yeah, that is a neat and shiny that D&D3 has too.”

Bullgrit

[Lonely Tylenol]

Originally Posted by Bullgrit

Don’t you and Mike Mearls know that this exists in D&D3, too. In fact, it’s simpler because it doesn’t scale by level – you don’t have to check to see if a 25 beats a hard DC at that level.

Right out of the D&D3 PHB:
Very Easy = DC 0
Easy = DC 5
Average = DC 10
Tough = DC 15
Challenging = DC 20
Formidable = DC 25
Heroic = DC 30
Nearly Impossible = DC 40

See, this is one of those “Look what neat shiny D&D4 has” moments that makes me say, “Yeah, that is a neat and shiny that D&D3 has too.”

Bullgrit

Yes, I knew about that. I also know that a 3-point system works better than an 8-point system for off-the-cuff adjudication. It keeps choices simple so you can make decisions quickly.

I use the same strategy in my science writing tutorials to teach the kids to evaluate each others' assignments as part of an exercise. I start with a 3-point scale: good/fair/poor. It's dead simple to figure out where any given assignment sits on a scale like that, without even applying any kind of objective criteria. Likewise, it's easy to figure out hard/normal/easy without having to think too long about it.

I also think that the inherent scaling in 4E is an improvement that keeps things simple. Most of the time, checks are normal difficulty. I don't have to figure out what "normal" means every time I ask for a check, because there's a background assumption that normal for paragon characters is not normal for epic characters, and vice versa. If I call for a check, I can assume it's a normal DC unless I have some reason to think that it might not be.

On a somewhat different note, I notice that DC 40 is "nearly impossible." How difficult is it to make a 10th level character who can hit DC 40 fairly reliably? Let's say they have a conservative 16 in a skill-friendly ability score, and max ranks in a class skill. That's +16 right there. With skill focus and a +2 to 2 skills feat, that's +21. Add in synergies, good ability scores, magic items, etc. and you're pulling off impossible things fairly reliably. Certainly by 20th level, you're doing ten impossible things before breakfast.

The point there is that it's pretty darn easy to do very difficult things using the 3E skill system, especially if you're a fan of optimized builds. The flip-side of that is that if you only stick a few ranks into a skill, it becomes completely useless within a few levels since the DCs will usually scale to provide a challenge to those characters who are putting max ranks into their skills. Which means that 3E was already doing DCs that scale by level, but without designing the system to specifically assume that was going to happen. In designing 4E, they just said, "hey, we scale DCs by level. Why don't we use that as a design principle instead of an outcome?"

[Nai_Calus]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw2

I'm not going to complain about realism in D&D specifically. I am going to ask, however:

Why do you believe that a fictional world will work as you expect it to work rather than possibly having rules that allow it to operate in ways antithetical to your perceptions?

What makes you think I expect it to work exactly the same? I expect it to work logically. The lava example is part of this. Under what conditions is magma/lava formed? Extreme heat and pressure. What happens to it when it gets outside a volcano and hits the air? It starts to cool. The heat is gone, the pressure is gone, it's going to eventually crust over. It might be flowing beneath the crust still but it's going to eventually all cool.

Now, you can say 'Well in my world rock melts at 300 degrees fahrenheit'. But that raises some serious issues. Cooking fires are easily going to get that hot. What are you building them on that isn't going to melt? What were ancient people likely to make things out of? Stone. Stone-lined ovens. We don't have metal yet so we're going to try to forge stuff on stone first- Whoops it melted. If you've got enough rock like that for there to be enough random lava flowing around in mountains(Which is bad enough of an assumption on its own, incidentally), it's going to be a fairly common rock. What becomes valuable isn't metal as much, it's rock that doesn't melt at such low temperatures.

Oh yeah, and the lava is still hot enough that simply being in the same enclosed room with it is going to be at best extremely unpleasant, and probably... You guessed it, deadly.

And for this we've created a fairly unbelievable world where the simple act of developing stuff became far harder, quite possibly to the point where civilization never really got started.

A floating rock in mid-air should be the result of a wizard in the normal world, not 'uh... Gravity is screwy here, yeah'. If you want fun with gravity, send the players to the Elemental Plane of Air, where down is where you decide it is and you can fall everywhere if you feel so inclined, or just not fall if you can convince yourself there's no down.

You keep the normal world relatively mundane, 'normal' except for the magic and the elves and what have you and whatever odd bit of actually interesting weirdness you have in it, and the players think 'well ok it all works like the normal world, except for the magic and the elves and what have you'. This isn't hard for them to accept or picture or get into. They don't know about the interesting weirdness or if they do they don't know the true nature of it.

And then when they find the area where the Far Plane is bleeding into the Prime and reality itself is going completely borked, that really grabs their attention from the very first thing that doesn't work the way it does in our world. They expect normal. They don't get it. This is immediately apparent to them, because the assumptions up to now have been normal. It's not 'oh another weird thing about this world', it's 'Merciful gods what in the nine hells is going ON here'. When they end up on the planes and things are *different* and you describe them, they notice immediately that 'hey, this is bizzare, never run into anything like this before, where are we?'.

And yeah, you can have interesting stuff that defies normal like, say, a mountain eight miles high that still has breathable air at the summit. But things like that should be used sparingly, and there should be a reasonable explanation for them. The world is flat, floats in a sphere a few thousand miles across, and the mountain is the centre point around which the world spins. You can breathe up there because you can breathe anywhere in the sphere. The stars are attached to the inside of the sphere, the sun-orb and the moon-orb are attached as well and move about along its surface. If you can fly long enough you can touch the stars. There is no lava, though, let alone cold lava, because the worldplate isn't thick enough to have magma chambers form and volcanoes occur. Other than being a flat disc, stuff is as normal. In fact, almost nobody knows about the world being flat. The world works normally otherwise, just like Earth. So when the PCs climb the mountain and see the edge of the worldplate, whoa. When they're sailing a ship through the dangerous waters said to be cursed because nobody sailing that way ever came back, and they find the edge and fall/don't fall off depending on what they do, whoa.

Stuff without even a good non-rational explanation like lava that doesn't really bother you takes away from stuff like that. It makes you think 'Uh... OK. That's kind of stupid' and you expect stuff to be off for no good reason. The lava encounter was on a totally mundane world that was apparently low-magic, where stuff worked normally otherwise. There was no reason for it, there were no special properties of the world, it was just bad random unbelievability. No wonder, no excitement, just 'wait what no.' Especially since the DM never told us... Pretty much anything at all about the world. >_>

THAT is what I'm complaining about. Random senseless purposeless shattering of the sense of reality that has nothing to do with how the world actually works and is.

"Wait if the world is flat and floating in a sphere how does it stay up? Maybe we should investigate and see if we can find out!" is great. "Wait isn't lava supposed to be really hot, why am I merely sweating, this is dumb" isn't. Next time you run into it make your DM explain it to you, and don't settle for 'Uh... Because that's how it works here'. If you're using it as a DM, give an explanation of why it works that way and why it hasn't screwed anything else up.

But yeah. Keep reality reasonably real so that when you screw with it for a reason the players are left going 'whoa'.

*shrug* YMMV. Me, I don't like random senseless non-reality and I refuse to accept its pointless unexplained use. Non-reality that actually has a purpose? Bring it. Have something corrupting the world, send me to the planes, make the world flat, or a cube, or whatever you like. Just don't have random pointless reasonless stuff that does nothing but pull me out of the game. Keep the fantastic sparse so it keeps its wonder. I've never seen unrealistic lava used to any purpose other than 'Wow, wouldn't it be dramatic if...'. Which, no. There's other ways to create drama that don't just make you sigh.

You know what would have made that puzzle I described somewhat believeable and not made me want to facepalm? Water. Simple ordinary water. The room is flooding with it. "If I don't get out of here I'm going to drown" is as valid a thought as "If I don't get out of here I'm going to be engulfed by lava", and doesn't have a "Wait, what" moment. It can even be reset easily! Trigger the drain, someone comes in and fixes the holes from the cannons, the reservoir behind the walls is re-filled and it's ready for the next pair of guys. Still deadly, but not as stupid.