How have you improved as a DM?

[BookBarbarian]

2 things that really improved that quality of my games.

As often as possible try to lay out the stakes of a roll before that roll happens. If we all know what will happen on a success or failure of a roll then we app watch it with anticipation rather than watch the DM with anticipation after a roll is made. It seems like a small difference and it is, but it contributes to the excitement of the player roll.

Learning to ask Individual Players "What do you do?" rather than asking the group. This simple change stopped the dominant personalities from hogging spotlight, while also significantly speeding up the game. If players knew that in any scenario I was going to eventually get to asking them "What do you do?" they spent more time listening to what other players were doing, and planning for their turn, instead of hanging back, getting distracted, bored, looking at their phone etc.

I'm still kind of surprised at how those simple changes made a big overall difference.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Same. The rule I keep telling myself is that every time they enter a new area, or encounter a new monster or NPC, take a few moments to describe things and bring the game to life.

I’m also leaning more into improvisation than ever. I still come up with an adventure, but I view it more as a toolkit to pull from and reassemble in response to PC actions. While I wasn’t a railroader, some of my adventures were…less flexible than they should have been.

I'm learning to take my time in setting the scene, too often I'd rush through atmospheric description (focusing just on what they see, not what they feel, hear and smell). Adding those senses (when appropriate) has really helped enhance the immersion.

I've also tried to improve my description of creatures too, where before I was rushing into the encounter without fully filling in the picture.

 

[robus]

Same. The rule I keep telling myself is that every time they enter a new area, or encounter a new monster or NPC, take a few moments to describe things and bring the game to life.

Right it's similar to how in a book when an author takes time to establish the setting at the beginning of a scene. Once that's finished there's little need to refer back to it. But it's highly important to set the tone.

 

[Laurefindel]

I’ve become better in so many ways, but it boils down to two things;

I learned to know what I like and what I don’t, and to be honest about it.

I learned to recognize what my players like and what they don’t, and to ask them to be honest about it.

There usually is a common ground that satisfies everyone, but not all players (in the broad sense of the term, including dm) are compatible. It has nothing to do with the quality of a player or of an individual, but over the years, I’ve learned to surround myself with the gamer type with whom I get along best.

 

[Charlaquin]

Another one that helped me was learning The players don’t care about my homebrew. That goes both for worldbuilding and house rules. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t run homebrewed settings or use house rules, but it does mean I should be economical about my use of both. If I have a good reason for tweaking a rule, I should let the players know what it is and why, and move on. If I have custom setting information to convey, I should tell players any such information that directly affects their character up front, and let the rest immerge through gameplay. My setting bible may be useful to me for understanding the world and portraying it well, but nobody else is going to want to read it, so I shouldn’t make them.

 

[MNblockhead]

"[W]hile I don't hesitate to slaughter innocent PCs, I do try to give them a fair shake.

There are no innocent PCs.

 

[5ekyu]

I agree, but there is a specific case where the player knows the NPC is lying due to metagame knowledge (eg player heard an earlier conversation), but the PC does not know (PC was not there). In that case I may use Insight v Deception and have the PC bound by the result.

I think this is partly a case of expectations. Also system.

Do you expect that a skill check activity can go wrong or just not go good?

Can a failed climbing check lead to a fall & loss of gained height or only not advance your climb any farther?

Can a failed investigate check give you a false lead with an inaccurate clue or just not give you any result to go on?

Similarly, can a failed insight check give you false impressions or just give you inconclusive results?

To me, since it is deception vs insight it seems obvious that its not just "do i see signs of lying" but also "do i see signs of being truthful". That creates a neutral ground of "cant tell either way." If that is the case, then it would seem to me that "he seems to be being sincere" is a valid response.

Now maybe you wont believe that and no matter what you werent gonna believe him, if so, why roll? No matter whst the result your going to be in the same place - i dont believe him. Why roll to stand still?

But in 5e a failure result is defined for ability checks as "makes no progress towards the objective or makes progress with setback determined by GM." PHB under Ability checks.

That would seem to allow the result of an insight failure to include "he seems to be lying" even if he is being truthful about most things (setback is picking up minor lie as the full read) or "he seems to be truthful" if he is lying (setback being only picking up the signs of truth for the bits that were, missing the tells that mattered.)

Or imagine a investigation check vs a rune set depicting some ancient lore.

Success shows George and Barry went hunting Orange Bog Serpent and killed it but after in dispute over claiming kill George kills Barry.

Failure PWS might give you George and Barry went hunting Orange Bog Serpent and killed it but **unknown bits** kills Barry. Could even be more explicitly misread as Serpent killed Barry with "some stuff still unclear."

Or the failure could be "no progress" and give you nothing.

But in 5e the ability check opens up **both** of those possible failure results by RAW - pws or np.

 

[MNblockhead]

Another one that helped me was learning The players don’t care about my homebrew. That goes both for worldbuilding and house rules. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t run homebrewed settings or use house rules, but it does mean I should be economical about my use of both. If I have a good reason for tweaking a rule, I should let the players know what it is and why, and move on. If I have custom setting information to convey, I should tell players any such information that directly affects their character up front, and let the rest immerge through gameplay. My setting bible may be useful to me for understanding the world and portraying it well, but nobody else is going to want to read it, so I shouldn’t make them.

When I got back into gaming I took months to create a homebrew world. I enjoy this, it is a hobby in and of itself and something I would do any, even if I wasn't playing. But when I started the campaign, I would write up detailed summaries of the last session and I would write up things that were happening between sessions. We were playing monthly 8-hour games. Because so much time passed between sessions, I thought it would be interesting to play out downtime and between-session activity by e-mail. Players only engaged with that in a limited way and then at one session a player asked me about something and I said that the information was in my last update. He told me he never read them. Another player said, "yeah, I never read them either."

I didn't get offended, I just stopped spending time on that.

Similarly, I used RealmWorks which could give players access to setting lore and revealed information. Nobody used it. So I just use it for DM-facing-only campaign management.

In the future, this is something that I would just discuss with players at session zero. I'm finding most players just want to show up and play the game. Anything else seems like homework. But, if I have a group in the future that gets really into the setting lore and making minigames with downtime over e-mail, I would consider giving that style of DMing another go, if time allows.

 

[MNblockhead]

Funnily enough, I've just started a process of going through a lot of the paperwork I've generated from old campaigns, including a lot of stuff I hand-wrote when I was a teen. It's being scanned and stored electronically, and then the hard-copies disposed of to make room. But looking at all that stuff has been a bit of an eye-opener!

I think possibly the biggest shock has been the sheer amount of time, and the number of pages, I've wasted on trying to find exactly the right set of house rules for the game - even going so far, on more than one occasion, as trying to rewrite the entire game from scratch to better suit. Invariably, each attempt got a certain distance in before I either got bored or drifted off, or had a better idea part way through that necessitated huge rewrites.

The one time I did complete one of these projects, I almost immediately decided I didn't really care for the result and promptly went back to the real game.

Then again, I'm not convinced that counts as an improvement - the main thing that stops me from trying to massively house-rule 5e is a lack of time.

After I got back into gaming after more than two decades away from it, an old friend of mine who remained very active in the hobby sent me a binder of campaign stuff from high school. A few things stood out:

1. My handwriting has not improved.

2. My writing was pretty good back then. I'm not sure that I've really improved that much in this regard, mostly because my writing has been almost 100% non-fiction business-related writing.

3. My map-drawing is decidedly worse. I rely on computers now and am hopeless with pencil and graph paper.

4. Boy did I like my details back then and I sure loved lists in the days of 1e. I mean, I have an inventory of books and their prices for a bookseller in one of my cities. Now, I like me random lists.

5. Related to 4. I am much better at making things up on the fly. E.g. no way am I going to have an inventory of books. I do have some random lists, but I'm also much better at just making up a title. I think this is partly because of necessity, I don't have the time for prep and world-building that I did in high school. Also, I've read a heck of a lot of books in the past couple of decades. I also read all the books in Skyrim. I just have some title patterns in my head and it is not difficult to fill in the blanks to come up with a book title on the fly. Similar situation with tavern names and menus. Also with NPC names. I've traveled a lot and lived in multiple countries since high school. It helps me make up names on the fly. I only use random lists when prepping games, but during play, if I have a non-prepped NPC, I can usually come up with an appropriate name. But in the 80s it was lists, lists, and more lists.

6. I played with a lot more female gamers in the 80s than today. My monthly game is pretty much guys game night. Not saying its good or bad, just interesting given the stereotypes and trends in the hobby.

7. Characters feel more special when you wrote down everything in pencil because photocopying the formatted sheets in the back of the books cost money and never had enough room to write everything, especially when your penmanship was terrible. You literally created your character from a blank page. Making it feel disposable at low levels and unmeasurably precious at high levels. There is this stereotype of a DM ripping a character sheet in half at death. For players today, in the era of digital character sheets, that's just funny showmanship, but in the 80s it was heartbreaking and/or enraging.

8. Holy moly did I know my office supplies. I don't even know where to find some of the tabs and book-corner protectors, I used back in the day.

9. Every gamer was an artist in the 80s. Not a good one mind you, but looking at old notes and character sheets, everyone embellished them with marginalia art, character portraits, family crests, fantasy religious symbols, etc. Now we search Deviant Art or do a Google Image search and cut and paste it into our digital character sheet.

10. I and my fellow players apparently have much better table manners. Boy are my old materials stained with all manner of mysterious liquids and greases. I don't even have finger smudges on my 5e stuff. My mom would be proud.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

I got a really nice piece of feedback earlier this year. One of my players said how impressed he was that I would come up with really cool scenarios and ideas which the group completely missed and screwed up, but that I never got annoyed.

I was really pleased to hear it because its a skill I had to work hard to get. 20 years ago if the players didn't pick up on my clues and didn't follow my ideas then I would get unreasonably angry and grumpy.

It took a long time to learn, but it was worth it. "It's not my story. It's our story."

So, how did I learn this? Partly by playing open-world CRPGS, like The Elder Scrolls, and seeing how different they were to games like Icewind Dale. Partly by reading articles (hi Angry GM!). Partly by learning to play Dungeon World. Partly by just growing up some more.