Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Ooh, I like this topic!
There are a lot of lessons I’ve learned since I started DMing, most of them the hard way, but many from observing other DMs and taking note of what works and doesn’t work for them. Some examples I can think of...
You can’t force roleplay. One of the first games I ran, I tried to set up a situation where the PCs would meet and interact. When no one could think of anything to say, we were just stuck, and I, stupidly, just made them sit there awkwardly until they had some kind of awkward forced interaction. No one enjoyed that, including me, and that game never had a second session. One of the players, who was new to D&D at the time, couldn’t play again for years, it made them so uncomfortable (though she’s now one of the most enthusiastic roleplayers at my table.) I made a lot of mistakes there, but they all come down to trying to make the players roleplay on my terms, when I should have let them do so on their own.
Its ok for the PCs to fail. This one took me a while. I used to be terrified of letting the party fail. Not on checks, but on a larger scale, like character’s dying, or failing quests. I would roll behind the screen and fudge results in the players’ favor, I would intentionally have monsters make tactically poor decisions to make sure the party won. And naturally, the players started doing wackier and wilder stuff, knowing that nothing would have meaningful consequences. I can’t really point to a specific moment when I learned this lesson, but I do remember one moment that really made me recognize the problem. A PC went off on his own and fought a group of monsters that he shouldn’t have stood any chance against, and I just let him win. I had to really bend over backwards for it, and I think it was really obvious. To him and the rest of the players. Then he asked how many exp he got for it, and I immediately knew I had messed up big time.
Never let an encounter overstay it’s welcome This is one I’ve both done myself and seen other DMs do a LOT. When you’ve mostly finished off a group of enemies, but we have to keep on going through the motions to finish the encounter, even though the results are already a forgone conclusion. And it’s always tedious and boring for everyone involved. But for some reason, I see DMs play encounters out to their end anyway more often than not. The first time I heard another DM say, “and, you finish off the rest of the stragglers” and just end a combat then and there, it was a revelation. I remember thinking, “wait, you can just DO that?!”
Dice rolls are tools for resolving actions, not actions in and of themselves. Probably a bit of a controversial one, but this one significantly improved my games. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s ok, but it definitely does for me. I used to struggle a lot with little things like how to deal with dice rolls failing when failure doesn’t cause complications and there’s no time constraint. Do I allow another attempt? Do I disallow it even though the player knows the result of their die roll was low? Do I always make such rolls in secret? But these things are only problems if I think of the dice roll as an action. Once I learned to think of the action as what the character is doing in-universe, and the dice roll as a tool to use to determine the outcome of that action when necessary, the problem went away. I realized the answer was simple: such an action wouldn’t require a roll at all. If there is no pressure, the character simply keeps at it until they succeed.
Never tell a player what their character thinks or feels. It sucks to roll a 1 in an Insight check (or at my table, see a natural 20 on an NPC’s Charisma check) and be told you believe what an NPC tells you, especially when what they’re saying is difficult to believe in real life. Instead, my philosophy is, “I’ll tell you if you know for certain that an NPC is lying. Otherwise, it’s up to you if your character believes it or not.” Just as one example.
Don’t sweat “metagaming.” Don’t. Just don’t.
There are a lot of lessons I’ve learned since I started DMing, most of them the hard way, but many from observing other DMs and taking note of what works and doesn’t work for them. Some examples I can think of...
You can’t force roleplay. One of the first games I ran, I tried to set up a situation where the PCs would meet and interact. When no one could think of anything to say, we were just stuck, and I, stupidly, just made them sit there awkwardly until they had some kind of awkward forced interaction. No one enjoyed that, including me, and that game never had a second session. One of the players, who was new to D&D at the time, couldn’t play again for years, it made them so uncomfortable (though she’s now one of the most enthusiastic roleplayers at my table.) I made a lot of mistakes there, but they all come down to trying to make the players roleplay on my terms, when I should have let them do so on their own.
Its ok for the PCs to fail. This one took me a while. I used to be terrified of letting the party fail. Not on checks, but on a larger scale, like character’s dying, or failing quests. I would roll behind the screen and fudge results in the players’ favor, I would intentionally have monsters make tactically poor decisions to make sure the party won. And naturally, the players started doing wackier and wilder stuff, knowing that nothing would have meaningful consequences. I can’t really point to a specific moment when I learned this lesson, but I do remember one moment that really made me recognize the problem. A PC went off on his own and fought a group of monsters that he shouldn’t have stood any chance against, and I just let him win. I had to really bend over backwards for it, and I think it was really obvious. To him and the rest of the players. Then he asked how many exp he got for it, and I immediately knew I had messed up big time.
Never let an encounter overstay it’s welcome This is one I’ve both done myself and seen other DMs do a LOT. When you’ve mostly finished off a group of enemies, but we have to keep on going through the motions to finish the encounter, even though the results are already a forgone conclusion. And it’s always tedious and boring for everyone involved. But for some reason, I see DMs play encounters out to their end anyway more often than not. The first time I heard another DM say, “and, you finish off the rest of the stragglers” and just end a combat then and there, it was a revelation. I remember thinking, “wait, you can just DO that?!”
Dice rolls are tools for resolving actions, not actions in and of themselves. Probably a bit of a controversial one, but this one significantly improved my games. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s ok, but it definitely does for me. I used to struggle a lot with little things like how to deal with dice rolls failing when failure doesn’t cause complications and there’s no time constraint. Do I allow another attempt? Do I disallow it even though the player knows the result of their die roll was low? Do I always make such rolls in secret? But these things are only problems if I think of the dice roll as an action. Once I learned to think of the action as what the character is doing in-universe, and the dice roll as a tool to use to determine the outcome of that action when necessary, the problem went away. I realized the answer was simple: such an action wouldn’t require a roll at all. If there is no pressure, the character simply keeps at it until they succeed.
Never tell a player what their character thinks or feels. It sucks to roll a 1 in an Insight check (or at my table, see a natural 20 on an NPC’s Charisma check) and be told you believe what an NPC tells you, especially when what they’re saying is difficult to believe in real life. Instead, my philosophy is, “I’ll tell you if you know for certain that an NPC is lying. Otherwise, it’s up to you if your character believes it or not.” Just as one example.
Don’t sweat “metagaming.” Don’t. Just don’t.
