What was your first year of DMing like? Mistakes new DM's can avoid..

[pogre]

Say "yes" first, but don't paint yourself into a corner. Tell everyone right from the beginning that you anticipate making a few mistakes and may have to change a ruling from time-to-time.

Example: You as DM have discovered the magic item you gave out is way too powerful and one PC is dominating the campaign. Admit you made a mistake and change the magic item.

 

[Emirikol]

Say "yes" first, but don't paint yourself into a corner. Tell everyone right from the beginning that you anticipate making a few mistakes and may have to change a ruling from ime-to-time. Example: You as DM have discovered the magic item you gave out is way too powerful and one PC is dominating the campaign. Admit you made a mistake and change the magic item.

FADING MAGIC is a nice house rule that I've used over the years. Actually in our CONAN game, we use it quite a lot (but you know..when wizards die, their castles collapse and the PC's have that tradtional 'narrow escape'

jh

 

[Huw]

Dumb things I did as a newbie DM (no I'm not telling you how long ago )

1) Gave monsters less hit points than hit dice (the rules said "roll d8 for hit point...")
2) Gave 1st level characters +3 swords
3) Gave a 1st level guard two dancing swords "to even things out"
4) Fireballs have a 2 inch radius (okay, you might be able to work out how long ago)
5) Let players bring the monster manual to the table because their characters had spent 10 years researching every single monster
6) Let a character hide a crossbow in his rectum

 

[Montague68]

Dumb things I did as a newbie DM (no I'm not telling you how long ago )

1) Gave monsters less hit points than hit dice (the rules said "roll d8 for hit point...")
2) Gave 1st level characters +3 swords
3) Gave a 1st level guard two dancing swords "to even things out"
4) Fireballs have a 2 inch radius (okay, you might be able to work out how long ago)
5) Let players bring the monster manual to the table because their characters had spent 10 years researching every single monster
6) Let a character hide a crossbow in his rectum

I took my first shot DM'ing AD&D 1E long ago, and all of us were inexperienced players at the time. In my first game I filled in for the regular DM and had to handle level 12 characters

I put them up against a level 14 evil cleric with a bunch of undead minions. However at the end of the session I was at a loss as to how much experience to give out for a level 14 NPC. The DMG and monster manual had the XP handy for monsters, but I had never seen the NPC rule. I asked the players how much XP the cleric was worth (bad move on my part) and one of the players said "We get as much experience as the cleric had." So I ended up giving out in excess of 1.5 million experience points

The next week the regular DM unleashed upon the hapless party a Dracolich with a special energy drain breath weapon

 

[Wraith Form]

6) Let a character hide a crossbow in his rectum

I......

Uhh.....

Eww. I wanna know the story, but I don't wanna know, if you know what I mean.

 

[Ferrix]

My first couple of DMing experiences were bad.

1) No DM NPC's; as a kid of 15 with too much free time I made NPC's all the time, I put them in the game with the players and they were the stars to me rather than the players.

2) Keep the focus on the PC's. This is in many ways a recap of 1, but it can come out in other ways. Your story might be great, but the players have to be involved to make it come alive.

3) Start with the basics. I started DMing at the peak of 2nd edition Player Guides and Complete Book of X's and let everything be free game. Bad idea. I imagine the same could happen easily in 3.5, start with the Core and work up from there.

4) Tell your players you are going to make mistakes. Be ready to rewind or reset and admit that you've made mistakes. Don't let it go on so long that everything has turned hopeless.

5) Tell your players you are new and to not be too hard. You don't know the finesse of good plot hooks yet so you might railroad or you might let the players wander amock without reason.

6) Don't be grand in your scale. Try to start small.

I guess those are my memories of DMing for the first time.

 

[Huw]

Eww. I wanna know the story, but I don't wanna know, if you know what I mean.

Simple. I was guilty of railroading. The party had been captured, stripped and chucked in a cell, and were organising a jailbreak. One player was annoyed by this, and announced he had various bits of a crossbow about him. The string was in his hair, he had a quarrel head in his mouth (or might have been up his nose), and the stock and cross-piece were in the only other large enough hiding place. No, it wasn't on the character sheet, but I'm not even sure if there was a character sheet.

In our defence, we were 14 and thought it was a cool idea.

 

[Festivus]

I am still not quite through my first year of DMing pen and paper 3rd edition. What have I learned thus far?

1. Know as much as you can about the rules. One way I have been improving my rules use is to setup encounters with my players that forces me to use them. For example, tripping was hard for me to understand at first, but now tripping is so commonplace it's easy for me to work through it. At present I am grappling with grapple, and so I try to use those rules when the opportunity presents itself.

2. Know the adventure. Read through the adventure ahead of time and look up rules and spells that might come up.

3. Use aids, like spell cards, initiative cards, a laptop with the SRD loaded, etc. All of these are huge timesavers when you can't recall something about a spell or how to handle sundering a weapon.

4. Don't worry about if you don't fully understand a rule and something comes up, just use DM Fiat and then look it up afterwards. This is subject to the sicilian clause of course, which means that if a death is on the line you should look it up. I use this a lot in my games.

5. Read some good books. I just recently finished reading the DM for dummies book, which I found to be a rehash of a lot of stuff I get from here, but it's all in one book I can read on the commute. Also Johnn Four's email list and GM Mastery book I found very helpful for running games.

6. Ask a pile of questions on EN World. I do all the time, and nobody has become angry at me thus far.

7. Relax and have fun.

 

[IcyCool]

1. Make it easy for the players to do cool stuff (this bit came from barsoomcore, I think). This is a variation on finding ways to say yes. Make it clear that you may let players bend the rules from time to time in the interest of fun, but let them know when the uber cool maneuver you let them pull off is a one-shot deal. Because I guarantee you, no matter how "heavy role-play" the player is, if you let him get away with some sort of game-breaking action without clarifying that he can't do it all the time, he will try to do it all the time.

2. Don't let the players argue with you during game. Nothing is more fun sucking or life draining than stopping the game to have a rules arguement. Even if the player has the best of intentions, the road to hell is paved with them. Make it a policy to talk about rules before or after game, but don't let your players use your likely limited game time to argue a rule that they could argue via email, phone, or morse code.

3. Everyone at the table should be having fun. This includes you. You are not some martyr to be sacrificed for the players fun, nor are the players there simply for your amusement.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

In many ways my first year DMing was a comedy of errors - I took up the reins because our first DM sucked, and I was the only one interested in running the game. To make matters more confusing I was one of the youngest members of the group. (I kind of miss being the young guy at the table.)

I had the DM PC problem for a short while, then realized what I was doing and smashed him with a 16 ton block of stone.

I had the Storyline is God problem for a longer time, where the events were bigger than the characters, as they were dragged will ye, nil ye from event to event. I generally managed to give the players the illusion that they were affecting events, but they really didn't. To this day I have to fight a tendency in this direction. I think that it stems from the same reason that I cannot run a game that I am happy with on the fly. So I now compromise - things that the PCs cannot affect do happen, but if there is a means for the PCs to interfere then they have free rein.

I had the pun filled 'funny' dungeon that even I lost interest in after the second session.

I had the 'Litererary Allusion' dungeon where everything tied in with a work of literature. (I would not run it now, but I still have fond memories of this one.)

Several hack 'n' slash adventures that I only vaguelly recall.

For a while I just had to use every critter in the game (there was not even a Monster Manual back then). Then I swung the other way and cut many of the humanoid races out of my game - there were no Lizardmen, no Kobolds, no fish-men (I think that the Sahuigin were already around...), trying to make a more 'sensible' setting. (I have cut the races even further since those days, preferring multiple cultures to multiple races.)

Then after about nine months of fumbling I got the swing of things. I decided that my campaign needed a theme, and since I was going to a Catholic school, and we were covering the Crusades in one class and American history in another I decided that conflicts of religion and the subjugation of native inhabitants was as good a way to go as any. The themes of war, religion, and racial conflict have been a part of my games ever since. It was also the first time that I had orcs as the oppressed aboriginals rather than the invading monsters. (Though as far as the settlers were concerned that is what they were...) I have run that world, or variants thereon for a long time. (My current homebrew is essentially that same world rewritten to fit the early to mid 1600s.) I also cut way back on dungeons and started having social interactions with the NPCs as the center of the game.

I guess that I did an okay job after a while, I ran into one of my old players a few years back, and he had a better memory of the campaign than I did. Father John Semineau (I always spell his name differently every time I attempt it - I am not sure that I ever learned how to spell it properly...) remembered it fondly, though he no longer games, I was surprised at how long I have been using some of those themes in my games (back in 1976-'77 if I recall properly.)

The Auld Grump