Bad DMs/GMs

[prosfilaes]

I've lost count of the number of times a player has tried to correct me about some rule, and been flat wrong because things were not what the player thought they were.

Good; that means the player is paying attention to what's going on and is using their knowledge of their world to discover that things aren't as they seem to be. I hate when I assume that something was an error on the part of the DM or author, and then discover that it was actually a subtle clue.

 

[S'mon]

Absolutely true. But the middle of the freaking session is not the time for criticism, no matter how much a player may want to give it. I've lost count of the number of times a player has tried to correct me about some rule, and been flat wrong because things were not what the player thought they were.

Hm, I'm normally happy to take correction during a session; I might have got a rule wrong or misremembered. However if I make a final judgement call (or state a house rule), then the players need to accept that & play proceeds.

There's a difference between:

DM: "I think the rule is..." (correction ok)

DM: "My final decision is..." (correction not ok)

As a player I have a bit of trouble with DMs who claim the RAW is something it's not, especially when that screws over the players. Either you should accept correction, or make clear that you're making a decision which may not correspond with RAW.

In the Savage Worlds game I played in recently, the GM kept applying the -2 "Darkness" penalty on to-hit rolls (-2 is very harsh since to-hits are based on a d6, on average; equivalent to about -6 in d20 games) whenever the lighting wasn't good. From what I can tell from the rule book, the appropriate penalty would have been -1 for "dim light". This really hurt the PCs since we were already taking -4 to headshot the zombies; -6 on a d6 roll is horrible even with SW's wild die & exploding dice. When we faced a fast baby zombie in a candlelit church with a -6 to hit its head we had a net -8, practically impossible. It bugged me that the GM insisted on the -2 for 'darkness' after I pointed out there was a -1 for 'dim' light which he didn't appear to know about.

But then I'm a terrible player.

 

[S'mon]

I really get peeved about DMs that read verbatim out of adventures, don't play any part of traveling(just say something like, "it took a week to travel through the thunder peaks to Suzail...", and do no more preparation towards game day, even pre-read the adventure that they are running.
It takes a lot of off time to make a successful game day; being prepared is the most important thing of being a good DM. You better make your players feel like it is a living world they are playing in and that is is full of characters both great and small.
Write some random encounters, make some NPCs, draw up a dungeon or 3 on some grid paper, make notes all over everything, at least know your player's character names!!!

Wow, you'd really hate me.

Do you really flip if a DM summarises a week of routine travel, rather than play through every minute/hour/day? I think that's pretty unusual. I think most players want to get to where the action is, and don't expect to be having lots of random encounters when travelling through settled lands. Even in (most) wilderness, it would be odd to meet monsters every day. For 'living world' you mean travelogue stuff like descriptions of terrain, wildlife, passers-by?

 

[S'mon]

I believe we all were bad DM's at one point. It's what you do after that which matters to me.

I'm sceptical - just as I don't think societies inevitably progress, I don't think DMs routinely start bad and get better. My own experience is that it's more like a sine wave, with peaks and troughs. You can GM great your first time and then suck terribly 10 years later. I GM'd way better at age 12 than at age 22, from what I can recall. More recently I've run great seasons (at ca 6 games per season) and mediocre ones.

 

[ValhallaGH]

You don't watch a lot of sports do you? The idea that you don't argue with the referee during the game is pretty far from what actually happens. People argue with the referee all the time. Heck, NFL builds challenges right into the rules specifically because of this.

Yes, calls get questioned. And then the ref makes a final ruling and that's the end of it. No matter how pissed a team, fan, or coach may be over the final ruling, that's the end of it and it stands for all time.

Can those final rulings be bad? Heck yes. Does guidance come down between games to prevent an identical final ruling? Sometimes. Does that mean that the players need to screw up play by trying to fight them after an appropriate discussion period? No.

 

[Kerranin]

While I agree that there are some situations where a incorrect ruling can cause an unnecessary PC death, most of the time it is far less severe and can be retroactively corrected. (if the GM is willing)

 

[Bedrockgames]

Like all things, there's a happy medium here. A player who challenges every single ruling the DM makes is every bit as much of a problem as a DM who gets hacked off every time he's challenged on a ruling.

So long as everyone is reasonable, everyone stays pretty happy. Only challenge when it matters and don't get too fussed when the player challenges something that matters to them.

I agree everyone should be reasonable and there is always a happy medium. But at the end of the day, in my experience, things go smoother if the GM has final say on these matters. That doesn't mean he should be a dictator, just a good ref. At a certain point someone in the group needs to be able to hear what everyone has to say and make a decision.

 

[Zhaleskra]

I believe few people start as excellent GMs. Most of them, I think, start as mediocre or even bad GMs.

That aside, when I was in a d20 Modern game, the GM placed a rule in later sessions that when a player had a character that was going to be out, whether dead or just unconscious, they got to play an NPC until their character was brought back or they made a new one. The point of this rule was to keep the player in the game.

 

[khantroll]

I'm usually pretty forgiving of DM's, but there are three things that really get my goat:

1.) Ramrodding. Ramrodding is different the railroading. To me, railroading is when an adventure or scenario forces to a specific choice, thereby turning the game into a rail shooter. Not my preferred setup, but I can roll with that. Ramrodding is the extremely heavy-handed version of this, where you get eaten by a grue for stepping off the path at all.

2.) House ruling "because I said so". Let me give you an example. My brother and I once played with this on DM that had a very slow delivery. I was cool with it, but it got on my brothers nerves that things took so long. So, he started getting absent minded; not adding modifiers, not keeping trap of HPs, etc. This infuriated that DM, so the next time we gamed, he instituted a new health system for all six players that went like this:

DM: The bugbear got nasty swing off with his, uh, mace. You feel bad.
DM: He got another hit in. You feel woozy.
DM: He got a hit on you head. You are dead.

Just an example. Instituting new rules once play has begun just because something annoyed you irritates me, though.

3.) Taking in game gripes into the real world. Not good for players, really bad IMHO for DMs.

 

[Hussar]

I'm sceptical - just as I don't think societies inevitably progress, I don't think DMs routinely start bad and get better. My own experience is that it's more like a sine wave, with peaks and troughs. You can GM great your first time and then suck terribly 10 years later. I GM'd way better at age 12 than at age 22, from what I can recall. More recently I've run great seasons (at ca 6 games per season) and mediocre ones.

Heh.

I think the problem with this idea is that it implies that good DMing isn't a learned skill. That some people just start good and some don't. I disagree. Good DMing is very much a skill, just like anything else. Yes, natural talent will take you a long way, but, even with natural talent, there are still all sorts of things you can learn that will make you better.

I'd like to think that I'm a better DM now than I was when I was 12. Not that we didn't have fun back then, we certainly did. Then again, volume accounts for a lot of that as well. We played a HELL of a lot of hours back then. At least some of it had to be good.

On an hour by hour comparison now, I'd say the games I run are qualitatively better than they were then.