D&D General OVERLY CRITICAL: Sucking the joy out of the game.

[Hawk Diesel]

@ad_hoc has the right idea. Part of it is contextual. If you have a person who is new to DM'ing, you need to inspire confidence first and foremost. If you are too critical, that will discourage this person from wanting to DM. Being a DM, just like any skill, requires practice, and no one is good right from the get go. It takes time to nurture that skill and learn how to juggle interpreting rules, creating fun challenges, sharing the spotlight, valuing player input, and creating and interesting narrative while also managing all the enemies and NPCs.

Feedback is important, but if you are providing feedback, you need a few things. You need to find examples of things the DM did very well. Then you need to narrow down the critique to just one or maybe two really important pieces of feedback. Then when you communicate them, frame them in a way that focuses not on how the DM did things wrong, but rather how you might do it differently or how it could be done to make it more fun. This way it is not a knock on the DM, but rather advice on how a slight tweak can enhance the game. It's also important to use concrete examples whenever possible.

 

[Shiroiken]

DM's are a bunch of masochists. We slave over every aspect of making our game perfect... then berate ourselves for what goes wrong. After most sessions I try to ask the players how it was. I want honest criticism, because I want to get better at DMing for them (I'm immodest enough to believe I'm a great DM overall). Sometimes the ego gets a little crushed, but sometimes that's the price for exposing your creativity to people.

As a player... if you're not having fun, get out. I'm not kidding. I've had to boot players from my games because they were dragging everyone down with them (as per the comic). No D&D is better than bad D&D, and with various styles of play, ruining a group that enjoys the game differently is a dick move. Just move on and find another game.

 

[Umbran]

I would start by answering the question asked.

"Did you guys have fun?"

If the answer is no then there really is a problem.

If the answer is yes then say so.

This is the important thing, not just for giving feedback, but just for yourself, both during and after the session.

If you are constantly focused on things that might be less than perfect, that means those things are taking up your attention. If your attention is taken up, then you are not paying attention to the good things in the session. This leads to a sort of confirmation bias - you don't see the good things, because you are so focused on other stuff, so of course the result seems bad to you.

Mind you, there are things of sufficient power and scope that you don't ignore them. Like, a toxic person at the table - no amount of "look past that" will serve you well there. But a whole lot of our nitpicks are not themselves game-killers if we don't set them up to be so.

 

[Oofta]

Spirit of Gygax grant me the serenity
To accept that I am not the perfect DM;
Courage to listen to feedback on things I can change;
And wisdom to not kill off Bob's PC when he criticizes me.

 

[Umbran]

As a player... if you're not having fun, get out.

I'd say: As a player... if you're not having fun, talk to the GM. Establish with the GM what's missing, or what's going wrong, before just walking out. There's a ton of reasons why your fun may not be present that are fixable, and some reasons that are not. Make sure you know which you are dealing with.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

Sorry Fauchard, I don’t have this issue. After seeking the ever elusive legendary Dungeon Master for decades, I now make a point of finding the fun in every game I play.

The Dungeon Master prepares a stage that we all play upon. I believe that Players make the game fun not just the Dungeon Master. There is a myth that playing this game means sitting around a great storyteller to be fascinated. Hogwash! This is a cooperative storytelling experience, if we aren’t having fun then the fault is often just a s much ours as it is the Dungeon Master’s.

I have come to understand that Players have a job to do, and that job is to drive the narrative forward. Without that, the game languishes and becomes something of a railroad as we relinquish control forcing the Dungeon Master to drive.

Now this all does not mean the Dungeon Master can’t do a bad job, but good Players will look for the stage the Dungeon Master has prepared for them and play along with it. If instead we use our energy to counter the Dungeon Master's plans and complain about the bad job they're doing, then we're doing a bad job too.

 

[TwoSix]

So you had a nervous new GM, you criticized his running of the game, and you’re worried that you’re sucking the fun out of the game for you?

Possibly you might get a larger enjoyment out of things if you learn a bit of empathy.

 

[Retreater]

I guess I'm very bad at determining when my players are having fun and when they're frustrated. And most of them are too nice (aka not confrontational) enough to tell me. So they flake out, find other games and drop out, etc.
So what I see as "one bad session away" from having a gaming group fall apart - it's actually more accurate to see it as a death by a thousand cuts, which I'm unaware that I'm dealing.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

I guess I'm very bad at determining when my players are having fun and when they're frustrated. And most of them are too nice (aka not confrontational) enough to tell me. So they flake out, find other games and drop out, etc.
So what I see as "one bad session away" from having a gaming group fall apart - it's actually more accurate to see it as a death by a thousand cuts, which I'm unaware that I'm dealing.

I've had this experience as well. I'm always asking for feedback after the sessions I run, asking what could have gone better or how others might have done things differently. But I found that often I was only hearing from some players and not others. So I started encouraging those players to email me. Sometimes people need time to process the session to evaluate it. Others aren't comfortable making those kinds of statements in public. And still others express their opinions and feelings better through type than with words. So email can be a great way to help get feedback from those that wouldn't otherwise provide it.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

Sometimes I think the game is better in the telling.

What I mean by that is while we're playing the game we often get frustrated and things are often tense. These are real emotions that we as Players feel, and they're not fun emotions.

We get frustrated when the Dungeon Master challenges us, when the dice won't cooperate, and by our general inability to glean information from the situation. Things get tense when our Characters' lives are on the line, when the dice won't cooperate; and, when we're surprised, put on our back foot, despite all our plans.

However, later, when the emotions have had time to pass, we relive the encounters, remembering only the good stuff. We tell ourselves and eachother embellished tales of our great adventures.

Fauchard describes himself as a joyless fun-suck, but also describes the game as his favorite pastime. I think it is because the game is better in the telling due to the real emotions we're feeling while we play it.

I think it might be a good move to take some time during the game to recount past deeds.