D&D General DM with too High Expectations - Advice?

[Oofta]

Because playing to an audience is different than playing with friends. It's a different experience, and if you want to be successful it requires a different attitude and way of playing. It requires a commitment to keeping to dates and schedules that goes beyond any home game.

And because if you're looking to make money from someone else's performance, it's impolite at the very least to expect them to perform for free.

Out of curiosity - do you have any personal experience with broadcasting with this or is it just speculation? My nephew did it for a little while, but then he also did it with a bunch of improv buddies who were used to performing.

Personally I might feel a little awkward at first but I would assume it would fade after a short period. Then again, I'm sure it would be different for everyone, I've given speeches in front of 100+ people and it didn't really bother me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Demanding more outside of the game from your players? Like filling out backstory worksheets? Watching "good player" video assignments? My wife was given around 2 hours of D&D homework for this week, in addition to her full-time job, 12+ hours of night school, etc.

Yeah, that's pretty excessive to do on any kind of a regular basis.

 

[Campbell]

I will say that as far as expectations go every group is different. The group I play Vampire with for instance has a pretty solid expectation of forum play between sessions and will sometimes do side sessions if we have the players available. In the mecha game I ran we did not do blue booking, but I maintained wiki detailing the various characters and factions with the expectation players would keep abreast of what was going on in the setting. So far the expectations here have been fairly light for my Scion game, but we might start doing some forum play once things settle into place.

 

[iserith]

My longstanding policy is that I never ask players to do anything outside of the session except possibly create a character. And even then I will try to have character creation be a part of Session Zero. I don't ask for backstories either. Anything a player does outside of the session is of their own volition. All you need do in my games is show up and play and, if you can't do that on a given week, no big deal - we got enough extra players to take your seat.

 

[Guest User]

Demanding more outside of the game from your players? Like filling out backstory worksheets? Watching "good player" video assignments? My wife was given around 2 hours of D&D homework for this week, in addition to her full-time job, 12+ hours of night school, etc.

The DM is trying to monetize their D&D game. If a profit sharing arrangement is being discussed, then assigning homework might be appropriate.

If the DM asked the group to participate in an intrigue based game, that was going to be deep into role playing, and wanted the players to read some articles to get a clearer idea of what they were hoping the game to be like...is that untward?

I completely understand feeling extreme umbrage at circumstances that negatively impact one's spouse, but the essence of the matter is your wife lacks the time to commit to the game, that the DM and other players want/expect.

 

[Eltab]

They haven't had a group discussion. Apparently what happened was the DM had the initial conversation with his group on Discord last session and recorded the conversation for posterity. Two of the players were not there for the discussion. So the DM re-recorded the video without any of the other players' feedback to send to the players who were not there, claiming a desire to send a more "clear explanation" (which was basically to scrub out any objections).
Some of the other players responded with positive emoticons on my wife's response, but they haven't had a discussion yet. The DM basically said, "we'll talk about this next session," which has ended the discussion at this point. In the meantime, I'm encouraging my wife to talk to her friends individually to voice her concerns.

I concur that she should talk to the other players, individually at least and/or in smaller groups.

 

[Retreater]

I completely understand feeling extreme umbrage at circumstances that negatively impact one's spouse, but the essence of the matter is your wife lacks the time to commit to the game, that the DM and other players want/expect.

To be fair, literally none of the players have asked for him to do this. He has taken all of this on for himself and sent them a video that basically called them out for being ungrateful for all the hours of work he is putting into the game. Again, the players haven't asked for him to do anything like this. They all seem to be casual players who just don't get his "masterful DM mind."

 

[iserith]

Frankly I think the better move for this DM would be just to find players outside of the group to run the stream. It sounds like this game is online anyway (though that's just a guess). Why limit oneself to this small group when there are thousands of players out there who might actually be interested in all the homework. Having the internet and playing online means never having to settle.

 

[Charlaquin]

I don't think its to the degree being discussed here, but I've absolutely run games where there was material a player was going to need to read to engage properly with the campaign. This ranged from houserules to background documents where a player was pretty likely to make nonsensical character generation or advancement choices if they didn't read it. I avoid turning the latter into a book, but its not uncommon for me to turn out 10-20 pages between the two, and I honestly can't find that a super onerous task; a player who can't bother to do that even once at the start of the campaign is probably expecting a much more casual approach than I'm going to supply them anyway.

Oh, yeah, something like that is perfectly normal. But it’s also not what I would call homework, since it’s something that can and should be gone over in session zero. If it’s too much material to review together, in-person... It might be too much material. Depends on the players.

 

[MarkB]

Out of curiosity - do you have any personal experience with broadcasting with this or is it just speculation? My nephew did it for a little while, but then he also did it with a bunch of improv buddies who were used to performing.

Personally I might feel a little awkward at first but I would assume it would fade after a short period. Then again, I'm sure it would be different for everyone, I've given speeches in front of 100+ people and it didn't really bother me.

No, this is second-hand for me, but I have some friends who are considering making the move, and I also follow an actual-play channel who are fairly open about what they do and how they make their money (mostly through Patreon), and one topic on which they are extremely hot is that absolutely anyone they put on screen for a stream gets paid for their work.