D&D General Which Aspect of DMing Do you Struggle Most With?

[Puddles]

For me it’s improv. As soon as my players are veering off and doing unexpected things, I can feel the quality of my DMing dip. I do loads of prep work, trying to sketch out a few details about anything and everything I think they might do, but they still catch me off guard.

If I feel it’s dipping too much, and we’ve played a good amount, I will call the session early so I can prepare on this new direction. If it’s still early in the session, I might call a 10 minute break so I can quickly get my ducks in a row.

However, I feel like it’s something I have improved on over the course of the last year, I so don’t beat myself up too much over it.

 

[Yora]

Interesting that people worry about pacing. It never occured to me that that's something a GM can control, or that can be done poorly.
I remind players to get back to the game when they start chatting about other things, but that's it.

 

[Li Shenron]

Creating crime/intrigue/mystery situations that are difficult but not impossibile to figure out.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

For me it’s improv. As soon as my players are veering off and doing unexpected things, I can feel the quality of my DMing dip. I do loads of prep work, trying to sketch out a few details about anything and everything I think they might do, but they still catch me off guard.

Yeah, I empathize with this. I feel like I do a lot of prep work, partially because I enjoy homebrewing items and monsters and such, but also because I want to plan for as many possible actions the players could take as I can. The thing is that I also decided to make this campaign essentially a sandbox around a central hub with a lot of factions to try and keep myself from railroading players as much as I felt like I did in my last campaign.

So, for example, I've spent a lot of time and effort writing descriptions for a hag's lair, the set dressing, possible hazards, unique magic items, and both magical boons and curses the players could get from the hag. I feel comfortable about all that. But then I've also got listed a few NPCs with brief descriptions and it doesn't feel sufficient.

 

[Reynard]

Interesting that people worry about pacing. It never occured to me that that's something a GM can control, or that can be done poorly.
I remind players to get back to the game when they start chatting about other things, but that's it.

I think pacing is both really important and one of the GM's primary responsibilities. It's a strange animal, though, because it isn't the same thing as pacing in things like movies or TV shows. It's more about directing how much time is spent on different aspects of play and being willing to call for decisions when players get stuck planning, and enforcing being prepared in combat, and so on.

It is more important in con games, or other instances where time is limited and there are set goals for the session, but even in open world sandbox play the GM still has to make sure playing is engaging and players don't get lost in the weeds.

 

[Thunder Brother]

A lot of things, poor long-term planning being the bane of my last two campaigns.

I also struggle with post-session anxiety, where everything is intrusively replayed in my head when I'm trying to sleep. It's why I try to run sessions earlier in the day, to give me time to decompress.

 

[el-remmen]

Judging how much the PCs will accomplish in a session.

It doesn't matter if it is a three-hour session or a six-hour session I usually overestimate how far they will get. That is not so bad, though because I see it as an opportunity to 1. do less prep week to week since stuff we didn't get to is already prepped, and 2. change upcoming stuff based on how the adventure has gone already.

That said, however, there is a flipside of those two opportunities that I don't like: 1. Feeling impatient and "been there/done that" when the party finally gets to the prepped part because I have been mulling them over and over in mind for so long, and 2. tweaking for the sake of tweaking when stuff was fine as it is.

 

[Yora]

Of course it's hard to estimate what ground gets covered in advance.

But is that a problem?

If you expect to play for four hours, but the content is exhausted after three, so what? And if you expected to reach a certain scene this game, but it it didn't, then you do it next time you play.

 

[toucanbuzz]

I couldn't decide, so my top 3 despite 30+ years of DMing. If your list ever gets to 0, kudos!

Keeping motivated

It's a ton of work and I love it, but there's weeks I simply don't want to do the extra legwork, work up that dungeon, check that rule, find that map. I just want to veg.

Balanced fights

It's a 5E thing because in AD&D days, I could whip up a challenge blindfolded, so well did I know what worked. The CR calculator can only take me so far, and it's not an option on the fly when the goblin invaders breach the village walls and I need to decide how many take to the streets against the PCs.

Organization

I play in-person with books (not a laptop), and to this day I've never really found the right place to put everything. I've reached fairly good harmony, but it makes a difference. If the DM is scrambling to find something, everyone is watching, and waiting. If the DM whips up the encounter with ease, it looks good.

 

[tetrasodium]

My big ones are linked to buy in.

Players with Main Character Syndrome(MCS) who lead wall flowers by the nose and have some novel level backstory that they are writing in their head/between games that must take precedence over anything. Game goes in a direction away from MCS PC's motivations & they grouse about how they really want to go do x but will tag along anyways. I give the MCS PC a hook that feeds into their metaplot & suddenly they ignore it, because they envision their character discovering that in a different way because they have some away from table written backstory that conflicts with it, or just because they see it developing different. I solve their distraction of an issue* & they ask me about ways to roll back the issue. This isn't a problem if there are enough other players at the tale willing to step up & counter it, but too many wall flowers who passively sit back being dragged along makes it a serious problem that can be difficult to solve

No offense but "I'm a role player and..." or "This is what my character would do" are the ttrpg equivalent of "no offense but". In nearly every case phrases like those are uttered the next few words might as well be "I don't want to come off as a huge jerk so lets just dance around the fact that I'm spitting in the faces of one or more other players at the table"

In past editions there was things like the need to accumulate wealth & better gear that could be dangled out to foil it, but in 5e with magic items unsupported by the system's math & no need to do either it's pretty much impossible to do that to any meaningful degree leaving the GM with an empty quiver when it comes to dealing with these kind of things

* i.e. a 2500 year old half dragon lich (Erandis Vol) is unexpectedly asked if she can make the pc no longer warped by his aberrant mark completely out of theblue & surprise she's both sympathetic as well as capable but the very next session the player is asking about how he wants to undo it because it was too easy