GMing Mistakes You’ve Made in the Past

[zakael19]

Oh, here's another one:

- Running pre-written campaign-length adventures.

Results in unsatisfying play if you want to see your players be self-directed, since you have to be always thinking about how to "hit the next plot point." Generally badly written, uninteresting narratives. Requires a well adhered to social contract across the table to function. If using non-OSR products, tons of prep time (the worst: Symbaroum's stuff my GOD) to take products usually written to be read to make them table usable.

Realized this running Call of the Netherdeep, where after some really egregious railroading for the first while it drops you into a big city and says "so have the players pick a faction, and then there's 7 days between faction quest offers. Dunno, figure something out." So I walked through the Gazetteer with the players, and they were like "hey, this situation sounds interesting (in the book: this is outside the scope of this campaign)."

So I walked around the table and had them all answer a couple of questions to take it from a one liner to a player + character invested narrative that we spent like 3 or 4 sessions going through almost entirely improvised between faction missions.

They said it was the most fun part of the entire campaign. I gave up running pre-written campaigns after that.

 

[pemerton]

I’m curious to hear about the lessons people have learned along the way as GMs.

Tell us about something you used to do that you have since determined was wrong/dissatisfying/mistaken.

How did you come to this realization?

What steps did you take to improve?

How have things gone since?

I've made plenty of mistakes. The main ones that I remember, and that had a big impact on me, were 30-odd years ago, GMing Rolemaster.

The campaign was long-running (1990-1997 inclusive) and sprawling. It started at 1st level and finished somewhere in the low-to-mid 20s. There were 10+ players over the course of the campaign, and 20+ PCs. Rolemaster is a very mechanically intensive system, and the campaign leaned heavily into that. The fiction - detail of backstory, details of play, note-keeping, etc - was intense too.

The mistakes resulted from not being able to manage all the backstory, and the climaxes. In retrospect I would diagnosis it as: RM doesn't have adequate formal processes for handling sprawling campaign events and stakes; and I hadn't developed adequate informal/ad hoc processes. The ones that I had developed worked OK for low-to-mid level play, but broke down as FRPGing hit the scope (mechanical and fictional) that opens up in higher level play.

Two examples:

*A massive NPC scry-teleport-fry raid on the PCs. It made sense in the fiction - the PCs had been fighting, on-and-off, with a powerful faction of wizards for a good chunk of the campaign. But my resolution of it was terrible: I statted up the rival wizards, worked out what they would be able to do, using their spells as rationally and ruthlessly as the players did theirs; and it was a massive hosing for the players (and their PCs). The mechanical framework - pure, unvarnished, hardcore simulationism - left no room for forgiveness. The whole thing left a sour taste in everyone's mouth.

*The end of the campaign. The PCs had travelled to another dimension to confront evil godlings. I had started full-time work and so was short of prep-time, but RM is not especially conducive to low-prep GMing. As the backstory became ever more convoluted, and my notes harder to follow (being scrawled down during play), and the stakes less and less clear to the players, it felt like what should have been a climax was becoming rudderless and ultimately directionless. One of the players - someone who is still one of my best friend - ended the game by detonating a massive fireball (or similar effect) so that it engulfed all the PCs as well as some of the enemy NPCs. This was his deliberate game-ending move, and it worked.​

Lessons were learned. Initially they were mechanical: in our next RM campaign (which ran 1998-2008 inclusive) we excised a chunk of the scrying and teleportation magic, and also dropped a few other mechanical features (like power point multiplier) that favoured casters over non-spell-users.

But I also worked harder on the non-mechanical side. The campaign was just as sprawling, backstory heavy and intricate. But the fiction was established so as to make the prospects of overwhelming retaliation against the PCs less likely: it was largely cosmological rather than earthly factional conflict. The stakes, and how they related to the PCs, were kept clearer. This game came to a natural, and hugely satisfying (for me a least) end, around 27th level. The mistakes, of letting mechanics and fiction both get out of the group's control, had been avoided.

But it was pretty exhausting. I would never GM RM again, and said as much to my friends. Our next sprawling campaign was 4e D&D. It was somewhat similar in its cosmological stakes, but the system - with it's non-simulationist resolution that naturally keeps the stakes front and centre, and does not rely on the GM's self-control and manipulation of the fiction to avoid hosing the PCs (and their players) - made life much easier.

I still made a few mistakes GMing 4e, but nothing on the scale of that first RM campaign.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Don't pronounce "brazier" as "brassiere."

Player: I approach the flaming brazier and peer closely at it.
GM: The Efreeti lady slaps you for being a creep.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

But seriously,

I've made all the classic blunders. Yes, even that one.

Non-exhaustive list:

Being adversarial.
Railroading.
Giving the players a sandbox with next to no info to work from.
Not using the heightened social influence of the GM role (and my many years of experience) to intervene when players are breaking the social contract (usually by sniping at one another.)
Running stuff I didn't really want to run.
Ignoring PC backstory, even when it was good and could have proviced some very fun adventures and the player really wanted to see it come into play.
Embracing PC backstory, even when it was bad.
Keeping important parts of the adventure locked behind dice rolls.

A lot of my improvement has come from listening to player feedback. And from reading many discussions here on ENworld.

 

[James Gasik]

Don't pronounce "brazier" as "brassiere."

All kidding aside, I once had a PC die near the beginning of a session. While the character's demise was due to bad luck on the dice, my mistake was not finding something for the player to do for the rest of the evening (since the party was too low to resurrect their character), leaving him with nothing to do but sit there and not getting to participate.

After that, I've always had a handful of ideas for what to do if that happens again, ranging from the character spontaneously coming back as a non-evil sapient undead creature, to having him run a key NPC, to having them co-GM for the remainder of the session (after which we figure something else out, even if it's just them making a new character).

I did this in one of my early outings as DM- curse Gary Gygax for constantly using words in flavor text that I'd only ever read, not heard out loud!

 

[James Gasik]

Yeah, fool for trusting your players to handle things in good faith rather than take advantage of your mistake. You may look back on this as being a bit cringey, but your players were the ones who were dicks.

You're not wrong, but we were all younger and stupider back then. Some people I played with back then really got the wrong idea from the rulebooks- they assumed it was the DM's job to screw over the players, so any time you could get one over on the DM was a "win".

I can forgive them for being jerks back then, as I knew DM's who were quite adversarial towards us as players, and did their part in perpetuating this wrong kind of thinking. The people I play with are much better sports these days, and I am as well, being the first to admit when I foul up.

 

[bloodtide]

Another one:

Letting girlfriends or boyfriend or husbands or wives play the game.

This sounds good....if your playing a board game. Or if your playing an RPG just like a simple board game. Or if your RPG will just be a casual fun time.

If you play to really play an RPG.....it just about never works. Most of the time there are a LOT of relationship problems going on, and this causes the "want" or "demand" for the couple to be Stuck Like Glue.

Roughly 100% of the time the SO is not a gamer and just does not care about the game. They might try and play a bit....like they would a board game....but mostly they will just sit there.

Worse, they will be a huge distraction....as they get bored sitting there and then disrupt the game with a story, joke or "watch this You Tube video".

And there is a better then zero chance that as soon as they "are not having fun" they will whine they they want to go home and they will take the player with them....

So....better to just say "no sos"

 

[timbannock]

I’m curious to hear about the lessons people have learned along the way as GMs.

Tell us about something you used to do that you have since determined was wrong/dissatisfying/mistaken.

How did you come to this realization?

What steps did you take to improve?

How have things gone since?

1. GMPCs - I used to care about my NPCs to the point of having feelings when they got killed or denied something that seemed reasonable for them to get from the PCs. I realized this was badwrongfun as soon as my players could clearly read the situation: they could tell I wasn't acting with their input (what RPGs are all about), but acting against them. It wasn't fun. They are fine with failure, difficult challenges, and all that, so when they weren't, I quickly realized it was because my framing of their failures and challenges was unfair or antagonistic. I stopped being a jerk by instead specifically setting up every major NPC to be expendable (or their position/power flawed), and enjoying their demise or downfall if and when it was brought about. Put somewhat more accessibly and very simply: in my campaigns, the gods have stats, because if the PCs can kill them, that's going to be freaking awesome.

2. Overprep & "Plots" - I came up from the 2nd Edition super-module days, and thought earth-shaking plots and long campaigns were where it's at. I've run quite a few, and at least half are fondly remembered by everyone involved. But let's face it: the amount of work, the things I thought I needed to focus on, and the occasional wasted storyline or 10 among the players (because so-and-so dropped out of the group, or someone grew sick of playing a PC that was "important" to a plot thread, or whatever) -- all of that was wasted effort. When you prep situations, not plots, and you prep each adventure as a consequence of "Where do you want to go next week: the kobold-guarded dungeon in the Caves of Chaos or the swamp-mound where you saw those lizardfolk disappear into?", then 75% of your prep will get used. And the rest of it is likely still tables, stats, maps, or other topics that can be easily plopped down in some future adventure, even if it's in a totally different campaign.

3. House Rules and Systems - If you want to design your own game, go crazy, I say! I've done it and it's fun. But I've had to dial it back over the years, because nearly every game I ran was so heavily house-ruled that players couldn't use books and other stuff that they paid money for in some cases. In others, their inability (and let's be honest, sometimes unwillingness) to reference my documentation created inconsistencies or gaps in the rules that caused them confusion or changed their expectations. I now refrain from more than a couple sentences of house rules at the most. Or, because I've done game design, I'll (very rarely) just create my own rulebook for a thing, so it's ready to roll and won't get anything more than the usual couple sentences of errata (I make simple games, obviously).

As a corollary to that, I try to stick to running games my players are familiar with, nowadays. We'll still venture out and try something new from time to time, but overall, we're all happy with a few "core" games (maybe 2-3 of those), and then doing other stuff as a hack of some familiar game, like a Mork Borg or the like. It's just easier to jump in and play that way. When we play something wholly new to us, we make a big event of it, so that we're all equally invested in learning the new thing.

 

[The Soloist]

All of them!

 

[Golden Bee]

I’ve luckily blocked out most of my early GM failures. One that comes to mind recently was trying to run a zombie island scenario in a system with capable, heroic protagonists. (This was a Fate core game in a pulp world.)
By putting it on an island, I made sure there were basically no NPC’s to endanger or talk to. I also chose a binary horror (you’re either infected or you’re not), I made it pretty clear that the risk was minor. The players weren't all gonna die.

I’ve had successful horror since then, but the key is Society. The characters are tough: but what can they do to take on a town? You might be able to defeat a demon as a group, but what'll they do about a portal to hell, a bizarre cult, or a sentient flood?