GMing Mistakes You’ve Made in the Past

[Kannik]

A handful of GMing mistakes I have made:

Getting everyone's backstories, working them into the campaign, writing up a personalized one-page intro for each player to read just as the game begins that brings them up to speed and brings their characters to the story, ready to dive in for some excellent in-media-res RP and then.... starting things off with a combat that drags on for hours and sucks the life out of everything and all that prep. Which was compounded by that this was diving full-bore into a combat with brand-new high level characters so that the players were trying to figure out how to play them (didn't help that this was in 3e).

Getting tied into knots ensuring everything is as perfect / best it could possibly be / airtight rather than getting it to 80% and knowing that'll carry the day. Part and parcel to that is not recognizing that the/my players are on my side in wanting a great time and will both overlook small things and assist wherever they can!

Not being willing to bring up the meta in telling the players "there's no cheese down that tunnel" or aiding in nudging by remembering something or ensuring additional information reaches them to avoid hours of wheel spinning (and boredom and frustration). Bring it up, move things onward.

Being fixated on making every encounter/combat "challenging." It becomes both time consuming and monotonous. Variety of challenge, negative-space quiet moments, and etc are all important.

Not being present to the fact that not everyone comes to the table with the same gaming experiences and thus approaches the game in the same way. Expectations can vary! Which is totally fine... if you are, again, present to it and work it out, usually in a middle path and invitations kind of way.

 

[Clint_L]

Hmm.

My wife and I have been friends for over 30 years, and she is one of the people who played in the first campaigns I ever ran. She's been a resourceful and innovative player from day one, and she's a delight to have in any group. She tends to think outside the box - big time - which can intimidate some other players, but she's great at worldbuilding too and always works for the betterment of the party. She also started running games shortly after she started playing, and proved herself a more than capable and skilled GM, too.

So I suppose mileage may vary on this front.

My spouse is my favourite player!

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Mine too!

 

[pemerton]

Not being willing to bring up the meta in telling the players "there's no cheese down that tunnel" or aiding in nudging by remembering something or ensuring additional information reaches them to avoid hours of wheel spinning (and boredom and frustration). Bring it up, move things onward.

This!

 

[Nebulous]

The players were in a wide open huge prairie with a ruined shrine behind them. They get attacked at distance by horse riders and longbows. Lots of horse riders. Who gallop away and turn around and fire again. I was trying to force them into the shrine and retreat as the only viable option. There were also vampires about to attack, but the shrine had a consecrated safe haven the vampires couldn't enter, but the players didn't know that. To them, I was attacking them with unstoppable ranged attacks and vampires with no way to fight back. I was "trying" to push them into a safe place, but hoo boy they got demoralized and suicidal. I don't remember how it ended but I think I had to placate them by saying you're safe and sound if you just go HERE. So that's the last time I tried to force behavior with overwhelming odds and an expected reaction. I still expect PCs to run sometimes in the face of adversity, but I don't frame it like I did there.

 

[aco175]

My spouse is my favourite player!

My wife will not play role-playing games, but she does play other 'role-playing games'.

 

[Staffan]

Back in the days of 3e I used to be fairly generous with character generation, allowing for characters that were quite a bit stronger than the game expected. I would then compensate for this, and occasionally for larger groups, by tuning up the opposition. As long as it was just a matter of some extra plusses it worked fine, but there was one occasion where I redesigned an NPC from an adventure and another where I made a custom leveled-up version of a monster, and overshot the expected power level dramatically.

The first was in Red Hand of Doom. One of the opposing faction leaders you need to deal with is the Ghost Lord, a blighter lich who is producing undead troops for the main evil army threatening the region. Blighter was a prestige class for druids who had renounced nature and turned to necromancy, and in its original conception was kinda nerfed because the PrC spellcasting progression started over from 1st level in the PrC, even if it advanced faster. So this ex-Druid 6/blighter 5, with the lich template for a total CR of 13, could only cast up to 5th level spells, and their one 5th level spell had already been used to create minions for the horde. That meant that by the book, his top offensive spell were flame strike and rusting grasp, both 4th level spells – that's pretty weak for CR 13. So I decided to fix the PRC so it restored your normal casting progression and added its levels to that, except with their new spell list. In addition, I threw in an additional level, so he'd cast at 12th level, which meant topping out at several 6th level spells including finger of death and harm. Turns out, the dude and his minions completely wrecked the party, taking out their heaviest hitter (which I think was a druid) in round 1 with finger of death. I came pretty close to a TPK, and only missed it because one of the PCs ran for the hills and I didn't feel like pursuing.

The other was in an Eberron campaign that, for once, didn't use a pre-made adventure. For some reason, the PCs had to fight a mind flayer – the daelkyr and their minions were a big thing in that campaign. But again, I looked at the regular MM (and XPH) Mind flayer stats and realized they sucked. Sure, the mind flayers have their psi blast, and an AOE stun is nothing to sneeze at. And the XPH version replaced their normal spell-like psionics with actual manifesting as a 9th level telepath psion. But the fun thing about mind flayers is supposed to be that they'll eat your brain, and they were still really bad at that. In order to get their nomnoms, they would first have to hit you with their tentacles – sure, there are four of them, but they only have an attack bonus of +8 (which is pathetic for CR 8), and for each one that hits they get to try to grapple with an even patheticer +7 (and this isn't affected by attacking a stunned creature). The next round, assuming they didn't hit and succeeded on their grapple with all four tentacles, they can attach their other tentacles with a new grapple check. And on the third round, they finally get their snack.

So this was of course unacceptable. What to do? Well, we can give the mind flayer a monk level. This set off a chain reaction of horribleness. For starters, it allowed me to give the mind flayer Improved Grapple, so it can grapple normally without provoking AoOs, even without doing it via tentacle attacks. It also gets +4 to grapple checks. In addition, monks get to add their Wisdom bonus to AC, so combined with some rejiggering of stats because adding a PC class level turns the monster into an elite and gives it the elite stat array, so it went from AC 15 to 20. I also changed one of its default powers to inertial armor, which is the psionic equivalent of mage armor except you can upcast it for +1 AC per 2 PP. This gave it an additional +8, so AC 28. Finally, the monk level took the mind flayer from 8 HD to 9 HD, which gives it an additional feat. I used this on the feat Expanded Knowledge, giving it an additional psionic power that can come from any class list. It of course took grip of iron, which can be activated as an immediate action and gives +4 to grapple checks, with +2 more per additional 4 PP spent. With manifester level 9 it could spend 9 PP for +8 to grapples, giving it a total of +21 to grapple checks. Quite a glow-up from +7.

So now I had a CR 9 frickin' ninja illithid with AC 28, grapple +21, 49 hp (with a power that could add +45 temporary hp), DR 5/byeshk, an AOE stun attack, and assorted other psionic powers appropriate for a 9th level psion. This was of course far more lethal than expected, and the lesson I learned was that CR is BS.

 

[billd91]

So now I had a CR 9 frickin' ninja illithid with AC 28, grapple +21, 49 hp (with a power that could add +45 temporary hp), DR 5/byeshk, an AOE stun attack, and assorted other psionic powers appropriate for a 9th level psion. This was of course far more lethal than expected, and the lesson I learned was that CR is BS.

You massively boost the mind flayer, only raise the CR by 1, and your takeaway is that the CR system is BS?!?

From the 3.5 Monster Manual on Advancing Monsters:

Estimating CR: Assigning a Challenge Rating is a subjective judgment, not an exact science - meaning that you have control over what the CR of a monster with class levels should be. If you find a class combination that improves a monster's capabilities significantly - or not as significantly as this guideline supposes - you should modify its CR as seems logical. Err on the side of overestimating. If a monster has a higher Challenge Rating than it deserves, it's less likely to kill off an entire party than if you had erred in the other direction.

I would suggest that you "erred in the other direction". And that's not really on the CR system. The CR system may be fuzzy and an approximation, but your case really isn't an indictment of the CR system - it's just a mistake you made in overtuning a monster for the situation.