D&D General Has online play changed your DM style?

Nevvur · Aug 15, 2019

Until about a year after 5e launched, all my RPG experience was at real life tables. After that point, I played almost exclusively on Roll20. I've been reflecting a lot lately, and I recognize my approach to DMing has changed in that time. This thread isn't specific to Roll20 or 5e, but answers relating to those systems are of greatest interest to me.

The question is per the title. Please remark on ANY aspect of the game. I'll revisit with personal examples later, just want to put the question out real quick, but I'll offer this for now. I've become very selective about who I let into my groups. I have an enormous pool of players to choose from, and the luxury to choose who I play with.

Bynw · Aug 15, 2019

My gaming has been online since the late 1990s. Initially and still via IRC, Roll20, and forums as both a player and GM.

As a GM, I don't think my actual style has changed from the days of face 2 face gaming. I still will run a game at conventions that way and with a home group every now and again.

Online gaming has enabled me to get a wide pool of players. The entire world is open to you. As long as someone can meet the time frame for a game over IRC, Roll20, or some other kind of real time gaming. With a forum and possibly Discord you could run a game without it needing to be in real time. Just post and wait which even gives a wider pool of players.

iserith · Aug 15, 2019

Nevvur said:
I'll revisit with personal examples later, just want to put the question out real quick, but I'll offer this for now. I've become very selective about who I let into my groups. I have an enormous pool of players to choose from, and the luxury to choose who I play with.

Yep, online play allows for putting together the best possible gaming groups. What I do is run one-shots for people on Roll20 (less than I used to), then select the best players among those groups and invite them to my player pool.

BookBarbarian · Aug 15, 2019

No, but my style changed after reading transcripts of a play by post game.

Prakriti · Aug 15, 2019

Nevvur said:
I'll revisit with personal examples later, just want to put the question out real quick, but I'll offer this for now. I've become very selective about who I let into my groups. I have an enormous pool of players to choose from, and the luxury to choose who I play with.

This was the big one for me. When I was still DMing on Roll20, I had applicants answer all sorts of questions about their gaming experience and their playstyle. Basically I wanted a cover letter that would help me understand what the player was all about and whether they gelled with other members of the group. (The people who would overlook these questions and drop one-line applications into the LFG were never invited. Surprisingly, there were a lot of people like that on Roll20.)

A few times, I (and established members of my group) would interview people over Discord. If we were going to be gaming with these people week after week, then we wanted to make sure that they fit in.

Yeah, we took our D&D seriously. But it was a useful experience in many ways. For example, I feel a lot more comfortable serving on things like hiring committees and even applying to jobs after being a DM and sifting through countless player applications. The experiences are not all that different.

Nevvur · Aug 15, 2019

iserith said:
Yep, online play allows for putting together the best possible gaming groups. What I do is run one-shots for people on Roll20 (less than I used to), then select the best players among those groups and invite them to my player pool.

Ever feel like you've overused or abused that 'privilege'? Refined your selections to the point of pure self-service and lost track of what other plays might want in a game? Wonder if you've let brilliant players slip through your net?

Sadras · Aug 15, 2019

BookBarbarian said:
No, but my style changed after reading transcripts of a play by post game.

I realise this is a bit of a tangent to the thread topic, but would you care to elaborate on this.

Rya.Reisender · Aug 15, 2019

I do play-by-post and that is definitely very different from usual Pen&Paper:

- I invest around 1-2 hours into every single post I make, updating maps, researching stuff, updating inventory and character tables, I might even edit it multiple times to make dialogues sound better and stuff; it's probably 100+ times the DM work per ingame turn, but also allows you for much more accurate information and less mistakes

- I let my players roll directly without me asking them to, because it saves me time if I know the result of certain actions before preparing my post (of course it can still be that the result doesn't even make a difference)

- I have to check rules and abilities quite frequently; in real life play, if I don't understand why a player can do something, I can just ask and get an answer directly, but asking in play-by-post usually means a full day delay, so instead, I often go and actually research all the abilties my player has to see if his action is actually valid

- I track status and inventory myself (as I need to check validity of rules, I need to know the character stats, so instead of my players keeping their character sheets up to date, I have it all in excel sheets)

- If I'm completely overworked, I might actually give certain tasks over to my players, like if they ask me if they can still carry some heavy object, rather than me starting to calculate it, I'll go "It weights x pounds, why don't you go and check?", that's quite uncommon for me as I'm more the type that likes to keep control over everything

- For players it means they try to post if/else conditions to save time, so rather than getting one action the player wants to do you will process sentences like "If I can see X, then I'll do A. Otherwise, I'll do B."; though that doesn't really have a big impact on my DMing style

Rabbitbait · Aug 15, 2019

Yes, absolutely. I no longer spend huge amounts of time drawing shoddy imitations of maps on dry-erase boards. I now have beautiful maps that are revealed as I need and each player can only see what their character would see.

Other than that, all my changes in style are related to becoming a better DM generally and now using pre-written modules rather than homebrew. Sadly, I think the pre-written modules are much better than my homebrew.

digitalelf · Aug 15, 2019

The biggest change is that I am not able to use physical handouts... For example, drawing "treasure maps" in charcoal on "duck-cloth" to represent canvas/sail cloth, or hand-written letters on real parchment, etc.