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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatula" data-source="post: 5850872" data-attributes="member: 2198">I haven't DM'd much 4e, so a lot these lessons were learned playing and DMing 3e. But 4e certainly confirmed a lot of the conclusions I had already come to, and taught me some new things as well.1. Don't sweat the small stuff. Make rulings at the table and look them up after. Games ground to a halt a lot in 3e because I insisted on looking up how certain skills or spells worked (with spells, you couldn't really avoid that). 4e frees the DM from a lot of that, which leads to a better game, IME.2. Don't get too hung up on creating a world that's interesting to you but not the players. Or don't overthink things. The players are only loosely aware of the game world and aren't half as concerned with it being a living, breathing entity as I was. This was a habit that 3e seemed to encourage in me that added nothing to the actual game experience. If the players don't care where these high-level opponents came from, I don't need to worry about it. And if they show interest, I can spin story ideas from that when it happens, not before.3. Don't over-prepare.4. Know your group and design for them. More of a rookie DM mistake, I think. Write and run adventures for the group you have, not the group you wish you had.5. Know your system and play to its strengths. As far as 4e goes, what I learned was that it does really great set-piece encounters, but that combat is too involved to be used for trivial time-wasters. That's a big change from the past, where D&D dungeons were pretty much filled with trivial time-waster fights. If the fight doesn't have stakes or isn't important to the plot, skip it.This was one of the big mistakes of the early 4e adventures, IMO. Pyramid of shadows is nothing but room after room of fight, fight, fight. It takes forever and it gets old, fast.6. 5 PCs vs 1 monster requires some breaking of the rules. The attention to the action economy in 4e and the extra abilities granted to elites and solos pinpointed a problem I had been having for years and came pretty close to solving it. Why does this NPC get to act 4 times per round? It just does, and that's ok, because otherwise you get a poor game experience instead of the big blowout fight you thought you were going to get.7. It's OK for monsters and PCs to have different rules. When 3e came out, I thought that having monsters built using PC rules was the best idea ever. 8 years later, I learned that I didn't want what I thought I wanted.</blockquote>

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