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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 9267566" data-attributes="member: 58172">When the players at the table are also DMs, it both empowers them to add indy content, and understand the concerns about balance and setting tropes.Learning to be a DM makes the game better for everybody.Yeah. It is really important to have an accurate sense of what a party should be facing as a "standard" challenge. But after that, the DM can just throw things at the party and see what happens. This unpredictability happens anyway, when an encounter that was "supposed" to be difficult turns out to be a trivial cakewalk, and one that was supposed to be an easy turns out to be a near TPK. It doesnt matter what the plan was. What matters is how it plays out when the players meet it.For a long time now, I have stopped using experience points. I count the number of "satisfying" encounters until the next level up. For example. During the Professional Tier (levels 5 thru 8), it takes about 15 encounters to level up. The actual level up happens between sessions when convenient. If the encounter was surprisingly difficult, such as a near TPK, it counts as two encounters. If it was a cakewalk, it counts as half an encounter. There is no math beyond counting the number of encounters. Sometimes the players really should run away, in which case it was trivial if unscathed, or difficult if suffering some loss before fleeing. The difficulty is always decided in hindsight, based on the reality of what happened, rather than on theoretical calculation of what might happen.Heh. Can you bribe them? Give their character extra good magic treasure, if they DM an encounter?DMing cannot be forced. Only a player can decide to rise to the occasion.Do you know why, exactly, they might not want to DM?A big reason is, it is alot of work.In this case, lessening the rules burden on the DM helps alot.Sometimes, you can have one of the players do all the hit point tracking and make all the dice rolls, on behalf of the monsters. Then the DM focuses on the encounter from a movie scene perspective. And the player learns painlessly how to deal with a mob of monsters.</blockquote>

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