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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zappo" data-source="post: 484073" data-attributes="member: 633">There are four very nasty mistakes you can make. In order of importance:A) Give out too much treasure/XP. I've seen countless campaigns come down in flames because of this.B) Have a pet NPC which is more powerful than all PCs combined and is always around to show off his power. I've seen three campaigns come down in flames because of this.C) Behave as if you were playing against the players. I've seen one campaign come down in flames because of this.D) Excessive railroading. Railroading is when you force the players down a path. While a bit of railroading is a good DM tool, excessive railroading is when the PCs are following a mountain path, and you tell them that they reach a dark cave, and they say "we aren't going to enter because we have stuff to do in town", and after 500 meters they reach another identical dark cave, and they still don't enter, and after 500 meters they reach another identical dark cave AND the path after it has collapsed AND the path they've just come from suddenly collapses too.Avoid doing A), B), C) and D) above. 90% of the "Horror DM Stories" I've heard were because of those factors*. Avoiding them won't automatically make you good, but it does prevent most real botches.Yep.Eh... it depends on the players. Just don't let yourself be pushed around.Hardest: constantly come up with new and interesting plots and NPCs that make sense.Most time-consuming: write down and detail the new and interesting plots, assign stats to the NPCs.Most disliked: when players just bash everything in the plot and, instead of trying to understand the NPCs' psychology so as to discover where he is or what he's going to do or what he cares about, they just cast Commune, Divination and Scry. Also, when the players challenge what you deem an irrevocable decision.Fairly good. Mind ya, all the players were green as well and couldn't really tell a good game from a bad game. In retrospective, it wasn't bad though.In any case, tell us how it goes. You can improve by making mistakes.* The remaining being due to more... creative things. Like a Vampire game involving a kindred-manned space station where cybernetic elders injected the PCs with genetically engineered blood cells which gave them new disciplines, for example.</blockquote>

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