As a DM, what aspects of the game do you feel weakest in?

[BluWolf]

Of the 156 votes the top three areas most DMs seemed concerned with are 1) Roleplaying 2) Pacing and 3) Adventure Writing.

Wow!!! This seems to me to be the real meat of the DMs job. Anyone suprised by these results?

Roleplaying (Interesting NPCs, character voices, inspired orations...) 59 ---26.11%

I wonder if we as DMs are a little hard on our selves?? Most of us profess to be in a more mature stage of rolepalying but it seems we all fell we could be better at it. Curious?

Adventure writing (modules) 34--- 15.04%

I wonder if we feel this is a challenge because it requires so much work or because we all feel the published ones are so good?

Pacing (session, story overall campaign..) 36--- 15.93%

Did everyone feel a challenge at maintaining pacing before 3E? (when there was a less defined approach to creating magic items)

the Illusive "game balance" 12-- 5.31%

Not too many people said they had an issue with game balance. I have never really felt this was an issue for me in other editions either. Do more people feel 3E is helping them with the overall balance of their game?

City adventures 16-- 7.08%
Dungeon crawls 15-- 6.64%
Wilderness adventures 14--- 6.19%

These three "categories" combined with the adventure writing category comes out to about 36% of us who feel like we have issues here.

Could we take this to mean we have a big problem with developing content!?!?! If you assume that content here is giving players stuff to do.

Game mechanics 23 10.18%
Perma other 17 7.52%
Total: 156 votes 100%

Any other input? thoughts?

 

[Dark Dragon]

I have trouble keeping everybody on track. They're always wandering off, fighting each other, commiting suicide, or setting the town on fire.

I think once we get past that we can enjoy the game.

(And my NPC names suck)

Sounds very familiar to me (not that with NPC names, I always have a book about the Conan universe handy, it holds hundreds of names...).

Hmmm, my weaknesses...showing too much mercy perhaps. Although I must admit that during my running campaign I've shown less mercy (7 PC kills, one of them was a suicide - the halfling tried to find out if she lived in "reality"...
Second, I try to put too many ideas in one campaign, the result: being a DM for now about two years *sigh*.

But it seems that I have some control over my dices - and the dices of the players... No cheating, of course...(PC fighter was brought to -9 hp by a drow sword master and had one last chance to stabilize. Me: Roll your stabilize check. 01 to 10 will do. Player rolls something lower than 10...) Such things happen quite often, strange...