Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheSword" data-source="post: 9447346" data-attributes="member: 6879661">Disappointing that this video starts by misrepresenting another DM’s good advice about GM burnout, and advertising itself with a promotional image mocking another DM. I don’t share MM’s style but it’s not nice to see this. The guy couldn’t make his point any other way?There is a fundamental misunderstanding in the video that writing is recording what is going to happen, that a writer can only be a novelist. In truth writing is any time you put a pen to paper to fix an idea about the game. Coming up with a description of the the local forest - that’s writing. Determining the goals of the local bandit leader - that’s writing. Deciding there is a local bandit leader - also writing. Deciding the 10 options on your random encounter table - still writing. It can take a lot of time and while some DMs are able to convincingly wing it without determining these things in advance, many others are pretty transparent or really struggle to do it meaningfully. So writing some notes first helps massively and mocking DMs for preparing is a pretty snide blow.At no point in MM’s intro clip did he say determine what the PCs were going to do. He just used the phrase tangle in a narrative thread. While sometimes these tangles are good, I’ve also seen a game bog down because one player decides to just hare off in a random direction following some scheme while the rest of the players are left twiddling their thumbs because they’re interested in the main thread. MM in all fairness does not tell his players what to do. He presents convincing scenarios for them that propel the action and create an interesting story.Don’t force your players to do things they don’t want to. That’s good advice. I feel it could have been said plainer, and without being a douche.</blockquote>

Verification