dm's, be honest: how often do you make mistakes?

[Fifth Element]

Where's the option for "The DM cannot make mistakes?" My homemade DM screen says "The DM is ALWAYS right!!!" in 72-point type.

Seriously, though, I slip up at least 2 or 3 times a session. The vast majority of the time, the players never know because they don't know what was supposed to happen, they only know what did happen.

 

[Mean Eyed Cat]

Really? This is a question? I've yet to meet a GM (myself included) who doesn't make mistakes during games. However, as Festivus points out, I think good GMs are able to alter some of these mistakes into something fun.

 

[The_Gneech]

Usually, if I make a mistake, it's in my players' favor, so they don't complain.

Me: "Hmm ... that fiendish vampire dragon was supposed to have SR 30 and I totally forgot."

The Survivors: "That's okay!!!"

-The Gneech

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I voted "sometimes."

For the most part, they don't matter or are easily fixed. On occasion, they're major gaffes. Sometimes, I can just say "I goofed- this is how "X" should be done, and we'll play it that way from now on." On the other hand, if I goof in such a way that it actually makes the game a bit more fun, I keep my error in as a retconned homebrew rule...still while letting the players know what's up. I wouldn't want them to try gaming at someone else's table thinking my error was the way the game was meant to be played.

The last campaign I ran, the main foes in the first story arc were a homebrew...and I screwed them up royally- I based their special attack mechanics & tactics on the wrong stat, making them far too easy to defeat at higher levels. Worse still, I didn't figure that out until AFTER the players had gone through the entire initial arc, somewhat underwhelmed by the non-epicness of the epic final battle.

I apologized to them, but didn't get to rectify my error with the subsequent story arc- the group broke up over RW non-game issues.

You're (presumably) human- you're going to make mistakes. The trick is to minimize their negative effect on the game.

 

[Angrydad]

I generally make mistakes every session. A particularly big one recently was mistaking "Bless Weapon" for a cleric spell when it's a paladin only spell. The players were fighting a monster that had DR overcome by holy weapons, the cleric had memorized the spell cause the entry for the spell in the PHB has the title of the spell and paladin only restriction on the bottom of one page and the description on the next. We just didn't notice until after the fight. In this case it was a mistake in the players' favor, so they're not going to complain, and I just have to make sure they learn to read the descriptions better.

 

[Nebulous]

I make mistakes every session, but they usually amount to simple things like forgetting that an enemy had used a standard action for something else, at which point the players viciously remind me. This usually just happens in large battles when there's a lot going on.

Behind the screen mistakes, such as calculating hit points or damage go unnoticed.

 

[an_idol_mind]

I've DMed for almost 20 years now, and I still make tons of mistakes in a given session. I don't worry about any of them as long as they don't slow down the pace of the game.

 

[Stoat]

Comedy of errors.

I make at least one mistake per combat, usually on the order of forgetting to add in a situational bonus or skipping an NPC in the initiative order.

 

[Ycore Rixle]

Yep, I make mistakes like that all the time. Forget a buff here, fail to take advantage of a feat there. Those things happen constantly. I think the important thing is to not make the bigger mistake, viz. letting the game slow down over details that don't really matter.

 

[jeffh]

At least a couple a session. Mostly they're cases of realizing after the fact that I used very sub-optimal monster tactics.