DM's: How much do you help out your players in offgame?

[FireLance]

I demand some sympathy too

Perhaps you should have introduced yourself as a DM of wealth and taste.

 

[Jon_Dahl]

Perhaps you should have introduced yourself as a DM of wealth and taste.

I don't consider myself as a DM at all. The only reason why I DM is that my players asked me to do it and no one else can run D&D 3.5. That is all. I don't like being a DM because there is too much pressure to it and things never work out like I'd like. I feel that I don't get the kind of support that I'd like to have.

 

[KidSnide]

Many of the posters seem to have all the sympathy for this player - which is understandable - but I want to point out that concentrating on the story, NPC's, other players and giving COMPLETE attention to every move this players makes, frankly makes me feel stressed. I feel that I do lot of extra to help this player and since he's not the only player at the table, my brain gets jammed.

Now I feel a bit pissed off because I just noticed that his summons (which he uses lot and so far NPC's never) have casting time of 1 round, not 1 standard action. It seems that he has never bothered about this and since I don't check every single detail what the character does, I have let him cast summon monsters as 1 standard action since that is sort of the default casting time. From now this will change, but it seems that I really have to read every single spell description myself when he uses them and most of the time this will during combat. Which is so annoying YYYYYYYAAAAAARGH! I demand some sympathy too

Fair enough, that is really annoying. I've been there too.

I think your issue is that - in the OP - you posed the question of whether it is right of you to help the player. At least to me, it seemed like you were asking whether or not we thought it was bad GMing to help your player. I think it isn't. IMO, it's good GMing to help your player, even if your player has trouble learning the rules.

Of course, lots of things are good GMing. Running challenging encounters, role-playing NPCs well and keeping things going are also aspects of good GMing. It's hard to do them all, and sometimes you just can't do them all with the time and attention to you have. I don't think there's anyone on this list who would think you're a bad person (or a bad GM) if you just don't have the bandwidth to give this player all the help he seems to need.

It's just a matter of choosing where to expend your efforts. All I'm saying is that helping this player is a valid way to spend some of them.

-KS