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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beale Knight" data-source="post: 2554673" data-attributes="member: 7033">Two actually.I am now 10 sessions into my D&D 3.5 campaign. This is the longest I've DM/GMed anything in more than ten years. Age and getting to be a player for awhile under some very fine DMs must have done me very well. Once I got back into the groove of really running the game, both sessions and on-line between sessions, I've really feel like I'm worlds better than I used to be. This struck me very suddenly today while replying to some e-mails and posts on our group's board.  In the past I've had campaigns implode because of style differences in the players, but I didn't realize the problem until far too late. My present group are all good players (and a young brand newbie who's all kind of enthusiastic and learning the ropes) but their styles are different. This has caused a little bit of strife already, but I've not only seen it, I've also taken steps to do about it - without really realizing it. Essentially, the campaign is wide open exploration and what I've noticed over the past few sessions is that without a real tangable Something-To-Go-Do, the players' cooperation level sinks. Their differences play up stronger than their similarities. Now I'm all for seeing some culture clash in my game (and it's certainly there now!), but not to the point of it getting game destructive. Thus - I've already made plans to give them another big Something-To-Go-Do, and will get the ball rolling through posts this weekend. My epiphany here came when I was replying to a player's e-mail about the style clashes and I put all that into words for the first time. It struck me that I'd matured as a DM to the point where I'd already seen a brewing problem and taken steps to eliminate it. My second epiphany came through their on-line discussion about horses, to be a mounted party or not (only one has a horse at the moment). In my younger days I have been both a bastard DM (not rat bastard, just bastard) that makes things hard for the PCs just to make things hard, and a doormat talked into allowing all kinds of things I shouldn't have and making things easy on the players just because I wanted to see them succeed. Today I realized I have found the balance. In talking about the merits and disadvantages to having a party fully on horseback, one player brought up that one danger is the DM's itchy fingers. Another two have illustrated how some later (post 1500 AD) explorers of the American continent used horses and some of a slightly earlier generation didn't - and how neither had to contend with ankhegs. My reply was to point out those explorers also didn't have deal with griffons and worgs, and how some challenges make you glad you're mounted and some make you wish you weren't having to bother with the horse. Then I posted the epiphany that struck right then and there:A truely rat bastard DM will make you regret whichever choice you make at one point or another. If they end up getting horses, there will be times they regret it, and there will be times when they are unmeasurably happy for them. There you go. Thanks for indulging me.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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