GM Confessional

[Thomas Shey]

Hmmm, I already made a thread about my lack of imagination, so no need to share that again.

Sort of relevant: One thing I have learned, despite DMing for decades, I'm a terrible player.

When I'm on the other side of the screen, I can't for the life of me follow along or patiently wait my turn. It's like my brain is more comfortable with the massive overload DMing requires, but can't handle the "easier" workload of being a player.

I have found that playing simple games on my phone (shout out to Threes!) keeps me pretty engaged, but I still space out time to time.

I feel terrible since I know the habits good players should have; my brain just doesn't want to cooperate.

I believe the cool reaction to this is "I feel attacked by this relatable content."

 

[Thomas Shey]

No, they don't care. And if they're having fun, I should be content with that. But I wish they would care a little. I'm not asking for someone that enjoys playing tanks to suddenly play a glass cannon or anything. Just to try introducing a little mechanical variance. Pick a difference species, or an adjacent class, something.

I get you, its just a largely in vain wish in those cases.

 

[Xamnam]

I believe the cool reaction to this is "I feel attacked by this relatable content."

Yes, to be clear to @Jahydin , that's why I liked your post.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, to be clear to @Jahydin , that's why I liked your post.

I'm honestly sometimes surprised GMs put up with me as a player these days.

 

[TheLibrarian]

Super guilty of overcomplicating the writing process. I try to make things line up just so and I doubt my player notice or care. They're just there to enjoy themselves.

I also tend to buy modules to make my life easier... and then end up trying to rewrite it because I think I can make it better.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Oh yeah, and there's no world where I'd ever tell a player "oh, you're playing a ____ for the fourth time, would it kill you to try something different!" But I figure this is a confessional thread, so I can let off a little steam.

I get you, its just a largely in vain wish in those cases.

 

[Keith Birkner]

I get aggravated by players not taking the time to look for traps, curses, puzzles and thier solutions. Even when I ask a player"are you sure that you want to pull on that chain hanging from the dungeon ceiling" they don't take the hint. Then they complain when thier character dies because they pulled on the chain.

Many players want to focus only on fighting and loot. They almost never use thier skills to gather information or assume that if they roll a die for a skill without discussing how they choose to role play the skill that a passed skill check should succeed. Don't tell me that your going to intimidate a monster/box, tell me how you plan to intimidate them.

Players complain that they aren't finding magic items in adventures that are stocked with magic items because they don't investigate things close enough or pay attention to the fact that something odd happens in a battle or a room. Every easily discovered magic item that the players don't grab during an adventure tends to get picked up by my NPC characters. Then one day a player borrows my NPC because their character is incapacitated and they complain that the NPC has 8 magic items while the rest of the party has 2 or 3 magic items. They don't like me saying that my pc saw the enemy use a ring of spell turning and grabbed it after the party saw the ring of spell turning being used and didn't grab it.

 

[Xamnam]

I get aggravated by players

Many players want to

Players complain

Just a reminder that this thread is not about stuff players do that you don't like, or rules you don't like, or playstyles you don't like. It is about your weaknesses and sins as a GM.

 

[Andvari]

Sometimes my brain glitches and I leave out a significant detail because I forget the players aren't directly seeing the images in my head.

Today, I described them entering a cave full of green mushrooms. A group of kobolds entered as they were hiding out, and I described the party members hiding within the mushrooms clusters. They were quite surprised a bit later when I remembered I had forgotten to tell them many of the mushrooms were quite large - about the height of the dwarf. They players had imagined they were lying down, covering themselves in blankets of little mushrooms, while in my head they were crouching behind big mushrooms.

Nice of them to just roll with it while the confusion lasted, though

 

[TheHand]

Ok, I didn't see this one posted yet... my GM sin is that I don't like choosing and divvying out loot, particularly magic items in D&D. It's not that I don't mind the PCs having magic items, it's just that I don't like picking and choosing through lists of them and deciding where they will get found. Maybe compounding this, I don't like handing out plain ol' +1 Swords and Armor and the like, I prefer my magic items to have a bit more flavor. Often times, I'll skim through other modules or random tables I own and steal from there.