GM Confessional

[TheSword]

My weakness. I have a habit of either giving out too little or too much in the form of magic items.

I just don’t think I’m very good at it.

 

[timbannock]

I homebrew too much stuff that never sees light at the table.

I enjoy rules lite to rules medium at most, erring toward the lighter side. Games with tons of character options that lead to mechanical widgets I have to know as the GM are problematic. 3e/Pathfinder is way too complex. 5e started out just right but as soon as the first splats hit with feats and more subclasses I couldn't get on board anymore. My players love options, though, so it's a constant struggle on both sides to get what we want out of the game.

I never used to have anything close to "stagefright" for nearly 30 years. Now I can barely get a game scheduled, and running anything past 4-5 sessions is a nightmare. I'll blame the pandemic, but I probably just need some time off from gaming altogether for a bit. The problem with this (besides the obvious) is that I often don't say "No" when I should to game sessions.

 

[aramis erak]

This is context dependent. You are also in charge of pacing, which means sometimes you have to cut players off when they are spinning their wheels or soliloquizing.

Or chatting off topic and preventing play.

 

[aramis erak]

Yeah. I wrote my own, so it's not as bad as when using the prefab modules, but it's pretty obvious to everyone when I start using one of my random encounter tables to fill a gap in my prep.

Just because it's random doesn't mean it has to be unimportant.

You can put major NPCs on the encounter tables, and really shake up things. One fun city adventure I ran (in AD&D 2E, so that puts it 1990's) was essentially wandering the town until the encounter tables brought the three key NPCs, one at a time.
They didn't realize that until they found the second one...

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Same. But I try to file all those thoughts away and keep them for the next time something similar comes up. Quality is iterative and I think we learn if we always have the perfect response the first time.

After the game I am a lot like George Costanza and the comeback: I think of great things I should have done.

Despite my love of Soulsborne games and OSR play, for long-term campaigns I don't particularly enjoy game after game of grinding difficulty. As for magic items, I've come to terms with the fact that the baseline amount of magic items I like in a campaign is a bit higher than the 5e baseline. Giving magic items out is fun for players and can make the game more interesting and exciting for the DM when the PCs come up with a wild plan using one of those magic items.

• I'm a little too soft as DM; I've caught myself indulging in Monty Haul a few times. <-- This one, I think, is a simple problem of inexperience and not knowing how properly to calibrate the whole monsters-versus-players-versus-treasure thing.

 

[dogoftheunderworld]

I <3 the railroad. I love moving from one tactical encounter to the next. I find it very difficult to run relational encounters. And unfortunately, my players are now used to my style -- so when I try to break free of it, they don't know what to do

 

[Joshua Randall]

The railroad is underrated. Me and my players ain’t got time for meandering non-important stuff. We’re old and every hour takes us one step closer to senility.

 

[RivetGeekWil]

The railroad is underrated. Me and my players ain’t got time for meandering non-important stuff. We’re old and every hour takes us one step closer to senility.

Ironically, this is exactly why I don't prep much.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Prepping is overrated too. I am a man of contrasts. I am a mystery even to myself.

 

[Ben from Periapt Games]

I also don’t know how to handle languages spoken, which is a problem, because one of my players LOVES that stuff.

There's a tricky balance to strike between
(a) adding lots of opportunities for player characters to speak to characters who only have one niche language, and
(b) ending up with too many situations where the player characters just can't communicate with characters they meet because they made the "wrong" choice in character creation.

That said, I'd kind of love it if one of my games got to the point where the PCs decided they needed to hire a dedicated hyperpolyglot as an on-demand interpreter.