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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 8993901" data-attributes="member: 6801845">Assuming a GM led game, there are many things that can make a DM bad in my experience and it has little to do with power balance in many cases.For example, we were doing a heist when one of the players ignored our plans and what the other players were doing and did a bone-headed move that started combat with the guards.  We had a quick real-world discussion and decided to ditch the heist (and the PC) and run.  The DM then declared that when we tried to leave out of a side window that the city militia had been alerted and the building was surrounded.  At that point he stated all our PCs were captured and were going to jail and the campaign ended.According to the DM it was because we had stopped to discuss options. In real-world time the discussion took between 1-2 minutes.  Adding in the other actions our PCs took, 3 minutes or less had elapsed between the guard being alerted and a couple dozen militia showed up.  Not only that but they knew exactly what was happening and completely surrounded the building so effectively that there was no chance of escape.Now perhaps in other games there would have been some other way of escaping because of meta-game resource (and personally even if there had been time for the militia to surround the building I'd have given people a chance to escape even if the odds of escaper were slim) but this was more lack of logical narrative consistency than specific game rules.  It was also far from the first time this kind of thing had happened.  Other examples included not waiting for people to declare what they were doing and just making assumptions or not giving us even the options to chase after a suspect.  Throw in a meandering plot while we searched for the McGuffins and his basically ignoring all attempts at pursuing interesting side-plots.So unless the players are controlling the overall narrative and direction far more than allowed in D&D I don't see how you can fix that.  I just don't see how someone who doesn't understand how to create an engaging story and isn't willing or able to change based on feedback is ever going to be transformed because of restrictions.  It may have stopped a killer DM who's dungeon was his version of the Saw movies that managed to kill every PC over the course of a few hours but we had our own way of handling that.  The DM for that game was never DM for us again.So perhaps there's some secret fix that I'm not envisioning.  I just don't know what it would be.P.S. Every DM can use improvement.  There's a difference between an inexperienced DM who is doing their best who listens to feedback in order to grow and a bad DM.  For that matter sometimes a "bad" DM is just a bad match.</blockquote>

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