How to Deal with a difficult DM?

[Creamsteak]

Every DM I've ever had with the exception of conventions has been great. The only one that I ever had a bit of an argument with was one who couldn't be convinced that a character can know more than the player about certain concepts. Basically, we were killed off one by one because according to the DM we didn't make fires properly and take care of our animals in harsh cold conditions. I don't really know how to survive antarctic conditions myself, I've only really been taught how to make a bed in a tree or such when I was at a winter encampment as a cadet, not how to survive for weeks in polar conditions.

The scenerio was as such: Horribly extra-planar winter conditions and extremely deathly cold was abundant and we had to trek a few hundred miles across this endless tundra to reach some forgotten temple of evil. On the way to this location, we had mounts, and my character was the primary provider of food and water (through clerical magic) for the party and animals, and also had a bonus of a ten or so to ride and handle animal. The ranger had a pretty large bonus to survival checks, and beyond a usual overstocking of supplies and gear, we didn't have much else to rely on. The DM would constantly quiz us on how we deal with the weather conditions, to which my character and the wizard were amply able to provide multiple cold-resistance spells to the party and mounts and the ranger had ranks in survival a-plenty. The DM ruled that these magical and skill based means only helped and were not enough for the conditions. We started having casualties of both mounts and characters into the second week of travel and by the time we arrived only two characters and no mounts remained.

When he explained why we were having an Oregon Trail in Winter like series of deaths, he said that it was because none of us PLAYERS (key term here) were properly dealing with the conditions. Not our characters and their skills and magic and supplies, but the PLAYERS didn't know how to take care of themselves in these conditions and were not answering enough of his quiz questions correctly. It took a long time to convince him that this was the same as saying that a wizard can't cast his spells because the player can't read magical scribbles and hasn't memorized a bunch of psuedo-kanji made up to represent arcane symbols.

Things worked out in the end though.

 

[Gizzard]

What finally imploded the game was getting together for the first time in months, the players - having real lives and thus naturally not remembering much of the previous session - asking for a quick recap of why they were in the town they were in and what was going on in the plot, and the GM refusing to tell them.

I think the smart thing for the GM to do is to start with a recap, especially if you haven't played in a month. But, this is also an example of where the players will see the problem differently than the GM.

When a GM spends a lot of time on his game, prepping and trying to make things run smoothly, he wants his work to be reciprocated by the players. It gets old to constantly be reminding PCs of things they "would know" when the player forgets. Yeah, a month is a long time and real life intrudes, but if a player tends to forget plot points between sessions he could always take session notes to help himself (and his fellow players!) along. And if he doesn't want to do that, then what does that say about his commitment to the game?

So this GM is probably posting about how unprepared his players are in a thread called "How to deal with difficult players". ;-) Two sides to the coin. Not to say that the experience isn't very frustrating for all concerned.

 

[mythago]

So, you are implying that the person is too stupid to consider dropping the campaign.

No, you're inferring that.

The original poster asked a question about dealing with a difficult DM. Giving answers doesn't mean the person was stupid for not having thought of them on his/her own.

Some DM's completely buy into the DM-vs-player mentality. I think it's valid, as long he's forthright about it.

The problem is that the GM is also in charge of the rules. It's not simply a matter of "my wits and foreknowlege against yours"; when the DM is the referee and has the final word on the outcome, there's no way for it to be anything like wargaming.

 

[Lord Rasputin]

The players in my campaign and I all recently left our bad DM, after several (and I mean a lot) frustrating talks trying to explain why we weren't having fun. Rather than listening, he repeatedly defended himself and insisted that the fault lay with us.

That is almost syllable-for-syllable a recent experience of mine, except another player was the leader. (As the group's other DM, I kept my mouth shut except to support the leader. Besides, I'm sure the players have horror stories about me!)

To blame the players boggles my mind. I keep worrying that what I am running sucks. Heck, if it were four players versus me, I'd take a hint. I may be sullen about it, but I'd get the picture.

 

[Lord Rasputin]

Basically the whole campaign was a mystery with virtually no actual clues, only the occasional mildly insulting comment from the GM about how we kept missing them. Well, some of the players in that game were smart cookies who like mysteries, and the clues still were, as far as we could tell, nonexistent.

http://host49.ipowerweb.com/~poxybogg/happyjacks/roleplaying/pointers.html has the best piece of GMing advice I have ever heard in point #3. Design problems, not solutions.

 

[3catcircus]

Most issues concerning gaming groups with difficult members focus on the players. How many of you have had to deal with difficult/bad DM's?

What constitutes bad DMing?

For me it's when I leave a game session and say to myself, "I'm not having fun".

Did you discuss the issues, or let it slide? What was the outcome if you did sit down and chat with your DM? Were you brutally honest or did you roll a 35 on your diplomacy check, and smooth talk your way through the issues?

I had already been DMing a campaign for quite a few sessions, with the PCs on the Moonshae Isles - I had adapted some of B1-9 (Castle Caldwell portion) and UK modules The Sentinel and The Gauntlet, with a backstory for them being in the Moonshaes to find a missing Imam of Tyr (the party's paladin was leading the effort, since his patron deity was Tyr.) While investigating the skulk situation, they ran into the underground lair of some Xvarts (I know, they aren't canon Forgotten Realms creatures - so sue me...)

Anyway, during the battle, the paladin killed fleeing Xvart females carrying babies in their arms - his justification was that they were calling out warning to other Xvart warriors to come aid the ones already present.

Later, the group discovered the remains of a village razed by (IIRC) gnolls. The gnoll chieftain was still alive - instead of taking him prisoner, they slew him.

I felt that while the 2nd event was a gray area, the first event was clearly a violation of what a paladin stands for - and I refused to award full experience points for the encounter, as well as making the paladin lose his powers until he atoned.

The entire group howled their outrage at me not giving them the xp for killing innocents women and children.

Now - is that a case of being a difficult DM?

What about the case of a different campaign, where the party was deciding who should guard some magical stones? The lawful evil hexblade bashed the party's sorcerer (who had 3 hp) in the head with a rock, knocking him unconscious to prove the point that the sorcerer should not be the one to guard them as he was too vulnerable to even a simple mugging, let alone any serious threat. He immediately healed the sorcerer afterwards, but he *was* played like an evil character. The sorcerer howled protests that the hexblade should have been arrested (there was no law-man around to witness the event, having taken place in a hallway in an inn in Triboar.) I didn't penalize the player for having his character attack an "innocent" person in this case because it was something that his character would do, being lawful evil. This same character (the party was guarding a caravan) tried to third-party negotiate with another character to not work directly for the caravan, but to be a sub-contractor to him, with the intent of cheating him out of an equal share of pay... So, even though the character was played as an utter bastard, everything he did was in keeping with the character's alignment and character concept.

Does applying this seemingly-double standard make me a difficult DM? Or do you think I was justified in my ruling in both cases.

 

[jeffh]

I think the smart thing for the GM to do is to start with a recap, especially if you haven't played in a month. But, this is also an example of where the players will see the problem differently than the GM.

When a GM spends a lot of time on his game, prepping and trying to make things run smoothly, he wants his work to be reciprocated by the players. It gets old to constantly be reminding PCs of things they "would know" when the player forgets. Yeah, a month is a long time and real life intrudes, but if a player tends to forget plot points between sessions he could always take session notes to help himself (and his fellow players!) along. And if he doesn't want to do that, then what does that say about his commitment to the game?

So this GM is probably posting about how unprepared his players are in a thread called "How to deal with difficult players". ;-) Two sides to the coin. Not to say that the experience isn't very frustrating for all concerned.

Since I GM most of the time myself, I do see that. I've long since resigned myself to the fact that having the players absorb all the details, while far from unachievable, is a luxury, not a right. (Especially with my current group. I like them and all, but on the whole they're rather lightweight in their tastes and approach compared to some groups I've GMed for.) I certainly prefer for that work to be appreciated, but it's not my place as a GM to throw a hissy fit when it's not, and it wasn't his either.

EDIT - another point that needs to be made here. It's one thing for players to forget stuff. It's quite another for them to never know things in the first place that their characters clearly would because the GM hasn't bothered to tell them. The latter was at least as much of a problem in that game. In some cases it was because the players didn't, in the GMs opinion, ask the correct questions, but as I said before, what the heck does that correspond to from the character's point of view? You don't have to make a special effort to notice things that are obvious in real life, and you shouldn't in D&D either. I do realize that what are sometimes called bandwidth problems happen - you *can't* convey all the information the character would have in a reasonable amount of time, so you have to pick and choose - but when the DM accidentally forgets to give the players information their characters would clearly have and that the players need in order to understand the situation, the proper response is to correct the problem as quickly as possible, not to blame the players for his oversight while still refusing to fix it.

And certainly refusing to answer them when they *do* ask the right questions is beyond the pale.

 

[S'mon]

I think that there are two very different aspects of DMing -- Game Preparation and Game Execution.

Some DMs are out to beat the PCs in Game Preparation ("Aha, THIS will throw them for a loop! They can't even hit this with their best weapons!") but then turn into softies for the Execution, offering lots of ways out and chances to work around things. Other DMs are pretty general in Game Preparatoin but then turn into death machines for Execution ("Well, you're here and here and here, so a fireball, followed by Black Tentacles, followed by flanking here and here, and I can kill everyone in two rouns!").

Either type can be good or bad -- it depends on how well it's done in each case. One of my fellow RBDMs swears by "Make a killer encounter, but then allow the PCs to succeed when they try to work around it," and it seems to work really really well. When I've tried it that way, my players have gotten unhappy with me, saying I was just negating any real chance of legitimate victory and forcing things into a "DM lets us win" category. That's probably because I wasn't doing it very well. The other end, playing an encounter hard and trying hard to defeat the PCs, is also good -- but if you're doing that, you shouldn't also be planning a tough encounter. After all, you wouldn't want to play in a wargame against someone who got to decide what the terrain looked like, what forces you had, what forces he had, and who could come up with rules on the fly to nerf many of your abilities, would you? I wouldn't.

This is interesting - as DM I tend to prefer the style of avoiding generating killer encounters just to screw with the players, I'm generally happiest running foes with CR below Party Level who use smart tactics to pose a threat. If I run foes at above PL there will often be PC deaths, which can get trying if the same player has loses a PC 3 sessions in a row.

 

[Acid_crash]

I'm a player in a Star Wars game with a good friend of mine being the games master (been reading Conan last few days that Games Master lingo is starting to stick ).

Anyway, the story is fine but he is bad with descriptions. I don't mean kind of bad, I mean Horrible. He started the game like this, "You are all in the cantina, you see the bartender mixing a drink, what do you do?" I mean, c'mon there...how in the world are we suppose to react to that kind of lame description? It didn't take me long to tell him that he needs to work on that, and he said that he will, but so far this week he hasn't worked on it at all, and I feel that tomorrow will be the same thing as last week.


***ranting, sorry about ranting***


If in doubt, if you have a bad Games Master, you have the option to fire him/her. I told my friend that if he has two more sessions like the last one, I was going to fire him from being my Games Master and I was going to run my own game.

 

[3catcircus]

I think that there are two very different aspects of DMing -- Game Preparation and Game Execution.

Some DMs are out to beat the PCs in Game Preparation ("Aha, THIS will throw them for a loop! They can't even hit this with their best weapons!") but then turn into softies for the Execution, offering lots of ways out and chances to work around things. Other DMs are pretty general in Game Preparatoin but then turn into death machines for Execution ("Well, you're here and here and here, so a fireball, followed by Black Tentacles, followed by flanking here and here, and I can kill everyone in two rouns!").

Either type can be good or bad -- it depends on how well it's done in each case. One of my fellow RBDMs swears by "Make a killer encounter, but then allow the PCs to succeed when they try to work around it," and it seems to work really really well. When I've tried it that way, my players have gotten unhappy with me, saying I was just negating any real chance of legitimate victory and forcing things into a "DM lets us win" category. That's probably because I wasn't doing it very well. The other end, playing an encounter hard and trying hard to defeat the PCs, is also good -- but if you're doing that, you shouldn't also be planning a tough encounter. After all, you wouldn't want to play in a wargame against someone who got to decide what the terrain looked like, what forces you had, what forces he had, and who could come up with rules on the fly to nerf many of your abilities, would you? I wouldn't.

Part of DMing is, I think, getting over the guilt that you can feel at possibly killing someone's character through either a tough encounter, or playing the monsters or NPCs as harsh as possible - since most DMs start as players, we feel some empathy there.

Once I got over that my DMing improved - primarily because I was willing to play the monsters and NPCs as intelligently as they would be if they were a PC. Why would I end cannon fodder waves of kobolds down a bottleneck corridor to the party when I can have them ambush the party in said bottleneck, utilizing crossfire from slings or crossbows while others form a spear Phalanx set against the PCs charge? In the former, the party is like "ho-hum, *another* band of stupid lemming-kobolds." While in the latter, they may say "Wow - they are really defending their lair and fighting as hard as they can - what is so important that they are fighting this hard? Is there some relic they've got, or trying to avoid us uncovering a plot?"

I look at it the same way as a player looks at his tactical options in combat - when can he flank, is it smart to try and charge, this enemy would best be hit from afar with arrows or magic...