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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7791746" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I started DMing <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😆" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f606.png" title="Grinning squinting face    :laughing:" data-shortname=":laughing:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />Seriously though, getting to see the game from the other side of the screen was a revelation. At first I tried to be the DM I wished I’d had as a player, and I quickly realized that it made the game extremely boring. Everything was abstract, which made it very difficult to form any kind of narrative out of. I also found myself all too often having to fudge DCs because failure would mean killing what little momentum a scene had. So not only did the narrative not matter, neither did the mechanics. I felt like I wasn’t really running a game at all, I was just giving players the flimsiest of excuses to roll dice.Then I started reading advice from the likes of you and Iserith (this was around the time of the 5e playtest). The Angry GM was also a big influence. I found that following this advice required a bit of a paradigm shift for me, but once I shifted gears it was a night and day change. The vast majority of my common DMing problems were caused by the way I was adjudicating actions. Now, as a player, I just describe actions and let the DM call for checks. As a result, my characters are generally very successful.</blockquote>

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