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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lyxen" data-source="post: 8386189" data-attributes="member: 7032025">Easy, for me it is whether I can feel my character really having adventures in their world. There is no "one-size fits all" way of doing this, it's a combination of many factors, great NPCs, great description, great stories, ignoring the system enough so that the strings are not too visible, so many factors...Honestly, even after more than 40 years, it's still part of the magic of the game, I can never point things that make it happen. I can certainly point out things that prevent me from getting there, like heavy railroading, bland situations and NPCs, technical rules-heavy system, ruleslawyers, powergaming, but even avoiding all these elements is not a guarantee that the magic will happen.We did that exercise with LARPs and our whole team at the time, because some games went incredibly well in terms of immersion whereas others, despite being objectively better in terms of organisation (when you run games for more than 200 people, it has to be really organised), completely failed, and we never could find out the recipes for success. We knew what to avoid, but not how to make games great.Our conclusion, just as is mine for TTRPGs, is that it's not completely up to the DM, as the PH says "Playing D&D is an exercise in collaborative creation". So it's a question of the synergies emerging between all the players and the DM, even though there might still be some hiccups here and there. So, in the end, the greatest quality of a DM might be his capability to create this synergy with his players with the game that he proposes.</blockquote>

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