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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xaelvaen" data-source="post: 7270086" data-attributes="member: 6681906">Seeing this article, I thought it'd be amusing to have my players fill it out on my behalf.  I was genuinely curious what they'd say.  I promised them no repercussions for being honest, invited them over this morning early (we usually start playing around noon) and we sat down and laughed our asses off at this.  This is the honest-to-goodness compiled list these hooligans came up with:Strengths"Reading your players - being able to predict what they'll do and when, or at least having enough improvisational skills to make it seem so.""Encounter Balance - some fights make us feel like heroes, and other fights make us remember there's always someone out there better.""Getting us engaged in a story just to twist us in knots or break our hearts by the end.  Just really awesome stories.""Lenient on character creation - if something is broken, you'll fix it yourself so we can use something, and just balance the rest of the party, and the monsters, accordingly.""Voices - you do a crazy amount of accents."Weaknesses"Reading your players - we try day after day to throw you off your kilter, it's frustrating you know.""Getting us engaged in a story just to twist us in knots or break our hearts by the end.  Just really awesome stories."  - At this point, they realized they should just add all the strengths to my weaknesses."Encounter Balance - ... some fights make us feel like Chumps, rightfully so in gritty games, but chumps nonetheless.  Maybe we should learn to run away... Nah.""Getting us engaged in a story just to twist us in knots or break our hearts by the end.  Just really crushing stories.""Lenient on character creation - if something is broken, you'll fix it yourself so we can use something, and just balance the rest of the party, and the monsters, accordingly... which makes it impossible to play anywhere else, so we're stuck at your table for the next 20 years.""Really Hard to DM for - you've done so much that we feel like there's no way to surprise you.  You're always bloody prepared!"  I will note this is why they only DM for me once a year (my Birthday)."Voices - you do a crazy amount of accents, including the bad ones."All their joke answers aside, I'll list my actual weaknesses - things I feel I definitely need to improve upon.Real WeaknessesMaintaining information delivery speed.  Sometimes I get so excited for a plot that I give the players too much information too early and it doesn't have the proper pace feel to it.  It'll sometimes drive a discovery session into an action session far ahead of schedule.  Been working on this one a long, long while.Remembering small bits of foreshadowing or plot I've delivered to the characters in their spontaneous actions.  If the Barbarian went into the woods one night to rest instead of staying in the Inn, and I found it interesting and rewarded him with a small bit of plot for the future to come, I'll not always remember those tidbits I dropped.  I'm very thankful my players take notes, seriously.The last weakness could also be said of other spontaneous things I make up, like names and places.  Just really glad there are many note-takers at the table.Follow-through.  Sometimes, creating so many campaigns from scratch, I quickly lose interest in one particular plot we're playing.  When I do, I'm honest with my players and tell them that for some reason, the current characters and their current schemes just aren't keeping my interest.  Sometimes this results in new characters in a new setting, or the same characters just switching gears and putting the focus somewhere else.  I'm very thankful for my understanding players, and hope you enjoyed their 'views' (biased views) of me.</blockquote>

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