D&D 5E What DM flaw has caused you to actually leave a game?

[Hussar]

Surely it depends on the table’s preference? If the players prefer combat and social interaction over exploration, then sure don’t bore them with uninteresting stuff, or wanking about as you so colorfully put it

But I do have to wonder about continuing to play a game of imagination when it’s become boring and routine. In my mind’s eye a room (that’s been sufficiently, and distinctly, illustrated by the DMs description) is a world of exciting possibility. Assuming a room is just a box with a few hidden items, so just give us them already, seems quite dull..?

Is searching a room actually interesting exploration? Really? After the fifteenth room in that adventure? I love exploration, but, actually make it exploration - finding unknown things and learning new stuff. Filling in that hex map, scouting ahead of the party, finding or making maps, discovering new information about the society that the PC's find themselves in - that's exploration.

Endless "I search the chest, I listen for traps at the door, I look for secret doors, Is the X trapped" is just as boring as endless meaningless combats or pointless NPC interactions.

 

[Hussar]

We had SOPs back in the day, but they were usually SOPs for the players not the characters. They were used as short-hand "against" DMs that required the utterance of magic words. When we got tired of pixel bitching we'd just say, "SOP". Where SOP = "we carefully search, examine, open, study, recall lore about, and ponder over everything you (the DM) just described to us. If you said a noun, it gets the treatment." Sure it was passive-aggressive, but having to openly state every single action or mental function, no matter how obvious, was just annoying.

So much this.

 

[iserith]

Is searching a room actually interesting exploration?

I'd say that's all in the presentation.

When you're exploring in my adventure locations, you're basically deciding on whether you want to risk a wandering monster happening upon the party in exchange for the chance of finding something useful and/or valuable. As well, almost all treasure in my games is found via exploration challenges, not combat or social interaction challenges (the latter being awarded typically with XP). Secret doors lead to hidden caches, shortcuts around dangerous areas, or places off the beaten path that can serve a resting area - all good reasons to risk a wandering monster encounter if the PCs aren't in bad shape.

What I've found is that players really get into it and, with a good procedure on the DM's side of the screen, it resolves quickly and keeps everything nice and tightly paced.

 

[Hussar]

I'd say that's all in the presentation.

When you're exploring in my adventure locations, you're basically deciding on whether you want to risk a wandering monster happening upon the party in exchange for the chance of finding something useful and/or valuable. As well, almost all treasure in my games is found via exploration challenges, not combat or social interaction challenges (the latter being awarded typically with XP). Secret doors lead to hidden caches, shortcuts around dangerous areas, or places off the beaten path that can serve a resting area - all good reasons to risk a wandering monster encounter if the PCs aren't in bad shape.

What I've found is that players really get into it and, with a good procedure on the DM's side of the screen, it resolves quickly and keeps everything nice and tightly paced.

Whereas, in my experience, that sort of thing turns into a mindless procedure grind. Every room is treated like a the party is a bomb squad with endless questions, poking, prodding and sure, when you find something it's great, but, most of the time, there isn't anything to find. But, because the party never actually knows what is or is not important, everything gets treated as important. It's like insisting that the PC's must talk to every single NPC out there just to find those 20% that are actually important. Snore.

Being able to assume, on both sides of the screen, means that the game runs much faster and there is a lot less faffing around time. Granted, I do get that this is totally a playstyle thing. It's not that you're wrong and I'm right. Absolutely not. It's that for me, your style just isn't a good fit. If there are five things to check out in a room - a bed, a desk, a rug, the walls and another door - I'd much, MUCH rather the DM simply state, "You check the room and find the following" without me having to enumerate every little thing. And holding the "Well, you could check the room but, you might have wandering encounters" stick is just annoying.

 

[iserith]

Whereas, in my experience, that sort of thing turns into a mindless procedure grind. Every room is treated like a the party is a bomb squad with endless questions, poking, prodding and sure, when you find something it's great, but, most of the time, there isn't anything to find. But, because the party never actually knows what is or is not important, everything gets treated as important. It's like insisting that the PC's must talk to every single NPC out there just to find those 20% that are actually important. Snore.

Still sounds like a poor presentation to me which is producing the outcomes you experienced. This is not at all how it plays out in my games. What you describe sounds an awful lot like players trying to avoid gotchas which I don't employ.

Being able to assume, on both sides of the screen, means that the game runs much faster and there is a lot less faffing around time. Granted, I do get that this is totally a playstyle thing. It's not that you're wrong and I'm right. Absolutely not. It's that for me, your style just isn't a good fit. If there are five things to check out in a room - a bed, a desk, a rug, the walls and another door - I'd much, MUCH rather the DM simply state, "You check the room and find the following" without me having to enumerate every little thing. And holding the "Well, you could check the room but, you might have wandering encounters" stick is just annoying.

I would still put the pacing of my game up against anyone else's any day of the week and twice on Saturdays.

 

[Lanefan]

I think you'll find cases where the DM wants something to 'happen' in almost any D&D campaign. But I think where I differ is how I deal with it. I've seen plenty of DM's try to force something upon the players by having them all roll perception checks until someone succeeds. My approach is to just not do that. Players roll only when they take an action. If I feel something needs to happen plotwise, or the players need to discover something, I just tell them.

I noticed this difference in yesterday's session, in which I was a player and not the DM. The DM had all of us make perception checks, because he obviously wanted to move the plot forward. Obviously someone is going to succeed at the check, and so the DM tells that player what they learn. But why even have these checks then? Why not either straight up tell the players what you want them to know, or wait until one player decides to investigate?

Plan C, which I do all the time, is to just have someone roll on behalf of the entire party; in effect batching all the individual rolls together. Or a variant: if one PC has special knowledge e.g. a party might or might not notice something in the woods and has a Ranger along I'll give a roll (usual odds) to the Ranger and another (perhaps more difficult) for the rest of the party combined.

But you could still have that if only one player made a roll. Why force a roll on every player? Why not wait till one player takes an action first? I take issue with the idea of a DM presuming an action on the part of the player, and setting up a possibility for failure for something the players did not choose to do at all.

You're setting up a possibility for success, not failure.

If they don't specifically do something to earn a roll they're going to auto-fail under your system. Giving a pre-emptive roll or a passive* roll gives a chance for success where otherwise there would be none. See the difference?

* - and yes I agree this is far from the best term. My first thought to replace it is "auto-pilot".

Lan-"typing on autopilot"-efan

EDIT TO ADD: and keep in mind that even if they blow their auto-pilot roll they can still get another roll by declaring an action, as per usual.

 

[Valmarius]

As one of Iserith's regular players I can attest to the amount of material we cover in a single session.
To use a recent session as an example, playing his one-shot Fimbulvetr, we had:
A PC introduction scene that lead into a social interaction scene trying to sway a crowd of NPCs.
A combat encounter pitting us against the NPCs we failed to convince and a powerful leader character.
A social/exploration scene where we struggled through a drug-induced vision quest.
A two-part combat encounter that started against a tough opponent and then threatened us from the opposite side of the map with a gang of weaker ones.
Short-rest and preparation for the arrival of the villain.
Epic dragon fight with spawning undead.
Epilogue covering the fate of each PC after the adventure wrapped up.

We got through all of this in 4 hours.
By only asking for rolls when it actually matters to the game and letting other actions simply succeed the whole story progresses at pace.


And to add my own DM pet peeve to the list:
I've only ever left a game once, because almost no effort was made to give new PCs a reason to team up and players who didn't take that task on themselves started getting into PvP.

 

[Hussar]

Still sounds like a poor presentation to me which is producing the outcomes you experienced. This is not at all how it plays out in my games. What you describe sounds an awful lot like players trying to avoid gotchas which I don't employ.



I would still put the pacing of my game up against anyone else's any day of the week and twice on Saturdays.

Instead, it's an endless litany of nothing to find here. I mean, how often is something there to actually find? 10% of the time? 20%? IOW, 80% of the time, all that "We look here, do this, do that" is a complete waste of time, because there is actually nothing to find.

Imagine if you applied that to the other 2 pillars. Even if 50% of the social interactions with NPC's were pointless, the players would be bored out of their tree. If 50% of the combat events were not actually doing anything - just mindless dice fapping with no real consequences - the players would be well within their rights to be bored out of their tree.

But, with this type of exploration, the majority of play time is pointless. There is actually nothing to find, but, because he players never know that, they are forced to spend the time and treat every single situation as important.

I mean, look at [MENTION=6801813]Valmarius[/MENTION]' description of the last session. One example of exploration that was tied to a social encounter. Nice mix of combat and social pillars, but, virtually no exploration. So, sure, it's not slowing your group down to insist on exploration when they don't actually DO any exploration.

 

[iserith]

Instead, it's an endless litany of nothing to find here. I mean, how often is something there to actually find? 10% of the time? 20%? IOW, 80% of the time, all that "We look here, do this, do that" is a complete waste of time, because there is actually nothing to find.

Imagine if you applied that to the other 2 pillars. Even if 50% of the social interactions with NPC's were pointless, the players would be bored out of their tree. If 50% of the combat events were not actually doing anything - just mindless dice fapping with no real consequences - the players would be well within their rights to be bored out of their tree.

But, with this type of exploration, the majority of play time is pointless. There is actually nothing to find, but, because he players never know that, they are forced to spend the time and treat every single situation as important.

Again, this all sounds like presentation issues to me. You must have had some bad experiences.

I mean, look at @Valmarius' description of the last session. One example of exploration that was tied to a social encounter. Nice mix of combat and social pillars, but, virtually no exploration. So, sure, it's not slowing your group down to insist on exploration when they don't actually DO any exploration.

The one-shot being referenced features very little in the way of exploration challenges. It's about Viking-esque characters trying to get into Valhalla, not about exploring an adventure location. More exploration was to be had in The Delve, Sunless Citadel, Ruin of the Gorgon, Secret Party House of the Hill Giant Playboy, and other adventures [MENTION=6801813]Valmarius[/MENTION] has been in. All of which had just as much or more content covered in the same amount of time. We get stuff done.

It's not exploration challenges that slow the game down, if they are presented well. From observing and playing in other people's games, what slows things down are all the other things that we've streamlined out of our games - the player debates over what to do next, the 20 Questions to the DM, the endless worrying over gotchas, the quirky cagey NPCs, the asking to make checks instead of stating a goal and approach, the dilly-dallying on a combat turn, and so on. Get rid of that stuff and you save so much time that you don't have to cut out the exploration pillar and have the DM assume and establish what the PCs are doing.

 

[Dausuul]

I'd say that's all in the presentation.

When you're exploring in my adventure locations, you're basically deciding on whether you want to risk a wandering monster happening upon the party in exchange for the chance of finding something useful and/or valuable.

Seems to me it's not in the presentation; it's in the wandering monsters. That creates the time pressure where players don't have the luxury of examining every little thing, so the decision about whether and what to examine is meaningful and interesting.

An awful lot of traditional D&D simply does not work without time pressure of some kind.