D&D General What is the worst piece of DM advice people give that you see commonly spread?

[Bacon Bits]

If we're just going into preference: Death is a worthwhile stake that has mattered at any point since 1999.

Jack Chick lied to me.

 

[S'mon]

Gary Gygax's terrible book Role-Playing Mastery (which even he later disavowed!) is absolutely full of this sort of stuff and has quite a lot of generally bad advice.

I was certainly surprised by how bad that book was.

There was a lot of bad advice on Youtube during the 4e era. A lot of you "You should do..." videos followed by "My game was a disaster!" videos - from the same author. It tended to centre around what Alexander calls "My Precious Encounter" design, and the idea that it's the GM's job to provide an entertaining dramatic narrative for the players to experience. Seems overall a lot better in recent years.

 

[S'mon]

Allow anyone into your game and make them fit in (no matter what).

The truth is, not everyone is a fit for every table. There are MANY factors here, but the point is trying to fit players that are just not a fit for the group (or when a DM is just not a fit for the players) just tends to give everyone a lackluster (or worse) experience.

The Five Geek Social Fallacies as advice, yup.

 

[Charlaquin]

“Players are the enemy, and will seek to undermine you at every opportunity. Giving them a say at the table or treating them like equals is a huge mistake - they will use it to exploit you every time”

I could not imagine running a game with people I do not trust and like, and yet some DMs clearly loathe their players, going by some of what is said in discussion!

This is definitely bad DM advice, but is it “commonly spread”? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually advise DMs to be confrontational towards their players like this, except maybe quotes from Gary Gygax that everyone agrees were bad advice.

 

[Tutara]

This is definitely bad DM advice, but is it “commonly spread”? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually advise DMs to be confrontational towards their players like this, except maybe quotes from Gary Gygax that everyone agrees were bad advice.

I see it far more than I would like to - certainly here and on other discussion forums. I don’t think it would be appropriate to cite examples, though.

 

[Charlaquin]

eh, this is one of those things i think needs to be determined at an individual table/campaign level, but if you have agreed that death should be on the table then yes this is true (true that it is bad advice that is)

Yeah, my preferred version is “don’t point your DM gun at any character you aren’t willing to shoot,” because it covers both angles: if you want character death to be on the table, you have to be ready to actually let the characters die. If you don’t want untimely character deaths to ruin the narrative, just don’t put (unplanned) character death on the table in the first place.

 

[Charlaquin]

I see it far more than I would like to - certainly here and on other discussion forums. I don’t think it would be appropriate to cite examples, though.

Fair enough

 

[GrahamWills]

"What is the worst piece of DM advice people give that you see commonly spread?"
The mathematician in me has to break this statement down a bit to formalize the parts.

worst: What are outcomes that are seen as bad? This could be causing emotional harm to actual players, but I think the general tenor would be that bad advice makes the game less fun to experience, and so the worst advice is the one that causes the most loss of fun. A bit wishy-washy, but essentially I'm taking fun as the metric and we want to consider advice that minimizes it.

advice people give: For the sake of simplicity, so we can all argue on the same footing, 'people' is best defined as "within enworld". We could broaden it, but let's assume the "DM advising" perfect population is roughly similar to our.

commonly spread: We can imagine terrible GM advice like "physically murder your players" that minimize fun, but this qualifier introduces a weighting factor -- we need to weight the advice badness by how often it is suggested.

So worst advice = MIN ( Badness(advice) x Frequency(advice) )

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With this is mind, I'd like to suggest "The GM should not make plans" as the worst advice. This advice is given in essentially every thread on enworld. It is the third suggestion in this thread, for example! So its frequency is close enough to 100%. It's not the worst advice in the world -- but it seems people are about 50-50 on how well it works for them. So about half the time, it's not good advice. Now that's not as bad as many bad ideas, but the frequency of this statement is so high, I can't think of anything else that is worse.

So, my contender is "The GM should not make plans" with a weighted badness of 50%.

 

[pointofyou]

"What is the worst piece of DM advice people give that you see commonly spread?"
The mathematician in me has to break this statement down a bit to formalize the parts.

worst: What are outcomes that are seen as bad? This could be causing emotional harm to actual players, but I think the general tenor would be that bad advice makes the game less fun to experience, and so the worst advice is the one that causes the most loss of fun. A bit wishy-washy, but essentially I'm taking fun as the metric and we want to consider advice that minimizes it.

advice people give: For the sake of simplicity, so we can all argue on the same footing, 'people' is best defined as "within enworld". We could broaden it, but let's assume the "DM advising" perfect population is roughly similar to our.

commonly spread: We can imagine terrible GM advice like "physically murder your players" that minimize fun, but this qualifier introduces a weighting factor -- we need to weight the advice badness by how often it is suggested.

So worst advice = MIN ( Badness(advice) x Frequency(advice) )

-------

With this is mind, I'd like to suggest "The GM should not make plans" as the worst advice. This advice is given in essentially every thread on enworld. It is the third suggestion in this thread, for example! So its frequency is close enough to 100%. It's not the worst advice in the world -- but it seems people are about 50-50 on how well it works for them. So about half the time, it's not good advice. Now that's not as bad as many bad ideas, but the frequency of this statement is so high, I can't think of anything else that is worse.

So, my contender is "The GM should not make plans" with a weighted badness of 50%.

I'm pretty sure I recognize the tongue-in-cheek nature of this but I do not think "The GM should not make plans" is the same as "the GM should not have future events pre-determined" and I will stand by the latter.

 

[Oofta]

Don't bother tracking monster hit points, just have them die when it's most dramatic.