D&D General Which Aspect of DMing Do you Struggle Most With?

[Hexmage-EN]

As a DM I greatly enjoy combat. I find it fun to build battle maps, design homebrew monsters, and think about how monsters will synergize. When running combat, I mostly just have to worry about what's on their statblocks and general tactics.

When it comes to world building and developing NPCs, though, I find the brainstorming portion fun but feel myself get more stressed out in the hours leading up to a game that I'd like to be more roleplay heavy. Combat feels a lot more straightforward and manageable to me versus the party having free reign to explore or interact with who they want in a non-dungeon environment.

For a more concrete example of what I'm talking about, I have been designing both a hag's lair and its features (including set dressing, unique items, NPCs, possible curses the hag could inflict, etc) as well as a more linear dungeon scenario. I've created a 10-page word document for the former, and it feels a lot more mentally intensive in trying to juggle everything I've developed, remembering the details, and creating on the spot improv for how NPCs react or what happens if a PC wants to know what books are on a bookshelf versus running groups of monsters.

Although, I think part of this comes from me trying to plan too much ahead of time and being afraid to wing it.

 

[Steampunkette]

Confidence.

Before every session I'm second-guessing every single decision and thought process I've ever had about my talent as a DM. I am testing out accents and voices and hating them. And that last 30 minutes before the game starts before I get on the call before I sit down with friends... It's everything I can do not to call everyone and tell them that I have died and therefore must regretfully cancel the session.

And then during the game everything's pretty much fine. Because every time I do a stupid accent or a ridiculous voice or air some plot line that I've second-guessed four or five times everyone seems to eat it up.

And then at the end of the session everyone's laughing and happy or heartbroken and happy and telling me what a good DM I am or what parts of the session they particularly liked or high-fiving or complaining about some minor problem and I explain more about that problem and then they're happy about what happened... And I'm delighted on everything is right with the world.

And then 2 hours later I'm wondering why they lie to me so much about enjoying my games which are clearly garbage.

I've been playing D&D for around 30 years. It has never changed in that regard.

 

[hopeless]

Unsure.
Initially I realised I didn't know as much about 5e as I should have and much of my time running the game was trying to keep up to date.
I created my own monsters, npcs and treasure in an effort to make the game more distinctive.
I'm far from feeling like I'm reasonably competent, but i still enjoyed trying.
The hardest part to me is trying to get the players involved as they have resisted my efforts to obtain more details about their character's histories for example three of them their parents are dead and the fourth as an acolyte hasn't even addressed that part!
Those details help with the story, but I have been looking much further for inspiration such as skipping hoard of the dragon queen for a modified against the cult of the reptile god for instance.
And found a way to include it in the campaign I had been running back then.
Hope you find your own inspiration to help you with the parts you found difficult too.

 

[TheDelphian]

I don't struggle with a great deal which may be the issue.

A sort of complacency and not improving all that much.

I use to try to choose a single weakness and get better at it then once it becomes better move to another weakness, but haven't been like that in a while. Partially in laziness partially cause my players seem happy.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Map making!

I feel very confident at adventure design, world building, designing challenging combats, pacing, etc. But for whatever reason when I sit down to draw out a map for a dungeon my mind goes blank.

Luckily we live in a time with an absolute proliferation of free or cheap maps online. I often use these as a starting point and then modify them to fit my adventure.

 

[Morrus]

Accents/voice acting. Though not to the extent that it bothers me. I just accept I can't do that.

 

[ccs]

The two biggest one's, even after all these years of doing this:

1) Naming the NPCs &/or monsters.
This is a problem if I'm winging it. Thankfully there's random name generators.....

2) predicting how much progress/content the players will get through in any given session.
I constantly overestimate this. Always have, regardless of the edition.
So it's not really a problem per-se as I've always got more content.

 

[Charlaquin]

Confidence.

Before every session I'm second-guessing every single decision and thought process I've ever had about my talent as a DM. I am testing out accents and voices and hating them. And that last 30 minutes before the game starts before I get on the call before I sit down with friends... It's everything I can do not to call everyone and tell them that I have died and therefore must regretfully cancel the session.

And then during the game everything's pretty much fine. Because every time I do a stupid accent or a ridiculous voice or air some plot line that I've second-guessed four or five times everyone seems to eat it up.

And then at the end of the session everyone's laughing and happy or heartbroken and happy and telling me what a good DM I am or what parts of the session they particularly liked or high-fiving or complaining about some minor problem and I explain more about that problem and then they're happy about what happened... And I'm delighted on everything is right with the world.

And then 2 hours later I'm wondering why they lie to me so much about enjoying my games which are clearly garbage.

I've been playing D&D for around 30 years. It has never changed in that regard.

I feel you. We’re always our own harshest critics.

 

[Yora]

Coming up with a campaign concept.

 

[hopeless]

Coming up with a campaign concept.

In the one I ran I took some inspiration from the Neverwinter mmo and the 4e sourcebook on that setting.
And initially was going with the Mage's Guild trying to turn the city and kingdom into a magocracy only rather than a few sessions leading into the shadowfell I let the players actions guide me.
Thus the run in with were rats the dwarven run Stingray and eventual trip down south to locate one of the missing heirs.
Had tried to set up a short email scenario intended to lead into the next session that involved them in some downtime to see how they'd handle that as the ramifications of the metropolis they had come from had been destroyed by an ancient dragon bursting itself free from the mountainside part of the city was built upon.
Refugees streaming in as the gauge the scale of the problem as that free time (2 weeks) would allow them to decide where they wanted to go next.
Continue after the missing prince last seen being carried to what is assumed safety further southwards by a gold dragon that had been posing as an acolyte of the Dawnfather, trace the remaining Cloaked Serpent Cultists in the fishing village or go back to help the refugees.
There are other options after all, but I like to think they might surprise me.

If I had to make a recommendation I'd suggest select a favourite movie or tv series and a book or comic you liked and see how mixing them might inspire an adventure idea and go from there?

 

[DemoMonkey]

Scheduling.

 

[ReshiIRE]

Does prepping absolutely everything needed and not losing motivation or discipline count?

I have wanted to run a Cyberpunk campaign for such a long time, in a homebrew world, but haven't gotten work done in it in months and still haven't found more players for it. That's arguably down to mental health but I was in one of the biggest creative bursts I've ever had a few months ago and now... nothing. Feels really sucky, but hopefully I can get out of that funk and get back into it.

Though I'm sure I'll struggle with other aspects after that

 

[Lia Evans]

Character voices and details.

I have a habit of going very detail light that sometimes annoys my players. I'll bring up the big picture and major things of note, but always forget smaller details that are important. I blame ADHD but yee.

 

[overgeeked]

It might sound like a cop out, but player buy in. I've had a few games start and flounder spectacularly in the early stages lately. And it mostly comes down to a mismatch between my expectations and the players' expectations. Like they're there just to play something but then end up not enjoying the game I'm running because they don't actually want to play what I want to run. So making that sound more like a me problem than a them problem would be phrasing it as "not expressing my expectations to the players effectively".

 

[Oofta]

Put me on the "I feel like a pretender" DM as well. Doesn't matter what people tell me, how much we enjoy the game, I feel like I'm faking it. When it comes to actually running the game I get caught up in it and it's fine, funny accents, voices and all. But before and after?

The other thing (and maybe this goes back to my first point) is that I never feel like I've prepared enough detail. I mean, I'm good at improv and I want player decisions to drive the game so I'm not going to map out a lot of details. But I always feel like I should have more.

Last but not least I have a bad tendency to ignore my general outline and throw in tangents that take the campaign from what we've been building on since the session 0. I don't have a plotline to follow, but I do have a general idea of world events that are going on in one area and I always seem to introduce a whole mini-campaign that's a complete offshoot. I guess it give people a break from the "main" campaign, but still. I keep telling myself I'm not going to do it and then next thing I know I improvise some major plot twist or introduce a new threat or something and off we go.

Oh well. I think most DMs are a work in progress, aren't we?

 

[RFB Dan]

For me it's the problem players and my patience for them. I've had too many hyper-munchkins, metagamers from hell, rules lawyers, and misogynistic grognards that don't listen when they're told to stop being so douche-y.

OK, so maybe my real problem is vetting players.

 

[Cadence]

Not fudging die rolls, or hit points, or reinforcements mid-combat to counter (un)lucky die rolls or good strategy on the part of the players. [As opposed to say adjusting when the challenge level was nowhere near what I was intending or I forgot to telegraph something I meant to or the like].

 

[bedir than]

Scheduling.

Yep. Putting the onus on the DM to also be the event planner and host has to change

 

[Burnside]

Trying to gauge whether the players, collectively or individually, at any given time during a longer campaign, want freedom to explore and pursue their own character-driven objectives or would just like me to nudge them expediently into an encounter/adventure situation and not "make them try to figure it out."

 

[OptionalRule]

General DM Anxiety. So much so I wrote a whole post on it that seems to have helped a lot of folks.

Managing DM Anxiety