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

[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