D&D General worst (real) advice for DMs

[Blue]

A good understanding or general awareness of characters is one thing, and I fully agree with.

But
1. knowing
2. all abilities
3. of all characters

… is beyond reasonable for a DM. It is a subset of the worse advice that DM’s must know all the rules.

My first page of my session prep has a feature & skills list for all of the PCs so I can remember to put them in adventures. It's 10-15 minutes to update every month or two when they level up. Mind you, I don't need to have the specifics, just what the main focuses are.

Sorry, this is trivially shown false.

Again, please note that I advocating knowing what all the features the PCs have are - I did not advocate knowing the details of all features. Let the players do that.,

My job is the DM, running all the monsters, knowing all the rooms, building the world. Players’ jobs are their characters. If we’re going to tell DMs that they need to master all of the player character’s abilities as well as the monsters, and come up with a world, and the dungeon… it’s bad advice.

I‘m advocating ignorance. Just that knowing all abilities (spells to!?) of all characters is too high a bar to advise.

When you bring up things like "all spells", you are missing the point. Are you letting the caster cast? Yes? Then you are not having a feature they can't use. You don't need the details.

On the other hand, knowing that your ranger has a favored terrain of desert and it hasn't come up in over half a year of play is a great chance where to locate the next part of what you are doing. Or that the paladin is immune to disease and that hasn't come up when picking a particular foe.

 

[uzirath]

My two cents: I don't think that knowing all the rules of a game is bad advice for playing any game. And advocating ignorance is just terrible advice in general.

Many RPGs differ from other games in that they have an enormous quantity of rules. I never expect GMs or players to know them all. I’ve been gaming since 1980 and I wouldn’t claim to know all the rules of anything beyond ultra-lite systems like Lasers and Feelings.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I did not advocate knowing the details of all features.

That is what I am saying is bad advice. I didn’t say “knowledge of what abilities the PCs have”. I said “knowledge of the abilities”. I was probably too economical in my choice of words.

It seems there is a debate over what I meant by “must know” as being “should have a general idea”. I did not.

 

[Lanefan]

Another one:

"Don't worry about tracking hit points. Just have the monster(s) die whenever you think they should."

I mean, why settle for killing imaginary monsters and NPCs, when you can kill player agency instead?

But - but, but - killing player agency is how DMs earn experience points!

 

[CleverNickName]

But - but, but - killing player agency is how DMs earn experience points!

I like to use the Rules Variant in the DMG that gives the DM experience points for TPKs.

 

[Lanefan]

The original relationship was pretty adversarial, yeah. I remember it well: DMs generally regarded it as their job to find clever ways of killing off players while keeping survival possible as a matter of principle.

By "players" here I hope you in fact mean their characters...

That said, I think that's when the game works best - when it's played as war rather than sport. The DM's job is to present a range of challenges from easy to not-a-chance-in-hell; the players' collective job is to find ways of surviving and overcoming (or avoiding) these challenges.

 

[Composer99]

So.

Which doesn't in the slightest address that it's the DM's responsibility to write good adventures and give players spotlight, and highlighting features they haven't used is important. Please, actually address what is written.


Really? Do you give the caster a chance to cast? Then yes, you are aware of their ability and have given it spotlight, exactly as I mentioned. Again, I don't think you are actually addressing my point, just making up a point in your head that you are trying to respond to.


Creating adventures tailored to the party isn't something you do at an open table. So this is irrelevant to what I put forth.

Honestly, all of this comes across as... not responding to what I wrote, because you're... assuming I didn't respond to what you wrote in response to this particular nugget of advice:

The DM must know all of the abilities of all of the PCs in the party.

To which you responded, and I quote...

This is actually great advice. If your players pick abilities to focus on things, like trap disarming or what-have-you, and your don't know about it so they never get a chance to shine, that's a missed DM opportunity and makes the player regret picking it.

Now, you think it's bad advice - why do you feel that way?

You did not include qualifiers such as "but only when you're creating adventures tailored to the party", or "but only when you're not playing a published module out of the box". You included no qualifiers at all. You just straight-up agreed with "The DM must know all of the abilities of all of the PCs in the party." If you want to amend your position to include such qualifiers, well and good, but it's no use trying to rebut my remarks as if you had included them all along. The actual words you responded to and the actual words you wrote are right there.

The simple fact is that your initial statement was one of unreserved and unqualified agreement with spectacularly bad DMing advice. If you didn't intend to express that degree of agreement, well and good, but it's bad joss to go around pretending that's not what you did.

---

As for specifics, frankly, I still disagree even with qualifiers such as those added in, so strongly that I'm prepared to say you're just plain wrong.

To my first point, I stand by my statement without modification.
Players are responsible for their characters. DMs have enough to be getting on with. If a DM wants to generate content specifically catering to their players, well and good. And if, in order to do so, a DM wants to have a strong handle on what the PCs can do, also well and good. But expecting DMs to "know all of the abilities of all of the PCs in the party" is bad advice, plain and simple.

I want my players to be advocates for themselves (unless they're both younger and newer players). If you pick an ability, and you feel that it's being underserved is causing spotlight issues, bring it up with the DM. Let's also keep in mind that managing who gets the spotlight, which is part of what a DM does, is not exclusively a province of "know[ing] all of the abilities of all of the PCs in the party" - or indeed any of them at all, necessarily. Allowing PCs to leverage relationships with NPCs, leverage social or celebrity status, or achieve particular goals or objectives, or presenting adventure hooks tailored to appeal to certain PCs' goals or personal desires are all ways of managing spotlight that don't require knowing their abilities.

To my second point.
Even 5e, which is lightweight compared to 3.5 or 4e when it comes to player-facing content, has hundreds of pages of player-facing content, comprising dozens of race, class, background and subclass options, hundreds of features among those options, and several hundreds of spells. By way of comparison, the first-printing PHB is just over 300 pages, or, say, just a few pages short of being twice as thick as the entire ruleset (including optional rules and setup charts) of the most recent edition of World in Flames, a meaty and complicated wargame where I would say it would be entirely unreasonable to expect a player to know the entire ruleset. And that's without taking into account monster statblocks, DMG content, supplements such as Xanathar's or Tasha's, and rules and content added in adventures and supplements such as Piety in the Theros book, all the waterborne adventure stuff in Saltmarsh, etc. etc.

Not to mention your rebuttal of my second point is nonsensical. What does, "Do you give the caster a chance to cast?" even mean? Unless I'm going out of my way to shut down spellcasting at every opportunity, there's nothing I can do to not "give the caster a chance to cast" - they just announce they're doing it and then do it. What is more, knowing that a PC can cast spells is not at all the same thing as knowing every spell they can cast, and frankly, it's sketchy that you're coming across as conflating the two things.

To my third point.
Since you did not exclude open table games from your initial statements as they are written, it frankly strikes me as illegitimately moving the goalposts to turn around after the fact and claim that you all along never meant to include them. That consideration aside, given points (1) and (2), suffice to say I stand by this point as well.

 

[Hussar]

Reddit is a breeding ground for terrible advice. Of the ones already mentioned, I'd like to add:
"Combat taking too long? Use a 60-second timer! If the time is up and they haven't called their action, they lose their turn."

To be fair, I've used a shot clock. And, yes, 60 seconds is MORE than enough time to call out their actions. Note, it's not, "finish your turn in 60 seconds", it's call out the actions in 60 seconds.

I wonder if this might be a bigger issue in online games, particularly ones without video chat, where sometimes I think players dither and don't realize how much they did. I actually timed one of my worst offenders once and presented the times everyone in the group, including the DM took during combat. It revealed that this one player was actually taking more time than the entire group COMBINED, including the DM!

Thus the shot clock was born. Almost never used once the house rule hit the table and never particularly rigorously applied. Just having it there fixed the problem.

So, no, this is one piece of advice that I think is very useful. If you haven't even decided what your character is going to do within 60 seconds of your turn starting, you aren't paying close enough attention to the game. Just pass and let other people play. Or, better yet, pay attention, have an idea of what your character is going to do BEFORE your turn, and then don't waste the table's time.

On a side note, this is one area where 4e actually gleamed bright. Because pretty much every character had off turn actions, and frequently had ways to grant other characters off turn actions, players were encouraged to pay attention a lot more because it wasn't half an hour before your turn came back around and you got to do something for thirty seconds and went back to spectating for the next half an hour.

 

[Orius]

See, this is what I personally would classify as bad advice. It IS good to occasionally throw stuff at the party they can't handle, and stuff that's far too easy.

If you train players that everything they encounter is a beatable fight, they can and will default to fights. And they will never learn to plan to retreat.

And sometimes you need to let the players feel like heroes and curbstomp opponents. if their numebrs keep going up but every battle plays the same it will never feel like they are becoming badass.

Well I said it wasn't an absolute. I do think a DM should include a range of difficulties to encounters, and I agree with your point above about antagonistic DMs. Challenge shouldn't be something that is likely to TPK the party as a matter of course with the DM shrugging it off as "realistic", but something that is potentially deadly if the players get careless is fine. The catch is that the dice can make things unpredictable so the DM can't always tell how an encounter will go especially if it's a monster the he's never used before. I think it's also a bit better to advise newer DMs to be more cautious with things while they're learning to run the game.

 

[teitan]

"You don't need to read the DMG"
"The DM's job is to always say yes"
"Every encounter should be perfectly balanced to the party's level"... no Karen, it shouldn't. If your players are going into every encounter with swords swinging then you are playing DiablOD&D not D&D. Quit button mashing. A Hill Giant is a perfectly fine encounter for a party of 2nd level PCs in a properly run campaign. Quit worrying about challenge ratings and "balanced" encounters.