Your biggest screw-up as a DM?

[WizarDru]

Biggest DM Mistakes?

Running Heart of Nightfang Spire for too long, and choosing to run Bastion of Broken Souls.


Seriously.

 

[Henry]

The biggest mistake as a DM was my unintentional mistreatment of a friend who drove 2 hours to a game only to have him sit doing nothing for 3 hours because I couldn't find a convenient place to drop his character into the story. He left disappointed and upset with me, and I don't blame him. It was then I learned a hard lesson: Story be damned, there's people playing this game, too. It was a mistake I've tried very hard to never repeat since.

Second biggest was probably a combat with an Spell Resistance 25 creature which turned out to be a cakewalk because I forgot the spell Resistance.

Write those special abilities prominently on the Initiatve Cards, he says!

 

[Black Omega]

My personal mistakes are many and varied, lord knows. Toward the top of the list might be running a Rokugan Game while allowing Forgotten Realms characters, or at least how I implimented this idea.

In a more specific sense, I'd have to say a battle that was run to capture the group. The set up was a good one. Sleep drugs knocked out one person and then the thugs with clubs made their attack. Then the wizard cast Web and the combat ground to a halt. The badguys hard trouble getting to PC's to attack them. The PC's had trouble escaping and even helping each other. So the battle took forever and the person who got slept had nothing to do and sat there bored.

 

[Chimera]

The biggest mistake as a DM was my unintentional mistreatment of a friend who drove 2 hours to a game only to have him sit doing nothing for 3 hours because I couldn't find a convenient place to drop his character into the story. He left disappointed and upset with me, and I don't blame him. It was then I learned a hard lesson: Story be damned, there's people playing this game, too. It was a mistake I've tried very hard to never repeat since.

We had a bit of this in our last session (I'm not GM, but I'm not really blaming him as much as this might appear).

Four hour session. New player comes in. GM is so intent on in-town roleplay (getting a wagon of illegal weapons) that only two of the five of us are doing anything. He seems not to notice me resting my forehead on my books in boredom. (Sorry, but 2.5 hours with nothing for my character to do will have that effect...)

Finally, we get into a potential combat situation. New PC has YET to make an appearance and it's over 3 hours into session with less than one hour to go. I'm really wondering about GM at this point. (Only our third meeting, second actual game session.) Don't you notice that half of us are bored silly and the new guy as NOT YET been introduced???

New PC just kinda wanders into the battle from the sidelines. I don't think that was the best way for him to be introduced. Especially when he (she) did Alter Self into the form of an Air Mephit and was nearly attacked by my character because of it. A bit of 'meta' in that I held back from doing so.

 

[Beanish]

biggest screw job i pulled was allowing a bunch of rokugan characters in my dragonlance campaign. fortunately the two most disruptive characters died. the third, a blind sorcerer was shocked when he was contacted by the tower of high sorcery for his test.

probably the second biggest screwup was when i had a group of 1st level characters on their way to a location. they hadnt had a combat yet and we were stopping soon for the night. they begged me for a fight. i rolled a die and picked a random page in my Monsternomicon and threw 5 Dregg (CR2 each) at them. that was a disasterous TPK situation.

 

[Someone]

4) Rooting for the players (ie fudging, giving them too much stuff, etc. - I'm cured now)

Mine, also. I´ve been DMing a campaing with encounters that were too easy. Now they say that a battle with two advanced dragonne while a sorcerer empties a wand of lightning bolts on them is "very hard"

 

[Rafael Ceurdepyr]

Me: (to the party) 'Why, indeed?" (settling back with a knowing look and waiting for them to "figure out" what happened)

Oh, this is a great save. I must remember this one.

 

[Rafael Ceurdepyr]

I do that all the time, too. I've started circling SR and DR in big red pen and labeling it "don't forget this, moron!" It's helping.

This reminds me of my big notation at the top of my notes. "Sing, stupid!" See, one of a bard's abilities is to give everyone a +1 morale bonus... I can't believe how many times I've forgotten to do that.

 

[Numion]

Biggest DM Mistakes?

Running Heart of Nightfang Spire for too long, and choosing to run Bastion of Broken Souls.


Seriously.

Please, do share (with spoiler tags if necessary). I ran both for my group, and we had fun with both. Only 'mistake' I made as a DM was that

Spoiler

Gulthias died to disintegrate on surprise round

.. some finale :\

Personally I found the locales in Bastion quite intresting and pretty fantastic. Spire was more boring in the latter stages, but still a worthy crawl nonetheless. My players utilized a nice mix of spells, melee and SWAT tactics to prevail, so more power to them.

 

[Bigwilly]

A long time ago, in a land far away...

...two Traveller PCs were trying to smuggle some drugs into a town hit by a plague. They are travelling across a desert in a hovercraft and stop for a spot of lunch.

Newbie DM (me) rolls for a random encounter: 12 Thugs

12 thugs jump out from behind sand dunes and attack 2 PCs.

Now Traveller was a pretty deadly system back in those days and I had to pull some Deus ex Machina to get the PCs out of that one. That was the last time I used a random encounter table straight out of the book.

Bigwilly