This is indeed something that is part of D&D history, advised in many a dungeon master guide book over the ages. However, people are sometimes reluctant to act without the guidance that the hard-defined rules provide. Still, as is wisely suggested, the dungeon master would do well to grow a feel for running the world even when the rules are sometimes insufficient or unavailable.
That's the thing. The rules are a guide. But ultimately it's up to the DM. What they say goes. If they want to allow a player to bend or even break a rule, they can. I hate uptight DM's.
The problem is that power gaming players have a tendency to use the rules to their advantage -- calculating the best ways to increase their power or finding some game-breaking loophole in a spell or a feat. More often than not, it is players who fuck up that old and now cliche adage (you shouldn't act like it is some novel stroke of genius). 5e makes the situation worse by creating so many player's options that the DM can't keep up with all the supplements.
@@commodoreperrytheplatypus2891 Same here I've been working hard on just the skeleton of my first story for over a year now, with only 2 main dungeons complete and about 78 pages of written material i was not expecting it to be as hard as it is. its really exhausting, i have had to take breaks that lasted up even several months just because i burnt out trying to think of what more i can add. Though in my test runs with some friends i have found i am surprisingly good with improve, like i even surprised myself with it.
I played a half-elf fighter once. In my backstory I decided that my character was agnostic. Rather difficult in D&D. My character didn't care about the gods and was hoping that they wouldn't care about him. My DM was brilliant. He used that desire to screw with my character. The gods chose my character as a champion and kept trying to get involved. I kept trying to mind my own business and ended up becoming the champion of the god Pelor. My character was not happy about it, but I enjoyed it very much. This sounds like railroading and the DM meta-gaming, but the way the adventure unfolded my character performed the actions and then the gods came along later and rewarded me for my actions or offered to aid me in times of crisis. I never felt that the gods (DM) were limiting my actions or my choices, or trying to force me to follow a certain path. It was that DM was rewarding me with the gods' favor which my character didn't want, you know like getting socks for Christmas. All in all it was a very enjoyable campaign.
Wow, that sounds like a lot of fun! I'm glad that worked out, as that sounds like you had a perfect player-DM balance in that scenario. I could easily see that going sour if the player viewed it as DM railroading.
Heh, you know you used those socks though. I even asked for socks and my wife flipped out on me. Not wanting something doesn't make it useless, but that story is friggen halarious.
Early on in my DND career, we had a friend who was our DM. This was before I started DMing (which I love now) and was newer to the rules. He was an adamant believer that the game was the players vs the DM which goes against everything I know that a good DM should be. Every encounter would have not-so-surprising traps and new enemies appearing just so he could try and kill us. It got so bad that we would get into regular arguments about rules that his homebrew enemies would have, making them utterly infuriating to fight. After maybe 6 or so sessions of this back and forth and animosity growing we ended up in a dungeon room where we killed all the enemies, and he "surprised" us with a Beholder. Way over our level to fight. Needless to say we all died and were pretty pissed. Instead of having us roll new characters and continue, I kid you not he packs up his things and says, "Well that was a fun campaign, I'll see you guys later." And just leaves, super oblivious to everyone's anger. As he was packing up too he was making jokes about killing our characters. We're not friends with him anymore.
@@a.spirit8408 Agreed, we were a lot younger then but that shouldn't excuse his poor decisions. The kid was a "self-described sociopath" who was also super narcissistic. Everything had to be about him, and it showed. It took a few years but my whole friend group dropped him as a friend en masse.
sounds like how 1st and 2nd edition was played. In those editions it pretty much was Player VS. DM. Most old school DMs would just come out and say it.
@@mitchelltyner5670 I don't think that's specifically how 1e and 2e were envisioned. Those were different gaming philosophies with a different player (and DM) mindset but still had a neutral DM as a referee. Yeah, mortality was more common and things were dangerous, but that's not because of how the DM was induced to act by the game; that was more related to game design in general. Same goes for OSR games.
I'm reminded of this one thing that doesn't really entirely concerns D&D but apologizing in general, I once played with a group of players at my local Adventures League and made a huge blunder with a spell ruling that resulted in a TPK. I apologized after the fact and, for some reason, got labeled as a terrible DM because I'm "weak" and can't "control my players". When I looked into my reputation there and asked some of the other people there, they tell me that the reason I got branded with that title was because I apologized because apparently, "great DMs don't apologize" and "apologizing is a display of weakness". This ended up being one of the main reasons why I left my local AL. Apologizing does NOT make a person weak, instead it shows that they are capable of taking responsibility and is a sign of maturity. Only spoiled children make a big fuss when they're wrong and accuse everyone else of being wrong except them. As far as controlling my players go, I believe that the DM's job is to control the table, not control the players. The players are not pawns of the DM to weave the DM's own story, instead both the DM and the players are co-creators in the group's story. The DM controls the table to ensure that everyone gets their time in the spot light, that everyone gets treated fairly, that things progress at an acceptable pace, and that the group's attention is refocused back onto the game or the current situation when people fly off on a tangent.
you make your local sound bad, but even though you are true. I also realize that most time what people say is true in other ways. so reflect and improve
Old post but I agree with you. It's about the table. I experienced a lot of gatekeepers as 5E became more popular. There was more diversity at the table and many veteran DMs were.... inflexible, to put it kindly. I have a group I play with now that aren't AL. I love my group but miss the variety. There were just too many toxic DMs in AL for a gal like me to play with. And as for apologizing..... YES, Yes, yes! I had a good DM that loved to throw a dozen targets at the party to pick off. One session we had two no-shows and went on without them. We were quickly overwhelmed and it would've led to a TPK. He was really cool and just stopped the session mid-combat. "I'm sorry guys, I tweaked their stats too high. Let me fix a couple things," he said and a few minutes later we continued with the session. That's not weakness, that's a smart, aware leader, IMO
DM: "Your character wouldn't do that. They're a Lawful Good paladin. They need to respect the laws." Me: "My character holds honor in high regard. He has seen this ruler conduct several acts of tyranny against his own people. He would absolutely kick the doors to this dishonorable tyrant's palace down."
Lawful good =/= follow the law. If im not mistaken, the lawful part just refers to your character having a code or principle they follow to the T. The code does not need to be the law of a certain land
In regards to respecting boundaries. I ran into an extreme example a while back where the group had a player who wasn't okay with ANY sort of conflict. At that point we just had to say "This might not be the right game for you."
What the fuck did they expect to get out of the game then?.. Overly sensitive PC: "So..I am not confident with rape...torture...heavy amounts of gore..." Dm: "Hmm well that is fair..I can't garanty that the others wont try some torture but we can keep it down to avoiding it being too brutal or detailed. I will simply describe it very lightly or make it a more funny scene..or have you guys just be a bit more open to other ways of manipulting the captured ene.." Overly sensitive PC"Oh I am not confident with manipulation either!" DM: "O..Ohh well..I mean I guess..." Overly sensitive PC: "Or murder..intrapment...bullying...pain...suffering...death...thievery or conflict!" Dm: "..........."
Now if you use that as a character trait not as a player trait then it is really cool I think. Make it a character conflict that they know they have to do something that disgusts them or something
@@havcola6983 A game without any kind of conflicts is nearly impossible. How will you create a mystery without a murder, a thievery or something else worth exploring.
@@bibbobella A mystery is just an unusual situation where you've provided incomplete information. You want to find someone who left several decades ago. You get hired to find a mcguffin but don't know where or how it looks. A strange thing has shown up and you need to figure out where it came from and how it got here, yadda yadda. As for exploration, that really just requires an objective and some interesting locations on the way and letting the players connect the dots between them. Conflict is just very easy, and kind of baked into the dna of dnd due to it's roots as a wargame. But it's absolutely not required for a good game.
@@DungeonDudes Honestly you guys are very good at this. Us Nerds can often be arrogant, and many think it's cool to play the arrogant know it all too... but most fail at that. (Except for Angry GM, he's good! But not God) I also love that you made the "be aware of peoples tolerances" not sound like the preachy "read peoples minds" that some people can do. Because knowing the limits of a group is important. (Better play it safe, than to be sorry.)
I had a campaign I was in as a player, that due to life changes I knew I was going to have to leave most of us expected the DM was going to find a way to write my character out of the game with some moment of sacrifice. The DM took a hook from both my character's backstory, and the persona I had played through the campaign, to bring in a character from my own character's past that created a perfect opportunity for my character to bow out of the campaign in a meaningful way but left my character alive and pursuing his own path, simply no lobger with the party.
I actually like the way Matthew Mercer dealt with alignment in Critical Role when Pike went against her character and showed cruelty. He didn't strip her of her powers outright but showed signs that she was losing favor with a cracked amulet.
Beautiful DMing. Not only that, but Pike began acting within her alignment better. The whole party started acting more good and less evil. Still chaotic or neutral wrt the law, ofc.
Calvin Jones best dm advice I can give to new DMs ‘Happily make every mistake, that’s how you learn’ Tell your players ‘choices are infinite, consequences are mandatory’ Practice makes perfect. When writing a campaign or a scene look to mythos or movies, or books for inspiration. Include everyone at the table. Cheers
I once made my players fight a party tailored to counter their strengths and strategies. And they loved it. This is how I played it. Every so often, the party would notice a tabby cat wandering around. It was an urban campaign, it was no big deal. It was often accompanied by other cats. I made them a tad paranoid until they killed the tabby cat. Then suddenly, animals would take notice of them when they entered an area, whenever they got into fights especially. When they finally confronted the big, bad evil guy, he swore revenge for the death of his wizard familiar (the tabby) and his wife was a dark druid. He had been watching them fight, watched how they solved problems and came up with counter strategies. The PCs were saved when his rival launched an attack at a most inopportune time, giving them an opportunity to escape. From then on it was an information war. They spent a great deal of time and resources researching the bad guys. Who their friends were, who their enemies might be, their quirks and relationships. Needless to say, the next confrontation was a lot less one sided. The PCs even managed to piece together about 3/4 of the wizard's spellbook by information gathering in places he once was and hunting down his old mentor via Speak with the Dead spells. Nothing lights a fire under a party quite like personal revenge. It boils down to foreshadowing. A warning that they are being watched. It removes the sting of the DM basically meta-gaming and gives an in-game reason why the NPCs fight this way. Wizards are intelligent; they will control the battlefield and seek every advantage in a confrontation. If a fight is inevitable, they will conspire to have one on their own terms. One trick I have found useful as a DM is to tailor encounters to the monsters' behaviour rather than meta-gaming. Animal-level intelligences tend to attack the most threatening or nearest PC. They will go after anyone who hurt them terribly. Brutes like orcs, trolls and giants are smart enough to go after "squishy" characters first, targeting healers and spellcasters. Human and higher intelligences? They plan, they strategize and if they can help it, they will never give the party a fair fight. You should never encounter three illithids standing shoulder to shoulder. They should attack the party from three difference angles, throwing mind blasts in sequence to have the best chance of stunning at least some of the party, some of the time. They will try to force the party to split their attention using misdirection, spatial magics and illusions. Illithids aren't scary because they eat brains, they are a nightmare to fight because they are evil geniuses and should act like such.
I think that was well handled. You gave them a realistically difficult encounter given the villain's resources, but also let them escape and come back prepared now that they knew what they were up against.
Explained Meta-gaming isn't meta gaming. The problem is when someone at the table (whether the DM or the players) uses their out of character discussions as in character knowledge with no reason or way for their character to hold the knowledge themselves. This could for example be the BBEG just knowing their exact tactic cause reasons or whatever. Or a monster having the specific abilities to counter everything the players can do. Or the player just knowing some detail that weren't there to know or using out of character knowledge about a rare/odd creature to exploiting their weaknesses even if their character wouldn't have known that. Also, I feel like you discredit orcs a bit here.
In my campaign, I had Mind Flayers be a near extinct species. There were only about 150 left in the world, and they were having a civil war. In this kind of environment, the Mind Flayers were incredibly careful. They'd developed means of controlling many thralls, never putting themselves in harms way because if a single mind flayer dies, that's a big deal to the colony.
@@zozilin reminds me of the shenanigans when the bard/(future) warlock negociates with a fay to trade for his firstborn. fay : the deal is sealed, give me your firstborn bard : when do we start? fay : confused look bard : when do we start making that child?
Not allowing players to utilize the strength of their characters. Example a GM attacked my paladin with unturnabke skeletons, dismisses players wanting to make checks, made every encounter a contest of brute force etc.
I think u can block a characters strength once in a game. My party was full of characters with darkvision and in our final boss, the wizard (who knows our characters are coming for a long time) hired 2 assasins with greyish capes so they couldnt see the assasins because of colorblind thing in the darkvision. That was cool i guess?
Berkay Karsli For example smashing the Druid every time they want to polymorph into a bug and scout ahead, not allowing rogues to rogue, fighting with a wizard that wants to raise a zombie pet, ranger never finds tracks or anything useful, just things the GM has decided to gimp because it might sway a fight or situation in favor of the players.
One of my dear friends was prone to this. He ran Star Wars but every encounter circumvented the power of using a lightsaber. No one ever fired blasters at us, instead the galaxy was armed with acid filled bullets that splashed our characters when intercepted. Random thugs had cortosis weave armor that shorted out our lightsabers. I had a much better time once I gave up and played a tech guy because he didn't usurp my character expectations in that role.
@@floridachomps2885 that's suck. What i mean is more like once in a campaign thing. You should make feel rogue very efficient in the game but when he desperatly need that power take it away. That make people more creative
I tell my players at the start of a campaign - I will not change their behaviour to match their alignment. I WILL change their alignment to match their behaviour.
Good Luck! Best piece of advice I ever got, don't worry during the game if it feels clunky, you actually have no idea how it's going. I can't count the number of times I thought to myself "well this one went off the rails and into the woods" and when it was over the players were really happy with it. You just can't tell so don't worry about it and stay in the moment. Have fun!
One thing I want to add to the idea of alignment policing, and something that bothers me during these discussions is that sometimes it isn't policing so much as reminding. For example, I once had something like this discussion with one of my players. Me: "So, you guys are planning on breaking into the temple and stealing the artifacts from the Bishop?" Player 1: "Yeah, man, I'm excited for this, we can sell them to finally pay off [Player 2's] debts and deal with that Guild." Me: "Right, the temple of the Raven Queen, your patron diety?" Player 1: Looks at their sheet and remembers they are playing a devoted cleric from a pious family who greatly supports the church, "Oh. Right, my character wouldn't be okay with this, would they?" Me: "Probably not" See, players can get over-excited, or have enough characters they are running, I've legit seen people forget things like their patrong diety, or the fact that their backstory included a long and devoted service to the crown. Now, I never tell them they can't do something, but I do ask them to justify it, "Why is your devout cleric suddenly willing to steal from their own temple in direct defiance to a perfectly reasonable order from their superior?" And, I think this is where the examples in the video fell flat. The LG paladin taking up arms against an evil, but lawful king, makes sense. How do you justify the LG Paladin holding down a shopkeep while the rogue tortures them for the combination to their safe? This is also why I sometimes hate the discussion of "you agreed to adventure with the party, so it is your responsibility to make your character's participation make sense." I had a really toxic group once, that murdered an innocent woman in front of my doctor and big G Good Gnome Cleric. Well, I revived her, spent an hour casting Raise Dead and using my own money to bring her back from the dead. So the party killed her again. Directly in front of me. They wanted to keep killing her so Strahd would keep showing up and they could kill and end the side mission early (metagaming hard, I note). Why would my character be okay with that? Or with a previous scene where one of the party members who hated the gods smashed the lost shrine my character found as proof of his Pantheon having female goddesses, which was his lifelong quest to prove? Still bitter about that game, I guess, but the point is, sometimes, done gently, this can be a good thing, to make sure the story stays consistent.
I love these videos. Even if we aren't always having these bad traits, and even fewer of us are being toxic, just keeping these types of things in mind improves the game for everyone.
re: Alignment. I don't see it as acting "out of" alignment, but shifting alignment. I let my players do whatever they want, but I do warn them that repeatedly acting a certain way will shift their alignment and the world will perceive them differently. I also make it clear that one act doesn't shift an alignment. I certainly don't force them to stay true to one alignment. I don't think disregarding alignment entirely is the correct solution; my solution is to discuss the alignment chart in session zero and what it means to be good vs evil, chaotic vs lawful.
Same here, I always tell my players that their alignment will not be always the same, but I instead will help them consider changing it if they believe or I suggest their character has grown out of it. It is the same for ideals, flaws and bonds: if the character behaves differently, their sheets change to reflect it :)
I totally agree! I’ve always believed that shifting alignment are wonderful plot devices that add drama. Such as a lawful good character pushed to evil acts as a last desperate measure to save a loved one etc.
I've had players shift alignment before. We discussed it at length & I made it clear where they were heading & why. I also sorta unofficially introduced bridging alignments to smooth the transition (like: Chaotic Neutral --> Chaotic Neutral (leaning evil) --> Chaotic Evil (leaning neutral) --> Chaotic Evil).
I love seeing more of this approach. Maybe we are finally getting away from the era where no one understood alignment and argument always ensued. I even feel inspired to make an episode myself and go into some more detail on the subject on top of all the already brilliant advice above (hopefully when I get at least a sole viewer or two). Thank you Dungeon Dudes and all the others who posted player advice and opinion.
"Don't write a scenario where only one option exists" Even better, write a scenario where no options exist (that you can figure out as a DM). Then let the players fumble with terrible ideas until either they begin to get desperate or they come up with something ridiculously funny. Necessity is the mother of all inventions and desperation is the solution to all impossibilities.
This is great advice. After a session which was mostly a prison break, ending in some super creative, and funny solutions, my players asked what the intended escape route was. There was none. Nobody would build a jail with obvious design flaws, so I gave the warden an approximate budget, and built the best prison I could think of, guesstimating what would be too expansive.
Yep, it's a dirty DM secret - sometimes the encounter doesn't have a solution. You just let them flail around for a while, then if what they come up with sounds like a good idea, give it a chance to succeed. They'll never know the difference - they'll think you came up with a creative challenge, then they masterfully figured out how to beat it. Fun time all around.
DM: "Your character wouldn't do that. They're a Lawful Good paladin. They need to respect the laws." Me: "My character holds honor in high regard. He has seen this ruler conduct several acts of tyranny against his own people. He would absolutely kick the doors to this dishonorable tyrant's palace down."
I love this. One of the PCs in our current campaign is in possession of an object that turns his blood into a black substance that solidifies once exposed to the air, but it returns to normal at dawn. He had become a pincushion with about 3 spears that were firmly lodged into his body. If we didn't remove them before dawn they would have dealt heavy damage to him, and the solid black blood was making them hard to remove by simply pulling them. I wasn't sure how the DM intended for us to fix them, but I had just gotten a new hammer from the encounter and wanted to test it out, so I had another party member hold the dude down while I hammered the spears out.
My opinion is the best thing you can do as a DM is ALWAYS own up to your mistakes, apologize for them, AND fix them as best you can. It really deepens the bond with your players as it shows humility and a willingness to change decisions made on the fly (or even preplanned) once getting feedback. It also makes players more willing to do the same at the table. Also, Session 0. I did the cocky DM "I don't need a session 0" and now I'm doing one mid campaign to deal with issues I didn't deal with.
For the forever DM, I'm pretty happy with my group. I do most of the DMing and in the background each player puts together a mini dungeon. When I need a break the players character splits and I make an npc to support the team through the dungeon for a few sessions. Gives me a nice break and allows me to learn how to play different classes.
That's a great idea! I'm usually the DM (only started in April) but we've come up with an idea that whenever one of the players has a birthday we'll have a session where that person takes over a session as a DM, either in a little one-shot or a different game. The first one went very well!
That's honestly a good way to handle it. Sorta just saying "You can do that but I don't see why you/your character would but it's your character". That is the long version of it from my perspective anyway.
@@moodyfingers7301 I mean the best way is to just completely ignore the alignment system tbh. Or rewrite the alignment into more well defined yet more human morals.
@@zaferoph Yeah, I don't like the alignment system but while playing with people that like it and don't want to change it, one as to come up with solutions.
When it comes to alignment, I have a player that's a druid - so they're Neutral. But they made the decision to walk into a tavern to get a drink because they were depressed about their friend that got murdered years ago. Well, the city was on lock down because of the players, and without a certain pass, you couldn't get alcohol. So the druid summoned a fire elemental, turned into one themselves, killed the bartender, and exploded the entire tavern with how much alcohol was in the building - unknowingly killing a dozen other people that were upstairs. Instead of getting rid of their powers, though that'd be the just thing to do, I instead just put a HEFTY bounty on their head that they still don't know about. I as a DM never thought I'd have to make bounty hunters for my players. Can't wait!
Druids are nature bros. If he starts burning down forests, then you've got to sic a druidic circle on him, but not have him lose his powers. Your bounty hunter solution sounds totally fair and he deserves it. If he has "heat metal" in his prepared spells, consider if you want him to be able to roast a NPC bounty hunter or not. Could be a good way to let them know about the bounty.
Please remember that they can actually be intellegent! This isn't some random monsters or bandits that are trying to just get the PC's meat/gold! These can be strategic and powerful to the point of giving your obviously high level party a big disadvantage. Let them have a plan, have them gather intell about these monsters (The party) from different people they have been around, let them figure out their weaknesses and strenghts and use that against your murderhobo party! (Or at least against that obviously chaotic evil druid they apparently have..) Remember this was what they did to themself. Obviously just throwing in some unwinnable battle would be bullshit but giving them a huge disadvantage and possible have them be the hunted for a while could be a good lesson for them and be super interesting especially if they are used to being the overpowered "heroes"
@@spam1576 be aware that not all druids are the same. "nature bro's" doesn't always mean protecting forests and nature. nature is everything, it's chaotic, it's destruction, some druids might believe that burning down that forest will pave the road for better and newer more prosperous life to grow from it (which is why forest fires can be healthy and why controlled fire's are a thing). not all druids embrace protecting , some emboby the chaotic and destructive parts too. this is quite a rare ideal though, so having another circle take offense to those actions is fairly justified and within lore, but it shouldn't be done as a method to "correct" a characters behaviour in all cases, however that doesn't mean do not give consequences if their views don't align with the world.
but could you say the same if it was a paladin or a cleric and they were completely unrepentant for it? I get that 5e is flexible with alignments and all that but would the world you build justify keeping their powers?
My top tip would be 'Never kill your players. Only the dice get to do that.' Never set up a situation or take an action likely to kill your PCs. Always give them a way out. But if the dice sometimes let them down, so be it.
My party started last week, going through Curse of Strahd, and they walked into an ambush of five swarms of rats, randomly rolled, in a house. The three, of the seven, PCs who went inside were down to two or three hit points and I stopped the fight to say, "Running is always an option." I let them go without attacks of opportunities.
It’s a crappy tip… life threatening moments add to adventures and you are taking that from them by carefully balancing every encounter so they never have a challenge outside of a completely accidental dice roll
@@Dragondan1987 I don't think you've actually read my tip, or if you did you didn't understand it. I didn't say don't let them die when they are stupid or roll badly, I said don't set up situations intended to kill them.
A note on audio and video: The change to the 2 different locations is handled well, lads. Shot framing, at both locations is great, as is the lighting and audio quality on Kelly's location. And great editing as usual. Keep it up.
Oh boy... I wrote an article down there... sorry about that: One problem I see in DMs, I even fall into the trap, is that players often play towards the DM. Let me explain with an example: *DM finishes describing the room* Player 1 to DM: I want to open the chest. DM: Okay, it's a Mimic, roll for initiative. Player 2 after fight: Dude, we could have inspected the room to figured that one out! This happened to my group a lot before we learned a very precious tool. (The mimic was actually a Tiny Dragon, which our fighter got to graple with, and the Warlock talked down from the fight... so it wasn't all bad) But the tool we now use is the concept of "the Caller", a very simple idea: One player is the Caller. Only the caller is allowed to directly communicate what the players will do to the DM, unless the DM specifically asks another player to do something, a RP session occurs, or Combat (You get the drift) It might seem very inhibiting, and some Improv Actor RPGers might frown on the idea, but it does something magical. It draws the players heads away from the DM and towards each other. *DM finishes describing the room* Player 1: I want to open the chest Player 2: Hang on, let's inspect it first, maybe it's a trap. Player 1: Okay, you do that, then I open the chest if it's safe, Player 3 what will you do? Player 3: Maybe I will search the room for hidden doors? Player 2, who is the caller, to DM: Okay so I will inspect the chest for traps, while Player 3 inspects the room for hidden doors. Player 1 will then open the chest if it's safe. I told that in a very "mechanical way", but if you are an Acting player then you can RP all that stuff out, but only stop to describe the "mechanics" of it to the DM.... Just like in combat. Once the Call is made, the DM plays it out with the characters, describing the walls Player 3 is inspecting, telling Player 2 that it looks like the chest might be breathing, and maybe getting Player 1 to describe his reaction to the news. My group found that this focuses the game. It seems to me that people are less on their phones, and more engaged with what's happening. It reels in the "Show stealer" who always has a reaction, and includes the more quiet players. I find that it's more enjoyable to DM too when you have a good Caller. Heck one of my players is an amazing caller. He will tell me the DM that "hey, that's not the call" if I try to move the scene forward. Because sometimes you don't need to get the call to understand what the course of action is, but that's when you sometimes get roped into the "Go with whomever speaks first" (Or Problematic Player if you want to use that term, I don't). Another thing I really got a lot of good usage out of is a propper Session Zero. Not just to find the thickness of players skinn, but to actually shape your game. Before my last Session Zero a week ago, I had this "amazing" campaign planned. Honestly it was Awesome! Drew a lot of inspiration from Drakkenheim... only to realize during Session Zero that: This isn't what my players are excited for. I even told them that I would have to rethink the campaign, but that I had another lingering idea. One of my players who has DMed a bit said: Do what you want, you have to love this too. But that's the thing. This is my first Campaign, and we are a very new group. What I love is to make a campaign that suits US. I'm sture they would have liked playing my campaign... but this new one? I man it will be EPIC. (As in it's an epic campaign, from 3 to 20! Dungeons and Dragons, and Kobolds Oh my!) One rule, that I learned from Angry GM, is: Never let you players make their character before you agree upon the campaign. And likewise: Never make the campaign before Session Zero. During the Session Zero I learned that two of my players wanted to play variants of the characters they played in my last game (my first Adventure as a DM, a trial run). That's cool with me. (Even though Angry says that's not allowed). I say: If they liked the class, and liked the idea of their character, let them start over. (Both seemed to rework the build and I have asked them for a more in depth character) The other two. One had a character he wanted to play, he had been talking about that character for as long as I have the other scraped campaign. He ended up realizing that the party would be lopsided, and decided instead on playing another character. The last guy has yet to submit a character. While character creation isn't needed for a Session Zero, discussing what they WANT to play should be. It informs you as a DM so much on what sort of campaign you should make. In the end I am so excited for this new campaign! It's almost as it's writing itself, I just need to structure each adventure. Tip I found here too, is make some adventures "empty", don't have a plot to the mackguffin, that plot will be given to you by the players. It's not railroading that "Adventure 3 would have been the same, no matter what", how does the players know? But making the mackguffin something THEY want, rather than me telling them they want it because Quest Giver dude told them, is more engaging. I have a friend who DMs us in another game, and he has ended three sessions now with: "So... you bypassed my awesome climax, and solved the task in an amazing way!" The polar opposite of railroading. (In fact last session I got to fly a helicopter!) One last thing to be aware of is how dice rolls are actually part of the interaction, and feeback for players. In one of my first sessions ever in 5e our DM would roll his dice hidden and just say "hit" or "miss" when I cast Sacred Flame. I got no feeback on what he was rolling... so to me Sacred Flame was the worst spell ever. Thing was... I was casting it on Goblins, who has +2 to dexterity saves... So we moved to him rolling them openly, but not telling us the modifier. That worked better to be honest. In my One off online I just tell the players. "I rolled a 16". But it comes back to player trust. At the end of that adventure one player told me he felt I was a fair DM. He felt I didn't cheat my rolls, if I rolled poorly for my monsters, I still used it. (Man did they butcher my awesome last boss like he was nothing) The same player said in our last session zero: We are a very strategical group, who can handle a lot, so don't be afraid to try to kill us. And that's where I think the difference between a good and bad DM comes in. A good DM can put the party up against deadly encounters, but still make them feel fair. A bad DM puts the players in the same encounter and proceeds to utterly annihilate the group. Sure you can do that once in a while. But I think that the fear of death is what's fun to play against and with, rather than the "Rofle stomp". A boss fight SHOULD be deadly if the players make mistakes, it shouldn't be deadly because the DM just wanted to win. A DM only wins when the players had fun, and get to face the last boss. Why should I spend hours designing Adventure 10, if I party wipe them at adventure 1? ...He said while looking at his final encounter in Adventure 1... well what's the worse that could happen?
oooooooo, this sounds sorta cool actually. Is this the type of thing that you guys are okay with and like? if so, how's it being handled and what's it like?
When you guys talked about the rules and how to handle improv it reminded me of a situation in a campaign. Me and my party were exploring an abandoned iron mine and came across an alter. We examined the later finding a channel that looked to lead blood down a hole. So as the other two players were arguing if we should backtrack on the face and bring back the dead body of an enemy we killed earlier and I had my character walk up to the alter and had him slit his wrist dripping blood into the channel. It surprised the dm and after taking 2 damage I unlocked a door that eventually managed to allow us to save one of the characters who had gotten petrified by a basalisk shortly after opening up the door. He told me after the session that he wasn't expecting me to do that. Probably because it was an alter for a chaotic evil God and I was a lawful neutral paladin and the other two were a chaotic good monk and lawful good cleric
I almost wondered why there’s a split screen! Hey I’m not even a DM. I’m a new player but I’ve been watching your old videos, and wanted to comment on a new one! Thanks for the content!
It seems to me that 90 percent of this can be solved with one simple piece of advice: **set your players expectations early**. If you don't like the character a player has chosen, talk to them. If you run a game that's low or high magic, tell them BEFORE the game starts. Let them know what kind of game you run. Be detailed. Don't be afraid to go overboard.
I play a goblin rogue called rat. While playing everyone was trying to put our booty to good use. Buying potions, items, donating to the church etc. Being the crude little vermin I am I opened a business...a house of I'll repute. I got four girls and a bouncer, bought a building, and paid a few key people to steer business my way. All good in game and it almost runs itself while I'm out adventuring. A few players said they were uncomfortable with that in the game... Poof it became a mercantile and exotic supply. The girls became shop keepers and the bouncer was now the guard. My shills became delivery men. And my party had a place to sell off unwanted loot. Adjustment is not that hard. The players as well as the dm should be cooperative about player comfort. The funny thing is irl and in game I am a good and was playing among neutrals.
Lucifer Radford, I think your example illustrates a situation where I would draw the line, to be honest. If there were graphic depictions of lewd content or mistreatment? Sure, I get not wanting that at the table. If there are minors in your group? Also very understandable. However, the idea that a group of adults can’t handle the idea of a brothel in a legal setting doesn’t sit right with me; and the thought of curtailing one person’s (harmless) fun and/or creativity in the name of someone else’s opinion seems to me an inherent imbalance in player agency.
@@Jacksonmckay107 there was an adolescent at the table. The game was in Nevada though where brothels are legal. It was enough that it was interfering with others enjoyment. The mercantile was a good trade off with a practical side. We could dump our unwanted loot, get items, and it often supplied intelligence about local happenings and competing groups outfitting for adventure. Win/win
@@Jacksonmckay107 exactly like what do you do if someone isn't ok with a gay at character? Make the player change their character's sexuality? That would clearly be out of bounds. Sometimes some people's boundaries are going to mess with other people's boundaries and you need to be able to draw the line.
I usually try to not only allow out of the box solutions, but also try to reward them. On an island infested with rust monsters, the druid befriended them by feeding them some iron nails. At that point on, the rust monsters acted "domesticated" with regard to the players, and even defended them at one point.
As a DM, I really try to avoid saying things like, "your character wouldn't do that." I prefer to ask if there's a particular reason their character would do this. More often than not, it'll lead to both me and the player gaining new insights into their character.
So me and my players at the end of every game do something we call roses and thorns. We go around the table and talk about one thing that we really liked about the session and one thing that we did not enjoy and use that as weekly feedback to the DM
My DM has had to accept the fact that the party likes katamari-ing up almost every enemy we encounter and adding them to the party. So far we've added a (modified) Helmed Horror, a Horned Devil, a Water Elemental, a guy possessed by a demon, and an Oblex. We also almost added a Mind Flayer to the party, but we got separated before they could properly join us.
These modern day zoom sessions we’ve been running have led to some seriously distracted players. Muting while they step out to smoke or have dinner-forgetting they are on mute or needing the map positions described to them so they can attack. It is seriously disheartening especially when you realize your enthusiasm and focus is not reciprocated. Great video, fellas. I am loving the popularity of dnd these days!
I've been the victim of "GM Policing" I was told that I couldn't "attempt" to progress with the infiltration mission which would've involved seducing a pair of male guards (the small group were female characters) because "Your Character is a vocal lesbian/asexual (can't remember which) they wouldn't want to get intimate with these guards"
Wow. As if gay or lesbian or asexual people have never performed certain acts to try them out or to attempt to "fit in" or conform to society's wrong expectations of them before. Not only could your character do that, they'd probably be able to do it convincingly. Edit: to be clear, your DM was wrong about... every part of that.
Took to heart a lot of these advices and after a weeks of preparing an adventure for my group to play, I've gotten many comments from them saying that I was one of their favorite DMs and that my content was phenomenal. Thanks for these advices.
Hey guys! Great video, thank you! Regarding the last point, the "Forever DM", there's also the situation where someone knows that the overall quality of the gaming session will decrease if they aren't running the game themselves. It becomes a choice between a) Choosing to DM and have everybody enjoy the game while overtaxing yourself with the extra work and responsibilities of DMing and b) Having another person run the game and get a half-assed experience with D&D because said DM shows some of the depicted "terrible traits". This has happened to our group, the last time someone else tried running an adventure we didn't end it due to lack of preparation, time, adversarial DMing, among other things, and that was frustrating as heck. I love D&D and I enjoy being the DM, but I also enjoy being a PC, imho the rest of the group should recognize that and take steps into developing the skills necessary to run an adventure. Our group gets along nicely, but If I openly voice my concerns in this regard, there's a risk of aggravating someone or force them into doing a role they just don't want to. Do you have any hints on how to motivate a new player to become a good DM? Once again, thank you for your quality content. Take care
Do a game developer session with the group. The idea is to have everyone take a turn DM'ing. The group can either try to run a single campaign and see how each players deals with the adventure when it is their turn to run the game. Or have each player know they have to make a quick one shot. Generic player characters should be premade. So all the DM's know what to the party is going to consist of. Players need to play the same basic character throughout the run. Version 2) Is for all the players to come up with a basic plot and generic characters. Then have each player take a gaming session to run the adventure. This lets each player see what it's like to DM in a low pressure atmosphere. I would then have a wrap up session when it is all done. With all the players commenting on what they liked and things that could be improved upon. The goal is to let players have a turn at it with out feeling committed to a full campaign when they don't feel comfortable with the idea of DM'ing. The wrap up session is for everyone to learn. What works well and things to avoid. Also, just to see what it is like and who naturally takes to it better. And who becomes curious to want to improve. Another way. With out committing the entire group. Is to say if anyone has a quick story idea they want to test. They get to be the DM and the team is committed to their story for 1-3 gaming sessions, which can get extended if the group agrees. It's very important to still have a wrap up. Again with the focus on helping the DM learn. Instead of just criticizing. When pointing out things that didn't go very well. Players should also make suggestions about different ideas for how to approach the less successful parts.
When it comesbto rulings, I tend to discuss the pros and cons with the players while avoiding looking it up for a lengthy time. I totally agree with you guys with the 'we'll do it this way for now, and come back to it when it becomes a problem.'
Love, love, LOVE the aspect of employing empathy and respect at the table. Specifically, taking players' real-life concerns into consideration. such as survivors of trauma. Well done, gents!
As for alignment policing: As the DM, I get to play the gods and other supernatural forces. If, after throwing a conscience-twinge at a player who goes ahead anyway, sending a vision or dream to the PC is going to be much more fun and effective than the player arguing with me. And probably produce a better outcome. Admittedly, don't remember it actually happening that way exactly ...
Was really happy when I figured out a way to turn a metagaming moment into a memorable narrative twist with the campaign I play with my younger twin cousins (Twin boys of 16, and their sister of 10, but she hadn't joined their storyline yet). The human (human is important) ranger picked a purple flower from a ruined manor house to give to a sailor elf he had a crush on during their boat journey to the town. He had to roll a constitution roll when he smelled it. But he rolled well. This was his first time challenged with the divide of playing in character, and playing himself. Well, when it came time to give it to her (In the infirmary where she was keeping her fellow injured sailor company) He left it at the bedside of the sailor instead, without any sort of explanation he could back up. I let it ride and moved on with the plot....but I had plans. Welp, they go on a huge forest adventure (the main storyline) for several sessions that involved a purple corruption destroying the river and forest brought on by a goblin experiment deep in a bullywug forest city. when they return to the small town they find a terrible plague, with poison symptoms similar to that of the corruption, affecting the villagers (Imagine that violent streak the virus gets in princess mononoke). They arrived at night and saw some crazy bonfires and town guards suspicious of each other, they also hear rumours of the town physician being one of the first casualties after stabbing a sailor while he treated someone. Welp, when they head down the path to the lightmage's house to investigate further it gets dark and it's grassy so the human turns on his torch and sees, lining the road, and all through the grass, are just bushels and bushels of that same, purple, flower. both my cousins stood up in unison holding their heads both laughing and shouting in painful disbelief that the one action of leaving that curious flower, could spark this chain of events all stemming from that butterfly-effect decision. They didn't see it coming, but they loved the trickle of clues and the crescendo twist and it really gave the young ranger a lot of motivation to save the town from his fault. He's been really working on his RP game ever since, and gave them both plenty of extra unexpected storyline options that I would have never been inspired to come up with otherwise. Definitely allow the odd metagame moment... Just don't let them get away with it for long and make it a memorably fun lesson full of whodunnit's, disguised kobolds, a shambling mound, and lots of xp ;D.
@@rogerwilco2 Once he realized he had to roll a saving throw to smell the flower, even though his character was unaware of the potential danger, he backpedalled the original decision his character was going to do.
I really appreciated your part about boundaries and history. To take it a step further, talk to players one on one! If people are sensitive to a topic, they probably don't want to expose that to a whole group. If you talk to them one on one, they will probably be much more comfortable sharing with you. And then, you don't have to even mention it to the group, you can just avoid it altogether.
LOL just roll for the eye effects and build a movement-effect web they need to follow to randomize them to keep them in character but not completely impossible to solve in a fight.
Beholder are meant to be kinda paranoid and always planning for every conceivable attack... Obviously the dm is listening when the PCs are planning so... He kinda should have a beholder plan tailor made in response to that player plan, which is essentially metagaming, right? So I kinda agree with you.
Novice dm here, but I just wanted to throw out an idea for a beholder lair: Everything is spherical or rounded and works similarly to as if you are on the inside of a planet (like mario galaxy) & all surfaces can be walked on as well as gravity being wonky.
Exisist that sounds legit like a great lair to battle in. Depending on your party level, the beholder could be modified and given some personality, extra abilities and you’ve got a solid bbeg fight
Chances are, if you are asking that question -- probably not. And in the rare chance you are doing any of these, asking yourself these questions will help you overcome them!
I’ve got to say, this has to be one of the best D&D advice videos I’ve ever watched. Particularly talking about boundaries at the table and player feedback. Super useful. We have a small group of DM’s who take turns running games for a larger player group and we have definitely all fallen into some of these traps early on. Super useful content.
I think this is one of your best videos yet, and there is a lot to chew on. Personally, I was a "Forever DM" and I burnt out twice. In my first go-around I was still enjoying the experience when I burnt out, but it was a form of escape, and I took on too much responsibility - three games, five groups (three in one, too many people wanted to play in it), and three different settings, all homebrew. The second time came out of too many people, too much player conflict, and the fact that nobody else in a nine player group was willing to DM, which wasn't really addressed in the video. Sometimes there isn't someone else who is willing to step up, and the best thing I've ever done as a DM was set it down and step away despite that absence. In my mind, if you're trying to fill a void, then you're already lost within it. As for alignment, I've been moving away from it. The notion of cosmic, universal morality is actively rejected by most players, and even when they do embrace it, often it can lead to unpleasant or nonsensical behaviour. It might be useful to put together a video on encouraging people to experiment with DMing, and what one can do to lower the barrier there.
I've only experienced one terrible DMing that isn't covered on this list and that was the DM playing minecraft at the same time (we were on Discord) and even told us what they were doing as an excuse when we would say something or ask a question and get no response. It was like the player on their phone but so much worse.
most of my players do that. we play over discord due to one member being in another country, and the rest of us are all spread out. i know it’s a lot harder to focus when you’re not physically there together, but some of mine are always playing some kind of video game at the same time. it’s so rude- we only play for around 2 hours, it’s really not that long to have to go without your console :(
@@keelinkelly8656 I feel you, we spent the whole session traveling in a caravan with no plothooks, no npc interactions and a couple of silent broody dmpcs. I had to kill a random chicken just for something to do.
Just another Glorpsday morning that's horrible, if possible i'd leave that group and try to find a new one, or maybe talk to the other players and the DM and let them know that's unacceptable
Thanks for these tips, as a new dm my party and I have been having sessions for a few months now and man we have had so much fun. Adapting to their creativity has made me such a better storyteller.
In A New Hope, Han Solo acted against his personality as displayed up to that point, not his alignment. I would argue that he, in fact, acted completely within his chaotic alignment by doing the unexpected thing.
Han Solo was chaotic neutral up until that moment, if you want to go that way. Or he was chaotic good the whole time, and just never acted on his goodness until then? Which means, he should have had an alignment shift at some time in the past, and then shifted back at that moment? Or it means alignment is more akin to personality on a PC than it is to actual alignment of a chromatic or metallic dragon who are imbued with near invariant moral compulsions.
Also the fact that, as explained in this video, alignment isn't a box locking you from ever acting in a way that doesn't agree 100% with what's written on your character sheet. That goes double for extreme circunstances like the Han Solo situation.
This was a really great video and a great example of how well you can take concepts that maybe a lot of us are very familiar with, but then present them in a way that really causes us to think deeply about in new ways. Superb.
I actually dislike DM’s that are too generous. Let me explain why! I’ve played with plenty of DM’s that willingly hand out advantage on the fly, thinking they’re helping the players and making it fun. in-fact it does the opposite. When a DM says “roll it with advantage” without giving me a reason, or without me explaining why I’d have advantage, the only thing I roll is my eyes. Only one thing goes through my mind. “okay what information is the DM dying to give me?” when they do that, it’s purely in their favour. And I’d argue it’s rail roading the players with kindness. When we win at everything we win at nothing. It’s like reading a book without no chance of failure and following the directive of the DM. Here’s the thing, it appeals to the power gamers, they love it when the DM says “have advantage on that” so the dm thinks, awe he’s having fun winning. But for the casual gamers it’s just a slog.. if I wanted to be good at everything with low chance of failure I’d tell myself a story of this adventurer who succeeded at everything and get bored within 2mins.
As a partial power gamer, random advantage is really not fun. The whole point of power gaming for some is to feel rewarded because you made a good choice with the information given (i.e. the rules). When a 'reward' is given arbitrarily and without explanation it undermines trust in that information and therefore denies them some future engagement. On the other hand, an explanation later on can reaffirm that trust so temporarily unexplained advantage can be fine. In other words I agree with what you say from both a story and mechanics standpoint.
I am running a game soon, after years of just being a player, and your videos have been a huge help in reminding me that some things could come back and bite me as a dm. Some things I thought would just be common sense when playing as a dm, but hearing some of the ways you guys explain things, it reminds me that not everyone thinks in a broad spectrum.
The way alignment finally made sense to me was to make it a description of the character, rather than a proscription for a character. (I.e. X action and character behaves in a Lawful Good manner, rather than X character cannot act in this manner because they are Lawful Good.)
Sound advice and opinions as always. I’ll use some of it, I am also a Forever DM sadly. Though I’ve never heard the problem of not wanting to pass the reigns, the ones I’ve seen is no one wanting to take them and trust me I’ve tried.
Scenario: I'm a DM. I have a paladin that has sworn an oath of nuetrality. He has promised to serve 'balance.' He goes around being good all the time and helping people, taking nonviolent choices, etc. I presented to him a scenario where he could kill a monster or spare its life, but before he chose i had his god give him images of scales, of all the good he's done, of bringing balance, etc. he decides to spare the monster. so i gave him a level of exhaustion. the character is confused but the player COMPLETELY understands what happened and is cool with it. am i alignment policing at this point or am i helping create a dramatic narrative?
I think you're fine if the player understands and accepts. But nonviolence isn't inherently good, and is in some ways necessary to neutrality. If anything sparing an evil creature's life is directly promoting balance, or rather continued existence of and conflict between good and evil, because the evil creature is now free to commit evil and invite an agent of good to slay it. The paladin of neutrality's place is to take actions that preserve that dynamic, rather than balancing his "good" choices with evil ones.
Ya know, if the monster was causing destruction and loss of life, sparing it (while an inherently good act) only so it could go back to said acts would be the paladin allowing such a creature to continue and put some balance into the scales because the paladin allowed the creature to continue doing them.
That's perfectly fine imo. They swore an oath to a God. You have every right to uphold them to that oath. I would even go so far as to make then lose their class if they continue down that path as they will have lost the favor of their God
I love DMing and playing. I did have a stretch of twelve consecutive years where all I did was DM. I loved it. It was terrific. Playing again felt refreshing too.
The more passive favouritism can be really, really hard to manage sometimes... and can often follow existing relationships not necessarily because of the relationship itself, but because of the increased access to the DM for brainstorming and spitballing. It *is* a problem I've noticed when my husband and I are playing together - even if neither of us are the DM, the degree to which we can interweave our stories with us both being heavy roleplayers can make others feel like they're missing out at times. I'm not sure how the problem can really be solved, though. Are we mean to... just *not* talk about games and characters that excite us? I've tried tackling it from the other end, but simply can't equalise the level of access even *before* taking into account that a large number of players aren't actually interested in talking about the game outside of session. Essentially, they see what is the result of a lot of prep time behind the scenes as a player, giving the GM more to work with, and want the same result without wanting to set aside any time for conversations like that, or to put in the effort to reach out with ideas. It's really hard not to feel put upon as a DM when players give you absolutely nothing to work with, and then complain when they don't get as many ties into the main story or unique character beats. Hell, it feels pretty bad as a player too to have the effort you put in shat on
Hey, so I was running a game for friends for the first time ever, and I greatly appreciated the information you give in your videos. It was only over two sessions, but it was a marked improvement from the first game night to the second seeing your vids. So thank you. :)
Hey guys! Just another Canuck stuck in isolation (who was about to start a home game right before the pandemic/ social distancing started) and I wanted to say a big thank you for continuing to provide this amazing content week after week, even when the world’s falling apart. You guys are great!
Nice video. I'm new to DMing but enjoying it and I am always looking for more tips. One thing I caught myself doing was just being too slow with the storytelling because I thought I needed to provide a lot of visual detail. I ended up just stalling or stuttering when there wasn't much to say anyway. "You go into the cave" is just fine sometimes. Doesn't always need the "it's dark and smells of rotting meat. The sconces are made of rusty iron and there are skeletons in the corner..." every time you go into a new place. I learned to trust my players to have their own imaginations more often.
I'm stuck with the problem "Forever DM". The thing is the moment I decided not to be one anymore, I completely stopped playing D&D, because nobody I know wants to be the DM. Checking the online webstites for Gdr Players I could find dozens of people looking for DMs and almost nobody stepping in to play this role. The fact that I'm no native english speaker amplifies the problem, because the pool of players which I can play with is much more limited... man I just don't know what to do.
I had this problem for a long time, but I'll tell you one thing: stick with the right group for long enough, you're bound to inspire someone. Yes, you'll have suffer through your players' unexperienced dming, but it will get progressively better. Currently running a campaign for about 2 years and playing two of my player's ones. Good luck for you
Try a different game. A Game I like is Zombiecide. It is played with miniatures, you need to flee the zombies. The role of DM is quite different. Settlers of Catan perhaps. Look into other types of games where there is no DM.
Try to play as DM and PC at once! of course your PC does not know the entire plot, but isntead of saying "hey paladin, roll perception" when you want to nudge your party forward your own character interacts with them. "Hey guys, I found this weird mural on the wall. Do you know what language this is?" That way, if you do it right, you enjoy both being a dm, deciding on the campaign and you actively influence the players actions without railroading them. if you do it wrong though, you need to make your pc disappear. plot twist: your pc is actually an agent of one of the enemies, and at some point he disappears only to return later and attack the party, knowing all their abilities and their preferences. maybe foreshadow a bit if you do use this though. your pc saying "maybe you shouldnt be this generous with your good faith" or "your trust is misplaced yet again" when your party lets a captured enemy go or decides not to chase the last of the disgusting goblins. also doesnt need to be an agent from the beginning, he can be "recruited" by the enemy while your party rests for a week or two inside a city. especially if they just foiled one of the enemies plans.
My dungeon master at some point decided that it seemed "unrealistic" that I wanted to to non-lethal damage with a melee attack, as I had pre-announced I wanted to do, after the attack turned out to be a critical hit. I thought this was silly since I had no way to avoid making a critical hit, but I wasn't that fussed, maybe he just thinks it's a stupid mechanic. Then next session he realizes he'd rather we hadn't killed the NPC so he told us it was okay after all. It just managed to make a very minor issue feel oddly frustrating.
I think alignment policing is fine if done right. Example: In our campaign, our lawful good Cleric performed a morally questionable action in the heat of the moment. When they next had a long rest, the DM had their patron diety show up in a dream and demand recompense. A Chaotic Good deity then crashed the dream, and gave the cleric the option to convert due to their actions. The cleric converted and was actually happier with the new diety. This also added new options for the story now, as the old diety was now PISSED. Just telling someone they can’t do something because of alignment is bad storytelling, but working the consequences in can be a great way to add flavor.
The thing about allignment, and how stripping a character of their powers for going against their allignment. That's not a GM being bad, that's a built in class feature and a risk of using the class. It's not the GM that wrote that in. It's a rule of the game. And it's best to ask to have the rule ignored at the start of a game and not right when it happens. For me, most of my games are played without allignment, cause I too think it's stupid as a gameplay mechanic. Though it is still fun to use to describe a character quickly.
"Y'know. Good and evil are a gradient..." Guys, paladin and cleric oaths literally specify what they believe good and evil are. It's like you forgot death domains and oathbreakers exist, and just want the classes to be numbers on a sheet. Divine oaths are pretty much perfectly designed for a character to shift beliefs and by extension, their powers. By all means, ask the player their stance on power changes or deity changes FIRST. But if you don't give a paladin or cleric or warlock or necromancer any kind of morality challenge, you're crippling their roleplaying options while the druids go out and interface with nature and rogues go out thieving.
I am really glad you all made this video. Like usual its a well made and informative video that should help a ton of DMs. "Deadly encounters" isn't a bad term and shouldn't be tied to "adversarial encounters". That being said I believe we totally agree on the spirit of this part of the conversation just disagree on the one term. Alignments are a fluid things and more of a "guideline" for players to use as a tool...not a restriction. This is not 3rd edition.
I was running a game a few years ago and one of my players began to use such disturbing and graphic actions and imagery even I was uncomfortable, I had to shut it down when another player became visibly upset and wasn't having fun. I wish we had a discussion about boundaries before it got to the point it did
Hey! I have seen various videos on this topic and the problem player topic, and I love that you guys cover this topic in your own inclusive and thorough way. It really helps to try to see yourself , the DM, from the outside, through the players’ eyes, and work on bad habits. You guys mentioned problem players. There some that are quite obvious and relatively easy to handle like the cheaters or the metagamers, but there are some, like the power gamer for example that are harder to identify and deal with. It would really help to have your viewpoints on this topic to go along side this great video. Thanks for all your work and stay healthy!
On Alignment: I think you guys were way of the mark, but not because you were wrong in your reasoning. You guys describe a game where alignment doesn't matter, and the player chose to move against it. If good and evil are a gradient and law and chaos are relative, then you're not playing a game where you should even choose an alignment in the first place. By that I don't mean "choose True Neutral", because that is a choice. What I mean is your in-character roleplaying is all that matters. If you're wildly inconsistent with your choices, it doesn't matter because everything is relative to each individual. However, if you're playing a game where there are defined boundaries of Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos, then your choice of alignment is very important. Classic D&D had severe consequences for breaking your alignment and even has restrictions on certain spells or classes based on your alignment. 5th Edition is no different in terms of RAW. If you're an Oath of Protection paladin and you look the other way from a group of travelers being attacked by goblins, you've broken your oath. It should mean more to your character to uphold this supernatural oath that gives them unbelievable power than to ignore that oath because they felt like it or the party was in a hurry. Same for clerics. If you're a disciple of Bane and you spend a week healing the sick and restoring order to a city recovering from a plague, you're in direct opposition to your deity's desires. Those scenarios need to have consequences if you're playing in a game where those boundaries exist, especially for characters who draw their power from an extraplanar entity with it's own intelligence and motives.
So I agree with you that there are things and times where alignment should matter. I think the Dungeon Dudes were trying to say you shouldn't force a PC to take an action based on their alignment. I think you are saying that acting against alignment or ideals is acting out of character and bad role playing that should have consequences. If you play a LG character, but you let an obvious villain walk free because they offer you money or power, that's immersion breaking for everybody at the table (unless it's your flaw, but then reconsider the LG alignment). A CG character has a little more leeway, because they can say "kill them" or "let's take them to the cops" based on situations on the ground. Regardless of alignment, I think the PC should be allowed to take the action. That action should also have consequences based on their alignment, though. I also think that this conversation has it's largest implications for players powered by the divine or a patron: clerics, paladins, and warlocks. These characters have an outside observer that is paying (some) attention to their actions. It's why they're a cleric and not a priest with a mace. The entity that gives you power has expectations and failing to abide by these expectations in RP should have real world implications. (adding to this druids that start burning every plant they see or killing animals at random.) What I think a DM should do in a situation where a divine/patron powered player is acting against what their entity would support is to first let the player take the action. This grants the player agency, and that's what they want. Second, stage an event where the deity/patron has a conversation with the PC. This could be a dream, or NPCs uttering weird, out of place phrases then snapping back, or a priest of X saying "Dude, what the hell?". Have the deity/patron establish that they are disappointment/irritated, and that further straying from the pact or arrangement will invalidate it. Maybe a deity says "Perhaps you are not the paragon of virtue (or trickery, or whatever is in that deity's portfolio) I thought you were. Maybe I should take away your power, and find a new champion?" This gives the PC another choice, straighten up (or find loop holes in their warlock contract) or lose power. If they continue moving away from their alignment, have a spell fail with a fizzle (or an evocation flicker for a warlock) at a NON-CRITICAL moment. Don't do this on a PC's attack role, or a clutch heal, but maybe post fight when they try to heal up, say "it just doesn't feel the same, like the spark is fading" and knock off a few HP of healing or have their demon sight flicker and plunge them into total darkness for an instant. The player should be getting the hint that this behavior won't fly. If they persist, it is the consequences of their choices to strip power away from them. This would be an absolute last resort and should have a conversation with the player outside of the game about if they are unhappy with this PC and want to switch for a new class. Paladins that clearly break an oath after phase 2 should slide rather quickly to Oathbreaker Paladin status which could severely derail a good campaign. I think alignment is less important for the simply martial characters, like Fighters, Rouges, and Barbarians, as they are just humanoids that are really good at their thing, but I think that you could make it so that people would perceive them based on their actions. If you start killing people in a town or threatening merchants, you will be perceived as an evil character, even if you are LG. You might get people offering you quests based on you being brutish or larcenous. If your players are thinking, they should be a little uncomfortable with taking these quests against their alignment or seeing how others perceive them. (note don't make it super uncomfortable as per the DD's point in the video about crossing boundaries) but maybe have they steal something then find out that it was destined for an orphanage or medical supplies for a hospital like in Firefly. In this way, their perceived alignment can slide a lot, and that should make their PC (and player) have some thoughts about how they're acting. The key for a DM in these cases would be to make sure that it would be a pattern of behavior and not just a single time when they try to intimidate a guard or steal a bauble before sliding the perceived alignment.
An oath made with a deity providing you powers is very different than classifying moral philosophy. Oaths have specific conditions. Alignment on a PC is personal opinion; alignment of a chromatic dragon is a measurable thing. I think the word alignment on the character sheet is a misnomer, and shouldn't be confused with monster stat block alignments. Some monsters actually have inherent, measurable properties of alignment. Alignment of a PC is just descriptive and self reported. Relationships with deities though, or balance with nature, or status of oaths? These can all be measured, and should be tracked behind the screen by the GM.
It's never a good idea to force an alignment change over a single incident. Instead, think of a single violation as one of those "formative hero moments" you see all the time in comic book origin stories. It's not really a question of whether that incident occurs or not, it's what the character *learns* from it. To put it another way, it's not the character's failings that decide whether they are good or evil; lawful or chaotic, it's how they grow, develop, and learn from these individual incidents of failure, or conversely, how they fail to grow, develop, or learn from them.
The problem I have with enabling problem players is the power gamers, the rules lawyers, and the instigators are also typically people that in some way get things done. Ruining a social interaction here, basking in the glory of incredible numbers adding up there... Sometimes it ends up being a good or funny memory, sometimes a bit of a drag, but more often than not in a group of friends I find it's the former.
@@Rick_Harper Someone who builds exceedingly efficiently for their goals, to the point that they may be making more of a tool to win the game rather than a character with personality and three dimensions. Example: In a campaign set to take place in lots of pure darkness (think Mad Mage's Dungeon), a Drow who is a Gloom Stalker Ranger / Assassin Rogue mix would be an incredibly useful build. But perhaps a little too uncannily well suited for the setting, and difficult to actually stink of a story that justifies the lifetime of training that goes into the many mechanics at play; a power gamer ignores these points and focuses on their strength.
Excellent video as always guys, thank you. In my many years of GM/DM'ing and playing I've definitely seen some of the things mentioned, but we've generally resolved them in a very amicable way. It can be difficult DM'ing, personally I like it, but I also enjoy playing, I'm playing at the moment but going to DM a campaign in the hopefully not too distant future!
“The rules are a tool, not a straight jacket.” I’m saving that one!
Definitely putting that in the hopper
That's what I was taught when I first looked into D&D. And now, finally DMing a bit, I treat the rules as guideline more than as a holy canon law.
This is indeed something that is part of D&D history, advised in many a dungeon master guide book over the ages. However, people are sometimes reluctant to act without the guidance that the hard-defined rules provide. Still, as is wisely suggested, the dungeon master would do well to grow a feel for running the world even when the rules are sometimes insufficient or unavailable.
That's the thing. The rules are a guide. But ultimately it's up to the DM. What they say goes. If they want to allow a player to bend or even break a rule, they can. I hate uptight DM's.
The problem is that power gaming players have a tendency to use the rules to their advantage -- calculating the best ways to increase their power or finding some game-breaking loophole in a spell or a feat. More often than not, it is players who fuck up that old and now cliche adage (you shouldn't act like it is some novel stroke of genius). 5e makes the situation worse by creating so many player's options that the DM can't keep up with all the supplements.
“A lot of players who have never DM’d don’t really realize the amount of effort that you put into the game” I feel you brother
Dude, one time my player group wanted to program an ai that would dm for a group, I was like... bruh, was both insulting and an impossible idea
@@bearpoker6470 Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Seriously, though, that's terrible haha.
Yea lmao Im writing my first campaign and oh boy is this a lot more work than I expected, but I'm very much enjoying it
I mean thats all irrelevant if your game sucks and your DM style is shit.
@@commodoreperrytheplatypus2891 Same here I've been working hard on just the skeleton of my first story for over a year now, with only 2 main dungeons complete and about 78 pages of written material i was not expecting it to be as hard as it is. its really exhausting, i have had to take breaks that lasted up even several months just because i burnt out trying to think of what more i can add. Though in my test runs with some friends i have found i am surprisingly good with improve, like i even surprised myself with it.
Already feeling a bit awkward cause Monty not looking on Kelly when he talks. xD
Oles Mysiura, I can use theater of the mind to imagine it. 😉
This was too funny
Feels like I'm being interviewed with them both staring into camera
Well I mean, technically they are still looking at each other, they are using cameras so they will see the other person on their display.
I played a half-elf fighter once. In my backstory I decided that my character was agnostic. Rather difficult in D&D. My character didn't care about the gods and was hoping that they wouldn't care about him. My DM was brilliant. He used that desire to screw with my character. The gods chose my character as a champion and kept trying to get involved. I kept trying to mind my own business and ended up becoming the champion of the god Pelor. My character was not happy about it, but I enjoyed it very much. This sounds like railroading and the DM meta-gaming, but the way the adventure unfolded my character performed the actions and then the gods came along later and rewarded me for my actions or offered to aid me in times of crisis. I never felt that the gods (DM) were limiting my actions or my choices, or trying to force me to follow a certain path. It was that DM was rewarding me with the gods' favor which my character didn't want, you know like getting socks for Christmas. All in all it was a very enjoyable campaign.
Wow, that sounds like a lot of fun! I'm glad that worked out, as that sounds like you had a perfect player-DM balance in that scenario. I could easily see that going sour if the player viewed it as DM railroading.
I'm also playing a half elf fighter 😅. I didn't think it was a very popular build.
Heh, you know you used those socks though. I even asked for socks and my wife flipped out on me. Not wanting something doesn't make it useless, but that story is friggen halarious.
@@LegendStormcrow Thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
@@austincooper5336 I don't know that it is, but I had fun with it.
Early on in my DND career, we had a friend who was our DM. This was before I started DMing (which I love now) and was newer to the rules. He was an adamant believer that the game was the players vs the DM which goes against everything I know that a good DM should be. Every encounter would have not-so-surprising traps and new enemies appearing just so he could try and kill us. It got so bad that we would get into regular arguments about rules that his homebrew enemies would have, making them utterly infuriating to fight. After maybe 6 or so sessions of this back and forth and animosity growing we ended up in a dungeon room where we killed all the enemies, and he "surprised" us with a Beholder. Way over our level to fight.
Needless to say we all died and were pretty pissed. Instead of having us roll new characters and continue, I kid you not he packs up his things and says, "Well that was a fun campaign, I'll see you guys later." And just leaves, super oblivious to everyone's anger. As he was packing up too he was making jokes about killing our characters.
We're not friends with him anymore.
Just reading this made me upset on your behalf. That was a terrible DM. He completely missed the point of the game.
@@a.spirit8408 Agreed, we were a lot younger then but that shouldn't excuse his poor decisions. The kid was a "self-described sociopath" who was also super narcissistic. Everything had to be about him, and it showed. It took a few years but my whole friend group dropped him as a friend en masse.
sounds like how 1st and 2nd edition was played. In those editions it pretty much was Player VS. DM. Most old school DMs would just come out and say it.
@@mitchelltyner5670 I don't think that's specifically how 1e and 2e were envisioned. Those were different gaming philosophies with a different player (and DM) mindset but still had a neutral DM as a referee. Yeah, mortality was more common and things were dangerous, but that's not because of how the DM was induced to act by the game; that was more related to game design in general. Same goes for OSR games.
@@mitchelltyner5670 This was 3.5, only a few years before 5e was released
I'm reminded of this one thing that doesn't really entirely concerns D&D but apologizing in general, I once played with a group of players at my local Adventures League and made a huge blunder with a spell ruling that resulted in a TPK. I apologized after the fact and, for some reason, got labeled as a terrible DM because I'm "weak" and can't "control my players". When I looked into my reputation there and asked some of the other people there, they tell me that the reason I got branded with that title was because I apologized because apparently, "great DMs don't apologize" and "apologizing is a display of weakness". This ended up being one of the main reasons why I left my local AL.
Apologizing does NOT make a person weak, instead it shows that they are capable of taking responsibility and is a sign of maturity. Only spoiled children make a big fuss when they're wrong and accuse everyone else of being wrong except them.
As far as controlling my players go, I believe that the DM's job is to control the table, not control the players. The players are not pawns of the DM to weave the DM's own story, instead both the DM and the players are co-creators in the group's story. The DM controls the table to ensure that everyone gets their time in the spot light, that everyone gets treated fairly, that things progress at an acceptable pace, and that the group's attention is refocused back onto the game or the current situation when people fly off on a tangent.
It's for the best that you stopped going to that store, because that's a toxic attitude.
you make your local sound bad, but even though you are true. I also realize that most time what people say is true in other ways. so reflect and improve
@@QuangNguyen-ep6mx Be that as it may, I will NOT agree with their statement that "apologizing is an act of weakness".
@@1003JustinLaw never should, and never listen to such idiots.
Old post but I agree with you. It's about the table. I experienced a lot of gatekeepers as 5E became more popular. There was more diversity at the table and many veteran DMs were.... inflexible, to put it kindly. I have a group I play with now that aren't AL. I love my group but miss the variety. There were just too many toxic DMs in AL for a gal like me to play with. And as for apologizing..... YES, Yes, yes! I had a good DM that loved to throw a dozen targets at the party to pick off. One session we had two no-shows and went on without them. We were quickly overwhelmed and it would've led to a TPK. He was really cool and just stopped the session mid-combat. "I'm sorry guys, I tweaked their stats too high. Let me fix a couple things," he said and a few minutes later we continued with the session. That's not weakness, that's a smart, aware leader, IMO
DM: "Your character wouldn't do that. They're a Lawful Good paladin. They need to respect the laws."
Me: "My character holds honor in high regard. He has seen this ruler conduct several acts of tyranny against his own people. He would absolutely kick the doors to this dishonorable tyrant's palace down."
You character has lost their powers
People who made this game should've used some other word instead of "Lawful", something like "honourable", because that's what it means.
"Good supersedes Law." - Vortan, LG Paladin of Pelor.
Lawful good =/= follow the law.
If im not mistaken, the lawful part just refers to your character having a code or principle they follow to the T. The code does not need to be the law of a certain land
A paladin would definitely kick the door of a bad ruler. However, a paladin would not poison the ruler's wine at the feast.
In regards to respecting boundaries. I ran into an extreme example a while back where the group had a player who wasn't okay with ANY sort of conflict. At that point we just had to say "This might not be the right game for you."
What the fuck did they expect to get out of the game then?..
Overly sensitive PC: "So..I am not confident with rape...torture...heavy amounts of gore..."
Dm: "Hmm well that is fair..I can't garanty that the others wont try some torture but we can keep it down to avoiding it being too brutal or detailed. I will simply describe it very lightly or make it a more funny scene..or have you guys just be a bit more open to other ways of manipulting the captured ene.."
Overly sensitive PC"Oh I am not confident with manipulation either!"
DM: "O..Ohh well..I mean I guess..."
Overly sensitive PC: "Or murder..intrapment...bullying...pain...suffering...death...thievery or conflict!"
Dm: "..........."
Now if you use that as a character trait not as a player trait then it is really cool I think. Make it a character conflict that they know they have to do something that disgusts them or something
@@bibbobella Hyperbole aside, if you focus your game on mystery, exploration or social situations you can still have great game experiences.
@@havcola6983 A game without any kind of conflicts is nearly impossible.
How will you create a mystery without a murder, a thievery or something else worth exploring.
@@bibbobella A mystery is just an unusual situation where you've provided incomplete information. You want to find someone who left several decades ago. You get hired to find a mcguffin but don't know where or how it looks. A strange thing has shown up and you need to figure out where it came from and how it got here, yadda yadda.
As for exploration, that really just requires an objective and some interesting locations on the way and letting the players connect the dots between them.
Conflict is just very easy, and kind of baked into the dna of dnd due to it's roots as a wargame. But it's absolutely not required for a good game.
Some people don't like the "negative" videos
But you guys turn them into something positive.
Big ups ♥
Thank you! We try.
@@DungeonDudes Honestly you guys are very good at this. Us Nerds can often be arrogant, and many think it's cool to play the arrogant know it all too... but most fail at that. (Except for Angry GM, he's good! But not God)
I also love that you made the "be aware of peoples tolerances" not sound like the preachy "read peoples minds" that some people can do. Because knowing the limits of a group is important. (Better play it safe, than to be sorry.)
This! So much this!
Am I the only one who just assumed these two lived together?
Saaaaame lmao I just assumed they were roommates or something.
No, no you are not ...
I really thought they were, like, brothers or something
@@foxgirlchainsaw I thought they were lovers, since, you know, different surnames, but sure
Like Bert and Ernie
I had a campaign I was in as a player, that due to life changes I knew I was going to have to leave most of us expected the DM was going to find a way to write my character out of the game with some moment of sacrifice.
The DM took a hook from both my character's backstory, and the persona I had played through the campaign, to bring in a character from my own character's past that created a perfect opportunity for my character to bow out of the campaign in a meaningful way but left my character alive and pursuing his own path, simply no lobger with the party.
That's poetic
Creativity and consideration; I love it!
I actually like the way Matthew Mercer dealt with alignment in Critical Role when Pike went against her character and showed cruelty. He didn't strip her of her powers outright but showed signs that she was losing favor with a cracked amulet.
Beautiful DMing. Not only that, but Pike began acting within her alignment better. The whole party started acting more good and less evil. Still chaotic or neutral wrt the law, ofc.
I just started DMing, this video is a godsend
Same here ;)
Same. It's good stuff
Ditto
Greetings Fellow new DM!
Calvin Jones best dm advice I can give to new DMs
‘Happily make every mistake, that’s how you learn’
Tell your players ‘choices are infinite, consequences are mandatory’
Practice makes perfect.
When writing a campaign or a scene look to mythos or movies, or books for inspiration.
Include everyone at the table.
Cheers
I once made my players fight a party tailored to counter their strengths and strategies. And they loved it. This is how I played it.
Every so often, the party would notice a tabby cat wandering around. It was an urban campaign, it was no big deal. It was often accompanied by other cats. I made them a tad paranoid until they killed the tabby cat. Then suddenly, animals would take notice of them when they entered an area, whenever they got into fights especially.
When they finally confronted the big, bad evil guy, he swore revenge for the death of his wizard familiar (the tabby) and his wife was a dark druid. He had been watching them fight, watched how they solved problems and came up with counter strategies. The PCs were saved when his rival launched an attack at a most inopportune time, giving them an opportunity to escape.
From then on it was an information war. They spent a great deal of time and resources researching the bad guys. Who their friends were, who their enemies might be, their quirks and relationships. Needless to say, the next confrontation was a lot less one sided. The PCs even managed to piece together about 3/4 of the wizard's spellbook by information gathering in places he once was and hunting down his old mentor via Speak with the Dead spells.
Nothing lights a fire under a party quite like personal revenge. It boils down to foreshadowing. A warning that they are being watched. It removes the sting of the DM basically meta-gaming and gives an in-game reason why the NPCs fight this way. Wizards are intelligent; they will control the battlefield and seek every advantage in a confrontation. If a fight is inevitable, they will conspire to have one on their own terms.
One trick I have found useful as a DM is to tailor encounters to the monsters' behaviour rather than meta-gaming. Animal-level intelligences tend to attack the most threatening or nearest PC. They will go after anyone who hurt them terribly. Brutes like orcs, trolls and giants are smart enough to go after "squishy" characters first, targeting healers and spellcasters. Human and higher intelligences? They plan, they strategize and if they can help it, they will never give the party a fair fight. You should never encounter three illithids standing shoulder to shoulder. They should attack the party from three difference angles, throwing mind blasts in sequence to have the best chance of stunning at least some of the party, some of the time. They will try to force the party to split their attention using misdirection, spatial magics and illusions. Illithids aren't scary because they eat brains, they are a nightmare to fight because they are evil geniuses and should act like such.
I think that was well handled. You gave them a realistically difficult encounter given the villain's resources, but also let them escape and come back prepared now that they knew what they were up against.
Poor wizard family :( they lost their familiar and got attacked twice
@@nflippo6201 Yeah, the players sound like the villains there. Killing a cat because it followed them around? xD
Explained Meta-gaming isn't meta gaming. The problem is when someone at the table (whether the DM or the players) uses their out of character discussions as in character knowledge with no reason or way for their character to hold the knowledge themselves. This could for example be the BBEG just knowing their exact tactic cause reasons or whatever. Or a monster having the specific abilities to counter everything the players can do. Or the player just knowing some detail that weren't there to know or using out of character knowledge about a rare/odd creature to exploiting their weaknesses even if their character wouldn't have known that.
Also, I feel like you discredit orcs a bit here.
In my campaign, I had Mind Flayers be a near extinct species. There were only about 150 left in the world, and they were having a civil war. In this kind of environment, the Mind Flayers were incredibly careful. They'd developed means of controlling many thralls, never putting themselves in harms way because if a single mind flayer dies, that's a big deal to the colony.
Replacing the word "players" with kids and "DM" with parent, makes this a great parenting video
"don't throw the baby with the bathwater"
indeed, a great parenting video.
:p
Its funny thinking a parent telling their child: oh theres a trap down the hallway! Or theres monsters up ahead! Haha
Read this comment while Listening at 12:00, I laughed so hard xD
Hehe, then according to #10:
"Try being a parent at least once and if you don't like it, it's alright, let someone else care for your child."
@@zozilin reminds me of the shenanigans when the bard/(future) warlock negociates with a fay to trade for his firstborn.
fay : the deal is sealed, give me your firstborn
bard : when do we start?
fay : confused look
bard : when do we start making that child?
Not allowing players to utilize the strength of their characters. Example a GM attacked my paladin with unturnabke skeletons, dismisses players wanting to make checks, made every encounter a contest of brute force etc.
I think u can block a characters strength once in a game. My party was full of characters with darkvision and in our final boss, the wizard (who knows our characters are coming for a long time) hired 2 assasins with greyish capes so they couldnt see the assasins because of colorblind thing in the darkvision. That was cool i guess?
Berkay Karsli For example smashing the Druid every time they want to polymorph into a bug and scout ahead, not allowing rogues to rogue, fighting with a wizard that wants to raise a zombie pet, ranger never finds tracks or anything useful, just things the GM has decided to gimp because it might sway a fight or situation in favor of the players.
Get a new DM
One of my dear friends was prone to this. He ran Star Wars but every encounter circumvented the power of using a lightsaber. No one ever fired blasters at us, instead the galaxy was armed with acid filled bullets that splashed our characters when intercepted. Random thugs had cortosis weave armor that shorted out our lightsabers. I had a much better time once I gave up and played a tech guy because he didn't usurp my character expectations in that role.
@@floridachomps2885 that's suck. What i mean is more like once in a campaign thing. You should make feel rogue very efficient in the game but when he desperatly need that power take it away. That make people more creative
Props for doing the responsible thing and keeping the quality content at the same time guys
Really? I miss them sitting on top of each other.
@@thedogrunner 1×q=+¹+q12
@@RandomPerson123321 Good.
@@RandomPerson123321 íyyo
The one thing I hate most about alignment policing is that the DM thinks they understand my character more than I do.
I tell my players at the start of a campaign - I will not change their behaviour to match their alignment. I WILL change their alignment to match their behaviour.
Sometimes we do. But i just ask that is this what your character would do. Also, bump your murderhobo ass from LG to CE lickety-split
@@oz_jones No you don't.
im trying my first run at dming this saturday
wish me luck
GL! You've got this!
What he said. Don't be afraid to cheat. Just do it to make the game more fun not less.
Good Luck! Best piece of advice I ever got, don't worry during the game if it feels clunky, you actually have no idea how it's going. I can't count the number of times I thought to myself "well this one went off the rails and into the woods" and when it was over the players were really happy with it. You just can't tell so don't worry about it and stay in the moment. Have fun!
You got this, Dungeon Master!
good luck, fellow adventurer
One thing I want to add to the idea of alignment policing, and something that bothers me during these discussions is that sometimes it isn't policing so much as reminding. For example, I once had something like this discussion with one of my players.
Me: "So, you guys are planning on breaking into the temple and stealing the artifacts from the Bishop?"
Player 1: "Yeah, man, I'm excited for this, we can sell them to finally pay off [Player 2's] debts and deal with that Guild."
Me: "Right, the temple of the Raven Queen, your patron diety?"
Player 1: Looks at their sheet and remembers they are playing a devoted cleric from a pious family who greatly supports the church, "Oh. Right, my character wouldn't be okay with this, would they?"
Me: "Probably not"
See, players can get over-excited, or have enough characters they are running, I've legit seen people forget things like their patrong diety, or the fact that their backstory included a long and devoted service to the crown. Now, I never tell them they can't do something, but I do ask them to justify it, "Why is your devout cleric suddenly willing to steal from their own temple in direct defiance to a perfectly reasonable order from their superior?"
And, I think this is where the examples in the video fell flat. The LG paladin taking up arms against an evil, but lawful king, makes sense. How do you justify the LG Paladin holding down a shopkeep while the rogue tortures them for the combination to their safe?
This is also why I sometimes hate the discussion of "you agreed to adventure with the party, so it is your responsibility to make your character's participation make sense." I had a really toxic group once, that murdered an innocent woman in front of my doctor and big G Good Gnome Cleric. Well, I revived her, spent an hour casting Raise Dead and using my own money to bring her back from the dead.
So the party killed her again. Directly in front of me.
They wanted to keep killing her so Strahd would keep showing up and they could kill and end the side mission early (metagaming hard, I note). Why would my character be okay with that? Or with a previous scene where one of the party members who hated the gods smashed the lost shrine my character found as proof of his Pantheon having female goddesses, which was his lifelong quest to prove?
Still bitter about that game, I guess, but the point is, sometimes, done gently, this can be a good thing, to make sure the story stays consistent.
Your old group sounds like mine
That just sounds like a group of a-hole murder hobos.
I love these videos. Even if we aren't always having these bad traits, and even fewer of us are being toxic, just keeping these types of things in mind improves the game for everyone.
It's still a good thing to think about when you're GMing, because knowing these pitfalls exist can help ensure you don't fall into them.
re: Alignment.
I don't see it as acting "out of" alignment, but shifting alignment. I let my players do whatever they want, but I do warn them that repeatedly acting a certain way will shift their alignment and the world will perceive them differently. I also make it clear that one act doesn't shift an alignment. I certainly don't force them to stay true to one alignment. I don't think disregarding alignment entirely is the correct solution; my solution is to discuss the alignment chart in session zero and what it means to be good vs evil, chaotic vs lawful.
Same here, I always tell my players that their alignment will not be always the same, but I instead will help them consider changing it if they believe or I suggest their character has grown out of it. It is the same for ideals, flaws and bonds: if the character behaves differently, their sheets change to reflect it :)
Amen to this. Alignment is (or at least should be) a measurement, not a rule.
I totally agree! I’ve always believed that shifting alignment are wonderful plot devices that add drama. Such as a lawful good character pushed to evil acts as a last desperate measure to save a loved one etc.
I've had players shift alignment before. We discussed it at length & I made it clear where they were heading & why. I also sorta unofficially introduced bridging alignments to smooth the transition (like: Chaotic Neutral --> Chaotic Neutral (leaning evil) --> Chaotic Evil (leaning neutral) --> Chaotic Evil).
I love seeing more of this approach. Maybe we are finally getting away from the era where no one understood alignment and argument always ensued. I even feel inspired to make an episode myself and go into some more detail on the subject on top of all the already brilliant advice above (hopefully when I get at least a sole viewer or two). Thank you Dungeon Dudes and all the others who posted player advice and opinion.
Muh guy Kelly is staring into my soul like I'm a bard who just said "I roll to seduce the dragon"
Sounds like something my Bard would do if he found the dragon hot enough. I mean what?
"Don't write a scenario where only one option exists"
Even better, write a scenario where no options exist (that you can figure out as a DM). Then let the players fumble with terrible ideas until either they begin to get desperate or they come up with something ridiculously funny.
Necessity is the mother of all inventions and desperation is the solution to all impossibilities.
I always say I don't create solutions, I create problems. You create the solutions.
This is great advice. After a session which was mostly a prison break, ending in some super creative, and funny solutions, my players asked what the intended escape route was.
There was none. Nobody would build a jail with obvious design flaws, so I gave the warden an approximate budget, and built the best prison I could think of, guesstimating what would be too expansive.
Yep, it's a dirty DM secret - sometimes the encounter doesn't have a solution. You just let them flail around for a while, then if what they come up with sounds like a good idea, give it a chance to succeed. They'll never know the difference - they'll think you came up with a creative challenge, then they masterfully figured out how to beat it. Fun time all around.
DM: "Your character wouldn't do that. They're a Lawful Good paladin. They need to respect the laws."
Me: "My character holds honor in high regard. He has seen this ruler conduct several acts of tyranny against his own people. He would absolutely kick the doors to this dishonorable tyrant's palace down."
I love this. One of the PCs in our current campaign is in possession of an object that turns his blood into a black substance that solidifies once exposed to the air, but it returns to normal at dawn. He had become a pincushion with about 3 spears that were firmly lodged into his body. If we didn't remove them before dawn they would have dealt heavy damage to him, and the solid black blood was making them hard to remove by simply pulling them. I wasn't sure how the DM intended for us to fix them, but I had just gotten a new hammer from the encounter and wanted to test it out, so I had another party member hold the dude down while I hammered the spears out.
My opinion is the best thing you can do as a DM is ALWAYS own up to your mistakes, apologize for them, AND fix them as best you can. It really deepens the bond with your players as it shows humility and a willingness to change decisions made on the fly (or even preplanned) once getting feedback. It also makes players more willing to do the same at the table. Also, Session 0. I did the cocky DM "I don't need a session 0" and now I'm doing one mid campaign to deal with issues I didn't deal with.
For the forever DM, I'm pretty happy with my group. I do most of the DMing and in the background each player puts together a mini dungeon. When I need a break the players character splits and I make an npc to support the team through the dungeon for a few sessions. Gives me a nice break and allows me to learn how to play different classes.
That's a great idea! I'm usually the DM (only started in April) but we've come up with an idea that whenever one of the players has a birthday we'll have a session where that person takes over a session as a DM, either in a little one-shot or a different game. The first one went very well!
Whenever someone did something out of alignment my DM always said "Confusing but ok".
That's honestly a good way to handle it. Sorta just saying "You can do that but I don't see why you/your character would but it's your character". That is the long version of it from my perspective anyway.
@@zaferoph Just ask: Why? Most of the time the players come with a really good reasons, and those moments can build to more RP in the campaing.
@@moodyfingers7301 I mean the best way is to just completely ignore the alignment system tbh. Or rewrite the alignment into more well defined yet more human morals.
@@zaferoph Yeah, I don't like the alignment system but while playing with people that like it and don't want to change it, one as to come up with solutions.
@@moodyfingers7301 That's true.
When it comes to alignment, I have a player that's a druid - so they're Neutral. But they made the decision to walk into a tavern to get a drink because they were depressed about their friend that got murdered years ago. Well, the city was on lock down because of the players, and without a certain pass, you couldn't get alcohol. So the druid summoned a fire elemental, turned into one themselves, killed the bartender, and exploded the entire tavern with how much alcohol was in the building - unknowingly killing a dozen other people that were upstairs.
Instead of getting rid of their powers, though that'd be the just thing to do, I instead just put a HEFTY bounty on their head that they still don't know about. I as a DM never thought I'd have to make bounty hunters for my players. Can't wait!
Jeshie Wafflez yes. Don’t railroad, but make sure they know that you are serious about consequences. They take an action, they own it. 👍
Druids are nature bros. If he starts burning down forests, then you've got to sic a druidic circle on him, but not have him lose his powers. Your bounty hunter solution sounds totally fair and he deserves it. If he has "heat metal" in his prepared spells, consider if you want him to be able to roast a NPC bounty hunter or not. Could be a good way to let them know about the bounty.
Please remember that they can actually be intellegent!
This isn't some random monsters or bandits that are trying to just get the PC's meat/gold!
These can be strategic and powerful to the point of giving your obviously high level party a big disadvantage. Let them have a plan, have them gather intell about these monsters (The party) from different people they have been around, let them figure out their weaknesses and strenghts and use that against your murderhobo party! (Or at least against that obviously chaotic evil druid they apparently have..)
Remember this was what they did to themself. Obviously just throwing in some unwinnable battle would be bullshit but giving them a huge disadvantage and possible have them be the hunted for a while could be a good lesson for them and be super interesting especially if they are used to being the overpowered "heroes"
@@spam1576 be aware that not all druids are the same. "nature bro's" doesn't always mean protecting forests and nature. nature is everything, it's chaotic, it's destruction, some druids might believe that burning down that forest will pave the road for better and newer more prosperous life to grow from it (which is why forest fires can be healthy and why controlled fire's are a thing). not all druids embrace protecting , some emboby the chaotic and destructive parts too.
this is quite a rare ideal though, so having another circle take offense to those actions is fairly justified and within lore, but it shouldn't be done as a method to "correct" a characters behaviour in all cases, however that doesn't mean do not give consequences if their views don't align with the world.
but could you say the same if it was a paladin or a cleric and they were completely unrepentant for it? I get that 5e is flexible with alignments and all that but would the world you build justify keeping their powers?
My top tip would be 'Never kill your players. Only the dice get to do that.' Never set up a situation or take an action likely to kill your PCs. Always give them a way out. But if the dice sometimes let them down, so be it.
My party started last week, going through Curse of Strahd, and they walked into an ambush of five swarms of rats, randomly rolled, in a house. The three, of the seven, PCs who went inside were down to two or three hit points and I stopped the fight to say, "Running is always an option." I let them go without attacks of opportunities.
My DM: *Power Word Kills me in the middle of my turn*
I can't throw a D4 hard enough though
It’s a crappy tip… life threatening moments add to adventures and you are taking that from them by carefully balancing every encounter so they never have a challenge outside of a completely accidental dice roll
@@Dragondan1987 I don't think you've actually read my tip, or if you did you didn't understand it. I didn't say don't let them die when they are stupid or roll badly, I said don't set up situations intended to kill them.
Props to you guys making that intro segment line up with each other
All the credit to Kelly on figuring that one out!
A note on audio and video: The change to the 2 different locations is handled well, lads. Shot framing, at both locations is great, as is the lighting and audio quality on Kelly's location. And great editing as usual. Keep it up.
Monty “Orcus” Martin
*season one flashbacks*
M.O.M.
Oh boy... I wrote an article down there... sorry about that:
One problem I see in DMs, I even fall into the trap, is that players often play towards the DM.
Let me explain with an example:
*DM finishes describing the room*
Player 1 to DM: I want to open the chest.
DM: Okay, it's a Mimic, roll for initiative.
Player 2 after fight: Dude, we could have inspected the room to figured that one out!
This happened to my group a lot before we learned a very precious tool. (The mimic was actually a Tiny Dragon, which our fighter got to graple with, and the Warlock talked down from the fight... so it wasn't all bad)
But the tool we now use is the concept of "the Caller", a very simple idea:
One player is the Caller.
Only the caller is allowed to directly communicate what the players will do to the DM, unless the DM specifically asks another player to do something, a RP session occurs, or Combat (You get the drift)
It might seem very inhibiting, and some Improv Actor RPGers might frown on the idea, but it does something magical. It draws the players heads away from the DM and towards each other.
*DM finishes describing the room*
Player 1: I want to open the chest
Player 2: Hang on, let's inspect it first, maybe it's a trap.
Player 1: Okay, you do that, then I open the chest if it's safe, Player 3 what will you do?
Player 3: Maybe I will search the room for hidden doors?
Player 2, who is the caller, to DM: Okay so I will inspect the chest for traps, while Player 3 inspects the room for hidden doors. Player 1 will then open the chest if it's safe.
I told that in a very "mechanical way", but if you are an Acting player then you can RP all that stuff out, but only stop to describe the "mechanics" of it to the DM.... Just like in combat.
Once the Call is made, the DM plays it out with the characters, describing the walls Player 3 is inspecting, telling Player 2 that it looks like the chest might be breathing, and maybe getting Player 1 to describe his reaction to the news.
My group found that this focuses the game. It seems to me that people are less on their phones, and more engaged with what's happening. It reels in the "Show stealer" who always has a reaction, and includes the more quiet players. I find that it's more enjoyable to DM too when you have a good Caller. Heck one of my players is an amazing caller. He will tell me the DM that "hey, that's not the call" if I try to move the scene forward. Because sometimes you don't need to get the call to understand what the course of action is, but that's when you sometimes get roped into the "Go with whomever speaks first" (Or Problematic Player if you want to use that term, I don't).
Another thing I really got a lot of good usage out of is a propper Session Zero. Not just to find the thickness of players skinn, but to actually shape your game.
Before my last Session Zero a week ago, I had this "amazing" campaign planned. Honestly it was Awesome! Drew a lot of inspiration from Drakkenheim... only to realize during Session Zero that: This isn't what my players are excited for.
I even told them that I would have to rethink the campaign, but that I had another lingering idea. One of my players who has DMed a bit said: Do what you want, you have to love this too.
But that's the thing. This is my first Campaign, and we are a very new group. What I love is to make a campaign that suits US. I'm sture they would have liked playing my campaign... but this new one? I man it will be EPIC. (As in it's an epic campaign, from 3 to 20! Dungeons and Dragons, and Kobolds Oh my!)
One rule, that I learned from Angry GM, is: Never let you players make their character before you agree upon the campaign.
And likewise: Never make the campaign before Session Zero.
During the Session Zero I learned that two of my players wanted to play variants of the characters they played in my last game (my first Adventure as a DM, a trial run). That's cool with me. (Even though Angry says that's not allowed). I say: If they liked the class, and liked the idea of their character, let them start over. (Both seemed to rework the build and I have asked them for a more in depth character)
The other two. One had a character he wanted to play, he had been talking about that character for as long as I have the other scraped campaign. He ended up realizing that the party would be lopsided, and decided instead on playing another character.
The last guy has yet to submit a character.
While character creation isn't needed for a Session Zero, discussing what they WANT to play should be. It informs you as a DM so much on what sort of campaign you should make.
In the end I am so excited for this new campaign! It's almost as it's writing itself, I just need to structure each adventure. Tip I found here too, is make some adventures "empty", don't have a plot to the mackguffin, that plot will be given to you by the players. It's not railroading that "Adventure 3 would have been the same, no matter what", how does the players know? But making the mackguffin something THEY want, rather than me telling them they want it because Quest Giver dude told them, is more engaging.
I have a friend who DMs us in another game, and he has ended three sessions now with: "So... you bypassed my awesome climax, and solved the task in an amazing way!" The polar opposite of railroading. (In fact last session I got to fly a helicopter!)
One last thing to be aware of is how dice rolls are actually part of the interaction, and feeback for players. In one of my first sessions ever in 5e our DM would roll his dice hidden and just say "hit" or "miss" when I cast Sacred Flame. I got no feeback on what he was rolling... so to me Sacred Flame was the worst spell ever. Thing was... I was casting it on Goblins, who has +2 to dexterity saves...
So we moved to him rolling them openly, but not telling us the modifier. That worked better to be honest. In my One off online I just tell the players. "I rolled a 16".
But it comes back to player trust. At the end of that adventure one player told me he felt I was a fair DM. He felt I didn't cheat my rolls, if I rolled poorly for my monsters, I still used it. (Man did they butcher my awesome last boss like he was nothing)
The same player said in our last session zero: We are a very strategical group, who can handle a lot, so don't be afraid to try to kill us.
And that's where I think the difference between a good and bad DM comes in. A good DM can put the party up against deadly encounters, but still make them feel fair. A bad DM puts the players in the same encounter and proceeds to utterly annihilate the group. Sure you can do that once in a while. But I think that the fear of death is what's fun to play against and with, rather than the "Rofle stomp".
A boss fight SHOULD be deadly if the players make mistakes, it shouldn't be deadly because the DM just wanted to win. A DM only wins when the players had fun, and get to face the last boss. Why should I spend hours designing Adventure 10, if I party wipe them at adventure 1? ...He said while looking at his final encounter in Adventure 1...
well what's the worse that could happen?
Monty: D&D should not be DM vs. Players
My DM: *Literally has an evil version of himself that can change rules*
oooooooo, this sounds sorta cool actually. Is this the type of thing that you guys are okay with and like?
if so, how's it being handled and what's it like?
It was recently sprung on me that I'll
be the DM for the next game, so this video couldn't be better timed. Thanks guys, keep staying safe!
Good luck!
When you guys talked about the rules and how to handle improv it reminded me of a situation in a campaign. Me and my party were exploring an abandoned iron mine and came across an alter. We examined the later finding a channel that looked to lead blood down a hole. So as the other two players were arguing if we should backtrack on the face and bring back the dead body of an enemy we killed earlier and I had my character walk up to the alter and had him slit his wrist dripping blood into the channel. It surprised the dm and after taking 2 damage I unlocked a door that eventually managed to allow us to save one of the characters who had gotten petrified by a basalisk shortly after opening up the door. He told me after the session that he wasn't expecting me to do that. Probably because it was an alter for a chaotic evil God and I was a lawful neutral paladin and the other two were a chaotic good monk and lawful good cleric
I almost wondered why there’s a split screen! Hey I’m not even a DM. I’m a new player but I’ve been watching your old videos, and wanted to comment on a new one! Thanks for the content!
It seems to me that 90 percent of this can be solved with one simple piece of advice: **set your players expectations early**. If you don't like the character a player has chosen, talk to them. If you run a game that's low or high magic, tell them BEFORE the game starts. Let them know what kind of game you run. Be detailed. Don't be afraid to go overboard.
Almost every issue seems to be one form or poor communication or another.
I play a goblin rogue called rat. While playing everyone was trying to put our booty to good use. Buying potions, items, donating to the church etc. Being the crude little vermin I am I opened a business...a house of I'll repute. I got four girls and a bouncer, bought a building, and paid a few key people to steer business my way. All good in game and it almost runs itself while I'm out adventuring. A few players said they were uncomfortable with that in the game... Poof it became a mercantile and exotic supply. The girls became shop keepers and the bouncer was now the guard. My shills became delivery men. And my party had a place to sell off unwanted loot. Adjustment is not that hard. The players as well as the dm should be cooperative about player comfort. The funny thing is irl and in game I am a good and was playing among neutrals.
Lucifer Radford, I think your example illustrates a situation where I would draw the line, to be honest. If there were graphic depictions of lewd content or mistreatment? Sure, I get not wanting that at the table. If there are minors in your group? Also very understandable. However, the idea that a group of adults can’t handle the idea of a brothel in a legal setting doesn’t sit right with me; and the thought of curtailing one person’s (harmless) fun and/or creativity in the name of someone else’s opinion seems to me an inherent imbalance in player agency.
@@Jacksonmckay107 there was an adolescent at the table. The game was in Nevada though where brothels are legal. It was enough that it was interfering with others enjoyment. The mercantile was a good trade off with a practical side. We could dump our unwanted loot, get items, and it often supplied intelligence about local happenings and competing groups outfitting for adventure. Win/win
The example is still solid. Like a video game changing it's skin. The mechanics are the same. I like it.
@@Jacksonmckay107 exactly like what do you do if someone isn't ok with a gay at character? Make the player change their character's sexuality? That would clearly be out of bounds. Sometimes some people's boundaries are going to mess with other people's boundaries and you need to be able to draw the line.
I usually try to not only allow out of the box solutions, but also try to reward them. On an island infested with rust monsters, the druid befriended them by feeding them some iron nails. At that point on, the rust monsters acted "domesticated" with regard to the players, and even defended them at one point.
As a DM, I really try to avoid saying things like, "your character wouldn't do that." I prefer to ask if there's a particular reason their character would do this. More often than not, it'll lead to both me and the player gaining new insights into their character.
So me and my players at the end of every game do something we call roses and thorns. We go around the table and talk about one thing that we really liked about the session and one thing that we did not enjoy and use that as weekly feedback to the DM
I'm stealing that one. It seems like a solid but low pressure way to gauge what's going well and what isn't.
Also definitely stealing
All thats needed is a note that says sexy goblin
It’s awesome that, even though you guys are apart, you still keep the same energy you always have!
My DM has had to accept the fact that the party likes katamari-ing up almost every enemy we encounter and adding them to the party. So far we've added a (modified) Helmed Horror, a Horned Devil, a Water Elemental, a guy possessed by a demon, and an Oblex. We also almost added a Mind Flayer to the party, but we got separated before they could properly join us.
These modern day zoom sessions we’ve been running have led to some seriously distracted players. Muting while they step out to smoke or have dinner-forgetting they are on mute or needing the map positions described to them so they can attack. It is seriously disheartening especially when you realize your enthusiasm and focus is not reciprocated.
Great video, fellas. I am loving the popularity of dnd these days!
I've been the victim of "GM Policing" I was told that I couldn't "attempt" to progress with the infiltration mission which would've involved seducing a pair of male guards (the small group were female characters) because "Your Character is a vocal lesbian/asexual (can't remember which) they wouldn't want to get intimate with these guards"
I'm alergic to that bs, so i never write specifics like alignment, just general backstory and a few key npc's the dm may slide in.
Just because you're lesbian doesn't mean you can't lie
God lord, give me a break. Whatever happened with the mythical "you can certainly try"?
That is BS.
Wow. As if gay or lesbian or asexual people have never performed certain acts to try them out or to attempt to "fit in" or conform to society's wrong expectations of them before. Not only could your character do that, they'd probably be able to do it convincingly. Edit: to be clear, your DM was wrong about... every part of that.
Took to heart a lot of these advices and after a weeks of preparing an adventure for my group to play, I've gotten many comments from them saying that I was one of their favorite DMs and that my content was phenomenal. Thanks for these advices.
Hey guys! Great video, thank you!
Regarding the last point, the "Forever DM", there's also the situation where someone knows that the overall quality of the gaming session will decrease if they aren't running the game themselves. It becomes a choice between a) Choosing to DM and have everybody enjoy the game while overtaxing yourself with the extra work and responsibilities of DMing and b) Having another person run the game and get a half-assed experience with D&D because said DM shows some of the depicted "terrible traits".
This has happened to our group, the last time someone else tried running an adventure we didn't end it due to lack of preparation, time, adversarial DMing, among other things, and that was frustrating as heck.
I love D&D and I enjoy being the DM, but I also enjoy being a PC, imho the rest of the group should recognize that and take steps into developing the skills necessary to run an adventure. Our group gets along nicely, but If I openly voice my concerns in this regard, there's a risk of aggravating someone or force them into doing a role they just don't want to.
Do you have any hints on how to motivate a new player to become a good DM?
Once again, thank you for your quality content. Take care
Do a game developer session with the group. The idea is to have everyone take a turn DM'ing. The group can either try to run a single campaign and see how each players deals with the adventure when it is their turn to run the game. Or have each player know they have to make a quick one shot. Generic player characters should be premade. So all the DM's know what to the party is going to consist of. Players need to play the same basic character throughout the run. Version 2) Is for all the players to come up with a basic plot and generic characters. Then have each player take a gaming session to run the adventure.
This lets each player see what it's like to DM in a low pressure atmosphere. I would then have a wrap up session when it is all done. With all the players commenting on what they liked and things that could be improved upon. The goal is to let players have a turn at it with out feeling committed to a full campaign when they don't feel comfortable with the idea of DM'ing. The wrap up session is for everyone to learn. What works well and things to avoid. Also, just to see what it is like and who naturally takes to it better. And who becomes curious to want to improve.
Another way. With out committing the entire group. Is to say if anyone has a quick story idea they want to test. They get to be the DM and the team is committed to their story for 1-3 gaming sessions, which can get extended if the group agrees. It's very important to still have a wrap up. Again with the focus on helping the DM learn. Instead of just criticizing. When pointing out things that didn't go very well. Players should also make suggestions about different ideas for how to approach the less successful parts.
When it comesbto rulings, I tend to discuss the pros and cons with the players while avoiding looking it up for a lengthy time.
I totally agree with you guys with the 'we'll do it this way for now, and come back to it when it becomes a problem.'
Love, love, LOVE the aspect of employing empathy and respect at the table. Specifically, taking players' real-life concerns into consideration. such as survivors of trauma. Well done, gents!
As for alignment policing: As the DM, I get to play the gods and other supernatural forces. If, after throwing a conscience-twinge at a player who goes ahead anyway, sending a vision or dream to the PC is going to be much more fun and effective than the player arguing with me. And probably produce a better outcome. Admittedly, don't remember it actually happening that way exactly ...
Was really happy when I figured out a way to turn a metagaming moment into a memorable narrative twist with the campaign I play with my younger twin cousins (Twin boys of 16, and their sister of 10, but she hadn't joined their storyline yet). The human (human is important) ranger picked a purple flower from a ruined manor house to give to a sailor elf he had a crush on during their boat journey to the town. He had to roll a constitution roll when he smelled it. But he rolled well. This was his first time challenged with the divide of playing in character, and playing himself. Well, when it came time to give it to her (In the infirmary where she was keeping her fellow injured sailor company) He left it at the bedside of the sailor instead, without any sort of explanation he could back up. I let it ride and moved on with the plot....but I had plans.
Welp, they go on a huge forest adventure (the main storyline) for several sessions that involved a purple corruption destroying the river and forest brought on by a goblin experiment deep in a bullywug forest city. when they return to the small town they find a terrible plague, with poison symptoms similar to that of the corruption, affecting the villagers (Imagine that violent streak the virus gets in princess mononoke). They arrived at night and saw some crazy bonfires and town guards suspicious of each other, they also hear rumours of the town physician being one of the first casualties after stabbing a sailor while he treated someone. Welp, when they head down the path to the lightmage's house to investigate further it gets dark and it's grassy so the human turns on his torch and sees, lining the road, and all through the grass, are just bushels and bushels of that same, purple, flower. both my cousins stood up in unison holding their heads both laughing and shouting in painful disbelief that the one action of leaving that curious flower, could spark this chain of events all stemming from that butterfly-effect decision. They didn't see it coming, but they loved the trickle of clues and the crescendo twist and it really gave the young ranger a lot of motivation to save the town from his fault. He's been really working on his RP game ever since, and gave them both plenty of extra unexpected storyline options that I would have never been inspired to come up with otherwise.
Definitely allow the odd metagame moment... Just don't let them get away with it for long and make it a memorably fun lesson full of whodunnit's, disguised kobolds, a shambling mound, and lots of xp ;D.
Where is the metagaming in this story?
@@rogerwilco2 Once he realized he had to roll a saving throw to smell the flower, even though his character was unaware of the potential danger, he backpedalled the original decision his character was going to do.
I really appreciated your part about boundaries and history. To take it a step further, talk to players one on one!
If people are sensitive to a topic, they probably don't want to expose that to a whole group.
If you talk to them one on one, they will probably be much more comfortable sharing with you.
And then, you don't have to even mention it to the group, you can just avoid it altogether.
Beholders are metagamers, change my mind.
LOL just roll for the eye effects and build a movement-effect web they need to follow to randomize them to keep them in character but not completely impossible to solve in a fight.
Mind flayers are metagamers, they changed my mind... um...
Beholder are meant to be kinda paranoid and always planning for every conceivable attack... Obviously the dm is listening when the PCs are planning so... He kinda should have a beholder plan tailor made in response to that player plan, which is essentially metagaming, right? So I kinda agree with you.
Novice dm here, but I just wanted to throw out an idea for a beholder lair:
Everything is spherical or rounded and works similarly to as if you are on the inside of a planet (like mario galaxy) & all surfaces can be walked on as well as gravity being wonky.
Exisist that sounds legit like a great lair to battle in. Depending on your party level, the beholder could be modified and given some personality, extra abilities and you’ve got a solid bbeg fight
This perfectly summarized so many problems that are going on with my DM, and so many of these are why I've decided to make my own campaign.
So nice that you still continue to put out videos for us amidst all this craziness... Thank you!
Thank you!
I'm getting back into DMing after about 6 months off and I find myself wondering "Do I do any of these things?".
Chances are, if you are asking that question -- probably not. And in the rare chance you are doing any of these, asking yourself these questions will help you overcome them!
I’ve got to say, this has to be one of the best D&D advice videos I’ve ever watched. Particularly talking about boundaries at the table and player feedback. Super useful. We have a small group of DM’s who take turns running games for a larger player group and we have definitely all fallen into some of these traps early on. Super useful content.
Understand what you can, memorize what you can't, and improvise the rest.
I think this is one of your best videos yet, and there is a lot to chew on.
Personally, I was a "Forever DM" and I burnt out twice. In my first go-around I was still enjoying the experience when I burnt out, but it was a form of escape, and I took on too much responsibility - three games, five groups (three in one, too many people wanted to play in it), and three different settings, all homebrew. The second time came out of too many people, too much player conflict, and the fact that nobody else in a nine player group was willing to DM, which wasn't really addressed in the video. Sometimes there isn't someone else who is willing to step up, and the best thing I've ever done as a DM was set it down and step away despite that absence. In my mind, if you're trying to fill a void, then you're already lost within it.
As for alignment, I've been moving away from it. The notion of cosmic, universal morality is actively rejected by most players, and even when they do embrace it, often it can lead to unpleasant or nonsensical behaviour.
It might be useful to put together a video on encouraging people to experiment with DMing, and what one can do to lower the barrier there.
I've only experienced one terrible DMing that isn't covered on this list and that was the DM playing minecraft at the same time (we were on Discord) and even told us what they were doing as an excuse when we would say something or ask a question and get no response. It was like the player on their phone but so much worse.
most of my players do that. we play over discord due to one member being in another country, and the rest of us are all spread out. i know it’s a lot harder to focus when you’re not physically there together, but some of mine are always playing some kind of video game at the same time. it’s so rude- we only play for around 2 hours, it’s really not that long to have to go without your console :(
@@keelinkelly8656 I feel you, we spent the whole session traveling in a caravan with no plothooks, no npc interactions and a couple of silent broody dmpcs. I had to kill a random chicken just for something to do.
Just another Glorpsday morning that's horrible, if possible i'd leave that group and try to find a new one, or maybe talk to the other players and the DM and let them know that's unacceptable
@@CalculusPhysics it never got past session 1 but my new group is awesome.
Thanks for these tips, as a new dm my party and I have been having sessions for a few months now and man we have had so much fun. Adapting to their creativity has made me such a better storyteller.
In A New Hope, Han Solo acted against his personality as displayed up to that point, not his alignment. I would argue that he, in fact, acted completely within his chaotic alignment by doing the unexpected thing.
Han Solo was chaotic neutral up until that moment, if you want to go that way. Or he was chaotic good the whole time, and just never acted on his goodness until then? Which means, he should have had an alignment shift at some time in the past, and then shifted back at that moment? Or it means alignment is more akin to personality on a PC than it is to actual alignment of a chromatic or metallic dragon who are imbued with near invariant moral compulsions.
Also the fact that, as explained in this video, alignment isn't a box locking you from ever acting in a way that doesn't agree 100% with what's written on your character sheet. That goes double for extreme circunstances like the Han Solo situation.
This was a really great video and a great example of how well you can take concepts that maybe a lot of us are very familiar with, but then present them in a way that really causes us to think deeply about in new ways. Superb.
I actually dislike DM’s that are too generous. Let me explain why!
I’ve played with plenty of DM’s that willingly hand out advantage on the fly, thinking they’re helping the players and making it fun.
in-fact it does the opposite.
When a DM says “roll it with advantage” without giving me a reason, or without me explaining why I’d have advantage, the only thing I roll is my eyes.
Only one thing goes through my mind.
“okay what information is the DM dying to give me?”
when they do that, it’s purely in their favour. And I’d argue it’s rail roading the players with kindness.
When we win at everything we win at nothing.
It’s like reading a book without no chance of failure and following the directive of the DM.
Here’s the thing, it appeals to the power gamers, they love it when the DM says “have advantage on that” so the dm thinks, awe he’s having fun winning.
But for the casual gamers it’s just a slog.. if I wanted to be good at everything with low chance of failure I’d tell myself a story of this adventurer who succeeded at everything and get bored within 2mins.
As a partial power gamer, random advantage is really not fun. The whole point of power gaming for some is to feel rewarded because you made a good choice with the information given (i.e. the rules). When a 'reward' is given arbitrarily and without explanation it undermines trust in that information and therefore denies them some future engagement. On the other hand, an explanation later on can reaffirm that trust so temporarily unexplained advantage can be fine.
In other words I agree with what you say from both a story and mechanics standpoint.
Ah the Viari Syndrome.
I am running a game soon, after years of just being a player, and your videos have been a huge help in reminding me that some things could come back and bite me as a dm.
Some things I thought would just be common sense when playing as a dm, but hearing some of the ways you guys explain things, it reminds me that not everyone thinks in a broad spectrum.
The way alignment finally made sense to me was to make it a description of the character, rather than a proscription for a character. (I.e. X action and character behaves in a Lawful Good manner, rather than X character cannot act in this manner because they are Lawful Good.)
Thanks for all the tips and guides about DMing, I just started, and I shall send many thanks to you guys. Your content is genuinely awesome !
Thank you, so happy you are gaining something from our videos! Happy rolling!
Alternative opinion: A great list of instructions for a great April fool's prank
Sound advice and opinions as always. I’ll use some of it, I am also a Forever DM sadly. Though I’ve never heard the problem of not wanting to pass the reigns, the ones I’ve seen is no one wanting to take them and trust me I’ve tried.
Scenario: I'm a DM. I have a paladin that has sworn an oath of nuetrality. He has promised to serve 'balance.' He goes around being good all the time and helping people, taking nonviolent choices, etc.
I presented to him a scenario where he could kill a monster or spare its life, but before he chose i had his god give him images of scales, of all the good he's done, of bringing balance, etc.
he decides to spare the monster. so i gave him a level of exhaustion. the character is confused but the player COMPLETELY understands what happened and is cool with it.
am i alignment policing at this point or am i helping create a dramatic narrative?
I think you're fine if the player understands and accepts. But nonviolence isn't inherently good, and is in some ways necessary to neutrality. If anything sparing an evil creature's life is directly promoting balance, or rather continued existence of and conflict between good and evil, because the evil creature is now free to commit evil and invite an agent of good to slay it. The paladin of neutrality's place is to take actions that preserve that dynamic, rather than balancing his "good" choices with evil ones.
If your player is OK with it, it's OK. That's the ultimate metric.
Ya know, if the monster was causing destruction and loss of life, sparing it (while an inherently good act) only so it could go back to said acts would be the paladin allowing such a creature to continue and put some balance into the scales because the paladin allowed the creature to continue doing them.
For a cleric or paladin, 'alignment policing' is kinda the point, as long as it's all in-universe.
That's perfectly fine imo. They swore an oath to a God. You have every right to uphold them to that oath. I would even go so far as to make then lose their class if they continue down that path as they will have lost the favor of their God
I love DMing and playing. I did have a stretch of twelve consecutive years where all I did was DM.
I loved it. It was terrific. Playing again felt refreshing too.
The more passive favouritism can be really, really hard to manage sometimes... and can often follow existing relationships not necessarily because of the relationship itself, but because of the increased access to the DM for brainstorming and spitballing.
It *is* a problem I've noticed when my husband and I are playing together - even if neither of us are the DM, the degree to which we can interweave our stories with us both being heavy roleplayers can make others feel like they're missing out at times. I'm not sure how the problem can really be solved, though. Are we mean to... just *not* talk about games and characters that excite us?
I've tried tackling it from the other end, but simply can't equalise the level of access even *before* taking into account that a large number of players aren't actually interested in talking about the game outside of session. Essentially, they see what is the result of a lot of prep time behind the scenes as a player, giving the GM more to work with, and want the same result without wanting to set aside any time for conversations like that, or to put in the effort to reach out with ideas.
It's really hard not to feel put upon as a DM when players give you absolutely nothing to work with, and then complain when they don't get as many ties into the main story or unique character beats. Hell, it feels pretty bad as a player too to have the effort you put in shat on
Hey, so I was running a game for friends for the first time ever, and I greatly appreciated the information you give in your videos.
It was only over two sessions, but it was a marked improvement from the first game night to the second seeing your vids.
So thank you. :)
OVERRULE - Trust between players and DM - 1:10
1. Not being prepared - 2:25
2. Showing Favoritism - 4:58
3. Listening to your players & Accepting Feedback - 7:30
3.5. Owning up to your mistakes - 10:10
4. Respecting player boundaries - 10:35
5. Railroading your players -13:07
6. Inconsistent, unfair, or draconian rulings - 15:08
7. Deadly or adversarial encounters - 18:30
8. Alignment policing - 21:00
9. Enabling problem players - 24:33
10. Forever DM -27:27
Hey guys! Just another Canuck stuck in isolation (who was about to start a home game right before the pandemic/ social distancing started) and I wanted to say a big thank you for continuing to provide this amazing content week after week, even when the world’s falling apart. You guys are great!
Handwaving rules too often, then complaining when players don't bother to learn the rules.
I am literally about to DM Strahd, 1st time DM, with a group who are new players. I haven't played since the 80s... love your videos.
To Quote Pirates of the Caribbean, “ Their more like Guidelines “
*They're
@@OfSheffield You didn’t.
Nice video. I'm new to DMing but enjoying it and I am always looking for more tips. One thing I caught myself doing was just being too slow with the storytelling because I thought I needed to provide a lot of visual detail. I ended up just stalling or stuttering when there wasn't much to say anyway. "You go into the cave" is just fine sometimes. Doesn't always need the "it's dark and smells of rotting meat. The sconces are made of rusty iron and there are skeletons in the corner..." every time you go into a new place. I learned to trust my players to have their own imaginations more often.
I'm stuck with the problem "Forever DM". The thing is the moment I decided not to be one anymore, I completely stopped playing D&D, because nobody I know wants to be the DM. Checking the online webstites for Gdr Players I could find dozens of people looking for DMs and almost nobody stepping in to play this role. The fact that I'm no native english speaker amplifies the problem, because the pool of players which I can play with is much more limited... man I just don't know what to do.
I had this problem for a long time, but I'll tell you one thing: stick with the right group for long enough, you're bound to inspire someone. Yes, you'll have suffer through your players' unexperienced dming, but it will get progressively better. Currently running a campaign for about 2 years and playing two of my player's ones. Good luck for you
Try a different game. A Game I like is Zombiecide. It is played with miniatures, you need to flee the zombies. The role of DM is quite different. Settlers of Catan perhaps. Look into other types of games where there is no DM.
Try to play as DM and PC at once! of course your PC does not know the entire plot, but isntead of saying "hey paladin, roll perception" when you want to nudge your party forward your own character interacts with them. "Hey guys, I found this weird mural on the wall. Do you know what language this is?"
That way, if you do it right, you enjoy both being a dm, deciding on the campaign and you actively influence the players actions without railroading them. if you do it wrong though, you need to make your pc disappear.
plot twist: your pc is actually an agent of one of the enemies, and at some point he disappears only to return later and attack the party, knowing all their abilities and their preferences.
maybe foreshadow a bit if you do use this though. your pc saying "maybe you shouldnt be this generous with your good faith" or "your trust is misplaced yet again" when your party lets a captured enemy go or decides not to chase the last of the disgusting goblins. also doesnt need to be an agent from the beginning, he can be "recruited" by the enemy while your party rests for a week or two inside a city. especially if they just foiled one of the enemies plans.
It's really great that you continued to make new episodes. Your channel is really helpful.
Not the Goblin in a funny hat OMG!!!
You guys have really answered alot of my questions and worries as a new dm thanks
Nice timestamps :) more youtube channels should do that.
My dungeon master at some point decided that it seemed "unrealistic" that I wanted to to non-lethal damage with a melee attack, as I had pre-announced I wanted to do, after the attack turned out to be a critical hit. I thought this was silly since I had no way to avoid making a critical hit, but I wasn't that fussed, maybe he just thinks it's a stupid mechanic. Then next session he realizes he'd rather we hadn't killed the NPC so he told us it was okay after all. It just managed to make a very minor issue feel oddly frustrating.
Thanks for the continued content, dudes!!
I think alignment policing is fine if done right. Example: In our campaign, our lawful good Cleric performed a morally questionable action in the heat of the moment. When they next had a long rest, the DM had their patron diety show up in a dream and demand recompense. A Chaotic Good deity then crashed the dream, and gave the cleric the option to convert due to their actions. The cleric converted and was actually happier with the new diety. This also added new options for the story now, as the old diety was now PISSED. Just telling someone they can’t do something because of alignment is bad storytelling, but working the consequences in can be a great way to add flavor.
The thing about allignment, and how stripping a character of their powers for going against their allignment. That's not a GM being bad, that's a built in class feature and a risk of using the class. It's not the GM that wrote that in. It's a rule of the game. And it's best to ask to have the rule ignored at the start of a game and not right when it happens. For me, most of my games are played without allignment, cause I too think it's stupid as a gameplay mechanic. Though it is still fun to use to describe a character quickly.
"Y'know. Good and evil are a gradient..."
Guys, paladin and cleric oaths literally specify what they believe good and evil are.
It's like you forgot death domains and oathbreakers exist, and just want the classes to be numbers on a sheet.
Divine oaths are pretty much perfectly designed for a character to shift beliefs and by extension, their powers.
By all means, ask the player their stance on power changes or deity changes FIRST. But if you don't give a paladin or cleric or warlock or necromancer any kind of morality challenge, you're crippling their roleplaying options while the druids go out and interface with nature and rogues go out thieving.
I am really glad you all made this video. Like usual its a well made and informative video that should help a ton of DMs. "Deadly encounters" isn't a bad term and shouldn't be tied to "adversarial encounters". That being said I believe we totally agree on the spirit of this part of the conversation just disagree on the one term.
Alignments are a fluid things and more of a "guideline" for players to use as a tool...not a restriction. This is not 3rd edition.
I was running a game a few years ago and one of my players began to use such disturbing and graphic actions and imagery even I was uncomfortable, I had to shut it down when another player became visibly upset and wasn't having fun. I wish we had a discussion about boundaries before it got to the point it did
This was extremely helpful as a person that is not only learning to DM, but learning the game in general as I do it.
"Don't be a dick to other human beings!" -Monty Martin 2020
Surprised no one else mentioned this much. I died 12:50
Hey! I have seen various videos on this topic and the problem player topic, and I love that you guys cover this topic in your own inclusive and thorough way. It really helps to try to see yourself , the DM, from the outside, through the players’ eyes, and work on bad habits.
You guys mentioned problem players. There some that are quite obvious and relatively easy to handle like the cheaters or the metagamers, but there are some, like the power gamer for example that are harder to identify and deal with. It would really help to have your viewpoints on this topic to go along side this great video. Thanks for all your work and stay healthy!
On Alignment:
I think you guys were way of the mark, but not because you were wrong in your reasoning. You guys describe a game where alignment doesn't matter, and the player chose to move against it. If good and evil are a gradient and law and chaos are relative, then you're not playing a game where you should even choose an alignment in the first place. By that I don't mean "choose True Neutral", because that is a choice. What I mean is your in-character roleplaying is all that matters. If you're wildly inconsistent with your choices, it doesn't matter because everything is relative to each individual.
However, if you're playing a game where there are defined boundaries of Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos, then your choice of alignment is very important. Classic D&D had severe consequences for breaking your alignment and even has restrictions on certain spells or classes based on your alignment. 5th Edition is no different in terms of RAW. If you're an Oath of Protection paladin and you look the other way from a group of travelers being attacked by goblins, you've broken your oath. It should mean more to your character to uphold this supernatural oath that gives them unbelievable power than to ignore that oath because they felt like it or the party was in a hurry. Same for clerics. If you're a disciple of Bane and you spend a week healing the sick and restoring order to a city recovering from a plague, you're in direct opposition to your deity's desires. Those scenarios need to have consequences if you're playing in a game where those boundaries exist, especially for characters who draw their power from an extraplanar entity with it's own intelligence and motives.
So I agree with you that there are things and times where alignment should matter. I think the Dungeon Dudes were trying to say you shouldn't force a PC to take an action based on their alignment. I think you are saying that acting against alignment or ideals is acting out of character and bad role playing that should have consequences. If you play a LG character, but you let an obvious villain walk free because they offer you money or power, that's immersion breaking for everybody at the table (unless it's your flaw, but then reconsider the LG alignment). A CG character has a little more leeway, because they can say "kill them" or "let's take them to the cops" based on situations on the ground. Regardless of alignment, I think the PC should be allowed to take the action. That action should also have consequences based on their alignment, though.
I also think that this conversation has it's largest implications for players powered by the divine or a patron: clerics, paladins, and warlocks. These characters have an outside observer that is paying (some) attention to their actions. It's why they're a cleric and not a priest with a mace. The entity that gives you power has expectations and failing to abide by these expectations in RP should have real world implications. (adding to this druids that start burning every plant they see or killing animals at random.)
What I think a DM should do in a situation where a divine/patron powered player is acting against what their entity would support is to first let the player take the action. This grants the player agency, and that's what they want. Second, stage an event where the deity/patron has a conversation with the PC. This could be a dream, or NPCs uttering weird, out of place phrases then snapping back, or a priest of X saying "Dude, what the hell?". Have the deity/patron establish that they are disappointment/irritated, and that further straying from the pact or arrangement will invalidate it. Maybe a deity says "Perhaps you are not the paragon of virtue (or trickery, or whatever is in that deity's portfolio) I thought you were. Maybe I should take away your power, and find a new champion?" This gives the PC another choice, straighten up (or find loop holes in their warlock contract) or lose power. If they continue moving away from their alignment, have a spell fail with a fizzle (or an evocation flicker for a warlock) at a NON-CRITICAL moment. Don't do this on a PC's attack role, or a clutch heal, but maybe post fight when they try to heal up, say "it just doesn't feel the same, like the spark is fading" and knock off a few HP of healing or have their demon sight flicker and plunge them into total darkness for an instant. The player should be getting the hint that this behavior won't fly. If they persist, it is the consequences of their choices to strip power away from them. This would be an absolute last resort and should have a conversation with the player outside of the game about if they are unhappy with this PC and want to switch for a new class. Paladins that clearly break an oath after phase 2 should slide rather quickly to Oathbreaker Paladin status which could severely derail a good campaign.
I think alignment is less important for the simply martial characters, like Fighters, Rouges, and Barbarians, as they are just humanoids that are really good at their thing, but I think that you could make it so that people would perceive them based on their actions. If you start killing people in a town or threatening merchants, you will be perceived as an evil character, even if you are LG. You might get people offering you quests based on you being brutish or larcenous. If your players are thinking, they should be a little uncomfortable with taking these quests against their alignment or seeing how others perceive them. (note don't make it super uncomfortable as per the DD's point in the video about crossing boundaries) but maybe have they steal something then find out that it was destined for an orphanage or medical supplies for a hospital like in Firefly. In this way, their perceived alignment can slide a lot, and that should make their PC (and player) have some thoughts about how they're acting. The key for a DM in these cases would be to make sure that it would be a pattern of behavior and not just a single time when they try to intimidate a guard or steal a bauble before sliding the perceived alignment.
Making a paladin lose his powers for going against alignment is crappy. Making him lose it for going against his god's teachings is justice
An oath made with a deity providing you powers is very different than classifying moral philosophy. Oaths have specific conditions. Alignment on a PC is personal opinion; alignment of a chromatic dragon is a measurable thing. I think the word alignment on the character sheet is a misnomer, and shouldn't be confused with monster stat block alignments. Some monsters actually have inherent, measurable properties of alignment. Alignment of a PC is just descriptive and self reported. Relationships with deities though, or balance with nature, or status of oaths? These can all be measured, and should be tracked behind the screen by the GM.
It's never a good idea to force an alignment change over a single incident. Instead, think of a single violation as one of those "formative hero moments" you see all the time in comic book origin stories. It's not really a question of whether that incident occurs or not, it's what the character *learns* from it.
To put it another way, it's not the character's failings that decide whether they are good or evil; lawful or chaotic, it's how they grow, develop, and learn from these individual incidents of failure, or conversely, how they fail to grow, develop, or learn from them.
The problem I have with enabling problem players is the power gamers, the rules lawyers, and the instigators are also typically people that in some way get things done. Ruining a social interaction here, basking in the glory of incredible numbers adding up there... Sometimes it ends up being a good or funny memory, sometimes a bit of a drag, but more often than not in a group of friends I find it's the former.
Kikori Kid, I'm a bit green in d&d. Could you tell me what a power gamer is?
@@Rick_Harper Someone who builds exceedingly efficiently for their goals, to the point that they may be making more of a tool to win the game rather than a character with personality and three dimensions.
Example: In a campaign set to take place in lots of pure darkness (think Mad Mage's Dungeon), a Drow who is a Gloom Stalker Ranger / Assassin Rogue mix would be an incredibly useful build. But perhaps a little too uncannily well suited for the setting, and difficult to actually stink of a story that justifies the lifetime of training that goes into the many mechanics at play; a power gamer ignores these points and focuses on their strength.
Nooice. I'll be doing alot of self refelction on this video
Excellent video as always guys, thank you. In my many years of GM/DM'ing and playing I've definitely seen some of the things mentioned, but we've generally resolved them in a very amicable way. It can be difficult DM'ing, personally I like it, but I also enjoy playing, I'm playing at the moment but going to DM a campaign in the hopefully not too distant future!