My understanding of the "Always say yes" concept, is that you always say "Yes" to them attempting to do something. They want to jump to the moon? They can attempt it. Oh, natural 20? Still not enough. Because a natural 20 is just the best case scenario. Not an automatic success on an impossible task. They want to cast spells as a barbarian? Let them wave their arms around and shout nonsense. Won't do any good until they take a class for it.
The player vs. DM thing is so stupid because the DM controls everything that's not the players. The DM can kill the PCs anytime he wants. "Rocks fall everyone dies" Congrats you just "won" and your prize? a bunch of angry players that don't want to play with you anymore.
I feel like I "win" as a DM when my party is having fun. Especially when I mix a lot of Homebrew into my games. I hate the always say yes mentality! As a DM, we're basically a referee of sorts and it is our job to stick to the rules. A baseball referee isn't going to change the rules to make the players happier.
100% agree. If the players are having fun, I've done my job as a DM (and I have fun, too). As a DM, I follow the rules pretty much as written. I feel it gives the players a stable foundation for the game. I have very few house rules.
Could be there's a misconception tho. You bring the example " A baseball referee isn't going to change the rules to make the players happier.", but that's not similar to the situation at hand. I am an "always yes" DM, that doesn't mean they always have what they want... so say yes, and have fun looking at the character planning his failure. The barbarian wants to learn spells? Who am I to say to the player "No, your character can't think that, change your mind". Let him, after consuming time and hard obstacoles, reach the wizard he wants to train with, and than the guy look at him and says "Are you even able to read at least?" Barbarian "Erm.... rid? It's something you eat?" That's fun for me and for the party. Sure, at the expense of the poor guy, but it's not my fault if he want to do something stupid. The only place to say "No" isn't in game, but in character creation. "No, you can't play an half dragon half troll with lich blood", "No, I care of your background but not to the point of letting you start with a 2hSword +5 vorpal", "No, you can't be the secret son of the king for reasons I can't spoil to you", "No, you can't play with a character with three 18 and three 3".
My DM always refers to gaming as “cooperative story telling”. It’s a cooperation between him, the players, and the game system. They go together. I’ve always liked that way of describing it.
Had a player with regular 60ft dark vision try to fly over a kobold city with watch and guards. I warned him that kobolds could see better in the dark than he could. He didn't listen. Two missed crossbow quarrels were enough to send him back down, but it started a huge argument that ended the session early. Kobolds have bows, crossbows, and traps and always have a dozen or more sentries. They're not strong, but if they're organized enough, they don't have to be.
@@jimmyshousevideos that he would be invisible against the backdrop of the night sky because he had black feathers, but because he has to be within 60ft, he'd be too close to the ground for that to matter.
bongos mcDongos Had a DM once that had a cigar box. Whenever we rolled a stealth check in a situation like that, we had to put the die in the box and shake it up. The DM would look and then roll the perception for the NPC. It was nerve wracking not knowing if we failed or succeeded until we had to roll initiative or not. I don’t recall him ever saying “no” to any of our hair brain ideas though.
Its funny how on those nameless forums I see even worse examples of bad DMing. I often find myself thinking "just throw away your dice... you have no reason to be DMing."
I was sharing an example of when I first started and fell to the trap of saying yes I am not that way know and I am quite good at dming with that said I understand u r entitled to ur opinion but these furums allow new dms to learn from our mistakes and arrigant untasteful comments like URS is what this video is talking about so please watch it again and maybe u will get the meaning
@@clelllightner6447 Matthew was joking about the "no dice/no DM" thing. Without dice or a GM, you're either playing Fiasco or you're trying to be the next GRRRRRRRRRRRM. Those forums do have horrible advice, and new DMs are in danger of falling for it. That's Matthew's entire point.
"I would like to wrestle the dragon" "I would like to bring the (insert weak but important NPC) into the front line of combat" "I would like to cast fireball on the orphan" And many more.
You can let them roll, but make sure they have to suffer the consequences. I have fireballed a child, and then preceded to get killed by the paladin, who then got killed by said child. On that note, make sure your party understands you are attacking the vampire child possessed by a demon who wanted to screw with the paladin.
if you say no to these three you are deadly wrong. Wanna wrestle the dragon? Stupid idea, but you can try and fail. Wanna risk the life of some important NPC? Sure, try it: the GM is not the owner of the story, the whole table is. Wanna cast fireball on the orphan? Sure, I see no problem there.
I would allow all of these but I draw a line when one player wants to do something bad or harmful to another PC and trust me some people do have retarded or/and fucked up ideas and that comes from a guy who really enjoys black humor.
I'm not a kill joy, and sessions tend to be pretty light hearted. Generally speaking, unless it down-right goes against the rules of the game I don't dictate what my players can and can't do, I try to save "no" for moments when it's legitimately impossible to do something. That all said, I still make my players wish I said no when also appropriate. Changing "quest to save the kingdom" to "quest to escape the king while kidnapping his daughter and also, the demon's still alive" can be fun.
@@felixargyle4871 Honestly thats how most of my games go :D On the other hand I run games that are dark as shit and 80% of my total brainpower is usually dedicated to not making it "edgy" :D
Gonna pause the video for a sec to comment on the spell casting barbarian. My current DM has played A BardBarian. He would sing songs of blood,honor and glory as he bathed in the blood of hie enemies.......Think Thor singing opera constantly and thats pretty much it. Just a funy character thought
If you bardbarian lacked charisma to cast spells, then you lose part of the class, as bard require a certain amount of charisma to cast certain levels of spells.. Pathfinder, on the other hand, saves you such dubious breeding because it has a hybrid class of Bard and Barbarian : the Skald. Look it up, it's cool.
I began a campaign of Dragon Heist. It only goes until level 5ish, so I opted to give my players 1 free feat of their choosing at level 1. Thought it would be fun to give them more agency on character creation and that I could account for it. One player ended up with a passive perception of 20 at level 1. And so now I cannot hide a damn thing from them...
Yeah... Feats are POWERFUL. There is a reason that alt human is one of the most popular race choices. I've made it a house rule that passive perception does NOT find traps and secret doors. PC have to declare they are searching for them, but are allowed to use their PP if they botch the roll.
I tend to use passive checks as a baseline for if they get the information needed to look to begin with, usually if the passive check would find the secret door or trap or hidden enemy, then I'd feed them a line of "you notice a small crack in this wall as you step close to it." then it's a matter of active checks to find it.
Yes, that how it should work RAW, I feel. I've just found it makes it too easy because there is always a PC with passive perception at 18. So either they find everything automatcially or I have to inflate the DCs. I've chosen to just houserule that they need to make active checks to find traps and secret doors. That said, neither way is better than the other. This is just my preference for my games.
@@theDMLair My take on it is this, passive perception is just that, passive. Things that are intentionally hidden are inherently more difficult to notice than something that's just obscure. As an example, a PP of 20 might notice the faint sparkle of a gem in a cobweb filled corner, but would fail to notice the rogue hiding in the shadowy alcove above, even if both have a DC on an active search/notice check of 18.
I started playing some miniature games with 2 guys in town. The one who plays RPGs is much more enjoyably to play with since he understands that the purpose of the game is to have fun, not to beat the other guy.
Fun fact, my friends and I used to simply roleplay, no dice, no system, just round table vocalization. DM decided what was possible. We all had really accurate ideas and expectations of what our characters could and could not do with the DM as the arbitrator. We used mainly examples to comic book characters and power tier systems in play as vague guidelines. So, taking our dice away? I think you'd be surprised how cool our group get when we're not bound by dice! Although we're perhaps exceptions and not the rule >.>
I actually address all three of these in my Session Zero runs. 1. I kinda want them to win, because if they lose than I don't get to share the rest of the adventure. But I can't just hand it to them. That would be lame. 2. Rule of Cool generally applies, but not much past Jack Sparrow levels of absurd. And nat 20s are not automatic successes: I consider it more of a "+10" or +20" to the roll. I'd rate the DC of a dwarf in full plate trying to fly by flapping his arms to be around 300 or so. 3. My stories are backdrops and setups for theirs. The focus isn't about the shenanigans of the my setting's mages' academy. It's about how the barbarian player wrestled one of the mages' escaped chimera, put it into a headlock, and started beating it in the face. :D
I feel the same about that first point, I hate not getting to show parts of my adventure more than the players beating the challenges. For 1 adventure, they used an ancient weapon to make a villainous god mortal so they could physically challenge him, I told them even without his godly aura, he'd still be incredibly powerful. I designed his mortal form to likely be able to be defeated while taking a couple of them with him. It was the last boss and he needed to die to save the world but they knew going in not everyone might make it out.
I played in an epic, 1-2 year long World of Darkness game in which every player had multiple characters of various different types (Wraith, Werewolf, Mage, etc). None of the players, ever, even once, rolled a single die. It was an amazing game in which story was definitely king. Clearly, that will *not* work for all players/groups, and certainly not all DMs can pull that off. But, to be fair, making story the most important thing and putting mechanics way in the back CAN work. (I wouldn't try it, I don't think I could pull it off. But it can work.)
I totally agree. There needs to be a balance, and that balance differs from group to group. I'm mostly speaking against the "It's ALL about story" trend.
Great video and all... But dare I ask what the hell ever happened to "learn to read your Table"? I know back in the 80's and 90's the Hobby was known to attract a lot of folks who lacked "social skills"... When the truth was it attracted folks who didn't care for "that usual pop-culture sh*t-fest"... BUT learning a bit about how to read what the Players around you are interested in "game-wise" is among the top level skills any GM should want to hone. Granted, it's also one of the hardest to successfully build upon... it's 90% trial and error, under fire more literally than I care to admit. Because about half or more of the time, the Players don't even know what exactly they want out of the game until they're in it up to their figurative necks... SO story isn't King in D&D... BUT understanding a principle of "Narrative License" IS in practically EVERY RPG. You're not going to craft a story line and lay plot-points like a movie script. D&D doesn't work that way, because whatever the Players figure out is in the plot, they're GOING to derail... it's a survivable trait for Players and PC's alike. BUT being able to discriminate between a looney-tunes effort to fly by flapping one's arms and creating a Narrative License to fly by watching birds do it and then building a reasonably sturdy glider with proportions approximately the same as a bird... can't hurt. It will almost CERTAINLY increase the general quality and entertainment value of your game... Yet, as pointedly expressed in the video, this is not at the detriment of the dice or mechanics... SO no, there's no need for the barbarian to bother rolling dice to see if he'll get off the ground by flapping his arms and "thinking happy thoughts" (put whatever stock you want in that)... BUT the GM should give some license to act, and have a few ideas of rolls to be made on the success or failure of the glider build, even if a half-orc barbarian with an INT of 8 is swinging a flat rock to drive nails to do it... ...and it probably won't fly "well"... or be a "pretty" thing to behold or watch... ...but the story will be remembered, and it's going to be fun to TRY. I'm not even going to touch that crap about trying to kill the PC's... I've heard that attitude many times and simply backed out of playing in that circle... Toxic GM's are very much like bad GM's... "sh*tty novelists". ;o)
Oh I had something that violated 2 and 3. So my first game of D&D was as the GM. I had barely a clue of how stuff worked. I thought that I wanted to give the players a chance to tell their story, so I said to them 'Bring whatever character option to me, and I'll just check it over. I'll probably say yes anyways.' I did that. We ended up having such a mishmash of characters to the point where I didn't even know how to build a world around them. In addition, there was such a massive gap in power levels. No surprise since they were from dandwiki. Everything was just falling apart and I found myself losing interest because I had no element of my own I could indulge in, and hence I had no place in my own game. They are really good players, and they are the reason I lasted as long as I did (with a bit of pruning of the easily distracted). However, I play the stern but fair GM now, thanks to that... experienece
About the story thing. I have a feeling that "d&d is all about story" comes from people whose first exposure to tabletop rpgs are shows like Critical Role. While I love Critical Role there are people that don't realize that Mercer isn't trying to write a novel. He's creating adventures. The story comes from all the players and the cool shit that they do, not from the DM.
Worse thing that sticks out for me, is when I was playing through the module for Curse of Strahd and in the amber temple there is a shield golem and also the control amulet for that golem... I was like "it's in the module so it's okay if the wizard gets it." .... ohhhhh boy was I wrong. That thing broke the damn campaign and broke it fast and rough.
"I wanna alter the mind of the royal guard so he forgets we tried to kill him" Player is a pyromancer so he fried the guards mind causing permanent brain damage
I once used a TPK-like scenario as a plot device, in which the party find themselves trapped in a legit impossible position that only ended one way: with all of the characters incapacitated. Now, since that wasn’t the end goal, I immediately introduced the PCs to their new surroundings and the drive to find out “who got us here and why” became a central force that propelled the story forward. So for me personally, the sporadic and rare impossible situation type of plot hooks is something that’s good in my books.
I had a player in a campaign that I was settin up roll up on me with a homebrew player race. (I always look over such things to make sure it's not completely broken as I love making my own worlds.) The race he showed me however, was a lich. Like a real live undead, master of the dark arts lich. It had an ever increasing list of spells it could cast, along with the ability to not die because of a phlactory. I told him no that's way too much power. He got so so mad, and told me if I didn't let him play that race he wouldn't play in my game. Yeah, "bye Felicia."
There was one time when I was running a game for my gf and a few of her friends. She’s kind of a spiritual hippy type. Regardless, she wanted as a level 1 druid to astral project and go alert a town guard that her and the party were trapped in a nest of monstrous spiders. That was a hard no from me, although she wasn’t exactly pleased. Least no one will ever say I’m a dm that picks favorites.
I dont remember if you had it in your last video. But I think another piece of bad advice is the guy who tells people, or just does this, to not give hints. Like they think you should give a puzzle, then give your charactere minor hints (some of them dont even want to give hints) and then do nothing. They wont let them solve the puzzle a different way, they wont let them roll to get better hints. That type of thing. Or they are worse and set an impossibly high DC for something and then just let their players keep rolling, even though its something they cant do. Anyway, yet another good video, man.
Thanks, glad you liked it! Yes, I agree. I sometimes adjust puzzles on the fly if players can't figure them out... Or I don't even have a solution and let the players come up with it. Sometimes it's all just smoke and mirrors...
Thanks, glad you liked it! Yes, I agree. I sometimes adjust puzzles on the fly if players can't figure them out... Or I don't even have a solution and let the players come up with it. Sometimes it's all just smoke and mirrors...
Most memorable moment from the "Worst DM Advice" series: "you need to kill your players." "Really? Kill my players?" "No, the player characters." "*Cleans crime scene.*"
Thing I regretted allowing: Letting players use the crafting rules as they were written in FFG's Star Wars (if you have the time, the money and the skill ranks, you can pretty much cheese out anything with extras, you can create enough schematics to eventually make every crafting check trivial). Learned to limit money, time, and limit schematics to 1 per item type after a player crafted 9 rocket launchers and various missile types for his entire crew.
Regarding the bonus tip. I don't track hit points on table, but I use those safety rings from beverages (they come in so many colors!) to track conditions like bleeding, on fire, stunned, etc. We use Rolemaster for our games, so conditions from critical strikes tend to decide fights a LOT more than simple hit points do.
I started playing D&D 2 years ago and I fell in love with the game. Then I started to watch videos of people way more experiencied than I am and I got really scared. Our DM always tries to kill our PC's (and he's very vocal about it), he improvises rules on the fly if things don't go his way (ie he decided Monsters with Multiattack also attack that many times as an Attack of Opportunity, IN THE 20TH SESSION), and when I told him I was planning on become a DM he told me this exact words: ''DON'T LET PLAYERS RUIN YOUR STORY''.
The ol' "my rogue built for urban politial adventures on a clearly labeled hexcrawl then got bored and started stealing from the party by getting to loot before others"
In a game I DMed, the barbarian (who was illiterate--this was in the early days of 3E) was fascinated by how the wizard could cast spells. So he kept his own "spell book" consisting of scribbles and crude stick figure drawings.
So I do this weird thing where when I am setting up encounters and dungeons I try to be as sadistic, insidious, and cruel as possible all while cackling like a madman! Thene whene I am actually rinning I am supportive and try to give my players leeway to resolve any problem or issue that comes up, only ever increasing difficulty when I feel I undertuned something (and typically only superficially). I wan't my plaers to grunt and if I get a kill every now and then it feels good, not beceause I killed a players character (Which feels pretty bad at times) but because I know I put the players in a situation where they where challenged enough that death was a possibility. Ultimately though, my players usually blow through my encounters like a tornado in a trailer park.
I've played in 3 ish groups. My first was a new DM. He had the makings of a very good DM. That was short lived in college though. My second group had a DM that seemed to follow all 3 pieces of advice here. He always said yes but because of the DM vs player mentality he would rewrite it later or throw the meanest thing he could at us and then save the day with an overpowered NPC. And that was all for the sake of telling some story. The second group still plays (me too) but he is no longer the DM. My third group is why I'm really here. I'm building a world and learning the intricacies of running a table. Because I want to use the game the way I see it. It's a role playing game in which could also be considered a collective storytelling game. I love a good story but there's so much more to it than that. People want to do cool things and they want to feel special. They want to be the big evil guy or they want to end him. This is a platform to role play that all while telling the story. My second DM was awful. When I told him I was interested in being a DM he said that if it's not mind numbingly difficult then it's not interesting.... Ah bad times.
On the Barbarian spellcaster example: I think there is a way to make it work. You’ll never be able to cast every spell in the book, it’s true, but if you multiclass into Wizard, and take spells that don’t require concentration (Mirror Image, for example) you can keep it active while you’re raging. Go two levels into Wizard for Bladesinger Tradition for an even higher AC while Bladesinging and Raging at the same time.
First time DM-ing 4 years ago, I made couple new subclasses because the other didn’t feel powerful enough for me. Let’s just say that with my limited knowledge of 5e at the time, by the time my characters were level 10-12 they could’ve taken on encounters at least 3-4 lvls higher without them being very deadly.
6:05 In session 1 of my campaign (a sequel campaign to another one my friend dmed) my players were asked to resolve a conflict between the families of my apparently-dead noble paladin's father and mother, basically the family of his mother wanted the lands of his father because there was no heir to the throne (the story's a bit more complicated but this is accurate enough). So the pcs were asked to serve as diplomats to avoid a war, and to do so they needed to talk to the general of the mother's family, my character's aunt, a 2m tall level 6 battlemaster, who came with a little group of representative to the father's castle. They found her at a table drinking beer with her high officers, and the tiefling rogue thought it would be a good idea to ask her to sleep with him. He rolled a 19+6 (didn't even allow him to roll) and I responded with: "She grabs you by the neck and punches you in the face sending you flying". He argued with me and the players told me he was right, then told me that I was too mad when I brought up that I had the last saying the day after
1. There are different kinds of games. If your goal as GM is to defeat your players, that's a finite, competitive game - so go play a finite, competitive game, like most games that aren't tabletop rpgs. Tabletop rpgs are infinite, cooperative games, where the goal is to work together to keep the game going. 2. If you always say yes - or if you always say no - there's really no reason for you to be there. You shouldn't be giving flat yes or no answers in the first place, you should always qualify them. You want a spellcasting barbarian? Okay, take a couple levels in sorcerer, druid, or bard - alternatively, give up your extra attacks and brutal critical. Also unless you go wild magic sorcerer, you can't use magic while raging. Third option, we'll make a spellcaster primal path. We can negotiate, reach a compromise. Your players will have more fun if they're getting creative, and always saying yes means there's nothing to adapt to. I had a player once who kept wanting to make every character a shapeshifter with no identity or personality of their own - I wasn't going to allow that at level 1 when I had an encounter in mind built around the PCs disguising themselves and bluffing their way past a guard. 3. Two words: "player agency". If the exposition express rolls into town and your players can't do anything because the story says it doesn't happen that way, that's a ragequit moment.
On #2, always saying yes, I get your point. If the players want to try something that they normally can't do, you can work with them to give a path to achieve the goal. Luke's point was sometimes the players want to do something unreasonable, and it is part of the GM's job to say "No, you can't do that" in that situation. If one of my players asks me if he can moonwalk through a solid wall like a glitch from a video game when he has no racial feature, class feature, magic item or boon from a god that allows him to enter the ethereal plane, it is my job as the DM to say No.
@@GuardianTactician No, you can't clip through the wall without magic that explicitly lets you pass through solid objects. Not even on a natural 20. You can, however, search for secret doors. There's no guarantee you'll find one, but you can search.
Well if you are running classic Tomb of Horrors and you are not trying to kill the players, you are kind of missing the point. And that is just most well known example, DnD can be about trying to survive meat grinders with no story and min maxed characters. Most important thing is that DM and players all understand and agree with what kind of game they are playing.
@@JV-fh1fg If I'm running The Meat Grinder, I'm going to be running it either of two ways: either it's splatstick, where the whole thing is dark comedy, all the horrifically unfair deaths are played for laughs, and if someone manages to survive that qualifies as a punchline; or I am doing everything I can within reason to make it at very least possible. I recently had the idea for an entire adventure consisting of nothing but ambush predators - a house full of animate objects, lurkers, trappers, etc, where literally everything is trying to kill the PCs, leading up to the revelation that the 'dungeon' was a househunter mimic all along. I think something like that could be a fun horror-comedy one-shot.
Me and my friend wanted to tame a bugbear on are FIRST game EVER and the dm said no and we got mad but it made sense for the story so we stopped getting mad and we got along
I played only once with a group where a few guys had this inside joke where, "He uses the boost!" Idk what the reference was to (a videogame maybe) and they kept saying it. At one point the DM even gave him a bonus like escaping easily because his character, "Used the boost!" That got old fast, broke immersion, and was an example of always saying yes.
Content was really good and helpful! One small technical point related to the video (please file under constructive criticism) if you can somehow turn off the constant autofocus on your camera that would help. There were a number of times where it seemed like it was adjusting the focus and trying to bring background items more into focus. Near the end of the video there was also at least once where it refocused and you dropped out of focus for a moment. It came right back, but was distracting and kind of gave me just a little bit of vertigo personally.
Thanks, glad you liked it! Yes, the horrible focus was killing me as I edited this. I believe I've figured it out now. The next batch of videos (January videos) don't have the focus issue. And thanks for mentioning it. One of my goals is to continually improve the production quality of my videos.
I have some experience with two of these, some good, some bad. On the "story is king" type of game, this can actually be a fun way to play, if your players are into that. Playing as a pure interactive narrative, not even using any dice, can be a fun experience. It's not the same, and shouldn't even be considered D&D anymore, but that doesn't mean you can't use it as inspiration for your narrative. Also, in the instance I mentioned, it was a game that was being played while in a moving truck, doing long-haul deliveries. So yeah, we slowly migrated away from the dice to a pure narrative just because we got sick of the dice bouncing all over before we could see how much damage was dealt. The other scenario is the game where I said yes, and immediately regretted it. I was in a situation where I had only one player, and no other options to acquire more so... But anyway, the premise was a mad wizard had kidnapped a group of existing adventurers (I hate starting at lvl1, a sneeze can kill you) and fused them with various creatures and monsters to make bizarre hybrids. So in character creation, I handed my player the Monster Manual and said he could pick just about anything so long as it had the same starting hit dice as his character, and their stats and abilities would all be averaged out. After a lot of arguing, since he couldn't understand the difference between "average" and "add", I finally let him have his nifty canine celestial thing that can teleport at will as a standard action. (At least I got him to realize the difference between a standard action and a free action ... eventually.) He merged this with a dark elf that was an obvious Drizzt clone. Needless to say, this teleport ability quickly destroyed my ability to set up any kind of dungeon or maze, especially when he figured out how to upgrade a crystal ball he discovered to let him see just about anywhere and then teleport to just behind the boss for a surprise attack, which usually resulted in decapitation since he had all the feats and magic boosts to upgrade his critical threat range as far as possible... Did I mention that if I adjusted the difficulty of an encounter so it was at all challenging he would just pick up his character's token off the map and toss it, saying he was fighting "over there" now? Yeah ... and people wonder why I don't like powergaming. I don't like DMs that put you in a powergaming scenario but don't give you any power as a player, resulting in a constant stream of TPKs, but that's a whole other rant.
Dungeon Master from the old TV show said it best. "...and I'll be your guide..." As DM or GM, you're meant to guide the characters. Try not to railroad if you can help it, let the players explore the world you bring to life for them. Plan your stories for them, then delight as they joyfully bound off the rails to try a different path you didn't think of. If they die, they die. If they live, celebrate with them. Be flexible where you have to and firm when you need to. What the game is really about is fun and enjoying how the players try to survive the world.
Guess I'll just keep going through your videos. I like these ones. It helps to see other points of view. I hate the DM vs the Player or vise versa mentality. I've been seeing way too many DM's lately out there on those communities that should not be named, bragging about how it's going to be a TPK. I just roll my eyes. Uh, yeah a DM will win every time...the deck is stacked in his/her favor. I learned the hard way of saying yes all the time. I was young and just started DMing and I was all about letting the players do whatever they wanted. Your game goes down hill fast without recovery. There are other systems to play full story type games, but even they have a way to still do the game portion. You can have a heavier story and yet still be challenging your players without giving them the cut and paste of go here kill that collect loot move to next area. But this should be decided before you play. If you don't want to play this style of game don't get involved with that group. Pretty easy.
Something that I allowed that I later regretted: Back when I was relatively new to D&D, I decided to build a Jurassic Park adventure. The only player was my partner, as I was still getting used to the hang of things. I did play as well, but my PC was more or less a more engaging version of a NPC. Anyway, I apparently did so well that I had to keep building onto the adventure because my partner couldn't get enough of it. Gradually, though, it kept getting bigger and more in depth, so I ended up mentioning several times that I felt like it was becoming overwhelming to my capabilities. So, we decided that I could run an encounter meant to kill my partner's PC. If I succeeded, the adventure was over. If I didn't, we would continue, but slow things down drastically. I decided then that it was time for a T-Rex encounter. Long story short, my partner's PC managed to spot the T-Rex ahead of time, and asked to pull off a crazy-impossible feat to shoot it directly in the eye, as an instant kill. I allowed it, under conditions of my choosing. I orchestrated TEN different rolls. If he messed up ANY of those rolls, he'd fail. Each roll, he scored higher than 16. EACH. ROLL. In the end, he killed my T-Rex (AKA Big Papa). The adventure went on until it reached a natural conclusion. But I regret allowing that to this day, partly because now my partner brags about that every time he can. but mostly because it was hard to top that stunt. Everything else was tame in comparison.
In my Pathfinder campaign, I let a new player use Greater Teleport if he only knew the area on the map (general distance) and I rolled to see how high they ended up in the air. After 2 uses and 2 entire sessions of sidetracked and no story progress (they gained a Lv from combat and found out just how big dragons and giant tortoises [modified dragon turtle] can get), I let him know the I am going back to having to know the place as if they had been there and can visualize it. Learned the "don't change the spell rules" lesson the hard way.
For fun, I once decided to let my party choose any character they’d like to play as from video games or comics. One guy picked a gun wielding scientist with millions of gadgets and bombs. Wanting this to be a fun loose campaign I let him have it BUT GOD DAMN WAS HIS DPS THROUGH THE ROOF. It was still a super fun experience for all involved and we still go back to these characters when we’re just looking for a one shot to blow off steam
I did once allow a couple things I really regretted and had to correct. I allowed for a homebrew Necromancer that could build literal armies of undead without any real downside. And warlock multi-classes regaining all their spell slots (warlock and non-warlock spell slots) after a short rest, The Necromancer player literally had an army of undead horrors in a day. There was no way to account for this sudden shift in power so I had to draw a line, allowed the player to multiclass into something else or gain those warlock levels in necromancer and caped the amount of undead he could control at one time, no one was happy about this but it saved the game and taught me a very important lesson about carefully reading through homebrew content.
I actually have one where I was the player that was told yes. I was a gnome Paladin who was afraid of heights. And we had to solve a bunch of puzzles to get through this gated wall to get into the town where the next part of the campaign was going to start taking place. I told my dm that I looked to my Barbarian friend and told him to throw me... over the wall. And he let us, as long as we rolled it. And my Barbarian friend rolled a crit for his strength check, and I rolled a crit for my athletics check. My dm was in awe that it worked, because he had planned a few sessions to get into the town, and had not expected the gnome he was afraid of heights to ask to be thrown over a 16ft wall
I was playing a session with a friend and he asked our DM if he himself, a "Priest" mind you, if he could use necromancy to raise some goblins. The DM instead gave have a holy goblin choir. Lol
Wow, yeah Id be building dice towers... Or reading my PHB... DnD is a war game at its roots and the majority of the PHB is rules for combat. I feel like if a DM wants to run a game with little combat there are better systems out there.
Technically not D&D I guess but there are other tabletop games out there that generally do emphasize story very heavily, and even a few that don't have a random factor like dice. Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine is a pretty great example.
I was running a Ravenloft module (Feast of Goblyns) and I allowed a Spellfire User/Barbarian and a Mage with a Staff of the Magi. It was alot of fun. TPK at the end. Turned out to be a dream but they kept their levels and some of the magic items. I intended to run them again but someone else wanted a turn at DM 👍
The worst one I heard recently was from a friend, not in the same vein as this but it was “to do combat well, don’t have lots of opponents just have one big one!” Which, isn’t really how the math of this game works lol.
Yikes. That's the sort of wish that if you're using 5th edition has a 33% chance of burning away the ability to cast wish ever again. That's a big risk for an NPC to take. Did you perhaps have the PCs all teleported 30 years into the future when they are powerful enough to defeat the monsters? That's the sort of old school consequences making that sort of wish would often have. LOL
@@theDMLair i wish i did later as it was my second campaign I ever run, I read about wish and thought it would be cool to include for a grand NPC wizard and for him to cast if for them if they would have to spend several months completing this quest that would get them killed, they didnt die so the NPC (Me) was true to his word and granted wish for them and after that it basically became, you walk up to the tarrasque and you swing your sword once and you kill it. i kinda said to my friends so now your gods what do you want to do and they just said make a new campaign. this was all in 5e by the way so yeah its a recent fond memory of what not to do.
The players would need to level up to 17+ to take on the Tarrasque. It would take a year or two of playing the game, but they would have a goal: "Get stronger so we can take on the Tarrasque!!!" 😀
My biggest regret is not emptying the royal treasury and saying "Sure, you can grab a handful each. Money is literally not a problem for them anymore. And I've already set in stone (basically) potion prices and scrolls. Plus they had a few really strong magic items from previous sessions. Might have to recommend them building a house? Or guild hall, Idk. Our bard has a nice crown now though.
My yes but regretted it moment. I had a dwarf barbarian decide he wanted to be a werewolf... after thinking it over I said yes, but when you transform you become npc (I know that is how it is supposed to be done) well one day he just assumed there was going to be a fight. The ranger (player, not character.) hated owls, and a giant owl landed near the party. He shot at it, and the barbarian transformed. The owl flew off, and the now berserking werewolf almost caused a TPK before he was able to roll high enough to turn back.
One example of the "always say yes" taken to the extreme is what I'd like to call GMless oneshots. Basically, players narrate their own actions, with only the dice to tell them if they fuck up. Want to tear open a portal to another universe to get a clone of yourself to fight this other demigod PC? Roll a 15 and there you go. Pretty sure that's actually happened in one or multiple of the ones I was in.
Once again loved the video. For number 1 I agree I hate playing in a game where it is player vs DM now i have run games were that happend and we had fun I left the story in the comments on the first video. The party and the DM win DnD by haveing fun and the you ba me thing can get real old real quick. Number 2 the yes man. Funny story time in my very first campaign I let a player do what ever he wanted and this is what happend he was playing a undead lord cleric in pathfinder and he learned of a lich that was in command of a necropolis a few miles away so by himself he when to the necropolis and asked to talk with the lich. When he got there he then asked to use diplomacy on the lich and ask it for help. My big brain at the time let this happen and it ended up with him summoning the whole necropolis on top of my city that the rest of the party was questing in. You can imagine how well this went. And from that day on I learned to say no. That being said I still get players asking me crazy stuff all the time and a lot of the time I dont say no but instead say maybe. I had the same player a few years later ask me for a mech suit for his PC and even though it did not really fit in I said yes but I am the one that builds it that way i can make it into the game in a way i can manage. There it is that's my story and I am sticking to it. For number 3 I agree I have had a lot of DMs play campaigns were they only cared about there story and it really sucked. That's it I have blown up the comments enuff.......for now.
I used to have a say yes attitude. I have since stopped that I have been dming for 23yrs that happened after or around first yr. Anyway I said yes to a player who wanted to be able to craft things and wanted me to make a list of possible things could find At first np it was fun then he asked what was difference between artifacts and magical items. At the time I just said artifacts are more powerful and harder to destroy magical items r created; where as artifacts a ritual is used deity intervention. To make a long story short character assended to god hood formed a bloodline with an elven maiden and mass produced all kinds of artifacts that were "linked" to his bloodline so that when he rolled up a new character his new one was an anstor of previous so at lv 1 he had those artifacts to help. Yeah since I have learned the word NO!!!! LOL well thanks for video
I would say there is a very specific balance between story and gameplay. It usually leans towards story but if you neglect gameplay then it makes the story pointless. On that note I have run diceless dnd (of course with other rules changed so that the players still have agency) and it can be really fun when that's what everyone agreed to.
My players are always trying to do more actions than they are allowed. Mainly trying to stealth towards a target and attack on the same turn. Especially troublesome with level 1 rouges who don't realize that sneaking is basically an action and not a free action. They are obviously trying to get advantage so that they can get their sneak attack bonus as often as possible. Other times, my players try to pretend certain skill checks they make aren't part of their actual actions. Example being, a player attempts to trick an enemy to look behind them and then tries attacking them the same turn. Its important to put your foot down in these cases.
Point 1: total agree. Gygax was wrong. Point 2: Agree... Conditionally. There are interesting things I *DO* want players to do that arn't covered in the rules. I love players thinking outside the box and coming up with solutions that nobody expects. Those solutions may only work once, and at high cost but they work. Point 3: Agree. My priorities are, Worldbuild -> Game-experience -> Story, in that order. An interesting and fleshed out world is far more important than a story, because a story is just "Stuff that happens in that world in an order" and players should be helping to forge that story. I tend to make a loose plan of "Okay, here's the pieces on the board and here's what they're gonna do regardless of / before they even meet the PCs. Here's what likely PC actions will do, and here's some consequences of that." as my plan.
Gygax wasn't wrong - he was running and playing games with his war game buddies. They simply had a different approach to playing than we do now. Based on the stories from the Greyhawk games, it sounds like they had a blast.
Gygax was a pretty permissive dm actually. He let a player play as a balrog once. He even added elves to the game even though he (allegedly) hated them.
Letting my dad play a gunslinger with a musket axe, first fight of the game boom nat 20, x4 crit modifier, and a d12 damage die. I let a Pathfinder gunslinger in a converted 3.5 campaign by paiso, on the plus side it became a running gag that if Dad's character got interrupted while playing cards a crit was sure to follow.
I agree with everything you say, however I am a story GM. I love telling a story that features the characters. I also run side stories that the players are unaware of. Usually a list of notes of what’s going on elsewhere in the world should it come up. Rumors of an irk uprising, dwarves hoarding, something. Just something that keeps the world alive. The players are the focus of the story and I give them options and as much information that would be available. More to the point though I hold them accountable for their choices. I also try to say yes or yet but to things especially for the “rule of cool,” however I also say that it’s “scene specific” and I’ll think about it between game sessions.
Not Dnd, but I was the Storyteller for a chronicle of VtM and someone wanted to do the most munchkin thing possible: a max generation Assamite that tried to take several secret, out of clan Disciplines. In short, he was min maxing to hell and back so that he could sling all kinds of magic that's normally restricted to and closely guarded by the clans that own them. Seeing as they couldn't come up with an actual reason for why this would happen, that was a solid no.
Years ago, during a 2ed campaign, my DM (brother) put a scroll of 1 wish in a treasure... My 3rd lol Wizard found it and quickly wished to be able to cast every possible spell up to 3rd lvl. He told me that such a spell book existed in the collection of a wizard in the area. If I could find it, it was mine... I spent a few sessions checking every casters loot and eventually, after the boss battle - one that we won with an acid-based attack - I found it... I had to roll to see how many pages had been destroyed... He gave me a SCROLL book with every 1st and about half of the 2nf lvl spells and a warning about being TOO greedy with a wish. Not bad for a 12 yr old DM.
I regretted: I had a monk that had a poisoners kit proficiency. I didnt know where the basic poisons stats were at so i picked a poison that was in the PHB. It was an on contact knock out poison since i didnt want an instant kill or an inhalation activation. I regretted this because the player ended up coating a lot of javelins in this poison and knocking out a lot of the enemies. Feel free to mock at this point, but ive learned the basic poisons and what the basic kits do.
One time when I was dm for a campaign we were doing an dnd campaign (it was hella fun even minding my dumb mistakes lol), meanwhile an friend of mine as a player had high amounts of energy and proceeding to make an high rank ability when his max was low to average abilities. Long story short he then proceeding to make lower rank but devastating abilities of that said high rank ability.... Side note: he lost his arms and can’t use it anymore at the near mid halfway point though :)
I had a player who has a race that had 3 different modes that they could rotate between which gave different abilities and bonuses to them depending on which mode they were in. They asked if their class could change for each mode and so basically have 3 entirely separate characters in one. As the DM while I loved the idea I had to say no because to me that was too powerful. On the flip side in a game when I was a new campaign I had a king promise whatever the players wanted for their help and they got their one thing they wanted. One player was a necromancer power gamer and took a platinum mine as his reward. He then raised some undead and had them mining the mine basically breaking the economics of the game with having extreme amount of regular income. I regretted doing that and learned one must set the reward and not get lazy
I let my players start out with magic items that could break the game, but I gave them boundaries and downfalls to using the items. It makes them think before using the items on everything. But I also made this world from scratch and made it necessary to have OP items at first.
I once let a player make a custom race for a Pathfinder campaign. He was also a DM so I thought it would be ok, nope insert the most op race I have ever seen that can paralyze people by looking at them. Learned my lesson.
I'm a new DM but I've been playing D&D for a few years now. A player wanted me to allow their Dwarven wizard to jump across a 30 foot pit. I said no and he rolled the die anyway. Rolled a nat 20.. i still said no but you can think of another way to cross and i might allow it. I didnt know a totally appropriate way to handle it but he didn't really argue after he finally crossed.
I had a player how desperately wanted to play a character who can teleport (which the game system did not support) and kept asking for it. Eventually, I crafted him a teleport abilitie so costly and limited it was actually weaker than most other things he could have skilled into instead. He played the charcter for one session and did not ask about teleportation ever again.
My players repetitively, in multiple campaigns, try to start cults by asking people 'do you want to join a cult?' and complain that it always fails no matter what they roll on Persuasion. So then I had them join a cult and nearly end the world by accident It was a controlled experiment. They couldn't actually end the world but...
The worse thing I allowed one of my players to do was to use their own homebrew class that was still a work in progress and was constantly changing. For a level 2 character, they should not have been able to do as much damage in one hit as they did. They have since changed it, but I regret letting them do that homebrew class. (they are no longer in my campaigns. there were so many problems with this player and their significant other that I can't DM for them... EVER!)
Funny you mention barbarians and spellcasting. I made a homebrew Barb subclass called Path of Tranquil Fury. They learn to internalize their rage and harness the power of magic whole thing. Been wanting to playtest it, but can't get a game together with everything going on right now
On one of my first tables DMing I allowed the fighter and the paladin to use a warhammer with both hands AND a shield because I didn't know you had to have one free hand for the shield, so his AC was like 18 or something like that, the next session I read again the shield/double hand rules and he didn't like it that I "nerfed" his character
I once accidentally let a PC become essentially a god via Wish. Basically the end result was he could theoretically cast wish infinitely, however he was a good sport about it and kept it fairly reasonable (occasionally using it for a dire curcumstance, like i had built a stronger BBEG Lich (they were lv 19) and he used it to remotely destroy the lich's phylactery
Player asked for a magic weapon at character creation at level one. It was a weapon that always did a set 10 damage. I didn’t realize how op that was until the barbarian showed me the damage dice for his greatsword.
So when I first started dming with my current group most of the players were new and the always wanted something to do for their bonus action so they would always ask can I hit it for my bonus action. At first I didnt see a problem so i let them straight roll no additions for said attack. As they leveled up i learned that that was a bad call and had to kill it.
Yeah, that could be a little OP, unless all the monsters get an extra attack, too. 😀 It seems like it'd be more powerful at lower levels. In what ways did you find it get worse at higher levels?
I had a player during character creation ask if they could be a wood elf raised by wargs. Not too bad. But then he asked if instead of the hide in plan sight ability if he could have blind sight out to 30 feet to show his dog like upbringing and heightened senses. After a quick look for not blind sight and how PCs can get it I had to say no.
Once I was helping my little sister make a character sheet( I'm 13 she's 8) and she chose a high Elf cleric and she wanted it to have a fireball spell when she already had it heal wounds and sacred flame as her 2 spells
I once showed up to a session 0 where the DM told us that we literally weren't gonna roll anything. Like, at that point it isn't even really D&D. I like to roleplay, but I also like to feel challenged. Otherwise I'd just go find an RP forum.
i made the mistake of DMing for a pathfinder game, when my only experience with the game was D&D 3.5, from years ago. I stopped playing 3.5 when 4th came out. the players insisted on "playing by the rules" and one of them had some "flaw" that wouldn't allow them to become fatigued. on top of that i asked to keep the group to 4 players. when we all got together there were 7.....I should have said no to a few things, but despite the issues, we still had fun.
So one thing that I allowed then later regretted was I let a player make dragonscale plate... then make it +1 so a total of 20 AC Base for level 8s... did I mention that I also originally gave it poison resistance? I did change it before it mattered as now it needs attunement by a level 17... mainly since I changed it to immunity and you gain a dragon's flight speed on top of the 20 AC
My rule is that "If you can do it within the rules and can justify it in character, ALWAYS yes, but you also have to deal with the downsides too. But if you can't, I might still say yes, but you're gonna have to convince me why it's a good idea." If you wanna be a spellcasting barbarian, you're either gonna multiclass, or be a skald(we play Pathfinder), with all the limitations your choice implies. You can do both, but you won't do either as well as you could if you focused. Nothing wrong with that.
Okay so, there was one time, not in a D&D game, but another ttrpg, I decided as my first time GM-ing I'd run a battle royale game, a few people joined we played, and I decided I'll just say yes to whatever crazy things they'd do, well, one of the players suggested we start at whatever level we do, with 1 ability, but that's max level (abilities are basically op effects you can trigger a certain amount of times) and the ability he took was enchanced hearing, basically perfect precision on whatever makes a sound in a 300 ft circle, and since everyone but some NPC-s started in the urban combat zone, and shotguns, melee and grenade launchers are the best weapons, most people were close quarters fighters, and the guy was just like, going under someone and blasting them through the floor with an autoshotgun. Eventually the teamwork of an NPC and a player who grouped up, and the distraction of the third player entering was enough to deal with him, then they went on to beat one of the enemies easily, then kill the other I accidentally made a little too broken and decided to play suboptimally so he won't use the autokill or turn cancel shells. I changed the entire system next day so it wouldn't allow crazy stuff like that, decided no PvP anymore. And realised the good reason we don't let the guy who got on the game's dev team for exploiting it so many times, go PvP with another dev who just wanted to try out a fun build and a relatively new player who didn't yet know about all the ways to break the game.
a thing i regreted in one of my game of dnd homebrewed with thing from monster hunter... My players fought a lagiacrus. One of them wanted absolutly to search the lair of the sea monster. I allowed it, without thinking about the consequences. That was supposed to be the last session before a major timeskip. I later realised that the egg of lagiacrus he had found would have hatched and become adult by the end of the time skip, resulting in a player casualy having some kind of LEVIATHAN as a familiar... A thunder spitting Leviathan... I had a hard time finding reasons as to how his familiar could be a problem in town, but still left it to him. After all, he had taken so much care to explain how he took care of the newborn beast during the time skip i would have felt really scummy to tell him "nah, you baby monster died." Still having trouble with it, but i guess it could have been worse ^^
The main 'yes' I lived to regret was letting one of my friends make a Monk with the Vow of Poverty/Ascetic rules. 'Overpowered' is an insufficient term for what he ended up being.
I wasn't the DM, my friend was, and figured I'd tell a story of the last session we did (we are two sessions in and in the middle of an arc where we are helping a black smith dwarf get his home back from the orcs, sadly only his wife and one of his daughters survived.) OKAY NOW TO THE STORY Our first session we ran into some where rats, our party of four beat two of three, one of then getting away, the other two getting killed. Me and our dwarf cleric decided to take some of the teeth of the where rats, and my Tabaxi Rogue Ria, took one of the eyes(He look done when we took the body parts of the dead wererats), and than on our second session, we ran into the orcs, and my girl Ria shot one of the orcs in the eye, blinding him(duh). BUT than she took the wererat eye out of her pocket, threw it over the trench and bridge, hitting the orc in his other, remaining eye. Our DM had the look of pure regret on his face, and was mumbling under his breath that he regretted letting me take the eye. But everyone else found it funny XD
My worst mistake that I made: I should note that I am a novice DM, and this was the first campaign I had ever ran. I was using the Curse of Strahd module at my LGS. We were initially only going to have 2 players as we entered the Death House, so I let them start at level 3 and end it at level 5. This turned out to be a very big mistake as our cleric entered Barovia with access to the Daylight spell, completely ruining the abilities of the vampires I sent against them. Not only that, but immediately after they left the Death House, a third player joined the weekly gameplay, and then a fourth when they got to Vazkii, and along the way, people that were there that night would also randomly jump in. I honestly wish I had a community that I could go to for advice on how to deal with this. I asked some of the other people from the shop, and one of them answered "Let them have the easy early game, but then really destroy them later." The other legitimately told me to TPK my party. Both of these seem like pretty bad advice and I didn't do either of them, which left me confused, so I just ran things by the book but with buffed up monsters and they still just crushed them with no contest thanks to Daylight.
My understanding of the "Always say yes" concept, is that you always say "Yes" to them attempting to do something. They want to jump to the moon? They can attempt it. Oh, natural 20? Still not enough. Because a natural 20 is just the best case scenario. Not an automatic success on an impossible task. They want to cast spells as a barbarian? Let them wave their arms around and shout nonsense. Won't do any good until they take a class for it.
That's a valid point, although i always let them try i always say "okay it's NOT gonna work no matter what you roll"
@@hypersonixgamer1962 what if they give u a 20
@@robertbartley2409 20 is only the best possible scenario. It isn't a guarantee.
@@hypersonixgamer1962 I meant paid u 20 dollars
@@robertbartley2409 Things may change yes
The player vs. DM thing is so stupid because the DM controls everything that's not the players. The DM can kill the PCs anytime he wants. "Rocks fall everyone dies" Congrats you just "won" and your prize? a bunch of angry players that don't want to play with you anymore.
I feel like I "win" as a DM when my party is having fun. Especially when I mix a lot of Homebrew into my games. I hate the always say yes mentality! As a DM, we're basically a referee of sorts and it is our job to stick to the rules. A baseball referee isn't going to change the rules to make the players happier.
100% agree. If the players are having fun, I've done my job as a DM (and I have fun, too). As a DM, I follow the rules pretty much as written. I feel it gives the players a stable foundation for the game. I have very few house rules.
Could be there's a misconception tho. You bring the example " A baseball referee isn't going to change the rules to make the players happier.", but that's not similar to the situation at hand. I am an "always yes" DM, that doesn't mean they always have what they want... so say yes, and have fun looking at the character planning his failure. The barbarian wants to learn spells? Who am I to say to the player "No, your character can't think that, change your mind". Let him, after consuming time and hard obstacoles, reach the wizard he wants to train with, and than the guy look at him and says "Are you even able to read at least?" Barbarian "Erm.... rid? It's something you eat?" That's fun for me and for the party. Sure, at the expense of the poor guy, but it's not my fault if he want to do something stupid. The only place to say "No" isn't in game, but in character creation. "No, you can't play an half dragon half troll with lich blood", "No, I care of your background but not to the point of letting you start with a 2hSword +5 vorpal", "No, you can't be the secret son of the king for reasons I can't spoil to you", "No, you can't play with a character with three 18 and three 3".
My DM always refers to gaming as “cooperative story telling”. It’s a cooperation between him, the players, and the game system. They go together.
I’ve always liked that way of describing it.
I say ''I allow that to happen'' and then they sometimes complain they are hunted down by the city guard for blowing up an orphanage during a get away
Had a player with regular 60ft dark vision try to fly over a kobold city with watch and guards. I warned him that kobolds could see better in the dark than he could. He didn't listen. Two missed crossbow quarrels were enough to send him back down, but it started a huge argument that ended the session early.
Kobolds have bows, crossbows, and traps and always have a dozen or more sentries. They're not strong, but if they're organized enough, they don't have to be.
what could he possibly argue?
@@jimmyshousevideos that he would be invisible against the backdrop of the night sky because he had black feathers, but because he has to be within 60ft, he'd be too close to the ground for that to matter.
@@DungeonMagister you should have taken him outside and see just how close 60ft actually is
Eh, if he was completely unarmored and rolled stealth I'd let them attempt it.
bongos mcDongos Had a DM once that had a cigar box. Whenever we rolled a stealth check in a situation like that, we had to put the die in the box and shake it up. The DM would look and then roll the perception for the NPC. It was nerve wracking not knowing if we failed or succeeded until we had to roll initiative or not.
I don’t recall him ever saying “no” to any of our hair brain ideas though.
Its funny how on those nameless forums I see even worse examples of bad DMing. I often find myself thinking "just throw away your dice... you have no reason to be DMing."
I was sharing an example of when I first started and fell to the trap of saying yes
I am not that way know and I am quite good at dming with that said I understand u r entitled to ur opinion but these furums allow new dms to learn from our mistakes and arrigant untasteful comments like URS is what this video is talking about so please watch it again and maybe u will get the meaning
@@clelllightner6447 Matthew was joking about the "no dice/no DM" thing. Without dice or a GM, you're either playing Fiasco or you're trying to be the next GRRRRRRRRRRRM.
Those forums do have horrible advice, and new DMs are in danger of falling for it. That's Matthew's entire point.
"I would like to wrestle the dragon"
"I would like to bring the (insert weak but important NPC) into the front line of combat"
"I would like to cast fireball on the orphan"
And many more.
You can let them roll, but make sure they have to suffer the consequences.
I have fireballed a child, and then preceded to get killed by the paladin, who then got killed by said child.
On that note, make sure your party understands you are attacking the vampire child possessed by a demon who wanted to screw with the paladin.
if you say no to these three you are deadly wrong. Wanna wrestle the dragon? Stupid idea, but you can try and fail. Wanna risk the life of some important NPC? Sure, try it: the GM is not the owner of the story, the whole table is. Wanna cast fireball on the orphan? Sure, I see no problem there.
I would allow all of these but I draw a line when one player wants to do something bad or harmful to another PC and trust me some people do have retarded or/and fucked up ideas and that comes from a guy who really enjoys black humor.
I'm not a kill joy, and sessions tend to be pretty light hearted. Generally speaking, unless it down-right goes against the rules of the game I don't dictate what my players can and can't do, I try to save "no" for moments when it's legitimately impossible to do something.
That all said, I still make my players wish I said no when also appropriate. Changing "quest to save the kingdom" to "quest to escape the king while kidnapping his daughter and also, the demon's still alive" can be fun.
@@felixargyle4871 Honestly thats how most of my games go :D On the other hand I run games that are dark as shit and 80% of my total brainpower is usually dedicated to not making it "edgy" :D
Gonna pause the video for a sec to comment on the spell casting barbarian. My current DM has played A BardBarian. He would sing songs of blood,honor and glory as he bathed in the blood of hie enemies.......Think Thor singing opera constantly and thats pretty much it. Just a funy character thought
If you bardbarian lacked charisma to cast spells, then you lose part of the class, as bard require a certain amount of charisma to cast certain levels of spells.. Pathfinder, on the other hand, saves you such dubious breeding because it has a hybrid class of Bard and Barbarian : the Skald. Look it up, it's cool.
Love it! BardBarian! Nothing like singing in the face of your mudered enemy! I would STR/CON/CHA the hell out of that!
@@terrybowman5870 lol that was the goal.
I'm currently playing BardBEARian and it's a blast. So many Bard abilities work so well with Rage (obviously not the spellcasting)
@@trequor whats your weapon of choice as you intimidated your enemies through "what the fuck am i looking at"
I began a campaign of Dragon Heist. It only goes until level 5ish, so I opted to give my players 1 free feat of their choosing at level 1. Thought it would be fun to give them more agency on character creation and that I could account for it. One player ended up with a passive perception of 20 at level 1. And so now I cannot hide a damn thing from them...
Yeah... Feats are POWERFUL. There is a reason that alt human is one of the most popular race choices. I've made it a house rule that passive perception does NOT find traps and secret doors. PC have to declare they are searching for them, but are allowed to use their PP if they botch the roll.
I tend to use passive checks as a baseline for if they get the information needed to look to begin with, usually if the passive check would find the secret door or trap or hidden enemy, then I'd feed them a line of "you notice a small crack in this wall as you step close to it." then it's a matter of active checks to find it.
Yes, that how it should work RAW, I feel. I've just found it makes it too easy because there is always a PC with passive perception at 18. So either they find everything automatcially or I have to inflate the DCs. I've chosen to just houserule that they need to make active checks to find traps and secret doors.
That said, neither way is better than the other. This is just my preference for my games.
@@theDMLair My take on it is this, passive perception is just that, passive. Things that are intentionally hidden are inherently more difficult to notice than something that's just obscure. As an example, a PP of 20 might notice the faint sparkle of a gem in a cobweb filled corner, but would fail to notice the rogue hiding in the shadowy alcove above, even if both have a DC on an active search/notice check of 18.
I started playing some miniature games with 2 guys in town. The one who plays RPGs is much more enjoyably to play with since he understands that the purpose of the game is to have fun, not to beat the other guy.
Fun fact, my friends and I used to simply roleplay, no dice, no system, just round table vocalization. DM decided what was possible. We all had really accurate ideas and expectations of what our characters could and could not do with the DM as the arbitrator. We used mainly examples to comic book characters and power tier systems in play as vague guidelines. So, taking our dice away? I think you'd be surprised how cool our group get when we're not bound by dice!
Although we're perhaps exceptions and not the rule >.>
A player who has been a player in my games for years wanted to play a dragon, a full blooded fire breathing dragon. I said no.
In a level 16+ party a young dragon isn't that op
In a hyper-fantasy-game, something like that is indeed possible, as long as the party is high level.
I actually address all three of these in my Session Zero runs.
1. I kinda want them to win, because if they lose than I don't get to share the rest of the adventure. But I can't just hand it to them. That would be lame.
2. Rule of Cool generally applies, but not much past Jack Sparrow levels of absurd. And nat 20s are not automatic successes: I consider it more of a "+10" or +20" to the roll. I'd rate the DC of a dwarf in full plate trying to fly by flapping his arms to be around 300 or so.
3. My stories are backdrops and setups for theirs. The focus isn't about the shenanigans of the my setting's mages' academy. It's about how the barbarian player wrestled one of the mages' escaped chimera, put it into a headlock, and started beating it in the face. :D
I feel the same about that first point, I hate not getting to show parts of my adventure more than the players beating the challenges. For 1 adventure, they used an ancient weapon to make a villainous god mortal so they could physically challenge him, I told them even without his godly aura, he'd still be incredibly powerful. I designed his mortal form to likely be able to be defeated while taking a couple of them with him. It was the last boss and he needed to die to save the world but they knew going in not everyone might make it out.
I played in an epic, 1-2 year long World of Darkness game in which every player had multiple characters of various different types (Wraith, Werewolf, Mage, etc).
None of the players, ever, even once, rolled a single die. It was an amazing game in which story was definitely king.
Clearly, that will *not* work for all players/groups, and certainly not all DMs can pull that off. But, to be fair, making story the most important thing and putting mechanics way in the back CAN work.
(I wouldn't try it, I don't think I could pull it off. But it can work.)
I think story is just as important as mechanics. Breaking down doors is fun, but if you don't know why, it becomes monotonous.
I totally agree. There needs to be a balance, and that balance differs from group to group. I'm mostly speaking against the "It's ALL about story" trend.
Great video and all...
But dare I ask what the hell ever happened to "learn to read your Table"?
I know back in the 80's and 90's the Hobby was known to attract a lot of folks who lacked "social skills"... When the truth was it attracted folks who didn't care for "that usual pop-culture sh*t-fest"... BUT learning a bit about how to read what the Players around you are interested in "game-wise" is among the top level skills any GM should want to hone. Granted, it's also one of the hardest to successfully build upon... it's 90% trial and error, under fire more literally than I care to admit.
Because about half or more of the time, the Players don't even know what exactly they want out of the game until they're in it up to their figurative necks...
SO story isn't King in D&D... BUT understanding a principle of "Narrative License" IS in practically EVERY RPG. You're not going to craft a story line and lay plot-points like a movie script. D&D doesn't work that way, because whatever the Players figure out is in the plot, they're GOING to derail... it's a survivable trait for Players and PC's alike.
BUT being able to discriminate between a looney-tunes effort to fly by flapping one's arms and creating a Narrative License to fly by watching birds do it and then building a reasonably sturdy glider with proportions approximately the same as a bird... can't hurt. It will almost CERTAINLY increase the general quality and entertainment value of your game...
Yet, as pointedly expressed in the video, this is not at the detriment of the dice or mechanics...
SO no, there's no need for the barbarian to bother rolling dice to see if he'll get off the ground by flapping his arms and "thinking happy thoughts" (put whatever stock you want in that)...
BUT the GM should give some license to act, and have a few ideas of rolls to be made on the success or failure of the glider build, even if a half-orc barbarian with an INT of 8 is swinging a flat rock to drive nails to do it...
...and it probably won't fly "well"... or be a "pretty" thing to behold or watch...
...but the story will be remembered, and it's going to be fun to TRY.
I'm not even going to touch that crap about trying to kill the PC's... I've heard that attitude many times and simply backed out of playing in that circle... Toxic GM's are very much like bad GM's... "sh*tty novelists". ;o)
Oh I had something that violated 2 and 3.
So my first game of D&D was as the GM. I had barely a clue of how stuff worked. I thought that I wanted to give the players a chance to tell their story, so I said to them 'Bring whatever character option to me, and I'll just check it over. I'll probably say yes anyways.'
I did that. We ended up having such a mishmash of characters to the point where I didn't even know how to build a world around them. In addition, there was such a massive gap in power levels. No surprise since they were from dandwiki. Everything was just falling apart and I found myself losing interest because I had no element of my own I could indulge in, and hence I had no place in my own game.
They are really good players, and they are the reason I lasted as long as I did (with a bit of pruning of the easily distracted). However, I play the stern but fair GM now, thanks to that... experienece
The more I hear about bad dms and idiot players the happier i am with my group.
About the story thing. I have a feeling that "d&d is all about story" comes from people whose first exposure to tabletop rpgs are shows like Critical Role. While I love Critical Role there are people that don't realize that Mercer isn't trying to write a novel. He's creating adventures. The story comes from all the players and the cool shit that they do, not from the DM.
My takeaway from this video?
*"Man, I love cake"*
Worse thing that sticks out for me, is when I was playing through the module for Curse of Strahd and in the amber temple there is a shield golem and also the control amulet for that golem... I was like "it's in the module so it's okay if the wizard gets it." .... ohhhhh boy was I wrong. That thing broke the damn campaign and broke it fast and rough.
Shield golems are no joke....
"I wanna alter the mind of the royal guard so he forgets we tried to kill him" Player is a pyromancer so he fried the guards mind causing permanent brain damage
If you’re going to play D&D without using any of the things that make it an actual game, you might as well join a roleplaying forum instead.
I once used a TPK-like scenario as a plot device, in which the party find themselves trapped in a legit impossible position that only ended one way: with all of the characters incapacitated. Now, since that wasn’t the end goal, I immediately introduced the PCs to their new surroundings and the drive to find out “who got us here and why” became a central force that propelled the story forward. So for me personally, the sporadic and rare impossible situation type of plot hooks is something that’s good in my books.
I had a player in a campaign that I was settin up roll up on me with a homebrew player race. (I always look over such things to make sure it's not completely broken as I love making my own worlds.) The race he showed me however, was a lich. Like a real live undead, master of the dark arts lich. It had an ever increasing list of spells it could cast, along with the ability to not die because of a phlactory. I told him no that's way too much power. He got so so mad, and told me if I didn't let him play that race he wouldn't play in my game. Yeah, "bye Felicia."
There was one time when I was running a game for my gf and a few of her friends. She’s kind of a spiritual hippy type. Regardless, she wanted as a level 1 druid to astral project and go alert a town guard that her and the party were trapped in a nest of monstrous spiders. That was a hard no from me, although she wasn’t exactly pleased. Least no one will ever say I’m a dm that picks favorites.
I dont remember if you had it in your last video. But I think another piece of bad advice is the guy who tells people, or just does this, to not give hints. Like they think you should give a puzzle, then give your charactere minor hints (some of them dont even want to give hints) and then do nothing. They wont let them solve the puzzle a different way, they wont let them roll to get better hints. That type of thing. Or they are worse and set an impossibly high DC for something and then just let their players keep rolling, even though its something they cant do.
Anyway, yet another good video, man.
Thanks, glad you liked it! Yes, I agree. I sometimes adjust puzzles on the fly if players can't figure them out... Or I don't even have a solution and let the players come up with it. Sometimes it's all just smoke and mirrors...
Thanks, glad you liked it! Yes, I agree. I sometimes adjust puzzles on the fly if players can't figure them out... Or I don't even have a solution and let the players come up with it. Sometimes it's all just smoke and mirrors...
Most memorable moment from the "Worst DM Advice" series: "you need to kill your players." "Really? Kill my players?" "No, the player characters." "*Cleans crime scene.*"
Wait did I say that?
*helps clean crime scene*
Thing I regretted allowing: Letting players use the crafting rules as they were written in FFG's Star Wars (if you have the time, the money and the skill ranks, you can pretty much cheese out anything with extras, you can create enough schematics to eventually make every crafting check trivial). Learned to limit money, time, and limit schematics to 1 per item type after a player crafted 9 rocket launchers and various missile types for his entire crew.
LOL Yeah, it seems there are broken mechanics like that in most RPGs. Most of the houserules I have for dnd 5e are to fix broken OP stuff.
Regarding the bonus tip. I don't track hit points on table, but I use those safety rings from beverages (they come in so many colors!) to track conditions like bleeding, on fire, stunned, etc. We use Rolemaster for our games, so conditions from critical strikes tend to decide fights a LOT more than simple hit points do.
I started playing D&D 2 years ago and I fell in love with the game. Then I started to watch videos of people way more experiencied than I am and I got really scared. Our DM always tries to kill our PC's (and he's very vocal about it), he improvises rules on the fly if things don't go his way (ie he decided Monsters with Multiattack also attack that many times as an Attack of Opportunity, IN THE 20TH SESSION), and when I told him I was planning on become a DM he told me this exact words: ''DON'T LET PLAYERS RUIN YOUR STORY''.
Dude, seriously, ignore everything your DM says and don't do what he does. You can be so much better than that.
@@theDMLair Thank you so much for the support. Your videos helped me a lot to become a good DM
My barbarian asked if he could cast meteor swarm as a bonus action at the end of just turn. He was a level 9 barbarian.
DID YOU LET HIM?
The ol' "my rogue built for urban politial adventures on a clearly labeled hexcrawl then got bored and started stealing from the party by getting to loot before others"
In a game I DMed, the barbarian (who was illiterate--this was in the early days of 3E) was fascinated by how the wizard could cast spells. So he kept his own "spell book" consisting of scribbles and crude stick figure drawings.
So I do this weird thing where when I am setting up encounters and dungeons I try to be as sadistic, insidious, and cruel as possible all while cackling like a madman! Thene whene I am actually rinning I am supportive and try to give my players leeway to resolve any problem or issue that comes up, only ever increasing difficulty when I feel I undertuned something (and typically only superficially).
I wan't my plaers to grunt and if I get a kill every now and then it feels good, not beceause I killed a players character (Which feels pretty bad at times) but because I know I put the players in a situation where they where challenged enough that death was a possibility. Ultimately though, my players usually blow through my encounters like a tornado in a trailer park.
Yes you can jump to the moon. Roll endurance vs suffocation, and roll % for day/night. Day= fire damage and night= cold damage.
What's the DC? 200?
DC 25 suffocation. +5 every round till they get back. Don't forget fire/ice damage.
I've played in 3 ish groups. My first was a new DM. He had the makings of a very good DM. That was short lived in college though. My second group had a DM that seemed to follow all 3 pieces of advice here. He always said yes but because of the DM vs player mentality he would rewrite it later or throw the meanest thing he could at us and then save the day with an overpowered NPC. And that was all for the sake of telling some story.
The second group still plays (me too) but he is no longer the DM.
My third group is why I'm really here. I'm building a world and learning the intricacies of running a table. Because I want to use the game the way I see it. It's a role playing game in which could also be considered a collective storytelling game.
I love a good story but there's so much more to it than that. People want to do cool things and they want to feel special. They want to be the big evil guy or they want to end him. This is a platform to role play that all while telling the story.
My second DM was awful. When I told him I was interested in being a DM he said that if it's not mind numbingly difficult then it's not interesting.... Ah bad times.
On the Barbarian spellcaster example: I think there is a way to make it work. You’ll never be able to cast every spell in the book, it’s true, but if you multiclass into Wizard, and take spells that don’t require concentration (Mirror Image, for example) you can keep it active while you’re raging. Go two levels into Wizard for Bladesinger Tradition for an even higher AC while Bladesinging and Raging at the same time.
First time DM-ing 4 years ago, I made couple new subclasses because the other didn’t feel powerful enough for me. Let’s just say that with my limited knowledge of 5e at the time, by the time my characters were level 10-12 they could’ve taken on encounters at least 3-4 lvls higher without them being very deadly.
6:05 In session 1 of my campaign (a sequel campaign to another one my friend dmed) my players were asked to resolve a conflict between the families of my apparently-dead noble paladin's father and mother, basically the family of his mother wanted the lands of his father because there was no heir to the throne (the story's a bit more complicated but this is accurate enough). So the pcs were asked to serve as diplomats to avoid a war, and to do so they needed to talk to the general of the mother's family, my character's aunt, a 2m tall level 6 battlemaster, who came with a little group of representative to the father's castle. They found her at a table drinking beer with her high officers, and the tiefling rogue thought it would be a good idea to ask her to sleep with him. He rolled a 19+6 (didn't even allow him to roll) and I responded with: "She grabs you by the neck and punches you in the face sending you flying". He argued with me and the players told me he was right, then told me that I was too mad when I brought up that I had the last saying the day after
LMAO - Seems like a perfectly reasonable response to me...
1. There are different kinds of games. If your goal as GM is to defeat your players, that's a finite, competitive game - so go play a finite, competitive game, like most games that aren't tabletop rpgs. Tabletop rpgs are infinite, cooperative games, where the goal is to work together to keep the game going.
2. If you always say yes - or if you always say no - there's really no reason for you to be there. You shouldn't be giving flat yes or no answers in the first place, you should always qualify them. You want a spellcasting barbarian? Okay, take a couple levels in sorcerer, druid, or bard - alternatively, give up your extra attacks and brutal critical. Also unless you go wild magic sorcerer, you can't use magic while raging. Third option, we'll make a spellcaster primal path. We can negotiate, reach a compromise. Your players will have more fun if they're getting creative, and always saying yes means there's nothing to adapt to. I had a player once who kept wanting to make every character a shapeshifter with no identity or personality of their own - I wasn't going to allow that at level 1 when I had an encounter in mind built around the PCs disguising themselves and bluffing their way past a guard.
3. Two words: "player agency". If the exposition express rolls into town and your players can't do anything because the story says it doesn't happen that way, that's a ragequit moment.
On #2, always saying yes, I get your point. If the players want to try something that they normally can't do, you can work with them to give a path to achieve the goal. Luke's point was sometimes the players want to do something unreasonable, and it is part of the GM's job to say "No, you can't do that" in that situation. If one of my players asks me if he can moonwalk through a solid wall like a glitch from a video game when he has no racial feature, class feature, magic item or boon from a god that allows him to enter the ethereal plane, it is my job as the DM to say No.
@@GuardianTactician No, you can't clip through the wall without magic that explicitly lets you pass through solid objects. Not even on a natural 20. You can, however, search for secret doors. There's no guarantee you'll find one, but you can search.
Well if you are running classic Tomb of Horrors and you are not trying to kill the players, you are kind of missing the point. And that is just most well known example, DnD can be about trying to survive meat grinders with no story and min maxed characters. Most important thing is that DM and players all understand and agree with what kind of game they are playing.
@@JV-fh1fg If I'm running The Meat Grinder, I'm going to be running it either of two ways: either it's splatstick, where the whole thing is dark comedy, all the horrifically unfair deaths are played for laughs, and if someone manages to survive that qualifies as a punchline; or I am doing everything I can within reason to make it at very least possible.
I recently had the idea for an entire adventure consisting of nothing but ambush predators - a house full of animate objects, lurkers, trappers, etc, where literally everything is trying to kill the PCs, leading up to the revelation that the 'dungeon' was a househunter mimic all along. I think something like that could be a fun horror-comedy one-shot.
Me and my friend wanted to tame a bugbear on are FIRST game EVER and the dm said no and we got mad but it made sense for the story so we stopped getting mad and we got along
You do relaise that a bugbear is roughly on the same int level as a human.
I played only once with a group where a few guys had this inside joke where, "He uses the boost!" Idk what the reference was to (a videogame maybe) and they kept saying it. At one point the DM even gave him a bonus like escaping easily because his character, "Used the boost!" That got old fast, broke immersion, and was an example of always saying yes.
Content was really good and helpful! One small technical point related to the video (please file under constructive criticism) if you can somehow turn off the constant autofocus on your camera that would help. There were a number of times where it seemed like it was adjusting the focus and trying to bring background items more into focus. Near the end of the video there was also at least once where it refocused and you dropped out of focus for a moment. It came right back, but was distracting and kind of gave me just a little bit of vertigo personally.
Thanks, glad you liked it!
Yes, the horrible focus was killing me as I edited this. I believe I've figured it out now. The next batch of videos (January videos) don't have the focus issue. And thanks for mentioning it. One of my goals is to continually improve the production quality of my videos.
I have some experience with two of these, some good, some bad. On the "story is king" type of game, this can actually be a fun way to play, if your players are into that. Playing as a pure interactive narrative, not even using any dice, can be a fun experience. It's not the same, and shouldn't even be considered D&D anymore, but that doesn't mean you can't use it as inspiration for your narrative. Also, in the instance I mentioned, it was a game that was being played while in a moving truck, doing long-haul deliveries. So yeah, we slowly migrated away from the dice to a pure narrative just because we got sick of the dice bouncing all over before we could see how much damage was dealt.
The other scenario is the game where I said yes, and immediately regretted it. I was in a situation where I had only one player, and no other options to acquire more so... But anyway, the premise was a mad wizard had kidnapped a group of existing adventurers (I hate starting at lvl1, a sneeze can kill you) and fused them with various creatures and monsters to make bizarre hybrids. So in character creation, I handed my player the Monster Manual and said he could pick just about anything so long as it had the same starting hit dice as his character, and their stats and abilities would all be averaged out. After a lot of arguing, since he couldn't understand the difference between "average" and "add", I finally let him have his nifty canine celestial thing that can teleport at will as a standard action. (At least I got him to realize the difference between a standard action and a free action ... eventually.) He merged this with a dark elf that was an obvious Drizzt clone. Needless to say, this teleport ability quickly destroyed my ability to set up any kind of dungeon or maze, especially when he figured out how to upgrade a crystal ball he discovered to let him see just about anywhere and then teleport to just behind the boss for a surprise attack, which usually resulted in decapitation since he had all the feats and magic boosts to upgrade his critical threat range as far as possible... Did I mention that if I adjusted the difficulty of an encounter so it was at all challenging he would just pick up his character's token off the map and toss it, saying he was fighting "over there" now? Yeah ... and people wonder why I don't like powergaming. I don't like DMs that put you in a powergaming scenario but don't give you any power as a player, resulting in a constant stream of TPKs, but that's a whole other rant.
Dungeon Master from the old TV show said it best. "...and I'll be your guide..." As DM or GM, you're meant to guide the characters. Try not to railroad if you can help it, let the players explore the world you bring to life for them. Plan your stories for them, then delight as they joyfully bound off the rails to try a different path you didn't think of. If they die, they die. If they live, celebrate with them. Be flexible where you have to and firm when you need to. What the game is really about is fun and enjoying how the players try to survive the world.
@8:20 y'all probably regretting saying that Game of Thrones series is well done right about now. :P
Guess I'll just keep going through your videos. I like these ones. It helps to see other points of view.
I hate the DM vs the Player or vise versa mentality. I've been seeing way too many DM's lately out there on those communities that should not be named, bragging about how it's going to be a TPK. I just roll my eyes. Uh, yeah a DM will win every time...the deck is stacked in his/her favor.
I learned the hard way of saying yes all the time. I was young and just started DMing and I was all about letting the players do whatever they wanted. Your game goes down hill fast without recovery.
There are other systems to play full story type games, but even they have a way to still do the game portion. You can have a heavier story and yet still be challenging your players without giving them the cut and paste of go here kill that collect loot move to next area. But this should be decided before you play. If you don't want to play this style of game don't get involved with that group. Pretty easy.
Something that I allowed that I later regretted:
Back when I was relatively new to D&D, I decided to build a Jurassic Park adventure. The only player was my partner, as I was still getting used to the hang of things. I did play as well, but my PC was more or less a more engaging version of a NPC. Anyway, I apparently did so well that I had to keep building onto the adventure because my partner couldn't get enough of it. Gradually, though, it kept getting bigger and more in depth, so I ended up mentioning several times that I felt like it was becoming overwhelming to my capabilities. So, we decided that I could run an encounter meant to kill my partner's PC. If I succeeded, the adventure was over. If I didn't, we would continue, but slow things down drastically.
I decided then that it was time for a T-Rex encounter. Long story short, my partner's PC managed to spot the T-Rex ahead of time, and asked to pull off a crazy-impossible feat to shoot it directly in the eye, as an instant kill. I allowed it, under conditions of my choosing. I orchestrated TEN different rolls. If he messed up ANY of those rolls, he'd fail. Each roll, he scored higher than 16. EACH. ROLL. In the end, he killed my T-Rex (AKA Big Papa). The adventure went on until it reached a natural conclusion. But I regret allowing that to this day, partly because now my partner brags about that every time he can. but mostly because it was hard to top that stunt. Everything else was tame in comparison.
In my Pathfinder campaign, I let a new player use Greater Teleport if he only knew the area on the map (general distance) and I rolled to see how high they ended up in the air. After 2 uses and 2 entire sessions of sidetracked and no story progress (they gained a Lv from combat and found out just how big dragons and giant tortoises [modified dragon turtle] can get), I let him know the I am going back to having to know the place as if they had been there and can visualize it. Learned the "don't change the spell rules" lesson the hard way.
For fun, I once decided to let my party choose any character they’d like to play as from video games or comics. One guy picked a gun wielding scientist with millions of gadgets and bombs. Wanting this to be a fun loose campaign I let him have it BUT GOD DAMN WAS HIS DPS THROUGH THE ROOF. It was still a super fun experience for all involved and we still go back to these characters when we’re just looking for a one shot to blow off steam
I did once allow a couple things I really regretted and had to correct. I allowed for a homebrew Necromancer that could build literal armies of undead without any real downside. And warlock multi-classes regaining all their spell slots (warlock and non-warlock spell slots) after a short rest, The Necromancer player literally had an army of undead horrors in a day. There was no way to account for this sudden shift in power so I had to draw a line, allowed the player to multiclass into something else or gain those warlock levels in necromancer and caped the amount of undead he could control at one time, no one was happy about this but it saved the game and taught me a very important lesson about carefully reading through homebrew content.
I actually have one where I was the player that was told yes. I was a gnome Paladin who was afraid of heights. And we had to solve a bunch of puzzles to get through this gated wall to get into the town where the next part of the campaign was going to start taking place. I told my dm that I looked to my Barbarian friend and told him to throw me... over the wall. And he let us, as long as we rolled it. And my Barbarian friend rolled a crit for his strength check, and I rolled a crit for my athletics check. My dm was in awe that it worked, because he had planned a few sessions to get into the town, and had not expected the gnome he was afraid of heights to ask to be thrown over a 16ft wall
I was playing a session with a friend and he asked our DM if he himself, a "Priest" mind you, if he could use necromancy to raise some goblins. The DM instead gave have a holy goblin choir. Lol
Oh yeah, I played in a game where the guy said he believed in 90% story 10% fighting. 8 hours and I rolled a die 3 times. Soooooo boring.
Wow, yeah Id be building dice towers... Or reading my PHB... DnD is a war game at its roots and the majority of the PHB is rules for combat. I feel like if a DM wants to run a game with little combat there are better systems out there.
the DM Lair agreed. I only played that one time with that group. I prefer 75% combat/encounters in my D&D.
Yeah, I"m not often a player, but when I am, I LOVE combat... :D
I hear ya. Last 3 games we’ve ran I have been DM. And we’re planning to start another next month. I will again be DM.
DMing FTW. LoL. A big advantage of being the DM is that you have a good say in the style of game you run. 😀
Technically not D&D I guess but there are other tabletop games out there that generally do emphasize story very heavily, and even a few that don't have a random factor like dice. Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine is a pretty great example.
I was running a Ravenloft module (Feast of Goblyns) and I allowed a Spellfire User/Barbarian and a Mage with a Staff of the Magi.
It was alot of fun. TPK at the end. Turned out to be a dream but they kept their levels and some of the magic items. I intended to run them again but someone else wanted a turn at DM
👍
The worst one I heard recently was from a friend, not in the same vein as this but it was “to do combat well, don’t have lots of opponents just have one big one!” Which, isn’t really how the math of this game works lol.
Worst DM choice I have is that I had a npc cast wish for a level 3 party, the wish was to always be able to beat the monsters they face.
Yikes. That's the sort of wish that if you're using 5th edition has a 33% chance of burning away the ability to cast wish ever again. That's a big risk for an NPC to take. Did you perhaps have the PCs all teleported 30 years into the future when they are powerful enough to defeat the monsters? That's the sort of old school consequences making that sort of wish would often have. LOL
@@theDMLair i wish i did later as it was my second campaign I ever run, I read about wish and thought it would be cool to include for a grand NPC wizard and for him to cast if for them if they would have to spend several months completing this quest that would get them killed, they didnt die so the NPC (Me) was true to his word and granted wish for them and after that it basically became, you walk up to the tarrasque and you swing your sword once and you kill it. i kinda said to my friends so now your gods what do you want to do and they just said make a new campaign. this was all in 5e by the way so yeah its a recent fond memory of what not to do.
Yeah that kind of stinks. A showdown against a tarrasque would have been so memorable too! 😀
@@theDMLair yeah but what can you do when your starting out thinking that they would never reach it. 😂
The players would need to level up to 17+ to take on the Tarrasque. It would take a year or two of playing the game, but they would have a goal: "Get stronger so we can take on the Tarrasque!!!" 😀
My biggest regret is not emptying the royal treasury and saying "Sure, you can grab a handful each. Money is literally not a problem for them anymore. And I've already set in stone (basically) potion prices and scrolls. Plus they had a few really strong magic items from previous sessions. Might have to recommend them building a house? Or guild hall, Idk. Our bard has a nice crown now though.
My yes but regretted it moment. I had a dwarf barbarian decide he wanted to be a werewolf... after thinking it over I said yes, but when you transform you become npc (I know that is how it is supposed to be done) well one day he just assumed there was going to be a fight. The ranger (player, not character.) hated owls, and a giant owl landed near the party. He shot at it, and the barbarian transformed. The owl flew off, and the now berserking werewolf almost caused a TPK before he was able to roll high enough to turn back.
One example of the "always say yes" taken to the extreme is what I'd like to call GMless oneshots. Basically, players narrate their own actions, with only the dice to tell them if they fuck up. Want to tear open a portal to another universe to get a clone of yourself to fight this other demigod PC? Roll a 15 and there you go. Pretty sure that's actually happened in one or multiple of the ones I was in.
Once again loved the video. For number 1 I agree I hate playing in a game where it is player vs DM now i have run games were that happend and we had fun I left the story in the comments on the first video. The party and the DM win DnD by haveing fun and the you ba me thing can get real old real quick. Number 2 the yes man. Funny story time in my very first campaign I let a player do what ever he wanted and this is what happend he was playing a undead lord cleric in pathfinder and he learned of a lich that was in command of a necropolis a few miles away so by himself he when to the necropolis and asked to talk with the lich. When he got there he then asked to use diplomacy on the lich and ask it for help. My big brain at the time let this happen and it ended up with him summoning the whole necropolis on top of my city that the rest of the party was questing in. You can imagine how well this went. And from that day on I learned to say no. That being said I still get players asking me crazy stuff all the time and a lot of the time I dont say no but instead say maybe. I had the same player a few years later ask me for a mech suit for his PC and even though it did not really fit in I said yes but I am the one that builds it that way i can make it into the game in a way i can manage. There it is that's my story and I am sticking to it. For number 3 I agree I have had a lot of DMs play campaigns were they only cared about there story and it really sucked. That's it I have blown up the comments enuff.......for now.
I used to have a say yes attitude. I have since stopped that I have been dming for 23yrs that happened after or around first yr. Anyway I said yes to a player who wanted to be able to craft things and wanted me to make a list of possible things could find
At first np it was fun then he asked what was difference between artifacts and magical items. At the time I just said artifacts are more powerful and harder to destroy magical items r created; where as artifacts a ritual is used deity intervention. To make a long story short character assended to god hood formed a bloodline with an elven maiden and mass produced all kinds of artifacts that were "linked" to his bloodline so that when he rolled up a new character his new one was an anstor of previous so at lv 1 he had those artifacts to help. Yeah since I have learned the word NO!!!!
LOL well thanks for video
Yeah, I'd be saying "no" more after something crazy like that, too. :D
See, that's when you start a bloodline war, his level 100 grandad wants all of them and won't take no for an answer! Haha
I would say there is a very specific balance between story and gameplay. It usually leans towards story but if you neglect gameplay then it makes the story pointless. On that note I have run diceless dnd (of course with other rules changed so that the players still have agency) and it can be really fun when that's what everyone agreed to.
My players are always trying to do more actions than they are allowed. Mainly trying to stealth towards a target and attack on the same turn. Especially troublesome with level 1 rouges who don't realize that sneaking is basically an action and not a free action. They are obviously trying to get advantage so that they can get their sneak attack bonus as often as possible. Other times, my players try to pretend certain skill checks they make aren't part of their actual actions. Example being, a player attempts to trick an enemy to look behind them and then tries attacking them the same turn. Its important to put your foot down in these cases.
I allowed a player to trade his starting equipment in dark heresy for a force sword. He was a psyker.
Point 1: total agree. Gygax was wrong.
Point 2: Agree... Conditionally. There are interesting things I *DO* want players to do that arn't covered in the rules. I love players thinking outside the box and coming up with solutions that nobody expects. Those solutions may only work once, and at high cost but they work.
Point 3: Agree. My priorities are, Worldbuild -> Game-experience -> Story, in that order. An interesting and fleshed out world is far more important than a story, because a story is just "Stuff that happens in that world in an order" and players should be helping to forge that story. I tend to make a loose plan of "Okay, here's the pieces on the board and here's what they're gonna do regardless of / before they even meet the PCs. Here's what likely PC actions will do, and here's some consequences of that." as my plan.
Gygax wasn't wrong - he was running and playing games with his war game buddies. They simply had a different approach to playing than we do now. Based on the stories from the Greyhawk games, it sounds like they had a blast.
Gygax was a pretty permissive dm actually. He let a player play as a balrog once. He even added elves to the game even though he (allegedly) hated them.
Letting my dad play a gunslinger with a musket axe, first fight of the game boom nat 20, x4 crit modifier, and a d12 damage die. I let a Pathfinder gunslinger in a converted 3.5 campaign by paiso, on the plus side it became a running gag that if Dad's character got interrupted while playing cards a crit was sure to follow.
I agree with everything you say, however I am a story GM. I love telling a story that features the characters. I also run side stories that the players are unaware of. Usually a list of notes of what’s going on elsewhere in the world should it come up. Rumors of an irk uprising, dwarves hoarding, something. Just something that keeps the world alive.
The players are the focus of the story and I give them options and as much information that would be available. More to the point though I hold them accountable for their choices. I also try to say yes or yet but to things especially for the “rule of cool,” however I also say that it’s “scene specific” and I’ll think about it between game sessions.
Not Dnd, but I was the Storyteller for a chronicle of VtM and someone wanted to do the most munchkin thing possible: a max generation Assamite that tried to take several secret, out of clan Disciplines. In short, he was min maxing to hell and back so that he could sling all kinds of magic that's normally restricted to and closely guarded by the clans that own them. Seeing as they couldn't come up with an actual reason for why this would happen, that was a solid no.
Years ago, during a 2ed campaign, my DM (brother) put a scroll of 1 wish in a treasure... My 3rd lol Wizard found it and quickly wished to be able to cast every possible spell up to 3rd lvl.
He told me that such a spell book existed in the collection of a wizard in the area. If I could find it, it was mine... I spent a few sessions checking every casters loot and eventually, after the boss battle - one that we won with an acid-based attack - I found it... I had to roll to see how many pages had been destroyed... He gave me a SCROLL book with every 1st and about half of the 2nf lvl spells and a warning about being TOO greedy with a wish. Not bad for a 12 yr old DM.
I regretted: I had a monk that had a poisoners kit proficiency. I didnt know where the basic poisons stats were at so i picked a poison that was in the PHB. It was an on contact knock out poison since i didnt want an instant kill or an inhalation activation. I regretted this because the player ended up coating a lot of javelins in this poison and knocking out a lot of the enemies. Feel free to mock at this point, but ive learned the basic poisons and what the basic kits do.
One time when I was dm for a campaign we were doing an dnd campaign (it was hella fun even minding my dumb mistakes lol), meanwhile an friend of mine as a player had high amounts of energy and proceeding to make an high rank ability when his max was low to average abilities. Long story short he then proceeding to make lower rank but devastating abilities of that said high rank ability....
Side note: he lost his arms and can’t use it anymore at the near mid halfway point though :)
I had a player who has a race that had 3 different modes that they could rotate between which gave different abilities and bonuses to them depending on which mode they were in. They asked if their class could change for each mode and so basically have 3 entirely separate characters in one. As the DM while I loved the idea I had to say no because to me that was too powerful.
On the flip side in a game when I was a new campaign I had a king promise whatever the players wanted for their help and they got their one thing they wanted. One player was a necromancer power gamer and took a platinum mine as his reward. He then raised some undead and had them mining the mine basically breaking the economics of the game with having extreme amount of regular income. I regretted doing that and learned one must set the reward and not get lazy
I let my players start out with magic items that could break the game, but I gave them boundaries and downfalls to using the items. It makes them think before using the items on everything. But I also made this world from scratch and made it necessary to have OP items at first.
I once let a player make a custom race for a Pathfinder campaign. He was also a DM so I thought it would be ok, nope insert the most op race I have ever seen that can paralyze people by looking at them. Learned my lesson.
I'm a new DM but I've been playing D&D for a few years now. A player wanted me to allow their Dwarven wizard to jump across a 30 foot pit. I said no and he rolled the die anyway. Rolled a nat 20.. i still said no but you can think of another way to cross and i might allow it. I didnt know a totally appropriate way to handle it but he didn't really argue after he finally crossed.
I had a player how desperately wanted to play a character who can teleport (which the game system did not support) and kept asking for it. Eventually, I crafted him a teleport abilitie so costly and limited it was actually weaker than most other things he could have skilled into instead. He played the charcter for one session and did not ask about teleportation ever again.
My players repetitively, in multiple campaigns, try to start cults by asking people 'do you want to join a cult?' and complain that it always fails no matter what they roll on Persuasion. So then I had them join a cult and nearly end the world by accident
It was a controlled experiment. They couldn't actually end the world but...
The worse thing I allowed one of my players to do was to use their own homebrew class that was still a work in progress and was constantly changing. For a level 2 character, they should not have been able to do as much damage in one hit as they did. They have since changed it, but I regret letting them do that homebrew class. (they are no longer in my campaigns. there were so many problems with this player and their significant other that I can't DM for them... EVER!)
Funny you mention barbarians and spellcasting. I made a homebrew Barb subclass called Path of Tranquil Fury. They learn to internalize their rage and harness the power of magic whole thing. Been wanting to playtest it, but can't get a game together with everything going on right now
On one of my first tables DMing I allowed the fighter and the paladin to use a warhammer with both hands AND a shield because I didn't know you had to have one free hand for the shield, so his AC was like 18 or something like that, the next session I read again the shield/double hand rules and he didn't like it that I "nerfed" his character
I once accidentally let a PC become essentially a god via Wish.
Basically the end result was he could theoretically cast wish infinitely, however he was a good sport about it and kept it fairly reasonable (occasionally using it for a dire curcumstance, like i had built a stronger BBEG Lich (they were lv 19) and he used it to remotely destroy the lich's phylactery
Player asked for a magic weapon at character creation at level one. It was a weapon that always did a set 10 damage.
I didn’t realize how op that was until the barbarian showed me the damage dice for his greatsword.
So when I first started dming with my current group most of the players were new and the always wanted something to do for their bonus action so they would always ask can I hit it for my bonus action. At first I didnt see a problem so i let them straight roll no additions for said attack. As they leveled up i learned that that was a bad call and had to kill it.
Yeah, that could be a little OP, unless all the monsters get an extra attack, too. 😀 It seems like it'd be more powerful at lower levels. In what ways did you find it get worse at higher levels?
@@theDMLair when they finally started playing spell casters it meant two cantrips at once. Had to shut that down.
Oh, wow, yeah totally. Two cantrips per PC turn is way OP. LOL.
I had a player during character creation ask if they could be a wood elf raised by wargs. Not too bad. But then he asked if instead of the hide in plan sight ability if he could have blind sight out to 30 feet to show his dog like upbringing and heightened senses. After a quick look for not blind sight and how PCs can get it I had to say no.
Yeah, blindsight is very very powerful in the game. Mostly only high level creatures have it.
Once I was helping my little sister make a character sheet( I'm 13 she's 8) and she chose a high Elf cleric and she wanted it to have a fireball spell when she already had it heal wounds and sacred flame as her 2 spells
I once showed up to a session 0 where the DM told us that we literally weren't gonna roll anything. Like, at that point it isn't even really D&D. I like to roleplay, but I also like to feel challenged. Otherwise I'd just go find an RP forum.
i made the mistake of DMing for a pathfinder game, when my only experience with the game was D&D 3.5, from years ago. I stopped playing 3.5 when 4th came out. the players insisted on "playing by the rules" and one of them had some "flaw" that wouldn't allow them to become fatigued. on top of that i asked to keep the group to 4 players. when we all got together there were 7.....I should have said no to a few things, but despite the issues, we still had fun.
So one thing that I allowed then later regretted was I let a player make dragonscale plate... then make it +1 so a total of 20 AC Base for level 8s... did I mention that I also originally gave it poison resistance? I did change it before it mattered as now it needs attunement by a level 17... mainly since I changed it to immunity and you gain a dragon's flight speed on top of the 20 AC
My rule is that "If you can do it within the rules and can justify it in character, ALWAYS yes, but you also have to deal with the downsides too. But if you can't, I might still say yes, but you're gonna have to convince me why it's a good idea."
If you wanna be a spellcasting barbarian, you're either gonna multiclass, or be a skald(we play Pathfinder), with all the limitations your choice implies. You can do both, but you won't do either as well as you could if you focused. Nothing wrong with that.
Okay so, there was one time, not in a D&D game, but another ttrpg, I decided as my first time GM-ing I'd run a battle royale game, a few people joined we played, and I decided I'll just say yes to whatever crazy things they'd do, well, one of the players suggested we start at whatever level we do, with 1 ability, but that's max level (abilities are basically op effects you can trigger a certain amount of times) and the ability he took was enchanced hearing, basically perfect precision on whatever makes a sound in a 300 ft circle, and since everyone but some NPC-s started in the urban combat zone, and shotguns, melee and grenade launchers are the best weapons, most people were close quarters fighters, and the guy was just like, going under someone and blasting them through the floor with an autoshotgun. Eventually the teamwork of an NPC and a player who grouped up, and the distraction of the third player entering was enough to deal with him, then they went on to beat one of the enemies easily, then kill the other I accidentally made a little too broken and decided to play suboptimally so he won't use the autokill or turn cancel shells. I changed the entire system next day so it wouldn't allow crazy stuff like that, decided no PvP anymore. And realised the good reason we don't let the guy who got on the game's dev team for exploiting it so many times, go PvP with another dev who just wanted to try out a fun build and a relatively new player who didn't yet know about all the ways to break the game.
a thing i regreted in one of my game of dnd homebrewed with thing from monster hunter... My players fought a lagiacrus. One of them wanted absolutly to search the lair of the sea monster. I allowed it, without thinking about the consequences. That was supposed to be the last session before a major timeskip.
I later realised that the egg of lagiacrus he had found would have hatched and become adult by the end of the time skip, resulting in a player casualy having some kind of LEVIATHAN as a familiar... A thunder spitting Leviathan...
I had a hard time finding reasons as to how his familiar could be a problem in town, but still left it to him. After all, he had taken so much care to explain how he took care of the newborn beast during the time skip i would have felt really scummy to tell him "nah, you baby monster died." Still having trouble with it, but i guess it could have been worse ^^
I like the bonus tip conceptually, but i feel it's smarter to keep the hp hidden
Holding a sword without also wearing a fedora --> big missed opportunity
The main 'yes' I lived to regret was letting one of my friends make a Monk with the Vow of Poverty/Ascetic rules. 'Overpowered' is an insufficient term for what he ended up being.
I wasn't the DM, my friend was, and figured I'd tell a story of the last session we did (we are two sessions in and in the middle of an arc where we are helping a black smith dwarf get his home back from the orcs, sadly only his wife and one of his daughters survived.)
OKAY NOW TO THE STORY
Our first session we ran into some where rats, our party of four beat two of three, one of then getting away, the other two getting killed. Me and our dwarf cleric decided to take some of the teeth of the where rats, and my Tabaxi Rogue Ria, took one of the eyes(He look done when we took the body parts of the dead wererats), and than on our second session, we ran into the orcs, and my girl Ria shot one of the orcs in the eye, blinding him(duh). BUT than she took the wererat eye out of her pocket, threw it over the trench and bridge, hitting the orc in his other, remaining eye. Our DM had the look of pure regret on his face, and was mumbling under his breath that he regretted letting me take the eye. But everyone else found it funny XD
My worst mistake that I made: I should note that I am a novice DM, and this was the first campaign I had ever ran. I was using the Curse of Strahd module at my LGS. We were initially only going to have 2 players as we entered the Death House, so I let them start at level 3 and end it at level 5. This turned out to be a very big mistake as our cleric entered Barovia with access to the Daylight spell, completely ruining the abilities of the vampires I sent against them. Not only that, but immediately after they left the Death House, a third player joined the weekly gameplay, and then a fourth when they got to Vazkii, and along the way, people that were there that night would also randomly jump in. I honestly wish I had a community that I could go to for advice on how to deal with this. I asked some of the other people from the shop, and one of them answered "Let them have the easy early game, but then really destroy them later." The other legitimately told me to TPK my party. Both of these seem like pretty bad advice and I didn't do either of them, which left me confused, so I just ran things by the book but with buffed up monsters and they still just crushed them with no contest thanks to Daylight.