5 Things DM's Wish Players Knew

greetings my name is Monty Martin and I'm Kelly McLaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes Welcome to our Channel where we cover everything D including advice for players and guides for game Masters please like our video subscribe to the channel and ring the bell so that you never miss an episode and off the top we just want to send out a massive thank you to all of our patreon supporters for making the work that we do here on YouTube possible more on how you can support the channel at the end of the video but today we're going to discuss five things that dungeon Masters wish their players knew when they're sitting down to play their games of d d this was actually a topic that we put together with the assistance of our amazing patreon Community hearing their thoughts and feedback from dungeon Masters running games chatting with us in our Discord hearing from them things that they wish their players knew as well as some of our experiences running the game as well being a dungeon master is a great part of Dungeons and Dragons and an essential part but most of us get into the game by being a player first some people will go their entire career being a player of Dungeons and Dragons without ever stepping into the seat to be a dungeon master which is okay but that also means that the people who have never sat in the dungeon Masters seat might not be aware of a lot of what a dungeon master deals with creates prepares and plans for their game sessions players and dungeon Masters need to work together to make the experience of the table fun and exciting for everybody and there are a few things that players can keep in mind that they might not know off the top of their heads that can help them to be a better participant in the games of Dungeons and Dragons now of course we just want to nail down two bits of low-hanging fruit before we get dive into this because when we asked our community what's something that you wish your players knew so many people responded with the rules and fortunately we've got a lot of videos about that that you can forward to to your group uh and just as many responded to something like the names of my NPCs or what's actually happening in the campaign but we want to go a little bit deeper than some of those ones because we got a lot of responses to those effects so if you are a game master in a position where your players don't know the rules uh you can share some of our videos with uh with your with your group yes and if you're a player watching this video uh try to remember the names of NPCs taking notes is great and try to learn at least what's on your character sheet I think that's a fundamental base point before we get into the actual meat of this episode is learn how your character sheet works and what you're doing on there it's okay to ask questions if you're new to the game and we should all have that grace period of learning those things but try to grasp the rules and be able to at least maintain your presence in the game with your character and your sheet of course it's worth it's worth remembering and this brings us into our first point that your character can do more than what's written on your character sheet your character sheet is a reference of useful powers and abilities that you might have but one of the things that might not be obvious to many players is that you as a player in d d you get to drive the action you are actually the protagonist in a fantasy story and you can be the one taking action and not just the actions in combat but making decisions affecting the story role playing your character you don't need to necessarily be the one that is just following along and reacting to the events that the dungeon master presents you with but you can actually be that active force and respond back whether that is just jumping on the adventure hooks when they're presented to you and embracing the adventure or deciding to go on a really different path with the adventure depending on how your character would react to the scenario presented to them one thing that I found interesting is that Monty and I spend a lot of time explaining the rules of DnD and so my mind was blown when Mitch was joining our DND game for the first time and I was about to start explaining everything on his character shoot sheet in terms of rules here are the things you can do here are ability scores here are skills before I said anything Mitch had asked the question so how do I play D and D and Joe answered and said all you're going to do is say what you imagine your character doing and the DM is going to tell you what to roll to figure it out and what I ended up seeing was some of the best creativity I've ever seen from a new player because he wasn't bogged down by what's on his character sheet he would just be like I want to surf on my shield down this set of stairs and you'd be like all right give me an acrobatics check and all of a sudden I was like man I'm sitting here reading my spells or my ability and be like I would like to sneak attack which is great but having the freedom to know that you can kind of do whatever you want you can relay the information you can use your imagination do things that aren't written down that sound like a cool idea don't rely on your dungeon master to be able to fix everything and don't try to give him too big of a problem start small I want to can I jump on my shield and slide down these stairs yeah give me a roll that's a great idea to start with and dungeon Masters don't forget something outlandish you always have the fallback of well you can certainly try because not everything that the players propose is always going to be a good idea or successful and that's something that's part of the negotiation the magic of the DND experience and so well there is a lot of importance that you need to embrace the creativity and make your players feel empowered to make those choices there is a back and forth and a negotiation and over time you as a DM will have better judgment and you as your players will have more creative suggestions and options in what you'll do in addition to remembering that as a player character you are in the driver's seat of the campaign it is important to know that that is a shared driver seat and you do need to share that Spotlight with the other players at the table and work together and invite collaboration with one another this was something that our patrons raid an assault tank both mentioned as things that they wanted their players to really know that they can appreciate and lean on one another and that they can work together creatively to overcome problems in a way that if they're only trying to think about themselves isn't always as effective or even as memorable The Avengers are coolest when they team up and tackle a problem together and I think the same applies to d d although many of us enjoy having those moments in our Spotlight where our character gets to do something awesome make sure to celebrate the moments that the other characters have in the spotlight pay attention to them cheer when they roll that critical hit or help them out with your turn to amplify what they're doing in their turn there's so many times in the games that two abilities or two spells can work really well together or a simple moment where you give up your action to help out with a situation that's happening on the battlefield turns into a team Dynamic be aware of it and focus in on what's Happening don't go on your phone when it's not your turn don't stop paying attention what other people are doing is just as exciting this brings us into our next point though which is some players have a tendency that when they start getting creative with what they want to do they often aren't clear about communicating their intentions to their dungeon master this can lead to an interaction that kind of sounds like this the player starts off by asking the dungeon master is the room illuminated the dungeon master says yes and the player says what's Illuminating the room and the dungeon master responds oh a chandelier the player then says how's the chandelier secured to the ceiling the dungeon master says well a rope the player asks do I think the ropes are flammable and the dungeon master is like well they're ropes so they probably are and then the the player says do I have flint and steel that I can light my arrows on fire and you're like yeah that sounds reasonable and then the player finally says I want to light my arrows on fire and shoot the chandelier down on top of my enemies to set them on fire that entire line of questioning wasn't necessary wasn't entirely necessary the player simply could have communicated their intent from the beginning rather than going through that line of questioning and while I understand that sometimes you do need to think the situation out as a player time and time again I've encountered players who try to kind of construct a Rube Goldberg sort of situation through a line of questioning where I have to say yes to whatever they're going to do what if they have just asked me from the very beginning whether what they wanted to do was possible was a possible outcome we could have stayed a lot more time and had a lot more clarity and a lot less confusion over what they wanted to accomplish I think that this particular problem stems again from players who have never sat in the DMC and there's this strange idea that even I had as a new player in DND that the DM was there to thwart my brilliant ideas for some reason so I would always try to ask as many questions as I could I'm notorious for doing this at my early playing I would ask a hundred questions to try to get to the point of what I want to do that is really cool but the DM won't allow it unless I figure out how to get the the yes but once I was a DM and my players said something like I want to shoot down the chandelier and I realized that my reaction as a DM was like oh heck yeah that was the moment that it clicked in for me that as a DM I'm there to have fun too I'm not rooting for the bad guys I'm portraying the bad guys and I want them to get absolutely destroyed by really cool stuff that the players do so when there's a group of goblins standing under Chandelier and the player says I want to shoot the chandelier and I go yeah kill all those goblins that's going to be great and then we roll some saves two of them survive they run away and get more goblins sure why not you get to roll with the scenario but letting the cool stuff happen for me as a DM has been just as fun as for the players so let's make it happen your dungeon master is probably going to be more excited by that cool and creative idea than you are expecting them to be so Embrace that say what you want to have happen and take that action and intention together and this goes hand in hand we've kind of handed this I think the Third Kind of component to all of these things is come to the realization that your dungeon master is on your side in the age of the internet we are inundated with horror stories of dungeon Masters that terrorize their groups had antagonistic play Styles and really put their players through a rough time but by and large I think that most dungeon Masters out there are more concerned about their players having a good time making the right call and supporting their players then there are the opposite it's like that kind of thing where the squeaky wheel gets the grease it doesn't it's easy to imagine that most dungeon Masters are this antagonistic force that is out to get you but the vast majority of it is I very rarely have encountered dungeon Masters like that in my actual place I have encountered dungeon Masters like that but I've encountered far more positive creative invested DMS that want to tell a great story with their players than the opposite and that kind of is one of the big lessons that I've learned as a DM is that being reactive to the player's ideas and this goes this trickles back through the ideas that we've already talked about as a player you're driving the action my job as a DM is to know the scenario and React to what you are driving the story Into the choices that the players are making is what's driving the action I just have to react to it I'm going to react to make things even cooler and listen to my players as they come up with cool things to do that's the second point so all of this is that I as a DMM on the side of the players tell me what it is you want to do make up some cool stuff I'm here to use the rules as a tool to help you achieve those really awesome moments at the table that's been my biggest job as a DM and the biggest lesson that I learned is how do we get to yes you take a piece by piece to get to the yes you add in the dice rolls to add an element of Randomness and then you react a core accordingly but that is all part of the fun everybody's in on the storytelling together the DM and the players are at their best when they're all gathered around Imagining the scenario together talking it out and deciding the dice rolls that are going to come into play and this is where friendship and Trust are big elements and kind of the secret ingredient of making a truly magical role-playing game experience when there is trust and friendship present between the players and the game master you know that you're in good hands with one another that your creativity will be embraced that your ideas will be taken seriously and implemented realistically and that you can try things out and have fun with that and stretch the bounds of things now it is worth mentioning though that just because the dungeon master is on your side that doesn't mean that the bad guys aren't going to be a threat and that there won't be challenges associated with it the dungeon master might be on the player's side but the villains aren't and this is an interesting kind of Duality to the dungeon Masters role and why a challenge can still exist when you don't have an adversarial DM the dungeon master isn't your adversary but Tiamat is and the dungeon Master's shared responsibility is to also portray all of those villains antagonists and deadly environments in a way that is true and in a way that is believable to those things as well and so in all of this the dungeon Masters on your side but I think that the next thing that I wish more players would know is that you're gonna have to take a risk and sometimes you might lose and it is okay to fail in D and D and that's that's a very important statement I know that rolling a one can be a bummer I know that not Landing your third attack in a row can be a bummer I know that the bad guy getting away and you not saving the day can be a bummer but you need to keep in mind that every story you've ever read every TV show or movie you've ever watched every every single video game you've played would be incredibly boring if every time the heroes did anything they succeeded failures make the story valuable they make the impact of what's happening at the table more important everything that you're doing has the possibility of failing and when you do fail Embrace that as part of the part of the narrative and one of the biggest lessons that you can learn as a player that I myself had to learn was instead of rolling that one and being like oh darn it oh man I'm not doing anything this combat encounter I'm just going to go on my phone you guys keep playing like that's not the attitude that is needed at the table instead describe your failures the same with the same enthusiasm that you would describe your successes if you enrolled a critical hit and you were like I jumped down from the wall and stab the enemy through the heart instead I go to jump down from the wall the enemy Dodges out of the way okay and I slam face first into the ground make it into a comical moment I often do and for me that's helped me deal with the ones that I roll the failures that we have make it dramatic make it funny whatever feels right in the moment describe it make it part of the story and then keep going some of our patrons had some great things to add on to this so Richie that said players should be reminded that it's okay to fail and our Patron glamor moth said that at the same time they should be bold and second class elitists let us know that players sometimes it's okay to for you to do the dumb and be led by your characters role-playing their input pulses and sometimes their poor lack of judgment if you look at a lot of protagonists in fantasy pulp and science fiction stories sometimes they don't make it the best choices sometimes they get in over their heads because of their own choices and that leads the story to interesting places that are quite satisfying so it's okay to not always be thinking about the optimal decision and I don't just mean when it comes to optimizing your character sheet you can play an optimized character in a very subtle optimal way and that has nothing to do with your character's combat tactics but rather the choices and decisions that your character makes in those role-playing moments like who's their who's going to be their friend and who's going to be their Ally are you going to wander into the Dragon Lair unprepared or are you going to take those steps in advance those are all ways that your character can make maybe not the best choices for in terms of your character's safety and survival but the ones that are going to help you find the coolest story some of my favorite moments playing characters in d d is when I have that brief realization that the choice I'm about to make is not something that I agree with as as Kelly but I'm looking at my character sheet and I played a character whose flaw was that he was hopelessly optimistic and very overly trusting and so when the creepy butcher was like go on into this shed he was like all right and walked in and in my head I was like oh this is a terrible idea but I looked down on my character sheet and was like yeah sure why not that sounds great because I'm playing the character and I'm having fun with it and I knew I was about to get into a whole heap of trouble but that was exciting and fun for me because I knew my character would end up in that situation and while the DM is on your side and you are rolling with the punches failing at something succeeding it out others making bold choices driving the action and you're now taking on a lot more responsibility but I think it is important to remember our final Point here and that is keeping in mind the amount of preparation that the DM is doing and this isn't to say that the DM is more important than the players the DM needs the players the players need the DM it's a very collaborative experience however there are things that some players do when they are being disrespectful or pulling out their phones at the table or arguing with the DM about a ruling that they made or trying to get their way at the table and derailing the entire night of D and D there's just a lot of again bringing up this adversarial play but a dungeon master is a human being your friend possibly who is there to try to weave a cool story for everybody at the table they've prepared the monsters they've prepared their notes the maps they've organized this sort of collaborative storytelling performance that's going to be happening that evening between all of you and they are sort of the Ring Master of the circus so to speak and it can be as simple as just paying attention and saying thank you at the end of the night that's really the Baseline and as long as you're doing that it means that you're respecting that the dungeon master has shown up to really bring this all to you and to prepare this all for you be because the dungeon master puts in the extra work to prepare the game their fun is just as important as everyone else is at the table and it's also equally important to have realistic expectations of your game master as one person your dungeon master has put a lot of work into detailing their world and their Adventures but they are only one person and they might not have the same level of detail or Vera similitude as established cinematic universes with 40 50 100 Years of publication history that someone post that multiple people have poured their entire lives into working and developing a dungeon master just might not ever make a world that is as big as these big established media properties and having expectations for a dungeon master to be equivalent to that is unrealistic there are certainly some very very amazing DMS out there who have created worlds that are incredibly detailed and definitely stand amongst the Giants of established media properties but it's not fair to expect that of every single dungeon master and at the same time we have to remember that dungeon Masters are participants and players as well and unless your dungeon master is a paid professional dungeon master who you are paying they're not a service provider and just a little bit of a side ran on myself I believe that there's three phrases that we should strike from our lexicon and I'm guilty of using these terms but I think that we should probably stop using them it's the words it's the DM's job because being a DM is not a job you're not getting paid for it unless you are getting paid for it a good DM would or only bad DMS would because all of these imply that there's some platonic ideal of this professional career dungeon master one that doesn't exist although we are stressing this point I do want to say that most of the time players haven't been that harsh and in our games I find that our players have been generally really amazing but it is the fact that some DMS are holding themselves to a high standard because they think that the players are expecting them to be up there it was a relief to realize that at my game table just a few weeks ago I was running a game and my players said what was the name of that NPC again the one from the town that we were just visiting and I was like I didn't write it down his name's bill now and they were like and we all laughed about it because I forgot the name of an important NPC and nobody wrote it down so we had to make up a brand new name again if this was a movie that we were watching you'd be like who wrote this movie that character's just changed names I can't tell you how many times I've been like I can't remember the name of this character anymore I I forget where I wrote it down my files are a mess on my computer and and especially because now that we stream our games too yeah we do but like no I'm sure dungeon Masters do this all the time where like they forget a detail or they forget something and then we don't all have the benefit of having a video recording of our campaigns to look back on and and uh it's actually easier to be able to just be like I forget so it's this now I the other one I got called out on all the time is we will take a few weeks off and then we'll come back and I'll pick up an NPC do a character voice and somebody will be like that's not the character voice and I'm like oh they're they're sick uh it's their voice now and like again we laugh about it and I think that's the thing that players can take away from this is your DM's gonna forget names they're going to screw up voices they might get parts of their story wrong they might say one thing one week and then say something different the other week these are things to laugh about not to get upset about because that's how D and D goes I said that in one game I might say okay so next week we are heading north to the mountains and the next week I'm like all right so you head West to the mountains and they're like I thought you said north and I'm like I don't care whatever you're heading to the mountains they're over there we're and we can get many different rewarding things out of DnD some games have Dungeons and Dragons are rewarding because they're exciting some are gripping and engaging and thrilling some are silly fun and jokes Different Strokes for different folks everyone gets different things out of their games of d d and that's why it's important to have things like session zero to communicate what everyone wants to get out of the game how everyone's going to have a good time together and put those expectations down and I do think that part of this ultimately is that maybe we can expect a little bit more from players and we should moderate our expectations of dungeon Masters just a little bit we can make that experience a little bit more Equitable a little bit more collaborative and still have a wonderful time playing our games together so this has been a look at five things that DMS wish players knew in Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition tell us about some of the things that you wish your players knew politely and kindly in the comments below the video videos that we create on our channel are made possible with the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters many of whom provided their amazing feedback ideas and suggestions for this video in our monthly writer's room so I want to give a really big thank you to all who contributed in our writers from Workshop earlier this this month your ideas and suggestions were really really phenomenal and I hope that we got everyone shouted out to that left some suggestions so thank you to all of our patrons if you do enjoy our work here on YouTube and want to get in on our writer's room join our Discord Community make sure that we can continue to make these videos follow the links in the description below and if you want to see a group of players getting along great with their DMS no matter how frustrating the campaign is you can check out our live play in the worlds of drachenheim which airs Tuesday evenings on Twitch you can find all of the previous episodes right up over here and if you're expecting this to be about the rules of DnD we've got a lot of videos including our top 10 rules mistakes which you can check out right up over here so please subscribe to our Channel like this video and hit that Bell so that you never miss an episode and we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 278,730

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: 5UeWgRrH-uM

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2022