Six Ways Dungeon Masters Cheat in Dungeons and dragons 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by our very own Kickstarter project Sebastian Crow's guide to drakenheim Sebastian Crow's guide to drachenheim is going to introduce a ton of new player content as well as expanded lore on the world surrounding the city of drachenheim this book is perfect whether or not you backed our first Kickstarter because it is full of player focused content that can be used in any setting as well as great lore that you can use to inspire Adventures campaign ideas or even just rumors and stories in your own worlds we've spent the past couple of years play testing workshopping and developing a brand new class for fifth edition the Apothecary which is featured in this book The Apothecary is an occult magician that combines medical knowledge with Arcane magic using intelligence-based spell casting mechanics alongside interesting powers that let them harm and heal in equal measure we've also created brand new subclasses at least one for every core class in DND and on top of that all we've created a number of brand new spells that are available to all the classes but also all of them are available to the Apothecary and they focus on heightening the abilities of poison damage acid damage and necrotic damage in your games of DnD we've worked so hard on all the content in this next new book and we are so excited to share it with you if you'd like to get information on the kickstarter campaign and find out when you can start backing it follow the links in the description below and now under this week's episode 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 GMS we upload new videos on Tuesdays and Thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we're talking about six different ways that dungeon Masters cheat when they are running their games of d d now cheating is a bit of a loose term that we're using for this episode because dungeon Masters get to dictate and manage the rules of their table and so some might say that dungeon Masters can't cheat but there are choices that dungeon Masters can make that can impact the game in a negative way however these same tools can be used for positive effects as well and so today as we dive into six ways that dungeon Masters cheat we're going to look at the potential to use these options in positive ways that might help you at the table as a dungeon master but you need to be careful because with great power comes great responsibility and power to bend and shape the rules to your will can be just as harmful for your table as it can be beneficial when players feel like the dungeon master is cheating they can feel frustrated and it can actually spoil their fun the reason for this is because there is an unspoken trust that exists in any role-playing game between the players and the dungeon master and when a player feels like their dungeon master is cheating it stretches and potentially even breaks that trust but the trust between players and dungeon Masters is the foundation upon which the fun of a role-playing game is built if there are cracks in that Foundation or if that Foundation is falling apart it can make having a good time during a role-playing game absolutely impossible and so when we decide as dungeon Masters to cheat we need to do so carefully so with that let's talk about six ways that dungeon Masters cheat there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling speaking of rolling our first topic that we're going to discuss today is fudging the dice this is when the dungeon master makes a roll probably behind their DM screen and decides that they don't love the outcome of the dice and so they say a different number instead this could be used for anything in the game really ability checks saving throws attack rolls it could even be used for damage rolls or spell casting really any aspect of the game where dice are being rolled there are even cases where dungeon Masters might have already predetermined the choice roll the dice behind their screen to make the illusion of them leaving it up to fate where when really they've already predetermined again there are times that fudging the dice might be beneficial but there are more cases where this is actually going to be a negative impact on the game for several years now I've been rolling my dice in the open my players can see my die rolls and so I have no opportunity whatsoever to fudge them even though it's surprising that when their players can see the rules you still have this ability to adjust the DC and the attack bonuses and certain things so there's actually ways that even when you're rolling in the open you can still fudge the dice it's kind of amazing how much power you have over the dice as the dungeon master and so I'd like to follow this General philosophy of I roll the dice when it's interesting exciting gonna create tension and when I am prepared as the dungeon master to commit to the results that's my general philosophy but the thing is is that even when you have that philosophy there are still times when the dice just decide your players are going to have a bad night I very recently fudged the dice in a game and it's not something that I normally like to do but I was in a situation where my player characters were in a very tough combat encounter they were dealing with many enemies on multiple fronts and there was a spellcaster involved who dropped their biggest spell against my fifth level party a fireball my party had already been whittled down a bit and this Fireball managed to end up with three failed saving throws and one success the three failed saving throws it was enough to knock them down to zero hit points and we only had one character left standing the mood at the table went down several notches in that moment exciting still because there's an opportunity to save them one of my monsters got to go next against the only standing player character I rolled the dice behind my screen and landed a crit in that moment I knew that that crit was going to kill that player and it was going to be a total party kill I'm not against a total party kill but when a random critical hit on the chance role of a die is what does it it just felt a little dirty to me and it felt like my players were already having their Spirits dampened in the moment and had learned a valuable lesson about how intense combat encounters can be uh just observing on that one of the interesting things about your example specifically is that the players didn't even have any opportunity to respond to that situation they went from having a good amount of hit points though being Willow down a bunch of them failed their saving throws and then one monster got to act before this still standing player even got a chance to do anything so there was Zero opportunity for any of the players to respond to what the dice had done to them in that case I think you were fully justified in in fudging because that's just one of those rare freak cases where all of a sudden all the dice go hey guess what the campaign's over and that's not fun and that was one of the Prime examples of when I think it is okay to fudge the dice the dice are fickle gods they giveth and they taketh away and sometimes when they're take a thing awaying way too much in a single moment before the players have any chance to respond that's the right time to make some calls and use your best judgment to make the game more fun for your friends although we ways that you can fudge the dice include reducing the amount of damage that a spell or effect does so for example if you roll that fireball and you roll box cars you can just be like I don't want a 60 damage Fireball to happen right now let's just go for the average you can also do things like adjusting the DC of a check on the fly so if originally you were planning for the DC to be a 20 and your players roll an 18 well they didn't know that it was a 20 and so you can be like yeah it was just a 15. use your discretion with these things I feel if you are bailing your players out by fudging the dice so that your campaign can continue and so that a player can have a good time that is an admirable an understandable reason to fudge the dice what isn't fun though is an example that I've run into when I play D D adventurers League there was an Infamous dungeon master in one of my adventurously groups who was Notorious and bragged about how many player character fatalities they had caused the reason why this was was that this dungeon master had a habit of fudging the dice to turn misses into hits and hits into crits I have never seen a dungeon master roll so many Critical Hits against a party and I do not believe for a moment that even a fraction of those crits were actual crits they just rolled them to make the game harder for the players and the result was that it was way more frustrating and they were the only one having fun the problem with this was was that this dungeon master was also a terrible liar every time they fudge the dice everybody at the table could tell they were doing it it was very obvious because they would do this thing where they would look at the dice and you could tell that they were realizing what the math added up to that it wasn't the result they wanted and then changing their mind to get the result that they needed and so this is just a warning to to dungeon Masters out there that fudge the dice you might have a towel that indicates to your player that you're doing it you might not be as discreet about it as you think you are and I found that once I played with the dungeon master for a little while I can usually tell when they're fudging the dice or not because it there's this sign that they're thinking about it and it becomes really obvious once you know the flow of how a dungeon master runs a game if you're fudging your dice against the players I think that that's a bad call so generally speaking if you are using your abilities as a dungeon master to fudge the dice and you are using it to hinder the party make things more difficult and basically make it less fun for them playing d d That's not the best time to use it if you are using it in circumstances where the dice have been terrible to your players and you know that changing this one dice roll will turn your battle from a party kill into a successful story that they will remember forever because of that time that three of them went down and the Barbarian the only one left standing with eight hit points managed to grab a potion and jam it into one of their mouths to save the party that's going to be a great story and that's fun for everybody it's still a really dangerous scenario a great story to tell but everybody's having fun at the table and that's really why we play these games somewhat related to the previous topic is our next topic of discussion which is adjusting hit points on the fly now a little different than fudging the dice this time as you're playing out a monster you might realize that this monster is way too powerful or not quite powerful enough and you would decide in the moment to adjust their hit points this is actually a very common cheat that DMS do and I actually have heard of several DMS out there who ignore the hit points completely and will play a monster out until the moment it feels appropriate for that monster to die and then let the monster die that's not really the way I like to run it but there are times that I do adjust the hit points as a dungeon master I have occasionally ran combat encounters that drag on a little longer than I want them to and you can feel it at the table when you're dragging a combat encounter onto round four five or six and it starts to feel like the fun is gone the excitement is gone your monster has 20 hit points left somebody lands another attack and only does four damage and you're like oh man is this gonna go another round at that point sometimes it's okay to just be like listen the next round they're gonna kill it this monster only has one turn left they don't have any of their big guns left maybe that final four point hit you look up from the table and you go that's all you needed and you let the monster die Sometimes the best thing you can do if a combat encounter feels like it's starting to drag is let the players win especially if they've whittled the monster down to a point where the combat is basically over anyways we'll talk about this more later but I love using monster morale and occasionally have my monsters run away or Surrender but sometimes you just want the encounter to be over and it's totally fine to just have the monster die on the next attack it's a great way to move things along and wrap up a combat encounter once it's run its course another great way to use this though is that sometimes there is a specific character that should land the killing blow when does that come up well sometimes you're facing a villain that is connected to a character's backstory or that through the campaign a specific player at your table has created a prominent villain out of that character for them specifically in these cases it might be beneficial that you see that that player is coming up next in the combat encounter and the player before them lands the killing blow but won't be nearly as excited or care nearly as much as if the player who has been hunting this villain since their backstory Landing that killing blow might be the most important story moment for them on the flip side I've also used this tactic when there is a certain player at my table who's just having a bad combat encounter I've had it where all the players around the table are rolling 30 damage 40 damage here's a hundred damage Smite from the Paladin and then the one player misses three rounds in a row and gets no damage their spells fail their attacks Miss then on the last round of combat when the monster's down to 15 hit points they land an attack they do 10 damage and you allow them to be the one to kill the monster just to give them that little moment in that combat encounter that kind of raises the whole thing up for them they've been having a bad time everybody else is having a great time let that one player also join in on the excitement Landing the killing blow can save a player's mood during a rough combat encounter and if you don't want to steal the Thunder from the player that got the actual killing blow you can use a fun narrative device that is used all the time in movies books TV shows where one character lands kind of this knockout dizzying punch that sends the villain reeling backwards and then they make eye contact with the character that has the intense story with them and that character now gets to land that finishing move over the villain that's kind of been set up for Success so the other player character who landed the actual mathematical killing blow is still feeling like they were an important part of that moment they were an important part of that story but you're completing the circuit and it's a cool teamwork moment actually and it really reinforces kind of the amazing flow that can happen in combat where yeah your ally disarmed your villain they stumble backwards and you see that moment lock eyes and stab them in the gut or behead them in an epic fashion or whatever amazing way the player wants to describe their kill one other strategy that might be narrated which is another way of fudging an encounter that the pla that is going badly for the players is to lower the hit points of the monsters to make it a little bit easier for them maybe you realize too late oh yeah it probably wasn't a good idea to give this Homebrew monster 2000 hit points and you see that the combat encounter is dragging on but also you conclude the players are going to lose if the combat continues on they're not going to do enough damage to win especially if you've made a Homebrew monster I think it's fair game to make a last minute adjustment if you have to in this case it's very reasonable if you think that you've made a design error or mistake or if you've just made an encounter balanced mistake and made it too hard for the players lower the monster's hit points have them get knocked out shortly one way that you might be able to make this more narratively compelling is to actually have the monsters run or Surrender not every monster has to grind it out to the last hit point and not every villain or NPC or Monster is actually going to want to try to get one kill on the player characters in exchange for their own life they might see oh yeah I could take one of the player characters out but that's going to cost me my own life that's not worth it I'm gonna run finally another case where you might change the hit points of your monsters on the Fly is when your boss monster gets one rounded you set up a great combat encounter a prominent villain and the Rogue sneaks in gets surprised they're an assassin they land a crit sneak attack on the bus and they're dead you might take that opportunity to suddenly double the hit points of the monster to include them in this prominent and Theatrical combat encounter but I think that this is where we start getting into dangerous territory with this and this is something you want to be very careful about sometimes the greatest thing in the world is when a player character lands that critical sneak attack and kills the boss in one hit that can feel really really rewarding there are times in a campaign that you may want to embrace this and that's something that all of us dungeon Masters need to learn embrace the incredible victories of our player characters sometimes your epic combat encounter gets crushed in a single round and you're disappointed but then you see the cheering faces of your players as they're all high-fiving each other and you've got to remember that this game is about them all having fun and as you learn to have fun with them that becomes more important as you gain more experience as a dungeon master you're going to learn a lot more about combat encounter design and you're going to be able to build better encounters that have far less of a chance of this happening but in the early days we're all going to make mistakes put a monster that is not powerful enough to stand up to our players thinking we're going to to have an epic encounter embrace it when you can if you absolutely need to for narrative purposes maybe have them last a couple more rounds but be very careful with that and try to embrace how awesome your player characters are being as we come to our next point this is another modification for combat encounters that might be feeling too easy and in my opinion it's actually better than the previous example of oh no they one rounded my boss let's give them double hit points we call this one the quantum ogres the quantum ogres or as I call it my table my B team is always some extra monsters that I have set to the side that could appear randomly in a combat encounter if it's just going way too easily for the players I actually did this the other day I didn't use the ogres because my Fireball wiped out almost my whole party but if they had destroyed the Mage in the first round killed the minions then I was going to have two ogres show up and just add some meat Shields into the combat encounter I had placed a cave in the environment nearby and never really mentioned it but I was going to say that there were two ogres sleeping in that cave I've done this a lot in my campaigns where I just have some extra monsters just in case I feel it's appropriate even if the random encounter pops up they're in the middle of the dungeon there's no real Combat encounter prepared but they're taking a long time investigating things you have a couple monsters just show up in the room being like what are you doing here let's fight it can be a really interesting way to mix things up or to increase the difficulty in an otherwise easy situation for the players I feel like if you you are going to use quantum ogres you do a little bit of preparation on your part to make sure that if they are going to show up that there is a narrative justification having monsters suddenly pop out of nowhere might make sense if there's an interdimensional Rift present but having monsters that are incongruent with the environment incongruent with the encounter just show up out of nowhere with no chance for the players to perhaps detect them cannot make a lot of sense so oftentimes if a monster doesn't have the ability to Simply show up out of nowhere because the combat encounter is happening in the magical Rift where anything can possibly happen because not every combat encounter can happen under those circumstances it might be worth telegraphing just a little bit there are other creatures present in the area that there are patrols of guards wandering around the area and instead of having the monsters immediately appear at the start of a new combat round give the players the opportunity to recognize one or two rounds before that monsters are coming the only downside to giving the players advanced warning is that it does lower the amount of discretion that you have as a DM over what's coming next so I usually like to leave it to one round notification I feel that that's fair and as long as you've then telegraphed in the environment the possibility that this could happen I feel like you're pretty pretty safe in in doing it and we use the term ogres Loosely obviously as Monty said pick some monsters that are appropriate if you're in a bandit Camp you don't need two ogres showing up just have some extra Bandits on the side when I ran my underdark campaign I always had a group of giant spiders set aside because giant spiders could be anywhere and so knowing your environment and the surroundings and knowing what monsters are likely to show up is very helpful for this one of the things that's also possible with the quantum ogre technique is not even having the monsters appear as reinforcements but not deciding how many monsters are on the field until you actually need to tell that number to your players so oftentimes we think about a lot about how we're going to design and balance our combat encounters before they happen and we commit to the idea that there must be this many of this monster this many of this monster plus the boss but if your player characters are going through several combat encounters at once and they've either had an easy time of it or been worn down you might simply decide when they run into the boss room originally the boss was gonna have six bodyguards but now they have eight and you just make that adjustment on the Fly and that one will fly completely under the player character's radar they won't know until they open the door and actually see how many creatures are inside there how many creatures are actually inside it is literally like Schrodinger's box right how many is in there well you're not gonna know until you kick down the door and Schrodinger's box is actually a large part of being a dungeon master is everything that you haven't presented to the players remains nebulous to them until you present it so you do have the ability of Shifting things around as you need to and that actually does bring us to our next point which again is a very dangerous one for DMS to use but can be used to great effect if used properly and that is the illusion of choice now the version of choice again we as dungeon Masters love presenting non-railroad campaigns we love presenting open Concepts the players get to choose where they go next how they're going to impact the world and we love that but especially if we're home brewing I've ran into this mistake several times where I have a major plot point that I've put at location a and the players decide you know what we're going to head towards location B which I haven't fully prepared yet and I don't know how it's going to connect back into the major plot at this point they haven't gone to location a which means I have more time to prepare more for that location and less time to prepare the location they're going to so although it might be silly to take the entirety of location a and move it over what I can do is take out the important plot points maybe an important NPC elements that were vital to progressing the story forward pluck them out of location a place them in location B and have more time to plan something else for the original location while my players still get to feel like their choices mattered and I still get to push the plot along one of the textbook examples of the illusion of choice is when the player characters come to a fork in the road are they going to go east or west unfortunately for them it actually doesn't matter whether they choose to go east or west they're going to go through a swamp end up at a castle and end up fighting a vampire no matter whether whether or not they decide to go east or west the choice is absolutely meaningless to them but it's been presented as if oh something cool can happen for you now obviously the illusion of choice is is usually not this overt sometimes the illusion of choice might be hey player characters are you going to work with the Wizards the Rogues the thieves or the clerics doesn't matter which one you choose they're all going to give you the same mission to go to the castle in the swamp and fight a vampire like we said before this is like the Schrodinger's Box what the players don't know or haven't encountered yet doesn't technically exist in the world so your ability to move pieces around or adjust your narrative as needed is actually a vital tool that us as home brewing dungeon Masters need to use and sometimes when you're creating a world rather than detailing every single aspect of that world they decide to go to town a instead of town B well you can just take the notes that you had for the town that you had prepared and just use them for the town that they went to and this really applies to a lot of aspects of campaign design especially if you are feeling underprepared what do you have prepared and how you can you just grab that and meld that in to what the player characters are engaging with it's worth remembering that there is a difference between alroading your players and creating a linear campaign where there's only one narrative through line there's a part of me that feels that a better term than railroading would actually be stonewalling your player characters stonewalling your player characters mean that their player characters have to get across a lake and you've planned that the only way for them to get across that lake is by taking the boat offer to them by salty Pete there is no other boat there is no other way across they must get on salty Pete's boat and that way salty pea can betray them halfway across the of the ocean there is no choice they go to the docks ask who can we hire for a boat they get no choices it doesn't matter if they hire a salty pizza or pepper Paula either whoever they hire is going to betray them halfway through their Journey again doesn't matter what their choices are if you make it a difference that salty peat is going to betray them to the clerics for this reason and pepper Paul is going to betray them to the Rogues for another reason then you might have other permutations in there that might be interesting the players can actually interact with again it really depends on how much your players are willing to go with the flow ultimately if you Stone all your players and say you have to get on a boat you have to get the trade and players are like but what if we just wanted to walk around the shore and you prevent them from doing that entirely that's railroading that's not a good use of your powers as dungeon Masters to cheat but there are ways within that to make the illusion of choice a valuable thing in this aforementioned example if salty peat and pepper Paula have something out for the PCS it's that these characters are planning to attack the player characters on the lake that attack is the plan that the villains have but they're going to adjust their plan based on the route that the players are going to choose across that is not the illusion of choice that is a living breathing responsive world and so this is where the the the muddiness really comes in because sometimes it can be just be as simple as changing your mindset it's not that the player characters have to get attacked when they go across the lake it's that the villain is looking for an opportunity to attack them on their travels so sometimes you just have to as a DM to avoid this illusion of choice problem think in terms of the world the motivations of your villains and how they would lack act in a logical way rather than thinking like a film director who absolutely has to have their set piece battle occur in this specific way as we move on to our next point one thing that I have learned is a great and valuable lesson as a dungeon master is that sometimes your player characters talking at the table come up with way cooler ideas than you ever had and this is why our next cheat which is eavesdropping on your player characters can actually be greatly beneficial but again we use this to amplify the game not to hinder or damage the experience of our players just the other day at my table the group of characters found a secret door to a room full of treasure I just had it congratulations you found the Secret Door you get the treasure but they all stopped and for 15 minutes discussed well this room's got to be trapped how are we going to deal with it what are we going to do and they came up with elaborate plans on how to navigate the potential trap during those 10 to 15 minutes of their discussion I was sitting there being like well now I got to put a trap in here what kind of trap could it be and I wrote a poison trap into the room and they sent the steel defender in and the poison went off and the steel Defender was like I'm immune to poison and they were like ah we set off the Trap we they marked the tile with an X and they all avoided it really at the end of the day they just went into the room like I expected them to and there was no issue but they felt rewarded for that time that they spent worrying that there was a trap never give up on an opportunity to capitalize on your player's paranoia and deliver on their expectations I think in a lot of modern storytelling particularly in big media properties there's a little bit of an obsession with subverting the audience's expectations and sometimes that loses the fact that calling it predicting it is so rewarding for an audience knowing that you'd figured out the puzzle or the big reveal before it's revealed is insanely satisfying and you don't have to have a knee-jerk reaction when your player characters have predicted your plans either if your player characters are like I think that the advisor to the king is actually a dragon plotting to overthrow the realm you're like oh man I need to change everything it's not a dragon anymore it has to be a vampire and they're not plotting to overthrow the king neither the king don't change your plan the players were smart they want to know that they were right give them the satisfaction of being right let them be awesome but on the flip side when your players then start making plans of like oh now we know the advisor is a dragon so now we found out they're a red dragon so now we're going to get a bunch of potions of fire resistance we're going to make this really big plan of how we're going to bring ice magic to defeat the dragon and then you're listening to them being like okay that's a really good plan too bad for them it's a white dragon not a red dragon who was immune to all of their cold spells now don't do that that's don't don't do that if your players make a plan and then you 100 take advantage of your eavesdropping to completely counter their plan that is not going to be a good time for them I gotta say that my players planning at the table is one of my favorite experiences as a dungeon master it means that they're so engaged in the story and world that they are sitting there discussing how to go about and interact with that world well I just get to sit back and listen in these cases the last thing I want to do is kibosh all of their hard work into engaging with the world that I'm creating it's these moments that I like to reward and so if they do discover that it is a red dragon and they go out and prepare for combat against a red dragon that's great storytelling I've seen examples of play groups where the player characters that had a group chat where the dungeon master isn't involved or where the player characters have whispered to each other at the table so the dungeon master wouldn't hear their plans or you get this style of play where the player characters don't communicate their intent to the DM so that in the hopes that by the DM not knowing what they're planning it's going to increase their chances of that plan succeeding but this is where the trust between the players and the dungeon Masters really is so important because if your players trust you as a dungeon master to listen in on their plans knowing that you're not going to sort of metagame their plans to have the villain defeat them immediately they know that they can trust you to talk about those plans openly and you might be able to say well you know maybe they can ask you while they're planning well maybe you should talk to this NPC for some advice I like to do that in particular if my players are making plans so that if they're making a plan that I know the villain would be prepared for I can plant the seed of that idea to be prepared for the villain's own plans and then it's just much more interactive I also think that this is something that again you shouldn't use at every single chance you get out of the poison trap into the room because they were engaging with it so intensely that I thought that it would be a good payoff but sometimes it's equally fun for them to do all that walk into the room and be like no trap and sometimes that can be just as fun so there are occasions where you do want to subvert their expectations just because you have a vampire behind a door and they say I wonder if there's going to be a dragon behind this door doesn't mean you need to go oh well the Epic vampire battle is gone now it has to be a dragon no maybe it's still a vampire you don't always have to do what the players say but sometimes they'll just throw something your way that you go all that that would be actually a good idea and when you feel that inkling of what they're throwing out there is a good idea go with it one of the things that we discussed start of this episode was how the dungeon master is the master of the rules technically a dungeon master can't cheat because they're the ones that decide how the rules work a dungeon master can't met a game because the rules of D D give the dungeon master the authority to decide what is and is not meta gaming and dungeon Masters should feel empowered to bend or break the rules you have the power of the dungeon master to decide that a player character's abilities work differently from the way they're presented in the rulebook you can Homebrew monsters with unique abilities that players could never have you can change the rules whenever you want to you can make whatever house rules you like in general it is best to do this by being transparent with your player characters and telling your intent and reasoning behind making these changes but when you make a change to the rules doing it in the middle of the game is the worst time to do it that's when it really feels the most like you aren't just bending the rules but snapping them and I think the biggest case of where this feels like the dungeon master is cheating is when a player character on the spot pulls out the ability that breaks the encounter and then you as the dungeon master decide that doesn't work or decide to immediately counter it in the moment or make a ruling that it just won't do that in a way that really knocks the wins out of the sales of the player characters because their interpretation of the rules is fair I'm not talking like a really great example like a player character wanting to use Creator destroy water to destroy all the water in somebody's body but a more um but I would say a more common example of this would be if a player character wants to use polymorph to transform themselves into an animal and you rule it because they are now an animal with animal intelligence that they lose control of their character and they weren't expecting that to happen and I think that that's where the balance between your reasonable interpretation of the rules and the players getting to do cool things really slams head on into each other generally speaking the players want to feel awesome and their abilities spells and Feats that they choose are all there to make them feel awesome and when you just shut down those abilities without warning that's when it can be a detriment if you have a party that has several spellcasters involved and they go into a dungeon and as soon as the wizard uses passwall to bypass a large section of your dungeon and you decide in that moment there's actually an anti-magic field over this entire dungeon suddenly the players are surprised while there was no warning to this how do we deal with this and if you if you planned it beforehand there are ways that you can broadcast that have the spellcasters feel like maybe they're approaching some sort of magical phenomenon I usually like to broadcast these sort of elements in a way that tells the players that they're going to have to overcome a problem even if it's something magical like a anti-magic field but when you just drop it on the players all of a sudden suddenly shut down everything that they were trying to do the spells that they picked the tactics they were using then suddenly it feels like you've just pulled the rug out from under them and they need to reevaluate everything they've been working on it's a classic example of the rules of d d promising player characters hey here's a bunch of cool toys for you to play with and then they show up to play with those toys that immediately have them taken away from them I've heard horror stories of dungeon Masters deciding that Fighters don't get to have their extra attacks because that's too powerful or coming in and deciding that Wizards can't use their cantrips at will because they like the way that it was in Third Edition better or making these very arbitrary and sudden changes to the rules which if you sit down with your group in session zero and discuss them and everyone is okay with that is totally fine but then when you use your powers doesn't matter to say no it's going to be this way and I'm going to make these fundamental changes to the rules I without even giving the player characters the opportunity to voice their opinion on those things is a little unfair and I think that that's the important final point of this is that you really need to take into account the people that you're playing the game with if you're hearing us talking right now and you're saying well I like to do all of those things in my game I like to bend these rules I like to snap them where I see fit if you're playing at a table where everybody is having a good time with the interpretation of the rules the way that you are running them then you're playing d d just fine what is happening at your table does not need to be the same and probably will never be the same as what happens at everybody else's table the way that you interpret the game the group of players that you're having fun with is the most important aspect and so if you decide that certain spells like create and Destroy water can destroy the water in somebody's body and you've heard us say well you can't do that but everybody at your table loves that interpretation then go for it there's nothing stopping you and you're not doing anything wrong but you need to sit down at the beginning in your session zero and say hey for those of you spell casters if you're thinking of using that Creator to store water that's okay in my game that way you're not surprised when the player characters do it and an open discussion on how these rule interpretations how these bending of the rules or what Homebrew rules you might want to use are put in place early or well in advance so that everybody can agree to it and knows what to expect at your games there's often a saying that goes there is no wrong way to play D D and while I do agree with the sentiment and the positive message behind that there are many ways that dungeon Masters can make the experience of playing the DND absolutely miserable there's also a lot of ways the players can make the experience of playing d d absolutely miserable for everyone else at the table and when it comes to the dungeon master cheating around the rules it is it can be a very fine line it can be that fine line between making the game a million times better and breaking your players Hearts by betraying their trust and that's where your judgment has got to be front and center and you really gotta think it through this has been a look at six ways that dungeon Masters cheat in Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition tell us about some of your DM cheat codes in the comments below the videos that we make on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters Kelly and I would like to extend our deepest gratitude to each and every one of our patrons thank you for making this show possible if you enjoy the work that we do here on YouTube and want to make sure that we can continue doing it please follow the links in the description below to find out how you can become a patron of our work as well and if you want to watch us ride the fine line of whether or not we're cheating in our games of d d make sure to check out our live play in the worlds of drachenheim which airs Tuesday evenings on Twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we have plenty more guides for dming in DND 5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thanks so so much for watching we'll see you next time

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 134,850

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: rlLzr53_wv4

Length: 42min 24sec (2544 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 11 2022