Top 5 Ultimate GM Mistakes - Game Master Tips

Oh welcome to this episode of how to be a great GM well in today's episode we're looking at five unforgivable mistakes that almost every new GM will make and which most experienced gems will fall into from time to time and which I can absolutely guarantee you I have done as recently as last Sunday so these are common common mistakes that we all make and they're not the usual things that you might find on the internet these are things that I have looked at over time and built a list around so there are some interesting things in this list if I look ahead at what we'll be talking about we'll be talking about something that has to do with metagaming and gods we'll be talking about putting characters on a pedestal putting players on a pedestal and the dangers that go in with that there's looking at the difference between adapting and inventing and why inventing is so bad as well as several other things that form the bulk of this list so it's an interesting discussion and I really would encourage you to leave your comments below and to tell me whether you think that there should be more added I certainly think there should be personally but these are for me the pinnacle of failures that GM's make repeatedly and then don't understand why their players become so upset when these actually come to fruition so without further ado let's get going metagaming outcomes now metagaming is a touchy subject to begin with in as players and as teams we'd like to avoid completely because well then we're not playing in situated gaming for a GM can become a major problem when that metagaming starts to translate into how your villains and how your situations and scenarios have been plotted out now what do I mean by this well if you have a party of adventurers and you're sitting there late one evening trying to work out what the next adventure is going to be for these P all the meta gaming component that starts to creep in is you start to analyze their powers their abilities and you start to design things that will specifically work against those powers and abilities that's metagaming and you could argue oh but it's to make it more challenging for my players well yes but at the same time it's also punishing your players for choosing their specific roles if they've been playing something else the same adventure would have had different traps different monsters different encounters altogether why is this bad well it's not bad if you handle it correctly on the other hand if you plan for every encounter ever adventure to find the weak point within the characters build within the players play styles if you're constantly attacking those weak spots then what you're doing is you're just manipulating the game to make it difficult for your players rather than to make it challenging for their characters that's the kind of meta game I'm talking about let me try a different example let's say you have an encounter planned with a bad guy who is aware that the playing party is quite different and well maintained you now decide to equip him with a magical item that removes all magic from the area because three out of the four party members of magic users and if you cancel out their magic they're gonna have to think of a more creative way of defeating the enemy but you then realize that there's also a fighter involved in the party so he's got lots of damage dealing attacks so this villain of yours who's now got anti magic now decides that he's going to have a series of traps that he's laid out about him so that when the party arrives the warrior who's not very good at dexterity saving throws will fall into one of these traps and will be rendered useless leaving the three magic users who cannot use their powers to face the wrath of this now all-powerful villain of yours what's now happened is that the villain has got abilities of godness they can anticipate exactly what the part is going to be doing and work their plan exactly to manipulate it that might be okay for your supervillain who's had henchmen spying on the party and trying to work out their weaknesses for several events and the players are aware that the villain knows their weaknesses on the other hand if every one of your villains starts to anticipate the abilities of the characters that are outside really of the realm of what they would know if they were actual real beings that starts to become very tedious and very boring the players know that no matter how they plan no matter how they anticipate your villains will always have the ability to metagame solutions now this metagaming continues when your villains are trying to escape again you know the powers of your players characters and your villain does not what at least your villain shouldn't if you are allowing your villain to make and take advantage of your players character's abilities your meta gaming your villain out of the box and you might as well just say well he escapes and there's nothing you can do about it the frustrating part comes in when the players have absolutely no way of anticipating that he would have a counter for every single one of their powers it becomes very very difficult and players well lose interest if your villains if your monsters if your encounters can anticipate everything even though they shouldn't normally have been able to anticipate anything or any a few things well what's the point in playing you're constantly working against them so meta gaming and giving your minions the ability to anticipate what the party is going to do even though they shouldn't is a very bad sign and it's not a sign of a good GM who creates challenging encounters for the players it's a sign of a weak GM who's just using the player's limitations against them try and avoid it try and cut it out altogether have your villain plan their traps and then watch with glee as the players manage to work their way through them with relative ease or with some difficulty but not that you've designed it specifically to thwart the players that's that's that's not good too much background information too much history too much prologue too much exposition this is something that happens when Dungeon Master's have drawn out their entire world with maps for every single area and can tell me the entire stat block for an NPC in an obscure little tavern on a little dusty road in the middle of a content that no one is likely to visit if you've done world building and you've relished it you've enjoyed it it is part of our perk of being the game master we come up with these fantastic worlds but if you've done all of that and you've worked out 5000 years worth of history where you've got this battle Nat King in this Queen and that wizard who's done this or that starship who blew up that planet causing the social economic collapse of this Empire all of that kind of stuff you've got all of that worked out now when your players are asking a piece of history you give them a three-hour lecture on it that's too much information that's really too much information no one's going to be interested in it my world of Brac seer that I play in then if you haven't heard about it head on over to bacon RPG where there's a brief tour of it that brief tour it takes I think about 12 minutes to move between the five great continents five one two three four five five great continents it's a lot of information to take in and unless you're giving this to your players way before hands they can start reading up on it and preparing themselves for that space it's too much there's so much that you want to give them and yet there's so much that they don't need so what you've got to do instead of just every time they ask a random peasant on the road or every time they come across a fisherman's wife's postman delivery boys assistant and they ask them so what's going on in this area instead of giving them this hour-long lecture on the local history what you want to do is you want to tease your history you want your players to want to know more so in your descriptions you can say oh as you're walking on the road you see a small hill on the left on top of that hill there are some eight and standing stones they look cold and bleak in this miserable weather that's it and if they say oh what are those standing stones you might say all right well give me a history check and they're all their history and they get a phenomenally good result do you then give them the hour and a half long lecture as to the Druids who dragged their stones there 400 years ago and then defended it against the dragon and then and there no you don't you simply say you recall from that one manuscript that you read that those standing stones were erected by druids who are desperately trying to protect the world from an evil dragon and the stones were rumored to have the ability to teleport you around the planet that's it no more information you give them just enough they go I want to know more about that I think that could be useful then they go to the standing stones then they get teleported because they work out the little clues as to how to activate it only they get teleported 500 years into the past when the Druids are busy building the standing stones and they have to help them do it and defend it against the dragon that they were trying to defeat in the first place that way your characters get to experience the history they get to experience that piece of information in a far more entertaining way than just listening to you talk for an hour and a half it's a much better way of doing it tease and taunt and deliver when requested don't record you Tait vomit or otherwise throw up all of your history all over your poor players because that's exactly how they're going to react to it an overload of information that has nothing to do with them whatsoever this next one I picked up from a GM whom I very much admire and upon thinking about it I went you know what that actually makes a lot of sense this one has very little to do with how you run the game it's more to do with how big your table sizes now I've done videos on how to run campaigns for six or more players I've done videos on how to run a campaign with a single player and at the present moment in time I'm running a game for a what for a single player running a game for three players and running a game for six players now you need to adjust your style accordingly now the way that I what I mean by this is a a small group obviously requires a lot more attention in terms of story in detail about each and every single one of those characters involved in the story you have the capacity to really explore their backgrounds a larger party requires less plot hooks less interesting political intrigue and more opportunity for the six of them to get together and have a lot of fun so you have to adjust your story but and this is something that really stuck with me when I heard this advice you also need to figure out what your personal playing group size is that's horrid English so you have to figure out how many players works for you now this is something that we forget is that we're supposed to be having fun whilst running these games we GM because we find it enjoyable most of the time some of you might have been forced to do it because well no one else is willing to but you need to find the fun somewhere and I think that part of that comes from working out your ideal group size being able to juggle just the right amount of people in a group to make sure that it works properly now for me my ideal group size is somewhere between three and four people so if I could have three and a half people at my table I would be ecstatic three or four players that is for me the golden number it allows me to juggle players characters against each other it allows the player characters to work with one another it gives them the ability to cover all of the bases if they want to do that and at the same time it gives them the ability to specialize and for the missions to be more focused around that particular specialization that they've gone on if you give me two players that's not bad but I'll probably start to introduce NPCs and that requires a little bit of admin with one player I'm introducing a lot of NPCs and that pool player is going to have to take on some responsibilities on their own it's simply too much for one person to or for me anyway to keep track of but maybe you're the kind of DM who actually works with smaller groups or who works better with bigger groups maybe you're a lot grander in terms of your scale maybe your narratives are not complicated little nuanced things where the balance hangs on a single word maybe it's more about grand spectacle where lots of players and by virtue of the fact lots of characters are running around causing vast amounts vast amounts of mayhem so finding your ideal table size is in my opinion a very good way to get your game to be improved playing to the wrong size table simply because well there's seven people who wants to play and well who are you to say no well you are the one who's running this game and who has all of the pressure of running it and making it entertaining for everybody else so that means you get to determine just how big your player size is so a common mistake that I see GM's making is just trying to fill up that table so they can say oh I've got seven players I've got six players I've got five players maybe you need to stand back and say well actually I work best with two players or I work best with six players and then try and get to that golden mean so that you can actually enjoy yourself so knowing your player table size is very important now before we get on to the last point which is adapt or invent and why inventors bad the point that I want to now talk about is putting players on a pedestal now we've all done this from time to time or maybe it's just me who put certain players on pedestals but I generally find that players at my table who are much more involved in the game who put in that little bit of extra work who spend that extra time developing their character and who send me messages going I think my character wants to start exploring this aspect or have got really complicated backstories and they want to work with the game they work with the table in other words great players I tend to focus on them more than on players that I don't particularly like or players who don't play in the same style that I like or players who don't invest as much time as I think one should invest in their character I tend to focus on the ones that I like rather than the ones that are okay now what happens is is if you don't rein that in if you don't control it the ones that you don't like I'm not going to get better they're going to feel sidelined and could possibly leave the ones that are good could start to develop this idea that there's a plot armor that keeps them safe the DM doesn't want your character to die because the DM is having so much fun playing with that character and manipulating the stories around that character that the character has become integral to the plot and if the character were to die the entire plot would fall to pieces so by having favorites by forming a that that player really does it very very well all the time and I'm gonna I'm gonna make sure that player has a fun time you are disenfranchising everybody else all of the other players are going well his carriage is important but mine is really just a secondary sidekick some people might like to play sidekicks but there's a lot of people who'd far rather have a balanced system where you are giving equal attention to all of them rather than just an individual so don't put players on pedestals rather focus on the characters and see which characters naturally come to the surface and try and spread the love if you like in terms of each character getting their own fair turn their own fair amount of stories it's just the way it should work and it's a mistake that we all make i myself included so try and avoid it if you can finally adapt versus invent and why is invent bad well what's the difference between adapting and inventing adapting and inventing here specifically refers to how much preparation time you put into your adventure now we've already handled that you don't want to overload your adventure with so much law and so much history that people literally get bored to death whilst you are working through your 400 chapters of history of the inn that they are now trying to book a single rumen for the night so we've already handled that by adapt versus invent I'm talking about GM's who go well if my players are going to be so crazy so chaotic that I can't anticipate what they're doing you've just told me I can't metagame my encounters just walk through everything so there's no point in planning I'm just going to busk everything I'm going to make it up as we go along I've been there I've done that and I've said that and I have done it for years saying oh my plateau now we can play straight away we don't know I don't need a plan I don't need a plan what do I need a plan for I'll just run it as it plays inventing making it up as you go along flying by the seat of your pants sometimes works and if you've been a GM for a very long time you can get by but you will always be seen for what you are which is someone who's making it up on the fly why is that a bad thing well players who are experienced and who are observing the GM fluster their way through the entire situation they might they might enjoy your ability to adapt to invent as you go along but there's also a certain amount of well you didn't put any effort into this sound open-end effort into this either there's also in some players the well if you're making this up I'm going to make it even more difficult for you to do that I'm going to do stuff that I know that you haven't even thought about I'm going to ask you all kinds of complicated questions and see if I can derail your train of thought that's one option the other option of course is that you come across as disingenuous and while the player is not going to take down notes because while you're making that up as you go along so why should they bother as well so inventing going by the seat of your pants is a mistake and it shows and it doesn't matter how much experience you have and I've done it recently players said oh you were making that all up that whole adventure weren't you I mean what do you mean no I I wasn't making up anything it was all planned it was all planned no it wasn't it was being made up on the fly in truth it was simply because I hadn't given it enough time and that is a failing on my behalf adapting however is a much better approach and it makes use of that mental ability that you are trying to cherish in terms of inventing everything it still makes absolute use of that whilst giving it platform from which to work I've said this before on the channel but not in this specific context plot out your adventure in big bold points plot out your campaign in big bold points you don't have to write down everything specifically we've spoken about going too much into your planning session when your players then deviate from it instead of having to invent a whole new adventure you adapt the one that you had planned so the NPC names that you've jotted down or the environmental factors that you had planned on throwing at them the one or two traps that you'd worked out because they're pretty cool to play through those can now fit in to where the players are going rather than just throwing it out the window and starting from scratch that's something that's very important to recognize and it to take into consideration is that if you can adapt something it allows you to be creative it allows you to change things on the fly but at the same time it grounds it in a certain amount of planning so there's a definite end there's a definite middle and there's a definite beginning and it definitely happens in the reverse order so that it makes sense anyway those are my 5 gm sins that I see being fallen into committed 5 gm pitfalls 5 gm mistakes 5 things that we do on a regular basis which can be avoided with a little bit of thought a little bit of planning and a little bit of reservation a little bit of self constraint yes we want to tell our magnum opus but we're not writing a book we're telling a story with a bunch of other people who should be involved in that that's something that I have really started to learn in only the last few weeks is the importance of finding a balance between your story and the players characters stories and the players stories and that's something that's quite remarkable let me know your thoughts on what are 5 mistakes that GM's make that are not necessarily related specifically to the game but more to how we tell our stories and unpack events for our players and how you would solve the mistakes that you our listing of course as well so that we can all learn and adapt from there until next time I wish you and yours the very happiest [Music]

Channel: How to be a Great GM

Views: 371,289

Keywords: dnd 5e, 5 gm mistakes, gm mistakes, dnd mistakes, rpg mistakes, dungeon masters guide, Dungeon master tips, top 5, dm mistakes, Dungeon building, Dnd gm tips, dnd, d&d, dnd gm tips, game master tips, Great game master, Tabletop Roleplaying, GM, How to GM, How to be a great game master, Game Master, Great Game Mastering, How to, How to be a great dungeon master, DM Tips, Dungeon Master, RPG, Game Master Tips, Dungeon Master Tips, GMing Tips, DMing Tips, D&d mistakes

Id: cPAmUibg_48

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 18 2018