GM Confession Thread

It's universal but expects both the GM and players to do part of the work like coming up with a few abilities/special moves a PC can do.

But it's a lot more cinematic than GURPS (which is more clunky, despite being designed to be versatile). I recommend giving the SRD a look over and deciding for yourself.

fate-srd.com/

Sometimes i just prefer worldbuilding instead of doing any work on the campaing or preparing the session. Because of that, most of the time combat encounters are half assed or just crammed with numbers instead of any real depth to them.

The best example of this was in the FFG Edge of the Empire campaing i'm DMing.
After weeks of preparing an entire world filled with dark side infused cyborgs, the session when they crash-landed on the planet was pretty good and the players feeled at constant risk thanks to the cyborgs hardiness and love for ambushes.
Then next session when they get to the place that they have to conquer to be able to escape the planet alive went horribly wrong.

For starters all five "bosses" were taken down in little to no time and the "Final boss" got axed in less than three turns thanks to being disarmed at the first turn.

Now the Campaing is about to end and i fear that the last encounter is just going to feel anticlimatic because of that.

I often forget the rules. I run SR 4th Edition (which some may know is abysmally edited in parts) and it often happens that in a session I think "Fuck, how are the rules for that again. Fuck it, I'll wing it like an eagle". Or after a session I notice that some rules I used were off, or sometimes I simply skip rolls and say that thisandthis happened. And I really don't know if my players really enjoy me doing this. It seems they do, but I don't know if they really mean it.

I can't roleplay.

I've been lying tomy palyers and telling them my system/game is done and that I needed more time because we decided to do it on roll20, and I need to get things up. I promised to have it done by the end of this month
I haven't done anything beyond design the bbeg and their sheets

I once DM a game with laryngitis and passed out several times on the table. lucky for me it was all role and no rolls that night.

I subtly dick over smug players who aren't as smart as they think they are, by poking holes in their 'foolproof' plans, sometimes going as far as changing my plans for a situation entirely.
I'll let a clever trick work in most cases, but it has to actually be clever.

>I often fudge roles to make things cooler/more dramatic (my own roles, not the party's)

>I hate killing PCs unless there is a good reason to do so, and my players were starting to suspect I "couldn't" kill a PC until recently when we started playing Legend of the Five Rings and now regularly come close to dying/fear dying

>I claim I plan out a lot of things, but outside of a very basic framework I almost never plan out anything and it is all improv which thankfully goes well

>I'm not a big fan of running combat encounters and would much prefer if my players did more "roleplay" intrigue fight stuff

>I hate Gnomes so I secretly work to make anyone who plays them have a bad time (has yet to come up much)

When I have to improvise characters because of player shenanigans, I unknowingly fall back on certain character archetypes. Gruff man, disinterested woman, cocky kid, etc.

I have a tendency to go into far too much detail, fucking up scene pacing. What should be a single test to explore a corridor becomes an exercise in tedium and a lesson in carpentry, masonry and sometimes trapmaking.

I can't do voices. Two of my players are great at it, but I just can't.

>will only play my shitty homebrew simpled6-clone
>will only GM because I hate being a player
>really bad at organizing, so most of my games fail/fade away after a while

players still love me

I sometimes make up roll results to balance a fight or to make the story more interesting.

I went the last 5 or 6 sessions without any form of notes, juste improvising. Although I have a general idea of what's gonna happen and what monsters they'll be fighting. I have never done this before, but it turned out pretty decent; although it's hard to keep track of everything by memory sometimes.

>>I try to avoid systems with Target Numbers, because I am actively very bad at assigning them. At worst I might actually come up with a TN after the roll.

I.

I do that. I actually don't come up with a TN, I just see how the player rolled and decide if it was high enough or not.

Can you share it by chance? I'm interested.

I force myself to spend countless hours preparing for my games.
This is made worse by the fact that around 50% of the time I wait until the weekly session is only a day or so away.
In the worst cases I'm preparing almost the entire session the day of the game on almost no sleep and straining myself to come up with stuff.

I'm obsessed with making combat work well in games but have no idea how good I am at it.
I make encounters against stock mooks and monsters easy to slightly difficult and usually only make boss fights really hard.

I get really depressed about my tabletop situation. I host a lot but never get to play.
Almost every game I've joined has flopped due to stupid stuff or drama. I can't rely on anyone to run anything and I'm still looking.
I'm open about wanting to play to my friends but none of them are competent enough or free enough to do anything.

I follow this sort of code of conduct where I never spoil my game plays to the players.
I never show any weakness and always have my shit together and never give even a hint of stress or strain.
I don't complain about how hard preparing the sessions can be.

I get mad when I hear people talk about how they put zero work into preparing their games and talk about how amazing they are.

I don't treat all of my player characters equally. I tend to center the game around one in particular, usually whoever stepped up as party leader.
Nobody has ever noticed/complained and frankly nobody else seems to want to take lead.

>I usually don't actually assign a target number to an action, I just say the PC passed if they rolled high enough for it to make sense that they do.
>I'm terrible at preparing stuff. Often I just make shit up as I go along. I usually run text games online though, so sometimes that means my updates are slow as I try to figure out what the fuck I'm doing or what this NPC I just pulled out my ass's name is.
>I'll look forward to running the next session sometimes, but then in game day I think about how I have to run now and I just don't want to. Sometimes I've made excuses just to cancel as a result, and I feel like the biggest shithead when I do.
>Often times I end up running a game hoping to make good friends among the players and get them interested in the system enough to run their own game(s) so I can play. It's never worked. Dammit, I just want to play L5R ;_;
>I have trouble dealing with problem players sometimes. I've never had problem players that did anything more than frustrate some other players or make them uncomfortable, nothing that's ever been really kick-out worthy, but since I normally run online I realize I have all the power in the world to just kick them out and find a better player. I just can't do it though, and at least one game has fallen apart partly because of that, as one player just couldn't stand another's autism and left.
>I sometimes get bogged down when it comes to pacing. Something that I thought would take 2 sessions might take 5 if I get too in-depth with stuff.
>I lose my confidence in GMing easily. If someone tells me I did something really well, then I get nice and confident for a while, but when someone tells me I fucked up something, I lose confidence quickly.
>Sometimes I'll get a good idea for a campaign, throw something together in an afternoon, find players, then on game day realize I didn't think things through as well as I should have, then have to make an excuse to cancel the game.

Basically 99% of my inspiration is me stringing together the themes and ideas of various rock songs. In fact, I come up with basically all my ideas, inspired by music I'm listening to.

I'm pretty sure I had a longtime player take advantage of this at one point, by linking me a new band, shortly before a session

I have never actually run a game. I just imagine doing so and bitch on Veeky Forums.

I can never decide on a system, or stop tweaking. I´ve been wanting to run a one on one campaign with my gf for months and I still haven´t decided a fucking system.

Please help

D&D 3.5.

>provides no details on what sort of campaign

is good enough for you.

None of my npcs have stats, just "what feels right". If a player notices this I just say they had a hidden modifier.

I really want to play 4e or a high fantasy game.

All of my combats are pinched from Wow dungeons and raids.

I get secretly frustrated when players breeze through a combat, and combat is either wipe or be wiped. And I don't like that since big planned battles end in one turn one way or another.

When I first volunteered to GM for my friends, I was obsessed with creating random tables for fucking everything. That was very close to Dorf Fortress levels of autism.
Nowadays I'm just really glad I worked Gygax' book of names into a randomizer program, because I can't make names up on the fly at all.

I'm living in the shadow of an old Veeky Forums project that is now years old and I've never improved past. It ended poorly and now I'm stuck in this mental rut and it's actually affected me as a person to the point where I flat out distrust new people because new people getting responsibility killed it. Same with silly players and plots.

I hate myself for not getting past it but it feels like a job left unfinished and I never will finish it. I'm working on my new project but I can't get a team together for it which is sort of when I can work quickly. It feels like a slow slog and at times I worry that it'll never get done and I just want it to be good to give something proper back to Veeky Forums for helping me out during the worst time of my life.

You are a good GM, user. Nothing bad about all that.

To be honest I didn´t expect replies.

She´s new to this stuff. I´ve made a one shots with her and her 7yo nephew, but that´s it.

When I asked her what kind of campaign she´d like, she mentioned Skyrim and Lord of the Rings. She´s into thief/archer characters and causing a fuckload of trouble wherever she goes, so I was thinking about dropping her into Tamriel, probably starting in Skyrim but soon giving her the option to head somewhere else.

Right now I´m doubting between FATE Core and The Elder Scrolls d6 with some modifications because fuck that shitty mechanic where your weapon tier changes the damage (normal, orcish, elvish, daedra...).

She´ll stick to whatever mechanics I bring, but she doesn´t like to think about them or take decissions in that sense. And I can´t decide between giving her more limiting mechanics to have it more "adventuring, rpg, game", I bring you a situation and you solve it, or to get her FATE and have her help in storytelling. She tends to abuse the system when she cans, which is what scares me off FATE.

I want to hang up the GM hat for a while because I'm starting to get burned out, but two of my players are really needy and complain I don't spend enough time with them as it is, and one of those two has worked up a massively elaborate backstory that she expects me to use a ton of, even though only 5% of what she came up with will end up being plot relevant.

I game with my girlfriend, but she's actually not one of the two mentioned above

I only run a little-known system called paragon, mostly because I know it pretty much inside out because I helped to beta test it. I'd like to run stuff like GURPS or 3.PF or WoD or 40Krp, but none of my players want to, and I don't know the systems well enough.

I love to run games but I can't prep for the life of me. All my material is taken from pre-written adventures.
Whenever players take an unexpected turn I try to get them to stall as much as possible while I hurriedly throw something together. I also never write a story or even a story outline so I never know what to prep other than what's immediately going to happen.
I can't bring myself to kill a player character, or even bring them down to 0 HP. I'm scared of people resenting me if I do.
I don't know if I like OSR or just the idea of OSR games. I've only ever run a game like it once and it was great fun, but mostly because of the huge amount of roleplay during the dungeon crawl.
I'm a gigantic furry and at least one race in the book is gonna be refluffed (heh) as something anthropomorphic. Usually the halfling if it's D&D or D&D-like.

I do this. It's almost as if rolling high for certain players is enough of a thing to celebrate by letting them succeed or something.

>I'll look forward to running the next session sometimes, but then in game day I think about how I have to run now and I just don't want to. Sometimes I've made excuses just to cancel as a result, and I feel like the biggest shithead when I do.

Are you me quads-kun?

Are you.... me?

No I'm not you fampai. But you sound like a really cool yet depressed and insecure dude.

>Can't worldbuild for shit, so I just use pre-existing settings and maybe put one new thing into them to freshen things up

>Can't story for shit, so I just let the players bungle around with very vague quests and pray that the game dies before I have to actually conclude anything

>Dread running every day, climaxes on game day when it's actually time, sometimes things work out. Sometimes they don't and my players are quick to tell me after the session.

>Don't plan anything except the immediate future/next session, and even then it's just basic thoughts on what should happen based on what the players've done

>The main reason all of my games start is because I get an idea for (what I think of as) a really cool scene, but don't know how to get there at all, or what would happen afterwards. This means I'll have one really good session out of every ten, if I have a lot of ideas for the game.

>Get bogged down in the minutia whenever I do try to worldbuild or make a story, find it impossible to make something remotely acceptable so I scrap the project after getting player hopes up, sometimes after running a session or two

>Not having to make sure the PCs survive most stuff is actually a giant relief, because death is a natural conclusion to the game that I don't have to think and fret about.

>All of my characters are just anime tropes

I'm not sure why I GM, honestly. It's nerve-wracking and I'm not cut out for any of the creative aspects. I'm decent at making fun and interesting combat, at least.

I barely take any notes, i make my pc's recount briefly what happened the last session under the guise that it's for them. They sometimes catch me, but never call me out.

I also run d20 modern.

I put my game on endless hiatus.
I just don't know what to make up or what I'm going to do with the story.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

One time I told a player that his character couldn't do something.

I manipulate my players by tugging on their heartstrings and pushing their personal buttons to make them follow the story lines I want, chase down the baddies I want, go where I tell them to go. I even manipulated a player into turning traitor on the party once without the player planning it beforehand (well... half traitor. He would have kept on being an evil character working with the party for his own benefit and because he liked them, but they turned on him when they found out he'd basically sold his soul for power).

It's not rail roading. They could always choose to do something else... but I know my group well enough that they won't. So it basically is rail roading. I sometimes feel bad about it, but at least I'm giving them an engaging story?

Perhaps the same could be said of all games

I'm terrible at everything I do and haven't even been able to have fun in this hobby since I was around 20 years old, i've had 4 years of nothing but disappointment.

I lose interest after about a month or two and inevitable mothball my own games. Oh and I like fight heavy games where I lovingly construct challenging set piece battles.. but every single game system I've used in the last 15 years is complete garbage for designing encounters EXCEPT for D&D 4e.

Oh and people who whine when I don't use their shit system by the book. Nigger you wanted me to run Exalted, WoD, whatever, shut the fuck up when I actually build around the group using real math and probabilities.

Kristinn?

But seriously:
> I'm a storyteller before I'm a DM. I make a story then drop the players in it. Railroading but they enjoy it in oneshots. That or...
> I don't preapare a campaign at all. I just make the world, get a concept, and do it. Which two out of three times turns out good. The latest campaign? Couldn't even bring myself to finish it
> I make fights too easy or too hard. Either everyone dies, or there's simply no challenge
> My voices are horrible but players seem to enjoy them
> I had a shit tone of imagination. Now I just don't. No new story comes to mind, or they just feel like ripoffs to me
> I hate being a player
> I only play 5e because a) None of my regular players (I play online) actually know how to play anything else, b) The time I can play is so weird that no one can play those games, or c) No one owns them
> Not really a GM sin, but in other people's games I tend to quote RAW (and I'm a fricking orator so they usually just resort to"My world, my rules"), but in my games I just handwave them
> I'm no good with descriing stuff. Most towns look the same, most villain lairs do too, and people have no life to them except if they're really important to my plot, in which case I probably spent three days thinking of ways to describe them in too much detail
> I get angry easily. But I have that calm, long term, seething anger
> I never stat out enemies. Ever. Just randomly put them together
> I hate SciFi and Horror RPG's though I love movies and books
> Hate d100 systems, FATE, and GURPS
> I homebrew too much. At this point I think I have something like 250+ pages for 5e alone
> I suck with names and they usually just end up stupid or ripped of. My players loved Azog the Annoying (goblin), but I still regret the name
> I RP out of session and allow it to effect in-session stuff. Sometimes it's good. Most of the time it's bad
> All my battles feel flat with no terrain or weather effects

My players all tell me I am great at setting up a story, roleplaying vivid engaging NPCs that they actually like to roleplay with and genuinely care about, and in general have a good time when dice come out and the killing starts.

But I never follow through to the end because expectations get too high and I choke every time. Yet I keep running new games because I like making my players happy and its fun.. until the stress makes me panic and give up.

just set a session limit for each campaign.

>I make up a DC and then fudge it a few based on whether I want the PCs to succeed or not when I hear the dice roll (always in their favor)
>I don't care about combats and have max 2 per session
>I'll end those combats early if the players are obviously going to win
>I only care about the players interacting with the world but freeze up when I have to explain anything or roleplay as a character
>I like making cool magical items, make them as underpowered as I can, and players still find ways to combine them to do overpowered bullshit
>I don't know how to say no when a player argues what they want to do should work
>I forget to include half the mechanics for fights that I come up with

>Story>crunch
>I'll play favorites with PCs who do interesting things or amuse me
>Risks therefor are sometimes rewarded disproportionately
>There can be too much of yes, but, and I've learned that the hard way
>I will blatantly steal things I find interesting or think they'd be fun on tabletop
>I will blue ball PCs to avoid monty hauling
>I don't Indian give with accidental game breaking rewards though

My group has a "one and done" rule for game-breaking bullshit. You can use it to cheese an encounter once, and then you don't combine those items/abilities again

I never take notes about anything.

At best, I write brief outlines of what I plan on having happen during the session, but I never actually take notes to remember NPCs I've introduced, plot threads I've started, or what loot the players get/spend, etc.

It's a horrible habit, but I just don't do it.

Also, I fudge a TON of things behind the screen so that fights are much tougher than they should be just so that maybe, one day, players will show some kind of excitement when they beat a boss.

I typically try to find a way out like that if it comes to that, and I do give one use items like that from time to time before 'boss' encounters if the party prepares appropriately.

I guess I'm talking more about when my players take what I thought was a rather mundane item and finding a really, really creative use for it that never crossed my mind.

> Every game day I have to actively talk myself into not canceling.
> If my players misunderstand a rule in their favor, I almost never correct them. If they catch it later, I pretend I thought they were right.
> I habitually cheat for my players to succeed
> I use an autistic number of random tables for things. Not because I need them, but because "random results" is preferable to "I have to take responsibility for them."
> I hate games with crunch, because I can't be arsed to learn it to run it. If I'm being honest, we almost don't need a system. I barely use the rules anyway. We could have an almost identical experience by just chatting and then me calling for a die roll once in a while. High = you get what you want. RP continues.
> I am an emo drama whore.

>I am really good at improving interesting combat encounters, but cannot for the life of me improv anything else.

>I have a hard time letting my players make mistakes, often asking them to think about the decision they are about to make

>I would rather play, but GMing is my only way to experience my favorite setting with my friends

>I fudge rolls for rule of cool, and my players know it. While no one has called me out on it, I think one of my players would rather I didn't

>My games often lack consequence because of the former problems, in a setting that should be rife with consequence

>I fucking love creating and telling stories, but I don't have the time to write my own modules

Mah brethen!!!

You are doing nothing wrong. Keep doing Gods work user.

>improving
You might want to use "improvising" instead of that. Abbreviations don't really work when you save a measly two letters and produce an entirely different, preexisting word.

I'll throw a couple in

>I always bring a world and a *very* vague idea of an adventure, have a before-session chat where the players come up with their character concepts and stories, and then I try to form a plot around them
>What ends up actually happening is I latch on to one of them a lot more than the others, and I accidentally create a Main Character situation before I realize it

>I much prefer to GM to playing
>But only because I get bored of playing one character very quickly
>I also tend to try to control situations if I can at all

I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT I'M DOOOOOOING, I JUST GIVE THE PLAYERS A SMUG LOOK EVERY NOW AND THEN AND THEY ASSUME THAT I'M BEING CLEVER. I'M PRETTY SURE AT LEAST ONE OF THEM SEES RIGHT THROUGH ME, BUT HE DOESN'T WANT TO SAY IT OUT LOUD OUT OF CAUTION.

No matter what system the players have created characters for, we're actually playing Fate and I just disguise it behind plausible numbers.

Veeky Forums I've been roleplaying(3.5e,2e,5e) for like five years and have two separate groups that run games regularly but never more than a couple months long before they lose interest. Got fed up with it and decided to run my own game with a few members of both groups. Ran the game for two years, lots of great characters, memorable story points, everyone in group always buzzing about it and even had a definite ending/resolution after party beat the overarching BBEG(Eldrich god who influenced their entire journey to orchistrate his will). Only real problem we had was sometimes people were late to the game.

Yet anyone who wasn't a player never wants to hear stories from my game. People share tons of stories about their TTRPG sessions, but if I talk about mine they change the subject. Are the jealous? Do they think my game was sub-par? Am I delusional? I just wanted to know what you fa/tg/uys thought.

I can't tell if you're confessing or bragging. But it doesn't really matter either way, because that sounds awesome. I wish my GM would do that instead of just having NPC's push us in certain directions when he thinks we're too off-track.

Everybody wants to talk about their tabletop experiences, but very few people want to listen. It's just an unfortunate ate fact of life, and it's the primary reason that 90% of posts in any story threads here don't get replies.

>I can only GM

I am incapable of playing a game anymore.

At the risk of sounding too humble I am the only creative and witty one in my group of friends. When I DM they're fighting gods and making history in a rich lore I created and I never use modules; which they love. When I'm a player we're just in a dungeon someone found online fighting Bestiary 1 monsters for no reason other than 'adventure and loot'

So now I have become the sole DM of my entire social circle and no one even tries to make their own campaigns anymore.

Is this a shortcoming or triumph?

You're the party member your group needs, not the one they deserve and they are lucky for having you

Ok let's make it a drinking game. Drink for every sin that weighs on your soul.

I always provide player agency.

I always make sure I understand the rules and try to use them as written before resorting to houserules.

I never railroad, and never plan for what is going to happen before it does. My NPCs make plans, but they're not omniscient.

I never punish bad behavior in game, and talk it out like a reasonable adult directly or after the game.

I never cheat, which would take away agency, suspension of disbelief and the trust my players have in me (they trust me to not make it easy for them, else what did they accomplish, really?)

>Drink for every sin that weighs on your soul.
But I don't want to die.

>Let myself get walked on by my best friend when he tells me he's going to defy the limits on character creation I've explicitly laid out (Playing certain races mostly)
>If players don't ask me about running the game I lose interest extraordinarily quickly
>Extremely low confidence in my GMing despite compliments to the contrary
>Can plan for short campaigns no problem but all of my games are intended to be long, so the plot dies quickly after the first few sessions
>Somehow manage to plan too little and my ability to improv varies wildly

One time I had surgery on my nose 2 days before I had to dm, I thought I was good to go on the day. Oh boy

>nearly the end of a campaign
>they come to talk with a slumbering demon
>demon gets angry
>I act this out and yell
>my nose explodes
>a torrent of red floods out
>lose like a pint
>I pass out
>wake up in the hospital
>players text me
>"that was pretty fucking awesome, user"

90% of the time, I just wing it. I just think of a basic plot from a game and kind of play with it.

I'm extremely lazy as a DM, while I don't cancel sessions because it would be letting my players down, it takes me a while to get in the mood to do a session.

The only actual work I do is map making and some basic world building on where shit is and even map making I leave to generators half the time and then edit it myself to make it look nice.

> I absolutely cant world build. The best thing about delta green is that I can just use google maps and real people's names to make things more realistic.

> I hate trying to be original, everything I think of feels forced and clichéd. Everytime i try and greak established cannon for a creature design or an item description/ effect I feel like im breaking a fucking law.

> I've been told im great at description, atleast in terms of acting of characters emotional states but for monsters, especially eldritch, some of them i just cant make sound scary at all; see moonbeasts

Are you still here? Here's the system.

I favor my best friends when I GM.

>I spend months making settings for games that last weeks.

I would reuse my settings if I didn't always end up scrapping my notes at the end of every game. I've lost dozens of completely original worlds and binders worth of details.

>I have no idea where the story is going until at least after the first session.

This has led my players to believe I am some super genius who has had all the pieces laid in advance when really I'm just retroactively making a story out of whatever random bullshit happened in the first session.

>I don't do encounters.

There are some important battles that I will plan out, like the climax of an adventure or something, but every other time I just make a cheat sheet of every level-appropriate stat block in the book and throw them at the PCs when I feel it is appropriate. At least half of my sessions have little to no combat at all.

>I pretty much only run one type of game.

No matter what the flavor of the setting is, the game will pretty much follow the pattern of a group of low-powered guys traveling around the continent/world/galaxy/whatever, stumbling upon some interesting location, solving the local problem which usually involves fighting against some force much stronger than the party, and then moving on to go do it again somewhere else. There might eventually be an overarching story, but there's no guarantee of that.