DM'ing styles

DM stood up as soon as he said his opening scene description and said 'oh I've got to make dinner'. And proceded to explain everything from the kitchen in the next room as he bashed around with pots and pans and cooked dinner for the players.

Sure it was a nice gesture, but we'd all brought snacks so we could just stay focused on the game, and all entire game had to be done by yelling things to him, where he'd 'umm' and 'uhh' and 'just wait a minute' while he clattered away.
He did the same thing after dinner when he was washing up.
>My face the whole time.

> "I cast Color Spray!"
> *Newbie player rolls die*
> GM: "Lol u rolled a natural 1 so it affects your allies instead :P XD"

I wasn't there for this, but that story gave me an aneurysm. I skipped because I was sick, but I stayed away because of this.

...

>"I cast web over the pit of black pudding."
>"Okay you do that, but black pudding is amorphous and can move through the web."

Crits are for attack rolls only

AhIseeyouarenotamanofculture.JPG

>GM promises a high powered game where you get to play as mid-high level adventure fodder monstrous creatures
>Has not actually bothered to even read half of the rules he's using, which are from splats that are between 1 and 3 editions behind the game version in use, let alone convert them
>Chunks of these rules are instead considered on a case by case basis when players want to integrate/use them
>Doesn't understand why players are frustrated when the mechanical performance of the characters doesn't match up at all to what he advertised, because he sticks to those rules fairly closely
>Gets frustrated and puts words in player's mouths when they treat his supposed sandbox like a sandbox and continue to explore. "You've already got a perfectly good lair, what are you doing, it's not what [your character] would do!"
>Ultimately gives up with a long talk about how our expectations what he wanted to run didn't match up

Bonus points!

>GM's girlfriend is in the game
>She might as well have a pair of tin snips for all of the corners that are cut for her and ONLY her

As a DM i wouldn't DM a game with my girlfriend in it. Conflict of interests and all. Play it yes, run it? Fuck no.

In my old group we had a running gag where a critical miss in archery resulted in a harpy dropping down from the sky. Every time. Including indoors.

The best part is, he got fucking defensive when called on it

Taking anti-metagaming measures too far was a problem I've had with a previous GM. No matter how we attacked something he would never tell me if it looked like I was hurting something, and he would do weird shit with enemies to make things like blindsense next to pointless. One of the more extreme examples had us fighting a fucking storm cloud for like 10 turns before we realized what was happening because it kept shooting lightning at us, and the way he would describe shit it sounded like we were fighting an elemental or something
In theory it could even be considered teaching the player not to ask to roll stupid shit in the first place instead of just saying he'll try to pet the dog, but someone will inevitably focus on the fact that using a nat one as a punch line makes them sound like a dumb secondary from reddit or something

What sort of assumptions did they make?

>GM tells group to make characters who are good at infiltration starting level 3.
>Almost all enemies have tremor sense, blind sight or used divination to foresee you coming.
>GM is mad that we don't have any focused face character.
>GM never gives us a chance to get better gear than our starting equipment.
>GM gets mad because party commits suicide on third session.

Entire countries, towns, races that didn't exist, putting paladin orders in the game with "major" deities that contradicted ones I had already created and put in the world doc (which was only 3 pages and very carefully organized).

I already wrote down the story of how I rolled a charismatic gambler in a post-apoc game a while ago, so here it is it in a nutshell:
>GM hints super strongly that it will be nice if we get a truck, so we pool our character creation resources to get one
>the truck gets busted within the very first hour of the session by some random mutant out of nowhere, engine is busted, we are supposedly out of fuel too, and barely pull to town
>the town is absolutely empty and the GM tells us that there is absolutely nothing of importance happening at all
>every single NPC he bothers to name and give a particular quirk (I live in 2nd world, so the quirk was always "he's an old nigger") is a red herring and they know nothing useful
>the only thing that sounds like a hint would be "go to the mines to work", but whenever anyone considers it an idea the DM actively tells them not to do it because it will take weeks and it won't work
>ended up trying to gamble once to get more money, the GM gave me 6 different skillcheck rolls, and even though I rolled all of them very, very well on top of my char's bonuses, they didn't seem to do anything (the opponents in a card game would keep raising stakes anyway, with the GM only saying "they look just a tiny bit intimidated")
>I end up rolling badly *once* and that makes me lose everything I gambled away (because the GM's weird methodology made it so that I had no choice but to keep raising the stakes to keep up, which I thought to be okay because I rolled so high so many times)
>when I tried to keep that fact away from my teammates the GM told them that "my character looks sad over some loss"
>I said I don't and I have the Charisma, Will and Bluff to do so
>I even roll for it
>I roll high
>"You see your friend successfuly hiding something"
>are you for real right now
>ended the session with another mutant breaking through 3 melee assailants to charge at me which immediately made my Charisma plummet really far down

Why do you hate session zeros, it's literally just sitting down to discuss tone and setting details for character creation.

Here is something I encountered during the last convention I was on:
>dude announces he's a hyper-experienced AD&D DM that has an interesting adventure for 6 people
>but the online registerer thingy says it's for 8 people
>I sign in anyway, it's just a minor inconsistency, and as an Infinity Engine veteran I am really curious about tabletop AD&D
>16 people show up, most of them have no clue what the system is about, DM says we're all gonna do it
>I explain the system and the quirks and I have to assist everyone with making characters to speed it up, it still takes 2,5 hours
>imagine explaining how old-school Druid works to someone who literally never played any form of D&D
>the session was okay, kinda boring, mostly it involved 8 out of 16 people yelling over one another trying to out-quirk one another
>even though we were already late because we were making chars for 2,5 hours the DM still takes breaks liberally
>one of the breaks involves a discussion about how he houserules axes
>he says that fighting with axes and dual-wielding them in general is houseruled away because axes are built in such a way that after you dig it into someone it "sinks" into their body due to pressure and it takes a ton of effort to pull it down IRL so axes are inefficient and unrealistic and you can't swing them around willy nilly even if that's your class fantasy
>someone points out it's D&D and it sees weirder shit, wizards are already world-changers and fighters don giant strength equipment, why be this specific
>because realism
>uh, okay
>final boss was a letdown, died to a fumble crit
It wasn't that bad, just kinda disappointing for a supposed experienced DM with 20 years under his belt. I don't know why he's so anal about axes.

My Fucking sides

And also as a cherry on top I recently became acquainted with a guy who goes REEEE at every possible depiction of a female adventurer in an RPG book, insists they should be extremely rare, and that having them be ubiquitous or represented in any way is a surefire sign of feminization of RPG, which lends itself to the downfall of western civilization.

It might not be outside of the scope of a typical grognard but the guy is a 40-something radically conservative dad who presently runs a campaign for his daughters. I'm really really hoping they're all having fun.

a lot of grognards have full blown actual autism, that means lack of awareness for social things and obsession over trival things

If anything it really sounds like having one would have saved him the trouble of running a game for those people. It's probably just one of those things where someone gets upset about a popular answer to a question and goes full contrarian

If anything, that session 0 served its purpose. It let the DM know he and those players had heavily different expectations about the game and that they should find other groups.

I'd like to date one of those daughters.

>Can I roll to pet it?
The player was asking for it.

>everyone rolls perception
>first player gets a 1, second player behind him gets a 20
>first player fails to see the rock in front of him and trips over it, knocking the second player over with him
>after rolling onto his back on the ground the second player spots the archers in the trees

Not seen personally, but a friend of mine played in games with his Friend's dad for years, he learned D&D from him, guy played 3.0 Technically but at some point or another basically did away with referencing the books himself and would come up with rules on the fly.
Direct Variation on the one OP mentioned:
>Rolls 1
>Everyone "Shit"
>DM "Roll crit damage on yourself"

They didn't like that and told him so, so he did away with it and actually came back in a worse way.

>Roll 20 vs Boss
>Roll 1 on Crit confirm
>"Okay, Roll to see who you hit"
>Everyone: "What?"
>DM: "Well you rolled a crit but you missed the enemy, roll to see who you hit.
This was early in a campaign and he ended up crit-killing one of the other players by cutting their head off.

They should have just ended his life at this point and done the world a huge favor.

Things that never happened; the post.

The worst DMing I've ever been exposed to was run by this chap running a pokemon tabletop campaign. Now, this guy was running his stuff on roll20, and you could tell he had done some prep, but his shit was horrible. He'd take the gameboy maps and blow them out to alrge resolutions, but wouldn't conserve the ratios, width to height, so you'd get these pixelated nightmares. Once we were done with route 1, and could probably stop giving him the benefit of the doubt, we realized pretty quickly that his setting was msising NPCs There was no description of people walking on the street, or anything going on in the town. It was practically a ghost town. The only NPCs were standing atop a tower: The gymleader a couple henchmen, and they just threw a bunch of the same pokémon at us. We destroyed them them and quickly left town with a badge, without talking to anyone.

Immediately after we ran into an archeological excavation near that unown cave of the second gen games. At the site we didn't meet a single NPC, but taking the stairs down into the ruins we managed to somehow summon Darkrai by accident, who proceeded to take so much damage in one round that the GM called the session mid-fight. We never came back to it.

Really, there are a lot of shit DM's that don't understand the point is to tell an interactive story. Some want tactical combat, some want to write a novel, some are retards and make the game neither interactive nor a story.

I'm trying to go Best of Both Worlds here in an upcoming campaign- I'll be running Edge of the Empire (so FFG's narrative dice) but with the space combat rules replaced with Heroes of the Aturi Cluser (X-wing campaign) rules.

Also, are there any people/newer GM's or anyone that wants some advice on running a game? I've been made perma-DM for almost a decadein every group I join. and I think it's because I'm good at it. (Or maybe everyone is terrible)

here are some rules from my first 5e gm
>nat 1s mean you hit your ally
>you can level ability scores by doing some activity associated with the score and rolling a 20
>custom currency which is equivalent to 1 copper but he takes forever to convert standard prices to his snowflake currency
>allows player to be a yuan ti pureblood mystic

The problems you encountered are literally what session 0's are for...

It wasn't a session 0, though. He refused to run one, according to his story. My guess would be that this is either bait, or the user ran a system that says the GM should do things he wasn't willing to do, like let the players create bits of the setting, and they just rule 0'd all taht shit out of it without saying anything and got blowback for it.

>FFG star wars
You already fucked up

The problems I encountered are entitled milennials who think they have the right to change my RPG setting.

Oh, fuck off. You're probably 12 years old yourself, you baitmonger. Why come to a thread about shit GMing to talk about your own and expect people to agree with you?

Have you considered holding a short meeting before the first session to describe the world and create characters? It's also a good way to spot-check their character sheets for anything that wouldn't fit in your setting. And if the players have ideas for something they want to add, they can collaborate with you and figure out how it might fit in.

I've ran games on Roll20 for ages, and I always try and put as much effort I can into the maps. So whenever I've joined others game, and they've said stuff like "I've been working on these maps for weeks" but upon actually seeing it, all they've done is google 'd&d country town map' and slapped it on a grid without aligning it correctly. One of them even has the pro version but can't even figure out the fairly simple lighting system, so every new map involves 10 minutes of saying "Can you guys see anything now?", before he just turns it off. Anyway, that's my Roll20 rant.

Back to DMs I've experienced:
>DM1 (Started off bad, but is getting much better)
He loves critical fumble rules, because he likes making up 1d100 tables of just bad shit that can happen. Our group would complain fairly often about this, but the only thing that actually made him take notice was when our rogue crit fumbled an attack and took more than 3 times more damage he could actually deal. Since that incident we convinced him to remove crit fails.
He often roleplays for our characters, I think mainly because he's more used to being a player, but whatever the reason, it's annoying.
He loves sandbox adventure design, but the way he goes about it is really random, he often has a big bland map, and then gives us zero plot hooks or reasons to actually go anywhere. Also all of his NPCs are either joke characters, or total assholes. Eventually we convinced him to run a more straightforward campaign.
He loves low level games, with high difficulty, and is super stingy with loot. An example; In a game he ran that started at level 1, by the time we were level 3, we had had to pool all our money just to buy a few health potions to stop getting our shit kicked in, and my character personally had got 0 money, in fact I lost my large greatsword, so that's -100 gold from my starting 150. Luckily this is problem which he has mostly addressed in his recent games.

...

When I ran my pokemon tabletop game, I actually had the mistaken decency of making my own area maps, which was a terrible, awful idea. It taught me a valuable lesson that's pretty relevant to this thread, though: Avoid showing your players the map of a place as much as you possibly can. Maps of a region are fine, especially if the map is available in the setting, but don't make people traverse an environment in a combat map, they'll start thinking they're playing a videogame (and PTU certainly did not help that). Stick to large scope and only use battlemaps if you system demands them.

Don't do pic related. Too much effort, no reward.

Cont.
However DM1 is getting much better recently. I think it was just the fact that he was new to running games, and he had prepared himself by watching a bunch of videos about roleplaying ran by a bunch a grognards or lolsorandumb DMs, and couldn't find a solid middle ground.
Anyway, he's still a pretty chill dude, and as long as he's still learning and adapting, there's always hope.

Stick to these or equivalent.

>Still rolling those dice with numbers on them
Much to learn you still have, young user.

youtube.com/watch?v=DxzZTKhGjLc

You fucking asshole. You woke my gf.

Yeah, I have my large overland map, then a map for each town or city, and I only go down to a 1x1 map for combat or if I need to for a specific puzzle. That map is still very cool by the way.

>Players all buy horses
>GM immediately comments "Lol, no player has ever had their mount last more than a session with me."

Same GM:

>You weren't in this combat because you have a problem with killing innocent guards? Fine, no xp for you. Everyone in combat gets 1000xp.

fuck you Jon.

>the X looks like this
>posts screenshot from a game, usually Skyrim

>I want to play [insert non-homebrew race]
>game is a system with high magic
>no humans only
>Okay I want to play a mage, then
>Eww, casting is for losers

>adding modern references, technology, or memes without any context

not dm related but gets my blood boiling anyways

>hahahahaha drunk character so funny
>hahahahaha skeleton character that says bone puns so funny
>hahahahaha monks are funny because punching things is badass
>hahahahaha i roll to grapple the dragon like a wrestler

youtu.be/NWdUTr6TZ7o?t=109

If love that in a light hearted and absurdist romp. Good shit

I'd*

Fuck phoneposting.

This lmao

Pathfinder. Our DM was Dave.
At first Dave wasn't a bad DM. He wanted it open ended, and we decided to travel to an Egyptian themed desert kingdom as mercenaries.
His descriptions were vivid, he responded to feedback, and seemed pumped for the game.

2 years on it became a nightmare. Dave refused to have Exp, provide magical items that weren't "boots of water walking that slow you if your not in water" or "a gauntlet of fire resistance that only applies to the gauntlet", he gave us a massive trove of adamantine (accidentally, he admitted several games later when he realized what it was) then decided it was actually worthless in his setting and we could not work it into items. He refused to use new monsters or strategy, simply taking hp levels and multiplying by 10, so we were fighting 400 hp strangler vines and such at level 8. And these were just the in game snafus.

I do this, except instead of harpies it's usually something appropriate for the area/system. Like:

>Your arrow misses the cutpurse and flies into a nearby alley. You hear a cat screech.
>Your arrow misses horribly and flies off into the air over the trees. You hear a bird squawk and hear something land in the bushes some yards away.
>Your blaster shot goes wide and flies off deeper into the hangar, you hear a man scream.

Shit like that.

Our group ballooned up to at one point 9 players, more the merrier as Dave would say. Few people would stay for more than a game, as 2 hour turn cycles became the norm.
Sessions became rotating doors of character introduction, poorly feigned reasons for cooperation, followed by boredom, indifference, and yet another person never returning.

At the same time, Dave became irritated with the casters and the magic spells he couldn't be bothered to read about. He started banning spells, then one shot killing characters sans saves with "the same bullshit" the pc's were using. We made the most of this situation, cannibalizing the corpses of the rotating companion door for the magic gear we so desperately needed to fight his custom monsters.
Eventually he just created a npc only spell called "counter-spell" that nullified any magic cast at them. Around this time he also started encouraging and allowing "new players" to undermine all our attempts to build non combat meaning into our game, by allowing behind the scenes unstoppable sabotage of our alliances, or npc interactions, or attempts to invest in our god or support the pharaoh.

The last straw was the final battle, a climatic event we had built our original characters up to for two years. First he tried to ban me altogether from game, for pointing out said bullshit of inter-PC unchallenged sabotage. A outcry from the other long term members shut him down. Salty, he banned another players class from game for being "to good". Then in the final battle, all our supposed allies turned on us, unleashing an unlimited barrage of wand based disintegrate beams. When (by pure dice miracle) this failed to kill all of us, one of the new "players" revealed he had been a traitor all along and finished us off using some kind of mind based mirror image bullshit.

Imagine watching a 2 year investment of time and energy with your friends get torn to pieces by some cocksuckers need to knock of lego buildings and that's about what we were feeling.

Was it good, at least?

>I give him a meaningful look *roll*
>you roll a 1, he begins to unbutton his shirt

That's a fair complaint.

>session 0
>Crap
????
the entire point of 0 sessions is to fix literally all of those minor issues you had with them.
Also:
>not letting players name their "hometown"
Unless they're wanting to do some meme shit, that's just a dick move.

"I shoot that bandit with my bow"
>Natural 1
>"You let go of the bow but still hold onto the string and arrow and it smacks you in the fucking face. take 1 D6 damage."

Was the character who got their head cut off A drow rogue
I'm pretty sure that was me, if so.

>They didn't like that and told him so, so he did away with it and actually came back in a worse way.

Every conversation with bad GMs ever.

I run a game with my girlfriend in it. Why? Because she was genuinely interested in the game and she wanted to learn. Plus I knew none of my players were gonna step up and run a game so I decided I would do it. She has a blast now and has even become emotionally invested in her character and the characters companions and the world they live in. I treat her just as I treat all of my other players. No special treatment, no hand holding because she's new. Just make it clear that when you run the game you are there to run the game and tell a story. They are the characters in that story and what happens to those characters stays there. Keeps any problems from coming up for me.

99% of DMs don't do that. You are clearly mature enough to handle it and don't have a bitch for a gf. Some DMs rather cave in than hear hours of bitching post game.

>DM insists on crit fail bullshit
>Whenever you crit fail, you attack a teammate
>This attack cannot miss in any way

>My leg!

>all these people complaining about critical failures
That's part of the fun in my opinion. Sure, always ending up in attacking a team mate is lame, but it largely depends on what's going on and how they described their attack. If the ranger is trying to shoot an arrow through three of his team mates to hit a goblin standing in front of his goliath ally then a critical roll is gonna result in him missing the shot and hitting an ally. Of course he has to do a second roll to determine if it actually makes it past AC, but that's the fun in it. If critical misses are just misses then it takes some of the imagination away. Nothing is more boring than sitting at a table as everyone rolls like robots and then announces their numbers with no flair. It's a role playing game, not a dungeon combat simulator. Add some spice.

Usually if someone rolls a critical failure I just have them fumble their weapon if it seems appropriate. If they're using something unwieldy I might have some friendly fire, but usually it's "you drop your weapon/the staff cracks against the ceiling, ringing your hands and it slips from your grasp/your bowstring snaps as you you pull it taunt (if I want the encounter to be harder, otherwise it's just) you shoot your compatriot in the ass" if an ally is within 5-10ft

Tell me about your 60 mile exclusion radius and the wailing of players you've expelled oh mighty DM-kun. quickly! my boipucci can only ovulate so hard

You ever experienced that shit first hand?
It's not fun. It sucks. It makes presumably competent characters looks like idiots. I don't really want to play idiot.

ad shooting into melee: I guess it kinda makes sense, but i hate when DM pulls that shit out of his ass the moment die roll 1. If i knew beforehand, i'd probably choose different action.

It works in a d100 system on a 1 as that's only a 1% chance. It doesn't work in a d20 system on a 1 as that's a 5% chance which over the course of a game is going to come up far more often than not. Likewise it punishes players who play martial characters and fight with multiple attacks disproportionately, considering they're already often gimped for not being wizards.

I think if I wanted to include it , I'd have a table and let the player pick a risk/reward consequence so they at least had a choice about it but overall it just needlessly slows down the game for no real benefit beyong 'lol random number generator says you died by hitting yourself in the eye'

Redditors misinformed you about what session 0 means

What the fuck

>Gets proven wrong
>M-millennials...
Pottery.

How did you make that map? Looks sweet.

Same for this one senpai.

>imagine explaining how old-school Druid works to someone who literally never played any form of D&D

iktf

>not ''You hear wilhelm scream''

Do people really think every single action your character makes requires a roll?

Most intelligent people don't. Those who are new to the game might because of memes, but they often mellow out after a year. That said, any GM that maintains the "critical fail attack roll=ally hit" is a shitter, no matter what.

...

To be fair, the player was also retarded for asking to roll to pet it.

>5% chance of failing anything
Ahiseeyouareafuckingretard.jpg

Our DM rules a crit 1 with a ranged weapon as hitting your ally if the ally is near the person you're trying to shoot or is in the line of fire.
I think that makes sense, but hitting someone in melee usually shouldn't happen.
Whenever someone suggests it does, I just imagine their experienced adventurer who has killed monsters and master swordsmen suddenly starts flailing wildly with their weapon like someone with a ladder over their shoulder in slapstick comedies.

>He often roleplays for our characters.
He fucking wot.
A DM can do many things, throw all kinds of shit at you, but at the end of the day, he shouldnt take control of PC like that at any point. At the most basic level, it's all about YOUR character reacting to HIS world and events.

christ

>I drive the car out of the garage
>you slam into the garage door and the car breaks down. You take 2d6 damage
>Wait wha? I would of opend the door before driving
>You didnt SAY you where opening the door.

Fuck him.

I have played that guy. "Ooo'Righ' you fuck'r who took the bit o jerk-e . I wer savn 'hat "
Good fun
I met people like this dude... I also know people who "Kek" without knowing where its from.
I havent read the web spell, but a black pudding is a ooze, so it should be able to just move over the web.
When Im playing with my (now wife) I tend to be harsher on her then the other players. Just because I want to avoid that crap
Sounds like he had been burned before and went too far the other way.
This guy has a really good idea. Shoot I might do that myself. Some sort of mini session before session 1. I wonder what we could call it.
But in truth, you said "I gave them the premise of the campaign and information about the starting area " This could be one of two things
>You gave them a massive book to read
No one cares about your setting. No one give a fuck. They might if you gamed with them for a while, but no one wants to sit though 20 page of bull crap then start the game to find out your a shit gm
>You didnt give them enough info
And that would be your problem too.
>GM never gives us a chance to get better gear than our starting equipment.
>GM gets mad because party commits suicide on third session.
Wha? You want to upgrade that quick. You got ADD or something man.

I dont even like it when they use mind control on my PC's

Yeah that one is a annoying as well, but i'm atleast slightly more overbearing with it as long it's like rare thing and kinda hard to pull off/ given reasonable tools to deal with it.