GM Sins

I sometimes look to myself and think "huh, I should probably talk about this thing whenever there's a GM confessions thread" but I always forget it so I read everyone else's posts instead

I once had a group of ghosts zerg a new player and kill him because I wanted to test a post-death mechanic I had up my sleeve, and he was out of position.

there is absolutely nothing wrong with stealing story elements. what you did is a virtue, not a sin.

players say they want sandbox games but if they aren't self starters, it will go absolutely no where. actually finding players who can thrive in a true sandbox is fucking impossible.

most players want a "sandbox" with fewer than a handful of options. choice paralysis is a major issue in those types of games.

I stole the entire Kokoda track campaign of 1942 made it more lethal shoved in a Deathwatch game and then got my party to take the Track and storm a Victorian artillery fort that i shoved in there because
1. to teach the teams 80s action hero (space wolf) that you need to work as a team to win and that it doesn't matter how cool you think your guy is or how drunk you are sometimes you will find problems that you cannot take down on your own and if you are a loose cannon berserker tearing the shit out of Xeno sooner or later they are going to send someone stronger than you to put you down.
2. I wanted to see if a team of space marines could take and hold this fort in adverse conditions.

That's not a sin, OP, that's AWESOME.

That's okay, though it might mean you need to throw some more stuff in for them to interact with or go for, or come up with a default goal for players.
"Get rich without having to do a menial job" is the classic TSR era one: when they make a character, ask them how it is they washed out and wound up trying to rob tombs full of deadly monsters for lost treasure instead of doing something less obviously insane with their lives. (You have to be crazy to be an adventurer in early editions, where the average life expectancy of a level one PC is like two or three dungeon delves, and it may take an average semi-competent party four or five to level up once)

I feel like becoming a good sandbox player is like learning to swim. Some players you have to just throw 'em in and let them figure it out, others will need some water wings to keep them afloat until they've reached a point where they don't need 'em anymore.

Sometimes your campaigns Just Work. OP.

Ass.

If you drop in obvious threats (to the players or to other groups in the world) and opportunities (to get cool shit or explore cool places for example,) then suddenly the idea that players need to be "skilled" to play in a sandbox just completely evaporates.

Same here. I can't sit still as a player when other GMs botch social encounters, don't know the rules of combat, aren't paying attention to table mood, can't sell their NPC characterization. I've become way to picky from DMing. I just want to play in my own game, but I have too much self respect to insert a DMPC.

I just can't seem to give my players a good fight. I'm just so lazy in designing combat encounters.

No one has ever died in my games

This sounds fine. In fact, it sounds amazing. Don't be afraid to steal from things.

What's weird is that "you're at the entrance to a dungeon looking for treasure" is fine for one-shots, but in a sandbox campaign the same players don't know what to do unless there's a Quest Board at the local Adventurers Guild.

>so obviously evil, he has to be innocent
That's hilarious. Keep him the villain.

"Zerg"?

I've heard 'merc' 'gank' 'frag' 'ice' and such, but never 'zerg'. What's this from?

Whoops, meant for this. And is it StarCraft? Wouldn't that be 'zergling rush'?

Unless the person can type fast, I wouldn't bother either.

>Quest board

A less meta option is to just have them hear d3 rumors whenever they settle in to start a session, and to also have them build a map of the area as they explore.

That way if they explore this dungeon over here, but nobody can figure out how to get the drawbridge to come down over the lava to reach the southern wing of the dungeon, they can jot down a note for that location and maybe a future party can go back and try to get into that place.

Over time, the "stuff we could do" list gets longer and longer. Eventually they'll probably put up their own "quest board" and then reinvent the "Adventurer's Guild," like what happened at so many tables back in the day

I don't blame you for not wanting to accomodate to a mute, but you shouldn't have lied.

Great minds think alike
youtube.com/watch?v=HLgGfSDZx8w

The other serious problem with a true sandbox is that it's very rare for an entire group of 4-6 to be on board with the same lack of direction. You tend to get a lot of games where they either bicker terribly over what they want to be doing, or you get "The Adventure of Hero PC and his sidekicks who are just there to help during the fights" as whichever dominant personality asserts himself over the other players.

The ONE time I've ever really gotten a sandbox to work (and this was by accident, I wasn't trying to do one) the game wound up being a site-based adventure instead of a character based adventure. They wound up buying this abandoned mage's tower and essentially waged continual war on it and its automated defenses to set themselves up as the new owners. Everything they did outside of the tower was raising money or trying to acquire knowledge to help them further their campaign. But in that sense it solved the underlying problem, they had an objective they decided to go after, and stuck to it.

I've found that throwing stuff in without actually directing them doesn't help. They get a big deal of choice paralysis, especailly if they do have a "get rich bitch" character, and they actually succeed on a few quests.

I've tried that. They don't follow up rumors, draw maps, or use their own initiative, they sit around waiting for "the adventure" to start.

It's not me, it's them. I don't blame them, I blame the linear modules and adventure paths they're all used to.

Yeah, this is a problem with players these days, and I figure vidjeo games must be at least a part of it. All I can say is eventually they ought to get their shit together and realize "hey, we can just talk it out and decide what we want to try, without the DM doing it for us!"
When I was a kid playing Basic in 80s, nobody had to tell us what we could do, it was more a case of the DM trying to discourage us from doing all sorts of ridiculous shit ALL the time.

>Hey can we eat orcs? They're pig guys, right?
>Yeah, let's go cook some orcs!
>Orc bacon!

Zerg rush or just zerg is common slang for just mobbing someone with weak enemies

It's tempting, but you can't blame video games too much. Think of all the video games where you explore just for the sake of exploring.

That said, I think JRPGs and MMORPGs are where a lot of the distinction between "the game" and "the story" come from. In D&D, bandits raiding a town to the south isn't just flavor text, it's something you can go interact with. Kill them and take their stuff, hire them in your fight against the goblins, join them and become bandits too! Stop waiting around for the town mayor or the job board to TELL you what to do. It's unsatisfying.

The real problem is when this became fine in modules. I read a Paizo product the other day that kept stating things like "now the PCs must..." and "this forces the PCs to...". Sequences of events that just happen, the players don't get a say at all.

>Running a campaign
>Give out small handouts for important NPCs, includes a short desc and picture
>Party meets pic related, description says that he is ambitious, people afraid to get in his way yadayada
>Try to make him sound as villainous as possible, because he's the freaking villain
>Voice sounds like Savorous Snape, brushes past the party in a hallway and tells them that they shouldn't trust the elderly veteran Magister who's been helping them out and giving them quests
>Party becomes afraid of Magister, wonders if they should trust him because of one snide sentence that came out from the Great Evil Wizard
Why must this happen to my games

Isn't it better that way? Why even do any of that if there's no chance of them NOT realizing he's the villain? You could have just written 'THE VILLAIN' on the handout. This way you get a cool reveal when he does something evil!

there's nothing wrong about completely nailing it!

Pic related a old screenshot I found, probably close to the final product I printed out.

He practically hissed like a snake when he spoke. Sometimes villains are supposed to be a big shocking reveal, but other times you want to build a reputation for them before the final showdown.

Oh my god, his name is magister Malum? Why not name him Professor Badguy von Murder, while you're at it?

>Think of all the video games where you explore just for the sake of exploring.
Which video games would that be? Cause I've been looking for a game where you do nothing but explore strange locations, but the end goal is always to farm items or kill monsters.

Is your campaign based on Fall from Heaven? I can't remember the last time I came across "Amurite"

>I've been looking for a game where you do nothing but explore strange locations

You might like Yume Nikki.

Magister Malum! I've heard so much about you!

>All good things, I hope. Heh heh.

>"Beware of Malum and his evil schemes for they are..."

(Hmm. This is probably fine.)

Try OneShot, it's on Steam. The less you know about it going in, the better experience you'll have.

(It used to be one of those gimmicky "if you close the game, your character dies and you can never replay it" shits that were popular, but now it's just a solid story and setting)

It was, yeah. Only lasted one session, but I had some more notes and ideas for further down the line. The game took place in the Catacomb Libralus, translocated from the Luichirp mountains to the city of Nimarail.

The party fled the city in fear of Ashen Veil cultists at the end of the session. That was a couple years back before I got busy with university work and lost my steam.

Unless I'm planning a big reveal, I prefer my villains to be big bads. It's not the first time my buddies have missed obvious hints during our games.

>Party is exploring dungeon, come across a treasure chest guarded by an animated suit of armor
>They could solve its riddle, or fight it to get to the loot, getting XP either way
>The Warrior and Warlock find the room, I'm honestly surprised when they actually make a genuine attempt to solve the riddle
>They tried, they really did
>Eventually the ranger and Wizard enter the room.
>This meeting of the minds did not bear fruit for another hour. I was literally humming the ABC song for fifteen minutes while they shouted out answers
>They finally guess the answer after numerous hints, earning the party a sentient floating sword
Pic related was the handout I gave them

The letter E

We were back in high school back then. I went up to an airheaded friend of mine and told her the riddle. She got in two seconds what these four gentlemen had failed to get after one hour with visual aids

Players man

That's pretty cool OP you should've just pitched it to your players like that.

Somehow being a player can render otherwise perfectly capable people into drooling retards. We may never know why.

>Magister Malum
>his name is literally mr bad
Beautiful

Did your players AT LEAST feel dumb afterwards?

because of too many stories that do the "your kindly mentor is an asshole" trope. People've been trained to trust greasy mctreacherous by like a generation of popular media.

I've always been fond of using "Baron Hitler von Evilsatan" when I'm running a more light-hearted type of game. Or Baron Kilstäb, who I introduce as "Baron Kilstäb, with some umlauts."

I once got so frustrated running an "escape from this science facility you were all test subjects" game with a pair of that guys that I blew up the earth, GM fiated that those two couldn't escape, and transitioned to a Space Opera without them.

Money is a god-awful motivation in most RPGs. "I am looking to get rich" is a shitty motivation because after the mid-game (at least in settings like D&D), you are far and away one of the wealthiest people on the plane. In fact, by level 5-6 you probably already have enough gold accrued that you could feasibly retire into a quiet middle class neighborhood. By level 15 you would be showing up on Bloomberg and Forbes covers as some up-start who is waving around a $10 million sword. There is very, very, very little reason why someone whos' main motivation is "get rich" would stick around after level 8 or 9, and may not gel with the party if the enemies seem to offer more money (which they might, seeing as the local necromancer lord keeps cultists supplied with potions, alchemical supplies, monster labs, loot treadmill, etc...)

>There is very, very, very little reason why someone whos' main motivation is "get rich" would stick around after level 8 or 9

In TSR era D&D, level 9 is "name level." That's when you go out into the wilderness, claim a hex, and use that pile of money you've accrued to build yourself a castle or a mage's tower, and begin playing the domain-level game, a la Blackmoor/Greyhawk. THAT is what all the money is for. It's a shame later editions forgot all about it.
Pic related is Advanced D&D's typically overcomplicated way of handling it.

But if I've got a character whose primary motivation is "get rich" why turn around and sink all that money into a stronghold that I will have to defend indefinitely from monster attacks? I'll just retire and live a life of hedonism.

Because you didn't fit into society, and the only way to live well out of it is to make your own place beyond the borders, dude. It's the quest for "fuck you" money, that gets you out from under kings and barons and lords and priests and taxes and tithes and the city watch telling you that you can't sleep under that bridge and they don't want your type dirtying up their nice clean city.

Or, if your motivation is just a pathological money for money's sake, like you're really not into the domain game, you can just retire him and start a new level 1 guy, which was also a popular choice back in the day, especially for people who liked the early level scrounging for cash part of the game.

I believe this is an awesome idea and would love to see more lyrically inspired campaigns and stories in general, especially with trippy songs like this.

FFH is the primary reason why Civ IV is the best Civ, and possibly one of the best 4x games of all time.
Actually, strike "possibly" and "4x" from that last sentence.

I did Apocalypse Now twice in dark heresy. My players loved it

I forgot my notes, and while pulling shit out of my ass, accidentally introduced unbalanced futuristic type shit and had to roll with it. Disappointed my players, and my campaign dissolved. Maybe I'll be a better DM someday.

Lucas?

It is you, when are you going to finish that shadowrun campaign? It's been 3 years

Hey, to be fair we were expecting something on theme with the knight, and me and the wizard I think wasn't there when the other found the riddle at first.

>games
>plural
The elderly veteran whom we just met and had given us one (1) quest that made us venture into an ancient library that coincidentally contained cultists? Real trust-worthy there. Also I don't recall being afraid of this dude at all, unless you're referring to W or D's reactions, in which case I must remind you, they're W and D respectively.

It was the finale of my first campaign ever(my players' as well) and I was an inexperienced, dumb railroading cunt back then.
Basically the PCs were supposed to stop the main antagonist from assassinating a kind. My plan was for them to break into the room to realise that they were too late, have a a short sentence exchange with the main bad, who would then jump out of the window. Le epic rooftop chase sequence ensues ended my the final fight with the antagonist and her goons.
Well, instead the first thing one of the players' done after entering the room, before I even ended description, was declaring "I shoot her in leg". He succeed. I sperged since that would be a shitty end for a campaign and declared something along the lines of "Eee, she has like 100 agility guys!" and proceeded with the rooftop chase sequence anyway. Yeah, it was shit GMing, but it happened and now I know better. The players wouldn't stop telling me how bullshit that was, they still do sometimes, especially the one who shot her. He however somewhat lost the right to do so in my eyes since he regularly did similar bullshit in the next campaign because I allowed him and this somehow wasn't a problem for him.
Also, 11/10 taste in music OP

>a kind
*a king obviously

I once dropped a large scale game I put a lot of work in preparing because it didn't really went the way I wanted it to(not even entirely the opposite way, just not really how I wanted), despite players having fun with it. I regret that and in retrospect I'm not even sure why have I even done it, although there probably was more factors I've forgotten about by now.

My biggest sin is that I am always trying to kill my players.

I have always had a meat grinder gm style. Everything is possible for the pcs... But they will struggle. And NOTHING can be done alone. It keeps them humble and keeps them from in fighting.
I make a villain present and accounted for.

Despite only working 3 days a week and having a more or less set in stone work schedule, I still miss my online games due to oversleeping, sudden appointments, or even just forgetting.

The worst part is when i was younger I never missed anything and despised flakes. Now I have become one. I just missed today's online session as well. If I had a real life group I would never miss it.

>guy is literally named Malum
That is not subtle at all. How dense is your party? are they made of lead?

you know that you should be going to these things and not be a flakey piece of shit but you do it anyway.

fix your shit user

The thing is, you don't have to make a challenging monster for a fight to be memorable. Write up your PCs health and armor class on some scrap paper, make them go down real low, or one member low. Then the monster grapples them for it's turn. Hopefully the other PCs will attack it, if they couldn't quite kill it, make it miss. Act like you rolled a 1 or something. Then let your PCs finish it off. And voila! Memeorable and 'challenging' fight.
But fi your players catch on to what you are doing, you'bbe be pretty boned.

Is reading chat on roll20 really that hard for you?

Being the one person who types in a voice game is suffering. Sure he was an asshole about it, but it would have sucked for both parties involved.

Och, aye

Says the guy who took an hour to figure out it was the letter E

There's literally nothing wrong with drawing heavily from other sources when writing your campaign, especially if you're transparent about what it was inspired by. Doubly so if you're talking music, since you're interpreting lyrics and transforming them into a story that lines up thematically with what the song was doing while still being your very much own thing.

>Is reading chat on roll20 really that hard for you?

On top of managing a session, yes. I already put work into making sure each players gets equal "airtime" (two loud players and two quiet players) and I can say with some confidence that a text-only player would get ignored half the time. Even a 5th speaking player would cause issues with people getting talked over.

>Being the one person who types in a voice game is suffering.

As a guy whose mic decided to crap itself before the last session he played, I can confirm.

>guys, I just said something
>guys?
>pls respond

to be fair, one of my literal character traits was "dense". I still have the sheet

Dictating a player's actions for them instead of what they wanted to do.
It's something I abhorr, and I got called on it by a player I once chewed out for doing the same as GM.
In my defense though the one I basically seized control of wanted to spend the whole combat fellating corpses instead of participating in killing three waves of hobgoblins, and his mother was listening - I didn't want to derail things to talk this out with him and I certainly didn't want to narrate out the results of his behavior.

>It keeps them humble
You sound like a shit GM I used to have. Every time the players or their characters would exhibit self-confidence, we'd get punished. Some squad of kobolds try to shake us down and we tell them to fuck off (we're level nine, mind), and suddenly he's a 12th level sorcerer with a bunch of level 9-ish goons. Three players score a critical hit in a row and bring down his big boss to the tune of OOC cheering? Better give him a shit ton of hit points out of nowhere! I make a scythe build and crit for triple digit damage minimum? "Fine, he's dead. No, don't bother rolling!" and then pouts.

Heaven forbid we ever feel good about playing the game.

It sounds like you build a dangerous world, but don't deny the players a decent shot. I can dig that. I would play in your game, as long as you're fair about it and don't go putting your thumb on the scales.

Like this guy's jackass of a DM does. Fuck that guy.

I like it when there are things in the world I can't handle, at least not yet, but I have a reasonable ability to avoid them and go after easier targets. I like games where I know the DM is impartially portraying a believable world with understandable rules, and just allowing us to interact with it, rather than forcing things into our path to fuck with us, or shove us back onto his railroad, or whatever.

I have sinned Veeky Forums.

I had a nice villain setup. A strange pale man who teleported in at the most opportune moments to harass the party. Mildly insane and quite powerful, he allowed the party to have small victories because, "I have plenty of time and will kill you all in the end."

The party Paladin has a sword that unsheathes itself when it is near Undead, Devils, or Demons. The pale man caused the sword to do this, and I loved watching them speculate as to what the pale man's true nature was.

In the most recent encounter with him...I slipped and called him a Lich, ruining the surprise and suspense.

Because a fucking fort is a hell of a lot harder to steal than a giant trunk of gold.

Exactly what I did as a player when the GM always gave too much gold and it always ended up stolen.

That works really well actually, better than mine. I based a VTM campaign on the zodiac album by electric six while ill with the flu. Was a bit railroady but my players loved old cokey joe.

Good Job OP.

Look fairer and feel fouler, old ass trope

Fucking.
This.
I spoil so much because I get super excited when I come up with someone I think is cool.

My current sin is thinking too much like a player; I slip up and occasionally strategize a little with them, then realize I fucked up and shut up.
I'm a new DM, no bulli

same, but i justify it as we're collaborating to make the story, that i can say some stuff that they should keep in mind, cause my players are all less wise than their character stats

Still, I don't want to spoil stuff. Thankfully I haven't actually revealed anything game-changing, and I have some interesting plans coming up for a villain.

As someone who has been praised for their combat encounters, have a few pointers

>Don't just describe the critic failures & successes, but don't spend too much time on random attacks either.
Damage roll is great ? Bravo, you just hit it in [insert detailed weakpoint here] and [Monster reacts accordingly]. This relies heavily on your ability to improvise but then again so does a lot of stuff in gming
>Have fights be about something, ie the direct outcome of the fight will impact the rest of the game (ex: villain fighting magic evil Queen, the group can decide what to do/who to supports but their allies may not agree on stuff and act on their own. On top of it, queen will hinder their overall progress but villain may get more powerful if he wins)
>Have fights that the PC should loose BUT be prepared for them to win
Those are really hard to do (and you shouldn't have more than one or two per campaign), but when done correctly they are great because it's litterally up to the players to make decisions on the spot. You don't fudge anything, you let them figure a way out to try and win. They do ? Great, they should be rewarded and they'll feel accomplished ! They don't ? Great, because they'll be way more pumped up the next time that they encounter X

That's all that I can offer you for things that work on general. Subverting player expectations or doing exactly what they expect you to not do also plays a big part so a lot of it comes from your combat system which needs to be fun. Knowing the system well also helps this (system mastery helps a lot in regard to predicting what your players will do). I also have an habit of changing system whenever we start a new campaign so that players have different options but I understand that it may a bit much for newcomers

BOTW

I ended up doing something like this once. In the campaign there was an old and dubious legend of a nigh-omnipotent wish granting artifact that was only spoken of and never been seen or shown up in records outside of obscenely old myths. I had put it in as a failsafe against the possibility of the party failing to beat the BBEG before his plans could come to fruition, and in the event of a TPK it would be the catalyst for the next group trying to find it to unfuck the world after.

Instead my players dropped absolutely everything to try and hunt this thing down as soon as they heard of it. The party consisted of a Cleric, Wizard, Barbarian/Bard, and DM's guild class I had allowed a player to use, the Pugilist. Keep this in mind, because this is probably one of the few times a full martial character has successfully completely fucked a campaign.

Cont.

Nice humble bragging bro