How to Stop Sucking and Kick Ass as a Dungeon Master
photo credit: Perfecto Insecto
I’ve written a lot about what it takes to be a successful DM. I’ve identified 7 Habits of Highly Effective DMs, and I’ve told you what to avoid. I’ve even built a new campaign from scratch, so you can observe the process.
I don’t pretend to know it all when it comes to DMing. Yeah, I’ve done it for the better part of two decades. Yeah, I’ve been able to keep the same group of folks at my table since moving here, with rare exception. In fact, I’ve got the opposite problem of many DMs: I’ve got more players than slots at the table. Having Randy along for the ride helps in that regard, as we tend to make sure everyone has a spot, and I give him the lion’s share of the credit for our group’s cohesion.
Still, while I’m not the best, I do kick ass as a Dungeon Master. Why?
I give a damn about my players.
The folks I play with are friends, and have been nearly since the day I met them. Some of them go way back, while some I’ve known just a little while. But each and every one of them is a friend. We stand in each others’ weddings. We babysit each others’ kids. We eat together, spend holidays together, camp together and will go to see Iron Man together.
It’s more than that, though. See, I want my players to have a good time. When I’m designing an adventure, I do it not only with their character in mind, but with them in mind. I put something in for each person. My hack-and-slasher gets to kill stuff. My role-player gets to parlay. My note-taking paladin… gets to take notes. I customize the experience for my players, and it adds exponentially to the game.
I’m passionate about the story.
I’m a writer. I write for a living. I write things about the difference between “HD ready” and “HD compatible.” I write about premature birth. I write about whatever my conscience will allow and whatever someone will pay me for. I even write solely for the purpose of helping other writers.
But when it comes to writing fiction, D&D is my outlet. It lets me tell a story, one that’s deep down inside of me just bursting to get out. It’s the story I’ll base a novel on, someday. It’s the story I’m thinking about when my wife says, “Whatcha thinking about” and I say, “How much I love you, of course.”
See, I need to tell this story. The fact that my friends are willing to sit at the table and help me tell it, and indulge me as I tell my part of it, is in many ways their gift to me rather than the other way around.
I know when to quit.
Sometimes, you have to take a break. You have to step away from the table, let someone else DM for a while. You might even need to stop playing altogether for six or eight months waiting for a new edition. Sometimes, you just need to quit.
It doesn’t end there, of course. You’ve got to know when to restart. I’m less than 30 days away from getting behind the screen for the first time in a good while, and I’m damned excited. I’m going to start with H1 and just sort of ride the wave from there with some one-shots until Gen Con. it’s going to be a wild ride, because the wait has made me hungry for it again.
I can paint a picture like nobody’s business.
Like I said, I write for a living. Hyperbole, onomatopoeia are my tools, and the thesaurus is my best friend. Can you be a kick-ass DM without a great vocabulary? Sure. But why would you want to be? Watch movies, read books and study the flipping thesaurus if you need to, but work on your flavor text.
Oh, and make no mistake, folks: it’s all flavor text.
I’m open to change.
I don’t DM the same way today that I did in 1996, because my players don’t play the same way they did in 1996. Likewise, when one of my players says, “Dude, that session sucked!” I make a note of it. If the player was full of crap, I forget about it. If the complaint was legit, I figure out what not to do next time.
I try new things. In my time, I’ve played just about every type of RPG you can imagine, from Live Action Vampire to Toon. Hell, I even enjoyed Everway. I watch other DMs, locally and at conventions. I read DM blogs and message boards and articles in Dragon and Dungeon, all so I can add something, anything, to make my game that much better.
I’ll very likey go 4th Edition for the same reason.
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I didn’t write this post to toot my own horn. Like I said, I’m far from the best DM. I wrote it to help motivate you guys and gals out there. Get passionate. Take a break if you need to. Change things up. Take your players out for dinner just to hang. Whatever you’ve got to do, take action now. You can be a kick-ass DM, you’ve just got to decide you’re going to do it and work toward that goal.
Almost there, folks.
So, I’m hoping to spend some more time here, soon. This month has been CRAZY busy. I spent the first half of the month fininshing off my Helium Experiment, and the second half finishing up some client work that’s due on the 28th.
Anyways, for those of you who are in my game at Gen Con, stay tuned. It’s going to be a wild and amazing journey just getting there from here.
How To Kill Your D&D Game Without Really Trying
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I’ve ended some campaigns in the past. My good friend Greg reminded me, right here in the blog, about the now-infamous Winter Court fiasco, for example. It occurred to me that maybe there is a lesson or two I could share with you all. Maybe if you could avoid the mistakes I made in that campaign, you can be spared the frustration and anxiety I experienced.
To give you some background, I decided in the fall of 2003 that I was going to start an Oriental Adventures campaign. Specifically, I decided I was going to start a Rokugan campaign. See, I’d been exposed to the Legend of the Five Rings settings via the collectible card game at Gen Con, and was truly enamored with the Clan system. I even bought the Clan Wars miniatures set and painted 40 some-odd samurai figs. Here was the first problem, though. Did you see it up there? *I* decided.
Step #1: Choose a campaign setting your players aren’t into.
Now, let’s not jump to any conclusions. I didn’t force-feed them Rokugan. In fact, I took a good three weeks to poll my players, dig into their collective brains, and try to decide on what campaign setting they wanted. There wasn’t a true consensus; there was a slight preference for Colona, my self-designed campaign world, with the Realms coming in a close second. Rokugan was in the bottom half, although no one outrightly opposed it. And, they preferred it to Ravenloft.
But they weren’t into it. See, Rokugan is a tough setting to play if you’re not really into it. The core classes are different, magic works differently, and you’ve got things like clans, honor and taint to deal with. And my players are loyal to a fault and willing to try anything, but they didn’t want to spend hours learning all of the intricacies of the world. So, I wound up with Shugenja casting standard-world spells like flaming sphere, and Samurai with a level of core Ranger so as to get the two-weapon bonus (this was 3.0, pre-nerfed Ranger). Mechanically those things work, but they killed the flavor.
But, that wasn’t the only thing that killed that particular campaign. See, I really have to give some credit to the only two words my players use today to describe the campaign: Winter Court.
Step #2: Force-feed good role-playing
photo credit: saintovbastards
Sometimes, you just can’t move your players.
Winter Court was a single gaming session that lasted about 5 hours. During that time, the idea was that the characters had to do just a shit-load of role-playing. They had a variety of objectives, including solving a murder, courtship, diplomacy and others. It was, in many ways, the opposite of the Warcraft Miracle Night (I’ll explain that one another time.)
At any rate, there were so many role-playing hooks that I couldn’t seem to present any of them in a way that engaged my players. Add to that the fact that, at the time, I had a couple of hack-and-slashers as players (No, Greg. Not you. I’m talking about Swamp Beast and the Big Red Dog). That certainly didn’t help things.
The result of that session? Everyone. Was. Bored. Out. Of. Their. Minds.
Had I stopped right there, we probably could have ended the game and moved on. But, I was determined. You see, there were good reasons, both before and after Winter Court, for me to move on. I completely missed them.
Step #3: Ignore the warning signs
I remember having to explain honor and taint at least once a session, sometimes twice. No one was listening. Not because they were rude (they weren’t, necessarily) but because they weren’t interested. Explain something once and they get it, that’s great. Explain it twice, that’s fine too. Probably a learning curve. Explain it six times and it must, by definition, be uninteresting and forgettable.
Now, I get that players sometimes have to miss a game. But with Rokugan, it seemed like we had at least one player gone each session, sometimes two. Sometimes, that happens. But not for six sessions in a row. The fact that people were skipping out on D&D night to go out to dinner with an uncle should have been a sign. In fact, it was a sign. I just missed it.
My players kept trying to back out (individually) due to scheduling reasons. I kept trying to accommodate them. That caused yet another problem.
Step #4: Get off schedule
Randy and I are opposites, in many ways, when it comes to DMing. Randy is a schedule Nazi. He plays, every two weeks on Friday, come hell or high water. And, if you can’t commit to that schedule, don’t even think about joining his campaign. I, on the other hand, tend to take the “we’ll play whenever” approach.
I really don’t advocate either approach. I think you have to have a routine, but I also think you need to have some flexibility built into that routine. How you do that is the topic of another blog post, someday.
Anyways, the result of “we’ll play whenever” became “we’ll play in 4 weeks,” and then “we’ll play in a couple of months,” and then, “Hey. Anyone want to start a new D&D campaign? I’m thinking Realms.”
Step #5: Fizzle out
D&D campaigns rarely die quickly. I told you before about the big blow-up we had during my wife’s campaign. That blow-up didn’t end things. It was a blowout that we patched. D&D campaigns end more like a slow leak. To mix metaphors, D&D campaigns don’t get the luxury of decapitation. They bleed out. Or better yet, they get a festering sore that starts on the ankle and winds up in a leprous coating over the entire body.
Ew.
Maybe we’ll just say they sort of fizzle out.
And it did. That’s what happened to my Rokugan game. What did I learn from the experience? Like the headline says: I learned how to kill a D&D game without trying.
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I also learned some important lessons about my group, my own personality, life, and even some lessons about running a small business from this experience, by the way. See, in any endeavor, especially a business, you can’t ignore your customers’ input. You can’t force your customers to want your product. You have to watch for warning signs that something is wrong, because some customers just won’t come out and say it. And you’ve got to be diligent about deadlines and follow-up, or you’ll never have them as a customer again.
Building a New Dungeons and Dragons Campaign Diary #15 - Specifics
Hooray for Gen Con!
photo credit: Templarion
This is the part of this campaign setting I’m excited about. As you may or may not know, I’m going to be running the very first game in the world of Lenryn at Gen Con. Event registration for Gen Con begins next Sunday, April 20 at 1:00 PM, PDT. I’m running four identical sessions so as to accommodate as many of my readers as I can. Here are the four sessions, along with their event ID:
Thursday, 6:00-10:00 PM, RPG00402
Friday, 12:00-4:00 PM, RPG00403
Friday, 4:00-8:00 PM, RPG00404
Saturday, 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM, RPG00405
Here’s the description, from the GenCon catalog:
Be the first to play in The World of Lenryn, the newest campaign setting designed by Bob Younce of dndreviews.com. Bring your own characters, as per guidelines on the web site. Role-play heavy. Free book, “How I Developed my New Campaign World, and How You Can Develop Yours” provided to each participant. Prizes will also be given for best role-playing, and best character concept.
As is always the case, spots will fill up quickly. Be sure to register early to reserve your seat.
For my local group, you guys can sign up if you want, but my hope is to run the same game for you all (after Gen Con, of course.)
Starting next week, I’ll be posting guidelines for character creation, and begin providing you with some of the back-story specific to the GenCon adventure. In the meantime, if you’re just arriving here for the first time, feel free to start at the beginning of the new campaign diary, and get a feel for what you can expect at Gen Con.
Also, check out my archives page if you want to pop through each of the campaign diary entries.
Spell names in Dungeons and Dragons
photo credit: super-structure
While we’re on the subject of magic, I thought it’d be worth it to revisit a topic I covered on the articles side of the blog a while back, but haven’t done here:
Here’s a list of some of the names in Dungeons and Dragons that have been passed down to the present day. For most of them, we have Gary Gygax himself to thank. Most of the names came from the original Dungeons and Dragons Greyhawk campaign in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, when Dungeons and Dragons was in its infancy. Read more
The Best Wizard Spells in Dungeons and Dragons
Note: This is an old post from the article section of my web site. It may be a bit dated. What do you all think? What would you add or change on this list?
For players who like to play Wizards and Sorcerers in Dungeons and Dragons, sorting through spell lists can be very time-consuming. In addition, many spells sound good on paper, but wind up being relatively useless when actually playing Dungeons and Dragons. Below, you will find a completely subjective approach to picking the best wizard spells for your character.
Before we get to first level spells, however, watch this tribute to Magic Missle:
First-Level Arcane Spells
- Detect Magic
- Magic Missile
- Enlarge
- Ray of enfeeblement
- Grease
- Shield
Second-Level Arcane Spells
- Rope Trick
- Alter Self
- Invisibility
- Glitterdust
- Scorching Ray
Third-Level Arcane Spells
- Haste
- Blindsight
- Nondetection
- Fireball
- Dispel Magic
Fourth-Level Arcane Spells
- Polymorph
- Stoneskin
- Black Tentacles
- Charm Monster
- Greater Invisibility
Fifth-Level Arcane Spells
- Summon Monster V
- Teleport
- Wall of Force
- Magic Jar
- Mestil’s Acid Sheath
Sixth-Level Arcane Spells
- Contingency
- Greater Dispel Magic
- Antimagic Field
- Disintegrate
- True Seeing
Seventh-Level Arcane Spells
- Limited Wish
- Hold Person, Mass
- Forcecage
- Spell Turning
- Simbul’s spell sequencer
Eighth-Level Arcane Spells
- Polymorph Any Object
- Summon Monster VIII
- Mind Blank
- Greater Planar Binding
- Horrid Wilting
Ninth-Level Arcane Spells
- Shapechange
- Timestop
- Meteor Swarm
- Gate
- Mage’s Disjunction
Conan, the Destroyer of Dungeons and Dragons
Off topic, but who the hell cares… I’m not trying to make money at this anymore, right? Right. Good. Just so we’re clear. No money in D&D blogs, ‘cept for Dungeonmastering.com.
At any rate, I was thinking tonight about fantasy movies and how there have been great ones (LOTR, duh) and there have been duds (the Movie Which Must Not Be Named with That Wayans Brother). In between, there’s been all sorts of good and bad, mostly bad.
Here’s where I’m at, thought: Conan the Destroyer was, in my mind, a great D&D-type movie. You had a barbarian, a rogue, an acrobat and a wizard, all fighting against an evil cleric, her evil wizard friend, and a fighter. That’s fricking D&D, and it was damn cool. Oh, and there was hella cool monsters.
Still, it did poorly enough at the box office that the third Conan movie was scrapped in favor of Red Sonja. Red Frickin Sonja?!? How much of a load of crap was that movie?!?
And was Barbarian really that much better than destroyer? Yeah, it had James Earl Jones, but come on… “He cannot cry, so I cry for him?!?”
Although, I will give Barbaian props in one area:
I dunno. Any rate, here’s what it all has to do with D&D:
What movie, in your mind, typifies D&D? If you can, forego LOTR. It’s too obvious. Is there a movie that does it for you the way that Conan the Destroyer does it for me?
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