Sinister Hang #2 ("GM Wins and Losses") will be on May 3rd!
Added 2024-04-16 10:09:08 +0000 UTCComments
As for beefing it, I feel I've blocked all those memories but retained the lessons learned, but I can hardly blame myself for messing up when I was a beginner DM. However, there was this one time a player was introducing a new character after their previous one had died and was going to introduce them on my mark at a reasonably appropriate narrative moment. We were playing via discord so they were muted and had their camera off until their arrival. I, with my adhd brain, got started with the session and then got carried away. Out of sight out of mind. I ran the entire two hour session, completely forgetting to introduce the player's new character. They sat in silence for 2 hours and watched us play D&D, waiting for their moment which never came. I felt pretty bad about that.
Gregory Morrison
2024-05-03 14:36:01 +0000 UTCJust realised this will take place the first night of my honeymoon, so it'd probably be a bit rude of me to attend... let alone make a bolognese at the same time. So here's my recent success story. I was at a fantasy themed weekend retreat and ran a 3 hour d&d one shot for two people who'd never played before. Character creation was included in those 3 hours. I built the entire thing from scratch, taking cues from the game DIE for how to structure a satisfying narrative and how to draw on player creativity to better invest them into a necessarily ephemeral game. It was challenging and demanded a lot of me as a GM, and was definitely something I couldn't have done without my 4 years of weekly playing as experience. BUT we pulled it off, we had the full range of emotions, we finished the story, and afterwards I overheard the players telling the host of the event how much fun they had had and how it made them want to get more into the hobby. So that made me feel pretty darn good.
Gregory Morrison
2024-04-28 10:31:07 +0000 UTCChoosing a previous PC as a deity is GOLD! I'm stealing that and keeping it in my back pocket.
Cave Darr
2024-04-25 21:46:46 +0000 UTCThe time I beefed it: After running 3 sessions of a DnD Adventurer's league adventures for my friends, I figured it was time for me to run a full campaign module for the party. I really liked the theme of Out of the Abyss so I decided to go with that, ignoring the community's consensus that the start was particularly rough and not recommended for new DMs. In short, it starts the party off in a prison with 10+ named NPCs that will more than likely join the party for the rest of the adventure. At this point, I've been binging Dimension 20 and have mostly been basing my DM style off of Brennan's. I really liked how the party had their own 5 min intro scene in Fantasy High so I thought I'd do that here, pairing off each PC with 2 NPCs. I also wanted to give them a more sandbox-y time rather than the railroad adventures I've been running. 20 minutes of downtime per person with zero direction? What could possibly go wrong? It was very bad. All of them were bored out of their minds and didn't know what they wanted/needed to do. Doesn't help that we were playing on Roll20 so I wasn't able to see everyone visibly tuning out since I was so focused on the individual scenes. Some of them decided then and there that TTRPGs weren't for them. Luckily they gave me a second chance and I played the rest of the campaign with more guided direction. They had fun and I still DM for them today, but hoooo boy was that first session rough. The time I nailed it: I ran Curse of Strahd for the same group of friends. The cleric of the group decided to choose one of our IRL friends as their god since they played a cleric in the Out of the Abyss campaign. Lots of inside jokes and fun was had. Queue the end of the campaign, the party is ready to siege Strahd's castle right as we ended the session. I wanted to do something special for next session to make it memorable, so I got that one friend to co-DM the final session with me. On the day, I had him hide in my room before the party started to arrive one by one. The session starts and I had an NPC give the party a fortune reading to prepare for the fight. The NPC couldn't see the cleric's fortune though but gave them a scroll that let them communicate with their god for a brief moment. Had to really nudge them to use it immediately since they were the type to save everything til the last moment. The scroll was used, (on the friend's request) I played the music that plays in the opening of the Mr Bean specials where he falls from the sky onto the pavement, he walks out of my room, greets the party and they went absolutely ballistic. To this day, that group always brings up that moment as the peak of my DMing career whenever we talk about DnD. DMing is fun and I love it.
Zachary Chow
2024-04-24 10:41:34 +0000 UTCI had the opportunity late last year to run a game as a "team building" exercise for several of my work peers. That meant running weekly in a one-hour lunch break window, with an all-remote, all-inexperienced cast of players, each with the likelihood of dropping in and out at random, not just in-between games but literally in the middle of the session if they got a pressing call from a VP or whomever. I cobbled together a simplified hack of PbtA as a ruleset and grafted it onto a set of characters that I wholly pre-generated and then assigned out to the players based on playing into (and against) their various actual personalities. I planned out a rails-light (but distinctly guided-tour) dungeon delve, which would let them get a taste of what it felt to play "a game like D&D," since that was the only touchstone for TTRPGs most of them had, but in a fraction of the required time and buy-in. I wanted it to be immediately accessible, simple to learn, and even simpler to pick back up after a week or three away from the virtual table. I didn't want them to ever feel overwhelmed or lost. I wanted it to be quick, quick, quick. I should have trusted them more. The thing about speedrunning is that it requires a bone-deep understanding of the systems at play. When you aren't intimately familiar with all those disparate elements, however nominally approachable they may be, they just slow things way, way down. What might've been an average-to-plodding meander in a normal table situation, when sliced up into 45-minute chunks, divided unevenly amongst 2-8 intermittent players, and stalled out frequently for weeks on end as we struggled to achieve a quorum... became absolutely interminable. My dream of a cool four-or-five session romp-and-done quickly dissolved into the snaillike madness of "Hey, if we clear two rooms today, maybe we'll get to the next map by month's end," as I rapidly erased monsters and red herrings in the hopes of funneling them more rapidly through the next meat grinder. It sucked. And then it ended, about a dozen doors before the exit point of the penultimate map of the would-be prologue. Remarkably, all participants claim to have had a good time and there was general disappointment when we cancelled the whole thing due to lack of availability, so I guess we could call that much a win, but it still feels like a loss on the whole.
Braden Liatris
2024-04-19 03:49:40 +0000 UTCI don't know if I can make it this time, so here goes my high and my low: Low: I asked some friends, who had never played TTRPGs,to play Dungeon World. The first session was a hit! So much fun with silly/loose vibe, it was great! Then for the second session, I prepared all kinds of "funny" scenes in a wacky setting... and it failed miserably, I made it all about my "fun setting" and not about the characters, I railroaded everything and it just was so so bad that we never played another game again... and I think i scared them off the hobby. Lesson learned: Focus on the characters, include your players, don't prepare everything up from, don't try to force the fun. Highs: First: All the countless worlds and shared memories my sons and I have made together! Second: Showing TTRPGs to new players and them going "wow, I didn't know about this but it was a blast". It is such an amazing hobby, but it has such a bad PR problem that most people will not even try it, so getting people a good experience enough to join the hobby is the biggest win.
Philip Kristoffersen
2024-04-16 18:36:34 +0000 UTCCan't wait to hear ya'lls best and worst moments
Ahti Katiska
2024-04-16 12:02:11 +0000 UTCGreat choice of topic! I usually come away from a session feeling somewhere in the middle. Some parts were great, some could have been better. I think what keeps me coming back to DMing is that it feels more art than science. Unlike a board game, you can't just learn all the rules and become an expert that way. There's so many different threads that go into it there's always something to chew on after a session.
Joe Boyle
2024-04-16 11:36:41 +0000 UTCOoh, I might actually make it this time! Can’t wait.
Ainar Miyata
2024-04-16 11:26:45 +0000 UTC
