Every DM and GM puts together their campaign to have fun with their players. Usually, these are friends, sometimes they’re new people you meet at a game store or convention, sometimes they’re just the people you shanghaied into playing. You want everyone to have a good time. But by chasing that goal too hard, many DMs take all the pressure and responsibility for the players having a good time on themselves, and they lose sight of running a game they’ll have fun DMing.
This is the problem of the servant DM. If you’re not careful, it can be the fastest path to DM burnout, and even falling out with your players in real life.
DMing: The Job That Shouldn’t Be a Job
Here’s the root cause of the servant DM conundrum: As the DM, you do have an executive role in the game. You call everyone together, you create the game they’re going to play, you host the game (mentally, and often physically as well), and you challenge their characters – sometimes to death.
In the process of all that, you want them to have fun, but there are also other factors at work that go beyond just wanting to show your friends a good time.
For starters, if they quit, it may destroy your game. Beyond that, you’re sort of in the friend-boss situation where you want to be liked but your vision for the game – the game you’re inspired to run – may require events game that you won’t be liked for. And since you’re running the game, you’re likely to get blamed for the things that happen to PCs whether you intended them or not.
Making this more complicated, hurt feelings can spill over into the real world. It’d be nice to think that everyone who comes to the table can separate the game from the players in real life, but often the reality is that players quitting the game leads to hurt feelings and at least awkwardness – if not anger – outside of it.
Even if your personal relationships are cool, there’s a lot of pressure for DMs to run the game for their players to enjoy. I have one friend who compared it to throwing a party: You’re the host, so it’s your job to make sure everyone has a good time, even if that means you don’t.
With the rise of YouTube Dungeon Masters and advice-givers, that pressure’s even higher. Most of the popular RPG content creators out there focus on how to make your players love you and your game no matter how far you have to bend over to make them happy. Often, the approach they describe is being a servant DM: They’re totally focused on just providing what your players want regardless of what you want.
This all makes DMing feel like a job. But I want it to feel like a creative endeavor, a kind of cooperative storytelling. And creative endeavors are only satisfying when you can express your honest self, too. You do want everyone to have a voice in the game, but if enabling them means you’re not expressing your honest voice, too, it’s going to feel less and less fun and more like a job.
That’s when you become a servant DM, when you feel more like an accessory enabling everyone else to have a good time than an equal player having a good time with them.
The ME in TEAM
You’re not responsible for everyone’s fun. In fact, if you’re not getting paid to do this, you’re not responsible for anyone’s fun but your own. (If you are getting paid, ignore this article, because then it is a job.)
Now, that doesn’t mean the other players’ fun doesn’t matter. Without other players, you can’t have a cooperative storytelling adventure. You should want them to have a good time. You should facilitate that.
But every DM needs to recognize that this is a game and you’re a player, too. They say there’s no I in TEAM, but if you rearrange the letters, ME is half of it. Now that ME stands for every player, not just the DM, but it stands for the DM, too. You have to create a game you enjoy playing in, that inspires and fulfills you, or you’re going to come to see DMing as a chore and lose passion for it really fast.
It may sound nice to serve your players, but unpaid servants burn out quick, and soon you’ll want to quit too. Then the game’s over for everyone.
5 Tips to Be the DM You Want To Be Without Ruining the Game
So the question is, can you find honest expression and run the game you want to run without ruining the fun for your players and killing the group?
Here are 5 tips to help you do exactly that.
1. Be Reasonable
There’s a fine line between asserting yourself and being selfish, and the wrong side of that line will kill your game even quicker than burnout. Just because you want the game to have a certain feel or mechanics doesn’t mean it’s OK to run a world no one at your table can enjoy.
If you want to be a gritty, kill-’em-all DM, realize that characters dying every game kills continuity and get unfun for the players real fast. Also, be careful, sensitive and tasteful around ugly subjects. Did slaves get abused? Yes. Do your players want graphic descriptions of that abuse in their games, most likely not.
This is a social game that’s supposed to be entertaining, so don’t be boorish. And if you really have a very good reason to want to push the envelope there, get consent first, which brings us to session 0.
2. Use Session 0 to Set Expectations and Find Common Ground
Session 0 is a pre-game meeting or conversation where you talk about what everyone wants to play, the kind of setting and campaign you could run, and find agreement on anything sensitive that might be in the game.
Often Session 0 is described as a chance to find out what your players like and give it to them. But it’s just as much a chance for you to tell them what you want to run and make sure they’re ready for that and OK with it. It’s setting expectations and giving everyone a chance to respond to that or get off the ride if they need to.
Again, be reasonable. Session 0 is a chance to talk, discuss, negotiate, etc. If you come into it saying “we’re doing this my way or no way,” don’t be surprised if everyone bails out before takeoff.
One of the best ways to approach Session 0 is to do what DM Dave did before we started Curse of Strahd: He offered the group 3 campaigns he wanted to run and we got to vote on it. Curse of Strahd won unanimously (eventually).
Now, Dave had his say on what we were going to do because he only brought ideas he really wanted to play with. Then we all had our say by picking from the selection. Then we talked about some things that could become a problem for us, like adventuring in one relatively small realm of endless night, and the characters we wanted to play.
In the end, we had easy agreement and it turned into a great campaign.
3. Set Your Boundaries
What are you willing to bend on, or even give players control of, and what’s going to be totally under your discretion?
You should discuss this during Session 0, but you want to know your own boundaries even before that so it’s no surprise when someone crosses them and you don’t budge.
For example, I have a strict rule that the PCs belong to the players, the world is mine.
This means I will let the players do whatever they want with their characters within the boundaries of the game. You want to murderhobo? Great! I’ll flesh out the king’s guard and law enforcement so we can go full Grand Theft Auto. You want to avoid combat and negotiate or outsmart your way around obstacles? That’s great, too! I’ll make the game more intrigue/political so you can do a lot of talking and make sure you have a chance to plan for when you’ve gotten so deep a combat seems to need to happen. You have a plan to one-shot the BBEG, bully for you! He goes down, you collect the loot and laurels, and I move on to the next thing.
(One of the great benefits of improv DMing is that I don’t usually have to have the next thing written up, I’m used to creating on the fly. This lets me use that talent to create a more flexible game that can react to whatever the PCs do.)
But the world is mine, so how NPCs act and react, how the story unfolds, the consequences caused by PC actions … that’s all at my discretion, and I guard it jealously. Even when a player suggests a story twist – which did happen in Woodstock Wanderers – I usually gently reject it because I have my own plans for those characters and plot twists to play out. They’re part of the world, and the world is mine. That’s how I get to express myself in the game, and I’m not giving it up. I may make the occasional exception for something like PC backstories, especially if it’s at the beginning of the game and I’m not too invested yet, but I feel no obligation to do that. This is a boundary for me.
So, figure out what you need to have complete control over to honestly express yourself and have fun in your game. Communicate what those are and why they matter to you to the players during Session 0, and field any questions or negotiations about it then. That is as important to get agreement on as the setting and characters they choose to play.
That can sound a little harsh, but for me, those boundaries are the difference between enjoying myself and feeling like I’m just bringing my players their order.
4. Don’t Be an Adversarial DM
Even as you set your boundaries, recognize that your game isn’t a fight. There shouldn’t be any power struggles, and if there are, that’s likely to ruin it for everyone. You’re not there to beat down your players.
So even when I maintain control of the world, and many characters in that world are plotting the PC’s destruction, I don’t actually want to see the party go down. I want them to be challenged, I want them to think creatively, I want them to solve their problems (I often throw out problems I don’t have a solution for to see how they solve them), but I don’t want them to fail.
I am the party’s biggest fan, and I think every DM should feel that way. You can turn up the heat, you can make sure they know things are still deadly to them, even kill them if you must. But I don’t think a good DM takes joy in the party’s destruction, and you certainly shouldn’t take joy in your friend having a bad time (after all, our whole point here is that you shouldn’t be OK with you having a bad time, that should apply to everyone else as well).
It’s a cooperative storytelling endeavor, and a good cocreator helps elevate the other players, not quash their voices. That means giving the players the opportunity to shine even as you challenge them and lay out the plots of NPCs that intend to destroy them.
5. Don’t be Afraid to Backdown When You Change Your Mind
People will surprise you. As the game unfolds you may find that something you all agreed on isn’t working. You may find that you set a boundary that is no longer important because of the chemistry you have at the table. You may find out that the players who all wanted to play Curse of Strahd are sick of all the dead children and want to hop to another plane.
Any roleplaying game is a living thing. You can change your mind. And just like the fact this isn’t a job means you get a full voice in playing the game, it also means you don’t have any rules from higher-ups you have to follow. The DM really is the CEO and founder of the campaign, you get to do it your way so long as you can lead your players in that direction – or follow their lead if they have great ideas you want to incorporate more.
Final Thoughts
DMing is always a balancing act. You’re balancing encounters vs. party capabilities, treasure vs. access, this person’s idea of fun against that person’s, and that other person’s, and your own, etc.
It’s important for everyone to recognize that the DM isn’t the only adjustable weight on that scale. All the pieces have to move to find the balancing point.
When you know what you want out of the game you’re going to run, communicate it clearly, and make sure everyone agrees to that give and take, you’re going to have a much better experience than feeling like you’re coming into every session trying to remember who likes hotdogs, who likes cheeseburgers, and whether you have to run to the store because you didn’t make enough potato salad.