As much as DMs like to take responsibility for the success or failure of their Dungeons & Dragon games (or any system), you’re one person running a group that could include six or more players. Their personalities, attitudes, relationships, and a hundred other factors will have a big impact on the success, failure, and fun of game. Some players are going to be very easy for you to work with, and others may not be.
In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave talk about the struggles they’ve had with player-DM relationships, including:
- What makes “good” players for their games
- What kinds of players can be hard for them to DM
- The ways leveling and rewards impact player fun
- How they’ve dealt with the hardest challenge for any DM: When the players turn on each other.
1:00 What makes a “good” player?
4:00 Maybe drinking at the game IS a problem?
5:00 Attitude, enthusiasm and players being “game” for the game
12:00 What kind of players cause problems for us:
- 15:00 Adversarial player-DM relationships
- 16:00 A strategy for handling power gamers
- 17:00 Players who don’t want to adventure
- 20:00 Players who don’t know what their characters do
22:00 Ways players help make it a good game
28:00 Guiding players to character classes they’ll enjoy (beware the casual player who comes to play a wizard).
36:00 When players become secretly disgruntled
42:00 Does faster leveling make better games and happier players?
46:00 How non-D&D RPGs handle leveling and character rewards differently (story rewards)
51:00 Grinding games: When the rewards are too low and slow
58:00 When players turn on each other — the hardest thing to DM
1:05:00 Figuring out what is true to you as a DM
1:12:00 D&D brings out everyone’s vulnerable side, be gentle with them
1:16:00 Final thoughts
Hey I enjoyed this. Might want to consider advice on how to effectively manage an Evil party without having the characters turn on one another or turning into murder hobos? What I did in our last evil campaign was have them serve a higher ranking member of their Organization (so I gave them an organization) with their boss as a Talon of Tiamat. To turn on the organization would require all of them working together. To betray any of them as an individual would be to betray the org. Two of their characters had tension so the boss eventually intervened and told them their squabbles displeased Tiamat and they must fight to the death. It was heavy handed but it worked. I wonder what other strategies there are?
Thanks Adrian! I actually think that’s an excellent solution for some of the problems that come with DMing an evil campaign. It covers all your bases and keeps the party working together despite their alignment inclinations, even while it lets them be evil to the rest of the world.
We covered evil campaigns a bit in the previous episode around the 39 minutes mark. Tony has run a couple of them. I’ve played in a few and DMed a little bit:
https://3wisedms.com/the-3-wise-dms-podcast/the-biggest-dm-mistakes-weve-made/
I think what you really need to make it work is players and characters who are still willing to come together to work toward an objective. So long as the character have motivation and the players are invested in it, evil can work, especially lawful evil.
Chaotic and neutral characters can be a little harder, but again, it comes down to motivation and investment. Even The Joker teams up when it suits his aims. Give them a reason to focus and something to prey on besides each other.
Another good episode! Problem players can be a… problem 🙂 One solution I found in my long-ago days of DMing, which you don’t mention, is–kill them 🙂 Kill them and keep killing them until they go away.Not the best solution, I’ll admit, but if you are in a player-rich environment, one which can work.
Thanks! The only problem with killing them is I already kill players on occasion, and I don’t want anyone taking that the wrong way. LOL