Do's and Don'ts of DMing

 So You Want to Be A Dungeon Master? Part I:

Do's and Don'ts of DMing

Buuuuuuuuuttttttt seriously, don't pull this nonsense on your players. It'll wear thin real fast. More ahead.

There's quite a lot I can say about DMing, but rather than try and cram it all into one post, I'm going to write up a series, probably featuring a post here or there by some guest writers. To start, here are a couple of basic Do's and Don'ts that I hope you find helpful!

• DO listen to your players.
• This sounds pretty obvious, but the truth is that a lot of DMs don't actually do this. It's sort of a counterpoint to not railroading your players (which I cover below). You may have a terrific story lined up for your players, and that's great! They may love it! But it's also possible that your players have a different kind of game in mind, and if they're all pulling in one direction and you're pulling in another, things won't go well. I actually don't like the term "dungeon master;" I prefer the term "storyteller," as it was introduced to me by White Wolf games awhile back. I prefer the latter because the storyteller works with the players to generate a story. Yes, it's satisfying to kill a big bad or solve a puzzle, but it's always the stories with which we walk away that make the game worthwhile. And for that story to be a worthwhile, the players and the storyteller have to work in concert so the result is a lovely symphony between the musicians and the conductor rather than a discordant mess because everyone is on different pages. Listen to what the players are telling you literally as well as through their play, and tailor your plans to their priorities.
• DO have a plan.
• I've seen different GMs handle this differently. A really good friend of mine, Biff, holds an outline in his head, but works out a ton of details on the fly. He's a much faster thinker than I am with such little material. Meanwhile, I really need a lot of characters to be written out ahead of time, I need primers on locations and events all written out before I run a session. I can riff as long as all of those elements are planned and written ahead of time, even if I don't use them directly, because they're a base from which I can jump off. Most of us find telling complete lies more difficult than twisting the truth when under pressure because we're working with something that's already there, right? Sort of the same situation for me here: I find that having a plan before walking into every session is really what makes for the best sessions. Sometimes, the players have us off-track not ten minutes into the session, but it's way easier for me to roll with the punches if I had something to start with, even if we never come back to it.
• DO be flexible.
• This is one of those "duh" pieces of advice, but the vast majority of people are far more resistant to change or the unexpected than we think we are. Why? Because when confronted with the unexpected or different, our brains hit us with cortisol. We literally feel stress and our body responds by releasing a chemical that pushes us toward a flight or fight response. Even for something that is not life-threatening, but threatens our beliefs or expectations! As a result, many of us think we're more flexible than we really are. But to be a good GM, one needs to be flexible, because the game is not just about the story we want to tell. If our story is that important to us as the DM, then we should really just be writing books instead. The players need agency to play their characters, and they need us as DMs to facilitate that because they don't control literally anything in their RPing world except their own characters. DMs control literally everything else. So it's our responsibility to be responsive.
• DO reward creativity.
• I know it can sometimes be frustrating if a player's creativity wrecks our plans. Believe me: I've been there. But if DMs do not reward creativity, players stop being creative. And can we blame them? What's the point? If saying, "I try to confuse the duke" and rolling a d20 has the same effect as saying, "I swap places with one of my companions so when the duke returns, I'm on their other side. Also, I'll arrange my armor and weapons to be on the other side of my body. When the duke notes that I must have moved, I tell him that I was always on this side, but he didn't notice because he had originally approached us from the other side. I point to my armor and blade as evidence," then you'll always get the former, and not the latter. Mechanically, I understand they might have the same effect. But the latter is far more enjoyable than the former, and these moments of creativity and subsequent reward make for more entertaining and thoughtful narratives.
• DO take breaks as needed.
• Sometimes, the players throw you a real big curveball. It is totally okay to tell the players, "Welp, I wasn't expecting that! Y'all talk amongst yourselves: I'm going to take the next five or ten minutes to work out a couple of things." I've done that before. Plan enough that you're not doing this after EVERY SINGLE DECISION the players make, but if you need to do it, that's totally cool. People will understand, and taking a breath and a moment can really help you handle that curveball much better than if you either respond harshly by trying to railroad or punish the players (more on that below) or if you just abandon your plot altogether.
  
  
  
• DON'T try and win.
• This is a game, but it's not a board game or a video game. If this is about winning, then the DM will win every time, the players will be miserable, and the game will collapse. It's a major flaw with games like Descent and Imperial Assault. Don't mistake me - I really enjoy those games! But the structure is very much like roleplaying in which the players each control only a single character, and then an Overlord/Imperial controls the scenario, the triggers, and literally all of the other characters. So it can feel one-sided or competitive in a way that isn't fun. Roleplaying should be fun for all involved, and, once more, it is about generating a story. Yes, there's push and pull. But if anybody is looking to "win the game," then that will drag down the game because not everyone is playing to tell a story, and the imbalance will quickly become clear.
• DON'T punish players.
• I've felt this inclination, and I'm sure every DM has at one point or another. The DM has worked up some clever trap or brutal adversary or some such, and the players either completely outwit it, or have bonkers-good rolls and completely bypass it. The big bad boss battle that was supposed to take half an hour of the session, or the really nasty trap that was designed to weaken players and force them to use some of their healing agents are reduced to a single good dice roll that sees the players happily strolling along. The inclination can be to bleed the characters anyway. And why not? The DM controls the entire world in which the players operate: why can't the big bad have a bigger, badder critter that steps out of the shadows? Or why can't the trap actually do more damage than you originally said it would after they save? I mean, it can. But if you're going to punish the players because they were clever or rolled well, what message does that send? Don't steal agency away from the players; they start to question why they're playing your story, and no answer you give them is good enough if you're going to keep punishing them for playing well or getting lucky.
• DON'T railroad your players.
• I don't care if your story is brilliant, and neither do your players if you're going to force them to play it out after they've made other decisions. If you seat them in a tavern with the assassin who is going to hire them and then betray them, thereby setting up the downfall of the entire kingdom and framing the characters for it, thus forcing them to live on the lam for the next year while they try and uncover the plot, clear their name, and save the people of that land, but instead, they want to leave and visit the nearby haunted wood because "that sounded cool," then LET. THEM. I get that it screws up your story. I get that your story might have been infinitely better than the haunted wood. But it's what the players want to explore, so let them. Again, when the DM makes choices that remove player agency, then it's creating a narrative in which the players are not players, but passengers. And that's not what they're here for. If your story is so brilliant, then write a book! People will love you for it! But they won't love you for wasting their time by claiming you want to DM a game, and then ensuring that the players won't get to roleplay unless it's in a very strict framework which you dictate from session to session.