What is your DM style?

[TheCrowing1432]

What style of DMING do you use?

I see the game as sort of a chess board.

I litter it with plot points and set the players loose in the world to see what paths they take. Whenever they make a decision, Ill move my plot points around to adjust accordingly. I always try to keep them open ended so my plans arent completely screwed over my player agency as is often the case.

My plotpoint could be as vague as "demon lord wants to kill the population an entire city using a powerful artifact which will turn all the dead people into his personal army"

Well what if the players discover the artifact and destroy it but never found out about the demon lord? Well the demon lord finds some other way of fufilling his plans, the realms are filled with intense dangerous magic.

[KillianHawkeye]

My style is similar to yours. After having some bad experiences with the lack of extra info provided by published adventures, I have shifted to exclusively writing original ones. As such, I tend to set up a situation and figure out what will happen without PC intervention, and then modify things based on what the PCs choose to do. I always try to write multiple paths through the adventure so that there isn't "one specific thing" that the players need to figure out in order to succeed.

[Emperor Tippy]

Most of the time I play a world. The PC's interact with that world however they choose and I make the world react with the highest level of fidelity that I can manage.

Occasionally I will run a plot based game. Here I basically go "This is the basic premise/plot, the specifics of the story are up to you." For example "A planar convergence that occurs once every thousand years is set to occur shortly and at this time, mortality becomes much more mutable than normal. A local wizard by the name of Wizardton McRapesphysics has hired you four to accomplish a number of task for him related to this planar convergence." In this case, its more like a Bethesda RPG (like Skyrim, Morrowind, or Fallout); the party has an overarching quest that they have to accomplish but the means used to complete it can vary greatly and a world exists that they can interact with.

[TheCrowing1432]

I often find published adventures are too railroady.

I mean theres nothing wrong with SOME guidence in your campaign, I think its virtually impossible to run a fully sandbox game without some rails.

But published adventures plot down everything from loot you get to how much exp you should get for an encounter and from what ive heard of the 5e tiamat one, its pretty brutal for something thats supposed to be for 1st level characters.

[Dornith]

My rule is this: as long as no rule of the universe prevents a character from doing something, that character can do it.
As such, I have developed a second rule: The players will ALWAYS come up with some other path than what you thought of.
Think about it, there's one of you, maybe 50,000 possible paths, and four or five of them. They have the advantage.

What I do is try to come up with some basic idea of what the backstory of the world is and fill in details as the games progress (I use myown setting). My players know they are free to explore and take full advantage of that.
I try to keep the story, to challenges, to fighting ratio about 35:35:30
We don't use a grid, but instead of a large whiteboard which we place ourselves on. Instead of using 1 square = 5 square feet, we use 1 inch is 5 feet and use a tape measure to determine how far away anything is and how far players can move.

Additionally, I try to emphasize the consequences of what players do. For example, one of the NPCs has a book about which she is quite secretive. One of the PCs who is quite noisy became interested in it and became determined to discover it's contents. Later, after having promised to not ask her about the book anymore, he goes to visit her parents and ask them about it, but in the process, tells them about how their daughter has gone on dangerous expeditions, and so they refused to fund her education from thereon. This was of course, about as far from what the player could have wanted to happen as possible.

[BWR]

My D&D-ish games are pretty classic. Most of my players don't do too well if they are merely dropped in the game without any sort of guidelines. "I go looking for plot hooks" is how most of their freedom works at low levels. So I make rather classic adventures. Dungeon crawls, wilderness adventures, city adventures. Stuff with a distinct plot, progression and outcome, made with the general intention that the PCs should be able to find out what's going on and with some luck, intelligence and skill, be able to get to the desired conclusion.
Once the game has been going a while and the PCs have plenty of history and the players know the world, it's a lot easier for them to make plans on their own, which I will take into account and build adventures around.

[Darcand]

Campaigns I loosely plan out everything I can and keep a lot of sidetrack adventures on hand for when the PCs go off script. I like to be able to adjust my encounters to the party's abilities on the fly.

In terms of planned adventures I try and stick to a four encounter format, with two skill based encounters and two combat. This gives noncombatant PCs a chance to shine and lets me build tougher, more dramatic fights without fear of overwhelming the party too badly.

Combat Encounters I try and incorporate fights which act like puzzles such as Gelatinous Cubes in corridors that allow enough room to slip by unharmed, or dragons that try to bull rush PCs off a bridge between fly by breath attacks. I look to good videogame encounters for my inspiration on many of these, as that genre has a wide breadth of fights which have to be solved before they can be won. I do like to include at least one good brawl per adventure though.

I also enjoy using Skill Encounters that act like fights, with opposed checks, such as sneaking past guards, beating a Sense Motive, or a Perform Off between rival Bards. On these occasions I like to use multiple opposed checks, each adding to or subtracting from the next. For example a slightly failed stealth check might increase the DC to sneak past a guard who is now a little more alert because he thinks he heard something. These I try to use no more then once per session though, as no group really wants to watch one player roll a d20 repeatedly for an hour, they do help to build suspense however.

[OldTrees1]

My DMing style:

I have found players to be an unpredictable combination of being predictable and unpredictable. Left turns occasionally happen but with no warnings. So I have tried to focus on maintaining a campaign despite these left turns.

Rather than build my worlds, I derive them from some set arbitrary assumptions. This creates a low detail image of the world that allows me to quickly rederive any part I forget when it becomes important. The ability to rely on rederiving information allows me to store in my head a more complex world than I otherwise would be able to.

Since I can't avoid left turns and since I don't want to railroad, I needed to create plots that the players would eventually return to even if they did make a left turn. My solution was to make the PCs' goals the primary story and have conflict arise from the world reacting to their attempts. But that leaves me with too much free time so I also have major NPCs pursuing goals in the background. Since these plots are secondary, it is perfectly fine if the players miss them(through avoidance or neutralizing) rather than come into conflict.

Since I use the PC's goals are the primary story and since I like to be a player as much I like DMing, I put an emphasis on working with the players to achieve their character concept(if appropriate) even if it requires creating new rules/content.

I think that sums up almost everything. The only thing I didn't mention is my preferences (I like dungeons, traps, puzzles, combat, diplomacy, and moral discussions/codes but I avoid intrigue).

[EisenKreutzer]

I tend to start with an idea (volcanic world where demons and devils wage war over the human souls who serve them), then make factions, NPCs etc. and plot them into a relationship map. Then I wait for the characters to get made, and readjust the relationship map accordingly with any new NPCs and their motivations and goals etc.

Then I improvise, using the r-map as my basis (just like the players improvise based on their character sheet).

[Yael]

May Lovecraft be with you.

[NichG]

Tricky question I think.

I guess I'd distill my style down to: "Be aware at all times of what the players cannot yet know, what they believe they don't know but could know, what they suspect/believe to be true, what they know with certainty, and what they wish to be true. Create motion by moving things between these categories."

Okay, that's a bit too abstract. Maybe a better way to put it is, I tend to run games centered around environmental mysteries. That is 'why are things the way there are?' is a meaningful, and even a driving question in my games. At the same time, I have a highly improvisational style with very little prep. Yet, mysteries tend to require a lot of prep because they need self-consistency.

So the way I deal with that is, I just try to keep up with the players' thought processes. The only iron-clad thing is 'theme' or maybe 'overarching idea' - I pick some particular concept which is going to be central, and everything can be followed back to that concept. Then, as the players poke at things and uncover mysteries, I reveal (e.g. invent) information which is consistent with that concept. Because everything is consistent with the concept, things tend to also be consistent with each-other (at least, much more often than if I just picked randomly). The places where that approach fails are when the players know something that would falsify a connection that I want to make, or demand a connection I've failed to make, and so I can improve the consistency a lot by watching what the players bring up when they start to encounter evidence or start to figure things out.

That way, if they basically leave some stone un-turned, I'm not wasting a lot of time working out what was under that stone. Instead, as mysteries are unraveled it usually creates things which I need to put somewhere so the whole thing hangs together. This becomes a cloud of things that need to exist somewhere, and I use places where there are gaps in the players' knowledge to bring those things into the game.

[Chester]

Simple. I have a plot hook, I plan some possible encounters, and I adjust according to player actions. The good news is that I'm decent, I think, at reeling them into an adventure.

When all is said and done, though, I like a good old fashioned dungeon crawl.

[Zalphon]

I tend to have an overarching story in mind that the players tend to follow. There are various minor plot points that they tend to hit or miss and three major ones that tend to be somewhat solid unless they completely left-turn the game (as I have had players do) in which case the plot is shifted to a new one.

I provide rails, but they're not required to follow them. How they arrive at the destination is up to them, or they can change it completely. I exist to accommodate the players.

[Darkweave31]

Most of the time I play a world. The PC's interact with that world however they choose and I make the world react with the highest level of fidelity that I can manage.

Exactly this. I build the world, they build the characters, and we build the story. I can't stand playing with DMs that run games like they're writing a novel where the players just happen to be main characters so long as they follow the story's design.

[chihawk]

I have a beginning in mind, and an end that I'd like the players to eventually get to. In the middle I give them opportunities to move in the direction I'd like them to, but if they have different (or better) ideas I let them go and adjust accordingly, making changes to my planned ending that fits what they've been doing. If they get bogged down I'll nudge them along back in the direction I was originally intending.

[Auron3991]

Elder Scrolls style. I tend to provide them a straight-up planned mission to start off and have that provide a major campaign hook, but I've got a world lined up for them to explore after that first mission.

Of course, my groups always stay on the rails. All that extra work for nothing.

[(Un)Inspired]

I tend to use Druken Style. It's unpredictable and hard for my players to counter.

If I need more speed and precise strikes I'll switch to Crane Style.

[Toilet Cobra]

Utterly open-ended, low-pressure, anything goes games. :smallsmile:

I make up the world, then I let the players make their own storylines and just roll with whatever they decide to do. Nobody tells them to go save the world; they see for themselves the state the world is in and decide what they want to do about it, if anything. This may not work for all groups but I have DM'd for my guys for a long time, and they HATE being "forced" to play out quests and plotlines, even really loose ones with lots of endings.

This has led to some fun and memorable games, usually related to a business venture. In a long-ago 4e game they visited some northern barbarian tribes and found that the natives used silver as their main currency, and thought gold was pretty but worthless (a tidbit I added in to mess with their spending power, since they had planned on bribing their way to the north pole). Instead of being defeated they just back tracked to southern lands, converted all their gold to silver, and started a trade route specifically for making a profit on the gold-silver exchange rate. Some DM's would quash this, but I loved it, and the game then became about securing their route from monsters and bandits and keeping the secret trade route away from their rivals.

This DM style has also led to a lot of spectacular failures. I like to have events in motion regardless of whether the players will be around. You know how in most games, if an assassin is going to creep into the king's bedroom on the night of the full moon, the players just happen to wind up there just in time? Usually my players have missed all the clues and are out making perform checks in the local inn for pennies while the king is murdered helplessly.

[VincentTakeda]

I rewrote my own version of GNS theory, and in that theory my playstyle is 'benevolent simulationist sandbox' gm.

I let the players pick what they want to play and what the nature of the campaign is that they'd like to play, then I improvise how the world is and how it reacts to the players.
Then: if possible and as much as possible:
Make sure each session includes something for each character that requires the use of that thing that they're really good at so they have a chance to shine and feel badass like they made a good choice.
Then make sure each session includes something for each character that requires the use of something that they suck at, to enforce the idea that nobody can do everything and that's why you're in a TEAM.
Give them plenty of encounters that are hordes of pushovers... nobody doesnt love laying waste to hordes of baddies.
Every once in a while toss in something that nobody in the entire team is equipped to deal with in a staggeringly obvious way to remind the players that no matter how powerful they get, they're small in a big big powerful world.

The heart of successful improvisation is
having a good familiarity with your players so you have as good an idea of what to expect from them as possible
Knowing that of the 12 possible ways they could handle a situation that you have planned for, they will inevatably choose the 13th.
Your solution to the 13th choice should be easy to arrive at as some blend of the results you had planned for the first 12 possible outcomes should still work.
Whatever choices you make in fiat situations, make sure that those choices are the ones that your players will find the most fun or funny.

Stick to it and you'll never run out of players.

The most important thing for me is recognizing that players play the game not just to create an image of an experience in their head, but to experience and share that vision at the table. You'll sometimes notice players at your table that always seem to play the exact same character the exact same way game after game after game.

Recenty we had a drizzt clone ranger/rogue and a guy who'd been in 'explosions and minions' mode for at least 4 different campaigns in 4 separate systems. I know our bombs and minion guy plays bombs and minions because he thinks in his head about scenes where his bombs and minions will just totally decimate an encounter, turning what seemed insurmountable into a shoulder shrug. There is a palpable sense of glee just roiling off of him about it. During the week he plays out these scenes in his head over and over and then come game day.... No satisfaction. He's never outright stated it... But it's unmistakable.

Our gms lately had all expressed their hatred for bombs and minions by carefully making sure that no encounter ever ends up being this thing that I can obviously see that he wants. If he got to have even one encounter that played out to his fantasy, he'd move on. It's no longer just a want. It's a need. Until the hero gets the girl, this movie ain't over... And in this players case the girl is 'turning impossible odds into exposive torrential overwhelming carnage..' He wants a hulk moment... Punching out the worm a thousand times his size. He wants a 'puny gods' moment. Why did everyone laugh at that? Catharsis. Plain and simple.

They're obviously not bored with it or they'd make a change... But this other possibility... That they have some goal in their head of something they want to accomplish with that build and they won't stop playing that concept until it happens. Some scene of awesomeness they want to play out that hasn't come to fruition yet and they're waiting for that perfect moment. A lot of gms are pretty good at seeing what ther player wants... but thrill at not letting them achieve it... My biggest recommendation is 'Let them have their moment.'... Help them build the story to arrive at that moment.

Catharsis can help players get over that hump real quick.

Skillfully craft that scene into being and you'll be the best gm they've ever had. Do it in a way that didn't seem like it was your plan all along? Even better. Make it even cooler than they even imagined it would be and they'll be ready to move on to whatever your 'next great idea is' in a heartbeat. One... Heart.... Beat... If I had to explain in one way what a gm's job actually is... This is a gm's One Job. Figure out the player's Awesome Button and push it.

If you want to tell a story or if you want your story told

Ironically... you should be a player

If your awesome button is finding out what stories others want to be told about themselves and then telling that story... That's gonna make you a gm that every player loves.

[Yahzi]

My style is exactly like Tippy + VincentTakeda.

Well, it will be, now that I've read all this.

[atemu1234]

While I try not to railroad, they often find themselves on a plotline I've designed. How they act and what they do are up to them, but it tends to have consequences.