1000 Things to Beware of that Every DM Should Know

[SowZ]

1. If you introduce a gladiator arena in a game with any level of sandbox, it will not be a one session thing. The party will stay there until they are the champions. They might stay after for awhile, expecting someone to challenge them as champions. If no one does, they will start challenging potential challengers to challenge them. The party may start to wonder why the Big Bad doesn't just show up and duel them in the arena since it is so much simpler. It isn't a minor distraction, it is a whole sub-plot.

2. Especially in modern or sci-fi games, someone always wants to be the antihero. The guy who will kick the dog and kill the evil but unarmed prisoner with government pull because 'it has to be done' and I'm so BA. Inevitably, at least two people will want to be this guy. They will try and out morally grey each other by doing more and more horrible but somewhat justifiable things until the only sensible thing is to send a massive manhunt for the PCs. Bonus points if most the party had it in mind to be the anti-hero. Everyone ends up grumpy that no one is appalled by their actions, demanding reasons for their deeds as a set up for their perfect Clint Eastwood one liner.

3. They may spend only two minutes planning on how they are going to assault the impenetrable castle/cave of the Big Bad Dragon/Platoon of elite soldiers no matter how many hints you drop that charge in and stab will result in TPK. Should they succeed, though, and you make recovering the loot difficult? As in, you try and make certain things immovable or there is too much stuff so you figured some of it has to be left behind? They will spend forty minutes devising some ingenious way to transport it all.

4. Trust me. There is nothing for predicting which NPCs the party will latch onto and love and which they will despise. It is totally arbitrary. You can spend half an hour on a backstory and personality, giving an NPC personality and clever retorts. Whenever he recurs? They'll say, "Oh, that guy, again..." But you introduce a guide you expect to have four lines and you even think he is a little annoying and the party will adopt him as a pet/mascot.

[Hyena]

5. If you grant your BBEG even remotely sympathetic goals, don't ponder why your party decided to join him after a while. After all, why not join this man/woman/genderless blob from outer space, if one thing he wants is to help humanity? It does not matter, if his/her methods are a little bit harsh - PCs shoot the dogs every day, so how are they different?
6. If you introduce the police force or city guard in your game, don't expect your murder hobos to befriend the arm of the law. Most likely, they will try to dispose of them, because nobody likes to be punished for things like collateral damage or shooting in public.

[supermonkeyjoe]

7. no matter how obvious the clue is, don't ever expect the Players to pick up on it, include at least 3 clues per plot point.

8. this goes double for puzzles in dungeons

9. this goes triple for riddles

[Maugan Ra]

10) If you leave any sort of choice up to your PCs with the expectation that they will do a particular thing (press a certain button, say a certain phrase, kill a certain man, whatever), the chances of them doing so are significantly less than you might think.

10b) The more the plot rests on the strength of a particular decision, the less likely the PCs are to chose the intended option.

[GnomeFighter]

11) Give the party a choice, no matter how simple, that cannot be solved at the end of a sword or fireball, they will argue for hours.

11a) Even when given a time pressure. All discussion suddenly becomes "out of charicter" no matter how much it seems to the GM this should be in charicter.

11b) use this time for toilet and food brakes. There is nothing better to make a party come to a decision quickly than the GM not being there when they want him/her to be.

[hymer]

12) Getting useful feedback from players is like pulling teeth.

[ArcturusV]

13) If you provide a non-combative objective, players will deal with it one of two ways, saying "I roll (relevant skill)" with no elaboration at all, or coming up with a Scooby-Doo Villain level plan where they try to make people think the cabbage patch is infested with Lycanthrope mummy ghosts from Baator just to get the farmer to sell them for half price.

[DigoDragon]

4. There is nothing for predicting which NPCs the party will latch onto and love and which they will despise. It is totally arbitrary.

So true. So very true.


14. If you're going to make an exception to a rule for one player, always assume that the other players all want an exception too. Also, it may not necessarly be an exception to the same rule.

15. Do not build NPCs on different rules than what the players are allowed to use. The players will assume what you did is fair game and exploit it themselves.

[Kaveman26]

16.Never aware make PC's aware of a secret door they may have missed. Expect a full excavation project to begin.

17.kobolds with class levels are cliche. Corrollary: Once in every parties life they must meet Tucker's Kobolds.

[Jay R]

18. Don't make it flammable if you don't want it burnt.

[Hyena]

19. Nobody likes it when villain is ranting. Players will usually try to shoot the bastard or attempt to kill him mid-speech in some other way.

[Elderand]

20. Someone will end up quoting monty python or the princess bride.

[Morbis Meh]

20. Someone will end up quoting monty python or the princess bride.

20 a.) or Dead Ale Wives on DnD

[Mono Vertigo]

21) If you expect a situation to be resolved in any binary and mutually exclusive way (example: when saving an NPC in distress, that character should either end up free or not free), the players will inadvertently find a 3rd option ("I make a deal with a demon to free the NPC, but make sure it won't take my soul as payment!" "... well, the demon frees the NPC, but in exchange, it separates their soul from their body and keeps it. 'cause that's what demons do.").
Even buttons will end up in a different state than pushed and unpushed.
And it's not even going to be intentional.

[GnomeFighter]

19. Nobody likes it when villain is ranting. Players will usually try to shoot the bastard or attempt to kill him mid-speech in some other way.

Thats why all villains have the power "monologue"...

[BlckDv]

22) One of your players is plotting to make Pun-Pun. In any party, someone thinks that the game has to have one winner, and they will pick an aspect of the game (Loot, Level, etc.) that determines who is winning, and will plot ever more elaborate ways to make sure they have the character on top of this ranking. Some lucky groups are able to move past this once a player feels that he has "won" and wants to try other things, other groups are cursed with Charlie Sheen always "Winning!" their games.

[EccentricCircle]

23) No Plan survives contact with the Player Party.

24) Any section of Plot will take at least twice as long as you expect it to.

25a) Just because it seems obvious to you doesn't mean that it will seem obvious to your players.

25b) Just because it doesn't seem obvious to you doesn't mean that your players won't see through it instantly.

26) Expect the Unexpected...

[HC Rainbow]

27) Do not make a very deep pitfall, The players will jump into it because potato.

28) Do not make the end of the dungeon too hard to locate, the players will search for pitfalls and jump into them.


They forgot about one door in my dungeon, and decided to jump into an endless pit, hoping it would lead the way.
There were no survivors.

[Kaun]

29) When your players devise a plan that is more then likely to result in their deaths but with a tiny tiny tiny chance of success, outlining the odds of TPK vs Win to them only increases their enthusiasm for said plan.

29.B) When TPK occurs they will undoubtedly pin all blame on you.

30) If you don't want the players to have it, don't put it in your game. Poorly worded flavor text is the bane of every DM at some time or another.

[A Tad Insane]

31) If you let the party go where ever they want, notes will do you no good when they inevitably invent space travel or survive falling off the edge of the world.

[Jacob.Tyr]

Going back to #1... I had the exact opposite happen. I wanted to do a few arena fights and set up some complex scenarios to test out their builds. I set up antimagic cells made of adamantium, epic level locks, guards, reinforced walls.

They stayed in their holding cells for all of 15 minutes before figuring out a way to escape that involved gratuitous amounts of punching and some slas I didn't plan for.

For our start I told the players "You're on a ship to X town, I don't know why, I'm not your character". My little arena scenario managed to turn a few sessions worth of planned simple gaming into one of the most obscene sandbox games I've ever ran, as I just rolled with whatever reasons they gave me for heading to that town and rolled out an impromptu world based on what they said were their characters motivations.

[Kaun]

by the sounds of it, you forced them into the arena where the op just offered it as a side thought.

[Joe the Rat]

32) If you expect them to fight, they'll talk their way out of it. If you expect them to talk to something, they'll try to kill it.

33) If you have an ABSOLUTELY VITAL clue that is needed to make progress on their quest/mission/thing, don't expect them to look for it.

[Guizonde]

32) If you expect them to fight, they'll talk their way out of it. If you expect them to talk to something, they'll try to kill it.

33) If you have an ABSOLUTELY VITAL clue that is needed to make progress on their quest/mission/thing, don't expect them to look for it.

thanks for laconically quoting my first experience as dm.

34: beware magic. seriously, it makes physics, logic, plot, and sanity run in a corner to cry.

35:rule 0 exists for a reason. do not abuse it, but remember why it exists next time your bard and sorceror intrepid duo rip off the town treasury by throwing barracudas in the town palace.

(ok, there's causation-correlation between the two )

36: cheat-sheets for character profiles are encouraged. looking for a specific profile for 5 minutes will bore the players, who'll most likely go into full-on murderhobo mode while you're not paying attention.

37: never say "i didn't expect that". it encourages the pc's to continue doing unpredictable things. (like collapsing the dungeon to bypass the load-bearing boss)

[Saito Takuji]

Going back to #1... I had the exact opposite happen. I wanted to do a few arena fights and set up some complex scenarios to test out their builds. I set up antimagic cells made of adamantium, epic level locks, guards, reinforced walls.

They stayed in their holding cells for all of 15 minutes before figuring out a way to escape that involved gratuitous amounts of punching and some slas I didn't plan for.

For our start I told the players "You're on a ship to X town, I don't know why, I'm not your character". My little arena scenario managed to turn a few sessions worth of planned simple gaming into one of the most obscene sandbox games I've ever ran, as I just rolled with whatever reasons they gave me for heading to that town and rolled out an impromptu world based on what they said were their characters motivations.

this is my mainstay of GMing when i do so, i usually have some kind of backbone as to what is going on and if the players don't follow that backbone, well they had the opurtunities, and the concequences are on them

[SgtCarnage92]

38) When you expect to run a sandbox, the PCs will stand around with no idea of what to do. If you run a plot-focused game, they will turn it into a sandbox.

[Ranting Fool]

39:

When the PC's capture any humanoids who don't have giant glowing signs saying "I'm Evil" they will inevitably spend the next hour or so arguing whether or not the local laws are fair enough for the crime of said prisoner, if the punishment is Death or Dismemberment and at least one player disagrees then expect this to take longer

[Surfnerd]

@SgtCarnage isn't that the truth of it!!!!!

40. Expect players to paraphrase or take out of context or just plain misunderstand rules in their favor. "I'm pretty sure full defense is just something you declare at the beginning of combat and lasts the whole time....Thats how I read it.... What? No I um.. didn't bring my rulebook."

[Jane_Smith]

41: Alway's expect a player to punch a npc. No, they don't need a reason. But if they DO have a good reason, no amount of traps, guards, anti magic fields, pitfalls, blackmail, inevitables or the fact that npc is a DRAGON, nothing will stop that player from falcon punching them. Yes, even if that player is a caster (especially if its a caster). Yes, even if it results in a TPK. And alway's expect them to ask to perform an unarmed attack with a touch spell or power while doing it. Or even try to provoke a bullrush. Extra points if fire is used in some way during the punch.

[EccentricCircle]

42) Don't Panic

43) "Erosion" is the little known eighth school of magic: Fire and Frost spells will inevitably be used for purposes of breaking hinges, bars, walls, doors, etc.


edit: My appologies, I nearly made point 42 the one about Erosion, but of course it isn't.