Bad DM Trends

[Pex]

Just to give the other side of the screen a chance.

I suppose there are the obligatory mentions of the Killer DM and Monty Haul DM, but this isn't really about what makes a DM bad at being a DM but rather common adventure tropes. Some examples:

1) The party comes across a room filled with lots of coins and gems and jewelry and chests. It's all legit and real. The vast amount is loosely laying around. Oh darn, the party doesn't have the means to carry it all. They can grab a pocketful or fill a sack, but they otherwise have to leave the entire treasure in the room because not only can't they carry it, they haven't cleared the dungeon yet to ensure safety trying to cart it out. The party always say they'll come back for it when they complete the mission. The party never comes back to that room. Either the adventure forces the party to leave the dungeon by some means in another place or after completing the adventure the dungeon is collapsing. The party just has enough time to flee as quickly as possible but cannot take the time to haul the grand treasure. What they did get in a pocket or sack is a nice sum, but it's a mere pittance of what was in that room.

2) Similar to the first, the party finds a large diamond. It's priceless or given a value of 50,000 gp or 100,000 gp. The party never gets to keep it beyond the adventure it's found to sell it. That diamond is a key to a door/portal the party must enter to complete the adventure. The diamond disappears or turns to dirt dust, valueless. Often times this door/portal is the exit the party must go through preventing them from going back to that grand treasure room they found earlier.

3) No statues lined up in a hallway are just statues. They're either golems or a trap.

4) Never drink from the fountain.

5) The most important of all. Never, ever, no not even then, never, ever release anyone or anything you find imprisoned.

[Geddy2112]

Adventures starting in a tavern.

All wishes are rigged and therefore pointless.

[Karl Aegis]

Random shopkeepers provide more of a challenge than the Big Bad Evil Guy of the campaign.

[sakuuya]

DMs who put adamantine doors in their dungeons and expect players to leave that valuable loot just sitting there.

Ok, for real, though. Single points of failure. Odds are that the players' minds don't work exactly like the DM's, and DMs who don't realize that (or are snobby jerks) often have trouble putting adventures together. Riddles are one source of this, but so are mystery plots that have a single string of clues that the players have to find or be screwed.

[erikun]

4) Never drink from the fountain.

This is a personal annoyance of mine. If there is something interesting in a dungeon - even if it's just a feature with no relevance otherwise - then why make it dangerous to interact with? I had one DM who put a fully functional magical fountain in the middle of some sort of dungeon/crypt, and attached a save for mummy rot to anyone who attempted to touch the water.


As for one from me, a DM who seems annoyed at players for roleplaying anything but stereotypical adventuring murderhobos. Please don't act surprised when my Paladin of a lawful deity doesn't immediately jump into bed with the prostitute hitting on him in hopes of gathering information. Heck, don't be surprised when the party, upon reaching a new town, is primarily interested in food and bedding. After a week's journey on the road, fighting bandits and wolves and whatever else, I think the critical story events can be put on hold for one in-game day and five out-of-game minutes just for everyone to sort themselves out and give their characters some R&R.

[draken50]

Making the newest, most irrational, confused player the focal point of the plot.

Edit: Really it grinds my gears when any single PC is the focal point of the plot, but that's just the frigging worst.

[Maglubiyet]

3) No statues lined up in a hallway are just statues. They're either golems or a trap.

Golem statues are such a hackneyed premise that I never have statues that are anything other than plain sculptures. Drives players nuts trying to activate them or destroy them. Of course, I am not above having creatures that sneak up on parties while they are spending so much time trying to determine when the statues are going to come to life.

[Mr.Moron]

Things I hate when a GM does:

• Getting too hung up on keeping things "Realistic" in the historical sense.
• Making things "Dark" or "Gritty", at least in excess.
• Spending too much time describing NPCs or locations instead of having us interact with them.
• Simulating too much "Off Screen" and us having to deal with the fallout
• Introducing anything related to secret societies or the "Real" unknown puppet masters of the world.
• Uses any of the common eye-rolling bad design tropes you get on image results when you google "Female [Fantasy or Sci-Fi Concept]"
• Gives really loose or permissive character creation guidelines, I work better when I have lines to color inside!
• Not giving me downtime to explore the more mundane parts of the setting or do community service.
• Can't strike a good balance between bending the rules for cool and making sure things feel consistently bounded.
• Consistently makes authority figures unreasonable or have shady motives.
• Writes adventures in a way that tends to punish giving people the benefit of the doubt, or asking questions first before shooting.
• Never gives me a chance use negotiation or comprise as a means of dealing with conflict.
• Mandating elaborate back stories before starting the game, I almost never a get a solid feel for who a character "is" before I play them a few sessions.
• Can't strike a good balance between letting mental stats/skills reveal useful information, while still leaving enough hidden to want to seek out sources of knowledge & expertise in-game.
• Runs games with a large group (3 is ideal, 4 is fine, 5+ is pushing it)

...and lots more I'm sure I'm forgetting. I've got pretty specific tastes as far playing games goes probably why I run games way more than I play them. I find it hard not to get frustrated with a lot of things that go on longer than 1-shots.

[Maglubiyet]

Ooh, wait, I thought of one!

When a DM plays favorites and spends most of the time with one player. I'm not talking about troublesome prima donna players who monopolize a DM's time. I mean when the DM is clearly just running a game for a single player and everyone else is just the support team.

[YossarianLives]

Don't stick your arm in the statues mouth.

[jaydubs]

-New party member introductions that involve rescuing the new PC, or getting rescued by the new PC. I know it's a classic, but I hate these with a passion, for so, so many different reasons.
-You guys have more gold? Basic expenses skyrocket. Generic inn rooms, mugs of beer, sandwiches, all suddenly cost an arm and a leg.
-Magic advancement works backwards. For some reason, the stuff from ancient civilizations is always way better than the modern stuff.
-Evil magic always has some noticeable downside. Corruption, damages the soul, requires sacrifices. It's never bad just because it's... y'know... immoral.

[BayardSPSR]

Single points of failure. Odds are that the players' minds don't work exactly like the DM's, and DMs who don't realize that (or are snobby jerks) often have trouble putting adventures together. Riddles are one source of this, but so are mystery plots that have a single string of clues that the players have to find or be screwed.

Related to that, vague descriptions when the GM is trying to get the players to do something. I've done this.

"It's big." How big? Horse, house, hill? Are we supposed to attack its ankles, or spear it in the face?
"There are doorways." With or without doors in them? Are we supposed to look through them or listen at them?
"... and on the ring is the symbol of X!" Is this supposed to mean that X is sponsoring the thief wearing the ring, or are you trying to say we should return it to them for a reward?
"It looks abandoned." ... Oh well, better leave - unless the GM is trying to say that it's safe to search for treasure.

Sometimes, the GM can correct the description and give the players another chance. Often, the result is the players acting differently than the GM expects, and the GM complaining that they're Doing It Wrong.

Obviously, being able to let the players do whatever they want within the circumstances presented is great; it's when the GM is trying to tell them to do something specific that this breaks down.

[Pex]

"Long ago there was a great empire that spanned the continent/world. It was full of wonder and had powerful magic. It was a Golden Age. Tragedy struck. The gods got angry/there was civil war when the most beloved and greatest emperor or king died/a meteor struck/something happened that caused the empire to fragment into different countries or lack of civilization altogether in just a few city-states and now magic is rare, dangerous, and the population frowns upon it. All who practice magic are suspect/hunted/mistrusted/exiled."

The party needs to sail across the sea. Not having enough money to book passage because it costs thousands of gold pieces or otherwise above their pay grade, the party has to hire themselves out as deckhands for the journey. There will be a storm. The ship will be attacked by pirates or a sea monster or both.

The party needs to travel a long distance across land. It will take a month, two months. In order to speed up travel time, the party has to hire themselves out as bodyguards for a caravan. The caravan will be attacked by bandits, once if the bandits have nothing to do with the main plot, twice if the second attack those bandits are involved with the main plot.

Either after the pirates attack the ship, bandits the caravan, or the party comes across the aftermath of an attack, there will be an NPC barely alive who has important information to tell the party about the plot but it's vague and cryptic. No healing magic in the world will prevent that NPC from dieing after giving the message.

[The Random NPC]

Making the newest, most irrational, confused player the focal point of the plot.

Edit: Really it grinds my gears when any single PC is the focal point of the plot, but that's just the frigging worst.

I'm in a Vampire game that's kind of like this. My GM's story was that there was a plot to assassinate the Prince, and we were embraced to try to find it out. Only problem was, we were embraced by the Prince's most loyal, and we were being cautious about rooting out the assassins. As it turns out, the player that had showed up for one session was the Prince's childe, and our friendship was supposed to be the driving force behind the assassins recruiting us to their cause. Needless to say, the assassins did not approach us, and we did not uncover them in time to prevent the Prince's death.

EDIT:

-New party member introductions that involve rescuing the new PC, or getting rescued by the new PC. I know it's a classic, but I hate these with a passion, for so, so many different reasons.

My GM also did something like this. The party is one Elven Princess, a Druid raised in the wild, and an ex-miltary swordsman making ends meet the only way he knows how. The new member was introduced in a city that had been overrun with Kobolds, hanging upside down from the ceiling. Now that would have been okay, but we were informed rather quickly that the new member was arrested for theft just before the kobolds ran everyone out of town. Not the best way to gain trust from the mostly lawful party.

[Mr Beer]

Really haven't had that many bad DMs, things that irritate me have been:

- Deliberately aggravating NPCs that are invulnerable to puny PC attempts to punish them.

- Paranoia-style encounters that seemingly aim for that sweet spot of wiping out half the party. Multiple times per adventure.

- Clumsy railroading - I don't care about having my 'creativity stifled' or whatever, I'll go with the rails, just don't huffily jam me back on them if I accidentally do something that doesn't advance the planned plot.

[Darth Ultron]

It's a Trap! The DM that makes every single encountered thing....a trap. No cake is ever a cake.....

Now, it's normal to find traps in set places....like dungeons, vaults and high security places. A fountain in a crypt is a dead give away for ''don't touch''. The same way that gold crown in the middle of the cave is most likely a trap or the door to the back has a trap.

But many DM's just go too far. Every little girl is a lich, dragon or god. Every salesman is shady. Every non combat encounter is some sort of alignment changing trap(DM-''You ignore the orphan? Haha! your no longer lawful good!'')

Plot Skips This is where the PC's take an action, and ''suddenly'' the lord high marshal has them arrested for it....even though there is no way for him to know about it. Unless the DM does some crazy handwaving like ''oh, farmer Bob is an undercover spy and he....". All too often DMs have NPC's ''know everything the DM does''.

[BayardSPSR]

DMPCs.

No more need be said.

[Kaun]

1) The party comes across a room filled with lots of coins and gems and jewelry and chests. It's all legit and real. The vast amount is loosely laying around. Oh darn, the party doesn't have the means to carry it all. They can grab a pocketful or fill a sack, but they otherwise have to leave the entire treasure in the room because not only can't they carry it, they haven't cleared the dungeon yet to ensure safety trying to cart it out. The party always say they'll come back for it when they complete the mission. The party never comes back to that room. Either the adventure forces the party to leave the dungeon by some means in another place or after completing the adventure the dungeon is collapsing. The party just has enough time to flee as quickly as possible but cannot take the time to haul the grand treasure. What they did get in a pocket or sack is a nice sum, but it's a mere pittance of what was in that room.

That is awesome. Now i have to do it.

2) Similar to the first, the party finds a large diamond. It's priceless or given a value of 50,000 gp or 100,000 gp. The party never gets to keep it beyond the adventure it's found to sell it. That diamond is a key to a door/portal the party must enter to complete the adventure. The diamond disappears or turns to dirt dust, valueless. Often times this door/portal is the exit the party must go through preventing them from going back to that grand treasure room they found earlier.

No no no... whats better then making it crumble to dust is letting them have it and then having them try and find somebody who actually wants to buy a 50k - 100k diamond and has the cash to do it.

as to the list.

DM pre-made characters. All combat wombats. DM: "Why do you guys use combat to solve every problem?"

Silmarillion inspired NPC names.

[Mr Beer]

- The feeble old man, oh but wait...he's not feeble at all! He's a wizard of surpassing power or perhaps a kung-fu master, who can't wait to astonish the party by dropping his feigned decrepitude.

[The_Snark]

DM pre-made characters. All combat wombats.

... I know it's not what you meant, but if a DM presented me with a character who was actually a wombat I would be intrigued. Bonus points if the game is inspired by Digger.

On-topic: quests in which the plot consists of "you are faced with an objective too difficult to accomplish on your own -> here's a powerful NPC you can convince to help you -> the NPC does all the hard work while you tag along". I don't mind diplomacy-oriented games, but if done clumsily this sort of adventure can end up feeling boring/anticlimactic.

(It's happened to me a couple times, to varying degrees: once it was the result of a whole session spent scheming to secure various allies for a revolt - I guess we overachieved in the prep stage and ended up trivializing the actual uprising scene? - but another time the party essentially acted as the couriers who found and informed Powerful NPC Hero of a problem that needed fixing, then tagged along to pick up loot and search for secret passages...)

[NichG]

This is more of a pet peeve than a serious problem, but I find DM over-dependence on preparation to be a bit annoying. I want a DM to be comfortable with saying 'okay, I haven't prepared something for this, so give me five minutes to come up with something and lets see what happens' rather than 'okay, I haven't prepared something for this, so see you next week'. I don't mind if the improvised stuff is lower quality because the more the DM improvises, the better at it they're going to be. But being afraid or unable to improvise is a problem since improvisation is such a central skill to rolling with natural player unpredictability.

A related thing is 'stick to the script' DMing, where even if the situation obviously is really different from what the DM initially had in mind, they can't adapt their plans to change so you end up spending a lot of time with things that might not be relevant anymore, or things of that nature. This could be insisting on playing out a battle that's already a foregone conclusion, or having an NPC stubbornly continue on some self-destructive path even when it's been proven unnecessary, or whatever.

A lack of willingness to go outside what's written in the system/setting/etc is also a problem - e.g. robotic DMing.

[Gritmonger]

Overpowered DMPCs. Kings who can't find anything better to do than round up murderhobos and send them on ridiculous errands with overpowered DMPCs, under pain of death.

Elves are pure and light and better than everyone and on and on and on and on.

[Storm_Of_Snow]

Adventures starting in a tavern.

But why would the PCs sign up to go off into, given the details the patron's leaving out, what is obviously certain death, unless they'd cleared out at least two barrels of the local brew each before hand?

For the fountain and similar things, I think it's effects have to make sense.

So, if you drink from a fountain, you've a chance of contracting mummy rot, why? Is there a mummy's arm lying in the bottom of it, contaminating the water, that the party can notice and take steps to work around (fishing it out, dipping a container in, then casting Purify Food and Water, even simply boiling it)?

Did the original builder want to use it to create an undead army or to spread a plague? If so, and they're not still in charge, why has no one from the current owners tried to destroy it?

Was it cursed by someone? If so, chances are there's rumours about it that the PCs should have heard.

[JAL_1138]

Just to give the other side of the screen a chance.

I suppose there are the obligatory mentions of the Killer DM and Monty Haul DM, but this isn't really about what makes a DM bad at being a DM but rather common adventure tropes. Some examples:

1) The party comes across a room filled with lots of coins and gems and jewelry and chests. It's all legit and real. The vast amount is loosely laying around. Oh darn, the party doesn't have the means to carry it all. They can grab a pocketful or fill a sack, but they otherwise have to leave the entire treasure in the room because not only can't they carry it, they haven't cleared the dungeon yet to ensure safety trying to cart it out. The party always say they'll come back for it when they complete the mission. The party never comes back to that room. Either the adventure forces the party to leave the dungeon by some means in another place or after completing the adventure the dungeon is collapsing. The party just has enough time to flee as quickly as possible but cannot take the time to haul the grand treasure. What they did get in a pocket or sack is a nice sum, but it's a mere pittance of what was in that room.

2) Similar to the first, the party finds a large diamond. It's priceless or given a value of 50,000 gp or 100,000 gp. The party never gets to keep it beyond the adventure it's found to sell it. That diamond is a key to a door/portal the party must enter to complete the adventure. The diamond disappears or turns to dirt dust, valueless. Often times this door/portal is the exit the party must go through preventing them from going back to that grand treasure room they found earlier.

3) No statues lined up in a hallway are just statues. They're either golems or a trap.

4) Never drink from the fountain.

5) The most important of all. Never, ever, no not even then, never, ever release anyone or anything you find imprisoned.

1) This is why I always put a reasonable number of bags and sacks in my starting gear (2-4 large, 3-6 small).

2) That's just evil. Even for me, and most of my DMing style is yoinked from old AD&D modules.

3) It's best done once or twice and then never again (at least until they get complacent). Keeps 'em paranoid, but doesn't utterly wear out its welcome. For bonus points, only one of the statues is a trap or golem, and must be interacted with to trigger.

4) If you wouldn't drink water in a cave on earth (and most water in caves on earth is not at all safe unless boiled and filtered), why would you expect water in a cave in D&D--or water in a derelict crypt full of zombies, skeletons, or the corpses of plague victims--to be safe to drink without boiling and/or filtering and/or Purify-Water-ing? Where this gets daffy is in a populated, well-maintained dungeon or stronghold where the inhabitants need to regularly use it too, or in the town square (when the town is not suffering from it). I've seen that done, and it's just silly.

5) This is aggravating. For once, just once, I'd like the imprisoned being not to backstab me or double-cross me. Once. And then the DM wonders why nobody is willing to spring the Plot Hook NPC out of jail.

- The feeble old man, oh but wait...he's not feeble at all! He's a wizard of surpassing power or perhaps a kung-fu master, who can't wait to astonish the party by dropping his feigned decrepitude.

"Rule One--never act incautiously when confronting little bald wrinkly smiling old men!" --Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

But when it's every single one, or doesn't make a lick of sense given the setup? Aargh.

Silmarillion inspired NPC names.

Oh, come on. Someof the ones in the appendices and genealogy tables don't sound odd out of context. Some. Not a lot, though. Maybe one in twenty. Maybe. Main text, though, generally not a good source. They work in the book, where everything else is derived from the same conlangs, but sound strange (or sound blatantly stolen) elsewhere.

All wishes are rigged and therefore pointless.

Back in AD&D, that's what the spell description in the book said, pretty much. There were no "safe" uses like 3.PF and 5e. [Old Man Voice] Dagnabbed whippersnapper. [/Old Man Voice]

[Karl Aegis]

Everything is an aggressive phallus surrounded by traps which are also aggressive phallus.

[JCAll]

Everything is an aggressive phallus surrounded by traps which are also aggressive phallus.

No no, not bad anime trends, that's a different topic.

[JAL_1138]

No no, not bad anime trends, that's a different topic.

Never ran across a dungeon full of mushroom-based enemies and traps (e.g., myconids and shriekers), I see.

[Studoku]

The party comes across a room filled with lots of coins and gems and jewelry and chests. It's all legit and real. The vast amount is loosely laying around. Oh darn, the party doesn't have the means to carry it all. They can grab a pocketful or fill a sack, but they otherwise have to leave the entire treasure in the room because not only can't they carry it, they haven't cleared the dungeon yet to ensure safety trying to cart it out. The party always say they'll come back for it when they complete the mission. The party never comes back to that room. Either the adventure forces the party to leave the dungeon by some means in another place or after completing the adventure the dungeon is collapsing. The party just has enough time to flee as quickly as possible but cannot take the time to haul the grand treasure. What they did get in a pocket or sack is a nice sum, but it's a mere pittance of what was in that room.

This happened to me once. We killed the drake guarding the treasure in one round, then spent half the session trying to leave with the treasure.

Our first plan was to have the druid wildshape and stack strength and size buffs so she could hold it and be teleported. The problem was finding a form that could physically hold the treasure- dire bears don't have hands.

We ended up cutting the drake open, removing the insides and filling it with treasure. Good times.

[JAL_1138]

We ended up cutting the drake open, removing the insides and filling it with treasure. Good times.

This is genius. Horrible but pragmatic genius, in the fashion of the very best old-school Neutral Greedy murderhobos. I salute you.

[DigoDragon]

One trend I really dislike in a GM is when they ask me to give them a short background of my character and then they never use it in the campaign. Backgrounds are little gold mines for plot hooks to get PCs invested. If they just want to know the character's personality I can write that in two sentences.

Making the newest, most irrational, confused player the focal point of the plot.
Edit: Really it grinds my gears when any single PC is the focal point of the plot, but that's just the frigging worst.

I personally don't mind if one PC gets the spotlight, on the caveat that it's a short plot and everyone gets their 15 minutes in turn.

No no no... whats better then making it crumble to dust is letting them have it and then having them try and find somebody who actually wants to buy a 50k - 100k diamond and has the cash to do it.

I did that once to a party. They were a little frustrated, but they understood the problem so were good sports about it. They used it later legitimately for a Resurrection spell.

Never ran across a dungeon full of mushroom-based enemies and traps (e.g., myconids and shriekers), I see.

I remember I was in a party that encountered a room like that. Swampy cave with a bunch of fungi to hang around. The wizard and rogue decided to just burn that part of the dungeon down. Destroyed all the monsters, but also destroyed all the treasure so... derp.

Related to that, vague descriptions when the GM is trying to get the players to do something. I've done this.

I once gamed under this GM that had a very annoying habit of answering "Kinda-Sorta" to nearly every Yes/No question I asked. For example:

Digo: "I cast Charm Person. Did he fail his save?"
GM: "Kinda-Sorta."

Digo: "I put the key in the ignition. Can I start the engine?"
GM: "Kinda-Sorta."

Digo: "After the smoke clears, I check the target. Is he dead?"
GM: "Kinda-Sorta."

Adventures starting in a tavern.

I once started a campaign with the players on an Airbus A300. As it was crashing.