The Yellow King's page

I'm not saying a GM can't ruin a game by surprising the players by bending and breaking mechanics. It's happened to me.

But I am saying that good GMing can have a little of that.

Yes a good and skilled gm it takes a very careful hand to do something like that.

Stuff like arbitrarily deciding player X does too much damage so I am going to do more damage to them and make them do less damage, meanwhile I will make player Y who does less damage do increased damage because I want it to be fair.
I had a dm do that to me, I was playing a character built around doing a lot of damage, and I would always get critted, meanwhile the person playing the bard using crappy weapons, and not using his class features to buff himself would get all the kills rarely get hit in combat, and in general out preformed me, even going all in which meant I was expending resources. All of the dms rolling was done behind the screen mind you, I was also the only d10 hd class and had the highest con, ac, and had some defense abilities, and I was still knocked out in almost every other combat.
Doing stuff like that just makes your players not see the point in playing because you have already decided what will happen.
And that is why the advice to do so was bad was because it was stuff like that.

Or, again, you can manage it entirely behind the screen without telling anyone and if you do it at all with subtlety everyone gets to play what they want without feeling constrained by the gm.

This is entirely the worst advice you can give someone, the gm I had that pulled that crap I refuse to play with anymore because I can't trust him and it was easy to tell what he was doing.

If you want things to go how you want arbitrarily write a book.

Mr. Pitt has the right idea. If you start undermining your players they will stop trusting you. The GM I had, after we figured out he was cheating we never trusted anything he did again, because well he cheated us once he could do it again. In the end it is a cooperative game, once you start cheating you ruin the spirit of it, especially if it is done out of spite, your role as a dm should be arbiter and judge. I am going to reiterate, if it seems too strong and like there is a problem talk to him about it, or if needed have the group talk together. Creating a mentality of us vrs them is never what you want to do but if you start doing stuff like fixing damage dealt, telling players that you are going to retroactively make them ineffective, ect it will hurt their faith in you running the game. So talk to him and rather then say this is how it is say I want to work with you to fix this, these are my concerns how can we come to an agreement that will make us both happy. A lot of dms seem to forget that the game is cooperative at it's heart not vrs.