good DM and Bad DM experience ?

[hellatze]

share experience you game with your DM.

is your DM good, or bad ?

my DM however, the reason i quit pathfinder, until i find another alternatives.

i still learning how to use online Pathfinder D20.

[Scott Wilhelm]

I had a GM who insinuated situations that created player conflict. His adventure was peppered with false leads. He was constantly trying to trick us, and on days I couldn't make it to the table, I'd come back and find out that the word of the day was Avoidable Disaster. The bad guys always seemed to know our plans, know where we were, know where we were going, and were more powerful than us. He is a Good GM: classically diabolical.

[DungeonmasterCal]

I'm the GM, and I'm hella good at it. At least my ego demands I believe that.

EDIT: More serious, now. My first DM way back in 1985 house ruled the heck out of things. I was brand new to the game and didn't know any better, at least until I got my own PHB. But even then I went along with it because that's how we played. He was a great DM. High adventure, often a lot of tension in the game as to what would happen next, and absolutely brilliant at describing the settings and situations we were in. He no longer plays, sadly. I'd love to return to those days of yesteryear. I learned a lot from him that I still use in my games to this day.

I'm lucky I guess. I've never had a really bad DM or GM. Some were of course better than others, but ever since 1998 I've been the DM nearly 100% of the time, except for very rare occasions when we play a different game than D&D (now Pathfinder).

[RumpinRufus]

Good GM: Weaves your character's motivations and actions into the overarching story. At the end of the campaign, you can look back and say, "I accomplished [X] that, while maybe not important to the main plot, was important to my character, and left a mark on the world as a whole. If I had played a different character, the world would have ended up differently."

Bad GM: Focuses just on game mechanics and on completing every encounter as it's written in the book. Rewards optimizing, doesn't reward roleplay.

[Rub-Eta]

Had a bad DM who just couldn't for the life of his campaign make anything interesting. We didn't want to go on his adventure, our characters found much more interesting stuff to do. Every NPC we'd meet didn't want us to go on his adventure (for many different reasons). When we (the players) threw him a bone and went on his adventure anyway, he constantly tried to convey to us how everything we tried was impossible (because he had thought out some "puzzles" with very specific solutions that we in no way could figure out). It was over after one session.

The best DM I've ever had made personal side-story-arcs for each PC to follow along with the main story, to spur our characters' motivations. He occasionally posed our characters in very personal situations, just to let us resolve it however we wanted. This way, he offered several opportunities for us to experience drastic character-development with our PCs.

My worst DM (who almost made me quit my group and role-playing altogether, before I kicked him out instead):

Took one and a half session before introducing a new player's character (while the new player sat and waited, for one and a half session).

Spent an entire session (about four hours) telling us how our characters traveled for a week by boat, repeating basically the same day seven times, with a bit of variation. As soon as we got to our destination he called off the session.

Did not know how to read a simple Bestiary entry, which lead to some very questionable on-the-spot rulings.

Stole from the PC's during impossible circumstances.

Knee-jerk house-ruled away PCs' abilities mid-sessions.

Would occasionally overrule role-play and fully ignore player agency. He would actually "correct" players and tell them "no, that's not at all what your character does".

Any attempt in correcting him was met with a very degrading and demeaning attitude and always ended up in an even less favorable result.
Oh, it also turned out that he sent dick-pics to one of the player's girlfriend... f$*& that guy.

[DungeonmasterCal]

Yeah, that guy might have met a tragic fate at the ends of some fists over those pics. He would probably have deserved them.

[SheepishEidolon]

For some reason, I always ended up with GMs that are both good and bad. There is no dramatic story to share, though - just a lot of lessons for me as a GM.

[master_marshmallow]

Bad DMs tend to have poor writing skills ime, in that they require lots of DM Fiat and custom enemies to force the game into an arms race standard. Or designed encounters for the purpose of not being winnable.

I've also had DMs attempt to trick me into alignment traps with both paladins and antipaladins.

I've also had "rule of cool" completely overturn game mechanics and gave blatant favorism to the GM's son.

Since our group wants me to take back over, I would say most of the good DMing I've had comes from learning from those mistakes I've seen on the other side of the screen and taking those lessons seriously.

Good DMing from my end usually comes down to working with my players who aren't as content savvy to find feats, spells, and archetypes that fulfill their character niches without resorting to blatant house ruling leading to the spread of munchkinism.

To my own faults, I am too nice and allow over powered characters, with the expectation being that I can forcibly retire any character for any reason. I don't mind overpowered characters, but am not claiming responsibility if the players ruin their own fun.

[Klorox]

I had a DM who used extremely artificial and unexplainable ways to railroad us into doing the scripted adventure (like, we're in a given place and on a certain course of action at the end of one session, and we wake up prisoners at the start of the next, with no real explanation about how we even got captured... he did that twice on contiguous sessions) well, I no longer play with that guy, who also decided to cut on his gaming time and so shelved another campaign right when it was becoming really interesting.

My usual DM now is a guy who is comfortable improvising to adapt to what we do, we only have to be careful about what we say and do, he's adept at sticking our noses into our own poo.

[Moonclanger]

Let me tell you about the least competent GM I've ever known. He only ever GM'd twice and unfortunately I missed both sessions. I was the group's regular GM at the time and he volunteered to GM on a couple of occasions when I couldn't make it. He was so bad I wish I'd been there!

His first attempt was a published adventure. An AD&D Conan scenario. He hadn't prepared properly and so read text from the module without looking ahead. The session came to an abrupt and hilarious end when he uttered the words, "You meet a beautiful woman, but don't tell the players she's a princess... Oops!"

His second attempt was an adventure he wrote himself. The group actually finished it but the following line will long be remembered: "You meet an Orcus."

[quibblemuch]

I've heard tell that great GMs are forged in the Icosahedrium of Gygax, deep beneath the trackless, storm-lashed Arneson Mountains, by a nibelung whose flesh is tattered graph paper and whose blood is Mountain Dew. He wields a hammer called Kritischerpatzen, pounding ingots made of cruelty and inspiration into eldritch, distended shapes. This mad ancient craftsman quenches the still-glowing GMs in the Woefont that bubbles ever forth with the tears of TPKs. With a single whispered Monty Python reference—unique to every newly forged great GM—the fell smith breathes life into them. Once every Plutonic fortnight, one of these great GMs lurches forth from beneath the earth, sometimes rising from Lake Avernus in Italy, sometimes emerging from a back room in a gaming store that no one had noticed before. If you meet one such GM but once in this life, you will be luckier than most. Give them all your Cheetos and let them do their thing.

[Moonclanger]

Now you've had a chance to laugh at my first post he are few more helpful examples.

I've been roleplaying for about 35 years and I've had a number of good and bad GM experiences over the years. Often the same GM has provided both good and bad experiences, sometimes in the same campaign. This is because a GM has many jobs to do and no one is good at all of them.

One of the best games I've ever played in was a short superhero campaign. However it began badly for some of us because the GM chose to introduce the characters gradually. So the first adventure only featured two players. It took about 12 hours, during which time the rest of us were sat in another room playing boardgames.

But what made the campaign so good once I became involved was the GM's storytelling ability. Of all the GM's I've known he was one of two who were natural storytellers (he now works in television), and that's the single most important skill any GM can have: the ability to immerse his players in the story to the extent that rules and metagaming considerations cease to become important.

My worst GM experience occurred only five years ago when I played Kingmaker with an experienced GM who's run some great games in his time. A new player had recently joined our group and (in his own words) he upset the group dynamic. The kingdom-building aspect of the game meant that every few sessions we were voting on new building projects. (Our kingdom was ruled by a council.)

Although the council included NPC members the GM left the voting entirely to the players. This proved to be a mistake. We soon split into two camps: a like-minded majority (including the council's leader) who kept winning the votes and a disaffected minority (the new player and the player who'd introduced him). After a while the two camps started to rub each other up the wrong way. Those of us in the majority felt that we were going out of our way to accommodate the minority, but they felt we were only paying lip-service to their needs. Gradually relations between the two player camps deteriorated.

And the GM did nothing until the minority camp went to him and threatened to leave the game. And then he made a bad call.

He should have put the campaign on hold and discussed the matter with everyone, in order to get both sides of the story and try to resolve matters amicably. GMs are supposed to be neutral. Instead the minority group persuaded one of the other players to take their side and with the GM's assistance voted in a new council leader. It was a coup, pure and simple. Facilitated by the GM. And it made matters even worse.

At this point relations between the two camps went downhill rapidly and for several weeks the atmosphere around the table became extremely unpleasant, with each camp hoping the other would crack first and apologise or leave the group.

Only one player, who remained neutral throughout, acquitted himself well.

Eventually the new player, realising he was the root cause of the problem, left the group. The council's former leader was reinstated, and within a few weeks we were all getting on again.

I learned a lot from that experience. Now, when I'm GMing, I make it a priority to pay close attention to my players and if any of them ever seem even a little unhappy I talk to them and find out why, so that I can fix things before they turn bad.

[Mathmuse]

I have played under two very good GMs.

The first is my adorable wife Amy. She is a firm believer in letting the PCs' actions shape the events, even in an Adventure Path, but in also in creating some way to repair the mess caused by bad decisions or bad dice rolls. For example, in the D&D 3.5 version of Rise of the Runelords, we encountered the boss at the end of The Skinsaw Murders, who was notorious in the Rise of the Runelord forums for Total Party Kills. (I hear the Pathfinder version softened her.) And we encountered her a level early due to the detective work of my smart gnome ranger. She wiped the floor with us. Yet rather than killing us, she decided that we heroes would be perfect pawns in her plan to kidnap and sacrifice the mayor. Charm spells and a charismatic speech about the corruption of the mayor put half the party under her influence. But the bard was not fooled by her speech, my ranger had escaped and hidden, one player had been absent that day, and another player joined the party, so we had a workable party dedicated to rescuing our companions before they committed the murderous act. And we could chose the rematch against the boss under circumstances that favored us. Meanwile, the players of beguiled characters had the amusement of playing for the evil team for a while, but had reasonable Will saves to free themselves from the charm when forced to fight their friends.

The other is Stewart Sinex of The Family Game story. He had a long-running Legend of the Five Rings campaign that had started as an Oriental Adventures campaign. He played a party through one story and then would start a new group of adventurers after the previous party completed their quest. My wife and I missed the beginning, my wife played two characters before I joined, and then I joined in when my wife created her third character. Our party had been sent to kill traitors who had fled to a foreign land based on the Roman Empire. Stewart ran the game with a heavy hand, where the storytelling elements often forced our characters into unpleasant circumstances beyond our control, but the story was full of drama and adventure. And he let us force our opponents into equally unpleasant circumstances with over-the-top tactics that were more cinematic than realistic. For example, my character was a gunpowder expert and after we escaped from being imprisoned by our enemies via the erratic uncontrollable spells of my wife's character, we found their gunpowder magazine. One long fuse later, we had lured our enemies to the top of the five-story building and then jumped down onto canopies and ran away before the entire building exploded.

[Gallant Armor]

I had a few bad GMs before I found my current group.

One GM scraped an entire campaign because one player dropped before we had our first session. It wouldn't have been so bad but he made us make all new characters for another campaign he wanted to run and several of us had put effort into our characters/backstories. The remaining players made new characters and then on the day of the first game the GM cancelled at the last minute...and proceeded to cancel each session for the next few weeks on short notice until the game was called off completely.

Another GM who screwed with players for his own amusement. We would be facing a monster and not seem to be making any progress after several rounds of combat and it turns out it was just an illusion and we didn't get saving throws because we weren't actively trying to disbelieve it. In a following session we faced an encounter with a minotaur and 2 mooks who killed several party memebers (we were level 2). After we died we just respawned randomly in the labyrinth and he ruled that we wouldn't know the correct path back to the encounter or the traps we had previously come across.

We eventually beat the minotaur (some dying more than once) and on our way out we encountered a dragon. After beating the dragon in a battle of riddles, I (personally) received a bag of holding "containing whatever items I wanted" while the rest of the party got levelish appropriate loot. After spending the time getting everyone some cool magic items over the week following the session, the GM said that the items had to be mundane and there was a low price cap.

[Matthew Downie]

Moonclanger wrote:

We soon split into two camps: a like-minded majority (including the council's leader) who kept winning the votes and a disaffected minority (the new player and the player who'd introduced him). After a while the two camps started to rub each other up the wrong way. Those of us in the majority felt that we were going out of our way to accommodate the minority, but they felt we were only paying lip-service to their needs. Gradually relations between the two player camps deteriorated.

Well, at least you did a good job of simulating real-world politics.

[DungeonmasterCal]

quibblemuch wrote:

I've heard tell that great GMs are forged in the Icosahedrium of Gygax, deep beneath the trackless, storm-lashed Arneson Mountains, by a nibelung whose flesh is tattered graph paper and whose blood is Mountain Dew. He wields a hammer called Kritischerpatzen, pounding ingots made of cruelty and inspiration into eldritch, distended shapes. This mad ancient craftsman quenches the still-glowing GMs in the Woefont that bubbles ever forth with the tears of TPKs. With a single whispered Monty Python reference—unique to every newly forged great GM—the fell smith breathes life into them. Once every Plutonic fortnight, one of these great GMs lurches forth from beneath the earth, sometimes rising from Lake Avernus in Italy, sometimes emerging from a back room in a gaming store that no one had noticed before. If you meet one such GM but once in this life, you will be luckier than most. Give them all your Cheetos and let them do their thing.

That...that was beautiful. I can only aspire to such lofty eloquence.

[quibblemuch]

Thanks! I recommend a combination of chronic sleep deprivation and a very weird reading list... :)

(This was one of those posts that makes my regular tabletop group take away my sugar.)

[Tim Emrick]

I've been lucky enough to have mostly good GMs in my 35 years of gaming. The only genuinely BAD GMs that I can recall are 1) me, my first time trying to run D&D in 8th grade (I quickly got better!) and 2) the guy who apparently held the seemingly incompatible beliefs that A. everything that Gygax ever wrote was scripture and B. the game needed a ton of his "perfect" house rules (I played one session, then declined to join his game, or even keep in touch).

Apart from PFS, I GM much more than I play. But I must be doing something right, because I have two players who have gladly played whatever I've run for the past 20 years (and a third who's been playing in my games for over half that time).

[Combat Monster]

My GM's have generally been good but two instances stand out as terrible in my mind.

One let characters have an evil alignment and coup de grace sleeping teammates. That campaign didn't last long.

Another had us fighting the bad guy bosses at long last and out of the blue, a team of other guys (who I discovered were the GM's old PC and pals from an older campaign) came out and pretty much won the encounter while we watched. Oddly enough that put the kibosh on that campaign as well.

As far as good, those never stick out as much do they? How about the GM who ensured we all had a blast and who let me read his entire library when I said I was interested in trying out tabletop gaming. He answered all my questions and guided me into playing a character I enjoyed.

[Klorox]

must admit the PvP campaigns are one instance of bad GMing I definitely hate, even when my (usually evil in those instances) characters manage to get out of the fight in one piece

[Planpanther]

I play with a few old schoolers and it took some time to develop an understanding of early game design. For these guys D&D is a dungeon survival simulator. Its not about how the PCs win; there is no winning for them. Its about how far the PCs can get before they all die. Its this mentality that lead to never split the party, always have a cleric near by (even when going to the outhouse), and carry a ten foot pole. I cant say this style is bad, its actually a lot of fun if you accept the premise, but it has definitely gone out of style.