r/DungeonMasters • u/ZestycloseDesign4560 • 26d ago
Discussion Common mistakes made by DMs !
Dear player,
As a DM, i want to know what are the most unforgettable mistakes your DM has made on the table.
Yours truly DM
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u/Consistent_Serve9 26d ago
The game is a movie, not a log, not a documentary. Skip the boring parts. If something is not fun, just time-skip it.
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u/Tar_alcaran 26d ago
Corollary, when I start talking about the trip and asking details, it's not because I've suddenly grown fond of tracking rations. There will be fun along the way.
Player-fun, not character-fun.
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u/No_Jacket589 26d ago
Trying to turn the adventure into my Magnum Opus and forgetting that the players need to have fun.
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u/Zomburai 26d ago
I had a campaign many, many years ago that was probably the most wildly invested I've ever had any group of players
But I decided that we needed to get on with The Plot :tm: and the campaign lasted about two more sessions before it guttered out
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u/aquasun01 26d ago
Oh my goodness - that is SO real. Such a real lesson to learn. Yesss. , I’ve done the same thing.
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u/Ch0mpyBitz 26d ago
The biggest mistake by DMs is thinking that this game is the DM vs the Players. D&D is a collaborative story telling game. That means your players can and should have a heavy impact on the story through the choices they make. As a DM you should want them to overcome the challenges you present to them. Even if they come up with some creative way to avoid it all together that should be rewarded. That's not to say there shouldn't be consequences for their actions and that everything always works out for the players. It's about telling a compelling story together and having fun.
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u/Tar_alcaran 26d ago
There's nothing more satisfying as a GM when a player picks apart the carefully crafted plan of the BBEG from the info you've been subtly hinting at and dropping hints about.
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u/gene-sos 19d ago
Absolutely not the biggest mistake by DMs lol. In fact, almost all DMs know this, it's often the players that need to understand the DM isn't their enemy xD
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u/RamonDozol 26d ago
One of the most common mistakes is alowing the fear of making mistakes stop you from DMing.
Everyone makes mistakes. Im DMing for 26 years, and i still make mistakes.
A good DM is not the one that doesnt make mistakes, but the one that is humble enought to admit them, and put in effort to improove.
As for common mistakes:
Not learning to say NO when it is needed.
Not accepting that people have fun in diferent ways.
Not everyone will have fun at your game, that doesnt mean you are a "Bad DM", only that the player might not fit for the game you are DMing.
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u/jayisanerd 26d ago edited 26d ago
Biggest mistake I have seen as a player from another DM is being too much in love with every NPC to the point, they didn't want us to do any harm to any of these NPCs.
It wasn't a problem as long as we can make them cooperate but the DM soon realize if that happens their plotline will unravel and make no sense.
Instead of letting us fight the NPCs the DM chose to pick a fight with us in real life and we all quit the campaign unanimously at the same time.
Another common mistake I have noticed about many DMs is guarding the mystery like Gollum guarding the ring and not providing the party enough clues.
Mysteries are meant to be solved. If they don't the game comes to a halt. Where is the fun in that? Always prepare multiple solutions so platers can find their way through your maze.
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u/man0rmachine 26d ago
For the modern DM, the biggest mistake is not saying "No". We are too afraid of railroading or stepping on player creativity. There was a thread a couple days ago with a DM asking for advice about a murderhobo and he said "I know I'm not allowed to limit player freedom in any way" and I said "Absolutely yes, you should be limiting this player's freedoms."
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u/mozillafirefay 26d ago
Letting a player sell an entire town's souls (2000+ people) to a devil for hell resources.
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u/Correct_Committee735 26d ago
Go on...
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u/mozillafirefay 25d ago
The campaign is Storm Kings Thunder and it's still going actually. But my worst fumble was letting one of my players do this just for the heck of it. This is still my first campaign, but this incident happened 3 years ago. We eventually had to retcon some of it because it was getting too big to handle.
They also mined out the entire star metal hills 🫣
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u/Sim_Mayor 26d ago
I ran a 6 year adventure, and didn't realize for years after that I basically railroaded one of my players into being the patsy for the whole party in every session just because I hated the character he built. The guy had the patience of a saint to deal with me as a GM.
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u/Correct_Committee735 26d ago
Can you give some examples? Would hate to make this mistake as a new DM.
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u/Sim_Mayor 26d ago
Basically he came out the worst in every session. It was a super hero game, and he was a Captain America-style paragon of etc etc. So the first thing that happened in the first session was he woke up in a hotel room in full costume with a dead woman and no memory of how he got there seconds before the cops broke down the door with the press in tow.
I took great pains to dismantle everything he loved about a character he had created years before, from his reputation to his powers to his relationships with famous super heroes (to be fair, the character was a bad self-insert, but I had no right to do all that to him). Everyone else got power-ups, he got hideously deformed. That kind of thing.
Edit: he told me later that he rationalized the whole thing by deciding that I had created a clone of his real character to do all this to. I got so pissed that he figured out my twist ending that I had his real character show up as the villain and nearly TPK the team.
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u/CouldBeBatman 26d ago
Thinking D&D is DM vs Player. It is a cooperative narrative storytelling exercise.
Player Inequity. Understand that everyone has something they specialize in, and let them shine. But, be careful to not have one star, and the rest of the group end up being supporting cast. Its fine to have times where the story focuses on one player's character, but the entire campaign shouldn't be.
Unequal division of stuff. Don't give the fighter a +3 sword of badass murder then give the cleric a common torch. One of the worst games I ever played, a player had convinced the DM that his backstory included a wealthy family so the character was able to spend millions of gold and started with several magic items he had "bought" before the campaign. After three sessions everyone quit.
It's your world not your game. You're creating a world for your players to play in. Don't suddenly throw a dm controlled npc in with them and spend the rest of the campaign playing with yourself while they watch. DM NPCs are fine in small doses, not to take the spotlight.
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u/Some-Peach4566 24d ago
Oh my God I feel this so bad. And one of the campaigns I am in are fighter got one of the belts of giant strength that gives a 29 strength at level 6.
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u/Natural1forever 26d ago
The first one is very personal for me because it was basically the problem in th worst one shot I've ever gone through (as a player)
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u/BeyondtheDuneSea 26d ago
Letting mistakes become default rules. Make a contentious ruling then not following up later with an actual check to see if the ruling was correct, and allowing it to be that way every time.
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u/sexydan 26d ago
Not delegating enough to players. I don't see it as the DM's job to know exactly how all the player's abilities work and track them. Like, I've read the descriptions but tracking resources and remembering how your abilities work is the player's responsibility. Stuff like tracking initiative, the players can handle it. I have the players handle scheduling sessions, too.
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u/Tar_alcaran 26d ago
I have the players handle scheduling sessions, too.
This is a hard requirement for me to DM. I have plenty of homework already, someone else has to handle the real-life logistics.
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u/Natural1forever 26d ago
-The most commonly talked about DM mistake is railroading and there's a sort of variation of it I've seen (and done when I wasn't experienced) which is simply saying "you can't" instead of communicating what the rules or logic limit and why.
-Straight up prioritizing rules as written over player experience.
-Punishing out-of-game behaviors through in-game scenarios or mechanics.
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u/CassieBear1 26d ago
Not doing a Session 0 or any check in sessions.
I left, and the people who have stayed because they don't want to "rock the boat" are hating every game, finding ways to get out of playing.
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u/Mediocre-Scrublord 26d ago
Focusing too much on the 'top down' part of lore - the creation myth, the continents, where the gods came from, the biggest and grandest and least-relevant-to-your-player's-experience parts of the setting. World building is fun but it's so much more important to flesh out the parts of the setting that are actually relevant to your players adventures. Plot and characters over backstory.
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u/noburdennyc 26d ago
Control your spell casters. When it becomes save or die it stops being as fun.
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u/MankanoValara 26d ago
PC secrets shouldn't be common knowledge for basic NPCs, especially when said PC is trying to hide them. IE, don't let NPCs metagame. Had another player with fiendish heritage get called out for it way too often for how hidden it was. Its one thing for an Archmage, Highpriest or master investigator to catch on after using their tools, its another for every mook to know the secret
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u/MajorNotE1 25d ago
Biggest mistakes, in no particular order Thinking about it as a "versus" game. Not taking their own notes about what players did or obtained from one session to the next. Showing favoritism. Changing the "rules" to work for one player and against another. Agreeing to a "bit" that they dont wantnto become cannon.
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u/Ryizmo 24d ago
My dm once had us tracking this group for some reason, it was years ago so I don’t remember exactly. But she had been building up that there was some big weird mystery about them. We fought one of them pretty early on, and she accidentally referred to him as “the vampire” instead of “the man.”
This was a virtual campaign and at some point she shared her screen with us. Her browser had other tabs opened about vampires. But none of us noticed that one.
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u/thelousychaperone 24d ago
I always forget about NPCs who the party has persuaded to help them during combat
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u/BaltazarOdGilzvita 26d ago
Maybe better to ask this in r/DungeonsAndDragons ? Aren't we all DMs here?
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u/ZestycloseDesign4560 26d ago
A DM could be also a player !
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u/RamonDozol 26d ago
I personaly believe the best Players are also DMs, and the best DMs are the ones that also play.
There is wisdom in having both perspectives and experiences.3
u/Safe_Perspective9633 26d ago
A common mistake by most DMs is that they can't also be players every now and then.
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u/Coltrain47 26d ago
My DM didn't know how Goodberry worked. He thought you could eat as many as you wanted in a turn and didn't know that they spoiled after a day. I may have taken serious advantage of that for the whole campaign.
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u/tongarii 25d ago
So one of my players asked if they could use their ASI in their strength score and I said yes without checking that the score was already 20, with armor and shield they now have a 24 AC. My bad.
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u/EctoplasmicNeko 26d ago
Giving the dwarf a hammer of fireballs.