Observations on DM styles
After many years of Roll20 D&D campaigns, we have whittled the process down to the bare essentials: there are only three of us now, with one DM and two players running two characters each. Having completed many of the classic modules of our youth, we are now tackling an extension to the Mines of Phandelver - Shattered Obelisk. Because this is golden age D&D from when we were teens, we chose a classic lineup. My friend is playing a half orc fighter and wood elf rogue, while I'm playing the dwarven cleric and high elf wizard.
What is new for us this time is that the DM is brand new to the position. He's been a player forever but has never had the time to run a campaign. These pre-packaged modules make things quite easy though so we're delighted to finally get the forever player behind the screen so that the two normal DMs can really play this team to its potential. It's been a blast.
But what I realized yesterday is how different his style is, and that's what I'd like to discuss here. I come from a theater and Hollywood background as a screenwriter/playwright and character actor. I also have a ton of improv comedy experience. I'll throw out a number of story elements or NPCs and just cut loose, completely fine with where the dice and the player decisions take me. Our other usual DM is also a Hollywood guy, but he's a producer. So for him it's all about marshaling the resources, optimizing the setting, and conducting the grand scenario. He cuts right through all my roleplaying to get to the tactical play as soon as possible.
Well our new DM is a senior medical doctor at a teaching hospital. I just realized as we played last night that he isn't narrative in the slightest because he is presenting each of the scenarios or NPCs as if he's on his rounds with a knot of junior doctors, giving them a brief outline or quick synopsis of each patient's condition before moving on to the next. It's such a different way of approaching this kind of data that it took me a few months of this before I realized what he was doing. All of us are trained to our own methods, that's for sure.
How do you and your tables present information and move the game forward? I fear that the success of Critical Role, etc. has given too many newer players the idea that there is only one way to conduct these kinds of games and I'd like to hear of more original approaches.
I think the success of shows like Critical Role and other shows like it definitely do give a skewed impression of what a campaign is like and an even more skewed impression of what DM-ing is like -- not every DM needs to be an absolute master of improv and voice acting. But I think they play into broader problems with D&D culture more generally where way too much burden is put on the DM compared to other players at the table when it comes to engagement with the game and its systems, and I think the popularity of semi-scripted actual play shows exacerbates this. There can also be a tendency at certain tables of players not engaging with the rules enough to learn the basics and expecting the DM to essentially be a videogame engine for them, but that doesn't seem to be an issue at your table thankfully!
I've been getting more into the indie TTRPG space lately myself, though I do think part of why is that my tastes in gaming aren't super well-served by D&D specifically on either a mechanical or genre level, which is more of a me-thing than anything else. That said, I do think some of the games I've looked at do a much better job providing a GM with tools and guidance about how to run a session/campaign than others, and I wouldn't rank recent D&D editions particularly high on that scale. Perhaps that's better when running pre-written modules, though -- I tend to find games that rely on those more approachable but haven't ever engaged with them for D&D specifically.
Unfortunately most of the 5E modules are laughably bad... As an example, dungeon of the mad mage has, in the lair of the eponymous mad mage - a dungeon intended for characters of at least level 17 - a trap that does 1d6 damage on a failed dex save. 1d6. This for characters who certainly have over 100hp at this point.
More to the point, the modules just aren't written for DMs to use. I've seen a lot of people argue online that the modules are written to be read (not played), and that doesn't quite ring true... but it doesn't exactly ring false either. The contrast between your typical 5e module and something from, say, Delta Green is immense. The latter has vastly more information on NPC motivations and what actions they will likely take in response to the PCs doing something, for instance, while most 5E modules have monsters that stand around waiting for you to blunder into their rooms.
Funny… Dungeons of the Mad Mage was the last module we ran and… yeah… Little to no coherent gameplay to be had.
Honestly I’m tired of D&D myself. If I could convince my friends we would try a new system or go back to my homebrewed campaigns. But my friends are less experimental than I am and busier in their daily lives. So the extra work doesn’t appeal to them.
If anyone here wants to start a new campaign of something unique and strange, let me know!
DotMM frustrated me so much as a DM that I bought a bunch of different RPG systems in the search for something better than D&D 5e.
If you're looking for recommendations; Fantasy AGE. It's familiar enough to D&D that it should be easy for your players to learn and adjust to, but it avoids basically all the things that make 5e so frustrating. GMing Fantasy AGE is pure joy compared to 5e.
Yeah 20 years ago I was running only homebrewed campaigns with friends I had in town. Now everyone is all over the place and so busy that the appeal of prepackaged artwork and structures got us.
When my daughter was three we developed Princesses & Palaces together. The princesses only had three stats (strengths, smarts, sweets) and they had a giant castle they lived in that was under constant attack.
More recently, I developed trailgoblins , a rules-light RPG meant for 5 to 10 minute encounters while hiking. I’m always looking for new ways to tell stories.
Ooh both of those sound super fun!
I've run TTRPGs for over 10 years now and I feel like I've explored a wide variety of systems and played with a wide variety of GMs.
I completely agree with the sentiment that Critical Role and the subsequent actual plays that come from it have set some seriously skewed expectations for new players now. I've had situations I've had to sit one on one with players and go over expectations for the game which has gone a long way to help.
But I have a friend pool I've drawn on for a very long time where I'm always able to get at least a couple of people to jump onboard and play what I'm pitching.
That's a long intro to say that I think I hate rules in these games. The best games I've had are ones where it's people talking, not the dice.
I struggle to put into words how I present my games, but I'm going to try.
I like to take a setting or at least a theme and get some very light rules (re skin powered by the apocalypse or something). I'll jot down as many ideas and thoughts that come to me as I'm thinking about the idea to try and give me ammunition during a session, then honestly I just get some people and go from there.
I used to have a huge weight on my shoulder about having a coherent, over arching story but as the years go on I've found it's more and more ok to run by the seat of my pants and string it together between sessions.
I think the key to all of this is between the document I have with ideas and my players great input its usually really easy to just put the pieces together and make some incredibly cool stuff.
GM secrets
I think I would very much like playing with you. My favorite system now is something I came up with called bids and negotiations. No DM and no rules, just a deep familiarity with tabletop statistics and dice lol.
Example: “I charge through the door kicking at the first goblin and slashing at the face of the second goblin with my axe. I figure, with the increased difficulty, I would probably need to roll a 14?“
“No. That’s at least a 16. The second goblin is behind the first.“
“And I think it’s two separate rolls, a 12 and 15 to succeed.”
“All agreed. Roll!”
I wondered when you wrote your post how you played! Sounds like you guys have a lot of trust in each other.
To add to the GM secrets above, convince players to describe their actions not their dice roll.
It's way cooler and more fun to say "I try to kick down the door and run through with my swords swinging" "ok that sounds like a strength check" "uh oh i failed" "ok you run at the door and go straight through it, straight into two goblins ready to take you on two on one" than
"I want to do a strength check to open the door" "ok" "ok in failed" "ok".
Earlier this year I started playing with a roleplay heavy group and I'm still adjusting. All of my experience went gameplay first. Not in a murder hobo way, but no one really spoke in character. Inter-party conflict was non existent. If we found a cool magic item it obviously went to the person who could best make mechanic use of it. If someone has a sidequest, he's not going to need to convince everyone else to come along. That sort of thing.
Now I'm in a game where a character died and the player's replacement character basically got a 30 minute job interview to justify letting him into the party. Something that would have been like 2 minutes tops with my old group. It's a big adjustment.
What I find interesting about your post here is you sound unsure about it. Are you not enjoying the roleplay heavy stuff?
If not, thats ok! There's a huge population who love the mechanics of DND and dungeon crawling is their bread and butter, it might be you want to look for a different group again?
If I read the room wrong and you are enjoying it, sorry for the assumption!
My group rotates DMs quite often. The main three all have different approaches:
I like to have a beginning, some checkpoints in the middle, and a definite ending. I improv a LOT and while I would love to do voices I often forget to. I often get comments that my players appreciate that I give moments which highlight their character's strengths and allow for role play. I tend to be forgiving when people want to try something cool, but merciless in combat.
My buddy J runs much like I do, but has a much tighter structure to his stories. We both like recurring characters and settings. His combat is by far the best of us all, even more demanding than mine, but his rp is far more limited. We often have free reign on how to approach goals, but sometimes it feels a bit too open ended.
My friend T has very big, high level ideas. Inspired by Tolkien, she likes big "save the world" quests (J and I tend to focus on more local affairs, against a larger backdrop of events). This is really neat and often drives a lot of cool big picture things in our shared world, but means that sometimes it's hard to feel invested in her plots. The combat portions are mid, and while there's chances for rp we often feel railroaded - I feel she doesn't do well with improv. She's been really improving on the exploration side of things though, and the world she's created has an enormous amount of lore.
I feel this all works together very well. None of us gets exhausted, stuck in one role. We all get to be creative in our own ways. I really enjoy this group and this dynamic.
Interesting point on the voices. Do you try and do accents or just inflections or quirks?
I put a lot of pressure on myself to make all NPCs sound unique, and sometimes it's as easy as speaking really slowly or spea-king in syll-a-bles or soemthing. Its easier and has the same effect!
I mean I do try! Accents, inflections, everything - I enjoy doing it but I end up falling out of character quite easily when I have to switch gears to mechanical things ("wait can you roll a perception check?" hits different in my rough Irish brogue 😂)
Edit - My favorites are:
That’s excellent. How many players does your table have? Or is it just the three of you?
It's fluctuated - we've added and lost players as time has gone by. Right now we have a core group of 5 players, though we'd accept a 6th.
Currently, the group has been together for 6 years. J and I were there at the start.
I'm running Shattered Obelisk myself. It's my first time DMing but not my first time playing D&D. My wife ran one short throwaway campaign to try it out (a setting she called Dumbshire) and then Curse of Strahd.
I like to get into the RP and so does my wife and her sister but not all our players are equally into that. Including our now-15 year old daughter and her best friend. My daughter has said it's hard to get into character, and I'm sure having a table of adults doesn't help.
I like to do voices (I always have, since I was young), though it's debatable how good some of them are.
My wife is a published author of short fiction and has written but not published a ton of books over the years. I used to write a lot but mostly gave it up when it became increasingly obvious my writing wasn't up my standards. The point is, we both come at it from a writer's perspective. D&D is certainly an opportunity to indulge my creative instincts in a way that I have often neglected to in my adult life.
To some extent, as far as our styles go, my wife and I diverge less in terms of our priorities and more in terms of how much we let players get away with. I'm a stickler for rules and verisimilitude. She's looser with that. Does our table have a preference between us? I have no idea and I don't think there would be any way to find out anyway even if we were interested.
I'm still enough of a novice that I'm over-prepping like crazy. A lot of it with the help of ChatGPT. I certainly can't bounce story ideas off my wife!
As far as Critical Role goes, four of the seven people at the table are fans, including my wife and me. Only one of us, my wife's sister, has TTRPG experience that predates watching Critical Role. So how does that affect our games? I'm not sure. I certainly wish I had Matt Mercer's faculty with switching between voices!
As someone more experienced, what do you think of Shattered Obelisk? I know Justin Alexander thought it was terrible but I'm trying to make it work.
We are three sessions into Shattered Obelisk and so far it’s hard to tell about the success of the module. We just broke into a room filled with mobs—about 300 hp of them. Both my cleric and wizard fell, not for the first time.
I am trying my damnedest to succeed with an Illusionist but this is maybe my fourth attempt and I sure do spend a lot of time making death saves. It’s indicative of my trouble with D&D combat. Nearly every illusion spell is an INT save and if it is successfully made then poof there is no effect at all and the turn is a waste. As an improv veteran who hates when the response is “no!” (silence) this is bad game design.
My fellow player, the fighter and rogue, says his attacks can miss too and the solution is fast gameplay, which certainly helps. But it still rankles. If I can just survive a few more levels, the promise of a powerful Illusionist awaits but I don’t know if I’ll get there.
Have fun with the module and let me know how it goes.
You should ask your DM if you can run those spells similarly to shadow spells from 3.5. They're fully effective if the affected creatures fail the save, but if they succeed it drops to 20% effective.
Damage becomes 20%, summons only have 20% HP, and special effects only have a 20% chance of occurring.
I’m not sure if you’re trying to theme your spells as well, or just playing the illusionist subclass, but if it’s the latter the key is that single target save or sucks, suck. You want to pick spells that either always work, or are AoE, that way the average outcome happens more often
Wizards have the best spell list, and you never have to use a single target spell save. At first level, you have sleep - no save. At 2nd, you have web - aoe save or suck. 3rd, hypnotic pattern, aoe. 4th, polymorph (on allies). 5th, wall of force aoe AND no save.
Thanks for the advice and guidance. I generally try not to play strategically, but rather with verisimilitude. But I have to be more clever with this sub-class.
So I do play themes. Making sure to take most of the illusion and illusion adjacent spells but I have also taken up a second identity as a mentalist with mind sliver, mind spike, and Tasha’s whip.
But I know when things look rough my fellow player wishes I just had fireball. Although our most potent move so far is casting haste on his fighter and then, like, hiding for the rest of the fight.
My view on the theming is that it makes sense for people in a hostile world to know the best ways to keep themselves alive. Is it strange for an illusionist to know the web spell? I mean, it is one of the best wizard spells. And if you live somewhere where there’s a bunch of things that want to kill you…
Is it weird for an author or illustrator who hates math to know algebra to do their taxes? I wouldn’t say so.
The way I have usually approached the game is that most of my characters don’t have complete knowledge of all the spells in the world as a level one wizard. I really try to be sincere about how imperfect my knowledge is.
The other players at my table are more pragmatic. They talked me into chill touch as a cantrip when mind sliver wasn’t doing anything.
Sorry, I forgot you said you were a player. D'oh! This is what I get for writing responses on my phone just before going to bed.
I can imagine where your group ran into trouble. It's a notoriously difficult encounter in the original Lost Mines of Phandelver module and the Shattered Obelisk version is, strangely, even harder. Part of the problem is that the early levels of 5e are often deadly. I really wish Wizards of the Coast had frontloaded a little more survivability into PCs' stats. If this was a deliberate design decision, it's a bit of a confusing one. You would think things would start easier and get harder as they progress. If we were to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps this was an attempt to help players really feel their power levels increase as they level up?
Are you running 2014 rules or 2024? At level 3, I switched our group over to the 2024 rules. We've got a monk and a barbarian (my daughter) in our group, and I know they benefit a lot from the 2024 changes.
We are running 2014. My table isn't interested, I guess, in switching until we're forced to. Yeah, I keep hearing that Illusionist becomes game-breakingly powerful at level 14 with Illusory Reality. But making it there might be tough lol.
I mean Wizards in general is the best class in 2014 5e and it’s not very close - a subclass less wizard is better than most of the other classes. You shouldn’t really have issues getting there. It’s not 2014 zealot barbarian or anything.