What's the worst DM bad habit you've encountered

[sjard]

Moved to Roleplaying in General.

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Yes, one of the key things that I learned quickly as a GM is that players always destroy your story, so you need to be flexible. One of the greatest complements I ever got as a GM is when players went off on a red herring, I winged it for the next five sessions, and the players congratulated me on designing an awesome story when they finished the 'mission', when it was all them. It is a sign of inexperienced GM when they cannot roll with the punches and adapt and a sign of a bad GM when they continue to refuse to roll with the punches and adapt.

Lots of good stuff here but this may be the best for advice, I have had creative parties totally go off the map, get lucky, or better just come up with and implement an idea I had not thought of or figured the bad guy wouldnt have. Those were the ones my players enjoyed the most. Not a slugfest but when they did something creative and won.

[WingedKagouti]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

-Favoritism -- not necessarily intentional, but paying lots of attention to only one or a couple of players while not giving a chance for the others to do things.

In my experience, this is likely a group dynamic thing more than it's the GM playing favourites (even unintentionally). Heck, "quiet" players may even enjoy not being in the spotlight as often as the others.

I'd only towards the GM if they always ask the same people what they're doing during a quiet period, when a major decision has to be made (unless they've been picked as the Voice of the Party) or if NPCs always approach/talk to them (outside Face PCs).

[Anders]

Had a DM who punished us for not knowing the system. We didn't know how the spells worked, and instead of telling us - or let us read the rules - he would have our spells fail horribly.

[Andrew Hackard]

During my freelance career, I was contracted to edit an adventure where the climactic scene was . . . watching the NPC solve a puzzle. My notes said, "This is a big room; can we add some bleachers so the poor PCs can take a load off while the NPC finishes the adventure?"

Ultimately, I think the developers decided to add a last-ditch assault by the bad guys so the PCs would have something to do -- protect the NPC at all costs is a time-honored technique and I have no idea why it didn't occur to the author in this case.

[Boge]

Originally Posted by Dalin

I got to observe an instance of terrible GMing last semester at the penultimate session of my classroom DFRPG activity at school. (Admittedly, these were middle-schoolers who are relatively new to gaming.) The GM had the party fighting a climactic battle against a dragon. They'd been fighting it for the entire session and were having trouble injuring it or hampering it in any way. At one point, one kid had her cat-person swashbuckler do an acrobatic leap onto the dragon's head. The GM called for a roll: critical success. Then she attacked it in the head with her magic sword: another critical success. The GM said that her sword bounced off and then she fell off and fell unconscious.

After the session, I pulled him aside and asked him what was going on. He said that they hadn't figured out the secret way to kill the dragon. I asked what the secret was, and he said, "I haven't made it up yet. I'm saving it for the final game next week!" Sigh.

I had a situation in a Western game. A character "Sid Cromwell" in fact, was terrorizing us in town. We got fed up. As he was riding away, I said, "I'm going to shoot him in the head." I rolled a 3 and was super excited about it. The GM said,"You shoot right at his head and the bullet hits one of the coins on his hatband. He escapes." I was so dumbfounded, I didn't even know how to respond to that.

[Boge]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Yes, one of the key things that I learned quickly as a GM is that players always destroy your story, so you need to be flexible. One of the greatest complements I ever got as a GM is when players went off on a red herring, I winged it for the next five sessions, and the players congratulated me on designing an awesome story when they finished the 'mission', when it was all them. It is a sign of inexperienced GM when they cannot roll with the punches and adapt and a sign of a bad GM when they continue to refuse to roll with the punches and adapt.

I have a friend that will often get upset about something. Maybe he gets beat up, maybe he just fails and his character looks like a fool and he's embarrassed. So he'll just leave, run away from the location where the campaign is held at the moment.

The other GM, who stands in sometimes, isn't all that experienced and he does what he can to reel this player back in, but the player is so stubborn he just says,"No. I won't answer my phone. No. I won't talk to that person. No, I'm leaving." Then he sits there all pouty about it. The GM feels guilty and frustrated because whatever he did ended up upsetting the player. Us other players sit there looking at both of them in silence, not knowing what we can do to help, and wondering if that's it for this Gurps campaign.

So, from a player's perspective, the player has some responsibility to try to stay within the lines. If they know that wandering away from the action will cause a headache for the GM, they shouldn't do that. You have to recognize the little things a GM is doing, trying to bait you into a situation, and you have to bite on it for both of your sakes.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Yes, one of the key things that I learned quickly as a GM is that players always destroy your story, so you need to be flexible. One of the greatest complements I ever got as a GM is when players went off on a red herring, I winged it for the next five sessions, and the players congratulated me on designing an awesome story when they finished the 'mission', when it was all them. It is a sign of inexperienced GM when they cannot roll with the punches and adapt and a sign of a bad GM when they continue to refuse to roll with the punches and adapt.

Originally Posted by Boge

So, from a player's perspective, the player has some responsibility to try to stay within the lines. If they know that wandering away from the action will cause a headache for the GM, they shouldn't do that. You have to recognize the little things a GM is doing, trying to bait you into a situation, and you have to bite on it for both of your sakes.

There's a difference. The player in your example is a bad player. They're making it not-fun for the other players. This is bad.

If I, as GM, give a red herring that I expect the players to follow for a bit, then realize it's a red herring and go back to the main plot, but the players begin to really drill into it because they're certain it's the truth, then, I, as GM, have the duty to continue telling the story they're interested in. Ziggy taught me that.

This isn't the real world. If your plot is so dedicated to following a mandatory path, then you shouldn't be playing an RPG you should be writing a book.

I can't count the number of times my players will be discussing something, in the open, and their "revelations" are so much better than what I had planned, I stole it from them. My story be darned--their story was better. So, I went with it. I change a little, so they can see that they were on the right track, but didn't have all the details.

Learn improv. It will save your GM-bacon.

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

During my freelance career, I was contracted to edit an adventure where the climactic scene was . . . watching the NPC solve a puzzle. My notes said, "This is a big room; can we add some bleachers so the poor PCs can take a load off while the NPC finishes the adventure?"

I'll be honest, I think this was an awesome way of telling the designers that there was a flaw.

Have I had stories where an NPC "won" the game? Sure. Was it intentional? No. It's usually comedic, where the PCs can't roll worth a darn but that danged NPC keeps getting critical success after critical success. During one of those events, a cheerleader character broke out her pom poms to cheer for the NPC because it was more effective than what they were doing. It wasn't intentional (and the players knew that), but it was funny.

Most of my worst GM stories come about from games where the GM is unfamiliar with what they're doing, and never communicated with the players what they were planning.

There was the Mutants and MasterMinds game that I had joined to finally get to play some super heroes, but the GM didn't have any idea of how combat or characters worked and kept looking to me to run combat and encounters for him.

There was the Star Trek game that the GM was trying to run more like Firefly and couldn't understand why none of the players made a character for that sort of game (we were all Star Fleet characters, because, well, duh). The players all looked to me, and thus was born the USS Red October with her Scottish captain, Marco Ramius (I don't feel bad about stealing that at all).

There was the Traveller game where the GM decided it would be entirely planet-bound and we would be on a lower-tech planet solving problems.

There was the Aliens game where the GM insisted that we play soldiers from the movie, and when we tried to deviate from what happened in the movie shrieked "that's not what you do!"

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Mark Skarr

There's a difference. The player in your example is a bad player. They're making it not-fun for the other players. This is bad.

If I, as GM, give a red herring that I expect the players to follow for a bit, then realize it's a red herring and go back to the main plot, but the players begin to really drill into it because they're certain it's the truth, then, I, as GM, have the duty to continue telling the story they're interested in. Ziggy taught me that.

This isn't the real world. If your plot is so dedicated to following a mandatory path, then you shouldn't be playing an RPG you should be writing a book.

I can't count the number of times my players will be discussing something, in the open, and their "revelations" are so much better than what I had planned, I stole it from them. My story be darned--their story was better. So, I went with it. I change a little, so they can see that they were on the right track, but didn't have all the details.

Learn improv. It will save your GM-bacon.

I've never really understood this way of thinking.

I don't see the job of a GM as having much to do with 'a story' .

Stories are what emerge from the interaction of characters with situations.

The job if a GM is to create a world, complete with characters and situation, and allow player characters to interact with that. A story is what emerges organically.

Deciding on a story beforehand feels like a pool player who knows the order the balls will go into the pockets, i.e. not a wholly honest pursuit.

[Phantasm]

Worst GM experiences so far as a player:

Stopping the game in the middle of the session for world-building because the GM didn't like the word "google" being used in an OOC manner as a verb meaning "to search the Internet" (such as the Internet was in that game). The GM gave sweeping top-down world politics in his setting doc, and his "logical" conclusions on the minutia of everyday life/tech were perpendicular to the players'. I can't remember if the next session happened; if it did, the one after that didn't.

A GM who had our PCs fight up a 30-story staircase to get to the climactic scene, only to have his NPCs - who arrived after us - already there and already defeated the BBEG/forced the BBEG to run away. So, what was the point of having us fight our way up when the NPCs have the key to the back door? Earlier in that campaign we ended a session while en route to free one of our contact NPCs, and the next session we started the next morning, the GM claiming "you never made it", and the NPC we were supposed to free waltzing into the scene having freed himself off-camera. ... And to top it off the GM didn't understand why we were frustrated.

GM has a PC hit with a spell that normally requires a saving throw, only to declare that because of his NPC's super-speshul NPC-only class there was no save against it. When he got upset with us asking questions and basically questioning the ruling, he said, "My game, my rules. Don't like it, leave!" So the four of us involved in that scene up and left on the spot. (I found out later he was bad-mouthing the four of us who left to the confusion of two remaining players who were not in on that incident.) Turns out that GM had a "if you're not munchkining things, you're doing it wrong!" mindset, and preferred players who were just as large a munchkin as he was.


And there were several other games where I made the exact wrong character for the campaign during chargen (characters the GMs green-lit), but that's at least partially my fault for not paying attention to the characters the other players were making.