My current gaming group originally got together back in the fall of 2018. To get the ball rolling, I volunteered to be the dungeon master. I was the one probing to see who would be interested in playing in the first place, so it just seemed like the natural thing to do. The thing was that I had never DM’d before, and I’d only previously played in a couple one-shots and guest-appeared in a few sessions of an ongoing campaign, so I wasn’t coming into it with a lot of experience. That said, I’ve always been one to learn a ton from my own trial-and-error so I figured I might as well pencil dive right in. Since it was my first go-of-it, I chose to run the classic 5e starting campaign, Lost Mine of Phandelver.
Needless to say, like any DM, regardless of experience level, I made my fair share of mistakes. As expected, I learned from my many follies, and since mistakes are best when they’re learned from, I carried over my discovered lessons into the next session as best I could. I also think it’s useful for us to read about the missteps of other DMs in a bit of detail to have a laugh and hopefully learn from them. I hope you enjoy mine.
(In no particular order)
Mistake #1: I Made a DMPC
I can hear your collective sighs now. For those of you who don’t know, DMPC stands for dungeon master player character. I did it for the same reason I suspect most do - I wanted to play! I made a character that I wanted to get into and play through an adventure as, but I was “stuck” as the DM. I let the players know in Session 0 that I was planning on doing it, and since no one protested, I sallied forth with my plan.
He was a Dragonborn paladin named Heel-Jah; a young golden-scaled knight of the Temple of Bahamut - awkward and falling into his role just like I was as the DM. As the sessions rolled on, the actions I was having him take in battle became strictly quick healing moves. The battles were dragging on as it was, and I was starting to see the writing on the wall that having ANOTHER hero take a turn each round was making the battles practically unbearable to finish. It also became obvious that I simply didn’t need an avatar for myself in this world because I was literally controlling every NPC in the game already. Having me try to inject myself in the game as a player character wasn’t working because he just didn’t feel like part of the party - he felt like an NPC to them because, essentially, he was.
I knew something had to be done, but I liked Heel-Jah as a character in the story, so while the party decided to explore Neverwinter Wood I had him disappear and reappear later as the hostage of one of the archmages of a necromancer cult I homebrewed in. After the heroes defeated the necromancer and burned down his horrible cabin in the woods, I had the celestial, Numalia, come down from the heavens and declare that Heel-Jah was to stay behind on a holy mission to purify the ground that the necromancer had desecrated. And that’s where Heel-Jah remained until my follow-up campaign where he became a proper, and very important, NPC.
Mistake #2: Being Too Rules-Rigid
I was a new DM, so what did I do? I tried to stick to the rules as best as I could. Doesn’t sound so bad, right? Well, here’s the thing - at the end of the day, RPGs are meant to be fun for those playing them, and what is enjoyable for one group may not be as enjoyable for another. This means that if it’s more fun for the group that a spell works a little differently than written, or if a monster has different abilities from what is shown in the Monster Manual, then it’s likely best to add a little different spin on things.
Here’s an example: my player’s young druid - a treasure-hunting Tabaxi named Pyewacket - loved the ‘mold earth’ cantrip. She used it at almost every opportunity. It bugged me a little, though, because she would try to use the spell beyond what, I thought, a cantrip could do (such as engulf goblins with the earth in a cave in order to take them out). So I shut her down. “No, a cantrip isn’t that powerful.” This kind of frustrated her because, to her credit, she was coming up with imaginative ways to use the spell, but I just stonewalled her usually.
What I wish I would’ve done in those instances was add a DC check to the ability. That way, it’s not a guarantee that it’s going to work exactly how she wants, but her imaginative use of the ability would have been rewarded. And this is the major lesson I learned here: players should be rewarded for being clever and creative. It’s fun and satisfying for the players and usually makes for more interesting storytelling regardless of how a spell is exactly described in the PHB.
Mistake #3: Not Understanding What the Players Liked and Didn’t Like
As I stated above, the best games are the ones where the group is having fun. The way I see it, one of the main goals of a DM is to maximize how much fun everyone (DM included) is having. This takes a keen real-life sense of perception of how the group responds to how you run the game.
I didn’t realize until later in the campaign that slow, tedious combat at low levels where most actions miss was low on the list of things the players enjoyed. Battle after battle, I noticed some of the players fiddling on their phones or simply zoning-out during combat sequences. I thought I might be losing them. Eventually, I realized that there’s better ways of going about these kinds of things.
First of all, if the battles were going on too long, then I needed to speed them up! I started grouping up enemy initiative rolls and implemented a timer for players who were taking too long with their turns. I also lowered the AC of most enemies so that there was less missing therefore fewer wasted turns. There’s nothing less satisfying than waiting 10 minutes for your turn, missing, and having to wait for your next turn to do anything.
I also began to reduce the number of combat encounters altogether since contant battling just wasn’t what they enjoyed doing as a group. The lessons I learned here heavily influenced how I ran my next campaign, but I’ll save that for a later time.
Mistake #4: Winging It Too Loosely
I like to add a fair amount of homebrew to my games. It allows me to better cater to what the players like (as discussed above), and, frankly, I find most published campaigns lacking. Homebrew makes the world feel more alive because I can literally make anything happen depending on the players’ choices, campaign books be damned. But, I’ll admit, I sometimes got kind of lazy with my homebrew. I didn’t always think things through, and it would get me into trouble.
I saw Matt Mercer on Critical Role once place a player in a dream sequence that foretold some kind of coming event. I thought that was really cool so I decided to try it out on one of my players, and I came up with a cryptic, imagery-filled dream that the player experienced while her character slumbered. The problem was that I had no idea what the dream meant. I thought up some ominous imagery that sounded eerie and weird, but had no idea how it was going to be relevant to the future of the story. I thought I’d come up with something as the campaign went on, but nothing happened that really fit what that dream could have been foretelling. In the end, it ended up just kind of being a dead end that was forgotten about, but if I would have just pushed myself a little farther, I could have come up with something that added to the fantasy realm’s sense of mysticism and intrigue.
Here’s another example of playing too loose with an idea: remember earlier when I mentioned the party getting lost in Neverwinter Wood? Well, that was intentional. I gave them a side quest to find the necromancer in the woods, and I wanted them to get lost to add to the sense of helplessness and anxiety the heroes would feel in a terrifying haunted forest. My problem was that I had no idea how this would work mechanically. I had them roll a couple of survival checks, but when they came up less-than-mediocre, I had them continue to wander aimlessly. This quickly began to fall apart, and it resulted in a stalemate where one of the players looked at me and asked, “What do we do?” I basically shrugged and eventually had them miraculously show up at their destination. Again, if I would’ve put just a bit more thought into it, that sequence wouldn’t have ended so awkwardly.
Mistake #5: Unnecessarily Clinging to the Source Material
For my homebrewed NPCs, I usually come up with either silly names that make the group laugh or some kind of implied meaning about their character (the healing paladin was named Heel-Jah. Healed ya. GET IT?!), but when it came to characters from the source books, I would pull their names straight off the page and pretty much regret it every time. Why? Because I hate most of D&D’s official character names. They’re often hard to pronounce and unnecessarily awkward sounding. Plus, the players had a much harder time remembering those.
Later on, I started altering their names or giving them entirely new ones that I liked more and that fit better into the theme and tone of our game. How the game feels and how it’s received by the players has a huge impact on how enjoyable the campaign’s going to be for everyone. Just like how albums and movies have particular tones to them that draw you in and add to the immersive experience, campaigns also benefit from environmental elements that make the world feel cohesive and believable.
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