DM’s Jollies

Here ChicagoWiz discusses more or less standing his ground on doing in his game what is appealing to him, and not giving in to player demands for what they find fun.

Although I think I am philosophically with him in that, historically I have tried to present things in my games towards player enjoyment. I’ve never really been a “killer DM” or gotten my jollies from “threatening” characters with my bag of DM tricks as is often prevalent among our kind . I think my focus has been on giving players the means to have a good time within the game context, because player’s enjoying my games is probably most of the fun for me. If they feel generally challenged by things, and are also feeling their character is “doing what he does best” and moving towards some as-yet formed destiny, it tends to be fun for them.

The game just sort of happens without a lot of conscious thought during the process of “I’m really enjoying myself!” (Although there have been exceptional in-game moments where I have allowed myself to savor some true bliss). It’s after the game, and during prep for the next one, that I let my mind wander to what I really enjoyed about it. But I can’t expect players to get that same feel. Players need to be palpably enjoying the experience during the game more than any other time. Otherwise it seems like a long time to be sitting at a table together.

Over the decades I have not experienced a lot of player complaints about not getting enough of some thing or another in games. I very rarely hear “we are in the wilderness too much” or “we are in the city too much” or things like that. I present what I am going to present, and players interact with whatever it is. Not necessarily because I “am that good,” but maybe because I am comfortable with any type of location or situation that might pop up in games. I’ve run entire campaigns in the wilderness (ranger and druid focused parties) and in civilization (thieves’ guilds). It’s all good.

Also, because I don’t often enjoy being a player myself, I try not to include things in my own game that I find a turn-off in others. Killer DMing, excruciating and fun-sapping overlong initiative and declaration rounds, and challenges beyond the group’s level are all peeves as a player that I keep in mind as a DM.

But as far as my own enjoyment as DM, it has been tested a bit here and there in my current gaming incarnation. My balls-up with an established Star Wars Saga group the other year is a perfect example of players expecting that the GM is “working for them,” to the point that they even patiently waited for me to leave at the end of a session so they could discuss my performance as a group (can you imagine?).

And in my regular group I have “Power Game Dan” and “Gimmi Gimmi Andy” (great foes of a player-friendly GM) to tussle with on a regular basis. But I get a lot of laughs out of these guys as well, so I don’t feel fully tested as far as an “overworked game master” for the most part. It’s become part of the game dynamic to successfully deal with sharks who go after a fairly easy DM. One hand has “hate” tattooed on the knuckles, and the other has “love” on it.

But bottom line, a GM/DM needs to look to what is fun for him. And if he has no fun whatsoever with games set in towns or whatever, it’s his prerogative to avoid those settings in his games. For the better part of the 90’s I barely had any true dungeons in my games because I had become so tired of them in the 80’s. And this freaking game is called “Dungeons and Dragons.”