Ten Common Mistakes of the Young DM

#10. What Happens In-Game Stays In-Game
In a game, things don't always go the way players had intended. There are feats which are impossible, and events they cannot stop, because it's out of their reach. If the whole party but one guy is KO'd and he gets killed, you can't do anything about it. You sent them a fiend which isn't overpowered for their rank, and if one there is in the campaign, you have likely made known through NPCs or other forms of warning that this is too much for their current capacities. Still: the character died, and the player becomes upset because, of course, he liked his character and now he has to roll a new one. Sometimes, this is it: the new character enters the game and everything's fine. Sometimes, the player somehow begins believing you killed his character out of spite. The issue extrapolates the game and it's you the player's mad at.

Now hold on there. This is a friendly game. This is not the Europe Cup of Soccer finals, your players aren't hooligans and you're not the referee. There is no reason why the player has to stay mad at you because he is mad at how the events turned out. You don't have to excuse yourself and he doesn't have to be a douchebag over it. Character death happens. More so if you've warned them it might, and they went in anyway. You don't have to pick a fight over it, and neither does he.

Another version of this mistake is when you take a day to pick on the character of someone you're not in good relations with. Suppose someone you don't like is invited to play, and you accept to DM for him. But in game, this guy is the most likely to step on traps, all foes gang up on him and the NPCs actively dislike him. The minute you agreed to DM for this person, you agreed to provide him with fair chances of success, just like you do with any other player. If you don't like him and don't want to include him in the game, say it out of game. Always make a distinction between you (person) and you (DM), and others (players) and their characters. Keep things from the game in the game, and things outside the game where they belong: outside the game. And believe me, if you can DM for someone you actively dislike properly, you're well on your way to be one of the finest.

#9. When Players Take Over
If you're a DM and you're beginning to assume your role, this is likely to happen. Your players have the freedom to do whatever they want... and sometimes, that sentence means exactly that. Especially if you're a first-timer and your players have more experience than you.

Never forget you are the DM. You are the one who defines what can and cannot happen. Within the game rules and logic boundaries (sometimes, not even that), you control everything but the characters' will. The characters may try with all their might to make something happen, if you've deemed it impossible, it's just not going to happen, and if it does, consequences will arise from it. Just because a player says "I head for the nearest river", you don't need to have a river appear in the vicinity if one wasn't planned already. Just because they say want to be in good relations with a given NPC, it doesn't mean the NPC has to be friendly and aid them from the start. That's what skills like Diplomacy and spells like Charm were created for. This is a world you're building, and unless it's an utopia, people will dislike your characters, be distrustful or even refuse to have anything to do with them. In the same manner, if the nearest river is fourteen miles away from their current location, all you have to do is say "within the first fifteen minutes of your search, you can't find a course of water".

You may want to cater to something you know ahead your players would like. You may plan a possible love interest for a given character because you know ahead its player would like one to exist. Or not. It's your call. But if the character has an interest on a given NPC and the NPC doesn't feel the same, you don't have to change the NPC to cater to the character. Impose boundaries, make impossibilities, don't let your players take over on what you have planned. That's what makes your game realistic: keeping a healthy balance between possibility and impossibility.

#8. Magic Can Solve Everything
You're not absolutely wrong in thinking magic can solve everything. Browse through the spell lists of a few classes, and even you'll start believing it. The problem is when the players begin to solve otherwise difficult tasks with magic, because it's available to them.

Magic is great. But it doesn't come easy. 20th-level casters are rare, and those who would be willing to aid your party for no reason other than "we need" or "it's the right thing to do" are even more rare. Masterwork magical items are hard to come by, even if there are specific merchants and stores where they can be purchased. And needless to say, a Ressurection scroll doesn't show up everyday and on sale, and a caster who can use it doesn't either. Just think about this: if gold alone could buy you both caster and spell, why don't the richest commoners make free use of magic? Commoners aren't all peasants: if the commoners can't buy themselves a few magical effects, then perhaps magic isn't as available as you'd think it is.

I once played a few sessions with a group where magic could do anything, to a point where their caster would freely polymorph himself a new face every hour or so. Because he had an item which enabled him to do it. On another occasion I DM'd a game in which a character, a caster, would overcome even the hardest tasks with a few magical effects, unless there was a No Magic Zone made permanent nearby. Just think about it: whoever made this dungeon, whoever made this trap, didn't they think a caster might be able to overcome it easily? Wouldn't they take measures against it? Spells sometimes can be used in innovative ways too, but sometimes they can't: I can accept the spell Shatter will work on ice, seeing as technically, it is a crystalline surface. I won't accept Shatter to work on common ground. If someone enters a magic item store and asks for a scroll of Remove Curse, it's perfectly doable for a price. If they ask for a scroll of Greater Teleport, the clerk is likely to laugh.

#7. Last Minute Change
Suppose you spent a whole afternoon planning an encounter between a given fiend and your party. Suppose you're feeling confident this will be one of the toughest bastards they ever encounter during the campaign, and are ready to reward them with the corresponding XP. All cool. But when you get down to it, one of the players found a loophole in your strategy, and your big boss becomes a walk in the park for them. Or a series of unbelievable numbers are rolled in a row. You're pissed. You spent a whole afternoon rolling up this guy, after all.

So what now? Of course: you do some last-minute rewriting which is not even on paper, but just came out of your head, and it turns out the party wasn't really fighting your fiend, but an illusion. The real one just cast an image of himself (a spell not mentioned on paper) to see how the party would attempt to beat him, and now knows better how to attack them. Players become frustrated, characters are infuriated, and you're ready to take a second shot at them with this fiend you rolled for five or six hours.

Seriously. Don't do it. One thing is realizing what you did on paper will not work, and take a while to do some re-writing. One thing is having your players take an action you did not predict, and needing to play by ear a little. A very different thing is being a sore loser. A better approach would probably be let them have the victory, learn from the loophole you didn't see, and prepare something bigger for the next session. Character victories always teach you how ranked-up and creative they are. From each battle, you learn a little more about what they can and can't do. Thus, it becomes easier for you to provide greater challenge as battles go. Always keep in mind your function is to keep the game going. The only way in which you're a loser, is if you lose the ability to do so. You're not here to kill them: you're here to provide challenge they can overcome, but may or may not depending on rolls and actions.

#6. Hint Hint, Nudge Nudge
Even the older DMs, people who have been directing games for years, can do this. Sometimes, the players and characters are at loss. Either there is a situation they don't know how to deal with, or a point in the campaign where the next step is not so clear. It is usually at this point they turn to the NPCs for advice: after all, the NPCs are the quickest link to the DM, and if the DM knows what they should do next, the NPCs may give out some sort of clue. This is what's expected, and usually what you deliver. Sometimes, players don't even need to ask, and there's already an NPC saying "I think you should do this and this next." You hint the players, in-game, about the next step. And, of course, this hint is always right and completely trustworthy.

This can turn into a habit, both yours and the players'. Eventually, they'll stop wondering if things can be done differently: they'll turn to the NPCs for advice and do exactly what the NPCs suggest must be done. And you'll never trick them by making the NPCs deliver bad advice, or advice which proves to be less right than they'd expect. This causes players to stop taking initiatives, and instead do exactly what you tell them should be done.

Me, I'm a sadistic DM. Really, I am: I used to belong in the Sindicate and all. I like to keep my players thinking. Some of the advice my NPCs deliver is right on the money. Some is just what it is: a commoner's two cents or the opinion of someone who isn't living through situations firsthand.

#5. Stop Acting Stupid and Go Back to Camp!
Players have all manners of quirk, because people are different, they have different tastes and expect different things from you. Their characters more so. And you need to keep present that no matter how much you plan ahead, your players are likely to do something different than you expect. And believe me, sometimes a bad call from a player can lag out or even ruin an otherwise perfectly decent campaign. One such, is when one of the characters, for some reason you cannot immediately perceive, decides to up and leave.

D&D is a group game, and most agree it goes best when the whole group works together. But "lone wolves" are very popular media characters, likely to be brought to game at a point or another. Or there may be a disagreement, in or out of game, which leads to this one member splitting up and going away. This is a pain in the neck: how are you supposed to provide a campaign for someone who won't be in the group? Your first instinct is to halt the game and tell the correspondent player he's being obnoxious and the game can't progress like this... but there's a better way. It's easier than you think, brother. I made this mistake, and now that I have a lot of campaigns under my belt, I know how I should've dealt with it.

First of all, if the issue happened out of game, see entry number 10. Stop the game and solve it, resume the game once it's solved. If it's in-game, solve it in-game. If the rest of the party doesn't care if he stays or goes, you're on your own. This guy wants to go away mid-campaign, he's a vulnerable target: keep the campaign rolling for him. See how far do they take the wanting to go away. After all, things will get stale for them very soon. And just because they walked away from the party, they didn't walk away from the campaign: they're likely to have encounters with foes related to the campaign just the same. If he ultimately refuses to join, make it simple: end the campaign for him with "and he went back to his hometown and was never heard of again". Then ask if he would be coming back, or if the player wishes to roll another character. If someone wants to play there are basic rules of sociability he must respect. When everything else fails, give him what he wants: going away.

#4. I'm Ready for My Close-up
If you're playing with more than two players, this is likely to happen at some point, especially if someone is playing with a new character and others with old ones, or if someone just joined your gaming group. Most player characters have a personal quest of sorts, very rarely you get characters who come from perfectly balanced families, never had unsolved problems in the past or are looking to reach some sort of goal. If you take in account a character's personal quest, he's likely to see a little more of your attention from time to time. This mistake is about giving a character and his quest more attention than you spare for the rest of your players.

The spotlight of the campaign will stop at a given character sometimes, it's just how it goes. And it's not always your fault: a character who most often takes initiatives, takes all the sidequests, provides good roleplay and who is more social will get the spot more often than one who is quiet and isn't big on taking initiative. Keeping the focus balanced between characters is something difficult to master. If you have a person who's been playing alongside you for years and four you never met before, it'll be hard for you to keep the same focus. Likewise, if you have an experienced and an unexperienced player, focus will fall on the experienced one. Try to keep either a balanced spotlight, or a communal one: make all quests solvable by one answer or goal they can achieve in a group. If you must give preference to a character at a time, make it so that all others have a chance to shine as well. That way everyone will feel satisfied they have leading part in the group and you'll have more opportunities to know the characters in-depth and better foretell their reactions further ahead in the campaign.

#3. Delicious Copy-Paste NPC
Some players notice this immediately. Anyone who is not the character has to be played by you: hence why these people are called Non-Player Character, or NPC. From the farmer the party asked directions from once, to the innkeeper they're on first-name basis with, from their antagonists to their allies, this including friends, neighbors, passers-by and love interests, you play all these people. It's a shitload of work, especially if the most of them can be recruited into the party. But then again, nobody said DMing was easy. You will sometimes make NPCs very much like each other, and most of them are very much like you: they like the same things, use similar lingo and act like each other. This makes players feel like no matter who they're talking to, it's the same person: you.

It takes less effort than you think to roleplay several different characters at a time. It's not in the major things you'll fail, but the small ones. Those little distinguishing feats that everyone has. For instance, give one NPC a fear of spiders, another one has a tendency to chew his fingernails, a third always talks too loudly and a fourth may be homossexual -whatever makes him different from the others is great, and tells more about their personality than you think. It's not uncommon for nervous people to chew on their fingernails, just like it's not uncommon for a very outgoing person to talk loudly. Just the same, someone brought up on a middle-class environment is less likely to curse than someone brought up in Hell's Kitchen. They are likely to use different expressions, have different world views.

Most young DMs are afraid to set up too many things on one NPC unless he's going to be a member of the party, for fearing they're creating a regular NPC circus freak. Well, just go out and take a stroll: the real world is a circus. So don't be afraid to innovate and give NPCs unique traits, likes and dislikes.

Another issue: if an NPC is eight years old... he or she is eight years old. Keep in mind it doesn't have the same understanding and language than a young adult or a teenager.

#2. Deus ex Machina
Sometimes it makes sense that your players will be saved from certain death by a cunt hair. An amazing roll can do this. Pre-planned, last-minute aid can do this. You can't do this. Your function is to keep the game going, but if death should befall your characters, they can't be saved from it by uncanny and unexplained godly intervention or sheer luck.

Between you and me, you don't really wish characters to die. After all, you have the front seat to this show, you wanna keep it going and you're rooting for them too. But be serious: if you're gonna save them anyway, what's the point of putting them in mortal peril? Having your characters saved from death too many times or ressurrected often takes the fun out of the game: they're not fearing for their lives anymore, they'll become reckless easy, victories become meaningless and so do losses, because these guys are never going to retreat, even if they're faced with something too big for them. They'll just continue to try, and as long as one of them remains alive, they know they can be ressurected no problem.

While you don't need to actively attempt to kill your characters horribly, you don't need to try to save their butts either. They're grown-up, mostly, they should be able to take care of themselves without DM intervention.

#1. My name is Merlin
This was mentioned as advice for people just starting to play the game in Hero Builder's Guide. Do not name a character after popular, already-existing characters. No Merlins, no Bilbos, no Raistlins, no Drizzts. Likewise, don't give them traits your players are likely to identify immediately. If you have a magician with hourglass-shaped eyes and your players are all familiar with Raistlin Majere, they'll assume it's the same person with the same personality and a different name. They'll treat your NPC just like it was the canon character if it has the same name or characteristics.

You also want to avoid special cameos. Cheers this ain't. You may be playing in a setting where characters like Merlin, Morgaine and King Arthur exist. That doesn't mean your characters need to interact with them or even meet them, like the actors of a given sitcom would interact with and meet a famous baseball player doing himself on the show. This is a world ruled by you, don't be lazy, create your own NPCs. Mentioning them is cool, and your players may even realize they're dealing with similar people to those from legends, shows, fantasy books and cartoons, but from the minute you let them think it's a copy-paste of the same character, they can predict actions and thoughts, or even the demise, of characters they've just met. It takes away the surprise element. It's a bad idea overall.