Submitted by: Johnathon Wilson
If you’ve spent enough time rolling d20s, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a variety of different Game Masters, either at your own table, your local game shop, or virtually through people like Drew Hayes on the Authors & Dragons podcast.
In fact, this access to different styles of running the game is one of the things that makes our current D&D renaissance so unique. Whether you were playing AD&D in the 80s, or 2E in the 90s, it was unlikely you’d see another DM outside of your home table unless you went to a tournament or convention. This means that nobody had the opportunity to see professional actors and voice actors spend countless hours perfecting a campaign, for better or worse.
“My kingdom for a Mountain Dew!”
While this does mean that earlier generations were deprived of Silas Kane, it also means that DM’s of the time didn’t have potentially unrealistic standards to compare themselves to. In my time behind the screen, I’ve realized a few things that I think make my games wonderful for myself and my players, and I’d like to take some time to talk about how important it is to manage expectations for players and yourself as a DM.
The single most important thing I’ve learned is that the best way to play D&D is however everyone at your table wants to play it. Everyone has a little different taste for their balance of roleplay/combat/exploration, and for their expectations of what a session is like and overall game structure. Do your players want to be heroes of legend? Crushing evil underfoot and bathing heretics in their burning purity? Or do they want to get nasty and do some evil shit?
Pictured: Nasty evil shit.
Either way they spin it, a DM needs to know what their players are looking for so they can figure out what they can and want to deliver on. I find that players have the most fun when their boundaries are respected with regards to overall theme and limits, and their expectations are subverted with regards to immediate experiences. Subverting immediate expectations isn’t a requirement by any stretch, but at a certain point in any campaign some surprise is always welcome.
For instance, most of my players are looking for high-powered games with lots of combat. They want to roll a lot of dice and get those big crits bay-bee, but we also leave pretty much all sexual content out of it. We have little to no romance in our games, and absolutely no sexual violence even from the evilest of enemies.
“Roll initiative, motherfucker.”
We’ve had campaigns where we played as Evil characters, but even then it was more just a group of selfish assholes than truly reprehensible characters. Well, except for Archie the Necromancer, that guy was a fucking nightmare. Even with these pretty cookie cutter standards we have, I’ve still been able to surprise them with unexpected story beats.
One of my favorite examples is a party that was hired to kill a vampire and steal a magic flute from him. While he was an Evil vampire, their employer lied to them about what the flute actually was and their intentions for it, and that action kick-started some…less than favorable outcomes. So, while they still got to be heroic adventurers, they also neglected to do their due diligence and ended up making a bad situation worse. What I’m trying to say is that the DM needs to help the table find their lane, and then they can experiment within the agreed upon boundaries of that lane to provide a great experience for everyone. I’ll talk some more about how to specifically subvert expectations in a later post, as there are ways to accomplish this on a macro and micro scale, both of which are important depending on your goals.
Now that I’ve talked about how to plan for your players expectations, I want to make it clear that it’s just as important to manage your expectations as a DM. People often talk about railroad vs sandbox games, but I’ve found that outside of specifically themed adventures (mostly holiday themed one-shots that spawn into 6 sessions), most games are a blend of the two. The implication of this for the DM is that there’s going to be times when your players spend a session investigating a well instead of the dungeon you painstakingly designed. I think this is one of the trickier things for new DM’s to deal with, and part of the reason railroading is attractive. As a DM you put a ton of work into making something for your players to enjoy, and you want to be able to see them enjoy it.
When I first started out I avoided all of it by having my players be gladiators in an arena, as we were looking for an excuse to roll some dice and didn’t care about being painfully unoriginal. That campaign grew over time into something more than just a weekly encounter, something with genuine characters and consequences, almost all of which were dictated by the decisions of my players. My take away from the 5 years that game has spanned is that whatever we create is meant to be enjoyed by the players, and that as a DM we have to expect that the end result may not be what we planned. That doesn’t mean players aren’t grateful, just that they’re playing with your creation and testing it out. It’s a living thing this game, and while a DM may be the hardest working component, we are also just one of the components that makes it work. I’ve personally felt the frustration of feeling like my creation wasn’t being enjoyed the “right” way, and it’s taken reflection and communication with my players to realize that managing my expectations behind the screen is crucial to the long term health of a campaign.
That being said, the DM has to have fun too! If you aren’t enjoying yourself, then nobody will have fun, and why spend all that time and energy on something that doesn’t give back to you? What I’ve found is that there is an immense amount of joy at seeing my players fully engaged in something I created, something that’s interesting or challenging enough that they become lost in it. If I can create a place where they can have fun and disengage from the stress of daily life, well that’s a pretty big win for me.
