Comments on: Do DMs make bad players?

By: Iain M Norman

Iain M Norman — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:54:40 +0000

You’ve described there Esspkay, in few words, exactly what my problem is in the main. It’s plot and wanting to get to the end of it!

By: Esspkay

Esspkay — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:53:12 +0000

I will let you know my thoughts when I finally get back onto the other side of the screen. Rules-wise I’m pretty lax, so I can’t see that being an issue. Plot-wise, however, I think I’ll always be trying to be one step ahead of the DM, trying to get to the end of the story before I’ve even experienced walking through it. I’ll probably also be busy stealing ideas for my own campaigns…

By: Iain

Iain — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:35:17 +0000

I’m glad it’s not just me! Beginning to sound like an Ex-DM support group. *grins*

By: Alric

Alric — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:50:46 +0000

While it didn’t make me a *bad* player, spending so much time as DM certainly limited how good a player I could be. On the plus side, it’s fair to say that I quickly gravitated to the role of party spokesman, and I did all I could to keep the party on track (something I always wanted from at least one player while I was DM).

On the minus side, your comment about “not having enough to do” was spot-on with regard to my play style. I fidgeted, doodled, even played solitaire on my laptop when nobody was looking (I tracked initiative and kept adventure notes on the laptop, so I always had it on).

I didn’t intend to be disrespectful by doing those things, but the game seems a lot slower when you’re not controlling it.

By: Iain

Iain — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:42:57 +0000

@Ravyn It sounds like novelist training

By: Ravyn

Ravyn — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:28:27 +0000

It’s taught me a great deal about show don’t tell, particularly since that was pretty much the only tool I had. When you can’t see your players, physical props are difficult, you can’t get anything across by gestures or pantomime, and it breaks immersion (a rather important concept to me) if you have to stop and explain that such a thing works a certain way rather than just being able to insert it offhandly in a pre-existing description. (Being able to self-edit helped.)

By: Iain

Iain — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:43:56 +0000

@Ravyn Do you mean DMing has taught you to show not tell and therefore impacted well? Or vice-versa?

By: Iain

Iain — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:42:46 +0000

@Sam You’ve hit the nail on the head there with the concept of control. I think mostly the reason is a small amount of ‘control freak’ and no longer being the centre of attention.

I am a bad man.

Acknowledging and admitting to that is a start though!

By: Ravyn

Ravyn — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:18:21 +0000

I was a player first; it took me quite a while to even consider DMing. But having served as a DM had a strong effect on my playstyle. Before DMing, I’d been rather hesitant, basically followed the plots people offered me. After, I started seeing it less as a plot and more as a mess of characters and events creating a vague sort of direction; I gained interest in interaction and characterization and lost patience with fights for fights’ own sake. Parts of my style grew from things that had frustrated me or that I’d been trying to avoid when I was behind the screen; I became proactive because of players who couldn’t make a decision without a plot hook, tailored the general lateral-ness of my ideas and solutions to what I figured the DM would accept, and learned to use just about anything as a tool from having spent long evenings trying to anticipate what sorts of things my players might bypass my events and challenges by exploiting. Having seen behind my own screen meant that I wanted to see what other people were doing behind the screen as well, to learn from them–and in one case, where my GM had been playing in one of my games for a year before he started running, wanted to know what was going on and make suggestions so it’d make for an even better story.

I also found that DMing, particularly in the play-by-chat format my group used, had side impacts on some of my other skills, particularly show-don’t-tell description–but that’s another story.

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:40:04 +0000

I don’t think they inherently do, but you have to be willing and able to give up the control you normally have over the table to the other DM.

I can’t say I’ve learned much from the other side of the screen though. I’ve barely ever gotten to see it.