5 Bad Habits Video Games Teach DMs

There are a lot of great lessons we can take from video games to improve our dungeon mastering when we play D&D. But what are some of the things we shouldn't try to copy over from the genre?

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[nfnk]

In videogames having chatty enemies is really too expensive to do for most combats. In an RPG space most monsters can talk yet very few DMs actually have your random semi intelligent monster get a voice.
Let them talk, have fewer monsters be hostile, let some monsters be indifferent to the party or be lightly helpful even if the monster are "evil"

[solaries]

I think Main Character Syndrome is a big issue as well. In a TTRPG you shouldn't expect everything to revolve around you.

[thedragonknight]

One thing I think both players and DMs fall into from video games is that if there is an enemy they musty be killed to progress. When the reality is there is a number of ways things can proceed. A Paladin can use his Lay on Hands to cure diseased wolves, ending the pain they're feeling and most likely resolving the issue. You can talk to ogres, negotiate with goblins, and beg Green Dragons to spare you. But we've all be trained that if an enemy is in our way, they must die for us to progress.

[PlehAP]

Notes on the "not creating solutions" point.

1. Puzzles with no solution can *also* stump players and grind the game to a halt. Having a few ideas about how you think your puzzles might be solved can be helpful in developing puzzles your players can quickly resolve. If *you* can't think of a solution, your players might not be able to either. The way to avoid removing agency is for these solutions to be *descriptive* notes for yourself and not *prescriptive* mandates the players must suss out and discover.

2. Often puzzles are created deliberately *by NPCs.* If a character created a puzzle, they likely had a solution in their own mind, even if the players outsmart the puzzle and solve it an unintended way. If a character made a puzzle, the DM should know at least what the puzzle crafting character was thinking. If not, it may become apparent to the players that the DM contrived a puzzle for no other reason than the metagame, breaking immersion.

[RyanZibell]

For my homebrew campaign, I try to give my players the chance to recap the story so far, and it tells me what they most payed attention to and what slipped through the cracks. I also gave one of my PCs the ability to ask his deity one question each day, which i would answer between sessions. The answer usually takes the form of a poem/riddle which is more complex the more specific the question is. The setting is sort of a serf revolt with a little bit of DC comics Flashpoint thrown in. The point is, the plot can change to fit the players, rather than forcing your players to change to fit your plot

[Raykkie]

The "sponsorship" bit was really cool, kudos to you

[MinecraftLovesSteve]

When I create puzzles, I create a solution. Then, I use said solution to gauge how likely or plausible the players insane solutions are. For example, if a door to a thieves guild hideout HAS to be picked as not even a key can unlock it, but the party doesn't have thieves tools, I'd allow them to use a hammer and chisel to break open the lock and it would be a moderate strength check.

[zendikarisparkmage]

0:24 Low Stakes Combat
1:49 Low Risk Puzzles
3:13 Plant Some Trees
5:28 Solutions Before Problems
6:36 Perfectly Scaled Encounters
8:03 Linear Dungeons

[KnarbMakes]

My players sometimes ask me what I thought the solution to a puzzle would be after they solved it. And I just shrug my shoulders, haha.

[f.a.santiago]

For one of my sessions, I had my players go in through a dungeon. They avoided most traps as they rolled VERY well. One of the things they succeeded in was perceiving a slimy, shloopy, slushing sound coming from one of the corridors. They decided to go in a different direction and actually found their way straight into the area where the macguffin was located.

After claiming said macguffin, they were making their way back out of the dungeon, only to realize that the fighting had attracted the source of the shloop, a huge mass of acidic slime in a rather cubic shape.

They almost don't make it out of the dungeon because the gelatinous cube was about to occupy the only entryway of the corridor leading out of the dungeon.

They were scared, I was so happy.

[lysytoszef]

The "world is paused until players trigger it" syndrome. In video games, entire world waits for the characters to progress before important events take place. In real-life RPG, it is much better when DM keeps the world moving, regardless of any actions (or inaction) of players, otherwise it will feel very fake and immersion-breaking.

[Keaggan]

Players too pick up bad habits such as thinking skills are "powers I press with a button" rather than tools to see what happens.

[LordSephleon]

I've seen all of these bad habits at work even when I started TTRPGS with AD&D 2E back in '95: a friend of mine (and part of my longtime group) took up the mantle of DM for the first time in '97, and it was clear that he was running the game like a video game despite having come up with an entire detailed world complete with a multi-page map that took up his kitchen wall (and that we affectionately called "Kitchen World" or "K-World" as a result). His dungeons weren't nearly as linear as Skyrim's, though, as he played a lot of JRPGs like Final Fantasy; I'll give him credit there.

On a side note: Elder Scrolls dungeons went the complete other direction after Daggerfall: those mid-90s procedurally-generated dungeons are still tense as hell to wander into, especially if you decide to be brave/foolish and enter a random dungeon that you have no quest/info for, and you suddenly find yourself beset by a bunch of angry Nymphs and their charmed henchmen (or worse). But they give a better feeling of TTRPG dungeon than most games I've played before and since... even if they're ridiculously convoluted and the in-game map is a mess of surrealistic polygonal art.

[arockstar]

The most fun part of DMing is hearing how other players solve problems. I usually have a solution in mind in case no one can think of anything, but it is a joy when the players solve something in a way you never thought about.

[MegatronYES]

I have a “rule of 5” that I have long used when building content. It’s basically just coming up with five different likely PC responses to every obstacle their game presents. Rest assured they will often do THING SIX out of five, but I always hve enough prepared content to patch together a proper contextual response to their crap

[Discordie]

Credit for being honest about established titles, and not just quietly dropping the sponsor. I'm glad Scott outted their decorative marketing practices.

[CraftNicks]

Great advise! Knowing when to draw the inspiration and when to recognize where the design of video games doesn't translate well at the table is definitely an art. I feel the timer like you mentioned is a DMs best friend. Great video!

[michaelcrumlett]

I really like to use the time factor and unbalanced encounters with intelligent, tactically adept enemies. When goblins aren’t content to wade into a melee slog, but use terrain, cover, fire and move tactics, and orderly (or even feigned) retreats, they become seriously formidable. Ditto kobolds with their pack tactics, ranged attacks, and close air support (urds) coordinated to negate any advantage a party may have.

[evangoodell]

This was a good one - helped me realize I may have been trying to bake in VG logic into my games when TTRPGs are a very different beast altogether. Better to look at the PCs and enemies as PEOPLE instead of individual storytelling "elements." Set-up is key, then let the players loose.

[athenabrown]

This is outside the scope of this video's topic, but I do think in Fallout or Skyrim, having generic Bandits/Raiders is actually quite a bad flaw there, too, particularly since they are RPGs which are meant to have stories and worldbuilding at their core.