Honestly, why do DMs feel the need to try and wipe the party? DMs should be hoping the party succeeds because the party is usually going to find a way to wipe without their assistance.

You also don’t need to make every enemy an idiot like a videogame. Monk catches an arrow? Archer wastes a turn figuring that out, calls it out to his teammates start of next turn and targets someone else.

A green dragon, depending on your source books, should be more than smart enough to notice its breath attack didn’t work on someone and change tactics.

It doesn’t work in every situation, like with enemies that shouldn’t be smart enough to figure it out, but there’s some great room for fun reminding your players that the enemies aren’t always braindead.

It also can add an extra layer to combat. Take out the commander that’s noticing this stuff to prevent it. Kill the archer before he can call out the monk caught his arrow, so another archer wastes a turn.

See, my question here would be “Why is combat boring in your games?” Because I see a lot of people try to fix D&D by focusing on making the most interesting board game possible, but roleplaying games aren’t board games, they’re stories.

For me, combat in systems like Shadowrun, D&D, WFRP, Storyteller and so on is boring because it brings the game to a crashing halt. The fact that it can takes hours of table time to play out a few rounds of combat in most of those systems is, to my mind, a far bigger issue than their relative quality as tactical gameplay experiences. Shadowrun tried to layer on more and more special moves and manuevers and combat abilities in the name of making combat more “interesting” and the effect was the exact opposite as so much more of the game became looking up the mechanics for the specific action you’re trying to take.

Combat should be fast and vibrant, and sometimes really scary. A firefight in Shadowrun - my go-to because it’s the game I run the most - should feel like a shootout from Heat or Ronin, or a John Wick movie. And it’s impossible to make anything feel like that when it takes an hour for everyone to get a single turn in.

This is just my take at the end of the day, but I don’t think the solution to boring combat is more or better rules. I tried that for years and nothing ever worked. What did work was finally shifting to more narrative focused systems with minimal, versatile rules that allowed me to treat combat just like anything else in the game. That way I could stop focusing on tracking hit-points and initiative, and I can make combat flow into the rest of the rest of the story in a way that feels natural, fluid, and visceral.

Usually it is one of two things. Either the person is just a toxic asshole who wants to fuck over everyone, which is not that rare or they think of themselves as a player as well a bit too much. While the Dungeon Master is a part of the game and a player, sometimes the line can get a bit blurred where it seems like the Dungeon Master is playing against you to win. Does not mean that they’re a bad dungeon master. Sometimes mistakes just happen or people get swept up, or other things they’re going on. Soft reminders like saying that you enjoy all playing the game together or other such language that makes it seem cooperative helps to extinguish this behavior from a dungeon master. Using language like you’re beating the dungeon master, even if it’s in a joking way, can instill that behavior in the dungeon master themselves.

I dunno if the new books do this, but when I started DMing, I was surprised that actually the NPCs are like a video game. They have rules for their behavior that dictates what they will attempt to do, and will be fairly stupid if you just do things by the book.

Talking is a free action. He’d say it right away.

I’ve switched to GURPS because the mechanics aren’t so combat-focused, but it has interesting combat mechanics too. A lot of people think it’s too complicated, but I’ve always started off super simple and slow-dripped additional mechanics as players get comfortable with the system and start actively looking for more crunch.

I do think it balances the super involved, tactical combat well by making rounds much shorter. Instead of 6 second rounds with Action, Reaction, Bonus Action, Movement, you have 1 second rounds that give you a single Action. There are ways to squeeze in a bit more on your turn, but it comes with trade-offs, like sacrificing active defense.

Active defense is also a great mechanic. Instead of just swinging at an AC, the defender actually gets an opportunity to Parry, Block, or Dodge. This means a lot less damage gets done every round, but that’s balanced by having way fewer Hit Points. I always thought people chipping away at each other’s mountains of HP until one dies to be kinda boring and unrealistic. In real fights, it’s generally a back and forth of attack and defense until an attack finally gets through and does significant damage.

And I won’t really get into all the details of the many different maneuvers available to you, or the techniques you can train. I’ll just say that it’s extremely tactical and provides for suspenseful combat with real stakes.

But by no longer utilizing poison against the party because of the monk, the monk has effectively made the entire party immune to poison by virtue of it no longer being present in encounters! Hah!

But seriously though, cutting out stuff you know the party will hard-counter is just going to make the party not feel as cool. A balance of both is important. Believe me, as the guy in the party who could cast Silence, I know; hard-countering every boss encounter kind of makes the boss feel lame instead of fun.

I have a character in a campaign DM’d by my buddy, and they’re a pretty weak build, as he was giving powerups to the party I asked for a much weaker change to my character that would let me make an attack while staying hidden.

Literally, the first time I got to try out the strategy, it was immediately invalidated, and I wanted to quit on the spot. The one cool thing my character could do I wasn’t allowed to do…

I think my biggest complaint might actually be that no matter what you plan to do, you’re pretty much always better off just bonking your opponent and doing damage.

Taking an extra turn to sneak around enemies and take them out stealthily? Hitting two turns in a row is better! Grapling an enemy to give your teammate a better chance at succeeding his attack? Still, two bonks will do twice as much damage. Healing? Complete waste of time as long as your HP stays above zero (and even then it only matters when you’re still down by the start of your next turn).

But I think my biggest paint points are not even combat related. It’s stuff like dark vision, spider climb, passive perception or Alarm, fly or breathless nature. A lot of characters start with these get out of jail free cards from level 1. 5e players will never experience the sense of dread and excitement that comes from exploring a deep windy dungeon with only a couple of torches that may run out at any given moment. 5e players will never struggle to hunt down enough prey in the arctic wilderness because someone will just cast goodberry.

DnD takes everything that makes the journey just as interesting as the goal and throws it away. There’s only this fight and then a long/short rest followed by the next fight. That’s really all the fun DnD allows its players to have.

Completely agree. Combat should feel fast and dangerous. With 5e It feels exactly like what it is. A bunch of sweaty nerds having a make believe d*ck measuring contest of whose made up character is the most awesome. But combat is far from the only problem here.

I’m somewhat glad that Pathfinder doesn’t have silence in the same way that dnd has and nerfed the shit out of counterspell as well. The second one makes it so much more satisfying when you get to do it.

Wrong. I’m perfectly capable of creating complex encounters. It’s just a fact that the system actively punishes any DM who tries to set up a FUN encounter because there’s so many special abilities that just simply solve any inconvenience at the cost of an action.

My players should feel rewarded because they managed to build a campfire from discarded boxes so that they have a steady source of light during an important fight and not feel punished because they picked one of the threeish races that don’t have darkvision.

My players should feel clever because they managed to fashion a pulley system to move a significant amount of treasure out of the dungeon and not because they just stuffed everything into their bag of holding and forgot about it.

5e is boring by design and making it interesting means fighting against the system every step of the way!

I feel like too many DMs play against the players instead of with them

The goal is not for the DM to win and feel cool

The goal is to let the players win and feel cool

time to change their title from buddy to acquaintance

The goal is to let the players win and feel cool

I wouldn’t use “win” here because that’s not always the case. I’d say’

“The goal is to acknowledge players decisions and show that their actions matter, regardless of the final result.”

I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree on a couple points:

Game design relies heavily on finding uses for the player character’s abilities. Imagine a metroidvania where you pick up a cool new grappling hook, only to realize there’s no terrain that can be grappled, and most enemies aren’t affected. What’s the point?

In terms of good/bad game design in TTRPGs, my philosophy is pretty simple; If everyone at the table is having a good time, it’s good game design. For my players, getting to use the abilities that they picked or earned throughout the game is super rewarding. For me as a GM, I can scale encounters a little higher knowing that they have a built-in edge.

In fact, my number one resource for game prep is my players’ character sheets. Did someone pick an obscure language as part of their backstory? You’d better believe it’s going to show up in the game! Dragonchess proficiency? Guess what the game of choice is at the local tavern?

Conversely, if an ability becomes the only thing a PC relies on, it can be interesting to add a foil to that ability. For example, one of my players built a Kensei Monk with a specialization in firearms. It was a fun character for him, but the sheer damage output he could do kind of overshadowed everyone else. My solution was to introduce a combat encounter where he could use the weapon, but doing so had a chance to attract more hostile creatures.

Anyway, all this to say that in my opinion, playing to your player characters’ strengths is not only rewarding for them, it can help a GM create some really cool moments.

That’s all we’ll and good but in my experience DMing, it takes a lot of work to prepare interesting outcomes for the actions my players might take during a pivotal moment. A player with a guaranteed success at something is usually something I try to avoid so they don’t feel railroads or like doing things that way is the ONLY solution. With 4 players I want everyone to have an equal share of interesting moments but when one person starts being a powerbuilding min/maxer I tend to build events from time to time that won’t let them just steal the whole show.

Unfortunately, because they are a min maxing powerbuilder they are keenly aware of any opportunity for which they should have been the most OPest of characters and will sniff out how they have been silently slighted. They lock on to the fact that they didn’t get to shine a few times while glazing over the times where they were OP because in their mind, that’s how it’s supposed to be!

Before you know it they start pouting, complaining to others, backseat rules lawyering, and just generally acting like they are being mistreated rather than trusting the DM to be trying their best to fit their fucking chadly, mind-controlling demigod in to situations with 3 other people who haven’t hyper focused for days on the most efficient use of their action economy.

I’m bitching sure but end effect was similar to this meme’s bad DM. I just stopped putting effort into letting the flawless demigod look cool because while he was A main character he was not THE main character and if that upset him… Well maybe next time he’ll finally learn why the actual best characters to play are the ones with lots of interesting flaws

I managed to work up an immunity to Poison, so our DM had a drow princess get one last action when she got to 0 hp to attack me with her only attack spell as I had severely pissed her off, and it was cast at 5th level

But her only attack spell was Ray of Sickness

“Wrong, I don’t reward players for being smart so it’s bad!” Dude my group went into town and bought a bunch of fertilizer and other things(because I checked and making explosives actually isn’t that difficult apparently) and that, plus a bomb-crazy dwarf we knew nearby, let us do some crazy damage to a golem.

You like a certain style of play, fine, but acting like that’s the only way to feel rewarded is showing your limitations, not the system’s.