If You Do Any of These 10 Things - Don't DM!

Thanks for watching! What are your biggest bug bears when it comes to dungeon masters? What traits do you think make for a terrible DM? Let us know in the comments below!

1 - Literally, the first Tabletop game I ever ran was Paranoia. I think I'm good on this one. When the party is walking through a door made of mint ice cream, only to later be rebuked because their clearance wasn't high enough to walk through the door, I think that means the DM doesn't take themselves too seriously.

2 - Why is this even a thing? The point of creating the stuff is to watch it be destroyed or changed by the actions of people who may act unpredictably. That's half the fun of D&D. Let the players tell the story, folks.

3 - I'm going to put this together with #2, because these two things are kind of the same thing. If you're preventing the players from destroying your world or changing your world, you're railroading them too. So avoiding one will incidentally avoid the other.

4 - I put this together with #1, because it's kind of the same thing too. If you aren't taking yourself too seriously, you'll probably pass this one too.

5 - I mean, that's usually the inevitable outcome. Someone you spent time creating is going to be killed off by the players eventually. That's what happens in D&D (and also most Tabletop games). Now granted, I wouldn't allow the players to just become murderhobos and kill literally everything in sight. But if you're sending them in with or against a key NPC, that kind of thing is probably going to happen at some point.

6 - I always have notes on important things to keep track of. I might make mistakes here and there with little things, but any time major events happen, you'd better believe that I'm going to remember them, and so will the rest of the world. If you jump in front of Sweetie Belle and take a hit for her while Celestia and Luna are present, that's going to get somepony's attention.

7 - This is another one of those things that should be obvious, because it falls in line with allowing the players to tell the story, which is a sign that you have a great campaign. If the players are narrating to you what is happening in the story, that means you set up the stage perfectly for the actors to act. Listening to the players is mandatory for this to even be possible.

8 - There are some exceptions to this, because there will inevitably be situations where two people will be talking at the same time, or where one player might say something and you might not hear them because of background noise, and might need them to repeat it. But yeah, you need to let the players talk. This one can almost be put together with the previous one.

9 - This one should also be obvious. It's up to everyone to create the fun times, and this is just done by making sure everything else is being done. If all of the other things are happening, this should happen automatically.

If you have watched this video and now consider yourself a bad DM - i recommend you considering reading what i outlined below. That's a pretty long comment I wrote, but I feel an urge to share my experience. Because I felt shitty after watching this video and for a moment even thought about quitting DMing and TTRPG. And it took time for me to reminisce all that good experience I received, when I DMed, all that joy and happiness we got in our campaigns.

"u're a bad dm if u don't want to torture npcs, u're a bad dm if you take uself and ur world seriously, u're a bad dm if you don't like it, when they make fun of u and what u do..." - well, I can only wish the author of the video good luck with dming a group of murder hobos, i guess. I find this wrong on so many levels.

where does this come from? Why should I hate my NPCs and predict my players torturing them? , normal people don't want to stab people and rob people and destroy taverns and rip and tear and torture... I believe, in modern society exists this myth about violence and people's need of it. When they asked Martin McDonagh why his plays are such a bloody mess, he answered that he just satisfies a human need of cruelty and destruction. Or was it Irvine Welsh... or Chuck Palahniuk... Whatever! What I want to say - they are all wrong. There is no such need in our lives. I watch a D&D campaign, in which the players don't dungeon crawl - instead they talk to the BBEG, solve their problems and invite them on board of their ship. And is's fantastic.

In russian TTRPG community exists a term. «Анал-карнавал»⁠⁠. It's literal translation is "anal carnival'. It's basically a chaos, caused by murder hobos' actions. "I beat goblins to death and start beating other goblins with dead bodies", " I push a fist into her vagina", etc. When we gather together with my group mates from the university and I hear from a player is "I approach [another player's character] and beat him" - I can't think about anything but "I am twenty years old. What I am doing with my life?". I have an answer to this question, I'll give it a couple paragraphs below.

You might say: anal carnival is a disease, cured by time. People explore what they can do in game (and can't - in real life) and become monsters, it's ok. Then they turn from newbies to normal players and become adequate. Well, I strongly disagree. I DM since I was 14, I play D&D since I was 13. I NEVER was a murder hobo, even when I was a newbie. I did childish things - but not monstrous. And when I DMed for my players (some of them were newbies) they behaved adequately and sensibly. There was no murder hoboing in my Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign. And not a single NPC was tortured. And I never waited for players to grow up.

It wasn't only D&D that I played. I also played text games at a discord server using homemade system and homemade worlds - and it was amazing. I DMed for 10 people in one campaign! I DMed solo games too - and those were the most beautiful games I ever attended. Half of the server watched us playing - and there was everything in our games: fun, drama, intrigue. And even romantic things. And it was not even cringe; it was touching and delightful, though we were men (it's especially important in Russia; though, the characters' sexes differed). And there was no anal carnival in those games. Players didn't destroy my NPCs, we admired the atmosphere and the plot and the tone of the story. My other forum campaigns included some unnecessary violence (after all, the characters survived an airplane catastrophe and a fight in the free fall - I can understand why they robbed that egyptian store. Yes, the whole campaign was a jojo reference). But . That's, by the the point of the second part of my speech.

To sum up everything in the first part: my point here is that it's perfectly fine with anal carnival being unacceptable in your games. It is absolutely fine to punish your players for making mess, chaos and dirty things. Your game has it's tone, and your players must accept it. If somebody is not fine with the tone - it's time for them to quite the game. They might not like it, but that's their problems, don't care about them. "You won't be a good guy to everyone".

Second of all, I absolutely agree with the last points the author notes - take notes, don't interrupt people, leave the players their agency (don't decide by yourself what their characters do), don't think of yourself as a key person in a group. This is all fine, especially the last one. And I believe, that's the key point. Fun is everyones' responsibility. It is not DM serving the players, it is not players silently appreciating all the DM's. It is everyone caring about each others and admiring each other. .

You are the DM - and a player too. Just like other players, you should understand, what you expect from a game. What you like in TTRRG. Once you get it, you gather together and talk - it's called a zero session. And you decide with your players what your campaign will look like. If someone doesn't like something - they quit. That easy. Right after zero session - or in it's middle.

I am not even speaking about "stop" themes. I knew a DM, who didn't balance encounters well, so several PC were beaten by robbers during his campaigns (he used a lot of encounters with robbers in his campaigns). This DM considered, that robbers wouldn't kill beated female PCs; instead, they would rape them. So the DM raped several PCs during his sessions. I would never join his campaigns, but players were fine with this - so they played and got their portion of satisfaction. From their teammates being raped. They thought, it was funny.

Remember I asked, what I was doing wrong with my life? The answer is: I played D&D without zero sessions. I played with players I didn't want to and wasn't ready for. My last D&D campaigns ended quickly and inglorious. I started browsing english Internet to understand, what's wrong with me. I found this video. I started thinking. "What if I take myself too seriously? What if I care too much about our games? What if my ego stops me from having fun? What if I am a jerk who wants to control every movement of my players - and that's why none of us has fun?"

And i started reminiscing.

D&D 5e, Forgotten realms. PCs enter Icewind dale and meet a Godfather-like walrus, who asks them to save sentient animals from wolves, enraged by hunger. Players like it so much, that one-shot turns into a campaign.

VtM Revised, USSR vampires. A comedy adventure: PCs must prepare a corporate party: find blood, find singers, find place, write and send invitations, prepare musical program. Every single player laughs so much he can't breathe.

Homemade system, homemade dieselpunk setting, inspired by polish artist Jakub Różalski. PCs stop at a village at USSR and chat with common soviet folk - kind, cheerful, grateful, naive. They spend a night there and then sneak into nazi underwater base and destroy it, summoning demons from the portal nazis were studying. Every single player is fascinated and charmed by the atmosphere.

No, I'm not a bad DM. No, I didn't expect my players to kill my NPCs. And they didn't. Yes, I love my NPCs, my worlds, my campaigns. And I love my players.

if you have watched this video and now consider yourself a bad DM - Not every player party is a murder hobo. Not every D&D session is an anal carnival. You shouldn't prepare for your NPCs being slaughtered. You should prepare for them being not. Have a zero session. Find friends and play with them.

Good luck!
With love, from Russia


P. S. they don't teach us english punctuation in schools, so I use rules of russian punctuation here. I know it's wrong, but it's better than no punctuation at all, ain't I right?

I would argue there's an enormous gap between taking oneself seriously and taking oneself too seriously. I take myself seriously as a story teller because it is an enormous part of who i am. I love telling stories, and it's really important to me. It's important to me to build a world that the players can immerse themselves in and have fun in, and i take that seriously.

I wish my players would have wanted to destroy the things I created.

They didn't even want to interact with the things I made. They just wanted me to make more things. Dungeon over there? We're not going in. In fact, we're going to completely ignore this request and go over to an entirely different area that you haven't developed yet, because I don't know why. There was no inkling that there was even anything over there to interact with. They didn't contribute to the world in any manner. It felt like the entire campaign was them just taking a tour of the world I built without telling their own story or interacting with any of the NPC's I made to fill it out. Every session felt like them just handing me more homework to create more and flesh out more but they never interacted with any of it.

Was about 3 sessions of that and I called the campaign there.

If you want to be a GM, you need to know when to just kill the game.

Great advice but I think that for people with ADHD and axiety most of this topics are things that are difficult for us. But I do agree on everything he said. Topics like the ones he said have to be interpreted as a person that really just dont cares about the game and its a ignorant person, not a distracted person. I do a lot of this things infortunetely bc of the ADHD but I always trying to pull back to the game to be consistent. But said all that, yes, if you are not a good listener and you dont want other people be the center of attentio rather than you, just dont GM...(this comment is not a critic of what hes saying, I just commenting to say, if you disliked the video bc there stuff that you do but its bc of a thing that its not of your total control, think of that as a advice of thinking how you manage all this). For me is really difficultt preparing and having notes of the sessions, but I still make the effort to do it, so, even if you will have to be off your confort zone and you really want to become a GM to have amazing stories with your friends, do it! Its hard but its worth it :)

I very much agree with all that. I can relate on number 3, I often have to re-write the scenario because of it. When I'm alone, writting the story or the idea of it, I don't realise that. And i have to tweak it afterwards to adapt it so players can actually have "their role" in it. ^^'

Dang I can’t believe that I need to stop DMing because I eat lettuce 😂

This guy is really annoying. One or two good points but otherwise vacuous proclamations which I can't see helping anyone. Oh well. YT recommendations can't always be accurate.

Once, my party stole a pirate ship from a dock, went on a mission for a few days, then came back to the same dock.
But, when we were getting close to the docks, I got intrigued and asked a question to everyone: "We stole this ship from this place, what if the people we stole from are there waiting for us..?"

My GM proceeded to laugh and clap loudly(not sarcastically) because I had just torn apart everything bro planned for us in that session.

Looking back at it, it's a common question in such a situation, but no one had this realization, not even the GM, and I had it in the last moment.

Sometimes shit happens lol

You make some excellent points. I feel many of these are symptomatic of the "game leader" mentality that's been propagated since Gygax at least (I love him but he did have his faults). I'd love to see more propagation of collaborative roleplay systems that dodge these sort of obstacles but I'm fully aware they face their own... much like capitalism v. communism there's no real easy answer. At the end of the day "don't be full of yourself" is good advice, not only for gaming but life in general.

I'm a first-time DM playing dnd5e with first-time players, currently preparing for our first session

For the first main quest only, I'm giving them maps with numbered rooms for no reason other than to encourage them to explore and pay attention to the various things in the world

My brother, who is a much more experienced dm, told me not to do numbers. But after explaining that all my players are ALSO first-timers, he agreed that I should try to encourage them to search around

1. If you don't ask the players to bring snacks, don't be a DM
2. If you don't eat the players' snacks... don't be a DM. Rude

I think you need to have some kind of seriousness to the game, if you don't it just turns into a silly mess.

This is great. Those are the exact kind of DMS that cry about metagaming. They always complain about losing control of their game because they don't know how to deal with their own personal issues and just have fun with it.

This type of videos is really off-putting for newbies. If I had seen this before my first game as a DM, I would have been super stressed.

I feel personally attacked by number 9. 😅

I had a really rough time with splitting myself from my NPCs, and also my PCs when I was playing in campaigns, but I found the easiest way is to make a character that is wildly different from my own personality.

P.S. If you're seeing yourself in any of these, be happy! You're aware of an issue and you can always work to fix it. Better than being unaware and letting it continue, don't give up budding GMs!

You are anamazing content creator and fully experienced DM but I think that the message of your video is not true. If you are any of these, please be a DM. Personally I started DM-ing very young, made a lot of mistakes and DM-ing helped me improve not only as a DM but also a person. I think no one is born as a DM. It is a series of glorious trials and embarrassing errors.

Welp I guess it’s good that I don’t take myself seriously and let the players take the reign of the story.

I can understand being unhappy and upset that your players destroyed an entire encounter without trying, thats fine. The problem ive seen is when the Dm takes it out on their players or like you said #1 taking yourself wayy too seriously.
Ive had numerous games where we steam rolled through our Dm's encounter and he would be upset in some way but never take it out on us. He would instead joke about it and say he didn't think it possible but we'll move forward onto the next thing ya'll want to do. Because he understands that it's going to happen especially in the world he created. He wants us to do whatever we want and knows that this is a world he created for us to carve our own story into which he loves. We've come across many refferences to old characters or even characters of another party he Dm's for that takes place within the same world but usually a different city/area. Weve become so invested within this world that we started adding lore to it and helping him build it out for us to explore 😂 its awesome.
Sorry I went on a rant but I agree with pretty much everything here, just some things might need a little bit of clarifying.

So I'm running a game with 8 players. It's all people i work with. I put out there that i was wanting to run a game but was NOT expecting 8 people to show up. I also didn't want to tell anybody no, because only 2 of those players have ever even played before and i wanted everyone to have a chance to decide if they like it or not. I'm trying my best to put together a Survivor(like the tv show)/Hunger Games style campaign.
That being said, we limit outside of battle turns to 5 minutes. We did all talk it out and agreed to the limit. As a matter of fact, I'm not the one that came up with the idea at all.
After watching your video here, should i do away with that rule and just let the players do their thing?

My hat (and yes I am a literal hat-wearer) is off to you, sir! I originally clicked on this video as clickbait with the attitude that it was a challenge. I have been DMing for 41 years and I get paid to coach other DMs, so I wondered 'Who is this guy to say what good DMing is?" and "I bet I do most of the things he's against." I WAS SO WRONG! I watched point after point, 1, 2, 3,....so far so good, point by point. YOU NAILED THIS! You just earned an enthusiastic subscriber. :)

One of my fondest memories as a GM was watching one of my players (it was his first campaign) completely destroy my BBEG’s last trap. We all laughed because it was brilliant!

Dont tell me what to do rat tail.

I was on an online dnd type thing talking with other dms and one of them said that "running a game isnt supposed to be fun for the dm, its supposed to be fun for the players."

I really hope they got the help they needed.

I can be forgetful so sometimes I don’t take notes but most of my games are recorded so I just watch what previously happened

ahh i see a gate keeper how did you end up on my feed?

I have most of these flaws as a person... I spend most of my time as GM trying to suppress them

Plan and document, realize you are not an all knowing and encompassing rule book, don’t think you know how the game session will evolve and realize your not in total control are all core beliefs I’ve had to learn and relearn as often as necessary. It’s a fun experience not a necessary job.

9: This is definitely something i struggle with, but I try to talk to my players about it when it happens.

My DM actually encourages us to interrupt them if we have anything to say at all. I just have the problem of I was talked over my whole life and rarely interrupt them because I feel like a dick interrupting others

If you like salad 🥗 GTFO

You haven't tried my salad!

3 or 4 kinds of not iceberg lettuce
cheese rectangles
chick peas
carrots cut \ diagonal (tricks the meat eaters to seeing it as steak bits - works - am meat eater, with Bro)
seeds or nuts
dried fruit to compliment
strips of meat
sauce of vegetables rarely seen in salad, spiced appropriately

If it's not meal with all the food groups, it isn't a real good salad. You need variety, but you need a theme, you need contrast, and a little bit of guidance to the chaos (the sauce type and thickness prevents the sunflower seeds from making a mess and jumping off the fork).

Pizza is a good simple salad on top of flat bread with the sauce on the bottom and containing most of the vegetables, which has been made hot. Debate me.


So, my first DMing went like this:

I was asked to make a dungeon crawler kill-everything until you are god-level game, with no heavy RP. Hadn't finished the intro to the dungeon and game when he excalims, "I piss on a wall!" to which his character urinates on a stone wall. I try to ignore this an continue, but he asks if does damage. There were rules, there were sequences to events, there were formulas, there was not suposed to be RP.... I improvise with my current system. He is leaning against the wall he is pissing on, and the dice want him dead (forever and always, as we shall come to see....). So to explain his disintegrating acid urine, I make it a secret entry into the dungeon that had warn away over time, he falls in down a vent shaft.

He barely survives the fall. He forgot his equipment up top. The quick loot and ready-to-battle set up I had awaiting him is dashed aside, and so is all my hard work as this now 99% RPG is running on a kill-and-loot only system without backup.

What happened:

Loads of laughs, tons of fun, an inerestin backstory for his character, a developing storyline with adventure and possibilities, and a hopeful return to the dungeon with proper gear, and possibly some NPC companions. We both appeared to have a great time. I worked hard to fix everything up for next session (including finding a proper dice roller - that was the biggest issue), including adjusting my numbers fo a cozier system.

Come next session 2 weeks later, he railroads the adventure to permanently end the story and game, and excalims to me that session 1 was the most humiliating experience he ever had in his life, I was out to get him and his character, it was all my fault for ruining his life a experience, and he will never play with me again, nor dnd, ever.

I did everything he wanted. I improvised to facilitate his ambition when he tossed my game out the window at every turn. We both laughed and had loads of apparent fun, curiosity, and intrigue. Yet, I literally ruined his life, and the life of his precious character with his now deep background story that was originally supposed to be a simple dungeon crawler hero. But he demanded I apologize, and insisted it was not only 100% my fault, but that we would never do anyrhing like this agin, ever, and he meant it completely, and still does.

Am I the AH?

So I'm guilty of a few, Taking Notes and Listening are the biggest ones, yet my Online group enjoys the way I DM for them, I do try to improve and change things to make it more fun for them and I always run it past our group's Lore Keeper/Assistant DM, they help me keep track of everything since I usually go straight to bed after our sessions due to work.

For listening I'm guilty but only partially due to multiple people starting to talk in a voice chat can end up confusing, also IRL interruptions can make things hard.

So yeah I'd say those are good points to work on but can't be justified to not being able to DM everyone has their own DMing style, for example one of my player's campaign is more railroaded than my own yet his players enjoy his style since both the DM and Players do crazy stuff.

My advice to new DM's would be Keep these in mind but don't let it discourage you from trying to DM, I had to learn from scratch on how to DM/World building/Making NPCs etc, and been doing it for 4-5 years now and I've been improving with each step.

I found the use of literary theory interesting, but felt it all came from one side of literary theory and presented it as true in all cases, and not as theory. It turns on the first point: about whether the GM should take themselves seriously. A diametrically opposing family of literary theories might be the Oxford Movement. Their take on GMing I think would be that roleplaying doesn't originate in pretence but a divine, ritual space similar to ancient drama. And I think they would hold that there is a third and more important stakeholder outside of the GM and the players: being the Art-in-itself (or the Muse if we are still romantic enough to personify her). It isn't a question of trying to outdo Shakespeare, it's horses-for-courses, the GM should put in the requisite effort and craft the performance well enough for the experience to satisfy the circumstance. We should do the best we can, whether the adventure's tone is low-brow and comedic or high-brow and emotive. If I'm being GM, I'm preferably not the person who has started the group or run the first adventures, because I want to have a good sense of the group's dynamics and its language so that I can create an experience they will remember, or that will affect how they think about some moral quandary. If they're the tricky sort who like to circumvent the whole dungeon, I might start them in the dungeon. Or if they are self-conscious about being elves and pixies, I might ask them to all play humans just to earth that. I won't attempt 10 competing points, but my first two might be (1) for GMs not to do it if they can't deliver the adventures credibly-confidently, and (2) not to do it if they can't predict the players' decisions well (whether by knowing them as people, or by reading them as they go along).

Take yourself seriously . . . my last campaign started with the artificer player being a snake oil salesman trying to cure STDs by injecting homeless people with random serums that he made and the monk going to a spore druid's circle and partying with fae while under the effects of mushroom spores . . . any chance for this to be serious was lost session 0. Yes, my fault for allowing, but honestly between them rolling high and my npcs rolling under 10, the dice were just on the player's side (plus the percentiles I rolled for how well they did kept being in the 90s >_>). Other 2 players weren't much better, a charlatan trying to scam nobles and his cousin who he drags along with him, ended about as poorly as you would think it would for two level 1 wizards. Two sessions later the party paid a blacksmith to have a branding iron with their logo made to leave "trophies" along side the road of whoever attacked them. Knowing your players helps, but honestly its all about how well you can improvise any given situation.

As a first time DM I am glad I don't really have these issues.

I've had a situation, where the players tried to get into a stronghold. They decided to lay fire to one of the entrances and when the goons came out, trying to put out the fire, the players introduced themselves as fire insurance salesmen. Critical Success. They believed them. We all had a hearty laugh and skipped the dungeon.

On a separate note from my other comment.

You are taking yourself a little too seriously here in your assessment of what not to do. I do agree with some points, but I also disagree on some aspects about others; and I personally believe that it is because of my experience with sperg types of players where a lot of your suggestions actually become the rule when dealing with those people.

For instance, I agree you shouldn't cut someone off in talking. Yes, you need to listen as a DM. But so do the players. Yes, you are creating an experience for everyone to have fun in hopefully. But if the player is ruining the experience for the DM just because the player thinks they can run amok without any concern for the other players or the DM themselves; then that's not okay. It's not the DM breaking any of your 10 commandments. It's the DM enforcing the fact that player does need to be aware of the others at the table too. So if you have a sperg of a motormouth player being dealt with, you might actually need to cut them off now and then to get anything going. If everyone is having fun, then of course let it go. But if the others aren't having fun, or the player has turned the DM's part in it all into a giant chore of despair; that's not the DM's fault. That's the players fault.

And I think you take too much side with the player in all of this. The DM made the game up for the purpose of having fun from that side of the table. If it's not fun for them anymore, that's not necessarily a fault of the DM. It could be, but not necessarily so.

Bad players do exist, which I doubt you can disagree with honestly. Sometimes DM's have to resort to the less favorable methods to ensure the game remains fun for everyone... else. Not the bad player.

Which is part of why I disagree with #10. No, it's not the sole purpose of the DM to ensure the game is fun; but it is part of the job in a way. If the DM isn't focused on making it fun in the first place, then where is the point in playing it all? To make it fun? Okay, sure. But then the DM really doesn't need to do anything serious right? Like make a story at all... or keep track of things... oh, wait... you said we should be keeping track of things. But that would be making sure the game is fun, right? Cause there is no fun in trying to figure out which is what, and what happened when, when you have no records of what occurred, right?

Do you see how your own suggestions conflict with each other now?

Again, I do agree with what you are trying to say over all, at least from how it seems from my listening to you and watching your body language occur on screen.

It seems to me that you've had a bad experience or perhaps few, with some DM's who constantly talked over you, took themselves too seriously, saw their creation as a masterpiece, got mad when someone wrecked, etc and so forth. And if so, I totally get it. When all those things combine, it can be a nightmare to deal with as a player. Been there, done that. But I've also seen players be absolute nightmares for DM's who normally were pretty chill about the whole thing. Essentially all I am saying is that your suggestions aren't terrible, but they don't exactly play well with each other in some situations where perhaps those suggestions should go out the door instead.

Fact is, if I make a story up to be played in, there are going to be at least SOME expectations from the players. Nothing huge, but if there is lore already built into the game, and there are certain aspects to the story that need to be understood to enjoy the world built for them; then I do expect on some level they respect the EFFORT put into it. If they don't want to do that, then they can find the door. That's not taking oneself too seriously. That's simply asking the common decency to respect the effort put into the game being able to be played at all. If the story ends up going a different direction even with the players respecting that effort; so be it. That's just how the dice rolls sometimes.

But if they aren't even respecting your effort; why put in the effort at all? And so we get back to how your suggestions kind of fight between themselves. They basically all point to one end result.

Just grab some paper, some pencils, some dice; and make things up as you go. But make sure to keep track, because it wouldn't be fun if we lost track of the game; but don't make it all about being fun of course.

Seriously bro... rethink this one.

Anyways. You meant the best from this, I realize. So I hope you don't take this all too seriously.

And I do agree with the writing a book part. I am of similar mind in the idea that if the story being built is too precious to the person, they are best to make it a book or video game instead perhaps. Not a table top. But that doesn't mean a table top can't be done. It just needs to be done with the right people, because spergs ruin everything anyways.

Player in one of my attempts made a 'rock hard bard'. His backstory was that he was on a quest to lay every dragon and penetrate any dungeon. Yes, your imagination is correct. First dungeon, used a certain substance that rhymes with niagra to literally fill the dungeon phallicly.

Dude was an absolute menace IRL too in his own ways, so it fit. The character may as well of had been a metaphorical take on his personality.

It was on that day, I learned I was not yet ready to be a DM.

I enjoyed the video, but I'm guilty of three of the above "things" (to a greater or lesser extent, admittedly.) Bad news. I was a GM for various games for my friends for nearly three decades. Only health reasons finally made me retire. To this day my friends remind me of bygone sessions and tell me how they miss those days. Yes, these are great guidelines. But no one should treat them as absolute rules for whether they are worthy of running a game for their friends. In the end, the real test is always: Are both you and your players having fun? If so, then obviously any of the above faults/problems you may suffer from are not bad enough to warrant you giving up GMing for your group(s). Still good advice for improvement here, though.

What's wrong with salad? ;~;

Gming is practically nothing but keeping track of stuff.

Just found this video and wanted to add one based on my experience. "If you actively develop countermeasures against a PC you perceive as too strong, don't DM".

Now, I understand almost nobody likes munchkins that rollplay before they roleplay, but if a player finds a nice synergy, a combo, or an exploit that allows them to build a competent and strong character capable of surpassing your planned obstacles, it feels very sour for that player when you improvise and adapt a little _too much_, developing and implementing new items or situations specifically catered to "nerf" them. Adaptive difficulty is cool in some videogames like Metal Gear, but it's not so much in TTRPGs.

When the party as a whole is strong, buffing the enemies to balance things out is a solution, but if the party is comprised of something like a Social Character, a Fighting Character, the Intelectual Character and a Jack Of All Trades Character, putting enemies that can become an obstacle for just one of them can make the encounters either boring or too deadly for the rest. In DnD this might not be so much an issue since all characters can kinda fight, but in other games like Vampire: The Masquerade or Anima: Beyond Fantasy, stat allocation can really define a character's role. If one player has too much resistance to the point of becoming near immortal against the common enemies, don't buff the damage of said enemies or you'll end up one-shotting their friend the scholar. *This has happened to me*. And it is not fun at all. Engrave in your DM mind that not every fight or encounter or trap has to be difficult for everyone, they might just have to be challenging for the average person, even if it means being easy for a PC specialized in said tasks. Surprising to think about, I know.

I think it says a lot about me as a GM that the first monster ideas that I had were of exploding robots

No, whatever you do, DM please.
That's the point of learning, you'll mess up, the only reason you shouldn't DM is if you are unable to accept your mess ups.

So, for the love of god, DM. We really need more DM's 😢

An important thing that I feel some GMs fail to recognize is that ultimately the goal of D&D (and most RPGs) is for the players to win. I mean sure, it should be a challenge for them to win, but the point is still that the players are supposed to win. I have seen too many time where GMs adopt a "Me vs Them" attitude where they feel that it is their goal to kill all of the players, and while that might be the goal of Paranoia, it isn't the goal of D&D.