The Pain Every DM Knows

"how did you know that there would be a plinth?"

Its the other way around, is not that the good characters stick around, the character that stick around are good

This is why you always prepare multiple main villains, just in case.

campaign where they beat the bbg but don't realize it til much later

“You have successfully smooth-talked your way out of any altercations with the man.” congratulantes the DM as he plans to spring the exact same enemy on the party 2 sessions later.

Bro you missed your chance to make Boba fett 😂

This is all of my campaigns. Which is fine. Players decide where to go, meet various obstacles and characters, overcome those obstacles and kill or befriend those characters and as long as they’re having fun, I’m having fun.

They thought they had BEATEN THE DM. That's why they were so happy. Even the most cooperative players secretly want to beat the DM at least once. But the DM is God and can't be beaten.

One thing Brennen could have done is built upon the Demon mask and made him use something like in Ghostwire Tokyo, Eg. the ability to teleport away from mortal danger using enchanted paper talismans. Maybe the players could find the talisman where the hunter would’ve been and at this point I’m just making a completely new campaign

The dnd group I’m in befriended a blue dragon by offering him candy…. He was supposed to be a difficult villian for us to defeat….. now he’s pretty much just a puppy for the group and I love him hahaha

Which season was this for?

I don't play d&d but I wanna play a game with him as DM sooo badly

Im planning a FATE campaign currently and so far my players have created 2 'reoccuring villains' that they havent even realized yet. One of them was left paralyzed after their first encounter and will come back as a mech rider and the other is a (now disgraced) millitary colonel who has a vendetta against them. Im excited to see how they will react to their reintroduction

-The one badass hunter who the DM spent hours crafting as a recurring villain: Dies after the first meeting with the party, unceremoniously and is forgotten
-The shopkeep the bard stole from at the start of the campaign: Learns the dark arts for revenge against the party, builds an army, is alive for eons...

The villain was awesome, but hey, they put in the work. They worked so hard to make a trap, so they deserve it honestly

I know very little about DnD. How on earth do you spend two hours planning a trap in a fictional environment that you can’t see or hear, and it WORKS?? Not even hating; I just don’t understand

TRUE! The most memorable villains aren't the slick dressed in black bad boys, it's the grumpy market lady that the party dunked on in the first session then DM turned into a villain organically towards the end.

Where can I watch this podcast

D&D

And lo, Darq Lightsbane looming with eyes full of fury, lunges into a sprint toward the party. He then...(rolls 1)...tripped on a small rock? and ...(rolls max)...is dead? gdit

Had a moment last week in a spelljammer campaign my buddy is running. My character (HB) Aetherborn and the party come across a ship with no air bubble and magic distress beacon on. Next we fight some space monsters and investigate the ship.
We found a Dwarf who said he was hiding from the monsters.

My dm's face was priceless when the first thing i ask was "how did you breathe? I know you have to my buddy here (points to dwarf PC) has to so you have to!

Amazing DM, makes me want to play a dm and make cool villains for my friends to kill too and mess up my story plans

My DM had an entire four stage dungeon planned for our first encounter and expected some murder.

I, however, was playing a super high charisma Folk Hero Firbolg Archfey Pact Warlock that did not want to do a murder.

I rolled amazing on Persuasion and Speech Checks, used Fey logic and rules on Fey creatures (I flavored my character towards a heavy Fey campaign), and offered to help them solve their problems.

My DM sat in abject horror as our party (a Paladin, Druid, and Ranger) all just assisted the Warlock where they could and offered their aid as well... and that's how our Party became Champions of the Boggles, Friends of the Darklings, and Ambassadors of the Goblin Crush.

We killed a couple Meenlocks a long the way, but my Warlock's ability to talk is out of some hairy situations is pretty spot on 🤣

Now my DM plans for my anti-murderhobo by making more political intrigue and some encounters very hard to avoid or impossible based on our established connections

The best part about collaborative storytelling is that your co-writers are also the audience.

This exact problem is why if I were a DM, I feel like I'd use a lot of villains that have a system to be revived. Almost like Uruks from Shadow of War, where they'll have a way to come back, bearing a grudge from having been killed before.

Why would that be narratively unsatisfying?

I just experienced the pain last weekend. The party were infiltrating the docks to steal some explosive contraband. When they got there, they stumbled onto a rival group from earlier sessions who were doing the same thing. They were supposed to be recurring characters, but the party's bardlock exploded both the contraband, the rivals, and a good portion of the docks. IT WAS SO WILD!!

Which series?

Yup, every DM/GM has had to deal with that! Sucks for us, but great for the players. You could always use the stat-block to build a revenge character that's hunting the party, that way you don't "waste" the work, organically build onto the story, and show that the player choices definitely influence the game.

After the first session of the players being defeated and escaping the Dark lords castle the players sold all their gear to send a single Druid in cheetah form back through the front gate with two bags of holding.

I should have known something was wrong when the player rped his actios to aliens soundtrack - futile escape.

The Druid was fast enough to beat the all 8 gates closing when the alarm was sound, was unable to be caught by war dogs, kings forces, men on horses, and the pet dragon in the second courtyard got skunked before he even knew to fire its breath weapon with this Ferrari of a desert cat blowing past it and around the corner into the last gate.

The Druid lept into the air over the magistrate crowd and into the Dark Lord placing one bag of holding through the other.

My BBG was instantly killed, his close guard and the entire magistrate along with his evil sorcerous queen and his royal Assassin all gone in one session.

I just stared at the players with a blank lost expression. Damn near stuttering on the loss of my main villain.

I'm still mind blown to this day.

Talking about his time in Iraq?

How did they set up a trap for him? You’re making us feel unsatisfied too!

I literally had a big villain get swirlied to death in his first encounter...

Hey, if the players had a great time and they enjoyed the outcome then the DM did their job!

That was some overlord/opm storytelling right there

had a guy I made who was going to be following the party, as a villain. Mainly just to push the party through a massive dungeon. They knew he was a few rooms behind them, set a trap and hid. I rolled bad he got hit by the trap, they cast 'hold person', bad roll again. Then they Coup De Grace, rolled great and killed him.

They were too much for him.

Being a dm is like being a dad. Your kids do something stupid but you shut up and let them have their fun

That's when you turn it into a reputation thing. "Hey, ain't you the guys who killed the Demon Hunter?"
Why yes we did! You've heard of us?
"He was my best friend. And you murdered him. Get em, boys!"

Now he is a recurring villain, in the sense that you keep running into his allies and they are ALL mad at you for killing him.

Other people are happy to hear that he's dead, but now they vastly overestimate your skills.

How do I teach the algorithm that, while I love nerd humor, there is no version of reality where I enjoy listening to DMs fangirl over their D&D?

This trans person really brings the emotion of this down. Completely shallow emotions and fakery

When you kill the boss that's supposed to beat you at the beginning of the game






(But did they get to loot him tho?)

I love video games that show a villain and say "survive this guy and you'll meet him later" but they DO allow you to fight him and win with intense preparation and effort.

I feel like the goal of most players, including me, is to see that reaction from the dm

Is that Rebecca Sugar?

Next they unmasked him and found it was really their DM

“You find his plans and wow looks like a lot of very detailed work went into them. He’s a corpse of course so none of it will come to pass. But lots of cool ideas in here. And of course I mean, narratively cool not ideologically but, you know.”

no offense to her but she looks like she does not give two shits

And then you remember that random guy they killed.... who they happened to forget was the brother of a necromancer. Hehehe
And then they bloody kill him in the first encounter too.....

I had something similar, except the encounters were genuinely designed to be doable, difficult if poorly planned, but if they were clever and resourceful they could do it. And I wasn’t expecting to get a recurring villain out of it.

It was a “counter-party” group of bounty hunters that was quite legitimately hired to track down one member of the party. Now, even though the party defeated them all (it actually took about three sessions, it was quite a memorable arc) there was one that wasn’t there, he said that he was out scouting or something, I can’t remember the exact reason, and he arrived back in the desolated town that held their base.

This loner goes up to the party, and challenges the target party member to a duel and he manages to convince the party that at that moment he just wants revenge for his fallen brethren. He even makes the party feel somewhat guilty by revealing some small personal details about the bounty hunters they just spent three sessions being beaten up by (I tried to make each character seem like an approximation of a DnD player character.) The girls in the group loved a sob story, and the guys in the group were all like, “For honour and stuff, yeah!” And they indulge him not realising how close it was going to be. They both got down to the point where one dice roll would decide it. The bounty hunter won (which I wasn’t expecting.) And on top of that, I was not expecting the party to be so won over by his character (they liked him!) that they would be willing to take him with them….

Needless to say, I had a really handy sleeper agent that I could deploy at any moment. 😄