Good DM'ing: Discussion, Support Group, and How-to

[xanshriekal]

A thread for players who enjoy DMing to discuss what makes a good DM and what the role of the DM should be. In any pencil-and-paper RPG the role of the DM is to provide a challenge to the players and to tell a story. If they die or fail, so be it, but the DM should not go out of his way to kill them. That is the purpose of a challenge: to make someone strive for a goal while balancing difficulty and attainability. Most RPG players are very familiar with this and I was hoping to see this attitudes reflected in Dungeonland, but I'm not sure they are.

We all know that the DM has a huge advantage over the players, especially for anything harder than Normal difficulty. While a patch might someday be released to fix that, I have doubts. I think the developers wanted this game to be very hard and I think they really wanted to force players to work together to survive in the same way that they must in a pencil-and-paper RPG. That's great, but where is the role of the DM in this? Should the DM limit him or herself when playing their cards or should they be providing the maximum challenge and difficulty?

I suppose the main topic here can be rephrased as: Should the DM work toward as much evil or as much good as possible in their alignment and play style?

Additional topics:
Do you have any advice for new DMs on how to make their game fun?
Do you have any favorite tips or tricks or combos that provide an extra challenge to the players without being overly evil?

[xanshriekal]

Reserved

[Dani]

The best way to make DMing fun in DungeonLand is. .

Ask the players what they want, then give them that.

Some people like to feel challenged to the point of a heart attack every so often, others like to play a bit more casually, maybe on Easy or Very Easy, and enjoy the experience as a monster bashing fest.

Sure, you could work towards winning all the time as a DM, but if your friends aren't having fun, you'll eventually find yourself DMing for bots. Everyone needs to be having fun, the players and the DM. Be as evil as the players want you to be.

[Amiculi]

I'm all for this style, but it appears the past couple days of DM's focusing entirely on murdering the players has scared the majority off of joining any DM mode games, either that or the network issues are getting to be more severe.

The first night, every game I made, DM or Adventure mode was full in seconds, now I can spend hours alone without a single person joining.

So yeah, I guess either more DM's need to focus on a challenge over killing the players, the DM needs nerfed/players need buffed, or we'll just have to wait awhile until players learn the game a bit better.

However, it seems painfully obvious at this point that Normal and above is pretty much impossible for the players without the DM actively helping them, and even then I don't know that they can progress. It's hard to say though, I've yet to get into a group that really works well, it's a unique game, nothing quite like it.

Another thing that seems pretty obvious is that the majority of DM's will always consider it their holy mission to just wreck their players, it's likely to take balance changes to make the game playable outside of people you know personally. And honestly, even your friends get a bit overly competitive.

[Mark-]

Great topic, pinning it :-)

[BloodOwl]

the players should know the DM plan so they could know what hero'es to use its impossible like this cause you dont know whats coming to you atleast in the higher diffculties

[xanshriekal]

An awesome start, thanks for the pin!

You've got a great point, Dani, Amiculi, communicating with your players is super effective. I've already had one friend who talked with his DM and had some improvements to the game.

Spiderpig60, that's also pretty important. Some of the perks, such as Juggernaut, are only effective against certain types of enemies such as the Dire Ducks and Imps. That goes back to the communication since the player-ready screen doesn't show the DM's plan.

[Amiculi]

Автор сообщения: xanshriekal

An awesome start, thanks for the pin!

You've got a great point, Dani, Amiculi, communicating with your players is super effective. I've already had one friend who talked with his DM and had some improvements to the game.

Spiderpig60, that's also pretty important. Some of the perks, such as Juggernaut, are only effective against certain types of enemies such as the Dire Ducks and Imps. That goes back to the communication since the player-ready screen doesn't show the DM's plan.

By the same stance, the DM screen doesn't show the player loadout either. This encourages more antagonistic gameplay I think.

A lot of the interface needs work I think, and there's going to be a lot of balance tweaking no doubt.

[Edit: I guess it's kind of double sided, some players will use knowledge of the other side to loadout to be more effective no matter what. In a 'normal' world of table top RPG, the DM would know everything about the players, but the players would know next to nothing about the DM. However, in this case, I think the players knowing the DM loadout but not the DM the players' may work out better.]

[The FOX]

Anyone who plays this mode twice and see the possess abuse with certain monsters, give up playing it again.

[CastaRune]

TB make a great story teller (DM)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie2n_YXHj4w

[Blackleaf]

Im just gonna go ahead and state the obvious. Power gaming is ridicusly boring.
Ive gotten into many games where the DM just abuses healing,OP units and traps to destroy the heroes. A good DM tries to extend the game preferebly to the second zone before really aptempting to kill. Ive seen people do some rather interesting stuff with traps in the game. Be creative with your aptempts to murder those smelly heroes! dont just spamm powerfull things without thinking.

[kvnmck]

A good DM should really try to gauge the players abiliuties. If they're running around on full lives, perhaps they need a little punishment. If they are on dire straights, the DM could probably stand to let them have a break. Extra points for creating a challenge while still utilizing some creative combinations. However, alot of the higher difficulties seem rather insanely difficult without the DM basically LETTING them win. There have been moments where ive had to posses minibosses just to pull them off my adventurers lest they be totally wiped out, it wasnt especially fun, sitting there waiting for them to get a hold of the situation. if a DM is activley trying, hell wipe his heroes out easily, but i dont htink rebalancing is really the issue. i think its just a matter of proper learning, which would start with good AI. Mabye this is just me, but practicing being the dungeonmaster is easiest offline, when you can quickly set up a match anytime, but there are some huge drawbacks. Without being able to alter bot loadouts, you cant actually see the strengths and weaknesses of the various different possibilities. It takes absolutley ages for them to get to the boss, so players never get a chance to practice the boss at all, leaving me scared to let players reach it. Worse still the AI is so abomindable, they dont use potions, they get stuck all the time, and combinations that would anhiliate them would be useless against players. I cant even really practice adventure mode off line, as the AI companions are far to stupid to be usefull.

TL;DR- A good DM needs to challenge players while being fair. i think players would have an easier time doing so, if they could practice offline, where its easiest to do so. which would require the AI adventurers be competent enough to serve as practice for the DM, and acceptable companions for solo adventure practice.

Edit: Also, itd be nice if the game better incentiviced better DMing. rewards for downing players might encourage you to down them but not let them be killed so you can milk them for money. If possible, a bonus for using different times of damage, to punish people for relying on healed beserkers, or possesing ducks for their kills.

[DuncanPerham]

I play D&D, and it hadn't quite occured to me, that thats how this was meant to be, to me, DMing in this game was about wiping them out ASAP. But thats probably not how its meant to be. If its meant to be like D&D, where the DM isnt actually out to deliberatly kill them, then perhaps all we need to fix it is some kind of stat on players, how many games hosted, then how many wipe outs on what area or levels, compress it all down into a simple rating or pie chart, then when a game is hosted, players can see what sort of DM there up against, An evil TPK DM, or a DM who's giving you a challenge, but is fair.
If it is the case, that there trying to get the DM, to be fair, rather than just giving him nasty blasty stuff, maybe he should have some good stuff too, like food and potions, and the ability to nerf his men, rather than buffing them all the time, that way if he has overdone it a bit, he can bring them back without it seeming like he handed it to them on a plate.

If its not the way the game was meant to be played, then maybe the devs should consider it, a few modifications further down the line, like bigger levels, coloured keys to open certian doors (doom style) to slow there progress a bit, etc, there is pretty good potential for this. I also think a game speed for the DM would be good, if it ran a bit slower, it would be far more tactical for everyone.

[tomer5404]

if you ask me there should be a scroll of difficultys allowing heros and DM find where it is challenging for both sides, even on easy some combos are realy strong for some people to deal with... scalling difficult for more % will let people sattle where it is best suit them to play. that ofcuse after they fix crashes that happan ever 3rd match or so

[Goromaia]

If we're talking about fun DMing, use walls. I'm notorious for putting walls right before the green checkpoint and then unleashing monsters on the players. Or using walls and then putting a discord turret and watching them scurry in desperation, that's quite the sight too. Makes it tense for the heroes, but not too challenging, and fun for the maestro.

[Amiculi]

Well, I seem to have found the problem.

Some 70-80% of the games up online are DM mode. Only about 10% of those have people in them, the rest are empty. That explains a lot. Everyone wants to DM but no one wants to be a player.