Hey everyone. I have been reading your messages and I have noted that the sponsored video format can be improved. I am still figuring out the extend of my obligation with sponsored videos, so it will be better in the future. Also, I just want to point out to you guys that, despite how frustrating he was being, there wasn't an ounce of malice coming from Steve during the session. It was just him being him.

A newborn baby takes a look around and says... "So this is life, huh? Why would anyone play a game so stacked against them?"

Soooo during one campaign we had two bards and the rest of the party had high charisma and we eventually formed a boy band. Eventually the DM created a rival boy band. It was pretty funny and we made a bunch of gold in the process.

"But how do we know you are just not making things up?" - I am making everything up, that is my job. My job is to make the story, reward and punish the players for what they do within the story.

"Can I kill him and take his money?" Average d&d session, tbh.

Isn't "cheating and making it up" the short definition of DM?

Player: "are there consequences for me to kill the mayor" Me: "well, that question is not for me. do you, controlling this character, think there are consequences for killing a town mayor? What do _you_ think will happen?" Player: "does my character need this money? Why does he need this money so badly?" Me: "that's a good question, why _does_ (character name) need this money? If he doesn't need the money, what does he want or need?" Player: "what stops you from cheating?" **casts zone of truth on me** Me: "two things, one, making sure the table and players have a fun time, and two, I have to follow the rules" *rule 1 of D&D, the DM can break the rules, as long as its fun for the group*

I was laughing until I choked at Steve just randomly wanting to kill a little old grandma and questioning why her grandson would even have any problems with him doing that in plain sight. Galaxy brain murderhobo logic right there.

I'd tell him the DMs goal isn't to win, but to make sure everyone is having fun while telling a story. The DM's win condition is how much everyone else is enjoying it. Also there is an expectation to go adventuring and/ or dungeon crawling, but the game is more improv than anything else. Thats why the DM can change things on the fly too.

TBH I'd be tempted to let him see the consequences of his actions, the crying child begging for their own life, screaming and alerting others to the area, and just see how he handles the situation.

This is what happens when true neutral alignments manifest in reality.

I've always reacted to "Can I kill them and take their money?" and similar questions with "Why?" instead of "Are you sure?" Surprisingly, a lot of potential murderhoboing gets prevented by that.

You mentioned that Steve was into board games and show him holding Settlers of Catan. In a game like that, everyone is on equal footing and is competing against one another. DnD is very similar, but different in that one person has to set up the game and serve as a storyteller and adjucator. It sounds like Steven thought you were another player, and his goal was to overcome your tricks and traps to beat you, personally. When a player asks things like "How do I know you're not lying? How do I know you're not cheating?" I would tell them that I'm not a player in the game itself, I'm setting up the story to give the players room to excel. I tell you how characters will react because we're telling a story together and I want you to make the best choices for your character so your story is interesting and compelling. Make it more players vs. monsters and less players vs. GM. Not saying that's what you did, but your answers definitely sounded like "just trust me, okay? Everything will be fine! Please don't look at the man behind the curtain!" It seems like Steve was worried he was falling for a trick and he'd end up "losing" to you, so to speak, which is a concept that needs to be cleared up before he can really enjoy the game.

6:15 the DM is "just making it up" for everything in D&D. I think he's probably heard stories about "killer DMs" and thinks that an antagonistic DM is the norm.

The video game running through the whole video is annoying. Your story is the content.

I see he had a "Players vs Dungeon master" mind set. That kind of kills the fun of the game. I hope he realized dm's job is to make the game enjoyable and challenging. If the dm wanted to kill the players he can easly do it anyway. There would be no "Versus".

DnD is a cooperative social game, as you said. Cooperative includes the DM, not just the players. So the answer I'd give a player like "Steve" is this: I am not your enemy. If I was, the game would end with the famous sentence "Rocks fall, everyone dies." My "job" as a DM is to help you tell an entertaining story, kinda like a director works in a theater play. What is considered an entertaining story is totally dependent on your table, which is why session zero is so important. DM and players is - as you correctly pointed out - a relationship of trust. You expect your players to give you the benefit of the doubt. In return, your players expect you to help them tell a story that is better and more entertaining than "Rocks fall, everyone dies". PSA: If any of your players ever says "No, this is not what happens here", it is time for an out of character talk.

Obviously you were getting frustrated at the time, but the correct answer to "How do we know you're not just making this up" is: I am making this up. That is literally my role here. "How do we know you're not cheating" You don't, but my goal isn't to kill you, because then I have no one to play with.

I've played with a lot of different people and I have to say I've fortunately never encountered this type of player, at least to that extreme. But I can see it happening. Also, I'm glad you got sponsored! Just maybe don't have it playing off the side the entire time during the video next time.

It seems to me that Steve was asking the "How do I win?" question without overtly stating it. I'm presuming that, due to his experience with board games, he had an expectation for a modicum of "fairness", which in his mind, was not actually presented in the way he had expected.

Holy shit, my DnD group and I did the SAME THING in lost mines. The only difference is that we're all long time players, so we suspect something foul will happen if we leave the cart unattended, but we also don't want to split the party, so we just decided to travel onwards xD. Our DM told us after we got to town that we were over thinking this campaign, so we eventually got in the groove of it, but the poor dwarf was beaten bloody by the time we got to him.

O MY GOD. ON MY SCREEN, HE ASKED STEVE, "Is this what you really want?" THEN IT JUMPED TO AN AD AND IT SCREAMED "YYYYEEEEEEEESSSSSSSS"

I’ll be honest, as someone with ADHD I had to watch your video with my hand over half the screen so I could pay attention to your story.

I would have told him that this isnt a fight against the dm, the dm is in charge that the story flows correctly setting the scenario acording to the characters. And he could do wathever he wanted but it all be his idea and his doing.

it was like revelation occurred to me when he said "but how DO you know that the kid would do that?" which I have run Phandelver, I don't remember there being a grandkid (already changing the module). But also how would you know the kid might not just "You have killed my grandma, take me with you!" or the kid just runs away into the woods to die or become strong to kill the adventurer. None of that stuff is written down so you have to make it up. the noob brought a fresh perspective to the game. he really got a lot of DM's figured out where they just add and remove foes or change elements to make it fit THEIR story instead of the players.

Soooo.. you make a point of _"you can do whatever you want"_ , and even put that in big text on the screen. But when "Steve" wanted to finish the quest they were on initially, that was somehow "wrong"? Kind of weird to teach the message that you can do whatever you want, in a game where you were heavily trying to railroad your party to the goblin camp.

"It's apart of the default social contract that governs the game. A DM has ultimate power in the fate of the game, but it's in his/her best interest to make the game enjoyable for those who play, another part of the contract. Also, characters created by the DM have personalities that the DM roleplays as a Player does their PC." My response.

Your player imagined that he was engaged in a game of trying to beat you, the DM. Like, it's a team of players against a single nebulous foe. That's the problem of bringing in a hardcore board gamer: they will invent an antagonist where none exists. I've played a few board games where the antagonist is mostly just the roll of dice but can still reliably result in the players losing and it gets messy fast. When we actually won against a game heavily stacked against literally all the humans at the table, it was almost confusing for the veterans. D&D is... almost not a game. It's more like improvisational acting with dice rolling on the side. It's kind of why I long for a way of using computers to speed up all the combat stuff because combat in D&D has a bad habit of taking up a lot of game time and mental space in both the players' and the DM's heads, even though it mostly doesn't matter. For every truly memorable miraculous save in a combat, there's dozens of ho-hum slaughter-the-goblins-and-loot-bodies encounters.

"How do I know you're not making it up?" ..... "I am" is the first reply that comes to mind.

this is actually a bunch of really important lessons for a DM to learn. I remember when the first one clicked for me: after my first ever adventure (narrow focus mostly in one large town and the surrounding lands) the party got their hands on a pirate ship and then... what then? they finaly solved their income problems, the BBEG of adventure one was dead and they could go anywhere. I deliberately didn't give them any plothooks for the first day of adventuring just to see their plan and they had a million options, but chosing just one was impossible. "think about all the stuff we might miss if we do this". Sometimes 3 choices is a lot better than 300. really depends on your players and how experienced they are though. yeah, DMing is kind of hard.

Um, TJ, I don't know if you were contractually obligated, but leaving the game playing on the right side of the screen during the whole video is going to distract the watchers from listening to your story. And it's especially going to distract from the animations you took the time to make. So, maybe you should just promote the game at the beginning of the video for whatever length you think is appropriate. At least that's my opinion.

My initial reaction: "Remember what we all talked about in Session 0, Stevie boy." If he did not attend session zero: "You should've attended Session 0, Stevie boy."

I would explain that a DM is a Story Teller, not an omnipotent god who's out to kill the party for their own amusement. If the DM changes the type of magic item, or makes more enemies to fight. It's for the purpose of making a better story.

The GM is on the players side. He/she is just the adjudicator and world portal, and wants the players to succeed.

When it comes to DM's and letting players do what ever they want. I'm the type of player who tends to enjoy the game when it's strongly enforced and reasonably restrictive. Like we can still do anything we want but we are limited by logic. I've been in games where the DM pretty much just lets anything a player says happen and I can see how that's fun for others, but it can get crazy and too unrealistic for me. At some point, it just becomes a bunch of people talking about random illogical stuff happening rather than us actually playing. I like having/playing a cool fun character but in a world bound by logic and rules both to make it feel more real and to make it fair. Plus It's not fun when some players get to break reality or have homebrewed rules that make them better than others or homebrewed or inconsistent rules that undermine your character's skills or background.

A group of friends and myself have been playing weekly since the start of the year, with no more than half of the group having any experience with the game. Our DM (at the time) ran us through two one-off dungeons before Mines of Phandelver just to familiarize us with how to play. Due to still trying to nail down a regular schedule that works for everyone, we wound up missing one player for the first session (which ended with us just about to enter the goblin cave). When the next session started, the first hour was spent following his perspective as he tried to reconnect with the party, and since he actually had no idea where we ended up, the results were spectacular. He found the dead horses and signs of combat, but because we had hidden our caravan just off the road, he didn't even realize that we hadn't kept moving towards town. So while we all fought through the caves and ultimately ended up saving the hostage, he wound up in town with no money, no weapons (his character's absence was explained as him having been drugged and robbed by a prostitute), and no idea where we were. His natural instinct was to try and find someplace to wait for us, as it was obvious at this point that he'd passed us up. He tried to bully his way into a room at the tavern, but was mocked by an elderly man. He then tried to sneak into a barn and sleep there, but was caught by the same old man, who at this point told him to leave or have the town guard called on him. Well, he decided that it might somehow be a good idea to steal the man's walking stick (which he successfully did) and attack him in an attempt to knock him out. Sadly, his roll wasn't ideal, so he ended up causing the old man to trip, fall, and crack his head open on a stone. Our missing party member had now just murdered an old man. We eventually met up with him, he sheepishly called two of us over to show what had happened (the rest of the party more likely to react more negatively), and we agreed to help dispose of the body, which went off without incident. As a grim reminder, he kept the walking stick, which later on managed to get some crazy crits and one-hit a few enemies. He and the DM agreed that if he kept one-hitting things with the stick, it would become cursed, absorb the souls of anything it one-hit, and grow in power, but his character would gradually become evil as a result (something which wouldn't play too well with our party, as we had two lawful goods who would definitely PVP if this happened). It was pretty neat.

I bought a year ago that starter set and played with my friends all not knowing anything. I let one of my friends to dm and we didn't chase the goblins we unanimously agreed to go to town and deliver the stuff xD. Later we had to go back

As a noob, this is historically accurate.

I would react by thinking "Steve is not hit by analysis paralysis, he is just a Malkavian", then say he was going on this old lady murdering spree by his own choice, and throw him the lifeline that the party needs some kind of adventuring job to pay for their daily necessities (food, water, clothes, hygene, equipment maintenance, etc).

This is exactly how our group played this adventure too. We fought the Goblins, nearly died, then went to town, never followed the goblins tracks. So funny to know another group did it too.

Growing up, I would have jumped at the chance to get into D&D but it never came. Thankfully I started working with a group of guys who did have D&D experience and we got a group going. It is a great stress reliever. We had to take a break when our work changed our schedules, but we will be getting our group back together soon. We are all happy about that

ah... reminds me of my first dnd session... my mom decided her character whould flash the goblin and rolled a 19, my dad (who was the gm) insisted that we specify whether we pushed or pulled the doors, and my sister missed the third session.... good times...

This method of advertising is absolutely the worst (the kind that permeates the entire video). Its incredibly distracting and offputting.

This was genuinely helpful. I have a player like this in my current campaign, but he's improved ALOT since when we started. Now he just comes across as Chaotic Good, rather than overwhelmed by choice and not understanding what he wants for his character at a given moment.

"The tarrasque, a creature who's hide can even deflect magic missiles" Me: I mean a level one wizard can do that too, it's not a big deal Also i would have the old lady mayor be a retired level 9 sun soul monk and that's the reason she's the mayor. nobody in town would ever dream to mess with her and thats why they hold her in such high regard. i'd just let him make the attack but when she ironshirts the attack and takes no damage and he's calling bs on the call the mayor just fries him with a bolt and tells him to come back in 90 years when he's a threat.

6:15 "How do we know that you're not cheating or just making it up?" Making it up? Making it up!? This is Dungeons and Dragons! Making it up is the entire point! It's a game that you make up, based on an established rule-set! And as the Dungeon Master, it is my right to bend this imaginary world we have created to my every whim, and it is my responsibility to do so in such manner as to provide you, the players, with amusement, challenge, and consequences. It is my responsibility to construct a game which is compelling, intriguing, and laced with the fear that you may not succeed, for there is nothing, I say there is nothing worse than a campaign so insultingly easy and without consequence that the players can sleepwalk through it. And I do this all by making things up! Mostly based on this module, of course, but perhaps I will take some liberties if I consider it beneficial. Perhaps if I suspect you will breeze through an encounter, I will make it harder, or if I think an encounter will discourage you unecessarily, I will make it easier. This is one of the many ways in which a dungeon master must take control of the world in order to provide the best experience to the players.

Honestly, you can’t really blame Steve for questioning the obvious consequence to murdering the mayor. While he immediately resorted to the most basic video game instinct that would be more at home in Elder Scrolls (i.e., murder and thievery), he did use his imagination to question the grandchild’s reaction-the child could have been abused or traumatized by the event, so the child may not have reported the murder to a constable immediately. But...then again, regardless of the child’s presence or reaction, it’s kinda hard to murder the mayor of a town at her doorstep without an immediate investigation. This is my first time watching your content-I like it. Keep up the good work!

Best experience I had with a GM who let anything happen was during my second time playing D&D. No matter what ridiculous thing the players did, he just rolled to see if the world at large or NPCs present would react positively or not. The funniest thing was when I made the wagon the party was riding on invisible but only the frame, so onlookers could see our bodies float through just a few feet above the ground with a horse running ahead. We were riding into an enemy fortress and most of our party was asleep inside and guards would just stop and stare too confused to react. Eventually after a couple of dodged encounters, the gm ultimately rolled a negative roll and the spell wore off getting us ambushed.

To answer the question... If all the players were absolute beginners, I would probably react the same way you did, doing my very best to point them at the intended storyline and explaining in-depth why things are the way they are. I'm aware it can be infuriating, but if it is their first DnD experience it has to have a happy ending, otherwise they would consider the game too difficult to process and play. If the majority of players are familiar with the concept of DnD, I would have allowed them to do whatever they wanted and face the consequences, even if it means de-railing the campaign completely until I would have them fight a group of bounty hunters they could not possibly defeat (... so they all end up dead.)

After reading through the comments here, I'm a little disheartened by some of the responses I've been seeing. So I'll throw my two cents in and maybe throw in a dose of rationality to the conversation. Keep in mind that my opinions are formed from 14 years of DM'ing experience, and roughly 20 years of play time total, so I feel pretty confident in saying I've seen it all from both sides of the screen. TL;DR - I have problems with the way you described your own way of running this encounter, but I think you can improve them. 1) One of the worst offenses I keep seeing repeated is calling Steve a "problem player." According to your own testimony in this video, this was Steve's first experience with DnD. DnD is nothing like traditional board games outside of "sometimes some groups use mini's to represent where there characters are" and I'll never understand where this idea comes from that someone who's played a ton of Catan or Chutes and Ladders is going to understand the RPG format and then shitting on new players for not getting it. This was his FIRST experience with the game, people. He can't BE a "problem player." He was an uneducated player who was left ignorant of what the table-top RPG format entails, so of course it tainted his approach to the system. Now I'm not saying that OP intentionally set him up to fail, but as the DM it was his responsibility to make sure that everyone who sat down at his table to play had a working grasp of the social etiquette involved and of the way the game flows. It would be one thing if Steve's behavior was crass - displaying some measure of sexism/racism/homophobia/whatever against another player, distracting other players with irrelevant or rude antics, whatever. But that's not what happened here, and it really does everyone and everything involved - the new player, the game, the DM, and the veteran players - a disservice to present our hobby as some elitist "You play our way or not at all" circlejerk. You mention repeatedly through the video that you expected Steve to ask certain questions, which would prompt specific answers from you regarding the nature of the game and how to play. I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. This is a conversation you should have with a player you KNEW had 0 experience with the format BEFORE he sat down for his first session. Who wants to be told "Hey come play this game with me," and then realize halfway through that they never explained the very basic nature of the game and expect you to know what questions to ask about something you've never done before? Let me put it to you this way - do you think that, maybe, the reason his actions continued to degenerate was not because he was a "noob," specifically, but that you basically dumping someone who doesn't know how to swim in the open ocean with bloodthirsty sharks might have something to do with the reason he was drowning? Would you pull someone off the street and say to them, "I need the countertops in my kitchen replaced," hand them a sledgehammer and plaster, and then ask then wonder why your kitchen is demolished? Do you see how crazy that idea sounds just be reading it? Well, that's exactly what you did here. 2) I'm not going to lie OP - you pretty much immediately lost me at the start with your backhand comment about the choice Steve's player made to continue on with their original mission, and you did so for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it's rather inappropriate for a DM to be ridiculing a player for their in-character actions; again, unless those choices are proving disruptive to the other players' ability to adopt their characters' persona and get into the game, you've really setup - perhaps even subconsciously and without meaning to - the sort of antagonistic DM/player relationship that everyone is accusing Steve for assuming. If you're open to constructive criticism, I have some suggestions you might want to read through below: First and foremost, I would NOT have pulled the rug out from under the party on something as mundane as payment. Again, this goes on to setup an antagonistic relationship between you and your players. The entire social contract between both groups - "You'll trust that what I do is for the good of the story, and I'll tell a story that gives you agency and entertains you" is only a valid argument when we as DM's hold up our end of the bargain. As a player - especially as a new player - if I'm getting screwed by people who are supposed to be paying me for the most basic of jobs "Take McGuffin A to Person B and get paid," then what your campaign is telling me is that nobody in this world is trustworthy. I'm going to move forward with the expectation that everyone is planning to screw me, and I'm going to plan for that and proactively work to screw them first. Maybe that was the theme you were trying to go with, but I doubt it. Unless you changed the narrative of the module, there is no indication that Gundren has any intention of meeting up with the PC's again until AFTER the supplies are delivered; the module itself explicitly states "The characters will be paid 10 gp each by the owner of Barthen's Provisions when they deliver the wagon safely to that trading post." Not, when they deliver the supplies to Gundren or when they meet Gundren at the trading post. I'm not sure why you and so many others consider it such a wild leap of logic for a player to say, "You know what, this is what we were paid to do, we're close to town anyway, let's uphold our end of the agreement." Instead of mocking this choice, if I had been DM'ing the session, my response would have been - "Okay, what do you plan to do afterwards? What does your character think they will gain from town?" The point here is to DIG for springboards. Whatever the players decide to do, it's not our job as DM's to "steer them back to the railroads," it's our job as DM's to work with the material the player's are giving us as they play to weave an interesting narrative that captures their attention and entertains them. If the players decide to attack a problem from an angle we never saw before, or even if they decide to approach an entirely different issue along the way, everyone has a better time of it if the DM knows how to roll with those punches, as it were, rather than trying to deflect them and push everyone down "this is the adventure I wrote/bought/have in front of me, play it!"

I would tell Steve "Making things up is part of the is the job of the DM.But the #1 Job is to make sure everyone is having fun and creating a challenge that feels rewarding when everyone can work together to solve events as they arise."

Me: I am the GM, I make reality. Steve: I reject your reality and SUBSTITUTE MY OWN!

Some of the obstacles with Steve would be solved with a series of extra-little mini session 0's. Employer in the 'Lost Mines of Phandelver' adventure required to be at the town to confirm the delivery? The players are absolutely going to know due to being debriefed about the nature of their contract with the dwarf before the adventure begins. Rules? DnD may have its structure, but my adventure is constructed based on my understanding of the rules. The DM is virtually incapable of cheating, since the DM makes the final judgment calls. Dice for the DM just provides a fair guideline to help give the players a reasonably structured experience, along with the other functions. Then... there's the existential problems with Steve. If he's only playing with his noob-level quality of understanding, he's basically playing a chaotic neutral (or chaotic evil) psychopath with some accidental psuedo-nihilistic tendencies. As the DM, I would have to explain the psychological aspects and consequences of his approach to this role playing tabletop game. Your character has a mind, with desires, fears, and goals with varying degrees of complexity. Also, to curb murderhobo tendencies, I need to explain the co-op nature of DnD. Even if Steve was to play an evil character, he must cooperate with the party to fulfill his dastardly schemes without having his goals completely compromised. Even if evil, the fellow party members never outlive their usefulness, because such is the nature of a lasting DnD adventure. As for anything else, I would have to have experienced DMing for Steve myself to determine anything else at present as far as I can think off the top of my head, currently.

The DM gets away with more stuff because they're the one who agreed to do the hard part of the game. The players micromanage their characters and possibly a very small number of followers or pets. The DM has to micromanage all enemies and allies within arms reach of the party and macromanage all existence in the entire game world. The DM also has to come up with a story compelling enough to the rest of the players at the table that 3 or more PCs take some interest in seeing it through to the end each week. The DM more often than not has to schedule the games, make calls to remind all their players that a game is in fact happening, host game night, provide some kind of snacks or get the players to chip in for a pizza fund, keep track of any odd role playing requests or backstory nonsense the players think they want their characters to go through, potentially construct settings for miniatures out of legos/dry erase mats/balsa wood, improvise realistic npc reactions to any dumb idea or killing spree the players might pull off, and about a hundred other things that mean exponentially more work for the one person in the group that chose to be the DM. The short answer is the DM gets away with more because you wanted to play one Dwarf with an axe, and someone else has to play literally all the things your Dwarf can potentially hit with that axe.

In the module for lost mines, they write out has an answer for if they go to the town, the person that you deliver too asks them to help, you should have let them deliver normally without railroading, then have the shop keeper say the dwarf never came, please go back and find him, then they can go to the trail.

"Hey I can think of a few more ways 2 orcs can turn into 4...eh? Eh?" *begins nudging random people near me with my elbow*

"Good Bloke" - Australian confirmed.

3:42 *Herme's bureaucrat song from Futurama starts playing*

I'm new to D&D and a DM running the Phandelver adventure. I had a player say "we have a job to do, let's deliver the cargo" too, and the party agreed to it. I was just glad I read farther into the module. My group immediately offended everyone in town. The Lawful Evil paladin then decided to start a fire as a distraction and then run clear across town, away from the emergency, to the stables so the party could steal the towns horses and a wagon. For some reason, the players still thinks they could go back to this town if they need to in order to buy or sell things and rest. Phandelver is not for new players who like being bad in Skyrim. If you aren't playing good characters, you basically break this campaign.

A few years ago while hanging around at the local game store, some kids come in and they have played 4e for a while and they tried one of the published adventures, but couldn't figure out how to play it. They get an invite for a quick demo game with a few pre-rolled chars. They expect there to be some kind of fight as they usually do, but instead they interact with some NPC's and suddenly there is this look of epiphany on one of the faces. "We are playing a story !!!"

*Why do we let the DM get away with so much* It's like asking asking why we let God get away with having so much power

So basically he have the mindset of "Players versus DM" instead of cooperate with the DM to have fun. This is one of these player that require sitting down and having a long talk to explain what D&D is.

I would have explained that the DM is not just another player. That the point of DnD is to gather around and follow the DMs' story that they designed with care for the players enjoyment. In between you can do whatever you want.

I'm currently running this module and the players can deliver the cart to Phandulin first without checking out the goblin trail no problem. There's a paragraph that says skip to chapter 2 if the party decides to finish their job first. The party might decide to come back later. It's not essential for them to go, and even without their employer they can still get paid.

I think this only happened because this was a module with set rules and objectives, had this been an open campaign made by you you could have easily responded with "I made this up" upon him asking how he knew if you didn't put more goblins there that there were supposed to be. His HP meter doesn't really matter as long as he doesn't cheat, and that can be spied upon by other players next to him. The DM is supposed to be the world, a god, as long as it is realistic then anything he says is true.

When you can do anything, the choice paralysis is daunting. For new people or casual people, it's better to give them a couple options and go from there. Or don't let them in the city if they don't have their employer because why would the guards open up their gates to strangers without the proper papers. Veterans might use a forgery skill at that point, but casual or new players would be more likely to go back to the story.

I think it goes deeper than trust, it’s what makes D&D special. When a person plays a game, some of their first questions will be “who am I competing against” and “what is my objective”? Many players will automatically assume they are competing against the DM, like most RPGs. But the relationship between DM and player isn’t adversarial-unless they want it to be, of course. Consider the relationship between a player and a video game. The computer has a set of rules for the player to learn, master and manipulate. The scenarios can be as complex as the designers can program them to be, but the computer can only follow the parameters set for it in advance. The purpose of the DM is to escape this limitation. The rules in D&D represent objective reality, similarly to a video game RPG. The DM gives that reality flexibility because they are able to adapt and interpret the rules in real-time, even operating entirely outside the predefined rules where convenient for the simulation. The DM allows D&D to be what video game RPGs can never become: not a series of defined scenarios with scripted outcomes, but an emergent story told in real-time by the players themselves. When a player realizes this, consciously or unconsciously, they stop playing D&D like a game, and instead begin exploring a world they and the DM are creating together.

Ultimately, I think what happened is that Steve took a part of his board game experience with him into D&D. In his mind, you weren't just the DM, you were an opposing player. He thought that your goal was to "win" by taking down him and the other players on his "team". Because that's how asymmetrical board games usually work. And from that perspective, I could see how he might think it unfair that you didn't have to tell him how many goblins there were or how much health they had but that you got to see his information. Or how the idea that you might be able to sneak in extra bad guys to make it harder on the players with the intent of killing them might make sense to him with his background and seeing how all your stuff was behind a screen. It still might not say much about his board game playing if he was hiding his HP during the game, but I digress. Now, some DMs do try to kill their players to "win", but not in the first session and usually they don't keep groups for long once they figure it out. I've added an extra monster or two to a fight at the last minute now and then, but always with the intention of making things more interesting or making sure the players don't blow through things too quickly and feel like things aren't dangerous enough. I can't say with certainty, but Steve might have been able to figure things out down the road with the right context and explanation of the cooperative elements between the DM and the player and broke through his idea that your job in the game was trying to kill him.

this is why i cant run pre mades

I am that kind of player if I attend your game. I will break it with logic if it is remotely possible to do so. However, I prefer to be the DM. You can not break my games. Trying to apply real world logic to my games is like paying for microtransactions. You can play the game without them, but it was designed for you to apply them, and by doing so you gain so much more exciting content out of the experience. Except unlike paying for microtransactions, applying logic is free. Just use your brain a little. If a player ever questioned my power, I have the answer I use to explain rule zero. Rule zero is "the GM is always right." The GM is the referee of the game. The GM brings the world to life. It is his job to make sure the players have a good time. If you aren't having fun, the GM has failed. The door is right behind you. You let the GM have unlimited power so they can make sure you have unlimited fun. If they had asked about killing the civilian, I would not have even hesitated. I would not have questioned the player's actions. Rule one is you can do anything you can do in real life. Fantastical elements are added on top of that. Rule two is act as your character would, not as you would. So my reply to a player asking about consequences would be "Well what would your character do? You can make your character to be anything you want. A villain? A hero? A simple farmer? Well not the last one, because at my table, there is at least some combat." Never in my wildest dreams would I suggest we "just go back to the previous quest". You want to become a super-villain and start by murdering the mayor and taking his wealth? Roll your attack roll. This won't take long." Obviously the mayor isn't defenseless. In a world of D&D the mayor is probably on par with a level 7 or 9 player, and will have level 5 guards nearby. I mean, I wouldn't tell the players this. They'd have to figure it out from the fact that the mayor has a sword on his side, his eyes seem to be watching you and your hands at all times, and his body guards seem to be wary of you. At level 1, odds of a party of adventurers defeating the mayor with his guards nearby are... low. But if you want to try, be my guest. Put my service to the test.

You're an awesome DM! I've watched several of your videos and you always take the time to try to work with the players and then think about things after the game. It takes a good DM to actually consider things rather than just beat the players into their way of thinking. Kudos.

Love "Knights of Pen and Paper 2". As for your question at the end.. I am a veteran DM myself. The best answer I can think of if asked of me by a Steve would be that "I am the GM, that makes me GOD as far as your game world is concerned. I can add and subtract goblins at will. The only thing you control is what you decide to do with the information before you. If you do not like it I am not the GM for you. If you do like it that's great!"

I don't think Steve quite understood the game

Can do anything= instantly murderous

"Im not against you, I can't "cheat" because my goal isn't killing you but telling the story"

I played my first game on the same map and story with the wagon and goblins. Our DM apparently knew I would want to just continue to town, because the wagon was robbed while we were fighting the first goblins, and we knew they took stuff into the cave.

I would tell them beforehand that 2/3 of RPG (litterally, the first 2 letters) is roleplaying. Sure, he could kill townsfolk or the mayor and steal them. But why his neutral good perfectly sane character would do that? I would let him him kill the mayor, and then would describe the kid crying and begging for his life. Possibly, someone would hear this and try to lynch him. I would change his alignment, and haunt him with visions about it. Maybe, some cleric would stop by and cast speak with dead on the corpses, he would be arrested and he would need to create another character. It is important to tell the players that this is a role playing game. You are playing a role, you can do whatever you want, yes, but everything you do have consequences. And every rpg game is about an agreement. The DM should agree to provide suspension of desbelief through scenarios, NPCs, general roleplaying, descriptions and engaging plots, and the players should play their characters and be willing to dive into the story and collaborate to it, in the general purpose of everyone having fun and creating a story together.

I honestly don't make much up on the spot. I have many things planned, and then another bunch of things set aside for if things don't happen the way I planned, which I could feasibly add in if I needed to. If a player wants to know if I've been shooting straight with them, I am free with encounter information, though not statistics. As for dealing with this kind of player, you can easily say, "You don't know." whenever you, as the DM, don't know. But the basis is, you can never fully predict or understand your players and have to be ready to make things up on the spot. How do they know you aren't fudging some details? They don't know. You might be. But to be completely fair, it is 4 on 1.

To answer the Steve question, I would simply quote Hand of Fate to him. "It would be so easy to create a game that simply defeats you. But that is not what we do here. Our rules are fair."

"How do we know you're not making it up?" "I AM MAKING IT UP!!!"

I totally agree with the statement that a dm should be someone the players can trust. I have a friend who I would be terrified of having as a dm because she has stated before that she'd like to tpk the players. Sheesh.

He's metagaming. D&d is just make pretend with rules

I was running a session last night, and in it I had a moment where a Doppelganger was trying to escape captivity, my party had split up, so the 2 on watch got put to sleep, then the others were watching the tent from the distance, under hypnosis I had the Doppelganger lure a civilian (later found to be a noble). I mentioned that the person was walking slowly with no visible weapons drawn, and was staggering side to side. My Lawful Good ranger shouted for the person to stop, and when there was no response Immediately shot and killed them. They were not caught, so I now have the interesting task of figuring the repercussions of this.

Well, i'm a new DM, but i've played in my younger years. What i've learned is that D&D is not for everyone, but the most important thing to understand is that is a game of pretending and setting goals to achive and improve our characters like we would do in real live, but with magic and fantastic creatures. The rules applies like in the real world, there is always a consecuence for your actions, the DM is just the guy that sets how low or high the bar of the consecuencuences would be, depending of how realistic, ironic or how funny the outcome might be. But must important... It's a game! Love your videos BTW. Regards

I'm only a newby DM so my answer to his questions probably isn't that good but I would have told him that "as the DM I'm essentially the god over all in this game world, you don't question what I do and if you do question my choices don't always expect an answer, assume things happen just because and are the way they are just because" while being as fair and honest as I can continue being of course.

"How can I trust you if you have centralized authority in this game?" Reminds me of specific political arguments that I will not talk about here.

Hello Don't Stop Thinking. Recently I was playing a pen-and-paper game (one where everyone was playing Super Heroes) with someone who had never played a pen-and-paper game before. This is someone who was just like Steve, effectively. He asked questions to the tune of "If I murder this guy... am I still a Super Hero?" The whole group broke out laughing, because we didn't think he was serious, but oh, he was. We told him "Friggan, NO!" His rebuttal was: "But if I"m here alone with this guy, and I use my super powers to kill him, and nobody finds out then to everyone else I'm still a hero!" In a game about Super Heroes ... let's just say the story just kept getting funnier from there.

I've had these kind of questions before. My answer is always: "As the DM I improvise to create a challenging and fulfilling experience for you. If I see you're bored, I spice it up, if I see you're stressed I calm it down" everyone gets it then.

" but why this job" Me: " BECAUSE IM THE DM AND I SAID SO." Problem solved.

Wow. This was very frustrating to watch. Also, to answer your question, Steve would be uninvited from my table. Trust between DM and players is implied, usually established outside the game. Such a n00b would need to demonstrate some humility and take a step back to observe and be mentored in the art of the game.

Because the DM is not just an adversary. He has fun when the story progresses and when the fights are fair but close matches. He's not your enemy. You're basically working together with the DM to have a fun game for everyone.

do not say do whatever you want to my players, the dwarf wizard fireballs the town tavern

Keep up the amazing work! Love your videos! Feels good you got a sponsor!

I just stared the lost mine of pandever canpain (thank you for teaching me how to play)

Your videos are fantastic and I am so grateful for them. Thank you for taking the time to produce this series. I especially liked this video, as it's a good reminder that players in a campaign setting should have more important, long-term goals that impact their character's lives and the environment within which they live.

I had a player who had a Chaotic Neutral Monk that she played as if it were a Rogue. She had a quest to investigate what had happened to an illegal shipment that was suppose to have arrived from another continent (a distance across water similar to the Atlantic), so she needed to get a ship, which she did. On the way there, the ship was attacked by pirates, and a fight broke out, where she and the first mate were the only survivors. She then decided to murder the first mate, hang him from the mast, and then sail back to the town she came from. Needless to say, she immediately got arrested and nearly executed, but instead imprisoned, and then after a couple of years died in the cell from a cursed object she had bought previously. Whilst interrogated under a Zone of Truth spell (which she failed the saving throw on) she also said things that went directly against what she had told me as the DM earlier.

i love this game, i used to play it, but there are some dungeons that are so hard and more powerful than the characters build in that moment, they have to check that and balance the game, there's moments that are impossible to advance in the game

More stories, pls.

This guy clearly had it firmly stuck in his head that the players and the DM are in a direct competition with each other. That’s probably one of if not the most dangerous mindsets to be in for the player or the DM.

"Of course I'm making things up. This town didn't have a mayor until you asked about him, they don't have much money in their pockets because I decided that this town isn't important enough to be full of wealthy nobles, and there wasn't anyone to report the crime to until you proposed the idea of committing a crime since after all, this town didn't exist as more than a point on a map until you decided to visit it. Just as it is my privilege to make up anything and everything within the world you interact, it is also my responsibility to maintain verisimilitude and logical consistency. I know what will happen because I make it happen and I make it happen because it makes sense and/or is interesting. Just as the boy would most likely report the murder, he could also have a slim chance of seizing the opportunity to steal the family inheritance, flee the scene, and stash it away somewhere before doing so, only to show up a few years later in the story as an adult and invite you to join his newly founded crime syndicate as thanks for taking the heat off of him in his ploy to steal the inheritance, but as a general rule, the consequences are comparable to reality in medieval times but with magic and dragons.