A while back we ran a DM clinic - for a more experienced DM to coach newer ones - I wrote up much of the 'on table' prep and tricks of the trade side of things before but the conversation also ranged around the 'above table' social aspects of the hobby as a whole. As per Gorgon Bones first best practice: "Record your hobby experience" this is a pretty solid reflection of the active questions of 'working DMs' within a pretty busy gaming group.
There was a lot of table management questions but some themes
- player engagement (dealing with stuns and deaths)
- DMs having fun (and not having to do the not fun bits)
- telling people what they are signing up for (content disclaimers)
- avoiding anti-social characters when you do not know the other players well
Challenges DMs were facing included the familiar 'persuasion is not mind control' issue, particularly manifesting as people repeatedly trying to intimidate shop-keepers for discounts and turning shopping sessions into a grind. This came up with DMs feeling that time was being burned and they were not having fun while the players did this. Our suggestion was to zoom out and hand the player(s) a price list to decide what they wanted, maybe roll a check or two to see the final price, but to not do the things they were not enjoying - first person RP of shop-keepers getting pushed around.
Another aspect of people having fun was the angle of getting knocked out of combat through stun or petrification is not fun and worse if someone gets killed without a clear replacement character during a five hour Friday night session - do they have to sit it out and twiddle their thumbs? Do they go home? This is exacerbated by the open-table Friday night format where a player may have say down with relative strangers so mitigating aspects that happen at campaigns - sticking around and laughing with your buddies and/or cheering for their characters as they press on - are lost because a player may not know the people around them or the characters they are playing with enough for that to be fun.
Does the DM pull punches and never use petrification/stun or the like? Does the DM back off if it looks like players might die? Neither of these are good because without risk of failure the joy of success is lost. We talked through ways of keeping someone in the game after a character dies - telling folk to bring spare characters, having pre-gens, take over an NPC or (in the event of TPK) having the entire party continue to explore the dungeon as incorporeal spirits for the rest of the session.
We had a significant discussion around a DM's home campaign issue which began as a discussion of phones at table but drilled down to a loss of agency question where the phone use was because the character ended up getting dominated and the player had nothing to do. Though it appeared different, in practice this was the same as getting KO'ed in a combat with nothing to do. Addressing the root cause of player disengagement due to loss of agency was our suggestion rather than whack-a-mole style going after the signs of disengagement.
There was a significant debate around the limits on acceptable characters for these open table games - dealing with the manifestation of 'but it is what my character would do'. Some of the folk present were advocates of letting the asshole character be an asshole but the broader view was that assholes, lone wolves and other hard-to-get-along types are not for one-shots with strangers. These characters might be fine for campaigns where you know your fellow players and can really plumb the depths of the human condition - be intenense and emotionally raw if you like. But do not subject strangers to it - they only just met you and are not going to be able to distinguish 'this asshole fighter' from 'this asshole player'. This was all raised as a mild challenge to a bit of our code of conduct on this.
Another challenge we got was on content disclaimers / warnings that were requested by quite a few of the DMs. This got some push back for reasons not really explained - for peoples own campaigns, they can go wild but for the Friday night open tables we get an awful lot of first time newbies and we want to try to give them a positive experience, not get a story published on RPGHorrorStories. Again it came back to people can do what they like at their home tables, go as hard, as dark, as disturbing as they want but if they are going to come to the open table games they ought to give people and idea of what the game is - whether that is cozy tea-parties or whether it is going to be a body-horror gorefest.
One thing that did come up that was a worthwhile observation was that we are running a somewhat safety-wheels version of the D&D experience, we are not really probing the hard edges. There are going to be some people coming just off Baldur's Gate 3 as their only D&D experience, others from watching actual plays, others coming from the Wargamer background with "my PC is a pawn". If you can somehow weld together a common understanding in a rapid manner on a Friday night to attempt some really intense and out-there role-playing, then amazing. But to make life easier on yourself, you might want to be attempting to hit the biggest common core piece of that Venn Diagram of everybody's shared understanding of what D&D is when they sit down to the table.
The core theme through all of this was communication - tell people what they are signing up for, recognise that you do not have a history of communication with strangers so you roleplaying as an asshole will be seen as you being an asshole.
These aspects of the session were a grind for me, we had a solid contingent of our DMs who seemed to take offense at any suggestions to exclude certain things - happily they were convincable when we made the split between 'go wild in your home campaign with friends, recognise the open-tables have newbies and strangers'. It did make me realise the value of these sessions in helping get everyone on the same page to run the open table games even if it felt like a bit of a chore at times to explain what feels to me like obvious things. I guess the point of it is that if I can pass on some of the bitter-won experiences of my time at table and stop other people falling in the same holes, all to the good.
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