You know, I see a lot of posts out there about dumb shit that players do and while all of those posts are incredibly valid, I feel like this is dumbass DM erasure. I dearly love every story about bards who seduce the final boss and warlocks with sugar daddies and all that BUT I think DMs are greatly misunderstood to all be these serious controlling entities who just want their players to follow through with their perfectly planned scenerios. Here’s to all the dumbass DMs out there who:
- forget their NPC names and constantly make up new names for unimportant recurring NPCs when the players see them in hopes that they wont remember
- plan a whole dungeon around one (1) spongebob reference that they really wanted to fit in
- accidentally give two NPCs the same name bc you just pull from a list and you forgot to cross it off
- choose to homebrew everything bc they have an Artistic Vision but the vision is just that you want there to be three gnomes in a trench coat selling sketchy magical items somewhere in the setting
- use the same dumbass voice for every NPC but with different 90s surfer slang for different characters
- make just awful items and make their players buy them (I’m currently working on the “Ross From Friends” tramp stamp of +1 AC)
- realize they only have 28 minutes before the next session to plan and instead make text posts on tumblr.com
Anyway if any DMs want to add onto this with some dumbass shit they’ve subjected their players to feel free
Dumbass DM things I have done, an incomplete list:
-had a one-shot end too early, completely improvise scenes desperately for an hour, each one intended to be a final scene but somehow giving my players the definite impression that they had found a massive conspiracy, to the point that they showed up to the next one-shot with characters expectantly levelled up and ready to go
-made my players fight fish MULTIPLE TIMES
-built an entire one-shot around a pun I didn’t even get to use
-expected my players to respect authority
-named a major NPC “auntie”
-decided to DM a game (and another, and another, and another…)