What’s your superhero weakness?
Knowing your limits
I think I mentioned recently that I used to be a semi-professional athlete (only semi because I never made much money from it!). From 2001 to 2004 I made the World Championships finals – that means top 10 – in my discipline but only twice was I really a top 10 player. The other 2 times I only performed better than other younger, more talented athletes because I knew my limits and didn’t try to do too much.
And I believe that knowing what you do well as a DM and sticking to it can make your D&D games better.
Don’t become predictable
Sticking to what you do best doesn’t mean all your games need to be the same. I believe that a dungeon master should always try different styles, rules, monsters. I know I’ll always be looking for an edge to make my D&D session better.
But I also know that I have one thing I really can’t do as a DM – more on that tomorrow!
Your superhero weakness
All superheroes have one crippling weakness. I have one major DM weakness – and a slew of minor ones! The important thing is that I know what my superhero weakness is and I stay away from it. If I decide to work on that particular DMing skill I’ll definitely tell the players before the game!
Keep learning
As long as you’re trying new stuff and learning and having fun, your superhero weakness(es) shouldn’t keep you from running killer D&D games.
What’s your superhero weakness?
My weakness is running combat. I’m better than I used to be but still not good and it took a long time. Mainly because I just kept telling myself I must get better.
But it wasn’t till I sat down, thought it through and identified a series of tasks – re-read the combat rules, read the rules again, make myself a cheat sheet, practise combat in between sessions, etc. – and gradually worked my way through them that I started improving.
But I’ll never be particularly good because I’m not all that interested in combat.
It’s always hard to learn something we don’t care about. Once you feel you know the rules better you can knowingly choose not to use some of them.
My weakness is combat as well, though not so much the running of it, as keeping the pacing of it. For some reason 2-3 monsters is simple, but it becomes exponentially harder for me to keep track of everything when encounters reach 5-6 creatures. it seems like when the’re all these little critters running around, it makes it incredibly difficult to keep the action revolving solidly around the PC’s (particularly when they make up 1/3 of the combat participents.)
I think my weakness is magic, i always forget to use it when doing combat!
mine is magic as a player and in the very few times i DM i love to use undead (they are so great) but any one who reads my post and has read libis mortis can probly tell im a lil obssed with the undead of D&D