I’ve been DMing for about two years now. Some days I’m a pretty good DM. Some days I’m not. Still, it’s long enough that my experience DMing (combined with three years of consistently playing D&D as a player) has given me some sense of how to DM. And sometimes, that sense doesn’t align with “DM tips” that I see pretty commonly. Some of these tips are useful in some but not all circumstances. Some aren’t. All of them are things that are very bad to treat as universal advice.
So, without further ado, the worst DM advice I’ve seen on the internet.
Never say no to your players
This advice is very common, and I think it comes from the “D&D is basically improv so you should always ‘yes and’” school of thought. And in many cases, this isn’t bad advice. If you’re finding you’re saying no to your players frequently, you should probably whether you’re being too restrictive and railroad-y. If your players are asking to do things that are maybe feasible but unexpected or unusual, most of the time, you probably should come up with an appropriate check for them to make (possibly with a high DC) and give them a chance to succeed.
So “rarely say no to your players” isn’t bad advice. But if you have DMed much at all, even if you are the most permissive DM in the world, I promise that you’ve said no to players plenty of times.
Why is this? Because players frequently ask to do things that are against the rules because they’re unclear on the map or the rules or some other aspect of the situation. Think of exchanges like “Can I get in melee with the monster?” “No, it’s 40 feet away, and your move speed is only 30 feet” or “Can I cast this spell?” “No, it takes an action to cast, and you already used your action this turn.” In these cases, it doesn’t make sense to answer yes. It doesn’t even make sense to say “no but”. You simply say no, give a brief explanation why, and move on. D&D is a storytelling mechanism, but it’s also a game, and as DM, you’re the referee. Sometimes you’re going to have to say no.
This also applies when a player asks to do something that technically doesn’t violate a rule, but seems physically impossible, absurd, or otherwise infeasible. In a more comedic game or a not so serious one-shot, you can let the player roll for it, letting them succeed gloriously on a very high roll and fail (perhaps hilariously) otherwise. But in a more serious game, especially if it’s part of an ongoing campaign, it’s totally fine to just say no. For example, I once ran a one-shot at a convention where a player asked if he could recruit an army of crabs while the party was taking a short rest along the coast. Because it was a one-shot where we were already playing fast and loose with rules, I said yes, he rolled a nat 20, and he got a bunch of crab minions for the final boss fight. It was a lot of fun, but I wouldn’t allow it in a campaign if the player didn’t have an ability to charm or control animals for a number of reasons. It would set a weird precedent, it would throw off the game balance a bit, and it would break the realism of the world if a level 1 could suddenly have animal minions by just being very charismatic. These, in my mind, are all good reasons to say no.
This, by the way, also goes for character builds. I would do this sparingly, but if you want to ban certain classes or spells or alignments (or whatever else you might want to ban), that’s okay. For example, my first campaign was shortly after 5e came out, and the DM didn’t want to figure out how metamagic would affect the game, so they decided sorcerers didn’t exist in our campaign. I as a DM have yet to ban anything mechanical, but I all but banned evil characters in my main campaign, because I didn’t want more troubles getting my party to work together on a common goal. In both cases, it was fine, and all the relevant players had plenty of character options. The more you get away from “core” options, the more this applies. Does your player want to play a homebrew class that either seems unbalanced or doesn’t really fit your campaign setting? Does your paladin want to multiclass into sorcerer for mechanical reasons even though the character has no arcane inclinations and hasn’t shown any signs of sorcery? If the player really wants it, you can try to work with them, but if that’s going to be too much work, just say no.
If players have fun, the DM has fun
This is almost more adage than advice, but I find it really harmful. First off, I will say that the inverse is true. If your players aren’t having fun, you’re probably not going to have fun, and if you are, that’s something you should probably work on. That said, games can look pretty different from the DM’s perspective and the players’ perspectives, and that disconnect means there’s all sorts of ways for players to have fun while the DM doesn’t. Maybe the players make fun of NPCs that the DM invested energy in. Maybe they find a way to breeze through combat, and the DM doesn’t ever get the chance to really use any of the monsters they wanted to use. Maybe players are repeatedly avoiding paying attention to the main plot of the game that the DM has invested time and effort into.
Sometimes these things can be fixed by an attitude adjustment. (Are players really breezing through all of combat or did they just find a way to destroy one monster you were really excited about?) But sometimes they can’t, and if you don’t do anything, you’ll grow resentful of the game, and then your players stop having fun. So in these cases, don’t just assume that everything is fine as long as your players are having fun. Talk to your players about the problem. Maybe it will mean they have to adjust their behavior, maybe it will mean you have to adjust yours, but either way, it can stop the problem from getting worse.
For example, my players have a tendency to ask hyperspecific questions that pick at the worldbuilding. (Recent ones include asking precisely how Speak with Animals works and why Scrying is legal and what the implications of that are.) Since I don’t tend to build up a ton of information about my homebrew world, and most of these questions aren’t directly relevant to the game, these tended to derail the game and stress me out by giving me more work that didn’t really progress the game. Eventually, I just talked to my players, and they agreed to try to to stop. It hasn’t stopped them entirely, but usually when they start to get into one of these discussions, one of the other players will cut them off.
You must make permadeath a serious threat
I see a lot of variants of this one, but basically they all amount to the idea that you should change some aspect of the game (rules or stories) to make death and/or permadeath more common than it typically is in 5e. Some of these suggestions, like making resurrection spells involve a skill check that can be failed, are perfectly reasonable rule change. Some of them, like banning Healing Word to make death more common in combat, feel overly draconian. Some of the story suggestions, like never basing plot points around specific characters in case they die, prioritize making the players afraid of death over every other aspect of the game and should probably be avoided.
But while some of these rules variants are reasonable and some aren’t, what I really want to say is that you don’t have to play with any of them. Hell, you can even guarantee resurrections at low levels when players wouldn’t normally have access to resurrection, and it won’t hurt your game. There seems to be a lot of worry in the RPG community that easy resurrection cheapens death, but ultimately, players know that death isn’t cheap. Even if the players know they have plot armor, the characters don’t. And ultimately, many players would rather not have their characters permadie. I know I wouldn’t.
Because the truth is that even if you absolutely guarantee resurrection in every circumstance, there’s still a lot of ways that death can rattle your characters. Aside from the fact that players are very likely to assign significance to their characters’ deaths, there’s a lot of things you can do as a DM. Maybe the cleric resurrecting the character learns some secret about the character as part of the ritual. Maybe the character “comes back wrong” and is missing some memory or skill they previously had. And ultimately, if the character is really blasé about their own death, doesn’t that also say a lot about the character?
Don’t start your game in a tavern
I can’t believe I have to say this after, say, Critical Role’s second campaign started in a tavern, but I see this advice in a few places, so I feel the need to say that it’s totally fine to start your game in a tavern. It’s a cliche for a reason. A tavern is a place where a variety of characters might be, and it’s a great place either for a quest giver to enter looking for adventurers or for something to go terribly wrong that requires the response of people inclined to do big heroic things. And just because starting in a tavern is cliche, that doesn’t mean that the campaign as a whole is. Aside from my Critical Role example, I’ve had two campaigns (my first ever campaign and the current one that’s being podcasted) start in taverns, and they’ve both been very original, a lot of fun, and very different from each other.
This same thing goes for any “Don’t do X, it’s too cliche” advice. Evil cults are common villains in D&D games, because evil cults make good villains, and giant fights with evil cults in the middle of creepy dungeons are fun. It’s more than okay to include those in your game. Similarly, the Forgotten Realms might be the most “boring” canon setting, because it’s straight up the middle high fantasy, but it’s also a very useful (and well-developed) campaign setting because it’s straight up the middle high fantasy. Ultimately, not every aspect of your game is going to be highly original, and that’s probably a good thing. Classics are classics for a reason, and it’s more important for your campaign to be engaging than original.
Honestly, any advice that begins with “never say” is probably bad, but I think this one could be particularly stressful to new DMs. Every so often, your players are going to ask a very specific, unexpected worldbuilding question. Maybe you’re Matt Mercer and know offhand what the tax structure of the city is or exactly which drugs are popular in the region, but chances are you haven’t prepared your world in that level of detail. This advice says that you have to come up with an answer on the spot instead of admitting that you don’t know the answer offhand or else your world will feel less real.
It’s true that it probably breaks immersion to have gaps in the world. And it’s true that if you have a really good sense of your world and/or are very good at improvisation, you should try to answer when asked. But ultimately, a poorly thought out, unresearched answer is also going to make your world feel less real and will probably only lead to more questions. If you can’t think of a good answer, it’s okay to say that you don’t know.
That said, you should try to get an answer to your player in the end. If it’s something that’s hard to answer because you are lacking real world expertise that a player has, you might let them answer. (For example, if your player is a chemist playing an alchemist and they ask how one of their concoctions work, your answer might be “I don’t know, you tell me”.) If it’s something that requires a little bit of thought but is tied to the plot of the game, take some time after the game and tell your players the answer at the start of the next session (or message them between games with the answer). Finally, in some cases, a player really will ask an offhand question that’s hard to answer. In that case, it’s totally okay to say you don’t know and ask if they really need to know the answer. There’s every chance they’ll say no, and you can move on. Not every tax structure needs to be delineated in full.
Anyways, despite this being a very long post, that’s probably just a few of the really bad pieces of advice out there, and I’d love to hear if people have others.
