Ways to avoid annoying your players

There are many ways to annoy, aggravate, frustrate, and generally irk your players. Unfortunately, many of these are easy to do without realizing it. If you want to keep your campaign going – and your players happy – there are equally easy ways to avoid these pitfalls.

1) The worst thing you, as a Dungeon Master, can do is not paying attention to your players. Many of the other pitfalls can actually be lumped under this one.

2) The second biggie, is not planning. Sure some people are just naturally talented at coming up with stuff on the fly; but for most of us we need to have at least a general idea of how we want to develop the story, how various NPCs will react to the party, and keeping a few side quests up your sleeve never hurt either in case the party decides that the ruler of the city can solve his own problems.

3) Providing battles that are either insanely difficult or so easy that they feel like busy work to occupy them because you didn’t plan on anything to run.

4) Running a game that does not cater to players style of game. For instance, if your players like a lot of puzzles, don’t keep throwing orcs at them. Or, if they prefer a battle heavy campaign, don’t make them role-play every interaction; allow them to just ask people in the tavern questions without having to persuade them.

5) Going along with the previous pitfall is demanding that players role-play every shop transaction. I actually had a DM decide that this would make the game more interesting. All it really did was cause the entire 5 hour session take place in stores; it literally took 30 minutes to buy a sword. Once in a while, especially when the player wants to buy a powerful item, this is cool. However, most of the time, the player just wants to ask the shopkeep for the item, pay for it, and leave – much like real life interactions in stores.

6) Not tying missions in a campaign together. Don’t get me wrong, it is okay to just do a series of one-off sessions. But when running a campaign instead, each mission should be related somehow to the overall story arc.

7) Do not be inflexible, if your players want to explore outside of the "track&track; that you have created, let them. This is where having a list of possible side-quests that I mentioned above can come in handy.

8) Not involving players and making them feel like the game is happening to them, not that they are playing it. Ways to involve players include passing out hand-outs at key points, using overhead displays, setting up dungeons using set pieces, and using sound effects. For more information about using sounds effectively in your game, check out this article.

9) Bringing the party back to life, over and over. I played in a campaign once where the DM did this. It got to the point where we would be brought back to life, cast a fireball at the center of the party to commit suicide, and would be brought back again. The reason that the party was committing suicide was not to tempt fate by seeing if they would be resurrected again, but because the mission was horrible and they would rather die; this goes back to points 1 and 4.

10) Not paying attention or being really tired while running a session. Players – from my experience on both sides of the table – do not like having to repeat themselves every five minutes.

Hopefully, by following these suggestions, you can avoid the problems that I have witnessed – and committed – over the years.