hey /tg/. i really, REALLY like the idea of GM'ing. on my first campaign, i would lose track of the time my adventurers spent walking. then they decided to fight a monster i was saving for later and they died quickly, then quit. i admit, that was kinda my fault. for my second campaign, i spent a good month planning, watching critical role, preparing, etc etc. one thing i read was to make your players feel at home- and to not introduce the main "adventure" yet. one of my players was a carpenter. so i rolled, and he came up. for about 2 minutes, i described how he woke up, walked down the street, and went to his job site. this all took about 2 minutes irl; when my players get distracted and start saying "this isn't working" and they basically just stop. we were talking about it @ school and they said "anon, you're a just a shitty DM. sorry to say it." is it my fault? or theirs? i really like dm ing, so i think i may just need to find a new group.
>>46173094
Find new friends, or beat some manners into the ones you have and tell them to try to do a better job if they think you're so shit
>>46173094
>then they decided to fight a monster i was saving for later and they died quickly, then quit.
Well that was a fuckup. How did they even run into the monster? Lesson learned is that player will attack anything in front of them.
>one thing i read was to make your players feel at home- and to not introduce the main "adventure" yet.
This is not universal advice. It's good advice for groups that lean towards roleplay.
But by your previous example, you have hack'n'slash guys. If you want them, you pander to them: run them a dungeon crawl.
P.S. Fix your grammar. Seriously. It'll help a lot.
>>46173094
Everything you have written here sounds ridiculous. I can't tell if you're nuts, or your players are, or both, or neither, or what. But I do know your problem.
>we were talking about it @ school
You're young. You'll get less retarded as you get older, and you'll look back at your younger self, and think, 'man, what a dumb asshole I was back then, no wonder my GMing sucked'. It's a process we all have to go through, don't sweat it.
>>46173094
Part of the problem is that you're dictating too much. Forcing one of your players to spend time as a mundane carpenter walking to work likely bored the shit out of him, whether or not he's actually really into roleplay. That doesn't do anything narratively, it doesn't establish his character because he already knows he's a carpenter, it's not interesting by itself. And while you're doing that, the rest of the table is doing literally nothing because you're focusing entirely on one player. I mean, you rolled to see how many real life minutes of everyone's time you were going to waste, that's awful.
In general it sounds like you're focusing on the wrong stuff. You sound like you spend an inordinate amount of IRL time on transportation - in a tabletop setting, there's vritually no reason to spend even a second on how the party travels. Think of it like a movie, you're at city A, the party says they intend to go to dungeon B, the camera cuts to a new scene and the party is now in dungeon B.
What you could try doing is buying a premade campaign, like the excellent adventure paths by Paizo for Pathfinder. They're written by people with much more experience and contain useful advice. That gives you more time to focus on how you should actually run the game, making sure you're never wasting anyone's time with descriptions no one wants to hear.
Your goals for next time are to never waste an IRL second and to include the entire group in everything. Address the party as a whole whenever possible and only focus on one person in particular when absolutely necessary or it's obvious they're asking for a minute in the spotlight.
If someone else in the group can GM, go ahead and let them handle it for a while and learn from them. It's a lot easier to appreciate what a good game is like when you've played in one.
You should only be speaking on three occasions:
1. Describing the start of an encounter.
2. Describing the result of a failed PC roll.
3. Describing the actions of an NPC.
If you're going to keep a log of every single step they take, you're gonna have a bad time.
If you're going to try and foresee every possible outcome of players' actions, you're gonna have a bad time.
If you're going to tell them what their characters are doing, would, or would not do, you're gonna have a bad time.
