"Incompetence" makes it seem really bad. I hope it's not actually that bad.
Well, I'm growing. I've crossed into what the Peace Corps calls "Conscious Incompetence": I'm starting to understand how much I need to learn about being a DM. Here's a partial list of mistakes I've made.
Most of these problems I've either devised solutions to, or are just going to take experience to master. Here's what I think my major high-level problems are: 1. I bit off more than I can chew. 2. I need to make the adventure more compelling. 3. I'm too focused on the rules.
1. There's nothing wrong with the campaign I came up with, except that I'm not totally ready for it. I would have been better off starting small and working my way up to something like this. I think I can salvage it, though. I've already started by thinking of my too-big adventure as a campaign, and putting smaller adventures at the beginning of it. I think I'm going to take this to the next level and give the party some smaller-scale quests to go on in the short term. I won't feel so bad about railroading them through these sorts of minor adventures, which will give me a chance to practice some of the things I need practice on (dialog, combat, rewards, that sort of thing). It will also give me a chance to level up the characters a bit before they get into some of the heavier stuff I have planned for them.
2. Same solution as above. If I can railroad the party into some small-scale adventures, then there will be opportunity for excitement, combat, and rewards - the immediately compelling stuff. It will also give the party a chance to bond a little bit, and that should provide a little bit more motivation for them. Additionally, I'll get a chance to see how they think a little bit, which will (hopefully) help me plan future adventures. This whole "small, tangentially-related adventures" thing is a lesson I should have learned from beyonder, but I just haven't been thinking small enough.
3. I don't know exactly how to fix this. I'm starting to realize that it's a problem. I really want to play by the rules, even if they're arbitrary. When a player tries to, say, climb a wall that I didn't expect him to climb, I feel like it's important to come up with an "appropriate" Climb DC rather than just decide whether I want him to succeed or not and sort of fudge the DC entirely. Okay, maybe that's a bad example. The point is, I demand that everything I do be explainable, even though I know the players aren't going to hear the explanation. And, while I think that's a good thing in general, I'm afraid that I might focus on the rules at the expense of the fun. Not, you know, entirely. But I want the game to be fun, that's sort of its point, so I'd like to learn how to do it without diminishing the fun at all.
All of this is in-game DM stuff. I'm also learning a lot about managing the out-of-game stuff that comes with being DM, like organizing sessions, dealing with a player missing a session, dealing with canceling a session, that sort of thing. That's a whole other issue.
Damn, is this a learning experience, or what? I love doing this, and I feel like I'm picking up and improving a lot of useful skills. I just hope that I can make the game fun enough that my players don't get bored while I'm figuring all of this stuff out.
- Talking Too Much - I'm learning a lot about how to do this. But when I get really excited about it, or when I'm trying to process some of the things I'm learning, I want to talk it through. Unfortunately, the people I have on-hand tend to be my players, so sometimes I talk too much. I try not to give away plot or anything like that, but... well, this list is a good example of stuff the players probably shouldn't know.
- Motivation and Hooks - I seem to be underestimating what it takes to motivate a party, or not tapping into character-specific motivations, or something. My original hook was a reward, that was supposed to lead the adventurers into a mystery. When the original reward disappeared the players understandably lost interest in the original mission (whoops, my bad), but they also had no interest in investigating the big new mystery. They have a patron, but apparently didn't think of her as a patron.
- Cohesion - I didn't set up a reason for the party to stay together at an inn. It hasn't posed any problems so far, and shouldn't be hard to fix, but for some reason I expected it to sort of just happen. I didn't realize it was something I would have to do.
- Breadcrumbs and Railroading - Good lord, this is a delicate balancing act. There are a lot of adventures going on around the players, but I'm not setting them up properly, because the party isn't finding them. I don't want to push the players in a particular direction. I want them to be creative and look for avenues to investigate.
- Unintentional Red Herrings - When the players actually did get creative in their investigation, they went somewhere I didn't expect and I didn't have any sort of (story or material) reward to give them.
- Information Management - There are a lot of high-level details that the players miss because they don't ask the right questions - questions that I've assumed they'll ask. I think this might stem from the fact that none of them ever played adventure games, which greatly inform how I imagine situations will be approached. I'm learning that I need to be more generous in scene descriptions and information that I give away freely, but it's a balance that I haven't struck yet.
- Urban Adventure - I get, now, why an urban adventure is fundamentally harder to run than a more traditional adventure. People warned me, but I didn't really understand. I still love it, as a setting, I just didn't really know what I was getting myself into.
- Planning Encounters - I simply don't have practice at this, and I don't totally get the way challenge ratings are assigned and used. It's complicated by the fact that encounter levels are based on multiple sequential encounters, as in a dungeon. Mostly I want one-shot encounters with rest in between.
- Progress Estimation - beyonder said that we made about half the progress he expected each session. So far, I'm overestimating a progress much more severely than that.
- Role-Playing NPCs - I haven't managed to do it yet. I'm just too nervous, I think. I have notes about what sort of information important characters will give out, but I'm not presenting it in character. And it makes it hard when I'm doing an NPC I hadn't planned anything for.
- Coming Up With Rules On The Fly - There are a lot of rules, aren't there? I don't know them all. I think this is mostly just an experience thing.
- Coming Up With DCs - What do you do when a player asks to do something, and you don't know what the DC should be? I mean, in some situations, there's a DC that you can look up, if you stop the game for a few minutes to find it. But sometimes you just need to come up with a DC on the spot. I have trouble in those situations, estimating what an appropriate DC is.
- Adjusting the Game Rules - I've made some changes to the game rules (no explicit XP rewards, for example). Making a small change of this sort can have far-reaching implications, and figuring out how to reconcile it with other things is hard work.
- Treasure - I know there are some guides, but I still don't have an intuitive feel for how much a particular thing is worth, or how much treasure the party should be allowed to acquire at any certain point.
- Familiar Surroundings - This is a big one, that I didn't plan properly. The campaign takes place in a city where many of the players are residents. As such, they have some pre-existing knowledge of the area, which I've thought of as a Knowledge (Local) bonus. Problem is, I haven't communicated this properly, so they don't make Knowledge (Local) checks the way I think they will. This is an Information Management problem as I described above, with the added complication that the urban environment is so large and complex that I am just starting to get a good feel for it.
Most of these problems I've either devised solutions to, or are just going to take experience to master. Here's what I think my major high-level problems are: 1. I bit off more than I can chew. 2. I need to make the adventure more compelling. 3. I'm too focused on the rules.
1. There's nothing wrong with the campaign I came up with, except that I'm not totally ready for it. I would have been better off starting small and working my way up to something like this. I think I can salvage it, though. I've already started by thinking of my too-big adventure as a campaign, and putting smaller adventures at the beginning of it. I think I'm going to take this to the next level and give the party some smaller-scale quests to go on in the short term. I won't feel so bad about railroading them through these sorts of minor adventures, which will give me a chance to practice some of the things I need practice on (dialog, combat, rewards, that sort of thing). It will also give me a chance to level up the characters a bit before they get into some of the heavier stuff I have planned for them.
2. Same solution as above. If I can railroad the party into some small-scale adventures, then there will be opportunity for excitement, combat, and rewards - the immediately compelling stuff. It will also give the party a chance to bond a little bit, and that should provide a little bit more motivation for them. Additionally, I'll get a chance to see how they think a little bit, which will (hopefully) help me plan future adventures. This whole "small, tangentially-related adventures" thing is a lesson I should have learned from beyonder, but I just haven't been thinking small enough.
3. I don't know exactly how to fix this. I'm starting to realize that it's a problem. I really want to play by the rules, even if they're arbitrary. When a player tries to, say, climb a wall that I didn't expect him to climb, I feel like it's important to come up with an "appropriate" Climb DC rather than just decide whether I want him to succeed or not and sort of fudge the DC entirely. Okay, maybe that's a bad example. The point is, I demand that everything I do be explainable, even though I know the players aren't going to hear the explanation. And, while I think that's a good thing in general, I'm afraid that I might focus on the rules at the expense of the fun. Not, you know, entirely. But I want the game to be fun, that's sort of its point, so I'd like to learn how to do it without diminishing the fun at all.
All of this is in-game DM stuff. I'm also learning a lot about managing the out-of-game stuff that comes with being DM, like organizing sessions, dealing with a player missing a session, dealing with canceling a session, that sort of thing. That's a whole other issue.
Damn, is this a learning experience, or what? I love doing this, and I feel like I'm picking up and improving a lot of useful skills. I just hope that I can make the game fun enough that my players don't get bored while I'm figuring all of this stuff out.