Dungeon Master Musings: Different Strokes for Different Folks

One of the most important lessons any DM can learn is the lesson of tailoring your game to the players that you have.  Ultimately, the objective of any DM is to make sure that those players are having as much fun as possible, while having a fun themselves.

As such, I've spent a lot of time monitoring my two groups of gamers, and trying to make the experiences as interesting as possible for both of them.

What they are looking for

For the guy's group, they are looking for exploration, accomplishment, success, and challenge.  They want to encounter situations and overcome them.  They want a more traditional dungeon crawl, where they handle each encounter by itself and gain power, glory, loot, and more capabilities as time goes on.  Role playing is a vehicle by which combat and victory are augmented and achieved.

The women's group is looking for a variety of interesting experiences and exploration.  They want to discover interesting people and interesting locales, while telling interesting stories about their characters.  Combat is interesting as a vehicle to help propel their characters forward and discover new qualities about themselves.

What they find important

For the guy's group, regularity and consistency are important, while storyline is secondary.  When the monster comes flying at them, they want the outcome of the scenario to be the same each time, based on some specific set of rules related to how the dice fell.

The women's group enjoys having more free-form encounters.  The monster trips, falls on its face, and lands prone.  You stab the wall with your sword and it impales itself into the cement.  Both bad and good things just randomly happen based on when I see an opportunity for bringing in interesting events.

One of my favorite things to do that I've started to tone down are critical hits/successes.  For the guy's group, having too much "interesting stuff" happen after a critical hit or miss was too much.  They complained multiple times about it being unfair and inconsistent.  So out it went.

But for the women's group we still have this.  And it results in some of the most amusing and interesting moments in those games.  "The shadow reaches out to touch the fighter, but overreaches, giving the fighter an opportunity to attack it.  Which she critically fails and manages instead to finally touch the shadow that she was trying to hit." is one scenario that happened.  In another, the player and the monster kept exchanging weapons as they fought.

Nothing is Normal

One of the biggest mistakes a DM can make is to assume that one style of play is necessarily better than the other.  Both are valid ways to play the game.  Whether you're doing a straight up tactical dungeon crawl or experiencing a story with many wild twists and turns, both are great if everyone is having fun, and it's best when you do a little bit of each.

Personally, the reason I prefer the looser version of the game is because it enables me to be creative and try to come up with interesting results of the players' actions.  But it does mean things are more chaotic and inconsistent, because I have to remember the "house rules" I've made in the past.  And do a good job of informing my players about those changes as much as I am able.