Update: thanks all for the very helpful advice! I think it’s really special that not one of you dunked on my DM. You all seem very supportive of a broad range of play styles and that’s a sign of a very healthy community.
I reached out to one of the more experienced players in our party, and I’ll be pinging our DM at some point over the next week. I’ll see if we can switch gears or if not leave peaceably. Thanks again.
Recently got into DND. Watched two seasons of Dimension 20 and loved them. A friend of mine offered to try DMing for our friend group. We meet every two weeks for 3-4 hours. We’re playing Pathfinder using the Foundry online interface so we can play remotely.
Apologize if I mess up any terminology, I’m new.
I am two hours into this week’s game right now (in another tab), and I’m so fucking bored. We’re in some underground tunnel system, and just getting bombarded by completely arbitrary enemies.
Last round we spent three hours fighting a mimic and a gelatinous cube, and there was no explanation for why they were even in the cave in the first place. We haven’t had a conversation with an NPC in three sessions. End of the round we come across some weird tunnel system with giant moths on one side and giant larvae on the other. No explanation for why they’re there. We start coming up with a plan on how to kill them so we can get the loot they’re guarding, but it was the end of the session.
This week, right when we start and try to do something about the moths, we get attacked by morlocks that came up the tunnel behind us, fight them for an hour and a half, and the remaining ones just run off. So now we’re finally dealing with the moths.
Anyway, we’re doing this on a giant map in Foundry. Nothing is theater of the mind. It’s all very literal, and it feels like I’m playing an incredibly slow PC game just sliding my token down tunnels. Nobody is really roleplaying. We rarely get any details during our battles beyond “they look really hurt.”
I don’t expect anybody I know to be at the level of Brennan or whatever at DMing, but there is just no entertainment value for what we’re doing here, we’re constantly in combat, none of my skills are useful (because we’re just fighting mindless monsters), and it’s like a solid 10 minutes between my turns.
Like end of last round, I floated the idea of trying to mount and tame one of the moths (I’m a halfling, and they’re big), and my DM just said “I mean, that’s pretty dangerous. If you’re ok rolling a new character, you can try it.” Like geez, sorry for trying to make it interesting. At least give me an in-game reason for why I shouldn’t do it.
I really want to quit. Any advice?
I find there’s generally 3 major skills outside of general group facilitation you exercise as a DM, world building, character design, and game design.
World building is designing the setting conflict and story, character design is making interesting NPCs and role playing them, game design is making interesting combat and skill based encounters.
Most DMs are only good at one or two of these. If your DM is new, they likely are still figuring out what they are good at and enjoy doing and what they’re bad at.
Ideally combat is well narrated, but if your DM is not a strong character builder, maybe there’s not a great understanding of the motivation of the combatants. If they aren’t great at world design maybe they don’t fully understand all of the alternative ways an encounter can be resolved.
They also are probably just figuring out how the basic rules work in general in which case give them some time and maybe suggest things like, can I roll animal handling to try and ride the moth? Or are there any tribal or religious insignia on the Morlocks I can use to try and parlay with them?
This moves some of the heavy lifting off of the DM who may be swamped with bookkeeping. I find often times players also don’t realize they also need to be familiar with the rules and how their character works and just rely on the DM to know everything out which isn’t often the case when everyone is new.