Post

Asking for unnecessary rolls. In certain systems like Mothership and Delta Green, if your skill is high enough and there's no pressure, you just succeed. I also like Burning Wheel's Let It Ride, which means you roll once, and it does what it needs to. Succeed at stealth, you follow your target.

Maybe there's creativity in working out why a student debt utility mage would commit to a crusade into The Hells, but it's not fun sitting with "why he is here? He'd have left by now, but I don't want to upset the GM and I want to see what happens to my character, but he's having to pick dmg spells.

This is the correct answer

Rule number 1 in all ttrpg's is have fun.

(・ω・) You've got great taste.

This is one of the reasons I opted for my system to be entirely player-facing. They roll Dodge instead of me rolling attacks. (The other reason is I have plenty to track already.)

(Besides, with players who have the right kind of mindset, they can well be aware of the hidden threat as *players* while playing their characters as being oblivious to it.)

Rolling unexplained things in front of the players achieves nothing. You can't fudge what the die says, but you can fudge what the roll is for, so what's the difference? It's performative and nothing more.

Telling you players to update their PCs between sessions but not making sure it happens so the next gaming session is wasted while the GM and the one player who's not useless scramble to update PCs. (Talking to you, Millennials and Gen-Z's.)

Putting untold hours into world-building to develop cultures, cabals, costumes and geography that could be described in a few sentences or a quick sketch. Making it worse by dragging PCs into this miasma, boring them with egregious detail and making it all immutable so the PCs have no impact.

Not killing off PC's owing to bad judgement rather than bad luck.

Yes and. Tell players No sometime. That can go overboard of course, but currently the top is not toward saying "No" too often.

Going "Hm." When the player makes a decision to spook'em. Making choices is hard enough already dang it!

The verbal ticks that throw.doubt on everything. 'You walk into what seems like a bedroom and see what appears to be a bed and on the bed there appears to be a dragon' Is any of it real?

Over preparing.