RPGMemes

I try to win as the DM.

"Winning" in this case being that everyone had a good time.

I've been playing in a game with my 11 year old nephew as the dm for the last few months and he's like this. He's great at the storytelling aspects of it but he gets pissed when we try to strategize before a fight and I somehow get critted at the beginning of every encounter.... I ignore it because he's a kid and I want to support him but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't getting old.

I agree with you, but there have absolutely been games (specifically in Pathfinder 1E) that I had to approach from a mindset of trying to win. PCs can get so ridiculously overpowered in that game that it can be difficult to balance combat properly and sometimes requires you to pull out all the stops to make combat encounters engaging.

Wife of a friend as well. She'll bend and "interpret loosely" every rule in her favor, but if someone else is doing the same, she gets mad and thinks it's cheating.

Mixed can be better. Rolling With Difficulty has a mixed group of players and it's awesome. Red is an expert on tropes and always knows exactly what the DM is trying to do. Sophia has dice blessed by the gods and always pushes the big red button. Noir has a habit of dropping impassioned monologues that completely change the trajectory of the story. And Wally has absolutely wild builds that let them go up against incredibly powerful enemies.

If the party were all like Red, there wouldn't be much momentum coming from the players. All Sophias, and nobody would actually understand what's going on. All Noirs, and you get the Star Wars prequels. All Wallys, and the party would always play it safe and be boring. But with a mix, everyone shines.

Had me until your last sentence.

It's always going to be mixed, to some degree. The challenge is making it work anyway.

In my opinion and experience, when it's mixed it's better. As long as you have a good group where you don't have any players that complain whenever someone plays in a way they don't like.

You're a good game ambassador. Keep trying.

Allowing for newer gamers to actually engage with the system is what is fun for them, same as all players. They won't have fun just watching someone who knows what to do play their turn for them. Idk if it would work, but it might be worth trying instituting a rule between your partner and you before a game night starts that says the more experienced players will only offer advice when asked? It might help, just spit balling.

My personal strategy I liked to do when I showed new people pandemic was asking what people around the table thought was important at key moments, as well as being vocal about the processes in the game. That way there is 2 way active discussion. If I can realize from those conversations that less experienced players are missing something (like it's been a little too long since seeing an epidemic card) I make sure to state that during my "what I think is important" contribution.

I try to make sure I'm not using language that makes it appear that I think my ideas are better than theirs, instead I try to talk as a GM who is making sure everyone knows objective facts about the game state and what may happen.

In my experience, doing that as well as constantly talking about game state and mechanics for new people such as, "remember, the next time we get an epidemic card (whenever that may be) London is going to outbreak," shows critical phases of the game that the group should be concerned with, but when it's worded like that you aren't putting pressure on the players to do anything about it outright. it still allows them the freedom to say "I don't think that's going to sink us, I wanna focus on blah blah blah on my turn."

Thats seems to be the best technique that I've found to take the pressure off of them to listen to the experienced players and fall in line. When the experienced players aren't dictating a course of action, but rather are stating what is going on and asking what we should do as a group to new players, it allows new players at the table to feel situationally aware and make confident choices because they feel included and like they aren't missing anything.

(I should point out that your partner shouldn't be answering you if you ask haha of course they already know. it's about coercing the newbies into playing rather than watching. not trying to insult, but if your partner struggles with alpha gaming they gotta know that isn't a question for them to answer)

I wish you luck.

There's nothing better than showing someone that game and they take a risk (either intentionally or not), it blows up in their face, and they have to scramble to recover and just BARELY scrape by with a ton of luck.

I was stuggling with this a lot (mostly successfully, I hope?) when we were playing Zombicide. None of us knew the game, we were confused by some rules and we got out asses kicked bad in the first tutorial scenario, but having experience from turn based games like X-Com, I felt like I had to bite my tongue a lot during the evening, especially once I realised that the margins for error are much smaller than I expected.

Mildly annoying? That's downright frustrating.

For me, D&D is a collaborative game. Players who go against group can leave.

Miguel moment

It's all perfectly logical to you, isn't it?

"Oh."

I came buckets

Is that Satya Nadella in the 2nd to back seat?

I take the sword of Duquesne!