DMs - Want to make your life easier while your players have more fun?

Being a DM is tough.

You're the only person at the table with homework. Your job is to encourage fun, but you also have to enforce the rules. The players just need to know how their character works, while ideally you would know how all their characters work, as well as the monsters and hazards they'll face.

With all that on their mind, it's no wonder many DMs get anxious about their performance.

Anxiety - The killer of fun

You spent hours preparing. You know the backstory of every blacksmith, trader, and urchin in the city. You invent a cool plotline and you have a variety of ways the players can stumble into it.

But when presented with the question of what to do next, your players start roleplaying the debate about what to do, and this goes on for a long time.

You're worried that they're lost. You're worried they're not having fun. So you interrupt and give a hint, or you toss in your own two cents, or you add additional information.

No. Stop. Shut up.

It seems counterintuitive when you're sitting on the DM side of the table, but your players ARE having fun. They're getting into character, enjoying their debate, and most importantly...

They are solving a puzzle.

When you give them a few clues about what to do, you have created a puzzle for them to solve. Puzzle solving is fun!

Sure, it may not be a perfectly constructed puzzle. Maybe you expected they would uncover more information before they had this debate. Maybe the clues as given don't entirely add up. But they don't know that. They're trying to decide what their characters would do, given the information at hand.

They WILL come to a decision

You may feel like you've lost control of the situation. You may feel like, as the DM, your role is to lead the party.

Both of those instincts are misguided. Your role isn't to lead, you're one half of the conversation. You throw something out, the players respond, and then you respond to their response. This is the back and forth of the game.

Ultimately, you are one person and you can respond quickly to what they do, but when it comes time for them to make decisions they'll need to confer and debate and reach consensus amongst 2-5 different people.

So what do you guys think? DMs, do you have any other strategies for handling this situation? Players, how do you feel when your DMs do this? Let us know in the comments section below, and happy adventuring!