Fun for All

One of the challenges of a DM is to make sure all the players are having a good time. This can be difficult, as players often like different things, so DMs have to prepare a variety of different scenarios. I mostly failed at that tonight. I knew that the game would start with a combat encounter, and then we ran into a second combat encounter. The third encounter we ran into tonight wasn't supposed to involved combat, but it did involve goblins, so one of the players started a fight. We managed to do a few things that weren't fighting this evening, but we spent a good deal of tonight's session in combat, and it seemed to me that some of the players were starting to get tired of it. Next time, I'm going to try to set up situations where it's abundantly obvious that violence isn't the answer. Still, I'm going to try to make sure there's at least one combat encounter each night, too, since the players who enjoy combat should have opportunities to have fun as well. It's hard to keep everyone happy when they all want different things, but I'm certainly willing to try.