So I don’t see enough talk about them, so I wanted to talk about Mark Hulmes, DM of High Rollers. https://www.youtube.com/@HighRollersDnD

You won’t find professional voice actors, on staff mini makers, or anything of the sort.

But I find him a fantastic DM for reasons that are completely attainable.

You’ll find him openly admitting when a boss fight is BS, so he’s changing mechanics. Either because it’s boring, way too easy, or way too hard. He won’t fudge the dice, he’ll explain in game changing forms, screeching of gods, and breaking of armor. While out of game explaining that things weren’t fun so mechanics are going to be different.

You’ll find him making the “Guardian Race” which has a matrix and serve a prime, and make incredibly deep lore for them and become super integrated into the lore of the campaign. Because one of his players wanted to play a transformer.

You’ll see there are no essential NPC’s. If they show no interest in working with an NPC, he laughs it off and doesn’t try to force it (RIP magical kobold that controls space time. We’ll never know what was planned for you. He didn’t die, the players just didn’t care.)

Aims for fail states besides TPK. Having there be a 20% chance of a TPK for every encounter not sustainable. Having most fights have like 1% chance of danger is no fun. But having a decent chance for some sort of strange failure that frustrates the players and forwards the story in a way the players won’t like is great. In the latest campaign, 3 of the greatest turning points were because the players failed miserably and the state of the world became far more dangerous as a result.

He even replaced spells that are no fun for players to be hit by, with special versions that encourage interaction. Instead of plane old banishment, the players may find themselves banished to a demi plane with a warden, and if they can defeat the jailor they can escape. Or dominate person where if they failed their save, the targeted player is trapped inside a copy of themselves and if they deal enough damage they can kill their doppelganger from inside, or they can try to cast a spell to escape. Those are just two examples, but I loved how instead of “Roll a wisdom save. Oh you failed? Okay that’s your turn. Wait another 10 minutes to do something.” it was “You failed a save, so you are in this weird situation. What do you wanna try?” The end result is still similar though, because they failed a save they lost their turn and maybe even resources (The paladin used smites to escape the jail of course), but the players had control on it.

I just love him because it looks so fun to play on this table, but there isn’t anything in it I can’t do. I just need to put more thought into things, pay attention to if people aren’t having fun from mechanics, and think through what enemies are trying to accomplish.

See a lot about Critical Role and D20, so wanted to talk about my favorite attainable goals DM.