r/AskReddit 1d ago

What’s a skill almost everyone thinks they’re good at until they meet someone who’s actually great at it?

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u/zyrkseas97 1d ago

DMing Dungeons and Dragons is great practice for this.

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u/greentangent 23h ago

I would create a whole evenings adventure straight off the cuff when I was in my teens. It didn't occur to me that I was story telling until college at 30. Been published twice for fiction since.

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u/Viktor_Laszlo 17h ago

I genuinely love this for you. Whenever I see a stand up comedian or go to an open mic night, my rule is that I’ll always applaud the performer even if I didn’t think it was a good set. Even if it wasn’t my kind of humor, I respect anyone who puts themselves out there and I applaud their courage.

Sometimes I feel like I have the kernel of an idea for a short story or an interesting character but I don’t know how to get started writing about them. Other than just sitting down and putting pen to paper, I guess. The hardest part.

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u/Luchux01 20h ago

Sweats in only ever runs modules

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u/bungle_bogs 22h ago

As a Dad that used to read and make up stories for my son, I have to say that my lad being a D&D DM for several online international clubs and ran his School D&D group makes me proud.

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u/lookitsnichole 23h ago

My friend started DMing DnD for a group of us and I am constantly in awe of her ability to come up with things on the spot. We tend to be absolute chaos demons and she often says after the session she didn't expect us to do a certain thing, but I never would have suspected that based on how well she deals with it.

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u/zyrkseas97 22h ago

My players be like: “it’s so cool that you had that whole encounter with the wizard and the troll planned out, how could you even have known we would press that button”

And I’m sitting there having improved the whole session like: “yeah, you know sometimes a DM just gets lucky”

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u/lookitsnichole 22h ago

I'm terrible at improving so I find it super impressive. She has occasionally cut the session short because we went so far off the rails she has to prepare more though lol.

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u/PyroDesu 17h ago

Reminds me of my poor DM.

He has now had to deal not only with time travel (on the one hand, yes, I triggered that trap. On the other hand, another party member at another time put a trail leading into it. On the gripping hand, why did the DM make it do that in the first place‽), but time travel stranding us in an alternate timeline when we finally got back to our "proper time".

We caused the BBEG (of this timeline).

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u/OttawaTGirl 17h ago

Lmao. Poor Billy getting a story for bed time about the undead lich, or gelatinous cubes. Kids gotta scream at Jello everytime he sees it

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u/acquaintedwithheight 13h ago

“Billy, have I told you the story of the Nothic? Write down your 3 deepest fears, we’re really going to hammer those home.”

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u/WinterStrawberries6 21h ago

I started DMing at 16, nowadays sometimes me and my gf are bored and I simply go "ok, you're a witch, it's the 1800s, what are you wearing?" and we just roleplay for 2 hours.

Everyone I know who don't play ttrpg think it's crazy how I can create a character with three random words, or just make up a story if they give me a topic, or no topic at all.

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u/caledonivs 17h ago

I started playing "the game of the dungeon" with my son when he was about 4 where he was Harry Potter having to navigate a maze to retrieve Dumbledore's glasses. He's 6 now and has been hooked ever since and we do one about every week based on the theme of whatever he's interested in at the time, for example he's Hiccup trying to find Toothless or Mario going through the sewers.