1, Combat - I'll admit to being one of the dreaded number crunchers, I just personally enjoy DnD most with a fast group, tension, and 'danger.' When I was DMing, one of the things I personally found most enjoyable was creating maps and enemies. How would this army of orcs act, what would they be doing in their off time, whose their leader. How can I use all of that to create the atmosphere of the situation, how could I use that for the combat. One of the simple maps I put hours of work into. Orcs, goblins, gnolls, and trolls all working together set up a camp in a cave. There's a body of water that they build a bridge over because there's something that they cannot kill in it, changes in elevation, piles of cloths for trolls to sleep on, different sized tents. Goblins are on patrol, I had the trolls arguing over a burning deer when the player first see them. Gnolls were resting to the east but hear the commotion to ambush them from the bridge. In various tents you'd find malnourished naked woman chained up. I describe piles of mundane weapons and gear thrown aside, orcs care about practicality 'blade sharp enough to stab?' Something else I played around with during combat was Con saves against weapons that were rusted from a mixture of blood, flesh, and feces. Cave walls and stagmites so that people could take advantage of them with dynamic lighting, fires giving off light. Different types of Orcs, ranged, heavy armor, shamanistic, worg trainers, berserkers, brute strength. 2. Roleplay - I wouldn't mind going through 4 hour long games not breaking character and interacting with NPCs and the party, but it primarily falls upon the players as opposed the DM to really keep it going. 3. Investigation 4. Command At the end of it all, I think Critical Role has set a new standard for role playing games, and I generally try to keep to their example. Every character is unique in their own way. Each NPC is unique and some of them there's actual development whether or not that's just because you're forced to party up with them. There's a nice balance between role-playing and combat and it's rewarding, you spend 3-4 sessions finding out information on a NPC you fight them in an hour long fight where different classes excel in their own unique way. Barbarians are the front line taking 20-30 hits and knocking down people, clerics have to balance support/damage/healing, rogues use their mobility to their advantage, spell casters are decimating groups of people with powerful but limited spells. People are running out of spells, health is dropping, people are making death saves, you have to forgo attacks to try and save your party members, the satisfying killing blow, and the magic items that you get to play around with after. The majority of the game is through theater of mind when describing areas and landscapes, but when combat does happen it's a nice organized flushed out map. They use character quest lines as the primary drive of the games, and when it isn't there's a clear quest/objective. 'Go kill this dragon' may be simple, overused, and boring but it's an issue that must be resolved and gives the players something to look forward to. A vampire who married a necromancer murdered my family in cold blood, claimed my castle, took my sister as hostage, infiltrated a city, turned our allies against us, corrupted a village, used my sister as bait, is using my castle as a base for god knows what, we fought giants, armies of skeletons, wraiths, I'm losing control of myself to a demon, etc etc, at the end of it all an epic fight. Every single player goes through all that develops their own opinions, but it all ends with "how do you want to do this," and everybody erupts in cheers and shouts. Afterwards they let out a sigh of relief, "we've been through some SHIT, and we got through it." I'm not against having a dynamic world, but in your case you feel as though we're just tagging along for the story. Well we're small, insignificant and we don't have much impact in the world, whatever we do something else is happening somewhere else that we have no control over. It wouldn't hurt to put some stuff on pause while we resolve something else. We spend 20 days traveling away from Rotting Blade that doesn't mean that you HAVE destroy Rotting Blade just because 'well you weren't there to stop it.' Something as simple as background music/ambiance adds a lot to the game, I'm primarily playing in 2 games at the moment neither of which use any music. It wasn't the DMing style, the voices of the other players, their character tokens, but the lack of music that I immediately noticed and quite frankly it annoyed me, because there are those stupid moments of absolute silence.
