All the playing techniques text are left aligned with the note it is attached to, but I would like to have it start before that. Is there a way to get this right aligned or at least a little more to the left of the note? I can do his in Engraving mode by hand, but there is a lot to correct in an orchestral score, so if Dorico could do this for me, that would be the best 
There’s no way to do this at the moment, I’m afraid, but I have made a note of this as something we should do in a future version. For now, you may find that filtering for them and then applying the offset via Properties is a quicker way of getting the result you want.