Forum

[Runestar]

This experience is called learning. Learning by doing, making mistakes, and improving is a good way to develop skill. If a person keeps making the same bad calls over and over, then the process isn't working. Some people who DM cannot admit that they make mistakes and thus are unable to learn from them. If a paint by numbers set is required to keep the DM from being a dork then the game only has so much potential anyway.

I think you miss the point.

Anytime you feel you are capable of DMing better than the material provided by any book, you use your own consummate DM skills. But if you are a beginner who does not feel up to scratch, or maybe can't come up with enough prep material for whatever reason, you fall back on established dnd material, which is assured of at least that much quality.

You are still expected to learn and improve your own mastery of the game in the process. Established rules simply help to ensure that your enjoyment of the game should never dip below a certain threshold due to ineptness. We all have to start somewhere, and sometimes, we just can't spare the time to waste precious hours of gaming time while the DM tries to get his act together.

To use an analogy, if you used your own skills, your performance might be a straight line starting from point 0 at time=0, sloping upwards to point 100 at time=10 (say). But using dnd material, anything below a certain point (say 50), it would be a horizontal line instead (because ytou have the option of using dnd material if it proves superior to whatever you can come up with), then slanting upwards when your performance index would exceed 50.