D&D General The DM Should Only Talk 30% of the Time... Agree or Disagree?

[Jmarso]

If students are speaking 70% of the time and teachers only 30%, where is the learning happening? Do the kids magically teach one another? I think not.

Get back to the teachers speaking 70% of the time. And what's more, let 100% of that speaking be about reading, writing, arithmetic, etc, and not their own home life, political beliefs, and any other naughty word not directly related to teaching kids.

I found it appalling when my middle school aged kids would come home with all sorts of 'personal' stories about their teachers. When I was a kid in school, the only way we knew a teacher was married was if they were wearing a ring, and I couldn't tell you how a single one of my teachers voted- especially my teachers in civics and social studies. But I could damn sure read, write, spell, and do math.

 

[BookTenTiger]

If students are speaking 70% of the time and teachers only 30%, where is the learning happening? Do the kids magically teach one another? I think not.

Get back to the teachers speaking 70% of the time. And what's more, let 100% of that speaking be about reading, writing, arithmetic, etc, and not their own home life, political beliefs, and any other naughty word not directly related to teaching kids.

I found it appalling when my middle school aged kids would come home with all sorts of 'personal' stories about their teachers. When I was a kid in school, the only way we knew a teacher was married was if they were wearing a ring, and I couldn't tell you how a single one of my teachers voted- especially my teachers in civics and social studies. But I could damn sure read, write, spell, and do math.

You've veered far off topic, but because I love talking about teaching I'll send you a message to continue this conversation.

 

[Jmarso]

You've veered far off topic, but because I love talking about teaching I'll send you a message to continue this conversation.

Don't bother.

 

[bloodtide]

If you are a DM that finds the game to be a burden, then this approach is just fine. It will also work for casual DMs and ones with "no time".

A DM has to do 99.9% of the work for any D&D game, and for most players that .1% is just "they showed up".

The vast majority of players want to be players as it's "no work and all fun". So few will want to do the DMs work for them. On top of that, few players can even if they want too. Not everyone is creative or can describe things. You will be lucky to get some things like "um the castle looks like um a castle with stone and stuff".

Really tough if you want a game where everyone talks all the time, try any Storyteller Type game and not D&D.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Don't bother.

Alright, well I'll say if anyone else wants to talk more about the shift from 70% Teacher Talk to 70% Student Talk, feel free to send me a message!

 

[Hussar]

Alright, well I'll say if anyone else wants to talk more about the shift from 70% Teacher Talk to 70% Student Talk, feel free to send me a message!

Someone’s never heard of Socrates methinks.

Meh. Like you said, this is waaaaay off topic.

 

[BookTenTiger]

There have been some really interesting replies to this thread! I appreciate folks for chiming in.

Here are some of my developing thoughts:

On the 30% / 70% split... Please keep in mind that these are not meant to be exact numbers. I'm borrowing the concept from education, which is why I kept the numbers, but you can generalize them as "less than half / more than half." Very few people are actually going into classrooms, recording, and calculating the split in conversation time, and nobody is doing that at the table, either. ...as far as I know...

D&D definitely puts the burden of work on the DM. The DM is positioned as a kind of "arbiter of truth" about the world and the rules. Because of this, it is difficult to, in the middle of a session, hand the reigns over to a player.

So to meet the goal of 30% talking, I think a lot of proactive work would have to be done. As others have mentioned in the thread, it would take something of a shift in how a D&D session is prepared and run.

Maybe it would mean giving up some of that work and authority to the players? In FATE games, players can actually impact what is narratively true about a setting... I could see creating some kind of system that allows / encourages players to be active creators within the setting.

For example... let's say the characters come into a town. The players could spend some kind of point or token to influence what kinds of shops, NPCs, or opportunities are in the town. Maybe the player of the Wizard spends a token (I guess these are the Plot Points in the DMG) to put a magic academy, or a library of forbidden books, or a scroll store in the town? The players then work together (including the DM) to describe and flesh out this addition.

Could the same thing happen in a dungeon? It's a little crazy to think about... but I do like the idea of players somehow contributing to the dangers and rewards of an adventure!

Oh, and finally, this is totally only something that would happen with the consent and willing participation of the players! This kind of stuff wouldn't be appropriate for every game, but it's something I'm interested in exploring.

 

[TerraDave]

Creating work for the players is probably not really the solution to this problem.

There is the related, and I feel bigger, problem of a single player that talks 30+% of the time.

I think the solution to both is just to create situations were everybody talks. This can even mean going around the table--out of combat--to get everybody to speak about a situation, as well as the slightly harder task of ensuring everyone gets some good moments over the course of a session.

 

[Yora]

It depends on a lot of factors. My personal approach is pretty much what Apocalypse World says to do - GMs say stuff when players look to them to find out what happens next or if there's a lull. If players are going at it and having a good time no need to intervene. Our groups tend to have a good deal of scenes where player characters are interacting with each other. When that happens I'm mostly there as a rule resource and avid audience member.

That style of running games, especially when running D&D, always sounded way too good to be true. There's always been older GMs who say they just set up a situation and improvise from there, and it's much less work because they don't really have to do that much, with the players mostly entertaining themselves. That never sounded right, but when I started doing it, it was all that had been promised. Immediately my adventures became the best I've ever run.

The key to running games like this is to get past the curse of Dragonlance and stop trying to write a story in advance and making it happen during play. That's not how RPG as a medium is made to work. People can do it, and have been doing it millions of times over several decades. But it significantly increased the preparation time and workload for the GM and results in less fun games for the players.

A good adventure starts with a place that is inhabited by people who are in conflict about something, and someone is about to do something drastic, or has just done it. Know who the actors are, what they want, and what they are capable of, and then release the players on the field. There is of course a bit more to that, but not really that much. There need to be ways players can find loose threads to pull on and stakes they might care about, and it helps a lot to have basic maps for the places that are most likely to become the sites of fights or sneaking around. But an incredible amount of work in "conventional" modern adventures is about making sure that scenes are going to happen and to play out in a certain way that ensure the following scenes will also happen. Both in the preparation of the adventure, and in running the adventure in play.
Without the need that certain things will play out in a certain way, the workload on the GM shrinks significantly. And when it's done reasonably well, the players are having a blast with it. The players are free to do and pursue anything that seems like it could get a result. Any result. They no longer have to figure out what they are supposed to do to progress to the next scene. This is a way to run games in which "default to saying yes" is easy and comes natural, and doesn't result in random anarchy. It's not about any NPCs anymore, it's about the PCs living through an interesting or chaotic situation and eventually coming out on the other side. Whether it's heroically riding of in the sunset, or fleeing into the night. And that's how you get players doing most of the talking in a game. Talking about what they want to do, why they want to do it, and how they want to accomplish it. Not trying to figure out what the next point on the script is that they are supposed to do but not being told about.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Allow players to play as NPCs in scenes their characters aren't present in ("Kathy, why don't you play as the blacksmith...")

Love this.

I think the better takeaway here is that the DM should outsource what they can to players, rather than trying to come up with a particular percentage of time they should be talking. A couple of things I have seen successfully outsourced to players:

-doing a recap of previous sessions
-looking up a rule in question while the DM continues to run the game

I do those, and it helps. I also ask players to tell me about their home (town and nation/kingdom/whatever) and families and such, and to help me define things like how the church they are part of works, what the aesthetic is, etc.