D&D General The DM Shortage

[AnotherGuy]

The more players, the harder the DM's job becomes.

It is why I included that is able to

 

[Li Shenron]

I was struck by a bad case of DM burnout earlier this year, so much so that I'm really soured on the idea of ever running D&D again.

For me the issues were:

• Prepping and running a campaign felt time consuming.
• The investment in the game felt one-sided. Besides me, only one other player had bought a single book.
• Rules competency was one-sided. The DM is expected to know everything, players can get away with knowing almost nothing.
• Playing online felt bad. This was more of a COVID-related problem than anything. But none of the online tools I tried felt great.
• I was the forever DM. No one ever expressed any serious interest in DMing.

We were all new players, with our group getting started in 2018. I'm not going to say my experience is representative, but I definitely relate to much of the talk surrounding the idea of a DM shortage.

You have my sympathies...

I do have my own perfectionism (bad) side which often makes me think too much about the next session. What I try to tell myself, when I start to feel like it's taking too much time and effort, is that (good or bad this might be) it doesn't matter that much in practice. If I make a mistake running the adventure, it's just part of the randomness... players make mistake and so do I.

As for investment, stop buying and use what you have already, or create some homebrew. Published books aren't really much better than what you can do yourself (excluding the artwork, which is usually amazing).

One-sided rules competency is so much our case... being a DM nowadays mostly for casual players, typically they don't know very much about the rules, if anything at all. But this is a blessing It means they won't be ruleslawyering or raising arguments in the middle of the game.

 

[pointofyou]

Most of the people I game with are willing to GM though some are more comfortable doing so than others.

GMing doesn't have to be especially difficult or time consuming while a campaign is going since a lot of the work of the campaign can be front-loaded and done before the first session. During the campaign I have found the work tends to clump in a similar way so there's a bunch of prep then a few sessions exploiting it.

The problem I see is not that people are told it's easy when it's not or that they're told it's hard when it's not. The problem is that there's so little information about how to do it especially in any form that can be referenced during a session.

 

[Oofta]

Or, you can pick up an OSR module or 1 page dungeon and spend 30 minutes reading it before play?

Running prepped mods takes longer for me than home brew. If I made up the scenario, I don't have to guess. I can also adjust on the fly more easily.

On the other hand I think there should be several free, simple modules made available for first time DMs until they get a bit of experience under their belt. Maybe a dozen or so adventures that could be played in 2 hours or so that are loosely linked would be a good start. Have a bit of variety including dungeon crawls, city based and exploration. Include instructions and a fair number of side bars along with references back to the DMG. Throw them up as an online reference so you don't have to pay for the dead trees.

But my suggestion doesn't have anything to do with game version.

 

[Reynard]

I was struck by a bad case of DM burnout earlier this year, so much so that I'm really soured on the idea of ever running D&D again.

For me the issues were:

• Prepping and running a campaign felt time consuming.
• The investment in the game felt one-sided. Besides me, only one other player had bought a single book.
• Rules competency was one-sided. The DM is expected to know everything, players can get away with knowing almost nothing.
• Playing online felt bad. This was more of a COVID-related problem than anything. But none of the online tools I tried felt great.
• I was the forever DM. No one ever expressed any serious interest in DMing.

We were all new players, with our group getting started in 2018. I'm not going to say my experience is representative, but I definitely relate to much of the talk surrounding the idea of a DM shortage.

Out of curiosity did you take a break? If so did another player step up and get behind the screen?

 

[Art Waring]

Rules competency was one-sided. The DM is expected to know everything, players can get away with knowing almost nothing.

Yeah this one is pretty common in my experience. Some players prefer to skate by on minimal effort, and its hard to address, because you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.

Playing online felt bad. This was more of a COVID-related problem than anything. But none of the online tools I tried felt great.

Strangely I had the opposite experience, but I ran games for two years over skype during C-19 before I moved to the UK, and it was actually a lot of fun. I don't use a VTT, I use my own text based docs with templates that make everything run smooth, I find VTT's can become a distraction so I made my own offline vtt.

 

[Reynard]

Running prepped mods takes longer for me than home brew. If I made up the scenario, I don't have to guess. I can also adjust on the fly more easily.

This. I keep making this mistake where I decide to run a mode primarily because I am using Fantasy Grounds and don't want to spend huge amounts of time on data entry, but every time I get burnt out within a couple months because forcing a WotC adventure to not suck is harder than making up everything on the fly -- except that it's not because FG.

 

[billd91]

But the issue isn't skill. The issue is TIME. I pretty much gave it up from leaving school to becoming semi-retied. You can't be a DM and work full time. Not enough hours in a day.

Sure you can. The fact that there are lots of us out there who do it, even running multiple games, proves it can be done. All you're really saying here is that you didn't feel you could do it. This isn't to say that there isn't a substantial time investment, just that it's not as bleak as you're laying out.

But that doesn't really matter, since not knowing how to do it isn't the problem. Having the time to do it its. After all, there is a shortage, so there is no pressure to be GOOD.

Sure there is. The pressure isn't from some sort of supply/demand economic assumption. The pressure comes from my players (who are all friends and family) and wanting to lay out a good game for them. I don't want to waste their time, effort, and enthusiasm so I do the best I can.

Probably better if they don't watch any streams. That will only teach them how other people do it, not how they should do it.

Not true. The problem isn't watching streams - it's failing to put what you watch and learn there into proper perspective. You can learn a lot watching someone like Matt Mercer, Brennan Lee Mulligan, or Aabria Iyengar. I've been DMing for over 40 years and I'm still learning stuff from other DMs that I observe. What you don't want to do is compare yourself to them, particularly as a new or relatively new DM. The main risk of watching streams is putting too high a burden on yourself to be just like them or as good as them without recognizing that they have years of experience with the game or performance or both as well as the tools and players to work with them.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The pressure comes from my players (who are all friends and family) and wanting to lay out a good game for them.

And if they think they can do better, then the can darn well do it themselves. Simple.

 

[Reynard]

And if they think they can do better, then the can darn well do it themselves. Simple.

So you aren't interested in running an enjoyable game for your players? Then why are you bothering, and why would anyone want to be at your table?