D&D General The DM Shortage

[Malmuria]

There's another parsimonious, Occam's razor-favoring interpretation of the discrepancy between 5e and the OSR "DM crisis", although it's not going to be a popular one, especially with OSR players. Maybe there's tons of DMs in the OSR and not in 5e because nobody (not literally, but relatively) wants to play OSR games, so all the people who want to DM them can't find players, who are looking for something else to play. Personally, before people resort to some other explanation, I think that null hypothesis needs to be falsified. And "everybody in my group loves OSR games" doesn't falsify a null hypothesis.

I would qualify anyone who is playing something other than 5e, especially osr and indie games, as a ttrpg enthusiast. There's a smaller pool of people to play with, but I'd expect those who are into it to be into both running and playing in games.

Larger games like Pathfinder 2e and Call of Cthulhu...I don't know. Being a keeper for CoC is a lot of work too, which can be somewhat lessened by purchasing fairly expensive and expansive campaign scenarios, so in that way it shares dynamics with 5e. Pathfinder, meanwhile, has a lot of player options, like 5e; does that mean there are fewer people willing to DM?

So... what topics do people think would constitute useful "DM Advice" for D&D specifically? Not the advice itself, just the topics, like what would the chapter subheadings look like?

Honestly, for 5e I think the sly flourish products together contain the most useful advice. Earlier starter sets taught new dms how to make a dungeon, so the dm advice would include how to create whatever kind of scenario 5e wants you to create.

 

[overgeeked]

Augh! I have work to finish! Don't make me try it to find out!

Since people like word count, too...here goes.

Full basic rules. 129,428 words.

For reference: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen – 126,194 words. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – 106,821 words. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince – 169,441 words. The Hobbit – 95,022 words. The Two Towers – 143,436 words. The Return of the King – 134,462 words.

Average page of this kind of text is between 500-1000 words per page. Being overly generous at 1000 words per page, at 15 1/2 pages, that's about 15,500 words saved by cutting it down to 3rd level. Which would bring the total word count down to 113,928.

So a 3rd level version of these would make it go from being slightly longer than Sense and Sensibility to slightly shorter than Sense and Sensibility.

For reference: the entire text of the Moldvay Basic, including the Haunted Keep, comes to about 60,000 words.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Plenty of 8 years olds learnt on B/X as well it's an anecdote.

I’m sure they did. You seem to believe that my point was that Cyclopedia was harder than 5e. It wasn’t. I was responding to @overgeeked ‘s claim that reassuring players that DMing isn’t hard “would be a lie”.

It wouldn’t. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now.

 

[Zardnaar]

That's exactly the problem I'm talking about; OSRians seem to operate under the impression that the OSR is the solution to EVERYTHING, and the only reason someone doesn't like the OSR is because they don't understand or don't know enough about the OSR. It couldn't possibly be that... they actually want something else! Dun-dun-DUUUUUUNNNNN!

I think the clear null hypothesis is that the OSR style is clearly a smaller plurality than other styles, and always will be. The majority of players want something other than what the OSR offers.

I'm not making this conclusion based on this supposed data, though—it's one I've been noodling around with since before the OSR even existed or had a label at all. Frankly, I've been noodling around with this idea since before Tracy Hickman started at TSR and blew out the bank by catering to demand that clearly existed for something other than what TSR had been doing up until that point. I do think that Ben's data, for whatever its worth, supports the idea that the null hypothesis is that doubling down on OSRian tropes is NOT the answer to the problem, because the reason that 5e players aren't playing OSR games NOW is because they don't want to play OSR games.

I think it's more that modern D&F has new problems created because of new mechanics and playstyle changes.
Realistically you're not gonna get the player numbers with an OSR game.

There's aspects of OSR that could fix 5E D&D eg saving throw scaling.

I would argue they're still trying to figure things out leading up to 3E design decisions. Level 1-9 spells without the OSR restrictions.

They need to fix those spells or rewrite the game and the can't really do the latter to much.

 

[Zardnaar]

I’m sure they did. You seem to believe that my point was that Cyclopedia was harder than 5e. It wasn’t. I was responding to @overgeeked ‘s claim that reassuring players that DMing isn’t hard “would be a lie”.

It wouldn’t. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now.

It's harder now you guided your son through it.
I had to learn without that guidance.

 

[Malmuria]

That's exactly the problem I'm talking about; OSRians seem to operate under the impression that the OSR is the solution to EVERYTHING, and the only reason someone doesn't like the OSR is because they don't understand or don't know enough about the OSR. It couldn't possibly be that... they actually want something else!

I think the main question for me here is: what is the GMs job? What is the GM supposed to be doing before and during games? This is a bit pithy, but:
OSR: design an interesting location, use procedures, allow for player creativity
PBTA/FITD: don't prep anything, ask interesting questions and use the answers, introduce complications, play to see what happens

5e: Be able to constantly reference and parse an extensive ruleset, read a 300 page module and then direct the PCs through it, create 6-8 balanced encounters per adventuring day, understand or create world's full of lore, improvise and act like Matt Mercer, buy all the books, set up fancy battlemaps on a vtt, or some combination of the above.

An integrated online ruleset + vtt would help with all those things, and for that, you'll have to pay...

 

[Sacrosanct]

That's exactly the problem I'm talking about; OSRians seem to operate under the impression that the OSR is the solution to EVERYTHING, and the only reason someone doesn't like the OSR is because they don't understand or don't know enough about the OSR. It couldn't possibly be that... they actually want something else! Dun-dun-DUUUUUUNNNNN!

Yeah, it bugs me when fellow OSR fans (of which I am one) go off into one-true-wayism and how OSR is the best for everything, without realizing that people want different things.

however...

Certain aspects of the OSR:

• rulings over rules
• DM's world
• Less text of rules

Do help address a lack of DM's. When you have more DM empowerment and less rules to memorize, that makes DMing more appealing.

 

[Malmuria]

Yeah, it bugs me when fellow OSR fans (of which I am one) go off into one-true-wayism and how OSR is the best for everything, without realizing that people want different things.

however...

Certain aspects of the OSR:

• rulings over rules
• DM's world
• Less text of rules

Do help address a lack of DM's. When you have more DM empowerment and less rules to memorize, that makes DMing more appealing.

As many people have noted over the years, the 5e dmg would improve immensely if they just took a cue from the OSR's obsession with layout and information design.

 

[FrozenNorth]

So you're making the assertion that being the son of a long-time gamer had no effect on your son's ability to pick up 5E...and it's my burden to prove that for you? That's not how this works. Burden of proof is on whoever's making the assertion, which, in this case, is you.

Nope! I said that to encourage more DMs, we should reassure them that DMing isn’t that hard.

You responded:

Why lie to potential new DMs? The context of where and when and with what system and what expectations players had back in the black & white days of yore is incredibly important to how easy DMing used to be when we were 12. Because, importantly, that’s all changed. The system is no longer 64-pages in total. Player expectations are no longer in the basement. And there’s no longer the relative safety of pre-internet isolation. Everything that made it easy to DM is gone.

You claim is that telling players that DMing isn’t that hard is a lie.

That’s on you to prove. The fact that an 8-year old can pick it up (even with a father that’s a gamer), strongly suggests that it isn’t.

 

[Reynard]

5E is wordy. You could lose nothing and literally cut the word count in half. There are much simpler ways to say things.