D&D General The DM Shortage

[Celebrim]

I think that when we get to people rejecting editions for any reason, we are dealing with experienced DMs.

Agree.

It really depends on the people.

Oh absolutely agreed. There are a lot of different styles of games and different tables will enjoy certain things and also will different players will have (fairly or unfairly) some hard "no" where they draw the line on what they can enjoy. And while you can run pretty much any style of game with any game system, some systems will fight you more than others depending on what you trying to do.

I would agree that beginning in location based play is a better place to start before tackling complex story type play.

Absolutely agree. A dungeon is so much easier to prep than event based and character driven play and more importantly, so much easier to do adequately well and hit everyone's aesthetics of play. You can always with a little thought put social encounters in a dungeon, and eventually you start realizing that everything is a dungeon and from there you can start working with bigger stages without ending up with something degenerate or trivial.

I am for instance a big fan of the "Return of the Lazy DM" as DM advice and a firm believe in don't over prep but I concede that some people find that terrible advice.
like:

In general, I agree with Ginny that "don't overprep" is terrible advice for a newbie DM. IME, the single biggest indicator of how good a GM is is how much time they spend prepping. The truth is, if you had limitless time, there would be no such thing as over prepping. The more detail to prep for, the richer and more immersive the game can be and the better able you are to handle and provide for player agency while still bringing the twists and narrative arcs that give your game big payoffs.

"Don't overprep" is actually, if we are to be generous with it, shorthand for some much more complex advice that a novice DM is not going to understand without a whole lot more explanation. It's a recognition that we as GMs don't have unlimited time and so we have to choose what to prepare. It's also a recognition that it's possible to prepare badly, leading to the GM either thinking about their game in the wrong way (budding novelist) or being actually completely unprepared for what happens in play.

It means things like, "Don't prep the wrong things. Focus your prep time on the things that are definitely going to come up, and not on the things that aren't. Or to put it in a phase, don't world build to the exclusion of having a rich neighborhood to explore."

It means things like, "Don't prep out a lengthy storyline in detail, because you never know exactly what is going to happen. And don't spend a lot of time fantasizing about the exact events that you want to have happen and how cool they will be, because not only will it turn out much of your prep is made obsolete by player choices, but you'll be tempted to railroad players or disappointed your plans don't come to fruition."

It means things like, "Don't prep for things you don't yet know if you have player buy in for. Make sure you know where the players want to go and do before you plot out the whole railroad or build out the whole sandbox. If you aren't sure, ask them in session zero or at the end of a session."

As far as the "Lazy DM" goes, whether or not the Lazy DM is giving good advice or not depends very heavily on you and your players tolerance for illusionism. I personally have a really sensitive illusionism detector and I personally hate, loathe, and utterly cannot stand illusionism. (By "illusionism" I mean that the game universe shapes and reshapes itself according to the metagame. Nothing is actually fixed until a metagame need establishes what happens. Simple illusionism and somewhat forgivable illusionism might be an event that is timed to occur when the PC's arrive at a location, and not at a fixed time in the game universe. That is to say a can't miss event. The Lazy GM veers toward advising the GM to save prep time by doing everything in response to the metagame.) If my illusionism detector pings off, I probably won't get up from the table and walk, but I probably will politely decline to ever play with you again and speak poorly of your game and even be a little bit angry. You try to pull the "Lazy DM" BS with me, and I will not only notice but will pack my bags. I'm not kidding. I left a group after 5 years in large part because a DM pulled a Lazy DM stunt on me. Probably not fair and yes it's probably an exaggerated pet peeve, and yes I know as a DM everyone uses a little bit of illusionism from time to time for reasons good and bad, but still it's a thing. The trouble with illusionism is it works really well as long as players never know it happened, but as soon as they find out that it happens you've got a problem.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Agree.



Oh absolutely agreed. There are a lot of different styles of games and different tables will enjoy certain things and also will different players will have (fairly or unfairly) some hard "no" where they draw the line on what they can enjoy. And while you can run pretty much any style of game with any game system, some systems will fight you more than others depending on what you trying to do.



Absolutely agree. A dungeon is so much easier to prep than event based and character driven play and more importantly, so much easier to do adequately well and hit everyone's aesthetics of play. You can always with a little thought put social encounters in a dungeon, and eventually you start realizing that everything is a dungeon and from there you can start working with bigger stages without ending up with something degenerate or trivial.



In general, I agree with Ginny that "don't overprep" is terrible advice for a newbie DM. IME, the single biggest indicator of how good a GM is is how much time they spend prepping. The truth is, if you had limitless time, there would be no such thing as over prepping. The more detail to prep for, the richer and more immersive the game can be and the better able you are to handle and provide for player agency while still bringing the twists and narrative arcs that give your game big payoffs.

"Don't overprep" is actually, if we are to be generous with it, shorthand for some much more complex advice that a novice DM is not going to understand without a whole lot more explanation. It's a recognition that we as GMs don't have unlimited time and so we have to choose what to prepare. It's also a recognition that it's possible to prepare badly, leading to the GM either thinking about their game in the wrong way (budding novelist) or being actually completely unprepared for what happens in play.

It means things like, "Don't prep the wrong things. Focus your prep time on the things that are definitely going to come up, and not on the things that aren't. Or to put it in a phase, don't world build to the exclusion of having a rich neighborhood to explore."

It means things like, "Don't prep out a lengthy storyline in detail, because you never know exactly what is going to happen. And don't spend a lot of time fantasizing about the exact events that you want to have happen and how cool they will be, because not only will it turn out much of your prep is made obsolete by player choices, but you'll be tempted to railroad players or disappointed your plans don't come to fruition."

It means things like, "Don't prep for things you don't yet know if you have player buy in for. Make sure you know where the players want to go and do before you plot out the whole railroad or build out the whole sandbox. If you aren't sure, ask them in session zero or at the end of a session."

As far as the "Lazy DM" goes, whether or not the Lazy DM is giving good advice or not depends very heavily on you and your players tolerance for illusionism. I personally have a really sensitive illusionism detector and I personally hate, loathe, and utterly cannot stand illusionism. (By "illusionism" I mean that the game universe shapes and reshapes itself according to the metagame. Nothing is actually fixed until a metagame need establishes what happens. Simple illusionism and somewhat forgivable illusionism might be an event that is timed to occur when the PC's arrive at a location, and not at a fixed time in the game universe. That is to say a can't miss event. The Lazy GM veers toward advising the GM to save prep time by doing everything in response to the metagame.) If my illusionism detector pings off, I probably won't get up from the table and walk, but I probably will politely decline to ever play with you again and speak poorly of your game and even be a little bit angry. You try to pull the "Lazy DM" BS with me, and I will not only notice but will pack my bags. I'm not kidding. I left a group after 5 years in large part because a DM pulled a Lazy DM stunt on me. Probably not fair and yes it's probably an exaggerated pet peeve, and yes I know as a DM everyone uses a little bit of illusionism from time to time for reasons good and bad, but still it's a thing. The trouble with illusionism is it works really well as long as players never know it happened, but as soon as they find out that it happens you've got a problem.

I do not think that you and I are ever going to agree on DM'ing best practise, I think you overstate the level of illusionism needed. That said, and this is a problem I find with nearly all DM advice, is that there are unstated assumptions about the game aesthetic being pursued embedded in it.
DM advice would be much better, if it explicitly stated the type of game being played. It does not help that we lack a taxonomy of playstyles.

 

[Celebrim]

I do not think that you and I are ever going to agree on DM'ing best practice...

I think at a very high level we actually do, in as much as your thesis says something I agree with wholeheartedly: "...there are unstated assumptions about the game aesthetic being pursued embedded in [DM Advice]. DM advice would be much better, if it explicitly stated the type of game being played."

Absolutely. Different players and different tables have different aesthetics of play and different hierarchies of aesthetic value. At a simple level, you can think of it as a question of which is more important to the fun of the player, where you ended up or the process that you used to get there? Instead of arguing about what is the one true way to play, we should be talking about what needs we are trying to meet and what tradeoffs we are making to meet those needs. And we really as a community need to have more empathy for different player's and table's aesthetics.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I think at a very high level we actually do, in as much as your thesis says something I agree with wholeheartedly: "...there are unstated assumptions about the game aesthetic being pursued embedded in [DM Advice]. DM advice would be much better, if it explicitly stated the type of game being played."

You are most generous.

Absolutely. Different players and different tables have different aesthetics of play and different hierarchies of aesthetic value. At a simple level, you can think of it as a question of which is more important to the fun of the player, where you ended up or the process that you used to get there? Instead of arguing about what is the one true way to play, we should be talking about what needs we are trying to meet and what tradeoffs we are making to meet those needs. And we really as a community need to have more empathy for different player's and table's aesthetics.

Agreed, I would love to see some research about player and DM play aesthetics and priorities. It would be nice to have some thing other than gut feeling to hang these discussions on. Also it would give us some basis to hang a taxonomy on. I suspect that WoTC has some pertinent data. I would be amazed if their only marketing data was from the UA surveys but they are looking at it from a sales and marketing lens. I would love to see it looked at from a playstyle and play priority view.

 

[overgeeked]

It does not help that we lack a taxonomy of playstyles.

We don't really lack a taxonomy of play styles. People just take offense to the most common names used, so any discussion about them instantly devolves into an argument, and the thread gets closed.

 

[Celebrim]

We don't really lack a taxonomy of play styles. People just take offense to the most common names used, so any discussion about them instantly devolves into an argument, and the thread gets closed.

There have been several attempts over the last 50ish years to produce a taxonomy of play styles. Leaving aside the fact that the early ones tended to use offensive stereotypes, the problem I have with all existing taxonomies is that they aren't only too simplistic in their assumptions about what the aesthetics of a play of an RPG actually are, but they tend to see these aesthetics as being mutually exclusive qualities rather than being relative quantities or hierarchies of player needs.

We could talk about (for example) thespians, real men, munchkins, and loonies and what they are getting out of play but the truth is that I think that's too few categories and also that the reality is most players (and even more so most DMs) are a little bit of each. The same is true of the division into gamist, narrativist, and simulationist.

And even more to the point, it's not really immediately clear from a taxonomy like that what you do about it in terms of preparation and process of play.

And perhaps even more to the point, all the preexisting angry and dysfunctional discussion creates a barrier of understanding that is too high to cross, and so we're probably better off starting over from scratch.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

There have been several attempts over the last 50ish years to produce a taxonomy of play styles. Leaving aside the fact that the early ones tended to use offensive stereotypes, the problem I have with all existing taxonomies is that they aren't only too simplistic in their assumptions about what the aesthetics of a play of an RPG actually are, but they tend to see these aesthetics as being mutually exclusive qualities rather than being relative quantities or hierarchies of player needs.

We could talk about (for example) thespians, real men, munchkins, and loonies and what they are getting out of play but the truth is that I think that's too few categories and also that the reality is most players (and even more so most DMs) are a little bit of each. The same is true of the division into gamist, narrativist, and simulationist.

And even more to the point, it's not really immediately clear from a taxonomy like that what you do about it in terms of preparation and process of play.

And perhaps even more to the point, all the preexisting angry and dysfunctional discussion creates a barrier of understanding that is too high to cross, and so we're probably better off starting over from scratch.

A much better reply to the one I was struggling to formulate.

 

[Aldarc]

Re @Celebrim and @UngainlyTitan: reading your respectful conversation has been delightful and interesting. Do please carry on.

 

[Zardnaar]

I've seen both. Everybody that plays pays a couple of bucks to play and the money goes to the store and then the DM gets store credit. Asking people to DM seemed to work better, even if I did get a lot of books at the cost of DMing.

How it works here for me. I've spent very little of my own money on 5E last 3 years. It's store credit and gift money.

4-6 weeks of D&D generally pays for a book. Even with store credit I passed on Spelljammer

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Re @Celebrim and @UngainlyTitan: reading your respectful conversation has been delightful and interesting. Do please carry on.

@Celebrim has been musing on this stuff far longer than I have but lately I have been thinking that characterisation of play does not look deeply enough. I think there is a deep disconnect between players that want to interact with the game word with as little between them and that world as possible.
They want as few "character levels" (think powers/skills) as possible. Player skill is a priority. They tend to OSR play if they find out about it. I think it may be one end of a spectrum of play with players willing to delegate environment interaction to the character at the other end (think more 4e)
I am not sure if exploration play is strongly coupled with that "simplified character sheet" style or independent or an aspect of the kind of challenge that, that kind of player likes. I think it might be (not sure as I was never really a fan of this type of game)

On the other hand exploration is not confined to this type of player. Players that are willing to delegate character competence (as adventures) to the character sheet and rules can play an exploration game in 5e just fine. So when someone complains that they cannot do an old school dungeon crawl in 5e they are really complaining about where the game rules (usually character sheet elements like cantrips and darkvision) get in the way of that low level high challenge type of game and then to confuse the issue a whole bunch of people pop up to say that they are running old style dungeons just fine like they always did (with or with out detailed inventory management).
The latter are telling the truth and were probably running AD&D or what ever but many issues they considered a bug in the old games the other crowd considered a feature.
Then you have the players that want their characters as big damn heroes and the people that want to see what happens next.