D&D General A Rant: DMing is not hard.

[TheSword]

And part of this, IMO, is the professional DM cottage industry. I get why people would want a paid GM, especially as it relates to scheduling, but pro DMing amplifies the attitude that DMing is some sort of elite skill set that only someone with expertise can do. And that is nonsense. Anyone can DM.

Anyway, I saw an ad that really turned my crank. Had to get that out. Everyone can go back to their regularly scheduled Best of 2025 lists or whatever.

/rant

I think you’re being a little unfair here.

I recently started a thread and @Benjamin Olson mentioned eight good reasons why someone might pay for a DM and I added a couple more. Only one was related to DM skill and even then it was very much perceived DM skill. I can’t speak for others but I’ve never believed I’m a better DM than other people. First foray into paid DMing - 16 session in.

DMing from scratch is absolutely possible. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that being willing to mess up in front of your mates is very different to messing up in front of strangers on the internet.

Though as I mentioned in that thread, my gaming spare time is precious. As an experienced player, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to spend it with a DM that knows the rules and has at least a little experience themselves.

The existence of taxi drivers doesn’t discourage folks from learning to drive. I’m not sure why a DM being willing to run your game for a small charge should discourage folks from learning to DM. If anything it should be an incentive.

 

[renbot]

It's been said already, but I don't find DMing to be HARD necessarily, but I do find it to be quite a bit of WORK. Granted, I develop my own adventures paths using a published campaign world (usually Midgard or Eberron) with significant changes, invent my own magic items, and often design new subclasses and/or races/species for players that want something different. I do all this because I enjoy it, I have more free time than most of my players (no kids), and I keep hearing that creative pursuits can help stave off cognitive decline (no evidence of that yet, unfortunately). And then I run the games themselves. As I said, I really enjoy DMing but it is definitely WORK and some people find that to be HARD.

 

[Mephista]

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[overgeeked]

And not to mention that lots players just don't... give the chance for people to get good at DMing? They quit rather than let the practice come?

Yep. The mantra of “no gaming is better than bad gaming” utterly kneecaps new referees. A lot of players expect Mulligan, Mercer, and Colville from the first session.

 

[prabe]

I think you’re being a little unfair here.

I recently started a thread and @Benjamin Olson mentioned eight good reasons why someone might pay for a DM and I added a couple more. Only one was related to DM skill and even then it was very much perceived DM skill. I can’t speak for others but I’ve never believed I’m a better DM than other people. First foray into paid DMing - 16 session in.

DMing from scratch is absolutely possible. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that being willing to mess up in front of your mates is very different to messing up in front of strangers on the internet.

Though as I mentioned in that thread, my gaming spare time is precious. As an experienced player, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to spend it with a DM that knows the rules and has at least a little experience themselves.

The existence of taxi drivers doesn’t discourage folks from learning to drive. I’m not sure why a DM being willing to run your game for a small charge should discourage folks from learning to DM. If anything it should be an incentive.

Obviously I'm not the person you're responding to, but the existence of the GM-Advice Industrial Complex doesn't seem to relate much to the existence of professional GMs. I mean, the existence of pop-psych self-help books don't diminish the value of actual therapy even a little. (To make a kinda crude analogy, no offense intended toward anyone in actual therapy or anything.)

I agree with what I take to be the main point/s of the OP, that GMing is (at least often) not anywhere near as hard as (at least) some people make it seem, and that there really are a lot of people who want you to think that giving them money will make it easier for you. There are people who genuinely want to make it easier for people newer to the hobby, and godspeed them, but I can't disagree hard with anyone looking at the situation with at least one jaundiced eye, here.

 

[Hussar]

Why do you think that is? Are new players less tolerant of new DMs?

Time pressure. Back in the eighties and nineties, you had tons of unsupervised time.

No one has that now. You have to schedule “play dates” with adult supervision. You have endless hours of classes and group activities that are scheduled for you. On and on.

There is just so much more competition for your time than there was back then.

 

[Cadence]

Yep. The mantra of “no gaming is better than bad gaming” utterly kneecaps new referees. A lot of players expect Mulligan, Mercer, and Colville from the first session.

I think I'm more than happy to give four sessions to it without huge expectations if it is being "reasonable" (doesn't need to be great, but has to be better than bad after a session or two and showing improvement if not good yet), and to continue if its trending well. Or similarly give some one shots to try things out.

I assume folks will help a friend move on an open Saturday, will critically a read a friend's first short story early draft or later draft of a novella, or will help a friend's kid in an emergency get ready for a math test (or whatever) that's important. But I wonder what the looks would be if asked to give up a month of Saturdays to redo a house; edit a novel from start to end; or be a weekly tutor. At some point it's work and not just helping a friend. I'm not sure why this is different.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I am not sure why anyone thinks that the metric for being able to do a thing should be measured against perfection.

The people that are mostly like to view the metric for being able to do a thing, particularly if that thing is DM'ing are the people that have never done it. IT can be quite intimidating and there is the embarrassment of failing and of wasting peoples time. That they are willing to let you and encourage you to do it again is something only experienced after trying but one can easily imagine failure.
I am reminded of a conversation I had in college with a bunch of women who where post grad chemists about cooking. One of them said that she could not cook. I responded that, that statement was utter nonsense, every week she was carrying out a delicate and involved chemical synthesis and doing it successfully and then refining the product and proving that the result was the chemical that she had planned to make, and this was a way harder than any cooking task she might care to undertake.
Stop comparing herself to top chefs, all she needed to produce was something she was going to enjoy eating.
DM'ing is work and it is easy to imagine how it can go wrong and that is what intimidates people. In particular, may non DM do not realize just how often DM's get rules wrong and how little that actually matters.

 

[Sacrosanct]

In order to be good at something, you have to be ok with being bad at it for a while. I usually make this comment in the context of art, but it’s true here as well.

 

[MichaelSomething]

We need to compare this to a thread where people complain about terrible DMs.