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

[SableWyvern]

Well, we're pretty sure that the majority of players are 18 years old or older. Most evidence points to this. While there are significant numbers of teens playing, that demographic is dwarfed by older demographics.

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From: this thread: WotC - Comparing EN World's Demographics to the D&D Community's

So, assuming that new DM's would be adults isn't too much of a stretch. Again, sure, there are new DM's under 18. After all, according to the above, a quarter of players are under 18. But, again, we're talking about a minority of players. While @EzekielRaiden didn't bring receipts to say that the majority of gamers are adults, I wouldn't have really thought that he had to. It's hardly controversial.

Now, as far as people choosing to DM after playing for some time, again, I don't think that's terribly controversial. That's how things have worked in the hobby for a very long time. New player gets introduced to the game through existing gamers, tries it, likes it, and then goes on to try running games.

If we assume those numbers are accurate (although it looks like there's no mention of how WotC sourced them), then "most" is a technically correct term but, in the context of the discussion we're having, it's being used to dismiss the younger people as irrelevant to the discussion. If 25% are under 18 and 42% are 24 or less, I'm not sure that's reasonable.

Do you honestly believe that most people who DM D&D have never played before they try running games? Or even a majority or people?

By sheer dint of numbers and normal group dynamics its unavoidable that a good number of GMs played before they GMed. But the comment I was responding to didn't say, "a large number of GMs were players first". It stated that most GMs played for several years before becoming GMs, and with nothing to back it up, that sounds to me like a fact plucked out of the air.

 

[Lanefan]

It occurs to me that while I never specified the age group of the hypothetical new DM, a lot of folks in this thread are assuming an adult. I wonder why that is.

For me at least, it's because I view D&D as being more an adults' game than a kids' game.

 

[Lanefan]

Huh. What's that like? I had been playing for nearly 30 years before I actually played a campaign that came to a conclusion. Every other campaign fizzled. Either real life steps in and squashes it, or the DM burns out. I've been gaming since the early 80's and it wasn't until a 5th edition campaign that we actually completed a full campaign.

How many of those campaigns were intentionally run as open-ended though, i.e. without a set "completion" point?

I've been running the same campaign for 17+ years now and there's still no end in sight; hard to call it "fizzled" after that long even if it for some reason stops next month.

 

[Lanefan]

Does it?

Because that exact thing is the problem. You've locked monsters into being one, and only one, kind of progression.

If you lock them all into having levels and classes and so forth, then sure; I'd agree.

But the purpose monsters fulfill within the abstraction that is the game doesn't progress that way. I agree that having numbers has its uses, but those uses are vastly outweighed by how much they hem you in as almost all of your GMing hats: the rules-adjudicator, the world-drafter, and the (I know you're going to hate this one) storyteller. When creatures work by precisely the same rules as characters, you as rules-adjudicator cannot ensure that (as I mention below) the specific, intended experience that characters really do survive/escape most combats, while monsters almost never do (with "capture" counted among "not surviving/not escaping").

What I want as DM is something that says in hard numbers "this creature, on average, is as strong as the strongest possible human, as smart as the average bag of hammers, not very wise, has average dexterity, can withstand more abuse than a vending machine, and is as ugly as sin".

"Typical stats: Str 22, Int 4, Wis 8, Dex 11, Con 20, Cha 6" handles that much more precisely and in way fewer words.

Unfortunately, that's where you--and most fans of this approach--are wrong.

The "fix" IS the "overboard". There is no separation between the two. Doing to D&D the thing you call a "fix" will always produce that, unless you build the entire system, top to bottom, to be what is needed. And that's...

...where point-buy enters. A truly point-buy game from the ground up, one where actually every character is assembled from disparate pieces, actually does put all entities on the same footing. It abandons some of the premises that went into D&D's design which separate the role of monsters from the role of characters. Unless and until you abandon those premises, you can't get a game that puts things on the same footing. Characters have genuine classes, have full articulation of a bunch of built-in stuff. Monsters/opponents don't.

Monsters don't. NPC opponents that are PC-playable species do; it's non-negotiable with me that PCs are representative of their species and NPCs of that species work the same as do PCs.

Characters are meant to survive through an indefinite number of encounters. Monsters/opponents aren't. Characters frequently carry significant spent-across-the-day resources. Monsters/opponents can't--because they're going to blow their whole load all at once, massively exceeding the design limits.

Again, let's separate monsters and NPCs, as there's a massive difference between them.

If I'm throwing a bunch of Elves at the party as foes it's ironclad those Elves will be created so as to fall within PC guidelines. If I'm throwing a bunch of Demons at the party, however, all such constraints go flying out the window.

In either case, I don't care how many encounters they're meant to survive through.

When you move to true, pure point-buy, all of the above is taken care of in looking at the budget for each creature, since you're, y'know, building them yourself, piece by piece, and you can directly tabulate precisely what each monster is. You know, down to a very fine grain, what each monster is--so you know precisely how much you're challenging the players. That's not possible in a class-based, asymmetrically-balanced, "daily"-resources (or other long-period resources) design paradigm. By moving to pure point-buy, where even having a single "daily" resource is something you had to buy, you break that connection.

D&D monster design doesn't work that way. It's all hunches and hard-coding. The latter is what traps you into the progression, the former makes it so putting a threat outside of a narrow set of contexts breaks that progression. The in-built design assumptions do you in.

If you're looking at 3e as your go-to example of this, keep in mind that 3e gets it wrong too: the power curve is too steep.

And those hard numbers being identical to player numbers is what causes the "overboard".

Having numbers is fine! But making it so those numbers have to be locked into one, and only one, progression--numbers that must always work precisely the same as the players' progression--is what causes the "overboard" you lament. It can't be separated...unless, as noted, you go to true, fundamental point-buy. Do that--abandon the class-based, asymmetrically-balanced, variable-resource-schedule structure--and you can perfectly achieve the goal you've set out for.

I;m not so worried about class progression (other then Fighter, a useful paradigm which all warrior species can use). I just want to know the base stats so I know what bonuses or penalties to assign. I also don't want asymemetrical balance: a 5th-level Elf Cleric is a 5th-level Elf Cleric; and regardless of whether or not it has a little "PC" sticker on its forehead the two of them should be completely interchangeable.

Put another way: in the fiction, they are indistinguishable; which means that in their mechanics they should also be indistinguishable.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, we're pretty sure that the majority of players are 18 years old or older. Most evidence points to this. While there are significant numbers of teens playing, that demographic is dwarfed by older demographics.

View attachment 424218

From: this thread: WotC - Comparing EN World's Demographics to the D&D Community's

The left-hand graph has a rather large and glaring flaw, as it implies that exactly 0% of the player base is 46 or older.

Such is not the case.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't mean to single you out, but I feel like this phrase was repeated a number of times in this thread: "DMing is not hard. DMing well is hard."

I dislike this phrase. I feel like there is an implication that long as you are not trying to do it well, DM-ing is easy. But, then try replacing "DMing" with anything else:

• "Doing math is not hard. Doing math well is hard."
• "Baking is not hard. Baking well is hard."
• "Acting is not hard. Acting well is hard."

Do you feel like these alternate statements above are true? I certainly don't, the same way I disagree with "DMing is not hard. DMing well is hard."

I would say "(For me) DMing is hard. DMing well is much harder."

Of these, math is the only one I fully disagree with, and that mostly because math allows at very best only a very small degree of wiggle room, generally in the space of rapid estimation. In almost all other contexts, the purpose of math is to be either absolutely correct, or to be as close as is physically achievable to absolutely correct because absolute correctness is impossible. That is, solutions are either analytic (perfect solutions) or numerical (approximations up to an arbitrary, but never perfect, precision). Hence, math stands apart as a special thing where perfection is sometimes attainable and always worth pursuing, even if you're unable to actually reach it.

So, no, I would not say that "doing math is not hard", unless we start employing equivocation--e.g. "Doing arithmetic is not hard. Doing differential equations well is hard."

Baking does inch in this direction because it is much more of a science than most practical arts...but it's still significantly art, a matter of both creator's personal taste, and audience's preferences. Acting, of course, is always both of those. Math is, at least as much as anything can be, truly objective.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Monsters don't. NPC opponents that are PC-playable species do; it's non-negotiable with me that PCs are representative of their species and NPCs of that species work the same as do PCs.

Then unless-and-until you give up some of the design assumptions that go into D&D, you will always run into the "overboard" problem. Guaranteed.

Put another way: in the fiction, they are indistinguishable; which means that in their mechanics they should also be indistinguishable.

This principle is precisely what causes the 3rd edition "overboard" phenomenon.

 

[Hussar]

How many of those campaigns were intentionally run as open-ended though, i.e. without a set "completion" point?

I've been running the same campaign for 17+ years now and there's still no end in sight; hard to call it "fizzled" after that long even if it for some reason stops next month.

None. As in I've never played an open ended campaign like that.

 

[AlViking]

Well, yes and no. For example, you talk about starting at an FLGS. For lots of us back in the day, that wasn't an option. The FLGS was driving distance away and not accessible for 13 year old me. Without any contact with other gamers, outside of maybe the odd Dragon magazine, there was one set of rules to worry about. Sure, some people might bring out another game from time to time, but, by and large, that was a rarity, not the regular.

Even though there might have been multiple versions of D&D, they were all largely compatible (you could easily play Keep on the Borderlands with a 2e D&D group, for example). There weren't a half dozen versions of incompatible D&D, let alone a hundred different RPG's out there. The idea of "story game" or "narrative game" or "indie game" wouldn't even be thought about for another ten years and even if they started out in the 90's, the overwhelming majority of gamers would have virtually no contact with most other gaming systems.

"Free basic rules" for example, Those didn't exist. There were no "Free basic rules" in the 80's and 90's. There were no "starter sets" back then. The only thing close was Basic/Expert and even that was pretty chunky.

I didn't start at an FLGS, I didn't even know such things existed. At a certain point after many years of DMing I started going to cons and got ideas on how to run games from other GMs. When I started there was no FLGS. But GMs my age are a tiny, tiny percent of all GMs. GMs that started in the 20th century are a small minority of all GMs now.

Whereas in my experience, that DM will drop the campaign six weeks in after realizing the amount of effort it will take to actually run a campaign that's longer than a 16 page module.

I mean good grief, there's a reason that players outnumber DM's by a HUGE margin. And that's always been true.

In my experience DMs outnumber players by something like 5 to 1. If it was any more, there's no way there could be as many people playing today as there are. Yes, the occasional idiot like me runs more than one game but in my experience I'm the exception unless your talking about the occasional convention where someone runs multiple. But even in my main group I also have 3 other people who DM, at least occasionally. Paid DMs likely run more, but those are still a drop in the bucket.

Your experiences, including how long campaigns run, seem to me to be extreme outliers and don't match the experiences I've had over decades of play.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I didn't start at an FLGS, I didn't even know such things existed. At a certain point after many years of DMing I started going to cons and got ideas on how to run games from other GMs. When I started there was no FLGS. But GMs my age are a tiny, tiny percent of all GMs. GMs that started in the 20th century are a small minority of all GMs now.



In my experience DMs outnumber players by something like 5 to 1. If it was any more, there's no way there could be as many people playing today as there are. Yes, the occasional idiot like me runs more than one game but in my experience I'm the exception unless your talking about the occasional convention where someone runs multiple. But even in my main group I also have 3 other people who DM, at least occasionally. Paid DMs likely run more, but those are still a drop in the bucket.

Your experiences, including how long campaigns run, seem to me to be extreme outliers and don't match the experiences I've had over decades of play.

Conversely, I've had exactly the same experience as Hussar, despite being significantly younger and living in a different country. GMs always--consistently--fall far short of the number of players seeking one. Across several different websites, I've seen easily ten times as many gamers seeking a GM as GMs seeking players.