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I would be especially quick to give someone I'd GMed for a shot.

The point of the rant seemed to be aimed at people who make it sound harder than it is, usually people with products to sell that they purport will make it easier for you. The GM-Advice-Industrial Complex isn't all that, or even all caused by that--there are other causes I can point at that...

Well, most conventional TRPGs call for multiple players and one GM. That probably has at least as much to do with there being so many more players than GMs. And I've seen far more GMs run entire campaigns than I have drop them prematurely; the only non-anxiety-related one in my experience was a...

I can think of at least three people in my circles who share at least one of your three reasons for finding GMing difficult, and I can think of at least one other who routinely has routinely needed breaks from it to reassemble in his head how he wanted to do it (though the last friend has mostly...

I know a couple of the people I GM for have run into anxiety-related walls connected to their GMing, that's a real thing, and it's at least vaguely connected to your "lack of belief in onseself" idea. While I think that is/was pretty much on them, not the rest of us at the table, I have no doubt...

"Takes time and practice to get better at" is not the same thing as "massively difficult." No, you're not going to look/sound/feel like a professional voice-actor running on a stream, first time, but that's also not the same thing as "good." My own take is that it's neither as difficult as some...

It seems worth pointing out that a lot of things that kinda fall on GMs to do are more social/hosting things, and GMs end up doing them for the same reason/s bands usually end up practicing at the drummer's house--they're the ones with the most stuff to schlep. Yes, managing the schedules of...

Sure, and that's their problem. Unless, of course, you make it yours.

The fact people have bad sessions--as players or as GMs--doesn't mean GMing isn't easier than a lot of people say it is. As someone said upthread, the process of getting better at doing a thing often entails doing it badly at points and/or for a while.

I think a lot of it is "not what I want in a GM," but that's not a strident disagreement.

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...

Well, that's just everyone's favorite category error in reverse. Even bass-ackward it's fractally wrong.

Spotify perineum seems like a rather specialized service ...

Yeah, the people at the table are OK with knowing it happens in the setting, they just don't want their faces shoved in it (or it shoved in their faces, whatever).

I enjoyed the heck out of Anima Rising. I particularly appreciated how much better it treated the characters who weren't white men than Sacre Bleu did. (Of the Moore I've read, that's the closest comparison, I think.)

In principle, I absolutely agree that safety tools should be in use in TRPGs, probably not just for Horror games--mainly because genre borders are often blurry and/or porous--even though in practice I'm utter garbage at using them. (Fortunately, I know the players really well; I pay attention to...

"It's on fire." That seems as though it's probably adequate information ... :LOL:

If not ignore, maybe disregard, or at least refuse to engage with.

Fair, I was thinking of the difference between a kind of enthusiastic cluelessness kinda common among nerds and something more malicious, but that might not be a distinction that matters as much when one is interacting with either.

There are probably some of those, yes. Often, people want to talk about what they want to talk about and will take any conversational opening to do so; this can, but needn't, be bad-faith thread-twisting.