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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8137197" data-attributes="member: 6696971">We can all be certain this is the case because for the 40+ years that TTRPGs have been a thing, poor GMs/GMing and how to fix it has been one of the primary conversation pieces from White Dwarf to Dragon to internet forums to real life!However, all of the people you are discussing these matters with in this thread are lifelong GMs.  Some of us, myself included, are pretty much exclusively GMs so we're broaching this subject through that lens.  Personally, what I want out of the games that I run (and I run many different types of games) is to get precisely the experience the participants who will be playing are looking for.  In the last decade the systems I've primarily (with stray exceptions like Ten Candles, My Life With Master, Sorcerer, Beyond the Wall, Masks, Scum and Villainy, Monsterhearts, 5e, The One Ring, 13th Age) run are (starting from most played to least played):* D&D 4e* Dungeon World* Dogs in the Vineyard* Torchbearer* Blades in the Dark* Apocalypse World* Strike!* Mouse Guard* Various Cortex+ (mostly MHRP)* Moldvay Basic if its low level or RC D&D if its my 30 year gaming friends spare continuing game (and they'll pick one of their 3-4 characters from their PC stable).[HR][/HR]On the Venn Diagram of TTRPG attributes, as GM, all of those games above (except for RC) share the following overlap:* Holistic, intentful design with a focused premise, explicit ethos, and engineering toward executing that precisely and consistently.* Clear, cogent (even if its a more weighty text like 4e/Torchbearer/Blades), player-facing rules that are all integrated to perpetuate the game's particular play loop.* Enumerated GM role and constraints, clarity of authority for participants (whether its more distributed or more siloed like in Moldvay Basic), great GMing advice, and clarity of procedures and conversation.[HR][/HR]Why do I want this stuff as GM?  Because it lets me offload mental overhead that I don't want onto system and players (thereby investing them in the responsibility for the trajectory of play), therefore reducing unwanted stress and allowing me to be mentally fresh and focus my cognitive horsepower on optimizing my creativity and industry for the particular role of the GM in that game (building an interesting, challenging, thematic dungeon in Moldvay is different than in Torchbearer and they're both different than running a 4e Skill Challenge which is different than running a 4e combat which is different than running a Blades Score which is different than running a Dogs escalating conflict).  There is never any confusion on what is happening or what has happened in a session.  And finally, I get to "play to find out what happens" (even in a Moldvay Basic dungeon where I've mapped and keyed everything with high resolution) because players and system are driving play while I'm reacting and countering (which is the inverse of a lot of TTRPG play).</blockquote>

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