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

[Cadence]

It just takes practice. It takes being allowed to fail.

Finding people who can schedule you in and allow you to do that as much as needed, feels like it might be hard though...

 

[Reynard]

I mean, those ads are wrong....but GMing is still hard.

That a bunch of 10-year-olds have attempted a thing is not the same as saying that doing it is easy. 10-year-olds paint. 10-year-olds play violin. 10-year-olds write stories. Does that mean that it is easy to paint like Dali, Michaelangelo, or Picasso? Does that mean it's easy to play Mozart, Bizet, or Rachmaninoff? Does that mean it's easy to write like Joyce, Woolf, or Frost?

Writing a novel is hard; NaNoWriMo exists. These are simultaneously true things.

The thing the ads are wrong about is that you cannot learn to do a hard thing entirely on your own. You absolutely can. Well, they're also wrong that you have to pay to learn anything. There are tons of 100% free sources which can help guide you on the road to GMing success. The rules for Dungeon World, for example, are an excellent starting point for new GMs needing guidance on how to begin GMing from an effective and focused starting point.

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

 

[Reynard]

Finding people who can schedule you in and allow you to do that as much as needed, feels like it might be hard though...

I also think people generally over emphasize scheduling difficulties. Not that they don't exist, but in my experience it is easier to have set day of the week/month/whatever you play, rather than try and schedule from session to session. life still gets in the way, of course. I have to concel sessions do to municipal commission meetings more often than I would like. But even so we play my Thursday night game far more often than we would trying to schedule it after each time we play.

 

[Cadence]

I also think people generally over emphasize scheduling difficulties. Not that they don't exist, but in my experience it is easier to have set day of the week/month/whatever you play, rather than try and schedule from session to session. life still gets in the way, of course. I have to concel sessions do to municipal commission meetings more often than I would like. But even so we play my Thursday night game far more often than we would trying to schedule it after each time we play.

I can generally manage to commit to one consistent night a week. And there are two groups of people I've played with in recent memory (including the current one virtually and the 2nd one in person) - each with a couple DMs if I'm not doing it - that I have had to choose between when there is a lull in the current campaign. And a third in-person group I know of I could join with folks I know and who have played a long time.

The harder part might be how long those groups (and myself) are going to give a DM to get good enough when that's the one night we have. (Do we need professional playgroups or AI players for the new DM to practice on?).

 

[Reynard]

I can generally manage to commit to one consistent night a week. And there are two groups of people I've played with in recent memory (including the current one virtually and the 2nd one in person) - each with a couple DMs if I'm not doing it - that I have had to choose between when there is a lull in the current campaign. And a third in-person group I know of I could join with folks I know and who have played a long time.

The harder part might be how long those groups (and myself) are going to give a DM to get good enough when that's the one night we have. (Do we need professional playgroups or AI players for the new DM to practice on?).

Existing groups that have a member who wants to get behind the screen should absolutely give that person a chance.

 

[touc]

DMing is not that hard. We learned to do it when we were 10.

That plus this

all those screw ups and bummers might feel like wasted time to [adult] folks (whether or not it actually is).

sums it up. Yes, fundamentally, it's actually easy to do. That's what D&D marketed to the 11-year-old me with a reprint of the Red Box and a preface by Frank Mentzer:

"And it’s not hard. It takes a little reading and a little thinking, but most of all, it’s fun. It’s fun when you discover that nobody loses, and everybody wins! It’s fun when you get good at the game...for example, knowing what to expect in a kobold cave, and which dragons are on your side...You already have everything you need to start: this package, and your imagination. That will do it. Ah, yes; it does cost one more thing, which you also have right now — a bit of time. It takes a few minutes to learn the basic rules, and another hour or two to play a full game. You will probably want to spend more time, and might even make it a hobby; millions of people have."

It was also marketed that way.

No Experience Needed! 15 minutes and you're underway! (And, see how your peers are enjoying this game?)

But, to be sure, the game has gotten a lot more advanced. The Rule Book is more than 63 pages. Characters take more than 5 minutes to "roll up." We've added podcasts and professional voice actors and an entire 24-hour D&D network on my smart TV's free streaming stations where you can see the pros doing it. And then there's the anxiety as @el-remmen noted of being an adult and you don't have that free time to "learn as you go" and blunder along and drive off a player or two with your mistakes.

That's wherein I think the fallacy lies. Mistakes and blundering must go with the territory whether you think you have the time or not. You must be willing to abandon, as a group, a number of hours until someone gets into a DM groove. But, I'll confess it looked a whole lot less intimidating with the Red Box set and its solo adventure that everyone played and a mere 120 pages, half of that the DM booklet + adventure.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Personally I find improvising things with consequences for a narrative I want to keep consistent, while also juggling a bunch of rules and stats, while remembering everything I have planned, while keeping a variety of npcs/monsters I'm running consistent (with consistent voices, characterizations, etc), while managing pacing and keeping an eye on the clock, while wrangling whatever "physical assets" (whether real or online) I need to wrangle, while also navigating the social dynamics of a game, often while also trying to find things in an obtusely written published module, to be a difficult mental load, or, as some might call it "hard". Much like teaching, my primary profession, few of the individual elements involved are actually all that difficult, but the demands of needing my brain to be operating at a somewhat demanding level in many different types of cognitive task simultaneously and/or in rapid succession results in a lot of stress such that after a session I am frequently exhausted. That's what I consider "hard". If you don't find it hard in this sense then I would guess either your brain operates very differently than mine or you have lower standards in what good DMing entails.

It is also "hard" in the sense that it is difficult to master on the simple basis that getting an opportunity to practice it requires getting people together to play a game you run. Most people only get a few hours of practice a week in if they're lucky, so feeling like you've really mastered it is likely to take years and years. If you were to follow the Malcom Gladwell 10,000 hour rule of acquiring expertise than running a single 4 hour game session a week would make you an expert after 48 years. Obviously that's a ridiculous rule to apply here, but I think it gets at the point that becoming some sort of "master gm" is a journey that's hard to finish quickly.

It's not "hard" in the sense of requiring some innate talent that most people lack. It does require patience and a somewhat long attention span, two things that seem to be rarer and rarer in humans these days, but I don't think that's so big of an issue among people choosing to play ttrpgs and thinking they want to run them. So yes, a child can do it. Many children can do many amazing things.

 

[bloodtide]

No, it isn't. It just takes practice. It takes being allowed to fail.

It is like any other skill. But you can't just "do it a lot" and get better by only randomly doing it a lot. You need to actively take real steps to be better at a skill

What about being an average DM is difficult? Understand enough of the rules, understand enough of the adventure, have enough social skills to make sure everyone is mostly engaged.

Everything?

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

I would measure it against average

 

[Cadence]

Existing groups that have a member who wants to get behind the screen should absolutely give that person a chance.

I completely agree they should get a chance!

If you have time for four gaming sessions a month, how many months of gaming will you use to give someone enough sessions of practicing and failing to be good enough? (Is there some set amount it takes people? That it is reasonable to take? That it is ok to stop after?)

 

[MGibster]

No, it isn't. It just takes practice. It takes being allowed to fail.

I'm been GMing on and off for about thirty years now and I still fail on occasion!

What about being an average DM is difficult? Understand enough of the rules, understand enough of the adventure, have enough social skills to make sure everyone is mostly engaged.

I think it's the social skills that makes GMing most difficult in that you have to be comfortable managing people. You've got to balance the needs of each player against one another as well as your own desires. You've got to have the fortitude to tell someone no and stand by your rulings even when a player disagrees. Everyone seems to have a different interpretation of what a reasonable GM should allow or not allow.