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

[Stormonu]

DMing is taxing. It’s difficult in that manner as you are generally organizer, referee, encyclopedia, creator and playwright. I’ve suffered DM burnout more than once having been a forever DM, and my recent time as a player (for once) has been extremely relaxing.

 

[Pamphylian]

I am not a fan of 2024, but it is literally the first DMG to provide short adventures you can plug in anywhere.

Yeah fair enough! I was thinking particularly of the Random Encounters section w.r.t. to the DMG (compared even to the 2014 counterpart). The mini adventures are nice enough, though maybe with variable on the fly pluginability.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I do think a few styles of play that seem prominent these days are legitimately pretty hard to DM for. There is a lot of discussion about crafting story beats and managing character arcs for each of your players and building perfectly balanced set piece fights that give everyone a spotlight and keeping a plot on track so that you have a satisfying and emotionally compelling story, beginning, middle and end. I think there is no way around this sort of stuff being pretty hard to run. At least without some combination of very high amounts of prep and dramatic skill. DM as storyteller asks a lot of the DM! The thought of herding mercurial players from prepared plot point to prepared plot point seems like a massive headache to me.

This is no shade on groups that enjoy this style of play, there are clearly people who have a lot of fun with it. But I feel lucky that it is not really how I or my players want to play, and that there are other options for playstyle that I think suit the medium a little better, and there's good advice out there for these approaches. But I think a lot of the popular on-ramps to the hobby (including official sources) put a lot of weight on this style, so a lot of beginner DMs think they are saddled with being an entertainer, a writer, an actor, and a group social coordinator all in one.

At the same time, a lot of the mechanisms that have historically been there for DMs to fall back on when players do something unexpected, or even just to feel like they are playing the game along with players, seem to increasingly have fallen out of favor. Various dungeon procedures, random tables, small modules that you can plug in anywhere seem increasingly out of fashion (looking at, say, the 2024 DMG). You see frequently see DMs worry about what to do if their players don't pick up on a plot point (I've even seen memes even from official sources to this effect), or go in a random direction, to the point of ending a session early if it happens! IMO, this should almost never be a point of worry - roll on a random table for the appropriate terrain, whip out a mini dungeon, etc. - play to find out! There are easy tools in the tool box for this! But they perhaps require a loosening of expectations of perfectly crafted cinematic plots. I think there's something better waiting for everyone once this expectation falls away, but this is seldom communicated in many sources.

Well, this would be part of why I'm such a booster for the Dungeon World GMing rules.

They are a highly effective process for needing only (comparatively) light prep, which produces things that feel like satisfying beginning-middle-end, but were never "plotted" in any serious sense of the word. Unless you think "there's bad guys, they'll do bad events X Y Z unless the players interfere" as being a "plotted" sequence...which stretches the word to the breaking point in my opinion.

It's actually really funny, because I've seen at least a dozen times the exact same reaction process from talking about these rules with people. When you describe the rules to them, and tell them that DW expects the GM to obey the rules essentially all of the time, they talk about how horrible and draconian and limiting those rules must be. Then, when you actually show them the rules, they go all "....but that's literally just telling you to be a good DM!" YES! That's precisely the point! The rules were designed to help you be a good GM. That's why you want to follow them almost all of the time!

 

[HatWearingFool]

Well, this would be part of why I'm such a booster for the Dungeon World GMing rules.

They are a highly effective process for needing only (comparatively) light prep, which produces things that feel like satisfying beginning-middle-end, but were never "plotted" in any serious sense of the word. Unless you think "there's bad guys, they'll do bad events X Y Z unless the players interfere" as being a "plotted" sequence...which stretches the word to the breaking point in my opinion.

It's actually really funny, because I've seen at least a dozen times the exact same reaction process from talking about these rules with people. When you describe the rules to them, and tell them that DW expects the GM to obey the rules essentially all of the time, they talk about how horrible and draconian and limiting those rules must be. Then, when you actually show them the rules, they go all "....but that's literally just telling you to be a good DM!" YES! That's precisely the point! The rules were designed to help you be a good GM. That's why you want to follow them almost all of the time!

What kind of rules does it have? The name of game to me would imply old school dungeon delves but you make it sound more narrative based.

I’m always on the look out for new tools. I know it’s fairly cheap but I wonder if you could give any examples of how the rules lighten a gm’s load?

Edit: I found the srd, just checking it out.

 

[Count_Zero]

I think the Pay DM thing also ties into the situation these days with people having, or feeling like they need to have, a side hustle in some form, with a side of the promotion of the mindset that any creative work worth doing well should be financially compensated for (which, perhaps wrongly, I've seen traced back to Harlan Ellison's statements on writing - that if you're writing you should be getting paid for it, and if you're not getting paid or doing it for pay you shouldn't write), and that going to Fan Art and also to GMing as well.

It's a frustrating mindset for a lot of reasons beyond what have been discussed here, not least of which that people need to have the space to develop their skills, and if you (or the people you're GMing for) operate from the perspective that if you're not able to practice a skill at a level where you gan get paid for it you shouldn't do it at all, then (as has been mentioned repeatedly in this thread), it doesn't provide room for people to develop skills.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

DMing isn't really harder but it's more work.

Regardless, a new DM is going to have gaffs whether or not they buy fancy "how-to" books. Save your money. I've been DMing on and off for decades and still make lots of mistakes. No book will change that.

These boards are the best help you can get. And totally free if you want it to be.

 

[dave2008]

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

Yes, that is about the age I started DMing. However, I just winged it and I was not good at it. Personally I don't think I became a good DM until 4th edition, almost 30 years after I started DMing!

 

[MGibster]

I wonder if a lot of terrible is that way because they aren't trying to get better.

Terrible is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. Over the years, I've been told I was a bad GM on several occasions online. I've been told I'm a bad GM for not allowing a player to create a Mage or Werewolf character for a Vampire campaign. When I mentioned that I'd replaced Swim and Climbing with the Athletics skill for Savage Worlds someone here told me they'd never play in any game I ran (a few years later PEG officially combined both skills and throwing into Athletics). I'm a terrible DM for reskinning creatures in D&D (i.e. Using orc stats for a mechanical humanoid or something similar).

I think it is medium. The amount of soft skills necessary to become good at DM'ing is far higher than a wide variety of other games. And I cannot count the number of GM's I've met who struggle to improvise, struggle to resolve disputes, are intensely inflexible, or treat the gaming session like an arena for social power.

And a lot of that does take practice. I'm a lot better at resolving disputes, improvising, and remaining flexible than I was many years ago. I do of course treat the gaming session as an arena for my unending thirst for social power though.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What kind of rules does it have? The name of game to me would imply old school dungeon delves but you make it sound more narrative based.

It's both. Dungeon World is a "Powered by the Apocalypse" ("PbtA") game, so it is a more narrative game, but it was made by people trying to recapture what it felt like to them to play classic D&D--which, I'd suspect, you're well acquainted with the notion that many people played old-school D&D in very divergent ways, so their vision of "classic D&D" may differ from others'.

There is another PbtA game, "World of Dungeons", which does consciously aim to be as close as possible to the old-school experience, while still living inside the PbtA space. I don't know how its rules-text teaches GMing though, so I can't speak to whether it is as good, better, worse, or simply different.

I’m always on the look out for new tools. I know it’s fairly cheap but I wonder if you could give any examples of how the rules lighten a gm’s load?

Edit: I found the srd, just checking it out.

Yeah, the rules are free because it's a CC-BY license. You can post the core rules, or print them, for free.

The specific section to focus on is the Gamemastering part; this may not be the same website as what you're using, but the content should be identical or nearly so. The Agendas and Principles are the primary focus I have turned a few different newbie GMs onto, even if they aren't using Dungeon World as a system. The Moves can also be useful, but in a rather more abstract way, that is, as ideas for what you can try to achieve using the rules of whatever system you're actually running. The Agendas and Principles, on the other hand, are a good enough core to apply to nearly any D&D-alike game, albeit with a little finesse if you're pursuing something a little more out there (e.g. intrigue-heavy games might need more creative liberties, because Dungeon World was not built nor tested for play that focuses primarily on intrigue.)

 

[Celebrim]

I have been mostly a forever DM.

This past year we've had a lot of life disruptions - new kids, sick relatives, players getting in that point in life where they are their kids taxi, work, etc. So the normal story based games I run that depend on everyone being able to show up have been disrupted.

There is a plan to develop a "West Marches" style haven-delve game. But, old fogey that I am, working up one of those on a virtual table top has proved a daunting task. Digital art is hard for me compared to my usual pen and paper mapping. And I made the mistake of making the map on pen and paper rather than figuring out what I could do on a virtual tabletop easily and then doing that. So that plan bogged down a bit over a year ago.

And we were talking about this, because everyone wants to meet more regularly.

And one of the players said, "I hate how this always falls to you to solve."

But you know what, no one is volunteering to pick up that slack because GMing is hard.