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

[TheSword]

People that do GM need to stop talking about how hard it is and talk about how fun it is.

Didn’t you say a few weeks ago that you took no joy in it and were burnt out?

 

[definiteFreakyFishGuy]

Hello. I'm one of the supposedly rare specimens that find GM-ing very difficult.

1. I find improv hard. It's very difficult for me to handle situations that are far out of what I've prepared, and that happens like all the time.
2. I find people management difficult. Dealing with people who are late or disruptive. Or how to give them the plot hooks they are interested in.
3. I have a hard time being in the spotlight. It gives me a lot of anxiety, and it doesn't feel like it gets any easier the more I do it.

In addition, I also had a really bad experience (as a player) once with another player, which lead to me severing my relationship with them. This experience haunts me to this day, and makes me extra anxious about running or playing games with new people.

To sum up, I absolutely agree that DM-ing can come more naturally to some folks—my partner, for instance, who spends less than a fraction of time reading / researching, runs absolutely banger sessions. But I am not gifted with the social & improv chops. And I didn't start the hobby at 10 years old with lots of room to fail and retry.

EDIT: Changed generalizing statement in final paragraph to make it specifically about me. "Not everyone is gifted" => "I am not gifted" & "Not everyone started the hobby" => "I didn't start the hobby"

 

[UngainlyTitan]

This is the thing I am pushing back against -- specifically how some people weaponize that feeling for clicks, backers and sales of products that don't really do what's promised. The only thing more ubiquitous than a D&D influencer-grifter is a fitness one IMO.

I am not sure I understand what you are saying here. I am someone that found DM'ing hard, it did not stop me, though it did cause burnout in the 3e era and I have found that I do better if I worry less about my performance and trying to keep the challenge rating up but just say "Yes" more and roll with things.
Are you saying that my experience is not true? Or that I should not talk about it?

Also, I do not get those ads, plenty ads for AI business solutions and tactical hoodies, almost no ads for anything remotely adjacent to anything I would likely buy.

Finally on the topic of DM advice, different DM advice is useful to different DMs and playstyles. There are more than a few YouTubers that I have bounced off of because I had little interest in playing in, or running their kind of game, or they were too long winded or clickbaity.

 

[Lanefan]

On this front, though, you have my full agreement. Monsters are not characters.

Indeed, but giving them stats anyway allows for quick and easy comparison with characters. Simply saying Giants are tough and resilient isn't enough; saying Giants average Con 24* is way more useful, and by extension provides their Con save bonus etc. without it all having to be written out in the stat block. Saying they average Dex 10* is really neat shorthand saying a typical Giant gets neither benefit nor penalty from Dex.

Giving stats to individuals, especially where they vary from the norm, is also useful shorthand. Saying that Glorg the Giant is more nimble and less starchy than his peers doesn't tell me by how much he is more nimble and less starchy; and it's the 'by how much' piece that I-as-DM need to know. Is he Dex 12 or Dex 16 or what? Is he Con 21 or Con 17 or what?

I should note that IMO bonuses and penalties from high or low stats should apply equally to monsters as to characters (both PC and NPC). One of 1e's biggest errors was to not give monsters their bonuses for high Strength and-or Con, making them far easier to defeat than they really should have been. 3e fixed this...but of course went overboard with it.

* - or whatever number, these are just for examples.

They do not serve the function characters serve. Trying to pretend that all rules will always work exactly the same for both players and non-players is one of the greatest siren's songs of design, and it has trapped many a designer. Realism is important. Trying to enforce realism in that way is, in my experience consistently, destructive to the long-term health of tabletop roleplaying games, unless you choose to go all the way to pure point-buy the way World of Darkness etc. do.

Not sure how-where-why point buy enters into it....?

I don't see this as a question of enforcing realism so much as a question of putting hard numbers to what's being abstracted; and hard numbers are useful.

 

[Lanefan]

The more I think about it the more the OPs argument seems strange. Objecting to books teaching you how to do things? I can’t imagine another subject where someone would object to a book trying to share advice. I mean really that argument basically states you shouldn’t try to learn from other people’s mistakes.

Part of the problem is that we're a diverse lot; and one DM's "mistake" might be another DM's "best practice", with both of them running games their players greatly enjoy.

Thus, there's always going to be objections from somewhere to published advice around something as bespoke-to-person-and-table as DMing.

 

[Shiroiken]

This is the thing I am pushing back against -- specifically how some people weaponize that feeling for clicks, backers and sales of products that don't really do what's promised. The only thing more ubiquitous than a D&D influencer-grifter is a fitness one IMO.

The problem is that your rant comes off against DMs, rather than your actual target, which is advertising. Marketing is a scummy business, designed to get people interesting in buying things they don't actually need. If you think D&D grifters are bad, you should look at relationship grifters (although fitness ones really are the worst).

People that do GM need to stop talking about how hard it is and talk about how fun it is.

Here, or in general? Good DMing may be hard, but it's definitely worth it (i.e. a lot of fun). When it stops being fun (often due to DM burnout), the game usually comes to a crashing halt.

 

[Reynard]

Didn’t you say a few weeks ago that you took no joy in it and were burnt out?

No. That was about a writing assignment. I thought it was about gaming in general, but then I realized it wasn't.

If you want to weaponize posts, consider reading the whole thread.

 

[AlViking]

People that do GM need to stop talking about how hard it is and talk about how fun it is.

 

[Reynard]

I am not sure I understand what you are saying here. I am someone that found DM'ing hard, it did not stop me, though it did cause burnout in the 3e era and I have found that I do better if I worry less about my performance and trying to keep the challenge rating up but just say "Yes" more and roll with things.
Are you saying that my experience is not true? Or that I should not talk about it?

This feels a little bit of a non sequitur to the bit you quoted. But helpfully illustrative:

A person (you even) might find GMing hard. That is completely beside the point of the rant, which is aimed at people trying to sell you garbage to solve the problem, when what you really need is time and practice snd a willingness to suck for a while.

 

[SableWyvern]

When you talk about "many of us", you do realize that you're talking about a small minority of DMs, right? Even back in the 90s there were multiple editions, not just OD&D, 1e and 2e but multiple versions with incompatible rules being sold at the same time. I don't see how today's environment is all that much worse. I get that it can be overwhelming at times, that's why I would recommend someone starting from scratch start out with a small campaign using just the free basic rules even if only for a short mini-campaign.

Yeah, this idea that there was one ruleset, narrow environments and the like doesn't remotely align with my experiences in the 80s and 90s. Even in regional Australia, with no access to a game store, we would receive quarterly MilSims catalogues which we would pour over in excitement looking at all the different games out there.

While we did mostly play Rolemaster, we dabbled in all sorts of different games -- TMNT, GURPS, Super Squadron, WFRP, James Bond, Call of Cthulhu, Shadowrun, even Cyborg Commando. One friend's older brother would tell us of things like Ars Magica and Twighlight 2000.

Sure, we didn't have thousands of low effort pdfs out there, but there were plenty of games to choose from and I can't help feeling as if non-D&D games had a larger overall market share, not less.

Our environment might have been more consistent in that we weren't connected to lots of other gamers outside our group but, had we been, that would only have increased the number of games we were exposed to, not limited it.