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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9814148" data-attributes="member: 6988941">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.</blockquote>

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