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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pamphylian" data-source="post: 9814315" data-attributes="member: 7053769">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.</blockquote>

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