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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9817781" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I agree, but if this is a 2000-lb argument, 1999 pounds of it are being carried by a single word: can. You can still be a bad GM even with this experience, and you can become a great GM even without this experience.But that is like saying that someone can be a terrible writer despite having read and carefully studied a thousand different authors' works, while someone else can be a profoundly sublime author despite having never read even a single line of anyone else's prose. Yes, there is a vanishingly small probability that a person could just be naturally amazing at writing books without any training, experience, or effortful understanding of the craft. Yes, there is a small (though not nearly as small as the previous) probability that someone who has carefully studied and genuinely understood many works of literature could still be just objectively and unequivocally terrible at writing prose.For the overwhelming majority, however, reading and understanding the work of lots of authors is critical to being a good writer yourself, and very few of the great authors in human history would have been nearly so good if they had actively refused to read any books they didn't personally write. It is, simply, a fact that in any creative medium--and GMing is a creative medium!--you should engage both deeply (digging far on one specific area) and broadly (digging into many different areas, albeit rarely quite so deep).Isaac Asimov was a better science-fiction writer because he was also a nonfiction (and particularly textbook) author. And, I'd argue, he was also a better textbook author because he understood how to write good, interesting, compelling science fiction, especially the type he personally specialized in, ideas-focused fiction rather than character- or plot-focused fiction.</blockquote>

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