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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DinoInDisguise" data-source="post: 9494106" data-attributes="member: 7045806">Did they? In 2014 the DMG said nothing on pacing or table management. If you go and play with random DMs off reddit, the widespread abscense of those skills will be very evident.Pacing in DMs, in general, is astonishingly bad. Basic ideas like not locking plot important information behind skill checks, varying the difficulty of fights, and avoiding overly long DM monologues are lacking in DMs across the experience spectrum. Once we get into more advanced concepts like rising tension, properly timing rewards, and managing split parties, the inadequecy becomes exponentially more pronounced. Some issues, like DMs taking 3 hours to run a low level combat with a single enemy come up way too often.Basic ideas of table management such as how to handle distruptive players, or how to keep the game moving are, again, absent from large swaths of the DMs you'll see. Additional issues like being unwilling to dismiss players from the table, using in game punishment for out of game behavior, how to handle or give feedback, or simply being unwilling, or incapable, of talking to players about the game in a productive way also plague many tables and DMs.You can go on the D&D horror stories sub-reddit and see that almost every one is due to a lack of understanding of one of the above principals. Yet, in another active thread, people cheer the inclusion of basic mechanical jargon like tables and bloated optional rules, while ignoring the defecienies that are so obvious in many DMs. Only to, in other threads, bemoan bad DMing.So as a primarily 5e player, I think they are woefully lacking in the advice new DMs need to make them standout. Instead relying on making the mediocre, cookie cutter, DMing as easy as possible. Because it doesn't matter if people lack the skills to do something well, if everyone who has those skills is already hiding in a existing playgroup - so no one knows any better.It is sad because these choices will deny many players the opportunity to experience the true joy that a good DM can bring. And anyone who has experienced this, and had to go back, will know exactly what I mean.</blockquote>

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