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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8337857" data-attributes="member: 18">To be fair Morrus, YouTube is no better/worse than the DM/GM/Storyteller guides of the 1990s, and in fact, are kind of more open to peer review, as it were, because people can give them the thumbs up/down, leave comments, and so on. In the 1990s and so on, it was essentially a "bully pulpit" situation, in that anyone who could get a GM advice book published could talk whatever smack they wanted, whereas everyone else had to put up a dodgy website and hope people visited, or post on a forum.YouTube is a bit of a bully pulpit too but it's more democratic and with the feedback likely less unreasonable.I mean, GM advice books in the 1990s and '00s really wildly varied in quality, from extremist one-true-way tracts, to just outright bad advice, to extremely good and well-considered advice, to "some wacky stuff we used to do in college and it seemed cool". It was all over the place, and a glossy high-production value GM book often had terrible advice in it, where some relatively low-production value near-pamphlet might be full of gold. Sometimes the same book would contain a mix of gold and trash too - I think of Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads! from Mike Pondsmith, which had some great ideas, some weird ideas, and some bad ideas, all just sort of mixed in together. White Wolf ones often had some serious one-true-way stuff going on, which often boiled down to "ARGH!!! Why do you damn normies even play our RPG for Cool Refined Goths - anyway here's how you should be playing!". Gary Gygax himself published the single worst collection of DM advice I've ever seen outside of parody, advice which ran directly counter to every single thing he's ever said about how he runs his home game, note - but the book came out long before the internet and Gary actually talking about how he actually ran stuff. The only universally helpful one I can think of off the top of my head (though there were probably others) was Robin D Laws' one (the internet has this not coming out until 2002 and in a fairly glossy form, but I would swear I had something on GMing by him in the mid-90s in a considerably less glossy format).</blockquote>

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