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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DinoInDisguise" data-source="post: 9438563" data-attributes="member: 7045806">DMG organization aside. This idea that 5e is uniquely difficult to DM bothers me on a deeper level than maybe it should. And it bothers me because DMing is just hard in general. And the issues people point to with 5e, and what makes 5e hard to DM in their minds, aren't the issues that you'd see if you played with random DMs off Reddit. And they aren't where the true difficulty lays in the DM role, nor are they objective.In those games, with random DMs, you will see two main culprits of bad game play. DM table presence, or lack there of, and a lack of proper pacing. Neither of which can be adequately taught in a DMG. You could write an entire book on pacing alone, and people have. And there is an entire branch of science having to do with human behavior and by extension table presence.We see people on this very forum, repeatedly asking for rules fixes for problems caused by a lacking in these two areas. Blaming 5e's rules for their own inability to handle social problems, or their own poor understanding of the pacing involved in storytelling. Topics that could fill college courses and far outstrip a section in a D&D book.Yet we are repeatedly led to believe that the real difficulty in DMing is a flexible CR system that requres looking at your players character sheet before blindly throwing enemies at them. Or that a DM has to make a judgement call because a rule isn't spelled out with great specificity. As if memorization is objectively easier than making said judgement calls. Or maybe the real fun is watching the DM flipping through the rule book. Needless to say, all of these are preferences portrayed as truths.But it all seems like a distraction and a minimization of the true difficulty in DMing which is system agnostic. We are just suppose to pretend 5e is uniquely hard. While in reality, DMing is just hard in general and the examples provided as 5e's issues are, at most, minor pain points and likely just personal preference.But maybe I just don't understand the true challenge in this role. Maybe Im missing something, and scripting out every DM action by developer fiat would fix all issues, and definately wouldn't end with a mediocre video game with bad graphics. But at least DMing would be "easy."</blockquote>

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