Well, I don't want to diminish Mercer and Woll, but being better than those two is a low bar to clear...
This is very true but look at how far we've come, look at it from that perspective lol. From actual mean-spirited internet trolls to lovely and super-skilled and charming celeb DMs.
I'm not sure it is true. Media evolves, of course, and RPGs are media, so it was different. I know my personal GMing has changed, not just with experience but with exposure to ideas that did not even exist in the 1990s, but I am not sure I would go so far as to say it was objectively worse.
It was absolutely objectively worse, I will die on this hill and I think I can actually objectively prove it, if necessary!
Even with all the forums gone, you can just look at DM advice books from the period and see how bad that advice often was - and that was absolutely the best advice you saw in many cases. Again the basic standards example holds true too - now, you'd never argue "You should be rude and disrespectful to your players to keep them in their place, and never talk to them about issues, just make rulings and never explain" - you'd never argue "If there's a rules issue, you should have a big loud argument about it in the middle of the game to get it sorted" - you'd particularly never argue "Your should treat your role as DM as a wise guide, not just to the game, but to how other people live their personal lives" - but these were routinely what significant numbers of people tried to argue back then! Or like, the dude who thought as DM he could hit on women and try and give benefits to their characters to make them like him, and whilst most of us were reacting "What the hell you freak?", several people were defending this as perfectly acceptable behaviour. Just a different era.
As for your individual DMing and whether it's changed - I think a lot of us were already DM'ing at least "safely", but everything I saw online, and a lot of what I saw in person tells me we were, perhaps not a minority, but it was like 55% "at least okay/safe" DMs vs like 35% "Needs severe remedial DMing help on basic things and has bad behaviours" and 10% "This man should probably face criminal consequences". Stuff you might see on DM horror stories now was just how a lot of people thought it was okay to roll back then (indeed it's notable how many of the posts on there are about stuff that happened from like the 1980s through to about 2005).
Also Numenera is the best aesthetic paired with the worst system.
Absolutely agree! The funniest failure in Numenera though is Monte tells you about this mindblowing, wild, beautiful, insane, quixotic world billions of years from now, and your mind is racing with these possibilities, dreaming of what it could be like, and the book has this example city which is the dumbest and most trite thing possible, just like someone combined the most boring and ill-considered stereotypical ideas of a medieval fantasy city and a 20th-century city and said "Done! Look at this amazing far-future wildscape!", and it's basically just this:
I need to be clear to Melbournians that I am not dissing the mighty Kyral Castle, only the idea that "A CITY BILLIONS OF YEARS FROM NOW" should be like this. Really reminded me of what 4E did to Sigil - this crazy city on the edge of space and time, where anyone could visit, and the DMG2 for 4E (an otherwise excellent book!) had this section of Sigil which made it sound like a particularly dull and sedate Midwestern city with maybe 100k people living there and deeply boring politics.
