Ruin Explorer
Legend
I agree with this, but my experience is that it's actually very game-specific. A lot of people are happy to, or even want to DM, in theory, but the actual practice scares them. Some games are much better at supporting people to DM, and making it seem like a doable task, and others make it more like an epic piece of homework/coursework. Further complicating matters, some games do a good job of explaining the role of the DM and making it attractive and others really do not.
D&D is sort of towards the middle on these axes. 5E is more homework-y, and less well-explained than 4E, and less homework-y and better explained than 3E.
What 5E particularly fails to do though, is support DMs in a number of ways, not least that it doesn't make DMing actually sound as easy as it actually is, nor does it explain the role in a simple way, nor provide tools to make it easier, and on top of all that, a lot of the pregen adventures actually assume a competent, experienced DM, and work poorly if just slapped in front of a new guy. Many of them also don't teach particularly good techniques. I'm sure there are exceptions, but there's no truly great training-wheels adventure for 5E, for DMs.
I'd go further and say 5E's structure and demands mean it is not an ideal game for people new to DMing in the way it is pretty great for people new to playing. Even if we, say, disregard or play down the encounters/day thing (which is a harsh demand most RPGs have nothing like), the way you're expected to design encounters, hand out loot/XP and so on is much more fiddly and asks more of the DM than an awful lot of RPGs. People loved to complain about 4E's clearer frameworks and player item lists and so on, but in fact these were a huge aid to inexperienced DMs.
I've been playing and DMing for 32 years now. The only D&D DMs I know who weren't DMs before I met them were my brother and my wife. My brother learned at the same time I did, and my wife is incredibly creative and technical, so pretty naturally fit into the role, but obviously I was able to teach her (and she learned on the most accessible modern edition of D&D for DMing, 4E).
But that's not to say I haven't seem people take up the DM/Storyteller/GM/etc. role in games. I absolutely have. Virtually all the players have, at one time or another. Just not for D&D. Why? Because D&D is not very approachable. Despite knowing it as a player, they prefer other games. PtbA and Resistance-based games have been particularly good for this. One player who had never DM'd anything in nearly 30 years of playing just ran us a one-shot in a Resistance-based game and he was clearly already good at literally all the harder bits of DMing, but it took a game with simple, accessible mechanics, and a low DM load to actually make him want to run it.
Until WotC put out an edition of D&D that does the following, I think we'll see a bit of a serious DM shortage:
1) Make DMing sound fun and easy, and create an actual framework for how to approach DMing in general, without the boatloads of implicit assumptions 5E has. Obviously this need not be prescriptive for experienced DMs, but it would be good for it to exist.
2) Make DMing a lot less work on the back end. I'm not really talking about creative work. I think most DMs are either good at being creative, or can find random generators or the like to help them out (or both!). Pointing people to the latter may help a bit but I don't think the creative stuff is the big issue here. I think the issue is the hard work that goes into creating an adventure mechanically. Finding appropriate monsters in appropriate numbers. Putting down appropriate loot. Coming up with NPC stats (and understanding when you don't need to). Coming up with non-combat challenges - this is extremely poorly supported in 5E and indeed most of D&D - whether they be exploration, social, traps, mountaineering, researching or whatever. D&D asks a lot, and provides relatively little.
It might also be worth considering whether shifting some work on to the players by default might be a good idea, too. 4E had the item lists some people have fainting fits about but that sort of thing can make a DM's life a lot easier.
Part of the problem is, if you create this amazing, supportive system for new players, a bunch of elitists (who may be themselves pretty new) and grogs will sneer at it and say "I don't want this safe starter car with an automatic gearbox, power steering, 4WD, a sensible engine and so on, I want an 600hp RWD manual which likes to drift and oversteer, because I'm not some newbie loser!", and those people will be the primary playtest group for any edition of D&D, unless WotC massively changes its playtest practices. So their opinion will dominate.
I think this is part of what Kate Welch was talking about re: new user experience. There are issues with the new user experience for players, in 5E. But they utterly pale in comparison to the mountain of issues a brand-new DM is looking at with 5E. Some people will just be driven or well-supported (but not by D&D/WotC) enough to scale that mountain anyway - but that doesn't mean it isn't a mountain.
I don't think there's any changing this this edition. But I do think a major revision, or new edition would provide an opportunity to look at this again.
One thing I would strong council against - getting confused and trying to limit the creative elements, instead of trying to support and simplify the mechanical/hard work challenges. For example, I remember people saying stuff like "Oh all new DMs should be made to play in [insert setting]" as if that would somehow help them. It won't. That's not the problem. Making all new DMs play in the FR or something is totally missing the point. A brand new DM is much more likely to be able to whip up enough of a fantasy world which is fun and works than they are likely to be able deal with the other demands. Ironically, I feel like 5E's DM stuff provides much better support for this (much of it not really necessary or helpful for the first-time DM, but more useful for someone who has been at it for a couple of years or more and wants something more refined) than it does for the actual core work of DM'ing, whether its making decisions at the table, or coming up with adventures, encounters, and challenges before the session.
