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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 9482597" data-attributes="member: 7030042">Strong foundational DM/GM skills - that is to say, facilitating a game session that you and your players all came away from having had an engaging and enjoyable gameplay experience - are undoubtedly the most important thing any DM/GM can posssess.Each of the following DMs will run better games the more skilled and practiced they are with those foundational skills and run worse games the more indisciplined and inexperienced they are with those same skills:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A DM who is running a game based in a pre-made campaign setting (Forgotten Realms, etc.) where the bulk of the world-building is already done.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A DM who makes stuff up on the spot pretty well continuously, maybe or maybe not soliciting world-building input from players as they go, and then who hopes the players are writing stuff down, 'cause they sure ain't!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A DM who has put together their own game world with exceedingly great care, with varying degrees of input from the players.</li> </ul>You can get away with lackadaisacal or neglectful world-building, but when the rubber hits the road you needs must know how to facilitate engaging and enjoyable gameplay at your table, for yourself as much as your players.Kindly note that nothing about the primacy of "foundational DM/GM skills" or "facilitating a game session that you and your players all came away from having had an engaging and enjoyable gameplay experience" requires an ethos such as "the player is always right" or "the player's enjoyment is more important than the DM's" [*]. Bluntly, suggesting that those are the kinds of positions being espoused strike me as blatant mischaracterisations.[*] Though I would think it obvious that the DM needs to be looking to have an engaging and enjoyable gameplay experience in a different way than the players are, by virtue of their different role in the unfolding gameplay.</blockquote>

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