IanArgent
First Post
It wasn't meant to be condescending, but let's be honest. A lot of DMs do not do well at their game precisely because they didn't prepare adequately or didn't bone up on the game as they should've if they wanted to play.
I hated doing prep for 3E. I didn't have the time or desire to do it, so I ran published modules. The underpinnings of the system weren't shown, so I had little guidance on how to adjust them for my particular group of players. I stopped running 3.5 because I didn't have time to do an adequate amount of prep time. Instead, I ran Shadowrun, a game for which I had to do literally no prep for other than pick a couple of plot points out of the air 5 minutes beforehand, and try and make sure I was consistent with the emerging story during the session. Now, there's significant mechanical differences between SR and D&D (mostly in SR's favor); but the main reason SR was so much easier to run is that I knew what the difficulty of a task should be to challenge the team and/or individuals, and could literally make up opponents on the fly based on those numbers and have it just work.
4E gives me what those numbers are on p42 of the DMG. If I don't mind only having monsters with basic attacks, I could run an entire campaign out of p42, the PHB, and my imagination. Add the NPC templates for spice.
3E D&D was an excellent toolkit. But it offloaded too much of the game design onto the DM. Prep time is a function of the system. It's not laziness to desire a lower workload for DM prep. The less time I spend prepping, the more I spend at the table with my friends, having fun.