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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7922116" data-attributes="member: 16814">Needing a mentor to show you the difficult ropes is another form of gatekeeping.And, D&D is bad in it's manuals (usually, some older exceptions) at teaching anything useful about GMing.  Largely, I think, because a lot of material on HOW to GM would make many returning customers upset.  There's already loads of complaints about the 'wasted' space in the 5e DMG that does talk about the basics of GMing.  So, yeah, that's gatekeeping as well.I huge amount of the problem is that we all think that the way we, personally, prefer games is how games should be, and that's been locked in through a few decades of GM's doing the heavy load lifting.  But, you don't have to.  You can offload a lot of the tracking onto the players.  You can using random generated dungeons, either from the back of the DMG or any number of tools online.  You can pretty quickly pull encounters straight from the MM that will work, especially with other neophyte players, or you can use an online tool like KFC to do work for you.  In game, all you have to do is listen to what your players say and then call for checks when needed.  It's not hard, but it would probably not look like a game you'd prefer.  But, that's okay, you're GMing.  And, maybe that game doesn't need to be like yours.But, this conception we have that DMing should look like our DMing (and mine doesn't look like the example above) and we know how much work we do so therefore DMing is HARD is really gatekeeping -- it's stepping on games that don't look like ours.I was guilty of all of these things for pretty much my entire hobby experience.  GMing was clearly the toughest job.  It's only after I've started playing other games that I realized exactly how much mental overhead I've borrowed in how I've run D&D, overhead that wasn't necessary to run a game of D&D.  That that overhead was a combination of how I was "mentored" and the lack of good, clear methods of running in the rules.  That I didn't have to do it that way.  That let me then choose what I kept and didn't, and the fact that I've chosen to keep stuff I didn't have to is my choice, and not a requirement of GMing.EMWorld is a great place to be intimidated as a new GM.  We climb deep into the gears here, because we're gaming nerds that like to argue arguing about gaming.  It's not as friendly and welcoming as you think.</blockquote>

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