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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4575732" data-attributes="member: 58197">I also am a DM and a writer, and Insight is right on the money.&nbsp; To expand a bit:The focus of a good D&amp;D campaign is on the players and the actions of the PCs.&nbsp; In my experience, DMs who think of themselves as &quot;telling a story&quot; have a tendency to lose sight of that.&nbsp; They get all caught up in telling a story, while their players are sitting around bored and wanting to do something.Even in a heavily-plotted campaign, the DM is only creating the shell of a story.&nbsp; The players are the ones doing most of the actual telling.&nbsp; In many ways the DM is more like a combination of director and producer than like a scriptwriter.&nbsp; The DM sets the stage, determines the pacing, and provides the background, but the players write the dialog and stage directions (at least for the main characters; the DM does get to do some writing where the villains and minor characters are concerned).The chief difference, I think, is that a storyteller is trying to entertain an audience.&nbsp; A DM is trying to engage participants.&nbsp; There are certainly elements of storytelling in what the DM does, but the goal of those bits of storytelling is to give the players something to play off of, not to construct an entire narrative.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 4575732, member: 58197"] I also am a DM and a writer, and Insight is right on the money. To expand a bit: The focus of a good D&D campaign is on the players and the actions of the PCs. In my experience, DMs who think of themselves as "telling a story" have a tendency to lose sight of that. They get all caught up in telling a story, while their players are sitting around bored and wanting to do something. Even in a heavily-plotted campaign, the DM is only creating the shell of a story. The players are the ones doing most of the actual telling. In many ways the DM is more like a combination of director and producer than like a scriptwriter. The DM sets the stage, determines the pacing, and provides the background, but the players write the dialog and stage directions (at least for the main characters; the DM does get to do some writing where the villains and minor characters are concerned). The chief difference, I think, is that a storyteller is trying to entertain an audience. A DM is trying to engage participants. There are certainly elements of storytelling in what the DM does, but the goal of those bits of storytelling is to give the players something to play off of, not to construct an entire narrative. [/QUOTE]

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