No. What makes conversation very difficult is the endless quibbling and waffling over every single definition out there without any actual attempt to engage in discussion. FFS, is "Bad DM" really that hard to define? Good grief.
Not at all. It's a DM who abuses his authority. He railroads. He drops dragons when irritated. And so on. It's not when you are bored, because others may enjoy that game.
I notice that you did manage to completely ignore the whole "1 in 5" thing I posted about virtually every other amateur hobby out there. You really believe that somehow DM's are batting better than average than pretty much any other hobby?
Yes. It's a VERY different kind of hobby than turtle racing or sculpting. Also, too many people equate being bad at a hobby with not being good at the hobby.
Years ago there was a 1st edition 1 shot at a convention that I got into. There was a huge physical set up with miniatures and the goal was to go down the path of the physical set up and reach the end. If you beat the end, you won this one shot.
We were all level 3 or 4 and we were told that there would be no rests, so whatever spells we had would be it. I played the magic user. In addition to the few spells I had, I also had a wand of magic missile with 3 charges.
We got to the first encounter and it had a spell caster. I used my wand(or maybe memorized MM spells) I twice and disrupted the enemy spellcaster twice, neutralizing him because magic missile is a very fast spell. The group handily won that fight. The next fight I didn't cast anything, because the rest of the group had it handled easily. Over the remaining other encounters I cast one spell and emptied the wand.
When we got to the final fight, I had two spells left, one of which was web. A group of dopplegangers came out looking exactly like us and were going to kill us. We were all low on hit points and resources, and even fresh would probably couldn't have taken on that many dopplegangers. Except that I still had my web spell and got initiative. All the dopplegangers were caught in the web and we killed them at a distance.
My nursing of my spells, only using them when necessary and to great effect, was the only reason we won our way to the end, let alone won the last fight. At the end, though, we all had to vote for who we thought did the best job with their characters by giving each person other than us a score from 1-5 without repeating a number. The only reason I didn't win was one guy gave me a 1. When I asked him why, he told me that I was the worst person to play a magic user that he ever saw. He insisted that the fact that I had spells left over at the end was proof and that I should have used them all up earlier.
The moral, just because someone says something is bad, doesn't mean that it is. He may not understand it. He may not like it for whatever reason(narrative vs. sim). He may think that not good = bad.
I don't give much weight to random internet pollsters saying that 20% of everyone in a hobby is bad. Too many folks get things like that wrong. That's why I use a very specific definition for bad when it comes to DMing. Is the DM being abusive with his authrority. If yes, bad. If no, not bad.
)
