D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Faolyn]

So exactly how many people who don't complain about their GM secretly want to but are held back for social reasons in your estimation?

I have no idea. I just think it's probably higher than a couple of percent.

 

[Faolyn]

ROTFLMAO.

ANyone on the "downward slope" of the bell curve (at least the side that is literally not as good as average) is somehow not "bad"? I really don't think you understand what a bell curve is.

But, yeah, this is pretty par for the course. Simply redefining commonly understood, plain English in order to fit biases. Bad is somehow "not bad". Something that is lower than average ability is somehow "not bad". Bad is apparently only someone who is deliberately malicious at the table. Well, I suppose if you redefine bad to only be that, then, sure, the number would be really low. Most people aren't jerks. I'd agree with that.

Winning arguments sure is easy when we justt redefine the definitions of words.

Define "bad GM," then. And are you going to say boring or incompetent GMs and malicious GMs are both the same type of bad?

 

[Maxperson]

Then you were, at the time, a bad DM. Just like me. We learned. We got better. We improved. But, if we were GOOD DM's, then we wouldn't need to improve and wouldn't make mistakes aplenty. Thus, we were bad. But, again, if your definition of bad is "malicious jerk" then sure, I imagine neither of us were bad by that definition. But, then again, I look at "mistakes aplenty" and say, "Yup, that's a bad DM."

That you got better is irrelevant.

No. I was never a bad DM. And yes, it takes being a jerk to be a bad DM. Otherwise you might not be good, and might even be poor at it due to mistakes, but you are not bad.

Of course if we use your definition, then 100% of us encounter bad players, since they are about 5x more common than bad DMs. Heck, I've seen people saying it's 20 to 1, but I have no idea where they were getting that from.

 

[Faolyn]

And, I would take this a step further. The number of obnoxious vs fearful DM's is exactly the same.

I very much doubt that.

ust that lots of us don't run into them regularly because we rarely get to play. Well, that, and we've now apparently redefined bad to only mean malicious and not inept or inexperienced.

Because you can't lump them all under the same umbrella. Or rather, you can, but then you have to have sub-categories under that because it's seriously unfair to everyone to say "this GM writes boring adventures" is the same as "the GM thought it would be funny to have the enemy cast power word castrate on a PC. (That is, by the way, an actual spell from the Complete Net Spellbook, an AD&D netbook compiled from Usenet and similar sources, meaning that whether or not anyone ever cast it, somebody thought it was a good enough idea to write it down and post it online for the world to see. I've converted spells from that source to 5e. Just not that spell.)

Also, what you might consider to be a riveting adventure I might find incredibly boring, and vice versa. Likewise, what you consider inept may be another table's jam.

Of course, when you include inept or inexperienced in the list, suddenly that 20-25% number seems pretty reasonable, doesn't it?

 

[Hussar]

People who are good at things don't need to improve still !?!?!? Does your scale not include an amazing, fantastic, or even just very good too?

Did you ignore the "make mistakes aplenty" part of what you quoted.

This is getting so frustrating. It's time for me to back out because there's just no way that this is going to be even remotely productive when EVERY SINGLE statement is twisted, turned and interpreted in the most ludicrous way possible without ever once actually addressing the main point.

Yeah, I'm done. At least for a while.

 

[Hussar]

Define "bad GM," then. And are you going to say boring or incompetent GMs and malicious GMs are both the same type of bad?

Who cares about "types of bad"? Why does "type of bad" matter in this context?

 

[Hussar]

No. I was never a bad DM. And yes, it takes being a jerk to be a bad DM. Otherwise you might not be good, and might even be poor at it due to mistakes, but you are not bad.

Of course if we use your definition, then 100% of us encounter bad players, since they are about 5x more common than bad DMs. Heck, I've seen people saying it's 20 to 1, but I have no idea where they were getting that from.

Well, yes. I've encountered bad players. Has anyone here NEVER encountered a bad player? Like, ever? But, of course, this is just more deflection - now we're talking about players instead of DM's. Why? Who cares?

Edit - sorry, posting answers out of order. Yeah, I'll be stepping away for a while, so, feel free to have the last word.

 

[kermit4karate]

I have no idea. I just think it's probably higher than a couple of percent.

Interesting angle. If that is true, I bet there's a correlation between people who lack the confidence to speak up or cause conflict, with their initial decision to join a game with a bad GM in the first place.

I suspect that players who seem to repeatedly find themselves in games with what they feel are bad GMs are working with a sketchy "bad GM detector."

What else explains why it seems to happen 10x more often for some of us than others?

 

[DinoInDisguise]

Everyone reading this. Have you ever considered yourself to be a bad DM at any point in your DMing career?

I was awful for years. It took a lot of feedback from strangers and friends a like. I committed every "bad DM" sin from those list videos on youtube. I've railroaded, overstepped social bounds, been adversarial, and so on. I could write a 1000 word essay about how bad I was. I could cite which campaign I learned which lessons in. It took years of feedback and reflection and progress was slow.

To be honest, I still think I'm pretty bad, now seven years in. Seven years of asking for feedback after every session. I still make pacing mistakes, break tone, and push combat a bit too much. I still struggle to pull together story lines throughout a campaign for a good conclusion. I still sometimes dont reward players in satisfying ways. I'm awful at narrating combat, often offloading it to the players. The areas for improvement are many.

Yet people continue to play with me. Strangers even. Almost all of them, actually, stick it out and play to the end. Because no one expects perfection. Most are just happy to play.

My advice to any DMs, especially new ones. Ask for feedback often and have humility and grace. And never stop trying to be better. DMing is hard.

 

[kermit4karate]

Let's recap the past 200-300 posts on this thread.

Somewhere between 2.5-25% of DMs may or may not be bad, depending on one's personal trauma and their definition of "bad."

Additionally, some enworld members advocate for the inclusion of rules to control DM behavior.

Other enworld members believe that that would be unnecessary for a variety of reasons.

Some think the rules are long enough already.

Lastly, feelings were repeatedly hurt.