NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8803216" data-attributes="member: 18">Ok, thanks for saying the primary school teacher who actually plays in my D&D group is a "snob" and an "idiot", that's super-classy. He doesn't seem like either to me, but I am aware that in teaching disagreements over approaches can get... er... heated. I've seen two teachers get into it on Facebook and wow, that wasn't pretty.Arguable at best.They're presented as if you do, certainly as the DM, and they're poorly taught by the materials.Strongly disagree.I think that's a horrible attitude that inculcates a reliance on generally poorly-written material. DMs should be encouraged to make their own material ASAP, frankly (so a couple of pre-gen adventures to show how it's done is cool in any RPG). Part of the issue D&D has is that it pushes people to rely on pregen material, because it's so much more effort to make material for D&D than other modern RPGs.Also absolutely disagree re: "completely separate skills", or rather, put it this way - you cannot be a bad DM and write great adventures for publication. It is not possible. And it's very obvious when bad or mediocre DMs write adventures, because they'll typically fail to account for obvious scenarios, rely on particularly heavy-handed railroading - often in fact relying on the DM railroading the PCs in an unnatural direction - and tend to be extremely fragile, because the writer basically doesn't understand what a DM's job is, and has no "theory of mind" for other DMs.I think you can be a good DM and not be good at writing adventures, though. I've just seem far too much evidence to the contrary to believe anyone who is a bad/mediocre DM could write good adventures.I'm not looking for advice, as I think you know, I'm discussing 5E as it actually exists.D&D is one of the hardest-to-learn modern RPGs, on multiple levels, but that weight is disproportionately put on the DM.What I'm advocating for is that they can, and should, do better. I'm surprised people seem to be against that.OTOH I totally agree with you and [USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER] re: baking. I don't think it's a useful analogy or comparison to adventure writing or DMing, because baking is as you implied, essentially a science. Certainly once you know your kitchen/appliances (and assuming those appliances don't have a "creative process" as my wife puts it about our microwave). And it's different to general cooking, too. You follow carefully and precisely with baking, and you get great results, like results people wouldn't believe. Freestyle that and things go south, fast. Whereas with general cooking you often see the reverse, especially as many recipes (esp. stews/chilis/fried stuff etc.) can be altered "on the fly" when you see they're missing something, which is rarely practical in baking.</blockquote>

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