The 5+ Styles of DMing: Contrasted/Compared/Mocked

[WaterRabbit]

In your stages, naturally. And the order in which they occur. Also in your lumping. Why is winger lumped with sadist when they have nothing in common, for instance?

What the sadist and winger have in common is the quality of play from the player's perspective. I have seen winger do a good job on one shots. But over the course of several sessions, the winger’s game feels like the sadist’s game – arbitrary and inconsistent. Or they turn into roll-playing games. Either way the player character’s abilities are marginalized.

But let me be clear about my definition of a winger: A GM that sits down to the table with no plan at all. Everything is off the cuff.

I have played in many one or two session games that were totally extemporaneous and a bunch of fun. However, in my experience I have never seen anyone who was a winger pull it off past that.

All good GMs improvise – that is the nature of it being a RPG. But the winger does no preparation and often doesn’t really know the rules of the game either.

To create a good murder mystery requires some planning. I have seen GMs try to wing it – all fell flat. Either the players solved the mystery right away because the GM did not account for their capabilities or the GM put up so many roadblocks to using such abilities that the game felt arbitrary.

So from the player’s perspective these two styles are not that different.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Hmmm, I'm going to assign myself 1 level/year GMing so I guess I've got 13 levels.

Winger:5 / Planner:4 / World Builder:2 / Sadist:1 / Mentat:1

I started as a Planner with two (fairly bad) home made modules. In the course of running them, I became an adept Winger when the dice said to give out a wand of wonder and the whole thing went sideways. Took more levels in Planning to keep things under control. World Builder was good to give the setting flavor once I graduated to "campaign" vs "series of modules.". I acquired the Sadist level while running a group of 12 players for over a year. They also gave me the Mentat level since I had to be familiar with *all* the rules to have a chance of keeping up.

It's funny, my memory's not that good except where game rules are concerned, at which point I'm dang near photographic. Amazing what stress will do to you.

I skipped the Newbie levels because I had some very good (and very bad) GMs in the early days. I started running because there weren't any non-Railroaded or Non-monty games that I could find with open seats.

 

[Desdichado]

I see. The order of the intervening stages is not hard and fast -- just my observation of myself and others through out my gaming career. I have seen some GMs skip stages. I have also seen GMs revert depending upon the players he had.

But you're still saying that even if some DMs skip stages, or go backwards, that the order you've laid out is the theory. Which is fine, but I have a competing theory, naturally, based on my own experience.