D&D General The DM Shortage

[Greg Benage]

They taught me how to run a kick in the door dungeon with an adversarial attitude.

The 1983 Basic Set taught you to DM with an adversarial attitude?

 

[Zardnaar]

I was struck by a bad case of DM burnout earlier this year, so much so that I'm really soured on the idea of ever running D&D again.

For me the issues were:

• Prepping and running a campaign felt time consuming.
• The investment in the game felt one-sided. Besides me, only one other player had bought a single book.
• Rules competency was one-sided. The DM is expected to know everything, players can get away with knowing almost nothing.
• Playing online felt bad. This was more of a COVID-related problem than anything. But none of the online tools I tried felt great.
• I was the forever DM. No one ever expressed any serious interest in DMing.

We were all new players, with our group getting started in 2018. I'm not going to say my experience is representative, but I definitely relate to much of the talk surrounding the idea of a DM shortage.

I don't play online, everything else is part and parcel last 25 years+.

 

[Digdude]

Probably unpopular opinion, but the lack of dms also reflects poorly on current dms not taking ownership to train others to dm. Despite my years of experience behind the screen, i still feel its my responability to be willing to show someone how to do it and even have one on one training sessions or whatever it takes to get them going.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Probably unpopular opinion, but the lack of dms also reflects poorly on current dms not taking ownership to train others to dm. Despite my years of experience behind the screen, i still feel its my responability to be willing to show someone how to do it and even have one on one training sessions or whatever it takes to get them going.

A good point. Part of why my group is all DMs is because we had people willing to not just talk about it, but to play in your first games and offer advice and critique instead of criticism and beratement and then we paid it forward with fairly quick turn around.

Buuut, that still requires an existing ecosystem that's in balance, not a burgeoning field of tons of new players with no existing DMs to teach people. People should be able to learn to run a game from the gaming books.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

In the "fireside chat" thread, we find WotCapparently asserted that GMs account for about 20% of the market, but a vast majority of the sales. From this we can glean a couple of points:

1) Beyond time as a resource for GMs, there's a monetary component as well.

2) If you fill a bag with 80 white marbles, and 20 red marbles, there are enough red marbles to go around in theory, but in practice if you grab any five marbles, there's a goodly chance they'll all be white.

#2 there is a problem - because you'll frequently have local GM shortage, but not an overall shortage. But, raising the number of GMs may not actually help - because then you'll tend to have areas where GMs who go underutilized, and drop out of GMing, and you end up back where you started.

Indeed, the probability of drawing 5 white marbles is very close to 31.9%, meaning about a third of all 5-person groups don't have a DM among them. (Assuming you're drawing without replacement. If you draw with replacement, it's just .8^5 = 0.32768 = 32.768%.) For 6-person (that is, hoping for "5+DM"), it's very close to 25.2% without replacement, or .8^6 = 0.262144 = 26.2144% with.

Given the sheer number of groups of gamers hoping a DM will be willing to pick up their premise on various forums I've been part of, I don't think there's too much risk of DMs "going to waste." (As I've said elsewhere, I spent a full year on multiple sites hoping to find a game across several systems, only to strike out.) Even if there were, however, there's a better solution.

Make more pink marbles.

That is, make more marbles that can work as the red marble in a group of otherwise all white marbles, or a white marble if the group already has a red one. E.g., let's say we take your example, but we make it 70% white, 20% red, 10% pink. That cuts the chance of a 5-person group not having any DMs from the aforementioned ~31.9% to ~16.1%, nearly half (with replacement: 32.8% vs 16.8%.) For the 6-person group, it goes from ~25.2% to almost exactly 11% (with replacement: ~26.2% to ~11.8%), a reduction of more than half. Despite only altering one-eighth of all "never DMs" into "sometimes DMs," you drop the proportion of potential-groups-lacking-DMs from one-in-three to one-in-six for five-player groups, and from one-in-four to one-in-nine for six-player groups. That's a pretty major impact despite being only a small shift in the overall population.

The questions then become: What constitutes a pink marble? How do we encourage some white marbles to become pink ones? Will some red marbles also become pink marbles? How would either of these affect sales?

I'm of the opinion that well-designed, well-explained, well-balanced rules, which are made for a clear and useful purpose, are one of the best ways to encourage more pink marbles. Pink marbles are folks who have seen that it isn't that hard to be a DM, if you can make a bit of time and become comfortable with improvisation and not needing to plan everything to the nth degree. That it is possible to create accessible, well-designed tools (both in the game mechanics sense and the digital applications sense), and either sell them flatly at a reasonable price or make basic versions free and feature-rich versions reasonably priced.

Serious design, which pursues what works under conditions of actual playtesting, and not just faux-playtest-as-marketing-gimmick, can get you a good portion of the way there.

 

[Minigiant]

Probably unpopular opinion, but the lack of dms also reflects poorly on current dms not taking ownership to train others to dm. Despite my years of experience behind the screen, i still feel its my responability to be willing to show someone how to do it and even have one on one training sessions or whatever it takes to get them going.

As a person who'd trained DM, there are 2 problems.

1) The people I've trained have never been in my games. It's always been DMs coming from other tables via WOM.
2) Not everyone can teach the DM style that a DM might want to run. I'm a very considerate and open fellow so Ican do it. But everyone isn't like me.

There are 10 flavors of D&D, 3 styles of D&D, and 4 tiers of play. That's a lot to teach.

 

[pointofyou]

Probably unpopular opinion, but the lack of dms also reflects poorly on current dms not taking ownership to train others to dm. Despite my years of experience behind the screen, i still feel its my responability to be willing to show someone how to do it and even have one on one training sessions or whatever it takes to get them going.

I have no doubt this is a problem. I am happy that two players who were newbies when they started at my tables have at least dipped their toes in the GMing pool and at least two others who were more experienced also GM. I hope they learned as much from me as did from the GMs I've played with.

 

[iserith]

In my experience, new DMs are created when players are exposed to lackluster games. "I can do this better!" and off they go. In my gaming circles, we call this "rage prepping" because you've just experienced a boring game of shopping or whatever and you're fired up to make a better game. When someone is suffering from writer's block, we just watch a couple of low-viewer Twitch streams and, hoo boy, the fires are lit again.

So, following that, if we just all agreed to run crappier games, the DM shortage would go away. WHO'S WITH ME?!

 

[Quickleaf]

Probably unpopular opinion, but the lack of dms also reflects poorly on current dms not taking ownership to train others to dm. Despite my years of experience behind the screen, i still feel its my responability to be willing to show someone how to do it and even have one on one training sessions or whatever it takes to get them going.

Yeah. When I introduced my nephew to D&D, I really encouraged his creativity and shared basic ideas of DMing while I was running games for them or driving him somewhere. A lot of my gaming friends are DMs already, but I try to take a little time each week to answer questions of fellow DMs on Discord/Reddit/ENWorld. It's a small contribution – not enough time for gaming these days – but I definitely agree it's worthwhile having conversations with new DMs, meeting them where they are at, and offering discerning support.

 

[Umbran]

Serious design, which pursues what works under conditions of actual playtesting, and not just faux-playtest-as-marketing-gimmick, can get you a good portion of the way there.

We are talking, in largest part, about designing and playtesting the game to be easy to learn.

That means people who already know the ropes are not valid playtesters. You need a large playtesting population that doesn't already play RPGs to do "actual playtesting" for this design goal.

That is not a small order.