D&D General The DM Shortage

[FrozenNorth]

And that's a flawed approach, IMO. We already saw how people were more than able to play the game just fine without every scenario spelled out when B/X came out. Bloating the rules, turning off potential DMs, because a small % of players are rules lawyers is the wrong approach, IMO.

Sadly, this is a legacy of 3e, that we are stuck with, now and for the future.

 

[Mort]

Sadly, this is a legacy of 3e, that we are stuck with, now and for the future.

5e could have addressed this (probably in a very good way) with their initially intended modular design approach. But that ship has long sailed.

 

[overgeeked]

reassure players that DMing isn’t that hard. Most of the people on the board started when they were 12, probably with a straightforward 5-room dungeon;

Why lie to potential new DMs? The context of where and when and with what system and what expectations players had back in the black & white days of yore is incredibly important to how easy DMing used to be when we were 12. Because, importantly, that’s all changed. The system is no longer 64-pages in total. Player expectations are no longer in the basement. And there’s no longer the relative safety of pre-internet isolation. Everything that made it easy to DM is gone.

 

[pointofyou]

I know of three people who GMed for the first time in D&D 5e. Two of them were entirely new to the game when they started playing at a table I was running. The current edition isn't really that much harder to learn than previous ones.

 

[Mort]

I know of three people who GMed for the first time in D&D 5e. Two of them were entirely new to the game when they started playing at a table I was running. The current edition isn't really that much harder to learn than previous ones.

Yeah, my son and several of his friends started DMing when they were around 12, all 5e. They picked up DMing just fine (1 didn't stick with it and clearly prefers just playing, but that's to be expected. Not everyone likes to DM).

 

[Reynard]

Yeah, my son and several of his friends started DMing when they were around 12, all 5e. They picked up DMing just fine (1 didn't stick with it and clearly prefers just playing, but that's to be expected. Not everyone likes to DM).

Just because people do it doesn't mean WotC couldn't make onboarding easier.

 

[pointofyou]

Yeah, my son and several of his friends started DMing when they were around 12, all 5e. They picked up DMing just fine (1 didn't stick with it and clearly prefers just playing, but that's to be expected. Not everyone likes to DM).

The people I know were older and it helped there were people around for them to ask questions of. I wasn't playing in the two new players' games but I fielded questions from both of them.

 

[Oofta]

Just because people do it doesn't mean WotC couldn't make onboarding easier.

Has anybody said otherwise? There's always room for improvement.

 

[pointofyou]

Just because people do it doesn't mean WotC couldn't make onboarding easier.

If pressed I'd say that it's easy to learn in spite of WotC's efforts not because of them but I think we've run that argument into the ground in another thread.

 

[Oofta]

Why lie to potential new DMs? The context of where and when and with what system and what expectations players had back in the black & white days of yore is incredibly important to how easy DMing used to be when we were 12. Because, importantly, that’s all changed. The system is not longer 64-pages in total. Player expectations are no longer in the basement. And there’s no longer the relative safety of pre-internet isolation. Everything that made it easy to DM is gone.

You don't have to have encyclopedic knowledge of the rules to run the game. If you have someone who knows the rules better you may choose to defer to them. Or you just screw up. Hardly the end of the world. No DM, no matter how experienced is perfect.

There are a ton of resource out there that I never had when I first started. Is it harder? Easier? I don't know. All I do know is that it's different.