overgeeked
B/X Known World
Have you tried West Marches?Locally, the problem isn't a shortage of DMs... it's a shortage of available time slots that work for everybody on a consistent basis.
Have you tried West Marches?Locally, the problem isn't a shortage of DMs... it's a shortage of available time slots that work for everybody on a consistent basis.
Are you okay? Do you smell toast?I said module not adventure. Reyand.
HEY Players. Drop $5 on one of Season x -01 modules in DM's Guild. There are low level, almost no prep, and most are easy to run. You too can be a dm. .
But remember most modules are generic third shift Denny's ready to serve dungeons.
Come to the bring side.
ADVENTURE LEAGUE NEEDS YOU.
This is a good point to make. Culturally, we have become tactical learners. By that I mean we find exactly what we need to know, and nothing more. For example, say your dryer quits heating up. In the past, you called an expert or maybe you yourself learned about appliance repair. You may have taken classes, worked in a shop, etc... You leaned from an expert who had the entire experience to fix the problem. Now, you can simply pull up a video that tells a newb how to fix the heating element in the specific dryer they own. They didnt need to go to appliance school, or work in a shop, they got exactly what they needed from a mins long video.Oh, absolutely. There's so much to be gleaned, I know that I've improved from such. But to try and carry this analogy, if the woodworker chooses hickory wood for the project, and doesn't go into why because teaching is not their goal, the amateur might run into constant frustration when they try to do the same thing with pine and don't understand why when put under the same pressure it keeps snapping in half. The issue isn't lack of perfection, it's not coming close to the desired result at all. They don't know what they don't know.
To me D&D was always an intellectual game, and if I had to guess that is what drew most of us on this site to the game/hobby. I was drawn to the mystique of DMing, learning how to do it. So I just figured it out and developed my own style. Its a shame that there isnt a step-by-step product these days that shows players how to run games but I wonder if new players are waiting for that book to teach them "how-to" that has yet to come. Perhaps there should be a fourth core book that its sole purpose is to read as a walkthrough of a typical campaign. Two things that come to mind; 1) the section on alignment in the 2E PHB or DMG that runs down a scenario which describes how players of all alignments might react in the situation, 2) the 2E Player's Guide to the Forgotten Realms which follows the exploits of an adventuring company from a pseudo game play style narrative AFAIR. So I definitely think theres money left on the table by not releasing books like this. I'd imagine they'd be easily produced and an easy sell. WotC should consult Wu-Tang Clan and diversify their bonds.One thing I see a lot of on reddit an similar places is groups of 3 or 4 or even 5 friends unable to find a DM. My first thought for this people is: duh, one of YOU be the DM. That's how this works. Then I think about how I learned to DM way back in 1985 with a Red Box that actually taught the skill, step by step, at the same time it taught the players how to play. D&D had "beginner products" but nothing (I am aware of) that actually handholds a new DM through the process from a to z.
I believe it is just a supply and demand issue, more players than DMs. I havent read the 5E PHB or DMG through since 2014 so I can't remember how much it doubles down on the "one of the players in your group need to DM" factor. So it makes me wonder if a group of 5 new 12-15 y/o players (as an example) are looking for DMs externally rather than internally?So, what do you think is driving the DM shortage? How do you think we (the community) and/or WotC can or should address it?
Cinnamon Toast. OOPS forgot to eat breakfast before posting. be right back.Are you okay? Do you smell toast?
IDKW but that made me laugh good. The edibles I had for breakfast might be a factorCinnamon Toast. OOPS forgot to eat breakfast before posting. be right back.
Numerous factors. Game design can affect some, not all. Things it can't influence include:So, what do you think is driving the DM shortage? How do you think we (the community) and/or WotC can or should address it?
As such, for the hobbies entire history there have always been more players than DMs and probably at any time half the people in the hobby have wanted a game but had no one to DM. That's the nature of the hobby.
Pretty much what @Paul Farquhar said. They taught me how to run a kick in the door dungeon with an adversarial attitude. Where my job was to try to get the players to tolerate a TPK just enough that they thought the next campaign they might lie through it and so they wanted to try again. Nothing about social interacting, or roleplaying. It was all about roll playing, tactics and stupid (to me) player puzzles and challenges that had nothing to do with the characters.How so?
The 1983 Basic Set taught you to DM with an adversarial attitude?They taught me how to run a kick in the door dungeon with an adversarial attitude.
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.
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.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.
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.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.
As a person who'd trained DM, there are 2 problems.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.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.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.
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.