D&D General The DM Shortage

[Haplo781]

Running a good game is hard and is a lot of work. DMs need 10-20 hours of free time to run the game aside from the session time. Running a game can at times amount to your only hobby, especially if you are writing your own adventures.

Or just play 4e and breeze through prep in like 1/10 the time.

 

[tetrasodium]

Prediction 1: WotC will come up with a DM-less way to play using D&D Beyond. This will help them get more money directly from players.

We could probably pre-emptively start a placeholder thread for the topic, lol.

Prediction 2: Someone will come up with an AI assistant GM that will provide real-time GMing support. It will probably eventually be pretty good.

Prediction 3: AI GMs will be developed. I'm not sure if this will be a good thing or not.

Ai is very much not up to gm'ing yet. You would need something much closer to artificial general intelligence (a gigantic leap beyond stable diffusion & chatgpt type stuff) for that.

Put in perspective... I saw a tweet or reddit post about a chatgpt prompt earlier asking something along the lines of... if I'm 70 & my sister was half my age when I was six how old is she now... The result was a bit wordy but 73 was obviously not a correct answer to the question it was prompted with

 

[Zardnaar]

Or just play 4e and breeze through prep in like 1/10 the time.

Or play OSR breeze through prep and encounters in 1/10th the time.

 

[Celebrim]

Or just play 4e and breeze through prep in like 1/10 the time.

It's interesting that you say that, because one reason I never tried 4e is I realized converting classic modules to 4e would be more work rather than less work than converting them to 3e or 5e.

But even more so than that, the vast majority of prep that I do in any system isn't mechanical preparation. I think I should probably fork out to a thread explaining what takes so much time to prep, but it isn't doing numbers for monsters or NPCs or whatever. That's the easiest part of prep. The map making tends to take more time than stat blocks. But the hard part of prep is the writing.

So whenever someone tells me that they breeze through prep in 1/10 the time by changing systems, it mostly just informs me that we have very different ideas about what play is like and what part of it is hard.

That said, I have no idea why people think prep in 4e is easy. I've tried my hand at it. There is a thread around here where I give advice for creating Tharzidun in 4e and even the rough, unfinished, and somewhat unsatisfactory draft of a combat with Thardizun for 4e easily proved itself the equal in intellectual challenge to creating that entity in another edition.

 

[Reynard]

Or play OSR breeze through prep and encounters in 1/10th the time.

Or play any game you know really well, don't prep at all, and just go.

 

[payn]

Or just play 4e and breeze through prep in like 1/10 the time.

1/10 the prep, 10X the combat length?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I try to get my players to think about opening businesses or getting a keep or being part of a guild

Are those the only things players could do to drive the narrative? Because they sound very much like the real life stuff people play D&D to get away from!

 

[Vaalingrade]

It's interesting that you say that, because one reason I never tried 4e is I realized converting classic modules to 4e would be more work rather than less work than converting them to 3e or 5e.

But even more so than that, the vast majority of prep that I do in any system isn't mechanical preparation. I think I should probably fork out to a thread explaining what takes so much time to prep, but it isn't doing numbers for monsters or NPCs or whatever. That's the easiest part of prep. The map making tends to take more time than stat blocks. But the hard part of prep is the writing.

So whenever someone tells me that they breeze through prep in 1/10 the time by changing systems, it mostly just informs me that we have very different ideas about what play is like and what part of it is hard.

That said, I have no idea why people think prep in 4e is easy. I've tried my hand at it. There is a thread around here where I give advice for creating Tharzidun in 4e and even the rough, unfinished, and somewhat unsatisfactory draft of a combat with Thardizun for 4e easily proved itself the equal in intellectual challenge to creating that entity in another edition.

Conversion and prep are two very different animals though.

And I'm not sure new DMs would be trying to convert old modules they likely know nothing about anyway.

Replacing the trap of CR with level per PC shoulders a LOT of the work in making encounters just by itself.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Are those the only things players could do to drive the narrative? Because they sound very much like the real life stuff people play D&D to get away from!

Of course not, but those things are fun for some, and should still be in the mix.

 

[Haplo781]

1/10 the prep, 10X the combat length?

Double at worst.