4e and 5e was a turning point as fans coming in starting asking for heroic fantasy they were convinced D&D had. However D&D has only done so on the players side. The DM side is still 50 years old and in "wrong genre"
The point is the base rules rules were written for one style that D&D is rarely if ever advertised by the IP holder or fans looking to make groups.
You typically have to add rules to adapt to those styles. And none of the core books if I recall ever were printed with those variants. You always had to lean on the DM to make them all up out of thin air to varying successes.
I've enjoyed your series of posts around the ideas that I've pulled out in my quotes.
I think there are (at least) two aspects to GM workload in the context of D&D:
*Creating fiction;
*Creating technical game-system information.
The second of these is a feature of the game system - eg it's an issue in D&D, which is a mechanically intricate system that depends on a lot of detail; whereas it's not an issue in (say) Prince Valiant, which is a very light system where a creature or NPC can be given relevant stats in moments and where resolution does not depend upon maps that record precise details of distance.
There is zero reason to think that D&D is going to change in this respect. The solution to the second aspect, therefore, is having someone else do the work and buying it from them, in the form of a Monster Manual or Rogue's Gallery or (as I did quite a bit when GMing 4e) a module from which I can lift stat blocks and maps.
The first is trickier. All RPGing requires
someone to create the fiction - it won't create itself. There are well-known techniques, in RPGing, for distributing the responsibility for doing so around the table. And I'm not talking here about "player narrative authority" (operationalised mechanically via fate points ect), which is an overrated thing in ENworld discussions. I'm talking much more basic stuff like deciding what play is about, what the core tropes are, who we the PCs are looking for having arrived in this village, etc.
The core premise of most contemporary D&D play seems to be that the GM is overwhelmingly in charge of this: creating it, keeping track of it, making sure that it remains interesting to the players, making sure that it regularly and in a spotlight-sharing way foregrounds PCs (both in respect of their mechanical competencies and their backstories), etc.
That's a lot of work, even if I'm using someone else's publication to get my creature and NPC stats, and my maps.
Reducing that workload, it seems to me, would require significant, maybe even radical, changes to how D&D is played.
