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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 8854259" data-attributes="member: 42856">There is a part of real work to GM, but also a large amount of perceived work. 1. Player expectations are highWhen I first played a RPG it was an objectively awful railroad with a power trip GM (me) being dickishly adversarial to the players. However, we were 12 and everyone had a blast. We were coming from gamebooks and wanted "more options than the pre-made choices at the end of the paragraph". That's low expectation and I was able to beat it. I wouldn't have been able to beat the expectation of a high-quality, thoughtful story caring for the PCs characters arcs and ensuring equal spotlight and detailed worldbuilding. In some way, I feel that I wouldn't have started DM'ing if my group had been exposed to the current crop of high quality CRPG out there or the professional GM broadcasting their games, because my performance would have been lower. Beating a gamebook wasn't that hard, especially the Forest of Doom. 2. Playing with stranger may not helpI read on this board that people are playing with random strangers over the Internet, or random stranger at a convention, or random stranger that want to play RPGs in their city. I have no reason to assume this is a huge conspiracy and this isn't happening. But wow, it must be hard to start GM'ing and say it and watch player flock to you to join your game. They'll be MUCH LESS tolerant to any mistake than a group of established friend will be. They'll be more prone to drop the game (sending a text message if they're polite) than stick to it even if something isn't to their liking. Among a group of friend, it's easier to have discussion about how to improve an activity and generally communicate than with stranger. It puts an additional burden to GMing: if your first attempt fails, you might want to end your aspiring GM carreer.3. We're work adverse... to the point of not tryingGiven the weight of player expectation, even if the aspiring GM realizes that he won't be the greatest of all time, but would seek to be a reasonably-competent GM, he'll assume a lot more prep time than his really needed. And the learning curve make it so that, indeed, it's longer to prep when you're novice. Especially since you'll be falling into the trap of not wanting to improvise and prep every single player idea beforehand. The Alexandrian makes it clear that a lot of prep goes down the drain, and he should be read more by starting GMs... so they wouldn't resign after a few weeks, exhausted.</blockquote>

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