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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8239508" data-attributes="member: 29398">Yes, barrier.And your tried and true methodology for any given one of those produces a small percentage that are quite good at it, a slightly larger percentage who aren't very good but keep banging away anyway, another small-ish percentage who are hopeless at it and give up, and a vast-majority percentage who are not interested in bothering to try in the first place.Why is it that humanity over its many-thousand-year arc has equally failed at pulling anything close to a 10% rate of functional musicians out of its population?  Or functional archers?  Or functional pole-vaulters?Let's see - by comparison (and ignoring things like convention games) I've probably played with about 75 and encountered maybe 50 (?) more that I know of.  I can't speak for the 50 as I don't know what/how much/how long they played; but of the 75 I can think of at least 20 who have tried GMing at least once; of which maybe half kept at it for long enough to matter.Thing is, not all players - in fact, I'd say rather few - are even interested in GMing; for a host of reasons many of which revolve around not wanting to make anything more of the hobby than sitting around a table rolling dice every week or two.For some - I dare say quite a few - it's they don't want to have to learn the rules in any depth. (yes, there's many players out there who interact with the rules as little as they can get away with and even that is too much)  I don't think it's controversial to say a GM probably needs to have or gain at least a vague familiarity with the rules of whatever system she wants to run.For some, it's that they don't want to commit to having to show up every week (even if they already do as a player) because while the game can sail when down a player it can't sail when down a GM.For some - and this hits your point upthread about practice - it's that they feel they need to put in considerable work and-or practice before running a game, and aren't willing (or able due to time constraints) to do so.  This one's removable, in that the "considerable work" can be reduced in various ways and practice doesn't need to be anything separate, it can be undertaken while running a game.Nah, it just seems that way due to the bigger pool.  1 million* post-high-school pole vaulters is a big number...until you realize that's drawn from a pool of billions and that the per-capita rate of pole-vaulters among the population is in fact really small.* a number pulled out of thin air; I've no idea how many actual pole-vaulters there are in the world and google doesn't seem to want to tell me quickly, but there's probably not all that many in the grand scheme of things.  I personally have never met one to the best of my knowledge. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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