EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
That isn't relevant to the example given by Oofta. Oofta was explicitly granting that the DM was, in fact, actually bad, horrendously so, not that they were a perfectly 100% fine and just a bad fit for this player/group. I was working within the example given, where it is a given that the DM is in fact horrendously bad, not just contextually inappropriate.The dreaded option 4!
4. the DM's style is 'good' but just doesn't match the style that particular player(s) prefers.
And yet, at the same time, most of us do not want engineers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, pharmacists, architects, veterinarians, and educators who have no pre-training and instead learn everything they do purely through experience, right? At this point in the thread, I honestly can't be sure anymore. Do you want your lawyer to have attended law school and passed their bar exam? Do you want your child's pediatrician to have attended med school and gotten a medical license? Do you want to know that the architect who designed the office building you worked in actually got a decent degree and a licensed to practice? Do you want the civil engineers who work on replacing a major bridge to have a solid educational background in civil engineering, rather than just picking up anyone who can answer physics questions?I think decades is a bit of hyperbole, but I also think 'there is no greater teacher than experience' is just as true in RPGs as it is for most of life.
Because if you're saying yes to most of those questions, you don't seem to actually believe that experience is the best teacher ever, no question. There's certainly a critical place for it. Medical doctors complete residency, after all, and lawyers should generally have internships or other work at a law firm relevant to their legal expertise, etc. But it very much seems to be that experience shouldn't be the foundation of knowledge, but rather the house we build on top of the foundation--a foundation coming from theory, explanation, and analysis, stuff that can in fact be taught.
Now, this is a leisure-time activity. It's not something that we should expect a whole friggin' degree for. But that isn't a reason to throw people to the wolves and whoever survives can successfully DM thereafter. DMing is hard; almost everyone recognizes this. And DMs are in incredibly short supply; everyone recognizes that. If we can do things that make it easier to get into DMing, if we can reduce the rate of errors--or hell, even your non-sequitur example of DM/player mismatch, if we can reduce rates of that too, which good instructions CAN mitigate!--isn't that worth doing? Shouldn't a thing purporting to guide dungeon masters help address that sort of stuff?
The 4e DMG spends a significant section of the first chapter--four and a half pages--just talking about how a group forms, what its dynamics are (and how they can become dysfunctional), and player psychology and how to address those things, both dealing with destructive stuff (distractions and players acting out) and promoting constructive stuff (how to give various player types what they want: that is, how to ensure they have fun.) There's a whole further section that talks about your role and behaviors and preferences as DM (two pages), as well as "table rules," social etiquette and effective ways to deal with problematic behaviors. The entire first chapter is information meant to forestall problems, equip DMs with tools to address them, AND inform them about playstyle/approach/preference differences that COULD lead to problems so you can try to work through them or recognize that they simply can't be resolved well in advance.
Like...how is this hard? How is this a bad thing to include? The 5e DMG gives all of this--this entire concept--less than two pages of discussion! In separate parts!
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