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5e doesn't support DMs. The products are player focused and I think this is by design. WotC wanted to monetize the players. Within the hobby, DMs were always the money makers for publishers. WotC wanted to monetize the 5 to 6 people at the table at the expense of the DM. Just my $0.02.
that is a very interesting argument. can you provide some examples which show how WOTC is targeting players instead of DMs? From a capitalist profit oriented viewpoint that makes complete sense, but where does it show through? I would love to see some concrete examples.
@@bigeye6606 the millions of subclasses and 70+ races show players are being marketed to. OneD&D will do this with customizing your vtt mini too I think. Nickle and diming you for customization.
I've definitely noticed that many of the 5e players I know tend to prefer deep story over dungeons and exploration. They see the DM as a director of a hit TV series and they're playing the lead characters. It's alot of pressure when you're comparing yourself to Mercer, Colville, Perkins, etc
The most frustrating aspect of D&D players who want a deep story is they never take the hook. You have an interesting scenario between the Teifling PC and the prejudiced NPC you have to meet? Just use disguise self. Enter a town that has a complex moral issue going on? Just investigate at a surface level before choosing a side. Need to convince somebody to give you a second chance? Just do a persuasion roll instead of explaining your reasoning. When you don't want to do combat or exploration and you don't fully engage with the story beats I have presented to you what do I as a DM have left to give? Also why don't we just play Vampire the Masquerade if you want heavy story and roleplay?
+1! Anyone who tells me I should be more 'Mercer' gets this line verbatim "No I'm not Matt Mercer. But we have one thing in common, you aren't playing at either of our tables" 8>D
I enjoy being a story driven DM. I have really cranked up the dial for my Curse of Strahd game and it is so much roleplay over roll play. Level eight and one player just received the first magical weapon, a +1 short sword. Strahd has stripped the land of all magical items to ensure his reign continues, etc. Also it is a humancentric campaign. No dark vision for anyone. But, this is the tip of the homebrew iceberg I had to have player buy in to create a proper horror campaign in 5e. Next campaign will be story driven and all, lots of RP. But, the homebrew system will be OSR and my own twists. The world will be low fantasy with a massive influence from Runehammer's A Burning in New Haven short stories. There will be horror, moral quandaries but not the level of Ravenloft. There will be much more freedom and the end goal would be to retire characters at level 9, 10, etc. with their own keeps, towers, guilds, etc. Not Avenger level cosmic conflicts. Less is more. Sidenote: I don't use persuasion, or intuition rolls. If you plead a good enough argument you can convince the NPC. If you think the NPC is lying then act on it. I do not use push button skills, even in 5e.
@@bigblue344 I had a game where the players had been asking for access to the wish spell at a low level for a few sessions. Eventually I had them run into a trapped Demon. They'd recently been slaying devils so I leaned into the blood feud. The Demon offered them a single wish if they set her free. They just turned and left. Then complained that the dungeon wasn't story heavy enough.
@@TuberTugger Man wanting to get the wish spell at low level sounds like a red flag. The scenario sounds awesome btw. I hope you find players that mesh well with what you want to run.
Even in their new surveys they don't ask if the person is a GM or a player. I doubt they'll address the issues with the design that produce a GM drought.
I agree. One DnD is feeding the players only. It's going to compound the issue. If your player base is complaining about unbalanced classes, races and stats, the solution isn't more adjustments. The solution is a paradigm shift.
I think the way they address it, sort of, is by pushing the game toward online play with a VTT. If all you have to do is click on the monster or character to see what skill/ability/spell/attack options are and the computer does the rest, "DMing" is easy. If you buy WotC adventures, which will have all the VTT assets included, DMing means you are the person who triggers the appropriate sound file when the players arrive at a certain point in the adventure. You don't even have to read the box text. They hired Mercer or some other voice actor to do it for you.
As a 20+ year forever DM, who DMed 5e for years, I think you've nailed it with the culture being a large problem. The folk who have piled the most expectations on me have been folk who play 5e exclusively. Sometimes it's the influence of critical role or other professional podcasts. Sometimes it's just a culture they learned at a different table. 5e also sits in an awkward position mechanically for me. If I want a crunchy game to play on a VTT, 5e doesn't have enough rules and structure. It also doesn't have constant support. WotC supplemental rules have been lacking and their core rules are often contradictory. Pathfinder 2e, with it's searchable rules wikis, and the rate that they pump out options, means I can keep things mechanically fresh without having to do all the work myself all the time. Yet if I want something more freeform, less pre-established rules, more homebrew, then the answer still isn't 5e. The core books are huge compared to more freeform games. If I'm trying to homebrew up something, or throw out a spur of the moment ruling, I enviably get a 5e player trying to "correct" me. One D&D would need a cultural shift to become my primary game. That would require WotC to dedicate the game to a strong core design philosophy and I just can't see that happening. They won't take any risk with it because making $$$ is their number one priority. Thus indie games are the place for me.
Your preference is yours. but 5e is highly customizable and has TONS of searchable resources so I'm not sure what you mean by that. And as a person who knows most of the rules of a player corrects me then have different players. If you don't care what the rule is then it's a quick, I understand but this is my decision.
Great vid, sir. From my experience, the DM shortage is certainly a recent phenomenon. I came in shortly after 2e, and easily half the players were also DMing their own side-games. My own highschool group had me running a side-game of Lankhmar, while other players were running us in Darksun, Planescape, and home-brew worlds. Maybe it's the recent surge of new gamers all at once to 5e D&D, but we were all DMing 1e/2e within the first year of playing, so I don't see the number of new D&D players as being the reason for such a huge shortage. Afterall 5e has been around for several years now, so there should have been a ton of DMs realy to take on the player surplus. The only area I can compare that level of GM shortage to is extremely niche games with tiny player-bases (Bluebeard's Bride, Dark Places & Demogorgons, etc.).
I love your channel Seth! I've been running games for 10 years, 5e for 5 years. I LOVED PHB+DMG+MM. But 5e has gotten BLOATED. I cannot run it anymore. When the offical rule from wizards was that you could only use PHB +1 (Xanathars, Volo's, SCaG, etc) , Things were atleast somewhat balanced. it was DESIGNED to only be PHB plus one other source book during character creation. Wizards has removed this rule and players can grab from ALL of the books now to create some Over Powered characters. Call it a failing on my part but I cannot read Name Page Count PHB 329 MM 352 DMG 320 Volo 224 XGtE 192 MtoF 256 AqInc 222 TcE 192(Why tell the players the puzzles?! argh) FtoD 224 MpMM 281 AAG 66 SCaG 159 GGtR 256 AqInc 224 ERftLW 320 EGtW 304 MooT 256 VRGtR 256 S:ACoC 224 For a total of 4,657 pages that I as the DM am supposed to KNOW and be able to recall at a moment's notice, judge, and make a ruling on. Call it a failing on my part, but 5e is un-DM-able right now. I am unable to "Balance" the game beyond level 5 characters. I've been running Basic Fantasy (170 pages) and love it. I've also been running "The Fantasy Trip: In the Labyrinth" (176 pages) and I've been loving that too! The combat is a LOT more realistic and deadly.
I think part of the reason is that WotC and the DnD community have discourage Player vs DM in all form while the OSR encourage it. And, Call of Cthulhu is built apon keeper/DM vs Player.
I started playing in the 2e era. For me the difference can be distilled down to back then I could prepare for a few hours, and have material to run games for days. In 5e I prepare for days, and have material for a few hours. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it seems a lot more mentally taxing to run than it was back in the day.
I think this is true, but also it's a self-selection issue too. OSR players are usuall already highly motivated and interested in GMing while 5e's fanbase is probably mostly players who want to feel epic. The relative sizes of the fanbase is also relevant I think.
Ding ding. And polls and surveys are naturally inclined towards selection bias in the first place. I wager Questing Beast also attracts more OSR arbiters than players as well.
I think the young fellas like the crazy feats Old guys like it easy and fun. I find that the importance of role play always gets mentioned by the 5e acolytes but then combat is made complicated by feats and actions .! Seemingly to make less room for role play. Just an old guy rambling . I just want people to play any version they like and to have fun.
Yeah this is definitely a factor I reckon. 5e is so big these days that a lot of people who want to play it have probably never played another TTRPG before and D&D 5e is one of the few they’ve heard of. Whereas I only heard about OSR through research when I was already interested in DMing and been a player long enough to be confident I could learn to run games.
It's true that in a way 5E culture puts DMs on a pedestal. However, it also expects them to be a slave to the players' expectations and put in an absurd amount of work regardless of whether the players reciprocate.
@@edwardp4038 I'm talking more about a wider culture of play. Anybody can change anything for their table, that has always been the case since the beginning of the hobby. I am just expanding a bit on what Milton said here about the bigger picture, and the effect it's having on the larger DND community is very evident.
Player, "I wish you DM'ed like Matt Mercer." Me, "I wish you played like Laura Baily and looked half as good." but in my head, "F off, why do I even do this..."
This is why I set the ground rules at the start. "This is how I run my game. I put a lot of time into planning the game for you guys so please respect that." and so on. If the players don't like that they can spend time finding another DM.
I gotta say as a teacher the problem you described with DMing in 5e sounds really similar to being a teacher.... you have to be an instructor, administrator, planner, and counselor tailoring the experience to each kid.
@@frankpiper8802 I mean the analogy falls apart of you start thinking in terms of solutions because you're dealing with willing participants in one and mandatory attendance for children in another. If I could just tell all the kids who don't want to go to school not to come my job would be pretty easy lol
Being a teacher, in addition to the satisfaction of contributing an important service to society, you actually get paid for all your hard work. As a game master you at best get some snacks on game night! In short - Should game mastering be as taxing as a full time paid job?
DMing SHOULDN'T be all that, though. It's a bunch of friends getting together and the guy with a cool idea for a campaign is the one who DMs this time around. That's the way its supposed to work. These are your peers, not your kids. (Unless they are your kids, but that's Dad hat, not DM hat.) As DM you are a facilitator of entertainment. That's it. And teaching rules to new players, of course, although the more experienced players should actually be handing most of that. And yeah, that alone might be enough that a DM should get paid, dependingon circumstances. We pay "fun coordinators," right? But if I gotta do all that other stuff, too, then not only should I definitely be getting paid, but folks might start demanding I be certified. Not just in rules, but psychology.
@@nrais76 If I had a group of players that were demanding things from me I would definitely start charging a cover fee. I've been lucky enough to never have players who really expected me to be Matt Mercer or Brennan Lee-Mulligan. However, encounter balancing in 5e has been my biggest ire. I love how the OSE doesn't expect you to balance that shit. Every time my players get in over their heads by taking a fight they should have avoided, someone makes a comment that I must be trying to kill them to have them be captured or something even though it's a situation where they are 100% at fault and I wasn't really expecting them to attack. But players have this belief that's it's all just "interactive storytelling" and assume they're being railroaded when they're not...there's a dragon and we're all first level? Well I guess we're supposed to fight it because why else would it be there... Oh we're dying now? This must have been the DM's plan. What do you mean make a new character? But I never resolved the revenge plot in my backstory!
5 years DM here that constantly runs for groups of new beginners. I find that the problem is not the players being new to the game, but rather the way 5e encourages the DM to be this professional movie director. I've run simple OSR style games for complete beginners and they didn't taxed me as much as a beginner would in 5e.
To me as a dm of 15 years the hardest part has always been making sure everyone arrives on time and has their shit together before the session starts. And I dont blame people at all for not wanting to deal with that
What I hear from other DMs and have experienced some of myself is that 5e era players have no respect for the DM as a player. I don't know what the problem is but they seem to see the DM as an entertainer and not as a fellow player. They're simultaneously entitled to the DM's work but also don't feel as if they don't have any obligation to the game.
Thats how I feel too. Partly because the people who come together to play are not real life good friends. The are strangers with very high expectations and not willing to contribute to a positive experience for everyone involved.
Understanding what it takes to DM is one of the reasons why I like having DM at the table as PLAYERS :-) 1. They are just happy to be there :-) "God, just let me play!" No more "forever DMing" :-) 2. They TRULY understand just how much work it takes to DM so they are very understanding and don't give you a hard time. 3. They probably know the rules well and can help you if you haven't mastered them. Tonight is my first session in a new campaign I'm running. I put up ads online on Reddit and on D&D Beyond. Respondents had to fill out a questionnaire. I had 64 respondents for only 5 spots - and I am not a known DM or anything like that. 4 of the 5 players I chose for my spots have significant DM experience. I didn't design it that way but it was a plus when considering applicants. But this is not a sustainable model for the game. The "DM shortage" IS a real problem. It's one of the reasons that competent - yet unspectacular - DMs are charging money ($10-$20 per player, per session) to run games on Start Playing Games. And easily maintaining 3-5 players per game.
This has been my experience. As with all things, it's been an experience, not a rule that applies to every single person. But yeah, I've seen that a lot.
This is why my two buddies and I are starting a campaign with just the three of us (2 players and a DM). We've all DM'd so we know how hard it can be and so we try to put as much effort as possible into characters, rp, and investment in the game and world.
I see we're ignoring that the hobby is full of people with dog**** people skills, and it's been like this a very long time. Of course we have people who don't consider others sitting at their table.
There was always a DM shortage. Back in the '70s and '80s, we could see the same situation, with AD&D tables always looking for DMs, while other games had a much more "balanced" GM to player ratio. I think the core reason is that D&D has always been the gateway -- back then, as now, most players started there, and most of those moved on entirely from RPGs within a couple of years, probably never having tried any other game. Other games (a few exceptions here, such as West End's Star Wars or White Wolf's Vampire) tended to be made up of people that started in D&D but fell in love with the hobby, and moved into other games in order to experience different things. People that love RPGs are more likely to play longer, be willing to try GMing in order to share excitement about a rule set they found, etc.
I occasionally fell into the exception. In high school and the later part of 90s, I had 7 players and 6 DMs no waiting but no campaign getting finish. But Between the early 80s and late 90s you had to hunt for a DM and were happy to find a lousy one. After my 3E group fell apart there was another shortage. I think the % number of gamers to like to DM is same. But the whole numbers are up. And I freaking older and need nappy time.
True, especially now with online access, DMs should be easier to find than ever before. This article mainly stressed an in person shortage at New York, and I’m betting that’s due to so many DMs moving from 5E to OSR, while the players are staying put and not bothering to look any further, sometimes even quitting from laziness of having everything handled to them (Crit Role and Stranger Things promising them a game experience that was not there). Although a common complaint I keep hearing from newcomers is of the “I want to play but I have no friends” or “my friends don’t want to play it” variety. That’s a marketing problem Wizards is reluctant to fulfill.
WOW! 28k views in 17 hours. Well done, Ben! You've obviously touched upon a subject people want to talk about. I shall cogitate and film a response video. Bravo!
Great editorial Ben. I agree with you about 5E. The culture there does not make the task of DMing it very enjoyable in my opinion. The amount of prep work required is fairly daunting.. just with 'stat blocks' and the like. I tend to run a 'blend' of the two styles myself. Site based and character centric. I enjoy developing out the NPCs so that they can react organically to the actions of the player characters. In this way, as DM, I'm really just 'chronicling the events of the game, rather than actually 'inventing' the plot. The plot develops from the actions of the players and the reactions of the NPCs over time, session after session.
Bingo! I think that's the best approach, and it can be applied to 5e in places where 5e is still the more popular option and there's a lot of people who still want to play it.
I started running 5e for my two kids right after it was released. The core game in the main 3 books was pretty good. They crawled through dungeons and towns, and the whole thing worked really well. Instead of updating the core engine to allow the DM to run more diverse scenarios, they took the easy path. Where they messed up was that they kept heaping on player options that made it harder and harder for the DM to keep up with all of it. After a while you had to adjudicate how the squid person barista's gamebreaker feat interacted with the three levels of rulebreaker paladin that they took. Of course that depended on if it was the UA version or the one from Mordentasha's Dumpster of Everything. After you figure it out your player tells you that "well, actually Pope Jeremy said in one of his edicts that it works like this...". Yeah that's not fun. I think modern D&D is overall better than it used to be, but the modern culture that surrounds it is garbage. WotC enables this garbage player culture in order to sell books, because players outnumber people that want to run the game. It is easier to write a new class or subclass than it is to make a (functional) system for spaceship battles (looking at you Spelljammer) I think the push towards "paid DMs" is part of their propaganda to normalize people charging to run games, because the fun just isn't there most of the time and money is a good substitute. I also think that is the reason for the new digital setup. Professional DMs who charge for games can afford it.
Player books will always sell more than DM books - and always have, hence the move to"player options" and away from dungeon modules long before 5e. Players will always outnumber DMs by design - one-on-one play isn't the norm after all. And in order to sell those you have to power creep the characters, and each one is harder to avoid unintended interactions with the ever increasing prior books. That said "No UA. No multiclassing. No feats." fixes basically all those problems. Alternatively if you play with reasonable people: "you work out your characters and I will trust you on them, if it turns out to be broken change it to something else". "well, actually Pope Jeremy said..." from a player is getting "well play in his home game then, my interpretation is different. Feel free to call it a house rule if that makes you feel better." fro me. Though that wouldn't happen, I don't play with that type of player in the first place.
@@samholden5758 I totally agree with and liked your comment. I too have a reasonable group I run games for and about half of us DM, so it is really cool. It also took years to find them. So no, I don't have to deal with the papal edicts of pope Jeremy coming up at the table, or the aforementioned squid person barista, but it took a lot of work to get there.
@@seanfaherty I was a DM for several years before I ever got to play, but that was what was required. I think the Professional DM thing is weird too, but if people are willing to do that and pay for it, I guess they can do that.
Two months ago, my 5e player asked me if I could DM an AD&D campaign. JOKE was on him, I only run AD&D! He said, and I quote, "I thought you just had a lot of house rules."
I've been a forever DM since age 10 in 1981. I had to be the DM in order to get the neighborhood kids to play the game I desperately wanted to play. I never thought about it and just did it. I can honestly say that the task of DM has become inflated and sounds daunting to newcomers. It's so much easier than it sounds. As you get older and have more experienced players you offload rule-knowledge onto them. So many DMs think they have to know it all, but it's a group game, and the group should share the load.
Yeah, been playing forever. Most of players do something of help to the DM. We have several people that help chronicle details, one that manages the initiatives, one that keeps track of the battle damage and all the found items and details, and each take turns doing a recap at the start of each session to keep everything in context so the work that the GM does doesn't get forgotten between sessions. We even have one guy that glues all the miniatures together since the GM has fumble fingers. I've chimed in when the GM forgets something, regardless of if it is in favor to the party or not. It is hard to keep track of everything, so yeah, sharing the load really helps. In actually helps our GM focus on the things that enjoys about running on the game more, as he doesn't have to worry about the small details.
I'm about to DM my first Pathfinder 2e game because that's the only way I can play the game around here. There is another DM in my area but the last game I was at, he threw a metal disc at me for being late due to car issues.
I'm running both a 5e and an OSE campaign. The 5e guys expect stuff like character development, voice acting, relationships and a deep meaningful story. My OSE guys just want a way out of the snake pit they just fell in to. Guess which group I prefer?
You can totally have character development, voice acting, relationships and deep meaningful story... but that needs to be ON THE PLAYERS. Its not the worlds (IE DM) to make a story happen, or to make sure their character grows. Only to present the opportunities to do so.
@@AvishaiGreenstein THIS. The Dm is just the world. All it takes is players saying "Hey I am wanting to do this with the character, can I have opportunities now and again to do so." Then the PLAYERS, do most of that work, the DM just helps to enable it.
I was hoping to see the results of those polls pop up in a video! Interesting topic to think about, and probably not something that’s going to change as long as the best-known examples of dnd play on the internet are produced by professional actors. I like it, but it’s certainly better at attracting players than GMs
The funny thing is Matt Mercer seems to have a fairly healthy dialogue with his players on what he wants from them. The problem with 5e is the players expect the DM to be a Matt Mercer but have no intrest in even trying to be a Laura Bailey.
For me, it's just how thankless it all seems. I play with great friends who are all awesome, but it seems to me like I'm the only one who puts any sort of work into the game. Even stuff like showing up on time and being prepared (i.e. leveling up your character, printing/filling out your sheet) seems to be a chore sometimes.
I don't think this problem will go away until we drastically overhaul how the game is run at its core. Players are content consumers, not co-creators of a shared world. It's the reason why DMing is such a thankless job: your role is to produce content for us to engage in and our responsibility for this game begins and ends at the table. Getting our players to hold up their end of the social contract is a challenge because the burdens are not equal.
Frankly, I’d be pleased as punch to perform the heavy end of game prep if the players simply delivered on the engagement end (and provided the snacks as well). Also, as a gamebook rule: if you buy it, I’ll keep it, read it, and incorporate it.
I genuinely feel like one of the most important things you need to do as a GM especially for 5E since it has so much exposure and people all have different ideas of what kind of game it should be is setting expectations before you even start rolling dice or making characters
I wonder whether the slant towards DMs in the OSR is partly due to the fact that DMs, being far more aware of the benefits and limitations of the systems they run, are more likely to explore different options? On top of that, a lot of 5e's limitations affect the DM more than the players; the players get to feel powerful while the DM is left with the stress and added work of trying to figure out how to challenge them. So I wouldn't be surprised if a good number of recent OSR players were 5e DMs before they switched systems.
It seems to be that way with any superpowered RPG, which D&D has now become, but those systems tend to be built ground-up to handle that mode of gameplay. WotC actually pulls this off well… in D20 Modern. D&D’s awkward, sacred cows won’t ever let that happen.
@ TheChoujinVirus. No RPG should ever do that. That’s what wargames are for. GMs are supposed to be impartial and fair, or else they can just go full “rock falls, everybody dies”, and what kind of fun is that?
@@TheChoujinVirus OSR and B/X worsens adversarial DMing because of how much it relies on DM rulings. Later editions introduced a ton more rules which standardized how DMs are supposed to make rulings but also gave the DMs the more complex job of being rules interpreter instead of just making rulings.
I think it's more of a cultural issue than a mechanical problem with 5e. My 9 year old kid had no problem running a few sessions of 5e for our family. Adults think they need to memorize all the rules while kids are great at improvising and making rulings on the fly. Also, in my experience, a new player has to be more involved than the average player to even know about the OSR. I imagine DMs are far more likely than players to spend time on dnd/rpg subreddits and TH-cam channels like this one. So a DM is much more likely to convert to OSR than a player is.
Yeah, I don't have any issue big issues with 5e itself, but I tend to play with my friends and all of us have DM'd year long campaigns for each other (in several different RPG systems, though 5e tends to be most common) so I haven't personally experienced this issue of DM shortages. Maybe my friends are just cooler than the average D&D players. This does to seem to be a culture issue, rather than a mechanical one.
5E really isn't a fun game to DM. The monsters are boring and basically amount to leveled up orcs and the players get all the cool toys to play with. Most RPGs give DMs tools to challenge the players, 5E gives the players tools to challenge the DM.
I feel this so much. Im am a Dungeon Master not because I enjoy it, but because I want to give my friends a good time. My introverted nature makes preparing for each session a self-doubting, stressful nightmare. Once im in the middle of running a session, Im usually fine, but I often feel an impending sense of dread before each session as if my players will hate it.
5e and OSR DM here. Love procedurally/randomly generated improvisational play. Regarding catering to what the players want, I use a "tool" that makes this a lot easier than it sounds: 3 stars/3 wishes. At the end of each session my PCs write down 1-3 bulleted points (about one sentence each) listing either (a) something they really loved about the session that they want to give me a "star" for, or (b) something they are interested in seeing some (or more) of in future sessions (i.e., they "wish" for). I do not commit to making these things come true, but it makes it really easy to find out what they like and give them more of it. Building clear and honest communication into the structure of every session makes generating content they are interested in a low maintenance task that any DM, new or old, can do easily.
DM of almost 9 years now, I love the thematic style of play. But thankfully I'm blessed with a full table of really good friends that I've known for a long time. So I know exactly what kind of game they want to run, what they want to accomplish and how to do it for the most part. My players cook dinner, all I do is set the table. However admittedly, sometimes it does get to be alot. Especially around the 2 year mark of a campaign and they are around level 16-20. You have to STAY on your toes and pre plan everything under the sun cause who knows what the fuck they are gonna do and you don't want it to feel railroady.
Sadly, I think what's triggered this issue is specifically Critical Role and the Mercer Effect. As an entertainment product, they're risen the expectations for DMs super high. There are other factors too, but this one is overt. As a DM I've had angry players complain about the following unironically: "Oh, you didn't describe my action. Do you need me to do that?" "Wait, we need to figure out when to meet for a digital game? All the DMs I know handle that for me" "I know this is supposed to be session zero and everyone's not here yet, but let's start playing already" Old school DnD, anyone could be the DM. People would switch up all the time. But today, it's like a career and the players let you know it.
I feel like this has been a problem since 3/3.5e, before streaming ttrpgs was a thing; as a long-time GM, this problem has always existed with rules heavy systems (e.g. Hero, 3/3.5e, Exalted)... It's just exacerbated due to the huge popularity boost from Critical Role (et al).
Yeap. Added to that players also often dictate nonsense to the DM. "I am not playing in your game if I can't play (insert ridiculous class/species combo here)!" "I need to make sure this backstory arc for my character is explored in the next few sessions, it is critical for their plot development!". Etc etc.
I feel like if you're not willing to take a turn and be the DM every few months (or years depending on how long your group runs campaigns), then you probably aren't worthy of playing in the group and you're taking advantage of the other players. It's just good manners to run the game once in a while.
@@DKarkarov Man, I am so tired of the backstory thing. I'm looking to run Dungeon Crawl Classics, where the backstory is the story of how your level 0 peasant survived their first adventure. Stuff that happens at the table > backstory.
@@johnkennedy3403 You know a backstory is fine, as long as it is reasonable. Something that justifies why you are now a level 1 whatever. If it is 20 pages long though you either deep dived your characters childhood, or you put more crap in than is reasonable for a level 1 character. If it also has stuff in it the DM is "required" to tie in, you are doing it wrong.
The number 1 thing that has helped me run dnd has been Sly Flourish's "Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master." To be fair, I don't run true 5e; but the steps and tips were written with 5e in mind, and I can picture myself easily running a 5e campaign with them (indeed, we just ended my "not 5e" campaign, and I think we'll do true 5e next, lol)
Not sure I would have ever had the confidence to jump in and let the game come to the group if not for this book. I think there's more actionable value to a new DM in that short booklet than the entire DMG, except maybe the dungeon builder tables in the back.
@@SeanFranchise Agreed! I have had some experience DMing 3/3.5e, so that was also helpful (if you think 5e is complicated, try 3e...), but this book has let me be able to plan sessions that my players have really enjoyed in an hour or two, total. I hear some other dms say they plan a session for 2 or three hours A DAY for a session, and that's... That's just too much.
I read that D&D is being used as therapy. If a player came to my table looking for help with emotional problems I'd have difficulty not pissing myself laughing.
@@davidmorgan6896 so interestingly friend of mine did a serious university level research paper about this kind of thing. Like half the people interviewed in the local dnd community said regular game sessions helped with their mental health challenges in some way.
Many of the reasons you cite were the catalyst on why I created Bugbears&Borderlands to begin with. To take the Moldvay b/x approach to 5e so players (and DMs) could play quickly without getting bogged down. While 5e has a basic version, it's all of the rules but none of the customization, and I think that's backwards. I took the opposite approach for B&B.
I think 5e's biggest problem is that it's player focused and it feels like there's nothing there for DMs. I got into 5e because of Chris Perkins and the Acquisition's games and his articles on how to be a better DM, they were invaluable. The videos they used to put out from Q&A's at conventions talking about how to create your own adventures and run the game were equably as invaluable. Where has content like that gone? Now all I see from Wizards are videos saying to interview your players so you can curate the game they want, nothing on how to build the game you want to run. It's been years since I've bought a 5e book because I feel like they don't give me any tools or unique ideas as a DM to build with and they're pretty expensive books. 5e to me feels like a hero fantasy for the player and the DM's job is to make sure they're all happy and got the experience they want. I want my players to be happy, but players don't prep and run games, they just show up and play, way easier to find happiness in that than DMing a game you're not excited about. It also doesn't help that D&D is a huge corporation now so they're trying to make safe marketable content, which means boring content. I'd rather drop $10 on DTRPG for an independent creator's unique work than the drivel coming out of Hasbro right now. I'm only 27 so the nostalgia isn't really there for me, I started with 5e. Other than the old school art I remember as a kid when finding my dad's old books I had never played old school D&D until OSE this past year. I came to the OSR as a DM because I like classic D&D, where there are consequences and players are thoughtful in their actions because things can get bad quick and looking at your character sheet isn't going to save you, your wits are.
wotc would rather burn the diminishing numbers of GMs to placate the egos of players and thereby turn them into loyal consumers and buy books than sustain a community of hobbyists
@@user-jq1mg2mz7o They burnt magic with product overload. Now they are burning D&D with player focus overload. Game will die without DMs to run it. People won't buy books if they dont have a chance of playing it.
@@Illianor123 yup. wotc is scrambling to put band aids but the problem is more fundamental and they refuse to fix those issues, or use half-solutions that make things worse. they're in for a huge crash in the near future
@@user-jq1mg2mz7o the ego of players is a good way to put it. I think there used to be a thought that DMs were power crazed and it was their game not the players, but now the pendulum has swung the other way and players are the ones making demands and Wotc is backing this ideology up.
@@Illianor123 absolutely agree! The new Spelljammer shouldve been a years worth of content, but they've already moved on and are sending out a Dragonlance book. Why?? If your gonna milk an old IP atleast get all the milk lol.
Perhaps the best sessions I ever ran was literally my players INDEPENDENTLY coming up with an assassination plot. All I did was create the castle where it took place, adding opportunities, NPCs, complications, threats, and post-assassination investigations.
I think another key difference that removes stress, is that the plot style of game can also happen very well in old school play, because the system does not get in the way an undercut achievements and choices. You are left as free form as a narrative game, but also have a simple game to rely on. Contrast 5th edition, which has a lot of game to deal with, and still no narrative tools to help you anyway.
I've been DMing 5e for 4-5 years now. It was my first TTRPG. I've recently been searching for something more suited to how i like to play and found Knave and OSR content - very thankful to have found it! 5e is a mess of player options. Too much. And the players, at least mine, expect that you can somehow always make every option available to them and incorporate the lore as written from every 5e book. There is definitely that attitude of, "ive turned up, now entertain me." But it's amazing how quickly that diminishes when they have a go at DMing themselves. Loving the focus on world building and exploration in the older style of game. Coming up with that stuff and sharing it with the group is what i enjoy most about the game.
Ive seen looking for groups with players searching for a dm with a very specific plot or theme in mind and I just sit there like "why not try running this yourself? You clearly know what you want why heap this onto someone else?" I have 5e players in my group sniffing at the dm role and I try to do the best I can to be helpful and encouraging as it sometimes feel you can get thrown right out the deep end. Espicially with high expectations.
While I haven't DM'd in some years, due to adult life scheduling issues in my group, I was always fortunate in that my group never cared to be the "main" characters. We were all tired of being the chosen ones in every video game out there, so when we got to the table, it was nice to play a group of mercs who's only advantage was being competent. Sometimes, there would be something of a plot, like being double crossed by an associate, and having to track him down, and once they did end up stopping a vampire's plans to control a rural village, but mostly, they were just a bunch eccentric mooks with skills to let them (mostly) come out of dangerous places alive and with something of worth.
Well, they did sometimes muck around in politics, but mostly the Orcish kind. Makes it easier to get to where the gold is if you make a deal to help set up a certain Orc to be chief so he owes you one.
My main problem with being a DM for 5e has always been the tools. Well, more like the lack thereof. If you want to do something that is not prewritten (which a fair amount of those adventures have issues that needs fixing to be good), you have to contend with the DMG, which is, in my opinion, a hot mess. It feels like they gave you a DMG that should read "some assembly required", or much rather "a lot of assembly required". I'm no stranger to homebrew, but when I buy a book, any homebrewing I do should feel like small tweaks to the system, not massive overhauls. First is the encounter balancer. Want to make a balance and fair low level encounter for a 1st or 2nd level party? Good luck is all I have to say, as the lack of HP and the damage that can be done is super swingy. How about one for anything above level 12? Welp, the math is so bad by that point the party is more than likely to steamroll through anything if you make that encounter by the book, so you have to make everything a "hard" or "deadly" encounter. Even then, the monsters CR is so badly built that things that say they are easy or hard are not. There are some infamous monster in the MM and beyond that hurt my head. How about rewards? Well, by default, you have to roll on tables to generate gold and other valuables, as well as for magic items. That's fine if you don't mind the RNG in doing such, but what about plan treasure and magic items? Well, with no wealth by level like in older editions, or even in other systems, you have no idea about how much the should have, and as for magic items, you have to look in Xanathar's to see an IDEA of how much you should give out based upon what tier of play you are in, which means you only have a level range to work. This means that you can easily hand too much or too little gold, which even then has so little point in the system unless you are a wizard or you allow for the buying of magic items. Yea, magic items where never intended to be bought (or really sold for that matter), which makes gold after a few levels feel worthless as there is no meaningful gold sinks to pursue. Sure, you can make one, but that means you having to create something whole cloth, and most newer DMs don't know how to do that in a fair way. Then the magic items themselves... Holy... Just how much should that item cost? The book gives (surprise!) a vague answer that you, the DM, have to answer. Then there is the matter of the balance of what is considered uncommon or rare or anything else is being all over the place. Wing Boots being uncommon? With that level of power? What where they thinking? Bag of Holding being always better and cheaper the Handy Haversack? Just why? Why is the meme glue and solvent legendary? Of course, with the passage of time, newer items they have introduced are just better (looking at you Tasha's). Speaking of Tasha's, there's the power creep in general. That one book legitimately made all the subclasses for the cleric and sorcerer that came before null and void. If both of the new cleric subclasses are played by two players, what little balance the game had is gone due to how the two subclasses abilities interact. And no, just making the encounters way harder is not a solution because if those players don't use the "I Win Button" you will absolutely TPK the party in 2 or 3 rounds. After Tasha's, I threw my hands up into the air and said "I'm done", which is a shame because I was looking forward to trying to run a game in Eberron for 5e. If I have to homebrew so much of the DMG (and the system in some regards) to the point that I'm not really using the book just to fix it and give me the tools to run the game, I have to ask why the designers didn't do this work before I got it? With One D&D, I have so little faith that any of the DMG issues will ever be addressed that I've switched to PF2e for a more crunchy system and to OSE for a more rules lite system.
Could ban Tasha's. Although some people will complain. Just to be clear, it's the subclasses being banned, hopefully that would've gone down reasonably okay at your table.
@@guyman1570 I could have easily done that, you're not wrong. The problem is more that WotC thought that releasing those subclasses in such an overpowered state was fine, if not good. The UA versions of the clerics were fine, and people even said a such. However, for some reason, WotC buff them massively to become broken. The bigger issue is the design philosophy is so bad that I just decided to stop because I just disliked, if not hated, 5e after playing and running it for a few years.
Wow this is really fascinating! I’m a teen who got interested in D&D in 2019, but haven’t played in very many campaigns up until now since none of my friends also play. I have a few that are interested in playing, but we hadn’t really gotten anywhere since I’ve been too scared to DM. Knowing all of the rules and building up a good story that I can improvise to fit the players’ actions just sounds so intimidating! I always wondered how it was so seemingly common/easy for kids to DM in the 80s, and this video really cleared that up. I think now (after I unexpectedly had to DM a oneshot module lmao) I’m finally ready to DM for my friends! Albeit another oneshot module lol, but I’m getting there! Good luck to any other new DMs
Keeping D&D easier to run means ignoring the complexity. What I mean is that as a DM, I do not run D&D using hundreds of rules. When I ran D&D 3e for nearly 10 years, I rarely opened the books while at the table. My 12-year-old self in 1976 became a fearless DM by rolling dice and interpreting the results. Was I good at DM'ing? NO! I was horrible at being a DM by any measure. Being good or great at DM'ing D&D only matters if you are having fun. I do not know ALL of the D&D 3e or 5e rules. I wish that more people would try being a DM (good, bad, or indifferent). Perhaps people need to DM by embracing a child's perspective on having fun.
I mean, they are games with rules in them. If any single person at your table is better read up on those rules everyone else is doing them a disservice by not bothering to know how to play.
Thanks for the video! I've been a tabletop gamer since first playing hex-and-chit as well as miniatures wargames in the early 70s, adding RPGs in 1974 with (Original) D&D. I've been blogging and using the OGL since 2000. I've been running 1E AD&D since adding it as the books dropped in the 70s, integrating it to (O)D&D along the way then switching when the DMG was released. I ran my current 1E AD&D campaign earlier this week and we'll return to it in January. I'll use the time in between to prep for Gary Con. Ben Milton of Questing Beast makes a lot of good points regarding the simplicity of running Old School games, as originally intended. The DM creates a setting, players state the PCs' actions, and the DM describes the consequences. Story is a byproduct of gameplay. It couldn't be easier.
I’ve actually had the opposite of this problem you’re describing. Without realizing it, I created the sort of location-focused campaign you described, and it was easy and engaging! And now, out of the 10 people who’ve 10 people who’ve been at our table (some have left) 7 have expressed interest in being DM, 6 have run session, 5 have been DM for a full campaign, with two of those 5 breaking off and starting their own groups! If you take a step back from “having to know all the rules”, keep it casual, and focus on having a good time with friends rather than a “narrative”, things really get fun fast! I legitimately feel that, especially the first leg of my campaign, I’ve never seen or been a part of a better rpg experience! And I think that’s what got the ball rolling for all the excitement in our group! (Though I really can’t take all that much credit for it. I was imbibed on Brennan Lee Mulligan’s gameplay and some heavensend players.)
I think that the 5e culture is problabily the cause. The new players see tv shows, movies, podcasts, YT vídeos and celebrities playing, showing how to act better as a DM, how to emulate diferents voices, how to create your amazing world etc… and believe that is the way all the game must be. The players start to expect all of this in the game, and the ones who would like to be DM give it up. The previous editions of Dnd did not have this kind of comparation, it is just your group playing and thats all. I believe this kind of behavior was transferring to OSR games too, to think simple about the game and the adventure.
Damn I hear so much frustration in these comments. I think this solution applies to half of them: TALK TO YOUR PLAYERS. If they do something that contradicts their desire, or that upsets you, or doesn't make sense with the story, their character, the theme, whatever, TALK TO THEM. 9/10 they didn't think it through or have different expectations, and if they have the same expectations they're likely willing to accommodate for the sake of the game.
When I finally realized that any “plot” I tried to come up with isn’t going to hit the table the same it was in my head. The DMG should emphasize that you dont need to come up with the story, your players and the rules should procedurally generate itself.
That's true, but the 5e DMG will never say that, because it contradicts the campaign sourcebooks that they have been publishing. They have completely sold people on the idea that the DM's job is to provide the plot. At this point, we should just stop telling WotC what to do and just do things the way we want. The market will naturally correct itself, and I believe that Hasbro is experiencing this right now.
@@michaelgunn9883 agreed. Where is the short-modular style adventures that built the brand for so many decades?All the sudden everything has to be a giant 1-15 super campaign. It can be fun but it also severely limits the ability to customize the game to your players and a DM trying to build their own campaign with these as models are going to feel helpless!
@@CaseyWilkesmusic I have found some of those old 1980s modules at a local book store. They're pretty expensive, so I haven't bought very many. But thankfully, the old goodies are still out there. I have had some great times DMing the old modules for Call of Cthulhu, and now I need to work on incorporating some into my D&D group.
My DM friends and I have 5e as 90% of our TTRPG experience, and we've definitely felt that DM stress. We've concluded on one thing- the story is always better when we plan for a half-plan things and make up the world on the fly, rather than meticulously plan most of the world.
Let's be honest. Scaling challenges is why I prefer to run games like Mausritter or Into the Odd or other OSR games. 5e and the power creep and the time it takes for a dm to build fair yet challenging encounters deters me from running. I am really looking forward to seeing what they will do with 5e and one D&D encounter building. Also would love more outline style adventure books like they did for Mausritter not a 100 plus pages like all the 5e adventures
I do this all the time. I find the challenge interesting and enjoyable. I’ve run 5 campaigns from level 0 to 20 in 5e to date. My PCs are about to finish ToEE (original/reincarnated). However, for context, I have optional rules and house rules to make the game play and feel like 1e AD&D.
I see One DnD catering more to players than to dungeonmasters, their feedback system is designed that way, while I expect monsters will be more relatable to their CR, player powers that manipulate dice rolls are becoming more common with changes to guidance and resistance and this has the effect that bounded accuracy, 5e's best trait, will mean little
I still don't understand why 5e has a power creep problem. Like, the complaint is an overall potential power increase in players, not an uneven power increase for the same character at different levels, right? If it's only one offset, then shouldn't it be easy to counterbalance it considering that you have an entire campaign to do so?
@@NoneNullAnd0 I think there are two power creep cases in DnD 5e. 1: creep due to inconsistent character progression. 2: creep due to new content releases. Case 1: character power increases in sudden jumps not a by consistent amount. This is different for every class. The power jumps are compounded by magic items and feats. Players often become wildly different in power levels despite being the same character level. DMs often only have a few encounters to figure out the party's power level before they level up again and the power curve suddenly creeps up once more. This problem may never be experienced in some groups. But it is the main reason people feel the challenge-rating (CR) system is not useful for judging monster difficultly. Case 2: as new supplements are released the newer options have been consistently better than the older ones. This type of power creep means older content becomes less popular and players that choose it often have less powerful characters. When new material is released it can change how powerful characters are in sudden and unexpected ways. A good example was the introduction of steady-aim to the rogue class. If you are not familiar: rogues can sneak if an ally is next to the bad-guy. With the new steady-aim rule, a rogue can trade their movement to be able to sneak-attack without any ally present. This one rule addition makes a decent combat class just suddenly better in every way. DMs can often be surprised by such unexpected changes in power level since they don't have to learn all the new rules for every class in each new release. Balancing power levels in such a complex game is definitely a challenge for the developers. Maybe some power creep is inevitable? But it is definitely there in 5e and causes many DMs frustration
@@GeoffSayre So are you saying there's been a lot of "creep due to inconsistent character progression" in recent releases, more so than what's in the original content?
I work in a residential facility for mental health; a LOT of kids in IOPs and transitional care play D&D, especially 5e. I ran a one-shot Old School Essentials game for Halloween and the response to the game lines up with what you're talking about. They were surprised at how easy and streamlined OD&D is, loved the fact that each class actually felt unique, they were all about the location-based aspect of the game mixed with plot, but not plot heavy. They all grasped the rules within 5 minutes of play. And they also loved that you only needed a few books, where as 5e you need (let's face it, you can get by with the core books, but there's a lot of pressure to get every rule, species, spells, etc in all of the WotC books) a ton of books. They also dug seeing where the rules came from.
One thing we need is a culture shift to remove at least some of those burdens from the DM to the Players. For me, it's Event Planner. I'm otherwise a fairly outgoing person and empathetic, so the life coach part I can handle if needed, but planning is a pain, especially for people in the adult world (up through college it's fairly easy to get people together, but working full time with a 4 yr old makes planning hard... and coralling other adults is near impossible). Lets try and get players to be responsible for stuff like campaign notes, planning, etc... the things DMs do that don't need to be the DM. Can't help with story and play archs though, that's on you DM ;)
YES. A major issue with D&D culture right now is the players expect the DM to do literally everything, even bail them out of trouble they have caused themselves and just playing along with the power fantasy. Now as a DM I don't mind catering to a power fantasy but you have to work for it.
Hear hear! As the D.M. I want my players taking notes and thinking of their character in between sessions just as much as I'm prepping the next story and the next fight/encounter in between sessions.
Easy solution that works for me: have a specific regular day and time for DnD sessions (consult with the players on this as well). This way players know that for example Saturday 3 PM is DnD time. If they miss it, the game still goes on. DM if at least 3 people are there. You don´t have all players to be present all the time. I have my sessions on the same place of the weeks nearly for two years now. Gets all the organization done in 1 hour for the whole year or so. Don´t be afraid to skip a session if too few players are present.
@@mikhailchuev8715 That concept always sounds nice in theory. But as an adult with a full life going on, there is no single day that is free regularly enough to reserve it entirely for DnD. My party meets once every one to two months and that has to suffice. That's just life.
@@XMaster340 A lot of people go to a bar or similar every Friday night. And I assume that a lot of audience of this channel is let´s say 25+. You don´t have to do a session 8 hours long, 3 or 4 would suffice. So this works in real life, at least for me or DnD players I know personally. On other note, if you try to regularly pull a 60-hour work week, this might be an unsustainable practice and you may need to address this first.
my biggest challenge as a dm is communicating to players that there are places to explore and encounters to find, without just having an npc with no context say "hey, there's something over there but don't ask me how i know that"
i've been really enjoying using rumor tables. fill a big table with little adventure hooks, and every time the PCs return to town between adventures, have each one roll on the table and flavor it as what they picked up while hanging out in the tavern.
The main problem is that 5e DM´s are not supported. Most of 5e´s failures, like CR stopping to work at certain levels, the encounter design not matching up to the more free movie-style of play that is intended, magic items not having clear prices, lore being removed to make the world as adaptable as possible, are things that increase the load the DM has to carry. And in 5e, the DM carries most of the game, if you ask me. If you want to have a big, deep lore, you either have to write one or get hardly accessible books from older editions. Getting these books however means that any interesting or cool things like artifacts or spells have to be reworked into 5e by you, the DM, or just be left out. If you want to have a more cinematic action-ish approach to the game, you can´t have the crunch of 6-8 encounters per long rest. Which means you have to use few encounters making the game ridiculously easy for the PCs. If you don´t want it to be this easy, however, you have to build your own encounters, ignoring the guidelines 5e gives you, which requires some skill or gut feeling for the mechanics of the game. If you want a more crunchy approach to the game, the encounters work (at least on low level), but the PCs will want to buy magic items or sell their loot. Since magic items only have a price range, you have to create price and sell tables to make the game consistent. If the group want to have a deep story with lots of character development, the players give you their PC´s backstories and you will have to work around it. DMing 5e requires lots and lots of different skills, and there is almost no way to play the game without some effort from the DMs´ side. This creates a big pressure and even DM burnout and makes DMing 5e very unattractive. The things listed are just a short list of potential work for the DM. In the campaign I DM (PCs started at lvl 1 and are at lvl 16 now), almost everything is homebrew by now since the game system could not keep up with the players´ demands and broke more than one time, even though my players don´t build optimised or broken characters. I love DMing but this one campaign needs so much attention and work that I can only DM this one and no others at all. So, after finishing this campaign, I too will quit DMing 5e. It´s a shame, really, especially since I don´t see One DND getting any better by the goals and playtests released so far.
From my understanding CR and Encounter rates weren't even a thing until 3E and from my minimal experience with OCR(mostly just the Wizardry games and the like which copied the rules if D&D) even low level monsters would obliterate Thieves or Wizards.
@@ericschmitz6789 That's right, D&D and AD&D were fairly different in terms of play. Still, in 4e they nailed encounter design pretty good. It's a shame people hate on 4e so much, there were some good ideas and design choices in it.
@@rakshalneyrak9862 4e is a *very* good game hamstrung by bad corporate and marketing decisions. It’s a fantastic game in design terms which, from my perspective, answered very logically the player demands of the day (highly customizable class features). 4e’s fatal flaw is really that the game is *incredibly* difficult to play without miniatures, and worse that it was pitched as a game with an in-built VTT (a VTT that never was delivered). Were 4e to be released today I think it would do very nicely, it just missed the mark by about 10 years.
A few years ago i encouraged my players to make min-maxed builds to challenge myself as a new 5e DM and reasoned that: "If i can handle over powered characters i can handle anything in the future." My players are now at LVL 8 and i hardly know what to do anymore. It soon dawned on me how there basically arent any truly powerful monsters at higher CR. The Challenge Rating system is like a pyramid: In the bottom there are tonnes of monsters that are dangerous to the PCs. But at the top there is only a handfull. AND the "Monster vs Player Difficulty" is decreasing rapidly the higher up the pyramid you go. It will soon be impossible for me to plan an encouter. I saw this other GM who has players at LVL 12 and they steamroll, and i mean STEAMROLL, everything up to CR 25... 1-2 rounds and the Boss + Minions are dead. How the hell are we as DMs supposed to run games at LVL 15-20?... something that i want to do. Besides that, the combat take longer and longer and becomes more sluggish and taxing the higher LVL the players and monsters are, because each has so much stuff they can do and buffs / debuffs that we have to keep track of and everyone have several actions each per round. And of course the players don't put in the work to really learn their classes so i have to babysit them to not make errors which is super taxing for me as a DM. 5e is not fun anymore, i only feel preassured nowdays.
5e definitely seems to heap more work on the DM. One egregious area I've noticed is in statblocks - Old School statblocks can be written in one line, with all of the information you need at a mere glance - whereas 5e statblocks often eat up a page, and even truncated for quick reference are still cumbersome. Further - The whole idea that encounters and adventures must be perfectly balanced, and worse - CATERED - to the party is also big part of this. You can, of course play 5e in an OSR way wherein you throw that out the window - but be prepared for some shocked and huffy players moaning about how having to run away from tough encounters isn't fun or 'cinematic.'
Running away from encounters generally isn't fun because I've basically never seen a P&P system which does it well. The rules are always set up for fights to the death. The overwhelming majority of class abilities and spells are set up to help them fight and win, not get away if they're losing. I've never seen a system where chases and especially retreats weren't an afterthought. Especially if your group enjoys playing on grids for the tactical combat side of things. Once you run out of grid, everything kind of falls apart.
@@Zakon673 Yeah that's part of it. Retreats don't work well with the 5E tactical system. Monsters are typically as fast or faster than the PCs so escape generally isn't an option. And given how powerful combat healing is, they won't even think about retreat until someone has a foot in the grave. The other issue is the general structure of modern adventures versus OSR. OSR was kind of a sandbox, you had a big dungeon and you explored it for loot at whatever pace you preferred. There wasn't a specific objective for you to pass or fail. Your goal was to get as much treasure out of the place as you could. This made avoiding and picking and choosing what you fought a lot more impactful. In modern style, you've got a princess that has to be rescued and a dragon that has to be slain. And if you fail at that, then you've failed the quest. The thing with OSR style is that you have to actually fully embrace it to make it work. If you don't give people that dungeon exploration freedom, all the other emergent behaviors of OSR don't happen.
100% agreed - I've talked about the poor industry support of the TTRPG industry's support of new DM/GMs for over 2-decades. Complexity of the rules, expectations of the DM role, and lack of good training materials is a crisis. I believe that the importance of Questing Beast, myself, and hundreds of other TH-camrs is that we are at least trying to be a positive and helpful part of the hobby/business that we love.
I'm a younger DM at 19 years old, but I've started with ad&d at age 12. I used to run a west March and have a big group of friends I've met over my years of 5e, so I got my favorite players from years of being in various servers and such, and here's the problems I already have. 1. Noone wants a character with a stat less than 17. The average spread in ad&d was like, 60 points. Now the average is ~85. 2. The first encounter was 7 bandits, a homebrew slightly stronger bandit, and a eldritch very strong, but very slow monster. The players went straight up to the bandits, talked to them, which lured them into the monster, and then a player complained about the encounter being too hard while not trying to even play around the monster or any tactics. They just expect to be gods and get mad whenever they're not strong. 3. Noone wants to be level 1. I compromised at level 2 instead of 3. People complain because they want to be overpowered off the start. 4. Nobody wants to play 'cleric' or 'fighter' or 'thief'. These guys want homebrew so they can play a air gensai ranger that attacks with a wyrmling, or fairy illusionist clerics. Noone is normal.
About point 2, a lot of people I find lack any kind of tactical skill to the point where they don't even focus fire on enemies and the most team work they may do is give each other advantage outside of combat but the spellcasters never buff the fighter opting to just do more damage. People not wanting to start off at level 1 is fair considering that there are not a lot of options you can do and falls into the first issue I brought up with people never doing anything tactical. As for point 4 it was at least always official content but people rarely if ever played something down to earth. People say that its fantasy and you can do whatever, which is fair. But you always needed a mundane, grounded element in my opinion for the fantasy to feel special.
No joke. Last DnD game I played in I was the most unusual character at the table. I was a human fighter. Almost no NPC's we met (unless they were nobody peasants) were human, none of the other players were anything less complex that a half aasimar/high elf, and every other character was a caster on some level. Even the self professed "barbarian" was really just a cleric dedicated to whatever weird nonsense he needed to have all the barbarian rage talents and cleric spells at the same time.
I think too it depends on how well the group knows each other. Pick up games on roll 20 or joining a random game in a Facebook group is intimidating. I’ve DM’d for the same group of friends since 2002 when we started with 3.5. It was easy to convert to 5e and even play DCC and DW because I wasn’t nervous to make a ruling up on the fly when I didn’t know it.
There's also an element of selection bias, I think, especially if a lot of your exposure is online. You only have so many hours to devote to a hobby. If you get into 5e as a player, then you're probably going to consume more in the way of podcasts/livestreams and maybe the various powergaming-focused youtube channels (both the sorts of things that encourage you to make your DM's job harder, and entrench 5e RAW as a universal standard). But if you're a DM, you've got so much more to learn that isn't in the rulebooks, along with a need for more original content - I think this is much more likely to lead you to the OSR in the first place, since this scene recognizes that DMs *are* game designers at some level and the OSR's DIY ethos fits that.
Excellent advice, and I would like to add : As a player and DM of almost 40 years, location based objectives work just as well for the sprawling, story-based ideal 5E players seem to want. Just attach the theme from the last adventure into the current location, and, suddenly, players are under the illusion that they're in a story driven campaign. But here's the secret : after a month or three? That story really does begin to emerge, organically, in response to the party. If you're a new 5E DM, try location based objectives and watch the story evolve with your table.
I’ve found that only running a game or oneshot I’m REALLY passionate about makes it easier to avoid burnout. Don’t run an “infinite” campaign where you are a forever dm.
Great video! As someone who plays online, there are always players everywhere searching for DMs. And it's tough, because it's a lot of work to DM. I started 5e as a DM, not a player, knowing nothing about the system - but we all knew nothing about the system and were all friends with similar expectations of the game. What I've found with gaming communities and playing online, there's a very different expectation. It's not just about knowing the system and running an engaging story - I'm now expected to know every spell, every subclass ability, every new feat - and it's extremely exhausting and overwhelming. I know that optimising your PC is just part of the game as a player - but I find players that like to play that way a little frustrating. For them, it's about gaming the system and finding exploits to cruise their way through scenarios or defeat enemies, much like a video game. I also find the written 5e campaigns very difficult to read compared to older editions.
As a 5E DM, previously 4E DM, I love creating stories for my players, memorable NPC's, a living dynamic world. My current Campaign takes place in the same world as my 4E one just in a different part of it. One shots do not interest me either to play or run. For me, my fun comes through creating stories and having my players enjoy themselves going their own way encouraging me to consider storylines I had not previously considered which further builds up my world building. I love that 5e has encouraged so many new players into TTRPGs which has in turn benefited OSR and producers of so much 3rd party 5e product and revivals of other old game systems. Seems like we are all benefiting from what 5e has done for the hobby as a whole.
I would say that the results of those surveys just indicate how much more 5e hyper-focuses on options aimed at players, and not enough things that aid DMs in the minutiae of running the game, such as templates, optional tables, and many of the things that I generally have to go to exterior reference material to find. Such as the "Complete Dungeon Master's Guide to _________." (Random Encounters, NPCs, just to name two)
Great post Ben. This is the 5e player base issue in a nutshell. They each expect to have their overly complicated character backstory fit into an epic story line along with 2, 3, or more players at a table. No one is capable of doing that.
"Where was that for 5e" My greatest issue as a dm in 5e was feeling lost, given a notion of what dnd is meant to be rather than a specific guide of how to dm. I have to homebrew so much on the average session that 5e is forever going to be the 'homebrew edition' rather than an edition with hard rules.
I think another key point is what you touched on at 5:03 -- 5e's design is deliberately DM-proofed. That grand majority of material published by WotC is player-focused, and lacks any real direction or help for DMs. This is crippling for new DMs, and hamstrings the rest of us if playing rules as written, and it shows no signs of improving (especially given the One D&D playtest packets released so far).
I’m shocked that, like you said, in older editions there were way more people DMing. I’m basically brand new and trying to get into a first campaign but I can already see that there’s a disparity, a club to play at my campus fell apart cuz the one person willing to DM wasn’t able to, and looking online I can definitely see there’s a lot more players looking for games than people running them
Time and Financial cost can play a big role in people wanting to DM I feel like. One thing I've learned about the OSR (from watching your channel and others) is the importance of the layout of key information in rulebooks. Time spent looking up rules instead of running/playing the game is time wasted. Keeping the rules simple and easy to remember or locate is a essential in a rulebook. While I like having physical books, I've also been incredibly frustrated playing online because I'm forced to rebuy books to use in a VTT even if I own a physical copy! That and on top of paying for subscription fees to use the premium features of those VTTs as well can add up pretty fast. I'm hoping the new edition of D&D will let me own the physical book AND the digital one without having to rebuy! Another thing I think might be an issue is DM confidence. As you said in the video there is a lot on a GM's mind and that's a daunting task for newer GMs.
I've been fortunate enough to play 5e for a while for multiple good dms. I've dm'd once and been overwhelmed by the amount of work required to bring about a good experience for everyone, and truth be told, it showed. I've told myself if I were to DM again, i'd want to have most of it already planned out even before session 0, which would be like writing a whole novel. A lot of this I feel comes from the expectations people have placed on DMs from their consumption of professional streams like Critical Role. So many people are expecting Matt Mercer, but the fact is, there's only one Matt Mercer.
As someone who has played and Dm'd every edition from 1st through 5th (but not much 4th) including Pathfinder, I have to say I agree. Running a 5th edition campaign can be a slog and there were days when it felt more like work than fun. Of course, sometimes 3rd/pathfinder was also a bit of a slog.
I have been playing D&D for going on 45 years and I have been a DM for most of that time. I think you hit this nail right on the head. In this day and age you have to run a session zero for your campaign, even if everyone has been playing together for years, so the players can do all their prep work and the DM can layout expectations for the game. Back in the day, you know how our campaigns started? We sat down, rolled 3d6 in order, spent 5 minutes equipping them, then I would start randomizing a dungeon straight out of the DMG. If your character died, you rolled up another one and the game continued. It became a running gag that players did not even name their characters until 3rd level. In case you think all we did was play one shots, this was certainly not the case, once the core set of characters was established, we would move on to modules or whatever crazy idea I had for a dungeon. At one point my players wanted to play the Giant series, but did not have high enough level characters, so I ran nothing but random dungeons for 3 months, playing from Friday night to Sunday night, while they speed leveled to 9th. After we finished the Giants modules, these same characters tackled Tomb of Horrors. To this day, that was one of the best campaign I ever ran.
Yeah, I'm really not a big fan of that insistence that you NEED session 0. We're gonna roll some dice and kill some monsters, let's just friggin' relax. No, you do not need a backstory. No, I do not want to read it.
Once again, why is your way the only way for everyone? Yeah, it sounds nice to just jump into a game like that, and yet you’ve lost that ability… how? Other people exist, therefore woe is your way of life? And now they should feel your wrath… because? When your game is determined by how others play it, you’ve got bigger problems. Your character generation sounds like Traveller with extra steps. Now THAT GAME couldn’t WAIT to kill PCs until a suitable one was formed! It was glorious… and by “was”, I of course mean “still is”, because RPGs aren’t food, they don’t spoil when they go out of print. Keep calm and game on. 👑
@@commandercaptain4664 It's wild how two people can read a comment completely differently. I don't get that at all from the comment above yours. Anyway, game on is always solid advice.
I'm curious how the poll results would differ if the data could be filtered to just responses from people who answered both, especially since both polls have similar numbers in the "Very few or none" response. I could also see OSR having more groups with mostly GMs simply because people inclined to look past the big name TTRPGs to discover OSR games are more likely to be invested enough in the hobby to want to be a GM.
Yeah I think this is more filtering (DMs are used to reading rules and more passionate about their tables) than inherent advantages in OSR. By which I mean, most OSR DMs were probably DMs before picking up the systems, not OSR players who converted into DMs.
I've been seeing the shortage of 5E DMs for a few years. I'm on a couple of D&D Facebook groups for my state and local area. There are a lot of players looking for games and all the local Adventure League games are packed. This has always been a problem to one degree or another. In the 90's there was a shortage of DM's too. I think the reason that OSR has a lot of DMs is that the people who are into the OSR most were DM's back in the olden times. None of the people I played with in the 80's and 90s still play. The accessibility and ease of running issue is a big one and here is what I think WotC is going to do to address it. Virtual gaming. They are making the game so complex with how many species (sic) and classes and more than 100 official subclasses that nobody could keep it all in their head. You have to use the digital tools to run a game and that is exactly what they want. They are looking for you to use subscription based tools so they can charge for it.
5e doesn't have nearly as many races as 3.5 though, there were what, 3 PHBs, multiple setting exclusive races, and supplemental material that added half races. 3.5 also run to lvl 30 with multiple subclass/heroic/epic classes where 5e you only get 1 subclass(unless you multiclass) and runs only to lvl 20. 5e cut down on the complexity compared to 3.5.
@@ChirutheKenku Every time they release a new product they add a few. Since they intend for DMs to be running games off of D&D Beyond and their upcoming VTT, it won't matter. Everything will be a click or two away and easy to manage.
@@grumpy_wizard_blog Right, but by the end of 3.5, which did not have any real digital support, they had 173 player races alone, 5e only has maybe 20. And DMs kept up with that without stuff like d&d Beyond just fine.
@@wyrdbrew But WotC is looking to mitigate that, sure it's via sub based system, but if the dm wants his players to have access to all his books then the dm is the only one that needs to pay it. And while, sure it doesn't help in person games too much, it's a life saver for online games. Plus you don't have to use DDB, just use R20 or one of the other VTT systems that let you purchase, share, and organize content.
As someone who got started a year ago, in 5e, I think this makes a kind of sense. It's not just D&D that's changed. Fantasy has become a huge genre, and continuity is king. Brandon Sanderson is raking it in as he writes series after series of books on interconnected worlds. Marvel is releasing blockbuster movies and shows where the characters enter and leave each other's stories, DC and Star Wars are doing the same (albeit with mixed success). Players who come from that culture want to do the same. I played Adventurer's League games at my local shop and they felt kind of bland whenever that continuity wasn't there. I don't think that will go away until/unless the culture shifts. I'm not totally sure it's a bad thing either. Storytelling and participation are accessible and accepted now in ways they weren't before. We just haven't adapted. I absolutely agree that too much is expected of modern DMs. 5e or 6e or whatever could benefit from a quick encounter and scenario builder. Maybe even something AI assisted - not to replace the DM, but to help them quickly generate content they can then adapt to their table, take some of that cognitive load off. But I personally wouldn't enjoy dropping the story and continuity. If I just wanted to go through enemies, traps, and puzzles? Well, I'd play a different game.
How he describes DMing in 5e is kind of how I always have done this since 2e. I just thought that was how you were supposed to do it. A deep story driven world makes it easier to adventure in. It answers the question of what questions to ask. Players back stories were the best tool ever to compel players on adventures and even present challenges. I just considered most of this part of framing a good campaign. I never put much thought into it being hard for some players. Maybe that's why our group usually wanted me to DM.
I am a returning player/DM - I played From the Boxed sets through 2nd Edition. It was much looser, more fun, as a DM fun was number one, 'Rules are the Guideline only' . Looking at the new books its "standard actions, move actions, full-round actions, free actions, swift actions, and immediate actions" WTF is this?! We just rolled for initiative and had a blast. I remember reading on one of the very first pages, that DnD was about fun and imagination and thats how we rolled. Making rules, breaking rules and bending rules as needed all for the sake of having a good time with friends.
The bloat of 5e streams generates the culture imo, new people want to play the thing they just watched, not what the dm has run - they dont see what the dm has actually done so it becomes some mystical power. Streams that showed the work from the GM could maybe help demystify and get new people into it... but also the 5e culture has been created off of the back of this problem and I don't think they want it to change
While this doesn't solve the issues you present, this is some of the many reasons why i only run campaigns with close friends. They know what i bring to the table and they dont expect more or feel entitled to things they might get in other campaigns. They know that if i make a different or odd rulings there is a reason for it.
This comes up with our 11 year old regular. She sees us playing, and she wants to play D&D, and I hand her something from 5E, and her eyes glaze over. She had fun playing, but DMing is overwhelming for her. We can play and run 5E because we're lifelong gamers - the barrier to entry for a new gamer is very high. I also suspect that the OSR scene is similar to the Indy RPG scene 10 or so years ago - the DM/GMs are the ones who are most likely to go looking for a new game to run, and they're the ones who find the new games that are out there. So you have a lot of DMs in the OSR because it is much more common for a player to go along with the group, or for a play group to play games based on what the DM/GM is willing to run.
I DM almost exclusively for other DMs- I have 1 current player who’s never DM’d and 2 previous players who’d never DM’d. It’s an extremely healthy table because everyone knows the rules, generally knows the lore, etc… Nothing against non-DM’s, but my table _gets me._ They get scheduling conflicts, they get bio breaks, they get “oh shoot I CANNOT keep doing that voice.” And I should clarify- I’ve never been a player. I’ve never not been the DM. I started off DMing with 0 experience running Rime of the Frostmaiden. I’m introverted, not the best person in the group with rules (one guy’s been DMing 10 years and another like 12). So I’m no Brennen Lee Mulligan, I’m no Matt Coleville or Mercer. I’ve never even finished a Tolkien book.
As a DM with about 7 years of experience across several editions of DnD and other systems, in my opinion the biggest problem about DMing for 5E is setting expectations. The PHB is really lacking in this one. I always set the expectations with the new players, explain the difference between a DnD show and a DnD game (it is needed sometimes) and usually have a positive experience. Some of players went on to become dungeon masters of their own after a couple of years, so I consider my model of behavior to be successful. Additionally, I encounter more and more new players with sky-high expectations about DnD sessions. They usually quickly leave my group and I am not afraid of letting them go. I mostly attribute it to Critical-role-like shows and WotC ads, to be honest. Another thing that could help is to combine DMG and PHB together. Maybe make it a little bit bigger, but then it would be more evident that a DM is also a player, like everybody else in the group.
To be fair, I've been playing D&D/DMing since 2e, and we still ran plot/story driven games. Frankly, while most players I knew would settle for location based, they preferred story games. And commercially, I still remember thin little supplements that could be "Used as a stand-alone adventure, or combined with the other adventures from this series, to make a complete campaign with a satisfying climax to this epic story!" 😆
Don't you hate being "of a certain age" where you have to start off with "In my day..." LOL! Ugg! Don't get me wrong, I'm "of a certain age" as well, and I often have to stop myself when I start to sound like I'm telling "kids" to get off my lawn >.
When you're getting your second degree and the proff mentions Watergate and everyone in the class looks at you expecting you to have personal experience.... C'mon, I'm not THAT old! Just because I've been seen with several professors reminiscing about the 80s...
I agree. Id say 80-90% of my play experience has been behind the DM screen. Probably for the last 5 years or so I have had next to no ambition to run a 5e game. The power creep, and the focus on a defined narrative over emergent story has kind of killed it for me. As a player I have always shied away from attaching any sort of back story to my characters and usually scribble a name down just before the initial session. As a DM I have little interest in player back story and navigating the labyrinth of rules that often accompany a players finely tuned and well thought out character build. Make a random Joe, play them well, be creative and lets see where we get!
Definitely a fascinating phenomenon, I wonder what a deeper statistical analysis could reveal. Anyway, I love videos where you talk about stuff other than the books themselves, such as this one or the one where you talked about the problem with Hit Points in D&D. Please, make more!
This is something I've been feeling for a long time but have struggled to put into words. So often new players will want to DM but will hit a hard barrier. Or, worse, they begin running a game and quit because they feel overwhelmed. I'm glad you brought attention to this problem
Forever DM here since ‘83. I can’t agree more. I actually really liked 3.x ed but eventually it broke my brain. I just couldn’t keep up. I found solitude in OSR before giving 5th a chance and it’s okay, but is still a huge drain on mental resource when trying to balance the abilities and feats of PCs and monsters. Unfortunately, neither of my two groups want to go back to OSR any time soon and there’s nothing worse than imposing a system on players when they’re not interested. If I could put together a solid BECMI group I would run it in a shot.
I have run a successful multi-year 5e campaign to great acclaim in my group. It's hard work! It's *much* easier to run Call of Cthulhu or any old school version of D&D. The mechanics of 5e are very 'touchy'; you have to consider your rulings very carefully. The system is always at the forefront, whereas it disappears in old school games. I would always prefer to play/run old school; I wouldn't even consider attempting to run 5e with all the bloat that they've introduced over the years. "I'm running a Wolftherian Psi-hunk Kitsunemaster with a Naruto build out of Tasha's Guide To Avengers Assemble Fursonas. I chose a Rainbow Unicorn as my pet/mount/significant other/familiar and I'll be quasi-classing into a Galactus-kin at 17th level."
I co-ran a West Marches PF2 server, and one thing I noticed was that it didn't take much for players to get interested in running games. We minted more than a few first-time GMs, some of whom never even played TTRPGs before. A huge part of it? If you could run your character competently, you could probably run a session! Everything you needed to know was on the creature's page, and one big assumption in PF is that players know how to run their characters. There's very few places a GM has to make a call because it isn't spelled out. One issue we did run across now and then were 5e players who came in and expected a bespoke experience. If they came in off the CR wave, they were puzzled that the story sometimes came from how your player reacted to the things around them, rather than having scenes crafted just for them (something that was impossible with how many players we had). The ones who adjusted their expectations were the happiest.
I think if we start DM'ing 5e like OSR like you were saying, it will attract more DM's. The best stories come out of how the characters face the challenges the environments present and all it takes is a little tweak here and there to get 5e there
It’ll take a bit more than that to achieve OSRness, like getting rid of death saves and skills (using ability checks instead) and severely limiting feats and class upgrades. This goes a long way with high level play.
Honestly I think you're a lot better just running OSR from the beginning. Going in with 5E expectations really probably won't lead to anything good. If anything you want to dispel those expectations as soon as possible.
OSR lets the DM & Players make up the story. Since the advent of the "rules to cover every eventuality" mindset in 3rd ed, the flexibilty to create the story was replaced by follow the module.
You left out the fact that a big chunk of the new market was taken from the video game culture and from millennials. There's a lot of consumerism and entitlement there. Those folks want a different experience and it's centered around them and their having all their desires met, and that quickly. Those folks don't want to DM, they want to have an amazing experience served up to them on a platter.
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The advice that I give to every new DM is: Pretend that you know what you are doing and if you mess up, freely admit that you did, fix it and move on.
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5e doesn't support DMs. The products are player focused and I think this is by design. WotC wanted to monetize the players. Within the hobby, DMs were always the money makers for publishers. WotC wanted to monetize the 5 to 6 people at the table at the expense of the DM. Just my $0.02.
that is a very interesting argument. can you provide some examples which show how WOTC is targeting players instead of DMs? From a capitalist profit oriented viewpoint that makes complete sense, but where does it show through? I would love to see some concrete examples.
@@bigeye6606 the millions of subclasses and 70+ races show players are being marketed to. OneD&D will do this with customizing your vtt mini too I think. Nickle and diming you for customization.
@@bigeye6606 The characters are highly customizable but the DM tools do almost nothing to account for the increase in options.
Creative way of saying 2 cents lol
@@lt3746 there's no cents symbol on most keyboards nowadays.
I've definitely noticed that many of the 5e players I know tend to prefer deep story over dungeons and exploration. They see the DM as a director of a hit TV series and they're playing the lead characters. It's alot of pressure when you're comparing yourself to Mercer, Colville, Perkins, etc
The most frustrating aspect of D&D players who want a deep story is they never take the hook. You have an interesting scenario between the Teifling PC and the prejudiced NPC you have to meet? Just use disguise self. Enter a town that has a complex moral issue going on? Just investigate at a surface level before choosing a side. Need to convince somebody to give you a second chance? Just do a persuasion roll instead of explaining your reasoning. When you don't want to do combat or exploration and you don't fully engage with the story beats I have presented to you what do I as a DM have left to give? Also why don't we just play Vampire the Masquerade if you want heavy story and roleplay?
+1! Anyone who tells me I should be more 'Mercer' gets this line verbatim "No I'm not Matt Mercer. But we have one thing in common, you aren't playing at either of our tables" 8>D
I enjoy being a story driven DM. I have really cranked up the dial for my Curse of Strahd game and it is so much roleplay over roll play. Level eight and one player just received the first magical weapon, a +1 short sword. Strahd has stripped the land of all magical items to ensure his reign continues, etc. Also it is a humancentric campaign. No dark vision for anyone. But, this is the tip of the homebrew iceberg I had to have player buy in to create a proper horror campaign in 5e. Next campaign will be story driven and all, lots of RP. But, the homebrew system will be OSR and my own twists. The world will be low fantasy with a massive influence from Runehammer's A Burning in New Haven short stories. There will be horror, moral quandaries but not the level of Ravenloft. There will be much more freedom and the end goal would be to retire characters at level 9, 10, etc. with their own keeps, towers, guilds, etc. Not Avenger level cosmic conflicts. Less is more.
Sidenote: I don't use persuasion, or intuition rolls. If you plead a good enough argument you can convince the NPC. If you think the NPC is lying then act on it. I do not use push button skills, even in 5e.
@@bigblue344 I had a game where the players had been asking for access to the wish spell at a low level for a few sessions. Eventually I had them run into a trapped Demon. They'd recently been slaying devils so I leaned into the blood feud. The Demon offered them a single wish if they set her free.
They just turned and left. Then complained that the dungeon wasn't story heavy enough.
@@TuberTugger Man wanting to get the wish spell at low level sounds like a red flag.
The scenario sounds awesome btw. I hope you find players that mesh well with what you want to run.
I'm literally editing a video where I bring this up as something one d&d is likely failing to address
Even in their new surveys they don't ask if the person is a GM or a player. I doubt they'll address the issues with the design that produce a GM drought.
Nice, I'll be looking forward to that one!
miiiiiindmeld
I agree. One DnD is feeding the players only. It's going to compound the issue.
If your player base is complaining about unbalanced classes, races and stats, the solution isn't more adjustments. The solution is a paradigm shift.
I think the way they address it, sort of, is by pushing the game toward online play with a VTT. If all you have to do is click on the monster or character to see what skill/ability/spell/attack options are and the computer does the rest, "DMing" is easy. If you buy WotC adventures, which will have all the VTT assets included, DMing means you are the person who triggers the appropriate sound file when the players arrive at a certain point in the adventure. You don't even have to read the box text. They hired Mercer or some other voice actor to do it for you.
As a 20+ year forever DM, who DMed 5e for years, I think you've nailed it with the culture being a large problem. The folk who have piled the most expectations on me have been folk who play 5e exclusively. Sometimes it's the influence of critical role or other professional podcasts. Sometimes it's just a culture they learned at a different table.
5e also sits in an awkward position mechanically for me. If I want a crunchy game to play on a VTT, 5e doesn't have enough rules and structure. It also doesn't have constant support. WotC supplemental rules have been lacking and their core rules are often contradictory. Pathfinder 2e, with it's searchable rules wikis, and the rate that they pump out options, means I can keep things mechanically fresh without having to do all the work myself all the time.
Yet if I want something more freeform, less pre-established rules, more homebrew, then the answer still isn't 5e. The core books are huge compared to more freeform games. If I'm trying to homebrew up something, or throw out a spur of the moment ruling, I enviably get a 5e player trying to "correct" me.
One D&D would need a cultural shift to become my primary game. That would require WotC to dedicate the game to a strong core design philosophy and I just can't see that happening. They won't take any risk with it because making $$$ is their number one priority. Thus indie games are the place for me.
OSE has been a breath of fresh air out of the pressure of 5e and the "theatrical" approach to the game.
At this point people are giving up on WotC. Pretty much everyone has their own full system overhaul at this point
Your preference is yours. but 5e is highly customizable and has TONS of searchable resources so I'm not sure what you mean by that.
And as a person who knows most of the rules of a player corrects me then have different players. If you don't care what the rule is then it's a quick, I understand but this is my decision.
@@Qyshawn the problem is, the customizations are so balanced its just like a coat of paint on the same buick...dnd should never be fully balanced.
@@gotpaladin9520 Uh, 5e is wildly imbalanced.
Great vid, sir.
From my experience, the DM shortage is certainly a recent phenomenon. I came in shortly after 2e, and easily half the players were also DMing their own side-games. My own highschool group had me running a side-game of Lankhmar, while other players were running us in Darksun, Planescape, and home-brew worlds. Maybe it's the recent surge of new gamers all at once to 5e D&D, but we were all DMing 1e/2e within the first year of playing, so I don't see the number of new D&D players as being the reason for such a huge shortage. Afterall 5e has been around for several years now, so there should have been a ton of DMs realy to take on the player surplus. The only area I can compare that level of GM shortage to is extremely niche games with tiny player-bases (Bluebeard's Bride, Dark Places & Demogorgons, etc.).
A wild Seth appeared from the tall grass!
I love your channel Seth!
I've been running games for 10 years, 5e for 5 years. I LOVED PHB+DMG+MM. But 5e has gotten BLOATED. I cannot run it anymore.
When the offical rule from wizards was that you could only use PHB +1 (Xanathars, Volo's, SCaG, etc) , Things were atleast somewhat balanced. it was DESIGNED to only be PHB plus one other source book during character creation.
Wizards has removed this rule and players can grab from ALL of the books now to create some Over Powered characters.
Call it a failing on my part but I cannot read
Name Page Count
PHB 329
MM 352
DMG 320
Volo 224
XGtE 192
MtoF 256
AqInc 222
TcE 192(Why tell the players the puzzles?! argh)
FtoD 224
MpMM 281
AAG 66
SCaG 159
GGtR 256
AqInc 224
ERftLW 320
EGtW 304
MooT 256
VRGtR 256
S:ACoC 224
For a total of 4,657 pages that I as the DM am supposed to KNOW and be able to recall at a moment's notice, judge, and make a ruling on.
Call it a failing on my part, but 5e is un-DM-able right now. I am unable to "Balance" the game beyond level 5 characters.
I've been running Basic Fantasy (170 pages) and love it.
I've also been running "The Fantasy Trip: In the Labyrinth" (176 pages) and I've been loving that too! The combat is a LOT more realistic and deadly.
I think part of the reason is that WotC and the DnD community have discourage Player vs DM in all form while the OSR encourage it. And, Call of Cthulhu is built apon keeper/DM vs Player.
Do you have any theories on why this could be happening?
I started playing in the 2e era. For me the difference can be distilled down to back then I could prepare for a few hours, and have material to run games for days. In 5e I prepare for days, and have material for a few hours. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it seems a lot more mentally taxing to run than it was back in the day.
I think this is true, but also it's a self-selection issue too. OSR players are usuall already highly motivated and interested in GMing while 5e's fanbase is probably mostly players who want to feel epic. The relative sizes of the fanbase is also relevant I think.
Ding ding. And polls and surveys are naturally inclined towards selection bias in the first place. I wager Questing Beast also attracts more OSR arbiters than players as well.
I think the young fellas like the crazy feats
Old guys like it easy and fun.
I find that the importance of role play always gets mentioned by the 5e acolytes but then combat is made complicated by feats and actions .! Seemingly to make less room for role play.
Just an old guy rambling .
I just want people to play any version they like and to have fun.
Yeah this is definitely a factor I reckon. 5e is so big these days that a lot of people who want to play it have probably never played another TTRPG before and D&D 5e is one of the few they’ve heard of. Whereas I only heard about OSR through research when I was already interested in DMing and been a player long enough to be confident I could learn to run games.
100 agree
Yep, that epic part has to be the strongest attraction. Sadly, 5E (Marvels Fantasy Avengers) cannot deliver.
It's true that in a way 5E culture puts DMs on a pedestal. However, it also expects them to be a slave to the players' expectations and put in an absurd amount of work regardless of whether the players reciprocate.
Change it at your table. Session 0's exist for a reason so you can set expectations
@@edwardp4038 I'm talking more about a wider culture of play. Anybody can change anything for their table, that has always been the case since the beginning of the hobby. I am just expanding a bit on what Milton said here about the bigger picture, and the effect it's having on the larger DND community is very evident.
Wow sounds like Hegel's lord-bondsman dialectic...
Player, "I wish you DM'ed like Matt Mercer." Me, "I wish you played like Laura Baily and looked half as good." but in my head, "F off, why do I even do this..."
This is why I set the ground rules at the start. "This is how I run my game. I put a lot of time into planning the game for you guys so please respect that." and so on. If the players don't like that they can spend time finding another DM.
I gotta say as a teacher the problem you described with DMing in 5e sounds really similar to being a teacher.... you have to be an instructor, administrator, planner, and counselor tailoring the experience to each kid.
Perhaps you've come to a core aspect of the argument: should play be standardized?
@@frankpiper8802 I mean the analogy falls apart of you start thinking in terms of solutions because you're dealing with willing participants in one and mandatory attendance for children in another. If I could just tell all the kids who don't want to go to school not to come my job would be pretty easy lol
Being a teacher, in addition to the satisfaction of contributing an important service to society, you actually get paid for all your hard work. As a game master you at best get some snacks on game night!
In short - Should game mastering be as taxing as a full time paid job?
DMing SHOULDN'T be all that, though. It's a bunch of friends getting together and the guy with a cool idea for a campaign is the one who DMs this time around. That's the way its supposed to work. These are your peers, not your kids. (Unless they are your kids, but that's Dad hat, not DM hat.) As DM you are a facilitator of entertainment. That's it. And teaching rules to new players, of course, although the more experienced players should actually be handing most of that. And yeah, that alone might be enough that a DM should get paid, dependingon circumstances. We pay "fun coordinators," right? But if I gotta do all that other stuff, too, then not only should I definitely be getting paid, but folks might start demanding I be certified. Not just in rules, but psychology.
@@nrais76 If I had a group of players that were demanding things from me I would definitely start charging a cover fee. I've been lucky enough to never have players who really expected me to be Matt Mercer or Brennan Lee-Mulligan. However, encounter balancing in 5e has been my biggest ire. I love how the OSE doesn't expect you to balance that shit. Every time my players get in over their heads by taking a fight they should have avoided, someone makes a comment that I must be trying to kill them to have them be captured or something even though it's a situation where they are 100% at fault and I wasn't really expecting them to attack. But players have this belief that's it's all just "interactive storytelling" and assume they're being railroaded when they're not...there's a dragon and we're all first level? Well I guess we're supposed to fight it because why else would it be there... Oh we're dying now? This must have been the DM's plan. What do you mean make a new character? But I never resolved the revenge plot in my backstory!
5 years DM here that constantly runs for groups of new beginners. I find that the problem is not the players being new to the game, but rather the way 5e encourages the DM to be this professional movie director. I've run simple OSR style games for complete beginners and they didn't taxed me as much as a beginner would in 5e.
To me as a dm of 15 years the hardest part has always been making sure everyone arrives on time and has their shit together before the session starts. And I dont blame people at all for not wanting to deal with that
What I hear from other DMs and have experienced some of myself is that 5e era players have no respect for the DM as a player. I don't know what the problem is but they seem to see the DM as an entertainer and not as a fellow player. They're simultaneously entitled to the DM's work but also don't feel as if they don't have any obligation to the game.
Thats how I feel too. Partly because the people who come together to play are not real life good friends. The are strangers with very high expectations and not willing to contribute to a positive experience for everyone involved.
Understanding what it takes to DM is one of the reasons why I like having DM at the table as PLAYERS :-)
1. They are just happy to be there :-) "God, just let me play!" No more "forever DMing" :-)
2. They TRULY understand just how much work it takes to DM so they are very understanding and don't give you a hard time.
3. They probably know the rules well and can help you if you haven't mastered them.
Tonight is my first session in a new campaign I'm running. I put up ads online on Reddit and on D&D Beyond. Respondents had to fill out a questionnaire. I had 64 respondents for only 5 spots - and I am not a known DM or anything like that.
4 of the 5 players I chose for my spots have significant DM experience. I didn't design it that way but it was a plus when considering applicants. But this is not a sustainable model for the game. The "DM shortage" IS a real problem. It's one of the reasons that competent - yet unspectacular - DMs are charging money ($10-$20 per player, per session) to run games on Start Playing Games. And easily maintaining 3-5 players per game.
This has been my experience. As with all things, it's been an experience, not a rule that applies to every single person. But yeah, I've seen that a lot.
This is why my two buddies and I are starting a campaign with just the three of us (2 players and a DM). We've all DM'd so we know how hard it can be and so we try to put as much effort as possible into characters, rp, and investment in the game and world.
I see we're ignoring that the hobby is full of people with dog**** people skills, and it's been like this a very long time.
Of course we have people who don't consider others sitting at their table.
There was always a DM shortage. Back in the '70s and '80s, we could see the same situation, with AD&D tables always looking for DMs, while other games had a much more "balanced" GM to player ratio. I think the core reason is that D&D has always been the gateway -- back then, as now, most players started there, and most of those moved on entirely from RPGs within a couple of years, probably never having tried any other game.
Other games (a few exceptions here, such as West End's Star Wars or White Wolf's Vampire) tended to be made up of people that started in D&D but fell in love with the hobby, and moved into other games in order to experience different things. People that love RPGs are more likely to play longer, be willing to try GMing in order to share excitement about a rule set they found, etc.
I occasionally fell into the exception. In high school and the later part of 90s, I had 7 players and 6 DMs no waiting but no campaign getting finish. But Between the early 80s and late 90s you had to hunt for a DM and were happy to find a lousy one. After my 3E group fell apart there was another shortage. I think the % number of gamers to like to DM is same. But the whole numbers are up. And I freaking older and need nappy time.
True, especially now with online access, DMs should be easier to find than ever before. This article mainly stressed an in person shortage at New York, and I’m betting that’s due to so many DMs moving from 5E to OSR, while the players are staying put and not bothering to look any further, sometimes even quitting from laziness of having everything handled to them (Crit Role and Stranger Things promising them a game experience that was not there).
Although a common complaint I keep hearing from newcomers is of the “I want to play but I have no friends” or “my friends don’t want to play it” variety. That’s a marketing problem Wizards is reluctant to fulfill.
WOW! 28k views in 17 hours. Well done, Ben! You've obviously touched upon a subject people want to talk about. I shall cogitate and film a response video. Bravo!
Hey Professor! Not to stir up $h1t, but this video: th-cam.com/video/nWmkOTR5Z2k/w-d-xo.html was annoying. I'd be really interested in your take!
Looking forward to it!
Great editorial Ben. I agree with you about 5E. The culture there does not make the task of DMing it very enjoyable in my opinion. The amount of prep work required is fairly daunting.. just with 'stat blocks' and the like. I tend to run a 'blend' of the two styles myself. Site based and character centric. I enjoy developing out the NPCs so that they can react organically to the actions of the player characters. In this way, as DM, I'm really just 'chronicling the events of the game, rather than actually 'inventing' the plot. The plot develops from the actions of the players and the reactions of the NPCs over time, session after session.
Bingo! I think that's the best approach, and it can be applied to 5e in places where 5e is still the more popular option and there's a lot of people who still want to play it.
Love your review videos man. Really, great stuff. Comment is spot on!
Same. I make a few NPC's, a few locations. The players drive the rest.
I started running 5e for my two kids right after it was released. The core game in the main 3 books was pretty good. They crawled through dungeons and towns, and the whole thing worked really well. Instead of updating the core engine to allow the DM to run more diverse scenarios, they took the easy path.
Where they messed up was that they kept heaping on player options that made it harder and harder for the DM to keep up with all of it. After a while you had to adjudicate how the squid person barista's gamebreaker feat interacted with the three levels of rulebreaker paladin that they took. Of course that depended on if it was the UA version or the one from Mordentasha's Dumpster of Everything. After you figure it out your player tells you that "well, actually Pope Jeremy said in one of his edicts that it works like this...". Yeah that's not fun.
I think modern D&D is overall better than it used to be, but the modern culture that surrounds it is garbage. WotC enables this garbage player culture in order to sell books, because players outnumber people that want to run the game. It is easier to write a new class or subclass than it is to make a (functional) system for spaceship battles (looking at you Spelljammer) I think the push towards "paid DMs" is part of their propaganda to normalize people charging to run games, because the fun just isn't there most of the time and money is a good substitute. I also think that is the reason for the new digital setup. Professional DMs who charge for games can afford it.
Player books will always sell more than DM books - and always have, hence the move to"player options" and away from dungeon modules long before 5e. Players will always outnumber DMs by design - one-on-one play isn't the norm after all. And in order to sell those you have to power creep the characters, and each one is harder to avoid unintended interactions with the ever increasing prior books.
That said "No UA. No multiclassing. No feats." fixes basically all those problems. Alternatively if you play with reasonable people: "you work out your characters and I will trust you on them, if it turns out to be broken change it to something else".
"well, actually Pope Jeremy said..." from a player is getting "well play in his home game then, my interpretation is different. Feel free to call it a house rule if that makes you feel better." fro me. Though that wouldn't happen, I don't play with that type of player in the first place.
I agree with the first part but Professional DMs ?
How twee
If you can’t find a DM become a DM.
Just have fun
@@samholden5758 I totally agree with and liked your comment. I too have a reasonable group I run games for and about half of us DM, so it is really cool. It also took years to find them. So no, I don't have to deal with the papal edicts of pope Jeremy coming up at the table, or the aforementioned squid person barista, but it took a lot of work to get there.
@@seanfaherty I was a DM for several years before I ever got to play, but that was what was required. I think the Professional DM thing is weird too, but if people are willing to do that and pay for it, I guess they can do that.
I agree that the move to digital will probably be combined with a host of paid online DMs so you can always jump into a session.
Two months ago, my 5e player asked me if I could DM an AD&D campaign. JOKE was on him, I only run AD&D! He said, and I quote, "I thought you just had a lot of house rules."
after looking at 5e spells and saves.... 2e is superior
hilarious
I've been a forever DM since age 10 in 1981. I had to be the DM in order to get the neighborhood kids to play the game I desperately wanted to play. I never thought about it and just did it. I can honestly say that the task of DM has become inflated and sounds daunting to newcomers. It's so much easier than it sounds. As you get older and have more experienced players you offload rule-knowledge onto them. So many DMs think they have to know it all, but it's a group game, and the group should share the load.
Yeah, been playing forever. Most of players do something of help to the DM. We have several people that help chronicle details, one that manages the initiatives, one that keeps track of the battle damage and all the found items and details, and each take turns doing a recap at the start of each session to keep everything in context so the work that the GM does doesn't get forgotten between sessions. We even have one guy that glues all the miniatures together since the GM has fumble fingers. I've chimed in when the GM forgets something, regardless of if it is in favor to the party or not. It is hard to keep track of everything, so yeah, sharing the load really helps. In actually helps our GM focus on the things that enjoys about running on the game more, as he doesn't have to worry about the small details.
Most players ive seen never help the DM.
@@user-dd9dh9kw5c that is unfortunate. I've always had at least one helpful player in all my groups.
I'm about to DM my first Pathfinder 2e game because that's the only way I can play the game around here. There is another DM in my area but the last game I was at, he threw a metal disc at me for being late due to car issues.
@@user-dd9dh9kw5c "helping the DM" is part of the skillset that should be taught to players when they start in the hobby.
I'm running both a 5e and an OSE campaign. The 5e guys expect stuff like character development, voice acting, relationships and a deep meaningful story. My OSE guys just want a way out of the snake pit they just fell in to. Guess which group I prefer?
I think you also make silly hissing sounds too.
Then why do you run 5e?
You can totally have character development, voice acting, relationships and deep meaningful story... but that needs to be ON THE PLAYERS. Its not the worlds (IE DM) to make a story happen, or to make sure their character grows. Only to present the opportunities to do so.
@@AvishaiGreenstein THIS. The Dm is just the world. All it takes is players saying "Hey I am wanting to do this with the character, can I have opportunities now and again to do so." Then the PLAYERS, do most of that work, the DM just helps to enable it.
I would love the first group, so I'd guess that one.
I was hoping to see the results of those polls pop up in a video! Interesting topic to think about, and probably not something that’s going to change as long as the best-known examples of dnd play on the internet are produced by professional actors. I like it, but it’s certainly better at attracting players than GMs
The funny thing is Matt Mercer seems to have a fairly healthy dialogue with his players on what he wants from them. The problem with 5e is the players expect the DM to be a Matt Mercer but have no intrest in even trying to be a Laura Bailey.
Being a DM for 5th edition seems like so much busy work. Being a DM for OSR seems like way more creative fun
For me, it's just how thankless it all seems. I play with great friends who are all awesome, but it seems to me like I'm the only one who puts any sort of work into the game. Even stuff like showing up on time and being prepared (i.e. leveling up your character, printing/filling out your sheet) seems to be a chore sometimes.
I don't think this problem will go away until we drastically overhaul how the game is run at its core. Players are content consumers, not co-creators of a shared world. It's the reason why DMing is such a thankless job: your role is to produce content for us to engage in and our responsibility for this game begins and ends at the table. Getting our players to hold up their end of the social contract is a challenge because the burdens are not equal.
Frankly, I’d be pleased as punch to perform the heavy end of game prep if the players simply delivered on the engagement end (and provided the snacks as well). Also, as a gamebook rule: if you buy it, I’ll keep it, read it, and incorporate it.
Depends on who you play with. The best players I've played with are also dms. They know how much effort goes into it, and I do more work than most.
I genuinely feel like one of the most important things you need to do as a GM especially for 5E since it has so much exposure and people all have different ideas of what kind of game it should be is setting expectations before you even start rolling dice or making characters
I wonder whether the slant towards DMs in the OSR is partly due to the fact that DMs, being far more aware of the benefits and limitations of the systems they run, are more likely to explore different options? On top of that, a lot of 5e's limitations affect the DM more than the players; the players get to feel powerful while the DM is left with the stress and added work of trying to figure out how to challenge them. So I wouldn't be surprised if a good number of recent OSR players were 5e DMs before they switched systems.
OSR is also built by DMs for DMs, often to target all the frustrations had with modern systems.
It seems to be that way with any superpowered RPG, which D&D has now become, but those systems tend to be built ground-up to handle that mode of gameplay. WotC actually pulls this off well… in D20 Modern. D&D’s awkward, sacred cows won’t ever let that happen.
wasn't OSR's system more or less made the DM an adversary?
@ TheChoujinVirus. No RPG should ever do that. That’s what wargames are for. GMs are supposed to be impartial and fair, or else they can just go full “rock falls, everybody dies”, and what kind of fun is that?
@@TheChoujinVirus OSR and B/X worsens adversarial DMing because of how much it relies on DM rulings. Later editions introduced a ton more rules which standardized how DMs are supposed to make rulings but also gave the DMs the more complex job of being rules interpreter instead of just making rulings.
I think it's more of a cultural issue than a mechanical problem with 5e. My 9 year old kid had no problem running a few sessions of 5e for our family. Adults think they need to memorize all the rules while kids are great at improvising and making rulings on the fly. Also, in my experience, a new player has to be more involved than the average player to even know about the OSR. I imagine DMs are far more likely than players to spend time on dnd/rpg subreddits and TH-cam channels like this one. So a DM is much more likely to convert to OSR than a player is.
Yeah, I don't have any issue big issues with 5e itself, but I tend to play with my friends and all of us have DM'd year long campaigns for each other (in several different RPG systems, though 5e tends to be most common) so I haven't personally experienced this issue of DM shortages. Maybe my friends are just cooler than the average D&D players. This does to seem to be a culture issue, rather than a mechanical one.
5E really isn't a fun game to DM. The monsters are boring and basically amount to leveled up orcs and the players get all the cool toys to play with. Most RPGs give DMs tools to challenge the players, 5E gives the players tools to challenge the DM.
I feel this so much. Im am a Dungeon Master not because I enjoy it, but because I want to give my friends a good time. My introverted nature makes preparing for each session a self-doubting, stressful nightmare. Once im in the middle of running a session, Im usually fine, but I often feel an impending sense of dread before each session as if my players will hate it.
When I saw the title of the video I immediately thought "because 5E is a pain in the balls to DM"
I am gratified to have that confirmed.
5e and OSR DM here. Love procedurally/randomly generated improvisational play. Regarding catering to what the players want, I use a "tool" that makes this a lot easier than it sounds: 3 stars/3 wishes. At the end of each session my PCs write down 1-3 bulleted points (about one sentence each) listing either (a) something they really loved about the session that they want to give me a "star" for, or (b) something they are interested in seeing some (or more) of in future sessions (i.e., they "wish" for). I do not commit to making these things come true, but it makes it really easy to find out what they like and give them more of it. Building clear and honest communication into the structure of every session makes generating content they are interested in a low maintenance task that any DM, new or old, can do easily.
DM of almost 9 years now, I love the thematic style of play. But thankfully I'm blessed with a full table of really good friends that I've known for a long time. So I know exactly what kind of game they want to run, what they want to accomplish and how to do it for the most part. My players cook dinner, all I do is set the table. However admittedly, sometimes it does get to be alot. Especially around the 2 year mark of a campaign and they are around level 16-20. You have to STAY on your toes and pre plan everything under the sun cause who knows what the fuck they are gonna do and you don't want it to feel railroady.
Sadly, I think what's triggered this issue is specifically Critical Role and the Mercer Effect.
As an entertainment product, they're risen the expectations for DMs super high. There are other factors too, but this one is overt.
As a DM I've had angry players complain about the following unironically:
"Oh, you didn't describe my action. Do you need me to do that?"
"Wait, we need to figure out when to meet for a digital game? All the DMs I know handle that for me"
"I know this is supposed to be session zero and everyone's not here yet, but let's start playing already"
Old school DnD, anyone could be the DM. People would switch up all the time. But today, it's like a career and the players let you know it.
I feel like this has been a problem since 3/3.5e, before streaming ttrpgs was a thing; as a long-time GM, this problem has always existed with rules heavy systems (e.g. Hero, 3/3.5e, Exalted)... It's just exacerbated due to the huge popularity boost from Critical Role (et al).
Yeap. Added to that players also often dictate nonsense to the DM. "I am not playing in your game if I can't play (insert ridiculous class/species combo here)!" "I need to make sure this backstory arc for my character is explored in the next few sessions, it is critical for their plot development!". Etc etc.
I feel like if you're not willing to take a turn and be the DM every few months (or years depending on how long your group runs campaigns), then you probably aren't worthy of playing in the group and you're taking advantage of the other players. It's just good manners to run the game once in a while.
@@DKarkarov Man, I am so tired of the backstory thing. I'm looking to run Dungeon Crawl Classics, where the backstory is the story of how your level 0 peasant survived their first adventure. Stuff that happens at the table > backstory.
@@johnkennedy3403 You know a backstory is fine, as long as it is reasonable. Something that justifies why you are now a level 1 whatever. If it is 20 pages long though you either deep dived your characters childhood, or you put more crap in than is reasonable for a level 1 character. If it also has stuff in it the DM is "required" to tie in, you are doing it wrong.
The number 1 thing that has helped me run dnd has been Sly Flourish's "Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master." To be fair, I don't run true 5e; but the steps and tips were written with 5e in mind, and I can picture myself easily running a 5e campaign with them (indeed, we just ended my "not 5e" campaign, and I think we'll do true 5e next, lol)
Not sure I would have ever had the confidence to jump in and let the game come to the group if not for this book. I think there's more actionable value to a new DM in that short booklet than the entire DMG, except maybe the dungeon builder tables in the back.
This is absolutely the truest advice. Lazy DM Is the DMG as far as I'm concerned.
@@SeanFranchise Agreed! I have had some experience DMing 3/3.5e, so that was also helpful (if you think 5e is complicated, try 3e...), but this book has let me be able to plan sessions that my players have really enjoyed in an hour or two, total. I hear some other dms say they plan a session for 2 or three hours A DAY for a session, and that's... That's just too much.
DM as life coach says everything about the problem. 🙂
If I don't grow as an actual human being after every session, you're a terrible DM.
I read that D&D is being used as therapy. If a player came to my table looking for help with emotional problems I'd have difficulty not pissing myself laughing.
@@davidmorgan6896 so interestingly friend of mine did a serious university level research paper about this kind of thing. Like half the people interviewed in the local dnd community said regular game sessions helped with their mental health challenges in some way.
@@GeoffSayre was that a random sample? If so, at least 50% of respondents are mad. Best to stay away from that place.
hanging out with friends is therapeutic by itself. not because of psychoanalysis sessions
Many of the reasons you cite were the catalyst on why I created Bugbears&Borderlands to begin with. To take the Moldvay b/x approach to 5e so players (and DMs) could play quickly without getting bogged down. While 5e has a basic version, it's all of the rules but none of the customization, and I think that's backwards. I took the opposite approach for B&B.
I am so glad I stumbled across this comment! Your hack is what I was looking for!
I think 5e's biggest problem is that it's player focused and it feels like there's nothing there for DMs. I got into 5e because of Chris Perkins and the Acquisition's games and his articles on how to be a better DM, they were invaluable. The videos they used to put out from Q&A's at conventions talking about how to create your own adventures and run the game were equably as invaluable. Where has content like that gone? Now all I see from Wizards are videos saying to interview your players so you can curate the game they want, nothing on how to build the game you want to run. It's been years since I've bought a 5e book because I feel like they don't give me any tools or unique ideas as a DM to build with and they're pretty expensive books. 5e to me feels like a hero fantasy for the player and the DM's job is to make sure they're all happy and got the experience they want. I want my players to be happy, but players don't prep and run games, they just show up and play, way easier to find happiness in that than DMing a game you're not excited about.
It also doesn't help that D&D is a huge corporation now so they're trying to make safe marketable content, which means boring content. I'd rather drop $10 on DTRPG for an independent creator's unique work than the drivel coming out of Hasbro right now. I'm only 27 so the nostalgia isn't really there for me, I started with 5e. Other than the old school art I remember as a kid when finding my dad's old books I had never played old school D&D until OSE this past year. I came to the OSR as a DM because I like classic D&D, where there are consequences and players are thoughtful in their actions because things can get bad quick and looking at your character sheet isn't going to save you, your wits are.
wotc would rather burn the diminishing numbers of GMs to placate the egos of players and thereby turn them into loyal consumers and buy books than sustain a community of hobbyists
@@user-jq1mg2mz7o They burnt magic with product overload. Now they are burning D&D with player focus overload. Game will die without DMs to run it. People won't buy books if they dont have a chance of playing it.
@@Illianor123 yup. wotc is scrambling to put band aids but the problem is more fundamental and they refuse to fix those issues, or use half-solutions that make things worse. they're in for a huge crash in the near future
@@user-jq1mg2mz7o the ego of players is a good way to put it. I think there used to be a thought that DMs were power crazed and it was their game not the players, but now the pendulum has swung the other way and players are the ones making demands and Wotc is backing this ideology up.
@@Illianor123 absolutely agree! The new Spelljammer shouldve been a years worth of content, but they've already moved on and are sending out a Dragonlance book. Why?? If your gonna milk an old IP atleast get all the milk lol.
Perhaps the best sessions I ever ran was literally my players INDEPENDENTLY coming up with an assassination plot. All I did was create the castle where it took place, adding opportunities, NPCs, complications, threats, and post-assassination investigations.
I think another key difference that removes stress, is that the plot style of game can also happen very well in old school play, because the system does not get in the way an undercut achievements and choices. You are left as free form as a narrative game, but also have a simple game to rely on. Contrast 5th edition, which has a lot of game to deal with, and still no narrative tools to help you anyway.
I've been DMing 5e for 4-5 years now. It was my first TTRPG. I've recently been searching for something more suited to how i like to play and found Knave and OSR content - very thankful to have found it!
5e is a mess of player options. Too much. And the players, at least mine, expect that you can somehow always make every option available to them and incorporate the lore as written from every 5e book. There is definitely that attitude of, "ive turned up, now entertain me." But it's amazing how quickly that diminishes when they have a go at DMing themselves.
Loving the focus on world building and exploration in the older style of game. Coming up with that stuff and sharing it with the group is what i enjoy most about the game.
Ive seen looking for groups with players searching for a dm with a very specific plot or theme in mind and I just sit there like "why not try running this yourself? You clearly know what you want why heap this onto someone else?"
I have 5e players in my group sniffing at the dm role and I try to do the best I can to be helpful and encouraging as it sometimes feel you can get thrown right out the deep end. Espicially with high expectations.
Well mainly because 5E is a players game. Being a PC in 5E is a lot of fun. Being a 5E DM is boring and tedious though.
While I haven't DM'd in some years, due to adult life scheduling issues in my group, I was always fortunate in that my group never cared to be the "main" characters. We were all tired of being the chosen ones in every video game out there, so when we got to the table, it was nice to play a group of mercs who's only advantage was being competent. Sometimes, there would be something of a plot, like being double crossed by an associate, and having to track him down, and once they did end up stopping a vampire's plans to control a rural village, but mostly, they were just a bunch eccentric mooks with skills to let them (mostly) come out of dangerous places alive and with something of worth.
Well, they did sometimes muck around in politics, but mostly the Orcish kind. Makes it easier to get to where the gold is if you make a deal to help set up a certain Orc to be chief so he owes you one.
That sounds like what OSR style is all about!
My main problem with being a DM for 5e has always been the tools. Well, more like the lack thereof. If you want to do something that is not prewritten (which a fair amount of those adventures have issues that needs fixing to be good), you have to contend with the DMG, which is, in my opinion, a hot mess. It feels like they gave you a DMG that should read "some assembly required", or much rather "a lot of assembly required". I'm no stranger to homebrew, but when I buy a book, any homebrewing I do should feel like small tweaks to the system, not massive overhauls.
First is the encounter balancer. Want to make a balance and fair low level encounter for a 1st or 2nd level party? Good luck is all I have to say, as the lack of HP and the damage that can be done is super swingy. How about one for anything above level 12? Welp, the math is so bad by that point the party is more than likely to steamroll through anything if you make that encounter by the book, so you have to make everything a "hard" or "deadly" encounter. Even then, the monsters CR is so badly built that things that say they are easy or hard are not. There are some infamous monster in the MM and beyond that hurt my head.
How about rewards? Well, by default, you have to roll on tables to generate gold and other valuables, as well as for magic items. That's fine if you don't mind the RNG in doing such, but what about plan treasure and magic items? Well, with no wealth by level like in older editions, or even in other systems, you have no idea about how much the should have, and as for magic items, you have to look in Xanathar's to see an IDEA of how much you should give out based upon what tier of play you are in, which means you only have a level range to work. This means that you can easily hand too much or too little gold, which even then has so little point in the system unless you are a wizard or you allow for the buying of magic items. Yea, magic items where never intended to be bought (or really sold for that matter), which makes gold after a few levels feel worthless as there is no meaningful gold sinks to pursue. Sure, you can make one, but that means you having to create something whole cloth, and most newer DMs don't know how to do that in a fair way.
Then the magic items themselves... Holy... Just how much should that item cost? The book gives (surprise!) a vague answer that you, the DM, have to answer. Then there is the matter of the balance of what is considered uncommon or rare or anything else is being all over the place. Wing Boots being uncommon? With that level of power? What where they thinking? Bag of Holding being always better and cheaper the Handy Haversack? Just why? Why is the meme glue and solvent legendary? Of course, with the passage of time, newer items they have introduced are just better (looking at you Tasha's).
Speaking of Tasha's, there's the power creep in general. That one book legitimately made all the subclasses for the cleric and sorcerer that came before null and void. If both of the new cleric subclasses are played by two players, what little balance the game had is gone due to how the two subclasses abilities interact. And no, just making the encounters way harder is not a solution because if those players don't use the "I Win Button" you will absolutely TPK the party in 2 or 3 rounds.
After Tasha's, I threw my hands up into the air and said "I'm done", which is a shame because I was looking forward to trying to run a game in Eberron for 5e. If I have to homebrew so much of the DMG (and the system in some regards) to the point that I'm not really using the book just to fix it and give me the tools to run the game, I have to ask why the designers didn't do this work before I got it? With One D&D, I have so little faith that any of the DMG issues will ever be addressed that I've switched to PF2e for a more crunchy system and to OSE for a more rules lite system.
Could ban Tasha's.
Although some people will complain. Just to be clear, it's the subclasses being banned, hopefully that would've gone down reasonably okay at your table.
@@guyman1570 I could have easily done that, you're not wrong. The problem is more that WotC thought that releasing those subclasses in such an overpowered state was fine, if not good. The UA versions of the clerics were fine, and people even said a such. However, for some reason, WotC buff them massively to become broken. The bigger issue is the design philosophy is so bad that I just decided to stop because I just disliked, if not hated, 5e after playing and running it for a few years.
Wow this is really fascinating! I’m a teen who got interested in D&D in 2019, but haven’t played in very many campaigns up until now since none of my friends also play. I have a few that are interested in playing, but we hadn’t really gotten anywhere since I’ve been too scared to DM. Knowing all of the rules and building up a good story that I can improvise to fit the players’ actions just sounds so intimidating! I always wondered how it was so seemingly common/easy for kids to DM in the 80s, and this video really cleared that up. I think now (after I unexpectedly had to DM a oneshot module lmao) I’m finally ready to DM for my friends! Albeit another oneshot module lol, but I’m getting there! Good luck to any other new DMs
Good luck man! Just gotta jump in feet first
Keeping D&D easier to run means ignoring the complexity. What I mean is that as a DM, I do not run D&D using hundreds of rules. When I ran D&D 3e for nearly 10 years, I rarely opened the books while at the table. My 12-year-old self in 1976 became a fearless DM by rolling dice and interpreting the results. Was I good at DM'ing? NO! I was horrible at being a DM by any measure. Being good or great at DM'ing D&D only matters if you are having fun. I do not know ALL of the D&D 3e or 5e rules.
I wish that more people would try being a DM (good, bad, or indifferent). Perhaps people need to DM by embracing a child's perspective on having fun.
I mean, they are games with rules in them. If any single person at your table is better read up on those rules everyone else is doing them a disservice by not bothering to know how to play.
@ Curtis Robison. The biggest rule of all in any RPG is to have fun. Any other rule contradicting this needs to go.
Absolutely spot on! It shouldn't be such a monumental task and that intro would turn anyone away from DMing. "I have to what?"
Thanks for the video! I've been a tabletop gamer since first playing hex-and-chit as well as miniatures wargames in the early 70s, adding RPGs in 1974 with (Original) D&D. I've been blogging and using the OGL since 2000. I've been running 1E AD&D since adding it as the books dropped in the 70s, integrating it to (O)D&D along the way then switching when the DMG was released. I ran my current 1E AD&D campaign earlier this week and we'll return to it in January. I'll use the time in between to prep for Gary Con. Ben Milton of Questing Beast makes a lot of good points regarding the simplicity of running Old School games, as originally intended. The DM creates a setting, players state the PCs' actions, and the DM describes the consequences. Story is a byproduct of gameplay. It couldn't be easier.
I’ve actually had the opposite of this problem you’re describing. Without realizing it, I created the sort of location-focused campaign you described, and it was easy and engaging! And now, out of the 10 people who’ve 10 people who’ve been at our table (some have left) 7 have expressed interest in being DM, 6 have run session, 5 have been DM for a full campaign, with two of those 5 breaking off and starting their own groups!
If you take a step back from “having to know all the rules”, keep it casual, and focus on having a good time with friends rather than a “narrative”, things really get fun fast! I legitimately feel that, especially the first leg of my campaign, I’ve never seen or been a part of a better rpg experience! And I think that’s what got the ball rolling for all the excitement in our group! (Though I really can’t take all that much credit for it. I was imbibed on Brennan Lee Mulligan’s gameplay and some heavensend players.)
I think that the 5e culture is problabily the cause. The new players see tv shows, movies, podcasts, YT vídeos and celebrities playing, showing how to act better as a DM, how to emulate diferents voices, how to create your amazing world etc… and believe that is the way all the game must be. The players start to expect all of this in the game, and the ones who would like to be DM give it up.
The previous editions of Dnd did not have this kind of comparation, it is just your group playing and thats all.
I believe this kind of behavior was transferring to OSR games too, to think simple about the game and the adventure.
Damn I hear so much frustration in these comments. I think this solution applies to half of them:
TALK TO YOUR PLAYERS. If they do something that contradicts their desire, or that upsets you, or doesn't make sense with the story, their character, the theme, whatever, TALK TO THEM. 9/10 they didn't think it through or have different expectations, and if they have the same expectations they're likely willing to accommodate for the sake of the game.
When I finally realized that any “plot” I tried to come up with isn’t going to hit the table the same it was in my head. The DMG should emphasize that you dont need to come up with the story, your players and the rules should procedurally generate itself.
That's true, but the 5e DMG will never say that, because it contradicts the campaign sourcebooks that they have been publishing. They have completely sold people on the idea that the DM's job is to provide the plot. At this point, we should just stop telling WotC what to do and just do things the way we want. The market will naturally correct itself, and I believe that Hasbro is experiencing this right now.
@@michaelgunn9883 agreed. Where is the short-modular style adventures that built the brand for so many decades?All the sudden everything has to be a giant 1-15 super campaign. It can be fun but it also severely limits the ability to customize the game to your players and a DM trying to build their own campaign with these as models are going to feel helpless!
@@CaseyWilkesmusic I have found some of those old 1980s modules at a local book store. They're pretty expensive, so I haven't bought very many. But thankfully, the old goodies are still out there. I have had some great times DMing the old modules for Call of Cthulhu, and now I need to work on incorporating some into my D&D group.
@@michaelgunn9883 I think a lot of the old D&D and AD&D ones are available as pdfs at reasonable prices.
@@chrisrobinson196 Yeah, that's also true. I was thinking about getting a Goodman Games book as well, since those apparently have good value.
My DM friends and I have 5e as 90% of our TTRPG experience, and we've definitely felt that DM stress.
We've concluded on one thing- the story is always better when we plan for a half-plan things and make up the world on the fly, rather than meticulously plan most of the world.
Let's be honest. Scaling challenges is why I prefer to run games like Mausritter or Into the Odd or other OSR games. 5e and the power creep and the time it takes for a dm to build fair yet challenging encounters deters me from running. I am really looking forward to seeing what they will do with 5e and one D&D encounter building. Also would love more outline style adventure books like they did for Mausritter not a 100 plus pages like all the 5e adventures
I do this all the time. I find the challenge interesting and enjoyable. I’ve run 5 campaigns from level 0 to 20 in 5e to date. My PCs are about to finish ToEE (original/reincarnated). However, for context, I have optional rules and house rules to make the game play and feel like 1e AD&D.
I see One DnD catering more to players than to dungeonmasters, their feedback system is designed that way, while I expect monsters will be more relatable to their CR, player powers that manipulate dice rolls are becoming more common with changes to guidance and resistance and this has the effect that bounded accuracy, 5e's best trait, will mean little
I still don't understand why 5e has a power creep problem. Like, the complaint is an overall potential power increase in players, not an uneven power increase for the same character at different levels, right? If it's only one offset, then shouldn't it be easy to counterbalance it considering that you have an entire campaign to do so?
@@NoneNullAnd0 I think there are two power creep cases in DnD 5e. 1: creep due to inconsistent character progression. 2: creep due to new content releases.
Case 1: character power increases in sudden jumps not a by consistent amount. This is different for every class. The power jumps are compounded by magic items and feats. Players often become wildly different in power levels despite being the same character level. DMs often only have a few encounters to figure out the party's power level before they level up again and the power curve suddenly creeps up once more. This problem may never be experienced in some groups. But it is the main reason people feel the challenge-rating (CR) system is not useful for judging monster difficultly.
Case 2: as new supplements are released the newer options have been consistently better than the older ones. This type of power creep means older content becomes less popular and players that choose it often have less powerful characters. When new material is released it can change how powerful characters are in sudden and unexpected ways. A good example was the introduction of steady-aim to the rogue class. If you are not familiar: rogues can sneak if an ally is next to the bad-guy. With the new steady-aim rule, a rogue can trade their movement to be able to sneak-attack without any ally present. This one rule addition makes a decent combat class just suddenly better in every way. DMs can often be surprised by such unexpected changes in power level since they don't have to learn all the new rules for every class in each new release.
Balancing power levels in such a complex game is definitely a challenge for the developers. Maybe some power creep is inevitable? But it is definitely there in 5e and causes many DMs frustration
@@GeoffSayre So are you saying there's been a lot of "creep due to inconsistent character progression" in recent releases, more so than what's in the original content?
I work in a residential facility for mental health; a LOT of kids in IOPs and transitional care play D&D, especially 5e. I ran a one-shot Old School Essentials game for Halloween and the response to the game lines up with what you're talking about. They were surprised at how easy and streamlined OD&D is, loved the fact that each class actually felt unique, they were all about the location-based aspect of the game mixed with plot, but not plot heavy. They all grasped the rules within 5 minutes of play. And they also loved that you only needed a few books, where as 5e you need (let's face it, you can get by with the core books, but there's a lot of pressure to get every rule, species, spells, etc in all of the WotC books) a ton of books. They also dug seeing where the rules came from.
That's awesome. Good job!
Everything is available free online for 5e, you dont need any books at all and for things like spells online is better.
@@joking2052 Yup, most electronic media is free if you know where to look.
It's always cool to hear how games and hobbies can be used to help people.
@@fourayes1655 i would like to know where i can get this. where can i download all the 5e sourcebooks for free?
One thing we need is a culture shift to remove at least some of those burdens from the DM to the Players. For me, it's Event Planner. I'm otherwise a fairly outgoing person and empathetic, so the life coach part I can handle if needed, but planning is a pain, especially for people in the adult world (up through college it's fairly easy to get people together, but working full time with a 4 yr old makes planning hard... and coralling other adults is near impossible). Lets try and get players to be responsible for stuff like campaign notes, planning, etc... the things DMs do that don't need to be the DM. Can't help with story and play archs though, that's on you DM ;)
YES. A major issue with D&D culture right now is the players expect the DM to do literally everything, even bail them out of trouble they have caused themselves and just playing along with the power fantasy. Now as a DM I don't mind catering to a power fantasy but you have to work for it.
Hear hear! As the D.M. I want my players taking notes and thinking of their character in between sessions just as much as I'm prepping the next story and the next fight/encounter in between sessions.
Easy solution that works for me: have a specific regular day and time for DnD sessions (consult with the players on this as well). This way players know that for example Saturday 3 PM is DnD time. If they miss it, the game still goes on. DM if at least 3 people are there. You don´t have all players to be present all the time. I have my sessions on the same place of the weeks nearly for two years now. Gets all the organization done in 1 hour for the whole year or so. Don´t be afraid to skip a session if too few players are present.
@@mikhailchuev8715 That concept always sounds nice in theory. But as an adult with a full life going on, there is no single day that is free regularly enough to reserve it entirely for DnD.
My party meets once every one to two months and that has to suffice. That's just life.
@@XMaster340 A lot of people go to a bar or similar every Friday night. And I assume that a lot of audience of this channel is let´s say 25+. You don´t have to do a session 8 hours long, 3 or 4 would suffice. So this works in real life, at least for me or DnD players I know personally.
On other note, if you try to regularly pull a 60-hour work week, this might be an unsustainable practice and you may need to address this first.
Wait, a DM needs to know all the rules? I've been doing it wrong for 30 years!
To simplify DMing, chuck simple, location encounters in a trench coat with a lil bit of story and watch as planning becomes so much easier
my biggest challenge as a dm is communicating to players that there are places to explore and encounters to find, without just having an npc with no context say "hey, there's something over there but don't ask me how i know that"
i've been really enjoying using rumor tables. fill a big table with little adventure hooks, and every time the PCs return to town between adventures, have each one roll on the table and flavor it as what they picked up while hanging out in the tavern.
The main problem is that 5e DM´s are not supported. Most of 5e´s failures, like CR stopping to work at certain levels, the encounter design not matching up to the more free movie-style of play that is intended, magic items not having clear prices, lore being removed to make the world as adaptable as possible, are things that increase the load the DM has to carry. And in 5e, the DM carries most of the game, if you ask me.
If you want to have a big, deep lore, you either have to write one or get hardly accessible books from older editions. Getting these books however means that any interesting or cool things like artifacts or spells have to be reworked into 5e by you, the DM, or just be left out.
If you want to have a more cinematic action-ish approach to the game, you can´t have the crunch of 6-8 encounters per long rest. Which means you have to use few encounters making the game ridiculously easy for the PCs. If you don´t want it to be this easy, however, you have to build your own encounters, ignoring the guidelines 5e gives you, which requires some skill or gut feeling for the mechanics of the game.
If you want a more crunchy approach to the game, the encounters work (at least on low level), but the PCs will want to buy magic items or sell their loot. Since magic items only have a price range, you have to create price and sell tables to make the game consistent.
If the group want to have a deep story with lots of character development, the players give you their PC´s backstories and you will have to work around it.
DMing 5e requires lots and lots of different skills, and there is almost no way to play the game without some effort from the DMs´ side. This creates a big pressure and even DM burnout and makes DMing 5e very unattractive. The things listed are just a short list of potential work for the DM. In the campaign I DM (PCs started at lvl 1 and are at lvl 16 now), almost everything is homebrew by now since the game system could not keep up with the players´ demands and broke more than one time, even though my players don´t build optimised or broken characters.
I love DMing but this one campaign needs so much attention and work that I can only DM this one and no others at all. So, after finishing this campaign, I too will quit DMing 5e. It´s a shame, really, especially since I don´t see One DND getting any better by the goals and playtests released so far.
From my understanding CR and Encounter rates weren't even a thing until 3E and from my minimal experience with OCR(mostly just the Wizardry games and the like which copied the rules if D&D) even low level monsters would obliterate Thieves or Wizards.
@@ericschmitz6789 That's right, D&D and AD&D were fairly different in terms of play. Still, in 4e they nailed encounter design pretty good. It's a shame people hate on 4e so much, there were some good ideas and design choices in it.
@@rakshalneyrak9862 4e is a *very* good game hamstrung by bad corporate and marketing decisions. It’s a fantastic game in design terms which, from my perspective, answered very logically the player demands of the day (highly customizable class features). 4e’s fatal flaw is really that the game is *incredibly* difficult to play without miniatures, and worse that it was pitched as a game with an in-built VTT (a VTT that never was delivered). Were 4e to be released today I think it would do very nicely, it just missed the mark by about 10 years.
A few years ago i encouraged my players to make min-maxed builds to challenge myself as a new 5e DM and reasoned that: "If i can handle over powered characters i can handle anything in the future." My players are now at LVL 8 and i hardly know what to do anymore. It soon dawned on me how there basically arent any truly powerful monsters at higher CR. The Challenge Rating system is like a pyramid: In the bottom there are tonnes of monsters that are dangerous to the PCs. But at the top there is only a handfull. AND the "Monster vs Player Difficulty" is decreasing rapidly the higher up the pyramid you go.
It will soon be impossible for me to plan an encouter. I saw this other GM who has players at LVL 12 and they steamroll, and i mean STEAMROLL, everything up to CR 25... 1-2 rounds and the Boss + Minions are dead. How the hell are we as DMs supposed to run games at LVL 15-20?... something that i want to do.
Besides that, the combat take longer and longer and becomes more sluggish and taxing the higher LVL the players and monsters are, because each has so much stuff they can do and buffs / debuffs that we have to keep track of and everyone have several actions each per round. And of course the players don't put in the work to really learn their classes so i have to babysit them to not make errors which is super taxing for me as a DM.
5e is not fun anymore, i only feel preassured nowdays.
@@PerfectionHunter My party is at lvl 16 now, not optimised and yet still almost everything is homebrew by now...
5e definitely seems to heap more work on the DM. One egregious area I've noticed is in statblocks - Old School statblocks can be written in one line, with all of the information you need at a mere glance - whereas 5e statblocks often eat up a page, and even truncated for quick reference are still cumbersome.
Further - The whole idea that encounters and adventures must be perfectly balanced, and worse - CATERED - to the party is also big part of this. You can, of course play 5e in an OSR way wherein you throw that out the window - but be prepared for some shocked and huffy players moaning about how having to run away from tough encounters isn't fun or 'cinematic.'
Love your videos btw.
@@sumdude4281 Thanks!
If running away from a tough encounter isn’t considered cinematic, then that player has never seen a movie before.
Running away from encounters generally isn't fun because I've basically never seen a P&P system which does it well. The rules are always set up for fights to the death. The overwhelming majority of class abilities and spells are set up to help them fight and win, not get away if they're losing. I've never seen a system where chases and especially retreats weren't an afterthought.
Especially if your group enjoys playing on grids for the tactical combat side of things. Once you run out of grid, everything kind of falls apart.
@@Zakon673 Yeah that's part of it. Retreats don't work well with the 5E tactical system. Monsters are typically as fast or faster than the PCs so escape generally isn't an option. And given how powerful combat healing is, they won't even think about retreat until someone has a foot in the grave.
The other issue is the general structure of modern adventures versus OSR. OSR was kind of a sandbox, you had a big dungeon and you explored it for loot at whatever pace you preferred. There wasn't a specific objective for you to pass or fail. Your goal was to get as much treasure out of the place as you could. This made avoiding and picking and choosing what you fought a lot more impactful. In modern style, you've got a princess that has to be rescued and a dragon that has to be slain. And if you fail at that, then you've failed the quest.
The thing with OSR style is that you have to actually fully embrace it to make it work. If you don't give people that dungeon exploration freedom, all the other emergent behaviors of OSR don't happen.
100% agreed - I've talked about the poor industry support of the TTRPG industry's support of new DM/GMs for over 2-decades. Complexity of the rules, expectations of the DM role, and lack of good training materials is a crisis. I believe that the importance of Questing Beast, myself, and hundreds of other TH-camrs is that we are at least trying to be a positive and helpful part of the hobby/business that we love.
I'm a younger DM at 19 years old, but I've started with ad&d at age 12.
I used to run a west March and have a big group of friends I've met over my years of 5e, so I got my favorite players from years of being in various servers and such, and here's the problems I already have.
1. Noone wants a character with a stat less than 17. The average spread in ad&d was like, 60 points. Now the average is ~85.
2. The first encounter was 7 bandits, a homebrew slightly stronger bandit, and a eldritch very strong, but very slow monster. The players went straight up to the bandits, talked to them, which lured them into the monster, and then a player complained about the encounter being too hard while not trying to even play around the monster or any tactics. They just expect to be gods and get mad whenever they're not strong.
3. Noone wants to be level 1. I compromised at level 2 instead of 3. People complain because they want to be overpowered off the start.
4. Nobody wants to play 'cleric' or 'fighter' or 'thief'. These guys want homebrew so they can play a air gensai ranger that attacks with a wyrmling, or fairy illusionist clerics. Noone is normal.
About point 2, a lot of people I find lack any kind of tactical skill to the point where they don't even focus fire on enemies and the most team work they may do is give each other advantage outside of combat but the spellcasters never buff the fighter opting to just do more damage. People not wanting to start off at level 1 is fair considering that there are not a lot of options you can do and falls into the first issue I brought up with people never doing anything tactical.
As for point 4 it was at least always official content but people rarely if ever played something down to earth. People say that its fantasy and you can do whatever, which is fair. But you always needed a mundane, grounded element in my opinion for the fantasy to feel special.
No joke. Last DnD game I played in I was the most unusual character at the table. I was a human fighter. Almost no NPC's we met (unless they were nobody peasants) were human, none of the other players were anything less complex that a half aasimar/high elf, and every other character was a caster on some level. Even the self professed "barbarian" was really just a cleric dedicated to whatever weird nonsense he needed to have all the barbarian rage talents and cleric spells at the same time.
5e is large and mainstream, therefore has much more casual players on average. DMing requires a huge commitment. No shock at all.
I think too it depends on how well the group knows each other. Pick up games on roll 20 or joining a random game in a Facebook group is intimidating. I’ve DM’d for the same group of friends since 2002 when we started with 3.5. It was easy to convert to 5e and even play DCC and DW because I wasn’t nervous to make a ruling up on the fly when I didn’t know it.
There's also an element of selection bias, I think, especially if a lot of your exposure is online. You only have so many hours to devote to a hobby. If you get into 5e as a player, then you're probably going to consume more in the way of podcasts/livestreams and maybe the various powergaming-focused youtube channels (both the sorts of things that encourage you to make your DM's job harder, and entrench 5e RAW as a universal standard). But if you're a DM, you've got so much more to learn that isn't in the rulebooks, along with a need for more original content - I think this is much more likely to lead you to the OSR in the first place, since this scene recognizes that DMs *are* game designers at some level and the OSR's DIY ethos fits that.
Excellent advice, and I would like to add : As a player and DM of almost 40 years, location based objectives work just as well for the sprawling, story-based ideal 5E players seem to want. Just attach the theme from the last adventure into the current location, and, suddenly, players are under the illusion that they're in a story driven campaign. But here's the secret : after a month or three? That story really does begin to emerge, organically, in response to the party. If you're a new 5E DM, try location based objectives and watch the story evolve with your table.
I’ve found that only running a game or oneshot I’m REALLY passionate about makes it easier to avoid burnout. Don’t run an “infinite” campaign where you are a forever dm.
Great video!
As someone who plays online, there are always players everywhere searching for DMs. And it's tough, because it's a lot of work to DM. I started 5e as a DM, not a player, knowing nothing about the system - but we all knew nothing about the system and were all friends with similar expectations of the game.
What I've found with gaming communities and playing online, there's a very different expectation. It's not just about knowing the system and running an engaging story - I'm now expected to know every spell, every subclass ability, every new feat - and it's extremely exhausting and overwhelming.
I know that optimising your PC is just part of the game as a player - but I find players that like to play that way a little frustrating. For them, it's about gaming the system and finding exploits to cruise their way through scenarios or defeat enemies, much like a video game.
I also find the written 5e campaigns very difficult to read compared to older editions.
As a 5E DM, previously 4E DM, I love creating stories for my players, memorable NPC's, a living dynamic world. My current Campaign takes place in the same world as my 4E one just in a different part of it. One shots do not interest me either to play or run. For me, my fun comes through creating stories and having my players enjoy themselves going their own way encouraging me to consider storylines I had not previously considered which further builds up my world building. I love that 5e has encouraged so many new players into TTRPGs which has in turn benefited OSR and producers of so much 3rd party 5e product and revivals of other old game systems. Seems like we are all benefiting from what 5e has done for the hobby as a whole.
I would say that the results of those surveys just indicate how much more 5e hyper-focuses on options aimed at players, and not enough things that aid DMs in the minutiae of running the game, such as templates, optional tables, and many of the things that I generally have to go to exterior reference material to find. Such as the "Complete Dungeon Master's Guide to _________." (Random Encounters, NPCs, just to name two)
Great post Ben. This is the 5e player base issue in a nutshell. They each expect to have their overly complicated character backstory fit into an epic story line along with 2, 3, or more players at a table. No one is capable of doing that.
I consider myself capable of that. If the players have the attention span and level of seriousness to make it worth my time, that is.
@@lberghaus Then you're a rare outlier that wants to devote more time to the hobby than most of us do. Good on you for your dedication.
"Where was that for 5e"
My greatest issue as a dm in 5e was feeling lost, given a notion of what dnd is meant to be rather than a specific guide of how to dm.
I have to homebrew so much on the average session that 5e is forever going to be the 'homebrew edition' rather than an edition with hard rules.
I think another key point is what you touched on at 5:03 -- 5e's design is deliberately DM-proofed. That grand majority of material published by WotC is player-focused, and lacks any real direction or help for DMs. This is crippling for new DMs, and hamstrings the rest of us if playing rules as written, and it shows no signs of improving (especially given the One D&D playtest packets released so far).
I’m shocked that, like you said, in older editions there were way more people DMing. I’m basically brand new and trying to get into a first campaign but I can already see that there’s a disparity, a club to play at my campus fell apart cuz the one person willing to DM wasn’t able to, and looking online I can definitely see there’s a lot more players looking for games than people running them
Time and Financial cost can play a big role in people wanting to DM I feel like. One thing I've learned about the OSR (from watching your channel and others) is the importance of the layout of key information in rulebooks. Time spent looking up rules instead of running/playing the game is time wasted. Keeping the rules simple and easy to remember or locate is a essential in a rulebook.
While I like having physical books, I've also been incredibly frustrated playing online because I'm forced to rebuy books to use in a VTT even if I own a physical copy! That and on top of paying for subscription fees to use the premium features of those VTTs as well can add up pretty fast. I'm hoping the new edition of D&D will let me own the physical book AND the digital one without having to rebuy!
Another thing I think might be an issue is DM confidence. As you said in the video there is a lot on a GM's mind and that's a daunting task for newer GMs.
I've been fortunate enough to play 5e for a while for multiple good dms. I've dm'd once and been overwhelmed by the amount of work required to bring about a good experience for everyone, and truth be told, it showed. I've told myself if I were to DM again, i'd want to have most of it already planned out even before session 0, which would be like writing a whole novel. A lot of this I feel comes from the expectations people have placed on DMs from their consumption of professional streams like Critical Role. So many people are expecting Matt Mercer, but the fact is, there's only one Matt Mercer.
As someone who has played and Dm'd every edition from 1st through 5th (but not much 4th) including Pathfinder, I have to say I agree. Running a 5th edition campaign can be a slog and there were days when it felt more like work than fun. Of course, sometimes 3rd/pathfinder was also a bit of a slog.
I have been playing D&D for going on 45 years and I have been a DM for most of that time. I think you hit this nail right on the head. In this day and age you have to run a session zero for your campaign, even if everyone has been playing together for years, so the players can do all their prep work and the DM can layout expectations for the game. Back in the day, you know how our campaigns started? We sat down, rolled 3d6 in order, spent 5 minutes equipping them, then I would start randomizing a dungeon straight out of the DMG. If your character died, you rolled up another one and the game continued. It became a running gag that players did not even name their characters until 3rd level. In case you think all we did was play one shots, this was certainly not the case, once the core set of characters was established, we would move on to modules or whatever crazy idea I had for a dungeon. At one point my players wanted to play the Giant series, but did not have high enough level characters, so I ran nothing but random dungeons for 3 months, playing from Friday night to Sunday night, while they speed leveled to 9th. After we finished the Giants modules, these same characters tackled Tomb of Horrors. To this day, that was one of the best campaign I ever ran.
That sounds awesome. I am sure many cheeseits, coca colas, and pizzas were consumed with Conan the Barbarian on in the background.
Yeah, I'm really not a big fan of that insistence that you NEED session 0. We're gonna roll some dice and kill some monsters, let's just friggin' relax. No, you do not need a backstory. No, I do not want to read it.
Once again, why is your way the only way for everyone? Yeah, it sounds nice to just jump into a game like that, and yet you’ve lost that ability… how? Other people exist, therefore woe is your way of life? And now they should feel your wrath… because? When your game is determined by how others play it, you’ve got bigger problems.
Your character generation sounds like Traveller with extra steps. Now THAT GAME couldn’t WAIT to kill PCs until a suitable one was formed! It was glorious… and by “was”, I of course mean “still is”, because RPGs aren’t food, they don’t spoil when they go out of print. Keep calm and game on. 👑
@@commandercaptain4664 It's wild how two people can read a comment completely differently. I don't get that at all from the comment above yours. Anyway, game on is always solid advice.
In one of our game the character death rate was so high one of our players call his characters "Bob the barbarian's brother Bob"
I'm curious how the poll results would differ if the data could be filtered to just responses from people who answered both, especially since both polls have similar numbers in the "Very few or none" response. I could also see OSR having more groups with mostly GMs simply because people inclined to look past the big name TTRPGs to discover OSR games are more likely to be invested enough in the hobby to want to be a GM.
Yeah I think this is more filtering (DMs are used to reading rules and more passionate about their tables) than inherent advantages in OSR.
By which I mean, most OSR DMs were probably DMs before picking up the systems, not OSR players who converted into DMs.
I've been seeing the shortage of 5E DMs for a few years. I'm on a couple of D&D Facebook groups for my state and local area. There are a lot of players looking for games and all the local Adventure League games are packed. This has always been a problem to one degree or another. In the 90's there was a shortage of DM's too. I think the reason that OSR has a lot of DMs is that the people who are into the OSR most were DM's back in the olden times. None of the people I played with in the 80's and 90s still play.
The accessibility and ease of running issue is a big one and here is what I think WotC is going to do to address it. Virtual gaming. They are making the game so complex with how many species (sic) and classes and more than 100 official subclasses that nobody could keep it all in their head. You have to use the digital tools to run a game and that is exactly what they want. They are looking for you to use subscription based tools so they can charge for it.
5e doesn't have nearly as many races as 3.5 though, there were what, 3 PHBs, multiple setting exclusive races, and supplemental material that added half races. 3.5 also run to lvl 30 with multiple subclass/heroic/epic classes where 5e you only get 1 subclass(unless you multiclass) and runs only to lvl 20. 5e cut down on the complexity compared to 3.5.
@@ChirutheKenku Every time they release a new product they add a few. Since they intend for DMs to be running games off of D&D Beyond and their upcoming VTT, it won't matter. Everything will be a click or two away and easy to manage.
@@grumpy_wizard_blog Right, but by the end of 3.5, which did not have any real digital support, they had 173 player races alone, 5e only has maybe 20. And DMs kept up with that without stuff like d&d Beyond just fine.
@@ChirutheKenku I disagree that DMs kept up. Most 3E DMs I knew felt completely overwhelmed.
@@wyrdbrew But WotC is looking to mitigate that, sure it's via sub based system, but if the dm wants his players to have access to all his books then the dm is the only one that needs to pay it. And while, sure it doesn't help in person games too much, it's a life saver for online games. Plus you don't have to use DDB, just use R20 or one of the other VTT systems that let you purchase, share, and organize content.
As someone who got started a year ago, in 5e, I think this makes a kind of sense. It's not just D&D that's changed. Fantasy has become a huge genre, and continuity is king. Brandon Sanderson is raking it in as he writes series after series of books on interconnected worlds. Marvel is releasing blockbuster movies and shows where the characters enter and leave each other's stories, DC and Star Wars are doing the same (albeit with mixed success). Players who come from that culture want to do the same. I played Adventurer's League games at my local shop and they felt kind of bland whenever that continuity wasn't there. I don't think that will go away until/unless the culture shifts. I'm not totally sure it's a bad thing either. Storytelling and participation are accessible and accepted now in ways they weren't before. We just haven't adapted. I absolutely agree that too much is expected of modern DMs. 5e or 6e or whatever could benefit from a quick encounter and scenario builder. Maybe even something AI assisted - not to replace the DM, but to help them quickly generate content they can then adapt to their table, take some of that cognitive load off. But I personally wouldn't enjoy dropping the story and continuity. If I just wanted to go through enemies, traps, and puzzles? Well, I'd play a different game.
How he describes DMing in 5e is kind of how I always have done this since 2e. I just thought that was how you were supposed to do it.
A deep story driven world makes it easier to adventure in. It answers the question of what questions to ask.
Players back stories were the best tool ever to compel players on adventures and even present challenges.
I just considered most of this part of framing a good campaign. I never put much thought into it being hard for some players. Maybe that's why our group usually wanted me to DM.
I am a returning player/DM - I played From the Boxed sets through 2nd Edition. It was much looser, more fun, as a DM fun was number one, 'Rules are the Guideline only' . Looking at the new books its "standard actions, move actions, full-round actions, free actions, swift actions, and immediate actions" WTF is this?! We just rolled for initiative and had a blast. I remember reading on one of the very first pages, that DnD was about fun and imagination and thats how we rolled. Making rules, breaking rules and bending rules as needed all for the sake of having a good time with friends.
The best quote in the article: “There's a DM shortage in the tabletop community like there's a top shortage in the LGBTQ community.”
I feel targeted by how correct that DM is. Second of all I want to hear all of their stories.
I became the DM the same way I became a switch, lol
I don’t understand
Salient AF
I'm always shocked to hear that because where I'm at its like Oops, all tops.
When I switched from plot based to location based something amazing happened. I got way more plot and it was free - the player's built it.
The bloat of 5e streams generates the culture imo, new people want to play the thing they just watched, not what the dm has run - they dont see what the dm has actually done so it becomes some mystical power. Streams that showed the work from the GM could maybe help demystify and get new people into it... but also the 5e culture has been created off of the back of this problem and I don't think they want it to change
While this doesn't solve the issues you present, this is some of the many reasons why i only run campaigns with close friends. They know what i bring to the table and they dont expect more or feel entitled to things they might get in other campaigns. They know that if i make a different or odd rulings there is a reason for it.
This comes up with our 11 year old regular. She sees us playing, and she wants to play D&D, and I hand her something from 5E, and her eyes glaze over. She had fun playing, but DMing is overwhelming for her. We can play and run 5E because we're lifelong gamers - the barrier to entry for a new gamer is very high. I also suspect that the OSR scene is similar to the Indy RPG scene 10 or so years ago - the DM/GMs are the ones who are most likely to go looking for a new game to run, and they're the ones who find the new games that are out there. So you have a lot of DMs in the OSR because it is much more common for a player to go along with the group, or for a play group to play games based on what the DM/GM is willing to run.
I DM almost exclusively for other DMs- I have 1 current player who’s never DM’d and 2 previous players who’d never DM’d.
It’s an extremely healthy table because everyone knows the rules, generally knows the lore, etc…
Nothing against non-DM’s, but my table _gets me._ They get scheduling conflicts, they get bio breaks, they get “oh shoot I CANNOT keep doing that voice.”
And I should clarify- I’ve never been a player. I’ve never not been the DM. I started off DMing with 0 experience running Rime of the Frostmaiden.
I’m introverted, not the best person in the group with rules (one guy’s been DMing 10 years and another like 12).
So I’m no Brennen Lee Mulligan, I’m no Matt Coleville or Mercer.
I’ve never even finished a Tolkien book.
As a DM with about 7 years of experience across several editions of DnD and other systems, in my opinion the biggest problem about DMing for 5E is setting expectations. The PHB is really lacking in this one. I always set the expectations with the new players, explain the difference between a DnD show and a DnD game (it is needed sometimes) and usually have a positive experience. Some of players went on to become dungeon masters of their own after a couple of years, so I consider my model of behavior to be successful.
Additionally, I encounter more and more new players with sky-high expectations about DnD sessions. They usually quickly leave my group and I am not afraid of letting them go. I mostly attribute it to Critical-role-like shows and WotC ads, to be honest.
Another thing that could help is to combine DMG and PHB together. Maybe make it a little bit bigger, but then it would be more evident that a DM is also a player, like everybody else in the group.
To be fair, I've been playing D&D/DMing since 2e, and we still ran plot/story driven games.
Frankly, while most players I knew would settle for location based, they preferred story games.
And commercially, I still remember thin little supplements that could be "Used as a stand-alone adventure, or combined with the other adventures from this series, to make a complete campaign with a satisfying climax to this epic story!" 😆
In my day, the DM didn’t cater to us, we got swallowed alive by giant frogs on our first adventure, and we liked it that way, we loved it!
Don't you hate being "of a certain age" where you have to start off with "In my day..." LOL! Ugg!
Don't get me wrong, I'm "of a certain age" as well, and I often have to stop myself when I start to sound like I'm telling "kids" to get off my lawn >.
When you're getting your second degree and the proff mentions Watergate and everyone in the class looks at you expecting you to have personal experience.... C'mon, I'm not THAT old! Just because I've been seen with several professors reminiscing about the 80s...
@@mikeb.1705 It’s the best part of getting old! I was riffing off the old SNL skit, by the way.
@@nrais76 Haha, did that really happen?
Sounds like KonoSuba but alright.
I agree. Id say 80-90% of my play experience has been behind the DM screen. Probably for the last 5 years or so I have had next to no ambition to run a 5e game. The power creep, and the focus on a defined narrative over emergent story has kind of killed it for me. As a player I have always shied away from attaching any sort of back story to my characters and usually scribble a name down just before the initial session. As a DM I have little interest in player back story and navigating the labyrinth of rules that often accompany a players finely tuned and well thought out character build. Make a random Joe, play them well, be creative and lets see where we get!
Definitely a fascinating phenomenon, I wonder what a deeper statistical analysis could reveal. Anyway, I love videos where you talk about stuff other than the books themselves, such as this one or the one where you talked about the problem with Hit Points in D&D. Please, make more!
This is something I've been feeling for a long time but have struggled to put into words. So often new players will want to DM but will hit a hard barrier. Or, worse, they begin running a game and quit because they feel overwhelmed. I'm glad you brought attention to this problem
Forever DM here since ‘83. I can’t agree more. I actually really liked 3.x ed but eventually it broke my brain. I just couldn’t keep up. I found solitude in OSR before giving 5th a chance and it’s okay, but is still a huge drain on mental resource when trying to balance the abilities and feats of PCs and monsters. Unfortunately, neither of my two groups want to go back to OSR any time soon and there’s nothing worse than imposing a system on players when they’re not interested. If I could put together a solid BECMI group I would run it in a shot.
5e is a tabletop video game where the players have all the cheat codes.
Basically, it's broken and unbalanced.
I have run a successful multi-year 5e campaign to great acclaim in my group. It's hard work! It's *much* easier to run Call of Cthulhu or any old school version of D&D. The mechanics of 5e are very 'touchy'; you have to consider your rulings very carefully. The system is always at the forefront, whereas it disappears in old school games. I would always prefer to play/run old school; I wouldn't even consider attempting to run 5e with all the bloat that they've introduced over the years. "I'm running a Wolftherian Psi-hunk Kitsunemaster with a Naruto build out of Tasha's Guide To Avengers Assemble Fursonas. I chose a Rainbow Unicorn as my pet/mount/significant other/familiar and I'll be quasi-classing into a Galactus-kin at 17th level."
Wow, and I thought it was bad when I had to deal with the squid person barista that had three levels of rulebreaker paladin and the gamebreaker feat.
I co-ran a West Marches PF2 server, and one thing I noticed was that it didn't take much for players to get interested in running games. We minted more than a few first-time GMs, some of whom never even played TTRPGs before. A huge part of it? If you could run your character competently, you could probably run a session! Everything you needed to know was on the creature's page, and one big assumption in PF is that players know how to run their characters. There's very few places a GM has to make a call because it isn't spelled out.
One issue we did run across now and then were 5e players who came in and expected a bespoke experience. If they came in off the CR wave, they were puzzled that the story sometimes came from how your player reacted to the things around them, rather than having scenes crafted just for them (something that was impossible with how many players we had). The ones who adjusted their expectations were the happiest.
I think if we start DM'ing 5e like OSR like you were saying, it will attract more DM's. The best stories come out of how the characters face the challenges the environments present and all it takes is a little tweak here and there to get 5e there
It’ll take a bit more than that to achieve OSRness, like getting rid of death saves and skills (using ability checks instead) and severely limiting feats and class upgrades. This goes a long way with high level play.
Honestly I think you're a lot better just running OSR from the beginning. Going in with 5E expectations really probably won't lead to anything good. If anything you want to dispel those expectations as soon as possible.
I can offer one alternate theory: the DM shortage is because everyone wants to be "the hero" instead of "the person who helps others be the hero".
OSR lets the DM & Players make up the story. Since the advent of the "rules to cover every eventuality" mindset in 3rd ed, the flexibilty to create the story was replaced by follow the module.
You left out the fact that a big chunk of the new market was taken from the video game culture and from millennials. There's a lot of consumerism and entitlement there. Those folks want a different experience and it's centered around them and their having all their desires met, and that quickly. Those folks don't want to DM, they want to have an amazing experience served up to them on a platter.