Is there a DM shortage? What can or should be done?

[2D8HP]

Maybe it's just at local tables (and PbP at this Forum), but it seems that they're a lot more willing players than DM's, far more than a five-to-one ratio that would seem to be about right.
Is there a DM shortage? What can or should be done?
I guess this could go into a different sub-forum, but I'm posting it here because 5e D&D is what I've been playing the most lately.
I thought to ask this just after I posted this:

I was being sincere. I have a much harder time remembering most rules I last read 35 minutes ago than I do remembering rules I read 35 years ago, which is why I'm a failure at DM'ing 5e, to the regret of the others at the table who drafted me on the basis of my "experience"
While I can still improvise adventures, and "worldbuild", I'm terrible at adjudicating current RAW, and given the unmet need for DM's that's a pronlem.
Is there a way to have more willing and competant DM's?
3.5 seems to have even more players seeking DM's than 5e (and looks to be even harder to DM to me).
This post has got me wondering:
I disagree mostly, since the days of 3.5 and 4e the DM has goitten a lotof agency back. Before, the player was guaranteed to have interpertations in the book, this was most commonly explained by the DC's set for skills in terms of guidelines or crystal clear set DC's for a certain task. This has disappeared completely in 5e since it says, that you can make a skillcheck and the DM sets a DC (no more DC X gives you Y success at [task]). And that's not the only example: the rules (both PHB and DMG give the player the warning that everything goes by the grace of the DM. it seems almost everywehre the designers could they said 'ask you DM' and went for a minimum effort on crystal clear rules.

That said I agree that the DM has a lot to do when preparing (one of the reasons that when I decided to start DMing to pick a different system) because he has the added burden of being ajudicator, on top of referee, opposition, and basically the world creator. Fortunately the DM can make use of the DMG and MM, however, as mentioned in another thread, they weren't as dilligent in creating the MM as they could have been. ( I believe the words 'lazy devs' were used at some point). The fact that the DM has to account for a myraid of options, yet at the same time narrow them down for the options the players have chosen (think about all those spelleffects) to create a diverse and challenging, but overcomable set of problems. I agree that it's a daunting task and the choice fatigue can readily creep in. However, the myria dof options does give the DM a way to create an ever diverse set of obstacles. Be they traps, mosnters, enemies (with classlevels) and so on. I think that in this case more options can definitely enrich a game like 5e.Would different rules make for a game more attractive to DM?
I know for me only using the free basic rules (http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules) and excluding much of the PHB makes it easier for me to DM, but I'm also a player in a game that is richer for having a Dragonborn Warlock PC that would be banned if I was the DM, to the games loss.
For me DM'ing the D&D rules I learned in the 1970's (or Keeper'ing earyl 80's Call of Cthullu) is easier for me than DM'ing 5e, but I strongly suspect that's because those earlier rules were imprinted on my younger mind rather than being that much simpler, but it did seem that they were more willing DM's per players then.
Is my perception of a DM shortage delusional?
Can/should anything be done?

[Specter]

The AngryDM has an article on that, which I can't really remember except that I agree with it.

The only advice I can give is to players: show love for your DM. Even the simplest dungeon crawl requires hours of planning and rules-study.

[Discord]

Welp.

A lot of people talk about the 'Forever DM' I feel like I might be the 'Forever Player'. You see. I love 5th Edition D&D. I started with 3.5 and 5th edition is vastly easier to remember and its a lot of DM 'says' for things.

I've tried to DM three games since I started 5th with varying degrees of success. 1st one was homebrew. It fell apart after we lost two of the players due to real life drama.

2nd game I started was a homebrew game based after the series 'Monster Blood Tattoo' had one session. Barely into the game on google hangouts one player fell asleep. And needless to say we never returned to that game.

3rd game I started Dming. Curse of Strahd. Love the setting. Love the source material. Everything. Spent a lot of time prepping the game in onenote. A lot of time. Love the players. Bunch of guys I met off reddit. We played a lot of sessions. Got up to the Wizard of Wines. Being a fairly new DM big encounters get complicated. Two players had complaints.

One player was gonna have to switch days because of college. We were gonna switch days for him then he said. "I dont want to play anymore." then my second player got a giril friend and busy in other areas of his life and more or less said "my campaign was the lowest on his priority list" and so he in turned dropped my campaign.

So we stopped CoS. After losing two out of five players. One of the three remaininf cant always make it to sessions weekly so I really only had two active players. So the campaign was dropped altogether.

I feel pretty dejected and not sure if Ill pick up Dming again. As I put an extreme amount of work into CoS that will never get used again. I asked them if they would like to restart CoS and more or less said no. We moved the one player who cant attend all the time into our Tuesday group.

And what is done is done.

[CantigThimble]

I am often the DM for my groups just because if I wasn't there would be no game but I usually stop pretty much as soon as someone else volunteers to run a game. I just don't enjoy DMing very much. I apparently do a pretty decent job of it, my players pretty universally like my games but I just get so stressed out by trying to manage combats and make exploration interesting and get different NPCs right that I just can't take it. Being a player removes so much of that pressure and allows me to just enjoy the game. Being the DM is at minimum 5 times as much work as being a player because for every idea a player comes up with you need to come up with an idea in response. Usually, it's more because session prep will involve coming up with preemptive responses to things the players won't try. On top of that when I'm a player I get to play a character I like and can have fun with while most of my NPCs are much less enjoyable or interesting for me to roleplay. It honestly just feels like I'm working customer service. I'm constantly trying to manage the needs and wants of a group of 4-6 people and even when those people are reasonable and appreciative and I like them that's too much for me. I've been looking into more narratively focused games like FATE or Shadowrun: Anarchy to see if those might help take some of the pressure off of me and make it more enjoyable to run games.

Anyway, that's my experience as a DM and why I'm contributing to the shortage.

[PeteNutButter]

I find DM shortage to be a very real thing. Recently our AL group grew too large for one table and its gotten right f***ed up.

I blame the increased usage of pre-written adventures modules and campaigns. It might just be my experience, but I feel like more games now use published materials than home-brew campaigns compared to older editions. I'm sure someone else has more detailed stats on it, but I'd bet wotc has published more campaigns and modules for 3.5 and on than earlier editions. More public content means less need to make stuff up.

What does that have to do with DM shortage? Well for me at least, one of the best parts of DMing is the story telling. A lot of the best games I've played or DMed have been home-brewed because the DM really takes ownership of the world and its characters.

When the DM reveals that twist ending to the campaign that he had planned for months and gets to see the players' "oh ****" faces... that is DM satisfaction. He got to impart something onto the players. He took them through his world, leaving crumbs and clues, and finally a big reveal of his own creation.

When the DM runs the final fight in Out of the Abyss, and the players just methodically clap d20s off the table until they win, the DM is just satisfied that its finally over.

If you ask me, you can't find a DM to run Storm King's Thunder, because he doesn't care about this storm king or his thunder. For me running a mod is like factory work. You are just part of the assembly line. The mod got all its widgets in and now you are just pushing it to the players.

My two cents: Put the story-telling back into DMing. Maybe release more DM aid materials and less mods? I don't know. All I know is I refuse to DM AL for this reason, but happily DM my own game.

[BW022]

Maybe it's just at local tables (and PbP at this Forum), but it seems that they're a lot more willing players than DM's, far more than a five-to-one ratio that would seem to be about right.
Is there a DM shortage? What can or should be done?
...
Is my perception of a DM shortage delusional?
Can/should anything be done?

Yes. Almost certainly. However, it is a simple matter of how the game is played.

DM'ing is harder than playing. You need a lot more time, money, and effort. DMs are expected to make the campaigns, provide a place to play, recruit people, buy modules, have all the books, know most of the rules, have enough experience to play, be far better role-players than most players (since they have to run all the NPCs), etc. Players only need the PHB and some time. Reality... you likely need years of experience as a player to get enough knowledge/experience to be a reasonable DM. So... where does a DM get that experience? Either "old school" (they played with a group prior to the video game era where groups stuck together long enough for a person to become a reasonable DM), or they play as a player for at least a year or two... under an old-school DM.

The issue is that new players need to find experienced DMs. They rarely have the option 'forcing' a group together and sticking it out. Players have a bad experience with you... it isn't like 1985 where they had to stick it out... today they'll just find another group or play WoW or something. Likewise... few new DMs have the patience to suck. The issue becomes even more of a problem when you consider that most experienced DMs form home gaming groups and everyone goes and plays with them. Add multiple editions of D&D.

So, imagine you have five new D&D players. Well... they then need to find an experienced DM (or several) willing to run them through a year or two worth of gaming. That DM then has to be willing to give up on his home group -- or run multiple sessions. And of course most games fail -- especially with new players and everyone needs to be able to find each other. If the players try DMing themselves... chances are the game will suck. Players won't like it and they'll go looking for a better DM.

Ways it could go better...

More people join Adventurer's League, especially old time DMs. WotC has an issue here since 4E basically split the game into Pathfinder, 3.5, some 4E, and some 5E.

WotC should give away free content for Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds (and likely memberships) for any DM willing to run a public game every week. Same with gaming stores, comic shops, conventions, etc. Give something free to anyone willing to run a game.

Pathfinder, 3.5, and 4E need to die -- at least to the point at which large numbers of DMs move to a common 5E system and run public games.

WotC needs incentives for DMs running games not to form home campaigns or just order them for "their group". Difficult. Many DMs often use AL and others as a recruiting tool... once you find a group of good players, you form a home group and stop running games for new players.

[NecroDancer]

Yes. Almost certainly. However, it is a simple matter of how the game is played.

DM'ing is harder than playing. You need a lot more time, money, and effort. DMs are expected to make the campaigns, provide a place to play, recruit people, buy modules, have all the books, know most of the rules, have enough experience to play, be far better role-players than most players (since they have to run all the NPCs), etc. Players only need the PHB and some time. Reality... you likely need years of experience as a player to get enough knowledge/experience to be a reasonable DM. So... where does a DM get that experience? Either "old school" (they played with a group prior to the video game era where groups stuck together long enough for a person to become a reasonable DM), or they play as a player for at least a year or two... under an old-school DM.

The issue is that new players need to find experienced DMs. They rarely have the option 'forcing' a group together and sticking it out. Players have a bad experience with you... it isn't like 1985 where they had to stick it out... today they'll just find another group or play WoW or something. Likewise... few new DMs have the patience to suck. The issue becomes even more of a problem when you consider that most experienced DMs form home gaming groups and everyone goes and plays with them. Add multiple editions of D&D.

So, imagine you have five new D&D players. Well... they then need to find an experienced DM (or several) willing to run them through a year or two worth of gaming. That DM then has to be willing to give up on his home group -- or run multiple sessions. And of course most games fail -- especially with new players and everyone needs to be able to find each other. If the players try DMing themselves... chances are the game will suck. Players won't like it and they'll go looking for a better DM.

Ways it could go better...

More people join Adventurer's League, especially old time DMs. WotC has an issue here since 4E basically split the game into Pathfinder, 3.5, some 4E, and some 5E.

WotC should give away free content for Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds (and likely memberships) for any DM willing to run a public game every week. Same with gaming stores, comic shops, conventions, etc. Give something free to anyone willing to run a game.

Pathfinder, 3.5, and 4E need to die -- at least to the point at which large numbers of DMs move to a common 5E system and run public games.

WotC needs incentives for DMs running games not to form home campaigns or just order them for "their group". Difficult. Many DMs often use AL and others as a recruiting tool... once you find a group of good players, you form a home group and stop running games for new players.

I agree with 4th edition but 3.5 and pathfinder can stay

[longshotist]

i used to dislike being the DM, but nevertheless wound up filling that spot much more often than not. i wanted to be a player! take my character with the cool backstory and guide his adventures and story arcs, grow in power, all that.

somewhere along the way i realized, being the DM allows you to do all of those things...except with a virtually unlimited number of characters! a great recurring villain that engages the party throughout many levels and adventures is just as rewarding, if you keep in mind that they still exist when they're not directly confronting the party. they have a story and their own adventures.

my DM style has changed a whole lot as well. These days, i like to paint the broad strokes of a world, get the group started on a small scale quest, and then see where they take things. it used to be a struggle using modules and stuff because if i didn't fully grasp why this NPC does that, or whatever, and players pursued those threads, i felt like i was floundering. but then i heard the best DM tip ever, which is that if you need the group to go to point A to progress your story, and they go to point B, just make point B into point A.

i'm getting off on a tangent though.

is there less DM's than players? yes, absolutely. i imagine a lot of people are either intimidated by the prospect, or want to focus on their hero, or some combination of those. but if they gave it a chance and (like anything) learned and grew over time, i think a lot of people would discover how enjoyable it is. even the between times working on the campaign and then seeing how the players react (and, yes, do completely unexpected things) is so much fun.

[MasterMercury]

Definitely a DM shortage, though in my area it's more of a D&D shortage. I DM for a group of 5-8 people who have never played before until I asked if they wanted to. I make up storylines and quests, and basically do what I want. This, to me, is a lot easier to keep track of than a prewritten campaign.
My friends love doing it, and I love making them love it. My group is getting a bit big, but that's beneficial for me. If I have 8 people to ask to come, it rarely will really affect the game if a few can't make it. This also leads to some pretty entertaining openings.
"As the combat continues, the rogue stabs the flying owlbear in the back. They both fly off into the distance. Out of the trees, a nude half-orc you recognize as Krushber charges down the hobgoblins. "KRUSHBER IS SORRY THAT KRUSHBER IS LATE!""
(First Minute of my last session. One guy who came last time was working, but someone who couldn't make it last time came.)

[MasterMercury]

the best DM tip ever, which is that if you need the group to go to point A to progress your story, and they go to point B, just make point B into point A.

Hahaha. Yes, I do that all the time.

[pwykersotz]

i used to dislike being the DM, but nevertheless wound up filling that spot much more often than not. i wanted to be a player! take my character with the cool backstory and guide his adventures and story arcs, grow in power, all that.

somewhere along the way i realized, being the DM allows you to do all of those things...except with a virtually unlimited number of characters! a great recurring villain that engages the party throughout many levels and adventures is just as rewarding, if you keep in mind that they still exist when they're not directly confronting the party. they have a story and their own adventures.

my DM style has changed a whole lot as well. These days, i like to paint the broad strokes of a world, get the group started on a small scale quest, and then see where they take things. it used to be a struggle using modules and stuff because if i didn't fully grasp why this NPC does that, or whatever, and players pursued those threads, i felt like i was floundering. but then i heard the best DM tip ever, which is that if you need the group to go to point A to progress your story, and they go to point B, just make point B into point A.

I had similar growth as a GM also. It was intimidating at first, and really tough to run the game even as I knew I was awful. But now I primarily love GM'ing. I still wish I could play more (at all), but given a choice between only playing or only GM'ing, I'll take GM'ing.

[Delicious Taffy]

My area has a very noticeable DM shortage, in that I seem to be the only one in town. I've got two groups of players, one of which I'm currently quite cross with, so I really only have one active group. Being that I'm the one who introduces people to the idea of playing certain games, I'm naturally the designated DM for those games. The one time I got to take a break and have one of my regular players take the role of DM, it fell apart in the middle of the first session, due to unrelated family problems that consumed my time.

By this point, I've sort of accepted that I'm going to stay the designated DM, at least until my players have enough knowledge of the systems to run their own games. It took over a year playing Living Legends (http://ponytales.forumotion.com/t459-official-handbooks-in-one-easy-location) for just one player to get enough of the rules that we could switch. I anticipate a similar time span until I can switch out with one of my players in 4e.

[MrStabby]

Our group started out with no, or at least little, previous experience. We had some rotating DMs for part of the story arc, each adding more to the world. We were pretty terrible, but each new incumbent learned from what they didn't like and added more.

The trouble is not that it takes so much time to prepare, but that it takes so much time to run. If a campaign arc lasts a year, and you have one group then if you DM it is a year that you are not playing for. I think it is easier with groups who have more time so you can run campaign is parallel - it is easier to get someone to DM if it doesn't mean they cant play.

Personally I love DMing. It is frustrating, I make huge numbers of errors, but as plots and schemes unfold and as the players put together all the tiny details you leave in the world to build a picture it is really rewarding.

So solution: everyone should play more, more games means DMs don't have to stop playing. Not quite a practical solution though.

[Sir cryosin]

Writing a story campaign is fun and all but players are so unpredictable. That they go on a murder hobo stabbing spree. And kill a important npc or BBG befor he can get to his lv. Or they can be like oh the town is going to be attack they talk to people trying to convince them but can't so they say **** it let go see what in the Mountain over there. I like using sandbox campaign's with small quest in it sometimes I'll throw in a grand world changing quest in. But I like to create a world and let then explore it. Let them change, create, destory. As they go. Some of my inspirations are the twitch shows (rollplay: west marches , critical role.) Now not everyone are professional entertainers. But what I like is how descriptive they are and how they make there world come to life. My DM runs pre-made modules we are doing storm kings thunder right now. He like to run pre-made stuff just because it easyer on him as dm and he injoy the storys. But we had a small homebrewed campaign in between HOTDQ and CoS and the only thing we talked about is we want a airship and blackpowder weapons in the campaign so we did and everything thing else he just used the random dungeons creation tables in DMG. Had simple plot and it was only 3 or 4 sessions and we talk about are characters from there all the time. Best advice that I have learned and been told is to never try to predict what your players are going to do. Don't ever plan. Use Simple plots don't make it over creative exaggerated keep it simple. Make it memorable, if they have to go for a whole bunch of goblins get goblins personalities make the Goblins actually feel like real creatures. But yes there are more players than two years because a lot of people just don't want the extra work that it takes to be a DM.

[Slipperychicken]

The only advice I can give is to players: show love for your DM. Even the simplest dungeon crawl requires hours of planning and rules-study.

This. I think that more people would GM if players had more respect for those who do GM, were more willing to communicate their desires and concerns instead of lashing out, and did more to make them feel like the immense time and energy they spend on GM-work is not wasted.


I'm a new GM. Well, probably former GM now. A player of mine just ran my campaign into the ground by repeatedly ragequitting, running away from the table, and sulking the second things did not go his way (i.e. an NPC doesn't do what he wanted because his social skills rolled too low, he gets KO'd in battle, someone calls the guards when he tries to cast a spell on the court wizard, etc), and his conduct in turn demoralized all our close friends at the table. This person was our former burned-out GM for years before: the one person at the table who I assumed would never behave like this. Experiencing this sort of childish, naked disrespect is something that has drained my will to GM.

I feel certain that at least some others have poured their time and creative energy into their work as a GM, got this kind of mortifying response (or any of the RPG horror-stories floating around really), and felt discouraged from GMing just like I am now. And I know there are people who witness the unmitigated suffering that some GMs go through, the way their hard work is trampled on (and how some players even see this as a desirable end to a campaign!), and perhaps rightly decide to stay far away from from the GM-screen.


tldr: If you want to encourage more people to take up GMing, then be more pleasant and respectful to those who do GM. If you have a problem with something your GM does or doesn't do, then raise your concerns in a polite way and try to work with him to find ways you both could do things better. You aren't doing him or the hobby any favors by attempting to lash out at your GM, however blunt or clever you think you're being.

[Shaofoo]

I sometimes wonder if the things that people see on the internet about D&D discussion makes them a bit averse to DMing because they might encounter the hardcore rules lawyer.

[EvilAnagram]

I tend to resist DMing more than one game at a time, and I've been DMing the current one for about a year. In the past, I'd DM for Encounters, but 5e AL is more intensive than the old system.

It's just too time intensive for more than one campaign at a time.

[Knaight]

I suspect that the shortage is at least partially an online phenomenon. I don't think my local group is representative (for a number of reasons), but of the 15 or so people who coalesce into smaller groups for an individual campaign there's a good 6 who GM at least part of the time.

[Kish]

I agree with 4th edition but 3.5 and pathfinder can stay
There's kind of an obvious problem with, "The solution is for the people who play editions I don't to STOP DOING THAT."

(There's totally a plot in Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales about this, though.)

[TripleD]

The AngryDM has an article on that, which I can't really remember except that I agree with it.


There are two point I remember him making that stuck with me.

1) Make a decent Dungeon Masters Guide. Seriously. It seems like 80% of the guide is devoted to world building, which is the last thing you should worry about when planning a game. Go over the concepts behind the game (e.g. When is it apropriate to force a roll?), and for the love of all that's holy, don't be afraid to engage in some math. D&D is ultimately a game of numbers: you have to be willing to teach things like plotting out XP budgets and Adventuring Days if you want to have any kind of pacing.

2) Have something like Adventure's League, but for DMs. If you want to be a Football Referee you aren't just handed a rule book and told "have at it". You get training and advice from more experienced referees. Why can't we also have once a week sessions on planning adventures or running a table?

[Sigreid]

It sounds like a lot of this boils down to AL?

I'm not surprised that there's a shortage of DMs there as you really don't know what you are going to get. I play exclusively with friends, and I've found over the years and multiple groups that it usually works out to where one person does disproportionately more of the DMing, but nearly everyone is willing to step up for a few sessions here and there as long as everyone is a bit forgiving of strange rulings. Heck the one who does the biggest portion of DMing usually starts out that way and finds that they actually enjoy DMing more than the others and that's how they wind up in that role. I think it also helps if the person who agrees to DM knows it's not a life sentence in the group. :smallbiggrin:

[EvilAnagram]

2) Have something like Adventure's League, but for DMs. If you want to be a Football Referee you aren't just handed a rule book and told "have at it". You get training and advice from more experienced referees. Why can't we also have once a week sessions on planning adventures or running a table?
like gitp?

[Grubble]

There is definitely a DM shortage online. Due to a weird schedule I explored playing over roll20 or fantasy grounds, and everything I could find had 15-20 people registered for the 5 player spots.

In contrast, we're overflowing with DMs locally. Our local Adventure League has been running 5 tables which is the max the space can hold. One of those tables is composed of mostly DMs. It's nice to get to play from time to time.

[EvilAnagram]

The shortage online probably has more to do with the quality of the experience. When you have less control over who gets to be at the table, the possibility for poisonous players increases.

[mgshamster]

The shortage online probably has more to do with the quality of the experience. When you have less control over who gets to be at the table, the possibility for poisonous players increases.

This, combined with the greater likelihood of misunderstanding emotions over text, can kill text-based online games. Especially when you introduce people who are bad at communication and/or have poor reading comprehension skills.

Plus the whole, "anonyminity creates *******s" concept for any sort of online community can worsen the gameplay.

[Shaofoo]

like gitp?

We want to actually have more DMs, not less.

[DwarvenGM]

Absolutely a shortage of DM's if I ever want to play a game I have to run it myself. I'm currently running a 5e game and a mutants and masterminds game. While I have fun it can be a lot, I've even had players buy new games they want me to learn and run for them.


I've asked others to run games and every once in a while they'll say yes. Then as they are preparing their game they back out due to the amount of effort it takes.

And that's the issue running, games takes effort and a lot of that effort is wasted when players go their own way. Hell in my mutants and masterminds minds game my players ended up nullifying my planned plot and enemies when they accidentally created 4 villains... yeah hours of planning and enemy write ups got thrown out but I enjoyed it because I got to show my players that their actions created these new villains and it was awesome.

But still when you spends hours on stuff that might get thrown out it is hard to justify actually doing it. And I think that is a big reason why some dislike dming.

I think showing respect and maybe just going out of your way to help your DM may make others in your group more willing to try.

[Xetheral]

D&D is ultimately a game of numbers: you have to be willing to teach things like plotting out XP budgets and Adventuring Days if you want to have any kind of pacing.

If anything, I sometimes think there's too much focus on the numbers from the DM's side. XP-budget approaches to planning are much easier to teach than the more-improvisational alternatives, and so one sees far more advice in the DMG tailored to the former rather than the latter. I think that scares off a whole crop of potential DMs whose skillsets would otherwise well-prepare them for a freewheeling style, but who don't realize that there are alternatives to methodical encounter planning.

[Ninja_Prawn]

My experience up to now is that there is a general shortage of willing DMs. It's not really a surprise; DMing is a hard, time-consuming, often thankless task that requires a certain type of person to really enjoy it. Plus, very few people are going to wake up one day and think "yes, I want to DM a D&D game!" The vast majority of DMs are former- or would-be-players, so the pool of potential DMs is very small.

I read Angry's article back in the day, too, and I agree with what he said. The shortage is a real problem for WotC: it's a bottleneck that stops people from getting into the game and therefore limits the amount of product they can sell. They should set up a pipeline for getting more DMs into the game. And I agree with what he said about recruiting amateur writers; I do NaNoWriMo, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of dedicated, creative people on the forums there, just waiting to be recruited. :smallsigh:

[Reosoul]

I DM more than I play, but I often get bored with the task. I can create my own characters and develop stories and enjoy it at the same time, I enjoy the simple act of world-building through different methods, but the thing that often ruins games of mine is that same thing that ruins a lot of good things- people. Just plain, stupid people.

Whether it's the idiot who comes to the table and is determined to play the chaotic stupid character they've played a dozen times until you ban them as a player. The airhead who can't remember 3/4's of their character sheet, much less a few rules from the PHB, but somehow thinks a spirited 'critique' of your game is just thing to put you in your place and 'make you a better DM.' There's that one guy 'too tied up in real life', but is honestly just terrible at time-management and self-discipline, can't make a game on time and when he's there, is typically on his phone. Then there's the rare few players who try to put in as much effort as the DM does, brings a 110% to every session and isn't playing on their phone or doing anything but trying to breathe that world that's been created for them. For every one player like this I find twenty more like the others that waste my time and effort for this thankless 'job', and that's all it can be considered when you tally up the time and effort, much less the cost of running a game.

People are the worst. People are why there aren't a lot of DM's.

[Contrast]

I find DM shortage to be a very real thing. Recently our AL group grew too large for one table and its gotten right f***ed up.

I blame the increased usage of pre-written adventures modules and campaigns. It might just be my experience, but I feel like more games now use published materials than home-brew campaigns compared to older editions. I'm sure someone else has more detailed stats on it, but I'd bet wotc has published more campaigns and modules for 3.5 and on than earlier editions. More public content means less need to make stuff up.

What does that have to do with DM shortage? Well for me at least, one of the best parts of DMing is the story telling. A lot of the best games I've played or DMed have been home-brewed because the DM really takes ownership of the world and its characters.

When the DM reveals that twist ending to the campaign that he had planned for months and gets to see the players' "oh ****" faces... that is DM satisfaction. He got to impart something onto the players. He took them through his world, leaving crumbs and clues, and finally a big reveal of his own creation.

When the DM runs the final fight in Out of the Abyss, and the players just methodically clap d20s off the table until they win, the DM is just satisfied that its finally over.

If you ask me, you can't find a DM to run Storm King's Thunder, because he doesn't care about this storm king or his thunder. For me running a mod is like factory work. You are just part of the assembly line. The mod got all its widgets in and now you are just pushing it to the players.

My two cents: Put the story-telling back into DMing. Maybe release more DM aid materials and less mods? I don't know. All I know is I refuse to DM AL for this reason, but happily DM my own game.


I think you've got this the wrong way round entirely. The reason there is a demand for pre-written campaigns is because DMing a good campaign theoretically takes a lot of effort and planning which intimidates people. They see a book which says 'Aha, I can make all that effort and planning easier by giving you XYZ off the bat' and people run those campaigns.

DMs aren't less inventive because of pre-written modules. There are more people being DMs because its 'easier' to be a DM with a pre-written module.

Now that said, this doesn't comment at all on how much people are enjoying DMing which is vital if you want them to DM another campaign and then another after that. I've DMed a couple of a sessions and they went alright (one not great, one good, two average). But the fact of the matter is, I prefer being a player because its harder and less relaxing being a DM and this is something I do for fun. If someone else is happy to be the DM, I'm more than happy to let them. That's why there's a shortage of DMs. Being a player is simply a more attractive proposition for most people.

[MrStabby]

If someone else is happy to be the DM, I'm more than happy to let them. That's why there's a shortage of DMs. Being a player is simply a more attractive proposition for most people.

I am not quite certain of this - it seems intuitively true but I have one observation that runs contrary to this: most players have not seriously tried being a DM. The Playground is not a good sample of players - it is the sample that is keen enough to use an internet forum dedicated to the hobby and DMs are over-represented.

[mgshamster]

I am not quite certain of this - it seems intuitively true but I have one observation that runs contrary to this: most players have not seriously tried being a DM. The Playground is not a good sample of players - it is the sample that is keen enough to use an internet forum dedicated to the hobby and DMs are over-represented.

I'm kind of in agreement to this. Of the three major groups I've been with throughout my life, each one lasting approximately 8-10 years:

The first group (throughout all of my teenage years) often switched GM's. We often had multiple games going per week with a different person as the GM each game.

The second group had one primary GM, but she was such a control freak that she wouldn't actually let anyone else be the GM. not kidding. The one time someone else ran a game, she manipulated the game to make herself the center of attention to control the entire party (she played a character with high charisma and lots of enchantment spells, then proceeded to enchant or threaten any PC who didn't follow her every word). That game lasted four sessions. Then she went back to being the GM. Despite all that, she was damned good as a GM for most of the time I was with the group. Her husband also ran a solo campaign where she was the only player. Pretty much every player in that group were GMing their own game on the side.

The third and current group I'm the primary GM, and we have a secondary GM who occasionally runs games (he also runs games on the side). Of all of us in this group, there were only ever two people who refused to GM, and one of those two doesn't even play anymore.

From there, I've been in a lot of smaller groups, like barracks games in the army or the local gaming club in college. I even belonged to a Meetup group that played once a month and have been a part of PFS and AL games (both as a player and GM). All of those had rotating GMs, based on who was available on the day we played. Then there's all the online games I've played in (mostly Play-by-post, but occasionally a virtual table top game). I've been the GM in about a third of those games.

There's plenty of GMs out there, you just have to open yourself up to new avenues to find them. Or start a game yourself and after a year pass the baton off to one of the players.

[StarStuff]

The Strategicon events in Orange County, LA are always looking for more dungeon masters. I suspect this is true of other regular Adventurers League playgrounds, especially those at friendly local gaming stores (FLGS).

I'm preparing an article on this subject, but asking players ease the burdens and obstacles to DM'ing is the sum of it. This goes beyond bringing kale and fried Oreo's. Consider the following roles at your table:

Initiative Tracker - gathers and monitors party initiative
Pathfinder - the player assigned the task of drafting the battle map
Treasurer - the player who' manages party inventory
Secretary - the player who observes damage values on behalf of the DM. (Example: DM, "Add 20 more damage to M1, what's the total?" Secretary, "65HP." DM,"Your sword cleaves through the giant's calf. He collapses with a colossal thud.")


Consider the most elemental responsibility of the Dungeon Master: narrating. Offer to perform whatever tasks you can to help them Occum's Razor down to that role.

Our initiative tracker also preps the player "on-deck" in initiative by reviewing relevant modifiers while the DM resolves the "spotlighting" player action.

Never talk over your DM while he/she is narrating. Pay attention and take notes so nothing has to be repeated. In practice, the only people allowed to talk at the same time as the DM are the initiative tracker and the player on-deck. And they should do so softly. Whoever manages initiative should encourage players to have an idea of what they're going to do before their turn comes.

Also, consider alternatives to dry-erase battle maps. Some DM's go out of their way to draw or print out the dungeon in advance. More frequently, groups wing-it with mats from Paizo and Chessex. You can save a ton of time by using Legos or even big clumps of dice (someone at the table is probably a collector) to build walls and corridors. And it's less messy than dry erase.

Oh, and roll dice in advance. I am the not the audience for your math skills. If you know you're going to attack on your turn, don't halt the action. Ask another player to spot you while you roll and calculate relevant modifiers. Do so in such a way that you cannot cheat or disrupt the game.

TLDR: Make it easier to DM and more players will take up the mantle.

[Tehnar]

Things that help DMs:


Digital books / searchable online documents: sometimes the only free time you have is during breaks and the commute. It really helps if you can access the rules from anywhere rather then lugging books around
Rules not rulings: Rules, especially when they are clearly laid out and easily accessible, are a major time saver. There is no need to explain your rulings, players can read the rules and know what your characters can do. Rule lookup is faster then contemplating rulings, and is learned over time. Rulings are made fresh every time. It is much easier to plan encounters when you know you have rules to fall back on.




So if you are wondering why its harder to find DMs for 5e then it was for previous editions, maybe take a look at what the designers did (or in this case chose not to do) instead of saying DMing is only for a certain type people.

[mgshamster]

I fully agree with the complaint about a lack of pdfs.

I fully disagree with the complaint about rulings over rules. Coming up with an on-the-spot ruling and judgment call is easy and quick. Significantly quicker than having to stop game to look up an obscure rule that only comes about once every few months.

When you start getting tons of little rules all over the place, like we had in 3.X, it doesn't matter how long you've played, you're never going to have them all memorized and you're always going to come up with something obscure or complicated every single game and you'll have to stop the game to look up the rule and figure it out. Easier to just make a judgment call right then and there.

In fact, one of the more common pieces of advice for GMing a game is to not stop the game to look up a rule, but rather make a judgment call and look up the rule later (and try to remember if for next time). With the rulings system, that's built right into the game.

The fact that we have a simpler system is almost certainly not a reason for why there are fewer GMs.

[Tehnar]

I fully disagree with the complaint about rulings over rules. Coming up with an on-the-spot ruling and judgment call is easy and quick. Significantly quicker than having to stop game to look up an obscure rule that only comes about once every few months.

When you start getting tons of little rules all over the place, like we had in 3.X, it doesn't matter how long you've played, you're never going to have them all memorized and you're always going to come up with something obscure or complicated every single game and you'll have to stop the game to look up the rule and figure it out. Easier to just make a judgment call right then and there.

In fact, one of the more common pieces of advice for GMing a game is to not stop the game to look up a rule, but rather make a judgment call and look up the rule later (and try to remember if for next time). With the rulings system, that's built right into the game.

The fact that we have a simpler system is almost certainly not a reason for why there are fewer GMs.

I disagree rulings are quick and easy, especially when player and DM expectations clash. In my experience that causes the longest arguments.

Rules on the other hand can be looked up beforehand; say for jumping a player knows how far his character can expect to jump. The DM doesn't even need to know the jumping rules, he just states that that is a 20' jump and the player knows how much he needs to roll to jump that far.
And with something like a searchable PDF or a SRD any rule is 15 seconds away.

IF you had plenty of DMs in the period where you had systems with more rules, and fewer DMs in the system there are less rules and more rulings, one of the first questions should be is rulings not rules detracting people. I claim that rulings unloads a whole lot more work on the DM, work that they need not do.

[Hudsonian]

I think that the biggest reason for the DM shortage hasn't been mentioned yet. That is that there are simply more players.

The popularity of shows like Critical Role, Yogscast, Acquisitions Incorporated, and several others have increased the player base. All of them are new to D&D and want an "experienced DM" since they have no experience themselves.

Not many of whom seem to have taken the same route as me, which was, "I can't find a DM so I will play my first session of D&D as DM and just hope I don't get crucified."

Since then I've learned the rules and run a couple of sessions. Prowled the forums to discover other peoples weird rules questions. I'm about to run my second set of players through my first homebrewed game.

The problem of the influx of players is exacerbated online by the fact that it is the "Easiest place to find a DM" according to a lot of the guides on finding a gaming group.

As to the solution? I would pay good money to go to a conference/workshop that was taught by DMs for DMs. In person. Where it covered a lot of the tricks of the trade with tracks for world building, encounter building/day planning, and tricks on encouraging the players to think outside of the box.

At the end of the weekend there would be a time where a few volunteers/students chosen by the teachers get to run a single dungeon for a small group so the can show off their new skills under the direct supervision of a teacher for some real time tutoring.

That would be my dream anyway.

[Contrast]

To MrStabby and mgshamster:

To be clear, the main group that I play in have all GMed campaigns for the group. I've done the least GMing at a one-shot and a 3 session campaign. That said, 80-90% of our game time has been GMed by one person because he's the one with the inclination to do it more than the rest of us. If it wasn't for him I'm pretty sure RPGs are something we would do occasionally when we can arrange to meet up for a weekend rather than a weekly event as the rest of us don't really have the consistent desire to DM longer games (our current campaign has been going on for 2-3 years now).


Re rules vs rulings:

I'd definately say that rules light systems are easier than DMs than a rules heavy system. For one there's less for the DM to keep track of. In the hypothetical situation that both the DM and all players knew all the rules perfectly and completely agreed with the DM on how those rules were interpreted then maybe a rules heavy system would be easier for the DM after the initial learning period but that seems to me like a set of circumstances that has never existed at any table ever. I know people who've played a game for decades and still struggle with the rules and I know people who don't really care to learn the rules because they play role playing games for the role playing bit not the game bit. Either type of player immediately makes a lot more work for the DM. On a personal anecdotal level, I've never seen a player actually argue with a ruling a DM has made but I personally semi-frequently point out when a rule is being overlooked or applied incorrectly which means the DM has to stop what they were doing and check the rules.

This, of course, assumes that the players are on the DMs side and willing to work with them to make a fun game. If thats not true than I can certainly see that a rules heavy system would be preferable. If that's not true though, I think you have bigger problems.

[2D8HP]

And with something like a searchable PDF or a SRD any rule is 15 seconds away.I didn't know PDF's were searchable!

[Ninja_Prawn]

I didn't know PDF's were searchable!

Not all are. If a pdf is formatted as an image, you won't be able to search it. Text recognition programs are getting good these days though, so a scan of the books can be made searchable.

I have to say, when I have both books and pdfs to hand, I find it much quicker to use the books, especially if I need multiple pages across all three books, as I often do while homebrewing.

And making rulings on the fly (and having the books tell the players that that's ok) is a million times quicker and easier than spending hours arguing over the nuances of how to read a 'clear' rule.

Besides, hasn't lack the of DMs been a problem for decades?

[ruy343]

A lot of the issues that are presented thus far can be mitigated with a good, adult conversation between DMs and players before the game begins: the DM outlines his expectations, and the players explain what they're looking for in the game. If you don't have a copy of the 4th edition DMG, pick one up: it offers some really great advice on how to engage players and lay out the table's rules and expectations (as well as a bunch of other useful DM tips).

Now, to offer an opinion that I don't feel has been expressed yet: I think that a lot of players (especially DMs) are trying too hard. (cue frightened gasps and accusations of heresy)

As a very experienced DM, and D&D player in general, I know all about what it's like to run a campaign, and I know that the players will invariably mess everything up. Similarly, many DMs feel that they need to over-plan, and have a bunch of backstories and sidequests that many players might not even know about or run into. On the player side: while it is cool to see the engagement brought to the table by the guy who spent weeks writing his backstory, he's going to get angry if his character ever dies, which hurts the game for everyone. As such, at my table, we've decided to take a step back, understand that it's just a game, and not put too much effort into it . My players have never complained.

Here are some tips:


When your players create their characters, ask them to keep their backgrounds simple: a simple background per the rules offered in the PHB allows the player to discover their character as they play them, and gives the DM enough hooks for roleplaying as you go.
Stop planning for campaigns to last from levels 1-20 (and for characters to level that far). When a DM has planned for a campaign to last from level 1-20, it's very frustrating when it's cut unexpectedly short at level 6. To do all of that work and never see it come to fruition can be frustrating, and could cause a person who put a lot of effort into an adventure to become disillusioned and unwilling to DM again because their effort didn't amount to anything. My advice: have a simple sketch of the story, and plan things out for the next 2 sessions max (in case your players make it farther than expected).
Building on these points: allow a new DM to just run a shorter adventure instead of a giant campaign. DMing is stressful, and taking turns DMing every few months is a great way to help mitigate that. Please, do not plan to run a 1-20 campaign with each DM you encounter.
You don't need to have a backup plan for everything: It's perfectly acceptable to ask the players for 5 minutes mid-game to think about what's going to happen next. Have the players take a food break, and make a few notes behind your DM screen to determine what happens next so that it flows with your sketched story.

[mgshamster]

IF you had plenty of DMs in the period where you had systems with more rules, and fewer DMs in the system there are less rules and more rulings, one of the first questions should be is rulings not rules detracting people. I claim that rulings unloads a whole lot more work on the DM, work that they need not do.

Let's first establish that this is the case before we try to determine the cause.

Mayhap it's a perception issue. For example, they both can have the same number of GMs, but if one has more players, the ratio can be different making one edition look as if it had more GMs.

[SillyPopeNachos]

Well, I've been trying to get players for my game for over 6 months now, and most people either flake, don't have time, or my recruitment threads get hijacked/die. If anyone is interested in having me DM, direct message. From my experience the solution is for people to follow up on their word. This would certainly convince me to allow more players to stay in my game consistently.:smallannoyed:

[Socratov]

Oh wow, I did nto know my reaction to a post in another thread spawned its own thread.

So, on to the point: I'd have to say yes and no.

If you consider a DM to be a dedicated person who runs games, then yes, there are not enough to fille very gaming need, so logically speaking there mush be a shortage, right? Well, not exactly.

Since the earlier editions came to a rules crescendo in 3.5 a lot of DM's got put off. 3.5 required a DM to have heaps of system skill and knowledge to make sure encounters were balanced enough and that playergroups themsemves were balanced enough. The whoel tier system and discussion of "Why won't my DM let me play X, what a richard!" or "I play a Y and my DM does nto eve allow me to use Z, what a richard! Then if you really want to notice a trend, look for those threads detailing crappy DM's and players wanting to get back at the DM by building a monstrosity which should be nigh unstoppable by a DM. Othe roptions include players dropping out beucase as is rightly pointed out: no DnD is better then bad DnD. However, that does not solve the problem of a DM shortage, it only aggravates it. Add to that the fact that bad DM's still roam this earth makes for a worrying prospect for the future of gaming.

Then 4th came out. Outrage was cried, hobbies abandoned and it's as if an otherwise flowing continuity of playerbase got a bit smaller. So, fast forward a few years and 5e comes out in all its splendour. Only this time there are a lot new players. even grognards who were nothing if not fused ot their old versions are flocking to see this newfangled edition which promises to solve all of DnD's problems. which is good news! The hobby loses some of its stigma, fun is had, buyt one thing is now a new problem: where people could slowly ease into the hobby before, carrying over form editions and maturing as players into people with enough system mastery or at least RPG mastery to make them into story tellers, it's as if we are missing a complete generation. So, with lots of new people and few having the balls (because starting at DMing requires first and foremost a set of brass balls to step up to the plate) to start out their gmaing career as DMs, instead choosing to dip their toe in the water first a a player. Wich is easier. And I can't blame the new players for not DMing. But there are too much people wnating to play.

However, this does not mean that there is a shortage of DMs, merely an abundance of players. You see, these days you can see groups starting out and just rolling with it, each player taking turns to run a module or create a world to play in. And I think it's this effect that will, in time, create a fresh batch of DMs, all we need is to have a little patience to allwo them to mature into dedicated DMs.

That said, I have only recently placed my first steps onto the path of DMhood, and chosen to do that in a different system since it handles, in my opinion, storytelling better and places less of a burden on the DM since palyers themselves will have a more active role in the actual story telling. The system is not perfect and we have already adopted some houserules (one of which is to srike through the PCs can't die clause to create something actually pretty lethal and exciting). However, it's the system I'd liketo start my storytellin gin and a system I'd always wanted to use.

[KorvinStarmast]

I had to bail on a chance to play in AL this year since my wife vetoed the Wednesday-each-week-AL at our FLGS. (No, she's not interested in playing). I was bummed. I have now been committed to a volunteer group from Nov to March on Wednesdays at our church, so my next season's chance at AL locally is not gonna happen. There is only 1 AL DM in our local area.

Rulings over rules. That's how you reduce the burden on DM's.

DM's get tired of rules lawyers. This was as true in OD&D and 1e as it is now. (Gygax had parts of his 1e DMG devoted to dealing with rules lawyers; Tim Kask has written more than one commentary on dealing with annoying players~which I finally figured out was mostly aimed at rules lawyers and whiners).

D&D 5e has some KISS principle applied that is the DM's friend. (Advantage is one, simplicity of combat another). There's a lot to like.

(The suggestion up there to assign one player as initiative tracker, another as mapper/caller, another as X is a great way to spread out the work).

Spells

Put the burden of spell detail on your players who are spell casters.
I am serious about this.
Our DM in my first 5e group asked us, the players, to help on this it helped a lot. (As three of us had been DM's before for extended campaigns, we knew where he was coming from, which probably helped).

What do I mean?
You can't cast a spell at the table if you don't know how it works.

Huh? What?

Spell caster does due diligence. Look up the spell and get familiar with the details. Sends DM via email the list of spells you want to use. Player explains how (he/she) thinks it works. (Do this at each level up). DM reads up on them. DM agrees or doesn't.

I realize that this means that players have to care. Yep. It's the price of using magic. You have to know what the hell you are doing. Since our group was all adults, and we've been with D&D on and off for a lot of years, this isn't/wasn't hard, but we still had some spells we weren't sure of.

Consider how much text in D&D is devoted to spells. Spreading this work out so that the DM has what I call "command by exception" is a huge benefit to the DM, who can either agree with your idea, or can ponder it before play and explain how it works/doesn't work. By exception, mostly, as a lot of spells are not that complicated.

When we did this for our roll20 game, it made things easier for us all.

If the players won't put some effort into the game, and expect 'to be entertained' by the DM, that's kind of selfish. Hell, it's a lot selfish.

Spells and how they work can be weird and strange, see the pages and pages of such discussion here, as elsewhere. Don't lay all of that on the DM. If you are the DM, get your spell casters involved in their craft. It can turn into a win-win.

[BigONotation]

On topic:

People are lazy, don't have time, or want to live out a fantasy self - DMing forces the to work, commit time, or look behind the curtain instead of enjoy the magic show. I DM because I enjoy it, but I think for a lot of people the prospect of having to work to enjoy their free time is abhorrent =P.


I had to bail on a chance to play in AL this year since my wife vetoed the Wednesday-each-week-AL at our FLGS. (No, she's not interested in playing). I was bummed. I have now been committed to a volunteer group from Nov to March on Wednesdays at our church, so my next season's chance at AL locally is not gonna happen. There is only 1 AL DM in our local area.

I am so glad I am past this point in my life; where my wife not wanting me to do something causes me to not do it.

[Tehnar]

Let's first establish that this is the case before we try to determine the cause.

Mayhap it's a perception issue. For example, they both can have the same number of GMs, but if one has more players, the ratio can be different making one edition look as if it had more GMs.

I don't think that is the issue, since 3.x had vastly more players then 5e has. By my reckoning, 5e sold to this date about 120k to 200k PHB's.* 3.0 sold 300k PHBs in its first month, and its total lifetime sales (including 3.5 PHB) are anywhere from 1.0 million to 1.5 million.

*This estimate is based on Amazon sales, which up to and including August 2016 have sold about 66k PHB's worldwide, and Chris Perkins statement in a interview that online sales make up for 50% of their total sales.

So I doubt its a ratio issue.

[mgshamster]

I don't think that is the issue, since 3.x had vastly more players then 5e has. By my reckoning, 5e sold to this date about 120k to 200k PHB's.* 3.0 sold 300k PHBs in its first month, and its total lifetime sales (including 3.5 PHB) are anywhere from 1.0 million to 1.5 million.

*This estimate is based on Amazon sales, which up to and including August 2016 have sold about 66k PHB's worldwide, and Chris Perkins statement in a interview that online sales make up for 50% of their total sales.

So I doubt its a ratio issue.

Last month Mearls said that 5e, in the two years it's been out, had already out sold 3rd, 3.5, and 4th's individual lifetime sales.

I think your analysis may be a bit off.

Edit: I'm really curious where you got your numbers. I checked Amazon and they said they don't give out numbers of units sold. The only way to get it is to guess using the best seller's list or to be a seller yourself (and then you only see your numbers).

The 5e PHB has been on the top 100 list from the beginning. That's hundreds to thousands or more sold daily, according to Amazon. So at a very minimum we're talking 70k units sold on the low end, to 6M+ on the high end across the two years its been out. The low end estimate is higher than your number, and the PHB by itself has not dipped down to rank 100 yet.

So I'm really curious how you got your numbers.

[WereRabbitz]

1. Playing is generally more fun then DM'ing
2. Players have to manage very little at all
3. Players require virtually no preparation time before or after a session.
4. If the DM's favorite Villian dies then everyone cheers
5. If a players favorite character dies there is a influx of DM Hate post on giantitp forums.


I love DM'ing in high school with my dorky friends and wife. It was more about funny voices and hilarious costumes then min/maxing the rules for the extra damage. Anytime that environment is recreated i'm happy to jump back into DM'ing.


Otherwise DM'ing wears on you a bit hard at times.

Min/Maxing, Rule Lawyers, Obnoxious players, ect... these things slow down and sap away the fun you normally have as a DM. Players should concentrate on Roleplaying, developing your character's character, and enjoying the game win or lose. It's hard watching all your preparation and story line get hacked apart by a group who doesn't care about the story, appreciate the setup, and plays Facebook games on their phones when it's not their turn.


I really think Inspiration die's were introduced as a way to encourage storytelling and rolplaying, but i feel it's often misused or not used at all.

[2D8HP]

Not all are. If a pdf is formatted as an image, you won't be able to search it. Text recognition programs are getting good these days. Very interesting!
And making rulings on the fly (and having the books tell the players that that's ok) is a million times quicker and easier than spending hours arguing over the nuances of how to read a 'clear' rule. That's my gut feeling as well, but 3.5 seems to be the most popular version of D&D today, and it seems even less friendly to DM (at least to me) than even 5e (maybe it has just as much or even greater of a shortage?).
Besides, hasn't lack the of DMs been a problem for decades?Um... I don't know!
What I dimly remember about playing D&D from the late 1970's to the mid 1980's is that DM's running Campaigns were rare. Mostly I remember lots of relatively short low level adventures/dungeon explorations, and the DM would usually be whomever was having the game at their house that week, which would often rotate (I don't remember any system to deciding who would be DM that week beyond, "want to try my dungeon?).
I'd read of long campaigns with many players in magazines back then, but that wasn't my experience, usually it would just be two to five players per DM, and playing the same PC for more then a couple of months was rare. We'd try "modules" ever so often, but mostly the adventures were homebrewed, as were the "world's" (but the "world's" weren't that different usually).
By the late 1980's and definitely by the early 1990's there wasn't a problem finding regular GM's who ran long RPG "campaigns", but I did have a problem finding DM's and player's, as it seemed that few people around wanted to play D&D anymore, only other RPG's (I believe the last RPG I played was Cyberpunk sometime in the early 1990's, with no further gaming on my part for decades until after the publication of 5e DnD which brought me back to the hobby)..
And after I rejoin RPG'ing, I find I've "Rip Van Winkle'd/Captain America'd" into a strange new world in which thanks to "The Adventures League", and the "Pathfinders Society" they're lots of willing players, but seemingly few DM's (I've also discovered that my ability to read and remember new rules is now terrible!).

[EvilAnagram]

Last month Mearls said that 5e, in the two years it's been out, had already out sold 3rd, 3.5, and 4th's individual lifetime sales.

I think your analysis may be a bit off.

Edit: I'm really curious where you got your numbers. I checked Amazon and they said they don't give out numbers of units sold. The only way to get it is to guess using the best seller's list or to be a seller yourself (and then you only see your numbers).

The 5e PHB has been on the top 100 list from the beginning. That's hundreds to thousands or more sold daily, according to Amazon. So at a very minimum we're talking 70k units sold on the low end, to 6M+ on the high end across the two years its been out. The low end estimate is higher than your number, and the PHB by itself has not dipped down to rank 100 yet.

So I'm really curious how you got your numbers.
You are correct (https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/764241988128419840). I'm not sure where the people claiming 3.5 is more popular are getting their info. From what I've seen, 3.5 has been steadily giving way to Pathfinder and 5e, and apparently WotC's sales numbers are supporting this.

[mgshamster]

I'm continuing my investigation into sales figures for D&D.

I found this unsourced figure on a GitP thread, showing total units sold:

BECMI: 1.250.000 (over a very long print run)
1E: ~350.000
2E: 270.000 in the first year
3E: 500.000 (most of which in the first month)
3.5: 350.000
4E: 75.000
PF: 250.000
5E: 100.000 as of February 2015

Source: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=19446159&postcount=15

Looking up Barnes & Nobles figures, they rank the PHB at 123. Source (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/mobile/w/players-handbook-wizards-rpg-team/1119702492;jsessionid=80B224C8E8D40078AF4FFEF4806F 959B.prodny_store02-atgap14?ean=9780786965601).

According to this estimate (https://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/thread/18051?forceNoRedirect=true), a rank of 150 is approximately 1200 units sold per week. So if we project that over two years, that's 125k units sold for just the 5e PHB, just at Barnes & Nobles.

If we assume Tehnar's number of 66k for the PHB is accurate (which I believe is lower than what it really is), that puts those two sites alone at close to 200k sold. Double that for the "50% of sales is online" comment, and we have close to 400k units of the PHB sold in two years.

Then add in the MM, DMG, SCAG, and the four adventures.

I can easily see that number being higher than the 500k units total of all 3.0 books sold from the unsourced figure above.

According to here (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?35019-quot-5e-lifetime-PHB-sales-outsell-lifetime-3-3-5-4-quot), Mike Mearls says that 5e is doing better than 3.0, 3.5, and 4e individually, but not in aggregate. If we assume the above figures are accurate, that puts current 5e units sold somewhere between 500k and 925k, which actually fits in the Amazon numbers I found earlier.

To restate the Amazon numbers, they say (https://support.amazing.com/support/solutions/articles/5000554518-how-can-i-tell-how-many-units-of-a-product-are-being-sold-on-amazon-based-on-the-bestseller-rank-) that the top 100 books sale 100s to 1000s of units daily. 356 x 2 x 100 = 70k on the low end. The PHB is currently rank 43 as of this writing, it's been rank 1 for a couple of months, and has never left the top 100 since its release. So a couple hundred thousand PHB units sold seems right in the ballpark.

Since Mearls didn't get any more specific than the individual sales of the previous three editions, we can guess that the 5e sales are just above 500k units sold, and not over 575k units sold (otherwise he would have said it's doing better than 3.0 and 4e combined). Of course, he could be vague on purpose just to avoid anyone getting more accurate than 500k - 1M units sold.

Since they're a private company, I understand why they don't want to release exact figures to their competition. But that's the ballpark.

Edit: according to this article (http://icv2.com/articles/games/view/1021/over-1-million-d-d-3e-rulebooks-sold), WotC reached the one million mark of total books sold for 3.0 in 2002. Two years to sale over a million. And according to Mearls, 5e has not only exceeded that, but has exceeded all of 3.0's total run. So we're not looking in the hundreds of thousands range right now, we're talking millions of units sold. Even my own estimates above are woefully wrong on the low end.

[Theodoxus]

My two cents: Put the story-telling back into DMing. Maybe release more DM aid materials and less mods? I don't know. All I know is I refuse to DM AL for this reason, but happily DM my own game.

I'm replying to this, without reading the rest of the thread (because I'm a jerk) but this hit home to me.

I'm running Rise of Tiamat for a new to me group of players. It's a large table (8 players initially) that I was a player with, doing HotDQ. The DM asked to step down after Hoard, and I volunteered to take over - either with RoT or a new campaign. Everyone voted for RoT - which was fine.

I'd perused the book a bit in the past, but didn't really dig into it until the week before the first game. I've been using internet resources constantly since. Both getting other DMs takes, reading walkthroughs, complaints, changes, side quest options, anything that ties the campaign together because RoT is literally a hot mess of widgets and fluff and very little crunch or hand holding.

In the past (even with Hoard for a different group), I've flown by the seat of my pants, going off the top of my head for most encounters and using the book as a crux for ideas but running with my own alongside it. RoT has been a completely different experience. I've been putting tons of hours into building the encounters, rewriting each minute detail into a cohesive story. Getting monster stats, mapping out the dungeons, etc. It's been a new and wholly enjoyable endeavor, and the positive feedback I'm getting from the players really encourages me to continue in this vein.

For me, Forgotten Realms is so rich and varied that if one wanted to, the trip from Greenest to Elturand that is basically handwaved, could be a campaign in and of itself.

I have been inspired to write out a detailed adventure arc from Lost Mines through Tiamat and culminating in a final tier campaign from 16-20 as delving into Hell itself and slaughtering the weakened queen of dragons in her home plane.

It will be a heroic epic questline. And it will be based solidly around storytelling, not just combat and railroaded handholding.

[Brendanicus]

DMing requires a lot of time/money to do at the best of times, and a lot of people are worried about wasting their own and their friends' time by accidentally writing a first bad campaign.

That's never going to fully go away. The best thing the community can do is try to mitigate that.

That being said, collaborative world-building and pre-established character goals can make things a lot easier for the DM. If a DM mandates that all PC's must have a goal or two in life, and that the DM must be informed of them before the game starts, then the DM would have a much easier job writing adventures for these characters.

[lperkins2]

I've found more of a lack of players than a lack of DMs. Finding people who claim to be interested is easy, but most of them either pull regular no-shows, sit on their phones the entire time, or play simple murder hobos. It makes it rather hard to want to invest time and effort in campaign creation.

[Vogonjeltz]

I disagree rulings are quick and easy, especially when player and DM expectations clash. In my experience that causes the longest arguments.

When that happens over a ruling the player is simply wrong and the game proceeds.

Just to be clear: Even if the player is correct in their argumentation, they are wrong insofar as anyone cares. In actual game play what the DM says , goes, irrespective of the rule books.

A DM who doesn't at least try to adhere to the written rules is going to lose players, for sure, but when push comes to shove the players always lose the discussion.


Rules on the other hand can be looked up beforehand; say for jumping a player knows how far his character can expect to jump. The DM doesn't even need to know the jumping rules, he just states that that is a 20' jump and the player knows how much he needs to roll to jump that far.

Yes, they could look up the rules and notice that there's no roll at all for a jump. :D

But in the event that nobody did look up the rule, rulings are there to bridge the gap in player and DM knowledge. It's there for when there's a question on what to do, in order to preserve the game flow.

i.e.: Jimmy wants to Disarm the Orc and nobody off-hand remembers how that works. The DM makes up a ruling on the spot until someone can look it up later. That way they don't eat up 1-2 hours trying to figure out one single combat event.


And with something like a searchable PDF or a SRD any rule is 15 seconds away.

That's no different than having the books at hand. 6 people can easily browse their books to find the "right" answer in that amount of time, but it still interrupts the flow of the game. Either do the ground work in advance, or play it by ear which = rulings.


IF you had plenty of DMs in the period where you had systems with more rules, and fewer DMs in the system there are less rules and more rulings, one of the first questions should be is rulings not rules detracting people. I claim that rulings unloads a whole lot more work on the DM, work that they need not do.

That or one might wonder if the new system is so much fun to play that nobody wants the chore of being the adminstrator versus getting to be the player.

Both are possible explanations, but we have nothing but a couple anecdoates to go on so this question remains unanswered.

The anecdotes we do have in this thread alone suggest that people stopped playing because of real life events (schedule changes, shift in priorities, etcetera) not because of a system change.

[mgshamster]

Here's another way to look at if 5e has GMs. Let's look at the quarterly reports for the number of games on roll20:

Q4 2014: 5200 5e, 10,200 3.X (3.5 and PF)
Q1 2015: 8800 5e, 12,500 3.X
Q2 2015: 10,500 5e, 13,000 3.X
Q3 2015: 12,000 5e, 12,500 3.X
Q4 2015: 12,000 5e, 12,000 3.X
Q1 2016: 16,300 5e, 13,000 3.X
Q2 2016: 19,000 5e, 12,500 3.X

From this, we can see that 3.5 and Pathfinders numbers have remained stable over the last two years, while 5e had surpassed both games combined and continues to grow.

This strongly suggests that 5e is going strong, both as a number of GMs around and (combined with my analysis above) in sales.

[Knaight]

DMing requires a lot of time/money to do at the best of times, and a lot of people are worried about wasting their own and their friends' time by accidentally writing a first bad campaign.

It really doesn't. Time is pretty variable - improvisational DMs can get by with extremely minimal prep, some people absolutely do take a fair amount - but there's no need to shell out a lot of money. The basic version of 5e is free, and a full set of PHB, MM, and DMG is about $100 total for the entire lifetime of the game - and there's no reason that one person has to personally buy all of it. Used that price can drop a bit, and even after taking various accouterments into account (dice, paper, etc.) $15 or so per person can cover an entire group for years even in D&D.

[2D8HP]

I posted this in the wrong thread before:
While the books are expensive (but so pretty), besides the free basic 5e rules (http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules) which are great, I haven't gone a year without seeing really cheap used year 2000 printings of the "3e" PHB for sale (that I paid full price for my so soon "obsolete" copy is a reason that I boycotted 3.5 & 4e), and my local Library has alll the core books and "Princes of the Apocalypse" available for checkout!
Now that's availability (if only I could better remember all those new rules)!
:smile:

[Nemenia]

Welp.

A lot of people talk about the 'Forever DM' I feel like I might be the 'Forever Player'. You see. I love 5th Edition D&D. I started with 3.5 and 5th edition is vastly easier to remember and its a lot of DM 'says' for things.

I've tried to DM three games since I started 5th with varying degrees of success. 1st one was homebrew. It fell apart after we lost two of the players due to real life drama.

2nd game I started was a homebrew game based after the series 'Monster Blood Tattoo' had one session. Barely into the game on google hangouts one player fell asleep. And needless to say we never returned to that game.

3rd game I started Dming. Curse of Strahd. Love the setting. Love the source material. Everything. Spent a lot of time prepping the game in onenote. A lot of time. Love the players. Bunch of guys I met off reddit. We played a lot of sessions. Got up to the Wizard of Wines. Being a fairly new DM big encounters get complicated. Two players had complaints.

One player was gonna have to switch days because of college. We were gonna switch days for him then he said. "I dont want to play anymore." then my second player got a giril friend and busy in other areas of his life and more or less said "my campaign was the lowest on his priority list" and so he in turned dropped my campaign.

So we stopped CoS. After losing two out of five players. One of the three remaininf cant always make it to sessions weekly so I really only had two active players. So the campaign was dropped altogether.

I feel pretty dejected and not sure if Ill pick up Dming again. As I put an extreme amount of work into CoS that will never get used again. I asked them if they would like to restart CoS and more or less said no. We moved the one player who cant attend all the time into our Tuesday group.

And what is done is done.

This. This speaks to me on a personal level. No matter how much work you put into a game as the DM, unless the players have DM'd a successful (and/or fairly long) campaign before, They're likely not going to appreciate the work you put in, thank you, or treat you with the respect you deserve sacrificing part of your own fun for their sake. It's much easier to be a player and only invest in your character sheet, which you can carry to any other campaign.

A player can simply drop out anytime they decide they're bored. The DM, on the other hand, is juggling 4-6 people, putting hours of work in to NPC's that may or may not ever be used, settings, stories, and encounters, all while trying to keep the game running and making sure every player gets to do something they want to do and have fun. It will always be the case that full-time players wont respect full-time DM's.

[Xetheral]

It will always be the case that full-time players wont respect full-time DM's.

My experience has been exactly the opposite: I've never felt disrespected or unappreciated by my players. Most go out of their way to explicitly thank me on a regular basis for running the game. With my current group, if anything, they think I do *more* prep work than I actually do, despite only one of them having any DM experience.

[Sabeta]

My experience has been exactly the opposite: I've never felt disrespected or unappreciated by my players. Most go out of their way to explicitly thank me on a regular basis for running the game. With my current group, if anything, they think I do *more* prep work than I actually do, despite only one of them having any DM experience.

I agree. I also think that most DMs do far less work than they think they do.


They're likely not going to appreciate the work you put in, thank you, or treat you with the respect you deserve sacrificing part of your own fun for their sake. It's much easier to be a player and only invest in your character sheet, which you can carry to any other campaign.

This really cheeses me. Bolded especially. If you're "sacrificing your fun" to DM then that implies that you aren't really committed to DMing, and as such your campaign suffers in quality; either due to lack of motivation, effort, or some other factors and/or the combination thereof. Which would also explain your jaded attitude towards players.


A player can simply drop out anytime they decide they're bored. The DM, on the other hand, is juggling 4-6 people, putting hours of work in to NPC's that may or may not ever be used, settings, stories, and encounters, all while trying to keep the game running and making sure every player gets to do something they want to do and have fun. It will always be the case that full-time players wont respect full-time DM's.

1) You can drop out anytime you're bored too. Though, a good DM results in less bored players and less dropouts.
2) You shouldn't have to juggle. Give players no more than 10 minutes to show up on time and then begin without them. The only "juggling" needed is making sure players get a turn, and most savvy players will do that on their own. (ie: I interrupted my interrogation of a vital NPC because we were in combat. I intentionally kept my conversations to about 6 seconds worth of dialuge then ended). If you split the party to do different things just make sure that each person "does one thing" then move on to the next. ie: Steve: "I investigate the library." DM: "You search a bit, but haven't found anything yet. Now Goerge, what are you doing?"
3) NPCs are easy. You don't need to stat-block most of them unless you have reason to believe they will fight. They only need as much backstory as your players are likely to interact with them, and most of the rest can be made up on the fly. ie

"Tim the Enchanter has the information you seek. Go to him."
>They do
>PCs: "Hiya Tim. We seek the Holy Grail."
>Tim: "Hey guys. If you can answer my three riddles I'll tell you where it is.
>They do
>Tim: "Cool, it's down thataway. Good luck guys."

Boom, Monty Python references aside you could write a dozen Tim's in less than 10 minutes. NPCs are easy, but just by assigning a job you can fill in some generic blanks if your PCs ask stupid questions.

>PCs "Tim, why are you called an Enchanter. Where do you live. Do you have Family, What do you eat, how many children did you burn alive today. Are you evil?"
>Tim "I Enchant things. I live in a cave on that hill over there. They passed away long ago. I eat goats mostly. Only three, slow week. Only on days that end in 'y'."

Ask those same questions to "Bob the Wagonmaker" or "Gary the Architect" and you'll find that it's actually really easy to fill the world with generic people who all live terribly mundane lives of zero consequence and only exist to answer the PCs questions. Villains of the Week are similar. If they work for the BBEG then that's their backstory. We don't need to know their childhood, why they became evil, and what they're doing in this cave at this exact moment. They're just an evil dude who's in the PCs way and needs to be smited. If you want, allow the guy to give the PCs a hook towards their next objective, but depending on the circumstances you don't even need that much. Basically, if you're doing things right you should only need to write a handful of important NPCs.
1) The Villain, who exists for the players to defeat
2) The Guide, who grants clues or advice on what to do next

Well...that's all you actually need really. You'll probably have multiple guides unless you write Gandalf into your story, and possibly multiple villains. You're free to add more based on the complexity of your story (I've run a heavily political game where there was no clear villain, and ended up with a split party as they chose sides and ultimately had to fight one another in war. Even then most politicians, including key figures, could be boiled down to a handful of goals and beliefs)

Encounters are my favorite part of DMing, and most of my players enjoy my encounters. The Civil War where the players had to fight each other was especially well received because I didn't let them PvP until the very end (instead they were working with various groups to try and win favor for their side, which culminated in both groups receiving missions to take the other out as they were being too disruptive to the battlefield) If you hate this aspect then you probably aren't cut out for it, and in my opinion most of your effort should be spent here. It's also extremely easy to make sure your players are having fun. Look at their skillsheet and see what they've taken proficiencies in. You don't even need to read their backstory, just look at Proficiencies, class/features, and spells if they have them. Your Rogue will love you if you include traps to disarm and locks to pick. He'll worship you if you throw a lot of shadows in there for him to sneak attack. It's not hard at all.

This post got way more ranty and more personal than I intended. I probably offended you because a lot of what I said was fairly rude and direct, and I apologize for that, but I'll stand by what I said.

=Edit=

For TC: If you don't want to DM don't do it. There's no point if you aren't having fun. There is however no solution to the DM shortage than to simply DM. However, I disagree with the notion that only game veterans should DM. Ideally, you should have been a player for no less than 5 sessions, but it's stupid to think that DMs need to have been born DMs or learned from DMs who were born that way. Even if that were the case, there are tutorials and blogs on the subject for quick learning. AngryGM is a personal favorite of mine. Most DMs I've played with started with 5e though, and modules such as Lost Mines are amazing for both new players and DMs.

[quinron]

Disclaimer: As this is a long thread full of dense posts, I haven't read it all yet, so some of this may have been stated already.

Having gotten into the game fairly recently (I've been playing 2 years, running since 2 months into that time), I can't speak to how we got into this situation, but I feel entirely confident that I know what's propagating it: players are too hard on new GMs. Whether they're long-time players who "know how the game is supposed to work" or new players brought in by the rising popularity of actual play games - games typically run by people with years of GMing experience - players expect a lot out of their GMs, especially when it comes to system mastery and improvisation. Unfortunately, they don't temper these expectations when their prospective GM is someone who hasn't had the time and experience necessary to develop those skills.

This means that we usually end up in one of two situations: either a) the prospective GM is so intimidated by the number of rules they think they have to learn - and that their players expect them to know - that they assume they'll fail and thus abandon the attempt, or b) the prospective GM overreaches their capabilities, trying to create an experience comparable to their players' expectations that they're not able to handle. I was personally guilty of the latter in my first few adventures, trying to accommodate everyone's wildest dreams instead of trying to find a compromise between what would be fun and what I could handle.

This leads to situations where, when they're equally interested in playing or GMing, people end up sticking with playing because they know how to play and aren't as likely to make a mistake that would embarrass themselves; thus instead of creating a table that could accommodate 5 players, we have one more person jockeying for space at someone else's table. This was a major problem when I was at college - I was seemingly the only person happy to keep GMing, so when other GMs let their games fall apart, they'd crowd my table, and I was too willing to let more people join and gradually get myself into an untenable situation.

While I can see the logic behind spreading responsibility among the players, I don't think it's addressing the real problem of GMs feeling like they need to deliver on unreachable expectations. The ideal solution would be to lower the expectations that both players and GMs themselves place on the position, but that's a complex psychological process involving upwards of 5 people at a given table; it's not going to happen easily.

[Waazraath]

My current experience: I play in 3 campaigns, 1 3.5, 2 5e; I DM in one of the 5e.
- campaign no1.: the friend who runs it just became a dad, doesn't have time to DM, is on hold
- campaign no2.: the friend who runs it has a very busy job in a multinational, doesn't have time to DM anymore, is on hold.
- campaign no3.: the one I'm running; I'm busy with my job, have a small kid, don't have time to DM, is on hold.

The problem is imo once you get out of highschool or college, life starts to interfere with D&D (which is not neccesarily a bad thing, mind you).

What can be done to help DM's with this specific problem is find an easy to play edition, and find scource material that's really easy to use and cut down prep time. As far as that goes, 5e is a great improvement over 3.5, because the rules are much easer. As for good campaigns, source materials, adventures: meh. Any tips are welcome. Both in 3.5 and 5e I've encountered plenty of modules that are more work than designing a campaign myself. At least, than I don't have to look for the errors, make up how to fix them, switch between 3 places in the book during a single encounter to find the right information. I'm plaing Princes of the Apocalyps now, and though I like the concept a lot, I'm dissapointed with how much time it still costs me to run it smoothly.

Playing low level reduces prep time in my experience, so a low level campaign might help people to find the time to DM.

[Sabeta]

snip

Just a quick follow on, but my current campaign is with a brand new DM and three brand new players. The first few sessions were painfully slow, and I had to abandon my Wizard character in favor of a Fighter because they couldn't understand tactical advantages granted by spells like Web, Fog Cloud, or even Minor Illusion. We spent entirely too much time arguing over Perception versus Investigation, and other fun topics, and we even lost a player.

That said, we're a little over five sessions in and everyone knows what they're doing now. The newbies are kind of bad at roleplaying still but now that we're not wasting time over which skill to use when things move along at a much quicker pace.

[quinron]

Just a quick follow on, but my current campaign is with a brand new DM and three brand new players. The first few sessions were painfully slow, and I had to abandon my Wizard character in favor of a Fighter because they couldn't understand tactical advantages granted by spells like Web, Fog Cloud, or even Minor Illusion. We spent entirely too much time arguing over Perception versus Investigation, and other fun topics, and we even lost a player.

That said, we're a little over five sessions in and everyone knows what they're doing now. The newbies are kind of bad at roleplaying still but now that we're not wasting time over which skill to use when things move along at a much quicker pace.

I've had to pull up stakes a couple times since I started playing, so I've gotten used to teaching new players. I've noticed a pattern: when someone isn't totally comfortable with the rules/mechanics, they tend to be hesitant to roleplay. I think that's probably what you're experiencing right now. And if it's hard to feel comfortable with the rules you have to manage as a player, it's magnified a hundred times over when you're the person who thinks they have to know all the rules and make sure they're followed.

[Sabeta]

Well like I said our current DM is brand new. He started by just reading through the three books and started up Lost Mines. There were a lot of growing pains, and thankfully I was knowledgeably enough to save some time running through the book for everything. I did my best not to correct him if he made a call unless I felt it was directly against another player's fun; however I probably still stepped on more than a few toes during the learning process. The group has survived through Lost Mines but Princes of the Apocalypse seems to be wearing the group a bit thin. Probably because we're a three man group and both of the other characters decided they would play antisocial types so I'm stuck as the Face with -1 Charisma. Needless to say I rely on Intimidation (Strength) to get anything done.

[mgshamster]

My current experience: I play in 3 campaigns, 1 3.5, 2 5e; I DM in one of the 5e.
- campaign no1.: the friend who runs it just became a dad, doesn't have time to DM, is on hold
- campaign no2.: the friend who runs it has a very busy job in a multinational, doesn't have time to DM anymore, is on hold.
- campaign no3.: the one I'm running; I'm busy with my job, have a small kid, don't have time to DM, is on hold.

The problem is imo once you get out of highschool or college, life starts to interfere with D&D (which is not neccesarily a bad thing, mind you).

What can be done to help DM's with this specific problem is find an easy to play edition, and find scource material that's really easy to use and cut down prep time. As far as that goes, 5e is a great improvement over 3.5, because the rules are much easer. As for good campaigns, source materials, adventures: meh. Any tips are welcome. Both in 3.5 and 5e I've encountered plenty of modules that are more work than designing a campaign myself. At least, than I don't have to look for the errors, make up how to fix them, switch between 3 places in the book during a single encounter to find the right information. I'm plaing Princes of the Apocalyps now, and though I like the concept a lot, I'm dissapointed with how much time it still costs me to run it smoothly.

Playing low level reduces prep time in my experience, so a low level campaign might help people to find the time to DM.

Family and work life can definitely put a hamper on games. I've done/seen a couple if things to accomodate for that.

Slow down game. We had one game that met up once a month. Every player was a parent with a full time job (plus extra). One Friday or Saturday a month we'd all hire a babysitter and meet up for a long session. Sometimes it was every other month. I know people who do game every other week and just hire a babysitter for the kids.

Move to online games. Play-by-post or play-by-email offer you games where you only need to find about ten minutes per day to write up a post and send it in. Most of those games want you to respond to the game once a day or once every other day, not including weekends. No babysitter needed. And you can do it from your phone. In one PBP game I'm in, one of the players only posts from work.

The most difficult accommodation is to simply play around kids. It can be distracting at times and you'll have to pause game a lot, but it can work. Especially if you have a spouse who can help out and wants you to enjoy your hobby. Or you can hire a babysitter. With kids, I find it easiest to host at my house, so I can watch the little ones at the same time (half the time they sit on my lap and play with my dice). And I'm lucky to be married to someone who prefers that I have a hobby that keeps me home instead of a hobby where I'm gone away from the family (like drinking at a bar, or playing some sports game, or riding a motorcycle, or something like that).

And, if you have to abandon your hobby for a few years, then that's what you have to do. Family should come first. But once the kids are old enough, then you have a new stock of players ready to play with mom and dad. :)

[MrStabby]

And, if you have to abandon your hobby for a few years, then that's what you have to do. Family should come first. But once the kids are old enough, then you have a new stock of players ready to play with mom and dad. :)

Or as a friend did - come back and DM a game with the boss fight being a faeces ejecting demon with a plethora of sonic attacks and an ability to put levels of exhaustion on the PCs. Sometimes having a kid can inspire you.

[Tehnar]

I'm continuing my investigation into sales figures for D&D.

I found this unsourced figure on a GitP thread, showing total units sold:

BECMI: 1.250.000 (over a very long print run)
1E: ~350.000
2E: 270.000 in the first year
3E: 500.000 (most of which in the first month)
3.5: 350.000
4E: 75.000
PF: 250.000
5E: 100.000 as of February 2015

Source: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=19446159&postcount=15

Looking up Barnes & Nobles figures, they rank the PHB at 123. Source (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/mobile/w/players-handbook-wizards-rpg-team/1119702492;jsessionid=80B224C8E8D40078AF4FFEF4806F 959B.prodny_store02-atgap14?ean=9780786965601).

According to this estimate (https://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/thread/18051?forceNoRedirect=true), a rank of 150 is approximately 1200 units sold per week. So if we project that over two years, that's 125k units sold for just the 5e PHB, just at Barnes & Nobles.

If we assume Tehnar's number of 66k for the PHB is accurate (which I believe is lower than what it really is), that puts those two sites alone at close to 200k sold. Double that for the "50% of sales is online" comment, and we have close to 400k units of the PHB sold in two years.

Then add in the MM, DMG, SCAG, and the four adventures.

I can easily see that number being higher than the 500k units total of all 3.0 books sold from the unsourced figure above.

According to here (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?35019-quot-5e-lifetime-PHB-sales-outsell-lifetime-3-3-5-4-quot), Mike Mearls says that 5e is doing better than 3.0, 3.5, and 4e individually, but not in aggregate. If we assume the above figures are accurate, that puts current 5e units sold somewhere between 500k and 925k, which actually fits in the Amazon numbers I found earlier.

To restate the Amazon numbers, they say (https://support.amazing.com/support/solutions/articles/5000554518-how-can-i-tell-how-many-units-of-a-product-are-being-sold-on-amazon-based-on-the-bestseller-rank-) that the top 100 books sale 100s to 1000s of units daily. 356 x 2 x 100 = 70k on the low end. The PHB is currently rank 43 as of this writing, it's been rank 1 for a couple of months, and has never left the top 100 since its release. So a couple hundred thousand PHB units sold seems right in the ballpark.

Since Mearls didn't get any more specific than the individual sales of the previous three editions, we can guess that the 5e sales are just above 500k units sold, and not over 575k units sold (otherwise he would have said it's doing better than 3.0 and 4e combined). Of course, he could be vague on purpose just to avoid anyone getting more accurate than 500k - 1M units sold.

Since they're a private company, I understand why they don't want to release exact figures to their competition. But that's the ballpark.

Edit: according to this article (http://icv2.com/articles/games/view/1021/over-1-million-d-d-3e-rulebooks-sold), WotC reached the one million mark of total books sold for 3.0 in 2002. Two years to sale over a million. And according to Mearls, 5e has not only exceeded that, but has exceeded all of 3.0's total run. So we're not looking in the hundreds of thousands range right now, we're talking millions of units sold. Even my own estimates above are woefully wrong on the low end.

Yeah I don't think Mearls is telling the truth. Either it has something to do with the Oxford comma, ie you can read the statement that it says that 5e sold more books then 3.0 and 3.x during 4ths lifetime that would both be factually correct and still look like 5e sales are better then 3.0. Or he is just flat out not telling the truth.

Because if the PHB sold over a million units there would be splatbooks, there would be minis, there would be comics. They would be advertising that fact out of every possible avenue the marketing team can dream of. Hasbro would be mentioning it in their reports, and they would have more then 8 people on staff. They would be producing products in house instead of licensing them to third party publisher. And they would not put up the July Unearthed Arcana (the one with the random character generation). Even if they wanted to keep not producing, they would get overruled by someone higher up the chain.

For my source I use novelrank to estimate sales, data was USA, CA and UK amazon.



That or one might wonder if the new system is so much fun to play that nobody wants the chore of being the adminstrator versus getting to be the player.

Both are possible explanations, but we have nothing but a couple anecdoates to go on so this question remains unanswered.

The anecdotes we do have in this thread alone suggest that people stopped playing because of real life events (schedule changes, shift in priorities, etcetera) not because of a system change.

If you don't have a DM you can't play DnD. If you don't play, can you call yourself a DnD player?

[Socratov]

Or as a friend did - come back and DM a game with the boss fight being a faeces ejecting demon with a plethora of sonic attacks and an ability to put levels of exhaustion on the PCs. Sometimes having a kid can inspire you.

You know, the more I hear bout raising kids, especially when they are still basically oozes eating everything and secreting poo just as fast, the more I stop to think wether I really really want kids...

[mgshamster]

Yeah I don't think Mearls is telling the truth. Either it has something to do with the Oxford comma, ie you can read the statement that it says that 5e sold more books then 3.0 and 3.x during 4ths lifetime that would both be factually correct and still look like 5e sales are better then 3.0. Or he is just flat out not telling the truth.

Because if the PHB sold over a million units there would be splatbooks, there would be minis, there would be comics. They would be advertising that fact out of every possible avenue the marketing team can dream of. Hasbro would be mentioning it in their reports, and they would have more then 8 people on staff. They would be producing products in house instead of licensing them to third party publisher. And they would not put up the July Unearthed Arcana (the one with the random character generation). Even if they wanted to keep not producing, they would get overruled by someone higher up the chain.

For my source I use novelrank to estimate sales, data was USA, CA and UK amazon.


Novelrank.com estimates 92k PHB units sold to date at Amazon. Care to cite your source for your 66k number?

As for publishing more and more stuff? They did that with 3.0. They did that with 3.5. They did that with 4e. Each edition saw fewer and fewer sales. Now they're trying something different with 5e and it appears to be working. Could it possibly be a better business decision to go with what's working rather than continuing what's failed them? That tends to be how businesses succeed.

You can also combine that with the ICv2 report (http://icv2.com/articles/news/view/35150/hobby-games-market-nearly-1-2-billion), which says RPG games have grown 40% over the past year (2014 to 2015) with D&D leading the way. (http://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/35144/top-5-rpgs-spring-2016)

[Finieous]

Because if the PHB sold over a million units there would be splatbooks, there would be minis, there would be comics.


If you've successfully sold large volumes of a few highly profitable evergreen products with a streamlined staff and low overhead, obviously you will expand staff and overhead to produce small volumes of low- (or no-) profit accessory products to increasingly niche audiences because...wait, what?

The new 5e business model seems to be working based on the available evidence. You're suggesting that if it truly did work, Wizards would revert to the old model that repeatedly failed. I believe there is an error in your logic. If I were a suspicious man, I'd suspect you had an agenda.

[PapaQuackers]

Or as a friend did - come back and DM a game with the boss fight being a faeces ejecting demon with a plethora of sonic attacks and an ability to put levels of exhaustion on the PCs. Sometimes having a kid can inspire you.

I couldn't help but thinking of the opera singing poo monster from Conker's Bad Fur Day...

"I aaaaaaaaaaaaam, the great mighty poo and I'm going to throw my sh*t at you."

[mgshamster]

Continuing down this path....

The ICv2 report in 2013 for RPGs was $13 million, with Pathfinder controlling a whopping $10 million of that.

For 2015, the ICv2 report had RPGs at $35 million, with D&D in the number one spot. A Paizo interview said that they have not seen an increase in Pathfinder sales since the release of 5e (they've also not seen a drop in sales, so we can assume that they're staying the course or slightly improving). That means 5e, in two years, is controlling nearly $15-20 million of the RPG market.

Paizo continues to grow, and still has a solid part of the market, but they report that they're not seeing new growth in a way they would have expected based on pre-5e metrics.

So 5e's eight books is currently selling at least as well as Paizo's 100+ books, if not better, over the last two years. But Paizo is a mature brand with a solid reputation and a solid business model - I doubt their sales will decrease over time. 5e is still new. We'll have to wait a few more years to see if the WotC strategy of slow pace will continue to work for them. We already know they're copying Paizo's strategy of focusing on story (they just dropped the past strategy of splat focus). So far it's working.

[EvilAnagram]

Well, Mister Hamster, you may have your fancy statistics on your side, but what about those people who feel like 5e isn't as popular as their favorite edition? How can you explain that?

[DireSickFish]

Well, Mister Hamster, you may have your fancy statistics on your side, but what about those people who feel like 5e isn't as popular as their favorite edition? How can you explain that?

Easy: People are emotional idiots. Source: I am a person.

[JAL_1138]

Disclaimer: As this is a long thread full of dense posts, I haven't read it all yet, so some of this may have been stated already.

Having gotten into the game fairly recently (I've been playing 2 years, running since 2 months into that time), I can't speak to how we got into this situation, but I feel entirely confident that I know what's propagating it: players are too hard on new GMs. Whether they're long-time players who "know how the game is supposed to work" or new players brought in by the rising popularity of actual play games - games typically run by people with years of GMing experience - players expect a lot out of their GMs, especially when it comes to system mastery and improvisation. Unfortunately, they don't temper these expectations when their prospective GM is someone who hasn't had the time and experience necessary to develop those skills.

This means that we usually end up in one of two situations: either a) the prospective GM is so intimidated by the number of rules they think they have to learn - and that their players expect them to know - that they assume they'll fail and thus abandon the attempt, or b) the prospective GM overreaches their capabilities, trying to create an experience comparable to their players' expectations that they're not able to handle. I was personally guilty of the latter in my first few adventures, trying to accommodate everyone's wildest dreams instead of trying to find a compromise between what would be fun and what I could handle.

This leads to situations where, when they're equally interested in playing or GMing, people end up sticking with playing because they know how to play and aren't as likely to make a mistake that would embarrass themselves; thus instead of creating a table that could accommodate 5 players, we have one more person jockeying for space at someone else's table. This was a major problem when I was at college - I was seemingly the only person happy to keep GMing, so when other GMs let their games fall apart, they'd crowd my table, and I was too willing to let more people join and gradually get myself into an untenable situation.

While I can see the logic behind spreading responsibility among the players, I don't think it's addressing the real problem of GMs feeling like they need to deliver on unreachable expectations. The ideal solution would be to lower the expectations that both players and GMs themselves place on the position, but that's a complex psychological process involving upwards of 5 people at a given table; it's not going to happen easily.

I've had a different experience in the local League community. New DMs *are* usually really worried about "getting it right and not being terrible at it," but the players have largely been supportive rather than hard on them. Posts to the local group FB page about new DM jitters are usually flooded with variations on "don't worry about it, it's fine, everybody has to start somewhere, we'll help however we can, nobody is expecting newbies to be perfect super-DMs, and even great experienced DMs make mistakes so don't worry." I had similar jitters getting back behind the DM's screen after being out for a decade-ish (and only having DM'd very rarely when I played AD&D), and I also got a ton of "you'll be fine, don't worry" from players and other DMs before the game, plenty of understanding from the table as I flailed during the game, and plenty of thanks after the game.

The rules-savvy players (some of whom were League DMs themselves) who knew more than me when I was starting didn't bash me over the head for it--they did point out my errors, but in a teaching manner rather than a complaining or accusatory one, with reassurances along the lines of "no worries, it's a lot to remember and it takes time and practice to get it down." They really tried pretty hard to be helpful and instructive, rather than being nitpicky and having unreasonable expectations of perfection.

I went through the New DM Jitters--nervous as all Baator--and still I don't entirely know where it comes from. But it's not from the players (at least not here--I can't speak for everywhere and experiences may be vastly different from place to place); they've been highly supportive throughout every stage of the acclimation and learning process.

I would hazard a guess at general public-performance anxiety / stage fright as a major component of New DM Jitters, though--new DMs thinking players have way higher expectations than they actually do, and new DMs having set way too high standards for themselves based on seeing experienced DMs (without knowing how often they flail or botch things too), and thinking that they'll have failed somehow if they don't meet those imagined high standards--even despite multiple assurances from the table otherwise.

[MrStabby]

So I got a little of the jitters too when I began to DM - still do. In my life I can be confident and I have spoken in front of hundreds of people with no problem. I think some of it comes down to The Right to Be There.

With whatever you do in life, if you are presenting it it an audience it is almost certainly because you have some kind of merit: an expert in your field, a particular insight or whatever. In D&D, with a new DM, there isn't this process of earning it and confidence building.

I wonder if it would help at all if more groups pitched to be DM. Each player put forwards some campaign ideas, some characters and other ingredients in and players voted for it. Maybe it would help confidence if when selected a DM could know that they were selected for the things that other players thought would make them a good DM - their ideas and their temperament. Having the confidence that people thought you were good, or at least people were confident that the other players couldn't do better might just make it easier.

[longshotist]

groups can always try rotating at the table, too. in my experience, most people that have been hesitant to take on the DM role, but eventually did, found it a lot of fun.

another way of looking at this issue is, if you are a player without a group and been looking for a DM, just start your own group and you be the DM.

a lot of the issue i think revolves around the perception of DMing. one can certainly invest a lot of time and effort into it, or one could improv a lot, wing it and DM from the hip - or anywhere in between those two ends of the spectrum. especially in a group of friends, it's going to be much easier and more forgiving.

[Nemenia]

I agree. I also think that most DMs do far less work than they think they do.



This really cheeses me. Bolded especially. If you're "sacrificing your fun" to DM then that implies that you aren't really committed to DMing, and as such your campaign suffers in quality; either due to lack of motivation, effort, or some other factors and/or the combination thereof. Which would also explain your jaded attitude towards players.



1) You can drop out anytime you're bored too. Though, a good DM results in less bored players and less dropouts.
2) You shouldn't have to juggle. Give players no more than 10 minutes to show up on time and then begin without them. The only "juggling" needed is making sure players get a turn, and most savvy players will do that on their own. (ie: I interrupted my interrogation of a vital NPC because we were in combat. I intentionally kept my conversations to about 6 seconds worth of dialuge then ended). If you split the party to do different things just make sure that each person "does one thing" then move on to the next. ie: Steve: "I investigate the library." DM: "You search a bit, but haven't found anything yet. Now Goerge, what are you doing?"
3) NPCs are easy. You don't need to stat-block most of them unless you have reason to believe they will fight. They only need as much backstory as your players are likely to interact with them, and most of the rest can be made up on the fly. ie

"Tim the Enchanter has the information you seek. Go to him."
>They do
>PCs: "Hiya Tim. We seek the Holy Grail."
>Tim: "Hey guys. If you can answer my three riddles I'll tell you where it is.
>They do
>Tim: "Cool, it's down thataway. Good luck guys."

Boom, Monty Python references aside you could write a dozen Tim's in less than 10 minutes. NPCs are easy, but just by assigning a job you can fill in some generic blanks if your PCs ask stupid questions.

>PCs "Tim, why are you called an Enchanter. Where do you live. Do you have Family, What do you eat, how many children did you burn alive today. Are you evil?"
>Tim "I Enchant things. I live in a cave on that hill over there. They passed away long ago. I eat goats mostly. Only three, slow week. Only on days that end in 'y'."

Ask those same questions to "Bob the Wagonmaker" or "Gary the Architect" and you'll find that it's actually really easy to fill the world with generic people who all live terribly mundane lives of zero consequence and only exist to answer the PCs questions. Villains of the Week are similar. If they work for the BBEG then that's their backstory. We don't need to know their childhood, why they became evil, and what they're doing in this cave at this exact moment. They're just an evil dude who's in the PCs way and needs to be smited. If you want, allow the guy to give the PCs a hook towards their next objective, but depending on the circumstances you don't even need that much. Basically, if you're doing things right you should only need to write a handful of important NPCs.
1) The Villain, who exists for the players to defeat
2) The Guide, who grants clues or advice on what to do next

Well...that's all you actually need really. You'll probably have multiple guides unless you write Gandalf into your story, and possibly multiple villains. You're free to add more based on the complexity of your story (I've run a heavily political game where there was no clear villain, and ended up with a split party as they chose sides and ultimately had to fight one another in war. Even then most politicians, including key figures, could be boiled down to a handful of goals and beliefs)

Encounters are my favorite part of DMing, and most of my players enjoy my encounters. The Civil War where the players had to fight each other was especially well received because I didn't let them PvP until the very end (instead they were working with various groups to try and win favor for their side, which culminated in both groups receiving missions to take the other out as they were being too disruptive to the battlefield) If you hate this aspect then you probably aren't cut out for it, and in my opinion most of your effort should be spent here. It's also extremely easy to make sure your players are having fun. Look at their skillsheet and see what they've taken proficiencies in. You don't even need to read their backstory, just look at Proficiencies, class/features, and spells if they have them. Your Rogue will love you if you include traps to disarm and locks to pick. He'll worship you if you throw a lot of shadows in there for him to sneak attack. It's not hard at all.

This post got way more ranty and more personal than I intended. I probably offended you because a lot of what I said was fairly rude and direct, and I apologize for that, but I'll stand by what I said.

=Edit=

For TC: If you don't want to DM don't do it. There's no point if you aren't having fun. There is however no solution to the DM shortage than to simply DM. However, I disagree with the notion that only game veterans should DM. Ideally, you should have been a player for no less than 5 sessions, but it's stupid to think that DMs need to have been born DMs or learned from DMs who were born that way. Even if that were the case, there are tutorials and blogs on the subject for quick learning. AngryGM is a personal favorite of mine. Most DMs I've played with started with 5e though, and modules such as Lost Mines are amazing for both new players and DMs.

Now I'm just peeved. There are so many assumptions made in this post that a Concrete Donkey wouldn't be a big enough ass to fill it. Firstly, It is sacrificing my fun. Not because I don't want to DM, I enjoy it, but because I want to be a player more, and being the only good DM in the group means they request I stay in the role longer than I want to, which I do for the group.

Next, It doesn't matter how much work you put in, a good DM can't always make a game fun for a player. Sometimes they simply aren't compatible, and you lose someone anyway.

To your next point, I cannot just "give them 10 minutes and start". Most of the groups I play with consider DnD a hobby, not a job, and not only will the players not ALLOW me to start without everyone, if I tried to they would be considerably offended and probably leave the group simply from my behavior. (My entire group is inundated with the GSF's, to an extreme degree.)

This NPC thing makes me feel like you've never DM'd a campaign before in your life. No I cannot "Fill in some generic blanks and make an NPC in 10 minutes.". Roleplay is actually important at my table, and I will spend hours making characters that may or may not be relevant in every campaign and for unique sections. It is absolutely relevant how the NPC's interact, relate, and treat the players, and several of them have spent an entire campaign with NPC's before. I absolutely put work into every person I make that isn't a street passer-by.

Yes you can simplify them to a series of goals and beliefs, and that is often how I make them, but that isn't something you can do in "10 minutes" and have an NPC that actually feels like they aren't a quest giver in an MMO. Maybe it flies in your group, but I certainly couldn't get by just giving my rogue some "shadows and traps to use sometimes."

Final Thought: Your directness and rudeness aren't what bothered me, merely the assumptions you made on how I DM and how my players expect me to act.

[quinron]

I think another element of what makes people hesitant to GM is their perception of what the role entails: the most common advice I've seen on the topic of GMing - seriously, something like 3/4 of the videos I've seen tell you this - is that "as a GM, you have fun when your players have fun." While I'll agree that - like any other pastime - gaming is more fun when everyone's enjoying themselves, I don't like the implication that "GMs are there to make fun for other people, not to have fun themselves." GMing starts to feel like a job instead of a fun leisure activity, which (I'm confident) is why most GM/players prefer to play and feel inconvenienced by having to GM.

It's important to remember that the GM is a player too, and as a player, the GM is going to enjoy certain aspects of the game more than others. Trying to please other people to the detriment of your own enjoyment is just going to make you resentful; you have to throw yourself a bone every once in a while.

[DKing9114]

First, I don't feel there is too much of a DM shortage, especially if you expand to GMs in multiple systems. Some people will enjoy GMing campaigns, adventures, or encounters more than others, and that has simply always been the case. Some people are better at it than others, which cuts down on the number of good GM/DMs out there, but that doesn't mean nobody is interested. I do believe the way people play RPGs can impact how many people in a group will be a GM; a group of friends playing together are more likely to switch off GM roles than a group that met online for a single campaign.

As to the rules vs rulings issue, it goes both ways. 5e is the fourth system I've played in, and my first time playing DnD. Shadowrun is very rules heavy, with the weapons, cybernetics, skills, spells, magic abilities, and many other factors laid out in the books. It's so massive, I knew more about the magic system than the GM because I skipped over the hacking rules entirely. Another system I'm currently playing is a superhero RPG known as SUPERS; this one is extremely loose and ruling based. It uses opposed checks in combat, so a player once defended against weapon fire using telepathy, to know exactly where they would all shoot; you can do pretty much anything you can convince the judge is valid. Our GM has called this both the strength and weakness of the system, because it neither restricts the setting nor provides solid guidance on what players can do.

In order for ruling based systems to work, the DM actually needs to spend time outside of the session coming up with rules for what will take place. Edge of the Empire uses a combination of rules and ruling, and you could see where the rules pretty much walked off the path. The rules for buying and selling goods very quickly became awkward and counter intuitive, with rules for the availability of purchasing items in different locations, but not for finding buyers. The core rulebook referenced crafting, but it took several supplements for FFG to finally come out with a sourcebook that actually gave crafting rules. Until then, GMs either came up with their own rules or juggled rulings that were either too lenient or too punishing on players. I own books for two different systems which I would like to run at some point, but still need to flesh out aspects of both because they are both very ruling based, and therefore subject to abuse.

[JAL_1138]

I've DMed a lot more since 5e hit than I did in 2e. It had a ton of setting material that made me want to run, but the actual DMG didn't really give much in the way of help when it came to figuring out how to scale encounters to be something besides a TPK or a cakewalk, unless you ran modules over and over until you got a feel for it. Closest was the random encounter tables and the dungeon level chart, which didn't necessarily help that much. I love the 2e AD&D system to death, but its learning curve behind the screen is brutally steep. And by now, I've forgotten so much that I'm not sure I could do it effectively anymore, and would need to stick to premade encounters from level-appropriate modules for a while. Granted, I like doing that anyway to save prep time, but still.

With 5e I at least get a solid and reasonably-reliable estimate of how to challenge players without being guaranteed to kill them; I can get it into the right ballpark for the dice to determine their fate reasonably easily. The enemy statblocks are both slightly easier (no more huge entries for Special Attacks and Defenses, no figuring up spells to replace psionics every time I want to use certain monsters) and harder to use (less info about climate, terrain, #appearing, ecology, likely loot), but leaning toward easier.

For a new DM who has never run *either* system, I think it'd be a significantly easier game to learn than 2e. For a grognard, it can potentially be a bit tricky because it owes more to 3rd and 4th in its rules than to AD&D, and the AD&D rules are sort of burned into our brains; it's hard to get new systems in there sometimes.

[2D8HP]

First, I don't feel there is too much of a DM shortage, especially if you expand to GMs in multiple systems.To me it seems like 5e (and 3.5/Pathfinder which I've never played) have players lacking DM's, and other rules systems seem to have GM's who lack players. From another thread:

On D&D vs. anything else.
Yeah, I've run into that pretty hard. The group wants 3.5 D&D. They say they want other stuff at times but they never actually stick with anything. I've run Traveller, Champions, and Paranoia for them and the other Dm of the group has run Shadowrun. We've even done D&D 4 &5 games. Generally they're pretty gung ho for the first two or three months. Mind you they won't read anything*, but they're enthusiastic. Then I think they get bored somehow. They can't articulate any reasons but they stop respecting anything in the game and go on killing sprees untill it collapses. Then they want to play 3.5 D&D again.
I get this all the time. I want to run a hardish science fiction campaign, an urban fantasy campaign, a low fantasy campaign, a historical campaign set in the Roman Republic, and a superhero campaign. I even have a Steampunk campaign planned, although due to Brexit I'm not feeling like anything pro-British. But all anybody wants it D&D. No, not fantasy, specifically D&D. Or occasionally Star Wars. I'm going to be back at uni in a week, and I bet you that even if it's in a fantasy setting, if I try to run Fate or Anima instead of D&D almost nobody will be interested.
EDIT: for systems I'd love to run? Fate is at the top of the list, but so is Anima, GURPS, World of Darkness (mainly Requiem), Ars Magica, Eclipse Phase, The Dark Eye (when is the English edition coming out in hardback?), almost anything but D&D. It's not that I don't want to run a fantasy game, I just don't want to run D&D.If true; the difference between what games players want to play and what games GM's want to run is curious, but it is nothing new. I can certainly remember that in the late 1980's/early 1990's no one wanting to play a Pendragon game or '70's rules D&D game I offered to GM (I never bought 2e as I couldn't find anyone else who still wanted to play D&D anymore anyway), and I also remember my not wanting to play Ars Magica, Cyberpunk, and Vampire games that had open tables, but that there seems to be so many potential players lacking DM's seems new.
I thought these quotes from another thread had some relevance to this one:

I think when it comes down to DM-ing, I get too bogged down by the rules and how much I have to actually plan to get things going. I'd almost rather do a super simple rules-lite HEAVY RP kind of campaign. Dunno what that system would be though, but like, even FATE is a little much for me in the GM pants, and I love FATE as a player character.
Even Chris Perkins says when it comes to 5e, when in doubt follow Rule Zero: Go where the fun is. Most of my 5e games are story-heavy with minimal combat. That's the way our GM has run it for 30 years. I think the problem with D&D isn't the game...it's the people who try to follow the rules so perfectly. (I'm not talking about you specifically...just a generalization from the chatter I've seen on the boards.) The first paragraphs of the books spell out that they are guidelines to be used or thrown out at our discretion.
And from this thread:

It's important to remember that the GM is a player too, and as a player, the GM is going to enjoy certain aspects of the game more than others. Trying to please other people to the detriment of your own enjoyment is just going to make you resentful; you have to throw yourself a bone every once in a while.For me worldbuilding and acting out the NPC's is the fun part of being a Dungeon Master, and it's the bookeeping and rules adjudicating parts of DM'ing (refereeing) that makes it a chore.
From yet another thread (my post):

Yeah 1970's D&D was a hodgepodge of "good enough rules now are better than a perfect rules later", that were put together on the fly. It's a mess, but I loved it because it had some great advantages:

1) It was fun.
2) I found other people who played it.
3) I memorized the rules back when I had a young and agile mind.

I still remember a lot of it (which I often remember instead of the game I'm actually trying to play).

Fortunately when I need to GM settings that D&D is inappropriate for I have an alternate truly multi-setting RPG rules system I made up in the 1980's based on a careful reading of the 1975 Greyhawk supplement for D&D, the 1978 Runequest rules, and the 1981 Call of Cthullu rules, which I now name "Gut check the RPG", and I will share with you:

1) GM describes a scene.
2) Player says an action that their PC attempts.
3) GM decides if the PC has no chance of success, no chance of failure, or a partial chance of success.
4) If a partial chance of success, GM makes up on the spot a percentage chance of success.
5) Player rolls D100 (two 0-9 twenty-siders back then).
6) If the player rolls under the made up number their PC succeeds in attempting the task, if over the PC fails.
7) GM narrates the immediate consequences until it's time to again ask, "what do you do".
8) Repeat.

It seemed to work.

Honestly, these days trying to learn rules other than character creation is a chore for me, and I mostly read RPG's for setting "fluff".
I may already own a RPG with a brilliant rules system that I would love, but I am unlikely to ever find out.
The problem with a "blank slate" rules light system is that players like to have some idea beyond the mood of the GM of what to expect will happen in game. Also, just as if when you already know say 12-bar blues it's easier to write a song than if your just handed a guitar and told "make some noise with this", a catalog of options ("rules") gives more of a template for your imagination, than a blank page and instructions to "make something up" will.
The 48 page 1977 Basic D&D was so short, and the 1974 oD&D rules so obscure (% Lair?) that they were effectively DM diktat games, and 1e AD&D had the advantage of some of it being familiar from Basic or Original, and there was something about them that encouraged DM'ing that I can't articulate, and (it pains me a bit to admit this since I loved old D&D) being a player was a often less fun than 5e because there was less rules based differences between PC's (you could still make up the "fluff" you wanted though), plus IIRC old D&D was lethal for PC's. In 5e you expect that most of your PC's will survive to reach 2nd level, that was not the case with '70's rules D&D!
Maybe as time passes more players will become DM's (or quit the game) and there will less players per DM's, but I fear that (what I perceive as) the overly huge ratio of players to DM's will continue.
While I don't want a 6e anytime soon (my bookshelves and garage are already full!), maybe the game needs to change to be attractive to DM, but I have no idea of how to do that while remaining as fun to play.
:frown:

[mgshamster]

Simply based on the massive growth of 5e games on Roll20, I'm inclined to believe that any perceived shortage of GMs is due to a massive influx of players.

[2D8HP]

@mgshamster,
Do you think that enough new players will become DM's to "bring the balance back"*, or will the disparity long continue?
At least now they're a lot more people who appreciate D&D, compared to the Dark Ages of the early 1990's when I would hear people say with disdain, "Oh I don't play D&D anymore".

*me ripping off homaging Led Zepplin's "Battle of Evermore", who were themselves homaging Michael Moorcock's Law vs. Chaos, which was then ripped off homaged by D&D

[Knaight]

@mgshamster,
Do you think that enough new players will become DM's to "bring the balance back"*, or will the disparity long continue?
At least now they're a lot more people who appreciate D&D, compared to the Dark Ages of the early 1990's when I would hear people say with disdain, "Oh I don't play D&D anymore".

5e is an easier edition to DM, so I suspect that if the player influx hypothesis is correct there's a time lagged DM influx that goes with it.

Also: "Oh, I don't play D&D anymore".:smallamused:

[JAL_1138]

Simply based on the massive growth of 5e games on Roll20, I'm inclined to believe that any perceived shortage of GMs is due to a massive influx of players.

I do see a lot of new faces in League. Several who have never rolled a d20 before, and several returning players from Ye Olde Days who had largely skipped 3.PF and 4th (like me). Not all of them stick with it, but plenty do. And we're slowly getting more DMs.

But I do think the jitters are an issue; we've had some difficulty with persuading people they'd do fine if they tried. And for that matter persuading them that they did do fine after a first session; even with the whole table saying they did fine it can take some convincing.