Musings on different amounts of effort in GMing RPGs

[Quertus]

Not sure why excluding this stuff. Your model works here as well. Premade settings everyone knows by heart and which can be used without any further explaination and adjustment would be Zeus, GM-made settings would be Hephaistos and vague settings that are only expanded/developed in play by the GM would be Atlas.

Similar with NPCs. If the system provides enough sensible premades for all occasions it would be Zeus, if you have to craft them yourself in preptime, it would be Hephaistos and if you give your NPCs only stats on the fly during game, it would be Atlas.

But sure, if you want, you could restrict the discussion to rules and rulings only. But it is worth considering that there are many groups where rules decisions are not something the GM can or should do unilaterally so it is not really him carrying the game here.

For me, it's almost all about mental overhead required to run the game. 3-4 hours of running a game, adjudicating on the fly and remembering how the rules work, is like running a mental marathon. At the end of that, I'm shot.

It's not really your point, but let me start off with adventure design: The more I have to make stuff up on the fly, the faster I burn out.

And this was the other half of the point of my post. While I think whether rules are Zeus, Hephaestus, or Atlas is a valid metric, it’s just… not the one that matters to me? What matters to me is the effect on the game and on myself that the total package has. Fate, or 5e skills, where I constantly have to Atlas? 5e skills, where I have to remember 1,000 pages of house rules / rulings for every single DC I’ve ever set in order to have a consistent game? **** that! There’s no advantage the system can give me to be with that effort! Compound that with the number of worlds and GM’s compiling those 1,000 page rulings documents I have to remember, to know whether attacking the mothership or clearing out the Fighter escorts first is likely to be the better plan, and to know whether I’m likely to be able to swim through lava or climb a tree to get to them, or should just ask for a Fly Spell? No way! Whereas pre-written rules & tables of DCs, where anyone at the table can chime in with “so that’s roll X, right?”, where the GM’s workload might well be 0, and my memorization workload is “whatever I feel like / can manage”, where such memorization just improves the game rather than being a necessity? That’s the good stuff. That’s the sweet spot where I won’t burn out, where games only get better as you play them, as opposed to building up more and more balls to juggle.

I'm happier when my notes on a pc are "good at <thing>, bad at <thing>, tempt with <thing>, fears <thing>" and a keyword summary of their background and current fame/social reputation.

Huh. My notes are usually the PCs interface to the system; ie, their senses and appearance and “AC” and sometimes “Charisma” - the things I need to know for the world and them to interact. But I usually eventually need to add or remember a few “good at <thing>” bits to not bog the game down with unnecessary rolls, and “reputation” for obvious reasons. So maybe I should add those to my standard sheet.

More or less unrelated, being the kind of person who likes data & result driven decisions, I had at one point, some years ago, a spreadsheet. Yeah, big surprise eh? It had (or has since its probably still around on the hdd somewhere) a series of questions about RPGs. Typical stuff like how much work you"re willing to put in, how much time & money you want to spend, how much houseruling & prep. All on the usual.... I think it was a 1 to 5 scale. It also clustered them into categories and put a "how important is this question" and "how important is this category" rating on top of those. Then I filled in copies for every RPG I owned or had played. Comparing results & stuff showed me trends in what and why I enjoyed some games more than others. Not a thing I'd expect to be useful across different people, but useful (to me) for provoking thoughts & questions about how I valued, used, and enjoyed different games.

Sounds cool. Any particular trends you can remember?