What I think about when I think about DMing
I've been playing more games as a player - which is to say, at all - and DMing for different people. My wife also started DMing last year, and has done lots this year, so we've had some good chats.
There's definitely a lot of impostor syndrome stuff going on in my relationship to DMing. I feel like I don't have enough experience, don't know enough, don't read enough, don't engage enough, to be a 'proper' DM. Even though when someone else says they are a DM I don't ask for their credentials, I just accept it.
Playing as a player and playing with different systems is an important part of this. Finding out what I like, how I want to do things, learning from others, figuring out my own philosophy.
My wife has been working on a couple of games and I've been helping out with bits. But I feel like a horrible fraud doing that when I haven't played every other game ever which is obviously impossible and insane.
My approach is I'm a referee-style DM. Here to adjudicate rolls. To make up (hopefully interesting) scenarios and place them in front of the players to see how they solve them. I don't know how they will solve them - that's not my job. Hopefully they will solve them in a very cool, fun way.
I am not a DM so I can tell a story, craft a narrative, write epic poetry to introduce a new city, or do the voices. (If you are, great! I love that for you.) This makes me sound pretty OSR and while it's true, I am pretty OSR I would not commit myself to being anything more than 'in that direction'.
A lot of the 'rules lite' stuff I read just seems to me to be a lot of work for the DM. When there's no rule in the book it's now completely on the DM to decide? And I'm not that kind of DM either. Often I propose a ruling and ask the players, "Does that sound reasonable?" or "What do you think?" and we can discuss it.
Nor do I want to have to think up, on the spot, possibly a hundred times a session, a narrative failure with consequences or something like that. Of course some failures have consequences - if nothing is at stake there's no point making a roll? Of course some failures move the action forwards in interesting ways. Of course some successes have unforeseen consequences.
But I haven't the brain cells to be doing this potentially every roll. And, from what I understand, a lot of people aren't doing that, in reality. But a lot of people are in this situation and this fifth generation of TTRPGs is supposed to be taking this into account.
Some months ago now I played a bit of Daggerheart. Because it was the first time most of us had played Daggerheart and because most of us were most familiar with D&D there was naturally quite a bit of 'compare and contrast'. Stuff D&D doesn't have or "you can't do" in D&D.
And it's not defensiveness for D&D that makes me want to object (obviously I didn't) but like... Did you ask? I absolutely would allow my crew to take an action together in combat or to rearrange their initiative order. Is the problem really with the thing (in this case, D&D), or how the thing is implemented in this specific circumstance?
Overall, I'm just asking myself lots of questions trying to figure out what I think or how I want to approach things. I've been slowly and haphazardly collecting resources, reading in a very scattergun fashion, trying to piecemeal stuff together for a games curriculum.
Filed in Games.