Starting last year and continuing into this one, there have been stories about a “dungeon master shortage” in the TTRPG hobby, specifically meaning D&D Fifth Edition. D&D rocketed up in popularity in the last decade or so since Fifth Edition was first released, but that means that some of the game’s liabilities have finally caught up with it. D&D was never great on rules clarity, but Fifth Edition, while aiming for simplicity on the player side of things, finally and completely left the DM in the lurch as the rules for that side of the screen were either executed poorly or, in many cases, removed entirely. Given the edition’s rise in popularity, the demand for DMs has completely outstripped the pool of game veterans who cut their teeth on earlier editions and could use their experience to fill in the gaps left in the 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide.
While there is no acute GM shortage across the rest of the hobby, the travails of D&D have brought the game-running role back into focus. Many indie games over the last decade have eschewed having a single player take on running the game (called both GMless, implying no need for any facilitation, and GMful, implying there is still a need for facilitation but it is split amongst multiple players), but the traditional “one GM-many players” paradigm still rules the roost across the spectrum of popular RPG designs. As the D&D hobby is finding out quite painfully, if you’re singling out one player to take on more responsibility, you’ve got to help them out.
I run games more than I play them, typically, but that doesn’t mean I’m immune to burnout or that I’ll run anything my players are interested in. For me, a good game to run is one that helps me out, both during the session as well as before. Some games do just feel easier to run, and some games just allow you to make more fun things happen. A lot of this happens because of everyone at the table, of course. But, especially when I’m running games, I inevitably tend to prefer games which have shown in their design that they’re paying attention to what GMs actually want when they run games. And what do GMs want? They want it to be easy to create stories with their players, they want the mechanics to help them out when they’re running, and last but not least, they want the game to do what it says it’s going to do.
Story Creation
The bits to actually create the game being played are arguably the thing that most RPGs are able to provide their GMs in one form or another. This is the role of the D&D Monster Manual: Provide the challenges which create the tension of the ongoing narrative. The reason I frame this as story creation is that it helps illustrate what else is needed to create a game beyond challenges and conflicts. Games do need a premise, something which explains why all the characters are pointed in the same direction. To use D&D again, this can be a flimsy premise; all you need is a dungeon with some treasure, and it’s off to game night. But Torchbearer, in comparison, gives you more information, tells you why adventurers exist and why you may be heading to that dungeon. That ‘why’ also permeates through the game in terms of how dungeons are constructed, how much treasure characters are supposed to find, and how resource-intensive dungeon crawling is. That context makes the game that much richer, and this is comparing two games which are both limited to delving dungeons.
Story creation also includes setting material, sometimes called the ‘fluff’. In my personal experience, I don’t find standalone setting material that interesting or that useful. The broader hobby shows I’m in the minority, though, and plenty of games with static (and text-heavy) settings do very well. For setting material to be appreciated, though, it does need to be usable; in the absence of embedded mechanics this usually means detail and ideas. Games like Eclipse Phase, RuneQuest, and Shadowrun provide reams of setting detail, to the point where the settings can stand alone from the games (RuneQuest’s Glorantha predates RuneQuest, Eclipse Phase has been translated into two different official rulesets, and Shadowrun also drives minis games and video games). Well written settings can be a veritable playground, and support the entire game when the rules can’t (i.e. Shadowrun). In an ideal world, though, both the setting and the rules are aligned. The rules of Torchbearer tell you how the game’s world works, the rules of Shadowrun barely tell you how the game itself works.
Story creation is the act of choosing your game board and putting the pieces down; it’s what supports the GM prepping the game both before and while the campaign is underway. GMs also want support in running the game; frameworks which are as clear as the ones given to players. This is neither as easy nor as well-executed as it sounds.
Rules To Run
RPGs have been asymmetrical since long before it was a trendy board game design. A GM is necessarily concerned with more and bigger elements than the players, meaning that engaging with the rules in the same way the players do is a recipe for burnout. As much as a player chooses to GM knowing it will be an undertaking, it’s still better if the game doesn’t make it any harder than it has to be. This generally means separate rules for the GM, which are as clear and understandable as the rules for the players.
Most game designers seem to understand that the GM has to know how to run the game, but often the GM rules stop there. This is admittedly the line between a GM ‘need’ and a GM ‘want’; if you’re running the game you need to be able to run a combat and adjudicate rolls, but if you were left to your own devices in coming up with a story you’d probably manage. Thing is, though, that we’re playing games that are intended for doing certain types of stories and themes and are often better at those stories and themes. It’s also not self-evident what a good gaming session looks like in any given game system, even if there are Actual Plays available and you happen to be the type of person who could learn from such a piece of media. Giving GMs guidance on how to run can be simple; the adventure generators in Genesys and Beat Charts in Cyberpunk RED aren’t particularly sophisticated, nor do they have that many rules integrated within them. That said, they teach the rhythm of a gaming session and how to think about what sort of conflicts are going on in the game.
There are of course more specific mechanics out there and I tend to think they’re better. Apocalypse World (and most good Powered by the Apocalypse games) are symmetrically asymmetrical, giving the GM their Moves and teaching a specific rhythm of when a GM is supposed to intercede or introduce new elements and complications. Electric Bastionland, despite being very simple mechanics-wise, still gives an immediate and strong story hook to the GM through the combination of the Debt and the Rival. Burning Wheel strongly emphasizes that the GM’s plot generation should completely originate in the characters’ Beliefs. Providing both rules and guidance to GMs helps them run sessions that go as the system’s design intends; even more important than that, though, is the system’s design actually working as it intends.
What It Says On The Tin
It could be argued that the Challenge Rating mechanics in D&D Fifth Edition are worse than no encounter scaling mechanic at all; that’s simply because they don’t work consistently. Any GM who doesn’t know better could easily TPK their group with what was supposed to be a ‘moderate’ challenge, and then get surprised when their next big boss fight turns into a cakewalk. If you as a designer are going to provide rules to your GMs (or your players for that matter), they should work the way you intend them to.
Honestly, the easiest example of this multiple times over is D&D, and D&D discourse around ‘fudging rolls’ or ‘house rules’ or, yes, the Challenge Ratings is utterly full of apologia for the game, stating that the freedom of an RPG is in being able to change it in the way you want. That’s true to a degree, but changing mechanics to give tieflings a different vibe or using third party encumbrance or travel mechanics is different than “ignore dice rolls”. If the rules, especially core resolution mechanics, aren’t producing the results you want for your campaign, then you’re using a system that’s ill-suited for your campaign.
Even if we pretend that ignoring core mechanics isn’t the symptom of a much larger problem, for the GM it’s just a ton of work. It’s easier to run a game where rolling a 14 means the same thing each time, and you are merely adjudicating the rules instead of having to decide “no, that’s dumb” and either make up a different number or discard a rule. If you’re able to learn the rules and get good results when applying them consistently (or at least know when you have leeway and must come up with something, like in Genesys), it’s both going to be easier to run and actually easier to come up with rulings for edge cases or material that isn’t directly covered in the mechanics. It is sort of depressing that the most important entry in a list of three things GMs want is “a game system that works correctly”, but that’s kind of where we are as a hobby.
Many of us don’t need to be enticed to GM. The promise of creating worlds and more actively shepherding stories is plenty of motivation, I know it is for me at least. What GMs want at the very least is to play games that don’t actively make the GM role, already more work then playing the game, any harder than it needs to be. One GM, many players is the default setup for TTRPGs, and when you consider that it’s a bit surprising that more progress hasn’t been made in terms of codifying some best practices on the designer side. That all said, the view across the hobby is a bit skewed when you consider how old virtually all of the top 5 most popular games are at their core. Looking further across the landscape, things are getting better; designers are figuring out what GMs want. As we look more to newer designs, hopefully “nobody wants to GM anymore” can become a thing of the past.
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