What the players we call "players" do is fundamentally and completely different from what the players we call "GMs" or "DMs" or "Keepers" or whatever we call them per game type, do. Therefore they must be differentiated. In general parlance, we refer to the GM as "running" the game, and the players as "playing" it. These differentiations are useful and I would argue necessary, because there are fundamental differences to what one does while "running" a session vs. "playing" in it.
I don't think we need other words. Everyone is playing D&D, but one player is the DM, and the other players are just players. There is nothing special (usually) to call the other players so we don't name them anymore.
In the past we DID name them. In addition to the DM, one player was designated the "Caller" -- this player theoretically was the person who told the DM what each character was doing, so that there wasn't chaos at the table (only necessary in large groups, which my friends and I never had). One player was designated the "Mapper" who draw out the map as described by the DM. One player was designated the "Treasurer" and kept track of treasure and magic items (usually the guy whose PC had the Portable Hole). All of these people are players, but you might have a large group in which one "player" is called "The Caller" and one is called "The Mapper" and all the rest are just called "players." It means they don't have a particular role and are just generically players. Whereas the DM, Caller, Mapper, etc., have specific roles above and beyond being "players."
It's really not a problem. There's no need to decry the terminology.
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GMing is usually significantly easier for me. The biggest difference between GMing and playing is how much information I have.
Playing a PC involves so much guesswork. Planning and decision-making is very stressful, and not knowing how much I know and how much I don’t makes it that much worse.
When I GM, I know everything. The stress just falls away, and it’s a lot easier to stay in control.
That's not my experience, though maybe that I don't really stress about anything much accounts for that. I don't know everything as DM. I don't know what they players will do, nor what they won't do - it's always a guess whether I provided enough contextual clues for them to figure something out, too few, or too many - and I certainly don't always know what direction they'll take the campaign in, or what plans they hatched since last week's cliffhanger session ending. Anything the players are guessing about makes me second-guess my assessment of what their guesses are likely to be. I also don't know how encounters will turn out, whether they'll kill PCs or have them fly through without breaking a sweat. It's wait and see how the dice fall. Of course I can (and if needed, I definitely do) shuffle things around a bit behind the screen when the situation calls for it, but I don't outright change the outcome; it's just a nudge here or there, never playing god.
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As a player I show up once/week, play may character for 3-4 hours, and don’t have to give it much more thought until the following Wednesday.
As a DM, I spend a significant amount of time, work, and creativity on the campaign from the end of one session until the beginning of the next. Then I spend 3-4 hours playing the entire rest of the multiverse. Then I rinse and repeat.
GMing is usually significantly easier for me. The biggest difference between GMing and playing is how much information I have.
Playing a PC involves so much guesswork. Planning and decision-making is very stressful, and not knowing how much I know and how much I don’t makes it that much worse.
When I GM, I know everything. The stress just falls away, and it’s a lot easier to stay in control.
That's not my experience, though maybe that I don't really stress about anything much accounts for that. I don't know everything as DM. I don't know what they players will do, nor what they won't do - it's always a guess whether I provided enough contextual clues for them to figure something out, too few, or too many - and I certainly don't always know what direction they'll take the campaign in, or what plans they hatched since last week's cliffhanger session ending. Anything the players are guessing about makes me second-guess my assessment of what their guesses are likely to be. I also don't know how encounters will turn out, whether they'll kill PCs or have them fly through without breaking a sweat. It's wait and see how the dice fall. Of course I can (and if needed, I definitely do) shuffle things around a bit behind the screen when the situation calls for it, but I don't outright change the outcome; it's just a nudge here or there, never playing god.
We’re different people, so I’m not surprised we have different experiences :P
But my point is that “what the players do” isn’t hidden information. I know what they’re going to do, because they’re going to tell me (or else we can’t play the game). The knowledge that I have of the story, the NPCs, and the world means I never to have to guess about what’s going to happen. My players tell me what they’re going to do, and I have an immediate understanding of how things respond to that because I have all the necessary information.
All of the things others in this thread are bringing up to explain why they think GMing is harder; the prep work, keeping track of plots and NPCs, etc.; these things simply aren’t difficult for me. I spend hours every week thinking about it all; GMing is definitely more work. But for me, it’s very easy work.
Playing a PC, on the other hand, is pure guesswork. I never have certainty about how the story or NPCs or the world will react to what I do. I may have a good idea of it, but I don’t know. I expect many of the people who think that playing is easier have no trouble at all saying “we just have to do something and hope for the best,” but that paralyzes me.
GMing is usually significantly easier for me. The biggest difference between GMing and playing is how much information I have.
Playing a PC involves so much guesswork. Planning and decision-making is very stressful, and not knowing how much I know and how much I don’t makes it that much worse.
When I GM, I know everything. The stress just falls away, and it’s a lot easier to stay in control.
That goes a long way towards explaining some of the reactions you’ve occasionally had toward some of the suggestions folks like BioWizard and I have given in other threads.
The type of game we prefer to run is entirely designed to give as much control as humanly possible to the other players. That requires us to be far more reactive, and improvisational. I literally have no way of knowing what will happen, I can only know what has happened. Until the very instant when future transitions into past it’s mostly guesswork, so I feel like I’m in the dark most of the time.
Unless they’re actively crawling a dungeon, the end of every session I ask the players what they intend their characters to do the following week. They quite literally tell me what to prepare on a session-by-session basis, and if when they change their minds for any reason at all I have to start winging it. I stopped trying to delude myself into thinking I could control the course of a campaign as a DM before I lost my virginity or gained a drivers license. (For context, those circumstances changed before I could legally vote or had to fill out my draft card, and I did both of those things way back before the turn of the century.)
I had been driving myself bonkers trying to control things and then when that didn’t work I tried planning for every contingency I could think of. But players do the darndest things sometimes and I realized I was using less than 10% of the work I was preparing. When I accepted that wasn’t working for me I started focusing my efforts in other directions. First I switched seats and went 100% player for a while. (Meantime I scratched my DM itches with world building and researching alternative settings which eventually led me to Mystara.) All of that “not knowing” you mentioned wasn’t an issue for me since I had already accepted that as a fact of life. And as OboeLauren so eloquently once said: “real life is a super high CR.” I figured by comparison the not knowing in a fantasy world where my eff ups can’t actually hurt anything was nothing to worry about.
As a player, one benefit was I only had to worry about a few characters at a time. That really gave me an opportunity to get into their minds and understand them as “people.” That made improvising their actions and reactions almost as easy as improving my own. (I manage do that all the time.) That helped me develop my abilities to improvise RP on the spot and to adjust stuff like combat on the fly. When I realized I could apply the same principle to NPCs, that’s when I realized I didn’t need to control everything, I just needed to understand it. (My dad taught me the same thing about math, one need not memorize all those formulas if one simply understands how they work.) That’s when DM got much easier and waayyy more enjoyable for me.
I wouldn’t have ever become anything even remotely resembling a competent DM if I hadn’t spent all that time as a player. I’m not claiming to be great or anything, I’m not even the best in my group. But I can actually do the job where I couldn’t before that experience.
Player and DM is sort of like my department at my college. We are all faculty of the department, and then one faculty member is the chair. Many times we refer to "the chair and the faculty." That chair is a faculty member. Our current one was until January when she became chair. When she steps down, she will be faculty again. In the mean time, she goes to "faculty meetings." But as chair, she has a different role. She teaches less, and administers more, and when they ask us to do surveys "of the faculty," we have to state that we "do not hold an administrative position." This means she can't answer that survey, even though she is still "one of the faculty" because as chair, at this moment, she has a different role.
Player vs. GM is very similar in an RPG.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
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Saga has an interesting counterpoint to the obvious answer relating to the differences in workload and responsibility (which doesn't directly equate to easy/hard).
I have been a player in a game where I was racking my brain for the whole session trying to figure out what them DM wanted us to do or why our characters were invested in this adventure or where to get the information we wanted or how in any way possible could we move the story forward. DMs can go a little too far into "sandbox" mode to the point where they expect players to drive the entire story, and we can scour a city talking to NPCs just trying to find a scrap of a lead on something interesting to do. I feel like in that campaign, with that particular DM, we as players had a harder time getting through the material than the DM.
But generally I would agree that DMing is harder. Certainly it's more work for me than playing is.
Most commenters equate time spent with difficulty. However there are a lot of things that take a lot of time, but are easy to do.
In general, I find it easier to stay engaged during a series of adventures when I am the GM. My prep time is about one hour for every three to four hour session. And finding one spare hour once a week is usually nothing that requires special consideration for me. Even in a busy week.
At least that's the case for a homebrew game. Bought modules take me more time to prepare, but I very rarely run non-homebrew.
We have mentioned other things besides time. Surely it is harder to RP many different characters (as DM) than RP a single PC (as a player) during a session. Having to decide what every monster in the fight is going to do, is harder than just deciding from among the limited set of options, what your PC is going to do. And designing a puzzle or a trap so that it is challenging but possible to solve/escape, is a lot harder than just solving or escaping it.
Looked at another way, DMs have to design something every week and execute multiple things each session.
A player has to design one thing one time (the PC, at character creation) and then execute one thing each session (playing that PC).
Equating the difficulty of the two is like arguing that it's just as hard to bring one covered dish to a pot-luck, as it is to cook and prepare an entire seven course meal all by yourself.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
there are certain tings harder about being a player for some people. being supportive to the other payers, not min-maxing, not being a backseat DM, ect can be hard for some people. I have always had trouble not backseat DMing when I play as a PC... I was reminded of this because I just got told off for being a backseat DM in a pbp...
there are certain tings harder about being a player for some people. being supportive to the other payers, not min-maxing, not being a backseat DM, ect can be hard for some people. I have always had trouble not backseat DMing when I play as a PC... I was reminded of this because I just got told off for being a backseat DM in a pbp...
So it's your assertion that it's harder to exert some common decency and be a good player, than it is to exert the same thing as a DM?
After all, DMs have temptations too -- the temptation to just blue-lightning your character every time you backseat DM... the temptation to build enemies who are there to completely defeat your abusively min-maxed character and kill it off by hoisting it on its own petard... the temptation to ban you from the game for not supporting the other players.
If we're going to get into who is "tempted to misbehave" more... it's still the DM. And most of us give into that temptation WAY less often than players do.
Next someone will be telling me it's harder to be a player because you have to resist the urge to buy and read the published adventure you're playing on.... like it's harder NOT to read it than to read and prep it.
Please.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
there are certain tings harder about being a player for some people. being supportive to the other payers, not min-maxing, not being a backseat DM, ect can be hard for some people. I have always had trouble not backseat DMing when I play as a PC... I was reminded of this because I just got told off for being a backseat DM in a pbp...
So it's your assertion that it's harder to exert some common decency and be a good player, than it is to exert the same thing as a DM?
After all, DMs have temptations too -- the temptation to just blue-lightning your character every time you backseat DM... the temptation to build enemies who are there to completely defeat your abusively min-maxed character and kill it off by hoisting it on its own petard... the temptation to ban you from the game for not supporting the other players.
If we're going to get into who is "tempted to misbehave" more... it's still the DM. And most of us give into that temptation WAY less often than players do.
Next someone will be telling me it's harder to be a player because you have to resist the urge to buy and read the published adventure you're playing on.... like it's harder NOT to read it than to read and prep it.
Please.
CERTAIN things. I agree that overall, the temptations mentioned above included, DMing is harder. but those temptations a DM does not have to deal with, and therefore those specific things are herder for a player.
there are certain tings harder about being a player for some people. being supportive to the other payers, not min-maxing, not being a backseat DM, ect can be hard for some people. I have always had trouble not backseat DMing when I play as a PC... I was reminded of this because I just got told off for being a backseat DM in a pbp...
So it's your assertion that it's harder to exert some common decency and be a good player, than it is to exert the same thing as a DM?
After all, DMs have temptations too -- the temptation to just blue-lightning your character every time you backseat DM... the temptation to build enemies who are there to completely defeat your abusively min-maxed character and kill it off by hoisting it on its own petard... the temptation to ban you from the game for not supporting the other players.
If we're going to get into who is "tempted to misbehave" more... it's still the DM. And most of us give into that temptation WAY less often than players do.
Next someone will be telling me it's harder to be a player because you have to resist the urge to buy and read the published adventure you're playing on.... like it's harder NOT to read it than to read and prep it.
Please.
I’m sorry BW, but this time I have raise an objection. It is certainly possible that even yourself has some habits that everyone else has to accept at times, we all do. I words too much. And the way my mind works, at times my brain links in more of a branching structure than a linear train of thought.* My brain is struggling to take an entire branching structure of concepts and unique memories and focus it into a linear path and not always successful. You can tell by how I’m rambling on instead of continuing on right now, and the fact that I do edit passes for typos, compound/run on sentences, and dangling participles. (My spelling is for crap, so I can’t spot those unless my spelling ‘retical turns red like it does for ‘retical, but I know that’s a legitimately correct contraction so Apple can suck it.) And while I’m in there you she sow much stuff Ike this I cut out sometimes. (Folks think I run on now.... 🙄) And here I am branching again, you can tell by the excessive use of parentheses.
This time I did all of that to prove a point that “people”on earth are all currently human. Nobody’s perfect, they without sin cast the first snarky/rude post. Backseat DMing often occurs for the same reasons most of these arguments do: because passionate people with unique points of view and varying degrees of rules knowledge are all trying to help each other make it the best D&D we can for everyone. I mean yeah, some people suck eggs, but others just have bad days, or just get carried away. (And I know there have to be folks who say all of that and likely worse about me.) I’m no better than anyone else, so I’m just as fallible as everyone else, including you.
For example, those DM temptations you listed... yeah I don’t think those things. If I notice a “power level” disparity in the party, my first instinct is to start homebrewing magic items or boons or something that I hope will speak to either the player, character, or both that could use a boost to bring them up to comparable with the high rollers, and then some cool unique items that those high rollers will like, but won’t actually up their numbers like the others. If someone calls me out on a RAW/RAI issue I either tell them we’re doing it the one way this time and I’ll look it before next session (and follow through), or we stop and figure it out right then and there as a group discussion. (Happened just last Wednesday and after we all talked it out and checked some comps for about 5 minutes, I realized they were right. And I have only ever had the urge to ban a single player, and he was that guy who reveled in Anarchy and all the DMs banned Wild Magic and Kender. (That was High School back in the ‘90s.) I have totally different issues as a DM, like talking too much and running off on tangents. (Shocking, I know.)
Having flaws, not recognizing them, or struggling to overcome one’s flaws doesn’t make a parson an asshat. Refusing to admit one is capable of flaw, refusing to try to improve, or were still doing it on purpose... those make someone an asshat.
And you know as well as I that there’s nothing inherently wrong Min/Maxing if everyone at the table is onboard with the program, just like there’s nothing wrong with a railroad campaign if everyone is having fun. Just like not min/maxing doesn’t automatically make someone a... shall we clean it up and say “anchor” to the party no matter how much my friend likes to say it does. (My friend who I shall not name for fear of being misunderstood by people not even involved in their conversation.)
So it’s a good thing you recognized you have these flaws so you can improve. Because as another friend of mine always councils people, “IG solutions are not good ways to deal with OOG problems.” 😉
*(You can tell by the fact who else you know of uses footnotes?!?)
I was not saying that I am tempted to do any of those things. I was being sarcastic, because I think the idea that somehow it is "hard" for a player to basically behave him or herself, and that this makes the job of being a player harder than the job of being a DM, is laughable.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
We have mentioned other things besides time. Surely it is harder to RP many different characters (as DM) than RP a single PC (as a player) during a session. Having to decide what every monster in the fight is going to do, is harder than just deciding from among the limited set of options, what your PC is going to do. And designing a puzzle or a trap so that it is challenging but possible to solve/escape, is a lot harder than just solving or escaping it.
Looked at another way, DMs have to design something every week and execute multiple things each session.
A player has to design one thing one time (the PC, at character creation) and then execute one thing each session (playing that PC).
Equating the difficulty of the two is like arguing that it's just as hard to bring one covered dish to a pot-luck, as it is to cook and prepare an entire seven course meal all by yourself.
Sure, time requirements were not the only argument. I just wanted to point out that they are not an argument by themselves. You could make the argument that you have a tight schedule, and fitting in a few extra hours each week for prep time makes playing DnD harder for you if you are the GM.
Regarding role playing difficulty. A GM giving live to a hand full of mostly short-lived NPCs is not necessarily harder than creating a reasonably consistent an believable player character. Some people will have an easier time with one challenge, other players will struggle less with the other.
There cannot be an objectively correct answer to the question which part is more difficult. Even if I am arguing that I find the GM role easier in general, this is only true for the game prepping style I am using and for the expectation I have for a potential player character that I would play.
But it’s not just roleplaying and story: as a DM, that’s the easy part. The real challenge is information and time management with everything happening at once and only so many hours in the session, along with balancing fights so that they pose a threat but don’t overwhelm.
But it’s not just roleplaying and story: as a DM, that’s the easy part. The real challenge is information and time management with everything happening at once and only so many hours in the session, along with balancing fights so that they pose a threat but don’t overwhelm.
That is true.
I guess it also depends on the group. My current group is very easy going and stuff like pacing is quite simple. I also don't worry too much about balance. If the encounters are fun for everyone, I don't care about how well balanced they were.
On the other hand, a few years ago I played with a group that made these same things much harder for me. They often got stuck due to infighting and complained about things being unfair.
Maybe I should change my answer to 'it depends'. :)
I was not saying that I am tempted to do any of those things. I was being sarcastic, because I think the idea that somehow it is "hard" for a player to basically behave him or herself, and that this makes the job of being a player harder than the job of being a DM, is laughable.
Dude, I got that. Why do you think I quoted you to yourself...? I mean, how long have we been conversing with each other? A couple of years now? Forget these (almost daily) forum interactions, just in our PMs alone I “talk” to you more often than I do my own mother. (Which reminds me I need to call her today.)
Part of the point I apparently failed to convey was that if any of that would be enough of a personal challenge that it could conceivably make being a Player that challenging, then it would also inevitably have to make the roll of DM more challenging as well by a proportional amount. If you reread you’ll see the foreshadowing at the end of the 1st p. and the reveal is the second half of the 3rd p.
The other part of the reason was because lots of people dealing with a wide range of mental disorders would legitimately struggle to sit still and quiet and wait. Compulsively interrupting others, racing thoughts, a need for things to be done a certain way, a periodic need for attention... those could all be reasons why someone might be backseat DMing, and those very same symptoms could also make it very hard for the person to resist. Some of the mental disorders that might possibly cause some of those symptoms include: PTSD, ADD/ADHD, OCD, Bipolar Disorder, Abandonment/Enmeshment Issues, Autism Spectrum, and Tourette syndrome. (There are more,.) I mean, it could just be they momma didn’t raise them right, Or maybes they’re just a wangrod. 🤷♂️ I’m not a licensed psychiatrist, so I’m not qualified to diagnose any of those conditions. (It’s actually really hard sometimes, even for the trained psychiatrists.)
Did you know that statistics suggest that half of all people with mental health disorders go undiagnosed, and that a decent amount of those who get diagnosed are misdiagnosed? Did you know that girls and women are less likely to be diagnosed than males? Girls on the autism spectrum usually just get to to sit down, be quiet, and stop fidgeting, and they are accused of having no self control. But you know what children with undiagnosed mental disorders of all genders hear a lot? Their told to sit down, shut up, stop fidgeting, and get control of themselves.
Of course those children weren’t fidgeting, they were stimming. Too bad nobody who ever observed it knew what that was or how to tell the difference. Stimming is a comfort behavior, like a kind of coping mechanism to help them stay calm in stressful environments like social interactions. It helps them maintain control if they’re, say for example....
That girl who never got diagnosed with autism is now a young woman. She loves stories and is really into Sword and Sorcery. Her brother and his friend played when they were younger and she wanted to but the game was really complicated and they kept getting cross with her for messing up. Now she works at a bank, but not up front because she doesn’t like working with the customers. She works in the back. People kept telling her how bad it was back there, but she doesn’t mind it. The paperwork isn’t that bad once she got used to it. And yeah, the end of every month is super busy, but at least it’s predictable, and the rest of the month it’s quiet. People kept saying how boring it was back there, but she doesn’t mind. And Barb, the young woman who works at the other desk is really nice. And it turns out that Barb and her boyfriend play D&D. Barb told her how much simpler the new edition is, and that the paperwork they do every day is way harder, and then Barb invited her to join them next Saturday.
She isn’t invited out very often and doesn’t really have many friends so she is really kind of thrilled, but also a little intimidated at meeting Barb’s boyfriend, but she likes Barb so.... And she’ll finally get to play D&D! The next day Barb oven brought their loaner copy of the PHB for her to borrow so she can get some ideas for what she wants to play before Saturday. She reads the book cover to cover, but it still doesn’t quite make sense to her. She doesn’t want to mess up this time so she reads it again. She even starts getting a little excited for it since Barb has been helping explain the stuff she didn’t understand before, so she’s not so nervous anymore.
Finally Saturday evening arrives, she heads over and Barb greets her warmly at the door. Barb then shows her to the living room and... starts inteoducing her to the other players?!? She had assumed it would just be the three of them, but instead there are six people, and the only one she knows is Barb, so now she’s suddenly feeling very nervous. On top of that, the couches are a little small. Everyone pleasantly made room for her. But now she’s sitting next to a complete stranger instead of her friend. And while he seems very nice. He keeps bouncing in his seat a little, every time he gets animated so the sofa springs keep bouncing her a little periodically, and his knee keeps bumping into hers. She dislikes the sporadic jostling, but she really, really prefers to not be touched.
The idea she had formed in her mind of a nice, quiet evening around a table with Barb and her boyfriend has suddenly been shattered. In its place is a very stressful evening in a room full of very loud strangers she wasn’t expecting and she keeps getting jostled and his knee keeps touching hers. All she wants to do is get up from that sofa and do that thing that always makes her feel better, but she was told all her life that people don’t like when she does that so she stays seated. And on top of all of that these people keep getting the rules wrong and every time she tries to help by telling them how it’s sposta work they keep getting annoyed with her like her brother used to for not knowing the rules. She doesn’t understand, she’s only trying to help. Maybe she shouldn’t come back next week...?
As a player, you can get away with not putting a lot of time or effort into what you're doing for your character. But if you halfass things as a GM you're affecting the whole group. Plus, there's a lot more to keep track of- you're controlling a bunch of enemies in combat. You've got to keep track of all of their abilities plus all their HP totals, plus keep track of tactics- there's a line between playing the monsters too stupid and making things easy and playing them entirely too tactical and making it an unfun beat-down on the party.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
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What the players we call "players" do is fundamentally and completely different from what the players we call "GMs" or "DMs" or "Keepers" or whatever we call them per game type, do. Therefore they must be differentiated. In general parlance, we refer to the GM as "running" the game, and the players as "playing" it. These differentiations are useful and I would argue necessary, because there are fundamental differences to what one does while "running" a session vs. "playing" in it.
I don't think we need other words. Everyone is playing D&D, but one player is the DM, and the other players are just players. There is nothing special (usually) to call the other players so we don't name them anymore.
In the past we DID name them. In addition to the DM, one player was designated the "Caller" -- this player theoretically was the person who told the DM what each character was doing, so that there wasn't chaos at the table (only necessary in large groups, which my friends and I never had). One player was designated the "Mapper" who draw out the map as described by the DM. One player was designated the "Treasurer" and kept track of treasure and magic items (usually the guy whose PC had the Portable Hole). All of these people are players, but you might have a large group in which one "player" is called "The Caller" and one is called "The Mapper" and all the rest are just called "players." It means they don't have a particular role and are just generically players. Whereas the DM, Caller, Mapper, etc., have specific roles above and beyond being "players."
It's really not a problem. There's no need to decry the terminology.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
That's not my experience, though maybe that I don't really stress about anything much accounts for that. I don't know everything as DM. I don't know what they players will do, nor what they won't do - it's always a guess whether I provided enough contextual clues for them to figure something out, too few, or too many - and I certainly don't always know what direction they'll take the campaign in, or what plans they hatched since last week's cliffhanger session ending. Anything the players are guessing about makes me second-guess my assessment of what their guesses are likely to be. I also don't know how encounters will turn out, whether they'll kill PCs or have them fly through without breaking a sweat. It's wait and see how the dice fall. Of course I can (and if needed, I definitely do) shuffle things around a bit behind the screen when the situation calls for it, but I don't outright change the outcome; it's just a nudge here or there, never playing god.
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As a player I show up once/week, play may character for 3-4 hours, and don’t have to give it much more thought until the following Wednesday.
As a DM, I spend a significant amount of time, work, and creativity on the campaign from the end of one session until the beginning of the next. Then I spend 3-4 hours playing the entire rest of the multiverse. Then I rinse and repeat.
I love DMing, but hands down playing is easier.
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We’re different people, so I’m not surprised we have different experiences :P
But my point is that “what the players do” isn’t hidden information. I know what they’re going to do, because they’re going to tell me (or else we can’t play the game). The knowledge that I have of the story, the NPCs, and the world means I never to have to guess about what’s going to happen. My players tell me what they’re going to do, and I have an immediate understanding of how things respond to that because I have all the necessary information.
All of the things others in this thread are bringing up to explain why they think GMing is harder; the prep work, keeping track of plots and NPCs, etc.; these things simply aren’t difficult for me. I spend hours every week thinking about it all; GMing is definitely more work. But for me, it’s very easy work.
Playing a PC, on the other hand, is pure guesswork. I never have certainty about how the story or NPCs or the world will react to what I do. I may have a good idea of it, but I don’t know. I expect many of the people who think that playing is easier have no trouble at all saying “we just have to do something and hope for the best,” but that paralyzes me.
That goes a long way towards explaining some of the reactions you’ve occasionally had toward some of the suggestions folks like BioWizard and I have given in other threads.
The type of game we prefer to run is entirely designed to give as much control as humanly possible to the other players. That requires us to be far more reactive, and improvisational. I literally have no way of knowing what will happen, I can only know what has happened. Until the very instant when future transitions into past it’s mostly guesswork, so I feel like I’m in the dark most of the time.
Unless they’re actively crawling a dungeon, the end of every session I ask the players what they intend their characters to do the following week. They quite literally tell me what to prepare on a session-by-session basis, and
ifwhen they change their minds for any reason at all I have to start winging it. I stopped trying to delude myself into thinking I could control the course of a campaign as a DM before I lost my virginity or gained a drivers license. (For context, those circumstances changed before I could legally vote or had to fill out my draft card, and I did both of those things way back before the turn of the century.)I had been driving myself bonkers trying to control things and then when that didn’t work I tried planning for every contingency I could think of. But players do the darndest things sometimes and I realized I was using less than 10% of the work I was preparing. When I accepted that wasn’t working for me I started focusing my efforts in other directions. First I switched seats and went 100% player for a while. (Meantime I scratched my DM itches with world building and researching alternative settings which eventually led me to Mystara.) All of that “not knowing” you mentioned wasn’t an issue for me since I had already accepted that as a fact of life. And as OboeLauren so eloquently once said: “real life is a super high CR.” I figured by comparison the not knowing in a fantasy world where my eff ups can’t actually hurt anything was nothing to worry about.
As a player, one benefit was I only had to worry about a few characters at a time. That really gave me an opportunity to get into their minds and understand them as “people.” That made improvising their actions and reactions almost as easy as improving my own. (I manage do that all the time.) That helped me develop my abilities to improvise RP on the spot and to adjust stuff like combat on the fly. When I realized I could apply the same principle to NPCs, that’s when I realized I didn’t need to control everything, I just needed to understand it. (My dad taught me the same thing about math, one need not memorize all those formulas if one simply understands how they work.) That’s when DM got much easier and waayyy more enjoyable for me.
I wouldn’t have ever become anything even remotely resembling a competent DM if I hadn’t spent all that time as a player. I’m not claiming to be great or anything, I’m not even the best in my group. But I can actually do the job where I couldn’t before that experience.
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Player and DM is sort of like my department at my college. We are all faculty of the department, and then one faculty member is the chair. Many times we refer to "the chair and the faculty." That chair is a faculty member. Our current one was until January when she became chair. When she steps down, she will be faculty again. In the mean time, she goes to "faculty meetings." But as chair, she has a different role. She teaches less, and administers more, and when they ask us to do surveys "of the faculty," we have to state that we "do not hold an administrative position." This means she can't answer that survey, even though she is still "one of the faculty" because as chair, at this moment, she has a different role.
Player vs. GM is very similar in an RPG.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Saga has an interesting counterpoint to the obvious answer relating to the differences in workload and responsibility (which doesn't directly equate to easy/hard).
I have been a player in a game where I was racking my brain for the whole session trying to figure out what them DM wanted us to do or why our characters were invested in this adventure or where to get the information we wanted or how in any way possible could we move the story forward. DMs can go a little too far into "sandbox" mode to the point where they expect players to drive the entire story, and we can scour a city talking to NPCs just trying to find a scrap of a lead on something interesting to do. I feel like in that campaign, with that particular DM, we as players had a harder time getting through the material than the DM.
But generally I would agree that DMing is harder. Certainly it's more work for me than playing is.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Most commenters equate time spent with difficulty. However there are a lot of things that take a lot of time, but are easy to do.
In general, I find it easier to stay engaged during a series of adventures when I am the GM. My prep time is about one hour for every three to four hour session. And finding one spare hour once a week is usually nothing that requires special consideration for me. Even in a busy week.
At least that's the case for a homebrew game. Bought modules take me more time to prepare, but I very rarely run non-homebrew.
We have mentioned other things besides time. Surely it is harder to RP many different characters (as DM) than RP a single PC (as a player) during a session. Having to decide what every monster in the fight is going to do, is harder than just deciding from among the limited set of options, what your PC is going to do. And designing a puzzle or a trap so that it is challenging but possible to solve/escape, is a lot harder than just solving or escaping it.
Looked at another way, DMs have to design something every week and execute multiple things each session.
A player has to design one thing one time (the PC, at character creation) and then execute one thing each session (playing that PC).
Equating the difficulty of the two is like arguing that it's just as hard to bring one covered dish to a pot-luck, as it is to cook and prepare an entire seven course meal all by yourself.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
there are certain tings harder about being a player for some people. being supportive to the other payers, not min-maxing, not being a backseat DM, ect can be hard for some people. I have always had trouble not backseat DMing when I play as a PC... I was reminded of this because I just got told off for being a backseat DM in a pbp...
I am an average mathematics enjoyer.
>Extended Signature<
So it's your assertion that it's harder to exert some common decency and be a good player, than it is to exert the same thing as a DM?
After all, DMs have temptations too -- the temptation to just blue-lightning your character every time you backseat DM... the temptation to build enemies who are there to completely defeat your abusively min-maxed character and kill it off by hoisting it on its own petard... the temptation to ban you from the game for not supporting the other players.
If we're going to get into who is "tempted to misbehave" more... it's still the DM. And most of us give into that temptation WAY less often than players do.
Next someone will be telling me it's harder to be a player because you have to resist the urge to buy and read the published adventure you're playing on.... like it's harder NOT to read it than to read and prep it.
Please.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
CERTAIN things. I agree that overall, the temptations mentioned above included, DMing is harder. but those temptations a DM does not have to deal with, and therefore those specific things are herder for a player.
I am an average mathematics enjoyer.
>Extended Signature<
I’m sorry BW, but this time I have raise an objection. It is certainly possible that even yourself has some habits that everyone else has to accept at times, we all do. I words too much. And the way my mind works, at times my brain links in more of a branching structure than a linear train of thought.* My brain is struggling to take an entire branching structure of concepts and unique memories and focus it into a linear path and not always successful. You can tell by how I’m rambling on instead of continuing on right now, and the fact that I do edit passes for typos, compound/run on sentences, and dangling participles. (My spelling is for crap, so I can’t spot those unless my spelling ‘retical turns red like it does for ‘retical, but I know that’s a legitimately correct contraction so Apple can suck it.) And while I’m in there you she sow much stuff Ike this I cut out sometimes. (Folks think I run on now.... 🙄) And here I am branching again, you can tell by the excessive use of parentheses.
This time I did all of that to prove a point that “people”on earth are all currently human. Nobody’s perfect, they without sin cast the first snarky/rude post. Backseat DMing often occurs for the same reasons most of these arguments do: because passionate people with unique points of view and varying degrees of rules knowledge are all trying to help each other make it the best D&D we can for everyone. I mean yeah, some people suck eggs, but others just have bad days, or just get carried away. (And I know there have to be folks who say all of that and likely worse about me.) I’m no better than anyone else, so I’m just as fallible as everyone else, including you.
For example, those DM temptations you listed... yeah I don’t think those things. If I notice a “power level” disparity in the party, my first instinct is to start homebrewing magic items or boons or something that I hope will speak to either the player, character, or both that could use a boost to bring them up to comparable with the high rollers, and then some cool unique items that those high rollers will like, but won’t actually up their numbers like the others. If someone calls me out on a RAW/RAI issue I either tell them we’re doing it the one way this time and I’ll look it before next session (and follow through), or we stop and figure it out right then and there as a group discussion. (Happened just last Wednesday and after we all talked it out and checked some comps for about 5 minutes, I realized they were right. And I have only ever had the urge to ban a single player, and he was that guy who reveled in Anarchy and all the DMs banned Wild Magic and Kender. (That was High School back in the ‘90s.) I have totally different issues as a DM, like talking too much and running off on tangents. (Shocking, I know.)
Having flaws, not recognizing them, or struggling to overcome one’s flaws doesn’t make a parson an asshat. Refusing to admit one is capable of flaw, refusing to try to improve, or were still doing it on purpose... those make someone an asshat.
And you know as well as I that there’s nothing inherently wrong Min/Maxing if everyone at the table is onboard with the program, just like there’s nothing wrong with a railroad campaign if everyone is having fun. Just like not min/maxing doesn’t automatically make someone a... shall we clean it up and say “anchor” to the party no matter how much my friend likes to say it does. (My friend who I shall not name for fear of being misunderstood by people not even involved in their conversation.)
So it’s a good thing you recognized you have these flaws so you can improve. Because as another friend of mine always councils people, “IG solutions are not good ways to deal with OOG problems.” 😉
*(You can tell by the fact who else you know of uses footnotes?!?)
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I was not saying that I am tempted to do any of those things. I was being sarcastic, because I think the idea that somehow it is "hard" for a player to basically behave him or herself, and that this makes the job of being a player harder than the job of being a DM, is laughable.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Sure, time requirements were not the only argument. I just wanted to point out that they are not an argument by themselves. You could make the argument that you have a tight schedule, and fitting in a few extra hours each week for prep time makes playing DnD harder for you if you are the GM.
Regarding role playing difficulty. A GM giving live to a hand full of mostly short-lived NPCs is not necessarily harder than creating a reasonably consistent an believable player character. Some people will have an easier time with one challenge, other players will struggle less with the other.
There cannot be an objectively correct answer to the question which part is more difficult. Even if I am arguing that I find the GM role easier in general, this is only true for the game prepping style I am using and for the expectation I have for a potential player character that I would play.
But it’s not just roleplaying and story: as a DM, that’s the easy part. The real challenge is information and time management with everything happening at once and only so many hours in the session, along with balancing fights so that they pose a threat but don’t overwhelm.
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That is true.
I guess it also depends on the group. My current group is very easy going and stuff like pacing is quite simple. I also don't worry too much about balance. If the encounters are fun for everyone, I don't care about how well balanced they were.
On the other hand, a few years ago I played with a group that made these same things much harder for me. They often got stuck due to infighting and complained about things being unfair.
Maybe I should change my answer to 'it depends'. :)
Dude, I got that. Why do you think I quoted you to yourself...? I mean, how long have we been conversing with each other? A couple of years now? Forget these (almost daily) forum interactions, just in our PMs alone I “talk” to you more often than I do my own mother. (Which reminds me I need to call her today.)
Part of the point I apparently failed to convey was that if any of that would be enough of a personal challenge that it could conceivably make being a Player that challenging, then it would also inevitably have to make the roll of DM more challenging as well by a proportional amount. If you reread you’ll see the foreshadowing at the end of the 1st p. and the reveal is the second half of the 3rd p.
The other part of the reason was because lots of people dealing with a wide range of mental disorders would legitimately struggle to sit still and quiet and wait. Compulsively interrupting others, racing thoughts, a need for things to be done a certain way, a periodic need for attention... those could all be reasons why someone might be backseat DMing, and those very same symptoms could also make it very hard for the person to resist. Some of the mental disorders that might possibly cause some of those symptoms include: PTSD, ADD/ADHD, OCD, Bipolar Disorder, Abandonment/Enmeshment Issues, Autism Spectrum, and Tourette syndrome. (There are more,.) I mean, it could just be they momma didn’t raise them right, Or maybes they’re just a wangrod. 🤷♂️ I’m not a licensed psychiatrist, so I’m not qualified to diagnose any of those conditions. (It’s actually really hard sometimes, even for the trained psychiatrists.)
Did you know that statistics suggest that half of all people with mental health disorders go undiagnosed, and that a decent amount of those who get diagnosed are misdiagnosed? Did you know that girls and women are less likely to be diagnosed than males? Girls on the autism spectrum usually just get to to sit down, be quiet, and stop fidgeting, and they are accused of having no self control. But you know what children with undiagnosed mental disorders of all genders hear a lot? Their told to sit down, shut up, stop fidgeting, and get control of themselves.
Of course those children weren’t fidgeting, they were stimming. Too bad nobody who ever observed it knew what that was or how to tell the difference. Stimming is a comfort behavior, like a kind of coping mechanism to help them stay calm in stressful environments like social interactions. It helps them maintain control if they’re, say for example....
That girl who never got diagnosed with autism is now a young woman. She loves stories and is really into Sword and Sorcery. Her brother and his friend played when they were younger and she wanted to but the game was really complicated and they kept getting cross with her for messing up. Now she works at a bank, but not up front because she doesn’t like working with the customers. She works in the back. People kept telling her how bad it was back there, but she doesn’t mind it. The paperwork isn’t that bad once she got used to it. And yeah, the end of every month is super busy, but at least it’s predictable, and the rest of the month it’s quiet. People kept saying how boring it was back there, but she doesn’t mind. And Barb, the young woman who works at the other desk is really nice. And it turns out that Barb and her boyfriend play D&D. Barb told her how much simpler the new edition is, and that the paperwork they do every day is way harder, and then Barb invited her to join them next Saturday.
She isn’t invited out very often and doesn’t really have many friends so she is really kind of thrilled, but also a little intimidated at meeting Barb’s boyfriend, but she likes Barb so.... And she’ll finally get to play D&D! The next day Barb oven brought their loaner copy of the PHB for her to borrow so she can get some ideas for what she wants to play before Saturday. She reads the book cover to cover, but it still doesn’t quite make sense to her. She doesn’t want to mess up this time so she reads it again. She even starts getting a little excited for it since Barb has been helping explain the stuff she didn’t understand before, so she’s not so nervous anymore.
Finally Saturday evening arrives, she heads over and Barb greets her warmly at the door. Barb then shows her to the living room and... starts inteoducing her to the other players?!? She had assumed it would just be the three of them, but instead there are six people, and the only one she knows is Barb, so now she’s suddenly feeling very nervous. On top of that, the couches are a little small. Everyone pleasantly made room for her. But now she’s sitting next to a complete stranger instead of her friend. And while he seems very nice. He keeps bouncing in his seat a little, every time he gets animated so the sofa springs keep bouncing her a little periodically, and his knee keeps bumping into hers. She dislikes the sporadic jostling, but she really, really prefers to not be touched.
The idea she had formed in her mind of a nice, quiet evening around a table with Barb and her boyfriend has suddenly been shattered. In its place is a very stressful evening in a room full of very loud strangers she wasn’t expecting and she keeps getting jostled and his knee keeps touching hers. All she wants to do is get up from that sofa and do that thing that always makes her feel better, but she was told all her life that people don’t like when she does that so she stays seated. And on top of all of that these people keep getting the rules wrong and every time she tries to help by telling them how it’s sposta work they keep getting annoyed with her like her brother used to for not knowing the rules. She doesn’t understand, she’s only trying to help. Maybe she shouldn’t come back next week...?
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Making my first campaign and dm'ing is 100% harder
As a player, you can get away with not putting a lot of time or effort into what you're doing for your character. But if you halfass things as a GM you're affecting the whole group. Plus, there's a lot more to keep track of- you're controlling a bunch of enemies in combat. You've got to keep track of all of their abilities plus all their HP totals, plus keep track of tactics- there's a line between playing the monsters too stupid and making things easy and playing them entirely too tactical and making it an unfun beat-down on the party.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.