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georges
@georges

So, a while ago I agreed to play some D&D, even though I'm not a fan of that game (https://cohost.org/georges/post/2026273-d-d-as-g-med-by-my-fr).

After the third session of the one-shot (yes), I'm starting to realize some bigger mismatches in my expectations (you know, bigger that just dice rolls or number of sessions in a one-shot). And they seem more about the GM and the GMing culture than just the game.


TarotCard2
@TarotCard2

I call it the Mercer Effect. So many of us new GMs got our start after seeing Matt Mercer on critical role, and we constantly compare what we do to the celebrities that Act for a living. It's daunting to make your own settings and tell your story. And yeah, It kinda is a GM culture thing.


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in reply to @georges's post:

If she's comparing herself to Baldur's Gate, it might be less "I have to carry everything" as a mentality and more that the past decade of how D&D has been positioned in culture creates an assumption that playing D&D has to be more than it actually is. There's a lot of folks - GMs and Players - who assume D&D is going to be like Baldur's Gate or the recent film or high-budget actual play shows, and when their own games don't mimic those experiences they wonder if something is going wrong. And if something is going wrong, they wonder if it's their fault.

It isn't, but it's hard to shake that doubt.

Past decade is underselling it. "The GM does all the work" has been the standard not just for D&D, but for things like Shadowrun and maybe World of Darkness (it's been 15 years since I flipped through the old world of darkness stuff so I can't remember), since inception. Collaborative Storytelling is relatively new in the space at the scale it's currently at.

Actual Play like Critical Role hasn't helped people's perceptions either. They see these professionals and go "oH I need to do THAT."

It's part of the reason why it's been so hard to find people to run games for so long. It's been made out to be a thankless job full of work for decades

The interesting part of this, to me, is that "oh, no, I made bad art" feels like simultaneously like a painful realization and a scam to get people to pay for streaming subscriptions or something. It's a shame that there's no easy way, because people get weirdly defensive about this when someone brings it up, to shift this sentiment to "no, it's good that you took the time out to make art and that you see where you could improve it"...

in reply to @TarotCard2's post:

when it comes to running a game for people in a world i made, it has to be good, i have to put my all into it, these people are giving me their time and attention and what i present to them has to solve the conundrum of both being an expression of myself as art and also as something that cares for and gives attention to each of them as a person and their characters, i cannot mess up the rules or introduce inconsistencies in the world, i will absolutely look at every storytelling game i have experienced to see if there are things to learn from and apply them

to be clear, the above is my first thought to myself, and it really is not an ideal mentality, the implicit "and if i fail at all that then i am worthless" is always tacked at the end

which is silly because when i make a mistake it is not a big deal, sometimes it is great, like once i messed up a character's name once and i decided to roll with it, so that character became two completely different characters - both of them the players loved for different reasons - like i almost had a mutiny at one point because the players were going to save one of those characters and they made me promise to not make the time it took to do that side-quest progress the main plot clock

happy little accident trees

that campaign started not long before critical role did, that is just a me thing, but i definitely did take inspiration from other gms online and that i knew personally

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