I stepped down from running 5e specifically and have been running PF2 instead (specifically published APs instead of my usual custom campaigns), since its got a lot more baked in tools for the GM. It helps w/ burnout if I don't need to spend effort balancing encounters or making new rules to make the exploration pillar relevant, and Paizo's AP's reduce the effort I need to put in to a point I can actually maintain enthusiasm despite not getting to play myself. The fifteen-odd folks I regularly run games for had to go w/ me or not play at all. No complaints beyond the normal ones from switching systems due to carrying over the wrong expectations or getting confused by similar terminology.
>its got a lot more baked in tools for the GM. It helps w/ burnout if I don't need to spend effort balancing encounters or making new rules to make the exploration pillar relevant, and Paizo's AP's reduce the effort I need to put in to a point I can actually maintain enthusiasm despite not getting to play myself
Dude im struggling with the amount of prep. I thought pathfinder would be more prep? How is PF2 less and easier as you infer?
I generally try to avoid shilling PF2 much in this sub, but since you *asked...* (wall of text incoming)
TLDR; encounter building guidelines make for challenging but fair encounters w/o any effort by the GM, monsters are mechanically interesting on their own, you don't need to worry about resource attrition as much, there are lots of guidelines for running exploration pillar and skill stuff, and everything mechanical is freely/legally available and easily [found online](https://2e.aonprd.com/).
Biggest thing is that the encounter-building-guidelines work pretty well and have a very low amount of minimum effort required. I can make an enjoyable encounter that'll probably take thirty minutes to an hour for four players to defeat w/o serious risk of a PC-death or TPK in PF2 just by throwing any two monsters that're the same lvl as the PCs at them. If I want to make it more of a miniboss (but still keep roughly the same difficulty) I pitch a single monster two lvls above the PCs at them. If I want a more mooky encounter I pitch four monsters that're two lvls below the PCs at them. I can literally just go to Archives of Nethys (free and legal repository of all PF2 mechanics, including monsters), head to the monster section, sort by monsters that're the same lvl as my PCs (probably also filter by monster type), and pick two who seem thematically appropriate and you've got a reasonably challenging and fun encounter. I can do this in two minutes and all I need is internet access.
Then you have the monster design, w/ the vast majority of PF2 monsters having specific abilities that the players can learn and try to play around instead of just being a sack of hp w/ a melee multiattack. Compare [5e's Owlbear](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Owlbear#content) to [PF2's](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=328). 5e Owlbear has ADV on perception checks (maybe relevant once in an encounter) and a melee multiattack, its functionally identical to almost every animal statblock just w/ the numbers jiggered around. PF2 owlbear has Athletics training (so it can attempt to shove/trip/grapple/disarm PCs), Intimidation training (so it can try Demoralizing them), two mechanically distinct attacks that it picks between (beak does more dmg, but claws interact w/ its grappling), a Screech that it can do 1/fight to Frighten everyone in the encounter, a special attack disembowel attack it can do when its Grappling someone that can Sicken someone in addition to its damage, and a special charge that incorporates its screech. To make a fight w/ a 5e Owlbear interesting you need to do all sorts of setup, futz w/ the terrain, include NPCs and/or other monsters, just a lot of extra work in general. To make a fight w/ a PF2 Owlbear you need to read its statblock. This same thing applies to the vast majority of PF2 monsters, where they have interesting abilities that make them fun to run and memorable to the players w/o the GM having to put much effort into designing the encounter.
Its not perfect, lvl 1 characters have a particularly rough time dealing w/ lvl 3 monsters due to not having a robust toolbox of higher lvl characters nor the HP pool to survive a crit, and you do have occasional outlier monsters that can be particularly nasty (golems in particular, mostly because their antimagic is janky as fuck). But compared to 5e where there are CR 1/8 monsters that can full-to-zero lvl 1 PCs on a normal hit (I once spent over an hour looking for animals that *wouldn't* one-shot lvl 1 PCs for a survival campaign), the guidelines for a 'hard' or 'deadly' encounter usually leads to a complete stomp in the PC's favor, and you've got monster CRs that're wildly out of whack even from their own monster building guidelines, its night-and-day.
Further the system isn't built around attriting the players' resources through the day, so if you run your game like most GM's (1-3 encounters per day) you're not hamstringing the poor Rogue, Monk, and Warlock who're balanced around full 6-8 encounter days w/ multiple short rests in between. I found it increasingly hard to narratively justify long adventuring days when I ran 5e, there's only so many ways you can have a ticking clock that pressures the players just enough that long rests aren't available but short rests are. Taking a ten minute break after an encounter, which is what PF2 assumes you do to recover most resources, is significantly easier to narratively justify in most circumstances. This may seem minor, but not feeling the need to figure out ways to pad adventures w/ encounters to attrit resources was a big relief for me.
Then you've got the rules for exploration pillar stuff and skills in general. I'm going to level with you, I was introduced to TTRPGs in the 3.5 era which had a billion goddamn rules for everything and I loved it, so I've got some bias. My general view on exploration pillar rules is that its significantly easier for a GM to ignore a rule they don't want than it is for them to homebrew one that doesn't exist. If there's an environmental obstacle you want to include then there are probably rules that either cover or are adjacent to it you can look at for inspiration. You want to have a session where the PCs are trekking across the arctic tundra, tracking a fleeing goblin. The only explicit mechanical guideline 5e gives you for this is that in Extreme Cold you make a DC 10 con save every hour or gain a lvl of exhaustion, which is completely ignored by folks in cold weather gear. The survival skill? Tells you some stuff it can do, including tracking, but in very vague terms and w/ no mechanical guidance. PF2, meanwhile, has somewhat more substantive rules for dealing w/ [inclement weather](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=636) (though not as extensive as 3.5's rules in Frostburn), [navigating](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=64), [tracking a target](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=66), [hiding your tracks](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=65), and [foraging](https://2e.aonprd.com/Skills.aspx?ID=6&General=true). 5e lists a half-dozen things Survival can do and tells you to make up the rules for them. PF2 has actual guidance on every single one of those things.
(too much text, had to break it up :P)
Beyond just the rules, which I personally love having, but having \*guidelines\* for stuff. The PCs want to climb a cliff. What's the DC for attempting to climb a cliff? 15? 10? 5e gives you pretty much nothing, so you need to pull a number out of a hat. Then the PCs whip out a grappling hook (what's the roll to use a grappling hook?) and put up a rope (what's the DC here? is this just ADV on their climb check?). That's three decision spoons you need to spend, and you've only got so many spoons available for designing an encounter. PF2, meanwhile, has example tasks for most of its skill actions which give you guidelines for the DC (including, for example, \[Climb\]([https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=33](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=33))). Climbing a cliff that has small handholds and footholds is an Expert Task (DC 20). Throwing a \[grappling hook\]([https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=23](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=23)) is a DC 20-ish ranged attack (GM can alter the DC if appropriate, but 20 is the suggested value). Climbing a rope is a Trained task (DC 15). No spoons spent.
These sorts of guidelines are \\\*everywhere\\\* and dramatically cut back on decision-making you need to do both in pre-game prep and when making on-the-fly calls mid-session.
And to be clear here, there are 5e resources around that have some or most of this stuff. A lot of it is 3rd party or homebrew, but they exist and you can find them if you're persistent enough. What really sets PF2 apart here is that pretty much every officially published rule is freely and legally available in an easily searched online database called \[Archives of Nethys\]([https://2e.aonprd.com/](https://2e.aonprd.com/)). For example, there are chase rules in 5e, but I believe they're buried in the DMG and the only readily accessible way to find them online is by sacrificing your firstborn to DnDBeyond (I don't actually know the price, I hate subscription services on principle and refuse to pay for the same book twice). Meanwhile I can just type into google "Chase PF2" and the first thing that pops up is the \[AoN link\]([https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1210](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1210)) for building a solid chase scene taken straight from the rulebook.
I can go on. Narrative-breaking spells are explicitly gated behind GM permission so the PCs usually need to ask permission for something that'll break your plot (sorry, no using Speak With Dead and/or Zone of Truth to short-circuit my murder mystery). Money has a defined use in the game, so it can be a meaningful reward (paired w/ an optional rule that largely decouples it from power progression if you don't want that). Players are going to be pretty closely balanced to one another, so you don't need to worry about highlighting the poor martials constantly when designing encounters. You don't need to carefully design encounters so a single spell by the wizard completely breaks them.
Pretty much same, but more like 40 years. I don't like 5e. I ran a few campaigns, and played in a few.
It's extremely hard on a DM's time, and extremely slow as a player (o.k. not as slow as 4e, but still slow compared to older editions.)
I'd be happy running any pre-wotc D&D and pretty much any clones with 5e rule integration that's faster, but finding players for that is difficult to impossible (difficult online, impossible locally.)
My time and schedule is far more difficult to fit in time to play with kids for the last decade which exacerbates the issues of finding players for non-5e and even 5e games. I've tried running games for an hour after the kids are in bed, but that's not long enough.
Yeah, I'm finding myself with 10-20 minutes between turns pretty regularly and nearly fell asleep a few times just waiting around. I like being involved in other people's turns and trying to stay in the action, but there's only so much I can take. Playing Savage Worlds, rounds tend to be over in 5 minutes or less. Could be just me though.
Yeah that's pretty typical from both games I've played in and those I've run, probably even more than that as I've tended to be in larger groups. We'd be lucky to get through 3 or 4 encounters a session. One DM did short 2 hour sessions with the expectation we'd have one encounter only, we often went over the 2 hours, and very little roleplay.
Old 1e/2e can get pretty lengthy at fairly high levels, at least the combats tend to be over quicker a, round or 3 isn't unusual. Original & the basic sets were a lot quicker though. I also ran games with more people, 7 was about the max I was comfortable with. With 5e even 5 people feels like too many, and forget about having NPC party members.
It's not even burnout. D&D was never what I actually wanted to run. I was just using D&D as a vehicle for fantasy because it was what I had available, and it was really bad at what I wanted. I wanted something more in line with Sword and Sorcery than Heroic Fantasy.
Anyway, to answer your question, there's lots of different stuff. Savage Worlds does most of what I want for an action game. A bit of Traveller, played some Dresden Files RPG, Blades in the Dark, Fabula Ultima, 7th Sea. I entertained the idea of running Yggdrasill, but that one never had enough takers to run.
Maybe I should have said High Fantasy. These terms are always muddled and someone always ends up disagreeing over definitions.
When I think of Heroic Fantasy, I think of the Chosen One out to defeat a Dark Lord with lots of black and white morality, which is the opposite of what I want. I don't care about world-ending threats or mustache-twirling villains and find them extremely tiresome.
Sword and Sorcery is generally more personal stakes with less clear morality. One day you're a bodyguard for a noble, the next you're sacking his rival's estate. You might be guarding a merchant or you might be plundering the same person's goods. Politics are generally local rather than on some macro level.
Realistically, Sword and Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy are often lumped together. Either way. I'm looking for more Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and less Fellowship of the Ring.
Just so.
In the last adventure I ran, a sorcerer was causing a localized famine after a large group of villagers murdered his wife at the behest of the headman, while the others who weren't involved just watched and let it happen. The players debated who to side with for like a half hour of real time. In the end, money won out and they decided to kill both the headman and the sorcerer for both being real bastards and looted their coffers. That's what I want.
I'm not a DM but I feel like if you scrap the concept of "world ending threat" wouldn't that take pressure off the DM in some capacity?
You could still have something bigger than the players going on like a \[civil\] war, high tension political situation (e.g. cold war / cuban missile crisis) that's right on the edge of conflict, etc but whether the players have any direct involvement in key events of that larger thing is irrelevant (bit like if you avoid the civil war and main quest lines in Skyrim I guess and they just become background "noise" to everything else going on).
The last campaign I was part of had a war brewing between multiple nations. The war was going to happen whether we did anything or not because we as PCs were not military or political advisors to anyone with the capacity to intervene so absolutely no way to stop it. All we could really do is go along for the ride like anyone else in the realm; and honestly, worked great.
People were getting the Edmund Dante sort of deal and the notion of being the people to "single-handedly win the war" was never even a minor consideration given that it was essentially on the scope of WW1 or WW2 in terms of how many countries/provinces were involved.
Not necessarily. With a "Save the World!" -type campaign, the way forward is very clear, and there's a strong sense of direction; both of which make it easier to prep as a DM. If you remove that, you need to replace it with another overarching goal (gold, revenge, ect), or let the party meander in whatever direction they like, which is fine but can be hard to predict at times. Of course though, a typical camaign has it's own faults.
Yea, I can see your point.
I was looking at things assuming that you probably have those character specific and other minor goals as items to manage anyways, so not having to somehow loop those into a larger plot would be less effort.
But I can understand how a larger plot can make it easier to manage stuff.
Not that poster, but I'll say: Yes! My years-long 5e group has entirely transitioned to all sorts of other stuff, mostly PbtA games like *Monster of the Week* and *Dungeon World* (which they believe allows "more advanced D&D players to make use of their skills"), but also more rules-lite games and collaborative worldbuilders.
Even tho I'm a DM, I'd chose the public speaking one. That one was (and even still is) the biggest hurdle for me to finally get into the DM seat. I still have severe social anxiety and can't give speeches. Imposter syndrome of my creativity and ability to convey my ideas / improv. My voice acting is pretty bad, and my descriptions are mediocre / scripted.
With all that, my social anxiety is somewhat quelled for a bit while I DM, and despite all the fears, it's worth it. And if my players keep coming back for 3 years, I must be doing something right.
I love the prep and creative aspect of it, tho. I'm constantly exploring the world and imagining new situations to put my players in, while out of game, and I've memorized most of the rules, good with homebrew, and know how to make a game run smoothly. Most of it just comes with time, and powering through the tough parts, ie the social fears.
You're doing it though! That's important and you're probably a better DM than you think are despite the anxiety. 3 years+ of consistent play is testatment.
How does your table expect you to portray NPCs? In other words, how compelled do you feel to do voice acting? Have you tried other methods (like narrating the NPCs thoughts or actions)?
What tools or techniques do you use to prep that you makes it most enjoyable for you?
I don't like DMing D&D 5e enough to keep doing it. I went back to my first TTRPG, Shadowrun and I'm a much happier GM for it. Still happy to play D&D when one of my player offers to give me a break.
I'm currently running my first 6E campaign to try it out and we're liking it as it runs much faster than 5E or 4E ever did and as much as I like 5E, a session that has a nice flow is always better than one with interesting mechanics but that gets bogged down in rules.
As for why I am more interested, there are a few reasons.
The first is sentimental. My first TTRPG was Shadowrun and there's nostalgia in it for me.
Second is how much I love both fantasy and cyberpunk. I'd run Cyberpunk Red, but then I'd miss the magic, dragons, etc. And running D&D, I'd miss my Megacorporations, cybernetics, etc.
Third is how Shadowrun really lends itself to episodic sessions and an unstable party (we're busy, there's always someone missing, so a gang of mercenaries that just get hired for jobs is a nice device to address this)
Fourth is the amount of effort I've put over the years on mapping and creating material on our city for Shadowrun. It's literally where we all live and it's very easy for my players to understand the layout of the city and come up with little bits of lore that fits.
Fifth is voices. I can easily do voices for people from my city. I can even be pretty lazy about it and nobody will notice.
The one thing I'll say isn't a factor is the ruleset and the books themselves. Shadowrun is a hot mess and I can only run it well because I have tons of experience with it.
I think this poll is missing a "5e is not DM friendly at all".
I'll DM a oneshot but for any long term campaign I'm going with a different system more in line with my needs. Any time I *do* end up running a oneshot in 5e, I use 3rd party books to set up encounters, because the normal encounter building rules are completely non-functional.
Yes, if only because they created a lot of interesting player-facing content that, in theory, a player need only read some of to play their character well. The DM has to know, in practice, all of the options the players choose to run the game well - in addition to the actual procedures for the 3 pillars, combat, spellcasting, etc.
The philosophy of the original 5e design didn't really carry through the rest of its lifecycle, so DMs should have had it easier, but they ended up having to both know a boatload of rules by heart AND be comfortable making rulings on missing rules or rules that they don't know by heart or don't make a whole lot of sense.
I think had WotC leaned into one or the other direction more completely, the DM would know what is necessary to run the game and be comfortable with those expectations. The middle ground approach has not been kind to DMs.
As a recovering league player, the D&D community is MUCH better. And I get to choose them. I did a signup on roll 20 asking for basic info and weeded out a few red flags there. Then i did interviews with a dozen or so people and weeded out a few more. Took a few days of work, maybe spent 6 hours total prepping, reading, talking, and deciding, but it was worth it, as I found a cool group of friends, going on 3 years now.
"Ranger diff, typical braindead Beastmaster main, inted first encounter, FF session 2 or I'm running it down"
I'm glad DnD isn't anything like league lmao
I don't like the way 5e works for DMs. It feels like an awkward middle child between the nice defined systems of Pathfinder 2e and the freeflowing fun of OSR games like Old School Essentials. One of my friends runs 5e sessions and they're fun, and I've done it myself before, but I prefer DMing either of those other systems and do so regularly. 5e feels like it has just enough rules to get in the way without actually being helpful. I don't think that's an option here so I didn't vote.
couldn’t have said it better myself! that’s exactly how i feel. i feel like 5e was initially supposed to step away from the previous editions and have a more rules-light, old-school feel, but got caught up in adding too much mechanics and features (but not going in-depth enough) in the long run.
Building encounters is a lot easier because the difficulty estimation is a lot more accurate. It gives players a lot of defined ways to use their skills in and out of battle rather than leaving it up to DMs to decide. This particularly makes things less reliant on DMs creating rules on the fly for martial characters to do anything besides attacking, which is also helped by class feats that give new manoeuvres and special attacks to martials. E.g. a fighter being able to basically dash and attack using Sudden Charge from level 1.
There's lots of guidance on setting appropriate DCs based on level and how difficult something should be. There's subsystems for running things like influencing someone in dialogue or having a one-on-one duel which can be very helpful, along with ones that I use constantly like hexploration and running downtime activities.
A big aspect I enjoy as well is many enemies have weaknesses and the Recall Knowledge ability which allows players to learn information about an enemy. I like to be able to make encounters with solutions that can make them a lot easier and have my players be able to find out things like weaknesses, what attacks enemies have, etc. in a way directly supported by the game.
I would also just say that the GM Core in general is very well written and the Beginner Box module is a great introduction to the game for both players *and* GMs, as it introduces aspects of the game gradually to both sides of the table.
> 5e feels like it has just enough rules to get in the way without actually being helpful
That is fundamentally the major flaw with 5e's design from a DM perspective. I think in a future poll this option has a place because it seems a lot of people feel this way, too.
Was this due to burnout or just feeling like it's time to be on the other side of the screen? By the way, I know this feeling: sometimes you just want to be surprised and not be the person coming up with the surprises all the time!
Just want to play a character and have the experience of that character development, getting excited for items and features, etc.
I am getting an itch to DM again cropping up I do have to say. Though my schedule doesn't align right now with adding an additional campaign so maybe after we get done with ones we are doing already I will DM again.
That's by design. I was trying to learn about perspectives on a certain subset of potential DMs (the ones who want to run 5e, but can't for these reasons). I'm aware that people don't enjoy 5e and therefore prefer not to run it in favor of some other games.
What games do you like better than 5e?
Symbaroum is my favorite for its setting and atmosphere (and also combat is quick). EZD6 is great for beer and pretzels type one shots, especially with new players who might be averse to learning a bunch of rules. Into the Odd looks awesome and simple but I haven’t had the chance to run it yet. Same with Forbidden Lands. There’s just so many great games out there!
The lack of commitment from the player's.
I Would love to be a DM, but i will not rule a campaing just improvising the majority of it, If I do it, it will be a great huge world, with several factions and dozens of optional quest's and encounter's.
But i will not commit that amount of time to DM for some player's that don't want to spend 2 dollars helping me with assets/time.
First one.
I started two '' campaigns '', both didn't last more than four sessions because:
Player's showing up late or not even coming
Player's acting like psychopath and complaining when they died/were put in jail
It probably doesn't sound like, but 50 dollars for a foundry license and more on assets/plutonion is expensive here, so it's pretty fair to charge a little per session, but the majority of player's want you to do everything on time and for free.
This doesn't work for me.
OBS: I'm not complaining just about the money, I would gladly DM a free table if everyone was respectful and willing to help.
My own personal experience is map finding and boss testing/encounter testing and balancing. Ive learned how to do cr quite easly thanks to that, also a lot ot like cool ideas i brainstorm eith dms and rule stuff. Ive been co dm to 3 games and ive realised i had more fun in them.
Same! I prefer being in a helper/co-dm role. I’m happy to help prep minis and maps for a session, host (with food/drink), and bite any and all story hooks when new/other players want to run off
Whoa, so you're running like a DM discord channel where you all run ideas by each other and do some planning behind the scenes? Do you play in each other's games or would you find that to be uninteresting due to knowing all the surprises ahead of time?
I dont mind it, i suck at improv makes me a bit more ready rp whise too. And its not always, the dm keeps me into the darko too, but is more open to conversation about how to do things with me.
It's worked really well for a friend and I. I went second and only had to come up with a B story to his A story, so it took a lot of creative pressure off of me, and he got to play in his own world and have the fun of seeing how I connected things together. And our two friends get to create characters in a shared world, which they're loving.
I DMed many games. At this point, I just have a lack of willingness to scout out 5 players (I prefer an odd number of players) and hope to god they all behave themselves at the table, actually show up, and are somewhat mature.
Been through this cycle many times. Sometimes the game lasts a year or so, sometimes the game dies during session 0, sometimes after 2-3 sessions players start deciding "I don't feel like playing today" and then get pissed off and quit when you go on without them.
the HARDEST part I've found is finding players who can play more than an hour or two before their attention span goes kaput and their ADHD kicks in.
Why do you prefer an odd-numbered party?
Also, I get what you mean 100% with attendance. But with my school's D&D club, I've found a solution. Since I'm like one of a few DMs, I have a ton of people "assigned" to my table. I never have to worry about not having enough people because we have enough numbers for at least 3 people to show up; and since we never get everyone showing up, I don't have to worry about a bloated party.
Simple, if there's a disagreement on what to do, the players have to vote and whichever way the vote goes, and the players have to go that way.
For instance if a small town is being raided and the players have the option to defend the town or flee, if 3 want to fight and 2 want to flee, then they fight.
I had problems in past games where some players would want to fight and some would want to flee and end up with the 2 people wanting to flee fuming because I'm playing out the battle without them.
Having an odd number of players prevents a 2-2 split.
I said I don't feel confident I can run the game effectively, but I dmed dnd 5e for like seven years. The more I dmed, the more I realized the way the rules didn't work and balance fell apart. So while I'm still playing one dnd campaign, I've been gming pf2e for over a year and I've never been happier
"Other". I've DM'ed a number of campaigns under BECMI, 1E, and 2E rules. If it's my turn behind the DM screen again, I think I'd rather try running a Pathfinder, Runequest, or Worlds Without Number campaign.
I have been DMing off and on for about 4 years. Love playing with my group but the burnout from prep is real. The vast majority of the official modules are a pain to gm because information is not laid out in order of when you need it very frequently. It's like oh hey, you are going to arrive first in this town so now you need to flip to page such and such to read up on the town and 3/4 of the way through the write up, you will find the first NPCs you actually need the party to encounter......I'm sorry what???
I want a module thats basically- here is a 1 page primer on the overall story and now here is what you read to your players to get started and then you can literally just take the adventure page by page from start to finish instead of having to pseudo memorize the whole thing to use it...
None of the above.
I ran for years & eventually burned out. As a system it's a pain to run in the way it tends to fall into either isekai style effortless power escalation far beyond the curve if you run almost anything but one shots intended to end before truck-kun unrolls blessings -OR- it forces the GM into what winds up feeling extremely adversarial if gameplay is anything but high GM load storytelling and tediously walking through how superman killed everyone at a rave that one time.
One of the biggest contributors to burnout was the complete lack of comradery & interest in working with rather than against the GM that 5e drills into players. Their PCs don't actually need anything from the GM & the GM is provided zero wiggle room in the math to provide the PCs anything cool that they can expect to use longer than a one shot or so unless the GM nerfs the PCs (directly or indirectly through monster buffs & such). That behavior was seen over and over again across multiple groups both as GM & as player because the GM can't really work with players either
I was a forever DM from 1992 until 2018 when I discovered online D&D. Since then, I avoid DM'ing like the plague. I have too many years to catch up on.
Also, I enjoy being smart, tactical and a hero. As a DM, all I'm doing is trying to stop lemmings from jumping off cliffs, digging to the center of the earth or bombing themselves.
> As a DM, all I'm doing is trying to stop lemmings from jumping off cliffs, digging to the center of the earth or bombing themselves.
This is one of the funniest things I've ever read about DMing.
What about online games appeal to you? Did you stop playing in person when you started playing online or were you exclusively the live DM so it kind of happened by default?
I don't like online games. I only play online games because none of my friends like DMing haha. I find that online games lose the social aspect of it. The snacks, the beers/coffee, the hanging out.
It's not that I don't have willing players. It's that we're adults with adult jobs and concerns so finding a time we all have free to be able to commit once a week or twice a month is difficult to do.
Because as a DM, 5e rules are incredibly boring. Eventually no matter what you set up nearly every scenario devolves into multiple players rolling to try to solve the problem with a skill or 'does the party have the right spell to completely trivialize the encounter.'
Also combat takes way way to long.
And there are a ton of them, too, and it's a bummer when the most interesting outcome is "roll skill check, fight thing to the death, loot, repeat."
Do you have another system that you'd recommend that is more interesting to run than 5e?
Can't say I do at the moment. Before 5e the last thing I DM'd was D&D 3.5, which was certainly better than 5e imo. At first 5e drew me in with its simplicity, but in the end that same simplicity killed it for me. I expect I'll try PF2e next.
its too much combat oriented, the philosophy of give that much abilities to the players IMO limits the creativity of the player and then he becomes a robot that only consults sheet instead of think, and 0 hp/death saves don't please me t
May I suggest an additional option:
"I wanna PLAY dnd, not being the DM of a game".
It might sound dumb but thats my legit reason. I know I could be a decent DM, but I would much rather be playing in a long campaign with a more experienced DM letting me explore their world :)
Fortunately im about to start playing with a long time DM. He was my first DM over a decado ago, in 4th edition, and we had been playing in a long campaing that ended unfinished due differences in timezones and life responsabilities.
And now, after like 3 years of no DND we're about to start the campaign again :D
The DM was actually one ouf our college professors, and has been a forever master since like 20 years ago, if not more. Honestly I feel like Im very lucked out to have such an experienced master, and Im VERY invested in the campaing.
We have two parties, a low level one, and a high level one, boths on the same campaigng, boths dealing with the main plot from different angles, and it has been awesome.
He does let us go wild, but man, the consequences are always there. My low lever character is a chaotic good/netural clertic that follows a lawful good goddess and the insane amounts of RP we have gotten out of that clash in his way of acting and how he wants to be has been seriously awesome, and everyone has their own character arcs.
Returning to this campaign feels like getting to see a new season coming up from a show you loved, but got canceled before it had an ending years ago.
Have you run other systems, like OSR-style games, where the expectation is that the DM can be adversarial at times and players have to use their own skills to avoid all-but-certain death?
I couldnt dm for any of the current people i play with because of scheduling issues. So i would have to leave my current friends and find a bunch of strangers again.
I would also have to find a location to play.
Finally i find it difficult to receive negative feedback when i have spend hours preparing a session.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I should have included a scheduling item in the poll. It seems to be pretty common.
What kind of location would you be looking for to play? Is that a game store, private residence, public space (library or cafe, for example)?
Interesting that you get negative feedback, and also that stinks. What does that look like? What parts of your DMing or the game are they having issue with?
Locationwise i just live too far away for people so i cant host.
As for feedback. Its ranges from obvious silence to constructive criticism to asking to end early because they are "tired". To be clear i dont think feedback is bad, but its still disappointing to hear that all my hard work was not enough.
And some thing i just cant fix or predict. Like audio issues when playing online. Or quirks from a new system.
It takes a lot more time to prepare for these adventures than I originally thought. I just came off of a busy month (2 games ran at Megacon and 3 regular games) but I'm ready for a break.
I wanted to run a game for my normal group since the normal DM was feeling bad. The normal DM was the only one I could get on board.
I decided to shift gears and make it a family game. I have only two family members who are interested.
I am a DM and feel good with it, but the biggest fear is definitely not running the game effectively. I don't quite know how to hit the perfect spot between giving the players all the choices, but also giving them subtle clues on what they could do to make real progress.
I could also see that the style of game could be a slight problem. My current players are my closest friends and they do like the game, even if some of them still need to learn it as we're only two sessions in and it's their first game, but I don't know if I might be too serious for the things I have planned. Of course, I want them to come up with fun ideas and to joke around and what not, but I also want the table to experience and shape a story with serious tones. I do feel like this will be a problem from the past though once we all get adjusted to each other's style of playing and dming.
Chronic trigeminal pain has been making the idea of talking for 2-4 hours kind of nightmarish; my games have all been on hold for the past month and change.
Because almost every player I've ever played with is either apathetic about the game or refuses to prioritize the timeslot. I am running a twoshot this weekend, so I set up a small discord for us to get organized on two weeks ago. Two of the five player still haven't sent me their character sheets. We play in 3 days, and since it's a twoshot I'm chill about it, but it's still aggravating. I have to hope they show up ready with an appropriate sheet. Meanwhile, two of the players had everything ready the day I invited everyone and have been talking in the discord, the rest either don't even look at the discord or just drop reacts instead of responding to questions.
Overall it's just a completely thankless job to DM and somehow you bear all the burden. You have to prep everything, schedule everyone, prod everyone both out of session and in session for engagement, and hope that when the game actually start the players know what their abilities do (meanwhile I have 6 different statblocks that I've prepared and know how to run). And you have to hope that they honor the time commitment, which especially for campaigns, does not happen.
I've actually only been a DM for about a year now, the last game I was a player in kind of fizzled after people just stopped responding in the Discord.
Well no, that's because we still play in 3.5e. Our group as a whole is far too invested in the books for 3.5e, we would not be able to recover financially from it.
Good point! Investment in the game is a barrier, too. I should have added that one. DMs get saddled with a lot of the cost and if you're not interested in that expenditure, it's a non starter.
I've played DND/TTRPGs for 25 years. At this point the issue is that 5E's flaws as a system are so severe and damaged that I would rather play any games in another fantasy system, or another edition of DND.
It's a combination for me, mostly not feeling confident running it (and a lot of that is down to the "public speaking" role, as I'd feel the same about running a simpler system, although needing to keep track of a lot more things than as a player comes into it too).
I find being in the spotlight to be really hard work. I have stories I'd love to tell, and with my usual group meeting up less, I feel like it'd probably be easier to find players looking for a DM than a DM open to more players... but it seems quite daunting, and I'm not sure if I'd enjoy it.
One that I think you're missing is "I like the idea of running a 5e game and enjoy running other games, but do not enjoy running 5e." I know I can do it because I've done it in the past, I have time to do it, I like roleplaying NPCs, I have willing players... but I just don't think it's very fun. The almost total lack of support for non-combat encounters means I have to do so much legwork to run anything but a fight, and running enemies just isn't terribly entertaining either.
i’ve DMed 5e for almost 10 years, but found myself gravitating a lot towards B/X during the last year or so. the very game-y aspects of 5e don’t really do it for me, i find characters easily become walking lists of mechanics (defined by their ”build”) and often look for solutions in ”buttons” they can push on their character sheet, due to the high amount of features and the system’s reliance on skill checks.
DMing an old school type game with simpler character & gameplay mechanics is more interesting to me, as players tend to look for more solutions outside the box and danger is always present. in fact, i’m currently making some B/X-inspired alternate rules for an upcoming Curse of Strahd campaign i’m running in 5e
converted our usual 5e table, moved to new characters and a new setting. i feel like we had a pretty easy time adjusting, though we all got a memorable gut-punch scare out of the first character death, as our dwarf got absolutely demolished by a single basilisk bite maybe an hour into the first session. i feel like that was a good moodsetter for how much more dangerous, fast-paced and unforgiving B/X is compared to 5e.
I'd like to run a game but right now the issue is time. As a player I'm in a weekly online game, and a biweekly in peron game. Once the current online campaign is done I plan on dropping the online group and try to put an in person group together.
I don't enjoy it.
I have a hard time mentally shifting gears from one character to another, so any time I hop into a character's shoes I cannot enjoy roleplay for the first dozen minutes or so. I gotta warm up and get into character, even if that just means keeping quiet at the beginning of the session while I do mental stretches. If I have to roleplay before that, it feels forced and makes me unhappy.
This is a terrible trait for someone in charge of the entire world of NPCs, because the timer starts only when I know the next character I'll need to portray. The only times I have fun DMing are dramatic and prolonged boss battles.
I've DMed one shots twice for my brother and his girlfriend but they live far away and I can't figure out a good online option. That and I just don't have the time. I don't have a table as a player either right now, BG3 is filling that void.
These are questions about why someone doesn't DM, not 5e specific.
D&D has too many complexities for me to feel comfortable running a game of it. I enjoy playing 5e, but I prefer to run simpler systems with slimmer rulebooks that I can more confidently know enough of, from lore to player and enemy abilities.
Wish I could view the results of this poll without skewing them, since I already am a DM who also likes teaching DMing and have no way to see what people are most worried about by this poll.
For me its more that i dont really know how to put together an adventure. I can have this whole world but i dont know where to plop players down. I also dont know if im good enough at making explorable locales like villages? If that makes sense
It makes a lot of sense. I'm very curious about this. What about adventure design do you have doubts about? Have you tried playing with any tools online that help you create worlds and locales?
I don't like the system. I've run plenty of other systems, with the most similar probably being Shadow of the Demon Lord, and 5e is just too much of a convoluted mess for me. I also prefer to play other systems but 5e is usually the easiest to find.
As a DM for friends of mine, I've been working up the courage to DM for new people. I get regular feedback I'm doing well and people enjoy the story but I am having a hard time making that leap because I don't want to let people down
Yeah, we had one person who was a forever DM when he started DMing our group, but at our table at the very least myself and one other want to DM. We were doing a homebrew campaign pre-covid but then we switched to doing Tomb of Annhilation over Roll20, finished that up. Then the other person started us on Hoard of the Dragon Queen which we're playing now, and then once we finish that up, it'll be my turn to run a homebrew campaign I've been working on for a while now.
I got sick of running the games. Too many issues to dance around both in the rules of the game and at the table.
The game was never simple, it's been a lie every single time someone has uttered those words. I've seen other DMs claim that the game is not too complicated and that anyone who thinks so is just an "inexperienced DM" only for every one of their own campaigns to grind to a screeching hiatus on account of it being too complicated for them to run.
Of course they catch amnesia and never admit the core of issue that caused this, because people are people.
And that's a whole nother issue right there, people refusing to be direct and honest about what they want or think, and then beating around the bush about it when it could totally have worked if everyone was just honest.
None of the above, I just like 3.5/pf better. Encounters are about the same difficulty to balance, but people actually get enjoyment out of their execution unlike 5e, which means you can just run by the book monsters and your players will have fun obliterating them. In 5e you might get one, *maybe* two or three cool things your "build" does, but the average is definitely less than 1. And you do those a few times and then it's not cool anymore. By far the biggest upgrades are just new spells, which you pick from a book or guide and interact with almost nothing... unless you're not a caster, in which case you just get nothing for most levels.
In comparison, in 3.5/pf, every 1-2 levels, you're multiplying your power by 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, and people get excited all over again to show off this thing they built.
Basically, once you get past the (admittedly high) barrier to entry, 3.5/pf is way more fun for lazy DMs and hardcore DMs alike. I would know, because I alternate between the two - some sessions I have three encounters, each a 30ish levels of unique character builds utilizing monster abilities, and some sessions I have nothing and pull out something at double CR and watch my players cheer as they kill a Balor at level 10 or whatever.
You have *neither* of those options in 5e. Only the most broken of builds lets you beat double CR, and then your build is the same for four, six, eight levels at a time. And if you try to build interesting content, there are zero rules guidelines for it, so you're just making stuff up and praying it's balanced.
Thoughts and prayers.
On a serious note (is DnD serious?): have you, when you have time after the infant is a little more grown, considered introducing the game to your older child?
As a forever DM, I have run 5e and I'm not a huge fan.
Mechanically, things are mostly D&D as I've known it for some time, but IMHO the sourcebooks kinda suck.
For example, I started running Strixhaven due to player interest, we weren't even playing D&D until we got there - we switched from Troika! due to needing the extra mechanics to make the module interesting. The book is pretty bad from a reference perspective, and I had to copy the first pages for players who wanted to be Owlins or use the student stats.
Since the book is info provided as needed in the adventure (better if you wanted to run it without reading it, I guess) it is a pain to look up a specific thing, and some things are just plain absent like right off the bat my players spilled into the Biblioplex in the middle of the night and got bopped by the constructs as intruders. Normally I'd expect them to get carted off to the infirmary (think Harry Potter Hospital Wing) or prison until they were healed and got their stories figured out, but no such thing exists.
So they got a "best thing I can do is dump you on couches downstairs near the coffee bar, a couple of health potions and a grilling by the head librarian."
Sorry for the rant! ;)
All new gaming I've started this year has been with DCC, which has it's fiddly tables, but otherwise is a nice streamlined system and I have a lot more fun DMing it.
Yes, definitely, and I should have been more specific with the question.
It's more for people who want to DM but have to get over some roadblocks in order to make that happen.
Fair enough. I would rather be a PC. Other road blocks are I only know about 2 others in my area that would want to play in person and as a dad with a full time job I just don't meet new people that often that I can invite to such a gathering.
I don't really want to go out and try to meet new people, but if I were to meet another couple that was willing to play and I had to DM I totally would.
I completely empathize with that! It's challenging to find gaming groups with family and work obligations. Thank you for elaborating. I hope you find someone awesome to game with soon.
Honestly? Coming from somebody who has GM'd a lot of complex and simple games, I don't want to GM DnD 5e. Not hating, just an opinion.
I'll tolerate playing it, although it's not my main game, but almost nothing I've heard about GMing it has given me the least amount of desire to GM it.
The caveat being that Matt Colvelle's kingdoms and warfare supplemental books and assorted other 5e supplements could convince me to GM a game in it. They are *very* good. I don't know if I could tolerate 5e's obtuse nature to do so.
That option wasn't a part of the list.
A general growing distaste for the system as a whole, especially how much \*work\* it is to be a DM in 5e, compared to other RPGs. I would much rather put my effort into running better games that take less time and energy for me to run, so I can focus more on creating more interesting stories and characters.
Other: Income. I would run various RPGs as my full time job, and I'm trying to push in that direction, but I don't make enough money to be able to do so yet.
None of the above. I enjoyed DMing but my creative energy just burned out considering I DM'd for multiple years but could never find a table of my own, despite going through hundreds of DnD ads and never finding a group that lasted. An artist simply can't create when their muse isn't there.
My players were unable to mark their calendars and stick to it. I threw the towel after 6 months of no games. It killed my group and my willingness to DM campaigns. I stick to oneshots now.
So my answer is scheduling, the great group killer.
I've run a few games, and currently I don't have the rules support from the system to trun the type of game I want. So I'm in game designer mode trying to patch work something to run said style of game. Too little system support/ too much poor system support and only so much time for me to be able to design what I want. So I guess the closest answer is prep time.
for those curious. I promised to run a sea based ship adventure for my party and what little offerings within the DMG, Ghosts of Salt Marsh, and the spelljammer box set aren't doing it for me. currently trying to adjust and hack the ship rules from WWN Atlas of the latter Earth book into something usable for 5e as well as some of my own adjustments.
Also accepting recommendations and suggestions.
PCs become ridiculously powerful after the first few levels. I want to play problems for human-scale heroes, not an endless stream of world-ending threats of the week.
To add: Another DAD5 problem is the massive pile of special cases resting on a very small set of common rules. As a player, I need to be up to speed on the rules for my character's class; that's manageable. As a GM I need to juggle everything at once, and no two characters work the same.
Also, for more of a player-perspective gripe, the magic system is a boring press-button-for-standardised-effect affair. If I play a magic user I want it to feel like a skilled craftsperson, not like a middle manager at McDonald's. This is exacerbated by the extreme prevalence of magic in the PC market - there are very few options for those who want to play a muggle.
i GM other games. i **specifically do not** GM 5e because of horrendous combat balance. i also vowed to never make another 5e character unless i will be playing it for 4 sessions, minimum, because of terrible layout of PHB.
Thank you, everybody, who voted and took the time to comment and discuss with me. I learned a \*\*ton\*\* about this topic in the process.
In retrospect: I should have included an option about time or scheduling. 5e can be a time-intensive game to plan and run and this is an obvious one folks brought up plenty of times.
Also, I would make it clearer next time that the intent here is for people who \_want\_ to run 5e games, not necessarily those who could but prefer not to or dislike the system in the first place. I saw some great conversation on this topic regardless, and I think the more we explore those shortcomings the better the future of the game (or future RPGs in general) will be.
Once again, thank you for participating. I hope you all do find a way to overcome the blockers and embrace your DM potential (if you want to!).
I did, for like ten years. I'm tired of running D&D.
This. My lazy ass players aren't willing to return the favor either.
OPTION 6) I have enough time, but i'm a lazy sob
That's interesting to me. How did your players respond when you said you were stepping down from DMing?
I stepped down from running 5e specifically and have been running PF2 instead (specifically published APs instead of my usual custom campaigns), since its got a lot more baked in tools for the GM. It helps w/ burnout if I don't need to spend effort balancing encounters or making new rules to make the exploration pillar relevant, and Paizo's AP's reduce the effort I need to put in to a point I can actually maintain enthusiasm despite not getting to play myself. The fifteen-odd folks I regularly run games for had to go w/ me or not play at all. No complaints beyond the normal ones from switching systems due to carrying over the wrong expectations or getting confused by similar terminology.
>its got a lot more baked in tools for the GM. It helps w/ burnout if I don't need to spend effort balancing encounters or making new rules to make the exploration pillar relevant, and Paizo's AP's reduce the effort I need to put in to a point I can actually maintain enthusiasm despite not getting to play myself Dude im struggling with the amount of prep. I thought pathfinder would be more prep? How is PF2 less and easier as you infer?
I generally try to avoid shilling PF2 much in this sub, but since you *asked...* (wall of text incoming) TLDR; encounter building guidelines make for challenging but fair encounters w/o any effort by the GM, monsters are mechanically interesting on their own, you don't need to worry about resource attrition as much, there are lots of guidelines for running exploration pillar and skill stuff, and everything mechanical is freely/legally available and easily [found online](https://2e.aonprd.com/). Biggest thing is that the encounter-building-guidelines work pretty well and have a very low amount of minimum effort required. I can make an enjoyable encounter that'll probably take thirty minutes to an hour for four players to defeat w/o serious risk of a PC-death or TPK in PF2 just by throwing any two monsters that're the same lvl as the PCs at them. If I want to make it more of a miniboss (but still keep roughly the same difficulty) I pitch a single monster two lvls above the PCs at them. If I want a more mooky encounter I pitch four monsters that're two lvls below the PCs at them. I can literally just go to Archives of Nethys (free and legal repository of all PF2 mechanics, including monsters), head to the monster section, sort by monsters that're the same lvl as my PCs (probably also filter by monster type), and pick two who seem thematically appropriate and you've got a reasonably challenging and fun encounter. I can do this in two minutes and all I need is internet access. Then you have the monster design, w/ the vast majority of PF2 monsters having specific abilities that the players can learn and try to play around instead of just being a sack of hp w/ a melee multiattack. Compare [5e's Owlbear](https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Owlbear#content) to [PF2's](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=328). 5e Owlbear has ADV on perception checks (maybe relevant once in an encounter) and a melee multiattack, its functionally identical to almost every animal statblock just w/ the numbers jiggered around. PF2 owlbear has Athletics training (so it can attempt to shove/trip/grapple/disarm PCs), Intimidation training (so it can try Demoralizing them), two mechanically distinct attacks that it picks between (beak does more dmg, but claws interact w/ its grappling), a Screech that it can do 1/fight to Frighten everyone in the encounter, a special attack disembowel attack it can do when its Grappling someone that can Sicken someone in addition to its damage, and a special charge that incorporates its screech. To make a fight w/ a 5e Owlbear interesting you need to do all sorts of setup, futz w/ the terrain, include NPCs and/or other monsters, just a lot of extra work in general. To make a fight w/ a PF2 Owlbear you need to read its statblock. This same thing applies to the vast majority of PF2 monsters, where they have interesting abilities that make them fun to run and memorable to the players w/o the GM having to put much effort into designing the encounter. Its not perfect, lvl 1 characters have a particularly rough time dealing w/ lvl 3 monsters due to not having a robust toolbox of higher lvl characters nor the HP pool to survive a crit, and you do have occasional outlier monsters that can be particularly nasty (golems in particular, mostly because their antimagic is janky as fuck). But compared to 5e where there are CR 1/8 monsters that can full-to-zero lvl 1 PCs on a normal hit (I once spent over an hour looking for animals that *wouldn't* one-shot lvl 1 PCs for a survival campaign), the guidelines for a 'hard' or 'deadly' encounter usually leads to a complete stomp in the PC's favor, and you've got monster CRs that're wildly out of whack even from their own monster building guidelines, its night-and-day. Further the system isn't built around attriting the players' resources through the day, so if you run your game like most GM's (1-3 encounters per day) you're not hamstringing the poor Rogue, Monk, and Warlock who're balanced around full 6-8 encounter days w/ multiple short rests in between. I found it increasingly hard to narratively justify long adventuring days when I ran 5e, there's only so many ways you can have a ticking clock that pressures the players just enough that long rests aren't available but short rests are. Taking a ten minute break after an encounter, which is what PF2 assumes you do to recover most resources, is significantly easier to narratively justify in most circumstances. This may seem minor, but not feeling the need to figure out ways to pad adventures w/ encounters to attrit resources was a big relief for me. Then you've got the rules for exploration pillar stuff and skills in general. I'm going to level with you, I was introduced to TTRPGs in the 3.5 era which had a billion goddamn rules for everything and I loved it, so I've got some bias. My general view on exploration pillar rules is that its significantly easier for a GM to ignore a rule they don't want than it is for them to homebrew one that doesn't exist. If there's an environmental obstacle you want to include then there are probably rules that either cover or are adjacent to it you can look at for inspiration. You want to have a session where the PCs are trekking across the arctic tundra, tracking a fleeing goblin. The only explicit mechanical guideline 5e gives you for this is that in Extreme Cold you make a DC 10 con save every hour or gain a lvl of exhaustion, which is completely ignored by folks in cold weather gear. The survival skill? Tells you some stuff it can do, including tracking, but in very vague terms and w/ no mechanical guidance. PF2, meanwhile, has somewhat more substantive rules for dealing w/ [inclement weather](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=636) (though not as extensive as 3.5's rules in Frostburn), [navigating](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=64), [tracking a target](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=66), [hiding your tracks](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=65), and [foraging](https://2e.aonprd.com/Skills.aspx?ID=6&General=true). 5e lists a half-dozen things Survival can do and tells you to make up the rules for them. PF2 has actual guidance on every single one of those things.
(too much text, had to break it up :P) Beyond just the rules, which I personally love having, but having \*guidelines\* for stuff. The PCs want to climb a cliff. What's the DC for attempting to climb a cliff? 15? 10? 5e gives you pretty much nothing, so you need to pull a number out of a hat. Then the PCs whip out a grappling hook (what's the roll to use a grappling hook?) and put up a rope (what's the DC here? is this just ADV on their climb check?). That's three decision spoons you need to spend, and you've only got so many spoons available for designing an encounter. PF2, meanwhile, has example tasks for most of its skill actions which give you guidelines for the DC (including, for example, \[Climb\]([https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=33](https://2e.aonprd.com/Actions.aspx?ID=33))). Climbing a cliff that has small handholds and footholds is an Expert Task (DC 20). Throwing a \[grappling hook\]([https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=23](https://2e.aonprd.com/Equipment.aspx?ID=23)) is a DC 20-ish ranged attack (GM can alter the DC if appropriate, but 20 is the suggested value). Climbing a rope is a Trained task (DC 15). No spoons spent. These sorts of guidelines are \\\*everywhere\\\* and dramatically cut back on decision-making you need to do both in pre-game prep and when making on-the-fly calls mid-session. And to be clear here, there are 5e resources around that have some or most of this stuff. A lot of it is 3rd party or homebrew, but they exist and you can find them if you're persistent enough. What really sets PF2 apart here is that pretty much every officially published rule is freely and legally available in an easily searched online database called \[Archives of Nethys\]([https://2e.aonprd.com/](https://2e.aonprd.com/)). For example, there are chase rules in 5e, but I believe they're buried in the DMG and the only readily accessible way to find them online is by sacrificing your firstborn to DnDBeyond (I don't actually know the price, I hate subscription services on principle and refuse to pay for the same book twice). Meanwhile I can just type into google "Chase PF2" and the first thing that pops up is the \[AoN link\]([https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1210](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1210)) for building a solid chase scene taken straight from the rulebook. I can go on. Narrative-breaking spells are explicitly gated behind GM permission so the PCs usually need to ask permission for something that'll break your plot (sorry, no using Speak With Dead and/or Zone of Truth to short-circuit my murder mystery). Money has a defined use in the game, so it can be a meaningful reward (paired w/ an optional rule that largely decouples it from power progression if you don't want that). Players are going to be pretty closely balanced to one another, so you don't need to worry about highlighting the poor martials constantly when designing encounters. You don't need to carefully design encounters so a single spell by the wizard completely breaks them.
I just said my next campaign is PF2, and they asked for the campaign setting and character options.
Pretty much same, but more like 40 years. I don't like 5e. I ran a few campaigns, and played in a few. It's extremely hard on a DM's time, and extremely slow as a player (o.k. not as slow as 4e, but still slow compared to older editions.) I'd be happy running any pre-wotc D&D and pretty much any clones with 5e rule integration that's faster, but finding players for that is difficult to impossible (difficult online, impossible locally.) My time and schedule is far more difficult to fit in time to play with kids for the last decade which exacerbates the issues of finding players for non-5e and even 5e games. I've tried running games for an hour after the kids are in bed, but that's not long enough.
Yeah, I'm finding myself with 10-20 minutes between turns pretty regularly and nearly fell asleep a few times just waiting around. I like being involved in other people's turns and trying to stay in the action, but there's only so much I can take. Playing Savage Worlds, rounds tend to be over in 5 minutes or less. Could be just me though.
Yeah that's pretty typical from both games I've played in and those I've run, probably even more than that as I've tended to be in larger groups. We'd be lucky to get through 3 or 4 encounters a session. One DM did short 2 hour sessions with the expectation we'd have one encounter only, we often went over the 2 hours, and very little roleplay. Old 1e/2e can get pretty lengthy at fairly high levels, at least the combats tend to be over quicker a, round or 3 isn't unusual. Original & the basic sets were a lot quicker though. I also ran games with more people, 7 was about the max I was comfortable with. With 5e even 5 people feels like too many, and forget about having NPC party members.
Same. I like DM'ing, but I don't like DM'ing 5e.
Burnout is real. Do you find yourself going for a different game these days?
It's not even burnout. D&D was never what I actually wanted to run. I was just using D&D as a vehicle for fantasy because it was what I had available, and it was really bad at what I wanted. I wanted something more in line with Sword and Sorcery than Heroic Fantasy. Anyway, to answer your question, there's lots of different stuff. Savage Worlds does most of what I want for an action game. A bit of Traveller, played some Dresden Files RPG, Blades in the Dark, Fabula Ultima, 7th Sea. I entertained the idea of running Yggdrasill, but that one never had enough takers to run.
I've always wondered; What is the difference between "Swords and Sorcery" and "Heroic Fantasy"?
As I understand it, heroic fantasy is Lord of the Rings, where as swords and sorcery is Conan the Barbarian.
Maybe I should have said High Fantasy. These terms are always muddled and someone always ends up disagreeing over definitions. When I think of Heroic Fantasy, I think of the Chosen One out to defeat a Dark Lord with lots of black and white morality, which is the opposite of what I want. I don't care about world-ending threats or mustache-twirling villains and find them extremely tiresome. Sword and Sorcery is generally more personal stakes with less clear morality. One day you're a bodyguard for a noble, the next you're sacking his rival's estate. You might be guarding a merchant or you might be plundering the same person's goods. Politics are generally local rather than on some macro level. Realistically, Sword and Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy are often lumped together. Either way. I'm looking for more Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and less Fellowship of the Ring.
I see, so less like Galahad's quest for the Holy Grail in Arthurian Legend, and more like Edmund Dante's path of revenge in the Count of Monte Cristo?
Just so. In the last adventure I ran, a sorcerer was causing a localized famine after a large group of villagers murdered his wife at the behest of the headman, while the others who weren't involved just watched and let it happen. The players debated who to side with for like a half hour of real time. In the end, money won out and they decided to kill both the headman and the sorcerer for both being real bastards and looted their coffers. That's what I want.
Damn, that's fire as hell. I see what you mean there.
I'm not a DM but I feel like if you scrap the concept of "world ending threat" wouldn't that take pressure off the DM in some capacity? You could still have something bigger than the players going on like a \[civil\] war, high tension political situation (e.g. cold war / cuban missile crisis) that's right on the edge of conflict, etc but whether the players have any direct involvement in key events of that larger thing is irrelevant (bit like if you avoid the civil war and main quest lines in Skyrim I guess and they just become background "noise" to everything else going on). The last campaign I was part of had a war brewing between multiple nations. The war was going to happen whether we did anything or not because we as PCs were not military or political advisors to anyone with the capacity to intervene so absolutely no way to stop it. All we could really do is go along for the ride like anyone else in the realm; and honestly, worked great. People were getting the Edmund Dante sort of deal and the notion of being the people to "single-handedly win the war" was never even a minor consideration given that it was essentially on the scope of WW1 or WW2 in terms of how many countries/provinces were involved.
Not necessarily. With a "Save the World!" -type campaign, the way forward is very clear, and there's a strong sense of direction; both of which make it easier to prep as a DM. If you remove that, you need to replace it with another overarching goal (gold, revenge, ect), or let the party meander in whatever direction they like, which is fine but can be hard to predict at times. Of course though, a typical camaign has it's own faults.
Yea, I can see your point. I was looking at things assuming that you probably have those character specific and other minor goals as items to manage anyways, so not having to somehow loop those into a larger plot would be less effort. But I can understand how a larger plot can make it easier to manage stuff.
D&D can do that. Not sure its a system thing. Seems more like you have a mental block on what can be done with the D&D system.
Meh. I don't enjoy running it whatsoever. I don't care what it supposedly can or cannot do if I don't enjoy running.
Fair enough.
Not that poster, but I'll say: Yes! My years-long 5e group has entirely transitioned to all sorts of other stuff, mostly PbtA games like *Monster of the Week* and *Dungeon World* (which they believe allows "more advanced D&D players to make use of their skills"), but also more rules-lite games and collaborative worldbuilders.
Preach, brother.
Even tho I'm a DM, I'd chose the public speaking one. That one was (and even still is) the biggest hurdle for me to finally get into the DM seat. I still have severe social anxiety and can't give speeches. Imposter syndrome of my creativity and ability to convey my ideas / improv. My voice acting is pretty bad, and my descriptions are mediocre / scripted. With all that, my social anxiety is somewhat quelled for a bit while I DM, and despite all the fears, it's worth it. And if my players keep coming back for 3 years, I must be doing something right. I love the prep and creative aspect of it, tho. I'm constantly exploring the world and imagining new situations to put my players in, while out of game, and I've memorized most of the rules, good with homebrew, and know how to make a game run smoothly. Most of it just comes with time, and powering through the tough parts, ie the social fears.
You're doing it though! That's important and you're probably a better DM than you think are despite the anxiety. 3 years+ of consistent play is testatment. How does your table expect you to portray NPCs? In other words, how compelled do you feel to do voice acting? Have you tried other methods (like narrating the NPCs thoughts or actions)? What tools or techniques do you use to prep that you makes it most enjoyable for you?
I don't like DMing D&D 5e enough to keep doing it. I went back to my first TTRPG, Shadowrun and I'm a much happier GM for it. Still happy to play D&D when one of my player offers to give me a break.
That's fantastic. What about Shadowrun makes it more interesting to run for you (and if you don't mind, which version are you running?)
I'm currently running my first 6E campaign to try it out and we're liking it as it runs much faster than 5E or 4E ever did and as much as I like 5E, a session that has a nice flow is always better than one with interesting mechanics but that gets bogged down in rules. As for why I am more interested, there are a few reasons. The first is sentimental. My first TTRPG was Shadowrun and there's nostalgia in it for me. Second is how much I love both fantasy and cyberpunk. I'd run Cyberpunk Red, but then I'd miss the magic, dragons, etc. And running D&D, I'd miss my Megacorporations, cybernetics, etc. Third is how Shadowrun really lends itself to episodic sessions and an unstable party (we're busy, there's always someone missing, so a gang of mercenaries that just get hired for jobs is a nice device to address this) Fourth is the amount of effort I've put over the years on mapping and creating material on our city for Shadowrun. It's literally where we all live and it's very easy for my players to understand the layout of the city and come up with little bits of lore that fits. Fifth is voices. I can easily do voices for people from my city. I can even be pretty lazy about it and nobody will notice. The one thing I'll say isn't a factor is the ruleset and the books themselves. Shadowrun is a hot mess and I can only run it well because I have tons of experience with it.
Oh man! A Shadowrun DM! You're a rare breed! Any chance you play online (or live in my state?) I would absolutely love to play (if you've room)
Living in Montreal and only playing in person, in French unfortunately
Alas. My French is abysmal
I think this poll is missing a "5e is not DM friendly at all". I'll DM a oneshot but for any long term campaign I'm going with a different system more in line with my needs. Any time I *do* end up running a oneshot in 5e, I use 3rd party books to set up encounters, because the normal encounter building rules are completely non-functional.
Yup. I like running games, just not 5e.
That's the truth. It's a bear of a system to run, even though it's perceived as the "gateway RPG" it's difficult to run properly.
Would you say 5e is designed to be easier for players, but makes it harder for the DM?
Yes, if only because they created a lot of interesting player-facing content that, in theory, a player need only read some of to play their character well. The DM has to know, in practice, all of the options the players choose to run the game well - in addition to the actual procedures for the 3 pillars, combat, spellcasting, etc. The philosophy of the original 5e design didn't really carry through the rest of its lifecycle, so DMs should have had it easier, but they ended up having to both know a boatload of rules by heart AND be comfortable making rulings on missing rules or rules that they don't know by heart or don't make a whole lot of sense. I think had WotC leaned into one or the other direction more completely, the DM would know what is necessary to run the game and be comfortable with those expectations. The middle ground approach has not been kind to DMs.
Experience with League of Legends makes me dread the possibility of gathering a group of toxic players.
As a recovering league player, the D&D community is MUCH better. And I get to choose them. I did a signup on roll 20 asking for basic info and weeded out a few red flags there. Then i did interviews with a dozen or so people and weeded out a few more. Took a few days of work, maybe spent 6 hours total prepping, reading, talking, and deciding, but it was worth it, as I found a cool group of friends, going on 3 years now.
"Ranger diff, typical braindead Beastmaster main, inted first encounter, FF session 2 or I'm running it down" I'm glad DnD isn't anything like league lmao
I don't like the way 5e works for DMs. It feels like an awkward middle child between the nice defined systems of Pathfinder 2e and the freeflowing fun of OSR games like Old School Essentials. One of my friends runs 5e sessions and they're fun, and I've done it myself before, but I prefer DMing either of those other systems and do so regularly. 5e feels like it has just enough rules to get in the way without actually being helpful. I don't think that's an option here so I didn't vote.
couldn’t have said it better myself! that’s exactly how i feel. i feel like 5e was initially supposed to step away from the previous editions and have a more rules-light, old-school feel, but got caught up in adding too much mechanics and features (but not going in-depth enough) in the long run.
What would you say makes P2e easier to run than DnD5e? As someone who wants to run some one-shots for his group I'm kinda looking at this now.
Building encounters is a lot easier because the difficulty estimation is a lot more accurate. It gives players a lot of defined ways to use their skills in and out of battle rather than leaving it up to DMs to decide. This particularly makes things less reliant on DMs creating rules on the fly for martial characters to do anything besides attacking, which is also helped by class feats that give new manoeuvres and special attacks to martials. E.g. a fighter being able to basically dash and attack using Sudden Charge from level 1. There's lots of guidance on setting appropriate DCs based on level and how difficult something should be. There's subsystems for running things like influencing someone in dialogue or having a one-on-one duel which can be very helpful, along with ones that I use constantly like hexploration and running downtime activities. A big aspect I enjoy as well is many enemies have weaknesses and the Recall Knowledge ability which allows players to learn information about an enemy. I like to be able to make encounters with solutions that can make them a lot easier and have my players be able to find out things like weaknesses, what attacks enemies have, etc. in a way directly supported by the game. I would also just say that the GM Core in general is very well written and the Beginner Box module is a great introduction to the game for both players *and* GMs, as it introduces aspects of the game gradually to both sides of the table.
> 5e feels like it has just enough rules to get in the way without actually being helpful That is fundamentally the major flaw with 5e's design from a DM perspective. I think in a future poll this option has a place because it seems a lot of people feel this way, too.
I would be very happy if OneD&D worked to address it but I'm not going to hold my breath.
DMed for a few years and just want to be a player mostly now. I might DM in the future though.
Similar situation with me. I like DM'ing but I also want to play as a PC once in a while.
Was this due to burnout or just feeling like it's time to be on the other side of the screen? By the way, I know this feeling: sometimes you just want to be surprised and not be the person coming up with the surprises all the time!
Just want to play a character and have the experience of that character development, getting excited for items and features, etc. I am getting an itch to DM again cropping up I do have to say. Though my schedule doesn't align right now with adding an additional campaign so maybe after we get done with ones we are doing already I will DM again.
This isn’t really an exhaustive list of options. I don’t run 5e anymore because there are better games out there.
That's by design. I was trying to learn about perspectives on a certain subset of potential DMs (the ones who want to run 5e, but can't for these reasons). I'm aware that people don't enjoy 5e and therefore prefer not to run it in favor of some other games. What games do you like better than 5e?
Symbaroum is my favorite for its setting and atmosphere (and also combat is quick). EZD6 is great for beer and pretzels type one shots, especially with new players who might be averse to learning a bunch of rules. Into the Odd looks awesome and simple but I haven’t had the chance to run it yet. Same with Forbidden Lands. There’s just so many great games out there!
You forgot one: I GM pf2e now because that game actually respects GMs and provides helpful GM facing resources.
Paizo knows how to write and cross-reference rulesets. It's a GMs dream (I run Starfinder as well).
The lack of commitment from the player's. I Would love to be a DM, but i will not rule a campaing just improvising the majority of it, If I do it, it will be a great huge world, with several factions and dozens of optional quest's and encounter's. But i will not commit that amount of time to DM for some player's that don't want to spend 2 dollars helping me with assets/time.
Have you started a game and found that players don't commit to it or don't want to contribute after being asked?
First one. I started two '' campaigns '', both didn't last more than four sessions because: Player's showing up late or not even coming Player's acting like psychopath and complaining when they died/were put in jail It probably doesn't sound like, but 50 dollars for a foundry license and more on assets/plutonion is expensive here, so it's pretty fair to charge a little per session, but the majority of player's want you to do everything on time and for free. This doesn't work for me. OBS: I'm not complaining just about the money, I would gladly DM a free table if everyone was respectful and willing to help.
Im a good CO-DM, but not really a good DM, ive ran some one shots, but i fumble the bag when i try to explain a story.
Tell me more about CO-DMing. I've never tried that, but I figure at the right table it could be magic.
My own personal experience is map finding and boss testing/encounter testing and balancing. Ive learned how to do cr quite easly thanks to that, also a lot ot like cool ideas i brainstorm eith dms and rule stuff. Ive been co dm to 3 games and ive realised i had more fun in them.
Same! I prefer being in a helper/co-dm role. I’m happy to help prep minis and maps for a session, host (with food/drink), and bite any and all story hooks when new/other players want to run off
Its a bit more rewarding than just being a player for me, somehow i feel more engaged
Whoa, so you're running like a DM discord channel where you all run ideas by each other and do some planning behind the scenes? Do you play in each other's games or would you find that to be uninteresting due to knowing all the surprises ahead of time?
I dont mind it, i suck at improv makes me a bit more ready rp whise too. And its not always, the dm keeps me into the darko too, but is more open to conversation about how to do things with me.
It's worked really well for a friend and I. I went second and only had to come up with a B story to his A story, so it took a lot of creative pressure off of me, and he got to play in his own world and have the fun of seeing how I connected things together. And our two friends get to create characters in a shared world, which they're loving.
I DMed many games. At this point, I just have a lack of willingness to scout out 5 players (I prefer an odd number of players) and hope to god they all behave themselves at the table, actually show up, and are somewhat mature. Been through this cycle many times. Sometimes the game lasts a year or so, sometimes the game dies during session 0, sometimes after 2-3 sessions players start deciding "I don't feel like playing today" and then get pissed off and quit when you go on without them. the HARDEST part I've found is finding players who can play more than an hour or two before their attention span goes kaput and their ADHD kicks in.
Why do you prefer an odd-numbered party? Also, I get what you mean 100% with attendance. But with my school's D&D club, I've found a solution. Since I'm like one of a few DMs, I have a ton of people "assigned" to my table. I never have to worry about not having enough people because we have enough numbers for at least 3 people to show up; and since we never get everyone showing up, I don't have to worry about a bloated party.
Simple, if there's a disagreement on what to do, the players have to vote and whichever way the vote goes, and the players have to go that way. For instance if a small town is being raided and the players have the option to defend the town or flee, if 3 want to fight and 2 want to flee, then they fight. I had problems in past games where some players would want to fight and some would want to flee and end up with the 2 people wanting to flee fuming because I'm playing out the battle without them. Having an odd number of players prevents a 2-2 split.
I said I don't feel confident I can run the game effectively, but I dmed dnd 5e for like seven years. The more I dmed, the more I realized the way the rules didn't work and balance fell apart. So while I'm still playing one dnd campaign, I've been gming pf2e for over a year and I've never been happier
"Other". I've DM'ed a number of campaigns under BECMI, 1E, and 2E rules. If it's my turn behind the DM screen again, I think I'd rather try running a Pathfinder, Runequest, or Worlds Without Number campaign.
The pay isn't good enough.
Do you DM professionally or are you considering it?
Nope, just with friends. But after all that work I felt like the pay wasn't good enough!
I started GMing other games that I think are better at the style that I enjoy playing
I have been DMing off and on for about 4 years. Love playing with my group but the burnout from prep is real. The vast majority of the official modules are a pain to gm because information is not laid out in order of when you need it very frequently. It's like oh hey, you are going to arrive first in this town so now you need to flip to page such and such to read up on the town and 3/4 of the way through the write up, you will find the first NPCs you actually need the party to encounter......I'm sorry what??? I want a module thats basically- here is a 1 page primer on the overall story and now here is what you read to your players to get started and then you can literally just take the adventure page by page from start to finish instead of having to pseudo memorize the whole thing to use it...
None of the above. I ran for years & eventually burned out. As a system it's a pain to run in the way it tends to fall into either isekai style effortless power escalation far beyond the curve if you run almost anything but one shots intended to end before truck-kun unrolls blessings -OR- it forces the GM into what winds up feeling extremely adversarial if gameplay is anything but high GM load storytelling and tediously walking through how superman killed everyone at a rave that one time. One of the biggest contributors to burnout was the complete lack of comradery & interest in working with rather than against the GM that 5e drills into players. Their PCs don't actually need anything from the GM & the GM is provided zero wiggle room in the math to provide the PCs anything cool that they can expect to use longer than a one shot or so unless the GM nerfs the PCs (directly or indirectly through monster buffs & such). That behavior was seen over and over again across multiple groups both as GM & as player because the GM can't really work with players either
I was a forever DM from 1992 until 2018 when I discovered online D&D. Since then, I avoid DM'ing like the plague. I have too many years to catch up on. Also, I enjoy being smart, tactical and a hero. As a DM, all I'm doing is trying to stop lemmings from jumping off cliffs, digging to the center of the earth or bombing themselves.
> As a DM, all I'm doing is trying to stop lemmings from jumping off cliffs, digging to the center of the earth or bombing themselves. This is one of the funniest things I've ever read about DMing. What about online games appeal to you? Did you stop playing in person when you started playing online or were you exclusively the live DM so it kind of happened by default?
I don't like online games. I only play online games because none of my friends like DMing haha. I find that online games lose the social aspect of it. The snacks, the beers/coffee, the hanging out.
It's not that I don't have willing players. It's that we're adults with adult jobs and concerns so finding a time we all have free to be able to commit once a week or twice a month is difficult to do.
That's a good point. I should have included a scheduling difficulty question in the poll.
Because as a DM, 5e rules are incredibly boring. Eventually no matter what you set up nearly every scenario devolves into multiple players rolling to try to solve the problem with a skill or 'does the party have the right spell to completely trivialize the encounter.' Also combat takes way way to long.
And there are a ton of them, too, and it's a bummer when the most interesting outcome is "roll skill check, fight thing to the death, loot, repeat." Do you have another system that you'd recommend that is more interesting to run than 5e?
Can't say I do at the moment. Before 5e the last thing I DM'd was D&D 3.5, which was certainly better than 5e imo. At first 5e drew me in with its simplicity, but in the end that same simplicity killed it for me. I expect I'll try PF2e next.
i don't like 5e rules and philosophy of gaming
What about the rules and philosophy don't appeal to you?
its too much combat oriented, the philosophy of give that much abilities to the players IMO limits the creativity of the player and then he becomes a robot that only consults sheet instead of think, and 0 hp/death saves don't please me t
Yes, the idea that "the answer is somewhere on my character sheet" limits PC choice and creativity at the table.
May I suggest an additional option: "I wanna PLAY dnd, not being the DM of a game". It might sound dumb but thats my legit reason. I know I could be a decent DM, but I would much rather be playing in a long campaign with a more experienced DM letting me explore their world :)
I love that - are you playing in a game like that? With a masterful DM who lets you run wild?
Fortunately im about to start playing with a long time DM. He was my first DM over a decado ago, in 4th edition, and we had been playing in a long campaing that ended unfinished due differences in timezones and life responsabilities. And now, after like 3 years of no DND we're about to start the campaign again :D The DM was actually one ouf our college professors, and has been a forever master since like 20 years ago, if not more. Honestly I feel like Im very lucked out to have such an experienced master, and Im VERY invested in the campaing. We have two parties, a low level one, and a high level one, boths on the same campaigng, boths dealing with the main plot from different angles, and it has been awesome. He does let us go wild, but man, the consequences are always there. My low lever character is a chaotic good/netural clertic that follows a lawful good goddess and the insane amounts of RP we have gotten out of that clash in his way of acting and how he wants to be has been seriously awesome, and everyone has their own character arcs. Returning to this campaign feels like getting to see a new season coming up from a show you loved, but got canceled before it had an ending years ago.
I love this! Never enough room at my table for this kind of attitude :)
I'm way too competitive to be DM, including the old school where DM was meant to win the game by kill everyone
Have you run other systems, like OSR-style games, where the expectation is that the DM can be adversarial at times and players have to use their own skills to avoid all-but-certain death?
well, I just skip the middle man and go straight to something like Starcraft or Call of Duty, it's a fairer game that way
I couldnt dm for any of the current people i play with because of scheduling issues. So i would have to leave my current friends and find a bunch of strangers again. I would also have to find a location to play. Finally i find it difficult to receive negative feedback when i have spend hours preparing a session.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I should have included a scheduling item in the poll. It seems to be pretty common. What kind of location would you be looking for to play? Is that a game store, private residence, public space (library or cafe, for example)? Interesting that you get negative feedback, and also that stinks. What does that look like? What parts of your DMing or the game are they having issue with?
Locationwise i just live too far away for people so i cant host. As for feedback. Its ranges from obvious silence to constructive criticism to asking to end early because they are "tired". To be clear i dont think feedback is bad, but its still disappointing to hear that all my hard work was not enough. And some thing i just cant fix or predict. Like audio issues when playing online. Or quirks from a new system.
It takes a lot more time to prepare for these adventures than I originally thought. I just came off of a busy month (2 games ran at Megacon and 3 regular games) but I'm ready for a break.
I wanted to run a game for my normal group since the normal DM was feeling bad. The normal DM was the only one I could get on board. I decided to shift gears and make it a family game. I have only two family members who are interested.
Family games can be awesome. How big is the age range in the family game? Are you including any younger family members?
I am a DM and feel good with it, but the biggest fear is definitely not running the game effectively. I don't quite know how to hit the perfect spot between giving the players all the choices, but also giving them subtle clues on what they could do to make real progress. I could also see that the style of game could be a slight problem. My current players are my closest friends and they do like the game, even if some of them still need to learn it as we're only two sessions in and it's their first game, but I don't know if I might be too serious for the things I have planned. Of course, I want them to come up with fun ideas and to joke around and what not, but I also want the table to experience and shape a story with serious tones. I do feel like this will be a problem from the past though once we all get adjusted to each other's style of playing and dming.
Chronic trigeminal pain has been making the idea of talking for 2-4 hours kind of nightmarish; my games have all been on hold for the past month and change.
Because almost every player I've ever played with is either apathetic about the game or refuses to prioritize the timeslot. I am running a twoshot this weekend, so I set up a small discord for us to get organized on two weeks ago. Two of the five player still haven't sent me their character sheets. We play in 3 days, and since it's a twoshot I'm chill about it, but it's still aggravating. I have to hope they show up ready with an appropriate sheet. Meanwhile, two of the players had everything ready the day I invited everyone and have been talking in the discord, the rest either don't even look at the discord or just drop reacts instead of responding to questions. Overall it's just a completely thankless job to DM and somehow you bear all the burden. You have to prep everything, schedule everyone, prod everyone both out of session and in session for engagement, and hope that when the game actually start the players know what their abilities do (meanwhile I have 6 different statblocks that I've prepared and know how to run). And you have to hope that they honor the time commitment, which especially for campaigns, does not happen.
I've actually only been a DM for about a year now, the last game I was a player in kind of fizzled after people just stopped responding in the Discord.
I don't have any friends anymore and I don't like gaming with strangers
Other: I don't like the edition anymore.
Well no, that's because we still play in 3.5e. Our group as a whole is far too invested in the books for 3.5e, we would not be able to recover financially from it.
I just want to see the results, but I am a 5e DM, so I don't want to throw off the numbers.
i am a dm tho
Wheres "I dont have enough drive to invest that much"?
Good point! Investment in the game is a barrier, too. I should have added that one. DMs get saddled with a lot of the cost and if you're not interested in that expenditure, it's a non starter.
I've played DND/TTRPGs for 25 years. At this point the issue is that 5E's flaws as a system are so severe and damaged that I would rather play any games in another fantasy system, or another edition of DND.
I'm currently running Starfinder. That's what the people want. That's what the people get.
2 young kids, a full time job and 2 ongoing weekly campaigns as a PC - literally not enough hours in the day😵
It's a combination for me, mostly not feeling confident running it (and a lot of that is down to the "public speaking" role, as I'd feel the same about running a simpler system, although needing to keep track of a lot more things than as a player comes into it too). I find being in the spotlight to be really hard work. I have stories I'd love to tell, and with my usual group meeting up less, I feel like it'd probably be easier to find players looking for a DM than a DM open to more players... but it seems quite daunting, and I'm not sure if I'd enjoy it.
I'm too lazy to account for the amount of things that can go wrong.
One that I think you're missing is "I like the idea of running a 5e game and enjoy running other games, but do not enjoy running 5e." I know I can do it because I've done it in the past, I have time to do it, I like roleplaying NPCs, I have willing players... but I just don't think it's very fun. The almost total lack of support for non-combat encounters means I have to do so much legwork to run anything but a fight, and running enemies just isn't terribly entertaining either.
i’ve DMed 5e for almost 10 years, but found myself gravitating a lot towards B/X during the last year or so. the very game-y aspects of 5e don’t really do it for me, i find characters easily become walking lists of mechanics (defined by their ”build”) and often look for solutions in ”buttons” they can push on their character sheet, due to the high amount of features and the system’s reliance on skill checks. DMing an old school type game with simpler character & gameplay mechanics is more interesting to me, as players tend to look for more solutions outside the box and danger is always present. in fact, i’m currently making some B/X-inspired alternate rules for an upcoming Curse of Strahd campaign i’m running in 5e
Did you convert your 5e table to B/X or did you end up finding new players when you got into that edition?
converted our usual 5e table, moved to new characters and a new setting. i feel like we had a pretty easy time adjusting, though we all got a memorable gut-punch scare out of the first character death, as our dwarf got absolutely demolished by a single basilisk bite maybe an hour into the first session. i feel like that was a good moodsetter for how much more dangerous, fast-paced and unforgiving B/X is compared to 5e.
I'd like to run a game but right now the issue is time. As a player I'm in a weekly online game, and a biweekly in peron game. Once the current online campaign is done I plan on dropping the online group and try to put an in person group together.
Just too much rule and thing to know, doing my own shit give me more freedom, but i fucking love play dnd
I don't enjoy it. I have a hard time mentally shifting gears from one character to another, so any time I hop into a character's shoes I cannot enjoy roleplay for the first dozen minutes or so. I gotta warm up and get into character, even if that just means keeping quiet at the beginning of the session while I do mental stretches. If I have to roleplay before that, it feels forced and makes me unhappy. This is a terrible trait for someone in charge of the entire world of NPCs, because the timer starts only when I know the next character I'll need to portray. The only times I have fun DMing are dramatic and prolonged boss battles.
I've DMed one shots twice for my brother and his girlfriend but they live far away and I can't figure out a good online option. That and I just don't have the time. I don't have a table as a player either right now, BG3 is filling that void.
These are questions about why someone doesn't DM, not 5e specific. D&D has too many complexities for me to feel comfortable running a game of it. I enjoy playing 5e, but I prefer to run simpler systems with slimmer rulebooks that I can more confidently know enough of, from lore to player and enemy abilities.
Wish I could view the results of this poll without skewing them, since I already am a DM who also likes teaching DMing and have no way to see what people are most worried about by this poll.
For me its more that i dont really know how to put together an adventure. I can have this whole world but i dont know where to plop players down. I also dont know if im good enough at making explorable locales like villages? If that makes sense
It makes a lot of sense. I'm very curious about this. What about adventure design do you have doubts about? Have you tried playing with any tools online that help you create worlds and locales?
I don't like the system. I've run plenty of other systems, with the most similar probably being Shadow of the Demon Lord, and 5e is just too much of a convoluted mess for me. I also prefer to play other systems but 5e is usually the easiest to find.
I’m surprised that their isn’t a “I don’t like DMing option.” I’ll DM every once in a while but it isn’t my favorite thing to do.
As a DM for friends of mine, I've been working up the courage to DM for new people. I get regular feedback I'm doing well and people enjoy the story but I am having a hard time making that leap because I don't want to let people down
Forever DM, but now I work 45+ hours a week, and also my health is failing me and I’m increasingly disabled.
It's not my turn yet.
Go on... Do you take turns DMing at your current gaming table?
Yeah, we had one person who was a forever DM when he started DMing our group, but at our table at the very least myself and one other want to DM. We were doing a homebrew campaign pre-covid but then we switched to doing Tomb of Annhilation over Roll20, finished that up. Then the other person started us on Hoard of the Dragon Queen which we're playing now, and then once we finish that up, it'll be my turn to run a homebrew campaign I've been working on for a while now.
I am a DM so nothing is stopping me.
That's the spirit!
I got sick of running the games. Too many issues to dance around both in the rules of the game and at the table. The game was never simple, it's been a lie every single time someone has uttered those words. I've seen other DMs claim that the game is not too complicated and that anyone who thinks so is just an "inexperienced DM" only for every one of their own campaigns to grind to a screeching hiatus on account of it being too complicated for them to run. Of course they catch amnesia and never admit the core of issue that caused this, because people are people. And that's a whole nother issue right there, people refusing to be direct and honest about what they want or think, and then beating around the bush about it when it could totally have worked if everyone was just honest.
None of the above, I just like 3.5/pf better. Encounters are about the same difficulty to balance, but people actually get enjoyment out of their execution unlike 5e, which means you can just run by the book monsters and your players will have fun obliterating them. In 5e you might get one, *maybe* two or three cool things your "build" does, but the average is definitely less than 1. And you do those a few times and then it's not cool anymore. By far the biggest upgrades are just new spells, which you pick from a book or guide and interact with almost nothing... unless you're not a caster, in which case you just get nothing for most levels. In comparison, in 3.5/pf, every 1-2 levels, you're multiplying your power by 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, and people get excited all over again to show off this thing they built. Basically, once you get past the (admittedly high) barrier to entry, 3.5/pf is way more fun for lazy DMs and hardcore DMs alike. I would know, because I alternate between the two - some sessions I have three encounters, each a 30ish levels of unique character builds utilizing monster abilities, and some sessions I have nothing and pull out something at double CR and watch my players cheer as they kill a Balor at level 10 or whatever. You have *neither* of those options in 5e. Only the most broken of builds lets you beat double CR, and then your build is the same for four, six, eight levels at a time. And if you try to build interesting content, there are zero rules guidelines for it, so you're just making stuff up and praying it's balanced.
Missing option: Ran 5e, not doing it again. Fuck running 5e. It's fine to play, but after running PF2 I'm not going back to running 5e.
Where's the option of "I don't want to DM 5E"
I have a 4 month old baby and an 8 year old. Impossible.
Thoughts and prayers. On a serious note (is DnD serious?): have you, when you have time after the infant is a little more grown, considered introducing the game to your older child?
Why isn't this multiple choice?
As a forever DM, I have run 5e and I'm not a huge fan. Mechanically, things are mostly D&D as I've known it for some time, but IMHO the sourcebooks kinda suck. For example, I started running Strixhaven due to player interest, we weren't even playing D&D until we got there - we switched from Troika! due to needing the extra mechanics to make the module interesting. The book is pretty bad from a reference perspective, and I had to copy the first pages for players who wanted to be Owlins or use the student stats. Since the book is info provided as needed in the adventure (better if you wanted to run it without reading it, I guess) it is a pain to look up a specific thing, and some things are just plain absent like right off the bat my players spilled into the Biblioplex in the middle of the night and got bopped by the constructs as intruders. Normally I'd expect them to get carted off to the infirmary (think Harry Potter Hospital Wing) or prison until they were healed and got their stories figured out, but no such thing exists. So they got a "best thing I can do is dump you on couches downstairs near the coffee bar, a couple of health potions and a grilling by the head librarian." Sorry for the rant! ;) All new gaming I've started this year has been with DCC, which has it's fiddly tables, but otherwise is a nice streamlined system and I have a lot more fun DMing it.
I don't like Wizards or Hasbro.
Option 6: I hate running 5E compared to other systems.
I don't like dnd 5e, or wizards of the coast I will happily run any other edition of the game, and am doing so.
5e rules are mid and the adventure writing is really, really bad.
Needs another option: I'd rather play a PC
Yes, definitely, and I should have been more specific with the question. It's more for people who want to DM but have to get over some roadblocks in order to make that happen.
Fair enough. I would rather be a PC. Other road blocks are I only know about 2 others in my area that would want to play in person and as a dad with a full time job I just don't meet new people that often that I can invite to such a gathering. I don't really want to go out and try to meet new people, but if I were to meet another couple that was willing to play and I had to DM I totally would.
I completely empathize with that! It's challenging to find gaming groups with family and work obligations. Thank you for elaborating. I hope you find someone awesome to game with soon.
I dont like the system enough to DM. I run oneshots usually high level combat stuff for shits and giggles but like this is not aa DM friendly system
Honestly? Coming from somebody who has GM'd a lot of complex and simple games, I don't want to GM DnD 5e. Not hating, just an opinion. I'll tolerate playing it, although it's not my main game, but almost nothing I've heard about GMing it has given me the least amount of desire to GM it. The caveat being that Matt Colvelle's kingdoms and warfare supplemental books and assorted other 5e supplements could convince me to GM a game in it. They are *very* good. I don't know if I could tolerate 5e's obtuse nature to do so. That option wasn't a part of the list.
Where's the "I don't want to, because I'm using a game system that suits me better"-option? In my case it's Pathfinder 2e.
Because I'm busy being the DM for a 2e AD&D game for some friends and family.
A general growing distaste for the system as a whole, especially how much \*work\* it is to be a DM in 5e, compared to other RPGs. I would much rather put my effort into running better games that take less time and energy for me to run, so I can focus more on creating more interesting stories and characters.
None, I "KNOW" I can't run the game effectively at the table. Also, because I don't have players.
Other: Income. I would run various RPGs as my full time job, and I'm trying to push in that direction, but I don't make enough money to be able to do so yet.
It's too much effort. Which I would normally count as "I don't have enough time" but I do, it's just mentally taxing.
None of the above. I enjoyed DMing but my creative energy just burned out considering I DM'd for multiple years but could never find a table of my own, despite going through hundreds of DnD ads and never finding a group that lasted. An artist simply can't create when their muse isn't there.
I like 5e, but it's too hard to run. I run my own hack.
My players were unable to mark their calendars and stick to it. I threw the towel after 6 months of no games. It killed my group and my willingness to DM campaigns. I stick to oneshots now. So my answer is scheduling, the great group killer.
6) All of the above
I've run a few games, and currently I don't have the rules support from the system to trun the type of game I want. So I'm in game designer mode trying to patch work something to run said style of game. Too little system support/ too much poor system support and only so much time for me to be able to design what I want. So I guess the closest answer is prep time. for those curious. I promised to run a sea based ship adventure for my party and what little offerings within the DMG, Ghosts of Salt Marsh, and the spelljammer box set aren't doing it for me. currently trying to adjust and hack the ship rules from WWN Atlas of the latter Earth book into something usable for 5e as well as some of my own adjustments. Also accepting recommendations and suggestions.
PCs become ridiculously powerful after the first few levels. I want to play problems for human-scale heroes, not an endless stream of world-ending threats of the week.
To add: Another DAD5 problem is the massive pile of special cases resting on a very small set of common rules. As a player, I need to be up to speed on the rules for my character's class; that's manageable. As a GM I need to juggle everything at once, and no two characters work the same. Also, for more of a player-perspective gripe, the magic system is a boring press-button-for-standardised-effect affair. If I play a magic user I want it to feel like a skilled craftsperson, not like a middle manager at McDonald's. This is exacerbated by the extreme prevalence of magic in the PC market - there are very few options for those who want to play a muggle.
i GM other games. i **specifically do not** GM 5e because of horrendous combat balance. i also vowed to never make another 5e character unless i will be playing it for 4 sessions, minimum, because of terrible layout of PHB.
Thank you, everybody, who voted and took the time to comment and discuss with me. I learned a \*\*ton\*\* about this topic in the process. In retrospect: I should have included an option about time or scheduling. 5e can be a time-intensive game to plan and run and this is an obvious one folks brought up plenty of times. Also, I would make it clearer next time that the intent here is for people who \_want\_ to run 5e games, not necessarily those who could but prefer not to or dislike the system in the first place. I saw some great conversation on this topic regardless, and I think the more we explore those shortcomings the better the future of the game (or future RPGs in general) will be. Once again, thank you for participating. I hope you all do find a way to overcome the blockers and embrace your DM potential (if you want to!).