What do you have against people who like to GM?
It's not me that has anything against GMs. There's a pervasive disrespect for the time, energy, and enjoyment of GMs present in the majority of TTRPG spaces.
People love to say âitâs just a gameâ while stacking more and more work onto the GMâs shoulders. Itâs selfishness, and often a contempt for TTRPGs in general.
The purpose of a GM isnât completely universal across all TTRPGs that use a GM role, hell a lot of TTRPGs donât even seem to know why they have them in the first place, but usually the purpose of a GM is to handle scenarios that the game rules donât account for, and handle procedures that the other players are not supposed to be privy to.
Over the years, more and more responsibilities have been put on the generalized GM role: sole rules memorizor, level designer, bespoke world creator, bespoke storyteller, scheduler, host, etc.. It has morphed into being a job as much if not more so than an activity to do with your friends. GMs have been dropping like flies to âGM/DM Burnoutâ for a decade or more and people willing to even go near the GM role are an endangered species.
What a lot of people donât realize is that while, yes, the rules of a TTRPG are technically changeable and nobody is going to kick down your door if you donât play them correctly, they do serve a purpose, and that is, simplified, to produce certain outcomes of gameplay.
A gameâs rules cannot account for every possible situation that may come up in something so open as a tabletop roleplaying game, and one of the strengths of TTRPGs is that when the rules donât account for something, human players can pick up the slack. In a traditional challenge game like every edition of D&D, this slack and the privilege to pick it up is by default handed over to the GM. This is because in a traditional challenge game that slack is often only handlable with that knowledge that other players are not meant to be privy to.
Since so many people are allergic to playing anything but D&D, even when they clearly donât want the gameplay which D&D is geared to produce, this privilege instead becomes a curse for the GM. All of the scenarios and characters that D&D(or any TTRPG) is simply not intended to be built to accommodate are seen as âthe slack for the GM to pick upâ instead of âthings that are outside the scope of the game.â Itâs going to a coffee shop and telling the barista, who hasnât trained in pizza, to make you a pizza. âA good barista could make it work, this is a food vendor so Iâm supposed to be served the food i order,â even though the barista isnât trained to make pizza, and the coffee shop does not stock the necessary ingredients for it.
Except the GM isnât even getting paid minimum wage, theyâre voluntarily taking on the most high-responsibility role of a group activity for you. Even if you do convince them through the shame of thousands of âa good GM could make it work, a good GM never says no to what a player wantsâ posts to make you a pizza, it wonât be a good pizza and it wonât go well with the other items on the menu. And even if it turns out to be a good pizza (because bad pizza is still usually pretty good pizza, not because itâs actually a good pizza) it wonât really be the coffee shopâs pizza, itâs the baristaâs pizza. Once you go far enough, creating so much slack for the GM to pick up, you arenât playing D&D anymore, youâre playing The GM. After a certain point the GM is doing way more work than the rules.
Saying "the GM should be allowed to just say no to something that isn't in the rules and/or they just don't want play" is, like, the opposite of having something against GMs.
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