On Playing Raw: Nasty, Brutish, and Undercooked

This image has made the rounds in some RPG servers in the last few days, where it has been the subject of much clowning and gnashing of teeth.

It is, unfortunately, real, and I did look at the original site. To be sure, there was plenty to laugh at both in the entirety of the above-excerpted piece and in the rest of the site. Much of it was baffling. Other parts I didn't have any particular disagreement with. All in all, it didn't seem to merit any commentary or response. Until I saw this other bit of the home page. 

I'm pretty sure 'JC' means Jeremy Crawford
The alternative sounds impious

The fifth and third points? Good and fine. The fourth point is mixed, and I think it makes a mistake by associating DM fiat with adversarial play. It's the first and second points that draw my ire. 

Are 'the rules' (here referring by default to the rules of the Current Edition™) complex? Sure. But there's a big jump from that to 'DMing is hard.' This is the exact opposite of the message I want to send to beginner players—and especially beginner DMs.

Can DMing be hard? Sure, in the same way that playing chess can be hard when you're playing at a high level against a seasoned opponent or under strict time pressure. This does not mean it must be hard. In particular, putting these two statements together implies that DMing is difficult because the rules are complex... and that just isn't true. 

Gaining rules knowledge can take a while and benefits from focus and experience as a player, but it's far from the toughest thing about being a DM; and it's definitely not the thing which most improves the play experience. If I had to rank all the most important aspects of being a DM, rules knowledge would be well below the mid-point, because unlike many other aspects of the DM's craft it does not benefit from the DM's privileged position. 

The DM can rely on other players to know the rules inside and out and inquire with them when a ruling seems uncertain, but pacing a session cannot be offloaded onto the players, for whom a veil of ignorance must be drawn lest the events to follow lose much of their power, and maintaining order and cordial relations among the group depends on the DM's special role as a group arbitrator. These things are far more crucial to the craft of a DM than mere rules knowledge, not least because they transfer from game to game even as rules knowledge falls by the wayside. These are also, crucially, intuitive and social skills rather than regulations to be memorized and effected. I am sure there are people for whom such things come as easy as breathing but memorizing a rulebook is a horrible imposition; such people will lose little from switching to rules-lite systems. 

The sort of DMing I do is (I'd like to think) quite difficult. In my upcoming AD&D game, for example, I've gone out of my way to make things harder for myself. I've just about rewritten the PHB for my players, made custom programs to generate weather by time and location, and I'm implementing a whole bunch of homebrewed subsystems. I would never recommend that any DM begin running a game this way. A simpler game, starting from the printed rules but loose with them, is an excellent starting place which will serve both DM and player much better than an insistence upon RAW. 

I can't help but think that the prevalence of this attitude contributes, and is perhaps the primary driver, of the 'DM shortage' which is claimed to exist in the 5e space. I don't play that system anymore, yet it still matters to me; fewer DMs means fewer people, especially new players, actually playing the game, and more participating in peripheral activities like watching shows, listening to podcasts, and reading about the game. To be sure, I do all of these things, but they are no substitute for the genuine article, and their prevalence can lead to mismatched expectations about what play is actually like. 

This attitude can seep in early. I can't for the life of me remember exactly when I first heard about tabletop games. I do recall my first year of high school, when I spoke to someone who had played in a campaign the previous year. I was excited by the prospect of the game and expressed a desire to make my own world. I was told flatly that this was a bad idea; much better to learn by running published adventures. Years later, I know this to be false. Never mind that, at the onset of the hobby, one began to DM not by running pre-published scenarios but by constructing one's own town, wilderness, and dungeon. The published modules available today, by and large, vary between mediocrity and crap, both in the case of official corporate modules and those prominently displayed in online marketplaces. These are products which neither teach essential tools (like how to properly run a dungeoncrawl) nor point the DM towards some ideal of play: even if run exquisitely according to the book and rules, what emerges is a railroaded slog. 

I may have lost some readers with the last paragraph, sensible and reasonable readers, whom I might have otherwise persuaded. But... seriously. This cannot be the standard. It's an impoverished shade of what the medium can do. When I imagine playing in a game like this for an extended period of time, I get the feeling of a man drying out in the baking sun. It is the reduction of this wonderful hobby to a mercenary service and of the DM's craft to a mechanical operation perfectly poised to be replaced by a cheaper and more effective mechanism. I don't tolerate it and neither should you. 

I will take a moment to rant about the RAW attitude on display above, though it was not my original intention: the original site states, regarding the choice of a novice DM to modify an encounter in order to challenge a character with an optimized PC,

It is grotesquely unfair to the player(s) involved, who may have invested dozens of hours into building their character under the perfectly reasonable assumption that the expensive rule books that they spent their money on would be the rules that the game follows.

This one sentence is a nesting doll of terrible ideas. How, exactly, is it grotesquely unfair to make a variant guaranteed-hit lightning bolt, in a way that it would not be unfair to include an upcast magic missile, or, for that matter, simply introducing Tiamat? 

Further, these players may have invested dozens of hours into building their characters? In what world? I don't disbelieve that there are players who spend longer making characters than they do actually playing them, but why is that the assumption?

Finally, because players have purchased expensive rule books, the DM is under some obligation to conform to them? This is the assumption that the DM is providing a service for the players who, as customers, possess some rights and protections, as opposed to the assumption that the players have been invited into a group experience in which the DM possesses some special abilities and responsibilities. 

It should be no surprise that this fellow is, in fact, marketing himself as a DM-for-hire, and is moreover a former Adventurers League DM. I consider myself blessed every day that I was not introduced to the hobby through that medium. 

DMing has a very high skill ceiling, but the floor at which an enjoyable game is played is low indeed. I have, myself, run games which were quite poor on a technical level and which were hardly better paced or organized: my players still came back, and they got to see a much better game grow as a result of their trust in me. One of my close friends, who had never interacted with the game until a couple of years ago, sat in on, and then became a player in, my last campaign. They have now for many months been running their own homebrewed campaign in 5e: it's a riotous, ridiculous farce of lobster cult secret police suppressing journalistic ventures to discover the secrets underneath a vast conspiracy, and all the players there are having great fun. My cousin, nine years old, is starting to run his own homebrew campaign based loosely on 1e rules; every time we meet, it's all he wants to talk about! None of these games or DMs started smooth or proficient in the rules—players developed a loyalty to them anyway. 

This is because the act of roleplaying, the burning creativity available when people come together in this magnificent game, really is just that appealing and enjoyable, so much so that it takes serious dysfunction on a personal level to make it actively unenjoyable. But it relies on the openness and freedom that distinguishes the role-playing game from all that came before it, both on the part of the player and DM. It is exactly that freedom that a misguided, absolute appeal to RAW threatens to smother.