From White Box to a “DM Shortage”: Only Our Level of Participation Can Bring Us Joy

When the original white box edition of Dungeons & Dragons dropped, it was a loose collection of ideas for one to use in forging their own game. For me, at 40, our session last year was primarily an artifact of where gaming was in 1974, a quest to understand my cultural roots, if you will. When I ran it for my group, it was purely for novelty. It was a huge pain in the ass to get going but a rewarding experience combining historical research with game crafting, shared by friends., It was also a hard 180° pivot from the increasingly passive corporate and influencer monetization schemes designed to further widen the consumer base for the hobby. After running the game, I was left reflecting on issues Gygax and Arneson weren’t concerned with in 1974, like a “shortage” of game masters, celebrity influencers streaming their games, and the very idea that such a game could be rendered so passive an activity.

The more I dug through the period, the more I realized there was no “right” way to play D&D. The Perrin Conventions were a set of house rules, so popular groups around the country began adopting them in 1976 because no one was sure how else to run the game! Until the release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax was publishing magazine articles offering advice, in addition to the official supplements offering changes so profound as to address how combat works. The original box was only a set of tools, calling on the “referee” (not yet a “dungeon master”) to combine its contents with other games such as Chainmail and Avalon Hill’s Outdoor Survival to weave a new experience. In a time before one could watch a game played on YouTube or at least check an online FAQ to see if you have the game “right,” this yielded some highly variable results. Why did they expect people to do so much work?

Like other niche hobbies before the rise of suggested online content, discovery and participation took some work. The Avalon Hill company existed at the time, producing boxed board games with a set number of paper chits and explicit rules in the box, but role-playing grew out of the other, more fluid denomination of 1970s tabletop gaming. The local miniature wargaming clubs Gygax and Arneson came from typically created their own guidelines, altering and combining rules, which were freebie suggestions from figure manufacturers at the time. The pair expected others to share their enthusiasm for forging their own experiences as they had done.

My group’s experience actually playing the game included some initial confusion and lots of winging it. And that was a blast. I felt a lot of pressure as the game master, going from carefully planned adventures to just drawing a dungeon map and rolling for what was in every room as the three little books suggested. That sense of true co-creation as I made up the world in real-time in response to chance die results and my players’ interests was extremely fulfilling.

Now that I’ve probed that early RPG history, both in looking through the period materials as an outsider and having my own personal experiences with them, I’m left wondering what is different today that there seems to be a push towards less personal experiences and more passive consumption. I would suggest a major development was live streamers, which resulted in two major challenges for the community – performance anxiety and non-active participation. To be absolutely clear, I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with making or enjoying live play programming, but I do think it has some knock-on effects we should be more consciously aware of.

The most obvious is performance anxiety, which some call the “Matt Mercer Effect,” after the GM of the Critical Role live play series. Like most things on social media, live play streams don’t always accurately reflect most people’s life experiences. Those sessions can be extremely polished, perhaps rehearsed, and sometimes stocked with professional actors. You don’t often see a game master on camera awkwardly searching their books for a forgotten rule or some obscure setting detail while their players stare at them blankly. Yet that is often part of the real game master experience.

While game mastering has always been a lot of work, I don’t recall hearing about a “shortage” until the last few years. Sure, prep work for the role can be a major time sink, but something seems different now. One has to wonder if, like body image or any other neuroses, gamers are simply too intimidated to just give it a go with their friends because they don’t think they can pull off the professional-level omniscient narrator performance they see on YouTube. Fortunately, real game masters don’t have to do that. They just have to sit down and do their best.

Another factor might be transitioning to role-playing games as a passive activity. Gamers can now just sit and watch other people play games. While I have used some of these videos to get a handle on how a game runs, I don’t quite understand watching other people play games as a form of entertainment, but to each their own. The disconnect here may be between the type of person that, even in earlier periods of the internet, had to actively seek out information on tabletop gaming versus the type of person that sits back and allows the algorithm to bring them videos.

This is not a statement supporting gatekeeping. Rather, it’s an observation that psychologically, something very different happens with how people discover and interact with the hobby. I would wager that the active seeker is more likely to give game mastering a try than the passive-acceptor of the algorithmically targeted content. They are just different sorts of people, expecting an experience to be provided instead of created. Which is fine, I firmly believe that the hobby should be available for anybody, but it isn’t necessarily for everybody.

With two things potentially going on here, where is role playing heading? Well, if the internet is to be believed (and it always should be), both Dungeons & Dragons and Critical Role are in a state of declining popularity. That might not be such a bad thing for the hobby to come back to Earth, just a tiny bit, to a more sustainable level. With that, I would expect the community rebalancing to trend toward a higher percentage interested in GMing as the more passive fans exit in greater numbers. Beyond that, I hope we can communicate the fun of sitting around the table with your friends, busting out the gaming toolbox of your choice, and just making a go of it. As the GM, there will be moments when you aren’t sure what to do. Sometimes they are a blast! Don’t get worried if your session isn’t perfectly mesmerizing as a flawlessly acted play – it’s a game, not a Hollywood production.

As for Mercer and Critical Role, I hope his endeavors continue to flourish because he wrote a post you really need to read if you question your game mastering abilities. Give it a look!

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Ryan Whalen irregularly publishes the zine MDNTWVLF between his hodgepodge of research and writing gigs. He keeps an instagram open for MDNTWLF in hopes he’ll do another one after finishing the book he’s working on.