Being a (good) GM is incredibly, problematically, blissfully hard
I love running roleplaying games.
Being a GM is the part of the hobby I enjoy the most. It's a skillset I deliberately work at. And it's also something I've spent a lot of time doing.
Over the past decade, I have run hundreds of sessions across a dozen different systems. Everything from epic campaigns to sprawling open tables to introductory one shots for dozens of players both old and new. And while that pedigree still pales in comparison to many of the greybeards in this hobby—and I certainly have a lot more to learn—I feel confident in saying that I am at least a pretty good GM.
I make this claim not to self-aggrandize, but to establish a little credibility when I lament that being a good game master is incredibly hard.
Few other hobbies require such a broad range of capabilities. Being a GM tests your cognitive, emotional and social intelligence—often all at the same time. It requires the ability to plan and the ability to improvise. To empathize with and embody a diversity of characters while envisioning and narrating an imaginary world all in the context of a mechanical framework that is necessarily incomplete. To respond to and shape the experiences of a handful of other people in real time without being able to witness directly the game that is playing out in their imaginations. The skill ceiling for a GM is essentially infinite.
Most GMs don't worry about these things. And they shouldn't. Getting started as a GM doesn't have to be hard or complicated. Plenty of GMs muddle along and they have fun and their players have fun and ultimately that's the most important thing. I know that's true because I have been that kind of GM and I have played with that kind of GM many times. And I have had many good experiences at these tables. For most, "good" is good enough.
But I want more from my games now. I itch for great games—the sessions you remember forever because they were so exciting or poignant or challenging in that special way that only RPGs can be. It's the difference between a coffee date and an all-night heart-to-heart, between music on your phone and a packed arena show, between a zoo and the Serengeti. And delivering those exceptional experiences does not happen through muddling—at least not consistently. For that, you need a really good GM.
I don't think I'm alone in wanting more from my RPGs (and thus from my own capabilities as a GM). The gap between average games and exceptional games explains, in part, the much-maligned Matt Mercer Effect. Many players want more from their GMs than is fair to expect from an amateur hobbyist (while, ironically, failing to recognize that the quality of high-profile actual plays has as much or more to do with the quality of the players). But the point is that exceptional RPG experiences are simply not as accessible as we often want them to be.
In this respect, RPGs are fundamentally different from video games or films or fiction or any other medium where the participant experience is curated or delivered directly by the creator. The best of these media experiences are available to anyone who wants them. You can just read the Lord of the Rings! You don't need someone to explain it to you second hand. You don't need to take prompts about hobbits and construct your own collaborative narrative. When you read a book (or watch a movie or play a video game) you get to have broadly the same experience—narratively, emotionally, mechanically—as everyone else.
RPGs are more akin to sports. You can watch the professionals, but most of us can only play beer league hockey or Sunday morning footie in the park. We can have a lot of fun in the park, but we never get the experience of receiving a pass from a world-class teammate and scoring a brilliant goal in a roaring stadium. The experience is fundamentally moderated by our own abilities and by the people we play with. So while you can go out and buy the latest, greatest RPG product, you can't just decide to go out and have the best RPG experience.
For this reason, the difficulty of being a good game master creates a real problem for RPGs. So much of the experience (at least, in the traditional RPGs that dominate the hobby) is gated by the GM's ability. Again, that doesn't mean inexperienced or mediocre GMs can't run fun games. Obviously they can and do. But the GM's ceiling is often (in practice, if not by design) the ceiling for the entire game experience.
I will refrain from drawing any conclusions about what this means for the hobby as a whole. There is a version of this blog that concludes that we need better GM education and training, for which there is clear demand and an endless stream of YouTube videos and blogs but very little in the way of well-developed curricula. Another version concludes we should all stop playing trad games and embrace GM-less systems. Yet another concludes that AI GMs are inevitable (a development I am vehemently opposed to, for the record, for moral, political and practical reasons).
Instead, I will end by reframing this problem as something that is actually worth celebrating—or at least as a problem with a silver lining. Being a good GM is, indeed, very hard. Becoming a great GM is harder still. And creating the exceptional, transcendent RPG experiences that I'm seeking is always going to require effort and will never be guaranteed. But that is precisely what makes the pursuit worthwhile.
Being a good GM is hard, yes, but doing hard things is good. And when it pays off, after all the work and the missteps along the way, those exceptional RPG sessions are more meaningful than the best video game or film or fictional experiences can ever be.
Being a good GM is hard, but it is blissfully hard. And the payoff is magical.