It’s Not Just You: NYC Has a Serious Dungeon Master Shortage
13th November 2022
Briefly, for the uninitiated: In D&D a group of players collaboratively play out a story in a world created by a Dungeon Master or pre-written source material, rolling dice to simulate chance as their characters travel through the game and encounter various challenges—like the aforementioned wyverns. Characters are assigned specific abilities, and a complex set of rules, arbitrated and enforced by the Dungeon Master, standardize the game. Typically the DM spot would be determined by seniority of experience with D&D or other role-playing games—the person who’d played the longest would run the game. Alternately, it would be the person in the friend group who is the best with logistics and plan-wrangling. Back in the day, game shops would have physical bulletin boards featuring players or DMs looking to pair up.
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Playing the role of Dungeon Master can be a rewarding job but it is sometimes thankless, and always taxing. D&D can be overwhelming to any new player; this is especially true for a DM, who needs to know all the rules, adjudicate them, create or manage the story, plan logistics for their group, and cater the experience to what each player wants. The amount of effort involved makes it inaccessible for new players and difficult for experienced ones to sustain long-term.
All of which has conspired to make it harder to find people to actually run the spiking number of campaigns. “I think a lot of DMs just want to sit back and let other people run a game,” one Dungeon Master on hiatus from running campaigns told me. “There’s a DM shortage in the tabletop community like there’s a top shortage in the LGBTQ community.”
To quote Stacy McCain: Nobody ever lived as a knight and role-played being a marketing consultant.