51 years.
That's roughly how long the various owners and writers of Dungeons & Dragons have had to fix the game's so-called “DM problem” in which the referee/dungeon master/game master/etc. has to do much more work than any other player in order to keep a campaign, or even a series of one-shots, alive, or even to run a single module: 51 years.
After more than half a century of this situation, D&D's corporate overlords have announced earlier this month that they'll be releasing a new Starter Set to go along with their revised 5E cash grab rules, and that this set will introduce, for the first time ever, some sort of game design which lends itself better to cooperative DMing, in which different game group members can take turns running the monsters and setting. Details are still mostly unknown, but the Bob the World Builder YouTube channel had a thoughtful video about this topic here, which is where we heard about it tonight (3/25).
That's well and good for 5E players, but for the last year, MSP happens to have been developing a fanzine for the DCC RPG which addresses this very topic head-on in the first article of the first issue and proposes its own solutions to make the game consist of less work and more fun for the judge, the DCC equivalent of a DM. Already having commissioned and received the illustrations, we had planned to launch it in January at the latest, but not being a giant corporation, personal life events got in the way, and as of right now, it probably won't be out until late spring or summer. And we really, really weren't expecting there to be any possibility of anyone thinking we might have plagiarized a megacorporation on a long-overdue idea we've put quite a lot of work into as an independent publisher on its launch, but here we are. Having reviewed countless other fanzines, rule sets, and blog posts, we've never seen this topic addressed to our satisfaction, or really at all for that matter, so we were quite excited to introduce what we felt was a needed innovation. Somehow, though, Hasbro/WotC also thought, "Hmm, why not do this now?" at the exact same time that we finally were ready to speak up about it. In any case, it's clearly an idea whose time has come.
As stated above, the specifics as to how exactly Hasbro/WotC intends to introduce some sort of shared or rotating DMing are still unclear as of this post. While we aren't quite ready to unveil our manifesto on the subject, we can tell you that our approach, which we call the IAG method (Improvised Adventure Game), combines a return to D&D's early days in terms of module design with a style of writing that's easy to access at the game table and leaves ample room for the judge to experience the adventure in real time along with the other players instead of requiring them to do excessive (or any) "homework" in advance, better separating the functions of "module writer" and "game runner." And yes, the thought was also explicitly to present campaigns in such a way that different game group members could take turns in the judge's seat from adventure to adventure -- what one might call cooperative DMing.
So, 51 years after the introduction of D&D and the start of TTRPGing as a hobby, both Hasbro/WotC and we are ready to take steps to shake up the traditional idea of what it means to be a DM -- in our case because we just recently became confident enough in our TTRPGing to produce an informed take on the topic, and in theirs because...who knows. While we're not sure exactly what Hasbro/WotC intends to present in their new Starter Set, our solution to the "DM problem" is true to our unique vision and that others out there are likely to get some value out of it. Just let this post serve as notice that what we've been working on has absolutely nothing to do with whatever Hasbro/WotC will be publishing.
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