Rock, Paper, Shotgun - The DM Delusion

At Rock Paper Shotgun, Richard Cobbett explains why Dungeon Mastering can't work in rpgs.

The most dangerous ideas are the ones so compelling, nobody wants to admit they're bad. Also the atom bomb was pretty nasty, but that's a bit out of a weekly RPG column. Instead, let's pick one of the chocolate teapots that people keep mistaking for the Holy Grail - the idea that RPGs can hope to offer anything close to a classic DM experience. It's a terrible idea. It's not going to work. Stop wasting everybody's time.

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Now, I'm not talking about dedicated tools like Roll20 or more specific ones like JParanoia here - tools whose job is primarily to connect people and handle the fiddly stuff like character sheets. I mean RPGs that want to offer both a game and a DM experience, which always fall far, far short of the dream or basic sell. Many have tried, including Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption (AKA Vampire: The Masquerade: The Crap One), Neverwinter Nights, and more recently, Sword Coast Legends.

Between them, the various approaches have brought along just about every raw feature needed to pull it off, and time and again players have hit the same issues - the biggest one being perception of scope. What I mean by that is that, well, look at just about any procedurally generated game. As much as developers like to claim that their scale is some crazily large thing, like Elite Dangerous having a hundred bazillion star systems or No Man's Sky rendering twelve universes without breaking a sweat, in practice their scale is limited to the point where you as the player feel like you've seen the edges of what it can do. At that point, the magic of the thing is immediately lost and all that remains is the hope that the core gameplay loop can hold players' attention. Cracking skulls in Diablo 3 for instance. The quest for credits in Elite Dangerous.

If the DM has one job here, it's to try and disguise it with hand-crafted content and a human eye for the rules and systems. The catch is that even using something as powerful as the Neverwinter Nights editor to create a complex module full of wonder and whimsy, once the game starts that player just becomes another puppet of the game engine - albeit one with the power to see and occasionally twang everyone else's strings. They're not in charge of the rules, because that's the game logic, and even the simplest of engines makes it a pain to create content on the fly. Sure, you can make a module or a map in advance, but then you're still stuck with the problem of not being able to react with the speed of thought to game limitations and player freedom. Which as ever, will usually manifest in variously murderous killing sprees.