>>98058113
Aitism is rather a plus.
Well, I think people who are no into geek hobbies at all obviously can't GM. Or older people who refuse to learn anything. But I think anyone who can be a player can be GM. You personal attributes only affects how easy it is for you and how good of a GM you will be. The quality of game itself is usually a bigger problem. That is why D&D has a """shortage of DMs""" or some shit. Well, duh. If WotC wasn't your usual retarded megacorp, they would create something like D&D 6e: Casual Improv. Set and all mon-retarded normies would happily play and DM D&D.

>>98058113
I'd rather have an autistic GM because then at least someone at the table will know the fucking rules.
>social anxiety
What fucking social anxiety. If you can sit at the table to play you can sit there to GM too.

>>98058113
Anyone can DM but your threshold for social anxiety would be more based on familiarity with the people you're DMing for.

>>98058113
A non-exhaustive list of reasons some people cannot GM:

>People who cannot or will not read the rules
>People who don't have free time (they can't play either)
>People who cannot sustain a group of friends (also can't play either)
>Nobody around you wants to play the system you want to DM
>You are trapped in a David Blaine box suspended over the Grand Canyon
>The smell from your amputated genitals drives people to flee from you (see point 3)
>You cannot stop playing with your phone
>You have a spinal injury which prevents you from arranging the furniture to receive guests
>You have been eaten by a crocodile

>>98058138
>>98058148
Autism doesn't always mean insane rote memorization. For me it means I am really terrible at improvisation, and I need a rough script to conduct most conversations irl, apart from simple yes/no answers. Otherwise I just blank and panic.

>>98058113
All you need is passion for your game.
The time for prep and will to improve come naturally over time if you are passionate about running a good game for your players.

>>98058258
Think of it as practice.
As the GM, you are writing the script.
Consider that most social situations have an almost predestined end.
Three factor analysis should do.
At a glance, you need to eyeball the power disparity between parties, their relation to one another, and the base disposition of the party you control.

Four player characters corner a lone Goblin pilfering a grain silo; what happens?
The Goblin is evil and vicious, but cowardly, hungry and outnumbered; the Goblin will beg for mercy, then come back with a gang if spared

>>98058113
As long as the will to dm and passion to learn to be better is there- I firmly believe anyone can GM

>>98058258
What's good homie I'm a bit on the spectrum too.

I used to write whole ass monologues for my characters but now what I do is give them a general idea of what they're gonna communicate and just give them a personality I saw in a movie, show or comic

Players can fill in the blanks if you portray even just archetypes.

At the end of it it's just practice
Good luck

>>98058113
If this cute cat can GM, so can you.

>>98058289
Yeah, working in broad strokes actually gives you a far better foundation.
The alignment system of D&D gets a lot of stick for being "rigid", but it actually allows a DM to determine at a glance how a being behaves in a broad sense.

If a creature is good, it will generally be peaceful at first, neutrals are self-interested but rational, and may be hostile towards you for practical reasons.
Evils generally want to hurt you for fun.
Lawful means they try to follow rules and abide by agreements.
Being neutral on the law/chaos axis can either imply being an animal with regards to complex social conventions, and having no idea of them, or else a tendency to prefer rules that favour themselves, and have no real dedication to the idea of law.
Chaotic entities break rules and agreements, because they don't care about stuff like that, and probably think it is clever or funny.

The alignment chart should be used as a descriptive tool, rather than a proscriptive one mind.

>>98058283
>>98058289
I have a entire group of autistic people; I seem to collect them like pokemon.
When they run games, they can be quite good, but what all the autistic folk in my game group have in common is an almost absurd inflexibility, and this is a massive sticking point for me.

>>98058319
Its sad this needs to be repeated so often.

>>98058113
I'm a cynic who believes that while anyone CAN be a GM, only a certain kind of person SHOULD do so.

>>98058369
What kind?

It's funny how GM's shake out. I'm the regular GM for my group, and we recently lost 3 of the 5 players (one to furry vrchat, one to military deployment, one to medical residency). We reached out to an old friendgroup we've list touch with. The remaining two players and I are all fully employed with spouses and families. The two we managed to reach from the old group who were interested in playing are nasally autist neets who both primarily GM. I shudder

>>98058113
DMing is like wearing yoga pants and a halter top, anon. Anyone can do it, but most people shouldn't.
>and many people are currently doing it who should not be, because the people around them are too polite to explain to them why they shouldn't be doing it

>>98058113

Some people can't roleplay, much less do it so as the GM.
Difficult to say how many of those could "improve". Honestly I wouldn't give a fuck, because I'm not here to "teach" anyone: you either can decently or not.
Good news is, in my experience if you WANT to do it you generally CAN, it's not rocket science anyway. Bad news: a non insignificant slice of people think/pretend they want, but they actually don't.

>player: "hey can I do [thing]"
>DM: "nah" *continues on with failed novel/script read/theater session*
>player *gets over it or leaves the group*

Yes, anyone able to bring a group of other people to a table can DM.

>>98058113
>can
Yes
>should
No

Some people have serious ego issues, and the nominal leader position at the table is going to bring those to the forefront. Some people have no goddamn clue what to do when not given instructions, and should not be in an executive position. Some people refuse to do certain background tasks required of their role, leaving them floundering when pedal hits the metal.

But someone with the ability to accept critique and improve certainly can learn to do it, even if they consistently fail at the beginning.

>>98058724
>Some people have no goddamn clue what to do when not given instructions, and should not be in an executive position.
Yeah... That's me. At this point in my life I'm not even sure it's something I can improve, it feels like a fundamental flaw.

you fucks are barely aware in the first place that what a good DM is is a relative thing to a variety of factors like play group, system, desired play style within a system, desired/required level of roleplay, and probably more I'm not thinking about. Given that, and the fact you're all autistic retards on 4chan, I highly doubt you can peg the desired personal qualities of a DM.

>>98058113
Anyone can be a GM, but if their rules knowledge (or ability to fudge the rules on the spot) or their improv skills are bad, they won't be a particularly good one, unless they're playing a simple game, have an amazing GM screen, or have meticulously planned out every possible situation to make up for lack of improv skills.
Social anxiety isn't that bad a roadblock once you've actually started, in my opinion, it's just getting around to actually getting players and starting the game is the hurdle you have to get over.

>>98058177
Just give the David Blaine box wi fi and you could still dm

>>98058113
I'd love to DM/GM. If I could find people who actually wanted to play a cyberpunk red campaign.

I was my groups forever DM for about 10 years during 3.5 and 4e. I think it does take a particular type of person to DM. My autism made it very easy for me to create a homebrew setting with a lot of variety for the players to interact with. I was less good at RPing a variety of NPCs so eventually I started prewriting notes on what important npcs would say. I also came up with a "threat level" system to make PC decision making more codified. OOC I would tell them the threat level of various events in the world and every time they went to deal with 1 threat all other threats would go up by 1 level. If anything reached threat level 4 the event would spill out of control and do something to majority change the setting like the loss of a major city, etc. What I was never good at was adequately integrating player back stories into the setting. In 4e I decided that any warlord would have a feif to act as the player's base. One thing I did during 3.5 was forced everyone to have a Cohort to act as a backup incase I killed their main character which happened a lot in 3.5 but never happened once in 4e. Thats all I have to say about DMing.

>>98058113
I'm autistic and have social anxiety and I love DMing. I actually prefer DMing to playing.

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>Autism

I wouldn't recommend it. GMing involves stuff like picking players with good chemistry and reading everyone's emotions(eg if someone seems bored, throw a monster or chatty NPC their way so they don't check out).

>Social anxiety

I don't think this is actually real. Just a result of growing up without a dad, lacking basic childhood formative experiences like summer camp, too much screen time, that sort of thing.

>>98059624
>I killed their main character which happened a lot in 3.5 but never happened once in 4e.
My experience was that 4e had pcs go down after grueling fights, 3.5 would be a random failed save or enemy crit.

>>98058113
Talent is a pursued interest. Barring those with significant neurological / developmental / physical disabilities which specifically hinder a given interest, anyone can do anything given enough discipline, practice, and dedication. You just have to apply yourself.

>>98060272
I know you're taking the hobbesian perspective on this but I don't agree with you. I've met some people who play TTRPG but could never GM. Either they weren't disciplined enough to always prepare for sessions or they didn't grasp the combat system well enough to make challenging but survivable encounters instead focusing on the nebulous concept of "rule of cool". Different systems are better and worse on how big a problem this is.

>>98058258
>I need to prep
Then fucking prep, you miserable cunt. What the fuck you think is 90% of GMing effort? What? Actually running the game?

>>98060360
Tbh, "Designing survivable encounters" is a nusoicaca approach to tabletop games.
Time was wilderness encounter tables in particular might contain a chance to run into things that you can't reasonably expect to win a fight against.

There's an argument that dungeons should have level-bounded encounters since they are more linear environments, but the idea that a random party of people wandering about in a dangerous backwood should never meet with anything too dangerous for them to beat up is ludicrous.

The onus should be on them not to mindlessly attack everything they meet without first gauging it's strength.
Though in order to be able to do so, without just resorting to meta-knowledge, the DM should take pains to frame the encounter with the appropriate level of gravitas, or provide a demonstration of the power of the encounter.

For instance, your party is unlikely to try and attack an overlevelled Wyvern, if they find it casually feeding on a creature that they struggled to beat in a recent encounter.

>>98060455
Unironically this, GMing is almost entirely about the prep. Setting up statblocks, considering how you want the session's expected plot to "flow," and accounting for player-made interruptions. You should feel utterly relaxed by the time you're settling into the big seat.

>>98058113
My friend is a pretty good DM but due to his adhd he can’t stay focused on long term campaigns. He always comes up with some nonsense excuse to quit.

>>98059667
Autistic GMs might be a mixed bag in real life but I've found them to beasts in VTTs.

>>98058113
It's easier to be a good GM than it is to be a good player. Everything that makes a bad GM makes a bad player, and things that make a good player are just not applicable as a GM.
More people should try to GM evern if just to see that it's way easier than playing

>>98060861
What's wrong with Nausicaa

>>98061827
"nusoicaca"
Nu-Soi-Caca
"New Onions Caca"

- terminology emanating from the sharty indicating that the subject is of recent origin, suffused with latterday cultural effeminacy, and therefore, is shit.

As for what's wrong with Nausicaa: Valley of The Wind, it was too light on plot and world building, and leaned too heavily on it's visual design, which while quality, was not strong enough to land it at the top of the Ghibli charts.

>>98058113
If you're autistic, play with spergs and squirrels.
If you're a normie, play football or something idk

>>98060861
Tbh anon you are an example of how bad some GMs are at understanding how much knowledge goes into running a game.

Your scenario reflects several facts about GMing that You, I and most other competent GMs are fully aware of:
1) encounters aren't inherently combat encounter
2) dangerous things need to be telegraphed aggressively
3) monsters are NPCs with their own lives
4) In most systems, getting caught in a bad fight is a death sentence if run RAW.

Now, lets throw away your big brain 105 IQ random encounter, and look at what a legitimately bad or inexperienced GM is likely to do when they don't know those facts:
1) They roll on the random encounter table. Most of the shit on there is stuff like "1d3 wolves", so their brain is primed to interpret every hostile creature as a combat encounter, and they have probably gotten away with it several times already.
2) They roll on the table and land on an entry like "89 - 1 Wyvern". They begin setting up a combat encounter with a Wyvern. They get their battle mat, and maybe draw a few trees and a road if they are creative. Otherwise, the map is a flat plane.
3) The party minis get plonked on the middle of a battle mat, and a larger mini of some flavor is placed on one edge of the battle mat to represent the wyvern. It is probably 60 to 120 feet away from the party.
4) Roll initiative
5) The party gets TPK'd, because D&D does not give you any mechanical means before mid level spells to escape combats with creatures that are more mobile than the party.
6) The GM is mystified as to why the book told them to do something that ended so poorly.

Obviously, the GM's takeaway from this is that the rules suck and are badly balanced, and not that the shitty GM fucked up by treating the random encounter generator as a balanced white room combat generator instead of as a source of inspiration that still needs to get filtered through the lens of balanced combat encounter design.

>>98058177
>People who cannot or will not read the rules

Never stopped me yet

>>98058113
>But I think anyone who can be a player can be GM
Most players are borderline retarded and showing up on time with a bag of chips taxes their organisational skills.

>>98058724
>
“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”

>>98062877
>
clever + dilligent = PC group lead
stupid + lazy = most players
clever + lazy = DM
stupid + dilligent = that guy

>>98061513
>>98058138
I once went to an midnight event were some autistic guy decided to run a VtM Dark Ages one shot. The entire description of the scene was weird and when I asked a couple question the guy panic. When he couldn't handle the players the guy just pretended to be asleep, it was a very surreal experience.
After that I just went to another table to play Pathfinder instead, weird shit all around.

>>98058113
Anyone interested can GM for good players, you a bigger level of intelligence and adaptability the more your players suck.

>>98058113
I think I’m a lost cause that’s why I don’t plan to go to the lgs for games.

>>98058177
The guests can help you move the furniture
They’d kinda be dicks if you asked for some help (so that they can play(!)) and they know you have a spine injury