The Learning Curve or Cutting New DMs Some Slack

tl;dr: campaigns that fail are part of getting good at DM'ing.

My big point here is that folk who joined before the 5e era joined younger and got in a lot more practice before arriving in their 20s (now). Someone starting in their 20s today is being presented with high expectations from Critical Role and other places straight out of the gate. If you are starting today, give yourself room to try things and fail in interesting ways.

In short, if you are setting out as a DM:
- go easy on yourself, less than perfection is still a good time
- be ready for things to go horribly wrong
- brief your players on what they are in for
- flag things you are testing and let decisions on new rules, mechanics, direction be two way doors

I had some thoughts that struck me in the small hours of the night as I pondered what the age up of new-joiners means.
- for the first decades of the game (70s-2000s), people joined as early teens
- a teen gamer, something like I was, has lots of time to pour into their hobbies
- once I found a group to game with, we put 15 hours a week on our TTRPGs alone - mostly in marathon sessions given our transport issues
- by the time I hit 18, I probably had ~2000 hours of table play time done
- once I hit college, I got straight into the games society, got involved in more games and did more, shorter games
- exiting college, I had probably added another ~1500 hours of gaming at least
- taking the ~10,000 hours-to-mastery rule, I was about 1/3 of the way there

Today, according to all these surveys, someone coming to gaming in their 20s:
- is typically getting in a weekly game of around 5.5 hours per session
- this puts them playing ~ 300 hours a year, assuming they play every week
- as a rough estimate they will be 27 by the time they have clocked the same table time as that teen gamer had when they hit 18

You can see the numbers to back this up below, but skipping to the 'so what' for now:

I think old guard gamers like myself got to trial-and-error their way through a lot of the learning curve of TTRPGs in a way that people coming to the table in their 20s today doesn't get the opportunity to. It is easy to sit down and chuck dice around and you can have a certain experience that is more towards the tactical combat side of things with very little prep or know-how. But trying to pull off more complex stuff - combat tactics, ease in role-playing, working together effectively, threading rewarding story experiences - all these things take a bit of skill and some practice. I wonder if some of the disappointed reactions we see from folk through things like RPG horror stories and spiky conversations about 'playing the game wrong' online are down to the mismatch in expectations of how smoothly the game should run *shortly after you start the hobby.*

Teenage gaming allows for campaigns to be run onto rocks through murder-hobo-ism, monty-haul gaming, grand failure of narrative, chaos, confusion, and so on. I think these things are almost inevitable - you can read lots of good online advice and do your best to follow it but it is very hard to pull off something complex the first time you actually do it. Advice is good and it helps but doing is necessary.

I think there is an issue of opportunity cost - our characters were not so dear to us, our time was not so precious as teenagers so characters dying and campaigns going splat represented less precious time and effort lost. Compare to someone who has to carve time out from the adult demands of life, those hours devoted to gaming come at more of an opportunity cost and therefore it is more difficult to be sanguine when things do not go as you would hope.

I think part of this can be seen in the negative comment and reactions online when people participate in games that do not meet their expectations. If it was a lot of trouble to set it all up, get people scheduled and then it was not the experience you hoped for, that is not a good feeling.

Mostly I am pointing this out to offer a perspective on why this might be happening. On the one hand I see what looks like 'back seat GM'ing' with advice along the lines of 'well, don't get into that situation in the first place' and on the other hand I see comments like 'am running super complex homebrew campaign as first time DM, is not playing out like my favorite twitch stream, halp' - both of which make me think there is a misunderstanding happening.

To frame this all up - I wrote before about how we see the age of new joiners has risen sharply recently and how we see this in multiple surveys and sources. What this means practically is an old school gamer (pre-3e) probably joined as a young/mid-teen, a 3e/3.5e/Pathfinder player probably got in as a mid-teen and a new joiner coming to 5e today is probably getting is as a low 20-something. This is taking the average age of starting from the OSR 2019 survey.

The average age of a joiner for these eras was:

Era	Average age of starting
1970’s	12
1980’s	11
1990’s	13
Between 2000 & 2010	15
2010-15	19
2015+	22

What does all this mean? Roughly - Cora, Ciara and Caoimhe could sit to table today and all be 27 - Cora joined in 2016 at 22, has been playing for 5 years. Ciara joined in 2013 at 19 and has now been playing for 8 years and Caoimhe joined in 2009 at 15 and has been playing for 12 years. They all joined at the average age for their group but now, despite being peers in age they have hugely different levels of experience with the game. In raw years alone, Caoimhe has nearly three times the experience Cora has, even assuming they all got steady time-at-table regardless of what age they were. One could reasonably assume that as well as joining later, it was harder to get table time for the older joiners - Caoimhe would have had her secondary school friends for 3 years. Ciara would have gotten in college gaming (Caoimhe too) and Cora has had to find her way into the hobby while also presumably earning a living and life in general getting in the way.

There is more separation with the earlier cohorts - the 25 year vets from the 1990s are in their 40s, the 35 year vets from the 80's are pushing 50 and the original 70's joiners are cruising up on 60 - you could guess their experience at a glance. The disparity in experience within the same age-cohort is a new thing.

Basically - there are two groups of people in their 20s in TTRPGs at the moment, one of them has hundreds of hours of gaming under their belt already - they should be patient ambassadors for the hobby, I say this strongly because I have been you. Help the new comers have the best game possible, be open things they suggest because maybe they have some new mashed-up home-brewed seed of genius in there.

The other group has just come to gaming recently and is surprised that their experiences are not matching what they expected. I suggest, because this is not my experience, that these people cut themselves and those other new people they are playing with some slack. Recognise the flare outs and raggedy gaming experiences as part of the learning curve - part of the 'practice makes perfect' that is true for all things. From my perspective, I ran a lot of not-great D&D and it made me and my players into life long fans so don't stress too much about it. Try the ridiculous idea, if it works it works, if it fails, it fails - shrug, take notes and move on. The next game you run will be the better for it.

Some similar recent thoughts from weaver.skepti.ch on the learning curve or from Tao of D&D on how DM'ing is a craft.