Are popular bloggers actually good DMs?
Yesterday I was watching Quinn's Quest actual play of CBR+PNK / Citizen Sleeper 2, and as I scrolled through the comment section, the top comment stood out to me:
"One thing that has been really valuable about this to me is it gives a super clear frame of reference for how Quinns plays games and therefore how that informs his reviews."
What struck me was how rare this happens in TTRPG discussions.
If I make a video giving out advice on drawing/being an artist, and you look at my drawings and realize that I don't draw very well, you probably won't take my advice or even watch my videos.
If I make a video editing tutorial and you notice that the tutorial itself is poorly edited, you'll click away.
But if I write a blog post about how to DM well... you have absolutely no way to know if I actually DM that well, if my techniques are achieving their intended goals, or how much the success of those techniques depends on other stuff that I do at my table but that I'm not saying in that particular blog post. To evaluate the quality of my advice, you must resort to other proxy questions:
- Does the advice make sense?
- Does the author have a large following?
- Is the advice corroborated by other people?
However, each of these questions has their own set of issues.
Sensible advice often does not work in practice. By definition, something "makes sense" if it fits your current model of the world, which is completely orthogonal to it actually being effective. "Trusting your instincts" does not really work here because newbie DMs have no instincts, so they can't effectively differentiate "a cool idea that works at the table" from "what sounds nice but wouldn't work very well / needs some tweaks".
Having a large following does not mean that the ideas are good or effective, only that the author has a large following. Perhaps they attracted this audience because they write well (which does not clearly correlate to good DMing), or simply due to first-mover advantage (they've become a household name in the community). The effectiveness of a particular advice is still not clear.
The consensus is not always true or effective; it is only the consensus. As bloodletting and lobotomy attest, ideas can be held in high esteem by the most respected minds of the field and end up being ineffective in practice. I'm new to TTRPGs so take this with a grain of salt, but I wonder if advice such as "don't prep plot" and "avoid perception checks" have always been as common in the OSR community as they are now.
So if I write well, have a blog that is often mentioned by other people, and give out advice that you see repeated elsewhere... What are the odds that I'm a top-tier DM?
I don't know.
I don't know if big names like Arnold K, Justin Alexander or The Angry GM are "top-tier DMs" -- or more accurately, if I would enjoy playing at their table. I'm not sure if following their advice will lead me to somewhere I actually want to be. Actual plays would be a way of clarifying this, but most interestingly, there seems to be minimal overlap between "those who write about DMing" and "those who record themselves DMing". In the absence of this, it seems that the best a newbie DM can do is to believe.