My blog response to Matt Colville’s video essay on Forever DMs as a concept.
Is it bad etiquette to post my own blog?
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Post you own blog as you wish. I reckon most of us are here to trade ideas and blog posts are all about the ideas, yes?
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I 100% agree. I was that guy that when my L5R GM said he was tired of directing and wanted to play, I didn’t step up. I didn’t read articles on RPGs, I didn’t know the rules that didn’t apply to my character, and generally was selfish.
This post, and Matt’s video, are great. But I think that they probably won’t reach their target “plays once a week and is not into the TTRPG sphere” audience 
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I think the advice you give at the end is sound. That said, I do not think the existence of Forever DMs “is a symptom of an unhealthy tabletop RPG group primarily”. It is simply a normal and consequence that happens in pretty much any human activity.
The reality is that for any activity, only a minority of people engaging in it will do so deeply while most other people will do it more casually. Take politics as a non-gaming example: most people that are interested in politics will watch the news and know a bit about policies, but very little will read party platforms, go to town hall meetings and things like that. Unless politics is put in front on them, most people won’t go out of their way to involve themselves in it. They certainly won’t found a local chapter for their party or organize events, even if they might go to one if it’s not too much of a hassle and some of their friends invite them there. This does not mean they are not interested; it is just that they are not that deeply interested in it the way hardcore policy wonks are.
It is not any different for ttrpgs. Most people that are interested in them are very happy to play their PC for a couple of hours, then not think about it until next session. Being a GM is usually more involved that that, and becoming a better GM even moreso. So only the deeply invested people try their hands at it while the more casual don’t, and won’t! They will stop playing instead of becoming GMs, not because they are bad players (or bad people), but because while they like playing ttrps, they are not ready and willing to invest that much in it.
The reality is that some people are more invested in some things than others; their time and effort are of course useful to them, but also, they create benefits (positive externalities?) for others. Let’s also keep in mind that while we might be the “deeply invested” person that create value for more casual people in our hobby, we also are the casual person benefiting from someone else’s comitment in other areas of our life. Maybe you play in a sports league that you do not organize, go watch your kid’s play that Sally put together, benefit from a union’s protection while you do not participate in most discussion, etc.
So yes, we should listen to the plea of unwilling Forever DM, like any nice human being should. We should make games that invites more people try their hand at GMing. We should definitely make GMing a cool, interesting part of the game itself. But we should also realize that having “Forever Players” is not a failure or a bug we can fix, but a reality we must accept and, even, celebrate.
After all, GMing is the best part of the game and I myself would hate to be forced to play more often than I GM, so I thank all people that are willing, week after week, to let me do just that (because I sure as hell would not do so myself!)
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I don’t see the correlation here. Having only 1 person willing to DM is a single point of failure within the group and makes the group as a whole brittle.
I agree with your take here, I don’t think Forever Players or people who don’t want to GM are a problem that need to be solved. That being said, adding even just one more person willing to run a game to a group makes the group far more likely to survive and thrive.
I suspect his target audience were the people shouting down Forever DMs, and I think those are folks who are mostly terminally online 
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No doubt that a group with a single person willing to DM makes it more brittle, we are in agreement. I just wanted to point out that it is not caused by a lack of health, and that such groups are not “unhealthy”.
How would you define the health of a tabletop RPG group? I didn’t mean it as a judgement on the group or to cast aspersions on a group that only has one GM, I meant it more as a reference to the viability of the group continuing on.
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We are debating semantics. I think you are right about this: more people willing to GM in a group means the group is more viable. I just thought framing single-GMs groups unhealthy (or symptomatic of an unhealthy group) was missing the fact that in a group of probably 4-7 people, having a single person invovled deeply enough to GM is just normal. Defining such a group as “unhealthy” would be akin to defining a car without a spare battery as broken. Sure, having one makes the car more viable to drive (it can start even when the battery do not work), but it’s way too high a bar to clear.
My definition of a healthy group is kind of beside the point, because it would be another topic. My comment was specific to your article: in my opinion, the existence of Forever DM is not a “disease”, but a fact inherent to the nature of our hobby. It is bound to happen when a single person (the DM) has much more responsibility in running the game. Even boardgames, where the asymetry is less pronounced, are in a similar situation: in a group, there is probably a single person involved enough to find, buy and learn the game everyone will gladly play even if they would not themselves find, buy and learn it for the benefit of the group.
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Yes, some people just enjoy piling down on others online. 
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Huh. In my 6-person group we have three GMs and only one experienced player who has no interest in GMing (the other two have only been playing for a couple of years).
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I would like to know how dependent the “Forever GM” symptom is on the “campaign style” of the group. There are exceptions, but mostly when you have a long-running, multi-year campaign, you stick with one GM doing that.
On the other hand, I could picture a group that’s more focused on one-shots, short story game experiences etc. to be more suited to switching GMs. Some people might not like doing the GM work for PbtA type of games, but have no problems for Into The Odd etc.
On the other hand, someone has to pick those weird little games, and as @Jordan pointed out, not everyone goes as “hard” into the hobby as others.
These days I also see a lot of “open table” games online in the OSR space (West Marches etc.), where you have a changing troupe of players anyway, does the GM spot change accordingly or is that one of the more fixed factors there in general?
In my personal experience, the most GMs I ever had was in a game where we were running multiple mid-length campaigns at the same time, with different genres. I was the “Forever GM” for a lot of that stuff, but I didn’t go as deep into genres I found a bit “meh”, like Shadowrun or even WoD, so some people more enthusiastic about that picked up those roles.
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There are exceptions, but mostly when you have a long-running, multi-year campaign, you stick with one GM doing that.
One of the reasons I’m a big fan of fortnightly games is that it makes space for other campaigns. When the GM in one long-running campaign I was in decided he needed to switch from running weekly to running fortnightly so he would have more time to prep, one of the other players jumped into the now-free gap weeks with a short (6-session? 8-session? It’s been a while) campaign, and then when her mini-campaign wrapped I launched my campaign that ran from January 2021 to February of this year. Other players got to experience different GM-ing styles and play different characters, and people who wanted a turn behind the screen had space for it, all without blocking off another day of the week.
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