"Are you the only one in your group who GMs?"
I am in 3 groups, in 2 of them I am GM. From these 2, in one I'm the only GM; in the other there are 3 GM's.
A bit hard to answer questions like this on a 5 point scale.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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I just submitted my responses. Can't wait to see the results!
I've been GMing now across 40 years or so, and my GM style these days is very different to when I started. These days, I'm much more a "fly by the seat of my pants" GM, with all of us building a story together. I see my role as bringing unexpected elements in to the story we're building, so that the players themselves have a dynamic environment to build their characters against, rather than it just being collaborative storytelling.
I use dice for a similar reason. They allow for the unexpected and for unpredictable outcomes. They mean that the players themselves feel uncertainty when making choices for their characters.
Do you spend more time on encounter prep, or art prep?
That's my secret. I never prepare
In all seriousness, there's a couple of questions like that, asking which type of content I spend more prep time on, but I genuinely don't spend time doing prep on anything, which makes it hard to answer those question. I voted in the middle, but it won't distinguish my answer from someone who does prep, but spreads their time equally.
When do you end your sessions?
At a particular time
After a particular story beat
So basically "how old are you?"
Actually, I've been running the data, and it seems there's a factor underlying when sessions end, whether joke characters are allowed, restrictions on character choice, comedy relief NPCs, and a focus on lore prep.
Where are you going to announce results?
I guess I'll post in this community when I've written up descriptions of all the dimensions.
But if you want to see how the sausage is made, we've been making it together in the MCDM discord server.
And I just named the last factor. So although I haven't written descriptions of all the factors, I can tell you the acronym is STOPJADEN. Strategy, Tactics, Order, Prep, Jest, Authenticity, Direction, Equality, Narrative.