Matthew Colville says "certain people" shouldn't be DMs on offical D&D Podcast?

The "Certain People" comment is probably SJW bullshit. He's normally good about keeping politics out of his videos but they leak through every once in a while, and that's basically the side he leans on. A lot of his early videos he goes on about how "anyone can DM", so I can only assume he doesn't mean that there are people who CAN'T, just that if you can't play nice with the identity politics issue of the week you shouldn't because you might give someone badfeels.

youtube.com/watch?v=EHUCi6ZbVxU&t=368

Suck my damn ass right off

>wanting the base setting to be anything but Greyhawk
Colossal faggot detected.

What a fucking faggot, holy shit.

Maybe? I guess that would make sense if that was what he was going for.

In the podcast it seemed to me like he was implying that non-creative types shouldn't be DMs before Tito cut him off.

This also applies to pretty much all of the so called "authorities" in roleplaying games. Sift through the bullshit and keep in mind the better points these people make in order to complement your campaing.

I think once players get a game under their belt you can use any setting really. It just really kinda helps when you use a setting that is familiar to people who haven't played before. And depending on the group might want to keep it like that. Unless everyone wants wolf companions then Greyhawk is in order.

Yeah I wish everyone took this attitude.

He doesn't seem to be saying the setting itself is right or wrong, but rather that it lets his players have more freedom in character creation.

He's always been a big supporter of giving players creative freedom, it's not something I entirely agree with, but it hardly seems like a politically motivated ideal

>not liking Dark Sun

Fuck off.

Considering that certain people are bad at certain things it only makes sense.
You wouldn't want some old lady doing 80mph in a school zone because she has cataracts and thinks its the highway, you wouldn't want a deathly sick person cooking your food and spewing boogers and slime all over it would you? So why let some idiot ruin your fun by instead having a fun medieval rp just have some scat rape rp because they're too autistic to keep their fetishes out of D&D, its the same reason why good D&D groups are hard to find, some people are just fucking dumb, you have to be a sheltered fool to not accept that.

You think this is bad? He is so bad he dedicated entire video to defending new Ghostbusters movie

Did you watch the whole video? Because he's using his example to demonstrate exactly that point.

Lest we forget: Matthew Colville's "Ghostbusters & Fascism"

youtube.com/watch?v=Gv9oeHd6oPM

Most people who DM shouldn't. It's a pretty mentally taxing job, and it requires a mix of preparation and improvisation that a lot of people lack, as well as a strong imagination and the interpersonal skills needed to convey it.

What do you guys think of Drunkens and Dragons?

Colville seemed (to me) to be saying that non creative people are not good DMs. All the bad DMs you are describing probably all think they are good creative DMs. They are not going to listen to Colville and think he is saying that they shouldn't be running games.

The absolute best DM I ever encountered was a person who felt they weren't creative enough to be a good DM. But they turned out to be amazing at adapting book campaigns into some amazing stuff. They technically never created anything new but their games were great.

That is the type of person who is going to listen to Colville as a authority and decide "Yeah I am not creative enough to be a DM".

So yeah again I wish everyone would take the attitude that there should be no authority for this sort of stuff.

He is right, young people and memesters shouldn't be DMs, neither should edgelords or women.

There are a lot of people who are DMs that really shouldn't be. A good DM is someone who is good at improvising, can make a coherent plan, and has decent interpersonal skills. I think we all have played with DMs who are none of those things.

As far as the stuff about 4e, that's a long and complex road. The surest answer to anything regarding the success or failure of 4e was that it was very different from 3rd edition, and you either liked or disliked that.

>what was up with the talk that "certain people" shouldn't be DMs?
I've believed this for 15 years. There are people who are just not temperamentally suited to running a game and will make the whole table miserable.

I have dealt with many of those types and it was never an issue of them not believing they were creative enough. Their overreaching with creative ideals is what made their temperament not well suited for DMing.

Colville's comments on the podcast are not going to weed any of those people out. They are probably going to weed out people who can run a hell of a vanilla 5E game out of a book.

Creativity comes in different forms

The DMs who I've found to be the worst are great at making stories, and fucking awful at having those stories interact with players, resulting in horrendous railroading. Whereas the best DMs have the sort of fast and loose creativity necessary to come up with great setpieces on the fly

I suppose my own recent history with D&D is effecting my stance on this.

Last two games as a player must have had a combined 200 hours invested in world building and custom homebrew and about 2 hours of knowing the actual 5E rules.

If I had to pick perhaps I would be happier with a bit less DM "creativity" and a bit more general competence at running a game table.

Yeah see all the railroading I have recently been dealing with is making sure that what the PCs do doesn't interfere with the glorious narrative experience the DM sunk all his time into. Nothing fast and loose about that experience.

As long as you don't end up in a that DM thread and completely ruin your players experience, you're probably fine. If you can't meet that bare minimum level of quality, you probably should learn how to be a better DM before you ask people to spend their time listening to you.

You'd have to have a pretty significant mental disability to be completely incapable of learning how to play pretend with your friends. I didn't listen to the podcast but I'm guessing Colville the "certain people" Colville was referring to were people that haven't learned to DM well. Not people who are intrinsically incapable of DM'ing.

>I didn't listen to the podcast but I'm guessing Colville the "certain people" Colville was referring to were people that haven't learned to DM well.
How do you learn to DM well without some time as DM?

Spending time as a player and/or looking up advice should be enough to at least not turn off your players from the hobby.

DM'ing is the fastest way to get better sure, but it's not the only way, and it's only the small fraction of people who don't have the temperament to DM decently after simply learning the basics of the system.

Also this advice is more important when you're DM'ing for strangers/newcomers. If you're DM'ing for your friends they'll probably be more patient and naturally agree with your DM'ing style.

>at most he's said don't be a cunt and advocated for commonly accepted morals.
i invite him to play a game of dark heresy with me, that should teach him about ethics in games

>This also applies to pretty much all of the so called "authorities"
-End Statement-

He's just a dude who's done this before. His words carry more weight than my own, but he is not infallible. No one is.

Exactly my point

>people shouldn't do thing if they're bad at it
>what is practicing
>hang on I need to look like a pretentious twat where's my pipe
>don't play this niche social game
>pls gib monies and watch my jewtube my guy
Sounds like a faggot tbqh.

I liked his ghostbusters video too, what a moronic goofball.

(different person)
I personally think some approaches to DMing are not actually legitimate, and it mostly comes down to this; there's a difference between writing a story and being a DM for a group of players.
If you want to write, then write; don't tell your friends you're gonna DM.

If you don't enjoy the idea of preparing something your players (assuming they're not acting in bad faith or anything) can relatively freely engage with at their choice and leisure, then you're trying to play the game without one of the main pillars that support the TTRPG game experience.

If you were up front about it, very few people would want to play along if you told them you just wanted them to shut up and listen, or do exactly what you want them to do like glorified sock puppets; they're gonna want some fucking agency.

I personally like Mathew Colville. I recommend his stuff to people who want to try DMing, and I recommend his books
They're editting messes because he does them indipendantly, but the story is interesting for a $4 book

People have already said what needs to be said
He's just an old DM who likes 4e and political correctness. He shouldn't have tried to say some people shouldn't DM and it's a good thing he was shut down before he said anything really bad or elaborated.

And if you're new enough to TTRPG that you're unsure of how well you can DM you probably weren't listening to the official D&D podcast.

>Certain people
Blacks?

Yea I'm sure people looking to improve their storytelling game wouldn't be watching the official YouTube channel of the largest franchise of said genre.

You sounds like a dumb cunt.

>Mike Mearls recently talked about why Forgotten Realms is such a great setting to start new players in
Got a source for that? I'd like to hear Mike's thoughts.

Colville is trash.
his opinion only matters to redditors and hipsters who jumped on the wagon with crit role and other youtube 5e shit streams

its bad GMing
shallow Storytelling
Hollow fun
and encourages a weak, form over function approach to to the hobby.

for everything he gets right, he gets 3 things wrong and slathers them in bullshit attitude and youtuber snark.

dont get me started on him as a "writer'

Most of the mechanical shit he loves about 4E is the stuff that really ruined it for me.

Minions, level-based magic item quotas, and perfectly scaling monsters. As much as the powers feel like a computer game, the fake sense of progress is even more MMO-ish. You're level 20 so now you can fight level 20 orcs that are functionally identical to level 1 orcs. They might as well be palette-swapped.

>Not the OD&D implied setting

Yeah he occasionally drops hints about being a massive SJW/feminist.

I always assumed it was because he was either a wizard virgin or autistic.

You gotta remember the communities he operates in are very cucked poor bloke.

Minions were a bookkeeping shortcut (do you really need to track HP on a monster meant to be one-shot?), magic item quotas is a math necessity later relaxed with the addition of Inherent Bonuses.

The ease of palette-swapping that you dislike is ironically one of 4e's strengths. It's very easy for the DM to refluff a dragon into a devil or whatever by tweaking its powers, and the players aren't going to notice unless they're very observant. You also generally never reuse monsters across tiers without adding/subtracting powers to compensate, so your example level 1 orc with his free standard action on dying might be getting standard actions when bloodied and making saving throws to keep standing for as long as he can instead of dying at level 20.

You have to go back.

But certain people shouldn't DM, being creative is part of being a DM along with a million other things.

Why did you make this thread OP?

Reminder that there is literally nothing wrong with elitism, and that if you oppose it you are the cancer killing academia, art, and tabletop roleplaying.

To bait. It's obvious from his language that he expected Veeky Forums to be upset by what he said.

Why are we acting as if making someone feel bad is a dumb reason to call someone a bad GM? That sums up 100% of all That Guy threads.

I'm shocked people like this are living on the same Earth that I am. It's like I'm looking at a parallel world or something. Like how can anyone believe that shit?

He really is retarded or worse; he actually believes in shit he is spewing.

>As a GM I don't know if I'm having fun. When my players tell me they had fun then I know I had fun as well.
Really nigger? You don't know what you are feeling for 4-8 hours? If I decide to cut breasts from women and butcheecks from men for 4-8 hours and then I tell you I had fun... will you say you had fun as well or will you tell me to find a different gaming group?

>You need to conform to your players and their mentality.

Hell no. RPGs and social interaction is based on compromise. You either meet in the middle or you don't hang out with people who are egocentric.

>starts talking about it is fine when people play Arabs in Viking country (uses a "you have a friend with middle-eastern ancestry that would like to play an arab"). Then he contradicts himself and say people shouldn't play idealized version of themselves. Double standards much?

SJWs tend to be incredibly American-centric in their view of race and culture. Which is probably why he thinks some empire would have to have a diversity experiment for their to be culturally diverse countries, instead of it happening naturally as a biproduct of conquests, empires, and shifting borders like in real life.

I think you missed my point. I understand that minions are a bookkeeping tool. But you can easily use the same mechanics for killing them with low level monsters in 5e without breaking the game in the slightest. The difference is that in one edition, you feel like your increasing numbers are actually increasing relative to your enemies.

Ha, holy shit. This isn't a published setting, is it?

>The absolute best DM I ever encountered was a person who felt they weren't creative enough to be a good DM. But they turned out to be amazing at adapting book campaigns into some amazing stuff. They technically never created anything new but their games were great.
>That is the type of person who is going to listen to Colville as a authority and decide "Yeah I am not creative enough to be a DM".
Isn't Colville only using premade adventures too? So that's kind of contradictory to his videos if he really turns away people who would do the exact same thing as he's doing.

That being said, after reading the thread I still have no idea what he actually said or who he thinks shouldn't be a DM.

>1. He starts saying that “Certain people” shouldn’t DM games
He's not wrong. There are some people who are just shit DM's.
>2. He had this bizarre rambling about why players disliked 4E
IDK, not sure if his ramblings were correct, because there's no way in hell I'd sit through an entire podcast.
>3. Colville claims 4E was superior in terms that that it allowed players to truly embrace roleplay and creativity.
Can't say he's wrong. The combination of re-fluffability, and every class being playably good allowed essentially any concept that didn't include true flight before epic-tier to be played, no matter how silly.
> And apparently shared narrative settings like Forgotten Realms are terrible because they are limiting.
Again, I have to agree. Giant shared megasettings are great fun to read about in wiki-form, and movies are starting to do some interresting things with them, and they make GREAT Vonnegut novels, but they add almost nothing to a GAME and detract SOOO much.

Sounds like he's sort of a dick, but not wrong.

>You're level 20 so now you can fight level 20 orcs that are functionally identical to level 1 orcs.

Not exactly true. Higher level creatures are assumed to have access to stronger effects. You _could_ scale up a level 1 orc to be level 20, but you'd basically only do that to show that you can.

As an aside, this is also sort of a silly complaint to make about 4e but not all other D&Ds. At least 4e gives you the option to diversify the level 20 orc barbarian; what would he do in AD&D? 3.5? 5e? Sure, you could homebrew stuff for him, but 4e has that shit built in, any homebrew you make is on top of that.

Goddamit this, as someone who started out playing 4th edition its so mechanical its painful to actually play

>only 4e allows for internal customization of monsters
I realize you may hate PF, but the fact is that the system for quick upgrades to a variety of things for any given monster exists in every single bestiary. You have access to slow upgrades too.

Cherrypicking asshat.

>old DM who likes 4e
You are either an old DM or like 4e, never both.

He's someone with opinions on the internet. Taking him at his word is stupid.

Nigga you just made sense

Yeah, I guess I am. You can plug in low level enemies if you wanted in 4e too, so nothing's changed?

Minions are for time saving. If you really want to track exactly how much damage your 10 HP fodder is taking, just don't use the minion system? It's not a required part of encounter building by means.

If you were complaining minions as a mechanic didn't mesh well with the flow of gameplay then sure, a lot of people agree and that's why many DMs don't use them or use variant versions (two-hit minions, etc.). Arguing that they detract from the feel of 'growing stronger' is a fundamental misunderstanding of their intended purpose though.

And besides, what shows more clearly that you have grown stronger when you go from taking several attacks to kill orcs to one-shotting them? Unless you care more that it says 'minion' on the stat block that you can't see than the DM telling you that you've just mown them down like grass.

I... what?

I know you can add templates to creatures in any D&D.

I'm saying that picking out 4e for making a level 20 orc just an inflated level 1 orc is silly, when as a baseline, it's the least true for that edition of D&D.

Admittedly, PF at least added rage powers (not that they are very interesting imo but w/e).

When the first reply hits it perfectly and we can all just go home.

Only if you agree on some of his worst opinions, maybe. See

>but if you have the capacity to sift the good from the bad, communism and nazism can be decent resource for for a different perspective

There is no reason to dig through a mountain of shit for a few good points.

He is a bigot and contradicts himself a lot. everything is fine as long it helps his narrative. When it doesn't then you are in the wrong (and should feel ashamed of yourself) and you should do things his way.

Oh shit. I watched his first video. I thought that it was a great way to introduce someone to gm'ing.

It's too bad he went full sjw retard.

Underrated.

I was watching his series on DMing, it was pretty cool at first but then I noticed some pretty hard case sjw shit being dropped in here and there. I bailed pretty early, he got grating.

>As an aside, this is also sort of a silly complaint to make about 4e but not all other D&Ds.

None of the other D&D editions have that problem. In them, you're expected to fight radically different things at different levels. Creatures that don't share templates and have nothing to do with each other, and usually are barely balanced at all (which is a benefit here, it makes them feel more like a real threat, something you have to watch out for because it doesn't scale to your level).

>Really nigger? You don't know what you are feeling for 4-8 hours?
Obviously I'm not him, but I personally have a feeling of duty/guilt to make a fun night for everybody. This would weigh on me if I didn't know if I was providing this.

Of course, I'm also a egotistical narcissist drunk on my own delusions of grandeur, so at a certain point I kinda feel if you're not having fun with my genius setting and plothooks then it's your own plebby fault.
>Hell no.
It's funny because you're going against conventional Veeky Forums wisdom here. The GM is the one supposed to provide an interesting game for the players. To be honest, if their idea of fun just doesn't match up to yours, it's better not to GM for them.
>starts talking about it is fine when people play Arabs in Viking country
It can be done very well. See: The Thirteenth Warrior.

Being too ethnically self-important to abandon your own race is a dumb reason though.

That guy is chill as fuck, I love him.

>None of the other D&D editions have that problem. In them, you're expected to fight radically different things at different levels.

4e gives you the option to scale things up. Nobody is forcing the DM to make you fight green/brown/red skinned orcs at 10/20/30.

You are not expected to do that. Just because you can doesn't mean you must.

Watch it cunt. #3.

>1. He starts saying that “Certain people” shouldn’t DM games

This is correct. Some people are shit DMs.

>He had this bizarre rambling about why players disliked 4E / compared it to Warcraft because D&D lost players when WoW was big. (I don’t know how you could look at a 4E player’s stack of power cards and cool downs

I don't think you understand what a cooldown is. You realize that your definition a 3.5 wizard is basically a huge stack of 'cooldowns'?

>Colville claims 4E was superior in terms that that it allowed players to truly embrace roleplay and creativity.

He's kinda right? Every class was viable and full of different mechanics that could be swapped around and reimagined to pretty much run any concept, and make it feel like you're playing that concept.

>And apparently shared narrative settings like Forgotten Realms are terrible because they are limiting.

They are extremely limited, that's true. Terrible is subjective, but I have to agree.

>Why would he waste 40% of his time on the official D&D podcast praising the previous edition?

I don't understand the question. Why wouldn't he? The podcast is about D&D.

Anyway, if that guy in the OP image is this dude he looks like a douche, but he sounds like a pretty correct douche as far as I'm concerned.

>In them, you're expected to fight radically different things at different levels.
Yeah, that's why you don't have stat blocks for level 20 orcs in the MM of any edition, you gotta scale them up yourself.

>Creatures that don't share templates and have nothing to do with each other, and usually are barely balanced at all (which is a benefit here, it makes them feel more like a real threat, something you have to watch out for because it doesn't scale to your level).
Really, man? A broken CR system is now an advantage because you can destroy your players by accident?

You misunderstand me on 2 points.

1. Why would you run a game for players when you as a GM aren't having fun? Your goal is for players to have fun but also for you to have fun. If you aren't having fun you shouldn't waste time on GMing, preparing the game etc.

2. I don't mind the Thirteenth Warrior. I actually like that movie. I don't like him being a douchebag saying it is fine for a middle-eastern dude to play arab in viking setting and you as a white male should broaden your horizons and not play characters that are idealized versions of youself (meaning white, male, your own set of morals, beliefs etc.)

>He starts saying that “Certain people” shouldn’t DM games

And he would be absolutely right. There's actually probably plenty of people who shouldn't do a lot of things.

This is the same guy who has uploaded a video ,saying people who hate the new Ghostbuster movie are facists.

>you as a white male should broaden your horizons and not play characters that are idealized versions of youself (meaning white, male, your own set of morals, beliefs etc.)

This sounded suspicious, so I just checked the video. He doesn't say this at any point.

Actually, while there are a few things he says that I disagree with, a lot of his points and the general spirit of this video are pretty good. He at no point says you need to have a genderdynamic racefluid world in your D&D. In fact, he literally says that the standard western fantasy world is fine if that's all your players are interested in and all they know. But the video is about introducing new people to the game and making them feel included, and, you know what, I've found that a lot of his points are pretty spot on.

It IS true that most first time or even second time players run characters that look and act like idealized versions of themselves. It IS true that a great way of integrating basically any person is having a Mediterranean sea analogue where your port cities can have characters from anywhere pop up. It IS true that trying to get new players to get fully into character and put themselves aside to play characters/settings that they're not really familiar is hard, and often a gradual process.

Also, I believe someone up above was complaining that this guy made 'forced racemixing' or something like that part of his setting? Fuck me, no he didn't. I'm glad I actually took the time to watch this rather than take the word of you niggas at face value, because you're misrepresenting what he said completely. He said that an empire repatriated citizens from around he world - SOMETHING REAL LIFE EMPIRES HAVE DONE ALL THE FUCKING TIME FOR THE SAME REASONS HE CITES RIGHT IN THE VIDEO.

Jesus, all you niggas is just looking for someone to be salty at.

Been meaning to ask some people. Are his books worth picking up? If anything i'd want a print copy, but if they're crap then meh.

>Jesus, all you niggas is just looking for someone to be salty at.

Did we watch the same video?

He talks about gender, ethnicity, and how they differ from our view of it and our historical view of it.

>Also, I believe someone up above was complaining that this guy made 'forced racemixing' or something like that part of his setting? Fuck me, no he didn't.

In this same video he mentioned he made space romans that decided to kidnap children in relocate them around the universe. Empire collapsed and 1,000 years passed. Now everyone is any possible skin color and any possible culture. This is prime example of forceful mixing of cultures to fit his narrative.

>SOMETHING REAL LIFE EMPIRES HAVE DONE ALL THE FUCKING TIME FOR THE SAME REASONS HE CITES RIGHT IN THE VIDEO
Can you share some examples?

He's awesome. I watch both and I think I like his advice more. I've found both helpful, but Hankerin's mechanics like timers and stuff really move crap along. Wish I had it earlier on. Actually had my first group spend like an hour scouring this damn mausoleum for some loot or some shit. If I'd had something pushing them on, we'd be done with that shit.

>He talks about gender, ethnicity, and how they differ from our view of it and our historical view of it.

So? Pretty much all his points are in how this relates to getting new players to play a game of D&D.

The only real historical point he makes is that there were places in history where cultures and ethnicities mingled constantly. And he's right.

>In this same video he mentioned he made space romans

I'm going to assume you meant fantasy Romans here.

>that decided to kidnap children in relocate them around the universe

I'm going to assume you meant setting here.

>Empire collapsed and 1,000 years passed. Now everyone is any possible skin color and any possible culture.

Actually, he says that this means ethnicities are distributed more like those in a modern nation. He very explicitly says that there are regional cultures that have redeveloped after the big fantasy Romans fell.

Either way, it doesn't matter. Firstly, forcibly moving populations around for reasons like this is something real life empires have actually done, and secondly, it simply doesn't matter. As a contrivance for new players that means they can make any kind of character from anywhere, it works fine. It doesn't fit a narrative, it serves a game purpose, and that's fine. Stop getting your panties twisted over literally nothing.

Not the same dude, but Assyria under Tiglath-pileser is well known for doing this, and probably being the regime that made it 'fashionable' to do this in the Middle East for a long period after that.

Fuck off retard.

No.
Not him but fuck off retard.
Related to nothing, but making your setting fit your narrative is exactly what you're supposed to do. What, do you want his setting to fit your narrative?

>hurrrr
>People not wanting a series rebooted to make anti-men shit is fascism

Fucking moron. People may have been more keen if it had been a sort of spinoff of the original ghostbusters with an entirely new crew. But regardless Paul Feig's directing is horrible and he actually wanted to put a scene in the movie where the villain somehow possesses all the cops and the military all at once and has them do a dance off. Instead he had to put it post-credits

It feels like he made the whole Ghostbusters video just to troll people, and it seems like it's working.

I enjoyed his books. I like stories with little to no exposition, when characters suffer plausible consequences for their actions, and settings that feel just-different-enough from other high fantasy tropes without being over the top.

On the other hand, pretty much all of his characters are established in the world, and experienced adventurers. When they suddenly show off a powerful skill with no prior exposition, it can seem ham-handed and frustrating. I like that I had to collect little hints and pieces of Heden's past adventures to get a full picture, but those adventures were basically your stock-standard "Save the world D&D plot for a party of 4 to 6 12th level adventurers," and there's a lot of bullshit magic artifacts and extraplanar hijinks that are involved in those.

I like the interpersonal drama from the, "Our party failed, broke up, and all kind of hate each other" stuff. But there's also, "I have my share of a dragon's hoard, my friend has a sword that can level armies just sitting around and I was also once besties with a leader of interdimensional beings capable of leveling cities."

So, you know, YMMV. I liked them, but I wouldn't have considered $10 for 2 books a huge waste if I hadn't.

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