Everything you think about Game Mastering is probably wrong: Part VIII - Automatic Player Options
This entry in the series might stray a bit more into the game design side, but it is very relevant to a common trend I see in terms of game advice. Game advice itself seems to have mostly shifted to YouTube where I see two types of people at the forefront (I have suspicions for the demographic reasons but those are neither here nor there).
New GM’s who have been playing less than 7 years and think deeply about GMing, running into the same ideas that anyone who has been involved in the hobby for more than 7 years has seen cycle through. The quantum ogre/illusionism, reskinning unrelated content, inventory limits actually add value, etc. I don’t worry too much about this camp, because (snob as I am), I don’t think anyone should take advice too seriously from anyone who has been doing anything less than seven years. Expertise takes time. I don’t take medical advice from first year med students either.
The second batch seems to be old hands, who I strongly suspected either cut their teeth or spent most of their early years with 2nd Edition AD&D. AD&D is the forgotten middle child of D&D and while it had its warts it had a lot of (poorly organized) gold mixed in. Second edition of D&D is both a high point of the issue I am going to talk about but also when it started to change towards its twilight with the introduction of kits.
A common suggestion is to move away from having players just “gain” things as they level up towards actually getting them from adventuring. Don’t have Paladins just gain a magic warhorse at 4th level out of the blue, make them go on an adventure and gain the horse. Don’t have fighters just have troops show up at 9th level, have them rescue the company of the black capes from a siege by the undead and earn their loyalty. Likewise downtime actions have made it into games when instead you could just actually DO the adventures. Don’t just roll to sell a magic item, have an adventure to actually find a buyer and sell it.
This makes for a much better game to play in. Instead of rolling a die and just gaining a benefit from a table because you hit a level, you actually get to play through the adventure. The magic horse your paladin pulls from the Swamp of Sorrow and resurrects with the tear of a unicorn will be much cooler than “War Horse (Strong), Max HP, unbreakable morale”. Said Company of the Black Cape will mean more than “78: 150 Light Spearmen”. A feat taught to you by a blind master in a mountainside cave in exchange for you avenging the wrong done to him by the evil Count Molari is far more memorable than going “I hit 4th level so I take Great Weapon Mastery”. So the obvious piece of advice I am going to give is don’t do that thing that I just explained is way better in great detail.
A common theme I bring up in these posts is understanding the medium of gaming and understanding the context of gaming. Gaming doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The random Paladin Steed table or Random Fighter Soldiers table aren’t there because they are better to experience for the player getting them than an adventure. They exist because they are better for the group as a whole.
Gaming is a social activity. It is a party with a fixed duration where multiple people (the players) have to share the attention of the GM. While going on a special side adventure to find a paladin steed is great for the paladin, it can be less great for the other players tagging along. This special attention can be spread out of course, in theory everyone could have their own side quest for their own "special thing" (assuming the GM built them to not be solo side quests). This runs into the second problem that these side quests tend to happen at similar points in time. If everyone gets a feat at 4th level, and the whole party hits 4th level at about the same time… who gets priority? How many sessions (and other levels) do the other players go without a feat until it's their turn? Do they hit 8th level and then need to get two feats? What happens to the main adventure the GM themselves wanted to run while all these side quests are dealt with?
"Aha!" Say some strawman advice givers “That just shows the need for a solo side adventure with the GM and the lone player in question”. This is a fine chance to share the spotlight and overall it's pretty fun, but it again misses the context of the medium of gaming. People have a hard enough time clawing a few hours each week to game reliably unless they are either very young or retired. If you have multiple players hitting a similar need at the same point then the GM needs to put aside vastly more time to run side adventures and write them. It heavily burdens the GM with even more work when they have the most in the first place. Who has this much free time anymore? And so we enter the “just roll a table” option. It is the equivalent of a jar of factory made spaghetti sauce. It isn’t as good as homemade sauce, created with tomatoes grown in your own garden and carefully prepared all day but it does allow you to have a fairly decent meal after a long day, longer commute, and a pressing need to clean the house. So too are the table rolls for special character options.
As always, you can attempt to square the circle when possible. In my games, downtime actions feature very prominently. To that end I make “unlocking” downtime actions something you have to do by adventure at least once. When I ran an Iron Age game, livestock raids were very important as a thing Clan Champions did during the summer months (the war season). So I wrote up some simple mechanics for a “Livestock Raid” downtime action, but before a party (not player) could use that option for downtime actions I required that the group play through at least one livestock raid in game.
If you do find yourself in a situation where the entire group has abundant free time, then by all means make your home cooked pasta sauce. But even in retirement I suspect most people will have other priorities. Part of running a game is understanding the surrounding context it exists in. Key among them is that we are busy adult people with many busy adult things to do.