Everything you think about Game Mastering is probably wrong: Part XVI - A dearth of GMs
There has been a lot of talk about a shortage of DMs/GMs lately, enough so that I switched out a future planned post in this series from Descriptivism vs Prescriptivism to touch on this topic. Not because its more important but because I already wrote half of this back in the era of Google+ and December is already a pretty busy month.
The general idea seems to spout back to this article, and I became aware through this youtube video .
The TL;DR version of my upcoming spiel is that this is heavily tied to the complexity of game systems involved and the work it places on the different players. OSR games have no shortage of GMs and 5e has a real shortage of GMs.
This builds upon the recurring themes of these posts that people forget that these need to be social games that appeal to all players, and that the GM is just another player like any other.
Back in the G+ era I noticed similar beats and did some sleuthing to the numbers. In what is now nearing a decade ago I noted that OSR groups had player shortages while the new 5e groups were showing DM shortages. Pathfinder I noted had even more chronic DM shortages (and more 'Forever DMs') and even had groups hiring DMs (back when this was considered a bonkers concept).
5e hoists a lot more work on the GM to create interesting story beats and balanced encounters to a party of characters with potentially wildly different abilities. A deadly encounter one week is suddenly a cake walk the next due to the changes between a single character being swapped out. The GM has to spend a lot more effort on being entertaining. It's all their brainpower. This is even more of an issue with more complex games.
OSR games also have a problem though, player shortages. Some of this is the lack of the 5e "official" and "brand name stamps", but it's not all that. Old School Games ask a lot more of players. The GM builds an interesting dungeon but as the answer isn't on the character sheet, that asks a lot more of OSR players to be entertaining themselves. Their sheet says "fighter 2 6hp, AC 5, Mail, Torch, Spear, Lard" and 6 stats (maybe some saves). To be interesting and do interesting things falls onto player ingenuity and creativity. There is some stuff to riff off of, but its mostly a blank page. A framework does make it a lot easier to come up with things, which is why random generators for new characters (random starting junk, random quirk, my own random bullshit) are so popular.
As always, I try to square the circle with NGR. Characters are simple and quick to make (especially with Schrodinger's Character) but still have enough mechanical crunch that you can tell any two randomly generated characters apart not only in appearance but in how they play. Likewise balancing encounters is enough that there is always a tension between a chance at victory or defeat because there is a high level of swingy-ness tempered with a strong bell curve possibility.
In short, the decision is always made to reduce the amount of work asked for from the players (which includes the GM). You can't have none (anything of value takes effort) but you can reduce the amount of work that adds no additional enjoyment and at the same time try to balance the work among all involved so you don't end up piling it all on one person. This is something that can be tweaked in any system.
This is one of the reasons for the descriptivism vs prescriptivism point I'll go into later (author's note, between the writing of this and the shutting down of the related Patreon account, the author did not write that post).