The Taste Gap, or: On the weirdness of learning how to be a better Dungeon Master

I got into TTRPGs only pretty recently, in the grand scheme of things. And when I did, I immediately started to DM. Since being a player doesn't interest me that much for some reason. I'm in my mid 30s, which is to say that I'm at a point in my life where I have at least a very basic understanding of what it means to acquire a new skill in a somewhat structured fashion. And that is what I'm very consciously treating DMing as: a creative skill. My creative outlet of choice.

This post is about what it feels like to do this.This doesn't mean I think you should do this too. Actually, I would probably recommend that most people explicitly don't do this, because taking playing make-believe with your friends this seriously is kind of a weird thing to do and many of you will probably already have a creative outlet in your life. I, however, am absolutely loving it so far. Make of that what you want.

The Taste Gap

Now the problem with any skill, and creative ones in particular, is that you will run into what "This American Life" producer Ira Glass calls " The Taste Gap " – that point in your creative journey where your taste is developed enough to know very well that what you do or create isn't very good. Your ability to judge your work is better developed than your ability to create it in the first place. This can be discouraging, and the taste gap is a famous concept because almost everyone will run into it. And many fail to stick with whatever they're pursuing long enough to get out of it. But that is exactly Glass's advice to budding creatives: stick with it. Put in the work. Years of it. And if you do this, there will come a point where your work catches up to your ambition.

The Taste Gap Skill Gap

I generally agree with this advice. It's very hard not to. But I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that you will improve beyond a certain point by simply showing up. You will have to spend that time doing something along the lines of deliberate practice to really get where you want to go.

For me, that means that one session or arc I will focus on improving my ability to improvise situations, and another time I will do the opposite and see how running a pre-existing adventure exactly as written works out.

This means that, while developing your skill, the work you create will not just be bad, it will even be somewhat worse than what you're capable of. Because instead of using your mediocre skills to create a mediocre experience, you'll be using the skills you're bad at, and naturally create a bad experience around them. That you do this with the explicit goal of improving doesn't magically change this fact. But to be as good as your taste wants you to be, you will need all of these skills in the end. And you can only train them one, maybe two at a time.

So you will have to put yourself out of your comfort zone, find things you haven't done yet or aren't good at, and then do them. Every time you feel somewhat comfortable doing something, you will need to do something new for the very first time. If you do this, almost every session feels like the first.

The weirdness of being a DM

The thing is that with most creative hobbies, this process of learning might be cringe, but also simple. Not easy, but simple. You do the work, you put it out there, and anyone who wants to engage with it can do so. But you can become really fucking good at playing the guitar, even if no one hears you play for years.

Not so with DMing.

TTRPGs, and DMing by extension, are collaborative at heart. That's a big part of their beauty. Most of the things a DM does you can't do without having players to do them with, or... at.

This introduces a lot of complexity into the process of improving. Since you will have to trade off your own goals with still keeping your players engaged enough and frankly, not just using them as training material, but as human beings who simply want to have a good time.

But if you constantly challenge yourself, you will have to constantly put your players through worse work than what you know you're capable of.

And that is super hard. At least for me it is.