There is a recurring GM complaint that I have never had much sympathy for: that the GM does all the work while the players merely turn up and consume.
There is an obvious truth in this. Being a GM and being a player are not symmetrical activities. The GM usually prepares more, and during the session the GM has to be much more consistently “on.” You are the players’ eyes and ears into the fictional world; you describe what they perceive, portray its inhabitants, decide how the world reacts to what they do, adjudicate consequences, create tension and pressure, and keep the whole imaginary machine moving. Players can sit back for a few minutes. The GM usually cannot.
But none of this means that the GM is some kind of unpaid entertainer generously producing content for a table of passive consumers.
For one thing, the amount of preparation involved in GMing is much less fixed than people think. I have run games for which I prepared for days and others where I arrived at the table with almost nothing and simply started improvising, and I cannot honestly say that the zero-prep sessions were worse than the sessions for which I had spent two hours preparing. Preparation is a knob the GM can turn. Different games and different styles demand different amounts of it, and some GMs genuinely enjoy preparation, but if you spend six hours preparing a three-hour session and then resent your players because they have not done six hours of work themselves, it is worth remembering that part of that imbalance was created by a choice you made about how to GM. Don't prepare if you don't like preparing.
I would go further, though. Beyond a certain point, preparation can make a game worse.
The reason is that roleplaying games are not novels. The fictional world is supposed to become a shared construction. If I prepare too many characters with elaborate agendas, too many revelations and possible events waiting to be triggered, I will tend to make those happen. I may still tell myself that the players have complete freedom, but I have already invested too much in my own intentions.
Preparation becomes less a gift than a set of constraints.
Players can do the same thing. A player who arrives with a one-page character background can give the GM useful material: a lost brother, an old enemy, a religious conviction, a hometown. A player who arrives with forty pages describing three generations of family history, seven important former lovers, a secret society, a childhood prophecy, seventeen named NPCs and a detailed account of every important event in the character’s life has unquestionably put in more work. But they have not made the game easier or better. They have handed the GM an enormous quantity of information to be remembered, respected and woven into a world. Player preparation may make the life of a GM into a nightmare.
I still remember a player who intensely disliked how I portrayed the parents of his character. I wanted them to be typical ageing parents, worried about their son and turning cranky with ag. But the player thought that was undignified compared with how he imagined them. It was the only time a player demanded of me to retcon an entire game session into oblivion.
The effort involved in defining long, complex backgrounds for characters is real, but effort and contribution are not identical.
The same is true of GM preparation. Five hours spent preparing material does not mean five hours’ worth of value. Sometimes five hours produce great stuff. Sometimes they produce baggage to carry around. Sometimes they produce nothing. How much time have I spent preparing a published scenario only to eventually realise that I didn't like it, or that it didn't make sense at all?
So what do players bring to the table? Well, first and foremost, they bring their time.
For three or four hours, these people agree to sit there and pay attention to what you are creating with them. They listen while you describe a ruined city, a frightened innkeeper, a body in a locked room or footsteps approaching in the darkness. They make the effort to imagine those things. They treat invented people as if their motives mattered. And they allow your voice to have final say in what goes into that fiction.
That is not a trivial contribution. In fact, I think GMs sometimes underestimate how peculiar and extraordinary the bargain is.
When I GM, other people are giving me permission to take them into my fantasy. They are allowing me to be their eyes and ears in an imaginary world. I say that there is a castle on the hill and there is a castle on the hill. I tell them that the king looks frightened and they wonder why. I describe a noise behind a door and a player is scared of opening it. I invent a person who did not exist before, give that person a name and a voice, and minutes later the players may care whether that person lives or dies.
There is almost an intimacy in that act. And there is trust.
They trust that I will not waste their attention. Attention is not a negligible resource. Nor is time. They may not have spent Wednesday evening drawing maps or designing encounters, but on Friday night they have shared with me three or four hours of their finite lives. They could have watched a film, gone to dinner, played another game, read a book, spent time with their family or simply gone to bed. Instead they sit in a room with me and participate in an imaginary world that I bring into existence.
They also bring agency. The players do not merely consume the fictional world. They animate it by making choices. Without the players choices, there would be no point in playing RPGs.
RPGs are asymmetrical, but collaborative. Neither side is doing the same job, and there is no reason they should be.
There is an economic problem underneath this. There are usually more people who want to play than people willing to GM. That scarcity makes GMing feel like a service. If five people want to play and only one is willing to run the game, that person is enabling something the others could not otherwise do.
But I suspect that much of this scarcity exists because people are frightened of GMing rather than because GMing is intrinsically a heroic burden. Players are told, explicitly or implicitly, that before they GM they need encyclopedic knowledge of the rules, a carefully constructed campaign, maps, NPCs, plots, voices, balanced encounters and contingency plans for every direction the players might take. They are worried about being responsible for everybody having fun, and that if a session goes badly they will have failed the group. And then they hear experienced GMs complain about how much work GMing requires... and everyone wonders why nobody else volunteers.
Perhaps we would convince more people to become GMs if we stopped treating enormous amounts of preparation as evidence of virtue?
TL;DR:
Being a GM is a service. You take on a role that other people are reluctant to perform, and without which the game will not happen.
But being a GM is also a privilege, because people are allowing you to lead them into a fictional world and trusting you to make it worth their time.
And that is certainly not nothing.
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