Opinions on DM style games.

I've run pretty much exclusively games that have some sort of DM involved (either a referee for the Pokémon Anime Style Battling League or an updater for my personal project) but I've noticed that most of the RP world involves more back-and-forth type RPing between two characters. Have other people around here had experience with this type of RPing? I'd love to hear thoughts about it.

 

I enjoy the occasional DM'd thread, such as for special site events, especially those in the expedition/adventuring vein, but I typically prefer the roleplay at large to be driven by members, not by a DM.

 

In my experience, it usually makes it harder for me, as a player, to really get into RPing. I find this is usually because there are so many actions that are GM dependent, and describing the scenery every post gets boring and repetitive quick. It's why I usually stick to freeforms, or if the site is based around Ref-style RP, I pray and pray they have an option to allow a GM/referee/whatever to do the rolls, and then let you type out and describe it as you wish, so long as it corresponds to what actually happened according to rolls.

 

The site I'm on has DM-style threads. It strikes an excellent balance by leaving the decision up to the player about what they want done. "Modheavy" threads have the DM involved in every round of posting and tend to be longer adventures with good rewards. "Modlite" threads have the DM spawn a few encounters to drive things forward, but the player has control over what happens in those encounters, and the rewards are middling. "Modless" threads have meagre rewards but tend to be good for your standard chat over coffee (or a more action-filled thread, if you're not in the mood to wait on a DM). It works really well.

It also helps that anyone can be a DM as long as they've been around the site for two weeks, and that if a DM goes MIA, anyone else can come along and pick up the slack. As far as I'm aware, we've never had any problems come from this arrangement.

 

A combination of both, like with important things being watched by staff, but lots of one on one type things too (or more than one on one in the case of some threads)