We are working on the mentoring program now. It’s a bit more complicated/involved.

The point is — and I think it’s a good one, rarely made — that good GMs are potentially bad for business, but I’m not sure they’re good for the hobby either. Those GMs who play the same game with the same 5 people for ten years, they’re not making new players, whether or not they’re making new customers. Also, that GM is learning how to GM wonderfully for those five players — but what could she learn from GMing for other players?

Bad GMs are still bad for everyone, because they drive people away from the games. If your first experience is with a shitty DM, you may think that ire and antagonism is how D&D is meant to be played, and go off for WoW’s graphics and quests as a better DM.

The industry/hobby divide remains illusory, though, as hobbyist publishers continue to publish and breathe life into the hobby — for discussion, for new ideas that can be ported over into other games, etc. — even while they are counted as part of the industry. That the industry’s goals are different from the hobby’s is, alas, true, but they overlap a lot more than they don’t.

That individual years-long campaign isn’t a part of the hobby, either, though. It’s a closed set, only a home game, possibly contributing to the industry by buying 1-5 books however often it does, but that’s it. (There’s the home game, the hobby, and the industry. The home game is part of the hobby’s atomic structure, but the fact that the home game can survive the local death of the hobby is evidence that they are different, separately sustainable or losable things.) But they’re not contributing to the hobby, by default, either. Now, should that great DM start a blog that shares her know-how, or write and listen about the campaign in an Actual Play thread, that group is starting to contribute to the hobby, but not the industry.

That’s fine. Wonderful, in fact. If the hobbyists were to network a little more, see GMing as a skill and take some public pride in being good at it (how many of us know great GMs who are otherwise quiet about being gamers at all?) and being interested in being even better at it, the hobby would strengthen itself by comparing notes. Not every GM would have to learn the same lessons themselves — we could learn from your spectacular belly flops. (And I certainly agree with you there — I’m for GMs striving to improve our average, not for becoming more average.)

Obviously, some of this already happens now in a way it didn’t in the 1980s, with blogs and forums giving the network new tools. We can maximize it, though.

As for the industry — if the player network is strong, and people aren’t so timid about joining new groups or sitting in with strange GMs, the industry’s in a better place, too. It’ll take care of itself if the hobby is well.

I shouldn’t go putting this into comments, though, ’cause I write these too fast and I get parsed for syntax over meaning. I don’t want to give away the value in the larger article, when I finally find time to say it right. I appreciate you putting the argument through its paces, though.