Trying to be "Less Wrong" in D&D

Shakespeare's Coriolanus

D&D is, at a minimum, two games played in tandem. The first is the role playing; the "RP" of TTRPG. This is the collective improve experience that has a narrator/game master embodying everything in the world that isn't the players. I've personally found this game composes nearly 90% of my time at the table. I don't know if everyone has had similar experiences, but I can say that D&D for me is a roleplay-heavy experience.

The other part, the "war game" part, is odd to me. It isn't that the arithmetic of this other game isn't fun; in fact, I'm deep in the junkyard that is optimization: I'm a living, breathing meme with a ream of characters that will never walk in the mind of anyone but me, and I regret none of the math making up the bones of that graveyard. No, it's not that combat isn't fun in D&D, it's that it isn't synergistic with the other game being played. I do believe that the juxtaposition of these two games, especially in their initial presentation, has intrigued, and dare I say, tricked new players into having fun, subverting and exceeding expectations once play begins.

Long may they reign!

I don't know if this experience is universal, but when I was first presented the game, it was several hours of option farming, increasing this or that number by a digit or two. It was an introduction to new math rocks that would boost those numbers further; the icosahedron likened to a god with the power it had in the game to come. It was expressing synergies between attacks and how little figures moved on a grid and so much more... I didn't roll a single attack with my character for three full sessions.

I'd gain the perspective years later to categorize this experience and would now call it simply an "intrigue forward" part of the campaign that I was dropped into. Old-hats and forever-DMs, I'm sure, will nod with understanding at this explanation. This wasn't a common initiation into the game, but their was enough crossover in the tales told by my peers that I know it isn't unique to just me. Even later, I came to realize through conversations and many more years of being a GM myself that the amount of roleplay people were expecting when first sitting down at the table almost always exceeded their expectations by a significant amount. The most mitigating factor of this in the last decade or so has been the proliferation of "lets plays" where people watch others long before sitting down at a table. Even with D&D hitting the mainstream, the disconnect between reality and expectation still persists. This brought me to an unavoidable conclusion: the way the game of D&D is initially presented to players is incongruous and, I personally think, deceptive. 

So, how do we as GMs become less wrong in our presentation of the game? I think I have only one true suggestion...

Know Your Table

This seems obvious, but I've known and know GMs that would have a hard time accurately describing their style when running a game. Hell, I know some that would, unknowingly, incorrectly describe aspects of how they run a game. The number of times I've heard "my game's 50/50 roleplay and combat" only for combat time to take up, at most, an hour of a 4 to 6 hour session is innumerable. The inverse hasn't been true for me particularly, but I know that it has been true for some of my mega-dungeon peers.

My first recommendation: Actually time how long combat takes. Humans, as it turns out, are terrible at predicting, remembering, or internalizing how long tasks take without a literal clock keeping them honest. I have done this. I now speak to reality more accurately when asked about my game: I'm a 90/10 GM, 90% roleplay, 10% combat. I came by those numbers by recording 20 sessions worth of games. More accurately, of 86.4 hours, 77.06 (89.2%) of those hours were spent roleplaying, while 9.33 (10.8%) of those hours were spent in combat.

There are far more numbers and more game analysis that came from those recordings, but it was shocking to see those numbers. Before recording those numbers, I said I was a 70/30 GM. If I extend this to other tables, perhaps a foolish extension, it would mean there's a 20% discrepancy in what GMs with decades of running games are presenting when onboarding first-time players. Simply put, I think GMs are misrepresenting their games very, very often.