I started as a player in September 1985 when I was handed the 1e character sheet of someone who had quit the game. After that first game I was hooked. I ran my first game about 3 months later. It stank on ice.
When I went home from college for the summer, I ran games for my friends from home. I realized I was pretty good at it, despite being really green. My friends really enjoyed my games and were always looking forward to the next one. It was during this time I think I realized that, "Yeah, I'm gonna be the DM". It later worked out that I got to play some, but I DM'd most of the time.
Since then, when it came to D&D then later Pathfinder I have been the GM well over 95% of the time for nearly 30 years. Sure, I get burned out from time to time, run out of ideas, come up with some clunkers for game nights, but since no one else has any interest in running this game it's always gonna be me. And yeah, I kinda dig it.
When my wife said "sure, I'll give it a shot"
That's an understatement GM Rednal, what do you have like 10 active games! :-)
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I read comics as a kid and I loved even then the stories more than the artwork. I would play with toys and develop long running arcs between the different factions - He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Star Wars were the main participants, I even have a picture (the old polaroids) of one of my set ups left as is which looks like complete chaos now but I suppose then I had everything where it was supposed to be. My mother would lose it and want me to clean that room but I would tell her "I'll lose the thread of the story if I do that!"
When I was 12 my aunt got me the D&D Basic Red Box for Christmas, after I was done playing video games for a few days I picked it up and ran the first solo adventure and I was hooked. My Fighter died right away so I ran a Cleric next, the Cleric has been my PC choice of class ever since.
I introduced my friends to the system and for the first three to five years we rotated DM duties. At some point that group (with the exception of one person) was done playing RPGs and I had my fill of people no showing for D&D games so I played for a while.
Then once again in my early 20's the games dried up so I decided to start running a Vampire game that would span the ages from 1190 to 2000. I started and finished the campaign in 5 years. At which point I decided to give up DMing and just play (I was starting Law & Business School so I figured I would not have the time to run anymore).
Six months later again the games dried up, so I decided I would run D&D while in school and give it after after Law and Business School - 15 years later I still run 3.5 table top.
I came here to find games to play in as I was tired of always DMing, then similar to Rednal's experience, I got frustrated with the PbP games that would die out, so I started GMing here as well.
Like DM Cal I occasionally get burned out so I take the summers off from Table Top to get the battery charged again. PbP, I experience less burn out but there are days when I do tune out.
That, obviously, is the short version of a 28 year gaming history. :-)
I think Rednal and I alone run over 30 games here on the boards... Oddly, neither of us plays in any of the others' campaigns. ;-)
...It's more than ten... XD
;-)
I started GMing just a bit later than I started playing. I had a lot of ideas and I wanted to give it a try. I was as inexperienced as a GM as I was as a player and my first games were probably awful, but that didn't kept me from continuing GMing. My first story was a V:tM one and I cannot even remember what it was about.
I got into GMing D&D much later, as I didn't want to GM that kind of games before I had a good understanding of the rules.
Some years ago I wanted to play - not just a computer RPG, but the real true fancy legendary PnP I never had the chance to try. I didn't know where to search, so I made up a bulletin and offered to be the GM, if necessary. Well, I got only one response, and she wasn't really motivated to actually start, but soon afterwards I joined the gaming group I am still in.
Roughly two years later I visited a good friend living half the country away. Our friendship was deep but suffered from the lack of a common hobby. So I simply risked it, told him we are going to start a campaign and continue it online. He was skeptical, rather wanted something small that could be finished within the visit, but I insisted in a campaign. Some friends of him joined and I got it handled moderately well, for my first real try.
Now, it's about two more years and like 40 online sessions (including a campaign change) later. Most of the guys will come over tomorrow, traveling through half the country for it. They tried GMing themselves, but it wasn't their thing, so it's me again. It will be a long evening today, with all the remaining preparation, but that's a low price to pay...
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When I was 11, since I knew no one who gamed, there was no question that I would have to DM. And anyway, I enjoyed telling stories, so why not? I figured - and this has remained my philosophy on RPGs to this day - that the players don't need to know the rules; they simply tell me what their characters do, and their characters do it. Unfortunately, my own extremely poor grasp of the rules was too much of a hinderance, and my first attempt to DM a BECMI game proved a dismal failure.
Fortunately, I soon made a friend who DM'd for me, and I learned from him. After that friend left, I was again left with no one with whom to game. It happened that my brother's friend was visiting our house a lot, and one day, I just proposed that I run BECMI for them. My brother quit after one session, but his friend kept coming back, and we ran a long campaign together.
Can you remember your first game?
Since that aforementioned failure doesn't count, the first REAL game I ran began with Keep on the Borderlands. After the clerics of the Shrine of Evil Chaos killed the party, leaving only one member alive to escape, that one PC recruited a new party to wipe out the clerics.
What were some things you’d tell your younger self about GMing if you could go back?
Don't fudge die rolls. Don't start beginning players with a grand epic campaign; start them with a simple dungeon crawl.
I'd teach my younger self to be less lenient with the players and to do a better NPC management. I still use GM-NPCs a lot, specially in small groups to fill some roles, and I try to make sure that they are relevant enough so the players like them but not so much that they steal their spotlight. It took some time to learn how to balance it right.
I realized I was going to have to DM when I brought my AD&D stuff with me on holidays, and suddenly realized that none of my brother and cousins had experience, good thing I had some modules with me, the hard part was levelling the characters up and equipping them to survive the very hard mmodules (no, it wasn't tomb of horrors, I don't even remember ever mastering that one, but I mastered Ravenloft several times, with the occasional TPK as a result)
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I attended PFS at a local store regularly for about 4 months before I decided to try to GM---they desperately needed more. I eventually realized I liked GMing better than playing, because I knew what was going on. I actually have a lot of people who like GMing in my friend group, though, so I have lots of opportunities to play as well as GM.
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I've been GMing almost since I started playing.
My first D&D game was back in 1981 when I was in sixth grade. I met another guy at a Pascal programming class for kids that I was taking at the local community college, and we somehow started talking about D&D, which I had heard of but had never played. He was a few years older than me (9th grade) but he invited me to join his D&D group... which included a few guys who were a lot older than me. They were using their own hybrid of OD&D, AD&D, and Judges Guild stuff. I had fun, and they were always really nice to me, but it was weird being an 11-year-old kid playing with guys in their late teens and 20s. I stopped playing with them after five or six sessions.
But I was hooked!
I bought the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set by Tom Moldvay later that summer after I'd saved up the money from mowing lawns. I then recruited my own friends to play. Since I put the group together, and I was the only one with experience playing, I was the DM. I ran them through The Keep on the Borderlands, In Search of the Unknown, Palace of the Silver Princess, and then started writing my own modules.
I started playing D&D in fifth grade (1989), my friend's older brother invited me to play one night that I was staying at their house. We played a few more times, and then I got my own set of rules (red box set). I wanted to play more so I turned to my younger brother and my sister to play; I was DM by default.
In Jr. high I met some other friends that played D&D. We would get together about once a month to play. I bought the AD&D 2nd edition rules and started running a few games as DM with my friends. In high school I dated the same person all four years. She enjoyed the games, and we invited her girlfriends to play. I was the DM and Storyteller with them for about 2 years. I helped two of them run games as DM and Storytellers. In college I started playing with a new group of friends, but I only DM once for them.
I do remember my first game I was the DM, it was a dungeon crawl. The PCs were hired to deliver a bag of ingredients to a wizard. It was a cockatrice in the bag, and the PCs were the ingredients; the wizard was a necromancer. The necromancer had also enslaved a goblin tribe to work for him in his mines. We had to fight our way out, or be turned into zombies. I kind of want to do this again, I would do better with it now that I am older.
The last game I GMed was with my sister brother, and two other friends. It has been a while, but I still would be doing it if time allowed.
I would tell my younger self to stop worrying about the rules, and focus more on making the game fun for the players. Apparently, many of them enjoyed the games because most of them still play to this day.
My middle school had an "activity period" scheduled that got used a handful of Fridays each year. All normal classes were shorter that day, leaving about 1-1/2 hours for the activity period at the end of the day. Teachers throughout the school would offer short classes for fun rather than a grade, and we could sign up for whatever we wanted (though some popular activities did have a cut-off on size, for various reasons). One of the Social Studies teachers hosted RPG space at least once a school year, recruiting students that he knew were experienced GMs to run games for other kids.
I was introduced to D&D in one of these activity periods in 6th grade, and played in another in 7th, but I didn't play regularly until 8th, when I asked for and got the D&D Basic Set for Christmas (1983). I tried running Keep on the Borderlands for my parents and sister, and it was a disaster because none of us knew what we were doing. But I had some friends who wanted to play, and I ended up being DM right from the start because everyone else in my group insisted that I was the most (only?) creative one. Because of that, I rarely got to play except as DM through the rest of middle school and high school.
I've always loved GMing, but was still happy to find other people in college who were willing and eager to run games, too. After 33 years, though, I still tend to GM at least as much as I play a PC. I enjoy it, and I've usually been more comfortable with it than the people who I've gamed with most regularly. But I'm usually happiest when I'm running my own campaign but also have the time and opportunity to play in someone else's.
I joined PFS last summer, so that has been largely been filling that very necessary role of "another game to enjoy but that I don't have to run."