How did you learn to GM?

[wingsandsword]

I learned the hard way.

I had started buying Star Wars RPG (d6) books in high school and early in college (having been prohibited from D&D by a well meaning but misinformed father). I thought this game seemed really neato, so I wanted to play it.

I met the campus gaming club and organized a game, recruiting a group of players. I had no advice, little written instruction (the blurbs in the 2nd Edition Revised & Expanded rulebook), and just intuition and having watched the movies a zillion times and played a load of computer/console RPG's.

I had my baptism of fire in the fact that some of my players were very experienced, both as players in general, and with that game in particular. I had to learn quickly how to handle things. The game went on for a year, and it was quite challenging to run. Given how the d6 system breaks down at high levels, after a year-long campaign with many of the same characters it was getting silly, so the campaign ended.

Then I ran a 2e AD&D game, trying for a quasi-magical, semi-historic game set in the 3rd Crusade. I had to Just Say No to PC's who wanted to play Elven Fighter/Mage/Thieves and remind people that Xexxdrixx is not an acceptable name for a character.

All of this after joining a gaming club full of gamers, most of which had a lot more gaming experience, and my attempts at running a game before even playing were quite the baptism of fire.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I'm still learning.

 

[Nighthawk]

Self-taught, via the trial and error method (lots of trials and lots of errors). There are still trials and errors to go through.

 

[Thunt]

I was taught by my Mother and Uncle (who raised me) when I was 8 years old. They actually MADE me read the DMG and the PHB from cover to cover. It was like paino lessons for a normal kid.

 

[JamesDJarvis]

I was self taught. My first two players were my mom and dad, i got stumped on how to determine damage, it took a week or two before we couldresolve our first encounter while i figure out how the heck to roll damage for player attacks. I played D&D with whoever woudl give it a go and it slowly spread from to the kid next door and a few school chums.
It was over two years before i played in a game with people whom i hadn't introduced to the game.

A funny side note: A lot of my early dungeons were drawn on big 22" by 17" sheets of graph paper at a scale of 1" = 10'. The players mapped and moved figures on a like sized sheet of paper they drew the map on as they went.

 

[barsoomcore]

I learned from a blonde leather-clad biker chick named Darlene.

Seriously.

Oh, we'd done a bit of fooling around, trying to figure this weird game out, but in 1979 I joined a game run by Darlene the lovely woman in leather pants who kept killing me.

I was eleven, I think. Most of the people playing must have been in their twenties -- when you're eleven you pretty much classify people into "little kids", "grown-ups" and "human beings" and they were definitely "grown-ups".

By the time I was twelve I think I'd been fundamentally shaped (in oh so many ways) by Darlene and her evil imagination...

 

[Desdichado]

I learned from a blonde leather-clad biker chick named Darlene.

Seriously.

Oh, we'd done a bit of fooling around

Hee hee! I bet!

Anyway, I learned by trial and error in the mid-80s, mostly. I must have done OK--by the time I got online and started reading about the "theories" of GMing, I'd intuitively already stumbled into pretty much all of those techniques.

I don't know that I'm necessarily a "good GM"--I tend to run all games a certain way, to a point. But since that ways' the way I'd want to play, I think I do OK.

 

[Belen]

Modules. I had played D&D before, but could not find a game when I got to college. I had met plenty of people who played, yet none of them were willing to run. I bought a ton of modules, then asked some people if they had the time to play.

I have been a GM ever since.

 

[EricNoah]

Participated in one-on-one sessions with my older foster brother (he was learning to DM the hard way, by reading the rules and running adventures with me as the guinea pig). After he left for college, I jumped right in with one-on-one or small group DMing on my own. I read as many adventure modules as I could to get a sense of what made a good adventure though the weren't always that helpful. Later, a subscription to Dragon Mag was key to helping me improve my game.

 

[fusangite]

I'm still learning.

Good point Doug. Same here. It bears repeating.