How long have you been a DM?

[edemaitre]

Game Mastering

I've been a Game Master since 1983, and for most of that time, I've preferred running games to playing in them. Rather than toot my own horn, I'd say that our role-players are better judges of the relative quality of campaigns, but I've been lucky to have numerous fun folks, characters, and adventures with them...

 

[Old One]

I am with Henry...you need a longer scale !

Started in Dec 1981...nearly 24 years ago. Have gone through 4 stages:

(1) Really Bad Monty Haul Apprentice (1981-1983): Didn't know what the heck I was doing...and it showed.

(2) Tolerable Journeyman (1984 - 1990): Started crafting coherent sessions/mini-campaigns

(3) Junior Master (1991 - 1996): Everything comes together...great group, great long-running campaign, role-playing bliss

(4) Senior Master (2001 - 2004): Charter member of the RBDM-club and pretty darn good DM. Current work load and other RL issues have signficantly curtailed DMing activies since late 2004, but I do manage to get a Game Day/1-shot in from time to time.

Note the 4-year gap from 1997 thru 2000. This was the great "burnout" phase...when 2E had become an unwieldy monster. 3E re-energized me and brought me back in.

~ OO

 

[sjmiller]

Let's see, I started as a Referee in Traveller back in 1979 and I became a DM in either 1980 or 1981, I am not sure which. I've only had a few brief periods where I have not been a DM, one was due to burning out on running games, and the other was during USAF basic training and tech school.

 

[Peter Gibbons]

26 years, off and on again.

 

[Tarangil]

26 years, off and on again.

That's double of what I've got so far. I've got 13 years, and the last few have been off and on. It's damn hard to play a game when you've got 3 young kids, and shift work with no regularity with hours. :\

 

[freebfrost]

I am with Henry...you need a longer scale !

I know, I know!

But I wanted to see if my initial thoughts were in the ballpark, and I haven't seen anything that makes me think I was way off.

Basically, I'm seeing that if you are in the 15+ year catagory, you consider yourself a good Dungeon Master. You may humbly state that you've got a lot still to learn, but in any open environment like an RPG, that's always the case as you encounter new situations and learn to deal with those.

But overall, if you've stuck with it that long, you tend to recognize that you have the skills, whereas in the other thread I saw a lot more younger DM's tend to be much more down on their abilities in this arena.

Interesting.

 

[jdrakeh]

Nearly eight years and, yes, I consider myself to be good at it. I've come to find that GMing a given game can largely be summed up as 'playing to expectations' - if you give players what they expeect from any given game, you'll have largely satisfied players (this isn't to say that deviation is bad, merely that it should be justified within a given setting/premise).
Two examples to illustrate a bit more clearly:

Example 1:

You tell your players that you're going to run a Call of Cthulhu game. They will come to the table expecting a Call of Cthulhu game - mad scientists, eldritch evils, inbred hillbillies, madness, death, and all of that. If you deliver, they'll be happy. That's playing to expectations.

Contrast that with...

Example 2:

You tell your players that you're going to run a Call of Cthulhu game. They come to the table expecting a Call of Cthulhu game - mad scientists, eldritch evils, inbred hillbillies, madness, death, and all of that. During the second session, you introduce giant, sentient, transforming robots from the planet Cybertron (yes, those robots). Your players will hate you for promising them one thing and giving them something else entirely different.

Bait and switch GMing is crap. Absolute and total crap. It is easily my biggest pet peeve as a player (and from experience, I know that I'm not alone here). If you tell your players to show up for a game of X, then you damn well better be running a game of X - not some horribly inappropriate fetishist mutation of X, Y, and Z. This is the biggest lesson that I have learned in eight years of running many different games.

 

[KRT]

I started DMing the first year I started playing (1980). I have always thought that I was an OK DM. I originally started because back in grade 8/9 there was a huge demand to play and even though we had 6 DMs they all wanted to play as well as DM. I always see myself as a player first and a DM second but I seem to play only about 20% of the time. I'm still searching for that legendary DM so I can stop DMing for good. Until then I build worlds and invite the riffraff in.

 

[Immak Antunel]

7 years ago, in my freshman year of high school, I played in a one-shot of Conspiracy X, my first RPG experience ever. I thought it was fun (even though our group mangled the adventure), and borrowed the books from the GM.

A few weeks later, I ran my own homebrew module for the same group.

Now I'm not saying I'm a great DM, or even that good. But from the beginnning, I've known what interested me most about role-playing, and focused on that. I kinda wonder if my DMing skills would be better if I'd been more experienced as a player before going behind the screen.

Interestingly enough, my players almost always think I'm awesome. I attribute this to their inexperience... more often than not, I'm the first DM they ever have. They enjoy themselves, which I suppose is the main thing, but I bet it'll be at least another 8 years or so before I'm on a level with the really awesome DMs out there.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

DMing since 1981.

Good? I couldn't judge. Probably adequate.