Where do DMs usually start out?

[The_Universe]

It would possibly be more helpful to also know WHEN these DM's started out (what was the first year they DM'ed), because observation has shown me that older DM's who started in the 70's and 80's usually started with Homebrew, and newer DM's (1990's and 2000's) started with published campaign settings.

1996, age 15.

 

[freebfrost]

Started with the B2 in 1980, and went to the X1, with no real campaign setting initially - just a series of modules with no real background world.

I eventually purchased the Greyhawk setting and started a campaign running the G, D, and Q modules there.

 

[CronoDekar]

Started with homebrew, and stuck that way for awhile mainly because there was no campaign setting that really wowed me. Forgotten Realms was crystalized in my mind as kind of a "template" of a campaign setting in my head, and though there were some aspects of it that I liked (such as the cosmology and the history), most of it I really didn't care all that much about. I also saw some Planescape stuff, but that setting struck me as really odd. So I decided it would be more funner to just design a world myself.

I played with Urban Arcana a bit, but I wouldn't really define that as a "campaign setting" as much as a "campaign format." It actually wasn't until Eberron that I found a campaign setting that I really cared about, and now I'd be more likely to start a D&D campaign there than I would a homebrew setting.

Though if I did something non-D&D (Iron Heroes looks like it'll be fun), I'd probably do homebrew.

 

[Haloq Jakar]

Hi my name is Hal and I am a D&D junkie .... oops wrong intro.

I started dming in 1977 at the tender age of 15. I started after buying the CSIO and its 1st outdoor map. I was the 1st guy in our group to have players roll a character for my game only. Prior to this We took turns dungeon dming using the same characters ifor everyone's dungeon. Not a good idea and the only outdoor adventures we had were using the old wilderness survival mapboard and we rotated being the dm on each encounter

 

[ThirdWizard]

I didn't even know there were published settings until a year after I started playing. I think it was about 6 months in that I realized there were published adventures. I wasn't sure what those things in the back cover of my PHB meant. "Ravenloft, what's that?" Ah ignorance...

 

[ShadeMoon64]

I started with a homebrew world called Midgard way back in 1979. It was a very Tolkien-like setting complete with an evil realm to the southeast surrounded by mountains. What the hey we were only 14 at the time! Most of our adventures were explorations of random dungeons from the tables in the back of the Original DMG. The backstory we each created for our characters evolved into an overall quest to put our ranger with an Aragorn complex on his lost throne. Just about ever published adventure from that period showed up on the map somewhere both TSR and Judges Guild.
We shifted over to Greyhawk when the first printing of the world map came out a few years later.

 

[VirgilCaine]

I used my homebrew setting: No elves, no half-elves, no monks (I've since reconsidered on the monk bit). There was more to it, but those were the mechanical implications.

 

[MrFilthyIke]

The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World
The Known World

There was no other.

Then I moved on to other worlds after a few years.

I started in late 1989/early 1990...age 13/14.

 

[Arkhandus]

I ran my first campaign in....lessee, 2000 I think, using my Azeria homebrew. I didn't want to deal with stupid people who knew more (or presumed so) about Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms and then presumed to tell me I was running things wrong, ruining this or that, completely misportrating such-and-such, or otherwise messing up their favorite campaign setting. I really hate people like that, so closed-minded, without any ability to just enjoy the game and go with the flow; not like I was going to be an RBDM or something, but the only way to avoid people ranting/whining like the above was to run homebrew. Avoided the problems of player knowledge exceeding DM knowledge, lack of mystery or whatnot, and conflicting ideas about what the setting was about. I'll run a published setting (well, besides T13K, which I already run games for, as it's fairly small and thus not a problem) when I'm confident enough in my familiarity with it to not botch it up in front of more experienced players.

 

[pogre]

My first adventure was to run my Mom & brother through the temple adventure in the first Blackmoor supplement. So I picked published campaign setting.

The first game I played in used middle earth.