Why did you start DMing?

[Wombat]

Short Answer: I was the first one with the rules.

Longer Answer: I had been playing miniatures wargaming and AH/SPI boardgames since about 1970 and while I liked many of the people I gamed with and loved painting (even though I was not very good at it), I hated and loathed the many arguments that the rules engendered. Then I got the July/August 1975 update of my Brookhurst Hobbies catalog. There was an ad for a new kind of wargame called "Dungeons & Dragons" -- (semi-quote) "Apparently you do not need miniatures, only pencil & paper. From the same folks who wrote Chainmail." Well, I liked Chainmail pretty well and was willing to throw in $10 on an experiment.

Fast forward to Labor Day Weekend, 1975.

I was (literally!) just walking out the door for some sort of Boy Scout Jamboree or other when the UPS truck pulled up. He handed me the package, I opened it, and immediately dove into this weird new concept of roleplaying games. The rest of the weekend, while everyone else was discussing CB radios (...and Convoy...), I was spouting off strange, incomprehensible blips about "Armor Class", "Hit Dice", and "Ocher Jellies".

Needless to say, no one knew what the hooey I was talking about...

Since I had the rules, I had to set up the first game. It was very strange and ultimately not very memorable, but the rest of the gang was interested enough that I was soon at work creating complex complexes on sheets of 10-to-the-inch graph paper, ordering up Greyhawk, and otherwise learning what it meant to be a Dungeonmaster (subsequently GM).

And as I already had the nickname of The Ref...

 

[Galethorn]

1. Nobody else would.

2. I wanted to run a game in my setting, not somebody else's. It was a matter of pride.

Long story short, my first campaign sputtered after about five sessions, and we found somebody else to DM a campaign, and I was just a player for about a year after that.

 

[Theron]

The first DM I played with on a semi-regular basis had come from a very house-ruled game (this was back in the late 70s, about the time the MM and PHB had come out, but before the DMG) and a lot of the style he picked up seemed to exist solely to establish the DM's power over the players. In short, he was an annoying prat and I got tired of his game, so I decided I couldn't do any worse and started running my own.

 

[KB9JMQ]

I had no fellow gamers, so I DM'ed and forced non-gamers to play. I was desperate, what can I say.

My situation exactly, and since the forced players were my younger siblings they couldn't run away

 

[lukelightning]

Partly because I can't stand having my character die, so I thought that if I was the DM I wouldn't have to go through that. Of course I discovered being a DM is like having ALL your characters dies; virtually every person/monster you make is destined to perish at the hands of some undeserving ingrates with pointy metal implements.

Of course, I've learned to love that. One of my biggest joys is making an adversaries that I know the players will hate hate HATE so when they finally kill them they will rejoice.

 

[engrishonly]

Sort of like becoming a goalie in hockey... all of the other kids wanted to be the hero, not the goat/donkey/whatever whipping animal.

 

[dave_o]

Actually, I'm running three. I am blessed with having more players than I know what to do with. Sorry man.

Damn isolationist San Diego ENWorlders.

 

[Oryan77]

I started playing in my friends Dark Sun campaign. I got hooked and became a better player than the rest of the group. I was with the DM at the comic book shop and saw the Planes of Chaos boxset. The artwork on that cover was awsome (still is) and images of some crazy world flooded my mind. I thought, "Woah, what kind of world is this? This would be fun to play in!"

I bought it, read it, and was confused as all hell. It took me about 15 pages of reading to realize that this isn't a campaign setting boxset. I went back to the store and bought the Planescape Campaign setting boxset. I got home, read it, and was confused as all hell. I had never heard of "planes" or prime worlds since the only D&D campaign I ever played in for the last year & a half was Dark Sun. My friends kept pestering me to hurry and learn the setting so I can DM. I sorta had a grasp on the idea of planes, primes, petitioners, ect. I really liked the idea of factions, and Sigil was awsome...so I ran it. What a disaster. I hardly knew 2e rules for DM'ing and I was always really nervous and unsure of myself. Luckily the DS DM kept playing & having fun so I got a little better. I stopped for 5 years and started a new 3.5 PS game with new players. Determined to become a good DM, I studied 3.5 rules hard and learned how to DM well. Been going strong since 3.5 came out and my old DM joked around recently about how I'm teaching him how to DM now after he stopped playing D&D 8 years ago & is DM'ing a new 3.5 game.

 

[MadMaxim]

Well, I started playing in the year 2000 when 3rd edition was released. Before that, I had only read about D&D in various magazines and playing Baldur's Gate so my knowledge of the game was minimal. Then I got into a friend's game as a player and the campaign went okay. I played a Fighter/Cleric/Hunter of the Dead since I had no idea about how important Clerics' spells actually were, so he was more of a Fighter than a spellcaster. The campaign ended in a bang with some seriously pissed off players (myself included), so I decided that I could do better than that and started a completely generic campaign with no more gods than there were in Player's Handbook.

It went well and I thought it was fun. I became the default DM since nobody else was interested in learning all the rules. I still think it's fun, but I've recently suffered from severe DM burnout after my Eberron campaign tanked, so I'm now preparing for an epic Forgotten Realms campaign while some of my players have finally found the courage to try and be the DM. It's nice to be a player for once, but I'm looking forward to getting my Forgotten Realms campaign going next year, I tell you that!

 

[frankthedm]

Why? I loved monsters since i had gotten over my fear of them as a small boy. I would go to waldenbooks and would read the monster books for D&D. I eventually leared how the 2e game was played [more or less] by 1995, and wound up running a game for my circle of lowlife friends since i knew the most of the rules, the rest of the lot were a touch dumb & if I played I could, at the most, be only one monster, but as DM I would be all of them . I stared hunting down old books and switched to 3e for the smoother running system when it came out.