Why do you GM for strangers online or at conventions? What do you get out of it?

[payn]

I used to run PFS about a decade ago. I did it mostly to meet gamers in my local community. I definitely had to adjust my expectations as personalities were wide and ideas of fun varied greatly. Though, I enjoyed it most of the time and learned new things about the game, the rules, and how to be a better GM.

Now I run for strangers online because my local group of ten years has fallen apart due to covid and moving around the metro etc... Though my online group is no longer what I'd consider strangers.

I guess for both PFS and online gaming it was to meet people and try and forge a game that is consistent with matching playstyle preferences. Thats the best thing to get out of it.

 

[overgeeked]

Why do you GM for strangers online or at conventions? What do you get out of it?

It generally lets me play a wider range of games and a wider range of styles. If I only played face-to-face with my regular group my choices would be 5E played as a combat sim or nothing. 5E is not my favorite RPG and combat is my least favorite mode of play. So to play anything even approaching what I want to do with RPGs, it's strangers or not at all.

I've been convention gaming for 30 years and VTT gaming for about 10. I'm soul-searching on why I bother to GM for total strangers.

I'm having second thoughts about doing it anymore.

Nothing wrong with taking a break and recharging and reassessing.

 

[Mezuka]

Did it once. Never again, is all I'm going to say.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I switched to online gaming last year as my local game community is dying out, and frankly, it is far better than any other gaming I've had since 1979.

I've used VTT at the table for over a decade, so that aspect is familiar, but what I love about online gaming is that you can find good, reliable players in quantity. There was a short learning curve in terms of posting openings and interviewing prospective players, but in the last year I have kept three groups full with zero effort. With a largely infinite pool of players, there has been no tolerating marginal or high maintenance players simply to make table count or because they have a friend in the group, no struggles to keep a group fully manned. Any player who doesn't measure up gets booted, and the next one of the waiting list gets called off the bench.

And then there's the beauty of no commuting to the game, or lugging all the gaming stuff around (I live in the country so although I was always the GM, I never hosted the game). At thirty minutes before the hour I stroll into my office, hook up my headphones, and begin my pre-game checklist. The players pop up on Discord chat (we don't use video) and BS a bit, and then at the stroke of the hour, we commence.

At the end of the session, we log off, I hook up my headphones to recharge, update the game support site, log in reward points on the PCs sheets...and I'm home.

Comfort, convenience, and unlimited quality players; I'll never F2F again.

 

[Birmy]

I don't DM online as I find the format far less enjoyable, but I do DM at conventions (including Gamehole Con; I've probably run into Bill D., above). I'm happy to just be a player in my home campaigns, so I use conventions as my ongoing "DM Academy"--to get more confident and hopefully better at DMing, a role I haven't regularly played since the '90s (and in grade school at that). The cons are a good environment for this: You get to see how you handle a wide swath of different kinds of players, and if you (or they) suck, you take the lesson and move on in 2-4 hours without having to worry about alienating friends or derailing a campaign. Since I mostly do organized play (Adventurers League), I know I can stick to a couple of short modules all weekend and, by the nth time running it, feel like I have a better understanding of both the rules and what makes a module tick. Also, it's not that big of a community, so it helps you get to know a lot of the frequent players.

So, for me, it's a kind of boot camp, where I can gain confidence and improve in my DMing, get a better grasp on storytelling in this format, and maybe meet some people on the way. Also: There's often free admission, PDFs, and swag.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

One of the big motivating factors for me is knowing that someone that's never played a game before can show up to my table and have an amazing first experience with it. That can turn into a lifelong love of that game. It's like the time I was DMing an open table running Tyranny of Dragons. Some young kid showed up that had maybe played D&D once before. For the final fight with Tiamat. One blow or breath weapon from her would've killed his character, but instead I made sure he had fun and got to contribute to her defeat.

I started running games at conventions because, frankly, I was not having fun playing games at conventions. As egotistical as it may sound, I decided that if I ran games then at least 6 people plus me would get to have fun instead of no one.

Same. Every friend was a stranger once.

I've GMd for strangers online. Those strangers became friends.

Another factor is that there's something about the communal aspect of gaming. I can sit down to run for people from all over the country or even world, and we can all tune into the exact same wavelength for a few hours. That's pretty heavy.

 

[Piratecat]

I love it! My total numbers are pretty large thanks to the RPGA and then EN World gatherings, I've run for somewhere between 2000 and 3000 strangers at gaming cons etc., spread out over the last 25 years. On average at each table there's one person I don't want to game with again, four people who are fine, and one person who is really interesting or a fantastic player. I love keeping in touch with those people; they're a huge pillar of my relationships with friends, and they're largely responsible for the truly remarkable gaming I've gotten to experience.

I also love getting to introduce new people to the games I love. It means that next time, there's even more people to play those games with.

 

[bloodtide]

For Fun.

It's interesting to meet new people/players and see how they play the game.

 

[Ath-kethin]

I ran games at Gen Con for the first time this year. I did it because a) I put in to run a module I was working on, never expecting they'd actually let/want me to actually run it, but they did, and b) I wanted playtest feedback from a group completely unknown to me, unlike the game I run at my FLGS.

The experience was a humbling and rewarding one, and I will do it again.

For clarity's sale: the system was Dungeon Crawl Classics, which has as far as I can tell one of the greatest, friendliest, and most supportive fanbases imaginable.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Echoing what other have said with emphasis on the "I get to run systems my home group wouldn't want to play".

Most of my recent con-GM'ing has been in the Indie Games on Demand room at Origins, where pretty much anything you put on the menu will get least 4 people to the table, often 6, and occasionally more than 6 and you end up running it again even though you didn't plan on it to accommodate the waitlisted players!

So it's a place to try out those systems I've always wanted to experience but never have, in an environment that is (paradoxically?) more tolerant of not-totally-awesome game experiences than might be expected.

I say paradoxically because everyone knows the random mix of players at the table can make for some less-than-amazing games, which tends to cover for any less-than-amazing GM-ing on my part. Not that I would ever deliberately GM poorly, but sometimes for a system with which I'm not that familiar, I execute it worse than I would otherwise. If that made any sense.

= = =

I also really like @Reynard 's idea of 'convention campaigns'. At any given time I have about a dozen campaign ideas, and if I try to run those as full years-long campaigns with my home group, I'll be senile or dead before I get to experience them all. I need to get some of those to a convention table when I can... and maybe it'll inspire one of the players to go home and GM "my" campaign idea for his group!

(I put "my" in quotes because a lot of the ideas were absorbed by osmosis from rulebooks, discussion boards, and media; plus idea ownership is murky at best.)