I don’t usually do editorials but I thought I’d ramble a bit here about the high art of being a DM or GM. Most people are happy to be players, especially those that have tried the DM chair, being a player is fun. You get to control one person or perhaps a couple if you do henchmen or no one wants to play the cleric and as a result someone gets ‘stuck’ with playing a secondary character which is easy. You also get to kill monsters and who doesn’t like that? You get phat lewt and again who doesn’t like that.
The DM on the other hand has to control a world at both the macro and micro levels. Whether planning and plotting out the political tensions between the City State of Kray and the city of Afar and the brewing rumours of war or deciding just how many goblins are under the orders of the ogre that’s currently raiding caravans shipping much needed foods and medicines to the plague stricken town of Shikant where three quarters of the gnome population has succumbed to the Grey Death and if they don’t recieve help soon the secret guardians of the Dakbeth’s Portal might be no more and the ancient evils there-in sealed will find their release upon the world.
Frankly being a DM is a shit pot load of work. Back in the day I’d spend hours every week drawing maps, laboriously and lovingly populating dungeons that made no sense (“How come the goblins in this room haven’t killed the kolbolds in this room and taken all their stuff?”) although in my defense they made a lot more sense than many, perhaps most as even back in the day when Dungeon Crawl was created, I had thematic dungeons and layouts with food stores and kitchens and ZOMFG they have a place to go take a dump?! Ever notice how no dungeons ever have bathrooms? Even disregarding the “ewwwww” factor it’s just dangerous health wise. No wonder heroes have such an easy time with clearing out dungeons, 9 out of 10 of the inhabitents are already dying from dysentary, diarhea and in general spewing from all orifices.
As a DM you want to challenge your players and their characters. Give them choices, sometimes easy, sometimes hard to make. You want to make many victories easy enough that they talk about that one time on that island at the end of the world? When those head spiders were chasing us and Leoss the Magnificent Hypnotic Patterned them and then fell on his ass three times running down the tunnels to safety and almost died from tripping and falling? Oh man good times… good times….
That’s why most players play, for those moments I think. There’s something about a shared good time that you remember for years to come and trot out when you get back together with someone “who was there time that the first time Paladin ran away from the evil rather than toward it?”.
As a DM you play because you enjoy challenging people, you get a sense of reward from their entertainment and enjoyment. Â You put up with having to buy all the crap so you have a big enough pool of stuff to draw from, the hours spent reading and outlining and thinking and detailing, the players who are asshats. You put up with all that just so you can enjoy watching someone else react with delight or horror or bemusement when you trot out a custom monster that they’ve never seen before with powers that tax them to their limits and someone makes that one saving throw or that critical hit that saves the day for everyone.
Or at least that’s me. You might be different.
