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How 'easy' was it for you to become a gm?

Started by Bill, August 07, 2014, 08:26:43 AM

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Bill

For me, the challenge was by far, learning to create campaigns that were not just fighting monsters.

I was never a railroady, asshat, or adversarial gm.

But man, when I started out, my games were combat focused.

Fortunately a player told me "Bill, all we do in your game is go into dungeons and kill monsters. Where are the Imps selling magic trinkets? Where is the rivalry between the local priests and thieves guild? Etc.. Etc..."

I wised up fast.

Bren

Very, very, very easy. Like skim through the OD&D rules and draw a dungeon up that same night easy.
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cranebump

Easy to play, difficult to master. Like all the best games.

(P.S. Just to be clear, 30+ years and I haven't mastered it yet).
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jibbajibba

We were 10 or 11 someone had to run the game and I was the one who bought the books so meh...

My problem was never having seen a game I made a couple of unusual errors. So I drew the dungeon out of 2cm square graph paper (we had loads of A1 sheets of it) and used it like a board. All the secret doors and stuff were marked the player just had to roll to see if they found them.

Still within a few weeks we had it sussed. The key bit was us not being allowed to stay in the classroom through lunch so we had to play without a table and we did it all in our heads.
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Omega

It just came naturally for me for some reason. I like DMing. Apparently Im good at it since people payed me to do it for five+ years.

I've known others who struggle with even the basics. An at least one who bogs down in the pre-game prep.

Matt

I generally end up GM by default as I'm more willing to read games and come up with adventures, plus my experience as a player has been largely disappointing due to lousy GMs with cruddy adventure ideas.

Coming up with adventures is fairly easy; for me the hardest part is remembering rules minutiae. I hate when we're sucked out of a game because nobody knows how far a character can jump or throw or whatever and I'm
not going to spend five minutes looking it up so stuff like that usually gets guesstimated.

Opaopajr

Mostly natural, but clarity was a very early lesson. Not so much for description as much as campaign expectations, prep, and pacing. Taught me to assert expectations beforehand instead of wait for people to read my mind (their mind).

Why can't you all guess what I'm thinking, it all looks so beautiful in my head! :p The soundtrack is unbelievable, too.
Just make your fuckin\' guy and roll the dice, you pricks. Focus on what\'s interesting, not what gives you the biggest randomly generated virtual penis.  -- J Arcane
 
You know, people keep comparing non-TSR D&D to deck-building in Magic: the Gathering. But maybe it\'s more like Katamari Damacy. You keep sticking shit on your characters until they are big enough to be a star.
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Exploderwizard

Fairly easy.

Moldvay basic has a whole lot of awesome packed into just 64 pages. The DMing section in the back outlining how to choose a scenario, a setting, and populate it along with key points of handling the game was and still is, the greatest DMing primer for the pagecount in existence.

Beyond that, the only thing really needed is experience. Run games and have fun.
Quote from: JonWakeGamers, as a whole, are much like primitive cavemen when confronted with a new game. Rather than \'oh, neat, what\'s this do?\', the reaction is to decide if it\'s a sex hole, then hit it with a rock.

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Quote from: Kyle Aaron;766997In the randomness of the dice lies the seed for the great oak of creativity and fun. The great virtue of the dice is that they come without boxed text.

Bill

Quote from: Exploderwizard;777094Fairly easy.

Moldvay basic has a whole lot of awesome packed into just 64 pages. The DMing section in the back outlining how to choose a scenario, a setting, and populate it along with key points of handling the game was and still is, the greatest DMing primer for the pagecount in existence.

Beyond that, the only thing really needed is experience. Run games and have fun.

It may seem obvious, but I think some of the gm's and players that have 'issues' are losing the point that its supposed to be fun.

Just Another Snake Cult

I was 11 years old in 1981 or '82, using Moldvay/Cook Basic with the Fiend Folio. The "Bad kid" in the 5th grade (Who would be dead just a few years later, killed by an infamous stretch of local country back-road that kills or paralyses a couple of teenage drivers each year) introduced me to the game and it became an OBSESSION instantly despite the fact that I was more into Star Wars and Marvel Comics than that Hobbit crap and fantasy was kinda tainted in my eyes because I knew a really creepy, abusive adult that was heavily into Tolkein and always trying to push it on me.

I couldn't understand the "To Hit" matrix at first so for my first few games everybody just hit all the time. When I got to be late junior-high/early high school age I started going to the local university gaming guild and local cons so I could learn from older referees, both good and bad (The greatest GM I ever had was a closet case who eventually pulled an Orson Scott Card and dropped everything to beat the drum for God Hates Fags, a terrible waste that informed much of my future worldview). I read Dragon magazine obsessively, but it was the shockingly literate and sophisticated early issues of White Dwarf that showed me the hobby could aim for something more than a never-ending stream of fighting.
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Opaopajr

Y'know, there is a debt to those old magazines that I often forget. For all their problems, they at least dreamed. It was a good example of DIY.

WotC's killing off its 'zines (and outsourcing their subscription list first) might actually be the stupidest thing they have ever done. Checking White Dwarf lately and it is also a crying shame of its former glories.
Just make your fuckin\' guy and roll the dice, you pricks. Focus on what\'s interesting, not what gives you the biggest randomly generated virtual penis.  -- J Arcane
 
You know, people keep comparing non-TSR D&D to deck-building in Magic: the Gathering. But maybe it\'s more like Katamari Damacy. You keep sticking shit on your characters until they are big enough to be a star.
-- talysman

nitril

I had the books, we were bored and so it started for me. Mainly hack and slash initially. As we got more sucked in it was more or less I who GM'd since I was the one who spent money on the books and also the only one who enjoyed the mastering part ofbthe games we played.

ArtemisAlpha

My early games were using BECMI (or, really, just the BE part of it) to more or less run a combat boardgame. There was some puzzle solving, but it was 90% about the combats.

Then, in the late 80s, I got the old Marvel Superheroes RPG, and tried it with the gaming group I was with. It was eye opening. Comic books have all these word balloons, and their best villains all have plans - and suddenly, the RPG wasn't about beating up whatever was in the next room, it was about saving people, or thwarting a scheme, or making a tough moral choice. When we went back to D&D, all of these ideas came with us, and we started playing what I consider Role Playing rather than Roll Playing D&D, and it was (and still is) wonderful.

Rincewind1

#13
Like many others, I started out not as much because I wanted to GM that much, but I was the least one to not want to be the GM.

Then, after a year or two, I preferred to be one. Nowadays, I vastly prefer GMing to playing, though it is much harder.

That, and always wanting to be in a centre of the attention.
Furthermore, I consider that  This is Why We Don\'t Like You thread should be closed

Haffrung

#14
Not hard. I was 11, and while the Holmes book I learned from was largely incoherent, I learned quickly by playing with more experienced groups. But the other groups included the dickhead older brothers of friends, so within a few months I was DMing for my buddies. We were only a year or two removed from playing toy soldiers and Star Wars figures, so the imaginary world and organic storytelling thing came naturally. And I loved drawing and maps, so creating dungeons was a pleasure. The rules were never much of a problem, as we played a stripped-down game, and there were no rules-lawyers in our group. My best friend and I took turns DMing, so we learned from one another, while never losing the perspective of a player. And ultimately, if you do something 3-4 times a week you quickly get good at it.