So this months blog carnival is about transitions and transformation and within seconds of putting my thinking cap on I realised I’d already started writing a post that would fit in perfectly with this subject.

They say our tame GM eats dice for breakfast and that he built his home from worn out copies of the 2nd Edition Dungeon Masters Guide. But how did he get there?

I don’t really know how I got here but I seem to be the groups gamemaster for most of our campaigns. In recent years both Mark and Willie have taken their turn and ran great campaigns but most of the time it’s me that will be sitting with the rulebooks in front of me telling the story.
When i first started out playing we had a couple of players and our GM was a friend’s cousin who would run games for us when he was visiting from London. It meant we could only ever play short campaigns maybe twice a year but because of this we savoured every moment of it. That was until one day my childhood friend Joe was given a copy of the Basic Dungeons and Dragons rules. He sat up all night reading over them until he knew them off by heart and then we sat up all the next night so we could get used to the rules. As players we were used to using the Rolemaster rules even if we didn’t understand them that well at that point so something this basic was actually a huge leap forward for us. We actually understood how the game worked for a start.

For the first year my friend was the GM. It was a no brainer. The rulebooks were his so it was his game. After a while though he soon grew tired of being the one to make up the story and wanted to play a character again. We all still wanted to be a player rather than the GM so we drew straws and I lucked out and so it would be another year before I ran my first campaign. It was not long after this that we purchased our own copy of Rolemaster. I say purchased but I’m sure a few of the Companions were pilfered from the local second hand book store. One of the group insisted that if you bought a boxed set they never checked inside so they filled the main boxed set with as many Companions as they could. I could never prove it though. Anyway we soon got to the stage where we were just lining up encounters and throwing the dice rather than actually roleplaying and I go bored very quickly.

I was never one for writing stories in English class. In fact I’d usually struggle to write a 500 word short story while I was at school and my written English skills haven’t really increased over the years if I’m being perfectly honest. With this in mind you can understand that running my own games didn’t come naturally to me. I could devour a rulebook in an evening and be able to quote back to you complex combat ‘what if’s’ or spell descriptions of even the less well known spell lists but if you were to ask me to write down what I planned for a game session I’d struggle. I still do to an extent but over time I manage it. I’m perfectly happy with an idea in my head but when it comes time to formalise it for a campaign I have real trouble.

From all this came my GMing style. I improvise. I push and pull stories until they match in game and I steal ideas from everywhere. I’ll have scribbled down a bullet point list of whats going to happen or how things are laid out but that’s it. Everything else stays in my head until it’s needed. It’s better for everyone that way.

The change over from player to GM was a very smooth process for me. I’m not sure if it’s like that with everyone but once the initial worries were shoved out of the way I gradually grew to enjoy it far more than just being a player. When your part of a group of characters you can easily get stuck concentrating entirely on your character and forgetting about the players and characters around you. It’s only natural that you’ll spend more time on that one ‘person’ than on anything else and its like a child or a favourite pet. You nurture and grow them from being a few scribbles on a bit of paper to a well rounded character than is far more than just the sum of its stats and skills. As a GM however you get that exact same feeling when you look out at your party as each and every single one of them grows and your world carries on it’s day to day routine as well as growing in the same manner as the characters. That feeling of success you get after running a successful game that has everyone talking about it can never be beaten by that you might get from just taking part in it as a player.

That’s why I can never go back to being just a player. No matter how hard I find it to succesfully GM.