Why do you DM, GM or Storytell?

[Cheomesh]

Content is in the title.

I do it because no one else will.

M.

[Humabout]

Because no one else will!  That and I like to make use of settings I dream up.  Oh and because it is fun!

[LD]

I create poorly optimized characters! I consistently perish and/or am ineffectual in my home game groups when I don't GM. At least when I GM I get to play some role in the story. :)

Still... at least when I am at conventions, I win awards for roleplaying :) so there is some justice there. :)

[LoA]

I'm a dumb player that's why. I once created a kobold character with two drow in our party... Plus I love world-building!

[sparkletwist]

For me, it's a fondness for world-building and populating those worlds with fun characters.

That, and very often nobody else I know is running the kind of game I want, so I have to do it myself. :grin:

[Xathan]

Personally, it's because I can never finish anything. I often have a vague story in mind that I'm not sure what to do with long term, so I figure what I should do is gather the kind of creative, crazy people this hobby attracts, throw a vague story at them, and see what they DO with it. :P

[Xeviat]

I do it as a creative outlet. "Playing D&D" for me is partially all of my rules tweaking, NPC and monster building, encounter building, adventure design, and campaign world building. Heck, I have fun just making characters, even if I don't get to play them.

[LordVreeg]

It has been my main creative outlet, and often a main social outlet, forever. 
GMing is partly the social playing of the game itself, but to me it has always been the creation of the backdrop and world, the plotlines, the connecting of these into plausibility, then the addition of the players as another layer, and then the intermixing of these to create some level of the players seeing themselves there more than as stats or players, but being able to, in some small way, know how something might respond or might logically happen because of the time spent creating this plausibility between backdrop, plot, and play.


"At times, various and sundry may verbally accost the author (yours truly) as to why pile on layer after overdone layer onto this setting. Why not push a breath of fresh air past their jaded, setting-nostrils, something unique, or failing that, something different and less hoary. Perhaps something more witty or nouvelle, less standard?


While there are actually answers manifold and various, one particular answer is that through dint of familiarity and overwork, I can sometimes feel Celtricia. Feel how it is supposed to be, how it is, not as how I want it to be. I am in the trackless wastes and gigantic spaces between settlements, not writing it, existing in it and perhaps reporting on it. The complicated relationship between race and culture, mixing over the encroaching centuries and millenia, tastes astonishingly real to me. The layer and strata of ruinous history, of pathos and tragedy played and replayed, crushes down on my writer's psyche at times, not as a creation, but as an object I uncover, piece by voide-beast guarded piece.


I still remember the first time this feeling of being, of cross-referencable logic as opposed to preference, overtook me during a session. Celtricia was by no means my first creation...but it was the first that I knew the answer to questions based on knowing what was already real, and what should come from it.

And unlike those that look back to their hallowed gaming days of their youth as unreachable heights, gaming in Celtricia just keeps getting better. Live and on the IRC, there are times when the reason the groups and your charming expedition-director get sucked into the finely grained detail of a hairstyle or the right clothes or the type of food being eaten is due to the shared unconsious urge to push that shared reality to that immersed level, or if one prefers, a more immersed level, as if the immersion is the actual, secret dirty satisfaction we are all seeking.

And what can one say when one can feel the unseasonable warmth of Tribin and Gerin as they rise over the Bazaar of Steel Isle Town, and can feel the this glory mixing with the sadness of lost comrades shared over an early drink in a rooftop cafe? One can only be glad of the road taken, and the strange solidity underfoot of this road as one delves deeper into discovering what is in Celtricia, together."

[Lmns Crn]

I like to build a machine and then invite people to break it.

[Gamer Printshop]

In our group of 7 participants, 3 people switch the GMs role every few months - so I don't have the lack of GM problem that many of you have. That said, playing as a PC after little over a month of play bores me to tears. I tend to be the one most likely to present my PC in character with  spoken dialog in roleplaying situations. Most of the other players play in 3rd person, rather than 1st person.

I need the complications of game prep, thinking by the seat of my pants as the players come up with out of the box actions to overcome obstacles I place before them. I enjoy telling the story and running multiple monsters and NPCs simultaneously with player actions. I need the busy nature to being a GM vs. running a PC, which is enough activity for me to enjoy in the long haul. Being a player is just not enough for me.

[Numinous]

I am surrounded by GM's these days, so I don't often run my own stuff.  However, when I do it is because I find the limitations of other arbiters to be too claustrophobic, too stifling.  My games are preposterous, and self-aware of that.  My players kill gods and steal airships, they enter hell itself when it is 2-dimensional and populated by beings made of chalk scribbles.  I like to let the absurdity bloom and grow to an impossible height and run with it way past the point of no return.  If nobody else will do that, I feel like it is my responsibility to create that space.