Why do you DM? What do you get out of it? Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?

*Kek heartily

The encounter started crying or your players did?

The encounter

>Why?
Few others are willing or can do it well. Often (especially now that I'm older) I'll be initiating a lot of brand new players and/or running a one shot. And honestly I've gotten good at it. People who know me prefer that I run their games rather than someone else.

I'm also a lot more likely to take on and keep up with the job if someone else is hosting. It's nice to only have one of those two on my plate.

>What do you get out of it?
What do you get out of playing? It's not as dissimilar as you'd think. I prep dungeons and NPCs and shit, but I allow myself to be as surprised by player actions as they are by my own prep.

>Do you DMPC?
For what purpose? I'm rolling up and playing like a hundred guys in the course of the campaign. I really have no stake in their victory in a PvE sense, since I'm playing the world. Kind of negates the fun of running a proper party member from my perspective. Or rather makes the party NPC no more or less fun than any other.

>Why do you DM?
It's more fun for me to GM, than play as a PC.
>What do you get out of it?
1: A valid excuse to world build
2: less stress from not knowing what's going on.
3: The ability to jump from one character concept to the next and back w/o disrupting party cohesion or narrative flow.
4: the ability to drop interesting/cool items into the party's lap, even if it's jjust to see what they do with it.
5: the ability to set up encounters and even whole adventures around concepts and ideas that appeal to me.
6: world building
7: never have to worry about missing a session due to work. (because I can schedule it more to suit my erratic work schedule)
8: world building did I mention that already? I really enjoy world building
>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
No, that's what NPC's are for...

>Why do you DM?
I enjoy doing it. I like world building and telling stories. I also enjoy coming up with the little stuff---fun encounters and enemies, items, maps, what have you. It allows me to be creative, and to tweak things I don't like about the rules.
>What do you get out of it?
Aside from the enjoyment factor, I get to get some experience managing a team of people. I normally communicate best with visuals, but I also get the opportunity to improve my verbal communication.
>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
Nah, I've always stuck with NPCs. Although I'm the "prime" DM, there are at least three other people in the group that either have DM'd before or want to DM, so I get the opportunity to focus on roleplaying a single character every now and then. But, I usually don't playing being out of the DM seat for too long.

>why
Because I enjoy using it as a medium to engage the group in a story of their own making. And I don't want my friend to get burned out as a forever gm.
>what
The satisfaction of the players when they succeed, the fun of having to adapt on the fly, and the huge laughs when people fall for obvious shit they should've seen coming.
>dmpc
No not usually, they may get an npc that follows them or if it's a new system they may get an npc for the first session or so as cannon fodder to show them the ropes or soak damage if things aren't going so well.

>Why do you DM?
Because I like RPGs and I'm usually the only one willing to take on the DM role. Also I've gotten more used to it than playing.

>What do you get out of it?
Friends being happy, talking about stuff they did in the game, drawing scenes from the game etc.

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
No, fuck that.

Why do you DM?
I love seeing players get lost in the game. Seeing them get swept away by the situation and the mood is fucking heroin to me. And that happy excited mood that people have right after a really good session, and knowing that, even if you didn't make it happen all on you own, it wouldn't have happened without you. That is awesome.

>What do you get out of it?
I guess I kinda already answered this.

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
see

>Why do you DM?
No one else is reliable enough to. I'm good at it but I miss being a player sometimes.

>What do you get out of it?
I like the players reactions mostly. It's fun seeing how excited they get after a big revelation, or how hyped they are for their characters to grow into bad asses.

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
The players meet NPCs along the way but I wouldn't call them my own PCs. Really I've played with too many people who make DMPCs that outshine the rest of the party and get NPCs to suck said DMPCs dick lol.

My NPCs (l like to think so anyway) are characters with depth and their own motivations, but really only exist to help motivate players or drive the story forward.

Why:
I have a God-Complex and a boner for theatrics.

What do I get:
The satisfaction of a job well done, and a story well crafted.

Do I create PC's:
When necessary, to fill a "role" the players have left open, like an engineering-savvy rogue in a "Techy" setting where the PC's have just made "Standard Fantasy" fighters and clerics, or an extra healer when the party only has a single front-liner soaking up all the damage.

Because I want to play D&D but

1. The other DMs are unreliable/boring. I don't want to sit through a 3 hour combat slugfest where everyone but the DM is falling asleep. If I DM, I can move the story along in a non-autistic way and ensure I'm always having fun, at least.

2. I come up with a lot of character ideas and don't have the foresight to know if I'll enjoy playing them several sessions in. Rather than be stuck with 1 character I don't enjoy for 10 sessions, I can make 10 characters every session if I want to.

>Why
I'm the only one willing to do it.
>What
A game.
>Do.
My group accuses me of DMPCing when I so much as RP the interactions between them and their hirelings. What makes you think I'm going to straight up make a PC of my own?

>Why do you DM?
No one else wants to DM.

>What do you get out of it?
A taste of how it is to play and the chance for someone else to take pity on me.

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
Usually not. After culling like half the group because they're dickbags I made a dmpc/npc to tag along with the party of 3. Probably safer to call him npc though since I'm super careful not to hog spotlight and he mostly just supports / gives advice when asked but never really decides anything.

It's fun and I enjoy it ad a hobby
I get to play with friends and also practice writing. It also let's me escape my shitty life.

>Needing to make a DMPC to interact with players when literally every single thing you do in the game is player interaction

I get to bully a bunch of people while telling my failed novel with little to no real interaction and also include a number of DMPCs to make up for my physical, mental and social failings.

jk
I like telling stories and GMing gives me a chance to explore my favourite settings while also educating my friends about said settings. I rarely use GMPCs, I feel like it limits what the PCs can do, offers up a convenient 'plot token' and also paints a huge target for my players aggression. Whether that's earned or not is another matter.

I love being in control. It feels so good to not only kill, but utterly ruin characters and their NPC friends. I have so much more freedom. I've had character captured and forced to watch their wife sodomized with a chainsaw that was then turned on while inside her vagina when the PC refused to answer the villains questions. So basically she was ripped open inside by a running chainsaw blade that completely shredded her reproductive organs. I had trouble even describing it properly but the player said he felt sick by the end so I think I did my job. The point of being a good DM is to get the players emotionally invested in the story; that's the tricky part. See, any dumb fuck can run your standard RPG campaign. Yeah yeah have a bad guy, have a good guy, have some other shit. But, at the end of the night, do they really care? They just wanted to shit around and eat pizza. No, the true sign of success of a good DM is when the playersa re on the edeg their seats, almost scared to keep playing. A lot of DMs do this by killing off PCs and NPCs in droves, because they subscribe to the Walking Dead / Game of Thrones story telling philosophy where you kill off characters for shock value. Like they did with Glenn and Abraham. Nah, that shit was pretty gay. What fucked people up was forcing the guy to cut his kid's hand off. But honestly, that's not even bad either. What you do is, you make the guy rape his wife then slit her throat, while you have his son at gunpoint, and tell him if he doesn't do it to his wife, they will do it to both his wife and his son. So, morally speaking, he has to do it, or else he's a selfish bitch letting two people die cause it's going to happen anyway.

Better yet, you find ways to mentally break the PCs. You cause them to be their own worst enemy. Or to rescue some girls and bring them back to a group that seems like allies fighting against the evil cult but then it turns out it's just the evil cult with disguise person and

when the PCs come back they discover the girls have been killed and sacrificed to appease an ancient demon lord that also slaughtered the girls' families. And the characters are then hit by a level 12 spellcaster who casts a spell that puts one of the PCs into a mindloop where he must watch the girls raped and slaughtered over and over so that he can relive his guilt hundreds of times in the space of 1d6 rounds, making a Wisdom save each round to try to break free. That is the kind of creative spell that players remember. That is the kind of campaign that players remember, whether they like it or not. Don't listen to that John Wick faggot. He just likes being an arse. No, you need to be seriously fucked up to have any impact on your players. Doesn't matter how original your setting is or how much effort you put into your fish people homebrew race, or into the details of the city of Snarklefack, or how you have gotten really good at running D&D combat fast instead of slow as jizz-ridden molasses. None of that matters (except maybe the last one) as much as being able to solidly punch your players in the emotional gut each and every time they play, and let them leave the game feeling sick.

I have never felt more lucky to simply not have to deal with someone, than I do right now.

Are you talking about me? You're probably too much of a pussy to handle one of my campaigns anyway. I only accept players who are capable of handling mature adult themes in their RPGs and if they can't handle it maturely (like you clearly can't) then they are not invited back. And I am universally recognized as the best DM in a 35 mile radius of the FLGS I run my games at, and I have a lot of influence, so if I don't like you, your name is mud, and your "looking for game" notices aren't staying on the community corkboard very long. That's what happens when you take the time to become a skilled GM. People take notice, and before long you've got your fingers in many pies, and your influence grows. And it feeds itself, your influence improving your GMing skill, as you talk to the masters, game with them, learn their ways, and take a slice from each of their styles to improve your own game. There is no perfection, only a summit we climb toward eternally, just out of sight in the fog, but never reach.

If you learn that, then one day you might be as good of a GM, and roleplayer, as I have become.

Until then, feel free to be dismissive. My games have won awards and I've even been paid for my GMing. Unsolicited. So perhaps you shouldn't be so glad you "don't have to deal with me" as you are.

>>psh
>>nothing personnel...kid

>Why?
I DM because I'm a story teller. Ever since I was a child I would regale my family with stories I thought up on the spot.

I'm thirty and married and even when I lay down for bed my wife will role over, give me the look and say "tell me a story".
>What do you get out of it?
Friends having fun, being engaged, having them so engrossed and on edge a sudden violen riff from some background music has them jump out of their chairs.

Also getting to actually do something acting wise after seven years of theatre.
>Do you create PCs?
If by npc yes, and I try to give them as much character and motivation I would a PC on the rare occasions I play. I have only ever inserted a character I would/have played once and that was just as a 'follow my lead' deal with a bunch of new militants with no combat experience early on in a Rogue Trader campaign.

I'm like 85% sure you are a completely magnificent shitposter, but that still leaves a niggling 15% that you just might be serious.
Strangely, that all points towards you probably being a pretty fucking competent DM.
Veeky Forums is a weird place.

>Why do you DM?

It's fun.

>What do you get out of it?

Enjoyment.

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?

There are some NPCs that are more prevalent than others, I'll admit sometimes I get attached to some, but I avoid shoehorning them in everywhere.

It's kind of one of those cases where parodies of That DMs and real That DMs become hard to distinguish, because people really do get that autistic. It's like a tabletop version of Poe's law.

I'm pretty confident he's shitposting though.

Because no one else in my group will do it.

>Why do you DM?
Because no one else will.

>What do you get out of it?
Getting to play at all.

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
Depends on the system and setting.

Literally this.

>Why do you DM?

Because it's more fun than being a player for me.

> What do you get out of it?

Why would I want to get out of it? Almost a decade went by without me playing in anything other than some one-shot scenario when one of the players wanted to try GMing.

> Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?

Nah. I'm a referee, not some first-among-equals player. One of the reasons I love to GM is the fact that I'm literally every entity PCs meet in the world.

Plus it's too easy to get accused of throwing some tacky GMPC and spoiling the fun.

Again, you are free to dismiss it, but it's pathetic. Because in doing so you are just compensating for your own failures at GMing.

You see, when you have been a GM for as long as I, you begin to understand that not everyone is as gifted as you. Some DMs just plain suck. That GM who wants to run a new homebrew he just invented? He sucks, and his homebrew is shit, and no one wants to play his badly-worded game with horrible rules that make no sense. Some people complain that most homebrews are too much like d20, whereas in fact, it is the opposite. At least with d20 you get a somewhat comfortable feeling of familiarity. But most homebrewers are absolute shit and given my status I am absolutely free to shit on their creation. I have shut down at least half a dozen homebrewers over the years with long, extensively-worded emails about why their game is shit and how they could improve it but won't because they refuse to compromise their "artistic vision" (more like autistic vision am I right?), and as a result most of them stopped trying to homebrew. Which is good. The RPG world is already oversaturated with RPGs, and we don't really need new ones. But anyway, you learn these things when you DM for 15+ years. Someday you may learn these things as well, even if your skills will, sorry to say, never come anywhere close to mine.

I honestly think it's because I have more fun making characters than playing them. I love characters with gimmicky, punchy personalities that I can set up to show their style and then shoo them off stage before they outstay their welcome.

>Why do you DM?
Because otherwise I don't get to play

>What do you get out of it?
Desire to play someone else's game

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
No, I don't want to be "that guy", especially since my groups are always too big or anything to try to accommodate my waiting list

1. Because I'm the only one among the three members of the Anima group who can consistently come up with plot hooks, and because the original GM passed the campaign onto me.
2. Enjoyment, the chance to make the players feel badass for taking down horrible gribblies and saving towns/cities/empires.
3. Yeah, I had made one as I was initially a player, like I said. But I limit his interactions to odd little side blurbs, or providing the party with a much-needed healer/psychologist/information repository.

I know how you feel.

>Why do you DM?
I love creating a story, and I enjoy seeing my friends enjoying something I created. Basically the same reason I love cooking, and do it for my friends (sometimes before playing)

>What do you get out of it?
Full creative freedom, I love thinking up stories, building a world and the gratefulness after the sessions is a great feeling.

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
No, I make a world of NPCs that are equally important, often far more important than the NPCs, but always getting far less screentime and importance to the missions. The one time it might have been close to a DMPC stealing the spotlight was when an powerful vampire used them to lure out the bad boss, but even this NPC is set up to be their enemy later on, being an absolute asshole.

>Why do you DM?
It's the only thing that arouses me sexually anymore.
>What do you get out of it?
Sexual pleasure.
>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
How else am I going to do it?

>Why do you DM?
If I didn't, there would be no game.

>What do you get out of it?
Sadness

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
Yes, but they're ignored by the party anyway.

God bless DMs everywhere.
Y'all are doing good work.

...

I dm because im a sadistic ass. I can't help thinking of puzzles, traps, and spiderweb politics to fuck with my players with. My satisfaction is that moment when they all sit there stunned after i pull the big reveal and they realize i've been duping them the whole time and they probably fucked. the only thing better is watching their satisfaction when they unravel my machinations and make it out alive.

No i never dmpc. Why would i limit myself to one conduit for the fuckery. I have a world of npc's to screw with them.

I'm a diva and a control freak. Can't be a good player, but still wanna game.
I'm mediocre, objectively.

I get to satiate my rpg bloodlust. We usually make about 100 corpses each session. My homebrew's optimized for hella fast hella deadly combat. Players are bloodjunkies so it works. I doubt it would work for any good RPers. Had a really cool, experienced RP guy once and I was so nervous if he'd like the axefest, but man did he love hammering down goblins and shit with a twohander.

I don't do GMPCs. On a side-note for GM plays with players, I've made a 52card-based labyrinth/gauntlet that has Players/GMs switch around , with each player/gm getting one draw/encounter, we resolve it, and then we kick down the next door in the gauntlet. Since the homebrew is really simple (sub 10-pages), non-GM people have an easy time making an encounter with it. Best 5 hours of gaming I've had recently.

>why
I DM because nobody else in my group will.

That's pretty much it.

>what
Entertainment, social interaction, I get to do fun things with friends

>create my own PC
No, I get a rotating cast of NPCs to play instead, which is alright I guess

>Why do you DM
So I can facilitate madness like few other DMs are willing to and play whatever monstrosity I want to.

>What do you get out of it?
The satisfaction of messing with stereotypes (i.e., werehumans, friendly liches, BBEG being LG Paladins that justify brutal inquisitions) and the ability to show off my world-building to other people.

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
When I reasonably can, as they make great quest givers. Their levels vary vastly, as my most recent one was a cowardly level 4 half-elf rogue in a group of four level 9s that the party decided to kill because he was cowardly and "useless" and my next planned one is a literal "doomsday prophet" (level 18 light cleric in scary black robes that goes around claiming the rapture is nigh, and they must prepare for an onslaught of demons; the party will probably be confused as fuck). I prevent them from taking over the story, and they usually fuck off after the quest is over.

I enjoy telling stories and playing games with friends.
>Why do you DM?
Because other people do it wrong and I can tell better stories.
>What do you get out of it?
To make sure we don't play the game and tell the stories wrong.
>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
What? No. That question doesn't even make any sense. By definition they are NPCs. DMPC is oxymoronic.

.>why dm
playing doesn't really give me any kind of satisfaction. I want my characters to inhabit my world and then respond and reacts to my players. I like taking on many roles.
>what do I get out of it
I get to respond to a story unfolding with choices and outcomes I dont have full control over. I get to improvise around them
>Your own PC's
No, the characters I make are more like plot devices. used to drive the narrative. They may take on a PC like appearance but they are not player characters.

>Why do you DM?
I DM because getting someone else to run / finding the game I want to play is like pulling teeth.

Frankly, I'd rather plop a sandbox setting and game system down in someone else's lap and have them run it while I get to play in it.

But I'm a realist, and the odds of that ever happening is basically 0.

>What do you get out of it
Worldbuilding and game design practice.

>Do you make a DMPC?
No.

Recurring NPCs? Maybe. But they generally don't tag along with the PCs.

>Why do you DM?
Nobody else wanted to.

>What do you get out of it?
Game experience and knowledge. I'm not super experienced with the system but I love the setting. There are a few awkward times where we have too look up rules but as long as long as the players get to play they don't mind.

>Do you create your own PC to interact with the other PCs?
No but I have modified a lot of NPC stats to create important NPC characters.

I made a setting, set up history and conflicts and characters that lived and moved within it. But it seemed artificial, because everything was going as I wanted it too. Every tragedy and conflict felt forced. Having my group play in the setting and make something of it is the best idea I've ever had, because they get to throw their own concepts and organizations into it. They ruined it, and by ruining it they made it better than I could on my own.