How many new DMs did 4e bring to the table?

I’ve DMed before, a long time ago (1st ED). Picked up the 3.5 ED stuff and played a little. 4ED inspired me to step up and DM again. Encounter-making is a lot easier. I think running the game is much easier now.

4ED is a great time to be a DM.

I actually started since the release of 4e (last Christmas), but have never played it at all. I run a 3.5 game, and love the rule system.

I DM’ed from the mid-80’s through to about 2000, red box, 1e and 2e. 3e inspired me to stop role-playing altogether, I hated it so. 4e has inspired me to start DMing again. I like it so much I’ve managed to get an online 4e game off the ground, even though I have a new baby in the house.

So yeah, 4e brought me back to D&D, and to the DM seat.

How about those of us who 4e brought BACK to the table? I haven’t played nor DM’d since AD&D……4e brought the memories flooding back and I’m introducing a whole new generation to D&D and we can’t get enough! It’s a good time to be a gamer!

I preferred playing to DMing before 4th edition, but now I strongly prefer being the DM. I just have far more fun behind the screen for some reason now – I think the monsters have been vastly improved and make DMing more enjoyable, and I enjoy keeping everyone entertained.

I started playing D&D on 3.5 a little before 4E came out. By this time there were so many different books with so many classes, and spells, and magic items, and rules that I barely felt confident enough to write up my character sheet on my own, let alone try to translate the stories in my head into a D&D adventure.

When 4e came out it felt like the slate was wiped clean, so I did my best to faithfully learn the rules from the get go. I realized that the system seemed very simple, and afforded me a lot of freedoms, so I decided to give DMing a try. I probably wouldn’t have run so much as a dungeon delve were it not for this edition.

I’ve been Storytelling for White Wolfs World of Darkness games for awhile, the New World of Darkness system is so simple I love it. 4e brought me back to Dungeons and Dragons again which I always found complicated due to it’s unnecessary amount of complications.

At 25, I’m probably on the younger side of the hobby (or at least on the younger side of the online community), but I’ve been role-playing since I was 15 or so. In these 10 years, I’ve always had a seat at a friend’s table. So when I tried to start up a game (BESM, Trigun themed) when I was 18, I figured I wouldn’t have any problems. But boy did that game ever crash and burn. I had a dozen prepared pages of story all based on the show, characters, maps–everything I thought you needed to have to run a game. But when I started the game, my players took an immediate left turn and left my days of preparation as scrap paper. They wanted to explore the universe; I wanted to replay the show. A show has a rigorous setting and plot whereas a role-playing game needs to be a little more free-form. It didn’t take me very long to realize that I would not be able to run a game based on something with such strict guidelines. After three hours of a session, I called the game off and, in my frustration, claimed I never wanted to GM again.

Cue winter 2007–five years later. There are two games on the immediate horizon that I am looking forward to, but few others among my friends are. Dark Heresy and 4e. I pitch both of them to some friends and they decide they like Dark Heresy but aren’t familiar enough with the setting to run a game (or if they are, they’ve found one elsewhere). January rolls around and I’m still enthusiastic about the game, so I pick up the core book and immerse myself in it, get some ideas together, and bite the bullet. I wrote up a short series of encounters based on the ones in the GM screen booklet and recruited three friends with the caveat–“If you want to play, don’t be an asshole.” Something clicked and I loved it.

The following week, I’m banging my head against the wall trying to write some encounters. It’s far from easy. The monsters/cultists/whatever are balanced, but not to any apparent scale. Setting stuff comes very easily, but there’s a ton of unpredictability in the system. I don’t know if my players are going to roll exceedingly well and plow through a legion of Xenos or if they are all going to spontaneously explode because of a couple bad rolls. I don’t know what gear is going to be overpowered and what they’re just going to trash for some extra cash. My players call me up asking if we’re playing and I have to let them down.

Soon, 4e was on the way and I was still pretty jazzed about it. In the first week, I must have read through those books a half-dozen times. My favorite part was how to balance encounters to specific levels with something as simple as experience quotas. And loot? The book has frikkin’ tables that practically say, “here’s what’s balanced for a party of this level.” All the math and playtesting was already done and I could just pick and choose exactly what I wanted and plug it into the setting which was still coming easily.

Now I’m not saying that 4e is without work. I find I have to spend about an hour for every hour of gaming I expect to run, but that comes more from perusing the books looking for the coolest and best thing to throw at my players for any given encounter. I don’t worry about doing a ton of mental math to see if the party can take on an equal number of dudes. I know they can; it’s in the experience budget. Since I don’t have to worry about that stuff, I can spend more time working on the setting and making cursory preparations in case someone pulls something unexpected.

So 4e didn’t exactly bring me behind the screen; it turned GM’ing into something that I can do. More than that, it turned it into something I have fun doing on a weekly basis. There’s no banging my head against the wall because the wall is illusory–I see right through it. My passive perception is pretty high these days and I definitely would not be here were it not for 4e.

I have been GMing since the late 70’s. My first game was Traveller, which I got as a Christmas gift. With no gamers around, my first games were PbP with my brother. Later I was the DM because I had the books and new the rules.

While 4E didn’t get me behind the screen, I love GMing 4E. I have also seen at least two players try their hand at GMing for the first time because of 4E, and I hope to encourage more.

After listening to the PA/PVP podcast games, and hearing how 4E was simpler to run, I jumped upon finding out that some of my friends were playing 4E.

Dissatisfied with how the current DM was running things in his chaotic boring homebrew, I went and said “I bet I can do it better.” You’d be surprised how much fun players can have with a plot, a few encounters, and a dungeon crawl.

I’ve been GMing since the early 90’s, but the 4th brings me to D&D and now I’m a DM.