GM's Day 2024

Today is "International Game Master's Day"! To celebrate, this post is going to be a little different than what I normally write / have written / will continue to write. I'm going to talk about my own experience as a GM--consider this a supplement to the "About Me" page; but first, a rundown of what this holiday is.

And be sure to check out GM Day sales on DMsGuild and DriveThruRPG!

This article may include affiliate links.

What Is GM's Day?

First, what even is this supposed holiday?

GM's Day was originally proposed in a now-famous post on ENWorld, a major RPG forum, back in 2002. The original poster wrote that:

It’s clear from another thread I was reading that many GM’s out there don’t feel appreciated, and clearer still that many players don’t appreciate the amount of work their GM’s are putting into their games. So what I propose is GM’S DAY. GM’s day is the day the gaming community would celebrate all the hard work our GM’s do for us.

Not to toot my own horn, but GMing is hard work and a lot of hours. Between worldbuilding, creating custom stat blocks, creating custom maps, writing out session notes (and I'm a fairly improv-heavy DM), thinking about the future arc of the campaign, and then of course actually running sessions, I regularly spend at least 10 hours per session. Potentially more depending on the session and how much general preparation needs to be done.

Most GMs I know also are filled with self-doubt. The first thing that I do at the end of a session is always go "Ugh, I should have done X, Y, or Z." I am my own worst critic, and the consensus from every GM I've ever played with and most that I've seen online is that this is common. Critique is good and leads to self-improvement, but it also means that the number of sessions that I've run over the past decade where I think I did optimally can be counted on two hands.

So thank your GMs and share your favorite moments with them! Hearing that a session was good from one of the players is one of the bright spots of GMing! Taking March 4th every year as a day to particularly appreciate the work of your GM is also a great practice--thanks ENWorld poster Heathen72, you had a great idea.

Sales

Many of the major RPG sites will host pretty significant GM Day sales. Yes, I tend to spend too much money on these sites every year.

The OneBookshelf sites that I post my content on--DMsGuild and DriveThruRPG--both have annual GM Day sales, happening now through March 10th (Sunday). Check them out! Maybe buy your GM a gift of a supplement for a system that they already run or a new system you'd be interested in trying! I guarantee that your GM's wallet will thank you, as you're sparing them from buying that product themselves.

About Me

I began playing D&D back in its 4th edition days, in 2010. I was in the 6th grade, and I had read about this game called D&D in the comic strip Foxtrot. I was interested in what it was actually, and my mom called up the local hobby store in the mall and asked if they had public games. I went Thursday night at 6 pm, to an open-invite game entirely made up of college students, which was run by a DM whose nickname was "Tactical" who was making a living playing Magic: the Gathering competitively, living off of his tournament winnings.

My mom thought that I would absolutely hate it, being the youngest by a solid 8 years. Instead, I loved it, and the college students were incredibly welcoming and inclusive to a child. I played with that group as it slowly shifted as people graduated and left town until somehow I was the most veteran player in the group while still in high school.

That is when I took over the role of GM/DM.

My first efforts were, frankly, pretty bad. They weren't hitting an interesting tone, the combats were pretty mundane, and I did not have a very good sense of how to structure a narrative. (So, to any aspiring GMs out there, don't let being bad at your first few sessions discourage you. It takes a lot of time and practice to build up the skills of GMing).

When I went to college, my first priority was organizing a D&D game. By now, I had made the jump over to 5th edition. I quickly found way more interested parties than I was expecting and heavily overcommitted. While the group that I was playing in fell apart as college got into swing, the group that I was GMing persisted. Thus began my role as a "forever DM"--usually a term people use about feeling trapped in the DM role instead of getting to play, but which I adopted as something positive; I love DMing even more than playing, and so staying as group DM was the best way I could play.

College also sparked my homebrew world being something significant. I picked up the world that I had played in at the end of high school, something very vaguely inspired by real-world history, set in a fantasy 1500s, dusted it off, and ran a game set in the Golden Age of Piracy for that first year. Since then, I have more-or-less continued to run games set in that one persistent world, fleshing it out with each campaign, giving it a depth of lore--most of which any one set of players will never see--that one former player described as "making the world feel really real, like there's a whole history there."

The world grew richer and deeper as I pursued my own college major in history. With each history class, as I kept my actual school notes, I kept a parallel series of notes about "how can I adapt this for my world or my campaign." I thought about the different forms of monarchy in Europe because I took a class on it, and let that inspire me to differentiate my monarchies beyond the sort of British feudal perspective that is the common D&D trope; more on that to come at some point in a full-length post.

In my second year of college, after taking an American history course at the end of my first year, I ran a campaign centered on a fictionalized version of the American Revolution, and this is where the link between history and roleplaying games clicked into place for me--the thing that would ultimately evolve into this blog. By using real questions from the American Revolution, questions about the nature and role of government, my players delved deeply into the politics of the world and left feeling like the world had weight. Actions had consequences--not just, "if we kill that guy, it might come back to bite us," but consequences for the world and its evolution. The decisions that this party made carry on to the entirely different crew of players that are playing in the world right now. When I tell tales about the current campaign back to those original players, they go "ugh, we should have done this other thing, we could have stopped the problem central to your current campaign before it became an issue." Even 5 years after the campaign ended, I was having conversations about the political implications of that American Revolution campaign with players who had not played in the world in years. That is what grounded, historically-driven, persistent-world D&D can inspire.

I paused from running history-inspired games in my 3rd year but returned with a pseudo-Napoleonic/English Civil War game in my senior year. Afterward, I explored the aftermath of that war--the setting grounded was in history, but the plot less so. And now, I'm running a game set in the Wild West of the fantasy country liberated during that fantasy-American Revolution game.

This world is my baby, and it has been my greatest pleasure as a GM to share it and see it grow deeper because of everyone's additions to it. While this can happen in any world, I have found that rooting it in the lessons of history provides a groundedness that certainly helps me. When in doubt, I can look at real historical examples of similar situations and use that to inspire the answer to the question of what comes next. I can draw from real myths to create more fantasy creatures beyond the limits of the D&D rulebooks.

If you're reading this blog (and aren't just a real-life friend who feels obligated to), it means you're presumably interested in using history to flesh out your campaigns. Stick around; I'm really excited about the history that will be coming down the pipe in the coming weeks and months. Next week, I'll be sharing a resource for both players and GMs about a faction inspired by a major social movement of the 1800s.

And remember to thank your GM today! Maybe link them to this blog if they're looking for more inspiration – I'll be sharing parts of history that I find particularly inspiring for TTRPGs and providing specific resources for how I'd adapt that history into a game.

Happy GM Day! I'm taking the rest of the day off--that's my gift to myself.