Life as a "Forever GM" & Keeping a Group Together

It's a good life, but sometimes you want more.

I’ll begin with this: I've been playing -- starting with one of the box sets of Dungeons & Dragons I got from Hess' department store in...'77? '78? maybe? Long enough that almost no one knew what D&D was. I know it took a long time to find someone who wanted to play. There was a distant cousin I wound up running the game for, and there was an older guy who was running D&D at the local library, but I remember he didn't make it very exciting; it was very rules oriented.

Once I had an actually group of friends playing by 1980, we played a lot -- and I was usually the guy running the show. That was partly because I didn’t have a lot of extracurricular activities, I could come up with a plot pretty, quick, and could usually improvise stuff on the fly. We cycled through a lot of games -- all the TSR offerings, Universe and Traveler, then hit on James Bond: 007, which was my favorite system until about a decade ago. It's still damned good.

In college, others would take over running games, but they usually would last a few episodes then hand it off to me because they were busy or just didn't have the time. After college, I was down to a single player for a while before I moved to Philadelphia and picked up a new group. Again, me running. It was in Philly that I started being a lot more selective about who got invited to play. My roommate and I had the misfortune of meeting a 350-pound “ninja” who was so unrelentingly bad at peopling that we dropped him. He then stalked us for two months. I remember an incident where he was trying to call into the building, whilst me and my not-inconspicuous falt mate slipped into the atrium, got the inner door unlocked, and managed to slip up the stairs unnoticed by his well-honed ninja perceptive abilities.

There was an interregnum between Philadelphia and moving out to New Mexico where I was again down to one player before cobbling together a group over six months, pulling good gamers out of mediocre groups to form something special. In one of the groups, where I would meet my former wife, there was a goth Christian who wrote awful religious death metal music. He ran Call of Chthulu -- and the experience was so Earth-shatteringly bad, I didn’t play CoC again.

The one GM that really sticks is this redheaded giant dude in Albuquerque, totally spectrum, who ran Dungeons & Dragons for his group of four. For about most of the session — which was a disaster — I started working on sussing out the players that were worth the effort, then peeled out the good gamers for our own group. This guy was stunningly misogynistic: after skimming through his 80 page bible on his game world, he gave us our characters, making sure the singular female got the cleric...who was mute. Seen, not heard. He rarely asked what she was doing, save when it was time to heal up the guys. Better yet, he made sure his wife was getting us drinks and food. He once played at our place and while stretching, he knocked the glass light cover off the kitchen ceiling. Shatter. Did he offer to clean up? Nope -- he expected my then-wife to. Lovely fellow.

Even during the military, I was able to keep a game going with the wife and a rotating group of folks that came and went as we changed posts, and on returning to Albuquerque, I reconstituted parts of the old gaming group and added more. Divorce, remarriage, and a kid — there was always the gaming group, usually with me GMing.

I’ve manage to keep my gaming groups together for a good while. The original high school group gamed together, on and off, for almost eight years after we graduated and went out separate ways; we would get together once or twice a year at wherever was most convenient. The first Albuquerque group lasted — with a break for military service — twelve years. Several others followed, bouncing between two and six players, plus me. Recently, the current iteration of Nerd Night™, has been mostly the same people since 2017. In the last year, one of the other players took the role of GM for the first time. He’s been running us through Fallout, which several of the players know and have played the video game version, and there’s a promised Mythic Odysseys of Theros campaign promised. It’s nice to play and not have the responsibility of the group on me but I did note — if I’m not available, the group doesn’t tend to get together elsewhere.

That brings me to the second topic of this piece: how does a group hold together for a decade or more? There’s a few reasons: 1) you have to be friends…not just for D&D. You have to get together for cookouts, or movie nights, or on the extreme end, blow a bunch of money to got to GenCon together. 2) There has to be the one guy that coordinates and keeps things moving. As forever GM, that typically has fallen to me, and still does — even when I’m not running. 3) Pick a day and time and commit. Yes, there will be kid’s plays, and illness, and trips, etc. but the group needs to meet regularly. Once a week is ideal, but at least every two. Longer than that and the momentum is lost. Chores, travel, other things will keep people away. If we have one player out, we typically have another player run the missing person’s character, or if the game allows for it, they are busy elsewhere. In our group of five, we’ll usually still play even with two down. We might do a board game night, movie night, or I find something I can run in a night. But you’ve got to keep it going.