Why I'd Like to DM* One Day
So part of this was brought on by the Self-Insert Meme link in ad_exia's recent post. I was about to submit myself, and then I realized that... I don't really ever interact with main characters in any self-insertion sort of things I do. Well, with the exception of pushing a self-insertion into friends' stories, but when you know the author and are getting the author to put you in one of their stories, that doesn't quite count as self-insertion because you're not writing it XD (Ahem, Bobert-chan, you should really get back to writing that story...)
I find that what I pick up out of most stories the most is the world setup. Worlds are really big places, and I like to claim a corner of them as my own. This has kind of been my M.O. since childhood--I'd create characters in existing worlds of anything from TV and movie cartoons to books. I think this is a good chunk of why I was so very drawn to MUSHes when I finally found a few; many of them picked up the premise of a particular world and picked another corner, away from the main characters (for copyright reasons etc.), and created their own societies and setups. I did very much love my characters from the ElfQuest-themed and Dragonriders of Pern-themed MUSHes, but the one I really got attached to (even though it very quickly died) was an original set in a medieval Earth-like setting where the new world is just being discovered, and magic exists in it.
Characters in Unicorn Point were essentially those early settlers of the so-called "new world" (ie America) in the process of discovering that all the magical/mythological things from the old world were alive and well in this new land. Actually, that's not completely true--there were also some characters who were playing native elves infiltrating the settlement to try and figure out what the newcomers were doing here. The thing I really loved about the discovery aspect was the fact that I could actively take a part in filling in the gaps.
And I did. Yea verily, I did.
My character was Sana Sidhe, the young healer who had survived the trip to the new world on one of those first few ships (I believe there were three, if memory serves, in keeping with the American-continent-discovery-like theme). I believe in the first drafting of her history, there'd been two other (older, male) healers who were the appointed healers, but both had perished in the shipwrecks. Sana had been on the one ship which hadn't been wrecked and thus survived to become the town healer.
Past the really contrived background and extremely shoddy profile drawings (hey, I was like 13 or something at the time, yo! Gimme a break...), I started something that the MUSH creator thought was a pretty cool thing at the time: a compendium of new herbs. It was something that made sense--a medieval doctor relied very heavily on herbs (and leeches, but I conveniently left that out of my methods for the ickiness and possible infections) and Sana was the closest thing to an apothecary to be had. It also made a lot of sense because in a world where you had a finite supply of familiar herbs from the old world, adaptation to the new world was necessary to survive. It didn't hurt that I was still entertaining the idea of going into botany at that point of my life, either. So, word was put out on the forums that people could "discover" new plants in the world and submit descriptions to me and I'd add them to the book (which was an object I coded up myself in the MUSH language, which is incidentally my very first programming language). I'd look at the plausibility (can't be a wonder-drug or otherwise ridiculous), fix up the grammar (geez, I was an editor even back then o_0), and if I deemed it okay, it went into the book along with credit to the discoverer. You have no idea how much I loved that compendium; I still think about it from time to time and all the fantastic plants I would have come up with for it if the game had stayed active.
When a couple of us decided to put together a D&D game, I helped my then-boyfriend and GM, Andrew, come up with the world we'd be playing in, and in some ways I'm still invested in that world. To be honest, I'm probably more interested in the world that was created than in my character, who is similarly trite and ridiculous of background (yes, there is a theme. I make characters with ludicrously grand backgrounds wherever I go, it seems), and I do a much better job of coming up with NPCs, possibly because I'm not so attached to them that I feel a need to infuse them with a significant slice of myself. (I am full of ridiculousness and parenthetical statements, btw.) In fact, the biggest problem with me writing stories is usually that I can write up a good world and decent backgrounds for characters, I just... don't put them into motion so much. I can't get them to do anything in the world, which is, you know, the story part of a story--I'm only ever good at the setup.
And that's where players come in. They have characters of their own that provide the actions, and reactions are my forte (drawing on background and/or personality assigned to the character). I'd be worried about how "correctly" I was playing, and I'd be worried about exactly how to handle combat because we played pretty loosely in our game due to pretty much all of us being first-timers and knew each other well enough that we knew we didn't care about how "correct" everything was. Gotta watch out for those munchkins***. But I think if I got some experience under my belt with people I knew, I might be good at it. Maybe not as much with creating a really epic storyline, but definitely in the devilish details; the players themselves can sometimes be the source of the epic storyline if they've got good items in their back-stories, of course.
So, that's why I think I'd like to be a DM someday, if I can find a good group to play with me. The end.
* For those who are not familiar with what a DM or GM is, it stands for "Dungeon Master" or "Game Master." Both terms appear to be generally interchangeable**, but one may be more appropriate than the other depending on whether your Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) or other similar role-playing game is occurring in a dungeon or not.
** If you're going to go munchkin*** on me over the terminology, you're totally not eligible for the game when I finally find a group to play with :P
*** A munchkin is a rules-lawyer type of player, who likes to play by the exact wording of the rules (letter of the law) rather than the spirit of the rules/law. It's that person who really likes to nitpick on technicalities and the like. I actually don't know how the term came about, I just know it is occasionally used to describe such a player mindset.
I find that what I pick up out of most stories the most is the world setup. Worlds are really big places, and I like to claim a corner of them as my own. This has kind of been my M.O. since childhood--I'd create characters in existing worlds of anything from TV and movie cartoons to books. I think this is a good chunk of why I was so very drawn to MUSHes when I finally found a few; many of them picked up the premise of a particular world and picked another corner, away from the main characters (for copyright reasons etc.), and created their own societies and setups. I did very much love my characters from the ElfQuest-themed and Dragonriders of Pern-themed MUSHes, but the one I really got attached to (even though it very quickly died) was an original set in a medieval Earth-like setting where the new world is just being discovered, and magic exists in it.
Characters in Unicorn Point were essentially those early settlers of the so-called "new world" (ie America) in the process of discovering that all the magical/mythological things from the old world were alive and well in this new land. Actually, that's not completely true--there were also some characters who were playing native elves infiltrating the settlement to try and figure out what the newcomers were doing here. The thing I really loved about the discovery aspect was the fact that I could actively take a part in filling in the gaps.
And I did. Yea verily, I did.
My character was Sana Sidhe, the young healer who had survived the trip to the new world on one of those first few ships (I believe there were three, if memory serves, in keeping with the American-continent-discovery-like theme). I believe in the first drafting of her history, there'd been two other (older, male) healers who were the appointed healers, but both had perished in the shipwrecks. Sana had been on the one ship which hadn't been wrecked and thus survived to become the town healer.
Past the really contrived background and extremely shoddy profile drawings (hey, I was like 13 or something at the time, yo! Gimme a break...), I started something that the MUSH creator thought was a pretty cool thing at the time: a compendium of new herbs. It was something that made sense--a medieval doctor relied very heavily on herbs (and leeches, but I conveniently left that out of my methods for the ickiness and possible infections) and Sana was the closest thing to an apothecary to be had. It also made a lot of sense because in a world where you had a finite supply of familiar herbs from the old world, adaptation to the new world was necessary to survive. It didn't hurt that I was still entertaining the idea of going into botany at that point of my life, either. So, word was put out on the forums that people could "discover" new plants in the world and submit descriptions to me and I'd add them to the book (which was an object I coded up myself in the MUSH language, which is incidentally my very first programming language). I'd look at the plausibility (can't be a wonder-drug or otherwise ridiculous), fix up the grammar (geez, I was an editor even back then o_0), and if I deemed it okay, it went into the book along with credit to the discoverer. You have no idea how much I loved that compendium; I still think about it from time to time and all the fantastic plants I would have come up with for it if the game had stayed active.
When a couple of us decided to put together a D&D game, I helped my then-boyfriend and GM, Andrew, come up with the world we'd be playing in, and in some ways I'm still invested in that world. To be honest, I'm probably more interested in the world that was created than in my character, who is similarly trite and ridiculous of background (yes, there is a theme. I make characters with ludicrously grand backgrounds wherever I go, it seems), and I do a much better job of coming up with NPCs, possibly because I'm not so attached to them that I feel a need to infuse them with a significant slice of myself. (I am full of ridiculousness and parenthetical statements, btw.) In fact, the biggest problem with me writing stories is usually that I can write up a good world and decent backgrounds for characters, I just... don't put them into motion so much. I can't get them to do anything in the world, which is, you know, the story part of a story--I'm only ever good at the setup.
And that's where players come in. They have characters of their own that provide the actions, and reactions are my forte (drawing on background and/or personality assigned to the character). I'd be worried about how "correctly" I was playing, and I'd be worried about exactly how to handle combat because we played pretty loosely in our game due to pretty much all of us being first-timers and knew each other well enough that we knew we didn't care about how "correct" everything was. Gotta watch out for those munchkins***. But I think if I got some experience under my belt with people I knew, I might be good at it. Maybe not as much with creating a really epic storyline, but definitely in the devilish details; the players themselves can sometimes be the source of the epic storyline if they've got good items in their back-stories, of course.
So, that's why I think I'd like to be a DM someday, if I can find a good group to play with me. The end.
* For those who are not familiar with what a DM or GM is, it stands for "Dungeon Master" or "Game Master." Both terms appear to be generally interchangeable**, but one may be more appropriate than the other depending on whether your Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) or other similar role-playing game is occurring in a dungeon or not.
** If you're going to go munchkin*** on me over the terminology, you're totally not eligible for the game when I finally find a group to play with :P
*** A munchkin is a rules-lawyer type of player, who likes to play by the exact wording of the rules (letter of the law) rather than the spirit of the rules/law. It's that person who really likes to nitpick on technicalities and the like. I actually don't know how the term came about, I just know it is occasionally used to describe such a player mindset.