If God were a human, he would want to be a Dungeon Master.

Why not?

I know if I were God, I would be a DM.

The ancient Greeks thought so. Their gods were the gods that had it all – power, wisdom, vanity to a fault – literally. And yet they would spend their Age of Power playing with humanity. I don’t think it was by chance that the ancient Greeks had a 20-sided die long before Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson ever existed.

Sure the DM has to stay up all hours of the night nearly every night of the week for months on end – fuck, I even had to end an unofficial marriage because she didn’t understand my need to DM (she also had no idea why I wanted to learn to surf).

In fact, most people hate being the DM. They would rather play in a game and I can understand that.

But, for me, there isn’t much better than being able to build everything from the ground up. To my friends, they loved it when I started to DM and GM (Game Master) all the time because it meant they didn’t have to. Being the DM wasn’t always long hours of design and work – shit, I remember running games that had little, if any, design or work involved.

Chaos & Carnage, that was what we called it when I had my friends roll up characters in a modern setting role-playing game like Top Secret, and I would rip the map out of our local phone book. That would be it. The gun rules out of Top Secret and a map of Berkeley, California.

My friends would arm their characters to the hilt – including machine guns, grenades and rocket launchers. They would then take to our local streets – in the game – and proceed to start havoc. You have to remember, this was long before Grand Theft Auto – it was circa 1979 and it was likely that most of the designers of GTA were either still in diapers or barely learning to speak. Regardless, there they were, a bunch of characters wandering around the Bay Area with weapons galore and killing most anything that got in their way. Eventually, they would either get killed by the state militia or we would become too exhausted to stay awake any longer.

Of course, those were the short-lived, one-shot games that can only occupy a certain amount of leisure time before they become ridiculous and trite. Later on we learned to expand our games to include more depth than seeing what kind of weapon power it took to take out Thor or Cthulhu.

That was when the real work started. Sure the one or two-shot games were actually helpful on both sides of the table as my friends learned to role-play and I learned to adjudicate circumstances (“Okay, you decide to shoot the toll-booth operator so you don’t have to pay to get across the Bay Bridge? That means the cops will likely find out on the next shift change at midnight. An hour away.”). But we all craved more.

Game modules were still fairly new and Dungeon Magazine hadn’t been invented yet. So, it was up to me to really take what I could and build our own games and game worlds. No one else in my small group of friends was likely to do it and they all insisted – after pitting them against a 150 foot tall spud monster – that I was the only one for the job.

I stole and plagiarized a lot in those early years. I even went so far as to design my own Helm’s Deep, Atlantis and Death Star. Nothing was sacred or off-limits, but yet no one in my groups ever complained or faltered in their interest. Seemingly, they all loved the idea of what they would do if they were fighting 4-armed creatures on Mars or how they would gain the crown of Hyborea. Soon enough, I began to love the idea of making my own myths and worlds.

To this day, I still have that love.

And who knows? Maybe someday God will want to roll up a character for my game. If he does, he better be ready to save or die, just like the rest of us.

Stay tuned for further installments.