I’m the forever GM, but my players also insist I play a PC in the party, so I kinda still get to play. I think they know otherwise I’d never be a player. LOL

This is why my group has like four different games going. I run one, and three of the others also run their own. I get to play twice a week and run a game every other week.

Let’s see. I started as DM in 92, after the group I was a player in fell apart.

From then, it was 99 before I had a chance to play as a player again. However! It was the first time someone ran my home brew system other than me, so it was a double pleasure. It was cool as fuck to see my best friend build his own world around the same mechanics and ideas we’d used with me as GM

After that, it was, I think 2003? A friend ran a white wolf game series. We did Vampire, werewolf, and changeling (or whatever the faery system was called). That lasted maybe six months though, the dude running it was a flake.

That’s it, that’s the sum total of play time I’ve had as a player in thirty odd years lol.

I’ve gotten my fix in video games off and on. D&d online, neverwinter there for a while, replays of Baldur’s gate and 2, that weird superhero MMORPG. I’d play Baldur’s gate 3, but I don’t have the income to upgrade my hardware. That’s usually good enough tbh.

I’ve thought about finding an online group to join, but I’m not super reliable these days. My parents are aging, I’ve got a kid, so I can’t do regularly scheduled play reliably. That’s a big ask for a group to put up with.

Thing is, I fucking love running a game. The world building, the planning of sessions amd campaigns, all the minutia of it just makes me happy. I have NPC enemies built up in five or six game systems that probably won’t ever get used, but I have fun making them up.

When I don’t have a game going, I write instead.

I actually enjoy playing a lot more than DMing. I don’t really like DMing all that much but I hate not having a game even more. I wish one of my friends would step up to the plate.