I’ve been dungeon mastering for a decent amount of time. About two years. My first creation was Grikk, the ice cream loving, half-orc barbarian, and I have so many fun stories I can share about him. After three months my time as an adventurer ended, and my time as a dungeon master came out of necessity to find people to play with. I really did enjoy being a dungeon master, some times running groups through my own imagined worlds and some times through pre-made campaigns—yet I always found myself wishing I could just be adventurer again. I had so many great adventurer concepts too, such as a cleric who is reluctant to heal and a fighter who is scared of confrontation. (For some reason most of my ideas revolved around making an adventurer who didn’t like performing his role in combat). As the weeks turned to months and three months turned into a year and a half, these concepts never had a chance to be created, and I feared they never would be. Anyone who has played as a dungeon master quickly finds out that once you take this role, it is a very hard rut to get out of, because none of the other players wants you to stop playing in this capacity.

My chance came three months ago

One of the new players in my gaming group expressed a desire to dungeon master. I quickly took him up on his offer and made plans. The death of his character and the introduction of mine was arranged. My character’s name was Penthus and he was a cleric who hated healing and helping people. Finally I was living out an idea I had for a character and it was a blast.

He soon died to the hands of diabolical gargoyles and so I created Zachian the Warlock. He was also a blast to play.

But then I realized…

From time to time my dungeon master would do things that would just excite me and make me wish I was the dungeon master again. As three months have gone on this has happened more and more, I found myself wishing I could lead a group of adventurers through my imagined worlds again. Much to the new dungeon master’s credit, he was great and that was the problem, he made me want to dungeon master out of a desire to do what he is doing and not a need to keep a group together.

From this I have learned that playing Dungeon & Dragons from any perspective is incredibly fun, and I have learned that my calling in D&D is to be the dungeon master. I lost sight of this after a year and a half of always playing as the dungeon master, and it was my time as an adventurer that reminded me of this and recharged my creative juices.

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