How Being a DM has Made Me a Better Player

In the last couple of years I have found myself being the DM for my group of friends and rarely being a simple player.  I enjoy this as it has given me a creative outlet for my thoughts and ideas, but it is a lot of work.  Setting up for a session and making sure I have plenty of material is a lot of work and cuts into my free time I could use for other fun pursuits.  In having to run these games I have become a better player.  Not in sheer skill at making characters or playing strategically, but in attitude and understanding how the game is run.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to be a simple player and all I had to prepare was my character sheet.  This was refreshing and relaxing.  I made a great backstory for my character, I knew how his family died, what his life goals were, and what his personality was like.  Spending so much time creating my own worlds and characters for my games helped me form what I wanted this character to be like.  Like anything else, practice makes perfect (or at least improves your skill).

At the end of a marathon session, my character died.  I don't mean unconscious, or awaiting a raise dead spell, dead, flat out dead with no way to bring him back.  This character I had spent so much time on was gone for good, and it didn't bother me a bit. The DM rolled spectacularly against me and was trying to backtrack some of his rolls to not take me out in the first fight.  I told him to just play the dice as they landed.  I have knocked out plenty of characters in my time, it happens.  Dice-based role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons are very random and subject to chance.  Having a DM roll super well is just that, chance, it happens.  My players have always given me the benefit of the doubt so I did the same for my DM.

Being a DM means you need to be well versed with how the game is run.  You are the referee and arbiter on rules questions and decisions.  Players will always have questions so you need to not only know the rules as well as you can but also the overall feel of how the game is designed.  This is especially important for D&D 5e as there are a lot of actions players can take that are not explicitly covered by the rules.  Instead, 5e provides many mechanics for a DM to handle these situations without a lot of table lookup and reading through all of the rules.  Advantage and Disadvantage have been a great way to help streamline play.

Being on one side of the DM screen is good practice for being on the other side.  Creating my own worlds and characters has prepared me to create more fleshed out and three-dimensional characters to play in games.  Having seen what happens with crazy dice rolls against players has given me a higher tolerance for it happening to me, even though it kills my well-crafted and beloved character.  Being forced to be the referee forces a DM to learn the rules in and out as well as to quickly react to curveballs thrown by players' actions.  I encourage any and all players to give DMing a shot to better themselves as players of the game too.