“And that is how you become a forever DM children. It happened to me.” 😔

Don't tell my friends, but I actually like GMing more than playing now. It's fun to have the galaxy-brain "always on" feeling and multitask information. (And it's always your turn in combat!)
- How to accomplish with peanut brain?
  
  Practice makes perfect!
  I'd say the most important thing is knowing who your NPCs are and what they want. That's what you should prepare outside of sessions. Once you have that, it's a lot easier to deal with players throwing curveballs.
  A constrained scope helps as well. Give the group a prompt like "make characters who want revenge on the Lich Queen" or "make characters who care about the city of Korvosa."
  
  Use a different, simpler system.
  DnD and PF are on the crunchier side of the spectrum for ttrpgs, as much as I love PF2. There are tons of great systems you can learn all the rules to in a matter of minutes and run awesome campaigns in without all the crunch. Personally, I love the crunch but it's not for everyone so you shouldn't force it if it's not for you. Simple doesn't mean dumb either, a great example is the newer system Shadowdark. Dungeon Crawl Classics is another solid choice, there are a bunch of others though. Like the indie system The Electrum Archive or TEA. The rules are free, simple, but engaging (with inspiration from Morrowind and Dune so bonus points from me).
  Don't confine yourself!
- I get that, but then I also love that sense of figuring out a creative solution to some social interaction or encounter. I only ever played once, but man I had a blast.

Hercules and Atlas
When Hercules visited King Eurystheus, he told Hercules he would need to complete 12 difficult labors for him. One of those labors was to steal the golden apples that belonged to Zeus. These apples were in a garden and guarded by a hundred-headed dragon and the Hesperides sea nymphs. Hercules did not know how he was going to get past these guards to steal the golden apples, so he sought the help of Atlas at the advice of Prometheus.
Hercules visited Atlas and proposed a deal: if Atlas fetched the golden apples, Hercules would hold up the earth. Atlas hated holding up the earth, so he willfully agreed. After Atlas had retrieved the apples, he returned to Hercules and told him that he would take the apples to King Eurystheus himself. After all, Atlas did not want to return to holding up the earth.
Hercules could not let Atlas do that but also didn’t know how to give him back the earth, so Hercules came up with a plan. Hercules asked Atlas to take the earth for a moment while he placed some soft padding on his shoulders to help him hold the earth. When Atlas agreed and took the earth back on his shoulders, Hercules grabbed the apples and left Atlas at the edge of the earth holding the world like he had done for so many years before.

I tried setting up our game so that other people could take over and DM it and take turns. Alas, I am the forever DM. I enjoy DMing, but missed playing.
But about a year ago I got to join an OSRIC campaign. It's been fun getting to play again!

Me when I want to be a player but the guest DM is doing it wrong:
https://i.imgflip.com/50394m.jpg

Fucking love that my group is basically all the second guy. We've all taken the GM spot at one point.
- That’s our group, we all swap out duties. Some people want to do longer-form campaigns, some just run til they’re bored, some (like me), specifically do shorter one-shots. We have to actually schedule things beforehand they’re so many people wanting to run stuff.
  
  Same here. There's the main game which has been going on for 4 years, and then whenever the DM is a little burnt out we all take turns. The result is years of steady dnd sessions with no burnout, despite playing online over text with no planned schedule and timezones literally across the world from each other

My group's had a pretty good thing going for 6ish years now. 3 out of the 6 if us all love DMing, and so we rotate beween new campaigns every couple years and all of us get a chance to play. We actually have 2 going on right now, and I'm a player in both. My last campaign ended in 2021 and I'll be taking over for one of the campaigns in a couple months

I like DMing, so I'm always DM.

I just wish I had the creativity, ability to improvise, and dedication necessary to DM. It's the fact that I'm lacking in all three that keeps me out of that position.
- Those are all ~~should~~ skills you can develop! Just start DMing with a pre-made adventure and go from there.

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.

I started DMing because no one else dared to try and I wanted a campaign to happen.
That was over 30 years ago.

You might be the dumbest man alive but Laura Les sure is the dumbest girl alive !
- PUT EMOJIS ON MY GRAVE
  
  Hi. I get this a song lyric. But here you go.
  🙏❤️😇♾️

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

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.

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 don't have the income to upgrade my hardware
  What's your Internet connection like?
  I've been using GeForce Now for Baldur's Gate 3 and it's been impressively awesome on a fiber connection.
  Playing on a lightweight laptop with no dedicated graphics card with max settings for $19.99/mo.
  I'd only sub while I had something I was actively playing, but probably the cheapest way to get to play on a 4080, there's zero lag in my case, and I'm not investing into a depreciating asset.
  It might be a good way to play without breaking the bank on upgrading a rig, as long as your Internet is good enough you stream 4k video from streaming services.
  
  Connection is fine when the weather is right lol. But if I had twenty bucks a month to spare, I could put it into an envelope for hardware.
  I had a little spare, but we got a chicken. Fucking disability income is poverty level.

Yuuup. Hey, look at this cool We Be Goblins adventure Paizo did for Free RPG Day. Why don't I run that? What's this? An adventure hook in the back of it for one of their Adventure Paths? Sure, I'll run that. Skip to five years later and I'm half-way through running another Adventure Path and I've done several other shorter adventures besides.
That said, I'm not the only member of our group that GMs, just the most reliable.

Forever DM since DnD 3.0. I averaged roughly one played session per two years. Until when I transitioned to PF2 I got 2 sessions of beginner box and 2 sessions of AP run by a volunteer. It was greatly appreciated and helped a lot with the transition.
RE DMing, I phase it in and out. Its mostly a winter thing for me - too many good-weather-dependent hobbies in summer complicate scheduling so things need to wrap up in spring. I'm preparing to start back up in a month or two, probably every-other-weekly roughly September to April/May-ish.
Also, Baldurs Gate 3. It's so good (it makes me wish for a PF2 ruleset adaption mod, but even under 5e-ish rules it's great).
- Hello! Thanks so much for sharing this. Please, can you speak more about Baldur’s Gate 3? How did the classes play? And is there environmental interaction like the studios other games?
  Thanks again!

I'd like to be the blue dude. I want to try running a little campaign, but my group has 2 very good GMs and I'm generally nervous and not good at talking. I've considered maybe running something online with some vague online friends to learn how, but our GMs are my roommates and I'm sure they would hear me playing with strangers and ask why and/or insist that our own group won't judge me. Which they wouldn't, but that doesn't mean I want to look like a fuck up in front of them in comparison to the standard of GMing theyre used to
- Maybe just try running something for you two DMs then! I'd bet that they'd be happy to help nurture another DM's growth. Speaking anecdotally about my own experience with mentoring other DMs I've never felt that they're fuckups, but rather just felt great joy at seeing them grow.