The reason I always enjoyed DMing (being the Dungeon Master in a D&D campaign for you normals, not sending direct messages) was something to which I could not put words until I read Chris Tolkien's preface to the first edition of the Silmarillion: It's a chance to co-create.
You get the fun of aping the Creator of the Universe in basically building and populating worlds (and you get to throw in dinosaur fossils to confuse the natives) and then watching it play out with people over whom you have influence but do not control.
And THAT is when the real fun begins, because as they interact with the world you've made, they change it, you change it, and the world grows together cooperatively and antagonistically and incidentally.
This is part of why when my kids stop fighting while I'm DMing for them, it's fun -- albeit in a different way from when I used to DM for friends in high school and college.
These brilliant idiots see and understand both this world and the one I've created differently from anyone ever; they have shared understandings of both; and without realizing it, they teach me a lot I'd never imagined.
For example, a lot of players will use a charmed creature as a damage sponge (the term since MMOs is "tank" but I'm old school), but very few will bring a charmed goblin along like a particularly burdensome pet and accidentally skin his best friend alive to prove he's a pig.
(He wasn't a pig.)
Most players don't think "paladin" is D&D for "suicidal and slightly deranged danger-eater." Most players don't manage to convince the rest of the party to help her go tame a unicorn because bad things will happen in real life otherwise.
You know who's neat, but thinks she isn't? My eldest daughter. (Almost 13, so that's a thing.) She doesn't come up with clever ideas -- she's extremely bright but doesn't think around corners. You know what makes her neat?
She always has enough rope. Veteran players will grok.
She always has enough rope. Veteran players will grok.
She takes inventory. She suggests buying food instead of just more arrows may not be the worst idea. She keeps track of the gold pool. She forsook the lightly enchanted weapons for a bag of holding.
Enter a darkness, 15' radius area? She's actually got extra staves and poles to hand out so the party can feel around. Turning a corner in a dungeon? She's the first to suggest this might be a good place to check for traps.
She loves casting magic missile and that little box of 2nd and 3rd level scrolls she got, but every party needs someone who understands that the game world behaves a lot like ours.
My second son almost never pipes up during campaigns or battles except to call rolls, but every so often he suggests something like setting fire to the ceiling on top of bad guys, or bottling sunlight with that enchanted bottle, that changes everything.
