Proud DM Moments

I have 2 I can think of right off the top of my head.

One was very recent in the campaign we are in now. My players are building their own kingdom in my world. They have collected the money and earned a little renowned with some high up people. The night after they purchased 2 ships and acquired 109 hirelings, 15 of which are adopted orphans and 53 of which are freed slaves,we were all standing outside talking about the night. Every single player at one point said how excited they are for next week. Then last night one of the players texted me and said "Hey man...I cant stop thinking about the adventure". I was at work at the time, made my night. hahaha

The other one is when one of my players was so invested in the previous 1 year campaign we did. He was a LG Elf Ranger from the coast. He had an extremely complicated history, as players sometimes do lol, but the jist of it is his wife and son had been kidnapped by the evil queen of another country in an effort to stop him. She did something different to every player at one point or another. She basically told him that if he just killed his party members, or betrayed them somehow and came to her side, not only would he have his family back but he could have an enormously rich estate in her kingdom. This came to him in a dream and he woke up afterwords. I expected him to be like "Heck no, not ever am I joining her", but to my absolute surprise he got out of bed and walked past the player on guard saying "I have to think."
I was floored. All through the campaign he was completely against this queen and working to kill her and get his family back. He was so into the role-play of his actual character that when that opportunity came up, he really really had to think about it. He proceeded to sit there for an hour of real time, completely silent. Intense moment.

I had a moment like that when my players and I finished an entire campaign, but left the ending open if we wanted to come back to it. It was the first time I ever got to that kind of point in any RPG I ever ran and I felt so happy that I didn't just rage quit it like I tend to when I run games and I don't like where it ended up.

Earlier this year I ran my first high fantasy RPG using the Pathfinder system for two of my buddies who I never ran for, but played with before. I used a pre-made campaign setting for sake of ease and familiarity on all parties, in this instance, Paizo's setting and then took my own liberties from it. The players were members of a newly made military unit known as the Taldan Musketeers, numbering just over 400 in total. The crescendo of the whole thing was when they were besieging a fort which fell to an invading army to the north and they, along with a mercenary they at first murdered his employers and then hired him, but he took a liking to them and decided to hang out to see where things would go, and a disgraced knight, sneaked into the fort, released the prisoners while the siege party outside the walls bombarded the walls outside with what they called a "number 7 shell."

My one player, who was playing the son of a minor nobleman that desired to rise through the ranks and become a prestigious member of this unit desired to try to win this battle once and for all by cutting the head off the serpent and proceeded to use a disguise spell to disguise himself as one of the enemy officers, the wrong one as it should be noted since the enemy commander noticed what what going on and challenged him to single combat in which he lost, but was avenged by the other player character.

We ended the whole thing back at the capital city where the remaining character, a sergeant called Ysolda, has become one of the most jaded people there. She saw all her friends die over the course of a few months, and yet she survives with her life, the clothes on her back, a mercenary with a black sense of humor and a bloodwood club, and a nobleman from a foreign kingdom who was working as a mercenary in her homelands defense at the time offering to take her back to his home and marry her in a too subtle way. She didn't get whisked off to some finer life, but stuck around with her less than noble mercenary friend Dale "the Phantom."

I need to reformat this, but its been a few months since this happened, and I was foolish enough to not write what happened exactly down.

I just finished up a 5 month long campaign last night and I had so many proud DM moments!

My players role-played exceptionally during a final session that was full of difficult choices and powerful emotional scenes. They took all of their decisions as seriously as their characters would and let the results of their actions affect them honestly. When they reached the BBEG, they pulled together (instead of bickering like they often did) and supported the team in order to take her down.

A beloved NPC (uncle to one of the PCs) died and a handful of the PCs spoke at his funeral during the epilogue. There was a wedding between two PCs as well (which we played out, despite the risks of a cuteness overload). We had some tearing up (tears of sorrow and joy respectfully) around the table during those last 30 minutes.

All of that and more made up one five hour session that brought me an immense amount of pride. I had never seen the group become so immersed in the role-playing aspect of the game, even in battle. It was just great.