One of the hardest parts of GMing is coming up with plausible and compelling motivations for NPCs and justifications for why things happen the way they do.

I have recently be wondering if life experience makes a good GM. For example, if someone had been a social worker for 30 years, then maybe he or she would be better at coming up with realistic street characters with realistic and plausible motivations and failings. If someone were a veteran from Khe Sahn he would be better able to describe the psychological stress of coming under artillery bombardment.

To take the opposite to the extreme, you would hardly expect an interesting campaign from an 8 year old GM with you being an adult.

Maybe some professions or experiences would be better than others for GMing. If someone had been a cloistered monk for 30 years maybe he wouldn't be much more interesting as a GM than the 8 year old, unless it were a game where everyone was a cloistered monk.


EDIT: The very awesome 80s computer game Alter Ego was basically cobbled together life stories told to a psychologist who made an interactive game out of them, basically. Case in point.

I think it's mostly about having seen many movies.

Acting. Especially Improvisation.

Know your tropes. Be able to improvise. Understand how people work.

Life experience is certainly helpful, but creativity, improvisational ability, cat herding, confidence, preparation, and knowing your players is more important. Moreover, life experience isn't something you can usually work-on.

Well, except by living life, that is.

"I just enlisted...I'm going to 'Nam."
"What? Did you enlist to avoid being drafted? Wasn't the whole point of that to go to Germany?"
"No, I want some trigger time. I'm so damn sick of Sam telling me how combat ought to go when we play D&D. When I get back I'm going to shut him down so hard when he does that his character sheet will spin."