Burnt out GMs

[Belen]

Tak!

Amen! That is exactly what some of my players do to me. My players fought some tough Mongol-type halfings this weekend, and one of my players was angry that they had 200+ hitpoints. If I throw a challenging encounter that way, I get arguments and complaints because the PC could not take the baddy down in two swings.

I guess I do feel underappreciated. I tend to put 10+ hours a week (outside of game time) into the game and all they seem to want to do is fight this and kill that. It can be frustrating.

Heck, last time I threw a murder mystery at them, their solution was to patrol the town and look at suspicious people. They never even tried to find out anything.... <sigh>

 

[Bagpuss]

We have three GM's in our group, we rotate about once every 3 months, so GM burn out isn't really a problem. What I do occasionally suffer from is fantasy burnout. I get sick of playing in magical medieval settings, so we occasionally switch to historical, Sci-fi or horror gaming.

 

[MarauderX]

I think I was pretty burned out at one point, when the players were demanding to play all of the time or wanted to do detailed things with their PCs since they had so much cash & magic. It sucked, and I felt like our games were getting more and more half-@$$ed. Luckily a planned vacation made the perfect interruption, and when I got back I decided to pace myself, and not to worry about every player wanting some time with me to work out some details that I figured would be fluff. Players wanted to build castles and create magic items, so I gave them the outlines of costs and time, and let them work it out for me instead of with me. I began to put more and more of the burden on them instead of myself, such as keeping track of the game calender or bringing minis. I think they realized how much effort went into creating the game, and were glad that the stories and such started to have more detail and excitement again. Pretty soon we were only gaming once per week, and one of the players got the bug to DM, so soon I was only DMing once every two weeks for about 5 months.

I'm not sure I would have been able to establish my boundries as a DM at that age, and it was hard to say no to the players that are so into your campaign world, and if it weren't for the timing I might have said goodbye.

 

[Simplicity]

Having played for a long time, I've burned out multiple times. When that happens, it doesn't always even help to play as a player... Sometimes it's just good to do other things.

 

[shadoe]

I burned out runing a Vampire game. It was so bad, that I ended the game mid session and have never played or run the game again.

 

[Beelzebub]

Burnout has always been a problem for me: I've said good-bye-for-good to D&D about 5 times now! Having learned my lesson, I am starting a monthly game supplemented by e-mail. Hopefully this will nip the burnout problem in the bud.

 

[Numion]

I got burned out on D&D after my second 3e campaign. Luckily one of my players wanted to DM, and turned out to be a fine DM, even though he uses only pre-made adventures. Now I've enjoyed tremendously just playing my character for several months, and am recovering

I've bought a couple of intresting books (Midnight, AU), and I'll probably start something new or continue the old campaign soon. At least I'm intrested in DMing again.

Oh, and I've DMed random sessions of Cyberpunk in the meantime. Thats a refreshing game every now and then, if you want to detach from the D&D conventions.

 

[ForceUser]

I burned out in high school and it lasted until I was 20. These days there are six guys in my game group who would be happy to DM if given the opportunity. Three of us actually DM at the moment, so we manage burnout prevention together by each taking turns and by not playing too much in total. We game six times a month, and that seems to be our maximum comfortable threshold.

I am designing a new campaign world that really gets rid of a lot of the "core" DnD troubles.

For instance, the world will have NO monstrous humanoids. Therefore, no races that are born evil.

One of the DMs in my group did this a different way in his campaign; instead of removing "inherently evil" races, he simply declared that races native to the prime material plane are inherently neutral and it is social conditioning, life experiences and personal choices that make one good or evil, lawful or chaotic. Only outsider races such as angels and demons are inherently good, evil, lawful or chaotic.

 

[Leopold]

Amen brothers. I did not get burned out by my players, well sorta. I had some whiney ones that drove me batty and some other personal problems and i needed a few months off. After that I wanted to DM like there was no tommorow!

A break and some speaking to the players really helped.

 

[Belen]

I thought about doing it that way, however, if all monstrous humanoids were neutral, then I would be forced to allow them as PC races. I prefer to have a smaller number of races, so I only have 5 (one of them being half-elf). All my races are custom built and not one is stereotypical, except generalist humans.

In fact, I have finally balanced the races in such a way that humans no longer predominate. (Humans are still populous, but only account for 45% of any given area.)

Heck, the races are not even tied down by culture. I am doing regional cultures. I never understood why the races had to fit one basic mold.