DMs: Do you have performance anxiety?

[Iron Sheep]

Just to be contrary, I don't have any sort of performance anxiety about DMing. It's just a game, and while I try to make it as fun as I can for my players, I don't get too stressed about it.

I do my prep work each game, and I do my best to keep things moving; but every now and then you have a bad game. I rely on my wife to let me know if things went bad, but by and large they go well.

It may be that because I'm a math professor in real life, running a game is trivial compared to standing in front of 30 people talking about advanced mathematical topics.

Corran

 

[francisca]

You know, even after playing D&D since the late 1970s and DMing for almost that long, I still sometimes get a kind of "stage fright" before the gang comes over to play. Thoughts like "ugh, this isn't going to work" or "I didn't prepare enough and so I'm going to have to wing it" or "the mystery is so obvious they'll be bored to tears" or just a general fear that I'm not going to do a very good job. Anyone else?

A little. I used to get it bad. But my current group and I have a good relationship. They trust me not to do something stupid (on purpose at least), and I trust them not to run roughshot all over the map.

Now, when I sit down at GenCon to run a pickup game for ENWorlders, I'll probably be quaking in my Boots of Elven kind.

 

[Alynnalizza]

Yeah, sometimes. I think most of my anxiety is not knowing what mood the players will be in on any given Sunday.
After that comes the fear that I will not be able to describe a situation correctly. I know my plots are always solid, and once the pc's figure it out they understand and even appreciate the story, but sometimes the fluff and details escapes somewhere between my brain and my mouth. Thus muddying up the water somewhat.

And this has been going on for 17 or so years.

 

[barsoomcore]

Heck, yeah. I'm nearly always tempted to cancel, or postpone, or otherwise put things off because I know I'm not nearly prepared enough and nobody's going to enjoy it and they'd rather go off and kill things than solve my careful puzzle (or else they'd obviously rather solve careful puzzles than go and kill the things I've set up) and they don't like me anyway and everyone will laugh at me and why don't I have any friends?

I've been DMing for what, twenty-five years? I've directed numerous films. I've acted on stage. I run a division of a software company. And yeah, I get stage fright.

I never do cancel, though, and everybody pretty much always has a blast. Including me.

Lucky, that.

 

[cidak]

Always.

Even though I can see that they are having a good time. I still worry about it and I am constantly asking the players if they are enjoying the night. We are three weeks into the Shackled City adventure and having a ball.

 

[hong]

 

[mythusmage]

Yep, performance anxiety is (one of) my (many) middle name(s)

One of the tricks I learned in theater was focusing. Focus on what you're doing, and use the energy generated through the anxiety attack (which is what you're going through) to power your performance. Make it more intense, more immediate.

Another is to practice. Rehearse the various roles you can expect to play during the course of a session. Take a look at the party's current situation and go over where they might end up. You could make it a game to play with the kids. Tell them an interactive story where the climax is a meeting with a particular group or an encounter with a particular situation. Make it free form and emphasize interaction, and you should get some idea of how to run it when it's serious.

And speaking of practice, constant and frequent is the word. The more you GM the better you get at it. Which can be a problem. So you need to decide just how good you want to be. Of course, you don't need to GM to practice GMing. Story-telling, acting, theater work can help here. The goal is to gain experience with presentation. Character, scene, setting, and campaign presentation that is. For the better you get with presentation, the more comfortable with it, the better you will do.

I hope this helps.

 

[drunkmoogle]

Yes. Bleepin yes.

That's only when I've got every t crossed and i dotted for the coming session. Oddly enough, if I'm winging half of it, I don't care enough to be anxious.

I also suffer from DM laziness and procrastination. Sometimes I just don't feel like actively guiding the PCs and it has hurt my game a little.

 

[Three_Haligonians]

Though I'm still pretty green as a GM, I've been an actress for a while now and my reactions are pretty much the same: just before I go on stage or lead a game, I start shaking with fright, sometimes I even feel vomitous. Luckily, with both, as soon as I start it evaporates completely.

As a funny side note, my father is the exact same way. When he was a lawyer he said that he always swore to himself that the day he stopped feeling nervous before a trial was the day he'd give it up. One day, after years of practice, he realised that he hadn't felt nervous about the trial, and he immediatly went home and put his name in to become a judge!

So I guess this is a common feeling!

T from Three Haligonians

 

[pogre]

Rarely do I feel any nerves at all. Only when I am running an event for strangers who paid to be there - RPGA usually - do I feel any pressure at all.