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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Liquidsabre" data-source="post: 2163525" data-attributes="member: 15635">I'll have agree with the "taking time to play the game as well as run it" helps to avoid DM-burnout, as long as you've got a decent fellow DM to take advantage of that is. Not that learning how "not-to-DM" is a perfectly valuable way to pick up DMing tips as well. I've found IMOE that being able to maintain a "player's" persepctive makes me a more effective DM, especially since as a player I spend less time as a DM focusing on the myriad of things to successfully run a game (rule/spell/monster/PrC-familiairity, etc.) and more time on more specific rules, spells-stuff, etc. that involve my own character that increase the depth of my game knowledge that as a DM left to my own devices would not necessarily be able to achieve. Now while I've never suffered from DM burn-out myself (5+ years of GMing experience and currently have a campaign I've been running for the last year and a half) but I've come awfully close and I've seen others overcome by it. DM burnout generally comes down to one thing that all DMs feel at some point: "Is all this effort really worth it?"As long as the answer is an emphatic "Yes!" then you're alright. At any point you find yourself uncertain or teetering on the fence, you've got to look at what you're doing. Usually for DMs it's usually a matter of working too hard, whether it's due to being a work-a-holic DM (too much work wasted) or having players that have no interest in the level of involvement the DM desires them to put into their characters and the gameworld.For example, a group of players may be just looking for a saturday night dungeon-crawl while the DM is looking for telling a story about a group of heroic vilagers who become lost in the under-belly of a great and mysterious series of ancient ruins secretly tied to the past of their village ancestry, scattered subtle clues exist all over the dungeon linking each character to their ancient heritage...This will either shake the players out of their hack & slackishness or send the DM into a bout of DM-burnout.Another example, a DM puts in 20+ hours in detailing the background, personality quirks, mannerisms, dress and equipment, mode of speaking, and bulding the villain's stats. Only to find the PCs kill the villain in their first encounter. The same DM has also put in 100's of hours of manwork in a longterm game setting for the campaign and knows every nook and cranny, every detail of every plot they'd enjoy running the characters through only to find the PCs want to search and discover underground passageways or play a sea-going game instead of his setting-nation. A work-a-holic DM easily falls pray to DM-burnout.Myself, I avoid DM-burnout, not just by being a player (as I said I use this primarily to retain my player-perspective, which helps me run a better game - as I have a better perspective on what the players enjoy seeing in the game), but by placing the burden of creation on the players as well, not only myself. You see I don't create everything in the game world, instead I create and flesh out wherever and whatever the PCs do, but just that. I generally set certain aspects, NPCs, quirks, significant details, but leave the rest of the real-world details to be filled out as the PCs get close enough to explore them. If the PCs never go there, the place, the NPC/NPC organization, etc. never gets fleshed out (unless I purposefully involve them on a whim, player background ties, or they are tied to another plot-thread the PCs have involved themselves with unknowingly). This most often leaves me plenty of wiggle room to alter things behind the scenes before the PC-light uncovers it to discover that the details of all they have done make sense and are completely and entirely tied to the story we are all looking to tell, making the whole plot make more sense and appear to be a masterfully planned, meaningful, and cohesive whole (something it most definately was not!).Often a PC's background and individual character will bring in elements I never expected to see in the game but since they created the character such things will be brought into the campaign, making the campaign a trully cooperative story-tellign experience, rather than a more or less one-sided one (something I see all too often in other games).</blockquote>

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