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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jayoungr" data-source="post: 7155059" data-attributes="member: 6702445">WARNING:  Long, self-pitying wall of text below.  TL;DR, how do I get my mojo back?I feel like I've been in a downward spiral as a GM over the last year or so.  My GMing experiences have become fewer and worse.At one point, I was highly active with two different gaming groups (one oneline, one in person).  I ran all of Tyranny of Dragons for the online group, plus a couple of follow-up adventures.  It was my ambition to get that party up to level 20 so we could all experience the full range of levels in D&D 5E.  The follow-up adventures both started out badly, and although they did come to successful conclusions, it felt like an uphill battle.So in early September, I decided to take some time off, hoping one of the other players would step in and run some games as he'd been talking about doing, allowing me to recharge my batteries as a player.  But then that guy got sucked into another commitment and didn't have time to prep games.  Okay, fair enough.I thought I'd run a one-shot of Death House in October; the group really likes Ravenloft, and hey, it was just a one-shot, right?  But the group hated the ending, and although we had an interesting conversation about it, it left a bad taste in my mouth.I should say that I fully acknowledge that I could have handled parts of all these adventures better.  But I only realized that in hindsight.That's the online group.  My in-person group plays a variety of systems, both "traditional" and indie games.  But we had trouble getting together in 2016 due to a variety of scheduling problems, and in 2017, our play has been just as spotty due to the fact that one member of the group is having fairly serious health issues.  I absolutely don't begrudge the fact that this disrupts our schedule, but it does mean that I have fewer opportunities to "get back on the horse."  (For anyone who's worried, his treatments are going very well.)I had a brief bright spot in January when I ran several successful sessions of Leverage in preparation for a con.  But the con itself was kind of a disaster.  I ambitiously scheduled myself to run three games, partly because I was already feeling starved for a chance to game.  One went well, one had the problem of starting out badly again, and the last one (an indie game) was a complete disaster.  I was trying to teach the game with a migraine and at one point had to leave the table to go throw up.  And of my four players, two got up and left before the slot was over.That was a major blow to the confidence.  I wanted just to play for a while, but that's been irregular for reasons mentioned above.  This week, only part of the group could make it, so I thought we could try out Microscope.  No prep, no GM, and all I have to do is teach.  Should be a nice way to ease myself back into running games, right?  And I was so sure that the hardest-to-please person in our group would like the game, because she hates crunch and fiddly bits, and this is so simple.  But at the end of the session, when I asked how people liked the game, she said she disliked it because it was "not collaborative," and she didn't want to play again.That might not be so bad if it weren't on top of all these other things, but it is; part of GMing is choosing the right game for the group, after all.  And then there's the fact that my mother passed away unexpectedly at the beginning of June, which isn't helping anything.I'd been throwing myself into planning to restart the online group's game as a project to distract me, but now I just don't know if it's worth it.  I tried listening to recordings of our old, fun sessions to cheer me up, and all I can hear are the places where I missed cues that the players wanted to do something different or where I was scrambling to react to things they did.  And the online group isn't sure when we can restart anyway.I've also committed myself to teaching some indie games at a con later this summer, and I just don't know if I'll be ready.  Or whether I'm ready to run for either of my other groups.  Or whether the online group even really wants me to run, or whether they're just being polite.  GMing suddenly seems so hard, and every choice I'm tempted to make about a game suddenly seems guaranteed to be wrong.What's a GM who's lost faith in his/her abilities to do?</blockquote>

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