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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6234578" data-attributes="member: 5143">I used to have this problem all the time as well.  I would feel entirely burned out and wouldn't want to prepare or run my game each Saturday.  I'd take a break and do something else for a week and come back the next week only to start feeling burned out nearly immediately again.I remember almost the precise moment that I realized exactly what was causing the problem:I was running a published adventure from Dungeon, Return to Castle Maure.  In it was a Lich, he was CR 20, I believe. The party was level 16 and this campaign had started at low levels and proceeded all the way to 16.I was thinking "This is going to be awesome, a Lich whose CR is 4 levels above the party, he can cast 9th level spells.  This is going to be EPIC.  I'm going to see maybe one or two party members die in this fight have have to be brought back to life.  Or at the very least they are going to be scared for their lives."So, the battle started, the PCs won initiative(or at least their Wizard did).  The Wizard cast a spell that I can't remember the name of right now, but it does 2d12(or about that) damage per spell effect that is currently active on the target.  So he cast it and the Lich had 6 spell effects up before the battle started.  So, he good 12d12 points of damage.  He only had around 85 hitpoints.  He survived it and I quickly looked at his list of spells to find a way to escape since he had almost died in one spell.  Then the Wizard said "I use Sudden Maximize to cast a second copy of that spell I have prepared."  And killed the Lich in one round before it even acted.That moment finally made me realize the reason I was so burned out was that each week I'd spend an hour or 2 reading through the next part of the adventure, I'd make sure I knew what all the spells and abilities the enemies had did, I'd read through their tactics and I'd imagine how cool it will be when the PCs encounter these tactics.  Only to be followed by none of that mattering because enemies died before they could take actions 90% of the time.  It seemed like it was pointless to even bother running a game, since there was no challenge at all and nothing interesting ever happened.Immediately following that campaign I dumped 3.5e and started playing 4th and it renewed my interest in DMing for a couple of years.I've gotten kind of burned out from DMing again because as books came out and my players learned to power game, the same thing happened in my 4e games until I stopped running it as well.I'm actually just now offering to run a game in D&D Next again after taking a break for a while because it seems like the game will focus less on battles as being the all-encompassing part of an adventure to the point where I'll care less if the PCs totally destroy an encounters.  Plus, it seems balanced enough that absolute destruction of all the enemies on round one simply won't happen that often.</blockquote>

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