How to Delay or Avoid GM Burnout

[Scribe]

In one of your other threads like this @Retreater someone mentioned '...you are throwing pearls before swine.' which is wasting things on those who do not appreciate it.

Your time, (or at least its this way for me) is quite literally the most valuable thing you have.

Play what you want, run how you like, but you really need to look at the expectations you have for this group, and wonder if they can meet that bar.

 

[zakael19]

Just like the rest of us are tired of people with great experiences feel the rest of us must be doing it wrong.

It’s all opinions.

No, that’s not it at all. Myself and @prabe have shared statements of fact about our games. Nothing in my original response to you had anything about other people “doing it wrong.” In fact, I simply put out there the concrete actions I’d taken to mitigate past frustrations in my current games. I’m sure @prabe (who is running his own lightly tweaked 5e) has done other things very different from me.

Our experience doesn’t invalidate your frustrations, and can’t help @Retreater who is stuck in a mire mostly of his own making, but it’s responsive to the theme of the thread.

 

[Thomas Shey]

No, that’s not it at all. Myself and @prabe have shared statements of fact about our games. Nothing in my original response to you had anything about other people “doing it wrong.” In fact, I simply put out there the concrete actions I’d taken to mitigate past frustrations in my current games. I’m sure @prabe (who is running his own lightly tweaked 5e) has done other things very different from me.

Our experience doesn’t invalidate your frustrations, and can’t help @Retreater who is stuck in a mire mostly of his own making, but it’s responsive to the theme of the thread.

They're probably exhibiting scar tissue from people who've played the "No gaming is better than bad gaming" card hard. You see that sometimes, including around here.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I get how harsh this sounds, but I think it needs to be said: There's no dealing with these issues without getting on the same page with your wife. Maybe you can sort things out with the neighbor and the other two, but unless you come to an understanding with her, I don't see how you proceed, aside from quitting as a GM. And based on your past posts, I don't think that'll go well with her, either.

But, more broadly, your posts present some very antagonistic dynamics within the group. That's really bad stuff, and needs to be addressed. Maybe you're unintentionally presenting yourself as the victim, when the dynamic is more two-sided, but from your telling it's dysfunctional in lots of ways. The answer—both when it comes to your wife and the rest of the group—is probably to do that aggravating thing that we all know we should do, and that's so hard we talk to strangers online about it instead: Have the "adult" conversation with them. Maybe all of them at once? Maybe with your wife first, and then everyone? Tell them how this is making you feel, how the dynamic's become confrontational in some ways, and just at odds in others. But whatever you do, stop putting yourself in the same hang-dog position of shuffling back into the GM chair, doing your duty instead of having a good time. Get some food, maybe some drinks, and talk it though, possibly under the auspices of a session zero (or campaign reset, in this case).

If you can't do that, you have to come to grips with the fact that you might actually crave being kicked around.

 

[R_J_K75]

My group is a difficult situation. First, one of my players is my wife. She loves gaming, and basically won't find another group without me because of social anxiety. Second, another player is my next door neighbor. He's a fine enough guy to play with. Third, the two remaining players are totally fine (even GREAT) players, they just want different things in a session than the other two want.

My suggestion would be to sit all the players down and have a discussion about what aspects each player wants out of the game, including you. I would never try and shoehorn every one into each session/adventure, but maybe you can get 1 or 2 in. I'd try and make sure I got all of them in in the course of few sessions or per character level. As long as everyone is willing to compromise it should work itself out.

I'm also living in a small town where I've struggled to find anyone to play with. I know that seems difficult to imagine now that D&D is at peak popularity, but try to imagine: no responses on social media "looking for games" groups for over a year; empty tables at D&D events at FLGS.
Until this group got together, I thought I would never play RPGs in person again.

I'd suspect that age group has a lot to do with this too. Younger people with more free time and less responsibility, probably play more, have more friends that play, and have a larger player pool to draw from. People who have, families, jobs, and other interests, probably don't have as many options. I'm lucky as including myself there a 4 other people, one being my neighbor, and the others live within 10 minutes walking distance. I'll be 50 in June and have come to the realization that I'm probably in the twilight of my gaming career, and DMing just becomes harder and harder as years go on. It's harder to concentrate, prep and come up with ideas and just running a game for 3-2 hours is taxing. If this group were to break up, I don't think I'd even try to find a new one as options are limited and I'm not interested in playing with people I don't know anymore. I want to try the Marvel Multiverse RPG but getting people interested would be hard as a few of my current players are a fan of the genre so guess I'm S.O.L.

 

[MNblockhead]

Not bad at all, you have a perfectly good reason to dial back. I do think you should address the players not biting on hooks this seems to be a common theme. From the postings it sounds like they want sandbox but are not meeting you in the middle for what you have prepared. Interests are not aligning. I think that needs to be cleared up whether you run homebrew or published adventures.

Yeah, if the players agreed to a certain type of game and then refuse to interact with it, I'd just say, "sorry, I apparently misunderstood our discussions and what you wanted out of the game. This is all that I have prepared. Let's discuss want kinda of campaign folks are interested in and who wants to run it.

 

[Aldarc]

I started my most recent campaign full of excitement about a month ago.

• I picked a new campaign setting (Eberron).
• I left confusing new systems to get back to something more familiar, but with new options (Level Up - A5e).
• I did research and created interesting NPCs.
• I designed an interesting dungeon full of history and original puzzles (which the players should have loved).
• I decided to write all my own adventures for the first time in probably a decade, just so I would feel more passion and connection to the material.

Which has resulted in...

• My group is not really interacting with the setting. They're running from location-to-location and not seeing any of the sites or doing anything.
• They aren't interacting with A5e, trying to learn their characters or the system. In fact, I think vanilla 5E is too much for them.
• They didn't go into the dungeon - even though they told me what they thought would be interesting. Like, I spent weeks on this. (They know enough about the dungeon that if I recycle it and put it in front of them, they'll feel railroaded.)
• I'm already at the point where I don't want to create anything else. I'm exhausted - between work, natural disasters, family deaths, my master's degree work, and all the wasted effort I've already put into this game.

Would it be "bad" if I just told my players that I'm going to run something pre-published and they can keep their characters? I can free my mind from trying to design stuff. I'm just putting way too much of myself into something that the players view as a fun thing they do once a week, mostly to hang out with their friends.

Have you talked with your players about one of them running a game of anything?

Not bad at all, you have a perfectly good reason to dial back. I do think you should address the players not biting on hooks this seems to be a common theme. From the postings it sounds like they want sandbox but are not meeting you in the middle for what you have prepared. Interests are not aligning. I think that needs to be cleared up whether you run homebrew or published adventures.

"This is what I prepared for today's session. I don't have anything else prepared because you said you wanted to do this. So if you wanna do something else, then the session will end here."

 

[Thomas Shey]

"This is what I prepared for today's session. I don't have anything else prepared because you said you wanted to do this. So if you wanna do something else, then the session will end here."

Of course some players expect you to just make it up on the fly. Which, to be fair, some GM's are fine with. But its not something you should expect unless you know the GM rolls that way.

 

[Retreater]

Have you talked with your players about one of them running a game of anything?

One of the players ran a session of Alice is Missing several months ago. It was mostly GMed by using the app, but it was a nice experience. No one else is interested.

 

[Retreater]

So I decided to pivot the group to a dungeon adventure (the Lost City from Goodman's OAR series, if you're curious). There's a degree of roleplaying and faction play to get the more story-interested players, but plenty of traps, puzzles, and combats for the other two.

I'm going to save my brain and try to give the game limited thought while not actually playing - maybe review it for an hour before the session. Probably will also try to scale back my overall interest in the hobby as well, at least while I focus on finishing out this semester. That likely means I won't be coming here complaining as often. Haha.

Anyways, thanks for the advice, everybody.