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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6733586" data-attributes="member: 6701872">I've gone through a similar burn out, though mine was more a constant feeling of wasted or unappreciated effort as I continually sought to generate excitement in my various players about the worlds their characters exist within by inventing the world just as it seemed the players wanted it (seriously, I built brand new campaign setting material for basically every campaign I ever ran for a solid 15 years - hoping with each new iteration that it would be "the one" and my players would finally show interest in the world beyond the tiny slice that was their own characters).In the end, I gave up and just used whatever pre-fab setting an adventure was attached to, or the players chose, or I basically just didn't give out or bother thinking of any setting details until the moment they were actually asked for, which worked to stop me from feeling I'd wasted effort building a setting that the players cared nothing for, but didn't actually stop me lamenting that the world around the characters basically didn't matter. So I asked my current group of players if they were interested in collaboratively building a setting for all of our campaigns to take place in, with each completed campaign become a piece of the setting's history for future campaigns, and there was a burst of excitement at the idea, but the follow-through proved to be just me slogging away trying to please players providing me no more feedback than "yeah, that sounds cool, I guess." and "whatever you want, dude, I'm not really picky about it." Which meant that I went right back to feeling my effort was wasted.Eventually, I got fed up again and decided to start reading old D&D settings I have on hand that my current players have never experienced before... and I found my "lost love" of a setting that I used when first getting into D&D, but moved away from as I ended up in groups of players that preferred AD&D over my own preferred Rules Cyclopedia version of the game. After rediscovering that setting (Mystara), I was chatting with my players and sharing anecdotes of this or that about the setting and I realized that something very important was happening; my players were responding with excitement at the prospect of getting to know this setting, because when I talked about it I was excited.That's when it dawned on me that all of my prior failures to get my players interested were not just that, but also failures to get myself interested - and have solved all of my issues by choosing not our own unique flavor of home-brew to set all our campaigns in, but to use Mystara as the foundation upon which to build or own history of campaigns (and we are well in progress).So after that great big long rambling, I arrive at my point: As a DM, you have to play to your strengths - don't force yourself into doing something that doesn't ultimately appeal to you, and acknowledge that there is nothing at all wrong with using pre-fab material. In fact, that's why the stuff exists in the first place, so that someone can help you with the "heavy lifting", prevent you from straining yourself and getting burnt out, and free up your mind to focus on the parts of the game that don't leave you feeling something besides enjoyment (like actually sitting down and playing).</blockquote>

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