For the last several years, I have been analyzing the successes and failures of each of my campaigns as they ended in a series of “Post-Mortem” threads. Doubtless, many of you have read my other threads about suffering from GM Burnout. Since I started my account here in 2006, I have spent many days making posts, disagreeing, and sharing puns. I’ve even had the pleasure to play games with some of you.
But today I'm ready to take a step back and analyze my relationship with this hobby. I’d like to share my overall experience in the hobby as a Post-Mortem thread. Read it if you’re interested.
Satanic Panic
I grew up in the 1980s in a small, conservative town in the U.S. South. D&D was a secretive, forbidden thing. Thus, my introduction to the hobby was Palladium’s TMNT and Other Strangeness (which I couldn’t understand at all), Japanese console RPGs (like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior/Quest), and the HeroQuest board game. HeroQuest was my first taste of being a GM, and I started designing my own quests, monsters, etc., for everyone in the neighborhood who would play. So many players would show up, we ended up combining several game sets to make a mega dungeon and changing some of the classes so we wouldn’t have duplicates.
In early middle school I tried to imagine how a TTRPG would work. I created my own system, which was essentially a game like Final Fantasy that could be played solo at the table with dice. My friends and I created an RPG “company” and raised money to photocopy the rules and art - and we sold a few copies door to door to our other friends.
I wanted to work in game design and share this great hobby with others.
Bulettes and Bullies
Starting in the 1990s I finally got my first official D&D books - in this case the newly released AD&D 2E. I didn’t understand how games went at all until I played in a few games with some of the older kids in the neighborhood. When I went to high school, I joined my first regular group, joining in their Ravenloft campaign. We played for about 2 years before they moved away to college. I had no success finding a group for several years.
When I entered college, I made new friends and reconnected with one of the players from my high school group. I started a group that would be an alternative to the college partying lifestyle, as several of the players were in drug recovery. Then, the unthinkable happened - one of our teenage players died from an undiagnosed heart defect. The game became his memorial and our way of coping with the loss. No game I would ever run could compare to the memories I made with that group. (We are still friends almost 30 years later, speak weekly on Zoom, and get together a couple times a year to play.)
That campaign wrapped almost the same time that 3rd edition was released.
Charts and Careers
It took me a long time to wrap my head around 3rd edition. We played a lot in that era, as new players would come and go. The extra crunch made me want to start using published adventures almost exclusively and run them almost completely “by the book.” I started getting labelled as a “Killer DM” - especially as I would run difficult adventures by Goodman and Necromancer Games.
I finally got to realize my dream of publishing game content with an adventure under the OGL. The announcement of 4E put a pause on my plans for the follow-up adventure. Getting married stopped me from putting in the time to update from 3.5 to Pathfinder. Eventually, all my work was lost, and it became more difficult to find players as others moved away.
Drunkards and Dragons
My quest to find new players led me to the FLGS during the 4E Encounters era. Wednesday nights would consist of me pregaming at the nearby sportsbar, staggering to run organized play, then returning to the sportsbar until they closed. We ended up amassing quite a crew. We decided we’d also like to play outside of the FLGS and start a home campaign. For these reasons (and others), my wife filed for divorce.
Back to the Game That Never Was
The D&D Next Playtest hurt the 4E Encounters group in my community. We went through the Hoard of the Dragon Queen, but it was no longer the “drop in and play, one to two hour experience” that it used to be. Against the popular consensus around the hobby, 5E was a momentum killer in our FLGS.
As we became unable to get folks to attend the events, the 3-4 tables we were running during 4E shrank to 1 table, and then we were unable to keep a single group together. The books also stopped moving, and it wouldn’t be rare to see 10+ copies of the latest WotC release sitting on the shelf for over a year.
Fortunately, the core of the Encounters club had transitioned to a home game, where we got to try systems including Call of Cthulhu, City of Mist, Dungeon World, and Rogue Trader. However, a combination of COVID fears, changes in work schedules, and IRL personality clashes have all but eradicated this group.
The Era of Occasional Popularity (and Scant Interest)
As 5E grew in the general zeitgeist (but never capitalized in the FLGS), there started an era of casual interest. I’d be asked to run games at work for patrons (something like once a year), the family members of friends, random guys who remembered playing 20 years ago, people I met at bars. The constant was: DM needs to put in 100% of the effort, players aren’t going to learn their characters, people are going to flake out last minute, campaigns are going to last for a handful of sessions, no one is going to dig into complex rules systems, and people are there to hang out and drink or talk about pop culture stuff.
I met my current wife in this era. As a player, she is better than the average from the current time period, but there’s still this demand of 100% of the effort. The expectation and workload are too much.
This era has been exhausting, trying to put everything I have into games that ultimately mean so little to people. When I try to put in a lot, it’s not appreciated and they don’t even go on the adventures. When I try to do the bare minimum for a fun “beer and pretzels” game, they complain that it’s boring and they want to quit.
What’s Next?
Honestly, this is mostly here to stick with the format of other Post-Mortems. I don’t know if there’s a “next” in the traditional sense where I’m going to be starting a new campaign.
I expect my time in the hobby will be:
- One player’s daughter wants to run a game for a couple months before she returns to college. I can play in that.
- I have a couple online games that I play in biweekly. I can do those until the current campaigns wrap up.
- My friend is recording an obscure gaming podcast, where he runs a one-shot once a month. I can do that as long as there’s interest.
- If approached by folks who want to just come over and play for a couple hours and they organize it, I’ll run the occasional game to try to keep the hobby alive for others.
- I’ll still get together with my old college pals annually for our gaming weekends.
