D&D 5E Understanding DM Fatigue

[Tyler Do'Urden]

I’m with you on most of this, but I don’t think Matt Mercer should be held up as the LeBron of DMs. Like, he’s a fine DM, and what he does works well for his group. But there’s this weird tendency to put his DMing on a pedestal, and I don’t think that’s good for the D&D community.

I actually meant it as a joke - the guy is more like the Hulk Hogan of DMs. Critical Role is to Roleplaying as Pro Wrestling is to Wrestling - fun to watch, but scripted and not an accurate portrayal of the reality of the thing in question.

 

[iserith]

I’m with you on most of this, but I don’t think Matt Mercer should be held up as the LeBron of DMs. Like, he’s a fine DM, and what he does works well for his group. But there’s this weird tendency to put his DMing on a pedestal, and I don’t think that’s good for the D&D community.

100% agree.

And I also agree with @Tyler Do'Urden that anything worth doing is worth doing well. But let's not pretend that presenting a good game is some epic feat or requires the sort of "work" that a lot of DMs burn out on. It's not necessary no matter how much we try to justify this silly use of our limited time. Get good at the fundamentals (play loop, DM/player roles, most rules), stay focused on what is essential for your vision of the adventure or campaign, prep only what you absolutely need. Everything else is extra and can be set aside if burnout is a likely result.

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Also, while we're mentioning tips for keeping campaigns going:

In my current campaign, I started by writing recaps after each session. But I quickly realized that these added a lot to my workload. However, there's a very gifted writer in my group who eagerly took to the job of being the "campaign chronicler"; he writes up a log of each adventure which I then email to the group.

I think I'm going to try to make this a role in all future campaigns that I run, as it's extremely valuable to me as the DM - and let's us create a chronicle of the whole campaign. When it's finished, I'll probably edit all the recaps together into a campaign record and print it as a book which I can give to all the players as a keepsake.

 

[iserith]

In my current campaign, I started by writing recaps after each session. But I quickly realized that these added a lot to my workload.

This is also one of those "extras" I stopped doing. It took time and I wasn't sure what real value I was getting out of it (or if the players were actually reading it for that matter). I do post a short blurb about what we did last session in my session sign-up post which I then read as the opener to the current session, but I put the days of a comprehensive log or recap in the rear view mirror.

 

[jasper]

I do recaps. Post them here and on facebook page of the local group. The recaps are NOT necessary but I discover they more for me to feed my writing bug than the group. Young people can be great dms, if us adults do the rule lifting. One of better games I had was a 13 year old trying to recreate the Buffy musical. My only dig at the kid was he should have provide the sheet music. And from some you adults here telling horror stories, age is not a factor in a great dm.

 

[Celebrim]

I DMed a game for about seven years, and had been dealing with burnout off and on during the whole process. I'd say I started having my first troubles about a year into it, and it would come and go.

It's just a ton of work, and the older I get the less happy I am with a game that hasn't had a ton of work invested in it because the level of quality I want from a session goes beyond what I wanted when I was 12. When I was 12 or 14 we'd spend hours just rolling dice and writing numbers down on paper as the PCs waded through some near random dungeon of random monsters and treasure. But now... I want more.

I burned out hard about two years ago. I tried switching systems and it went OK for about a year and at first I was excited to run games again, but still burnout. Fortunately, one of the players has agreed to DM for a while and it's been nice to be on the other side of the screen for a while.

Lately I've been thinking of picking back up the 'main campaign'.

Things that really went wrong:

a) Players are difficult. Like in a perfect world you'd have players that always RPed consistent, intelligent, thoughtful, heroic characters. In the real world, you have players with baggage, depression, bad days, and no interest in your favored aesthetics of play most of the time because they just want to blow steam. What you want as a GM is 'Critical Role', but you'd be happy most days with a better session of 'Knights of the Dinner Table'. Some sessions you fail as a GM, they fail as players, the dice hate everyone, and nothing goes right.

b) The work effort is hard, and the level of quality I'm personally satisfied with is inversely proportional to the amount of time I have in my life to work on a pointless hobby.

c) The game can just go wrong. The party has gotten itself into a really tight spot, and for the dozen or so sessions prior to me calling a halt, they'd been in a progessive death spiral of declining resources. NPC henchmen died. Consumable resources consumed. Pets dead. Now PC's are dead with no obvious replacement candidates. Potential allies are turned to enemies. No safe haven to rest at. They are losing right now, mostly through bad decisions, because a single bad decision can turn really bad. Now I'm facing a less than climatic and heroic end to the campaign, and I don't know how to dig the PC's out of the hole they are in.

d) Writer's block. Even if the PC's do win, I don't really know what happens next. The problem with running a travel/wilderness based game is that while the journey can be fun, and the destination exciting, there is that whole "and back again" part of the story that feels like you need to handwave it away. I need to do some world building so that whatever happens, I have some options, but that gets back to the work effort issue.

 

[Quickleaf]

I completed my first long-running 5e campaign last year (2019) which was Tomb of Annihilation. Before then (during 5e's life at any rate) I'd run adventure modules and one-shots, but no true campaign. During the course of TOA I had players negatively metagame, go off on tangents, make evil choices, struggle with communication and compromise, disagree about rules, and all the other stuff that happens as a new group finds its footing. Sometimes it was frustrating, but I never felt overly fatigued from managing that. They're great group and I really enjoyed what each player brought to the table – even when it left my poor DM head swimming!

However, I did experience fatigue toward the end of our 51 session run (spanning 20 months) which I had to push through. What fatigued me was how 5e treats spellcasting as a magical arms race & how often I ended up adjudicating spell effects because the intended effect was unclear in how it was written.

An example of the magical arms race how the PCs having arcane eye made me change how I prepared adventure sites/maps, and required that I think up novel ways of presenting a dungeon in TOA so the PCs didn't just arcane eye through it and spoil a surprise, while still allowing the wizard PC to make great use of arcane eye in the campaign.

And an example of unclear writing would be Leomund's tiny hut (with its contradictory dome/hemisphere references, and corrected Sage Advice) and wall of force (which turns out by acting as total cover it blocks line of effect/sight even though it's transparent). Ugh. I made myself become decent at it, but both of these things really turned me off and contributed to DM fatigue.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I highly recommend experimenting with other forms of leveling up.

I tie the advancement to certain number of sessions. I do not calculate XP based on combat because it would turn my players to murder hobos. I also keep the party synced even if someone misses some sessions. The number of sessions required to level up goes up at higher levels. I think I borrowed the idea from Dark Albion.

Thanks for the suggestion, but from my experience as a player, combat XP is necessary to prevent player fatigue. We tried going to milestone XP for a while, and it just felt like combat was entirely pointless, because the enemies couldn't inflict any lasting damage and there was nothing to gain by going through the motions.

At least with combat XP, tedious combat feels like legitimate grinding. You spend an hour killing a bunch of purple worms, but you get XP out of it, so it doesn't feel like a complete waste of time.

 

[Charlaquin]

100% agree.

And I also agree with @Tyler Do'Urden that anything worth doing is worth doing well. But let's not pretend that presenting a good game is some epic feat or requires the sort of "work" that a lot of DMs burn out on. It's not necessary no matter how much we try to justify this silly use of our limited time. Get good at the fundamentals (play loop, DM/player roles, most rules), stay focused on what is essential for your vision of the adventure or campaign, prep only what you absolutely need. Everything else is extra and can be set aside if burnout is a likely result.

I... Agree with the content of what you’re saying here, but something about the presentation rubs me the wrong way. No DMing isn’t an especially difficult skill to learn, yes many DMs dedicate far more time to it than is necessary, yes that effort is generally better spent on the fundamentals than on excessive preparation... But at the same time, lots of DMs just really enjoy the time they spend on it. Many are proud of the DMing skills they have cultivated and I think rightly so. And how much prep you “absolutely need” varies from one DM to the next.

Take me for example. I know I’ll never be one of those DMs who can come to the table with nothing but one sheet of notes and some blank papers and run a great session out of that. That degree of improvisation is just not a part of my skill set, and my time is better spent on advance prep than on refining improvisation skills that just don’t come easily to me. After years of practice, I’ve learned what parts of the game I am good at doing with little to no prep, and what parts I am not, and I can run a much more enjoyable game with much less effort when I prepare in advance the things I know I will need prep for than I can trying to improvise as much as possible.

As well, while DMing doesn’t have to be a lot of work, it’s work we voluntarily take on in order to entertain our friends. Saying “actually, DMing is so easy a 12-year-old can do it” is... technically accurate, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it downplays the work that DMs willingly spend their limited free time on for the benefit of others. So, while I agree that many DMs make DMing harder on themselves than they need to, I think it should be acknowledged that they do so out of love. They should be encouraged to learn more efficient prep habits rather than shamed for employing inefficient ones.

 

[Charlaquin]

Also, while we're mentioning tips for keeping campaigns going:

In my current campaign, I started by writing recaps after each session. But I quickly realized that these added a lot to my workload. However, there's a very gifted writer in my group who eagerly took to the job of being the "campaign chronicler"; he writes up a log of each adventure which I then email to the group.

I think I'm going to try to make this a role in all future campaigns that I run, as it's extremely valuable to me as the DM - and let's us create a chronicle of the whole campaign. When it's finished, I'll probably edit all the recaps together into a campaign record and print it as a book which I can give to all the players as a keepsake.

From experience playing in a game where the DM made this a dedicated role, I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s great when you have a player that wants to do it, but making it a requirement when there’s nobody who wants to fill it can have less desirable results.