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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8340030" data-attributes="member: 42582">I GMed weekly for about 10 years, then fortnightly for about another 15, and over the past 5 years it's turned into more like a session every 3 weeks - those years track the aging of me and my friends!But I've never suffered burnout as I read about it on these boards. So I can easily believe that you're right that the burnout results from an expectation of GM as performer/entertainer.This seems to be another thing that might be talked about in "best practice" advice (the topic of another active thread that has some overlap with this one).I do think it's impossible, simply because a story consists, to a very significant extent, in the actions of its protagonists.The solution, in RPG design terms, is to stop pretending that the players' action declarations for their PCs will have any significant effect on the overall direction of the fiction. Instead they are understood to play a pacing function - the tension and release of dice rolls - and to add some colour and embellishment via characterisation.Embracing this can also potentially help with the GM burnout issue - if the GM is in charge of providing a plot (either self-authored, or from a module/AP) but the players are the ones doing most of the literal entertaining via their characterisation, then maybe GMs won't burn out as quickly.Marvel Heroic RP actually provides an example of how this can work - it can be played as a "story now" game (which is how I use it) but it can also be approached as a type of characterisation-heavy railroad. In MHRP players earn XP for their PCs via (what the game calls) Milestones, which are character-specific events that - if they actually occur in the fiction - accrue XP. Eg Captain America gets 1 XP when he gives an order to an ally; and gets 3 XP (no more than once per scene) when he takes advice from an ally or successfully uses assistance provided by an ally.Under this approach, the GM provides the "supervllian of the week" - in 5e D&D that would be the AP - and the players provide the characterisation, which is largely independent of the GM's plot but provides colour to their action declarations and helps drive character progression. There are some Milestone triggers in MHRP that aren't such a good fit for this sort of approach to D&D 5e (eg PvP ones, or events that take as a premise that the player will make a fundamentally plot-altering choice) but I think the idea could be adapted to work, and to help distribute expectations for energy and contributions among the participants in a pretty clear way.</blockquote>

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