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18 Tips to Beat Game Master Burnout - Running RPGs
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- Опубликовано: 15 авг 2024
- Have you lost motivation to run games? Is your joy behind the screen waning and you're simply going through the motions, unable to GM more than the bare minimum? Then welcome to Dungeon Master Burnout. Here's my tips and suggestions for curing Burnout and getting your DM Groove back.
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#DnD #TTRPG
00:00 Hello Internet
01:26 Determine the Cause
02:23 Group Discussion
04:57 Is Life Getting in the Way
05:12 Fewer Sessions
06:39 Over-Prepping
08:27 Try Shorter Sessions
10:29 Tired of the Same Old Thing
10:45 Puzzles
10:50 Countdown Timer
12:04 Random Geomorph Dungeon
12:15 Puppet NPC
13:03 Edible Badguys
13:23 Don't Overuse Gags
13:36 Try New Theme or Plot Element
14:06 Change the Terrain
14:43 Side-Quests
15:13 Change Campaigns
15:37 Theme Campaigns
16:22 Try Other RPG Systems
16:52 Switch Your Primary System
18:54 Become a Player
22:57 Outro
Dang, this came at just the right time. Thanks homie.
Merci, hombre
(sorry for bad german)
Seth videos always do... I have had a theory that Seth has been spying on us for years
Being a player is the biggest anti burnout tool I know. It is precisely the reason we run 2 different games that alternate so both our GM's (of which I am one) get to enjoy playing. The games are different genre's and systems as well - 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms D&D and SWADE Deadlands. One week I am running my players through the harsh arctic of the Savage Frontier and the other week I am a rookie sheriff in Tombstone.
We do the same thing, bouncing between D&D 5e and Traveller HERO. It’s definitely fun to swap roles.
I'm also wanting to find a game to play and it being a different system is important to me. I run a Cyberpunk-themed game but I don't want to be playing in someone else's Cyberpunk game; I want a genre break as much as I want a break from being Referee.
i dont have anyone else to alternate with so 💀
@@MetaphorUBm😊mmm😊m😊m😊m😊m😊mk 4:03 öp😊
Have I ever mentioned how much I love how you put GM screens into stock pictures?
It's definitely a lost art.
I swapped systems, changed to Dungeon Crawl Classics. Absolutely changed everything for me. It's like I rediscovered the game after 26 years. A change can absolutely make a huge difference!
Sometimes burnout happens because of the players and not the game. Maybe it's annoying to put a bunch of work in and have someone cancel every single week or have every single thing you create questioned beyond what's proper. And before someone says get better players, realize we aren't all so lucky to have a line of people ready and waiting to play. I'm lucky if I can keep a 4 man group where I live so I have to endure certain behaviors or not play at all. A lot goes into this for sure.
Edit: Seth did cover this somewhat...appreciated.
It's a team effort - the GM can't reasonably be expected to do EVERYTHING, including supply all the player enthusiasm. (And just as i write this, Seth says the same thing in the video!)
For all too many role-playing groups, the situation looks like a rock band where one guy writes all the music and all the lyrics, plays an instrument and sings, buys all the instruments, designs all the flyers and banners and so on, schedules everything around the other band-members' lives because the band comes second to virtually EVERYTHING they do, drives the only car in the group to pick everyone up for rehearsals and practice, finds back-up members to replace anyone who can't show up, plays manager, diplomat between bickering band members, psychologist for the band members who aren't doing so well, and on and on, all while other band members, if they're invested in any part of the band at all, criticize things constantly without contributing much of anything creative to the band themselves - it's inevitable that a "band leader" in that position is going to burn out, while the band disintegrates due to "creative differences"!
To an extent, a GM can ask "what am I doing wrong here? Am I micromanaging things too much, discouraging the rest of the group from doing their fair share? Is there something I can do to delegate more responsibility to the others? Do I need to move on to a new group? Maybe each of the other group members needs to GM for a while whether they like it or not to see what it's like?"
Maybe at the end of the day, gaming just isn't for the group, and it's best to just find a new hobby to spend time on, and if that other hobby isn't for everyone else, it's maybe for the best to let the group disband. (One of my first and longest-running groups hit the doldrums in part because a couple players were only interested in LARPing, which the rest of the group had little or no fun with compared to table-top games, the different factions couldn't really find a way to schedule time for any common interests, and ultimately the group parted ways, perhaps for the best.)
I agree, I am dming for friends but those arent big PnP nerds like i am and they don't really get how much prep goes into a Session,(including finding a scedule) even If it is only a one shot.
Just this Halloween 2 people forgott (accidentaly deleted) their pre Made char Info.
Another Player ist always making problems when it comes to planing a new session. "Oh lets Just say next saturday, I have time!" "Well yeah but i need to prep and ask the others first"
And then: "oh sorry i forgott we were playing tomorrow, i don't have time. Can we do it next week?"
@@heikesiegl2640 I dm for two groups. They are just random store groups. One has 6 the other 7 players. Life happens, I run the session if half the players show up. If someone misses two sessions in a row, I talk to them. I set up the campaign so no player has plot armor, so if a player misses the session it does not effect anything. Next session, if they missed the session before they just pop in next to the other players. Same if one dies, the new character just pops in. It takes a ton of the stress off.
I don't dislike my players, but I tend to prefer games with more serious characters and stories (OK, well, to be more precise, I just want to be able to immerse myself in the situation and have the characters take what's happening seriously, joking and comic relief is fine), but a lot of the players in my group are very...unserious, constantly telling dumb jokes totally out of character, making stupid suggestions that create a silly atmosphere, and generally just not having the kind of game that I enjoy DMing. There's nothing inherently wrong with that style of play, but I just don't enjoy it very much, so I've ended up settling down with the two players in the group who enjoy roleplaying as much as I do and running games with them alone. That seems to have worked out pretty well.
This... I had not one but two good friends who constantly played in our games, but always managed to derail everything trying to make everything about themselves. It finally came down to some hurt feelings, but I had to get rid of them because everyone else was having a miserable time including me as the GM!
I'm definitely a victim of being a forever DM. I can't even remember the last time I was a player. Probably something like 20 years ago. Maybe it is time I joined a game as a player just to refresh that perspective.
My experience with burnout has never manifested as a lack of enthusiasm, but I have hit times where I'm just creatively tapped.
And that's when allllll those supplements, adventures, and etc that I've never used come in handy. Every one of those books, no matter what they are, has ideas in it even if you don't love every bit of the content, sometimes all you need is just that one weird idea that you can pull out of there and run with.
I can remember years where I would be watching TV and a commercial would play. I would suddenly lean forward and say "Ooh!" and my brother knew I had just gotten an idea for something in my game. From a 30-second commercial for a car or something.
@@MonkeyJedi99 "The new, revolutionary grill glove - turn your meat with no hassle. Order now, and enjoy the precise and easiest solution to all your grilling problems!"
"Wait a second...what if there was a lord who found an ancient artifact, a glove if you will, which makes them impervious to fire? Now they set out to burn all their foes to the ground, setting mansions and villages ablaze and leaving ruins that the PCs will discover and slowly lead to the source of all evil?"
I've completely given up on trying to get people to play games. at least I have this awesome channel to watch.
You mentioned this in your video, but the single best thing I did to combat burnout was switch from weekly sessions to bi-weekly. And then during the "off" weeks I wouldn't do any prep at all for the game. I found it really helped to keep everything RPG-related mentally compartmentalized into its own week.
Remember when your grandparents got together with their friends to play cards? They never had tournaments, leagues, or prizes; they didn't care who won. It was just an excuse to socialize. That was my biggest problem as a DM - players who didn't take the adventure seriously. Playing out of character, cracking jokes at serious moments, not paying attention and missing important clues. That's what made me feel like my efforts were under appreciated.
Will, I'm not sure I follow. So, is it that you'd like the group to be more like our grandparents' generation? They come in to socialize and all, but still commit to making it so that the game is fun and still within the scope of the rules. The games were serious enough to actually try to win the tricks they bid, but not so serious that they can't enjoy playing.
Personally, I don't mind a couple cracks in the tension, but the constant derailing of a story is a real problem. The way I see it, it's like going to a movie and when things are tense, someone pops out with a "THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID! LOLOLOL".
Sorry about the rambling reply, but I feel I get you.
Don't take the laughter personally - - I'm an extremely serious DM, and sometimes, all my best efforts actually result into a super laughter at the table. Also sometimes, It's all because of me or something I say. :D
I ran a game in D&D 5e for just over a year that wrapped up about 7 months ago. At the end of that I revealed an invasion of the country the party had been working to protect the whole campaign by the rest of the world.
They loved those characters and plenty of the NPCs but they hated the monarchy (rightly so, the king is a megalomaniac control freak who uses divination to see what's happening everywhere in the country at almost all times including slightly into the future in an attempt to maintain absolute order). So when I told them the next campaign was the story of the people who founded that invasion force and united the assorted countries against the most powerful mortal in all the realms, they were into it.
A lot of the game was convincing various nobles of the 2nd largest country to help them collect allies and that's just wrapped up, so now we're making the push to invade with all of them... but I told my players I was getting tired of the world and was going to create a new one after this campaign was over and move on to a new system I'm currently designing that was created with the setting in mind. So I told them I wanted to wrap up the campaign in the next 5 sessions (I'd do it sooner if I could, I've been using this version of the world for 6 years now and It's due for another overhaul. This already lasted longer than the last version that only went 4 years.)
So I had 1 player quit until the next campaign starts because they were more interested in the things I was doing for their specific subplot than the actual overarching campaign. 2 of the others have just been telling me how disappointed they are, and the other 3 have been pretty neutral. But not a one of them seems excited.
I don't really know what to do. I know I spent the majority of this year setting up plots and sub plots that will never be resolved and got (most) of them invested in what will be the last story in the setting and am rushing the ending. Am I the 1 in the wrong for not caring about giving a satisfying ending to a world I no longer care about? Should I redouble my focus on finishing that campaign in a way that will make them happy, assuming they survive, and put off the new system and setting I've now been working on for 3 months? Should I just end the game now so I can put my full focus on my new endeavors? I can see why they'd be disappointed, but is it my obligation as the GM to finish something I've started, almost 6 years ago now including all the campaigns in this version of the setting, that I no longer even want to think about I'm so tired of it, to make them happy?
This is a really good group, the majority of us have been playing TTRPGs together, D&D, CoC, Multiple homebrew systems, now Windrose, for 7 years now. I don't like disappointing them, but I can't bring myself to care about this setting I made in my late teens anymore. I'll be 26 in 2 days and I'll have been running games in this setting for almost 10 years now despite it's overhauls and rewrites and everything the players have done to it being factored in, and I'm just so... bored of it.
I think I just needed to rant this all out where some unaffiliated people could see it, hope none of my group reads it. I think they'd feel bad if they knew how much I was agonizing over this, and the last thing I want to do is make my friends worry about me over something we'll probably laugh about this time next year. I think I've done a good job hiding it from them at least. They just know I'm bored and wanna do something else and not how much I've honestly started to hate my current setting because of this.
Thanks for reading anyone who actually took the time too.
Sounds like you're pretty passionate about your setting, so I understand that it must be hard...
There are a couple things that come to my mind:
- if something went on and on for so many years, it means it did at least something entertaining, right?
- if you're not enjoying that setting/plot anymore, let it go; it doesn't mean you're never gonna touch it again: maybe in a couple of years you'll have a plot hook or weird idea, and your world will be there waiting for you;
- if your players don't seem excited about the new world/system/setting, try Seth video "Talking To Your Group About Changing RPG Systems".
Hope these could help ;)
I find it interesting that your main plot is nearly the same as the one I planned for my game - a council of immortal beings who have founded their own empire, slowly expanding, but there are people who have an idea how to kill these immortals and are now looking for allies all around the world to start a full-scale invasion of the empire and enact their plan to kill the immortals.
Anyway, I can only tell you as much: I think you don't have any obligation to play something with them that you're not invested in anymore. It's not going to be satisfying either way, so maybe you should put that campaign on halt for now? It's one hell of a cliff-hanger, but still, it might be better to finish it when you feel like you could get invested into the setting again, even if only for a long enough time to finish the game and never go back to the system.
If your players are still really unsatisfied, well, you should obviously have a talk with them and tell them that you just can't finish the game well enough now. Maybe do it at a later point, or maybe even have someone else finish it for you - but to be fair, I don't know what the best or easiest solution would be.
Just don't push yourself too hard. You're supposed to enjoy the game as well, you're a player just like everyone else.
I'm five months late, but I'll chip in anyway. Don't feel guilty about calling it quits. It's your prerogative as the GM. More importantly, "burnout" is exactly that. You're totally done. Every iota of energy and perseverance has been spent. There is no more. It's like a soldier at the front, when all their courage is spent, they must be rotated away from there. They might be back after r&r, but it's not a sure thing. So for your own sake, I hope you made the change. There's no other sane alternative. Best of luck to you!
At our recent Halloween-themed game, the characters were combating a giant pumpkin beholder (thing Great Pumpkin with individual jack-o-lantern eyestalks). Instead of dice rolls, I let the ranged characters throw candy corn at the miniature we were using to determine whether or not they hit. We had a ton of fun with players' various corn-tossing abilities, and my dogs had fun scarfing errant candy corns off the floor. :)
I feel my personal burnout with GMing has been due to finding the time to prep even though my prep isn't really heavy I still feel sometimes I don't even have the time to prep what little I do. Like Seth said in the video life happens which can totally interrupt your prep for the game. I have a little girl and totally get that and would drop everything for her but it definitely has effected my games.
Seth, your description of GM burnout reminds me of the way Charles Dickens was portrayed a few years ago on Dr. Who. He NEEDED an adventure that broke all of the "rules" and his comfort zone in order to kick start his creativity again. I suspect some of your methods could help break a writer's dry spell.
It wasn't Dikkens with two k's?
edit: I remember that episode. It was a fun look at the serious problem of writer's block.
Yes I’ve faced burnout before. Life gets in the way a lot of times. I’ve found that being a player has helped a lot too.
I DM once every 4 months now and game once or twice a month and it’s fun.
Nice video
"Don't ask me, ask the puppet" -a thing Seth has now said.
One hint for playing in online game: Every player should have some agency on the story, but they don't all have to have it at the same time! When I played Shadowrun on Roll20, I played a face-type character, I did the negotiating for payment, and talked our group past guards, or snuck in and opened locks from the inside.
When it got to heavy combat, I had an old retro game I've played 100 times before pulled up in another tab on mute, the samurai and magicians could have their time to shine, I could listen to the action, keep track of what was going on, and when it was my turn I could play my character appropriately without missing a beat, and not just sitting there bored waiting for someone else to finish their turn!
The lack of side bits really changed the tone of this video. Not in a bad way at all, I would say a helpful way. It gave it that “let’s get to the point and relate” tone that someone looking for advice really needs
Your burnout story hits me hard becayse for 10 years I was primarily a D and D DM, always trying to finish a campaign. After I burntout in the middle of a sprawling campaign, I tried running Call of Cthulhu because of your channel. AND I COMPLETED MY FIRST CAMPAIGN! Thank you, Seth! Your videos helped keep me enthusiastic about TTRPG and inspired me as well.
Almost spit out my coffee when surfer bro was cheering for enemy 'edibles'...
I am DMing an epic campaign with my group for almost 3 years. We play four to six times a month. To keep my and my groups interest, I pause after a few months and one of my players is DMing a side quest in the same campaign. Another player is sometimes step up with another rpg. In addition, I changed the rules from D&D 5e, which I don't like, to 3.5e, which increased my motivation again. Seeing forward to the next three years 😊
Seth's out here still giving the best advice on running games you can find. I've learned a ton from you man, Thank you!!
Seth, thank you so much.
Before this video I honestly didn't have words to describe how I was feeling at my game table. I felt like I was an awful dm for not being able to run my game like I used to.
This video and others like it have really helped me understand where my feelings are coming from. And though it's going to take work to resolve my burnout, I'm SO grateful for the reassurance that I'm not alone in feeling this way
Thank you.
16:52 is so important. I got super burned out on D&D and Pathfinder and that's when I started checking out Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green and just other games in general and my love for the hobby came back.
I think the power gaming people that I encountered so much in D&D definitely had contributed to that. People got focused more on having big numbers than actually caring about the story. Discussing that aspect with the players was a whole other thing, too.
Yeah Burnout is a real thing ! Thanks for posting this ...!
Being my hobby and my work obligation, I'm glad this video popped up lol.
love the William Gibson quote, thankfully never experienced that in game groups
Theme campaigns have been some of the most fun game we've ever had. One was the four players were the four horsemen. Each cursed with a trait that suited them, Famine was gaunt and always hungry eating almost anything, Death was unusually pale and had to wear gloves to avoid killing people with a touch, Pestilence had boils all over their body (I can't remember if it was a joke or if they really were used as a weapon), sadly I cannot remember War besides always wanting to fight.
I burned out as a GM a few years ago. I am a player for the foreseeable future.
My group alternates every week, something we just started after some time. One week we have play CoC run by
me and the next week play DnD run by my friend. I think it helps both of us because we don’t have to run a game every week and it gives us more time to write and change things.
That is a great situation to be in!
This video comes at really the right moment. I am trying to get out of my burnout not only because of a very long and difficult year, but a very terrible group that drained the fun out of me. DMs are people.
That edibles gag was the funniest thing over seen all week
One of the big reasons I started up my campaign (springboarded off of Against the Cult of the Reptile God) was to help my Forever DM with his burnout. For several reasons, he just wasn't feeling his game anymore, even though we the players loved it, so I and the other player ended up DMing two separate campaigns and two separate one-shots in our own time that he could attend; get to experience that player-side excitement a bit, and give both of us some practice on how tough DMing really was.
Since he dropped his campaign, we've split ways with a problem player that just didn't mesh well with the rest of us, had a bit of fun hanging out in Faerun and Greyhawk and Ravnica with the different highs and lows that brings, tore out some long-standing grudges with heart-to-heart conversations, and after all of that he's actually made mention of almost wanting to run the game again. Which is fine and all, but I'm just glad that he's actually enjoying being part of both of our games enough that it's helped him out a bit. At least enough that he's started writing some short stories when the want strikes him, that's untapped creativity welling back up!
I have lived through this. Sadly, none of your advice would have worked.
Still, this video made me feel even more justified for dumping the group I was in.
Thanks for an awesome analysis of this really common problem.
3:33 - "As a game master, I feed off of my players"
I KNEW IT! All your C'thulhu games are probably just your own experiences and memories!
Pausing about 10 minutes in to say that a flexible, changing schedule for both length and frequency of games is wonderful for keeping people excited. Our group meets weekly (except when they can't) for 6 hour sessions (except when they're not), meaning we often have gaps of a couple to 4 weeks without play and some sessions go only 4 hours while others run almost 9. Every session we're always eager to play, even if we kinda petered out on a dull note lastnweek.
I definitely do my best to keep self aware about my games and session planning. I try not to over think planning the sessions and will bounce ideas off the group to see where their heads are at.
There are times when I feel pressured and other times the session planning feels easy. It is a juggling act to keep the broad strokes of the campaign held loosely in my brain while maintaining a sandbox structure that allows the players to go in various directions, and preparing encounters for a session.
Books, shows, movies, or even art are often my fuel for session encounters. But taking a mental break makes a big impact.
Sending this to my forever GM. I will run you as a player again, promise.
It's nice to see Puddock again.
In the past when I played more; my friends and I dealt with DM burn out by the DM taking a break and somebody else DM'ing for a few weeks, or longer with an entirely different campaign. Another thing we would do to keep things fresh, our game day might be changed up to board game like Axis & Allies, or Risk. I also remember one change up game was a super hero RPG (Hero's Unlimited? if I remember correctly) . Thanks for this video, it is great advice for a real topic.
Literally running a “shakeup” session with a countdown timer *today!* The serendipity!
Love your advice videos, sir! Great to have such regular input from a long-running, sensible GM!
A lot of times when I have begun to feel burned out, it is because I get dissatisfied with my players, their playstyle, or what they choose to focus on. I have found that sometimes I expect way too much from them, and I have learned to accept their quirks, be thankful for them, and relax and enjoy the game
I am so relieved to hear that I'm not the only person who finds online gaming so much more exhausting than in-person. I used to be able to run four straight hours without noticing, and up to eight if I ran to exhaustion. Online it's hard for me to even make it two hours, and I realized I was dreading sessions instead of looking forward to them. (Being a forever GM also doesn't help ...)
This is my favourite RPG channel on RUclips. You always give such good advice. Thank you.
When GM'ing felt like work I was OUT.
I am a HUGE victim of the "players didn't use half my adventure" problem.
I'll have a several hooks and a dozen rumors to track down and help the players plan their tactics and strategies and to plant seeds for the next adventure in the campaign... Then my players roll into town, see the first obvious hook, and basically railroad themselves. "oh, the trade caravans from the dwarven stronghold have suddenly started coming less frequently? No need to gather info or talk to the dwarf traders and merchants that are in town, lets just go straight to the stronghold."
That Sounds sad! I am a player that likes to immerse herself in the world. Talk to npcs, interact with the world etc.
When I am dming i try to do the same for my players. But i think sometimes Player brains are just too full. Because i also experience it when i play sometimes that after a session i think: damn! I Wish i did xy, oh i forgott about abc!
I guess players are too occupied sometimes ;)
I'm thinking it's pretty common for a lot of us to overachieve as GMs: building campaigns and maps and so on that are fare more "epic" in scale than the players actually have time for. I kind of noticed that was a problem for me when I would start filling time when some group members would fail to show up, with the HeroQuest board game instead of a normal pen-and-paper RPG: the smaller maps, smaller stories, and simpler mechanics of the board game seemed to go over much better than what I was doing with the regular RPGs.
The nature of HeroQuest was such that I could experiment all I like, tossing in-jokes, improvised ideas, portrayals of monsters etc. that deviate a lot from the standard "fluff", bending genres, and even playing with game-breaking stuff in one-shot games without having to worry about breaking anything over the long-haul, since we were basically playing one-shot dungeons. HeroQuest was keeping a lot of things fresher than the more ambitious pen-and-paper games seemed to encourage or allow for. One of the more fun things I started doing was asking the players what was in some of the rooms on the board, encouraging them to make things up themselves - less work for me, more surprises, and they could set up the sorts of encounters they wanted to play that way. It was sort of liberating, not having to worry about designing and managing long-running, consistent campaigns myself, which often included a lot of ideas I would never get to use because of player attrition and players doing their own thing!
Anyway, I bet that a lot of mileage could be had from trimming down a lot of the scope, size, and complexity of your pen-and-paper games - maybe one-shots, or smaller, more focused dungeons, less pressure towards lengthy campaigns, less structure, more improv, more experimentation and play and less playing things by-the-book.... (A lot of the "old school renaissance" type old D&D throwback games that have become more popular over the last few years perhaps run on this sort of smaller-scale, beer-and-pretzels dungeon-crawl thing.)
@@heikesiegl2640 it's a change in philosophy I think. Back in the 90s when I started, everyone played D&D for some level of immersion.
Nowadays, I seem to find more people transitioning from elder scrolls or WOW and they're basically programed for "oh look, a glowing question mark over the NPC, he'll tell me if I need to talk to anyone else to do this quest".
@@dgriffinctc3834 Thats quiet possible. One player i dm for (and is a Player in a campaign i am also a Player) and He shows some of this "gamer behavior" despite never playing much. But He always sais things like: oh i am glad that this Sidequest is over. Why do you care? We will never See this character again etc.
Not Sure If i explained well but i hope you understand what i mean.
Make it a "Modular System". Make the Hooks 2Stereotypic" so you can adapt them to another Setting.
Give Players to choose A, B or C. When they choose C, okay.
Next Time, you use A, B and D. They use B.
Next Time, they get A, D and E - and maybe recognize that recurring A, so maybe also change it to E, So you mix up new Combos and such.
Let everyone have ONE memorable Trait. Having a Caravan Circus is nice, but "too much" for the Players to Process (Choice Paralyzation).
But, seperating the simgle great NPCs and thus having not one Circus rrather than 3 Cirus wandering aournd with each one havinf two memorable Guys and the others beeing "just something alike but not as good as [Guy from anothe rCircus]" makes them great.
Same goes for Taverns. Make a list of all Taverns in CRs first Campaign and then do it for the second one - you will see, they work similar. A Tavern can be similar to a Kings Court - the Local Dude beeing "the King", the Rich Noble beeing the Bartender and such. That Way, you can create wonderful inspirations without many Neurons having to move inside a Brain.
Basically, "Gaston in a Tavern" is alike to the Politics of the Emperor and the Harkons/Artreides in Dune. One holds the Power over the People, but the other owns the Court.
And if they miss out on Garry, the gawking Goblin in your DnD, he will be great as "Lally, the lisping Labbit" in some SciFi-Setting.
I just have to stop and appreciate the photoshop work Seth does for these videos. They slot so well into his narrative and style that I think they can be easy to forget as a key component.
Also, what a thoughtful video! And look at the comment section! Says a lot of positive things about this audience. When and where is the Skorkowsky Con going to be? I'd pay real money.
lol! I LOVE the images with the DM screen inserted in them!
one thing that helps me a lot besides a virtual table top that really helps me make what i want the players to see. is having a very sandbox base world. we havent had a grand campaign yet but we have had a few over arching sessions. like 6-10 sessions quests but usually something grounded and not world ending. but when we arent in a large quest the party just gets to travel the world i made for them and see new areas and meet new people. so usually we are always engaged in a different setting
My burnout comes from realizing that I'm giving 200% and most of the table is just at 50% at best. Feels like they think they just have to come, sit and enjoy whatever I prepared. Or sometimes they behave like they will only be available for playing if they literally have nothing better to do. However then the games are amazing, they have so much fun, but after, when it comes to scheduling next session, or asking for their backgrounds, or asking anything about the plot for them to participate outside the sessions they show no interest. I'm the one talking alone in the group whatsapp chat and the messages just get ignored. It's tiring to feel you have to be after everyone, when it's actually you working for them to have fun. It's frustrating. And I know the answer is to just "talk to them" but idk, some of them are close friends and I dont want this to become a fight or smth, and I end up not saying anything.
PS: Feels so good to vent this out, couldn't do it on my twitter cause my players are there...
The forever GM thing hit me hard. I had people in my friend group who bought TTRPGs because they wanted me to run it.
They would try to sell me on it; get me excited and thinking of the possibilities but would fall silent when I asked them when they were going to run it.
After many years I found a balance between over-prepping and minimal prep that seems to work for me (might work for you). Where you heavily prep (or keep good notes notes on your improvs) your game world, i.e. history, culture geography, etc.. Then just minimally prep plots and adventure hooks, et c. that way if your players go off script, so to speak, it will not stress you and no need to try to railroad them back. You can roll with it and improv a new situation based on your knowledge of the game world.
The timing of this video is borderline eery for me, couldn't come at a more precise time.
I've been having a hard time to orchestrate my ideas for sessions lately, and preparing fresh things for my players. They seem to really like to play and aren't bad players at sessions, but have that mindset of "i don't want to expend any energy into this aside from coming to play", and even after talking to them several times and asking for help with the burnout, they still don't give a damm. And I say that, because I already asked, many times, if there's something that is demotivating them or that I could do better.
That is snowballing into a hard demotivation for me, as that feeling of "why expend energy into this while those ungrateful bastards don't care to even reply a simple question when I ask something?" creeps more and more. I want to bring a good experience for them and it's really satisfying when I manage to do so, but it's turning harder every week.
I think at that stage you should either ask them if they want to DM, or just find another group. It's hard when you want to play but everybody else doesn't seem so interested, a lot of people don't realize how much work you have to put into preparing the game.
I return to DMing pleasantly surprised to see Seth still producing wonderful videos.
I’ve been running upwards of 5 games a week for years now as my job and god damn, it’s starting to hit me hard. I’m gonna give some of these a shot and see if I can get something that helps!
Thanks man!
They say that the first album of a band is often strong because it draws on material they've been creating over years of gigging and, after that, they suddenly find it harder to produce a solid follow-up album because they have to start creating from scratch again.
Something like that happened to me, as GM, two thirds of the way through a D&D campaign (which ran over four years at the pace of one Saturday afternoon per month). Adventure concepts I'd been thinking about for _years_ before were eventually expended, and I now had to both invent _and_ implement concepts at the same time.
I think we dedicated one session to not playing at all, but just watching some old fantasy movies, chatting and eating, and this gave me a bit more time to devise a concept-shift which would hopefully kick-start more creativity. Basically, to further the over-arching campaign mission, the party had to travel into the past to ensure a world-saving prophecy would happened. This allowed me to 're-dress' familiar settings in the clothes of another and stranger era. This worked, generating sufficient new content to get the campaign to a satisfying conclusion.
To return to the album analogy, I guess it was like turning to an older, more foundational musical genre to define the follow-up album. :)
I had no idea I needed this video as badly as I did. Work has been brutal leading up to the holidays and it's taken it's toll on my game. A friend noticed this before I did, and we jumped to Call of Cthulhu from Carbon 2185. It's been a life saver.
Had some severe burnout all through last year, tried to muscle through and I eventually just had a breakdown in December about it. I stated i wanted a year break from running and a chance to let myself just be a player. After like 2 months all I wanted to do was run again. Ran for the first time again just because my GM was out of town last weekend and it was awesome to come back. Still have to wait till a slot opens up but a good GM break can really reinvigorate the creative juices.
I'm sure its been said a million times but I love all your characters.
The effort you put into making them all unique and memorable is welcoming, I can literally hear Dweebles voice talking even tho the clips had no audio to them.
They're all such great personas, even when you're trying to make them look bad, like making Todd be an ass or Jack the NPC being overly arrogant before combat while being one of the first to show his goofy side during.
I could honestly watch a sitcom of just you playing all of them doing dumb sitcom crap.
Speaking of, how can we fund that?
I have also seen that a change in the game system has revived the excitement. I do own the German DSA (English TDE) and have played it ever since 1984 also I do own D&D since then. Both Systems went through quite an evolution in that time, and not always for the better. My groups have also tried stuff like Shadowrun Midgard, Starfrontiers, Rolemaster ...
What we/I learned was that for our group it was often the world that made for the fun. So we tried adapting systems to the world. This has helped massively. For example, D&D is, at its core, intended to produce massively powerful characters. Other systems might be different there, TDE characters for example can not even compare. Thus playing in the same world with different systems make a massive difference. Villains are much more powerful, the environment much more dangerous etc.
We have even changed the ruleset we use in the mids of a campaign, just for fun. Converting characters showed us how good or even OP they were and how much fun it could be when the struggle was harder.
The world I'm currently creating takes this into account, so much so that I make it as compatible as possible with at least one system from either side of the spectrum.
I had burn-out when I, myself, was DMing too many sessions! I'd 're-discovered' AD&D2 while unemployed and found several local guys wanting to play. I ended up DMing 5 days a week! Sure, I should've asked if anyone else wanted to have a crack at reffing. But I was quite inexperienced, no one seemed unhappy with the set-up, so I started running out of stories, prepping etc. The five days dropped to three then one then ...
Real life interrupted, I had a marriage break-down (probably not helped my excessive reffing) and, when the dust cleared, a friend of a friend was running RuneQuest and invited me along. This once-a-week session revived me. So after this, I only 'booked' myself for once a week. :)
One advice I would add is to change gm from time to time. We are closing to the end of a two year Pugmire campaign and I have already told my players that next game, be it a full blown campaign, or a short one or anything else, will have to be run by one of them. One of them already volunteered so that's cool. I love gming but I don't want to be forever gm.
Forever GM here too. Started playing in a game, 5 months in DM friend had to put things on pause for a few weeks due to IRL pressures. I picked up a short one-shot to bridge over those few weeks to keep the online group together. 12 months, and 35 sessions later, I'm still running it.
In my group I DM D&D and another GM Call of Cthulhu . We play 7-10 sessions of D&D and then 3-5 session of Cthulhu, and its great for combating burnout! Me and the GM are feeding off each others ideas and creativity when planning the next part of our respective games.
Its crazy how I was just moping around about DMing and you make this video lol, thanks Seth and keep up the awesome work!
We were fortunate in that every player in our gaming group for fifteen years were also Game Masters of multiple RPGs. I think there was only one player the entire time who never GMed anything at all. We had a couple of Forever GMs of particular systems, but there was always something else we could fall back on if need be.
Seth Skorkowsky - life coach for Game Masters. Great video sir!
I've been a DM for 3 years, so I haven't yet faced burnout, but this is his to keep in mind for the future.
2 years later and this is still great insight. Im officially a member of the burned out forever GM and I had mostly quit. I played in another game and LOVED it but then... that conversation came back... maybe you should run a game. EEEEEK. LOL
We're at once a month too. It's less than I'd like to play but yeah, life demands it.
Thanks for the tips Seth. I’m running two D&D Campaigns and work full time. A Thursday night game and a Saturday.Sometimes I do run into burnout. I usually play each group session every 2-3 weeks. I’ve been DMing for years and found that every 2-3 weeks is a happy medium. It gives me enough time for preparation and planning. Changing game frequency is a good tip. I think that a group should meet at least one a month. Otherwise the players lose interest and move on to other things. One a week is too much I think. Especially for adult players.
It also helps having good players too. It makes a huge difference. I’ve had a few players over the years who were poison to the group by either being flakes or just plain rude and disrespectful. Fortunately I’ve got some good players who make it enjoyable for everyone. Two are DMs themselves. 😊
The "Fritz" part killed me.
Seriously, I just failed my second death save, someone help
I used to run games all the time, but it's been a few years. It's difficult to get back into it, things don't make sense to me anymore, I get frustrated trying to put together maps whether overland or dungeon. I can't watch this right now, but I'm definitely going to catch it later and see if it helps.
Lots of really good advice!
But! Before you reduce your play frequency, take a good hard look at your entire life situation: is the burnout really coming from the game or from some other source?
All too often modern life pressures convince us to sacrifice our recreational activities to make room for 'important' stuff that is really not that important.
This can send us into a death spiral - and I'm not using all that much hyperbole here: chronic stress kills!
If your burnout stems from non-gaming sources try to re-balance those demands without letting go of your precious recovery time. You can't run on an empty tank ;)
Excellent topic and great video on the subject.
If you can, play in a group composed (as) entirely (as possible) of people who can _all_ be GM's. That way when you inevitably get burnt out another player can step in and become the GM. Not necessarily of the game you're running, but _something_ so that the group doesn't break up.
Make sure that it's well-understood by everyone in the group that running a game is highly encouraged by and for everyone and that it's part of the price of the good times of RPG-ing in that group.
And if the new GM is that player who's always busting _your_ chops in some specific way, do the same exact thing to him or her *_once_* and *_only once._* That way he or she will get the message and understand and learn, but you're not hounding them with it.
If there are people in the group who aren't confident or experienced enough to be a GM, it's you and your fellow gamers' duty as a role-playing aficionados/mavens to develop their skills and encourage them to take that next step in their "career." And it doesn't matter, really, if they suck at being a GM at first. It's to be expected and really about the effort being what counts and the experience they'll gain that will all-around improve them in the art, not being World Champion Game Master of All Time their first time out. It's a virtuous circle, so give them encouraging hints and tips if they seem to need them.
Being the GM is usually the most taxing "position" at the game table and away from it (and rightly so). Of _course_ you'll want to lay down the scepter once in a while for a while and just show up to games and run a character. As someone once told me when they thought I was overextending myself: "You don't supposed to be Superman!" Also, playing in another GM's game can cause you to examine your own style, strengths and weaknesses and can act like a vacation, where you come back refreshed, reinvigorated and rededicated to being the best GM _you_ can be.
Well, this speaks to me. I have been trying to figure out what was up so this helps.
As a forever GM, my last game had a buddy of mine finally get to run for me and I was so excited to play. But he was sinister when he decided I needed to run again, because the game ran for less than 10 sessions. He decided he was done with the story so early on that I didn't even get a chance to recover from the burn out before he ended it and asked if I would run his new character.
So for my current game I'm making it as long as possible so nobody can complain when I end it and say 'sorry guys, you've gotta impress me before I run for you again.'
This is gaming, a group experience, not a negotiation
My games usually run for less than 10 sessions, hehe (granted they are long sessions, 4-6 hours). Idk, I like DMing is small bits, there's a lot of preparation involved and I like games with a lot of history, so it gets tiresome after a few sessions, so I like ending before I reach the burnout stage and can still give an ending that I'm excited about.
But must be kinda annoying when you're the forever DM and when you finally get to play you feel it wasn't enough :/. Luckily in my group we rotate who is the DM and we always change the game systems :p.
Nicely done. For me: 1) digital game prep! 2) the players haven't quite jelled. One solution I did was to play a 5e published adventure, told the players I was just purely in it for fun, that their backstories were for them and for each other but not for me, that they'd probably die and should enjoy it and have a backup pc ready. They began shipwrecked in the jungle with nothing. My favourite game so far.
Sometimes it is not the DM being burnt out but terrible players too deal with.
Take a break, focus on life for awhile, enjoy reading, video games, movies, ect...
A couple of years not running or playing, just watching movies and listen too Audiobooks has helped me alot in wanting to DM
This is an excellent video that so many people need to hear, especially DND dm's as D&D is not an easy system to run. thanks for making it!
Great stuff Seth! I got a good laugh at some of the jokes and some of the reused stock photos you photoshopped! I've been really sad all week and, today, while preparing for the international Call of Cthulhu campaign I am the Keeper for, I went down a really dark hole. Finding out what about the surgery chamber inside of the construct, where shoggoths remove your head, then realizing that not only is my group going to have 1 Investigator succumb to Permanent Insanity because his sanity is so low, but also they must sacrifice 1 Instigator to restore the God Trap...was too much. Doing PT exercises while watching yet another smashing Seth Skorkowsky video made my day! Thanks again Seth!
"What's with you and always preparing? Stop preparing! Ludicrous Speed Go!" ;)
The bit with the puppet. Never underestimate props. I ran a session a long time ago, and impromptu started putting on hats for NPCs. Those players still talk those hats and the NPCs they represented.
Want a good example? Would you remember the trio from these vids if it was just voicing?
Great video. It's a thing that happens. I was super sad when our game of nearly 4 years and two complete campaigns fell out because the DM just didn't want to play anymore :(
Yea I just quit being A ST/GM because I did some of these things. Great timing
I'm running an Alien RPG campaign. I planned its end last October. We couldn't play all through that month, and in the sessions we had after that I felt my players were too scared to take the next step because they're inside the hive. My idea was an infiltration and rescue setting for the hive (I even watched your heist video) but my players didn't get that and we haven't finished it to this day. The problem is that they were simply supposed to power through swarms, then there'd be a last minute threat of explosion and they'd have to run for their lives away from the blast radius and that's it. But now I feel like sessions are empty of content and I'm constantly thinking of re-writes to create excitement and that is burning me out. But I've made myself a promise to end this chapter of the campaign next session no matter what. If they die, they die.
This would be great if I didn’t have a game in less than 23 minutes that I don’t want to run
I feel that. I found this during the break of a game I'm burning out on.
It's too late, but if you actually find you don't want to run a game, don't. Tell them you don't feel like it, you're not happy about your ideas, you're not satisfied with your planning, the system or something else.
Honestly, I've had a player tell me she just didn't feel like RPing that day because she had too many in other games that day, so I just said "Alright, no worries!", even though it was literally an hour before our session was supposed to start.
This Channel is an absolute bomb.
I have been watching different GM content and this one is by far the best. Valuable insights, Seth is both laid back and dissociated from his opinions so its easy to listen and its not system specific which helps a lot. Thanks!
Thank you very much.
Seth, you have hit this right on the Head with a Hammer. Life and prep are the real problems for me...I dive in way too hard and most times the player are excited but not at the epic level I am. Half my group is off site...so makes it hard to read the room. Thanks again...very helpful...Thanks
That comment about using gummie bears as monsters reminded me of the time I used a green colored fruit roll-up torn into little pieces to represent green slime. I got some strange looks that night....
I was so ecstatic to see the puppet make a return.
The amusing thing to me is that I got thr opposite problem: I got player burnout. I had two DMs who would switch every week and neither of them made games I found particularly engaging. Plus I had gotten into D&D thanks to Critical Role and this wasn't panning out to be amateur improv theater with dice roles like I hoped.
I became the group's DM after many weeks of them trying to persuade me and I enjoy it a million times more than playing. Making the stories and seeing people's reactions to them is so much more engaging and I hope I never get tired of it.
I took Alternity Gamma World and converted "Barrier Peaks" to it.
They had a Samurai "Hoop" that would do awesome fighting tricks and t the end of a battle say (in a super high pitched voice) "Nowth, we pufwomth da haiku." and get one of the other players to write it down for him, for permanent record of his legendary status.
A feline that would walk up to people and push their beer off the table while making eye contact, or sneak up on them and put things where people would knock them over, or accidentally put their elbow in a butter bowl.
The party healer was a psion that had a talent for fire and guns. He spent a lot of time trying to get ammunition. The player was medicated at the time, and sometimes dead from the neck up, but he was funny, and had a habit of mangling eighties songs that fit the situation.
Yeah. Sometimes you have to switch it up. .
The first time I hit GM burnout, I took about 3 and a half years off, which resulted in our whole group doing nothing at all.
The second time I was approaching burnout, our group started rotating GMs with different people running their own campaigns. We will either do a different one each week, or sometimes run one campaign for a couple of months of sessions straight, then switch to another one.
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My last campaign ended about a month and a half ago, and when my next game starts we'll have a Rolemaster fantasy campaign, a Spacemaster sci-fi campaign, and a 5E fantasy campaign in the rotation.
16:04 I was JUST GOING TO TYPE that I've wanted to be in a circus campaign when you said that. A circus is a GREAT cover story for why you keep moving from place to place, and not everyone has to be a performer; you could sell snacks, be in the ticket booth, run a small carnival game, etc.
Oh yeah. Theres a ton of roles the PCs could have from performers, security, the crew that goes in ahead and books location sites and promotes before the rest arrive, or general staff from medical, cooks, fortune tellers, and general labor.
@@SSkorkowsky but i can NEVER GET PEOPLE TO AGREE TO PLAY IT, URGHHHHHHHHH
Real life is definitely the big killer for me. When something goes wrong with my already high stress job it pretty well kills my ability to improvise (which is like 80% of my game).
We have a good thing going though; we have 2 concurrent games running. We usually switch back and forth every weekend, but when one of us is feeling out then we just play the other one that weekend.
Ive never been a GM proper, and ive suffered the group i was GMing collapsed due to RL, but i'll keep in what you and Matt Mercer said.
Great video, really interesting your group's response to changing system, just goes to show how sometimes there is more to a situation than we realise!
My own personal experiences seem to revolve around the same few things.
1 - Over burdening myself with things - maybe I've got a homebrew rule I'm working on and it isn't quite right yet and I don't feel like I can run until this niggle is resolved. Maybe it is something similar but in the plot and there is something happening in the world that I can't quite capture and present. What I found for these was a bit of a shock, it worked instantly. Simplify. I had a few rules I wanted to implement and thought they would really round off our play style nicely but spent weeks if not months putting off tackling this 'big rules problem'. It put me off playing as a GM for ages, I delayed, procrastinated and avoided. Then when I started watching people play, reading things I like etc the fires started to burn again and I though sod it, I will just hash it together, and we can work any problems out during play. I simplified it and it fell into place probably exactly as I had wanted anyway, maybe better in fact, once I had stepped out of the way of the thing I wanted to create, it sort of created itself. Adventure wise too I think going back to 'basics' is often the way to go - What is going on in the world that is interesting, who is involved that is interesting, what other fun elements draw your attention. Offer no solutions to these, present them and see what happens. Both these really helped me recently. It isn't the only way to write, but sometimes less is more and reducing the burden on yourself often leads to more creativity.
2 - Past horror stories - These can weigh on a GM's mind, I have a friend who is going through that now and I have done too in the past. You can get stressed without realising it, over problem players who might have long since left the group. This can put you off without understanding why. Sometimes it can seem really insignificant, so much so it is hard to notice, but it can destroy a GM's enjoyment of playing through chipping away at their confidence. I think just immerse yourself and practice doing so, in the things that gaming offers that brings joy to you. Focus on the good stuff, relax with that and it should help. Also dont push through it, dont add to the punishment, find the enjoyment and then push on with that. It can be trial and error doing that until you find the things that really make you tick as a GM.
3 - Prepping to a deadline has to be at your pace. Maybe you can prep an adventure every week, maybe once a month, maybe something between. Discover which and play that way for your own sanity.
Huge topic, sir. And Seth knows me too well; Over-Prepping will burn you out. I've put so much thought in that by the time the story reaches those points, I just want to get it over with.