Almost a month and I have only blogged three times in January! Good thing "more consistent posts" was not one of my 2022 promises.
This has been a weird month already. Hard to find time to game due to a combination of work schedules, school (for my wife), COVID scares, regular illness taking out players and GM alike at random, etc. etc. and amidst all of this I have been keenly aware that I am wrestling with a combination of sleep-based fatigue making it tough to motivate myself to run games, and a level of GM burnout (akin to writer's block, I would say) that has made actually showing up difficult at times. More of the former (fatigue) than the latter, but still.
I also continue to question my systems of choice. Running D&D 3.5 last year has forced me to see that my problems with D&D 5E are deeper and more troubling than I had considered....I really like the deeper level of granularity in D&D 3.5, the level of customization and content, and its such a sharp contrast with D&D 5E that I just am not sure I can keep on with the latest edition. I started a new campaign which is only two sessions in and I'm already barely motivated to continue.
When I've gotten to this point in the past I often stop and take a moment to think hard about what has been motivating me the most, recently. When I look at what was successful in 2021 I realize I really enjoyed the one D&D 3.5 campaign which felt very energetic and fun. It was put on pause due to an absent player, but I'd like to get back to it. I also really enjoyed the Cypher System game earlier in the year, even though I had a persistent disconnect between my use of a world grounded in very D&D-style theatrics, but using a game system (Cypher) in dire opposition to that style of play. It's a case where I'd love to get back to that campaign, just not with that system....Cypher had already streaked past the more conventional level of play the story expected and left it all in the dust. Cypher is a wonderful game system, but its demands on the story telling are distinctly different from conventional D&D storytelling.
I technically had a great campaign with Pathfinder 2E that I quite enjoyed, but I wasn't actually enjoying running it as much as I should have, and felt at times not motivated. This is my tip that I am experiencing GM burnout: the plot was great, the players brought exciting characters to the table, there's a lot of interest in total, but my own desire to just show up and do it was lower than ever. Bad sign!
Some of the problem is oversaturation: I am currently running a live game Tuesdays (D&D 5E), a virtual game Wednesdays (Mothership), playing in a Call of Cthulhu game on Fridays, and Pathfinder on Saturdays (Roll20). The reality is that I only have time for maybe two nights a week....and what is happening is I achieve that by cancelling, a lot. Sometimes its provoked by work schedules, sometimes by illness, but the net effect for the last couple months has been a harrowingly inconsistent mess of random game nights.
If I could dial it back to one night a week, which is realistically all I really have time for, I think it would be the best solution....but the problem is I have players who are friends that I like gaming with, and they are often quite spread out on which nights they can actually game. It is a no win situation! Worse yet, even if I picked, say, Saturday night to be the sole night for gaming that would be tough because the fewest number of players among all groups can actually game that night. Worse yet, I in theory can't game on Saturdays as often as I'd like simply because I periodically take weekend trips.
Of all the nights for gaming, Fridays are least problematic because I am not the GM. In the old days of the before-pandemic times I often could find a reprieve for a while, sometimes for weeks or months, when one of the other players could step up and run games for a while. This let me recharge my batteries and get a break. But that stopped with the pandemic, ironically, as the process of a sub GM setting up a VTT room and putting the time in to a pick-up game is actually laborious and requires some careful planning. It doesn't help that no one I know, including those who used to GM, ever volunteer anymore. Put simply: if I don't GM, apparently no one else does, either. Gah!
So one thought I have is to make some nights deliberately bi-weekly and rotate. One week: Mothership Wednesday. Next week: Pathfinder Saturday. Tuesdays are a special issue which I have special considerations to address, that go beyond the scope of this post (or what I will stick into print in a public space). Long story short is: I may make Tuesday night the "chopping block" game for a bit, even though it is the live game. I don't want to....but I can then dial it back to the D&D 3.5 session I enjoyed, and move it back to a VTT environment for a bit, selectively picking the players I wish to continue with. Or I can just keep going with the live game and maybe disinvite a couple specific players. We shall see.
In a perfect world I'd get my A-Team of players all on one night, but I know that is impossible currently. And that night I picked would be the mysterious eighth day of the week, that mystery day that exists outside of time and space and on which I have a full night's sleep and am feeling my maximum level of creativity and engagement. What a day that would be!
The reality though is that I am treading water on the time/energy amounts I need to sustain three different games and storylines, and I only really have energy for one right now. A cruel situation indeed, one in which I drown in a bounty of excess. But because I try to juggle three games at once, all of them suffer. So I need to solve this by going back, ideally, to one game a week, and maybe one other game every other week, like I used to do in the Good Old Days. The problem is....which games?
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