The Handbook of Heroes
I guess we finally know what happened all those centuries ago. Someone must have said, “We should start a new campaign!” Then lots were drawn. Dice were rolled. Somebody volunteered.
This is the plight of the forever-GM. The poor bastard who sits at the head of the table session after session, week after week, rolling up new challenges for his friends to fight and slay.
Few of us start out this way. We’re players first, drawn to the promise of the self-insert fantasy slapped on the cover of every Choose Your Own Adventure book: “YOU CAN BE THE HERO OF YOUR OWN ADVENTURE!” And for a time it is good. We learn the rules, write a bit of character backstory, overcome a bandit camp or two, and get invested in the narrative. The group is solid. The table is firing on all cylinders. Everyone is bound for The Land of Adventure! But then it happens.
“Hey guys,” says the current GM. “I’m burned out. I can’t come up with what happens next. And with work / school / insert-responsibility-here taking all my time, I’ve got to pause the campaign.”
And of course that’s fair. Mental health is a thing. Burnout is a thing. You tell your GM how much fun you had, and that you understand the need for a break, and that you’ll be ready to pick up your dice and RP again whenever the next session happens. But that short break stretches. The temporary pause turns into two months. Someone thinks to ask, “Are we ever going to game again?” And the former GM says those fateful words, “I’d be down to play, but I can’t really handle running right now.”
This is what happened to me once upon a time. I was tired of all my campaigns ending. Tired of putting in effort and getting invested, only to watch the narrative fade away and die.
“I’ll do it,” says the brave volunteer. “I’ll take up the mantle. Each week I’ll obsess over my campaign notes, overthink our group’s interpersonal dynamics, and send out save-the-date reminders. I’ll paint minis and buy a battle mat and carve out 4-hour chunks of my weekend. And I’ll make sure the campaign goes right up until the very end!”
Poor chump. Naive fool! Your world too will end. The architecture of your universe will crumble and fall around you. Just as the random encounter tables collapse, and the dice towers topple, and as the sun at the center of your cosmology cracks and pours across the campaign setting like a runny egg, you too will make a desperate ploy. You will open your campaign binder, pass it to a promising young gamer, and ask if they’ll volunteer.
This is how liches are made. We are wizened and withered. All-powerful figures plotting in the solitude of our moldering halls, scheming of the ways we will finally outsmart some ragtag band of heroes. We cling to the spark of magic that keeps the old bones animate, but we feel the fire dying. The only choice is pass our blasphemous magics to the next power-mad mage willing to trade a hero’s fate for a villain’s.
So good luck making your choice, Fighter! The world ends if you refuse. No pressure or anything.
What do you say, gamers? Do I draw too bleak a picture of a GM’s genesis? Or does the lich version of the forever-GM strike a chord? Does your group have a stable and orderly way of moving from one campaign the the next, or is it all about running yourself into burnout and then hoping someone else takes over? Tell us your tales of GM succession and new campaigns sprung from the old down in the comments!
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No that sounds entirely accurate to every single roleplaying group I’ve been part of
The Wheel of GM turns, and Campaigns come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to misplaced campaign notes, etc. etc.
In my old group there was one guy ran most of the ganes, but 4 other who occasionally handled games in systems we liked. In the current it’s mostly me and my brother and voth are candles burning from both sides. So it has become
sporadic. Also since I like to give a spin to different systems, currently Judge Dredd and worlds of 2000AD to another group as the main crew does not want to learn new systems.
I do like telling stories but I have mindset that NPCs are my player characters, as I don’t get to be the player often, especially in systems I’d like to play.
How do you keep the “NPCs are my player characters” separate from the dreaded “GM PC” mindset? What’s the difference in approach?
When I have a PC, I want them to win and accomplish their goals. When I have NPCs, I take glee in their suffering and failures at the players’ hands.
That’s the trick, isn’t it? You’ve got to make sure you’re still serving the players first. Your own dude takes a back seat.
GM PC is part of main cast, playing NPCs as PC is just me treating them like a special quest in a episode of a tv show. Notable appearance, maybe plot important but probably wont be mentioned ever again, like MacGyvers “old friends”… Unless the party adopts them. Good thing I like systems with high lethality.
I like the idea of “frequent guest characters” rather than a long-running DMPC. That way you still have a convenient character with the party to insert bits of GM knowledge as necessary without overshadowing your players.
I too am a wizened lich with my IRL group, except when the burnout hits is also usually when everyone starts being unable to make it due to school/work/etc, so the difficulty’s in starting back up, rather than passing it on. Oh well. At least I have my online group to be a player in.
Yeah. Hard to keep your phylactery charged when the mortals stop showing up to fall into your traps.
My group is fortunate enough to have several people who particularly enjoy GMing (and a few more of us who don’t mind running short games), so the creative burden is shared over time, and they all get a chance to play too.
Further, we jump around different games a bit anyway… there’s usually one main long-running game, but it’s not uncommon to also have a shorter one that started while someone was absent for a period, giving the main GM a few months break (or in some cases, years) while that plays out. We do a few one-shots and other short games too, which also helps.
Finally, I’ve said before that I game exclusively with long-term friends, so looking out for the welfare of those friends obviously takes priority… we wouldn’t be very good friends if we’re letting them burn out trying to provide entertainment for us. So if someone needs it, nobody is going to be unhappy about taking a break… skipping a few weeks, or having someone step up to run some low-prep one shots…
Do your long-running campaigns often die out completely? Or do you normally find a way to come back and pick them up again?
It’s mixed, as you’d expect. Most of them have finished eventually, even if they’ve had some long gaps in the middle… e.g. the current one went on hold for nearly two years after Covid hit and we started another playing a new one online, finishing that and resuming the original one (now moved online).
But yeah, some have stalled and never resumed. Most commonly it’s the filler campaigns… e.g. people keep talking about going back to a game that started while I was away for a couple of months, but I’m pretty sure that was nearly eight years ago now, and I’m skeptical it’ll ever happen.
It occurs to me that one of my games has more people what run games (myself included) than not. (Unless you account for the people that have dropped out.)
And then there’s the game that rotates GMs for multiverse shenanigans.
Oh man… I’ve always wanted the rotating-GM multiverse campaign. The one time I tried it didn’t work out so hot though. Too many different ideas of what the campaign would look like.
5-10 years ago, when we still had an active gaming group
we had (allegedly) a rotating DM system. It quickly became “Jay is forever DM, unless someone else has something cool they want to do this month.” Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy DMing as much as I liked those once-a-year chances to just be a player. Now, though, as a certified, card-carrying, white-bearded DM, I fear my days of a regular gaming group are done. I help design 5e adventures for my son to run with his buddies, online or in person. Once in a blue moon, however, my son will bring one or more of his college friends home with him to demonstrate the joys of “old school gaming” and ask me to run a session.
The DM screen and big chair are a patrilineal monarchy.
Very cool. I hope that there is a fancy gold hat that goes with the DM chair. 😀
As long as my little group still wants to play and still can sometimes, my hopes of actually reaching an end will never die! I’m glad I at least reached a cool stopping point (read: end of book 2 with a nice dramatic session) before having to go on prep-and-moving-and-work hiatus, and we might be able to start a separate campaign under my girlfriend in a week or two as well. It’ll be nice to be a live session player again :>
Also: fun twist tbh :b
😀
What’s your girlfriend gonna run? Anything particularly awesome?
Keeping it simple but spicy with Paizo’s Outlaws of Alkenstar AP! Gonna root and toot and *definitely* shoot, but also be kind (as much as an edgy ancient killer soulbot can be) ~w~
I’ve felt the burnout in the past. Staring at my notebook thinking I should write something, anything, and doing nothing. The weight of Forever GM pressing down on my shoulders.
Thankfully, my current group has myself and another player that alternate between GMing and being a player. Once one campaign finishes, we alternate.
I’ve also found that using adventure modules really helps. I used to turn my nose up at them. Why would I play someone else’s adventure? But they’re a great time saver and I’ve found that they are pretty easy to customize for your group.
That’s always been my thought on modules as well. Customize them and carve ’em up and you’re every bit as valid as a full homebrew campaign. And if you really are overwhelmed and need to take a break, it’s easy to fall back on the text-as-written.
I’m more of an Artificer Lich. No one else really wanted to gm in my group so I ‘stepped up’, but because stuff I was always working on and fiddling with my campaign, but never really had anything for us to play, so we’d devolve to just hanging out and doing other stuff.
Which in hindsight was really kind of annoying because in the past these guys used to actually play and have others gm… when I was not around (work schedule and then college) so they all burned out on gming when I became more available, and I lacked certain skills and feats to make me suitable for the dm position.
Have you considered letting somebody else pilot your campaign for you? If you write it up formally and then act as a PC in the game, it’s called “playtesting.” It’s a short hop from there to publication.
(to the tune of Barbossa at the end of black pearl) “I feel… (c)old
That is to say. the lich metaphor is quite apt.
It’s been a mortal age since I’ve run a campaign but I still remember how it goes, at the start there’s so much excitement, potential abounds!
Then six months pass and somewhere in between cramming for one session and drafting the battlemap for the next, you realize that you’re not having fun, or not having as much fun as you should, it’s become a chore.
Then you chuck in the towel and go be a player till the creative batteries recharge (for me this has been literal years but in a few weeks, I’m climbing back on the wagon).
I think that’s just how ttrpgs work, it’s hard being the dm and sometimes you just need a break, it’s tricky turning it on time after time and turning up week after week.
I remember some fantasy author or other talking about how it writing “draws from the same well” as gaming. He couldn’t do both at the same time.
When I have another creative project going, it becomes awfully hard to show up as a GM.
I think that’s the way it goes, you spend so much mental energy on planning and storyboarding that you don’t have enough juice in the tank to double dip.
I metaing my mixaphors here but you get the point, it’s a tough gig being the group free-ball storyteller.
Show your DM the love!
I have the opposite problem. I prefer to be the forever GM at this point. Playing a single character, only getting to level up one person, choose one feat at a time just feels so limiting. It feels better to design an entire party of opponents, level up an encounter, and use all my different gimmick builds to troll my players.
I seldom get excited for NPC character creation. In my head, it’s too much effort for a single combat encounter.
Still, if you are bursting with mechanical ideas, then I can see the appeal.
It’s hard for me to GM mostly because I like to excessively over-prepare.
With my most recent stint at GMing I had backstory notes for every NPC I wrote up and there were over a hundred of them before the first session even began.
And then the party only even interacted with maybe a quarter of them, and even fewer past their role as Quest Giver or Villain of the Week respectively… but what if they did?
I just can’t bring myself to tone that down at all; I don’t like making up motivations on the fly, my setting needs to be holistic for me to be able to run it.
I’m told they had fun and the game did make it to the “final boss” instead of petering out early, but even now, nearly two years after it ended, I’m left wondering if I was just running the wrong kind of game for what the party wanted out of it.
As a lich myself, I actually started D&D as a DM, not a player. For a while I was a forever DM, but have gotten plenty of opportunity to play. I’ve been lucky that when I need to step back, others at the table would pick up running things.
As for how I became a lich, it’s a secret but involved an irrational particle accelerator, a pair of rubber bands and a liquid lunch.
Obviously, I became a lich not for power or immortality but for the good skeleton puns and memes.
I’ve been feeling this vibe for quite a while recently: I’ve played a lot of play-by-post games and they’re a unique challenge for GMs, and out of more than 30 campaigns I’ve been in as a player, only one or two have ever been played to completion. All the others collapsed due to players being burned out and the party falling to 3 active players or less, or the GM burning out and no one else taking up their mantle.
Which has created a reoccurring intrusive thought that fills me with dread: “If I want to experience even HALF of the stories I want to with these games, I’m going to have to GM them myself.” It terrifies me because I’ve tried GMing before, back when I was a young and stupid kid, and I’ve sucked at it, because I was a young and stupid kid, and I am scared s***less of just how many OTHER things I would need to learn besides the rules of the actual game, like how to use Google Docs, how to make and keep track of loot tables, how to update and tweak aspects of Adventure Paths that are weak or poorly thought out to improve the party’s experience on my own, and it just makes my insecure, ADHD-having ass shut down in panic. Plus, being the GM means I can’t run a character of my own in said story, or do a cool thing where my PCs from different campaigns are related to each other.
Needless to say, it makes me feel conflicted. <_<
Let’s see… of all the campaigns I’ve run:
Three ended with full, satisfying conclusions.
Two ended unfulfilled due to COVID.
Four burned out with nobody taking up the mantle.
One ended on a tpk when I was pretty much through with it and another player took up the mantle.
So I guess it’s not really been the case for me? Certainly wasn’t how I got into gming, though I’ve done it once since then. That said, the assessment of the threat of burnout seems accurate. I’m kept going by the knowledge that nobody else would be.
I should keep a bookmark and return when my current campaign ends.
So far I‘ve had Sessions 0 to 3 in Jan, Mar, Aug 2023, dumped two players in October and now we’re more than half way though the story at lvl 10 of 17.
Too bleak by half.
Overly Sarcastic Productions asked this question of another pop culture figure, but it’s relevant here.
Is being a GM a curse, or a choice?
And years into willfully doing it for multiple groups, and only having to abandon it, briefly, because of some truly awful job demands?
A choice. And when everything goes *just* right, a blessing.
It’s only a curse on the days when your players totally derail your plans, but it swings back around to blessing once you figure out how to help them run in the random direction they chose 😀