GM Burnout

As a Game Master in a table-top or pen-and-paper RPG, sometimes you hit a wall. It’s the GM’s equivalent of writer’s block. That is what’s happening in my current campaign of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game. I still enjoy the game when we’re playing, but I have a difficult time getting myself motivated to put in the work that I need to do between sessions. I’ve thought about what I’ve done right, what I’ve done wrong, and how I would like to do things differently with my next campaign in order to – hopefully – avoid this happening again.

Too Many Plot Threads

In our Star Wars campaign, I had, from the beginning, three basic plot threads that I wanted to try to intertwine throughout the course of the campaign. In truth, one of those plot threads has all but disappeared and I’m having a little difficulty even keeping the remaining two going without letting things get bogged down jumping back and forth between them.

In addition to this, each player character in the Star Wars Roleplaying Game has a “Destiny” that the story should be subtly moving them towards fulfilling. I also asked players to provide me with some details on their characters when we first began the campaign, including NPCs that I could incorporate into the plot at one point or another. Mostly, I’ve been neglecting all of this.

In my next campaign, I think I would like to keep the main story limited to just one central plot. Subplots could develop here and there if it seemed natural for them to do so, but each subplot should be wrapped up in a single gaming session or two so that they do not detract from the main plot too much. Perhaps at the beginning of the game I would let each player create a single NPC or other important background element for their character and give them some freedom to decide when this background element comes into play. They could only use it once in the whole campaign, though. This would both make it a very special event, and keep it from becoming disruptive. Also, if the next game I GM has anything like the Star Wars RPG’s destiny mechanic, I think I’ll just grant a bonus to a player character for behaving in accord with their destiny, and it would be up to the players to actively seek out opportunities to do that. This rewards players for moving towards their character’s destiny, while taking the pressure off of me to try to incorporate their destinies into the plot.

Too Many Auxiliary Game Mechanics

I’ve run into this before in other campaigns, and I’m seeing it again in my current one. I get what I think are good ideas for auxiliary game mechanics and try to incorporate them into the campaign. But they end up becoming rules bloat, and mostly overlooked.

In this campaign I’ve done two of these. The first idea was to keep track of the relationships between the player characters and major NPCs by way of a positive or negative score. The idea was that players could apply their relationship score with a particular NPC to die rolls made while interacting with that NPC. This is a neat idea in theory, but I often forget to adjust the scores, and I don’t think the players have ever actually used them. The second idea was to have the players write down goals between sessions and assign values to those goals. At the beginning or end of a given session, players could add new goals to the list or increase the value of existing goals. When goals were achieved the players would receive bonus experience points based on the value that had been assigned to that goal. This was intended to help keep the players focused and on task. While it has worked better than the relationship scores, it still tends to get overlooked a lot of the time.

In my next campaign, I think I’ll resist the urge to implement ideas like this. If I do use them again, I’ll keep it to just one auxiliary mechanic that will really help emphasize the focus of the game. A campaign about political intrigue might use the relationship score mechanic, or a campaign about taking on an epic quest might use the goals mechanic. But, I think using both is just too much.

Trying Too Hard to be Epic

I have a tendency to want to make my campaigns epic. Sometimes the setting just begs for an epic storyline. For example, it’s hard to imagine a proper Star Wars story that isn’t duly epic. The problem with epic is that it requires buildup. Buildup takes time, and working on the same campaign for too long contributes to burnout. I need a faster turnover rate for my campaigns. Moving on to fresh ideas gets me excited to work again. In my present campaign, I think I’ve got plotlines and pacing figured out well enough that we can wrap things up in a reasonable amount of time, before I give out completely. But with my next campaign, I’d like to pace things better so that we’re wrapping up before I’m starting to get tired.

Have you ever suffered burnout on a campaign before? Any ideas how to avoid this problem? Any thoughts on the ideas I’ve expressed above? I’d love to read your comments, so leave them below.