Gamemaster Burn Out

Hello heroes! I hope you are having a wonderful day out there in gamer land. I wanted to take some time today to talk about why I needed to take a break from our weekly streaming schedule (and the other games I’ve been running for the last year or so.) As you know I have been running at least one weekly, ongoing campaign since 2019. I’ve missed a few weeks here and there, but I have been continually churning out stories from Heroes Incorporated to Heroes of the Mist to our Titan City Serials to Fallout to NetherWar to Guardians of Haven back to Titan City and shortly we will be diving into the Multiverse of the Master Mage. On top of that I’ve been a player in quite a few streams and I’ve continued to run games off-camera with my home groups, my work group, and at conventions. In a nutshell, I get to play a lot of RPGs, which is a great problem to have!

I love this hobby, so much so that I went and made it a career, but lately I have been feeling stretched, like butter spread over too much bread. It has been harder for me than I’m comfortable with getting the energy to sit down and prepare my stories each week, and increasingly I have felt as though I have been scrambling just to keep up with the output. It’s not something anyone has commented on, to my knowledge, but personally it feels like it has affected my performance as a GM negatively. I pride myself on being calm and collected as a GM, but I have not felt that serenity in a few months. And to be honest my passion for the work has diminished as these feelings of stress and unpreparedness have crept into my mind. Running games is usually my happy place, something I do because it brings me joy and it gives me an opportunity to pass that joy to my players and the viewers. I have had trouble finding that joy and I don’t want that to spill over to you or the people who sit at my table every week.

To put it plainly, I’m burned out.

Burn out can happen to anyone and it is a serious specter hanging over a lot of Gamemasters in our hobby. GMing (when done properly) is a lot of work and a lot of the people who gravitate towards the position are naturally giving humans. I love that I can provide an escape from the world to my players for a few hours a week. I create a place where they are powerful and where their actions can truly help triumph over evil. It’s a really wonderful thing, but it’s a lot of work. Any given week a Gamemaster is a storyteller, a referee, an actor, a prop maker, a programmer, a world-builder, a counselor, and so many other jobs. RPGs are a group storytelling exercise, but that story has to begin somewhere and someone has to develop and play the non-player agents in the story.

Traditionally, I’ve never been good at boundaries or delegation and I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my tabletop games. I want to build bigger and better experiences for my players and I always want to be better than I was yesterday. This is something I’ve been working to improve over the last few months and this mentality is ultimately what led to my deciding to take a break for a few weeks. I’ve scaled back some of my responsibilities to make room for healthy growth and self-care. I’m incredibly grateful to Calvin for being able to take on some of our streaming duties, freeing up some of my producer time to focus on things like blog posts, YouTube videos, and some of the storyboarding elements that take place behind the scenes, and I am so grateful to my players for being willing to give me this time and not have it affect our in-universe momentum.

If you’re a Gamemaster experiencing burn out, I recommend asking your players for some time away from the table. You can still gather on your regular game night, but ask if someone else has a game that they’d like to run, or break out some board games, or go out and touch some grass together for a session. Use your break time to rest, but also to engage with the genre in other ways. Look for inspiration and for new things that can get you excited about your game again. If you run a superhero game like me, maybe check out what’s happening in superhero video games or go see the new movie that’s undoubtedly coming out in the genre. Read some comic books, just do the things that you love.

Make space for yourself as a creator and listen to your body when it’s telling you that it needs a break. It’s okay to make room to take care of yourself, you’ve been taking care of your players for a long time and they will understand. Asking my players for this break was difficult for me. In my brain I knew that they would understand, but there was a little voice in the back of my mind telling me that if I stopped providing this GM service for them, they would hate me. It’s not rational and it would never be true, but it is something I had to push past. If you’re looking for a sign that you might need a GM break to rest and recharge those creative batteries, this is it.

I appreciate all of you so much and I cannot wait to come back in February to start a new game with fresh eyes and an unburdened heart.