It’s day 14 of the Blogging for GMs project, and today’s post is about the positive aspects of taking a break from GMing:
• Brannon Hollingsworth wrote Gimme a break!
Brannon’s post makes several good points on the pro side (thanks for contributing to the project, Brannon!) and I’d like to use it as a springboard to point you to a couple of resources on GM burnout, and to talk about “death by break” and alternating games.
As Brannon points out, taking a break from GMing is a good way to avoid burning out, and I’m not going to cover the same ground here. There are also a couple of other great resources on this topic:
• 9 Symptoms of GM Burnout
• 8 Tips For Recovering From GM Burn-Out
• Roleplaying Burnout
The first two come from Johnn Four’s excellent Roleplaying Tips weekly e-zine, and the third is an article by Heather Grove (of Burning Void) that takes tips about writer’s burnout and applies them to GMing.
This topic is as old as GMing (okay, maybe “as old as a few months after the first GM started GMing” would be more accurate), and I don’t just want to repeat what’s already out there. Instead, let’s look at two specific burnout-related topics: “death by break” and alternating games.
“Death by break” is one of the downsides of taking a break from GMing: whether the break was taken by choice (as in Brannon’s post) or out of necessity, if it’s too long there’s a good chance the game will never start up again.
When I started gaming as a kid, we never really took breaks; if games ended, it was because we lost interest during play, or finished them. As an adult, though, there are a lot more demands on my time — which increases the likelihood of “death by break.”
My Selgaunt campaign took a four week break because I moved out of state, and even though we transitioned to play-by-post to try and keep it going, it never recovered from that break. (To be fair, our group also wasn’t the best-suited to PbP play, but looking back I see the break as a big factor unto itself.)
So how long is too long, break-wise? It mainly depends on two factors: whether your group does any other gaming during the break, and your group’s overall interest in the game. The second factor is pretty straightforward: if interest in the game is waning, a break will probably push it under for good.
As for the first factor, I find that breaks where no one is doing any gaming at all are the most deadly, because everyone finds something else to fill that time — which means there’s a chance they just won’t want to come back to the game. This is where alternating games comes in.
Brannon’s post talks about alternating GMs for the same game, which is a good option. Alternating two completely different games — with different GMs — can also work out well, and that’s the approach I’m going to cover here. My group is actually about to start doing this, and our main reason is one of the most common ones: so that if I need a week off for some reason, we have something else to play. Once alternating two games becomes part of the regular schedule, however, other benefits crop up as well.
You get to sit on the other side of the screen regularly (and at least for me, playing always recharages my GMing batteries), and the two games can each explore a different gaming style or genre. Most GMs I know always have game ideas simmering on their back burners, and as a GM it can be frustrating to be in a regular group — even a very good one — and not be able to run a game of your own. Alternating games gives you that creative outlet, and for some groups it can be a perfect fit.
It won’t work for every group, though, and there are a couple of things to think about before trying it. Assuming that one game is already running, you need to consider whether or not its pacing can survive if you starting skipping sessions. How often you play factors into that, too: if you only play once a month, alternating games probably isn’t going to work for you. Your group’s desire to learn a different set of rules should also be taken into account, assuming that you don’t want to alternate with, say, a second campaign of the same game.
Have you tried alternating games before, successfully or unsuccessfully? Have you lost a game (or games!) to “death by break?” Is there a “magic number” for how long your breaks can be before the game fizzles?
“Most GMs I know always have game ideas simmering on their back burners, and as a GM it can be frustrating to be in a regular group — even a very good one — and not be able to run a game of your own.”
I have nothing to add but to say, “that’s me!” 🙂
I’ve constantly seen games die from breaks. Fortunately, rarely mine. Typically breaks are given as the reason when, in reality, it was waning interest in the game. A break is a convenient excuse to politely kill a game, I’ve found.
I’ve a theory that a game that suffers from too many breaks, especially those initiated by GM, are passive attempts to suicide the game, be it by players or the GM. People that want to play will find a way.
Okay, I guess I had a little to add. 😉
I’ve constantly seen games die from breaks. Fortunately, rarely mine. Typically breaks are given as the reason when, in reality, it was waning interest in the game.
Good point — those two can be tied together pretty closely, sometimes.
In any case, I’m looking forward to alternating Eberron with Star Trek/X-Men, whenever you decide you’re ready to run that. 😉
I have one of those “forever” groups mentioned (started ’81, ’82 or ’87, depending on how you count), but have pretty much been the sole DM. The exception is a handful of occasions where one of the other players did a one-shot.
About 10 years ago, I realized the key thing for me to avoid burnout. I like running homebrews campaigns. I also like running other peoples’ stuff. Since then, with rare exception, I alternate a near-pure homebrew campaign with a near-pure published campaign. If I run a mishmash in the middle, I burn out. If I alternate focus, each is fresh for the length of the campaign.
One of the reasons this works for me is that the prep demands are very different. At the end of running a published campaign, I have practically no prep work, but am really itching to run my next homebrew. So I get a lot of homebrew prep out of the way early. In contrast, by the time the homebrew finishes, I’m running downhill on fumes. But I have relatively little to do to start the next campaign.
Well, all that and way our group is forced to all but abandon gaming for the 8 weeks or so around about Christmas, because of scheduling conflicts. That break doesn’t seem to have any of the negative effects listed for breaks, because our whole group quit fighting it a long time ago. 🙂
I run short story arcs, usually 3-6 sessions. If players need to bow out, they can, if new people want to jump in, they can. It keeps burnout low, ideas fresh, and lets me switch games if I like.
When games die to breaks, I don’t sweat it, clearly folks just weren’t interested. And that means its time to find a new game or new people.
It’s interesting that both of you (Chris and CJ) know the timeframe of your current and upcoming games, and that that’s one of your keys to avoiding burnout — but that the timeframes are so different!
Everything Abulia said is 100% true in our group. The break is that polite lie to sweep a game under the carpet without anyone getting their feelings hurt, yet there is like a silent agreement at some point on both the DM and players that the campaign is over. Occasionally, we do have “legitimate” breaks for moving and whatnot, but these also tend to kill games. The longest break I’ve seen a campaign endure was probably a month, and the first pickup game had a lot of ‘review’ to refresh memories.
One thing we have collectively learned as adult players with childern is to end all campaigns by Thanksgiving. I have ran “the final episode” of a game the first week of December, but that is an exception. Besides, its a nice break for everyone to recharge and kick off a new campaign in the new year. It also helps with that post-holiday feeling I get of “nothing to look forward to for a while” since it’s still winter and such. We play in Maryland and Jan-Feb are the coldest months. December is usually not too bad (which is why we rarely get a ‘white Xmas’)
In the last year, in order to stem DM burnout, help rotate players and DMs, and keep things fresh, we have agreed to limit all games to 4-6 months (but they can be picked up later). In the past we had ‘epically’ long games or the DM would simply run the game till it died out. I was the first DM in our group that said right from the beginning that the Campaign had a finite end, no matter what. I am sure a lot of DMs do have set endings, but in our group the players would want to play their chars ‘forever’ but sooner or later the DM’s batteries would wind down and the inevitable “break” (end of campaign) would occur.
One thing I forgot to mention- alternating games. This a tough one for us. Everyone is pretty busy with real life so learning a new system is hard to do. It took us a while to even pickup DnD 3.X since everyone was familiar with 2.X. Luckily, one of our players embraced it and said “you have to try this!”.
(Judas) In the past we had ‘epically’ long games or the DM would simply run the game till it died out.
Up until recently, this has been my “gold standard” for games — they run forever. I’m starting to see a lot of value in shorter, pithier games, and I really like the idea of the “stop in November” lifecycle.
Yea, I almost figure there’s an effective break from Thanksgiving to after Christmas. One problem for me, that makes that even longer is that I tend not to get back from Christmas until a week or so after the 1st, so that becomes like a 6 week break.
I’m reaching burnout on my current campaign, so maybe that will be a welcome break.
The November/December thing really sucked for gaming last year. Because I was buying a house in September/October and moving in October/November, it bascically meant gaming was dead all fall…
Ah, gotta go.
Frank
Some of our most successful campaigns were alternating weeks; AD&D one week, and Mage: The Ascension the other. It worked out very well for quite a while. The drawback is that missing “your own game” led to a month gap between games (running a game weekly), which did make catching up harder.
Death by break is common– and, as mentioned above, it’s often a non-confrontational way to quit something that’s no longer great fun.
(Scott) The drawback is that missing “your own game†led to a month gap between games (running a game weekly), which did make catching up harder.
If the schedule looks like this:
1. AD&D
2. Mage
3. AD&D
4. Mage
…and your game is AD&D, and you have to miss (for example) week 3, I think the best approach would be to slot in AD&D for week 4 — giving you 3 weeks between the most recent session of each games, rather than 2 weeks for Mage and 4 weeks for AD&D.