After only a handful of sessions of my B/X D&D campaign, DM fatigue is starting to set in -- or it might be more appropriate to label it "Gamer ADD". This is nothing new, and doesn't mean that I'm going to wrap up the Demon Verge game. It's still chugging along pretty nicely, even with my occasional missteps. If it's going to come anywhere near the open sandbox I'd originally wanted it to be, though, I'm going to have to put more work into it. But at the moment I'm feeling uninspired about it, so it'll probably remain a "dungeon crawl of the week" type of thing for a while. I hope my players are cool with that.
I can point to a number of reasons for my vague disillusionment with the campaign. For one thing, I went out of my way to make a fairly "vanilla" D&D setting this time around, in the interest of hitting the ground running and actually playing something instead of just thinking about it. But there's nothing that's stopping me from making things a bit less "standard D&D fantasy" now that I've got a regular game with a stable group of players. Nothing other than my own blasé attitude, that is.
Before I started looking at making a D&D campaign out of Demonlord, I was working on my own weird trashy 80s science-fantasy thing using a mash-up of Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future, but I decided that I was wasting time on a high-concept campaign I was never going to run instead of just making a dungeon and saying "go". I'm starting to think that that might have been unwise. But then again, I've found that no matter how you dress up D&D, people are going to play it like they always have, and that would have just frustrated me more.
Like I said before, nothing is disastrously out of whack with my campaign. But there are a lot of little annoyances -- my own clunky DMing, my constant interest in other games and genres, the difficulty of really cutting loose and getting into character via the strange medium of Google+ Hangouts -- and while they're not killing my campaign, they are getting in the way.
I too suffer from Gamer ADD. It sucks so much! Hope you can power through it or figure a way around it.
ReplyDeleteI'm planning on powering through.
DeleteYou better, Magda has to become the powerful strung-out witch she was destined to be.
ReplyDeleteJust throw some robots or laser-wielding sub-men at us.
Don't tempt me.
DeleteI hear you as someone just bit by the OSR bug & still getting something together. I have like three or four RPG things I want to do! I am are sure you recognized how much enjoyment that the process of just putting something together gives. So while the end goal is to present, it is something that brings joy. Follow that joy. I do not know about you but any joy you can get in this world is not a waste of time.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I'm not planning on giving up on it at all; I just need to figure out how to make it more like what I want it to be.
DeleteYou know, the last couple times I've tried to get an old-school flavored D&D campaign going (once with Swords & Wizardry White Box, once with Pathfinder, so I really ran the mechanical gamut), I ran into a similar wall of de-motivation. I've certainly managed to leave my Gamer ADD behind in other ways--I mean, my current tabletop Deadlands campaign is due to wrap up next month after 20+ sessions. But when it comes to D&D, I seem to have some sort of block. I'm actually starting to look at it as a sort of challenge to overcome...
ReplyDeleteI try running D&D more than anything else, and yet I feel like I have more success when I run other things. It's odd.
Delete