As someone who has more than a passing interest in tabletop games, scholastic pursuits, and reflecting deeply on things, following Dr. Emily Friedman, a professor studying games with a focus on tabletop roleplaying games and the Actual Play media created using them, on social media was a no-brainer the instant I first came across her posts. I also wound up following a bunch of people she communicates with regularly for their insights on these interests of mine and, after the fall of Cohost, saw the tabletop scene of that website merge with the growing one on Bluesky, such that it isn’t uncommon for me to find someone proposing an interesting idea and them mutliple other people examining the idea or thought through different lenses. Lately, this has been especially important to me because Dr. Friedman has been writing more and more about how being a Game Master (or Dungeon Master) is a form of labor, how the labor of game-making happens falls so heavily on them, and what that means for the community that exists in the form of players and GM. It has given me a lot to think about as I reflect on what I want out of running games, why I care about games, and what am I actually getting out of all the time and effort I put into running games. This, itself, has sparked a lot of thought about the various games I’ve run over the years and the one lingering campaign I still have these days, even if we don’t play that often, and all of it came to a head when I read a follow-up post to the latest idea proposed by Dr. Friedman (that a specific corner of the hobby that is tabletop gaming is likely comprised almost entirely of poeple who did all the work in group work assignments to make sure it all got done right): RPGs are, in a sense, an unwelcome activity even while doing them.

Rod Donoghue, a guy who has definitely done a lot of work in the TTRPG spaces but who I followed on Cohost for his thoughtful, reflective analysis of TTRPGs (and his lack of a severe distaste for D&D, which was kind of a given in a lot of those spaces), suggests in his thread of posts that most GMs don’t love to GM but love to play. They’re just the ones who are the most passionate about and the most interested in it, so they wind up taking the view that any kind of game is better than no game, even if they have to be the one to run it. Further, he goes on to add that part of the reason so much work falls on the GM, and why GMless games tend to only be popular in TTRPG groups made up of GMs, is that this hobby is already a weird niche interest and, unlike most hobbies, has a hefty homework requirement so a GM who wants ANY kind of game at all to exist will be motivated to put as little of a burden on their players as possible no matter the cost to themself. I’m leaving out a lot of interesting details and salient points, so you can read the entire thing here, but the combination of the two ideas really struck a nerve with me. I mean, I love telling stories and I can get a lot of enjoyment out of running a game, but what I want most of all is to play a game. I am also a very passionate, driven individual who will jump in to doing the work required to make a game happen (or to make anything happen, really, which Rob touches on here) without a second thought because I want the thing to happen. Which means that, when I got my first real taste of what fun could be had at the table and our group’s GM had to end the campaign due to post-graduation obligations, I was the person who came forward to run a game because any game was better than nothing. There wouldn’t have been any of my college D&D experiences if I hadn’t been the one to step up and run all of them because no one else wanted it badly enough to do the work.

Scanning through the years and all my experiences with running games and it become painfully clear just how much Rob’s and Dr. Friedman’s thoughts about running games apply to me. I did all the work. I moved mountains to take labor off the shoulders of players who wouldn’t play if they had to do it. And then, at some point in the process for every game save one, it eventually fell apart not because people weren’t interested, but because I was too burned out or because we didn’t have a community so much as a group of people who showed up if it wasn’t an inconvenience. It took thirteen-and-a-half years, but I did eventually hit a point where I couldn’t run a game for a group of people who didn’t care as much as I did any more. I burned out and eventually crashed hard, to the point of largely falling out of contact with people, because I just couldn’t bring myself to put in that level of effort anymore and so many of my relationships were built on me putting in that effort. On me doing that labor. Which is why my Magical Millennium campaign was such a breath of fresh air! Yes, I still had to do a huge amount of work, but everyone else was as bought-in and excited as I was! Everyone wanted to be there, would prioritize being there, and cared enough about what was happening to take the reins any time I was willing to give them up!

All while my other campaign, one designed for the players to do more storytelling and leading than most such TTRPGs, floundered and eventually flopped to the ground in a disgruntled heap, because no one there save one other player (a fellow GM) cared enough to invest their own time and energy into the game. Everyone else was looking for me to do it. So, when that ended, I started up something that was going to be either low-energy or fun enough that I wouldn’t mind doing the work and now I’m here over a year later and finding myself unwilling to run that game anymore because I am tired, I am burned out, and I do not have it in me to do the work for this game when so many of the players can’t be bothered to show up half the time. Sure, I helped lead to that outcome by designing the campaign to work with as few as three players despite eventually recruiting six players, but it’s just so painfully clear that this is not a priority for most of my players and it is nothing more to the majority of them than an opportunity for them to show up so I can tell them a story. It’s exhausting and unfulfilling and that, coupled with the way that Rob’s posts spoke directly to me solidified the thought I’ve been having for a couple months now: maybe no game is better than ANY game. Maybe I should stop desperately trying to have an active game in my life and instead focus on finding the people who care about this stuff as much as I do. People who also want to tell stories and who care enough to run a game if no one else is going to do it. After all, wouldn’t it be nice to take turns? To swap back and forth? To share the load so that everyone gets a chance to play and one person isn’t stuck doing all the labor?

That’s where I’m at now. That’s what I’m thinking about as I write this the day before I talk it through with my therapist, a week before it gets posted, and six days before what was supposed to be my next session for my The Rotten Labyrinth campaign. I have to stop this game even if I feel bad for doing so. Even if I feel like I’m failing or letting people down. I’m gonna suggest that someone else could run a game if they like, but I expect that’ll go as well as that suggestion did in my The Magical Millennium group–a chorus of suggestions to at least hang out that faded into silence faster than I expected. I know some of these other players run games (I’ve even played with a few of them), but I really don’t expect any of them to pick up the slack because two of them are very inspiriation-focused and one of them is taking a rather long break from running anything so I won’t be holding my breath that this turns into anything other than another slow descent into stillness. But that’s okay. I need to stop putting in all this time and energy. I need to save it for the things that will bring me joy or fulfillment or that feel like they’re worth it and this game just isn’t any of those things anymore. I’m not sure that it ever was. Because, as much as I hate to admit it, the reason I got this game going was because having a game to run–a story to tell–replaced my need to have some kind of writing project to work on and I just wouldn’t be myself if I wasn’t telling stories. I did it to fill the hole in my heart left by the pandemic and isolation and the evaporation of my dreams, not because I really wanted to do it. All I really want, still, is to play.