This weekend I decided to shut down the Dragon’s Bend campaign. It’s bumming me out and I want to talk about it.

Much of my RPG gaming since March, 2020 has been online. As a way to get gaming in when it wouldn’t otherwise happen, it’s great. It also allows you to play games with people you wouldn’t normally get to play with due to distance. Some games are difficult to find players for locally and online gaming makes playing possible.

Struggling to put together an in person game.

I tried to get the group back to playing in person in the last month but it’s fallen apart. Adult responsibilities of jobs, kids, and other priorities have made it difficult to put together a consistent group. I never knew who was going to play or if there would be enough players to run.

I’ve had a difficult time recruiting new players. I make it harder on myself by having a very specific style of game. I run an old school retro-clone, with gritty, sometimes dark, and challenging themes. My style of gaming is unfashionable.

My choice of style and game simply has a very small pool of potential players.

My own mental/emotional difficulties.

I haven’t had my heart in this campaign. I didn’t intend to run it as long as I did. It was something I threw together haphazardly in the first place. There is a certain amount of work involved in running a great campaign and being honest, I never put that level of focus into it. I did just enough to get by and not much more than that.

My attention has been scattered among competing priorities this year. I’ve felt burnt out and overwhelmed lately. I have tasks and intentions piling up. I’m in a place where I need to focus on the necessary, do what is most important and abandon anything that isn’t working or required. Dragon’s Bend wasn’t working and I decided I needed to bag it.

Dragon’s Bend wasn’t high up enough in priorities to produce the kind of game I like to run. Prep was getting to be not very fun and generating anxiety. It was an ugly feedback loop. I wasn’t working on the game at all during the week, Sunday morning was a flurry of anxious activity trying to keep a few steps ahead of the players. Because I wasn’t sure if the game was going to even happen because of attendance issues, I didn’t feel like putting in the effort.

The quality of the game was suffering and that was 100% on me.

Lessons Learned

Don’t start a campaign before I’ve hit a certain degree of preparedness.

Proper prior preparation prevents piss poor performance. Running an open world/sandbox style of game requires a certain amount of material to be ready to go before you start. At the same time, you don’t need to write The Silmarillion before you get the campaign going either. There is a balance. With Dragon’s Bend, I went too far in the minimalist end of the spectrum.

I was relying on my ability to improvise. I definitely needed to do more outlining and build more structure. Dragon’s Bend was solid from a conceptual basis but it needed more detail than I ever gave it.

The game never ran as smoothly as I want a campaign to run.

Part of the issue was that I didn’t expect the campaign to run as long as it did. I intended for it to be a fairly short campaign based around the hypogeum with a few side events for little novelty. I had other plans to build another world while running this as a way to keep the group going until I was ready to start on the bigger project. That hasn’t happened.

Focus on organization and tracking.

One of my biggest weak points as a game master is organization and tracking. Unless I start the campaign with tools in place, it gets chaotic. I forget things, I misplace NPC stats, can’t find notes I made or get behind on creating the next thing I need to make.

Before I start another campaign, I need to review my process for organization. Get my shit together, look through my collection of worksheets and campaign record sheets, and set myself up to be organized at the start rather than trying to impose organization on something that is a mess.

Priorities and limits.

Competing priorities, external challenges, time management, discipline and other problems have been a problem.

I’ve been trying to do too much. There’s an old saying, “The man who chases two rabbits catches neither.” I’ve been trying to catch a half dozen rabbits.

There are only so many hours in the day, a certain amount of energy, a certain degree of focus I can muster. My lack of organization and the anxiety it was creating made my attempts at preparing for the game ineffective and inefficient. All of that made it worse.

Until I clear some projects off my plate. I won’t be running a campaign.

It might not be until January before I can GM something other than a one off.

Managing my brain.

I haven’t been managing my brain very well.

I have ADHD and I have a tendency to “hyperfocus.” That can be great. Once I get some momentum on a project or idea, I’ll go at it for hours at a time. The problem is that early in the year I got hyper focused on current events in the news and not on my work.

The best way I can describe how it feels is to compare it to an addiction. It probably is an addiction in the sense that it is a dopamine dysregulation issue but let’s not get into the weeds. I’ll finish a writing task or take a break. I pick up the tablet thinking that just one article or paper will be a good break. 3 hours later… I’ve read three or four long papers, watched a couple videos and I suddenly realize its after lunch and I haven’t eaten yet. I feel disappointment in myself, anger that I’ve let myself get distracted, annoyance and a deep concern that civilization is in a bad place.

Shit’s ugly out there in the world. There’s no denying that. Once I take a peek, it’s too fascinating not to keep digging. The thing is, there’s not a damn thing I can do to to make any of it better, EXCEPT write. I can provide readers with something that brings feelings of connection, catharsis, and allows them to detach from some of the horrors for a little while.

I am starting to get back on track. It’s hard and I have to be aggressive about using my tools. One of those tools is an app called Freedom. I have it set up to lock me out of the apps and websites that I use compulsively. I created a session during the block of time I want to write. The app locks me out of social media, news sites, and other sites that distract me. For a few weeks, I had gotten around that because I have a tablet without the Freedom software on it. Entire days of work just…gone.

It’s frustrating and embarrassing. I started leaving my tablet with my wife in the morning and she doesn’t let me have it until later in the day or if I’m leaving the house for an appointment.

Exercise. Eating right. Managing my sleep. Creating an environment to limit distractions is all part of the process. I’m getting back on the path but it’s bumpy.

Starting again.

I could run a 5E game and probably fill up a table. I don’t want to do that.

I am considering running some one-shot events of some indie games I like. There is a tabletop gaming cafe in Cleveland that has events and are always looking for GMs. I may be able to find some players that way.

It may be that I need to recruit in the spaces where the themes, genre and motifs of my campaign would be more appealing. The underground music and heavy metal scene in Cleveland is active. I could create a book club for sword-and-sorcery or grimdark fantasy fans in the area.

There is still some anxiety about catching the plague, the increased costs of living and other issues providing some headwinds. I posted n on a local, not-D&D, RPG Facebook group asking what games people want a GM to run and it got only one response. The group is quiet to begin with so I am too surprised my post hasn’t received much attention. I find myself wondering what is going on in the scene that nobody is willing to make a request.

I dunno, maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the asshole.

I had a good time running Dragon’s Bend and the players in the group indicated they enjoyed it as well. It could have been better.

My main reason for running the game was the positive social interaction and fellowship it provides. In that area, it was a success. It is my nature to always be looking for ways to improve on things and I’m rarely satisfied. Contentment is probably something I need to work on.

At any rate, I want to get another in person game going.

I haven’t decided what that will be yet. There are several possibilities. My tendency is to run my own creations but maybe it would be worth just playing through someone else stuff for a while. I’ll do more journaling and come up with something.