Is GMing/DMing a huge waste of my time? Should I Quit Playing RPGs?

[2D8HP]

To the OP: Do less work.

I've GM'd settings that I had little interest in, and I did it really half-assed.

My players liked it better than the adventures that I put more work and passion in.

Basically I still liked the Conan/The Hobbit mash-ups that we did for D&D, and I was interested in doing a more realistic medieval-ish setting (Pendragon), but that's not what my players wanted, they wanted James Bond.

We compromised a bit and did Space Opera using Traveller, which I did some world-building for, but I relented and ran "Top Secret" except that I didn't even bother to learn the rules, and on the theory that the 1920's are close enough to the 1980's I just used the rules for Call of C'thullu instead, and I improvised most everything, no notes and little prep

My players said my GM'img "had improved".



To be fair we had another GM in our circle you did the kind of adventures that I was interested in better than me (he used RuneQuest and then Rolemaster), so my attempts to do likewise always suffered in comparision.

I concluded that besides my players really wanting to role-play PC's who use modern firearms, that most of my world-building just wasn't wanted.

Modern setting power fantasies are dead easy to do and usually are more popular among players.

Or just play board games.

[Jarawara]

In this game I had set up a ridiculous hook. Essentially there was a festival in town that had classic medieval games setup, Jousting, sparing, hammer tossing, pie eating, horse racing, ect ,ect
And placing in the top 5 of any of these games awarded the players tickets that they could exchange for magic items at a ticket counter 80’s arcade style. Well at one point in the game I described a scene in which the players witnessed an npc leaving the ticket counter with an item the party really wanted... In the hopes of getting the players to do a little roleplaying and maybe talk the npc into giving it to them or maybe sneaking into the npc’s tent and stealing it,
do something in game to solve the problem.
I guess that was asking to much though because the player who wanted the item immediately after I finished describing the npc walking away with the item punched the d&d table with his fist yelled some obscenities then glared at me with a look like he wanted me to burst into flames… then he spent the rest of the night giving the other players the silent treatment and refusing to engage in the game at all or even look at anyone for that matter with his arms crossed the whole time. This was enough to make all the other players decide to stop coming to the games, because they understably didn't want to spend time with this ****heel.

This one here is clear as daylight. He wanted a particular item from the contest. You figured out what that item was. And then, you deliberately made sure he could never, ever win it, because you were deliberately screwing him over.

Or at least, that's how he sees it.

He's had problem DM's before (or even, problem *people* in real life) who have deliberately taken steps to screw him over, and he sees the same scenario unfolding in this game, and automatically assumes you're doing the same thing to him now. He's angry at you, but really he's angry at the previous DM's before you and making the assumption that you're the same way.

Now the solution is straightforward, but not entirely easy. Talk to him, find out his concerns (easy to do since you already know), and describe what you were doing so as to correct the mistaken assumptions. The hard part is how to describe to the player what options he had without just leading him to that action. What I mean is, if you say to him "I was assuming this action would lead to a roleplay with the NPC, or even an attempted theft to take the item", then of course the players will immediately talk to the NPC and/or try to rob him. You were hoping to get the players to *try something unexpected*, not lead them into a course of action. And also you don't want to set the precedent that whenever a player has a bad day you'll just hand him the solution.

But even if you're handing him the solution, it's far preferable to him thinking you were deliberately screwing him.

[redwizard007]

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: if you are consistently loosing players, triggering meltdowns, and failing to complete campaigns I would hazard a guess that somewhere between your campaigns and your players is a disconnect. Try changing things up, or run a PC for a bit.

[King of Nowhere]

I dunno man, I've never really had this problem, past high school anyway.

Last time I needed to start a group from scratch I went to the nearest RPG club, played there as a player, decided that they were mental after a few sessions. So I went to a different RPG club, liked them, offered to run a game and then once I was running it for a couple of weeks, I suggested to move it to my place. Those guys formed the core of a decent sized group for a decade.

When enough of them moved away that the game was finally falling apart, I tried to repeat the same trick, with partial success and also advertised online, snagging another 2 long term members.

So I've had nearly 2 decades of uninterrupted gaming, with about 18 months where it got very patchy. One of the players have been playing the entire time and another one for well over ten years. Total number of jerk players in that time was one and he got uninvited.

I will say if you go to public gaming sessions, it's pretty hit and miss and the theory I've heard is most decent players end up gaming at someone's house with people they like and the dregs (who are unwelcome for various reasons) bounce around public games. You really only need one or two annoying players to ruin the best game.

that's a common problem; most good gamers already have a group, those left out and looking for one are often the dregs. You have to find people you can trust and with whom you share something, and it's gonna take time. the good thing is, once you find some, they will generally stick with you. I don't know your players, but I get the feeling that you play with random people. Try playing with real friends, they are much less likely to make a mess of it.

Your pain is shared. The world is full of bad people, jerks and worse. And it's not just RPGs, you can hear the same horror stories from any type of group, social, activity.

Also this. rpg is not really different from other social activities - except maybe that it is a social activity that somehow tends to attract a lot of antisocial people, so maybe it's a bit worse.
I was lucky with D&D, I found good groups fairly soon in my career. I was not lucky in finding friends, however. All the way to middle grade I was surrounded by ****. And I changed people, until around the middle of high school I had found some good people and befriended them. 15 years later, I'm still a good friend to most of them.
So, your D&D could go a similar way. You're stack with bad players; I suggest you change players until you find the good ones, and then, barring exceptional circumstances, they will be your group for life, and it will be worth the effort.

There is one more point to raise: similar people tend to congregate. Whatever the activity, you rarely see nice people and jerks together. If it happens, the nice people will kick off the jerks, or they will leave. Nice people will tend to segregate themselves away from the jerks, and jerks will tend to segregate themselves with other people who will put up with them. Of course there are a lot more distinctions on which people congregate; people who like fantasy and people who think it's childish will rarely hang around together, for obvious reasons. But I focus on the distinction between jerks and nice here.
I have seen some nice people hang with jerks, because they had an old friend they could not accept had grown bad, or because they got a crush for a (bad) girl and they gravitated towards her company, or because they felt lonely and would take any company offered. Regardless of the reason, it didn't end up well. Those formerly nice people also became jerks. The opposite scenario, where a jerk hangs around with nice people and become nice, also happens. People tend to conform to their surroundings.
I'm saying this to adive you to stay way from toxic people and do not let them ruin you. Find good people. You can get a bad player and by talking to him maybe you can turn him into a good player, but if there are too many bad players in your group, it's more likely that they will turn you into a bad DM.

[2D8HP]

Maybe, to avoid burn out, trade of GM duties?

In the '80's my gaming circle had three of us that traded off GM duties, and none of us did long multi-year "campaigns", and we also played war games that didn't have a referee from time to time as well.

It seems to me that modern GM's expect too much of themselves, maybe from the tales of "star" GM's that they're exposed to.

[Jay R]

The crucial thing is this: if you don't enjoy DMing, don't do it

I enjoy it. I enjoy creating a world, coming up with history for why things are as the are, inventing NPCs, designing encounters.

In my younger years, I put together a couple of compete dungeon complexes that nobody, it turned out, ever played. I do not consider that hard work that was wasted, because it wasn't work at all. It was playing with the rules and learning about them, exploring who the Mathemagician was and why he did what he did, inventing the dwarf dragon-riders and developing the shared dragon / dwarven culture, etc.

It's an extra benefit when somebody plays and enjoys my creations, but it isn't necessary to enjoy the act of creation.

[ross]

A Monster of the week format sounds promising. I have to entertain a bunch of essentially big children... If it worked for the power rangers tv show it might work for me.

you don't have to do anything. ditch your group.