Take a Break from DMing; It’ll Make You a Better DM!
I used to be a full time DM. I started off as a player, but after my regular group broke up I didn’t want to stop, and started DMing some friends. I had a lot of fun, but as time went on I realized my stories weren’t as interesting as they were in the beginning, and while I was technically sound and knew the rules, something was… missing. After a few failed campaigns my girlfriend, who posts here as FemJesse, said she wanted to try her hand at faking 20’s as a DM. Eventually I caved, after much deliberation (and a party where I burnt my DM screen and threw my dice in the air), and said I would be fine passing the torch. I figured, if nothing else, it would give me the time to play I craved so much. She’s been doing a wonderful job, and given me some of the best D&D sessions I’ve played. However, after nearly a year of her campaigns I’ve realized what I was missing, and why my sessions began to suffer.
It’s sympathy for the player experience. Not sympathy for the players themselves – that’s very different. In fact, I still think it’s the job of the DM to create impossible to escape situations and sit back and make the players find interesting ways out. That, to me, is D&D.
But no, it’s more about learning how a player reacts to what the DM is doing. As time went on, I think that I forgot what was fun for players. I built things more… by-the-book? I don’t know, actually, I just know that I was doing things differently. Either way, I learned the most important thing about being a DM, to me at least, is to take extended breaks every so often. After being a player for some time I feel I’m finally ready to get back in the ring, and hearing how another DM handles a situation (and secretly thinking about how differently I’d do it) has made me grow more on the opposite end of the DM screen than behind it. Saying to myself, “Wait, I would have done this like this, and it would have been better!” makes me want to grab graph paper and start scribbling. On the other hand, just as many times I’ve taken notes and thought, “Wow, that’s a fantastic way to handle this. I need to remember it.” I’ve grown, and my time with Chris Perkins didn’t hurt, either.
Has anyone else found that a detox is needed to successfully DM?
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November 24th, 2009 at 11:49 am