(no subject)

[ralphmelton]

GMing is by far the least satisfactory thing I do so vigorously and so well.

I prepared hard for tonight's D&D session. I took care to rest a bit last night and take things a bit easier at work today, so that I wouldn' t be as tired and frotzed as I feared I might be. I wrote down carefully-thought-out responses to all the questions that the players had listed beforehand, and a few that they hadn't.

I felt I did a pretty good job of running things in actual play, too. I stood up, to better convey the Oracle's presence. I improvised pretty well (albeit not perfectly), including coming up with some fairly poignant bits about the Oracle sacrificing herself to fuel the forge that would revive Kotara-Nar.

And the players praised me and said it was a good session.


And yet I feel... drained and unsatisfied. I think I did a pretty good job, but I seem to be unable to feel it. Which, quite frankly, is terribly unfair--on the basis of the evidence, I think I deserve a warm glow of satisfaction.

But instead, I feel drained but not able to sleep, and acutely aware of all the bobbles of the evening, such as forgetting details about the Oracle like the gems falling from her mouth and her gift of tongues. And Kevin engaged with my big climactic question on an intellectual level, instead of an emotional level as I had hoped. (I don't fault him for it; his default mode is intellectual, and he's had a hard week too. I was terribly worried that if I wasn't well-prepared, I'd engage the evening on a purely intellectual level too.)

This weekend, I met one of Monica's LJ friends, who said, "Oh, you're the GM of that wonderful campaign I keep hearing about!" And I read Monica's latest entry in her character's journal, and I said, "Wow, that's so cool!"
.
.
.
I wish I could feel it being as good as I think it is.

Comments

[dlatimer.livejournal.com]

Sounds familiar to me. I went through a bout of not feeling adequate for the task at the end of my DMing in Pittsburgh.

With a couple years of retrospect (and now being a player in a campaign), I realized that I kept raising my bar. Which was a good thing, until I got my expectations so high that I couldn't meet them entirely. I also noticed that I was judging my success not on the "did we all have fun" factor, but if I ran a "perfect session."

Are you doing the type of gaming you want? Are you developing the stories and characters that interest you?

Those questions work for me. You'll have to find the ones that work for you.

[adamdray.livejournal.com]

I do the same thing.

The question you need to ask yourself is, "What criteria must a game meet to satisfy my concept of a good game?" Set reasonable goals for yourself and figure out how to meet them. I think you're probably not setting specific goals for yourself and thus you'll never know if you've really succeeded.

Is the success of your game something internal (something relative to you) or external (something relative to your players)?

[glenbarnett.livejournal.com]

I think I understand how you feel. I don't get the rewarding feeling of achievement normally associated with doing something well when I GM either.

In fact I don't think I'm actually a good GM, so that may not be entirely surprising -- but I don't get it when I give a seminar either, and (judging by enthusiastic comments I get) my seminars generally go over pretty well with a decent proportion of my audience, and the feeling I get is generally the same.

Nice comments sure help though.

[glenbarnett.livejournal.com]

Been meaning to say for a while. Kotara-Nar is a cool sounding name for a sword.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I did at least some of this long ago when I started the campaign--I decided that I would consider the campaign a success if it reached the level of bad schlocky fantasy.

Keeping that specific, feasible goal in mind has been a big help to me; among other things, it's given me the freedom to use the most banal overused motifs of fantasy without shame or regret because hey, if it works for Extruded Fantasy Product, it works for my stated goal.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I can't take credit for that one; one of my players asked if he could begin the campaign with nothing but a masterwork bastard sword, which he named Kotara-Nar, saying it meant "Serpent's Tooth".

I did reinterpret "Serpent" to mean "Dragon", which has worked out very well indeed.